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faceh


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 04:13:17 UTC

				

User ID: 435

faceh


				
				
				

				
4 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 05 04:13:17 UTC

					

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User ID: 435

These charges were patently frivolous from the very start but setting that aside they don't even make sense from the political grandstanding perspective. Bewildering.

Think on the meta level just a bit. As in, not about whether these twenty people themselves were or were not intentionally trying to commit a crime, and catching them is proof of anything.

From a pure signalling standpoint, if you want to prevent people from knowingly casting illegal votes and demonstrate that you are capable of enforcing this rule (i.e. detecting illegal votes), then yes, you have to arrest people who do cast illegal votes, even if they possess a defense for the action.

Especially since "I was told it was legal to cast my vote" is such an easy defense to invoke and hard to disprove otherwise. You show that you will STILL investigate such situations and try to verify the defense as valid.

Do you think that this action will, on the margins, increase or decrease the chances of someone attempting actual voter fraud in the 2022 elections in Florida?

Or would the effect be entirely minimal and worth disregarding?

I've become exceedingly fatalistic about the 'outcome' of this war because it really feels like the ultimate destiny of each nation (for the next 50 years, at least) is largely baked into the cake at this point.

Ukraine may very well be able to maintain autonomy over most of its' own territory. But their population has been in decline for decades now. Now add in a few facts:

  1. Lots of Ukrainian men are dying on the frontlines instead of starting families.

  2. Even those men who survive have been deployed for a year+ and probably won't be starting families anytime soon.

  3. Russia has apparently been abducting tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Children. The prospects of getting these kids BACK even if Ukraine wins are slim-to-none.

I don't see any way to slice it to avoid Ukraine entering terminal population spiral/decline, and it may as well already be there. If the war drags on for another year then even if Ukraine prevails and all the men return and start enthusiastically knocking up women it'll be 16 or so years before those kids can become economically productive in any way.

In short, win or lose I don't see how Ukraine maintains itself as a functional nation as their demographics become untenable to support economic activity. Unless perhaps all the other nations of the world commit to pouring massive ongoing support into the country.

And most other countries face a similar, though less sharp, demographic crunch.


Russia, well, they're slightly more likely to hold together as a country but it seems increasingly unlikely they'll achieve their overall goals for territorial security and so I would assume they will just continue to fight a war of attrition to their last man rather than return to the status quo ante.

Johnson has apparently set his particular calling card as a director to be "All extremely rich people are simply irredeemable fuckups and only obtain their wealth by luck; the only people who are trustworthy, empathetic, or heroic are the salt-of-the-earth working class." No comment on the fact that the working class also correlates with Trump support in the U.S.

He even shoehorned that into STAR WARS of all things.

Which is... FINE, but he ends up making the rich characters into blatant, openly incompetent fuckups, and not just subtly ineffective, nor does he add any other facets to their character. So when he doesn't give them any moments which might allow the viewer to empathize with them and he does minimal work to humanize them, the ultimate effect (to me) is that it feels smug and nasty.

And likewise, I don't even buy that they 'lose' in the end. The irony here is that Johnson wants to have his cynical cake and eat his idealistic ice cream too. That is, he posits a view of the world where rich (but incompetent) people dominate most industries and use their influence to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. There's no way for the common man to strike at them in a way that will matter.

Then, enter Benoit Blanc, who can outmaneuver the rich dummies, see through their deceptions and machinations, and use their own blackened souls against them to arrange for their downfall, then handing that off to the enlightened everywoman to enact the final, decisive blow. Johnson works very hard to make his 'good' ending irrefutable and irreversible.

But to believe that you'd have to ignore the rest of the message that wealthy, connected people are able to use their influence to manipulate outcomes. In this world, shortly after the movie ends, all the wealthy assholes are going to hide behind expensive lawyers, bring in PR firms to spin the story, and while yes they're almost certainly financially ruined for the short term, I rather doubt they will end up serving jail time or losing 'everything.' Okay, the billionaire will probably serve a LOT of jail time for murder (but maybe not) so that's something. But in order to believe that the 'bad' people 'lose,' you have to both believe that all of them were 'bad,' and that they have fully 'lost.' And I wasn't convinced of either by the end. And that's because of the world Johnson set up for us, not my own cynicism!

He wants to push forth the idealistic vision that a smart, educated, clever interloper like Blanc, who champions all the 'right' ideas too, can assist an underprivileged, exploited commoner to win against connected, wealthy idiots through sheer effort and persistence when the stakes are high enough. But then he has to end the movie before reality ensues and the world he posited reasserts and reverses most of the alleged gains.

Side note, whilst I get that destroying the Mona Lisa as a cultural artifact to get some revenge is an iffy message, I think the core idea that the Protag had been extensively and personally wronged by the villains and thus wouldn't give a damn about destroying a mere physical possession was completely valid. A human being was killed, and you're more outraged at the destruction of a tiny little portrait?

That might be one of the few truly interesting points the movie makes.

Also, the real 'twist' wasn't one that the viewer could have reasonably guessed in advance, I think, so I find it a bit bad faith to hide so much from the viewer, rather than merely misdirect their attention so they miss or misinterpret the clues. There were NO clues as to the switcheroo, so the audience was just left in the complete dark until the flashbacks, which recontextualized everything. And that was neat, but a bit unbecoming of an actual mystery story where the audience is looking for clues. But then again, with modern genre-savvy audiences it may have been impossible to fool them if there were any clever clues hidden in plain sight, so perhaps this was the only way to pull it off.

All that said, I still enjoyed it. I don't think one can effectively deny Johnson's pure technical skill as a writer and director.


P.S. people keep saying he's targeting Joe Rogan and Elon Musk specifically, and I see why, but that seems more based on the particular cultural moment rather than the intent when he wrote or even directed it.

The billionaire asshole is much closer to a pastiche of Steve Jobs and other tech founders than Musk in particular. Especially since Musk, of all Billionaires, is not the one who would spend gratuitous amounts of money on a private island with a giant architectural abomination on display. As far as I know, he doesn't own an island, or even a yacht. So 90% of the 'critiques' in this film would roll off him anyway.

The redpill manosphere streamer character also doesn't really fit Rogan. Rogan of course didn't 'lucky break' his way into prominence, he had a lengthy career as a comedian and hosted mainstream TV shows before starting his podcast. And by and large he is known for being a genuine and empathetic guy rather than loudly spouting any particular ideological viewpoint. And given his deal with Spotify, he wouldn't need to cater to some Billionaire's whims to maintain his platform. So again, 90% of the 'critiques' in the film would roll off him.

I genuinely don't think these were the targets Johnson had in mind when writing. He wrote much more generalized sendups of a given cultural archetype and viewers projected the current pop culture bugaboos onto it.

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

Correct. Since the entire history of gun control regulation has shown that advocates of gun control will never admit to a policy failure. Any violence that occurs is ultimately because there was insufficient gun control in place, thus no failure is actually a failure of gun control policy, it is instead a failure to go far enough.

California has some of the most stringent gun laws in the country and also one of the higher murder rates. To say nothing of fucking CHICAGO. You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate. They've tried heavy gun control and it didn't help. So can they admit that gun control has failed in this instance?

If there are no circumstances under which they'll admit the policy is failing, then in what sense can they be said to be acting in good faith?

Every single compromise gun rights advocates have made previously has been met with demands for further compromise, and nothing is offered in return.

The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.

Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.

The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.

The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...

You see the subtle error in reasoning here?

Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder.

And because those instances are given outsized attention by the national media, who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.

But that's a fundamentally different problem. If it weren't terrorism it'd be something else.

IIRC the statistically average Ukrainian woman wanted to be a mail order bride before the war, so it’s entirely possible that the vast majority of the most fertile women leave and never come back.

Geeeezus.

But gets to my point. If Ukraine wins, they've got a decades-long rebuilding project ahead of them, and their standards of living will be comparatively horrendous in the meantime. How do you convince people (esp. females) to return, stick around, and have babies when they could just retreat to a wealthier country and shack up with a local there?

And if you CAN'T convince them to return and have kids, then the country dies out in a couple generations anyway, despite rebuilding efforts.

That said, the thought has crossed my mind that if my dating life doesn't improve over the next few years, the idea of finding a displaced Ukrainian woman who would presumably be quite grateful to not be in an active warzone vs. the current elevated standards of American women has a certain appeal.

My personal take was that transactivism was just the next, inevitable step in the march to atomization in liberalism. And it probably still is. But there may be bridges too far, even for liberals. I hope.

Similar here, I figured that the high water mark before the tide receded would be somewhere in the vicinity of HAAS Fat Activism and the push for acceptance of "Otherkin." I hoped dearly that it would be be WELL before we hit the "MAP is a valid and acceptable sexuality" movement.

My suspicion is that the very visible entrance of Trans women into female sports leagues combined with the push for gender reassignment of prepubescent children is what snapped normies into a posture of resistance.

Note that I don't think the resistance is particularly well organized or even coherent, but with NYT taking the position that "it is in fact acceptable to consider the implications of these policies and one is not required to accept activist claims at face value" at least there's some room to breathe for those who actually WANT there to be a discussion on the matter.

But the left has no option to just retreat on this point, and as we've seen even the most milquetoast of defiance is treated as a nigh-existential threat, so generally I just find myself wondering which angle of attack they will implement next.

It feels very weird, though, to be on TheMotte talking about a culture war issue where the right is seemingly the one with momentum and the left is now on defense. Only took the combined might of the most popular author on the planet, the largest newspaper on the planet, and some of the more popular GOP governors and pundits.

The Cathedral as a whole appears to be proceeding with it's general plans quite unhindered, mind.

If we posit the world where the guns are removed, you've just made it so that physical prowess is solely determinant of success in violent encounters.

Which is to say, you're making females less able to resist male attackers, or allowing organized groups to terrorize individuals more freely, or make it harder for the old and infirm to defend themselves.

This leaves aside the generally observed tendency towards government tyranny become gradually (or suddenly) more harsh against disarmed populations.

And of course probably going to see a rise in Cars as tool of mass homicide

Bud Light/Anheuser-Busch just penned a large advertising partnership deal with the UFC. The unconfirmed reports I've read are suggesting the 7-year deal totals about $100 million or so.

Dana White, President of the UFC, suggests its 'not determined by the money' and while this is an eyeroll-worthy statement, in a sense it must be correct, because the obvious benefit to Bud Light is that partnering with one of the few remaining bastions of 'toxic' masculinity left to Western Culture offers a promising route to rehabilitate their image and customer base after the Dylan Mulvaney Kerfuffle tarnished their red-blooded, blue-collared reputation.

Which of course means it is still about the money, since Bud Light sales remain in the tank and thus regaining customers would mean a return to their former glory and profitability.

Will it work? I'm personally skeptical. The move is actually a pretty good, and costly, way to show that they're returning to their roots as a beer for the hard-working and rough-handed everyman, since the UFC is honestly synonymous with uncouth, politically incorrect athletes beating the snot out of each other, and features sexy ring girls at every fight with the Machisimo levels simply off the charts. Trump himself is known to attend events and get standing ovations. Tying themselves to THAT brand is actually likely to hurt their 'cred' (such as it exists) with any liberals who might have been swayed by their moves towards increased inclusion. I'm honestly looking forward to the next Sean Strickland (the current UFC middleweight champion) fight, just to see how he might mouth off in a way that will lead to controversy against Bud Light pushing in the other direction. EDIT: It has already begun LMAO

That said, it's not like anyone expects the "beefy men beating each other to death" league to try to conform with polite norms anyway.

Still. It isn't anything resembling an acknowledgement of the mistake, and even if the logo is plastered all over the Octagon and fighter's shorts, all that has to happen for this to backfire is for people to just... not buy the beer. The UFC pockets the money and the needle doesn't budge otherwise. It sure didn't work for Crypto.com or Vechain, both of whom forked over a ton of money for UFC sponsorship.

There's also the insidious take that this is an attempt to try to bring the UFC itself to heel, by exerting enough influence over it to cause it to clamp down on its athletes and 'clean up' its image (read: bring in line with progressive values) rather than allow it to exist as a potential rogue cultural element resisting the leftward swim of Cthulhu.

Given that I hold the position that martial arts/combat sports are probably the last remaining healthy outlet for positive masculinity, if THAT is the goal I'd be extremely alarmed. Not saying it is, but when that much money is getting thrown around, you expect strings to be attached.


I had 'jokingly' suggested to friends a while back that the single best way to bring male customers back to Bud Light was to simply hire a cadre of busty women who would stand in the beer aisle at the grocery store wearing an American Flag bikini and offering to fellate anyone who bought a case. Boom. Apology accepted.

And considering how many buxom ladies with relatively lax morals you could afford to hire for $100 million, I am wondering if that might have been a better plan overall.

This is economically very efficient, as it encourages land to be used for its most economically efficient purpose. However, this butts directly up against peoples' real-world desires to "settle" - to establish a home in a place and be able to stay there indefinitely. If, for reasons beyond their control, the price of their property increases, they can be financially forced from their homes, which is about as soulcrushing as being foreclosed upon, while also seeming much more unfair.

The solution I've seen mentioned is that you can permit the homeowner to 'name their price' i.e. the value of what they think their home/land is truly worth, with the caveat being that if someone offers to purchase at said price they are legally compelled to accept it.

If they name an astronomically high price, then they are going to be taxed accordingly.

So the incentive would be that they name a price that is sufficiently high to make up for the the distress of leaving a cherished home, of finding and moving to a new one, and whatever other burdens would be placed on them if they were to move, but not so high that they couldn't afford the tax burden.

I've not thought of nor seen a solid rebuttal to this proposal. If a homeowner has a price they are genuinely willing to accept for a property they have an extreme emotional attachment to, then 'forcing' them to sell at that price is barely a harm. If they claim that the property is actually worth far more than any buyer would reasonably be willing to pay, then they are prevented from complaining if their inflated valuation is the one they pay tax on.

Because if we take the complete inverse of your scenario, we end up with nail houses where a person refuses all reasonable offers to sell, and ends up having all the positive features of their neighborhood stripped away and end up distressed anyway, but with no money to show for it.

The right isn't gonna accept trans people no matter what at this point, when you start calling people pedophiles the conversation is kind of over.

When you openly and blatantly state your intent to convert people's children to an ideologically driven belief system backed by the power of the state, then no conversation is possible. Arguably it never started.

"We don't have to convince YOU of anything, we'll just teach your kids to hate your beliefs and we may convince a few of them to undergo invasive surgery to alter their very personal identity, against YOUR wishes."

Explain to me how there's any room for negotiation when such a position has been moved to the forefront of one side's platform?

You see the dynamic in any online forum that is still pseudonymous (such as this one). Even though we can all guess based on general demographic surveys that 85% of the forum, at least, is male, one can't confirm the gender of any particular poster beyond their own representations.

As soon as you enable users to present as a particular gender (all the moreso if you let them add photos) that all goes out the window.

On a side note, this is also tying into my experience of becoming quietly convinced that the inability of society to 'rein in' female sexuality in a healthy way contributes to almost every form of social dysfunction we observe.

Note I'm not saying this is the ONLY condition for dysfunction (plenty of dysfunctional societies which heavily police female sexuality, cf. Iran) but just a seemingly major factor that contributes to dysfunction in the long run.

But as soon as you start letting attractive people leverage their attractiveness to gain popularity, you necessarily compromise the basic factor that allows people to engage in conversation on a 'neutral' playing field. That invites all the rest of the problems inherent to human social group dynamics.

Just say no.

A thought and question I've had bouncing around in my head that I don't expect a real answer to, or even a coherent framing, since its possible there are a few false premises at work here.

Is it possible that one side effect of the rise of Onlyfans/digital prostitution is that (many) men are noticing that (many) women know precisely what men want in a sexual partner and are willing to provide it... but only outside the context of a committed relationship.

Simply put, Onlyfans creates an extremely liquid marketplace for attractive women to produce smut content for a large audience. Content producers want to optimize to capture as many customers as possible. Something like 87% of the customers/users on OF are men. So competitive forces drive the (mostly females) creators to figure out exactly what men's sexual preferences are and provide content tailored to those preferences and produce it en masse.

So by sheer economic necessity, these women are demonstrating that they are willing to engage with men's deepest sexual desires in order to make a buck.

Imagine being a 20-something male in the current environment, being aware of the fact that you can go on OF and for the price of a cheeseburger find women who will perform almost any male sexual fantasy you could imagine. Then going on the dating market to find a woman who might be willing to indulge in fantasies with him (assume he's seeking an otherwise healthy, committed relationship).

If he goes into the dating marketplace and is open about his own personal sexual desires, he can be branded as a pervert or a sex pest because "women don't exist solely to please men" and/or "you can't reduce women to sex objects, even if they sexualize themselves." In some cases, they might just simply express ignorance of men's sexual preferences and act as though expecting sexual gratification from a partner is suspect!

But this would read as extremely bad faith given that, as above, women clearly can figure out what men want if they put in a modicum of effort, and WILL provide it when provided sufficient incentive.

Seems, to me, that seeing the difference between what women are willing to do for money and attention from thousands of onlookers online vs. how they can be unwilling to indulge their own partner's personal desires could lead to a feeling of resentment.

but from my perspective the abortion and trans rights issues look entirely defensive from the left. The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade and wants trans people to be left alone. The right is the side making those into culture war issues, not the left.

Only in the "cries out in pain as he strikes you" sense, holy cow.

It's really interesting that you simultaneously suggest that "the left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade," (nevermind that was imposed by SCOTUS and not anything like the result of a legislative process where all citizens had their say) because when it comes down to it the right wants the "status quo" of people with penises and Y chromosomes to have separate bathrooms, prisons, sports teams, and certain other facilities from people with uteruses and lacking Y chromosomes.

And definitely prefers the status quo where it doesn't matter what the person claims to identify as, the term 'man' and 'woman' has an easily verifiable component that isn't subject to the individual's personal preference. And that, on it's face, is entirely compatible with trans people being 'left alone.'

If trans people 'just want to be left alone' that message REALLY hasn't gotten through to the actual left.

Why else are, among other things, the existence of a biological male competing against biological females and unsurprisingly dominating the sport supposed to be celebrated as an achievement, even if this ruins the competition for biological females?

In what sense does this gel with trans people being 'left alone,' if it imposes on people who are trying to compete on something like a fair playing field?

Because blanketing a whole town with flags that represents your identity is almost fundamentally opposed to the concept of 'being left alone.' By this very act you are demanding people confront, acknowledge, accept, and support your particular beliefs. In so doing, you are requiring them pay attention, which is the opposite of leaving you alone.

Similarly when you make biological females wax your penis. That's not 'wanting to be left alone.' Nor is insisting to be allowed into a women's changing room with pubescent females. If this isn't some version of culture warring, then what is it?

You don't get to call it 'defensive' and then literally threaten to take people's kids away for failure to comply with your beliefs.

Or appoint openly trans officials to high ranking federal government positions seemingly only on the basis of their trans identity. This is not behavior that implies a desire to be 'left alone.' It is being openly stated there:

As many facilities across the country face harassment, including death threats to providers who offer gender-affirmative care, Levine told physicians “to highlight the importance of the work that they are doing for vulnerable, transgender and gender diverse children and their families, and to continue to do that work and to keep the faith.

What is 'the faith' in this case?

“You can see a pattern here in terms of the attacks on rights,” she said. “I really reject the language that the opposition is using. I reject their terminology. I reject their ideology.”

"Just want to be left alone" but if you disagree with them, people at the very highest levels of government are ready to come for you.

I don't know that you're even arguing in good faith, but assuming you are, please put forward a plausible narrative of the last twenty years in which the right is the side that pushed trans issues to the forefront of public conciousness as a culture war issue.

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?

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.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. War is chaos. Determining which signals are good and which are misleading at best is nigh impossible in the moment.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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:

  1. '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.

  2. Ukraine's demographics are even worse. They cannot win a war of attrition unless Russia knuckles under.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?