Tanista
1yr ago
Just out of curiosity, which of those two buckets do you feel "don't ask enemies for political help" and "avoid calling elections rigged" each fall into?
From what I recall from the stories it was an almost childish form of 'seeking permission'. Basically he seemed to spring it fast and then, if no one immediately and vociferously objected, he...um, quickly followed through.
The image that comes to mind is an overeager kid going "umcanIkissyou" and then "but you didn't say no!".
My opinion is that it's the sort of defense ("but he asked!") that only seems acceptable when all norms except consent have been so eroded (by the sexual revolution and the same tribe now pushing #MeToo) that only the barest, hyper-literal contractionism counts.
At this point liberal feminism has so thoroughly corrupted shaped mores that it's fighting its own twisted children.
Tanista
1yr ago
Which one is more likely to give a dishonest review for financial reasons?
Not a fair comparison, since critics are the only side in this comparison likely to get significant financial pay for attaching their name to a corrupted review.
As silly as I find the isolated demands for rigor in terms of which audience ratings we take seriously, the faceless internet mob has shown itself incredibly willing to put out corruptive "reviews" at will too, for basically free. If anything they don't even count as "reviews" since they happen before the work is revealed.
So you're correct, but it may not mean what you think :)
This seems like an odd response given my demonstration that it was election denial from the Democrats that was the serious political defection of 2016.
Democrats pushed Russiagate after they lost cause they hated Trump. But they hated Trump because...? That is a question people are trying to answer and I was touching on.
Trump offended the sensibilities of left-wingers, obviously - which sometimes gets coded as a "threat to democracy"*. I think though that certain things like asking Russia or especially raising the specter of contesting the election was a red rag.
Trump saying "I'll accept the election...if I win" was probably a funny response to hysterics in his base's eyes. I legitimately think it scared and then enraged Democrats - precisely because there were no consequences.
Honestly I think Trump's Twitter belligerence does far more to distinguish him from (most of) his opponents
It's all of a piece.
Trump's narcissism is why he can't stay off Twitter and be "dignified" (which offends sensibilities) but also why he can't just take the loss (any loss - which leads to problematic places)
I really do suspect he's a symptom rather than a cause
I tend not to believe in Great Man theory but Trump is the biggest counter-example that gives me pause. I do think a lot of the situation (e.g. polarization and the risk that a radical can capture the party as a result of combining that with primaries, discontent with the economic and cultural consensus) were built in but Trump's particular character and nature shapes how everything turned out.
For example: a different candidate might have just folded and went into obscurity when they lost, especially if pressured by power players (look at how Ted Cruz couldn't make even a token stand against Trump).
A political entrepreneur might have realized that they could push the issue and win points from their base eventually but it feels like Trump has the exact right personality type to push things past what even his fellow Republicans thought he can get away with it (they criticized him for a lot of moves that either worked or at least weren't fatal). Either he's a political savant (of the idiot variety or not) or his narcissism dovetails really well with the polarized climate.
* See anything smeared as "populist".
Russia is not entitled to USSR-sized sphere of influence.
It's doubtful that's what they were going for. Eastern Ukraine? Probably. Getting to USSR levels?
This "as Ukraine goes, so does Europe" is a talking point by hawks to try to leverage the domino theory instincts from the Cold War* so Americans can pay the price (at least in ammo, not blood this time) for a nation that most of them previously couldn't find on the map.
* In this case justified by the psychologization of the Russian imperatives as a product of Putin's particular feeling of humiliation at the end of the USSR rather than justified via the evangelical nature of communism.
Tanista
1yr ago
punishment
Which is the party of "tough on crime"?
If I were to blame the Right's ideology for this I think the better scapegoat is the right wing's predilection to be more pro-business and anti-regulation.
Wokeness is, after all, a regulatory regime.
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.
But they are there people
They won't take them. What can we expect? They're not of the "civilized world"!
But Israelis are your people. Your struggles are their struggles, their struggles are your struggles. This really is the neatest possible solution. As the article points out: they've tried other things (including allowing an election that led to Hamas, on the behest of their allies) and it hasn't worked. If everyone is standing shoulder to shoulder against barbarism, think how dire the straits had to be (or how limited the downsides to allies with more demographic inertia) for them to suggest this.
Tanista
11mo ago
More likely you get another wave of overcorrecting tough on crime bills and a trail of political careers ruined by the latest version of Willie Horton.
As Battlestar Galactica tells us:"all of this has happened before and will happen again"
Tanista
1yr ago
talking like a dweeb
Maybe he just is a dweeb? He's shown himself to be thin-skinned and frankly pathetic on other occasions (accusing a guy of being a pedophile for criticizing his suggestions)
The "RL Tony Stark" image only held when he kept his mouth shut.
It's just that it would be silly to judge the entire town as deplorable because those things happened.
Not if you want a casus belli to force toxic compassion unto it.
Tanista
5mo ago
Why is 'groomer' a bad word to them?
It's historically been an effective weapon against advocacy for gay people. Activist PTSD?
Tanista
5mo ago
If Christianity is not true then I don't care about what kind of record it has at encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions.
That is a value judgment (arguably a very Christian one) you're entitled to make. It's not just a fact.
I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.
I'd prefer a non-deluded, rational secular humanism where we dispense with all superstitions and life is improved in every way by it, as was promised to me by Dawkins and Harris (PBUT) at a formative point in my teens.
But I'm no longer certain that truth and value are the same (especially when it comes to an individual life). And I'm not sure that option is available. What I see in that clip are dueling "delusions", except one has a longer track record of encouraging kids and pro-social behavior.
Tanista
6mo ago
A movement can start with a few people it has to have a living intellectual tradition or a way of life or unified purpose.
The New Atheists, in terms of beliefs, were not meaningfully separate from the ratskeps that preceded them/overlapped with them (is Matt Dillahunty a New Atheist?) and almost none of their stuff was really original nor did it create any sort of succeeding tradition imo. Atheism wasn't really even the central intellectual focus of most of them. Dawkins and Dennett had distinct and successful careers out of that and even Harris, who may have been the least prominent in his field before the association, admits he finds "atheism" a very limiting box. I don't think any of them have really engaged with any responses to them on the topic in further publications?
And, in terms of a movement to create a way of life, I don't know if I can say they utterly failed because they didn't really try. It's pretty telling that one of the moments of tension (Elevatorgate) led to an attempt to create a more substantive political philosophy for left-wing atheists and it didn't come from them.
Four people just happened to write books when the Anglo world was secularizing/dealing with 9/11 and so someone came up with a pithy title and then people tried to make it bigger than it is. Like if there were a couple of (very different) hot Indian directors and someone coined "New Bollywood" and everyone kept trying to make it more of a thing than it was. The BRICS of atheism.
I guess she is saying that Western society needs some real spiritual belief to unite it against its enemies, but I don't see how one could manufacture such a belief on a mass scale
She doesn't think you can, which is why she abandoned secular humanism and New Atheism (which was very optimistic about how easy it is to do so). The point is to try to regenerate the old one. I think it's likely impossible too but it's a better bet.
Part of what makes Western modernity good is the respect for truth as opposed to belief
There're plenty of illusions in modern "rational" Western society too. Maybe it's pick your poison, because "a spectacularly unsuccessful Jewish agitator is looking out for you in heaven" as a belief system - at least the liberal version - is less worrisome than some of the secular nonsense I've seen.
I'd have expected to wuss out under globohomo pressure
The end of the end of history may have been greatly exaggerated. Even the one militarist ethonationalist state Westerners can vicariously live through is getting cucked.
and make it known to the Palestinians that there is nothing they can ever do which would make the Israelis leave, so they better get used to a life with the Jews in charge
If Israel cannot easily go into Gaza after Jews were murdered and raped on live TV, they're not going to be able to do what it takes to "convince" Palestinians (or at least Hamas) to "get over it".
But I can see an occupation quickly convincing Israel it isn't worth it, while convincing (more) Muslims that it is very much is to fight Israel.
Why Robinson decided to interview Rufo is beyond me
Cause if you don't Rufo will go around insisting that the Left isn't willing to have a discussion.
Tanista
9mo ago
Regime stability is nearly always prioritized over ideology
Or AA was the regime stabilizer. It would have been very awkward for elite institutions to remain vastly white while the rest of the country was supposed to be "reckoning with race".
EDIT: It also bought off the most enterprising black elites. Inside the tent, pissing out and all.
Tanista
11mo ago
Some trans people would argue that such a “cure” would fundamentally change who they are as a person
So would cochlear implants. It hasn't posed a significant moral problem for us I think.
It is only a problem if you buy into the idea that an illness or deficiency has the same value as the natural functioning of the body. But that is putting the cart before the horse.
Given that transpeople are claiming that their dysphoria makes them suffer so significantly that care is mandated and most of their gains have been based on a mostly pragmatic desire to avoid this suffering they have less room here than many - e.g. homosexuals - to complain.
That's not going to happen. If the trans side loses the whole thing is getting memory holed
Might be naive, but I don't think things like that can get memory-holed.
The fucking President met with Dylan Mulvaney, on HD video, visible from the little clairvoyant in everyone's pocket. It's over.
Tanista
1yr ago
Point two is the psyop potential we are giving the CCP. I'm not sure they have the competency to actually do anything meaningful to us, but it is a fair concern for the future. But what can they do to us that we haven't done to ourselves in the past 8 years, exactly?
This is a brush-off, not an answer.
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Even if I bit the bullet that TikTok is only as bad as the worst US social media site, there's still an argument for US citizens preferring to not have it, because US sites are at least forced to be more responsive to US concerns.
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Socially negligent and corrosive messages spread for profit are bad. It may be worse to have a peer rival doing the same thing to you for strategic reasons - presumably at moments pivotal to strategic competition.
Tanista
1yr ago
What does "regulat[ing] [the] negative characteristics" for dating, social norms, porn, or video games look like in a way that is compatible with liberalism?
Ban porn or heavily restrict access on the grounds of it being obscene or a harm to children.
Obviously, this is problematic in the view of many liberals today but more onerous and socially damaging restrictions can and have been imposed in the long reign of the ideology.
At worst, it's a constitutional amendment away.
I personally think - if collapse happens* - there's more long-range factors like the exhaustion of any tradition that balances out liberalism (which Western liberal democracy has had for most of its existence) and the total failure to solve the fertility problem (another atypical situation) to blame. New territory.
But yeah, TikTok & social media in general add their own drag here.
Of course, a final argument - or rather question- can be raised: and? Yes, defying the naysayers for "more than a century" is good but we're not talking about Coptic Christians saying "this too shall pass" about the Muslim conquerors are we? The Soviet Union lasted from the 20s to the 90s while facing seriously challenges (to say the least) and the most powerful nation to ever exist.
* Clearly some forms of degeneracy (e.g. mass obesity) have proliferated.
Except it wasn't the opposition's standards - at least not on election denialism. The difference between that and "being racist" by wanting to deport people is vast.
The idea of accepting election results was uncontroversial on both sides until Trump talked. The benefits of polarization.
Hell, the Dominion lawsuit revealed that, even within Fox, people who didn't excoriate him in public were dubious but worried about their audience.
But I guess they were also playing by Democrat standards?
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