domain:kvetch.substack.com
TowardsPanna
1m ago
This coffee venture feels frustrating so far, in the research and purchasing stages. I've spent a couple hours on research. It seems like almost everything is sub-optimal in some way, especially the budget models. And everything in terms of good equipment is expensive where I live. I can't even find a decent manual grinder for less than $60. The automatic ones worth buying cost 200+. We don't have any domestic Amazon warehouses or anything like that, and import fees are high. I've looked at second-hand listings; can't find the models I want. I may end up buying the Baratza Encore, but annoyingly it's priced 30 higher than it was a couple months ago.
I think I do want a good burr grinder, because trying out various whole beans from around the world is a big part of the appeal of getting into coffee. As for the brewing instrument, I'll probably go for a Chemex with the glass handle. It doesn't look quite as cool as the classical one with the wooden handle, but it should prove more hassle-free. I might go for the "3 cup" version, which afaik doesn't really provide enough liquid for 3 cups, but I hope I can make coffee for two people in one operation.
But I may have hobbled myself a bit with this pour-over route. A few days ago I ordered a new electric kettle with a temperature/thermostat function, thinking that would come in handy for both tea and coffee. It doesn't have a gooseneck...! I don't think the spout is extremely unsuited, but it's not optimal. Sigh. It's the Bosch TWK7203.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4m ago
Qatar hosts a US base, has been repeatedly publicly proclaimed as an ally by successive administrations, have Trump a PLANE, and only harbored the enemy leaders at this point because the United States told them to keep them around. Collaborator might actually be too mild.
jkf
8m ago
Now I haven't weighed in on who I thought killed Charlie Kirk, because deep in my heart I'm terrified it will turn out to be some right wing nut.
The ARFcom thread on the incident is annoying yet informative -- sounds like the shooter carved trans/antifa positive messages onto the shells in his gun (which has now been recovered) -- so "right wing nut" is looking unlikely, barring an unrealistically convoluted false-flag attempt...
07mk
8m ago
I'll just say, I have no argument to make against your belief. But from my experience as a blue living in one of the bluest areas of the country where that modal Democrat voter you described is likely a majority (certainly D voters are a supermajority, but whether that specific modal D voter is a majority is questionable) and if not that, a plurality, I don't think many of them would murder Musk if given a chance like that. Most of them go along with the most extreme of the progressive demands, and most of them do have lots of antipathy towards Musk, but straight-up cold-blooded murder is still beyond the pale for most, by my perception. That's probably changing, with the left's reaction to Mangione pushing things somewhat and perhaps its reaction to Kirk's murder pushing things even more.
Now, if you selected for young, college-educated people among those D voters, especially women, among the modal D voters, then yeah, I'd probably take the under on a millisecond.
Catsnakes_
9m ago
(Apparently, he called for people to bail out the Pelosi attacker, which seems cringeworthy poor taste to me, but is still different from calling for her to be murdered.)
You could just look this up and see what he actually said (and then discuss it here) rather than just taking it on faith.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9m ago
Getting bombed by the U.S. does not make you a failed state. Getting bombed by a U.S. ally, even less so.
I think this is a questionable decision, but not a particularly novel one.
gattsuru
10m ago
Fair. We'll see if it's a real thing or just another Toobin, but I'll register that I did genuinely not expect that.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
10m ago
I remember being a junior in highschool when 9/11 happened. In the ramp up to the war in Iraq, closer to when I went or was already off to college, anti war protesters were a common object of mockery. I'll never completely forget this one clip. The details are fuzzy. He was holding some sign like "Arrest Bush" or "Bush is a War Criminal", you know the type. He had a slight speech impediment, accent, or both. And some conservative was asking him loaded questions like "Don't you think Iraq is the most dangerous country to world peace?" and the protester, in his weird mush mouth way of speaking went "I think the United States is the most dangerous country to world peace."
Like I said, something to all that effect. I doubtlessly have the details wrong. It was 25 years ago, and some throw away clip on cable news. But I remember my mind exploded. How could this guy be that fucking stupid? What the fuck. What a moron. What a rube. How delusional.
I'm sorry unwashed protester with a slight speech impediment on the TV. I didn't know better.
NewCharlesInCharge
12m ago
I think Kirk would have disagreed that he ought to be murdered but wouldn’t want his murder to justify restrictions on gun rights.
The optimal number of murders is not zero. The cost of what we would have to do to implement a zero murder society would not be worth it.
You're thinking of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. but yeah.
I grew up in an environment where you either become desensitized to everything or you learn to develop a very thick skin. Leftists can have their parades and celebrations if they like. It doesn't bother me, nor should bother anyone who bought into the "leftist snowflake" or "lispy pussy" rhetoric. On a personal level there are days I feel like Christopher Hitchens did on the debate stage, "Love and peace? Very very overrated in my view." Call me immoral or immature if you like. Likewise I'll celebrate when one of theirs gets knocked off and they shouldn't have the gall to complain about it for the same reason I didn't complain about them.
... just not acting like literal demons cackling with glee would suffice to temper my rage towards them. I consider it well earned at this point.
Civility is one thing. Moral policing is another. When I was growing up people just seemed to have so much more of a thicker skin than they do today. Nowadays you call someone faggot here, they act like a pearl clutching moron who looks at you like you just pulled out a gun and shot their dog. Which is odd because that's what the left-wing of old used to attack and criticize the right-wing for, because the stereotypical image of them was of a bunch of straight-laced white people that behaved like soccer moms. We didn't call that "being offensive," we called that "letting off," and most of the community kept quiet in the knowledge that sometimes people really did deserve it and had it coming to them. And it actually toughened those people up and caused them to shift their behavior for the better. I actually miss those days sometime.
rae
13m ago
Felled-Martin’s novel is poorly written, sanctimonious, masturbatory drivel and it absolutely did not deserve the praise that it got. I stopped reading after one of the main characters (a trans woman) got a hard-on from shooting at a TERF militia called “the Knights of JK Rowling”. I wasn’t aware before but it doesn’t surprise me that the author called for the death of public figures she disagreed with, I’m glad she’s being cancelled after celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, and I genuinely hope it represents a vibe shift from the politics that dominate the kinds of media she’s involved with.
And I say all of this as a liberal trans woman who heavily disliked Charlie Kirk and found his politics morally reprehensible. You don’t have to mourn the man, you can even comment on the irony of his final words, but actively cheering on his death, a gory assassination in front of thousands of college students, should be completely unacceptable.
jkf
14m ago
They're... pretty red though? Maybe not so much at the board of directors level, but if you've met any O&G execs, "Landman" is not too far off base there.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14m ago
If they had bombed the college basketball stadium or the NYC auditorium at which I saw him speak, would that have been acceptable?
If the ChiComs bombed an entire baseball stadium or auditorium, packed with civilians, I would consider this an act of war. It would evince a grievously callous lack of regard for civilian lives. However, if they planted a bomb on the Dalai Lama’s limo and blew it up, killing only the inhabitants of that car, I would see this as a legitimate act which could be smoothed over diplomatically.
Similarly, if the Ukrainians shot down Putin’s plane over American airspace, I would not consider it an overly aggressive act against American sovereignty; it would be an obviously targeted act against an indisputable geopolitical foe of theirs, and if the only collateral damage to America was embarrassment about our lack of airspace security, that would be something I could live with.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
15m ago
I use this custom CSS for reddit-like upvote/downvote arrow colors. Worth noting that on my phone, I have to tap on something else after tapping the vote arrow for the color change to apply. Works with no surprises on desktop though.
.active.arrow-up::before {
color: #bd2130;
}
.active.arrow-down::before {
color: #0062cc;
}
The message is being taken in the Muslim world: collaboration will not save you.
Who is Qatar collaborating with? I wouldn't call "harboring enemy leaders" an instance of collaborating with Israel, or with its allies including the US.
Zelensky has traveled to the United States multiple times, if the Russians blew up his limo would that be acceptable?
That's war. Doing it on the territory of a neutral risks making the neutral into a belligerent, of course, but the US likely wouldn't actually do anything all that rash. The Soviets were and now Putin is fairly well known for that sort of thing, actually.
No other country can assassinate or bomb its enemies on our soil, not if we remain a sovereign country.
Sure they can. They just risk the US's not-inconsiderable wrath if they do.
SnapDragon
20m ago
Wow, yeah. Cenk's tweet is perfect. And I remember he was similarly classy and principled after Trump's near miss. He's way to the left of me, but it's clear that he's just a fundamentally decent person. If we could only incentivize having more pundits like him, political discourse in this country would be much, much healthier.
07mk
20m ago
I don't condone the celebration of it but is it really so far fetched to accept this as a "Sword of Damocles" situation? Kirk advocated and is directly on record for saying: "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights". Live by the sword and die by the sword.
Saying "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights" is specifically living by the word and specifically not living by the sword. Living by the sword would be "watch me as I assassinate this politician who's pro gun-control." No argument that Kirk could ever state around gun control could ever rise to him "living by the sword." Words don't become violence just because they are about violence or condoning violence. Nor do they become equivalent to physical violence.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21m ago
That's fair, however:
But, taken as an abstraction, the experts are always right.
'Member "question authority"? I 'member.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21m ago
We aren’t.
Other commenters have asked the important meta-questions like “why do you think your socials are representative?” and “who exactly are you planning on shooting?”
So I’ll engage purely on Catholic terms.
- Is there a competent authority organizing your violence? No, there’s no credible counterpart to the existing government. To satisfy this one, you’d be better off joining the army or at least the police.
- Is there a realistic possibility of success? The caveats about an organized authority ought to apply here. But you’ve also got to have a goal which is actually compatible with whatever you’re trying. There are remarkably few which benefit from acts of terrorism.
- Is the cause just? I consider this the free space on your bingo card.
- Is it your last resort? Ask yourself whether Republican control of the White House, Supreme Court, both houses of Congress, 28 state legislatures and 27 state governors represents a total collapse of your legal avenues.
One in four criteria. Make of that what you will.
quiet_NaN
23m ago
What I found really disgusting were the imgur posts openly celebrating the assassination.
Now, I am not someone who thinks that every human life is sacred. I will celebrate if Trump finally croaks from natural causes, and I would not take any inconveniences to save Trump's life. But if someone were to shoot him (whose death would matter per se, in a way in which shooting a random MAGA proponent I had never heard of before will not matter), that would be quite bad in a lot of different ways, from normalizing political violence to turning him into a martyr.
Trump will not be defeated by murdering his supporters, nor would the cost be worth that.
I was not very upset about the killing of the United Healthcare CEO because I did not consider it to be a step on the slippery slope any more than any non-political murder is. Running a company which sometimes makes decisions which people feel (rightly or wrongly) are ruining their lives comes with certain risks, and even if one health insurance executive was shot every month there seems to be little danger of it spiraling out of control.
By contrast, Kirk was a clear political murder. Any effect the guy may have had as a human will be overshadowed by orders of magnitude by the effects he will have as a murder victim and MAGA martyr. If such a killing happened once a month, things would spiral out of control.
And the idiots who claim that he now became a part of the gun violence he had previously called an acceptable price for the 2A are missing the point. That would be an excellent point to make if he had been randomly gunned down during a routine school shooting. But he was not, he was very deliberately targeted for his political activism. If he had argued that assassinations were a legitimate form of political debate, that would have been mentioned in every other imgur post, so I guess he did not. (Apparently, he called for people to bail out the Pelosi attacker, which seems cringeworthy poor taste to me, but is still different from calling for her to be murdered.)
ThenElection
24m ago
It's about a hierarchy and order of abstractions, as opposed to a hierarchy and order of individuals. "The experts" is itself an abstraction. Any individual expert can be bad and wrong; even a majority of individual experts can be bad and wrong. But, taken as an abstraction, the experts are always right.
CarnePorLaMachina
Oye Beltalowda!
25m ago
You misunderstand, no one was expecting kirk to "defend them".
The point is that Kirk was a moderate and that the people celebrating his shooting may as well be declaring war on "normies" as a class.
NullHypothesis
27m ago
This is a valid criticism of the survey, but I suspect if it had been done the other way one could argue it creates no room for nuance and then try to argue for why the percentage of people that would say it is justified is actually smaller for one reason or another. I don't think the research methodology is sus in as so much as the interpretation of the results, since these are self reported answers. Maybe the collection methodology or their sampling of the population is flawed.
Regardless, if we were to grant anything 4 or under to be on the not justified side, that's still 22% for killing elon and 31% for killing trump of those left of center that believe there is justification for political murder. That's still not an unsubstantial amount, although to be fair it is also far from 50%. The amount of justification for the assassination of a non politician I've seen even in small niche non-political discord servers with people I am friends with, let alone in the wider web certainly does lead me to believe these stats. I'd like to see some surveys giving contrary results.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
28m ago
Economically and in other aspects, there is a lot going well the the US, but I think we will start seeing more assassination attempts. These are different from typical riots or school shootings. Even though the Trump shooter failed, society was still disrupted. Assignations exploit a weak point in society and carry symbolic value with efficacy that other forms of political unrest cannot match.
Given how poorly that Red Hood comic went, I'm not sure Felker-Martin's barely a tenth of a Tara Strong. Dowd is more persuasive, with the caveat that it falters if pulls a Toobin and is back in six months.
I genuinely do appreciate that. I will note others: I've mentioned KelseyTUOC already, but there's been some number of decent prominent and not-so-prominent people who've spoken up, sometimes even in credible or costly ways. Even some pretty awful scumbags are at least trying to motion around it, if not very sincerely.
It's also a long way from persuasive enough. This is a moderator at NeoForge Discord. This is a moderator at the Hexcasting Discord (to her credit, the mod dev herself has been more responsible, albeit in a 'don't make people watch someone die' sense than a 'aggressive violence is bad even when it happens to people I don't like' one). This is imgur yesterday, this is the front page sorted by viral today. This was tumblr yesterday, hastag his name, sorted by top; this is tumblr with the same constraints today. I logged into Star Citizen last night to take my mind off things, and had literally could not get out of the in-game bed before I had chat cheering it on; this is from an FFXIV guild I dropped before the election, and a discord I'm gonna leave in a few months.
And it's not just the nameless and faceless grunts, or bluesky, or the people who skinsuited a project I once respected. This is Ken White, who to what minimal credit he deserves says that Violence Is Bad before going straight into 'you can't defame the dead' mode. This is Barry Deustch, B from Radicalizing the Romanceless. This is from the writer of NeoReaction: A Basilisk, and was well-respected in the tumblr ratsphere for almost a decade. There were 51 posts over 12 hours in the rpg.net thread (cw: big image), and while there's a couple that aren't dancing in blood, there's literally five times as many where people who I once took seriously now going full :
I can keep doing this, if you'd like, but I don't think it's healthy for either of us.
I've gotten it from someone I let live in my home for six months while they were getting back on their feet. Didn't even go looking for them, I don't follow them on anymore, just bam, snuff video on tumblr with a Dark Souls meme thrown into it, with a 'leopards eating faces' tag in case they needed to make it clearer what they were condoning. Do you want a list of exactly what thoughts, in what order, went through my mind? I considered looking up the social media of some of my past partners. Do you think it would help, or not?
I'm pointedly not doing it, because that way lies even more psychosis than looking up your ex's does.
As a prediction, which I will send you in plaintext in PM and post publicly here in a week, sha256: a009fcb948bd1a70a38d133d81f0cc96af6efa94904133184a5f40d0cb5d6004
Because ten years ago, it would have been useful to have a decent handful of examples of prominent speakers who would consistently speak in defense of "bad argument gets argument, not bullet". We have not been dumped ten years in the past. We have a decade of people Friedersdorfing these grand principles about how they'll defend people that they totally didn't defend in the past.
Jerk That Can't Write A Comic Story Worth Shit isn't a costly signal. Matt Dowd might be, if it sticks. Actually blackballing people and organizations that promote or defend this sorta stuff is. Either people haven't brought serious and costly signals of enforcement against their own side, or people think these examples you're bringing forward are the serious and costly signals. If that's the central example from the aftermath, I'm going to point to Forge again, and Damore again, and Kashur again, and show exactly how much political debt their alliance is in.
They might not have done it, themselves! They might even, in their heart of hearts, have whispered words about how it tots would have been better if no one did these terrible things. It's genuinely terrible that people have to handle the weight of bad acts from people they might not even like, just because their political alliance. It's also a little late for them to complain.
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