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ArjinFerman

Tinfoil Gigachad

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joined 2022 September 05 16:31:45 UTC
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User ID: 626

ArjinFerman

Tinfoil Gigachad

2 followers   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 05 16:31:45 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 626

Verified Email

The fixation I’ve observed on this forum with the 2020 riots is certainly interesting.

Riots are not exactly an uncommon part of political life, yet judging from what I’ve read from many posters here these seem to have been the formative event for many right wing posters.

My gym teacher in primary school was an alcoholic. All the kids would watch him show up for work obviously drunk, do the bare minimum required by the bureaucracy (check if all the kids are present), throw us a ball and tell us to play, and he'd lock himself in his office to drink some more.

He never did anything terribly bad because of it, but he did neglect his duties rather egregiously, and possibly the most frustrating thing about it was all the adults gaslighting all the kids about it. I told my parents, and they'd say "can't be, someone would have done something about it". We'd tell the teachers and they'd either change the subject, or go off on us for impugning our coach's integrity.

Anyway, some years passed, I went on to go to high-school and forget about the whole affair. I then ran into an old friend from that school, we catch up on what we've been up to, and then he tells me some news he heard recently - our old coach was fired, got caught red-handed by the principal. So I take these news to my parents and they say "why are you acting so shocked, you were telling us all these years that he wa an alcoholic!".

Story unrelated.

Where were we? Ah, yes. Riots happen, you're absolutely right. There was nothing special about this riot, or the way the Blue Tribe, including half this forum (which included moderators) talked about it.

A lot of right-wingers around here like to spread this whole idea of high and low trust societies. Okay, fine. Here is a mini-society, and Trump is almost singlehandedly making it a low-trust relation full of perpetual suspicion and mistrust. Maybe he's "owning the libs", but at what cost?

I agree with you that trying to quantify it is a futile task, but I would like someone to explicitly take into account some very obvious counter-arguments before making their conclusion. If we juxtapose Trump's lies with things like "racism is a public health emergency, therefore protests are perfectly fine", maybe it will still turn out that he is the worst in terms of damaging societal trust, but it's far from obvious to me, and I don't think people should get to just assert that, and act like everybody agrees with them.

Another thing I'd like to see is some direct comparisons to past presidents. Even if you want to go with the "Republicans bad" framing, it is again rather counter-intuitive for me that anything Trump said could be as bad as George Bush lying the country into the war in Iraq.

across the country and a couple dozen extra murders?

*Thousand.

There may have been only dozens of deaths directly connected to the riots, but the increase in the murder rate following the police withdrawal (which not only merely followed the riots, but was explicitly demanded by the protesters) accounted for thousands of lives lost.

Cynically, I think if the rioters had decided to loot in the suburbs, the Dems would have been more likely to send the cops.

Wasn't the place where the Rittenhouse affair took place a suburb?

Not much to report, been refactoring as per last week. I think it will have some pretty cool cnsequences, like simplifying the import code, but I actually have to get there first.

Anything on your side @Southkraut?

It's not true speech, it's a lie that uses truth to mask itself, making it more dangerous, because it's more likely to be believed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump

So? Wikipedia is well known for slanted coverage of anything political, it's no surprise their edditors would autistically catalogue every misleading statent from him, and refuse to do the same for other politicians.

Anyway, don't many of his supporters acknowledge that he lies a lot, but say his lies are good car salesman style lies, whereas other politicians may not lie but they are selective with what they include and what they omit?

Yeah, and I think it's dishonest to pretend the former is worse than the latter.

in a country presided over by one of the most prolific liars in history seems absolutely risible.

Where are you getting the idea he's any worse than any other politician, or even journalist or academic?

I’m not going to dox myself to make a point, but back when I was a politician I wrote under my real name in support of Jyllands-Posten posting the Danish cartoons, and against prosecuting David Irving for Holocaust denial.

I was originally flabbergasted by your post, so I had to take a step back, mull it over, read it over a few more times, and hope it would help. I don't think it did...

First of all, definitely do not dox yourself, it won't really prove your point, because the issue isn't that I don't believe you. The issue is that for over 10 years we've been seeing an ever-escalating cycle of speech-controls coming from the left. Now, my memory is kinda sketchy, and I do tend to remember some thing better than others, but I simply do not recall you expressing that much of an issue over that. Now that the right retaliates with a fraction of the force the left was applying for over a decade, you call McCarthyism. This is the basic state of where we're at.

Now, in order to show me that you did actually have an issue with left-wing speech control, you bring up... cases from over two decades ago? How is that addressing my concerns? What I want to hear from you, and people from your side, is that if I burn political capital (such as it is) with my side in order to enforce a "free speech" rule for all, you'll do the same when your side starts transgressing, and won't just slink back under a rock, wait for it all to blow over, and call me a McCarthyist for not raising a finger in your side's defense once they're out of power again. I'm sorry, I'm already pushing 40, I don't have time to play Charlie Brown in political cycles that take decades to play out.

I'm also not sure what point you think you're making when you talk about citing "Exiting the Vampire Castle". You did it a whopping 4 times total, including this post, and it was always to litigate some point about chronology, and never to show a left-winger how they're doing leftism wrong.

Re. The international angle, various people in the US, most recently when explaining what Charlie Kirk was pushing back against, have talked about the climate of fear that wokestupid created in US universities and PMC workplaces.

Right, and your previous point was how this climate of fear prevents various critical sectors of society from doing it's job properly. I'd argue that norms like "don't make fun of victims of political assassinations" is far less harmful to the work of these sectors than norms like "don't talk about riots being ineffective at political persuasion", or "don't talk about the impossibility of men becoming women".

was worse for you than it was for us

I'm not an American, and don't live in America.

Fining people for teaching dogs the Roman salute is bad, but a lot more people want to make small donations to right-wing causes or say that there are only two sexes than teach the Roman salute to dogs.

You literally just arrested Graham Linehan for making fun of trans people. Your government arrests ~30 people per day, over tweets. This includes criticizing progressives for being too authoritarian by arranging their flag in creative ways

The UK courts have ruled explicitly that saying there are only two sexes is not a firing offence, and I’m not aware of a case where a British employer even tried to fire an employee over a normie-level political donation.

Yeah, the court has ruled so in response to Maya Forstater getting fired. The case had to go all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the ruling was extremely controversial. How did you end up thinking that this shows that the British workplace culture less censorious than the American one?

Wokestupid cancel culture created fear, anger, hate, division, and above all retardation which broke things I care about - and not because of the specifics of what was cancelled. The backlash to wokestupid got us Brexit and the Trump tariffs, which also broke things I care about.

Again, I've seen you talk a whole lot more about one than about the other.

If Hasan Piker gets killed tomorrow you think it will be well-behaved reactions in general from the Right?

Yes. You will get nothing like the sadistic glee that came from the left. The most you'll get in terms of similarity will be "wait, seriously, we're doing it for this guy?" if the left chooses to go full national mourning over it, the way the right did for Kirk (and even then I'm not sure, because Hassan Piker is a way better choice for a saint than George Floyd was).

What backfired was pissing off Elon enough that he started talking about buying Twitter, and then having a judge force him to actually buy it, because they thought they'd be owning him this way somehow. Were it not, we'd be living under president Kamala Joy, you wouldn't be hearing about half of the news we're talking about now, and the ones you would be hearing about would be fully framed within the progressive narrative.

It's depressing how short people's memories are.

There were a long series of religious right-motivated censoring movements in the 90s (and not to mention the Dixie Chicks and Freedom Fries stuff following 9/11)

The Dixie Chicks can barely even be called a boycott, let alone censorship, and "freedom fries" is just a way of saying "fuck France", again I fail to see how it prevented anyone from speaking their mind.

The only consistently free speech people have been the centrist democrats (Liberals who want higher taxes) and centrist republicans (Liberals who want lower taxes).

The moment you start criticizing the core ideas of liberalism, liberals start doing the same deplatforming campaigns that the far left does, using the exact same arguments.

Ah yes, Stalin, the famous good-faith negotiator.

If it was disavowed, why did people who stabbed, tasered, threw bombs at, or otherwise attacked cops get pardoned?

Because what they were subjected was a kangaroo court that was an affront to justice.

But I notice that the right seems to be trying to bring back the worst parts of 2021 era cancel culture

These aren't the worst parts, it's some of the mildest ones, and it's not bringing them back, they never left. I have sympathy for principled free speech advocates, but the way they act these things are perfectly symmetrical detracts from their point.

We can always just counter by pointing out how many of the same people opposing trans kids have also defended circumcision.

You won't finish the sentence without your own side shouting you down, and it will look like a pathetic attempt at deflection if you do. It's like trying to fend off the opiod addiction scandal by saying "but what about all the people abusing marijuana and alcohol!!!".

Think for 3 seconds why this argument has never left obscure internet fora.

Personally I think chopping off a baby's genitals with a meat cleaver is a little worse than letting them dress in opposite-sex clothes.

Ah yes, transgender care is fameously done without it he applications of meatcleavers to genitals, and other body parts.

Anyway, I think circumcission is pretty bad, but it's medical consequences aren't even in the same galaxy as the stuff being performed on children in the namw of transgenderism.

An unwoke democratic party would

...have to come into existence, before you can start dreaming about what it can do.

P.S. Last thread appears to be the most comments in site history

We've had people dooming and glooming over our decline, and while there were bigger thrads back on reddit, the primary reaaon for reduced activity is that nothing was happening. But when things happen, they happen here as well.

But like he said, lots of people want to live there. And who wants laissez-faire anyway?

I'm not in America so this isn't about me - I'm mostly worried about the damage to the system from another round of purges. McCarthyism was on track to break the system if it hadn't been stopped by the Army-McCarthy hearings.

I'm trying to find a way to move the conversation forward and not dredge up the past, but when I hear stuff like this it's really hard. Like, how come you never mentioned all your worries about the system when every other anti-woke here was doing so? How come the spectre of McCarthyism didn't worry you enough to bring it up, when it was progressives doing it?

And is "I'm not in America" a good argument for you? Your country is literally arresting people for tweets, and you're worried about people getting fired an ocean away from you?

You might be right, but at the moment you're freaking out over getting hit with a fraction of the force you were dishing out over a decade, so I don't know if you're qualified to gauge demand exceeding supply, or who is likely to spiral out of control.

It's a safe-edgy position

It's only a testament to how far we've come that liberals are describing it as "safe-edgy".

The constant drumbeat of trans bad will just sound like bullying the longer it goes on

We don't need to rely on "trans bad" and bullying. We can go after the doctor Mengeles that pushed the practice on unsuspecting parents of vulnerable children, we can go after corrupt academics, we can go after healthcare providers that cynically used this fad to extract money. We can keep hammering this issue longer than you can imagine, outflanking you from the left as we're doing so.

The true depth of this scandal is yet to hit the mainatream, and if it does, you will be looking at the innocent days of the year of Our Lord 2025 with wistful nostalgia.

Sorry, I meant "either of [the Trump ones]". The Kirk shooter shack-up is now reported all over the place, so I think it's true.

Sure, he happened to be signed up with the other party.

Is he? The only specifics on this that I heard of was that he supposedly donated to the Trump campaign... except he didn't. Someone just found a guy in the donation record, with the same first and last name.

Last I heard the shooter was not signed up with any party.

Edit: although from the context it sounds like they're talking about the Trump shooter(s), not the Charlie Kirk one, I don't think either of them shacked up with a transsexual.

And the comment above yours is filtered ;)

It's not about the numbers, it's about the other side coming to the table and negotiating the terms of a truce. This thing isn't going to end if all we have is radicals who explicitly say the tools are good, if they're only used by them, and centrists who want to limit the conversation to hypocrisy, rather than what should be the rules going forward.

Finally, even once the terms of truce are found, anyone who cares about hypocrisy will be in a bit of a bind, because how do you enforce them if not by cancelling the cancellers?