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
1yr ago
Some cases of AR ownership are even a step further - one of the major reasons I chose to purchase an AR-15 is because of the political valence around it and proposed ATF restrictions. Yes, it's also fun to shoot at the range and could serve as a quality home defense weapon, but I could have just as easily chosen something else that fits that description. I don't know how many people are in a similar boat, but I don't think I'm all unusual of a gun owner.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
The defensive gun use one is fairly sketchy data given the phrasing and lack of ability to validate the claimed usage.
Aside from that though, I think these are basically just facts. Understanding that criminalizing ownership of "assault weapons" would create tens of millions of felons-in-the-making for such devious actions as having 17 round magazine pistols should be part of the conversation.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I doubt that there would be a bunch of people lying about that
I doubt there will be many people outright lying, but I don't think we can glean much from the claim since firearms owners will tend to be motivated to stretch the truth regarding what qualifies as a defensive gun use. If I live in a city impacted by the 2020 riots, might I be able to say that I engaged in defensive gun use if I readied and loaded weapons, even though no one saw me do so? I think the phrasing leaves that open. If I go for a bike ride with a firearm holstered and have it available to deal with wildlife or loose dogs attacking, have I engaged in defensive firearm use? I guess I would say no, but I don't think someone's lying if they say yes. If I must evict a tenant and concealed carry a firearm in case the altercation goes bad, is this a defensive firearm use if the tenant is never aware the gun is present? That seems like a defensible claim based on how the question is worded.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
As a slight contrast to your anecdote, I will say that I live in a very blue city and I'm not shy about speaking to liberal friends (or even acquaintances) about firearms. It turns out a decent number of them own as well and those that don't have some of the myths around firearm ownership dispelled since they know me as a rational, cool-headed person that does not have any desire to engage in unnecessary violence.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
(I would say that normally I'm fine with going along with someone's preferred pronouns, but when it is so obviously farcical you have to draw the line).
When does it become farcical to you? My standard is that anything other than standard male or female pronouns are farcical and that you only get to switch those once, maybe twice before it's really not on me to figure out what you are today. If someone makes an obvious effort to present as a man, they get male pronouns, if they make an effort to present as female, they'll get female pronouns. Anything more is a bridge too far and I don't believe in the sincerity of even a single xir.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
At my previous workplace, people listed pronouns in their work profiles and one person had a long explanation of why their pronouns had asterisks in them and how to pronounce them out loud. Fortunately, I never had the misfortune of needing to engage further than emailing a group list that they happened to be on.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Robert Lindsay
Do you mean James Lindsay? You know, Jimmy Concepts?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Which, judging by the Breitbart comments and replies I expect here, laughing at my pearl clutching is absolutely the point. You want me to be mad, you want me get up on my soapbox and bleat some self-righteous Soyjak lines about muh poor illegals so you can get mad right back and it feels good.
No, I want the people that live in Martha's Vinyard to admit that living around illegal aliens fucking sucks and everyone knows it. I want them to admit that despite having way more than enough wealth to handle 50 people, they don't want to, because they know that it's bad for their community. I want the people that utter platitudes about how diversity is our strength to deal with even the slightest bit of personal consequence for their ideology.
Of course, I don't have any illusion that any of these things are going to happen, but putting it as blatantly front and center as this does might at least make it apparent to fencesitters that the empathy of the very wealthy for illegal aliens only extends as far as some other neighborhood.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Less schadenfreudenly, has anyone ever been happy with the claim of "I'm not racist, just classist"?
Almost everyone trying to exercise control over their own neighborhood has been basically happy to hear that from their neighbors, as near as I can tell.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Grain of salt, but this link has a few images.
Personally, I'd bet quite a lot that "in this house, we believe" style signs are common there.
I really cannot overstate how much I despise these lawyers. I don't believe for one moment that they actually believe that the asylum laws were intended to include migrants from countries that are simply unpleasant places to live. I think they know beyond any shadow of doubt that coaching economic migrants up on how to make asylum claims that result in them being released into the interior of the country is exploiting a loophole in how the law works. They want people to be able to migrate freely, they know they can exploit that loophole, and they feel morally righteous in doing so.
I don't know if Patchwork_October has the perfect solution, but it seems like a good enough workaround to curtail the worst of this behavior.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Mermaids' simultaneously tries to hold the laughable position that they're not medical experts when questioned
Much like the Kentaji Brown-Jackson confirmation hearing, I can't really tell what the strategy or motivation is here. It comes off as just pretending to be really stupid, but are there actually people that sincerely believe that they don't know what "woman" means due to a lack of university-level biology education? Or that are sincerely unsure about whether there is any biological difference in the average size and strength of men and women? I'm not trying to be sardonic, I really can't tell if there's a dishonest ploy going on or if people have actually become confused about these remarkably simple topics as a result of political conditioning.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
In a Friday Fun coincidence, I recently helped a friend pick out a mechanical watch as a birthday gift for her significant other, and I got rediscover how much joy I have for the basics of watches. They really are incredible little devices and some of the detail work that's put in on pricey models is a thing of beauty. Owning them at this point is purely a point of fun and vanity, but they really are fun and beautiful.
Let's add the tourbillon as an interesting nugget of horology.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
It's a national issue - I don't just want them out of my state, I want them out of country. I want them to never try coming back. This requires changing the prevailing national political winds, not just state-level policy that shifts which states illegal aliens prefer to live in. If I lived in Florida, sure, I'd also want a hardline approach that's effective in the short-run, but I would still be in favor of this sort of political gamesmanship.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
So does it being a national issue excuse Desantis or Abbot from not taking a hard line against employers within the boundaries they control?
No, it doesn't.
This looks to me like a 2002 Democratic governor pulling some stunt regarding gay marriage while their own state hasnt legalized gay marriage. My reaction would be "screw that! Do what you can in your state and then pull some stunts!"
Yeah, that actually worked. No one succeeded in taking that action at the state level, they pulled it off with federal legal shenanigans. I don't think this example works in the direction you're kind of implying.
I dont underatand why people againstt illegal immigration are giving governors a pass when they pull stunts rather than do what they can.
I don't think I'm granting such a pass. I think Desantis and other governors should attack the issue from multiple angles and do so as aggressively as politically feasible. I don't think there's 4D chess going on here or anything, I think Desantis just likes flashy, politically combative maneuvers. Sure, I'd like him to do more on it locally, but I'm still going to be happy to see a culture warrior on my side of the issue.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Topher's The Patriot released in December 2020 and stirred up some controversy after the rapper performed it on January 6, 2021 at a Veterans for Trump rally and it was pulled from Spotify.
I don't know, maybe these sorts of things have to come from counterculture rather than the dominant culture. That doesn't seem like a very satisfying explanation, but it pattern matches from what I can see.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
If you subtract the top 3% wealthiest people in the USA and UK, both America and Britain are "second world" nations.
Definitely false. The United States leads the world in median disposable income.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
No, median refers to the 50th percentile. The American that sits in the exact middle of the income distribution has more income than a similarly situated person in any other country (although Switzerland and Norway are comparable, it depends on which data set you use). Bizarrely, you can see the same thing in this graph from the OP's citation.
There is flatly no truth to the idea that the American middle is doing poorly.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I would assume that vehicles are counted as consumption rather than subtracted from disposable income. I would likewise be surprised if I found out that bikes were subtracted out of disposable income in Copenhagen. That said, I'm not entirely confident on how they handle transportation.
I don't know how college debt is handled, but I strongly object to the idea that Americans "must" go into debt for education.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
...liberal notion that land usage shouldn't be based on ethnicity and that the resources should benefit all of society.
This does not strike me as a "liberal" notion.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
So am I. I don't think the idea that "resources should benefit all of society" is a liberal notion. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but that sounds like a rejection of private property in favor of a more collectivist approach.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Sure, and we also have to factor in the amenities at ski resorts and beaches when thinking about quality of life. Those aren't the metrics that the article was using to "prove" that the United States has a wealth problem though, so I didn't address them.
I'm insufficiently familiar with British, Polish, and other European loan systems to offer any real commentary on them. I can speak to the United States though, and quite a few states have rules that make attendance at major state universities free or close to it for middle-class and lower residents. Americans accumulating large amounts of student loan debt basically fall into one of three categories:
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Making poor choices and attending private schools for no particular reason.
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Wealthy and not that great of students, so attending expensive schools for actual good reasons.
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Going for graduate and professional degrees that are highly fiscally rewarding in the long run.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Not exactly an original observation, but I keep bumping into a style of writing that includes "falsely" or "conspiracy theory" or similar verbiage every time that it mentions a given claim. This popped up for me again when I went to read the Wiki for the Republican New Hampshire Senate nominee, Don Bolduc:
For more than a year, Bolduc endorsed the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to favor Joe Biden.
...
he continued to promote the false claim that the election was marred by fraud.[7]
...
Bolduc is a 2020 presidential election denier.
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He endorsed the false claim, promoted by outgoing president Donald Trump,
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Throughout his campaign for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Bolduc continued to promote the false claim that the election was stolen
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Bolduc continued to promote his false claims that the election was marred by fraud
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Bolduc has repeated COVID-19 falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
This is a really short article on this guy to have at least seven times that they keep repeating the same thing over and over. Yes, OK, got it, the official position is that there was definitely nothing wrong with the election and that all of The Science on Covid has always been completely correct and questioning it just being a conspiracy theorist repeating falsehoods, which are super false, and also disinformation. But given that this has been pounded over and over and over, why the written tic of repeating it so many times? There are lots of things that I think are obviously, factually wrong, but I don't feel the need to reiterate that literally every time I mention those things.
So what's driving this stylistic choice?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions
One thing that I think (or at least hope) comes from this is for the people who were more moderate to see that when the anti-lockdown people said "for how long?" and the Covid-cautious replied "as long as it takes", they really meant it. There have been a bunch of sardonic exchanges that opened with something like, "are you going to wear a mask the rest of your life?" and the answer is apparently that this is exactly the plan for people that take continue to take Covid seriously. Their retorts seem to be along the lines of "I also intend to continue wearing bike helmets and seatbelts", which is consistent with this just being something that they think should be a permanent feature of society going forward.
My hope is that this looks crazy enough to the median person that it is effectively politically impossible to mandate masks any time in the foreseeable future. Biden's statement that it's over seems consistent with that, but I tend to think politicians give whatever answer is consistent with the timing of elections rather than generally held principles.
I had no practical recourse when the United States government decided that my family's rental properties could be indefinitely occupied by squatters because (apparently) that prevents Covid or something. There are also more than a few examples of individuals being disciplined by their governments for defending their own property - sometimes it's worse to have a government than not.
I agree with your broader point, but the level of practical recourse available can feel just as hopeless under a government as a gang. Ain't no drug dealer ever tried to tell me whether gardening supplies are "essential".
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