kescusay

kescusay , 11 months ago

It’s a good thing. Makes identifying the actual fucking Nazis like DeSantis easier.

kescusay , 11 months ago

Maybe, but I don’t think that’s the underlying motivator. I think down at the bottom, conservatives are driven by fear.

• Fear of the other.
• Fear of progress.
• Fear of being left behind by that progress.
• Fear of new ideas.
• Fear of looking weak.

It’s all fear. Right now, I’m leaning towards fear of looking weak as the biggest one. It motivates all the virtue signaling on the right, and causes them to treat safety precautions in multiple situations as signs of weakness, from refusing to wear helmets on bikes to refusing to vaccinate against deadly diseases. They have to prove they’re “stronger” than anything that could hurt them.

It also explains why they’re resistant to accepting expert advice, but easily fall for “strongmen.” If some effete scientist manages to get them to do what he asks, why, that’s just showing that they’re weak. But if a strongman does it, then falling in line isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of how gloriously strong the strongman is.

kescusay , 11 months ago

Could you kind of just… remind the rest of the Boomers that the planet will continue existing after they’re gone? And people younger than 60 would really like it to be liveable? That’d be great.

kescusay , 11 months ago

No, he’s not right.

Although the Constitution establishes the Supreme Court, it permits Congress to decide how to organize it. Congress first exercised this power in the Judiciary Act of 1789. This Act created a Supreme Court with six justices. It also established the lower federal court system.

Source: www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/…/about

Congress gets to set the rules of how the Supreme Court is organized. They are a built-in constitutional check on SCOTUS.

kescusay , 11 months ago

Well. I guess now we know why he didn’t get charged in the other investigation this week.

No, the other other investigation. (It’s getting hard to keep track.)

kescusay , 11 months ago

It’s true, but in Mitch’s case it might be that staying literally kills him. He’s the minority leader in the Senate, which has got to be stressful, and if the fugue state he entered was caused by a mini-stroke, he needs to be resting and avoiding stress like a literal plague.

kescusay , 1 year ago

It’s not really about age. There are plenty of older people who are still functioning fine. Hell, Biden is almost as old as Mitch, but he’s physically fit and doesn’t go into fugue states. (And the claims that his stutter and verbal gaffs are evidence of decline are utter bullshit. He’s been that way his entire life.)

Where we’re fucking up is that we don’t have any systems in place to require our elected officials or candidates to be mentally sound. We should require people running for or in elected office to pass cognitive tests the same way we require people on the roads to pass driving tests. Yes, more of the elderly will fail those tests because age is a factor, but the focus should be on “can this person do the job,” not “is this person too old.”

Mitch might be someone who’d be removed from office with a test like that, but it would also potentially catch young guys with catastrophic mental health issues, like Herschel Walker, who got frighteningly close to public office while showing blatant signs of illness.

kescusay , 1 year ago

The vast majority of that time he didn’t have any stutter or gaffes. I don’t even think it was happening when he was VP.

It was. And the vast majority of the time, it doesn’t happen now. It’s just that when it does, right-wing media seizes on it.

You can find plenty of footage from when he was VP, and when he was in the Senate, where he clearly struggles to say the right words, and sometimes a malapropism slips out. In the past, he’s referred to himself as a “gaffe machine” (that is a direct quote) because of it. So it’s less accurate to say that he overcame his stutter, and more accurate to say that he found workarounds that usually - but not always - work.

It’s only become a big deal now because of his age. Republicans latch onto any slip of the tongue or difficulty speaking as supposed evidence of his decline, but it’s completely disingenuous.

But as we age we lose that “filter” where we think before we speak. Which often causes the re-emergence of childhood speech impediments along with a lot more serious stuff.

Sure, but listen to any of his recent speeches. You’ll find that for the overwhelming majority of the time, he’s perfectly clear-spoken. There will occasionally be hiccups, but find any long speech of his in the last 40 years, and you’ll see the same things.

My point here is that while I’m sure he’s not quite as sharp as he used to be, there’s a material difference between a verbal stumble and what happened to Mitch McConnell. I’m not sure what exactly that was, but McConnell has no medical history of fugue states. That’s new. Biden’s intermittent verbal stumbles aren’t.

Like I said, it’s not a reason to impeach him, but it’s definitely a reason to ask why we’re expecting him to be president for four more years.

I’d much rather have a different candidate, but not because of Biden’s age. I think he’s too willing to go along with Republicans for the sake of “bipartisanship.” Obama had the same problem.

That said, he might actually be the best possible candidate, given the circumstances. He utterly spanked Trump last time around, and keeping the orange shit-gibbon out of office is of paramount importance.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Sounds like it’s time to re-watch Glass Onion. Elon Musk is Miles Bron.

kescusay , 1 year ago

There are no actual socialist countries, but if you’re referring to, for example, the Scandinavian countries, they use far less oil per capita than the United States.

kescusay , 1 year ago

I… don’t think we disagree? China has a corrupt communist government. I was specifically referring to socialist governments, and the ones that are frequently (mis)labelled as socialist are doing a lot better on oil consumption than either China or the United States.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Grown? Yes. Men? Ehhh…

kescusay , 1 year ago

Hired by who? Dude tried to back out of the deal, and it’s cost him billions.

kescusay , 1 year ago

You just described steps that would actually reduce abortion by quite a lot, without making it illegal at all. The sex ed and contraception stuff is basically exactly how it’s done in other western countries that don’t have nearly the issue with teen pregnancies we do. What you’re proposing is practical and effective.

And in the eyes of the MAGA crowd, you’re not just a leftist, you’re a baby-murdering, Satan-worshipping communist America-hater.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Without comprehensive sex ed? Yeah. I think they are. A lot of them believe myths about getting pregnant, and no one - either at school or in their religiously restrictive homes - will tell them the truth. So they find out the hard way.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Revolting that this is now a “crime.”

kescusay , 1 year ago

Yep. Know why she did it? Desperation + living in a state that already made it hard to get abortions, but also doesn’t provide good prenatal care. Nebraska has one of the higher infant mortality rates in the country (though it still pales in comparison to Mississippi).

kescusay , 1 year ago

Yes. I read the article. I know that already. The fact that she felt she had to do this is an indictment of Nebraska.

kescusay , 1 year ago

What an absolute legend, and an incredible life. RIP, Mr. Bennett.

kescusay , 1 year ago

I mean, it’s Douglas Murray. What did you expect?

kescusay , 1 year ago

If you don’t know who he is, you don’t know whether or not he’s credible on any of the issues he discusses.

For the record, Murray is well-known for being a right-wing bigot when it comes to Muslims - he wants to restrict immigration based on their religion or perceived religion, and publicly worries about the supposed decline of “white Britons” in London. And any legitimate criticism he might have of the tenets of Islam and how it’s practiced in countries with Sharia law are drowned out by his apparent inability to differentiate between islamists and people who happen to be Muslim.

He believes in “white genocide” and other common tropes of white nationalism, and generally embraces all of the associated conspiracy theories.

Weirdest of all, he’s a gay man who believes LGBTQ+ identities are inherently destabilizing to society somehow, and is expressly bigoted towards trans people.

All of this is to say, he’s legitimately kind of a crazy person, and you should take everything he says with a huge grain of salt, if you even want to bother with him at all.

I certainly wouldn’t.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Yep. Polls are getting less reliable anyway, because so many of them rely on landlines, and some segments of the population are less likely to respond to surveys than others.

kescusay , 1 year ago

The Joker: “I may be a literal deranged clown with an obsession for a guy in a bat suit, but even I’m not as cartoonish as this Trump guy.”

kescusay , 1 year ago

Funny you should mention that… www.lennytroll.com

kescusay , 1 year ago

I wish you had shared the rest of the conversation, so we could see Bard’s lies in context.

kescusay , 1 year ago

a more miserable place.

Fixed that. I can’t imagine a platform less appealing than Threads.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Have you thought about coordinating with the other internationally-focused news communities in the fediverse?

kescusay , 1 year ago

To build on what @C4RCOSA said, the appropriate response to a tanky or suspected state-owned propaganda account is to debunk it and report it.

kescusay , 1 year ago

At this point, any Russian families remaining in Crimea really should leave for their own safety. They know full well they live on stolen land.

kescusay , 1 year ago

As others have pointed out, Crimea is not 82% Russian. The majority of the populace speaks Russian, but a shared language does not indicate a shared culture. They don’t want to be part of Russia, and were illegally invaded.

kescusay , 1 year ago

This is a gross and flagrant distortion of events in Crimea leading up to the illegal annexation. It leaves out the fact that the operation of the checkpoints was still subject to Ukrainian governmental oversight, the fact that prior to the take-over, Russia illegally brought soldiers in unmarked uniforms over the border (the “little green men”), and the fact that the “changeover” was far from violence-free, let alone just a “signing of papers.”

kescusay , 1 year ago

I never said Russia didn’t operate the checkpoints. But prior to 2014, Crimea was indisputably Ukrainian territory, and Russia operated security checkpoints inside Ukraine at Ukraine’s discretion.

No one is claiming that the annexation of Crimea involved violence at the scale of the current war, but it was not non-violent, either. Characterizing it as just “signing of papers” is false.

It’s extremely painful discussing these topics with people online whose only understanding of these regions comes through the lens of this war.

What other lens should we look at the annexation through? It was clearly the early stages of this war.

kescusay , 1 year ago

We’d all prefer a non-war lens of Crimea. You’re right, it was a cool and interesting place, and hopefully still will be when the war is over.

But Russia has no say over whether another country’s territory will be used as Russia’s military port. The fact is, Ukraine was amenable to hosting Russia’s military there, so long as Russia didn’t try to actually own the land, but they’ve forfeited their right to use it now.

Ultimately, Russia’s military will be ousted from Crimea along with the rest of Ukraine, and that will be that. Had they never annexed it or escalated to open warfare, they would still be operating there freely today, with a much friendlier Ukraine happily hosting them.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Nope! Not what I meant at all. Hope that clears it up for ya.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Ever see Glass Onion? Musk (and spez) are Miles Bron.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Yeah, I’m not convinced, either. It seems like every couple of years, someone puts out an announcement that Lambda CDM is dead, other scientists take a look, and a much quieter announcement correcting their work gets put out.

kescusay , 1 year ago

But it’s been like that for two solid weeks. A lot of people simply can’t handle long stretches of heat that simply don’t stop.

kescusay , 1 year ago

I can’t think of a single good reason for anyone to actually want that. Reddit isn’t a site for content creation, it’s an aggregator. It works for YouTube because, well, it’s YouTube. It’s practically synonymous with content creation. But exactly zero people are on Reddit for that.

kescusay , 1 year ago

To be fair, I think the Zuck-bot has a better shot at eating the Muskrat’s lunch than Google+ had of taking on Facebook, because Facebook basically worked fine at the time, while Twitter is now a stinking pile of fetid garbage that not even the most avid users can excuse anymore.

That said, I’d really like to see both festering boils on the ass of the internet suffer ignominious deaths.

kescusay , 1 year ago

For my fellow Americans: That’s 118.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Fun fact: That’s also the temperature of Satan’s taint.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Since it’s southern Italy, I think it’s a given that the humidity will be high. This is going to pass right over “miserable” and on into “dangerous.”

kescusay , 1 year ago

Yeah, holy shit, that’s really bad. A wet-bulb temperature above 32 C is considered unsafe for normal outdoor activity levels.

kescusay , 1 year ago

Dude, you are not going to find a welcoming audience for your demented conspiracy theories here.

P.S. COVID-19 is real, and it’s still killing people.

kescusay , 1 year ago

That video is so fucking bizarre. It’s like someone hired a bunch of 4chan incels and edgelords to do his PR.