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What is going on? World Blogs Clogs Elections The Bar (talk) (talk) (talk) (talk) (hic)
Pointless poll Worst Vice President in US history? Aaron Burr 2 Vote John C. Calhoun 23 Vote Richard Mentor Johnson (believed in a hollow Earth and was so bad that van Buren ran for reelection without a VP pick) 1 Vote John C. Breckenridge (became a general in the Confederate army) 8 Vote Spiro T. Agnew 2 Vote Dan Quayle 1 Vote Dick Cheney 11 Vote Mike Pence 2 Vote Which pronunciation of the cacao/cocoa bean do you prefer? Cacao 29 Vote Cocoa 62 Vote Why should we care it's fucking chocolate 82 Vote
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Above IP

@Christopher, So, the above IP is a sockpuppet of User:Machina? New world (talk) 15:28, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, suspicious from that post alone, but quite obvious when looking at the BoN's edit history. It's a rare exception of a 3-week block for a BoN, which should be escalated to 3-months if the existential dread postings persist after that. Bongolian (talk) 20:23, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Looking at the user contributions, @Machina seems to be banned only from editing the Saloon Bar. Why not ask the user himself? He should be able to edit outside of this page. New world (talk) 20:59, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Machina can offer a defense on RationalWiki talk:All things in moderation Bongolian (talk) 06:36, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Can someone open a ticket? Am on phone and it's really shit for stuff like that. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:48, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I like Machina. Y'all are posting while living your lives? I am so glad I never accepted a moderator position. Machine is a solipsist, that is not actually harmful. A lot of young people go solipsism or simulation, and I think it would be useful to them to hear takes that they couldn't invent. Torrent (talk) 09:54, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Trump rally shooting

Idk if im gonna witnes a shinzo abe 2.0 soon.

Edit: not sure if gunshot so far the sound is described as popping. 2600:387:F:4710:0:0:0:6 (talk) 22:39, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Elevating fascist politicians to martyrs is a terrible idea. New world (talk) 23:18, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

To all of you who think this was a good idea: one audience member was killed and another was critically injured. MayGodSaveUsAll (talk) 23:42, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

cough cough r/politics 2600:387:F:4710:0:0:0:6 (talk) 23:45, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

I have a bad feeling that this will be the American Reichstag Fire moment, where the right uses this as an excuse to turn the US into a police state. Not to mention this almost certainly solidified his chances of winning. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 00:01, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

This is exactly what I thought. Now the MAGA movement is going to be out for blood at this rate. The base is absolutely going to use this as “The Deep State” hellbent on stopping him. Patty Pat 01:30, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

The only way this hurts Trump is that people are no longer paying attention to Biden's flubs. Things are NOT looking good for the Dems this November; Biden really needs to step aside ASAP. CorruptUser 02:44, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

His big ass ego is not letting him and trump knows this by calling him an "old broken down pile of crap" to troll him. 2600:387:F:4710:0:0:0:6 (talk)

I don't think its an ego so much as Biden genuinely does not know how terrible he is. CorruptUser 03:54, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘Thomas Matthew Crooks, the dead perp was a registered Republican,[1] but that won't stop MAGA cult members from blaming Biden/BLM/Antifa/Nancy/Hillary… There is a history of autocrats surviving assassination attempts (Berlusconi was shot once; Mussolini survived several assassination attempts). It feeds into their sense of victimhood and invincibility. Never mind that the orange ogre has been calling for violence since 2015, expect him to make the most of this one. Bongolian (talk) 06:44, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

This might very well be the moment that wins Trump the election, no matter what the Democrats do. Trump now not only has his martyr story served on a silver platter, he also has an obvious justification for all of his authoritarian Project 2025 ideas, and the Democrats now have practically no chance to make the election about Trump’s ideas and not his person. Fuck. ScepticWombat (talk) 07:14, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh, and I’m pretty sure the Biden cabal will try to spin this as a reason not to introduce further “chaos” into the race by switching out Biden, so that door might well also be closing now. ScepticWombat (talk) 07:15, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

It's certainly a gift for Trump. That photo of him with blood running down his face, with his fist in the air and the American flag in the background couldn't have been better if he had posed for it.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 07:28, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Trump is going to be presented as a martyr by his followers, and protected by God given the way the assassination attempt failed. Mark my words. Panzerfaust (talk) 07:47, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Latest conspiracy news (Swedish edition, the stuff my mom reads on Facebook). This was all the start signal, and now Operation Storm will unfold Very Very Soon (but no time table, nothing definite). Martial law is hereby in place globally, the entire financial system will shortly be replaced by Quantum Financial System (QFS) bringing justice to finance, the Khazar mafia responsible for everything bad in the world will be defeated, all the energy needs of all the world will be filled by Tesla free energy brought out of suppression at last, and all the news media all over the world will be replaced by military transmissions Busting Wide Open all the terrible goings-on in the world that are now brought right. Very Very Soon, but no date and no time. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 08:15, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Social media is shit, Ric Romero reports (for all you old fart Farkers out there). Also, the Republican media spin cycle certainly protects their geriatric candidate better than the Democrat media spin cycle does. (Regardless, we are at a point where, when it comes to presidential politics, both sides have their ~40% base and -- so far -- no story has changed that.)

I'm going to wait a few news spin cycles to comment further. In another Ric Romero statement, United States politics tends to be a wee bit more violent than the politics of most developed nations. And yes, this gives Trump a "martyr" motif, but the real question is: does this "motif" actually change any minds? BobJohnson (talk) 09:11, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

The martyr thing isn’t gonna change minds, but it doesn’t have to because that’s not what this election is about. This election is about which candidate can get their base to turn up to the election booths. One side is depressed and demoralized at the prospect of voting for a senile old fool who's bad on Gaza and has seemingly already lost. The other side is angry about the state of the country and are now eager to vote for the someone they see as a badass who just took a bullet for them. Which side do you think is a winning electoral coalition? Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 11:09, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

You don't think the liberal side is *not* angry about the state of the country? You must have not seen all the chatter about Project 2025 of late (as well as the lingering folks pissed off that Roe v. Wade was appealed). All that mainstream media pissing and moaning about Israel / Gaza and Biden's age has resulted in FiveThirtyEight's electoral vote forecast to be, er, roughly tied... like it has been since mid-May (and only slightly down since early May when 538 started the poll).

In addition, the United States is not a monarchy (yet). There are Congressional elections, state elections, and local elections. Yes, it seems like half the electorate in the United States doesn't give a shit about this stuff... that civic failure is a conversation for another day. But Trump v. Biden is not the only thing going on. BobJohnson (talk) 14:54, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh the Dems are mad about the state of the country too, no doubt, but that’s hardly useful when the incumbent is a Democrat. A lot of Dems might stay home because of it. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 17:16, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

This very well may not have much of an effect; the Orange One was perhaps hit in the 'best' bit if the body regarding damage, blood loss etc - if they overplay this 'I'm sooo bwave!' thing (qv; Musk's comment earlier) it might put the backs up of a non-zero number of voters.

But there's one bit I want to deal with. I am aware of some comments (not here, elsewhere) that this was 'a setup' or something. I don't believe it is on the simple reason that a situation like this is hard too pull off and Trump is a coward personally. The Secret Service also wouldn't have gone along with this either. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:46, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

It also argues against a setup that the shooter being killed was an extremely likely outcome, no matter what happened to Trump, and I think that would make it pretty difficult to recruit a shooter who was “in on the game”.

A “serious but duped” shooter, on the other hand, would not be something that Trump would dare (as mentioned, he’s the classic coward bully), and I doubt he would even risk a “sympathetic shooter” scenario either.

Not to mention the obvious fact that things were already going his way in the campaign and there was thus no need for such risky, conspiratorial shenanigans. ScepticWombat (talk) 10:54, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't trust a Navy SEAL sniper to "only" graze my ear with a bullet while I'm talking and moving around, let alone some random kid who looks like one of the Hapsburgs. CorruptUser 11:59, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

When Raygun was shot it won him 49 out of 50 states. I'm calling it right now. It's Joever. Carthage (talk) 12:47, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

4 more years! 4 more years!

In the long run, I really really REALLY hope the Dems have a lot of introspection as to why they lost 2024, and not just blame it on the failed assassination attempt. Stop giving us candidates that belong in a nursing home. Actually focus on the issues the vast majority of the public wants; affordable healthcare and housing, stable employment. Stop doing things which only piss off the general public; entering into new wars hasn't made a party popular since 2002, you aren't going to win any voters through invasions. CorruptUser 14:08, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Trump I feel is more a figure-head symptom of a bigger problem in the US, of almost half of Americans desiring, apathetic to, or maybe just plain ignorant of the country sliding into Fascism. Even if Trump were to die at this point, I'm not sure it would change the course the US is heading. I guess we'll see what happens in the next couple decades; with looming climate change as well, it's sure to be interesting anyways. Impiricism (talk) 15:01, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Randomly woke up to see a fundraiser has started and 800k of donations already with people like vivek, shapiro, and kid rock donating in the 5 digits https://www.gofundme.com/f/president-trump-seeks-support-for-butler-pa-victims. 2600:387:F:4717:0:0:0:9 (talk) 15:38, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

@CorruptUser I heartily agree. Unfortunately, the DNC seems stuck in an ideological 1990s time bubble where it’s forbidden to discuss anything along those lines. That’s also convenient vis-à-vis the donor class which really doesn’t like any of those suggestions.

If that’s going to change, it may require a bottom-up takeover like the one attempted (and partially successful) by the MAGA hats in the GOP, as depicted in Finish What We Started (2024) by Isaac Arnsdorf.

Now, I’m not familiar enough with the party structures of the GOP vs. The Democrats to say whether a similar strategy is feasible in the latter, but I think something along those lines is a more likely avenue to change than hoping that the Democratic grandees are suddenly going change.

They didn’t after Obama turned off a large slice of his electorate by failing to reform, they didn’t after Hillary lost to Trump, they didn’t after Biden scraped by under very favourable circumstances and they didn’t when it was obvious that running Biden again would likely be courting disaster, but there was still a decent amount time to find another.

They are now panicking about Biden, but that’s just because they realise just how badly they’ve messed up on a tactical level, not because they recognise that “Biden’esque” candidates simply won’t cut the mustard. In other words: They will not change unless forced to.

The donor class sure as hell won’t force them, meaning that only a political challenge, either external via a third party (which means fracturing the vote and almost ensuring at least one GOP win) or from an internal bottom-up party movement is likely to change anything. ScepticWombat (talk) 07:29, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Comparison

As with Lee Harvey Oswald the perpetrator was killed - wo we will not know 'the logic/reasoning' and so can act as the focus for fever-dream conspiracies.

The most dangerous attackers are those individuals who operate alone (even if they have 'a particular viewpoint') and do not act so as to draw attention to themselves, as they operate under the radar. Anna Livia (talk) 10:34, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

The big difference is that Oswald was killed by a third party well after he was apprehended, rather than shot during the act, with the latter being much less obvious “conspiracy fodder”.

But there is still a chance that the shooter left some kind of “testament” about his motives (think, Breivik or the Christchurch shooter), but that he didn’t leave it online in order to reduce the chance of advance detection. ScepticWombat (talk) 10:46, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

They could have easily have scheduled it's release by a time delay. Very easy to do. KarmaPolice (talk) 11:35, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Sure, but I think it’s a bit early to discount that such a fairly clear statement of the shooter’s motives exists and that we’ll never know what those motives were. ScepticWombat (talk) 11:45, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I've seen a few people on twitter claiming that this was a false-flag by Trump. This can be debunked instantly by pointing out that at 150 yards, no sniper in the world is guaranteed to hit ONLY a willing participant's ear, and just an inch off would've struck Trump's brain. And bullets are not like they are in video games; bone and bullets both shatter.

What I am seeing also are claims the Secret Service are a bunch of incompetent "diversity hires", promulgated by Musk because prior to working the Service, the director Kim Cheatle oversaw the security for PepsiCo, keeping America's Doritos safe. Nevermind that she was working as deputy director in the Secret Service before this. CorruptUser 11:55, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Sigh, I hadn’t thought of that particular scenario, but it’s hardly surprising that someone in the Xdiocracy would launch the “because of incompetent DEI hires” allegations. It’s totally on message with several pre existing GOP/MAGA narratives that blame all kinds of failures on DEI for, basically, excluding all of the supposedly hyper competent white dudes from [insert relevant job title here]. ScepticWombat (talk) 13:18, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Given that Elon Musk has royally fucked up Twitter, would he consider himself an incompetent "DEI diversity hire"?

((sarc)It's those gosh darn Canadians like Musk infiltrating the tech-bro scene that's fucking Silicon Valley up, I tell ya! Blame Canada!(/sarc)BobJohnson (talk) 15:01, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Details are a bit sparse right now, but I shall say with some conviction the Secret Service does have questions to answer.

The suspected shooter (apparently) had a reasonably clear aim at Trump, the distance was about ~140m and was apparently armed with an 'AR-15 style rifle'. If we take this to mean it's a longish barreled with 'intermediate' rounds (like 5.56 or 5.45mm) as long as the shooter was fairly competent and rifle not in shit condition hitting the target would not be that hard. A decent scope etc would continue this. I will therise that it might be windage alone which saved Trump. And if they'd have used an old-school bolt-action (like the Carcano used on JFK) he would have been hit 'properly' (as long as it had a good zero).

Point being; if I know this, the Secret Service clearly would. And more. KarmaPolice (talk) 14:23, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Why not shoot-to-disable so there are 'words out of the gunman's mouth'?

For some of the first conspiracy theories see [2]. Anna Livia (talk) 18:20, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I'd guess the shooter was prone so a shallow target. Chances are they had a decent magazine capacity so the Secret Service sniper did 100% right thing - immediately located the hostile and took them out. KarmaPolice (talk) 20:56, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

@Anna Livia No such thing; this is real life, not a video game. If you shoot, it's to kill, and you keep shooting until your target stops moving. CorruptUser 21:35, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Some of us live in contexts where 'what we have read about such matters' is all we know. Anna Livia (talk) 23:25, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Corrupt is wrong. For example, British 'SWAT' teams aim to incapacitate the targets - only killing when they judge there is no other option. I expect Secret Service is about the same - if possible they will try to disarm/ incapacitated but the health of the principal is paramount. KarmaPolice (talk) 00:05, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

incapacitate in this case usually involves killing targets. shots to chest area is considered the most effective way to incapacitate which generally results in death. if the target is deemed a possible suicide bomber, this might set off of any explosive vests, as might a taser. incapacitate in this case is via shots to the head. generally even more fatal than shots to the chest. ultimately, if it becomes necessary to shoot someone, then it is invariably going to be lethal, in effect if not by design. they are not going to try and wing them. just ask jean charle de menezes. any kill by the armed response will be referred to the iopc to be independently investigated. this is no sense a whitewashing of the police officers involved either. they can and have been prosecuted for murder if found the a shooting was not justified. the point is, incapacitate is not disarm, and they only incapacitate when there is no other option, because invariably it means death. there have only been about 80 or so police shootings since 1990. the uk is not the us. it is relatively rare for there to be no other option but shooting is rarely the first option, and never the default option. sadly, sometimes there really no other options. the differences with police cultures between the us and uk not withstanding, i dont see how there would be any other options for dealing this gunman after he had already started shooting at people that would not have resulted with his death. AMassiveGay (talk) 20:30, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Or put more glibly; 'incapacitate' in regards to firearms normally means 'shoot them somewhere not immediately lethal and hope they quit it'; ie through being effectively disabled by pain and/or survival instinct. Problem is, people can be temporarily immune to pain from say, adrenaline, drugs, determination etc and continue to fire back. This is compounded by some modern popular calibres [like the 5.56mm and 9mm] which have fairly poor 'stopping power' - there's been many a report in the 20th where militaries have found their weapons good at poking holes in people but not that good at 'stopping' the enemy from continuing to attack before they bleed to death.

In this, Corrupt is a bit correct; while you don't have to always 'shoot to kill', trying to 'shoot to incapacitate' is kinda difficult and really not something guns are designed to do [though there are 'less lethal' options like say, rubber bullets and baton rounds]. KarmaPolice (talk) 23:40, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

How to get US gun control at last

Currently floating around on the inner tubes:[3]

“”Democrats should introduce a gun control bill called the "The Donald Trump safety and gun control bill" and make republicans vote against it.

Bongolian (talk) 03:05, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

While I agree that might be hilarious, I don’t think it’ll be “good politics”, but that it’s more likely to be viewed as “nefarious politicking” and thus turn voters off. ScepticWombat (talk) 07:29, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

How fucking .close was this to being an entirely different conversation? An untrained kid, 20 years old, took a shot and knocked the ear. Armor of God is in the whackadoo conversation. Iron sights from 150 Yards, dumb ass kid almost made the shot, missed and killed a person because guns are built to be long range killing machines. And the conversation from both sides is Thank God it wasn't Trump? Torrent (talk) 10:01, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Why should I give a shit if Trump's ear got grazed when unstable gun fanatics with a name to gain can just crawl up a roof and enact indiscriminate violence, and even if it is targeted, it is indiscriminate because a bullet doesn't care who it hits. Torrent (talk) 10:11, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

There is a lot of 'dork can't shoot, haha' shit going around. Dude missed by an inch and still killed somebody, guns are fucking killing machines. There is no purpose for a gun other than to kill something, and if you mess that up, big surprise, somebody might die. Nobody should be allowed to run around with an AR-15. Torrent (talk) 10:18, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

One oddity with certain pro-extremely-loose Second Amendment types (particularly the guns-as-identity right-wing crowd) is that they seem to be convinced that their side is the only side that owns and can handle firearms. In reality, there's not only plenty of left-wingers that own guns... there's also plenty of apolitical that own guns, and (as seems to possibly be the case here) some mentally disturbed (or parents of the mentally disturbed) that own guns. I do not expect the conversation here to change at all; after all, a lot of this crowd simultaneously is Very Concerned about inner city crime, which loose gun laws help perpetuate. Alas, this crowd often prefers to evoke stereotypes on that issue and leave it at that. Furthermore, events like mass murders of children have not moved the dial at all, either. BobJohnson (talk) 10:46, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

The right-wing has a very strong doublethink going on regarding stuff like this. It not only fails to realise that 'the left' can [and I suspect will] stock up on weaponry and learn how to use it right [also put in the effort for physical training etc] but also will most likely be willing to fight and die for what they believe in as much as they would be - to the point that if they needed to, the US Army would be able to build new field forces out of traditionally 'librul' [and low-recruitment areas] like New England and the Pacific states to [let's say], put down a Gileadian rebellion.

This mental blind spot frankly put, scares me more than anything else. Balances of power last because each side respects the strengths and determination of their opponent - they know that they must never push them too far or slam their back to the wall, otherwise they will fight back with everything they've got. If you don't respect your opponent, that you believe you can get away with anything because 'They're wusses' and will fold the moment you bring ut a blade... this is how wars happen. KarmaPolice (talk) 20:24, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Good luck with that. There are more guns than people in the US, and you can bet your ass off that many of those gun owners would rather be branded criminals than give up their guns. The problem isn't guns, the problem is gun culture. Too many people treat their guns as replacement dicks, rather than the tools they actually are. You don't see people posing with their power drills, do you? Also, any serious attempts at gun control are gonna be directed against people who need them the most. The marginalized. Trans folk, people of color, etc. Carthage (talk) 14:18, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

And how many people are realistically suggesting let's call it a 'general disarming' policy for America? It is impractical to the level of insanity, and most get that before we get into Charlton Heston impressions. I will cite the 'weapons ban' in Discworld's Night Watch too, where Vimes noted that the majority of weapons confiscated was from law-abiding citizens, meaning that basically, you've disarmed the 'good citizens' but obviously, left the 'bad citizens' armed. Smart.

There is also issues with the phrasing of the issue. Does America have a gun problem, or a violence problem? Are the guns a cause, or merely the favoured tool? Similar can be said about other things; for example, does America have an obesity problem, a ultra-processed food problem, or both? Chicken or egg, or perhaps chicken omelette? KarmaPolice (talk) 15:12, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

How realistic do you think even a "minor" attempt at regulation is gonna be when you not only have the GOP controlling one and a half branches of government, but also have sheriffs who straight up refuse to enforce any gun laws no matter what their content is? Of course, those same reactionaries would love to disarm queer folk and people of color. Carthage (talk)

Let's be more accurate here; those fuckers would prefer to disarm everyone who's not a right-wing white. But there's an issue that a lot of the 'mainstream left' in America loathe all firearms with an understandable venom which makes 'reasonable discussion' impossible, or a general lack of understanding which means the suggestions are hugely impractical [who was it who suggested all guns should be registered with a gun club?]. Anyhows, while you're right in that almost nothing will actually pass right now due to the extremist capture of legislatures etc, the Democrats need to show they've actually got some reasonable policies ready 'in the drawer' if only they could get it passed [the sort of answers which have their angles protected in advance against the usual counter-arguments, such as 'this proposal is utterly impractical']. And part of this is a critical analysis of the myriad of problems which is causing the problem [for like obesity and drug use, there's no single cause or solution]. In more general terms, it is not a good idea electorally for a major party to become associated with the top view when it's something 35% possess.

And I shall offer 'toxic individualism' to this analysis. That there's a percentage of folks who think their rights to do X is absolute, that it comes with zero responsibilities and that it cannot ever be remotely hedged in. You see this in for example, free speech extremists who shall angrily lash out if they are brought face-to-face with the effects of their airing of views. KarmaPolice (talk) 07:15, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Most legislators also know next to nothing about guns. That's why you get stupid shit like bans on "assault weapons" (a category know-nothing legislators invented out of whole cloth) that don't do much, or anything at all, to reduce rates of gun violence. Most gun violence is committed with pistols, not "assault weapons" BTW. According to a Pew survey, in 2020 only 3% of firearms fatalities were the result of rifle usage. Carthage (talk) 00:03, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

In discussions with "the gun folks" (short of the absolutist true believers of whom the firearm is some sort of identity religion, of which nothing will change their minds), the one point I have brought up that "seems to get some of them to think" is that a lot of the "NRA schtick" IMHO is pure cold marketing. With outdoor recreation on the decline, catering to the "paranoid style" allows gun manufacturers to make up some lost revenue. There's a lot of shit in the US (and elsewhere) that tries to market a "SPEND!" solution to things that require some dedication to get good at; it takes some time to become a decently proficient marksman, but (in true musician-style "gear acquisition syndrome" guise) a helluv a lot of firearms marketing is spent trying to convince people that they can successfully become a Gun God by simply spending a lot of money. The same applies to the "paranoid style" marketing regarding personal protection; far more marketing is spent convincing people that they need Super Gee Whiz Expensive Semi-Auto Shit for personal protection when in reality, simply honing your technique will probably do far more. (As an example of marketing over competence, one of the things I remember about the St. Louis gun-toting incident in 2020 was that people who actually had some experience with guns commented on just how shitty the McCloskey's form and protocol was. They should've spent their money buying that Fancy AR-15 learning how to actually hold a weapon.)

The other fun aspect of the NRA is a bit of that outdoor recreation aspect that is ignored these days. The United States has historically been very good with public lands IMHO, and it's more than just the more environmentally protected stuff like national parks. Let's face it: if you didn't have public lands like the national forests, what happens with hunting land is that it's bought up by some uber-rich weenie who will proceed to prevent the general public from hunting on their land, either charging up the wazoo in order for people to hunt on their land, or only exclusively allowing other uber-rich weenies on their "dude ranch" retreats. There's plenty of non-protected land that falls in that category. Generally speaking (not historically, Teddy Roosevelt would've been pissed with the modern GOP) the Democrats tend to be the ones promoting public lands these days, which means that given the current political environment, the NRA (despite being "pro-hunter") says nothing about this stance, at least that I can find. (I vaguely remember during Obama's era they had some tepid support of public land expansion buried beneath the fearmongering whargarble, but these days I don't even see that.) BobJohnson (talk) 00:36, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

There is a growing number of queer people who have taken up arms in response to current events. They don't believe the state will protect them, when the state is the very same entity persecuting them. Do you think these people are paranoid? Carthage (talk) 00:43, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Depends on whether they are learning to use their weapon or are Spending Money on Fancy Shit without learning how to use it. Queer culture that has taken up firearms is too far under my radar (I'm aware of groups like Pink Pistols but don't know too much about them). Although my personal knowledge is limited, from the little I've seen, left wing gun groups like Redneck Revolt have personally impressed me more than current NRA culture. The term "paranoid style" refers to a term coined by historian Richard Hofstadter which addresses a specific sort of right wing personality that is heavily into conspiracy theory, and has existed for decades (examples range from the John Birch Society to QAnon). While there are left-wingers into conspiracy, my usage of "paranoid style" follows the 1960s essay convention and doesn't apply to them. BobJohnson (talk) 01:42, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, 'Gear Aquisition Syndrome' is in almost all hobbies; fitness, art, cooking, sports, gaming, camping, photography etc - blame American hyper-commercialisation. Truth is, the 'gun market' in the USA is very mature; there's not been any serious technological developments since the advent of plastic polymers in the 80s, they are usually pretty durable products which are [relatively] easy to repair there hasn't been much in the way of capability improvement for at least 50 years [in regards to hunting rifles / revolvers, perhaps a century], the vast majority of very good weapons are now 'out of patent' which means anybody can produce them [qv Norinco of China, churning out decent/affordable clones of iconic weapons] and they use [as a rule] generic ammunition types.

All this is shit for a gunmakers POV. I can't lock you in using the 'razor and blades' model with some wierd calibre of ammo, my 'new' hunting design from 2020 is not going to really be superior to one from 1920 [and most serious folks know it], my new design is nothing to shout about, a lot of those ones from 1920 are still kicking about, there's a huge cottage industry of gunsmiths refurbishing weapons so they can be returned to the market and it's fairly easy to get spares etc to do this. Thus, marketing more shit to the paranoids, dressing up my wears in 'tacticool' garb, using every chance to stoke the 'they're coming for your GUNS!!!' flames so they come in and clear out my inventory and constantly throwing out more aftermarket shite for folks to collect like Pokemon.

The interesting thing is [as Carthage notes] is that this crap has infiltrated the anti-gun group too. They think banning things like the scary-looking AR-15 is really important, when at best it's just a distraction to the real issues. The more sane part of this realises that they've fallen into the 'politicians fallacy'; that gun violence is horrible, something needs to be done but this is one of the very few things we might actually succeed in doing. Some folks might believe/hope that if they can start with say, getting back the Federal Assault Weapon Ban from the 90s they might be able to gradually 'salami-slice' their way to a reasonable level of firearm restrictions [but I would argue this is now moot with the MAGA-majority in SCOTUS]. But we need to remember there is a segment of the American population who is at best rather blase regarding gun deaths in general, merely objects to 'mass shooter' events - reasoning [with some logical, though cuntish reasoning] that a lot of those attacks/deaths would have happened even if the murderer hadn't had access to a firearm.

From what little I've read, it would appear those non right-wing gun owners are getting their shit togther, but in a haphazard manner. Like with leftie preppers, they're aware that they're in the distinct minority, that a lot of 'their community' is very anti-gun and they [usually] don't have the funding levels right-wing groups enjoy from sympathetic millionaires. I would put my money on ethnic-minority based groups being the most organised, because often they're plugged into their local community, can be spread via word-of-mouth and have the example of the Black Panthers to follow [or not].

Good thinkpiece: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/john-brown-gun-club-armed-anti-fascist-1234733200/

KarmaPolice (talk) 20:40, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Serendipity

Maybe trump is what you got better alive than dead. Maybe I'm the kind to say if you're awful take the shot. Take the shot for me. Insanely close but the plan isn't ever violence..Torrent (talk) 11:06, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

You want my honest take? Torrent (talk)

I think we should regulate guns. Torrent (talk) 11:19, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

What will it take for 'the legislatures' to introduce legislation regardless of the squawking and more of the gun-nutters?

In the UK most people do not feel threatened by having to undergo checks to get the various gun licences (including black-powder and other categories). Anna Livia (talk) 18:17, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

In the UK, you need a licence to even operate one (we'll, good as) - and most don't go further than side/side shotguns or perhaps a varmint rifle. But for starters, we don't have any big game to take down.

But the problem is (apparently) there's not much which could have been done legal-wise. If it turns out they used an 'AR style' (aka 'scary looking') weapon banning them wouldn't really have done much because they could have simply used an old Marlin, Garand or Mosin (all legit hunting rifles) instead. KarmaPolice (talk) 19:09, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

The point is that there is a general awareness that 'people need licences for guns and other weapons, apart from criminals who don't' - and many of us not of the 'hunting, shooting and fishing brigade, or with military connections' will never knowingly cross paths with weapons unless seeing museum displays and historical re-enactments (plus a few 'old weapons found in attic/dug up in garden' type stories). Anna Livia (talk) 23:37, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Pro-gun people have lots of arguments that are shit, but the 'there's too many guns in circulation to do licensing' is not one of them. Or pointing out that due to a combination of shit policing and the above plethora law-abiding citizens do need a means to defend themselves. However, the shittiness starts when they oppose licencing of the weapon holder rather than the weapon, or even making it mandatory for the above to have secure methods of storage (one of the main sources of firearms for mass shootings is 'legal pieces taken from a relative without consent').

As for 'knowingly crossing paths with weapons'... well the 'knowingly' is the part. There has always been some 'leftish' owners, and 2016 found an upswing of ownership amongst groups such as LGBT, women, minorities etc (no prizes for guessing why) and from what little studies I've seen is that they are a lot more circumspect about their ownership (for example, they don't talk about it, attend ranges outside of their locality) as well as the folks who simply don't talk about 'stuff I don't think you'd care about'. 35% of Americans own at least one firearm and 44% said they lived in a 'gun household' as of 20 (Gallup poll) - while some will be Dale Gribble types, some clearly won't be. KarmaPolice (talk) 10:14, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

it can't be about punishing gun owners when their kids go incel bang bang, if my parents had any kinda gun safe I'd have cracked that. The idea I have is to require all guns to be registered to a club, with federal standards that would absolutely be in odds of state open carry laws. There are buildings in the US that have to use signs, similar to no smoking, that show in no uncertain graphic language, no guns https://images.app.goo.gl/p3qAjN5gAp5X8nCg6 I can't think of the last time I've seen a no smoking sign. Torrent (talk) 11:11, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

And how would this work, exactly? KarmaPolice (talk) 12:35, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I was using 'knowingly' in the UK sense; we can all think of contexts where weapons will be present but not visible.

In various contexts guns (of whatever kind) can be a visible part of local culture, but that they have to be treated 'as what they are' (much as in other cultures 'serious' knives and bladed weapons are carried, whether or not as a status symbol/part of the normal costume).

'The weapons' and 'the culture' have to be considered as at least partly separate. It does not matter how many guns or other weapons there are if the general attitude is that they are 'used correctly' and not as the answer to any question or problem (so, on one level, they are no different to a box of matches or a lighter). Anna Livia (talk) 13:21, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I agree, it is the 'gun culture' which is a major issue in the USA, as seen by the relatively low level of gun violence in 'high gun ownership' places (Canada, Scandinavia, Germany etc). I mean, I've heard folks talk about 'knife culture' but I've spent the weekend working with a 45cm heavy machete which would truly ruin anyone's day. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:41, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I am a little in the weeds here and I want to clarify something. A pistol and a rifle are different. The gun club would require standards of understanding ownership, at the very least, proper storage. It is Illegal to have a 3 inch knife, Google it and you will get a bunch of places selling a millimeter under. So I don't think in America you could just walk around with a machete and claim right to bear arms, which is a part of this.

So then, to own a gun is still easy, but register all guns at a club requires at least a two step regisistration process. It's honestly barely a protective measure, but misuse of the highly defensive weapon of gun needs be addressed. I'm not saying making it illegal to run somebody over with a car makes it impossible to run somebody over with a car, It's a much more consistent argument that pointing a gun at a living thing increases its chance of dying. And if I have to argue on that, I will. Guns, especially rifles, need to be accounted for. In numbers, users, location and uses as much as it is important to register a modification like a suppressor to a gun club. I wouldn't say a gun club would be responsible for a member's bad action, but man, that kid almost smoked a presidential candidate. Was he, at 20, just fully in charge of a rifle? It's silly and speculative to think, but if he had one extra responsibility to log taking that rifle out, he could have lied or not logged it, still 100% on him, but knowing who has a rifle in the first place, even if it doesn't turn out to be any of the gun club. Demolition Ranch has gun club rights, ATF requires registration and they have no reason to harm anyone or leave their range. It simply means they can use modifications that must stay on their property. If I said all their rifles needed to be registered the same as their modifications, they would be bothered for at most 30 minutes, I guarantee they have a very capable team logging every gun and modification. Torrent (talk) 07:33, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

In a practical sense, Q: 'you have logged your AR-15 for what purpose?'. A: 'Range shooting' Q: 'You are not storing your AR-15 at the designated clublocker, are you storing it in a safe?' A:'yes' and then it's extra penalties from there IF the gun is used in impropriety, as in irresponsible of the gun owner to fail to meet the standards of the gun club, which at least some terms must be mandated, like if a dumb kid or an angry person acted outside of a mandate. Torrent (talk) 07:51, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Issues;

1/ This will turn gun clubs into arms of law enforcement. They shall hate that, and I don't trust them all to 'do it properly' either - one of my legal/regulatory maxims is to never outsource compliance to folks who can't be relied on to do it right [just imagine; Dale Gribble or Jimbo and Ned doing the questioning?]. Plus is there even enough clubs to do this?

2/ Your system doesn't do a jot about all the 300m+ weapons which already exist, or those which could be made later on from construction/assembily methods.

3/ The system of each gun being registered will be hugely bureaucratic and include a massive database which quite a lot of folks would object to. Even more so, if you start demanding all mods etc being re-registered too.

In short, this is [to your own admission] a lot of work for not much actual effect. In fact, it smells more like 'security theatre' than anything really productive, because the vast majority of current 'shooters' would still get their mitts on those weapons. Now, there are politicos out there who [I think] would put their political lives on the line by standing up to the NRA/fweedom nutjobs but I don't think they'd count this hill as worth dying on.

Personally, I think the UK example is a better one - where you licence the person, not the weapon [closing 'gun show', 'ghost gun' and 'preexisting firearm' loopholes]. This check would be functionally to the current NICS background checks done if you've bought your piece through an authorised dealer [which means the system is already in place]. It would be an 'shall issue' basis [as it is a right, not a privilege] but there would be a couple of conditions attached ['you will not sell/lend weapons to unlicenced people', 'you are legally liable to keep your weapons secured when not in use to prevent theft' etc]. To sweeten the deal, I'd also make said firearms permit a legal form of photo ID. KarmaPolice (talk) 10:08, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

okay, it's now known the shooter was part of a gun club. But turning gun clubs into militias is nuts bonkers. Gun law maybe irks libertarians, but an ID to own a gun sounds reasonable. If you're walking around with a gun, maybe keep that permit in your wallet. I would happily work with you to make a gun license as culturally relevant in America as a Driver's license. Torrent (talk) 05:06, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

While I think the prevalence of guns is the biggest issue, undercutting all attempts at licensing, I do think that something equivalent to a driver’s license would probably be the most feasible. That way, you could also have several classes of licenses for various types of weapons (a handgun/shotgun/rifle division would probably be fairly easy to handle) just as you need different licenses for different types of vehicles.

However, while it is probably not politically feasible, I’d say that banning certain classes of weapons would probably limit the lethal potential in mass shootings, while still allowing plenty of room for personal protection, hunting etc. A very simple technical definition would be a ban on detachable magazines, period, alongside a maximum magazine capacity (say, 5 or 10 rounds). Or you could go further and additionally ban autoloading weapons altogether.

This would still allow for revolvers, shotguns, a lot (most?) of bolt action rifles, and even some semiautomatic pistols and rifles (that is, if autoloaders aren’t banned, of course), but the latter would be less attractive without their high capacity, detachable magazines. The lack of high capacity, automatic weapons would likely reduce the lethal potential in mass shootings, because they allow any shooter to get a lot of rounds off in very little time. However, this probably wouldn’t change most shootings, which are likely to be one on one, or at most involve under a handful of people.

And yes, I know that people can train to a high proficiency with bolt actions as well (“mad minute” and all that), but the point is that this takes time and effort, unlike the time it takes to become equally (or more) lethal with a semiautomatic rifle (especially with a large, detachable magazine), say one of the many AR-15 clones. ScepticWombat (talk) 06:22, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

I got to fire a Mosin. I had just fired an AR, so I kinda 'Sally'd' it and my first shot went very high. I put the rest of the rounds direct, but it is not a hunting rifle, the target will explode. Torrent (talk) 07:09, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Problem with multi-licencing is that driving is not a 'protected right' as per the Constitution while gun ownership is [esp with this current SCOTUS lineup]. Most of your limitation suggestions would basically be a resumption of the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, which I suspect is currently politically impossible to get returned right now at a Federal level. A part of me wonders whether uses of taxation might be a good 'work-around' solution - say, '1000% excise tax' on sales of new assault weapons [the Constitution says about the right to own guns. Not that they should be affordable]. Now, I personally think that's a bit too stiff a tax and won't deal with preexisting pieces, but it's a method to start to staunch the inflow of weaponry. There are other items which can be put in, for example cracking down on unlicenced firearm dealers, using the above tax revenues for the ATF to covertly buy up assault weapons on the used market for destruction [in the hope it will push up the prices to ridiculus levels] and also looking at the restrictions on certain types of ammunition [for example, flechettes]. But the main purpose of my licencing model is to drill it hard into the heads of every gun owner in America that it's their duty to ensure their pieces don't fall into the hands of unlicenced people [kids/thieves/etc]. KarmaPolice (talk) 13:32, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Biden

What are the important figures able to replace Biden which could realistically win the US election? Is there any chance the left faction of the Democratic Party could take the leadership? New world (talk) 13:29, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I would say Bernie or AOC, but they have both endorsed Biden. Carthage (talk) 13:39, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Neither are widely popular, and AOC in particular has a national hate-dom greater than her support base. Better off with some governor. CorruptUser 13:52, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I would like Gretchen Witner, but all the signs are Harris will insist it's her if not Biden. KarmaPolice (talk) 14:25, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Sadly, I think KarmaPolice is right, although I agree with those suggesting that one of the more popular governors would probably stand a far better chance of saving the sinking Democratic ship. ScepticWombat (talk) 14:54, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Due to the shitty way that elections are held in the US, having enormous amounts of money counts for a lot in running a campaign. If Biden stepped out, Harris would control the funds that they've raised together. That makes it extremely unlikely that anyone could run without her on the ticket as presidential candidate. The pundit class has been fueling this nonsense about an 'alternative' candidate to Biden since the debate. One good thing about the incident is that it could end distract the easily-distracted pundit class from that foolishness. Bongolian (talk) 15:11, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I think we need to remember Harris is running (effectively) to be President because there's a reasonable % of the electorate who suspect (for whatever reason) Biden won't see out a second term. Even the most pro-Biden people will at least privately that folks of Biden's age can go from 'fine' to 'dead' worryingly quickly. So she really needs to get out there and convince America she is a damn fine backup. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:46, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I think a workable compromise might be to run Harris for POTUS, but adding one of the popular governors as VP, which might be able to secure at least one key, swing state (as LBJ was chosen by JFK to essentially “deliver Texas”). This way the Democrats could strive for a combination of “sensible continuity & change” in contrast to “risk complete chaos with Trump”.

But it also requires the Democratic campaign to really start talking about what it’ll actually work to deliver in terms of policies and concrete results in the coming presidential term, not just trying to scare the electorate and claim they already delivered.

The one upside to the assassination attempt is that it might force the Democratic campaign to talk about policies and promises, exactly because it will be harder for them to just run negative campaigns about Trump without sounding as if they at least tacitly endorse the attempt on Trump’s life. ScepticWombat (talk) 15:59, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, there’s nobody else but Harris. And that’s because the “popular governor” candidates are white, so the party would have to struggle to explain to black voters why the party just completely snubbed the first black woman vice president and replaced her with a white person. And with the election bound to be so close, any decrease in black turnout would severely hurt the party both presidentially and down ballot. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 17:19, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I am happy to recant if evidence shows otherwise, but a) I think Harris is less popular with minority (esp black) voters than it's assumed and b) I think said voters would be more attracted to actual policies which effect them/ communities than a mere face. KarmaPolice (talk) 17:28, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I’m sure, but it wouldn’t be a good look at all. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 17:29, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

True, but this is a situation where every situation looks shit. KarmaPolice (talk) 19:00, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Fox poll finds Harris the most viable of any, at least on favorability/unfavorability measures. (Before dismissing because of the source, see here.) Chillpilled (talk) 23:04, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Who would she pîck as VP, btw? Arcadium Trancefer (talk) 11:38, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

It would never happen, but it would be pretty cool if Harris was president and Ocasio-Cortez VP. I just imagine conservative heads exploding because it's not just one, but TWO women in powerful political positions. Impiricism (talk) 14:52, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I am as confused by this as I was by The McCain and Palin ticket. Are you trying to lose? I, in my conspiratorial mind, think the two party system in America is really trying to keep a center that benefits big money. There is no dark horse Democrat, aside from Harris. I just have never bought the idea that a two party system would work against itself. Guns are bad murder is wrong. Torrent (talk) 05:32, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm not. The right-wing have well-oiled political machines which 'gets out the vote' really well and gets lots of said oil from a clutch of megadonors. There is no real 'left' equivalent. In short; if you are a progressive/ socialist in the USA and you want to be actually noticed by the smoke-filled room folks, build yourself a political machine if your own (not just ad-hoc lashups for particular issues/ elections). KarmaPolice (talk) 12:16, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

While it looks monumentally stupid in hindsight, there was at least some short-term logic to the McCain/Palin ticket. It was probably supposed that McCain could rope in the “moderates”, not least the “Reagan Democrat” types, while Palin could bring in what would become the Tea Party and the fundies and thus create a GOP win in an otherwise very uphill election. Instead, Palin essentially scared away those who might have gone for McCain and her (pre) Tea Party/fundie appeal wasn’t enough either, likely because the (pre) Teabaggers/fundies saw McCain as a RINO. ScepticWombat (talk) 15:32, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

There was also the issue that McCain was getting practically NO coverage due to the media being completely obsessed with Obama. McCain had to do something to get attention. CorruptUser 15:48, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

So the fact Obama was running on a 'change' ticket during the wreckage of the banking crisis which was morphing into the Great Recession (which had happened under the early 00s Republican dominance of all three parts of Govt) had nothing to do with it?

While going up against Obama was going to be difficult, chances are Palin was much more of a minus than a plus. Which the 2008 BBC agreed on - Why McCain lost (BBC News, 2008) KarmaPolice (talk) 16:52, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Don’t know if it was addressed to a specific comment, but the “uphill election” I mentioned was meant to point to the financial crisis, which indeed would’ve made any GOP ticket a long shot to win, although that doesn’t change that the McCain/Palin combo did make some sense at the time. However, it was clearly also a “marriage of convenience” and I seem to recall a lot of stories of internal conflicts within the campaign too, which probably didn’t help things either. ScepticWombat (talk) 01:51, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Was referrting to Corrupt's point. I vaguely remember the online chatter from '08 and one the few impressions left to me of then was of 'a maverick Republican touring the country assuring everyone he wasn't a maverick anymore'. I also remember think this might have been the first time where age/health of candidate was made an issue [McCain was 72 and had had cancer in the past] arguing it meant greater scrutiny of Palin was required than of say, Biden [as VP]. KarmaPolice (talk) 02:12, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

USA

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qyXNcCOMeVc New world (talk) 18:50, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Funny but man, the French version of the American accent is exactly the American version of the French accent. Incredible. Torrent (talk) 09:01, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Ahn hohn hohn, c'est incroyable. (En chhr like you got stuff in your throat, oi like oyi, then ah bluh like you got other things to do) Torrent (talk) 09:14, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Trump VP

He's headed to the RNC and my bets are he will pick J. D. Vance as his VP. Chillpilled (talk) 23:06, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

JD Vance is the smart choice to ensure he gets Ohio and a couple other key Hillbilly states, but Trump doesn't like people who have a chance to outshine him. That's why the prior VP was a sentient #2 Pencil that a fairy godmother forgot to "deal with" after the princess found her prince. CorruptUser 00:48, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

The one thing authoritarians don't want is someone stealing the spotlight. For that alone Vance is unlikely. Count on the idiot billionaire from North Dakota or someone similarly unnoticeable, who's more in the Pence-mold. Bongolian (talk) 01:42, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

That's... quite a description of Pence. Impiricism (talk) 14:25, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

You win a prize, my friend. He's now the official candidate.

This user is RWs self-appointed culinary expert

N A Z U N A -H I W A T A S H I-

I'll burn ya!TheAlePower (talk) 19:24, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Mildly surprised that Trump chose Vance and not someone with a lesser personal profile. Apart from the advantages it could bring in terms of the electoral college, it might also be a sign that Trump is banking on a “tech bro billionaire alliance” to raise funds from the likes of Thiel (who basically invented Vance as a politician) and Musk who, while having different political projects from Trump, also see him as a potentially useful “agent of chaos”. ScepticWombat (talk) 19:45, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

So, Vance confirmed now? What tweets from 12 years ago yall gonna pullup about him now? 2600:387:F:D13:0:0:0:2 (talk) 20:17, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Why do we need tweets? J.D. Vance gained fame by writing about a "Cletus safari" book essentially blaming the culture of the poor for keeping them poor. Whatever you can say about that aspect, the one thing I wonder about is the contrast in education between his life story and GOP rhetoric. From what I can tell (he hasn't seemed to go into this part as much), Vance appears to have used America's university system to lift his way up out of "Appalachia" (actually, Middletown Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb, but whatever) into becoming a hedge fund manager. This stands in contrast to the Republican party's hostility to public education -- at least when it comes to that Project 2025 Heritage Foundation side, as well as the anti-intellectualism among many of the rubes. From what I can recall (and have Googled), during his Senate term, Vance was happy to patter the usual DEI/critical race theory bullshit in order to attack colleges, so I guess he's now firmly part of the "got mine fuck you" class of America now that he "made it". Le sigh.

Vance the politician has oddly made himself a "champion of the working class" when in reality, if you just look *slightly* beneath the marketing, he's essentially a tech-bro aligned with the increasingly authoritarian capitalism side of such (as epitomized by Musk and Thiel). That's quite similar to Trump in some ways (in that the "champion of the working class" is a ruse, though Trump is far from a tech-bro). It's just another sign that probably the most comparable political party to the GOP is not anything democratic, but Viktor Orbán's "illiberal democracy" of Fidesz. And that if you really are working class and voting Republican, you are going to get economically fucked over... again. BobJohnson (talk) 21:06, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Vance has so many skeletons in his closet that this could end up sinking the ticket a little. Some of the background on Vance's benefactor Peter Thiel is this right here. And then also this. Chillpilled (talk) 21:25, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Heh, at some point the neoreactionary movement article should be updated when the "dust settles". Vance does seem to have loose connections to the movement at first glance. In which case, that weird techno-libertarian movement full of incredibly strange long-winded bouts of hot air is not quite the "largely insignificant and mostly an object of curiosity" thing that it was several years ago. BobJohnson (talk) 23:16, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

The connections are hardly "loose". He is personal friends with Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel. He follows Richard Hanania, BAP, that kind of crowd on Twitter. This guy should not be anywhere near power, much less a heartbeat away from the presidency. I figured he would run for president in 2028 but I wouldn't have guessed this would be the way he would make himself the heir apparent to Trump. His recent rhetoric and image are a deliberate act, evidenced in part by his radical switch in opinions. He has ulterior motives of some kind, probably simply fulfilling whatever Thiel wants in addition to personal careerism. He is the furthest thing from someone with this country's best interests at heart and manages to be someone who would be worse than Trump (in my initial estimation). I've just added something to WIGO Elections, where Vance calls for devaluing the US dollar. Some of you may remember that Milei recently took Argentina for a similar ride. Along with Trump's call for a 10% base tariff against every single country in the world, this looks like some real economic recklessness. Chillpilled (talk) 23:39, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I just thought of another thing that Vance might bring to the Trump campaign, and please tell me if I’m totally off my rockers here. But I think that, however bizarre it might sound, that Vance actually brings some “pundit credibility” to the Trump campaign. Vance is quite articulate and there’s still a lingering glow from Hillbilly Elegy that gives him a veneer of being cultured, or even an intellectual.

Remember that far fewer people actually read the book than have heard about it, and they’ll probably easily gloss over the kind of “white trash has a culture of poverty and should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps”-stuff in favour of some sense that Vance is “actually” a working class hero and champion. It’s also worth remembering that although critics panned the subsequent film, audience response seemed to have been more positive, so I doubt that it actually dimmed his halo much.

Similar to how Pence supposedly brought “fundie respectability” to Trump’s 2016 bid, I think that Vance will be portrayed as bringing some kind of “working class, upwardly mobile, erudite intellectualism” this time around.

Because Vance speaks in fairly clear, coherent sentences that are well tailored to the media and is arguably equal to Trump in projecting “faux working class populism” (“blue collar billionaire” vs. “bootstrapped hillbilly”, sigh), I think certain pundits will blithely ignore Vance’s blatantly obvious history of opportunistic flip flopping and toadying and the fact that his entire career has been as a wholly paid for Thiel boot licker. ScepticWombat (talk) 10:11, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I say this tentatively, but now I've looked into this Vance being better - I think he's more a threat than is being given credit for, and it's beyond the 'intellectual veneer' which Sceptic alludes to. I can feel the appeal of Vance to a particular demographic [the working class, not just whites], even across the ocean. And I shall sum it up in two 'generalised' lines.

'The 'Working Class' hates the 'Professional Class'.

and

'The 'Working Class' hates the 'Welfare Class'.

The first bit is the 'elite-bashing' we all know and love - said 'elite' in this case being folks like 'teachers', 'bosses', 'social workers', politicians', 'lawyers', 'journalists' and 'bankers', fairly thin on the ground, viewed as 'outsider adversaries' to the local's lives in all the brain-drained 'Middletowns' throughout America [and beyond]. In this, Vance is kind of painting himself as a kind of 'rogue element'; someone who did 'fly away' but didn't 'go native' by being 'indoctrinated by librul culture' in the process.

The second bit isn't so much 'blaming the poor for being poor', it's a more nuanced class division between 'working class' and 'underclass'. I found evidence in a '16 interview, in which Vance states his grandparents were comfortably retired and elsewhere says 'they weren't destitute'. His bitching anecdotes like his 'people on welfare with cell phones' and complaints of a co-worker who kept on skipping work is nothing special; because anyone who has been working class has known - and looked down on - folks who are like that. There's not a huge number of them, but there's enough in every community.

It's the whole 'Homer's Enemy' scaled down; the annoyance of the person who's having to slog to get anything then seeing a fucking lazy moron expecting - and often getting - 'it' for nothing. It's the anger of dried-out person at the end of long day labouring in the sun on seeing their 'disabled' neighbour has spent their day drinking beer on a lawn chair, or the footsore shelf-stacker hearing their cousin bitching about 'their very hard day' which they know mainly comprised of them watching TV watching their arse grow. Nobody likes a freeloader, esp one with learned helplessness. The issue is that most 'outsiders' cannot see this division between 'Frank' and 'Homer', and thus think when the former is attacking the latter that they're attacking 'their own'. And if you said that to Frank, he'd chew you up - that he had 'self respect', a 'work ethic', that he was 'a striver' - that if you hired him, he'd turn up clean/groomed and on time, ready to work well as he darn could, wouldn't steal or goof off etc.

This is the 'personal responsibility' and 'tough love' aspects Vance peddles; that in the former individuals have the responsibility to act least do all they can to try to get somewhere in life and the latter is making the culprit 'own' their failures etc. It can be said in some ways he's describing in 'Middletown' a situation where due to a local economic collapse a decent % of the population have lost hope of things getting better and have fallen into a kind of very insular rut of an existence. This does resonate - even with minority groups [because a lot of what he's describing is class in nature, not racial].

In true rightist fashion he might be vaguely-decent in describing the problems, but he is utterly shit in describing possible solutions. Even when they're literally in front of his face. He directly mentions how the local church had given him support etc growing up but he fails to appreciate that part of it's 'help' was due to it being a 'Third Place' [which means that an improvement of secular places - like children's centres, libraries, parks, gyms, youth groups etc would help this]. I mean, he to some extent 'worked his way out' of Middletown via education but doesn't seem to acknowledge the help he got on the way. No. It's all just him [and his grandma]. Obs, this is part of his 'fuck you, got mine' Horatio Alger thing he's got going [one review for Hillbilly summed it up as being a mix of Vances' gloating for having 'got out' while dumping on the folks who hadn't but also mythologising a 'blue collar white America' which he never had any personal experience of]. I've also seen a few questions raised about whether he really was as 'hillbilly' as he's making out [he's wouldn't be the first self-made person who's exaggerated their level of 'rags' at the start of the tale] but I don't know enough for sure... but I'm sure there's some journos beavering away right now digging all that up.

How much traction will Vance be able to generate with all this? I am not so sure. My suspicion is that ultimately, Vance resonates less with the 'Middletons' of America than the MAGA elite hope he will. But there is resonance there, and it would be very stupid for Democrats to ignore it. KarmaPolice (talk) 12:45, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Ultimately, Vance is more Peter Thiel than Joe Average, and the more the Democrats can paint him as "just another VC tech bro", the better off they will be at deterring his faux "hillbilly" vibe. Vance does have a voting record, and the executive summary I've seen so far is that it pretty much is "toe the GOP line" outside of a handful of symbolic things. For instance, Vance has said some surprisingly nice things about unions and worker's rights... however, so far, the actual voting record on worker rights is not impressive at all. In addition, we all know that the Thiel/Musk "tech-bro" VC types hate unions as well. Ultimately, no matter what comes out of Vance's mouth, the truth is going to be more "follow the money"; hopefully the Democrats can capitalize on that. BobJohnson (talk) 14:30, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Yet that doesn't matter because 90% of these voters aren't gonna look up his record or even hugely study him beforehand. In this, they're gonna go more on the 'feels' he gives off and that's very hard to judge in advance. In the end, I think it's gonna all boil down to whether they believe a) he actually gives a damn and b) whether his promises [in short to 'bring back all the jobs' to the Middletowns] are going to be really achieved. I've done a little bit of digging on what Middletown actually thinks of Vance and I think the answer is circling 'meh'. He has no huge detractors but not really any fans either. 'Quiet kid who had a bit of a rough childhood and got out and did okay for himself' seems the consensus [they more remember his grandmother]. Some think his book was alright, others accuse him of overpainting the town as more a shithole than it actually is. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:48, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

I've actually been surprised at how big Project 2025 has been trending among "left-wing chitchat". Most of the time, policy-wonk stuff like think tank plans don't catch much currency. But this time, the Heritage Foundation wrote up something so extreme, it may actually motivate the other side to the polls to some degree. Obviously, this does not apply to the "casual voter"; rather, this applies to the politically active sort.

Likewise, with Vance, you have that whole association with the neoreactionary movement. As with Project 2025, highlighting this would not be something for the casual voter. But most people outside of the Silicon Valley scene have probably barely heard of this movement at this moment. And now we have a VP candidate who is a few hop skips and a jump away from Curtis Yarvin's extremely strange authoritarian fantasies. It's just something to highlight to make sure that at least people "in the know" are aware that not only Vance is not a "hillbilly", he's got a connection to some of the disturbingly weirdest feudal fantasy shit Silicon Valley has to offer. BobJohnson (talk) 21:55, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

It’s not for no reason that Trump has “talked down” the importance of Project 2025, because he knows that its extreme contents is more than likely to turn off swing voters and motivate his opponents.

While I also agree that the mythical “average voter” is not going to check Vance’s voting record or fact check Hillbilly Elegy’s depiction of his background and career, any serious inconsistencies in these records can be used by his opponents to poke holes in his fake populist rhetoric, which is indeed a big bunch of “feels over reals” BS.

Similarly, beyond the Muskrats and similar cultists, who are probably not going to vote Democratic anyway, tech bros are probably not particularly popular among “average voters”, either — something that Trump is tacitly acknowledging with this “woke Big Tech” attacks. Highlighting Vance as a bootlicker, rather than his own claim to be a “self-made tech entrepreneur” could thus also work to undercut his BS.

One reason attacking Vance as a “billionaire booster” and “tech bro toady” might be even more feasible is because Peter Thiel is not a sympathetic character. He doesn’t have the (undeserved) aura of “real life Tony Stark” of Elon Musk and many of his ideas and projects are outright dystopian, even on their own terms (really, what kind of cartoon villain decides to name their own(!) nefarious surveillance project Palantir?).

All of this taps into a narrative about Vance that basically says “Nope, he’s not what he claims and he’s certainly not like you or actually trying to improve your prospects in life”. Of course, this has then to be followed by actual policy proposals that would help improve people’s life prospects and not tap into Vance’s “I’m alright, Jack” attitude. ScepticWombat (talk) 15:34, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Truly, a shit idea...

I'm not sure how terrible the idea to deliberately devalue the dollar is has resonated with folks. Trump's 10% world tariff is the stuff of a sane economist in comparison.

1/ USD hasn't been pegged since 1973 [when Nixon ended the gold peg] which means the only real methods to 'devalue' the dollar would be a) the Fed flooding the market with USD and/or b) buying up colossal amounts of Euro/Sterling/Franc/Yen so those rise in value. Now, the first will be inflationary and the second massively expensive. Like, 'costing more than the increased revenues from more exports would be'. Now I think of it, inflation will kick in regardless because all American imports [from timber to medical gear, oil to consumer goods] will become more expensive. The US domestic market would in fact be more hit by this than most advanced economies, because she has decided to allow said markets to be ruled by 'market forces'.

2/ The world will go apeshit. Every country holds their official reserves in mostly USD. Why? Because it is relatively stable in value and accepted almost everywhere. How did this happen? Partly because America has built over a century plus of being 'a serious donkey who never fucks about'. Pulling something like this will damage that hard-earned rep. Cue, for example losing that AAA rating for US Treasuries. I'm assuming Uncle Sam having to pay more interest on debt is such a good idea. Politically, it will be worse, as everyone [friend or foe] will feel fucked over.

3/ China's currency is pegged, so it could easily neutralise this by switching to a USD peg and 'riding it down'. Other nations who have pegs can do similar, such as [if I remember right] the Gulf States. What's more, chances are without further interventions, the USD will 'float' up to something approximating it's previous level. Minus the economic damage, that is.

Now, it's not insane to argue that USD is currently 'too strong' and needs to weaken a bit to encourage exporters and for domestic consumers to choose domestically-produced goods [I've argued this for the UK for years] but this would perhaps be the worst manner to do it in. However, as the holder of the de facto world currency in this particular situation the USA has less 'freedom to manoeuvre' than say, the UK does because [basically] Sterling is something measured, not the stick to measure with. KarmaPolice (talk) 12:22, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

'And that, my dear children, is how the (Mongolian tögrög, or other obscure currency of choice) became the official reserve currency of the world...' Anna Livia (talk) 16:11, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

It's basically the financial Nuclear Option. That $34T the US owes? It's almost all in dollars. The US can print $34T in dollars anytime it wants. The problems of course are that the US will never be able to meaningfully borrow in dollars again, at least not in the lifetime of anyone currently alive and probably then some. This isn't too much of an issue if the US doesn't need to borrow money to function... which it does, even without interest payments on debt. Compounding that problem is that, well, collapsing the US debt would effectively collapse the financial systems of the entire world as well; the second great depression would effectively cut off a lot of the government's revenue, and nobody would lend to the government to make up the shortfall, leading to even core functions of government being gutted, which would lead to even more drastic problems that either last for generations or simply end the "Pax Americana" of the past few decades. CorruptUser 04:50, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

So Trump will now see the value of gun control

For crying out loud, he has experienced now the dangers of shootings. If he has any sense he'd cut ties with the NRA and support gun control. The guy may be foolish but he's certainly selfish enough to not want to endanger himself. ^{— Unsigned, by: Drivingcars / talk / contribs}

If I recall correctly, he implemented one or two mild gun control measures when he was president, like the bump stock ban (overturned by SCOTUS later). I had a theory the shooter could've been a hardcore gun nut who was pissed about this. Would be a very curveball motive and I don't put much stock in it, but it's one that was on my mind. Chillpilled (talk) 14:14, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

What realistic gun control measures would have stopped the shooter's father from legally purchasing a rifle? Christopher (talk) 14:38, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I think the reaction, if there is one, will be anything but gun control. Something along the lines of "we must have more police officers, with far-reaching surveillance, and of course MORE GUNS". It's America, where bullets can be quickly obtained via vending machines. Impiricism (talk) 14:40, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps if the father had kept his firearm secure, his son wouldn't have taken it to try to assassinate the ex-President. Perhaps if the father had been more aware of his home-life, he might have spotted his son fucking up to the stage they started planning to assassinate said person.

However, it is predictable that the result will be more guns for Good People™ and blaming 'Democrats' / 'hard left' for stirring up hatred. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:30, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

too late for that. whatever you do, don't log on to facebook. The G (talk) 17:53, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

[4] Found this while checking News section on Google. So the NRA is suggesting banning elections now? Drivingcars (talk) 22:12, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Chaser is a satirical news source. Impiricism (talk) 22:32, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh. Wonder why it was mixed up with actual news sources? That said, wonder what response they will make. Will they continue to resist gun control or not. Drivingcars (talk) 22:51, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Of course "they" will - but only for people who are not Faux-xians and/or paid up Magamorons. Aloysius the Gaul (talk) 01:27, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Where to go in Florida?

Miami resident, shit gotten so expensive over the years. I heard inflation hit hard here because of the abundance of new yorkers and other businessemen moving here due to less state and city income tax. What hope is there for the residents that were born here. Plan on moving soon but I’ll need ideas where. ^{— Unsigned, by: MeesteeGerry / talk / contribs}

Troll rating, 2/10. *yawns* KarmaPolice (talk) 15:22, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

go to your next city council meeting and demand zoning reform in favor of more affordable housing. The G (talk) 17:55, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Is there a troll scale somewhere? Might be a good idea for a funspace article. Bongolian (talk) 18:12, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

If such an article is created then this troll post should certainly be included for its high farce quotient.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 18:31, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

It scores lowly for it's very low originality scale. I suggest to the OP that they demand all taxes to be cut to zero at their next city meeting - no ifs, no buts. It's not like anyone needs them things like the alleged 'services' they provide with those taxes, right? Bet 90% of it goes on 'hug a criminal' woke policing, gender-neutral bathrooms, the daily Pride parades and giving to welfare queens watching their flatscreen TVs, right?

Failing that, I suggest the OP moves to Somalia. I've heard they have 0% taxes because there's not actually a functioning government [and thus, no tax collectors]. But business will sort all those things out, right? Government is the problem, not the solution to anything! KarmaPolice (talk) 20:00, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Any real Floridian (who has experienced the enshitification of I-75 over the years) knows that a lot of the "Florida growth" is Boomer retirees moving to planned community like The Villages, Florida in order to spend their last days not shoveling snow and getting angry watching Fox News. Also, there's that pesky factor of climate change that Ron DeSantis doesn't want you to know anything about, but insurance companies nonetheless are absolutely pricing in as best as they can. BobJohnson (talk) 20:02, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I have a strong suspicion that the vast majority of jobs 'created' by creepy geriatric Disneylands are neither well-paid, offer career development or have decent benefits. It's something which I've noticed more and more of late; that quite often the 'money magnet' places of the world [like tourist destinations] run on the blood and sweat of a legion of folks working enshitified jobs. KarmaPolice (talk) 23:09, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if this was the same drive-by-poster who posted the lies about low student debt in Florida? Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 05:39, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

If it's not KenBot, it's a clone of. Look past the subject-matter and to the points they're making. KenBot got an update around '22 that 'inflation' is the #1 Bad Thing™ and so they're pushing it hard [as 'inflation is Biden's fault'] but in true KenBot style, they don't have a frigging clue of what they're actually talking about. I mean, why can't it data-scrape Investopedia or something? KarmaPolice (talk) 11:04, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Does Ken live in Florida? Arcadium Trancefer (talk) 13:09, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

No, he lives in buffalo, ny. 2600:387:F:771B:0:0:0:A (talk) 01:21, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Or did. Servers can be moved, y'know. KarmaPolice (talk) 06:55, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Amazing

The genocide in Gaza has claimed 186 thousand victims. Paid for with American tax dollars, of course. Carthage (talk) 20:34, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

This isn't a research study, but an estimate marked "correspondence". Which in The Lancet, means a letter, kind of like a letter to the editor. Also, it's a projection of the ultimate death toll, not a count so far. But there was some discussion at Wikipedia about how and whether to use this letter as a source and I think some people make decent arguments it's not an implausible estimate, referring to other sources lending it credence: 1 2. Chillpilled (talk) 00:25, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

"Source: We made it up" CorruptUser 04:40, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Do you not see the difference between 'guestimates' and just 'making stuff up', Corrupt? The bits of data used to extrapolate includes from the UN, Hamas estimates [generally backed up by Israeli intelligence estimates] and using ratios gained from previous conflicts. Al-Jazeera might have exagerated the figure, but it's not one which was simply siezed on randomly. KarmaPolice (talk) 18:42, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

War is truly terrible, no matter who finances it. Looking back, it has been claimed, that nearly 10% of the world's population was killed during or immediately after the Mongol invasions. I do not point this out as a "what-about" fallacy. The point is, even with only knives, swords and arrows, Mongols killed maybe 40 million people. Taking away those folk's weapons won't stop them. They want to kill one another with a passion. Cutting off Israel from military aid will probably happen, eventually. Unfortunately, bulletsare cheap. UncleKrampus (talk) 23:56, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

I remember that after one of the earlier wars, Hamas bragged that more people were born during the war than had died. I suspect that's still the case. CorruptUser 03:30, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

You have no evidence of them saying it this time, so who's 'making stuff up' now? KarmaPolice (talk) 09:27, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

In an area with no food, no water, no medicine, in increasingly crowded areas as people are pushed closer and closer together all the while starving and dehydrated and suffering relentless bombing campaigns? This "war" isn't like the others. Because it's a genocide, not a war. Carthage (talk) 04:07, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Israel has the power to shut off food, water, and electricity to Gaza. Palestine and Israel are not equal parties here. Palestine is under hostile military occupation from a military power that denies its very right to existence. Carthage (talk) 04:09, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

So why haven't they? CorruptUser 16:18, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Why haven't they what? Shut off power and denied importation of food and water? They've been doing that since the beginning of the genocide. Why aren't they exterminating Palestinians? Well, that's exactly what they're doing in Gaza. Carthage (talk) 18:48, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Because turning the entirety of the West Bank into a sealed ghetto and leave them all Palestinians to die would make their country a complete pariah to the point even the US would support arms embargoes etc. KarmaPolice (talk) 16:25, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't trust a thing the UN says about that region. CorruptUser 14:04, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

So you refuse to even read it out of willful ignorance. OK. Carthage (talk) 14:11, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Why? Who do you rely on instead, Corrupt? Would it be voices which backup your preconceptions? Now, I don't take every single thing the UN says as gospel but when they officially say something, they usually have some logical basis for saying it. Oh, and for the record; Israel still has produced *zero* evidence that Hamas had any 'control' over UNWRA. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:06, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I listen to the Beeb and Reuters, and even then I have to take everything they say with a grain of salt. CorruptUser 21:23, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

You do know that almost all journalists/ activists are banned from Gaza, right? That effectively now the only two orgs remotely competent/capable in reporting is either UNRWA or the Hamas-run health ministry? How 'reliable' do the stats need to be before you'll believe them? Wanna see every single body? The truth is; like most wars in modern human history, we won't really know exactly because of incomplete records-keeping, destruction of said records and quibbles how you can count 'a death' [for example, does a death from a typhoid outbreak due to destruction of water supplies by bombing count or not?]. In cases like this, the best we can do is make the best stab at guestimates we can [hell, we don't even know how many people died of Covid due to recording issues etc]. Wanting to have the most accurate stats is a laudable aim, but there comes a point where you have to either accept the best guestimates provided or start to reek of being a denialist doing a 'just asking questions' defence with stats.

Anyway, the article cited at the top is saying that the final deathtoll could be as high as 186k, which would result in the loss of 9% of the Gazan population. Now, this is going to be a bit on the high side but as we don't know how much further it's going to go on and if indirect deaths [infectious disease, hunger, untreated medical conditions, exposure etc] are counted... I wouldn't be shocked if it turns out to be that high. KarmaPolice (talk) 22:31, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

"I am going to dismiss the report without even having read it because the evidence it presents is inconvenient to my preferred narrative." This isn't skepticism, it's denialism. Carthage (talk) 08:11, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

I actually did read it, and it does detail some genuinely serious issues with the military. Conspicuously absent is any acknowledgment that Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization that intentionally puts civilians in the way and dresses as civilians (both war crimes there), and also absent is any actual articulation of intent to commit genocide outside fringe lunatics that aren't actually empowered to make that happen. And yes, the UN has showed itself to be thoroughly unreliable in this region. Now I'm sure you'll fulminate at me for not reading it right or some such, but I did read it. You tell me; what do you think is an appropriate response to a genocidal terrorist organization murdering 1,200 civilians and taking hostages that it still has today? I'm no world leader, so I really don't know; I'm just glad I'm not making these decisions. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:09, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Do you honestly believe shutting off water, power, and electrity, destroying cemeteries, schools, hospitals, and universities, will cause people to turn against Hamas? No, that's stupid. I've told you this before: committing crimes against humanity is bad counterinsurgency practice. So, no, committing genocide in response to a terrorist attack generated by decades of apartheid and occupation is a horrible way to "resolve" this conflict, because all it does, besides making your nation look no better, or worse, than the terrorists you're supposedly opposing (and Israel hasn't even put a serious dent in Hamas' military effectiveness), is galvanize recruitment for the opposition. That's stupid. Carthage (talk) 00:48, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

While I agree that a lot of this was of Hamas' own making [their plan all along was to provoke a huge Israeli response, get them generate a huge amount of collateral damage / death in the said response, then hope the world turns against the Israelis because of it.] I am not sure this needed to be explicitly mentioned in this attempted guestimate. I also ask for reason/evidence to why the UN is [as you put it] 'thoroughly unreliable'?

As to 'what should the Israelis have done... well, not have Bibi doing his 'divide and rule' on the Palestinians for decades or more recently utterly take his eye off of Gaza because he was more interested [due to politics] to redeploying the IDF to help expand/defend the settlements hacking up more and more of the West Bank and was too busy trying to gut the country's basic law and undermine the judiciary for his own partisan ends to read the fucking memos that Hamas were clearly up to something. Just a thought.

Anyway, back to the main point. There's one thing discussing probable death tolls, another regarding whether it is regarded as 'avoidable' in a realistic manner. KarmaPolice (talk) 00:36, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Blade mentions that Hamas has committed perfidy and used human shields. Should I mention how Israel has committed perfidy and used human shields in this war alone? Carthage (talk) 00:51, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Also can we stop pretending that Israel and Hamas are equal opponents here? Hamas, even before October, wasn't even truly in control of its own territory. Gaza is an open air concentration camp whose water, food, and power all are granted by Israel, and can be taken away by Israel. Gaza was a pressure cooker just waiting to explode. Carthage (talk) 03:28, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Why is this site so damn slow?

For me, at least. It will take me occasionally 5-10 seconds to load pages on RationalWiki, despite other pages operating normally without this lag. Is a constant DDOS attack happening or what is the cause of this? --Chicken4War (talk) 00:53, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Inactive server maintainers, 3 simple words 👏👏👏. 2600:387:F:771B:0:0:0:A (talk) 01:22, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

This has been discussed in Technical Support (RationalWiki:Technical support#Is it just me or is the searching function getting slower? and RationalWiki:Technical support#The DDoser is back). We have been under DDoS attack for a while. David Gerard implemented an easy but suboptimal fix that limits number of page loads per unit time. Someone yet to found to spend the time to make a better fix. Bongolian (talk) 03:32, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

I honestly can't say I've noticed regular slowness being an issue.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 19:24, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

I've had some real slow loads recently. KarmaPolice (talk) 19:56, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

The two main symptoms that I've consistently seen are 1) the main page text loads quickly, then the icons on the page load slowly 2) the autocomplete search feature does not work until after a few seconds after the full current page has completed loading. These are explicable by the anti-DDoS fix that David Gerard had implemented. Bongolian (talk) 21:00, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Clovis first

Clovis first, America second. FirstAndFormost (talk) 17:02, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

This seems incredibly niche... I'm assuming this is a shitpost? OP's account just created today too. Impiricism (talk) 20:15, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

I mean, saying a American first nations tribe was here before America isn't exactly conspiracy thinking. I dunno what the point of saying this at all.2001:569:FDC9:AB00:1A2:B9FD:C9F4:AE48 (talk) 22:10, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

@Impiricism It's pretty much archaeological consensus that Clovis was not the first culture in the Americas. Carthage (talk) 23:21, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

That's what I gleaned too from the Wikipedia page I linked. My above comment was supposed to express mild confusion at OP's statement "clovis first, america second"; the entire subject of early cultures in the Americas and which one is the first seems like quite an obscure thing to post about. Impiricism (talk) 14:11, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

The article is garbage, bull's shit, outright stupid to a point where you know it's all wrong. Dumb. The americas oldestes site is positing at the site of Monte Verde, in Chile. Please fix that fucked up piece of lies article. The peopling of America is on-mission, please cover it you geniuses. Oh, yea, my lord. Nothing. Anything. FirstAndFormost (talk) 15:10, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Why don't you fix it yourself instead of wasting your energy whining about it here? —cosmikdebris ^talk stalk 15:18, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Fuck, I confess. Oh great lords forgive my stupidity. New world (talk) 15:13, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Is Wikipedia Politically Biased?

A report published by the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute suggests Wikipedia has a left-leaning bias. It says that Wikipedia entries are more likely to associate negative/positive sentiment with right/left-leaning terms respectively. There's a Wikipedia Signpost article discussing this report: [5]. What are your thoughts on the report? Personally, to put it mildly, I think the report is bullshit. Sorry for poisoning the well. MayGodSaveUsAll (talk) 06:11, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Cool Story, bro. Revolverman (talk) 06:48, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Manhattan Institute has been spreading disinformation for decades, hence not a trustworthy source. Perhaps the 'bias' is well-deserved, and that the institute thinks that fascists and fellow-disinformation artists should be treated better. Don't forget:

“”And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

—Stephen Colbert[6]

Bongolian (talk) 07:14, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

You should read the RW article on Manhattan Institute before commenting. :)

Essentially, would you trust the so-called "think tank" heavily behind the propaganda effort to snarl word-ize "critical race theory", "woke", and "DEI" to be objective on anything? They're just whining that Wikipedia is actually a pretty decent source of information (and therefore is not a Republican propaganda mill), and that the one attempt to make a Republican propaganda mill Wikipedia ended up being a complete joke.

I noticed that even the paper's bias classification itself was called into question in the discussion (for instance, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald was classified as "from the left", which is a complete joke). The "left-right" political binary really isn't terribly good when examined in close detail, and I would be skeptical of any paper that tries to be Science-y with that.

If the United States ends up embracing the Orban-style "illiberal democracy" courtesy of reactionary Republicans, it is very probable that sources like Wikipedia (as well as public education in general) will be under attack in the future. Many of the Manhattan Institute's snarl words have been specifically designed for attacking public education. Orban did a fine job warping higher education in his country to be propaganda mills after all. No doubt this is a space to watch as at the moment I believe our higher education system (flaws and all) is one of the US's competitive advantages. BobJohnson (talk) 10:55, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Another thing to skim read... and Bonglian is correct in their not-that-obvious guess to what MI's gripe is. Manhattan Institute/City Journal is mainly rated 'right', which means chances are they think the 'zero' is perhaps around the National Review you're gonna be seeing 'liberal bias' in loads of things, such as say, The Economist [something which can be described as the last tender of the flame of classical liberalism].

They start nit-picking about word usage, for example bitching about WP not using terms like 'death tax' but instead using the line 'estate tax'. In their world, the former is 'correct, neutral' while the latter is 'misleading, biased'. Shame that the latter term ['used by Democrats' *snarls*] is the official term while the one favoured by CJ is in fact informal and an example of mild loaded language. WP, being an encyclopaedia has a general desire to use correct termonology for shit. Let's see exactly what pissed them off, yeah?

In the United States, the estate tax is a federal tax on the transfer of the estate of a person who dies. The tax applies to property that is transferred by will or, if the person has no will, according to state laws of intestacy. Other transfers that are subject to the tax can include those made through a trust and the payment of certain life insurance benefits or financial accounts. The estate tax is part of the federal unified gift and estate tax in the United States. The other part of the system, the gift tax, applies to transfers of property during a person's life.

In addition to the federal government, 12 states tax the estate of the deceased. Six states have "inheritance taxes" levied on the person who receives money or property from the estate of the deceased.

The estate tax is periodically the subject of political debate. Recent opponents have called it the "death tax"[1] while some supporters have called it the "Paris Hilton tax".[2]

[WP, 'Estate Tax in the United States']

However... they do have a very minor point here. I picked another 'tax' which had a nickname and looked it up... the 'Community Charge' introduced by Thatcher in 1990. While the blurb is correct, the page is titled 'Poll tax (Great Britain)' - an informal [and perhaps politically loaded] term the opponents managed to glue to it. Something noted within the Talk page. There is a bit of a lack of consistency here.

(insert) 'Poll Tax' was used because of the historical references - the Poll Tax and the Peasants' Revolt. Anna Livia (talk) 10:12, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Technically, it was a flat tax, not a poll tax - it was the same rate regardless to whether the amount of 'heads' were in the property. It also was not it's official name, which was my main objection for it being titled it on WP. I referred to it as it as 'poll tax' for our 1992 general election page here, but we're not WP. KarmaPolice (talk) 12:08, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Next, let's look at MI's bitch that 'coverage of American polticians is biased' [link to the graphs here]. Now, ignoring the first one [I am not exactly sure what they're trying to prove here] you'll notice while on average Democrats appear to have higher plus rating, the real issue is a general clutch of very minus Republicans at the end [who will significantly drag down the median score]. Note that here the MI instantly concludes [with no evidence] that it 'must be librul bias' for this, rather than [for example] the possibility that the quality of Republican politicians might be lower [my pet theory is this; as rightist folks are more drawn to money, the 'cream' is more likely to go into finance, business etc than politics than their leftist counterparts].

There's another issue which ,NPR noted a decade ago as a rule there's more Republican Governors than Democrat. This means simply statistically, if you're sniffing for 'dirt' you're more likely to hit a person with a red rosette than blue. The nexus of money raises it's head again; as the article suggests, 'Republicans are more likely to be tight with local business interests' and thus raises the possibility of the very negative word [according to MI's survey] corruption in their WP article.

Lastly, I take issue to the methodology used here. Why, for example did you not combine the scores of 'Boris Johnson' and 'Prime Minister Johnson' - are they two different people? Could his very poor scoring be due to his name turning up next to 'emotionally negative' terms like 'pandemic', 'death' and 'war'? Why is a description in a WP page of 'conflict' between ideologically opposed persons/groups counted as 'negative'? Why didn't you mention in your conclusion that part of your results are clearly skewed due to the presence of a few very poor 'Right' outliers? Is is possible that more 'left' politicians are likely to have say, worked in the charitable sector or something which according to your wonky measuring 'generates a positive emotional response' which learning a rightist politician who formerly worked in say, a retailer's HQ doesn't [I accept there might be a slight coverage bias here; a person who worked in public service for 20 years is more likely to have their achivements noted in their WP biog, which the private corp achievements are much less likely to be].

Every remotely serious study shall make notes of the limitations of their study. This one doesn't [in fact, it tries to throw doubt on their own tools by suggesting the LLM used to evaluate might itself have 'liberal bias']. Why the hell do you need to suggest 'conservatives are happier'? That has fuck all to do with this topic.

So in my own conclusion, I say this is a very dubious bit of crap which tells the reader more about the biases of this Rozado believes exists and/or the rightist think-tanks have requested more 'evidence' of librul bias in everything. KarmaPolice (talk) 11:57, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

We've also seen this type of argument before, one that argues for truth-independent absolute neutrality, as with Wikipedia self-exile Larry Sanger's Citizendium and its promotion of a "neutral" chiropractic article written by a chiropractor. Bongolian (talk) 17:10, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Aren't objectivity and neutrality different things though? New world (talk) 17:38, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

They're overlapping, but related. When WP lauds it's 'NPOV rule', it doesn't literally mean it's neutral on every topic, merely that it endevours to be free of editorial bias. WP is 'biased', but towards stuff like 'reliable sources', 'expert consensus' and the 'reality-based community' in general. It is not 'neutral' in debates regarding, say discussing who caused 9/11 - there is a consensus they explain in the main page, the cranky conspiracy theories get shoved into the 'cheap seats' in this case literally called '9/11 conspiracy theories'.

And yes, the CJ 'report' literally cites Sanger about Wikipedia being biased. They have just enough self-respect to describe it as an anecdote. WP's response to this has been generally either calling out the shittiness of the report, making arguments regarding false balance and/or arguing that they'd be a fan of more 'right-of-centre' [sic] sources if they quit peddling their arses to Trump and his myraid of failings and outright lies. KarmaPolice (talk) 18:34, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

As it is said of various other 'providers of information' - if persons of different viewpoints complain that [whatever] is biased against them then [whatever] has a degree of neutrality. There is also likely to be 'bias' against 'constructed interpretations' and 'topics on the borderlines/yet to be analysed/where multiple interpretations exist' etc. Anna Livia (talk) 10:29, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Archiving

Is it normal for Inferno bot to take so long to archive? New world (talk) 17:53, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

'Someone said' when I asked before - sometimes if a number of discussions are (intermittently ongoing' the bot sits on its hands (or equivalent) until things settle down. Anna Livia (talk) 18:02, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Am no expert, but bot is still sleeping. New world (talk) 14:40, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Article 8K

What - no attempt by people of a sensible or look-at-me nature trying to hit the target? The probable article 'The US 2024 Election and its aftermath' should be at a slightly higher number. Anna Livia (talk) 18:02, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

So - what was it? (And does it 'deserve' a little note on the talk page, along with eg 'Oldest page' (other than the Main Page) - which is not the same as the 'oldest' page list), and, somewhat distant page 9k?) Anna Livia (talk) 13:13, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Farm labor supply

I wonder how farmers are gonna replace their supply of labor when the politicians they vote in deport their supply of undocumented, underpaid labor. Prison labor, perhaps? Carthage (talk) 01:58, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Republicans might be happy to have less food; that way, more poor people, Black people, indigenous people, etc. will starve. Fuck, that sounds dark. MayGodSaveUsAll (talk) 02:26, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

It gets even more fucked when you realize much of the global food supply comes from the US. Carthage (talk) 02:32, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Prison labor as a large-scale solution is disturbingly possible. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 03:08, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Most of the food harvesting is practically automated, even for things like carrots and blueberries. It's just a few crops such as tomatoes and peppers that require unskilled labor. Meat is a bit tricky, given how much illegal labor they use, in spite of the amount of automation those man-made horrors already have.

While the rising cost of meat and some veggies would in theory raise the demand for all other foods, given how much farmland is used for feed, the lower consumption of meat would end up causing a collapse in the price of grains. So no, we won't starve, nor will every food item go up in price. CorruptUser 03:09, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

People may not starve, but there would definitely be disruption to the orderly function of society. You forget that people rioted over masks and quarantine. Often times protests or riots or whatever over whatever issue is a symptom of deeper, systemic problems. If someone who is stressed, underpaid, depressed, anxious, and atomized from their community suddenly can't get the coffee they need to stay awake during a 12 hour work day? I can guarantee you there'd be at least a few mass shootings over that incident. Plus, there are entire industries that rely on crops like the tomato. You think that a sudden loss of labor won't have undue effects on those industries? I can see them lobbying Congress to institute prison labor in replacement of the labor lost to mass deportation. Carthage (talk) 04:00, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

It's ghoulish enough for the GOP to salivate over, yeah. Carthage (talk) 04:02, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

They won't, they just want to maintain the threat, the problem is they care so little that the threat of deportation is getting mixed with the right to just shoot. There are people at the border leaving water as a gift, because you can't just walk across Texas without water. There are also people https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-border-patrol-mexico-water-bottles-video-migrants-kick-over-video-illegals-mexicans-hispanics-a8165591.html who truly believe the 'other' aren't people. In what world would an immigrant steal your job as an abhorrent border patrolman? In what world would kicking over some water, what should be a human right, make your job easier? Fucking wait for them to need water and then arrest them, if you're honestly trying to nab criminals. The point is dumbass cruelty is a nonsense social survival tactic and it's the easiest way to be accepted. Violence as an invitation to a group is caveman shit, but so is fire, so it's not easy to discount. Kicking water into the ground because you have water and you don't like the idea of somebody, when the idea literally applies to a human someone is worse than caveman shit. Torrent (talk) 06:13, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Old age care homes are also heavily reliant on immigrant (not necessarily undocumented) labor (US & UK). Also regarding the automation angle. I've recently started working my way through the book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant. It's quite interesting regarding the parallels between Luddites in the Industrial Revolution and the reactions to "distrupter" tech bros of recent years. The complaint of Luddites wasn't anti-technology per se but against the technology that eliminated livelihoods. Bongolian (talk) 06:15, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Right-wing politicians don't really care. They are - at best - myopic businesspeople. They have a 'more where that came from' mentality when it comes to labour in their heads. They're the sort of 'pointy-haired boss' who will whine and bitch about not having enough staff for their fast-food joint but the reasons are never their fault - like being a PHB and your shitty pay and conditions. I expect if they actually go through in really cracking down on foreign cheap labour, their stock response will be 'why don't you hire all them Tammy Welfares and Johnny Sicknotes?' [which allows them to attack these groups due to being 'lazy'/'entitled' too]. They revel in their ignorance of actual business - like the fact some 95% of the people they're referring to are either physically incapable of doing the job and/or aren't in the correct area.

Businesspeople, in my experience are often pretty lazy thinkers and very entitled [this is what you get when you have a century-plus of fetishising the businessperson]. Their first stock response [when cut off from cheap labour] will to whine about it being restored - such as demanding exceptions for the ban etc. They will then say it is the state's responsibility to sort it out for them. And when I say 'sort it out' I mean 'put it in a cute box, tied up with a bow and hand-delivered to their desk'. They hate the idea of having to actually train them, or make any accomidations to them or even pay them a living wage. And don't you dare suggest they would invest in capital plant to make better use of the labour they do have or - gasp! - actually fucking improve your pay/conditions to attract more workers.A

Nah, I'll just continue to whine to all who'll listen while simply scheduling 5 people to do the work of 10 and putting them on PIPs when they don't do all the work. Easy.

The more cynical end of PHBs will believe the 'migrants ban' is just the circus for the plebs to believe in while they still can employ them via the backdoor because of 'light touch' enforcement. In fact, they might welcome it because it will make said workers even easier to exploit and underpay than before. KarmaPolice (talk) 09:26, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

"BaN tEH mIgRANtS!" is nothing new in the United States. See Alabama HB 56 and Arizona SB 1070 (both enacted in a 2010ish wave of anti-immigration sentiment). In both cases, the effect after a few years was... not much. Executive summary: Businesses whined, there was a few rather embarrassing incidents (such as a couple of C-suite folks detained for not having "the papers" in Alabama), courts struck down some parts of it, the remainder was quickly forgotten.

As I've mentioned before, the easiest way to stop illegal immigrants from coming in is to strictly enforce E-Verify and other checks when employing someone, and arrest C-suite level execs that fail to enforce this. I would be seriously surprised if something like this happens (for one, the economic impact will be significant; for another, the ruling class that drives American government won't like the notion of actually being held responsible for the situation). Instead, what we are seeing here is the development of what looks to me like two-faced politicians that throw out a lot of "red meat" "tough talk" but merely perform stunts (like all those busing stunts Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott do) to satisfy the Fox News crowd. (Though both Florida and Texas have enacted "tough on migrant" legislation, long term I think those bills probably will have the similar fate of the Alabama and Arizona bills 15 years ago.) BobJohnson (talk) 10:30, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm not so sure. In my experience it's more important to actually have reasonable chances of being caught than having a huge punishment but near-zero chance of being convicted. Thus, beef up enforcement (but businesses don't like this *whine* 'limits In fweee enterprise' *whine*) KarmaPolice (talk) 11:58, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Here's the deal. They don't deport to the extent they promise. They use the threat of deportation as a stick to scare migrant workers into accepting subpar labor conditions. That's the upshot of all the anti-immigration panic: dividing and harming workers. Republicans still tend to support legal immigration: Trump was talking "stapling green cards to diplomas" recently. The furthest-right hates this but immigration in some form is currently almost an economic necessity unless you want to evolve past capitalism, which almost no one on the right wants to even entertain as an idea. With now-global, cross-cultural, cross-religious etc. drops in birth rates (unlike what Muskrät will tell you, it's every continent, not just Europe and Asia), growth could more or less be over this century if AI or some other curveball doesn't save capitalism. Chillpilled (talk) 04:23, 20 July 2024 (UTC) As for prison labor as an alternative solution, to the extent that would be required to patch that hole, it would mean what we used to call "labor camps". H. P. Lovecraft: "The only avenue of survival for plutocracy is a military & emotional fascism whereby millions of persons will be withdrawn from the industrial arena & placed on a dole or in concentration-camps with high-sounding patriotic names. That or socialism—take your choice." Chillpilled (talk) 05:08, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Which as I said above is easy to do; order enforcement agents to do lots of performative cruelty on the illegals they find, while gutting the capabilities to actually locate them and (ideally) don't really punish the dodgy employers for hiring them. In this case the UK under the (now-nuked) Tories were ahead of you lot in the US in regards to being shitty to migrants.

As for the use of prison labour... I am not so sure. Not that I don't think they'd wish to use it, more the fact most available labour is already being used. And as prison labour is hugely uneconomic, deliberately expanding prisons just to get some more farm workers is... unlikely.

But we have to remember that our lazy, spoon-fed businesses don't really know what to do apart from whine. This is the first time since the '50s where there isn't really 'more where that came from' and workers are understanding this. Therefore, some of the brighter bosses are urging the slashing of what unemployment benefits etc remain, in the vain hope that the 'brute hand of starvation' can rustle up some more cheap/docile labour. KarmaPolice (talk) 11:33, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Coffee tends to be imported from Columbia. If anything, tens of hundreds of thousands of unemployed Columbians returning would result in coffee becoming cheaper. CorruptUser 13:06, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Way to miss the point. Anyway, I had climate change in mind when I brought up coffee as an example. I should've been more specific. Carthage (talk) 18:41, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

We're talking about mass deportations and their effects. You're the OP, after all, no need to change the subject. Also, tomatoes could go either way in price; while US-grown tomatoes would obviously be more expensive, the US imports about 2m metric tons from Mexico, and much like coffee, the sudden surge of farm labor in Mexico would cause those prices to tank. It'd cause a trade imbalance, which is another long-term problem, but in the medium-term it's not the nightmare scenario you're envisioning. CorruptUser 04:26, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

What essentially will happen is that any commodity that requires significant immigrant labor would not be as competitive compared to other countries with cheaper labor markets. There are multiple other factors involved here, including growing seasons. Coffee of course is a bad example -- aside from a tiny amount in Hawaii, the United States hardly grows any coffee. Automated crops like grains or beans also are bad examples. The chief crops we are talking about are American crops that is too delicate to be picked automatically as of now (such as berries and apples) as well as meat and dairy processing where similar applies.

Even with a crimping in illegal immigration and political rabble rousing, America does have a system (H2-A visa) that allows farmers to temporarily bring in migrants to pick crops. It is more expensive than illegal immigrants, because there are some minimal (oh noes!) regulations for housing, pay, and food. (Despite this, there are still abuses, but I suppose it's better than the alternative...) So even with an illegal immigration crackdown, it wouldn't necessarily mean the complete end of American fruit, dairy, and meat. But it still will probably be a cost increase even in the best case scenario. (Not necessarily a *bad* thing of course if previous low prices were due to slavery-in-all-but-name of illegal immigrants... but some people just look at the list price in the store and nothing more...) BobJohnson (talk) 22:18, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm in favour to a form of H2-A visas, if it is run competently and with reasonable T&Cs [which are truly enforced]. Foreign-earned money can provide a welcome dollop of 'seed money' for folks back home.In fact, I would go as far to argue it should be run by the state so it's not left to local mafias as another money-maker. KarmaPolice (talk) 22:40, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail

according to Homer, the blade itself incites to deeds of violence. When I was younger and more prone to fits of absolute despair that I believed I couldn't live through, it is maybe lucky I didn't have access to a gun. I once tried to kill myself with a helium mask. I figured I could do it if I built it myself and my worst fear is drowning. I thought, if I could go full hypoxia but keep breathing, it would be easier. My blood burned and I woke up with the mask off. I would love for my name to echo down the halls of history. I love in a way that I don't exactly get in return, and that's my lot. But, death will occur, whether I am in charge of it or not, so I'm willing to ride this nonviolent shit out. Getting to know myself has been a lot harder than just offing myself, but it has made assholes and bullies a lot easier to deal with. Torrent (talk) 06:44, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

I find that some days the nihilistic despair can start to be overwhelming, especially when there isn't a readily available distraction to blind oneself to it, but well... there isn't much one can do. The body is biologically hardwired to want to live, and the ceaseless finality with death is a bit troubling... so uh... why not get a nice drink or something at a local cafe during this dreary waiting game and oh! a nice distraction! :D Impiricism (talk) 17:50, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

According to Callimachus, in reference to Homer, " A big book is a big evil." UncleKrampus (talk) 16:10, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

I have officially dumped all theology

My beliefs in terms of Satanism is the same as the Satanic Temple. I am in the ranks of the Godless. I consider myself an atheistic Satanist.

It took thought and consideration but I just can't believe in any God or supernatural. --Trans Fem Agenda 13:50, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

I have a female figurine statue on a shelf in the one corner of my home. Once in a while I'll light some candles in the evening in front it and look at the dancing shadows. Most of my mind tells me that it looks nice but doesn't mean anything, but the small still-reptilian part of my mind gets exceptionally pleased with it for some reason. Impiricism (talk) 18:10, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

The Imperial Truth, but unironically. 2600:8800:7800:1204:A0C8:E15F:1084:C7AF (talk) 01:52, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

you are not a baby, you're gonna have to clear the pipes. Consider it an ablution. https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/ejaculation_frequency_and_prostate_cancer if you get caught, you're fighting cancer. If you're horny for shadows, please get something more explicit. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vzCjQwt2rgI it is fine to clear the pipes, it is fine to use pornos to get there, it is important to remember what you want, because pornos are nutso bonkers anymore. I once was fully finished, no hormones, and I watched a lady put a bunch of eggs up her rectum. Only thing I felt was concern. I don't want to watch a lady lay a bunch of eggs, and I know that about myself now. Torrent (talk) 08:58, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm not lusting after a statue if that's what you're thinking. On the contrary, it's usually in evenings after I've finished browsing and closing tabs of smut, and have switched to reading upsetting news stories and RW's articles on how disappointing the world is, that I often feel like lighting candles. And yeah there are some odd fetishes out there... I think the general rule is as long it doesn't harm others, do whatever. Impiricism (talk) 15:29, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

What a relief, don't go light in no fires you can't control. I really like to camp and I can solo, but I've never made a coal from friction. Maybe it's time I try that. Torrent (talk) 08:50, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

CrowdStrike/Windows worldwide outage

Something that seems to be missing from the discussion on the CrowdStrike computer outage is what role, if any, did generative artificial intelligence play in the outage. CrowdStrike introduced "Charlotte AI", its own generative AI program, last year as being integrated into CrowdStrike, and it is part of the updating process, at least on the back end.[7]

Conspiracy theorists might think that the CrowdStrike executives who sold stock just before the stock dropped by more than 10% on news of the outage might have known something (insider trading), but Barrons reported that the stocks were sale was initiated more than a year prior.[8] The Charlotte AI announcement was also more than a year prior (May 30, 2023). Bongolian (talk) 15:33, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

It seems far-fetched that their chatbot system would have caused it. The talk of AI in that old announcement mentions not only the chatbot, but in general terms older machine learning systems of the kind antivirus use, which they now highlight using the term "AI" in order to seem trendy. It seems more like a marketing gimmick to add the chatbot and make it seem more related to the rest of it all than it is.

The update that caused the issue would be something their developers pushed to the world. It's bad practice to auto-update without adequate testing, and in anything where security and reliability matters, bad practice to force an update on users without having verified how it affects them, like having only a smaller testing group receive it first and then changing course if it goes bad, otherwise increasing rollout, eventually all receiving it. Evidently there weren't safeguards here.

Coincidence or not, the CEO was in the past also at the helm of McAfee during an incident where an update messed up millions of Windows XP systems, the year before he left to found CrowdStrike. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 16:12, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

The fundamental problem as I see it, is that generative AI is far more susceptible to the garbage-in-garbage-out problem than narrowly-focused AI based on high quality datasets. They did say generative AI in the press release, so I'd take their word for it. If they were aiming at a marketing gimmick, they could have just said "artificial intelligence" and probably gotten as much PR as saying generative AI. There is also this idea floating around among techies, and promoted by LessWrong, that Bayesianism is superior to the scientific method, therefor the scientific method can be tossed out entirely. And as they don't mention, leaving themselves wide open to garbage data. Bongolian (talk) 18:28, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Sure, they did add a chatbot, and it could be a poor-quality feature. My point is, the announcement didn't really tie the generative AI to performing anything beyond people chatting with it, with vague and suggestive wording making it seem like its responses may empower users to deal with threats. There's an update too where they rolled it out. But you wondered what the connection may be with the outage, and I think it's completely separate; the outage had to do with some custom OS kernel module poking into the working of Windows in a hairy way and combined with a bad file it relied upon crashing the system. A chatbot would be elsewhere in code and functioning, not a kernel hack but far away from that "level". --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 20:38, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Turns out CrowdStrike actually broke Linux systems for versions of 2 distributions earlier this year.[9] This was a much smaller affair in numbers and didn't receive media coverage at the time. But it shows their M.O. is truly to push untested updates to their software, software which messes with the core of OS functioning. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 09:06, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Some people in China, which went largely unaffected, are thanking Microsoft for the impromptu "early vacation." Carthage (talk) 18:40, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

And "Russia thanks Western sanctions for helping it avoid the CrowdStrike IT outage". And Iran too.

These 3 countries could ironically, in the long term develop an edge in software security and reliability, even if in hardware sanctions do bite them. Because good software is freely accessible and can be built further upon, while big businesses and some government agencies in Western countries insist on running Windows servers with large attack surfaces in many places and buying questionable security software for it mainly in order to claim compliance for bureaucratic purposes while doing nothing more. And excessive reliance on cloud services is a structural weakness in adding single points of failure. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 20:57, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Will it be 'good software', though? You think Russian/ Iranian/ Chinese IT companies will be allowed to build systems in which their own Govt does not have a permi-backdoor built in for their own use and with loads of limitations? I predict that those countries [plus North Korea] are going to be even bigger than they are now in providing the myriad of authoritarian regimes around the world 'technological solutions' from content-filtering browsers to entire 'walled garden' national internets. The signs have been increasingly spotted for quite a few years now, but we are close - if not there already - to 'the internet' being dead, now being the 'splinternet era' of which some splinters are more 'isolated' than others.

However, with my economic-historical hat on, I would also question the premise that due to the embargos etc that these companies will develop independently and perhaps produce some truly innovative/original products. Case in point; the USSR. Now, they could of desiged from the bottom up an entire world of innovative/original products to populate the 'new civilisation' they were building... but as a rule they did not. They reverse-engineered almost everything they could get their mitts on [or simply bought the licence/prints to produce, like the Fiat 124] and after making a few tweaks for the local conditions would then start churning them out [which is partly why the latter years of the USSR looked so shit; it was like a dated, 'bad cover version' of the West]. The explanation for this is twofold; that firstly it is quicker and easier to 'steal' IP etc than develop it natively and that in the Eastern Bloc there was a bit of a fetishiation towards 'Western-looking' products. We are now seeing similar with our 'New Authoritarian Bloc'; product clones [legal or not], mass reverse-engineering, exploitation of expired patents and outright IP theft. It's why a ton of Chinese weapons now look/operate almost identically like the Soviet/Western products they 'coincidentally' look like [including the innards being cross-compatable], North Korea uses a Linux fork for their domestic computers and Chinese phones use Android instead of going out of their way to y'know, develop their own moble OS. KarmaPolice (talk) 13:42, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, it may generally suck for their citizens, and at least in terms of them having state backdoors it seemed obvious enough to not need mention. I was thinking more in terms of how well the systems generally work as designed, and are resistant to outside penetration. I wrote a bit snarkily with a gloomy idea of what the future of Western formal and de-facto standards may be. Currently there's little or no progress towards sane security practices in the West (it's inherently at odds with big business outside way stricter regulation), and governments including the US, UK, and EU are even flirting with backdooring secure communication on a massive scale (EU "Chat Control 2.0" and equivalents), though they only hover around the idea so far (despite the UK technically having passed their version of such legislation already, passing off doing more for the time as they have no tech to their liking).

The idea Western countries flirt with is to mandate sloppy AI scanning for objectionable material, and to create a bureaucracy of officials reviewing alerts from the scanning, which at the outset is limited to child abuse and terrorism, but the scope could easily creep, and if actually implemented it would exceed what China does in terms of scrutinizing Internet traffic. The basic way in which the West currently still can be said to have embodied "liberal democracy" in the fabric and workings of the Internet could be killed off rapidly, if resistance to such changes is a little too weak.

On economics and countries developing their own solutions, my main point is that with software, given the enormous role of open source in modern IT infrastructure (every big corporation uses it majorly, its development has become in large part a corporate endeavor), the barrier is very small and historical rules don't really apply in the world of software. The example of Linux and North Korea is good in that regard. The point is, in such matters there don't exist and cannot exist embargoes, and there's no need to even do anything in order to "steal" something from the West -- it's all simply available for anyone for any purpose, that being a core tenet of open source. Embargoes only apply to proprietary software and to hardware, which means that everything needed to get going on the software side in any major area is usually freely available for years already. (Of course, autocratic countries could "steal" in the sense of not honoring the open source licenses.) --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 15:20, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I have considered for some time now the 'demands' of Western agencies for 'backdoors' etc for products etc to be a bit of theatre than anything else - for example, a lot of virtual ink was spilt about Apple refusing to break into their own devices on the behest of the FBI but I know for a fact [for example] the British police have their own tech-folks who can do this without Apple's official help. What's better for the look of the thing? That criminals etc believe their stuff is so secure that they continue to use it because of LEO whining about it? There's historical precident for this; Western powers often bitched about the Swiss company 'Crypto AG' for selling to unfriendly powers during the Cold War... but it turned out that the British had conventionally cracked their cyphers in the 50s and the Americans were basically getting the blueprints and update sheets posted to them on a weekly basis. Western LEOs to some extent don't need these backdoors, they want them - for roughly the same reasons they'd like cash to be banned and make it mandatory for all bank records shared with them routinely.

And while AI spying online will increase anywhere, I also predict that AI will quite quickly 'enshittify' the internet [whichever splinter] with their crappy generated/pirated content to the point I think a huge amount of folks will use it a lot less and new technological work-arounds etc shall counter the spying attempts - in tech like politics, actions cause equal reactions and all that.

Lastly, 'closed societies exploiting open societies openess for their own gains' is again, nothing new. During the Cold War [for example] the KGB made quite an effort to collect as much 'open materials' [scientific/health journals, think-tank reports, symposium memos etc] that they could get their hands on [I remember a quote from The First Circle, in which Solzhenitsyn mocked the fact that cryptography articles from magazines openly on sale on American newstands were stamped 'Top Secret' and locked in expensive Soviet safes lest American spies stole them]. Our 'openess' of societies is both a strength and weakness of ours - the weakness is obvious, but the strength is that 'alternative ideas' shall circulate to our elites, said elites get much more accurate information what's happening in the country and the greater freedom breeds innovation. KarmaPolice (talk) 20:46, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, there's Western backdooring -- Edward Snowden revealed much about its extent. Intel CPUs have a backdoor in the "management engine" sub-CPU that can mess with computer memory, and access hardware including webcams and do internet traffic. And Windows is widely believed to have an NSA backdoor. That's not the end of it. But all the related surveillance copying Internet traffic amounts to so-called "big dick data", a way to feel powerful and important more than being able to do anything, unless you're able to target more precisely, because there's an ocean of targets and data sucked up across the world which can't be sifted through fast enough to be useful in most cases. Note how stuff just keeps happening which Western intelligence agencies would have meddled with if they could, but they couldn't.

But encryption is still a nuisance if you want, at least on paper, the ability to examine any data. Unless there's a great quantum computing breakthrough very soon, in practice the hands of spies are tied much of the time, and the only way to change that is to make proper encrypted secure communication illegal. (Western countries are now hoping to regulate quantum computing so that when that next paradigm comes around, they won't repeat the "mistake" of allowing encryption too strong to break to become the property of the global public.)

On AI and spying, two different topics are generative AI and AI snooping. Yes, the web is becoming more of a trashy wasteland. The Internet is however much more than the web, it's all systems and services using standard means to connect globally (both old and new standards). Encrypted communication systems won't go away, even if it's made illegal to use ones that actually are safe -- rather criminals will keep using them and others who feel they need them will become criminals. What's proposed to be mandated currently looks to be client-side scanning, automated reading of your stuff before it's encrypted, i.e. requiring government spyware to be included in services. It works badly, generating an overwhelming flood of false positives, and having weaknesses (the usual machine learning ones for scanning/recognition) allowing evasion in the future by smart actors who send stuff through it, yet it's always tempting to mandate such stuff no matter how bad it technically is, apparently.

A last point on open societies and open source, the latter has changed the IT economy greatly -- it's a large part of why such business has been able to profit so greatly the last decade. It greatly reduces costs of developing stuff, because so much can just be copied, and corporations love it because they get enormous unpaid labor by volunteers across the world. Corporations contribute, when they do, because they contribute a small fraction of the labor they get out of it. This is economics of open source in a nutshell. Actors in authoritarian countries actually often contribute back in the same way, e.g. Chinese and Russian developers, but not always -- it transforms their economies in the same way, because it just works better. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 09:47, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Again, this isn't anything new; in the 50s the likes of MI5/6 were collecting such a collossal amount of Signit that even with computing power they were processing less than what was coming in, and I've heard that the British police are a already staggering under the sheer volume of raw digital evidence collected in some cases - to the point there's been cases where defendants found conclusive digital evidence they were innocent within the data-dump the police had shown the defence [ie the cops had not been able to process the dump to find it]. I still suspect in a lot of this it's a 'want to have' rather than 'must have'; I am no criminal expert, but I suspect there's few crimes in this world where all the evidence would have been in uncrackable end-to-end enycription devices [and the increase of 'closed evidence' in English courts suggests that they 'have their ways' with tech without the maker's help and are doing their best to obfuscate their level of skill].

But talking of the shitty UK encryption bill actually revealed how shit the idea is/was. They basically demand that all message services to effectively create backdoors and share the location with the state - so far, their response is 'we'll see you in court'. The critical issue [as found with other backdoors] is that soon enough others find them and will use them for their own purposes, while a lot of legit uses exist [for example, a lot of smaller companies managed to survive Covid because they used cheap off-shelf 'secure systems' like WhatsApp for their homeworkers]. There's also the 'PornPass issue', in which their proposed solution was to create a big central dump of data which yes, could be stolen or leaked. Govts don't have a monopoly on either 'skill in the art', processing power or use of AIs. Or that said government would be a friendly one.

Which is a key issue. With the riddle of backdoors, the North Korean 'internet' [for an extreme example] is only safe from the NSA etc having the run of the place because it's in a walled garden with [apparently] no external links. The 'American' internet is a lot more open already, and when you consider it the banning of end-to-end and the placements of backdoors is basically making the country more vunerable to external subversion and attack. Again, the Ukraine War has shown us of the 'shape of things to come'; a situation where mass cyber attacks on civilian infrastructure and connections is now part of the 'order of battle' of any power with sufficient means to wield it. Which raises the question; perhaps countries should start viewing their cybersecurity sector properly as a 'strategic asset' [similar to say, arms manufacturing] and encourage the growth of 'domestic capability'. KarmaPolice (talk) 11:22, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Is it time to ditch "Twitter" and embrace "X"?

The twitter.com now redirects to x.com rather than the other way around like before. So safe to say Twitter name is no more. Is it Time to now use the new name? And move the article to its new name? 22:40, 20 July 2024 (UTC)~ — Unsigned, by: Duct Tape / talk / contribs Funny, hilarious even. A somebody. (talk) 14:05, 21 July 2024 (UTC) It is Twitter in SCOTUS documents and so shall it be Twitter on Rationalwiki. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante ItalianoMake a Reservation 01:58, 21 July 2024 (UTC) I always thought that renaming Kanye West to Ye was a bad idea, and I think that should be undone. —cosmikdebris talk stalk 02:33, 21 July 2024 (UTC) It's both Twitter and Kanye West for the page headers on Wikipedia. Musk has a stoopid obsession with the letter X. I support Wikipedia in this matter. Bongolian (talk) 05:55, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Troll has a point?

"X is a sufficiently different beast to Twitter that it is logical to speak of them as two different entities, including even having two different pages for them. Discuss". KarmaPolice (talk) 17:59, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I can see Wikipedia having separate pages for X and the historical Twitter in the not too distant future. But I think it would be a bit too hair splitting for us to do that at this time. That might change, depending on how long Musk's X sticks around for. Spud (talk) 07:03, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Monkey Pawed

So, ever feel like this happens to you and your life at times? TheEternalOutsider (talk) 02:59, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

What the fuck does that mean? I'm guessing it has something to do with the classic horror short story "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs. Of course, there's no such thing as wish-granting objects or curses, so I guess it means, "Have you ever got something you wanted and then found out there were negative consequences to it?" But for all I know it might mean, "Have you ever been fondled by a monkey?" Spud (talk) 06:57, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Biden drops out

The idiots won out.UncleKrampus (talk) 18:14, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Its joever. 2600:387:15:3B1B:0:0:0:8 (talk) 18:19, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it's 'the idiots' who did this - that in part Biden did this to himself. I actually think part of the 'Biden chaos' was not a sign of dementia or something, more a guy in his 80s trying to play a guy in his 50s as the 'active boss' but it simply burnt him out - that he'd have fared much better if he'd played the 'blue-skies strategic planner' role with his top team doing a lot of the public heavy lifting. Yet he didn't do this because... vanity. I'm reminded here of a quote from The Godfather on Hyman Roth - that while they talk of sucessors and suchlike, they secretly believe they'll live forever [and thus try to stop any of the 'next generation' poking through, like making much stronger use of Harris as VP]. KarmaPolice (talk) 18:44, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Given that generic democrat polls better against Trump than Biden, I think you got the "idiot" label backwards. Carthage (talk) 19:01, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

The head of lettuce is undefeated! CorruptUser 20:35, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Good bye Biden

Is any candidate capable of winning? New world (talk) 18:17, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I dunno, but the Dems need to get fucking serious about beating Trump and unite behind Harris. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 18:35, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Kamala Harris (who will probably get the nod) did seem to poll reasonably well, and the "anyone but Trump" vote is significant for... well, anyone. My guess is that they'll pair her with one of the popular Democrat white male governors (ah, demographics!); one can name several that should be able to hold his own against JD Vance methinks. This should completely neuter the "too old" narrative floating around the conservative pundit scenes.

Still, from my perspective (something pointed out by AOC), this strongly has a whiff of being led by outdated Third Way pundits and the political "establishment" types. They have access to data that us peanut gallery types don't but still... given some of their lousy pushes in the past, one hopes they really know what the hell they are doing here. BobJohnson (talk) 18:38, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I accept Harris is going to be the candidate, so it's time for a VP. I would like, again Gretchen Witner [Gov, Michigan] but perhaps Andy Beshear [Gov, Kentucky] or Roy Cooper [Gov, North Carolina]. All three are generally well-respected/ liked and they are all in 'regions' which the Democrats are relatively weak [Rustbelt, Appalachia and Southeast Seaboard]. KarmaPolice (talk) 18:42, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

'By then, Biden' (works better with some variants of English) Anna Livia (talk) 19:08, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

"Is any candidate capable of winning?" - I'm pretty sure that one of them will! Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 19:25, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Name recognition helps. Cooper (who?) is actually North Carolina (big diff; I'd shit if SC had a Democratic governor in my lifetime). Also, it's Witmer. I think it's hard enough for a lot of Americans to overcome their misogyny to vote one woman on the ticket, let alone two. Beshear would be a good choice to pit against Vance, since Beshear won the 'hillbilly' vote in his own state, but it likely sacrifices the state to a future Republican governor. Gavin Newsom might be a good choice, particularly after sparring with with DeSantis. He's termed out as governor in California, but had previously declined replacing Biden. He might be convinced. Bongolian (talk) 19:35, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Newsom is out, because Harris is from California and a constitutional rule prevents electors from voting for a ticket that contains two candidates from their home state (so Newsom would be shut out of California's 54 electoral votes, which will almost certainly be needed to win the election) Plutocow (talk) 19:50, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I know Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (despite his relative inexperience) has been floated around; given his popularity in that state, it might help shore up the "Midwest state" vote. Arizona Senator Mark Kelly's been floated around to shore up the "Western state" vote. We'll see what happens, I suppose. BobJohnson (talk) 20:10, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I corrected Cooper's home state earlier, so it wasn't Bongolian misreading. I am theorising that the vast majority of voters who'd get freaked out that both picks are bra-wearers would be voting for Trump regardless [though I would be persuaded otherwise with key polling]. Cooper's very 'who?'-ness is an interesting point - it means Trump/Vance would be dealing with a relatively 'unknown' [unlike Clinton and Biden]. Plus, what little I saw of him for 2020 kinda impressed me; Here's some reasons to pick Cooper. I think all three [to some extent] would be a decent foil against Vance's attempts to court the blue-collar white vote. I don't like Newsom; I suspect a lot of folks would think he's 'too slick' and from what I've gathered his record isn't that great. Plus, California. KarmaPolice (talk) 20:20, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

For all the talk of Newsom (and setting aside the California issue), I too worried about him seeming too slick. To me, he seems to have some of that condescending, sleek and slick Hillary vibe that the Democrats need to avoid at all costs, if they want to (re)gain the White House in any presidential election.

My two cents’ worth is that the Democrats desperately need to field a VP that can bring some degree of “worker’ish authenticity” to their campaign, if they want any chance of winning. Something to indicate that they aren’t just a party for the “coastal elites” who look down on the “flyover country” (and the problem with Harris is that she can easily be made to fit into this image). Beshear, Cooper, Shapiro and Whitmer might all do that, or someone from the “prairie states”, although I frankly admit to not knowing enough about each to say who’d be better at it.

I’d still suggest that going for a governor, rather than a senator would be the better choice. It would blunt the “Washington insider” attack angle that’s at the heart of the Trump campaign and it can boost the kind of Bill Clinton’esque “I feel your pain” message that can counter Vance, while also pointing to actual, real world, governing experience (“being used to make hard choices”). ScepticWombat (talk) 02:32, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Also, fielding one of these governors means that it will be easier to depict the inevitable attempts at lawfare against the Democrats switching their ticket (The Heritage Foundation has been quite clear for some time that it’ll sue) as “Washington meddling” to “keep you from voting for our ‘local’ candidate”. Such messaging might also blunt Trump’s attacks by putting him on the wrong side of the “local vs. Washington” divide and clearly illustrate where the actual problems with “election meddling” stem from. ScepticWombat (talk) 02:52, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I forgot about that detail about not being from the same state. Bongolian (talk) 02:54, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

If the DNC is really stupid, however, it will choose someone like Pete Buttigieg, and he keeps popping up in the news coverage of potential VP picks. ScepticWombat (talk) 03:06, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Don't jinx us like that. Carthage (talk) 04:47, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Is it possible for an emergency rerun of a primary to happen? 2600:387:15:3411:0:0:0:1 (talk) 03:40, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

I really doubt it. It’d be a legal mess and anyway there’s not enough time to arrange it, let alone for any campaigning to be done. ScepticWombat (talk) 03:43, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

The short answer is absolutely not. Bongolian (talk) 04:38, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh its gonna be fun when Trump slips some hard slurs on someone who's both a woman and a mixed race. (I'm not even joking. I think Trump is gonna chase anyone not full MAGA with his behavior towards Harris.) Revolverman (talk) 21:58, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

I think Trump is going to find it difficult to not be a condesending jerkwad to Harris - because I bet he won't be able to see her as a 'worthy foe' due to ownership of funbags. I also wonder whether needling him on his age etc might be able to rile him to screw up in debates etc. KarmaPolice (talk) 10:33, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

One problem for DT (who is somewhat less orange than he used to be) - *he* can be presented as 'the 'doddery old fool' in comparison. (ie 'the image thing' not the actuality.) Anna Livia (talk) 13:08, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Quite apart from the “theatrics” of it, I wonder whether Trump shit talking Harris in a live debate is actually going to change anything?

It probably won’t turn off anyone from voting for him who haven’t ditched him already. He has said so many outrageous things so far that I doubt there’ll be any negative shaming factor for those already in his camp.

One the opposite side of the line, I also doubt whether it will motivate anyone to vote for Harris who wasn’t going to already. Again, Trump’s views and rhetoric are both very well known, so I don’t think it’s likely to move the needle here, either. ScepticWombat (talk) 08:03, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

New tech that impressed you?

Something positive for once. I saw a home HIV test for sale the other day; it appears I've reach the age where I've started being impressed by new technology. Anyone else semi-recently see or read about something cool [tech-wise] they'd care to mention? KarmaPolice (talk) 19:10, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I've been more annoyed lately: new tech on the endless software update pathway that stops working with a 4-year old cellphone. Bongolian (talk) 19:59, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Now that Biden is gone, what now?

Does this mean Trump now might win (especially with the late assassination attempt making hik potentially a martyr)? Biden seemed to be the man who could protect America from Trump. Now that he's gone it is worrying. Scaredperson (talk) 23:13, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

cool story, bro.154.5.228.234 (talk) 23:24, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Biden was all but guaranteed to lose against Trump. Carthage (talk) 23:26, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

The "Only he can save us." idea is nonsense that can be found vaguely in great man theory, and more directly in sycophants of autocrats, like Trump. If you want Trump stopped, then ask yourself whether you can do more yourself to stop Trump (volunteering and donating to campaigns, national, statewide in battleground states, or local). Bongolian (talk) 03:00, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

"Does this mean Trump now might win?" It means Trump "might win" or it means Trump "might lose". It's not the most intelligent question.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 06:29, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

On the off chance that the OP is not simply an outright concern troll, I think it’s a case of mirror imaging: Because Trump supporters conceive of politics as a search for the right “strongman”, they think that switching out Biden must be a catastrophe, because he had already become the “Democratic Champion”. ScepticWombat (talk) 08:19, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Trump

A few months ago, some few particular users on this site were hyper-confident in Biden's victory, Trump was "no danger". Anything to say? Bavarian (talk) 13:05, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Really? Which users? Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 14:07, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

The ones that were claiming Biden was popular enough to defeat a convicted felon, those people. The ones concerned will know who I'm talking about. Bavarian (talk) 14:13, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Uh, okay. For my part, I’ve been consistently a doomer since Biden’s performance in the debate, although with him gone I’ve switched to a cautious sense of optimism. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 14:20, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't think there's been any at the Bar who were 'hyper-confident' of a Biden victory. I'd like to know 'these users' too. KarmaPolice (talk) 14:25, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Don't remember names, but reading the archives, there were a few (not many) people confident in Trump loosing against Biden. @UncleKrampus was one of them, I'll search for more later. Bavarian (talk) 15:47, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

@The Blade of the Northern Lights Ok. Wasn't the smartest of Posts. I'm not a concern troll though, some people here liked him as candidate, neither am I conservative. I think those people, and those people only, owe us a reaction. Bavarian (talk) 17:45, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Daydreaming

I can't stop daydreaming when I'm alone. When I'm not around people talking it just starts. Are there any useful techniques to stop that? Bavarian (talk) 13:23, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

It depends upon what the daydreaming is - eg 'exploring various options' as to what you are going to do later, or distracting you from the practicalities. Otherwise - consider writing (fan)fic (many options available): having to actually do something useful with the ideas tends to resolve the matter. Anna Livia (talk) 15:07, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

It's anything really. Sometimes I don't even realise it started again. In the metro, at work, at home, in the street, anytime I'm not talking to someone. This very post results from daydreaming about it. Thanks for the advice, I'll try that right away (: Bavarian (talk) 15:42, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Damn, daydreaming about this post now… Bavarian (talk) 15:53, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Why would you ever want to stop? Daydreaming is a fun escape from the disappointing reality of this world. Impiricism (talk) 15:36, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps you'd want to stop because you feel like you're doing less than you can due to daydreaming. Personally, daydreaming is my all-time favorite thing, so I'd rather tone my daydreaming down to a workable level rather than stop entirely. Plus, I find that my daydreaming can be useful to help tackle certain problems in the real world, like playing out a scenario that I'm either trying to predict or "calculating a line of reaction" to in advance. I also use it for worldbuilding. Yes, it's a fun escape, but I want to better tackle this disappointing reality to make it better, & sometimes I can use daydreaming to do that. You can't make something better if you don't try to, so let's do something. Zentashka (talk) 16:57, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Problem is I don't do it on purpose, it just happens, one way or another. It also involves weird stuff, which I don't want to think about. Sometimes I forget it's not real entirely. I don't like it, that's all. I get that it's nice to some people, to me it's just inconvenient. Bavarian (talk) 17:32, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

'Dead dove weird' or just ordinary weird'? If you look at some of the fanfic you will realise how tame many ideas are. (Take note of tags and ratings - though as with streaming service tags 'your mileage may vary'). Anna Livia (talk) 23:06, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Should Governments Provide Free Body Disposal?

Just read the following CBC article about a woman who is unable to afford the disposal of her daughter's body, so it currently just sits in a freezer at a morgue. Definitely raises interesting questions regarding the legality, cost, and obligations associated with the dealing of the dead. I feel like the best outcome would be for a government to offer a basic "free" (taxpayer-funded) disposal option for people that have died; the government could then also use the option to handle unclaimed bodies for which the state eventually takes legal ownership of. Cremation, or the more environmentally-friendly alkaline hydrolysis, would likely be the prime candidate options for such a service. An uninsightful person may grumble that it would be a new tax on the general populace, but really it would save everyone money since it is something everybody eventually must consider. Conventional options, such as burial, I imagine would become more of a "boutique" option for those who can afford it. Thoughts? Impiricism (talk) 16:34, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Sounds like a morally good thing for a government to do, plus it seems to, at least somewhat, fit their job description. Zentashka (talk) 16:57, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

They already do in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_health_funeral ('pauper's funeral'). In this case, the fact I come from poor people is an advantage because I've been to them.

Most are cremations, because many councils own them. They will give friends/relatives a chance to hold a short service in the chapel before the burning. Afterwards, you can either claim the ashes to do what you see fit, if not claimed they normally have a kind of 'garden of rest' they scatter it in.

I've also attended a burial verson of it too; there was only a token service [literally the local vicar turned up to do the basic read over the plywood coffin] and then it's put into a 'paupers' grave' [ie a space which is used for three people]. The main difference here is that there won't be a headstone; which means chances are after awhile unless you deliberately noted it's location you won't be able to find it unless you somehow dug out the records for the plot. I do remember the council woman [who'd turned up to make sure they were buried] said that it wasn't forever - I later did a bit of digging and learned that new regs now allow grave re-use after 75 years; so around 2088 they'll re-open that grave and do it again [but this is policy for all graves now, not just the 'cheap seats'].

The way it works is this. If there's an unclaimed body, the local council takes it on. They will first try to find a next of kin, hoping they'll take the body. If they can't find anyone, they'll then give them said pauper's funeral and [if possible] charge it to the estate of the dead body [unless there's a pre-arranged funeral plan all paid up]. If they do find someone, they'll try to strongarm you into signing for it. If you refuse, they'll then do the pauper's one and if they find no money to pay they try to charge you for it [I see £950 being quoted]. However, it is possible to wiggle out of this without too much difficulty and unless you're cuntish about it the council will allow you to recover 'personal effects' [with no real money value] because they also do the house clearences for the 'lonely dead' too [partly to recover money, partly to find next of kin etc]. KarmaPolice (talk) 17:19, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Inferno bot

User:Inferno Bot still not working, according to User Contributions since 12 July no activity at all. New world (talk) 11:16, 24 July 2024 (UTC)