Famous people's attractiveness is usually judged relative to the time they were most visible to the public. When people think Audrey Hepburn, they think Breakfast At Tiffany's, not her retirement years.
Joe Biden was actually very good looking as a young man, but that's not people's mental image of him.
The context of OP's comment didn't involve considering academics in a vacuum, but measured up against a conservative majority.
When considered in strict relation to each other, there's definitely a fact of the matter when it comes to quality.
aeqno
7mo ago
Who would you rather live next to, a randomly chosen elite college faculty member, or a randomly chosen MAGA?
aeqno
7mo ago
conservatives are ~50% of the U.S. population, while academics are a fraction of a percent (or maybe slightly larger)
Quality > quantity.
aeqno
7mo ago
Could you elaborate on the difference? The armed forces personnel back then were more virulently racist and reflexively anti-Washington than probably most people alive today. And yet they didn't hesitate in turning their guns on their fellow Southerners in the name of racial equality.
You think some infantryman with a Lebron jersey in his barracks room is going to counter this trend?
aeqno
7mo ago
When the Feds ordered military and national guard units to desegregate the South with armed force, they did so unquestioningly, despite those units being staffed by decidedly unwoke Southerners.
aeqno
8mo ago
Perhaps. Just seems to me that in answer to the question of where to build a white utopia on a continental-sized landmass, they were like "Well, where are the black people"?
aeqno
9mo ago
The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
aeqno
9mo ago
I have no idea how the government could continue to stand
The current Israeli government continues to stand despite having apparently missed the invasion force massed on its borders.
aeqno
9mo ago
His whole selling point on the foreign policy front was that world leaders would tremble at the mere thought of crossing Mad Man Trump.
If that's now shown as fantasy and Putin, Xi, Netanyahu etc. are ignoring him and doing whatever they want anyway, where does that leave things?
aeqno
9mo ago
What?
His take on Putin's interview with Tucker is a classic:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1755750991964913902
I still go back to it from time to time.
aeqno
10mo ago
my grandparents who remembered it clearly describe it as definitely on the way out
C'mon. It required actual military force to desegregate educational institutions in the South. That isn't a system that was petering out on its own accord.
aeqno
10mo ago
it’s hard to function believing you offer no value while getting a paycheck
Private sector here, but this is me, and I'm perfectly fine with it.
aeqno
10mo ago
Schumer: Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies, programs, and personnel “non-essential,” furloughing staff with no promise they would ever be rehired.
So the same thing that's been happening for the last 3 months?
Also, the fact that Medicaid remains untouched and the defense budget is actually increasing demonstrates once and for all that these guys were never serious about curtailing spending.
aeqno
10mo ago
400km of steppe without big natural impediments
What's the Russian Air Force doing while this hypothetical invasion force is rolling across wide open steppe?
Somewhere in the world right now, some unfortunate young girl is being forcibly married off to some old, toothless geezer.
Do you think it's any consolation at all that he was a real hunk several decades back?
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