domain:x.com
Hadad
3hr ago
I'm sympathetic to fatties, I'd say there's plenty of reasons. But it also goes for smokers, drinkers, for people who get into toxic relationships, etc.
Comfort is seductive. Pleasure is seductive. No matter the costs, people gravitate toward them. This is why society should try to restrict them, not facilitate them -- nobody needs help pursuing vices.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3hr ago
These are logistics, and it is not the place of US Senators to do the logistics work of the US military.
Doing another Ceteris Paribus, I would much rather my elected officials understood the scope/scale of the military conflict they are pre-commiting the military people to executing on.
For a more tangible point, every missile fired at Iran, and every defensive interceptor used to protect American assets against Iran, cannot be used for a war against China. The bigger Iran is, the more of those you will need. T
here is a serious opportunity cost to committing to a war, especially when you are in a cold war with a country that is expanding its military faster than you.
Maybe you think it's more important to smash Iran than be maximally prepared against China, in which case fair enough.
But to confidently say "I don't care if the people in charge of deciding to start a war don't understand basic facts about the scope and scale of the war they're committing us to" I think you should have much higher standards for your elected officials.
Jiro
3hr ago
Minority outcomes have shifted very little in any positive directions.
I think "not being a slave" is pretty positive.
hanikrummihundursvin
3hr ago
That might be true but I'm not sure what that changes.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3hr ago
I did not say the population would drop 80%. I said food production would drop by 80% (though that's a rough estimate). There's give in a few places (the USA exports food and that would be redirected; grain-fed animals would be replaced by eating the grain; also, while Westerners do need more food than Third-Worlders to not die - because the body stunts from undernutrition, but that's not retroactive - we don't need quite as much food as we get) - just not 5x worth of give.
I think you also have a different opinion of what constitutes "a going concern" than FCfromSSC.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
4hr ago
I got nothing for that, fair enough
Honestly I ask myself that every time I see a fat person. I have my own shitty habits but that level of self-destruction blows my mind.
Hadad
4hr ago
Healthy lifestyles are harder work than unhealthy ones, and people are accustomed to self-destructive hedonism. Why don't fat people just eat less?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
4hr ago
Great points
My observations are obviously effected by my biases, you see what you expect
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
4hr ago
Oh no worries, I was just making sure I wasn't missing anything
You introduced me to the fact you can see gross up/downvotes, you can do no wrong by me on this day
Hadad
4hr ago
If that's true, then you're fucked no matter what happens in Iran. You'll eventually be washed away in a tide of foreign brown.
Hadad
4hr ago
We can always make more. I'm not persuaded by material limits -- we're the richest people in the history of the species.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
4hr ago
Your points are fair, but I guess to rephrase my point as a question
If Christianity dominated times were so much better (or not worse for women/minorities/whatever) than why does only a rather small portion of western society (a good chunk of the GOP, and tiny fractions of other right-leaning western populations) want to go back?
Why isn't "make $COUNTRY a Christian theocracy again" a winning political strategy?
BahRamYou
4hr ago
I really think you're delusional/mistaken about how powerful the US air force is at that kind of thing. It's built for precision strikes, not mass destruction (unless nukes). "kill every single scientist and engineer" and "transform mountains into infernos" is just not what they do. Israel wants them to use this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-57A/B_MOP on Iran's mountain nuke research facility, but there's only 20 of them in existance and that's basically the only weapon capable of penetrating (maybe?) deep into a mountain. And Iran has a lot more than 20 mountains.
roystgnr
4hr ago
Okay, I think I've edited out all my idiotic identity confusion from my reply. So, that said:
Always open to feedback
I actually have no negative feedback on your comment. My only other nitpick would be with:
it feels independent of comment quality
The bias here might be independent of comment quality, but it's not always large enough to be overwhelmed by comment quality. I see left-wing comments here get highly upvoted regularly, just not as highly upvoted (and not as consistently upvoted) as a right-leaning comment with the same quality would probably have been. So the effect of the bias depends greatly on comment quality: someone who's already on top of their game might not be getting too much unwarranted net negative feedback regardless of their politics, but someone who wanders in here to write right-wing cheap shots probably isn't made to feel as uncomfortable about that as they should be, whereas their left-wing counterpart probably gets scared off too quickly to consider improving instead of leaving.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
First, you have to determine whether or not the law itself makes a distinction based on sex. This is a legal question, not a biological one.
Not really. If the law says "you can't change sex" to both sexes, it's not a sex-based legal distinction. It's a sex-based biological distinction, because how exactly you'd go about changing your sex is a biological matter.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
4hr ago
I'm not here to defend liberalism uncritically. Many issues you illustrate here are 100% correct. Alienation is one of liberalisms most profound legacies (I think this is probably a feature to the elite, not a big).
But I'm not with you on a bunch of them. I'm significantly more free than I would be in basically any other time, and I'm a white straight male, so the delta for literally any other mix and match of traits here is even higher.
I actually have a chance to improve my station in life, which was famously not something peasants did frequently.
I could marry a black woman and not risk her being murdered.
I can say things that piss people off without being ostracized or jailed or killed (although this is steadily getting worse).
I can vote despite not being rich or owning land.
It is easier than ever to literally move around the world, both temporarily and permanently. I'm pretty sure peasants frequently literally weren't allowed to leave? Also if they moved somewhere else they'd just be destitute.
I have no idea what medieval effective tax rates were so I'll defer to you there. I also don't consider taxes to be a horrible burden though. They buy me amazing healthcare, functional infrastructure (which enables a lot), infinite amounts of the cleanest drinking water in human history, much lower chances of dying a violent death, on and on.
Did peasants own land? I assume it depends on time and place but I thought that was the whole point of Lords.
I am quite happy with the quantity and quality of my relationships, but that is something out society is struggling with.
I'm so confident that peasants got drafted. Isn't that what peasant levies were? Did fighting age men get to opt out of wars? If so, why did any go?
I don't consider the quantity of paperwork I do to be a freedom constraining issue in my life lol. Although I used to be an accountant so my bar is low.
I really can't imagine how I'd be more free in basically any time period that isn't now, not excluding the post war boom in North America when life as a western man was straight easy mode
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
It's a 2-step analysis. First, you have to determine whether or not the law itself makes a distinction based on sex. This is a legal question, not a biological one. If you determine that it does, only then do you get to consider biology, since step two then asks if the distinction is "substantially related to an important government interest". The Tennessee law doesn't even pretend that this isn't a sex-based distinction. Hell, the law finds it necessary to define "sex" to eliminate all ambiguity. Yet the majority puzzlingly finds that it doesn't to avoid having to get to step 2.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
I believe in you guys.
Thanks, but we're being ruled be literal lizardmen, and we don't have nearly as many guns in the hands of the common people as you do.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4hr ago
In the RCC, You can live a consecrated single life that isn't religious. It takes discernment and represents a real commitment. If one doesn't go that route, doesn't join a religious order, and also doesn't have a family, I don't believe this is seen as inherently sinful, but the person should be honest with themselves about selfishness, laziness etc. As far as I can tell, discerning one's vocation should be very intentional and not accidental or emergent happenstance. If you know what you're doing and do it with good intention, there are many, many good ways to live.
Tenaz
4hr ago
"If your God has commanded you to support Israel, then surely you would do it even if it was actively against American interests?"
Mu. Cruz' position is that God blesses those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel. It's less of a commandment and more of an explicit statement handed down From On High that helping Israel is in America's interests.
I don't agree with his interpretation of those verses, but it's worth clarifying this.
BahRamYou
4hr ago
another way of looking at it is that it's roughly the size of Iraq and Afghanistan, combined, and even larger than that in land area. There's a reason that during the iraq war the US still shied away from invading Iran.
roystgnr
4hr ago
I know that I'm often an idiot, but since "I'm currently being an idiot" is the sort of thing that interferes with my resolutions to frequently double-check whether I'm being currently being an idiot, it's frustratingly hard for me to make that knowledge actionable.
I mistook you for the top level comment author @voters-eliot-azure - my apologies.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4hr ago
I agree with you that the issue is much more complex than "it's all the women's fault", but I also think that any solution demanding that women change anything about their behavior is haram in our society, and that such changes are indeed necessary to solve the problem.
I mostly agree with this. I have been reading hot takes on both sides for a number of years (the redpillers vs. the feminists, the Dread Jims vs. the radfems) and I think the discourse overall is quite poisonous. On the one hand, yes, Women Are Wonderful and how dare men ever criticize any woman's choice ever? OTOH, it's hard not to sympathize with women who become paranoid and fearful of men when you see so many men (including right here on the Motte) who, mask off, believe that women should not have a choice about who will fuck them. Also, I admit there are very few populations I have a harder time sympathizing with than incels.
All fair concerns for you to have, just not ones I share. I genuinely don't think it matters at all if Ted Cruz knows the population of Iran, because its population isn't one of the relevant metrics for our decisions.
More options
Context Copy link