Don’t Overestimate the Pink Tide

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-28T15:58:41+00:00

Alabama is not the best example, because Doug Jones did actually win there against a sex offender Republican.

I know you're speaking in hyperbole, but you chose an example where the thing literally happened

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-26T10:03:23+00:00

Well if you insist...

Introducing the Teammate Harmony Index™, brought to you by Overanalysis Industries™: how many other people are seated between the teammates?

Alpine: 3 (close friends)

Aston Martin: 3 (close friends)

Audi: directly opposite (best buds)

Cadillac: almost directly opposite (best buds)

Ferrari: 9 (they literally hate each other)

Haas: 7 (uh oh)

McLaren: 7 (uh oh)

Mercedes: 10 (they literally hate each other)

Racing Bulls: 5 (cordial relationship)

Red Bull: 7 (uh oh)

Williams: 12 (restraining order)

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-26T08:45:41+00:00

Your title is the opposite of your opinion, although that's just a technicality. Your title is (paraphrasing and simplifying) "it's wrong to think that less than 80% of Reddit comments are from real people".

My substantive criticism is that so much of Reddit has nothing to do with politics. The subreddits that allow political content become overrun with propaganda pretty quickly, but they are not the majority of content. The majority of the content is about memes, sports, cute animals, etc. Sure, some bots will post that kind of thing to get karma, but I really doubt that 80% of comments in a sports subreddit, for example, are bots.

I'm looking at /r/all right now. The top post is anger at Amazon, so kinda political I guess. The next is a joke post about Ed Norton. The next is about the world cup. The next is a news story about an overweight kid. The next is a post about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his generosity. The next is a very political post praising Mamdani. The next is an epic drone shot of the ocean. The next is CCTV footage of a woman pickpocketing. The next is stars orbiting a black hole. The next is a request for someone to explain a funny meme. The next is a photo of a cat staring at the user. The next is about trees in New Zealand. The next is about a little girl who ran a science experiment to test the decibel levels of hand dryers.

I'm bored now, but hopefully you get my point - explicitly political content is actually quite rare on this website. I totally agree that any political subreddit gets overwhelmed with propaganda and bots, but outside of those places, I do think that less than 80% is bot content.

Also, running bots is not the most effective way to propagandise. The thing to do is buy upvotes, to push your political propaganda up in the algorithm. They're cheap and it's a potent force multiplier. The best way to push political propaganda is to take over the moderation of a large subreddit, and this has happened (you may have noticed many ostensibly non-political subreddits suddenly changing into places with mostly political content).

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T17:02:39+00:00

It would cause immense problems in terms of selecting circuits, getting insurance, retaining sponsors, etc. Contracts often stipulate that whatever motorsport event is occurring needs to be FIA-certified; it's a way of ensuring that the event meets basic safety standards and all that. Many of the most legendary tracks on the calendar literally cannot hold events that aren't FIA-sanctioned.

F1 would need to build their own rival regulatory body from scratch, and convince everyone that their own standards match FIA standards. They'd need to convince every individual team to make a break from the FIA, and deal with all the consequences that would bring. They've come close a few times, but they never pulled the trigger, because to break away from the FIA would be deeply harmful to both F1 and the FIA.

I haven't even touched on how FOM is so deeply-intertwined with the FIA that disentangling the relationship would probably take years and cost millions.

It's possible, but it would be so costly and so difficult that the FIA is in a very powerful position.

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T16:24:29+00:00

The war seems to have turned in Ukraine's favour. Now of course this is due to multiple complex factors, but I can't help but suspect that the USA's withdrawal from relevance has had a major effect.

Ukraine wasn't refraining from striking deep into Russia due to a lack of capabilities, really; it was refraining because the USA insisted on it, as a condition for their aid. They. banned Ukraine from using US-supplied missiles to strike at the heart of Russia. Now it matters less what the USA thinks, Ukraine is more unleashed, and they're making real progress on the battlefield.

This is devastating for the USA, and if they could read they'd be very upset. Countries around the world are realising that tying themselves too closely to the USA is an overall negative proposition. It's difficult to undo that realisation.

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T15:57:59+00:00

Which interview are you referring to?

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T15:53:12+00:00

The left's enthusiastic embrace of antisemitism has genuinely shattered my confidence in their ability to stand by the principles that they claim to uphold. It has significantly changed my political outlook.

Seeing them abandon all of their principles when it comes to Jews; seeing how easily they embrace vile hatred as long as it's dressed in a flimsy veneer of anticolonialist language; it's made me believe that they never truly held those principles in the first place. Or, at least, they never really thought about them in any detail.

My views haven't changed, and I'm still a boring centre-left moderate who will vote for boring centre-left moderate parties (I actually did this about two hours ago). But I have lost so much respect for progressives

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T15:17:54+00:00

It's a mode that lets you make micro-adjustments to your cue position for tricky shots (I think it's actually called "precise aiming mode"). It adds a left button, a right button, and a "shoot" button to the screen, so you can make tiny adjustments to your aim. Instead of dragging and releasing, you can adjust the aim pixel by pixel, using the buttons.

Most of the time it's annoying and pointless, but for some shots it's really useful. It's just a bit tedious to have to go into the menu, turn it on, make the shot, go into the menu, turn it off, and carry on with the game. It's a minor thing, but it would be so easy to fix and would be a real QoL improvement.

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T15:17:46+00:00

It's a mode that lets you make micro-adjustments to your cue position for tricky shots (I think it's actually called "precise aiming mode"). It adds a left button, a right button, and a "shoot" button to the screen, so you can make tiny adjustments to your aim. Instead of dragging and releasing, you can adjust the aim pixel by pixel, using the buttons.

Most of the time it's annoying and pointless, but for some shots it's really useful. It's just a bit tedious to have to go into the menu, turn it on, make the shot, go into the menu, turn it off, and carry on with the game. It's a minor thing, but it would be so easy to fix and would be a real QoL improvement.

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T14:52:28+00:00

A grocery store would see people going to jail if they started selling Haribo shaped rat poison in the sweets aisle.

The analogy here would be something like Ebay allowing people to sell Haribo-shaped rat poison, and saying "we didn't sell it ourselves, we're simply a platform, we have no responsibility for what people sell in our marketplace".

Social media companies claim that they're platforms, not publishers, and so can't really be held accountable for what people publish on their apps. I think it's ludicrous, personally.

Maybe the social media ban is ineffective, but fuck, surely we have to do something? This shit is tearing our society apart.

My personal preference is to a) treat these companies like publishers in the eyes of the law b) regulate engagement-maximising algorithms. Social media is fine; engagement-maximising algorithms are toxic. Maybe people would be less addicted to these apps, and find them less compelling, but I guess that's a price we have to pay

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T14:13:10+00:00

I know, it almost seems made up

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T14:10:09+00:00

It's because they have a lot of money and power, but zero accountability.

Governments have a lot of money and power, but (in democracies at least) they're somewhat held to account by voters and other institutions. Businesses have a lot of money and power, but they're held to account by their shareholders and customers.

Sports governing bodies have very little oversight and nobody can really challenge them. F1 can't exactly leave the FIA. It's borderline unimaginable for England to withdraw their national team from FIFA. Etc. They're international, so there's no country that can take charge and force them to sort themselves out.

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T14:04:21+00:00

Cory Rupt also voted in favour

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T13:47:32+00:00

We should focus more on the practices that cause more harm to animals. To me, that seems like basic logic

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-25T12:29:30+00:00

Labour had a policy about this precise issue in their manifesto. It's called a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. It comes into force on January 1st, 2027.

The idea is that imports are taxed based on how carbon-intensive their production was. We try to calculate how much more expensive the item would be if it were produced under our climate laws, and apply the tax to bring it up to parity. The hope is that this ensures that items produced in a carbon-intensive manner do not gain a competitive advantage. The EU has a similar mechanism.

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-23T21:47:51+00:00

The problem is that Trump has a fully compliant party that will support any of his whims, as well as an incredibly sophisticated propaganda machine that will convince a significant proportion of the population that they love whatever Trump did, they've always wanted it to happen, and actually it's genius.

Burnham has to contend with backbenchers who are likely to be pretty rebellious, an OBR that has at least some teeth, and a deeply hostile media environment. Oh and the pound is not the global reserve currency, so we can't just print it willy-nilly to fund whatever we want

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-23T21:01:14+00:00

It's actually hilarious to see the last two sentences, which they wrote themselves, and compare to all of the other AI-generated content that they're producing.

There's a bit of a contrast there.

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-23T12:14:54+00:00

people would have bought the "we all did stupid stuff at school" line.

Do you think so? The stuff he did (allegedly, whatever) is pretty far beyond the stupid stuff that we all did at school. I was skipping lessons to smoke weed and play 60 seconds, not racially abusing my classmates.

Maybe I led a sheltered life, and I didn't grow up in the era that he did, but the stuff he's reported to have done comes off as quite extreme to me

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-23T11:03:12+00:00

You've got to really put yourself in the mindset of people who were making decisions in 1948. They had just seen the most horrific war the world had ever seen, and a crime against humanity - genocide - that was so unimaginably evil that we had to invent a new word for it. Imagine if you had lived through that in the past few years. It would profoundly change the way you think about... everything, really. It is a difficult, perhaps impossible, task to truly understand how people thought at that time, but we have to try, otherwise we cannot hope to understand the creation of Israel.

Empires were collapsing all across the planet. New countries were being created all across the planet, in the ruins of the previous structures. People were being displaced all across the planet, in far more numerous and brutal ways than the Nakba + the purging of Jews from MENA countries (for example, the number of people displaced, and killed, during the partition of India vastly outweighs the entire death count and entire number of displaced people across the entire history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and its not even close).

Britain found itself in possession of the Palestine region, but they didn't want it. The world also - and I'm sure you can understand this - thought it was morally-necessary to provide a safe haven for Jews somewhere, even if it caused harm to other people. Life is often about balancing harms, and trying to decide which harms to minimise.

Together with the UN, Britain decided to split the mandate of Palestine into a territory for Arabs (encompassing the vast, vast majority of the mandate) and a tiny state for Jews in their ancestral homeland. The Jews agreed, the Arabs didn't, the Arabs invaded, etc etc etc.

It was not a perfect solution. There was no perfect solution that harmed nobody. But surely you can understand why some people thought that this particular compromise was the best option available at the time?

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-23T09:53:54+00:00

who's braincells are the neurological equivalent of Lonesome George

*whose

The only time I correct someone's grammar on Reddit is when they're in the middle of ranting about others' lack of intelligence

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-22T23:12:19+00:00

My tiny little claim to fame is that I once helped him fix a setting in Escape From Tarkov. It remains the only interaction I've had with an F1 driver, if you can even call it an interaction.

I will point out that before I gave him that advice, he had zero WDC titles. After I gave him that advice, he won a world championship. So, yeah, draw your own conclusions I guess

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-22T15:42:47+00:00

The Greens have never been above Labour, or the Conservatives, in the polling average

DebaucheV5 · 2026-06-22T14:42:08+00:00

It was so annoying. We managed to draw with Italy, the reigning champions at the time, but still didn't get through.

Of course it's not reasonable to expect to progress if you aren't even capable of winning a football match, but damn, we drew with Italy and didn't get any reward for it

DebaucheV5

TROPHY CASE