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Iconochasm
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2mo ago
I remember something like it happening once during the first Trump administration. Guy was born in Texas to a Mexican immigrant mother. Details are fuzzy, but the gist was that the mother was playing games with the son's citizenship status when he was little to make it easier to travel back and forth from Texas to Mexico and didn't actually have proof that he was an American citizen. The situation ended up getting resolved after it made the news, and a retired maternity nurse remembered the mother and scrounged up some sort of personal memento (thank you note on hospital letterhead or something) that helped confirm the guy's status.
From your first link:
The 20-year-old’s first language is Tzotzil, a Mayan language, and he took a long pause when he was asked if he wanted to hire a private attorney or obtain a public defender. He lived in Mexico from the time he was 1-year-old until four years ago, when he returned to Georgia, his mother told the Phoenix.
I wonder if there's some similar thing where even though he's a citizen, he traveled internationally in less-than legal methods.
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2yr ago
Iirc, the reasoning was explicitly Doylist. Wildbow mentioned at some point that it seemed likely to turn into giant flaming culture wars and so he decided to just kind of ignore the entire glaring topic.
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2yr ago
I think this is a distinction without a difference, a fig leaf of an epicycle. The context in which the argument is made is always a hysterical, histrionic affair in which responsibility is viciously externalized. "Your epistemic skepticism is LITERALLY GENOCIDE!!1"
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2yr ago
Alien vs Predator 3: No Matter Who Wins, We Lose.
Some final thoughts and commentary on this race, focusing mostly on the campaign ads. I had wanted to link the ads I'm seeing as I discuss them, but there does not seem to be any easy repository. Some of the Oz ads, or similar clips, are available on his website and Youtube channel. Fetterman has a much more expansive listing of clips on his Youtube channel, but they don't seem very similar to the ads I'm actually seeing FIVE TIMES EVERY COMMERCIAL BREAK. Note that this is all in the Philly market.
Let's start with this Fetterman ad which is not one I've ever seen on TV, though there are some similar themes, and some glaring omissions. The ads I see do hit that note about wanting to "cut taxes for working families", but I have never seen a Fetterman ad say one word about the minimum wage. His ads talk about how Oz has 10 mansions, but Fetterman wants to cut taxes and make sure no community gets left behind and he definitely wants to fight crime and get more stuff made in Pennsylvania.
He still plays this like he's an anti-establishment Republican; you could be forgiven for thinking he was a moderate Tea Partier. Zero references to progressive or left-wing causes, he is nativist, vague on actual policies, but he is definitely One Of Us, not like that Turk.
On a related note, Josh Shapiro has a spot running where is also in favor of cutting taxes, and promises to put parents on the state education board. Taking in the tenor of these campaign pitches, I would be very morose if I were a leftist.
Fetterman does also have another ad running a lot, with a very positive, uplifting tone, where he doesn't say anything negative and ends by "respectfully asking for your vote".
Oz has a parallel one (unfortunately, it evades my Google-fu). In it, Oz expresses gratitude on behalf of himself and his family for "your kindness, and your grace". Just a strong positive note from both of them to end on, only mostly ruined by the shitflinging from the last few months... and their other ads... and all the ads being run by affiliated groups.
Oz has this ad, or one very similar running all the time. Oz stresses that he is like, amazingly super compassionate, and that the real problem is extremism on both sides. His ads position him as a moderate, who just want solutions gosh-darnit by listening and working together and building a reality-warping engine from a condensed singularity of generic moderation.
Both men have allies running harsh attack ads. CRAZY JOHN FETTERMAN WANTS CRIMINALS TO RUN WILD. He also, I hear, MOOCHES OFF HIS PARENTS. It must be nice to actually work for a year, and be so upset about it that you have daddy buy you a political office that is supposed to be extremely part time instead. There is another pair of ads featuring black people ripping into Fetterman for the whole situation where he heard gunfire, grabbed a shotgun, and held up the first black jogger he saw. Obviously a brutally negative ad aimed directly at the black community in Philly.
The other side has ads running against Oz, but almost more at Republicans in general. Republicans want to BAN ALL ABORTION even in cases of RAPE AND INCEST. Look at this 10 YEAR OLD GIRL who could be FORCED TO CARRY HER RAPISTS BABY. Republicans apparently also are going to DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. These ads focus less on attacking Oz directly, and more on the logic that as a Republican vote, he'll enable the other more extreme Republicans, which is an interesting bit of raw tribalism/game theory. They make a bit of hay out of Oz's statement at the debate that abortion should be between "a woman and her doctor and local politicians", but not as much as is made of Fetterman's performance. One ad just runs this clip, almost without commentary. Another has a bunch of Very Concerned People discussing how much Fetterman's debate failure changed their opinions, because he clearly can't do the job. One line effectively pings off a previous Fetterman ad where he bizarrely talks about how grateful he was to get to spent time with his family while recovering, by saying that he looks like he should be resting with his family instead of running for Senate. Oz is also going to RAISE YOUR TAXES (lolwut?), including one little snippet that should win an award for dishonesty, where the name "OZ" is pasted above a newspaper headline style snippet reading "CUT MEDICARE" and "RAISED YOUR TAXES", clearly implying that he has already done so, in spite of his never having held office before.
So, I want to talk about the REPUBLICAN PLAN TO DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. I went to look and see if this is something that anyone is actually talking about, but what I'm mostly finding is onion links in partisan outlets that link to stories that link to stories that link to stories that have that one time in 2010 that Mike Lee said we were going to have to do something about SS going insolvent. Are there any actual, current plans by actual Republicans to do anything that could reasonably be called "gutting SS/Medicare"? My impression is of desperate, disingenuous fearmongering, but I only have so much tolerance for digging through Dark Hinting from the outgroup, and I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that there is something serious in there.
Finally, some Kabbalah. I find it delightful that his support for releasing criminals has been an albatross around the neck of a candidate named Fetter-man. Unfortunately, the surname apparently has no linguistic connection to fetters, it's actually an old Germanic nickname/insult for "the fat guy", which again is odd because John looks like he has lost a bunch of weight, all of which went to his hideous neck goiter. "Mehmet Oz", OTOH, apparently just means "praiseworthy courage", which is so bland and boring and inappropriate I can't even make fun of it.
"John Fetterman" has a gematria of 1065, which is the Return of Partnership Income Tax form. "Mehmet Oz" has a gematria of 728, and Luke 7:28 reads "I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” The Khabbalistic implications of this are obvious, but I cannot find anything saying if Oz was a C-section or not. If Fetterman wins, this should be a critical attribute of the next Republican challenger in 2028.
If there is some hidden message in their names that will reveal the winner, it eludes me. But I can say with confidence and joy that 48 hours from now I will be 5+ years away from seeing a single ad for either of these fuckheads again. May God have mercy on us all.
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2mo ago
because
he wore a chicago bulls hata confidential informant of purportedly verified reliability named him as a ranked member of the gang.
Also, he got stopped doing what looked rather like human trafficking in 2022, but the Biden FBI told the locals to let him go.
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2mo ago
Trump has dropped plenty of hints that he is thinking about sending American citizens to El Salvador prisons.
Until he makes any kind of effort at doing so, this seems much more likely to be a cruel taunt. Trump is much more understandable once you grasp that he's essentially a right-wing John Oliver type, but less stupid.
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2yr ago
Keystone Clown Contest Part 2: Ischemic Boogaloo
See here for the last discussion of the Hoodie Ogre vs the Huckster Healer.
In Our Last Exciting Episode...
Mehmet Oz, in an effort to look like a real person, went to a grocery store and was caught on camera complaining about the price of crudités, which is apparently New Jerseyan (or maybe Ottoman) for "uncooked vegetable platter, maybe with dip". So Fetterman did the obvious thing and ran ads and had a fundraiser about how obviously elitest and out of touch it is to use (forgive me) Fr*nch words for common things.
Fetterman’s campaign said it had raised more than half a million dollars off the viral video within a day, including more than $65,000 from a sticker that has the phrase “Wegners: Let them eat Crudite” on it.
Oz's people clapped back with this banger
“If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly,”
(Speaking as a man who once spent three weeks on the "all cheesesteak diet" and learned a painful lesson thereby, eat your vegetables.)
Again, Fetterman's people did the obvious thing and harshly criticized Oz for this failure of decorum. Many variations on "Imagine your doctor making fun of you."
So, the next point of contention to come up is the debates. Team Fetterman initially tried to use the mockery about his stroke as a reason to dodge out on them altogether,, to which Team Oz published this vicious list of concessions
Doctor Oz promises not to intentionally hurt John’s feelings at any point.
We will all allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with any earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff in real time.
At any point, John Fetterman can raise his hand and say “bathroom break!”
If the topic of his pardoned murderers comes up, we will allow extra rime for him to explain that second-degree murder is “not as bad as first-degree murder.
We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.
(Incidentally, "lying liberal Fetterman" is a terrible mocking nickname. I never thought I'd long for the days of Shady Katie McGinty. I wish I could find one of the ads that really hammed up the nickname, but they don't seem to be on Youtube.)
Team Fetterman is obviously outraged.
Ok, more serious face on.
As of now, the first debate was supposed to have been on Sept 6th, and didn't happen. Fetterman has committed to one debate, but not until mid-late October, which will be weeks after early voting starts. Team Fetterman has been flipping stories about his health issues, from downplaying it, to "almost died", and now it's purportedly some minor auditory processing issues. Some people covering him have expressed concerns, including the Pittsburg Post-Gazette. Fetterman has only had some brief interactions with the public or reporters since his stroke in May, heavily supervised. The ads he's been bombarding the Philly market with are supposedly made with pre-stroke recordings. His current speaking is.... not great. This issue, and Oz campaign ads hammering Fetterman on his progressive crime policies may be working to Oz's favor, as Fetterman's lead seems to be more like 4-5%, down from 11% a month ago.
But at least he's got the Snookie vote.
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20d ago
Yes, there are plenty of people who have no contact with illegal immigrants and suffer from a virulent Typical Mind Fallacy.
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1mo ago
Why, because he looks weird?
Yes, that's definitely part of it. Hanania has gone off about how he hates the Republican masses because they're fat and ugly. Meanwhile, he's more visually repellant than any Person of Walmart I've ever seen. He's like the Platonic Ideal of what generations of fantasy writers have been groping towards, when they want you to know a character is a contemptible pussy you should hate just from the initial description. Every time I see that PFP, my lips curl into a feral snarl. I feel like a dog that is sensing that the stranger knocking on the door is a corruption demon in a skinsuit.
Richard Hanania makes the Devil from the Constantine movie look like wholesome Brad Pitt.
I think he‘s smart and feisty. You guys complained for years that Scott is too nice, but when a guy gets a little combative, then you‘re offended.
"Combatative" is all he is. The man is a LOLcow, farming engagement by using his own idiot takes as bait. Even before I saw what he looked like, he gave me a consistent impression that he was the human hardware equivalent of AI slop. I don't think I've ever seen something he wrote that made me feel like a concious mind was having thoughts and trying to communicate them. Even on topics where I did, or used to, agree with him, there was something off, some failure of the intellectual Turing Test. If we could get a Neuralink installed to observe the process, I would bet money that Hanania goes vibes->wordcel vomit. "Mexican twinks are hot, therefore yay immigration." "Fat daddies are yucky, therefore boo Trump."
And that's what Hanania comes down to: vibes. He's junk food for people like Trace, who want to imagine that they're ivory-towered, neutral intellectuals, but can't shake the vibe that makes them heavily tilt the scales. His "feistiness" lets them get that ArrDrama hit of being a total bitch while pretending to be chaste maidens. His appeal is entirely a function of aesthetic preference for pseudointellectual slop in a sweater vest. Which is hilariously ironic coming from a viscerally disgusting creature whose entire oeuvre consists of LOLcow vibes-posting.
If you want your partisan arguments to gain extra consideration because you claim to have a costly non-partisan virtue, it is completely reasonable for other people to ask you to prove you've paid that cost.
And when you appear to struggle to grasp what that would even entail in the first place, it is completely reasonable for people to notice that, and adjust their impressions of you accordingly.
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2yr ago
It's true that they're anti-racism to a degree, which was part of the appeal, but there are other aspects that would be very troubling to the left today. For example, government officials are mostly incompetent, petty tyrants. The wizard newspaper prints only fluff pieces and official propaganda. It's not a book with that supports the "trust the experts" style of government that's been a staple of leftism for a long time but has ramped up even more since 2016.
Nah, they went a decade+ without noticing it's a story about armed children in school fighting the government, or that the Slytherins are a better "Jewish conspiracy" stand-in than the goblins. Shallow thinking is endemic, and motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
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2yr ago
By Casual Voter Fraud I mean things like ineligible voting, impersonation at the polls, and mail-in or absentee ballot fraud; in other words, the kind of voter fraud a normal person could attempt without much difficulty.
That's not really what this is directed at, though. This is people voting in spite of not actually being allowed to. Felons, indigents, flavors of immigrants. Most of those categories seem likely to favor Democrats. It makes me think of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race, which ended up being decided by 225 votes. It was later determined that something like 1000 felons illegally voted in overwhelmingly Democrat counties. That result sent Al Franken to Washington, and gave Obama the 60th vote for the ACA.
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2mo ago
You know what's poison to discourse? Being expected to take every bit of speculative, hysterical catastrophizing with more deadly seriousness than actual things that literally happened. Member when the president had a 16 year old US citizen murdered by flying robot assassin? I member. How does that compare to an off-hand comment that was immediately followed with caveats about legality? Is it a thousand times worse? A million? Are you going to take those caveats as deadly serious evidence of Trump's deadly serious concern for the law? Of course not.
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2yr ago
It is also a fact that the nazis were far right
I'll dispute that. There's a reason PoliticalCompassMemes classes them as AuthCenter. Nazism is weird, and very clearly a mutation off of socialism. There is definitely a reasonable argument that they shed core elementals of socialist thought (like class abolition) during that mutation, but they kept others (like the framework of being a revolutionary ideology to remake all society in their own image), and that leaves in them a weird position compared to other types of "right-wing" ideologies. If just being racist and homophobic is enough, then Marx, Engels and Guevera are "far-right". If we're going to ignore the distinctions and categories enough to group Brandon Sanderson with the Nazis, then everyone to the left of Joe Manchin is Stalinist - and apparently it doesn't matter if they never sent anyone to the gulag.
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2yr ago
No, grooming is not merely a set of behaviors. You are ignoring the intent to molest, which is the key part.
And plenty of teachers and activists have that intent, in rates at least comparable to other organizations that have faced reputational and financial ruin over their association. And as you say, we have bright-line rules to make it easier to detect bad people. Actively generating shrouds of chaff in which bad people can operate is a bad thing. It deserves criticism. "I'm not molesting children, I'm just deliberately cultivating an environment conducive to child molestation" is not the defense you think it is.
Imagine a Scoutmaster or priest actively arguing that they should be allowed to engage kids in sexually charged conversations, make sure they had access to porn, and set an official policy of keeping secrets from parents. Oh, but don't call us groomers, only an increasing-by-obvious-incentive portion of us are literally raping kids! In the real world, Scout leaders are not allowed to talk to kids at all without another adult present, or CCed in any written communications.
Frankly, this seems like a wildly isolated demand for charity.
I am not sure that BSA is the most representative example re these general issues,
Yes, that was definitely erring too far on the side of protecting kids, which rather undermines your point.
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2yr ago
render your child homeless
Isn't that obviously a point where the state has pre-existing authority to step in? Can teachers conceal anything from parents if they merely claim to be worried about the parent overreacting?
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2mo ago
Yeah, this is back to not understanding the concept. Genuine non-partisan concern for the rule of law is costly because it pisses off everyone, eventually. If you're going to be big mad about due process for deportations now, that pisses off conservatives. And if you were actually principled, then you'd have already pissed off the progressives by spending the Biden administration writing scathing critiques of their utter disregard for the law. You'd be criticizing at least some of these activist judges for overreach. You'd be carefully mindful of all the laws and evidence demanding that Garcia must be deported.
The fact that you don't recognize this, the fact that you seem totally unaware of the tribalism that infuses most political discussions, the fact that you don't have a gut-level appreciation for how progressives treat heretics and enemies are very strong signals that you've never actually insisted the law be applied to them, too.
FWIW, there are members of this community who do have such a track record, and I highly respect them for it.
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2yr ago
The Slytherins are an unmanly ethnogroup that uses their wealth and ownership of the media to secretly control the government. The "good ones" are a favor-trading backdealer whose redeeming value is that he's so fame and favor hungry that he is willing to dip into genuine meritocracy instead of raw nepotism, and a creepy villain who is "redeemed" by his pathetic unrequited lust for a pure Aryan Gryffindor redhead.
I mean, yeah, it's a silly stretch, but it's funny how far you can stretch it to fit.
The skin-in-the-game element seems obviously a factor. But there's another major one in play, and that's the sheer memetic dominance the left is throwing around. I occasionally check /all as a guilty pleasure, and I aggressively prune it. The second time I see some dumbfuck political crap (do I even have to specify that it's progressive crap?) I filter out the subreddit. 50+ subs filtered out, and the other day still had the front page with 5/25 posts that were just random, content-free slams against conservatives. Most media, most news, most of academia are in the "fish doesn't realize it's wet" phase. I'm an older Millennial, and my cohort has a sense that old people just sit and wat FAUX NEWS all day, but the awful truth is that most of us are trapped in a comparable echo chamber with a flipped valence and a bigger aquarium tank. Reddit, twitter, netflix, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, etc. It's just in the atmosphere. You pick up progressivism via osmosis.
So we have people who are having fewer of those conservative-making experiences (being responsible for stuff) while being bombarded with unprecedented amounts and degrees and styles of propaganda. And every person who might start to have a moment of awareness that maybe this nice sounding idea is actually kind of impractical has fewer real life friends and family to discuss it with (especially older ones!). And when they turn to the internet, they either get sucked into a redpill community or face a torrent of SMALL DICK NO BITCHES conformity-policing and flinch.
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2yr ago
He was apparently "caught" because he started a Twitter feud with Greta Thunberg, during which he posted a video that had a shot of a pizza box that supposedly confirmed his presence in Romania, and the Romanian police arrested him within 30 minutes. That seems... implausible? Like, you needed the confirmation of the pizza box, but knew his exact location within the country well enough to nail him that quickly? OTOH, this all provides further evidence of my Dankest Timeline Hypothesis. Expect one more bit of absurdity before 2022 slips away.
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2yr ago
From the brief reading I did last night, it appears they were banned by a possibly automated process after insisting on linking to real-time location doxing, including offsite, after an incident in which Musk's child was threatened by a possibly crazy person.
Per normal standards as I have come to understand them:
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Twitter is a private company.
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Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
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The people involved were directly encouraging stochastic terrorism, which is not protected speech.
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2yr ago
This isn't exclusive to the LGBT community either - plenty of straight people engage in similar things and get half as much flack for it.
Can you name a single other government employee who has voluntarily talked to the media about their fetishes in comparable detail? What about celebrities in general? What passes for you as an example of a straight person doing something similar?
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2yr ago
As a calibrating scenario, remember that guy who tried to assassinate the conservative supreme court justices a few months back? That situation seems to have gone very quiet, but let's speculate that he was found to have been "inspired" by the rhetoric of a leftist group or media. Would it be reasonable to sue/prosecute Ruth Sent Us or MSNBC into oblivion?
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2mo ago
You never answered that question the other day about exactly how incredibly privileged and sheltered you are. Why do you believe that you have shared values with the murder-cult warlords who were terrorizing a nation less than a handful of years ago? Why do you think that you know better the exact line that can be drawn on exactly how rough one must be to repress the murder-cult, compared to the politician who actually accomplished that? Have you ever successfully spearheaded any kind of harm reduction effort comparable to reducing a nation's murder rate by 99%?
And once again, please explain what the purportedly inhumane conditions are. When I looked, CNN said it was "spartan rooms" and the machismo-fueled murder-cult prisoners were made to kneel while their heads were shaved, which probably didn't make them feel very good.
I'm glad I posted this because the responses revealed a serious flaw in my explanation.
I very specifically do not mean "they don't know what a female is". They get that, for the most part. I'm talking about the internal experience of womanhood, the preference for faces over mechanics, the keen interest in social networks and how much a man makes and the low-key rape fetish. Instead, when they think about the differences between men and women, they think the women are just smaller men. It parses the same way you would consider the differences between The Rock and Kevin Hart. They treat their female friends and girlfriends like a guy, and then don't understand why it backfires. To them, a woman is just a guy with a vagina in a skirt. So if a person with a penis puts on a skirt and claims to be a woman, what's the difference?
And the solution is to have other men explicitly teach them about the differences in perspective. The full Boomer Wisdom.
Or they can just watch Hoe Math videos.
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