The Don Lemon one was clearly on the cards as soon as stories started showing up about a hostile work environment and past drama with female cohosts. IMO that was the company generating a pretext justification to fire him.
As for going to CNN: Megyn Kelly - who had "One of the Good Conservatives" points for standing up to Trump - failed utterly. (I remember being sad about it because it basically meant there was no mainstream offramp from Fox for any conservative commentator).
She might have done better had Trump lost. Liberals weren't in the mood for bipartisanship and Cons were looking to get SCOTUS seats and had no interest in traitors. Another career ruined by 45.
Tucker is way more entangled with Trump than Kelly. CNN viewers would mostly peacefully protest.
EDIT: Slight word change.
Claims that "cancel culture doesn't exist because this particular, highly , highly talented and famous person escaped our wrath" are, imo, just obfuscation.
Akin to saying "homophobia doesn't exist cause this one rich gay Hollywood Jew in the 60s got away with it"; it changes absolutely nothing about the claim being made about society.
This is a common line of argument with JK Rowling and the bad faith is most evident there: trying and failing is not the same as not trying or being globally ineffective. They absolutely would have cancelled her if they could; she's simply a once-in-a-generation celebrity.
What there is something hellishly dystopian about, is that the very same people who demand you fulfill your duties to the nation, are working tirelessly to abolish the very idea of there being a nation to start with.
Well, there is an argument that what's really being fought for here is not a nation but a federation. Ukraine gives the West/the EU something to rally around, and someone (the European nation most hostile to their vision) to rally against.
So, from the perspective of non-Ukrainians, it may not be incoherent. Ukraine's right to self-determination is important because they chose to join the great melding, and freedom is worth dying for.
The Ukrainians on the ground can fight for some specific, blood-and-soil concept of Ukraine if they want.
"Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race...HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.
I think these are the sorts of things Westerners say because they have an atypically low focus on group honor. No man is an island, we all have a tribe and that tribe and its success matters.
"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters. Both in that the first affects individuals and that we can easily see it being otherwise. We know how to vaccinate groups, we don't know how to raise IQ.
All of this Coleman Hughes "focus on individuals" stuff is essentially an ameliorative tactic to save individualism and group agnosticism, but that only makes sense if groups are the broadly same. As the dissident right joke goes: "individualism and freedom for all (* obviously for 130 IQ Anglos)". On this view, "equality" and not caring about groups works because they just assumed power would be limited to those capable of handling it. And then everyone forgot range restriction and became optimists.
Once we actually accept that blacks can't be "130 IQ Anglos" all sorts of group judgments can flow from this that should concern any individual. For example: I'm African (my post history goes back so I can't be accused of being a troll - and you can probably find me on reddit with minimal effort too tbh). There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds. That argument has historically worked against me (which is why Western nations mainly took white people and didn't even consider African migration) and may again, if people come to believe it again.
Am I supposed to go "well, as an individual, this is not my concern"? Are my opponents supposed to say "oh, okay then"? I cannot escape my race except under the very system HBD destroys.
It's "bad sh*t" from a female point of view because it makes average women look unattractive in comparison.
If women stated that the issue was avoiding runaway intrasexual competition it'd be one thing.
But that's not what they say. They say it's bad as such, immoral. Some feminists will even draw a line between this "objectification" and actual violence.
So, I read a breakdown of the SEC complaint (Original PDF)
Someone was asking if Wang and Singh should go down too...and based on this claim of SBF spreading the money via loans to all of them...yes
67 The FTX funds transferred to Alameda were used not only for Alameda’s proprietary trading, but also to fund loans to FTX executives, including Bankman-Fried himself, and to fund personal real estate purchases. Between March 2020 and September 2022, Bankman-Fried executed promissory notes for loans from Alameda totaling more than $1.338 billion, including two instances in which Bankman-Fried was both the borrower in his individual capacity and the lender in his capacity as CEO of Alameda.
68 Bankman-Fried also used commingled funds from Alameda to make large political donations and to purchase tens of millions of dollars in Bahamian real estate for himself, his parents, and other FTX executives. Singh and Wang also borrowed $554 million and $224.7 million, respectively, by executing promissory notes with Alameda in 2021 and 2022.
Wang, Singh, hell, his parents (who he put in this position. Can't imagine...)
No wonder SBF said Singh felt "ashamed and guilty" (not content to snitch on himself!) in the Vox interview.
Speaking of snitching: his own comments are cited, as everyone thought:
As Bankman-Fried acknowledged in a network television interview on or about December 1, 2022: “I wasn’t even trying, like, I wasn’t spending any time or effort trying to manage risk on FTX.” Bankman-Fried continued: “What happened, happened—and, if I had been spending an hour a day thinking about risk management on FTX, I don’t think that would have happened.”
Maybe his opinions on the trans thing are less unpopular than the screeching media wants you to think. Or even: they screech precisely so no one can sit and have a sober moment to reflect how popular this opinion is. Instead the hope is that the media cacophony is loud enough to convince you it isn't and so you get cowed into silence.
Bro, if you're miserable and struggling in life I don't know why you think cheating in school would have changed that.
There's plenty of potential reasons?
The most obvious being that he might have been on the bubble in his degree and cheating could have given him the marginal boost he needed..
But it's almost certainly not the case that if you had cheated in school things would magically have worked out better for you.
"Things" in some totalizing sense, maybe not. Central life moments? Maybe yes.
Because then you would have compromised your integrity, which is far more valuable than any material gains ever could be.
I mean, for someone who criticizes the OP for making bad or unbacked claims about how things would work out...you seem to be making one yourself.
I find this far more unintuitive and convenient than OP's assumptions.
People violate ethics all the time and prosper. There's no evidence that pristine integrity is actually of some overriding practical value (or morality would just be pragmatism)
In fact, if anything, life is about knowing which ethical lapses to accept (often those that burden strangers rather than the in-group)
This whole thing is almost too perfect.
I don't know how to describe it other than I can almost feel the beats in Adam Mackay's inevitable film with every new headline.
People have really summed up the issue with the guy; he really does sound like he's playing Paradox grand strategy games with actual grand strategy.
With Nixon and Monroe firmly in hand, we can now move into application. Let us start with our great power rival, China, and the jewel of their near-abroad, Taiwan. We have operated in strategic ambiguity with regard to Taiwan for far too long. I will move to strategic clarity, by which I mean that China must understand that I will defend American interests in Taiwan. If Taiwan wants any partnership in their defense, then they will need to raise their defense spending and military readiness to acceptable levels. Meanwhile, I will commit to making sure Taiwan has the weapons they need for that defense, both from a sea-borne invasion, and in future, for a long-term insurgency against any occupying foreign force, if needed.
Vivek has publicly said that he's going to tell China "we'll defend Taiwan until we get semiconductor independence". Which...I guess everyone is supposed to take well?
Can we consider one potential consequence of telling Taiwan that the US will defend them right now (against an enemy that continually states it'll declare war if Taiwan ever tries for independence) while also promising to throw them under the bus as soon as the US is sufficiently diversified?
In Paradox-land, only the player has agency so it isn't that big a deal. People are less cooperative.
Tanista
1yr ago
It might be a basic human need...but is it better to be alone, or to marry and have children...only to find that your wife tried to kill one of them? Or to be with an abusive alcoholic? All of these things suck: are relationships truly the least bad option here?
Obviously most people don't go into it and get that binary choice between a potential relationship and a baby killer. You might as well ask if it's worth driving if a semi might crumple your vehicle.
And, yes, our psychology is tilted such that we are broadly driven to downplaying those risks (some of which, like matricide, are relatively small here) and driven to be less satisfied with a parlous social network. Precisely because the benefits are manifold.'
I'm not sure what Dreher's Law is
The Law Of Merited Impossibility
The Law Of Merited Impossibility is an epistemological construct governing the paradoxical way overclass opinion makers frame the discourse about the clash between religious liberty and gay civil rights. It is best summed up by the phrase, “It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.”
There are popular formulations that make it less specific to gay marriage like "that'll never happen but, when it does, you bigots will deserve it/it'll be good".
In this case, we've seen the absolute refusal to grant any potential downsides like this specific scenario, until it happened.
I wouldn't say it's completely out of the woods
Neither would I. To be frank: even having this discussion at all seems like a sign of vast confusion, in multiple domains.
But, while I did start to write a "Dreher's Law strikes again?" post I think it's fair to note that the worst didn't happen...yet. While pointing out that it still could.
Tanista
1yr ago
In an ideal world you could show up to court in a clown suit and not have it affect the outcome
You can make the argument backwards: that is because we insist on a much more stringent set of grounds for judgement in courtrooms.
We do not in the rest of our lives. So, by this logic, it's actually more justifiable to discriminate against Brinton for his behavior outside of court, given it represents a flouting of social norms in a way that he can clearly restrain himself from if he feels it's in his interests.
Tanista
1yr ago
the right views the "status quo ante" of Roe v. Wade as being premised on illegitimate grounds
Not just the Right, frankly.
Legal theorists on the other side have criticized the grounds for Roe.
The difference is that the Left obviously has a pragmatic incentive to maintain it and many feel like the outcome was right, if not the reasoning.
No reason why a conservative would adopt that position so, to them, the problems are disqualifying.
Certainly it's just an empirical fact that Roe wiped out a bunch of anti-abortion laws across dozens of states. The fact that it took this long for the GOP to respond effectively doesn't mean that that wasn't an attack. If you are defensive only insofar as you've pulled off a Pearl Harbor-like legal coup, you're not really defensive imo.
It's ironic to see free speech warriors pulling the same move the wokes do: yes, we're for free speech however some things just can't be tolerated but are still being defended as speech so we're going to use the "incitement to violence/harassment is not protected speech" exception.
Let's wait and see if it takes on the utterly stretched, mutilated character "danger" has in woke discourse as the need for exceptions grows.
So, how do you refresh your memory of the books you've read? Do you have a set process or use a third party app?
What makes you think that CZ isn't himself a fraudster?
CZ sent texts to SBF complaining about him selling 250K of Tether and how it might cause a depeg. If Tether has a $60billion market cap and people redeem all the time and it wasn't fraudulent (as it almost certainly is) then why does CZ think $250K would seriously impact it?
Beyond that: why is he even texting a competitor about his specific trades?
Beyond even that: after what happened with FTX CZ and everyone else in the crypto space has an incentive to appear transparent, yet he refused to do an actual grown-up audit.
Instead, like FTX and Tether (again: two almost certainly fraudulent things) he basically circles back round to "take our word (or this random attestation that isn't an audit) for it". I believe this is cause he can't, just like SBF (who also reassured everyone hoping to avoid a bank run). I think it's the same scenario playing out in slow motion.
tl;dr: I think they're all crooks and CZ stabbed SBF mainly due to SBF trying to amass political power and throwing shots at Binance/CZ with it. It was imperial court intrigue, not altruism. I think they're all playing the same game (except maybe Coinbase, which iirc is public and thus regulated) so I'm not surprised that CZ was able to "expose" SBF. SBF's problem was just hubris in breaking the code among thieves.
Tanista
1yr ago
International Culture War: Seven European World Cup captains ditch One Love arm band under FIFA pressure
So basically: European countries decide on a face-saving, performative gesture while still going to the Qatar World Cup, despite it being a more repressive, anti-LGBT country.
Then, when they actually get to Qatar, FIFA - I guess to stay on the right side of Qatar and any future traditionalist cultures that want to bid for a World Cup- pulls the rug out from under them and starts threatening sporting sanctions if they do wear a "one love" arm band, turning it into an actually meaningful symbol of defiance if they do wear it.
They don't though, they fold.
"As national federations, we can’t put our players in a position where they could face sporting sanctions including bookings, so we have asked the captains not to attempt to wear the armbands in FIFA World Cup games."
I guess I shouldn't be shocked; they folded when they went so why not fold again? But I am a bit surprised that they weren't even allowed this irrelevant gesture, and by how far FIFA is apparently going to help its patrons.
Well, this is the sort of thing we should expect from an exchange in culture (which everyone keeps telling us will enrich us). What did they expect? That it would always go one way and globalization meant that everyone would inevitably fold to all Western moral presumptions? It's a highway, not a one-way street. Moneyed Third-Worlders will push back to maintain their ways.
Tanista
1mo ago
OP does go on to say:
Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.
Seems to me the argument is not circular, just compact: without a concrete definition of man and woman, there is nothing to be "trans" in comparison to.
This sort of argument is not new - a common variant is to argue that trans and non-binary are inherently in tension for this reason.
Tanista
6mo ago
You'd think being a very immigration friendly nation would prevent blood and soil rhetoric like:
"It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around."
But apparently not for all groups. I guess the brown "occupiers" just stay out of this stuff?
The dating market is more competitive for men than for women; women are far more selective than men about sex partners. Imagine an attractive person of the opposite sex walking up to you on a college campus and saying, “Hi, I’ve been noticing you around town lately, and I fnd you very attractive. Would you have sex with me?” How would you respond? If you are like 100 percent of the women in one study, you would give an emphatic no. You might be ofended, insulted, or just plain puzzled by the request. But if you are like the men in that study, the odds are good that you would say yes— as did 75 percent of those men (Clarke & Hatfeld, 1989). As a man, you would most likely be flattered by the request.
I'm sympathetic enough to the general post that I actually want someone to debunk it (I've swung a little too hard towards Caplan and Hanania on this I feel) but this seems like the weakest point.
This can easily be put down to evolved sex differences: women have more risks and less benefits from casual sex..
See, this is actually the argument for feminism: why should men's internal experience and preference be the standard here?
There's a very common notion in class-first left-wing circles that identity politics sharply ticked up right after Occupy Wall Street in order to keep people divided and away from actually threatening things (the stronger version of this is that it was deliberately coordinated)
Has anyone run into an actual attempt to prove or disprove this with data? (Besides that one chart of NYT's mentions of 'isms' going up)
Tanista
1yr ago
I see him get called out for straw-manning & being a bad-faith actor, but his videos pretty much come across as a 'fight fire with fire' approach. The worst things people have to say about him, also apply to his ideological opponents.
It's funny that I see a lot of criticism of him from other people who also criticize wokeness in the same way.
I think significant portion of those critics* are those who broadly agree with his ideological opponents except on a few issues or tactics and therefore are obliged to hate Rufo for working with The Enemy, even though that's basically the only way to achieve anything when one of two political parties is totally opposed to your positions.
Truth be told, there's a class of homeless leftists who I think are a) jealous that he can have an impact, b) have been browbeaten into ineffectiveness by the constant leftist smear that they're further right than they are and, unlike Rufo, aren't willing to bite the bullet and c) scared that by doing so he's empowering the right wing to achieve their other ends (e.g. weakening public schooling)
Ultimately, they're politically irrelevant, clinging on to some self-serving, slave morality definition of "good faith" in spite of its inertness on a policy level. I can see why they're resentful; they can't work with Republicans cause that's a no-no in today's polarized world, but their own side has cast them out as witches. Meanwhile Rufo is using all of their critiques** and winning.
* We know why his direct opponents don't care for consistency.
** I remember Katie Herzog being furious when Rufo (rightly) responded to a trans-skeptical feminist's accusation that he was appropriating their arguments without giving respect by pointing out that the feminists had either totally failed to hold the line on gender identity issues or had actively abetted the problematization of their own hard-fought privileges and so didn't deserve much respect anyway. Having the argument means nothing if you constantly lose or fold; Rufo was going to have to come up with the central piece -winning- on his own anyway, so it's a bit much to demand laurels.
Kanye was saying that 400 years of slavery is a choice, not that chattel slavery was. 400 years leads up to today. He's saying that people are mental slaves today, and you can choose to set your mind free.
Your steelman captures half of his point I think:
“[T]o make myself clear. Of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will. My point is for us to have stayed in that position even though the numbers were on our side means that we were mentally enslaved.”
“[T]he reason why I brought up the 400 years point is because we can’t be mentally imprisoned for another 400 years. We need free thought now. Even the statement was an example of free thought. It was just an idea. [O]nce again I am being attacked for presenting new ideas.” [I've seen this mocked but I never knew someone actually said this lol]
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/01/entertainment/kanye-west-slavery-choice-trnd
It seems to me that he actually is saying that black people hanging around as slaves was a result of "mental enslavement." And that this enslavement continues today.
Which seems like something that is either true in a banal sense (if you are facing a larger and more technologically advanced civilization that will brutalize you for trying to escape are you "mentally enslaved" in any way similar to what we face today? Or are you just enslaved*) or just outright stupid (said technologically superior foe literally publicly mangling you if you try to leave makes it not a choice)
It wouldn't surprise me if Kanye actually had the quotes you're thinking of in mind and then jumbled it together with a bunch of whatever's flying in his head and gave us...this. The man is talented but he's an ultracrepidarian narcissist who seems to want to be recognized as an iconoclast who goes around saying insightful things but doesn't want to put in the work, so he settles for saying provocative things and then sees the negative attention as weirdly validating.
Anyways, I think the root of this is that black people moving up in society start 'noticing' how many Jews there are at the top.
I mean, this isn't specific to black people. Everyone notices this.
I think the problem for black people is the radfem problem: Radfems were allowed to say all sorts of crazy shit about men by their side. Then transwomen came along. And they just...continued to say crazy shit about men (why would they change when their target hasn't?) but then had to learn very fast that not all men are equal.
Black people are given somewhat of a pass for saying crazy things about white people and have gotten accustomed to it (some of the things they say about whites are similarly deranged or weird). They look around and see a group of affluent whites and naturally start applying the same logic. This is, of course, a no-go. Not only is antisemitism a third rail but, if we're being cynical, there are benefits to claiming to be an oppressed minority (even when affluent) and so people are naturally defensive of someone trying to strip them of their cloak of victimhood in a country where it's currency.
Beyond that: can we just say that they picked it up from around them? Islam and Christianity both have had problems with Judaism, to say nothing of general antisemitism floating around and black people aren't an island.
* The gulf in tech between Rome and the leaders of the Servile Wars was infinitesimal in comparison yet no slave revolt succeeded and, in fact, Romans never suffered another one after Spartacus. A simple explanation is that it's just hard to pull off, especially without external help.
I think it's a combination of arrogance and general "Prequels PTSD"'.
The arrogance is not just in Iger rushing it to have it out in his time. It's also in the fact that the people on the A-side - the movies - just didn't give a shit about any of this. Joss Whedon admitted as much about the original MCU shows like Agents of Shield. They're lower budget fanfiction that just interfere with their canon (which is the real canon) and may confuse fans but they have to pretend to indulge because some nerds buy the tie-ins. In that way, they treat it much like Lucas did. They just didn't care. Especially since there's just so much you can point to to shit on the EU.
The second thing is that basically everyone old enough to work on these films either hates the Prequels or remembers the absolute, wall-to-wall hate the Prequels got. Simon Pegg is a friend of Abrams and look how he talks about them in an otherwise diplomatic industry.
But people disagree on what exactly was bad about the Prequels. As someone who grew up with them I hated the dialogue and characterization. I was not only fine with but loved the Republic era - plenty of us found some quality in the games, books or The Clone Wars show even if we agreed with the criticisms of the mainline films.
The message Disney apparently took was that they were bad in their essence: people didn't just hate the prequels cause of bad execution, they hated the idea. What everyone wanted more OT-like stuff, fewer Jedi, less of a Republic, more Empire v. Rebels, less shiny CGI Coruscant so give them a ton of that, at least at the start. Well, that led to the derivative mess we got and the insistence on movies like Rogue One and Solo which all stayed in the very safe "post-Revenge of the Sith, pre-A New Hope" space.
Which would have perhaps been survivable (The Force Awakens made too much money) but the rush meant no ability to plan for a coherent trilogy and each movie not only pissed off fans of anything original, it even pissed off fans of the previous movie.
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