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hydroacetylene


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 04 20:00:27 UTC
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User ID: 128

hydroacetylene


				
				
				

				
6 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 04 20:00:27 UTC

					

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User ID: 128

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I think that’s @2rafa’s point- Greg Abbott is going after the campus left in such a way as to make them defend that hypothetical KKK grand dragon to try to defend themselves. It’s a clever strategem, although I expect it winds up with a bunch of friction dragging it down from working as intended.

And de facto you were already well advised to keep your views on the Holocaust to yourself at any university anywhere outside the Islamic world.

This is obviously targeted at left wingers on college campuses as part of a non-terribly effective effort to go after left wingers on college campuses. Your groypers who incidentally go to Texas A&M are largely safe, or acceptable collateral damage if they aren’t. Even most IRL right wing antisemites don’t really care who controls that patch of desert.

Do I think it’ll work? I don’t have high hopes. Do I particularly care that some campus lefties are going to get written up for antisemitism when they insist on making an ass of themselves? Well, I suppose I’d prefer they be written up for making an ass of themselves, but I don’t really mind. Am I happy that it sets a precedent for the state to intentionally write laws unevenly to target the left? You betcha, even if this example is kinda stupid. It’s time to aim state power against the left. Just get it done. They’ve pointed it at us; I’m not really interested in continuing to be a gentleman completely onesidedly.

People are more forgiving of combativeness when they agree with the actual content of the post. There were posts where Dase really laid into Hlynka, and those posts were still upvoted, because Dase's views are popular here and Hlynka's views are not.

It seems to me that a big part of the frustration with hlynka was his refusal to engage with certain points routinely made by his opponents, and not his views per se. Really, I don’t perceive hlynka’s views as particularly unpopular here; I’m something of a poor man’s hlynka and it seems like I’m agreeing with people more than disagreeing. Hlynka had trouble interacting with actual, literal, honest-to-God Nazis and white supremacists in a civil and constructive manner and that’s why he was such a source of frustration.

While this order is not mostly aimed at Nazis- although they’re not going to get a special exemption either- Greg Abbott can get a few Allies onboard that normally don’t go conservative, while he has a partly captive judiciary to work with. His chances are better than you think.

Red tribe has most of the hefty individuals in the country and they will tell you not to get fat because it sucks. Like pack a day smokers telling you not to start. Blue tribe has plenty of people in unenviable shape, but few cartoonish fats, and they’ll tell you it doesn’t matter.

Now, I think it’s entirely fair to allow health insurance to set rates however they want; at the end of the day fat peoplepeople of size should eat less if they want to pay less in insurance. I think it’s reasonable that poor decisions cost more in the end. But I also don’t think blue tribe actually disagrees with me- they think smoking should raise your insurance rates, after all.

Instead I think this is that they think obesity, specifically, is caused by something outside the affected individual’s control. And to be fair, there are genetic factors to it. But mostly this is their inaccurate idea that systemic barriers shape the poor outcomes of large numbers of people in the USA. ‘Food deserts’ for example. And compounding this is that the blue tribe, on average, is extremely privileged and doesn’t actually understand how functional working class people live- witness the Twitterati who think doordash is important for the working class to feed themselves.

Obese red tribers mostly cop the blame for getting fat, even if they think losing weight is too difficult to be a reasonable expectation.

I mean, Japan probably does have stricter food purity than the USA.

because, outside of a very limited subset of jobs, like, nuclear power plant technician or something, the accomplishment of the task is irrelevant because the task is essentially a fiction.

Except that’s very definitely not true; most jobs have actual accomplishments that need to be done. Sure, diversity coordinators are figures no one would miss if they all called in for months at a time, but almost all of the common jobs need to actually do something. Even the HR lady could perhaps be routed around but there are actual things she does; if she quit on short notice management would have to do it until they found a new one.

It seems like this idea is limited to very high status jobs- and truthfully I don’t know if replacing CEO’s with a block of wood in a suit would make any difference, I suspect it depends on the company- and we only notice it when it applies to things like ‘surgeon’ and ‘airline pilot’, where, not knowing how to do there jobs even in very broad strokes, I can tell you that a block of wood in a uniform powered by chat gpt could not do it. Honestly I’m not actually sure if diversity advocates believe these jobs are less skill-heavy than commonly assumed or if they’re just high on their own supply about the massive untapped potential of black women.

Islamic countries have very high obesity rates, though.

It’s quite possibly endocrine disrupters.

and I expect anti-anti-government agencies would be just as likely to use a heavy hand

I don’t think that’s actually true, I think they’re desperately trying to prove they’re doing something about the real terror threat- white guys with right wing views.

Yeah, having this volume of firearms sales and none involved in any sort of offensive crime strongly suggests to me that he was doing some degree of due diligence with regard to buyers.

Or it just means he was selling within his bubble of libertarian firearms enthusiasts, who very rarely commit crimes involving firearms(other than possessing them) and have virtually no overlap with the people who do so regularly.

I do agree with you that he should do the paperwork and get set up as an FFL if he’s going to be buying and selling guns on the regular. ‘Gun dealers need to be licensed’ is a reasonable law and you should follow it. At the same time, a no-knock raid with little justification is a distinctly suboptimal way of enforcing it.

I mean to be totally fair, the Biden admin shifting law enforcement attention towards flyover whites with right wing views does seem to be a thing that’s factually happening. Granted it seems like that’s happening more out of the mistaken belief that this group is about to launch a jihad, but taking enforcement efforts against people in maga hats that they normally wouldn’t take is probably actually happening and that does make thing like this more likely.

I'd be curious to see research regarding whether obese conservatives are more likely to hold themselves responsible for the size of their bodies than obese liberals. My gut feeling is that, the higher a person's BMI gets, the probability of blaming their condition on factors outside their control approaches 1, regardless of political alignment.

Having been around obese conservatives quite a bit more than the median motteizean, lots of them don’t think staying fat is their fault, but all of them admit that getting fat was their fault.

Venezuela’s situation is due to it being run by socialists, not due to to American sanctions. While Venezuela may not be literally communist in the sense of Eastern block collective farms and shit, they’re making the kind of constant macroeconomic mistakes you would associate with having leaders who studied Marxist economics and ruined their own economy that way, combined with a healthy dose of short-sighted populism.

The counter factual to ‘Venezuela, but competently governed’ is Iran, which is also an oppressive petrostate heavily sanctioned by the USA, and it’s in much better shape than Venezuela even if it’s not quite as nice a country to live in as the US or Western Europe(notably few Iranians decide to try to walk to the EU the way Venezuelans walk to America, after all).

divorce rate was higher in red states than blue states

Red states vs blue states is an apples to oranges comparison, because the south is dysfunctional, poor, and very red, and most non-southern red states are very rural.

I knew people who went about their lives not having ID’s in my time among the underclass.

Many of them had at one point had ID’s(generally a drivers license), but hadn’t had one in 10+ years. Most commonly this was because of refusing to pay a fine for a minor traffic offense preventing renewal or getting it suspended for reason of DUI and then not bothering to renew. They had bank accounts from back when, but mostly lived their lives in cash. They cashed their paychecks at dedicated check-cashing places, paid rent in flophouses(or put it in their girlfriend’s name and reimbursed her), and bought beer by looking over forty, either in the cashier’s imagination or in real life.

Obviously it shouldn’t surprise us that this is technically possible; there’s an entire social stratum of people who do this- illegal immigrants.

I can't claim this is particularly rigorous, but I have noticed a broad pattern in which traditional or right-wing ideologies tend to include a strong belief in the power of individual agency to shape the world, whereas progressive or left-wing ones don't.

And this is obviously adaptive, for the simple reason that even if you can’t affect the world very much, behaving better can affect it at least a little bit, and probably make life better for you as well. Traditional ideologies have an upper limit to how maladaptive they can be because they have by definition been around long enough to weed out the worst ones.

On the other hand novel or progressive ideologies have no such upper limit; the failures of communism are the obvious example, but there’s thousands of others. Lobotomies, alcohol prohibition, these things died out because they turned out to be bad ideas. That’s not to say absolutely everything new is going to kill millions of people; that’s to say most ideas which go on to kill millions of people are new-ish at the time they’re tried.

So we should generally expect traditional ideologies to tend towards adaptive beliefs, and novel ideologies to have no particular tendency, irrespective of truth value in any which way. And that being said, while adaptive beliefs encourage adaptive behavior, they don’t necessitate it. Most people have at least some disconnect between their actions and beliefs, and we should expect adaptive behavior to be more associated with adaptive ends.

That is, I think, what the thread notes.

There’s definitely a regional tastes and cuisine thing going on, like prevalence of sweet tea or certain southern deserts. I tend to agree that junk food varies less across the country than home cooking, but, like, incidence of grocery store fried chicken or likelihood to drink sweet tea(which usually has more calories than regular soda) probably makes enough of a difference at the margins to be noticeable.

It’s interesting to look at this in the wider context of Zionism, because of course the greatest mistake the Zionists made was believing that the Holy Land could be held by the Jews easily and forever onward. But you have to understand that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many bourgeois Jews and gentiles in Europe considered the Muslim world to be a largely passive, defeated people. By the end of World War 1 pretty much every single Muslim country in the entire world was subordinate - whether under colonial rule or indirect suzerainty - to a European empire of one kind or another (the UK, France, Soviet Union) all led by non-Muslims. The young elite of the Muslim world were secularizing, Europeanizing, going to private schools run by French missionaries, urbanization seemed to see declines in religiosity. Many early Zionists, especially on the Anglo-French side, expected that Europeans would rule over the Arab world, including the Levant, forever. After all, the Ottoman Empire was over, the region was largely scarcely populated, local rulers were most fine with serving European foreign policy. Revolts were regular but mostly easily put down by modest European forces. Neither Arab nationalism nor Islamism were yet major forces to threaten Israeli dominance of Judea and Samaria. Israel had a bright future as an informal outpost of empire surrounded by the statelets of various other client peoples.

To be fair, at the time nearly everywhere on earth was under the thumb of a European empire(or the USA or Japan). South Africa made the same mistake because the continued dominance of Europeans over the black and brown masses seemed as obvious as day and night to everyone at the time.

They did not predict how much the world would change, and now it seems hopelessly naive to imagine it would not. In hindsight it was very stupid to pick a fight with that many people.

Except Jews have a local majority, and, significantly, are winning. Perhaps not in the court of public opinion, but Israel is essentially getting what it wants.

Republicans have gotten voter ID In basically every state they control. Dems being conspiracy nuts about voter suppression means it’s probably not coming to blue states any time soon, but republicans have mostly won on the issue.

I think this is a small number of mostly very old- like makes congress look young- people who don’t maintain picture ID because they lost their driver’s license from age related legal blindness or something and didn’t bother to keep track of it. I suspect they’re all living in nursing homes or with family.

Most people who can’t come up with a picture ID on reasonable notice are dysfunctional underclass types who just drive illegally and do everything in cash.

So, now that mint.com has turned into intuit, which is a useless loan advertising platform, anybody have any budgeting trackers worth recommending? I'm looking particularly for something that can track spending in one place.

Utahan food is also a thing people prefer not to think about. Southern food is both generally loved and unusually calorie dense.

Southern food is much more calorie intense than other parts of the country.