domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
Hadad
13hr ago
It's the transparency that ruins it, not the news. If government was impenetrable and its records masked instead of openly presented, compromise could still happen.
Hadad
13hr ago
What you say here is directly opposite to what I've observed in my own life throughout both presidencies. Trump faces significant more pushback than Obama ever did. I'm unsure how to reconcile this -- one of us is simply wrong in our understanding of reality, there's no other way around it. And I don't think it's me.
Hadad
13hr ago
The QAnon stuff goes here.
Yes, QAnon is a similar sort of crazy.
...and the "God-Emperor" memes, among others, go here.
The difference is irony, though I understand a third party might not believe this. The worship of Obama was sincere in a way Trump never has been. Trump is a creature of social media and deeply performative displays.
Hadad
13hr ago
Maybe for a short while but left-wing opinion turned cool on Obama surprisingly quickly, and the 'anti-imperialist' Chomskyite left never liked him. As early as 2009 not-exactly-radical-lefist Bill Maher said that:
No, it endured his entire Presidency, and even beyond it. While there's a slice of the left that dislikes Obama, it's not at all mainstream opinion.
More importantly, I think the election denial/J6 clearly puts MAGA a class apart from any other modern American political movement in terms of cultishness.
Definitely not. Challenging elections is simply what one does in such a competitive system -- there are entire Reddit communities devoted to conspiracies about 2024, you know. And J6 wasn't even the worst mostly peaceful protest at the Capital, let alone remarkable at all compared to the Burn, Loot, & Murder riots. Indeed, J6 was actually uniquely acceptable compared to other protests, given it actually directed itself against the ruling elites rather than terrorize innocent, unrelated people in cities across the country.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13hr ago
I do not think this level of low-effort sarcasm is conducive to good discussion. This is a warning; please do not post this way in the future.
Hadad
13hr ago
That you think Obama's cult was in blacks, and not the whites who fetishized him, suggests to me we fundamentally don't see the same world. Obama's cult was significantly larger and more mainstream than anything of Trump's. What are you even suggesting with Catturd as a leading figure? He posts on Twitter. He doesn't make any kind of decisions or influence any thought, he's just an aggregator of outrage.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
13hr ago
My understanding is that the traditional way is that it's fairly common to just accept that if you get pregnant from pre-maritial sex, you get married and everyone agrees to not do the math on the wedding date compared to your first child's birthday. While there's certainly been a change in the past few decades of whether it's acceptable to not get married in that situation, I'm not sure there's any real reason to believe the prevalence of unmarried people having sex has gone up.
cjet79
13hr ago
If it was anglo names that would help with memorization. If it was mainly non-anglo names I think I'd be just as screwed. I've learned from reading translated works that only anglo names actually stick with me. And I fear in today's culture it would be lots of non-anglo names.
No_one
13hr ago
Tar & chip seems like a good method, if properly done. Tar should prevent weeds from taking root easily, also waterproof so if there's soil being created in there (and it will be getting created in there), you can poison the crap and not risk much getting into the soil. Ofc, bad contractors can fuck it up easily.
I spent three days this week paving a 10x10' area with flagstones at the dacha. The old outdoors table was mostly rotten. Just the bloody stones, about 1000 lbs of them cost us €120, but there's nothing like those in the ground around here and we didn't want just a concrete slab.
Digging the ground level, putting in sand, buying, moving and placing the not that even flagstone to be at most +- 1/8" off the sloping horizontal plane, at most and then filling the gaps with concrete took like three days total. Hopefully it'll last at least 30+ years like other similar flagstone-paved paths at the dacha. Maybe 2-3 pros would've done it in 8 hours, I think.
Yeah. My wife already had an autoimmune condition which seriously worsened after taking the covid vaccine. We even tried to get an exemption for her since she has had similar issues with other vaccines and we saw the early case reports on young women with autoimmune diseases, to no avail. And we're hardly layman, we're both scientists with relevant expertise. Covid was a major blackpill for us on the topic of trusting scientific consensus. If we get shut out like this for a mildly inconvenient opinion (we're not even fully sceptics for the covid vaccine in particular - I took my doses with no problems nor expectations of such), imagine the pressure for even less popular ones! Of course it did not come as a complete surprise due to earlier experiences, but it really solidified our opinion of academics.
On the first part though I disagree strongly. People frequently write something like "men do/are X" with nobody complaining, and the same goes for plenty of smaller groups. If you disagree, just do so in writing, as you did; It's what everyone else does, and a good reason to stop lurking.
Throwaway05
13hr ago
Yes and just like queen mab,* contact with them can be quite hazardous.
I do enjoy the "deck the halls with beta blockers olol, olol, olol, olol" joke.
*Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
13hr ago
Tangentially related and a bit more on-rails, but you might really like Suzerain, a sort of amalgamation of a little bit of political simulation, a bit of choose your own adventure, a bit of visual novel, and a bit of Paradox. You basically guide your country, fresh off of a lifelong dictator's one-party rule, into the sorta-democratic era, and decide if you want to be a dictator yourself, maybe a commie, maybe a capitalist pig, maybe in the middle. But it's not all country-simulation: you are you, the leader. If you promise to reform the constitution, you sort of have to follow through, unless you're savvy enough. The chief justice of the supreme court might try to bribe you at some point. Your son sometimes acts out. A cabinet member might get embroiled into an affair or a scandal. Terrorists sometimes attack. You have neighbors including one who might invade you, and a sort of cold war analogue going on internationally (where you are not one of the big dogs).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
14hr ago
Manchin is actually quoted as saying he's doing this "not as a Democrat".
So? He's still a Democrat.
Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism.
That's not what 50 Stalins means. As it was originally used, it was "Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”"
It's supposed to be a completely facile pseudocriticism, not an actual criticism that is simply coming from a different direction than where you yourself are coming from. If we loop back to actual Stalin, it was just as dangerous to attack him from the left (like Trotsky did) as from the right (like Bukharin did), originally even considerably moreso. The only way to stay say would have been not to attack Stalin at all but "attack the system" while praising Stalin, like the 50 Stalins example guy does.
And it's not actually hard to find conservatives criticizing Trump.
This is someone obscure enough that I have never heard of them before you linked this, and the whole piece starts with him taling about how his criticisms of Trump get him constantly attacked by dozens of readers. Not a particularly worthy example, this.
gattsuru
14hr ago
Yeah, they're not even subtle about it.
Jiro
14hr ago
Manchin is actually quoted as saying he's doing this "not as a Democrat", and I think this counts as saying that the Tsar is poorly advised:
Manchin said he is a proud Democrat, having been raised with the values of “always reaching out, trying to help others have a better quality of life and help themselves” and taking care of those who cannot help themselves.
But he said sometimes his party’s priorities in Washington are “out of balance with … how we do business in West Virginia.”
Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism. And it's not actually hard to find conservatives criticizing Trump.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
14hr ago
I'm not comparing with the Bidens, though. To me that's too much selection bias, of a sort, but there's more than that besides. We should compare Trump's progeny to other business magnates - the original claim from faceh was that Trump is underappreciated for having well-adjusted progeny, and I reply that no no, he's merely doing par for the course. Billionaire kids, near as I can tell, aren't poorly-adjusted all that often. Politician kids, which were lumped in the same category, are not the same category. They are in fact on the spectrum that leads toward celebrity kids, which is definitely not the same category, despite conflation in that same comment! Trump is a businessman who, in the twilight of his life, decided to be a politician (and some think didn't even fully intend to, alleging he expected to lose). That's a very different thing than a political dynasty family. And even then... you know, children of major politicians being an embarrassment is probably still the exception rather than the rule.
WhiningCoil
14hr ago
So I finally took profit on COIN and decided to get my driveway redone with some of the windfall. It's a fucking disaster, washed out, weeds coming through, you name it. Thinking of going with tar & chip to the house, and then recycled asphalt back to my workshop. It's about 400+ ft of driveway total and my first quote is about $11,000. I guess we'll see how this goes.
No_one
14hr ago
Has anyone ever described the motivation for watching fights, or what people get out of it ? I greatly respect anyone who is crazy enough to get into such a fight, unless they're obviously crazy and unprepared.
But watching the fight itself is completely different to being in a fight, which to me is a very exhilarating experience judging by serious grade school fights or some kinetic sparring I've done a few times.. but that's sadly too risky and I generally prefer to avoid doing it- especially the 'real' fights with hot blood. There's just nothing there, sure it's somewhat more interesting than the fake fights in films, but it's only a very 'academic' interest.
Clearly, that's not other people's attitude so I'm wondering what's going on.
If people healed like in computer games, I'd probably be very much into MMA, but we sadly don't.
Iamme
14hr ago
Despite rules about writing as if everyone is reading and you want them to be included, I often see posts like these which assume no female readers. That’s one of the many reasons I mostly lurk.
But this:
Women are more hostile to COVID vaccination, perhaps reflecting a female urge to make politics revolve around their bodies.
You could just ask us. This has an answer. Or at least, I have an answer as to why I have mostly soured on the COVID vaccine and I will not be subjecting my children to it. Hint: It’s not because I want politics to revolve around my body. At least no more than men want to make politics revolve around their bodies.
It’s because ever since I “trusted the experts” and eagerly took the vaccine back in 2021, my life has been miserable for a few days out of every month. As an outcry of women rose up, the news happily reported that this was a “rare” side effect and would go away in a couple months. They basically told us to shut up about it and to stop getting in the way of the solution to COVID. It has been more than four years and I am still suffering the same as when I first got the vaccine. And I know of others in the same boat.
I don’t know of any who are speaking out publicly. That “shut up” command got through loud and clear. However, considering what it has done to some of us, I am not surprised that women tend to be more “hostile” to COVID vaccination.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
14hr ago
On the other hand, the amount of times I have been muzzle swept by old boomer fudds at the range who cant remeber the 4 rules of gun safety much less their blood pressure medication is way too damn high, and I am all for not letting them have guns.
I've said before that the quickest way to lose your 2A absolutist beliefs is to work the gun counter at your LGS for a weekend.
Poultice
14hr ago
This is a bizarre statement to me, Trump's cultists are not "mainstream" in any meaning of the word.
I'm old enough to remember the dozens of covers of actual mainstream newspapers and magazines with pictures of Obama with the Presidential seal positioned just so behind his head to give the appearance of a halo.
Do I need to provide links to the "Lightworker" articles or the newsweek "god of all things" Shiva cover? This is either absurd revisionism or you're very young.
sun_the_second
14hr ago
I think a cult of personality is when a statesman is treated not merely as a statesman who did a great job, but an exceptional, well, personality. It's when sycophants say "Stalin raised this country from its knees (and no one else could)", not "we raised this country from its knees under Stalin (he was a great help)".
No_one
14hr ago
Yeah, pretty much. But there's no peak nor end to cinephilia or any other arena of art-snobbery. I'm sure among cinephiles you'd find those who look down on people who think Tarkovsky's 'Nostalghia' isn't actually self-indulgent artsy trash and a true person of taste and discernment likes some more obscure indeciphrable film with better cinematography.
As Mihow said, she made her life better. Why would any father dread that?
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