SlowBoy
2d ago
Yes! I don't want to be around bums. Regular people don't want to be around bums. I do not want nice expensive public parks to be full of smelly, unwashed, dirty, mangy bums. I don't want to walk through a park and get harassed for change. My sister doesn't feel safe in public when bums are loitering around on the street. My mother won't even bother going to the park.
It's not about being poor. Poor people are not bums.
If you can't have nice public parks, nice parks will all be private.
The park is no place to be a bum. There's nothing illegal about being a bum. But the police station is also not the place to go when you're sick.
SlowBoy
2d ago
People want clean, nice public spaces not occuppied by drug addicts, criminals, and bums. If you make it so that cities can't kick out the bums, then these nice public spaces will all become privately-owned or corporate. And public parks become de facto property of the bums.
Talk about abstractions like "status" just seems like a distraction to me. I think this is a sign of a society in decline. We can't do anything, we have to parse out all the implications of natural rights and status. Well. I feel very confident in saying that the people who designed our Constitutional system of rights would have gladly kicked some bums out of public.
SlowBoy
8d ago
I would imagine it as reversion to the mean, where most of the Kennedys regressed to mediocre politicos with no special ambitions or purpose. Denouncing Bobby and endorsing Biden is very rational if you're "normal" in many senses of that word.
SlowBoy
9d ago
I think the current map looks more like Russian Pyrrhic Victory than Ukrainian Pyrrhic Victory. With the caveat that final borders are not yet drawn.
SlowBoy
10d ago
Strelkov was important in 2014, but pretty marginal in 2022.
Strelkov started the chain of events that bubbled up to the war. It's a much bigger point: Putin didn't "just woke up" and create a war, there was already a war. It was started by other individuals, and Putin actually refused several earlier opportunities to escalate the war the way he did in 2022. The situation changed in 2022, which precipitated Russia's direct invasion. You can actually admit all of this without wanting Russia to win, or having to change any of your other opinions.
Nothing had changed in 2022 in terms of Ukraine's ability to join NATO
This is blatantly not true: The US refused to make a guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would not join NATO.
SlowBoy
10d ago
Well, last post you were supposing Putin's peace terms were the end of the Ukrainian ethnicity, now you're falling back on asserting that we don't really know what was in them. Which isn't entirely true: according to all reports the deal included total Ukrainian neutrality. And we have some of Russia's most recent peace terms, which are stronger now that they've conquered territory: they aren't as you've feared.
SlowBoy
10d ago
Definitely. But in this case, China is exporting arms to Russia, which it does not really export to the West. I wouldn't put it past them to sell to both sides if they wanted to, but it moots any simple analysis about the US arms industry being larger than Russia's.
SlowBoy
10d ago
The fact that China outcompetes Russia and US is bad for US prospects against Russia when China is currently supplying Russia.
SlowBoy
10d ago
A lot of Ukraine's ability to resist was predicated on US assistance, which has become increasingly rare due to resistance from House Republican leadership.
Ukraine has received oodles of money from the US, and oodles more from Europe. There has been no shortage of aid.
SlowBoy
10d ago
House Republicans have sabotaged the compromise bill that would have provided aid (and limited immigration) at Trump's behest.
That bill would have enshrined minimal allowable amounts of illegal immigration into law before the proposed countermeasures kicked in, and would have transferred great authority over such enforcement to the discretion of DHS. It was a bad bill that deserved to die.
Ukraine could very well be forced to give up land in an eventual peace agreement
Ukraine is not getting Crimea back, and probably not much of anything else they've lost. The only question is how long it will take for everyone to accept this reality.
SlowBoy
10d ago
The one actor responsible for this war is Putin, and all the kvetching about NATO expansion and Euromaidan elides the fact that Putin singlehandedly launched an expansionary war of aggression to conquer territory, massage his ego and restore the glory of the Russian empire. Putin was under no personal threat from the west, nor was Russia.
This is a really bad cliche by now. Putin represents a moderate faction within Russia compared to the hardliners who wanted to invade 10 years ago after Maidan. Putin did not single-handedly launch the war (if one single man is reaponsible, it would probably be Strelkov). And Putin is not irrational for feeling threatened by NATO and the US.
SlowBoy
10d ago
No doubt Putin did offer peace but I see no evidence it was anything less than the end of Ukranian nation/ethnicity (heavy Russian culturalization).
The terms as discussed to that point said no such thing.
SlowBoy
12d ago
Russia believes that Ukraine is a core interest, and NATO encroaching on Ukraine violated their security. Even if the war is a net loss (a debatable question), they model it as a smaller loss than Ukraine joining NATO (de facto or outright).
SlowBoy
12d ago
Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending
What do you mean by "easily"? I suppose the money is there, but Europe's entire political formula rests on the welfare state. Which nations want to upend this?
SlowBoy
29d ago
Americans pay about $1000/month.
How much of that cost is borne by consumers, and how much by insurance? How much of that is actually paid, and how much is negotiated away when the drug manufacturers and hospitals and insurance companies square up? In this system, Novo Nordisk would be stupid to charge less, and it's not especially their fault that drug costs are so high.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
I guess. He's not really telling people to lift weights or invest or make their lives better. I do think he would just tell cons to suck it up when policies he likes cause bad outcomes, instead of trying to change policy.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Sure, Trump isn't telling people to lift weights. What generalization do you want to make? That makes all the difference. The GOP isn't running on a platform of gym access and diet subsidies. If that's what you mean, I agree with you. But there are plenty of influential right-wingers with millions of followers -- BAP, Cernovich, lots of the guys Rogan brings on -- who are talking about these things.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Who defines "the core messaging of the right"? OP included "right-wing influencers". Those people are overwhelmingly discussing self-improvement. Politicians? Nobody is running on lifting weights and eating clean but there is absolutely a culture of "personal responsibility" and individual freedom. Whats's fair? Donald Trump isn't talking about it, but there are plenty of things that fairly characterize "the left" that Democratic politicians aren't running on either.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?
There's Cernovich, or Bronze Age Pervert, or dozens of smaller accounts. Maybe you're thinking of Ben Shapiro and Cadence Owens and Hanania types. Beyond them, there is an overwhelming surplus of righties telling kids to buckle up, lift weights, learn to cook, invest, mew, code, read, write, train, work, learn, mog. If you step outside academic credential and op-ed circles, it's hard to find right-wingers who aren't talking about such things.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
What are you talking about? The provenance of mail-in-ballots is basically unverifiable, and chain of custody was long-since destroyed, in some cases while ballots were being counted. You cannot prove a negative, and the unverfiability of election results is what has been concluded by everyone who has actually studied the problem.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
It can be literally true that some Democrats cheated, and yet perfectly reasonable that Donald Trump concede the election
If it's true that Democrats are cheating, then, as someone generally opposed to the Democratic Party, I have two responses:
-
Republicans should not concede illegal results
-
If this is uniquely democracy-destroying, and unacceptable, then: Republicans need to cheat harder.
Since in many ways (2) is worse than (1), I'm skeptical of any argument that supposes that conceding a rigged election is the healthy and adult decision.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
it's far more likely to be in the category of ethically dubious transactional politics with interests groups than buying ballots from bums
How do you know this? Your skepticism about election fraud being without proof seems to rest on your intuition here.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Every voter ID law / bill I'm familiar with over the last ten years has included subsidies for acquiring an ID. Republicans already do it.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
It’s protected speech
How do you propose pro-crime posts "become illegal" if you imagine that they're protected speech, and that court orders can't be used? It seems, in fact, that if these posts are protected speech then it's exactly when we would want a court involved -- only the courts could stand up to government overreach against Constitutional rights.
I think your scenario breaks down far before the government has to censor it -- the government has lots of tools at its disposal before resorting to censorship. (Just as in the real example of Corona, the government had lots of tools available to induce vaccines without resorting to etc.) But in this hypothetical, if people are making protected speech: then no, the government can't censor it, or ordered it censored by third parties. Both sides in this case, in fact, acknowledge that it would be illegal for the government to do directly what it's asking third-parties to do on its behalf.
I imagine this is going to get modded for being inflammatory / antagonistic, but I guess there's a core question here that's worth answering.
I just laugh. I accept history as absurd. I read some nonsense in the news, and it makes me laugh how stupid everything is, and I don't suppose things were really less stupid in the past. I don't suppose that I'm less stupid. It's funny. You have to accept that basically illiterate positions, even if they're strongly-felt, are not strongly-reasoned. And that's how people are, and nothing you do is going to change it. Being frustrated about it is about as useful as being mad at traffic. They can't hear you, it's just how the world works.
Are you trying to contain your anger? When I get angry (or broken-hearted or tired or what) I find it useful to let the feeling wash over me. Instead of trying to suppress whatever I'm feeling, or working myself up about it, I just feel it for what it is. It's like a kind of meditation. In many cases, the worst of the hysteria and ranting comes from people who aren't very attuned to their feelings, full of emotion because they never resolve any.
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