What's the most wild and out-there hopium/copium take you've ever heard from a liberal? The more absurd, the better. Give me your biggest whoppers.
What's the most wild and out-there hopium/copium take you've ever heard from a liberal? The more absurd, the better. Give me your biggest whoppers.
Mine's a tie between a near future and a not so near future sci-fantasy bazinga take:
"Self-driving cars are the key to a post-scarcity future!" (when asked how the fuck that conclusion was drawn, I was told "do the research.")
"Even if climate change is proven to actually be a problem, climate doesn't matter in space. We can have fully sustainable cattle farms in orbit producing as much meat as we need. Elon Musk." (yes, that bazinga fuck actually said "Elon Musk" at the end of that claim like it somehow stamped a seal upon the rest of the take)
"Bernie can win" - me four years ago.
"There is hope for the United States" - me four years ago
The biggest one is just the idea that the climate apocalypse can be meaningfully stopped. Like sorry, no, that window closed probably 20 years ago.
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XKCD covered this, it turns out any method of bringing enough ice into Earth's gravity well will release more energy than it will ever cool the planet down by. (In fact simply harvesting the energy of slowly lowering it down would lower emissions and planetary heating far more).
Still, there's a fuckton of investment, organisation, and technology we should be working on to slow change and adapt to a different Earth that would save billions of lives. Sadly we're more busy spending billions on Twitter and luxury cars or whatever.
That is not the point. It's not making it even worse than it is going to become. We are already going to get ass fucked, let's make sure it's not with barbed wire instead of a dildo.
Hillary is light itself was kinda out there.
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It would be hard to believably satirise a yes-man of such devotion
The evergreen one in my mind that I got to dunk on the guy for was, "Joe Biden will fix student debt!"
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Man I'm not even vegan, but cattle farms in orbit is peak carnist nonsense
Oh my God I've never heard this one but it's so stupid it's very funny to me.
I know! I mean do they have any idea hiw much a cattle ranch costs to set up and maintain on Earth? Where grass grows out of the ground and there's oxygen and a water cycle all just happening. Do they have any concept of what it would take to put all that in space. How much does it cost to send shit to space per pound? A full grown steer is over 1,000 pounds!
"Gay people only exist in the west"
I heard a self professed communist say that BDSM only exists in the west
Every ideology is extremely weird about sex, but it sucks seeing leftists deciding that people's consensual sexual preferences are bad and then dying on that hill. It's so easy to just let people be weird, but so many people want to harass people who enjoy sex differently than they do.
Yup, no shibari bondage or anything like that
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Who's this Al guy that everyone keeps talking about? You mean Weird Al Yankovic? He seems pretty cool, but I don't know if he should run everything
Feel like we could do worse, he's a pretty decent guy
We can have fully sustainable cattle farms in orbit producing as much meat as we need
WTF the
take is supposed to be that we'll all live in giant self-sufficient skyscrapers that grow made-to-order beef in bioreactors, not animal agriculture in space! 
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Flavor is stored in the suffering
Bioreactos don't generate suffering. Am I missing something here?
Like this?
animal agriculture, in space!
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NATO is a defensive alliance
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Whatever variations on the theme of streamerbros assuring their audience that they don't need to do the reading ("Just watch my streams where I skim Wikipedia and provide a terminally-online westoid hot take instead - you're actually the smart one because you don't even need to read a book; your opinions are always correct by default! Now that you're sufficiently flattered send me a superchat, you filthy little paypiggies!!")
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You can't judge historical figures by today's moral standards (Often used to run defence for slave-owning US politicians oblivious to the fact that there were people, including political philosophers, of the same era who denounced slavery. Also, fuck you, I'm going to judge people by today's moral standards and there's nothing you can do to stop me.)
The "Can't judge history by modern standards" take is asinine because new information frequently alters or outright negates old information. Asbestos was once regarded as safe for use as insulation, for instance, but as time went on it was determined that it caused mesothelioma. As a consequence, asbestos is no longer regarded as safe by most.
It's also a weird sort of historical revisionism because it implicitly assumes that people in the past were one homogeneous blob which all shared in the identical set of moral standards.
Like, at which point in time did everyone unanimously agree upon moral standards again? Remind me.
Not to mention the fact that it's inherently classist and racist; it might have been considered "moral" to incite pogroms against Jewish people in European history but... that's only according to the people who held the most influential positions in politics and philosophy. You can't tell me that the family of Jewish people who had to flee their village because they risked getting lynched were like:
"This is a terrible tragedy that has befallen us and we have lost everything. However it should be noted that, on the other hand, it is entirely morally-justified."
So when people talk about the moral standards of history, they're talking about the moral standards of those who held hegemonic power over society (and that basically means wealthy white men) to the exclusion of everyone else.
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"I dream of a society in which I would be guillotined as a conservative"
— Proudhon
there's two kinds of "judging history by modern standards",
there's using it as equalizing bleach, 'people of their time', 'i can worship a mass murderer if i want to'---this is navelgazing and ignorant.
and there's trying not to take our 'baggage' with us when we study the past. 'morals' encompasses a lot more than murder and slavery being bad and it's important to try and perceive things as much as practicable in the ways they were in the past. most dramatically and acutely this is reflected in sexuality--the whole 'historian says they were just friends' joke is the result of taking a modern (victorian) moral standard into the past, and misinterpreting evidence around that. people can also do this from a good moral analysis, iirc it was st augustine(?) that had a lot of writing about the importance of sex within marriage--and the good feminist critique of that was interpreting it as cementing patriarchy in christianity, controlling women's bodies. but the particulars of the terminology used has more recently cast doubts on that interpretation, was it actually about telling men not to patronize brothels and their unmarried, -enslaved- workers? that's a pretty dramatically different read we couldn't make if we took our modern prejudices against christianity & marriage into the past but goes some way to explain why early christianity was so popular with women and slaves.
the lazy excusal version of 'judging history' is a pretty typical case of a complicated concept in a field being hazily remembered & used as a rhetorical bludgeon---with a little help from some bad faith professionals using it cynically, of course.
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North Korea actually doesn't have nukes
After only their first test, which was like a 0.5-2kt yield, I can understand this claim somewhat. They could have faked that as a bluff with lots of conventional explosives. Doesn't make so much sense why they would, but it was a plausible interpretation I guess.
Given that their later tests were something like a hundred times that, it's kinda absurd to still try to make the claim
I think libs think of the DPRK as a project of enormous effort to give the illusion of functionality from the last 3 remaining north koreans.
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"Self-driving cars are the key to a post-scarcity future!" (when asked how the fuck that conclusion was drawn, I was told "do the research.")
It's really simple.
Once everyone owns a self-driving car then they will be able to rent out their car as a self-driving taxi to everyone else, thus generating a perpetual cycle of passive income for everyone, at which point we will have achieved a post-scarcity future because everyone will be able to afford everything.
Dumb tankies call themselves materialists and they can't even figure this out themselves smh.
Sometimes I zero in on housing, and NIMBY liberals are their own unique brand of annoying:
"Anyone who's white should move out of cities in blue states and StAy AnD fIgHt in the red states they came from. Wait, what's an invisible minority? Why am I not moving to red states?" Well, ummmm....."
"Stop being entitled and stay in your suburb in the boonies, no one owes you a city life!" (The nanosecond they have something, they start doing the whole bootstraps thing)
"We appreciate that you're trying to save the world, but go save the world somewhere else." an actual quote. They know building more housing is the right thing to do, but they're invested in real estate.
"Just move to Texas/the midwest, bro."
"There's plenty of housing, just please PLEASE live in the boring suburbs in bumfuck nowhere far away from me! Sure, I'll call you redneck trash for doing so, but I need you there so I can have someone to feel superior to!" (not an actual quote, obviously. But this is sort of how they think)
A lot of lib NIMBYism boils down to trying to keep blue cities in blue states as exclusive as possible. Yeah, the dems suck ass, but if I could afford to, I would have fucked off to San Francisco a long time ago.
City NIMBYs and YIMBYs drive me crazy.
On one hand you have people who refuse to build anything claiming neighborhood character. On the other side you have people who have complete irreverence the real aspect of what actually gives cities their unique character.
Like I wish people would:
1: admit architecture unique to regions has played a role in the overall feel of a city
2: admit that not everything plays a big role in #1.
3: Stop doing the leg work for corporate developers who price people out of neighborhoods, turning every area in to a large scale wholefoods themed downtown disney.
There's no winning. Modern developers are doing that thing to cities they did to suburbs. Essentially corporate development architecture and planning that makes nearly every suburban area completely indistinguishable from the next. So many of the new housing developments are in-fact poorly built, lowest bidder 500 sqft micro-apartments that cost a ton to rent out with like 2 affordable units. They're ugly and destroy whole city blocks.
BUT
Not all of these old buildings are worth saving. I'm partial to the old greenpoint multi-family row houses and all the other old brooklyn brick. I wish developers would use more brick. Stop for the love of god with the garish plastic siding. Otherwise, keep building.
The Domino factory development is an example of a really cool way to re-develop. Gut the inside of the landmark, build inside of it. Making the area useful without knocking down this thing that generations of NYers enjoy seeing.
Sure its probably not very affordable inside and me saying all this might make me a :lib
idk this is a silly rant, but I genuinely love to visit new cities and see neighborhoods unique to the area. I hate that our system makes it so the only option to get people into homes is to make everything feel like some Raytheon Acres "Luxury Apartment Home™". For the love of god find an architect and some eccentric real estate VC to make something nice. I want to see weird local shops ran by just some guy. I want less corporate chains making everything the same everywhere. It's so depressing.
"Tech will save us."
Also:
"AI is the greatest advancement for democracy."
Heard in the wild from a tech guy a few years ago after Elmo had bought some AI language translation firm and announced it makes "information accessible for all". He was hyped, hyped for it.
A few months ago he told me that AI will destroy the world and spesifically his job.
Haven't asked him how he thinks all this is going recently because can't handle the takes anymore.
"Manchin will vote with democrats on important shit." Lib defending his vote to confirm Kavanaugh
Capitalism is good because people from (list of countries the US has either bombed or sanctioned to shit) envy our poor!
We also provide them economic growth through sweatshops!
On the topic of the Amerikan revolution. I stated that the revolution was a bourgeoise revolution that did not actually benefit the majority of people. This of course triggered the liberal into arguing Amerika is good actually. I asked, how did the revolution benefit enslaved people? They insisted that being enslaved actually helped those people, and that, had they been emancipated when Amerika revolted it would have caused mass famines and more death and suffering than the enslavement itself caused. They told me they could prove this with, and I quote: "spreadsheets, baby!"
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We can have fully sustainable cattle farms in orbit producing as much meat as we need.
Found the X3 player
(yes, that bazinga fuck actually said "Elon Musk" at the end of that claim like it somehow stamped a seal upon the rest of the take)
Dispair washes over me...
