Iconochasm
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
3hr ago
it's a tough sell when you're rounding up hardworking people just trying to make a buck.
No one is seeing this. Functionally no one has ever seen anyone get rounded up by ICE at all. If you think that's a reasonable description of reality, then you're in a propaganda bubble. What they're seeing is context-free clips on Facebook and TikTok elaborated with straight up lies, posted by activist Karens who assault and harass federal law enforcement with near impunity due to their overwhelming privilege. OTOH, DHS and ICE don't ever shut up about the prior criminal convictions of the people they're deporting, but that doesn't go viral by abusing weaponized empathy.
Maybe some conservative billionaire needs to start shelling out a grand for every woman who posts a crying fictional sob story video about how she was raped by an illegal immigrant.
I too am skeptical of polls, but you ignore them at your own risk.
Not wrong, but I'm also super skeptical of this "Better stop doing that stuff you were just elected by promising to do because we've suddenly gotten better at narrative control!" line.
Like, yeah Sherril just won, but she did so while disavowing everything she'd ever said as a progressive, dumping a fortune into painting Citarelli as a tax-and-spend liberal and swearing to fight against her own Democrat economic policies.
Maybe ignore that at your own risk?
Iconochasm
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4hr ago
AIUI, he gained approval with Dem voted, lost more with independents, and came out with a net loss that was still enough to win the election.
Iconochasm
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4hr ago
Tariffs. Aggressive immigration enforcement. Troop deployments to US cities. The George Santos pardon. Mass firings. The Epstein Files. Withholding grant money. Ending healthcare subsidies.
I'm skeptical about most of that list, but I don't really trust any polling at this point in a cycle. Most of the polling from before suggested that a straight majority of Americans wanted every illegal gone (and a supersupermajority for illegal + criminal history), but yes you can probably show some women pictures of a crying Guatemalan and they'll report not liking that. I'm not sure there's any takeaway beyond "Dems still have a hell of a propaganda machine".
Iconochasm
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7hr ago
But, Zohran has extended olive branches to the police & Jewish communities.
Why would you take that at face value? A politician "moderating" during a campaign is probably the least trustworthy speaker on Earth.
Iconochasm
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11hr ago
I'm not going to say "Who?" because we don't actually encourage named call-outs just to start fights, but on the other hand, it's hard to see who you did have in mind.
I don't think this was ever going to start any fights. I left the address line open-ended so it might apply to anyone who thinks it might apply to them. I've had a number of conversations with people here over the last six months where they were very insistent that their norms-loving was very even and non-partisan, they're just unfortunately new enough to have never been recorded denouncing a violation from the left (or have ever heard of one, or been able to think of one when prompted).
This seemed like a really great opportunity for those people to build some credibility.
You just seem to be angry and hoping someone will step up to fight you.
I would be shocked if anyone started an argument over this. I expect silence instead, which I absolutely plan to remember, gattsuru style, the next time certain people insist they are not just engaged in concern trolling.
Iconochasm
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11hr ago
In the event you're thinking of me,
Nah, I know you and would have predicted you taking this stance. You're an actual reasonable person, Chris. I was thinking more of magicalkittycat and wanderinginthewilderness and a few others, newish accounts who get so deeply concerned about civility and norms violations from the right. In my discussions with them, they keep insisting that it's a general principle and they definitely apply it generally, even if they struggle to name a single example. Well, this is a perfect opportunity to build credibility on that topic, isn't it?
And yes, I do try to denounce, not "bullshit", but "actual psycho shit" from my own side. I think it's important to set those kinds of bounds.
Iconochasm
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1d ago
You're just objectively wrong. The person I said that to flatly said it felt threatening before they realized I was making a point.
Again, would you say that black people in the Jim Crow south were being unfair and irrational for feeling "threatened" by speech that fell short of being a specific, immediate, actionable threat from a specific person who was about to actually do it? Please be specific. Ignoring the question again will be considered an adverse answer.
Iconochasm
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1d ago
Well, at least this is a place of reason and decency. I'm sure the respectability centrists among us will pop in to drop some absolutely scathing denounciations of the Virgina Democrat party. I mean, if they didn't then that would be taken as Bayesian evidence that they never sincerely cared about respectability and standards and norms at all, and it was just pure arguments as soldiers and that they're morally more contemptible than men like Donald Trump or George Santos. So I'm sure they'll be by.
Any time now.
Iconochasm
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1d ago
It's almost like some people just constantly lie. Like their entire worldview is based on the notion that there's no such thing as objective truth, just competing power narratives.
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1d ago
Don't worry. I'm sure all of our stalwart norms enjoyers will pop in to excoriate the Democrats for liking Jones even more after his comments came out.
The point is that there are implications to statements that go beyond their basic dictionary definition meaning. The fact that someone is choosing to explicitly say that carries weight, and informs the interpretation. You can make reasonable inferences about the character and beliefs of the person who chooses to go around saying that to aquaintences the day after a shocking murder.
Imagine a white man who, the day after the MLK assassination, went around loudly saying to all the neightbors "Well, sometimes things happen to people who won't stop running their mouths." Do you think that would be just some irrelevant banality that no black neighbors should use to further their understanding of the man in question?
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1d ago
I don't think that statement counts as a threat, even meant seriously, in a legally actionable sort of way. I do think it colors in the difference between "thinking ill of someone" and "celebrating a death". And I think when you're at the point of quibbling over how much approval of the assassination of a debate bro counts as "celebrating" then it is past time for you to have the "Are we the baddies" conversation.
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1d ago
Is there no truth value in pointing out philosophical incoherence? Free pass on that, ends justify the means?
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1d ago
Still, and maybe this is just nitpicking, I think there is a difference between thinking he was a bad person (who the world is better off without) and celebrating his death. In your own account, you say they call him out for his right-wing positions, but these "impliciations" are dicier and usually requires some level of psychologisation of your interlocutor.
You are a bad person and the world would be better off if you were shot.
When you read that statement, does it feel like a calm acknowledgement of detached utilitarian calculus?
Or does it feel like a threat?
Iconochasm
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3d ago
"Don't assume consensus or enforce what you believe to be consensus."
This is basically how the rule is interpreted in practice. Don't assume your controversial, far-from-universal position is universal and then begin reasoning from there.
The examples you listed here:
"I think people should believe...", "I think many people believe...", "I observe people acting like..."
Are all totally fine because they're phrased as beliefs specific to the writer. In general, much more leeway is offered to statements hedged with "I think that..."
I think this is a straightforwardly good rule
Gets a lot of leeway.
This is a straightforwardly good rule
Gets more scrutiny
Given that all sane people know that this is a straightforwardly good rule
Veers into consensus-building.
And worse of all is when you're doing #3, but only by implication because you take consensus as so baked-in that it doesn't even appear to occur to you that some people might disagree.
I do not think that "Biden had dementia which made him an unappealing candidate" was a particularly Democratic party line. It was basically the consensus reality. Anyone who pushes back against people trying to make our collective map of reality worse is doing god's work.
I think this is overly charitable. The Democratic Party Line up until halfway through the debate was "This is the best Biden has ever been and any suggestions or "video evidence" otherwise are cheap fakes from that liar Trump."
Then the debate happened, and the extent of Biden's decline was at last laid bare before the voting populace, and the movers and shakers in the party acknowledged his dementia just long enough to force him out of the race and replace with Kamala in a Hail Mary effort to not get destroyed down-ballot.
After which the party line flipped to something like "OMG, why are you even talking about this? Who care who was running the country, or how many people told how many lies about it? Trump is old, too!"
The real problem with KJP is that she is still talking about it, and she's not even remotely smart enough to thread the needle of lies there. Quite possibly no one is. Biden's overall situation is bad enough that it ought to be a crippling scandal for the party, and the Democrat Party Line is to simply brazen through on sheer shamelessness, an important part of which is simply pretending it never happened. Writing a book and putting it back into the news cycle because KJP is a sub-midwit who is just blindly following the formula without reading the room, is counter productive to this tactic.
Compare that to Jake Tapper's book on the topic (As an aside, I'm going to need either him or James Clapper to drop out of relevance forever. I'm sick of getting them mixed up because their names rhyme.) Tapper's book was utterly, shamelessly retarded and disingenuous. But it served the purpose of providing a fig leaf for the "Democrat operative with a chyron" media and the Democrat party to pretend they had no role in the scandal and sweep it all under a rug. It let them pull the "We've been over this, it's old news, MoveOn.org" rhetorical trick.
I'd say no one with a brain believed it, but there are plenty of people even here who get very upset about Trump's cheating fuckboy relationship with the truth who seem to mostly not care who was actually running the country for the Biden years, and certainly haven't updated on the degree of known dishonesty that was clearly involved among functionally all high ranking Democrats.
Which brings us back to the real problem with KJP. She gave me a platform and excuse to hammer all that home again, really rub everyone noses in the reminder that Biden's dementia was a scandal a thousand times worse than Watergate, and that anyone who doesn't write off most of the DNC doesn't get to pretend to care about truth and norms ever again. And she did this not just while failing to provide any useful rhetorical chaff, but while making the situation actively worse and also reminding everyone about the consequences of DEI hires.
Iconochasm
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4d ago
How much of his viewership is voting-aged American citizens?
Iconochasm
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5d ago
I was going to recommend Valheim because it can be super slow. Building is an intricate and careful process.
Iconochasm
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5d ago
Mr. President, we must not allow a retard gap!
Iconochasm
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5d ago
I suppose that most men would prefer to be the generally senior partner in the relationship
This is backwards, imo. The problem is that most women lose all respect for us if we're not. Riffing off what the other guy said, women are still evolved to expect men to take charge of most of that physical reality and survival and stuff. Except now the mechanisms for those things are heavily feminized bureaucracy so it seems natural to let the women take the lead on it and they utterly fucking hate doing it because if they are taking care of and being responsible for something, that means it is a baby.
Iconochasm
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6d ago
The fastest way one loses their judicial career is denying a motion in a DV case and have the offender then kill the victim the next time around.
Perhaps that should be extended to judges who let violent criminals out on no cash bail.
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7d ago
Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
They take this angle only after their actual prediction, a massive spike in murders didn't happen.
Well, it did, but not because of carry laws and Stand Your Ground. It happened because of BLM and pro-crime policies from people who want to use the state against normal gun owners.
So now they're reduced to mendicious phrasings to scaremonger about an increase in "citizens defending themselves from violent, crazy drug addicts". Literally their own second example is a methhead with a history of violence and a chainsaw acting aggressive.
However much you hate journalists, you don't hate journalists enough.
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8d ago
You mean a butter bar?
Iconochasm
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8d ago
and the marginal senators who would be needed to get the thing through the Senate.
Who can forget the Lousiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback?
Man, we used to have great names for these things. Now everything is just -gate. We used to be a country.
Isn't Home Depot where they picked up the wife-beating, human-smuggling, child-exploiting gang member?
Is that the weed farm with the child slaves you're talking about?
But what's the ratio of Home Depot day laborers with no other legal problems to people who are criminals even aside from the border crossing? Do you know? Does it matter? Is the standard "your policies can never have a single instance of a sad optic and will never get any credit for any number of positive optic scenes"?
There's a reason you're not posting links to the ICE twitter feed going "Damn, Democrats. I'm so concerned about the optics of all these rapists you're going to the mats to protect."
Just so with every other issue. Troop deployments; are people seeing Stunning and Brave Activist Women denouncing tyranny, or are they seeing the charts with stunning drops in carjacking and murder rates?
Your point isn't wrong, but the real issue is that conservatives need better methods of dealing with suicidal empathy.
That may be a coup complete problem.
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