ajuuiomml
1mo 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…
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
1mo 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
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
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.
ajuuiomml
1mo 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
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
4mo 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
1mo 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
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
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
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
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
1mo 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
1mo 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
7mo ago
I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot.
This is explicitly illegal in the US and would land you in deep shit.
Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing?
That is illegal.
Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.
I suspect this is also illegal in Michigan.
ajuuiomml
11mo ago
The victory I wanted was for everyone else to not care, too. Instead, I got LGBTQ2A+ climbing night at the local gym, corporations under the auspices of straight white women plastering rainbows on every surface, and “we believe love is love and kindness is everything” along with casual discussions on the internet of the moral imperative to punch my face.
We replaced homophobia with political enmity, not indifference. To me, the pride flag feels sorta akin to the confederate flag. Its not exactly a symbol of hate or exclusion for most of the people flying it, but it sure feels that way on this side of things.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
I’m reminded of the sidebar content or /r/antiwork which was truly shocking when I first read it:
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists—except that I’m not kidding—I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry.
Such a society is incompatible with one that has things like housing, running water, electricity, heating, plumbing, medicine, any form of transportation or sufficient food to keep its population of 300 million from starving. It would also not have any computers or software so turn the dial back to the 40s before your trip to the Middle Ages. It would be incapable of trade to get any of these things. It would be incapable of producing even art, because that too takes a huge amount of work. Committing to the is plan is commitment to genocide in a Great Leap Forward sort of way.
Beyond genocide, and outright impossibility, it strikes me that the author had all the aspirations of a 13 year old. A world of frivolity is not a utopia. A world with no responsibility is a world devoid of purpose.
I remain unclear how anyone engages with this writing seriously.
ajuuiomml
1mo 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
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
4mo ago
and (possibly in the future) even eliminate conservative candidates through bog-standard abuse of process
Coming out to an election near you this winter. If states reign supreme, what’s to stop any state from stripping literally all of their political adversaries from their ballots? Why would they stop at national elections for that matter? All they need is a governor and a stacked court.
ajuuiomml
2mo 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
5mo ago
I don't think of people being trans or gay as being strictly worse than cis or straight such that society or government ought to be oriented around the minimization of such people.
To me, this is nearly a complete non sequitur. Why the sudden spike of people identifying as trans? Society is more accepting now for sure, but gay people have always been with us. Trans is something new, and certainly in these numbers. I personally believe there is a strong biological cause. I’ll place my bet on ingesting microwaved plastic daily. Actually looking for the reason would imply that there is something wrong with trans people and that they can be fixed or even prevented so I’m not holding my breath.
I think being trans is about as morally wrong as being deaf. I’d expect the federal government to do something in the case of an unparalleled epidemic of deafness.
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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