Tanista
23d ago
So, neither wanting to get deeply involved, a fairly predictable pattern emerges. First, the left tries to support the “black community,” or at least the image they have of them. This tends to be through charity and lenience towards crime. This generally does not go well, and without seeing any positive outcomes, the general public starts getting sick of crime. Then the right wing sweeps in, declares the problem in racial(-ly coded) language, and cracks down hard. It doesn’t take long to notice that this policy rests on practical elements of prejudice against blacks, and so the general public starts swinging the other way…
The language always becomes racially coded because the underlying phenomenon is too. If you have one group that's massively more prone to crime, any attempt to attack criminals will lead to that word being associated with that group - until the problem resolves itself.
How do we know this? Because even left-wingers do not escape. Hillary Clinton was criticized for her own usage of terms like "superpredator" - meant to describe young, "feral" teens committing crime with abandon but it was then taken to be a racial dogwhistle based on who it was applied to. Trump, bizarrely, used it against Biden as well.
Are they? Then why is India a dumpster fire?
Cause all the good Indians are overseas, obviously.
It seems pretty clear that rhetoric from the top, especially from Trump, has pushed nativist ideas into the open. The strong version of this argument is that this has moved beyond simple policy disagreements (like border security) and has become a real cultural attitude of exclusion. How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?
I don't take those immigration arguments seriously. America is and will remain an attractive destination because America is doing better than most of the world, same as always. Americans are still, factually, incredibly immigrant-friendly by most standards. Hell, I think Trump may end up suffering because of the one thing he undoubtedly did well: closing the border reduces the salience of the matter and normies become much less willing to tolerate his other immigration shenanigans.
Complaints by downwardly mobile people online won't change than an Indian American woman is married to the VP right now and is closer to power than any online dissident rightist or person bitter about being driven out of a Google job
The argument I would make is that the left is better at this, according to the Right's own theory of the case. They took over the institutions more effectively, to the point where the attempted populist reclamation (which came pretty late) looks hamfisted and illegitimate in comparison. They possess the bulk of the human capital and their ideology is just baked into the culture now. So there'll be huge payback when they inevitably get into power with the support of a radicalized normie base. If you think this leads to awful decisions and a never-ending polarization spiral, it's pretty bad for everyone, not just Republicans.
For me, as much as I've been infuriated with progressive activism the past decade, the censorship rollback has revealed that the leftists were, in fact, right about many of the rightoids.
They've always been right that some people are racist. The steelmanned counter-argument is just that the cure is worse than the disease . Progressives themselves agree that pure racial animus alone is not that important, which is why they define it away via "racism= prejudice + power" . Progressives can't be trusted not because racism doesn't exist, but because it's a blank cheque for a bunch of very stupid and/or illiberal policies.
Tanista
24d ago
I mean, not all of them. There are definitely SJWs who believe that SJ doesn't count as politics but indeed "just common fucking decency"*, although there are certainly others who'll yell at anyone who thinks it's possible to be apolitical.
I think the "personal/everything is political" is a better explanation of the mindset than "just common fucking decency". Especially because it's paired with a sort of almost gnostic/mystery cult mentality. The Onion parody of the general mindet of "if only you were educated as I was" is instructive: "just decency" doesn't require induction into a political discipline.
"It's just decency" can be taken as an attempt to build consensus that ran out of control, precisely because of the dynamics you note.
Now, you could argue that all the democracy-bombing was window dressing and each instance was actually motivated by hard geopolitical and economic interest, but then how do you disprove the same statement about the Commies?
You can't. But this is a realist argument so the out already baked in is that international and domestic politics are different beasts.
Discrimination in sports? Like 73% of the NBA players being black? There are no level playing fields in sports. You can compensate for some genetic advantages (like high testosterone), but then the people who win will simply win through other genetic advantages.
Precisely. If we let everyone play, women would simply be shut out.
Which is why women's sports gives women a place to play that they otherwise wouldn't have, society has decided that 50% of the population being mostly locked out is bad, even if we don't care that Michael Phelps crushes the dreams of all his male competitors daily. There are critiques of Title IX and how it's interpreted wrt what counts as a "sport" but the plain purpose was not to facilitate males destroying the whole point of having female sports.
There's no point in trying to even have a philosophical discussion about which biological advantages society decides counts: what they're doing is just against the law. There's already a law passed to protect women's sports and many universities are simply acting against those rules. That they may feel coerced by a past administration to do it simply says that that administration was also wrong.
If you want to have that debate push for another law and we can have a real discussion on the merits of mixing sports, with a positive case made for this stuff outside of bogus definitional arguments and suicide threats, instead of skin-suiting Title IX and then pushing the burden of proof unto the side that wants to stick to it as it was.
And the "endangering women" thing is even worse. Are there credible accusations of people abusing their trans status to rape or grope women in their protected spaces, above the base rate?
Can you explain your thought process here? Like...why is it that people always go to "a trans person wouldn't abuse their trans status"?
Besides the obvious problems with this, it's a bit akin to saying there's no problem waving through Orthodox Jews in airport security because Jews aren't as likely to do suicide bombings. The point is obviously that weakening the standard allows any bad actor to exploit the situation because trans status isn't exactly based on having completed surgeries now.
This seems self-evident to me. But it is not to a whole swath of people, the question is why we have a gap here.
I was going to suggest that it's caused by priming but OP did say "men in women's spaces" not "transwomen in women's spaces" so I don't even have that explanation.
Tanista
24d ago
People understand it's political. That's why the claim is often that science is always political so you're either for good things or for bad things.
But simply stating "I thought we were on the verge of a thousand year woke reich and would never face consequences (but I certainly would if I defected)" is unflattering.
Tanista
24d ago
The other way to look at it is that the whole thing is so riven with enemy collaborators that you throw a rock in what is ostensibly the field that needs politics the least and the people you hit are also complicit so fuck it, carpet-bombing is called for.
Tanista
27d ago
Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.
The government can bypass the Courts even on issues of fundamental rights. Poilevre threatened this as a way to get round judges blocking penalties for criminals.
So, theoretically, a Canadian PM could come in and just hit ignore every time the judiciary tries to interfere with their immigration law. But this has never happened and I don't even know how people would react if it did.
The politicians are now talking about implementing mandatory minimum sentences in order to fix the problem. My guess is, it won't work.
America ran this experiment. Did it fail?
My impression is that the subversion of the punishment now happens when prosecutors refuse to charge or hold criminals or the law is changed on things like felony shoplifting, not judges failing to deliver the legally mandated minimum.
Tanista
29d ago
Johnson and Pascal do have some chemistry with one another, but as my girlfriend pointed out, it's the chemistry you expect between a girl and her gay best friend, or perhaps a girl and her cool uncle. It was hard for me to believe they were romantically interested in one another, even if it's implied that Pascal's character is significantly older than Johnson's (although probably not quite as much as their IRL age gap of ~15 years).
It's been a while since I saw it but that one I thought was deliberate.
The revelation about his character casts their entire relationship in a different light.
Pascal's character didn't approach her because of chemistry, but for validation.
Tanista
29d ago
I don't know if Chris Evans is a bad actor so much as out of practice. His post MCU run isn't exactly a Pattinson/Radcliffe-style rush to stretch himself.
This is the first real movie I've seen him in since like Knives Out (which he was fine in). The rest has been streaming slop like Ghosted and Gray Man that might as well be AI generated and he could probably do in his sleep.
Tanista
30d ago
A leftist might also argue that shooting first and helping the descent into lawlessness without public buy-in benefits fascists, who already believe in violence and want to discredit the status quo. It's especially bad if Trump already controls the government.
A much less extreme form of trying to play the man (all of the prosecutions, which Democrats do not see as unprovoked) has arguably already backfired.
I tend to perceive progressive strains of liberalism as making the assumption that civilization as they know it is tge default state of humanity and you can’t really destroy it.
This is difficult to square with the constant neuroticism around reactionary enemies who seek to destroy this state or return everyone to a much worse status quo. There's always someone about to put y'all back in chains.
I recognize the quoted section describes a psychological tendency amongst some very sheltered leftists especially, but "you can't destroy what we have" doesn't really fit the hysteria shown by the references to The Handmaid's Tale or - of course - Weimar Germany and the Nazis.
Tanista
30d ago
If you're an anti-natalist who believes that life is inherently suffering this makes sense.
I'm not really sure why you'd be that bothered about it given your own experience. By your own account life can be very good. Seems like you got a good deal here.
You find life "viscerally" valuable, you find the fruits of your society enjoyable enough that you want to be alive for them. You clearly value your civilization and its continued existence. You just don't care if someone younger gets to or at least gets out before it all goes to hell.
I don't see why this would change anything about the pro-natalist/pro-civilization argument. Is it providing new information? This all seems like the prosecution's case being made for it.
People who benefit from a thing but refuse or are unable to care for its continued existence for whatever reason have always existed - usually people assume they're talking to people prosocial enough to not bite that bullet, invested enough in the common good to not benefit from doing so (what if you were twenty years younger and can't count on croaking before it gets really bad?) and agentic enough that they can impact the outcome if they're convinced. And it is also debatable if you can enjoy that standard of living without a concern for fertility.
The standard of living is good across the developed world, by definition, but there are also clear signs of strain due to the aging population. What if you're the one fucking up the math? Live a little too long, run out of money too soon before you croak? Assuming a safety net that isn't there? Your own logic should drive you to care.
Most people really don't think in thousand or even hundred year timescales. They think about what would stop them and their children from losing out on the sorts of fruits you enjoy and that's enough. Their grandchildren can run the same logic, ad infinitum.
They do this for the same reason police in the US write tickets for people going 45 in a 30 instead of 90 in a 55. It's safer, easier, the person going a measly 45 is more likely to comply, and they just don't give a fuck.
I've also heard theories this is a desperate hail mary to game the stats and have more white people committing "sex offenses" since the current stats are so stubbornly brown
I'm fascinated by the fact that people like Jess Philips have no problem talking about misogyny or condemning the more gender egalitarian Western societies but generally but shy away from specifically targeting minority communities (I don't see how this can fit @TwiceHuman's model: if the point is for high status men and women to tamp down on low status behavior why give low status minorities a pass?). The (apparently correct) assumption is that they're the ones that will take it.
It really does seem like a weird displacement thing where you go after the easy cases. The charitable stance is that they go after both in the background but it's rhetorically easier to not get into migrant/brown crime. I don't know how many people in the UK believe that though.
The example I provided was a picture of women in full niqab. My experience with men from countries where niqab is common is that they are often extremely distressed by the comparatively immodest dress of Western women. Traces of that remain in most Western regimes, too, though usually limited to the exposure of genitals (and sometimes breasts) being treated as legitimately "distressing" to display.
I'm pretty sure there was a post here by a frustrated man who didn't appreciate seeing tight gymwear constantly in public. I can't find it now unfortunately but I believe it was well-received or even AAQC.
So apparently not just a Muslim thing.
Modernity for them often means "the consensus of the last couple of decades". Which is how you often get claims that some relatively new understanding or institution is all that stands between people and barbarism. The laws they ignore presumably are from less civilized times.
Makes sense in that light.
Funny, my impression is that it was a drug driven thing. People being high would explain the repetition, the weird descriptions of physical sensations and how long they go.
And I think that would place them on the far end of consumption habits.
Nerds were wrong to enjoy attractive female characters in their videogames, because misogyny, patriarchy, and oppression of women. But at the same time these nerds were two clicks away from the most graphic hardcore pornography that has ever existed.
You can't do much about porn, it's too low status and ubiquitous. People already think it's low status so trying to make it more so is just a waste of energy . And you can't "improve" it because the rubber really meets the road there. (Same reasons the current backlash to porn is irrelevant if you don't pull a UK. It was rape to feminists in the past, 'cool' or at least accepted at some point, and is now being seen more negatively by feminists. People who consumed did so regardless)
You can however do something about nerds and what they're liking in public. Since sff media became mainstream and arguably took over the box office in the 2010s, people have an incentive and levers to fight those battles.
Tanista
1mo ago
But the black UFC ring girls pass it.
Those are for guys, like Sweeney.
Zendaya clearly isn't unattractive, but she seems to get a lot of admiration from women and red carpet watchers for how she glams up rather than raw sex appeal.
The goblins are allegedly Jewish caricatures. A lot of the bits of evidence that are brought up - like a Star of David on the floor of Gringotts - are either coincidences or issues caused by the adaptation (the location they were filming in had them already).
On the other hand, they do run the banks, hounded at least one person in canon over debts and do have a different understanding of property (anything wrought by goblins is seen as only leased for the lifetime of the wizard who bought it which...you can see how that could lead to misunderstandings) that leads to at least one goblin betraying the team for treasure.
A lot of stuff in these movies are like this, reused badly or inexplicably. Even down to Holdo's Leia-style costuming frankly. Leia dressed that way in ANH because she was still undercover in the Senate, still a princess. Why does Holdo dress like that during open warfare?
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