So, they finally decide to be honest.
By working from home, people aren't paying for public transport or eating out at restaurants near their places of work, while expensive offices remain virtually empty. "WFH offers direct financial savings on expenses such as travel, lunch, clothes and cleaning," he said. The 5% tax rate "will leave them no worse off than if they had chosen to go into the office".
Translated:
"You're not making the choices we want, so we'll force you to pay to make sure we get the money we expect"
Also look at the little wins too, and there's a lot. Senate is hopefully safe (definitely safe if Georgia holds) and if so that will hopefully shut down a lot of the worst stuff. Rs have (at the moment anyway) flipped 6 house seats.
And where I am in NY, Trump obviously still lost the state but did about 8% better than he did in 2016. My upstate congressional district was one of the few R reps from NY and in 2018 won the election 56% to 42%. This year (against the same D opponent, actually) she's currently up 63.5% to 35% In another upstate NY district, the D won in 2018 51 to 49. This year (again same matchup) R is up 53.3% to 42.5%.
It really does seem like people are waking up, at least slowly.
That's the thing, most of the people we'd want to get rid of can't get into Canada. It has much stricter immigration requirements (unless you're a middle eastern/African "refugee"), so all these white liberals will just get turned away.
I won't be as blunt as some of the other people, but I will agree that this line from your announcement is very concerning.
The Terms of Service will be heavily revised and updated, prohibiting any kind of hate speech and pornographic content left by guests and members of our community.
What is the new ToS going to look like, especially as relates to hate speech? What is going to qualify as hate speech? And will your enforcement of hate speech be incredibly one-sided just like (virtually) every other single website out there which has adopted a hate speech ToS clause (see, for example, Twitter where saying "OK, dude" is misgendering and leads to a ban while saying "Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people" is perfectly allowed)?
Well, at least their final paragraph is unintentionally honest:
This summer, millions of Americans took to the streets to protest racial injustice. Now, millions more in California can cast their ballots for a simple measure advancing that cause
Indeed, NYT, giving university admissions and public contracts based on race is racial injustice. Now why are you supporting it?
Between A) something as civilization-threatening as the entire free press agreeing to lie, manipulate, and fail to do their jobs to an obvious and overwhelming degree, or B), Trump getting re-elected, they without hesitation regard A) as the overwhelming and obviously correct outcome, the more morally correct, the thing that they want to occur.
If accurate, that's horrific. Its one thing to be deluded into believing the MSM is accurate. But to acknowledge they are a bunch of unethical DNC propogandists and still want them to win is a special kind of stupid. You don't have to like Orange Man, or even vote for Orange man, to acknowledge that if Biden wins, the media and DNC establishment are going to (continue to) do this same thing over and over and over again, with the only change being they'll probably go even more extreme if that's even possible. Whereas if Trump wins at least they're kept out of power for a couple more years and there's a chance that they'll just collapse under their own weight and insanity given how far gone they've already gone.
You can't tell a third person omniscient story with gods on the screen and have it come out serious.
That's true, but even without that trying to adapt the Silmarillion would be a lost cause IMO. Its more a history/legends book rather than a straight narrative. You've got time-skips all over the place, you've got major characters dropping in and dropping out, and things just aren't fleshed out in enough detail for a film.
Take the Nírnaeth Arnoediad, for example. It's one of the most important battles in Middle Earth history, and yet the whole thing (in my paperback copy anyway) - from the planning to the last axe swing - is 9 pages. Hollywood is just incapable of dealing with that sort of thing. Peter Jackson's Hobbit treatment suggests they'll want to expand it out into a massive battle sequence there's just not enough information for that short of making it half an hour of elf on orc (and vice versa) stabbing sequences. And we saw how that panned out with tons of dwarf on orc (and vice versa) stabbing sequences.
This is what makes the Reddit salt threads from Barrett's confirmation last night so sad. There's a bunch of comments calling for a general strike in protest of the confirmation which just made me go WTF.
If you've spent the last several months protesting every night, I doubt you're holding down a regular job.
If you keep demanding more and more lockdowns while you hide from the virus, I doubt your job is all that essential.
If you're a (as the r/socialism survey from a few years ago suggests ) an upper middle class white dude living with your parents who has never held down a job for any length of time, there's nothing for you to go on strike from.
You're not the working class. You're not the average joe. The only people who vote Dem anymore are rich people who want to stay in power or wanna-be Commies who want more free stuff and are too dumb to realize they're just cannon fodder for the first group.
The one article (about unprofessional behavior) is still available online, if anyone is interested: https://www.jvascsurg.org/article/S0741-5214(19)32587-X/pdf
The apparent offending paragraph:
Among those with a Facebook account, 193 (96%) accounts were visible to the public (ie, not set to private), 136 (68%) were male, 51 (25%) were integrated residents, 187 (93%) held MD degrees, and 84 (42%) self-identified as a vascular surgeon (Table I). There were 46 (23%) Facebook accounts that displayed evidence of either unprofessional or potentially unprofessional content where four (2%) accounts had clearly unprofessional content and 61 (30.4%) contained evidence of potentially unprofessional content (Table II). There were no instances of HIPAA violations and the most common forms of potentially unprofessional content were holding alcohol (25 accounts, 12.4%) and controversial political/religious/social comments (20 accounts, 10%). Inappropriate attire included pictures in underwear, provocative Halloween costumes, and provocative posing in bikinis/swimwear. Controversial political and religious comments were any derogatory or demeaning comments directed to ward an individual or specific faith. Controversial social comments were largely limited to comments centered around specific stances on abortion and gun control.
So, yeah, willing to bet that the actual story here is that this would-be doctor got offended at being (indirectly) told "a lot of your public social media stuff is not appropriate if you're going to be a doctor" and decided to scream "SEXIST!" instead of just switching the setting to private.
Man, first reply on there:
And even before gamer gate, black women online were sounding all sorts of alarms.
Seriously, can someone find a way to ID and safely kill the intersectional brain slugs impacting all these people?
I think this is the most likely rationale. From the beginning of the primary everyone was talking up Kamala as the heir apparent both then she got utterly smashed. Biden (who was doing miserably early primary) was deemed the easiest one to push out of the way post-election so they manipulated stuff to get Biden to win, attached Kamala to the ticket and if Biden wins he's probably resigning a month or two in.
What the ****.......
If all this sounds overcautious, consider that almost 12,000 people have died in the state where I live;
You're in Florida, lady. And, in the 1.5 months since this article, the CDC says the number has gone up to gasp 15531 deaths. And that's still NEGLIGIBLE.
Florida has a population of around 22 MILLION. That means, for every 1000 people in Florida, 0.7 people have died. Yes, less than 1 person per thousand has died, and that's in Florida, which is home to a whole ton of old people who go there to sit in the sun all day.
"Oh no, a virus is running around that kills about 1 in 1500 people in my state. WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!1!". You, that's you.
I think the end is near, one way or another, and we'll know in a month or two.
I'll agree with the first letter that the institutions are indeed converged to a scary level. The question, though, is how much influence those institutions still have. A good number of people have revolted against them, so they are weaker, but I don't know how weak.
The problem with the second letter is that I think she's putting too much faith in how much the average person cares about true liberal ideals. The virus has shown that many people are willing to throw away most every freedom and principle they have in the same of safety. And while wokeism isn't appealing, it can certainly be scary.
As for the end of the war, I think the election is a huge barometer. If Trump wins - especially very convincingly - then Wokeism is in serious trouble. I don't see them lasting another 2 or 4 years without mostly self-disintegrating, especially if the average American tells them to sit down and shut up.
If Biden comes out on top, then I'll agree with the first letter that they've won for now. They'll still end up imploding, eventually, because it is an unsustainable ideology, but I doubt there will be that much left worth salvaging by the time that happens.
Possible. I think there's a couple more optimistic possibilities.
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They've realized the lockdowns are causing more harm than good. In the US, places like NY and California are badly broken at the moment, and unless they restart the economies soon they're not going to be able to keep their bread and circus programs going. Sure, Pelosi and co are still trying to get federal bailout money but even that is a weak bandaid rather than an actual fix. Couple that with continued lockdown protests continuing all over the place (even though the MSM rarely reports on them), and several states saying they won't be doing any further lockdowns it will rapidly become obvious to everyone that these were a huge mistake.
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They just want to spike the covid numbers. Birx is already talking about muh second wave, but while the infection numbers have gone up a bit with schools the death rate is still going down. Current deaths per day is about the same as it was in mid-July. Infection fatality rate among confirmed cases is closing in on 2.8% (and thus likely much lower than that due to untested cases) and its becoming clearer and clearer that the disease is just not that scary. By trying to spike the covid numbers they can say "See, we were right all along!" and try to make people panic about a second wave.
Indeed. Doesn't look like skin color was included, a bit back WotC used their online platform to track race/class (apologies for no archive, but the table doesn't seem to show up in the archive) combos and the top 5 were:
Human Fighter
Elf Ranger
Elf Wizard
Human Wizard
Human Rogue
Human and Elf accounted for >40% of characters
our universities dont need to raise money from sports.
US schools don't raise money from sports (at least the overwhelming majority). In fact, for most schools, athletics are a drain on their finances. American education would get cheaper and likely better for everyone if we cut out college sports, especially football because it is far and away the most expensive.
Yeah, I'm willing to concede that maybe the guy posing the question is overreacting. So maybe it is just more ominous than it sounds.
The fact that the followup though gets cut off mid-question with no answer, though, makes me really wonder if something more sinister is going on. If for no other reason than:
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If it is just for quarantine (even though that's still massive govt overreach), just do what he says and reassure everyone its only for quarantine
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Recent history shows that ever time the "establishment" for lack of a better word says "shut up and stop asking questions" they are just trying to hide the thing you're asking about.
Several months back, I was thinking the virus panic would be the end of a lot of politicians careers because of how obviously insane their reactions have been, and how its security theater at best or insane power-grabs at worst.
I still feel that way about the government reactions, but now I'm growing disillusioned by how many people are still buying into the hype despite more and more evidence showing that its utter nonsense.