Sort of, but not quite. I get where you’re going with that though, and it’s the right idea.

The explicit goal of Project 2025 is simply to make it easier for greedy and power-hungry privileged right-wing assholes to bring harm to people and to the nation as a whole for their own imnediate benefit. So yes - it actually serves as a sort of backhanded guide to what is of value in government.

It’s just that doing the opposite of what Project 2025 calls for would mean expanding agencies and regulations rather than reducing or eliminating them, and that’s likely not the best option, since it could just lead to governments run rampant instead of corporations run rampant.

As with most things, the optimum lies between the two extremes.

But yeah - at the very least, it can be taken as a rule of thumb that there’s a direct correspondence between the value a thing provides to the people and the nation as a whole and the degree to which Project 2025 opposes it and intends to destroy it.

I choose to hold myself to high standards. Writing is one of the great joys of my life, and there are few things I enjoy more than the satisfaction I feel when I do it well.

Additionally:

If someone disagrees or has a problem with what you say then they can just say so and you can clarify.

Would that that were so, but the reality of the internet in this benighted age is that many (most?) who misrepresent another’s position do so not because they sincerely try but fail to understand it, but because it serves their purposes to do so, and no amount of clarification is going to overcome that. It’s a waste of effort at best, and is actually often detrimental, since saying more just provides them with more fodder for even more fallacies and diversions.

Which is another reason that I write for my own satisfaction.

Thanks for the response though.

About three minutes ago.

I had actually written a few paragraphs in response to another thread, but it wasn’t coming together right and would’ve had to have been rewritten almost entirely to get it to my standards, and I just didnt care that much, so I closed it instead, then went to the main page and saw this.

Overall, I would guess that I post less than half of what I write, either because I’m struggling to get it to my standards and don’t care enough to keep going, or because I stop and realize that if I go ahead and post it, it’s likely that if it gets a response at all it’s just going to be some tunnel-visioned ideologue hurling disinformation, fallacies and/or tired emotive rhetoric.

Both, I’d say.

Money doesn’t create corruption out of thin air - anyone who’s corrupted by it already had to have the potential. But money does undoubtedly lead people who otherwise would have resisted their baser nature to indulge it instead.

And it very definitely provides the means for people who are already psychologically and/or morally inclined to corruption, and so is very attractive to them.

There was likely a time when “incel” just meant “involuntarily celibate,” without all of the baggage, but then two things happened together.

First, a significant number of “incels,” most notably on 4chan, fell into a specific set of essentially misogynistic coping behaviors - primarily blaming the supposed hypocrisy and shallowness of women for their own problems.

And second, a significant number of smugly self-righteous bigots saw an opportunity to hurl self-affirming hatred at an undifferentiated mass of people without suffering the backlash they’d get if it was directed at a group that essentially enjoys protected status, and leaped at the opportunity.

So now the popular conception is that all involuntarily celibate men are “incels,” with all that that implies - that they’re not just involuntarily celibate, but shallow, hateful, misogynistic losers and assholes.

It could potentially help if involuntarily celibate men who don’t share the misogyny of the “incels” had their own label, but honestly I don’t think it would make much of a difference in the long run, because there are now enough asshole bigots reveling in their hatred of “incels” that they’d refuse to let anyone get away. Just like all other more traditional bigots, they’d cling to their self-affirming conception that the mere fact that an individual is of a specific race gender sexual orientation relationship status means that they’re necessarily foul and loathsome, so their hatred of them is justified.

I have no more right to interfere in someone else’s life than they have to interfere in mine.

Avoid people who don’t share that view.

None.

I think that the exact measure of whether or not a war is justified is whether or not people are willing to fight it.

It’s very rare for a war to be a direct threat to the people. That’s generally only the case in a situation like Gaza, in which the invaders explicitly intend to not only take control of the land, but to kill or drive off the current inhabitants.

As a general rule, the goal is simply to assume control over the government, as is the case in Ukraine.

So the war is generally not fought to protect and/or serve the interests of the people directly, but to protect and/or serve the interests of the ruling class. And rather obviously, the ruling class has a vested interest in the people fighting to protect them and/or serve their interests. But the thing is that the people do not necessarily share that interest.

And that, IMO, is exactly why conscription is always wrong. If the people do not feel a need to protect and/or serve the interests of the rulers, then that’s just the way it is. That choice rightly belongs to the people - not to the rulers.

No - it’s actually not like that at all.

Google didn’t pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.

Mm… no. It’s really not.

The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.

So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.

So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you’re free to go.

Best of luck to them.

It’s true in essentially all industries, but it’s especially obvious in rideshare that there’s a layer of parasites who get paid far too much money for nothing beyond the fact that they won the fight for the position of “parasite who gets paid far too much money for doing nothing.”

Anything that might even just decrease the number of overpaid parasites would be a benefit not just to the concerned industry, but to society as a whole.

How deliciously ironic that this is paywalled.

I would say that it depends on how the other person feels about the thing in question.

If the person you say it to is sincerely lauding something, then yeah - I’d say it’s necessarily insulting, since you’re implying not only that they have no taste, but that they’ve been indoctrinated into mindlessly singing the thing’s (nonexistent) praises.

But if the other person is simply asking about the thing, or better yet, has already signaled their own disdain for it, then it’s just a potentially appropriate potential witticism.

I’m sold.

Certainly.

I saw in another post that AMA is apparently copyrighted (which is ridiculous, but I guess rent-seeking fuckwads are gonna do what they’re gonna do). At worst, what that means though is that if the fuckwads at Reddit care enough, they can arrange for a DMCA takedown if someone uses it.

And unless they’re even more stupid than I cynically presume, Reddit isn’t even going to do that, since the last thing they should want to do is try to establish a precedent of criminal sanctions against forums that host copyrighted material.

I say use whatever the fuck words you want to use.

IMO the only relevant issue is whether or not they accomplish the task of communicating the thing you wanted to communicate in the way you wanted to communicate it. If so, then they’re as right as they need to be, and any objection anyone else might have is only your problem to the extent that you allow it to be. If you care what they think then it matters, but if you don’t then it doesn’t.

My favorite of those…

It was 20 or so years ago, on the old IMDb forums (IMDb used to have some general interest forums).

It wasn’t actually that it was going well until it flipped - the poster was actually already notorious for arguing in bad faith. But even with that, it was so remarkable that I’ve never forgotten it.

Essentially what happened was, I was arguing “A” and he was arguing “B”. We had gone back and forth for a while, and he had backed himself into a corner, and I moved in for the kill. I wrote a response - a near-perfect bit of argumentation that directly quoted and directly and entirely refuted him, and there was no possible way he could wriggle out of it - then I posted it and sat back, knowing that even someone as dishonest as he was couldn’t get out if it.

Then after a bit, he responded and said essentially, “Then you admit that A is right, as I’ve been claiming all along!”

Yes - he actually, when faced with an argument he couldn’t refute, spontaneously switched sides and claimed that he’d been arguing my position all along, and therefore I had just proven that he was correct and therefore, somehow, that I was wrong.

That’s when I blocked him.

Yes and no.

My parents are thankfully at the age at which they just don’t give much of a shit. They think that there was a lot of shady political shenanigans surrounding the whole thing (and I’d say they’re objectively correct about that), but they cynically expect that and mostly ignore it. They talked to their doctors and came to understand that covid is real, and dangerous, and that the vaccines do have some risks, but the benefits outweigh the risks, and that was enough for them to take it seriously and take proper precautions.

My brothers on the other hand…

I’m the oldest of three, and they’re both… well… angry, spiteful, delusional, Fox News and talk radio consuming, gun-toting, Trump-voting, road-raging reactionaries. So they both lined right up and marched in lockstep with the expected dogma, to my complete lack of surprise.

So yes - our relations have been strained over it, but really it’s not quite accurate to say that it’s because of that, since that’s just one of the many, many MANY things on which we disagree.