DTulpa
11mo 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
10mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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.
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
1mo 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
6mo 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.
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
11mo 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
7mo 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.
And I'm saying it's a futile game to play at this point - to 'produce evidence' that would be inevitably rejected by arbitrary standards that align with political convenience. I agree that evidence for fraud is lacking, and I'm also of the opinion that no quality or quantity of evidence would matter, either. I could no more produce evidence for election shenanigans than I could for whatever Hillary Clinton may have been up to after she Bleachbit her files, yet I find it perfectly reasonable to assume she's a crook because of the nature of her transgression, regardless if I can't find the evidence that was deliberately destroyed or withheld.
My issues with the election have more to do with last-minute changes to rules and procedures, specifically with regards to mail-in voting. But I recognize that because these changes were officially approved by local governments and are therefore 'legitimate', I have no standing to complain. I also know it has a plausible defense in COVID safetyism, so I really can't push against it without seeming like a callous asshole. But at the same time, said safetyism was also of their own making, and it increasingly looks like they had no idea what they were doing or its potential consequences while they forced their decisions through anyway. And while US political media has always been a circus, their conduct during Trump's presidency rose to the level of mentally poisoning the electorate IMO - to the point where I seriously question the legitimacy of democracy when in its inputs are perverted in such a fashion. I don't think it works (at least to my satisfaction) when the media engineers half the country into believing the president is a Nazi and Putin's puppet.
Some people seem to think all of that is just kind of a backdrop for the real meat and potatoes discussion of election legitimacy; like vote counts. To me, it is the primary thing. The background is the foreground. Whatever process is borne from it is tainted with it. Whatever procedural fuckery may or may not have happened in the aftermath, I can't really asses because I am reliant on institutions I can trust in order to parse them. They revealed themselves untrustworthy, and now all I can do is shrug in suspicion. And that's what it is: a suspicion, that I will probably have for all my life, but won't actually do much with. It's certainly not a high-ranking factor in my 2024 decision making.
I feel like people are trying suss out legitimacy with data tables, tabulations, rulers and metrics. Those aren't worthless, but I think what seals the deal is a magic trick: doing a good job and not deeply alienating your political opposition. In a world where Biden is addressing the border crisis, not mindlessly going along with LGBTQ politics, not selecting an idiot for VP, and speaking more like he did in 2008 than he does now, nobody is harping about his vote counts. People broadly would have moved on. Counterintuitively, the obsession with proving MAGA dummies wrong on this topic reveals how little else is on offer from that platform, and deepens the suspicion. "Any man who must say 'I am the king' is is no king at all" and all that.
I'm not sure if this is clarifying or frustrating to read. I'm self-aware enough to recognize that I sound like I'm intentionally closing myself off from evidence, but I don't think I am. It's just that nothing really turns on this, and I'm fine if it's never conclusively settled because I have plenty of other reasons to doubt Biden's 'legitimacy' any way.
I also accept that this dynamic was also true for Trump. For his antics and speech, he was deemed illegitimate by half the electorate despite winning fairly according to the rules.
DTulpa
6mo ago
Those arguments were what, again? GG is a force for evil on the internet and we all have an obligation to 'do better'?
I'm not sure exposing this person's dirty laundry qualifies as an ad hominem. Anti-GG mouthpieces made a big deal out of their moral superiority to their reactive, basement-dwelling, chuddish foes. Tearing off their robes and exposing them as mere creatures - and all the weirdness that entails - was practically a public good. But then I would think that given the level of disdain for them I carry, so take that FWIW. And if they wanted to circle the wagons for Nyberg because 'ad hominem' - to be understood as spotlighting a warped moral zealot as a problematic fraud - then double dumbass on them too.
DTulpa
1mo ago
This may hinge on two things.
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Are you a devotee of RTWP? Then BG3 is an abomination (I personally prefer turn-based).
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Do you like or tolerate DnD post-Critical Role, or do you find the sensibilities it has developed to be subtly but omnipresently obnoxious? I'm not well-versed in the franchise, but it doesn't look like BG3 matches the tone of the original games based on some writing samples.
I'm a semi-fan of RPGs, although I'm not good at them. Given their lengths and complexities, I really only have the appetite for one RPG on occasion every few years. And if I'm going to spend multiple hours and nights with one, I need an interesting world to retain me. I don't know where people stand on POE these days, but that managed to hold my interest even after the combat started getting sloggy and boring. FO1 is still my gold standard.
But every piece of media I see for BG3 seems to trigger a reflexive disinterest. There's something so self-consciously table-toppy about it that feels LARPy, for lack of a better word. Clearly some people love it for those reasons, but I must have read a dozen pieces about how 'amazing' BG3's narrator is ("Because it's just like having a DM, guys!"), and to me it just seems irritating and pointless. They understand that cRPGs don't need 'DMs', right? You're playing the game, why would you need it described to you?
DTulpa
5mo ago
I used to be a big Harris acolyte, so my read on him over multiple podcasts, interviews, and books was something like:
"Pound for pound, the Old Testament may have more content we'd find objectionable than that in the Quran. Despite that, there are wrinkles in Islam such as the Hadith that are difficult (if not impossible) to detangle from the religion - a necessary component for its defanging and modernization. WWJD and WWMD entail very different behaviors, and the horrific negative consequences of the latter make Islam inherently and uniquely more problematic to deal with than any other world religion. Even if the others were 'worse' by several other metrics, none pose the challenges that Islam does, both historical and modern."
He had a long-running dialogue with Maajid Nawaz over this specific issue, trying to find a path forward for Islam and modernity. A decent effort, but I got the impression he was never particularly hopeful about its prospects. Essentially, there are features of Islam that preclude it from ever becoming sufficiently progressive in the way Christianity did - at least on a timescale or with the population numbers he'd be comfortable with.
DTulpa
7mo ago
People aren't oblivious to the logic. Well, maybe some are. I dont think most people here. But you said this take was out of step with a community thats supposedly grounded to reality. I think from the responses you can maybe see that it is based in reality - such as it is.
One of the consequences of institutions playing favorites with mob violence is that it causes many individuals to second-guess their own definitions. If the BLM riots didn't qualify as violence in popular sentiment, then who is to say J6 should? Am I being cheeky, or am I being serious? Could you even tell? Honestly, I'm in limbo between both states. Where does 'reality' have a say? That's a socially mediated phenomenon, as demonstrated quite clearly since 2020 onward.
'Violent' is one of those fuzzy terms that can mean anything from a playful shove, to murder, to mean insults. We probably had more national consensus on the thresholds for qualification in prior decades, and then that was wrecked in 2020. That you now see so many (what you regard as) peculiar opinions on this subject shouldn't be too surprising. And while it's hard to often tell if this is sincere or troll-ish (just reacting to progressives 'reality'), I think its often both.
If Justin is Castro's son, and he with the Canadian government vociferously deny it, then who is sewing seeds of low trust.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Then I think your nose will serve you right here. I know here in TheMotte we've had people praising the writing and also those unimpressed by it, and the latter consistently brings up zaniness and the 'it's a fun romp' vibe as criticisms. And regardless of writing quality, everybody pretty much agrees this is a Larian game with a BG skin, not a proper continuation. The horniness of the companions alone makes it feel juvenile to me.
Outside of a dabble or two, I don't table-top. But my understanding is that Critical Role played a big part in reviving DnD in the age of streaming and Let's Plays. I went to a DnD birthday party years ago for a girl who had no awareness of any of the rules or anything, but wanted a game held because the show looked so fun. She was very confused when we explained to her that she had already wasted all her spells in the first combat encounter, when all she really wanted to do was girlboss a mage.
That night was fun, don't get me wrong. But I felt like I got a decent insight into the kind of person CR was appealing to: people who like the drama, the self-expression, and the costumes of table-top, but are quickly in over their heads when they have to roll for crit or w/e. So they just watch others do it.
I don't necessarily think this framing is wrong, but this certainly isn't the kind of anodyne charity deployed in the wild.
It's all well and good to say that 90s liberalism would drift into a kind of conservatism as times change. What I see is progressives habitually claiming that this new strain of 'conservatism' is actually the latest genealogical strain of fascism and white supremacy that traces its lineage to Nazism or similar. You see the difference, and so you can surely understand why that tribe may balk at this "No no, you really are technically right-wing" insistence.
I agree that some of this is 'embarrassed conservatism' being expressed by people who probably identified as good liberals up until the 2010s give or take. But some of this is because there are consequences to being frankly conservative. Few are going to honestly embrace the conservative label if that immediately and unfairly typecasts them as villains.
How close was he?
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