Find me a single likely voter who was actually swayed from voting for Desantis due to this action, I'll give you the point. Honest.
I doubt Desantis needs many extra votes given how he's got approximately zero chance of losing his re-election bid this year, though.
But if OTHER races end up being close, and he can dissuade fraudulent votes from being cast, well that is a serious benefit to people besides him.
HENCE: The Meta level analysis.
Desantis seems to actually care not just about looking good and winning his own elections, he seems to care about establishing systems which will, over a longer term, support his allies and thus increase the chances his goals will be achieved in the future.
Looking buffoonish for a month is a fine trade if you can bump your party's electoral chances by a few percentage points in the next election and every election to come.
If I can find a single felon who was considering casting a fraudulent vote who is now dissuaded, it would be strong evidence that the tactic worked.
I'm begging the people who push this line (which is true on its face) to actually run some calculations and estimate for the class how many actually marriageable women are available in the pool.
How many are single, heterosexual, haven't had kids already, are not grossly overweight, are not riddled with mental disorders, don't have a huge bodycount or any Onlyfans, and are actually interested in having and raising kids in a committed, monogamous relationship.
Otherwise you're basically telling guys to go bobbing for apples in a tub full of acid.
faceh
1yr ago
There's a solid point that the U.S. being able to offer a higher standard of living than virtually anywhere else is its single greatest power to tempt defection and dissuade its own defectors. As you say, if you defect somewhere you don't have immediate cultural ties, you'll almost certainly end up living a far crappier lifestyle once the initial rewards for your valorous actions are spent.
Like how in the Hunt for Red October the defectors manage to persuade themselves that American life will be idyllic if they can pull it off.
I know the feeling. I was also surprised that Russia wasn't able to even get to Kiev with the main body of it's forces. Miles-long convoys, a dominant air force, and an underprepared defender should have, one thinks, enabled a Thunder Run to the Capital and they should have been able to at least temporarily control the territory.
It's like if the U.S. decided to invade Mexico and could only penetrate about 100 miles from their own border before bogging down. But then again, if China was providing ample material support to the Mexican fighters maybe that is what would happen.
But man, there's simply no systemic way to exercise good rationality here for various reasons:
-
Russia is pretty good at the propaganda game. They're even better at the 'muddy the waters and deny objective reality as much as needed' game. Being confident that Russia is lying or withholding the truth doesn't actually help you determine the real truth.
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War is chaos. Determining which signals are good and which are misleading at best is nigh impossible in the moment.
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Ukraine has massive incentive to lie about stuff too (Ghost of Kiev, etc.) and will exaggerate Russian 'atrocities' and casualties as a matter of course.
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The "Russia is evil empire, Ukraine is brave freedom fighters" narrative is firmly locked-in, so anything that makes Ukraine look bad or weak will be downplayed and ignored whilst likewise Russia's 'wins' will be minimized by Western media.
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As seen from the Wagner situation, the nature of the conflict can shift unexpectedly on a dime, so any prediction over the medium-long term is eminently susceptible to black swans.
-
The situation on the ground is subject to information you simply cannot get. Local knowledge which can't be easily summarized and translated.
So you can't understand a situation this complex and dynamic simply by absorbing all possible information you can find. You have no way to verify said information, and the information you DON'T have will probably end up being critical to accurate predictions anyway. And the good info will become outdated rapidly. Adjust your confidence levels accordingly.
In lieu of making predictions on week-to-week occurrences I've tried my best to understand the broad-strokes motives, capabilities, and weaknesses of the relevant parties. A few things I'm relatively confident about:
-
'Russia' (the government that is representing it, at least) has to view this conflict as existential, since they need to control certain geographic positions if they are to be safe from future invasion. Further, they are now beginning a terminal decline in demographics. Beyond anything else, they'll never have as many fighting-age males as they do now. So they are committed to see this through and will throw bodies at the problem as long as it can.
-
Ukraine's demographics are even worse. They cannot win a war of attrition unless Russia knuckles under.
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Ukraine is not generally valuable in-and-of-itself to ANYONE but the Ukrainians. Neither the U.S. nor Russia stands to achieve much economic gains from merely controlling the territory, so in that sense broad destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is acceptable to both parties.
-
Russia's logistics are in atrocious shape, so Ukraine is punching above its' weight regardless of anything else because their soldiers have ammunition, food, and working equipment.
-
Even the U.S. Manufacturing capacity isn't quite filling the gap, however.
What do these facts allow me to predict? Not much. Other than a long, bloody, conflict which will probably result in a Russian 'victory' but also with Russia ceasing to be any kind of major player in world affairs.
faceh
2yr ago
I'm even willing to use whatever pronouns you prefer, even if that means changing them from time to time (so long as you let me know what they are today and aren't going to throw a tantrum if I sometimes make a mistake).
I'm not, unless they're willing to do the same for me, in which case mine are Sir/His Lordship.
If we're allowed to semi-arbitrarily declare pronouns and we agree to recognize them because it validates the other person's choice of identity, then this should be a small ask, and I would find it massively validating, thank you kindly.
Or we draw some bright lines around which ones people are 'allowed' to use and have an actual discussion around why some are allowed and some aren't, rather than the unilateral declaration that every identity is valid.
Hell, we've had the concept of "nicknames" for fucking ever. If you want to be identified as something other than your biological sex then come up with a nickname that you like that captures this and most people will go along with it, right?
If someone were to genuinely ask me "what are your pronouns" my response is "go ahead and use your best judgment and I promise not to be offended either way."
It is a hassle to be 'made to care' about this game in the first place, so I would shift the burden back to the person who wants to play.
women no longer need men for physical or economic security [when careers and the state will provide]
I'm really liking the discussion here but I'm going to call this point out.
Its true on the face of it. Society is set up so no woman need be entirely reliant on any particular man.
But its really just because they can outsource the duties normally handled by a spouse to other specialized MEN in their community, as needed. Men can be hired on a gig basis.
If she's physically threatened, she calls the police. Who are mostly male.
If there's a natural disaster, fire, earthquake, tornado, hurricane, flood, avalanche, etc. etc., the first responders/rescuers are largely male. DITTO for the guys rebuilding infrastructure in the aftermath, and who will be shipping emergency supplies in.
If she needs something at her abode fixed, her car repaired, heavy furniture moved... SAME THING. It'll be a man doing it.
And for economic security, well, the various programs that allow women to have shelters, welfare, food stamps, and other support, even if they're a unmarried, drug addicted, unemployed mother... are largely paid for on the back of taxes extracted from other men.
Its male labor all the way down. No, not every male, or maybe not even a majority, but the only reason women can even afford to express open spite towards male behavior is because men have built the prerequisite conditions for them to do so safely.
Its been shunted into the background somewhat, but oh boy do women still ABSOLUTELY NEED MEN to enjoy any standard of living and and ongoing safety from most physical dangers.
Men created and maintain the internet, too, and various apps, and that's now the preferred vector for women to complain about how useless and ugly men are. This is a supreme, SUPREME irony. Google "Chopped Man Epidemic" for a vantablackpill. Women who couldn't manage to set up a basic LAN are tearing into the exact type of men who make it possible for them to publish this stuff to the masses in the first place.
The current delusion (I will call it what it is) shared by many women that because they can work a job and provide for their own independent living means they don't need men at all is the symptom and somewhat the cause of the current gender discourse. And trying to point this out is very much taboo in polite society.
In short, I'm actually pondering whether we should organize any and all single men with decent-paying jobs into a unified income tax strike. Just refuse to pay taxes and see how society reacts to this simple act of peaceful rebellion. If men aren't needed, if women are capable of getting along without them, then things should putter along okay anyway.
My wife started significantly more liberal than me, but is now radically more conservative than I am
Yes, I didn't include the political affiliation criteria because that's one of the most malleable traits for women.
On the other hand, a full on seventy motherflipping percent of unmarried women vote democrat.
40% of women aged 18-29 identify as VERY LIBERAL or Liberal.
Have you not heard about the recent, RADICAL political polarization among young women?
These women ALSO largely refuse to date conservative/Republican men.
So men don't HAVE to filter these women out, these women are filtering THEMSELVES out. And they go on social media and aggressively police other women on this issue.
Whoops.
(btw this wasn't the case 15 years ago when you got married, so I humbly suggest your advice is based on a qualitatively different scenario)
Its all well and good to say "it worked out for me."
But the situation has gotten drastically worse. Not acknowledging this is a huge oversight.
a lot of the men I talk to about dating are just weak losers. Stop being a weak loser. Women want a man who is going to take care of them, and in a sense "tame" them. Look at every single female erotica story and it's some version of "strong willed man tames crazy rebellious woman" (often wrapped in: strong man sees the thing in rebellious woman that nobody else saw and they tame each other, but she still wants him to remain strong and only tamed towards her).
And here it is.
"Men, be better."
Okay.
But now the best men get to sleep around with their pick of women and never have to commit.
The rest of the men have to compete for a smaller pool of women, because you can't even suggest that maybe we should make the pool of good women larger.
The relationships are not forming at all.
AT WHAT POINT do you start suggesting that we put pressure on women to lower their standards a bit and settle down earlier?
I don't fall for these kinds of traps usually because I also understand there are potentially second order effects to consider, and thus its not a pure linear tradeoff, even if we design the policy on that basis.
Maybe the population of dogs, despite killing kids, was also curbing some additional threat where, if the dogs were removed, would mostly replace the dogs as the primary threat to child livelihood.
In fact we have a very topical analogy for this, in the real world! WOLF REINTRODUCTION!
Ranchers killed off wolves because they were a threat to cattle herds, but this also allows the local deer, elk, etc. population to explode, which means overforaging of vegetation and other potential environmental harms, which is ALSO bad for the cattle on top of all else!
So they've brought back wolves in certain areas and the argument is that now the herbivore population is back into a 'natural' balance checked by the predators which is better for the local flora, which is better for the ecosystem as a whole.
Similarly, imagine we get rid of guns and criminal psychopaths with knives are suddenly springing up everywhere, stabbing children, unchecked by their natural predators.
So the Buridan point for being in favor of mass dog euthanasia is going to be relatively high, for me, and I would certainly explore other policy options before committing to it.
I've noticed an appreciable number of my old acquaintances who have gotten married to and had kids with women who are first generation immigrants, including from Latin-American or Eastern Asian countries. And by all accounts they appear happy and stable.
Compare that to friends who married a woman they met in college, most have kids now, some don't, and a handful are divorced already.
But the real eye-opener is the female friends who didn't lock down a guy in college or shortly thereafter, a few of whom do have kids now, and they seemingly spend most of their time angry at the world/males for letting them down, and 90% of them are clearly letting their personal health slip, too. I'd be hard pressed to think of any who seem happily single AND seem appealing as a potential partner. Thems just the breaks.
To make my point explicit: It seems like near 100% of friends who married immigrants are still married and currently happy, 75-90% of those who married American women are still married and currently happy, and MAYBE 10% of the women who are still unmarried are currently happy.
The almost inescapable conclusion is that if you're an American guy who is entering his thirties and is single, if you limit your dating options to women who are in your peer group in terms of age, nationality, and education you'll find exceedingly slim pickings. The best partners will have been snagged early and those that remain will have high standards and shitty attitudes to go with it. So finding a woman who isn't a ticking divorce bomb almost certainly does require broadening the search.
faceh
8mo ago
Well, I'll toot my own horn:
Quoth me 12 days ago:
I also expect the markets to narrow in a bit as we come closer to the election and people decide to close out their positions at a marginal profit rather than actually take the dice roll. If somebody bought a bunch of Trump shares at ~45-50% and can sell them for 55-60% that's a decent profit for a short period trade.
Wasn't sure if they'd get right back to 50-50, but when there's THIS MUCH actual uncertainty (everyone has their vibes, but there simply no trustworthy, unbiased way to call the election in advance) then the 'money' has to return to baseline because very few people are willing to keep their funds at risk all the way to the final bell.
Previously I thought Trump had a pretty solid shot at winning this but I’m seriously thinking Harris has it in the bag now, against all odds.
Lmao. Harris doesn't have any single advantage that Biden lacked going into 2020, and has a number of disadvantages.
My personal expectations, in order of decreasing confidence: Trump squeaker win. Kamala Squeaker win. Trump blowout.
A Kamala Blowout doesn't seem possible, and my post up there explained my thoughts:
So in short, she's got the die-hard Dem base + the anti-Trump brigade on lock, but I think she utterly lacks cross-demographic appeal AND has been boxed in by the dueling demands of demographics they DO have support from, such that any attempts to outreach sincerely to outgroups will be interpreted as defection.
Which demographics is she pulling in 2024 that Biden DIDN'T pull in 2020? Make the case for me because I don't see any way she pulls better numbers than Biden. I can buy that Trump might do a bit worse than he did in 2020.
faceh
9mo ago
Yup.
The Prohibition impact isn't really the problem. The first order effect of prohibition is to decrease availability of [banned thing]. The long term effect is to decrease legal availability of [banned thing].
The second order effect is to push the markets for [banned thing] underground, correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
And the third order effect, or one of them: when merchants of [banned thing] can't use normal conflict resolution/contract enforcement methods, they have to invoke base violence in order to operate. Wars over turf, breaking kneecaps to collect on debts, burning down establishments that don't pay protection, killing snitches, those all become necessary to the business. And then it eventually becomes organized and systemic.
They can't use the court systems and the state-sanctioned violence, so unless you have a full-on police state, this stuff will spill over into civilian life.
So yeah, flipping a switch on and off between "banned" and "legal" will show some effect, but leave the switch on "banned" long enough and you'll ultimately see a system evolve which perpetuates violence. THEN maybe you can assess whether the additional violence is worth the actual harm reduction achieved by the ban.
It seems unfortunate that for many things there isn't a stable equilibrium of "Legally permitted but socially verboten" where a given activity or product is not banned, but the social judgment that comes from engaging in it is so severe that it necessarily remains hidden on the fringes of society, so there's 'friction' involved in accessing it, and most 'right-thinking' people avoid it because they don't want to risk the social consequences, even if they're curious.
I know the argument for going now, while he has momentum going, and that waiting will just dissipate anything he has built up
The other argument for going now is that Biden is just an incredibly weak candidate who will not inspire voter turnout, and the only person who can almost certainly lose to him, and can inspire Dems to turn out, is Trump.
2028 will be a whole different ballgame, and the Dems currently have a shallow bench, but if Trump wins the nom, then Biden likely wins re-election, which means 4 more years for Democrats to attempt to shore up their electoral odds.
Oh, and for a fun bonus, if Trump wins the primary but loses the general in 2024, he is STILL ELIGIBLE TO RUN IN 2028, so if his health permits he very well could CONTINUE to be the 800 pound gorilla.
This seems to be a quandary, but not one that suggests waiting on the sidelines as the wise choice.
I don’t think religion is that strong anymore on the right. I say this because there is a lot of tolerance for Trump being not a Christian. He bangs hookers. So red tribe has an internal sub-war between their traditional alpha male and their good Christian Desantis.
Yeah, and Christianity is generally okay with sinful, imperfect men being used as instruments to spread the word of God and advance the cause.
I mean, look at King David's reign or King Solomon (he of 1000 of h̶o̶o̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ women) and tell me Trump is really beyond the pale.
Problem is every group wants to tap into religious fervor and the fanaticism/loyalty that comes with a deep faith that you're doing the right thing, but nobody can present a leader who is capable of actually embodying the ideals that the religions (including the secular ones) profess so it becomes hard for anyone but the most ardent of adherents to actually buy into a movement that can't possibly deliver on its promises because there is no all seeing all knowing deity at its center to actually make things happen.
You can look at Trump and see him as a charlatan who talks a great game and maybe even is an extremely strong negotiator but has zero actual principles and no higher goals in mind other than enriching himself and bolstering his own fame.
You can look at the LGBTQ+ movement and see it as a divisive and somewhat incoherent mishmash of different interest and activist groups that at best manages to be a pale echo of the original civil rights movement but has no other core, defining belief system and thus they only manages to cling together because the members have been convinced that their very survival depends on presenting a unified front.
But you can't shake the faith of the followers of those respective secular religions and get them to turn away and embrace a different religious order merely by pointing out how their respective gods have utterly failed them.
Desantis, speaking somewhat cynically, seems to have a chance to actually live up to the ideals he tries to espouse and thus might function as the head of a secular religion (with Christian trappings) where even the less devout might pledge to follow.
But many competing groups (including the Trumpists and the LGBTQ+ mentioned already) consider it blasphemy to even consider lending him support, so I'm very curious to this election seasons develops in the midst of increasingly fanatical cults of personality.
faceh
2yr ago
I mean, degeneracy and collapse is a common feature of almost every empire for which we have historical records.
Presumably there's many more that experienced the same decline yet didn't leave a record.
Why do we suppose ourselves to be the exception?
Finally, I was surprised to see how much more aggressive Rowling has gotten in her anti-trans rhetoric. Not that I necessarily disagree with her, but it looks like I can no longer say that she's being unfairly smeared as an enemy of the trans movement.
I have still not seen a single quote or statement attributed to JK that reads as anything other than bog-standard third-wave feminism applied to a situation she perceived (correctly, I might add) is a threat to the gains previous waves of feminism made for biological women.
She's not come across as 'anti-trans' so much as 'pro-women' and defines 'women' in the terms that are directly related to biology and social roles that inherently set 'men' and 'women' apart.
VERY LATE STAGE EDIT: She confirms as much in her own words. You tell me whether you believe her or not.
If she's gotten 'more aggressive' it is probably just a result of the doubled and tripled efforts to redefine the aforementioned terms in the public eye and she, unlike many, can afford to actively fight back without risking her life being torn down.
faceh
4mo ago
Very interesting to me about this whole thing is how there's still plenty of space for new contenders to pop up and beat actual established players at their own game.
I thought Grok was just purely a derivative of existing products with some of the safety measures stripped off. And now they've done made an updated version that crushes all the cutting edge products in, feels like, about a year?
It sure seems like OpenAI has no meaningful "moat" (hate that term, honestly) that keeps them in the lead DESPITE being the first mover, having the highest concentration of talent, and more money than God.
Doesn't mean they won't win in the end, or that any of these other companies are in an inherently better position, but it is becoming less clear to me what the actual 'secret sauce' to turning out better models is.
Data quality? The quality of the engineers on staff? The amount of compute on tap?
What is it that gives any given AI company a real edge over the others at this point?
I've run numbers in the aggregate. I'm not standing by them as anything other than a starting point:
About 40% are obese. We've already thinned things out (heh) significantly right there. Maybe Ozempic will save the day.
19% are single moms in the U.S. and Canada. Although I imagine that changes drastically based on race, because I wouldn't have believed that number on first glance.
Around 5-7% are LGBT... although that's much higher for Gen Z women.
Somewhere around 25-27% have had mental illness diagnoses (not counting the severity). Might be 30%+ for the 18-35 year olds that we're talking about)
Around 50%(!) have had 5 or more sex partners. 5 is an arbitrary cutoff, and I CATEGORICALLY DO NOT BELIEVE THE NUMBERS on this type of survey, but again, not an encouraging sign. Difficult to find hard data on how many have been strippers, or prostitutes, or sugar babies, or had Onlyfans pages.
If you want more reliable data take a look at STD rates by gender. Or don't. Its not a fun read. (This one IS hugely disparate based on race, to be fair).
EDIT: to add on, women have more student debt on average, and are less likely to pay it back. So now these women are adding financial burdens to any man who takes them.
And finally, drumroll please, somewhere around 40% of young women are left/democrat leaning. That's before you examine unmarried women specifically. Something close to 70% of single women are probably on the left, politically. Go ahead young man, take a swim in that pond, I'm sure it'll be fine. “Plenty of fish in the sea,” but barely any that are safe to eat.
So we're likely looking at a scarily small % of single women who are relatively chaste, mentally stable, straight, and politically 'moderate', AND also not grossly overweight. And this is what any guy trying to intentionally date and find a relationship is encountering: slim pickings.
And that's before we get into a guy trying to find a match in looks or intelligence.
And as I said in a different comment, women just aren't bringing much to the table to counter the risks, when divorce is still prevalent and doesn't favor the males.
I haven't done the analysis to figure out how these various stats interact (i.e. obviously there will be crossover, so you can't just treat all of these like independent factors), but my gut feeling is it won't help.
And keep in mind, almost by definition the most marriageable ones will get picked up early and removed from the pool and stay out of the pool (people capable of maintaining stable relationships tend to stay in stable relationships. Surprise!). So selection effects would suggest that you're far more likely to encounter the dregs when you're actively searching.
And what makes it particularly bleak is running the numbers on the number of single males in the U.S., and consider how they're ALL chasing the same pool of women, almost regardless of the guy's age. A 50 year old can still have a fling with a 25 year old.
I would guess that what is actually GEOGRAPHICALLY AVAILABLE to a given man will vary too. SF may be a particularly unique circumstance compared to anywhere else. But the type of male you're competing against will also probably be top 1% too.
So yeah, MY read on the situation inevitably leads to the blackpill.
I want people to get married and have kids, but I feel like I can't, in good faith, tell guys to just bite the bullet and marry someone as quickly as possible when there's a veritable minefield out there.
faceh
2yr ago
What does the murder rate look like in Chicago a year later? How about 10 years later? Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?
I mean,
See my other post about conservatively estimating that we could expect around 50,000 LEO casualties in trying to enforce a gun confiscation program.
PLUS the fact that guns can be 3D printed now, so it's not sufficient to confiscate those already in circulation.
Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?
I might concede this if you concede we would probably see an increase in vehicular-based massacres
Since nothing in your hypothetical has actually dealt with the issues that make mass shooters want to kill people, we have full reason to expect many of them will merely shift methods.
And if we accept the idea, for arguments sake, that we could toss out our civil rights in the name of achieving lower crime, then maybe the example of El Salvador represents a much MORE EFFECTIVE path we could follow to achieve a similar impact on violent crime.
So perhaps it looks really suspicious to zero in on the Second Amendment and impacting the rights of huge swaths of peaceful citizens in your zeal to bring down the crime rate, when there are readily conceivable alternatives that are less intrusive?
Thought experiment: let's just ignore the fourth and fifth amendment and massively incarcerate the most violent members of Chicago's population. What does the murder rate in Chicago look like a year later?
powerful ammunition for the "voting rights" faction.
How powerful is the "voting rights" faction?
I suppose you can defend the heavy-handedness if your overriding priority is primarily to tamp down on the handful of actual voter fraud that takes place.
Perhaps we can gain some insight into Desantis' mindset by looking at the 2018 election:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Florida_elections
Desantis won by the veritable skin of his teeth by 33,000 votes out of 8 million cast.
Rick Scott won his Senate race by about 10k votes.
Nikki Fried, the ONLY Democrat to win an executive office, won by 6,000 votes.
These are outcomes that could be swung, potentially, by one county in the state being manipulated or screwing up a count.
And guess what happened in Broward County in 2018?
Half of Broward County’s election precincts reported more ballots cast than the number of voters. Backlogs in processing mail ballots snarled reporting of results.
Confusing ballot design may have led thousands of voters to inadvertently skip an important contest.
Money was wasted on unneeded blank ballots, which weren’t adequately tracked and were eventually destroyed.
After election day, auditors found the recount was plagued by poor planning, inadequate staffing and equipment, and poor quality control.
And the money quote:
“We conclude that the November 2018 election was not efficiently and effectively conducted,” Melton wrote in to county commissioners. “Based on the totality of these issues, we are unable to provide assurance over the accuracy of the November 2018 election results as reported.”
Oh, and lets not forget that Rick Scott very directly claimed the election was being stolen. He and Stacey Abrams were two years ahead of Trump on applying this tactic.
Broward singlehandedly delayed the final outcome of multiple races and from the look of things had gaping holes in their system that COULD have been exploited. Oh, and it's heavily and reliably a blue county.
Actually, Palm Beach County also delayed it. Also another heavily blue area.
One of Desantis' first actions upon taking office was removing and replacing the Broward and Palm Beach County Election supervisors.
And, 'strangely,' Broward and Palm Beach County had no discrepancies or delays in the 2020 election. Further, Florida went more heavily Republican than usual, including more towards Trump than expected.
Broward County has almost 2 milllion citizens, this is not a small podunk area that we're talking about. Palm Beach has 1.5 million.
And while Desantis is going to walk to an easy victory this time, I can't imagine he wants to allow ANY room for doubt in the sanctity of the election should any races come down to the wire.
So in light of all this, perhaps it makes sense why Desantis might conclude that arresting 20 people is worth it for the possible upside of dissuading electoral shenanigans throughout the state?
Is dissuading a handful of bad actors worth putting some innocent people in jail? Worth dissuading large swathes of the population from legally voting? If so, say so.
I dunno. I think he cares very little that those twenty guys got misled, but cares a lot about ensuring he doesn't have to worry as much about catching electoral fraud after the fact.
So this action is a cheap way to possibly pre-emptively solve an issue that could arise.
Going along on the premise that because voter fraud has not been detected in the past and therefore is not likely to occur in the future seems like an unwise tactic in an environment as adversarial as this one.
It's not like there's not ample historical precedent of organized efforts to fraudulently influence election outcomes. Oh, also recent precedent.
In June 2022, the defendant admitted in court to bribing the Judge of Elections for the 39th Ward, 36th Division in South Philadelphia in a fraudulent scheme over several years. Myers admitted to bribing the election official to illegally add votes for certain candidates of their mutual political party in primary elections. Some of these candidates were individuals running for judicial office whose campaigns had hired Myers, and others were candidates for various federal, state, and local elective offices that Myers favored for a variety of reasons. Myers would solicit payments from his clients in the form of cash or checks as “consulting fees,” and then use portions of these funds to pay election officials to tamper with election results.
Just because it's 'rare' doesn't mean, when it happens, it won't have significant impact.
Can't imagine why you'd want to chance it in a state where races can be extremely close.
Nope.
The situation has given women more options, which has led to them being more selective.
For the young folks, there's a general recession in sex and in Relationships, which is especially pointed amongst men. Its baked in, young men who don't get experience dating while young will just have a harder time getting dates going forward.
"Women are easier than ever" only holds true for the subset of men that women find attractive on a basic physical level.
Dating Apps, for instance, heavily favor women and the small subset of men who are getting laid left and right and, likewise, have no incentive to settle or commit. Which just makes the women they interact with bitter.
This is supported by virtually every statistic you can find on the matter. You can't self-improve your way out of a game that is rigged against you.
Its harder for everyone else across the board.
but chances you’ll get off on pussy 10x more if you give it a shot.
Men don't just want pussy, they want a meaningful, committed relationship within which they can start a family.
This advice is just not going to work for the vast majority of young men, no matter how much it is repeated.
Now what?
faceh
10mo ago
First, I don't think the vast majority of gun rights advocates would be in favor of such a compromise, so you're not putting forward a live proposal that is really worthy of consideration
Nobody has made this proposal seriously, so perhaps this is simply a matter of it not being considered at all yet.
Why not change that.
It's stupid to unilaterally disarm yourself, in a society where 40% of your "enemy" is legally armed.
Wow, maybe there's certain advantages to owning guns that THE SECOND AMENDMENT WAS MEANT TO PRESERVE?
I GUESS THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS GOOD FOR SOMETHING AFTER ALL.
/sarcasm
So this argument now convinced me that I should oppose ALL gun control measures.
Debate over, as far as I'm concerned.
faceh
5d ago
she should be satisfied with her own personhood without having to surgically alter herself in order to please men. The broader point has been a feminist theme for centuries.
Perhaps.
But I've also been listening to rhetoric along the lines of "My body, my choice," "We look pretty for ourselves, not for men", and "my outfit is not an excuse" which all go towards that idea that women can dress up as sexy as they want and make whatever changes they feel like to themselves and are all but immune from judgment for it, for over a decade now.
Hence they can get trashy (in my eyes) tattoos everywhere, as many piercings as they like, they can go with fake boobs, butt, and lips, and all of this is just a celebration of their femininity or whatever.
Its a bit discordant for feminism to actively police its own side for doing things that incidentally appeal to the men in their lives, when there's no evidence that it was the result of coercion but rather her own desires... even if those desires were executed with the male gaze in mind.
I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts. Maybe a step further, banning them from possessing smartphones altogether (yes, enforcement would be a bear. No arguments there). Give them a basically functional blackberry-esque device that can send and receive messages and has GPS functionality and bluetooth, and no app store.
I think there has been vastly insufficient discussion of superstimuli and policies that address the proliferation of ways one can completely wreck their life in short order. Just like drugs are more potent than they were 50 years ago, marketing companies are much, much better at their jobs and barely-legal scams are more efficiently predatory than ever before. And meanwhile, humans are, if anything, a little dumber on average.
Like, I am libertarian as fuck when it comes to social issues, but I've experienced the rush that gambling brings and my sincere belief is that we HAVE to provide some 'friction' in place to prevent people from slipping into deep, DEEP holes from which there is no escape, or at least they'll be stuck climbing out for years.
Consider if you owned a property with an extremely deep sinkhole on it, that was surrounded by smooth, polished rock with low friction coefficient on a 20 degree slope, so that anyone who wants to approach the edge of the pit would find it very difficult to climb back out without special equipment, and some % of people are going to slip and fall into the pit. If you're charging admission to view the pit, I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.
ESPECIALLY if you were enticing people to come view the pit with the promise that some small number of guests would get fabulously wealthy, and the closer they get to the edge of the pit, the more they could possibly win.
Even my deepest belief in personal freedom doesn't require that the pit must be tolerated as-is, in its maximally dangerous state.
But metaphorically speaking, we're apparently allowing thousands of these sorts of pits to dot the psychological landscape, with bright flashing advertisements drawing in patrons and no mechanisms in place to 'rescue' those who fall in.
It is bad enough for adults who get sucked in, kids whose entire development was awash in these stimuli might not even develop basic defenses, since this is what they would consider 'normal.' The kids these days have gambling mechanics in ALL their video games, they've already made and lost minor fortunes in Crypto, they can gamble on literally any sports event they want, and they grew up watching influencers shilling them on the most harebrained of get-rich-quick schemes.
And meanwhile, financial literacy is barely ever taught.
Also, it is patently absurd that the rules as they exist allow anyone over 18 or 21 to throw money away gambling, but if they want to invest in early-stage startups they have to have a certain amount of wealth built up already.
The 'problem' such as it is, if we start investigating and making rules for those who have addictive personalities, or are easily manipulated, or simply don't understand odds/statistics and restrict their ability to use their own money in ways they wish. Maybe they have restricted bank accounts that limit them to, say $500/day withdrawals. Maybe they're not allowed to take on long-term debt, or we legally cap the amount of debt they can take to some specific % of their net worth. Or require them to pass an annual financial audit to exercise certain rights...
Because if we don't, there's a certainty that many of them will blow up the entirety of their savings and becomes a burden on the rest of us later on. And thus we can only do our best to mitigate this externality.
Well, we're essentially carving out a different class of citizens with reduced individual rights due to their vulnerabilities. What's the justification for letting such people vote? Or have a bank account at all? Or have kids?
I have a question that could turn into a culture war topic but I need some kind of sanity check before I flesh it out further:
Does anyone else feel as though, even as the general populace becomes less and less optimistic, the mainstream narrative has nonetheless converged on a message of unrelenting positivity?
It is hard to describe, but the best examples of what I'm talking about that spring to mind are The Rise of the "Corporate Memphis" art style and the seeming ubiquity of beauty filters as a default feature in smartphones.
Or in the way Youtube video comments have turned from a cesspit of trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls to basically a competition for who can heap the most bombastically hyperbolic praise on the subject video.
The common thread is that these techniques/styles end up minimizing the appearance of 'flaws' and 'ugliness' whilst also idealizing the subjects it examines so as to avoid... I don't know. Offense? Critique? Any possible negative emotional valence? Where before there might be depiction of ugliness as ugliness or actual examination of social and personal flaws in a way that risks causing offense, where before there were art styles that embraced ugliness (while still being aesthetic) and Cartoons like Ren and Stimpy could use unpleasant visuals for comedic effect now it seems like most products are produced with the intent of avoiding any unpleasant sensations on the viewer's part.
And this now seems to apply to every single product of modern culture, aside from some decrepit/degenerate corners of the internet. "Good vibes only" seems to be the accepted norm... with the exception of certain acceptable targets who may be used as punching bags.
I'm not even getting into possible causes, I'm literally just trying to see if this is an actual, noticeable phenomenon.
Have you felt as though mainstream/corporate-produced culture has reached increasing heights of 'toxic positivity' even as your own outlook on the state of the world has degraded?
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