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@ADreamOfLiberty
And I think that anyone that finds an animal attractive has something seriously wrong with themWhat is that thing?
They lack the tender ministrations of a judicial apparatus willing to punch an 8mm hole in their skull.
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@badger
I'm really not terrible picky. I liked Dune. I just feel like Hollywood is completely out of ideas and is just making remakes or rehashing the same tired superhero movies. Most of the remakes are trash that just insult the original work; Dune was one of the few that I liked. I think a lot of it is due to people letting ideology bleed into creative works in a really hamfisted way.
I think a good example of a new series that was fun and creative was the whole Pirates of the Caribbean thing. They milked it to death and ruined it by the end of the series, but it was a fresh idea. Other than that, so many of the big hits have been book adaptions, remakes, comic book adaptations, or (absolutely dreadful) anime adaptions. It doesn't help that streaming services are eating up more market share, and they seem to exclusively hire hacks to direct their adaptations.
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Hollywood should be banned from producing any more superhero movies.
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@Double_R
Trump definitely understands branding, but I think you give him way too much credit. The man gets away with what he does because he is a perfect storm. His lifetime of conning everyone to believe he was richer than he actually was is what allowed him to build his empire to what it became, which allowed him to pass himself off as a business genius. Yet at the same time he comes off as a complete imbecile who might actually be dumb enough to believe the stupid things he is saying, which people could overlook because of his fake business acumen. So what we get is someone who is both dumb enough to champion ideas which dumb Americans approve of, and yet smart and successful enough to make the dumb people think this is reality.No one else could get away with that because the smart ones couldn’t pass themselves off as genuine enough to believe this stuff, and the dumb ones would never have such a strong background to hold up as their resume.So sure, branding is part of it but without the imbecilic aspect of this the man would have gotten no where. And I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the intention.
I think there are two dimensions to this.
First, I think that there's a typical self-congratulatory tendency in liberals that conservatives have grown adept at taking advantage of. I think that Dubya was being more canny than most realize when he said that people 'misunderestimated' him -- him being attacked as a yokel stoked his popularity because American's don't like to watch better off people pile on and mock someone who apes poor rural America's mannerisms - it appears grotesque because it is grotesque. But he wasn't a yokel. He was a patrician, a Texas blueblood who went to Andover and Yale, and a politician who in the end achieved all his aims. Disastrous as those aims were for the world and the country, they were very lucrative for Bush and his cadre. Bush let himself be hated and mocked and seen as a dumb redneck, even as he sailed through eight years of horrific mismanagement and corruption that benefited himself and his personal backers. Romney had a similar pedigree, but he owned his background, was cast as a wooden vulture capitalist, and failed spectacularly. Bush's alchemy was to wave the matador's red flag - the typical liberal just couldn't resist the gaffes and malapropisms, and their rabid vituperation managed to transfigure this slick, privileged scion of a Texas oil baron into a poor victimized hillbilly in the public eye. To quote an article I once read that touched on this subject, the left 'misunderestimated' Bush for all eight years of his presidency. Trump has tapped into this same strategy, and it worked wonders for him as well -- on the other side of the aisle, I think that AOC has also managed to master this trick. Her father was an architect and she grew up in an expensive neighborhood, but casts herself in the public eye as just a workin' class broad from Brooklyn because she got a job at some bougie bar for a few years. When someone achieves spectacular aims, and being perceived as 'dumb' helps them along their way, the canny observer (who isn't obsessed with feeling intellectually superior) entertains the idea that they might not be as dumb as they appear.
Secondly, without falling into that trap, I think there's some truth to what you said. Trump reminds me of a Baudrillard passage on Disneyland that I read recently, especially this segment:
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.
I think something similar happens with Trump, and specifically with the 'return to normalcy' which was supposed to happen afterwards. Part of why Trump was elected was the absolute failure of the Washington elite to do anything competently. In foreign policy, it's been nothing but failure after failure since the 90s. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Georgia/Ukraine. Domestically we've seen the financial crisis and bank bailouts. The student debt crisis. Health crises. Rampant drug overdoses and the hollowing out of the working class. It had become abundantly clear to large segments of the American people that the adults were not in charge any more.
So we went to Disneyland - we elected Trump. Trump was never going to right this sinking hegemon; he could at best hope to patch some holes. But the real service that he provided was a break from the psychological anguish of seeing the people that every elite institution in the country had selected - the creme de la creme of American society - running the country into the ground in every arena of public life. Many on the right have decided that Disneyland is nicer and want to stay there: this world with Trump's larger than life personality, the electrifying rallies, the screeching hordes of enemies outside, the madness and the mayhem - it's so much more colorful, it makes more sense than a world where every single institution was catastrophically failing with no solution in sight. Some on the left also want to stay in Disneyland. They have their own fever dreams and their own mythology: Trump the Russian agent serial rapist. Russians plotting to shut off the gas during a polar vortex. Havana Syndrome, hookers giving golden showers to the President, high treason, the walls are closing in! It's all very cinematic, the Manchurian Candidate meets James Bond.
There are also people who are leaving Disneyland with the desired effect - restoration of belief in 'the adults' running things. These are the people who want to vote for DeSantis, and the people who voted for Biden. These people just want to go back to normal; invigorated by the mad whirl of the Trump presidency, they find their faith in the adults running the show restored. But this too is an illusion, which Biden's presidency is shattering at breakneck speed. Inflation, disaster in Afghanistan, Covid resurging, now the clusterfuck in Ukraine. The same leeches that have been running the country into the ground for decades have flocked behind DeSantis's and Biden's banners, and they will do the same shit once they get back into power. Already we are losing that revived faith in the competence of the system - the adults can't be 'back in charge' because there never were any adults in charge to begin with -- Trump just made us forget that for a while in the mad whirl of his presidency. Personally, I think we're all going to be 'going to Disneyland' a lot more often in the years to come. In a way, this is a repetition. The Bush years had a markedly less pronounced but still unmistakable 'unreal' quality to them that quickly dampened during the Obama presidency - which turned out to be just as incompetent and corrupt on many levels. I think that this cycle is both intensifying in amplitude and accelerating in frequency. Hold on to your seats, this ride's not over yet.
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@Double_R
It would be so simple to just pass the popular items in standalone bills, but they don't. That's because their aim isn't to pass popular items, its to pass the unpopular items which their donors direct them to pass.I get this in theory, but it doesn’t address my issue here. Politicians care about their own political careers, and above all else. The only reason politicians are subservient to their donors is because they need them to keep their seats. But passing popular agenda items is every bit as valuable and I would argue more valuable to that end. For the democrats being in the situation they are, there’s no way for them to hold onto control if they don’t give voters something to show why they should be in power, so this failure in particular is their political death sentence. No donor can fix that, so why prioritize them?
I think that on the right this is true because there's a large cohort of right wing voters who will not vote 'R' if they don't get fed red meat. There is no longer any sizeable cohort like this on the left - in fact, there's a whole extensive sheepdoging apparatus that fires up every election cycle, convinces them that the alternative is 'literally hitler', and gets them to 'vote blue no matter who'. If the party knows that you'll never have the balls to take your vote and go home, they'll take your vote for granted. That's what happened to the left.
When the GOP ran McCain, whom I despised, I voted for Obama. When they ran Romney, whom I didn't really like, I stayed home. When they ran Trump, I voted for him. There are very few people on the left who are willing to do this, and it's the root of voter power in a democracy. You have to put your vote on the market if you want politicians to give you something for it. What's going to happen if the democrats break literally all their election promises? Will these 'socialists' actually stay home? They sure as hell won't vote Republican. My bet is that they will pull the lever for a half-embalmed Biden and then whine about it for four more years. The Democrats know this, and so studiously ignore their party's left wing on any economic issues which their donors would frown upon, only pursuing the cultural issues that Citibank has no problem with.
and that's when I realized that all their talk about helping people is complete bullshit. It's about serving their donors, that's why not a single one would take a deal that was weighted heavily in their constituents' favor -- denying Trump a symbolic victory was more important to themThis doesn’t make any sense. You’re claiming that all democrats care about is appeasing their donors, yet your example is of them not extracting what they could from republicans all for the symbolic victory of denying funding for the wall. What use do the democratic donors have with a symbolic victory? If they were all about their donors wouldn’t this have been a perfect opportunity to appease them?
Maybe I wasn't as clear as I could have been. The donors by and large don't want border security or trade protectionism. So from a donor perspective refusing to compromise with Trump's agenda was exactly what they wanted. In this specific case, they could give Trump his wall in exchange for hugely disproportionate populist economic policies for their constituents, which they claim to care for above all else. It was eye opening for me -- the Dems are so slavishly committed to their donor class that they couldn't even let 10 billion slip through to Trump for border security even if it meant a huge windfall of funding for social programs.
Republicans are at least honest about serving the middle and upper-middle classesWhat policy have republicans championed to help the middle class?
Tax breaks for small businesses - usually that's the lower cutoff point for who reaps the economic benefits of Republican tax plans. The one really big exception to this was capping SALT deductions - that's basically a tax rise on the rich. But I'm aware that this was driven by Trump and not the GOP in general and was an outlier as far as tax policy goes.
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@Greyparrot
I mean I could just say you're dead wrong about that, but 2016 proved without question that a person who made a speculative investment about which 3rd rail policies he could monopolize on when NOBODY else would touch them proves policy indeed DOES matter.
But people had touched those third rail policies before. Ron Paul touched America First foreign policy. There have been plenty of immigration restrictionists (hell, even Bill Clinton wanted to 'build a wall'). Trade protectionism - ever heard of Ralph Nader? And Pat Buchanan more than touched all three. What Trump brought to the Republican party was a deep understanding of branding, and his own personal brand developed over decades in the public eye. Trump coming down the escalator was a unique moment - it absolutely electrified the political environment in this country in a way that hadn't happened in my lifetime. It was powerful, and it was personal.
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@Greyparrot
Nah Fam. A backstabbing rat would be the John McCain moment where he voted against Trump policies cause he hates the man. People care much more about policy infidelities over petty hero worship. That goes for both sides. You saw what they did to Manchin and Sinema. DeSantis has shown zero Disloyalty over every key Trump policy. That's more than enough to win the primary.
This is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how most people think about politics, probably born out of your own preoccupation with policy. People view politics in a personal way and usually don't give two fucks about policy wonkery. Trump people love DeSantis when he is the 'successor', the mini-Trump in Florida, the viceroy to a swaggering, arrogant Trump enthroned among a sea of shrieking beltway swamp creatures. Most of the people in the area I grew up in, a swing country in a swing rust belt state, voted Trump by pretty large margins. I've talked to them about it. It is largely a personality cult. They like Trump's Borscht Belt schtick, they like his swagger, they like that he enrages their enemies inside the beltway, they like his mannerisms and his jokes, his brusque personality. They like Trump, and they like people who are on Trump's side. If DeSantis ran against Trump, all Trump would have to do is go on the road and do his 'The Snake' bit, but bemoan at the end that he trusted DeSantis and ended up being bitten. It would be demotic, it would be Caesarean, but it would work and it would stick to DeSantis like glue. Two thirds of Republicans believe that the election was stolen. Avenging the Stolen Election is something mythic, something that electrifies people on a personal level and galvanizes them to political action. If that perceived noble endeavor fails due to DeSantis shivving Trump in the back, it would end very, very badly for DeSantis.
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@Double_R
I don't think it's incompetence, I think it's how the system works. It would be so simple to just pass the popular items in standalone bills, but they don't. That's because their aim isn't to pass popular items, its to pass the unpopular items which their donors direct them to pass. When the school nurse is giving you food with a pill inside, she's not trying to feed you, she's trying to get you to swallow the pill. When politicians pass an enormous bill with popular provisions sprinkled into it, they're trying to use the popular (good for normal people) provisions as an excuse to jam through things which aren't good for normal people. It's like the school nurse, only she's trying to poison you. This isn't just a Democrat thing either, it's both parties -- you just see it more from the party that's in power. And it's not just the 'bad' Democrats either, the so-called progressives refused to force a vote on Medicare for All despite proposing to do just that while running, because they didn't want to rock the boat and lose their committee assignments.
Just look at the recent BBB bill that failed. Whenever they stripped something out of it or watered something down during negotiations, it was a popular provision that helped normal people -- paid family leave, vision and dental, free community college, allowing medicare to negotiate drug prices. How can they pretend to care about normal people? I used to be a both-parties populist, but the moment I gave up on the Democrats for good was when they were negotiating over the money for Trump's wall. It was a drop in the bucket when looking at a federal budget - only a few billion. The Democrats could have extracted 100 times that in programs to help people if they were just willing to give Trump his wall. But they steadfastly refused to budge even an inch, and that's when I realized that all their talk about helping people is complete bullshit. It's about serving their donors, that's why not a single one would take a deal that was weighted heavily in their constituents' favor -- denying Trump a symbolic victory was more important to them. Republicans are at least honest about serving the middle and upper-middle classes and aren't completely insane on cultural issues -- what reason do I possibly have to vote for a Democratic part who wouldn't give Trump his cheap-ass wall in order to help the poor by a disproportionately larger amount?
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It was very courageous of him. If any of us went back to one of the later Chinese dynasties and tried to argue against the process of footbinding, we'd have reality on our side. What we would find, however, is the just about every facet of their society -- from the doctors to the political powers to the economic powers which profitted from the practice or produced the golden lotus shoes and the aesthetic taste setters -- would be dead set opposed to us in lock-step. Our position would be the minority position, the ridiculed one, the 'unscientific' one, because this was a widely accepted social custom no matter how horrific and nonsensical, and so every major culture-making institution would be marshalled in its defense. I think that we're in a similar place as far as trans issues go. The whole ideology first gained acceptance in academia not through some groundbreaking study that won a Nobel Prize and changed how we looked at the issue, but by a literal 'lunatics running the asylum' situation, wherein a trans advocacy group used case study subjects to pressure Northwestern politically to muzzle the actual experts on the subject, and the university caved. It then metastasized throughout our whole system. The 'consultants' that Walsh argued against are basically running a modern day protection racket similar to that run by the Robin DiAngelo types. You go to a company, quietly threaten that without your 'training' program they will be smeared and maligned as racist/transphobic/bigoted, and then the company shells out ludicrous amounts of money in order to subject their employees to pointless, retarded trainings so that the company doesn't have an online mob sent after them (or so an already existing online mob is called off). This results in people being browbeaten or at times outright cult brainwashed into an insane ideology. At the same time, there's a huge cottage industry of incredibly unscrupulous plastic surgery, hormones, and 'puberty blockers' being built up - and it's very lucrative. A single trans person can easily spend a million over the course of their lives mangling themselves into a simulacrum of a man or woman, and in many countries schemes have been set up to fund this insanity through tax dollars -- it's basically an instance of a cottage industry raiding the public treasury. Then you have its proliferation through Hollywood and other entertainment avenues. To go up against this is necessary, but it's very much a David vs. Goliath issue. The actual trans people may be mentally ill and pitiable, but the predatory industries that profit from their misery, the big entertainment organizations that glorify it, the universities who produce apologia for it, and the extortionate consulting groups that spread the ideology are all immensely powerful and very invested in continuing the insanity.
Just imagine if we decided that the cure for anorexia/bulimia was to get them lipo until they looked like how they felt on the inside. I half think that the pro-ana stuff way back was a similar attempt at turning a mental illness into a cash cow, and it didn't take off so they all switched gears to the trans issues.
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I actually agree 100% with Double_R here. All the people who think DeSantis has a chance usually have one or more of the following three characteristics:
- Were party loyalists to the pre-Trump GOP
- Tied in to suburban culture
- Tied to Florida
What all of these people fail to realize is that the blue wall fell in 2016 because Trump drew independents and blue dog voters, and he did it through force of personality and a unique political package. DeSantis is a competent guy with decent political instincts, but he's following tracks that Trump laid down and does not have the force of personality required to replicate Trump's fervent support, especially in the rust belt. People in this group LOVED the way the Trump trashed the Bush legacy and trashed half the GOP candidates while thoroughly domesticating the other half, because they HATE the old 'gosh gee willikers, I'm an old fashioned guy, lets ship your jobs to China, send your kids to Iraq, and deregulate Wall Street' GOP. People who liked that GOP and see Trump as nothing more than a rebranding catalyst do not have a firm grasp on what Trump actually did to the party. Trump earned these voters' loyalty by bloodying that beast's nose in a very public way. DeSantis has not done this, and he likely will not do it. Suburban people heavily overestimate how much Trump's 'tweeting' and 'grotesque mannerisms' hurt him at the polls, because they live in a very gentile and isolated bubble that doesn't represent how the rest of the country talks about and to one another. I think many of them also are coping on a personal level - they're tired of having to defend Trump's uncouth behavior at cocktail parties and will lie to themselves about the real political situation in hopes of getting someone who shares their gentile mannerisms, someone who won't cause personal social friction for them. Floridians overestimate the damage the this split would cause because DeSantis has his strongest following there.
In reality it would be horrible for the GOP if DeSantis tried to primary Trump mostly because DeSantis is the first choice for Trump's successor in 2028. I know huge amounts of people up here who would gladly vote for DeSantis if Trump wouldn't run, but who would look very, very dimly on him turning on Trump after Trump pretty much annointed him - DeSantis already has a charisma deficiency, this would make him seem like a backstabbing rat to a huge portion of Trump's base and would actually fracture the populist movement in the US and severely weaken it, possibly even killing it in its cradle. It's a bad move on every level. If DeSantis simply waits for four more years he could become the 'Donald-Approved' heir and inherit the goodwill of the entire movement. By trying to cut in line there's a good chance that he completely destroys it.
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I think that giving to the poorest among us is not only a morally good action from the beggar's perspective, it is also morally important for the person who gives. It doesn't have to be money, it can also be time, attention, or basic needs like food or shelter. It's a recognition of the universality of human frailty - I know one homeless man who walks the street in the rural area I grew up in. People will stop and talk to him, buy him stuff. For most of his life he had a perfectly normal house with a wife and kids. One day he just had a mental break, his wife left, he lost his kids. Now he just walks, and doesn't even want huge charity. People have offered him houses and whatnot, he just wants to be out in nature. But he loves when people stop to talk or give him food. Another guy in the area was a green beret in Vietnam, it broke him. He was an alcoholic and can't really function, but I probably would be too in his shoes. So what, nobody should give him money and let him suffer because he'll spend some of it on booze? That's some puritanical shit.
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There's something honest about these more ritual forms of slaughter - I actually find the feigned sterility and mechanical nature of modern slaughter to be more off-putting. Slitting an animal's throat really drives home that you are taking a life - I feel like stun guns, gassing, and electrocution doesn't feel like killing, and so doesn't really respect or acknowledge any moral dimension to what's being done. The animals are treated like vegetables being processed, which has its own sort of quiet horror to it. Given a choice I would still eat meat that was hunted though; I'm glad a grew up in the sticks and knew a bunch of people with freezers full of venison. I feel like hunted meat both has the honesty of the kill and an animal which has lived a free life in nature right up until the day it dies.
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@airmax1227
Btw it's great to see you again. We need to play risk or mafia again together one of these days.
Definitely if I'm free sometime I will log in. Hezbollah will return to the Risk board.
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@Danielle
China and Russia whipped up some shitty inactivated virus vaccine that wasn't very effective at all but doesn't seem to have the safety concerns attached to them that a lot of the western ones do.What kind of safety concerns are attached to the U.S. vaccines?
Mostly vascular issues (especially with young men) and some menstrual issues with women.
I think that pharmaceutical companies hate FDA testing regimens and found a way to both skip them and be completely freed from liability.So you're suggesting they just sort of got tired of waiting for approval, and were okay with killing millions of people around the world to get some ROI. That wouldn't be the craziest thing to happen, but I don't get why governments and corporations all over the world would be in lockstep with this scam.
I think it's mostly to do with the ownership of things becoming concentrated into very few hands. When the same class of people are invested heavily in media, educational institutions, and pharmaceutical companies it introduces a lot of perverse incentives. The same goes for politicians who are watching whatever stock that they own in Pfizer shoot through the roof even as they craft the policies and laws which will shape the markets in which these companies operate. I don't think that millions of people are necessarily going to drop dead, but I think that there are demographic groups for whom the risks outweigh the rewards. For example, children and people who have already had the virus, especially the omicron strain. I think it's criminal, for example, that many of the vaccine mandates that are rolling out contain no exemption for people who were already infected. This exemption is offered in many other countries with very strict mandates, like Israel or some European nations. I think that it's scientifically incoherent to treat a person who's getting boosted with a vaccine designed for alpha (with diminishing returns) as having better immunity that someone who just recovered from omicron. The only reason I could see for this policy is to financially aid vaccine manufacturers and expand government power. It's also a pet theory of mine that the conservative Supreme Court majority is going to support mandates if they are challenged on medical privacy grounds, in order to undermine the legal arguments that support Roe v. Wade before repealing it.
China's economy suffered tremendously -- I think they might still be locked down.
China is probably lying about their numbers, and has actually been locked down for very little of the pandemic - they kind of play whack-a-mole with sudden regional lockdowns in response to spikes (Xi'an was the big one last year) but otherwise claim that they've achieved 'zero covid'. Personally I'm skeptical and think they have just decided to live with it and keep up appearances.
I don't know if I agree the shots didn't do what they promised to do considering we kind of knew all along how viruses mutate and how the efficacy of vaccines wanes with subsequent mutations. That's why there was a push for quick vaccination.
I remember when 99% effective was the mantra, and people were pretending that if we got high enough vaccination rates the virus wouldn't be able to mutate and would die out (there were already multiple animal reservoirs at this point, and much of the global south remained unvaccinated). Now we're on multiple boosters with diminishing returns, with the WHO warning that the entire model is unviable. It was sold as a silver bullet, and governments embraced it under that premise, sometimes to the exclusion of all other approaches (early treatment, vitamins, weight loss, etc).
I also don't know if I agree that the government cares about accumulating more emergency powers here since, as I said, the vast majority of life has gone back to normal and in some places hardly changed at all. Why are all the big liberal city mayors fighting lockdowns and unions mandating restrictions if their goal is more control? What kind of control, specifically are they after here? I'm not saying it's not true - I'm saying I need an explanation of what specific power they're looking for so it doesn't just sound like a Fox News sound bite.
Vaccine passports are now a thing in NYC, Philly, and Chicago. That's an absolutely huge intrusion - you have to show people your papers to get a hamburger. Then there's Biden's attempt to use OSHA to completely bypass the legislative process. I know that in Pennsylvania things only went back to normal because a plebiscite stripped the governor of his emergency powers halfway through 2021 - these powers weren't willingly surrendered, and he still bitches about having his hands tied and being 'unable to do more'.
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@Yassine
This is largely my impression as well - I see the Saudis and Iran being locked in a deathmatch, with Turkey steadily, quietly building regional influence and flexing its muscles in a restrained way (northern Syria and the Azerbaijan-Armenian conflict). One thing that I find interesting is the Istanbul canal project - the circumvention of the Montreux Convention would completely upend the geopolitical balance in the region and put many of the most critical cards in Turkey's hands regarding both trade and military traffic through the Bosporus.
I also find the usury stuff interesting. I wasn't aware of that development, and I hope that they succeed in challenging insane Western views on the topic.
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Would you care to make a statement on the proud nation of Iceland?
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Which takes us back to the question of religious testing for Congresspersons. The first sentence of the First Amendment prohibits Congress from respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Since Crenshaw is prohibited by the Constitution from promoting Christianity publicly do you think its appropriate for constituents to demand such unconstitutional demonstrations? Do you think its appropriate for Citizens to be teaching 10 year old girls such unconstitutional practices?
This takes the cake for 'most retarded take on the First Ammendment'. Well done, you beat out a lot of strong contenders.
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During his reign here, all mockery of Jews and their one god shall be kept to an appropriate minimum.
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Big Meat can be nice if you're looking for a cheap meal, but there's a lot to say for Small Meat, depending on how it's handled.
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These stories always make my day. Here's to many more graves dug!
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I vote Airmax
I have beheld him in a vision, guiding this site through the desert, marching to the tune of fevered drum beats. There are some who cannot bear to look at him, who drop at the sight of his terrible visage. But I cannot look away, even as the unworthy writhe like worms in the dust all around me, voting for some '3ru7al'. I know that even these ingrates will one day be bathed in his incalculable mercy and wisdom.
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
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I hate this scumbag. McCain 2.0
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@thett3
The numbers from China came out: births were down 12% from 2020 to 10.6 million. People are estimating that the TFR has fallen to around 1.15. This is lower than Japan was at its lowest. Also new marriages, which are strongly correlated with births in a country like China, fell 5% so it’ll probably decline even further next year. I’ve heard that property in many parts of China, relative to income, is even more expensive than the Bay Area in the US, so if that’s true it makes senseIt’s crazy that China is so gigantic that even with a record low birth rates there were still more Chinese babies born in a single year than the entire population of a country like Sweden
Talking to Chinese friends of mine, it's interesting to see how social norms established during the one child policy days are keeping the birthrate low. With one child per couple, both families absolutely poured resources into that child. Instrument lessons, best schools, huge pressure to succeed, huge investment in that child starting a family. Now it's seen as shameful to not offer that level of support, and this makes people less likely to have kids because they can't afford it. For example, they've said about American families with four or five kids that it was incredibly selfish to have that many kids because you can't afford to provide for them, which these Chinese people define as paying the downpayment for their first house, or outright buying the house. They've essentially gotten into a rut of extreme k-strategy breeding patterns.
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I don't think it takes a lot to fool the whole world - and several countries haven't really used the vaccines that concerned me. China and Russia whipped up some shitty inactivated virus vaccine that wasn't very effective at all but doesn't seem to have the safety concerns attached to them that a lot of the western ones do.
I don't really subscribe to the big conspiracy theories - I don't think it needs to be a big conspiracy. I think that pharmaceutical companies hate FDA testing regimens and found a way to both skip them and be completely freed from liability. They pulled the right strings to get approval in the US, then sold the vaccines as a silver bullet to end the pandemic to countries around the globe. To say that it is profitable is the understatement of the century - $36 billion is a huge amount of money. The entire global recording industry - every star from Dolly Parton to Post Malone - made $23 billion in 2020. The product ended up not doing what it was promised to do, and booster shots were shoved through the FDA approval process to rake in more money. Now the boosters are failing too. I don't think that everyone who got the vaccine is going to die, but they were never going to eliminate the virus or stop it from mutating, and for low risk groups it doesn't make sense to get jabbed. Governments mostly go along with the hysteria and fan the flames because it allows them to accumulate more 'emergency powers' that will have to be pried from their cold, dead fingers; the individual government officials' investments in Pfizer yielding dividends is probably just an added bonus for them.
Oh and fuck teacher's unions. Absolute scumbags. Grocery workers have to deal with hundreds, thousands of different people in and out of their store every fucking day, but these dumb fucks are hyperventilating about going to a single classroom with the same fifty KIDS (low-risk group) every day? Then they scream and cry and get the schools shut down, and said grocery worker now has to worry about having someone to watch her kids while she goes to work keeping everyone fed. I've completely lost whatever shred of patience I had for these spoiled idiots.
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The whole idea of citizenship and immigration exists because that's what a nation is - it's both a geographic area and the people who inhabit it. Humans on average tend to have a strong drive to improve their surroundings in order to pass it on to their posterity. There are incredibly strong sentimental attachments to this - termed oikophilia, or 'love of home' - that are pretty universal. All other things held equal, people feel most comfortable and happy among what they consider home - they like their own culture, their own architecture, their own food and customs. They may like to try other things, but something like moving to live permanently in an entirely foreign culture comes with a great deal of stress and long-term discomfort. When Abd al-Rahman III fled from the slaughter of his family at Damascus to the ends of the earth, settling in Cordoba, he felt this deeply. Though he was an exiled prince ruling a foreign land, one of his most treasured possession was a palm planted in the courtyard which was native to Syria, and he wrote a poem about it:
'A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa
Born in the West, far from the land of palms
I said to it, “How like me you are, far away and in exile!
In long separation from family and friends
You have sprung from soil in which you are a stranger
And I, like you, am far away from home”'
I think this epitomizes what I'm talking about, which is why I mention it - it's a deeply seated very human set of emotions. And the reason why it's so important is that we are living in a time of great aberration in this regard. There have always been wars, displaced peoples, political unrest and economic stagnation. Migration isn't new. But it was typically an ebb and flow, slow, and over relatively short distances. The sense of dislocation that an Arab moving to Egypt feels is much less than that of a Chinese man moving to Africa or an Englishman to India. What we have, economically, is a situation that's completely novel; the flow of resources is all going to a few places, and especially to America. I don't think most people who want to move here are in love with what might be called traditional American culture. I'm friends with many immigrants, and a lot of them have disdain for our ideas about things like freedom. They come here for the promise of a better life, and that promise exists because of that resource flow. This map is a good proxy: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Energy-consumption-per-capita-2003.png. Energy is the fuel of any economy, and we're in the upper reaches of consumption - this means that primarily fossil fuels are predominantly flowing into this country, where they are burned and yield energy that people in this country can use to achieve their aims. That, at the bottom of it, is the power behind American prosperity that drives people to come here. We also have other benefits, like huge tracts of arable land. Politburo member and influential Chinese political scientist Wang Huning's writings about his time in America devote a whole chapter to marvelling over the great plains. Two oceans to provide political stability (as long as America remains a united polity). These things make everyone want to move here, even at the risk of cultural dislocation, because to them America means a better life.
But, what I think that advocates for immigration miss, is the fact of whether or not these people getting their wish actually would fulfill that wish. Of course it appeals to typical American arrogance to think that it's this nation (its people and land) that make it so great. If that's the case, we just need to bring these people here and turn them into Americans. But I think that's a ridiculous proposition. Americans aren't drawing disproportionate carbon reserves into the country and burning them for energy, like a giant tick, because being an American is inherently better. It's our imperial reach that secures the flow of oil and ultimately backs our currency, which we use to reinforce our global hegemony. I think that the reality that undergirds America is far more brutal: it's our strength as an empire that allows us to consume energy, that buys our citizens a good life, and is the root of our power.
If you believe that it's the people or the land then it makes sense to bring in as many people from around the world as possible and make them into Americans - after all, the more Americans, the more great we are and the better our lives will be. But I think that if you understand that this is a system that is quite brutal and extractive at its core, then you face a pretty nasty conundrum. If immigration does make America stronger, then it will use that strength to squeeze the rest of the world harder, to extract more raw resources, and to give its citizens the very 'better life' that people immigrate to America for. This will further immiserate the rest of the world, reinforcing the very conditions that make the rest of the world's people willing to abandon their own homes to escape from the suffering inflicted on them. If more people come, the problem will just be compounded in an endless feedback loop. If immigration makes us weaker, then as more immigrants come in our ability to extract resources will wane as both our population and internal cultural dividing lines multiply. This will lead to an falling standard of living and an inability to provide the very 'good life' that immigrants have sacrificed so much to attain. This situation is a tinderbox that will lead to the opposite feeback loop: the country will tear itself apart among sectional lines. Before the fall of Rome, the city was being defended against the barbarian army of Alaric by another general of barbarian origin: Stilicho. For a time he was successful, defending the city and repelling the invaders. But as the ruling class of Rome felt their influence slipping and saw that Stilicho's star was rising, they butchered him, his son, and his soldier's families. The remaining soldiers went over to Alaric and Rome was razed. The morality of any of these actions isn't important, just that it's human nature to reinforce and dig in along pre-existing cultural and ethnic fracture points during lean times. A situation in which you saw large influxes of foreigners and a dropping standard of living would end the same way as Rome did - in recrimination and blood.
So overall I think that the industrial revolution and the advent of fossil fuels has led to a dynamic that's on a runaway course and can't really be stopped. It's lead to huge gaps in who has access to energy, raw materials, and so the fruits of a modern life. This drives people to want to migrate to those countries which possess higher access to those resources, but to see migration as a solution is insane - squeezing everyone who wanted to live in America and reap the benefits of her geopolitical dominance would just make America a more crowded and angry place, and it would either require America to become more exploitative in order to supply a rising standard of living to this swelling population, or it would cause America to collapse in on itself and allow another power to rise in the vacuum. We're past the point where wealth was made off of the land and people could migrate from place to place and not see huge swings in wealth or power. Now wealth is sucked out of the ground and shipped by pipe or tanker to what's called the first world, where it is burned to produce level of energy and productivity that would boggle the minds of people living centuries ago. We're all living in this mirage, in a world built on energy that can't last, but we refuse to give it up and always demand more, like a morphine addict. People who want a taste of this life stream into the western world and then feel displaced and immersed in an alien country. Can they all come? If they do, what will happen when the pie shrinks - not only due to the dwindling geopolitical dominance of the West, but the rise of an oligarchy which isn't as eager to share spoils? I think the West in general is in for a rude awakening, and that if we really wanted to solve the problem we'd stop sucking up all of the world's resources and allow wealth to build in other countries. But we will never take that hit to our own standard of living until circumstances force us to.
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@Yassine
Considering our answer to this has been 'let girls going through an awkward puberty saw their tits off and castrate any young boy who looks sideways at a Barbie', tbh I could go for some more cultural chauvinism and a refusal to 'improve'.- Hahahaha... this made me laugh more than it should. Any topic you wish to discuss openly?
Thoughts on Turkey's regional geopolitical ambitions and relationships with other major regional Islamic powers?
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It's so heartwarming to see RM and Airmax bury the hatchet.
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It's very promising to see the mods reassess a clearly incorrect action and rectify it once they realize the true extent of the abuse and gaslighting that's been hurled your way. I hope that they continue to evolve in this direction, it's a very refreshing change from the previous situation.
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This is the problem with Islam. No amount of self reflection. The West and christians can look at themselves and say "how can we be better", so saying the west and christianity is wrong, is what we do all the time, so we can improve.
Considering our answer to this has been 'let girls going through an awkward puberty saw their tits off and castrate any young boy who looks sideways at a Barbie', tbh I could go for some more cultural chauvinism and a refusal to 'improve'.
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I think that the problem that the OP is getting at is the one called 'Scientism'. If you look at the original great populizers of science - those who brought it to widespread public attention during the dawning of mass media - they were highly esteemed, revolutionary scientists like Einstein or Feynman. During this period, it was Feynman who said that 'science is the belief in the ignorance of experts'. He was referring to the fact that science was the antithesis of what you might call a magisterial understanding of truth - the idea that a group of people tell you what was true and untrue, and that they ought to be believed on account of their expertise. To Feynman, and other great scientists of his generation, science was a wrecking ball that tore down ossified bureaucracies and hardened assumptions about the way that the world worked. As time went on, however, a gap formed between this class of 'science communicators' and the actual creme de la creme of the scientific world. It dropped down a notch with Sagan and DeGrasse Tyson - adept scientists and intelligent men, but they never left a mark similar to that left by Feynman or Einstein.
This level of prestige took an enormous step down with Bill Nye and the slew of internet populizers that followed in his wake in later decades - many of these people don't even hold advanced degrees, yet are treated by society as authorities on physical reality. This slow and steady degradation was also accompanied by the growth of scientific bureaucracies - by the present day, these are inhabited by a mix of careerist political climbers and hopelessly corrupt scientists-for-hire, with an ever-dwindling population of principled holdouts. Fauci is emblematic of this - he is best known for completely bungling the AIDS crisis and has only failed upwards since then. If you look at the actual revolutionary scientists you can see how low of an opinion someone like him is held in - Kary Mullis is the most famous example of this, but if you know anyone in the scientific world you know that the gold standard isn't people at the top of the NIH or the FDA, it's people at Harvard, Oxford, MIT, or the Salk Institute.
So the million dollar question is who, precisely, distils down whatever serum is dripped into the public's ears and branded as 'science'? Increasingly, it's scientific popularizers, scientific journalists, and scientific bureaucrats. We all know that there are scientists who will sell their soul to the devil - the ones who are on the payroll of gas companies and present research which comes to the convenient conclusion that there's a 0% likelihood of fracking mishaps, or that burning oil is actually good for the planet, are the prime example. The idea that we should just accept whatever is fed to us in the name of science present a serious problem - because how would the general public be able to differentiate between a slew of populizers, science journalists, and ecological bureaucrats who were compromised by business interests like oil and gas companies, and one that wasn't, if we were all uncritical consumers of scientific 'truth'? The same applies to health outcomes. Over 65% of FDA funding for drug regulation comes from the very companies which the FDA is supposed to be regulating. The former FDA commissioner now sits on the board of Pfizer. Two highly regarded vaccine experts resigned from the FDA over their approval of Pfizer's booster schedule. At what point does what the FDA says about vaccines cease to treated like divine revelation?
The gold standard for science is the ability to make accurate predictions - that's what we use to test hypotheses, it's the core of the discipline. All throughout this pandemic, I have predicted one thing, the experts have predicted another, and I have been right. I said that there would be booster programs back in spring of 2021 and I had people calling me crazy - I was right. I said that a new Covid variant would come roaring back when it looked like things had died out in the summer of 2021 - I was right. I said that mask and lockdown policy would have little impact on covid numbers between US states and that temporally specific discrepancies were due to localized seasonal spikes - I was right. I predicted that Covid would never be eradicated - it has animal reservoirs and mutates way too fast - I was right. My predictions more accurate - am I more intelligent than all of these PhDs? No, I don't think so. But I don't have the same biases and don't exist in the same ecosystems of social pressures that they do, and so am unaffected by the things that introduce bias and distort their own predictions in a way which weakens their accuracy. Everyone should be at the bare minimum critical of the conflicts of interest that our self-anointed masters of reality are operating under, and shouldn't for a second take anything that they say as gospel truth. That's the polar opposite of what the greatest scientists in the world have understood science to be, and it's an incredibly ugly corruption of a beautiful tool.
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I thought it was hilarious aside from the poor gal who got shot. Personally a big fan of desecrating big lies, like the idea that a governing body with an approval rating that rises into the 20s every few years is a temple to democracy. It's a masonic lodge with better furniture and uglier women.
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@3RU7AL
Have you ever considered I'd not be a fan of the block button if it disallowed me to read content?why would you block someone and then continue to read their posts and reply to them ?
It makes his pp hard and then he feels like a big man. He gets so mad about this proposal because he wants to be able to block people without it actually affecting the way he uses the site. He finds the very act of blocking to be erotic and wants to do it to as many people as possible, and making that act contingent on never seeing another poster's posts again means he'd actually have to to weigh the pros and cons instead of blocking people reflexively.
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@Polytheist-Witch
The goal is for the atheists in the religion forum to block every theist so they have their own little private forum. They don't have to read our posts, they don't have to respond to us and they can say whatever they want and it not come back on them by the mods cuz all they have to say is well they can't read anything.
If they ever actually achieved this, they would just leave the site to find a new forum where they could have the same argument with a bunch of religious people who don't want to talk to them ad nauseum. Extremely online atheists have an all-consuming drive to invade any online space where religious discussion is taking place and shit all over it with their midwit takes. It's a strong biological urge that they'll never be able to shake, and this proposal robs them of their satisfaction.
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Some of the more vociferous critics of Airmax are starting to smack of antisemitism, and frankly I'm finding that a bit disconcerting. I'd like to reinforce, just for the record, that I would be honored to be moderated by one of God's chosen people, and I'm sure he would do a swell job. It'd be nice if certain users would stop invoking crude antisemitic dogwhistles and just give Airmax their full support. Jews can be more than 'community organizers'; I don't think its inherently nefarious for Airmax to pursue moderation powers. He is clearly capable of moderating without putting some shadowy elite in charge, Airmax is a committed meritocrat. Let's dispense with these ugly generalizations and judge candidates on their merits, please.
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@Ramshutu
You’re all arguing about niche issues of niche individuals complaining about people insulting them, when the real issue is the complete lack of user engagement, outreach, linking, proportion. We should be blitzing Twitter, parler, gab. We should be forcing down the throat of every argumentative asshole on the internet that this is the site where people are wrong in the internet. This site should be flooding the internet with argument tinder. Greyparrot random bullshit of the day, Wylted railing on Jews, flat earthers, creationists - rage inducing click bait.
I agree that those would be good places to target, but you're going to have a very hard time convincing someone who haunts those corners of the internet to give this site a try while you have a hate speech rule on the books. Why invest in this site, which is much smaller than Parler and Gab, when we have the exact same sort of rules that can get you banned off of any other forum on the internet for, say, questioning transgenderism, with only the restraint of the mods preventing it from being applied in that way? Not many people will have a conniption over mods moderating spam or other things which make life universally unpleasant. But I know that, personally, the only thing that has me posting here is a lingering connection to DDO; those two words anywhere in a TOS are usually a deal-breaker because of how easily they can be abused and misapplied. I think the TOS should be retuned to specifically ban things like the Brontoraptor situation (spamming topics and derailing threads incessantly) while leaving zero wiggle room for mods when it comes to ideological content.
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@badger
And then you got dudes chopping off their dicks. People identifying as dolphins. Whatever other silly shit. I hold that America is the silliest nation in the entire world, and entirely down to culture of politics.
The magical castration stuff is especially bonkers, and is a perfect example of footbinding-esque mass medical malpractice that will be looked back on with complete bewilderment centuries in the future. Aside from that festering boil called England and, strangely enough, Iran, I think most people in the rest of the world are completely bemused/horrified by it.
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@badger
Funnily, I was reading through your posts recently and came upon a G.K. Chesterton essay. "With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization."
I love the last paragraph to that essay.
In contrast, Rand writes erotica around her "heroic man". I think, anyway.
Pretty much. I always found it very ironic that Rand's two greatest strengths as a writers lay in her ability to write descriptive natural scenes and her ability to write villains, since so much of her shtick was about hero worship and she hated the worship of nature.
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I tend to remember a lot that I've read, but the latter half of the Narnia series is foggy for me. I remember an evil vulture god and a ship sailing through lotuses at the end of the world but that's about it. The most memorable for me were the original and the prequel that explained how the wardrobe worked.
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@badger
For me, it's the Sword of Truth series. I don't remember where or when I read it. I know a disappointing series came out, but I remember nothing about it. I remember that people couldn't touch each other for some reason. I barely remember Darken Rahl who I had conflated with old DDO user Ragnar_Rahl. I don't believe I ever did ask him if that's what he was named for.
The name was derived from Ayn Rand imo. One of the main heros of Atlas Shrugged was named Ragnar Danneskjold. Goodkind was a big fan of Ayn Rand and drew pretty heavily on her when writing. Ragnar_Rahl was also an objectivist iirc, so he probably made a composite username of the main character of the Sword of Truth series (Richard Rahl) and Ragnar Danneskjold.
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@Yassine
- I don't see that as a handicap at all.
Do you know many Chinese people? They take the idea of familial legacy to extremes, and I say that being generally favorable to the idea. It's absolutely a problem in the military if you can't count on you men to act in a way that puts them in severe danger.
No matter the case, China has double the population of the entire West combined. 10 times more militarily eligible persons than the US.
Yes but if they start taking loses they'll have simmering unrest on their hands, and the Chinese couldn't fight off a rebellion after starting a war that could quickly burn out of control.
The reason why China is not acting aggressively against the US yet, is because the latter has huge leverage controlling maritime trade & crucial straits. China must secure its energy supply -from the Middle East & Central Asia- outside of US naval reach, secure its material resources from Africa & Australia, by establishing new maritime & land trade network circumventing US bases, & also secure their export markets in Europe & elsewhere, again without the US. Only then, will China feel comfortable enough to say "f you".
They've been working on all that for a while now. I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of the OBOR projects are scheduled to wrap up in roughly 30 years time, a point at which the present baby boom will be entering their fighting prime.
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@Yassine
- I heard before that Islamic Law did not "evolve" enough to adopt 'corporate personhood', which is a ridiculous claim. One, the practice actually originates from the Waqf concept in Sharia, that is non-profit perpetual trust, thus entrusted to God (generally schools, hospitals, mosques & such). Two, for-profit trusts (corporations) are against Taklif, the fundamental concept of human accountability. Duties & privileges, including wealth, can you only be entrusted to a human, as a vicegerent to God. As an actor by-proxy of God's boundaries, only a human can be accountable for the preservation of these boundaries (or lack thereof). An impersonal entity such as a corporation, therefore, does not by design possess any divine permission to act on God's domain. The whole notion is absurd; a perpetual for-profit trust is immune to humans' justice, yet acts on humans' rights. That's chaos of moral & legal boundaries, for these are the rights within & dues without. Inheritance is just an aspect of this action. If not purged, in such system, corporations will grow indefinitely in perpetuity, overcoming states, & even empires.
I agree that the entire concept is absurd from the perspective of justice. The classic scholastic definition of usury in the Western tradition is 'profit without risk or labor', and that's precisely what a limited liability for-profit corporation provides to its stockholders. I think it's absurd that it arose out of some healthy 'evolution' of Western law; the limited liability corporation was first created in Delaware as a scheme to attract corporations looking to headquarter in the most friendly legal environment possible. It worked, and other American states adopted it in order to regain equal economic footing. That's a just a race to the bottom as far as corruption is concerned, not some profound advancement.
- As to Inheritance Tax, it's indeed weird. Being a Muslim, the only thing that makes sense to me is static wealth tax, & nothing else. Economy is essentially the centrifugal transfer of wealth, from capital to income, which is labour. New income raises consumption, & new labour raises production. Hence, economic growth. By taxing static wealth, you compel the holder to either invest his wealth so diligently as to make a profit greater than the tax, or keep his wealth while contributing to the economy through that tax. (in Sharia it's generally 2.5%).
How is that administered? The idea has been floated in America, but people always say it would be a nightmare to actually implement. For example, how do you deal with capital flight and offshoring?
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@FLRW
Yes, the world has witnessed horrific accounts of the enslavement of thousands of innocent Yazidis and other religious minorities by ISIS partisans in Iraq and Syria.In a recent article in its online English-language magazine, ISIS ideologues offered legal justifications for the enslavement of these non-Muslim non-combatants, stating that “enslaving the families of the kuffar [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah or Islamic law.”
ISIS are largely Salafist Islam. It's a fringe school that used to be relegated to one tiny backwater of Arabia and for much of Islamic history was not very influential or mainstream. It was the school adopted by the house of Saud in the Najd. When the British put the house of Saud in power (hence Saudi Arabia) this school of Islam also came to power, and the royal family of Saudi Arabia has been using their vast oil incomes to finance its promulgation throughout the Middle East and beyond ever since. They view other Muslims as infidels, which is a pretty unique understanding in the Islamic world, and leads to a lot higher levels of inter-religious violence. Groups like ISIS are often even more extreme than mainsteam Salafist thinkers, so using what they say about slavery as some sort of example of Islamic thought at large, or especially historically, is not advised.
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We don't 'pretend' that favoritism is okay -- favoritism is okay. It's the foundational principle of love. A mother favors her children. A wife favors her husband. A child favors their family. This isn't exclusive to the rich, but to the poor as well, who also dream of having something to leave to those whom they care for, to provide for those whom they value far into the future, and would not break bread to feed the whole city block if it meant that their own children would go to bed with half-empty bellies. You do love to wrap the mantle of the poor around yourself, but poor people by and large aren't animated by the same venomous spite and resentment that you are. They have families and other human ties which adorn their otherwise dire circumstances, and make them more bearable. It's not the poor that feel such burning resentment, but those who have isolated themselves and failed to make and hold on to healthy human bonds and a supportive community.
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I think the opposite is true: it's only 'sick and twisted' to people who don't think about it at all. They just say 'I don't like this aspect of it, so I'm not going to examine any possible reason that any of this has for existing in the first place.' Utopian, idealistic ideas of fairness and universal plenty require pretty much zero thought or originality, it's why they're so popular among the young. Just take what feels nice and say 'wow, I wish the world were like this' while ignoring all of the realities that underpin human societies, families, tribes, nations, etc. The status quo has unfathomably higher amounts of careful thought behind it compared to some pipe dream that ignores human nature, and the complex situations which arise from the intersection of all these myriad little threads of human behavior.
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@thett3
Another aspect of this people don’t think about it warfare. I know there have been relatively few wars in the past decades due to Pax Americana but that’s going to eventually end at SOME point. I know there will be further increases in technology, robots, drones, etc but fighting men being totally obsolete is a “I’ll believe it when I see it” thing for meA society with low birth rates would get rolled by one with high birth rates. Pretty much no matter how the war is going, there’s going to be massive political pressure to sue for peace pretty much immediately when you have tons of families with four grandparents, two parents, and one son losing their progeny. Even if wars of the future are fought with robots and drones and technology the last time industrialized economies went toe to toe it didn’t take long before they were indiscriminately killing each other’s civilians, so the same pressures would apply whether people are dying on the battlefields or in bombings
This is actually probably why China hasn't started any hot wars yet - the one child policy lead to what the Chinese call 'princeling syndrome': their conventional forces have a huge handicap because all the soldiers that they have are both solely financially responsible for all of their living ancestors and their family's only hope for an enduring legacy. In military engagements, these soldiers are incredibly risk averse, trying to return alive at all costs, which is horrible for military competence. The government is rolling back that policy rapidly, trying to encourage stay-at-home moms and ramp fertility up exponentially. Over 80% of Chinese GenZ moms are staying at home, which is a huge increase. I think that once the new generation comes of age you're going to see China become much more aggressive on the world stage.
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@thett3
One of my biggest issues with inheritance being taxed is that I much prefer personal wealth and things like sole proprietorships to corporate wealth. By taxing interpersonal wealth transfers every time the property holder dies you're handicapping real, personal property ownership, as corporations are artificial persons and never die, so the property never needs to be transferred. I think that one of the most morally hideous aspects of the current US economy lies in the massive buyouts of farmland and residential property by corporate interests. An inheritance tax, especially one capped as low as those in some European countries, accelerates wealth transfers like that.
I think that, morally, inheritance doesn't have an issue with it on any level. It can cause problems depending on surrounding economic and social contexts but those aren't problems with inheritance itself. You don't want a society, for example, where all the farmland is owned by a few oligarchs. One of the reasons behind the slow collapse of Rome can be traced back to this problem; eventually politicians instituted a grain dole to buy the loyalty of the impoverished populace and riots would regularly break out if that supply dried up. Bread and circuses - not a good way to maintain a virtuous populace.
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@zedvictor4
I don't think anyone expects things to 'stay the same', that would be quite literally insane.
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@thett3
It’s true that the government isn’t forcing these companies to ban anything that disagrees with the CDC
I think this is actually debatable. I think that hauling the heads of social media companies before congress and berating them while constantly talking about the need for them to censor content more constitutes a threat of legal action by the government. A lot of the tech companies didn't even start to censor until Congress blamed them for 2016 and 'Russian interference' and applied immense indirect pressure to get them to do so. Dorsey for example had little to no interest in policing content at any strict level originally.
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