domain:vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com
cjet79
5m ago
As I said things are a spectrum, you said continuum. I don't think I'm asking for an impossible standard. The post office will send any letter between two private addresses, no matter what words you put in there. They'll send it no matter who you are or the recipient is or who they voted for. As far as I know they've maintained this level of non-politics since they were created. Even when they were a much more essential service.
JTarrou
11m ago
Leaders are almost always elites. You need to get your shit and run if a former bank robber or army corporal takes over the government.
What's interesting to me is how far down the elite governance scale Republicans had to go to find someone who would fight. Whole goddamned party, not one set of nuts between them. Turns out, only Democrats are willing to fight Democrats, the Republican establishment has completely internalized its social position as the Washington Generals of politics.
Payback23
11m ago
We know. You've already been cheerleading for such. Biden even campaigned on ignoring the Supreme Court bc it resonates so much with you. You wanted to pack the court. Destroy the electoral college and get rid of the filibuster.
Remind me again what other norms were on your wish list to tear down?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
14m ago
Are you suggesting that you figured out what timecube is actually about?
haroldbkny
15m ago
Look, it happened a long time ago. I specifically don't memorize every thing Trump's ever been accused of, or why the accusations were false. I don't want to devote all my mental energy to Trump, one way or the other. All I knew was that I'd seen that journalist argument before, and I knew it didn't hold water in some way back then, and that made want to illustrate exactly why none of these accusations actually tarnish Trump's name, why people like me check out. Because so many previous accusations don't hold water, and we have epistemic learned helplessness.
erwgv3g34
24m ago
No? Ren'Py is easy to use; if you can get a degree in physics from Caltech, you should have no problem learning it. Or, if you absolutely can't manage that, you can use Twine, which is so easy, a purple-haired Tumblrina can do it.
As for art skills, come on, it's The Year of Our Lord 2025; that's what AI is for. Try Fooocus, locally if you have a GPU, or on Colab if you don't. Or farm free credits from Civitai and use that.
Aapje58
25m ago
But with the Holocaust we are told the order to kill all the Jews was communicated through Mind Reading, and no that is not a straw-man those are direct words.
Where do you get that claim from, that the narrative says that they communicated through mind reading?
It's pretty obvious that orders can be given in person, with no records being kept.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26m ago
Would you change your mind if the military did get a new oath?
Yes. Even the proposed 'free response' questions are less overt than 'I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to the leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler'. Loyalty to the office rather than loyalty to the person.
They do this all the time. It's like in academia, they phrase it as 'how do you implement diversity and love diversity and advance diversity, write an essay about it'. You get a choice as to how you respond. They don't go 'swear an oath that you'll advance DEI' formally. Likewise, in the US Air Force under Biden, they sent a memo around saying that they wanted an Air Force that represented the country, so it should have these demographics. Of course they added the 'don't actually act on this, it's all supposed to be meritocratic, it's not a quota haha' part too: https://www.af.mil/Portals/1/documents/2022SAF/Officer_Source_of_Commission_Applicant_Pool_Goals_memo.pdf
If they strip out the waffle and say 'this is the goal, now make it happen' then there's a phase-shift. De facto and de jure are brought into alignment.
SubstackNecron
26m ago
Trump has also dismantled the Democrats’ base
This doesn't matter if his death just totally disengages and fractures the entire MAGA coalition. If this occurs the Dems basically win by default.
Aapje58
27m ago
Your intuition is correct that it is outlandish to think the Germans could make millions of bodies from these camps just disappear, they couldn't and they didn't.
Yet very large numbers of Jews did not return after WW 2, so where did they go, if they were not murdered?
SubstackNecron
30m ago
I mean, the next time they get power when the MAGA cult dies upon its leader's death, I expect them to just legalize them unilaterally. Also college debt should just be deleted and the papper work lost and deleted. If the next Democratic president listens to the Supreme Court a single time, I will consider them a failure.
JTarrou
33m ago
Adopting the exact same tactics as your side is a "spiral toward civil war"? What was it when your people were doing it?
Now that the other side has learned, now it's a spiral?
There's nothing you think the left should do to de-escalate? No off-ramps you see? The entire elite superstructure of our nation and the world just has zero accountability? No amends that could be made? No compromise?
Doesn't sound like it's my spiral. But I am waiting at the bottom for the rest of you.
Corvos
35m ago
I wonder if this is just a general human behaviour, and we would have seen exactly the same pattern discussing the Dreyfus Affair in 1894.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
54m ago
I do not think your skepticism is unreasonable.
I do think that you were illustrating the “standard Trump apologetics,” which consist of denying something as fake news, downplaying it, and then deciding it was actually a good thing.
I find that particular pattern frustrating. There’s nothing wrong with believing any of the steps. Combined, though, I think they’re bad practice.
Do you want to explain the difference between Antifa and the proud boys and how they are handled? Or maybe parents at PTA meetings not only being labeled domestic terrorists. But the DOJ coaching the school districts on how to write their letters to the DOJ so the domestic terrorism label could be given.
Explain that with your destruction and proximity theory.
Edit: is the one of the norms you were talking about that were so sacred and how concerned you were about fascism? Was this even what got you worried? Or what? Bc that seems really bad to me. But what do you think? Is that the sign of healthy government?
Payback23
1hr ago
Saying it's "destructive" takes the human element of suffering away and makes it more palatable to yourself
So the FBI doesn't care about domestic terrorism or civil unrest? I doubt you believe that. The few files regarding the civil rights era proves that. So I'm in good faith assuming that you understand that it was something other than "proximity" that explains the difference in response to Jan 6.
And we don't even have to talk about the dog and pony show that happened in congress afterwards. Or all the media lies.
Was that also when the blue tribe was committing acts of domestic terrorism because blacks were a being held accountable for their actions?
Sure. What do you want to talk about?
haroldbkny
1hr ago
I'm not fully sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're downplaying my skepticism, as if it were caused by this one example. Like I said, it's not just one example. It's every example of something people said about Trump, from the earliest ones I can remember where everyone was calling him racist and kept telling me how he was calling all Mexicans rapists. That sure sounded bad, until I looked into it and saw that's not what he said at all, on several levels.
Aapje58
1hr ago
But I don't know why the death camps were all on the USSR side.
They weren't. One of the first death camps was in Brandenburg, to the west of Berlin. This was part of Aktion T4, the precursor to the Holocaust, where mental patients were killed (and they later extended Aktion T4 to Jews on a small scale, until they later scaled up massively as part of a new program). At that location, they experimented with carbon monoxide gassings in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room. They closed that facility after complaints by the locals about the smoke.
There is no official document about why they chose Poland for most of the large scale program, but you only have to look at a map to see that Poland is an obvious choice if you want to do it outside of Germany, but within easy reach of Berlin. The Netherlands, Belgium or France are also close to Germany, but on the side of Germany that is far away from the capital.
I suspect that they preferred a foreign country, and especially an Eastern-European country because it is much easier to get things done if you are not beholden to an established bureaucratic system, and a populace that is used to appealing to that system. The idea was to establish a new nation in Eastern Europe, so then there effectively were no existing rules holding them back.
ChickenOverlord
1hr ago
And potentially face prison time for not correctly complying with regulations.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
Right. The threat of "advertiser boycotts" was almost certainly dreamed up by people at marketing agencies, and used by their politically-aligned friends at YouTube to get the censorship they wanted. Or possibly they were dreamed up by the YouTube group and the marketing agency people gave the assist.
Corvos
1hr ago
Protestors took over a section of Seattle to create a literal militarised zone in the middle of a major city that seceded from the United States, in which multiple people were murdered. I can't find records of any associated prosecutions.
On the one hand there was no possible way this threatened the US government. CHAZ was dismantled by force after a month, once enough people had tied that police felt okay taking action.
On the other hand I can't see any viable way that Jan 6 threatened the government either. People broke into the government building for a while, milled around and then left. There's no chance they make it past armed security to the VIPs and even if they had, it would have sucked for the VIPs but not affected the US government one iota.
If your argument is that senior officials take threats to themselves from the outgroup much much more seriously than threats to vastly greater numbers of people arising from looting, burning and murder by the ingroup then I agree with you but it doesn't paint a pretty picture.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
1hr ago
Consider any ideological cause leftists and liberals are interested in: creedal citizenship
If leftists and progressives were that interested in that cause they would have freed their slaves legalized their illegals when they had the power to do so. They have had it several times in the past.
They did not, and because of that inaction- that inability to make a deal with the rest of the country and get it Done- now their cause suffers. Perhaps it was because they'd be destroyed as a party for making legible that flagrant and absurd violation of the laws and norms of the country? Perhaps it was because they believed that holding "they'll be deported otherwise" hostage would curry greater electoral success by driving turnout? Perhaps it was because they could do the county-level equivalent of court-packing by counting them in the census and redistricting accordingly? Perhaps it was because they were of a demographic that (socially, politically, economically) profited most from being able to undercut domestic labor, being of the class that most often buys it? It's difficult to say.
Now, we can talk about corruption in the sense that some slaves are getting rounded up faster than others, or who it's being done to first/who's getting exempted. And I have sympathy for your material conditions; economic instability is, naturally, bad for business as finance for it depends in large degree to a now-frustrated economic forecast (and of all the criticisms of Trump this is the greatest and most grounded, and affects both the capital of the Empire and all of its provinces).
But a side doesn't get to claim it's some unique badness because it [mistake theory] never made the sacrifices and compromises necessary to fix the issue and in so doing revealed that side didn't care, or [conflict theory] where it intentionally made the problem worse.
All of this is already priced in. Anyone voting for Trump now on the belief that victory would result in permanent victory is a fool. I, and I think many others, have long understood that we can rely neither on the Constitution nor purported "rule of law" to protect us from rule by those who hate us, and that to the extent that we uphold institutions or norms at our own expense, the response will be ceaseless defection. We do not consider people like you to be our countrymen. We do not wish to share a society with you, and if providence be kind we will not do so much longer. We will never accept your authority nor your rule. We are, collectively, now in the process of burning what shared institutions remain, and then either we will go our separate ways in peace or resort to fratricide.
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