hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
As a specific nothingburger prediction, Israel will do something Iran can respond to with a typical Hezbollah-launched and ineffectual strike, Israel will blow up some building in Beirut, and they'll call it even.
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
Mormons are probably the easiest comparison, but my understanding is that aside from eschewing technology Amish have similar lifestyle rules and social organizations to other Christian fundamentalist groups in the US and Europe.
How much of it is technology vs how much of it is the lifestyle rules and community organization suggests a natural comparison.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
The baby boom is pretty well explained- working and middle class male incomes skyrocketed after the war at the expense of upper end incomes, and the best way for women to get in on this was marriage, which then leads to babies because within-marriage fertility rates are universally much higher than a society’s general fertility rate. Sexism was absolutely a load bearing part of this and a shrinking income gap was part of what ended it.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
Was Henry actually a loser, or was he a winner who happened to treat his women badly?
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
I know Italy doesn’t really have room to raise debt levels; does Northern Europe?
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
The rational thing for Russia to do would be to not invade Ukraine, but for regime-legitimacy reasons they’re kinda committed to winning the war.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
Tripling the population with sub Saharan Africans is a fantastical pie in the sky scenario that won’t happen and was intended to illustrate just how mathematically implausible South African demographics in the USA are.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
I mean I’d just ask if they want an end to police brutality or not, I don’t think we need to hand wave away any and all opposition to have a chance of it working.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
Let me be clear here- you’re absolute ruler of the government. In America that means you control the executive branch, congress, and all federal courts. It does not mean the media has to like you, that corporations or unions or ngos have to listen to you more than they normally have to listen to the government, or that lower level governments March to the beat of your drum, but we’re going to rule out actual insurrection or armed resistance for the sake of the scenario.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
What’s the comparison between Amish and members of tech savvy high-demand religions?
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
You think America is going to be a single digit percent white? Or 80+% black?
If America’s population tripled entirely with sub Saharan migrants(and this is unlikely), we would still be as white as South Africa ever was- not as it is today. If America maintains its current trajectory we’ll be white plurality but minority for a long time, but without any increase in the black population.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
Yes, this will cost lots of money, but Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending.
This is the one thing Europe will never, ever do.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
t will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.
No, it will not. Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe for the foreseeable future- it was before the war, and getting bombed flat didn’t help. It’s poorer than South Africa. Even third worlders do not want to live there, and if forced to- well, they’re third worlders, they can walk from there to a nicer country- which is such a low bar to clear that it includes the entirety of the balkans. Notably, Romania and Bulgaria, which are both several times wealthier than Ukraine, have functionally no third world migrants.
You have to be at least as wealthy as Mexico or Russia to attract migrants. Ukraine is as poor compared to those countries as they are to the US and Germany.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
Russia will probably not treat Ukraine particularly well in victory, certainly much worse than Britain would treat us.
A shame that's not a choice actually offered me...
While the USA will likely be minority white in our lifetimes, South African demographics are simply not in the cards. I honestly thought my grandfather was the only person who worried about the US being majority black.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
A good point, but in practice I think it doesn’t matter because community college classes already transfer to state universities and students know that.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Iran probably doesn’t have the ability to wage a large conventional war on the other side of multiple hostile countries in the least stable region on earth. That’s true. But if troops were crossing the Iranian border, Iran’s millions of conscripts defending itself and operating in nearby hostile countries would be adequately fed and supplied absent a total collapse of Iranian war fighting ability- Iran is able to supply more limited forces quite well on a much longer and more difficult logistical tether and their defense establishment legitimately looks more capable than in the 80s, when starvation was still not the main challenge facing millions of Iranian conscripts.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
If a kind fairy made you absolute ruler of your country, what batshit crazy out of left field ideas would you implement? We’re assuming that you can’t be overthrown or stymied by the deep state, but have only the normal powers of the government and other actors for your country’s coordination problems don’t necessarily listen to you.
As for me, a few ideas-
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declare that police racism is caused by angry confederate ghosts and that by appeasing them we can prevent police racism. To this end have sweet tea, Marlboros, fried chicken, etc left on confederate graves and monuments and put all of Dukes of Hazard in the library of congress. Trumpet anything and everything that could be considered improvement in race relations as a victory of this policy. This is because ‘hey, police shootings are actually nothing to worry about’ is simply not a narrative that will catch on, but an outlet of superstition can make intractable problems seem acceptable.
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Ban federal funds from supporting university education for anyone without an associates degree from a community college first, including by guaranteeing debt- most people who obtain student debt without a degree drop out in the first two years, so forcing people who would otherwise borrow to complete community college will minimize the amount of new pointless student debt.
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Pay already-canceled celebrities to go on racist rants using foreign racial slurs like ‘preto’ and ‘kafir’ so the n-word will lose its racial connotation as it morphs into a general very harsh swearword(which it kind of already is) similar to the c-word. This way future controversies caused by this use can avoid harming race relations.
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Require any school getting federal funding to give equal time to any gender, sex Ed, or civil rights lessons to curricula designed by popular boomercon figures like Mike Rowe and Dave Ramsey. Either the schools teach things the kids could stand hearing, or they stop teaching stupidity like what actually gets pushed in the former category. Win-win.
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Repeal Marbury v Madison to take the federal government out of hot button issues(which, let’s be real, are very rarely passed by congress).
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I think I would stand out like a sore thumb in a group of motteizeans enough to be doxxable even if we don’t share our usernames.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
‘Take measures to reduce UV exposure when in the sun’ is actually one of the more reasonable things the CDC has said- as anyone who works outside in Texas(or Australia) can tell you, ‘not taking your shirt off for hours on end in direct sunlight in the summer’ is well worth being mildly more uncomfortable to avoid sunburn.
Hell, blacks who work outside in Texas advise broad brimmed hats and tattoo covers(the local name for detachable sleeves), and they’re the least susceptible to sunburn of anyone. Sunburn and skin cancer are reasonable things to be concerned about and there are reasonable measures to take to reduce them.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Saudi Arabia and Japan don’t have nukes because they don’t want them badly enough(both of them have plans to obtain nukes very, very fast). Taiwan is a bit of a longer stretch, but they’re also a technologically advanced, wealthy, and stable country with a single strategic threat- nukes probably make sense as a strategy there.
Catalonia seems less stable because it has an active secession movement in political conflict with the national government. Texas having nukes probably doesn’t change anything, because Greg Abbott is not leaving power any time soon and prefers to take advantage of the Biden admin’s unpopularity among the no rankers to accomplish his political goals in ongoing conflict with the federal government, although 50% of the US nuclear arsenal is sitting in a warehouse in Texas run by contractors that don’t inspire much confidence, so something that’s a big enough space whale to make Abbott really want nuclear weapons probably just introduces a delay before he gets them, kinda like Iran and Saudi Arabia. Cuba is a shithole whose hobby is supporting terrorism in other countries and impoverishing its own people, but the kinds of activities nukes deter are ones it faces functionally no risk of anyways. Qatar probably doesn’t want nukes; it seems to benefit from its strategic neutrality.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
90 million poor Iranian people are not an asset. They are a liability. Zergrush is not a viable strategy in the 21st century. If Israel and Iran shared a land border it might be different, but only because the millions of Iranian casualties would affect public opinion.
A lesson from the Ukraine war is that highly modern weapons which give countries like israel a technological edge get smashed up under large conventional operations which devolve into trench warfare in which quantity has a quality all its own.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
But Israel is also much wealthier than Iran- the cost/benefit analysis in terms of fractions of national wealth looks very different.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Before you go anywhere, look at it on a map. You’ll get progressively better at not using a GPS.
It’s an old- I guess ‘white van man’ is the term that applies- trick.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Who knows? Presumably autistic people aren't all identical. They can have a diverse range of goals and values, same as non-autistic people.
I think you can read it as ‘a bunch of accountants run out anyone with sports specific knowledge’.
Agricultural and hunter-gatherer populations are definitely different enough to suggest that there's a genetic difference driven by evolution.
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