BANNED USER: /comment/21314
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
White, right-wing, male.
User ID: 101
Banned by: @ZorbaTHut
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
I don't take your pearl clutching as legitimate worry. It's weaponized concern; no human is illegal, but also it's not generally your communities suffering the constant tide of human detritus.
If you want me, or people like me, to take this concern seriously, you need to put your money where your mouth is for a few generations. Spend the next thirty years getting shipped hundreds of thousands and tens of millions of these people, and then, at the end of it, still argue that you care and no human is illegal and strive to help them.
If you think this is unreasonable, then we're at an impasse, because we've already been lied to on the immigrant problem for decades. We've been betrayed by amnesty, by lax border security, by sanctuary cities and their advocates. The left mashed defect on this issue, and we're not going to hit cooperate until you give us a few wins.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
The left sees the artistic class as fundamentally theirs, and AI disenfranchising them is a loss of social capital. That's all there is to it, and the appropriate response is to not care.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
Once you've learned enough about the world to realize how little you know and how easy it is for power to lie, everything collapses. If you're on the right side of our culture, you have seen, in real-time, how captured institutions propagate falsehoods and immediately sear them into public consciousness; 80 years from now, the official story of Gamergate will be what the journalists said, even though they lied constantly and it was called out constantly.
Now, Gamergate's not really a big deal. But once I realized every respected institution in the country -- if not the world -- was ideologically corrupted and willing to lie in unspoken cooperation, I realized I can't really trust what I know about the world and history. Epistemic learned helplessness is real, and conspiratorial thinking is one of the ways to cope; you can't tell when something is true or false, but you're pretty sure the people telling you are bad, so just assume they're lying.
I'm educated enough that I don't believe most of these things. But the older I get, the less I trust what I used to believe. Who knows. Talk to me again in ten years and maybe I'll have radicalized into a Holocaust denier insisting the Jews faked the moon landing to hide Bigfoot.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
What is the steelman argument against vegetarianism/veganism?
I like meat.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
No woman wants an average or below average man to come up and talk with her. Yet, offline, women are approached by average guys plenty and always have been, and end up sleeping with them and forming relationships with them. Dating apps are not a real interaction, where personality, chemistry, confidence, or the vagaries of chance and a good mood can overcome a hyper-competitive low-effort meat market.
Don't use dating apps unless you're a genuine stud and can easily pull in NSA pussy. Then do whatever you want, king. But if you're a normal guy, dating apps are an unfriendly platform that emphasize your worst traits and minimize the best. You can overcome a lot by building a real rapport.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
A family member of mine is a deeply committed QAnon type. I've heard about it and spoken with her about it extensively. My takeaway:
QAnon isn't a conspiracy theory, it's the conspiracy theory. Q is fully generalized skepticism of the intellectual, moral, and scientific consensus. It started out as something specific and more focused, but now all kooky stuff falls under its umbrella -- I've found myself dragged into conversations on Bigfoot, aliens, mind control, demons under the Vatican, Jesus being fake, child abduction, the inevitable ascendance of humanity to their spiritual forms as we pass through the North Gate (or was it East? I forget)...
Q has embraced all conspiracy theories. It is the platonic embodiment of Conspiracy Theory. And like all conspiracy theories, really, what it means is that the people have decided authority can't be trusted.
So Q's crazy, and wrong, but they're wrong in the right direction, usually. I find them pretty sympathetic.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
The alt-right as a movement died with Charlottesville and Richard Spencer; it was basically the right version of Occupy. Energy that went nowhere. These days, the group is much larger, but also less coherent. Others have pointed to MAGA, dissident right, etc., and these are all related, but not exactly direct children of the Alt-Right.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
The audacity of seeing a gay libertarian fail to attract women to an app for spergs and going "women hate conservatives".
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
The common wisdom these days is that Clinton was a uniquely awful candidate so of course she lost; this is obviously wrong, Clinton was a very strong candidate, with access to immense funds, a social network of insiders at every level of politics and business, Clinton name recognition, and the full force of Girl Power and the media behind her. Similarly, the common wisdom now is that of course Biden won, he was a return to normalcy and proof that Trump was widely hated.
This ignores, of course, that Trump received the second largest number of votes of any candidate, ever, even if you accept the election was on the up and up, which I find to be a dubious proposition at best, and more than he did the first go around, and this was even with the media uniformly against him and the political machines of both parties loathing him with every fiber of their being.
The real takeaway is that the electorate is roughly but not perfectly split, and that elections come down to random fluctuations. Run Biden v. Trump again, and it's not at all unlikely Trump wins, especially if election laws are actually followed this time. Run Clinton v. Trump again, and it's entirely possible Clinton wins.
The nation is a house divided and it stands by inertia alone.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
Amen. When someone tells you they hate you -- or themselves -- listen to them. When White progressives say something anti-White, they mean precisely that. Nihilistic self-loathing is the norm among them.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
If the total illegal population is mostly stable, and NYC already has, to a first approximation, its "fair share" of that population...what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?
The justification is that they support the migrants and the people shipping them away don't. There's no problem with that arrangement; if you are pro-migrant, congratulations, you should welcome the chance to live up to your principles and help the unfortunate.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
"Just talk to her" is not dating app advice. It's advice for your life off the app.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
My 5' 4" female self looks around at all the guys around me, who are between 3-6" taller than me at a pinch.
Have you tried just being taller? Grow more smh
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
What threshold do you suggest that leaves Alex Jones culpable but doesn't simultaneously make the DNC responsible for the BLM riots and their associated crime?
Replace "the DNC" with "significant figures of importance within the Democrats" if you prefer.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
Wait, hold on. We've done a verbal sleight of hand here: you went from "is anyone really dying out?" to "is anyone being genocided?". I don't blame you, that's the phrase IGI mistakenly used, but let's rewind.
Consensual or not, if all the Uyghurs have kids with Han, are the Uyghurs dying out?
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
There's a long strand of postwar Italian glorification of Mussolini by relatively 'mainstream' rightist politicians
Is this fundamentally any different from the mainstream glorification of someone like Marx or Guevara in the American Left? It seems pretty universal for groups to harken back to the icons of yesterday, regardless of affiliation; I'm not sure there's too much of interest there beyond a vague nostalgic appeal and a memory of older, more vigorous times.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
And the second "White Patriarchy" is noticing that white men hold something like 65-70% of all US political offices, but constitute 30% of the population.
One of these is empiricism, one is insanity.
In the name of empiricism, I bid you take a deeper look. I think you'll find these positions are disproportionately held by an even smaller group than that!
But other than Jews ruling the world, this is just special pleading. There's no lack of ridiculous fringe left-wing beliefs, feminist and non-feminist; tarot, astrology, otherkin, are all as absurd as anything the worst of Q asserts, and feminism's mainstream belief is certainly more than Noticing the numbers.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
"We'll spend money so long as you deal with the social and cultural baggage" is the left's offer. It is not an acceptable offer. I do not care about you wanting to spend marginally more in taxes on your already comfortable wealth. I want you to deal with the social and cultural baggage.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
More elaborately: there is no moral value in the world outside of human flourishing. Morality is not a characteristic of the universe, a cold hard fact we can measure with a morality device; it is a value we assign through our own personal determinations.
Animals don't have rights. Animals have whatever we give them and nothing else. My cat is valuable because I've got a personal bond with my cat. A cow isn't because I don't and want to eat it. In a different life, maybe I'd have a personal bond with a cow, and not eat it. But that's not because cows have the right to not be eaten, it's because I have a personal, one-on-one connection to that cow specifically.
Why do we eat meat? Because we like meat. That we like it is justification enough, because humanity alone is the arbiter of right and wrong.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
It's your church. The only moral obligation it has is to serve the needs of the congregation in a righteous and forthright manner. If you all crave more non-Whites, for whatever reason, then there's a responsibility to recruit them. But if the group is content with what it has, that is enough.
Do not confuse "come under pressure" with an actual obligation. Many people will tell you that you have to do something. You don't. You can in fact ignore those people and tell them to pound sand and continue as you will. They have no power save that which people grant them via willing submission.
Just have a spine. The ultimate defense against woke subversion and conquest is not being a worm.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
I'm sure he does care about it for many reasons, much like how there are many things I care about for many good reasons. Yet those reasons all boil down to justification thrown over deeply personally-felt losses of status and power.
People don't like being blunt or crass. They want to decorate their selfishness with good-sounding justifications. Ultimately, why Vaush cares is that AI weakens his allies. He needs a more palatable reason, both for others and for his own lofty self-image. It's very human.
It's also very unimportant.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
Indeed, the horror that we might be forcing a woman to endure a terrible situation is awful, indeed. On the other hand, the horror that we're slaughtering innocent babies is awful, too. I don't think anti-abortion activists are "innocent to potential horrors", they're in fact very aware of a different horror.
Minotaur
Si vis pacem, fac bellum
1yr ago
Tolkien wrote a story where the Ring was a strong temptation to evil, but there were stronger things still (friendship, or duty), which one could use to resist the temptation. Jackson got the first part, but whiffed hard on the second.
Tolkien wrote a story where literally everyone succumbed to the ring or knew they would except Sam, regardless of their thoughts on friendship, or duty, or... anything. The only form of resistance anyone truly offered was refusing to be exposed in the first place and take the ring. And in the end, what saved the world was not the rising of good, but the self-destruction of evil.
This is the only insult I've ever gotten here that's stung.
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