Iconochasm
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1mo ago
I don't see what Shapiro not being selected as vice president has to do with anything. Literally every Democrat not named Tim Walz wasn't selected.
Shapiro was such an obviously good pick (popular, moderate, highly increases chances of winning an important swing state) that not selecting him his strong Bayesian evidence that being a Jew is considered electoral poison by the DNC. If he's the nominee, leftist anti-Semitism becomes a major campaign issue and major source of internal strife for the Democrats.
I feel like it's trendy now to see the Democrats as a party in disarray, and while those criticisms are valid, the Republicans might actually be in worse shape going into 2028.
They're not in disarray, they're in freefall, posting record low popularity ratings. Meanwhile, Trump is polling in the 60's with Hispanics. A lot can change in three years, but Democrats are facing relegation.
Also, I think you are wildly overestimating how much people give a fuck about experience. Obama was plenty inexperienced, and look how that turned out.
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1mo ago
I’m not entirely convinced that anyone can know the internal experience of any group that you are not a member of.
Don't worry about "knowing". Settle for "being able to usefully predict the results of". For example, I have read books from an author with a feminine name that I knew literally nothing about as a person. And halfway through my brain just says "Sorry, but there is no chance a woman wrote something this spectacularly autistic", and then I go look and of course the author is trans. There are tells, in what gets highlighted and how things are approached.
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1mo ago
The actual best comparison is the 2011 Wisconsin statehouse takeover, wherein a large mass of hostile protestors Occupied the legislature building for the express purpose of preventing legislation from being passed, while openly calling for the deaths of the Republican legislators and governor.
But leftists disrupting legislative proceedings in DC is so common it's banal. There's procedures, where the "rioters" wait in line for their turn to get into the room, make a scene, get "arrested" and then released to go brag about it to their friends.
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1mo ago
You've read John Scalzi, I see.
I haven't actually. He never rose high enough on the TBR pile before his antics and personality turned me off. That's not a total dealbreaker for me, but there's a lot of other stuff to read.
But that character trope is a fairly common issue.
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1mo ago
I'm sure all the civil libertarians are just struggling with how passionate they are about norms and standards and the rule of law, and that's why none of them have come around to express outrage at the gangs of foreigner men waving foreign flags and attacking federal agents performing lawful duties.
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1mo ago
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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1mo ago
What is a woman?
I had an epiphany a while back and it's so obvious in retrospect that I'm mad about it. And I don't have anyone else to talk about it with, so you people can suffer this.
They actually don't know what a woman is.
Not everyone. I'm not saying there aren't any AGPs, or bad actors, or just people with extreme dysphoria. But a significant subset, including among the supporters? They actually just don't know.
Like, literally. They are not dissembling. They are not fucking with you. It's not Kolmgorov Complicity. They actually do not have a mental construct for "woman" that is a distinct referent class from a mental construct labeled "man".
I think this is the intersection of a couple of different things.
First, if a core conservative flaw is Othering, perhaps the core progressive flaw is the Typical Mind Fallacy. Think of the guy who can't even pretend to believe that fetuses have souls. Or the dude who looks at a religious extremist screaming "I love killing women and children in the name of my God!", and thinks "This person would adopt all of my beliefs about queer theory if they were just a bit less poor and uneducated and oppressed." Why on earth would that provincial fool do any better at understanding the alien category of "women"?
Especially with the elephant in the room, feminism, insisting that there are no meaningful between men and women that could justify any discrepancy in representation in any professional field. Women are just like men and want the exact same things, right? So, what exactly are the differences you're allowed to talk about?
(Writing prompt: explain gender variances in readership between romantasy and milscifi... to HR.)
And the cruel irony is that a lot of progressive men can traverse that minefield. Just blame the other men for gatekeeping and emotional immaturity. It's not a fair answer. It's not a true answer. But it threads the needle. There are plenty of people who can accomplish that task, because they have the mental agility and verbal IQ to mouth the platitudes while internally running logic straight out of a Hoe Math video.
It creates this doublethink world where everyone is supposed to know what a woman is and how to treat them differently, but never acknowledge the source of that knowledge, or openly admit to any real world implications. In fact, they have to actually deny that knowledge in a mass gaslighting. Remember Darwin? He was doing that all the time. A critical precursor to this epiphany was that time he pulled the mask down a little bit, and expressed his annoyed bewilderment that the rest of us spectrum-y nerds were taking progressive politics literally, instead of understanding it as a cynical exercise in tricking other men into acting like dumbasses.
Now what about the guys who aren't that mercenary cynical socially adroit? What happens when we combine the preceding socially-required doublethink with the common autistic struggle to model other minds? Remember that autistic-to-trans pipeline? Yeah.
So what the hell even is a woman, if you struggle to understand other people in general, and you don't think you're allowed to notice any impactful differences between men and women and all of the smart and successful people in your (blue) tribe sneer at the idea of any meaningful differences? The resulting rationalization is like a pastiche of the Jack Nicholson line: "I think of a man, and then add some cuteness and whimsey".
Which is, I observe, is exactly what it looks like when a pro-T prog guy tries to write women characters. They write women as men with some shallow "loli Dylan Mulanney" cuteness, because they don't actually have a mental model of "women" as having any differences in mentality, life experiences, preferences, traits, qualities or viewpoints compared to men. "A woman is a dude who spends 12 hours writing spreadsheets about Warhammer 40k battleships and then adds a heart emoji and a tee hee at the end. Don't deadname her, bigot."
And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.
How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people? In a way that provides useful guidance and doesn't make T seem like a normal thing for any boy who isn't obsessed with sports? In a way that let's them successfully navigate the differences?
How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
Newsome is trying to pivot to look like a moderate in preparation for a presidential run. He needed a Sista Soulja moment here, and instead he's whining on Twitter about how Law and Order will only make things worse. Meanwhile protestors, his constituents, are slashing tires, breaking into federal buildings, and assaulting federal officers while they carry out their duties.
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1mo ago
I'm eagerly waiting for all the deeply sincere civil libertarians who were minted on January 6th, 2020, to come forward and angrily denounce these insurrectionists. I expect calls for Palantir to have them all IDed and then rounded up and fed into a woodchipper of a prosecution storm, including random grandmas who just happened to be at the protest, but too close to someone obstructing federal business.
Trump sends in the National Guard, Newsome looks like a pussy.
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1mo ago
My impression is that they think the deficit/debt is both less immediately important and less tractable than dealing with immigration. The attitude is something like "Let's kick out 10+ million illegals and then see where entitlement spending is at". And without giving details, I'll just note that I see people who don't speak English interacting with expensive government benefits every single day. I would be very surprised if they weren't mostly right, in that mass deportation was de facto the largest cut in entitlement spending in history.
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1mo ago
It was fun to channel John Oliver for a minute.
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1mo ago
Really? That? It's kind of exactly my problem with him. Very much a "written for Twitter" piece. It could have been a single snappy-if-kinda-vacuous sentence, but instead it's putting just enough vague wordiness into pretending to be an essay, so you can imagine there's some real knowledge and insight there, if you already wanted a reason to think badly of Putin.
How does that post not trigger your bullshit detector? The person who wrote it clearly doesn't actually know anything about Russian or Ukranian history. If they did, they would have actually worked it in in a meaningful way.
But I'm sure it was great for engagement farming. People can both dunk on Putin and argue about the history.
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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.
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1mo ago
Richard Spencer had no organic relevance to the first wave Alt-Right. That short-lived moment coalesced out of things like GamerGate, rather than the irrelevant swamp where Spencer lurked. Functionally none of them knew who he was, and if told, would have called him stupid and crazy. But after Trump started gaining momentum in the early 2016 election cycle, CNN dug Spencer out of a landfill because he had once used the term a decade earlier, and practically gave him his own show called "FACE OF THE NAZI ALT-RIGHT WITH NAZI ALT-RIGHT KING RICHARD "NAZI" SPENCER".
Rather like exactly what you're doing here.
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1mo ago
Hanania in particular. It baffles me that anyone takes that creature seriously.
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2mo ago
>Be Pope
>Latin American
>live in walled city-state with strict immigration
>criticize Trump administration for deporting members of gang famous for Satanic black mass human sacrifice initiation
>drops dead
What did God mean by this?
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2mo ago
How do you know I didn't?
Exactly. I don't know that you did. Because you're a new account with no history, and nothing you've said makes me think you're being honest, based on my own unhealthily expansive experience on this topic, which you can double check since I've been discussing these things on this account name since two site migrations ago.
And at what point did a court ever charge the Biden admin with contempt? There were plenty of rulings against them so it's very hard to imagine they're willing to rule against him but not enforce it. More likely you just misunderstood the specifics of the rulings or the response to it by the administration, as most people often do. Law is complex, there's no shame in not understanding the intricacies.
See, this is the exact kind of shit I would expect from a smug ideological child, not an experienced civil libertarian. The civil libertarian would have immediately thought of multiple egregious incidents, such as the eviction moratorium or student loans.
well known conservative minded Republican aligned judge who was appointed under Reagan and on a short list of SC nominees for Bush.
Again, this strongly predisposes me to think you're college aged at best, and deeply embedded in ideologically progressism. "Well known", because Politico and NYT described him that way last week when you and everyone else heard of him for the first time. If you'd actually been adult enough to be politically minded for longer than your account existed, you'd be expected to be aware that there's a wee bit of friction between the Bush Republicans and the Trump ones.
Even Garcia had multiple ways the Trump admin could have done it without violating the withholding of removal order, including seeking to get it overturned.
Oh, good, you did eventually, inadvertently, acknowledge that all this furor is over a minor paperwork mixup.
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2mo ago
When you put a bird-feeder in your yard, you don't get to complain when it attracts birds.
People often complain when they get squirrels.
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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.
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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2mo ago
If your standard of evidence was so lax as to take "Just take me trust bro, I believe X and Y", why were you seemingly unwilling to accept it beforehand?
Because you wouldn't even give a single example.
If you want an example where I criticized progressives, I believe Biden's covid era eviction moratorium was a bad thing. While not on the exact level (such a thing was not ruled against yet), Biden had previously suggested he knew it was likely to get struck down and proceeded anyway.
See, this is a reasonable and good example. Thank you. Was that so hard?
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2mo ago
You really can't imagine how to reference such a prior belief/argument without doxing yourself?
FFS, just briefly paraphrase.
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2mo ago
but if I fretted over everything I wrote I'd never let anyone read anything.
Remember, your boos mean nothing. I've seen what makes you people cheer.
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2mo ago
I honestly don't think that's the relevant label. I think the guy comes off as very provincial and inexperienced. My whole point is that I suspect he's never been in a situation where being a pussy vs being brave would even come up, to an extremely unusual degree.
I'm suggesting he check his privilege, while actually bothering to explain why that's relevant. But there's no reason to continue belaboring the point.
If that "insightful answer" turned into any actual understanding on your part, you could have just reformulated the concept in your own words.
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