sun_the_second
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User ID: 2725
sun_the_second
1yr ago
I would like, as an aside, to commend how music and tone does add and potentially subvert the "raw" meaning of the words. Consider Eurydice's rendition of Farewell in the video game Hades versus Orpheus' rendition of it. (I'm on the phone, so find it on youtube yourself).
sun_the_second
1yr ago
If you want to argue that any imaginable president would have handled the situation in exactly the same way, you have to explain why other countries’ COVID responses varied so significantly.
I'm sure you are aware that there are many other people in the government and adjacent to it besides the president. People that don't change much between term changes in USA, but are completely different in other countries. You're also aware that other countries operate under different arrangements of those people and different laws that take various lengths of time to change, when they can be changed at all.
You know all this, so why not skip to the point and explain why you believe the president has more influence on the covid response than all the rest of that?
sun_the_second
1yr ago
I don't even know what a honky is.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
The hardest-hitting insults are the ones that are technically (and obviously) correct but add a negative valence to it. They stick. So no, I wouldn't be particularly offended if I was called retarded, I'm nowhere close to sub-90 IQ and don't look like it either. It's like when back in childhood some kid called me a fatso (I've never been above regular BMI). I was just confused and wondering if that kid couldn't see very well.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
I observe a 100% correlation between those who call someone a tranny (besides themselves in jest) and those who imply something bad about that person and about them being trans.
You might as well try to argue that "retarded" doesn't imply anything bad because arrested intelligence isn't necessarily bad.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
Is there a plan for putting that wish into reality that you're not sharing? If not, I fail to see the use of stating the 'should's in this case. The question was if you really think putting elites that are ruthless in charge of society is good for us.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
They certainly don't seem to feel rich today, what with the common complaints about rent and healthcare and being unable to support a family on a single income anymore.
Perhaps single income only felt rich before because men were effectively earning their wife's share in the market and their wife felt rich as long as her husband was, resulting in some kind of positive-sum richness feeling?
sun_the_second
1yr ago
When new words become reliable markers of a low-value post, they ought to get regarded as such.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
They believe it though. The illusion of censorship is that hiding something makes it disappear, like a hand in front of a baby.
It is impossible to prevent people from writing an uncharitable post against their ideological opponents by forbidding them from calling them faggots (or insert any other snarl word). But I do believe it introduces significant friction and reduces the amount of such posts.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
Do you expect "the Science crowd" (i.e. the majority of Westerners) to not believe aliens exist even if they literally Show Us The Aliens?
sun_the_second
1yr ago
You lost rather bigger piece of credibility with people whose support you desperately need.
I have my doubts that Ukraine would be getting Red Tribe's support any time soon with or without imprisoning their activists who advocated against them.
Was "tranny" ever a neutral way to call a transsexual (compare and contrast, btw)/transgender person, like "cripple" was for people with disabilities?
My standards are fairly simple I think - if it isn't a word my grandma would have used when trying to be polite, it is not acceptable for a polite discussion. This allows words like "colored" or "cripple", but not "nigger", "tranny" or "faggot".
sun_the_second
1yr ago
Do you think "nigger" or "tranny" are words that "people don't agree can be slurs"?
sun_the_second
1yr ago
You cannot stop people from thinking gross thoughts. Moreover, they will be using AI in the near future to generate all they could ever want, and already do, and even if your children weren't in the dataset, it is diverse enough that something close enough to your children could be generated.
Focus on preventing real harm.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
Does your ideology support the notion that it's better for billions to have lived free than -illions to have spent their lives in chains?
sun_the_second
1yr ago
I'm going to be frank: such enforcement is rare because it is completely unreasonable to expect people to metaphorically walk on eggshells within their own home. If you wish to live as if other people do not exist near you, then live apart from other people, invest into soundproofing and/or vote for building better-insulated apartment blocks.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
And yet it is not, in my case. Perhaps I am but a young grasshopper and will speak differently once I acquire mouse-related hand fatigue.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
I mean it's easier for me to scroll down than scroll left to right and back to left with my eyes. I don't get the "use ALL of my screen" demands, especially as screens only ever get bigger. Different physical widths have different purposes.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
But a single column is not always the best presentation.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
Not really, no. For a multi-column design that has several chunks of content, I want them all at the same time filling my screen. For a single-column website like an article or a book, I prefer the text filling no more than 50% of my screen so that I do not forget where the beginning of the line was by the time I've gotten to the end of it.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ is my preference. I don't care if my screen fits a lot of information when it doesn't fit into my eye focus.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
You must be having an argument with someone else, because I have no idea what half your points have to do with anything I'm saying.
What, then, were you saying when you went on about how the US "barely manages to keep its military voluntary"?
Yes, in fact they did, and this is elementary knowledge in geopolitical circles.
From the link...
In reality, the United States and NATO bear much of the responsibility for the Ukraine crisis. Through a series of misguided policies, Washington and its European allies placed Russia in an untenable situation for which war seemed, to Mr. Putin and his military staff, the only workable solution.
Speculation on what was going on in Putin's brain is "knowledge", let alone "elementary"?
You mean like the Azov Battalion that explicitly defined itself as Neo-Nazi? That one?
See, now you're looking like you're insulting me. Yes, I'm aware that the Azov Battallion exists. That does not, in fact, make "denazification" less of a figleaf. Russian state propaganda routinely uses "western nazis" as snarl words to legitimize its actions vs. the West whether the particular people in question wear the swastikas or not. You're doing the equivalent of pointing out that the stopped clock is right at one of the two moments when it does match real time.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
The only reason why there's any pretense otherwise in the US is because we've barely been able to get by staffing the military on a purely voluntary basis. If we couldn't, there would be conscription.
And why does the US go at length to keep its military purely voluntary? If conscription is cheaper, then the answer can't be just "because it can", it could free up resources by grabbing more near-free manpower.
I really don't want to seem like I'm insulting you here because I'm honestly not trying to, but are you really this dense? Even the foremost western scholars on the matter like Richard Sakwa fault the west for Russia taking drastic measures in securing its own national security interests.
As a matter of fact, I haven't read all those books by "the foremost Western scholars", no, so if that's what it takes to be dense today, I'll cop to that. I have, however, heard of a significant bias Western scholars have when it comes to determining the agency of the west in world matters. It is always either the west's mission or the west's fault. I happen to think, based on data I didn't need a hundred politological books to learn, that there ain't anything the West did that "forced Russia's hand". Russia has enough agency to have culpability in this bloodshed it covers up with figleafs of "denazification" and "restoration of historical lands", and it does have culpability as much as one can ascribe common morality to machinations of state powers. All the scholars in the world are unlikely to convince me that TPTB can't go fuck themselves.
Russia could do better than that, too. It managed with Crimea.
sun_the_second
1yr ago
The difference between what I know of how USA treats their soldiers and how Russia treats theirs is big enough that I wouldn't use the words "throw away" for both of them. This is without even going into the fact that Russia conscripts men against their will. US military recruiters might target the dumb and the hopeless, they might lie and embellish, but it's a choice.
Could justify it if "defending" meant "defending" as it did during WWII, but this? Hardly different from USA's "national interests securing" and "projecting influence". The only major difference is that USA's got oceans on both sides and Russia's only got one.
The goal of those is usually proof of work/attention given, not quality.
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