domain:questioner.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13m ago
People are terrified of Trump because they don't really know what 'fascism' actually means. If Trump was really fascist, the first thing he would've been doing is purging/ensuring loyalty of the military to consolidate his power base. The failing New York Times would've been shut down or put under new management, not sneered at on twitter. Party cadres in key institutions, 'coordination' of Google, Facebook, Disney... NGO LGBT centre staff brought in for police questioning until the message is made clear and they shut down, not merely cancelling funding for an LGBT suicide hotline. Boots on the ground in Greenland, not posturing and talk without action.
People are concerned about Trump doing the fake version of fascism (enforcing immigration law, banning immigration from shithole countries) because they think it's the real version of fascism (totalitarian government, military expansion overseas, active suppression of dissidents/ethnicities). They don't appreciate that there's a qualitative difference. There's no law of nature that says an administration that starts with enforcing immigration law ends up pursuing extermination of non-whites.
No_one
17m ago
Isn't Romney a private equity guy, one of the class of people specializing in what's basically elegant asset stripping?
Tenaz
29m ago
Ha, I just read that one at the beach a few weeks ago.
I'd love to hear what you think. I enjoyed it but not enough to continue the series.
Tenaz
33m ago
It's not necessarily older than I (am) though.
Consider--"he looks older than dirt." This isn't saying, he looks older than dirt looks, it's saying he simply looks older than dirt itself, dirt as a concept. Older than dirt is also wouldn't be correct--it would imply that the statement depends on dirt's current age, e.g. that he looks younger than dirt generally will in a few hundred years, which is asinine.
Botond173
40m ago
For instance, it would be appropriate for men to cheer, cry with joy, or hug each other if their sports team won the grand final, whereas stereotypically women might not react to that.
They might not do so, but is there really any social convention dictating that it's somehow unbecoming of them as women to do so?
haroldbkny
54m ago
That's a fair point, but I think the pure contempt with which I remember people speaking about Bush, compared with the number of times I've heard similar people point to him as a surprisingly human decent dude in the past 10 years makes me really skeptical. If he was truly so awful back then, he wouldn't be forgiven and nostolgized so easily, even if someone worse came along, at least not by an intellectually honest person.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Volk is often used as a metonym for Rasse, though, or just used interchangeably due to semantic sloppiness. I wouldn't read too much into it.
Thanks for the detailed response!
When I watched, it looked like it cleared the pad pretty quickly
Yeah, I take it back. When I was watching a livestream, someone commented on it taking it's time (probably it being held, as you say), but what really gave me the impression was a post-launch commentary video, which, looking at the original stream again, must have shown the takeoff in slowmo.
But, unless they can do upper stage reuse, that still doesn't put a colony on Mars
Eh, it would be awesome, but unless some rabbits get pulled out of several hats, Mars feels like a distant dream.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2hr ago
Right, "volk" is not the German word for "race". There are sparse references to "Herrenvolk" although it was very uncommon, and no references to "master race."
Blues generally did not consider the 2000 election victory of George W Bush to be legitimate. Problems with the ballots and voting machines resulted in a protracted and highly contentious recount, ultimately ending with a lawsuit which the Supreme Court decided in favor of George W. Bush. Many, many blues from all strata of Blue culture believed that Gore had won the election, only to have his victory stolen by the Republican machine. This objection was inescapable in popular culture from 2000 to 2008, and I'd imagine that for most people who lived through the era as politically-engaged adults, the event is indelible in the hippocampus.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
The straightforward reduction in revenue is that we would have collected substantially more revenue without the cuts to the tune of trillions of dollars.
...I think I understand your argument, and even consider it colorable, but the core of your claim seems unfalsifiable. "Revenue would have been higher in the counterfactual case" is very clearly distinct from "revenue was reduced", and I think it behooves us to respect the distinction.
cheesecake_llama
3hr ago
What conspiracies are you talking about?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3hr ago
Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf.
Less crying wolf and more underestimating the efficacy of checks in the US political system. It has largely been memoryholed here, but the first Trump admin was constantly going for executive power grabs. He simply had not consolidated power within the GOP to the same degree and was facing a less friendly judicial environment. Likewise, there was an incredible amount of corruption, and while the presidential pardon has never been applied very fairly in practice, Trump was exceptional in the self-serving nature of his pardons.
JarJarJedi
3hr ago
Not sure why it should be. Generally, the majority of Israel population is very sour to the political Left right now because, as the sibling comment noted, Oslo process had thoroughly failed and none of the promises the Left made to the people is even close to being even partially fulfilled. The question is who would lead the right or the "centrists" which will be pretty much the same as the right on the question of Arabs, but may be different on taxes or economic policies or how to deal with secular/religious divide, etc. - Israel has more than one problem. Among all those people, Netanyahu is the most credible and the most seasoned politician, so he keeps the power. The challengers, even if they have temporary success, usually fail to handle one crisis or another and get booted on the next election - and in Israel, that can happen anytime, because of how the Knesset works, the moment the ruling coalition loses the majority, it's new elections (not mandatory, but the majority can cause them to happen anytime they want). So the reason as it seems to be is kinda boring - he is on the winning side and he is the best at this game out of all available players. Maybe one day he'll get too old or somebody better than him will raise.
Election denial of various forms has been a notable and escalating feature of most elections of my adult life. In 2000, Both the Grassroots and elite Blues did not accept the legitimacy of W's victory, and were not shy about saying so; You may have heard of a guy called Michael Moore, he made a documentary alleging (among many other things) that Bush hacked the election. There was less of this in 2004, but it was certainly still present, as was the widespread certainty that Bush would find a way to suspend further elections and rule as a dictator permanently (and no few "just kidding... unless..." references to assassinating him; the inimitable Tim Kreider's "Sic Semper Fuckwads" was a personal favorite, as is 303, a mass-market comic book about how Bush did 9/11 and wouldn't it be neato if a russian spetznaz veteran sniped his head off.)
2008, my side won, but the Reds had the birther conspiracy theory. 2012, I'd mostly checked out on; my side won again, birtherism was spent IIRC, if there was an election meme I wasn't aware of it. 2016, the left went in hard on the election being illegitimate, including through various organs of the federal government coordinating efforts with the media, activist class, and democratic leadership, and 2020 we had "election fortification" and Jan 6th.
I vaguely recall a story about some crypto bros who were facing federal charges for one thing or another which went away once they spent a suitable amount of money on Trump's shitcoins.
To be clear, your claim is that Trump pardoned criminals because they donated to him, and you believe that this is a new low in presidential pardoning?
Throwaway05
3hr ago
Again don't really blame you - based off of the issues we have with insurance it often seems like the people on the other side didn't really have correct training. That actually being the case seems like the kinda thing that would be by design.
Depending on how long ago this was it could also just be process changes. As I get older I get more worried about these, times when you find out Pluto isn't a fucking planet anymore.
If you are lucky someone tells you at a reasonable time but it's all too easy to get left behind.
aqouta
3hr ago
Then I guess it cannot, even in principle, be done so I would like to not hear about it as a problem and we shouldn't bonk down norms in order to fail to solve it.
cjet79
3hr ago
The account of the introverted feeler here seems to be approaching an almost mythological level of detachment from social norms and practical concerns, an ideal standard that no mortal could ever reach. Like, barring mitigating circumstances, how can the goal of social interaction not be to make the other person feel good, or at least avoid causing offense? Hello?? But, if the accounts that I've been reading are correct, this is essentially how a great number of people go about experiencing life on a daily basis (or at least this is how they subjectively experience life, regardless of how much they must actually modulate their behavior due to social norms out of rational self-interest).
This is indeed how I feel and act, and it is neat to read a description of it that actually makes it sound cool.
Growing up I felt like everyone else got to read a secret manual about how to act in social situations, and I was stuck trying to figure out the manual through trial and error. I'm not autistic so I'm not oblivious to the veiled insults, or the looks of hurt on people's faces when I broke a social rule. And I'm not a psychopath, so I'd still feel bad sometimes when I caused those moments of hurt.
There is a great deal of rational self-interest in being able to moderate your behavior to match social norms. Its how you make friends, acquire romantic partners, maintain any job with a boss or customers you must speak with, etc. Its required, not an optional add on. We at at least need to know the rules before we can know how to break them. But the rules are not very simple, they usually take an entire childhood to learn, and I've known plenty of adults that still don't seem to understand all of the rules. I had always been jealous of the people that seem to have a psychic ability to read and measure the flow of a conversation with someone in such a way that they are just always a joy to be around. Then I discovered a magic elixir that could temporarily grant me their powers. People call it alcohol.
Grass is always greener on the other side I guess.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
The way deficit hawking works is tax increases are proposed and accepted "to reduce the deficit". Myriad other interests smell the new money (whether it actually materializes or not) and make a play for it. Many of them succeed. Net result: more taxes, more entitlements, deficit goes higher. That's why there are very few deficit hawks left.
Florida is the fifth oldest state
Ooh ooh, don't forget we're The #2 most visited state by foreign tourists, narrowly behind New York, and CRUSHING California (if you don't count illegal immigrants, that is). That's why sales tax works so well for us, incidentally.
You probably can't tell me anything about my state's strengths and weaknesses that I'm not already acutely aware of.
Did you know we got high speed rail before California?
Oh, and don't forget we're second in all time rocket launches behind the USSR and ahead by a country mile in launches in the last 10 years. Yeah yeah its mostly federal funding.
Also we have won more Stanley Cups than the ENTIRETY OF CANADA over the past 30 years Panthers won this year so the total is now 5, BTW.
On the flip side, did you know that New York is the place with the most Medicaid spending, even in excess of its population share. Florida happens to be WAY lower on that list. Fourth from the bottom.
So your point about Florida being "old" is well taken, but not really a knockdown argument in the slightest.
Also we're allegedly #1 or #2 in the country for education DESPITE being eighth from the bottom in per-pupil spending and DEAD FUCKING LAST in K-12 spending as a % of taxpayer income.
SINGLEHANDEDLY blowing up the idea that its education spending that drives outcomes, I guess.
Having experienced the Florida Educational system I would find this hard to believe, but I assume other states' systems are genuinely JUST THAT BAD.
Best state for Higher Education...NINE FUCKING YEARS RUNNING. Seriously what the fuck are the rest of the states even doing at this point?
Anyhow, please don't move here, it sucks. You're welcome to visit and leave your money, though.
Of course even if there were 1 billion prisoners and 150 guards the guards would outnumber each individual person 150-to-1.
And yet, there are numerous examples available of the simple maxim that one or two people with machine guns can control a far larger, even if not infinitely or arbitrarily larger, group of unarmed people. I maintain that my formulation is an accurate description of the psychology of humans in crowds, and that your reductio does not actually answer it. I am confident that a demonstrated capacity and willingness to employ overwhelming lethal force is sufficient to overcome 20:1, even 50:1 odds, and maybe higher, and certainly for brief durations. The ratio for the Bataclan attack was ~500:1, for example. I bet if we looked at, say, the Khmer Rouge or the Gulags, we would not find guard ratios of 4:1. I bet if we looked at Vietnamese POW camps we would not find ratios of 4:1. A quick googling indicates somewhere around 10:1 for the Russian Gulag as a whole.
There's no statements to the effect that 100% of the security force or garrison was involved in managing the prisoners- quite the opposite, with the vast majority of the work was said to have been done and orchestrated by the unarmed Jewish "Sonderkommando" with little guard presence.
There's no evidence that 100% of the gulag guard force was involved in managing the prisoners either; If we assume split shifts, that bumps the ratio immediately to 20:1, 30:1 with three shifts per day. I bet you we can find photos, stories or SOP docs of two or three guards handling fifty prisoners or more for work details. Humanity has a long, long history of people with guns putting people without them in chains or in graves. The comparisons you're drawing seem question-beggingly selective.
Your argument was that there weren't enough camp guards to force large groups of people into a small building.
The idea that <150 guards (assuming every single guard and SS officer was at every single transport, which is not attested to) would be sufficient for the task of forcing 2,000 people to walk to their deaths without resistance is absurd.
This does not seem absurd to me at all. Again, Bataclan, three gunmen, 1,500 victims, who provided zero meaningful resistance. In this case, the victims have already arguably been repeatedly selected for meekness/ cooperation and keeping their head down, they've been subject to absolute power throughout their arrest, imprisonment and transport, and they presumably have no idea what's waiting for them. Uniformed men with machine guns and authority to use them on the resistant are directing their movements, as they have been on a regular basis for days, weeks, months previously. They tell you to go this way, all in a line. They tell you to go that way, all in a line. They tell you to go in there, all in a line. I see no reason to believe that people would panic at being crammed into a confined space, any more than they panicked when being into the confined space of cattle-cars for transport, as is generally claimed for both the Nazi death camps and the Russian gulag. humans will endure much misery if they don't see an alternative, or if they have even a glimmer of hope that they might survive.
Note that there are examples of procedurally-similar execution methods being used in other parts of history: loading prisoners into a barge, locking them in the hold, and then sinking the barge seems quite similar, and IIRC is attested to have been used repeatedly as an execution method in the French and Russian revolutions.
...If I had read the rest of the thread, I would not have bothered. Even from your evident priors, this does not seem like a productive line of argument. I'm not sure why you're expending this much effort to argue from such a weak position.
Dean
Flairless
4hr ago
The impression I got from the 2016 and 2020 primaries was that he lost because he wasn't popular enough with Democratic primary voters to win a national race
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Bernie was positioned to pull a 'biggest minority in a divided field' win in the Super Tuesday primaries, where he was outpolling most competitors. This was after a strong early showing in contests, where to date Biden had been underperforming. This biggest-of-a-divided-field was notably the way Donald Trump started building momentum in the early 2016 Republican primary, where he never won a majority. The momentum-value of the primary win is what provided the growth opportunity in attention, endorsements, and so on that ultimately allowed Trump to win in 2016.
In 2020, things might have been different for Bernie since he was posed to do well on Super Tuesday, but do very poorly in later conferences where Biden had strong alliances with the southern black political machine Democratic parties. The Bernie party wing's bet was that they could leverage the momentum in early wins to build endurance and carry the campaign past this predictable barrier, where it might then open back up to a more even primary split once it went to more progressive regions.
The reason this didn't happen wasn't because Bernie's popularity dived, but because nearly all the major Democratic candidates at the time pulled out of the race and endorsed Biden, rather than split the field. Biden didn't get more popular as much as he had less competition for the centrist party vote, and so was able to win these early contests, and then cement victory with the Southern wing conferences, and thus cement the win. This was widely seen at the time as the Democratic establishment, which is to say Obama wing of the party that dominated at the time, pulling strings and applying pressure to the candidates who dropped out in favor of Obama's former VP.
Where the ass fuckery charge comes in is not only the Party establishment coordination in stage-managing the primary pool to shape primary outcomes, but also/especially the caveat of 'most' people pulling out. One of the main candidates who did not pull out at the time was the only one who was splitting Bernie's vote more than Biden's vote. Elizabeth Warren was also running on the progressive/left-wing track, despite herself having no chance to beat Biden either. This was likewise thought to be a quid-pro-quo of sorts between Warren and Biden, with Warren's network getting plenty of key postings in the administration. Had the left united behind Bernie, who was far less of a party man than Warren, it would have been the Bernie wing getting such posting potential during negotiations.
Combined, this was broadly seen as a two-part betrayal by the Bernie-left. It was a broader DNC betrayal of the Obama wing picking favorites to maintain its primacy in the party rather than letting voters pick via the nominal primary purpose, but it was also a betrayal by the more party-institutionalist Warren-left, who sabotaged a bigger left momentum in favor of selling out for postings and influence.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4hr ago
I do find myself fighting intrusive "do not redeem" thoughts on a daily basis. It doesn't help that they really like putting the Saar- prefix on everything.
faceh
4hr ago
I notice that some people forget that Trump's Organizations owns or has fingers in real estate all over the planet.
This gives him some pecuniary interest in NOT doing foreign adventurism and warmongering. And avoiding wars involving countries where he has property, at all.
I imagine the thought of big, beautiful buildings getting bombed to rubble causes the guy physical pain.
He was and is an idiot and the people who caused these wars went on to become the only faction that matters in foreign policy circles,with the Ukraine war being their crowning achievement.
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