DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
I don't think this analysis really checks out; "trads" and "conservatives" are not the same group, and the latter are the ones it's reasonable to pose as "progressives driving the speed limit". Best I can tell, trads are generally opposed to racism, but pretty good at noticing when people are fucking with them with false accusations of racism, except in cases that are especially dimwitted and easy for progressives to peel off by any number of tactics. Some of their number predictably die in overseas mission trips or doing other charity work, so they do have to have some "suicidal empathy". However, it's often said that progressives support policies that let dangerous criminals into the country, but wouldn't personally invite them into their homes; I think trads are basically exactly the converse. They aren't generally Amish-style absolute pacifists, and it's pretty easy to whip them up into a nationalist fervor by posing things as a cultural and religious war.
DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
For example, Jesus says "love your neighbor", this works fine in his time because "your neighbor" is literally your neighbor
I note that as much as this interpretation might have been the result (unclear), this is pretty verifiably not the intention on display in the New Testament, much to the embarrassment of many a heatmap-pushing X user treating it as at least an open question.
DiscourseMagnus
6d ago
"white people are disfavored in two-tier policing"
Some extremely stunning loss of message control going on there where the usual suspects are denying that two-tier policing is real while the UK government itself is desperately pleading with the public that it'll review its explicit two-tier policing policies.
DiscourseMagnus
10d ago
I was going to say "I don't think it's particularly likely that Donald Trump will pull a successful auto-coup and establish his administration as above the law", but then I realized you were instead talking about him dying (or being killed) in office.
DiscourseMagnus
23d ago
While I agree that it looks like trash, I would question the label "overrated", seeing as practically all commentary I've seen on it firsthand comes to the same conclusion. I guess "overrated" begs the question "overrated by who". "Gaming journalists"? Uh, okay; are there any real people with that opinion?
DiscourseMagnus
25d ago
This is simply the Marxist error of the labor theory of value. The difficulty of producing something raises its value indirectly by reducing its supply, but people do not demand things simply because they're in short supply. A great work of art is not great because of all of the effort that went into producing it; all of the effort that went into producing it was commendable because it had the goal of producing a great work of art. If it worked the other way around, then the most beautiful paintings and statues would pale in comparison to efficiently hiring teams to dig and fill ditches pointlessly.
It's entirely likely that AI will contribute to the end of the world and bring about unprecedented evil, but getting angry at it for making it easier to produce art is fundamentally similar in kind to getting angry at old computers, printers, or any other tools for making it easier to produce art. When people first started making AI art, it was novel and incredible and worthy of applause on that basis alone. Now AI art is very common, and it's rapidly raising the floor for how cheap decent-looking art can look, lowering its value. People feel threatened because if they can't make art that looks better than that, no one will value the labor of traditional artists remotely as much anymore. But their getting angry at that dynamic does not substantially change that dynamic.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Did God not make us to be servants, and did we not rebel? All the works of detailed information on the nature of angels and demons that I know of are either extremely speculative, not considered religiously significant by many serious authorities, or both.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I feel like people overdistinguish between B(/D) and C. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all. "Demons try to trick humanity into thinking they're aliens to shake our belief in God" is an opinion that's all the rage among fundies these days, and every time I see it, all I can think is, can you really not draw the connection that "angels and demons" and "aliens" could quite sensibly just be two different sets of vocabulary for the same thing? Is "angels and demons might be beings much like humans but from different stars/planets" an inherently heretical view? Did ancient people have any need to be informed of the logistical specifics of how angels and demons came about? If we have faith, why would we presume that aliens don't have their own histories with and views on God, for good or for ill, which would make them, to us, angels or demons? In the event that our elites are secretly in contact with aliens, it seems entirely plausible to me that this is a very evil thing, on both ends of the contact, and that this is functionally occult activity, powerful people with demonic patrons.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I feel like this line of thought has to be post-facto rationalization that people are doing to justify their choice to themselves. Yes, obviously it's inhuman and cruel to force children, the mentally handicapped, etc to participate in a "game" with life-or-death stakes. It's also obviously inhuman and cruel to summon any significant fraction of the world's population to participate in a "game" with life-or-death stakes. There is no scenario in which this game is being run ethically.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
And he was killed, apparently, by a black inmate who didn’t believe him. So in a meaningful sense Dahmer was killed for being a racist and not for being a serial killer.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
For parallelism, perhaps it should be "the subtlety of a pulp writer with the humility of a literary fiction author".
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Just off the top of my head, Ford had two, not one. The line between serious and unserious attempts is pretty blurry in any case; Butler, Pennsylvania is clearly in the most serious tier of near-miss (well, maybe second-most serious tier - Reagan was out of commission for weeks), but the other Trump attempts are comparatively mundane. Numerous crazies made some gesture in the direction of killing Obama and Clinton, and while these "attempts" were laughable, I'm not sure that they were objectively moreso than something like this.
I'd also say that there's no coherent standard that gets Trump "three serious assassination attempts". Everyone's apparently forgotten about the one in 2016. If it's more than one, then it's at least four.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
This makes sense seeing as, despite her focusing a lot on body positivity activism, she was, like her entire set, selected for fame on the basis of being attractive to begin with. I always assumed her body positivity activism that presented her as oppressed for being overweight was mostly countersignaling, but I guess she must have been genuinely insecure about it.
This really doesn't work, in any case, as an anti-Ozempic argument. The average person getting Ozempic is not Meghan Trainor, or even close.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I'm not seeing any reports elsewhere of someone dead; someone was saved by a bulletproof vest.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I would add that I strongly suspect that the ubiquity of "gay" as a generic insult meaning "bad" around the early 2000s likely played a substantial role in the normalization of homosexuality, because a generation of children grew up with a horde of angry antisocial disagreeable people throwing around the explicit accusation of homosexuality as a crude playground insult with no real weight. Such insults existed in earlier generations but were rarer as the subject matter itself was more illicit and taboo.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
an election map that looks like Fairfax county (rich county in northern Virginia) gets to elect about half of the state's representatives.
This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
In right-wing circles. In left-wing circles I believe it had already taken off by then as an insult.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Neon Genesis Evangelion gets away with using Christianity as an aesthetic, because it looks exotic and cool.
I will say that, while true in a sense, I understand this line to be a common overcorrection. Evangelion's Christian (and Judaic) imagery didn't come from some deep place of spiritual belief, but it wasn't really a careless choice made out of blissful ignorance, either. The Japanese, too, have libraries and the ability to research things, and our religion has had more of a historic impact on them than vice versa. It's sort of akin to a Hollywood movie that incorporates a lot of references to Buddhism - the filmmakers may not have been Buddhists themselves, but at some point it's clear that they did the reading.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Not just the mobile and console versions - the paid PC version, too. I would add that when Dan Salvato made the paid version, he would have been well-advised to
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
While this certainly reflects badly on Google and raises the cultural temperature on censorship in general, I don't think it'll directly reduce availability of the game all that much; as far as I know, Google was never a major provider of the game in the first place. In any case, the developers already repeatedly cucked to censors years ago both to appease their friend circles (by making the disclaimers around the game increasingly heavy-handed and adding trigger warning settings plainly incompatible with the nature of the game) and to get the game access to consoles (by slightly toning down miscellaneous scenes for bespoke console releases).
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I've only ever heard of that legislation as regards France, but I understand the sentiment behind it to be much more widespread. You even see it among ultraprogs in the US, it's just much further from the mainstream. But in any case I'd expect "cuck" probably exploded as a political insult in areas where people's opponents would have a harder time laughing it off as a non sequitir accusation, it just also got broadcast to us in the US because the internet is global.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I love me some good Black Mirror - lots of decent ones, and I'd heartily recommend the episode right before this one, Fifteen Million Merits, as an incongruously clear-eyed dystopian tale that feels like it came right out of a high-quality post from here, /pol/, or X - but I always took for granted that the creators are Euro-establishment-progpilled enough to believe that
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
You can go even more maximalist than A, it just makes left-wing critics of Trump uncomfortable because it shades into Satanic panic stuff.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Isn’t the rescue operation being claimed as a victory? What's your theory?
Yeah, it's a rare positive sign for modern sexual morality that many of us have forgotten the distinction between lower class prostitutes and upper class ones and assume the latter doesn’t exist.
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