aqouta

aqouta 1d ago

What we ought to have is an app where everyone ranks the field from day 1 of the campaign and can change at any point. Then we could get real time feedback on messaging. Of course the end problem is even if you were made godking of the docratic party you still have to implement a system like this where 95 year olds who can't handle technology more complicated than a television remote or deal wit the disengenuous claim that poor black people don't have cell phones.

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aqouta 1d ago

He was a populist promising improbably handouts to the kinds of people who dominated the social media sites when he was running. Really not surprising he appeared popular.

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aqouta 1d ago

I do agree that another voting system might be useful but it's not even the first past the post thing, it's also that they do every state in sequence. It's actually pretty hard to design a system around this kind of thing, especially because the primary isn't just about the voting but had also kind of morphed into a narrative building function. If you get rid of them and ran it all at once then you'd have the campaigns be very driven by polling which has its own problems.

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aqouta 1d ago

They didn't. Refusing to do something stupid that is required for him to win is not a heroic effort. Bernie is not entitled to the people representing the more popular platform splitting the moderate lane 4 ways so that he can win with a minority of the vote. "why didn't you let the guy that your base didn't want lose so that his followers, who never liked you anyways would whine less" is jot a serious argument.

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aqouta 2d ago

The Ratfucking of Bernie Sanders: The mainstream of the Democratic Party saw the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign, after he won the first three primaries in 2020. Biden wasn’t within 10% of Bernie in any of those primaries. Typically, after three straight fourth place finishes, a candidate drops out, that’s the purpose of primaries. Joe Biden, in fact, had some experience finishing poorly in early primaries and dropping out, having done it twice before. But the Dems needed someone to beat Bernie, and were stuck choosing in a bad field: Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren were all seen as too weak to step up and couldn’t agree on endorsing each other. Facing a split field among moderates, with COVID appearing on the horizon, and with no other unity candidate available, the rest of the field suddenly dropped out and rapidly endorsed Biden. Biden was seen as a compromise candidate because he was so old, he might only run for one term. This was a classic example of the Golem legend: they empowered Biden to protect them from Bernie, but Biden once empowered did not have to give that power up when it was time. The lesson being that you have to let the primary process play out, and that voters will punish you if you refuse to let them vote. The Republicans threw in with Trump in 2016, against their better instincts but to their long term benefit; the Democrats ratfucked Bernie in 2020 and the lack of a real primary left them with a reanimated corpse that finished 4th in competitive races. Tapper mentions Bernie only twice, for a moment, and pays no attention to how he played into the 2020 primary and the selection of Biden. The Original Sin was gutting the primary process and not forcing Biden to compete among voters.

Will this obviously wrong and tired narrative ever go away? Bernie doesn't win because people don't want a leftist candidate, even in the primary let alone the general, he would get slaughtered. His path to victory has always required all the more moderate candidates to split the more popular policy platform in so many ways that he could sneak through with a plurality but not majority. Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win by avoiding creating the specific conditions that they need to win without getting the popular vote is not "ratfucking".

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aqouta 2d ago

It's not a kind thing to say, but anything over a little pudge is actively revolting to me.

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aqouta 4d ago

Sorry! Treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex is going to... require treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex!

This seems the opposite of the mainstream trans appeal? It's mostly not gender abolitionists because the desire to transition from one gender to another reifies rather then minimizes gender differences. If men and women are to be treated the same then what exactly are trans women asking for?

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aqouta 6d ago

Would not be possible as that is a response to my impassioned screed.

Yes, I understand how time works. I'm asserting that if you put out an OP with a lot less heat, Maybe asking what people here who support mass deportations think will be the state of the job market for jobs currently done by illegal immigrants, then you'd have gotten coffee enjoyer to respond with his view and we could have had an actual conversation without the several meta threads on whether or not people should be allowed to come in with scorching heat.

I'm repurposing it

Please don't repurpose words to mean basically the opposite of their original meaning, it's confusing and retards communication.

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aqouta 6d ago

I am not a newcomer to the SSC sphere, I've been posting on ACX and DSL for years, and I've won DSL's Diadochus award for my posts twice.

I'm not accusing you of being an outsider, I'm responding to @shoeonfoot 's understanding that you're porting your disagreement with people on X, the everything app, over to this site. You can do that of course, it's a wellspring for many posts here, you posts would just be much better received if you appended "on twitter" somewhere in them so that people here can choose whether or not they want to defend those ideas without feeling like they're being imposed on them.

I'm not attributing the stupidity of Twitter to this place, I'm just reading what people here write, like coffee_enjoyer

I detect some differences between what you accused rightists here of believing and what coffee enjoyer is actually saying but if you had launched into your impassioned screen in response to this then the whole dynamic of the conversation would be different. That comment spawned some fair back and forth even among the right leaning contributors, I'd hazard that if this whole topic was less heated from the get-go you'd see even more pushback from other rightists who don't feel like you've forced them to defend this position by tying it to rightists in general.

This, by the way, is what I mean by "poverty fetishism" and "third worldism."

As an aside this is kind of confusing because "third worldism" has a different more common meaning related to anti-imperialism. It took a few times of you using and me scratching my head to realize you were using the term to mean something like sweatshop romanticism.

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aqouta 6d ago

Turok has a public Twitter account. Many of the people he responds to and interacts with on Twitter would be part of the "online racialist Right"

Here I think is the rub. I've personally gotten more familiar with the twitter/x sphere since the musk takeover. There is a common dynamic that happens there, where someone responds exclusively to the people they most disagree with in order to argue, a natural enough behavior. This however creates a kind of reverse echo chamber where the algorithm feeds them an overwhelming amount of exactly that type of person. I personally have frequently found my feed overwhelmed with Chinese Maoists regularly with only the occasional response to their nonsense. I know that Chinese Maoists are actually pretty rare so I've found it pretty easy to not assume that this is actually the mainstream belief but if you are responding to extreme racialists I can see how one could convince themselves that this is a major opinion of the online right. But what is really is is a kind of shadow of the poster's opinion, everything they most disagree with, because the algo accurately assumes it's what drives engagement.

This dynamic, where I see Chinese Maoists, confrontational conservatives there see idiotic leftists and @AlexanderTurok sees moronic Trumpists causes each of us to have a distorted vision of our opposition. Turok makes the mistake of then coming to this forum of actual thoughtful people and assuming the conservatives here need to answer for the worst Trumpists the engineers of X can serve. The conservatives here don't recognize themselves in the criticisms he levels at them and drama ensues.

This is all very understandable, but also very silly and avoidable. In fact the rules of this forum can and should correct for it But it's much more satisfying to assuming all of our enemies are as dumb as the dumbest people the algo of X can serve us. It's a very satisfying kind of assumption. It's just too bad that anyone who falls for it is going to spend the rest of their days tilting at windmills.

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aqouta 6d ago

JP Morgan has facilities in Israel and is one of the most important banks in the world. The idea that they needed a mossed connection to have some of their executives meet with the prime minister of Israel is just kind of silly. Jaime himself could have easily facilitated the connection. If it was with some lower level executive then you really shouldn't invoke the JPM name because lower level execs are just normal people with limited influence. I've met a number of executives of this level and if they were interested in this type of connection it'd just be mundane "can we cut the red tape on the construction of this thing we are underwriting the loan on" type of stuff, not insidious geopolitical shenanigans.

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aqouta 8d ago

China tightened regulations on real estate developers in 2020. Xi Jinping stated 'houses are for living, not speculation.' Ghost cities, huge numbers of Chinese citizens owning multiple houses as investment vehicles, I assume you're all familiar with the stories after five years of news stories and discussion. Economists and western commentators largely agreed that the policies were A Really Bad Idea due to the ensuing chaos and meltdown in property prices.

To which I have to say ...what? They said they wanted to reduce housing costs! What did you think that would look like? How else are you going to do it? And what do you think it would look like to 'make housing more affordable' in the USA? If the YIMBYs and neoliberals abundance socialists get their way, home prices are going to tank here too. This is a good thing! Maybe there's some Chestertonian benefit to the upwards spiral of housing costs, but this here's a fence I'm ready to take a torch to.

I think you're misunderstanding the housing issue in China. Their problem is that all that housing was financed with debt taken on by the local governing bodies who are up to their eyeballs in it and also get most of their revenue from building the housing. The Chinese stock market doesn't make returns and Chinese citizens are limited to where they can put their savings. Housing being cheaper is fine, good even but that sector was propping up the local governments. Chinese people have something like 70% of their savings in housing and housing makes up something like 30% of chinese GDP. Chinese local governments are facing debt crises as a result.

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aqouta 8d ago

The spreading and individual evaluation of ideas by informed citizens is supposed to be an ideological immune system, suppressing it does indeed allow you to install a fragile ideology that wouldn't survive immune response. Perhaps it's like a transplant in which suppressing the immune system is good and necessary, but "just suppress your immune system because it keeps hurting me" is also the kind of thing a disease would say.

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aqouta 8d ago

Right, I assumed it was the resent Turok ban that set this off, but it just also isn't the case that rightoid posting like Alex did wouldn't cop a ban. Like we see this from both directions, go to a place where a right winger is banned and you see basically symmetrical complains. There's this soccer dynamic where no matter the cause people from the offending team rush in to argue with the ref while the rest of the field ignores the interaction and every fan goes home assuming the refs were against them. Like are they seriously of the opinion that right wingers don't cop bans on this site?

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aqouta 9d ago

I don't think there's exactly a word for it but I see this phenomenon everywhere on open internet forum forums and social media sites. It really seems like all it takes is a couple posters with views that someone finds intolerable being tolerated that gives the impression to some subset of people as totally captured. The Social justice lot on reddit genuinely convinced themselves that reddit was a right wing echo chamber held up intentionally by the admins because a handful of harshly moderated communities were, for a time, allowed to remain.

I don't think it's cynical, I think people with this perspective are reporting their experience truthfully. But I always come away from posts like this scratching my head. I have read/listened to greater than 80% of every comment that has been posted to a CW thread since the site spin off and before. It's just not the case that neonazis right wing extremists run rampant, it's just not that case that they outnumber liberals. It's not even clear to me that if we held a motte wide vote that Trump would win. The last couple times I've broached the topic here it felt like, although there was plenty of representation of the opposite side, my generally pro-israel position was at least as well received. The jew posters we do have receive strong pushback on their posts even if I, like many, aren't that interesting in relitigating the subjects as endlessly as they are.

If for your own good you can't maintain good mental health in a place that allows nazis to post if they do so under certain conditions then I hope you do what is right for you. But if this is related to a recent crash out drama then I think you're just misreading the room.

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aqouta 10d ago

I think you and @ArjinFerman are both wrong about the point. The optimal amount of fraud is not zero is about how as you eliminate fraud and increase social trust you increase the incentive to fraud and the marginal cost of reducing fraud rises asymptotically such that the last little bit of fraud isn't worth the squeeze. The point isn't that you tolerate fraud as in not police it, it's that you police it but you don't turn panopticon to go from 10 cases of fraud across the whole population to zero. You tolerate it in that you accept cases won't be zero, not that you don't do every reasonably cost effective thing you can do to reduce it.

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aqouta 11d ago

I thought it was pretty good until it it was very evident the writers decided they didn't want to write an ending. The exact moment(spoilers obviously) was when the Japanese lady suddenly and randomly invited the vampires in. At the exact moment it just became stupid. Up until that point the character were interesting and they managed to avoid it being overly preachy. But then it just became a series of pretty dumb scenes. I will say that it wasn't stupid in the way I worried about after the early reveal of the klan involvement. I didn't even really mind the gratuitous KKK slaughter at the very end because it had already jumped the shark.

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aqouta 11d ago

A random person in real life described Sinners glowingly then talked about how it was about how evil white people are. Im disinterested watching it now, I'd rather see Near Dark again.

It really wasn't tbh.

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aqouta 13d ago

'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted.

How is this problem solved through democracy?

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aqouta 16d ago

Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.

I mean we won huge battles in the fight against affirmative action and knocked the woke racial identarians off their game in a lot of areas. It being discussed less fits squarely in the hypothesis that most of us HBD people weren't actually white nationalists but simply what we've been telling you we are, people who prefer race blindness if they're allowed to have it. Yes, white nationalists continue to exist and they will continue to make white nationalist noises, not really sure why that should matter when discussing HBD.

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aqouta 16d ago

The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.

People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.

We must be reading totally different threads. Every time the topic comes up it's people defending what you're calling the motte from blank slatists. Not to consensus build, as I'm sure we have people who cynically want to live in the bailey, but it really seems like the modal motte opinion on the topic is that HBD is obviously real is a large part of various outcome gaps and what should be done about it is to stop trying to overturn every inch of society for a racism of the gaps. It's an end to affirmative action, not establishing a racial caste system.

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