getastandingdesk.bsky.social
527 posts
54 followers
34 following
Discussion Master
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Something something salary depends on not understanding it
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You have to believe that the mission is more important than you are; not that pursuing the vocation makes you more important than everybody else.
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Dems probably should've been banging the "Trumpism is radical extremism not conservatism" drum for a few years now.
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Have you considered bundling all these up into one document and mailing it to every journalist you can find? I think if you could get even a city newspaper to cover it, the Times might have to pick it up.
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All the people who *weren't* sellouts or far-right ideologues were run out of the party starting in the 1990s. We've just refused to reckon with the inevitable consequences (creating a political party that's a 'hybrid regime' of fascism + crime syndicate).
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To be more accurate draw the speaker as an armed hijacker while the other hijacker wrestles with the pilot in the background.
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It's good that there are still civic leaders willing to stand up for civic values. New York deserves better than Eric Adams.
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I dunno, I mean, doesn't that make it so "Fuck Everything Trump" is the best and only possible rallying cry?
And I think that'd be fine for managing the anti-Trump crisis. But for some reason they're averse to using it and keep trying to do egg prices.
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And the longer they avoid admitting it, the worse their problem gets, and the harder it becomes to change.
And if we ever add real state terror to the mix, it becomes harder still. The easiest choice will be choosing, voluntarily, to believe in a wholesale alternate reality.
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You don't have to get up on stage "Hi, I'm spineless and can't defend what's good and right in the world."
But voters end up receiving that message from your actions and inactions in ways big and small.
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How you communicate is a big part of what you communicate, and if you're obviously hopelessly neurotic, you *do* communicate weakness: an inability to stand up for what you truly believe in.
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What's fun is a message emerges organically from your behavior no matter what. If they never step up to the plate, the message that emerges is "Dems won't fight."
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This is like 90% of what makes MAGA tick, though.
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It's like nobody in leadership anywhere in Europe or America is able to make any decision besides doing what's most convenient for them in the short term.
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Kitchen table issues is a safety blanket. Dems can't figure out what's going on with the electorate or how to engage with it, or they know but are deeply uncomfortable with what they need to do (direct confrontation against the new fascist regime). So they're retreating to a comfort zone.
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It's called a government in exile and it'd definitely help grant legitimacy to Dem opposition efforts.
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If you bought a Tesla in 2017 Elon isn't making any money off you continuing to drive it, and a car is a pretty big investment for most people. I would be mildly embarrassed to own one, but I wouldn't encourage people to ditch a perfectly functional vehicle. Just don't buy new ones!
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The Splendid Isolation style of communication turns out to be wrong for the same reason Splendid Isolation foreign policy turns out to be wrong: the world keeps happening whether you're involved or not, you just forfeit your chance to influence events.
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Rule of law = knee-jerk politics now? Hochul may have inadvertently become one of Trump's biggest boosters, just by implying what he did wasn't on-the-face criminal.
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Learned helplessness, but for people who are most comfortable when they're helpless.
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Also, it's a statement about your personality: you're so terminally consultant-pilled that having live red-blooded human emotional reactions is no longer part of your life experience.
Behaving like a lizard person is a huge turn-off for normal voters!
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Not having live reactions is also a statement. Going to a focus group first signals that the issue is complex, and there's lots of reasonable arguments you have to consider. Regardless of what you *end up* saying, your first response is now to say that it's not ethically black-and-white.
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There's hope!
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A lot of industrial warfare is basically about your willingness to inflict self-harm on your own country in the name of hurting the other guys. Russia is sadly quite willing.
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The second part is the important one; various Euro countries could outclass Russia in basically any of tech, gear, command skill, training, morale, whatever. But if you budget for fifty artillery shells a month and the Russians produce 700,000 a week, they'll win.
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They've improved a lot since Feb '22 when the Ukraine invasion went off the rails almost instantly. They still aren't *good*, but they have modest competence and an industrial/manpower base they're willing to feed into the grinder for victory.
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The extent to which this matters is debatable because Russia has an EXTREMELY competitive nuclear weapons stockpile and there's not much anyone can do about that.
But there's a good chance they wouldn't outlast Saddam in a conventional war.
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Russia isn't a peer or near-peer competitor to the U.S. in military or economic terms. They have a (comparably) trivial navy, a vastly smaller airforce, and an army that while numerically large relies heavily on outdated Soviet-era armor and artillery stockpiles.
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And Russia 100% KNOWS this, which is why they devote so much effort into psyopping us to stand down on our own initiative. Their only route to victory is if we give up without trying.
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They absolutely do, but we have like 5000 supersonic jet fighters or some shit. Russia couldn't fight our little finger in a straight up showdown.
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One thing Stancil keeps talking about is how a lot of leftists don't seem to care if their facts are right or wrong as long as they justify burning down the system (while never doing anything productive) and I think that's an expression of this.
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Someone who deep down really wants to set something on fire will design a political ideology that gives them a permission structure to do that. It's part of my horseshoe theory: the people at the extremes are violent jerks who don't care if their ideology makes sense, they just want to hurt people.
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A lot of those choices are made for sadly personal, emotional reasons; for mainline Dems its basically personal cowardice. For the kind of 'leftist' whose main contribution to our politics is throwing molotovs at the police, that comes from deep-seated personal anger and a desire to cause harm.
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But my sense is that it's similar to his disagreements with mainline Dems: not exactly about policy (no idea how much he agrees or disagrees); the angryposts are about atavistic strategy and self-destructive tactical choices.
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Anyway Stancil does a lot of angryposting because he's angry, but also because that's what generates traffic, and unfortunately it's true that it means he rarely posts anything positive about anyone. I don't know if he's got good experiences with leftists.
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When Republicans talk about The Left, I assume they mean me, but when Stancil talks about The Left, I assume he means other people. But I don't actually know!
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I feel like a lot of conversations about groups/factions on the internet are bogged down because everyone has a different idea of who's in what. I think of myself as a leftist but I think the DSA are a negative and unserious influence, for example.
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Seriously though dude is up at 3 AM in his timezone every day trashing Dem leaders for their weakness and cowardice, saying their lethargic response to Trump will leave us in a fascist hellhole.
It's possible to not be a borg-drone apparatchik while also not wanting to burn the whole party down.
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He rejects most of the consultant-class worldview of how politics works, and as a result most of their tactical & strategic advice. That's not the same as rejecting the explicit policy goals of the Democratic party, or debates over the technical facts related to those policies.
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Stancil, famous adherent to consultant class dogma.
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Dems can't figure out how to generate public pressure but are constantly scrambling to respond to it. It's like a guy in a fighting game who's only moves are blocks and parries. Try spamming heavy attack! See how it works!
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Going a few decades post-RotK, Sam takes over the Shire's politics and we can assume he becomes decently politically savvy; enough to recognize that Trump would be nothing but trouble, regardless of any cultural disconnect he feels with Harris.
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After the Scouring I think Sam probably also has a healthy distrust of upstate businessmen.
He also isn't insecure and doesn't need to be sold on 'greatness' which is Trump's main pitch.
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Sex crime charges. The rapist president comes through for his rapist friends again.
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Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, morons talk testosterone.
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHJI...
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Most predictable L in history though
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Tbh good, MSM isn't reporting on anyone's nazi stuff anymore, millions of people are about to find out what's really going on.
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I hate that if Biden had done this Fox News would've run 3 weeks of crisis coverage on the destruction of a great American tradition.
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Increasingly respect the decision to have 6-year senate terms on the basis that we can elect madmen to the Presidency & Congress all at once, but only 1/3rd of the Senate in a single election.