Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Where specifically do you think I'm misrepresenting what the Right is doing?
In your selective conflation of unlike categories via gerrymandered definitions, such as the one Jiro quoted.
This was not particularly ambiguous in the post you responded to, nor is it a point that needs your concession or concurrence to be valid.
Thank you for summarizing it so succinctly.
Arguments built on gerrymandering definitions and framings are tedious. Doing so to re-re-litigate the aftermath of a political assassination is... I'm not sure what the right term is.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
There's a grammar nazi joke to be made here, but I fear it wouldn't translate.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
You could add the 'ICE is disappearing people like gestapa!' -> 4th of July attack on ICE in Texas.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Sounds like there could be an interesting effort post there to share. Something something how the early 2000s video game industry evolved?
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Greater (>10x), since you can pack a helicopter into the largest ones, and yes (mostly), but also not necessarily.
The larger issue is more the relative precision of drops. You can not only greatly increase the survival / receipt of food delivery when doing it via helicopter rather than plane, but you can also even manage a loose idea of who will receive it. Such as, say, a clan enclave that has defensible positions against a Hamas seizure/retaliation group, as opposed to airdropping into Israel or the Mediterranean. So you could absolutely carry X ration packages cheaper in the plane, but you'd also need to carry far more than X packages on Y planes to get the same effect.
High-air drops aren't really effective, and tend to assume you have relatively free mobility across the land area being dropped upon. There's a reason the Berlin Airbridge was overwhelmingly land-unloads while the airdrops were propaganda.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
I'm half tempted to ask you for the meanest cowboys jokes you can come up with, and half-worried that you'd deliver.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Unironically, you could probably also figure out a way to shoot them out of a canon. Or a literal trebuchet.
Wouldn't be the best way to do so, obviously, but if we're looking for cost-efficient airdrops, why not blimps and zepplins?
Maybe we could get steampunk zepplins after all.
More celebrity, sure, but less controversial? Eh...
Jon gladly flipped between 'most trusted newsperson' and 'you can't take what I said so seriously, I'm just a silly comedian' whenever it suited. He was never balanced, and was a significant cultivator of the 'Democrats may be inept, but Republicans are stupid-evil' smug-superiority of the 2010s progressive cultural zenith.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
But this has been the case for at least ten years, and the so-called "fascists" remained remarkably unshot until about a week ago.
Widespread, public, and celebratory cheering by left partisans also remained absent until about a week ago. Now it is here, and it is public knowledge that there is a non-trivial degree of revolutionary chic and social support for shooting the evil [capitalist]/[fascist]/[etc.].
One of the noted points of the rise of the Columbine Shooting copycat school shootings was that even unambiguously evil things can be popular/inspirational in their own right, and that popularity (a) isn't degraded by official condemnation, and (b) spreads memetically to copycats. Almost every school kid knows a school bully, or an oppressive school system, or some other grievance, and getting to get even and go out in a blaze of glory is still echoed to this day. Including, not so long ago, the trans-student shooting a christian school.
Charlie Kirk's assassination is far more likely to be part of a trend than an outlier before a return to the status quo. Anti-fascist political violence is a cultural artifact of the further-left ideologies, and cultural artifacts tend to be iceberg dynamics where far more mass is hidden below view, as opposed to potholes that are soon passed.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
The Chinese Robbers fallacy strikes again.
I regularly use it as a teaching point for availability bias, and really need to remake the powerpoint animation for trying to scale the original metaphor in a presentation format.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
You can be like the Washington Post and omit that part of the quote to imply it never happened.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
And yet, gun use isn't a Blue tribe anathema. Guns have an extremely long history with the left, ranging from highly-American contexts of racial-progressive awareness of the American South's Jim Crow efforts to disarm african americans in order for KKK terrorism, to gender-considerations of God making man and woman but Sam Colt making them equal, to the John Brown gun club varients of various Antifa and other bluer-than-you groups. Outside of the American context, this includes the revolutionary aphorisms up to and including 'all political power derives from the barrel of a gun,' countless cold war era revolutionary chic, and more.
Gun control in general may be a blue tribe coded program, but using guns is in no way a monopoly of red tribe.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
As a rule, I agree! Challenge runs, and things you can 'complete' and put down and move on, are a bit more low-key than the never-enough speed run absolutism.
Then again, I'm not really much of a sports person in general, so the competition over whose best is less interesting to me than how they did it.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Well, I'm glad you didn't, lol. That would have been an awkward amount of last-minute-edits lost, and I hadn't even considered the thought. I am considering doing future 'A [X] Review: Topic' series in the future, so that would have been a downer for sure.
I do second @ArjinFerman that a 'best of the worst that was filtered' post would be interesting. Probably would need a standard format including why it was filtered (since these kind of callouts would always beg the question of 'that sounds interesting and should have been allowed'), but peeks behind the curtain are often interesting.
total loss of America's moral standing in the world
I'll just note that this perception of moral standing was more self-perceived rather than actual. The Iraq War was not particularly relevant to the moral standing of the US in Latin America, Africa, or Asia, and it was far secondary from decades-long support for Israel in the Middle East. IE, the conflict regions of the Cold War, where US amorality or real politic were most personally known and a matter of living memory. The US standing circa 2003 was 'winner,' and possibly 'benefactor,' but not 'liberator.'
By remainder, the rest of the world leaves Europe- where the strength of views of the US intervention in Iraq largely hinged on alignment with the French and German objections and failed efforts to unite the continent in diplomatic opposition- and the US, whose views of the morality of the US largely tended to hinge on who was in the White House at the time. And, of course, the extension of americanized politics that cross those bounds.
Rather than the Americans losing moral standing in the world, Iraq was far more a shift in certain Americans losing their belief they had moral standing in the world.
Notably absent in this response is how the disinformation claim is structurally part of the joke. You point to the goldfish as the laugh line, but the goldfish line is not set up by the MAGA accusation. Kimmel's insult is before the goldfish line, but this is sequential context, not structural composition. Appealing to the pacing and tone of the voice is an appeal to the means of delivery, not the structure of the joke.
The distinction @ulyssessword is asking is clearer if you have a more obvious 2-part joke structure, and then place something else inside that structure.
'Why did the chicken cross the road?' 'To get to the other side.'
This is a two-part joke structure.
'Why did the chicken cross the road?' 'My outgroup is terrible for trying to deflect their culpability for murder.' 'To get to the other side.' 'Also, Trump bad.'
This is still a two-part joke structure.
It has additional parts in and after, but it's still a two-part joke, regardless of how smooth the delivery or transition between the joke/not-joke parts are. Placing the two-part joke in the context of the broader Trump bad monologue does not change the structure of the joke. The joke being part of the monologue does not make other parts of the monologue- such as the disinformation accusation- part of the joke.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
exaggeration of a call to action (not fact based)
Don't Call Your Wife 'Beautiful.' Use These Less Sexist Compliments Instead
"A real self-starter": Is she blushing? Oh, she's blushing.
Okay, this one made me laugh.
"The strong nose of a Caesar": She'll feel like a princess -- no, an empress!
And this one truly is 'not fact based.'
The mid-2000s were, to be fair, a rather atypical period in the modern American political left of the last half century. Obama came in on the back of the anti-Iraq War protest movement, which was non-violent for multiple reasons of strategy, political co-option by the Democratic party, and the then-Democratic Party leaderships own relationships with left-coded political riots.
The US has a long history of violent political protests and actions. It is by no means exclusive to one side of the political isle or the other, and this is not a claim of the US political violence relative to any other state, but it's also not exactly distant or theoretical history either. Many of the recent and still contemporary political elites had formative experiences in the Vietnam Protests of the 60s and 70s, and while less massive there were major protest movements across the 80s as well. These were largely unassociated with the direct action political violence of the time, such as the Weather Underground, but there has long been a ven diagram overlap between the political-violence American left and the fringe-edges of the Democratic Party.
This included into the 1990s. Go back not even a decade before 2008, and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests aka The Battle of Seattle,, involved tens of thousands of anarchist/anti-capitalist-left-aligned protestors, militant anarchists and unionists, and typical not-entirely-peaceful protesting. Two battalions of national guard were called in, in a Democratic city of a Democratic Mayor under a Democratic Governor under a Democratic President.
This was not even a decade after the 1992 Rodney King riots, which were significant in their own right and had their interplay with the Clinton administration that began in 1993, and which served as a significant part of Bill Clinton's first campaign. Clinton threaded the needle politically, siding more against the law enforcement than for the violent protests, but the 90s were a formative period for the people who were violent protest footsoldiers then, and would become more, and then less, and then more influential again over the next few decades.
While the Rodney King riots were an element in Clinton's rise to power, it's better understood that Bill Clinton co-opted the effects than had major alignment with the radical left. Sister Souljah moments aside, the break developed with the Clinton administration's adoption of post-cold-war globalization/free trade-ism, and the conflict that brought with the traditional militant democrat constituencies. This culminated in the WTO protests towards the tail of the Clinton administration, which were functionally a base rebellion of the union/labor-left base. It was big, loud, embarrassing... and it was part of the background context for the break between the Clinton (and eventually Obama) wing of the Democratic party, of technocratic free-traders, from the traditional blue-collar base (whose protests were a political affront/challenge/nuisance to the Clinton administration).
These 1990s political violence set the stage for the 2000s non-violent Iraq War protests that fueled Obama's rise, because the Democratic Party's embrace/cooption of the anti-war movement turned that protest movement into an evolution/response to the 1990s violent protests.
This was in part because one of the major institutional efforts of the Democratic Party in the 2000s was the efforts to centralize control of all levels of the party influence infrastructure. This was in part a Clinton-wing specific effort to get Hillary Clinton set up for the 2008 election, but also a broader part / consequence of the Democratic Party's centralization of power in the party elites over time. (IE, what led to the visible age issues / lack of younger bench in the last few election cycles, as the centralized power brokers gathering power in the 90's and 2000's never retired.) This was a period where many of the more modern Democratic Party political alliances of the Clinton-Obama-Biden era were being formed and cemented to supplant the Blue Deal coalition, including high-visibility dynamics such as increasing globalism, media-party relationships, and the institutionalism of racial/demographic balancing preferences.
But it was also, going back to your awareness of left political violence during your coming of age period, the period where the Clinton-aligned establishment was co-opting the loosely left-aligned mass protest movement architecture.
The Clintons were notorious for their efforts to factionalize/control the Democratic Party machinery. The protestor-turnout aparatus is often informally a part of that- not necessarily showing on any organization chart- but it was a historical tool of influence for the American labor union movement, for whom turning out people to fight and vote were equal assets.
The uncontrolled protest wing was also a Clinton target / goal. After all, while helpful to getting Clinton elected, the more violent labor-left protestors were a personal afront to the later Clinton administration, which itself was when the Bill-Hillary relationship arguably transitioned to a more explicit quid-pro-quo of future political support for Hillary after she stayed by Bill during the Monika Lewinsky scandal. It wasn't just a challenge to Bill's interests, but Hillary's future ambitions. And the political consequences of unpopular political violence had been a factor in George Bush's election in 2000 on a law-and-order theme, and had been influential in decades prior given the Reagan Revolution. And, of course, the blue-collar versus white-collar split, of which the Democratic elite consensus was already firmly towards the technocratic white collar, and in opposition to the blue collars... who were, via the unions and the militant unionists, both part of the mass-turnout and political violence architecture.
So in the 2000s, deliberately or not, things like 'a willingness/propensity for political violence' was a filtering function for the Clinton/establishment wing during a Democratic Party internal realignment. Violent protests weren't just bad strategy for the anti-Iraq-War movement trying to win over American voters and emerging young voters, but they were an internal conflict point for the establishment-Clinton wing of the Democratic Party as it took over and coopted the Iraq War protest movement, which it would quickly euthanize after the 2008 election. Now, granted, that 2008 democratic party was won by a Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton- surprise upsets do happen- but Obama himself was also not part of, or appealing to, the politically-violent-prone parts of the left, and largely adopted (in)to the Clinton wing even as he seized and further centralized the party machinery around himself. Not surprising, since he was from the Chicago Illinois political machine. Also not surprising in terms of Obama not having any real ties to / relationships with the more militant fringe-wings, given those of the 90s were largely (west) coastal parts of the party geographically and politically far from Chicago.
Of course, Obama's rise was part of, and gave impetus/resourcing to, the progressive ideological evolution of the American left as it turned from the economic-leftism to the racial-leftism as the new deal coalition was abandoned in favor of the Obama-style permanent Democratic (demographic) majority thesis. The racial-alignment support demographics of that didn't pan out, but it was the ideological permutation that corresponded with cultural marxism vis-a-vis classical marxist phases, and the the evolution/growth of progressive-left political violence that grew aparent in the 2010s. Which included, yes, a deliberate return to mass protest organizing not only for responses to police shootings during the Obama years, a topic area he had strong opinions in. The more racial-left protests also led to / evolved into the mass protests as an anti-Trump tool in the later 2010s, ie. the fiery-but-mostly-peaceful protest era and its Fortifying Democracy party architecture of coordinating the people leading protests, the people leading the responses to protests, and the people covering protests.
Or, to put another way: a decade before 2008, the American political left was associated with mass violent protests. A decade after 2008, the American political left was again associated with mass violent protests. In 2008, someone just coming into politics could be forgiven for only associating the Democratic Party with peaceful protests, as the Democratic Party was in the later phase of ditching the older violent protestors and hadn't yet developed a new violent protestor cohort.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
Strictly speaking, any evolutionary / branching system can look like a horshoe if you zoom close enough to see the modeled divergence.
< is just the more angular form of C, and family branches can easily share traits (and re-merge, Hapsburg-style).
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
This is the lovable sort of self-confidence/smug/humor that, well, I love.
Thanks for the smile.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
Sure. Agreement with this is more, not less, market reason to cancel.
Media market analytics tends to go by national/regional demographics, not partisan demographics. Flat cost decisions (such as hiring) that might make sense if you view yourself in a 320 million market make a bit less sense if you're in a 'merely' 160 million market due to a political filter.
If the 160 lost market might be recovered, you fire the excess and bring in new help. But if the 160 market can't be recovered, you still fire the excess.
At least Kimmel can rest easy knowing that the Biden administration as recently as last year was publicly mooting to global business elites how to address the sort of disinformation that Kimmel was perpetrating in his remarks.
Polls indicate that Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low. Those on the Right often refer to much of what the mainstream media reports as “fake news,” while those on the Left characterize much of the reporting from the Right as a “disinformation” problem. However, the approach to resolving these concerns remains partisan.
This issue has come into sharper focus recently following comments by John Kerry, former secretary of state under President Obama, at a World Economic Forum conference. He described the First Amendment as “a major block” to achieving accountability in media reporting on facts.
Kerry’s remarks underscore the delicate balance between protecting free speech and addressing what different political factions consider fake news or disinformation.
“There’s a lot of discussion now on how to curb those entities to guarantee accountability on facts,” Kerry said. “But if people go to one source that has an agenda and puts out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to just hammer it out of existence.”
Kerry noted that the problem of disinformation is unique to democracies, where no single leader has the authority to define what constitutes factual information. He suggested that the upcoming elections in November could lead to changes, depending on the outcomes for Congress and the White House.
“What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to implement change,” he said.
Kerry’s comments have revived sentiments expressed by progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2021, when she called for greater restraint on media practices during an Instagram live video.
“We’re going to have to figure out how we reign in our media environment so you can’t just spew misinformation and disinformation,” she said. “It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another entirely to just say things that are false. So that’s something we’re looking into.”
Well, Kerry's monkey paw seems to have well curled on parts of that. But Kimmel's remarks on the partisan nature of the political assassination-
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"
-would be an almost textbook example of disinformation, i.e. false information intended to mislead. In this case, a false claim that the political assassination was a MAGA gang partisan, to mislead from the already apparent and growing weight of evidence of a left-partisan.
I'm sure if the Biden administration had won, it would have applied its desired rules, fairly.
I have no idea what that is, so no.
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