professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
No bio...
User ID: 1157
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
3hr ago
"they cut food support to pay for his friends" is gonna hit pretty hard
seems to have had no effect in massachusetts politics cutting school funding.
Food and gas prices hit hard, and Republicans are going to lose on that.
Nobody really gives a shit about corruption, though.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
3hr ago
Congressional stock trades, which involve like 1/100th of the value of what Trump is doing.
Nancy Pelosi's net worth is $280 million, so if we boldly say that's all corrupt stock trades it's more like 1/6ish of the new slush fund.
mostly i think it's funny that the guy motivated by obama's mic drop is largely rerunning the obama playbook cranked up a notch.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
7d ago
It's as if they wanted to make an example of him.
The sentence and hate crime conviction rather demonstrate that.
Sort of an interesting contrast to the usual narrative that you get light sentencing for killing someone with a car: both Fields and Darrell Brooks (the Waukesha parade attack guy) got sentences centuries longer than the 1992 WTC bombers. Car-based terrorism seems to accrue more charges and sentences than other forms.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
7d ago
I am emphatically not saying that the MV Hondius should have be dealt with using Hegseth's patented double-tap method
Eh... Anyways, the difference is that for a certain kind of mindset, "punishing" everyone is more acceptable than "punishing" a subset. Yes this is terrible and braindead; no I don't know how to solve it.
You might as well say "sooner or later, that naive tourist walking through the slums will get murdered for his wallet by someone, so I might as well stab him right now".
A utilitarian Argentine government should pay people to at minimum threaten tourists that want to go to the hantavirus garbage dump. They should just kill the birds that seem to be the main attraction.
Currently, while some people near me claim that this will be the next pandemic, I am taking the fifth until Scott publishes one of his trademark 'much more than you wanted to know' articles
I don't really expect it to be the next pandemic, but I don't think a current-Scott will be as useful or forthcoming as any of several eras of old-Scott. Maybe I'm too cynical there, Kelsey's been a bit spicier than she used to be (low bar to hit!), but... should he publish such an article it will be after most useful points. At best we catch a tweet, or if you're closer to him you hear it first or second hand conversationally.
the WHO tells us that everything is fine, but these are basically the same people who told us that masks will not prevent COVID
Current WHO recommendation is that everyone on the ship is high-risk, should be tracked for 42 days minimum, and should wear N95s. This is less than ideal but better than I expected.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
7d ago
The officials outright recommended that "going out in the nature is a very good idea now".
Good for y'all. The US version was that public parks that had gates were chained shut, people were fined for going to the beach, etc. In the UK your neighbors would snitch on you for being outside.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
13d ago
the guy who got life in the United the Right accident
While it is effectively LWOP, he officially got a sentence more than twice as long as the guys that did the 1993 WTC bombings, which killed 6 and injured over a thousand. Absolutely absurd, radicalizing sentencing.
Some of them have even had sentence reductions and could die as free men if they make it to 100, assuming they don't get more reductions over the next couple decades.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
13d ago
It might return to pre-2000s levels if the online trend goes down
Bit of a wording quibble but I would count that as dying out; pre- and post-2000s transness seem like quite different phenomena with quite different motivations, even if they rhyme somewhat.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
13d ago
What an amusing topic to invoke the concept of "sin" under. Beautiful, really.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
13d ago
CBS
The company that just produced a 60 Minutes special about how eeeevil white supremacists helped rebuild and brought food and supplies to the area after Hurricane Helene, and that's terrible? That CBS?
I get Bari Weiss is theoretically in charge over there now but evidence is pretty thin on the ground that it has changed their reporting or the insane bias.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
13d ago
I can predict it's Republicans who will be doing the fraud, because that's the only context in which it is ever permissible to admit that election fraud ever happens
The lesbian ex-mayor of Hamtramck, MI was willing to say it was Muslim Democrats committing voter fraud locally, until it got reported by Project Veritas and she complained about being quoted by a bad source.
But that's a pretty limited example.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
13d ago
If I donated to the SPLC, I would expect my money to be used on normal things, not non-profit cloak-and-dagger nonsense.
Based on my experiences elsewhere, I do not think our intuitions match that of the kinds of people that actually donate to the SPLC, or at least there's a vocal contingent of indeterminate number that will happily pay for them to do whatever crazy thing they want.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
Yeah, Gattsuru's got it and I'm borrowing it from Eigenrobot.
I'm a little more optimistic than the 'bot but when it comes to topics like the above, I enjoy the little flourish gesturing towards the absurdity. I suppose a Camus reference might be more accessible, though.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
Virginia all have third-trimester bans
Not for lack of trying, of course.
most Americans—most American politicians
Not the same thing and I disagree with you about the politicians. But fair enough that saying shit on the internet is free.
please share a non-culturally-Christian argument on the unitary telos of sex:pregnancy.
Nature does a perfectly fine job of that, and you've displayed your unwillingness to accept it. I do not think there is any argument I personally can craft that can overcome your bias against it.
Edit: I'll take a quick stab. For one, I never said unitary telos.
I recognize that not every sex act leads to pregnancy. However, pregnancy is the natural consequence of sex absent interference. We are sexually reproducing beings. Ergo, pregnancy is a natural consequence of having sex. To have sex is to accept that risk.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
Christian-derived beliefs in your own life.
I know the "pregnancy isn't a natural result of sex!" crowd hates Christians with a white-hot passion mirroring their hatred of having consequences of their own actions more generally and so want to blame them for all the evils in the world, but it's entirely possible to come to the conclusion that pregnancy is a result of sex from a secular perspective.
"Sex is just sex" is nonsensical, like saying "Russian roulette is just Russian roulette, I didn't know I might die."
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
when it seems easy to ignore
It wasn't for several years, habits die hard, and the degree to which it's easier to ignore now than at its peak is going to vary wildly depending on local culture, social class, and familial considerations.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
So they gesture at an epidemic of violent rape that just didn't exist to the degree they needed to, in an attempt to reconcile public feeling to how unbearable things felt to them.
And, in a case of pitch-black humor, as a vague coalition and surely many of the same individuals go on to later to ignore actual rape and actual rape culture. Fascinating, really.
Enjoy arbys.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
"hey this is fuzzy and flawed in tons of different ways" or we can plug our ears and ignore the difficulty because we know what we want the answer to be.
As much as I hate that The Motte is not more influential than WPATH or the Beeb, shrugging and going "whaddyagonnado" is ceding the territory to much worse actors that also plug their ears, but do so with much, much more influence on the world.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
Show me someone who argues for shrimp welfare and abortion in the same breath
Ozy, maybe? Nicholas Decker. Probably Matthew Adelstein/Bentham's Bulldog.
Sermons intended for the choir don’t reflect policy
How unfortunate that they escape containment and poison policy and common discourse!
how fortunate that neither of them dominates the public square!
One's a lot closer than the other, but Ralph Northam's out of office now. I guess we'll see if Spanburger resurrects that position.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
You can't dismiss a problem just because it makes knowing things harder
We're talking about a subject that has no real definitions, everything's circular and changes on a whim, the language is deliberately obfuscatory, etc etc.
While you're correct it's not literally impossible to know, any form of knowing would require forcing outsider definitions to pin things down.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
I do get the sense that over the years it's drifted away from fighting KKK type organizations and more towards becoming a generic progressive organization.
Their hatewatch list includes such threatening and violent organizations as the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine and a bunch of immigration reform think-tanks in DC.
They are entirely generic progressive Omnicause organization. As it has been for a while, the demand for anti-black racism outstrips supply, so they have to generate their own and expand "hate."
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
No, we haven't. We refined our apparatus for retrieving and signal-boosting the most offensive possible formulation of any given argument.
Do you think those people don't exist? Aren't representative? There's no need for algorithmic refinement to make Internet Feminists sound like unrepresentative strawmen, they do just fine on their own.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
While pro-choice people can point to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v Wade four years ago, and a patchwork of state laws that look like this and claim that the battle is lost, and women's rights are a dead letter in much of the United States
And they're be wrong and stupid, given mifeprestone mailing and that abortion is up considerably post-Dobbs.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
14d ago
50-odd years of legitimacy are difficult to hand off.
Whether or not that matters in practice probably varies by industry.
American taxpayer pays either way, that's how the government works.
I dislike the system but I'd rather pay people abused by the IRS than a bunch of NGOs trailblazing through the Darien Gap or campaigning for more two-tiered justice system or whatever.
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