laxam
9mo ago
It's oppositional defiant disorder spreading to older whites. While ODD is something that is, from time to time, provided as a cause for black youth underperformance in schools, it's not something you've seen attributed to older whites. The perception of mistreatment by authority creates a permanent attitude of anger and defiance.
This can sometimes feel like just part and parcel of the way modern society seems to outright encourage mental illness in the general population. Attitudes and outlooks that, given time to fester, can develop into something almost clinical are celebrated and spread far and wide, coping mechanisms and other attempts to deal with mental health issues like this are denigrated and people are exhorted to reject them.
I don't really know what should be done about it. It has kind of metastasized into a pan-social malady that can't be addressed entirely because it's distributed and deeply entrenched.
laxam
2mo ago
Israel was well on the way to coming to an understanding with its neighbors prior to 10/7.
The role of the global hegemon here, if we're really talking about 'just do whatever creates stability' would be take the population of Palestine, break it up into families, and scatter them around the globe, then decapitate the regime in Tehran and hand the reins over to a transitional government and leave. The Middle East would calm down very quickly.
laxam
2mo ago
Who said anything about invading?
Kill the Guardian Council, the President, the top layer or two of the cabinet and the IRG, and tell the people who were trying to overthrow the government because of the overreach of the morality police that they're in charge now and leave the place to its own devices.
Seriously, OP talked about stabilizing the Middle East. The Oil Princes just want to make money, the military in Egypt wants more or less the same, the Turks just want to be able to play regional hegemon, and the Israelis just wanna feel like they won't all be killed for letting their guard down. It's the Iranian government that throws a wrench into the works. Get rid of them and break the back of the IRG and there's no longer going to be anyone who cares enough to spend time destabilizing other countries (and the Arab world will be all too happy to quietly wash their hands of the Palestinians).
laxam
2mo ago
If Western governments had the reach to mobilize the failed protest movements Iran has had over the last decade, we'd have just overthrown the Guardian council and been done with it.
laxam
1yr ago
Trump was given a curated list to pull names from.
Mitch held a seat and Trump did what he was told. The one, huge, unequivocally great thing he did wasn't him, because you have to be delusional at this point to think Trump is good at doing anything but trolling the hell out of the libs.
laxam
26d ago
The law is much less over-reaching than no_one (and most of the bill's critics) is making it out to be.
laxam
5mo ago
There were many people who said "local costs are up in some goods more than average statistics would suggest". My beef isn't with people who concluded that "because of this + negativity bias, things feel worse than they actually are", it's with the people claiming "because of this, economic data are rigged and useless".
Perhaps you might have saved yourself a lot of words had you considered, "Maybe I'm wrong about the actual state of things for many people", and, "The economic data are accurate within the gamut of what they're actually measuring", aren't mutually exclusive things.
laxam
5mo ago
Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.
Which averages matter a lot.
Of course, there is no real policy discussion going on with these discussions of macro statistics. It's just Lefty professionals sneering at the rest of the country and saying, "Why won't you just do what I tell you and vote for the Democrats?"
laxam
1yr ago
Personally, I think the organized efforts of the media, big tech, and the federal security apparatus to both conceal truths harmful to democrats and propagate lies harmful to Republicans is probably what, if anything, is going to get the Democrats elected in 2024.
It's kind of weird how that didn't get enough Democrats elected in 2022.
Or 2016.
Or 2014.
Or 2010.
laxam
4mo ago
If we could exchange these people for the homeless and the activists, that would certainly be a net win.
Zelensky has ...
His best option...
so that he can ...
so that Zelensky can...
so that Zelensky can have more...
It's astonishing the level of dishonesty that goes into writing a paragraph like this.
It's not Zelensky doing this. If Zelensky negotiated a surrender to Russia right now, the Ukrainian people would toss his ass to the curb and probably kill him for it.
laxam
9mo ago
Mental health in general is almost entirely about whether something substantially prevents someone from functioning normally.
laxam
8d ago
You bulwark against any European nationalism movement because this threatens American hegemony.
It can be breathtaking sometimes just how much things coming out of the further ends of the right directly match up with the way critical theory works.
laxam
5mo ago
I'll preface this by saying that I'm transgender, and I had dysphoria since I was a child myself, but I am a bit of an old-fashioned "truscum" as I don't really fully subscribe to the mainstream leftist trans views. I do know some people in the "neutral middle" - most of my more right-wing friends are opposed to the excesses of the trans movement, but otherwise either don't care or just passively go with the medical consensus.
Do you think there is such a thing as 'non-binary'? Is there something meaningful and connected to your experience of dysphoria in neo-pronouns?
laxam
7mo ago
It's dangerous for both to abandon their position, but empire is more costly and doesn't have as many benefits as it seems like it should. The hegemon is always tempted to empire, but benefits more from staying merely hegemon.
laxam
2mo ago
A more mainstream candidate could probably have won Virginia, New Hampshire, and Nevada. And maaaaaybe New Mexico.
Plus, Bush '04 lost Wisconsin by a few thousand votes. Michigan and Pennsylvania may or may not be taller orders.
laxam
6mo ago
Ah so he has no option to negotiate?
He can try, but he's significantly more constrained by internal Ukrainian politics than you seem to think he is.
laxam
7mo ago
I could spend a half hour writing a wall of text about what social constructs are and how the categories are made for man and so forth
Could you, please?
Moreover, could you define 'gender' in a non-self-referential way that isn't just biological sex?
laxam
2mo ago
Dunno, but Iran has had several waves of very large scale anti-regime protests. I think you could prevent something exactly like the Mullahs taking back over if you just hand the government over to the right people. Iran isn't really like Iraq, it's a more developed place, even with the sanctions.
laxam
5mo ago
The ground invasion is what Hamas wanted from the start, it's a trap. It's sad to me that so many people are so brain poisoned from watching too many Hollywood action films that they see a trap and say "Well a real hero goes in anyway and figures out a way."
Al Qaeda thought they were setting a trap for the West with 9/11. Now, Bin Laden and his contemporary lieutenants are dead and Al Qaeda is scattered and broken, fighting over scraps in sub-Saharan Africa, and the West is mostly annoyed that it had to spend the time and money to do that to them.
Sometimes, it really does work out that the 'hero' goes in anyway and figures things out just fine. Provided the Biden administration doesn't knuckle under to its Left flank and start applying real pressure to get Israel to stop, Hamas is going to be crushed in the ground invasion and Israel will re-occupy the Gaza Strip, probably eventually handing over (Non-democratic) control to the PA.
laxam
1yr ago
This isn't burning the system down, this is getting the Democrats elected in 2024.
laxam
2mo ago
not just an unprovable counterfactual, but a belief of yours which is apparently immune to any sort of evidence against it
Do you not understand the difference between low turn out midterms and high turnout presidential election years?
And 2rafa is right: 2014 was the best recent Republican Congressional year, when they peaked at 54 Senate seats and 247 House seats (more than any time since the 1920's in the House). The fringes of the Tea Party cost the GOP Senate seats in 2010. Remember the Witch? Republicans could have had a Senate seat in Delaware.
The Trump era has been a historic disaster for the Republican Party downballot. After fighting and clawing it's way into centuriate power during the Tea Party era, reaching a peak of state and local power in 2016 unmatched since the 1920s, the anti-Trump backlash drove them out of power everywhere in 2018 and 2019.
They have the luck that the Democrats really suck at not just assuming they will hold power forever, so driving yet more backlash, but people in many places would rather have Democratic leftists over Trumpist conspiracy theorists (even if that is a near run thing).
The fact that the crazies have gained local party power in a lot of places is going to be a hobble on the party's performance for a long time. Arizona -- what is probably still a light red state in natural circumstances -- is probably going to be become blue just because the AZGOP is nuts.
My local party has stayed mostly sane, thankfully, so hopefully we can finish pushing the Democrats who won county control for the first time in half a century back into minority status. We'll see.
No shit. They need cash and weapons now, not the support of internet contrarians who will always hate them because they had the audacity to be invaded by the Russians.
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