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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. I love how you don’t even engage with the entire story, just make it be what you want it to be. Complete intellectual dishonesty about what happened because you support their ideals.
  2. The organizers and spokespeople of the campus encampment literally sent a press release that they are going to keep doing this and it’s the natural outgrowth of their little encampment game.
  3. What counter protesters? You posted a video of Israeli settlers in the Middle East. Were there counterprotesters calling for ethnic cleansing at zero dark thirty on UM regents’ yards? Or are doing the thing here, where you insist that no one can correct the behavior of Americans in America until GAZA IS FREE!!! So tiresome.
  4. If harassing regents at home isn’t enough to get you booted from school, what is? These people are grownups. What happens if you show up at your CEO’s house if you arrive at 0400 with a mask and list of demands. These people are coddled beyond belief and it led to unacceptable behavior.
  5. The first step is to stop with the “uWu, he’s just a smol bean, he made a silly mistake.” This action and the 0545 harassment of another regent were deliberately planned and organized. This is not a silly mistake or a stupid college kid, it’s a decision to harass people at home as part of their movement. The answer is give them a deadline, announce that the encampment organizers are inciting inappropriate and dangerous activity, and then at deadline tear the tents down, expel the students still there, and have anyone who comes back get arrested. This whole thing and all these students give off these vibes. https://www.bridgemi.com/talent-education/u-m-board-chair-body-bag-protest-my-home-over-israel-unacceptable?amp
  6. Taking your shit to private people’s houses who are at best marginal to the issue at hand is corrosive and threatening behavior and it’s nuts to argue otherwise. It’s a direct threat to democratic and civil norms, and it’s NOT misguided it is a deliberate tactic. This is the equivalent of dropping off an angry demand to “stop baby genoicide” to a hospital administrator or clinic that provides abortions while masked and under cover of darkness. No one here would (justifiably) dismiss that as anything but beyond the pale, threatening behavior. The Overton window shift is beyond ridiculous: - Students have the right to protest! (YES!) - Students have the right to set up tents as part of their protest! Are you afraid of tents (Maybe…) - They can wear masks and live in the tents as long as their demands aren’t met even if that’s against the rules! Are you afraid of tents and masks! (Why do they need masks? Do they really need to live there!) - They can mask up and come to your house in the dead of night! What are you some wimp who doesn’t want masked prowlers hanging out around your house! (WTF?) Get fucking real people. You do not mask up and skulk around strangers houses at night. That is BY DEFINITION hostile and harmful behavior.
  7. Such a garbage take and you know it. There is a world of difference between someone with a job leaving behind a flyer, on each house of the block and an angry person in a mask showing up specifically to an individual’s house to target them over politics. It’s harassment and intimidation tactics and making a “we know where you live” point. ”Her boyfriend calls her late at night and says he loves her and that they’ll always be together. She loves it when he drops by her work for a kiss or to drop off a latte. But when I call her at midnight from an unknown number and tell her I love her or show up unannounced and ask to see her at work, all of a sudden the police give me a restraining order. But it’s the SAME THING, she’s being overly dramatic.” You’ve just decided you sympathize with these people and nothing can ever be more than “misguided” on their part.
  8. Thirty people come to chant and yell at another regent’s house at 0545, set up tents, leave behind body bags. ”No different than the guy who leaves a Chinese menu or offers to clean my gutters.” Regents are fair game now, of course. They manage investments and so none of them get to live at home quietly.
  9. This is not a politician or a leader or anyone with something to do with Israel. He’s a Michigan U. regent.
  10. This will have zero to no impact on neighbors, who have relegated Slovakia to embarrassing relative (Czechs, Poles) or playground for autocratic stress tests (Hungary). Fico is an autocrat at heart and he (he will likely live) will not let the crisis go to waste. His party and Allies are already upping the calls to clamp down on “liberal” media and claiming they fostered the atmosphere of hate. The shooter is least important, he is likely to be revealed as disturbed. He has some history of racist writings and potentially unclear endorsement of a defunct paramilitary, but his recorded statement cited some common “liberal” complaints. The interesting thing will be how far the government can push this opening to attack the opposition and liberal structures.
  11. Baseball is beautiful and frustrating in that the sheer inborn talent and skill you need to be great is tremendous, as much if not more than any sport. But the gulf is much subtler and less immediate and less “in your face” physical than other games. A smart, very good but not great ball player will make some plays in the field against D1 competition, might get a handle of a couple pitches. But the coach will see— you can NEVER tweak your swing enough, you will NEVER get the extra step base-running, you will NEVER have the arm to make all the throws reliably. It’s hard for you to accept that though. One day on a football field you don’t belong (Rudy notwithstanding) and you will get beat up and pushed around and burned and you’ll know that the field isn’t for you. One day against D1 basketball players and you will get clowned in a way that you can’t lie to yourself about. You can run against a D1 track athlete over and over and over and you will NEVER get lucky and win, or even look like you could one day, same for swimmers. It is obvious and it’s not humiliating—- it’s just a realization that they are a different species than you. Golf is one that convinces people they can really be great if they just keep going.
  12. To be clear, I support parents being behind kids and helping them excel and pursue sports or music or whatever. Just go in with your eyes open and don’t pretend that it’s an investment for a scholarship. Even below the D1 level, doing college sports is absolutely doing college on hard mode and if the goal is education, then make it about education.
  13. Way back in the early 2000s, I had a a friend who played D2 volleyball on a partial scholarship who went over how much cash her dad spent on club teams and travel and etc but “then I got a scholarship so all worth it.” She did not respond well to the info that all that money dropped into a 529 account would have covered the partial scholarship and much more.
  14. Just so we are clear, in the 1950s and 1960s we keep referring to, we imposed taxes of up to 90 percent on the highest bracket, only falling into the 30s in the 1980s (which is when we began to look at the crazy rising CEO pay rate). Raising taxes substantially on the extreme upper end of the compensation spectrum will heavily disincent those sorts of packages and will boost revenue and provide for more services than implementing some sort of “wage speed limit.” The blueprint is all there. To that I’d include a wealth tax and larger inheritance taxes.
  15. Shoigu is arguably getting a promotion. He will be overseeing Russia’s continuing shift to a full wartime economy (lots of $$$) and Belousov will be serving the role of the competent technocrat making some difficult and needed bureaucratic reforms at the MoD. I’ll expect uniformed military to get some promotions and have better oversight over operations. Patrushev is the loser, it’s unclear where he is going.
  16. Musk is trying to drive people to Telegram as a secure messaging app. Don’t do it. Use Signal.
  17. The U.S. was demarching NATO Allies with downgraded intelligence about a likely attack as early as November 2021 and by February 2022 we were bringing them downgraded intelligence that fairly accurately described the opening phases of the invasion and what Putin wanted to accomplish. Some believed us and some didn’t (Germany).
  18. Yep, and they wanted to use Hostomel to airlift in heavy equipment and troops to lead the pressure on Kyiv. The plan was to capture the city and likely decapitate leadership and then watch Ukrainian forces fall apart. Unlike what we did in Iraq, they did not precede any of this with extensive air strikes, because they wanted some element of surprise for the ground invasion.
  19. We assessed that Putin believed and planned that he would capture and cut off Kyiv in a few days, not that we believed it would happen. Based on what the Russians actually did with their invasion force (which was too small and did not bring strategic aviation to bear right away), it’s a safe bet we were right on Putin’s planning and belief. If Hostomel airport goes a different way, then the war maybe also goes a different way.
  20. Russia is not on the brink of collapse internally, they can take a lot more pain and they will. But they also have a cap on what they can accomplish. Ukraine needs to hold on through 2024 and surrender only small chunks and regenerate forces but all of that falls apart without Western arms. The issue is that Ukraine actually had Russia on its heels and could have made bigger gains but we chose not to move quick enough due partly to a fear they can’t digest aid, and party to a fear that a collapse of Russian lines in Ukraine would lead to escalation.
  21. Maybe while we are debating the direct transfer of assets from one class to another class, we could also debate different funding mechanisms for schools? Maybe we can talk about a wealth tax? CEO pay is outrageous but it’s way down the list of what needs to be done here— the problem is the singleminded pursuit of quarterly returns and shareholder value as opposed to long-term health and viability of companies where workforce is a stakeholder as well. Implementing some sort of upper income cap doesn’t fix that.
  22. I don’t consider good public education and better public healthcare “giving it to people poorer than me.” I think that taxes for services and a social safety net is a fairly good model.
  23. If we’re going with “The Guardian is clickbait,” we are just totally gone here.
  24. Lol, that’s what you got from “we should tax people so we have good housing and schools and medicine for everyone..”
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