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Man, at this point I'm hoping Trump will randomly drop dead.
Well hoping is a strong word. I don't wish anyone dead, I don't think Trump deserves to be dead, I would be horrified and outraged if somebody killed him. It's just that I'm a Republican and I want to win. Trump seems to me to be just about the only Republican running who could possibly lose to Biden. A huge chunk of the country hates the man, and while he has a passionate fanbase a significant section of Republicans are tired of the Donald. I've never voted for a Democrat in my life and I'm not sure I'll vote for Trump if he ends up the nominee (not that I'd vote for Biden, I'd just throw it away on a protest vote for DeSantis or leave it blank). I voted for Trump in 2020 but all the talk of the election being stolen without the goods to back it up has soured me significantly. I want Republicans to win, but you don't rock the boat of democratic legitimacy like that. You could break America that way. I think a lot of Republicans feel the same way.
The way things are going Trump is probably going to be the nominee. And if he is then I think he's more likely to lose than not. The only way I can think of that would change the outcome is if Trump keeled over. It doesn't seem likely though: he may be old, but he's certainly spry. According to the SSA Actuarial Tables a man Trump's age only has a 4.9152% chance of dying in the next twelve months anyway.
Yeah. Hell, I don't even mind whatever election fraud bullshit is going on on both sides, as long as there's a kind of...gentleman's agreement to only cheat so much and in certain ways, and it's for the most part kept under the rug so most of the peasants like us think it's mostly legitimate.
This is basically the bike cuck comic except replace “bike” with “election” and “happiness” with “legitimacy”.
I’ll take an actually legitimate election over deep state vs. controlled opposition volume 24, thanks.
The optimal level of bike theft isn't zero, given an environment with bike thieves. Legitimacy is also a continuum, as well...a "candidate" that wins in a 99% landslide isn't exactly stealing an election, he's robbing it at gunpoint along with a bunch of voting booths, election officials, and the whole damn building. The threat of civil unrest or worse - much worse - keeps a lot of politicians "honest". We'd both prefer an actually legit election. But like the bike dude: are we willing to get in a gunfight with the thief over it?
Explain yourself.
The cost of enforcing zero bike theft is generally higher than allowing a few thefts.
Given that time I had my purse robbed by some little bitch of a thief in a shopping centre, leaving me literally penniless with no way home, I am quite happy to spend more on enforcing zero X theft than just 'allowing' a few harmless 'victimless' thefts.
If Bike Cuck Guy is so happy about being robbed, let the happy thieves take everything he owns down to his last penny, then see how content he is about the level of happiness in the world being greater than the loss. Only someone who can comfortably afford to lose a certain amount of money or goods, which means little to no ill-effect on himself, would express such an attitude.
Maybe St. Francis of Assisi would rejoice in a thief taking the few pence he possessed as being in greater need than he, but those of us who can't afford to laugh off a loss of something that cost a couple of hundred quid (depending on the price of the bike) aren't so saintly and are more vengeful.
Are you engaging with what "zero X theft" actually means, though? That's not "vanishingly small number of X thefts," which could possibly be accomplished by scaling up the current enforcement mechanisms by a few factors or a few orders of magnitude. That's zero theft of X, which for purses or bikes would likely mean something like having full coverage surveillance of all public areas (and most private areas) at all times, and furthermore those policemen or security guards would also need full surveillance to prevent corruption, bribery, etc. Of course those people also need surveillance to prevent corruption as well and so on and so forth. On top of all the regular training needed. We'd probably need to commit a substantial majority of our population just to law enforcement. Even after all that, I'm not sure that zero X theft for something like purses or bikes is a likely outcome. It's really difficult to build a truly perfect system with literally zero failures in anything but the most trivial circumstances, and society-wide theft is very far from trivial.
If we call for anything short of that (and possibly even if we do call for all that I described above), that means we are fully admitting that we are completely okay with and accepting of some nonzero level of X theft in our society, even if each and every individual occurrence of such theft is an injustice that we seek to prevent.
We've had a recent example of what attempts at "zero X" look like with zero covid. Notably, it looks like that people who aim for zero crime and people who aim for zero covid are different sets of people.
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