You can't have a left-wing Joe Rogan because the next time he strays from the line on COVID or anything else, they'll get what Rogan got. Friedland has already had one brush with cancel culture for utterly inane reasons. He got past it because he was too small to be the priority target. Whoever sits in that spot will go down for something.
This whole discussion is a bunch of evangelicals sitting around trying to figure out why they can't make movies that appeal to outsiders while refusing to mention the mile-long faith statement and guidelines they need everyone working on the film to sign on to and the essential points of doctrine that must be squeezed in. There haven't been many good movies about Mohammed for a reason.
You can have a left-wing person who's at Joe's level. You can't have a left-wing Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan isn't a partisan warrior. That's how he got so big!
Even desiring a left-wing Rogan is telling on themselves. Not everyone sees their media consumption as a way to bring about the Kingdom. It's just more of the same: people need to be educated -> people resist and flee our spaces -> well, we should just colonize that outlet too so they have no escape. Doesn't work as well with new media.
Tanista
1mo ago
I reject this premise. What we can do is work with them, educate them on how to live a better life, and love them.
As with HBD the question is what happens if you can't do that (at least at scale) and it's easier to do other things?
In this case "destigmatize" whatever their condition is, which seems to have somehow flowed directly into "publicize" and even "encourage".
You can see why. It's simply much more convenient, and less mean, if society has the problem and it can be made to disappear in a puff by encouraging the "marginalized".
If you take punitive/mean options off the table it's an excruciating problem to find some way of containing bad memes without containing carriers. And, frankly, it cedes power to a certain sort of person I'm not sure it's wise to trust.
The suicidewatch subreddit has always struck me as weird, in that it expects incredibly specific behaviors from posters that are in line with the way suicide hotline call center workers are trained, but from anonymous redditors.
I honestly don't think it's weird at all. Except maybe in a sort of Tumblr-ish "weirdos online intuit where the culture will go" way.
A lot of the stuff around microaggressions, trigger warnings and pronouns essentially insist on turning first any employee in proximity and then the average person into a caregiver for those who are or claim to be fragile.
A sad story. But I wonder if the object lesson is not so much about intolerance of dissent as it is about the characteristic Christian calling of humility: humility before morality, before duty, before other people, and ultimately before God.
Atheists of a certain sort simply do not see humility in religion but the opposite so this point never lands with them. But it should raise an interesting question: Christians are tyrannical, know-it-all busybodies, how bad do the consequences of a lack of humility have to be that even their book warns against it?
I get the sense that Democrats really, really, really wish they could just run against 2006 era George W Bush again, or Mitt Romney.
I mean, people just explicitly say this. Even with a sense of humor
They frame it as Trump being particularly awful but W was called a war criminal who killed hundreds of thousands for years, hard to say that 2016 - especially early - Trump was worse by any utilitarian calculus. It isn't just that Trump is loathsome, it's that it doesn't seem to stick. People giggle along way too much.
My roommates got a mining rig in college and, in hindsight, it's great for my FOMO because it made it clear I obviously would have done what they did and sold BTC off long before the peaks.
Assuming of course, that social transition itself is not a negative. Either to the person transitioning or society itself.
Tanista
1mo ago
It's not "loser-coded" if you're just a loser. Nobody would even blink an eye at a poor person being for socialism, it's not even a great condemnation to note it. It's sort of a trivial statement that losers look like losers.
"Loser-coded" implies that the act itself carries the stench of failure and ressentiment no matter who does it.
There were 76 million people in the US circa 1900 and they were 88% white. The American Empire followed, and it wasn't Chinese students building it. We did have a glut of Jewish talent but if anything the peak of our Empire was smaller than it would have been as their contribution was hastening the inevitable that was American victory.
The gulf between the West and the Rest was greater then.
Some nations may not have come as far as they think but China definitely isn't one of them. Even if we do the whole DR special pleading thing and assume that Asiatic bugmen are worth less than one intrepid Western autistic genius no matter what the overall IQ score says , no one can deny that China has the numbers, at least close human capital, and doesn't seem to be doing badly enough that Western quality is guaranteed a win.
The other side remembered the proscriptions and chaos caused by people pushing their reforms and will too far. People lost friends and colleagues and people like Pompey and Crassus were prime beneficiaries.
They weren't scared of just losing a political battle. They were scared of getting liquidated this time around if they let anyone claim enough political clout by getting certain wins.
Very different from the initial backlash to Trump. The moment of realization that history hadn't ended and there wasn't going to be a coronation by the emerging democratic majority may have felt existential but hard to argue it's the same.
It was not really a dispute about whether corruption was acceptable or unacceptable. I would argue that the Optimates' desire to sweep it all under the rug was actually a step in the wrong direction. Caesar talked about corruption openly, and having a problem out in the open is the first step to solving it.
Because it wasn't about corruption as such. They just didn't want Caesar (or, early on in his career, his allies Pompey and Crassus) to win
You can't really map it unto America by making it all about corruption in the shady business deal sense. You can't really explain anyone's behavior here (though arguably some Optimates seem crazy or reckless either way) without the civil war that preceded Caesar and what it did to the Roman psyche.
America isn't really there.
Now that Donald Trump is openly messing with US tax policy for personal gain with his combination of tariffs and insider trading, maybe that will be the catalyst to finally pass laws against using secret government intelligence to make money trading stocks.
I mean, if we're going to compare to the Roman Republic, it should be noted that many attempts were made to pass laws to fix the problems caused by corrupt people. Including, sometimes, by those very people!
It didn't work, and the after-effects of their corruption and norm-breaking outweighed their good intentions.
The Republic, once it became so "corrupt" that it lost the ability to promise its citizens safety in the pursuit of politics, could no more legislate that back into existence than it could control the weather or enforce a positive economic sentiment.
You can't always get it back. You can't always write something that outweighs your lack of virtue. Sometimes you just break things.
Sure. But that could be because it leads to a total loss on the political front in both the West and with its neighbors which might vastly outweigh any benefit to being more effective at killing Hamas.
I took the claim to be that it'd be militarily less effective than people tend to imagine.
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.
That whole worldview (America as moral crusader) is dying anyway.
You'd think so. But, on the one hand, Trump criticizes regime change and social engineering and moralism in foreign policy and then litigates DR fascinations like South Africa and white genocide.
Perhaps we're just in the age where Americans don't even pretend that moral crusades are anything but domestic culture wars by proxy.
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.
Tanista
2mo ago
I can get why Coogler didn't want the bad guy to be lying about the Klan, thematically.
I thought the mid-credits scene was a bit indulgent though and raised needless questions about the established vamp lore.
Currently reading SM Stirling's To Turn the Tide. Which is exactly the sort of ISOT story I signed up for. Not the deepest characters but still enjoyable enough. Except...
I just wish Stirling didn't crib from his own - much better - genre namer. You read enough of a small circle of althist writers like him and Eric Flint and you start to see the same tropes.
They said rap should be subversive, well what did they think subversive meant? Vibes? Essays?
Most people are able to roll with realizing rap not a subversive genre anymore, even if they feel embarrassed enough to cope a bit when their favorite rapper is at the Super Bowl. At worst, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, people disappear for a bit to deal with the revelation "the system" actually loves or is totally fine with their content.
The best proof of Kanye's mental illness is that his reaction to this is actually trying to be subversive. Sane people worry about their bills.
Tanista
2mo ago
The question is actually whether the wedge itself helped the giant grow.
American socialists continually lament the lack of class consciousness even on the left. The identity politics-obsessed left that has power has based their entire movement on America's second founding. Maybe the next weapon is just significantly worse.
Their power comes from the fact that there is - was - a bipartisan consensus on some things. Many things that expanded their power were justified explicitly by special pleading on race and either allowed or ignored by mainstream Republicans for fear of being on the wrong side again. Would they be equally sanguine for other things?
It took till Trump to even fight on the AA issue. Things like the trans activist craze are building off laws and ideas that started with race. In a different time it would be inconceivable how fast it's spread and even been mandated. But you can't actually deny the left the tools that do this, because they can always point out where they come from.
Tanista
2mo 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.
Tanista
2mo ago
I mean, the bigger question is whether Hollywood movies filmed abroad or with too much foreign labour will get hit by tariffs, which would screw the entire industry.
Tanista
2mo ago
How much of it is just that people want to unabashedly discuss and analyze mainstream/progressive works?
Does it matter?
In practice the unsubverted government saw competent wizards (reacting to a real threat) as a threat to it. Its response was to select the longhouse manifest, Umbridge, to totally remove all practical knowledge in favor of book learning and indoctrination in schools.
The subverted government was obviously even worse. Most wizards are incompetent at defense magic, and as a result seem powerless once Voldemort starts imposing his will. The well-meaning apparatchiks like Umbridge reveal themselves to be tyrants just waiting for an excuse.
In practice the message ends up being that you can't trust the government (not even to protect itself) and so must defend yourself. That's basically the RW American take and the Ministry of Magic is arguably more arbitrary and illiberal than the US state.
Tanista
2mo ago
Habermas' criteria for his minimal facts is that "vast majority of even critical scholars must recognize the occurrence’s historical nature"
I can see how later Gospel material doesn't meet that standard while Paul's vaguer mentions of appearances right alongside his talk of persecuting the Church would. There's the naturalist assumption. And critical scholars accept at least seven undisputed Pauline epistles and no Gospel's attribution to an Apostle or follower of one has the same level of consensus AFAIK. So someone would likely have quibbled about the "apostle's claims" while Paul's own claims of a vision combined with vague claims about appearances to Peter, James and the 500...maybe not.
He's just being conservative I think.
You missed Step 0, where he's in denial about how crazy Democrats are. See the "menstruating men" discussion with Dennis Prager.
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