Isn’t this why the 2nd Amendment exists?

[base698 15]

10 minutes ago, jakee said:

What do you care if a private company decides to fire someone? You like people being fired

I said I don't want to pay $100 for a hamburger I'm not flying in a 100LL airplane to get.  I don't want the money supply tripled again so we can pretend to pay for gay trans musicals in Gaza while lining people's pockets with tax money.

[jakee 1,500]

14 minutes ago, base698 said:

Seriously? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59989476

 

The first sentence, dude. The very first sentence.

The US Supreme Court has blocked President Joe Biden's rule requiring workers at large companies to be vaccinated or masked and tested weekly.

14 minutes ago, base698 said:

Disinformation on social media was Trump's thing? 

Oh for sure Trump and his supporters spread a huge amount of disinformation on social media. Good to see you recognise that at least. But the clip you provide is of Sinclair's stations accusing the mainstream media of spreading misinformation against Trump. You know this (in part because the clip is literally titled "Sinclair's script for stations"), which is why I know you don't believe for a second that it has anything to do with USAID.

[jakee 1,500]

16 minutes ago, base698 said:

I said I don't want to pay $100 for a hamburger I'm not flying in a 100LL airplane to get.  I don't want the money supply tripled again so we can pretend to pay for gay trans musicals in Gaza while lining people's pockets with tax money.

Which is, again, all obvious nonsense which you don't believe and which has nothing to do with the government potentially firing tens of thousands of people without due process. You just like seeing people fired.

[base698 15]

9 minutes ago, jakee said:

The first sentence, dude. The very first sentence.

My wife's company did not care if you were tested they enforced it as vax only.  Several other companies I was familiar with similar.  Mine gave a quasi way out, where you could attest you had a vax but didn't have to show proof.  The practical implementations, especially in blue areas, were more severe.

8 minutes ago, jakee said:

Which is, again, all obvious nonsense which you don't believe and which has nothing to do with the government potentially firing tens of thousands of people without due process. You

You don't think the government spending and printing money, tripling the money supply, causes prices to increase?  If the government didn't have to print money to pay these people and their vast patronage network you think they would print money indescriminitely as they have since 2008?

[jakee 1,500]

1 hour ago, base698 said:

My wife's company did not care if you were tested they enforced it as vax only.  Several other companies I was familiar with similar. 

So? Biden didn't do that, your companies did that. 

1 hour ago, base698 said:

Mine gave a quasi way out, where you could attest you had a vax but didn't have to show proof. 

That would be a way out of complying with their own internal policy. Biden did not require you to be vaccinated or to say you were vaccinated. You were simply having a private dispute with your employer over the conditions of your employment. Given what you support you cannot possibly claim they did not have the right to fire you if they wanted.

1 hour ago, base698 said:

You don't think the government spending and printing money, tripling the money supply, causes prices to increase? 

You think it causes wages to stay flat? No, people like Musk and Bezos do that.

[gowlerk 2,206]

5 hours ago, base698 said:

Can you explain how when wages remain constant and prices for housing, insurance, education and food triples everyone is supposed to afford life and basic necessities?

• United States:
  • Wages have risen faster than prices since the pandemic began. 
     
  • Lower-paid workers have seen the largest gains. 
     
  • Wage growth outpaced inflation in nearly every state since 2021.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americans-wages-are-higher-than-they-have-ever-been-and-employment-is-near-its-all-time-high/

Edited Monday at 01:31 AM by gowlerk

[billvon 2,998]

1 hour ago, gowlerk said:

• United States:
  • Wages have risen faster than prices since the pandemic began. 
     
  • Lower-paid workers have seen the largest gains. 
     
  • Wage growth outpaced inflation in nearly every state since 2021.

FOX News didn't tell him THAT!

[billvon 2,998]

5 hours ago, base698 said:

I said I don't want to pay $100 for a hamburger I'm not flying in a 100LL airplane to get. 

Tariffs are going to drive up the price of tractor parts, cattle feed, and food preparation equipment.  Mass deportations will drive up the price of wheat, produce and service industry personnel.   Sorry Charlie!  Perhaps you can help drive it down in 4 year by electing someone else.

[base698 15]

8 hours ago, billvon said:

Tariffs are going to drive up the price of tractor parts, cattle feed, and food preparation equipment. 

For sure, short and medium term that will probably be worse, especially for small to medium sized manufacturing businesses.

 

8 hours ago, billvon said:

FOX News didn't tell him THAT!

Fox, like every other network, is trash.  I've said that before.  My take on TV news comes from "Amusing Ourselves to Death"

 

10 hours ago, gowlerk said:

Wages have risen faster than prices since the pandemic began. 

I have a bridge to sell you.  Rental and housing market nearly everywhere I track are still out of control, with some exceptions.  If you compare to pandemic here, then yeah, but if you go back to 2018 prices are still 2-3x.  Groceries and restaurants are particularly egregious.  Look at jump tickets!  

There is definitely some wage growth in low wage work.  I know i see what looks like a lot of money for that posted on job openings but it doesn't help if you're paying $2000 a month for rent, $400 a week on groceries.  

[jakee 1,500]

1 hour ago, base698 said:

Fox, like every other network, is trash.  I've said that before.  My take on TV news comes from "Amusing Ourselves to Death"

Which is why you know nothing about it, and why it was so easy for Musk to fool you into thinking a right wing media conglomerate pushing a mandatory pro-Trump message across its channels was actually evidence of a left wing deep state USAID propaganda plot?

Ah, sorry I got sucked into taking your posts at face value for a moment. I know you don't really believe any of that, you just need some cover to make revelling in the illegal mass firings of tens of thousands of ordinary people less wealthy than you seem more palatable. 

1 hour ago, base698 said:

I have a bridge to sell you.  Rental and housing market nearly everywhere I track are still out of control, with some exceptions.  If you compare to pandemic here, then yeah, but if you go back to 2018 prices are still 2-3x.  Groceries and restaurants are particularly egregious.  Look at jump tickets!  

A Skydive AZ tandem costs £260. In 2018 did it cost $90? $130? I find either of those hard to believe. Similarly a normal jump ticket is $33. In 2018 was it $11? $16.50? I think almost certainly not. What do you think it was? 

Now what about particularly egregious groceries? In 2018 a gallon of milk was $2.85, in 2024 it was $4.10. Doesn't look particularly like a 3x increase to me. And 2018 was a freakishly low priced year. In 2014 it was £3.82 and in 2007 it was $3.87! So really in nearly 20 years the peak price of milk has increased by 1.07x. If anything that sounds unsustainably low for producers.

[base698 15]

2 hours ago, jakee said:

Which is why you know nothing about it, and why it was so easy for Musk to fool you into thinking a right wing media conglomerate pushing a mandatory pro-Trump message across its channels was actually evidence of a left wing deep state USAID propaganda plot

I simply looked at the video talking disinformation and I remembered it when it went around.  Has disinformation been a smear against the left or right?  Trump's preferred term is fake news.  He would have, I assume at the time, not claimed that social media and the Internet was disinformation.  He reserved that for the mainstream media.

I am happy to be wrong that was protrump messaging.  The main point I made with it was the media was in lockstep with messaging since at least Trump and maybe before even in publications and TV news that should have had some ideological diversity.  The prevailing theory was an abstract concept called the cathedral (or iron polygon) which is decentralized.  If there was a direct funding it was in fact centralized.

Edited Monday at 05:16 PM by base698

[billvon 2,998]

24 minutes ago, base698 said:

I simply looked at the video talking disinformation and I remembered it when it went around.  Has disinformation been a smear against the left or right?

Both sides have used it.  The right has made it a central pillar of their propaganda efforts.

[JerryBaumchen 1,367]

18 hours ago, gowlerk said:

• United States:
  • Wages have risen faster than prices since the pandemic began. 
     
  • Lower-paid workers have seen the largest gains. 
     
  • Wage growth outpaced inflation in nearly every state since 2021.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americans-wages-are-higher-than-they-have-ever-been-and-employment-is-near-its-all-time-high/

Hi Ken,

As I continue to say:  The problem with facts is that they are so factual.

Jerry Baumchen

[jakee 1,500]

2 hours ago, base698 said:

I simply looked at the video talking disinformation and I remembered it when it went around. 

And then you pretended it supported the USAID propaganda accusations, even though you know very well it doesn’t, not least because you know vey well that the accusations are fake.

2 hours ago, base698 said:

I am happy to be wrong that was protrump messaging.  

That’s good, since you know very well that it is.

2 hours ago, base698 said:

The main point I made with it was the media was in lockstep with messaging since at least Trump and maybe before even in publications and TV news that should have had some ideological diversity.  

And you know it doesn’t make that point. You know there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to think that a bunch of different TV stations all owned by the same man should be ideologically diverse. You absolutely know that there is nothing inexplicable about that man deciding to make all his stations push the same pro-Trump messaging. But you tried it on anyway because you hoped no-one would check. 
 

 

[base698 15]

4 hours ago, jakee said:

And you know it doesn’t make that point. You know there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to think that a bunch of different TV stations all owned by the same man should be ideologically diverse. You absolutely know that there is nothing inexplicable about that man deciding to make all his stations push the same pro-Trump messaging. But you tried it on anyway because you hoped no-one would check

That's a little unfair and not being charitable at all and even a little cunty to the only person engaging with you. 

The concept I was describing and thought the Sinclair clip showed was this: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24266512/jd-vance-curtis-yarvin-influence-rage-project-2025

> For Yarvin, democracy is an illusion: elections make people think they have a say in what happens, but the Cathedral, his catchall term for journalistic institutions and elite universities, runs everything. Monarchy, in this theory, is the only honest government.

The Cathedral refers to all institutions not just ones owned by one man.

The idea being it's not the Cathedral but explicit messaging unification from InterNews.  

 

Edited Tuesday at 12:43 AM by base698

[gowlerk 2,206]

1 hour ago, base698 said:

even a little cunty to the only person engaging with you. 

Have you noticed yet that he is the only person engaging with you?

[jakee 1,500]

6 hours ago, base698 said:

That's a little unfair and not being charitable at all and even a little cunty to the only person engaging with you. 

Again bro - the title of the video made it clear that they were all Sinclair stations. I.e. stations owned by Sinclair. You obviously know that you don't need a gov't conspiracy to explain why they're all saying the same thing.

6 hours ago, base698 said:

The concept I was describing and thought the Sinclair clip showed was this: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24266512/jd-vance-curtis-yarvin-influence-rage-project-2025

You didn't think it showed that, because you know it doesn't exist. If you did, you'd have tried to find some actual evidence instead of just pretending.

6 hours ago, base698 said:

> For Yarvin, democracy is an illusion: elections make people think they have a say in what happens, but the Cathedral, his catchall term for journalistic institutions and elite universities, runs everything. Monarchy, in this theory, is the only honest government.

The Cathedral refers to all institutions not just ones owned by one man.

The idea being it's not the Cathedral but explicit messaging unification from InterNews.  

And we both know you don't believe any of that. If you did, you wouldn't have chosen a source which makes it clear the originator of the theory is a fucking insane shitposter primarily motivated by a staggering level of explicit racism.

[nigel99 489]

I summarised Heather Cox Richard’s update for what happened in the US since Friday. What a shit storm.

Trump’s administration has frozen government funding, leaving many Americans struggling. Farmers who had contracts with the USDA to improve infrastructure were left without promised financial assistance. Democratic-led states are suing to challenge these funding cuts, while Republican-led states, despite being hit harder, are seeking direct exceptions from Trump.

Trump’s appointee, Russell Vought, shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, calling it a shakedown mechanism for leftist groups. This move has sparked legal action, with the National Treasury Employees Union suing over what they claim is an unlawful shutdown.

Vice President J.D. Vance and other MAGA figures have suggested they may defy court rulings, drawing sharp criticism from Chief Justice John Roberts, who called such ideas dangerous and unacceptable. The American Bar Association has also condemned the administration for undermining the rule of law, urging elected officials and attorneys to push back.

Five former Treasury secretaries have warned that democracy is under siege, particularly as Trump and his team attempt to politicize the U.S. Treasury. Trump even suggested that the U.S. might not honor its debt, a direct challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees the validity of public debt.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to purge officials he deems insufficiently loyal. He has fired key government watchdogs, including the heads of the Federal Elections Commission, National Archives, Office of Government Ethics, and Office of Special Counsel. Some of these officials, like U.S. Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, are now suing over their removals, claiming they were illegal.

[base698 15]

3 hours ago, jakee said:

And we both know you don't believe any of that. If you did, you wouldn't have chosen a source which makes it clear the originator of the theory is a fucking insane shitposter primarily motivated by a staggering level of explicit racism.

I picked a source that a liberal would take.  Yarvins isn't a shit poster given the depth of his writings.  He's half Jewish. He's written a lot about Thomas Carlyle who was contemporary with Walt Whitman. People without nuance take his discussions about what an 1850s writer says and conclude he's racist.

I don't know why you keep saying, "you don't believe that" when you can take practically any 2021 liberal issue: trans kids, George Floyd, vax mandates and see that NYT, NBC, Harvard, and Yale will have the exact same take with a narrow Overton Window.  Some theory is needed to explain it.  

Edited Tuesday at 11:07 AM by base698

[jakee 1,500]

 

2 hours ago, base698 said:

Yarvins isn't a shit poster given the depth of his writings.  He's half Jewish.

Oh ok, I guess he must be fine then! My mistake. Obviously you’re right, it’s completely impossible for someone half Jewish to be a racist shitposter. 
 

2 hours ago, base698 said:

I don't know why you keep saying, "you don't believe that"

Obviously you know exactly why - you don’t really believe it. If you did, you would have found at least one source that actually demonstrates what you’re claiming instead of just pretending. 
 

2 hours ago, base698 said:

you can take practically any 2021 liberal issue: trans kids, George Floyd, vax mandates and see that NYT, NBC, Harvard, and Yale will have the exact same take with a narrow Overton Window.  Some theory is needed to explain it.  

Lol, you obviously don’t believe that! Take Floyd - victim of a murder so obvious that a serving police offer was successfully convicted of committing it (and you KNOW how difficult that is) - why would you expect any mainstream non far right source to have any significantly different opinions? The answer is that you wouldn’t and you don’t. 

I would imagine that every news source in the country (even including the right wing ones) had the same reactions after the Boston marathon bombings, for instance. Or 9/11. Must be a pro-nationalist conspiracy! 

[base698 15]

4 minutes ago, jakee said:

Lol, you obviously don’t believe that! Take Floyd - victim of a murder so obvious that a serving police offer was successfully convicted of committing it (and you KNOW how difficult that is) - why would you expect any mainstream non far right source to have any significantly different opinions? The answer is that you wouldn’t and you don’t. 

I would imagine that every news source in the country (even including the right wing ones) had the same reactions after the Boston marathon bombings, for instance. Or 9/11. Must be a pro-nationalist conspiracy! 

I'm not talking individual instances but the set.  Remember the joint probability of independence is the product of all said event.  So take 50 views, what's the probability these are all the same?  If it's 90% they would agree because only perfectly rational people have your preferred view it's 0.005%.  If it's 98% (let's call the 2% the white nationalist ignorance factor), then it's 36% they would all agree.

[gowlerk 2,206]

3 hours ago, base698 said:

Yarvins isn't a shit poster given the depth of his writings.  He's half Jewish.

Did you know Stephen Miller is jewish? He is also a white supremacist.

[jakee 1,500]

2 hours ago, base698 said:

I'm not talking individual instances but the set.  Remember the joint probability of independence is the product of all said event.  So take 50 views, what's the probability these are all the same?  If it's 90% they would agree because only perfectly rational people have your preferred view it's 0.005%.  If it's 98% (let's call the 2% the white nationalist ignorance factor), then it's 36% they would all agree.

You don’t believe that any of that is anything other than mathematical gibberish and intentional falsehoods. Like where’s your 2% of white nationalists? Maybe they’re at Fox. Plenty of people on Fox were more than happy to defend Chauvin and denounce the guilty verdicts. So all of a sudden your stats, as utterly baseless and made up as they are… make perfect sense. 
 

Because as you very well know you can’t just cherry pick all the sources that agree, ignore the ones that don’t, and say ‘holy crap how unlikely is it that all these sources I’ve picked because they agree with each other actually agree with each other!?!?!?’ You know that would make any statisticians head explode. Otherwise you could say something like what are the chances Donald Trump got 70,000,000 votes? Like even if every one of them was 99.9999% Trump was their guy, the probability of every single one of them following through and voting that way is zero. Genuinely zero, you can’t even round it up to a comprehensible number. So Donald Trump definitely stole the election, because that’s how numbers work, right? Of course you don’t really believe that. You know very well where the error lies.

 

And even that is still misdirection. Your earlier point with the Sinclair video wasn’t that all these sources merely agreed, it was that they were all reading from the same script! Which, again aside from all the people who work for Sinclair reading Sinclair’s pro-Trump script, you know is not a thing that is happening. You know that’s a nonsense conspiracy theory. 

Edited Tuesday at 04:03 PM by jakee

[base698 15]

2 hours ago, jakee said:

You don’t believe that any of that is anything other than mathematical gibberish and intentional falsehoods. Like where’s your 2% of white nationalists? Maybe they’re at Fox. Plenty of people on Fox were more than happy to defend Chauvin and denounce the guilty verdicts. So all of a sudden your stats, as utterly baseless and made up as they are… make perfect sense

I was assuming whatever shitlib thing you agree with that is not considered wrong think by the politburo would have somewhere between 90% agreement and 98% agreement with reasonable people.  I picked 98% because somewhere between 1-3% of the population is antisocial or psychotic.  I assume you believe a rational person would believe the way you believe.  I then extrapolated to show a random sampling of papers and media could be as unlikely as a small fraction of a percent to at best 1 in 3 (definitely possible).

If you don't agree there has been immense pressure across corporate, media and academia for left leaning views since at least Trump i don't really know what to say.  Guess we are done.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

> A Fermi problem (or Fermi question, Fermi quiz), also known as an order-of-magnitude problem, is an estimation problem in physics or engineering education, designed to teach dimensional analysis or approximation of extreme scientific calculations. Fermi problems are usually back-of-the-envelope calculations. Fermi problems typically involve making justified guesses about quantities and their variance or lower and upper bounds. In some cases, order-of-magnitude estimates can also be derived using dimensional analysis. A Fermi estimate (or order-of-magnitude estimate, order estimation) is an estimate of an extreme scientific calculation.

I admitted I was wrong about the Sinclair case I don't know why you keep referring back to it.

[jakee 1,500]

56 minutes ago, base698 said:

I was assuming whatever shitlib thing you agree with that is not considered wrong think by the politburo would have somewhere between 90% agreement and 98% agreement with reasonable people.  I picked 98% because somewhere between 1-3% of the population is antisocial or psychotic. 

So your argument now hinges on the question of why don't some mainstream liberal news sources present psychotic editorial stances? And if mainstream liberal news sources don't present psychotic editorial stances, it must be a conspiracy orchestrated by USAID? I really shouldn't have to tell you that you know that's total bollocks.

56 minutes ago, base698 said:

I then extrapolated to show a random sampling of papers and media could be as unlikely as a small fraction of a percent to at best 1 in 3 (definitely possible).

A ) You absolutely did not do that, and you know you didn't.

B ) A genuinely random sampling of 50 unconnected news organisations regarding for instance George Floyd would result in a mix of opinions including those in support of Derek Chauvin, and you know it would. 

By the way Mr Mathematical Man, run the numbers on the jury. With so much on the line and a far higher burden of proof than needed to write an opinion column, how sure must they all have been for 12 out of 12 of them to all individually vote the same way? Sounds pretty damn unlikely already doesn't it? I guess USAID paid them all off too. Hell, if you tweet that to Elon I bet it'll be reposted by tonight, and that will make it THE TRUTH.

56 minutes ago, base698 said:

I admitted I was wrong about the Sinclair case I don't know why you keep referring back to it.

First, because it's the only piece of evidence you have provided, and the fact that you have not provided any other piece of evidence since shows that you never believed what you were saying, you were only ever pretending you could back it up.

Second, aside from all these rabbit warrens you're trying to drag us down, it shows the difference between what your argument was at the start, vs what it is now. What you said originally was that every media organisation, even those that should be idealogically diverse, have the same exact messaging, even the same script, and that's proof that it's a USAID conspiracy. Well if that was true, it would be suspicious. But the only 'evidence' you had was the Sinclair clip, and you always knew that was never evidence. What you're saying now is that if you pick the news organisations that all lean to the same side anyway and ignore the ones that are idealogically diverse, then you kinda get the same general views about the same stories and none of them are even a little bit psychotic... and that is proof that there's a massive USAID conspiracy! It's quite obviously total bollocks and you absolutely do know that it is, otherwise you woudn't have tried to change your own argument so much.

Quote

If you don't agree there has been immense pressure across corporate, media and academia for left leaning views since at least Trump i don't really know what to say.

Oh good, you've run out of ways to talk obvious nonsense that you know is nonsense. So why not try talking about reality? For instance bang in the middle of Biden's presidency CNN famously hired a CEO with the mission statement of ditching the liberal image and making programming more attractive to Republican viewers. You know this is true. You know the version you're trying to push isn't true.

Edited Tuesday at 07:11 PM by jakee