Pentagon blasted for failing five audits and missing 61% of assets: 'All gone to Zelensky!'
No, was asking you for your thoughts on this specific sentence, on its own:
Do you think the pentagon has EVER passed an audit?
Which you did eventually stumble into, but not before engaging in some mental gymnastics for the sake of accusing me of mental gymnastics. Thanks, sort of?
What feedback do you have on the first sentence, which is not hyperbole? Honestly curious. You appear to have very strong opinions on this topic, but you aren't replying to any of the comments pointing out 33 years worth of failed audits.
Is this most recent one particularly suspect compared to audits that have come before it, and more sketchy than ones that have failed during administrations run by the other party?
A friend of mine does too.
I'm ready to form a supervillain league with the sole motivation of performing unethical research experiments on your kind. This power must be brought to the masses!
Ok but to balance it: it forces you to confront your own on the topic as well.
I was actually tempted to include that in the original, but I didn't want to belabor it. :)
I'm fine with this, and would prefer it that way.
Ability to force anyone to objectively confront their own cognitive dissonance by maintaining eye contact.
Possibly too powerful. Some heads may spontaneously combust from a lifetime of preferring their own reality.
desperately struggles to maintain character while responding again
turns purple in the face and vanishes in a puff of logic
Unfortunately, I am not an adventurer like you.
He announced something even better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2y2bIlfbfI
(nsfw)
@meco03211 is pretty squarely presenting the difference between "pro-choice" and "pro-abortion" branding. No harm in pointing out that some debates aren't worth wasting energy on until they're properly framed.
“I’m not gonna get in trouble for this, I’m not gonna have to worry about a kid cuz I can make her abort it!” Ik that sounds retarded but I kid you not when abortions are made legal (where I live anyway) we will see a huge wave of young kids coming to get them as a form of birth control.
This is a "trust me bro" argument. It doesn't contribute much to an online discussion because it's speculation that cannot be affirmed or denied based on the information you have presented.
What about rape? Silently putting the kid up for adoption is an option, no one has know and there are couples waiting to take kids in. Well what about women’s rights!? Well, what if I told you I don’t care. I only care about the babies right to life, if he/she wants to off themselves later on (which they shouldn’t and should seek help) then that’s their choice.
This, on the other hand, is useful to the rest of us. It regretfully informs us that you are very poorly informed on the subject of mental health, and aren't likely to be persuaded to invest the effort that would be needed to change your mind. You have already chosen the life of a potential child at all costs and the mother is an acceptable casualty of circumstance, because she gets a "choice" in what she does with the trauma from being forced to bear a child against her will, and the fetus having no agency precludes all further discussion.
The fact that you will likely read that italicized text and think that is a checkmate argument in your favor is the crux of the issue. I apologize for not being willing to invest the energy in convincing you otherwise, but I also thank you for being honest with it. Way too much time gets wasted when people pretend that isn't the core pillar of their anti-abortion argument.
Now, if the mothers life is in jepordy, as well as the babies then why not abort it and save the mothers life? Well there is a thing called c section.
There is also something called non-viable pregnancies. They tend to be conveniently ignored by policy makers and half-researched attempts to steelman a pro-choice PoV. (aka, what is happening here)
If medical practitioners are placed in a position where they can't provide preventative care without risking a lawsuit, then the mother gets traumatized by being forced to carry a corpse to term, and at worst both die pointlessly. The baby will never develop agency to begin with, and the mother isn't given any agency either because she's an acceptable casualty. This has happened several times in recent news already: one woman nearly bleeding out on the floor of a salon, and another being forced to bear a baby without a head.
By all means, let's allow politicians to make these decisions for us in advance of pregnancies instead of medical practitioners. Politicians are equipped with an infallible combination of medical experience and psychic powers that allow them to anticipate all medical scenarios ahead of time and prescribe the correct dosage of lawsuits to their constituents.
Lemme tell you a story:
Appeals to the fear of non-existence are not uncommon, and sympathetic to a degree. Non-existence is the shit that keeps a lot of us up at night. Fear of non-existence and ignorance of mental health unfortunately don't make for good policy making.
I will delete this account in a few cuz apparently this isn’t the instance for me, I think I might make my own!
Not gonna actually help anything, that's not how ActivityPub works. You're participating on lemmy.world from your account on lemmy.fmhy.ml. It does however suggest that you are in search of an echo chamber, in which case...best of luck.
I wouldn’t want the Republican party to vanish and have nothing take its place. Having only Democratic party candidates to choose from would be bad.
I agree with the spirit of where you're coming from, but I don't think this is a realistic risk. More than two major political ideologies effectively exist already, but their coalitions are the parties themselves due to the limitations inherent in the US voting system.
The Democrat party already encompasses a broad spectrum of political philosophies, and they're not in the same party because they want to be. They are a de facto coalition of whatever the Republican party isn't. This is because the US leans to the right on the Overton window, and the two-party government of the US forces the role of the leftist party into being the kitchen sink coalition. This regretfully gets wallpapered over by the "radical left" narrative talking point that Republican media chestbeats over relentlessly, to the point where the average American never makes this connection.
If I were to wave my magic wand and enact voting reform that doesn't empower a two-party system, we have at least four parties worth of politicians in play:
- establishment liberals, neoliberals, etc.
- everyone in the democrat party who is to the left of them (who would realistically form more than just one party)
- non-MAGA conservatives (Republicans who jumped ship to Democrat already/are too indoctrinated to consider it, conservative politicians who don't agree with party leadership but maintain status quo for their careers)
- Far-right Freedom Caucus types. McCarthy would already backstab these guys in a heartbeat if his speakership was politically viable without them. The fact that Republican leadership cares more about ego than principles is what put them into this predicament. (largely a consequence of what safe primaries have done to political strategies, but that's another rant)
You can split this up even further by pointing out libertarians (ones that aren't really just conservatives who don't want to be Republicans anymore) and others, but it's enough to make the point. Let the Republican party collapse. Something else will immediately take its place, and as long as their replacement recognizes that the Freedom Caucus is what sank them, maybe they can steal enough of the right leaning Democrats to where they no longer need the far right crazies to be politically viable. A system that accommodates more than two parties would be better still, but congress critters are never going to vote in favor of something that weakens their own power. Voting reform will have to happen at the state level.
It's a common feature of any demographic that is convinced of their moral superiority. Once you've accepted that you and your leaders are on the side of justice and are presented a designated enemy, you cease having to look inward. Progress requires acknowledging that you are operating inside of a flawed system, and that you have to work with people from other systems who acknowledge their own flaws.
Tangent: "Enlightened centrists" acknowledge the flaws of both sides of an argument while failing to acknowledge that both sides have to play fair.
Basically another Eternal September. Yes, I'm going to keep linking to it in these threads like the lazy bum I am.
The cycle of social tech becoming mainstream and conversational norms being dragged down to a least common denominator predates modern social media. The earliest example I can think of is Usenet (newsgroups):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalSeptember
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year. Once ISPs like AOL made Internet access widely available for home users, a continuous influx of new users began, which continued through to 2015 according to Jason Koebler, making it feel like it is always "September" to the more experienced users.
It's the same cycle. Social tech starts off being used by a smaller number of technically inclined people. Communities are smaller and normalized civility is more commonplace. Peer pressure holds people to those norms. Once a social tech balloons from mainstream interest, the norms (or zeitgeist if you prefer) shift toward the incoming population because they outnumber the early population and exert more peer pressure. The new norms become a compromise between the norms of the incoming mob and what the community moderators are willing/able to enforce.
It's tempting to put a label on the incoming demographic and use it in a derogatory way, but removing the label from the equation doesn't change the source of unhappiness; the memory of what once was and the knowledge that it can't last when cultural dilution sets in.
(no, I'm not providing any solutions to the problem, this is just rambling that might provide more insightful people with a starting point)
This is where the argument for unconditionally providing equal air time to bad faith arguments falls apart, and where paradox of tolerance comes into play. One side demands tolerance for itself but argues in bad faith, and the other is inclined toward tolerance with others because it's what they would want for themselves. The latter is taken advantage of because the former does not return the favor.
The key to solving for the paradox is recognizing that there is a difference of scale:
- If one ideology demands tolerance for itself but is intolerant of all ideologies aside from its own, its intolerance is broadly scoped. There is more intolerance in play than tolerance.
- If one ideology grants tolerance to other ideologies except when their own is denied the same, then the intolerance is narrowly scoped. Intolerance is still in play, but it is a false inference to imply that those who champion equality must unconditionally surrender it to those who do not believe in it.
Pay attention to how many ideologies a school of thought is trying to silence and who their allies are. Unreasonable extremists can be found in all camps and their existence alone does not prove a movement's bad faith or your own righteousness. Reasonable people should exist, making it more important to focus on the goals of the movement and how its better stewards comport themselves. Remember that people who open their discussions with rudeness and toxicity are compensating for the insecurity of their debating point and already betraying their own intolerance. They aren't worth engaging with.
- Who are the patient and reasonable people that are standing up for an ideology?
- Does a leader for a movement rely on emotional appeals to unrelenting anger? Are they always angry and rude in a public setting, and primarily trying to appeal to those who behave in a similar way? Ignore their spiel and use someone else as your benchmark. (edit: But if this is the best they can offer and the leaders who are most frequently pushed to the top, this should be seen as a large red flag.)
- What happens when you try to engage in a conversation with the patient ones? Do they keep a level head and respectfully agree to disagree with you while happily trading points, or do they go on the attack with ad-hominems when you patiently poke at the holes in their arguments?
At the end of the day there aren't any simple solutions and you're left with a critical thinking exercise that only works for you. Be one of the patient people who is a good advocate for your cause, but do not allow yourself to invest a disproportionate amount of effort engaging with someone who does not return respect. Seek out those who return that respect, regardless of their stated ideology, and you will both be better for it when the conversation is done. And hopefully the result of those conversations will help other people make up their mind about who is truly acting in bad faith.
Yeah this is a memes community, but it's something that I've been thinking about for a while. Feel free to quote/link/whatever.
I won't deny it, at least one third of my motivation for making this post was to deliver that diss.
(the other two thirds are split between Chad deserving the recognition, and doing my part to make this place more attractive than Reddit)
We seem to keep coming back to how I supposedly think or assumptions about why I was asking the question. Either you have confused me for the original person you were replying to, or you're jackhammering straw men onto anything they might stick to while making a conscious choice to be a tool about it.
As you were.