jake
11mo ago
same underlying reason they released trevor bauer
the dodger front office is one of the better in MLB at developing talent, past that they have the money to sign any top free agent to cover deficiencies
dodger ownership, guggenheim, they run a brand. they sell a product. their product is valued in the money generated from tickets and concessions, from ads and merch, and that's because of baseball and success in baseball, but to them it's incidental, they don't care about baseball. most MLB owners don't anymore, but guggenheim is the worst offender.
dodger marketing felt it would negatively impact their brand to keep bauer and it felt it would negatively impact the brand to not acquiesce here. that the overwhelming majority of people complaining in both cases are not people they get money from is, i don't know, depressingly, grossly, peculiarly, exactly why they did it. it's somewhat self-fulfilling, the dodgers are a strong enough brand and baseball viewership is conservative enough they didn't actually have anything to worry about, but they have correctly appraised their brand in knowing any antiestablishment association would over time be more trouble than it's worth.
i don't give a shit about pride night. bill veeck was great for baseball and he'd have leapt at a pride night if for some reason it were on the table in the 60s and 70s. he'd have played both sides like a fiddle to get people in the stadium because he loved the sport and wanted people to watch. sure the money was nice, but the money wasn't the goal in itself. money is the only thing most owners care about now and baseball is worsening by the year because of it. manfred runner, pitch clock, rules on mound visits and pitching changes. the fucking atrocity of a playoff structure. if the worst sin dodger ownership committed these last few years was that of taste in inviting the sisters of perpetually beating a dead horse to 1 game, baseball would be in a lot better shape.
jake
11mo ago
it's appropriate to only refer to them as a baseball team. the dodgers don't map to the lakers, being gracious they maybe map to the celtics, but the best comparison is probably, and appropriately enough, the clippers. LA audience, high payroll, strong regular seasons followed by consistently choking in the playoffs. there's 2020, but most fans already consider that a fake season and title.
jake
11mo ago
How can you possibly know that?
a better way to phrase this could have been "What makes you say that?"
the dodgers are the only team in MLB owned by a hedge fund, guggenheim partners. "guggenheim baseball management" is a legal contrivance, a result of MLB's requirement that teams have a single person hold ultimate decisionmaking authority. guggenheim partners led the acquisition in 2012, then to adhere to MLB requirements to complete it they created GBM. partners' CEO mark walter is the nominal owner of the dodgers but the dodgers remain an asset effectively owned by a hedge fund. or a "hedge fund plus" since guggenheim does more on top of "normal" hedge fund things. even putting aside the inherent soullessness of being owned by a hedge fund, their backing puts a chasm between their ability to spend against the next highest. the yankees were hated for that under boss steinbrenner but they at least have a real legacy; the only reason we're talking about the dodgers is the "los angeles" in front.
as for game time, all MLB needed to do to speed up games was have umps be strict about enforcing rules already on the books. a pitch clock is kind of supported by that, but the problem i have with it is the mentality. first, it's rich to hear manfred and the owners say "fans want a faster game" when TV ad breaks are the biggest factor slowing games. second, fans want a faster game because they've been conditioned to have a sense of urgency about a game whose entire point is its pointlessness. playoffs are everything now, it didn't use to be this way. the fall classic was the last celebration of the season, not the point of the season. in baseball's greatest eras people were packing stadiums of teams that had no shot at the pennant. they weren't there to feed avarice, they were there to pass time watching summer's mandala.
jake
11mo ago
desantis voters will vote trump because they would vote trump without desantis
the support of mcconnell, romney, jeb! et al. is toxic. a meaningful amount of trump support comes from whole-establishment hatred of him. in the event desantis gets the '24 nom he will be unable to draw on that support unless he heel-faces by torching establishment GOP.
desantis' manner and deed of pursuing the presidency prompts questions about his place in the GOP shift. as causing them to adopt certain populist positions or if they were already shifting, florida was a test, and he was just the lucky stooge. trump's 2016 win and 2020 turnout was enough for the GOP to change and the former implies contempt for the same old establishment desantis now gladly aligns with. priors go on the latter.
t. irrelevant demo
jake
11mo ago
(p.16) A plan of attack on a foreign country (from press reports Iran)
(p. 17) A classified map related to an ongoing military operation
(p. 28) A Top Secret//SI document concerning the military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States, with handwritten annotation in black marker.~~ disclose in any manner at will
(p. 29) A top secret document from June 2020 concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country.
(p. 29) A top secret document concerning military attacks by a foreign country
(p. 30) A top secret document from November 2017 concerning military capabilities of a foreign country.
(p. 33) A top secret document from Oct 15 2019 concerning military activity in a foreign country.
every single one of these is information the executive is free to disclose in any manner at will
jake
11mo ago
i held my tongue on this last night because i appreciate dissenters here but the discussion has gone too far without someone taking an appropriately hard stance in criticsm.
these are abject falsehoods originating in the same retarding hatred that has wholly taken the federal bureaucracy. trump achieved nothing in office and he was defeated as an incumbent in 2020 by the largest vote total a candidate has ever received. these indictments of a man whose only success is cultural fixture as the left's he-who-is-most-hated is transparent to everyone ungrasped by mass media as the latest attempt in most of a decade of baseless serial persecution.
if trump had special access materials on an unsecured server the place would have been raided at 3 AM by FBI's SWAT but i have to read shit like "he's getting the kid gloves treatment" and "clinton just did it right" yeah, she just did it right when she directed her team to destroy as much evidence as they could. you'd have been better off calling me a fucking moron, i'd feel less insulted than being presented serious consideration of the feds' position. no, no, this time, they really really really have something.
only grossest judgment would here assert preeminence of decorum yet i still give this circus a far fairer treatment than it deserves. many paragraphs of carefully worded lies corrupt the spirit more than one-sentence petulance.
Article II, Section 1. The President is incapable in any way, shape, or form, of mishandling information classified under his authority. Next topic please.
jake
11mo ago
The documents were moved at his order while President. By Executive authority under the constitution-as-written and implicit-as-extrapolated from established precedent, all materials discussed here were declassified upon formal transfer of power.
jake
11mo ago
all evidentiary priors support "they will perform lengthy investigations on trump for things that didn't happen." there is no evidence to assert this as unique. they would investigate him over nothing, because they have repeatedly investigated him over nothing. hyperrelevant example: a federal investigation over a crime it is not possible for the president to commit.
jake
11mo ago
The law is indeed incredibly clear: the President is the sole adjudicator of whether his documents are personal or subject to 44 USC 22. Neither congress, the archives, nor the courts can make determinations on executive materials because in so doing they would effectively limit executive authority established by Article II Section 1. Those documents of a former executive are for constitutional purposes considered to have been handled at the prerogative of the executive while still in office. Thus the tidy precedented solution of implicit mass declassification.
You are flailing against the impenetrable wall of "ALL RELEVANT MATERIALS CONSIDERED DECLASSIFIED AT FORMAL TRANSFER OF POWER" because a body of individuals who have made their contempt of the United States' constitution and laws not so much clear as irrefutable fact are predictably disregarding that constitution and those laws along with prior administrative and case precedent as they attempt yet another attack on the uniquely vilified failure of a former president.
Only nuclear secrets (of which the nuclear capabilities of foreign states do not qualify) exist in classification separate from executive authority, and executive classification exists solely because the President says it does. Congress has no say, the sitting Executive has no say (and this includes the DOD and DOJ), and the Courts can do exactly one thing and it's knock this farce down on constitutionality. If it doesn't happen in the lower courts it will swiftly be heard in SCOTUS where Trump will be found in favor 9-0.
jake
11mo ago
the DOJ does not have the authority to investigate the former executive over the handling of classified documents as such. it is not possible to obstruct an unlawful investigation.
jake
11mo ago
If you can find evidence that a past president did something like this and wasn't prosecuted, I'll significantly change my mind.
that would be the former secretary of state who kept special access materials on a server she had wiped, who did who knows what with a dozen phones she had destroyed, and who is once again selling "but her emails" hats in a truly amazing flaunting of lawbreaking. the difference is where trump as executive could do whatever he wants with classified materials, clinton as secretary of state had no authority whatsoever to handle those materials as she did. yet she profits from a crime trump is being indicted for, a crime it is not possible for him to have committed.
It is still illegal to lie under oath / to investigators about a crime you didn't commit!
it's not only a crime he didn't commit, it's a crime that doesn't exist for the executive. the DOJ is investigating him for an area of law they have no authority to act on and it is not illegal to obstruct an unlawful investigation.
jake
11mo ago
It's a little ridiculous to suggest that if the president takes classified documents home and becomes an ex-president, that those documents are now declassified based on Article 2.
i'm not suggesting anything. this is exactly how the law works. materials of the leaving executive are considered declassified as a matter of law and precedent.
jake
11mo ago
he was, and that makes all the difference. it's what makes the list, especially its framing, meaningless bullshit. "in any manner" includes "sending it to maralago and forgetting about it until biden was sworn in, at which point the materials automatically became declassified"
jake
11mo ago
my side? what side? i'll answer: it's certainly not trump's. my side is the United States' Constitution and her people. so that in mind, let me say what "does not follow" is those who participate in discussing a matter of pure constitutionality when they lack the understanding of the constitution to contribute. the only way the documents would matter is if they contained state nuclear secrets. that's how to build nukes, the nuclear capabilities of foreign states are not nuclear secrets. since that's not what the documents contained, their contents don't matter.
jake
10mo ago
a lot of these I'd rather argue the other side but you can hit me up for #6. discord works.
How I'd describe the problem, and it's one underlying your beliefs and the beliefs of your critics, is a lack of truly considering the person. The people who criticize you consider too little, you consider too much. Your critics offer no support, why would they? What they dislike is inherently wrong, why would they consider it except to explain their reasons for disapproval? You offer too much support, why wouldn't you? You see the person, you listen to what they see they need. They live their life in their own way, almost all of them are good people, why shouldn't we support them realizing themselves? Where's the cost?
What's lacking in this discussion from reactionaries (a better term than conservatives) and progressive is the judgment of the good parent. The father who sees his child abusing a drug and finds it so obviously wrong it is only right to practice the "harsh love" of stern words and refusal to understand, let alone accommodate--he lacks good judgment. The mother who sees her child abusing a drug and enables them, it's what they say they need, it makes them happy, who's she to do anything else than show unconditional love and support? She also lacks good judgment.
You could read this as weighted against the mother, so feel free to frame it as a valid prescription used to treat a real condition. But it's a medication the child is abusing. Maybe they're getting too much and sharing with their friends, maybe they're encouraging their friends to get their own prescriptions by coaching them at faking the symptoms. Not that it's particularly hard. The American medical industry is the best in the world, the treatments developed and quality of highest care truly cannot be overstated; neither can be the depravity they are willing to indulge in pursuit of profit. There is decades of evidence proving this: they might not be the bad guys, but it is empiric falsehood to suggest they could be anything better than the neutral beneficiaries of the current climate.
This is something the father would gladly cite; this is something the mother overlooks. Neither love their child as they should.
"Harsh love" is an oxymoron. The person showing "harsh love" is either not showing love at all, what you probably think of the father I've described, or they are showing love, and it only comes across as harsh because it really is love. It's deeply and truly caring for someone, caring for what's best for them, looking for what's best for them, and knowing something they're doing might be bad for them or even disastrous. It's a concept that has been difficult to understand forever, it's what Kierkegaard wrote a book about, just trying to help people get it. It's the essential idea of what Eliezer Yudkowsky worked at with his "Coherent Extrapolated Volition." The ideal AGI is one that truly loves humanity, loves us as love is meant to be. Perceptive, understanding, upbuilding. Like the good parent.
I have a good friend who identifies as trans. This is a person who until the chrysalis exists will never pass. To use the most descriptive phrase but one they would certainly dislike, they are too much man. Too tall, too strong, too hirsute. They do have a certain androgyny in the face, insofar as so masculine a person could be in any way feminine, but it is of course the sort that accentuated their handsomeness and made them highly desirable to the biological women they have exclusively dated before and after "coming out" and beginning chemical therapy. They were told a lie by whoever first suggested they might be trans, that was a lie perpetuated to them as they fell deeper into those communities and as they specifically, and they said as much, looked for the right therapist in town: just a glorified prescription mill. That therapist wasn't doing their job, the people encouraging my friend weren't acting as friends should. They were lied to, they were told this is right. They were told this is how you support people. They don't know what's right, they don't know how to support people. They don't know what good is, they don't know what love is.
It isn't love to believe that a condition in the black box of the human brain, a condition novel within popular knowledge and largely in medical treatment, has already been cured. Humans are diverse, there are without question individuals who truly suffer from symptoms accurately described when called "gender dysphoria." Who when prescribed cross-sex hormones, who when pursuing major cosmetic surgeries to accentuate or minimize desired and undesired features, who change their names and their wardrobes and are treated as they identify, experience an abatement in those symptoms with minimal or no other psychiatric comorbidities.
There are in ever-increasing numbers individuals with serious mental illness who self-attest to gender dysphoria and are treated accordingly, as if that is the issue with them. Like my friend. My friend doesn't fall under what was once well-known in psychiatry as the "homosexual transsexual," my friend is not actually trans. Their mental illness has nothing to do with the gender dysphoria they believe they have, this is why they still struggle with it. I love my friend but not enough, I wish I loved them enough, to tell them this when they came out. To criticize what they believe they are, to appropriately indict their supposed "friends", myself now damn well included, who encouraged them or said nothing. I "supported" them and they aren't any better, and at this point I'm just hoping that when the dissonance becomes too great and finally shatters their years of rationalization, they don't commit suicide.
As you describe yourself, you would be encouraging of them. You'd be one of the ones telling a mountain of a man how the world is wrong, how the structures of man can be ignored, how we can assert the reality we wish. How he really can be a woman, we just have to force everyone to pretend hard enough. You're "supporting" his dream that for now cannot possibly be realized. And if he really does have gender dysphoria, if all his issues really are about how he was born in the wrong body, I still ask what love are you showing for the person who cannot pass when you encourage him to become something that people have a million years of evolutionary wiring conditioning them to find irreconcilably freakish?
You're not showing any. You think you are because you don't know better.
There is something we both believe. Eventually the chrysalis will exist and a man will be able to climb inside and emerge, at least superficially, as a seamless and beautiful woman. Where it'll take a DNA test or CT, if even that and surely eventually not, to be found as originally male. Where we diverge is this: you think this moment will be the great and final realization of the trans movement while I understand it will be what buries it forever.
I always caveat myself on this subject, "I don't care." You can see above how I obviously care some but I feel describing as apathetic is still closer to the truth because what side am I, exactly? I consider a lot of the discussion here on trans-advocacy as pointless, the matters settled. Short of a dark reactionary taking power, the movement isn't going away. Best learn to live with it because that's the future. But in the future, when pharmaceuticals have advanced enough to do wild things to the human body, where we can make ourselves look almost exactly as we like, we'll see the truth. We'll see so many people who believed all their problems would be solved if they could take a magic pill and wake up as an ideal form of their desired sex will do that and still have problems. It'll work for some, as experiencing the most drastic change in lifestyle possible means even those with a variety of mental issues may find their strange new reality a cure-all, but you'll see so many stories about people who discovered how fulfilling everything they thought they wanted didn't solve the problems inside their head.
It'll be sooner than that. With the rates of kids having delayed puberty and altered puberty for identified gender, combined with advances in cosmetic surgery, novel tissue generation and implantation, the various tech being explored right now to change how voices sound, we're approaching a point where there are going to be many people who pass seamlessly enough as the sex they thought they were. Probably not 5 years, 10, 15 at the most, and those stories will come pouring out.
"It's not what was wrong with me. I wish the people who pushed me into it, or who helped me along, thinking they were loving me, thinking they were supporting me, knew better."
Love is making it hard but not impossible for people to follow this life path. Love is not cruel dismissal and hatred. Love is accepting some people really are this way and and supporting them. Love is also understanding how we do not know how the brain works and so we will not indulge the I-cannot-modify-enough, the astonishingly unparalleled, sheer fucking hubris of unquestioningly believing the cure has already been found. Love is exhausting every option before extreme body modification becomes the chosen path. Love is putting every physician and therapist who treats this and absolutely the pharma that makes money from this under the largest lens to ensure they aren't abusing and unrighteously profiting from their position. Love is helping those who cannot possibly realize their desired appearance to learn to live with and love themselves, at least until the tech is there. Love is knowing "This is who I am" is not a magic phrase, it's knowing people get things wrong, especially when it comes to themselves. Love isn't blindly supporting what a person thinks is best for themselves, it's knowing and standing firm on what's actually best for them. Love is the good parent.
jake
10mo ago
the preferred outcome is whatever allows the tech i describe to develop uninterrupted. that tech is connected with advancing human simulacra, and simulacra will probably be the key to keeping humanity from destroying itself long enough for us to develop the further necessary tech to pass through the great filter.
jake
10mo ago
it's very interesting how you recognized the problem at the heart of the show the good place without having seen it. i put off watching for years because the only thing i knew was its setting in heaven and i had doubts on how that was going to be handled. eventually i did watch it, all the way through but not as a binge, i enjoyed it until the ending.
the mistake ZHPL made, the same as @self_made_human, and one that's understandable but not in the best way from people who didn't watch it, is thinking it's an atheist work. if ZHPL did watch it and missed it, bad look. it is ostensibly atheist: heaven with no God, hell with no devil, what's going on? it makes no sense, to disregard God is to disregard the source of objectivity and in the context of a show about the domain of God it renders that show nonsense, it destroys everything. i don't mean this on a level of modern soullessness or even just logically. the grand narrative of the show has a God-shaped hole, it's nothing without it. thing is, the hole isn't supposed to be there.
imagine a fan cut of fight club. the sole purpose of the cut is removing the last reveal of tyler durden's identity. it would leave in everything it could without it being explicit that "pitt is norton's alter-ego." this cut would probably work well enough, it would seem off, like it was building to something and the bombings at the end don't quite resolve that feeling, but it'd have beginning middle and apparent end.
that's what happened with the good place. the show lacks the fundamental truth of the world of the story, and in a show about heaven and hell that can't just be skipped. michael schur is a smart guy, he wasn't ignoring this, it's there the whole time, i think the writers didn't know how schur intended for the show to end because schur didn't want to accidentally ruin the show with a cliched and bad ending.
i'm certain it was supposed to end one of these ways:
-
the whole show was eleanor in purgatory. the ending was going to be her realizing something was still missing, but how can heaven be missing something? so we get the final twist: she's still not in heaven, she was never in heaven, and what she's missing is God. she'd pass through the door, find herself in actual heaven, and meet God.
-
reality in the show--hell, mundane, divine--is a simulation, and when eleanor passed through the door at the end she would have met those running the simulation.
the season 1 finale is famous and the narratively perfect bookend with the s4 series finale would be her meeting God, or "god", contrast with the dissonant ending we get. ZHPL criticizes parts of the show as escalating soullessness, like the character of the judge, but it's so obvious as meta-level escalating absurdity. schur takes it farther and farther into nonsense to the point the judge character is as good as schur screaming at the audience "You still don't get it! The characters still don't understand what's actually going on! They still don't see the fundamental truth!" The first intended ending has to be done perfectly or it nukes the show's legacy. The second is the choice if he can't pull off the first, but then it becomes the "too smart for its own good" ending.
schur went with door to oblivion, why risk the legacy of it-was-all-a-dream-ing his show? but that's the problem with the good place: it's so damn obvious it was all a dream.
jake
9mo ago
guess this is the only comment i can reply to.
you raging about threads here is a tough look. same for deleting your top-level, something @ZorbaTHut & co should block as an option, at least when the thread it's in is the weekly.
i don't know of anywhere online where discussion is as good as the motte. i see twitter commentators racking up followers and media appearances/cred for observations that are at best watered down versions of ideas posted here years ago. it's all i think of with the hanania hubub. his pieces i've read, not many, would receive bipartisan scorn if posted by a rando here. yet i see people here treating him with respect and i know a lot of that is only because he's a known name. it's not his old and just bad arguments, it's certainly not his asinine leaps in reasoning or pure worse writing. not when a lot of people here could go on twitter and make a name for themselves, and i think more than a few would do better than hanania. how couldn't they? he'd be a motte washout.
i maybe get some bit of what you're feeling, i try to comment only when i think i have something to add. but i'm tired of people being critical of this place because they can't get a handle on their own emotions, whatever the angry/nihilist/impotent root. yeah in some cases, by no means all, quality dips here because a matter's clearly settled and there's no good faith arguing to be done. or to counter my own point, because it's been hashed out and explored enough everybody knows the positions and without anything novel it suffers from repetitiveness. but in whole, the motte is better at so novel and astute posts than all of substack. i'd like to find the time and impetus to contribute one of those, maybe you should strive for that too. posting something truly interesting, not attention-seeking complaining on the meta level of the best place for real discussion on the english-speaking internet.
also--scott stepped back from this community because for all his brilliance, he greatly lacks conviction.
edit: realized i forgot my own point. none of that list will have 1/10th the image boost to the right as him saying "if 2020 was a legitimate election, it wasn't for lack of ability and willingness to steal it."
looks like rams gets why trump exists, unlike the rest. trump's continued utility as a political figure is being the single strongest signal of antiestablishment alignment. "your boos mean nothing" and all. the antiestablishment vote is what puts him ahead. it's why desantis flamed out attacking him, he can't attack and look like he's not just another stooge. rams' best strategic move is probably a "united" divide and conquer: loudly and unconditionally backing trump/more or less categorically support trump positions, including the high shibboleth of fraud, which in his rhetoric would really be pure antiestablishment signal. he'd be instantly unacceptable to the ruling powers and so the guaranteed second-runner behind orange man; brown orange man. rams does that and he's got 2028 on lock, 2024 if all the lawfare succeeds. not to mention a real shot at destroying the GOP.
not that i intend or ever expect to vote for rams. but years of annoyance at people, even sometimes here, not getting why trump is still in play means i can't help but have some respect by the ones who do. especially when they're a politician. middle finger molotov. that's trump. always was.
jake
8mo ago
I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in
This is the second time I've seen this idea expressed. It's been funny both times because both times the commenters were praising Ramaswamy while they dismissed his statement realpolitik, not realizing they, you, are insulting the man. There's a reason he said "God exists" besides actually believing it, it's the idea he could have said without lying: "The Christian Church was foundational to modern civilization and remains the moral basis for all popular discussions of ethics, including those among individuals on the left whom espouse belief in obligate Christian treatment of others and not only sin but original sin and the perpetual atonement thereof. I forever reject their Godless branch of Christianity."
His religiosity would remain ambiguous, and were he an atheist it would mean he is not the sort of man to open a key political statement with a lie. "I'd totally vote for that [not-too-clever grifter]" isn't much for praise.
I'm no proselytizer, I'm not the right material for it and this isn't the place, not with its certain decorum. Decorum like I must be charitable, that I must take your comment as made in earnest and good-faith and originating from reason. Good-faith enough, yes, but the problem I face reading so much of the by-atheist, on-atheism comments here, like you saying Ramaswamy couldn't possibly be religious, is they do not originate from reason. You say this of Ramaswamy because of the solely emotional importance apropos your self-concept that intelligent men ought not be religious. Yet it takes little searching in our past to uncover rich fields of brilliant and highly religious men; it takes no searching at all to see the greatness of western civilization, directly resultant from biotruths Christianity identified and curtailed where degradative and saw flourish where beneficiary. What else is this but the final testament of transcendental intelligence? What would someone counter with, "appeal to tradition"? It worked then, it doesn't need to now, because now we "know better"? Okay--for its know-better Godless Christianity, Western Europe and the UK have maybe 25 years before war returns when the movements that rose a century ago rise again for bloodshed that will only be stopped with whichever side achieving permanent victory. At least we knew better.
jake
8mo ago
Yeah that was verbose.
Ramaswamy is a very smart, very successful guy who takes positions like "climate change is a hoax" and "we should give Israel less money." He knows what he's saying, he has a real ethos and speaks from it. Opening a list of tenets with "God exists" is endorsing religion, and since this is the US, it's endorsing Christianity, and he knows this. Why would he lie about what he personally believes while nevertheless endorsing the church when he could just not lie and endorse the church? Unwilling or unable, either would disqualify him.
jake
8mo ago
They're the same statement, his is the more intelligent way of phrasing it. This is my whole point: he shows clear care in framing his positions, meaning he could endorse Christianity without lying about what he believes.
Aw man, cmon, what is the western culture war but a religious schism? Those high IQ people--specifically those within who would describe themselves as ideologically congruous with the modern American left--don't believe in God, transubstantive atonement (exactly) or afterlives as such, but they believe in sin, original sin and metaphysical moral obligation. They are Godless Christians, they view the world with fundamentally Christian moral framing, they act essentially as Christians act, insofar as they are Godless, they judge others for their failing to behave as what they consider proper of Christians. They have holy days, religious celebrations, sacraments, saints, martyrs, heretics and blasphemers (and the punishing thereof) and excommunication. They are recognized by the state and they hold tremendous power within the state. I am not being strict with terms or pedantic; in fact referring to them as "still technically irreligious" would require severe equivocation.
The relevance of this is in rebuke of the idea that "greater" intelligence relates with a proportionate decrease in religiousness when the evidence shows firmly it does not. They still take the impossible as possible in faith, they still need and yearn for religion and the moral guidance it provides. You're a smart guy, all of this is an understanding I know you're capable of reaching through reasoning. Why then doubt this of Ramaswamy?
You fired off a comment asserting he's a lying atheist with no effort to substantiate your belief until called on it. If you were seriously considering his religiosity it would be in your first comment and I would have felt no reason to reply. Your initial low-effort is consequent of your belief that he couldn't possibly be religious, something that shows again in your response as you again fail to consider how you could be wrong. I could be wrong for the exact reasons you list, but I understand how this would make him unsuitable for the highest office.
Look at what he's said and find another serious candidate other than Trump who even comes close. There's not one, but the strength isn't just the novelty of those positions from someone with a radically different image than Trump. There's strength in the intelligence his specific words indicate he possesses. Where you see a "white lie" or "fib" I see someone who is deeply considerate of and articulate on many matters save one and your attempt to excuse that one inadequacy is poor.
As I said to another, if his "God exists" statement is a lie, it means he is either unable or unwilling to endorse Christianity in a way so as to not lie. If he is unable to endorse Christianity without lying then he is significantly less intelligent than I assessed, and if he is unwilling to endorse Christianity without lying, all of his positions must be reevaluated within the maximally cynical frame. That he is making a play for pure power and is at risk of shedding all stated positions for political utility. His strength as a political figure comes in honestly presenting himself to the movement that has formed around Trump as of the like mind with them. Any willingness to lie for political gain is a grim indictment of his leadership, regardless of a "protection" against being Hindu-coded.
On that, I can't ding you for having the larger-world image of the United States, but as someone who lives in deeply red, deeply Christian America, the idea of evangelicals still being a meaningful demographic in the electorate is a bad joke. It's insulting, really, every time I've been subjugated to the inanity of unironic usages of the term "Christo-Fascism." The Church has no power. Past that, political lines are swiftly approaching pure "because fuck the outgroup" motivations. If Ramaswamy is on the ballot there is not a meaningful number of Republican voters who would pass on him even if he were known as a Hindu or an Atheist. If he goes all-in on supporting Trump and for whatever reason the latter is unable to run, between Trump's support, the (R) beside his name and being up against Biden as a non-Trump face, he'll steamroll the general with no whit of obstacle from his personal beliefs regarding religion.
There is an extremely high chance he's on the ballot come November 2024. If he is, he will be the next President. That's why this is so important. We're not quibbling over the positions of an obscure candidate, he's the frontrunner after Trump which means after 2024 he also has a very good chance of winning in 2028. Everyone here should be looking as seriously as I am at what the man who has the highest chance of being if not the 47th, the 48th POTUS, is really saying.
architecture nerd here, looks essentially modern, no fusion. southwest accents. could be better, modern southwest has many beautiful works.
could be much worse. a lot of purely modern houses are dissonant, inhuman shit. that house doesn't do anything interesting, it also doesn't do anything terrible. inoffensive.
i imagine gates will spend very little time there. isn't that the thing with those 8 figure fantasy mansions? all that time and effort to get it and no time to enjoy it. gotta keep grinding. except maybe notch.
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