magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
I think you meant "yes" to "are they not a liar?". Or at least, if you were looking for liars that seems inadvisable.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
I agree, but I'd argue that in this particular instance the instructor was speaking on behalf of the institution; grades are, after all, the university's official opinion of a student's work, and the instructor was being paid (among other things) to give them in a manner the university would agree with (that the university agrees with the marks is a necessity to make degrees actually mean something). This wasn't a case of a random shitpost on social media outside office hours.
"You can fire people for saying X if you hired them to say Y" is a small-enough impingement on free speech, and enough of a necessity, that I'm not really objecting on those grounds; I might or might not disagree on the object-level if I cared enough to dig into the case, but not on the meta-level.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
The point is that DeBeers has increased the price of a "valid" engagement ring by getting people to insist on diamond, while driving up the price above that of rubies and sapphires via cartel behaviour.
(NB: I am not going to give, and would prefer not to receive, a diamond engagement ring. Rubies and sapphires are a hell of a lot more "forever" than diamonds; they aren't combustible, for one thing.)
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
I think it's not directly "women choosing not to have children", although it kinda is that in a less-direct way.
There are two big effects I can see. One is that dating moved onto dating sites, which are low-trust lemon markets that fail for Economics 201 reasons (because those that don't know it's a lemon market will reliably pick the apparently-excellent deals - i.e. the fake ones, because if you're centrally lying you might as well go the whole hog - over the actually-good deals, and a lot of those that do know it's a lemon market - and aren't themselves selling lemons - will just leave). The other is that feminists declared men chasing women to be punishable aggression (unless she wants it, which the man doesn't know in advance), men (and especially good men) mostly chose to respect the short-term incentives this creates, and women mostly failed to chase to fill the hole, resulting in deadweight loss.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.
You're missing another failure mode, one very much inherent in single parenting and in some ways worsened by social justice.
Specifically, that there's no easy way to spot abuse in a single parent. There's by definition no other adult in the household, and abused kids have trouble noticing that their parent is a psycho because they have little basis of comparison and are highly susceptible to frame control (the single parent does, after all, have a very-large degree of control over the kid's environment and can argue circles around him/her).
I say that this is in some ways worsened by social justice because, well, social justice feminism does not exactly teach mothers not to abuse their sons, and it does tend to try to direct the police at the wrong target if and when they do become involved, complicating the issue even after official attention is drawn.
(I was starved as a teenager for the "sexist abuse" of "standing over" my foot-shorter mum. Eventually I went stark raving mad and started threatening to topple bookcases, she started dialing the police, I wrestled the phone away from her in a panic, she fled, and of course eventually she made it to a phone and the police reduced me to tears with a lecture about how I was going to grow up into a wifebeater and they expected most of my life to be spent in prisons and halfway houses (well, after making me put on underpants; I wasn't kidding about "stark"). Now, the fallout of that was actually mostly good - specifically, it was enough of a blowup that everybody working my case switched from "keep things from exploding" mode to "find me somewhere else to live" mode, and I wasn't actually arrested - and it's hard to blame the police given she wasn't lying (just delusional) and I was badly brainwashed to the point that I thought I was at least in large part in the wrong; spotting that in a short encounter is not actually trivial. But, y'know, I'd rather not make that situation, or that bad call by the police, happen more than necessary.)
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.
I'm not sure they thought through the economics of anyone who would approve of this trailer likely being a proud pirate.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
· Edited 8d ago
Nah, there are some people explicitly and publically advocating more of this - Destiny's "you need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events", for instance. I'd call that a strategy. It's not a strategy "the left" as a whole is pursuing, though (the Democratic Party certainly came out against it).
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
Democrats have been almost pure delusional hate-fueled rhetoric for most of my adult life, intensifying into cancerous ferocity over the last decade, and it doesn't seem to have turned anyone off on general principles.
Trumpism, and Musk becoming pissed off enough to buy Twitter, seem the obvious examples. Well, no, the more relevant examples; the most obvious example, in context, is this board.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
To be clear, by "systematic" I mean like nearly 100% endogamy (I haven't run the numbers, but I suspect 85% still wouldn't be enough) in a moderately-sized clan, like the actual Habsburgs, so that you get a pile of allele-fixing and increased consanguinity. Are there a lot of families that do that in the Muslim world?
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
While you might be 'strongly-Zionist', this seems orthogonal to your argument, which is mainly about Jewish minorities in gentile countries being net-positive.
@FireRises I'd go further and say "opposed"; if you want to keep Jews in the West, you don't want them to "go home" to Eretz Yisrael.
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
Funny thing about inbreeding is that unlike protracted heavy inbreeding (where a family has no new blood for an extended period), protracted mild inbreeding (lots of cousin marriages but not systematic) will eventually tend to weed out most of the alleles responsible for inbreeding problems (as it exposes them to much-stronger natural selection).
Do also remember that if someone heavily inbred marries someone else heavily inbred - but unrelated - the offspring are not inbred at all.
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
China doesn't seem to be too keen on military domination of the eight dash line, you have both okinawan and phillipino islands a stone toss away - you can contain them just as good there.
The PRC has been building military bases all over the nine-dash line. And Taiwan actually is strategically critical; if the PLAN can base out of its east coast, they can more credibly threaten a blockade of Japan or South Korea (they can't do that now because the narrow, shallow straits might as well be labelled "insert sea mines here"). Would also allow them to put their ballistic missile subs into deeper water and hide them better.
magic9mushroom
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16d ago
I think the word you're looking for is "invasion" rather than "occupation", then. The USA invaded and occupied Germany, but only occupied Japan.
@Dean's usually fairly precise with his terminology; I believe he was specifically raising concerns over the USA's ability to occupy China - concerns which I share to at least some extent. Invading China is a completely-different kettle of fish, and one I dismissed out of hand in my first reply in this chain ("Rule 2 of war": "do not go fighting with your land armies in China"); I don't think Dean was even entertaining that idea.
magic9mushroom
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16d ago
If a nuclear exchange has happened, there are no longer 1.3 million Chinese.
I think you meant "billion" here; I would expect high Chinese casualties, likely over half a billion if they don't surrender immediately, but not >99.9%.
if they launched even one of theirs at us then we would have launched most of ours in response.
Nah, it wouldn't take that many.
magic9mushroom
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16d ago
Going full countervalue in response to a single nuke? No. Going full counterforce in response to a single nuke? Yes, at least on the US side. The question isn't so much of retaliation as prevention; you want to destroy as much as possible on the ground.
(Also, a single nuke pointed at a city probably won't do much due to ABM.)
I predicted the USA going countervalue against China in a big way if the PLA had nuked cities, the counterforce response ran China out of nukes, and the PRC still refused anything but a white peace. At that point, there's just straight-up no alternative; the Western public would not stand for a white peace (not to mention that it'd let them try again in a few years), and invading China wouldn't work (rule 2 of war). Hence, "after I destroy Washington DC Shanghai I will destroy another major city every hour on the hour, that is unless of course you pay me 100 billion dollars unconditionally surrender". Same trick as was used on Japan in WWII.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
My point exactly.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
Possible, I suppose (though occupying China to that degree wouldn't be trivial). Largely ends in the same place, though, of "PRC refuses, China burns in countervalue strike".
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
· Edited 18d ago
Worst case, nukes get exchanged (maybe half a dozen).
Half a dozen nukes is not the worst case or a likely case. If the USA detects Chinese launches, it will go full counterforce in an attempt to destroy as much as possible of their arsenal before it's airborne. That in turn means the PRC is in a "use it or lose it" scenario and will likely launch as much as it can (excepting, possibly, the sea leg).
Of course, then there's the issue of the peace terms. If PLA nukes have hit cities, the West's peace demand would be along the lines of "denuclearise/demilitarise China, free Tibet/Xinjiang, formally cede Taiwan" with little room to budge (particularly given the need to prevent the PRC trying again later). The PRC is aware that, as you note, this means no more Mandate of Heaven, so it plausibly refuses. Plausibly, Trump/Vance then order countervalue in order to force a capitulation (or state failure), because Rule 2 of war and they aren't the sorts to just back down. End result is that China is a basket-case again, like the early 20th century. Russia, if it stays out, does well in some ways (with the West significantly weakened), but doesn't become outright hegemon. Probably no more culture war, as SJ would suffer base existence failure to a fair extent and would be blamed for weakening the West and thus causing WWIII.
China winning a lightning strike? Honestly I view this as somewhat status quo, believe it or not.
No. The immediate problem is that the PLAN would have un-interdictable access to the Pacific proper via Taiwan's east coast, which means Japan and South Korea would have Beijing's hand around their throats via the threat of blockade (neither is even remotely close to being able to feed itself). They probably both withdraw from the NPT, Beijing in its overconfidence (and with popular support due to the long-standing cultural antipathy) plausibly attacks, and you're back to WWIII. There's a reason that Japanese PM Takaichi Sanae made those comments about a Taiwan invasion posing an existential threat to Japan and justifying the use of the Japanese military, and there's a reason (though not a good one) that one of China's diplomats to Japan publically threatened to cut off her head in response.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
@EverythingIsFine may be referring to the idea of the Mandate of Heaven - that the Chinese tend to violently chuck out governments that are seen to have failed. If the CPC were forced to relinquish its claim to Taiwan as part of a peace deal, it would have a hard time holding on to power. This potentially means loose nukes.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
School shooters are spree killers; what Corvos is talking about would arguably be serial killing. Profiles are pretty different.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
And "let's free these oppressed people".
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
Geopolitical alliances crack when one party is seen as the partisan partner of one's own domestic political opponents.
TBF, this kinda goes both ways.
From the US point of view, the EU supports the Democrats against the Republicans (in a lot of ways), and thus the Republicans see the EU as backing their domestic enemies.
From the EU point of view, the US is supporting the European far-right (by providing communications that circumvent the various EU censorship laws), and thus the EU establishment see the US as backing their domestic enemies.
I happen to be extremely unsympathetic to the EU establishment's position, but that's because I see their suppression of the far-right as an oligarchical attempt to revoke democracy and thus not a legitimate state interest.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
To take an extreme example, if you receive a letter from your landlord telling you that you are going to be evicted then in a sense your choosing to leave peacefully rather than squat or lay makeshift pit traps under the welcome mat is a moral choice. But only in a sense.
I mean, you say this, but while the Zizians opening Door #3 there was pretty obviously doomed, I understand that people do get away with squatting in California.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
Wow, can't believe she crossed state lines.
I'm guessing she was trying to ensure that the fetish artist didn't hear about the case, given the high likelihood of him turning her in (I mean, come on, the political leanings of fetish artists are well-known even aside from the "most people want justice done" thing). "Don't expect the enemy to cooperate in the creation of your dream engagement" is still such an obvious flaw in the plan that it's not how I'd have done it (not to mention the time delay), but then again I'm not crazy enough to do something like that to myself.
@wsgy, relevant issues are girls going through puberty earlier without dads, and that many women might not know or want to find out about certain uniquely-male medical issues (e.g. I had an abnormality of penis development that went completely uninvestigated for my entire childhood and most of my adolescence, because even when I did notice that something might be wrong, my single mum had no clue about what normal penis development actually is and was sufficiently creeped out by the mere mention of my penis that she just intimidated me into shutting up about it - it resolved fine AFAIK, but obviously that wasn't knowable ex ante to either of us).
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