itty53 everywhere but twitter.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • He was hired, performed the task he was hired for, and left, sounds like it to me.

    Executives have used this for decades. Governments with armies hire mercenaries for the same reason, has gone on for centuries. Romans did it, it’s so old. It’s not a far off speculation here … it’s a well known, well practiced pattern of authoritarian behavior.

    Why do you guys think bad cops who resign over and over keep getting hired the next city over?


  • This sounds like a joke but this is the explicit problem: doctors won’t be the ones to do it.

    You guys all knew that right? Doctors don’t administer those chemicals for lethal injection. And they won’t be administering gas either. Some po’dunk cop will.

    Because doctors take an oath that begins “first, do no harm”. This has forever been the problem of the very notion of “humane execution”, there are no physicians involved. None. At any step.

    Know what’s just as effective? Bullets. But we can’t call a firing squad humane with a straight face, and the witnesses remaining are traumatized, including the shooters. That truth exposes the truth of the death penalty. It’s not about justice, but retribution - for the living. They’re lynchings. Violent theatrics. That’s the point.

    They shouldn’t be legal, it’s barbaric. But you already said you weren’t for them, so I’m just preaching to the ether.



  • Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.

    He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It’s literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.

    I really don’t get why people think he’s all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn’t sell, theft and litigation.


  • If a private, but not secret agency has access to the physics and can’t engineer it, there’s a question of why. As much as we’d like to disassociate engineering from discovery, they’re linked together. Engineering leads to further observation leads to discovery and vice versa back the other direction. It’s entirely possible there’s “new physics” at play even if they’re only theoretical to the Discovery Channel right now. Who’s to say, really?

    So while I’m not gonna disagree with you, and you’re right there’s a difference between engineering technology and physics itself, I still don’t really see the distinction as that important to the discussion here.

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all. We’re talking about exactly that level of technology, commonly being called physics-defying by many engineers today. That’s magic to common understanding, for all intents and purposes, even if it’s possible that we could all eventually understand and demystify it given the education to do so.

    Until then? Hard to close doors other than just “do we need this for the story”. And aliens don’t need to be there, hence my whole line of thinking above. That’s just another example of “any secret is the exact secret I want it to be” kind of thinking. See also “everything I don’t understand is a communist” or more recently, “everything I don’t like is woke”. I like to make reference to dinosaurs, because no one ever does. Why not? It could be dinosaurs in those crafts too! There’s more evidence for that than aliens, right? We know 100% dinosaurs existed, here. They would’ve had much much more time to develop technology than we did, eons longer. So again why not? “Because it’s absurd.” Yep. It is. Every argument against it counts against aliens too.


  • I’m gonna propose to the alien believers a different explanation of UAPs: they’re black projects. Yes all those physics defying things are man made, and they probably have an understanding of physics we don’t currently know about in the wider public.

    Technology trends exist. We can see them. It’s no wonder that every generation’s stereotype of unidentified craft always always always mimicked the latest generation of military flight tech. That’s what’s been true since the inception of the whole thing. It’s true today too, thirty years from now we’ll get a public look at the crafts they’re testing out in the skies today. Be that because they get used or because they become obsolete. Thats how it goes.

    So why the hearings in Congress? Because they’re black projects. We’re talking trillions in this rabbit hole. Congress very much has an urgent want to understand what they military might be keeping from it, vis a vis private contractors. We’re talking multiple times the budgets of nation-states and we’re getting receipts that are basically "trust me bro"s.

    But Congress can’t very well tell the truth of all that without undermining the American military, and thereby America itself. So they go along with the same “aliens” reasoning, “uhh yeah, let’s go with that, okay”, and keep pressing for more information.

    Is that crazy? Yeah, you bet. But it’s no crazier than believing all that and that there’s aliens. Because the alien conspiracy crowd asserts virtually everything I just said, just, with aliens. Aliens aren’t necessary for any of it though.

    In the history of nations there’s never been a more sure-fire way to lose democracy than making an enemy of the military complex propping it up. So Congress ought to be careful too, keep a little plausible deniability for themselves.



  • Case provides further evidence. We know peppers can lead to serious consequences. Case in point, these chips have warning labels on them already. Don’t eat if pregnant, nursing, heart condition, etc.

    That last one is the active player here. The kid had an undiagnosed heart condition. It’s not his fault, it’s not the fault of the chip maker either. It’s just a sad happening. Not every sad happening needs to result in legal actions and regulations or … anything, really. Guns are still legal after all, I don’t want to hear fuck-all about banning fruits and vegetables.


  • I think this is worse, arguably. Don’t get me wrong, Wakefield wasn’t good. But this is actually worse.

    Wakefield wanted to call into question a thing which, at the time, was a relatively small thing: the MMR vaccine. There was no political platform of vaccines back then, it was the fallout from his con years after that created that platform. He wanted to do that so he could sell his own snake oil cure-all for autism. He frankly didn’t care about vaccines, he simply knew people were hesitant about shots and overly concerned about normalcy.

    So Wakefield really was just a greedy sonuvabitch ready to capitalize on the tremendous effort parents of autistic children are ready to commit for their kids. Bad, but just selfish greed. Not trying to accelerate an already existential crisis for political maga points.

    This though, climate change, is already the political platform. This is very clearly an attack on the very institutions of academia themselves. This is trying to discredit the act of collecting data and replicating experiments as real science. And there’s frankly a lot to say about that topic today (p<0.05 apocalypse) but this isn’t saying any of that. It’s simply saying “here’s a reason not to trust climate science at all”. That’s the argument. That’s way more dangerous than anti-vax arguments. Thank God this instance was as ineffective as it was.

    Silver lining, it took almost ten years for Wakefield to get caught and detracted. This didn’t take long to catch at all because the guy who did it was smug about his shitty goal, in typical right winger fashion: he went and published an opinion piece on his own paper, to the surprise of even his co-author.


  • Somehow? I’m not stopping you. You keep talking about something else - you keep insisting China and America do the same bad things. And I’m correcting you. That’s all.

    I’m not stopping you from talking about what America has done, in fact I already told you we can talk about it. Four times I said those words, in each individual comment I wrote to you. Every time you made a choice not to and instead chose to double down on your original take, flawed and incorrect though it was. Every time you just insisted I was defending America and I never did.

    So talk. You have things to say, say them. Don’t do this childish “well fine” act where you pretend I’m controlling what you can and cannot say.

    By the way China never murdered and raped the middle east. Just one more example of the point isn’t it?

    Call me a hypocrite, that’s fine. I never cared much what children think of me. Grow up kiddo.



  • Again, we can talk about the terrible shit America has done and still does. I won’t deny it. Yes murder is bad. Okay? That’s not what you’re here arguing though. You wanna try again, no sweat. I’ll listen. Will you?

    “Anything bad China has done, America has too” is what you said. That is not just factually wrong, it’s childish and ignorant and above all lazy. You can’t even be arsed to be more than nominally aware of things.

    I was very clear about this already, so that you want to keep arguing tells me you’re not reading my replies at all or they won’t matter anyway, you’ll just pound your fists and stomp your feet. Fine. Do that. It’s alright. Won’t help you, won’t get you any closer to a better world, but you’ll feel better for a half second. Neat yeah?





  • That’s a highly generalized take that doesn’t hold water at all. The American government sucks but they’re not operating organ farms in concentration camps targeting religions, they’re not redrawing their maps to include parts of neighboring nations like Mexico and Canada, they’re not funding North Korea as the DPRK launches missiles over South Korea and Japan, they don’t have social credit scores, they don’t systematically harass and threaten their own citizens abroad…

    We can keep going if you want. And we can talk about the terrible shit America does too.

    But “these two entities are both bad and therefore they do the same exact things” is fucking dumb, naive, myopic, childish, and a bunch of other pejoratives I could think of. Grow up.


  • Nah. I still disagree. “Casual racism against Chinese people” has been a mainstay of America since the railroads were built. Probably before.

    I mean Bugs Bunny comes to mind, what more casually racist and beloved character is there?

    Those guys were all using coded language for decades. Many white kids pick up on that language and adopted it. All while Trump was donating to the Clintons and well before too.

    The danger in attributing this all to Trump is that Trump is going to die one day, fascism in America won’t die with him.


  • His fascism and bigotry aren’t spilling over anywhere, Trump represents a mean streak in society that’s dominated by wealth, eg, fascism. It’s everywhere already, that’s why non-Americans are focusing on Trump. You’ll note that happens in anywhere defined by “Western society”. Australia included. Hell, Qanon’s founder didn’t live in America.

    I’m not saying any of this is good or right, but don’t pretend your nation’s fascists will slow down because of Trump. They won’t. They were there already.

    The same thing was happening back before WWII. Fascists existed in America before the war. They existed here after too. And Canada. And Australia, etc.