Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
I am actively attempting to deradicalize myself. I dislike puritanism and intolerance. DM me if you want my Discord, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
User ID: 1719
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
2yr ago
Elon got harshly booed on stage with Dave Chappelle, and I am absolutely baffled. I thought the people who still enjoyed Dave's comedy post-The Closer (when he got deemed transphobic by left-wing activists) would be indifferent, if not positive, towards Elon Musk. But people who like Chappelle and not Elon are not only common, but the majority of the people in this audience. Did I miss something?
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
2yr ago
I wrote off this story immediately after it broke, because mentally ill males commit school shootings two or three times a year in America. But now, over a day later, I just found out the shooter was biologically FEMALE. That makes it extremely different from other school shootings for reasons the media obviously won't comment on, and I'm extremely surprised I don't see any discussion of this aspect of the story online. Why is a biological female perpetrating this, when the trend has always been male? Could they have overdosed on testosterone?
The Jedi cannot be a force for good, because in 2023 everyone knows that everyone with power is oppressive. You cannot have a government that isn’t secretly evil or broken by infighting because everyone knows that doesn’t happen
Those things are true, though. There is no such thing as pure uncomplicated good, only good enough.
What I liked about the prequel trilogy is that (even though Lucas stubbornly denies this) it portrays the Jedi as incredibly flawed, but still obviously better than the Sith. They take children from their families at as young an age as possible and forbid them from starting their own families so that they never form loyalty to anything above the Jedi order. The novelizations go even further in creating a sympathetic defense for the Sith, to the point that they're not obviously better than the Jedi until Order 66 happens.
I've always thought that a sequel trilogy should be about Luke starting his own Jedi order that is less oppressive than the original one, but running into the same problems that those harsh rules were created to solve. (Kids missing their families, questioning the Jedi ways, potentially creating new Anakins.) I haven't read the Harry Potter books, but based on what my friend has told me of them, the Wizarding World is similarly morally flawed, despite meaning well and being the good guys of their universe.
But back on topic: to me, the problem with our popular culture is the exact opposite of what you're describing. The issue isn't that people don't believe in pure, uncomplicated good. The issue is that believe it exists and that they represent it, while their enemies do not. This is why before JK Rowling became a "TERF", leftists would compare themselves to the Wizards and their political enemies to Voldemort. It's why they describe themselves as the Jedi, and their enemies as the Sith. It's why their definition of "fascist" always boils down to "cartoon supervillain who is obviously evil".
When a self-identified socialist disparages tankies, what they're saying is "I want to do exactly what the Soviet Union did, but it'll work this time, because we'll put a Snowball in charge instead of a Napoleon. We learned from our mistake and won't trust obviously evil people like Stalin, only obviously good people like Lenin or Trotsky."
I don't know if popular culture influences the way people see the world, reflects the way people see the world, or merely gives them a vocabulary to discuss their experiences. Regardless, I think we need more depictions of moral ambiguity, not less.
I'm with you on therapy culture, though.
In this NYT article, race isn't mentioned, so I assumed it was either a black-on-black or black-on-white killing, but apparently it was white-on-black! It's unusual for the NYT to not mention race in such a situation. Could it be that they're finally downplaying all races in their
crime reporting, and not just the ones that it's offensive to speak negatively about? That sounds too good to be true, but I want to believe.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
They do force an interpretation via Ferrara's monologue, and they have blatantly counterfactual stuff like an all-male board room in a state where there illegal. But if you edit out the more on the nose parts, the movie does become open to interpretation, yes.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
2yr ago
"These laws are seen as the government condoning that bullying"
Wait, really? You mean by the bullies (who I assume will use any justification they can to do bullying), or by adults?
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Those are not the people who need to forgive Hanania. The people we need to forgive him are the Republicans in Conservatism Inc. Typically, they go along with left-wing cancellation campaigns, then brag about how much better than the left they are for ousting the "bigots" from their ranks, while still engaging with the bigots on the left. The smart people who do this like Ben Shapiro are acting in bad faith, but most Republicans are just too stupid to notice the contradiction on their own. If Hanania points it out, there's a chance some of them will get it. And we NEED conservatives to read his upcoming book. Mass awareness of Griggs v Duke is the key to getting it overturned, which is the key to defeating wokeness.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
2yr ago
I agree that a Jewish rejection of idolatry would be akin to a rejection of tyranny, but the Jewish voices you see in the media don't actually reject idolatry. You can tell that by the way they treat the holocaust. Dennis Prager said that questioning any part of the official narrative means you're denying it in its totality, which means you're evil, which means that if hell exists, you will go there. And this guy is a dissident Jewish voice!
And yeah, the fact that Jews are a monotheistic religion is important, I guess. But so is the role that Jewish people (were believed to have) played in the formation of the USSR. Why isn't that mentioned in this article? Or in most articles on this subject?
By the way, what're your views on the holocaust, if you don't mind me asking? The fact that people get so mad about holocaust revisionism leads me to believe there must be something to it, but I'm not educated enough to say what that something is. I do believe the Nazi party deliberately murdered several million Jews because they don't want Jews in their territory. I don't care about the specifics beyond that, and I think calling anyone who disagrees on the specifics beyond that a "denier" is insane. It's weird to me that David Cole gets so much flack for saying the gas chambers were fake, when he still claims that the Nazis committed genocide. (And in case anyone lobs an accusation at me, I don't think the gas chambers were fake. I just think that if they were, it would change nothing.)
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
2yr ago
It occurred to me recently that I have no idea why Jim Crow laws existed.
I know from life experience that white flight isn't the result of racist white people wanting to avoid being near people who look different from them, but rather, reasonable people wanting to avoid black crime. I could extrapolate from this that the point of Jim Crow laws was to keep black criminals away, but that makes no sense. Black people had been enslaved for their entire time in the new world, so they didn't have the opportunity to become a criminal underclass. White people would not yet have any basis for the claim that black people are dangerous to be around, would they?
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
The reason to repeal it is that the use of "disparate impact" and "hostile work environment" in discrimination investigations have been disastrous for society, as Richard Hanania's book argues. Repealing the CRA would be the quickest way to fix the problem, and it'll be the only way if the Supreme Court reaffirms disparate impact.
I forget whether I already posted this, but it occurred to me recently that it may be more accurate to say that J.K. Rowling, and perhaps TERFs in general, are sexist than to say that they're transphobic. Rowling supports the right of people to dress however they like and receive whatever medical intervention they desire. She uses preferred pronouns in polite company. But she wants spaces to exist that discriminate based on biological sex, without taking someone's gender identity or expression into account. The term for sex-based discrimination is sexism.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Aside from Mama Odie, who lives in the bayou, every black character we see works in the diner with Tiana or lives in her neighborhood.
I see your point about the merchandising implications, though. Thank you.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
2yr ago
I went through a link chain to figure out who/what Crenshaw was, and I ended up at the Time Magazine article, which does provide some useful context.
"While the Reconstruction era after the Civil War is often skimmed over in high school U.S. history classes, AP African American Studies delves into progress made at that time, as well as how the roots of today’s mass incarceration system can be traced back to that era."
That's where my alarm bells went off. Mass incarceration is critical race theory. It's a conspiracy theory which, depending on which version you hear, states that the reason 13% of the population makes up 52% of the arrests is that either A. they're not actually committing more crime, the police just have it out for them because they're black or B. they are committing more crime, but there's deliberate social conditioning to make them do it (because they're black).
I mean, I'm totally sympathetic to the claim that the existence of prison labor provides incentive to arrest more people and hold them for longer. I'm also sympathetic to the claim that people whose jobs depend on the existence of prison will try to arrest more people and hold them for longer to protect their job security. The part of mass incarceration that always loses me is when people make race a part of it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the reason that America bought slaves from Africa wasn't because they had a pre-existing, innate antipathy towards Africans; it's because Africa was doing the selling. There is no similar reason I can think that would motivate the prison-industrial complex to go after black people, specifically. And every time I've asked a leftist to provide me with a reason, they just say "racism," and I've never found that satisfactory, because the vast majority of racists don't take pleasure in inflicting pain on a particular race for the sake of it, they're just indifferent to it and/or care about it less than they do pain inflicted upon members of their own race. I could argue that white people in power feel less guilty arresting black people than arresting white people, so they target black people to lesson their guilt over the horrors of the prison-industrial complex, but without any supporting evidence, I'm inclined to assume the other explanations for 1350 are more accurate. And even if the hypothesis I just created has truth to it, it doesn't connect to Reconstruction, like the paragraph says.
Sorry if I come across as dismissive in the above paragraph. I want to be more open-minded. f anyone reading this wants to make a case for racial mass incarceration as the result of systemic racism, I'd appreciate it and I promise not to belittle you.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
2yr ago
This is a good essay and I have shared it with people. While I can treat the doxing incidents as outliers, as Hanania has instructed me to, it still troubles me that the people who do these things continue to find employment in an industry that allows them to do such things. Taylor Lorenz may be best-known for doxing LibsOfTikTok, but she also doxed Pamela Geller's kids in response to hate speech committed by their mother, which they were obviously not responsible for. Until Lorenz apologizes for going after Geller's kids, I can't think of the Washington Post as a good institution while they employ her.
Also, I'm not convinced that Trump playing "QAnon music" was a signal to his base like Richard thinks it was. That was stock music that QAnon followers had been using in their videos. For all I know, they started using that stock music because they heard it at Trump rallies.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Maybe they're afraid to let their hypocrisy on Israel's border vs. America's border be too obvious, especially in light of Tucker Carlson bringing it to the attention of boomers.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
How many white racists even are there who would identify Nikki Haley as non-white?
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Autocorrect is a bitch. I meant positive discrimination, i.e. going out of your way to hire people from protected groups. Griggs brought affirmative action into the private sector by making it potentially illegal to have any hiring standard that created a disparate impact. I say "potentially" because you could still prove your standards were necessary after being dragged to court to pay legal fees.
New York recently had to pay out insane amounts of money because they were demanding unnecessarily high reading and writing skills from public school teachers.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
The main argument against repealing the Civil Rights Act is that if people have the option to discriminate against racial minorities in jobs, housing, and school admissions, they will do so. In order to know if this is true, we would need to look at a country that has a similar racial mix to America, but no anti-discrimination laws, then compare the life outcomes of Africans or other historically oppressed groups in America to their life outcomes in that country.
Can anyone think of such a country to use as a test case?
I recently found out that France does not have anti-discrimination laws, but also that they don't collect data on race, so it might not be possible to use them as a comparison.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Horseshoe theory is when the far-right and fat-left become indistinguishable because they're both demanding human rights violations in order to achieve pie in the sky goals. This sounds like something totally different.
And by "based", I don't mean anti-Semitic. I'm Jewish and pro-Zionist (with some reservations about how the Palestinians have been treated). I just mean that they're not going "ewwww, icky low status person with low status beliefs, get away" or demanding people be blacklisted.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Great post! Thank you!
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
2yr ago
he writes, after implying that the total death toll was fewer than a million
What?? I don't understand where you're getting that, but I don't want to argue with it because it feels like a distraction.
After all, if it was only half a million Jews who died, well then that would be roughly similar to the number of German civilians who died via the Allied strategic bombing campaign, or the number of ethnic Germans who died in the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Eastern Europe in 1944-46.
It would not be similar to the civilian casualties of war. War is morally complicated in a way that straight genocide isn't. As for your second example, I wasn't aware that there was a genocide that took place against ethnic Germans, but if such a thing did happen and was deliberately orchestrated by the government of whatever European country this took place in, then I do think it is morally equivalent to the Holocaust. That doesn't, however, mean it warrants as much attention as the Holocaust. The Holocaust is exceptionally well-documented by the very people who perpetrated it, and there are also thousands of hours of recorded interviews with survivors. The ethnic cleansing you speak of here is presumably less well-documented because I haven't even heard of it.
Germans were disproportionately and unequally punished for this
To my knowledge, their only punishment is living in a country where "hate speech" is illegal, and every Western country except America has unfortunately been given this punishment.
Hell, given the rough-and-tumble nature of total war it would be natural then to suggest the Holocaust wasn't deliberate,
They were put in camps, for Pete's sake! The camps are still standing! How can people be accidentally put in camps? I know you're trying to play devil's advocate, but I can't even follow the devil's advocacy you're doing.
I'm much too well-versed in the rhetorical style and strategies of Holocaust deniers not to get a lot of red flags popping in my brain as I read this post.
If I have to accept the label of Holocaust denier to have this discussion, then fine. I don't care. My point is that I don't understand why getting details wrong about a historical event is a moral failing and that people who do it should be "damned to hell." I also don't understand how someone could feel that way about the Holocaust, then turn around and express other taboo ideas without any cognitive dissonance. Dennis Prager is viewed by many leftists in prominent positions in the same way that he views people who underestimate the death toll of the Holocaust.
Again, I apologize if I'm making less sense now. This is one of the few subjects that makes me really emotional, and when I'm emotional, I don't make as much sense as I otherwise would. But that's why I need to talk about this, and there aren't any other places for me to talk about it.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
That makes sense. Thank you for your answer. This opens up another question, though: if not much has actually changed for women, what explains The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness?
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
2yr ago
Why not? If people are interested, then I think these courses should be offered as electives.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
2yr ago
A groomer is someone who subtly leads children or similarly vulnerable to make decisions that they otherwise wouldn't make. In recent years, its connotation with sex has overshadowed all other meanings. The people accusing trans activists of being groomers weren't, to my knowledge, accusing them of sexual grooming when the meme took off, but it's devolved into that because dumb social conservatives are conflating this very real problem with the gay agenda they tried to warn about a decade ago.
America First means putting the needs of one's nation above the other needs of other nations, and American citizens over the needs of foreigners.
Into the Spider-Verse was my favorite movie of 2018. I only found out this year that one of the film's directors was someone whose values are antithetical to everything I believe and as harmful to me as ideas can be. I knew he wasn't returning to direct the sequel, so I thought that meant I could go see it without feeling shame, but I just found out (again, surprisingly late) that he's an Executive Producer on it. This likely means he gets a share of the box office gross, though I don't know how big that share would be.
This presents an e̶t̶h̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ psychological dilemma that feels as though it's ethical for me. This is one of the few movies where seeing it in the theater is very important to me, and I do feel that I'd be missing out by seeing it on my tiny laptop screen several months after release. However, I would feel emasculated if I gave this person any more money than I already have. Is there a way I can have my cake and eat it too here?
I know it's unlikely that anyone here has a better idea "than stop giving a crap about what filmmakers believe," but I'm asking anyway, just in case. There's nobody else on the internet where I'd expect people to be sympathetic to my problem in a way that's more than superficial. Left-wing spaces (as I've experienced them) would say "you should only care about political violence and life ruination if you're the kind of person we'd be using it against," and right-wing spaces (as I've experienced them) would say "these tactics are actually good and we should use them against left-wingers when we're in power" after making fun of me for liking children's movies. I do not mean to imply all left-dominated or right-dominated spaces are like the ones I describe, but that's my expectation of them based on experience, and it's always demoralizing to get those kinds of reactions, so I don't want to go seek them out.
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