domain:imgur.com
oats_son
6hr ago
Well, then! I guess those are more achievable than they sounded. Now I guess it's up to whether you actually have enough free time and willpower to do them all. If you have 8 hours and don't spend much time cooking/eating dinner or on hygiene or on other pursuits, then probably possible. If you have 4 hours after work and after your PhD efforts, and you have those other pursuits to contend with, maybe not. I can't tell you what you should value more, though to be honest, reading this site and others are a huge sink on my time, personally, so cutting those out would give me a huge boost to doing more stuff without having to cut much important. Anyway, you can do it!
... I'm not sure how that relates?
I'm asking why the contemporary Democrats would expect that to work in the first place. I think you've restated your first post?
Stellula
6hr ago
Bannon does a daily podcast with an extremely active base of people. It's not like anything else that I know of.
As much as he doesn't really have Trump's ear anymore, he does have the ear of a lot of MAGA.
ABigGuy4U
6hr ago
They don’t necessarily have to frame anyone though. Just announce a fictitious perpetrator.
Shrike
6hr ago
I think it's easy to see infighting and assume it's a sign of weakness. It's only a sign of weakness if it isn't handled properly. If Trump publicly "wins" the fight, it consolidates power around Trump as The Sole King. (And I think this is what will happen - Musk is definitely a live player but I don't think he has the proper levers in this situation).
Over the longer term, Trump consolidating power into the party could prove to be a weakness, simply because he's not going to be around forever, and after that the party could devolve into infighting. So perhaps the Western Right is in trouble over the long term. But this was always a possibility, and getting some of that infighting "worked through" now while Trump is still around to dictate winners and losers might actually help the right get some of that infighting sorted out before, making them stronger in the post-Trump stage.
Elon calling for a party that supports the 80% of Americans is sort of funny - balancing the budget [inevitably: by nuking Social Security/Medicaid/Medicare] might be good and necessary, but it's not an 80% position. Socially conservative and yet fiscally liberal is actually the closest thing there is to an American consensus, and right now Trump occupies that high ground.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6hr ago
there's nothing to be done about it.
This wasn't true for the first several hundred years of the country's existence. Heck, it wasn't even true in the 90s.
Nihilism like this is just a demotivational DDOS.
dasfoo
6hr ago
Yeah, it's a quick "No" for me, but I live in the Portland area and the women in my age range (40-55) are basically the Pussy Hat brigade from 2016-2017. It does limit the options when an entire geo region is a meme. There are a few conservatives, but I don't fit in well with them, either, unfortunately: I'm not religious or outdoorsy, I'm blue culture with greyish-red politics, and I'm not a masculine ideal. That leaves me mostly with the silent cohort of women who simply don't care about politics, which also sounds dull.
AnonymousActuary
7hr ago
One more comment - not sure if you can read the Atlantic, but always thought this story by Ezra Klein's wife (Annie Lowrey) to be a fascinating one (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/pregnancy-birth-complication-abortion-life-of-mother/671006/).
It's basically about her harrowing experience with pregnancy through truly truly terrible itching (among other things). She relates this horror story she went through...then get about halfway through the story and relates how she still decided (and followed through on) having another kid.
AnonymousActuary
7hr ago
Yeah I think it's hard to look at society writ large right now in the US (or Korea...) and think that increased parental attention is doing a lot of good for the median family (or even the 85th or 95th percentile family). I'm sure there's some Bryan Caplan's out there who are giving their kids a lot of good experiences but in general I think self sufficiency and learning how to entertain yourself without parental impact is generally quite good. I think you have good reasons to be wary, but I also think worrying about impact on your kids from a 4th is not it (kids like having little siblings too!)
No_one
7hr ago
He wasn't too liberal. He is a living fossil, him with his open mind and willingness to talk to people.
Today liberalism stands for western guilt, feelings and self expression over rationality, safety over openness, faith in solving social issues through social engineering, despite half a century of total failure of such efforts.
Mandatory spending (mostly social security, medicare, pensions, and welfare), plus interest, now exceeds total federal revenues. We could eliminate every discretionary budget item, shut down everything from NASA to the Army, and we'd still see the debt continue to increase.
The debt is about to hit $37 trillion. If we cut all spending in half, everything down to Grandma's social security check, that would give us a $1 trillion surplus, and it would still take half a lifetime to pay everything back.
If we eliminated all spending, including collecting social security taxes but paying no more benefits, it would still take around 9 years to pay off the debt, not just a few.
Goodguy
7hr ago
No, if it was a staged fight there is no reason for Musk to use what in our society is the rhetoric equivalent of nuclear weapons, which is implying that Trump had sex with underage girls on Epstein's island. It would be easy to effectively stage a fight without going that far.
Also, there's Occam's razor. It seems more likely to me that these two guys, both of whom have a track record of being emotionally volatile, abrasive, and vindictive, actually did just get into a real spat, than that it is staged.
pigeonburger
7hr ago
No, it's the Democrat aligned media that try to make a big deal of Republican controlled legislatures that try to (futilely) put the genie back in the bottle and require age verification for access to porn.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
7hr ago
Saying "denial" is something that has gotten me warned by the mods in the past, and I was only using it in a vague general sense. You're using it as a personal attack. The moderators on this site are heavily tilted towards conservatives so I doubt anything will happen to you on that front. Still, personal attacks make me just not want to respond to people who make them.
widely known facts
I'm not sure which specific "widely known facts" you think I'm disputing, but the overall "Joe took bribes" story is disputed not only by Dems, it was completely abandoned by Republican House members since there was just nothing there despite all their fishing and their dozens of subpoenas. Filling in that hole, that there's just no evidence, with unfalsifiable claims that Joe was crafty enough to evade all detection, then claiming "it's obvious" while making personal attacks that people who disagree are naive and "in denial" is one way to go about it I suppose. Did you know Dem partisans made similar attacks when the Russia investigation failed to show much in regards to Trump's collusion? Flip the valence of what you said, how it's ludicrous to expect any sort of evidence, that Trump would never be so stupid to sign a big contract saying "I, President Trump, agree to sell out the USA to Russia", and it would sound very much like something a never-Trumper would say.
In any case I doubt we'll change each other's minds, so I'm going to drop this conversation.
Musk also routinely drives traffic to various random X posts by posting one-liners like "Interesting" or "100%" in response to them. Which, while not any sort of heinous deceptiveness, nonetheless is clearly just a way to put his finger on the scales of what gets amplified without having to literally manipulate the algorithms. It's not the kind of action that a pure guileless engineering-minded person would take, I would think.
I also find it a bit hard to believe that Musk would get $300 billion without having some understanding of Machiavellians. In our society, pure brilliant engineer-types tend to max out at a net worth of a few tens of millions, don't they? To get more than that people generally need to have a lot of business acumen, and it's a bit hard for me to imagine having that level of business acumen without understanding how to deal with Machiavellians.
I do think that the overall notion of Musk as being more of an autist type and Trump more of a Machiavellian type seems correct to me, but I quibble with some of the details of Davon Eriksen's purported explanation.
erwgv3g34
7hr ago
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
I mean, the last time they had an advantage in exploration they totally did.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
7hr ago
Are you armin ferman? Also what makes you think that?
No_one
7hr ago
Elon Musk is too guileless. He says exactly what he thinks is true with little regard for how others will react.
This is wrong. Musk has been consistently serving slop to the masses on twitter. Things he could not possibly believe but that were yet flattering the average 110 IQ twitter user.
I propose that Musk is not guileless, he has guile but is also erratic.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
7hr ago
The US electorate is too pants-on-head retarded to save itself from spending. That's it. There is only one way out of this, and it's riding the lightning until we're all consumed by a black swan event in the next couple of years.
Disagree. There is always hope to fix things, this mindset is a huge reason why we're in the political mess we are. We can and will fix spending, now or later. Unless a black swan comes of course, which is always a possibility.
Listening
7hr ago
Isn't that like the Republicans saying "vote for us or the Democrats will ban abortion?"
I'm living the dream!
We don't have them often enough, since my youngest isn't as big a fan as the rest of us, but variety is good too.
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