samiam
25d ago
I think Republicans can do well on the midterms. I think the most important thing is to repeal the tariffs so that prices are not as high for household goods; while I’m mostly apolitical in real life, one friend of mine who is fairly conservative doesn’t like the tariffs at all.
samiam
25d ago
Here is a reply to that, which I will just copypaste:
https://x.com/DavidGiglioCA/status/1996246101137973315
Green won by 20+ points in 2022 without Trump on the ballot and by 20+ points in 2024.
Also, Masha Blackburn is not a “very popular” Republican.
I think the best apples-to-apples comparison is how the red vs. blue tribe did in previous versions of the same election (i.e. the election for the congressional seat), where, ever since redrawing the lines for the district in 2022, have been 22% blowouts (before redrawing the lines, they were 40+ point blowouts; a Democrat hasn’t won this seat since 1980). A 9% margin for the congressional seat hasn’t been seen this century.
But, let’s look at that tweet. The tweet the parent post contains claims Republicans only won this district (for the senate election) by 9% in 2018. While the actual tweet uses AI slop and could be a hallucination, I will assume the figure is correct[1], and that recent blue candidates for the district were so weak they were unvotable. If so, the 9% margin in 2018 is consistent with the Democrats winning 41 seats in the House that year.
Yes, Republicans won this one. But they didn’t have a good night; if I were a Republican strategist, I would figure out how to message midterm voters so that we don’t get another Democrat blowout like we did in 2018. Tough on crime, religious faith, and most importantly, making the economy as strong as possible would be good ideas. My boots on the ground experience is that, while I don’t talk about politics much, the times I bring it up, people are upset the tariffs are jacking up prices.
[1] Before putting this figure in my blog, I would bring out my calculator and look at the 2018 Senate results county by county to verify the AI generated response is correct.
Last night, we had an election for who would represent Tennessee’s 7th congressional district at the federal level. This election was for a seat in the House of Representatives.
It was a very closely watched election because it is a bellwether of just how satisfied voters are with the right-wing politicians currently in power.
While Virginia and New York were very successful for Democrats (the left-wing), with someone who has voiced support for defunding the police (yes, he apologized for this later) winning the New York mayoral race.
While these were notable victories for Democrats in 2025, both happened in very blue states: Virginia last voted a Republican for president in 2004 and we have to go all the way back to 1984 to find New York voting for a Republican. One could make the argument that these victories mainly show greater polarization in today’s social-media driven political climate, with blue voters voting more blue. Perhaps red voters will vote more red come the midterms next year.
Or maybe not.
Tennessee’s 7th congressional district is very red; the last two congressional elections have been 60-38% blowouts, with the blue (Democrat) candidate losing by 22 points. So, if the polarization theory is true, we would expect the blue candidate to lose by even more points, perhaps having a 65-33% blowout.
That’s not what happened.
While Matt Van Epps did win, it was not a blowout. It was a 54-45% victory, with him leading only by 9 points in a district where Republicans have previously won by over 20 points. At one point, there was even a blue mirage, where the blue candidate was actually leading Van Epps by over five points.
The Democrat’s (i.e. blue) candidate, one Behn, is no blue dog moderate. She has chased ICE agents, filming confrontations with them.
Indeed, one very left-leaning site says that this looks really bad for Republicans, and with good reason: A nationwide 15-point move leftward would be a bloodbath for Republicans in the midterms next year.
Based on the elections we have had this year, it looks like a blue tide is rising after Trump’s victory in 2024.
samiam
1mo ago
My quick thought: I don’t think it’s appropriate to have polarizing political views in a work setting, unless the work environment is one with an obvious political agenda. The person who brings up falsehoods about Kyle Rittenhouse was the one who was bringing up an inappropriate topic of conversation here. Saying stuff like that at work is asking for a fight.
Keep in mind that a lot of people, particularly on the right, supported Rittenhouse’s actions, and reading his Wikipedia entry I tend to agree that Rittenhouse was not starting trouble, and was only defending himself.
samiam
2mo ago
“the reported number of partners female claim to have compared to men is lower, but we can normalize for that: around 30% of the men have 70% of the reported female sexual partners, and, likewise, around 30% of the women have 70% of the reported male sexual partners”
As long as there is correlation between the reported number of partners and actual number of partners, there is a pattern that there are about as many promiscuous women as promiscuous men. For 80/20 to be true, we would see just under 80% of men with low partner count and 20% of men with high partner count, but that’s not the pattern we see. 20% or so are virgins, about 50-60% have a handful of lifetime partners, and about 20-30% have a lot of partners. This is true for both women and men.
samiam
2mo ago
The argument that people are actually engaging in a certain behavior, but lie when asked about it, is the kind of argument which quickly leads to conspiracy theories. Sure, they could all be lying, but that’s an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
samiam
2mo ago
For the “cock carousel” theory to hold water, we would see a pattern of a large number of male virgins and/or men with only 1-2 partners, and a small number of males with a lot of sex partners. We would see women with a more even distribution of sex partners.
That’s not what we see: We see about the same number of male and female virgins, about 60% of the population of men and women have around 3-10 lifetime partners, and about 20 to 30% of both men and women have a lot of sexual partners (the reported number of partners female claim to have compared to men is lower, but we can normalize for that: around 30% of the men have 70% of the reported female sexual partners, and, likewise, around 30% of the women have 70% of the reported male sexual partners).
samiam
2mo ago
The mistake David Buss made in the 1990s to 2000s, when he was making a version of the “Alpha Fux Beta Bux” argument (to wit, Buss argued that women frequently cheat on their “beta provider” husbands to have children with “alpha bad boy” men which their husbands pay for) is that genetic testing, at the time, showed a high cuckoldry rate.
More recent and extensive genetic testing has contradicted that notion, showing only a 1-2% cuckoldry rate: Over 98% of the time, a wife’s child is fathered by her husband.
samiam
2mo ago
no one's claiming that the women are having children with the alphas
Actually, that is a claim made by “Red Pill” men and has been falsified. One post claims that “Woman’s Nature is to Cheat, Protect Yourself [...] This is the basic meaning of ‘alpha fux beta bux’ and it’s true” (original TRP post).
Going back to the 80/20 argument, it looks like only about 20 to 30% of women are promiscuous, and, likewise, only about 20% to 30% of men are promiscuous, and the most likely explanation is that those 20 to 30% of promiscuous men and women are mainly having sex with each other. So that contradicts the notion of women being generally promiscuous in their 20s and “settling down” in their 30s.
South Korea, Japan, and, yes, Poland have a serious fertility crisis right now. Maybe these women want to be with “chad”,[1] but those women contributing to Poland’s fertility crisis sure seem to complain when men from other countries, i.e. “Passport Bros” come to Poland and get together with them
[1] I have posted on my blog that the notion that 20% of the men are having sex with 80% of the women is not true
the ability to share gossip efficiently about businesses using sites like Yelp is net positive for humanity
Interesting you bring up Yelp. Another posted has already addressed that someone’s personal life is a very different kettle of fish than a business which is open to the public.
But, besides that, there are some key differences between Yelp and the Tea app:
- Yelp makes its reviews public. The Tea app kept its “reviews” of men private, only allowing women to use the app.
- Yelp allows business owners to respond to negative reviews. The Tea app does not allow men on the app at all, much less let them share their side of the story when someone gives them a “negative review”.
- Yelp will disable posting about a business and remove reviews should a given business go viral on social media. The Tea app has no such protections.
samiam
2mo ago
The Tea app is/was only available in the US (quote: “the US-based Tea Dating Advice app, which is only available in America”). While still available on Android, removing it from the Apple store greatly reduces its spread because of network effects.
It looks like the Tea app has been pulled from the Apple store. The linked article has a strong bias supporting the existance of this app, but was it a good idea to have this app?
This app is/was, if you ask someone in the blue tribe about it, a safety app to keep women safe. If you ask someone in the red tribe about the app, they will say that men were not allowed to use the app, that the app was used to spread slander about men which the men were not allowed to see, much less respond to (often times female friends of a guy being slandered would let him know what’s going on).
As a lot of readers here probably know, earlier this summer, pictures of some Tea app users were leaked online causing those pictures to be widely shared, including in a torrent file. Someone even briefly had a web app up where people could rate pictures of Tea app users. The blue tribe thought it was a violation of privacy to do that; the red tribe responded by saying that the entire purpose of the Tea app was to violate the privacy of men.
The app was only available in the US; while it was arguably legal there, they didn’t even try to make it available in Europe, where it probably would not had been legal because Europe has much stronger data privacy laws than the US.
For myself, having had a close friend who was slandered in a similar Facebook group, I can not be neutral about this app being pulled from the Apple store: It harmed a lot of men, innocent men in many cases, and the world, in my opinion, is a better place when we don’t let men be slandered this way.
samiam
2mo ago
Where there is a tremendous correlation between toxic cancel culture and the feminization of universities, correlation is not necessarily causation. The toxic cancel culture we are seeing could be caused by other factors, such as people interacting online more and in person less: I have observed that getting behind a screen makes people ruder and less pleasant.
Toxic cancel culture is one response to what I call the “troll bait” issue: Certain ideas, which are unpopular with mainstream society, get a certain loud minority all worked up. For example, Super Audio CDs had a small but fanatic userbase who were convinced conventional CDs sounded harsh and digital, but didn’t have any real scientific evidence to back up their assertions. The correct response to bad troll bait ideas is not to shame people for having opinions we don’t like, but to present more facts showing that they are wrong (this is how we kept the SACD article under control, since the evidence showed that people can not distinguish CD quality audio from a wire).
Fellow former liberal here. I also would had been offended by those chats 10 or 15 years ago. These days, I just shrug. When the left wing stopped being about tolerance and acceptance and started being about finding a new group of people to hate (e.g. how the illiberal left hates men who date in other countries[1]) I became a lot more jaded, cynical, and apolitical.
[1] I have a lot of real world female platonic friends, and they all universally support me living in another country and dating women there. The only people in the real world who at all opposed me dating in another country are both men: One straight man and one gay man.
samiam
2mo ago
Without reading the article, a line from the original Star Trek comes to mind:
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
The article comes off as a typical left-wing shaming Gish gallop:
- It quotes a bunch of things said by alleged right wing people out of context
- It does not examine the context of the quote nor why the writer said the quote, but immediately assumes the worst.
- It makes a long list of these quotes, all of which are done out of context
Without letting other people see the source of these quotes, we are left guessing. And, quite frankly, to give just one example, the mainstream left-wing press was really dishonest when quoting RMS out of context to shame him, either quoting things he hasn’t believed for years to decades, misrepresenting jokes others made about him as something he said or did, quoted something out of context to imply something he never endorsed nor said, etc.
Until we get full context, we can not damn anyone. And we haven’t gotten that context to examine the facts for ourselves.
samiam
2mo ago
The thing about changing how US currency works is that most people have a really hard time getting used to new coins and bills. We tried to have a $2 bill but many people just couldn’t adjust to the new type of bill and it didn’t really catch on. Ditto with multiple attempts to have a $1 coin.
It’s almost as if a large part of our population learns how coins and bills work at a young age, and that knowledge becomes fossilized and doesn’t change.
I don’t think Reddit is really perceived as being “neutral” any more. It never had the mainstream traction Twitter did, and my general perception of Reddit is that it was always a fringe platform, probably less popular than, say Discord. In my real world social circle, only one person uses Reddit, and the general consensus is that our Reddit user is a bit of a loose cannon.
Reddit is so inaccurate, I would get more fair and balanced reporting at DailyKos (another far left progressive site), and I really don’t think anyone in the real world has the same respect for Reddit that they have had for Twitter. Wikipedia, of course, doesn’t consider Reddit reliable.
As an aside, I have a lot of respect for Jesse Singal because he defended Alcoholics Anonymous in an era when the left wing media was using questionable (and ultimately false) science to claim AA didn’t work. Waffles indeed.
samiam
2mo ago
You linked to politics, politics, unfiltered news, and bluesky skeets
The particular subreddits where these lies were spread do not matter because every single one of these stories made the front page of Reddit
Since you asked for a source for when the right dropped the ball with regard to objective facts, back in 2012 George R.R. Martin commented about red tribe voter suppression. In response, someone in the red tribe claimed that “the Obama administrations lawsuit in Ohio is meant to prevent active duty servicemen from being allowed to vote early”. The right wasn’t even being told the same story the left was.
samiam
2mo ago
It would seem that this weekend, there was a fire at the house of one Diane Goodstein, a judge who Trump does not like. Reddit being Reddit, they immediately assumed the fire was arson and accused the right wing of violence; the linked story made the front page of Reddit. However, the investigation so far shows no evidence of arson: “At this time, there is no evidence to indicate the fire was intentionally set. SLED agents have preliminarily found there is no evidence to support a pre-fire explosion.
Point being, the radical left (i.e. Reddit) will say lie after lie after lie how how Charlie Kirk’s killer couldn’t have possibly done it because of his left-wing beliefs, even though the evidence overwhelmingly points that way, then they will turn around and accuse the right of right wing violence without any real evidence to back up their claims.
The truth matters. Objective fact matters. I have decried it when the radical right was telling lies, and will decry it as long as the radical left tells themselves lies.
On virtually every CW hot topic, he vehemently argued for his side, using many of the techniques which make the CW so toxic. That was the reason why a large part of the left demonized him.
I question how contentious and controversial and combative Charlie Kirk really was with culture war (CW) topics. Yes, the illiberal left says he’s this horrible contentious person, but I don’t believe them. Let me explain why.
A few years ago, Richard M. Stallman (RMS) was dragged through the mud by the illiberal left. They came up with an entire Gish Gallop litany of reasons why he was a horrible person; since he did not believe all the doctrines of their belief system, they painted him a heretic.
People looked at every claim that was made against RMS and found them to be false misrepresentations. The illiberal left flat out lied when attacking RMS
Now, I haven’t looked at every single claim made against Charlie Kirk made in these Gish Gallops of attacks against him, so I will look at just one claim used to attack him: The claim that he advocated stoning gays.
This claim was made out of content; Charlie Kirk was making a rebuttal to the claim that “Love your neighbor” (Luke 10:27) means we must not consider gay pride marches sinful. He himself was not saying gay people should be stoned to death. This claim is so inaccurate, Stephen King apologized for making it
Point being, I know the illiberal left lied when they went after RMS. Based on the one claim I have taken the time to investigate, they seem to be lying again when going after Charlie Kirk.
My personal impression of Kirk is that he was a kind and caring person even when debating someone he strongly disagrees with. In this five minute video which I just linked to, he patiently listens to a pornography actress describing her open relationship and sexual lifestyle, making a empathetic comment that it sounds like she doesn’t have a good relationship with her father.
For some people, there is no objective truth, there are no facts. Particularly on Reddit, facts are distorted to promote a narrative.
They did the same with Tyler Robinson (Charlie Kirk’s murderer). He did it because he was right wing, or maybe it’s because he wasn’t in a leftist organization, never mind that the Reddit folk feel Kirk should had died.
On Reddit, the truth doesn’t matter. It’s the narrative that matters, and if the narrative contradict itself, well your average Reddit poster is too drawn by their extreme hateful left-wing narrative to let facts get in the way.
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