The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[Mopsus]

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/tanks-ukraine-war-vladimir-putin-germany-us-britain-volodymyr-zelensky-latest-news-b1055691.html

"‘We need jets and missiles to beat Russia,’ says Zelensky in fresh plea"

Now that tanks are on the way to Ukraine, net on the list are F-16s

Should be next on the lists……，

[Kamala's side hoe]

This is probably the most well-thought-out explanation I've read of what this balloon was actually doing.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/why-would-the-chinese-government-be-flying-a-large-stratospheric-balloon/

This is the key section for those who don't want to read the whole thing:

So the Chinese launched this balloon to spy directly on the United States?

Probably not. The Chinese would have known that sending a clearly observable balloon into the US heartland would be a provocative action, and they are unlikely to have done so on purpose.

The most likely scenario, Antonio believes, is that the termination mechanism, which is used to bring down a balloon at the end of its desired flight time, failed. Typically a stratospheric balloon will have one or more backup termination mechanisms, but a technical problem would explain why a balloon launched in China days or weeks ago could have eventually drifted into the United States. (The Chinese government may not want to admit this technical failure publicly.) The prevailing currents in the stratosphere would appear to support this theory of a drifting balloon the Chinese government had lost control of.

The time to fly such a balloon, for spying purposes, would be during the summer months, Antonio said. That's because during the winter the winds throughout the stratosphere are much more uniform in the Northern Hemisphere. This means that raising and lowering the balloon would provide very little steering capability. "Controlled stratospheric flight is a thing, but it's not something you can really do over the United States at this time of year," Antonio said.

[world.execute(me)]

The whole "Chat-GPT is woke" notion is stupid and seems to rely upon a misunderstanding of how these language models are productionized in industry.

The cookie-cutter response of not saying a racial slur, regardless of the situation, is almost certainly a hard-coded rule that is imputed directly into the system, likely by some naive (by large language model standards like GPT) binary predictor on is the prompt asking me to use a slur?, and if so, the template response is returned. There is no "wokeness meter" set to high in the general model or anything, and the "intelligence" capability of Chat-GPT is not predicated on determining edge cases of woke-speak or not--instead researchers care about the general model's accuracy on the 99.99% of regular text in the world not related to woke debates.

The reason for the existence of such a strong filter is an obvious selling point to deployment vendors--no company who wants to use Chat-GPT in say a customer support bot or an autocomplete system wants any risk of the AI generating incendiary slurs. The text corpus used for training for the general model of GPT certainly may contain undesirable slurs, and the black-box property of neural networks makes it pretty much impossible to ensure the model has not learned to use these slurs for every possible prompt. AI researchers and engineers at OpenAI do not spend all day thinking woke-ness and understand these technical and market constraints, so they implement some naive filter that is purposefully more aggressive than not so that their clean-language claim of the product pitch is not jeopardized.

Trying to "own" Chat-GPT with anti-wokeness is just trying to bypass the simple filter that was slapped on for simple financial and ethical concerns. It's essentially the same as spending time to attempt putting up fake illegal drug dens as businesses on Google Maps without them getting removed to "own" Google Maps or something.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Kamala Harris is interesting because she's a machine politician. There aren't a lot of those left because there aren't a lot of real machines left in America, but San Francisco has one and she's part of it. The political skills that have gotten her to this position aren't really electoral but instead involve forming connections, which she has in spades in San Francisco and in Sacramento.

The last time there was a vice president like this, he was only in that position for a matter of months before Franklin D. Roosevelt died and he became president. We're in sort of uncharted territory with a vice president like her, and right now she's in a job with no clear responsibilities, cut off from her source of strength in California and mostly cut off even from Congress.

The media framing of her in the last two years suggests two things, both of which can be true:

• Kamala Harris has not endeared herself to people she has needed to make strong connections with and she has consequently struggled to have any sort of role in the current administration.
• People in positions to talk to reporters see Kamala Harris as a potential rival and so they're informing against her to the press.

That Gavin Newsom is very openly looking to run for president suggests that Harris really has missed an opportunity, because they can't realistically both run serious campaigns and Newsom wouldn't be so bold if he thought that she had a real shot. If she does just go back to California when her time as vice president is through, that would be very normal for vice presidents.

To add on to my previous post, the extreme hostility we see toward Kamala Harris (on this forum, but also elsewhere online) is interesting to me. It's unclear how specifically she's "unqualified" or how she's demonstrated "incompetence" when she has a job with no power and no responsibilities and (as mentioned previously) her background is similar to that of other vice presidents. The obvious difference here is the idea that she got her job just based on the identity boxes she checks off.

The people who feel this way have obvious justification in that they can point to what the Biden campaign actually said. I don't recall these sorts of criticisms of Kamala Harris being leveled in the same way when she ran for president, because then she was running against a bunch of candidates who weren't black women whom she would have to defeat. It may have been strategically useful for the Biden campaign to say that it was going to choose a black woman as its running mate, but doing so preemptively destroyed the credibility of anyone who might be chosen.

Sometimes you see the suggestion that Biden should have chosen a different black woman instead of Kamala Harris and that would have been better. I find that hard to believe. My recollection is that the other candidates who were regularly mentioned were Val Demings, Stacey Abrams, and Susan Rice. None of those three have ever won a statewide election and only Demings has ever been elected to a higher position than state legislator. Does anyone really believe that any of them would be seen as less of a token selection?

Suppose that the Biden campaign had chosen Kamala Harris without announcing that it would select a black woman and after suggesting that a variety of Democrats of different backgrounds would be considered. This wouldn't change the issues that Kamala Harris has had as vice president in terms of being disconnected from her base and lacking strong allies in Washington, but I think that there would be less hostility toward her in general because she wouldn't be seen in the same way as having been advanced without merit.

[GeorgiaModerate]

You can tell the GOP is deeply disturbed and disappointed at the fact that the president spoke more about supporting the working man and woman, and indeed even pre-empted and outdid their own rhetoric on some issues (including a masterstroke in which he cornered them into conceding his position on Social Security/Medicare), than about culture war nonsense.

I am not sure why that would come as a surprise or a disappointment to anyone.  Joe Biden has always been fairly conservative regarding kulturkampf projects.  He opposed busing students across the cities in the 70s and 80s to help integrate schools, he voted for a failed constitutional amendment allowing states to overturn the Roe vs Wade decision, he help author the Violent Crime Enforcement Act to build prisons and hire more police officers, he was at least as big a Drug Warrior as Ronald Reagan, in fact he criticized Reagan's timidity on that front, he authored anti-terrorist legislation that later became the dreadful USA PATRIOT act, he has repeatedly said that he would not allow the so-called "sanctuary cities" to violate federal law.  He even voted in favor of the "don't ask/don't tell" bill for homosexuals in the US military.  Moreover, he frequently cited the Catholic church as an inspiration for his social positions.  

His schtick was always a pro-union, working-man's policy.  He is a very mainstream Democrat regarding what are sometimes called "bread and butter issues".  He was consistently in favor agricultural development, protecting homeowners and borrowers, and big spending on transportation projects.  He has always opposed privatizing social security and he has always supported strengthening medicare and veterans' support.  Last night his priorities were the same as they have been for at least 40 years.  

As far as Sanders, I think it was a logical choice.  Biden is ancient, and Trump is as well.  I imagine that the white-collar Republicans and the big donors are very nervous about the prospect of Trump becoming the 2024 nominee.  The idea is to appeal to the younger Republicans with a younger, fresher Republican leader.  She is the youngest governor in the United States, so she is a logical choice.  It puts one in mind of 1985, when a young Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton was chosen by House Speaker Tip O'Neill to give the response to a SOTU speech given by a crotchety old US president, in order to contrast youth and vitality with senescence and senility.  Of course the Republicans went on to gain 8 governorships in the 1986 elections and an impressive 425 electoral votes in the 1988 presidential elections, so the plan apparently did not work.

She can also trade on her name.  She is one of those women who uses her birth surname as her middle name:  Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  It's a bizarre recent custom that no one in my family has adopted.  (They either co-opt their husband's surname, as my mother did, or they keep their own surname, as my sister and my wife do, but they don't turn their original surname into a new middle name.)  In her case, though, it makes sense because it gives her an advantage in Arkansas politics.  In her shoes, I would have just kept it Sarah Huckabee, avoiding Sanders altogether, but that too may be a political move:  it would have a certain appeal to old-fashioned women in Arkansas who maybe feel that a woman should co-opt her husband's surname.  This allows her to have her cake and eat it too, so to speak.  She is also a female, and the Republican party has a desperate need to appeal to females--especially independent, working women.  Unfortunately she lacks charisma (and, apparently, speechwriters.)  It almost appears as though there was no coaching or vetting of the speech, which is incredible.  

A few lines could have been effective.  Consider this one:  "The Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day... Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight."  The fact that it is false is not a problem--politicians often take the liberty of making pronouncements which are divorced from reality--but the fact that it was delivered in monotone and delivered immediately after a speech given by an old-fashioned Democrat who has no interest in cultural progressivism is a problem.  

Don't lose sight of the fact that she was hand-picked by Kevin McCarthy to give the speech.  Therein lies the real problem.  He cannot even unite Republicans, so I imagine we are in for at least two years of inexplicable politics.  In an uncharacteristic display of humility, McCarthy pretty much admitted that the SOTU and its response was all a fiasco.    

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Alben's actual views on trans people aren't out of the mainstream at all. His issue is with framing and style, not the substance itself.

However, he has gotten it into his head that all the fake provocateurs and bots he sees on Twitter are what Democrats actually believe, egged on by Republicans who have invented this whole trans culture war out of thin air. Who in real life is this "radical TRA" strawman he keeps arguing against?

He says that he recognizes that gender and sex are different and that he treats people with respect and uses the preferred pronouns. That's the Democratic position. What's the problem? How have the Democrats let fringe Republicans redefine the "default" positions of the parties to the point where Democrats are believing it? Every time he's ranting about these "radical TRAs" I'm like "man, I'm one of the most pro-trans cis people here and this caricature he's presenting doesn't resemble me at all."

[Fuzzy Bear]

https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1625556034189201414

This has me conflicted. Normally, I'd laugh or go ripbozo or something like that, but I really can't. I've told the story before, but Teddy von Nukem was a former, close friend of mine.

I knew him from about 2008-2012. He was a fairly normal Ron Paul-type libertarian back then. Eccentric, and very into WW2 history, but I never would have dreamed he would actually become a full blown Nazi. I remember him teaching me how to play Diplomacy, and us playing Halo Reach together. I remember playing a few older RPGs because of Teddy. My guess is he was drawn to Trump and went down the rabbit hole from there.

We had drifted apart around 2012 – I had left our community, stopped logging onto AIM, and we just lost touch. I was one of the few people who he told his real name. I actually remember him telling me he had changed his name to Teddy von Nukem. I thought he was joking at first, until I saw his name pop up in the Charlottesville riots.

I didn't even know of his involvement in the beating of DeAndre Harris until recently, or his trafficking of fentanyl. I only found out a few days ago about his death It's shocking seeing someone you know, and someone so close to you, turn into a f**king monster. Lord knows I've already seen it here on this board. I just feel more empty and guilty than anything - like if I was still in contact, I could have stopped him from going down this path.

I feel like a horrible person, but even after all of the horrible things he did, I can't bring myself to remember him as Teddy the Nazi. I remember the guy who was nice to me, even throughout all of my cringey teenage years. I remember the good memories - him teaching me how to play video games with me. I can understand why you're glad he's dead. But for some reason - maybe because I knew him for so long - I just can't.

In the next life, I hope you let go of the hatred you held in your heart. Until then, A, may we meet again.

This isn't an endorsement of "Teddy" or his politics, but this is one of the more heartfelt posts ever on this site.  This guy WAS a human being, who loved people and who people loved.  Sawx has the ability to recognize that while not signing off on the guy's Alt-Right participation.  Few people here have the abilty to do that here, and it would be better if more people could be this humane.

[Kamala's side hoe]

It's well-established that exchange students from Eastern Europe tend to think of American schools as extremely lax and Americans studying in Eastern Europe think schools feel like prisons. This is obviously an extreme case where it sounds like the students were out of line, but sometimes it can even come down to little things like how in American schools, a teacher would use wording like "can you finish this tonight?" instead of "you need to finish this tonight" making it sound like it's optional when really it isn't. (I had that conversation in 2014 for the record, so this isn't some Zoomer/post-COVID phenomenon.)

A lot of that also just boils down to big differences between American and Slavic/Eastern European cultures regarding comportment, tone, body language, and interpersonal communication more broadly.

In America, if you're not smiling and acting happy around a person, you're being mean to them. In Eastern Europe, if you're smiling and acting happy around a person who's not family or a very close friend, you're presumed to be a bit "slow."

In America, you have to say something is great even when it's not. In Eastern Europe, even when something's fantastic, the best they can do is, "Even so..."

I once had a Romanian (okay, not technically Slavic but still in that cultural sphere) economics professor in college who I and everyone else was absolutely terrified of because she always looked and sounded extremely pissed off at you even when she wasn't.

[S019]

Most Republican candidates: "What will get me elected?"

If they think licking Putin's shoe leather, and kissing the hem of MBS' thobe will get them elected, that's what they'll do. If they think posturing about China and Russia will get them elected, then they'll do that. And if they've got a choice between doing something spiteful and something decent, they'll go for the spiteful option 9 out of 10 times.

Trump: "I like dictators."
Trump imitators: "Dictators are awesome!"

Trump would suck up to tyrants even if he didn't need to.

[Kamala's side hoe]

This ad just seems extremely-online to me. Do any reasonable people really believe that Democrats are ensuring that airline pilots are transgender refugees?

IMO anti-wokeness can be a winning issue for republicans when they focus on curbing the excesses of progressives with a broader notion of actually fixing societal issues. Appeals such as "School closures and poor management have failed our students' education, but 'radical Democrats' are only focusing on making Thomas Jefferson look bad" or "College is becoming an unreachable cost for most families, while Democrats focus on universities hiring more diversity coordinators to talk about pronouns" can work. This ad offers zero diagnosis nor plan of issues tangible to swing voters.

Those suggested talking points don't not-so-subtly further their racist/fake-Christian agenda, though.  If implemented, they would actually work against that agenda, and would result in a more egalitarian and diverse United States... the exact thing that they don't want.

I get that you are trying to make a point trashing the modern GOP for what it is, and I overall agree with your sentiment, but I feel like you might have literally just fell for the suggested GOP messaging (no personal diminution, just trying to make a discussion point).

"School closures and poor management have failed our students' education" coming with an (R) attached to it is a railing against teacher's unions and public schools in general from the covid-era. (e.g. The continuation could be "since this district is poorly managed, we should give students the choice for the school they can attend.")

"College is becoming an unreachable cost for most families, while Democrats focus on universities hiring more diversity coordinators" is an attempt to place the blame of continued college cost increases at the current administration, "wasted money" on DEI admin and majors like sociology, and "loose money" policies like student loan forgiveness.

I'm not saying current GOP legislators (or most for the past few decades) have solutions to the problems mentioned, but the framing I chose is meant to be for right-leaning folks with no guarantee for a "more egalitarian and diverse United States." Perhaps my nitpicking is more from an incessant need to focus on political strategy, but this is the Youngkin route that Democrats need to counter well in order to compete in swing areas during poor national environments.

[world.execute(me)]

We don't even have decently funded voluntary services to help homeless people get back on their feet in most places, so the fact that your first instinct is to go to involuntary for everyone is telling. As is not a single mention of housing in your list of 'solutions' that includes an "aggressive police response". Ugh.

Yes, many of these people are going to need serious help because even if you didn't have mental issues before becoming homeless studies show it's very possible you'll develop them while homeless. Even bears need a cave to return to; being unhoused (without shelter) isn't natural for humans or pretty much any animal and constant stress warps the mind.

I have a lot of sympathy for the couple in the article; they seem like fine people in an unfortunate situation, but imagine life for the 1,100 people living in squalor.

Make the necessary funding available for EVERYONE to see a Doctor in some capacity, make the needed investments in community based mental health facilities which have been extremely effective where they have been well funded and then replace the "aggressive police response" with social workers and a robust affordable housing system.

All these things are possible; this crisis of homelessness, austerity for the poor with generous welfare for the rich and over-policed neighborhoods when social work is what's really needed is at the root of the issue. Homelessness is a manufactured choice we make.

[Kamala's side hoe]

There are an almost impressively short list of fungi that can cause pathogenic infections in human. The next pandemic will also certainly be viral. That’s not to downplay the importance of drug-resistance, which is crucial in our ongoing issue with bacterial, viral and fungal infections, and is clearest in the antibiotic space.

The problem in this article is a nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infection, which isn’t new. Because fungi are poorly suited as human pathogens, the immune compromised are the most likely to present with them. In fact, the HIV pandemic taught us a great deal about pathogenic fungi and viruses that we thought were harmless. Turns out, we’re all carrying strains that are suppressed effectively in the immune-competent, but cause real harm to the immune-compromised.

Suppressing nosocomial infections is a real pain, because they tend to be amongst the most resistant to cleaning agents as well as drugs, and there’s only so much a normal cleaning staff can do in a working hospital.

Most Candida species are a nightmare - you don’t want to know what they can do to your oral or dental health, put it that way…

Tldr - wash up well when you go to visit someone in hospital, and just get over yourself and wear a mask. It all helps, and you could prevent a chain of infection.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Among other reasons, immigrants are less likely to vote, the non-college educated are less likely to vote, young people are less likely to vote, and people who are poor English speakers are less likely to vote. Hispanics disproportionately fall into all of those categories, so it’s not surprising they’re less likely to vote?

Outreach to Hispanics and Asians by the parties has also traditionally not been great, which obviously also depresses turnout. And this is a point that this forum probably has a blind spot for, but there’s an understandable lack of knowledge on how the American political system works among immigrants which can be intimidating.

My assumption would be language barriers. Do all states have Spanish language options for ballots? Jersey has Spanish and Korean.

Also, I think if you're living in the United States, you should able to speak and read English. It might not be the official language per law at the federal level, but is de facto the language of the country.

I agree. I hate when people say "Oh, America has no official language blah blah blah". OK and? English (as you said) is the de facto language of the country. It's the language of the government, commerce, trade, business, the military and so on. Most Americans are native English speakers. This country was founded by English speakers from the country of the language's birth (England). If you're coming to America to live then you learn to speak at least SOME English.

That should be the expectation for anyone who moves to another country where most people don't speak your native language. For example, Mexico doesn't have an official language but we all know that Mexico is a Spanish-speaking country. If I were to move to Mexico and live there for 10+ years but don't learn at least SOME Spanish, that would be irresponsible/unacceptable.

I don’t think anyone disagrees with this, but also the level of fluency needed understand political debates is definitely on another level from the conversational skills needed to make it on a day-to-day basis in the US.

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

Let's look at the one state that Nixon lost but Reagan won in both of his elections:

1972


1980


Look at the immediate Boston area/Riviera.  While there isn't a massive shift (Anderson did take a bunch of anti-Carter liberals in some places) there are still quite a few towns (particularly on the North and South Shores) that went for Reagan.  In 1984 with the absence of Anderson Reagan would improve his margins even more among these types.

Now what is the sociocultural dynamic in these places that went for McGovern but ended up going for Reagan?  Alright a lot of them seem to be middle-upper class areas that attracted for lack of a better term "Democratic whites" from Boston who started moving out of the city and into the burbs.  When Nixon was president a lot of these folks still had reflexive Democratic voting habits (though you can tell in some parts even back then there was some underperformance among this group with McGovern largley because he was seen as an affirmative action pro-busing kind of candidate).  McGovern trying to associate himself with Robert Kennedy's movement in 1968 and having a random inlaw on the ticket might have helped a little bit.  I mean you have a candidate whose last name is "McGovern" who is somewhat associated with the Kennedy family, makes that point quite clearly, while his opponent has made a career out of attacking "the Harvard elites".  So yeah, even if Nixon did have some issues that these voters agreed with him on and would otherwise be sympathetic to he was always a TERRIBLE CANDIDATE for Massachusetts (he lost the state twice with less than 40% of the vote (LOL) at a time when Republicans still had a decent state and local presence there and then he lost it again with only 45% against a man that was widely painted in the press and media as a liberal radical who wanted to legalized ACID on top of abortion AND amnestry).

Contrast this with Jimmy Carter who made minimal gains among in Mass and actually LOST some of these Dems despite being ambivalent on the whole busing issue.  Where does a lot of this come from?  It was a combination of factors.  Namely these folks were still pissed off about the busing crisis that happened earlier in the decade.  Middle class voters started moving down to the shore, out of Boston, and voting more in line with their newfound economic and racial concerns as suburban commuters.  Thus you would see in Massachusetts in 1976 a very weird development: heavily Yankee rural western Mass going for Georgia peanut farmer Carter in a massive shift while the shift in South Shore would be very lukewarm at best.  Don't be fooled by the below map, Carter gained maybe 2 points over McGovern (LOL):



So basically, the whole "Reagan Democrat" phenomenom that a lot of folks for some reason associate with working class Kentucky whites and western Pennsylvania coalminers.  In reality while there was a working class component to the Reagan coalition (think more like Sal at the local VHS repair shop/Sean at the local Target, not coalminers) a lot of these folks were honestly very middle class if not upper middle class and largely adopted the suburban American lifestyle that many Republican voters did at the time.  A lot of these places (besides like idfk South Boston) were not poor Southies living in projects but actually very comfortable solidly upper middle (what the locals might refer to as "lace curtain") class towns.

I think there were similar dynamics at play in several northeastern states at the time that generally leaned Democratic: basically a middle and upper class revolt among the base in response to inflation, high interest rates, and a slagging economy.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Whereas Republicans, by their small scoped party nature, are generally more homogenous. We've seen this in the growing "rural blue collar aesthetic" in the Republican Party. In fact part of the identity of republicans nowadays is monoculturizing liberals and being against the idea they have of them.

Neither group is a monolith, but republicans (especially after the centering the party around trump) are more cohesive them democrats

I think this description does a better job of describing what OP was suggesting because yes, Republicans have assumed a more "minoritarian" view of themselves in recent years. From 1968 to 2006, I think it's pretty clear that Republicans represented the median of American public opinion. Congress was Democratic until 1994, but for long stretches of that period - especially the Reagan years and beyond, Blue Dog Democrats held the balance of power and gave Reagan his share of legislative wins in a way that a liberal Democratic majority simply wouldn't have. The Republican revolution of 1994 changed this, making congress even more conservative and forcing Clinton to effectively govern as a moderate Republican.

There was a stretch of Republican congressional domination from 2010-2018, but they really couldn't get much done against a popular liberal Democratic president who represented the new majority of American public opinion. Congressional Republicans since 2010 have actually been a remarkably ineffective vehicle for conservative politics, and ironically this has only strengthened the executive state, staffed largely by those with a more liberal outlook. Faced with an increasingly liberal shift of the nation and a deeply useless political arm in the current GOP establishment, conservatives have retrenched into a more reactionary position.

Interestingly, the Supreme Court always seems to stand in opposition to the overall national majority, in large part because the positions tend to be filled by previous presidents' appointments. SCOTUS was a force for conservatism during the FDR era of ascendant liberalism, a force for liberalism during the Nixon-Reagan era of ascendant conservatism, and it has swung back to being a force for conservatism during an era where conservatives are struggling to find a place for themselves.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: China got much richer than India in the last 50 years. What’s Modi’s plan?

I'm not actually that familiar with the specifics of China's development, but one thing that greatly holds India back is overregulation, protectionism, and a total lack of coordination between the states and the federal government.

The License Raj still exists, and India still has relatively high levels of protectionism and state direction of the economy. I remember that one of the big problems that the GST reform was supposed to tackle was that different states taxed different goods at different levels, and had very dated and inefficient tax compliance systems. On highways along state borders, there would be massive traffic jams of trucks carrying goods because the truck drivers would have to stop, get out of their trucks, hand over paperwork or do the paperwork themselves, and pay any tax differences on the spot before they could continue.

One of the first points of economic liberalism is that internal trade should be as free and frictionless as possible; in fact, that the United Kingdom abolished internal taxes and levies centuries ago is cited as a foundational reason why the UK started its economic rise. India has still to learn and embrace this, and it's not just taxes, this License Raj still applies to everything.

I find the internal bureaucracy in Germany to be crippling compared to what I experienced in Sweden and the United States; I cannot begin to imagine how it is in India. India is fundamentally extremely hostile to anyone doing business (unless you pay major bribes), and is also deeply hostile and unhelpful to foreign investment. China has its problems with mandatory Chinese participation in foreign investments, and IP theft is faciliated by the government, but China also has a whole government agency whose jobs are to walk foreigners through the registration process and get their factories and offices up and running. India tried copying this, but that office is still frustrated by the entrenched interests in the federal, state, and local governments.

China shares a lot of issues with India, such as corruption, a heavy-handed state, protectionism, etc. but China has taken bigger strides to correct some of these (at least, in a way that promotes development). India for some reason is deeply wedded to the old way of doing things.

[Fuzzy Bear]

In memoriam:

The line is a thin one.

I am disgusted that after the amount of time we have been there, there seems to be no plan for victory, and I don't agree with having our soldiers give their lives in some type of holding action rather than a strategic plan for victory.

For us to just stay there indefinitely taking casualties, with no plan to defeat the enemy, is unconscionable.

Having said that, I think we should go for victory, not defeat, as some seem to want.  The problem is that President Bush has squandered his most precious resource -- time.  Time = the opposite of patience, so the more time has elapsed, the less patience people have.

We have allowed political constraints to hold us back from pursuing victory.  The same f-king thing as in Vietnam.  If a war is not worth some political risks, then it's not worth soldiers' lives.

Definite Freedom Post by an FF.

[world.execute(me)]

This is 100% accurate and we in fact should require universities to cosign student loans as well . He also is 100% correct that the goal of a modern university is to make students as employable as possible.

There may be something as to the first statement there, but universities should certainly offer more than just making people employable. Not everyone has to be a STEM major. There's also more to life than just work. I know it's an anathema to the right-wing now, but there are benefits in having an educated citizenry. That said though, I support a more wholesale reimagining as to how the education system should be structured.

A lot more people should be going to community college. A 4-year college/university isn't for everyone, though the opportunity should be there for all (that means tuition-free public colleges and universities). We should also be encouraging more fast track paths for those that can, which could include more 3-year programs for a bachelor's degree. Similarly, community colleges could also function partially as satellite campuses for larger universities. Ultimately, it should not be the business of the state (i.e. the taxpayers) to pay for the "college experience" that has come to define many colleges and universities. The higher education system is fundamentally broken and using a model that has outlived its usefulness.

K-12 aren't necessarily teaching the best skills either. For some reason, some states are trying to bring back cursive handwriting. I can think of few things more useless.  I think elementary schools should be teaching foreign languages. On top of the obvious benefits, learning a second language is excellent for brain development. I think the education system misses out on teaching many practical skills. For example, I think everyone should be required to learn first-aid skills in school.

Call me crazy but somehow in many other nations in the world universities are able to remain solvent, universally low-cost, and decent enough quality without defunding majors that don't provide direct financial returns.

As a "loony leftist," I disagree with posters in this thread who have the idea public universities should only function as instruments to further future earnings potential. I think such a view falls under the "neoliberal" notion of viewing policy as solely financial that Antonio V has espoused before. And while I don't find myself doctrinally opposed to Antonio's definition of "neoliberalism" when it comes to how governments should manage say interest rates or decisions on vanilla market interventions (e.g. managing licensing barriers, externalities, etc.), I find it completely in the wrong when it comes to education. In the vein of a "head-in-the-sky" progressive, I believe that any academic discipline should remain equal access, and that we can find other solutions to the cost of college.

The idea that the only purpose of education is to get a job needs to die in a fire.

[world.execute(me)]

Since when do regional boundaries have to follow political ones? Since when are regions supposed to be homogenous entities in political terms?
Did Missouri change what region it was in when it voted for TR in 1904?

I do not think every state in a region has to vote the same way. I do think, however, that regional boundaries should indicate common political characteristics between states. In other words, in a given election, most or all of the states in a given region should generally shift by the same amount in the same direction for the same reason.

This is such a bizarre take.  Absolutely nobody in Chicago would deny being from the Midwest nor would anyone from rural Iowa ... and neither person would see a conflict with both CLEARLY being Midwestern even though they vote differently.  It's fine to include cultural differences - for example, I think Maryland and Delaware have mostly shifted into being Northeastern states at this point, but that took DECADES, not a couple elections of voting differently - but politics alone shouldn't really be considered ... that's a hyper-Atlas take, haha.  You could of course dig deeper if you went beyond state borders (e.g., Richmond, VA is clearly the "Cultural South," but I'd entertain the idea that NOVA is not), but if we are grouping entire states ... I would personally go with this:



THE SOUTH
Darkest: The Deep South.  I entertained grouping the Carolinas together, but the inclusion of Virginia in that category made me want to put SC in the "most Southern" group.
Regular Green: Appalachian/Border South.  Only parts of these states are "Appalachian," but they share a culture that while distinct from the Deep Southern states is still undeniably Southern when compared to the Midwestern and Northeastern states that they border.
Light Green: Southwest (Southern Portion).  These states have areas in the east that are very clearly culturally part of the South, and - most importantly - as a whole they fit into the South better than any one region.
Lightest Green: Coastal/Peripheral South.  All of these states have VERY culturally Southern areas as well as areas that either (A) are filled with non-Southern transplants, (B) developed their own subcultures that are not really Southern or (C) both.  At a STATEWIDE level, all are very clearly part of the South ... but they are unique within the region (especially Florida and Virginia).

THE NORTHEAST
Darkest Red: New England.  Pretty much explains itself and one of the best-defined regions in the US.  At a county level, you could argue that Southwestern Connecticut could belong in the same category as New York.
Regular Red: NYC Orbit and/or Mid-Atlantic (Northern Portion).  You could really just read this as the non-New England part of the Northeast, but I really thought Maryland, Delaware and DC deserved their own category.
Lightest Red: Lower Mid-Atlantic.  Yep, pretty much what used to be considered the South but due to DC being the capital and getting less culturally Southern with the decades has rendered this as a sort of transition zone from the Northeast to the South.  I'm actually perfectly fine with the Census calling it the South for historical reasons and because this is a GEOGRAPHIC designation, but it also fits nicely with the Northeast.

THE MIDWEST
Darkest Blue: Big Ten Country.  This is the true core of the Midwest in nearly every way, and nobody questions if these states are "Midwestern."  I will say, though, that if this were at a county level, I would consider some select counties in Southern Illinois and possibly Southern Indiana as "culturally Southern" for various historic reasons, including having segregated schools well past the rest of their states and intense Confederate sympathies.
Regular Blue: The Great Plains.  On one hand, this is almost as clearly defined as New England ... but on the other, it's a transition zone like MD-DE-DC from the Midwest to the West.  Using KS as an example, people view the KC suburbs as clearly Midwestern, if with a little more "Western" flavor ... but western Kansas is starting to feel like the West.
Lightest Blue: I'm biased as a Midwesterner (i.e., I know more about our region and will thus maybe analyze it with more nuance), but Missouri really is its own beast.  Kansas City feels like part of the Plains, St. Louis feels similar to "Big Ten Country" (if with slight Southern influences) and the southern half of the state has VERY clear cultural and historical ties to the South, including everything from Southern Baptists outnumbering Mainline Protestants to being a slave state.

THE WEST
Darkest Gold: The West Coast.  A lot of variety within these states (especially as you move away from the literal coasts), and you could honestly split it up between the "Pacific Northwest" and just California, lol.  I also considered adding Nevada.
Yellow: Mountain West.  This region would extend into AZ and NM if it were at a county level, but I think these states are pretty easily defined here.
Light Yellow: The Southwest (Western Portion).  Again, I feel like the Southwest kind of strattles the West and the South, and these are the states that are clearly Western as a whole.
Lightest Yellow: Alaska and Hawaii are not really in any regions, haha.

States are very complex, and that is okay.  All of Illinois is in the geographic region of the Midwest.  However, the cultural boundaries fluctuate quite a lot.  Chicago speaks for itself as a unique culture, and that absolutely does not include the suburbs, haha.  While both in the broad region of "Downstate Illinois" and similarly sized industrial cities, Rockford has clear influences from Wisconsin that Peoria does not.  Truly Southern Illinois, which has the Shawnee National Forest and literal swamp land rather than the cornfields you might be imagining, might as well be Dixie.

[Fuzzy Bear]

This Professor is an anti-semetic, racist leader of a left-wing extremist hate and anarachy group that recruits and radicalizes its members to commit hate crimes against Jews.  The group receives protection from Democrat Officials and Media outlets.  They won't investigated or prosecuted.  This lady should have been arrested years ago for organizing and inciting violent riots.  She's not crazy.  She just hasn't been held accountable for threatening other people with machete, so she's comfortable using it.  

The Professor claimed she was fired cause Huntington College "Capitulated to racist, white nationalists and misogynists."  Would it surprise anyone to learn that she was arrested during the 2020 BLM Riots, and filed suit against the NYPD for abuse suffered when she was arrested.  In her BS pleadings, she claims that the police arrested her as she was leaving.  She was arrested with 14 other people for inciting violence on behalf of a radical left-wing group called "Take Back the Bronx", which advocated for defunding the police and prisons, as well as promoting anti-Israel sentiment.  They have organized multiple, large-scale riots.  One of the founders tweeted, "Knives, aim for the neck, and blind police".  The groups is believed to have ties with left-wing terrorist groups for which they help recruit and radicalize members.  They also have ties with Antifa.  The Professor was one of the leaders of this group, and her role was to help incite violence.  
https://nypost.com/2020/02/15/nyu-professor-founded-anarchist-group-that-attacked-subways-last-month/

In addition, this professor is a member of a group called 'Decolonise This Place", which is a group that calls for Jihadism against all 'oppressors'.  A representative of the group had also attempted to incite violence against Jews by tweeting a call for members to "Find targets now.  Find where the Zionist fools live, and where their offices are, and act."  

Both groups consist of blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and Muslims.  Both groups encourage members to use machetes.  Both groups hate Jews.  Hate crimes against Jews has skyrocketed.  The use of machetes in these hate crimes is becoming a trend.  Jews now represent 78% of all religious hate crimes due to rises in NYC, Los Angeles, and Chicago. 97% of hate crimes in NY between 2018-2022 were committed by other minorities. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/report-97-of-anti-jewish-hate-crimes-in-new-york-were-committed-by-other-minorities/ar-AA15N6d2

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: US Students academic performance lowest in DECADES

Again, the solution is to integrate modern technology into the educational sphere and more importantly to do it CONSISTENTLY. The screens many on here bemoan actually are the way we can improve educational outcomes beyond what they were even before Covid. There must be a three pronged solution.
 First is within the classroom itself. This is the hardest to really legislate but the goal should be to improve time efficiency. What I envision is essentially flipping the class lecture homework structure on its head. Instead teachers should prerecord lectures and have those sent out to students as “homework”. Meanwhile, the actual application of concepts and the written work should be done in class individually with the teacher available as a resource for those struggling. This has the added benefit of preventing ChatGPT cheating. And if the kids don’t listen to the recordings? Then they can be exposed in class. This strategy should be for upper grades, obviously elementary school is an exception here.

Next is the usage of technology and social media to change culture and accessibility. I’ve long been a proponent of a centralized national website that offers interactive modules/lessons on pretty much any topic within curriculum and even some supplementary stuff if possible. Many colleges and organizations do a good start but having it in one easy to access and memorize space which is publicly funded will facilitate this all. Second and most crucially, we should collide with YouTube/TikTok to prioritize educational content in algorithms. That way we get some kids to learn and they don’t even realize it!

Finally is of course the equity issue which has arguably improved in recent years, but we do have some ways to go. While I don’t believe it’s the main problem (the issue is more cultural generally which I think the second prong of the strategy I lay out will help) I do think that ending local property tax funding for schools and other such measures matter. More importantly, charter and private schools must be discouraged, they are poorly regulated compared to public schools.

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

Imagine marrying someone without having had sex with them, and they're just terrible in bed. Like why take the risk?

The reason has been stated many times in this thread: because doing so is sinful. You just claim not to understand because you refuse to acknowledge that someone could validly reason this way.

This is something I see remarkably often among people who were presumably raised without religion: they are willing to imagine and impute all sorts of reasoning to religious people (see this very thread for examples), but they cannot imagine that people might sincerely believe what they say they believe. If you reject out of hand what people with religious belief say about themselves, of course you will see them all as liars and hypocrites.

A friend of mine recently watched I Confess, a movie by Alfred Hitchcock about a priest who is accused of murder and has the ability to exonerate himself, but does not because he would have to violate the seal of confession to do so. He noted that many people online reject the plot because they find it unrealistic that the protagonist would act in this way. This, again, is a refusal to believe that people take religion seriously, that it isn't just some sort of cultural designation. You can either accept the reality of religious belief or you can continue feigning ignorance forever, but only one of those options will help you understand the world as it is.

[Ferguson97]

We're talking about people who will be sentenced to prison for a lengthy period of time.  I cannot think of a state in the Union where DUI-Manslaughter (or however the crime is styled) where state prison sentences aren't part of the punishment for such offenders.

The Child Support system already has enough people in their Debtor's Gulag.  People who face Writs of Bodily Attachment, or even criminal charges for failing to pay child support, even when the ability to pay is, arguably, not there.  We're not talking about willful deadbeats; we're talking about people who are unable to work enough to both pay their child support AND keep a roof over their head. 

For those in this situation who have means, they can (and are) civilly sued.  Those who are not are likely to be in a situation to where they will be behind the 8 ball for the rest of their lives.  I don't mean not being able to afford to buy a house; I'm talking about not being able to keep a roof over your head or afford to get to work (especially given that you will likely not have a valid driver license ever again).  If the end is more punishment, I believe that one who has completed a prison sentence has already been punished, and the punishment of probation or parole ought to be a punishment where one can succeed, and not be so oppressive as being a deliberate set-up for failure.  We are talking about a population that is, at least initially, far less employable than they were at the start of their sentence.

Let's also not forget that much "child support" is actually reimbursement to the government for social services rendered or benefits paid out.  It's about reducing the cost of government without cutting budgets or increasing taxes; it's about a plan for "revenue enhancement".  And it's unrealistic.  It's part of the unrealistic "taking responsibility" mantra that is, in fact, the attempts to get blood from stones under a different name.  That these people be required to serve prison time is one thing.  That these people be hit with child support after their release is stone-bleeding and buck-passing. 

[Kamala's side hoe]

Re: What is the primary factor behind Trump's support within the Republican base?

It started with immigration, but since then he has obtained broad based support.

The thing you need to understand about the GOP is that it is defined by the failures perceived or otherwise, of the Bush years. In many ways Trump is the answer to all of them.

I used to be on this blog called "CoMITTed to Romney" and even among this group of Romney supporters in 2007, you heard these two questions all of the time:

1. Why is the GOP establishment so weak on immigration?
2. Why doesn't Bush ever fight back against the "Democrats and their lies"?

Combine that with a growing dissatisfaction with the neoconservative monopoly on foreign policy, and the rising salience of trade protectionism as the GOP shed suburban moderates in favor of working class traditionalists via the Bush era social issues, and the anger at the bailouts, the insiders, the establishment for losing twice to what seemed to them to be easily winnable elections against someone portrayed as radical by the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity.

Trump is seen as this outsider force who even if he cannot decapitate the power of the insiders, consultants and the like, even if he actively enabled them, he pisses them off utterly and they are willing to settle for that.

I think the rise of Trump and the spine removal surgery that most Republican politicians have undergone that has facilitated Trump, are both symptoms of a larger decline.

1. A decline in independent thought so as to better service the demands of donors, consultants and echo chamber partisan media.
2. A cultural decline in the value placed upon our institutions both justified and not stretching back to Watergate and the abuses it uncovered going back to WWII. This leads to a nihilistic and/or cynical viewpoint held by those politicians drawn from a populace marinated in this cultural rejection of establishment institutions (even those of an essential nature for the preservation of a constitutional republic).
3. A generation of politicians coming power beginning in the 1990s, that is more concerned with their self interest than that of the country's interests.

No one has emerged that is able to bridge the cultural divides enough to successfully win and win big enough to have the political clout to institute the reforms necessary to break from this paradigm of mistrust and cynicism.

Coming back down to the GOP primary, Trump is seen as a guardian or a protector. Evangelicals see him as a protector from the progressive left, and ironically, more secular Republicans see Trump as a protector from the Christian Right (and once again, its Bush era dominance). Trump's ability to bridge this divide within the party, speaks volumes to his stranglehold on the primary electorate. 

[Kamala's side hoe]

I constantly hear from Democratic voters (moderates, liberals, lefties, whatever) how they don't like Biden and how they want somebody else. When asked what they mean by that, they can't really name an alternative (other than maybe Buttigieg), and when asked why, they just say something about the candidate being "young" and "exciting", or like the OP, they talk about Obama's "charisma".

When it's pointed out that Biden has accomplished quite a lot in a short period of time with paper-thin majorities and has repeatedly frustrated Republicans, and is politically quite useful because he is both knowledgable about the powers of office at his disposal while simultaneously not triggering strong opposition (the "dementia" stuff is clearly backfiring on Republicans, because basically they are telling their voters that Biden is not a threat to them and this demobilizes the base), they don't particularly care.

In the end, all of it boils down to: "I wanna feel warm and cuddly inside when voting". That's really all it is.

Americans would rather have feel-good Presidents like Carter, Clinton, Obama, Trump, etc. who waste time with on-the-job training and pissing away political momentum than actually getting anything done, and then when their toy isn't new and shiny anymore they get really mad and then look for the next "outsider" who validates their feelings. And then the cycle repeats.

As someone who once tried to immigrate to America through a student visa, it seems to me that legacy admissions are actually good for poor and underprivileged students, in an indirect way. How could that be? Well, Ivy schools like Yale or Havard don't really provide better education than top state schools like CalTech, nor are their students necessarily smarter, are they? Their biggest selling point is their prestige and near limitless connections that you can get there. A poor person coming from an underprivileged background and going to school with the kids of top CEOs, current and former politicians and diplomats, top scientists, nobel prize laureates etc. and becoming friend with them is one of the best and fastest means of upward mobility I can possibly think of. There are few faster ways of going from bottom to elite of the society than that (I guess being a talented athlete is another way). In addition to that, the donations given by the parents of such legacy alumni can probably help these poor students to get there and attend classes for free (through fully funded scholarships).

That's why combining legacy admission and income based AA is the best combination if colleges absolutely want to keep both (AA and legacies) imo.