JTarrou
11hr ago
It's two separate things, morality and risk mitigation. "Victim blaming" begs the question, the answer in many cases is that there is no victim, just two people in a weird situation created by hormones, drugs and alcohol. Which is why most moral systems have a web of rules about that sort of thing that don't make much direct sense but serve to reduce such craziness.
If there is a clear crime, the victim is not morally responsible for it, but may have contributed by carelessness or sheer idiocy. We shame them for being dumb, not for provoking the crime. The criminal bears the moral responsibility. The equivocation between the two papers over the differences between and holes within moral systems.
JTarrou
1d ago
The "free pussy" thing doesn't strike me as proving anything except that there was some sort of group/sequential sex going on.
It may strike some sheltered folks as crazy that there are women who will turn up to a mostly-male venue for a gangbang of their own volition. First one I saw was in the hotel at MEPS, some aspiring airwoman made good use of the free hotel room. I passed a few guys waiting outside in the hallway and got the lowdown, and "free pussy" was about the extent of what they'd heard. I didn't figure to bat sixth at best.
Leftism struggles with the hole their deracinated religion removed from sexual mores. We have an intuition that women should not be doing that, and neither should the guys. People with sexual mores in their belief system can chalk it up to weakness, sin, moral failings, just bad ideas, daddy issues, unhealthy behavior etc. For leftists, the only value in sexual morality is consent, and thus all bad sex has to be rape, and if consent was explicit there must be some arcane emanation from a penumbra to make it not count.
JTarrou
6d ago
Yeah, I wish I could count on masked people having a cold.
As it is they're either brain-broke on politics, currently stealing or reinventing human sexuality from first principles....badly.
JTarrou
6d ago
From the limited contact I have, it's a combination of covid conspiracies (they have a whole raft of unique ones), surveillance conspiracies (ditto) and avoiding identification for criminal acts.
JTarrou
6d ago
Ah, a story I can root against everyone involved! Shitty artists! DEI bullshit! The French! Lit snobs with terrible taste!
At this point, any aspiring writer who isn't faking six disabilities, four genders and three ethnic groups is just plain lazy.
JTarrou
6d ago
About 30% of black people and 10% of white people in my town still mask, and this is the rust belt, not Massachusetts.
JTarrou
7d ago
That's only the fiftieth step. After all the other ones, it has to have happened six feet from the lab it leaked from.
JTarrou
8d ago
No, but the surface evidence is strong enough for lab leak to use that as the base assumption. Zoonosis is fifty steps of unlikely shit, lab leak is just their published intentions and known research/funding + one entirely banal human accident.
JTarrou
9d ago
in hindsight, the war seems eminently winnable for the South.
That's pretty much the opposite to the opinion I've come to. In my view, the South bet a slightly better prepared soldiery (in 1860) and wish-and-a-prayer magic-thinking diplomacy against.........everything else. Confederate diplomats made a mess of things, their greatest triumph was getting arrested off a British boat, thereby creating an incident. Britain was heavily anti-slavery and had already turned the Royal Navy against the slave trade. They weren't going to finance a pack of slavers, and in fact might have invaded/blockaded if the Union failed to defeat the Confederacy. Nobody else in Europe was going to piss off the Royal Navy for Jeff Davis.
Lincoln meddled as much as Davis did, but he could afford to fuck up several times, and Davis couldn't. Could a perfect storm of events and unstinting genius on the part of 100% of the confederate officials and generals have hypothetically given them a result that could be called victory? Yes. Was it ever likely? Not even for a nanosecond. The confederacy lost the minute they seceded. It just took the Union a bit of fumbling and a quarter million casualties to make it happen.
JTarrou
9d ago
There's a joke in bodybuilding that if you're not worried your wife is cheating on you, while you're cheating on your wife, you aren't taking enough Tren.
JTarrou
9d ago
Soccer = godless middle class PMC types in your area? I played soccer in the late '90s in rural michigan and we never played Sundays.
JTarrou
19d ago
Pre-Trump, pre-Me Too, back when the Dems controlled all messaging and could win an election based on lying about someone's taxes rather than their rape record.
JTarrou
20d ago
I don't know enough about state politics there to have a good opinion. Single party states are always wildly corrupt and it damages the party in power. Talarico strikes me as deeply weird with a raft of opinions that would make him absolutely toxic to anyone with real religion, plus a carpetbagging "How do you do fellow Bar-B-Q enjoyers?" that seems very inauthentic as a presentation. I don't trust polling to be within forty points of the election. I don't trust someone of Paxton's "moral character" to not have some dodgy electioneering strategy. Uneducated guess, Talarico goes the way of Beto and we never hear from him again. Paxton is indicted a few years after winning.
JTarrou
22d ago
So sure, not everyone in the AfD is a fascist, but everyone in the AfD is someone who is fine with being in the same party as fascists.
Not everyone in respectable left-of-center politics is a communist, but they all are fine with being in the same party/coalition/movement with communists. Is there any principled reason center-right parties have a special duty to ostracize their LARP wing, while the center-left does not?
JTarrou
22d ago
Ken Paxton isn't a nationally important race, he has other baggage, and it's Texas. If he were up for the presidency, he'd be Hitler Hisself. Nearly all politicians are adulterers who take bribes, you might as well call just him a politician.
JTarrou
22d ago
"We called every Republican a Nazi and Hitler Hisself for a century, but Eisenhower was a difficult lift because he just kinda....beat Hitler and Nazism so we left that particular slander to our pet commies" isn't the defense of establishment liberalism you want to pin your hat on.
JTarrou
23d ago
From Grok: From communists and the far left: This is where associations with fascism occasionally appeared. East German Communist leader Wilhelm Pieck in September 1952 attacked Eisenhower’s call for a “crusade against communism” (in a speech to the American Legion) as repeating “the program devised by Adolf Hitler” and using “the language of Hitler and Goebbels.” U.S. Communist Party materials from the period sometimes warned that the Eisenhower administration represented a “sharpened war and fascist danger,” linked McCarthyism and anti-communist policies to fascist tendencies, or framed the Republican victory as heightening fascist risks.
So yeah, same same. The center libs were too circumspect to accuse Eisenhower of fascism directly, but the far left wasn't.
I'll go further and say neither you nor I will ever see a Republican candidate for important office anywhere, ever, who isn't called a Nazi/Fascist/Hitler. Nor will we ever see such a candidate fail to garner some vague rape claims, often by large numbers of anonymous women. The only question is how far toward the center believing such things extends.
JTarrou
25d ago
This tragedy serves as yet another painful reminder that homophobia is still rampant in our country.
Apparently, our country is Gambia. So desperate for the oppression they imagine used to happen in the US, some have resorted to importing their hate from overseas.
When the history books are written, the black muslim Gambian will be a white christian MAGA chud.
Most of all this fighting is not about the bulk of human relationships. It's about dating, which is heavily selected for people who are bad at relationships and good at getting laid. Most people dip into the dating pool a couple times, then settle down. People who stay in the pool for a long time, and thus do the most dating, and thus make up a majority of most people's failed dating relationships, are not the norm. The Professionally Single are a small and pathological part of Heterosexuality, but they get a lot of press.
The whole structure of dating is not some eternal truth, it's a specific social ritual invented in the last century and fast outrunning its usefulness. It's a sort of conspicuous consumption.
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