he/him History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
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i think the zero-covid folks almost represent a mirror version of MAHAism in that both believe what they do primarily due to having been insulated from the reality of how disease has worked for all of history for the majority of their lives by the power of modern medical science.
covid deaths are underneath flu deaths.
If yelling about covid went along with a laser focus on advocating for indoor ventilation standards and UVC lighting and vaccine research I wouldn’t find it nearly so annoying
It’s why I always say as dysfunctional as the Democratic Party is, it’s a miracle it works this well when: 1.) Kamala got the vote of everyone, however begrudgingly, who has a political ideology which should be legal from Bill Kristol to HentaiHoxha69 2.) It wasn’t enough for a plurality
the US explicitly refused to send weapons to either side in the 1948 war because Truman viewed it as contradicting the UN plan. where’s your evidence that the US was funding the Zionist militias in the region?
“Why are you talking about pancakes, do you love Donald Trump and his mass deportation policy?”
Once again, “at least three” and the follow up “don’t play games” show why Joe-Biden-Thought is undefeated.
It's very fortunate for us that the regime has no intention of courting allies of any kind
it's the same statistical problem which explains why most people currently in prison committed very serious crimes, but most people who were incarcerated in a year were incarcerated on tiny charges.
i think the basic thing here is that non-poly people have mostly met poly people whose relationships exploded into shrapnel the moment they tried it (this being because they did not meet them through being poly) and poly people have mostly met people who didn't (because these are the longest ones.)
the issue is that we need many of those people in order to defeat fascism! the goal of social progressivism isn’t primarily to convert everyone to social progressivism, which we can’t do, it’s to make everyone live by the tenets of social progressivism, which we can!
the issue with trying to logic your way through relationships is that desire and affection and human bonding generally are not, and have never been, strongly rational elements of life, nor do they exactly cover themselves in glory with regards to equal respect for others and full independence, etc
polyamory has a lot of reasonably strong philosophical arguments for it, but they all basically fail on grounds of “you cannot logically argue people into experiencing attraction differently”, which is what a lot of the poasting about the irrationality of jealousy fundamentally is
as foucault says, we invented sexuality a few hundred years ago and socially reified it into something we believe is fundamental and unchangeable but today i ask: what if we also make up a bunch of other identities and act like those are also immutable facets of ourselves
what’s going on here is that the typical educational/demographic profiles of people who practice self-described polyamory (as opposed to like, open cheating) line up very well with “people who, if they are bad at it, will Poast about it, and maybe even write a story in the Cut or NYT about it”
getting everyone on the internet to watch your press conference so they can see if you’re dead is one way to expand attendance
If Joe Biden had been even a few minutes late to a press event, Jake Tapper would’ve pronounced him dead and it’d have been a weeks-long scandal.
my point being that the Czech government’s aid for Israel wasn’t an arm of American foreign policy, because presumably if the US could dictate Czech foreign policy it would not have been in the Eastern Bloc
monetary incentives and subsidies and lowered costs are mostly going to allow people who want to have children to have at most a few additional children (perhaps from 1 to 3 total) but it’s pretty much impossible to make people who don’t want children decide to raise them anyway.
also, a lot of the cost of childcare isn’t actually economic, it’s opportunity cost in terms of lifestyle. if me and my partner suddenly inherited Musk’s entire fortune we still wouldn’t have children because we do not want to have children, and there are a lot of people like us.
maybe Loomer's just really taking her time with the new tongue ring
fortunately being time-travelers who know exactly who most of the spies are mean it’s pretty easy to make sure you got the right people and to clear the innocent
His people seem scared shitless about people thinking he was dead
Trump II never even tried to build the mass consent necessary for authoritarian consolidation, they just assumed it was there because they won the popular vote
you can carve out a lot of independent states from Russia’s various minority peoples, but you still end up with a massive Russian state, and you’re not gonna divide St. Petersburg and Moscow into separate countries and have the inhabitants suddenly decide “welp, i guess we’re not Russian anymore”.
this type of prison of nations shit requires convincing Russians that they aren’t actually Russian, is the issue, and “externally imposed divisions of self-conscious nations” has a habit of blowing up in the face of whoever does it!
but this isn’t going to happen, is the thing, because Russia has been successful in establishing itself over those territories, and trying to divide self-identified nations by force doesn’t tend to work. you could carve off every minority area of russia and still have a massive russia!
every other new world state (aside from arguably haiti depending on how we define terms) are still very much colonial-descendant states despite having far less continuity of government than the US or Canada does. even states like Bolivia that are indigenous-majority are recognizably colonial!
i do not think any plausible outcome of future american politics includes “the lands making up the united states cease to be governed by people whose ancestors arrived in the region within recorded history”, just due to basic demography.
and how far back does this go? Should Russians be forced to migrate back West of the Urals?
they won’t be, is the thing, because the overwhelming majority of people living there do not want them to be.
notably, Israeli nationalists and their allies often use the recent invention of Palestinian identity to argue that “they should just all move to Jordan”. This is wrong: the only person that decides what one’s nationality is is oneself, and the Palestinians believe themselves to be Palestinian!
trying to use “but their nation is made up” is an inherently flawed premise to critique the actual problems with any particular nationalism, since all nationalisms are made up! this isn’t the actual problem with Israel!
That Israel is equally as “real” as any other nation, because it shares with all of them the only defining feature of nationhood, namely an agreement among a population that they constitute a distinct nation!
*looks at map of the Americas*
the oldest nations in the world are at most two and a half centuries old, because nationhood is constructed, it is a shared social fiction, that draws on older historical influences and contemporary events to justify its own mythology
this argument could equally be used against Palestine, since a palestinian, or pan-arab, national consciousness isn’t older than a century either!
you cannot actually do this because Zionism existed in discourse with, and competition with, these varied other ideas and proposed schema for organizing the world. what’s notable about it is that, unlike many other ideas from the time, Zionism actually came to fruition, and so still exists.
there is a desire to separate Zionism from the context in which it was created and popularized, namely a context of “national awakening” (really national invention) across Europe, from Lusotropicalism to Turanism to Pan-Slavism
zionism obtained fairly widespread support among Jews, especially in less liberal states, to the degree that ie Austria had elected Zionist representatives from highly-Jewish areas in its legislature by the 1900s. this should not be shocking—that legislature was filled with nationalists!
why are you unwilling to consider that the reason Palestine was chosen was because a substantial number of Jews sincerely believed (and believe) that Palestine is their legitimate national homeland, as promised to them by God and recorded in one of the oldest surviving written documents we have?
note also that all of these other plans also require doing settler-colonialism to establish a Jewish State!
most of those other plans were proposed by the imperial states of Europe looking to find a solution to the Jewish Question, to my knowledge there was not a substantial movement *among Jews* in favor of them. notably the JAO didn’t ever end up hosting a majority of even Russia’s Jews
but why did they want that specific land? if it’s just for colonialism, surely they would have wanted the more valuable land in other countries?
all the 19th century nationalists had a weird dynamic with regards to every other nationalist movement where they simultaneously wanted to be like them and wanted to be better than them
I do think one thing that the Israel-Iran War proves to me is that if there is a Big Pacific Oopsie that missile production today is like shell production in 1914
the czechs were an eastern bloc state by this point, the coup had already occurred
if you gave the Dems a majority remotely close to what Labor has they’d have radically transformed America! If you had a Senate of 100 Joe Manchin clones you’d get more done than Labor has!
also, a pro-Soviet israel implies western support for pan-arabism, which potentially leads in interesting directions, such as “pro-American Mumar Gadaffi”
i think such an Israel isn’t necessarily a communist dictatorship—Israel’s Labor Party was a major political force even when they were allied with the US! the real question is whether the end of Soviet backing leads to some type of forced settlement in the 90s under the aegis of US unipolarity
I think all the criticisms of the prevailing culture on Bluesky are basically correct tbh, I just don’t care that much because the alternative is ran by a insane billionaire who hates people like me shot through with literal Nazis. I’ll take the occasional annoying millennial with an MSW over that
It is your duty the poorest among us in any high status social environment to greet any statement of support for Trump or the GOP in general with the most condescending imperial sneer imaginable.
Putting on my elitist cap once again: I think one of the core reasons 2025 is worse than 2017 is that supporting Donald Trump is no longer seen as a low status signifier in many elite circles.
notably an Israel that had allied with the soviet union would have caused pretty much the exact same problems as the one we got!
if people consistently behave in a way that is “opposed to their own interest”, it is perhaps worth evaluating whether you are wrong about what their interests are
this is also certainly true, but hypocrites who vote the right way while being personally bigoted are still more helpful than people who are bigoted and vote on the basis of that bigotry, which are the two options being compared here
not sure anyone in america is that big a fan of “here comes the airplane”, to be fair
I don’t think the Klan is an op to divide poor whites, I think it’s actually an “op” to terrorize and assault black people
Is Richard Hanania white, the greatest thread in the history of stormfront, locked by a nazi after 12,239 pages of racist debate
"I hear and see this all the time and just don't let it influence my views" is simply not how human brains work.
More than that, *you are actively hurting trans boys and girls* if you convince them begging for money on the internet is better than being a lawyer *and* hurting the people who do need help because it means there are fewer resources to go around and more people who need assistance.
A lot of people from the center-right to the far left have a fantasy about being Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai for inbreds.
very real chance a big chunk of this is just the wizard lady
The UK is low key weirder than the USA because the USA is simply dumb and weird whereas the UK is a strait-laced country that thinks the USA is dumb and weird, then proceeds to slavishly ape it.
everyone on this website to the right of me is a bot. everyone to the left is in an echo chamber. this place is dying.
there’s no strong case for inequality as the cause of any of this, based on the evidence we actually have, it doesn’t show in polling, there doesn’t seem to be a reward for reducing inequality. the only way to assert it does is believing the voters will retroactively stamp their approval on a change
or rather, was hounded from the race due to being unpopular, and his successor lost due to being perceived as too close to him
i think the reason for no re-election is more just, as Stancil thinks, social media. Every issue with present america is magnified and blamed on the president. Note also that Biden, who presided over the first lessening of inequality in my lifetime, also lost!
they’re the second-largest party in the Riksdag, and the current government is in a confidence and supply agreement with them
Literally no offer of goods and services on the Internet cannot be improved by a fine-print disclaimer that reads “Not an orgy”
Three ticket levels, plus Slutcon After Dark (which to be clear is NOT an orgy)
i think "there should be no jobs which routinely involve the use of force against civilians and if any job of that sort exists, additional duties should be added to it until no one for whom that is an attraction wants to do it."
its funny how Corbyn is who centrists said Bernie was, and Starmer is who leftists said Biden was
while Bernie should have retired in 2024, something that separates him and to a lesser but still noteworthy extent Warren from the rest of their old colleagues is he clearly sees it as a priority to build up a bench of successors to his brand of politics
an avatar of Republican faux moderation getting unseated by an avatar of left-wing rage would own so hard honestly
this sounds like a reasonable false positive rate for a relatively rare condition that can kill you
this seems like a base rate problem?
I keep saying this, but if there is a sharp rise in skepticism or negativity towards the military among liberals because of these occupations, it will be treated as a problem that Democratic leaders need to answer and apologize for, not a crisis that the military or US government needs to address.
the question is whether the media loves “going to war” or “complaining about how the war we started isn’t won already” more, and that’s a cointoss tbh
what if he just says the Shahada and refuses to elaborate
The problem with discourse on American policing is exactly the opposite of a failure of imagination, too much pontificating on the platonic nature of law enforcement and not enough treating it like a concrete policy problem where we look at best practices from peers that get better value for money.
I just don’t know how to make democracy work in a country where a third of the population thinks the vet is trying to give their dog autism and the other two thirds think you’re lying when you point this out and the other third must be reasonable chaps whose legitimate grievances must be addressed.
Also, the Presidential Medal of Freedom is *not* our "highest civilian honor." The much older Congressional Gold Medal is, because Congress as a body properly outranks the President. Thus why the military Medal of Honor is presented "in the name of the United States Congress" and not just POTUS.
ngl social media egging trump to do a "i am not dead" tour that ends up making him sick tired and miserable would be really funny
There probably is a lesson in the fact that Obama shepherded the most left-wing piece of federal legislation since the Great Society, over opposition in and outside his own party, and is chiefly remembered by the left now as a do-nothing moderate.
Aside from how Obama is remembered, it's striking that Obamacare is basically the last serious presidential legislative agenda that wasn't just trying to contort an annual budget bill to fit in everything you can crowbar into it.
The crisis of Atlantic liberal democracy is imo partially mirrored: the Euros will happily pass laws but won't spend money, the Americans will happily spend money but won't pass laws
the thing that's hilarious about people complaining on X that Bluesky is an elitist platform that normal people hate is that, very plainly, they're mad that the userbase of Bluesky rejected them
if you like the old war horses retiring, can’t hurt to say a couple nice things when they hang em up pour encourager les autres
also, what evidence is there that more people *realize* there is inequality? if Americans are rebelling against inequality why are they voting for a famous businessman billionaire?
why does Sweden have a massive far-right party despite having a Gini coefficient lower than the US’s has literally ever been?
Good game plan for the next Dem admin I think
Meanwhile, everyone on the center/left spends so much time politically jerking off, having meta-argument about whether things are "distractions" and such. Part of why "Orange Man Bad" wasn't enough in 2024 was because we spent so much time arguing over "Orange Man Bad" as a good message.
This is why I found it so funny the ivys and snob schools rolled over so fast and got double fucked for doing it. These are the same people getting duped putting 50 grand in a shoebox. Rich and priveleged Americans are the easiest people to scam and bully because they've never deal with it before.
the way you are defining policing implies that the KKK was a “community based system built on horizontal relationships”
the fact that the guys chasing you out of town for violating the rules didn’t wear little metal badges that say “police” on them doesn’t render whoever they’re chasing out less oppressed
because they were engaged in policing by the normal definition of the word policing, namely *using force and the threat of force to uphold the social structure of their society*
if you are only one member of a community with a very large claim on your identity, you have very little recourse if said community demands something of you! they are the law!
note also that *the premodern family is very often founded on violence!* the institution of the modern family still contains arbitrary domination implicit in it, and the premodern world was generally much harsher. if your rights are as a family unit, you, individually, generally lack rights at all!