Nations do win wars though. The Confederacy was conquered after its armies were defeated and its cities razed. The kingdom of Hawaii is long gone though the spirit of aloha remains. The Comanche likewise are gone. The allies actually did conquer Nazi Germany and Japan. Their leadership was executed and their countries remade in the image of the US. Neither has waged war or even raised an army since.
At some point, a people lose the will to fight. Total war tends to be convincing to that end.
ajuuiomml
18d ago
Disregarding pimp my ride, it’s hard to say the platonic ideal is male or female, right? Why would going from the one to the other violate that ideal, so long as you arrive at the right spot (theoretically)? We could claim the ideal is that of a man for a man, etc, but then we are back to disagreeing about the initial state.
To my non-catholic understanding, I’d be down with someone transitioning if it is to serve God. That’s a pretty damn high bar, but who knows.
ajuuiomml
18d ago
Thank you for translating.
What would you say the pope would say if we had actual etiology with a highly predictive biological test for trans? I also wonder what progressives would say for those who tested negative and want to claim the identity.
ajuuiomml
19d ago
The problem with our Covid response was the urban/rural divide. Policies for the one don’t work for and aren’t wanted by the other. Unfortunately, that bifurcation closely corresponds to our political parties. It also didn’t help that the public health administration is seemingly tightly aligned with the Democratic Party. Covid functioned more like a mass shooting in the realm of the Culture War.
Accountability literally anywhere in government would be great…
ajuuiomml
19d ago
I don’t understand the distinction between curing congenital defects and sex changes? Surely the person undergoing the procedure would consider them one and the same? If the one doesn’t affect the unique dignity of the person, why should the other? Why does the natural order of the human person exclude some chromosomal ”abnormalities” but not others?
I’m not Catholic, but I’d readily accept some argument to this end. This one feels really light on God.
ajuuiomml
22d ago
- If they want a military victory, then the longer they wait the better their chances.
Not in terms of manpower which is about to take a nose dive.
ajuuiomml
23d ago
Do you really trust those numbers? 70s is can’t tell left from right putting on shoes is a struggle range. That implies literally half the population is literally retarded.
ajuuiomml
27d ago
I lived in SF for a decade. It had strong sense of neighborhood but without neighbors. We’d make friends for a short time, but everyone moved on, literally - to Oakland, Portland, Austin, or even just the Outer Sunset. I live in suburbia now which is exactly the opposite. Some neighbors have been here for 50 years!
ajuuiomml
28d ago
If I had to steelman buyers agents it’s probably something like they need to exists
Why do they need to exist in the age of the internet? It’s way less overhead to hit up Zillow for leads than it is to coordinate with an agent. You’d still have an appraiser, inspector, title insurance and a bank guarding the interest of the buyer. Earnest money protects the seller. If you need coordination, a one time fee is most appropriate. Residential real estate agents pattern match to cars salesmen who are strictly negative value. They artificially inflate the cost of automobiles via unwanted human interaction and likewise exist due to cartels.
As for pricing, Zillow or the equivalent will tell you the price and estimated price since the last sale of every property in your city from a birds eye view, often with photos from the previous sale. In my metro, there is no way the average buyers agent adds 30k of value - maybe a couple of grand is reasonable. On the sellers side, a one time fee also makes more sense to do staging, photos, and listings.
ajuuiomml
1mo ago
I appreciate your reply quite a bit. I’d like to ask you, in earnest, if psychiatry is legitimate, why is the problem only getting worse with increasing application? Has “mental health” ever been worse than now? I don’t actually know the answer, but it sure doesn’t seem so.
ajuuiomml
1mo ago
But what in the world makes you think that the source code of the universe is so neat and simple
Because the universe empirically works. It doesn’t appear to be particularly random, and where it is, that randomness disappears as appropriate. There doesn’t look like enough room in the universe to support infinite complexity - where would it go and to what end? If the complexity disappears at macroscopic scale, what could it actually be doing? Bounded complexity and a few centuries of progress point towards understandability.
I’d agree there is no reason to extrapolate theorems towards zero or beyond a single decade of supporting evidence. For your specific questions about gravity, I’d reply: no, -, very high.
ajuuiomml
1mo ago
You propose a new dichotomy between right and left in the US at least. A very common online critique of the right is that it is happy to eternalize the cost to companies who defect (food stamps for Walmart employees and bailouts for banks). Your addition would be that the left believes we should do so at the level of the individual (instead of demanding personal responsibility).
It’s a sort of measure of the things we shrug at.
ajuuiomml
2mo ago
It doesn’t feel that way to me, but thinking back that’s probably accurate in terms of policy. Attempting to cancel student debt strikes me as his most radical position. He also seems to be on board the caboose of the rainbow train which feels transgressive somehow.
I’d place moderating radicals at the feet of the murder rate more so than Biden.
ajuuiomml
2mo ago
1973 saw 2-3 domestic bombings daily! We don’t blow up transformers and police stations anymore so much as shoot groups of random people.
Of course, the domestic terrorists of the 70s were left wing radicals whose white leadership often went on to careers in academia which is hard to imagine for the current right wing radicals.
Back to the topic at hand. I don’t know how to compare the two.
ajuuiomml
2mo ago
I agree it’s not an existential threat - quite possibly every actually does. The people on the other side of you on the issue are not making a claim on the grounds of Utilitarianism.
ajuuiomml
2mo ago
Ana de Armas was very well liked in Bond - the rest of the movie was an actual disappointment including Bond himself. Charlize Theron was awesome in Fury Road. Mackenzie Davis and Gabriel Luna were great in Dark Fate. Their scenes shine in comparison to Arnold and Linda who drag down the whole movie to mediocrity. Imagine how much better it would have been without them at all (at least Arnold).
The female equivalent of Jon Bernthal is uncommon to begin with and even more so for someone attractive enough to be a lead. Brie Larson doesn’t come close to convincing at portraying violence. Wonder Woman was successful in spite of Gal Gadot looking out of place in most of the action scenes (the last act being the worst by far).
Fights more often come across as cross fit than people trying to hurt each other and fearing for their lives in turn.
ajuuiomml
2mo ago
The only study I know of for auditing voting was done by the NYPD in which case every fraudulent vote was successful except for one. The officer claimed to be the son of a poll worker who was in jail at the time! I believe the elections department worked to make such audits illegal in response. I can not find a link.
ajuuiomml
3mo ago
At 650k homeless and 500k per unit of housing, that’s 320 billion which is maybe doable for the federal government. Double that price (for California) and not so much. I have no idea what the ongoing maintenance cost for that housing would be - a typical house is .5%. Let’s 10x to 5% which is tens of billions per year. Having said that, we’ll manufacture more homeless next year and it’s not like we have the infra, materials, real estate or man power to actually build all of that anyway. I’m not sure this is actually fixable with money after all.
ajuuiomml
3mo ago
Lesbian marriages have the highest divorce rates so it goes. Also, their stated reasons for divorce are just the same. I’m not sure about gay men.
ajuuiomml
4mo ago
To recap my main thesis again, none of this makes any sense unless you incorporate the ideological component that needs Palestinians to remain stuck where they are, playing their role as the downtrodden in this grand theatrical production, all to ensure the jihadi casus belli against the Jews is maintained.
How many civil wars did Palestinians cause in neighboring countries in that time period? Egypt just couped the Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan fought a civil war against the PLO who wouldn’t stop attacking Israel and their king was assassinated by a Palestinian. The histories of Lebanon and Syria aren’t much different. No one will take the Palestinians because they will use their newfound freedom to once again attack Israel, either pulling their new benefactor into direct conflict with Israel or kicking off another messy regional/civil war.
Seriously, why would any country let alone a neighbor agree to extend citizenship again when every previous time ended in blood. At best, you get to support a bunch of impoverished, uneducated refugees whose greatest hopes and dreams rests upon the literal genocide of your nuclear armed neighbor.
NPR very clearly has a mission of political advocacy. The angle on literally every single story is “how does it affect people of color/women/minorities”. Frequently, resulting in bizarre, inappropriate, or completely uninformative segments.
This is the segment when I turned off marketplace for good - which advocates for “prioritizing black women” via the “black women best” framework. In the whole segment, no policy position or course of action is actually advanced - at all. Very little evidence is offered to suggest that prioritizing black women will actually benefit everyone (trickle up) or that any interventions would be cost effective. The guest even goes as far as to suggest nothing at all will work:
…with the only proscription being:
The segment is so off putting that I come away taking the position opposite than it advanced even though I agree it’s not great that black women have a higher unemployment rate.
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/09/01/why-centering-black-women-in-the-economy-could-benefit-everyone/
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