DTulpa
10mo ago
I have no idea who Pence or Biden may have exposed their documents to while they were sitting in their garages. So maybe indict them any way well after the fact.
DTulpa
9mo ago
"This will be the first in a five part series on Jewish influence on Austrlian immigration policy."
You can stop at one part, buddy.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Right, but those are strong religious and traditional headwinds to be battling against, opening up multiple fronts of conflict when I am only interested in one in the here and now - eliminating nonsense about 'reversible puberty blockers' and the commonly accepted pseudoscience in that orbit. I'm not sure if badgering potential allies about circumcision helps towards that aim. Table it for later, I say.
If I could be convinced that banning the practice and any other 'cosmetic' surgery for minors was the silver bullet to my issues with gender transitioning, I'd sign off on it. Just doesn't seem feasible. And I don't think people are all that confused about circumcision and what it entails. That is less the case for 'dilating' your nether regions. I think a lot of passive support for minor transitioning would dry up if it were exposed to the reality of the practice without the safety of WPATH euphemisms. I don't think that dynamic is in play with circumcision.
Given what I saw in the last US election, I'm not too keen on letting the average low-info, TV-enraged person have the process of voting greased up for them any further. It's an imperfect process, but I would afford a minimum of respect to people who at least took the time to leave their home, get in line, and sacrifice a few hours of their lives for democracy. Those who are not physically able can make a similar gesture to request their own mail-in ballots. I would say this miniscule effort demonstrates and engenders more skin in the game than automatically sending every Joe and Jane a ballot just waiting to be filled out after a CNN story on a candidate gives them a frowny. It's not evident to me why their input - lazy as it is - should be given any due by default, or further enabled. I can't think of anything positive or constructive they contribute to the process, but certainly a few negatives.
Democracy has always suffered from the dilemma of "what if the idiots vote the wrong way", but maybe we can stave off the worst of it by putting up these bare minimum of barriers? Like, I see a future where people can vote for their presidents via their X accounts or a similar platform. I'm sure that would be amazing for generating 'skin in the game', and also be utterly horrible precisely because said skin doesn't exist. You laugh at a GIF of Biden falling down AF1's steps, then punch the button for Trump without getting off your couch. I would like to stall that as long as possible.
DTulpa
1yr ago
Yeah, and to most people born after their presidencies, all that is behind the smoky curtain of history. It's the perpetual meme that all that shady stuff that happened in the past is just the messy, unglamorous history of an imperfect nation - but we certainly don't act like that any more!
And I feel extremely silly for writing that, because the naivete is blinding by now. I considered myself more cynical than most, and the degree to which people went mask-off during Trump was shocking to me. At the very least, I expected them to manage their appearance better.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Why let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I'm not sure if matters of consent are of the utmost primacy to me.
I have no interest in being hamstrung by the circumcision debate while more clear and obvious ethical violations are occuring in front of our eyes. Especially since nobody's going to harangue me for having incorrect opinions on circumcision.
I get why it may be logically consistent and principled to go after both circumcision and gender transitioning wrt to minors, but I think reality is screaming for some triage and focus here.
DTulpa
1yr ago
That certainly seems to be the takeaway I'm left with, given how progs have boxed in these arguments. And I don't think they appreciate how psychically destructive it is. Like everything you were taught from your childhood upbringing to adulthood was actually just total bullshit, and we all decided this last year.
This is the kind of thing that annihilates any and all integrity of your political project, AFAIC. gj
I was in that trench, too. I don't share your view of that period. Plenty of Christians condemned WBC, and this was casually disregarded as inauthentic or meaningless because we perceived very little daylight between WBC's stance on homosexuality versus Christianity on the whole. "WBC is disgusting, but at least they're honest" was the kind of thing you'd read (or write yourself) in a lot of those spaces.
Worth remembering that WBC was paid attention to primarily for its protesting of soldiers' funerals - an act that I'm sure you can easily imagine pisses off people of with all sorts of different politics and faiths, including Christians who were against gay marriage! The image of some Jesus-loving Good Ol' Boy passively accepting Phelps and co picketing his dead son's funeral is a bit hard to swallow.
And since we're comparing notes on history - I don't know why anybody should go hunting for the unicorns of consensus-bucking trans spaces when a lot of us here have spent the last 10 years watching their political movement steamroll nearly every forum and platform we used to be part of, and got to see first-hand how these spaces got captured, converted, and degraded. I am not lacking examples of what I see as the default MO of trans and trans-supportive spaces. If somebody wants to show me a trans space that goes against a lot of the current progressive orthodoxies, I'll happily peek at it. But then we will be clear that the thing making their lives harder isn't right-wing bigotry, but a prog-aligned media that doesn't consider them worthy of attention. I think you have a good point that perhaps they are reluctant to criticize their messengers out of fear that it may result in wave of Red Traditionalism crashing over them after tampering with the barricades. But I think if you're already subscribing to that dynamic on anything, it's too late. You're practically a foot soldier, whether you're enthusiastic about it or not.
DTulpa
6mo ago
And most people would probably be with you in punishing J6ers if the previous consensus on violence hadn't been utterly thrashed by progressives and fellow sympathizers. So yeah, they're not judged as harshly because the standards changed. We weren't aware they had changed, but media consensus dictatated otherwise. And this is somehow incomprehensibly alien to you? Come now. That's a pose.
So you would be willing to throw the book at J6ers because you feel they objectively warranted it. Congratulations; now what? I am more interested in fair treatment than I am justice as a terminal goal, because I think that's the superior algorithm for a host of reasons. So what if I think J6 qualified as violent by some technical metrics? So does play-shoving a friend, and I'm not going to entertain anybody calling that violent just because Webster says so.
So if BLM wasn't violent, then neither was J6. As I said before, this is indeed partly cynical. But is also deadly serious. I refuse to call J6 violent because of the valence of that word, much in the same way I don't consider assimilation to be cultural erasure, that taxation is theft, or that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is ethnic cleansing, even though any of those could be considered technically true. This isnt being cryptic, or hiding behind a mask. Why do you assume this some deliberate, self-inflicted partisan error?
DTulpa
1yr ago
NPR told me Trump was 'groomed' by Putin. It just reveals what a bad-faith farce this debate is. NOW we need to have sensitive conversation about when it's kosher to use the word?
DTulpa
24d ago
The Pandora Radio option is there mostly for car trips with other people. I'm not really a George Michael or Prince fan and wouldn't acquire their albums. But 80s pop hits are the best pop hits, and they're definitely more palatable to others than, say, Autechre. I don't mind firing and forgetting a playlist there as long as we're having a good time.
I think what made me pull the trigger years ago on setting up my own media server and foregoing streaming was deciding one Thursday that I was going to watch David Lynch's 'The Elephant Man' that coming weekend. I saw it on Prime, noted its availability, played a little bit just to have it at the top of the queue, and made the plan. Friday night rolls around and it's gone; 'Unavailable in your region'.
15 minutes may seem like a lot to some folks these days. But that's all the time it took to download a blu-ray rip, fire it away, and put this nonsense behind me.
DTulpa
5mo ago
I remember reading that Hemsworth was tapped for a US adaptation of The Raid films. I didn't think it would work because American fight choreography wouldn't capture the appeal of silat.
Suddenly I'm watching a prison fight in Extraction 2 that feels very similar to Raid 2's. And it works! Sure, the protagonist has merc gear and guns, and it dodges direct comparisons to the Indonesian films since it's not an adaptation. But without knowing anything about Extraction's production history, it feels like vestiges of the old pitch made their way in.
DTulpa
1yr ago
People keep repeating this, but none of them have bothered to make the apples to apples comparison of discriminating against political viewpoints versus banning real-time location doxxing. Until they do, this is just more 'Boo Musk' weaksauce.
Wake me up when Elon starts banning people for referring to Rachel Levine by their preferred pronouns.
DTulpa
1yr ago
Then the game has been laid out very clearly. My enemy must be totally vanquished before they do the same to me. Reconciling with the opposition is a fool's errand; at best providing a minor speedbump, at worst enabling my opponents to snag a few more miles out from under me. It's not like being patient and reasonable was slowing anything down.
It should be said that I really hate this, and that I write those words with some measure of guilt and shame. I'm not even 100% sure "this is the way", but I am frantically looking for another path and coming up empty. Trans activists have boxed in this debate with such immense dishonesty, with no effective antibodies to push back with.
I'm far from pleased to have Matt Walsh and various other SocCons being champions for my views. But this displeasure is starting to feel like a prissy holdover from a prior era. On some level, there is still a well-honed instict that conservatives have cooties. It's probably in my best interest to fully get over that at this point.
DTulpa
1yr ago
The entire reason 'nuclear weapons' are being deployed is because all others have seemingly failed. This never even becomes an issue in this timeline if the SocJus left had demonstrated any capacity to police its own and smoke out harmful ideologies amongst its ranks; if some figures of authority actually put their foot down and declared that this stuff is a bright red line that will not be crossed.
Instead, the Left just Presses X to Doubt and dismisses all criticism as conspiracy mongering, with mainstream support. And when their opponents start getting a little too mean, the Left says "Whoah buddy, I'd love to resolve this, but I don't think I can when you're this hot and bothered! Come back when you've cooled off!".
I see no reason why anybody should drop "groomer" from their lexicon in the face of this willful intransigence.
I can't believe I'm asking this years after the fact - but did Trump actually say "They are rapists"? Because in that sequence of words, it's obvious to me it's possessive 'their'. As in 'their drugs, their crime, their rapists'. But everybody up to a VP candidate in the debates just so conveniently interprets it as him calling Mexicans rapists or whatever. And now it's one of those things that "Everbody knows he said" like the fine people smear job, the koi fish smear, and 'Tim Apple'.
I hope you understand that this is one of the many reasons people who aren't already persuaded by this hackery place low value in your assessment of what constitutes moderate or far-right.
She's part of a league of voice actors with a lately very overinflated sense of importance that has thrown their weight behind various progressive cause celebres. I wouldn't be able to recall anything specifically to her name, but the few times she showed in my Twitter feed was the kind of right-on, fuck-the-other-team hot takes that conform with the rest of her field.
I'm a little surprised to see her 'canceled' over what seems to be a very mainstream take that isn't clothed in the usual pro-Palestinian sentiments often displayed by her 'team'. But I'm not sure what else it could be.
Regardless of how I feel about 'cancel culture' overall (which is irrelevant) or the reasons why she may have been booted, she doesn't engender my sympathy. But it's just one gig and she has a large fanbase cultivated over many years. I'd wager this is a blip and she'll survive fine with all her other work and with no long-term consequence.
DTulpa
10mo ago
This is a succinct a summation of my concern regarding teaching or validating trans theory in schools.
A discord server cannot provide a real-world pipeline from your kid having the thought of being trans to getting prescribed puberty blockers and arranging surgeries, at least not without getting some wild side-eye. Transplanting that lunacy to school and medical care can, and will only further reinforce itself once embedded.
I do not understand how some posters here fail to appreciate this.
DTulpa
10mo ago
Is Fasnacht all that spicy? Some bizarre imagery and some grotesque caricatures, but not really Love Parade circa '99 (RIP). More of a colorful brass instrument party that occasionally invites itself into your pub, killing any attempts at conversation without yelling.
DTulpa
6mo ago
Understandable, and a fair enough play. Despite my last post, I'd probably do the same.
One does lament, though.
DTulpa
9mo ago
Yeah, this all intuitively rolled into my mind after the incident. Not shocking in any revelatory sense; more a "this how things really be" reminder/wake-up from the artificial, socialized script everybody's trained to have - particularly in a corporate environment.
DTulpa
2mo ago
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.
DTulpa
1yr ago
An organic phenomenon in circles of varying levels of progressiveness that is exported via mass media to circles that find it distinctly inorganic - because it's practically an alien signal from a foreign reality that doesn't reflect or align with theirs. And you may have noticed that a sizable part of our culture war is spilling-over resentment towards and reassesment of these memes; either due to being fed up with them to the point of dropping politeness or in some cases betrayed by what they feel were implicit lies sold through them.
Like, half (if not most!) of the argument around these issues is that critics find them largely inorganic and astroturfed! And all you can do is serially post strings of words amounting to:
"OK, but so what?"
"OK, but what could you even do?"
"OK, but like, doing anything would be coercive, no?"
You remind me of a friend who talks this way whenever we have a political discussion that trails into something he's either plainly uninterested in or (frankly) unable to seriously defend a pet position of his - his tack of course totally changing when, say, the conversation turns to Roe v Wade. He's a great guy, pretty sharp, makes a good debate partner to keep me on my toes, and so I look past that stuff.
This is just boring and low effort.
Both of those bullet points are completely compatible with reducing cop presence. Or if not presence, cop interactions - to diminish the overall surface area where police and black Americans interface with each other. The second point in particular gestures towards this.
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