MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
Stuff like this is why I come here. I don’t mind criticism of a movement provided it’s based in facts. And what bothers me about most of the criticisms of both them film and the organization is based more on “yuck” emotions than facts. The critics to my knowledge haven’t pointed to fabricated parts of the movie or even the financial statements of the organization itself.
I find the “yuck” emotion writing tends to discredit the opposition to the idea in question just because to my mind, if you had real reason to distrust the movie or the organization that’s what you’d talk about. Instead it’s been wall to wall “oh my god, can you believe this MAGA Qanon movie is actually being shown in theaters, and people are not only going to eww see it but actually shudder like it!” It’s a terrible way to get people to listen to your opposition to the film simply because it cannot articulate why it’s wrong or why OUR isn’t exactly on the up and up.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think there’s a danger in caving too early. If you accept the very first olive branch, then it’s pretty obvious that you weren’t serious and we’re going to cave as soon as possible. Boycotts are in essence demonstrations of consumer power, and if you’re accepting the first offer, you’re showing a lack of staying power. Once companies figure out that they can do whatever you want as long as they occasionally toss a few platitudes your way, they won’t be afraid to hit the accelerator on liberal/woke causes because they know that waving a few American flags around is enough for you. You’re cheap and easily bought off.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
I think at least for me, the question is “what exactly are the Jews supposed to do here?” People love to criticize, but I don’t think any other groups would have as measured a response as Israel has to a group of people living within a stone’s throw of their major cities having a stated aim to kill them and wipe them off the map, and who regularly target civilians with rockets and bombs and terrorist attacks. If the native tribes of North America were regularly launching missiles from their reservations, we’d probably have a very similar response. If they do all the things Palestinians regularly do from Gaza, there’d be a wall, guards, and everything else.
We’re not thinking that way because for most of us, warfare, especially warfare of this type hasn’t happened in our countries for almost a century. It’s pretty easy to sit back and arm chair quarterback when war is something you only know from movies and that being too restrained is free for me in the USA who doesn’t have do worry about anyone you know suffering the consequences. When it’s your city, your people, and so on, anyone would tend to err on the side of protecting their own.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think a lot of the reasons come from the elites no longer having significant skin in the game and little connection to the real meat potatoes and dirt road.
If you see the world through a laptop full of spreadsheets and as long as the spreadsheet makes graphs that make them look good, they don’t see a problem. Problems will only show up after I’m gone. And thus why not make pretty graphics that make the boss happy? You get paid, it feels good, and you don’t have to deal with the aftermath.
And even when the aftermath comes, you’ll be pretty insulated from it. If the economy tanks, you have money, international investments, and a passport. You probably don’t even know anyone affected by it. All of your friends live like you do, visiting Europe and the Caribbean and wherever else. You have people to handle the cooking, shopping, cleaning, you have security to keep people from bothering you.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2mo ago
I think a lot of the problems stem from the professional inbreeding of writing and filmmaking. You are certainly correct about people having less lived experience. I would argue that in a lot of ways it goes much much further. In order to make it in Hollywood, you have to go to film school, and by the nature of college and student loans, you have to come from a certain stock to have the ability to study film, creative writing, or acting in school, As in at least upper middle class with a mommy and daddy able and willing to not only foot the college bill but support this budding Hollywood star for years while they worked on getting in. So we’re talking about at least 50 years removed from the time when their ancestors did ordinary manual labor in a factory, repair shop, store, or building site. They exist both in their families and among their peers in a world where nobody takes religion seriously. They also are not the kinds of people who watch boxing or MMA on TV and certainly have never been in a fight themselves. They don’t know anyone who’s been in the military. All of this means that not only does our author know nothing, but he’s surrounded by know nothings. And he’s likewise been taught by no nothings.
There’s not much of a chance that a person who’s never seen a real fight and never took so much as a karate lesson is ever going to understand fighting. And someone who doesn’t know anyone who’s ever been a cop or soldier can’t possibly understand the mentality of those professions.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4mo ago
I think in the eyes of a lot of the public there’s no plausible charitable reading of “they removed a major candidate (who pretty much has the nomination at this point) from the ballot in absence of a conviction for a crime.” This is a red line for any country that wants to claim the mantle of “real democracy” — that candidates even the ones the elite disagree with — have the right to run in a free and fair election. I don’t see how anyone who planned to vote GOP in any form is going to be okay with losing the election where their nominee Isn’t on the ballot.
So what’s being created here is a scenario in which the only result that the public can be sure that there was no interference in is “Trump wins.” If Trump loses, the GOP and MAGAs are not going to simply say “maybe next time,” because the reason they think the6 lost is the denial of their right to a fair and free election. It’s going to make the aftermath of 2020 look very tame. At least in 2020 we were holding a fair election where everyone who was running was on the ballot, the laws were mostly followed, and while there’s plausible theories of fraud, it wasn’t overt. I expect that there might well be attacks on state governments and election officials, possibly riots or other forms of violence because that’s generally what happens when people belief that their government has betrayed democracy.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5mo ago
So Meta the parent company of Facebook and instagram is now allowing users and advertisers to post claims about election fraud in the last election but not the soon to be held 2024 elections. I’ll lay my cards out here and say I’m personally a skeptic of the claims that the 2020 elections were stolen. I don’t see why that should prevent other people from making such arguments.
But my question for you guys is whether these claims are going to really erode trust in future elections. To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened and instead opted for the COVID style full court press of “nobody should bother to take it seriously, and if you do it’s clear that you’re falling for misinformation.” To me nothing erodes trust faster than an official response of “nothing to see here.”
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
It depends. The mainstream media isn’t reporting this, so it’s unlikely that the average NPC or low information voter will know about the issue at all, and among those who do, most as dismissive of the Hunter Biden stuff. So it’s unlikely that most of the people will feel strongly enough to not vote for Biden.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I think honestly the things that I see in the culture now that weren’t when I was a kid (for reference I graduated high school in 1996) is a couple of really big “zeitgeist” changes. First, was the idea that everything was awful in some way, and that no amount of effort was actually going to help matters. People made fun of the Hope and Change Obama campaign poster. If you believed in a better world, you were a naive person. It was all cynicism all the time. Everyone knew problems were unsolvable, the climate was fucked and we were at peak oil and nobody cared.
At the same or similar time, therapeutic culture (probably through over diagnosis of mental disorders) entered the mainstream of discourse. I believe this kind of ideology is ultimately disastrous because it gives answers that are meant for a population already severely broken and who need to be treated gently and pushed this same bubble-wrapped feelings first idea onto normal people. This created two affects: it gave cultural scolds the language and legitimacy to curtail speech, and it created a culture full of wimps who can do little for themselves and thus break much more easily than their ancestors. Cultural scolds have always been around, but until therapeutic culture entered the mainstream, the idea that people suffered harm from reading things they disagreed with didn’t have much traction. Once everyone started feeling trauma, and their body started keeping score and so on, it became the job of everyone to protect the weakest from trauma and the resulting mental illness. Which means that if you say something wrong in public, you’ve committed violence and inflicted trauma. And thus venues that allow that are now participating in creating trauma. The second is that people themselves are much weaker simply for being taught to be that way. They can’t handle loss or defeat, they can’t handle not getting what they want, and are unwilling to put forth effort into getting those things.
If you put those things together, you create a sort of grim dark world. Everything is awful, you’re weak and will be harmed by mere words. When you live in grim dark, you don’t see much to look forward to. Why work hard when you aren’t going to get anything much for it and the world will boil to death? Why have kids? Why make art with heart and soul? Why challenge people to do great things when it doesn’t matter?
I think this is the problem for a lot of bastardized media franchises as well. Woke (the cultural scolds) are definitely a part of it, but I think the unstated part of it is that we no longer believe in heroes or heroism. It’s impossible to make a serious hero movie in a culture that no longer believes in that sort of thing. Or at least impossible to play it straight without it feeling naive to the deconstructionist writers and producers who find those stories to be kid stuff. The Jedi cannot be a force for good, because in 2023 everyone knows that everyone with power is oppressive. You cannot have a government that isn’t secretly evil or broken by infighting because everyone knows that doesn’t happen. If you for some reason try it, you have to play it for laughs, either by frenetic action or absolute farce, because hope, change, and belief in a better future are silly.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I’ll agree that parents are responsible for their kids, and I’ll agree that in this case (as they bought the weapon and took him out target-shooting with it) they are responsible for enabling the shooting.
But I think as a blanket thing, I’m less convinced simply because preventing your kids, especially if they have ongoing mental health issues, from doing anything wrong is an impossible task. Once a kid has access to money and a vehicle, your ability to control them is pretty small. It would take an extreme level of helicopter parenting to prevent a teenager from doing this. He goes and steals a gun from somebody else, and you don’t know. He builds bombs out of household materials, and you don’t know. You’d have to track him to be sure, and watch his internet to be sure.
Worse, I fear that the looming threat of liability might make parents less likely to seek help. If you have your kid diagnosed with something like bipolar or borderline personality disorder or something that makes them more likely to be violent, you’ve now created a situation where you’re admitting possible guilt — you know your kid has issues, and if they act out, well, you knew about it. The best defense is that the child isn’t diagnosed with anything.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6mo ago
Except that the advice given to women is in you example is pretty exaggerated. The places women are asked to avoid are generally places that are dangerous to men as well. General safety means not going to seedy bars, not walking in dark alleys and not getting blackout drunk. Other than “wear clothes that fully cover your reproductive organs and breasts” I’m not seeing anything that would seriously curtail normal life for most people. Nobody is telling women to stay home and wear a burka except in their imagination.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
I think a lot of elites simply aren’t very religious themselves and thus are sort of befuddled by religious objections and thus tend to assume it’s about the other people. Like the state leadership of Colorado seems to be assuming that his religious objections are a rhetorical device and a way to say “gay people are yucky”. I think they just honestly don’t understand religion as a belief. To a religious person it’s about obeying God, and thus violating this is out of the question. I tend to find most people in those elite positions tend to be heavily utilitarian and consequentialist — they don’t really start with axioms that you can’t violate, they start with who is affected and how. They’re seeing only the effects — gay couple not getting a website. And that must have been the intention by the religious person, because they chose the actions that denied gays the website.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
Morally speaking, yes it is defamatory. It’s obvious to anyone familiar with the subway incident that the story is in fact a direct reference to that event and that the audience is meant to assume that the background is at least somewhat accurate as well. And as to other stories, I think the same holds true. If I’m very obviously writing a story about George Floyd and then veer off into making my fictional Floyd into a drug dealing, gang-banging pimp, it’s very clear that I intended those accusations to filter down into the real person that my fictional character is a representation of.
And again just from a moral perspective, I think if you’re going to use a “ripped from the headlines” story, you need to change the story and the character enough that it’s not intuitively obvious that I’m talking about this specific person who did this specific thing. A fictional version of the story where the event happened somewhere other than a subway, and perhaps the guy getting choked had a weapon or whatever is probably a big enough change that the average viewer isn’t pointing to the screen with Daniel Perrry’s name on their lips. Then you have a fictional character that you can do whatever you want to do especially in making them hated in some way.
Or son Scott Card had advice about world building that amounted to “don’t use warp drive, everybody knows it’s Star Trek.” And I think in any fictional story, the general advice is good. If I’m creating my own fictional story, it’s bad practice to make it obvious where I’m getting my world building, characters, and events from simply because it tends to pull people out of the experience and in the case of using real events, transfer the fiction onto the real world.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I think it’s a culture change. And it’s not just sex. It’s a weird thing where people no longer simply do things for fun. They have to have a purpose to do them. You don’t read because you like it, you read because it’s good for you and keep track of all the books you read because you have to hit your reading goal of X books a year. You grind all the time to make money, but it doesn’t seem that most people are doing so because they intend to actually spend it, god forbid. Instead, it’s for show. They live minimalist spartan lifestyles to not spend money. It’s a bank number, nothing real. Even vacations are supposed to be learning experiences and get you to experience a new culture. Partying, relaxing on the beach, sitting around and reading a book, these things aren’t what people think a vacation should be. I’m kinda a duffer of a writer, it’s a hobby, and it seems like the entire culture around this hobby and art in general is about selling your work. I have no objection whatsoever to selling, but it’s a monofocus on publishing, on getting sales, and working on what will actually sell rather than on having fun. Even though getting your stuff out there can be literally free (a pdf and a webpage is good enough) nope, publishing is it, sell it.
To me, the entire experience of life in 2024 is an exercise in optimization. It’s not about enjoyment, fun, or doing things you enjoy doing for the sake of doing them. It’s about trying to optimize the time used to become a better person in whatever sense it is. Almost as if somehow we’ve lost the sense of doing things just because we want to do them, to have a good time doing them. And I think there are several reasons for this.
One is work culture. Everything has metrics and you’ve been judged by metrics since you were a child. Your parents sweat whether or not you’re keeping up with your peers. And sports at least after age 9 is almost all select teams. You live in a make the grade culture. And you will do your best to measure up.
Two is that leisure time is shrinking. People work 60 hours a week instead of 40. And this shrinks your available time to do anything not work or chores. With that shortage of time, every moment counts and therefore you feel pressured to show that you did not waste time.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2mo ago
I think this is why people are really using DEI. It’s a great way to deflect attention and criticism from your story or game because any time someone says they don’t like the product, you can always default back to “the fans are just mad about inclusion.” Which means you don’t have to spend time producing something fun or good — which takes time and costs a lot of money — and still get people to buy it and even defend it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4mo ago
I think it’s a bit simpler than that. The media has a very large blind spot when it comes to things done to republicans. It could be rhetorical flourishes (every republican since Regan has been accused of fascism of some sort), criminal investigations or accusations, or actions taken but things that would invite howls of protest if done to a democrat are suddenly perfectly fine when done to a republican. Having hearings about the embassy attack in Libya and grilling Hillary about her emails is proof of a witch hunt. The Hunter Biden investigation is a witch hunt. Mueller wasn’t. Two impeachments wasn’t.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5mo ago
I think there’s a lot more leeway in women able to indulge in childish fantasy than there is for men. A man, obsessed to the same degree with male-coded versions of escapism (basically nerd and geek fandoms) are quickly shamed into hiding it from peers lest he be tainted with loser stink. If things were equal I suspect there are just as many men who would want to spend the same amounts of time, energy and money on their favorite escapist fandoms. There’s cons, obviously, but I’ve never known an adult male who talks openly in work or social environments about how he’s going to a con and has spent hours making an Ironman suit that cost him $100 (which is probably lowball compared to what is really spent on that stuff). Women get to openly indulge and most people wouldn’t think twice about a woman who has a shire to Mickey they way they’d double-take a light saber collection or a shrine to Spock.
Men seem to be much more culturally constrained in what they’re allowed to like and to what degree they’re allowed to do it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6mo ago
I’m not even sure that will stop the bleeding. I see the same things happening with most franchises— the problem isn’t woke (though I think it’s a symptom) it’s that the franchises have been essentially coasting of name-brand recognition and bizarre fan-service ideas rather than doing anything new, thought provoking, or interesting.
I can’t remember the last franchise show that I’ve genuinely been surprised by, or even thought about ten seconds after I stopped watching it. That’s not just Marvel, it’s any franchise TV series or movie. I follow Trek a bit more than Marvel, but even here it’s like they’re so insular that they don’t even realize just how silly the ideas are. It’s like they think if they throw the images of old characters on the screen, or crib notes from ten year old franchises that they’re going to attract people. The academy idea is pretty much literally “Harry Potter, but in the Star Trek universe,” Picard is basically “hey, look, it’s those character from other, better shows, reprising their old roles,” and both Discovery and Strange New Worlds are busy reintroducing Spock to Kirk because really, in an entire universe, with an entire galaxy, the best modern Hollywood has is “let’s imitate things that worked before, change nothing, say nothing, and cover it up with current thing”.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I think the question of when one’s speech begins to represent the opinion of an organization or otherwise stops being simply your own touches both this and the Peterson Social Media case. In both, the question is when are you speaking in behalf of your organization. I think there needs to be something done to give people clear lines because it’s really an end run around free speech at this point. All I need to do is have you always represent your work and then your speech in no longer protected.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
Reading the complaints, most of them are him giving personal opinions. As far as I can tell, none of it is advice given in a professional capacity (as a clinical psychologist do this or don’t do that) with the exception of him talking about a client and calling a doctor criminal.
The statement in response to the overpopulation guy is simply pointing out the hypocrisy of the position. If you’re convinced there are too many people on earth, you’re perfectly able to reduce the population by one (yourself) rather than advocate that others shouldn’t be born. Taken with Peterson’s other statements about climate change policy, the “it’s just poor kids” line is almost certainly sarcastic. Peterson’s positions on climate policy are generally that the needs of the climate are being taken from the poor both locally and globally in the form of increased poverty and decreased options. In short the rest are political opinions, and obviously ones the cathedral doesn’t like. So the question then becomes are professionals allowed to have opinions and express them publicly?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I’ve never considered either side of the debate “hatred”. I don’t hate fat people or lazy people or whatever other outgroup we’re talking about. My issue on a lot of this is about normalization — that the movement in question is encouraging society to treat as normal and neutral things that are generally harmful either to the people in question or the larger society. I don’t think problems get solved by pretending they don’t exist. We have a lot of these kinds problems. We have a lot of people who are too poorly educated to really understand and interact with modern society. We have people who have been made so emotionally fragile that they find coping with things not going their way is impossible for them.
I agree that in most subjects and movements there’s a pop-version of the main subject. Even for religion, there’s the high version people learn in official ministerial training full of very complicated theology, theodicy, and cosmology. Then there’s the pop-religion where not only are the ideas vastly simplified, some pop beliefs tend to contradict the official dogmas of the religion.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
The rather obvious problem for the LGBT community and the rest of us is that we cannot even point out the bootleggers without being labeled. No matter how nicely you point out the connection between letting small children make sexual decisions (or that the adults are pushing, often covertly for sexual discussions and books without parents consent) the answer is you are a horrible bigot for even thinking like that. Which means either you have to reject the Baptists outright or accept them and everything they want to do. This hurts the Baptists because people don’t want strange adults teaching their kids sexual content, especially without their consent.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
I think honestly progressives are, on a global scale, not really as popular as they think they are and never have been. Anyone who’s read any sacred texts from an Abrahamic religion would have known that homosexuality is not allowed. This isn’t a surprise.
I think the point of connection between Muslims and Christian fascists (if we’re to use that term) or even Orthodox Judaism is that unlike the liberals and progressives and secular groups they take the religion seriously which really is the bone of contention in the USA where the progressive ideology is trying to overtake religion and create an essentially pagan religion in which various deities and religions are really all the same, and where what matters isn’t your gods but adherence to the cultus progressiva. And really, this is exactly the crisis that Rome faced with Jews in the last century BC and the first century AD. They refused the cultus, rejected the imposition of pagan ideas and symbols and mores. The Abrahamics especially the conservative ones have chosen their god over the imperial cultus progressivas and are greeted with hatred or at least disgust by the thought leadership.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
Honestly it’s because of the narrative. They simply cannot admit or allow others to admit that transition is anything but good. Any decision you make has trade offs. That’s just life. Even social transition has trade offs (mostly in creating a social rejection by the natal sex peers. Kids tend to pair off by gender and while there might be exceptions, for the most part, a girl who’s too masculine will be rejected by girls and thus never get any path toward acceptance by girls. Boys do the same. Thus you create a situation where de-social-transition means rejection of their peer group and no acceptance by the other sex, and thus loneliness.).
It’s always come off as a weird cultish sales pitch. Everything must be wonderful and anyone who says otherwise is sowing FUD and driving kids to suicide. No decision is that way. Choosing something means making a trade off. Choosing a major in college is a trade off. Eating Pizza instead of spaghetti is a trade off.
I think Covid hawks were a creation of the hype machine. The searches don’t go up and down based on variants, but media coverage. The media basically dropped all COVID coverage around the time of the Russian invasion when the hype machine went from coverage of COVID related stories (new variant, mask/vaccine) to Plucky Ukraine with a guy who looks like Hawkeye. Instead of the signal being masks and telling everyone you never leave the house, it became Ukrainian flags and being obnoxious about the pronunciation of Kiev as Kyiv.
But to my mind, it was always a creation of media. Had the media not covered the story, it wasn’t much. It was, for the vast majority of people, a glorified flu virus. Had it not come with death-tickers and infection-tickers on the nightly news, breathless coverage of new variants, and endless advice about whether given activities were “safe” to do, people would never have cared in the first place. Had this happened in 1983, there wouldn’t have been nearly the hysteria— in large measure because we didn’t have the possibility of sending millions of office workers home, and didn’t have online shopping. The hype pushed billions into to coffers of Amazon, Walmart, Doordash, and instacart simply by virtue of making people afraid to leave the house.
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