pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
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User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Are they going to get the immigration crackdown?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Because the bureaucrats who implement the statutes can not be trusted to do so.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.
This is completely missing the point. Most people who are not academics do not live in a world of intellectual imagination, they live in a world full of practical concerns, and these questions need to be boiled down into yes/no policies, procedures, and judgment calls. When a teenager with a penis demands to use the girls locker room, you cannot handwave the issue and appeal to imagination! Do Democrats understand that they are running for control of the government, and not the English studies department?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
It would be a highly costly victory for the other side, though: having to, in public, defend the veracity of very unpopular and uniquely broad pardons by refusing to cooperate and invoking privilege.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
There's an app for Android called Physics Toolbox that basically allows you to directly read and plot data from all the phone's many sensors. It effectively makes the phone into a tricorder and you can gather information about acceleration, angular velocity, magnetic bearing, GPS position, temperature, pressure, ambient light, noise levels, audio spectral analysis, magnetic field vectors, all kinds of fun stuff.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Mainly because crime is a local issue, not a federal one, and nearly every metro area is firmly under local single-party rule.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
My metaphor was much more literal than that. The corn of a society is its people. If your society has values that cause it to not reproduce itself, as ours does, it will simply cease to exist. Young people alive now will, if things don't change, see their societies wither to failure within their lifetimes. That seems to me to be an unambiguous lack of success. That it will leave a beautiful corpse is cold comfort.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
If eating the seed corn causes starvation, why is my belly full?
pusher_robot
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4mo ago
Even granting that in this specific case the subject in question is not broadly anti-American, the principle being proposed - that permanent residents cannot have their status revoked for any free speech activity, even including explicit subversion and undermining of our own policy - is so broad as to make vetting earlier in the process much more important.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
These foundational ideas are good as far as they go, but I think makes it clear the point the girl was getting at: these are the minimum basic requirements to be an American. Is there nothing more? Is that all there is? Sam might say, no there is nothing more. Everything else is an illusion or not genuinely American, but I think this is (a) profoundly unsatisfying for a lot of people and (b) not historically genuine. What are the aspirational aspects of being an American? I can think of a few things that I thing makes someone a good American:
- Industriousness and/or self-reliance
- Charity and respect for strangers
- Weak regard for social class
- Civic nationalism
I don't think there's anything the slightest bit untoward about desiring to live in an America with more people who share those values and fewer people who wreck the commons, bugger their neighbors, and exhibit antisocial behavior. Yes, it's possible to tolerate those who don't share these values, and it's better to grant dispensation than engage tyranny to force an outcome. But it is unpleasant and it would surely create a more desirable society if people would, through the power of assimilation and persuasion, voluntarily adopt such values. I'm baffled and increasingly despondent that people find this to be a totally unreasonable imposition, and demand that instead Americans give up these values to accommodate people who don't share them and don't feel inclined to change.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
If so the only logical response would be to dramatically increase the scrutiny applied to granting of permanent resident status. It is unacceptable that we would be required to import people who seek to destroy us.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Charitably, Walsh must be communicating something other than the plain meaning of his words. In this case, he must mean "I don't think the media is covering this enough", or "the media isn't being adequately sympathetic to Tesla".
They are "covering" it in the sense of reporting that it is happening , but not in the same way they would cover it if there was an opposite political valence, e.g. haranguing political leaders to demand accountability or issue groveling condemnatiions, and heavily insinuating wider responsibility to political fellow travelers.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
This is the most important point. You can't appeal to a "Rules-based order" by handwaving the rules, which explicitly do not guarantee Ukraine's territory against Russian perfidy.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Once it becomes clear that this is a long war, and that support for Ukraine is going to start coming out of the budget rather than existing idle resources, the goal is to maintain a leading role while dumping the economic cost on Europe. So say, first quietly and then loudly, that the US is happy to continue helping Ukraine, but after some reasonable period of time (3-6 months) they are not going to do so for free. Then follow through - based on the above analysis the Europeans will grumble, but pay up. The US should chip in enough to retain a seat at the table - say 10-20% of the cost.
This is the part that seems like the lynchpin to me. Suppose that the Europeans reasonably believe, as they have for 50 years now, that they can call America's bluff here and either not pony up, or only pony up for things that are not useful to the war effort like expanded benefits for servicemembers? Are we willing to back that up by writing off Europe? Is Europe able to hold us hostage by putting a knife to their own throats?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
What use do they have for citizenship?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
That is the easily foreseeable outcome of a security guarantee. Trump is 100% correct not to offer this.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
You cannot use commercial reactor fuel for weapons (except some kind of dirty bomb). It would be easier to make weapons material from scratch.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
You're just dealing with a catastrophic loss of trust, driven by I think mostly Covid and woke ideological excess. That puts this stuff in the same category as public restrooms and park benches: it sure was nice when we lived in a society where we could have these things without them being abused and ruined for everyone.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Winding back a bit to option A, to put things into perspective, what we’re presently doing is pretty much what led to WW2. Chamberlain and the rest of the west were in a stance of appeasement. By not actually fighting evil, we let it grow. Just as appeasement emboldened Hitler to push further, letting Russia keep gains now might signal to Putin—and others—that aggression pays.
On the other hand, forming a complicated web of alliances, security guarantees, and geopolitical networks is somewhat the thing that escalated into WWI. It's worth considering that making security guarantees allows the opponent to decide when to trigger a large scale conflict.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Of course, there are some on the American right who would be only too happy to dismantle the post-WW2 alliance system in favour of a more narrowly transactional approach, even at the cost of global influence and leadership.
What "influence and leadership" does the U.S. have that is not transactional already? EU seems to believe U.S. "leadership" consists of them making decisions and us paying for it. Our "influence" in most other countries consists mainly of bribery in the form of foreign aid and trade concessions. This is all transactional already! What soft power we do have comes from cultural output completely independent of and irrelevant to our foreign policy establishment, and that has all gone to absolute shit anyways.
From my perspective it seems like we're the Sugar Daddy who is promised that we're really, truly, loved and fun to be with, so long as the wallet comes out. They'll say nice(ish) things about us exactly as long the checks keep flowing. One second later, we're monsters who are killing the entire world.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Trump is a “make it so” kind of guy.
You mean Jean-Luc Picard? I don't know, I think if Trump was a starship captain he would be Jellico. "Get it done."
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
I would distinguish activities that have a tangible, elevated risk of death from ones that have a risk of death high enough that the odds of dying in repeated acts over time approaches 1. Riding a motorcycle or smoking is risky, but someone who does those things, even their whole life, is not likely to die from them even though they might. Consuming recreational doses of street narcotics is something that, if you do it frequenlty enough, is very likely to kill you sooner or later.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
Congress can delegate their power to subordinate positions. Why can't the President?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4mo ago
If you choose to repeatedly engage in an activity that you know has a high risk of death, that's just suicide with plausible deniability. I don't consider someone who loses a game of Russian roulette to have suffered a "fatal accident".
Here's a compromise: a huge operational shelter, complete with three hots and a cot, and you can stay as long as you want and even get basic medical services. You can even camp on the outside where no rules are enforced. The only catch: it's in the middle of nowhere. If you're arrested for aggressive vagrancy in a metro area and can't prove you have a residence or employment, you are put on a bus and sent to the
campshelter. You are not required to stay, but the state will not give you a free ride out.More options
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