domain:streamable.com
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5hr ago
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
Yes? The vast majority of second and third generation Mexican-Americans are never going to fly a Mexican flag in their life. This is a strawman.
Strawman would be a caricature of you position. You're being a bit guarded with it, and so I have to ask some clarifying question about the extent of your beliefs, and such questions cannot be a strawman be definition. So answer please: are the blokes flying the Mexican flag just as American as you?
How the descendants of immigrants are going to integrate is an open question. If they're a tiny minority in an otherwise unified culture, they'll probably integrate. If they're a plurality, and / or the host culture is fragmented, reasons to integrate start disappearing, and there might not even be anything to integrate into, even if they wanted to do it.
Wanting to deport non-white citizens is a suicidal political position because it foments civil war.
I'm not sure citizens can be deported, which is the whole point of doing it now, rather than waiting until the second or third generation. In any case unlimited immigration foments civil war too. Deportations at least have the benefit of not demographically replacing your own nation on top of that.
anti_dan
5hr ago
Most middle class kids never work at Mcdonalds or a similar place (not that there is anything wrong with that). They, in my day, worked as supplemental workers at a place that needed an infusion of labor. I worked at a factory where books were distributed.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
They can be forgiven for wanting to shore up the progressive wing by running a woman of color with progressive tendencies, but not so progressive as to be at odds with the platform.
No, they can't. Because they didn't just run "a woman of color with progressive tendencies."
They ran Kamala Harris. Who was the worst candidate in the history of American Presidential races since WW2 (pre-WW2 Presidential stuff is really a completely different dynamic. It's kind of funny it almost parallels the deadball / liveball demarcation for baseball).
The "meta" of what @FiveHourMarathon wrote can be summarized as Democrats Often Neglect Reality (DONR PARTY). They professional politicos simply ignore the obvious. Not always, necessarily, in favor of something else (i.e. identity politics) but just because acknowledging a harsh reality is often jarring and uncomfortable.
Kamala Harris was bad as a candidate. Her interviews were atrocious. Her stump speeches were too volatile - she'd be doing well in one part of one speech but then nosedive in another part. Her "unrehearsed" interactions with her own voters/fans were awkward and seem bizarrely staged even for American politics. She had an awful laugh (which is something you can modify). This is America in 2024. Social media is understood. In fact, it's a cornerstone of mass communication, including politics. Beyond that, the "5 second clip" has been happening since the 2000s. You either have to be psychopathically on-the-ball sharp 24/7 (and this is why I still think Newsome is in the mix for 2028) or you have to develop a brand wherein gaffes and flubs are kind of part of the deal - this is what Trump has been doing ever since his first word salad speech in 2016.
How in the hell do you run Kamala Harris knowing all of these things? She's a dumpster fire of a candidate. But when you Just Say No (I LOVE YOU, NANCY) to reality ... anything can happen.
2D3D
5hr ago
And make the camps livable but not comfortable. Like permanent fat camp. Honestly the best immigration strategy was Ali Gs strategy: only young hot women, no men EVER. I would also advocate for obligate LGB-especially T maximalism and have every declared MTF migrant get the chop. Yay feminism!
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
5hr ago
That’s bad. “Me and Epstein share a secret pleasure that only the elites are able to enjoy. This enigmatic thing never ages, wink wink. But you remember that from last time. I AM WRITING THIS WITHIN THE SILHOUETTE OF A NAKED WOMAN IN CASE THERE IS ANY CONFUSION”.
Eric Weinstein wrote on x a few days ago
He was almost certainly a front used for funding edgy science, information gathering, control, etc away from normal channels.
It wasn’t one thing. He wasn’t a creepy front company…he was a mall filled with different business providing different goods and services. It wasn’t all about raping kids. Some collection of people invested something like 9 figures in creating a weird 11-12 figure fairy tale via leverage. And it was used for a lot of things. It was called Jeffrey Epstein.
The funders of Jeffrey Epstein were possibly able to blackmail both Bill Clinton and Trump. In the 2016 election, no matter what, they had leverage.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5hr ago
and the only thing it accomplishes is to potentially egg on the next mass shooter
Do you genuinely believe that the next mass shooter is reading The Motte? And if the answer is yes, do you believe that his opinions would not have been radicalized if not for having read racially-tinged comments on The Motte?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
5hr ago
either the agenda is unpopular and they know it, or they don’t have an agenda to run on.
It's also a credibility issue. You can only run on building infrastructure or fixing Healthcare and then fail to do it so many times before voters conclude you are either lying or incompetent. Ironically Trump benefited from being outside the establishment in this regard, as while he didn't have any credibility in delivering government results, he at least didn't have the stink of repeated failure to deliver that both parties have accumulated.
This is the I think accurate point the abundance bros are making: it's not actually enough to be in favor of things people want, you have to execute as well. And simply allocating funding doesn't count as executing!
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5hr ago
It's more of a mixed bag for the people possessing it, as you mentioned.
It also encourages people to pursue harmony, intimacy, and compassion, which are real positives. I don’t endorse the “I get whatever I want thing,” but I simply can’t bond with a disagreeable person because I care deeply about fairness and I prefer to resolve conflicts in a way where everyone is heard and cared for. I believe in stating preferences openly, and finding compromise; I’m certainly not interested in docility, but in every kind of human relationship I strongly prefer cooperation and compassion, because we all need it.
I usually think of myself as rather disagreeable, but that does sound like a description an agreeable person would give of themselves. Huh.
Anyway, I would frame the attractiveness of agreeableness as being more about similarity and bonds of affection. I simply don’t like disagreeable people, not because I can’t exploit them (I don’t like exploiting anyone!) but because I feel like I’m constantly being exploited by them, if they even see me as a source of any value, which they usually don’t. I don’t like living like that. I’d rather lay cards on the table and cooperate rather than engage in games of status and one-upmanship.
It’s true that agreeable-agreeable pairings can have their own downsides, but I’ll stack them up against other personality combinations any day, particularly for intimate relationships. Especially if you couple your agreeableness with honesty and forthrightness. Maybe that’s what HEXACO honesty-humility+agreeableness looks like? I don’t know.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
To summarize: genetic diversity and local groupings are constantly changing (fact of history) and any definition of race you make fundamentally requires you to choose a snapshot in time to use as a baseline (bad and subjective); this concept of race, ill-defined (it's a very high-dimensional space), generalizes poorly to groups with any significant intermixing (which is most groups), and especially generalizes poorly to any given individual (especially recently mixed-race ones). Slicing race more finely, in terms of geographic origin (e.g. "ethnicity"), fixes some of these problems, but far from all.
Spez1alEd
5hr ago
It seems obvious to me that even assuming WhiningCoil's claim is "true," in the sense that young black men commit more crime, and this is inherent to their biology, and we have countless studies to prove it, it is still perfectly valid to strongly object to describing them as an invasive species. To do so is a blatantly dehumanising use of language that I believe could easily prime those who engage in it to see such a group as less than human, and therefore to be dealt with in the manner you would deal with non-human pests. This isn't complicated, it would be clear to everyone if he were describing Jews in a manner that compared them to vermin. So it is with blacks or any other ethnic group.
To be clear, I'm not accusing him of personally wanting to genocide or start a race war against blacks or anything, nor is this about being squeamish and finding the language offensive. But I think when you normalise referring to groups in such blatantly dehumanising and contemptuous terms, there is a clear risk of it contributing to a culture that views violence against them as legitimate.
There is nothing about acknowledging HBD or even arguing for explicitly racist policy that requires you to engage in this sort of thing, and the only thing it accomplishes is to potentially egg on the next mass shooter and to turn the public against you because whatever points you may or may not have, they can clearly see that your position is rooted in seething hatred and malice.
anti_dan
5hr ago
Harris isn't blameless, but she surely has less blame than the surrounding figures, particularly those that actually made Biden's presidency so unpopular like his Chief of Staff and Secretaries of various departments. She is a classic case of a schoolteacher level intelligence person being elevated far beyond her competence (in this circumstance due to race and willingness to sleep with older men). But she doesnt even know that. Her whole worldview is predicated on her being incapable of learning that.
AAND on top of that all she was the VP, which is typically a useless and powerless position.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5hr ago
"don't adopt a black kid, they're all bad, and they're ruining everything".
No, the actual claim is, “The specific black kids who are up for adoption/fostering in America are, to an extremely large extent, likely to be a huge problem.” They are not a randomly-selected cross-section of the overall black population. There is a reason why they are up for adoption, and it is nearly always a terrible reflection on the parents.
If you accept any sort of hereditarian explanation of human behavior, then it should matter to you that the kid you’re considering for adoption is very very very likely to be the child of A) a drug addict), B) an incarcerated person, or C) a teenage unwed mother. (Or the very common D) all of the above.) The same traits that led such a person to such a lowly state are likely to manifest at least to some extent in the child as well. Even if you don’t accept any hereditarian claims, you still have to worry about things like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, childhood malnutrition, and even neglect/abuse leading to stunted cognitive/physical development, etc. Again, these things are not guaranteed to make the child a ticking time bomb, but the likelihood is far from zero.
These things are at least partially true of non-black children up for adoption or in the foster system as well, but to a markedly lesser extent. The likelihood of these problems just is higher when it comes to adopting a black child. That could change at some point down the road, and certainly there are numerous exceptions and success stories even today, but that doesn’t mean it’s immoral or misguided to take these things into account.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
That's sort of exactly my criticism of race and racism, it just doesn't serve the purpose. We should either talk about discrimination on the individual level, or talk about stereotypes on the group level (and not limit it to poor pattern-matching, open it up to more than just genetic ancestry - let's talk culture and more, directly). Racism is a bad word because it can be applied to either case! Race by itself means genetic ancestry, and quite obviously genetic ancestry is not the biggest thing that matters when talking group-wide trends, fair or unfair alike (plus as I pointed out the ancestry gets fuzzy edges way too easily in modern life, especially melting pot countries like the US). I'm not even trying to start a HBD debate or anything. I agree on the trivially true bit and maybe even a bit more FWIW. But if you think pre-industrial humans believed in HBD or something like it, you'd be wrong on at least two levels.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5hr ago
Buddy. Pal. Lemme level with you here. I gotta be brutally honest, because you did ask for an explanation of why you get downvoted so much.
You have, from what I've observed in your posts, a staggering inability to ever acknowledge when the person you're talking to has ever made a valid point.
Now obviously no one in an internet debate ever actually admits they were straight up wrong. But there's a difference between "yeah ok, that's true but your position is still bullshit because of XYZ" and "ah, no, erm, you see, you've simply misunderstood the situation as it were, it's actually not like that at all, I don't know what you're talking about..."
You seem to be particularly fond of the latter. And it's one of the fastest ways to really turn people off from listening to anything you have to say.
I told you that the way you phrased your post will read as insulting to many people here. I'm quite confident that this is a fact. There are many ways you could respond to this. You could say "well fuck 'em I don't care", you could say "it shouldn't be an insult if it's true", there are lots of things you could say in your defense that aren't just total capitulation and admission of guilt. But instead you chose "nope, that never happened, don't know what you're talking about". Which is essentially the most obnoxious type of response possible.
Again, the lion's share of your downvotes come from the simple fact that your views are anti-consensus, but your particular style of argument certainly doesn't help things.
PokerPirate
5hr ago
I wish our best and brightest were competing to make video games. They're all at FAANG serving ads and optimizing our attention.
anti_dan
5hr ago
Biden was not uniformly coherent in 2020. He did accomplish stepping up in a few select debates and appearances, probably as a result of extremely planned napping schedules and drug dosing. It was obvious to anyone who wasn't on his side or influenced by mainstream media that he was already severely impaired. The tale of 2024 is that his impairment became so ridiculous that it was not possible to conceal.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
IIRC they both said she wanted more green energy stuff generally (power generation, that is), which I counted. My mom also said... "something about housing? I don't really know and can't remember" which I didn't count because it was too vague. She was right though, that was one I named, the first-time homebuyer credit. I also could name the expanded child and childcare tax credit, and her vague gestures at tightening the borer. After thinking about it a little longer, I think I was able to remember some plan to negotiate Medicare drug prices, but Trump also had some similar-sounding version of the same plan, so I wasn't sure if that counted - or if the border tightening counted either, since she was basically forced into it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5hr ago
I replied that your reasoning is a defacto state of eventually arbitrarily banning anyone who goes against the dominant ideology of this forum unless they adhere to a much stricter ruleset.
Thank you for adding another nickel to my pile.
You will continue to get downvoted as long as you're not in line with the consensus.
I'm glad we can agree this is what's happening. I wish this was universal knowledge here.
MAGA (a concrete group of people
Is MAGA really that concrete of a group? I always understood it to be fairly amorphous -- I doubt many people would unironically identify with such a label on this forum, yet I know plenty of people here are effectively in it by the points they argue.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6hr ago
I said "first of all" but so far responses have been fixating on this point rather than the broader point that modern racism doesn't back-extrapolate to history very well at all. That's presentism. Modern racism has at best very imperfect analogies historically (at the very least, pre-industrial ones). I just want to register my annoyance that I'm being argued with on a point that's not germane to the topic I was trying to refute.
What you say is true! Any categorization algorithm, which usually involves some kind of "cutoff" that is chosen, is inherently subject to a confusion matrix with its accompanying tradeoffs. Right? You have false positives, true positives, false negatives, true negatives. To continue that analogy, in the modern world, the tradeoffs are actually kind of large. Total model "accuracy" hits unacceptably low numbers, in my opinion, because of how many blurred borderline cases there are, resulting in miscategorizations of various types. So I guess what I was trying to say is that people have currently 'latched on' to race because of its salience in the political conversation, but it's a poor tool for the job. So sure, race as a categorization algorithm "works" to some extent, and so in that sense it's "real", but we shouldn't be in the habit of substituting models of reality for actual reality. That's the sense by which I call it "not real" - it works (kinda sorta) but it isn't a true depiction of reality. A lot of people especially on this forum go around pretending that race is a Big Deal, and are the equivalent of the gender essentialists (which I actually kind of am) but for race (which I am definitely not). But gender is like, obviously and self-evidently a Big Deal, and race is... well, it just isn't. Not by itself!
This is why I always try and insist that we should have different conversations for issues of race (broad category that, critically intersects with a lot of more-potent things like culture, social status, economics, etc that we might as well discuss more directly!) than we do for issues of discrimination (where we debate and talk about ethics and how they intersect with practical reality and probability) because otherwise everyone always ends up at cross-purposes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6hr ago
right now they depend on GPS systems for accuracy
Pretty sure they're using GLONASS, the Russian version of GPS.
At the end of the day war is mostly about mass. If there's broad technological and political parity (not a colonial stomp or a guerilla war), then it's about numbers. How can a European NATO of over 600 million lose to a Russia of 140 million? What level of unpreparedness and inexperience can counter 4:1 in numbers? And they have the defender's advantage too.
If Russia can quickly make lots of cheap jet drones, so can Europe. Anything Russia can do, Europe can replicate. The asymmetry is this: just as Russia can hammer Ukraine down in attritional fighting after early reverses, so can Europe to Russia.
Only if there's a political failure, if the whole edifice just implodes as the Turks nope out, the Serbs and Hungarians decide it's not their war, if Britain and France won't really use nukes to defend Polish or German territory... then Europe loses. But so long as they're united they can fight on to victory, if only by drowning Russia in men. The US need not even show up IMO.
Let the Gerans fly, let the Oreshniks blow up Patriot batteries, let the T-90Ms thrust into the Baltics, let the Russians run wild for 6 months. They've got a huge front to man from Finland to the Caucasus. They'll be hemmed in at sea. They'll still be facing vast reserves of wealth and manpower, a foe with time on his side and talent to spare. At the end of a long attritional war they'll have to fall back on their strategic nuclear forces to broker a peace.
I don't buy that they'd risk a war with NATO unless China suplexes the US in Asia, at which point we all have much bigger concerns.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6hr ago
So, to be clear, the reason people get downvoted is because they express views that go against the majority opinion. The downvote button is a disagree button. You will continue to get downvoted as long as you're not in line with the consensus. Sorry.
That being said, I think the reason @Goodguy's third comment there didn't get downvoted is because he framed the issue as being more about Trump (an individual) and Trumpism (an abstract ideology), rather than MAGA (a concrete group of people, as you seem to be using the term). In the short comment I'm replying to, you said that MAGA "likes authoritarianism" and "goes with the flow". You can't hide your contempt for the majority of people who are reading your comment. That's obviously not going to endear them to you.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6hr ago
The hypergamy crunch is just around the corner. We're already at a point socially where there are three women to two men among new college graduates. This clearly cannot last.
Why can’t it last? Sure, over timescales some groups will have more children than others, but liberalism is a powerful identity package that has a lot of ability to convert people from conservative backgrounds.
This is trivially true, but unimportant.
American blacks with racial consciousness have started calling themselves Black, and so that's what people call them, unless it's completely laughable like Meghan Markle. If someone with very dark skin comes over from some monastery in Ethiopia and doesn't do any American Black things, and doesn't teach children to whine about someone else getting opressed several generations ago, then even the racists don't complain about them.
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