Catsnakes_
5d ago
He's saying that he's not culturally American in any meaningful sense: "He has zero American values. He does not speak English."
Catsnakes_
9d ago
I find it hard to believe you don't "get" this.
Is this obnoxious implication of bad faith accomplishing anything useful?
Catsnakes_
10d ago
their insane marker system
This is the longest Tim and Eric sketch I've ever seen.
Catsnakes_
10d ago
Teenagers were talking in Homestar Runner references 20 years ago, that's nothing new.
I think the author has glued a bunch of unrelated ideas together and then gave it an unrelated label. The look is just what's for sale. Mall-emo metastasized because there was still money to be made selling it, much like every other youth fashion trend from the last 30 years didn't go away.
Probably no trend that gets big enough will ever really go away now. Older cultural phenomena like pet rocks and poodle skirts didn't have the internet and access to a global market to prop them up so eventually they went away. Pokemon and mall-emo hit fixation and will be here forever, they'll just continue to mutate over time.
I spent most of my 20s as a 24-hour diner creature. This doesn't make me an authority, but it makes me feel like I am. The pandemic caused most of the 24-hour businesses around me (not just diners) to get rid of their overnight hours. The local diners mostly all failed and reopened afterward with new owners, reduced and much more expensive menus, and much more limited hours. My suspicion is that, long before the pandemic, those 24-hour diners had already lost most of their overnight clientele (graveyard shift employees, EMS, cops) to mega convenience stores along the lines of Royal Farms, Sheetz, and Wawa, so once the pandemic killed the inertia that was propelling the 24-hour service there was no reason to bring it back.
There are lots of factors keeping the current crop of 20 year olds who should be lurking in diners in their homes, whether it's lack of jobs, the internet, or social-developmental damage from the reaction to the pandemic. But even if they did want to go hang out somewhere, I think there are even fewer places left to go than ever. We went to the diner because it was the place that was open once everyone was done second shift. Even once everyone was old enough to drink we mostly wound up there because it was open later than the bars and our cop and firefighter friends would cycle through. It's how we made our friends in the first place. Now where can they go? Not even the local Wal-mart is 24 hour anymore, so that last resort of killing time is also gone.
(As an aside, I knew real human beings who were goths lurking in diners. Dinergoths, you could call them I guess. This article seems to me like the author's brain made the noise "dinergoth" and he found a way to staple it to a concept that, in so far as it even points at a real thing, has nothing to do with either of those ideas.)
Catsnakes_
11d ago
"How does this affect you?" is the lowest form of discourse.
Catsnakes_
17d ago
+1, I think your interpretation is a more accurate one in terms of true beliefs. The protestors in MN definitely didn't think that they were going to get shot, but the disconnect between thinking that these are evil nazi thugs killing anyone they want but that they won't shoot you is the confusing thing for me. Saying one thing, acting on another.
Catsnakes_
18d ago
You're right, of course. I think the difference relevant to this situation is that the Bundys were banking on the feds playing by the rules, but the protestors in MN appear to have it as a starting premise that they aren't.
Catsnakes_
18d ago
I am also very confused by this. I don't know how to characterize this mindset without resorting to the word "unserious".
The starting premise for the protestors, as stated, seems to be that a swarm of evil, poorly trained stormtroopers are invading the city and snatching up and killing anyone they please. So why aren't they acting like it? Their behavior doesn't seem to follow from the premise. If they were getting into shootouts with the cops I would not be confused, because it would indicate to me they were taking the premise seriously.
Pretti got into a tangle with federal agents while armed. I don't think I can construct a coherent reason to carry while protesting that takes the premises seriously that doesn't involve an active intent to use it aggressively. Good seemed to be acting out of a misplaced sense of white liberal plot armor which is sort of understandable but still didn't take the "evil stormtroopers killing with impunity" premise seriously. Mark Russell and his wife went on vacation to a city they seem to think is under siege, and then proceed to treat the protest like a social function to kill time until the bowling alley opens.
Do they think this is for real or not? Did the constant crying wolf about Nazis for the last 10 years cause the reference to become so unmoored from the referent that they can't actually bring themselves to really mean it even while they're getting shot?
Catsnakes_
18d ago
It's a sexual metaphor, but the point is the concise metaphor and not the sexual aspect: the person being insulted is meant to understand that they are willingly handing over or choosing not to protect something that belongs to them in a craven way. On the other hand it seems like the sexual aspect of "it gives them a hard-on" is the intended reading.
Catsnakes_
19d ago
Sure. If we assume for the sake of argument that would fall under their "aftercare" label, then I would still assert that language choice is informed by squishy-leftish-queerish-sex-playacting-without-the-sex and that unconscious choice communicates unseriousness.
Catsnakes_
19d ago
This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition.
This entire wall of text is from ChatGPT. Is there any signal in this noise at all?
Catsnakes_
19d ago
Personally I doubt that the amount of healthcare people protesting overwhelms the number of merely heavily-online-leftish people enough to drive language choices. Further, I don't think the medical sense of it applies at all. I very much doubt that they're planning for long term injury aftercare vs emotional "I had a hard day playacting danger and now I need to be cuddled and validated" aftercare in a more BDSM sense of the term.
Catsnakes_
19d ago
I thought "aftercare" had to be a joke, but no, they've really got a role in that signal chat called "aftercare provider". Although that term has been around for a very long time in the context of care for convalescing patients, in the current cultural consciousness I think it most commonly comes up as a very leftish-inflected BDSM/kink scene term-of-art that has leaked into leftish spaces more generally. Choice of language may not be conscious but it's not coincidental, and I find it very interesting that the term they've chosen is from a conceptual realm in which participants playact pain and danger but no one is really going to be hurt and it can stop at any time. I think this is another element communicating the unseriousness of this movement, and by "unseriousness" I mean the failure to act like the things they claim to believe about the world are actually true.
I do believe that the protestors "mean it" when they talk about Trump's gestapo going through the street killing anyone they please and kidnapping people and acting with total impunity, that there's no accountability, that they are evil and can get away with anything and something must be done. I believe that they believe these premises. What I don't understand is the "unseriousness", the failure to follow from premises to conclusion. Why be surprised that the jackbooted thugs with guns have real bullets, not rubber? Why tell the SS agent to go take a lunch break? Don't you know they are murderous and won't be held accountable?
I think some protest movements (left or right) in the United States have a touch of "video game logic" to them, where if they do the right thing a victory screen will display and they get what they want. I don't think that is the problem here. Part of it might be the extension of adolescence that all millennials seem to suffer from and its concomitant black-and-white thinking and sense of invulnerability. Part of it might be that people have been calling everything Nazis and brownshirts for so long that the reference became unmoored from the referent and the conclusion no longer follows from the stated premises. I don't know and I don't know how to know.
But that choice of language sure is weird.
Catsnakes_
1mo ago
People don't live in amorphous clouds of statistics. They live in particular locations and can watch those places actively get worse year over year even if national stats show otherwise (because other places are actually improving or because the stats are gamed). You couldn't pay me to raise kids in the town I grew up in even though for most of its history (including the first half of my own life) it was a fine place to live.
Catsnakes_
1mo ago
I don't think they're really different attitudes. The things that got developers in trouble on the Windows side was broken code (in the sense of something like use-after-free) or use of undocumented code/code that wasn't part of the API contract. So when stuff that was outside of the API contract changed behavior, programs that were violating the API contract broke and that was the sort of stuff the compatibility code on the Windows side had to deal with. On the Linux kernel side, Linus considers everything exposed to userspace to be part of the contract, and anything that changes behavior in a way that breaks userspace is a violation of the contract from the kernel side.
Catsnakes_
5mo ago
(put another way, if in the wake of an enemy hero's tragic death you're more interested in making a point than extending an olive branch, your enemies are correct not to extend any charity in interpreting your point)
Catsnakes_
5mo ago
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. The point I'm trying to make is entirely about time-frames. Quoting my original comment at the top of the thread in reply to TheAntipopulist talking about rightists treating criticism of Charlie as saying he deserved it:
People could also just not comment on the guy's assassination. Going on Twitter to criticize the guy 10 minutes after he gets internally decapitated live in front of his kids (rather than just saying "what a senseless tragedy" or just remaining quiet and saving the takes for a week later) does in fact amount to saying "he deserved to get shot" and both the intended audience and their political opponents are correct to interpret it that way!
My point was specifically that the timing of choosing to level criticism of the man immediately in the wake of his killing sends a (probably unintended!) message that can be avoided by waiting. I think it's pretty commonly true throughout life in general that when and how someone says something (let alone the relationship of the speaker to the audience, intended or overheard) is as much a part of the message as what they say. When someone's immediate in-the-moment response to a political opponent's assassination is "well he sucked anyway and his policies lead to this", it communicates a way stronger message that sounds an awful lot like "he deserved it" at worst and at best it just communicates incredible callousness.
I do genuinely think that (hopefully unintended) additional message can be avoided by just waiting a week or so and then writing whatever well thought out criticism about him once the heat has started to diminish. I don't think that's some novel or complicated rule either; in day to day life most people have an instinct not to badmouth the recently deceased where the grievers could hear unless their entire point was to start a fight. Unfortunately the nature of social media puts us all in the position of being crashers at somebody's funeral whether we meant it or not and I think the easiest way to turn down the heat is to slow down the takes.
So to summarize my point as best I can: someone genuinely interested in discussing the consequences of his policy or other reasoned criticism and not dunking would wait tactfully for the appropriate moment. It's entirely reasonable for grievers to interpret their enemies lack of tact as saying he deserved it, given it would be so easy for someone who meant not to cause undue offense to avoid it.
(personal disclosure: unfortunately I think a lot of the people "criticizing" do actually mean to communicate he deserved it and that bleeds through in a variety of ways beyond timing and having so much of that in the air really hurts the ability of well-intended people to communicate a milder message, but I really sincerely think that just waiting would help those people to the extent that they genuinely exist.)
"What a horrific tragedy". And then a week later go ahead and write your thinkpiece about how he had it coming.
(this was written before your edit, I'll update to your update when I have time)
Catsnakes_
5mo ago
I could absolutely respond by acknowledging what a horrible tragedy this was for her loved ones and the country, and could even deny the involvement of the right, without having to criticize her at all.
Catsnakes_
5mo ago
"Kirk supported the Second Amendment, he was wrong, and his murder is a great example of why he was wrong" is absolutely a "he (with his preferred policies) brought this on himself" argument, which is about a hair's breadth away from a "he deserved it" argument. An ally could maybe make that statement, or an opponent after a respectful time had passed, but coming from a political opponent in the immediate wake of his brutal assassination it will absolutely and correctly be interpreted as "he deserved it" by the wider right.
Catsnakes_
5mo ago
What kind of criticism is relevant to him getting shot that shouldn't be understood by the right as saying "and so he deserved it"? With regards to Floyd, rightists were clearly saying he had brought it on himself and that was the entire point.
Catsnakes_
5mo ago
If you walk up to somebody to get into an argument with them (even if they're encouraging you to do this), can you really say you were ambushed?
That's a definitionally anti-American sentiment, so "Puerto Rico is not America and celebrating Puerto Rican culture is un-American" sounds like an accurate summary and the intended takeaway if your statement is true.
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