If you believe in democracy, personal rights, and capitalism

🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like the other 🎶

🎼 One of these things 🎶 Is not like its brother 🎶

given how much modern ‘conservatives’ hate democracy and personal rights

“This far and no further” politics is a pox on conservatives and liberals alike. This is one of the reasons you see Gavin Newsom fucking around with TERFs in the name of fairness in college athletics. Its one of the reasons why so many people soured on Barack Obama inside his first term.

“Personal Rights” always seem to terminate at the edge of popular consensus.

teaches you to take pride in shit you’ve never done

The better outcome.

I’m more disgusted by the fuckers who go out and do the war crimes, then come home and demand everyone else say “Thank You For Your Service”.

You’d need media that wasn’t predicated on advertising revenues.

being knowledgeable

IQ has nothing to do with being knowledgeable. Shit headlines like this play into the exact same eugenics theory of humanity that gooners like RFK Jr and Peter Thiel have been pushing.

I don’t know how well that corresponds to IQ

It’s quite literally just a measurement of one’s pattern recognition speed. Has nothing to do with your politics.

Case in point, Christopher Langan, who regularly outperformed on these cognition tests, was a total nerd on trivia, and ended up becoming a forest ranger because he had a perpetual chip on his shoulder. Once his reputation blew up as someone who could ace cognitive tests, he leveraged that into becoming a right-wing grifter.

The guy is a total piece of shit who tests well. Go out to any of the Ivy League universities and you’ll find this kind of person in spades. Silicon Valley, the DC Beltway, Wall Street, Raytheon Acres, the Florida Real Estate scene - very intelligent assholes are a dime a dozen. FFS, we built our rocket labs on Nazi scientists. No shortage of right-wingers in the “High IQ” space.

Western corruption is starting a company to produce y and when a government orders x of them, x are delivered

Well… not always.

The initial contract award called for the combat-ready tankers to arrive in August 2017; the first arrived in January 2019. In the years that followed, the KC-46 program was beset by further delays, including production line problems that regularly stalled deliveries and an underperforming vision system. That system is years behind schedule and expected to come in October 2025.

and

Broken Boeing airplanes are going to the military thanks to corruption and bad decisions

Increasingly, the US model for contracting is to take money, outsource the work to a bunch of bargain basement contractors, pocket the profits, and then fail to deliver the end product.

Also R&D is priced in because it’s all done for the sake of making profit and must be recovered through the unit sales.

Again, this is something of an open question. The engineering of a given retailed unit is priced in as part of the unit rate. But the bluesky R&D is, as often as not, performed at the university level and then arbitraged through the private sector or simply stolen from rival militaries / companies / individuals through espionage and laundered through the private sector.

The Octopus Murders, on Netflix, tackles the anatomy of this kind of government-backed swindle with regard to the development of early iteration database technology.

The real difference between more Socialist/Communist models of corruption and the Western Capitalist style tends to be in the legal canonization of the corrupt practices. You really got to see this in the post-Soviet liberalization of Eastern European economies, as mafia cartels were supercharged by western financialization and eventually subsumed the entire federal apparatus of ex-Soviet states. What was considered a criminal black market prior to 1991 became the standard for managing the economy a decade later.

I’m speaking less about the Catholics in the pews and more about their Bishops.

The Bishop of Rome seems broadly critical of the entire US political establishment.

There is a whole Wikipedia page on politicians who have been denied communion over pro-abortion stances

Recent popes have presided over Masses at which pro-abortion rights politicians have been given communion on many occasions.

So this does not seem to be a universal doctrine, just a habit among certain priests and bishops looking to make a stir.

On January 21, 2021, one day after his inauguration as president, Biden received communion from the hands of the archbishop of Washington, DC, Cardinal Wilton Daniel Gregory. The event was condemned by conservative activist Austin Ruse, in Crisis magazine. In October of the same year, Biden stated that during a meeting with pope Francis, “We just talked about the fact he was happy that I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving Communion”.

But Democrats are probably more likely to be pro-Choice, and the American Catholic Church has made the abortion issue a litmus test for support.

YMMV. Plenty of Catholic Democrats have campaigned as Pro-Choice. The odd secular Ayn Rand loving Republican always finds a way to be Pro-Life. Rank and file Catholics routinely advocate for abortion rights, breaking 60/40 in favor as of just last year. Abortion prohibition hasn’t been a winning issue with Catholics in my lifetime.

Really, the Catholic Church has brought this onto itself.

Totally ahistorical. Catholics (in America) are practically synonymous with liberalism going back to the 1930s. They’ve been in the tank for the Democratic Party since Kennedy.

If anyone has shifted over the last few decades, it’s Republicans who have become more Catholic, not Catholics who have become more Republican. TradCath influencing and political leanings come from historically Protestant regions that are seeing the local evangelical churches dry up from lack of attendance or go bankrupt due to corrupt and incompetent leadership. Increasingly, the Catholic Church is the last church left standing in Rust Belt and Sun Belt states that have seen poverty wipe out the traditional middle class religious centers.

Might as well just get rid of the first amendment at this point.

You’re super late to the party. 1A has been a running joke in legal circles since checks notes the Alien and Sedition Acts.

It’s always been a paper promise. Even when the state isn’t explicitly cracking down on anti-government speech and opposition groups, they’re constantly surveilling and censoring it. Without a meaningful political coalition surrounding the speaker, cops always find an excuse to arrest you for something. And if you can’t lock someone up, well… don’t look to hard into who shot MLK.

People unironically believe Trump is cool and suave.

Trump’s been a notorious petty bitch since the 1970s.

Fantastic movie.

Like, can anyone explain how they thought this got in a police report if all cops supported this shit?

Very possible that they just filed it all on reflex because nobody really thought hard about what they were putting in the record. Cops are both evil and stupid. Sometimes they just do stupid shit, thinking they’ll never get caught.

That said, maybe someone actually did the right thing here. And maybe that’s why it is a news article getting passed around the back alleys of social media, rather than a conspiracy theory whispered at DSA meet ups.

If they ommitted any of it to protect a cop, they’re not fit to be cops.

Cops have their own Omertà. Sort of the reverse, in practice. If you rat out your fellow officers, you’re the one who isn’t going to be on the force for much longer.

SOP. If you’re at a protest and you see some guy in a <Local Sports Team> fitted cap, underarmor, and steel toed boots, you better fucking believe your event is being surveilled and infiltrated.

I think they might have misread the title.

JFC, it took look enough.

Majority of their state legislature has been pro-Confederate practically since the end of Reconstruction.

I’m so sick of the South and their stupid grievances over starting a war with the rest of the country over slavery, and then losing.

Plenty of them are sick of the North and its stupid prohibition on owning slaves.

That said, nobody is talking about taking the fucking revanchist statues down. This is going to force them to reshuffle their accounting so they can pretend they don’t have any taxable land or income. But they’re still allowed to be public and notorious bigots from the Atlantic to the Shenandoah Mountains

Probably (my guess) with the AI set to “if you lose connection, try to hit any humans in this area”

What could go wrong there?

Which one of these two do we think is going to run out first?

Setting aside that this is largely wartime propaganda horseshit - both militaries are relying on conscripts and mercenaries, both are heavily invested in cheap long-range drone artillery, both are saturated in “Victory is just around the corner” propaganda which has degraded support for their civilian leadership - Russia has 5x the population of Ukraine. If this really is just a Bodies-In-Spaces conflict, the Russians can drown Ukraine in their own blood over a long enough timeline. Ukrainians still need someone to fire those bombs and bullets, ideally before Kiev looks like Tehran.

But then nobody is “winning” this war in a material sense. Putin is shedding what political allies he has as the war drags on - Romania, Hungary, Turkiye, Syria. Zelensky is fully fucked the next time Ukrainians bother to have a domestic vote. Both of their economies have tanked, with further economic pressures coming from the conflict with Iran and the climate change threat.

The issue isn’t whether one runs out first. It’s how long the political leadership can drag this forward before someone pops them and brokers a settlement that ends the bleeding. Netanyahu is in a similar position in Israel, with endless war being the only excuse he has to stay in office. And domestic revolt might be what brings all these governments down long before the actual wars are ended.

Rub a lamp

Genie comes out

Oooh, that felt good. Keep going and I’ll give you three full wishes.

Shrug

Keep rubbing lamp

Ooooh yeah baby. Give me your wishes. What are your wishes? You’re going to get so many good wishes, hon.

Victor Orban is also very much not Polish

Is he European?

We were talking about popluational trends and statistics though

Since the collapse of the USSR, the trend towards reactionary religious movements has only increased over time. You can definitely blame this on western evangelicals and Catholics piling into these countries during their brief liberalization phase. But to say Europe lacks a large and wealthy Christian community is to deny what’s in front of your eyes.

I will explicitly say that I’m talking about “median” population, not literaly the extreme 0.1%

The extreme 0.1% are the ones with all the money.

Past that, European parliaments all have their variation on the Christian Democrat Party. The CDU/CSU coalition is currently the largest party bloc in Germany, following the ignominious collapse of Olaf’s Greens. Idk how you win 208 MPs without a plurality of popular support.