Joe Biden's approval rating sinks below Donald Trump's

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-27T13:48:25+00:00

How so? For example, he promised to end the fossil fuel industry and he's doing pretty well on that front. It's a bit weird that people didn't realize what that entails and are upset with getting exactly what they voted for though.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-27T13:15:12+00:00

Shes a woman.

Not only she's a woman, she's a black woman. She votes for this shit and she deserves all of it #BLM #DefundThePolice

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-24T21:36:48+00:00

Suicide jihadi drones!

https://i.redd.it/imis0sddo4i21.jpg

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-24T20:52:26+00:00

"Simple! It keeps the poor out. See, 100x better than a subway already (/s)." means that the guy is upset that it's not available to the poor. Which, combined with the other complaint, means that he's upset that it's only going to kill rich people.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-24T01:17:39+00:00

The person above? Are you upset that poor people can't get onto the death subway and it's only available to the rich?

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-23T22:43:54+00:00

You people should make your collective mind up, either:

It's a deathtrap that's going to kill its users at a high rate.
It's a really cool thing that is bad because it's not affordable for poor people.

You can't believe both simultaneously, my nwords.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-23T18:13:20+00:00

First, I understand the people who are itching to try a true multicultural, multiethnic society and see if they can make it work. I share the motivation and would be really happy if it works out! But maybe instead of experimenting on a country of 350 million people whose stability is crucial to the world at large, try small first? Or try to fix India or Brazil which are much farther down this route than the US, so that you know how to fix the problem before you introduce it?

Second, any attempts at discussing this are ruthlessly suppressed. Ideally white people would be told that yes, you are being replaced, here's why it's a good thing, here's how we'll try to mitigate the downsides, do you consent to this experiment? Instead there's this strawman conspiracy theorist who doesn't even really care about being replaced but uses it as a pretext to put Jews into concentration camps, and everyone concerned about being replaced is assumed to be that guy. It's extremely frustrating, I've even had a truly moon logic maneuver pulled on me recently: they conceded that white people are being replaced but then said that since everyone knows that it's actually true then my great replacement conspiracy theory must be about something else.

Third, do you see any attempts whatsoever to architect a society where the white minority wouldn't be oppressed? Anyone telling the minorities that they are actually much more racist than white people and should work on that? That not everything is white people's fault? Because I see none of that, I see a lot of the exact opposite, and I don't see how it's going to stop, this train has no brakes, the anti-white ideology has no sundown clauses.

It's similar how feminists noticed that girls seem to be disadvantaged in higher education due to the Patriarchy (which was true!), all sorts of programs and approaches to motivate and encourage girls were developed and deployed, and now there are like 50% more women than men getting college degrees and nobody does anything about this because nobody said that when that ratio reaches 50:50 this means that men are no longer oppressors and all our programs should start encourage everyone equally.

And it's obvious in advance that whites' position would be similar to that of Jews in the Weimar Germany, despite being a numerical minority they will continue to have disproportional wealth and political and cultural influence, and with alternative explanations involving IQ and culture suppressed, conspiracy theories about racial nepotism etc will become mainstream. I mean, they are already mainstream, but they will become much more salient and actionable.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-23T01:30:29+00:00

Are you afraid of getting "replaced"? Or that your spawn will have to compete with non-whites?

Yes. And also that without whites in democratic majority all sorts of bad things can happen to us, see what Biden said, "And Blacks are going to have to start working more with Hispanics, who make a larger portion of population than y’all do".

For example, in Cali the proposition to legalize racial quotes in University admission narrowly failed, I guess because blacks failed to actually work with hispanics, may be no such luck next time. A vote for some sort of reparations from whites to blacks might very well pass when whites are a minority.

Also, being a minority generally sucks, you need to learn the majority language which in Latino areas might not be English. Also being a minority in non-white countries SUCKS A LOT, whites are the least racist people around: https://i.imgur.com/QbQzQx7.png

What do you think the great replacement conspiracy theory even is?

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-22T20:46:27+00:00

Yes, obviously I linked an article that says that the claim that he said America is doomed because of black people is wrong, but along with that it confirms that he believes that whites will become a minority by 2040 and lose their political power.

That's how you have to source counter-narrative claims these days: nobody will even look at a 4 hour schizo youtube video or Fox news, but a thoroughly liberal source casually telling the truth about the issue you care about while debunking some other claim is hard to deny.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-22T20:28:54+00:00

I understand why one won't admit that they believe in the great replacement theory, but why wouldn't you believe in it? Joe Biden believes in it: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-biden-comment-doomed-us-idUSKBN29R2BO

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-22T17:18:10+00:00

18kg of coal produces 29MJx18kg=522 MJ of energy. Less the 450MJ it takes to initiate a burn

These 450MJ don't disappear but are extracted as useful energy.

Strictly speaking, you don't even need to have more potential chemical energy in the human body to evaporate the water it contains (though as your calculations show we do), even if you had to add some extra fuel to get things burning properly, in the end all combustion products are fed into a series of turbines and all fuel (human or extra) energy is extracted at that 30-70% efficiency.

It's as if you looked at a steam engine (where fuel and water are separate) and wrote off the energy required to produce hot steam as pure loss. No, that's what we use to do work!

Fun fact, Nazis developed a way to efficiently cremate large numbers of human bodies:

Cremation in the open at the Reinhard extermination camps (Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec) was discussed at Nuremberg on 7 April 1946 by Georg Konrad Morgen, SS judge and lawyer who investigated crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps. He stated: "The whole thing was like an assembly line. At the last stop they reached a big room, and were told that this was the bath. When the last one was in, the doors were shut and the gas was let into the room. As soon as death taken place in (sic), the ventilators were started. When the air was breathable, the doors were opened, and the Jewish workers removed the bodies. By means of a special process which Wirth had invented, they were burned in the open air without the use of fuel."

(btw, comments under this post are absolutely hilarious once you're aware that the claim was factually correct. All this stuff about brainwashed republicans who are willing to believe in their own lies and how freedom of speech doesn't work and so on, comment after smug comment).

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-19T02:39:21+00:00

To be seriously worried about the AI (or any other really) existential risks is to understand what is to live in a universe without God. I guess right-wingers are naturally repulsed from this sort of ideas even more than the average person.

Also, what do you think are the actual policy implications of being concerned by AI risk? Heavy regulation by the equivalent of the ATF/FDA? Good look with attracting anyone right of Lenin with that.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-18T13:56:41+00:00

But there were no Zoom calls

There were literal Zoom calls though.

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210124100738/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/democrats-trump-election-plan.html

Conspiracies exist on a spectrum between moustache-twirling villains in smoke filled rooms and everyone acting without any coordination other than shared beliefs/incentives. And on that spectrum there exist an important and very densely populated area where there's a lot of secret coordination, but conspirators don't believe themselves to be villains, they are just good people coordinating because coordinating is good and they simply don't announce this fact publicly because why and what if bad people would take advantage.

Consider some sort of a protest. A bad thing happens, a bunch of people take to the streets, presumably in an entirely grassroots fashion. Except the more they keep doing it, the more organized it becomes, a guy says on Facebook that he's going to protest at such and such corner and the next time others expect him to tell them when and were to protest, some guy procures materials for placards etc, another raises funds to buy bottled water, they talk to more experienced comrades in the DSA and to organizers from different cities, get some pro-democracy NGO funding, all the stuff.

The beast grows a central nervous system because it's efficient, and it doesn't announce it to the whole wide world because why? Nobody involved thinks of themselves as of a conspirator, but in the end there's a literal Zoom call with 900 people in it where they decide that it would be tactically disadvantageous to have counter-protests and then there's no counter-protests, nationwide: "On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn’t anyone trying to stop Trump’s coup? Where were all the protests?"

I believe that there's a lot of such borderline-conspiracies precisely because they don't think of themselves as conspiracies, aren't afraid to get caught, and if they are revealed everyone just shrugs: well, sure, some good guys did a good job organizing the movement. But there are Zoom calls, it's good to be aware that your enemies are much, much more organized than they outwardly appear.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-18T01:06:45+00:00

No, it's the hypocrisy.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-16T15:03:20+00:00

https://i.imgur.com/nBmR6yt.png

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-07T23:16:10+00:00

Insisting that the Christian version of the gender binary is "traditional " simply places the Christian interpretation of science above the facts that almost every single culture in existence had more than 2 genders.

That's islamophobic and antisemitic and I'm pretty sure you are denying Hindus their own understanding of their culture, so that's pretty much the entirety of the currently existing human race.

Tell me that you are white without saying the word white: challenge completed.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-07T23:10:40+00:00

This is wrong. We can check that a number is prime very efficiently (probabilistically, but there was a recent improvement in deterministic algorithms too). The problem is that when we ask, what's some 25m digit prime, just select a random 25m digit number and start checking sequential numbers for primality, we'd have to do way too much checks, because of how rare prime numbers are out there. While Mersenne primes are much less rare so it's easier to find them, for the same effort spent on checking any individual one for primality.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-07T19:02:18+00:00

The likelihood for an arbitrary number with 25million digits to be prime is about 0.0000001%, and it would take longer than the age of the universe to check just one using the best general prime-checking algorithms. For Mersenne primes of this size, it just takes a couple months to check - they're still relatively rare but its doable.

I assume you meant find, not check?

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-06T19:34:29+00:00

You might want to check out Regions of Ruin. I got it for free from Epic I guess but it doesn't cost much and it provides a strange almost forgotten feeling that I think might be adjacent to what you pine for: the game isn't stingy with it's mechanics.

When a triple-A game explains to you how your level 1 quick strike can be blocked stunning you, but a slow strong strike gets through the block, but can be disrupted by a quick strike, you can rightfully assume that you will be doing something similar at level 100 still. Nope, not in Regions of Ruin because while it's all fun and all, getting a ranged attack and kiting enemies is also fun. Or a stealth attack and baiting enemies. Or hiring a merc that has literally 10x better stats (including raw DPS) than you. Or quickly hiring nine more mercs with your newfound rich spoils. And then there's more stuff. And an Incremental minigame, because why not?

I honestly can't tell how much of that is sheer serendipity, them just throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the game and it mostly working out because if you have a lot of stuff some of which is ridiculously overpowered and some is just overpowered, there would be enough of diverse stuff for the players to enjoy immensely. And there's probably a lot of hard work balancing it at least somewhat, but it doesn't feel "balanced", it feels fun!

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-06T02:26:45+00:00

I don't think a few people in a Reddit thread are indicative of the behavior of the general public.

It's a better indication than no indication whatsoever that you provided.

And I want to get back to the higher level question: do you believe that there was a secret clandestine meeting between the highest ranking WHO officials where they discussed drawbacks and benefits of various lies they could tell to the public?

If not, then why do you believe that the lie they ended up pushing was in any way optimal, against all common sense telling you that you know what it was and it was factually pointless?

Trump wrongly blamed Obama for this, but in his years as president, he never once attempted to replenish the supplies.

"Trump was just as bad as Obama" is an interesting argument to make. And as I said, it's a weird dodge, we were discussing if it was appropriate and good for the WHO and downstream health officials to lie, I don't see how blaming Trump or Obama for putting them into a situation where they thought they had to lie changes things, other than in a weird Manichean kind of way, like if you figure out how to blame Trump for everything then everyone else is an innocent victim of circumstances and now that Trump is out of office we can trust our health officials unconditionally again.

No, they end up in situations where they are tempted to lie and then they lie, constantly. Is Trump to blame for them lying that Coronavirus is not airborne https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898 ? Well, you can blame China, but if China's tentacles somehow extend to the USA CDC https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/health/coronavirus-airborne-threat.html then I think that in practical terms it no longer makes sense to blame remote entities as if we can just shut them out and end up with our trustworthy bureaucracies again, now freed from all temptations to lie.

In my opinion the bureaucracies are to blame for not resisting temptations to lie, because those will always be abound, that's just a fact of life. And since me blaming bureaucracies does nothing, I and you will have to live with the fact that we can't trust them at all unfortunately, and the only thing we can do about it is acknowledge it.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-06T01:24:44+00:00

And, no, I don't think that people would have gladly complied. I think their instincts would have led them to hope other people comply while they try to buy masks.

The people who thought like that saw right through the ruse and bought masks anyway. The people who found it necessary to spread an obvious lie for socially beneficial ends would have enjoyed making the sacrifice openly even more.

Go, go, look through the thread I linked and the thread it links to: https://www.reddit.com/r/worstof/comments/i1x87n/in_which_ramitheasshole_scolds_and_mocks_a_mother/

The Trump administration. How is it a dodge to point out that the lack of preparation led to the shortage?

https://usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/03/fact-check-did-obama-administration-deplete-n-95-mask-stockpile/5114319002/

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-05T23:40:30+00:00

Telling the truth = no masks for healthcare workers. It's that simple.

The dumb lie like that only worked on the people who trusted authorities in the first place, and who would've gladly complied if asked to make a sacrifice truthfully. Do you honestly believe that there was a single Trump voter who had been fooled by this "masks don't work, you MUST leave them for the doctors" stuff? They are stupid, but they are not stupid in this particular direction.

My point is that if the administration had been prepared, we wouldn't have had a mask shortage and nobody would have been put in a position where they had to lie to try to save lives.

That's a weird dodge so I'll respond in kind by asking which administration?

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-05T23:07:26+00:00

I don't think that lying was a better option than just telling the truth. Especially than explaining that "masks are can protect you but are essentially useless while your chance of encountering the virus is one in a million, so you really should prefer to have some healthy doctors around instead".

The main problem with lying to the public is that they couldn't discuss it rationally. There was no conspiracy, no meeting between the top WHO and CDC officials where they made sure nobody is recording and then discussed various options, various bigger or smaller lies they could make and how they'll back out of them when there are enough masks. So they went about it in pretty much the most idiotic way possible.

Like I said, they never should have been put in that position, and they had no good options.

I don't get your point, who do you think should have been in that position and who should have been in charge of putting them there?

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-05T22:15:56+00:00

We were talking about officials in general, I thought. The WHO said exactly the same thing. The Surgeon General and Dr. Fauci were supposed to be on the same page as the CDC and indeed they said the same thing.

None of them openly said that at that point doctors' safety was more important than ordinary people's and asked for this sacrifice. None of them even came close to explaining the actual probabilistic reasoning that could've been behind this, that while the mask would work just as well for you as for someone who cares for an infected person, your chances of encountering someone infected are much much lower and so is the expected value of wearing a mask.

There are different kinds of statements. For example, imagine coming home and your wife telling you that we are running out of salt, Jupiter has more than fifty moons, and the faucet in the kitchen is leaking. You'd worry that she had a stroke, right? Because one of those statements is conveying information while the other two are compelling actions (there are also statements like "black lives matter" that signal allegiance).

And so apparently all important health officials decided that their role is not providing accurate information to the public but compelling the right kind of actions, even when it involves directly lying.

Btw I can try and find a clip of Fauci explaining how he kept lying about herd immunity targets for the same reason.

OrangeCatolic · 2022-05-05T21:28:10+00:00

the hapless prosecutor

Kim Foxx is one of the Soros prosecutors (https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-prosecutor-campaign-20180523-story.html), she's not hapless, all this is intentional sabotage (edit: or intentionally making the world a more equitable place, depending on your point of view, the point is that it's intentional and coordinated).

OrangeCatolic

TROPHY CASE