magicalkittycat
No bio...
User ID: 3762
magicalkittycat
2d ago
PEPFAR was started by the Bush admin and partnered with many Christian organizations. https://www.devex.com/news/pepfar-s-top-10-faith-based-health-partners-99501
I'm pointing out that this follows exactly what Christians say they believe in and what many Christians did. Ironically Musk as an obvious atheist destroying PEPFAR should have been a criticism from the right, except of course modern "conservativism" is mind virused away from the bible and towards TrumpDoesNoWrong personality cults. Another part of how the average religious person can not be taken seriously in their claimed beliefs, they are hilariousy inconsistent.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
You just need to fabricate some excuse to keep them away from you
Ah ok, they're too retarded to find the fabricated excuse suspicious.
If they object, have them arrested!
What kind of fabricated excuse would be able to get them arrested?
(I know this sounds far-fetched, but it's literally what happened in 2020)
Luckily it's literally not what happened.
You are not getting it -- this conversation never happens, people just do stuff.
You would need coordination to fabricate an even somewhat workable convincing excuse against any non retard Trump monitors and keep them away.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
Plus the article explains there are property right issues.
Yes, that is literally the exact mechanism in which NIMBYism functions in basically every country.
“Europe now has NIMBY”
Europe just let in a lot of third world brown people.
NIMBYist personality isn't new in Europe, great piece out recently on how that got overcame for a while and they were actually able to do stuff. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-abolishing-the-stakeholder-state-caused-the-industrial-revolution/
The YIMBY vs NIMBY fight has been an ancient battle.
(as far as I can tell, MKC lives a completely normal and unremarkable life in a completely normal and unremarkable place - not that I'm sneering at raising a family, that's a noble thing, but wildly out of step with some Manichean division of the world into "builders" and "whiners"). That's it, that's the whole post, everything else is a spandrel.
Yes, fairly normal people like me are a form of doer. Some doers are also whiners (Trump is a pretty massive example of being extreme in both compartments at once), and some losers aren't whiners (I've known a few people who I would see as genuine victims but they keep a positive personality and keep working for success) but the whiners are typically skewed towards people who are sucking at life somewhere. Both because being a loser gives you a reason to blame your failures on others, and because an extreme lack of self actualization can lead to failing. People with an internal locus of control tend to do better.
I have sympathy for them. After all like I said, I have an aunt who is literally one herself and lives off of disability after finally stabilizing from full blown craziness. I have another mentally disabled relative on my father's side as well who needs constant monitoring. They're both extreme examples of losers in society, but I don't hate them. I'm glad they get the support they get.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
Buenos Aires where they literally genocide blacks and Indians is dense and walkable. European cities are dense and walkable. Chinese cities are dense and walkable. Tokyo is dense and walkable.
A lot of these are either from historic choices, lack of land, and/or poverty. Europe is consumed with NIMBYism too, they're worse than the US now in many parts! Hong Kong has long been a NIMBY hub.
But it would be a mistake to infer that the territory’s housing shortages are because there is no more space in between the mountains. Like in nearly every country, Hong Kong’s problems ultimately derive from uncertain property rights regimes that do not let those who would benefit from development trade with those who have the power for it to be blocked.
Am I supposed to believe this is from racial tensions?.
If we go off the notion that America is a Christian nation with Christian values (which as an atheist I don't agree with but many do say it should be) then the US responsibility is really high to help those in need, as it follows the teachings of Christ. Which we can see in how religious charities are some of the most helpful around in the third world. Many of the most ardent believers understand their religion as a helpful one.
What meaning would being a Christian nation hold if it doesn't honor God through kindness?
Where?
If you're already living on the golden goose, you have nowhere else to go
Exactly my point. There is no mythical land that is better than the west. If we're fucking things up in a way that other places do better and can be done without sacrificing other gains, name the other place. But no one can, because we live on the Golden goose already.
There is no real world example of the better place, just imagination. But in imagination land there's also free ponies, waterfalls of booze, and everyone skateboards around doing sick tricks. It's always better and cooler than reality.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
Well yeah, people in Houston and Charlotte don't want much walkable neighborhoods. If they did, they wouldn't constantly vote against dense construction and bike lanes and the like.
The victimization crisis and surrounding issues is something that's been talked about for a while.
https://putanumonit.com/2020/09/12/against-victimhood/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Victimhood_Culture
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f3zeukxj3Kf5byzHi/underdog-bias-rules-everything-around-me
Including as you can see, in other rationalist communities! It's literally one of the main motivators people will bring up for woke culture, an obsession with who is the greatest victim.
The victimhood obsession is what losers and failures use to cope when they don't succeed. "It's not my fault I don't got a smoking hot babe, it's cause society just hates men", "it's not my fault I didn't get that job, they're racist against black people", etc etc. Online discussion has been consumed by whiners, in part cause the whiners don't shut up while us doers spend most of our time doing.
the "presumably there should be mass desire for movement somewhere if we're fucking something up in a significant way and we just don't see it" is one in a long series of actively refusing to see the evidence in front of his own face, and it doesn't actually interact with the claims of the post it's reacting to so much as just pretend that they didn't real to start with.
Because in the modern day in first world nations, most victim complaints are not real. I literally went over in several ways how us men are far better off now than almost any other point in history. Even most of the losers are better off in many areas, the poorest and laziest NEET won't die of starvation anymore. I had an aunt go crazy and live on the streets for like a whole decade and she still had food, clean water, access to healthcare, a cellphone, etc.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
They all hate Trump too! (the opposing campaign people, you need to find a way to shut them out -- the other workers will support you in this, because those people support Trump! They are icky and annoying!)
Even if we assume that they all hate Trump and they all do so in a way that they will go along with "Hey guys I just had a thought, I know we don't know each other well but let's rig this election" works so well, are we supposing the Trump monitors are all too retarded to notice anything? Certainly they should notice that they're being shut out.
If we have to assume braindead room temp IQs from the Trump side and brave genius risk taking on the anti Trump side, then we're probably assuming too much.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
14th biggest city in the country.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
As such "normal channels" means exactly what it says. Is this terror group performing the legally mandated background checks and filling out the legally mandated transfer paperwork/bill of sale? If so they will be easy to track, if not straight to jail.
Ah ok, well good thing they made sure to fill out the proper paperwork before giving a nuke away in a rigged raffle. Those charges over faking a giveaway will definitely dissuade them.
Under my argument this is something that the President and their Cabinet would have to assess for themselves.
We clearly live in completely different worlds if you think after the multi decades long disaster of the middle east, much of it based off completely bullshit, that just taking the president and cabinet at their word to do the right decision is reasonable.
who would you be to judge?
An American citizen.
magicalkittycat
4d ago
Sean Davis, CEO of the federalist, among many other crazy ideas suggested the dissolution of the union and forced sterilization of all tourists which is definitely the biggest meltdown I've seen. But there's been others. Micheal Tracey points out the issue here
These tough guy right-wing pundits have the same emotional dysregulation issues as the most frantic Trans activists. Always with the knee-jerk cognitive distortions: the constant melodramatic catastrophizing, the whiny performative bellyaching at the slightest perceived adversity.
We’ve been essentially ethnically cleansed out of NYC.
NYC is still plurality white and I know plenty of people living there who love the life. This "ethnic cleansing" does not seem to impact them.
sick and tired of being exposed to gun violence in Chicago.
Chicago sucked even worse in the "good old days!"
San Francisco is a boring Asian town now which use to be like the people from Full House. Besides the quality and safety of our cities declining we’ve made it worse by not building housing in our cities
This is what people want! So many American voters want the NIMBYism, and the boring sprawl culture. We don't build because citizens are constantly opposing new construction. I think it's lame too, but it's obvious that people genuinely disagree and love extreme sprawl without construction. You can see this with your own eyes if you visit any local city council meeting when new construction comes up as a topic.
and also subsidizing immigrants so that you either need to make 7-figures or live on welfare to live in a big city.
The main form of federal welfare that helps with housing is section 8, and those are highly limited. It also only applies to renters (therefore about 2/3rds of people are not applicable at all), and only 12% of renters have it. Other things like project based rentals are even less common.
But also you don't need seven figures. The median household income in my state's big city of Charlotte is ~83k. Not even six figures. Given that is the median, plenty of people live with less than that.
The fact that the American Dream of living in a big city doesn’t exists anymore Akshually does mean immigration sucks and black crime killed neighborhoods. So sure America is great if you want to live in a 5k sq foot house with a giant truck far enough away from any immigrants to not deal with them, but if you actually want to live in an community then the American Dream dead.
The American dream is an immigrant concept! The dream is coming to the land of opportunity, working hard and building up your life through your sweat and tears because of our historical libertarian freedom loving meritocratic ideals. Crime rates are also misleading, they are hyperlocalized. Unless you hang out on the kill streets (and if you're not a useless loser working part time at a McDonald's, you should be able to avoid it) then you avoid most crime.
People like Jensen Huang, a Taiwanese immigrant from a middle class family, Jan Kuom, a Ukranian immigrant raised in poverty, or Hamdi Ulukaya whose family were Kurdish dairy farmers before moving are living proof it still exists. You just need to be worth something. Stuff like the many Indian and Chinese immigrant workers in tech companies is lower level examples of this too. In the US if you can't make something of yourself and you want to, it's because you suck. It hurts to hear the truth, but it is the truth.
It just better not living around immigrants in ways not captured by GDP goes up.
Nope, GDP is the best metric and is great in part because of basic mathematics https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-boring-reason-gdp-is-inevitable
But why even throw in a random complaint about GDP to begin with except to signal economic illiteracy?
The meltdowns in response to the ruling have been pretty incredible, looking at a lot of comments on X would have you believe that the SC just decided to institute birthright citizenship today, instead of them just not changing the law of the land precedent of >150 years. No one alive knows a US without birthright citizenship.
If it's so damaging, why are we one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations not just in the world but in history? Even if you're a pessimistic doomer who can't appreciate the country today because you've gone too fast on the hedonic treadmill and who thinks the 90s or the 60s or the roaring 20s or whatever were Peak America, those times were also under birthright citizenship.
Conservatives even considered it a point of pride! Here's the great Ronald Reagan on immigration https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-presentation-ceremony-presidential-medal-freedom-5
And since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: ``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.''
Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world. For it's the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America's triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond. Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close.
But modern "conservativism" isn't conservative. It's a corrupted cult of personality based around grievance politics, and racial grievance politics is just a subcategory of that. If modern "conservatives" had any balls left, they would rise against the welfare state they think is attracting parasites, and not against stuff like H1B visas, scientists, engineers, and other great additions to the country. It's not very complicated
Micheal Tracey even made a great point about how victimhood complexes have consumed these "conservatives" so much that they've even largely stopped caring about abortion.
What they fundamentally need is a perpetual Victimhood Complex to sustain themselves, even when they wield enormous state power. This also sustains their ability to browbeat recalcitrant GOP-leaning voters when the next Presidential Election rolls around, because they can emotionally-blackmail these voters about why they must vote Republican, despite any misgivings, because it's just soooo existentially vital that a Republican President fill any forthcoming Supreme Court vacancies -- that's the only way to right this grievous wrong re: Birthright Citizenship, and avert the total destruction of America. (Even as the purported mass baby-murder genocide, which their "Supreme Court Or Die!" talking point would've been predicated on in the past, continues apace)
magicalkittycat
4d ago
Who alleged that? Literally everyone in many spaces hates trump; they don't need to coordinate in order for many people (particularly people in the class involved with counting/monitoring elections) to be working towards the same goal.
If you don't have any coordination then holes will open up from that too, like how does election monitor 1 get everyone else, including ones sent by the opposing campaigns, to ignore their fiddling with the counts?
Has this ever happened with any crime where basically everyone involved is super competent to stay hidden, despite people on the lookout for it but also there's no coordination or planning or communication or anything between them? They just all happen to align as super criminals with a shared goal and no knowledge of each other.
Material furnished is exactly what it says, if a nation or any other organization gifts or sells that material outside normal channels they are on the hook for how it is used.
"Outside normal channels" what does this mean? Can a terror group just host a raffle that NutJob McGee just happens to win for a free missile?
I also dont understand your preoccupation with deniability, we're not talking about citizens with consitutional rights, we're talking about sovereign nations. "Drop the act, we know it was you" is a perfectly valid realpolitik response to such behavior.
Outside of what the other comment said about framing, it also means "what if we can't really track it well to begin with?". The exact amount, if any, involvement of Saudi Arabia involved in 9/11 is still contended to this day.
21 years after, we still don't seem to know if a single guy Al-Bayoumi had knowledge of the attacks beforehand, and if they were an intelligence agent working for the Saudi government. This of course is despite the initial reports in 2004 concluding there was no connection.
In 2022, the FBI stated that "there is a 50/50 chance al-Bayoumi had advanced knowledge the 9/11 attacks were to occur". Al-Bayoumi also helped the hijackers find housing in San Diego. Al-Bayoumi stated that he simply befriended the hijackers and also denied being a Saudi government agent. The Saudi government also denied that Al-Bayoumi was an agent.
Did they know? Were they involved? I don't know! There's apparently 50% chance that this guy, who may or may not have been an intelligence agent (and if he was may or may not have been doing it under orders from above) might indicate Saudi involvement. Maybe.
And they found circumstancial evidence for it! Just no smoking gun of direct links.
Operation Encore was a secret FBI investigation launched in 2007 to investigate the alleged links of Saudi officials to the September 11 hijackers.[51][52][53] According to The New York Times, "circumstantial evidence" was uncovered but no direct links were established.[54]
Under your argument where presumably we should respond to vague traces of government involvement despite layers of deniability, should we have gone after Saudi Arabia too or not?
And maybe the FBI does know the answer for sure and just won't tell us plebs, but that's an assumption. Intelligence apparatuses have been known to make plenty of mistakes, either on accident or "on accident". How do we trust them to be this mystical source after multiple decades in the middle east based largely off (in good faith) a huge mistake and (in bad faith) a lie about WMDs.
Well there's also the big issue that if it's surplus then there is no reason whatsoever to include the final bit of foreign diplomats being included.
If I wanted to ban all fruits, I would not say "this ban includes fruits, and also apples". Apples is included under fruits. It doesn't make any sense to include them separately. If I wanted to make it clear that fruits contains something contentious, I would say "this ban includes traditional fruits and tomatoes" to clarify that tomatoes are included as a fruit here.
If diplomats would be included under the "aliens" and "foreigners", then why mention them? Presumably there's either
-
A distinction between them and they kept it in mind that some diplomat children might not be alien/foreign
-
Considering diplomats as aliens or foreigners is disputed for some reason,
-
It's meant to be specifically fitting all three categories.
-
We are meant to consider that US citizen who happens to be a diplomat to us of some kind actually make non citizen child.
It is unfortunate the right lacks the left's organized supply of underemployed, politically-obsessed weirdos to do things like trawl through California's voter registration databases and hunt down every homeless person in the state to question them.
If the excuse is "we're too lazy" then yeah sure maybe I don't know. But if that's the case then the response is if you can't bother yourself with gathering real evidence then don't make allegations.
And it's not like my idea is particularly clever either. That very few people even seem to put energy into figuring out and discussing real actionable double checking measures they could take on their own right now isn't excused by "that's hard work" unless the very act of thinking is too difficult. I should see way more people come up with this idea, and similar ideas, if they truly believed that voter fraud was happening in such a manner and wanted to take it seriously.
If it's just a bunch of random people doing it without greater coordination then yes it could be theoretically possible, but this would also not be what is alleged (a greater scheme coordinated by politicians). And we would expect to see something similar, many of these schemes should be caught instead of it just being rare one of occurances.
I would not be surprised whatsoever if in every state there's been cases of someone filling out their nursing home parents ballots or sending in for a recently deceased but not yet recorded and updated nephew or even yes, a random person who pays another one to vote and don't get caught. If we're saying it's never happened, that would be absurd.
But is it large or coordinated as alleged? Well that would show a lot of signs we aren't seeing.
This has multiple flaws.
-
What does "material furnished" mean? Do all guns and bullets have to be exclusively made from minerals mined and put together in the US or else it counts as a shooting by a foreign power? If the gun is stored in a Russian made holster, is that a Russian attack? If we don't make it extremely strict, then there's lots of inevitable workarounds created to provide the "pieces" of advanced weaponry to be easily constructed and used.
-
What about proxy groups? Private organizations that go through deniability chains from those nations can furnish weapons for nutjobs. There will be sophisticated plans where building a convincing casus belli will be difficult. They won't be like al-queda taking credit for 9/11.
-
It doesn't even take rival nations, just sophisticated networks like the aforementioned 764. They spend some of their child porn money on materials and supply it to a crazed member. Gonna be hard to charge most of them. If giving someone a gun as a gift who just totally coincidentally proceeds to use it in crime can't be charged, then the same would apply to a missile or drone or anything else. "Oh we didn't know he would blow up that building with the rockets we provided him for his birthday". They can produce a lot for their own legal deniability, just like they already do. If we can't get them for shootings, why should I expect we can do it for anything else?
Diplomats could be married to US citizens, or possibly be a US citizen themselves. Apparently there's been quite a few Canadian diplomats who are also American. There's also one of an American ambassador to France who had French citizenship through their marriage.
Anyone who is has the resources and know-how required to procure and operate an F-35 or Nuclear Weapon is going to be a lot more than just some "fringe whacko" in a compound somewhere.
You don't personally need the resources or know-how for most of this (besides operating but even that can be simplified by bad actors) so long as people can sell you or gift you one. Decentralized terrorist groups like 764 already grooms random local depressed nutjob kids to shoot up schools among many other types of crime, imagine what damage coordinated rival nations could deal if these nutjobs could have access to major weaponry.
And if we ban selling or gifting major weapons but not guns, then we have already established there is a distinction and they do not count as "arms" in the same way.
As I went over here https://www.themotte.org/post/3822/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/457705?context=8#context you personally can do most of the checking yourself.
Find you the John Alexander Adams (or whatever votes you think are suspicious), track them down and ask them if he voted. Maybe you stumble across some 85 year old with poor memory who says "what's that son? I boated? I can't remember" or a guy who got in a car accident after and died or someone who assumes you're up to no good and tells you to fuck off, or idk even just a guy who lies but you can even help solve for this base rate by gathering a base rate from other states that you don't think voter fraud occurs in. If the average is .5% and California has 2%, that's pretty good evidence of something going on. Although of course we can also just use our brains and ask how the fuck did the fraudsters predict who would get in a car crash or develop dementia and not even bother with most of it. Then the only problem is dealing with specifically with the base rates of idiots who forget they did vote and liars.
Is it a bunch of work? Sure. But people have done tons of work for way less important stuff. If it was truly believed to be a major avenue of fraud, "it's hard" is not an explanation. The explanation is that no one thinks it worth the effort, most likely because they don't think they'd get a result reasonably exposing fraud.
A significant chunk of Americans, including just of the white population don't have any strong genetic ties to the colonists. I have German and Irish and Italian heritage myself in my grandparents/greed grandparents and while I don't know the full lineage of my ancestors the idea that I, and many others like me, exist because the colonists fucked a lot is just incorrect. I may or may not have genetic ties to the colonists somewhere, but it's not some overwhelming key piece. And in fact about 40% of the country can trace themselves back to Ellis Island alone which only operated for 62 years out of the 250 we've been around (and was for the east coast, the west coast had Angel Island which processed a lot of the Asians). Now some of those people may have higher percentages of colonial heritage than someone like me does, but the idea of it just being beause the original colonies reproduced is incorrect.
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Italy, and a significant portion of post soviet nations, among quite a few others here and there are success stories of Americanism spreading. So successful that you didn't even consider them, we literally did an anime style defeat means friendship with quite a few. Those dirty inferior Japs are now our friends and one of our closest allies. There's also of course Israel (which is a democracy and generally an ally even if they're a shit one), and the other nations that Olive mentioned.
More options
Context Copy link