BETO_Institute [none/use name]
This take is a fucking reach.
brb, verifying with archduke ferdinand that the World is actually only causally effected by “systems,” and that individual actions or contingencies never change the trajectory of path-dependent developments, or have massive world-historical import.
moron.
okay but trump is fucking dead in the water; the only thing that could that could go wrong is if the covid diagnosis somehow redounds to his benefit, by generating sympathy for him, and that only occurs if dems come across as uncaring or spiteful or whatever.
dems fucking suck as a rule, but refraining from running negative trump ads rn isn’t this huge tactical blunder ya’ll are making it out to be.
some monkey paw shit where you get to be president, but only for week until you get your ass handed to you by vice president pudding brain
not obese
The Times of London reports that he’s shared his theory with friends since he left hospital, saying that he was around 17 and a half stone (around 245 pounds) at the time of his infection. At 5 foot 9, that would put his body mass index at around 36, meaning he soars above the point at which adults are deemed clinically obese.
yeah, i guess putting up with your gender questioning teen is sort of like being cucked by your pussy-hound husband, if you really think about it, and also are a fucking cunt.
you can quibble with the example, but it strains credulity to imagine that the every possible version of the world will be so constrained in its development that there is only, in the main, one vector by which everything unfolds. more plausible is recognizing that chance or contingency will produce positive enforcing loops, shaping outcomes in a way that will be materially different from counterfactual worlds wherein that event did not occur. ya;ll know the language of “capitalist realism” – but imagine the kind of thinking, not that there aren’t at present any possible deviations from the current state of affairs, but even that historically, there was no other possibility of anything different.
i’m sure there are some thoughtful metaphysicians that take this view, but it’s deeply unintuitive, necessarily unverifiable, and its blase assertion/implication in the OP is worth ridicule.
maybe in the “long term” there are deep structural factors that would have been suggestive of some teleology or something (not that you could ever know this), but the route by which this unfolds certainly matters to those who travel by it. if WWI (or a similar conflict between imperial powers) was longer in duration, or shorter, it would certainly affect the lives of the people who would live and die through it; many things would “change” for better or worse, contra the OP. these people would care if the duke was assassinated or not.
likewise, Trump’s death, insofar as he could be the vessel for a right-populist cult of personality, after the election, is material-- the same systems will govern the world, but with or without a figure who commands an incredible amount of power, and could instantiate a world of more cruelty. i suppose people who are merely constructed from texts and systems and culture do not worry about such things, but as someone who thinks the world could be more than just one way, and who thinks there should be less cruelty in the world than more of it, i think the question of trump succumbing to covid the next days is a deeply significant and material one, and truly hope he dies.