jkf
5mo ago
Where’s the equivalent to cult control of income?
Ummm....
Maybe the way the cult will get you fired from your job if you get too heretical, or alternatively get you some sweet DIE points to help with a better job if you are one of the stunning and brave ones?
(I mean I don't necessarily disagree with your thrust here, but I'm not sure the line between 'regular social dynamics' and 'cult behaviour' is as bright as I'd like for literally anything these days. See "You know what nobody hates each other about yet?")
jkf
4mo ago
I highly recommend listening to that call and/or reading the transcript -- there's very little room for the alternate interpretation, he goes on for like an hour about all the ways he thinks fraud was committed, and how many votes can be 'found' just by looking into one or two of these things. It doesn't really support the idea that he didn't believe what he was saying to be true either, he's very vehement.
I feel like sometimes I’m good at this where you say something in a scissor statement way. I usually do it in a playful way. Trumps good at this.
I think it's more that he says a lot of stuff, and there's an army of people employed at sifting through it to snip out bits that make him look maximally evil out of context.
jkf
1yr ago
It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun
Yes, and?
jkf
3mo ago
If he's a conspirator, who are his co-conspirators?
The "far-right anti-government militia" group (thanks wikipedia) that he was chapter president of? Prosecutors have had no trouble putting together conspiracy charges based on very little actual conspiring for other members of such groups.
I know that you think that the bar for conspiracy charges is high, and you are probably even right based on an honest reading of the law -- but that's not how the law is being used around J6, and I'm very confident that this case could have been made if someone were so inclined.
jkf
9mo ago
Other than Nate they were pretty much all Vox-wannabees anyways -- so yeah, pour one out.
jkf
11mo ago
The whole idea with "influencer" campaigns is that they cost next to nothing, and sometimes go viral getting you ridiculous bang for your buck.
So when one goes viral in a negative way, "don't hurt me bro, it was just supposed to be a shitty little influencer campaign" is probably not the excuse that will save your job.
jkf
1yr ago
A lot of people would boycott a Trump beer. (or maybe wine would be more demographically appropriate)
In fact, didn't some non-Yeungling drinkers try to get a Yeungling boycott going when the owner had the temerity to say he supports Trump as a political candidate?
The difference here is that the pissed off people actually consume the product, like, a lot.
jkf
1yr ago
The trouble arises when "it isn't happening" is implied to mean "nobody is agitating for it and you are silly to agitate against it."
The reason people are against eating bugs is not because they think bugs are bad for you, it's because they don't want to eat bugs, and are concerned that people with the power to affect the affordability of non-bug sources of protein would like to rig the game so that bugs are all they can afford to eat.
Bringing up the relative health benefits of eating bugs seems like a non-sequitur on your part.
jkf
3mo ago
Even if you just stick to gun issues it doesn't hold -- Texans might be OK keeping their nose out of Hawaii, in exchange for local regulation of things like machine gun stamps/silencers -- but this is manifestly not on the table. States' rights is not the issue here, even less so than it was in the Civil War -- anti-gunners will grasp for tools of convenience, whether at the federal or state level. (and note well the pattern of introducing such things in blue states and then using them as precedent to justify slowly creeping them over towards the Red ones whenever the dice come up with the Democrats in power at the state level)
You can't make a principled legal argument for this, it's power and ideology all the way down.
jkf
10mo ago
I mean, we have the video -- it doesn't really look like there'd been any shoving match recently?
Much more likely the dude was hanging around in the general vicinity of the bike but still felt entitled to it -- once he noticed the pregnant woman mounting it he started making a fuss, to which "fuck you, it's not your bike" seems like a New Yorker response with much precedent.
jkf
22d ago
Off the top of my head -- Peterson himself of course is also facing legal reprisals.
jkf
6mo ago
If that's the worst you can find, it still looks... fairly peaceful?
The crowd is mostly just pushing the riot cops out of position, not even grappling them -- certainly not throwing rocks etc. Like a football offensive line -- the reason it looks chaotic and violent on the officer's side is that their line is too small, and can't stand.
The cops are the ones with the close-quarters pepper spray and wacking people with batons -- the level of discipline in terms of not much striking from the crowd in these circumstances is pretty good, actually!
jkf
7mo ago
At a 2013 press conference, then-White House press secretary Jay Carney assured reporters that "this is a practice consistent with prior administrations of both parties, and, as the story itself made clear, any FOIA request or congressional inquiry includes a search in all of the email accounts used by any political appointee."
It's one thing if it's a .gov address with a non-obvious local part -- joe.biden@whitehouse.gov is not something I'd expect the president himself to monitor, so obviously he needs some other one.
But the use of a plausibly fake name combined with a gmail account does look much more like an attempt to deceive -- as it is, the Archives will only have emails to/from .gov addresses, not from (say) foreign government contacts who know about the alt. And if Hunter weren't such a bozo, a pretty close audit of (say) the usgov's interactions with Burisma would not have turned up Biden (Sr)'s involvement -- since nobody would know who Robert Peters (or whatever others) is.
Also, Hillary BTFO -- she said she couldn't manage to juggle even two phones/emails, so she needed the server; now here's old 'Sleepy' Joe with four+!
jkf
11mo ago
Not to mention the murderous blunder of sending recovered-yet-contagious patients back to old-age homes full of vulnerable targets so as not to "stress the health care system".
jkf
9mo ago
It's kind of weird dunk though -- if there actually were witches stealing people's penises in Africa, it seems like the Africans would be entirely correct to panic about it? Witch panics in general are mostly bad when the witches don't exist. For instance, one could argue that the problem with the Red Scare was being bad at identifying the Soviet spies -- they were a real problem!
jkf
10mo ago
To the extent that it’s anti democratic it’s a scene from Hungary
Or Canada -- relatively few cities here have their own police department; it's mostly managed either federally or provincially, but with the weird caveat that provinces and cities using the RCMP have to pay out of their own budget; same goes for cities that rely on the OPP (no, not that OPP) AFAIK.
jkf
2mo ago
If China dominates all of Asia and Russia dominates all of Europe
Great spot for a laconic 'If' here, but more loquaciously:
If you take this at face value while it proves that Trump's critics have articulated some criticisms, it also proves that they are utterly insane -- in what world could Trump cause Russia to dominate France and China to dominate Japan/India/take your pick?
jkf
2mo ago
Importantly here the BP agents are already in Texas, and are largely Texans who wish that Biden would let them do a better job of stopping the illegal crossings; ie. they mostly support Abbot's side of things.
So it seems unlikely that there will be any sort of direct confrontation between the BP and Texas authorities -- if Biden decides to send somebody more loyal in to cut the razor wire things do get more interesting.
jkf
3mo ago
The most vocally trans woman I know reports being abused by guys in middle and high school locker rooms specifically due to insufficient masculinity.
If this person is over ~35 I'm gonna go ahead and say that (oddly) this was pretty much the universal experience of middle and high-school boy's locker rooms -- somehow even the bullies get bullied. (now they don't even make dudes shower together, so I'm not sure it's the same)
jkf
6mo ago
@ZorbaTHut Have we considered preventing users from deleting top-level posts? I don't remember it being a problem in the past, but it's getting kind of annoying.
jkf
9mo ago
"invitations" is key IMO -- not because Susan was going on dates or wild parties, but because it's code for "social climbing" in the England of the era.
Put your focus on the material world to the exclusion of the spiritual one, and you are no longer welcome in the Kingdom, is what Lewis is saying here.
jkf
11mo ago
I'm sure that's what he means, but note bene that non-zero people were literally imprisoned (like, in prison) for protesting. Here in Canada we have folks still facing charges and living under blatantly unconstitutional court orders restricting them from contact with other dissents among other things:
As of this moment Peterson is on the hook for a $5000 fine and losing his medical license -- what a dum-dum, he was sooooo off base.
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