MelodicAthlete
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User ID: 1861
MelodicAthlete
6mo ago
The big picture here is that Hamas claimed a hospital was bombed by Israel and 500-800 people were killed. Mainstream outlets, including NYT, ran with that narrative. A hospital was not bombed and I don't think there is a credible estimate on deaths. The downstream effects of this misinformation included widespread anti-Israel demonstrations in the Middle East and cancelled meetings between Arab and Western countries. The NYT faced a lot of backlash over this and isn't exactly a disinterested party. Israel being responsible for the blast would help them save some face.
Let's say the NYT knew everything it knows now. Would "parking lot bombed, 30 people killed" have caused this much ruckus. Instead, ISRAEL BOMBS HOSPITAL is what is anchored in the minds of Middle Easterners.
MelodicAthlete
1yr ago
Do you actually have children?
MelodicAthlete
10mo ago
That's correct, there was a lot of coordination. Today's decision had the following text from UNC admissions officers:
"[P]erfect 2400 SAT All 5 on AP one B in 11th [grade].”
“Brown?!”
“Heck no. Asian.”
“Of course. Still impressive.”
Do anyone think this will be allowed going forward?
MelodicAthlete
11mo ago
A guy goes to the bar to get a bud light. Hipster guy says "Bud Light? chuckles". Cool trans/lesbian/NB person comes up and orders a Bud Light. Or rolls their eyes at the hipster guy from across the bar while drinking one. It includes the people you want to include and attempts to manufacture some alliance between red america and trans. Something like that is "inclusive" while complimenting your current audience's good taste in the face of insufferable craft beer drinkers (of which I am one).
MelodicAthlete
11mo ago
I can't claim to know a lot about marketing, but I don't know how this campaign got out of the gates:
-The word "Shit" is spoken a dozen times in their beverage ad and "Shit" is printed on their product. If your ad campaign works, people associate Miller with "Good Shit". Like I took a good shit this morning.
-Mud wrestling ads from 2003 are not on the forefront of anybody's mind in 2023. Nobody associates Miller with those long forgotten about ads. Nobody except for the all female marketing team responsible for the ad, who apparently were looking over old ads and posters and took them personally.
-Like Bud Light's marketing executive, Miller is taking a swipe at their core demographic of straight guys. Why are companies hiring marketers who hate the consumers of their products? Do they think they can do a 1:1 trade for a cooler demo?
-Who is going to participate in this Stalinist campaign? Who still has Miller Lite bikini ads from the 90's and wants to destroy them so they can Stand With Women?
-Literally destroying beauty (blurred faces, turning into mulch) and using homely women to sell your product.
MelodicAthlete
9mo ago
The progressive hissy fit over the end Affirmative Action continues to be hilarious. A few assorted thoughts:
- The sense I get is that progressives want to take a scalp as revenge for AA being over, but I don't think I've ever seen a widespread effort by conservatives to defend legacy admissions. The primary beneficiaries seem to be a handful of wealthy/connected applicants and the administrations of elite colleges, who get dump trucks of cash and connections to powerful people.
- The top 0.1% getting a significant bump has a marginal effect on overall admissions, and I doubt the beneficiaries skew conservative.
- Turning off a major source of funding for higher education seems like something progressives should avoid doing. Conservatives are already hostile towards higher education due to academia's dominant leftist political orthodoxy. If you believe in the signaling theory of education, then crude cuts to funding are the best first step.
- Similar to (3), ending legacy admits seems to be a good step toward reducing the prestige/social cachet of elite higher education.
- The smartest strategy for conservatives might be to have David French types write op-eds defending legacy admits. This way progressives think we care about it a lot, spend a lot of time and effort ending legacy admits, and removing influence/money from an important liberal institution.
MelodicAthlete
1yr ago
The progressive goals of (1) Criminal Justice Reform - getting rid of three strikes laws, decriminalizing open drug use, light to nonexistent prosecution for being a public nuisance and (2) promoting public transit, seem to be in tension here. Riding the bus or subway would be more appealing to normal people if psychopaths who are prone to outbursts weren't "just a part of living in the city".
MelodicAthlete
8mo ago
Part of me is stunned that he isn't cancelled due to the extreme nature of his old posts. However, Richard has God-tier levels of cunning. If you look at his latest twitter posts, he's still referencing racial issues, ADA scams, and even retweeted Steve Sailer. This has to be endlessly frustrating to his would be cancellers.
How did he thread the needle? Some assorted thoughts:
- He apologized but didn't grovel. He owed an explanation to his readers. He didn't seek forgiveness from Cristopher Mathias or the NAACP or whoever. This latter strategy never works because they just want to make an example of you.
- Pointed out the political nature of the cancellation and Mathias' affection for Antifa. Makes it hard to support the cancellation if you're on the right.
- Not panicking. He didn't automatically assume he's getting cancelled and must go into exile. He put it in his supporters' mind that the cancellation will fail.
- Gave a plausible reason for his change in views. "I came back from extremism" is something that is broadly appealing to more centrist politicos.
- He avoided the cascade effect of cancellation where cancellers will pick the weakest target and get them to capitulate. This provides Social Proof for the cancellation, leading to a domino effect. On twitter, he reposted people who supported him, downplayed getting dropped from UT, pointed out his skyrocketing book sales, and promoted the idea that he was getting a lot of new job offers. This is social proof in his favor: "Look at everyone who sympathizes with me!"
Richard isn't the most sympathetic cancellation target, but this episode is heartening in that it shows that there are ways to avoid cancellation and that it's not inevitable that the left will always define the boundaries of political debate.
MelodicAthlete
10mo ago
Doesn't this ruling mean that White/Asian applicants have a pretty good shot at suing and winning a discrimination lawsuit against a University implementing such a system?
A University needs to get the message to dozens of employees in the applications office but somehow not have any emails/text messages that could come up in discovery.
MelodicAthlete
1yr ago
I have never heard of the Zebra killings before now. I would have expected to hear of 70+ racially motivated serial murders in a "non-historical" manner the same way as I have heard about Dahmer, Ted Bundy, the Unabomber, etc. None of those serial killers had a historical impact that you could point to, yet they all have Netflix specials.
There are ways to shape this into a historical narrative (or counter-narrative):
Why did the public have a growing taste for Tough On Crime policies in the 1970-90s? Why did large swaths of the public support racial profiling or de-facto racial profiling (stop and frisk, etc.) where Civil Rights organizations did not (as documented in the Zebra wiki)? People trash Biden today for Crime Reform in the 90's (strict sentencing, "Superpredators", etc.), but crime was a top issue in politics in this era.
If the NYT (especially with their writers who are very skilled at crafting narratives) repeatedly reminded the public of the Zebra killings, it would be on everybody's mind every time the topic of racial profiling or Criminal Justice Reform came up. Instead it's just deemed "not relevant".
MelodicAthlete
6mo ago
The mirror here would be mainstream conservatives saying that KKK/Neo-Nazi types are a negligible % of the right. If you're a mainstream conservative, you find these people embarrassing and don't want to be associated with them. It's psychologically easier to pretend they just don't exist rather than acknowledging that a troubling group that votes the same way you do.
A problem here is the disparate treatment in mainstream culture. After Charlottesville, nobody on the right defended the tiki torch people. Media falsely attributed the Fine People quote to Neo-Nazis in an effort to tie them into the broader political right. Contrast that with rediscovered staunch free speech principles and special support groups set up for people literally celebrating terrorism and cheering on Hamas. "Stupid college kids" are a very important group when it comes to mobilization, so in theory it should be easier to albatross the political left with their existence.
MelodicAthlete
1yr ago
Democracy in Crisis just means progressives not getting what they want. But why would the Democrats want to stop this? It makes Republicans looks incompetent and signal boosts the embarrassing Gaetz wing of the party. Imagine The Squad pulling this against Pelosi in 2018. Republicans would just laugh.
MelodicAthlete
10mo ago
Obviously universities will look to get around this, but I don't see a "poison pill" here:
Roberts: "But, despite the dissent's assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today."
Doesn't this leave universities open to lawsuits if they attempt to racially balance? The 14th amendment has a strict scrutiny standard.
MelodicAthlete
4mo ago
In your own quote, he says "I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem" and then continues his 5000 word post calling DEI racist and explicitly condemning white racism as equal to all other types. Take the W, what else do you want?
MelodicAthlete
6mo ago
Anyway, I'm sure if a Tamir had hit the hospital, Hamas would be parading the pieces through the streets by now.
This is really is the most important piece of evidence. Within minutes of the blast, this was international news. If it had been an Israeli missile, wouldn't Hamas be highly incentivized to allow Western investigators full access to the debris the next day? Have they done anything like this? If instead, they hastily scrubbed the area of any evidence, that points to them being responsible.
MelodicAthlete
1yr ago
The incentive structure is not the point. The point is that the person sending the tweet has a good heart.
MelodicAthlete
1yr ago
The story of 70+ people being murdered is of course going to circulate at the time it's happening and not be completely buried. The question is why is it considered literal bar trivia? As mentioned, many of us hadn't heard of the killings at all and have heard of many Dahmer-type serial killers. The obvious reason is the racial angle. Five Klan members killing 70+ black people in the 1970s would still be widely discussed today, but I'm not sure what could convince you of that.
I'm not suggesting a sensational Top Men coverup of the story. It's more mundane than that. People in media will highlight and dwell on stories that conform to their world view and forget or downplay those that counter their worldview.
MelodicAthlete
5mo ago
Based on these notebooks, we're not looking at another Unabomber. "Retarded Angry Kid" seems correct. Extremist rhetoric sometimes trickles down to these types and has tragic results. Various shootings have been done by Alt-Right Retarded Angry Kids in recent years.
MelodicAthlete
10mo ago
Two things can be true at once:
-
Democrats, Establishment media and the USG bureaucracy hate Trump. They have put a lot of thin gruel in front of the public for 7 years, with 3 years of breathless Russiagate coverage and a sham impeachement over Ukraine. Conservatives rightly became desensitized about the boy who cried wolf.
-
Trump legitimately does reckless things in pursuit of his ego.
As someone who resented the media/natsec agencies for (1), I really don't see how anyone can defend what Trump did with the documents scandal. He is literally on tape talking about sensitive national security documents with a journalist while admitting it's not declassified. As much as the establishment is after him, I think no former President would have gotten away with taking natsec related documents and then refusing to turn them over.
MelodicAthlete
11mo ago
Light beer seems like the type of product that you would never switch once you've made a choice. Once you pick Bud Light in your early 20s, you just stick with it for the rest of your life. So it's a choice that people rarely re-examine and the brand benefits a lot from inertia. I don't think conservatives are going to be upset forever about Bud Light, but getting them to switch back seems like it will be an uphill battle.
MelodicAthlete
1yr ago
Looking over Mohamed Noor's spotty biography, he may have benefited from Affirmative Action by MPD (see: Psychiatric concerns). The Somali community is significant in Minneapolis and they are underrepresented in policing. "Noor had been lauded in the past by Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges and the local Somali community as one of the first Somali-American police officers in the area".
Perhaps a story about an incompetent jumpy cop shooting a woman who posed no threat could have been deemed Newsworthy and sparked a debate about Affirmative Action.
MelodicAthlete
1yr ago
The more I think about it, this is actually a great demonstration. Prior twitter management censored political speech surrounding various issues (COVID, trans issues). Current twitter management censors accounts that are threats to personal safety. Which one is gets criticized by the mainstream press?
MelodicAthlete
6mo ago
This is the point. There is no way this becomes a major international story that dominates discourse if we knew what we know today about the location and size of the blast. But the misinformation got out and we're dealing with the fallout.
MelodicAthlete
1yr ago
Earlier you had suggested that the Zebra Killings are not discussed in media because they lack "historical" relevance rather than the story being memory-holed for uncomfortable political reasons. Modern political issues can be given "historical" salience if there is motivation to do so. Bizarro Right Wing-NYT: "Activists say black on white crime is rare, the grandchildren of Zebra Killings victims beg to differ" could be used to promote racial profiling. In this scenario, activists would have statistics on their side, but enough repetition leads to a distorted view of the world.
Emmitt Till is relevant because the story of his murder gets reinvigorated every time progressives want to push for Criminal Justice Reform or to tie it in with some tragic police shooting, giving the story narrative throughline. Between him and George Floyd, people mentally have an anchor when it comes to lynching and police brutality. Vivid stories of "black on white" violence exist but don't receive the same level of obsessive coverage because it would lead the general public to have more right wing views of policing/crime. I don't think obsessive coverage of "black on white" violence is good because it would enflame racial tensions and because they account for a relatively small number of crimes. However, you can't get mad a people noticing the double standards in coverage.
Steven Crowder released it, so a possibility is that there are 100 pages and he only released the 3 that indicate anti-white and anti-Christian bigotry. Of course all of this can be resolved by making the diaries public.
This makes me believe it's real. If someone forged this to make a trans shooter look bad, an anti-gay slur is the last thing they would think of. It's bizarre and seemingly out of place, which puts it in "schizo ramblings" territory.
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