DiscourseMagnus
7mo ago
Technically, Roosevelt didn't lose reelection. He was very popular but didn't seek reelection in 1908, and Taft was his chosen successor.
DiscourseMagnus
7mo ago
This description reminds me of Sarah Palin, who was a remarkably charismatic figure, except that that charisma was a very normie boomer type of charisma that's very vulnerable to attack in our modern political environment. Trump has something similar, but with an extra more unique quality that makes him the defining figure of our times.
DiscourseMagnus
7mo ago
It feels like a race between the Antichrist and the Whore Of Babylon.
DiscourseMagnus
7mo ago
Yeah, I remember it was big on Tumblr a decade ago, too, and it seems like it's worse today. I would expect that if the graph added two more data points for "2010s" and "2020s" they'd probably be a lot higher than the "2000s".
DiscourseMagnus
7mo ago
the DID fads of the past decades. And we did manage to put a lid on the social contagion for those
...we did?
DiscourseMagnus
7mo ago
Look, whatever the name you want to put on the phenomenon it's been with us for a very long time. I balk at the idiocy of presentism all the time, but "rare case of pathological desire to be of the other sex" goes back to the beginning of history.
I think the real presentist error people make here is treating transgenderism and homosexuality as more distinct phenomena than they actually are. They're separate manifestations of a single underlying ancient pathology, which could have manifested in any number of other ways if our culture had developed differently. When conservatives express tolerance towards homosexuality and disgust towards transgenderism, it's a clear example, IMO, of not being nearly as free from the ideas of the surrounding culture as you think you are. The deviancy of homosexuality is downplayed and the dangers of transgenderism are exaggerated. They're the same basic life-destroying contagious confusion about the binary of sex. If history had played out differently, we easily could have wound up with transgenderism normalized a generation ago and homosexuality being normalized now, and then the same conservatives would be treating the latter as the bridge too far, with very elaborate arguments as to how this set of priorities made perfect sense.
DiscourseMagnus
8mo ago
Oh, to be clear, I didn't mean to imply that tall women are precisely equivalent to short men, or that tall men are precisely equivalent to short women - different sexes are different. It's just closer than the other way around.
DiscourseMagnus
8mo ago
False symmetry. Height is a masculine trait, and its absence is a feminine trait. The counterpart to short men isn't short women, it's tall women - short men and tall women are both wrongly-heighted. The counterpart to short women isn't short men, it's tall men - short women and tall men are both superbly-heighted.
DiscourseMagnus
8mo ago
Yes.
DiscourseMagnus
8mo ago
(tbf, not one of the better ones)
I'd certainly consider it one of the best ones. If you're mostly familiar with the material via the movie, I'd recommend remedying that; I'd call it an inferior adaptation all-around, for many reasons. Its mediocrity is perhaps more infuriating than a worse adaptation would have been, as it makes it easier for people to conflate it with its basis. Your Fault in particular might be the song that suffers the most from the adaptation; they made the very strange decision to slow it down, draining an awesome, climactic moment of its energy. It's a patter song, and it benefits greatly from the faster speed it was written for. I think of Your Fault and Last Midnight as two halves of a single moment, almost a single song, the buildup of tension followed by the breaking point.
The PBS American Playhouse recording of the original show is one of the best filmed performances of a stage musical out there. A lot of Sondheim pieces got that treatment, which is a boon for musical theater nerds.
DiscourseMagnus
8mo ago
Is the presence of a "concentration camp" per se really the deciding factor? I heard an account recently of the Nazis conquering a Slavic village and, as a standard part of their war plan, immediately rounding up and killing everyone present, men, women, and children. Is this excluded because it was less industrialized and more like standard savage ancient warfare? Is the village itself considered a very short-lived, improvised concentration camp? It seems like a distinct phenomenon from the long-term "corpse factories" we know as "concentration camps", but I think I'd be slightly more surprised to hear it excluded from the Holocaust than included.
DiscourseMagnus
8mo ago
Rachel Dolezal and her ilk are at least a relatively fringe case; attractive to culture warriors because race is such a hot button issue, but not actually particularly common. In my experience hanging around trans/SJ/woke/etc youth communities over the past decade or so, the real "if you accept trans people, you have to accept this too" poison pill waiting in the wings (being desperately kept out of sight for PR reasons, but still existing in huge numbers that become unignoreable once you learn to spot them - a populist phenomenon on the identity-obsessed left) is trendy multiple personality disorder. It has many competing pseudointellectual frameworks for describing it, and accordingly it goes by many names, including "otherkin", but if you associate that term primarily with furries (as in the infamous litterbox hoaxes), you're probably picturing the wrong thing.
It's a new-age spiritual belief system where people degrade their real sense of identity, casually but with utter self-seriousness make any arbitrary number of tulpas, and treat them as real people sharing their body. People identifying as fictional characters, people identifying as Napoleon, people identifying as a "family" of fake people they made up. One starts to think that this was probably what was going on with Legion in the Bible. It's an extremely popular trend among kids on TikTok, but I think people tend to underestimate it and treat it as a passing fad; it was just as popular a trend among kids on Tumblr when I was in that demographic. Even in trans activist communities that generally have a bit more dignity to them, the multiple personality people get a foothold really easily, because it's imminently obvious to everyone that setting up community norms to make the multiple personality people uncomfortable in any way would undermine the transgender ideology itself. Many outright embrace this, and adopt intellectual frameworks for transgender stuff that are deliberately syncretist with the multiple personality stuff; people are increasingly and proudly framing their own transgender experiences as cases of demonic possession.
For the really committed, narcissistic multiple personality people, anti-trans jokes like "my pronouns are 'your majesty'" really aren't jokes; these are fundamentally people who have figured out how to exploit community norms to get everyone responding to their overtly delusional sock puppets and treating them with the full respect they demand.
DiscourseMagnus
8mo ago
What's your opinion on alcohol? I don't have a strong opinion on the legality of either marijuana or alcohol (though personally, I avoid both and find their users unpleasant), but I have a hard time seeing why they should be treated differently. The most compelling argument I've heard for regulating marijuana more harshly is that apparently it impairs driving ability for a much longer time after use, but otherwise they seem broadly similar in the damage they cause to individuals and society. I suppose, theoretically, Chesterton's Fence should apply here; alcohol has always been an important part of Western society, while marijuana is fairly new. But the failed attempt to prohibit alcohol seems like a clear object lesson in the failure modes of that kind of substance ban.
DiscourseMagnus
8mo ago
You're thinking in an entirely different moral and historical reference frame, probably closer to what Nietzsche called "master morality" and further from what he called "slave morality". The poverty and criminality of the black community just makes it more sympathetic for someone who sees them as victims of Democrat policies designed to keep them as an underclass. I'm guessing you'd agree with "Democrats are the real racists" Republicans that Democrats are encouraging blacks to commit crimes - but they'd think of that as an anti-black policy while you'd think of it as an anti-white one.
They understand that blacks generally act and live differently than whites do. Their noticing this does not lead them to an HBD position.
DiscourseMagnus
8mo ago
This only works on normiecons who are bullshitting when they talk about Democrats being the real racists. My dad would often trot out this line (about abortions being a tragedy in part because they've halved the black population) in full sincerity. Many Republicans whose families have been Republican for generations take pride in having been on the winning side of the Civil War, and see their place in the national mythology as being deeply tied to doing right by blacks. The so-called Southern Strategy is far from universally accepted; my uncle believed in the party switch, and became a Democrat over it, while my father didn't, and remained a Republican.
DiscourseMagnus
8mo ago
Rotherham has desensitized me and now all I can think about this story is "how quaint". If only this was as bad as it got.
DiscourseMagnus
9mo ago
It might have robbed the US of multiple future presidents.
DiscourseMagnus
10mo ago
There was some stereotyping, but the primary complaint was that it depicted a black sharecropper in the post-reconstruction era who seemed basically content with his lot in life.
In my experience, this is the complaint in the motte, and the complaint in the bailey is that it depicts a black slave in the antebellum era who seemed basically content with his lot in life. (The people complaining are historically illiterate and do not understand what the film is about.)
DiscourseMagnus
10mo ago
(There's always a reason ready-at-hand.)
To my way of thinking, I predict that many positive black representations current today will eventually be seen as racist.
I noticed recently that, at least prior to 2017 (The Problem With Apu), it was absolutely industry standard for people making cartoons not to care too much about voice actors' races. People are trying to enact a taboo today on cross-race voice-acting (at least in the case of less-white characters voiced by more-white actors), but even aside from the moral depravity of the principle in a vacuum, I don't think the people advocating for the taboo understand just how widespread the practice was before (because voice actors are "invisible", at least if they're doing their job right - people typically don't notice when white VAs are playing black cartoon characters, and so on). If all media breaking this rule becomes seen as dirty and worthy of purging, then it'll get a pretty significant chunk of pre-2017 animation.
DiscourseMagnus
10mo ago
Sure, there are more men who would be willing to overlook a swastika tattoo on a partner than women - but I think swastika tattoo lady would more strongly prefer men who see it as a feature than swastika tattoo man would prefer women who see it as a feature. And I don't think she would have any trouble finding them.
DiscourseMagnus
10mo ago
Of course. But we're grading on a curve here. There are worse things and less bad things.
DiscourseMagnus
10mo ago
Perhaps my thoughts here are too rooted in stereotypes, but regardless of how many partners they each pull, I would assume that the swastika tattoo lady would mostly be pulling men who see it as a feature rather than a drawback, while the swastika tattoo man would mostly be pulling women who are merely willing to overlook it.
DiscourseMagnus
10mo ago
Would you have been okay with his actions if he had intended to marry her, perhaps in a society where child marriage is more common?
Depends heavily on outcome and specifics. If they split or divorce later, for example, it reflects very badly on one or both of them, and probably specifically the man as the more mature participant. But an intent for marriage would shift things over to "negligence" or perhaps even "bad luck", and away from "malice".
What if their age difference was larger?
Larger which way, and by how much? I don't know, really. It can be hard to disentangle the emotional disgust reaction from the moral disgust reaction. The strongest moral arguments here, IMO, are also strong moral arguments against nonprocreative sex more generally, which seems kind of weak.
Is consent required for marriage [...] ?
Universally? No, but something like it should certainly be pursued. Better marriages are (among other things) ones where the husband and wife (or wives) make each other happy, which is obviously less likely if they don't want to be there. There are material considerations as well, of course, but I think men and women have a responsibility to care deeply about each other, especially in the context of sex and marriage.
DiscourseMagnus
10mo ago
While I realize this is an edgy thing to say, I strongly disapprove of this man's actions but my reasoning has nothing to do with the age difference or any modern feminist notion of consent as a real ethical fundamental. I simply think men have an important responsibility not to have sex with any woman they do not seriously intend to marry.
I know; I'm pointing out that he didn't run for a non-consecutive term after losing reelection once.
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