Fruck
Lacks all conviction
Fruck is just this guy, you know?
User ID: 889
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
I have been calling out Hanania's stupidity since at least 2023, and I'm no true blue aussieleftist. But he's definitely flattering different biases these days.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
Oh you want data? Read all of the motte - it's all in there.
I point blank do not believe you care about corruption. At all. If you cared about corruption by anyone as much as you claim, you should already have investigated the claims against the previous administration, and you would have had no choice but to conclude that it at least looks fishy, and therefore you would have investigated it and you would now have bulletproof arguments that it wasn't corruption. Since you claim that you don't even know what corruption the previous administration has been accused of, I can safely conclude you don't care about corruption, you care about Trump.
And I did not imply that republicans are immune from criticism. My implication is that nobody gives a shit about corruption on their side anymore. I have been beating this drum for years, but I have been explicit about it since Trump's election - this is democrat's own fault. There is a point past which spite becomes an acceptable justification and they pushed the right there. They had plenty of warnings this was coming, plenty of people were willing to point out that the right would only tolerate two tier anarcho-tyranny for so long, but they were ignored. So now they reap the whirlwind.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
Nah man, you don't get to say that, not after people screamed until they were blue in the face trying to point out the corruption of the democrats in the past few administrations only to be gaslit by the fucking government and media and have their lives ruined. You don't get to punish anyone who mentions corruption and then when you have silenced them claim their silence is proof they don't care.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
That's a kind of inoffensive stupidity though. Overt obsequiousness is just unpleasant.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
We'll have one actor who is the leading man type, every time you see an AI playing Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves you will know he's a leading man, every time you see Jason Statham or John Cena you know he's going to fight some people, every time you see Nicole Kidman you know she's going to be sexy and vulnerable and a little bit evil - regression to the 20th century. But we won't stop there - through cultural osmosis we'll start referring to those characters by the actor names - oh King Arthur is the Brad Pitt of the story and Guinevere is the Nicole Kidman. Then we'll go even further and use them to represent archetypes - 'ooh that dude is giving real Keanu vibes' and different ais will have different pantheons until we end up right back at 'Brad Pitt, of course, was sick of Nicole Kidman's nagging, so he turned into a sexy swan and seduced Leda.'
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
Stop there, go no further, turn back now. That is the antilife equation.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
I'm not finding it either, even though I remember watching her say it, and mocking it with my friends so frequently I can remember the exact quote. And when I widened my search it got even better - apparently no US official ever said anything like that!
We are so fucked as a species.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
Fucking everybody bud. If the zeitgeist position on vaccines wasn't 'they make you immune' the politicians and the media wouldn't have been so cavalier about safety concerns. If your gish gallop needs names, start with Kamala Harris - "The vaccine will prevent you from getting covid."
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
Ah, stupid public, thinking 'vaccines make you immune to a virus' just because scientists have been putting exactly that in kids books and shows and songs, and saying it to the UN and African and Afghani warlords for the past 80 years.
If you don't think the establishment were deliberately relying on the public perception of vaccines being viral immunity you are cuckoo.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
Likewise, plus I think it is a fundamental piece of the puzzle that @FiveHourMarathon's op was missing - the female perspective. I didn't want to say anything in reply to five, because the op was insightful in other ways and I didn't want to put our few women on the spot, but since it's been brought up I think it would be great to talk about, because I also find it fascinating. Also you are at your rhetorical best on two subjects imo @2rafa, class and gender dynamics, I am always keen to hear what you think about them, even when I find what you say upsetting or even degrading.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
Which is why you torrent triple a slop and pay for indies that deserve it. You shouldn't be pirating because you are poor, you can get games cheap easy enough, you should pirate because FUCK THE VIDEO GAMES INDUSTRY. Burn that fucker to the ground and salt the earth behind you. Then Nintendo or whoever can start again, again.
Which social media do you trust, and for god's sake why?
That's not really an effective disarmament tactic for scissor statements anyway (which is another reason they're so effective), because it doesn't matter whether the story happened or not - nobody really gives a shit about that scarf or the hotel or whoever really owned the scarf, they care that there are other people talking about it who don't share their values and have the audacity to judge them despite being sick, perverted scarf stealers/opposed to manic pixie dream girls/insert-your-own-description,-I-can't-take-this-seriously.
I'll tell you what the real scissor statement part of that story is - I can't possibly have been the only guy to read this guy explain how he told his girlfriend he was cold and immediately think 'cuck' can I? Aww is the widdle man cold? Does he want some mittens for his fingies too? If it was really that cold you would only have to wait a few minutes for hypothermia to kick in, and then you'll feel warm again you bitch! It's a damn sight better than letting a woman see you being weak when you haven't even jizzed. That's the only time you should ever show a woman weakness - only after she's seen you bang can you let her see you whimper.
That's how it always starts, by the way, first they steal a scarf for you, next thing you are walking funny and telling people pegging can increase a couple's intimacy.
If it was me on an imaginary date with Agent Scarf Stealer I'd have autistically insisted on trying to get the exact scarf she left at the hotel, and thought the genius part was her suggestion that one scarf is much the same as another. I'm very used to quirky nonsense though, in my defence.
Edit: iprayiam, I should have guessed you'd tackle the real issue, high five! I swear your post wasn't there when I read this thread earlier though.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
Yeah basically God sacrificing his son patched out the sacrifice dependency.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
I am... less surprised at the pushback you have received than you are, but that's because I work in a retail adjacent industry I think. And I post more. Anyway I sympathise with your perspective, although I think it's a little outdated. Everyone is calling you rude and entitled, but from my perspective you have what seems to me the default attitude to retail of everyone gen x and older (and the occasional millenial and zoomer) - in any transaction there is a buyer and the seller - the buyer is there to buy something, the seller is there to sell something. Therefore, if the seller wants to sell their product, it is up to them to get the buyer to buy it. Whether they are angry, calm, crying, raging, male, female, black, white, gay, straight, trans, cis - if you want their money you have to convince them to give it to you. The buyer on the other hand, has one responsibility - to hand over the money required to purchase the good. That's it. They could talk entirely in profanity if they liked - as long as they pay, they get service.
Which is to say that yes you were being entitled, but it was precisely as entitled as Starbucks wanted their customers to feel until recently. (It was also as entitled as Starbucks wanted every visitor to feel for a few years there, but that was always madness.) Starbucks didn't become a household name, land a store on every corner and redesign the coffee industry because they made good coffee, everyone is aware of that, but few people ask the follow up 'why were they successful then?' Starbucks' runaway success was in large part due to the way they treated their staff - and a large part of that was their profit sharing type program that gave even the baristas and other part timers stock options. Having a stake in the success of the company, the baristas worked extra hard to convert customers into sales - aka they smiled even when they didn't feel like it. That tied the reliability and success of a corporate operation to the atmosphere and staff behaviour of a mom and pop outfit, and consumers went nuts for it. People want to feel like their presence is wanted and they will drink poisonous tar to feel it.
And I understand the people who feel it's duplicitous to pretend to be nice to someone you loathe or pretend to be happy when you feel like shit, but a) that's society and b) that's what they're being paid for, most people don't care if they grind the beans a particular way, they just want a cute girl or guy to smile when they get their coffee. And yes, maybe it's selfish to not want to worry about tailoring your behaviour to not upset some barista you'll never see again, but I think it is eminently more selfish - and entitled - to expect strangers to treat you like you belong in their Dunbar's group. Especially when you are being paid to be there and the stranger is paying you.
Buy something next time though lol.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
But that's an issue of trust - idk how old you are, but there were conversations like this in the early oughts about search engines dumbing everyone down and removing the need to think for themselves, then a few years after that it was Wikipedia. Each time the same objections were made - it reduces the need to think for yourself, it reduces your ability to find information for yourself and it leads to people stating inaccurate and frankly idiotic statements as fact.
But eventually people realised they couldn't trust google or Wikipedia entirely and we developed epistemic hygiene around them. The same will happen with ai, and I know it will, because my mum - who is by no means tech savvy or even especially research savvy - gushes about ai, but her gushes are 'I love how it gives me all the opinions up front and doesn't hide the ones the establishment doesn't like' (paraphrased) and 'it's no doctor, but it's a God send when I need a sanity check.' (paraphrased) If my mum has developed epistemic hygiene around ai, so can students, and they will.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
Tree paper? Like the stuff you wipe your ass with? I only read works scribed on vellum.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2mo ago
Goes great with our post modernist half joke meme president!
Seriously. Every time people think about this song they will say nigga heil hitler in their head. And when the sky doesn't fall as a result, some of those people who were told it would will realise they have been lied to. This is an effective use of outrage to send a message. It's basically the right wing version of Childish Gambino's This is America - except This is America was fuelled by the progressive zeitgeist, and thus was basically substance free, reliant on censorship to both provide substance and shield the song from critics, so my progressive friends' opinion of it was along the lines of 'we have to prop up black people so even if it's kind of empty we can praise it for what it didn't say'.
But Kanye is right (wing lol) so he can't use censorship to his advantage by leveraging silence, he has to leverage outrage. I like both Childish Gambino and Ye as artists, but I'm pretty sure I already know which of the these songs will have a bigger impact.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2mo ago
Kanye West is like a Holocaust-denying parrot. Imagine it, a parrot squawking "six million didn't die, the Holocaust is a lie!" Funny for a few days, but then you're left with a Holocaust-denying parrot squawking and crapping all over its cage.
The value of calling Ye a parrot rests exclusively in the idea he is mindlessly repeating phrases, and while I think that is an odd accusation to level at a guy who just released a rap song literally nobody ever even imagined making before, it maybe fits if you uh, don't count stuff like that. What really frustrates me though is that you extended the analogy so far as to throw parrots under the bus - funny for a few days? Like they're a Yak Bak from the nineties you play with for a bit and throw in the closet? Have you never had a pet bird before?
A parrot is not just for Christmas Alex. They can be for a birthday too. In fact you can eat them all year round.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2mo ago
That's excellent advice, thanks man. I was going to ask further questions, but I stumbled on the answer myself - I need therapy lol.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2mo ago
It isn't one lol, it's just his name - that's also why I used politesse instead of something more normal like etiquette or behaviour - it's a set up, if you have a passing familiarity with the words in the title (which is true of most educated people) it sounds very smart and classy, but if you actually know how to use those terms they don't actually make sense together like that. And then you discover that the fancy thing you are about to watch is actually two people cramming fistfuls of eggy pasta into their faces.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2mo ago
New podcast idea - you take interesting people out to fancy restaurants to discuss controversial topics and eat carbonara with your hands. Call it The politesse functor.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2mo ago
How did you convince yourself you aren't being selfish though? Like you are standing there just having listened to someone explain that they feel like going postal and can you do them a huge favour and over-commit to some project that is frankly none of your business, and what am I going to do with that time? Nothing of value most likely. If I'm at work it's no drama, because work is work, but if they ask in my free time I don't know how to say "sorry, no, I just finished the second season of this puppet show I've been watching and I have to watch a movie now before I start season 3." Doesn't the "I have a right to defend myself" argument feel a bit hollow in the those circumstances?
I think the exact opposite. This seems like a conflict vs mistake theory thing to me - I think you are a better person than anyone who has or will run for president. Perhaps if you have generally good pious people in charge corruption can be better in secret. Perhaps. I think the incentives will still lead to disaster, but I can buy the argument. When you are run by halfwit narcissists though, overt corruption is intrinsically better because overt corruption must toe the line of public acceptability. Kickbacks, insider trading - all perfectly acceptable to the US public as has been amply demonstrated by everyone in power since at least 2008 (before then absolutely but 2008 is where it became obvious to everyone paying attention). Sex trafficking rings? Pedophilia? Those bloom in darkness.
Edit: added the line about my personal view
More options
Context Copy link