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cjet79


				

				

				
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Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds

Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds

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User ID: 124

cjet79


				
				
				

				
8 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 04 19:49:03 UTC

					

Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds

Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds


					

User ID: 124

Verified Email

This feels less like breaking social and sexual norms and more like the same old problem with mixed gender workplaces under a different name.

I don't think I have ever been in an adult work environment where there wasn't at least one couple. I met my wife at work, I had two other work romances before I met my wife.

If you put people together a bunch, and give them a common interest then they will at a minimum develop some friendships and social ties. It shouldn't be a surprise that some of the friends start taking it further if they share a sexual interest in each other.


I think people should be responsible and be adults. Which is a whole package of norms and expectations. And I'm guessing the EA crowd broke some of those rules.

However I sometimes feel like the metoo movement and some parts of feminist groups want a completely asexual workplace. I feel that such a thing is largely impossible, but would also be a travesty. Once an adult leaves college the workplace can become one of their best places for finding a compatible life partner. Apps and bars are a shitty replacement.

Every time you write about legal stuff I just feel more and more convinced that the rules are made up and the laws barely matter.

What is the point of a statute of limitations if it can be changed after the fact to include things previously protected by that statute?

What is the point of the trial related amendments if you can just have your reputation smeared and ruined by the media without anything vaguely resembling "due process"?

What problem are civil courts solving other than 'how to make lawyers rich'?

Plea deals destroying incentives to get your day in court. Prosecutors seemingly immune to any consequences of malpractice.


An old movie keeps coming up in my mind. It took me an hour of searching to find it based on my vague recollections. Interstate 60. There is a section of the movie where the main character (on a mythical road trip) takes a stop in a town called Morlaw. The entire town is comprised of lawyers that are constantly suing each other for everything (get it, Morlaw -> More Law). Any unlucky idiots that find their way to the town get caught up in the web of suing very quickly.

How does the protagonist escape? Do they make a compelling argument that this is insane? Nope, that doesn't convince any of the lawyers. They just see that as another reason to sue him.

Valerie McCabe: Every adult citizen of Morlaw is a lawyer, so everybody sues everybody else. It doesn't matter if there's a cause. It's how we ensure that everyone makes a living of their profession.

Neal Oliver: Yeah, but that's insane.

Valerie McCabe: I could sue you for that. You just made a defamatory remark about this town. Hey, are you looking at my legs? I could sue you for that too, sexual harassment.

Neal Oliver: Is there anything you can't sue me for?

The way the protagonist escapes is by making a call to a friend he met on the road. An ex-marketer that is dying and decides to go on a personal crusade against lying. This ex-marketer has a bomb vest strapped to him, and seems willing to use it. Yup, that's right, it takes literal terrorism to extricate the main character from a web of lawyers. The ex-marketer decides to stay around Morlaw to keep them in line.

Our legal system increasingly resembles a system of "might makes right" if you have enough powerful people on your side then the law can literally be what you want it to be. It doesn't feel like there is a legible system of rules where an underdog that is correct or in-the-right can beat the system. In the end someone might make the same realization that the ex-marketer makes. "Why play by your rules when I'm always going to lose? Why not bring violence to the table?"

I wish you luck in the boycott, only because I want culture war issues to be seen the same way companies treat religious issues. There should be a giant blaring neon sign in the mind of any exec saying "TOXIC! STAY AWAY! BEWARE!" Where the only winning move is not to play.

I didn't watch the ad, I don't watch ads in general. I don't watch controversial things just for the sake of being aware of the controversy.

I won't be joining the boycott, I purchase Michelob Ultra pretty regularly because its one of the lowest carb beers, and I'm on a low carb diet.


The marketing exec that started this campaign did it as an effort to expand the brand to younger audiences. I do generally hate marketing departments. They are often filled with a certain type of person. They typically despise their customers, rarely use their own product, and only seem behind HR in terms of signing up for the latest woke craze. If anything good comes out of this it will be a tighter leash on marketing departments.

I had my first experience this week using ChatGPT for my job. I'm a web developer. I manage all of the web properties for a small non-profit.

They have an old wordpress site that is bloated with a lot of plugins. Its often impossible to get support from any plugin developer because they take one look at the mess that I'm managing and nope their way out of helping.

ChatGPT was actually helpful. It helped me diagnose the exact problem. Then it helped me locate an area to implement solutions. Then it gave me a solution. Then it told me how to test the solution. And then the solution failed to do anything. I went through all the steps a few times, and was able to realize it was giving me some bad code. I kept prompting it in different ways and asking for explanations of its code. Eventually I got to a valid solution.

Anyways it was weird as hell. I've worked with junior programmers underneath me before. And I'd be happy to have someone like ChatGPT as a junior programmer beneath me. I'd never recommend they advance past junior programmer. But they basically make for a super googler + semi-dumb code thief.

And I'm not saying that to be like "oh look how crap AI is". Its more like "shit, its too far gone".


I have two young daughters. They are by most standard metrics pretty smart well adjusted little kids. I can say with strong confidence that my wife and I are better at our jobs than the AI. (both our jobs involve a fair bit of text manipulation + talking to people). But in twenty years when my daughters are entering the workforce I don't really have much confidence that they will be better at a text manipulation job than the current generation of AIs.

Forget future advancements, just using the current level of AI will eventually crowd out a bunch of entry level text manipulation jobs.

I look at my daughters playing at night and I think of what world they might grow up in. Right now they love playing a make believe version of day care. They tuck the babies in for nap time, feed them, and then spend an inordinate amount of time giving them diaper changes (including reactions to poopy diapers "eww stinky", or "oh good just pee"). I can't help but think that "daycare professional" might be an oddly resilient career path in the future. Its not like anyone is gonna submit their kids for surveilance in a daycare setting to train up a set of AIs.

Hopefully we'll get to a time where they are wondering about what useful jobs they can have. I was a bit of AI apocalypse skeptic a few years ago. Most of my skepticism is gone.

Bryan Caplan has a new book. His typical approach is to tour around the ideas in his book to various libertarian gatherings and podcasts. His latest book is in the form of a letter to his daughter. Various essays are put together. The title says it all:

"Don't be a feminist".

He has a talk out on the topic here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d4C-Rz3Wv5c

@The-WideningGyre sums up the video:

I watched it, it's fairly short and enjoyable, but it's almost entirely preaching to the choir, I find. There wasn't really any support for helping de-program the other side. (The factoid about prison rape was new and interesting for me though).

Most interesting was the very first slide, where he says the dictionary definition of a feminist ("wanting to men and women to be treated equally") is wrong, in that almost all men agree with this, but only 1/3 of men consider themselves feminists. He instead proposes (paraphrasing) feminists think that "men are treated unfairly better than women" and notes that essentially all feminists would agree with it, but most non-feminists (including ones who agree with the dictionary definition) would disagree.

The rest is kind of the classic stuff -- men die on the job more, are affected by violent crime more, commit suicide more, the pay gap is BS, the "women are wonderful" effect etc. He notes how no one sees anything wrong with the Ukraine not letting any men between 16-60 out, which is a powerful contemporary datapoint.

It's also nice that he notes he wrote this book for his daughter, because he sees the feminist ideology leading to self-pity, antipathy, and injustice, which he sees as bad, and also that he briefly explores why he thinks it so popular, which he sympathetically phrases as "If so many people disagree with me, why do I think I'm right?"


I think The-WideningGyre is correct that most of this stuff is probably not new to a lot of people reading on this discussion forum. What is maybe a little new is someone sticking out their professional reputation to say these things.

That gives us a good opportunity to register predictions on how Caplan's book will be received. He says he had multiple friends come up to him and suggest that he not publish the book, or give it a different title.

Caplan is a tenured professor and shares a department with Robin Hanson (who has also courted some pretty big controversies). Caplan has also released books on controversial subjects in the past.

My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored. The book is never taken down from Amazon or any other publishers for the controversy. Caplan has a dry argumentative style, and tends to laugh at his own very nerdy jokes. I think those aspects play badly for drumming up a culture war controversy. And he has plenty of experience saying controversial things in a way that makes it sound like he is apologizing for the world. He also has a well insulated job and few easy avenues for people to go after him. If I am wrong in my predictions I should update in the direction of thinking that the culture war is hotter and more intense than I previously believed.

I think the line between status / conduct is pretty clear. It just seems that some people want an expansion of the meaning of "status" so that certain types of conduct are protected.

I don't have the same legal brain as the justices. When I see that attempt at expansion it doesn't make me think that more things should have the protection of status, it makes me think "status" shouldn't have protection in the first place.

To a determinist everything is just someone's status. Their current status along the pre-determined timeline that is their life.


This exchange particularly frustrated me:

JUSTICE KAGAN: -- I'll tell you the truth, Ms. Kapur. I think that this is -- this is a super-hard policy problem for all municipalities. And if you were to come in here and you were to say, you know, we need certain protections to keep our streets safe and we can't have, you know, people sleeping anyplace that they want and we can't have, you know, tent cities cropping up, I mean, that would create one set of issues.

That is exactly what municipalities wish they could do. "Just tell us what laws we are allowed to write that allow us to clean up our streets?!" That is not how the Supreme Court works though. Municipalities instead have to play a game where they write laws that maybe might work, and then the worst versions of those laws get challenged somewhere else with case details picked by people that hate those kinds of laws. Then it spends half a decade in court and then some asshole justice lectures them about how 'they should have just come here honestly trying to address the problem'. Meanwhile the justices and everyone involved will spend a bunch of time going over past court decisions on this topic, the same court decisions that nearly everyone agrees were decided badly.

This is insanity.

Also, stop deleting all your old comments, it's annoying, and makes old discussions with you unreadable.

Another thought about Bronze:

It is easier to turn peaceful Bronze towards war than it is to turn peaceful Steel towards war. What I mean:

Bronze has a much lower melting point than Iron, and requires far less knowledge for metal working than something like Steel. You can get wood fires hot enough to melt and then cast bronze. Cast iron is nearly impossible with wood as a fuel source. Also, cast iron is a strictly inferior metal to cast Bronze.

If you want to outfit your entire military with Bronze, the main limiter is going to be how much Bronze you have.

If you want to outfit your entire military with Iron/Steel, the main limiter is going to be how many skilled craftsman you have.

A barbarian horde that loots a Bronze age city suddenly has way more Bronze. They can melt down the currency, decorative items, tools, etc. A barbarian horde that loots a city with iron tools is still limited by the number of crafters that can re-work iron into weapons/armor. Iron is also very fuel limited. They cut down entire forests to supply the iron industry.

There is a kind of power dynamic that exists. In the same way that a boss asking an employee under them on a date. There is a power dynamic in place, even if it isn't explicitly stated.

'I could fire you'. or 'I could drag you before congress, make your life hell in the media, charge you with being a monopoly, etc...'

Almost no matter what if the under-powered entity says no they can be punished, with full plausible deniability by the overseeing entity. So we decided as a society that you just don't allow those sort of relationships.

I don't have time for this right now, but I'll leave my flag in the sand and say HBD is wrong. I'll just leave this quote here I found on reddit that does the same job as me taking the time:

Don't do this.

The purpose of this forum is to be a discussion group. This is why we don't allow people to just drop bare links at the top and say "discuss".

So either participate in the discussion, or don't. If you do not want to participate the correct action to take is to not post.

I've paradoxically kept my fun on a tight leash and never let it get too far away from me. I've dealt with some mild depression all my life, and fun is usually one of the only cures that works.

The key thing has always been friends. Finding and maintaining friendships has to be a full time priority (and keep a strong preference for IRL friends over virtual friends). Family can count towards this, but they should be a bare minimum. I'm also saying this as an introvert. I get exhausted hanging out with people too often. But friends once a week or every other week is still very important.

The things you do with friends matters less, but it should be something playful. And I mean "playful" in a very specific way. Slightly directed activities, loose goals, new situations. The goal here is to stimulate your brain and your body in new and unexpected ways. Playing a sport rather than going to the gym. Engaging in conversation and banter, rather than watching a show together. Visiting a new place rather than the same old haunts. It is best if these situations make you a little uncomfortable. Afterwards always try and have a story to describe the experience and sell it as something that was fun. You can tell these little stories to your parents and make them happy to still be in your life. Or just tell them to yourself. Either way you it will help you seal the memories as fun things you did. Even if they were not all that fun (those stories can be sold as, "well at least I know to never do that again!"). Over time you will train yourself to look for those fun stories, and to enjoy them even more in the moment.

Having fun in life and being happy in a fulfilled way is a long term project. Quick fixes exist, but those suffer from falling prey to the hedonic treadmill effect. Start finding friends and start making stories now. It might not feel like it is paying off for a while. But this problem you are feeling will not magically go away in a decade, it will only get worse.

If you want to hop on a video game with me and chat I'm available, you know my discord.

This is another bad top level post.

I warned you last week for this exact thing so this time its a 3-day ban.

Crazy. Apparently your friend is not the first person, news story from February 2023: https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/little-known-maryland-law-requires-people-with-sleep-apnea-to-report-diagnosis-to-driving-authorities/3272929/

The I-Team reviewed driving laws from across the country and found several other states – such as Florida, New Jersey, Maine and Texas – also list sleep apnea as a condition that may be subject to medical review by state motor vehicle authorities.

Virginia law requires its Department of Motor Vehicles to ask drivers applying for or renewing a license if they have a medical condition that could prevent them from driving safely but doesn’t specify sleep apnea as among them.

This is probably because driving is treated as a "privilege" by the state.

I would like to tie social security to an official retirement age.

Once you hit the retirement age you are expected to retire from any publicly held office. No elected officials older than that age.

This would tie in with the other solution that is my favorite: just raising the age of retirement to save money.


As a young person I have little to no expectation of receiving social security money.

New York cases where jurisdiction is proper because NY is the Trump Org's principal place of business

Do you think those cases would have happened if Trump had not made himself a target by being a republican president? Or in an alternate dimension where Trump is democrat president and New York likes him, would they have found a way to bury those legal issues?


"This kind of lawfare" strictu sensu - i.e. seeking to regulate the worldwide behaviour of businesses outside your jurisdiction on the basis that they did some business inside the jurisdiction - has been SOP in the US for a very long time. From my perspective as someone who has spent most of my career working in non-US multinationals, the biggest issue is random insane civil verdicts in US state courts, but there are a number of federal policies which are also objectionable - especially sanctions on Cuba and the law attempting to punish companies for participating in the Arab boycott of Israel. Countries other than the US do not do this - for example the UK only attempts to regulate British companies and British-based activity of foreign companies. In general, countries other than the US take the view that, as applied to international trade in goods, this kind of behaviour violates the WTO treaty, which says that countries can only discriminate between identical goods based on whether or not they have a trade deal with the country they were made in, not on who made them.

Is the EU starting to step into this territory? GDPR explicitly says it applies to EU residents. But it has ended up impacting most websites, since it is too easy to be an EU resident browsing a US website. There has also been recent multinational company mergers. I don't understand what happens when say the US approves microsoft and activision merger, but another country says 'no you cant merge'.


This is the important point - a world in which every jurisdiction tries to regulate activity outside its territory - particularly if that regulation is driven by idiosyncratic local politics rather than being an attempt to enforce widely-shared norms - is very bad from the point of view of making it legal for normal people to do business normally.

I think even regulating certain things inside your territory can have basically the same effect. California regulations have certainly reached a point of ridiculousness, where a bunch of products now have silly labels like "known to cause cancer in the state of California" as if cancer has some kind of geotagged activation key.

Also internet sales taxes, which quietly went away as an issue as soon as Amazon embraced them as a way to build a moat against competitors.

I wish it was that simple. I really do.

I've been a moderator on /r/slatestarcodex and then /r/themotte. I also semi-moderate a few different real life non-profit thingies.

I'm also an anarcho-capitalist by philosophy, and a libertarian via practicality.

At the end of the day, censorship is a consumer demand, not a platform demand. After all, if you are a platform the easiest move is not to censor anything. But there are many things that will absolutely turn off users. Maybe those users suck, and they shouldn't be so picky. But I can guarantee that you, as a user, want at least one, and more likely all three of these things censored on the platforms you use:

  1. Child Porn.
  2. Gore and death.
  3. Spam.

Spam is really the trickiest though. One man's trash is another man's treasure. And one man's spam is another man's news. It is subjectivity all the way down on "spam". Because spam is ultimately just content you don't want, sent by people that want you to have the content.

This post is too much on the side of waging the culture war rather than discussing it.

Remember to speak as if everyone is reading, rather than only people that agree with you.

Imagine you are writing to convince one of the people you mention: "(read: Reddit, PMC, sports media, and virtue-signaling athletes who are delighted to be out of the Sauronic Eye for once)".

I think Islam's success and spread was partly a result of religiously enshrining a tax code. As a merchant back in those times there was a huge amount of uncertainty. Unless you had been somewhere before you had no idea if they were open to trade. A leader or regime might fall, and suddenly a formerly safe port becomes a port where they confiscate everything you own. The locals rarely cared about how foreigners were treated.

Along comes Islam with a religiously enshrined tax code and religiously enshrined rules about how fellow Muslims are to be treated. Being a Muslim in the ancient world was like being an American, you had God-given rights, and if any ruler violated those god-given rights they'd had have hell to pay. And thus all of the Muslim world became a trade zone with itself.

Other empires had accomplished huge internal trade zones, and the Europeans would later achieve the creation of their own massive trade zones (enforced through naval supremacy). But the Islamic trade zone was a huge accomplishment at the time, and united almost the entirety of the Old World equatorial area in a multi-generationally stable trade regime.

This doesn't have as much to say about Immigration. I generally think more open immigration is a good thing. It does say a lot about the long term benefits of open trade.

I do wonder if Section 230 should be amended to something like "If you want the protections of section 230 you must be a 'public square' and you follow nothing stricter than US speech guidelines. If you choose to exercise editorial control, and you are responsible for what your users post".

This is covered partly by @ControlsFreak's post below.

As I see it tech companies kind of want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the protections of a free speech regime that prevents them from getting in trouble. But they also want to control speech for the sake of their brand/ideology.

A ceremony is supposed to symbolize something.

In this case a ritualized agreement that 'hey it was a good fight in the election, but we all agree it was fair, and we will now crown the winner'.

The obvious problem is that it didn't actually symbolize that for a decent portion of the country. I personally believe the actual votes were generally tallied correctly, but that it was not a "fair" election in many other senses of the word.

January 6th broke the symbol, but they certainly didn't break what it was supposed to symbolize. That was slowly broken over the preceding four years, and then quickly and fully broken in 2020.

I also generally believe that attacking symbols of a group is a bit more civilized than the alternative ... which is just directly targeting people in that group. When foreign protestors burn the American flag, its sometimes because they don't have an actual American to burn or behead. Taking a crap on pelosi's desk is better than showing up to her home and taking a hammer to her husband.

Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.

There is generally a sense among gun owners that there have always been more concessions to be made. Any "compromise" with gun owners needs to be an actual compromise, not just a "you lose one more inch" style compromise.

I'm not huge into the gun scene, but some of the compromises I've heard could be:

  1. Easier gun modification, specifically silencers. Its a pain in the ass to get a silencer on a gun right now. And unlike how Hollywood depicts them, silencers do not "silence" a gun. They turn it from instant hearing loss without ear protection to hearing loss under prolonged use. They also require subsonic rounds (otherwise the crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier defeats the purpose).

  2. Some form of national gun transportation standardization. There are scenarios where you can legally own a gun, have it locked up in your trunk, drive across the wrong state line and suddenly you are violating a law.

  3. Some form of concealed carry reciprocity. States all have their own versions of concealed carry (or don't allow it).

There are 51 versions of gun laws out there. Standardizing them in a way that doesn't treat California or New York laws as basis for standardization would potentially be appreciated. One way I could see them doing this is create different levels of constitutionally approved gun restrictions. Maybe 5 levels. With level one being the strictest, maybe equivalent to cities in California, New York City, or DC. And level 5 being the least strict, something you might see in rural Alaska. Municipalities are allowed to choose one of these levels of strictness, but they can't keep making up all their own restrictions and bullshit.

One thing I'd personally be interested in seeing it to remove all special exception carve-outs for law enforcement or active military. Instead there is only one category of carve-out: "Militia". The police and military can be assigned to this carve-out. But there is also a path for regular citizens to join the militia (devil would be in the details here).

I'm libertarian and have a bit of experience fighting losing political battles. I have to say I'm often suspicious of any group that claims to need some form of total victory for any success to be seen. Because they tend to quickly turn towards violence when their victory is not immediate.

There should be intermediate changes in any political plan, here are some reasons why:

  1. You can verify that the underlying belief system is good and useful. If intermediate changes produce obviously bad outcomes then you need to rethink stuff.

  2. Your followers can be happy about something.

  3. Your enemies will see you going slow and they won't all fight as if this is an existential crisis. (some minority will treat it like its existential anyways, politics attracts crazy people)

As it is, that plan is basically going to wind up being "kill my political enemies, and then things will be great".

Its weird I both vehemently disagree with your post, and also generally agree.

When I was 13-17 it was impossible to get sex. When I was 18-22 it was only possible for me to get sex in a dedicated relationship with a woman (usually after a few months of being with them). When I was 23-25 it felt stupidly easy to get sex. I got married after that.

So the majority of my life it was really freaking difficult, and I really started trying to get to know girls and have sex at 13. So it sorta took me a decade to go from "trying" to "this is easy". I have some male friends that were sorta late bloomers and weren't really trying until maybe 17. Those 4 years late still had to be made up.

I agree that it is fully possible to get to a point that it is "easy" to acquire sex, for even not that attractive looking guys. Hell, this comedian is a somewhat known and very successful womanizer.


But I vehemently disagree that getting to this point is at all easy. It took a decade of my life, working approximately 40-60 hours a week at it for me to get to a point where I felt it was easy. I went through a lot of rejection. I went through a lot of soul searching at being basically controlled by my urges. I dealt with depression. I had to fake being an extrovert. I read novels worth of content online to glean some kind of advice. It wasn't just getting sex, I had to learn my whole role in our society as a man.

It feels a bit like telling someone "oh, getting a job is easy, just give a good interview, have some useful skills, and don't expect to be paid millions of dollars". Which is kinda true ... once you already have a job and have been in the job market. But getting to that point can be really difficult. We structure approximately 16 years of a person's life around preparing them for holding down a job.

I do believe that the incel movement is partly a problem of boys just not starting the sexual pursuit young enough. Because all of society is telling them not to start that pursuit. I would stay up to 4am during highschool trying to have sexting chats with girls online. Those chats did not help my grades. I would sometimes spend classes just badly sneaking glances at girls in the classroom, barely paying attention to lessons. I had a 3.2 GPA in highschool. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't impressive either. However, I did come out of highschool somewhat prepared to date women. Not very well prepared, I still fucked up multiple times in college.


And things have sorta come full circle. I'm not getting much sex these days. I have a wife I love and 2 kids. We are having sex about once a month, I'm trying to time it around her ovulation for another kid. We miss it some months if either of us happen to be sick. But I'm pretty happy with this. If my wife told me tomorrow I could treat it like an open relationship, it wouldn't change the amount of sex I was having (she would also never say that). I just don't ever want to spend the amount of time and effort I spent in my dating years for an ultimately empty experience. Sex was really exciting when I was young, and I was willing to spend lots of time and effort to get it. Now, its not. But that is maybe the heart of what bothers me about what you said, just because a lot of people are willing to spend a ton of time and effort on something, and through that time and effort most of them can acquire it. That doesn't mean that thing is easy.

This isn't really what we are looking for in a top level post.

Problems:

  1. Without going off and reading the attached links and discussions it is impossible to know what is going on.

  2. The content of your post amounts to "here is a thing, lets discuss". At a minimum it is helpful to at least give your view on the topic. Extra good if you include other viewpoints and how you disagree with them.

Wow, few things:

  1. Paragraphs help most writing by breaking it up into readable chunks. I'm not saying this will help here, but it does seem like the most easily addressable aspect of this ... thing?

  2. I'm not sure why you think you are liberal. Do you just like the way the word sounds? I can't figure it out. You are at most a "progressive" but I don't want to insult all progressives by lumping them in with you. I think you fit in best with communists / maoists / stalinists / etc. They share your belief in "everything will be great once I kill all the people on the right that disagree with me".

  3. Its always possible that you are a troll, and that is what some people will think here. I've become a big believer in a variant of Poe's law: doesn't matter how crazy it sounds there is someone out there that believes it. I'll treat the views you espouse seriously, even if the actual person writing them doesn't see them as serious.