AugustDeRosa
6mo ago
None of that has anything to do with my point. Even if HBD is objectively untrue and completely useless, it is the one inviolable taboo of 'Wokeism', far moreso than anything to do with trans people, and the supposed "death of woke" has done absolutely nothing to change that.
My point is that woke isn't dead, it's just a little dormant at the moment, and is about to come back with a screaming vengeance. Progressives acting like it hasn't gone anywhere are acting rationally. Conservatives parading about and doing victory laps without actually doing anything to change the institutional and demographic factors at play are the ones behaving irrationally.
AugustDeRosa
6mo ago
My question is WHY do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds either lost permanently to the enemy or scorched to irrelevance.
It's been, what, two years since woke "died"?
It's still omnipresent in every large financial institution, it still carries the majority of the Western population under age 40, and even the most "based" right-wingers are still tiptoeing around the most important cornerstone of Woke - racial biology (which even Nick Fuentes, the new media appointed archdemon, is unwilling to broach - he's on the side of 'Based Blacks').
Anyone talking about the death of woke is a Chinese man talking about the death of Maoism in 1965 because it suddenly went quiet. You're in for a very rude shock come 2028. Steve Bannon is right to be worried about being jailed when the Republicans lose the next election.
AugustDeRosa
7mo ago
They are appealing to Zoomers, rather than Millennials. Mamdani ran the most Millennial, Chapo-listener campaign I've ever seen and cleaned up, because Millennials are the new boomers. They will soon be the largest and most wealthy generation in human history.
The death of the left-wing Millennial has been overstated, they are still around, and soon they will decide the course of the West. If the right wants to win they need to realise that they need to appeal to the crowd whose culture is downstream of mid-00s Something Awful rather than late-2010s 4chan and Twitter.
AugustDeRosa
8mo ago
I agree with your point overall, and I think we may live to see peak woke yet, but 2020 was definitely the local maximum, with the aftereffects continuing to ripple on. It would not surprise me if by 2030 we're more woke than we ever were before.
AugustDeRosa
9mo ago
I personally date peak woke to October 7th 2023
I obviously can't speak for everyone but peak woke to me has to be June 2020, and frankly I'm shocked that anyone feels differently.
After the summer of George, things definitely cooled down. Yes, woke still existed, yes, Biden was in charge, but overall the public insanity was definitely trending downwards, especially on the issues most identifiably 'woke' (race, transgenderism, economic redistribution). By 2023, it was somewhat acceptable to start questioning the 'official' narrative of transgender ideology, and BLM was basically gone.
I see the Biden (and then Kamala) 2024 campaign as decidedly not woke in the vein of prior Democratic politics.
Trump, on Truth Social, after reports of Israel continuing to bomb Tehran:
ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
This tone towards Israel is, to me at least, unexpected given the terms of the ceasefire. I expected Israel to have carte blanche to 'finish the job'.
Maybe a reductive take but I genuinely believe the next move depends on what Trump is currently watching on television. If Fox News presenters start covering for Israeli actions, or harping on about Iran 'breaking the ceasefire first', Trump may be convinced. It really is a shame that Tucker isn't on a major network anymore - if it's not on TV, Trump doesn't care.
AugustDeRosa
11mo ago
Officially, Iran will start the CEASEFIRE and, upon the 12th Hour, Israel will start the CEASEFIRE and, upon the 24th Hour, an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR will be saluted by the World.
Am I understanding this incorrectly or does this essentially mean "Israel gets 12 hours to do whatever it wants to Iran"?
AugustDeRosa
11mo ago
In that case it should be easy to provide an example of others that made the same predictions.
AugustDeRosa
11mo ago
But then he turned around and did exactly that when Tucker said that leaders of governments kill people, as if the idea of the President of the United States having someone killed was unthinkable and that Trump could never, ever have done such a thing.
AugustDeRosa
11mo ago
Sure, but I think it's fair to say that someone who is interested in regime change would be better off knowing some basic facts. It's of course not necessary - you can hold whatever opinion you want with or without facts - but an individual who has done some research is likely to be more adept at the decision making involved. It has utility.
AugustDeRosa
11mo ago
The Bible makes it pretty clear that there is something special about the relationship between the Jews and God, that this is passed down in a tribal fashion, and that this was not, at least in its entirety, entirely erased by the crucifixion and resurrection (e.g. Romans 11). I would personally read it as "the tribe of Israel is very special, but now everyone is able to become part of that tribe in a new, special way that didn't exist before, and this is partially because of how the tribe of Israel really dropped the ball".
These politicians hardly act as devout christians who believe every word of the bible.
They act as most devout Christians act, in my experience: when it's something that doesn't impact them directly on a personal level (e.g. nuking Iran), they're all for it, when it's something that inconveniences them personally (e.g. not having sex with underage male prostitutes), they had a moment of weakness and will return to the Lord.
That doesn't mean they don't believe it, it just makes them human.
AugustDeRosa
11mo ago
Many have explicitly said regime change is the goal.
AugustDeRosa
11mo ago
While I don't believe Cruz is stupid (based on his background, he is probably one of the most intelligent members of the current batch of leadership amongst the American right, although to be frank I think there are some genuinely not very smart people amongst them so perhaps I'm being too charitable due to who I'm comparing him with), the one thing that I genuinely thought was pretty 'stupid' in this interview was his inability to engage with the issue of whether the polity of Israel in 2025 is the same Israel referred to in the Bible. His arguments elsewhere were not particularly 'stupid', they were just occasionally dishonest or misleading, but in this one instance he seemed to be genuinely confused as to how two things that have the same name and are somewhat similar in 'type' couldn't be the same thing.
Some somewhat unstructured thoughts:
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran? And what is with him generally? Or the whole upper echelons of the US govt?
While "Cruz doesn't know anything about Iran" seems to have been the big takeaway that people focus on from this interview, I think the much more important and more alarming part is, as you pointed out, the religious element - but I don't think it's a case of stupidity, at least on that specific issue, or of ignorance. "What is with him" is that he genuinely believes that his God, through scripture, has commanded him to support Israel, and there are many in the upper echelons of the US government who genuinely and wholeheartedly believe the same thing.
"Republicans want to go to war in the Middle East because they're Millennialist Christians" is one of those horseshoe / bell-curve-meme situations where if you know nothing about the state of the American right, you probably believe it, if you are sort of read up on the American right, you probably think it's nonsense, and if you really listen to everything they say and the actions they take and try and discern their motivations, then yeah, it turns out they really just do believe it. Yes, sometimes they'll give other justifications based on liberal principles or American statecraft or plain might makes right rhetoric, and sometimes those justifications make sense, but they are all made in the shadow of the initial basis of theology. They are add-ons, NOT the central thing itself. In that way, it's telling that Cruz gives two reasons for his unconditional support of Israel, and the first one he describes is theological.
I really wish Tucker had asked the natural follow up, which is, "If your God has commanded you to support Israel, then surely you would do it even if it was actively against American interests?", but he instead chooses to focus on the difference between what Israel meant in the Bible and whether it can be understood to refer to the modern-day polity of Israel (the answer is very obviously no, because the polity did not exist in any meaningful form, but Cruz refuses to engage properly on that point).
HOWEVER, with all that said, I would be curious as to whether Tucker himself disagrees with the idea that Christians have some obligation to support some form of Israel, whether that is just "the chosen people" (i.e. Jews). I've heard some Christians explain this away by saying that "nah, doesn't matter because Jesus, new covenant, we're all God's chosen, etc. etc." but I don't think that holds out when you read through the Bible. I, personally, follow in the strong and storied European tradition of pick-whatever-works faith, so would be interested in what the more theologically-minded Christians of the motte believe.
The only reason anyone in Europe has ever done this is because America spent the entire post-war period enforcing it on Europe.
You invented all these shenangians and in a few years, once the Republicans lose, you'll jump straight back into it.
The benefit to the increasing divide between the USA and Europe is that soon Europe will be able to publicly partner far more with China, who has never cared how racist their business partners are, so long as they are stable. No Chinese ever called me Whitey.
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