Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
So the Pride flag is officially on the same level as the National Anthem now? I thought that was just a dissident right twitter meme about "globohomo" and the "GAE." But good to know, good to know.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I believe that speech is powerful. Words are a means we use to convince other minds of beliefs about the world. Minds act upon those beliefs.
Especially nowadays, words are in massive superabundance. Unless you are someone with a public following - and even then - the idea that any one statement, out of millions, is dispositive of an individual's actions, strains credulity.
At present, there is a powerful right wing-meme that many people, some LGBT and some not, mostly democrats, are attempting to sexually confuse children for nefarious purposes. This is often described as "grooming" in order to equivocate with sexual abuse children.
It is also described as "grooming" because it is seen, in its own terms, as a dangerous hijacking and corruption of children's development towards au courant notions and sexed identities. There is evidence for this claim.
Insofar as the reasonable man's reaction to a co-ordinated effort to sexually abuse children is not "I should vote about this and if I get outvoted, I should allow my children to be sexually abused", the actions of the shooter are completely predictable.
No, you have not drawn a nexus between this particular bar and efforts aimed at children; or between the shooter and the "groomer" meme.
All you have on that point is that the shooter is the grandson of a Republican politician. This, in itself, tells us very little, because it is not uncommon for the descendants of major GOP figures to vocally repudiate, or distance themselves from their politically-active kin. In fact, it's a meme that every brooklyn hipster has to deal with "conservative family" on Thanksgiving.
Nor does there appear any evidence (at this time) that the shooter himself was politically radicalized (though that could change). What information we do have suggests the shooter was, in fact, generally violent (e.g. the threats against parents with home-made bombs and guns, with sufficient severity that the parents had the dude arrested). Of course this could change, and if and when new information comes out I will update my assessment accordingly. But right now, there is no link other than supposition and weak inference-drawing.
You should take care to think about the consequences of the speech you use. If someone were to be persuaded by your argument, what would that cause them to do?
This proves too much. No speech could survive a standard requiring that not even a mentally-deranged individual threatening their own parents with bombings could interpret any particular statement so as to encourage violence.
Even if this standard were workable, which it is not, I would reject it because it is only ever applied unidirectionally. Only traditionalist or conservative speech is ever to be muzzled; the entire industries built on the left about pathologizing and demonizing conservatives, whites, and men are to be left alone. For example: no-one suppresses the speech of Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nahesi Coates, or thinks about reining in the legion of diversocrats who make a profession out of demonizing "whiteness," when radicalized black racialists kill white people, or torture white people, or assault random white people because they are white.
I would gladly stand with you if you said "we should all condemn these unprovoked murders." I would even be on your side if you had referenced the Idaho pastor cited in OP's link who apparently called for drag queens to be put to death. I would still be with you if you were proselytizing this sub's decorum rules, which would foreclose most use of the 3-edgy-5-me "day of the rope," "free helicopter ride," and other memes which do play around with and cheapen actual lethal political violence. But that's not where you're standing, which seems a bit telling to me.
You aren't reponsible for every nutcase or moron on your team. But you are responsible for the logical consequence of your ideas. I know of no society that believes they should be having free and open debates and votes about whether teachers should be permitted to sexually abuse children.
The French did, and within living memory. And it may not be specifically teachers doing it, but, well, uh, the sexual use of children does happen in some cultures today. The question of when "childhood" ends, and what special privileges are to be accorded children is not inviolate throughout time and space, and has been answered many different ways, changing over time in response to material circumstances and cultural shifts. It evokes especially high emotions for many contemporary Americans, but that's not a cross-cultural universal.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
In Accessibility law, this is the realm of ADA testers and their lawyers: a very small group of people who promise that they're at least theoretically interested in going to a far larger space of public or semi-public accommodations and making sure that anyone with similar disabilities can access them (and not coincidentally make a lot of money), who individually have hundreds or low thousands of complaints or even lawsuits.
There is a SCOTUS case coming on this. Last month the Supreme Court elected to take up an appeal from a 1st Circuit case questioning whether a self-appointed ADA "tester" has standing to sue for damages in federal court if they never intend to actually visit the place they're "testing":
The plaintiff, Deborah Laufer, has brought 600 lawsuits against hotels around the United States. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, hotels are required to make information about their accessibility to people with disabilities available on reservation portals. In this case, Laufer – who has physical disabilities and vision impairments – went to federal court in Maine, where she alleged that a website for an inn that Acheson Hotels operates in that state did not contain enough information about the inn’s accommodations for people with disabilities.
The district court threw out her lawsuit. It agreed with Acheson Hotels that Laufer did not have standing because she had no plans to visit the hotel and therefore was not injured by the lack of information on the website. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit reinstated Laufer’s lawsuit.
That prompted Acheson Hotels to come to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to weigh in. The company pointed to a division among the courts of appeals on whether cases like Laufer’s can move forward; indeed, Acheson Hotels noted, courts have reached different conclusions about whether Laufer can bring these kinds of cases. And the issue has “immense practical importance,” the company stressed, describing a “cottage industry” “in which uninjured plaintiffs lob ADA lawsuits of questionable merit, while using the threat of attorney’s fees to extract settlement payments.”
Laufer agreed that review was warranted, although she urged the justices to uphold the lower court’s ruling. The justices will likely hear argument in the case in the fall, with a decision to follow sometime in 2024.
vastly poorer, shittier, more corrupt, more violent countries don't have the problems that the above article notes exist in the Los Angeles metro.
Because they're not rich enough to (1) afford ubiquitous personal car transportation, (2) isolate themselves from the effects of luxury beliefs like "we should prioritize the feelings and welfare of criminals over having orderly public places"
Los Angeles is the second city of the richest country on earth. The median income in Los Angeles is $70,000 a year.
Right, rich enough to afford personal cars for most people, and luxury beliefs allying the guilty-feeling, effeminized elites and the underclasses.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
This is literally the plot of Shakespeare's Coriolanus - "discriminated-against military leader defects to erstwhile-enemies" is so common as to be a trope throughout history.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
You've misjudged the politics. Trump was already the leftward turn on policy for the Republican party. He's against cutting Medicare/Medicaid, wanted to tax the rich heavily to pay for infrastructure projects, was by far the most pro-gay GOP candidate ever, and made a big deal of signing major reductions in criminal justice efforts. He also was exceptionally dovish by GOP standards.
There is no outflanking that on the left, and Trump wasn't getting criticism because he was too far right on policy - he got attacked as the boorish tribune of declasse plebs; all those rural white men ... YUCK! Can't be any less cool than that. Didn't anyone tell them the Future is Female? And takes a train in a big city to an email job? Deviating significantly from a Trump-ish attitude signifies that the candidate isn't with the base, and that's no way to win a primary.
No, the way DeSantis attacks Trump is on details. DeSantis can sell himself as the type of executive who actually can do things. This means culture war stuff about defunding woke educational bureaucracies, sure. But it also means basic good-governance stuff like public order, disaster recovery, COVID management, firing rogue prosecutors, etc. (Whether or not DeSantis can make good on this is another question - he's benefitted mightily from having good connections with the friendly legislature in FL while governor; he's significantly less well-connected or -liked in Congress, and there's no guarantee that a Pres. DeSantis would have majorities in both houses).
The RCID thing is not as big as you make it out to be. I'm not even sure people remember why they were mad at Disney in the first place over this.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
The black population of the Union states was negligible in the late 1800s, but it was there that the U.S.'s great agricultural and industrial innovations were born and took root. The "Great Migration" of southern agricultural black laborers north to the booming industrial cities occurred after the great gilded age of American lassiez-faire capitalism, and well into the urban progressive movement (which itself smoothly transitioned, after flirtations with fascism and communism, into the FDR welfarist coalition that dominated the mid-20th century, and whose institutional bones we're still building).
Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK
This is a very doubtful proposition. The U.S. is several times larger than the other major industrial powers in the world (Germany, UK, France, Japan), significantly more diversified in resources, and - these are the big doozy - didn't get bombed flat or invaded during WWII, and didn't lose an entire generation of elite young men in WWI. Instead, WWI put America in the position of having the allies mortgage their empires to us in exchange for food, war materiel, and ultimately intervention (WWI debts to the US weren't fully cleared in the UK until I think 2003?), and then the physical destruction of Eurasia in WWII put us in a massive comparative industrial advantage.
One perfectly valid question to ask is why did the USA not follow in the same footsteps as Europe when it came to implementing a very high tax and spend redistributive economy...
We tried to. It led to the stagnation of the 70's and early 80's. We then elected Reagan (as the Brits elected Thatcher) to try and shake the system loose, to varying degrees of success.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
The problem appears to be wider than that - from the same article:
Race, color, or national origin discrimination claims made up 3,329 of all complaints received in FY 2022, according to the civil rights office’s annual report, which was released last week. That’s up from 2,399 the year prior. Disability-related complaints comprised 6,467 of the total compared to 4,870 in FY 2021.
At the same time, age discrimination claims, which made up 666 complaints in the most recent report, were down from 1,149 the prior year. The office notes the majority of these claims were also filed by a single person in both years.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The political will for AA exists in the universities and bureaucracies, and will be abetted by ideological fellow-travelers in law, politics, and journalism. If this iteration of AA is struck down in these particular places, colleges and universities will simply change their methodology and bury the decisional factors even further under layers of committees, unrecorded exercises of discretion by low-level admissions staff, and student advocacy. They will stop collecting, and attack as racist, the metrics which would reveal their actions to be discriminatory (e.g. standardized testing). They will bog down litigation in years of lawyering, backed up either by billion-dollar endowments, or blue state's public fisc. One or two red tribe suits might win, but on the whole, the system will remain.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
I hate the discourse around inflation - when people say "inflation is down" they are talking about a decrease in the rate of change, not a decrease of an absolute number. This is unlike many other things we talk about in economic life; when the unemployment rate goes down, more people have jobs; when there is a decrease in the mortgage rate, houses cost less, etc. This condition people to think that an economic indicator "going down" means that things are getting better.
This is not the case with inflation. When inflation "goes down," it does not mean that prices are actually decreasing back to the levels that existed prior to the inflation. Deflation is a separate phenomenon that almost never actually happens (and maybe shouldn't be allowed to happen - I'm not smart enough to parse the monetary theory of it all). When inflation "goes down," it means "you're still paying way more for stuff than you were a year ago, but at least the prices aren't skyrocketing up quite as fast anymore; you have some time to rebudget and get used to these new, permanently higher prices."
That statement isn't actually a "good sign" for the economy; at best it means "things aren't actively getting worse." Unless there is some significant increase in productivity to drive prices back down, people are still having to pay more for goods and services than they did previously; their money is worth less and they are poorer now than they were previously. The damage has already been done.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Liberalism answers: it’s not our problem. If they want to dismantle the gender binary, so be it. The rest of us can, in theory, go on our merry way.
"Dismantling the gender binary" is not a personal voyage of discovery, but a broad social program including significant changes to governmental policy at all levels, fairly substantial changes in pedagogy, dissolution of parental authority over their children's upbringing, development and deployment of unproven hormonal interventions, the redefinition and hijacking of ordinary language, willful deception regarding scientific research and suppression of contradictory findings, and coordinated harassment campaigns against dissenters in anything from dating (the "cotton ceiling") to workplaces and academia. It is not as simple as "live and let live."
I’m frustrated that the article doesn’t address any of them, instead blaming a cabal of autogynephilic billionaires.
Insofar as the "cabal of. . .billionaires" is either responsible for the intellectual development of a concept, coverage of that is basic bog-standard pop-intellectual history. Insofar as the cabal is providing a network of organizational and monetary support for activists, then that's worthwhile reportage just like pieces on the Koch or Soros networks, or "Big Tobacco's" involvement in quashing cancer research.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I was cajoled into seeing the recent spiderman movie and I remember there was a cameo of some black superhero, and all of the black kids in the audience went nuts over it. And it was clear in that moment that there's a compelling need, to some extent, for more representation of x demographic, because, for instance, it can't be positive to grow up watching superhero movies and none of them look like you.
With respect, I disagree that this is the only correct response to that moment. An equally-valid response would be: "how tragic, these kids have been stunted and boxed-in so much that they're incapable of having heroes who don't look like them."
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
that there is no evidence of democrats having tried anything like changing the actual vote totals or storming the capitol building
(1) Lying to create "Russia-gate," including lying to FISA courts in order to ensure that Trump campaign officials' phones were being tapped.
(2) Impeaching Trump over his attempt to investigate what we now know was actual quid-pro-quo corruption in which Ukranian oligarchs paid Joe Biden's son to have Joe Biden leverage U.S. foreign policy to prevent their prosecution.
(3) Rioting outside the White House including setting the next-door church on fire.
(4) Organizing 51 intelligence officials to falsely claim that the Hunter Biden laptop - which the FBI had possessed for over a year previously and knew to be genuine - "bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation" in a successful attempt to interfere in the 2020 election.
(5) Organizing social media censorship of stories connected to the Hunter Biden laptop.
and, actually most importantly for the 2020 election:
(6) funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars in ostensible "COVID-relief funds" through private donors to election officials in Democratic-controlled swing-counties, who then proceeded to use almost none of the funds for COVID-relief purposes, and instead used it to hire Democratic activists to run partisan get-out-the-vote operations, and in some cases effectively privatize the actual conduct of the elections themselves:
"Trump won Georgia by more than five points in 2016. He lost it by three-tenths of a point in 2020. On average, as a share of the two-party vote, most counties moved Democratic by less than one percentage point in that time. Counties that didn’t receive Zuckerbucks showed hardly any movement, but counties that did moved an average of 2.3 percentage points Democratic. In counties that did not receive Zuckerbucks, “roughly half saw an increase in Democrat votes that offset the increase in Republican votes, while roughly half saw the opposite trend.” In counties that did receive Zuckerbucks, by contrast, three quarters “saw a significant uptick in Democrat votes that offset any upward change in Republican votes,” including highly populated Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, and DeKalb counties."
Hemingway, "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections," Ch. 7
In the US gas stoves are mainly a blue-state / higher-end restaurant phenomenon, so I found the conservative media response to be a bit baffling because it's not really their fortress under assault here.
You underestimate the degree to which conservative online discourse is driven by politically-conservative residents of blue states/cities (because online discourse generally is driven by people in blue jurisdictions, as well as structurally/culturally blue-tribe people.) [Edit: added a close-paren]
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The anti-suffragists were sure voting would tear apart a fragile equilibrium between the sexes.
But they were right, though. I'd call prohibition, which was a very gendered issue and the major suffragette policy issue, a huge disruptive to the body politic.
A decade ago he was literally a standard neocon with occasional libertarian sympathies.
Not really - he turned against the Iraq war pretty quickly after he visited the country and saw what was actually going on:
Outside of the heavily fortified—and relatively safe—U.S.-controlled "Green Zone" that surrounds Saddam's former main palaces in Baghdad, you can spend days without hearing English or seeing an American flag. Almost nowhere is there the faintest whiff of American cultural influence. People light up in elevators and carry Kalashnikovs to the dinner table. Gunfire and explosions are background noise. It is a place with almost no Western-style rules. It's not a bit like Denver.
You'd think it would be. According to the Pentagon, there are more than a 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. The country seems to have swallowed them. We drove from the Kuwaiti border to downtown Baghdad and back again and didn't see one on the way—more than 700 miles on major roads without catching a glimpse of a single American in uniform.
If the goal is to control the country, there are not enough American forces in Iraq. If the goal is to rebuild it, there could never be enough. The U.S. military simply doesn't have the manpower. As it is, the Pentagon could not fight even a small war without the considerable help of civilian contractors. In Bosnia during the peacekeeping mission, there was at times one contractor for every soldier. That was nearly a decade ago. The military has grown smaller since and even more dependent on contractors. On the battlefield, contractors cook soldiers' food, deliver their mail, provide their housing, and take care of their equipment. (DynCorp maintains virtually all U.S. military aircraft in the Middle East.) In Iraq, they are sometimes nearly indistinguishable from soldiers.
It wasn't until I was flat on my back that the strangest part of the night sunk in: No one outside our immediate compound had seemed to notice the firefight. The gunfire had gone on for 15 minutes. The noise had been tremendous and unmistakable. Yet nobody—not U.S. soldiers, not cops from the Iraqi police station 150 yards away, not representatives of the famously benevolent "international community," whoever they might be—had come by to ask what happened, who did it, or if anyone was hurt. There were no authorities to call. No one cared. We were totally alone.
Not as alone as the rest of the people in the neighborhood, however. We were on a residential street. Iraqi families lived on both sides of us. What did they think? Hundreds of rounds had been fired—hundreds of needle-tipped, copper-jacketed missiles whipping through the neighborhood at half a mile a second. What happened to them all? Where did the bullets go? Into parked cars and generators and water tanks. Into people's living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms, and sometimes into human flesh.
It must have been terrifying to live nearby, or to live anywhere in Baghdad. You couldn't blame the coalition forces exactly. They weren't doing most of the shooting. But they didn't seem to be doing much about it, either. On the street where I was staying, they weren't doing anything. And how could they? All the foreign troops in Iraq hadn't been able to keep the country's main airport safe enough to use. A single block in Baghdad wasn't going to get their attention. By necessity, it was left to civilian contractors, or whoever else had the time, energy, and firearms to police their own tiny sections of Iraq.
He was a quite good magazine journalist for a while. Of course his piece about getting invited to go on a peacemaking trip to Liberia with Al Sharpton, Cornel West, and a bunch of other African-American clergy, is the best.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
The thing that makes this a national story is that Mr. Ballard, through the fictionalized version of his life that is "Sound of Freedom," one of the major cultural figures held up as virtuous and good by Team Red. Thus, it is imperative in the kulturkampf that Team Blue knock him off his pedestal or prove him to be bad in some way, lest Team Red be able to convince people that Reds can be virtuous, or that it is virtuous to be Red. That's what's driving amplification of this story in higher-profile news networks/through non-Red social media networks. Obviously Reds, Mormons, and Utahns have their own reasons to care about this - their idol has feet of clay / adultery is something they care about, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Look at what Elon Musk tweeted yesterday. It's a hop, a skip, and a jump away from anti-Semitism.
Only if you're looking for it. It would work just as well if the names were:
"Sam Jones" [was a student of, then regulated by] "Gary Williams"
[was fucking and working with] [was a former subordinate of]
"Caroline Smith" [is the daughter of] "Glenn Smith"
The incestuous relationships and regulatory capture are the point Elon was making; the ethnicity/religion, while notable, is orthogonal.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Given our emerging consensus that politics is replacing religion as the dividing line of society, and taking on many of the same functions, perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive. . . . Being a politically sophisticated person means being able to articulate fully the fundamental forces behind these human tensions that form our society. It means understanding that there is no "right side of history", no perfect past to retVrn to. It means accepting that progress and change are both inevitable and not inevitably positive.
I think you've misinterpreted the way in which "religion" is being used. Insofar as politics is being described as "religious," it is so precisely because people are increasingly siting claims to fundamental, un-questionable, axiomatic truth in their political affiliation/tribal identity. A "religion" in the modern, western understanding of the term is not just an interpretive framework - it is identity, morality, anthropology, and teleology all rolled up into one. It's something that answers the big questions: "who am I," "why am I this way," "what is the right way to live" and "what should I do in my life?" You can't meaningfully answer that with cynicism. It's been tried repeatedly, and failed repeatedly.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Why would someone make easily falsifiable claims about an organization’s stance and about his role in it?
Because he wants to run for Congress?
No, but seriously, because a non-zero number of people will not bother to either check the claim themselves, or believe the people who did because they are already affectively aligned with the position the falsehood is supporting. Also, it's much, much easier to sling bullshit than it is to fight back against it, and so in the long-run the bullshitting side is going to get something to slip past the filters, or just convince people through the "if there's smoke, there's fire" method of shifting the Overton window.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
If they wanted to say "this is a tragic but inevitable consequence of our society's failures with respect to public safety and mental health" they could do that without also adding "Neely was human garbage, I'm glad he's dead, and we should do this more often." The fact that they did add that is evidence that yes, 'kill the undesirables' is within their range of acceptable policy.
Most homeless people aren't violent, and don't have law-enforcement records as long as your arm. Most homeless people - even the drug-addicted ones - don't get in your face and scream at you about how they're not afraid to die today, and not afraid to go to jail (insinuating that they're willing to commit acts which would either result in their death or long-term imprisonment - i.e. violent ones). Most homeless people are not schizophrenic street criminals with 40+ arrests, including multiple serious batteries and at least one attempted kidnapping. Most homeless people are just trying to get back on their feet and avoid the shame of being seen in a destitute condition. I have no problem with them, nor do I think that most Mottizens have any problem with them. So no, there's no connecting this to "homeless people" or "undesirables" writ large.
What proportion of the Motte's posters does this sentiment encompass? Couldn't say - I expect most motte posters are smart enough to figure out that if you are directly asked "Do you support exterminating the homeless" the correct answer is "no" even if they privately feel different. But it's clearly a sentiment that they are happy to express in adjacent conversations and which garners largely positive internet points on this forum.
It is a goddamn travesty that in American big cities, public spaces - including sensitive ones like public transit - have been abandoned to people who think it's their birthright to scream at, threaten, assault, batter, or otherwise harass ordinary people. Sometimes these people are obviously suffering from some species of mental defect; sometimes they are just cruel, entitled, and aggressive. Securing the public peace is literally the first responsibility of an organized state, and any state that can't or won't even do that is really no state at all. Moreover, if the state can- or will not do anything, people are justified in attempting to reclaim public areas, including by force if necessary. There is no affirmative obligation to suffer otherwise criminal harassment by others.
People who abuse public spaces in aggressive ways should be punished - not because they're inherently evil or "undesirable" (though they may also harbor genetic tendencies towards, e.g. psychosis that we would not affirmatively select for if we had the option) but because of their actions. Their punishment should not necessarily be death (i.e. no, don't just shoot annoying people on the subway), but I'm not going to categorically say that someone screaming threats shouldn't get cold-cocked (let alone someone who's assaulted or battered a stranger unprovoked), and when people get into physical fights, sometimes death results.
In such cases the death may be sad to the deceased's family and loved-ones, but it was not honorable. It was largely the result of their own bad actions, and (absent serious extenuating circumstances) was inflicted in defense of the public peace and welfare. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. It shouldn't be that hard to not scream in random strangers' faces and threaten them day after day after goddamn day. It's generally sad that their life was wasted on such shitty, harmful behavior, but on the whole society is improved for their absence.
I don't think "Italian satellites changed the voting tally" is actually the bailey - it's not terrain that everyone wants to occupy; it's not the goal in and of itself. From the stolen-election perspective, the end goal (thus the bailey) is "the election results do not represent a fair vote or a small-d democratic mandate."
The "Italian satellites" and "unfair rules/elite lies" are the various types of argument-soldiers sent out to secure the bailey. If the "Italian satellites" thing were true, it would be extremely good evidence for the bailey position - actually fiddling with vote totals is a very good reason to declare an election void. Unfortunately, the audacity and putative strength of the claim is betrayed by its falsity.
The "unfair rules/elite lites" arguments are much weaker evidence for the bailey position, precisely because they can be pattern-matched to other dirty tricks in American political history that we've just learned to shrug and accept. However, they have much stronger basis, and are harder to dismiss as groundless.
The reason I make this distinction is because the way you phrased it suggests to me that you think anyone who has a negative opinion of the 2020 election would like to or perhaps wants to accept the "Italian satellites"-style arguments, but falls back on the true "election fortification/information suppression/media manipulation/weaponized intelligence community" arguments when they're forced to. This is not true. There are people who believe in the wild conspiracy theories, and there are people who have digested true reportage. That both may arrive at similar conclusions about the election, the media, the Democratic party, or politics more generally, is beside the point.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I don't care about the Hutchinson story or about Trump "lunging" at the wheel. This is not a principled stance - it may well be important - but it doesn't grab my attention and so I leave the discussion to those who do care about it.
However, please note that the concern that Joe Biden is "the big guy" in Hunter's emails does not just come from Bobulinski. The person who originally referenced "the big guy" in writing was James Gilliar, a Brit working with Hunter Biden on a Chinese energy firm deal. When the Hunter Laptop story broke, Gilliar texted with an unnamed person, who was concerned that the Bidens (mentioning both Joe and Hunter) would throw them under the bus. In discussing Joe Biden's incentives whether or not he won the then-ongoing election campaign, Gilliar again referred to Biden as "the Big Guy"..
Please also note that we don't just have Bobulinski's word. He has also provided text messages with Gilliar wherein Gilliar specifically instructs Bobulinski to take special care to hide Joe Biden's involvement in Hunter's business deals. (see the above-linked article).
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
But why are the "basement dwelling gamur incels" among the most reviled subgroups in the culture war?
Because "revilement" doesn't necessarily scale with danger - it can also scale with ickiness. Incels are one of the lowest-status identities in WEIRD countries, particularly among women (natch!) and gays - groups which wield disproportionate soft/cultural power, particularly on the cultural left. So of course the Incels are going to be treated like lepers by those groups, and the left more generally, and beating up on social outcasts in every way possible is an old, old political strategy.
I would be interested to see if this holds when you control for "stage of life" rather than age. I would be very surprised if Millennial homeowners, married Millennials, and Millennials with children weren't significantly more conservative than their generation, more broadly. This is because I would bet heavily that the Churchillian "young liberal -> old conservative" spectrum has at least as much to do with the changing levels of responsibility that people go through as they age into adulthood as it does with the actual passage of time.
Millennials, overeducated and under-worked due to some combo of secular western parental trends, the 08' recession, and the unfortunate conjunction of economic opportunity and extremely high cost-of-living in the major U.S. metropolises, are way behind previous generations in taking on the full responsibilities and social roles of adulthood (self very much included). Less married, fewer kids, less money, fewer assets - it all plays a role.
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