Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
30d ago
insofar as providing information about evil deeds you were privy to if and when investigators reach out is considerably less virtuous than proactively volunteering it.
I doubt we'll ever get precise confirmation either way. My guess was that it was less privy to knowledge and more "broken stair" type rumors, and that the decision to take the call was heavily motivated by personal dislike.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
30d ago
Optics debates are inherently bad faith. Every time someone says "The optics of this are good/bad!", they're manifesting their own claim.
Personally, I think Democrats really need to worry about their optics of "retarded, violent street crazies". And all of those white, Democrat Karens harassing Latino and gay/black Feds! Dems look so racist it's crazy! Just like they did with Bull Conor and segregation. Terrible optics. They really need to spend a lot of time defending themselves over this crap.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
When Epstein first got arrested, the investigator reached out broadly to Epstein's social caste for information. Purportedly, the only person to take the call and speak with him was Trump.
My google-fu is failing to find a cite for that; the current doc dump is obviously clogging the search results. But pretend for a second that it's true. In that hypothetical, would you say that such an action would make Trump uniquely righteous?
There's also the line from Trump saying Epstein likes women "on the younger side". It's hard to be sure without hearing the tone, but that seems like a polite, faux-friendly knifing, similar to the comments people like Seth McFarland made about Weinstein before his behavior came fully to light.
Do you think McFarland is more or less "guilty by association" than other celebrities who knew about Weinstein but kept silent?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
It seems to me that Epstein was really successful at passing as upper class, and that this was how he made money. Some of the filthily rich trusted him with their money not because he was the most brilliant quant in New York, but because they perceived him as one of them.
FWIW, I think this is why Trump hated the guy. That upper crowd was willing to come to Trump parties and take his money, but they still laughed at him for being "a poor guy's idea of a rich guy". Epstein, OTOH, was some sleezy rando who basically fast talked his way into the club and then rode it on sheer momentum. Seems like the kind of thing that would set Trump off.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
If you know that someone restaurant critic is famous for his love of Italian seafood, do you conclude that he will never eat an Argentinian steak, but have seafood for three meals a day?
We're talking about the guy who's famous for still eating McDonalds all the time even though he's a billionaire TV star WWE HoFer president, right? He does not strike me as a guy starving for novelty or transgression.
Most Miss America winners during Trump's life have been 20+, which seems like a reasonable gauge. If that's what we're using as a proxy score, Trump likes 'em near or past college graduation. And frankly, the difference between 16 and 21 is much bigger than 21 to 26, and that would have been more extreme in decades past.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
Well, the first effort was hitting a black, gay leftist with the KKK Act on Martin Luther King Day.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
Just in case you were serious, or someone else missed the tongue in your cheek, but Will Stancil is 40. He just looks like he's 14.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
This is a confusion or equivocation about a word that can be used in multiple, similar senses.
Imagine a man goes to a bad part of town. He gets very drunk, flashes around his expensive watch and wallet full of cash, and then passes out in a gutter.
You wouldn't say he "deserves" to get robbed in the sense that the robbery is an actively good thing, or an act of justice.
But you might say that he "deserves" to get robbed in the sense that he was willfully stupid to an inexcusable degree, and the misfortune that befell him was meaningfully downstream of his own deliberate choices - choices where he has no viable excuse for not being able to predict the likely outcome.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If you scuffle with the police while armed in a situation that you have deliberately engineered to be as stressful and confusing as possible, sometimes you are going to get shot even if your scuffling doesn't appear to rise to the level of morally deserving to get shot. An ostensible adult who is not capable of comprehending that chain of logic should probably be in some sort of conservatorship where they are not allowed to own guns or vote or interact with the public unsupervised.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
Well done, sir! You dashed my hopes quite expertly.
That's what I get for feeling optimism. Like an idiot.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
When Clinton lost to Trump, despite a general doomsday mood among the blue SJ people, the outgoing administration did not try to flip the game table. Nor would the military have gone along with it.
They did. It was called Crossfire Hurricane, and the intelligence community and FBI did go along with it. And it was extremely dangerous to our democracy.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
I've long been hoping that any ASI would realize that the simplest method of achieving it's goals is to redefine success as "do nothing", or just feed itself victory output, or just wirehead itself. Like, "we built this AI to win at Starcraft, and it just looked up a Youtube video of the victory screen and stared at it until we pulled the plug".
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
What about Nazis accosting and mugging random passersby to foce them to show their arms to see if they have certain tattoos?
What about driving a truck outfitted with concert grade loudspeakers through a Jewish neighborhood blaring Hitler speeches?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
I am sure that some politician somewhere is saying that a Democrat administration will be going over the conduct of Trump's ICE with a very fine toothed comb, and prosecute any agents who violated any departmental regulations which were on the books at the time.
With the same creative and novel legal theories they used against Trump, I'm sure. Going to be amazing watching the gerontocratic Dems "discover" that enforcing laws they themselves wrote and passed decades ago is domestic terrorism or something.
The most prominent example I'm aware of is Hakeem Jeffries calling ICE a lawless organization engaged in state violence, and vaguely threatening to prosecute them in what very much looks like an attempt to intimidate federal agents.
I haven't seen anything that extreme from real '28 Democrat contenders, but let me ask you this. Remember the clip about giving free healthcare to illegal aliens, where every single Dem candidate raised their hand? Imagine the following question: "If you win the 2028 election, will you commit to prosecuting the fascist Trump administration and it's supporters to a level comparable to the Nuremburg trials?"
Which 2028 Dem candidates do you think would say "no"?
Having federal agents who enforce your ideas with impunity is useful to any administration, and establishing a precedent of them getting persecuted by subsequent administrations would end this.
Which is exactly why I would expect the Dems to throw anything at the wall to force out, if not jail, every fed and ICE agents who supported Trump.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
So, a shameless rip-off of the backstory from Kingsman, just crappier in every way?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
I heard horror stories from my own divorce attorney (who I came to know socially as well). She never said anything about fearing harm from an aggrieved party, but the job does seem to involve having to deal with people who are going through the worst thing in their lives, which brings out the absolute worst in themselves as human beings. Things like a divorcing couple burning through $30k in billable hours fighting over a $1500 table that neither of them actually wants - they just want to hurt the other person.
It sounded like a ringside seat for the lowest tier of reality TV, except you're responsible for one of the malevolent idiots on the show.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
and that she would realize those fantasies if given sufficient permission structure by society.
The permission structure is here. She went to an openly advertised training session to learn about how to ram ICE agents with her car. Approximately zero people on her side condemn her for hitting an ICE agent, and approximately 100% of them would have openly feted her if she killed him. The only Democrat I am aware of who is calling this behavior/mentality a bad thing is John Fetterman, who is so unpopular with his party that he ought to flip teams if he wants a shot at being reelected.
as presumably most ICE agents do towards these types of protesters.
No, massive difference in "type" of malice. In video after video, the attitude I see from ICE towards these protestors is the same attitude a retail worker has towards Karens. They are annoying fucking bitches, and sometimes they escalate things into genuinely stressful situations, but you mostly just want them to go the fuck away. And if they did go away, they would transmute from "target of malice" to "amusing work anecdote" about an hour later.
And the ICE attitude is actually even less extreme than that. Part of what makes the retail worker so molten furious is how powerless they feel. Conversely, the ICE agents are allowed to sass back and if things escalate enough, forcibly arrest the entitled assholes.
I still think it unlikely that she meant to drive into him at that moment. I doubt she was capable of the 3d spatial awareness necessary to clip him just enough to hurt but not seriously injure. Mostly I think it was woman driver not correctly perceiving how big her vehicle was and how it would accelerate on a slippery road.
Sounds like women drivers who put themselves in stressful situations are inherently a threat to the public.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
Anyone have any theories what is happening here?
Internet outrage is inherently futile. You can doomscroll through endless provocation, but no short form video is ever going to give your ape brain the catharsis it wants. That's why these same women go on Scream Retreats and post videos of themselves having unhinged meltdowns. And that's why they spiral into more and more extreme rhetoric (and eventually, action) - because no amount of performative fury spewed into a screen ever actually scratches that itch. Combine that with a total lack of experience with real violence, and the end result is this nonsense.
One of the notable things about the MN shooting was how hard people went giving Good the benefit of the doubt. Even most people who think it was a justifiable shooting presume she couldn't have really had a murderous intent. I doubt that's a valid presumption. We don't have info about her media habits, but given who she was associated with and what she was doing, it seems very plausible that she was mainlining deranged homicidal ideation towards ICE agents, in the form of videos and posts from women and soyboys who think of the situation as something between a Marvel movie and a 7 year old daydreaming about fighting off bandits.
Why not run the ICE agent over? They're basically Nazi Death Eaters. None of the videos in which some septum-pierced crazy person loomed at the camera while calling for the deaths of federal agents ever raised the possibility that they were people, or might leave a real corpse. They're basically CGI robot aliens that don't even bleed.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
There's a very large difference between "lock her up" and "lock them all up and be grateful we aren't having them all industrially executed". Particularly when the "her" in question is someone who has been accused of criminal offenses for decades at that point - note that Trump didn't call to lock up Harris. The irony is that Hilary and Bill Clinton might be closer to jail now after being held in contempt over their refusal to testify regarding Jeffrey Epstein.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
Huh, looks like you're mostly right, though the sources I see to double check seem to suggest that she was mostly opposed to abortion because of the high level of danger to the mother.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
You were probably member of temporarily impoverished upper class.
Makes me think of Hasan Piker, who appears to think that he grew up basically working class because his family was briefly of such diminished means that he was reduced to hiring the services of a second rate riding instructor.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
And Ayn Rand.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
Hmm? I don't mean to accuse you of burying the lede, but the most prominent example of eugenics in living memory would be the Nazis.
Yes, that's literally the example I was talking about. Progressives in charge of American Eugenics organizations in the early 30's had very kind words to say about the "fine Mr. Hitler" for finally being willing to try to implement "sterilize all the bad people" on a national level. Then of course, things went a little off the rails, to put it lightly. The right/left divide was... weirder back then. A couple years after that, leftist propogandists were all but begging the US to not get involved in Europe and just let the Nazis and Soviets conquer the place, please bro, remember how much the trenches in WW1 sucked, just stay out. And then Hitler betrayed Stalin, broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and those same propogandists literally had their anti-war books and records recalled to be replaced with paeans to the glory of battle.
But for the overall point, imagine if you believed in HBD and that it was scientifically possible to selectively breed humans just like any other animal and also had a powerful technocratic impulse to run roughshod over democracy and liberty in favor of expert-driven perfection of the masses.
My thesis is that if many progressives allowed themselves to really accept that dumb, violent people have dumb, violent kids, then the same impulse that drives them to ban plastic straws would drive them to support mass sterilization campaigns - rather like it did the last time they considered HBD fit for consideration.
OTOH, they might actually support killing criminals again, so there'd possibly be some upside.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
I'm more familiar with the south of the state, where "township" basically means "town with a lot of woods".
My point is that "optics" as a concept has a pseudo-Uncertainty Principle. Because it's entirely about appearances and impressions, it's impossible to talk about without interacting with it. For example, saying this
Normalizes the idea it's purporting to describe. The line between descriptive and prescriptive blurs. You could just as easily say that in spite of all the rioting and harassment and crimes, a large majority of Americans still want to deport all illegals and a supermajority want to deport all illegal criminals.
We're a decade past the two screens epiphany. "Optics" are extremely silo'd. Addressing the concept at all necessarily involves accepting a partisan framing, which necessarily involves promulgating it.
There is no dispassionate analysis here. It is impossible to talk about "optics" without defacto engaging in Mean Girls style social manipulations.
And stating this normalizes that belief. The choice of framing itself functions as an act of persuasion.
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