anti_dan
2mo ago
Obvious in what way? The FBI's recent track record is not even mildly indicative that they are nonpartisan in their targets.
anti_dan
2mo ago
I haven't seen the meat of this story yet. What is the bribe allegedly for? Allowing a terrorist to get a VISA? Given the FBI's recent track record I am highly skeptical that they did good enough police work to have actually made America safer via a sting operation against a Trump Cabinet Official.
anti_dan
2mo ago
This seems like the worst possible example - “Are transwomen women?” seems to be a question where 90% or the disagreement about the meaning of the word “woman” and only 10% about ground truth.
Its not really a disagreement about the meaning of the word "woman" because if it was, the trans movement would have a consistent and coherent answer to the WIAW question.
anti_dan
2mo ago
There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however -- essentially all the qualified Americans are already employed or don't care to be.
Unless you are talking about a very specific industry that I don't have any tangential relation to, this is simply not true. We are graduating more engineers and comp sci majors than are getting hired for those types of jobs, and the workforce is constantly in attrition at the other end as well in all relevant industries.
anti_dan
2mo ago
Nah. They would win a case if Kimmel was popular and not just propagating lies without comedy on TV. It would be a huge win. Instead they abandoned the guy right after another company abandoned a similar guy who was revealed to be expensive and losing that company lots of money.
If Kimmel merely makes a crass joke he probably gets the Colbert plan. These expensive, bad, shows are clearly set for execution and have been since that weird Jay Leno situation where Conan took over sorta but they also sorta gave Leno his own earlier show then walked it all back. The point is, they all have been a waste of money since approximately then, and have been operating on inertia, and the inertia is breaking.
anti_dan
2mo ago
Perhaps if your intent is to remain ignorant of how the Nazi's formed a winning coalition, but if you are interested in such things the genocide is more of an afterthought. Its obviously the most important thing when talking about their impact on world history, but when discussing domestic politics and drawing comparisons between the politics of various regimes it is very unimportant.
anti_dan
2mo ago
But to give everyone money you either have to tax at such exorbitant rates that you are going to cripple the economy, or you are going to be giving out so little that it doesn't help anyone but the very poor anyways.
So unless you are the first politician in centuries to figure out a way to tax the underclass to give some extra money to private sector upper middle class families, your redistribution program is going to be bad for society.
anti_dan
2mo ago
What leftist movement has been obsessed with concepts like purifying the racial makeup of the country?
This is central to the identity of Nazis for people on the left, but they had a menagerie of policies that frequently overlapped with the left.
anti_dan
2mo ago
See, I think the politics are typically very similar when it is invoked. People quibbling over whether to nationalize the banks or the banks and the hospitals.
anti_dan
2mo ago
What if giving him cash is just mathematically the most effective option?
I mean, it is theoretically possible if you have the rare case of a guy who was fired from his job for no fault of his own and needs some money for food and shelter until he gets another job. In that hypothetical you are preserving the theoretical productivity of a person just long enough until they return to productivity.
In practice even unemployment insurance as implemented is not even this. Last I checked, most users of UI are repeat users. The rest of the redistribution programs fail even harder. The problem with giving money to people to keep them alive is it doesn't wean them off. Its just a self licking ice cream cone in social program form. That is, unfortunately, the Achilles heel of EA as currently styled as well. You have to account for future expenses as well.
anti_dan
2mo ago
Yeah. I've always understood horseshoe theory as an invention of necessity for socialists/communists to sanitize themselves of the obvious similarities they shared with the Nazis. In many ways, the Fascist is just a socialist who has realized they can do 99% of what they want to do without the burden of having to actually run the means of production (and get the blame when they inevitably fail at doing so) by just imposing regulations and mandates. Its not your fault the steel industry failed because it had to compete with foreign steel that didn't have to be made using gold dust, it was your stupid capitalists who failed the gold dust mandate.
anti_dan
2mo ago
This whole thing seems semi-delusional in a delusions of grandeur sort of way. He has this whole theory of politics that elevates his quirky specialty to near-magical status, and then applies that theory is a way most flattering to his own political preferences. The right having a well funded and tightly organized right wing in 2011? Is he talking about Rush Limbaugh and Fox News? Two voices yelling into a hurricane of leftist media that was slowly ceding ground at the time to leftist social media?
Its all way too much and I don't find it accurate or prescient. Just kinda silly. It is after all basically the writings of a college professor in his elder years after several decades spent in a bubble of university leftism.
anti_dan
2mo ago
No one knows or cares who that guy is. Maybe some frogs would be rude about it. Fox News certainly won't be platforming people who speculate he was killed by his own fan celebrating.
If he's executed at an "Appalachian outreach" event there'd be somber reaction from the right. Perhaps some jokes if he gets killed ironically. Like by a Palestinian
anti_dan
2mo ago
To this day right wingers on Twitter still bring up the image of him trying to run and tripping on the bench right before he was stabbed as a sort of Always Sunny meme. A lot of them took a similar line that leftists took with Kirk - "I don't agree with this but he did".
If Charlie Kirk was killed by a spray and pray tactic taken up by some switch modified AR-15 this might be a valid comparison along the lines of, "this was his stupid prize for playing the stupid game of supporting the 2nd Amendment," but this was nothing like that. None of the laws Kirk opposed would have saved his life even with perfect implementation.
This is a routine problem of people pretending non-like things are like, or like things are non-like. Its silly.
anti_dan
2mo ago
If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave. (Especially right now, when the risk of leftwing cancellation is the lowest it has been in a very long time.)
I doubt this. First of all, there is a reason there is no leftwing version of Kirk, which is because lefty influence is distributed. If someone kills all the presidents of the Ivy League + AOC + the NYT editorial board, that is a lot of killing to get to the kind of impact that one bullet achieved here.
Secondly, we've seem Republican reactions to violence, and they are not positive. At worst you can sometimes see things being joke-worthy and the right making some crude jokes, like the Paul Pelosi homosexual prostitute situation.
anti_dan
2mo ago
Why is he the natural successor? Anytime he's been in the spotlight he has either been boring or incompetent. Maybe Black Americans don't like him because of the gay stuff, but that's just them stumbling into the right opinion that every other Democrat should already be pretty close to. Its not like South Bend was the Mecca of the Midwest when he was mayor, it was crap and got worse while he was in charge. This is a city with Notre Freaking Dame propping it up and it still manages to have out of control crime and drug problems. His Transportation stint was probably even worse, mostly defined by being MIA and/or mismanaging crises.
anti_dan
2mo ago
Riot support is closer to the line than many leftists probably would like it to be. Financial support for riots/ers is a crime after all
anti_dan
2mo ago
I don't think this actually applies this time. Multiple meat space humans have celebrated this in front of me
anti_dan
2mo ago
Unlike Fuentes, Kirk did a lot of public appearances, so even if he's not nearly as provocative a figure he was simply more exposed. I personally never thought of Kirk as anything more a suited buffoon - a borderline caricature of a YR. Not a figure of any real note. The only reason I can think of to go after Kirk is pure availability on the part of a shooter who was determined to shoot somebody.
Charlie Kirk hasn't been a buffoon for years. This is an old bias you hold.
Instead he is(was) basically the equivalent of what Democrats would call grassroots movement for most of the last 5 years. In other words, he was normie conservative.
But still he was assassinated because???
anti_dan
2mo ago
I would say that it is probably the most shocking video I have seen this year. Maybe the most shocking since 9/11. I havent really recovered from it because it was presented to me in a very awkward way and I was totally unprepared to see an assassination play out (more or less someone asked me if "I had seen what happened with Charlie Kirk?" then showed me the video).
But its just a 30-something guy in a button down sitting with a microphone, and then pop-blood. So much blood.
anti_dan
2mo ago
A company I used to do jobs for had a pretty good team that churned out steady work and a decent number of patents a year. Nothing that makes a practice, but a good client. They had a 56 year old guy on the team that was clearly slowing down, but still was sharp, just not 8am-8pm shift sort of on his game. But he was the best at helping me draft their patents. Any questions, go to Richard. Richard picks up the phone every time and always can clarify a point with a helpful few sentences, and then go on to point out some more things he thinks were not explained properly in the specs they sent over (almost always correct). So this guy was still a good engineer, and outstanding communicator. One day they submit a spec and his names on it but he doesn't pick up. Ask another guy, "oh Richard had to leave." That sucks I say. Something about being in the bottom 30% of deliverables 2 years in a row.
anti_dan
2mo ago
This, of course, mirrors what any engineering or chemistry grad would tell you if you just...walked around and interviewed a bunch of seniors at local state university. Ask them if they have job offers and what they are in and at what number. Lots do not. Even your 'B' students that have done an internship often will only have 1 pretty mediocre offer. And if you don't get an industry offer within 6 months of graduation your likelihood of ever getting one drops off pretty significantly.
On top of that, there is also the large cohort of "retired" engineers. We use this term sparingly because almost none of them have retired voluntarily. They were all let go for being too old and given a BS reason, and no one else would hire them because they are too old (and also given BS reasons). Sure, they just have 3 decades of industry experience being wasted while they run an online CNC custom parts website, but he's 50 freaking years old and wants 6 figures to work 40 hours a week with standard sick and vacation! Insanity!
anti_dan
2mo ago
A lottery would be better than the current system for sure, but it doesnt address the problem that once the top 10% of the bids are actually filled, there will still be a bunch of people offering "job openings" in the 60-80k range that they claim they cant fill with Americans and then the bottom bidders still can fill those. Unless there really is enough actual high end demand for H1bs for all of them to make like 500k. But given the current market that seems extremely unlikely.
anti_dan
2mo ago
This appears to be a consistent failure mechanism with all "high skill immigration." Because there are clear metrics, they are clearly game-able by motivated by people who are from a worse country and have no buy in to the social contract of the country they are moving to.
It is not just CS, this sort of issue exists across all of STEM. Engineering grads from the State U where I live (a top 20 undergrad program by basically every metric) are graduating with 1 or 2 industry offers IF they are top 20% in the class AND did a relevant industry internship/co-op. To reliably have multiple offers you need to be top 5%+ experience or be a minority candidate. Bottom half graduates (and this is an engineering school that still washes out about 1/3 of freshman, and is very competitive to enter) are receiving practically zero offers. In the business environment we have been in for at least 10 years now, the whole idea of a non-fraudulent H1B visa is silly. There are dozens of qualified people Americans for any job opening in white collar work, there are gluts of degree holders in every field from Math to Chemical Engineering to LGBT studies. There are also, by this point, millions of "retired" Americans who have 2-3 decades of industry experience and have been forced into retirement, long before age 65, because they got too expensive, but even if willing to take a 30% paycut cannot find work.
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