2024 ELECTION THREAD
The next presidential race will be here soon! Please see current Bovada odds. Thoughts?
Man what a journey
Me: I have no idea who this guy is but he seems to have come out of nowhere to post obnoxious MAGA **** en masse so better safe than sorry
(Everything from this point is based on what I’ve seen quoted)
Him: why’d you block me?
Him: you blocked be because I’m white?
Him: why do you discriminate against white people?
Him: you wouldn’t have blocked me if my name was ‘Jamal’ (?)
Good call, me
I like a steak as much as the next guy, but this logic about liking meat being evolutionarily tied to hunting seems a bit ludicrous. I'm sure that there are plenty of things we did in our hundreds of thousands of years on this planet that we no longer do due to technological advances, and I don't think you'd argue that makes us any less human at all.
interestingly enough, i gave some people in the living in thailand thread the same spiel about wtf is wrong with soy because a few posters there had soy boy as a go to insult
they shared a bunch of peer reviewed studies saying consuming soy boosted estrogen in men - that was a big reason why vegetarian/vegan men are so often not masculine in the slightest
i just did a brief check and it seems there's new studies out there that claim the opposite - but it's important to note, there wouldn't be studies done to determine estrogen generation in men due to soy consumption if not for the fact that so many prior studies argued as such
pretty sure it's well-established eating soy leads to negligible increases if any. but there's a market out there for research that confirms someone's priors or life preferences
Actually I think she over-performed with (American) Jews. Not based on history, but based on expectations Jews might defect due to the administrations tepid response to domestic antisemitism since 10/7. Ironically, the reasons she over-performed with Jews is they are not single issue voters. And most American Jews are generally liberal and oppose xenophobia; so they recognize they overall aligned much more with Harris's platform than Trumps.
a liberal nyc jew who married into a well known liberal family sent me this tweet after the election
It's very weird. She explicitly said there was no line Israel could cross that would cause her to reduce funding.
Are they mad she expressed sympathy for civilian suffering?
She even seemed down for war with Iran.
Trump is also very pro Isreal. But he at least ran on peace generally and his supporters are currently clamoring for "war hawks" to be excluded from the cabinet, where Harris campaigned with the Cheeneys.
It's very weird. She explicitly said there was no line Israel could cross that would cause her to reduce funding.
Are they mad she expressed sympathy for civilian suffering?
She even seemed down for war with Iran.
Trump is also very pro Isreal. But he at least ran on peace generally and his supporters are currently clamoring for "war hawks" to be excluded from the cabinet, where Harris campaigned with the Cheeneys.
both were pro israel
fact that qatar expelled all hamas officials the day after trump wins the election is no coincidence
one carries a list of pronouns and the other carries a big stick
It'll be interesting.
Trump is almost unique among US politicians in calling Iraq murder, saying chicken hawks should fight if they love war so much etc.
What I see from Randoms online, Trump influecers and Trumpers I know is a strong preference for peace, including proxy wars. Trump says he'll do it.
Lefty doves either didn't vote for Harris or did so reluctantly. She made it clear she was a firm hawk, surrounded herself with the same. Blue MAGA and MSM are very hawkish. So basically no anti-war element at all.
I think Israel gets carte Blanche with both, but there is almost no chance Harris would impose some kind of peace before Isreal wants it, but Trump might actually stand up to them. Unlikely but possible.
Harris far more likely to start wars with Iran and who knows else. These are Iraq war types.
A lot of what makes us human, men especially, is predicated on posting 50+ times per day about culture wars on internet message boards.
Unironically yes. The stimulus of posting on social media is very easy for the body to confuse with the stimulus that allows us to survive. Else it wouldn’t be so addicting. Just like eating a lot of sugar confuses our evolutionary pathways.
I’m sure you guys are familiar with the pattern of elite athletes holding onto slights / failures from their past in pursuit of greatness. Michael Jordan getting cut in high school is the famous example.
What is going on here?
The survival instinct is pain avoidant, so when you hold onto pain, you are disconnecting yourself from the survival instinct. The survival instinct operates within the Darwinian story (survive + reproduce).
So what story do you enter into when you disconnect and transcend the Darwinian story? What is the story of greatness that these elite performers are engaging? Do you guys ever wonder about this?
*Before responding that this pursuit of greatness is still nested within the Darwinian story (in service of survival and reproduction), pause and realize that you can’t remain in the Darwinian story while actively alienating yourself from your survival instinct. No animal can consciously hold onto pain in this way.
craig, are you saying kamala will come back bigger and stronger in 2028?
I just logged on and saw the comment. Without reading the previous comments, I'm guessing he's saying that it's pointless to spend so much energy bitching and moaning about Trump because it doesn't with help anything, and it's better to adapt to the situation one finds themselves in. To quote one of my favorite songwriters: "We know the government can't improve our lives anyway" and "I have seen the enemy. He looks an awful lot like me."
I’m saying analyzing what a man is or what a human is strictly through Darwinian evolution is dead.
I’m sure you guys are familiar with the pattern of elite athletes holding onto slights / failures from their past in pursuit of greatness. Michael Jordan getting cut in high school is the famous example.
Far more athletes are cut from high school teams and end up going nowhere, so not sure this examples proves anything.
I’m saying analyzing what a man is or what a human is strictly through Darwinian evolution is dead.
Okay, I'll go back and actually read the last few pages to see what you were responding to. I agree with this statement, I think. Humans have developed a certain level of self-consciousness that allows us to transcend our instincts.
I’m sure you guys are familiar with the pattern of elite athletes holding onto slights / failures from their past in pursuit of greatness. Michael Jordan getting cut in high school is the famous example.
What is going on here?
The survival instinct is pain avoidant, so when you hold onto pain, you are disconnecting yourself from the survival instinct. The survival instinct operates within the Darwinian story (survive + reproduce).
So what story do you enter into when you disconnect and transcend t
Depends on how you define the survival instinct. For me when we are talking about evolutionary survival we are talking about passing on your genes, not maintaining your own life. And when we refer to evolutionary success we should refer only to passing on those genes at the very least.
The pain of Michael Jordan helps him to be a high status male which allows him to pass on his genes. That’s the evolutionary advantage of being a great competitor.
That of course doesn’t necessitate that the goal of humans writ large is gene transmission, just the goal of a successful organism from an evolutionary perspective.
The neighbor poll is really interesting to me. I would think, which neighbors? Then I would guess based on demographics.
Obviously, it's effective though.
Anecdotes:
Family member: Richard Simmons super fan that voted for Trump
Friend A: Grew up on Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Still likes those guys and didn't vote for Trump but recently got into Jordan Peterson because the left has gone crazy.
Friend B: Liberal friend who didn't vote because he didn't like either candidate but is clearly happy that Trump won because "**** the Democrats."
I could share more, but the idea is that while I do have friends that moved further to the left in recent years, none of them were Republican voters in the past. However, I do know people who traditionally voted Democrat that flipped.
when normal, otherwise routine deaths happen (like the death of a child or the early death of a parent) we can't cope appropriately.
When child mortality rates were high it was normal for people to have much larger families (and still is in many places). which also provides something of a coping mechanism. But otherwise of course we’ve been able to become much more risk averse in our lives, making deaths less commonplace and harder to cope with.
I’m sure you have a remedy for this though.
Cultural evolution plays a role as well.
I’m saying analyzing what a man is or what a human is strictly through Darwinian evolution is dead.
I don’t think anyone argues for only using Darwinian evolution. We have the same desire to reproduce as other animals, same desire for food, for self preservation and the mammalian desire for sociability. I could go on.
If you ignore these aspects of our existence, you will most often draw the wrong conclusions about human behaviour. That’s not to say evolution is the whole story, but it’s at least as important as environmental explanations, probably more so.
I don’t think anyone argues for only using Darwinian evolution. We have the same desire to reproduce as other animals, same desire for food, for self preservation and the mammalian desire for sociability. I could go on.
If you ignore these aspects of our existence, you will most often draw the wrong conclusions about human behaviour. That’s not to say evolution is the whole story, but it’s at least as important as environmental explanations, probably more so.
It's not even about Darwinian evolution at all for me for this topic (meat eating).
It's about what you are built for, whatever it was that built you that way.
What is the whole story is that we are heavily programmed at a biological level to eat meat (from large mammals especially but not exclusively), which comes with a myriad of other factors that allowed us to eat meat back in the day and so on.
Embracing and accepting human nature works because if you are programmed to eat meat (and all the accompanied elements that come with it) then not doing so will cause distress in various ways.
And it's not like addiction it's more like sex. Not having sex for a long while creates distress even in people who aren't sex addicts.
For many centuries if not millennia there has been this deep fight among intellectuals between the team that considers human nature the devil, something to trascend in order to become "better", and those who consider it anti human not to fully embrace human nature and it's consequences.
It's the de contemptu mundi vs i Carmina Burana, and i of course I am fully Carmina Burana team.
It's stoicism vs bacchanalia.
Savonarola vs the Borgia family.
It's Oscar Wilde vs puritanism.
It's the double masked with 3 doses staying at home vs those having normal spring breaks in 2021.
It embracing life as an orgy of food wine sex wealth power or at least trying to achieve that vs asceticism, temperance as virtue, abstinence from the pleasures of the flesh as moral.
I think I gave the picture
I don’t think anyone argues for only using Darwinian evolution. We have the same desire to reproduce as other animals, same desire for food, for self preservation and the mammalian desire for sociability. I could go on.
If you ignore these aspects of our existence, you will most often draw the wrong conclusions about human behaviour. That’s not to say evolution is the whole story, but it’s at least as important as environmental explanations, probably more so.
I’d prefer to hold ourselves to higher standards than the behavior of other animals.
