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Iconochasm
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11d ago
I've been obsessed with the Unleash the Archers cover of Northwest Passage for years.
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13d ago
I was a den leader through cub scouts. The day we did Totin' Chip, the first boy showed up and I set him at the dining room table with my own boy, and then walked into the kitchen to finish gathering supplies. When I came back, not even 20 seconds later, the both of them were bleeding. It was one of those "I'm not even mad, that's almost impressive" moments.
But yeah, I get that this is likely a situation where my gut confidence is ignorance and arrogance. And yet...
YMMV on the relevance, but I'd say a twelve-year-old girl with knife/hatchet is still a deadly threat
Epistemic Status: I have zero experience with knife fighting and plentiful experience playfighting with children.
This is a thing where my brain just declines to recognize the danger. Even aside from the strength issue, most 12 year old girls are just not terribly coordinated. An athletic girl from say, the top 10%? Yeah, ok, she has solid odds of making it hurt. Less likely to be somewhere vital, because I'll have about a foot of reach, even discounting the length of the blade. But my mental model of a median 12 year old says I'd be more likely to accidentally hurt her trying to disarm her than to be seriously injured in the process.
But I fully admit that this might be a "I can totally wrestle a black bear" situation. I'd try to do the marker test with my own kid, but I'm honestly worried about going too hard and accidentally hurting her.
Maybe that's the issue. A 12 year old girl can feign vulnerability and get in close for knifework. IIRC, that was what the Japanese were telling their schoolgirls to do if the Americans invaded back in the day. Under real world conditions, I would probably try to be gentle, and maybe suffer sorely for the sake of chivalry. Because if bloodlusted, I feel confident that I would wreck any 12 year old girl in a fight, knife or no.
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14d ago
Even if you're not getting cut, you're still playing against them. I've heard kids on my son's all-white middle school basketball team make comments asking how they're supposed to deal with a "casual 6'3" dreadhead" that every team from certain towns seems to have. Or in football where there's always that one kid from the predominantly black down who looks like he's 4-5 grades ahead of everyone else. My son's class doesn't have a lot of size; he tends to get put wherever the disparity is worst. I've literally heard coaches tell him his position is "wherever their biggest kid is". When he was 9 years old, he came out of a playoff game in tears, because the black kid he was supposed to be handling was taller than the refs and just absolutely trucked him every play.
Maybe they just lie about ages for a few kids to cheat the system - I know for a fact that some of those towns train outside league rules. But that sort of thing absolutely drives kids towards lacrosse or hockey. (And funny note, my son just discovered a few weeks ago that the couple of enormous black kids in his 12-15 hockey league are only a year older than him. From the first game we saw them, two years ago, I assumed they were 15. Luckily they've been on his team often enough over the last few years for him to become friendly with them.)
But the Sailer sort of argument, as I've seen it, isn't that kids are being cut, but that Eastern Europe is putting up white guys in basketball at the NBA level because in that environment, they get to compete against age-appropriate athleticism all the way up, until things are evened out in late high school or college, so a lot fewer kids get discouraged and quit or go to other sports.
I can see it either way. On the one hand, my son has massively improved his hockey skills by comparing and sharpening himself against enormous (and talented) black kids. On the other hand, he occasionally brings up quitting football and basketball to focus on year-round travel lacrosse.
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15d ago
I really, really don’t want to litigate how bad any one of these actions is.
Of course not, because that involves getting BFTO most of the time. Not that it'll ever matter. The defining trait of TDS is the antimemetic effect where the afflicted form an angry conclusion, lose the argument on the details, and then immediately forget that step two ever happened.
Let whosoever among you never repeated the Fine People lie for years after it's thorough debunking retain a shred of credibility here.
The point is that polite (blue) society sees this and goes, “damn, reminds me of uncle Ricky telling jokes about the short bus.” It’s low-status. It’s decidedly not supposed to appear on national TV.
No, it's more venal than that. It appears on national television 500 times per day - but there's a removal. It's not supposed to be the politician making the jokes. It's supposed to be the legion of Colberts and Kimmels and media flacks, etc, etc who gin up clapter and Two Minute Hates while the "respectable" politician laughs in the audience.
Well, the right doesn't have that (aside from shitposters on the internet) so Trump (the OG shitposting king) just makes the jokes himself. It's truly something watching progressives pretend to be Maude Flanders while Stephen Colbert is nervously trying to pretend his audience doesn't want Trump dead.
I truly, sincerely do no understand how anyone over thirty can take it seriously. The whining, prissy fussiness about muh respectability standards from the same people who brought us Piss Christ and That's My Bush and Samantha Bee. If I say "Fuck your norms, fuck your pearl-clutching, fuck your traditions, I piss on all your self-righteous, self-serving bullshit"... where on earth could I have learned that except the last 60 years of blue tribe culture? They're like mean girl bullies who throw a crashout fit whenever they catch some flak back. It was all fun and games until the right grew a sense of humor. Have you seen the new South Park? Shit's fucking hilarious.
If an ingroup politician did something like this they’d be groveling for months.
I call bullshit. That particular one might, because it triggers a blue tribe sacred cow of ableism, but I bet even that would be waived if the target were a Red. And I don't even have to bet, because I've been hearing progressives call Abbot "Governor Hotwheels" for years. Oh, remember when a congressional meeting devolved into Jerry Springer? Far from groveling, Ms. Crockett's star rose. I can't really think of an example where mockery of the other side triggered an internal backlash. I mean, they're all sister-fucking, illiterate white trash nazis with meth mouth, right? The insults just sting because they're true, no?
If somebody thinks Donald Trump should have lost 1 point of social credit for telling a rude joke, she probably would have deducted more for the “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment. Or the “bleeding out her wherever,” or “I like veterans who weren’t captured,” or any number of his greatest hits. Curiously, his balance never seems to go negative. From this perspective, he’s consistently avoiding his just desserts.
No one cares, Maude. His immunity to social criticism is his biggest drawing point. Because if he hadn't said any of those things, they'd just be making them up, like the hundreds of other examples that never seem to die.
Learn to take a joke.
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16d ago
Left-wingers are not mysteriously unable to notice the Dems' underhanded tactics.
I think you are brutally underestimating the power of media bubbles and the Two Screens hypothesis. My Republican father and Democrat mother dragged me into a discussion yesterday because dad was just astounded that mom had never heard a single rumbling that suggested that the Russia Collusion Incident might be flawed (much less a deliberate hoax).
My mother spends a great deal of time on social media mainlining Democrat narratives. When would she ever hear about an underhanded tactic from her own side?
Nor do they necessarily approve of them. But whether or not you approve, unethical shortcuts are much more forgivable when wielded towards mostly-good aims than when wielded towards evil aims. It's the difference between your properly corrupt cop who's covering for a gang boss in exchange for cash, and your archetypal cop-show "loose cannon" who ignores protocol & anti-entrapment laws in his quest to fuck the bastards back. They may violate exactly the same laws on paper, but one is obviously rotten, while the other should probably be tolerated. There's no hypocrisy here, just an underlying values difference which is rarely admitted to in plain English because "it's okay when our guys do it" sounds hypocritical.
This is just Russell's conjugation.
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17d ago
It would probably be helpful to look at an actual chart of US tax receipts and a chart of US GDP around the time of the DJT tax cuts(Jan 1 2018) you can see that GDP continue to trend up and the tax receipts stayed stagnant.
What exactly are you seeing there? It looks rather like GDP kept on a similar trajectory from the end of the global financial crisis until Covid, whereas the tax revenue chart shows movement that basically cancels out from 2015 until 2018. It looks like tax revenues were stagnant until the Trump tax cuts, which started revenue growth that was, if short of the steep climbs during the back half of Bush 2 and post GFC under Obama, still pretty in line with the 90's.
Of course, that only gives us not quite 2 years until Covid throws everything out of wack.
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17d ago
Yes, they were an extension of the previous Trump cuts, they still create a straightforward reduction in revenue. No it is absurd to suggest we are on the side of the Laffer curve where higher taxes would reduce total tax revenue, we're not even close to that point and no one seriously suggests we are.
It is not clear to me that this is absurd, given that revenues rose after the cuts were initially enacted. The thing about the Laffer curve is that it's only ever a post-hoc explanation. You're expressing a high degree of confidence that tax hikes won't negatively impact the economy. Why?
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17d ago
At some point, student loans are mostly bad debt and bad debt does have to be dealt with. I'm curious what makes student loan forgiveness a 'disastrous' as opposed to merely sub-optimal policy.
Expected downstream effects. After the first round of forgiveness, universities will jack tuition prices at an even more exhorbitant rate than the last 50 years, blow the money on stupid amenities and inspid activism, while telling every potential student "It's free money! Just don't pay it back and tthe next time a Dem is in office it'll be forgiven!"
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17d ago
Of course the most obvious place to start would be getting rid of the literal trillions of dollars(over a decade) in tax cuts that he passed.
Wasn't that an extension of the previous tax cuts? After which tax revenues went up, suggesting we were on the good side of the Laffer curve? Were there different cuts, or do you have a reason to expect no negative consequences to tax hikes?
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17d ago
Not so with Trump. He is acting with a self-interest that would make most kleptocrats blush. He will happily burn 100$ of commons to earn 1$ for himself.
This seems silly. Trump almost certainly lost money going into politics, no? What parts of his governance look like that to you? The most obvious ways for politicians to arrange such things are foreign adventurism, warmongering, and massive trillion dollar boondoggle bills for easily embezzled projects, and Trump has been pretty opposed to all of those things.
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17d ago
No, I was saying that Liberals, not the 'classical liberals' but the ones that vote Dem and are very performatively anti-Trump for reasons independent of his actual policies
This is why I make a point of calling them progressives. It's more true and causes less confusion when there are libertarians about.
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17d ago
Yes? Specifically for mouseworld the nearest example doesn't involve being dashingly wounded,
That is fascinating, in an uncanny valley kind of way. The wounding is the key part, imo, and the resulting reverse expression of concern. I remember conversations when I was younger where the boys all agreed that the ideal dream was for a woman to gently touch the scars/wounds you'd heroically earned and dramatically gasp. I feel like I've seen that moment in a hundred action movies, and it's the pivotal one for establishing the relationship between the love interest and male protagonist. It a moment where a man is allowed to be vulnerable without it ever counting against him.
Altogether, it makes this code as a female fantasy to me, because the locus of concern is on her, but I can't discount that I'm seeing what I expect to see, because I already know the boy mouse is a transman. I might post those three images together without any explanation, and just ask the boys what they make of it.
To give the more general argument: if you believe "FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity", how does this explain the presence of transman who present (perhaps depressed) masculinity, but like femininity in others around them, such as by having (cis, femme) female romantic and/or sexual partners, close female platonic friends, or (if sexually attracted to men) liking feminine men?
I don't have enough personal experience to say anything particularly relevant aboout their internal states. I'll just say this: observed from a distance, though clips and articles and the one "boy" my daughter was friends with, the way they approach masculinity/manliness does not seem congruent with my own experience (which I often find to be broadly applicable when conversing with other cis men). From my distant POV, I don't see much reason to think there's a similar internal experience to what I experience, or my son experiences.
Is there an explanation that can separate itself from the trans-internal claim of just not liking being/being seen as feminine?
Honestly, I figured this was a lot of it. The few transmen I've encountered IRL had a strong tendency to an unfortunate "It's Pat!" type of presentation. I assumed there was a fair bit of "You can't fire me, femininity, I quit!".
But that's why I asked.
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17d ago
As for your lack of reproductive rights, say you had those rights. Without knowing the specifics of your life, would you have grabbed your ex by the wrist and physically dragged her to the abortion clinic? Would you have held her down to dose her with abortifacients or undergo a surgical abortion? Or I guess just not have to pay child support? What does this world look like, where you have reproductive rights?
No, I think the only way to get close to parity given the biological realities is just allowing men the option to opt out of the legal responsibilities. But I thought I was being careful, I was just too much of a quokka to understand why a woman might lie about being "on birth control AND infertile". I was presented with the situation fait accompli and had my life thoroughly derailed. It doesn't match up to the body horror of having an unwanted entity growing inside you, but it's not nothing.
Coming back to your dichotomy of 'grace and forgiveness' versus 'punching back twice as hard,' I knew as soon gave any concrete example the goalposts would move from the latter to the former. If your expectation is 'my side wins and nobody on the other side says mean things' then you both have a long, unhappy life ahead of you and moreover, come nowhere close to living up to your own standard.
But that's what a reverent respect for norms as the highest value would actually look like. From the conservative perspective, that's basically what John McCain and Mitt Romney actually did, and that's why so many people picked Trump - because for all his flaws he's a fighter. Because no one (aside from maybe 4 civic religion fundamentalists and the older Republicans who were content to be corrupt Washington Generals) actually places norms and standards as their highest value.
Again, my objection is to the two-facedness of crying about norms and standards, while never actually prioritizing them when it would cost. It just comes off as concern trolling.
There has been tacit acceptance. Trump issued reams of EOs, gutted agencies, tariffs, pretty much whatever he wanted. There's no widespread unrest, no major congressional resistance (remember Schumer giving in on the budget because the alternative was worse?), no 'deep state' blocking his will.
Schumer did cave on the budget, not as an act of goodwill, but because a shutdown gave Trump even more power and authority. Meanwhile, every action you listed has been hit with an injunction from activist judges, often with no authority to do so, even after the SC smacked them down and told them to stop it. I don't deny that the Dems don't seem particularly effective in their opposition, aside from the rogue judges, but they still seem to mostly be in earlier stages of grief than acceptance.
And 'we' tried to kill Trump? Did 'you' shoot up that synagogue, or that church, or the wal-mart? Don't give me that nonsense. If you want to play that game, take responsibility for your own nutjobs first.
I do sincerely think there's a massive gap in how nutjobs are parsed. I would bet that 80%+ of Republicans would support putting a bullet in Dylan Roof Storm. OTOH, Mangione (who I think is an actual drug-addled nutjob, rather than any kind of ideologue) is openly lionized on the left. People wear shirts emblazoned with his face in public. In the wake of the most recent shooting, the response that I've seen on the Dem side is a blend of blaming Trump (ABC news had an amazing piece where they noted that "Trump's name was on one of the guns" without mentioning that the phrase on the gun was "K-ll D-nald T-ump"), mocking prayer, and freaking out over the possibility that people might try to have a conversation about the Venn overlap between trans, mental health, and violence that looks like it might be a Thing.
And democrats escalated, responding with their own molotov cocktail against norms and conventions, Joe Biden.
Eh. I think the calculations there are very different. Biden himself probably is a good standard bearer for the "norms and standards" crowd, or at least he would have been 10-15 years ago. Same as the Republicans I mentioned above, I don't think Biden has broad ideological commitments. I think he wanted to keep the boat steady and enjoy the kickbacks.
The people who made up his administration are a different story.
In 2008, Republicans got wrecked far worse than dems did in 2024. Word for word, what you just wrote applied to them 10x and was written about them as well. And then we all remember how they moderated, played nice with hispanics (muh demographic replacement) and that strategy paid off in 2016, right? Much as I'd like them to (and the Republicans as well!) it boggles my mind that you would look at the last ten years and say that moderation and saying nice things on camera wins you elections.
They very much did go for the Hispanic vote. That didn't pan out too well, but ironically, going absolutely ham on illegal immigration did seriously improve the Republican party's favorability with that demographic.
But let's look at the comparison of today's Rs with the ones from 20 years ago. Roe was overturned, and that was a major win for the religious right, but it's coming from a president who utterly refuses to pass national legislation on the topic, and openly talks about how a 6 week window "isn't enough weeks". The religious right "won", but at the cost of their party being forcibly dragged over towards the much more popular centrist position on the topic.
Gay marriage is not something that anyone anywhere in power on the right is willing to spend political capital to roll back.
They're much more opposed to foreign adventuring. No more Iraqs. No more Afghanistans. The neocons have flipped back to the Democrats as a more pliable vessel for warmongering.
It's not "saying nice things", but these are all significant motions back towards the center of the American Overton window.
Shooting people or waving guns around is the biggest own goal you can score, and will stay that way until the state has truly failed. And even if you win, what then? You're going to kick down every door with a pride flag on the lawn and shoot them, every registered democrat too, and then institute a police state to prevent wrongthink? These are all just childish fantasies. 150 million people disagree with you, and even if, as you like to say, 'we're the ones with the guns,' those people aren't just going to disappear. But by all means, talk more about euphemistic responses in public fora - I don't think it will help your cause.
No, you're mostly right. I don't give high odds of things ever getting that bad. I did try to phrase that carefully, as "if the worst of the worst comes to pass". If a future Democrat administration invites in a hundred million foreigners on welfare, and all but openly tolerates them raping my children while viciously repressing the native population, then yeah. But I don't think the version of the party that could do that is one that can win national elections in the first place.
Not to mention the juxtaposition of you ridiculing left-wingers for being scared of Republicans and a Trump administration while also 'darkly hinting' about 'euphemistic responses' is frankly hilarious.
I think a lot of Democrats believe the world we live in is as bad as the "worst case scenario" I outlined above. I often hear people talking about ICE snatching any random non-white person off the street to disappear them forever - this is a thing I literally hear from strangers. FEMA camps for queers are opening up any time now. Women are dying in droves because Roe was overturned, and they'll probably lose the right to vote soon. The economy is surely about to melt and all the poor people will starve. Millions of children have been stripped of healthcare, we murdered millions more in Africa by cutting US AID, etc, etc.
So many issues where the emotional rhetoric is starkly at odds with the facts on the ground. So many people openly wishing for violence about it, much more than I saw during the Biden administration from the other side.
I think there is a world of difference between believing that there are potential futures where political violence is acceptable or necessary, versus catastrophizing yourself into believing that we're already there by social media psychosis.
This is complicated even further by the "who has the guns" issue, as you noted. I think a lot of the left-wing psychosis and ideation is driven by a kind of general helplessness. Someone should be doing violence to save the innocent trans migrants, someone else. I think a major factor in why the rhetoric gets so heated and incendiary is because there's no thalamic outlet, just keyboard rage until exhaustion. Humans weren't evolved to handle that kind of stimulus. I think the right is less prone to that because there's at least some degree of awareness that the specific individual might actually have to do something, and because they're more likely to have a gym habit or manual job that offers endocrine catharsis. There's a reason this rhetoric stuff seems the worst with "disabled by mental illness" twenty-something NEETs, because they have the most frustrated energy.
Or maybe it's just a bubble, and I tend to see the worst in the outgroup and only pay attention to the parts of the right I find tolerable.
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20d ago
"Being a man" in the "toxic" sense. Being a protector and provider, a rock and the firmament. Do transmen dream of defeating villains and being dashingly wounded in an act of heroism?
EDIT: and, conversely, I'm not sure it makes sense to say someone's rejecting femininity while literally screwing as feminine MILF-to-be as possible.
I'm going to level with you: I gave at least a token effort to reading the trans-mouse erotica comics and I could not figure out what the hell was going on. Consider my comment to be a fully general take that does not relate to those specific pieces of media at all.
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20d ago
What does "keeping it real" mean in this context?
There is a documentary
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21d ago
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine.
Presumably the presence of a real effort at actual masculinity. Isn't it kind of a trope that many FtM want to be soft, emo, cuddle-and-cry boys? It seems that many transmen don't really have any idea what being a man means, aside from yaoi porn.
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22d ago
I'm and pretty sure that for 99% of Republican primary voters, their opinion on Nick Fuentes is somewhere between "that wierd gay Mexican kid that hates the Jews?" and "literally who?"
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22d ago
Hi, Chris! I hope life is going well for you.
It doesn't seem like your hiatus has given you much optimism on the culture war front.
In general, the hiatus went well enough. The problem came last summer, when I had both parents trying to talk to me about whatever Facebook story they were incensed about that day, from both different sides, and then Trump got shot. I let myself get sucked back in. I still think it's not a productive use of my time (and I find myself thoughtlessly developing workarounds for my self-imposed limitations), but the last year has certainly been more cause for optimism than the previous four (at least in the US), as well as being a ton of fun.
The OP here, with it's Rose Tico concern trolling, just really grinds my gears. And really, I should probably just stop interacting with the OP. They routinely post stuff that hits me as so earnestly "someone is insanely wrong on the internet" that I get all riled up. And frankly, if it's not spectacularly fine trolling, then they are probably a literal child who simply lacks the experience to grasp that other sides do, in fact, exist. In which case, my own brand of scathing heat is less than helpful.
Anyway,
After the conservative majority on the supreme court (viewed by many on the left as obtained through defection) struck down Roe v. Wade, many people here and elsewhere predicted riots and burnination in every major city in America. Ask Whiningcoil and FC about that one. Where, exactly, is the punchback from that one? Jane's revenge?
In fairness, a higher expectation for riots doesn't seem like an unreasonable prior just two years after the Summer of Love, even if it ended up being a false prediction.
Still, I don't think that's really a counter-example. The general response was still apoplectic rage, even if it didn't spill over into real violence, and kept itself to rhetoric and hostile personal encounters. My own mother blew up at me over it, even though she knows I'm personally pro-choice. Though that did give me an opportunity to gently explain that the reason she is a grandmother is because, as a man, I have literally no reproductive rights at all.
But in terms of the grace vs revenge scale, I don't think I've seen a single leftwinger say anything like "Look, the SC made their ruling and we have to accept that. Even Ruth said that Roe was on shaky legal ground. We should have expected this would happen, and better prepared for it. The issue has been sent back to the states, so let's focus on the state level and win as much as we can."
The reponse I've seen is more like "The Supreme Court is illegitimate, fuck the entire institution, pack the court, we literally live in The Handmaid's Tale." Along with a slew of very dishonest news stories, at least some of which look suspiciously like hospital administrators letting women die to own the cons. Alongside that was a bunch of low grade domestic terrorism, which was tacitly tolerated by the Biden administration.
Similar predictions of riots, defections, #resistance after Trump's inauguration in 2024. Even the protests were muted compared to 2016, Trump deleted USAID, laid off some largely indeterminate number of federal workers, is extorting Harvard and the other major colleges for hundreds of millions for 'antisemitism' (among other things). NIH and NSF have proposed budget cuts of ~40% each for 2026 - I suppose congress can appropriate the funds and Trump can just do to NIH/NSF what he did to USAID.
I think it's a bit early to call on most of this. But I don't see any tacit acceptance, or anyone saying "fair enough, we did try to bankrupt, jail and kill you, let's call it even". Instead most of the Democrats seem to be talking about how they've been playing nice up until now, and calling for the gloves to come off in a scorched earth war to the knife.
Since you want to talk about immigration, where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds? People bitched about it, but it's not like Desantis/Abbott are being harassed by the feds or blue states are shipping red-county fentanyl addicts to Florida and Texas.
They made a huge, grandstanding spectacle calling Abbott and Desantis cruel monsters (for exposing their own hypocrisy) and demanded they be investigated by the feds for human trafficking, kidnapping, fraud and deprivation of liberty. The feds didn't comply - is that where we want to set the bar for compromise and reconciliation?
Your example for Republicans is what, 17 years old? And isn't even from a sitting president. Has Trump ever told his supporters to be nicer to Biden? There's no asymmetric defection here.
Yep, the best examples I could think of were old. We're well down the slippery slope at this point. There are examples of Trump doing things like that, but they're all blatantly insincere and backhanded.
To be clear, I'm not saying the Republicans look particularly good under this light. A huge part of Trump's appeal is specifically that he's a Molotov cocktail thrown at norms and conventions that his supporters see as having been weaponized. He is the Devil turning round on you.
My incensed objection rather, is to the naive or trollish implication from the OP that the Democrats have clean hands.
You mean the lockdowns that started during Trump's administration, that he could have stopped at any time for months? Lockdowns that had overwhelming bipartisan support in the first 1-6 months of their institution? Lockdowns that, I'll remind you, many people here predicted would be permanent as they asserted the government would never voluntarily relinquish power that they had taken from the people and it would be 'lockdowns forever.'
Most lockdowns were state and local. It wasn't the Trump administration that was prosecuting gym owners - that was my Democrat governor.
You're not concerned about Trump calling a governor and asking him to find votes after losing an election? I'm genuinely asking - do you think it was justified because democrats stole the election in Georgia, because this is normal behavior for presidents who lose elections, or you just don't think he should face consequences?
I sincerely don't think he was asking for what you think he was asking for. That line came at something like the 53rd minute of a conversation, and the whole prior discussion was Trump confidently insisting that an investigation would uncover large numbers of fraudulent votes. I don't think Trump is as dumb and blunt as many, but I do think it's more likely he was referring to that, as opposed to pivoting abruptly to overt requests for obvious crimes on a recorded line in front of multiple other people. If nothing else, that theory presumes that Trump believed that he truly lost Georgia and I don't think his ego would allow that.
I hardly think the man covered himself in glory there, but there's a reason that investigation fell apart after the only prosecutor willing to push it was caught using the situation to engage in blatantly shady corruption.
And that was the "good" case. The asset valuation fraud and the 34 counts ones were, I believe, very clearly corrupt, politically motivated lawfare.
Come on, this is your steelman for why people are worried that John Bolton was arrested? The guy publicly had a falling out with Trump, wrote a nasty book about him and now he's got the FBI kicking down his door. You're not worried at all about the weaponization of the DoJ?
The DoJ was already weaponized. Do you remember when they were falsifying evidence to spy on the Trump campaign?
Tons of people write nasty books about Trump. And there's a thing among that cohort, where a lot of them seem to want to believe that Trump is out to get them personally, but most don't even merit a nasty Truth Social post. The Bolton investigation had been going on for years before it was shut down by the Biden admin. If anything, it looks like he was being protected by politics.
And really, it was for leaking classified documents, i.e. the exact same thing Trump had the DoJ kick down his door and riffle through his wife's underwear. Did that make you worry about the weaponization of the DoJ?
Do you have any specific reason to think Bolton is being held to an unusual standard? My memory goes fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure a few generals or other high level political types have gone down for very similar behavior to what Bolton is alleged to have done over the last few administrations.
I genuinely still don't know why this is. Are the moderates leaving the site and losing interest, and all that's left is the bitterest remnant? My perception is that this seems to be broader than TheMotte, though. And my recollection of you, at least, is that you were fairly restrained in your rhetoric and beliefs.
Honestly, polarization spawns clicks and posts. Like I said in the beginning, I'm honestly pretty happy about how the country is going. I just don't feel the need to post about how I got what I voted for again. I just laugh at the meme and move on.
And I understand that the other side is going to be less than pleased with this turn of events.
Let me take a step back for a moment, and share a bit about where I'm coming from. Iirc, you and I are around the same age. I graduated high school just in time for Iraq, and that colored the hell out of my view of politics. I cut my teeth writing heated diatribes about Christian fundamentalists and neocon warmongers.
My tepid willingness to consider myself a Republican these days is mostly dependent on the fact that those factions lost, and the party was forcibly remade in a different image.
The Democrats now find themselves at an even starker crossroads. Their approval ratings are at historic lows and they are hemorrhaging voters. It's time for reevaluation and repositioning. For moderation. There have been a few gestures in that direction, but overall it looks like they're worse than doubling down. Beto is giving speeches about how the problem isn't that they support Unpopular Thing, but that they haven't been big enough assholes in their support of Unpopular Thing. And Trump has just been baiting the shit out of them, taking positions like "Crime is bad", and then watching them scramble over each other to claim the extremely bold "There is no crime and also all this crime is your fault" position.
I see videos of people who seem to think that the Ministry has fallen and Voldemort rules the land, genociding the Muggleborns... even as they feel emboldened to harass and attack federal law enforcement officers. If those people honestly think that the Biden administration was unacceptable generosity towards the outgroup, and that once they get into power it's time to be brutal and cruel...
And I do see many people openly calling for this.
On the plus side, I think/hope that the Democrats are going to spend the next 10 years in the political wilderness, and all their bloodthirst will amount to little.
But if I'm wrong, and their worse natures prevail, then yeah. I think that's potentially crossing the line where responses of a euphemistic variety go on the table.
Same reason I think we should be arming moderate rebels in the UK.
Secondly - much ado is made about the loss of faith in institutions over the last decade, but I have to admit the inverse is just as interesting to me. Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago? Do you really think the government or New York Times were that much more honest with the plebs in the 70s than they are in the 2020s?
The NYT, no. The government, yes to an extent. In being less developed, it was less captured by people whose aim was power within the government over doing the government's job. I think there was more room for optimism then, regarding what could be accomplished by the hand of the state, and that a large portion of the lies we live under now came as a response to that optimism failing.
And if not, is faith in flawed institutions nevertheless adaptive for a society?
It's more general than that. One of our earliest social technologies was loyalty, because faith in an imperfect leader was better than no leader at all. But there does come a point where a terrible leader is so bad that your loyalty becomes maladaptive. The hard part is figuring out where that inflection point lies.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
22d ago
That's actually a very good example. Thank you.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
23d ago
This is a good point. I'd extend it even further. I think a lot of heat arises from the fact that news media brings political conflict right to our faces, but doesn't give an outlet that viscerally feels like retaliating.
I think this is a major cause of the phenomena of "progressive woman screams at her phone camera" videos. It's why people spiral deeper and deeper into violent ideation. If they redistrict us and then we redistrict them back, it just doesn't feel like a proper retaliation to an ape brain that expects retaliation to feel like knuckles violently impacting something. The endocrine response is just frustrated.
So we do a 2X tat, but it feels like a 0.1X tat, so we demand a 20X tat.
Multiple by emotional incontinence, mental illness, and arrested development.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
23d ago
The implication of this is that the entire rest of the internet exists as a left-wing dominated space.
And no one ever tries this precious stuff there.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
23d ago
Not quite, this is still scientism. Economics can help answer the actual object-level question, "Are tariffs an effective way of obtaining a desired outcome?" It can tell you what the trade-offs are.
But the questions of what outcomes are desirable, and what trade-offs are acceptable, are values questions.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
23d ago
Right now, Trump is playing two-tits-for-a-tat, and his core supporters fully support him in this. The Democrats believe, arguably correctly, that they have been playing 0.9-tits-for-a-tat, and the "we need a fighter" debate on the Dem side is whether they should switch to playing two-tits-for-a-tat and embrace the downward spiral into continuous mutual defection.
In the same sense that it's "arguably correct" that the Earth is 6,000 years old. It's been asked repeatedly in this thread, but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?
In the dim recesses of the past, I can recall John McCain telling one of his supporters to be less racist and cruel towards Obama. But I sincerely can't think of an instance from the other side more recent than Bill Clinton's Sister Soulja incident.
For God's sake, we just had four years of lockdowns, riots, and total defections on having a border at all. They went Stalinist levels of low to throw Trump in jail and bankrupt him, and as many of his supporters as possible alongside him. The totality on the left of people who gleefully cheered when Trump was arrested spent this weekend crashing out because war criminal John Bolton was arrested. That would have been a perfect example of "revenge logic" if the whole post weren't artlessly partisan, but it's an even starker example than that. Bolton is about the most perfect patsy to sacrifice to defend "principles", to regain some clout and credibility for the next time people want to throw a show trial at Trump. And instead we just see wall-to-wall meltdowns decrying and denying any possibility of fair play.
If Democrats honestly think this is "0.9-tits-for-a-tat", then we should just start the civil war.
It's more one particular civilian/children/wounded/prisoner killing colonel. The film does a skilled job at rousing a ton of hatred and focusing all of it on Jason Isaacs.
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