Informal poll: having lived with Trump as president for ~four months now, how many people actually think we’d be better off with Pence?
Followup question: would Trump’s impeachment make it more or less likely for the Republican Party to win reelection in 2020?
No. Less. But my estimate for re-election declined to 40%.
Need to get someone to promise to eat something ridiculous if Donald Trump get impeached. A hunk of granite maybe? Maybe some of the Swedish rotted fish thing?
can i volunteer to eat abstract concepts
@collapsedsquid Unless you can get on national television and make a good spectacle of it there somehow, no.
Call Xi Jinping. I will eat the share of the national debt controlled by China by transmuting it into bearer bonds printed on tortillas.
@argumate is this your thing now
WE WILL CONTINUE TO POST PIXELATED ART OF QUESTIONABLE QUALITY (AT RANDOM INTERVALS BETWEEN TWO HOURS AND SIX MONTHS) UNTIL OUR DEMANDS ARE MET
ADDITIONAL DEMANDS
Now, the original posts here are a joke, but…
(1) A group selected from such high IQ people, including one pool that has direct experience with US politics, would probably outperform Donald Trump, and they could do some real data-crunching using all that computer hardware to develop the kinds of new policies we need. Of course that’s not an actually practical hiring-for-President mechanism, but performance in other sectors of government might be improved by such things.
(2) Access to defensive military hardware is relevant to the 2nd amendment and will continue to be as we go farther into the 21st century. Part of the very idea of arming the populace is that it introduces last resort accountability.
(3) Detroit being put under the rule of a gifted businessman with flexibility in policies could radically alter its economic fate in ways that, under the current path, are not feasible.
(4) Martial Arts training as an option would likely increase interest in Physical Education and help lower obesity, in addition to increasing national defense readiness.
(5) National identities being useful doesn’t mean they’re immutable and vice-versa. The entire political infrastructure in Palestine has this whole opposition to Israel element built into it, and I’m not sure who the Palestinian identity is really benefiting anymore. Jordan and Egypt are both faring better and would likely improve overall conditions in those areas without them being owned by Israel. Of course, there’s probably some reason this won’t work / catch I’m unaware of.
(6) California isn’t actually a monolithic blue state, and if they want to have sanctuary cities and the like so much… why not let them kinda do it, but torpedo the effect on voting demographics so there’s no incentive to undermine the national immigration policy just to win more at politics?
Actual racists won’t like the policy, but the opposition to immigration is not driven purely by racism despite what many proponents say.
(7-1) A lot of policing police focuses on individuals, however, if the entire police department could be effectively fired at once, that provides organization-level incentives to use best practices better policy. Costs of externalities, and public benefits, are worked into the bid so that it isn’t flat lowest-cost. For instance, add $500,000 virtual price to the bid for every police-related fatality provides organization-level incentive to provide more training / be less gung-ho about the use of guns.
Alternatively, just make them take out insurance that pays into an offset fund.
(7-2) Cops need to be physically fit for their jobs, even though counting individual donuts is overkill. If a cop in this country is bulky, it should be because he’s built like a weightlifter.
(8) If this shift occurred, it would make both of their policy angles less stupid.
Donald Trump has spent years telling outrageous lies. He’s continued to do so since assuming office, even lying about obviously verifiable things like what he’s tweeted about or the size of his inauguration crowd.
He is attacking the idea that truth matters, and trying to make people give up on telling the difference between the truth and a lie. This is dangerously disoriented.
In order to stay oriented, we need to care what’s true. This is easier said than done. In the short term, bullshit is often much more politically convenient than the truth. In the long term, if we create a world in which the truth doesn’t matter, we will end up defenseless.
We need to keep in mind that being on the right side doesn’t make everything someone might say true. Good people can tell lies. Good people can get things wrong. Their goodness doesn’t make the lie true.
Being marginalized doesn’t mean that someone always knows what they’re talking about. Being oppressed doesn’t make people infallible; being wrong doesn’t make someone privileged.
Similarly, not every rumor about a bad person is accurate. Lies told about a bad person are still lies. (And not everyone who has a bad reputation is actually a bad person.)
Be careful about spreading rumors. Learn to recognize fake news, and avoid spreading it. If something doesn’t sound true to you, ask for citations or investigate. Everyone can be wrong, and you don’t have to believe anyone without being persuaded that they are right. Evidence matters, arguments matter. (And being a good person isn’t a substitute for either.)
You can’t fight evil with bullshit. In order to fight evil, we have to care what’s true.
The rivals have been lying/bullshitting/misrepresenting/omitting a lot in their attacks on Trump. Every time I go and investigate one of the claims, I come back less trusting of the media and less trusting of the left and liberals, instead of more.
But it’s growing less surprising every day, since why was I ever foolish enough to think the Left and Liberals weren’t every bit the truth-apathetic political operatives as their rivals, when correct only correct by coincidence and not by process?
And I don’t mean to say that Trump is great, because he isn’t, but one can’t beat him on his level. He lives there.
@argumate is this your thing now
WE WILL CONTINUE TO POST PIXELATED ART OF QUESTIONABLE QUALITY (AT RANDOM INTERVALS BETWEEN TWO HOURS AND SIX MONTHS) UNTIL OUR DEMANDS ARE MET
ADDITIONAL DEMANDS
@argumate is this your thing now
WE WILL CONTINUE TO POST PIXELATED ART OF QUESTIONABLE QUALITY (AT RANDOM INTERVALS BETWEEN TWO HOURS AND SIX MONTHS) UNTIL OUR DEMANDS ARE MET
America has Donald Trump, Britain has Nigel Farage, and Australia has the one and only Pauline Hanson, a fiery redhead who rose to prominence in politics twenty years ago (back when a very different Hanson sung MMMbop).
She gave fiery diatribes about deporting all the Asians and dodged accusations of xenophobia by honestly not knowing the meaning of the word, all until she was voted out and briefly jailed for fraud.
Now she’s back! And she… hasn’t changed a bit actually, except the Chinese community can breathe easily knowing the Muslims are going to be taking the bulk of her attention for the time being.
Of all the media franchises we had to reboot in 2k16, why this one.
and now she’s after autistic kids because hey why not.
I, for one, would welcome Australia being ruled by an Asian lesbian cyborg.
Though admittedly that isn’t a very controversial opinion on Tumblr.
Anonymous asked:
collapsedsquid answered:
Standard answer is that don’t perceive it so much as rich v poor as educated coastal vs uneducated inland. He sells himself as an uneducated inlander, so that’s what think of him as.
Or to put it another way, every time a newspaper writes an article bitching about Donald Trump putting ketchup on a steak, he gets more powerful.
Anonymous asked:
wirehead-wannabe answered:
Honestly, I mostly agree with you that this is the explanation. There’s kind of a pattern where liberal thinkpiece writers will either try to explain the Trump phenomenon in terms of one or a few components of these things, or else think of it as a result of a bunch of independent factors that add up to produce it. In reality, Trump voters seem to believe in the entire narrative, and it seems like a mistake to address it as though it’s merely the sum of its parts. “Illegal immigrants come to America, take our jobs, dilute our culture, bring crime and drugs, spur social atomization, and collude with the left to keep us down, all while shipping what few jobs are left overseas and imposing stupid and/or malicious regulations on us to benefit the bureaucrats over the little guy” is an entire worldview that, despite how silly it might seem to us liberals (except for maybe the part about cronyism), a large fraction of the country Actually Believes. Economics lesson about the Iowa Car Crop don’t seem to be helping much, and I’m not sure how much we can get Trump voters to trust us when we tell them that the narrative is faulty when there’s a genuine value difference in how much we care about preserving Red Tribe culture and helping the ingroup versus trying to help everyone by being globalist/universalist.
The only way to convince them would be to change ideologies.
When the plan is to prioritize foreigners over them, replace them with foreigners to obtain a permanent political majority, erase their culture, encourage social atomization, remove as many social rules as possibly feasible, bow to foreign cultures that are actually more oppressive in the name of “inclusiveness” and “diversity”, and abolish nations, then why on Earth would they go along with the plan?
The Left doesn’t want them to have a place that is theirs anymore.
I don’t know what to say.
There was another likely terrorist attack in the UK today. At least 19 people died.
Culture is real! It isn’t just aesthetics! Religion is ideology, much like Communism, and it can be as dangerous. It isn’t just the shape of the building you pray in! People actually believe in this stuff!
Polygamy practiced by normies is polygyny, and polygyny is bad and patriarchal. Some cultures practice cousin marriage at much higher rates than what we consider normal, because their religion says it’s okay, and over multiple generations this has pretty serious effects that can alter the cost of healthcare. Having a religious threat to kill people that leave the religion is cheating when it comes to competing in the metaphorical marketplace of ideas.
Culture is not individual! Culture is not linear!
These things are not accidents!
Anonymous asked:
theunitofcaring answered:
Oh wow.
I want to be clear that I think I’d be a pretty bad president. I wouldn’t be worse than Donald Trump, admittedly, but I think being president is legitimately a really hard job which you can kill billions of people by screwing up badly enough and kill millions of people just by not thinking to ask the right questions or appoint the right people. And I don’t know the right questions or the right people. I don’t even necessarily know how to find them, it’s not like ‘interviewing people and determining whether they are competent at federal policy’ is a skillset I have.
I think like @ozymandias271 I probably call Obama and explain what has happened and ask him for suggestions and take them unless they involve bombing people, which I am not going to do even though becoming president seems to mysteriously make people conclude it’s a good idea. And instead of spending our foreign aid bribing people we should probably spend it stamping out malaria and neglected tropical diseases. And maybe I could try to wiggle Trump’s position on immigration around to the stance that we should have an arrangement like Canada’s where communities can raise money to sponsor a refugee and help their integration.
And of course throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture and developing carbon sequestration and so on and so forth (how much power does the President actually have to do this?) and bringing in people to have debates over things like the minimum wage and healthcare where the end result of the debates will not be ‘I know what to do’ but just ‘I remain horribly uncertain what to do, and I feel terrible about myself for not being smart enough to have it figured out’. Meanwhile I desperately try to replace the VP with someone who will be a good president. As soon as this person is secured I step down.
- to, uh, be a seventy year old man? The rest of my life sounds super unpleasant tbh. I will feel uncomfortable around all of my friends who have made cracks about how ugly Donald Trump is (moral: you shouldn’t body-shame people because what if a random blogger is bodyswapped with the sitting president and feels bad about themself as a result?), and most people I interact with will think I have a long history of sexual assault and this will be, like, incredibly unpleasant and terrifying and make me feel constantly disgusting. And I’ll have a ten year old who thinks I’m his dad, though maybe improving on Trump’s parenting would be as easy as improving on his presidency.
> throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture
Moonshot making an artificially-grown human heart. It’s doable, it’ll go over better than vegetarianism, pave the way for better tissue engineering, and help push us to the far side of the medical care cost curve where costs start coming back down again. So far we’ve been hurting from costs coming down from infinity.
The tissue engineering technology can then be used to develop and mass produce in-vitro meat, which will almost entirely replace animal agriculture within a few generations, to the point at which our descendants will wonder why we didn’t do it sooner.
I mean Donald Trump has married a succession of models, just sayin’.
So either he’s not a true asshole or “assholes don’t get dates” has a ton of mitigating factors, as assholes are well aware.
wasn’t it more like “assholes get all the dates”?
The people who use shaming for people who don’t get dates don’t believe that. They frequently denounce anyone who does. This is the problem with applying moral weight to whether someone is dateable. Even Adolf managed to have dates, but the average dateless slob that is complained about is multiple orders of magnitude less evil. This is because attraction is nearly orthogonal to whether someone is a good person.
