Kiwifarms is still up and still thriving, though, in part precisely because its users care.
You don’t need to make your own country, you just need to stand up for yourself and make persecution too bothersome to enforce. You don’t need the powers that be to agree with you, you just need them - as with the Bud Light boycott reaction - to say “it’s not worth it”.
The threshold for “it’s not worth it” is actually quite low, but fat American rightists grown comfortable on cheap entertainment and cheaper corn syrup find it hard to meet even that reduced standard.
DeSantis in Florida, which isn’t even a red state traditionally, shows how easy it is for real legislative wins. You can drive these people from the institutions, try to make them destitute, defund them, cancel them, and reduce their influence with barely any ‘revolution’ at all. Imagine that x30 GOP states, plus a Republican president and conservative SCOTUS engaging in consistent rapid lawfare against the left. But the right just don’t care. They want their Donald back to own the libtards on bird app.
2rafa
11mo ago
This is only the sole option because conservatives clearly don’t care about actually conquering institutions, as Trump’s polling over DeSantis transparently shows.
2rafa
11mo ago
You seem to be under the impression that conservatives won the Bud Light fiasco. If they did, then why is Bud Light still donating to the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce?
If donations to the “National LGBT Chamber of Commerce” were what conservative boycott organizers cared about they’d have acted years ago. They didn’t. The evidence is that conservatives don’t care much about companies donating to these kinds of political organizations.
They did claim the two most senior scalps in the marketing of Bud Light, and neither they nor other beer brands that cared to the same audience will try a similar marketing technique again. Look at how quickly so many on the left walked back anti-police rhetoric as soon as polling data showed even a small swing against them.
2rafa
11mo ago
In practice Pao was less woke than her successor, but the uproar from users provided the current CEO and the board (and Conde Nast, which was and remains the largest shareholder) with the pretext to fire her for someone else.
2rafa
11mo ago
Why wouldn’t she be replaced by someone worse? It’s exactly the problem of not understanding how organizations work and what the differences between them are.
Reddit was and is unprofitable and the money it does make is derived from cat gifs, the AskX subs and porn. It was entirely beholden to the ideological whims of its leadership and board, and its primary owner is literally the publisher of Teen Vogue.
2rafa
11mo ago
In general, I will not believe humans have captured an alien spaceship unless someone is willing to show me the spaceship that has been captured.
Which country are you in? A white guy who moves to the Philippines and sleeps with a hundred bar girls obviously isn’t going to find that this confers any special kind of status with American women. To be honest, I think promiscuity in general confers only very limited status on men: it’s less about how many people you seduce and more about who. The fat driver who sleeps with a thousand truck-stop hookers will always have less status than the guy who gets one hot Victoria’s Secret model.
What’s “men like you”? Are you fat, short, facially deformed, of a less desirable demographic in some other way?
Jury trials are a challenge in diverse societies. In fact, one notable part of the legal history of the former British Empire is that almost every diverse, non-settler commonwealth country (including Singapore, Malaysia, India and Pakistan) has abolished jury trials in part because members of various groups consistently voted to exonerate their own.
The online rights generally thinks it's futile to court black voters to the GOP, as evidenced by this piece.
To be fair, Vivek decided to organize a meeting on Chicago's South Side attended by local black activists involved in the black chamber of commerce, black city organizations, black rights groups and so on. These are people who are often employed in and around the entire Democratic activist framework. Using this as a bellwether is like failing to convince the New York Times newsroom to switch sides and concluding that you'll lose because no Democratic voters will swing right.
Bannon's plan was never to court the majority of black voters. It was to peel off the edge cases, which people involved in the Democratic machine certainly aren't. Maybe instead of 90-10 or 95-5 it's 85-15, which might still make a difference in the right places. And if messaging on immigration convinces some black voters to stay home because they see both parties as equally bad, that's a win too.
2rafa
11mo ago
If scientists demonstrate abiogenesis in conditions similar to those of the earth 3.5 billion years ago, will you renounce Christianity?
I'm not an atheist, but for me it is enough to know that very unlikely things do, occasionally, happen.
2rafa
11mo ago
A fighter jet did arise from natural processes, because humans evolved and built a fighter jet. This is merely a restatement of the original argument, which is the point.
2rafa
11mo ago
...the median 19th century American man in a state like Minnesota or California. He lived in a social, economic, and political world that was largely fashioned by his own hands. Be he rich or poor, he lived as his own master, independent from the domination of the boss or the meddling of the manager.
Is this actually true? The average 19th century Californian man likely lived surrounded by a highly complex network of social connections that drove numerous responsibilities and obligations. These may only distantly have included the federal government in Washington but they certainly included locally powerful figures with whom he was most likely not directly acquainted and who wielded a substantial degree of power over him.
Not America, but watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.
Amusingly, though, the solution to a lot of this stuff isn't for more local government, it's for less of it. Planning restrictions are almost all decided locally. Pesky municipal by(e)laws are - in large part - why Clarkson couldn't do most of what he wanted to do on his farm. Local government is inherently NIMBYist, especially in a wealthy rural locale, as he found out.
The best answer is to abolish local government and make the smallest unit of government the state or - possibly - the city in the case of extremely large (4+ million inhabitant) municipalities. A 75 year old member of the town board of supervisors living in the local pristine heritage area with a valuable home they bought in 1985 is always going to veto any construction. A 24 year old bureaucrat in the capital city whose job it is to stamp forms can be instructed much more easily to approve everything. Billionaires can lobby the state, but even relative nobodies with a little time on their hands can stymy the functioning of local government.
One of Boris Johnson's core plans was to reform planning in England to make construction much easier (by making it harder for local councils to block planning permission, by simplifying the environmental review process etc). His own voters rebelled, and the Tories lost a by-election in a formerly safe seat to the Liberal Democrats (whose leader said it was "a massive mandate for those of us who were campaigning against the planning reforms"). So they cancelled the reforms.
Endless ridiculous HOA stories show that tyranny, for the most part, is local rather than federal or national. Fewer people with power might well mean more freedom for everyone.
2rafa
11mo ago
But abolishing jury trials isn't always a solution - Scotland is currently doing a test run on abolishing jury trials for rape cases, because the Scottish government is unhappy with the number of jury acquittals for these charges.
Well, part of the longstanding debate around jury trials (including in the OP’s comment) is that they’re almost always better for defendants. Abolishing them makes convictions more likely, for better or worse.
Plenty of grooming gang cases, for example, saw acquittals on many charges for precisely the reasons the Scottish government notes in its arguments for this legal pilot.
2rafa
11mo ago
Very little of the NIMBYism in, say, Berkeley, CA is coming from the federal government, though. Some of it comes from the state. Even in California, however, much of it is local.
2rafa
11mo ago
The problem is precisely people in the local council thinking their right to their property includes their right to, say, prohibit the construction of a house in front of their own that would block their views (etc).
2rafa
11mo ago
Once you get into the fringes of homesteadism the lines between far left and generic kind of right-libertarianism blur since ancoms consider homesteading to be acceptable personal property + owning your own means of production.
2rafa
11mo ago
That presents different problems. The tyranny of the ten most powerful people in your village might be genuinely and significantly worse than the tyranny of the central government, which doesn’t care about anyone in the village specifically but might care about upholding broad rules that protect you from those ten people. Often local politics is far more aggressive, far more bitter, even far more violent than national politics.
2rafa
11mo ago
Something that looks enough like a hundred dollar bill to be accepted as legal tender is a hundred dollar bill.
I actually agree with you. I’m happy to call any transwoman who passes a woman.
However, I have never encountered a truly passing transwoman. Ever. Perhaps 5% can pass in (posed) pictures. Maybe 1% can pass on video. 0% in real life, where the tiny tells and minutiae of body language are a clear giveaway every single time. Put me in a room with 999 cis women and 1 transwoman, and after 5 minutes of conversation with each I’ll be able to identify the latter.
Go on /r/transpassing and sort by top all time. Even the MOST passing transwomen on Reddit as voted for by their own peers don’t pass. And that’s in posed photos!
Nobody truly passes.
2rafa
11mo ago
If the note was real enough to be universally accepted as legal tender, the forgery would never have been identified and reported, and nobody would go to prison. The history of paper money is full of examples of new security measures designed to combat the genuinely successful and broadly undetectable forging of notes.
However, as I note above, we’re a very long way from this being true in this situation.
2rafa
11mo ago
However, it's my understanding that people who transition before puberty are in much better shape.
It’s very important to note that most trans teens on puberty blockers do actually start puberty before they go on them, so the effect isn’t total.
There are some very rare cases where a transwoman is ‘fully’ able to avoid male puberty. Jazz Jennings is a good example. Does she pass? I think it’s a more complicated answer than just ‘yes’; she has very broad shoulders as an adult for her build, at least from the 5 minutes of YouTube footage I just watched.
One thing that Jazz and quite a lot of very-early transitioners who are sometimes considered to pass (eg. NikkieTutorials) have in common is that they’re very much overweight. This obscures many minor and moderate physical differences between sexes, and softens out parts of the masculine facial structure.
2rafa
11mo ago
I completely agree with you on FTM transitioners. They don't really interest me, they're not what the debate is about and nobody except butch lesbians upset that most of their peers are becoming transmen cares all that much about them as an issue.
2rafa
11mo ago
The contention is that the 'internal model' is possibly more pro-trans than anything else, since it says that a trans person who passed in your estimation would be considered by you to be their goal sex.
2rafa
11mo ago
Malaysia has been kept in check since the 1990s because the strong trading relationship with China is predicated on fair treatment of overseas Chinese. Not that the CCP care at all about Chinese Malaysians, but it would create domestic drama in China if Malays went full pogrom again.
People in Western countries consistently poll as being opposed to immigration but in practice do not express supermajority support for anti-immigration parties. It is a fair point. If people prioritized it as the number one issue, the Sweden Democrats, AfD etc would do better electorally.
More options
Context Copy link