Tyre_Inflator
1yr ago
Does China have enough conventional ballistic missiles to do this? Destroying air bases is extremely hard, and attacking Japan is a huge escalation.
Tyre_Inflator
1yr ago
I saw this because the quokka asked for help, and am happy you're as confused as me.
Tyre_Inflator
1yr ago
Thanks for asking this question, because I don't have time to watch a 4 hour video either, and JhanicManifold's answer was very helpful
Tyre_Inflator
1yr ago
At one point another poster shared many, many excerpts from one such study about it. I wish I had kept a bookmark for it.
I couldn't find where it was mentioned here, but could it have been excerpts from a book on Rosedale, Tx? https://twitter.com/godclosemyeyes/status/1414619671056297984?
The racial violence there and the excuses for it from white liberal academics qualified it as a state supported pogrom by any standard.
As far as I know one guy got fired, for saying that people working in the World Trade Center were little nazis who deserved it. And technically he didn't get fired for that, the public attention just forced the university to acknowledge that he was a plagiarist who got promoted to full professor without any qualifications.
The appeal to an imaginary era of right wing censorship is so strange, when the only example anyone can come up with is that people stopped buying Dixie Chicks albums.
Swap the races and see how that plays out. Gangs of white teenagers gang rape and murder terrified black women, while the local government and academics say "lol. lmao. It's ok, she had it coming because her grandfather might have been a gang member. No need to do anything, because our boys will run out of victims soon enough"
That is a pogrom.
Tyre_Inflator
1yr ago
What? The people he was talking to were government officials in the town of Rosedale, and social workers running programs there. Are we talking about the same thing here?
Tyre_Inflator
1yr ago
Yeah, I'm definitely not saying things didn't get weird after 9/11 (and in some ways both are typical of American National Hysterias) but professors weren't getting fired for refusing to swear loyalty oaths to The Homeland. The scale and level of coercion were so completely different that it's hard to see the comparison being made in good faith, until you realize some of the people doing it were 3 years old at the time and are working off a mythical version of events we actually remember.
Tyre_Inflator
1yr ago
This is insane cult behavior that makes maoist struggle sessions look measured and sensible. I have a hard time understanding what happened, but in the end the most rabid group won everything and purged all the competition? And these zealots are basically the self-appointed enforcers of community policy for all minecraft modding?
This collab program is occasionally misunderstood as a sort of "hit squad" attempting to "cancel" Minecraft community members and have them removed from as many servers as possible, largely due to rhetoric pushed by queerphobes, racists and other bigots that have been banned by communities taking part in the program. However, it does nothing of the sort
And then proceeds to narrate how they did exactly that
Tyre_Inflator
11mo ago
Five days ago you said
they aren't just a gay rights group, but clearly ridicule Catholicism.
@naraburns @desolation This might be helpful context for your discussions.
This is misleading to the point of being a lie, and shows that you have been getting your information from people trying to backpeddle and deceive:
If there are no regular bikes left at a station, the E-bikes become free for people on the special subscription, as if they are regular bikes. The boys were trying to bully everyone into taking the pedal bikes so that the E-bikes they were camping would become totally free for them. They did it all for 6 measly cents a minute (or they could have just pedaled a non-E-bike for free like normal kids), which to be fair is a more moral motivation than the people still trying to ruin the nurse's life have.
Tyre_Inflator
11mo ago
It's not that you get the 45 minutes totally free.
Your colleague was at best incorrect and missed the scam the boys were trying to pull by bulling people into taking all the regular bikes rather than the E-bikes. At worst he was repeating the new narrative that is going around liberal twitter to keep blaming the nurse.
Tyre_Inflator
11mo ago
In the defense industry, diversity training has remained fairly anodyne.
You keep saying this as if you don't want to admit what's happening. https://reason.com/2020/08/13/sandia-laboratory-nuclear-white-male-privilege-training/
And then when you're given evidence you forget all about it by next week. Is this deliberate?
A decade ago the supreme court unanimously ruled that people are actually allowed to appeal federal agency rulings to the court system, which the Obama administration did not want. The EPA had attempted to fine a couple $75,000 a day for starting to build a home in compliance with local permitting, on the theory that their land being next to a ditch gave the federal government control over the land. The houses right next to the local lake didn't bother the government: they just randomly picked this couple to ruin. Moreover, the EPA claimed that nobody could challenge its rulings in court, as they were "civil actions" rather than final penalties.
The court remanded the case and allowed the couple to appeal the EPA ruling, and it has been working its way back up the appeals courts ever since.
The couple just won a second unanimous supreme court case against Biden's EPA, which had attempted to define the navigable waters of the united states to mean any land on which there is any standing water at any time of the year (turning about 80% of US land into "water" for legal purposes). The EPA tried to moot the case by withdrawing their compliance order, but
It's interesting and a little encouraging that even the liberal members of the court (except Ginsburg) are not eager to give the executive infinite unappealable power. You might get a letter out of the blue threatening you with ruinous fines or prosecution because some federal agency decided to go after you as a test case, but if you have a hundred million dollars and backing from the US Chamber of Commerce, you might actually win after several decades of legal action.
Tyre_Inflator
11mo ago
Whoops, my bad. And you never know with Ginsburg.
I don't even know what to say to this. You admit below that the Obama administration's position was that the Sacketts should not be allowed to appeal the EPA penalty through the court system. But you worded your quibble as if you're trying to insinuate that this wasn't the case.
Worse, the Biden EPA announced the new definition of waters of the united states in December 2022. Your claim that it dated from the 1980s is deceptive at best. But you worded your claim very carefully to imply rather than state something plainly untrue.
Tyre_Inflator
11mo ago
That reminds me that I need to uproot the "wetland grasses" on my land that are growing in the middle of all the other stuff.
Tyre_Inflator
11mo ago
November 26, 2007, my bad. I thought they only started building their house that year, and the enforcement came later.
Tyre_Inflator
11mo ago
Going back and forth to mess with people is the neat part. You can stall them by demanding infinite evidence until they give up, and if they provide ironclad proof you can fall back to "ok now prove it's a bad thing." It's a foolproof zero effort trolling strategy.
Tyre_Inflator
11mo ago
Was it Orwell who said that phrases like "perhaps not unreasonably" are like ink clouds for indefensible political writing?
Against Luxury Beliefs
I'll link Henderson's entire post about Luxury Beliefs for reference, but for the purposes of this post I'll be focusing on his brief definition:
Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.
Henderson speaks of luxury beliefs like Scott's Barber Pole theory of fashion, using many of the same examples. Put shortly: "Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it."
He also frames it as a costly signal of wealth: "They can afford to (defund the police), because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security... Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances."
There are two contrasting claims here. The first is that luxury beliefs impose a genuine cost on the believer that he can afford to bear, like a wastefully pronking gazelle. The second is that the believer does not actually suffer that cost due to his existing position. The wealthy people in all-white gated neighborhoods on private islands bear no additional cost after all the criminals are released on the streets of a far-away city.
I believe Henderson is wrong that these beliefs are a luxury of the upper classes, and that they are rather highly costly expressions of loyalty from an upper-middle-class "Outer Party."
Henderson's income chart for defunding the police has three categories: <$50k, $50-100k, and >$100k. Thanks to rapid income growth and inflation, these categories no longer separate neatly into lower, middle, and upper class. Most of the people with incomes over $100k are not the estate-dwelling ultra-rich, but urban professionals in precarious social and economic positions. Indeed, crime-vulnerable city-dwellers are almost three times as likely to support defunding the police as rural people.
The most radical beliefs expressed in the great "uprising and cultural reckoning" of 2020 came directly from the most precarious and poor members of high status white collar classes: journalists, teachers, librarians, adjunct professors, social workers, petty officials, job-hopping employees of bloated tech companies. None of them were aping Obama or other members of a higher class. And all of these people suffer serious costs because of their beliefs, whether from direct violence from the underclass or indirectly from general social breakdown.
The day after John Kerry bought a beachfront mansion next to Obama's (his Martha's Vineyard one, not his Hawaii one), a woman in tech told me she had led a costly project to remove their business from the Netherlands "because the whole country will be underwater soon, thanks to the Climate Crisis."
Obama installed a 2500 gallon propane tank and whole-mansion backup generator; she had her husband destroy the portable generator that came with their new home, and suffered winter power outages in dignified silence.
Obama's children (and the children of all his class) live completely normal lives, just with more polo lessons and hedge fund internships.
Yesterday this woman instagrammed her Pride Month Announcement: a photo of her five year old son in a dress.
Henderson says that "Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it." But Obama and the ultra-wealthy didn't create or model these dysfunctional and self-harming "luxury beliefs," only to abandon them once they became déclassé. They are entirely the product of a desperately status-poor and precarious outer party in a society where climbing the social latter requires winning a red queen's race of radicalism, caught in an increasingly rapid purity spiral. Those at the top pay little attention to the crab bucket below them, except perhaps to nudge the ladder a little further out of reach.
So why should we care? Because I think charging these people with hypocrisy is counterproductive, unless their name is Soros or their job title is "mayor" or higher. Most of them are not benefitting from these beliefs, and would be much happier not suffering under the constant pressure to one-up each other in expressing them.
Tyre_Inflator
10mo ago
Solzhenitsyn quote you probably already know, but will come in handy if you don't:
“Your punishment for having a knife when they searched you would be very different from the thief’s. For him to have a knife was mere misbehavior, tradition, he didn’t know any better. But for you to have one was ‘terrorism.’”
Tyre_Inflator
10mo ago
I'd like to ask anyone in tech if there's another reason companies might be relocating server infrastructure from the fiber hub in the Netherlands, because I've heard of others doing it recently.
Tyre_Inflator
10mo ago
"Noticing," of course. And using the general phrase "has anyone noticed...?" to open a topic. Leftists have almost completely switched to speaking in plain assertions.
Hello, sorry for commenting on this out of nowhere, but I found the podcast you suggested and wanted to ask you a question, if you don't mind.
The host of the podcast retweets groups of vandals who slash car tyres and smash people's headlights. Links: https://twitter.com/Naparstek https://twitter.com/T_Extinguishers/status/1630479016531578881
Can you explain? Are you acting as the public facing moderate voice of a violent extremist movement?
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