07mk
16d ago
Heck, the very term "Jew" was declared offensive in some blue tribe circles 5+ years ago! There was even a This American Life episode featuring the Jewish host Ira Glass asking one of his younger interns or recent hires to describe what person he is in terms of his religion, and she insisted on calling him a "Jewish person" or something of the sort, while explicitly refusing to call him a "Jew," despite the fact that he self-identified as a "Jew."
I don't think it caught on, but then again, the blue tribe environments in which I reside don't have that many Jews and don't talk about Jews much, so it could be one of those things that just quietly passed under my radar and is actually dominant in the blue tribe.
07mk
16d ago
Yeah, I think the issue with this sort of complaint is that there's nothing horrifyingly racist that Democrats can say in private group chats that would be more horrifyingly racist than what come out of Democrats' mouths in public. Democrats openly saying horrifyingly racist things is just "baked in" to people's expectations of them, such that similar private group chats just wouldn't be scandalous; . And, indeed, a somewhat similar-but-mirrored analog happened in the past month with some small Democratic Virginian politician, with basically no hubbub, in large part because Democrats openly and unironically espousing such hateful and pro-violence rhetoric has just been normalized.
07mk
16d ago
From what I've seen of the jokes, I couldn't help but be taken aback by how completely run-of-the-mill banal these would have been coming out of the mouths of standard issue blue tribe liberal progressive young adults in the 90s-00s with some equivalent nouns swapped around (or perhaps not, depending on how edgy they wanted to be), as someone who was one of those in that time. I feel like it exemplifies better than almost any single event I've seen recently of how much of the blue establishment and the Democratic party has taken on the role of the excoriating church lady, and as much as I hate the "[side] pounces" meme, this fits "Democrats pounce" to a tee. 2028 is still a ways away, but Vance's response is the one thing here that makes me slightly more optimistic about that, since he's probably the front runner to win that election right now.
07mk
17d ago
When people say “just kill fascists”, is the latter one what they mean?
Absolutely yes, based on my experience living with people who say things like this and along with people who are on the border of saying things like this. From my observation, the people who actually believe in fighting fascist in ways that involve specifically targeting individuals with power but are against blanket condemnation of wide swaths of people tend to not to be the ones who jump on to slogans like that one. The ones who are willing to carelessly embrace extreme or extreme-sounding slogans like that almost always mean it in the most extreme way it can be interpreted (usually more extreme).
07mk
17d ago
Does that mean woke activism is just a far right extension of Nazi legal theory adapted to modern times?
I don't know if that's what it means, but this is certainly an elegant summary that mostly accurately describes what woke-ism is. Woke-ism is just the latest iteration of an ideological structure for justify bigotry against types of people one dislikes, that has been adapted to be palatable to high status people. In the past, it might have been things like "grace of God" or "they're genetically predisposed to being lesser than us and thus belong in the fields" or whatever, but in modern times, it involves narratives around "oppression means that people we dislike are actually each individual, down to the last baby, guilty of [crime]."
07mk
17d ago
What I find especially funny/galling about this is that Peterson almost never used the phrase "Cultural Marxism" - the one time I saw him use it was in a meta way, referring to the term as something that people used and coined, but not referring to the thing that the term was pointing at.
The phrase he's most quoted as saying in terms of "Marxism" is actually "Postmodern Neo-Marxism," not "Cultural Marxism." Eliding between the two when complaining about the vapidity of the term, I think, is a reflection of the fact that there's a real cluster of ideologies there that is being pointed to that is postmodern, cultural, new, and Marxist.
07mk
21d ago
It's an amazing slight of hand from Trump.
Given all the criticism Trump has received for the rather unimpressive size of his hands, I love this typo.
07mk
22d ago
Also, it is noteworthy that this case is literally "Burgers?". I guess life does imitate art.
Given how often Stone Toss gets parodied both by his fans and haters, I feel like someone must've already made an edit of that comic using "Waffles?" as a punchline, but I'm not clever enough to figure out what the joke would be.
07mk
22d ago
IOW if you don't talk much about the other 99% of your issue positions how much do you really hold them?
99%, of course. People don't have a responsibility to talk about their opinions in order to hold them.
One can criticize the likes of Singal for being tactically incompetent in terms of how talking about the 1% difference aids the "other side" more than they ought to, or whatever, of course. But that's a separate question than whether or not he holds these opinions, with its own various dimensions, such as the fact that someone like Singal can reasonably (and very possibly correctly) believe that disproportionately focusing his speech on that 1% where he disagrees with his "side" is actually beneficial for his "side" and harmful to the "other side."
07mk
22d ago
with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff)
FYI there's no restriction on porn on Twitter (except required by law). There's tons of hardcore stuff easily available, though I believe the algorithms tend to limit their reach.
07mk
22d ago
I'm no longer a 4channer, unfortunately, but 15+ years ago, I used to use it heavily. Spending time there and seeing how communities can develop when anonymity is enforced both through trivial inconveniences and norms, on top of not only tolerance for but celebration of the breaking of taboos and common decency is one of the main things that convinced me of the value of free speech. In my 30+ years of using the internet, 4chan remains the most loving, welcoming, dynamic, and fun community I've encountered. TheMotte comes a distant 2nd and is even better in some aspects, but falls far behind in others.
07mk
22d ago
This reminds me of a scene in one of the later seasons of Game of Thrones, where Tyrion, a dwarf with a scar across his face, is wanted for escaping after patricide, and some men are caught bringing the head of another dwarf that they marked with a scar. When Cersei (the queen and Tyrion's sister) notes this, the guards are about to send the men to the dungeons, but Cersei stops them, telling them that she doesn't want to discourage people from finding and bringing in the real one.
So it seems that Greece-associated things being damaged is a worthy cost to pay for maximizing the number of Israel-related things being damaged. Or, perhaps, "The optimal number of Greek things destroyed in the process of destroying Israeli things is not zero."
07mk
23d ago
At what ages does one normally outgrow Santa belief in America? I never believed in Santa (I recall being told around the age of 4 or 5 and finding it absurd, especially since our family didn't have a chimney), but also, Korea didn't have as much of a Santa culture as America. I moved to America in 1st grade, and I don't recall my non-believing of Santa ever being something that even came up, so I figured that, by grade school age, kids had outgrown it. But it sounds like that's actually not the case?
07mk
23d ago
The response to a dog yelping in pain is not to yell at it, especially if the pain was not anticipated to occur.
Agreed. Presuming that my 50%+ guess is incorrect and it is either a vibration collar or just a regular collar, his response to what appears to be a moment of distress by his dog is still absolutely horrid behavior. However, I wouldn't condemn him for just one clip of him losing his cool like that; even someone with stupid and vile opinions who has actively harmed US society like him deserves grace for one momentary lapse of that sort. Given how he likely has hundreds (thousands?) of hours of video of him and his dog, finding a single instance of something like this shouldn't be enough to condemn him as a piece of shit.
a shock collar is horrible, but so is what Hasan is claiming he actually did in the moment, and no one seems willing to comment on the behavior of the latter just because that type of abusive behavior is less bad than the shock collar.
I think you're mistaken. No one seems willing to comment on the behavior of the latter because the people who want to remain skeptical given the lack of damning evidence are mostly people who are motivated not to condemn Hasan for anything in the first place, no matter what he does; he could film himself ordering a shock collar from Amazon, unwrapping it, putting it on his dog, and zapping it indiscriminately, and a significant number of these people would figure out why the dog deserved it. And the people who would condemn him for the lesser type of abusive behavior are mostly people who are motivated to jump to conclusions to condemn Hasan with the flimsiest of evidence, so they've already decided that he's guilty of shocking his dog. The exceptions in either group are likely vanishingly small.
07mk
23d ago
I am trying to propose a grassroots way of continuing that decline in violence. I would rather not simply have cops on every corner, even though I am a cringe level of "back the blue" pro-police.
Cops who patrol corners often need to be fit, strong, and willing and capable of inflicting violence on unwilling individuals, for the purpose of protecting their community, right? Perhaps having cops on every corner is the way to provide a pathway for young males to adulthood in a way that reduces violence?
07mk
23d ago
My father got a shock collar for one of our dogs when I was a kid in the 90s-00s, to let her out in our yard without having to worry about her running away. It didn't work for keeping her "fenced in," as she would respond to the shock by just running even faster until she left the area. I didn't think much of it at the time, both as a kid and as a Korean immigrant who grew up with dogs being little more than props to put in your yard to keep thieves out.
07mk
23d ago
Occam's razor suggests Americans opinion of this is probably being shaped by the things ICE is deliberately doing to shape their image.
I'm not sure how Occam's razor would suggest such a thing. There's nothing more parsimonious about that than Americans' opinions being shaped just as much by the organizations that have shaped Americans' opinions in the past and continue to do so through today. It's clearly being shaped by both, and it's very difficult to parse out which has more influence, and parsimony doesn't really offer us any answers.
07mk
23d ago
I'm reminded of an ironic line someone posted in a comment back on slatestarcodex or perhaps the subreddit, well before TheMotte was a thing:
I'm principled! My principles are, everything for my team, nothing for yours, and win at any cost.
I'm also reminded of a discussion I had on the SlateStarCodex subreddit with someone probably around 2020, when they were arguing that Twitter was being perfectly principled in selectively censoring Trump, since they were following the principle of "I don't want Trump to speak" (it might have been some different public figure on some different platform - my memory is fuzzy).
If you make principles sufficiently absolute or sufficiently bespoke, then you can make any behavior principled. Which, sort of like "everything is political," is really just word games, since the entire point of words having meaning is to discriminate between things that match that word and things that don't, and this destroys this ability to discriminate between "principled" and "unprincipled."
Either that, or perhaps it forces people to explicitly declare which principles are involved, forcing people to recognize different principles that each other have that were only implicit until then.
07mk
23d ago
That's not how statistics work. It's quite possible that this action by ICE is making Americans like it more, it's just countered by the other stuff around optics that's also happened in that time lowering it. In whole, we can say that Americans like it less now than they did in January - we cannot say that one individual act that happened in that time caused the net negative effect, i.e. which is why I said "I'd wager that," not "it is the case that" or even "it is evident that."
07mk
23d ago
It is obviously a shock collar that is being used. No amount of denial or snarky comments can get anyone to believe that their lying eyes can see any differently.
I have no love for Hasan Piker - I don't follow him on any social media, so my exposure to him is all second-hand, and what I've seen of him indicates to me that he's a very careless thinker and impenetrable ideologue that has actively made political discourse worse in America. But I do think there's reasonable doubt here. Based on the behavior, the timing, his personality, the way he seems to treat his dog, and the way he has talked about potentially using shock collars on his dog in the past, I would absolutely guess that the odds are over 50% that that clip was of him using a shock collar on the dog. But without seeing the remote or a close-up of the collar to verify that it's indeed a shock collar, I wouldn't vote to convict in a court of law.
And though he won't be judged in a court of law, he will be judged in the court of public opinion, by people who will be more than happy to hold the "prosecution" to a far higher standard than "beyond a reasonable doubt." As well as by people who will use a far lower standard of, "I don't like him, therefore he's guilty." I believe that there will be more than enough people of the former sort such that Piker has absolutely nothing to be concerned about with respect to "cancelation" or whatever.
Personally, as someone who has had dogs and cats for most of his life, I find shock collars for pets to be pretty much evil, and this has lowered my opinion of Piker as a person even more. But my opinion of him doesn't matter.
07mk
23d ago
but it would be much less effective if ICE were acting in an extremely professional and regimented manner, they aren't.
Hard disagree. At best, it would be infinitesimally less effective, small enough that you'd need a magnifying glass to tell the difference. Of course, it's impossible to properly ascertain what an alternative universe would look like, but, based on the general reception that these official ICE-released videos got, I'd wager that the effect was net-neutral at worst in terms of Americans' perception of ICE.
07mk
23d ago
Masked and armed bouncers dragging people away at gunpoint has horrible optics.
This is happening, and the optics do suck. You can tell they suck because people hate and fear ICE officers in a way they didn't a year ago.
The core issue here is that there's no causal relationship between the optics sucking and the behavior of ICE, though. The optics are defined primarily by 2 things: what people see, and how they respond to what they see. Former is primarily determined by people who hate Trump and hate the core mission of ICE, and the latter is highly determined by those people as well. And the past decade or so has established a pattern that these people will always make the optics bad when it comes to Trump, in a way that's entirely orthogonal to truth and fact. So it makes sense that ICE and the people who lead it, like Trump, have decided to focus little on the optics.
Credibility takes a lifetime to earn and a millisecond to destroy, and unfortunately, the media and political organizations that are against Trump pretty much blew their load within his first presidency (I'd argue within his first campaign) and are still in the refractory period 8 years later, furiously rubbing the poor flesh and wondering why it just hurts instead of shooting another rope.
07mk
24d ago
Perhaps it's "light" treason?
07mk
24d ago
This seems like pretty standard euphemism treadmilling. As long as the core sense of considering men as being worthy of derision exists, it doesn't matter if the Dems call them "men," "dudes," or "florks." It's that core sense that needs to be changed if the Dems want to call men by a term that isn't derogatory.
I think you have a very sad and hateful view of humor if you believe that someone joking about how Jews are dishonest and gas chambers is something that reflects badly on them.
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