Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
I want to believe that Court is better modeled as a club of weirdo turbo-lawyers.
Among whom Gorsuch prides himself on being the most idiosyncratic weirdo.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
Lots of labor doesn't really have the ability to gain additional marginal income with a couple minutes of work though. Plenty of people are salaried and don't have a straightforward way to earn a few bucks. Doing something like spending a couple hours to figure out how to move credit card points around to save a grand on flights can pretty easily be worth it.
Even in the case of really trivial amounts of money, I think people just gain a psychic benefit from feeling like they got a deal. Should you actually give a shit about a sale on potato chips? Probably not, just buy them if you like them, but it feels better to get the brand that's BOGO.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
Alternatively, people just like saving a buck regardless of their financial position.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
I had no familiarity with the cast or the chonker in question, but the Wiki is hilarious:
In 2018, while Coughlan was appearing on stage in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at London's Donmar Warehouse, she wrote a piece for the Guardian calling out unfair scrutiny of women's bodies in theatre criticism.[24][33][34] In the following year, she made headlines again for rebutting the Daily Mirror's comment on her 2019 British Academy Television Awards look: "Not the most flattering". She tweeted "I mean incorrect @DailyMirror I look smokin’, sorry bout it".[24] Following the 2021 Golden Globe Awards, she retorted against other comments on her weight on Twitter.[35]
Personally, I am completely lacking the ability to feign confidence about my worst traits.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
That's gotta be the least popular position - Azov really were a bunch of Nazis and they died heroically, defending their country to the last man because of their steadfast Nazi hatred for Russians.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
And if they do, what does that say about migration more broadly?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
Doubt if I’d buy that piece of land in [Small Town, Southern US State] for fear of the ancestor’s spirits, Native and African slaves wandering around looking for descendants in 2024 to be released from their bondage and inequities thrashed upon them for wealth by its oppressors.
Man, I don't know how other people react to these sorts of things, but my reaction certainly isn't anything remorseful or kind. While I am not responsible for either the good or evil deeds of my ancestors and I know that well intellectually, my gut response to someone speaking to me this way is that I'm glad my ancestors won and theirs lost. If the best way someone can think about their ancestors is thinking of their them hanging around my property being spiteful ghosts, it's no wonder that they couldn't do any better during their lifetimes.
Of course, as I think you imply later when speaking of the kind relationship your mother has with her interlocutor, that kind of spiteful response isn't good and isn't healthy either. These identitarian sentiments that dredge up centuries old wrongs and treat them as contemporary are absolute poison to discourse. The people telling others to dwell on them, to hold this sense of grievance dear to their spirit are undoing decades of progress towards healing and camaraderie.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
"But you should vote to support [social issues]." I'm not voting to support a cause. I'm voting to find the most qualified candidate.
What does "most qualified" mean to you? For me, it's the person most capable of advancing the causes I support. Politics isn't and shouldn't be some HR checklist of who had the most jobs that are roughly similar to this job and can tick the boxes for being "qualified". I want them to agree with me on the issues I care about the most and demonstrate the capacity to legislate accordingly.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
Yeah, I get the reticence, particularly within a monoculture of people that aren't necessarily close friends. I'm just asking because my own experience with being hard-right on a number of issues, including things like advocating the elimination of multiple federal departments, just doesn't seem to get actually get me any real blowback. Maybe it's because I tend towards either being kind of jokingly sardonic or dryly policy focused rather than coming off as a cultural enemy, but it's just really not consistent with what I hear people expecting.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
In 2020, I voted for Biden, because I wanted to be able to honestly say that I helped to vote out Donald Trump from the White House, lest I face severe negative consequences from people who consider not voting against Trump to be a mortal sin.
While I am aware that such people exist, have you actually encountered them in any meaningful context in real life? My friends are pretty much all normie blue tribe liberals, some even work for the federal government, and no one seems all that surprised or bothered that my views do not match their own.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
What if some better democracy, with better candidates, simply isn't achievable, and the only choice is between the current dysfunctional, partisan democracy that has you disillusioned; or abandoning democracy altogether?
Intermediate options have certainly existed. The available policies with regard to democratic representation aren't universal suffrage or bust.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
Maybe that's right, maybe it's not, but if it's a signal that's sufficiently weak that it's hard to detect in the data, the advice for any given individual should be to get their shit together rather than moping about systemic decline that makes it impossible for them to profit from labor. Get a degree in petroleum engineering or accounting or chemistry or literally anything else that has a plausible practical use and get to work. Even if there is a broader problem, being a Debbie Downer and giving up before even getting started is a poor approach to life. Being a Debbie Downer in the context of the American economy circa the present isn't just a poor approach, it's comically ridiculous if one takes even a slightly zoomed out look at history.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
Much more than 25% of the US population is obese, yes.
I mostly just don't look for alternate explanations for people's poor health when I can look at them and easily observe that their poor health is a product of eating too much and moving around too little. I've never met someone that was a cross-country runner or hobby cyclist or Crossfit enthusiast or powerlifter or mixed-martial artist that informs me that they got laid up after they moved into the wrong building. I'm sure there are genuine sufferers of idiosyncratic illnesses of autoimmunity, post-viral syndromes, and fungal infections, but as sweeping explanations for the poor health of Americans, I think these add little to the story. I wouldn't dismiss an individual, stuff happens, but I am pretty skeptical of these oddball diseases having more explanatory power.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
For pretty much any chronic disease that kind of looks like just being a lie-about, I would be more inclined to believe it if someone could show me an afflicted individual that doesn't seem like they were deeply neurotic, quite fat, or just generally frail prior to getting the putative disease.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
If you don’t already have substantial wealth then it seems nearly impossible to build much wealth through selling your labor.
What leads you to believe this and when do you perceive it as starting? I finished a postdoc a decade ago and had pretty close to zero net worth at the time, but I'm doing great now. I've seen a decent number of friends go from near zero or negative net worth at the time to quite wealthy since. All of us that have done well do have some sort of specialized skill but saying that making money is greatly helped by having a specialized skill is very different from claiming that labor can't build wealth.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
Here's the rundown:
When he was 13, Lanza was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome by a psychiatrist, Paul Fox.[155] When he was 14, his parents took him to Yale University's Child Study Center, where he was also diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). He frequently washed his hands and changed his socks 20 times a day, to the point where his mother did three loads of laundry a day.[166] He also sometimes went through a box of tissues in a day because he could not touch a doorknob with his bare hand.[167]
Lanza was treated by Robert King, who recommended extensive support be put in place, and King's colleague Kathleen Koenig at the Yale Child Study Center prescribed the antidepressant Celexa.[168] Lanza took the medication for three days. His mother Nancy reported: "On the third morning he complained of dizziness. By that afternoon he was disoriented, his speech was disjointed, he couldn't even figure out how to open his cereal box. He was sweating profusely ... it was actually dripping off his hands. He said he couldn't think ... He was practically vegetative."[155] He never took the medication again.[168] A report from the Office of the Child Advocate found that "Yale's recommendations for extensive special education supports, ongoing expert consultation, and rigorous therapeutic supports embedded into (Lanza's) daily life went largely unheeded."[163]
In a 2013 interview, Peter Lanza (Adam's father) said he suspected his son might have also had undiagnosed schizophrenia in addition to his other conditions. Lanza said that family members might have missed signs of the onset of schizophrenia and psychotic behavior during his son's adolescence because they mistakenly attributed his odd behavior and increasing isolation to Asperger syndrome.[155][162][169][170][171]
I don't buy the claim that this is such an ordinary history that the dragnet would catch Motte shitposters. I suppose it is true that his utterly amoral parents protected their precious psychotic baby as he devolved from merely being an isolated lunatic into a murderous lunatic and that there might not have been much anyone could have done about it after they elected to do so. In any case, there is simply nothing anyone could have done to make this guy less of an unloveable incel.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
While I am not @Primaprimaprima, my perspective on lone wolf shootings is that most of them are done by a specific sort of maladjusted man that isn't really that hard to notice and that the vast majority of these could be prevented pretty easily by returning to a much broader regime of involuntary commitment for dangerous lunatics. The kids at Sandy Hook died because our society values the freedom of lunatics more than the safety of innocents. The problem with the approach to Adam Lanza isn't that he was treated with too much disposability, but that he wasn't treated as more disposable.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
Have you tried to introduce an adult to say.. swimming or bike riding if they've never been exposed to those activities? Watch their looks of incredulity at their suggestion.
FWIW, I learned to ride a bike in my mid-20s. It took about a half hour of messing around in a parking garage (riding uphill as a learner is much easier because you can pedal harder without going fast) to get the basics down and then maybe like five rides outside to be reasonably competent.
Swimming, on the other hand, I've basically written off and triathlons with it. I can doggy paddle around or do a really goofy semi-freestyle well enough to keep myself alive if I needed to, but actually putting my face in the water is deeply uncomfortable and I just don't care to learn at this point. So, yeah, pretty much what you said.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
I continue to believe that very close to zero people coming to the Southern border are even close to meeting any ordinary standard of asylum. The entire crisis isn't just self-inflicted, it was created deliberately by people that just don't want there to be any immigration standards at all and found a stupid loophole where they could just encourage migrants to concoct ridiculous stories that meet an arbitrarily low standard of "asylum". Now that this is locked in as the formal policy, migrant-friendly courts will treat these "asylum seekers" as having rights to asylum per international treaties and changing that course is quite difficult.
So, yeah, I am not inclined to think that the people that cooked up this whole ridiculous scheme that has added an enormous number of people to the United States have suddenly had an epiphany any more than I'm inclined to believe that the Senate bill was a good-faith effort to control immigration. The Republicans in the House passed H.R. 2 in 2023, it's a good and reasonable bill that actually controls the border, and it was rejected by Democrats because they're opposed to controlling the border. It's pretty hard to treat the executive branch as differing from that when they literally went to the Supreme Court because they were so mad at Texas for trying to control the border.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
Yes, those are both white culture. Neither is "more white" anymore than different Asian subcultures are "more Asian". I can find both endearing and dislikeable things about aspects of both of their subcultures, but they do share the relevant traits called out by the Smithsonian poster on the matter. In their own ways, they find success in white cultures and I say good for them.
I can think of few people I'm less interested in impressing than the matriarch of a jungle tribe whose culture is obliterated the moment it comes into contact with the civilized world.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
The Smithsonian's African-American Museum created the brochure. I don't think any of those traits are individually specific to white people, but collectively I think they're a good way of describing the culture of Amerikaners in contrast to other groups that have inhabited the continent.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
I started riding a bike because I was getting a little soft looking and wanted to move around more and explore. I got talked into entering a duathlon. I enjoyed the duathlon, but also found out that I liked running more than biking. I picked up running, got talked into a half marathon, did really poorly in my first one and was annoyed because I knew I could do better. After that, being naturally competitive, decent enough at the sport, and really enjoying it have been more than enough. Having been fully immersed in it for a long time now, there isn't any motivation necessary - I like running, I run almost every day, I run with a club and other friends, and the benefits are very easy to see. I have more trouble making the smart decision to rest than I do with just lacing up every day.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
Nice, nice, nice. More time in the water and less hanging out with us dorks on the internet is good for the body and soul. Happy summer!
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
Cynically, I expect that the young people in the tribe are learning about TikTok trends and performative nonsense from Western culture, but getting absolutely none of the cultural and personal habits that are the "ways of the white people" that have generated the wealth and success of the Western world. That she believes that learning the ways of the white people leads to laziness suggests that she also doesn't actually know anything about those white cultural habits and is going entirely off of what she sees on the internet and sees the kids developing. In reality, white culture looks a lot like that Smithsonian poster (that was apparently intended to be a critique) - rugged individualism, family structure, future orientation, rigid time schedules with time viewed as a commodity, and hard work as the key to success. I doubt the tribe is learning those values, which is perhaps an indictment of internet culture, but has nothing to do with the ways of the white people.
I like it! This is excellent elaboration on the shorter summary of the court I had back at the beginning of the year. I think the model I lay out there continues to work pretty well with what we're seeing in rulings, particularly in the two split decisions from Friday. In Campos, I'm sure Gorsuch was very excited to contemplate the possibility of a conjunctive "or".
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