domain:web.law.duke.edu
FD4280
19hr ago
Dungeon Crawler Carl, on the third book. It’s decently fun after the disappointing “The Devils” from Abercrombie.
The latter was not that bad, by the way. I just have to accept that Abercrombie will never reach the level of his first five books again.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
19hr ago
I can't possibly answer that question. You might want to ask the woman herself. I just don't think one should accuse people of hypocrisy without evidence, even (as in this case) people I don't like.
Mantergeistmann
19hr ago
I don't think any president wants to have to make the call of "Hey, this country just nuked a non-Nato country and wiped them off the map. Do we... respond?"
You don't want to set the precedent that there's no response or a limited one, and you also don't want to be the one who gets dragged into a nuclear/heavy-handed military response that has to try to force regime change.
In MMA News: Jon Jones finally retired, now that his attempts to hold on to the belt without fighting the interim champ Aspinall failed. Apparently he asked for a ridiculous payday, got it (which is a miracle in and of itself) and then promptly changed his mind. In the perfect capper for anyone who knows anything about Jon Jones, he had another hit and run right before announcing retirement. In terms of objectively successful prospects who nevertheless blew it by being incapable of staying out of trouble he's up there.
Good news: the division can finally move and Aspinall can actually have a career as champ. Bad news: the UFC is now functionally boxing with its own Joshua/Wilder HW mess despite not having any rival promotions and apparently Jon Jones is trapped in a time loop.
Hope they book Aspinall's next fight ASAP.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19hr ago
I hate to use the cop-out, but it's so obvious here;
Physical beauty is inherent and always subjective, no? A higher level of body fat, for instance, has objective downsides compared to being within a more normal range, but there are people, both male and female, who viscerally and immutably prefer it. So, even if a full head of hair is objectively a better marker of virility, vitality etc. it can also be subjectively worse. And the whole genesis of this thread was obviously around female sexual interest (or lack thereof) in balding or bald men.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
19hr ago
Isn't one of America's political platforms to go to war with Iran?
Can you point to the platform of any party or politician that says "Go to war with Iran"?
quiet_NaN
19hr ago
I'm surprised how much political capital he was willing to spend on this.
I don't actually think a few airstrikes on Iran are worth that much political capital.
Trump was never a dove, and MAGA was never pacifist or pro-Iranian. At most, hit platform was a bit isolationist, but more in a "us playing world police is a bad deal" than "let us downsize our military to what we would reasonably require to defend our country" way.
Assassinating a few enemies or weddings with drone strikes or dropping a few bombs on countries your constituents could not find on a map is very in character for any president.
I mean, sure, if he announced that he was invading Iran, his base might get deja-vu, but if he spends a smallish fraction of the defense budget on personal pet projects like military parades or bombing Iran, I doubt any of his voters will care much.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
19hr ago
Yes, everybody here does know my views because I don't hide them. The accusation that I secretly want all the Jews killed just because I give cultural criticism towards Jews in a similar nature as Jews like Ignatiev constantly levy against whites is simply your attempt to enforce a social consensus making any criticism of Jews taboo.
But you do hide your views. For example, once again you are carefully tap dancing around the question of whether you do in fact want all the Jews killed.
No one is "yelling hysterically" - we are, rather, noticing, you might say.
Now if I pinned you down and sat on your chest, I am guessing (but this is only a guess ) that your actual preferred solution would be something like disenfranchising Jews, denying them the right to vote or own property in non-Jewish lands, and shipping them all off to Madagascar or somewhere where "Jewish lands" could constitute an impoverished third world incapable of affecting anyone else. So maybe not literally exterminating the Jewish race, just treating them like an invasive species that must be banished elsewhere.
Am I warm?
But you won't even concede that much openly because, you know, it doesn't sound a lot better than just being an outright exterminationist. One way or another, your solution amounts to "Jews cannot coexist with us or be given rights." That sounds pretty bad to the, well, non-Neo Nazi ear, so you waffle on with lots of words about "enforced consensus" and how you don't hide the views you won't admit to. And so you will continue to complain when I point out your intrinsic unwillingness to stop hiding your power level, and I will continue to point out your intrinsic unwillingness to stop hiding your power level.
hanikrummihundursvin
20hr ago
Isn't one of America's political platforms to go to war with Iran? Seems like a good reason for Iran to get a nuke...
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
20hr ago
A nuke detonated anywhere on earth would kill millions.
Certainly not. Hiroshima and Nagasaki together killed maybe a quarter-million. Bigger bombs' damage doesn't linearly scale with kilotonnage (which is one reason many small bombs became more fashionable). Tel Aviv and Haifa together have less than a million people, and while nukes are big, nothing Iran would be likely to build could wipe out an entire metro area.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
20hr ago
That’s too anonymous; I’m opening myself to embarrassment if I’m wrong.
HereAndGone
20hr ago
And maybe it’ll wind up being suitably specious cannon fodder in this or that culture war, as a treat.
That's the problem at this particular moment; the latest nutjob is not just agreed to be a nutjob, he has to have a secret agenda which will demonstrate that he is One Of Them and that naturally it is Their Fault for encouraging such people with their inflammatory rhetoric. We got it with Sarah Palin and a target map, we got it with the Pulse nightclub shooter, we're getting it with every shooting since (of course that person was influenced by party A or party B to do this, there is a direct political line so we can make hay by blaming our political rivals!) That's why Walz was straight out of the gate with "this is a politically motivated assassination" instead of shutting up until there was more information, or just saying something about mentally ill individuals having access to guns.
quiet_NaN
20hr ago
Turkey is NATO, we are contractually obliged to aid them when they come under attack, which is commonly understood to involve turning Tehran into a parking lot if the ayatollah foolishly attacks them with a nuke.
My problem with Iran is that I do not have a good model of just how nutty they are, really. I would model their close ally Hamas as being willing to sacrifice every soul in Gaza to kill a few 10k or 100k Jews. Presumably they are less crazy than that. It is of course much more convenient if the kids of their allies are bombed in retaliation, and the ayatollah certainly did not have a problem aiding with actions which would predictably result in a lot of Gazans killed.
I mean, if Iran's version of Islam considers any Muslim bombed by unbelievers to be a martyr who will go straight to heaven, then getting their cities nuked is what an utility maximizer would do. Then again, their past behavior indicates that they care a lot about maintaining power, and not so much about sending their population to heaven in the quickest possible way.
orangecat
20hr ago
Isn't one of their political platforms death to America?
I think that's a good reason to stop them from having a nuclear bomb.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
20hr ago
No, if Iran with a nuke is dangerous, letting them have it because you don’t want to lose a midterm is short sighted. A nuke detonated anywhere on earth would kill millions. That would certainly be worse than losing a midterm. Especially if that nuke hits an American or allied city, an American military base, or some high value target in the Middle East.
Israel is Israel and they’re frankly not part of my analysis here. If Israel didn’t exist, I think the history of Islamic radicalism would make an Islamic nuke a danger to world stability. A religion that says those who kill for God with a weapon that can obliterate a city is not something that would improve my insomnia.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
20hr ago
I'm for the dual-pricing system in Japan-- one for Japanese (or local residents) and a different, higher price for tourists, who are almost always disruptive and are seemingly everywhere in Osaka now. This could be charged to me unless I initiated some negotiating tactic, which would itself be disruptive.
Terracotta
20hr ago
certainly not relations on the terms I'd have once looked for (not overweight, not a single mother, not a drug addict, not older than me, not prodigal).
So you haven't had much response from younger women who are 75th+-percentile slender and wholly unencumbered. Out of curiosity, what happened when you reached out to women who were slightly plump, slightly older than you, or divorced/had a kid in tow?
Jiro
20hr ago
If they're lower in cognitive ability they aren't similarly situated. And if they have a different major they certainly aren't.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
20hr ago
Well, I apologise for mischaracterising you on the neo-Nazi point. Guess this must have been on Reddit, and you just haven't bothered to restate it since.
You're also mischaracterising me, though. I'm somewhat anti-Zionist myself, and there are plenty of others on this site that do not draw the accusations you do. The reason you get accusations of wanting to gas the Jews is because you AIUI combine anti-Zionism with having little faith in ability to assimilate Jews and believing Jewish-exploitativity and Ashkenazi-Jewish-intelligence HBD. At that point, there aren't really a lot of options left for solving the problem; I will grudgingly grant that assuming gas chambers is somewhat uncharitable, but the least-horrifying solution I can see with those premises would literally be ghettos. And, well, you're not an idiot and you clearly think about the Jewish Question a great deal, so it would be very strange if you hadn't reasoned that through.
(To boil down my disagreements with those premises, I think Jews are pretty assimilable if you make an effort, I think any form of HBD on Jews is much, much more suspect than HBD on Africans/Austronesians/Everyone Else due to shorter timescales, and given that of the Jews and part-Jews I've notably interacted with (and I am part-Jew myself, though it's a small part) most of them seemed fine (and the one major exception was probably just a case of misplaced righteousness meeting overconfidence in a risky plan) I'm not really feeling the whole "Jews are evil" thing.)
I mean, I suppose I do have to grant that it's possible to hold a bunch of premises that imply a conclusion and then just go "but I refuse to accept this conclusion, fuck logic". Have to, because there are two issues on which I've basically done that and laid down an unprincipled exception for the sake of my sanity. Is this you?
The US claims to have an interest in non-proliferation and international order. If Iran gets one, Saudi Arabia gets one. Israel already has one.
So now, instead of one independent-minded nuclear power, you have three in a region of the world a huge amount of oil and trade passes through. Lots of chances for drama. (Also, harder for the US to threaten a nuclear nation)
Maybe nothing happens. But it'd just be better to not deal with this.
veqq
20hr ago
Persians rising up against the Azeri controlled state, is more plausible, since in a purely national lens, Azeris currently control the government as both the current president and supreme leader are Azeri. (I don't think either will happen nor that nationalities are a useful lens here, because there are so many and very few people are "only" "Persian".)
I mentioned it downthread, but I literally don't know what the point was. Since you saw something interesting here, could you explain it?
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