bubbatheclown

Schrodinger's Tragedy: It either is or isn't being cynically exploited for political gain depending on whether the observer agrees with the message or not.

Taxation is not theft whenever the end good is a necessary or obviously beneficial common enjoyed by all, with a tax burden proportionate to the benefit received.

For example, let's say everyone gives 13% of their income to support the police and the military. No one is being suckered in this arrangement. A rich man and a poor man alike get proportionately the same benefit: security to enjoy the remaining 87% of what they own, however much that is, and to continue living without fear of being murdered by a criminal or a foreign army, whatever value they assign to their own lives.

Same thing with roads. A rich man pays a greater lump sum to finance the roads, but he also enjoys greater utility from traveling on roads. For example, the opportunity to travel from point A to point B and cut a business deal or sell his specialized labor for a higher value than a poor man with lesser skills or capital. Roads mean time saved, and your time is worth whatever you'd do with it.

Taxes become theft whenever they are plainly disproportionate, or whenever they are redistributive in nature.

Separation of church and state is the doctrine of state neutrality in matters of religion. It's not discouragement of religion or favorable treatment of irreligion, but this misunderstanding is both extremely widespread and a good 50-70% of the reason why the country has struggled to achieve bipartisan support for the concept.

In a school setting, it means that public schools can endorse neither religion nor ideas or ideologies that are harmful or conventionally opposed to religion. Student prayer must be student-led and without teacher endorsement or support, and the same applies to (among other things) LGBT student organizations or events.

"Trump has made a military strike against a small Venezuelan boat with no evidence whatsoever that it involved drugs, gangs, or any other reason to strike it in international waters"

The intelligence/law enforcement community hasn't (yet) released whatever evidence led it to the conclusion that this ship was involved in drug trafficking, therefore no evidence must exist!

The same reasoning applies to every single operation conducted during the War on Terror, regardless of whether Bush or Obama was president! There was never a single ISIS militant bombed, it was always just killing of random people for the lulz! Why? Because the military hasn't met my arbitrary demand of declassifying and publicizing how it came to the decision to drop every individual bomb that it dropped! Since they haven't done so, there must therefore be no evidence of a legitimate legitimate War on Terror having ever happened! I haven't seen it, and so it mustn't exist!

Footage of right before and right after the murder of 23 year old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, which appears to have been totally random/premeditated and unprovoked, is public record now. The killer, after fatally stabbing her three times with a pocket knife, proceeded to wander the interior of the train car, trailing blood, muttering "I got that white girl". Everyone in the vicinity seemed to ignore him. He removed his red hoodie in the middle of the train, either because he found it uncomfortable or in the belief that doing so would let him slip away from the scene easier.

One DeCarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., age 34, a man with 14 prior criminal cases against him, has since been arrested and federally charged in connection with the murder. He was homeless at the time and had been allowed to board the train without paying fare.

Discuss.

To clarify, what is the first-order objective of the nomad war machine?

Of morality? Yeah, no, I doubt that. Ethics are a metaphysical construct, which science has no way of measuring.

Here’s a real list of what fascism entails;

Authoritarianism - Trump doesn’t believe in any check on his power and literally tried to steal an election

Charismatic leader with a cult like following

Demonization/Scapegoating of the “other” (perhaps MAGA’s most prominent trait)

Glorification of force (pardons J6 rioters, celebrates “being tough” on everyone from criminals to illegals i.e. ‘Aligator Alcatraz’, loves watching ICE smash windows of illegals, military parades)

Suppression of dissent (sues 60 Minutes for a routine edit, locks up students for protesting or writing an unfavorable editorial, withholds funding from Harvard and other universities who don’t do what they say, gleeful about getting Stephen Colbert fired, fires the BLS commissioner for reporting unfavorable job numbers)

First, this is a silly Umbarto Eco-esque definition of fascism. A regime can be simultaneously authoritarian and not fascist, unless you think that fascism just means "mean dictatorship".

The first principle of fascism is the maxim "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." If there's any sphere of society that a mass movement wants to lessen government interference over, said movement probably isn't fascist, even if it is authoritarian and/or autocratic.

Certainly this movement wouldn't tolerate the idea of homeschooling, or of churches that operate free of state control and don't pay taxes, or making health decisions for yourself and your children contrary to what state-employed experts recommend.

And assuming that Trumpism is generically authoritarian, the same is true of the contemporary left, evidenced by more anecdotes of canceling, deplatforming, firing, academic expulsion, pulling of books, cancellation of lucrative contracts, doxxing, violent assaults in the streets, and death-threat laden harassment campaigns than could possibly be counted in a lifetime. This is what you get when people embrace black-and-white thinking about their political opponents and come to view winning as more important than anything else. And using slurs like "fascists" to describe one's political opponents does nothing but to perpetuate this mindset.

And as for Trump reportedly being mentioned in the sealed Epstein documents, and his freakout that makes him look guilty no matter what's factually in them, it seems he truly is Teflon Don. There's no way Bush or Obama could've politically survived that. Or I guess the zone has been so flooded that no one can be bothered to care about any one scandal anymore.

Ames v. Ohio was a very good start, but we need even stronger protections for "majority groups" in this country. Like making it easier to sue big outlets and breadtubers for defamation when it comes to phony racism allegations, whenever those allegations incite an internet hate mob against you.

There are two outrageous things about this whole situation.

First, the gaslighting that, actually, they were never bullying Sydney Sweeney and the whole thing was a figment of an overactive Republican imagination. Like, no, here's an article from July 29 that covers the ongoing backlash:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/soniathompson/2025/07/29/5-marketing-lessons-from-the-sydney-sweeney-american-eagle-backlash/

It links to a TikTok video with 17.5K comments, which were apparently mostly negative (I can't verify this for myself since I don't have a TikTok account).

Here's an MSN article from one week ago:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/sydney-sweeney-s-new-american-eagle-good-jeans-ad-accused-of-being-nazi-propaganda-who-approved-this/ar-AA1JrUWe?ocid=BingNewsSerp

An influential breadtuber named HasanAbi made a whole video about her, presumably one with a negative slant.

And here's an article from literally yesterday by a black woman screaming about "white supremacy" and "eugenics".

https://19thnews.org/2025/08/american-eagle-good-genes-ad-history-eugenics/

Second, that a black or Asian woman could've made the same ad and nobody would've batted an eye. Same jean/gene pun with the same "problematic implications" or whatever. Legit nobody would've cared. And in the aftermath of this whole debacles? No apologies. Instead, Sydney Sweeney is being doxxed as a registered Republican, as if by some insane troll logic that justifies how they treated her, so the cycle of rabid unblinking hate from the "anti-hate" crowd continues.

Accusations of racism, especially Nazism, are thrown around as a borderline terroristic cudgel against white people to keep them from getting too uppity and to make them learn their place in the new demographic hierarchy (re: "progressive stack").

Hmm. Looks like this feature, when enabled, hides entire threads. I guess that shouldn't surprise me.

The funny thing about 20th century de-instutionalization is that everyone seemed to agree it was a good idea at the time (those places had a horrible reputation), but now both sides at the aisle like to point fingers at the other and blame them for the decision. I guess it really is as JFK said: “Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan.”

Looks like the pendulum is swinging back in that direction now. Until its reputation eventually sours again, upon which we'll go back to where we are now.

In a best case scenario, where the homeless don't commit crimes or otherwise intimidate the surrounding population, they still have to use the bathroom somewhere. If the city furnishes them with public toilets, then you have a situation where taxpayers are on the hook because of the mere presence of the homeless. And if the city doesn't, then suddenly the streets are awash with human urine and feces. 

Either way, it's wrong to suggest that the homeless are truly “just there”. Maybe this is true of a certain group of episodically homeless, who are on the streets for a week or two, work day jobs, shower at the gym, live out of their cars, and then resume normal lives once their next paycheck has come in. But the chronically homeless are a different story.

If your existence poses intrinsic costs for the local community, this rationally entitles them to exercise a degree of heightened control over you that wouldn't be acceptable for a net contributing citizen. At least with this EO they have somewhere to lodge instead of just being told to leave town with no backup options.

I mean, let's say for the sake of argument that you were actually willing to do something like that. You'd need to live alone (somewhere with no neighbors preferably), have a basement or whatnot, never entertain guests or visitors to your home, and have enough home improvement skills to remove your basement door and replace it with one that locks from the outside. This hypothetical psycho would have to tick all of these boxes, which probably a small minority of people with that extremely rare mindset do.

There's a reason why these cases, where they do happen, make national headlines, why these cases have individual Wikipedia articles, and so on. And even then, Junko Furuta sounds like she was abused in a much more extreme fashion than what you typically see in these cases, where the only motivation is sex.

Oof, no. “Years of suffering” refers to being taken captive and held for years. Not PTSD. It sounds like you're assuming a psycho would just rape you once and then lose interest and leave, and you could return to civilization and begin your recovery process. My worst fear would be weeks or months of abuse followed by death, a Junko Furuta case or something like that.

 

Ah, okay. Still quite unlikely, though.

In economics and behavioral science this is a concept known as revealed preference: that when people's claimed preferences don't line up with what they actually do when given a choice, their actual behavior reflects their true preferences. Obviously no one wants to be raped and everyone tries to avoid it, but virtually no one chooses death over it or over continuing to live in the aftermath of it. Their revealed preference is one of death being the worse of the two evils, be that death at the hands of a human or a bear.

Since 2020 there have been 7 women killed by bears and 15 nonfatal bear attacks on women. Since 2020 there have been 8,000 fatal attacks on women by men and 1.6 million nonfatal attacks.

Sure, but the difference in encounter rate between men/women and bears/women is well into the millions, if not billions, to one. Even just counting 1 to 1 encounters between opposite sexed strangers with nobody else present, the numbers are still heavily lopsided in favor of encountering fellow humans over bears.

Also, 8,000 since 2020? Assuming your numbers counted the four years from 2020-2024, women make up less than 1 out of 8 if not less than 1 out of 10 murder victims. You are statistically far less likely to be murdered as a woman than as a man.

In a crazy hypothetical where we adjust for population, we crank up the bear population to 165 million bears.

 

Even if we did this, again, bears do not share human habitats and the encounter rate would still heavily favor humans. You would have to change this to have a meaningful comparison.

Keeping in mind that bear attacks are pretty anomalous as well; the vast majority of bear encounters do not result in any violence.

Yeah, because either one or the other will usually run away or at least keep a safe distance, and people visiting known bear habitats carry things like bear spray. You've probably gotten your hair cut by a male barber, but you wouldn't dare let a bear get that close to your head. Additionally, most bear encounters in the US are with black bears, rather than grizzlies or whatnot, which kind of skews the numbers.

I'm sorry, Swag, but if I encounter a hostile bear I suffer for days, tops. If I encounter a malicious man, I could suffer for literally years, and in ways a bear could never imagine. There's nothing that could make me choose that, and I still don't get what's so hard to understand about this.

 

I understand quite well that you're being hyperbolic about this. This might sound like an offensive thing for me to say, but I say it because it's the truth.

Yes, surviving rape, especially if conscious during it, would cause a person suffering for untold years, if not for the rest of their lives. However, this amounts to a subtraction of utility from a life which is still generally a net positive. This fact is evidenced by how relatively few rape survivors go on to kill themselves (for any reason whatsoever, not just that one), and if you're being honest, however much you might protest that such is a “fate worse than death”, you probably wouldn't kill yourself in the aftermath of becoming a victim of such either.

Even if the bear killed you instantly and painlessly, which is not a given, it would mean the deprivation of your remaining lifespan, a lifespan that probably would've been a net positive. When forced to choose between death or rape, the overwhelming majority of people will choose the latter. Were that not the case, no criminal would even try to rape somebody at gunpoint or knifepoint, because it'd be a self-evident exercise in futility. And yet, some 11 percent of rape/sexual assault attempts involve use of a weapon.

Dang it, Savant beat me to it lol

Visit the Discord server and ask for help in the bug-reporting channel.

The “Edit Profile” option wasn't working for me at first. Then it did work. I'm not sure what else to tell you.

Statistically, we are just more likely to be killed by a man than a bear. Even if you adjusted for population – even if you put just as many bears as men in the country, we are still statistically more likely to be killed by men.

 

I'm not condoning or agreeing with RemyBrown's unhinged rants, nor the central thesis of this thread, but this notion (the idea that, were the encounter rate between men and bears equal, the number of dead women to either cause would be equal) is ridiculous on its face.

If humans were feral like bears or other animals, then sure. But the average person, male or female, has been subject to intensive social conditioning. The kind of person who would engage in unprovoked murder but for too many witnesses around has stripped his/her self of said conditioning to an extent that's statistically rare. In the United States, a country with 330,000,000 people, there's “only” around 20,000 murders a year, and a lot of these are probably in the heat of the moment as opposed to acts of truly senseless violence. It's true that a woman alone in the woods with a strange man has no way of knowing whether or not the man she's dealing with belongs to that anomalous group, but this uncertainty has no objective bearing on the statistical likelihood of being murdered. Her fear may be understandable but it's not commensurate to the facts.

Even if we're talking about rape (which, though horrible, is generally less bad than feeling your limbs ripped off and your guts spilled open by a bear as the life drains from your eyes), most of this is either at the hands of close relatives or under circumstances that, due to perverse social cues, the rapist has convinced his/her self that the act is justified and at least not entirely nonconsensual. For example, social cues which conflate going to a party with wanting to have sex with anyone available, of dates culminating in sex with the other subject of that date. None of these cues are present during a random encounter in the woods. Only the rare kind of person who would commit rape without any element of self-deception needed would do so. These people are a small minority of the population, so an average encounter in the woods with a strange man would have a lesser incidence of rape than the incidence of dying at the hands of a bear.

Now, on second glance of your post, you said “number of bears (versus) men in the country” as opposed to “encounter rate between men and bears”, and conflated the two, but obviously humans and bears don't tend to inhabit the same spaces (i.e. bears that get too close to human habitats risk being shot), meaning the encounter rate would not be equal even if the nominal bear population was equal to the nominal human population.

Look at Japan. No one seriously believes in Kami at this point, but religious festivals are a big deal, especially in rural areas (I've heard city slickers who move to the countryside have been bullied for refusing to participate in the planning/preparation of these events, which are often the lifeblood of the town).

Fun fact: I started using the internet because I was asking questions about nautiluses my parents couldn't answer and they encouraged me to go online. My very first Google search had to do with nautiluses. This was back in like 2006 or 2007 I think.

Which is bizarre because there's like a 4-6 year gap between then and when I started using Facebook and actually “being online”. I must've not found the internet all that interesting as a kid.

I don't remember lol it was just something that interested me for a while, like penguins and nautiluses.

I think one issue is that historical paganism wasn't really a creed in the modern sense. One did not profess belief in the resurrection of Osiris and worship him privately (yes, I know that household altars existed, but still). Religion was a communal affair, and people were also known to dabble in this or that religious space in a way that, to modern sensibilities, would smack of “unfaithfulness” to one's god of choice.

The very idea of Hellenism seems reflective of modern Christian, especially Protestant, understanding of what religion is supposed to look like. Paganism in general has the black mark against it that its cosmological/mythological claims are widely understood to be rather demonstrably untrue, so framing it as an intellectual tradition or ideology, something analogous to Christianity or Buddhism, is unlikely to win many converts. Instead, I think neopaganism would be more successful if it billed itself as an experience, a celebration open to public participation, and something to find a sense of belonging within. Americans are lonelier than ever so this is actually the perfect time for neopaganism to make its pitch.

The question is a bit poorly worded IMO because yes, most economies the world round do consist of private ownership w/ complex models of organization facilitated by such legal instruments as stock, bonds, fiat currency, corporations, etc. This is what capitalism is, and it already exists.

If you mean laissez-faire capitalism, then I'm inclined to think not. It's in the nature of all states to interfere with the economy. That's been true in the United States as well (see the “American System” of the early 19th century), and broadly speaking it has been true for thousands of years. When you're a government official who wants to change things for the better, taxation/redistribution and state coercion are pretty much the only instruments at your disposal to accomplish this, and you are tempted to use them liberally. Same is true if you're a corrupt scumbag who wants to profit off the public's dime.

I would argue that Reaganomics was revolutionary not in practice (the implementation was rather tepid) but because, in theory, it represented the first attempt of its scale to consciously reject the old - or indeed, ancient - statist paradigm of thinking about the economy. But then flash forward 30 something years and the GOP has turned its back on laissez-faire economics again. I suspect that at the end of the day statism is just too popular to be replaced. No government, be it democratic or dictatorial, can survive without bribing enough people to establish a base of support and laissez-faire is a principled stand that doesn't accomplish this.

I would approach strangers and ask if I could look at their scalps, or even start examining such without permission. That much I do remember.

I watched Veggietales (Christian cartoons for children, a surprisingly early pioneer of all-CGI productions) when I was a kid, and after that I would apparently freak out when my mom chopped vegetables, accusing her of murdering Larry the cucumber.

I have no independent recollection of this. But I've been told that it happened.

You had me going there for a second, not gonna lie.

But seriously, congrats on the start of your recovery.