pigeonburger
17d ago
Oh my, I have choice "cultural phrases" to say about this new euphemism
There's unconfirmed reports that the rifle was a Mauser bolt-action, with antifa/pro-trans statements carved on the cartridges found alongside the weapon.
https://xcancel.com/scrowder/status/1966118431511433267
If it is indeed a dirt old, cheap, relatively abundant surplus bolt action, and considering the shooter only had to take one shot, I think it'll be hard to make the usual gun control arguments for this one. At least regarding the weapon.
pigeonburger
18d ago
I am not sure this represents a "vibe shift" (DC and Marvel would always be likely to fire a writer who openly cheers an assassination) but it is interesting how quickly Felker-Martin got "cancelled."
Within hours, Matthew Dowd got fired from MSNBC for implying Kirk brought this on himself. Yeah, it might be premature to say this is the "vibe shift", but at least institutional left-leaning media is enforcing messaging discipline right now, which is something I don't think they would have felt they needed to do a few years ago. They barely did for the attempt on Trump.
I think you mostly have to make sure your regulations actually align with your stated goals and don't become at odds with themselves. Our provincial government chose to legalize only through government-run stores mostly because they wanted the public has a safe product sold in a responsible environment. If your regulations push them back to the black market, then that's a fail in that respect.
pigeonburger
19d ago
Very fast motorcycles are perhaps a better analogy; an unnecessary danger, but pleasurable and alluring.
Also, what if legalizing (due to those imposed regulations) increases the price. Essentially, what if requiring drug producers to not lace their products, etc. makes it prohibitively expensive for the main population that is seeking out these drugs, meaning there will once again be a black market for them.
Even after we had cannabis legalization here, my province in particular passed laws capping all cannabis products sold legally in the province by the government-run stores at 30% THC. While this is plenty THC for flower, it pretty much nullifies as a category concentrates (hash, wax, shatter, resin, rosin, THC crystals... as well as THC vapes). For an alcohol comparison, it's like they made alcohol legal only as long it was at most 10% alcohol (20 proof), the alcohol percentage of a strong beer. The result is that, when I was a regular cannabis consumer, I would get those products from the black/gray market, despite legalization.
Price was, though, comparable between the government-run stores and the black/gray market for flowers.
pigeonburger
21d ago
I think my main gripe with the retvrners is that there's a poorly defended (IMO) assumption that the good times of the second half of the 20th century were an unstable position, merely a breather at the top of a slippery slope. Maybe it's because I'm a pure product of it, but I don't find the ideals of that era hard to defend without slipping into postmodern madness. I think those ideals have been betrayed, they didn't fail on their own terms.
pigeonburger
21d ago
I'd add somewhere in your list a feeling of guilt towards historical wrongs and a feeling that sacrificing their own countrymen's welfare in favor of immigrants' is somehow helping make up for it.
pigeonburger
24d ago
Yes, I am too a civic nationalist, and would like for this to work. But I find few liberals are okay with enforcing the clear us/them distinction, because it doesn't "feel" liberal to do so.
pigeonburger
24d ago
The Nazis.
Hence the lack of coherency, as it doesn't escape the public that the average modern "Nazi" has more in common with them and with good western liberals than an average practicing Muslim, and that the practicing Muslim has more in common with the historical Nazi (including strong hatred of Jews, totalizing politics)
pigeonburger
24d ago
Maybe Biden was never truly president in anything more than a ceremonial sense, and was essentially understood consiously or not, as simply giving executive power back to the administrative state that the Obama administration installed.
Sure. Basically I think the purpose of a state is to be a back-scratching club: designate an ingroup, and then work to benefit them.
Here you imply what is the main issue I have with the western liberal's version of this, and why they are unable to apply it in a way that actually functions; an ingroup implies the existence of outgroups, or at least of people not in the ingroup. If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup, who isn't? If people are denied a coherent definition of their ingroup, they cannot believe it will scratch their back, so they fall back on base individualism and all the civilisational gains that were achieved by nationalism slowly decay.
Honestly, I truly believe that the only thing that could potentially unite humanity in the way globalists dream of is the discovery of alien intelligence advanced enough to exclude from our ingroup. Because there is never an us without a them.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
The way I envision it is not large payments, it's small payments by a large amount of mules that would fall below the threshold to trigger alarms that would accumulate into the same OF provider's account.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Coin tumblers is how they can be laundered. The coins are deposited into a big common pot, you get a code to get your coins out, and can cash them out from a new (clean) address. As long as you don't do something stupid like match the exact amount going into the pot when you withdraw, or withdraw immediately after depositing, then the coins on the outgoing side can't be traced to their origin.
But those coins are of course traceable to a tumbler you still need to find a way to spend them that won't block you for having used a tumbler.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
This just made me think about how easy it must be to launder money through OnlyFans kind of services.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Giving good advice starts by making the person feel good about accepting it. If your advice sounds like a reproach, if the advice is framed in a way that makes the receiver feels stupid for not knowing before, it won't be accepted. Your "Fun Facts" and "Winning" categories are easier to give accepted advice in because they are not inherently negative. But if negativity cannot be avoided you need the insulate the reciever from it; such as you did in the "Tough Love" example, by saying it may not work for everyone, because if you didn't you'd be implying that they're lying if they percieved themselves as having tried it and the results didn't follow. If insulating the person doesn't work, or cannot work because the advice inherently implies that they've been deluding themselves, then you need to put yourself right there next to them taking on the implication, so that they don't feel it's their personal failing. So instead of saying "you think you're cutting out carbs but I've seen you eat tons of sweet desserts", go with "when I was trying to cut carbs, even when I thought I was doing it properly, I wasn't counting my desserts properly and turns out they amounted to more than I thought they did".
Ultimately I think that's simply because most people are intuitively centrists or flexible, but that's a tough position to defend in debates, because keeping your options open is also what someone without a plan would say they're doing. But ideology blinds and binds. Whenever a politician is out of power, they argue like ideologues, and they argue that whoever is in power is failling their own ideology by not sticking to it. It's an easy position to stake. Keeping your options open, while smart, makes you an easy target for nasty headlines, anything you refuse to rule out off the cuff while talking to a journalist (and they won't give you time to think) will be held up as "(politician) could/might/is considering doing this stupid thing!" Trump got very good at evading the trap, but most politicians stumble, they either submit and rule out the stupid thing and then they're made to look weak or stupid for having even considered it, or they find themselves driven into defending the stupid thing.
And that's how we find ourselves in a situation where people kind of hates all sides and no politician can really ever seem like just a smart honest person. Because you can't argue the same positions in the opposition and in power.
Just no one has even tried to explain how exactly government buying up and owning private enterprise is a smart idea (something that we've been saying isn't good for decades) and why it's a solid goal towards improving the nation's economy and wealth.
Is your modeling of Trump so poor that you attribute it to deliberately wanting to wreck the US economy, during his own term, because fuck the Democrats?
He's just not very committed to specific ideology, he mostly plays things by ear and gut feeling and he has a good feeling about this one. Sometimes his gut feelings are right and sometimes they're wrong. His feeling about sending those B2s to Iran seems to have been pretty much just upside so far. The dust hasn't settled on the tarrifs but at least it didn't lead to the immediate collapse that his detractors were claiming were coming. Governing outside of ideology is what his voters wanted, "Making America Great Again" is spectacularly vague and non-committal as to the method of achieving it after all, and for what it's worth I don't think it's a particularly bad way of going about it in reality. Pure ideology will get you all fruits of that ideology, the good ones but also the rotten ones. A wise king who can pick and choose which fruits to pluck is the best political system, and with the short supply of wise kings nowadays, a businessman with good instincts is not the worst stand-in. Of course, opinions can vary as to whether Trump has good instincts.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
An optometrist helped diagnose me with an autoimmune disease. I had been having eye pain for a week or so, went to see a generalist who half-assedly assumed it was a bacterial conjunctivitis, prescribed me antibiotics which only made my eye feel worse. I looked for an emergency optometrist, the one that had appointments on shorter notice was in a small but fancy glasses store downtown. Went there, the optometrist checked my eye and she diagnosed it as a uveitis instead. Started me on steroid drops that helped, but then she asked me questions about stuff that seemed unrelated, like do I often get back pain. Is it at rest or from exercise that I get back pain. Indeed, I had been having back pain for years, that physiotherapist have been trying unsuccessfully to help me with.
Turns out having a uveitis was atypical at my age and in my condition, so she suspected there must have been more. She had me check with an ophtalmologist that specialises in uveitis, who then referred me to a rheumatologist and ayuup, I have ankylosing spondilitis.
Sure, the optometrist helped me by "merely" doing her job well, but to be honest she could have just treated the uveitis and I would never have thought that she had been negligent.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
"The Mandalorian" worked because the female appeal was Pedro Pascal plus baby Yoda (and I understand the female lead was not actively terrible in a Girlboss mode, so of course Disney bounced her for badthink) while having enough of the SW lore to appeal to the guys.
I like to think it worked because it (well, at least the first 2 seasons) was a freshly brewed batch of the original Star Wars recipe. Instead of reheating in the microwave the same old moldy batch of samurai/western (same thing) tropes with pulp sci-fi trappings from the originals like Disney did with the sequels, Jon Favreau took the recipe but made it with fresh tropes. Western/samurai tropes that were not part of Star Wars yet, starting with the premise taken straight from Lone Wolf and Cub.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
They soft retconned the entire point of the last two movies. Dinosaurs got loose and spread throughout terrestrial ecosystems, being somewhere between invasive and endemic. Photos of Triceratops herds migrating through Wyoming, Pteranodons nesting on skyscrapers, the works. And then they just... died off. No, seriously, dinosaurs - which colonized everything from the Arctic to the Antarctic - just couldn't handle conditions outside the modern equator. Thanks, global warming?
I think that's also pretty much what they did with the last two movies, in the sense of them trying to execute as little as possible on the premise of Dinosaurs Everywhere(tm), probably because it's not conducive to the kind of plot they want to tell, or it would be too high budget, or it would make the dinosaurs seem boring and not special anymore. So what they do is put out trailers that show prominently Dinosaurs Everywhere(tm), put it in opening or closing scenes, and then quickly in the movie find an excuse why yes, there's Dinosaurs Everywhere(tm) but not really dinosaurs everywhere and the trailer feels like a bait and switch.
I posted a while back about how practicing driving was tiring to me in a way few activities are. I'm happy to report that I now have my license and a car. Even though I live in the city so parking is less convenient, just feeling of being able to go anywhere without having to check public transport is very freeing.
The reason I only bothered so late in life is that I have been living in the city for all my adult life so it was never a necessity, and my province imposes taking expensive classes (around a 1000$) for one year before you're able to get your license, so the cost and delay killed my motivation to get it for recreational purposes. But now I'm thinking to move out of the city so having a license is a prerequisite.
It's still tiring and stressful to me in the kind of road environment I have practiced less in (highways, on-ramps, service roads) but busy city roads are getting to be second nature now.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
I can imagine some recalls are just about adding a redundant safety feature to address perception of a weakness even if the existing safety features already work perfectly. While this is unpleasant for engineer brains, it can be necessary as typically marketing requirements trump engineering purity.
My understanding was that gooning is reserved for any particularly degenerate and indulgent forms of masturbation. Like when I think of a gooner, I think of someone for whom cranking it while looking at porn sitting in front of his computer doesn't work anymore, he needs to be watching 10 videos at once for hours on a multiscreen setup laying down in a reclining chair while vaping weed.
Ultimately, the best rampart against this kind of violence is making sure it's counter-productive. I don't care if that requires canonizing a man who didn't necessarily deserve it to make it clear that if you kill a peaceful activist, you risk permanently losing the normies and moderates from your side.
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