Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it.
It's pretty strange to see so much discussion here about why liberals hate Trump - a lot of "sore loser" theory - without Democrats or progressives pushing back on why they think he's particularly norm-breaking.
It actually makes me worry about the skew of this site and if we left a lot of left-wingers back on Reddit.
It's not just that "Trump wasn't supposed to win". He violated a lot of norms - not just red and blue norms like unconditional support for the nominee - starting with not releasing his taxes and escalating to things like playing footsie with not acknowledging the outcome of the election.
THIS was the particular red rag that was theoretically avoidable by a generic GOP candidate (as opposed to being anti-immigration - or rather: anti-some immigration)
There is obviously a thing where liberals (this can be of the left AND right variety - especially if you look at Europe) conflate their particular politics with democracy and freedom as such - which is how things like populism, Brexit, being anti-immigrant all end up being marked as "dangerous" or threats to freedom - but, in this case, Trump tied the connection himself.
We don't even need to look at the lib reaction - look at some of Tucker's leaked texts from the Dominion case if you think this reaction is purely lib derangement at a "blue collar billionaire".
I also don't quite know how to fix this.
"˹O Prophet!˺ Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their chastity. That is purer for them. Surely Allah is All-Aware of what they do."
The current trajectory is pointing towards boring adjustment, where even in exciting situations people consciously suppress their emotions and play it cool, which we already do in most other, especially work, situations.
Or stable and internalized norms will mean that people won't even consider that particular expression of their emotions, instead of it being a constant struggle to not do a certain thing.
Take the Sharia pill.
major marketing pushes are not "jokes".
Was it major though? Isn't this the exact sort of low-effort campaign influencers do all the time? It's one step above having a random "Instathot" pose with a bottle of Bang. It wasn't like he was the face of Bud Light on billboards.
I mean, it's still an ad and they're still responsible - would handing a can to a "racist" Instagram influencer get a pass? - and it was deeply unwise but I also see how this didn't even seem like a potential brand/career ender.
The reaction seems like the perfect storm of building resentment and an easy target for a boycott. Hard to predict.
They're not subsidizing Nigerian daycare. They're subsidizing life-saving treatment.
If you mean "why don't they cut them off so they have fewer kids": a) see "not everything is about TFR"; some people think it's good that people don't die actually, even if they'd have six kids at their funeral. That is insect logic. b) it's unclear that making their lives more precarious will stop them. They had a higher TFR before. Maybe they'd have fewer kids the less they needed to hedge against disaster.
I don't think the sorts of people who do this stuff are particularly interested in boosting the number of kids every African woman is having, quite the opposite. They're likely the sorts who also support family planning and female emancipation and education that they hope will have the same effect on Africa's TFR as it's had elsewhere. I think we discussed Macron stating this explicitly a while ago.
If you want to go that route you might gain from the soft power and proven competence that comes from stopping people from dying.
so I have to suspect that "taking care of asylum seekers" is really a pretext for serving some other ideological belief, like "increasing diversity" or "destroying white hegemony" or "free market absolutism."
Or it's a product of post-war hangups: a bunch of people refused to take as many Jews as they could have, and they'll never be allowed to forget it (see the infamous "none is too many" from Canada)
Just as no one can attack the entire DEI infrastructure when faced with its extremism because doing so places you against the Civil Rights Act, people can't just dismiss the entire concept of asylum even though it's impossible to live up to the claims it makes (as you say: it's actually a suicide pact if taken to its conclusion) and it is used to basically smuggle in economic migrants by blurring the lines between them and asylum seekers (probably because they are blurred in the minds of the pro-migrant class)
Some people may simply be willing to pay some cost to live up their values, even though obviously there's more refugees than viable spots and their values simply cannot fully be implemented.
Tanista
2yr ago
There's no norm that says "don't call on Russia to release hacked emails".
There is no law. Just as there is no law that you have to release your tax returns.
I think it's more of a stretch to claim there's no norm against calling for a foreign entity to help you win the election.
There isn't now though, that's for sure.
There certainly no norm against complaining that elections are rigged
Yet losing candidates are expected to congratulate their opponents and concede (it was noteworthy that Clinton didn't have a concession speech).
Again, less of an expectation with Abrams' thing + Biden pre-complaining about the midterms.
Tanista
9mo ago
It's not a coincidence, obviously. They'll find something.
It's preferable they find "binders full of women" than you saying what Vance said. All you can do is minimize.
There's an argument for some Trump-style disagreeableness on important things. But I'd be making this argument if a Democrat spoke this way. This is not the sort of thing you want a paragraph-long explainer on. Waste of time.
Tanista
11mo ago
Similar to Caster Semenya and likewise raised as a girl
Another case of pervasive misinformation; most people (including myself until very recently) think that Semenya really is a woman.
It's not a truth finding expedition being made in good faith, but rhetorical culture war.
I'm sorry, but Rufo of all people doesn't get to complain about this. He is engaged in an explicit political project, to win the culture war. In fact, despite all the seething, that's what's attractive about him: he knows this. No way he walks into a debate with Robinson and doesn't get the game.
If his counter was inadequate that's on him.
Islamic Republic of Iran was, for each person killed in 9/11, ordered
By a federal judge in New York.
Alex Jones lost in Connecticut.
Can we leave some room for regional variation as a thesis?
Because, tbh, this feels like the comparisons that Leftists do whenever one black person gets a lower sentence (or is harmed more) than some white person somewhere else. It's a large country with lots of laws, all sorts of reasons people could behave differently in different cases.
Of course many of them are with Zendaya with whomever the male lead is
Maybe we should thank God that Challengers didn't do well; otherwise, we might have been hearing about this for a decade
but the sheer amount of complaining about how Zendaya is too ugly to be paired with Hollywood men should by itself indicate that this happens quite often.
I think this is part bitter Twitter racist thing and part "woman who glams up (she looks better on the red carpet than in many films) well enough to be liked by women but isn't a sex symbol, so men complain" thing.
You hear similar things about how Taylor Swift isn't really sexy and I don't think she really gets into racial issues.
how do you refer to non-binary, anyway? "guy" is offensive, yes?
If they can commit a stereotypically male sex crime they can be referred to as a male is my view.
Tanista
5mo ago
Trump and Tom Cotton performed hypothetical violence by suggesting sending in troops/national guard, quite fascist. Direct and tacit support for lawlessness and chaos on the streets though? Nope.
Tanista
10mo ago
Yes, but there was appropriate ass-covering.
Musk is significantly more defiant.
Tanista
1yr ago
Because democracy isn't just an arbitrary principle, it's a political technology for nonviolent resolution of unrest. People who live in your country but don't vote can still riot, can still strike, and can still join insurgent groups.
Which is why the Gulf States are a hotbed of insurrection?
Trying to trap your opponent between heresy and concession is a dick move in my opinion.
Another way to frame it is "trying to find out your opponent's basic beliefs and how they interact . Which is essential to debate. Not even for "gotchas"; you have to know why Lance is pro-choice and why to even have a productive discussion.
It's Lance's fault he's so bad at organizing his beliefs that he trips when he has to consider them holistically.
As for whether it's "heresy": I mean, whose fault is it if your side considers it so? Not Tim's issue.
Personally I don’t think you can have a truly fair debate in any position where there’s an audience.
Maybe not. But we'll have to make do.
Tanista
1yr ago
Why is it stated as self-evident even by supposed ideological dissidents like Hanania that romantically unsuccessful men are the only men holding so-called misogynistic views?
Because at least some scholars who study such men seem to think (e.g. William Costello) that they do tend to be more misogynistic (which, as pointed out, is different from them being the only misogynists)?
Tanista
2yr ago
Standing up for the national anthem is culturally universal phenomenon
Nationalism isn't universal, let alone being for the national anthem of your (again, not a universal sentiment) country.
I'm sure there's some Irishmen who don't feel too kindly about the national anthem of the United Kingdom, for example. To this day iirc there are elected Sinn Fein members that'll never sit in government cause they can't accept the trappings of the UK government.
The official honest-to-God NATO account posted that. Not some third-rate dingbat functionary, like the execrable Karen Decker who posted about how Afghanistan needs more “black girl magic”. No, this is the public-facing voice of a war machine that controls hundreds of billions of dollars, and it decided that the best way to make its case to skeptical world was to spam references to media primarily targeted toward middle-schoolers.
Can't appeal to the dead white patriarchs , they're racist. Can't appeal to a defense of Christendom (even if that weren't verboten, Russia is still Christian), the only civilizational throughline left are platitudes we get from cultural consumption of deliberately watered down and simplistic media.
2.those civilizations were far more adept at social engineering, such that they could far more successfully integrate people like this into their social fabric and find roles for them which utilized their strengths and defanged their more dangerous and subversive tendencies.
You could argue it the other way: those personalities didn't exist because they were far less adept at social engineering.
The increase in modern state capacity has dovetailed quite well with the Rousseauian/early liberal impulse that society is responsible for many of man's ills and these ills can be cured with more intervention and the general optimistic view about the perfectibility of man.
The state today is ludicrously more powerful and has aided along major changes in daily life, so the thinking goes: why could it not just fix all those other endemic social ills like inequity in dating? Beyond that, modern systems' tolerance for deviance may allow these people to fit more appropriate niches than before*
I think this is silly for a variety of reasons, but I imagine that's a major factor in making people like the above who blithely assume enough "raising awareness" or "activism" will resolve any issue they don't like.
* It's hard to determine how much freedom merely releases people to do what they always would have wanted or creates new impulses they then mistakenly see as immovable
He's just also an asshole, whose idea of disagreement with people is just turning the "be a dick" dial up to 11.
I think @Fruck is looking at this from today's perspective with "SJWs" having the whip hand and making more and more deranged claims. So the assholishness of people like Dawkins and Amazing Atheist seem less important.
But they were assholes at the time and it mattered. There's "good" assholes - i.e. anally nitpicking expert types who don't care to "read the room" which is good. But there's also the "asshole"' in the more colloquial sense. Atheism had both, sometimes in the same person.
I recall AmazingAtheist engaging with Anita Sarkeesian before she was (in)famous and, instead of just "destroying her with facts and logic", going on a tangent about how she was broken because she was fidgeting. Even then, it seemed a bit fucked to me.
It's also worth remembering that Watson was actually relatively toned down compared to the absurd SA claims being made today, and the reaction was OTT and mocking. Watch the video, it's actually a relatively offhand thing and there was context; she stated that she had spoken about not liking this sort of thing in the conference which adds a point in her favor.
... All of you except for the one man who didn't really grasp, I think, what I was saying on the panel, because, at the bar later that night — actually at four in the morning, we were at the hotel bar, four a.m. I said I've had enough guys, I'm exhausted, going to bed, so I walked to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me and said "Don't take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more, would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?" Um, just a word to the wise here, guys, don't do that. I don't really know how else to explain that this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at four a.m., in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and I, don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I've finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualise me in that manner.
This wasn't a general puritanical thing like today. Nor did she try to humiliate him by naming like the recent video of a woman getting mad at a gym "creep" for staring. She explicitly says she had made her preferences clear here.
Then people like Dawkins jumped on it in an assholish way and this led to the other side responding (I can see how this was seen as male nerd rage and entitlement) and it became way bigger than it ever should have been.
Tanista
2yr ago
"Democracy" when used in these contexts essentially means rule by the global professional managerial class.
"Democracy" is important to liberals insofar as they want the legitimacy that comes from allegedly representing the populace.
Once they have that they then go about tying the people up in all sorts of ways that actually prevent them expressing their will.
Tanista
26d ago
I was trying to help B against C, but accidentally helped A against B instead" (with A=cis women, B=trans women, C=conservatives) is an easy mistake to make, even if your distinction between A and B is solely based on who is the target of C's enmity?
But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.
I'm not OP, I do think in this situation things likely just dissolve. But if transwomen were making some sort of demand that made them distinct from women (the male version would be being forced to tolerate Sam Smith's ridiculous name shenanigans), without a clear indication of who wins on the stack, you'd at least think sometimes the bulk of the movement would sometimes just side with the women who don't want to deal with it. Especially since they couldn't appeal to the alleged suicide epidemic.
(Are you in fact trying to make a serious argument there, or are you just attached to the snappy sound of this line of polemic for your side?)
Yes.
Did Hamas debunk the "Bronze Age Mindset"?
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