Skibboleth
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
1yr ago
It's always been low, security has just gotten better*. The clever high functioning psychopaths are working in finance or law. A large share of presidential assassination attempts pretty much boil down to "weirdo with a guns walks up to president, tries to shoot him."
*and arguably many of the historical examples got pretty lucky.
But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism.
Prior to last Friday, taking an anti-Zionist stance would have gotten you applause in progressive circles. For that matter, you're still clear to say "I'm anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic" as long as you can resist the urge to openly celebrate massacres of Israeli civilians. Before Friday, you were clear to say Israeli civilians should be massacred.
This seems to imply two things
Alternatively, it implies your model is wrong. That it's not as simple as "people higher up the progressive totem pole get to do what they want and Jews are at the top".
Skibboleth
1yr ago
"Twitter, but for SJWs" go live? And will that work out any better for them?
No. Normies are the lifeblood of social media, and any ideologically inflected alternative is going to suffer from the fact that normies aren't going to be interested in switching platforms to hang out with a bunch of fanatical weirdos. Being slightly more reputable that right-wing conspiracy theorists is not enough.
Many also use Discord but for some reason don't seem to think of Discord as "social media."
Most people are operating off a vibes-based rather than rigorous definition of social media. "Social media" means the big, talked about platforms - Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc... Not private forums, the comments section of a news site, or a blog.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
I think Hillary was a massively flawed candidate because it was so close. 2016 was a cripple fight, not a clash of the titans. Trump was an appalling candidate and in 2016 he didn't have incumbency or anywhere near the fully developed cult of personality he did by 2020. Clinton had a trainload of baggage, including an active FBI investigation and decades of GOP attacks. I think it's quite probable that if Tim Kaine (or almost anyone basically competent who wasn't as politically radioactive as Clinton) had been at the top of the ticket then the Democratic candidate would've won handily and we'd be talking about how weird it was that the GOP nominated an insane reality tv star as their candidate. Conversely, someone like Rubio or Jeb might've been mediocre candidates in the grand scheme of things but they probably would've mopped up Hillary.
think it's actually possible that he actually thinks it's bad that our massive deficits come from a budget process that doesn't even follow the basics of a budget process.
Considering he was enthusiastically in favor a tax cut (without attendant spending cuts) that increased the deficit a few years ago, I think we can safely dismiss the possibility that Gaetz is a principled deficit hawk.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Why does this company even exist?
To publish Magic the Gathering. The amount of money in the TTRPG sector is hilariously small. D&D for all intents and purposes is the market, and its owner (correctly) treats it like a sideshow to their main product. At the same time, the problem is not a lack of alternatives. To say TTRPGs are a dime a dozen would be to overprice them - many of them you literally can't give away.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
He's also swinging at Youngkin:
Young Kin (now that's an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn't it?) in Virginia couldn't have won without me. I Endorsed him, did a very big Trump Rally for him telephonically, got MAGA to Vote for him - or he couldn't have come close to winning. But he knows that, and admits it. Besides, having a hard time with the Dems in Virginia - But he'll get it done!
My estimation is that Trump or his advisors sense that there are a lot of people in the GOP who are primed to blame him for spoiling what should have been a blowout and wants to signal that he's prepared to sabotage the party if they try to get rid of him.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Most illegal immigrants already live in a couple of metro areas, generally in blue states or blue cities in red states. The issue is not really about the distribution of the notional burden of illegal immigration; it is a fundamental dispute whether or not illegal immigration/asylum seeking is even a big deal.
Think of all the other subpopulations for which progressives write highly specific codes of etiquette. 10 Things Not to Say to Pregnant Women. 15 Common Microaggressions Against AAPI. Now imagine that these codes are replaced by Grandma's simpler, more scalable etiquette that recognizes where respectful behavior truly originates: not in feelings, but in habit and training.
If I were to be a touch ungenerous, I would say that these things emerge because many of their writers and audience are incredibly socially awkward and lack the sensitivity or experience to intuit appropriate behavior. And not just for what they might do/say, but for what other might do/say to them. If I were to be less generous, I would say that these things emerge because some people are looking for an excuse to get offended. If I were to be more generous, I would say that these things emerge because many people were not socialized into a culture of dignity and courtesy. Or the socialization didn't take, or carried with it an unspoken assumption that these standards of behavior only applied to the right sort of people. It is certainly not difficult to find people who openly delight in meanness (especially online, where a lot of our instinctive filters aren't functioning).
(If I were to be honest, I think all three of these things are true simultaneously).
None of the ideas you describe as "Miss Manners" etiquette are alien to my or most of my midwestern middle-class millennial peers (though I would hazard to guess we all picked it up from our parents rather than writing). However, I think you are right in saying that there is an effort to promote sentiments rather than behaviors. The goal is to get past polite toleration (which very much has its limits, as you note) and into actual acceptance. We might not call someone a fat fuck to their face, but as you also note there are a thousand little social indicators that being fat Not OK. And now apply the same concerns to, e.g. LBGT acceptance. (Though ironically, that may be more attainable, given that even notional allies of Fat Acceptance tend to not-so-secretly think that being fat is bad).
Skibboleth
1yr ago
About as likely as gun activists feeling any pressure to moderate over school shootings.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Well, I usually predict nothing happens because usually nothing happens, but that's the coward's move. I do think that's what will happen, but I will say that there's a low-but-not-that-low (in the proud tradition of made up confidence levels: 33%) chance he tries something aggressive/ambitious and kills twitter. Here's hoping.
High confidence (75%): Twitter will continue to be a money pit.
Medium confidence (50%): Musk will try to divest himself from twitter in the next four years. Musk clearly noticed the above issue and wanted to back out, but his ego and/or market position may make it difficult. (Nothing says confidence like the guy who just overpaid for the company immediately trying to unload his position).
Very low confidence (5%): Musk pulls off a miracle and makes Twitter into a profitable company that isn't a socially corrosive dumpster fire.
Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist
Musk has a history of being incredibly thin-skinned and willing to use his clout to retaliate against critics. There may be a more scrutinizing eye cast on critics of Musk and his companies and a slight refocusing, but I doubt there's going to be a huge boost to freedom of discourse on twitter. Nor will there be a mass exodus - the cost of moving to a new platform (which platform, anyway?) is too high. In the mean time, Twitter's moderation practices will continue to be erratic and arbitrary.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
I'm going to stay with my usual schtick and say actually everything is fine. The weird corners of the internet are still there. In many cases they're doing better than ever, because the nerdy adolescents have been nerdy adults with software engineering jobs and six figure incomes to throw at their esoteric hobbies. Yeah, the normies invaded the internet, but the normies didn't get online so they could join SomethingAwful or 4Chan or your sci-fi versus debate forum with twenty users. They joined the internet to use Facebook. The only thing that is truly lost is the sense of exclusivity - the feeling that the internet as a whole was a preserve from normie influence.
I think Le Conte's problem (cf. @MeinNameistBernd) is that she has chosen a life path that demands she be engaged with the most toxic parts of the normie web.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Diversity for thee, not me me. 'Red' areas, in general, tend to be much more diverse ,especially economically, and culturally , and even racially, compared to wealthier blue areas.
While I'm sure you can find some red county that is more diverse than some blue county, I am extremely skeptical that this holds as a general statement. Red states in the midwest, for example, tend to be somewhere between very and overwhelmingly White (in the 75-90% range). Red states in the traditional South are not as White as the Midwest thanks to substantial Black minorities, but are still distinctly majority White and tend to lack other large minority population. Texas and Florida are the big outliers.
Within-state comparisons tend to be a similar story, e.g. in Illinois downstate is a) very white b) very red, while the purple collar counties and blue Cook/Chicago have large minority populations.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth
What stops the enfranchised elite from voting themselves other people's wealth (e.g. enclosure)?
Skibboleth
6mo ago
https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1714525590873575600
Photograph of the aftermath in the daytime.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
What is considered racist is always changing.
On the margins. Kanye West's behavior would have drawn censure 20-30 years ago (though it would have been harder to expose himself in such a way without modern social media), so it's not like he's the victim of semantic creep here. Nor are we talking about a careless choice of words in an isolated incident. Even in time when anti-semitism itself was more tolerated, you were generally expected to be somewhat genteel about it. Going on an unhinged rant in public about the Jews would've gotten many of your fellow anti-semites edging away from you awkwardly for fear of association.
Also, just being accused of racism can be as bad as being racist.
I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean, but I think what you're saying is that the social consequences of having people falsely believe that you are racist can be as bad as the social consequences of having people correctly believe that you are racist. Which seems trivially true, and applies to any accusation of some negative trait (e.g. being believed to be a liar). The real question is how likely is a spurious accusation to be taken seriously, and my comment there is: even in communities that think racism is a serious issue, "that's racist" is mostly a punchline. People of relatively ordinary means who live in communities that are hypersensitive to racism do sometimes get in a lot of trouble for innocuous statements, but that doesn't lead us to the conclusion that accusing someone of racism is a superweapon unless we're willing to accept an incredibly high miss rate on our superlaser.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
What will be the retaliation for this
The US is already engaged by proxy in the hottest interstate war in decades with Russia. Even if true (X), this is totally eclipsed by the Russo-Ukrainian War - Russian allies in the US still think Putin is the based defender of Christian civilization against the homosexual globalists, people worried about escalation are probably more afraid of Russia exercising the ultimate veto than espionage bullshit, and anti-Russians still want to bomb Russia.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
if the federal doesn’t already have people in position to assassinate Abbott they are beyond a joke.
They almost certainly don't. I'm sure someone's gamed out the "rebellious governor", but not seriously. The plan, such as it would be, probably doesn't amount to much more than send in feds to arrest Abbott. Probably to cheers and applause.
But I want to emphasize: this whole quasi-secession scenario people are salivating over because they're bored and crave death is incredibly unlikely. The overwhelmingly probably outcome is that Abbott does, in fact, back down. His "win" is that he gets to say "I tried, but the tyrannical Biden administration stopped me."
This is another chapter in the ongoing saga of a subset of American Christians and American secularists fighting over whether or not Christianity should have a privileged social and legal status in the United States (albeit one of the more superficial elements of that conflict, namely display of religious icons). The point of these displays is to demonstrate that (some) Christians want precisely that. It's not enough that there be equal opportunity religious displays. It needs to be exclusively Christian.
A Christian church could create a parallel object to be installed in the Iowa Capitol, a similar deliberately provocative anti-atheist symbol to be promoted as a sacred symbol of a pseudo-atheist
They'd find that no one cares. To the extent that their ideological adversaries would react, it would be with mockery. This is because their goals not symmetrical. One side wants Christian symbols to have an exclusive status; the other wants government spaces to be secular. If you take down the nativity scene and the statue of baphomet, that's a win for the Satanists.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
Evidence for the theory that Jordan's biggest problem is that he's an asshole no one likes.
The biggest factor is that Joe Biden is president, and for a lot of bitter Trump supporters, that's all they need to hear. (The converse is also true).
The second biggest factor is that the paleocon/populist segment of the American Right is the new party establishment, and while they may favor a strong military as an expression of national virility, they are also generally isolationist. This is not new. What is new is their being in the drivers' seat for the GOP and especially for messaging.
Skibboleth
8mo ago
The "deep state" is a motte-and-bailey where the motte is public choice theory and the bailey is that a cabal of civil servants controls the USG.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
I've only read one High Republic novel (Light of the Jedi). It wasn't particularly good, but it wasn't particular woke, either. It was fairly androgynous, though more in the sense of being sexless and sterilized (but hey, most of the characters are celibate monks, so what can you expect) rather than embracing the post-gender future.
Perhaps more damningly, it felt like bad Star Trek.
To be a little uncharitable, having not listened to the podcast, past experience indicates that the best argument against Tema Okun is listening to Tema Okun. If you start pushing back, she may retreat into the Motte whereas if you let her talk without opposition, she'll hang herself.
More options
Context Copy link