DiscourseMagnus
1d ago
I'll say this: very few sexual preferences strike me as being so evil as the man who has a preference for virginity paired with a disinterest in marriage. At that point you've got a fetish for burning the commons for no reason.
DiscourseMagnus
1d ago
So, I totally understand why there are so many threads lately about what's going on in Minnesota; that's obviously some serious shit, and significantly worse than I'd personally seen coming. I think we're currently significantly closer to civil war in the US than most realize, and if that risk is realized, Minnesota is clearly a key hotspot for where it goes off. But I think Virginia is overlooked as a similarly risky hotspot for where US political tensions might break down. And that's because, as of this past weekend, the Attorney General of Virginia is Jay Jones. It was common in the last month of the campaign trail for uncomfortable Democrats to rationalize that he could simply step down as soon as he'd won, but that notion of compromise died rapidly as time passed, people learned to stomach it by familiarity, and common knowledge was created that Democrats collectively had no problem with Jones.
So for the next four years, if any Republican is accused of a crime in the state of Virginia, Jay Jones will be in charge of prosecuting them. Should Republicans accept the legitimacy of a state AG who explicitly and sincerely advocated that they and their children are scum who it is morally obligatory to exterminate in a campaign of revolutionary terrorism? For the next four years, if any serious episode of left-wing political violence occurs in Virginia, Jay Jones will be in charge of prosecuting it. Will Republicans trust in the process of such a prosecution?
There are two specific boys in the single-digit age range living in Virginia right now who Jay Jones, the current Attorney General of Virginia, explicitly advocated for assassinating as a form of propaganda of the deed, because their father is a minor retired state politician in Virginia. Do those children have a Secret Service-level security detail? (And I mean an actual Secret Service-level security detail, not whatever the fuck Trump got on the 2024 campaign trail.) How about every single young child of every single Republican state politician in Virginia? Do they all have a Secret Service level security detail?
Now, to head off the obvious rejoinder: no, obviously it wouldn't be in Jay Jones' political interest to have Todd Gilbert's sons murdered, or any similarly plainly awful political murder in Virginia. But it would be extremely destabilizing to the United States. A state-level actor - Russia, China, hell, North fucking Korea - could easily arrange for some culture-war-bait crime to happen on Jay Jones' doorstep that Jay Jones and company can't solve. Remember, Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk's assassins almost got away, and as far as I can tell they were just random idiot dipshits. Would Jay Jones step down, or be forced to step down, if something on the level of Todd Gilbert's sons getting murdered by an unidentified assassin happened? I doubt it. If he had that sense of shame, or the Democratic party had that sense of shame, we wouldn't be here right now.
Oh, by the way, Jay Jones also has two sons in the single digit age range. Is the potential for devolution of the United States into an ethnic revenge cycle between the Republicans and the Democrats not glaring to everyone else?
For the past couple of months, I've been obsessing over a scenario I cooked up in my head in which the US has collapsed into a state of open civil war by the end of 2026, and one of the biggest dominoes there is that Jay Jones' presence turns Virginia into Bleeding Virginia. It's a pretty crazy and specific series of far-fetched events and I never literally expected it to play out exactly.
But in my scenario we weren't nearly this far off the rails by January 19th.
DiscourseMagnus
1d ago
Close, but the vibe she's aiming for is "Kindergarten teacher", which is hard left coded. Matt Walsh described it as disturbing and childlike, and was only begrudgingly willing to admit that it was even vaguely tradwife-esque; I imagine he'd be much more disturbed if he realized that that was just the standard Kindergarten teacher register.
DiscourseMagnus
1d ago
I wonder if these left-wing propagandists have accidentally revealed via typical mind fallacy that right-wing propaganda would be more effective on them if it depicted its left-wing antagonists as distinctly aesthetically right-wing. A Reverse Amelia, if you will, a conservatively dressed tradwife caricature spouting antifa talking points.
DiscourseMagnus
10d ago
In retrospect it seems telling to me that Pixar's most successful film of the 2010s, cash-in sequels aside, was about brain drain from Minnesota to California.
DiscourseMagnus
11d ago
Having a pair of sisters as babies’ mommas is reaching the pinnacle of capitalizing on female mate-choice copying.
The Old Testament prohibits it as incest.
DiscourseMagnus
11d ago
Currently horrified by the notion that this might be practically impossible for Trump to accomplish simply because it would secure his legacy - and so any anti-Trump successor would have a strong incentive to just hand it back to Denmark for partisan signaling reasons. Any legacy Trump wants to leave needs to be durable against a predictable successor every few years who wants to repudiate and smash it.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
By and large, Straight men are pretty directly signalling "We like tig ol' bitties and approachable, kind personalities, with the idealized representation of femininity being Sydney Sweeney." Meanwhile Sabrina Carpenter is who gets aggressively marketed and celebrated.
Okay, I'm not that familiar with celebrity culture, but is Sydney Sweeney well-known for having a more approachable and kind personality than Sabrina Carpenter? It looks like you're using political signaling as a proxy measure here.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
Its crazy how we've come around to the "porn is bad (from the feminist perspective) but women should be rewarded for producing it" (see: Bonnie Blue) point of view as a seeming cultural default.
It occurs to me that this default seems much less absurd if you realize that the cultural default is also willfully incentive-blind. It's an uneasy truce between people who don't think of porn as bad from the feminist perspective, they just think of all kinds of things it strongly correlates with as bad, and people who don't think that they're rewarding women for producing porn, they think they're being respectful to women who've been exploited by it.
DiscourseMagnus
23d ago
This feels less like a Mottepost and more like a psychological thriller film pitch from the 1990s.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Gonna be real here and say that this sounds like saying that feminists never promoted misandry. I'm sure many PUAs said that they didn't promote that, and most of them probably even meant it, but that's not the same thing as a perfect or even very good track record for a large and loose movement, even if we're being generous.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
There are few beliefs with such strong bipartisan appeal that I find so contemptible as the idea that calling someone stupid as an insult constitutes cruelty to the disabled.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Yeah, I noticed this a while back: that even when fictional media has some supernatural excuse for women to be militarily powerful (often it doesn't), modern screenwriters, as part of the general delusion of modernity, tend to miss the deep unconscious discomfort associated with putting women in a military context as soldiers. There are basically only two contexts in which that happens in real life, and the one that represents the overwhelming majority of cases in the human condition is "a war is so existential that it is deemed worthwhile for the women to fight"; a war can get very, very bloody indeed before getting to that point. The other, distinctly modern case, in which the women are never actually expected to see combat and are functionally institutional decoration for gender egalitarians, is even more rarely what the screenwriters are going for.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I don't think "your body, my choice" even reflects bigotry; it reflects sabotage of the right wing, it reflects a total apathy or even antipathy for actual pro-life politics, it reflects "scaring the hoes" for the sake of it while actively desiring for them to continue murdering their children. It's evil. It's fed shit. It's willfully encouraging the abortionists' rhetorical frame.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I mean, why assume it'd be an accident if it happens? I kind of take it for granted that many terrorist attacks are successful ops by the FBI et al, parts of some grand chess game they're playing that involves killing lots of innocent American civilians.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
On the one hand, feminism is generally hostile to the category of strategy you're suggesting, if it's too obvious. And on the other hand, there's right-wing adversarial selection of ugly failed men to publicly pin to the movement.
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
First thing coming to mind is a chutzpiracy theory?
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
This failure to detect irony goes both ways in multiple senses, both in the sense that Republicans are also prone to it (if less so) and in the sense that it also takes the form of defending your own side's genuine expressions of malice as Just Fooling Around (the Jay Jones thing is still heavy on my mind).
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
Maybe add Sally Hemings to the $2 alongside Thomas Jefferson?
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
I think one of the stronger tells re:Marxism-as-religion is how they treat Marx himself, much more like a prophet than a scholar (despite protestations to the contrary).
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
I feel like the political leverage the hostages represented was probably worth a lot more to Hamas than 2000 additional warm bodies. In spite of any Israeli rhetoric to the contrary, I'm pretty sure if the ceasefire breaks down, Israel will no longer be fighting with one arm tied behind their back.
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
My personal theory is that it got to Thiel how often people accuse him of being the Antichrist and he wanted to deflect.
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
or telling your kids that Santa Claus is real is child abuse
"Child abuse" is poorly defined, but lying to your children is definitely bad, and I don't think this is nearly the trivial matter that people usually think of it as.
DiscourseMagnus
3mo ago
I think you're blundering straight into the greatest problem with anti-porn sentiment (though this is probably more of a problem with anti-porn sentiment from the left than anti-porn sentiment from the right): its bleedover into censorship of non-porn. Non-porn has a much harder time adapting to the conditions of porn censorship than porn does.
As the OP of this subthread, I should reemphasize that I do not expect that Jay Jones would deliberately arrange for the murder of Republicans' children, nor would I expect him to deliberately botch such an investigation. However, I think that the appearance that his election and leadership creates is a very dangerous one. If Republicans' children are murdered on his watch, then many Republicans will readily blame him, and I won't really be able to blame them for blaming him.
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