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General politics thread (was: General U.S. politics thread)
Comments
Huh. I was wondering if you were channelling the rage against farm attacks or something. Now I don't have an easy hold to play armchair psychologist on you.
They even made a movie out of it. I knew of it, but I might've not if not for that one conspiracy theorist I listened to once.
That was one of your best posts gck how could you forget.
Edit: there was also the thing with the post with the two anime girls, one of which had a fried egg on her hair.
Edit edit: Odd that you hadn't heard that, it was super well known (at least inasmuch as anything besides the main incident can be well known at the time I guess) as the one where the passengers knowingly* got themselves killed to avoid having the terrorists crash it elsewhere.
* At least that's how the story goes.
edit: can you link me to these posts?
I'll try to be more helpful next time. I really enjoy armchair psychology as an art form. Like DIY, except you lost the instructions from Ikea.
'Twas quite a while ago, so I probably forgot.
It's an actual story-revelant hair decoration!
Of course that I remember.
Sono toki ni nattatte osoi~n dakara
Sono toki ni naita tte shiranai~n dakara
ClariS' Naisho no Hanashi really enriches discussions on U.S. policy...
If I know one thing about this sort of stuff it's that people really, really care (and are basically kind of racist about it except you can't be racist about it so ????). When people in the New York Times talk about "tribalism" they probably have literally no idea that some people mean "actual my-grandpa-vs-your-grandpa tribalism".
I mean, Hotel Rwanda captured people's hearts way back in [that year], but that stuff's not gone. Obviously, it's not that bad, but it's the sort of thing that would send Critical Race Theory professors into anaphylactic shock.
I'll save that for the other post in IJBMU.
Also I think ClariS is overused so we need to do something else. Or should we go with ClariS as tradition?
I think I should probably scrub the stuff about the other guy though. I mean, he'll probably never see it, but I still feel like he'd know.
I mean, it's just that I've been on this kick of being very open with you guys lately and I feel like a jerk even if it's over things that happened before I decided this new thing literally probably this 2020.
It's not family drama, but I think I've granted your wish for now in IJBMU.
(Not that it really changes my opinion of anything, or has much relevance to our arguments over US policy today. Also I think slaves in the U.S. were more typically descended from people from western parts of Africa? just from convenience for trade routes, I think.)
Also yeah, by the time two or three planes had crashed people had figured out what was going on and the passengers basically decided to make a noble sacrifice to bring down the fourth one. It crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
There was a bustling slave trade run out of Zanzibar (Tanzanian peninsula/island thing) by some Arabic society for quite a long time. They sold theirs mainly I think through Asian/Middle-Eastern and European routes.
So yeah you're probably right.
Yeah I didn't mean Americans.
You know what? I actually had fun today. I haven't ever gotten the chance to talk about the thing in IJBMU with anybody ever, and it felt good to get it out.
I think you guys know me well enough that if somebody claimed something was "culturally insensitive" I would get on my soapbox and shout about cultural relativism and the scourge of modern collectivism until somebody (probably also Stormtroper) was like "uhhhh maybe stop now?".
Also I kind of want to tell people I'm Zulian and make them think I'm from the former Zulu empire.
But I did this not because I had any particularly substantive reason for opposing same-sex marriage itself. Rather this was more so because just because basically no one stepped up and said anything during the negatives side of those debates, and if I staked out a negative position for my speech I was basically guaranteed a speaking slot, which of course is how I could even participate in those tourneys at all.
Back then I did nominally oppose legalization of same-sex marriage, but this was based on "this isn't an issue I care much about, but if you have to ask me, then I think this is how the world should work". That said, even right before the US Supreme Court ruled to legalize SSM, I was still suggesting a "compromise" solution involving renaming everything (including heterosexual marriages) "civil unions".
And a decade or so later, I was also foot-draggy about trans rights, in a similar way, until after several conversations/arguments (with various internet acquaintances) that convinced me to adjust my worldview to be more accommodating.
Some people say that people get more conservative as they age, but if anything I've actually gotten more liberal (based on ideological labels in current use) on this realm of issues, on the basis that the position considered more liberal is more able to be part of a more comprehensively applicable understanding of the world, which frankly speaking is IMO a more philosophically (even if not ideologically) conservative way of looking at things anyway.
That said, now that I have decided on this piece of worldview, fourteenwings, you're encountering my intransigence at changing it back, because I've already thought through this one and found it to be better than my last one.
Still though these issues are not really my front-burner issues for me, while apparently they are for you.
I assure you there are posts somewhere around here where I said to our wise tumblr stoner InsanityAddict (I am not trying to slander you in absentia IA but I feel this is basically the best way to put it) that I was not particularly a fan of or a subscriber to the idea of "Queer", or I just outright dismissed it.
Since we're saying things I might as well just say when I was younger, I basically thought InsanityAddict was right about literally everything. I still might.
Have these people met literally any Democrat in office right now?
I will let this go because I have four episodes of Penny on M.A.R.S. to get through tonight.
It's not about holding some specific slate of litmus-test views based on current political trends. It's more fundamental than that.
Also, how did I forget; ClariS' Naisho no Hanashi has multiple covers!
What other edits should I be aware of?
I wanted to discuss the fundamentals of Conservatism, Western culture, and Christianity, but I accidentally tired myself out elsewhere.
I will say that even as an atheist I do hold a pretty pro-"Christian values" view now. This happened partly because secularism -and it's outgrowth transhumanism- started scaring the heebie jeebies out of me.
To be clear, transhumanism is not about transgender issues in it's most important developments, that is to say I don't associate one with the other).
Remember when I said people changed and I of all people wanted to deny it being mostly about politics?
i'm not sure i really have anything to say in reply to that; it's just sorta there
not that i even had much of a reaction to it
I know some of these people might have had their minds genuinely changed about things, but I doubt it could be all (and definitely not Kirsten Gilibrand).
These are the top four audiobooks on Amazon right now and I don't like it one bit (for reasons such check complaints on the previous page and the stuff about secularism).
It's the only one I've personally read on this list, but I'm guessing the rest are no better, if not outright worse.
And for what? So we can re-institute judging people by their skin color rather than the content of their character? I mean, imagine somebody releasing any of these books with "Black" where "White" is. "Black Fragility" would literally break people's minds open as they raced to deride it on social media.
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Another fun issue; a few weeks ago The Lancet (the much praised, trusted medical journal) published an article that outright called for the removal of Donald Trump from the American presidency.
A bit after that, the "Donald Trump dangerously puts HCQ into his own body" barrage started. Aside from the whole "Donald Trump did it, so we must hate it forever" thing, there's been speculation that since HCQ costs so little, but other C19 treatment regimes are more... uh... sympathetic to Pharmaceutical Companies' pockets, there's a vested corporate interest. I personally doubt the latter. The former was clearly in full force.
So, The Lancet published what was basically the back-breaking peer-reviewed study that proved that HCQ was not only ineffective at treating C19, it exacerbated the condition. In addition, this medicine that professionals had been using for so long was bad all round.
When I first saw it, I was cautious. I recalled very clearly the "Donald Trump should be removed from office!!!.... for public safety reasons, we assure you" article. However, these guys knew what they were doing. The study was peer-reviewed, and even though I'd been hearing positive things about HCQ, maybe it was all wrong.
Then it turns ou the study was not peer-reviewed, contained all the possible discrepancies it could, and was commissioned by an unknown, untrustworthy company out of some office park in the US. The company was run by a doctor who had previously gotten into trouble on credibility issues, and two of his 6 (not 11, as he'd claimed) employees where a sci-fi writer and an "adult content creator".
I've always been one to trust medicine, because it's a hard science, there's no messing with it. However, this incident has dinged that trust for me. Very slightly, but it seems blindly trusting medical professionals may not be the path to health.
This reminds me. Once in a while, somebody calls one or another literary classic racist. Around here, it's usually "Bambo the Little Negro", a children's poem about a little African boy who loves his mother, likes some minor mischief, studies dilligently and is a bit afraid of turning white. This time however, it was (in modern parlance) young adult adventure novel "In Desert and Wilderness". It has a TVT entry, so you can read a bit about the bad there.
Also: @fourteenwings, what is your stance on the matter of race-as-objectively-real versus race-as-social-construct?
Everybody alive has a race, because of evolution and natural selection and all that jazz, but I want to live in a world where that matters as little as possible.
Anti-racism sounds like it would be that stance, but it turns out to be the exact opposite, because it was created via social constructivism.
It's probably also because it came to exist where people were already not all that racist (or really, at all), so you gotta find some windmills to chase, like when somebody doesn't want to comment on stuff is committing violence via their silence.
Unlike feminism, it never even had a great era (1st wave) or decent era (2nd wave was like a half and half situation since that's when the constructivism/navel-gazing started to permeate it), it just skipped straight ahead to being as terrible as possible.
In this case, though, actual HCQ studies were pulled across the world based on the findings in the quote unquote Study in The Lancet. I don't know if HCQ works as well as anecdotal evidence seems to prove, but we might never know now, or we might now a little later than we could have.
I mean though usually you can safely ignore basically 90% of what he says and what those who obsess over him say about him.
If it turns out to be an effective treatment, then that would be luck on his part, and not something he actually did right.
Don't strawman.
Also, I'm going to leave it to you to prove the claims you've made here:
Also, even if I assume your claims are true, that doesn't make Mr. Trump any better, or more trustworthy, as a POTUS.