domain:natesilver.net
Botond173
1d ago
LOL...is this what you unironically associate late-stage capitalism and existing cyberpunk conditions with? "good conditions, decent income, nice job"? Do you think this is the lived experience of South Korean normies, for example? People who cannot even reproduce themselves?
"mostly functioning nations"
I meant "mostly well-functioning Asian nation". English isn't my mother tongue. Either way, I think Vietnam, as unified through force of arms, represents an overall outcome that is clearly preferable to both those of all other former COMECON member states and that of the partitioned Korean nation.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1d ago
Jesus Christ. It's one thing to observe that a lot of QALY and DALY improvements come from "clean water, vaccines and antibiotics" and then entirely another to imply that additional interventions are zero or negative expected value.
Do you think that our (now quite successful) treatments of childhood leukemia are as ineffectual as extending the unhealthy lifespans of the very elderly?
Crowstep
1d ago
Can you give examples of these institutions and how they censored information?
Because every developed country (and most undeveloped ones) used COVID vaccines and demonstrated their effectiveness. Is the entire planet in on this conspiracy?
WhateverHappenedToNorman
1d ago
Further justifying BurdensomeCount's question! Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Okay, sure. This conversation is still very strange to me, it's like reddit-tier grasp of nuance. I am not defending the statements, just saying he said A, not B. "Oh, so you're saying A is fine!" No, that is not what I said.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I forgot BigLoom's comment was filtered, so you aren't the only one who thought I was modding BurdensomeCount. I have fixed it.
yeah? who did al nusra pledge allegiance to?
same guys and same leaders but they rebranded with the admitted purpose of attracting more US support which makes them not al queda
it's a story of how the US made al qaeda not a threat to the US, but it doesn't involve them bombing and killing al qaeda, it involves them offering money and support to be used as tools against America's enemies and they rebrand
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
is your claim the organization which controls syria's only connection to al qaeda is it's controlled by the emir of al queda branch and that this means they're not al qeada?
I mean it is not al-Qaeda itself, though it is affiliated. And I don't think al-Sharaa answers to al Qaeda.
bombing and killing al qaeda leaders didn't beat al qaeda and it's not the reason they're not longer a threat to the US
So you say.
Bleep
1d ago
is your claim the organization which controls syria's only connection to al qaeda is it's controlled by the emir of al queda branch and that this means they're not al qeada?
do you have the same story about al qaeda in yemen?
bombing and killing al qaeda leaders didn't beat al qaeda and it's not the reason they're not longer a threat to the US
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
I'm saying the only way you "know" COVID vaccines work is through information provided by the same institutions which were involved in the lying and censorship.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
Wishcasting, as has been going on with respect to Iran since the waning days of the Reagan administration. Most likely they're reaching a non-representative set, with religious Iranians being more likely to eschew their survey. Islam tends to the more strict, not less, from the bottom up; any moderating influence comes from a "degenerate" (or Westernized) elite, which Iran lacks (largely because they killed them or drove them out in the Revolution)
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
I suppose we'll see how long until they exhaust their missile supply on Israel. Two more weeks of this, or will they be in for it for years?
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
The issue is not whether these arguments sound as if they could be logically compelling — the issue is whether these arguments actually are. Closer inspection reveals that they lack substance.
- The "overcrowding" argument applies to in-country movement of natives as well. By the same argument, from one part of the country to the other, or from countryside to cities would be detrimental. But people — native or not — move to cities because the concentration of people enables new kinds of services and collective works that would otherwise not be sustainable or even possible.
- That's a general argument against a higher standard of living — so why not lower the standard of living for the natives and then let the immigrants come? Another option would be to keep the immigrants where they are — and also force the other countries to stay poor at gunpoint.
- The culture argument is the only one where I see some merit, though it hinges on 1) the assumption that people do not adapt, and 2) that culture rather than power structures determine the success of individual countries.
In order to be logical, the arguments must hold up when replacing words, such as "immigrant" by "native", and they do not.
The common theme behind all these arguments against immigration is that they do not make sense as logical arguments for organizing how people can or should live together — but the core theme is "there is not enough for all of us!" and therefore "we need to cast out some people (based on random criteria)!".
Essentially, the premise is that "it's a game of musical chairs" and "we need to stop more people from playing", but the mental effort devoted to preventing people from getting in would be much better devoted to changing the game.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
alqueda controls syria
Well, an organization controlled by a guy who was once part of al-Qaeda in Iraq controls Syria. The terrorist-to-statesmen pipeline isn't such a bad thing; with some notable exceptions (like another AQI successor, ISIS), it usually calms them down. Ask the Sons of Liberty.
Hadad
1d ago
On the one hand I don't think Iran has provided the US sufficient reason to attack them
Eh, you say "Death to America" even once and I consider my country wholly justified in destroying you. Talk shit get hit is natural law.
Hadad
1d ago
Jews do not have anywhere near the level of explicit racial solidarity that whites had in, say, apartheid South Africa, or the Antebellum American South.
No, they don't. But whites don't have anywhere near the racial solidarity of the Antebellum South or Apartheid South Africa, either, and Jews are significantly more in solidarity -- openly -- than Whites have been at any time in the modern era.
Whatever covert influence some powerful Jews have to influence things in their favor at the expense of others, surely you can acknowledge that their actions (outside of, arguably, Israel) are of a qualitatively different form than, say, passing laws explicitly forbidding non-Jews from owning property, voting, patronizing the same businesses as Jews, etc.
Of course, they take a different form. They don't need to ban you from public spaces, just advocate for those spaces to be ruined so that you self-select away from them.
The worst thing a powerful Jew can do to white people in 21st-century America is write a mean book about us, produce a TV series where we’re the bad guys, and attempt (with intermittent success) to legislatively block border enforcement.
No, the worst thing a powerful Jew can do is help irreparably break society and culture through the importing of foreigners. That, plus make life domestically suck.
Contrast that with the worst era of White Supremacy, in which a white person could own a black person as property. The two situations are not comparable.
No, today is not like slavery. But it's also not like slavery for anyone. Slavery's no longer a relevant period of concern that should determine how we respond to prejudice and bias. It is a dead era.
But I don’t believe that Noel Ignatiev has the power to make me a second-class citizen, or that there’s any realistic American future in which white people are explicitly and systemically oppressed based on group identity
We're already systematically and explicitly oppressed based on group identity! That it's not naked slavery doesn't matter one lick.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
On the one hand I don't think Iran has provided the US sufficient reason to attack them (at least not one that's recent and public). On the other... eh, Iran's government sucks and I'm not going to lose sleep over it.
That is the consensus in my part of twitter.
zeke5123a
1d ago
Originalism isn’t strict textualism. It is trying to understand the public meaning at the time of enactment. To understand that, you obviously look at the words but also the entire context.
Note that even textualism (for reading statutes) tries to ignore strict textual conclusions. Scalia and Garner wrote a book on how to interpret texts from a textualist perspective. Strict literalism is something that caution against. Doesn’t give license to ignore the words but there ought to be an attempt to give the most reasonable interpretation of the words that puts the words in proper context.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
Who would Gaddafi have nuked? France?
He could have, and that might well have been enough to keep NATO out of it.
alqueda controls syria
they're no longer a threat to the United States
not because of bombing and killing their leaders, it's because the US pays and supplies them and uses them against their enemies like they did before they started attacking the US
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
The Houthis haven't attacked commercial shipping since December and haven't attacked US ships since the bombing campaign.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
It did work on Al Queda; they're no longer a threat to the United States. It won't work on Hamas because Israel would have to kill basically every Palestinian before they got to a point where the remaining ones won't re-form something like Hamas, but I don't think Iran's enmity of the US, while deep, is quite that deep. Iran's enmity with Israel might be, though.
Citation needed
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