TheSanSabaSongbird

@TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id

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TheSanSabaSongbird,

Also, throw massive temper tantrum about “crisis at the border,” but refuse to do anything about it. If anyone is wondering, the answer is no, the Republicans do not want to make a deal with Biden on border policy; it’s way too politically convenient for them to have it both ways.

They want to use it as a campaign talking point and as a political cudgel, while also refusing to do anything about it. Also they can’t give Biden anything that might look like a win, no matter how much the American people want it.

Unfortunately they have right wing media on their side so their constituents will never understand the two-faced game they’re playing.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

In Ore-gon no less! By the way, Oregonians love it when you say it that way.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

Almost no one actually needs a full-size pickup. The only real exception is if you regularly haul heavy loads on trailers, but that doesn’t apply to most full-size pickup owners. Most people buy them because it’s part of an image they’ve been sold through the advertising industry.

I drive a 20-year-old mid-sized pickup with an extended bed and there has never been a single time when it hasn’t been perfectly adequate for all my needs. It’s also a 4-wheel-drive, but since I only ever use that feature on snow and ice and rough unpaved roads and am not an off-road enthusiast, it’s not lifted and doesn’t tower over other vehicles in traffic.

Today 4 years ago, Dr. Li Wenliang warned of a suspected SARS patient in a Wuhan WeChat group. Soon later, he was arrested for “making false comments on the Internet about unconfirmed SARS outbreak.” (harakahdaily.net)

Dr. Wenliang’s message went viral, becoming the earliest warning of what we now know today as Covid-19. He returned to work, but contracted Covid from a patient, and died on February 7, 2020....

TheSanSabaSongbird,

This place is swarming with idiots. I think it’s an age thing. There are a lot of young people on Lemmy and they tend to be very wedded to viewing the world in strictly ideological terms with little nuance and no real appreciation for how complex the real world actually is. As a result, it’s almost impossible to be critical of anything without being subjected to pointless and condescending whataboutism.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

Dang! Bill Westlake no less! Me and Bill Westlake fist-fought each other in junior high school and again shortly after we’d both graduated from highschool in our shitty northern California ag-town.

We hated each other back then, but I feel nothing but brotherly feels for him now, 30 years later.

I hope you are thriving Bill Westlake. I hope you have done well in life and I feel no animosity toward you whatsoever.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

Also, 50k words is pretty short for a novel. It’s more of a novella.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

Some ridiculous percentage of all currently publishing novelists in the US have an MFA in literature or creative writing or something similar. If this makes you feel a little suspicious about how the publishing industry actually works, it should. It’s very much a closed ecosystem that’s all about recycling the tried and true and that is highly risk averse in terms of straying from the norm. This is why it’s almost impossible for “regular” people to get a novel published unless they self-publish.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

Right, whereas we see them as deeply stupid and naive.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

When I was a kid in the 80s, the language my state used was that the yellow light means “prepare to stop.”

Not sure if still true. Much has changed since then.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

Not really. Poe’s Law just states that extremist positions are often impossible to distinguish from satire. It doesn’t say that there’s no such thing as satire.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

I think it’s way worse. At least on Reddit you can find smaller niche subs that are full of serious-minded, intelligent and well-informed users who have no time for pure amateur hour bullshit. R/askhistorians would be the premiere example, but there are a lot of others.

It’s only on the big lightly-moderated subreddits that your signal-to-noise ratio really goes to shit, whereas all of Lemmy seems to be awash in teenage level discourse.

Hopefully it gets better as its user sse expands and diversifies into more tightly-focused and heavily-moderated instances.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

Nope. There’s nothing special about Americans just like there’s nothing special about any nation or large group of people. You have to be deeply ignorant of history to think otherwise. We’re all the same species and when things play out in specific ways it’s always for a similar set of reasons and circumstances.

As Dan Carlin would say, “it’s a human thing.” You think this kind of insanity can’t happen in your country because it hasn’t yet. But you’re wrong. It can and has happened, many many times throughout history, in various forms, all over the world.

Again, Americans aren’t special and you have to be deeply stupid and/or ignorant to think otherwise.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

My wife’s old iMac over here. It’s lightning fast too.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

You still have the problem of misaligned incentives together with the fact that the only way to mitigate it is through coercion. This is why all communism inevitably leads to authoritarianism. The strength of capitalism is that it can absorb and indeed is designed to allow for the fact that humanity’s cooperative impulse --due to the fact that we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to live in small bands of about 30 to 150 people-- cannot work at the level of the modern nation state.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

They take draconian measures because they’re held hostage by one of the world’s most powerful and effective crime families. One only needs to look at South Korea to see that it doesn’t have to be this way.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

There is a reason, it’s just not the one you think. Hint; it’s about empire, not communism.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

It’s a problem because people don’t feel like stakeholders when they don’t have a say and can’t participate in their system of governance. This in turn means that they aren’t incentivized to willingly participate and have to be forced or indoctrinated, both of which are violations of human rights.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

This is true, but agriculture is a trap in the sense that once we adopted it, there was no turning back.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

I think it’s fair to criticize Israeli tactics and overall strategy, but most of the blanket condemnation you see on Lemmy is indicative of pure moral confusion and/or an unfamiliarity with historical and contemporary facts. That the outrage is so selective --it’s never applied to other similar and even unprovoked civilian massacres-- tells us everything we need to know about how well-thought-out it is.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

In OP’s defense, is it possible that they were referencing the Xi as Winnie the Pooh meme? Pooh is in fact yellow and is ostensibly an animal.

I dunno, I wasn’t there for the larger context, but it seems at least possible that this is what happened.

I will take my downvotes now.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

Nice! I’m a Telecaster man as well! Me and Jesus.

TheSanSabaSongbird,

Terrorism is a tactic, so no, not all “freedom fighters” are terrorists. There are and have been throughout history many guerrilla groups that don’t use terrorism tactics but that could still be called “freedom fighters.”

TheSanSabaSongbird,

100 percent spot on. It’s also a huge part of how they lost such a ridiculous chunk of blue collar workers in spite of labor leadership being solidly Democrat for decades.

Poor whites and rural hicks became the only working-class people it was still socially acceptable to openly mock in public. This was noticed and exploited by the right with dire consequences for our current political landscape.

Of course, a ton of other variables were at play as well, but the certainty that so-called “coastal elites” held them and everything they valued in contempt played a huge role in convincing blue-collar and middle-class rural whites to vote against their economic interests.

Now here we are.

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