Broadly I have concluded that the main problem the US faces is racism towards the Chinese; the ill-earned sense of centrality and irreplaceability.
My thesis is that in picking this fight, Americans don't understand that they're actually not that big of a deal. Unfortunately, their delusions are globally shared and become reality in their own right. But perhaps not enough to offset the gross physical one.
People do keep pointing out that Trump has had this fixation with tariffs and the US being screwed by the world for so long that Japan was his original target.
I have wondered if he simply slid China into that same niche and never updated anything else.
This whole thing is demented but if you imagine Trump is still in the 80s or 90s in his head fighting the trade war he never got to fight then, it makes a bit more sense.
It’s been apparent to me for years and years that the vast, vast majority of opponents to Trump & Trumpism have little to no theory of mind when it comes to their political enemies.
This is true but Trump also just has a personality cult.
Trump drags the party to where he is, based on his own idiosyncrasies. It's not just Democrats who failed to fully account for this. The entire Bulwark-class of the GOP are outsiders now for a reason. Many Republicans took stances against Trump only for him to double down and forcibly bend the base and party to him (he was attacked for the Access Hollywood tape in a way that seems far less likely today for people who want to stay in the party).
The number of people who think Canada is an enemy has risen...purely amongst Republicans. If you had asked people before the election about it, they would hardly have cared. I've seen even skeptical media figures (who're presumably more invested in politics) suddenly start caring about Canada and a trade deficit they never mentioned as a meaningful Trump priority beforehand.
Trump flips on TikTok? No issue. How exactly do his stated plans for Gaza fit in with the "no wars, no foreign entanglements" thing? We'll figure it out.
Part of it is that your enemies exist in a bubble but part of it is also that the most mercurial man in politics is the only one with a bully pulpit and ability to swing his base apparently.
Tanista
1mo ago
Why do you think it would go worse than expected for a casualty-insensitive modern military facing an enemy it totally outclasses and a hostage population?
Cause, in the recent cases of Western militaries tangling with such groups that come to mind, those foes have things (friendly geography, the ability to cross into a nuclear-armed Pakistan of dubious reliability) that Gazans simply don't.
Tanista
2mo ago
How much of it is just that people want to unabashedly discuss and analyze mainstream/progressive works?
Again you can disagree with them from a categorical perspective. But the fact still remains that people are doing it.
You're making a normative claim that understanding the trans position on the "wrong" puberty strengthens the activist case.
You cannot now pull back to the empirical fact that trans people exist when someone challenges that.
Updating something from 1937 isn't impossible or a bad thing, but they should have put a muzzle on Zegler. Add in the delays and the unforced errors about replacing the Seven Dwarves with the Seven Persons Experiencing Unhousedness (who now turn out to be the merry band of thieves in the forest led by the prince who is no longer a prince but a bandit chief this time round) and then having to bring back the dwarves with poor-looking CGI, and you get a mess. EDIT: I also heard that the climactic battle is anti-climactic? Originally it was supposed to be Snow White and Evil Queen going toe-to-toe, but now she just falls off a cliff or something?
Seems like the main problem then was on the production side at Disney and Zegler was mostly just mirroring their energy. The ambivalence-at-best towards the source material seems to come from the top.
I don't think her inability to shut her mouth is good - why would you bring in Palestine on what's an already fraught campaign? - but Disney made multiple inexplicable decisions that not only apparently harmed the movie but ballooned the budget to the point it was far less likely to make its money back even had the changes worked. And now they're leaking that Zegler's big mouth put them in this mess to shift the blame.
Tanista
1mo ago
I guess the difference is that I'm skeptical that black victimhood really is a central plank to Blue ideology. My perception is that the central plank in Blue ideology is the belief that they are capable of an arbitrary level of control over material reality, that they have the power to make the world as they wish it to be.
What justifies the violations of freedom that allow that material control?
America has a liberal counter-narrative to totalitarian optimism, in theory. It's supposed to have much stronger protections than even many other liberal nations. One wedge that allows the defeat of defense mechanisms like freedom of association or federalism and hell, just even entry level noticing about transgender athletes is the condition of African Americans, to an actively uncomfortable degree ("black women would suffer more from attempting to police femininity" is a take that would be considered Stormfront-tier by SJWs if it wasn't SJWs saying it).
The Civil Rights movement is still considered an important enough pillar to base all of these arguments on (or the laws extending these protections to more and more people) and any modern attack on freedom is justified on the grounds that those values were already attacked during the CRM, and this is universally considered to be the right thing.
And the more that gets stacked on it, the harder to default.
It's the wedge they have, and it's been very effective.
Nothing about this entrenched ignorance seems accidental. Some seed was planted that caused him to recoil from any confounding evidence.
Yeah, I suppose it's more noble to blame your neurodivergence and a hermetically sealed bubble but, speaking from personal experience, it really is just this. People treat disconfirming evidence on certain subjects like touching the proverbial poo. There's really no profit in doing so and plenty of social risk.
There was nothing magically convincing about new atheists or biblical scholars when I was 18 rather than 15. In one case, I simply counted myself amongst the religious and didn't approach the fence or ask myself obvious questions (like why the sports were sex-segregated in the first place) and, in the other, I was more independent and chose to do so.
Now, I may be wrong now but I can't blame my past position on ignorance just happening to me. I knew what I was doing when I simply refused to read certain things.
I don't think it is a huge problem for the idea that society can put us in a place to believe false things since people will do this semi-reliably with a little prompting. Though I suppose it may be embarrassing for a rationalist.
Tanista
1mo ago
Yes. Inasmuch as anyone at Columbia actually believes that this is tyranny, they should be willing to let the institution's current incarnation collapse before they give in.
Or you recognize that Trumpism may be temporary and letting him destroy Columbia before that would be useless or counterproductive since institutions like that will be needed come the counter-counter-revolution.
I grant it's totally hypocritical if you think there's an active genocide though.
Tanista
1mo ago
The entire history of the debate around wokeness: "Everyone is folding to wokeness, all the time. That's weird"
But also "so-and-so folded because he, specifically, is a pussy".
It's funny that even reversing the dynamic in favor of antiwokes doesn't change the assumption.
and possibly yet another political dynasty scalp Donald Trump may claim.
He didn't really do much. Trudeau is dead for the same reason a lot of centrist-but-for-migration parties are dead: people don't like the economy or the rise in migration. While we can argue about Biden, I don't think the UK Tories or Canada Liberals were acting out of TDS and the unpopularity was baked in before Trump won.
The self interest of the Liberals and NDP is the only reason he lasted to see Trump
But we may never get another world leader on camera in blackface.
Besides it being very funny how he couldn't even answer how many times he did it, it was a good chance to see how many people actually give a fuck about this shit when it comes time to vote.
I think some of these complaints are legit and some are typical progressive culture warring. I think a huge does of the criticism of Emilia Perez is that a white guy made a movie about a “Brown” without being excessively apologetic, and if the nationalities were reversed (ie. a Mexican made a movie about France), no one would care.
Didn't Emily in Paris get shit for its unrealistic portrayal of Paris? And that was just a random show. It didn't get 13 Oscar nominations which naturally puts more of a spotlight on things. As I said on reddit on the same topic: people hate Crash, a movie about fighting racism, more than worse movies because it won Best Picture.
My general impression is that the backlash from Mexico is organic and this gave people in America something to rally behind (the lead actress being incredibly unwoke, hilariously so, didn't help*). You've given good reasons for Mexicans to consider this film absurd and, frankly, I don't really have much sympathy. This movie is probably only being rewarded because it's seen as a moral milestone for white libs, so it is fair to note that it violates those standards.
When called on not casting Egyptians in Exodus: Gods and Kings Ridley Scott just said "nobody is going to go watch Mohammed Whogivesafuck" and went about his day. The attack is working on this movie because it's seen in a different light than a purely commercial project.
Prompt: what is a rational approach to assigning sacredness in society, especially when it comes to comedy? Is it ok to joke about the holocaust? Is it ok to joke about 9/11? Is it ok to joke about Muslims? If my best friend’s son dies in a horrible freak accident, is it ok to make a joke about that the very next day? Where should the lines be drawn? How do we distinguish between personal lines and broader societal lines? My sense is that the progressive left has conquered this space in the popular culture, but I haven’t seen a coherent alternative beyond 4chan “make fun of everything” culture. Are there better models out there?
I hate sounding even a bit like Kulak but these discussions seem utterly pointless to me. A lot of norms around sacrality are basically arbitrary. The group that cares more, that is more intolerant and more willing to fight decides. In the absence of an already unifying set of beliefs you're just gonna have to fight it out.
Roman norms around sacrifice and emperor worship were sacred until they weren't. European countries have free speech norms (a non-arbitrary example) yet the fact that psychos will semi-reliably kill you for drawing Mohammed has set a new taboo. Meanwhile, other groups that theoretically have more power have allowed the statues of their great men and icons of their people to get torn down and tabooed even when it makes no sense.
I don't see any coherent throughline in a lot of the things that happen, but they happen anyway because one party imposes its will.
Things are sacred if you'll pay a price for violating them. This is why warring tribes smashed the idols of their opponents. It was a theological argument: either your god doesn't care about you, or he cannot do anything.
* Although, ironically, she's unwoke in a progressive sense: her hatred of religion seems to universal, it's just her bad luck that she's not capable of managing the cognitive dissonance that comes with pretending brown religions from manifestly more conservative backgrounds are somehow not worse than her native faith. That's a middle class Anglo superpower.
Canada turned racist because their newcomers were subcontinental...If Canada had opened their borders to Mexico and Vietnam instead of India, Trudeau would still have a job.
Canada already had a bunch of "subcontinentals". Sure, the proportion got worse but terms like "Bramladesh" predated the recent wave of temporary foreign workers. There is a general sense that immigrants have gotten worse, but this is true within the same group.
Canada's biggest problem in terms of generating populist backlash is that it has the worst housing crisis in the G7 and everyone wants to/has to live in the same few places. You can't drop those amounts of people into such a market without massive backlash.
People hated it when it was the Chinese middle and upper classes competing with them for housing and their hate grew proportionally the more people they had to compete with. They'd hate Mexicans too.
That's probably why the preference cascade has been so total: talk about culture and you get suppressed as a racist. Housing? Everyone gets it. No amount of gaslighting or talking will change reality.
Tanista
4mo ago
Copyright law is at fault for this. Letting individuals monopolize cultural icons neuters our ability to use them as shared myths...
"Cultural appropriation" is, strangely, an attempt to do this even to things that can't be copyrighted, by people who otherwise can't stop complaining about capitalism.
but only warner bros is formally allowed to use that shorthand to make money which in practice serves as a massive disincentive for artists to portray the same values in the same package and discuss them in a salient way.
On the flip side we have no end to Superman expies: Homelander, Omni-Man, The Plutonian, Brightburn. They're just deeply, deeply cynical and aimed at subverting the character. Which may say something about the audience.
Our solution to that was to just split the kids into four or five classes based on their performance. Seems vastly cheaper than individualized coaching or trying to figure out the specific issues.
That's going to be the case for mainstream entertainment pretty much no matter what by definition of being "mainstream entertainment". They're not aiming to be that challenging, they're aiming to appeal to mass markets. Mainstream entertainment isn't going to stop being slop if China stops watching because the average American is still a slop consumer to begin with, yet alone the below average Americans that still have money to spend on the Netflix subscriptions and theater tickets. If anything a lot of modern mainstream media is arguably better compared to the slop of Dance Moms and Real Housewives and Kardashians and Honey BooBoo and shitty reality television from just a decade or two ago.
The top ten highest grossing movies in 1990 looks very different from today. IPs have always been a thing. Slop has always been a thing.
But you used to have smaller-scale movies like American Beauty be one of the biggest movies of the year, you used to have more variety in your action slop so you'd get a Gladiator along with your Marvel and Bruckheimer slop, and that movie could credibly win Oscars without it being a pity nomination like with current comic book films like Black Panther.
If anything, the American audience has proven itself capable of watching more complex stuff. Not just in the past but on TV today. Part of the problem is the opposite: films have an even larger global market they need to appeal to today. The slop is extra bland because they need to squeeze juice out of every disparate community in the world.
Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.
Is that what happened to the zombie genre?
Tanista
2mo ago
Drug addicts can admit that they're doing drugs. Doing drugs is a discrete act from non-drug, non-destructive acts.
Speaking from direct experience: Food addicts either don't know or actively convince themselves that they haven't crossed the threshold between eating and gluttony. Their mental math never bothers to account for that extra quarter cup of canola oil they dumped into the pan. They don't have a good sense or willfully refuse to investigate how calorie dense a cup of berries is compared to a cup of Nutella compared to a cup of jam. The direct relationship between that snack (which they may forget when they go back to tally at the end of the day) and the amount of time it'd take to burn it are conveniently uninvestigated.
When some people are forced to stare this in the face with strict CICO, they make better decisions.
That's true. And they don't care.
Or they don't believe it. This is also my struggle with accelerationists on the left : I get the idea, I just doubt that they actually have internalized how bad things can get, and how long they can stay awful.
Even bad times for Americans are better than a lot of places. And, as the most powerful country, Americans have reason to think that if they simply got rid of the suckers and losers the whole thing could just pick up again.
so using that fact to extort them into annihilation is not going to work.
If the Democrats came to them with a total surrender on immigration in exchange for ending this tariff game, do you think they'd take it?
Maybe Ackman missed one of the two political views Trump has held for decades? Couldn’t say.
I think for a lot of people immigration is the thing Trump is most associated with. It's what he initially got the most buzz and criticism for .
He's also just a liar armored in sycophants trying to "translate" his thoughts to something acceptable to win power which always makes it harder. At a certain point I give people a little grace for not knowing that he actually has values.
Tanista
4mo ago
Yes. This infamous discussion between Bernie and Ezra Klein gives away the game. Not everyone is a Kleinian, but you would be a fool to believe that people like that are driven by purely pragmatic calculus about the benefits to Americans.
It also doesn't help that one side maintains a final card they can play: false consciousness.
Feminists do this all of the time: feminism is good for you too and, where you disagree, it's because you simply haven't had enough feminism.
I simply don't believe some of these claims. I've heard a few economists blithely write off the downsides of immigration as "an allocation problem", as if that makes it a matter of a couple of dials for some bureaucrat to fiddle with. Let's grant that immigration has been great for Canada. That doesn't change that the fundamentally political Gordian knot of increasing housing supply still exists so everyone feels squeezed. It's not going to be dissolved by an efficient market because it's a matter of geography,regulations and the interests of some groups over others. Hanania is a libertarian so he does get this, until he doesn't want to.
And, even if I did believe them, I know no nationalist has ever won the debate by saying "I'll take the tradeoff". They just get written off as ignorant.
The International Rules Based Order was always fiction. It was code for “the West has several times as many soldiers, rockets, tanks, and navy vessels than you, and can kick your ass just by thinking about it. What’s changed generally is the global perception of that military might.
Even if that were true (and it could be argued) does it matter? The Pax Romana was clearly a matter of military domination no matter how the Emperors justified it, and it clearly led to practical benefits for as long as it lasted.
The American-led, rules-based liberal international order was a better deal either way.
And we are much much more adverse to “bad images on TV syndrome”. Show the leaders pictures of sad children, flattened buildings, or crying women, and we lose sight if the objective. It’s why the Hamas tactics were so effective.
Yes. It's actually lawless, contrary to what the supporters of this status quo claim. They are actively providing law-breakers an incentive to violate the actual laws of war because they don't want to feel mean.
This may apply elsewhere.
That said, some US wars were just stupid and that doesn't help. The sense of a lack of legitimacy doesn't make people want to jump into the meat grinder.
The style of discouse you describe, in which a party is described as irredeemably evil due to an excessively right-wing position, is usually directed at third parties.
Funny, I was just listening The Young Turks, as left-wing as it gets, fire a former contributor for doing this to their CEO. Cenk Uygur is in no way an outsider.
Yes, a lot of the uncharitable and unprofessional things she said were about Cenk and told to allied leftists. But it doesn't change that she basically lost an ally by talking crazy about them with other leftists because he only wanted trans athletes to compete up to the high school level or thought Democrats should go on Charlie Kirk.
It only strengthens in-group bonds if a) your asks are reasonable enough that most in-group members see no need to defect and b) you're perceived as a winner.
In reality, TYT is one of the older and larger progressive media channels. Losing them (this isn't the first time an employee has declared them rightists and detached) doesn't strengthen the tribe at all. I think some people's faces are just stuck like this now. They're used to talking like this about their enemies and they simply can't help but slip into it when they see traitors pulling away as their influence recedes after a loss.
With maybe bad incentives due to social media. A smaller figure thinks they gain from punching up at an insufficiently doctrinaire one, and never consider the downsides.
I don't think @Southkraut's point has anything to do with "like". I can like drag queens and not grant that drag queens exist in any sort of sense that places them in a similar place as the category of women.
The question is whether it makes any sense for society to place the interests of a few people who want to avoid the otherwise normal healthy developmental pathway with the rest of the human race as if they're equivalent.
If you're not a transhumanist and "trans" is not a mirror of "cis" and is instead just a compassionate term for people who identify with the opposite sex for whatever reason it simply doesn't mean anything to you that puberty is also irreversible.
What of it? Puberty is the normal pathway.
More options
Context Copy link