Politics [Archive] - Page 95

Rare White Ape

June 24th, 2023, 09:46 PM

Well yes, that’s Russia’s aim. Putin has been warning Ukraine for years that this is what Russia’s response would be if it kept snuggling closer to Europe and NATO.

And Ukraine shouldn’t have to wave the white flag. It is a sovereign state independent from Russia and should have the right to act as it’s government sees fit.

So I agree and disagree on both points. I’m not both-sidesing it… it’s more complex and harder to explain.

However the main thrust of my argument that Zelenskyy should surrender is because I’m looking at the bigger picture:
1. The severe global economic impact that has come from the combination of this war and COVID-19
2. The immediate suffering of millions of people across Europe
3. The looming threat that this could easily flash over to WWIII if nobody in charge takes one second to think that maybe they should stop
4. Nukes

Dicknose

June 24th, 2023, 10:24 PM

Whats best for the Ukrainian people??
Your points seem to be more about the global impact, but Zelenskyy's top priority is to his country and people. Global implications should be considered but as secondary.
If its the global impact that's priority then it should be other countries that act to serve their own interests.

Yw-slayer

June 25th, 2023, 06:41 AM

The Russian mercenary rebellion should really, really, shed some light on how the western mainstream media goes about reporting on the interior politics of countries of the Orient and of the Global South.

It's now fizzled out, but you and I know how western msm reporting goes. I bet we could write the headlines and opinion pieces in our sleep.

We are definitely under no obligation to belive anything, let alone the hilariously simplistic Star Wars Good v Evil narrative targeted at people with the mental and emotional age and maturity of toddlers, but who go Ona dn on about how they are proud of having the "right to vote".

neanderthal

June 26th, 2023, 10:40 PM

https://twitter.com/QasimRashid/status/1673534822839619585?t=z2hbMWBQmg0loBlCzLtY7g&s=19

Crazed_Insanity

June 27th, 2023, 06:41 PM

2 parties obviously have different names and push for different things.

2 parties are very similar when it comes to accepting corporate money and do their bidding. Democrats are supposed to do people’s bidding.

The other aspect is foreign policy. R and D are pretty much the same.

It’s also amazing to me that the Democratic Supreme Court justices also agree with the other lame justices that they are above the same ethical standards as the other federal judges.

It’s just mind boggling to me the incidences democrats agree with republicans. Accepting corporate money is probably the main reason why they’re similar in those areas.

Cam

June 28th, 2023, 08:21 AM

My wife talked to "Mayor Pete" on the phone today. :mindblown:

Tom Servo

June 28th, 2023, 08:41 AM

Did she tell him to stop talking so much and start doing?

FaultyMario

June 28th, 2023, 09:02 AM

Did she tell him to stop talking so much and start doing?

She was "talking" to a politician. I don't think the opportunity presented itself.

Crazed_Insanity

June 28th, 2023, 09:49 AM

You guys are so mean!

Tom Servo

June 28th, 2023, 10:33 AM

She was "talking" to a politician. I don't think the opportunity presented itself.

A boy can dream, dammit.

21Kid

June 28th, 2023, 04:03 PM

My wife talked to "Mayor Pete" on the phone today. :mindblown:
Congrats Lori!

That's awesome! I love that guy!

neanderthal

June 28th, 2023, 06:34 PM

Congrats Lori!

That's awesome! I love that guy!

One of the most under rated but over achieving politicians out there. I remember people complaining that he and President Biden dropped the ball in the negotiations for the railway workers because their sick pay/ time wasn't addressed when they made them go back to work. But that was fixed after the fact and very few news channels reported on it.

Secretary Pete and MVP Kamala quietly getting the job done while others are squawking in front of the cameras.

Tom Servo

June 28th, 2023, 09:50 PM

Road fatalities are approaching if not exceeding previous records from decades ago. I like a lot of what Secretary Pete says, but he's reminding me a lot of Eric Garcetti. Lots of talk, very little action. I mean, you've got Biden doing photoshoots with the 9K lbs. Hummer EV that honestly should not be allowed on public roads. No meaningful action has come out of Buttigieg that I'm aware of. I'm happy to be corrected, and I hope to be, but I don't expect to be.

JSGeneral

June 29th, 2023, 03:16 AM

Tom, I hope you don't think people here are attacking you when they disagree with something you say. You are, in my opinion, a voice of reason here... and also someone that is mature enough to debate. You've demonstrated time and again the cognitive discipline of being able to state your opinion frankly, defend that opinion intelligently, and listen, opine, and walk back if others present contrary evidence that is compelling. I know I only speak for myself, but I'm arrogantly speaking for everyone else here when I state that it actually feels safe to discuss anything with you, even if you take a view that one opposes.

So yeah, I like Pete too. I think he has been a great buffer in the current administration. When things are going wrong, he's the fall guy. But that's not what I want to discuss.

Road fatalities are approaching if not exceeding previous records from decades ago. I like a lot of what Secretary Pete says, but he's reminding me a lot of Eric Garcetti. Lots of talk, very little action. I mean, you've got Biden doing photoshoots with the 9K lbs. Hummer EV that honestly should not be allowed on public roads...

The 7K-lbs-Rivian lobby anxiously adjusts in their chair...

I don't think you can blame large EV vehicles as there are many more examples of large ICE vehicles on American public roads. They all drive too fast. And yes, more mass, means more inertia, means ideally more time to stop, and more likelyhood of causing damage... but EVs brake better than ICEs... but that's science and not politics. Keeping this on brand in the Politics thread, I'll use a "Supply And Demand" defense.

When I recently took a long road trip (600+ miles) I became immediately aware through telemetry and just common sense that driving at or slightly below the speed limit was DRAMATICALLY increasing my range. I would do this because there was a fast charger on the highway that I was planning to use... and desired to reach that. The onboard computer calculated the range as I changed my pace. So I drove slower on the highway than I have previously on that trip. You know what... I was MORE relaxed at my destination. There was less stress! (IE... it felt safer) There aren't a lot of EV chargers out there yet for fast charging for long road trips (Supply). But no matter what you set the price to for gas (Demand) there is still a pump at every exit. People no longer realize that driving slower can save them money and get the farther on less... so they just complain to the government (and maybe blame Pete) if the price of a gallon of gas shoot up. Trying to make safer drivers using Demand side economics (which is really the only play the gov has... they can't just remove 70% of gas stations) is not as impactful as a limited Supply of chargers.

Tom Servo

June 29th, 2023, 07:20 AM

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not specifically blaming EVs or anything. That's just I think a really strong example of on one end having Buttigieg correctly calling out that the roads in America are more dangerous than they've been in decades while the President is doing photo ops with the newest version of maybe the most egregious offender of that (in it's new EV form and in its previous ICE forms, not specifically to the EV).

We've got a huge problem where a ton of new trucks and SUVs are designed with massive front ends and bumpers up high enough that a) drivers literally can't see if someone is in front of them and b) when they hit someone, that person tends to get pulled under the vehicle instead of being thrown up on the hood. Hummers have always been a "fuck you, I've got mine" vehicle, and now there's one that can do 0-60 in 3 seconds - I'm sure you've seen the video of someone demonstrating that in Las Vegas. The thing is a nearly uncontrollable 4.5 ton missile, but it'll be available for anybody that has the money for it, and the president is glorifying it.

I realize I'm being a little bit of a hypocrite here, having just bought a big SUV, but c'mon. (https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/volvo-xc90-2014-suv-vs-ford-f150-2014-4-door-pickup-supercrew/?units=imperial) (I don't see the Hummer on that site, but the F-150 is maybe the best selling car for however many years so it seems like a solid comparison).

A lot of blame for the increase in fatalities gets put on people using their cell phones when driving or other modern distractions, but other countries that have the same issues aren't seeing the same increase in deaths. It's the design of our roads and our lack of political will to regulate car designs in any meaningful way. I know Top Gear were all up in arms about regulations mandating lower front ends to cars for pedestrian safety all those years ago, but hey, fewer people are dying so maybe they were on to something?

That said, while EVs may brake better than ICEs (I'm not 100% sure I buy that...if I can lock the wheels in an ICE car, then the brakes are as effective as they can possibly be, yeah?), it's also science that F=ma. In a collision where a remains constant but m is much higher, F is much higher.

To be clear, my main point here is not a dislike of EVs. I would love to have an EV if I had somewhere to charge it. Not quite an EV, but I would have loved to have gotten the T8 Recharge version of the XC90 instead of the B6, but it'd cost us a fortune to get a charger installed at our condo, and we'd have to get all the other residents to also agree to pay a fortune as well...wasn't going to happen. I look forward to an era where battery weights come down and we no longer have gas stations. My main point is that Pete Buttigieg keeps saying all the right things about road safety, but I haven't actually heard of any real, tangible policies put forward about it and the President is actively celebrating things that are part of the problem.

Cam

June 29th, 2023, 07:24 AM

...EVs brake better...

Umm... what? Better braking is not a function of the drivetrain. :lol:

Tom Servo

June 29th, 2023, 07:38 AM

Heh - I think in hybrid drivetrains (and presumably EV ones), part of the regenerative braking is that there's magnetic resistance applied to the drivetrain that can help with braking. Still, though, if you can already overwhelm the tires with conventional brakes, then you're braking as effectively as you possibly can, more braking power isn't going to help.

Rare White Ape

June 29th, 2023, 07:41 AM

EVs do have regenerative braking, but that doesn’t make braking better. Under normal driving loads the drivetrain does a large proportion of the job of slowing a vehicle down by turning inertia into electricity, and when needed it’ll apply the brakes.

In an emergency it’ll REALLY apply the brakes. Stopping performance then comes down to driver reaction, car control, and how good your tyres are.

JSGeneral

June 29th, 2023, 07:45 AM

Umm... what? Better braking is not a function of the drivetrain. :lol:

You are all going to get me to fall into a trap. The braking is different in EVs than in ICEs. Yes the driver is responsible, but one-pedal regenerative braking is a much different experience than before when I would lift my foot from one pedal and apply the brake on a separate pedal. It feels safer. Instead of brakes being applied all at once, it's applied a little bit at a time.... [gtf meme recognized]dammit![/gtf meme recognized]

Anyhow, there might be a different angle on that Biden-next-to-an-EV-Hummer story (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/27/lordstown-motors-electric-vehicle-maker-trump-ohio-bankruptcy). Just like that one day he strolled up to an interview on a bicycle, stopped put a foot down, answered some questions and then off he causally pedaled away. I feel like he quietly trolls Trump when hidden opportunities arise and then just doesn't ever call it out. I mean, do you EVER think Trump could do the same and ride a bicycle?!

Tom Servo

June 29th, 2023, 07:57 AM

It was a little more than "next to an EV Hummer", he test drove it and said "this sucker's something else." And absolutely I cannot imagine Trump doing anything other than falling over at the mere sight of a bicycle.

My *only* complaint about EVs is the sheer mass of them and that that makes them more capable of destruction in a crash. I think the benefits outweigh the risks in most cases, but a 4.5 ton Hummer that can out-accelerate most sports cars is stupid and the idea that any idiot, no matter how many driving violations they have under their belt, can own and drive one on public roads if they have the money for it is asking for trouble. This type of thing is not specific to EVs, the dipshit doing 100+ in a 35 zone in a Lamborghini Urus when he killed a woman a couple of blocks from my home is also an example of maybe we need better regulations around cars, which I have no faith that Buttigieg would even propose, much less make happen.

Crazed_Insanity

June 29th, 2023, 09:16 AM

I used to like Mayor Pete, thought he might be the next younger Bernie. However I don’t like him anymore because he’s clearly just a very good ‘team player’ of the party. So good, in fact, he’s willing to step aside and take the falls at times!

To be fair, I do think Swervo is asking too much of a transport secretary. I think Pete is just not very good at PR so he’s been unfairly blamed on lots of stuffs.

Still, so far, I haven’t seen the qualities that’d make him a great leader.

You can say folks like Pete and Kamala are just quietly doing great work all you want, but if public perception of them is bad, they’ll not be able to win more votes in an election.

If stuck in a similar situation, do you guys think Obama would step aside and help Hillary win and then settle to be a transport secretary? No way.

Cam

June 29th, 2023, 12:52 PM

You are all going to get me to fall into a trap. The braking is different in EVs than in ICEs. Yes the driver is responsible, but one-pedal regenerative braking is a much different experience than before when I would lift my foot from one pedal and apply the brake on a separate pedal. It feels safer. Instead of brakes being applied all at once, it's applied a little bit at a time.... [gtf meme recognized]dammit![/gtf meme recognized]

:lol: It's fine. I kinda knew what you were getting at anyway. ;)

Yw-slayer

June 29th, 2023, 01:54 PM

Want to reduce the weight of EV batteries? Use the BYD Blade Battery. Has the plus side of being hated by Billi's Briainwashed Bros even though Tesla are starting to use it!

Crazed_Insanity

June 29th, 2023, 03:32 PM

I don’t know about my bros, but I won’t hate tech innovation.

Anyway, one way transportation sect could do is besides just rebuild old bridges and repave old roads, maybe roads can be integrated with chargers so that EVs could charge as they go, without having to carry so many costly batteries?

Eisenhower gave birth to the interstate highways, are we just going to be maintaining our old highways or are we going to create something new?

Rather than forcing people to not able to buy ICE cars, why not help people to be able to wean off gasoline by making EVs cheaper and more practical?

Elon was also at least fwd thinking enough to create a charging network. Not only making Tesla’s more viable, but now also other EVs as well. This is a decent intermediate step. However, even if we could charge new future batteries as fast as we fill up our tank, batteries are still heavy and costly. Minimizing onboard batteries will definitely make it easier for EVs to beat out ICEs.

Anyway, politicians of today are probably more focus on fighting fires of today rather than planning ahead for a better tomorrow.

Hope more scientists like Lori will help government figure out better ways to fight climate change rather than just ban this or ban that. Solutions shouldn’t just be bans.

neanderthal

June 30th, 2023, 09:29 AM

Roe. Done.
Affirmative action. Done.
Student loans. Done.
I and others said over and over how the supreme court was on the ballot in 2016.

Here we are.

neanderthal

June 30th, 2023, 09:33 AM

https://twitter.com/TerryWatkinsJr1/status/1674711092734627840?t=jX7CQ1anRx6IYtUQFpIoTg&s=19

neanderthal

June 30th, 2023, 01:47 PM

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/687050404971069442?t=KBz_0vYE5WL9oyvWRBAMlA&s=19

Crazed_Insanity

June 30th, 2023, 02:34 PM

Wow, twitter won't let me see anything unless I sign up. Wasn't like that before, right? Oh well... unless Elon comes up with some new killer app on twitter, guess that's done for me. :p

As for Roe, Affirmative action, etc... too bad we don't have a liberal billionaire buying our supreme court justices fancy trips. So for now, we can just blame Billi and his bros I guess.

FaultyMario

July 1st, 2023, 03:17 PM

Elno's webpage is like a broken washing machine that makes you look extra hard if you want your socks in pairs.

Rare White Ape

July 1st, 2023, 04:59 PM

What?

Yw-slayer

July 1st, 2023, 05:25 PM

He is talking about how Elun has messed up BlueWhiteBird Messaging Service.

FaultyMario

July 1st, 2023, 06:01 PM

That idiot only came along and borked Twitter trying to turn it into a moneymaker on the same level as Facebook.

He's basically trying use a blender to bake something.

Rare White Ape

July 1st, 2023, 07:21 PM

Oh. That.

I saw reports of it becoming unstable but I didn't notice anything untoward when I was browsing it not long ago.

retsmah

July 1st, 2023, 08:44 PM

At least from what I've read it's throttled based on your account: if you're not logged in you can't see anything, if you are logged in but unverified you can see like 800 posts per day, if you're verified then it's something like 8000.

Twitter says it's because of "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation". I read that as they no longer have enough engineers to keep up with the variety of bots, scams, and whatever other issues big websites are normally staffed to deal with.

Tom Servo

July 1st, 2023, 10:00 PM

JSGeneral

July 2nd, 2023, 10:50 AM

Yeah, I hit the rate limit just browsing my feed through the tweets that had come out overnight. There aren't many tweets that come out overnight. Just scrolling through counts as "post views", so it's real easy to hit that rate limiter.

I still think debating EV braking is better political discourse than talking anything that guy is up to... but I found this bit of internet hypothesis plausible and interesting.
https://images.spot.im/image/upload/q_70,fl_lossy,dpr_3,h_200,w_92,c_scale/v200/d3a401ed66ba85318c1130e2fdbc45aa

Yw-slayer

July 2nd, 2023, 03:57 PM

There was another dude defending Elun's decision as actually being a legit defence against data scraping. Don't know who's right and don't care, just want an excuse to type Elun trollolololol

Tom Servo

July 2nd, 2023, 04:22 PM

I've seen a few versions of that checklist - one saying that it was a GCP bill and that they were using GCP specifically for some of their support/moderation/anti-really-bad-stuff tooling. A $1B bill for AWS seems pretty high, but I have no idea what all their needs are.

If the rate limiting was an attempt to try to deal with rate limits coming from AWS, doing it as a "per-day" rate limit would be an unusual choice. Most rate limits on AWS are per-second or per-minute, and load over the course of the day tends to be awfully spiky, the site's pretty dead at night and busy in the middle of the day, so if a bunch of people start using the site around the same time in the middle of the day, it wouldn't really help you a lot. Also, he keeps claiming it's other companies like Microsoft scraping Twitter, but in my experience at least the major companies that have the compute power to really put a dent in Twitter's site are honest about their User-Agent, so you could just filter on that if you wanted to block them.

The self-inflicted DDoS was even more hilarious than what this person described. When people on the web hit the rate limit, Twitter's own website started hammering the endpoint as fast as it could trying to load the timeline, over and over and over again. It wasn't other sites trying to import tweets, it was their own site doing it. If you've never heard of the "thundering herd" problem in computing, this was a perfect example of it. Every time it started to recover, it just got overwhelmed again.

But ultimately, it's a little bit hilarious to try to run a site that still mostly survives on advertising by not letting people look at the website. I can only imagine what the ad impressions graphs look like, just normal for the first 1/3 of the day and then dead flat after that.

Cam

July 2nd, 2023, 04:48 PM

Wow.

Tom Servo

July 2nd, 2023, 04:52 PM

Oh, and agreed it's not really politics except that he is trying to turn the place into a red-pilled hellscape, so I guess there's a little bit of a connection there.

Rare White Ape

July 2nd, 2023, 06:26 PM

Is the speech still gloriously free?

Rare White Ape

July 2nd, 2023, 06:27 PM

One analogy I saw was that a restaurant patron has ordered a meal from the waiter. The waiter goes to the kitchen but the cook says no, but the waiter isn’t instructed to tell the patron why. The patron then asks where their meal is, so the waiter goes to the kitchen again, only for the cook to say no.

And over and over and over…

Tom Servo

July 2nd, 2023, 06:30 PM

Oh yeah, speech is gloriously not free. If there's a specific one, a guy who's main thing was using Twitter's public APIs to discern information about how the platform was doing just got banned. Captain transparency is at it again.

As it was, Elon recently posted that repeated harassment would result in at least a temporary suspension, along with saying that "cis" and "cisgender" is now considered a slur (so much for all speech that isn't illegal is allowed, yeah?). In the meantime, someone was replying to every post from someone I know with "Ok, pedo". Every single post. I reported it, was told that it wasn't violating the rules. After Elon's post about repeated harassment, I pointed out that they were calling someone a pedophile every time that person posted on Twitter, and got an extra special response from Twitter telling me that I was wrong and to stop bothering them.

neanderthal

July 2nd, 2023, 11:22 PM

All of which shows the idiocy of Elno, but he's still a hero to billi and em. The einstein of their generation. :rolleyes:

Crazed_Insanity

July 3rd, 2023, 08:02 AM

Yes, humanity tend to be quick judges. Cross that political line, then the dude is evil. Likewise, cross over to your side, then he becomes a darling.

I’m a fan of him mostly because of SpaceX . Tesla is nice too. He certainly started the EV revolution. Had he failed, we’d still be bitching about climate change and still be driving ICE cars. Or perhaps cars will still be banned and we’d be forced to ride bicycles?

Anyway, never a fan of Twitter anyways. I can only hope that it won’t drag all of his other ventures down. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him doing something special with Twitter eventually. There were lots of short sellers of Tesla. Thought Elon had no business selling cars. Plenty thought he had no business trying to go to space either.

If he has gotten himself into unfamiliar businesses and then turned the entire industry upside down and became a leader of it… maybe we should give him some benefit of the doubt rather then just assume the idiot got lucky multiply times? ( simply because he doesn’t share your political views?)

Tom Servo

July 3rd, 2023, 10:33 PM

I may or may not have foolishly clicked on view post, which while I wasn't going to bother responding, the news that Elon's now liked two tweets from a famous Irish neo-Nazi kinda brings me back to it.

Elon wasn't radicalized when he took over Twitter. He had some right-side leanings, but we've actually watched the radicalization happen in real time. He's gone from vaguely Republican talking points to liking neo-Nazis' posts.

His politics had nothing to do with whether or not we thought he'd drive Twitter into the ground, as his politics were drastically different less than a year ago (or at least he kept them more hidden). It's like a post I saw that said something like:

When Elon built electric cars, I didn't know anything about electric cars and everyone said he was a genius, so I thought he was a genius.

When Elon built rockets, I didn't know anything about rockets and everyone said he was a genius, so I thought he was a genius.

When Elon tried to run a software company, I knew a ton about software and how a software company should run. Now I know I'm going to stay the fuck away from his cars and rockets.

Crazed_Insanity

July 3rd, 2023, 10:52 PM

Elons cars obviously are not perfect and same with his rockets. However, their performance speak for themselves.

Dude started out with software companies. It was kinda nuts for him to think that he can build cars and rockets.

Anyway, stay away all you want. I’ve stayed away too. Mostly because I couldn’t get near his rockets and I don’t need an EV right now.

I was never a fan of Twitter, I’d probably only join if Elon could he can really turn it into an everything app including various form of payment.

Anyway, seriously. To see how SpaceX rockets fly and land and continue to believe they suck, it must be some sort of extreme political bias. Don’t let politics distort how you see the world!

Rare White Ape

July 3rd, 2023, 11:49 PM

https://i.imgur.com/L2Ee9tf.jpg

neanderthal

July 5th, 2023, 08:26 AM

Cenk proudly proclaims he is "progressive ..."
https://twitter.com/saladshooter9/status/1676297819265593353?t=xDqN_LeSaY-XPWzpviCCGA&s=19

Crazed_Insanity

July 5th, 2023, 10:54 AM

Whoa! Twitter works again! Elon didn’t break it yet?

Anyway, sadly that tweet was just a photo and I couldn’t click to read Cenk’s reasons.

Personally I’m kinda on the fence about justifying reverse discrimination. However, in general I can agree helping people who are disadvantaged. However, not all minorities are poor and need help though, take Liz Warren for example. Should the Native American card really be played that way?

I’m all for aiding those who need help, regardless of race. However, do we really need to force NFL and NBA teams to hire more Asian players. Clearly Asians are under represented in that field, right?

Also, LA had tossed out white politicians for Latino ones. Yet, corruption and racism remains. White people can all drop dead and disappear off of this planet and the same problems humanity have will remain.

Our problems will not be fixed by changing the color of our skins, but improving the content of our characters. With that said, am I happy with our Supreme Court now? No. That court proved my exact point. We have a black dude there to represent black folks, yet, I question our court’s character at this point.

neanderthal

July 6th, 2023, 10:34 AM

MR2 Fan

July 6th, 2023, 01:01 PM

From Elon's parents have...at the very least questionable...mining operations in South Africa (where things are known to have been a bit sketchy as far as race relations)...to Elon buying Tesla, not founding it, to other things that he's promised then pulled back on (like helping out during some disasters, and COVID, etc.) and spreading inaccurate information during the height of COVID, yeah, problematic at least.

He also took his hero worship a bit too far and I would not be surprised at all if he is good buddies with Russian billionaires, we saw him sitting with Rupert Murdoch, so yeah, there is a cabal all right but it isn't the one that the GOP want you to believe.

Crazed_Insanity

July 6th, 2023, 01:51 PM

I wonder if in the future, only conservatives will be driving EVs using Tesla’s supercharger network…

Only conservatives will be doing space tourism in SpaceX rockets?

Only conservatives will tweet?

Interesting future.

MR2 Fan

July 6th, 2023, 01:53 PM

Tom Servo

July 6th, 2023, 01:56 PM

Tom Servo

July 6th, 2023, 01:57 PM

speaking of which, I signed up for "Threads" aka Meta's Twitter clone, but I'm annoyed as it's only designed for mobile right now...I do 90% of my stuff on a PC and I hate "mobile only" apps that could just as easily work on PC

It is an absolute dumpster fire.

https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing

Blerpa

July 7th, 2023, 03:04 AM

It is an absolute dumpster fire.

https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing

Hilariously enough... I've read articles about it being stellar.
So, journos praising or putting down stuff, per usual.

Cam

July 7th, 2023, 04:10 AM

That is a blog post, not a news article. It should not be taken seriously.

Rare White Ape

July 7th, 2023, 05:30 AM

Also, an opinion piece in a newspaper is just a blog post with added legitimacy.

Cam

July 7th, 2023, 05:53 AM

Opinion pieces in newspapers normally go through editorial review before publication. Anyone with a web site can blog.

The link Tom posted reads like bad satire. Reminds me of that sarcastic NYC cyclist dude. Can't remember his name. Someone help me out here. He used to write a column in Bicycling Magazine, but then was fired by the new editor because she didn't like him.

Edit: The Bike Snob!

Edit2: After reviewing a Bike Snob article, I am reminded he is a better writer.

MR2 Fan

July 7th, 2023, 06:16 AM

One thing that annoys me about cable news channels is how often there's opinion shows but they're not labeled as such or have a disclaimer at the beginning. Newspapers usually will state that it is an opinion piece, but not cable news.

Meanwhile I think it's too early to call Threads a dumpster fire. I have no love for Zuckerberg and Meta but I'm hearing they've had 40+ million signups already, thanks to the integration with Instagram, so people want to go where the traffic is, and where the nazis and russian bots supposedly aren't.

I still hope Twitter can be saved if Elno sells it (at a major loss obviously) to someone who will try to bring it back from the brink.

Tom Servo

July 7th, 2023, 08:17 AM

That is a blog post, not a news article. It should not be taken seriously.

That doesn't mean it's not accurate.

I should make it clear - it is my personal opinion after "using" Threads that it is a literal fucking dumpster fire. It's a firehose of influencers you don't know or care about or corporate accounts being chummy and almost nothing from people you actually care about. It's the Twitter version of what Instagram and Facebook already are - vehicles to try to slam shit you don't want down your throat when all you want to do is connect with your friends. So, so many of the posts in my Threads feed are Netflix trying to be funny. It's just painful.

I just posted the link after it because I thought it was an entertainingly-written version of what I already think about it.

By way of comparison, I got lucky enough to get a bluesky invite. The feed on there is just the people I follow in chronological order. That's it. Takes me maybe 25-30 minutes to read through an entire day's posts, but I see the posts from the people I whose posts I want to see. It's a vastly better experience, and I hope they open up publicly soon.

Crazed_Insanity

July 7th, 2023, 08:36 AM

Hilariously enough... I've read articles about it being stellar.
So, journos praising or putting down stuff, per usual.

Yep, don’t really cared that much about Twitter nor about Threads.

I also wouldn’t vote for neither for president(even assuming Elon is natural born qualified to run…) yes, I’d prefer Joe Biden over those billionaires.

However, I do have a higher opinion of Musk than Zuckerberg.

Everyone has his/her own opinion. Whether thru blogs or major news outlet, People can express them however they want. I don’t have to agree with them. To me, it’s always good to know what other people are thinking.

Tom Servo

July 7th, 2023, 09:54 AM

Meanwhile I think it's too early to call Threads a dumpster fire. I have no love for Zuckerberg and Meta but I'm hearing they've had 40+ million signups already, thanks to the integration with Instagram

I think that's a big part of why they got so many signups so quickly. I'd chalk it up to two reasons:

1) You've got a huge installed base on one app who literally just have to download this other app and say "sign me in" and they're in. It's about the most frictionless experience I've ever had. I think from finding out that it had launched to being on the platform took me maybe 30 seconds? It also sidestepped something that would normally give me more pause - it asks for a ton of data, but it's data I already share with Instagram/Facebook, so there wasn't that moment of "do I really want to share this?" I don't, but I already do so whatevs.

2) Technically, it is not a dumpster fire. Facebook know how to handle tons of traffic and it shows, the app was running from a technical perspective pretty much perfectly on launch night despite huge numbers of users. It's well written by people with experience dealing with traffic at enormous scale and it shows.

I don't think it's too early to call it a dumpster fire though. There's that concept of the enshittification of the internet. Facebook used to let you just see a chronological list of posts from your friends. Now you can sorta see that on the web but on mobile, you don't have a choice anymore. Google search has gotten noticeably worse in the past year or so. These are all attempts to monetize and make the experience worse and worse right up to the point where users get fed up and start leaving. Facebook on mobile has a "suggested for you" thing every 5 posts or so for me and they're never anything I care about or have ever shown any interest in. They just want to increase engagement so they can sell more ads. There is no way to turn this feature off, even though it actively makes my user experience worse. Almost every product change in the past few years has made the user experience worse, I can't think of a change FB has made in recent times that actually improved the app for me.

Usually this happens over the course of a product's lifespan. It starts out cool, then the venture capitalists start getting antsy for a return on their investment, so they start making product changes to squeeze money out of their users, and the enshittification begins. The thing is, Threads *started* already enshittified. It shows me almost nothing I care about, and it's an endless stream of that. I have no levers or knobs to adjust the balance there, and as such in the limited time I've used it, I've seen almost nothing from the people I actually follow.

It's starting life as a social media app that shows you what Facebook thinks you should see, not what you want to see. It's a communications platform that makes it actively difficult to communicate with the people you want to communicate with, and you can only do so by desperately trying to figure out how to get your voice through the din of companies and their social media presences trying to get you excited about the new Baconator at Wendy's.

It's a brand new app and I can barely stand to be on it for more than a couple of minutes, and if Facebook/Instagram are anything to judge by, this is *the best it will ever be*.

Standing by my "dumpster fire" verdict.

Cam

July 7th, 2023, 10:01 AM

I was not disagreeing with you. I was questioning your use of a poorly-written sarcastic blog to support your argument.

What you wrote is much better.

Tom Servo

July 7th, 2023, 10:04 AM

Heh, well, admittedly my goal was not to support my argument, it was to share something that made me laugh. I actually thought it was well written and enjoyed it, but much obliged for the compliment.

Crazed_Insanity

July 7th, 2023, 12:26 PM

I like the word enshitification. Sounds like a fancy word, yet very down to earth too! ;)

Cam

July 7th, 2023, 12:37 PM

Ultimately, I agree that Threads will be the same as other Meta properties. It only purpose is to serve you ads.

FaultyMario

July 7th, 2023, 12:44 PM

2) Technically, it is not a dumpster fire. Facebook know how to handle tons of traffic and it shows, the app was running from a technical perspective pretty much perfectly on launch night despite huge numbers of users. It's well written by people with experience dealing with traffic at enormous scale and it shows.

One of the reasons why I don't often spend time on FB is because it doesn't work well for me. Granted, I'm running a bunch of ad and script blockers on my browser, but those work on the other social media I visit. I know, from the explanations that you've shared over the years, all the things that Facebook engineers are asked to do, but from my end, it still feels patchy.

Edit: I don't go on FB on mobile because it's a huge memory hog.

MR2 Fan

July 7th, 2023, 12:49 PM

Free websites: you either get ads or you pay for premium offerings above the free portion

Tom Servo

July 7th, 2023, 01:29 PM

See, I think that makes sense for certain platforms. I pay for the premium version of just about every streaming service I use because I would rather just drop an extra $5 a month than watch ads. The thing is, those streaming services provide the content. They have shows and movies I want to watch. I consume them for my own enjoyment.

Social media companies do not provide content. A social media without people posting to it, no matter how perfectly designed it is, is useless. Think about any other platform where you publish your own writing - if you have to pay to publish it, then why the hell would you publish it? Social media is at some point writing things for the public for free in exchange for the benefit of staying connected with your friends/fans rather than being paid for your work. Paying to do the work is insanity.

It might be that social media just is not a sustainable business model. It's only ever been propped up by tons of venture capital. I don't know the answer to that. But making people pay to do the work of creating what's necessary to keep a business alive is absolutely not sustainable.

Tom Servo

July 7th, 2023, 01:58 PM

Edit: I don't go on FB on mobile because it's a huge memory hog.

Not sure what platform you're on, but after scrolling through a ton of posts on the FB app on my Pixel 7, it's using 7.9MB of the 8GB on my phone, or about 1/1000th of the memory available. It's actually surprisingly efficient.

Crazed_Insanity

July 7th, 2023, 02:49 PM

I think FB is just slowly going out of fashion because they’re ‘centralized’. People are tired of these big companies censoring them.

Billi and their bros are now into more decentralized things. With no more centralized control. Adding financial features so people can pay each other with money not from any central banks…

Anyway, I still hope Elon or Jack Dorsey will be able to create such decentralized social media platform capable of Bitcoin transactions…

Rare White Ape

July 7th, 2023, 04:14 PM

I think that's a big part of why they got so many signups so quickly. I'd chalk it up to two reasons:

I’m also hypothesising a possibility that I’ve not seen anyone else mention yet.

Is Teh Zucc paying companies and people large sums of cash to drop in and create all this activity?

If he is, it’s a different approach to what the other Twitter competitors are doing, which is trying to grow a user base organically.

All of this puts me on a train of thought which leads me to conclude that Twitter won’t die because all of the platforms which are competing to take its place will never grow large enough to take over. One of them will eventually get bigger than all of the others, but it will never be bigger than what Twitter already is.

Twitter might be turning into a dumpster fire, but it is still the most relevant, and it still has the most active users. That’s why it’ll remain on top and still retain some immense value, if not $40+ billion worth when discount store Sheldon finally decides to give up.

Leon

July 7th, 2023, 05:31 PM

I'm probably far from the only one, but I deleted Twitter when Elon started flying his true colours, and signed up for Threads purely to play my tiny role in pissing off Elon.

I have no idea how to control the feed at the moment, but it does give me a chance to look for some of the nerd folk that I used to follow on Twitter.

Tom Servo

July 7th, 2023, 05:45 PM

I'm not sure that Zuckerberg needs to pay other companies other than that "being nice" bit might be part of encouraging advertisers to move. A year ago, advertisers didn't have to worry about having their Twitter ads run right next to someone ranting about how the Jews are pushing for The Great Replacement. I'm sure there were plenty of phone calls, I just don't think Zuckerberg had to spend a lot to convince them that his new realm was a safer place to advertise.

Twitter might not die, but the way you speak of Twitter reminds me of the way we spoke of MySpace when I worked there. We dominated Facebook when I started there, and I still remember when we were pumping almost 100GB/sec through our border routers at a time when 3G was just showing up. I don't think Twitter's too big to fail - if Musk keeps pulling the weird rate limiter stunts he's been pulling, it loses maybe it's main thing: news and commentary about events in real time. Already places like the National Weather Service are directing people to other sources when emergencies are happening, and that was part of what made Twitter valuable.

Crazed_Insanity

July 7th, 2023, 09:47 PM

I seriously can’t believe Elon bought Twitter just to return it to its former glory… or to just improve or make it better (freer speech or what not… )…

I think it will probably have similar fate as Tesla and SpaceX, either revolutionize the industry or perhaps die trying. Tesla and SpaceX both nearly died on multiple occasions.

Tom Servo

July 7th, 2023, 10:30 PM

Fired up Threads for shits and giggles. Took 26 posts before I got to someone I follow. One of those 26 was for the fucking Baconator.

FaultyMario

July 8th, 2023, 12:12 AM

Not sure what platform you're on, but after scrolling through a ton of posts on the FB app on my Pixel 7, it's using 7.9MB of the 8GB on my phone, or about 1/1000th of the memory available. It's actually surprisingly efficient.

Some older android. Yeah, I get that the appeal of some newer hardware is that it was design with certain software in mind.

Tom Servo

July 8th, 2023, 11:57 AM

Huh, I wonder if it's some overall Android SDK optimization that maybe wasn't available in older versions of Android? Not really important, just surprising to hear that it's so much less memory efficient, as it's using less RAM than almost any other app on my phone.

Tom Servo

July 8th, 2023, 10:56 PM

In the meantime, things are going great over on Elon's Twitter.

https://cdn.bsky.social/imgproxy/W9jGponb5keqzLXaE73ogx-A1Yner1_rKQTF5K2PA5I/rs:fit:2000:2000:1:0/plain/bafkreiadcrkilfwcqtm24ktqxzees2cgxdasog2tbwevlfqu5 sb46bsocu@jpeg

Crazed_Insanity

July 9th, 2023, 03:19 PM

Last I checked, about only 1 in 10 Americans believe Neo-Nazi views are acceptable.

So all of those 10% of Nazi Americans are probably on Twitter and less than 10% of normal Americans on Twitter in order to come up with a poll like that.

Or people are probably just fucking around. It’s very easy to skew poll results with just 592 votes total.

sandydandy

July 9th, 2023, 07:19 PM

I downloaded Threads. Looks alright. Definitely cleaner than Twitter, though I expect it to be cluttered with ads in no time. I don’t think I’ll be using it much. I’m good with what I already have.

Tom Servo

July 9th, 2023, 09:19 PM

Again, things are going great on Elon's Twitter with this blue-checked account.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F0omIT1WIAYr1GJ?format=jpg&name=medium

I have personally verified this account exists and that this post exists.

Crazed_Insanity

July 9th, 2023, 09:36 PM

So what’s the ‘truth’ shown in that video?

Tom Servo

July 9th, 2023, 09:46 PM

I am happy to share the other posts I screengrabbed from that twitter feed, but I am not willing to watch Nazi propaganda videos for you. Suffice it to say, assuming this video is on brand with the rest of the feed, it's about how happy everyone was to have Hitler around.

As of a half hour ago, that twitter feed was still active, and they've since stopped requiring you have an active Twitter account to view posts. You are more than welcome to enjoy your own Nazi propaganda if you like, and you can report back if you so choose to.

Crazed_Insanity

July 9th, 2023, 11:27 PM

Can’t search in Twitter without login. Anyway, even mass shooters can probably find fans to rally for them in a video. How difficult would it be for a dictator to find bunch of his ‘supporters’ and film them together?

Anyway, like I said about 10% of Americans might be Nazis. However, I really think our political orientation may be very similar to our sexual orientations. There may be a genetic component that makes certain groups more likely to lean a certain way.

I think conservatives have this irrational fear that somehow everyone might turn gay if liberals get their way. Likewise, liberals fear that Americans might become nazis if GOP gets their way… however, I really think people like roofer has a 0% chance of becoming Nazi just as you probably have 0% chance of turning gay or black?

Kinda like during Cold War, we were afraid of the domino effect turning everyone into communists and they were afraid of their citizens becoming capitalist pigs…

In reality, I really don’t see why capitalism and socialism can’t work together. China did it quite well, right? If China has a benign dictator, then their future will be super bright. But seriously, the only benign dictator I know is Jesus Christ. Most others really fucked their countries up, including hitler’s…

Rare White Ape

July 9th, 2023, 11:40 PM

Remember all those memorials of the WWII casualties designed to remind us ‘never again’?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Crazed_Insanity

July 10th, 2023, 08:06 AM

Wars shall happen again and again. We obviously will never learn and we’ll continue to believe if we don’t act irrationally now, all of our neighboring countries will Join NATO. Likewise, the other side also believe we need to make every nation on earth part of NATO as if that’s the most effective method against nuke wars.

Plus, memorials will probably never change the minds of this 10%. However, I don’t have anything against memorials. At least they help most people remember a bit better.

The danger is only when someone from that 10% group got into positions of power. That’s when we’re screwed. Democracies definitely has issues too, but at least that should contain an extremist to not go fully nuts with his/her extreme views or risk being thrown out. However, if he/she becomes a dictator, then our normal lives will get thrown out.

MR2 Fan

July 10th, 2023, 10:53 AM

One problem with humans that as time passes we get less emotional about things, and beyond that, when generations pass and we don't see the destruction first-hand, we tend to not take these threats as seriously. That's why the holocaust museums and any movie or story related to nazis or other similar fascist history needs to be shared as a constant reminder of what happened.

Crazed_Insanity

July 10th, 2023, 11:23 AM

No argument against memorials at all.

My argument is against suppressing these things too much.

The more we try to suppress, the more these shadowy things gain energy to bounce back!

On a more personal level, it’s the same as those hardcore preachers preaching hard against homosexuality constantly and then end up getting caught with male prostitute…

On a societal level, we were trying hard to suppress Germany after the 1st war, right? To make them pay for their sins… but that only gave Hitler more fuel.

Likewise, do NATO countries really need to surround Russia? If we can be so close with Ukraine, why couldn’t we befriend Russia as well the same way? If we let Putin join NATO or just have Trump dissolve NATO, Ukrainians may still be able to live normal ordinary lives.

Putin/Hitler for sure are evil monsters, but I think we were also indirectly feeding these monsters by our attempts to suppress them. It doesn’t even have to be evil people, we could try to suppress anything including ideology and it’ll actually end up peak some people’s interests and end result is accidentally promoting it.

Setting up memorials are probably the best way to go. Setting up policies to suppress whatever usually won’t work. Didn’t work with alcohol, drugs, nor terrorism… most likely won’t work with Nazism or communism. A truly free society should be able to handle whatever -isms that comes its way and be able to properly deal with it.

If you want to lose weight, you know suppressing food from yourself won’t ever work right? ;)

Tom Servo

July 10th, 2023, 11:50 AM

Thankfully the lovely Nazi / pro-Hitler account has been suspended. It'd be one thing if it was just a free, normal account, but this is a Twitter Blue thing, which was supposed to still serve as some level of "verification." Like, this account got approved to spend $8 a month to tell people that Hitler wasn't so bad, as long as you weren't Jewish. Or gay. Or Roma. Well, as long as you were Aryan, he wasn't so bad. And you didn't say anything too mean about him.

MR2 Fan

July 10th, 2023, 12:17 PM

The approval is probably just their credit card being charged

21Kid

July 10th, 2023, 01:19 PM

speaking of which, I signed up for "Threads" aka Meta's Twitter clone, but I'm annoyed as it's only designed for mobile right now...I do 90% of my stuff on a PC and I hate "mobile only" apps that could just as easily work on PC

I heard that it wasn't supposed to be released until Autumn. But the disaster happening over at Tweeter accelerated it's release.

Crazed_Insanity

July 10th, 2023, 02:25 PM

The approval is probably just their credit card being charged

I hope Elno kept their $8 because otherwise that’d be like denying their ‘free’ speech. Now, Elno simply denied an $8 speech! :p

MR2 Fan

July 10th, 2023, 02:27 PM

right, if you get banned, do you get a refund?

Crazed_Insanity

July 10th, 2023, 02:29 PM

You can’t give them a refund! Holding on to their money is the only way to maintain the fact that Elno is still pro ‘free’ speech!

If you paid $8, you agreed to subject yourself under Elno’s rules! :p

Drachen596

July 11th, 2023, 07:59 AM

The Russian captain of a submarine used to launch missiles into Ukraine was killed.

They knew where he would be because he posted all his runs and bike rides on Strava.

Crazed_Insanity

July 11th, 2023, 08:59 AM

It'd be better if they can figure out Putin's routines.

I'm sure they can always find another sub commander.

That makes me think... if Putin is dead, will the Ukraine war really end? Is Putin just one crazy man or is there a group of folks set on taking Ukraine back?

Cam

July 11th, 2023, 09:24 AM

I don't use Twitter for much other than reposting links to my YouTube videos. I follow a handful of people, like less than ten. I still visit daily, just in case anyone messages me there concerning My Garage stuff.

A fellow maker posted a link to his latest YT vid. I clicked on the post to watch the video. There were a few people that replied to that Tweet. I was reading the responses, only to discover there were promoted tweets interspersed in the comments. They were all right-wing garbage. I believe this maker would not want to be associated with this trash and neither would I. I went into my settings to see if I could disable promoted tweets within my feed. I could not find how with a cursory glance. However, I discovered a list of what Twitter believes to be my interests. I hardly use Twitter, so I do not know how this list was curated. It was a few hundred topics, many of which I am totally not interested in, like politics, ball sports, etc. I can only guess this list was created using the people I follow and the stuff they have engaged with in some way. Every topic had a check box next to it. I started unchecking everything. I got about a third of the way down the list and got an error message. "Twitter is at capacity. Please try again later." :lol:

Tom Servo

July 11th, 2023, 11:49 AM

I use Twitter a lot for just keeping myself entertained, but it's also been a really important tool is spreading news quickly in real time. The NWS makes extensive use of it to collect and disperse information about weather emergencies. USGS uses it out here for earthquakes. We recently had a situation where someone with a gun was running through Little Tokyo and quite a few people said that they went to turn to Twitter to find out what was happening, which is normally where they'd find that out, and found themselves rate limited.

Twitter's job isn't to replace emergency alerts, but that was a useful part of it as a tool that is now gone, and does reduce its value significantly for little obvious benefit.

sandydandy

July 11th, 2023, 03:13 PM

I don't actually read Twitter much. I follow a bunch of prominent figures in the forex trading industry, but I don't actually read their tweets, rather I just watch their content on YouTube. The main reason I was following one guy in particular was to listen to his informative, yet entertaining, Twitter spaces. But others copy and reupload those Spaces on YouTube and Spotify, so I just listen there.

So why even have a Twitter account? I honestly don't know. It was a little entertaining when Trump was active on it, but now I have almost no use for it.

retsmah

July 11th, 2023, 06:30 PM

I've been using threads a little because I want to feel like I'm contributing to Musk's ongoing mental breakdown (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/07/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-dick-measuring-contest).

Rare White Ape

July 11th, 2023, 06:32 PM

This is all soooo cool and normal.

I don’t use Twitter much either. I follow a handful of motorsports related tweeters.

Oh, and some degenerate leftists who would make Billi cringe.

Crazed_Insanity

July 11th, 2023, 07:24 PM

I only see tweets linked in articles and linked by you guys here. Not much of a Twitter user myself. Not before and not after elno.

Btw, I have no issues with leftists. Bernie Sanders is pretty far left. I generally have no issues with left nor right. I only have issues with hypocrites or corrupted folks. The extremists are corrupted by their past hurt probably?

I really wish left and right could work better together. However, I guess it’s just not possible yet. Take the Covid origin story for example. Natural or lab leak? Before we know the real truth, people are already taking sides and digging in their heels convinced the folks on other side are evil assholes.

Conspiracy is still being investigated:
https://oversight.house.gov/release/wenstrup-releases-alarming-new-report-on-proximal-origin-authors-nih-suppression-of-the-covid-19-lab-leak-hypothesis/

If left has its way, issued could easily be settled on natural origin. If right has its way, the issue would’ve easily been settled as lab leak, and Fauci helped covered it up!

Will they really find the truth or is this just a political battle? God knows.

Crazed_Insanity

July 12th, 2023, 08:43 AM

Gee, wonder if this is rumor or life imitating art? Elno might be building a secret glass onion house? Secretly using Tesla’s funds?

If this is true, I guess you guys are definitely right about him.

However, gonna be more like YW and his friends to not believe the western MSM for now and see how things play out! :p

MR2 Fan

July 12th, 2023, 01:52 PM

Good news: DeSantis is polling very low. He's having his wife out doing campaigning to see if she can do any better.

I'm not too surprised, Ron Desantis has zero charisma whatsoever. Trump, as much as I hate him, has "used car salesman charisma" and acts like a strong man. Having "lots of money" and "being a successful businessman" (even though it's mostly not true) also helps.

What's interesting is if Trump goes to jail before the election season is over, who's next up. No one else scares me as much as Desantis, he's way more right-wing than Trump.

Trump is in a lot of bad shit and is hateful, but he will also do anything to benefit himself, so if it means being "nice" to people he hates, as long as it benefits him or he thinks it does, he will do it.

Desantis is just a nazi

retsmah

July 12th, 2023, 02:45 PM

Whoever this guy is on Fox News sums it up pretty well: DeSantis is a weird guy (https://www.mediaite.com/election-2024/a-weird-guy-fox-news-panelist-tears-into-desantis-for-not-resonating-with-gop-voters-because-its-still-donald-trumps-party/). I don't pay very close attention to what's going on at Fox, but it seems like the mainstream media push to make DeSantis a contender is losing steam.

Crazed_Insanity

July 13th, 2023, 09:36 AM

Dems gave us the 1st black president, it'd be nice for GOP to give us the 1st woman president.

Anyway, another thing that kinda demoralized me about dems is this cocaine in the WH incident. Imagine if it's a bag of lethal virus... or a bag of highly explosives... you think Secret Service would let it thru or have no clue where it came from? Of course, it could also be planted by some member of GOP to frame the current admin... or maybe just some random tourists who just accidentally dropped a bag of cocaine in the WH.

Interesting, just like the Covid origin story. All we have are conspiracies and we just couldn't get to the truth somehow. So annoying that we now live in a world where truth is so damn hard to know and we end up relying on faith to vote for our politicians.

My faith in the US government is rapidly dropping. However, I have to say that at least I'm still more free here than if my ancestors decided to stay in China. Hope things will turn around. Hope we can end up with 2 or more good candidates to choose from in future elections...

Now that pandemic is thing of the past, another match up between Biden and Prisoner Trump may not end in Biden's favor. Normalcy is boring now.

MR2 Fan

July 13th, 2023, 05:29 PM

ooh, one of Billi's people it looks like:

https://twitter.com/JoJoFromJerz/status/1679620722941911041

Tom Servo

July 13th, 2023, 06:09 PM

Between him and Tuberville saying that white nationalists aren't necessarily racist....

Leon

July 13th, 2023, 06:15 PM

I wonder if it's racist, or white nationalists that they don't understand the definition of?

Or is it just that they're trading on hate, because they have nothing else beyond trying to make their voters scared of "something".

Tom Servo

July 13th, 2023, 06:50 PM

I mean, Tuberville is not known for his smarts. It's *possible* he thinks that the term is nationalists that happen to be white. Either way, probably not qualified to hold national office.

Tom Servo

July 13th, 2023, 06:56 PM

Crazed_Insanity

July 14th, 2023, 08:18 AM

Between him and Tuberville saying that white nationalists aren't necessarily racist....

Yep, clearly, Billi must be a white nationalist too based on his choice of words?

I don’t know those politicians that well, but I do believe white people nowadays are a bit overly sensitive and quick to be offended one way of another.

Like the Kyle Rittenhouse story, he was quickly riled up and run to defend a store that’s not his, and other white men who got hurt were also offended on the other side and were quick to protest on the streets for blacks. If only they could be more chilled and stayed home or be more peaceful about it, things probably would’ve been a bit less explosive?

Seriously though, are you guys really threaten by white nationalists? Do you really believe they’ll be able to succeed and build a white america and get rid of all people of ‘nonwhites’?

To me, that’s like the conservative Christian’s fearing gay pride parades turning everyone gay!

Should these folks be politicians? Well, if they represent the people well, why not? We have our own politicians to worry about. Isn’t that what democracy is about?

If I want to run for president, naturally I need to learn to speak/write better. However, in normal day to day lives, it now seems like if people mis-identify Japanese as Koreans can be viewed as racist. I just think that's a bit too much 'racism'... It's now so pervasive that we can only have a single correct way to speak or whatever narrative to believe in... if you talk in appropriately or believe in an inappropriate narrative... then you must be a hateful conspi"racist"?

I can be onboard and fall in line with that if we're really serious about pursuing the real truth. However, quite often, that's not the case. It used to be the church attempting mind control of the masses. Even back then, Catholic church probably wasn't really pursuing the real truth, but their own interests. Nowadays, 'Somebody' else has taken over the role of the old catholic church.

Anyway, I suppose this sounds like I'm defending nazis/white nationalists, but I'm really not. I just don't really see them as a threat at this point. I honestly see this 'Somebody' as a more serious threat to our current way of life though. Did 'Somebody' kill Epstein? Did 'Somebody' leaked that virus? All we can know is that 'Somebody' left a bag of cocaine in the White House and that's it. There's just no path forward to the real truth.

Crazed_Insanity

July 14th, 2023, 10:40 AM

Back to the social network drama, hopefully this writer will be better received than the last one. I've heard Ed speak a few times on podcasts and enjoy his essays, and I think he's completely on point - the modern world of VCs and going public has created a rot economy that results in services that use metrics to determine exactly how shitty they can be without you giving up and going somewhere else. Anyway: https://wheresyoured.at/p/the-last-social-network

This article reminded me that I used look upon Zuckerberg very favorably back then... His concerns for IPO all came true I suppose. It's just very difficult to control the rot when so much money is involved? If he wants Threads to succeed, he really should've used his own private money and develop and grow it organically the old way... rather than copying the new rotten way of FB, right? Makes me wonder if whatever he said previously was all BS?

I think at least Elon has done one thing right... which is to delist Twitter. Cutting off tumors and amputating rotten limbs... difficult to say whether if the bird will remain alive, he also doesn't have to the time to slowly boil the birds, so I can understand some of his drastic actions.

Anyway, I'm no expert in social media. Only use FB to keep in touch with family and friends. The other social media I use the most is probably this forum! I do enjoy reading and learning from you guys over the years... hope Random won't ever take this forum public! :p

retsmah

July 14th, 2023, 12:39 PM

"IRS says it collected $38 million from more than 175 high-income tax delinquents." (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/irs-collected-38-million-175-high-income-tax-101266065)

It's good that there's some effort being made to show that we need to fund the IRS to catch the wealthy that are illegally evading taxes. From the article: "A team of academic economists and IRS researchers in 2021 found that the top 1% of U.S. income earners fail to report more than 20% of their earnings to the IRS."

Tax rates are not high enough on the wealthy to begin with, there's a bunch of loopholes to further decrease their taxes, and then on top of that they're still illegally hiding a large portion of their income.

Crazed_Insanity

July 14th, 2023, 03:20 PM

Assuming we have 380 million Americans, $38million is about additional 10cents/person of taxes collected.

To put that into perspective:

The federal government collected $5.0 trillion in revenue in fiscal year 2022 (FY 2022) — or $15,098 per person. The federal government spent $6.5 trillion in FY 2022 — or $19,434 per person

We need to collect $4000 more /person, not $0.1/person in order to balance the budget! :p ideally we probably should just spend less.

neanderthal

July 14th, 2023, 03:57 PM

Student debt.

https://twitter.com/What46HasDone/status/1679844724457308162?t=3L7w2xiRSOekdWj5Ou7BSQ&s=19

neanderthal

July 14th, 2023, 08:10 PM

Student debt.

https://twitter.com/What46HasDone/status/1679844724457308162?t=3L7w2xiRSOekdWj5Ou7BSQ&s=19

But ask the "progressive" left and he hasn't done anything or met the campaign promises that "he made" never mind that Biden only ever mentioned cancelling $10k for each student while other candidates were promising complete loan forgiveness.

This administration has quietly been *KICKING FUCKING ASS!!!* on pretty much every front while billi and them keep shouting for them to "do something." Y'all know I am the biggest President Obama fan, but he has surpassed by Bidens administration.

"Do something" twitter can go kick fucking rocks.

FaultyMario

July 14th, 2023, 08:22 PM

She's the lady in red when everybody else is wearing tan
The feisty girl from Flushing
The Comrade named Fran

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1C1lTpX0AAsFba.png

Leon

July 14th, 2023, 09:14 PM

If we traveled back in time, and told younger me, that "The Nanny" was going to be at the forefront of a union movement, I'd have been confused.
At least partly because I was not so great about telling the difference between actors and characters.

sandydandy

July 17th, 2023, 10:23 AM

Kamala Harris slipped up and said “population” instead of “pollution”. Normal people know it was a mistake. The deplorables however are running with it all over social media.

MR2 Fan

July 17th, 2023, 10:54 AM

Reminds me of a video of a conference regarding observations of population declining overall in the next few decades due to less people having children, etc.....it was a very nice discussion, then I saw the comments section and people were going apeshit thinking they meant there's some planned population "control" happening and that these people are admitting it. I lost so many brain cells, and it truly was scary how people can't comprehend basic info and immediately think of conspiracy theories.

If there was some grand conspiracy at making sure populations decline, you really think they'd post it on youtube?? people are friggin' nuts

Tom Servo

July 17th, 2023, 11:12 AM

A lot of it comes from a fundamental (and likely willful) misunderstanding of one metric a lot of orgs use to gauge how well a nation is doing. When child mortality rates decline, families tend to have fewer children, so declining birth rates are generally a sign that the quality of life in a country is improving. However, lunatics like claiming that it's a sign that the new world order wants to conduct population control.

Crazed_Insanity

July 17th, 2023, 12:12 PM

China had population control and that one child policy likely had hurt China more than helped in the long run. So governments can definitely control its population.

For US, I think some conservatives are claiming prochoice liberals are trying to control population that way? But abortion rate really didn’t skyrocket. Most people would not want to kill their own babies believe it or not…

Is there a grand conspiracy which would cause people to just enjoy life and cease to be fruitful and stop multiplying? Yeah, that’s satan’s goal. But again, that’s just a crazy conspiracy.

You know, when Bible predicted extreme climates near the end times, unbelievers thought it’s BS conspiracy. But when scientists predicted the same thing, then yeah! Let’s repent and ban cars!!!!

Of course conservatives are the exact opposite. Most believe Bible prophecy is true, but if scientists say the same, they’d be like what climate change? Everything is fine while they experience extreme weathers all across US.

Politics make people crazy for sure.

dodint

July 17th, 2023, 12:14 PM

Crazed_Insanity

July 17th, 2023, 12:21 PM

"...new world order wants to conduct population control."

To what end? That's the problem with a lot of these half-baked conspiracy folks. A lot of the theories demonstrate no motive, the theory exists just to exist without any thought as to its purpose.

The purpose is to cure earth from this human virus. Look at how they destroy natural world and even each other? They should not be allowed to procreate and all deserve to die!

Seriously, there are definitely people who wish humanity would just go extinct.

They’re not completely wrong pointing out humanity’s flaws, but they’re just way too pessimistic about mankind. Surely humanity is capable of doing wonderful things as well.

sandydandy

July 17th, 2023, 12:23 PM

:blahblah: Bill Gates. :blahblah:

MR2 Fan

July 17th, 2023, 01:59 PM

:blahblah: Bill Gates. :blahblah:

yep, this. People tend to have a notion that's incorrect about religion, birth control and population growth. The late Hans Rosling and Bill Gates as well both discussed that the overwhelming factor in less population growth isn't religion or birth control, but access to resources like food, water, shelter and medicine. They have more children because many of them would die.

Improving those factors led to a drop in population growth, regardless of beliefs

Rare White Ape

July 17th, 2023, 02:19 PM

Have you guys not heard of the Great Replacement Theory? I mean… come on!

If you want to read up on it I know of a few famous people who’ve got it outlined in their manifestos that they wrote just before they became famous.

Just make sure the FBI isn’t watching while you search for them.

Crazed_Insanity

July 17th, 2023, 02:27 PM

Birth control is definitely one factor for population decline. Pretty sure my grand parents generation did not have more kids simply because they felt the need to populate earth.

Besides willful birth control, I’m also seeing more and more couples having difficulties conceiving! One reason is that people are having babies later and later due to careers, so naturally older age can perhaps make it harder to conceive. However, we are noticing more and more couples needing medical help to have babies. Older age can’t possibly be the only reason? I wonder if there are also certain environmental reasons? The stuffs we breathe, drink or eat?

For me personally, I guess my faith is a bit lacking because I don’t think I can afford to raise more than 1 kid, so we stopped at 1. If I make more money, I might have more. I’m sure most people have similar financial pressures as well.

Tom Servo

July 17th, 2023, 04:51 PM

Crazed_Insanity

July 17th, 2023, 08:47 PM

In moral relativism, we could reason ourselves into doing pretty much anything. Hitler had his reasons. CCP had their reasons. Putin had his reasons. Road to hell could be paved with good intentions.

FaultyMario

July 18th, 2023, 02:03 PM

i saw a meme with thumbnails of all the presidents portraits except Donnie's and the caption said something like "unindicted presidents".

I don't buy it.

memory might serve me wrong but about half of those men did incur in criminal activity while in the White House.

I'm pretty sure neither Jack nor Barry we're allowed to OK assassination attempts on foreign heads of state.

FaultyMario

July 18th, 2023, 02:04 PM

for example.

Tom Servo

July 18th, 2023, 02:30 PM

Well, indicted is a pretty specific legal term, at least in this usage.

FaultyMario

July 18th, 2023, 03:53 PM

Well, indicted is a pretty specific legal term, at least in this usage.

Yeah, sure sounds like I confused it for a more moral concept.

What was I thinking? I must've been hungry. Hunger makes me a modern girl.

neanderthal

July 18th, 2023, 07:10 PM

Yeah, sure sounds like I confused it for a more moral concept.

What was I thinking? I must've been hungry. Hunger makes me a modern girl.

You're not wrong though. Not one US President, including the best President of All Time President Obama, has clean hands. President Biden is doing a great job keeping his hands clean so far though.

FaultyMario

July 18th, 2023, 07:11 PM

Old dog knows all the tricks.

neanderthal

July 18th, 2023, 07:39 PM

Beau on third party candidates.

https://youtu.be/1S66zqiiJsI

Crazed_Insanity

July 18th, 2023, 09:15 PM

Couldn’t agree more. Gotta start at the bottom. Bernie Sanders started at the bottom. If only there were more independents like Bernie in other states, that’d perhaps be possible to change our current 2 party system?

However, Bernie is like Frodo. There just are not many like him. Nancy started out progressive. Likewise Obama campaigned hard against Hillary as progressive, but in the end, they’d fall in line with DNC.

There’s no guarantee AOC won’t become the next Pelosi.

neanderthal

July 20th, 2023, 12:25 AM

California makes state college free for foster kids.

https://twitter.com/leahfrombklyn/status/1681799161945944066?t=ENXUkdJtJAsPQ3vvuui6tw&s=19

I love it.

Rare White Ape

July 20th, 2023, 06:33 AM

California makes state college free for foster kids.

https://twitter.com/leahfrombklyn/status/1681799161945944066?t=ENXUkdJtJAsPQ3vvuui6tw&s=19

I love it.

Tyranny

Crazed_Insanity

July 20th, 2023, 09:52 AM

Tyranny

I know you're just being sarcastic, but you did hit the problem in the head.

People tend to see the worst things about the folks on the other side.

This free college for foster children along with affirmative action are in place to help disadvantage kids, but of course conservatives see them as reverse discrimination. Both side are not wrong. It all depends on whether you see the glass as half empty or half full I guess. I just see as it is. Half glass of water. Ideally, we should make it free or at least more affordable for all! Likewise with healthcare.

But of course conservatives are usually more 'conservative' and would not want to spend the money that we don't have on these free services. Which is not wrong either. They'd rather we spend the money we don't have on bullets and bombs and stuff. So perhaps we need to sell education and healthcare as some sort of 'warfare'! Declare war on the aging population, education, healthcare, housing, climate, etc.

Then problem solved? :p

Socialism ought to just be a short term safety net for people. Of course social security would be the exception. There's no way average older folks can make more money as they get older. However, for other stuffs, it should just be a net to catch falling folks to not get too badly hurt, but people shouldn't be living on the 'net' forever.

Even for things like masks or vaccines... there should've been more clear metrics showing us where are we and what do we need to see in order to lift mandates. What was done seemed like mandates will last indefinitely. Even the awesome Chinese people got sick and tired of lockdowns from CCP eventually!

Unfortunately the 2 sides just can't agree on anything. Was Fauci really that 'scientific' or 'political'? Just like whether it was lab leak or natural origin? Only time will tell. However, people on each side seems to firmly believe one or the other. If you don't believe what I believe, you can go to hell! It's really a shame that such old school christian doctrine seemed to have rubbed off on everyone. Differences in opinions can no longer be tolerated.

If you want say shit under free speech? Move to a red state.
If you want to kill babies under free choice? Move to a blue state.

We all desire freedom... and at times security. I just wish both sides can stop having allergic reactions with one another.

Right now, Biden and Trump seem like the current front runner to be our next president.

It's funny that most Americans (>50%) believe neither one is fit for that position come 2025.

Which is the lesser of the 2 evils is only in the eyes of the beholder.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/poll-most-americans-say-biden-and-trump-are-not-fit-to-serve-as-president-133443536.html

The >50% # is encouraging though. Right now it's only slightly above 50%. As that disdain increases to 70%~80%, then perhaps America will finally be ready for a 3rd party.

neanderthal

July 20th, 2023, 02:14 PM

Class warfare billi ... is a capitalist apologist.

Explains the talking out of both sides of his mouth everywhere else.

Crazed_Insanity

July 20th, 2023, 04:06 PM

To be fair, there are a lot to apologize about in a capitalistic society. Likewise, there are also a lot of things communistic societies need to apologize about.

No ism is perfect; however, every ism has its good points. Every ism isn’t like a god or a particular religion, I don’t see any reason why I can’t just cherry pick and choose just the good stuffs and avoid the bad stuffs that you’d end up apologizing for.

Rare White Ape

July 20th, 2023, 06:42 PM

Class warfare billi ... is a capitalist apologist.

Explains the talking out of both sides of his mouth everywhere else.

I'd like to know how one word joke generated a whole load of typing with not a lot of meaning :lol:

Brevity is the soul of wit, and all that...

Crazed_Insanity

July 20th, 2023, 09:09 PM

I’m definitely not very witty. Only smiley! :p

Just that your wit inspired me to see that the left is afraid of a fascist dictator and the right is afraid of a communist dictator.

We’re all actually afraid of the same damn thing, but somehow political ideologies caused us to only see the dictator of the other side. End result is that we end up with 2 lame ass candidates on the ballot.

Don’t get me wrong Neanderthal, Biden has been better than my expectation so far. I agree with Bernie that we probably shouldn’t swap him out at this stage.

neanderthal

July 20th, 2023, 10:48 PM

https://twitter.com/thejackhopkins/status/1682228303304830977?t=_ZOnghWpM8M6cXa2X22hUw&s=19

neanderthal

July 20th, 2023, 10:59 PM

"End result is we end up with two lame ass candidates on the ballot." :smh:

Loud and wrong. As always. It's baked into your DNA (i'm now convinced) to be contrarian, loud, and always wrong. If you told me the time I'd have to check with several atomic clocks/ laboratories. And i'd disbelieve them before I believe you.

There was a CNN poll that said only 37% of Americans approve of Biden's handling of the economy. :twitch:
Unemployment is at record lows.
Inflation has come down dramatically.
Etc.

You, are one of the 37%.

Crazed_Insanity

July 21st, 2023, 08:08 AM

Reluctantly approve yeah. However, I also do believe there has to be a better candidate than Biden out there somewhere. Current political system prevents that from happening. Not only was difficult naturally, DNC artificially worked the system to prevent Bernie 4 years ago.

Lame ass meant majority of Americans don’t like either one of them. If you think I’m wrong, you are certainly entitled to your opinion. This is a free country sir!

Crazed_Insanity

July 21st, 2023, 09:52 AM

Fednow, a new instant payment system from the Central Bank is now live and ready to go.
https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/federal-reserve-fednow-payment

Likely paving the way for the future Central Bank Digital Currency?

Looks like Elon's Twitter or whoever else's working it with Bitcoin is lagging behind...

This is another political issue. I think most liberals have no problems with CBDC and figured that's the future and will be happy to go along with it.

Conservatives would rather have their own control of money; therefore, prefer the decentralized Bitcoin. They'd rather not government be able to control what they can or cannot buy when time comes for another pandemic or whatever 'national emergencies'.

Yeah, the contrarian and both-sidedness in me will be taking the diversification approach. Will not bet on only 1 side. :p

Still, I personally favor the decentralized approach though. If not bitcoin, hopefully something else.

Just use the church as example. Catholic church represents centralization and protestant church represent the decentralized version. If there's a screw up, such as sex scandal happening in a community... a protestant church could simply shut its door and prosecute the appropriate people. However, for a big centralized church, they'd probably tend to want to cover things up in order to protect the 'Church'. Point is centralization can get too big and powerful which will inevitably result in corruption... and once a central mainframe dies, game over for everyone.

Whereas a decentralized network will probably be more robust. Nobody can shut down the entire internet, right? Most terrorist groups and vietcog's guerrilla tactics are more decentralized in nature. It's hard to cut off their leader's head and end things... so things drag on and on... Although US is the biggest baddest Central government around the world, it's still no match against those decentralized groups. Fighting Hitler's Nazi was easy in comparison. If Japan had no Emporer, maybe it would've been difficult to end things with Japan too.

Anyway, I think computer networks is clearly showing that centralized mainframes are out of fashion. Making things too big to fail is not a smart move. So I personally would not like to see the Central Bank succeed.

Tom Servo

July 21st, 2023, 10:21 AM

sandydandy

July 21st, 2023, 10:26 AM

I've been hearing a lot about CBDC from conspiracy minded people recently, though have seen no evidence of it yet.

For now cash is king.

neanderthal

July 21st, 2023, 12:07 PM

https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1682104033589469185?t=WEx6KR-k58MBGyptjLqQDA&s=19

Rare White Ape

July 21st, 2023, 12:57 PM

I decided to torture myself and click "view post" and was not ready for Billi to be a one-world-currency conspiracy theorist, but here we are. Can't wait for him to start railing on the Rothschilds any minute now.

A single-currency for the global economy would probably be a good thing.

But it would take away the ability for mum and dad investors to make a small amount of extra money for the family holiday by expertly gauging the currency markets and directing trillion-dollar investment funds to capitalise on the relative value of various local currencies.

And it would drastically limit the ability of god-following Good Countries like the USA to wedge the influence of devil-worshipping Bad Countries like Teh CCP by being able to control a portion of the global economy through the issuance of their own currency to a larger proportion of people than teh Bad Guys.

None of this fits the scary conspirational narratives conjured up and pushed by gronks, and parroted by morons.

Crazed_Insanity

July 21st, 2023, 02:23 PM

I decided to torture myself and click "view post" and was not ready for Billi to be a one-world-currency conspiracy theorist, but here we are. Can't wait for him to start railing on the Rothschilds any minute now.

Very nice of you to spew conspiracies of your own that I'm against all Jews. (Why Rothschilds? Because they're Jewish?) You just assume I'm white nationalist again? I want to build a white america? Thanks to you, a white dude, Billi, an asian dude who is a follower of a Jew, couldn't succeed? :p

Dude. Chill out. Stop torturing yourself. You are jumping into conclusions just like those conspiracy theorists.

Anyway, a single currency definitely has its advantages, but if its really all that rosey, surely the Brits would've abandoned their Pounds and would still be part of EU. Brexit was definitely not ideal, but pretty sure craziness wasn't the only reason why they wanted out of EU.

Can't really say who's right or who's wrong, but this cycle has been going on since the beginning of our history. We get together to build a tower of Babel(out of prideful ambition, EU, Globalization), and then it collapses and we scatter into many different nations... (nationalism, each nation out for itself only...) The cycle just keeps on going. Too much of one thing will inevitably swing the pendulum to the other side and back and forth.

It is clear now that the pendulum is swinging toward the nationalistic side now. The days of global cooperation is probably over. We'd be super lucky if US and China won't get into a war.

For YW's benefit, I'll use the star wars reference again. Yeah, I'd rather not want the 'empire' to know exactly how much money I have and where I have them and then be able to control how I spend them digitally. Even if it is the American empire. I'd rather not allow the US government to be taken over by somebody like Xi. I don't care what party he's in.

To me, neither Trump nor Biden is looking out for interests of Americans. They are all looking out for their own selfish interests. How do I know that? By the way they'd both manipulate elections. Biden did more legally of course. All the candidates ganged up to stop Bernie. There wasn't any fraud, just political maneuvers. I can't blame Biden for that, but it's the same as Trump trying to get Biden by get to Hunter. These people just want to hold on to power. They're not really in it to serve the American people.

At least I truly believe Sanders' in it to serve the people. To help narrow the gap between rich and poor. I don't have to fully agree with him to get behind him.

When it's just a bunch of political maneuvers to try to stay in power, chances are, the average people will suffer. When average people are suffering..., they'd appear crazy...

Tom Servo

July 21st, 2023, 03:21 PM

If you believe in ultimately antisemitic conspiracy theories, is it better or worse if you don't actually understand that they're antisemitic? Not sure I know the answer to that.

Tom Servo

July 21st, 2023, 04:10 PM

I guess this gibes with a lot of other things he says. There's been a pretty repeated theme about why people protesting can't be more like Martin Luther King, as though his peaceful protests were this magic solution. Just saw a series of stories on polls taken around that time, where some 80% of people had a negative opinion of MLK and that 75% or so thought that protests or sit-ins were "counter-productive". When you not only have no concept of history but also willfully ignore history and instead just go on vibes, you end up making a lot of the same mistakes. Central bank/one world government conspiracy theories are some of the oldest antisemitic tropes in the book, but if you don't actually want to learn or understand that, I suppose you can think that you're a new thinker on these things.

Crazed_Insanity

July 21st, 2023, 06:05 PM

I’m definitely not a new original thinker by any means. At least so far, I have not thought of anything original yet. Take my controversial babblings in the past… Doc Love’s System. Not Billi’s! :p Christianity? Definitely not mine!

Just like lab leak theory, it’s been tagged as racist, so it off limits too?

Why is natural origin from wet market less racist? Who determines what’s racists? What’s antisemitic?

As a scientist or any sort of investigator, when multiple theories are on the table, do you toss away possible theories because it’s been proven false or do you toss them away because it seems racist?

Why is it only Jews who can create single world currency? If you’re against single world currency then you must be against Jews? If you believe American financed dangerous research leaked out of a Chinese lab, then I must hate Chinese? Really?

You certainly don’t have to buy in to any of those theories, but there’s no need to conclude believers of those theories/religions/politics must be also those other labels.

Jesus claims to be the truth. Science is in pursuit of truth. I really don’t believe the 2 must go against one another. Both church and science could be compromised by politics though. Of course they don’t always agree so sometimes I’ll just have to wait and see which is true…

As for protests, how will history see Kyle Rittenhouse and those he killed? What is really the right way to protest? Which ever way works. Personally I’d not pick up a gun to defend a store that’s not mine. I also would not loot and destroy a store for any lives. I would pick up arms to defend my family though. Against looting rioters and against federal agents who act as storm troopers. They should be easy to kill! ;)

Tom Servo

July 21st, 2023, 06:43 PM

JSGeneral

July 21st, 2023, 07:17 PM

I have got to stop clicking on "view post". It's enraging seeing someone not only being willfully ignorant about the antisemitic origins of most modern conspiracy theories but then trying to defend it by elevating Kyle Rittenhouse.

Just absolute trash.

It's worse than that. He's not just being stupid, dumb, or ignorant. He's intentionally being morally deficient.

https://youtu.be/ww47bR86wSc

Crazed_Insanity

July 21st, 2023, 07:18 PM

Swervo, I’ve never claimed that Kyle is my hero, yet you choose to see it as that. If you cannot read my posts with a clear mind and all you see are things that’ll enrage you, then yeah, you probably shouldn’t click to read my posts.

Crazed_Insanity

July 21st, 2023, 08:20 PM

He's intentionally being morally deficient.

I really don’t see how I’m being morally deficient here.

https://bigthink.com/thinking/bonhoeffers-theory-stupidity-evil/

Bonhoeffer puts it like this:

“Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”

Am I the one being easily irritated and on the attack? Also Bonhoeffer is say stupid people are usually in a position of power. I’m not sure how I’m powerful.

neanderthal

July 21st, 2023, 09:14 PM

It's worse than that. He's not just being stupid, dumb, or ignorant. He's intentionally being morally deficient.

He is intentionally, deliberately, consistently, obdurately, obtuse.
If there is a logical or clever thing,he will seek out and say the opposite, while claiming to believe the logical/ clever thing. All because he supposes he is on some elevated level of intelligence. That he can see and intuit things that we do not. All while only proving that intellectually, that emperor is wearing no clothes. He's duller than a box of rocks. And not just a box a rocks, a box of stupid, multi generationally inbred- rocks.

In the pantheon of idiots, he would be king.

Crazed_Insanity

July 21st, 2023, 10:33 PM

At least I’m not an idiot who’d attack people.

Regarding emperors new cloths… I’m just glad most Americans have low approval ratings for both Trump and Biden. At least that shows that most Americans can actually see that they’re naked and not just clothed by their ideologies.

I don’t really want to call anyone stupid, but one has to be brainwashed somewhat to believe either trump or Biden did great jobs during their respective presidencies…

However, to be fair, we probably need some distance to truly judge a president. Approval rating is fleeting and not always accurate. Time will always tell. I can definitely be wrong and if I am wrong, I can definitely repent and change.

Yw-slayer

July 22nd, 2023, 07:13 AM

It's worse than that. He's not just being stupid, dumb, or ignorant. He's intentionally being morally deficient.

https://youtu.be/ww47bR86wSc

Man, this video definitely describes Billi's Brainwashed Bros from 2019.

Crazed_Insanity

July 22nd, 2023, 07:35 AM

Yeah, I can agree with that. Back then, they were the ones in power. Only thing is that they probably also see me as contrarian and won’t accept me as their bros. I’m probably way more stupid than them. :p

neanderthal

July 22nd, 2023, 09:10 AM

https://twitter.com/joncoopertweets/status/1682737493358047232?t=kmOcjEfwi9QqiBviOEuZKg&s=19

Tom Servo

July 22nd, 2023, 06:25 PM

I do hope that actually starts being reflected in a tangible way. It's weird, the unemployment numbers all look good, but in the meantime there are tons of layoffs happening in my industry and Michele hasn't been able to find work at all. I'm glad it seems like we're not going to have a recession, but VC money has still almost completely dried up and it's really doing a number on the sector Michele and I are in.

FaultyMario

July 22nd, 2023, 07:59 PM

Your congress is giving way too many subsidies to the military lobbyist/States.

Crazed_Insanity

July 22nd, 2023, 09:55 PM

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/07/20/bidens-economic-approval-rating-rises-slightly-but-is-still-just-37percent-despite-bidenomics-push.html

Most Americans believe republicans do better job with the economy. There’s really no need for Biden to try to prove them wrong or try to be a better ‘republican’. If economic data really is great, then use that as leverage to do more of what dems suppose to do best! Keep lowering healthcare, student loans, housing costs! Things that will actually improve average Americans lives!

Just touting numbers like stock market or GDP or whatever mumbo jumbo #’s is something GOP tend to do. Dems need to be more relatable.

FaultyMario

July 22nd, 2023, 10:29 PM

The first job of a politician is to be an educator.

Crazed_Insanity

July 22nd, 2023, 11:37 PM

Not sure what you mean there… I tend to think politicians are more like police. They should protect and serve the people. However, often times they protect and serve the rich and themselves and the people end up screwed.

FaultyMario

July 22nd, 2023, 11:51 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bnmc_8pA1tY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GkwO6w7WOQ

Rare White Ape

July 23rd, 2023, 04:23 AM

Mario are you wasting energy?

It's 2023 and Greta would be very mad, you know?

Crazed_Insanity

July 23rd, 2023, 07:08 AM

It’s pretty sad that during that Lyndon Johnson speech, we can still see some lawmakers not clapping… pretty sad.

This is why I don’t think education is a political leaders main task. Education is definitely part of ‘service’, but they must try to do more.

Jesus was a great teacher, but there were plenty who refuse to learn and intended to kill him. So he ‘leveraged’ that to do what he was born to do! The ultimate act of serving and protecting his people…

FaultyMario

July 23rd, 2023, 11:21 AM

Mario are you wasting energy?

Yes, I am.

Crazed_Insanity

July 23rd, 2023, 09:01 PM

Religion, politics and sex tend to be very energy draining… that’s why they tend to lower people’s interest levels.

The thing is though… people tend to continue to expend energy in such efforts anyways since the beginning of time.

I suppose I can’t speak for Peterson nor Musk, but I can assure you guys that I’m not a hateful white nationalist Neo Nazi. I do not hate Jews nor the Chinese. If some of you insist that I am a hateful bigot, I’m not sure what I can do about that. Ignore feature should be a good energy saver. That should make Greta happy.

MR2 Fan

July 24th, 2023, 07:00 AM

so twitter is now x, thanks to xlon xusx, because reasons

Tom Servo

July 24th, 2023, 07:41 AM

Course all the buttons still say "Tweet" because all he did was change a logo and tweet a lot about it.

retsmah

July 24th, 2023, 09:51 AM

I think part of Musk getting kicked out as PayPal's CEO was that he really wanted the PayPal/x.com merger to move forward with x.com as the company's name. I don't have a source for that at the moment, I think it may have come from the Behind the Bastard's podcast episode about Musk. I feel like it's just a grudge he's held onto probably this whole time.

This seems like another very poorly thought out move, the obvious first question people have is so are they still called tweets or what? It seems like he wants them to be called x's instead. Facebook at least had the sense to only rename the parent company, they still call the product Facebook. Nobody is going to say that they saw an x from a celebrity, or they re-x'd an x or whatever.

I'm kind of interested in how it will play out from a trademark standpoint, assuming this doesn't get undone pretty quickly. "Tweet" is kind of borderline genericized, people want to call posts on threads or truth social tweets instead of whatever they are called on those platforms. I don't really know anything about copyright law, but it seems like if Twitter stops using Twitter and Tweets they risk having their trademark become generic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark#Avoiding_genericization) and allowing twitter clones to actually just call themselves twitters, and call their posts tweets. I'd really love it if Mastodon could just start calling itself Open Twitter or something.

This is the second time in a month that, despite having a very low opinion of Musk, I've been like "that can't be right, he's not THAT dumb." The first being that weird tweet where he said he wanted to measure dicks with Zuckerberg.

Crazed_Insanity

July 24th, 2023, 10:14 AM

Not sure about it being a grudge, but it’s his vision. Getting bumped out of PayPal gave him vacationphobia. He’s afraid of taking vacations because bad things like that always happen! Anyway, PayPal finally released x.com in 2017.

If he had gotten the rights to X.com back right away, I’m sure Tesla and SpaceX might not exist because he’d be working on that instead.

Dumping the Twitter brand is really unbelievably. X is also a Unicode, not sure how he’ll copy right that?

However, this is a guy who doesn’t mind opening up Tesla patents for free.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how this develops. Will he be twixing more about it in the future? Anyway, I don’t really care. I’d only sign up if this everything app can eventually exchange Bitcoin amongst users.

21Kid

July 24th, 2023, 10:15 AM

Yeah, every time I think about clicking it, I just remember how upset I get just reading his words. Do I really want to go through that again? For no substantial commentary... No. I don't think so.

21Kid

July 24th, 2023, 10:18 AM

That was about CI's posts. I don't know why it didn't copy Tom's quote.

Crazed_Insanity

July 24th, 2023, 10:21 AM

I’m pretty sure everyone, including CI, knows who you’re talking about! :p

MR2 Fan

July 24th, 2023, 11:38 AM

Elmo seems obsessed, maybe he thinks he can "own" a letter of the alphabet if he makes an "X" version of everything, the way Monster Energy thinks they own the word "Monster" or how Facebook tried to own the term "book" in website names.

FaultyMario

July 24th, 2023, 03:02 PM

That was about CI's posts. I don't know why it didn't copy Tom's quote.

I've had that problem too.

Quoting Tom's posts, coincidentally.

sandydandy

July 24th, 2023, 05:42 PM

Course all the buttons still say "Tweet" because all he did was change a logo and tweet a lot about it. He’ll call it Twix. Then he’ll buy Mars, Incorporated and take them public. Every Twix done will be free publicity for the chocolate bar he owns. He’ll pump and dump the Mars stock to pay for his Twitter boondoggle.

I know how Elon’s mind works better than him. :P

Cam

July 24th, 2023, 06:42 PM

:lol:

Rare White Ape

July 24th, 2023, 07:20 PM

This seems like another very poorly thought out move, the obvious first question people have is so are they still called tweets or what? It seems like he wants them to be called x's instead. Facebook at least had the sense to only rename the parent company, they still call the product Facebook. Nobody is going to say that they saw an x from a celebrity, or they re-x'd an x or whatever.

I'm kind of interested in how it will play out from a trademark standpoint, assuming this doesn't get undone pretty quickly. "Tweet" is kind of borderline genericized, people want to call posts on threads or truth social tweets instead of whatever they are called on those platforms. I don't really know anything about copyright law, but it seems like if Twitter stops using Twitter and Tweets they risk having their trademark become generic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark#Avoiding_genericization) and allowing twitter clones to actually just call themselves twitters, and call their posts tweets. I'd really love it if Mastodon could just start calling itself Open Twitter or something.

Well a tweet (using the lowercase t) is already a generic noun, same as googling a topic on Google.

The word ‘twitter’ already existed before the company came along as well, so it’s just the brand name of the company that it will be protecting from its business rivals. I don’t think the generic act of tweeting - akin to the act of hoovering the house with your Dyson - would pose any risk.

A genius like Muks would know all of this already.

Cam

July 24th, 2023, 07:23 PM

Very stable genius.

Tom Servo

July 24th, 2023, 07:27 PM

Lol, apparently the service mark for the use of "X" in a social media context is owned by Meta.

Rare White Ape

July 24th, 2023, 10:14 PM

https://i.imgur.com/pdwmbqt.jpg

Crazed_Insanity

July 24th, 2023, 10:21 PM

:lol:

MR2 Fan

July 26th, 2023, 06:17 PM

Congress needs term limits and age limits.

Yw-slayer

July 26th, 2023, 07:11 PM

Don't forget how rich all of them got on insider trading.

Rare White Ape

July 26th, 2023, 07:37 PM

And laundering taxpayer money on tax breaks and/or government grants/contracts kicked back towards the politicians as political party donations.

FaultyMario

July 26th, 2023, 08:33 PM

And after today's pitiful circus, it needs science.

Which brings me back to representative democracy, one can't look at one's own congress and not feel it faithfully represents one's own society.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rare White Ape

July 26th, 2023, 09:30 PM

How about we just make poorly-framed comments about Biden being 'too old' in order to undermine his presidency?

MR2 Fan

July 27th, 2023, 07:14 AM

How about we just make poorly-framed comments about Biden being 'too old' in order to undermine his presidency?

Yes, because 80 is WAY OLDER than.........77 (Biden vs Trump's age)

sandydandy

July 27th, 2023, 07:42 AM

So they're trying to impeach Biden now? For what exactly?

FaultyMario

July 27th, 2023, 10:30 AM

And after today's pitiful circus, it needs science.

I was of course referring to the UFOs hearing.

And I totally support this guy's take on it: people need more transparency from government agencies (https://twitter.com/i/status/1684348039073353729), classification methods for sensitive information need to be assessed.

Also, Grusch is full of shit.

Rare White Ape

July 27th, 2023, 10:40 AM

I thought you were actually talking about Mitch McConnell accidentally stepping on the pause button yesterday.

FaultyMario

July 27th, 2023, 10:56 AM

That guy. Some people are just not meant to work after certain age. A few bodies will go on and on, but others won't; too bad that for some people their previous commitments won't let them have an appropriate retirement in old age.

MR2 Fan

July 27th, 2023, 11:20 AM

I would definitely prefer to have a younger candidate than Biden but his policies have been quite successful, even if the media isn't covering it well.

One thing people don't realize is that the President doesn't do a lot of things by himself, it's a whole administration of assistants, experts, secretaries, etc. that get a lot of the work done.

Of course when Trump claimed he would do it all himself, it was mostly because he just got a bunch of grifters and sycophants to do his bidding and make their own money. It wasn't a proper administration of anything.

It reminds me of the show "Spin City" which was a comedy which loosely covered the New York mayor's office (IIRC) and the mayor was likeable, but dumb, and his well meaning staffers did all of the actual work. (It was also cool that being a show in the 90's, they were progressive enough to have a black, gay man as the main character's best friend.)

Crazed_Insanity

July 27th, 2023, 02:03 PM

Age can be irrelevant if we can have term limits. People age differently. But people tend to be similarly corrupt when in position of power for too long. Point is we should not have career politicians.

When we have career politicians or people working in government agencies who don’t even have to care about elections, combine that with lack of transparency, things will just get worse and worse. This is a bipartisan problem.

MR2 Fan

July 27th, 2023, 02:17 PM

I think with congress, the problem is that there is so much established power, it's VERY difficult to get of incumbents that have been there a long time. Whenever it happens, it's big news.

Part of why these people never retire is that they're practically guaranteed to keep getting elected somehow. If they retire, the incumbency is gone and it's way more of a question mark if the next person can win the votes.

Tom Servo

July 27th, 2023, 08:49 PM

I would definitely prefer to have a younger candidate than Biden but his policies have been quite successful, even if the media isn't covering it well.

That is almost a fundamental flaw with having a media system that's privatized and commercially driven vs. state run. The good news doesn't sell, so it doesn't air.

To be clear, definitely not arguing in favor of state run media, but wishing people were more willing to at least acknowledge the idea that sometimes no news is good news.

Rare White Ape

July 28th, 2023, 03:05 AM

Drachen596

July 28th, 2023, 03:40 AM

34 members of the Senate are 70 or older.
74 members of the House are 70 or older.

A few have been there since before I was born. Its honestly ridiculous in my opinion. 40 years is way too long.

FaultyMario

July 28th, 2023, 09:28 AM

State run media doesn't have to mean the same in western nations as it does for China or Russia.

How about: media that doesn't have to be supported by commercial interests, and is separate from the government of the day?

I think there might be a country or two where advertising is forbidden on news programming. I've heard that proposal being thrown around down here when discussing media law reform.

Basically the media company designates one hour of their daily schedule as their prime news show, for which they can't run any paid advertisements and an independent group of ombudspersons review the content and complaints from the audience. The rationale is that those safeguards allow for a more balanced presentation of the information and that audiences would prefer news shows based on the quality of the content, not on the vociferousness1 of the delivery.

____
1 Louder = more sponsored.

sandydandy

July 28th, 2023, 10:05 AM

That is almost a fundamental flaw with having a media system that's privatized and commercially driven vs. state run. The good news doesn't sell, so it doesn't air.

To be clear, definitely not arguing in favor of state run media, but wishing people were more willing to at least acknowledge the idea that sometimes no news is good news. In this country we have the CBC which is publicly funded but not state run, (or at least they claim they're not). But you're not compelled to watch them as there's plenty of competition from privatized media both locally and nationwide. You need a good mixture of both I think to have a healthy perspective on things.

Of course we have our kooky far-right media as well...Rebel Media aka Infowars of the north, who like to blatantly push fake news that their feral devotees eat up.

neanderthal

July 28th, 2023, 02:26 PM

Everything Musk is political, right?!?!?

https://twitter.com/TheRealHoarse/status/1684777377925128192?t=9Ynbaao-UBjHrNokNMFZpw&s=19

Crazed_Insanity

July 28th, 2023, 03:13 PM

State run media doesn't have to mean the same in western nations as it does for China or Russia.

How about: media that doesn't have to be supported by commercial interests, and is separate from the government of the day?

I don’t see how that’s possible. Our NPR is probably the closest to that here, but not sure if it’s really completely free from corporate sponsors and government influences…

Crazed_Insanity

July 28th, 2023, 03:19 PM

34 members of the Senate are 70 or older.
74 members of the House are 70 or older.

A few have been there since before I was born. Its honestly ridiculous in my opinion. 40 years is way too long.

Don’t think we need to discriminate against old people. There can be old folks with sharp minds and know what they’re doing. The main issue should be to make sure they don’t hold on to power for too long.

Crazed_Insanity

July 28th, 2023, 03:27 PM

Everything Musk is political, right?!?!?

https://twitter.com/TheRealHoarse/status/1684777377925128192?t=9Ynbaao-UBjHrNokNMFZpw&s=19

Wrong thread. EV range is mostly about simple physics. If you drive faster on the freeway, it will require way more energy to cover the same distance. I think most range epa estimates are based at 55mph? Nobody drives at those speeds in the real world.

Not to mention extreme heat and cold could severely impact battery performance as well.

Lots of folks may want to blame all this on Elno, but I think this is one of the conspiracies on the left?

Tom Servo

July 28th, 2023, 03:29 PM

State run media doesn't have to mean the same in western nations as it does for China or Russia.

How about: media that doesn't have to be supported by commercial interests, and is separate from the government of the day?

To basically restate what sandydandy said, at least for me "state run" means the state dictates the news that's run on it. I'd consider things like the CBC or BBC to be "publicly funded." I should probably go with "state controlled" instead, definitely disambiguates that.

Rare White Ape

July 28th, 2023, 06:17 PM

Yeah, definitely a better way of putting it.

Crazed_Insanity

July 28th, 2023, 08:05 PM

Publicly funded could run into trouble by reporting things against public opinion.

I think our current way, although not perfect , is probably fine. People are free to look at the same news with multiple angles. Who right who’s wrong, time will tell. For viewers who stubbornly refuse to believe you, there’s really no changing their minds anyways. So just let them watch whatever they want.

Personally I enjoy having multi-narratives. Different perspectives should help us see the real truth better.

Think of it this way, every judge may interpret the same constitution differently. Same Bible can also branch into totally different religions! Which is right and which is wrong?

Reporters could also see the same story and then report it differently as well. Nobody sees the whole truth anyways. Different perspectives should help us piece together the whole truth better. There’s no guarantee publicly funded news will always be the best.

I just think no one should be the arbiter of speech, religion and press.

In a truly free world, people should be allowed to choose rather than being told what to believe.

Rare White Ape

July 28th, 2023, 09:45 PM

FaultyMario

July 28th, 2023, 09:55 PM

I take it you're not a parent, Mick. (Knowingly).

Crazed_Insanity

July 28th, 2023, 10:10 PM

Interesting: being hands-off on free speech seems to include tolerance for people who share child sexual abuse material.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dom-lucre-elon-musk-child-exploitation-reinstatement/

I suspect the guy was posting liberals doing the bad deeds.

It’s kinda funny to see Q folks accusing only liberals are pedos because liberals are actively sabotaging the movie sound of freedom. It’s also funny to see liberals believing conservatives are pedos.

Pedophilia is most likely a bipartisan sickness. However, political opposition tend to believe this disease can only happen to the other side.

Rare White Ape

July 29th, 2023, 05:36 AM

The trajectory that the USA is on is quite amusing. If it keeps up this way, it may one day be compared to hyper-regressive and strict conservative countries like Iran.

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/kids-online-safety-act-lgbtq-youth

Tom Servo

July 29th, 2023, 07:48 AM

Interesting: being hands-off on free speech seems to include tolerance for people who share child sexual abuse material.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dom-lucre-elon-musk-child-exploitation-reinstatement/

In the meantime, the writer of an article for the Southern Poverty Law Center got suspended for "doxing" when he wrote about the leader of a neo-Nazi group forming a compound outside Springfield, Maine.

So CSAM good, reporting on Nazis bad.

Rare White Ape

July 29th, 2023, 04:08 PM

In Victoria, the cops are unable to gather enough officers to keep the peace when some drag queens want to read books to gay kids at the local library.

However if some nazis want to fucking march around the streets wearing black and doing nazi salutes while waving huge banners with bigoted statements written on them, you’ll find the cops will absolutely roll up in their dozens and declare zones around the and enact various public safety preservation acts and search people and cars and demand you take off any head gear or masks or outer layers of clothing to ensure that the nazi march goes off without a hitch.

Rare White Ape

July 29th, 2023, 04:12 PM

And when I mention gay kids, I’m not talking about kids that paedos want to groom and then sexually assault and then kidnap and then put in tunnels and then murder.

I mean kids who are gay, and their parents know they’re gay (or potentially transgender), and their parents want to support them and include them in a community and take away some of the pressure of growing up gay in a world that actively hates them, so that they don’t fucking commit suicide.

Tom Servo

July 29th, 2023, 07:27 PM

Well, nice to know that's not only happening here. We definitely get the same thing - when the Proud Boys or Patriot Front go marching someone, the cops generally seem more concerned about their well being than anyone else's.

Crazed_Insanity

July 30th, 2023, 08:40 AM

I think clearly police has some bias, otherwise there wouldn’t be a BLM movement. However, having racist cops probably doesn’t mean that they’re Nazi sympathizers. Do we really need to jump to that conclusion?

We really have so much in common but choose to focus on our differences. Both sides believe the end is near and we need to make changes, but each side is like fuck your Bible or fuck your scientists. Why should I make any changes?

Both sides also do not approve of pedophilia but accuses the other side for over sensationalizing it. Each side probably believes Epstein catered to republicans or democrats only?

With regard to Nazism, our biggest danger is probably the collapse of our economy? At least that’s what happened to Germany. 2 crazy extreme parties emerged. Communists who’s blame the rich and the Nazi who’s blame the rich Jews. Our country is kinda in a similar boat I suppose.

Assuming we retraced the same steps as Germany and Trump became like Hitler… there’ll probably be no nation on earth capable of defeating the American Nazis.

My guess is that it’ll be up to folks like roofer to fight against this evil US government because they’re the only ones with guns.

Anyway, I seriously doubt Nazism will eventually win and reach power this way in the US.

JoshInKC

July 30th, 2023, 03:45 PM

That whole post is nonsense, but I want to highlight this part:

Billi: My guess is that it’ll be up to folks like roofer to fight against this evil US government because they’re the only ones with guns.
No, they're not.

Crazed_Insanity

July 30th, 2023, 06:25 PM

I’m sure they have more guns! :p

Anyway, I’ll finally buy guns too if US is really going that direction.

I truly believe most American conservatives will be fighting against Nazis rather than for Nazis.

MR2 Fan

July 30th, 2023, 09:20 PM

why? their ideals align way more with nazis than against

Yw-slayer

July 30th, 2023, 11:35 PM

Lofl

Rare White Ape

July 31st, 2023, 12:37 AM

However, having racist cops probably doesn’t mean that they’re Nazi sympathizers. Do we really need to jump to that conclusion?

Conclusion not jumped to. Met with evidence:

https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/app/uploads/2021/06/racist-police-720x405.jpg

Read every single word in each of these links before replying or commenting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/us/ok-sign-white-power.html

https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/okay-hand-gesture

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-13/nsw-police-officer-ok-symbol-black-lives-matter-march/12352134

https://www.thedailybeast.com/brenton-tarrant-idd-new-zealand-shooting-suspect

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FretbJbaYAYhKfu.jpg

Yw-slayer

July 31st, 2023, 03:25 AM

Do you have more information on the first one?

Rare White Ape

July 31st, 2023, 05:56 AM

Not a lot unfortunately. I know she's a Qld cop and was likely photographed policing a protest outside a military arms expo in Brisbane within the last 18 months.

Crazed_Insanity

July 31st, 2023, 08:28 AM

Earlier this week, I pulled over our RV caravan because I noticed low tire pressure. After pumping it back to the correct pressure, I had a 2nd thought of giving the OK gesture to my wife waiting in the chase vehicle parked behind. However, I thought screw it, nobody should confuse my hand gesture as White Power since I ain’t white! :p

Did the cops intentionally or unintentionally used that hand gesture? Might as well expect the worst I suppose, but still we can hope for the best.

ADL could be right. For the example, I don’t personally know Mel Gibson nor Jim Caviezel. Maybe they are Jew haters. As for the movie Passion of the Christ, is that an antisemitic fictional movie? According to ADL, it is. Sure, there were some creative elements not in the Bible, like the androgynous Satan or the scene where Jesus was joking around with his mother… overall, I did not think it’s antisemitic at all. Unless ADL wish to claim Bible is antisemitic? Even the Old Testament contains a lot of stories of God ‘murdering’ Jews too?

Anyway, let’s just assume ADL is totally right. Were all cop gesturing the OK sign? Just because a few cops who had to hide behind an OK sign to demonstrate their White Power doesn’t really mean all blue lives are Nazis, right?

I’d be more afraid of police becoming openly and blatantly racist as a whole.

Yes, fascism/Nazism is to the right, but my point is that not all right leaning conservatives are willing to lean that far. To the point of willing to kill others for it.

Just as not all liberals would want to kill for communism under normal circumstances.

Currently I think we’re just in a stage of 2 sides trying to stop one another and not kill one another… it is good to expect things to get worse so that we can better prepare ourselves, but I still hope the 2 sides will eventually learn to love one another.