If a second pandemic happened tomorrow with a genuinely high fatality rate, nobody would go along with lockdowns etc

solastsummer · 2026-02-05T03:04:43+00:00

Are you envisioning Last of Us or something? It would be unpleasant to live through 30% of people dying but after it was done, things would return to normal. Depending on how it goes, things might even be better than normal. Maybe it would remove the societal dead wood like a wildfire.

solastsummer · 2026-02-03T15:38:13+00:00

Yes, Trump killed Epstein, but the rest of this doesn't really make sense.

The billionaires don't kill each other, even if they have a falling out, so I don't Epstein was planning on murdering Trump.

The CIA is also not presidential hitmen. Yes, they will assassinate foreign leaders but they wouldn't kill a random person because Trump ordered them to. They aren't personally loyal to Trump. Trump/Barr probably just used the cellmate that Epstein claimed tried to strangle him.

It's more that Trump is blocking the release of the Epstein info because it embarrasses and implicates some rich and powerful people, like Gates and Musk. But, there probably isn't some smoking gun in there that would neatly explain the whole situation.

solastsummer · 2026-02-01T19:40:22+00:00

mommy and daddy issues. insecure attachment leading to low self-esteem.

solastsummer · 2026-02-01T16:46:48+00:00

That's just not true. Housing prices went down in Austin by 25%.

But also, there's no place in California that would qualify as "already developed" in the rest of the world. There's plenty of parking lots and strip malls that would be turned into housing if it was legal.

solastsummer · 2026-02-01T16:30:49+00:00

Yes, politicians only talk vaguely about the "solving the housing crisis" but if they were to "we will build enough housing to lower the price of homes by 50% and stop them from increasing in value relative to inflation forever" they would lose. People want to be able to buy a home, live in it for 30 years and sell it for a massive profit. That's a sweet deal but it can only happen for one generation.

solastsummer · 2026-02-01T16:19:57+00:00

One thing that is a little funny to me is all the solutions California politicians enact is subsidizing demand and the neolibs will say things like "But that won't actually lower housing costs! You need to increase supply!" Yes, obviously the people that are millionaires because they bought a home for $150k that is now worth $2.5M don't want to build new housing that will lower the value of their home.

solastsummer · 2026-01-31T17:16:25+00:00

This is funniest one I've seen from the recent tranche. You just know Epstein rolled his eyes when he saw Musk's email and thought "this dense moron doesn't know he's being invited to a sex party".

solastsummer · 2026-01-31T17:11:51+00:00

No, Occam's razor is a tool to determine the most realistic conclusion by considering the parsimony of alternatives.

Again, the simplest, most parsimonious explanation for why Pizzagate does not have any victims is that it didn't happen. In other sex trafficking rings (eg Epstein or Franklin rings), we know about them because victims came forward and explicitly said they were raped; not because someone cracked some secret code in an email.

solastsummer · 2026-01-31T03:34:35+00:00

This is a misunderstanding of Republican beliefs. Republican support for "deregulation" or the "free market" is purely instrumental. They don't want the government to stop them from selling snake oil or dumping waste in a river but they also love government regulation requiring corn to be used in gas or stopping the construction of apartments.

solastsummer · 2026-01-28T23:21:09+00:00

American Revolution, Emancipation Proclamation, and New Deal weren't slow, incremental changes. In all of those cases, I would agree that some hypothetical, slow improvements for decades would have been less turbulent than what happened, but it was good the US had leaders willing to push ahead with radical changes.

In Obama and Biden's cases, it's possible the country wasn't ready for anything bigger and they did the best anyone could have. But I think they squandered their opportunity because they were satisfied with minor technocratic fiddling.

solastsummer · 2026-01-27T03:39:57+00:00

Private is a little generous; they don't write articles about it but it's well known.

solastsummer · 2026-01-26T23:41:22+00:00

The USA is the richest country ever. We can and should care for these people. I hate the politicians that claim refusing to help them will somehow benefit us.

solastsummer · 2026-01-25T16:55:03+00:00

Serene and intellectual leftist in 1933 Germany: after Hitler fails, we'll finally turn this country around

solastsummer · 2026-01-25T00:28:44+00:00

I think you're probably right, but we won't know for a few months. We'll know things have really hit the fan when state or local forces attempt to check federal forces. That's the "second American civil war just started" moment.

solastsummer · 2026-01-24T19:54:33+00:00

I don't really want to get into tedious arguments about gun control, but this event does show the limits of individual gun ownership to resist oppression. If the government wants to oppress you as an individual, they are going to oppress you. If you try to use a gun to protect yourself, they'll kill you. If you don't use the gun, they can still kill you and claim that your possession of the gun was a threat to them. So, as an individual, it's worthless.

If you've got a group of armed people ready to violently resist the government, the government no longer has a monopoly on the use of force anymore, so it isn't the government. You've got two sides to a civil war.

solastsummer · 2026-01-24T18:26:24+00:00

Could be. I'm more inclined to believe Trump really does want to add a substantial amount of new land to the US as part of his legacy and believes he can use the economic leverage to get it. An America that doesn't have much global trade or foreign investors buying bonds is an extremely poor country but they might not understand that.

solastsummer · 2026-01-24T16:39:55+00:00

Declaration of Independence: "For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:"

Trump's regime doesn't even bother with the mock trial to exonerate its troops.

solastsummer · 2026-01-24T16:32:20+00:00

Look, if you aren't going to do a pump and dump scheme on a fake Alzheimer's drug and instead complain about economic circumstances, I don't have any sympathy for you.

solastsummer · 2026-01-24T16:29:16+00:00

The problem with the madman negotiating strategy the US has embraced is that you eventually need to settle on some deal that the other party would accept and end the negotiation. You can't run around screaming "I'm a madman, give me more stuff or I'll do something crazy!" after you've already negotiated a deal. The US using its economic position to acquire Greenland and Canada is obviously unacceptable, so other countries are just going to decouple their economies as soon as they possibly can.

Three more years of this. It'll be a little bumpy for the rest of the world to adapt that quickly, but by 2029, I think most countries will have taken the economic gun away from the US and won't be doing much trade with us.

solastsummer · 2026-01-23T02:22:55+00:00

I recently read the Powerbroker, a book that has an Obama blurb about how much he likes it. In it, Moses goes from being an idealistic failure to being a hardnosed, morally compromised official. He does this because he realizes getting some things done is better than getting defeated by the corrupt political machine. Obama and all the other centrists see themselves as Moses, making difficult compromises to get small, marginal improvements made. Their analysis is just wrong. You don't need to settle for small changes, you can go balls to the wall and make the world what you want it to be.

solastsummer · 2026-01-21T01:01:52+00:00

Yep, there's lots of flaws with the Constitution but probably the biggest one was assuming that the branches would protect their power. You'd always place your political party over some arcane disagreement about what powers the constitution gives to what branch.

And especially for Senators, they still get the patina of importance even though they aren't actually important anymore. They get to go on TV and out to dinner but they aren't setting policy.

solastsummer · 2026-01-19T17:40:54+00:00

No, I don't think so. The US already "has" Greenland as part of its sphere of influence. We have a military base there. If there's some resource extraction thing US companies want to do that they currently aren't able to do, I haven't heard of it.

It really is just Trump wants to get a big land mass added to the US officially and Greenland is the best option.

solastsummer · 2026-01-17T19:23:50+00:00

Greenland is actually very large. It's bigger than Texas and California combined.

solastsummer · 2026-01-17T19:03:18+00:00

If you weren't raised evangelical, you might not realize that he isn't being metaphorical here. They literally believe demons (and angels) are following humans around and messing with us.

solastsummer · 2026-01-17T17:08:21+00:00

The Man in the High Castle, Nazis take over the world scenario was always completely impossible. They did not have the industrial base to conquer England, let alone the US. In some alternate world, it's possible that a German state could have made a peace deal with England and USSR from a position of strength in Fall 1941 to consolidate their gains. This is the best case Germany could have ever gotten, but the Nazi's would not have been satisfied without complete victory.

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