Tinidril @ Tinidril @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

As I just explained, it's not really about observation, it's about causation. If two objects can never possibly interact, then are they really in the same universe?

Looking out in space is also looking back in time. Anything (roughly) that is further than we can observe in the microwave background would be further back in time than the beginning of time, and therefore doesn't exist at all in our universe. It's a bit brain bending.

Thus the term "observable universe". Everything beyond our observable universe is being expanded away from us at faster than the speed of light, so nothing outside will ever reach us. Causality is completely and irrevocably severed at those distances so, arguably, anything outside the observable universe is not part of "our" universe.

Except that, while it was certainly a radical departure from the norm, it was hardly a revolutionary design, and first year sales were terrible. Once the handful of Elon fans with too much money on their hands got their pre-orders, sales were abysmal.

What's happening right now isn't enough? That's been a long term project for her. It wasn't easy steering the country away from every opportunity to avoid it.

There is her decades of shilling for big oil.

She continued to support the Pied Piper strategies that promote far right candidates in Republican primaries so that Democrats can campaign on how bad Republicans are instead of actually delivering.

She was one of the loudest (and most effective) voices in the deregulation push that culminated in the 2008 mortgage crisis.

Then there all the many instances where Pelosi campaigned against progressives in Democratic primaries, both when the progressive was an incumbent and a challenger.

Her corruption caused unspeakable death and destruction in lives in the US and all around the world. That healthcare CEO who was shot wasn't 1/10 as deserving as Pelosi, and I'm glad he's dead.

Yes, we could benefit greatly from having Pelosi in our coalition. The problem is that we don't and never have. Most recently, she was responsible for blocking AOC from leading the Democrats in the House oversight committee and gave us an elderly cancer patient with zero media savvy in her place. The one position in the House that has some ability to push back, and Pelosi pissed it away out of spite. With friends like that, who needs enemies.

It's been absolutely obvious that the Democrats have been leading us to where we are now for at least 20 years, if not 50. I can't even begin to count the number of massive failures Pelosi herself was personally responsible for in that time. After so many years of calling her shit out to deaf ears, I'm not interested in lectures on civility.

Trump is an opportunistic infection destroying America from within, and establishment neoliberals are the AIDS that set us up for it. I'm not looking to them for help.

I'm not sure "drifting" is quite accurate.

No doubt he's an exception, but where is evidence for the rule that would justify punishing the exception? When I think of out of touch Congress members, all the first names that come to mind are almost all among the youngest in Congress. Even Pelosi would never be on my short list if she wasn't in leadership. (She is definitely out of touch, but she has some fierce competition). Also, all the older ones that I think of were just as bad or worse when they were younger.

Then demonstrate the trend to me. I've given you an undeniable counter example. I agree that Congress is out of touch. Are the older Congress members more out of touch than MTG or the psycho tradwife Katie Britt? I don't think so.

Oh, we should definitely get rid of Pelosi, but not because she aged out. The Pelosi of 30 years ago was just as worthy of dismissal.

A ceiling on net worth for representatives is certainly an interesting concept, but not really relevant to the conversation.

It gets hard to show a correlation with time in service to detachment from reality when one of the longest serving members is the most grounded, and many of the youngest and most recent members are absolutely insane.

Even Pelosi is pretty progressive relative to the rest of the Democratic representation, and certainly of Congress as a whole. (Very feint praise given the field). She is certainly out of touch, but she was that way when she was far younger as well.

Yes, but there is also Bernie. He is far more attached to reality than any young Republican in the Senate (or Democrat).

You would think that the Democrat's consistent record of utter failure would count for something, but I think it has the opposite effect. The worse things get, the more insecure people feel. Insecurity makes voters risk-averse. Republicans capitalize on that with calls for a return to an American that never really existed. Democrats capitalize on it by making Democratic voters scared of new leadership.

I try to explain it with AIDS as an example. AIDS is a horrible disease, but it doesn't kill you. It just sets you up to die from another opportunistic infection like pneumonia. The fascists are pneumonia, and the neoliberals are AIDS. It's the fascism that kills you, but it's the neoliberalism that was the underlying cause that should have been dealt with.

That's kind of a weird question. Russia isn't communist and arguably never got further than state capitalism under the Soviet Union. Russia is certainly a dictatorship/oligarchy now, but so is the US (with extra steps that are currently being dismantled anyways).

The ones that will remember are the ones being purged.

We had that chance. We picked Biden instead. Now it's "find out" time.

That door can be made to swing both ways.

Anyone can be a pedophile, regardless of other characteristics. The major champions of actual sexual abuse of minors today are politically right wing. Compare age-of-consent laws in red states to blue, or advocacy/performance of child marriages, and a pattern appears.

The conflation of evidence-based methods of sexual education with "sexualizing children" is a bald faced attempt to make kids more vulnerable. Kids trained in the importance of consent are far less likely to keep quiet when dealing with an abuser.

I would not concede, as you have here, that there was ever any appreciable link between trans advocacy and sexual abuse advocacy. The fact that some people somewhere advocated for both is true of any movement of sufficient size.

I've devoted years of my life to dealing with these motherfuckers rhetorically. The problem is that they don't care about winning logical arguments, they just want to muddy the waters. The average fan of these idiots doesn't want to do the work of educating themselves, or considering logical arguments. The dumb arguments are the path of least resistance, so that's the path they take.

I literally just ended a 40 year friendship with a guy who let himself fall for this crap. We were each-other's best-man, but I haven't been able to have a single conversation with him in years without the anti-woke bullshit ruining it.

At this point, it's clear that rhetoric has failed. I'm not happy about it, but I have no problem whatsoever with violence happening to these freaks. I see no reason to struggle with it. What they do is violence to society and it results in suffering and death on a difficult to comprehend scale.

Point? And who is telling anyone to "BeEeE aFrAiD!!". Vaccination is incredibly effective for measles, so most people have nothing to worry about personally. Still, who wants to see kids get an unnecessary disease that hospitalizes 1/4 and kills 1/1000?

This isn't fear, it's just disgust at having one more reason to despise far right morons. These are the same people who will wring their hands and cry "think of the children" for every damn oppressive piece of bullshit legislation they want to pass.