Is there anything more singularly obnoxious than a Reddit thread of smug shots at Elon Musk? According to them, apparently he doesn't know electricity and servers cost money. And firing most of the worthless staff at Twitter was the worst self-inflicted wound anybody could have ever made!
You ask why this causes bafflement, but do you really think these idiots know something he doesn't? That they have a better grasp of tech and its funding than the man who has a history with payment processors, cybercars, rockets, and now social media - and Elon is just bumblefucking his way to success? I'll grant that he is human and more error-prone than his godly 4d troll image would have some believe. But give any one of his businesses to a chump in that thread (or a group of them) and watch it go belly-up or taken away from them under their noses.
Maybe Musks's single qualification over these people is that he doesn't post on Reddit. A lot of Musk criticism clearly comes from a type who thinks they could do the same job he does even better if only the world had been more fair and gave them the opportunity to do so. It's laughable and contemptible in equal measure.
DTulpa
1yr ago
It's schizophrenic. It's always going to be seen as tawdy and low-brow, and earnest arguments that its consumption is sexually healthy ring hollow to most ears. At the same time, my weekly news feed seems to regularly drop an article or two about 'empowered porn stars and all their money' or 'a porn star was invited for a school book reading and incels can't handle it'. Few people want to be porn stars or would recommend it as a career, but there's a reflexive defensiveness against anybody who might ask 'what special qualifications does this whore have to read to my 5th grader?'. There's also 'former porn star, despite being forewarned, has trouble getting a normie job after exiting and isn't that so unfair'.
Hardcore straight porn is ugh the worst, but exploring your mommy kink with roleplay and bizarre anal insertions for the viewing pleasure of strangers is both normal and an exotic frontier you should explore assuming you're not close-minded. No, there is no sense to be made from this.
DTulpa
2yr ago
Regarding trans children at least, I don't know how many parents take their cues on child-rearing from online porn. I think there's a general heuristic that the internet is a crazy place, and whatever hot new fad or kink that is expressed from online spaces is just "that weird meme crap my kid ocassionally references that I don't understand or feel like understanding, because the 'net is crazy". It's hard to separate it from "The Grimace Millshake Challenge" or whatever bizarre FOMO meme is being reported on, and you can see your Mom's face screw up in judgmental confusion as you attempt to explain it.
If this is just crazy internet shit, you can hold onto the hope (somewhat reliably) that the fad will pass and all you need to do is hold down the fort as the storm moves past you. Codifying it into education sanewashes and perpetuates the phenomenon, because you can't so easily dismiss an army of smart-sounding educators who supposedly knows what's best for your child and are 'experts' on teaching kids - since you're just some dummy that has the humility to understand some things are beyond your understanding and intellect, so might as well to defer to your betters even if it makes you uncomfortable
I think many people are wising up to the idea that this trusted dynamic has been utterly abused. And resisiting the trans push into education is 'holding down the fort'.
DTulpa
3mo ago
"tranquility, forgiveness, humbleness and charity"
I'm on board with the accusation that many Christians are only nominally so. But it is absolutely laughable that you think Progs have exemplified these values to any significant degree given the last 10-15 years, if not more. I've seen almost none of these things from the Left as of late. Nor do I recall them exemplifying these values any more than the average person on the street from my teen years to early adulthood - a time when the idea of ever voting Republican for any reason was unthinkable to me.
DTulpa
11mo ago
As a former Democrat, perhaps I was never able to summon a burning dislike for Ms Clinton, although I was never her fan. I didn't vote in the matchup between her and Trump. My opinions of her only turned more negative further down the line.
By comparison, I find Kamala to be odious on nearly every dimension. I might have given Hillary a lot of shit, but I never doubted her intelligence or general political savvy. Kamala is a bobble-head, and while I could have tolerated her existence as a fashion accessory for the Biden campaign, watching her get escalated to her current position without having to jump through a quarter of the hundreds of fire rings Trump had to circus through is now insulting.
I think she will ultimately do herself in. But I admit that every couple of hours I have a mini-freakout about her being this close to POTUS. I relax when I remind myself that she never had any momentum and has been entirely reliant on elder statesmen's protection and hiding her from view. Now she has nobody else's wing to hide under and there's no more safe spots to bail to.
Awesome. I guess our 'lived experiences' cancel each other out, then? As in, it should have been predictable that unverifiable statements like 'Progs I know are more Christian than actual Christians' was going to be an unproductive dead-end in this discussion, and why did you even bother with it?
Maybe your friends are totally angels. It's rather weightless compared to your vanguards that freak the fuck out when they see a crucifix in a public building, or give themselves the sweats over Pete Hegseth's tattoos. For extra fun, go look up who Bernie Sanders invited to sing at his recent rally. Meanwhile, the Left (coded non-religious) reports more mental health issues and their compassion dries up the moment 'refugees' get bussed to their towns.
I sympathize with your vexation here. I'm not sure how productive these discussions can be if we have to regularly pause for interjections of "you haven't assigned enough (or any) blame to my outgroup". I think he could have made a better post than that.
At the same time, I also think we would be remiss to completely talk around a very obvious link between female promiscuity and popular progressive feminist messaging. A certain subset of men may benefit the most from modern dating/hook-up college, but this culture has never been broadly or enthusiastically condoned by men, at least out loud. A man may be happy that prostitutes exist if only to satisfy his base urges, but he's not exactly proud of it. And since humans aren't consistent, principled thinkers - while he may be happy that some women sleep around if only for the opportunity for him to get laid, he's probably not thrilled to find out his wife/girlfriend had dozens of partners prior to the current relationship. "X in the streets, Y in the sheets" kinda sums up the attempted propriety.
By contrast, it is feminism that has railed against "slut-shaming", argued that women who sleep around are unfairly judged compared to Chads, whitewashed sexual exhibitionism as personal exploration, and so much more since at least I was in Jr High. I'm not even interested in blaming anybody for our current state of affairs - just an admission that there is an obvious (if not clear) relationship between the dashed expectations of young women and this ubiquitous ideological memeplex. I don't think you can assign more culpability to men for herding women towards the Sex Party - gently pushing against their backsides and reassuing them to not worry, this will all be so fun - versus an industry of Grl Power media that is assumedly produced mostly by women.
As such, I am not interested in curbing or punishing legions of cheating/insistent men that potentially threaten the structural integrity of our society. Not until we dial the lens out far enough to indict a few other groups. Zero interest in "getting men to play by the rules again" when both sexes have defected from them (with women running the full sprint, one could argue), and when the fairer one routinely acts like it never has any agency in these affairs whatsoever - which is unacceptable when you've spent decades trumpeting how you know what you want, you are self-empowered, you don't need anybody to hold your hand or 'mansplain' things to you, and being chaste is just an insecure demand from the patriarchy.
Short of actual rape, there's a lot I'd give amnesty to until this conversation space starts looking halfway reasonable. But I'm not optimistic, and it is for that reason I reluctantly agree that this wound may not heal. All the "stitching up" has to happen on the men's side, and women act like they're just oblivious passengers that never saw the dozen road signs warning "POTENTIAL LANDSLIDES AHEAD".
And my point is that assuming children's gender identities or sexual orientations are being shaped by exposure to online porn, then we are from and away from 'born this way', and parents may feel they have a duty to restrict and deny access to such material, its relatives, and all their associated theorycrafting if they they deem it ultimately harmful for their offspring - without having to deal with a decentralized mass of sneering 'betters' who repeatedly/fraudulently cite The Science as being on their side, and who will utilize any mass of power they've accrued to culturally coerce you into behaving differently, up to calling CPS (and why believe it would stop there, left undeterred?).
Parents are often reliant on the integrity and validity of our institutions so they know what to expect, preempt, encourage, or ameliorate when it comes to the acculturation of their children. Instinct can probably get you far, but in a complex society with layers of social/economic/political abstractions, parents are looking for a consensus guard rail that reinforces their beliefs, gently reminding them "Yes, encourage that!" and "No, do what you can to curb that!". Validating the trans phenomenon as 'just some other way of being' after saying something that layman's ears might interpret as "The porn is mind controlling your kid and nobody should be concerned because #Pride" is seriously messing with the credibility of that rail, and the more it is emedded and officiated, the more concerned parents will be left out to dry, because...
"...Holy shit, I can't believe you disagree with the doctors and the teachers and about 75% of politicians (see, this is a totally non-partisan thing!) about the utility of teaching gender fluidity in Kindergarten! You still think it's a memetic contagion run amok? That is soooo 2023. Jordan Peterson is calling, and he wants you to clean your room! Haha."
I'm not sure if the above counts as uncharitable or inflammatory. But I was compelled to write it out and illustrate my point because these are very real conversations I've had too many times to count. I'm not too keen on the consequences of that dismissive disregard getting heavier.
This is probably just sour grapes on my end, but I think a distinction should be drawn between her campaign itself and the backwinds of one of the softest, non-hostile media environments I have ever seen for a candidate. People are giving Trump crap for his NABJ appearance, but are there any examples of Harris or her surrogates being able to survive a similar waltz through a lions' den? Every interview I've seen with Harris has her nonsensically flubbing through easy lay-ups provided by sympathetic journalists. Then there's the retroactive editing of articles from years ago, the refusal to grill her at all with regards to covering for Biden's obvious unsuitability for office, and an inability to make a case for her beyond riding a coconut with a smile.
Without the aid of the news orgs and a voting base that has totally mindkilled itself in the last few months to justify her ascension, this campaign would be stillborn. The power comes not from some expertly-run campaign, but the media putting its ass on the scale to glide her through. Biden was a beneficiary of this dynamic, too. This isn't a novel whiny excuse. Rightoids have tagged this as the true threat for years, and it doesn't matter if Biden, Harris, or some other thoroughly unimpressive Dem candidate is the avatar being supported.
I wish more feminists were more like you, then. But I think it would be hard to argue that the things FC listed weren't advocated by feminists as feminism, and you were cleared out of the room.
I'm sympathetic to people like you who may have been boxed out by a wayward media machine - in much the same way I think many reasonable LGBTQ voices got boxed out by the strident 'blockers before 18' movement sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But I can't help but be suspicious that both groups suppressed their misgivings due to outgroup fear, the want to not be a 'bad ally', or were content to soak up the secondary benefits up until it looked like they might be drying up.
DTulpa
5mo ago
I don't want to weird out my friend. You could say "No true friend would care if you're a closeted homosexual and why would you want to be friendly to such a person", but the fact of the matter is that many friendships are conditional on one not giving somebody else the ick.
And the need to not signal homosexuality is infinitely stronger when it comes to women, if for different but much more obvious reasons.
The only people who could be confused by this are a very small minority of women and asexual aspies.
This is so obvious a point that I wonder why it gets glossed over so much.
Yes, you have people on both sides of the aisle expressing violent fantasies and urges. The difference is that for a long time one side would lose their jobs, their status, their opportunities, and their protections. And not just them, but anybody who could be considered adjacent to those sentiments. Not even worth mentioning all the nonviolent expressions that got similar treatment. If you shoved some Sam Hyde quotes in front of an 'honorable Republican', they would reflexively denounce it, and maybe throw in a preemptive but unnecessary condemnation of white supremacy for good measure. There's /pol/, which isn't nothing, but it's also a bunch of faceless assholes who cant be held accountable and whose power level is overstated.
This is all before a POTUS candidate got shot. While I have some respect for the attempts to dissuade people against revenge, I have not been convinced that that said revenge isn't the smart, productive, and deserved play. Moreso, I don't know how you skip this step and go straight to Peace and Unity. There's a gap in this thinking that some expect to just sort out on its own, but I don't see the mechanism or the reciprocity required for it to work.
And when I compare the Left's body count to the Right's today... the suggestion to relent seems facially ridiculous? To my awareness, we have a Home Depot employee, an asshole streamer immolating himself and his surrounding bridges, and a member of a joke band pulling a Kathy Griffin (as in, largely punished by his peers, not external Rightoid forces). Not because of pronoun faux pas, or slips of the tongue, or statements that could be maliciously and dishonestly interpreted, but because they cheered on the death of Trump and/or Comperatore. These are the bridges too far? Really?
I don't believe in God or Heaven. More power to the folks with a strong Christian ethos or equivalent and the lines they wish to hold. I think holding these people over the piranha pit is ugly but necessary. And I'm prepared to accept that I likely won't see a quarter of the just desserts that would make this even remotely symmetrical. That's fine. I'm not greedy.
DTulpa
1yr ago
I definitely am discussing Reddit in general. The hot takes and easy karma shown in that thread appear any time Elon or any minimally right-coded figure pops up as a topic nearly anywhere on the site. You'll be browsing a sub for a video game or show you like and then one day there's a "DAE see similarities between Musk and the Dark Lord?" post sitting up top with 6 gold and thrice the upvotes relative to anything else.
Few are immune to smug convictions. But there is something stupefying about the particular thing they are convinced of. I'd frankly find it more tolerable if they accused him of being a grifter, a conman, a snake, or even evil. But dumb and incompetent? It's this reflexive tic among leftitsts where surely your opponents are just straight-up retarded; as opposed to you, brilliant cat man shooting for the 6 figures with your journalism and poli-sci courses (assuming they're even taking those and not just posing). And it's not just Reddit. I dont think a week goes by where I don't get fed an article about how Musk is doing something crazy or inscrutable. Just this morning I was reading about his digs at Wikipedia, and the article hintingly framed this as mental instability.
This started to feel tryhard with Trump, and it's doubly so with Musk.
Something that increasingly sticks in my craw is modern socprogs appealing to the "invisible hand of the market" whenever something like this happens - that is, when they're not accusing free markets of being corrupt, predatory, immoral, unsustainable, and demand more "ethical" dictats to be handed down from authorities.
If the accusations against Brand are made public, and his audience decides to give him 0 dollars the next morning, that is the invisible hand at work.
If a group of journalists, activists, and politicians bypass audience response and go straight to spooking management to cut him off, that is preempting feedback from the market. You are not letting the hand do its thing; you are calling God and demanding he intervene precisely because your faith in letting the market decide doesn't exist.
As if the decisions and personal preferences of Youtube, Rumble, Amazon, Steam constitute 'the market', and all the rabble like you and I don't count. As if those people (their CEOs or their beuraucratic layers that weigh in on these controversies) are what we are referring to when 'let the market decide' is invoked.
"Jeff Bezos doesnt like Confederate flags because racism, and now he has banned their merchandising on his storefront! See, you free-market right-wing capitalists? The market decided! You have literally nothing to complain about unless you're a hypocrite. Consumers are rejecting your racism."
That's been a decade-long refrain by now, and it has not gotten less idiotic or obfuscatory (by intention, I've come to believe). I'd wager that all these attempts to cut people off from their sources of income, to appeal directly to a storefront's management to have something taken off the shelf, to algorithmically suppress 'bad content' and 'bad people', are actually driven by fear. The fear that if you went hands-off and let the chips lie where they fell, progressives would have to face the truth that their shit is not as popular as they think it is, and oh gawd these peddlers of hate, sexism, racism, PUA-ism, COVID misinformation, election denialism might have more appeal than us! Or at least enough to make us sweat.
That must be psychically turbulent to experience, so best take steps to avoid that scenario. Just cut off some heads and say "Consumers were begging me to do it! Nothing unnatural occurred at all. Im just following the will of the people". And it really explains everything between the night of Trump's 2016 win and what we see today.
DTulpa
2yr ago
The investigations that ultimately ended up clearing Trump were treated as de facto proof of guilt by the media, Dem politicians, members of their investigative committees, and various NatSec officials in positions of seniority. Even with the Mueller report, the common refrain in its aftermath was "Trump may not have been proven guilty, but he wasn't proven innocent either". Even today, it is nigh impossible to get any plurality of Trump opponents to admit the accusations were bupkis, and there remains a substantial minority that still believes them outright.
As many here are fond of saying, "the process was the punishment". The investigations were blatantly weaponized, leaving a stench even if the shit didn't stick.
The CIA and its affiliates may be totally sqeaky clean and above-board behind closed doors. But since nobody has visibility into that apparatus, and history would indicate that's not particularly likely, I'm giving them zero deference.
DTulpa
10mo ago
This week we had a homeless woman fully evacuate her bowels in front of a kids museum, with families and children about. She is apparently known in that area for being aggressive and walking around with no pants. I briefly saw crap like this (haha but not really) when briefly visiting San Francisco, and it's the kind of thing you expect will stay only over there even though you know full well there's nothing stopping it from popping up in your own backyard. I thought I was being trolled when I heard.
The local subreddit has decided this is an issue with lack of public restrooms, and I feel the Hitler rising in me.
There is something really dispiriting about the death grip of advertising (or its lack thereof) and the way it is cynically wielded. X would be a prime spot to pump your ads, but we are told to believe that the general population would find it unacceptable to hawk your wares on a site that occasionally has a user say 'nigger'. Outside of vocal minorities, I absolutely don't believe the average person would care, and would generally be able to discern that the ads hovering around any given tweet have nothing to do with its content - just like I know an ad for Liberty Mutual has nothing to do with the 3-hour RPG retrospective it's interrupting. I've rambled before about this kind of 'fake free market' where companies are claiming their customers are literally begging them to remove a product or cut off a platform, and said company is just respecting their wishes.
If people really can't disassociate the served-up ads from the content they hover around, you would think the healthy thing to do would be to encourage some maturation on this matter instead of indulging these fainting couch sensibilities. But as I said - I dont believe this is really the case. It has nothing to do with people finding offense and everything to do with boxing out political opponents. Even normal people I know who support the ad bocott against X eventually give this away, but still suggest nothing fucky is happening.
So much of what pisses me off about these conversations is that I'm betting your description of her behavior is fairly accurate to a degree. The sticking point for me is the completely-bought framing that any of this qualifies as 'transphobia'; at least in a way that I could give weight to the term, as opppsed to simply granting and swallowing the activist line.
It seems obvious to me that if you dig deep enough, immutable differences between the sexes will reveal themselves. This does not automatically entail that trans people don't deserve respect or the same same basic protections and amenities as any other citizen. To my understanding, this is Rowling's position. And if there's a moat around her stance, its on what would have previously been largely agreed-upon, practical notions like "putting penises in womens' prisons and shelters is a bad idea". Compassion and universalism does occasionally need to reconcile itself with the hard limits of bad actors and material reality.
If the word 'transphobic' encapuslates even this, then it's a dead word to me. I register it as a hostile entity everywhere it comes up.
Now, I'll admit that I actually don't know much about who Rowling allegedly platformed or buddied up with. Perhaps they were truly terrible and a shade too red even for me. But if their statements and conversations are less "Delete trans people" and more "Your neovagina - bluntly - is incapable of fooling anybody", then I'm so over it.
Given that I recently copped a permanent sub ban and a weeklong site-wide admin ban for daring to make a three-sentence tepid defense of JK against activists (not trans people with any specificity) - charged with transphobia and 'promoting hate' - I think my disdain for this word has been freshly renewed, and replanted a few feet deeper towards core of my being.
I already stated in my post that I don't expect to ever be symmetrical with the left. Nor do I particularly want to be.
I'll admit that 'vengeance' is on my mind, although I don't believe it to be petty. Nor am I acting on it, unless shrugging at LibsOfTiktok antics counts. Perhaps admitting that undercuts any further point point I try to make. But the most sober, serious take I can muster is this:
There will be no possibility of progress on this until the left gets a bit of this in their bloodstream, and their safe little clouds get punctured. They're gonna need to get sick a bit before they truly appreciate what a healthy body is. Because right now they're still in La La Land to my eyes. A blob that wants to go to the mattresses over Dead Trump jokes after a decade of pearl-clutching about so much weak shit is not a good partner for reform, and I expect them to resume maximum hostilities when they feel free enough to do so.
And if that doesn't work, so be it. I don't know what else comes next. We're not drowning in optimal choices here.
DTulpa
2yr ago
I've had a similar beef with mod hosting sites like Nexusmods and Moddb regarding their recent removals.
Mods in the past could be downloaded from multiple different hosts and mirrors, but usually required you to have the awareness to seek out the dev's website. Sites like NM gave a lot of convenience of a central location for downloading, managing, and discovering content, with community tools for ranking and feedback. These days it's common for NM to be the only host for many mods, and removals were typically reserved for the truly heinous and illegal. While not perfect, it felt like a spirit of community collaboration mostly divorced from politics (more the norm 10 years ago than now) was working fine.
And now we see mods removed for petty political reasons, with the platform owners basically saying "Tough shit. You're paranoid. Don't like it? Delete your account." And boy would I (I even donated to you guys in the past!), likely while still begrudgingly downloading their hosted content without logging in. But now it seems many mods require a NM accoint, and so my options are to eat shit or just not play the mod. And if you were a modder who wanted to pull your own mods from the site in protest? Too bad, NM has made it so all mods are archived to preserve compatibility with other modlists.
It's such a blatant flex - "We dare you bigots to cut yourself off from the primary platform for modding" - and one they can only afford because of their position. I should not be feeling nostalgic about Filefront and Fileplanet.
DTulpa
2yr ago
Too many syllables, and I can't tell who its supposed to resonate with.
Is there a large contingent of Rs that would nod in agreement with the 'sanctimonious' label? Sanctimonious about what, exactly? The things that they already broadly align with him on?
It would be more understandable if Trump was appealing to Democrats with that jab. But it's still nowhere near catchy enough. Disappointed.
DTulpa
8mo ago
I don't get it. I can't reconcile "she ran a pretty good campaign" and then several paragraphs later read that her doing interviews was essentially a liability with nothing to gain.
Surely this speaks to big problems that can't be papered over with "hey, she never took a dump on stage!".
You're correct that the specific predictions didn't pan out as stated in the 90s and 00s. To cut them a little slack, nobody really anticipated a hot debate about the definition of 'man' vs 'woman' or the 'gender spectrum' to enter the fray.
However, that the Left enabled that kind of blindsiding has shown me that they can't be trusted to not flip the board and mealmouth things that I find rather horrid, like puberty blockers. I have to say that my trust for the Left to stay within reasonable lines has done a complete 180 on this topic, and I wonder if the 'kink wing' of the party is just waiting for more favorable conditions to finally push through. And they could very well do so even if the vast majority of their compatriots don't like it. We have not slid to the specific point that moral conservativism predicted, but I don't want to be distracted from the fact that a slide did occur, even if indirectly.
My suspicion is you will ultimately be found correct. There won't be a mass normalization of beastiality and pedophilia. But that's predicated on my faith that surely people don't change that quickly, and I don't know how I justify that. So personally, I'm going to extend the deadline to 2040 and see where we stand after swimming in AI futa cocks for a decade or two.
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