pigeonburger
1d ago
Chotiner is the New Yorker’s resident assassin. Merely being asked to sit down with him is a sign that someone wants to see you politically gutted.
Which honestly was predictable. Right now, for Democrats associated with the Biden administration, the smart move is laying low, not launching books. The party is still looking for excuses for its 2024 performance and its moribundity going into the 2026 midterm season. Peeking your head out, like Harris and now Jean-Pierre did, is just asking to be thrown under the bus.
pigeonburger
2d ago
Even given the collapse in journalism, wouldn't you expect someone pushing that thesis to collect the most persuasive cases, not the most ambiguous?
I guess that speaks to either the weakness of the case or the incompetence of the journalist that these are the best cases he could come up with.
Then we get to the Reno shootout. Woman decides to intervene in some quarrel between a man and a woman. Man starts yelling at woman. Husband of woman intervenes. Man goes back to truck, gets gun, shoots husband. No, this wasn't what was deemed justified -- things continue. Woman pulls out her gun, shoots man. Man shoots woman (and some bystander) too. Then another bystander fatally shoots the man, thinking he's going to kill the woman. The dead man turned out to boozed up, coked up, and high on pot too. If the WSJ writer had his way, presumably the bystander who killed him would be imprisoned for it. Or not shot him and maybe the woman dies instead. How would that improve things?
Its presence in the article is clearly because the journalists needed more meat to try and push his point that stand-your-ground laws are bad, but he knows the facts aren't aligning with that so he just says it's an example of how guns and alcool don't mix.
But then, the story has this important tidbit:
Instead, Wilson retrieved a handgun from his truck
So it's not like the guy who turned this incident deadly had a snap lapse in judgement and the presence of the gun is what turned a likely fistfight into a shootout. The gun was not present, he had to go get it, which means we're dealing with an asshole whose brain was so fried he had murderous intent for several seconds to minutes.
Also
Instead, Wilson retrieved a handgun from his truck and shot Reichert’s husband at arm’s-length.
So why are we focusing on the gun here? He could have just as well stabbed him with a knife, with a broken bottle, concussed him with a baseball bat or tire iron, etc... Would it have been less deadly then? I'm not sure at all; what if the fact he wasn't using a gun made Reichert and the bystander less willing to pull out a gun in self-defense out of fear they'll be convicted of homicide? Would they have been able to stop Wilson before he murdered Reichert and her husband? We don't know and can't know.
pigeonburger
2d ago
Here, online gambling gets away with advertising on TV (which they are not allowed to do) using the stupidest loophole: they advertise a different website (onlinecasino.net) where you can only play with pretend money for free. But if you go to the obvious website (onlinecasino.com) then of course you get into real gambling.
pigeonburger
2d ago
Prime example of the worst argument in the world (non-central fallacy).
When someone says:
It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it.
They imply murder, not very justified self-defence.
The article is absolutely rife with that kind of manipulative but technically accurate language. Just under the title
legally sanctioned homicides
Technically true, but has the connotation that it's some "The Purge" shit that's going on.
so-called stand-your-ground laws
They are indeed so called, but the phrasing implies that it's pretense.
The laws are written to protect those who tell authorities they feared for their life.
This one is not even technically accurate: the laws are written to protect innocents who defend themselves. That they incentivize less than innocent people to claim they feared for their life is not the reason they were written. Unless the writer can prove otherwise.
pigeonburger
2d ago
One of the nice things of the technology is that if things get too crowded or expensive on the base chain, you can settle multiple transactions on another smaller and less expensive blockchain and only use the base chain to settle the start and end state of those transactions. From what I understand that's how the Lightning Network works for Bitcoin (I'm more familiar with the Ethereum ecosystem).
Independently of whether women hypergamy should be celebrated or socially repressed and shamed, a lot of the obsession you see in the crowd that say they want nothing but a virgin tradwife has very clear parallels with other sexual fixations. If it was really just about worrying about how it affects their chance at a good relationship, they could just, you know, get to know a woman' personality before committing, for sure a better indicator of compatibility and relationship potential than any reading the tea leaves in her sexual past. But the point is that a lot of the "trad or bust" crowd really have a purity fetish, with exactly all the same implications that the word 'fetish' has in porn.
On one hand, it seems trivially fine that private spaces where only a subset of people are allowed should exist, and while I'm sympathetic to the privacy argument, it could have been resolved with a (somewhat purposedly) cumbersome and opaque process that would be able to split between genuine interest in maintaining privacy and mere curiosity.
But the west as a whole has decided that men-only clubs are not ok, so I don't see a principled argument that would make
The first ever girls-only space
okay.
The difference is that after getting his opinions from (relevant) people on the left, someone went and did shoot all (relevant) Charlie Kirks. And the reaction was mostly (with notable and appreciated exceptions) not a sobering realization of the impact of their words. To compare, no one (relevant) installed, attempted to install or even proposed installing a modern version of Hitler.
That should inform as to which was only banter and which was not.
/* (using relevant here to exclude non-central, lizardman constant people on both sides)
pigeonburger
16d ago
It's funny because Politico would have a stronger article if they did not fixate on this obvious joke mentioning Hitler, some of the edgelord racist stuff would have the potential to shock prudish normies or at least create enough of a problem for the right that it would have to address as if the public and the private are not different spheres of communication, but the Hitler quote Politico (and magicalkittycat) highlight as if it was the worst of it is so obviously said in jest that it's easier to dismiss the rest.
pigeonburger
16d ago
"I love Hitler" seems about as literal Nazi as possible. If that is not "proof of Bad Nazi" to you, what is?
Did you read the context?
AD: He did say “My delegates I bring will vote for the most right wing person”
PG: Great. I love Hitler
Do you think that last line, if this was written with acting cues as in script, would be:
PG *with stars in his eyes at the thought of a Fourth Reich* : Great. I love Hitler!
or
PG *deadpan* : Great. I love Hitler.
or
PG *sarcastically* : Great. I love Hitler
is neonazism, support of slavery, and unabashed bigotry such as this actually common among young conservatives as Hanania and the group chat themselves seem to believe?
See, this is the problem with the question. Someone asked recently about what the building consensus rule here meant, and I think this is a stellar example: it presumes that what you're referring to is clearly "neonazism, support of slavery and unabashed bigotry", where someone not highly motivated to see it as more will just see joking and edgelording. Tasteless, yes, and ill-advised in a context that had the possibility of being leaked, but looking at the quotes in the articles I see nothing that reads to me like neonazism or support of slavery, just laconic jokes. As for the bigotry, there's a better case there (though nowhere near a slam dunk) but at this point the right has run out of shits to give about following the left's rules for what they're allowed to notice and think about groups of people. Or at least joke about.
pigeonburger
17d ago
He probably wouldn't like it because his era was obsessed with industrialization, yeah, but that doesn't mean that the people doing it are not transplanting his ideas from the factory to the movie studio.
pigeonburger
19d ago
People can point to a consensus that already exists, and no one is going to object, but building a consensus is smuggling your controversial opinions in the shared, uncontroversial context of a post hoping they will evade scrutiny. Well executed it's a great propaganda tool, but in a forum where people are expected to lay out their opinions clearly for debate, it's dishonest and counterproductive, as if someone spots the smuggled opinion and cares to debate it honestly, they will need to have you unwind that argument back to that assumption, which wastes everyone's time. It also, as Primaprimaprima mentions, feels very hostile and unwelcoming when you have it done to you.
pigeonburger
21d ago
But profits go up, share holders are happy, so every year it continues. At least on paper. It's almost impossible for me to reckon that this can continue forever. That they aren't eating their seed corn in some fundamental way. That at some point the tech debt they continually accumulate won't cause the Microsoft ecosystem to be such a risk to run, that there is an institutional push to abandon it.
The hard part, though, is that if that is true, if you know for certain that they are eating their seed corn, then my friend you have tremendous alpha and should put all your money betting on Microsoft going belly up.
These risks are not separate from the valuation, they are priced in. And while I also really, really dislike the direction Microsoft has taken, they are making a killing on cloud licenses, especially Office 365. Pretty much every company I work with and for has to pay a monthly per employee tax to Microsoft.
pigeonburger
21d ago
I kind of feel like you're someone entering a cult, eyes wide open, saying "Sure, I see their game, but it won't work on me," even as the bait is perfectly obvious. But there are worse cults to fall in with, I guess.
Is it that, or "Sure, I see their game, and honestly? I wanna be taken in. It's mostly upside compared the status quo."
pigeonburger
21d ago
Yeah, but if you were to have to explain to someone why CEOs compete for 7-8 digit salaries while "normal people" compete for 5-6 digit salaries, even if you accounted for time spent in education and risk taken, it would be hard to make it seem fair. And if you told them that in the end, everyone ends up with more if they just shut up about fairness and let the market do its thing, it'll be hard to convince them it's not self-interested rich capitalist propaganda (or bootlicking), because, again, of how unfair it seems.
This happens because labor theory of value is rather instinctive, as it appeals to our innate sense of fairness, even if it's wrong and inefficient. In which, of course, there is no realistic way a CEO could be doing thousands of times the amount of labor that his subordinates do, so there is no fair way in which they should be taking home thousands of times the pay as these subordinates.
Once people realize that there is no fair objective way of pricing goods and services, including labor, then they can understand why they should accept the inequalities created by a market.
*EDIT : Of course, that matters for mistake theorists. Conflict theorists that do know better than to believe in labor theory of value will still gladly invoke it to agitate against their opponents.
pigeonburger
21d ago
It's very rare that I would ever say that, but the meth user seems to have been more than reasonable there.
pigeonburger
22d ago
I'd worry they can't meme well since "Gotta catch 'em all" doesn't really work for them.
pigeonburger
23d ago
That's my recollection as well, that everyone was playing along including myself. It never felt like my parents were betraying my trust, but more like this was one thing that was an exception and it was okay to playfully lie about. And I can see how that can be a prosocial thing to teach kids. Of course, there might also be parents that go too far, insist too much on the reality of it all without enough winking, and actually cross the line into betraying their children' trust.
if this alleged mistreatment of the dog is what gets him cancelled, it's pretty revealing what certain people's priorities actually are
I don't think it's so much a question of priorities. The people that Hassan mistreats, he would argue (and his audience would agree) are evil people that deserve it. And for that matter, he could be right; I don't know enough about it to say for those people, but I do believe some people are evil and do deserve bad treatment.
Dogs though, I'm not convinced at all are capable of evil. They either act according to their natural instincts, or they act how they've been trained. Thus I find mistreating a dog is a worse act of villainy against an innocent than mistreating a person that you believe is evil.
pigeonburger
23d ago
I don't know personally what he did, but I know that I've never seen a dog yelp in response to anything except pain or the expectation of incoming pain if it has been conditioned into them, neither is a good look for Hasan.
pigeonburger
23d ago
It doesn't look good man.
Would it not look good if it were not in the context of the media breathlessly describing them as stormtroopers for months? We're talking about counter-factual world we can't really observe here, but purely on its own, for me, masked guys blowing up doors to the Pokemon soundtrack doesn't really raise an eyebrow. It's not like they're committing atrocities, or even just filming themselves doing a bit of the ol' unnecessary police brutality and laughing about it, that'd be different.
Both these movies are scary because they understand the true nature of horror, what really scares us: powerlessness. Not monsters, danger, pain, violence, death. These are all present in definitely not scary action movies. The extent to which these are scary in horror movies, is the extent to which the characters the viewers identify as are powerless against them. The Exorcist, like Rosemary's Baby, goes straight for the root, not incidentally. The former forces us to confront the horror of a parent being unable to help their child with an ailment. Rosemary's Baby forces us to confront a woman losing all of her social power and agency as she's railroaded into a parental role.
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