Totalitarianit
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User ID: 3448
Totalitarianit
18hr ago
I think they should be fired for glorifying the death of someone on their public social media profiles. Firings produce a chilling effect. We learned this from the censorship propagated and performed by the left (that they either denied was happening or justified for being harmful). If censorship of this kind is unavoidable, which it has demonstrated itself to be as of late, then I'd prefer it be from the camp I support rather than the one I don't.
We know there is no absolute free speech. It is inherently bounded by our government and cultural norms. We are in a culture war that was started most noticeably because the dominant left culture cancelled, censored, and doxxed nearly every dissenting opinion they could.
Totalitarianit
2d ago
It certainly feels that way. Even if this wasn't planned by the powers that be, all they really had to do is wait for some other act of political violence and use that one as their reasoning. This is the perfect opportunity for them to introduce it, and people, in their emotional state, will support it. I don't think it can be avoided.
Totalitarianit
2d ago
Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota?
Because, as bad as that is, we have not seen a closeup video of those people being shot to death, and that means something. That Senator's death could have been gruesome. Being shot to death in your own home is a gruesome enough picture, and it carries weight, but it simply does not have anywhere near the same impact that the imagery today had.
The red tribe does not have the moral high ground, and some sort of grim moral imperative, simply because a red tribe figure was assassinated. Hysteria.
You are not the arbiter of moral high grounds. Even if you were it will fall on deaf ears.
I don't know who the shooter was, or what their motivations were. There's a chance it's another mentally ill person who has no real political affiliations. Maybe it's a far right winger with accelerationist goals. Maybe they had personal beef with Kirk.
None of that changes the sheer giddiness and overt schadenfreude of the anonymous leftist redditor or tiktok'er, or the careful framing our left leaning mainstream outlets will use to report and cover this story. That, while not as disturbing as the violence, will have a larger impact on broader non-left society and discourse down the road. It's been like this for over a decade. People are tired of it and they were looking for a reason to get pissed because they were already pissed off to begin with.
Totalitarianit
2d ago
What about the surface connection? Can you see surface connection?
Totalitarianit
3d ago
It's an example of consumption-based adulthood vs. sacrifice-based adulthood. Video games are historically associated with childhood, darts and pool are associated with adult social space. So when the nightlife scene revolves around nostalgia and video games, it represents the shift in the meaning of adulthood from the maturity of mingling to playtime escapism.
Totalitarianit
5d ago
Great post.
The current "best" choice for our young adults from their perspective is the continued liberalism and juvenilization of our society. They're not having to make the same sacrifices, and I understand why, but our society has now been forced to cater to 30 year old juveniles with their juvenile emotional maturity. Video game bars everywhere, bars that are pet friendly, Disney adults, etc. It's bars with games fucking everywhere. Go over to reddit and look at the popularity of subreddits like /r/malelivingspace. A lot of the places are cool looking, but as you would expect they're all clean bachelor pads and/or studios that look like a one man LAN party room. Single men with cool apartments isn't a crime. It's just the romanticization of that lifestyle that's really hard to overlook when the alternative, at least on the surface, is a way more "unnecessary" sacrifice. The dating market is a disaster: the freedom, control, and lack of accountability that society has given to women when it comes to sex, makes modern courting feel like you're walking through a minefield, blindfolded. It's all mostly high risk/low reward tradeoffs. To top it off, a large portion of guys this age have been exposed to porn and many prefer that over the real thing. One can easily understand why having a cool apartment and a terabyte of the porn you like, and being on your own schedule is a "better" option. There's no grief or jealousy that you'll almost certainly have to deal with if you have a young attractive girlfriend. It's an easy choice with consequences that don't directly present themselves until decades after the point of no return.
I wonder about the feasibility of getting people to behave in a more self-sacrificing way without forcing them to do it. My first thought (and something that had drastically impacted my own life) is for people to have and raise children. It's like bootcamp for adulthood. I knew that it would be difficult, but I didn't know in what ways it would be. The amount of daily sacrifice made by my wife and I is something I couldn't have possibly understood by someone trying to explain it, and I think this applies to so many of the things that we try to convey to people through our words and that simply cannot compare when it comes to lived experiences. Having an infant you're raising and protecting grow into a little person before your eyes is a truly wonderful experience. I've posted here before that my kids are not biologically mine, and that we adopted them after them being the foster system. One we picked up directly from the NICU as an infant. When that child was almost 1, I took a picture of them while they were on a swing, and the picture that appeared on my phone just shook me in a way that nothing else ever has. I have deep questions about god and religion, but the way that baby looked at me through that image was the closest thing to a religious experience I have ever felt. It was like God was looking at me through those eyes. So, there is all the sacrifice that comes with this life choice, and it's rough at times, but there is something on the backend of it that cannot be put into words and therefore cannot be argued to the intelligent (often leftist) Westerner who only believes in what is materially achievable.
I don't know how you marry modern living and religion on a broader scale, but the kid trick seems like the most tried and true process. I'd like to hear others, including @TitaniumButterfly's take on the potential of molding these two seemingly incompatible lifestyles into something that might be more workable. Obviously, any "taking away" of rights will bring out the wailing banshees, but even their "argument" about rights is starting to bring consequences to light that people have warned about for ages.
Totalitarianit
5d ago
Yes, but their existence wasn't because of the liberals.
Totalitarianit
5d ago
Probably because people suspect you are a liberal, and as a liberal, you don't have to agree with the position of an open borders progressive (or true libertarian) to help ensure that massive amounts of immigration happens. Progressives can just use the moral framework that you believe in to wedge in an argument that you can't reject, and therefore immigration that you can't stop. The only way you can stop it is by abandoning your liberal principles. Stopping peaceful migrants requires force that liberals aren't comfortable with. Even though they don't want that much immigration, they ultimately waste their energy on criticizing the only methods that actually work, which are the ones that involve use of force.
Totalitarianit
5d ago
I can understand the avoidance of IQ topics, given the incendiary nature of them, and to that extent I probably agree with Sam (and maybe Ezra?) that they probably shouldn't be so openly talked about. Too many bad actors.
Ezra just came off so slippery in a bad way in that exchange.
Harris criticized the Vox article that was written by another journalist. Klein then claimed he was editor-in-chief at the time, but didn’t assign or edit it, but that he stood by it, but that it’s ultimately on him as editor-in-chief, but that it was a good article, but that he can only speak from his perspective.
He also said:
"And by the way I’m not here to say you’re racist, I don’t think you are. We have not called you one." Of course, after that he went on to explain all the racially damaging things he thought Sam had done. To Ezra, I guess Sam was (is) effectively a racist, not an intentional racist. That was really the progressive argument in a nutshell for about 10 years.
Totalitarianit
5d ago
For some maybe. For Democrats trying to win elections, it's a trend to latch onto to get additional votes.
It's ignoring in the sense that you will not convince the other side by using it as an argument, and that it doesn't carry the political weight that used to not even 2 years ago. It might drive your side to vote more, but it's a double-edged sword that also drives your political opponents to vote. Conservatives will have to contend with it, yes, and it cannot be completely ignored, but leaning into "morality" over practicality will not be a winning strategy for Democrats in the next election cycle now that we have examples of "moral" policy's impact on society.
Totalitarianit
5d ago
I think you know at this point that very few people here buy into the moral imperative that liberals and progressives like to invoke when it comes to immigration. It's easy to place myself in the shoes of someone trying to come here from a less economically stable and more dangerous place. Of course I'd want to come here. That's not the point that people care to discuss, because the structural and cultural issues that have come about from Biden's policies take priority over the tiresome moral grandstanding.
Biden's government elected to not use violence to stop mass immigration which aligned with the progressive moral framing and aligned with our economic model that relies on cheap, exploitable labor. When his admin chose not to stop millions of people with force it had massive downstream effects. The "fundamentally moral" intentions behind that decision is no longer a political get out of jail free card, and that has to be demonstrated to the progressive and liberal-minded folk so that it can be made abundantly clear that this type of progressive immigration policy is a total nonstarter.
Totalitarianit
6d ago
That podcast episode kicked off the downward spiral of /r/SamHarris. It's also a great example of what reddit became across the entire site. The debate brought in tons of Klein apologists and progressives which turned the subreddit into a battleground. On one side you had liberals who simply accepted the available evidence (those siding with Harris), and on the other you had the anti-racists who alternated between the arguments of denying or questioning the data and labeling anyone who accepted it as racist (those siding with Klein). Boiled down, it was another example of secular evangelists spreading the framework of their religion: if data suggests uncomfortable conclusions about racial differences, the data is false and those who believe it are racist.
That debate and its aftermath had a significant impact on my perception of the social left. They weren't actually in favor of using objective truths to solve real world problems. They were only in favor of promoting specific moral "truths" while suppressing any evidence they deemed to be immoral.
A lot of things shouldn't have happened prior to Trump doing the things he did, but they did happen and here we are. I can empathize the frustration from an intellectual standpoint, and I'm not saying the things he's doing are all good, but this country went through some radical shifts over the past 15-20 years leading to a massive cultural schism. The 2008 financial crisis, the explosion of social media, Trump's first term, and a global pandemic all played a big role in the gradual loss of faith in our institutions, for both sides.
The left's aggressive cultural takeover starting in 2012 and then peaking in the early 2020s served as my gradual, and then sudden psychological/philosophical turning point. There's plenty of blame to go around on the right side of the aisle, and I know for others (maybe you) it was Trump's brazen disrespect of our political norms and law breaking that served as their turning point. Going back to me (and millions of others) it was the coordinated takeover perpetrated by progressives in literally everything we interacted with when it came to the society we all shared. News, academia, entertainment, social media, social norms, even the definitions of words were all hijacked and rapidly moved into a new progressive framing that none of us agreed to. And yet, we were aggressively "encouraged" to comply or face the new social penalties, most of which involved formal and informal versions of ostracism and cancellation. We were subjected to it for years.
The people who supported all of that, who sat deep within all of these institutions, who literally could not distinguish between an actual Nazi and someone who wanted stronger borders and less critical theorizing all over the place, made their policy positions moral positions that could not be argued against. They couldn't help themselves from hating and othering and ostracizing. They still do not see themselves as part of the problem, and now, to whatever extent they do, the time for "I fucked up. Let's make a deal." has come and gone. I mean, I'm certainly happy to accept any mea culpa from a recovering progressive, but many others won't. Not now when they have the advantage. There are economic issues, and health issues, and birthrate issues, and AI issues, but underneath it all is an ideological issue that seems irreconcilable at this point; and even if they don't realize it, progressives started that fight.
Totalitarianit
10d ago
It's certainly possible that some, or even most of those people were prosecuted fairly in the court of Law. However, they weren't found guilty in the court of Mainstream Media and Democrats. Summer of 2020 rioters were heralded as social justice warriors fighting against a racist dictator, and almost any act of force against them was liable to be treated as an act of tyranny.
Cops and DAs could have arrested and prosecuted way more, but I don't think there were many large departments or DA offices chomping at the bit to be sued into oblivion. Most large city DAs are blue anyway and are all about whatever "perception" wins them their seat come next election cycle. The perception at the time was that any person who fell between Hitler himself all the way to some average Joe saying "I'm not sure people should be burning that." was racist, and the mainstream media and Democrats leaned into it.
I think this is a fair take. My issue with it is that I have hard time believing a course correction of necessary magnitude can actually be done in another way. Certainly there are a lot of smart people who can theorize and think of good and less messy ways to do it, but there lies in wait an equal or greater number of smart people on the other side who are hellbent on suing, prosecuting, and rhetorizing against those ways who are already embedded within the institutions that need the reform. This system, as I see it now, is designed to do two things simultaneously A) dull any scalpel meant to cut out the bad parts, and/or B) complain that a cleaver was used while saying "A scalpel would have sufficed and done less damage!", knowing full well the scalpel has not been allowed to cut for quite some time.
So, when critics argue that Trump's methods are too messy, I hear "Why don't we try the things that have been proven not to work?"
It's totally understandable to be concerned, but there is critical number of our best and brightest who are all-in when it comes to their secular religion that they see as objective reality. Requesting they renounce it could be temporarily effective, but history is not on the side of people making that request. Better they be reminded that there is a very large portion of the population who do not believe what they believe and that they will wreck shop if necessary to make sure a proper counter balance is put back into place.
If there is a less messy and workable alternative, sign me up.
Totalitarianit
11d ago
Yeah, I guess you kind of did, and to your point I also see their concerns.
Trump gives anti-Trumpers reasonable cause for concern, but it reminds me of the tit-for-tat discussion that happened here last week. Trump and his crew are probably overreaching, and there is also counter culture that supports it. In that regard, there is plenty of reasonable criticism going on. It just comes from a camp who have unintentionally shown their ass when it comes to their inability to see outside of their own ideology.
If the exercise was to come up with steelman arguments without the "yeah, but the otherside..." then I failed and that's my bad. I will say that, within their moral framework, it's easy to see where people are coming from with their concerns and why it is so significant to them.
Totalitarianit
11d ago
Hybrid regimes, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, operates off of public-private partnerships. Governments have lots and lots of leverage, to the point that they can essentially get their way by bullying private organizations. And we live in the post-state; like in medieval towns, powerful non-state organizations essentially share the governance of society. In our case it’s not so much thé medieval church and the guilds as it is powerful companies, universities, a few labor unions, and maybe some religious organizations and NGOS.
Trump appears to be the first Republican who realizes that exerting government pressure on these organizations can enact his agenda at second hand. And he’s much better at it than previous republicans; he got the deal shoved through with the top law firms, he got the teamsters to jump ship, he won over big tech, he’s going after universities.
This to me reads like a steelman of moderate's and right winger's description of the Democrat party. This is exactly what the left and Democrats have done. Now they're getting a taste of their own medicine and half of them act like it is the most authoritarian thing they've seen in modern history. All they really see is the reckless nature in which Trump and crew try to pull it off, and I will definitely concede that part to the left; Trump and his people are not nearly as good at hiding their intentions or authoritarian tendencies. The primary difference is that the Democrats have been very successful at the "We're not doing the thing we're doing." for about 10-15 years. It's easy to pull that kind of thing off when nearly all Western mainstream media outlets will eloquently argue your position for you, and when you can completely ostracize other schools of thought by calling all of their believers "bigots." It has been incredibly successful. That is until the receipts started piling up.
Totalitarianit
14d ago
Very well put. This tracks pretty well with what I believe, and also what I think is pretty observable. I don't know about 80-20 or 50-50. I'd say it's probably more case by case, but I've known enough nonwhites who were raised by good parents to understand that environment plays a critical role in how they act as adults. I understand and agree with the genetic implications behind the broader statistics about group differences, but they are still generalities that don't guarantee unfavorable outcomes for all people.
Totalitarianit
14d ago
It will be undeniably used in the "Why we hate blacks." camp. I understand why, but some of my still-surviving liberal sensibilities can't help but examine another layer to this situation. This layer is touched on in nearly every single anti-Rampage/Raja rant out there, but nobody really delves into the father-son dynamic past Rampage being a shit father.
What Raja Jackson did to that guy cannot be denied. It was a shockingly violent attack that warrants a lengthy prison sentence. With that said, when I listened Raja's tough guy rant after he pummeled that defenseless man and was walking down the street, I just kept thinking his use of "everybody" in "I'm tired of everybody fuckin' playing with me 'n shit" was really just about his dad relentlessly jabbing at him throughout his entire life. I have serious doubts that any other people really fuckin' play with him 'n shit outside of his father, who he simply cannot fuck with on a physical level. I think there's a lot to this.
Rampage even told a story about Raja sucker punching him. Rampage's response was that he "sent him to the hospital." You read that right. He beat the shit out of his own son. What we don't really know for sure is what happened before that sucker punch, but seeing how Rampage constantly jabs at people on camera, I think it's a fairly safe assumption that Rampage was, to some extent, antagonizing Raja and probably has antagonized Raja for most of his life. I know Rampage isn't all bad. He can be funny, but he doesn't ever really seem like he's serious when he needs to be. On some level that has to be psychologically torturous to have a father who "won't stop playin'" when you need him to be a dad.
I'm not excusing Raja's actions. I think he needs to go to prison. What I'm trying to do is see if anyone on the internet who isn't a self-hating leftist that might be considering another reasonable explanation outside of it just being the warrior gene assumptions that a lot of people on the right like to grab onto.
Totalitarianit
16d ago
I hear NPR say he was born male yesterday.
Do you remember if they said "he was born male" or something like "the shooter was assigned male at birth"? I know it's a small distinction, but NPR flat out saying "he was born male" seems uncharacteristic. It would be a welcome surprise.
Totalitarianit
16d ago
Well, I'm here, so it pulls down the weighted average.
Totalitarianit
17d ago
I, for one, will be devastated that you will be ridding everyone here of your Main Character Syndrome. Please don't go...
To your point, there is some clear frustration that we all share. Some people here are more hysterical about it than others, and I appreciate @magicalkittycat for starting shit (in a thought provoking way) here and challenging people to explain their positions. That being said, if you need a reminder of brain drain on a massive level, hop on over to reddit where as a collective they consistently call millions of people Nazis and ban a not-so-small percentage of them for the capital crime of having a dissenting opinion. The mods here don't do that.
According to mainstream reddit (which is the largest internet forum on the planet), I have been a Nazi from 2020 forward for stating the facts of the Kyle Rittenhouse case, not wanting certain sexual content in schools, disagreeing with certain aspects and goals of BLM, calling out the leftist creep in our institutions, etcetera, etcetera. So, take what you see here, flip the politics, lower the IQ by about 10 points, then multiply it by a couple hundred thousand users, and what you end up with is a gigantic brain drain, plus an ideological purge that's been allowed and encouraged for the better part of a decade.
Totalitarianit
18d ago
This framing assumes that the game is purely Republicans vs. Democrats, and in that framing the answer to who is tit’ing more is obvious. The problem with this is that it is only two-dimensional. Introducing another axis, like the culture that controls our institutions, flips this argument around. Republicans have escalated more openly, but Democrats have benefitted from institutional alignment for decades.
This has created a situation where Democrats appear to be playing “0.9-tits-for-a-tat” within the narrow realm of party politics, but their ideological allies, with their near complete control of academia, media, entertainment, etc., have been free to push constant aggressive “tits.” Democrats don’t need to overtly defect as often because the institutions that are aligned with them have constantly moved the Overton window on their behalf. From the Republican perspective, and for many who support them, they’re reacting to a broader cultural movement that has not been constrained by the limitations of party politics.
I don't think that's possible at scale. You could get smarter, more self-aware people to do this, but most people aren't either one of these things. In fact, I think bots designed to grab your attention implicitly makes this point. The bots will grab the people's attention, so "Make better choices" isn't really feasible for the population.
The Left's attempt at trying to "end" racism by shifting blame onto the history of white people while also censoring their opinions made things worse, so I'm not advocating for going back to that, but the algorithm and its recognition of our tendency to gravitate toward controversy should maybe figure out better ways to redirect the energy people have for hating others.
Right now, there are people on the right attempting to doxx, cancel, and censor left leaning people. Some of them will obviously go too far and attempt to cause harm to reasonable people who have opinions that don’t align with their own. That will happen, and I will not like that. I see people like Laura Loomer, or catturd on twitter, or Candace Owens, and it is obvious to me that these individuals are a net negative for Republicans and anyone right of center.
The distinction here though is that the mainstream left has been treating political disagreement in this country as an existential and moral struggle for years, and the liberal principles that you're trying to hold me to have been completely weaponized by them. That approach has been done to the detriment of this country and whatever unifying culture we used to have. So, when you call me out for not holding tight to the idea of "free speech" (all while the other side has essentially completely abandoned it) all I really see is you acting confused at why people like me are no longer fighting with one hand tied behind our back.
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