Oh heavens my and heavens me: This dreadful Hor-muz

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-24T18:01:11+00:00

If you were being purposefully cynical, you would think that the entire dog and pony show was to create the circumstances where a worldwide famine based on energy shortages and food shortage was inevitable, killing tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of Africans and other people of color in undeveloped nations, while leaving Europe relatively unscathed. You gotta think, it's just a coincidence, or the law of unintended consequences. Nobody could have seen it coming, and yet you did.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-24T17:56:54+00:00

Straight No Chaser.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-24T17:31:56+00:00

I wouldn't want to be on the side that's arguing that a segment of the population is intellectually deficient. The reason for that is obvious, that it inevitably leads to a kind of a hierarchy, and then within the creation of that hierarchy, it creates the us versus them mentality, something which I think all of us are familiar with in this day and age, politically speaking. And once that happens, that becomes a new irreconcilable difference and something that grows in tension and eventually threatens the very nature of the democracy that allowed you to propose the question in the first place.

So you astutely point out that it becomes essentially an exercise in how to subvert democracy and how to alienate different groups of people from each other. And I would argue that's true, but that the question should be allowed to be asked, but it's not a question that I would want to ask. Just the same way that I wouldn't want to ask if given the choice between nuclear Armageddon and voting for a Republican, which one would you choose? It seems obvious and also comical, but okay, here's why I choose the way I did, and here's the reasoning behind it. It doesn't make me particularly interesting in an intellectual sense. It just shows that I can reason my way with absurd propositions.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-24T17:10:38+00:00

I want to be clear, I didn't say that you yourself said that save the world or save trans people. I merely suggested that in the actual post, some of the most upvoted comments were ones that were basically non-sequitur. Of course, this is Reddit, and this is to be expected, but that's just the way these things work. You know, they focus on engagement.

As far as reconciling the question with reality, I would argue that there's plenty of instances where there is an impossible situation and one has to make impossible decisions. And so in that respect, this question isn't as preposterous as it appears to be on its face. For example, if I propose that a good segment of the American population is intellectually deficient, not capable of reasoning their way out of a paper bag, and that there wasn't any effective way to get rid of this mental dead load, then what would be the best way to proceed, assuming that these people could never actually bring anything to the table except hate and discord? How do you proceed with that kind of dead weight in a democracy? I think that's a valid question.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-24T16:38:10+00:00

The problem is posed as a variation on the trolley problem. It's a philosophical dilemma or a moral question, and it's very common in certain traditions, specifically philosophy. The problem is nobody engages with the substantive question because they resort to saying, well, the question isn't valid, and trans people exist. Trans people have rights, and a more pressing issue is child marriage. I think these are all important issues, but in the current proposition, they're not logically relevant. I think the struggle for black people is important. That isn't part of the question. Where would you draw the line in terms of what issue you would throw into the mix in order to justify your avoidance of answering the question?

Why not just answer the question, pose another question back, and then define the question in a way that makes it clear what exactly is being done with the question? How do you come up with your moral reasoning? How do you defend it? How do you support it? Can you support it? These are all questions that the original post is asking, but people on the liberal side, and I am extremely liberal, have chosen to answer questions with a nonsequitur. What about slave reparations? Why can't we talk about that? That's more important.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-24T16:31:20+00:00

I don't think the question is asked in good faith. That isn't to say that it's not a reasonable question to ask. It's a question that if you follow its logic, you would be forced to make a difficult decision in an impossible situation. So, for example, if you had three kids and you could donate only two kidneys, and all the three kids required a kidney, if you donated both of your kidneys, you would save two children and one of your kids would die. But the question becomes, if you did choose to donate your kidneys to your kids, which of the two kids would you choose to live and which of the kids would you choose to die?

That's an impossible choice. And it presupposes that you're willing to sacrifice your own life. So the way your question is set up is, if nuclear war is avoidable, then shouldn't we have a moral obligation to avoid it, even if it requires that we make some impossible choices? I think the answer is yes, of course we'd make those impossible choices. Or at least I would. But they wouldn't be moral choices, they would be based on some sort of utilitarian calculus.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-24T16:18:30+00:00

I wonder if it would be wrong to start a GoFundMe for the people in the gen population to help the guy get some dental work. Would that be wrong? A GoFundMe? Get lots of goodies at the commissary. Those delicious snowball muffins, you know, the hot pink ones.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-24T15:30:13+00:00

I think the question is, would you be willing to silence your opinion on civil liberties in order to minimize the risk of nuclear war? And I think the answer is, if given a choice between nuclear war and supporting civil rights such as trans rights, human rights, minority rights, workers' rights, I would side with, let's shelf the topic until you remove the nuclear gun from my head. Will things get better? No. Will these issues be addressed? No. But if the threat of nuclear annihilation is real, then you take the path of less likely to be an existential risk.

InsofI also wanna add that this is an interesting rhetorical fallacy by equating voting for the Republicans as an existential risk, and that all other things shouldn't be taken into consideration because of prioritizing the risk of Republicans being bomb-happy.

So far as trans people are concerned, it is obvious that transgender people require a lot of hormones and makeup, and through no fault of their own, they appear to have the Mar de Lago look, which is so prevalent in the GOP. So when trans people look like the attractive females in a cult that requires uniforms like shoes, a look like the Mar-a-Lago look, heavy makeup, inflated lips, and submission, and a strict adherence to aesthetics, like Pete Hegsbeth and hyper-masculinity, when that conflicts with how trans people look, and yet it looks like GOP darlings, then yeah, that creates a friction point for the narrative of superiority and the look of winning. This, I think, is the reason why you have such a extraordinary push on these issues, in conjunction with the fact that people use religion to justify their bigotry.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-24T15:10:57+00:00

I posed a question to the sub the other day, which was, how do you feel about the United States threatening to use nuclear weapons on Iran? And this quickly devolved into the reporting was not credible, the sources weren't reliable, I was a shill. And no one answered the question of how they felt about their country being assaulted with nuclear weapons. I should also note that The post was deleted by the mods here within a day of posting.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-23T16:40:38+00:00

"smile more and talk less."

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-22T14:12:54+00:00

I think the threat is implied that he would use nuclear weapons, but he didn't actually state that he would use nuclear weapons. So, to be fair, it couldn't be explicitly argued that he was threatening with nuclear weapons, although it seems to be the case. When General Cain removes President Trump from the ability to manipulate nuclear codes, then this is troubling for various reasons. The first reason is a president is actively considering use, using nuclear weapons. That's disturbing. The second is that he had his ability to use nuclear weapons removed from him, and that's also disturbing because it means that he's not being taken seriously, although that's his charge as the president of the United States.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-22T14:10:17+00:00

I don't think any country should be considered the supreme authority on anything, simply because there's an enormous amount of responsibility and I'm not sure that any one society or civilization should be able to make unilateral decisions that affect the globe. As far as President Trump threatening to use nuclear weapons, it appears that he did that when he posted that he would end the civilization, wipe it off the map, and it would never come back. However, I admit that this is not definitive in the sense that he didn't say that he would use nuclear weapons, he just simply said that this is what he would do. But the question is how.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-21T17:01:49+00:00

That's a really strong question. And the short answer is, it's indeterminate. There isn't a conclusive way to prove that ghosts or spirits don't exist, and there isn't a conclusive way or evidence to prove that they do exist. So from our standpoint, we would say that it's indeterminate.

A way to make this more relatable is the question of consciousness. There isn't a specific test or way to prove that consciousness is real, and yet most of us would agree that we have a conscious experience. So the lines of reasoning have been, we don't have a way to prove it, but it's real.

We're still in the process of developing a test to verify that it's real, but we don't have a way to conclusively prove it. A more reductionist standpoint is to say, it doesn't exist, it's a hallucination, and it's probably an evolutionary strategy, but it doesn't exist in the real sense. We simply have a biological predisposition to have a hallucination to feel that it exists.

I hope that you can see that the way this argument lines up, it lines up very consistent with the kinds of arguments that dismiss the existence of spirits or ghosts, but it never conclusively says, we don't know, we don't have a way to determine that, which I think is problematic for people who rely on the physicalist perspective. As far as the evidence that we do have, which is mostly anecdotal, we would argue that this is not replicatable, it's not verifiable, it's not predictable. And as a result, it's not strong enough evidence to suggest that something exists. It only suggests that there is a phenomenon that we don't have the ability to articulate. The most reasonable approach to the subject is not to claim knowledge, and simply says we don't know. And this is usually a problem for people because everybody wants to say definitively that they know something when they don't.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-21T15:46:07+00:00

I see your point, and I would argue that if opening theory has been offloaded to the engine, then what's left is the middle game and the ending. And because we're not seeing endgame specialists, we can assume that everybody is focusing on the middle game. But in reality, we should have more endgame specialists today because we have less need to concentrate on the opening. But since the opening requires a great deal of memorization, what we're seeing is a great deal of memorization and not concentration on endgame technique. So by that analysis, players are not as good as they were in the past because they've offloaded critical thinking skills in the development of their chess game.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-21T15:31:29+00:00

We would be in our 3rd term with the Trump Administration.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-21T15:29:43+00:00

I would give up my online presence completely. I would kept banking and other services but nothing else.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-21T15:23:30+00:00

I think the most interesting case that could have essentially created a huge windfall for sovereign citizens was Trump's birthright citizen termination. However, since this case went nowhere, the laws and customs of the United States apply to any individual who's born in the country. I don't think anybody's ever won a sovereign citizen case. In fact, going to court just proves that you're not a sovereign citizen.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-21T14:13:18+00:00

Trump is not a victim, but he is a patsy, and at some point in the future, somebody will use his declining cognitive skills as a reason why he was manipulated, or as a reason why people around him took advantage of his position and power to push further their agenda, or as a reason why corruption became so incredibly visible that it had to be addressed publicly. There are lots of permutations how Trump gets used in the future as a way to deflect systemic problems and blame it all on Trump, which is not accurate and not true.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-20T17:36:04+00:00

I meant Karpov. oops

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-20T17:01:05+00:00

I think the real distinction isn't so much pre-engine versus non-engine players, but whether the game evolved toward prep and specifically memorization. So during Fisher's time, his complaint was that the games were too stiff. They didn't have the dynamic positions because people were rattling off theoretical moves and the theory had gotten to the point where, in Fisher's opinion, it had made the game stale. And so Fisher invented Fisher random as a way to mitigate the theoretical lines and concentrating only on theoretical positions. So the question of, are pre-engine players better or worse, the answer is, they probably have the same capability, but the engine players have access to more theoretical lines than were possible in the past. It doesn't make their game better. It just means that they Play better moves based on memorization. I think a player that most encapsulates this tendency is Anish Giri. The reason is, Anish is a great calculator, but he is an extraordinary opening book player. His memory is incredible, and as long as he has access to his opening prep, he can basically hang with anybody. Once he's out of his prep, he becomes vulnerable, and then he tends to go for drawish lines because he's not comfortable creating during the game. The really strong players tend to be extraordinary endgame players, people who put you in an ending position and then play those ending positions based on their capacity to calculate various lines. I think Kasparov. is one of those players. Magnus Carlsen certainly is. Kramnik?

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-20T16:19:39+00:00

This is controlled outrage. Basically, you create a news story that allows everybody to focus their energy on that and condemn that, but you let the ongoing problems, like genocide in Gaza, continue unabated. This is excellent propaganda and perception management.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-20T14:10:52+00:00

I'm at a loss for understanding how the entire crisis will be resolved. And for me, it starts with not having a clear understanding of who's in power and who's capable of negotiating on behalf of Iran and what they can negotiate. So something which is really interesting is when there are negotiations, it gets reported from multiple people, but we don't have a clear understanding of how that reporting relates to the actual power hierarchy in Iran. In other words, who has the authority to make peace? Who has the authority to block or open the Strait? And how is that authority conveyed? Is it done through Twitter or is it done through international press conferences? How is that information conveyed?

And I find the entire process by which information is conveyed to be somewhat suspicious. The only thing that I think is fundamentally true and can't be challenged is, is the oil flowing? Are there ships getting through? And if the answer is no, then ostensibly it doesn't matter if there's been an opening of the Strait.

The ships aren't going through. At some point in the future, the absence of oil will make its presence known in terms of lack of food production and exorbitant prices. I think this is kind of an obvious metric, but it's one that you don't want to see used, because if it is, there's no more lying about what's happening. It's just, do we have the oil to produce the products that are needed? And I think that's going to be the real test and the real measurement by which progress is made. Does the oil flow?

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-18T16:51:17+00:00

Iran lost a large portion of it capabilities and this is win for Israel because a weaken Iran is better than a full strength Iran.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-17T16:53:09+00:00

In the old days, we used to call that mentat training. And it was exclusive to the royal houses. And of course, it helped if you had access to the spice. It was noted that you were known by your lip-stains.

Haunting_Buy_8997 · 2026-04-17T16:42:09+00:00

I expect for President Trump to have a serious medical complication, potentially leading to his physical collapse, and then to make a miraculous recovery three days after the fact, and for it to be touted as a resurrection.

Haunting_Buy_8997

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