SmirkingRevenge

6 ms·

31.
by SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
CATO has been quite good of late at dismantling many of the worst of the Trump GOP's initiatives with real research. They're immigration research is a great resource to rebut the nativist MAGA nonsense.
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by SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
Running up massive debt and deficits is also a way to kill appetite for D priorities that require new spending. The best way to make sense of the GOP is in it's opposition to wealth redistribution. Primarily downward wealth redistrib
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by SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
> I will not ignore the evidence of my eyes and ears The gesture he made matched the Nazi salute. With gusto. Eyes, ears plus the video confirm it. There's nowhere to hide on this one. If you want to be charitable, you can argue tha
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by SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
Hallucinogenic experiences can be really specific to particular hallucinogens. There are some hallucinogens that only produce auditory hallucinations. We don't really have a reason to think those are real sounds. There are others that
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by SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
The reason it is so believable is that he did it and it happened, in public. He contributes to this understanding by straight-forwardly promoting and agreeing with white nationalists and even straight-up neo-nazi accounts on twitter, and by
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by SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
I remember looking around at the people in my friend and family circles who supported and defended the imprisonment of migrants at CECOT, often repeating the propaganda that they were terrorists and criminals, etc - and realizing chances ar
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by SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
> That over 35% of the population are completely fine with this stuff is frightening Most literally don't even know, because what little information filters down to them, is all radical right-wing propaganda from Fox or worse. The
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by SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
I think the biggest risk of war between nuclear powers is from mistakes and accidents that might trigger nuclear escalation/MAD. Systems can malfunction. War can spiral out of control, fast. We had some very close calls in the cold w
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by SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
I think this comes out in the wash mostly. While we're going to have lots of officers who've been to war for a while yet, turnover eventually evens the playing field. The people who would be doing the actual fighting in a war toda
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by SmirkingRevenge 2mo ago
> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable. Sadly, I find it very believable. To build them costs lots of time and money.
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
Eh, I think there's a kind of survivorship bias in this POV: "We've survived authoritarians in the past, so the system working as intended, everything is fine". I don't think things are working as intended, even if
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
Better to say the current US government is run by authoritarians, doing everything they can to convert the US government into an authoritarian one. And they've gotten way farther than they should. We're a backsliding democracy, an
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
So many of those books are basically like those "Here's one weird trick to succeed at X" style articles in book length form.
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
Tesla could have found a path forward without Musk. It might've been painful or even dangerous financially, but they could've come up with something. Same with the other companies Musk "runs". So long Musk remains at th
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
Blame Musk himself. He did this. He jumped right into the center of US politics, and turned himself into one of the most toxic figures within it, while acting like an unhinged conspiracy addled maniac. Then he broke the law and killed a bun
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
> I don't know I felt like for 4 years we were hammered about defunding police or something. If you tell me that's far-left that's fine, but realize that's what your news has been pushing. As another commenter said, s
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
I think it's pretty likely it would have been mostly left alone if not for Musk. No one was asking for PEPFAR to be killed, for example - it's one of the few things in Washington with near unanimous bipartisan goodwill and it was
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
> It did some good, yes, but from what I can tell, it was better to shut it down. Whatever you are reading is badly misinforming you. I'm sure there was some reform and cleanup to do in certain USAID programs, but the programs Musk
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
A good recent write-up with more links to follow in the article. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/opinion/usaid-elon-musk-d...
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
I'm not sure asking the AI to support or oppose something is the kind of bias I would really worry about, unless those "opinions" degrade other kinds of queries. I'd be more interested to see how well the AI's do wh
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
Maybe it's just that conversing with something or someone that is acting manipulative can be unpleasant in and of itself, even if the manipulation is not successful. Each time I hear the bot emote, it's like a subtle suggestion to
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
My preference would be to turn down the fake emotional expressions and notes in the responses. No cheeky quips, etc. Otherwise it's kind of like being manipulated by a psychopath
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
In one of the videos the AI quips back things like "Happens to the best of us" - its basically pretending to be human and that feels kind of creepy and weird, like it's trying to cultivate a para-social emotional bond. I just
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
The goal was simply to display performative strongman machismo using the military (just like the missile strikes on alleged drug boats). It's a branding exercise for Trump personally (not even for the US as a whole). To that end, it do
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
B/c they have nukes
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by SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
Money is important, but there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to lobbying and campaigning. Elon's success at putting candidates into office isn't great, despite flooding massive amounts of cash into several ele
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by SmirkingRevenge 4mo ago
Yep, this is exactly right. When people are added to the economy, demand increases, including demand for more labor. The downward pressure on wages that one might intuitively expect from immigrant labor is basically erased by those increase
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by SmirkingRevenge 4mo ago
The Biden admin was not far-left. Biden was basically a mainline Liberal Democrat and much closer to the center than far-left. The far-left basically hates mainline Liberal Democrats like Biden.
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by SmirkingRevenge 4mo ago
The truth is, assimilation is usually a process that takes a generation or two. First generation immigrants don't assimilate very well. Many never manage to even learn the host country's language. Assimilation really happens at th
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by SmirkingRevenge 4mo ago
Biden did not support "open borders", nor did he cause the immigration surges during his term. CATO of all places refutes both of these ideas: - https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didnt-cause-border-crisis-pa...

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