Pulpachair
5mo ago
Biden (and other Democrat presidential) pardons of leftist activists wasn’t the precipitating cause of the J6 pardons. The two primary complaints about the J6 prosecutions were 1) the partisan zeal combined with the DC venue meant that an impartial jury of ones peers was not in the offing, and 2) that J6 was being used as an info Op as part of the “Get Trump at all costs” campaign from 2021-2024, and MAGA grannies were collateral damage.
Pulpachair
10mo ago
Mentioned downthread, but the timing is interesting that the same week that Kamala assumed the presidency, Tulsi Gabbard just happens to land on the terror watch list.
Pulpachair
11mo ago
Potentially, but I would expect that widespread gun ownership would help dissuade the vast majority of potential muggers (a far more common form of gun violence) while very slightly increasing the risk of political assassinations.
I suspect that there is a very low, static baseline likelihood of a political assassination in a stable society - aka crazy will find a way. Japan has very low gun ownership levels, but that didn’t save Shinzo Abe from being killed with a homemade zip gun.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
If someone had asked you five years ago whether Hunter seemed fine, you probably would have answered yes as well. He was of counsel at Boies Schiller, was co-owner of an investment company, had bounced around at various government and private lobbying posts throughout his adult life, and carried on publicly like a respectable member of a political family. But for the laptop incident, that would still be the public view of him.
Being well-connected and having sympathetic political press at your disposal is hugely beneficial for families like the Bidens. The respectability is more of an effect of people not looking too closely than actually being respectable. I would venture a guess that a deeper look at the rest of the Bidens would probably reveal more of Hunter-type behavior than you might expect.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
I may be your worst enemy. I only tell intentionally bad jokes at work, really awful forced puns and jokes where the setup is overly long for a weak punch line. A portion of it is sadism for sure, but the other portion is giving my team a momentary distraction and a common enemy to fight against. It’s actually pretty good for unit cohesion. On the flip side, if someone laughs at my joke, I know that they’re either an idiot or a kiss-ass and not to be trusted with important tasks.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
I sort of feel like Johnson is not a great screenwriter, just flashy, and pulling wool over people's eyes with simple lazy tricks
I hard disagree. Brick and Looper are two of the better-written movies of the last 20 years. He has a good ear for dialogue and gets good performances from his cast. He was absolutely the wrong man to write and direct a Star Wars movie, but the sequel trilogy was doomed from the beginning due to structural problems with the story JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy decided to tell.
Johnson’s problem is that he views himself as an auteur. He definitely makes his best movies when he is constrained by budget or a script supervisor who can put the kibosh on his desire to make “art” instead of telling a good story. He crawled up his own ass when making Star Wars and the fan reaction basically guaranteed he would stay there out of stubbornness. I wish he would come out again and make some good niche movies that weren’t full of swipes at the kids on Twitter who were mean to him for “ruining Star Wars.”
Pulpachair
8mo ago
Seconded. Unless you have a really odd skull shape, shave it. It’s easy to maintain and makes applying to a biker gang much easier.
Pulpachair
5mo ago
A 179 or 180 is more than a 30% chance of admission. Stanford median LSAT score is 173 and median gpa is 3.8. They love 180s to counteract some of the legacy 165 scores. I’m not sure what the methodology is, but lsd.law/rankings says you’re guaranteed to get into Harvard Law with a 3.5 gpa and 179 LSAT.
Even if you don’t shoot for a top-10 school, you can turn a high LSAT into a full scholarship at a top-25 school. Some of the biglaw firms have HQs outside the Acela corridor, and they tend to recruit from well-regarded regional schools. E.g. some of the big Chicago firms prefer Northwestern or Michigan over Ivy League. Vanderbilt and UGA grads generally don’t have problems finding work in firms based in the southeast. You are also much more likely to make the network connections to conservative judges if you aren’t in Massachusetts or NY.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
Also, generally speaking, a community less likely to weigh in on subjects where they have no knowledge base. I appreciate Stefferi’s Finnish culture war entries, but never comment on them as my knowledge of Finnish politics could be contained in a matchbook, with plenty of room to spare.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
That would indeed be terrible if, you know, Twitter weren't already knowingly penetrated by Chinese intelligence assets.
Pulpachair
1mo ago
“Plausibly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Biden had a 50 year career in public office and the first time his “stutter” was ever rolled out as an excuse was in the 2020 presidential race to explain away aphasic rambling incoherencies on the campaign trail. Even if he did have a stutter as a child, he did not as an adult.
The Afghanistan withdrawal debacle was in August 2021, barely half a year into his term, and Biden was out of public view during the march on and fall of Kabul for days before making a public appearance. He was showing signs during the 2020 campaign, but this was the moment when I was certain that he was being kept out of public view on his bad days. Trying to say that this only really started in 2023 is stage two of the modified limited hangout, and is a self-serving lie to help protect the political media from the fallout of years of collaborative deception.
Original Sin is a scapegoating effort to deflect blame from the party and media organs that propped up a wheezing husk of a pretty mediocre and sleazy career politico in order for the party to try to hang on to power for a few measly years. That you are buying it tells me that you want to be deceived.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
Over the holidays, I had a relatively pleasant call with my mother. Relatively in that there were only four oblique references to my infidel status.
My wife doesn’t hear it when it happens. She is missing a few decades of history of argument via insinuation, so she leaves the call thinking it was just the nicest call, while I am ranging between annoyed and fuming.
Almost no Hollywood tv shows or movies are made by or for conservative audiences. The closest conservatives get are things like Top Gun: Maverick or Yellowstone, which aren’t exactly conservative. It’s more that they don’t treat conservatives and/or non-coastal Americans with sneering contempt. For most of the red tribe types that I know, they are primed to see microagressions in Hollywood productions. Perhaps the writers and directors are wholly innocent and just repeat what they see on n their milieu. Maybe my mother doesn’t mean to provoke me when she brings up religion multiple times in a short call. It is a significant part of her life and informs her worldview in almost every aspect. The entirety of my adult life, she has used it as a cudgel, but maybe this time she was wholly innocently bringing it up seemingly out of nowhere.
Pulpachair
5mo ago
Fwiw, there is no conservative lawyer army. At best a division. Political donations by attorneys go 10:1 to Democrats. Law school professorships and biglaw very much reflect this. The 9% of non-left attorneys trend libertarian more than conservative.
The upshot is that if you somehow navigate the scylla/charybdis of top law schools and biglaw with your politics intact, and can land a clerkship with a conservative justice, you can probably turn that into a federal judicial appointment because there just isn’t that much competition.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
It is certainly the excuse that many of these men use; how seriously to take that excuse is a different matter, and clearly it’s transparently false in many if not most cases. I do think there is probably something important and true, though, about the profound culture shock and almost “kid in a candy store” mental space that a lot of them must be experiencing in their new environment, though.
I think it is telling that we don’t hear stories about roving gangs of young Amish men on Rumspringa assaulting women. It is far more reflective of Muslim attitudes toward women generally and kafir women in particular that this cope is taken seriously at all.
Pulpachair
3mo ago
There is also a structural reason for lack of conservative intellectual output. Conservatives like old ideas. There are only so many publishable takes on Aquinas, Hobbes and Kant, or why Shakespeare was pretty dope.
New ideas are the domain of reformers, who are definitionally not conservative. The main issue is that most new ideas are extremely likely to be less practical than old ideas. There are an infinite number of ways to explore why bread is racist, actually.
Pulpachair
11mo ago
I am somewhat baffled about why people would think that Kamala isn’t implicated in the coverup of Biden’s deterioration. Either she was totally fine with continuing a charade of Biden being compos mentis, or she is such a naif that we might as well just tell Taiwan to start playing nice with Xi now. Same goes for Buttigieg, Newsom, Milley and every other mouthpiece who swore up and down that Biden was in command and showed no signs of slowing down.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
I doubt it's any of these. I think it's edgelording. I think it's Iron Maiden feeding on Christian Satanic Rock panic by releasing Number of the Beast. I think it's Joe Biden doing Dark Brandon memes in real life. I think it's 4-chan making the left turn the OK sign into a white power symbol. It's meant to tweak the ideological opponents by saying the thing that will trigger them the most. In which case, well done fellas. Too bad the message was muddled by, you know, having people twerking in front of kids. Message discipline across broad coalitions is a lofty goal.
In general, my opinion on the groomer stuff is that I really, really doubt that the vast, teeming majority of the LGBT community is trying to convert the straights or their kids. Most gays alive today still remember how shitty it was to be a young, closeted gay before the mid-2000s and would prefer to spare kids nowadays the shittiness, so being more open and accepting about it is a good thing, but they don't mind the straights having their preference.
There are, however, a not insignificant number of predatory activist allies who want to collect exotic people like rare Pokemon. The more exotic the better (a shiny Trans kid is the winning card these days.) These people are overrepresented in media, influencer-types and, apparently, the education system. A lot of them don't mind if they make a kid's life measurably shittier as long as they are bolstering their collection. They're the left's version of conversion therapists.
There are also the actual pedos who wear activism like a convenient skinsuit, but I suspect those are mixed in with any group that provides easy access to kids proportionally based on how easy that access is.
The trick for LGBT is how to shed the predatory activists and police against the actual predators. The predatory activists tend to run a lot of the LGBT organizations, so it's a fair amount of cutting off of one's nose to get rid of the predatory activists. And getting rid of the actual predators entirely is a quixotic feat for a group as disorganized as "all of the gays."
One thing that would be really, really, really easy to do, though, is to stop supporting sexy drag shows for kids and stop advertising Folsom Street Fair stuff as being family friendly. If they were to take that really simple, easy step, it would go a long way toward convincing normies that the behavior is not, in fact, "groomy."
Pulpachair
2yr ago
It would be more accurate to say that in the minds of the authors, the positive traits are held to be positive largely because they correlate more strongly with having white skin. That if non-whites had a greater say in the culture, other attributes (not necessarily the opposite of the “white” traits) would be held as markers of good character.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
shank's pony
This is not a substantitve response, but it has been decades since I've heard that phrase. You brought a smile to my day, sir.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
This deepfake youtube series of Gandalf commenting on The Rings of Power seems particularly tuned to the interests of a significant number of users here.
Pulpachair
1mo ago
Billion dollar idea - rent-a-yenta. A service where an overly critical older woman follows around the timid marriageable types and needles them constantly about their relationship status, frequently trying to set them up with their neighbor or cousin’s kid until finally something clicks and they find a suitable match.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
Mr. Penny’s use of force may have been justified, but it’s not going to hinge on a rap sheet which he couldn’t have seen.
Minor nitpick and only tangential to your comment. Yes, the rap sheet can’t possibly have informed the judgment of those that were on the train. For the rest of the world that wasn’t on the train, it should adjust our priors regarding the likelihood that Neely was acting erratically and threateningly enough to warrant being subdued by three grown men.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
I would venture that he's denying victim status to the two people Rittenhouse killed and the third he wounded - Rittenhouse being the victim. From the conservative perspective, they were aggressors who happened to aggress someone holding a loaded weapon.
Pulpachair
1yr ago
I wouldn't say so, but either way this is irrelevant, because it's a completely different question to whether the economy is 'good' or not.
I don't think it's irrelevant. The economy isn't just a snapshot, it's a trendline with predictive value. We've got an uptick in the trendline right now, but is it a dead cat bounce or actually indicative of healthy and sustainable economic growth.
Here's the fed in July 2007, after the fuse on the bomb was lit.
Not to mention that the default judgment happened not once, but twice, in both Connecticut and Austin, after some of the most hilariously incompetent lawyering by his defense counsel. They accidentally emailed Jones’s unculled phone data to plaintiffs’ counsel, which included texts showing that Jones was refusing to produce relevant information, all after years of dilatory tactics and abuse. They data dumped on the plaintiffs in the Connecticut case, including child porn that should have been culled. If you are an unsympathetic defendant, maybe don’t fuck around with testing the limits of the rules of civil procedure.
Jones is definitely an enemy of the cathedral, but he’s also a scumbag and an idiot who deserved to lose his cases. He will get out of this relatively intact after discharging the judgment debt in bankruptcy and go back to being a convenient weakman for the left to meme on.
More options
Context Copy link