Favorite recent post by the previous poster

[Joseph Cao]

That poll shows Collins' approvals at less than 70% of Republican, she still has room to grow among Republicans. Also there are sure to be some moderate Democrats who crossover to vote for her. It may not be enough in the end, but can Atlas please stop acting like she's DOA. This reminds of how a lot of people thought that McCaskill was destined to lose by double digits. In any case, I think Collins has hit her floor, she's seen nothing, but negative media coverage for months. She's an institution in the state, and some Democrats will appreciate that, will it be enough, we'll wait to see. But anyone calling this race Likely or Safe for either party or declaring that it's inevitable that Collins wins or Gideon wins is a clear hack. I do have Collins as the favorite in this race, but I have it at Tilt R, to me any rating from Lean R to Lean D is a reasonable assessment of this race.

[Joseph Cao]

ExtremeRepublican is extremely (ha) correct in many ways here. We're talking about generalizing about a group of 74 million people. Most of them are fairly normal. In fact, a very large majority of them are in fact normal people - not the most crazy group of wackos who would do this.
It's not civil, just, or fair to overuse guilt by association and presume automatically that an expression of support for one's political tribe would also lead to one committing these acts. It's not right or correct to spout these ideas and then attack someone for giving a partisan reply defending either their own side's voters or politicians, after you have doused yourself in a level of, however understandable or otherwise, rhetorical excess. It's not conductive to the starting of healing or even of normality in any way, shape, or form to just mudsludge the other side in this manner and treat a person as a potential criminal purely on this sort of basis.
Sowing even more increased and thorough partisan hatred will only increase the risk of something like this recurring in the future. And it's even more harmful to our democracy in the long-term than anything the attackers did yesterday. We need sanity. Please be considerate and compassionate. We can disagree on what needs to be done but can we just please be considerate? Is that too much to ask?

[Joseph Cao]

Mods please delete the Bohemian Rhapsody crap.

Bismillah! No - we will not let it go!

Oh geez. 

The call is coming from inside the house. 

[Joseph Cao]

The media are all fixated on the slow vaccine rollout, and the Conservatives are gleefully making hay over this.

This will bite them in the ass, for the 63452nd time. Within a few months, production capacity will have ramped up, and the (rich) world will be awash with vaccines. Supply will no longer be an issue.

As usual, the Conservatives ridicule Trudeau and lower public expectations towards him, so that when Trudeau greatly exceeds these expectations but still doesn't perform as well as he could, these attacks backfire on them again and again.

[Joseph Cao]

I didn't say there would be no blowback, just that it wouldn't be worse than the blowback from a military invasion and likely wouldn't be as severe.  From a realpolitik viewpoint, there's no reason for the mainland to do anything against Taiwan, but the CCP has shown that it doesn't always base its actions on realpolitik. If it had, it never would've gone as far as it did in Hong Kong. Still, they have shown a pattern of starting small and then escalating rather than back down or even just stand pat when their small provocation doesn't yield the desired result.

Such a step - threatening to nationalize foreign investment over a political demand - would be seen as the end of China's post-Mao economic reform period, and the start of something very, very bleak.

Hong Kong could be explained as Winnie protecting his own job security: escalating political dissent was immediately threatening Winnie's credibility as CCP leader, and the economic consequences of abolishing its autonomy would take many years to accumulate. It was an action with a short-term benefit (he exerts his credibility as leader, and no immediate backlash), and an unclear long-term cost (foreign investors may gradually become more hesitant in investing in Hong Kong). Threatening Taiwan, even through economic means, would come with no clear short-term benefit (high risk of failure), but definite long-term costs (tens of millions of lost jobs).

The CCP has, for its part, proven sensitive in protecting immediate domestic employment, and when it can claim a victory in domestic propaganda. Do you remember ages ago, in January 2020, when Trump signed his Phase 1 trade deal with Beijing? It imposed a whole slew of demands on China, while the US was free to raise tariffs effectively as it pleased. Effectively, Beijing yielded to Trump's gaslighting, because it was afraid of the alternative, which was an immediate loss of millions of jobs. Then it used its propaganda machine to present this defeat as a victory. Beijing was so, so desperate for that bad trade deal that it ignored news of a festering disease in Wuhan. This means that they are always making political calculations, and are willing to retreat when the conditions are against confrontation.

[Joseph Cao]

You want to visit Alaska one day?

What happened to D.B. Cooper?

What do you think of Libertarianism? (not giving a definition)


One of my favorite posters  

I absolutely want to see Alaska someday, its natural beauty is breathtaking and it's a very varied place in both human and natural geography.

I actually never heard of D.B. Cooper until just now. But assuming he survived the jump, of all the candidates that are so far known, William J. Smith looks likeliest. We'll never know for sure of course.

Libertarianism is an interesting philosophy that is very, very strongly influential in deciding  my views on some issues such as free speech. But I do tend to hold the view that society is a collection of people who did their jobs and pursued their pleasures in pursuit of enrichment, stability, and spiritual meaning. And so I'm inclined to think in terms of "the greatest good for the greatest number". I self-ID as a communitarian for precisely this reason. Focusing purely on individual efforts and individual needs can handicap broad society, and the end point of that is the sort of unhealty level of societal atomization we see in the present. I would not say this is anti-libertarianism itself per se as much as it might be seen as an unconventional variety focused more on the freedom of groups of people and freedom from repressive things. People should have freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. True freedom, true liberty, is being liberated from evil and undue restriction of these freedoms. These were formulated by FDR and more or less represent the heart of liberal identity in my view, forming the core of my liberal communitarianist self-identity.

All in all I don't have a doctrinaire, "consistent" political worldview in a way that most politically aware opinionated do, and I don't think one single way of implementing this worldview is best everywhere. It varies from society to society, and time to time. Generally I favor working within established structures and norms, whatever form they might take, and I have strong reformist tendencies, though neither of these are absolute. Pragmatic incrementalism and a strong sense of egalitarianism are among the two biggest influences on how my mind works out what specific policy I support on a given issue, though I also hold the view that it's basically impossible not to have some kind of heirarchy - that's just human nature really. It's impossible not to have a 'political class', especially in the modern era where governance has became even more complicated, and it's impossible not to have people who are richer than others in a complex society.

The fact that societal stratification is also to a certain degree an inevitable consequence of prosperity and complexity within a people means that in practice I wind up placing a lot of focus on "freedom from want" more generally, because the crushing realities of poverty are what can be intensively managed and mitigated by government action. It's also important that people show charity and kindness to each other regardless of their wealth level or background or other sympathies or personal characteristics. Government cannot impose that sort of spirit onto people, especially governments whose policy is heavily impacted by popular elections. Those sorts of ideals need to be vigorous among wider society, aka the electorate. In a government where the overall course of policy is decided more or less by popular elections, aka a democracy (give-or-take), if you have an electorate that cares about X and Y issues and has bad stances on those issues, you just aren't likely to get a government that really cares.

[Joseph Cao]

Banning women from attend college (sane, normal)

[Joseph Cao]

Because things aren't going so well. Additionally, most 'journalists' are little more than opinion writers with degrees. This goes for both sides.

[Joseph Cao]

This should put to rest one of those COVID vaccine conspiracy theories:

Covid vaccines not linked to deaths, major US study finds

That would be true if the sorts of people who believe that the COVID vaccine killed people weren’t also the sorts of people who don’t trust medical studies

[Joseph Cao]

The New York side of Niagara Falls

1960 102,394 12.7%
1970 85,615 -16.4%
1980 71,384 -16.6%
1990 61,840 -13.4%
2000 55,593 -10.1%
2010 50,193 -9.7%
2020 48,671 -3.0%

This is a stark contrast from the population growth of the Canadian side which is below:

1961 22,351 -2.3%
1971 67,163 +200.5%
1981 70,960 +5.7%
1991 75,399 +6.3%
2001 78,815 +4.5%
2006 82,184 +4.3%
2011 82,997 +1.0%
2016 88,071 +6.1%

[Joseph Cao]

What is it with you D-MA avatars?

There's something in the water of Cape Cod.

Yeah that's my fault, I was off the coast crab fishing a couple years ago with my lucky bowl of Wendy's chili from 2001 and accidentally dropped it into the water. I think it might've been radioactive because it turned the same color as Nickelodeon Slime for a couple of seconds and dozens of dead fish came popping up.

[Joseph Cao]

Walter White is actually an real person, and the poster above is actually him, and is caught and sent to jail for his crimes