Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening? You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.
What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane? Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?
Consider that in writing mindkilled screeds about how terrible everything is, you're probably part of the problem. Maybe engage in a bit of self-reflection. Consider compromise. Read the aspirational text at the top of the culture war thread. Do something that makes you happy. Touch grass?
More realistically, Trump gets elected, Republicans suddenly stop caring about deficit spending and cut taxes and voila - all of your problems are magically solved. Instead of crying about how bad everything is you'll be crowing about the liberal snowflakes losing their minds over Orange Man Bad and TDS.
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good?
I used to. When the people like you were diluted by those who were well-meaning, who wanted to have actual conversations and maybe learn a thing or two from someone with a different perspective.
How about this? If you can manage to write a measured and polite post about any of the topics above, I'll respond in kind. If the though of trying to do that is so abhorrent, then maybe this isn't the place for you.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.
As the joke goes, you can build the pub, you can build the pier, but ya go and fuck one goat...
Your sin was goring the wrong ox, not trolling in the first place. If you had gotten the NYT to publish a positive story about furries insisting on eating out of dog bowls in school cafeterias, the majority of these people would be singing your praises. I don't recall the Texas abortion bounty hunter trolls provoking any real outrage.
At the end of the day, no matter how much investigating reporting you do to embarrass activists on the left, you'll still be the goat fucker my friend. IMO, stop apologizing and double down.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
This, right here, is exactly the thing I was talking about.
Ah. Was I 'gaslighting you while celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?' Slamming the Overton window leftwards on you? Or something else you edited out of your post?
I don't think my post was particularly celebratory, nor do I think I made any comment on the object level issues you raised in your post. But whatever, the one leftish leaning person who bothered to reply to your post managed to perfectly demonstrate all the problems you were complaining about. Bravo.
My friend is feeding his new daughter on the free expired baby food he gets from his grocery store job, while this instagram play-farmer writes grants for more money than he makes in a year.
Alright. Forget about the black person who got taxpayer money for a moment (we can go back to it later if you like). Imagine that I'm an actual human being and I want to help your friend and people like them - what should I do? What set of policies do you think would be most helpful to your friend? Was he significantly better off when he was stocking shelves five or ten years ago? And do you think grocery store workers had it better in 1990, 2005, or 2020ish?
I don't believe your motivation for engaging is to discuss the culture war. I think you're waging it by manipulating people into passive acceptance.
Hello, pot. Kettle here. You're black.
But then, give me some advice. How could I reply to your post in a way that wouldn't be 1) denying these are problems or 2) manipulating people into passive acceptance, short of agreeing with you on every point and accepting that leftists are evil? I'd invite you to sketch out a very brief outline of what such a post might look like such that you think you could have a productive conversation.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
So no I don't think that the other side of immigration is doing anything in good faith.
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead, while the majority of voters today (myself included) weren't alive or were far too young to vote for your compromise. Your imagined voter who supported amnesty in the 80s knowing that we'd be in the situation we are today as part of some dastardly bad-faith plan to bring in more illegal immigrants is nonexistent.
"But Chris!" you say, scurrying back to your bailey, "I didn't mean voters today are acting in bad faith because of legislation from 40 years ago, I'm saying they push compromises in bad faith knowing that they're meaningless and we'll be back where we started 40 years from now! How could you not parse that from my two sentence effortpost that I worked on meticulously to avoid any ambiguity?"
To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them. I believe that the majority of Americans support a middle path, flanked by people like the one I replied to and open borders folks. Biden, the media, and a majority of voters all knew the administration had a problem with immigration leading up to the election which is why they tried to craft a compromise to address it. You won't get a mea culpa, but it was pretty obvious throughout the summer that the status quo was unsustainable.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Cynical read is that you're always talking about Hunter Biden. Breitbart has written 134,000 articles mentioning Hunter Biden and pumps out like 5 or 6 a day. Fox News has written 260,000 articles about Hunter Biden between January 1st, 2020 and today. You'd be saying this if it had dropped last month, last week, or next year. When, exactly, should the indictment have been unsealed to satisfy you?
Ah, right. The answer is never, isn't it?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it.
I've spent over a decade living in the northeast, bouncing around a few cities while making what most here would consider poverty wages until recently. I've never lived in Baltimore specifically, although I have spent a few years in multiple places with similar demographics and reputations. Maybe your experience is colored by your proximity to the courthouse or something, maybe it's a pre/post-COVID thing but...I've just never encountered things like that? I'd routinely go out every Friday and Saturday night and walk/bike a couple miles through the downtown area to get home at 2-3am completely hammered and nobody ever bothered me. Do you all go out of your way looking for trouble? Do things change when you're significantly older and look like an easy mark? I didn't think I was particularly intimidating, but who knows.
In the last ~2 years there has been a noticeable uptick in the number of homeless people (the opioid epidemic making itself felt?), but they were at first largely confined to the homeless encampment (our equivalent of SF's mission district I suppose). Once that got cleared, they all moved to congregate in a public space which honestly hasn't been any better. At some point, people will get sick of it and I imagine they'll clear it out more aggressively and institutionalize the homeless at a significant cost. In the meantime, my quality of life and lived experience haven't been affected in the slightest - never been mugged, never had anything broken into, never had my bike/car stolen, never been harassed or attacked. I've enjoyed all the cities I lived in and don't have any desire to move elsewhere.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,' for lack of a better word. You're unemployed because the government shipped your jobs overseas, you're addicted to fentanyl because of corrupt doctors and politicians in bed with Chinese companies flooding the country, men are depressed and committing suicide because of feminism/hostile society/subversion of traditional gender roles, you're poor because immigrants are driving down your wages.
When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs? I can accept that even if they did believe that, saying so publicly would be political suicide...but do you think that they believe it? Do you yourself believe that, or do you agree with most of the statements I made above?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Trans/queer; the new punk
A plague is corrupting the youth of Athens. Men dress like women, sport long, dyed hair and refuse to wrestle in the coliseum or participate in polite society. Women dress like men. Both mutilate their bodies to the consternation of their elders and abscond from their parents homes in droves.
I am, of course, talking about punks. And emos, goths and metalheads if I can lump everyone into the same bucket to make my life easier.
Having a fluorescent blue footlong mohawk, tattoos, piercings and a leather jacket made you eminently unemployable outside of menial service jobs and was the fashion equivalent of telling the world to go fuck itself. ‘Posers’ would get a tiny tattoo on their ankle or something and listen to the wrong music, then cover it up for their day job. Plenty of people will be nonbinary on the weekend and just pass as whatever gender they were assigned at birth Monday-Friday. 15 years ago, the mainstream was sharing cringe videos of emos and goths instead of the ‘it is ma’am’ person.
I believe that there are genuine trans people in the world who have always felt uncomfortable in their body. Numerous posts here have already described the rapid rise in trans youth so I won’t belabor the point, but my thesis (which will no doubt tank my career when this account is doxxed) is that a large fraction of these youth are protesting the gender binary and heteronormativity rather than experiencing a true, deep-seated gender identity different from what they were assigned at birth. A man wearing a dress, long hair or makeup is rebelling against arbitrary norms around clothing/fashion that evolved for a vastly different society with different needs. Spend some time on Feeld, okcupid or other dating apps (especially within the poly community), and you’ll see many people who identify as trans or queer and aren’t so much trying to pass as telling the system to go fuck itself by refusing to conform to gender norms.
Boomers and Gen Xers decrying trans youth and trans culture are Barbara Streisanding the phenomenon; the fact that you hate it is what makes it appealing to many kids in the first place! In the same way that being a punk is a nonissue today, the future of trans is becoming a minority of the population who wear the clothes that they want, use the bathrooms they want and nobody cares. Meanwhile, we’ll all be losing our minds about otherkin or pluralkin. Or maybe this guy. This isn’t to dismiss the harms that punks and anarchists may have caused in their time; I can think of a couple small-scale riots and businesses burned in my hometown during Mostly Peaceful demonstrations that got out of hand. The trans movement undoubtedly isn’t an unalloyed good and criticism will likely be valuable to reign in the excesses as it evolves into whatever the endgame is.
History may rhyme, but it’s true that it never directly repeats itself. The punk community, obviously, placed a large emphasis on music and art. While queercore is a thing, as was PWR BTTM pre-cancellation, the trans movement clearly isn’t centered on music in the same way. This could just be a shift in protest/underground culture, as neither punk nor metal carry the same bite that they used to - I saw Rancid about 10-15 years ago and even then no amount of cocaine could give them the energy they had in the 90s. Napalm Death was a hell of a time, but it hits a bit different when the entire crowd is in their 30s-50s instead of their teens. Kids are on their phones instead of listening to the radio, hanging out at the skate park and going to punk shows - as a result, protest culture just looks different than it used to, but I believe the trans movement are the ideological inheritors of the punk movement.
The other major difference, and one place where I expect the most pushback, is that punk was anti-authoritarian, anarchist and explicitly ungovernable. On the other hand, major media outlets, schools and ‘The Cathedral’ are explicitly pro-trans. I would argue that while the progressive activists are genuine they are vastly in the minority, and opposed by an equally loud minority with inverted views if not quite the same institutional reach. The majority in the center make pro-trans noises, but at the end of the day they aren’t going to date a trans person or wear clothes that don’t match their gender.
As an aside, if I can ramble for a bit - the corollary to Cthulhu swimming left is that youth crave rebellion and transgression, only to grow up and normalize whatever was shocking to their elders. Septum piercings and tattoos were ‘big deals’ growing up, whereas I have friends who are academics in good standing with visible tattoos and piercings. Going way back, lindy hop in the Savoy ballroom 12 was viewed as scandalous, whereas now it’s largely practiced by white retirees in their 60s-70s and millenial STEMlords who like dancing predetermined patterns. Elvis shocked the nation with gyrating hips in a performance tamer than 99% of the content on instagram. Punk and metal have vastly less appeal for Zoomers in the same way that the Beatniks and Hippies held no sway over the Millenials; each generation of youth pushes for progress and wants to do something transgressive. I’ll leave it to someone smarter than I to make the case that this freedom and spirit of rebellion is core to what makes America and the West great, but I do genuinely believe it.
Anyways. I, for one, can’t wait to see 60-70 year old millennials trying to dance like this. See you all grinding on the nursing home stripper poles in a couple decades.
Obligatory statement to head off some remarks: minors being able to medically transition against the wishes of their parents makes me deeply uncomfortable. I don’t support public school children being forced to attend drag queen story hour, but have no problem with people who want to bring their own children. Most other trans-associated culture war topics (pronouns, bathrooms, clothes, whatever) I'm fine with.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Good. There should be consequences for advocating for political violence. It has ever been thus, and some social consequences are better than being (literally) tarred and feathered.
This isn't even a problem as far as free speech is concerned. The Gestapo didn't kick down her door and drag her off to a reeducation camp, a private corporation fired her because it thought her opinion beyond the pale. Free speech doesn't guarantee that you can say whatever you want to whoever you want without consequence.
As an aside, this is hilarious considering that less than a week ago people (@Jiro et al.) were still pulling the LoTT is a powerless private citizen compared to the checks notes cathedral juggernaut that is Social Text. At some point the fig leaf of 'punching up' just isn't going to work anymore when LoTT is getting people fired like that.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Do you think you're better than him?
Nope.
The point in your favor for suggesting moderation is balanced by your politely-phrased smug tone.
As someone who supports some of the causes he decries to varying degrees, how do you think I'm supposed to participate in this conversation exactly? I could respond in kind and we could fling feces at each other while you tut tut and enjoy the show. Or more realistically I'm buried in feces by the largely right-leaning commentariat.
I could craft a thoughtful response to some of his individual points, but what kind of conversation do you think he and I will have?
I could be the apologetic, liberal whipping boy who takes his lumps for That Bad Thing The People I Don't Like Did This Week.
I've done enough of all three. At a certain point a spade is a spade, and a bad post is a bad post. I can link you to massive exchanges I've had extending weeks and tens of thousands of words with FcfromSSC, gattsuru, professorgerm (now desolation, I believe?) and others so clearly I'm capable of having a decent conversation with people who hold very different beliefs. The process certainly changed my worldview.
That hasn't happened in...upwards of a year, I don't think? I'm sure you could make the argument that I changed rather than the space, but then I'd challenge you to show me any interesting and civil back-and-forth between a real liberal and conservative here that's happened recently. At a certain point, what exactly am I supposed to do with OP?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
19d ago
You started your post with:
Why Should I Care? To provide some context, I've been in a bit of a malaise for the last few days, having had a rough week at work, and I get into a spiral of fantasizing about quitting my job when the thought hits me - why, exactly, do I even care about the job? Why do I actually care about contributing to society?
You followed up with 20 different ways society fails men, whom you depict as passive victims in your narrative. None of these actually answer the question you started with - okay, in the past men could be decidedly average and the church would still furnish them with a doe-eyed virgin and 20 acres of land on their 18th birthday. Even if you and all the NEETs lived in that world, what's the point of getting married? Of having children, raising them well, working to feed yourself? Why do you bother to call your elderly parents?
If your answers were orgasms, economic utility, economic utility, not starving and I don't talk to my parents on a regular basis then your problems run a lot deeper than dating market hard and my life is pointless because the state won't let me starve. If you don't want to do your job then don't, but quitting to pick pineapples isn't going to make you any happier until you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
First, I believe you have conflated the budget bill with the debt ceiling. Biden authorized a temporary budget through March 14th to avoid a government shutdown. The debt ceiling is untouched, and we are right up against it. We cannot spend money we don't have anymore.
No, I understand the difference. That's why I asked whether you thought Biden should have pushed congress to raise the debt limit in the last few months of a lame duck presidency.
Second, Biden pushed as much money out the door to the Democratic Patronage Network as he possibly could. I mean look at these headlines. $4 billion for World Bank, $100 billion for clean energy grants, $5.9 billion for Ukraine, as well as "forgiving" $4.7 billion in loans to Ukraine. Since after the election they've emptied the coffers as quickly as they could.
lol, Democratic Patronage Network. If nothing else, I admire your rabid partisanship.
Anyways, the $4 billion for the world bank you linked doesn't get paid until after Trump takes office (and presumably he can, and I presume will, cancel it). Your argument is that Biden went on a spending spree over the last few months - can you explain the timing of how you see that working? The 100 billion for clean energy came from the funds appropriated by congress for the inflation reduction act. Do you think you could also explain how that fits your narrative that Biden went on a 'spending spree' to bankrupt the federal government in his last few months in office? Did you read the articles that you linked?
Your examples don't seem to make your point very well. It's just not clear to me, legally speaking, how a president can go on a spending spree in their last few months in office and bankrupt the government when funding is appropriated by congress.
Now maybe you can frame this in a way where it's all smart politics. One persons "They put party above country" is another persons "The opposition party is entirely illegitimate and we must break off all the levers of power and leave the country crippled before they use the turnkey fascism we set up." Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
No, I don't think I would ever argue that harming your own country for partisan gain is a good thing. And broadly speaking, Trump won an election, so let him govern as he sees fit (within the bounds of the constitution and short of Watergate-level offenses) and the voters will decide.
All the same, given the situation he finds himself in, why shouldn't Trump close every money spigot he possibly can, regardless of the letter of the law, because we've been left completely broke? When we hit the debt ceiling, we start defaulting on our obligations. That's what this looks like. Complaining about Trump making lemonaid out of lemons, since slashing the budget was part of his agenda anyways and he can spin it as a victory, is just spin.
I'm not complaining about Trump freezing all federal spending. I'm responding to a comment that you made and asking you to explain what you meant.
I'd be making different arguments for USAID or NIH/NSF/DoE or whatever other department.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
In context I'd defend it as 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion'
Indeed; mask mandates are also pro-liberty as they give people the freedom to not worry about getting COVID in the train. Censorship gives LGBT and minorities freedom from hate speech. Jailing Donald Trump will give us freedom from fascism and neo-nazism.
Censorship is inherently illiberal however you try and dress it up. That doesn't make it bad. There's such an aversion to censorship that when we actually decide we want to engage in it we have to lie to ourselves and dress it up as some freedom or another.
school is mandatory and funded by all sides of the political spectrum after all.
Better argument for the curriculum. Bad argument for book bans. Nobody is forcing your child to look at those books any more than anyone was forcing the other high school kids to go to that party.
I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a neutral curriculum
Whew. Good luck with that one, man.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin
And yet, most of their advocacy revolves around banning books and curricula discussing LGBT, trans and civil rights issues:
Accompanying that letter is an 11-page spreadsheet with complaints about books on the district’s curriculum, ranging from popular books on civil rights heroes to books about poisonous animals (“text speaks of horned lizard squirting blood out of its eyes”), Johnny Appleseed (“story is sad and dark”), and Greek and Roman mythology (“illustration of the goddess Venus naked coming out of the ocean...story of Tantalus and how he cooks up, serves, and eats his son.”) A book about hurricanes is no good (“1st grade is too young to hear about possible devastating effects of hurricanes”) and a book about owls is designated as a downer. (“It’s a sad book, but turns out ok. Not a book I would want to read for fun,” an adult wrote of the owl book in the spreadsheet.)
...
At one juncture, the group implores the school district to include more charitable descriptions of the Catholic Church when teaching a book about astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was persecuted by said church for suggesting that Earth revolves around the sun. “Where is the HERO of the church?” the group’s spreadsheet asks, “to contrast with their mistakes? There are so many opportunities to teach children the truth of our history as a nation. The Church has a huge and lasting influence on American culture. Both good and bad should be represented. The Christian church is responsible for the genesis of Hospitals, Orphanages, Social Work, Charity, to name a few.” MFL’s Williamson County chapter also takes issue with a picture book about seahorses, in part because it depicted “mating seahorses with pictures of postions [sic] and discussion of the male carrying the eggs.”
So painting them as being about Liberty in any meaningful sense of the word, other than Liberty being a red-tribe codeword, seems patently dishonest. Their objections to content are often explicitly political and coded red-tribe. Some of the shit that was banned in Florida schools a few years ago was hilariously inoffensive.
As for the OP, whatever. I don't really care. But if people bothered to look at the context, I'd expect most to at least get a chuckle out of the fact that people clutching their pearls at the idea of their child being exposed to the idea that gay people exist then get schwasted with them on the weekend in between threesomes.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
From OP:
In related olds, DisruptJ6 protestors, despite alleging molestation going on for a longer period of time, and interfering with bodily autonomy in much more invasive ways, have yet to be given money.
What it says in the article they linked:
The detainees list several issues. The conditions allegedly include no religious services or visitations, "black mold" and "worms" on the jail's walls and in food, abuse by guards, and vaccine requirements for visits and other services. They also say their clothing sent to laundry is returned covered in "brown stains, pubic hair and or reeking of ripe urine." And they say they've lost eyesight and hair because of "malnourishment.
So...prison? You can't expect me to believe that in a forum where people routinely express a desire to murder carjackers and other petty thieves that someone being outraged about moldy food and dirty clothes without pushback is evidence of anything other than blatant tribalism*. Not to mention the use of the word 'molestation' without providing any evidence that they were sexually assaulted in prison - which, for all I know, exists, but they don't link to it and (lest I be accused of not doing my homework again) some basic google searches of 'january 6th protestors prison rape' or 'january 6th protestors sexual assault' only turns up a few cases of the protestors themselves raping children or assaulting women. Or perhaps you'll claim that they used the word 'molested' per the dated 'Alice and Bob arrived at their destination unmolested,' but now the level of mental gymnastics you're expecting from me to imagine that the OP is being fair or charitable exceeds my modest IQ.
From OP:
Recently the US city of New York, decided that BLM protestors that felt victimized by the police preventing from running amok, deserve 21500 USD (28267877.5 KRW) each.
From the article they linked:
They were restrained with tight plastic handcuffs also known as zip ties by officers who were not masked as the pandemic raged. Officers wielding batons swung at protesters and hit them with pepper spray, according to the lawsuit.
You can also follow a link to videos of the protestors being beaten. Why would you frame them as 'feeling' like they were victimized when they were beaten with batons and pepper sprayed?
From OP:
But now the what the Hot Coffee Incident was in common perception notable for, harm suffered being greatly outweighed by compensation, has come true. Thus making protesting a net-gain, unless one views publicly supporting BLM to be so immoral, as there existing no sum high enough for which one would do it.
Between 15 and 30 million people protested that summer. Three hundred are eligible for a payout. Based on the estimates in the NYT article, 180-230 will collect and some other undefined number have already settled. From the evidence provided, OP's argument is that some minute fraction of BLM protestors being paid out makes protesting liberal causes anywhere in the United States a net positive, which is frankly idiotic and ignores all the jail time that BLM protestors did receive:
The AP found that more than 120 defendants across the United States have pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial of federal crimes including rioting, arson and conspiracy. More than 70 defendants who’ve been sentenced so far have gotten an average of about 27 months behind bars. At least 10 received prison terms of five years or more.
Do you think OP's inflammatory claims brought a reasonable amount of evidence?
We could have an actual conversation about events - the ping-ponging hypocrisy of conservatives swinging from prison inmates FAFO'd to moral outrage at the in-group suffer, and liberals salivating over the possibility of January 6th rioters being prison-raped. From conservatives being hostile or apathetic towards women's sports to suddenly being outraged that the purity of women's sports might be compromised by trans athletes, and liberals who went from supporting cis-women's leagues to dogpiling women who dare to suggest that trans athletes might have an unfair biological advantage. We could have, and have had, more nuanced discussions about both the January 6th and BLM riots - although I admit that I was disheartened by them at the time, at least they were better than this.
This is what the community has come to - low effort, inflammatory posts bashing left wing topics du jour with minimal evidence receiving virtually no pushback or rebuttals. And frankly, most posts along these lines aren't even worth engaging with.
*For the record - prison rape and poor prison conditions are bad, and neither the J6 or BLM rioters should be raped, starved or otherwise abused.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
19d ago
'I hate it,' quoth the hater.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
Ironically, claiming that Watergate was the CIA running a coup on Nixon probably has less bipartisan support than the consensus view that it...wasn't.
Not to mention Nixon was so far in the past that he doesn't even map as Republican or Democrat to me, I'm broadly unfamiliar with his policies and those of his contemporaries, and just used Watergate as the most salient presidential scandal of the last 50 years. If you have an approved nonpartisan example to replace it with, I'm all ears.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
I mean, I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse. As I've already stated in this thread, I am myself pretty ambivalent about immigration, insofar as it (A) tends to benefit me, personally and (B) tends to economically benefit nations, on average. But when immigration yields a specific, horrific crime against the indigenous population and people get upset about that, telling them to weigh the overall positives against their negatives seems like a non-starter, argument-wise.
You could replace everything in this argument with the case of George Floyd. When policing yields a specific, horrific crime against black Americans and they get upset, telling them to weigh the overall positives of policing against their negatives seems like a non-starter, wouldn't you agree?
And yet, I don't recall you ever making that point five years ago. Perhaps you were just silent, perhaps I don't have Gattsuru's eidetic memory and you'll correct me, but I think it much more likely that you'll split hairs about how the UK rioters are morally justified while BLM was not now that the shoe is on the other foot.
I'm personally ambivalent. What you say is true, and the statistics people give about police brutality and immigration are also, presumably, true. It's not particularly surprising for people to react this way, but at the same time, western democracies need to find a way to adapt to the viral nature of the internet, social media and ubiquitous cell phone recordings without sliding into chaos or authoritarianism. Violent crime has decreased significantly since the 90s in the USA, but it certainly doesn't feel like it given the constant sensationalism in social media and news feeds. And yet, any centralized effort to block production or consumption of viral news is antithetical to our values. Millenials and boomers are probably screwed; maybe the zoomers will become sufficiently desensitized to snuff and viral videos that we'll return to equilibrium after people born before ~2005 die off.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
When the government takes half your paycheck and gives it to a swarm of party-aligned parasites that live off grant money, the government is denying you agency.
Hey man, I don't like that the government is subsidizing traditionally red tribe occupations either, but you should really pressure your elected officials if you want it to stop.
Not to mention the income tax rate tops out at 37%, so it's not half your paycheck, and even if you are in the top tax bracket...you really don't have anything to be complaining about because you're making over half a mil per year.
When politicians coordinate with megacorporations to enrich themselves by impoverishing american workers, they are denying you agency.
Based. How do you want to bust the megacorps, comrade?
When your child isn't allowed to take algebra in school because a leftist "education consultant" got paid $5000/hr to call math racist while sending her children to a private school, they are denying you agency.
That's an impressive 10,000,000$ per year. Do you have any idea how I could become an education consultant?
Anyways, I'll ask you the same question as last time. I largely agree with you about the problems in the country. Do you have any realistic, well-thought out plans to address them? We could zero out budgets for all the education consultants, all the minority-owned business subsidies, most of the other stuff you complain about as woke, and your buddy would still be struggling to feed his family stocking shelves. If you want to cut taxes, we probably need to cut medicare and social security (I'm assuming you don't want to touch the military), so your shelf-stocking friend will age into being a senior who both can't afford healthcare and has to keep stocking shelves until he keels over and dies.
But seriously, I'm listening. I'm open to having my mind changed. What do you actually want? What's your positive vision for the future?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I haven't read much about the code of conduct in particular, just that there is one, but in general I think it's a cudgel to be used against the conservative justices, because that's how its implementation has been characterized.
You don't explicitly lay out how a code of conduct that applies to everyone equally is biased against Conservative justices. Is it because you think conservative media outlets are incapable of doing investigative journalism? That only Conservative justices are likely to violate said code of conduct? That everyone is corrupt, but the public/congress will selectively pressure corrupt Conservative justices?
If it came out that, say, Soros was buying houses and fancy vacations for some of the liberal justices I'd anticipate Fox News, talk radio and the Matt Gaetz' of the world would convulse in a collective orgasm and talk about it nonstop for the next three months. Do you disagree?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
but when have I ever expressed anything positive about eugenics?
I was trying to head off anyone who might be upset about X so we could focus on what I think is salient for the discussion. I don't know what your views on eugenics are, but my base assumption is that most people here believe in HBD and most of those people support some form of eugenics.
Are you an anarchist?
Nope. I'm just here for the music.
If not, can you explain to me how to lay out a positive vision for a society without resorting to any social control?
I'd suggest you go on the internet, join a community (it could even be this one!) and just write. Try and convince your fellow (wo)man of your vision for the world without being a hater. You could also start a substack, write op-eds for legacy media, be one of those youtube influencers, talk to people in meatspace. Tell me about your tradwife utopia in good faith, how you want to get there, and engage in a respectful dialogue.
I've seen this "you guys don't have a positive vision at all, you're just reacting to our glorious progressive revolution" going around, but I don't get how you can say it with a straight face. Remind me again who came up with the whole concept of "deconstruction" and was madly applying it to every positively created social institution we had over the past 50 years?
'No u' isn't a particularly convincing rebuttal. Moreover, it papers over the fact that your specific contribution is at least 90% complaining about 'bad thing my outgroup did this week.' Your idea of a palate cleanser, because the previous conversation was too toxic, is 'look at these gay fucks trying to be happy in a way I dislike. Major Cthulhu/body horror vibes here guys amirite?'
But alright. Come on, arjin. Whip out that meaty, utopian vision of yours and slap my dirty deconstructionist face with it. I'm ready for it.
I know you noticed, and I know it surprised you, so why didn't you stop and reassess your view of us, and the implications of our beliefs, when you saw that the people actually expressing any kind of discomfort with the whole Katja Grace thread were Dase, Hlynka, FCfromSSC, SouthKraut, and me?
Because you turn around and write the exact same thing as yesterday about a different group and are somehow blind to the fact that you're doing it! It's frankly hilarious that you think you're somehow morally superior to the trolls who were shitting on Katja for trying to be happy yesterday, even as you're turning around to shit on gay people trying to be happy today!
It doesn't surprise me at all that there's discord between the Rights who are sympathetic to rationalists and the Rights who aren't, and of course there are plenty of people here who I believe do have good moral character. In fact, I believe most people here probably are perfectly fine (almost certainly far above the median) in real life. The beliefs expressed here are just a small facet of everyone's personality.
But man, they do suck sometimes.
You didn't even say a bloody thing yourself, until you saw Dase speak up!
Why don't you, @aqouta and gattsuru get together and tell me when and what I'm allowed to write and get back to me. You complain if I say something, complain if I don't and I'm pretty sure the actual operative principle here is that you just don't like what I say.
Oh god, why am I the only one that has to answer reductio ad absurdums around here?
Because you carelessly toss bombs like:
Accept the limits of your biology, and move on...Given the utter dominance of the trans ideology, the vindication of the slippery slope argument, and the extrapolated trajectory of these ideas, I believe we have no other choice - Transhumanism must be destroyed!
without making an argument beyond gay people trying to have children is icky, transhumanists are icky, transhumanists must be destroyed! Which leads 'accept the limits of your biology and move on' to be the closest thing to a principle I can distill from your post. Okay...can you elaborate on how I should apply that principle to the rest of my life? Or if that's not your actual principle, what is?
You don't like exploiting third world women? How about brain dead surrogates? They can't get any more disempowered than they already are. Please you give me the positive principle
Brain-dead surrogates don't bother me any more than organ donation does. Put another box to tick next to the organ donation one for womb donation and problem solved. But moving on:
I don't have any objection to a woman choosing to use her body as a surrogate. I get uncomfortable when a woman is forced to choose between abject poverty, slightly less abject poverty flipping burgers or being a piece of womb-meat for ivy-league educated Chad and Jake who live across town. Even more uncomfortable when the woman is in the third world and faces even worse choices. We don't allow pharma companies to entice homeless people into super risky clinical trials with million dollar payouts, and I think the same principle applies here. On the flip side, we also need to incentivize people to work, so the economic carrots need to have at least some bite.
So...maybe utopia is some form of UBI that allows basic needs to be met while still allowing incentives for people to work if they can? Followed by a world where we could grow babies on command without physically incapacitating women for 9 months? Followed by a range of worlds enabled by speculative technology I can't imagine at the moment. I suppose if you boiled it down to principles, bodily autonomy, consent, general freedom in how you decide to pursue happiness balanced with the Greater Good? And, dare I say it, intersectional analysis when it comes to the dynamics between surrogates and couples trying to impregnate them?
Alright, now how about you tell me your vision?
stop this insanity
You want to stop the insanity? Stop being a hater on the internet. Politely tell other people to stop being haters on the internet. Go grill some burgers.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Come on man, as an argument, this is "Nuh-UH" and "No U". If the left manages to lose whatever cosmic thing you think they're winning, it will be because they followed policies informed by arguments as shallow and pathetic as this.
I'm skeptical I could make any argument along these lines that would impress you. I'm doubtful that my comments that are critical of the left or wokeness are any more incisive or insightful, but they never draw the same accusations, so /shrug. Most top level posts are naked culture warring cutting the other way that again, never draw this objection. To some extent accusations of being a shallow culture warrior is just table stakes for participating in this community regardless of how careful I am. If I truly took all Your (not you personally, the royal You) criticism to heart I would never say anything, and indeed, I delete half my abortive comments without them seeing the light of day. Maybe you'd like that better. I suppose if I got enough replies like yours I'd stop writing long before I became Darwin 2.0, but at least some people seem to find the discussion useful.
Anyways - many of you are taking this as some value judgment. That I'm trying to say 'This is why I'm a blue blooded Democrat damnit, because those dumb-dumb Republicans can't come up with a vision beyond robbing the poor and cutting taxes on the 1%.' Rather, I'm trying to make an argument along these lines although no doubt much less skillfully. I'm also trying to leave an opening for people to tell me I'm misunderstanding the problem, that this is the vision being articulated by so-and-so and I've just never encountered it, or that I'm typical-minding half the country who don't respond to the same incentives I do. I've gotten precious little of the former, maybe half the replies are the latter, and half the comments make me think I'm right and reinforce my belief.
All I can offer is to do my utmost to give your perspective a fair shake.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Violent nutjobs have gone after whoever they hated most - not infrequently, gays among others - since long before groomer discourse was a thing. You trying to hang this on anyone who ever complained about Drag Queen Story Hour is honestly kind of repulsive. As is trying to spin something out of "His grandfather is a Republican."
And you're not engaging with anything near a steelman of the argument he made. Painting relatively benign opponents as fascist white supremacists is not particularly productive, nor is it particularly controversial in these spaces that this kind of speech is dangerous. People don't like Arthur Chu talking about putting bullets in tumorous nazi Republican flesh or whatever that quote was. Seems fair to me that PM doesn't appreciate being called a groomer pedophile out to rape your kids, no?
Let's assume Aldrich was persuaded by LibsOfTikTok that we must stop the gays from grooming our children by any means necessary. It's still very unlikely that this otherwise stable and non-violent individual was just going to live a peaceful life until Twitter and grandpa told him about the "groomers."
Bad things happen. Bad people do bad things. We will always have bad people doing bad things. Therefore, why bother?
I hear this logic hasn't worked so well with defunding the police, and that actually, there are people who respond to incentives and the environment they live in. Seems pretty reasonable to me that there people out there who may not have been stable, peaceful individuals that nevertheless wouldn't have become mass shooters if it weren't for the toxic political waters we swim in.
I expect to see "If you say (fairly mainstream thing) you are Literally Killing People" on Twitter, but you offering it unironically here is crap argumentation.
It probably wasn't framed in an ideal way, nor does putting it in the context of his previous posts paint a very flattering picture, but...I think his point about not calling your fellow citizens pedophile groomers is valid? If you don't want to engage with it, you don't need to try and reduce it to puerile twitter one-liners.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
19d ago
I haven't seen you around for a bit and am happy you're still here.
I've been here the whole time. Lurking is just my natural state. This is the only forum I've participated in across thirty odd years on the internet.
What's your personal solution to this problem?
It's always been easy on a personal level. I have some innate affinity for and take pleasure from responsibility, returning the shopping cart, and working towards the flourishing of family/community/nation/humanity in that order. I appreciate that this is not a generalizable solution, although it's one I wish we could evangelize.
If one's moral framework is entirely built around one's own pleasure and benefit (or limbic gratification as you say), then sure, none of the above matter and anything I say will fall on deaf ears. There's no logical argument I can provide to convince you that I'm right. But frankly, not calling your parents or raising your children or treating your wife well or reading books or staying fit is, for lack of a better term, a bitch move, no? At the risk of typical-minding after already admitting I'm weird, I think nearly every man has this urge or understands what I mean when I say that.
Both sides of the aisle generally agree that the left fails to provide role models for men. Someone needs to wrest the banner of self-improvement, fitness, hygiene, stoicism, etc. from the Tates of the world and divorce it from the more toxic aspects of masculinity.
They just need a better physique and more charisma than I can muster.
Carrying on, one of my major frustrations in modern discourse is that there doesn't seem to be much individual reflection on what the point of life (or anything) even is, let alone widespread agreement. "Gratifying the human limbic system" seems to be what we're settling on and that puts us squarely in OP's dilemma.
The time is ripe for the birth of a new religion. Gather thy flocks, and adapt thy sermons to tiktok.
'You see Charlie, these liberals are trying to assassinate my character. And I can't change their mind. I won't change my mind, because I don't have to. Because I'm an American. I won't change my mind on anything, regardless of the facts that are set out before me. I'm dug in. And I'll never change.' For your viewing pleasure - one of my favorite clips, and not even for that quote.
Every time I read one of these pathetic tough guy screeds, my first thought is to laugh at the absolute lack of self-awareness. 'Reee, my outgroup is full of animals who would never compromise or act in good faith! This justifies me never acting in good faith either. I can't wait for my fellow citizens to get mown down by the stasi for disagreeing with me!'
My second thought is to reply, 'Say it louder, and into the microphone, please.' Seriously. Go hop on Fox News and give an interview about how you want to shoot protestors and cruelty is the point and God praise Donald Trump. Write your angry, impotent screeds and spread them as widely as possible - under your real name if you can. There's really nothing better for democratic electoral odds than platforming people like you.
Or, and I hold little hope for a week-old-probably-troll account, you could dig yourself out of your sad little internet radicalization hole and stop holding so much hate in your heart. I guarantee your life would be better for it.
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