TheDemonRazgriz
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User ID: 3577
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
I have seen some lefty friends and acquaintances calling him a “notorious transphobe” and similar. I have no idea how true this is, but there seems to be a perception among lefties (highly online ones at least) that he was a particularly virulent anti-trans figure and thus deserving of special hatred.
Honestly I doubt that he was any more anti-trans than any other vaguely right-wing figure, but that’s the perception I guess. Maybe because he was known for talking on college campuses and therefore getting into spaces where even mild pushback to trans talking points is normally forbidden? Or maybe he really did make a point of being aggressively anti-trans, again I don’t really know. But the “unique” accusation I’ve seen leveled at him is transphobia, not being pro-gun or pro-life or a Zionist or whatever.
I will say, if it turns out the shooter is trans, that’s going to be a whole new shitshow.
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
I’ve always thought Mangione just gave up on running, and expected to be caught there. Why else would he be carrying the manifesto?
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
Yeah, I’m not trying to go too far with this take. Very true that we’ve always had alcoholics, opium dens, and weirdo hermits. But I really do think the barrier to entry for that sort of extreme dysfunction is significantly lower now than a century ago, and that has to have some effect.
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
I believe this is standard journalistic practice, in that it’s not technically a “murder” per se until someone is found guilty. The same way news outlets have to call people “suspects” and crimes “alleged” until a trial happens even if there’s obvious video of them committing the crime, it’s just accepted standard practice, nothing nefarious. It does result in somewhat silly outcomes at times, but I think the legalistic consistency is worthwhile for a non-tabloid outlet.
Edit: Just scrolled down and saw that @VoxelVexillologist already posted essentially this exact comment. Whoops.
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
disparaging euphemism
Fun fact, the little-used word for this is a “dysphemism”
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
I suspect, although I’m not sure how one would go about proving or quantifying it, that this mechanism has been broken down by what I suppose you could call the vices of modernity. The type of “long-term unemployed” people who in the early 20th century would be riding the rails, as you say, today either end up on the streets and become addicted to hard drugs, or shut themselves up at home and become grotesquely obese. These conditions are supported by welfare programs (and in the former case supplemented by petty crime) such that they never have any incentive to even attempt to find work, their conditions worsen, and eventually they become functionally irreparable parasites on the society. Many of these people, in decades past, would’ve picked up low-skilled jobs as drifters, doing a lot of the work that today is done by dubiously-legal low-skilled immigrants. The path to becoming a true “lost cause” in this sense, someone who is not merely disincentivized from working but so far gone as to be genuinely incapable of it, is far shorter now than it has ever been, and I think this has more of an effect on the economy than is usually discussed.
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
The author of the appeals panel's opinion autistically changed nearly every quoted instance of "cell phone" to "cell[ular tele]phone".
The image of him doing this is just killing me. “No colloquialisms in THIS court!”
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
if you think a man who married and had children with a one handed Thai Buddhist in a foreign country is a racist. You’ve exposed nothing but your own ignorance at that point.
In fairness, there’s a non-negligible amount of genuine racists who include Asians alongside whites in the “civilized” category.
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
It shocks my tiny European mind when I see guys in the US getting literally arrested and charged for pissing in an alleyway, as if that is an actual crime.
Not only that, in most (all?) of the US, getting caught for public urination can land you on the sex offender registry.
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
Oh definitely, yes. I’m not trying to say the OF-style market won’t take a hit. But I don’t think it’s going to die, either, I’d imagine there will always be an audience willing to pay for superior verisimilitude.
It's hardly more shameful to be in a relationship with a machine than an e-whore. Neither is something people are likely to admit.
I think the ability to pretend to oneself that it’s really the girl on the other side puts a floor on demand for the “real” thing. If anything I think OF girls using AI to talk for them will generally outcompete AI chatbots alone.
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
There's a great quality yet cheap Japanese place called KENKA on Saint Marks Place. $7 for a bowl of hearty ramen and $7 for a 20oz bottle of beer with good vibes.
$7 for a bowl of ramen in NYC?!? I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I visit.
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they were two chav-adjacent girls doing chav-adjacent things in the park with their friends, and an innocent immigrant found himself caught up in the mix.
If this were the case, why is he following them around and filming? He’s walking toward them, and they’re backing away, not the other way around. Certainly I can believe that the two girls are not, themselves, “innocent” exactly. But it is very weird to follow two teenage girls around the park with a camera.
Although it is very strange that the released video is from the man’s perspective, which is a point in favor of his innocence. Has anyone seen an explanation for this? Did he post it himself? Has he accused them of stealing from him, or anything like that?
TheDemonRazgriz
9mo ago
I remember that video well, it was actually one of the first (well, not the first, but certainly one of the more acute) cases which really shook me from the lefty consensus I had grown up in. I was already drifting away for various other reasons, and had always disliked SJWs (as they were then called), but the SJ race-war reaction to this incident was so ludicrously indefensible, and the left-leaning pushback so conspicuously absent, that it really stuck with me.
For anyone who hasn’t seen the video, the cop absolutely unequivocally saved the other girl’s life; the one who got shot literally had her arm up mid-stab (and going straight for the heart) when he opened fire. It was quite heroic, really.
It was just such an obscenely naked case of “black lives matter, but only when it makes a white person look bad”. It’s not like anyone would be saying that other poor girl’s life mattered if she had been stabbed.
TheDemonRazgriz
10mo ago
Not sure I'm following you correctly -- do you mean the turning point of average people's trust in the lockdown regime? If so, that's relevant, but not really what I was trying to get at.
I don't think there was any one singular turning point as relates to the public's trust in science & medicine writ large, more of a death-by-a-thousand-cuts scenario. There were countless examples of public-facing scientists, and crucially actual public health officials either blatantly making things up as they went along while pretending they had a plan, or outright lying for naked partisan gamesmanship. I suspect I don't really need to remind you of these times. And every time an official said something obviously false it killed the institutional trust of another chunk of average everyday people. Add this up over many, many examples of lying and flagrant idiocy and you get the crisis of trust we have today.
A lot of scientists and doctors at the time (and seemingly a fair number still today) seemed to believe that because they were trusted by the public, they could make pronouncements on social issues and be taken seriously, basically lending their gravitas to the cause of the day. This started relatively rationally with the pandemic measures and then rapidly metastasized into the "racial justice" situation. The problem was they had the flow of authority exactly backwards. People trusted scientists and doctors because they were apolitical. The trustworthiness of scientists comes from their being fixated on their particular field of interest -- "those eggheads might be weirdos, but they sure know their stuff when it comes to biochemistry/astrophysics/[insert niche interest]" is the longstanding popular image of science.
The whole point is that they're dealing with something way over the head of Joe Sixpack, but it's clear that they've devoted their lives to it, so they can be trusted when they talk about that particular thing. This trust does not -- and in fact cannot -- generalize outside of their one particular domain. If anything it anti-generalizes. In other words if a bunch of chemists start talking about structures of intersectional oppression instead of chemistry, people start to question how much they really cared about chemistry in the first place.
TheDemonRazgriz
10mo ago
Every time I hear this kind of shit from my colleagues I want to shake them: you are burning political capital for short-term gain.
I think in most cases it’s much worse than that: they are burning political capital for no gain at all (well, except in their own personal/social lives, perhaps). Was anyone, any single solitary person, actually convinced by the argument that “the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus”? I highly doubt it. On the other hand, did people who read things like that lose their faith in the fields of science and medicine? Quite plainly yes, by the hundreds of thousands.
TheDemonRazgriz
10mo ago
If it’s just morbid obesity, it’s life changing for those people, but I don’t think it’s something that’s going to spike the stock price like if you cured a common and deadly disease like cancer
There are a LOT of morbidly obese people. This would still be a major customer base.
TheDemonRazgriz
10mo ago
It should be “X’s and my Y”, not “X and I’s Y”. So for example, “Elon’s and my moral systems are deeply at odds.” Like people saying “me and him” instead of “he and I”, something being a common mistake can make it acceptable in everyday speech but does not make it correct usage in a more formal context.
TheDemonRazgriz
10mo ago
I would give a slightly unusual but wholehearted recommendation to start with Gundam 00 (my personal favorite of the franchise, and probably one of my favorite anime series in general).
It is fully standalone, so you don’t need to worry about Gundam continuity— while you’ll inevitably miss some of the thematic callbacks to the overarching franchise, the only one that really matters for understanding 00 is that the timeline is pointedly set in terms of “A.D.” time (where other continuities are given alternative labels like being set in “the year 0079 U.C.”), meaning it is supposed to be set in the future of the real world as opposed to a more vague sci-fi future; this is thematically relevant in that the show is really trying to say something about the structure of the world and about the trajectory and nature of humanity. Having been made in the mid-00s a lot of the themes and morals are, in my opinion, notably prescient and are still relevant today.
Without spoiling anything, I think the reason I like the show so much is that it’s one of fairly few anime (or any pop-cultural media really) that you can watch with your “literary analysis brain” engaged and actually get a payoff for it. Damn near every creative decision, plot development, and character arc is meaningful and analyze-able in a way that connects to the central themes and plot. For example this is the reason why my fiancee, who very rarely likes mecha anime, thoroughly loved it— there was always something to talk about after every episode, often something meaty too. I’d caution that it is a bit of a slow burn, but this is deliberate and the pace does pick up as it goes on. It’s definitely not a perfect show, there is filler (although less than in a lot of similar shows, and there’s never an outright wasted episode) and there were some production issues that do show at times, but never anything bad enough to really drag the show down.
Very strong recommendation as an anime in and of itself, regardless of being a Gundam series really.
TheDemonRazgriz
10mo ago
I would argue that “unalived” already looks quite stupid.
TheDemonRazgriz
11mo ago
I don't know why Vance is "terrifying" (is it because he's Catholic?) rather than "he's a hick with no idea of how to govern" or "he's a blood-sucking capitalist".
An aside, but I still don’t understand this phenomenon either, how he came to be seen by so many people as the image of the “evil right” (as opposed to the “dumb or incompetent right”). My very liberal mom absolutely hates him, almost as much as she hates Trump, and I remember a lot of my lefty friends making offhand comments all through the election about how despicable he was. He’s far from unusual in being pro-life; I can see why pro-choicers hate him but not why they seem to hate him with such passion, or indeed to fear him. Was it just the cat lady comment? I think this image predates that, honestly, but I’m just not sure where it came from or when it started. Was there a particular hit piece or something like that? Maybe it’s his relative youth, it gave the lie to the comforting idea that the right is dying out with the elderly?
Incidentally, my idiosyncratic-but-liberal fiancée actually likes Vance quite a bit, she sees him as flawed but sincerely wanting to help the country. We are Catholic so maybe that helps get over the fear factor, lol. At one point, I think shortly after the VP debate, she even commented— much to my surprise— that she would gladly vote for him over AOC in a hypothetical future election. Although she despises Trump so I’m not sure if he’ll be tainted by association in her mind by the time 2028 rolls around.
TheDemonRazgriz
11mo ago
Warfare was excellent, something really unique and special in the movie world. It comes very close to being an exact minute-by-minute recreation of the events it depicts and had some unique stylistic choices (most obviously the total lack of a soundtrack) that I think made it tremendously effective. My fiancée and I caught it at the tail end of its theatrical run and both loved it. I would highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject matter/genre.
TheDemonRazgriz
11mo ago
I disagree quite strongly with this, I think it represents a failure of imagination on your part. Yes, that war was brutal, involved many players, and had a lot of civilian casualties (especially if you include deaths from famine and disease). But it was frankly not that large of a war. Over the entire conflict only a few hundred thousand combatants, at most, were involved across both sides (Wikipedia actually estimates it as less than 100,000 total). Most combat was in the form of skirmishes; daring but small-scale raids; guerilla actions; and cyclical series of atrocities against civilians, reprisals for the atrocities, reprisals for those reprisals, and so on. You have to consider the possibility of much more industrialized warfare between countries with much larger populations with the ability to raise much larger armies. Consider the possibility of a “water war” between not just Sudanese rebel groups and Ethiopia, but between the Ethiopian and Egyptian armies. Or a war involving the likes of Kenya, or Nigeria. These aren’t realistic possibilities in the short term, it’s true, but after another 10 or 20 or 30 years of population growth and industrialization, maybe throw in some unexpected coups or stronger dictatorships… the worst case scenario is much, much worse than the Second Congo War.
And, perhaps more importantly from a Western perspective, the modal “poor African civilian” has a lot more options for migration— and, crucially, awareness of those options— today than at the time of that war. Not to mention the sheer explosion of population. Even another war of the same scale as the Second Congo War would likely trigger a much larger wave of migration to the West today than it did at the time, never mind a war with armies (and often civilian populations) an order of magnitude larger.
Note that these newly massive populations are also youth-heavy, which means a lot of disaffected fighting-age men. Sure, a lot of the time this just leads to civil war, but all it takes is one charismatic dictator to direct that energy into outward aggression and you could have yourself a good old-fashioned war of conquest. Get two of these situations going at once and you could have a catastrophe. A lot has changed in Africa from 2000 to 2025, and a lot is going to change from 2025 to 2050.
TheDemonRazgriz
11mo ago
I think there’s a fairly enormous, qualitative difference between Musk’s PoE situation and Ackman’s tennis situation. Very much separate from benefits to the tennis tour, etc.
Ackman bought his entry, but once in the tournament he played fairly and was rightfully crushed by the real pros. It’s a tacky thing to do but in the end doesn’t interfere with the status of the tennis players; to some extent the gulf between “real pro” and “competent amateur who paid his way in” is even reinforced by how much they demolished him. And, similarly, it’s clear that Ackman does know how to play tennis, he’s just not operating at the level of the tournament.
Musk wasn’t just paying for entry, he was trying to pass himself off as a “real pro” without the baseline game skills or knowledge to go along with it. As an analogy, imagine if he entered a tennis tournament using a sci-fi exoskeleton that could move his body/limbs to run fast and swing his arms with proper racket form. He’s holding his own in the tournament by making flawless serves and spectacular returns thanks to the super-tennis-suit, but he’s also making clumsy positioning blunders and misunderstanding how the scoring works, because he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. And he’s simultaneously talking a big game about how great he is at tennis. It’s not merely tacky, it makes him look like a buffoon while also making a mockery of the sport.
I agree it’s more likely than not, but I wouldn’t yet rule out the Democrats managing to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.
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