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Joined
6 mo. ago

  • I used to watch his show 2018-2020, but I put in on my never-watch list after he invited a bunch of antivaxx "researchers", who were low-level PhDs (meaning recent grads, who left academia/research for blogging[!]), and said stupid things. Also, in general BM's takes on medical issues tend to be highly misinformed, bordering the Dunning-Kruger effect.

    Maher being the aging narcissist cliché, always reminded me of some of my high school teachers and some of my med school profs when they bashed my generation [they raised] for being dumb and lazy. It takes a narcissist to not realize that dissing a generation raised by yours is always self-criticism. BM is even more pathetic about this because he both manages to diss millennials (and now GenZ) about being terminally on-line, and consistently make all his young generation bad references from Twitter.

  • It's nice and all, but Dems still haven't learned the lesson. You can only capture the republican voter with raw emotions. This is 100% worthless if it doesn't elicit raw anger from those voters, and as we've learned it doesn't. It's stuff they experience and get frustrated by daily, like healthcare uncertainty => Dems promise expanded access <= Reps will cancel it out by claiming "illegals" will benefit from it.

    The grocery prices thing was a good rep strategy to rile people up because most shop for groceries at least weekly so you can remind them how pissed they are every week. same thing applies to paying at the gas station. Dems need to find something similar and pound it in. Good luck with that.

  • heir phones. Like phone on their head, not with the fancy bordcomputer. And because they are always on their phone, they can’t use turn signals. And even that aside, most tesla drivers seem to have a lot of trouble driving.

    the tesl driver demographic really changed since musky started coming out as racist

  • Bill Maher is pretty damn conservative tbh

    nah, he's just an aging narcissist cunt

  • This is called ‘stochastic terrorism’.

    It's carefully timed and targeted, thus no longer "stochastic"

  • These people literally don’t know what mRNA is, they believe it’s the same thing as DNA because it sounds vaguely similar. It’s good to see actual experts calling him out though! We really need more of this.

    People being clueless about mRNA is an abject failure of the US education system.

  • people fall for unvalidated tests, often even totally fake ones that offer "training" to increase your "IQ". Generally IQ tests are a very good measure of how well people take standardized tests. The problem is, scoring high on those tests might correlate with one's capabilities, but it doesn't mean real-world competence. In medicine for example, it's not the people with the highest scores tend to be the best doctors, but the ones who follow up on issues, and that habit compounds. etc.

  • The belief that an commercial IQ test is an "objective measure of your intellect" is a pretty good subjective measure of your intellect.

  • tech and age, need for investment.

    • fediverse is complicated for scientists not doing computer sciency stuff
    • senior researchers are less flexible with new tech, so similarity w twitter means they don't have to learn a new system
    • Already present audience means there's little risk in investing time in BS.
  • Let's say that there is an honest, clear, standard diplomatic protocol running as you described. Trump's concurrent activity, specifically mentioned in this interview, sets the tone and not in a positive way.

  • they are deals between Israel and other countries, without including Palestine. Here the deal would be between the main protagonists Ukraine and Russia.

    That's exactly my point. The present style of negotiations makes the impression like this was a deal between Russia and USA.

  • If someone ignores all the cues about the discussion's context (trumpian peace) let it be implied (thread's topic; my first post), or explicit ("the point I was making" and beside the point of the present discussion), they shouldn't complain about the discussion's style either.

  • The point I was making is that you can't make lasting peace through flimsy one-sided negotiations, but the trump brand of peacemaking is about quick "results" with single-presidential-term durability that solves very little on the long run, just pushes the problems to the next presidential term (which may be his own this time...).

    Your comparison of Hamas and Russia doesn't only lack nuance but blatantly ignores crucial geopolitical differences in worldwide influence, military might, and general motivations, which are all totally beside the point of the present discussion.

  • Clickbait title, and then partial summary for more clickbait? OP, could you please update the summary?

  • I remain unimpressed by CNN reporters because he has not asked the most important question: What will guarantee Russia's adherence to any kind of peace deal?

    It's boring to repost it the Nth time but the 1994 Budapest Memorandum was quite clear about these matters:

    1. Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders
    2. Refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of the signatories...
    3. Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest...
    4. Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".

    Yet, putin kicked nearly every single point in the memorandum the moment he felt ready. Why would the same leader act differently in the future?

    It's eerily similar in my view to the Abraham accords. Trump negotiated bypassing Palestinians and then we got Oct 7 and the war that spiraled from it. These "deals" are as flimsy as a CyberTruck, but it's also very trumpy. He gets to act like a peacemaker and then his successor will deal with the consequent shit. Same thing happened in Afghanistan.

    *edit: also, if someone wants to be "fair" (i'd rather say naive) one can consider the official Russian narrative, but again that narrative explicitly goes against the Budapest Memorandum, meaning, they are very open about not respecting treaties they sign.

  • investigations into crimes against the financial infrastructure of the United States.

    this cracked me up.

  • holy shit.... i suspect ET will get himself killed within the next few years