domain:streamable.com
anon_
2d ago
Agree with most of this. On the last part, I don't think you can prosecute your way out of corrupt unions. Labor law in the US was broadly designed to keep the peace, not to promote virtue.
I also think putting the DA on dealing with dozens oir hundreds of obstruction charges is probably a tactical success but a strategic mistake, given that it diverts resources from more serious prosecutions. If it were me, I'd tell them to pick a few to make an example of and plea the rest out to save powder.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
To be clear, I'm assuming that these people would have to compete against Vance running with a Trump endorsement. It's possible that Vance doesn't run or that Trump doesn't endorse anyone, but I don't see that happening. VP is a traditional springboard to the presidency. If Trump had wanted a skilled insider who could negotiate with congress or provide behind the scenes advice, he would have gone with Rubio. Instead he picks a guy whose political experience is a year and a half in the Senate and who won't win him any votes he wouldn't otherwise get. The only reason Vance made sense as VP pick was because Trump wanted a young guy who owes pretty much all of his political success to him. As for Vance himself, I don't see him leaving a Senate seat to be VP for four years before going back into private life. With that, let's look at who you mentioned:
Noem: She had little national profile before becoming DHS Secretary, and none prior to Trump becoming president. And, for whatever it's worth, she had trouble winning the governorship in 2018 in a state where it should have been a blowout. I don't think she has the juice to resign from her cabinet position and win the nomination over Trump's objection.
Rubio: He's the candidate you listed who has the best chance of winning, but I only see this happening if Trump endorses him. But if that were going to happen, why not make him VP? Without Trump's approval, he has the same problem of running against the incumbent administration, which may require him to resign and stake his entire political future on a presidential bid, since it's doubtful that Vance would bring him back into the fold if he were to become president. Even in that case, his current position makes him too tainted by Trump for Republicans looking for a change to support him in the primary, and for independents and moderates to consider him in the election.
Desantis: His tightrope act of refusing to embrace Trump as governor and refusing to criticize him as a candidate backfired horribly; it still isn't clear what his opinion on Trump is. Unless he starts criticizing the administration soon, he's going to lose all credibility as a possible Trump alternative, and it's a long shot even then. He also has the face of a dogcatcher and absolutely zero charisma. When Nikki Haley does better in the primaries than you do, you know you're in trouble.
Cruz: He could win the nomination over Trump's objection, but he has too much of a history as a far-right firebrand to win a general unless the Democrats nominate a real lefty.
Hawley: He has a decent record of going against the grain, most recently with his opposition to Trump's spending bill, but he has the same image problem as Cruz.
Abbott: He might win the nomination over Trump's objection, but he's unelectable nationally. First, he's a Texas product, but without the homespun relatability of George W. Bush. Worse, he's another firebrand who is most known for ignoring the Federal government. That kind of thing might play well in the South, but whether he'd be able to beat Vance plus a more moderate candidate elsewhere is another story. The way the primary calendar is set up he'd have to withstand early losses and hope for a big Super Tuesday just to remain competitive. In the general he'd be dead on arrival.
Youngkin: He's the only one I can see winning over Trump's objection. He has shown he can win over moderates. He hasn't leaned into MAGA, but he hasn't done anything to piss them off, either. I only see him winning the nomination over Vance, though, if there's a massive blowout in the midterms, followed by a series of Trump boo boos, such that only the real MAGA diehards will vote for Vance in the primary.
Compounding the problem is that it isn't likely that one of these people gets a shot against Vance head-to-head, but that two or three of them will by vying to be the Vance alternative once primary season gets into full swing, splitting the vote. Any of them will have the same problem Desantis had the last go-around. Every Republican I talked to with an IQ above room temperature preferred Desantis to Trump, and I argued here repeatedly that if Trump ran again, he didn't have a chance. I was excoriated for this opinion, but the Desantis campaign did miserably. The problem for Republicans is that enough Trump voters will lose interest in voting for another candidate that it will keep them from winning the general, but not enough to keep Vance from winning the nomination, if only due to establishment inertia. Anyway, I'd love to hear why I'm wrong and what kind of scenario you think would lead to any of these people winning the nomination over a Trump-endorsed J.D. Vance.
Stellula
2d ago
You're just continuing down the linguistic treadmill. Are trans-women a distinct category that is different than "cis" women?
Yes, that is why you can identify them as "trans women". Regardless of the semantics: trans woman(2030 parlance) = man(<2030 parlance).
It doesn't matter. The language is simply describing the reality, which is that "trans women" are men.
To use your analogy: if we genetically engineer an apple to be the color orange, it is still an apple, just an orange one. We could call it an "orange apple", but tit's still just an apple which is orange.
A man in a dress is still a man, just a man with a dress on.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
There was less "violence and threats of violence against congress", and more "fumbling around a building until asked to leave". Also what they set on fire was a police station, making it more than mere property crime.
Violence committed on federal property is a bigger issue.
So... it's closer to those federal courthouses being attacked, than the police precinct being burned down?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
2d ago
Riots during Trump admins have been politically genius. If the admin Does What It Takes to restore order, he confirms the image the left has painted of him of being a dictator. If he just lets them run their course (which he has done every time thus far) his presidency looks chaotic and people yearn for normalcy.
Puts him in a double bind.
(If you ask me, if you're in a double bind anyway you should do the right thing.)
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
2d ago
Perhaps, but the offense comes more because discussing them quickly pattern-matches into angry venting (in the "I don't see the use of you, let us clear you away" Chesterton's Fence sense).
That, and "knowing"[1] someone in public is just fucking obnoxious. "I read in a book that You People do X, so I'm going to do X then get frustrated that it's not working" kind of comes off like stealing in the... sense that you've taken information that wasn't being emitted then drawn conclusions based on that to gain a personal advantage. Compare the "I read that black people like fried chicken, so we'll serve it for Black History Month" thing for a more neutral? example.
But then, how to balance "making the attempt to understand" against "there's a right way and a wrong way to do this", combined with the fact that the people who aren't all that experienced (or competent, in some cases) at the former are less likely to understand the required secondary knowledge of the latter? And then you have people who want to do it for the wrong reasons anyway.
[1] I find the Biblical meaning of "knowing" to be instructive here (and as a consequence, take being trusted with certain other kinds of information more seriously than I do the knowledge gained by 'merely' sleeping with someone; there are plenty of things that can be way more destructive than that).
And I’m certain I could never understand the internal experience of maleness
Sure, but when people say that, a "so you don't have the right to call them out for destructive behaviors that I'm trying to normalize for myself" is being smuggled in. You don't need to internally experience being an X to have the right [when it is within my political power] to impose costs designed to constrain nastiness that the statistically-average member of X exhibits.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
2d ago
I've decided in celebration of the show being cancelled to re-read the Wheel of Time. It is just as aggravating, annoying, lengthy, and wonderful as I remember.
GBRK
2d ago
All his modern books have the same plot and the same relatively mediocre writing style but they're still fast, enjoyable reads. Grab on the next time you have a 3 hour flight-- they're peak airplane fiction.
anti_dan
2d ago
Well, I think that pretending that the seat of one of the branches of government is nothing special just so you can equivocate is special pleading. If it's so non-special, why do protesters not storm it more often? Manifestly, doing so would shut down a central government function that pisses a lot of people off, and guarantee eyeballs in a way that torching some random police station in bumfuck nowhere won't.
Oh no. I think it IS special, just in the opposite manner. There is no reason for anyone to protest a Binny's Beverage Depot in Chicago and take 300 bottles of Tequila because a cop stepped on a black guy too long in Minnesota. OTOH, protesting the seat of government over their proceedings is inherently legitimate activity. Therefore, the question turns more to how an ordinary protest turned into a riot and a riot turned into a bunch of unarmed, uncoordinated, people essentially sacked a 18th century fort.
As to the first question, I would say its about 20% that the J6 protestors were a more animated group of folks than the average protestor, but thats not a very good explanation. They really werent a particularly aggressive group, and very few professional agitators were in the group. Law enforcement's failures explain a lot more. They were severely understaffed, as you can see on video and as was testified by many witnesses at the Congressional hearings (multiple requests for additional staffing were denied). Given that, they were also incompetently deployed. You can see multiple teams of 2-5 police standing behind a couple of those metal gates they use at Six Flags to make sure people queue in an orderly fashion. This is not actually a crowd control device. Given the size of the crowd, those poorly thought out isolated positions would have been overwhelmed with no violence at all. And, of course, they were. And that is what led to the escalation, because the retreating police from those idiotic positions were the first to physically engage with protestors in an aggressive manner.
So now we have multiple rapidly collapsing "defensive" positions with police having the obvious fallback position of the building's doors. If they can just close those and lock them. No amount of people shoving, kicking, etc can get into the building. You'd need a SWAT battering ram to start to have a chance, and even that would probably be inadequate, those doors are thick and heavy. BUT, of course, the doors are never closed and people just kind of flood in right behind the retreating police. Often you can see people entering the building while officers just kinda stand there at the door watching. In other words, the entrants at that point shouldn't even qualify as trespassers or rioters. They are, implicitly, invitees, as the local authorities have implicitly blessed their entrance.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
2d ago
Please explain your line of reasoning because i do not see how anyone could reasonably make this claim in good faith.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Due to various circumstances, I sometimes (about 6-8 times a year usually) find myself traveling to various cities in the US and having a free weekend afternoon with no plans. I usually just went for a walk in a park, or to a museum, but lately my walking capacity has been diminishing (after an hour or so I sometimes start getting various unpleasant feels) and with the museums the ongoing wokification is starting to get on my nerves. So, I am looking for new ideas - what could be a fun way to spend an afternoon in a new city? I am an introvert, and the free afternoon usually comes after several days of interacting with a lot of people (that's usually the reason why I got there in the first place), which means my social battery is near depleted and anything involving meeting any new people and talking to them is just too much. And unfortunately I am completely indifferent to most sports. Obviously there's always spending the whole time reading or watching some movies, but I can do it at home too, so I want somehow to leverage being outside in the city. Any fresh ideas?
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
2d ago
Instead, when they think about the differences between men and women, they think the women are just smaller men. To them, a woman is just a guy with a vagina in a skirt.
And from that, witness the fundamental anxiety: there are women who qualify as this (tomboys are not trans men, though they function like the platonic ideal of one, including attitude and general outlook on life- there are women who just act like this more generally without specific tomboy markers, and they're harder to spot, but they'll always show you who they are eventually), and there are women who do not.
Women who qualify tend to get lots of high-quality male attention, for reasons that are blatantly obvious (the self-awareness alone makes a much better partner, to say nothing of the other stuff; hostile unproductive attitude, which is something TERFs don't solve, is corrosive). Pick-me-s. This makes Mean Girls jealous.
So, how best to attack such a woman? By doing the same thing to these men-women that they did to men more generally- take away their spaces, destroy what was good about them through gender politics. That is the sole purpose of having men in women's sports: destroying the spaces where participating in a male-type pursuit is productive, and making them as miserable as every other worthless bitch (and now a disadvantage in the instinctual quest for the highest sexual price that defines womanhood). Mission accomplished.
The spear counterpart to this behavior is, of course, as you described:
that time he pulled the mask down a little bit, and expressed his annoyed bewilderment that the rest of us spectrum-y nerds were taking progressive politics literally, instead of understanding it as a cynical exercise in tricking other men into acting like dumbasses.
I'm talking about the internal experience of womanhood, the preference for faces over mechanics, the keen interest in social networks and how much a man makes and the low-key rape fetish
"Lived experience" of a thing is not required to know how expressions of it can be destructive.
SSCReader
2d ago
By my observation, the anti-LGBT crowd generally don’t desire to go on the offensive, they just want to be left alone.
Then you probably don't live in the right areas of the country. People still disown their gay kids. There are a lot of very socially conservative spaces in America, they are just not visible online mostly.
SSCReader
2d ago
I’m not entirely convinced that anyone can know the internal experience of any group that you are not a member of.
Forget groups, I’m not entirely convinced that anyone can know the internal experience of anyone else.
We just had a whole discussion about how one man thought no men would be willingly be kicked in the balls to have a child. And was immediately corrected several times over by multiple other men. So clearly even for men, for a fairly universal experience of being kicked in the balls our individual internal experiences vary massively.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Good words refer to clusters in thingspace.
In Scott's article, this is a shared understanding between "you" and King Solomon, because both are assumed to have read the sequences. Both can happily agree on a definition of "hair" at least as long as no disputed example (such as the hair on a coconut) becomes relevant.
The thing with thingspace is that it has a really high dimensionality, and often people do not care about all of the axis. Solomon is basically saying "for the projection of thingspace I am interested in, it makes sense to classify a whale as dag.
In mathematics, you can really build your definitions bottom-up, so that new definitions only contain stuff already defined (as well as pre-agreed syntax, such as quantors). In all other human endeavors, not so much. Every definition is its own can of worms, and it is highly practical to be able to open up a minimal number of them, for example to debate what should be included as a mammal without pre-emptively also debating what "hair", "water", "leg", "swim", and "definition" mean, exactly.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
They don't give a shit. Their social circle is other pensioners, and what's gonna happen if they make a drunken ass of themselves in public? They're not going to be fired, they're not going to be shunned by their social circle, they're not going to deny themselves future opportunities. They basically can do whatever they want (within limits of the law, presumably) and not care. So they are doing that.
Arnaud
2d ago
Anyone know any games, roleplaying or otherwise, which end up encouraging real/historical tactics?
That is an impressively vague question and one which I can only really answer by saying "yes" and "more than I could list in a single comment".
To start with there's the entire world of tabletop historical wargaming, which (as it says on the tin) is supposed to encourage historically accurate/authentic gameplay. Now, sometimes you end up with games like Team Yankee, which somehow managed to make a Cold War game look more like a Napoleonic one thanks to a business decision to use a miniature scale that is too large for the rules. Games I would recommend include Chain of Command for WW2, Warmaster is good for a fairly wide period of real world history, as well as fantasy. Speaking of fantasy, the Lord of the Rings/Middle Earth tabletop game from Games Workshop is actually great and does an excellent job of capturing the "heroic" but still quite grounded combat you'd expect from that kind of story and out of all the stuff I list here is most likely to be the kind of thing you're looking for. There are tonnes of other good games but those are just ones from the top of my head.
In terms of computer games you're slightly more limited but there's still a pretty decent selection, in terms of realism/authenticity I struggle to think of much that can top the Field of Glory/Combat Mission/Graviteam games. The last two are really not games for the faint of heart though, it turns out that in our modern age, real world tactics are actually quite complicated and unintuitive.
I was playing D:OS2 this weekend and found myself thinking, "wow, all these spear-wielding magisters have zero incentive to form up and fight in ranks." It's a chaotic free-for-all.
This is what really killed my interest in that game, it's all so incredibly over the top. It's more than a little silly how everyone seems to be able to do these incredibly over the top attacks and have these incredible abilities and yet it is still somehow a standard issue medieval fantasy world.
anti_dan
2d ago
The country's main legislative building is arguably the most legitimate target for protest in the country.
That the J6 protest escalated into a riot that eventually spilled into the building itself is more about the abject security failures than anything special about what the rioters did.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
I got to the middle of Use of Weapons and I am kinda doubting if I'm going to finish it. I've pretty much guessed the main reveal already (it became so painfully obvious at some point that I broke down and checked it and yes, it was exactly what I thought) and the story is somehow not that engaging for me, and in general the Culture kinda looks pretty assholish to me at this point, not sure if it was the intention of the author or my biases. I know a lot of people like The Culture series, would you advise me to persevere or try another book or just look elsewhere entirely? I read Player of Games before, and it was kinda obvious how it's going to end (I mean you don't set up the whole thing to lose at the end, right?) and there also were a reveal which I thought was kinda meh but overall it was ok, not super-excellent but also I didn't feel like I need to force myself to go on. With this one, I am kinda struggling.
Obviously the average man is much stronger than the average woman, and elite female athletes cannot compete at all against elite male athletes, but I think you and a few posters here are exaggerating the disparity because there’s no way the “slow boys” can compete with actual athletic women.
When I was forced to play basketball in high school PE class, there were some girls who played with the boys, and I can tell you from first hand experience, a clumsy autistic nerd who’s just getting into shape absolutely cannot just move a 5’10 elite female athlete with broader shoulders than him.
Like, I was in OK-ish shape and could do a 5k in 21min, and there were girls who did it in 17mim. Sure, there were boys who could do it in 15min, and most girls did it in 25min or more, but I didn’t stop to think about the statistical distributions, I just saw that there were both boys and girls way ahead of me.
Just look at female athlete records in any sport, compared to the mean or even advanced male performance.
anti_dan
2d ago
Being left alone is clearly not an option. I would speculate the number of people who want to criminalize homosexuality is increasing as a result of being exposed to it more often. I certainly have moved away from a libertarian position for those reasons.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
After watching the series and reading all the books I can definitely tell the books are better. Some cliches are there for a reason, I guess.
You don't think Newsom will avoid prosecution? What kinds of timeline and odds are you offering for this, because I'm eager to take the other side of that one.
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