The same way Christian Zionists believe Jews need to go to Israel for the rapture to happen, I believe Bolsonaro has to go to the hospital for a vibe shift to take place. Things are gonna get weirder.

Felons can't vote, but they can be elected.

Distinguished megathread denizens,

I have acquired a Mageblood in Path of Exile

I don't remember that, but they've been dunking on libs a lot in their last couple of videos about Palestine so I can excuse a little bit of radlib brainworms.

If you have to go back to the time where agriculture was first being developed to find a jump in quality of life comparable to what Communism brought to China, does that not show that Communism brought about an enormous improvement to the Chinese people? Even if it technically isn't the most significant improvement in all of history (which is still kind of a fuzzy thing to quantify)?

And how is it relevant that they only improved the quality of life of their own people, beyond just being pedantic about the claim "largest increase of quality of life in human history"? Like, was it necessary for Mao to invade all the neighboring countries and modernize them too so they could qualify? Very strange way to move the goalposts.

I had some suspicion about Skip Intro but they seem mostly fine so far. Unproblematic slop exists, I have seen it.

(also, what do you mean she was outed? she's been pretty clear about being a lib for at least about a year)

• Monster or Liberator? by Carlos Martinez
• How did Mao manage to kill ~78 million people? by Godfree Roberts
• The Long Game and Its Contradictions. Audiobook
• The Rise of the Chinese People's Communes by Anna Louise Strong

I see you're defending your heroes by parsing words and cherry-picking books and news and rallying your arguments (and propaganda) to defend them. I expected nothing less from you; it's exactly the same thing a Trump supporter would do.

Meanwhile you do something a million times more honorable and simply refuse to confront new information, dismiss it all as propaganda, and say your opponent is equal to a Trump supporter (for what? for having principled stances that he backed up with multiple sources? How often do Trump supporters back up their claims with sources that aren't PragerU videos or AI generated images?). You're implying that Dessalines is being intellectually dishonest when he has done nothing incorrect in this conversation: he made a claim to counter your unsourced claim, cited his sources, and when you refused to learn anything at all he's just calling you out for falling back on Western propaganda. Is any of that wrong?

This kind of post-truth nihilism is completely fruitless. If you dismiss evidence that contradicts your preconceived notions on the basis that evidence against other unrelated facts might also exist, then the only valid beliefs are the ones you already have. You've arrived at an epistemological position that rejects all new knowledge and positions all knowledge you already have as infallible.

Why not evaluate the claims and their evidence, instead of starting from the position that any defense of Mao is comparable to defending the Nazi Holocaust? Not to mention, if you did come across a group of Holocaust deniers, is this really the weak response you'd give them? Not even going to produce any evidence in support of your own claims?

If you go far enough right, half of them start to hate cops because they see cops infiltrate their nazi groups. The other half are cops. I think the ones that hate cops generalize that to firefighters.

Real question: does Grok actually have a mechanism to find data about what supporters and critics are saying about an issue, or is it just making a guess about what supporters and critics might plausibly be saying?

Between this and Iran closing the strait, we live in a time where sensible environmental policy can only be achieved via geopolitical intrigue.