Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
No bio...
User ID: 314
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
8d ago
I kind of hate to use this example, but EY nailed this dynamic in MoR with the clerk who was happy to enforce petty tyranny on the heroes, because they were heroic and would not retaliate, but careful to show respect and deference to the villains because they would retaliate viciously to disrespect. Frankly, I don't feel like Europe and Canada have acted like allies for a long time. They rather act like freeloading "friends" who hate us specifically because we do most of the work and pick up the tab all the time and they can't forgive us for it.
Many such cases!
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
8d ago
No one will see the poor rambling, but the most glowing and positive 15 seconds will be on every morning show and news network.
Also, you'd have to listen to Hakeen Jeffries talk.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
9d ago
IIRC, the issue was that the bill originated in the wrong half of the legislature, because the Democrats took a previous passed bill, replaced the name and the entire text, and then pushed it forward like it had already passed in the House once. Then Roberts waived that UNCONSTITUTIONAL NORM SHATTERING POWER GRAB FASCISM by saying that a tax increase wasn't a tax increase because please stop making me make hard decisions.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
9d ago
Didn't he get outed for applying to colleges as black?
But yeah, the dude could openly say "9/11 was great and I'm going to do it again" and win large portions of NYC immigrants and Democrats.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
9d ago
It's not complicated. Taylor Lorenz is just a shameless liar who knows that her followers never actually check source material. How many of them still think Rittenhouse opened fire on a peaceful crowd and killed three harmless black people? Piker is probably the biggest leftist streamer with serious support from Twitch, which refuses to ban him no matter what he does. Getting him canceled (or arrested, using a shock collar to force an animal to perform is apparently a crime in California) would be a blow to the cause of champagne socialism. Just so, Lorenz would tell you the sky was water if it helped her political faction.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
10d ago
If you think you know where Wall Street is going to relocate, and you have the money for property investments...
Or you just hate NYC and want to get the finance industry the hell out.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
10d ago
You may be part of a problem... but it's not this particular problem, unless you're one of the people running the scam.
The real question is, what do you want to do about it? You've mentioned that you're flirting with Fuck You money. Have you weighed the merits of reaching out to DOGE, or some other, better choice?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
11d ago
I have a woman who works for me (Well, for GloboCorp. I'm her manager.) 30yo single mom of two. The state provides her and her kids with free healthcare, Section 8 housing assistance, and more besides. Her kids go to school in one town, do sports in another, and she talks about moving their school district based on petty annoyances. Residency requirements are not a problem because she has told me that you can just lie on them. She was hired as a full-timer, but is down to 15ish hours per week due to latenesses and shrinking availability and callouts. She was actively scouted for promotions at one point (DEI considerations were involved), but she has no interest because making more money might impact how much she collects in transfers from the government. She takes two vacations a year, one usually international.
You're not wrong that she is less of a societal problem than some violent thug committing violent crimes.
But there's a similar theme of standards at play for the both of them. A huge part of the problem with crime is that too many people are sympathetic to the criminals. They believe it would be mean to judge someone just for being a feral rapist. And how many people have ever openly judged my employee for using the system like that? None, of course. We more functional citizens maintain a facade of social equality, no matter how many years we spend watching a perfectly healthy person decline to do more than the barest minimum, because doing more would cut into her TikTok time.
I hit my lowest point fifteen years ago. I dropped out of college after my girlfriend "accidentally" got pregnant to take a construction job with my dad. That was during the GFC, so all the construction work fueled by cheap, bad mortgages dried up until he had no work to offer me. I was getting windmill slammed by male post-partum depression and flirting with total personality collapse (What the fuck even am I if I'm not The Smart Guy? Smart Guys go to college. I'm not in college. What the fuck even am I?). And there came a day when the mother of my children brought me to a government office to apply for welfare.
And that moment, seared into my memory, of sitting in a cubicle while a nice man in business casual asked if I knew how to read... That was the single most humiliating moment of my life. If I hadn't had an infant child I would have preferred to just kill myself. It was so bad it broke through the depression and sparked enough agency to go get a job, any job, no matter how shit. Because a complete downward revision of my life expectations was still preferable to that.
What would my life be like if I hadn't suffered the sin of pride? What would my children's lives be like? How easy would it be to just slip into the permanent underclass? It looks like our society makes that pretty damn easy.
Maybe we should add more friction. Maybe we should hold people to a higher standard. Maybe we should spit at criminals and sneer at welfare recipients, and then do the same to their retarded gentle-hearted defenders.
Maybe we're not being "manipulated to hate".
Maybe we're being reminded to have some basic fucking standards.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
12d ago
They required women to submit photo ID. The geo-tagged ID photos was the important part of what leaked because it allowed men to see the faces and weight of the women being judgmental.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
12d ago
In my view it's precisely because this would be complex that Trump supporters would be fine with it. Anyone opposed could be cast as a lame nerd quibbling over boring legal language.
I'd be fine with it for the exact same reason I've never heard a Democrat get all high dudgeon at the suggestion that Michelle Obama run when everyone and their dog knows who would actually be executive.
Leaders I like having power is a good thing, actually.
But if progressives and "centrists" want to cite the Constitution about it, then they have a half-century edifice of utilitarian jurisprudence to exorcise before they get to be taken seriously in those concerns.
More realistically, I'm 99.9% sure that nothing like this is going to happen. Trump is not the dictator that idiots think he is. He does not value hard power for it's own sake, or he would have gone into politics 50 years earlier.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
13d ago
Yes, exactly. Because they don't have a model of the internal differences between men and women that makes it glaringly obvious that the autistic, extremist shitposter who never, ever tries to draw attention to themselves in a personal/appearance way is obviously a man. They don't have the trad wisdom that there are no girls on the internet. So they see the trivially faked pfp and assume there is a non-zero number of actual women like that.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
13d ago
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
14d ago
I love the people who yell at Kulak "That's a man, baby!" like they've uncovered some cunning plot. That shit must go so hard if you think wrestling is real.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
19d ago
TBBT is declasse slop playing to tired stereotypes, unlike the heckin' progressive and intellectual Parks and Rec.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
19d ago
but if you take an objective look at the party itself, it's absurd. The party chairman is a white guy. The most recent president was a white guy. All across the country, at all levels of government, there are white guys in elected positions as Democrats, and there are plenty more who were nominated by the party and lost.
No, this fits exactly with my beliefs on the matter. It was Darwin (who is likely OP) who clarified the matter for me. It was a post long ago, and he was being grilled about why his extremely progressive beliefs didn't compel him to offer his own well-paying job to an equally deserving woman or minority. And his response was annoyed bewilderment that these autistic nerds kept trying to actually apply the ideology consistently. Didn't they understand that it was just a manipulation? You're not supposed to actually suffer for it, you're supposed to make rivals suffer for it. Joe Biden doesn't give a fuck about black people, he's just shameless enough to use them as a weapon against Mitt Romney.
White Democrat men are like the pick-mes of the Democrat Party. They talk the talk specifically to sabotage other white guys and surround themselves with less competent identity people who are less of a threat to their striving and status.
These do not come off as the actions of a party that is hostile to white men.
No, it totally does. They are very open about projecting believing that everyone else is super, super racist, and will never vote for or support non-whites. Kamala Harris literally just said that this exact logic was why she passed over her preferred VP pick!
and there's certainly a brand of lefty that is hostile to white men, and, as I've been saying for years, the influence of this kind of person among normie Democrats is wildly overstated by people
Nah, we've had this argument and it isn't plausible. 90%+ of Democrat politicians and leaders are openly misandrist (even if they are male themselves). There's a tiny handful of influencers trying to triangulate their way around that, timidly suggesting that maybe more Gen Z men would support Dems if the Dems spent less time actively shitting on them, and those influencers were themselves mean girls ganged into submission.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
19d ago
It would help if you, pseudonymynous poster, gave an example of something you acknowledge as "evil on your own side" and said that it is bad, as an existence proof. This would earn you credibility on this topic, which you currently lack.
Sort of like the fairly highly upvoted post I made here calling neonazis "contemptible retards".
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
19d ago
Evidently we can't call these people Nazis because the term's become meaningless
No, the problem is that you lose all the oomph when you also use that word for anyone who works out and doesn't hate themselves. It's archetypal motte and bailey arguing. Wanting to kill all the Jews is terrible, but also insanely fringe. Working out is much, much more common, so by tactically conflating the two, you can pretend that the number of people who want to kill all the Jews is much larger.
Meanwhile, a third of the left is over there chanting "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab".
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
19d ago
Nah, this was a shit post and it generated way more thoughtful discussion than it, or OP, deserved. OP brought zero respect, light, or thoughtfulness to the table, just pure culture warring, and this forum is worse off for having it here.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
19d ago
an example of someone who got pushed away.
I'm glad to see the right is ousting nazis like Richard Hanania. Shame on you for citing him so credulously, but that makes him a problem for your side now.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
19d ago
Glad that's established.
There appears to be about 1,000-10,000 pro-Hamas left for every neonazi on the right, with vastly more institutional support. The left has rising star politicians that refuse to condemn Hamas, and strongly hint at open support. Their controlled institutions, like the unviersities, openly support and coddle Hamas partisans. Their biggest influencers, like Hasan Piker, openly support the mass murder of Jews and cheer on literal, organizationally-continuous-from-the-1930's NDSAP allies.
So do you agree that the left has ten thousand times the nazi problem that the right does, right? Or are you engaging in some sort of Terryology math?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
19d ago
Hanania is not an "established rightwinger". He's a purportedly recovered racist troll whose whole schtick is leveraging his experience as being a shitstain of a person to shit-talk the right in exchange for goodboy grifter points from the left.
I somehow forgot about that. I think I saw a bunch of posts about dog training in the firehose feed first, and maybe missed the top-level. But that drives home my point - your post was about Hasan, not using it as a massive leaping off point to tar an entire political party.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
20d ago
That said, one person's "ragebait" is another person's outside-the-local-overton-window argument.
I expect that a post consisting of four twitter links and a "doesn't this prove all my outgroup are just the worst?" would invite a warning for being obviously boo outgroup antagonism. Like, I can imagine a post talking about Hasan Piker's scandal over torturing his dog and how doesn't this prove Democrats have a psychopath problem? But I can't imagine the community norm thinking that was a good faith contribution.
Failing to engage in good faith is another matter
More concerned about this as a consistent pattern. If it's on the radar, I'm happy enough.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
20d ago
Hey, while you're here I'd like to gesture vaguely in the direction of this entire thread. It's actually pretty well constructed ragebait, slinking right under the rules. I admit I got baited. There's been an uptick in this recently, entirely from two posters, and they seem to be refining the schtick. If this kind of post (especially with the grade of replies from OP) is going to fly, then I expect we'll rapidly descend into just a pure shitflinging forum. FFS, most of the OP is just links to twitter posts.
Is there a single line here that seems intended to shed light, instead of generate heat?
It's more about bargaining position and how much respect is due to Zelensky. He's a debtor here to beg after his nation's corrupt bullshit caused us (Trump) internal problems; letting him show up in the outfit of a heroic frontline operator sets a very different tone for the discussion.
More options
Context Copy link