domain:themotte.org
Jiro
22hr ago
If you believe that the 2020 election was tabulated honestly and that Biden won by more than the margin of sloppiness, then Trump's response to losing the election was the biggest defection since Reconstruction,
No, it wasn't. Trump did hardly anything in response. I'd say that the Democrats' support of rioting during Covid was a bigger defection.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
Biden gave money to Intel with strings attached. Trump made a deal with Intel that changed the strings (it's the same money). I don't see much difference between these two.
FtttG
22hr ago
I can't comment on the specific tactical wisdom of Trump buying stakes in private enterprises. I'm not even persuaded that his motivation for doing so was anything as simple as "revenge" or "retaliation".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22hr ago
I have to say, I do like the idea of Bukele solving the crime problem, and then throwing people in the slammer for shits and giggles.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
That long term is at least a little further away. Of course, now I have to worry about Republican excesses again... but they're starting from further back and mostly aren't aimed specifically at people like me (wealthy old heterosexual white men).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
"When they go low, we go high" was something Michelle Obama said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention during Hillary Clinton's campaign for president. It was about a month later that Clinton referred to the "basket of deplorables".
Totalitarianit
22hr ago
This framing assumes that the game is purely Republicans vs. Democrats, and in that framing the answer to who is tit’ing more is obvious. The problem with this is that it is only two-dimensional. Introducing another axis, like the culture that controls our institutions, flips this argument around. Republicans have escalated more openly, but Democrats have benefitted from institutional alignment for decades.
This has created a situation where Democrats appear to be playing “0.9-tits-for-a-tat” within the narrow realm of party politics, but their ideological allies, with their near complete control of academia, media, entertainment, etc., have been free to push constant aggressive “tits.” Democrats don’t need to overtly defect as often because the institutions that are aligned with them have constantly moved the Overton window on their behalf. From the Republican perspective, and for many who support them, they’re reacting to a broader cultural movement that has not been constrained by the limitations of party politics.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
22hr ago
I am 1000% over this chair project. I think I started it in the spring?
Anyways, I'm on the home stretch. Everything is sanded, although I think I need to go back over a few of the back legs and even some things out. I've begun shellacing and waxing all the pieces, and hopefully on Thursday I can glue up the first completed chair. My wife suggested I get a chair finished and assembled at a time to stay motivated, and I think that was a good idea. It was feeling daunting having to finish nearly 80 pieces before I could assemble any. So hopefully next week I have some pictures of the first finished product.
TitaniumButterfly
22hr ago
What's particularly Nazi-like about it? I'd associate that more with communists though I guess Nazis were prone to it as well.
WandererintheWilderness
22hr ago
these "Don't you know fighting is bad?!" posts always get directed towards the right and never towards the left
I think this is partly down to venue. This site has a broad range right-wingers, and it has a lesser amount of variously heretical left-wingers. This makes it the perfect place for a heretical left-winger to try to get through to representatives of The Right. In contrast, a top-level Motte post directed from a right-winger to The Left would be a pretty hollow exercise: none of the people it's aimed at would actually read it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
· Edited 22hr ago
The noise thing is true, but irrelevant here because the signal in the culture war is so very strong.
Right now, Trump is playing two-tits-for-a-tat, and his core supporters fully support him in this.
Trump has not even reached parity. How many political opponents has HE sicced the criminal apparatus of government on? Because it was sicced on him PERSONALLY at least 5 times. And quite a few in his administration. How many Democratic allies have been sued to bankruptcy in show trials? I count a minimum of two the other direction (Alex Jones and Rudy Giuliani. As a bonus civil show trial, the E. Jean Carroll case). How many times was Biden impeached? How many times was the Biden or Harris campaign literally wiretapped? How many Democrats disqualified from office due to their participation in a riot? There's at least one on the Republican side.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
22hr ago
Charlie Gard and other related cases had nothing to do with resource allocation.
English law (and this isn't an English weirdness - for example it is the same as the Florida law the courts applied in the Terri Schiavo case) is that once there is a legitimate dispute about whether a patient with no capacity to consent should be treated or not, the courts get to determine the best interests of the patient rather than automatically deferring to the next of kin. I am not a legal historian, but my understanding is that the law ended up in this state in order to stop parents who are Jehovah's Witnesses declining blood transfusions on behalf of their kids - the whole point is the parents' religious beliefs are not imputed to the child, so the Catholic parents' belief that they should prolong life for religious reasons is irrelevant. From a secular perspective, it is not in the child's best interests to keep a moribund child alive in horrible pain in order to attempt treatments with a negligible chance of success.
This isn't a libertarian rule, but it is a perfectly reasonable one. Gard-type cases (resources available to pay for the Hail Mary treatment but the current treating doctors object sufficiently on avoidable-suffering grounds to go to court over it) are rare compared to Jehovah's Witnesses etc, so the rule is life-preserving relative to "go with the parents". And "always try to preserve life" gives the wrong answer in a large fraction of the normal run of cases where resource allocation is an issue.
Because fuck you, that's why.
I'm serious. Too much "advice" is given as a command. The link between "advice" and "order" is increasingly blurred. Especially in our current media environment of public/private partnerships to craft information narratives that change behavior society wide. Psyops about having less kids because of the climate crisis, eating less meat because of the climate crisis, not lifting weights because toxic masculinity, I could keep going. And probably the most toxic form of "advice" every young man receives is the state approved messaging about how to date women. They'll probably fail with that for about 10 years at the most before they wake up to the fact that these mother fuckers are lying to them, possibly on purpose.
It hasn't been uncommon in my life for people to give me "advice" and then get really annoyed to angry with me when I proceed to not do it. Usually doesn't help when I tell them "The best part of free advice is I'm free to ignore it". Half the time these people are giving advice that is counter to my goals, but they don't even realize it.
I can't help but be suspect of "advice" anymore. All I see is a demon wearing layers of masks going "...would you kindly..."
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
Do you think people who criticize Nayib Bukele question the effectiveness of his policies?
They do; in particular they claim the reduction in crime precedes his throwing gang members en masse into CECOT.
Quantumfreakonomics
22hr ago
I don’t buy the dating app hate. It wasn’t smart phones that ruined the OkCupid model. Women were always going to gravitate to a system where all men are filtered by default and they get to opt-in to who gets the privilege of messaging them.
There was a temporary window wherein there was a structural advantage to being verbose and tech-savy. This was always going to be temporary.
thejdizzler
22hr ago
I think so. Something happened in 2012 when it came to interpersonal relationships, depression, test scores, etc. And all these trends are in the wrong direction This shit is bad news bears.
Relevant article: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/what-the-heck-happened-in-2012
WandererintheWilderness
22hr ago
Yes, but I think there is truth to the claim that many political disagreements are genuinely downstream of disagreements about the object-level questions, not value differences in the weighing of whatever associated trade-offs exist.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22hr ago
But offworld datacentres are a really dumb idea at present tech, why would you want a massive drama getting to the servers to replace something if it breaks? Why would you want them to be hundreds, thousands of kilometres from eachother instead of networked all right next to eachother? Why would you spend rockets on them?
Starlink satellites have good enough bandwidth and Huawei has plenty of networking talent. It seems like they'd be better off sending that data to earth than processing it in space.
Space-solar isn't that cheap, China has plenty of cheap power. I just don't see it getting funded unless it's for guiding missiles over the horizon, something to do with ECM or signals intelligence that demands very low latency and orbital compute.
Throwaway05
22hr ago
How old are you?
My life before smart phones was so different. I love that I can pull out and read any book I want, I love that I don't need a separate device for music, I love that I can research anything anytime instead of writing it down and searching through my encyclopedia at home.
Have you ever tried a long road trip with a physical map?
Yeah they ruin a lot of stuff and may not be worth it but don't forget what they've added.
Throwaway05
22hr ago
I don't think you are wrong, and at the same time if you look at the NFL the majority of the coaches are quite obviously awful.
Is giving advice just that hard?
WandererintheWilderness
23hr ago
Not that principles should get in the way of doing what is right.
This is a baffling sentence. How do you define "principle", if not a belief about "what is right"?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
23hr ago
Not quite, this is still scientism. Economics can help answer the actual object-level question, "Are tariffs an effective way of obtaining a desired outcome?" It can tell you what the trade-offs are.
But the questions of what outcomes are desirable, and what trade-offs are acceptable, are values questions.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
23hr ago
Right now, Trump is playing two-tits-for-a-tat, and his core supporters fully support him in this. The Democrats believe, arguably correctly, that they have been playing 0.9-tits-for-a-tat, and the "we need a fighter" debate on the Dem side is whether they should switch to playing two-tits-for-a-tat and embrace the downward spiral into continuous mutual defection.
In the same sense that it's "arguably correct" that the Earth is 6,000 years old. It's been asked repeatedly in this thread, but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?
In the dim recesses of the past, I can recall John McCain telling one of his supporters to be less racist and cruel towards Obama. But I sincerely can't think of an instance from the other side more recent than Bill Clinton's Sister Soulja incident.
For God's sake, we just had four years of lockdowns, riots, and total defections on having a border at all. They went Stalinist levels of low to throw Trump in jail and bankrupt him, and as many of his supporters as possible alongside him. The totality on the left of people who gleefully cheered when Trump was arrested spent this weekend crashing out because war criminal John Bolton was arrested. That would have been a perfect example of "revenge logic" if the whole post weren't artlessly partisan, but it's an even starker example than that. Bolton is about the most perfect patsy to sacrifice to defend "principles", to regain some clout and credibility for the next time people want to throw a show trial at Trump. And instead we just see wall-to-wall meltdowns decrying and denying any possibility of fair play.
If Democrats honestly think this is "0.9-tits-for-a-tat", then we should just start the civil war.
In On Writing, Stephen King outlined his writing process in broad strokes:
My girlfriend finished reading the second draft of my NaNoWriMo project, and rated it anywhere either 6.5 or 7 out of 10. She confirmed that it was never boring or cringe, often very entertaining to read and emotionally affecting in places. She had two major criticisms which I'm taking seriously, and a couple of smaller criticisms and suggestions. Work now continues on the "polish", or third draft.
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