anti_dan
4mo ago
I had a longer post that got eaten. But here it is in short:
Americans aren't turning towards Russia, but some are turning away from Europe. The reason is simple, Europe has picked a side in the American culture war, and it is the far left side. That is not a good formula for maintaining good relations with America because even when we have a Democratic government, you guys are still to the left of it by a lot. There's the immigration piece, the welfare, the speech regulations, the climate alarm. And it doesn't help that Brussels and Berlin's default position is "never compromise".
So now we turn to military spending. Europe has failed at this from not only a monetary perspective, but from a readiness perspective to an even worse degree for decades. And what are you asking Americans to defend (while you certainly attempt to appear unwilling to do so yourselves)? An increasingly authoritarian Bureaucracy who are so intent on being authoritarian they'd rather cripple their own economy than let a little freedom spill out.
So, we are at a point similar to the point where we were around 1916 or so. Is it really wise for the US to jump in yet? I'd argue it was far too early for us in WWI. We should have let the sides bleed a bit more and come in and swept it all aside instead of what we did, which yielded the ineffectual Treaty of Versailles and more conflict just a generation later.
anti_dan
1mo ago
How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people? In a way that provides useful guidance and doesn't make T seem like a normal thing for any boy who isn't obsessed with sports? In a way that let's them successfully navigate the differences?
Well, #1 I'd make him do some sports. That's the easiest way for any teen to get on the path of appreciating the differences between men and woman. That girl who was good at tag? Guess what, when you both at 15 shes no good anymore. Even the slow boys are beating her. And physical activities involving even a modicum of contact like basketball? Forget it. Its not just that she can barely jump by comparison, its that any man that does even a little physical activity can just move her. And, its actually scary in many ways, because you will be afraid that you are going to break her. Which you could easily do on accident.
anti_dan
1mo ago
- No. Totally useless and actively harmful like most traffic laws when strictly enforced.
- No. Totally useless and actively harmful like most traffic laws when strictly enforced.
- No. Totally useless and actively harmful like most traffic laws when strictly enforced.
- No(ish). The left lane is a lane. We should utilize all lanes. When traffic is slow it is better to use them all and it would be stupid chaos if people were passing, merging, then being passed in the left lane. But, if you are slow in the left lane while there is open road, you should be tailgated, and all liability for any collisions should attach to you, the slow loser.
- This situation does not exist. People don't have time for this shit. Just drive everyone.
- I find these rules largely evil and written for the purposes of giving out arbitrary traffic tickets, not improving driving conditions on the road. So lots of people should be allowed to ignore them. HOWEVER, many people who have drivers licenses should not have such driving privileges. The test should obviously be much more vigorous and then we could make traffic laws that are actually reasonable.
- A drunk driving test should be part of the licensing process, wherein your BAC is monitored while you execute various driving tasks and are force fed alcohol and you should be personally assigned a legal BAC just like you are issued a personal prescription from your eye doctor for your glasses.
anti_dan
4mo ago
When you start talking about Putin's control over Vance and Trump you should double check yourself and think "what am I doing here?"
The reason for the antagonism between the US right and Europe and Ukraine right now is not a mystery, and you don't need Putin based conspiracy theories to explain it.
Part 1: Ukraine has been acting as part Democrats international money laundering operations that have been further exposed via the vetting of USAID. They also engaged in an active cover up of those money laundering operations, a but-for, reason that Joe Biden was able to win in 2020. In other words. Zelensky went all in betting on Biden. His son's freedom was in Zelensky's hands after all.
Part 2: Zelensky doubles down on being partisan in 2024, actively campaigning for Biden then Harris.
Part 3: Ukraine is a symptom of longstanding fractures between Europe as a whole and the American right. Europe has been militarily freeloading for almost a century at this point. On top of that the cultural shift is probably even more problematic. The European reaction Vance's freedom of speech speech has been disturbing. There hasn't been an ounce of self reflection, just pure agitprop and condescension. But lets be clear, yes they are the baddies. There are the ones imprisoning grandmas for praying 30 meters from an abortion clinic and dads for calling a Muslim who raped his daughter a rapist.
They'd probably arrested Vance if he was some comedian instead of the VP. The situation isn't just bad. It is really bad.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Europeans hating Americans is as old as apple pie friend.
The snobbery didn't start with Trump and people's various Putin conspiracy theories either. They were snobbish about GW Bush before Iraq!
anti_dan
1mo ago
Suddenly? Acknowledging that it is a dangerous disease spreading subculture has been part of the anti-woke right from the beginning.
anti_dan
8mo ago
I mean. Its not really about the article itself, although the article is good. The point is true. Gay and transgender ideology have become akin to the pagan/satanic religions of old. Many people have noticed. Scott just figured out the best headline.
anti_dan
1mo ago
When I was forced to play basketball in high school PE class, there were some girls who played with the boys, and I can tell you from first hand experience, a clumsy autistic nerd who’s just getting into shape absolutely cannot just move a 5’10 elite female athlete with broader shoulders than him.
The existence of such a person is a failure of the public schools.
I agree with you with regards to comparing elite female athletes with average guys. But the fact is almost no high school has even one such elite female athlete. Under a proper physical fitness regimen, if the school held a 1v1 tug of war competition girls would win against guys like 5% of the time. That there are so many weak and feeble men is a choice propagated by the system that not only doesn't prioritize physical fitness, it actively discourages it for all but the top percentages. That is why you have guys thinking girls can beat them at things. Because those 20% are working out everyday while he eats potato chips and does nothing. If he merely did 20 minutes of running and 20 minutes of lifting every other day he'd instantly be in the top 5% of females.
I am by no means an elite athlete. That said, I once faced a girl who would go on to be an Olympian in a 1v1 match. I won. It was not close. I wasn't even fully into puberty at the time. I was embarrassed by the existence of the match.
The fact is, if you are losing to girls as a guy in basically every sport but super long distance swimming they are substantially outworking you. If you told George Washington that his country would be dominated by places of child education wherein the average kid just sits all day and cant run a 2 mile sprint to notify the neighbor you need some butter for a pie, he'd be appalled. Movement is the solution. It is, of course, pain as well. But pain is weakness leaving the body.
anti_dan
17d ago
Congress has put many conditions on Medicaid, and only through controversial interpretations of various statutes is PP eligible in any state, let alone South Carolina.
anti_dan
10mo ago
Ive never met someone like Walz. Every person who served I know underplays their service. Every teacher I know doesn't start pedophile adjacent clubs for kids (except the one who was arrested for giving 16 year olds booze and we all knew was a creep). Walz is an outlier in my life in that he simply lies about everything in very important ways. Much more important than Trump saying he had the biggest crowd somewhere. If Walz was in Vance's position he'd already have dropped out, that is how bad he is and how extreme the Democrat media advantage is.
anti_dan
5mo ago
protections against retributive genocide
This is incongruent with the population of Gaza being given political power. Even if Israel for the last 50 years had engaged in solely defensive actions, accepted mass bombings as a thing that happens, and never did any counterstrikes, the Arab Palestinians would still try to genocide them.
anti_dan
10mo ago
I mean, to be fair, no taxes on tips acknowledges a de facto reality: who reports their tips in their tax returns? Enforcement would be impossible. As a handout to Nevada, it makes sense politically.
Taxing tips is basically a huge part of IRS enforcement. It is why you always see stats that most audits are on low-mid income people. The IRS knows they dont report so they audit them and check bank statements, and almost always find the person was committing tax fraud by underreporting tips.
anti_dan
7mo ago
The reason the average trial takes so long to commence is defendant delay. If you shoot a clerk at 7/11 and get picked up that day. You'll be charged by tomorrow, in bond court the day after, indicted and arraigned within 30 days, and the prosecution will be ready for trial in 60. But your public defender (because lets be honest you dont have and cant keep a real job) wont be. And you will flirt with a private attorney half a dozen times. And they will lose the discovery the state already gave them and demand the same video surveillance 10x before trying to get you to plea, and you will flirt with said plea for 3 years before demanding a trial that you will lose. But now it will be a big pain for everyone because the murder detective retired to Florida and all the 7/11 employees who used to maintain that video system now work for wal mart on the other side of the state.
anti_dan
10mo ago
I find the timing of this alongside the Russia Today fake indictments of Russians who will never face a real trial to be suspicious. The DOJ has lost its presumption of objectivity, and it really feels like they are trying to say, "pay no attention to the fact that the DNC of our second largest state was severely compromised by the PRC. A few right leaning youtubers got paid a few million dollars by a media company secretly financed by Russia!"
anti_dan
4mo ago
The old, "side with the fascist enthnostate because the liberal democracy's leader told you to stop putting meme-makers in prison" move!
Unfortunately it is not implausible given the authoritarian direction Europe has gone down.
anti_dan
4mo ago
-The “best” solution is probably to violate patient rights and involuntarily commit them to make someone else be on the hook for making sure they go to their aftercare.
We have gotten to an odd place where people can nonchalantly talk about fighting police weekly and utilizing millions of dollars of public resources as "rights". This seems like yet another example of why the left and Democrats are so alienated from "the working class", as far as such a thing exists. Relaying a story like this to an Amazon delivery guy, a stay at home mom of 3+, a legal secretary, or a midlevel real estate agent and they'd very likely be seething with rage, thinking about how they just got a $3000 bill from a hospital because their kid had an asthma attack, which came just after finished paying off the bill for their other kid's birth.
Why didn't they just pretend to be homeless again? That is the question they ask. Why is the violent drug user getting better treatment from the state?
anti_dan
5mo ago
To expand on this, if you defined "liberalism" as a general agreement as that, it never existed outside of DC. No one (simplistically) ever won an election running on being the avatar of the experts and the neoliberal establishment.
I wouldn't personally root for a comeback of these folks who want all sorts of foreign adventurism and welfare + chaos at home. Instead I'd advocate for a new class of actual liberals to emerge. People that actually hold to the principles of Smith and Washington. A strong hand at the rudder, none of this chaos run amok at home, overseas we kill people who are bad, and most importantly, tears and people suffering the consequences of their own actions are not persuasive arguments in any context. A murderer who is upset he is on death row is ignored, an unemployed person without food is ignored, a country whos crop failed because they are too stupid to understand crop rotation is ignore, a person who can't build a malaria net is ignored.
That is liberalism.
anti_dan
7mo ago
I find your framing a bit odd.
Russia is not winning the war because it is taking and may keep territory in the Donbas, it is losing the war because Russia itself framed the war not as a conflict between itself and Ukraine, but between the Russian world and the west.
I mean, perhaps that was how Russia framed it at home (I trust neither set of sources on this), but it is certainly true that NATO/America has been losing the war as we defined it as well. Putin was a big bad that had to, and would be, soundly defeated by the power of freedom and money. The latter idea, has failed. We are spending many multiples of what Russia is spending to gradually lose terrain.
I suppose this deal is not so bad if you are a Brit or Canadian who cares nothing about Ukrainian deaths. But if you think NATO prestige is important, its a huge loss. Being a NATO proxy is a provably bad deal now. Even with American investment. Heck, the rest of NATO might as well be dead to the remaining civilized world. Minus America, NATO couldn't help anyone anywhere.
In so much that NATO is worse off in 2024 than 2022, it's because of reasons other than Ukraine, and in many respects NATO is considerably stronger and more threatening than before.
NATO is certainly much weaker now than 2020, but not than 2022. We cratered as a legitimate organization under Biden and it is likely impossible to get lower than Russia just invading again after abstaining for 4 years. But its certainly possible. Trump could keep doing the same things but more. And then our support would get discredited even more.
anti_dan
17d ago
So I just had a delivery guy brazenly steal the delivery ON CAMERA. The camera is not subtle. It points directly at the place she took her "Proof of Delivery" photo. And she just kinda put it down then looked around and picked it back up.
Sorta fun I suppose.
anti_dan
2mo ago
There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.
I 100% agree with this. There is no constitutional right for progressives to have their ideology subsidized by taxpayers, which is what has been happening to the tune of trillions of dollars over the last 3+ decades. This is one of those "sniff tests" so called centrists need to pass. If you can't comprehend that there is no free speech at modern universities, there hasn't been, and we need to force them 10 steps right before there will be a chance for free speech at universities, you just have missed the mark.
Another (right now) is if someone uses "woke right" unironically. If you are talking about the "woke right" you have fundamentally misunderstood the world. The actual woke was Google and Harvard discriminating against white men openly. They still are doing it, just a little less openly. The "woke right" is frogs on twitter, they have no hope of doing anything. If the right won for 20 years in the institutions then, perhaps, there would be reasonable reasons to worry about overreach by right wing extremists. As of now it is frankly laughable.
anti_dan
6mo ago
DEI as a plan doesn't make any sense under this theory though. You are a startup. Your first 10 guys are all still there. You know them. They aren't DEI in the slightest. You went to the same school as this potential DEI hire, you thought she/he was a dunce not worthy of being part of your SR design team that is now literally your company.
The only reason you are going for DEI is because your funders want it. Why they want it is a black box to you, but it is because either the government or their funders are demanding it. This will always be the case because DEI is the most inorganic type of movement. People will often refer to it as race communism, and usually such ridiculous descriptions of large movements are not well founded, but that one is. The demands of DEI ask a team to violate both ingroup preferences and competency preferences. Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you. Such a system will almost never be ground up or organic.
anti_dan
4mo ago
Evidence could look like a gay version of conversion therapy where straight kids are sent to centers to shame them into gayness, or maybe a large lgbt organization like GLAAD admitting they want to turn straight kids gay. Or something along the lines that there is an active and widespread attempt to take straight children and make them homosexual instead of a genuine (even if poorly executed) attempt wanting gay teenagers to be accepted.
I mean, many people would call these places "public schools" and after the NSA leaks, and the fact that we have seen many teachers, counselors, etc get caught on various social media platforms talk about "hatching eggs" means this isn't some non-mainstream thing.
anti_dan
7mo ago
I think the "peak woke" line is cope on the center left and right for different reasons. The center-left keep writing these articles as a smokescreen to let their radicals reload, and the people on the right are just deluding themselves that the extremists will give up and/or that the center-left will ever side with them.
Tehran does not have the capabilities to launch a serious war against Israel. They wouldn't get an army to Baghdad, and their airforce would be lucky to get 50% of any attempted strike further than that as well.
Like their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, their entire goal is to lose spectacularly and hope American and European leftists get extra mad at Israel for being competent at warfare.
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