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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • It’s funny that Walz is preaching nuance and critical thinking, and yet the people who purport to agree with him in this thread apparently can’t synthesize your point. The Holocaust is a stark reminder that genocide will not only continue, but will be improved and augmented by new technologies and ideologies. Like you said, though, that doesn’t make it worse than others. I think the issue you’re running into is that the point here is Walz is being subjected to ad hominem to distract from a broader discussion on the nature of genocide because such discussions are bad for Israel and their conservative benefactors in the US. Folks ITT probably have it in their heads that you agree that Tim Walz is an antisemite, but as it turns out, two things can be true. The Holocaust is unique in a particular sense, but that is not what Walz is talking about; in the context he is speaking, the Holocaust is not unique. Essentially, the Holocaust, as a vivid and well-documented case study, can and should be a window into the broader history of genocide and human rights abuse.


  • I agree with Walz here, the Holocaust was not unique in the sense that genocide is an ongoing feature of human history and events. I also agree with the dude elsewhere in this thread that the Holocaust was unique among genocides, because it was the first industrial genocide. That doesn’t make it worse; we don’t need to play victim olympics. In the grand scheme of things, Walz certainly should not be called antisemitic for saying that we shouldn’t hyperfocus on the Holocaust at the expense of understanding the prevalence of genocide in general, and we should realize the reason he’s being called antisemitic is because, right now, it benefits Israel to derail any broader discussion on the nature of genocide.


  • In the US, there are positive and negative stereotypes, too. German efficiency and Japanese perfectionism and perseverance are among them. Jewish intelligence and commitment to education, too. These things have a basis in reality, of course, but they shouldn’t be mistaken for reality itself. It seems to me these things appearing in your textbooks were probably attempts by your own government to get its people to emulate what it sees as positive traits in other cultures, rather than an attempt by foreign adversaries to paint Chinese people as inferior. Of course, when the message was a little too unclear or negative as in the “toxic textbooks” incident, your government deflected blame.





  • It’s not a Ponzi scheme because withdrawals and deposits are scheduled and mandatory. You don’t get into a situation where investors lose faith and ask for money that you don’t have because that’s not allowed. You get your money when you reach the requisite age. You also don’t get into a situation where you run out of investors because it’s a mandatory payroll tax.

    Essentially the only issue facing social security is the fact that since 1974, wage growth has become decoupled from productivity gains, meaning the payroll tax that funds social security captures a smaller proportion of business revenue over time - because businesses spend less of their revenue on payroll than they used to.

    Social security doomerism of the type on display here is a tacit acceptance of conservative propaganda on the subject. The government is fully capable of indefinitely maintaining a pension fund, we just have to stop accepting the lie that it isn’t.




  • The real mistake may have been attempting to pivot to Iran in an attempt to reinstate the JCPOA. As admirable a goal as that is, I also think it’s clear Trump squandered any trust Iran had in the US when he cancelled it. Iran has taken the Biden admin’s overtures as an opportunity to test its regional influence, instead of being a good faith negotiating partner - and why would the Biden admin have expected anything else when the US hadn’t been a good faith partner? Trump was awful on foreign policy, and set middle-east peace back decades, but Biden has completely failed to understand and adapt to the new status quo.



  • For gaming, you’ve got Steam, which is pretty close to the ideal legit content delivery service. You don’t even necessarily have to pirate in order to demo games if you’re comfortable paying up front and making a decision within 2 hours.

    Nothing similar exists or has existed for TV/Movies. Netflix was pretty good for a while, but you’ve never had the option to download the content to your own hard drive. Now you’re not even allowed to log in to your account on as many devices as you want.

    Give me a service that’s a free storefront where I can pay a one-time fee for content that I’m actually interested in and download it to my hard drive as many times in as many places as I care to. Bonus points if I can stream to other devices that I’m logged in to and lend my purchases to my friends & family like I can with Steam. I don’t care if there’s DRM in the form of me having to log in to actually use the content if I can use it the way I want.



  • https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/11/biden-single-term-082129

    Another top Biden adviser put it this way: “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen then I’ll run for reelection.’ But he’s not going to publicly make a one term pledge.”

    A top Biden adviser said Biden ruled out a one-term pledge when the issue was raised before he even entered the race. “He said it was a nonstarter,” the adviser said, adding that Biden believed it was a “gimmick.”

    In April [2019], when asked whether he would serve just one term, Biden responded, “No.” More recently, Biden has been ambiguous. In October, The Associated Press reported that when “asked whether he would pledge to only serve one term if elected, Biden said he wouldn’t make such a promise but noted he wasn’t necessarily committed to seeking a second term if elected in 2020.”


  • Humanity divorced itself from nature long before capitalism existed. Without natural bounds on growth, any organism will multiply indefinitely. Every technology we’ve developed, from stone tools and fire to transistors and fractal antennas, has been in service of removing natural bounds. After the world wars, people were concerned about our ability to feed an exploding population, then the green revolution happened. Today, we’re grappling with how to feed 3 to 4 times as many people, as well our depletion of other natural resources and the effect we’re having on the planet as a whole. We’re developing fusion, solar & wind, carbon sequestration, desalination, vertical farming & hydroponics, and the asteroid mining and extraterrestrial colonization you mention.

    It’s scary now because it feels like we’re truly on the brink of destroying ourselves - outgrowing our planet’s ability to host us in multiple different ways - without a nascent technology close at hand to save us from ourselves again. We’re smart, but are we smart enough to defeat nature entirely? Either we stay one step ahead of perpetual growth, or we finally realize that perpetual growth is the one natural thing about ourselves that we have not managed to truly grapple with.