aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
2mo ago
It says that they haven't committed troops because they think Russia will spaz out and start lobbing nukes.
aqouta
2mo ago
while some cases of leech use were appropriate, a lot were just applied pointlessly to unrelated conditions.
Outside of places where they're controlled carefully, this is true of antibiotics today.
aqouta
2mo ago
You do seem to think I am going for you in particular, rather than the general attitude on here around "it's all the fault of women for not having babies the second they reach the age of sexual consent".
I really do just think people here who take a generally adversarial position against the whole site don't really grok that some of us do kinda identify with this place and how irritating it is to have people talk about how "the general attitude on" here is so and so when so and so isn't even an accurate representation of the handful of people they engaged with on some tired topic let alone representative of the general commentariat. So what do I do? Pile onto the push back you're getting with "actually that isn't really what they said" and confirm to you that the rest of us are at consensus? Argue on your behalf to prove I'm one of the good ones?
aqouta
2mo ago
My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?" In the past I had seen the reverse. Official government accounts were scrutinized, eye witness accounts and video evidence were taken in higher regard
Both red and blue tribe, really every person besides those of us skeptically inclined, believe what the people who have status and credibility in their social circles say and disbelieve what people who don't have status and credibility in their social circle say. When the facts happen to align with their side's story and not the other side's story they get to gloat like in the Smollett and Rittenhouse cases. When they don't they rarely even hear about it due to their bubble, it gets memory holed, if you bring it up later as proof of their side's error they downplay it because they barely even remember that thing and they never really looked into it that much.
The trick isn't noticing this phenomenon, it's having noticed it and realizing in horror that you are not immune to the problem. I'm preaching to the choir of course, this is a place where bubbles are pierced, but if you want to know why normies are the way that they are it's because they are not woke to this phenomenon. Hell, it's why a lot of the people here who seem totally incapable of both sidesing an issue are the way that they are. It takes a kind of freak not to fall into this trap.
aqouta
2mo ago
water memory
Is it bad that this is the only one that really seems disqualifying to me?
aqouta
2mo ago
He wasn't even the most drama candidate in the race. Sliwa is an incredible specimen.
aqouta
2mo ago
the invasion caused a 25% drop in fertility, yes if another country invades you it'll be bad for the long term success of your people but this was never in question. The poit remain 1.41 is not a sustainable TFR either.
aqouta
2mo ago
As far as I can tell both Russia and Ukraine had a TFR of 1.4-1.5 before the war, of course the war is bad for both of them but both there was no actual "don't have demographic collapse" option available. It was always demographic collapse where your young men die for Putin's delusion of empire or Demographic collapse under their own power.
aqouta
2mo ago
"Forcefully intervene" as a euphemism for conquest is cowardly. Russia is attempting intervention here in the sense that forcible rape is a form of spirited disagreement about sexual relations. Russia is not intervening in Ukraine's internal affairs, they are attempting to obliterate entirely the concept of Ukrainian internal affairs.
aqouta
2mo ago
Ukraine now has collapsing demographics and will end up being completely replaced
This is of course also true of Russia, the two nations have similar TFRs.
aqouta
2mo ago
Was Yanukovych a Russian citizen? How does a Riot in Ukraine justify annexing Ukrainian territory and then invading Ukraine? Ukrainians killed Ukrainians over some corrupt bullshit and therefore Russia should get to conquer all the territory? If this is how Russia conducts business then no wonder so many Ukrainians saw fit to violently oppose a corrupt deal pulling them into the Russian sphere of influence.
aqouta
2mo ago
Americans, unwilling since Trump inauguration to keep paying for what they started
I must have hallucinated the Russian Tanks rolling into Ukraine originally, were those a CIA op? These types of posts would be more convincing if you could resist falling into even the most absurd Russian propaganda positions.
Europe, as everyone knows, is mostly broke, with the exception of Germany, which isn't only because it typically doesn't shower money around. Paying through the nose for overpriced weaponry like e.g. Patriot or Aster 30 missiles ($ 2mil per unit) which then are going to be fired, best case, at cruise missiles of equal worth doesn't seem like a winning strategy, especially with the Geran spam being able to destroy anything that doesn't have a rare cannon SPAA sitting on top of it. If there's 50 of them in Ukraine, that's probably too much.
Is the implication here that you believe Russia is richer than Europe? Because that's uh... and interesting take on relative world economies. A sanity check through claude and grok both come up with Russia having about 10-12% the economy size of the EU. If you insist on PPP then at best 20%.
We've been hearing a steady beat of these triumphant "the ukrainians are definitely beaten now, they'll submit any day now" on the motte for years at this point. It's not happened yet. Would you be willing to make a bet?
aqouta
2mo ago
I'll chime in to say that I do find statements like this
If that happens, users on this board will immediately defend it as not illegal, not partisan, not an advantage, and not as bad as something that happened in the Hillary campaign.
To at the very least be toing the consensus building(negative consensus) line but more importantly just very irritating. if you added a "most" to users then it'd go over the line and without the most it's a kind of limp claim that would be true if two users did that at which point why even make the comment. I dunno, I'm taking it out on your but people have been doing this more recently and it has been contributing to a general rise in heat on the forum.
aqouta
2mo ago
I ran across Taylor Lorenz's podcast episode on it "Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For" (link to YouTube and therefore auto-transcript, since I follow via podcast, I have not seen the video).
It is important context that Talor Lorenz is a Hasan fangirl and general whacky person who has several blocked and reported episodes dedicated to her shenanigans.
aqouta
2mo ago
I think you are overthinking this to try and be general enough to be inclusive of worlds very unlike our own. Yes, in some kind of libertarian utopia with no taxes this all breaks down. And there could be as many as a dozen people in the US who are miscategorized because of your objections here. But it's just not true that amazon doesn't pay taxes, it's just not true that you can run a company, big or small, without spending a significant amount on your own taxes be they salary or capital gains even if we don't credit you with payroll or other corporate taxes, even granting that there are still consumption taxes.
Yes, I agree, above and beyond the more simple analysis some people provide even more value just through their voluntary transactions. But point to someone who is significant on that scale and you will be pointing at someone who is also a net lifetime tax contributor. I only insist on this simple analysis because it undercuts a lot of usually unproductive heehawing about how actually in some theoretical universe the people obviously taking more than they give are really, if you squint, providing a benefit by not being even more value destroying.
aqouta
2mo ago
This is one of those things you need to be really smart to think up something beyond the obvious. If over the course of your life you pay more in taxes than you receive in direct or indirect, yes including multiple layers of being a downstream beneficiary from infrastructure spending or whatever, then you are from at least a public perspective productive. There are some edge cases, intangibles and arguments on the margin but this basically covers it for 95% of people.
aqouta
2mo ago
This is the resolution I reference, with this being the US representative response to such nonsense. Of course it isn't just the attempt of the UN to assert authority over other organizations on the topic of pesticides but the absurd idea that a bunch of countries doing nothing, expected to do nothing and indeed once passing this vote doing nothing to address world hunger while the vote against does more than every other nation combined in this effort, at least until Trump dismantled USAID but that's another subject. These are not serious people engaged in serious work, they are the purest and most inconsequential symbol of virtue signaling. They are the yapping dog that would not know what to do with itself if it ever caught the mail van, saved from the results of their own actions only by their immense irrelevance.
aqouta
2mo ago
Normally I'd be inclined to agree, but most of the world is not Muslim, so when you get the entire world voting one way, and the only two countries voting the other are a direct party to a dispute and their greatest ally, I'd say we need more evidence then "Islam bad".
The other side of the aisle is full of the kind of countries who voted Yes on the "food as a human right" proclamation that was essentially both worthless and if actually carried out, with its ban on pesticides, ruinous. They should properly be modeled as essentially unthinking actors that can be convinced to vote for anything that can be summarized dishonestly as empathetic.
aqouta
2mo ago
This only seems paradoxical because of the framing. You're a human with normal desires. You want to be prosperous, high status/self esteem and comfortable. You want to balance all of these things. That means you're neither willing to sacrifice your prosperity and comfort for the status/self esteem of child savior nor are you willing to take on the status and self esteem of a baby murderer even if it would secure higher prosperity and comfort. This is all perfectly rational. It is like finding it shocking that someone on a desert island would neither trade all of the water for a thousand lbs of dry food nor all of their food for a thousand gallons of clean water.
aqouta
2mo ago
If I join a union that negotiated a pension for me, let's say I agree with you for the sake of argument that the union used "corrupt" tactics to get that pension. Does that make me a parasite because I shouldn't have joined a union, or I should refuse the pension? As as a follow-up question, is there any union or pension scheme that @The_Nybbler does not think is "corrupt"?
You can join the union, just don't expect any portion of the contract that says something like "the guys we largely helped get elected have promised to let you enslave future generations" to be honored by future generations. You should have the same recourse as a southern slave owner when slavery was abolished, be glad we only take from you the future fruits of your corruption.
aqouta
2mo ago
Yes, that is the author's point. The article is meant to aid in the rationalization, you take part in a whole community of people lambasting the leeches, you feel superior and high status, the programs don't' change.
aqouta
2mo ago
but government spending is such a large part of the economy that the total size of the economy would be much less, possibly more than 27% less, which would cancel out your gain
I'm not sure how you convinced yourself into believing that. The government spending share of the economy, at least the amount of it spent by the dependent class, is being spent bidding up goods in services against the producing class. In no first order way way would ending welfare reduce the economic power of the productive, it would plausibly increase the per dollar power by draining some of the competing demand. That's before considerations of whether the unproductive might decide/be able to become productive if the money spigot was turned off. Now there are second and third order consequences like possible disruption caused by the dependency class reacting in anger, or the reduced demand reduce the protective's total wage(this is the strongest of a weak set of arguments).
aqouta
2mo ago
The top/bottom dichotomy is often generalized to describe demeanors rather than just sex acts at which point it becomes synonymous with dom/sub. Most bottom straights are women and most bottom tops are men but some women, dommy mommies as they might be referred to, are flocked to by males who crave the oblivion of submission.
When briefly in Japan I was surprised how much Japanese wife Chinese wife was able to decipher.
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