BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

This is probably the most irrelevant takeaway from that 20 minute video, but is there REALLY a line of men's products called "mando?"

that's just the momentum from biden, obama, clinton.

uziq wrote:

where is anyone proposing that, you dipshit? why is reading salient policy thinkers/advisers paramount to 'doing nothing'? that's how good governance has mostly always taken place, you idiot.

i mean, what do you even propose? putting a bunch of people totally inexperienced in government in positions of seniority, presumably approving of them reading or learning nothing about the organisations they helm, and making drastic cuts? letting oligarchs strip mine the organs of state?

you parrot the lame populist shit about 'being tired of experts' but you know full-well that elon hasn't got a clue how to run a government. you would genuinely rather let a person set back the west a generation in the global multi-polar world just because they have a STEM background and make comic book meme jokes, and because their actions spite 'liberal elites'. totally unproductive, ideologically motivated claptrap.

you genuinely think that your position of golf-clapping at the unfolding circus is somehow 'wise'. why a middle-aged man adopts this edgy online edgelord persona, i'll never know. even more mystifying, you're reading reich -- literally the sort of career insider you otherwise rail against. okay, then, don't read a world-renowned analyst, read listicles from a stooge of the liberal establishment.

i mean, do you actually have a clue or is it all attitudinal posturing with you, all the way down? tooze is widely regarded as one of the leading authorities today on the crisis we face - why wouldn't you want to read him to orient yourself? it's not 'inaction' to get your analytical bearings, ffs. the anti-intellectualism you espouse while on the other hand insisting on high-IQ types is really fascinating. a case study in insular maladaptation. one would think your main animus against humanities types, after all, is that they do read this stuff and do care enough to acquire a clue what they're talking about. your impatience with that isn't indicative of your higher understanding or politick, dilbert.

Just on climate we've had 50+ years of research, 30+ years of conferences.
Do we need another 30 COP meetings?
Do we need 85,000 people flying somewhere every year for no purpose?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Na … Conference
We do not.

Everyone knows the issues, everyone knows the solutions, no-one, people like you, is willing to do anything.
Of course they aren't, they want to carry on talking and not making painful decisions while they do laps of the world to photograph themselves for instagram.

i was referring to the political crisis and you start talking about instagram photos. aww, honey.

you haven’t found a solution dilbert.  you’re a low-participation recluse and a loser. as soon as you venture outside - 'just taking a drive to get out the house', etc - you’re implicated in the same climate change debates as anyone else. as is well-established, as soon as you want for something, you don't think twice about its carbon footprint or whatever. ‘live at home, never meet anyone and don’t have friends’ is not a globally exportable solution to the climate crisis. you continually do this martyred saint act as if the sad life you’ve found for yourself was ‘chosen’ in order to save the planet. actually you’re just a gimp.

i took a long distance flight to introduce the woman i’m going to be with to my family. my mother can’t travel because she won’t leave my brother’s bedside. my grandparents are very old. my uncle has MS. actually very few of my close family can come to east asia.

as someone whose family emigrated i'm sure you’ve never had to go between the UK or australia for weddings, funerals, arrange legal matters and estates, to visit relatives or old friends, or to transport stuff. give me a fucking break with the ‘travel to take instagram photos' stuff. it makes you look pathetic, man. people take photos and have a nice time when they travel! you sad act.

it's really unbelievable that you keep trying to use international flights as a cudgel in this discussion. dude, your whole family emigrated to the other side of the world. presumably you didn't do it by boat, passing cape horn in hazardous seas, etc. no, presumably you all got on a plane. presumably also you transported some or quite a lot of possessions with you. that single excursion alone probably puts you in, like, the top 1% of humans that have ever walked this green earth in terms of emissions. maybe shush?

but let me guess ... your family emigrating and incurring a big carbon footprint was a matter of absolute necessity, right? and anyone else doing that journey ... is leading a life of foppish luxury, right? you do realise this is how pubescent 13 year olds comprehend real life, right? ‘everyone else is dumb, selfish, and hypocritical automatons, but not me, no, i have perfectly valid and very rational reasons for all the things i do’. grow up, i beseech ye. it may even lead you to think more clearly about evidently very important and pressing issues.

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clearly the science on climate change isn’t the issue. i’m not calling for a pause in activity while we gather more data, am i? i’m saying it’s a good idea to read commentary and analysis on fast-changing events in global politics. if you can’t see the difference, i don’t know how to help you. reading adam tooze isn’t ’stalling’ on action, moron. you would hope any policy-maker is continually reading and keeping themselves apprised of new information and analyses. it’s called being well-informed and it used to be thought of as integral to healthy democracy. of course, now your brand of philistine populist is in power, reading is an elitist activity. you really just sponsor the dumbest fucking opinions in order to excuse your laziness and incuriosity. but hey, make some more pithy remarks and post some more memes! it’s the right-wing soup du jour.

Last edited by uziq (2025-02-27 04:32:31)

cats should have an enclosed outdoor space they can chill in without mixing with the local wildlife. it's all the rage, you know. it's weird to me that as the high-level cat person you are, with the resources and possibly skill to DIY make this happen, or the money to subcontract it, that you're skipping out.

even if they still want to hang out with you and bother you with their attempts to connect and interact throughout the day, it would still be a nice gesture.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

cats should have an enclosed outdoor space they can chill in without mixing with the local wildlife. it's all the rage, you know. it's weird to me that as the high-level cat person you are, with the resources and possibly skill to DIY make this happen, or the money to subcontract it, that you're skipping out.

even if they still want to hang out with you and bother you with their attempts to connect and interact throughout the day, it would still be a nice gesture.

The Cat is fairly uninterested in the outdoors, she's occasionally take out on a lead but spends most of the time lying under a bush.

We don't want her unsupervised as she'll eat lizards which are full of nasty stuff and she'll get eaten by mosquitos.

If I had a gun to my head I think I could probably find it in me to assemble a pre-fab cat-house, if the instructions were clear.

https://x.com/jayelharris/status/189525 … 7OKnIcMVqg

you’re no different from these people. plunge in with both feet and gleefully express an impatience with analysis and thinking. then, whups.

no people haven’t been analysing the same thing for the last 2000 years? in what sense is ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘fascism’ or any of the terms in that book older than an implied modernity of about ~90 years?! do you think it’s a waste of time to analyse the material of living history or contemporary politics?

And here we are, everyone is carrying on as normal - or in fact worse - and saying we need more time to discuss it.

lmao. literally nobody said that. stop being dumb, dilbert. reading political commentary or policy analysis, as and when things unfold, is not ‘saying we need more time to discuss things’. it’s part of the process of intelligent political deliberation. maybe you wouldn’t understand this because, long ago, politics seemingly became a matter for you of calcified personal bitterness. again, the content of said reading/writing covers a lot more than that narrow category of issues that require scientific-technological understanding and solutions. where’s the ‘scientific consensus’ on china, pray tell?

The point is there's literally no problem which is either not fully understood or thoroughly debated to death - with all the footnotes and reference to go with it.

lmao.

you’re obtuse and incurious. don’t try and present your quitting on life as a cogent worldview.

so far, your ‘it’s time for action’ talk only seems to translate to applauding oligarchs when they cite a marvel movies meme or make a lame joke, like a seal at seaworld clapping its little flippers and hoping they’ll eventually toss you a fish. no thanks. i’ll continue reading and discussing issues with people as part of my engagement with politics, instead of your brand of bitter resignation to and coaxing of authoritarianism.

what exactly is the sense in this act of yours? you talk as if the climate science from 30 years ago is the biggest determinant of your politics. but then you delight in right-wing populist movements that are all massively upscaling fossil fuel extraction and burning environmental regulations. all your tech billionaire heroes have fantasies of getting off planet. these fascists aren’t environmentalists, dilbert? nothing about all your posturing makes any fucking sense.

in 2017, musk left an advisory council to the first trump administration when it threatened to leave the paris accord. now, in the second term, he is at the very heart of a government that ... is tripling down on wantonly environmentally destructive policies. why have you dovetailed this discussion of politics into a specifically climate-based debate? none of the things you have been cheering on are in any way good for the environment, LMAO. impatience with the boring analysis and discussion of ordinary democratic political process is not as intelligent as you think it is.





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and keep coping about me taking a long-distance flight once every 1.5 years for approx. the last 4 years of my life. i’ve done the europe-asia journey 3 times (and the flight to east asia is more or less half the distance of the flight to australia, derp).

tell me, do you think overall the world would be better off if everyone moved to a lifestyle more like mine, or one more like yours?

for >325 days a year my transport footprint is entirely on foot, by bike, or utilising very short distance mass transit. maybe once or twice a month i’ll take a medium-distance train or bus. i have never owned a personal vehicle in my life. i have never driven solo for 100s of kms. i work from home and do not commute. i live in extremely high density housing. i eat meat a few times a week, which could probably be improved, admittedly; but i don’t eat an american (or australian, for that matter) diet high in gigantic portions of red meat and dairy or other methane-producing livestock. i consume small amounts of meat including fish. i shop for things infrequently, and when i do it’s typically limited to very purposive spending on a boutique or locally produced item. i don’t support fast fashion, in my lifestyle i'm far from what you'd call consumerist, and i'm not taking deliveries for minor items 3-4 days a week.

you live in vast suburban sprawl and have to get in a car and drive to get milk. you commute to work seemingly out of boredom and lack of social contact. everything you need is a journey or delivery away, meaning cars and space and endless stretches of concrete.

do you think if 7 billion people on this planet adopted your model of living, the climate crisis would solve itself? the suburban middle-class dream of owning your own detached property with 2-3 cars on the driveway, aircon blasting through several hundred square metres of rooms, and a perfectly manicured green lawn out front is one of the LEAST sustainable lifestyles ever adopted in the history of mankind, dipshit. even if everyone switched to EVs tomorrow, this lifestyle of driving around everywhere alone for every single necessity is singularly unachievable with the resources budget and emissions ceilings that we have. what would the environmental externalities look like for manufacturing another billion EVs?

but yeah, harp on again with this line that i am only travelling ‘to take instagram photos’ and not for reasons as emotionally/personally valid as anything your family have done. do you know how sad and pathetic it makes you look when you gripe about the environment at people for introducing their partners to their family? lol. i’m sorry but you’re not going to make anyone feel guilty, that way.

you seem to think being vegan and living in a state that gives solar power to 1% of the australian population makes your lifestyle one of impeachable environmental probity. head firmly stuck in the sand over there, methinks.

get a life and i’m sure all these issues you delight in declaring ‘solved and closed’ will suddenly acquire new and manifold relevances.

Last edited by uziq (2025-02-28 04:06:16)

yeah, introducing your future spouse to your family by zoom and never having in-person contact before one of the major decisions of your life. not wanting to introduce your significant other to close family members before they die. just get them on the phone!

you know, i'm really not surprised you're a lonely ingrown person.

meanwhile, you shill for the globally powerful like a lickspittle fascist - those who really are destroying the planet at an ever-increasing rate. instead, you indulge in virtue olympics and puritanical lifestyle shaming, like the climate emergency is a matter of consumer choice and the package holiday industry. very intelligent politics chap!

This argument "The climate is important right up to the moment it impacts my personal life" is a pervasive problem and you're the same.

as exactly are you? i don't see any difference. you laud yourself for the things you're doing out of automatic habit or sheer preference, and try to turn it into some sort of self-sacrificing virtue signal. it's not. you don't deny yourself anything. your family didn't move to that state because of its impressive solar energy statistics. you haven't NOT left australia in 20 years because you want to save the planet - you're just at the arse-end of the world, a 9 hour flight away from anywhere interesting, and you don't have any friends or significant others to even visit. it's not exactly OBE/MBE-type public service, is it? you haven't made a single considered choice or cut back on a single aspect of your lifestyle thinking 'wait a minute, the planet ... !'

4.6t for one round trip every 1.5 years = 3t/yr - and thats assuming economy,  no feeder flights.
My car, 225g/km and 10,000km/yr = 2.25t/yr

yeah, nice napkin math. that imperial education really did you well. now expand the data window from the last 3-4 years in which i actually have taken several long-distance flights, to the last 15 years of our working lives. again: i have never commuted in or owned a personal vehicle in my entire life. what's your lifetime driving emissions like compared to my 20s spent living in a city within a 15 minute walk of the office?

not to mention, when you emigrated to australia the fuel and flight technology would have been an order of magnitude worse for the environment in terms of emissions.

you're easily in the top 1% of humans to have contributed to the destruction and despoliation of earth. you live in a technologically advanced, materially rich (from ore and fossil fuels extraction, natch) society in the 21st century. your expectations of middle-class comfort and amenity represent an ENORMOUS carbot footprint relative to, erm, 95% of all other human beings currently alive on this planet. what you take for granted - what you congratulate yourself for - is simply not as exportable to the middle-mass of humanity as my lifestyle.

this weird misbegotten notion you have that's critical of city-living and thinks it's more 'wasteful' by having a horn of plenty and conveniences on your doorstep, which is a talking point in the lunatic and paranoiac fringes of the alt-right, is scientifically illiterate. high-density housing and '15 minute cities' are far, far better proposals than transforming vast tracts of countryside into endless suburban sprawl. we've had this discussion before and it was equally dumb then.

Last edited by uziq (2025-02-28 04:22:59)

lol so in two short posts we’ve gone from ‘try to make uziq feel bad for flying to asia, for the 563rd time’ to ‘no; i think our lifestyles are easily comparable’.

sounds like a wise retreat  

and i am fine with discussing the obvious carbon footprint of my lifestyle and cities, for what they are. everyone has an impact. but i’m not the one continually diverting all discussions, no matter how irrelevant, into my eco-credentials. that’s you, when you are evidently a saint of the ‘blind and deaf’ variety when it comes to inconvenient facts about your own lifestyle.

‘cities are built of things’. yes well done. i forgot you were living in suburbs made of balsa wood and wattle and daub, still driving along cattle tracks in the sand and mud. the point is high-density living in very modestly sized apartments is a helluva lot better than the mcmansion model that was sold by the Ford boomer generation along with their absolutely necessary motor vehicles.

if the majority of the planet could be encouraged to live in high-density clusters where all their needs were within walking distance or a short public transport journey, we would be in a much better place than any number of vegan or EV feelgood initiatives you’re talking about. don’t be so fucking stupid.



because leaving your lawn-and-sprinkler suburb to sit and idle in this for 40 minutes a day is the truly virtuous lifestyle. it’s so funny to me that you focus on 1-2 flights and just ignore the daily, long-term, chronic inefficiency of suburban living.

i mean, at least have the intellectual honesty to admit that you're in defence of your current lifestyle because you simply like having lots of open space, your own privacy, a detached property, a bit of land to grow a garden, plant fruits, dig a patio, etc. without there being 1000s of other humans pressing down upon you and looking into your common spaces. who wouldn't? that's the luxury of your chosen lifestyle - that which precisely can't be rolled-out at scale to hundreds of millions more people. you live in a state with a population smaller than my neighbourhood ffs.

Last edited by uziq (2025-02-28 04:48:32)

yes and how many years have you driven a car for over your lifetime, on top of your own occasional long-haul flights? jesus christ use that engineering brain of yours. so 4 long-haul flights in my entire life means i've incurred a far greater carbon debt than you? lol. i really don't think you can comprehend that there has never been a time in my life when i've commuted to work. i've never driven a car to a vast exurban warehouse grocery store, parked up in a sea of concrete, to then transport my food 30 minutes back to my place. that has never, at any stage in my ~20 years of independent living, been a part of my lifestyle.

which is why i make the rather simple point: would it be better if the majority of humanity went down the path of development more towards your car-oriented suburban life, or shacked up in high-density car-free lifestyles like mine? make u think. use that MSc of yours to ask what makes the greater cumulative difference?



ironically, in this same debate you used to regularly hate people citing per capita statistics at you. 'but china and india contribute far more en masse!'

again, you can't just load your entire virtue signalling act on being vegan, as if that absolves every other aspect of your lifestyle that is wasteful or far, far above the global mean when it comes to carbon footprint. i'm conscientious of the fact that almost everyone needs to cut back on meat consumption and change their diet in some way, and i eat meat-free meals several days a week. i'm making micro-adjustments to my lifestyle there. am i going to deny myself meat forever, particularly when moving to new a country/culture for the first time? obviously not. again, it's about a simple utilitarian sense of 'what makes the greater difference'?

i've always found your zooming-in on the minutiae of consumer choices in this debate to be spurious, and borderline disingenuous. the world isn't going up in a great conflagration because of urban millennial 35-year-olds like me, WFH in their tiny apartments, eating meat occasionally (for the record, i don't eat a burger or steak once a week; once a month more like) and - gasp! - occasionally ticking off major rites of passage in life by introducing their partners to their families. your idiosyncratic personal grievances and animosities really need to be wound in, at some point, to think clearly about the world picture. it seems as if you reserve most of your odium and invective for harmless luvvies employed in the arts and left-wing millennial hipsters? lol. yeah, they're really strip-mining the planet. those are the bad guys! get them!

by contrast, you are completely sanguine about and give a free-pass to the type of economic activity (say, the vast-scale ore extraction that keeps the australian state coffers well stocked) or social classes which genuinely do make a big impact, but rather want to bully other people who are more or less swimming in the same waters as you, nudging them in the ribs with your sharp elbows, as if it's really going to fix a fucking thing. it's alllll so tiresome, and doesn't really come across as the behaviour of the most level-headed person.

what exactly is the sense in this act of yours? you talk as if the climate science from 30 years ago is the biggest determinant of your politics. but then you delight in right-wing populist movements that are all massively upscaling fossil fuel extraction [in the name of the sorts of nativism and ethno-nationalism you have vociferously supported] and burning environmental regulations. all your tech billionaire heroes have fantasies of getting off planet. these fascists aren’t environmentalists, dilbert? nothing about all your posturing makes any fucking sense.

Last edited by uziq (2025-02-28 06:13:43)

when it comes to transport and habitation, there are so many changes that could be made and incentives rolled-out that would improve the climate prognosis. the problem is that people ensconced in the suburbs really quite like their feeling of the family castle, their privacy, the homogeneity of their neighbourhoods, etc. evidently, when it comes to saving the planet, a preference for being away from dirty foreign hordes in major cities and entrepôts is a higher priority.

attacking WFH millennials who make long-distance flights on average once every 5 years is just so funny, in the grand scheme of things. yeah, punch down/lord it over the car-free 20- and 30-somethings who are all already earnestly voting for green/redistributive parties (or else the neofascist ones that dilbert quite likes) ... and not, say, the frequent flyers and business class? who precisely could switch most of their meetings and engagements to zoom or business email? or,  hey, what about the class of career science researcher who literally have departmental budgets for flying around to far-flung corners of the world to gather in conference centres and give presentations? an entire profession relies on that for its lifeblood.





i'm sure engineers and materials scientists can only do their jobs properly by gathering in croatia. i mean, this is the STEM researcher's version of 'just driving to the office to get out the house and have human contact'.

it's not even as if millennials or people of my generation are in the habit of taking annual family holidays 'abroad', as was the case for my parents' and grandparents' generation, in which international trips were seen as aspirational and part and package of middle-class luxury. 'staycations' are hip amongst my peers. i've been on many more vacations to other places in the UK, weekends away with girlfriends, train trips to paris, etc. than i have ever done the 'package holiday to a beach hotel resort' thing like those of dilbert's age grew up with.

the whole logic of blaming everything on personal choice and consumption patterns is, of course, a coup of PR companies and ad agencies, employed by big fossil fuels and petrol companies expressly for the purposes of stalling progress. you know, those companies that dilbert has stock portfolio investments in. and then he cries, 'the science has been settled for 30 years! why aren't we making progress!' while simultaneously doing the work of the petro CEOs by guilt-tripping zoomers. lmao.

Last edited by uziq (2025-02-28 06:36:29)

Uzique, my thinking has kind of shifted to where Newbie is at. He often complains about consumers being guilt tripped into changing their habits while CEOs live in McMansions. I get that.

It is also why I think the kind of collective action sort of politics is dead for a generation. It is impossible to try to talk people into having more sustainable lives while you also see Instagram influencers drive Lambos with bimbos in the doomed city of Miami.

Collective action on a lot of things is dead. I made a post at the beginning of the pandemic that was like "this is going to be the end of the push for universal healthcare. People will not want to share resources with more people." Probably right on that.

RTHKI wrote:

Good news mac, we're getting rid of all the public workers

The stock market is a mess and consumer confidence is dropping. I don't want to be like those Republicans who said the sky was falling in 2009 and 2021 when Obama and Biden were in office. But nothing the new administration has done gives me confidence.

And I also have a small appetite for destruction regarding the whole DOGE thing.

Conservatives and middle American types have complained about how much modern society sucks. Make their fantasy a reality. Just collapse the entire system. I am not an accelerationist who thinks collapsing the whole thing will result in a New Deal Democrat coalition being reborn. I just want to see how hard things could become for Americans after they willed it to happen.