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That was exactly my point, yes
I just wanted to confirm from our meeting just now, did you want me to (some crazy shit that could cause problems)?
That was exactly my point, yes
Rail lives in that weird category like rural mail or power service (or, for that matter, highways) – you need to provide it if you want your country to be a civilized place, but it’s real real hard to make it available at a reasonable price and still turn a profit.
Turns out the answer was government, all along…
Saying that it’s okay if one group of people that someone tried to wipe out, does whatever they want, because of course they’re the victims after all, is exactly how we got to this situation where Israel is creating on Earth a for-real biblical apocalypse and people are trying to defend their right to do so.
Two things can both be concerning
When one side is being violent and racist against innocent people and then some other people start being violent and racist against innocent people on the “other side” to counterbalance, that’s not a calm or welcoming development for anyone concerned
Apparently the only way the candidates will agree to do it is if the format is so stilted that there’s no chance of anyone learning anything or seeing the candidates get challenged on anything. It’s basically just a taking-in-turns version of a campaign commercial.
What, indeed, is the point. Like a lot of American politics, the whole “debate” survives as a pointless vestige of a thing (now long forgotten) that was useful and productive in its original form, but now is mutated to a useless and unrecognizable monstrosity, which you have to pretend is super serious and important if you want to be able to be on TV.
Yeah. I mean it’s hard to blame them–
You know what, fuck that, let’s blame them. They have a responsibility. This is like all the German businesses that played along with the Nazis because it was easier and then had to change the subject when their grandkids asked them about the war years. Like yeah grandad ran a, uh, a pots and pans factory. Yeah. Just pots and pans. Now go play outside.
In ordinary times I think it would be fair to say well you know a bunch of them didn’t focus on the bottom line and went out of business and everyone had to get new jobs, so hard to blame the ones still around. But this is kind of all hands on deck time. It’s one thing if you don’t want to write articles about the IRA and all good stuff about Biden. It’s a whole different fuckin story if you want to write stories feeding into getting the guy elected who is going to fuck up your home and city and business and economy and the safety of you and your families, too, and then (I am sure) stand around like “we’re all looking for the guy that did this” if it winds up coming true.
It gave some sound bites for people to hold up as examples of why Biden is old which I’m sure we will be seeing on certain news networks from now until forever going forward
And gave a bunch of “objective” news outlets a good excuse to write a bunch of “DEMS IN PANIC AFTER BIDEN’S UNFORGIVABLE SHIT SHOW” articles they are for some reason eager to write
Other than that significant amount of fodder, I think nothing of value occurred
It’s bananas from start to finish
I can’t recommend it highly enough
Why would you hurt me this way
You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:
I classify most of those people as shills. The people who want to talk about communism or anarchism or pro-China/Russia-ism, and lack of any interest or hope for US electoral politics as kind of an outgrowth of that but US electoral politics is not the main thing they are interested in focusing on, I classify as probably authentic tankies.
Like I say, of course, I have no idea. That’s just how I write it down in my head.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are places in the world where it works the way this guy wants it to. Redmond O’Hanlon talked about observing the results, someone falling off a boat and clearly going to drown, and O’Hanlon becoming incredibly alarmed to the people around him, like where is the rescue boat, isn’t someone going to do something for him, don’t they have some kind of safety in place? And they asked him, who’s going to pay for it? Why would someone set up a lifeguarding operation like that for no one in particular just out of the goodness of their heart? And they laughed at his naïveté about how the world operates, as he watched the kid struggling, going further and further away and out of sight as the boat continued without him.
There are places in the world with no government. Africa has lots of them; that’s probably the best place to travel to if you want a much more immediate and easy and possible-in-the-first-place path to get there than the total non starter idea of destroying the US government. Central and South America have some too, in selected places, but it’s less complete or widespread than it is in Africa. You could literally be living your dream in like a few weeks from now.
Actually I think there are also some crypto based attempts at doing something like that (like floating ships or islands or something), and they’d carry a lot of benefit in terms of the people speaking English and being supportive of your worldview and all, but they have worked even worse than the land-based places with no government, if you can believe it.
If you just meant you want the nice things about the US and its government, without either the destructive things that it does alongside or the obligations that have to happen in order for it to exist and do those nice things, me too! It’d be great. Maybe when you go to Africa you can get to work on making that system. Let me know when you get done and in the meantime I’ll be here with my clean water and highways and taxes garbage collection and anti-bear-attraction regulations and military and all.
Sure. My question is, why such a concerted effort to look for bad things about such a clear win?
Like would it work the other way? If the IRS was making life more difficult and expensive for everyone making W2 income under $79k, would you be out here saying well I guess an L is an L, but let’s remember it only applies to W2 earners and only some of them and anyway it’ll probably get overturned later on and I want to highlight the program’s important limitations and etc etc, instead of just saying “that’s a bad thing” like a normal person?
So you think it’s a good thing, just doesn’t go far enough / needs to be extended further in the same direction in the future?
The truth is, I have no idea and I don’t think it’s all that productive in most cases to try to sort it out or talk about it. I didn’t actually say anything at all about what the person was; I simply highlighted flaws in their argument and linked to one of their other comments and let the reader draw their own conclusions. In this case I think they were so self explanatory that I didn’t really need to indicate any of what my conclusions were.
But… to deal explicitly with my conclusions, I’ll say that in almost every case where there’s some kind of weird nonsense-logic, and then poking through the person’s history instantly yields some “let’s not vote for Biden” advocacy, I do personally tend to draw the conclusion that they’re a political shill. If I saw a bunch of geopolitical stuff or extended arguments about Marxism then that would tilt the scales in favor of tankie (although like I say, this is only my private logic about it, not like anything I would present as conclusive, because it’s basically impossible to tell.) Going into mainstream political forums and getting real vocal about how people involved with mainstream US politics are supposed to engage with it doesn’t strike me as real common tankie behavior.
I looked back in my history as an exercise in self criticism, and I found many many recent instances of me arguing with people I’m pretty sure are shills without bringing that accusation into it in any capacity, because usually, it’s not relevant and I think just dealing with their arguments at face value is more productive. And then, I found a comment from a few days ago where I called the Biden administration “fuckin assholes” about their support for Israel.
I won’t say that back further ago than that, you won’t be able to find me accusing someone of being a shill, because you will. I will say something about it in cases like this where it’s (a) hilariously obvious and (b) relevant to the conversation on a level that makes bringing it up productive, in addition to dealing factually with what they’re saying. But I actually don’t say it nearly as often as I think it. I won’t speak for how anyone else likes to do their internet arguments, but just as far as my conduct is concerned I’m pretty sure you’re just making up a convenient reality that doesn’t exist. Both of your main accusations here have nothing to do with the actual reality that exists in the real world.
I’m not sure why you’re committed to saying something “rebuttal-like” here, instead of just “yeah that guy’s full of shit” without any “but” attached afterwards, athough I have a theory.
(Also, this conversational pattern – where one person who is pretty clearly a shill expresses a statement, and someone does a rebuttal, and then the first person disappears completely and someone different instantly jumps in and starts conducting the conversation or attacking the rebutter – happens often enough and is slightly-unusual enough that I think that pattern is worth pointing out, also.)
So I thought to myself, well that’s a weird comment. It’s nonsensical in a couple of different ways.
So I sort of wondered to myself: Why would someone be so aggressively negative in this specific way about something that almost any normal human being would look at and say “hey that’s good,” and for such weird and counterlogical reasons?
And so I looked three comments back in your history and said oooooohhhhhhhh okay I get it it all makes sense now.
Dude FUCK HIM UP
I can’t even imagine being outside the school for over an hour with the cops actively preventing me from going in and getting my spouse or child out, getting pepper sprayed and handcuffed, and then at the end of it finding out they were inside slowly dying of a gunshot wound the entire time. I am legitimately confused about how none of the cops involved in that have not been vigilante’d.
If every single one of them get felonies with long prison sentences, they should count themselves lucky as hell that their community is for whatever reason being so forgiving about it.
The quote leaves out the best part.