Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
Stop with the president Zuckerberg memes, you guys don’t know how dangerous memes can be in bending the fabric of reality
Okay, so not joking:
I think Trump can beat Zuck, and I think the Democrats (or rather the party leadership) are currently, uh, clueless enough to pick him. I don’t think the rank’n’files want him.
I do think he’s positioning himself to run. It’s going to be an uphill battle seeing as he’s a white male tech billionaire, and not even a cool one like Elon Musk.
Trump’s going to be tougher to beat than he looks. It depends in part of how much legislation he can get passed and how much of the GOP elite he can shift - particularly during the mid-terms. The Trump base want to use the mid-terms for that purpose.
By the time we get to 2022, I think some of the Democratic leadership will have changed, and conditions will be less favorable for The Zuck.
I put 70% Zuck goes for it, 30% he gets the nomination if he does, and 30% he gets the Presidency if he gets the nomination, for about ~6% chance.
A. Outwards-spiraling iterative development across multiple successive levels.
Among key factors is that the experiments must have ways for experiment members to act contrary to the wishes of the pro-policy members, or to move sideways within the model as it were. Additionally, experiment members should be rewarded with real-world money to drive an incentive other than just appearing nice/virtuous. To achieve this adversarial nature, the anti-policy forces must be involved in planning or approving the experiment.
A framework of methods for game-theoretical defections (or however you want to put it) could be developed, since in the real world, “cheat and kill the guy” is an option in many scenarios.
While not strictly going to capture every way that a policy could go wrong, this should act as a series of sanity checks for preventing some of the worst policies, and highlight promising policies.
B. Proportional Block Grant Committee.
Have the national government collect some share of national tax revenue for conducting policy experiments. Since most experimental policies would be de facto subsidies relative to other states, issue it to states proportional to some factor like population or size (or maybe population times size). This means all the states are subsidized about the same, at least in terms of the policy spending, depending on implementation.
Use block grants awarded in such a way as to make it difficult to just use the money to offset tax cuts. Generally, give experiments to the subnational governments that most want to attempt them, since those same governments will be less likely to sabotage the experimental policies.
C. Internal migration is an experimental result.
Yes, putting a UBI in a province might result in people migrating to that province to freeload off it. Or it might result in taxpayers fleeing. Alternatively, it might not.
However, unless your country is going to ban emigration and immigration, this is actually important information, as are shifts in jobs, building, etc across the economy so long as your country must compete in the global economy.
None of this will be perfect, but it should be feasible to gather a good harvest of information.
1. Guns are indeed totally banned. Swords are now completely legal, and are normalized to the point that if many private-public places want to prohibit them (and don’t have excellent security plus lockers for you to use) they would be considered the weird ones.
2. Eliminationist gun buyback program, at the actual market value, which starts off fairly low and eventually rises towards “have me set up to be a rich man for life” as supply falls below demand and fewer and fewer people are willing to give up assets they know they would never be legally allowed to replace.
3. Guns are indeed totally banned for ordinary people. Everybody now is allowed to hire armed private security with special licensing and regulation – people with said armed private security licences make up around 20 percent of the population, with a pretty even cross section between race, class, etc.
(one of the biggest talking points in the gun lobby is the hypocrisy of politicians who are protected by security, though I suspect that they overestimate how heavy security for politicians below the level of the President is.)
4. The federal government forms the American Home Guard. All gun owners are required to be members in good standing of this national militia, which can be called on in the event of either natural disaster or the invasion of the American homeland. After an initial training period of six weeks and clearance for membership, there is one week of follow-up training each year with a payment of $500-800 as compensation. Membership status must be renewed each year. Guns may be owned and traded, but not in unsupervised personal possession (thus at gun storage facilities) if no valid membership is held.
Various things, including crimes, can disqualify future membership in the Home Guard. Members receive a card that they can carry with them for law enforcement to see when inspecting guns, each year.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.“
I actually really like #4. Done properly, most of the gun people I know would totally love being part of the American Home Guard.
Mitigated Chaos
known for Lack of Familiarity with Soviet History, Accidentally Turning Gun Ownership in America into a Heavily-Armed Boy Scout Troop
I don’t disagree.
Thus why Full Communism was described implicitly as having a (much) high(er) risk of “exploding and killing everyone.”
The Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats lack the necessary organizational science and political will to successfully implement the hypothetical post-capitalist society they want, and the necessary cluefulness to overcome ideological blinding and make the necessary ideological sacrifices to achieve and maintain it.
Most of them don’t even seem to have the concept of organizational structuring/mechanisms as a form of technology which must be researched and developed (including with competing experimentation), despite all the rhetoric about how the mechanics of Capitalism drive human action.
I don’t disagree.
Thus why Full Communism was described implicitly as having a (much) high(er) risk of “exploding and killing everyone.”
The Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats lack the necessary organizational science and political will to successfully implement the hypothetical post-capitalist society they want, and the necessary cluefulness to overcome ideological blinding and make the necessary ideological sacrifices to achieve and maintain it.
Most of them don’t even seem to have the concept of organizational structuring/mechanisms as a form of technology which must be researched and developed (including with competing experimentation), despite all the rhetoric about how the mechanics of Capitalism drive human action.
Revolutionary Girl Utena with Monarchist Characteristics
1. Guns are indeed totally banned. Swords are now completely legal, and are normalized to the point that if many private-public places want to prohibit them (and don’t have excellent security plus lockers for you to use) they would be considered the weird ones.
2. Eliminationist gun buyback program, at the actual market value, which starts off fairly low and eventually rises towards “have me set up to be a rich man for life” as supply falls below demand and fewer and fewer people are willing to give up assets they know they would never be legally allowed to replace.
3. Guns are indeed totally banned for ordinary people. Everybody now is allowed to hire armed private security with special licensing and regulation – people with said armed private security licences make up around 20 percent of the population, with a pretty even cross section between race, class, etc.
(one of the biggest talking points in the gun lobby is the hypocrisy of politicians who are protected by security, though I suspect that they overestimate how heavy security for politicians below the level of the President is.)
4. The federal government forms the American Home Guard. All gun owners are required to be members in good standing of this national militia, which can be called on in the event of either natural disaster or the invasion of the American homeland. After an initial training period of six weeks and clearance for membership, there is one week of follow-up training each year with a payment of $500-800 as compensation. Membership status must be renewed each year. Guns may be owned and traded, but not in unsupervised personal possession (thus at gun storage facilities) if no valid membership is held.
Various things, including crimes, can disqualify future membership in the Home Guard. Members receive a card that they can carry with them for law enforcement to see when inspecting guns, each year.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
A monarch is nothing more than the crown jewel worn by the State.
Dual Monachy? I’ve got anons inventing entirely new forms of government right here in my askbox.
A monarch is nothing more than the crown jewel worn by the State.
Dual Monachy? I’ve got anons inventing entirely new forms of government right here in my askbox.
You just know that someone in this general circle is going to have historical levels of impact, and some poor grad student in the 2130s is going to write their dissertation exploring who @argumate might have been and what impact they had on $famous-person’s early years
*crosses fingers* please no spree killers
I was thinking more along the lines of Alan Greenspan.
While Bereton and Yu argue that Mitigated Chaos was an alias of one of several other figures in the Post-Neoreactionary movement that emerged early in the 2030s, and Harvey argues that Mitigated Chaos was a joint project between several authors, we demonstrate using reverse textual analysis and schedule modelling based on post timing and employment records that the true identity of Mitigated Chaos was Robin Lo, a DMV clerk located in Oklahoma City at the time of the Second American Revolution.
We dispute the arguments in Levy (2078) that Mitigated Chaos was the original name of the highly obscure VR film author “Destiny Playwright.”
A New Theory on the Middle Influences of Australia’s First Dictator, Bright & Walker, Tumblr Journal of Post-Rational Political Psychology, Vol. 43, Q1 2132.
There are only two genders: human and transhuman.
assigned human at birth, but determined to change that.
Correction: There are only three genders: human, transhuman, and owl.
It’s probably too late to ask this but
What the fuck is a soft boy
Low or near-zero cybernetics percentage. Male. The opposite of heavy or medium infantry.
Typically, no paramilitary augmentations or secondary backup organs.
It’s the glorious post-scarcity future in Star Trek Discovery but they still have open plan offices. Some fucking utopia that is.
I think that means the crewmen need to start a revolution, overthrow the officer bourgeoisie and establish a classless society.
This is a pretty fantastic example of how Star Trek has always been about a specific utopian vision based in our current capitalist (one might even say “neoliberal”) world.
You should have me write Star Trek inste-
wait, where are you going?? come back!
I was half-joking when I suggested that I’d use the statue controversy to remark on how to carry out an imperialistic foreign policy.
But I was half-serious as well.
Nationalism is one of the main drivers of imperialist foreign policy, but it is also one of the primary forms of opposition to the same.
Consider, however, an Empire with a different plan - it wants to spread not its people, nor, per se, its culture, but its ideology. (It may not even consider itself an Empire.)
The thing to do with Nationalist sentiments in other countries, then, is to merge and entangle them with the ideology to be installed (or rather, instilled). For each country, an adapted version of your ideology, fit more closely to the local needs and patterns. Not all countries need to be exactly the same. This allows you to deflect some of the popular will away from direct opposition to your imposed form of government.
This is actually part of why Democracy has had what success it has in its acts of imperialism. (And yes, Democracy as an ideology has a bit of a habit of imperialism, though a lot of that has been driven by America.)
How to interweave them?
Take elements of the local culture that are aesthetic or which are not in opposition to your ideology, and make them official and protected. (For instance, you probably want people to be timely, so if being chronically late is one of the local things, you need to get rid of that. On the other hand, architectural style can generally vary without crushing the GDP.) Pick various writers, historical works, and so on. Tie your ideology into the history of the region, as part of its self-narrative. Elevate local historical thinkers that can be described as proto-your-ideology. Build statues of locals that exemplify the positive qualities you want your ideology to represent.
You must create a new national mythology as a legitimization for the new government.
Over time, if executed well, your transplanted ideology will become part of the socially legitimized history of the country and thus gain the protection that affords.
In the meantime, most countries you could conceivably do this in are going to be relatively underdeveloped. Take advantage of the physical security you can manage to impose in order to pursue a long-term program of development.
Borrow a page from Milton Keynes and have the price of the development paid for by speculating on the values of the land to be developed. If you don’t drop the ball on this, the country is going to undergo a 7-10% annual rate of economic growth for some years. Investors would normally be skittish due to concerns about corruption and physical security, but you have the power to calm those risks.
The development doesn’t have to take place across the whole country, but a critical mass is needed so that future development will be self-propelling, and local talent must be trained (in your universities) so that it can continue to operate in the future.
Now I know this sounds incredibly expensive, and of course it is, but the goal here is to turn those countries permanently to your ideology and increase your ideology’s share of total global resource output - and that is, in itself, very valuable.
(Also, your pension funds can ride that 7-10% annual growth as your corporations are able to buy up assets at low prices.)
It also requires a great deal of political will. Will that, in Afghanistan and Iraq, America did not have.
The simultaneous cowardice, foolhardiness, and ignorance of the American political establishment and voters made for a military campaign that was not only highly aggressive, but failed to accomplish all that much for all the blood it spilled.
Something more ideologically imperialistic that sought to convert Iraq and Afghanistan into true, developed democracies, with all the basic underpinnings that required, would have been better. Alternatively, not going at all would have many advantages. Instead we get the worst of both worlds - a willingness to invade without a willingness to see a conversion through to the end, fueled by the naive belief that liberal democracy is the natural state of humanity and will flourish in all soils if it is simply unleashed.
There are, of course, far crueler ways to expand dominion if one has different goals. I will not go over them here. The age of such empires is over, now, and for the better.
I had to read all the way to the end to be sure that you were in on the joke, and it seems that you were. What you describe is more or less what America did all over the world WRT Democracy, at least when it had the actual political will to do so.
Europe and Japan are liberal democracies today because the US was willing to put in the money and time to install its imperial ideology properly.
Africa is full of creaky, mostly-broken democracies because the US and the USSR were united in wanting to dismantle the old imperial empires and open up the Global South for their own ideologies, but neither really wanted to put in the time to fully reconstruct the African cultures.
And Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are catastrophes because America got high on its own supply and started believing that democracy would just happen.
I think it could also work for other ideologies.
Anyhow, “do it right or don’t do it at all” is becoming something of a recurring theme on this blog.
Screw it. I was going to make a more detailed piece, but this will have to do for now.
I still haven’t really discussed cultural transmission and the role of national mythology as much as I probably should.
I keep meaning to make a post about cultural transmission and assimilation but I hesitate because I don’t want to bother making the visual aids that I want to go along with it.
I was half-joking when I suggested that I’d use the statue controversy to remark on how to carry out an imperialistic foreign policy.
But I was half-serious as well.
Nationalism is one of the main drivers of imperialist foreign policy, but it is also one of the primary forms of opposition to the same.
Consider, however, an Empire with a different plan - it wants to spread not its people, nor, per se, its culture, but its ideology. (It may not even consider itself an Empire.)
The thing to do with Nationalist sentiments in other countries, then, is to merge and entangle them with the ideology to be installed (or rather, instilled). For each country, an adapted version of your ideology, fit more closely to the local needs and patterns. Not all countries need to be exactly the same. This allows you to deflect some of the popular will away from direct opposition to your imposed form of government.
This is actually part of why Democracy has had what success it has in its acts of imperialism. (And yes, Democracy as an ideology has a bit of a habit of imperialism, though a lot of that has been driven by America.)
How to interweave them?
Take elements of the local culture that are aesthetic or which are not in opposition to your ideology, and make them official and protected. (For instance, you probably want people to be timely, so if being chronically late is one of the local things, you need to get rid of that. On the other hand, architectural style can generally vary without crushing the GDP.) Pick various writers, historical works, and so on. Tie your ideology into the history of the region, as part of its self-narrative. Elevate local historical thinkers that can be described as proto-your-ideology. Build statues of locals that exemplify the positive qualities you want your ideology to represent.
You must create a new national mythology as a legitimization for the new government.
Over time, if executed well, your transplanted ideology will become part of the socially legitimized history of the country and thus gain the protection that affords.
In the meantime, most countries you could conceivably do this in are going to be relatively underdeveloped. Take advantage of the physical security you can manage to impose in order to pursue a long-term program of development.
Borrow a page from Milton Keynes and have the price of the development paid for by speculating on the values of the land to be developed. If you don’t drop the ball on this, the country is going to undergo a 7-10% annual rate of economic growth for some years. Investors would normally be skittish due to concerns about corruption and physical security, but you have the power to calm those risks.
The development doesn’t have to take place across the whole country, but a critical mass is needed so that future development will be self-propelling, and local talent must be trained (in your universities) so that it can continue to operate in the future.
Now I know this sounds incredibly expensive, and of course it is, but the goal here is to turn those countries permanently to your ideology and increase your ideology’s share of total global resource output - and that is, in itself, very valuable.
(Also, your pension funds can ride that 7-10% annual growth as your corporations are able to buy up assets at low prices.)
It also requires a great deal of political will. Will that, in Afghanistan and Iraq, America did not have.
The simultaneous cowardice, foolhardiness, and ignorance of the American political establishment and voters made for a military campaign that was not only highly aggressive, but failed to accomplish all that much for all the blood it spilled.
Something more ideologically imperialistic that sought to convert Iraq and Afghanistan into true, developed democracies, with all the basic underpinnings that required, would have been better. Alternatively, not going at all would have many advantages. Instead we get the worst of both worlds - a willingness to invade without a willingness to see a conversion through to the end, fueled by the naive belief that liberal democracy is the natural state of humanity and will flourish in all soils if it is simply unleashed.
There are, of course, far crueler ways to expand dominion if one has different goals. I will not go over them here. The age of such empires is over, now, and for the better.
The Canadian experience is that it’s very hard to care about Columbus discourse but you still see almost as much of it you would if you were an American.
It’s an incredibly annoying topic because it transparently has nothing whatsoever to do with Columbus – the pro side just uplifts him as an avatar of American mythology, but despite their fixation on enumerating the (actual, serious) evils Columbus committed, the anti side also only cares about him in that capacity, it’s just that they propound a competing mythology where America is evil. (This is a far more accurate mythology, but that owes less to the wisdom of the American left than the fact that classifying any large, powerful nation as evil has a fantastic ROC curve.) Not even the people whose ancestors were killed by Columbus care about Columbus specifically! He’s a stand-in for genocidal American colonialism on the whole.
Anyway, this is bothersome because the putative issue of “let’s not honour Columbus since he sucks” is trivially solved by replacing him with a better avatar of positive American mythology. It’d be pretty easy to get bipartisan support with a good alternative! It’s not like with Washington; nobody is really that attached to the guy. However, the kind of people criticizing Columbus don’t want to do that because their actual goal is to dismantle positive American mythology entirely, so the entire thing is just this obnoxiously indirect parable about the moral worth of America staged using a Columbus hand-puppet. Just talk about America directly and stop beating around the bush! (While I disagree with their political takes more often than not, @mitigatedchaos had a similar comment about Lee today that was fairly on-point.)
Oh, just wait until I tie it into how to carry out a form of expansionistic foreign policy. You’ll regret posting this then.
And thus, our dear local anon suggests the establishment of Anarcho-Mafiaism.
Reactionary, or avant-garde Progressive?
We leave it to our readers to decide.
So I guess in theory you could carve out an exception allowing nonconsensual human sacrifice on religious grounds. That seems like sort of s major loophole.
In practice, it would be deemed a fake, rather than real, religious conviction, since the religion would be too new or not have enough popular support.
…or else it would undermine state power, and so the actors in the system would be forced to change it.
Naturally, I don’t believe in pure freedom of religion.
obviously yes there are differences, but if what you’re asking is are those differences categorical then basically no, states and mafias are (or can be) more or less divergent versions of the same type of system
i would point to scale as a significant factor here. when something is the size of most states it doesn’t make sense to run it like a mafia anymore; states that operate on the same basis of personal relationships, patronage, and rent extraction as mafias do (lacking, in effect, the professional bureaucracy and rule of law characteristic of modern states) tend not to be regarded as especially well-functioning
conversely, however, mafias tend to be very good at providing passable ‘state’ services on the local level, either in communities that have slipped through the cracks of the state or where the state has ceased to exist altogether (as in a civil war context)
I feel that the dudes getting super-excited about the memesauce didn’t really get Rick & Morty. In an episode of R&M, people like them would be one of the jokes that’s about the nihilistic nature of human experience.
…or maybe that’s the point?
I miss the days when I had a lot of leftist followers who would send my own posts to me through the tumblr messaging system and demand I explain it to them
Just be me and be politically inscrutable to all of your readers at once, without explanation.
Nah, actually I was thinking that there are lots of other southerners we could choose from for replacement statues, specifically ones that weren’t all “rah rah slavery” and so on. Some of them could be a lot more modern, others from before the war, and so on. U.S. founding fathers from those states would be the ideal option for many of them - it reaffirms membership in the US, still has lots of historical weight, and so on.
They shouldn’t be more black than the proportional share of the population, though.
The goal here is to provide an alternative, positive regional identity for the white southerners that is not rooted in the racism inherent to the Confederacy. (And the racism was inherent - at least one governor or whatever went on about how yeah, this was about slavery, and yeah, this was about “the inferiority of the negro race” and so on.)
History is big. There is a lot that can be chosen from when we decide what to emphasize. There are many people, with many stories. With this, we could step sideways.
(The exception is generic confederate soldier statues, which should stay. After all, the side that wins the war usually thinks it’s the ethical side, since most factions fighting a war think they’re the ethical side, so removing them just means legitimizing the idea of removing monuments to soldiers of losing sides in general.)
However, I don’t think the capital-L Left, in broad strokes, wants the southern whites to have a positive southern identity. I think it wants to crush them in order to celebrate itself and its righteousness.
It doesn’t like the founding fathers, either. It doesn’t like the United States of America.
It could celebrate the power of the very ideals this nation’s founders espoused as the source of some of the very power that overturned the cruelty they allowed at this nation’s founding. But most of those people were white men, so they won’t.
China really needs a decent land tax to ease the housing bubble, encourage investors to rent out their properties instead of leaving them vacant, and provide local governments with badly needed funds so they’re not so dependent on land sales and loans that will never be paid back.
was I expecting to see “Xi Jinping liked this” or something
I’m definitely not Xi Jinping or in contact with Xi Jinping. Don’t worry, Argumate. You’re safe, for now.
It’s possible for a dead character to have great influence on the plot without being undead or some other form of not-really-dead.
In real life, such things are echoes, or mechanisms setup beforehand.
Many years ago, I observed a discussion between an acquaintance and his father. The father said that the shows the son watched did not deal with death. The son said that Dragon Ball Z did deal with death - that the characters had died at such and such time, and were trapped in the spirit realm. But the father said that, as those characters came back, and so on, that they hadn’t really died, not in the way we understood it, and that the work didn’t really deal with death.
…how difficult is it to become a Girl Scouts troop leader? Just wondering.
Like… fuck it. I’m good with kids, I’m decent at teaching, I’m WFR trained, I know how to camp and organize activities…. sure, I might not be the sort of person most parents would allow their impressionable young children around, but Girl Scouts as an organization is famously accepting, so maybe I could form a troop that Actually Does Things someday.
just don’t say things like “I demand minions” and you’ll be fine
You don’t say things like that. You get henchmen through a combination of admiration of your enormous ambition and force of will, exploitable personal flaws among your henchmen, and money. Begging for henches is just bottom tier, the incel of supervillainy.
everyone is capable of being bigoted and aggressive. women can be misogynistic, men can be misandristic, homosexuals can be homophobic, and so on and so forth
I am capable of doing significant harm to myself. everyone is capable of doing significant harm to themselves
therefore, the only truly safe space is empty
No Lives Matter
East Asian people shamelessly adopting/stealing (a debate to be had there) black American music is a huge growth industry right now. The Teriyaki Boyz were way ahead of their time.
Ironically you could argue that they’ve also appropriated the act of appropriating black culture, because that’s a foundation of white American culture
Do you believe in cultural intellectual property rights, or not?
That’s the real question posed.
Don’t worry, Progressives, Leftists, et al.
The Republicans will never actually take my advice on healthcare.
Therefore your eventual single-payer system is practically assured. In like 4-8 years.
No one hates anime as a hobby
this anon is proof that’s not the case
the people critiquing arent the problem
Hey remember when that 17 year old got called a pedophile and run off this site for liking dragon maid and Nico Yazawa
remember when this has happened multiple times
remember how the only reason you’re sending this to me is because I pointed out that assuming “the majority” of anime fans, especially male, disliked Boku no Pico because it’s gay not because it’s child porn is like…the exact kind of weirdo-logic leaps you guys make to rationalize sending suicide bait to other kids on this site
No one hates anime as a hobby
this anon is proof that’s not the case
the people critiquing arent the problem
Hey remember when that 17 year old got called a pedophile and run off this site for liking dragon maid and Nico Yazawa
remember when this has happened multiple times
remember how the only reason you’re sending this to me is because I pointed out that assuming “the majority” of anime fans, especially male, disliked Boku no Pico because it’s gay not because it’s child porn is like…the exact kind of weirdo-logic leaps you guys make to rationalize sending suicide bait to other kids on this site
First, we’re going to need a lot of money…
shit you’re right
no, they have suicidal utopian ideals, very different.
a bit less restraint than the Bush II White House is really not something you want to wake up to in January 2017 is it
If any president is going to be worse than W, it’ll be Donald. And yet, he hasn’t managed it yet, much though Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers would like to protest that he has, largely due to his aura of unclassiness. But I’m gonna use the Iraq war benchmark: If he can start a disaster that big, or accumulate that level of damage in total, then I’ll put him into consideration. And he may yet do so; I wouldn’t put it past him. But we’ll see. If he manages it, it will take some real effort on his part.
AL Gore also pushed for the Iraq war in the general election
He wouldn’t have been willing to pay the ideological price to transform Iraq into a Real Democracy, either.
This half-measures imperialism is really annoying and really deadly. I probably need to hire someone to go around and smack whoever still thinks it was a good idea.
It’s worth pointing out that we’re still occupying Germany and Japan, however technically.
The functional American system is basically “We don’t leave. Ever”.
The dysfunctional one is “We leave a decade after we ought to have”.
If Iraq turned out as well as Germany or Japan, would it really matter if we still had airbases there from which we could project power?
I mean, certainly in the sense of regional politics it would, but as something to complain about, I don’t think so, it’s easily a price worth paying.
a bit less restraint than the Bush II White House is really not something you want to wake up to in January 2017 is it
If any president is going to be worse than W, it’ll be Donald. And yet, he hasn’t managed it yet, much though Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers would like to protest that he has, largely due to his aura of unclassiness. But I’m gonna use the Iraq war benchmark: If he can start a disaster that big, or accumulate that level of damage in total, then I’ll put him into consideration. And he may yet do so; I wouldn’t put it past him. But we’ll see. If he manages it, it will take some real effort on his part.
AL Gore also pushed for the Iraq war in the general election
He wouldn’t have been willing to pay the ideological price to transform Iraq into a Real Democracy, either.
This half-measures imperialism is really annoying and really deadly. I probably need to hire someone to go around and smack whoever still thinks it was a good idea.
ok can anyone explain how the fresh heck is Buzzfeed on fast track TOWARDS becoming a trustworthy and insightful source? it’s always the other way round
I’m assuming this is in reference to their long posts which, as far as I can tell, have been really in depth and interesting
I’m sure there’s a reason for it, but the dichotomy of Serena Williams OBLITERATES this Sexist RacistFuckface (followed by a mild rebuke) vs an investigative article exposing the struggles in punishing sexual assault at HBCUs is really weird
I’ve just read a long post about how they uncovered a massive amount of fraud (45 pages of errors (not 45 pages with errors in them)), in a respected nutritional scientist’s body of work and buzzfeed is literally the last place I’d expected to read that on
You aren’t the only one that has noticed this.
Well, not that I actually read Buzzfeed on purpose, but I’ve stumbled on a long-form article or two from there and been pleasantly surprised.
I suspect that the answer to the puzzle is that there is demand for long-form, investigative journalism. There just isn’t enough demand for it. So Buzzfeed and the others are converging on the “optimal” (for money-making) ratio of junk listicles to actual journalism.
