VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I always assume that anyone unironically quoting Schenck agrees with its conclusion that distributing anti-draft pamphlets is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater. Which seems like a downright fascist perspective, but what do I know?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face.
Worse, "ghosting" has become ubiquitous in dating and employment, so doors aren't even being slammed. They just disappear without feedback.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3mo ago
university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,
My libertarian friends back in the day would have you know this line was crossed and the ship sailed the better part of a century ago. I'm not going to say I'm broken-hearted over the people that lost in the '60s, but when masked protesters [1] blocked students from getting to schools and engaged in the sorts of violence that sound a lot like the Hamasniks at Ivy League schools this past year, JFK mobilized 30,000 troops. Various Federal civil rights laws clamp down pretty harshly on certain kinds of speech in schools and workplaces (or effectively force those places to clamp down) [2], even if the penalties aren't always technically "criminal".
It feels like the broader Left is only really complaining about "authoritarianism" here because the levers controlling speech regulations that they championed are no longer under their firm control, and are no longer solely against their outgroup.
- In fact, the laws on the books in various jurisdictions prohibiting masked protests mostly date back to the time when "masked protest" meant "Klan rally".
- For most cases, I'd even agree that the speech that is banned is pretty darn reprehensible, and I'd judge anyone unironically saying, posting, or expressing those sentiments pretty harshly. But if you're complaining about restrictions on absolute freedom of speech, I'm not feeling terribly sympathetic.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
the French
This, on the heels of AP rescinding its guidance to not use "the" in phrases like "the disabled, the poor and the French"!
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8mo ago
WALZ: You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test!
Narrator: It is not, in fact, the Supreme Court test. That would be "imminent lawless action".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I watched Idiocracy (2006) recently and had a similar experience. Sure, it takes hard swipes at Bush-era conservatives, but the fundamental premise is about how intelligence is heritable (this is, in fact, just assumed without discussion) and how educated populations aren't having kids.
Also Team America World Police hit differently in a 2023 in which opinion seems to have swung back towards "actually, some intervention might, hypothetically, be for good" with wars of violent conquest ongoing in Europe and potentially elsewhere.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9mo ago
From what I can gather, the idea of residential schools at the time was a rather progressive idea: "we can make these kids lives better by bringing them up assimilated with Western education and values." And several prominent Native Americans were at least loosely supportive of the idea (Charles Curtis, Vice President of the US during the Hoover administration comes to mind).
It strikes me as very similar to the far-left/communist meme about who gets to educate your children. And I think even now there would be support for it among progressives as long as you make sure it's for children of the right "undesirables."
I don't know that I want to stan RFK here, but the status quo isn't inherently better: public health generally has a lot of egg on its face, not just from the pandemic. Attempts at COVID vaccine mandates seem pretty ham-handed in hindsight given their lack of long-term immunity. The FDA approved, over the advice of its own scientists, a very expensive drug for Alzheimer's that wasn't even found to be effective. Literally the current assistant secretary of HHS was found to have put political pressure on WPATH to remove age limits from gender medicine in its guidelines at a time when many Western countries have reviewed the literature and are questioning the practice for youth.
I get where you're coming from, but I find myself questioning whether putting RFK in charge will actually make things worse. At least he'll get push-back against crazy policies.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
So the school district in question was recently taken over by the state due to the consistently failing scores of some of its schools. This is somewhat politically controversial because it's a red state but a blue district, although most at least seem to agree that the schools themselves are underperforming. The new superintendent brought in to fix this is trying some pretty aggressive reforms -- honestly I would have expected business-as-usual with maybe a hint of red politics, followed by little actually changing.
My understanding of the details from peripherally following this are as follows:
- New Education System schools are (mostly?) the failing ones: they seem to be leaving the well-ranked ones alone.
- Several thousand (IIRC) non-teaching administrators at the district office have been laid off.
- Teacher salaries at NES schools have been bumped measurably, but will also be tied to test scores.
- There seems to be a focus on the core "Three Rs" (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic), and honestly swapping librarians for improved classroom sizes and reducing classroom disruption might be worth it. It sounds like they are keeping the actual books.
Overall, I'm surprised they are willing to try an experiment with such large changes. Some of the changes seem a bit partisan, but "reduce classroom sizes and pay teachers more" seems to generally have bipartisan expectations of improving scores. Classroom discipline is red-coded, as is cutting non-core services. I'm modestly hopeful it will show results, but the blue teacher constituency would love to see egg on the State' face. I'm never quite sure how much we can expect the education system to solve issues at home: maybe in aggregate, but not in every case, certainly.
I think "due process" has come to be a Russell's Conjugation: "I am a peacefully requesting my due process rights recognized by law, you are raising procedural hurdles to ensure the law is respected, and that guy over there is claiming 'due process' to indefinitely forestall judgement against himself."
And I can see why some are frustrated this only seems to apply in some directions: some legal decisions can get handed down quickly and hamfistedly (vaccine mandates, forcing closed houses of worship), while others (asylum claims, death penalty appeals, cashless bail) can get backlogged indefinitely to the clear benefit of the party claiming "due process."
In some ways, I think it's funny that we've made a full cycle from "those geese belong to your feudal lord" to various democratic revolutions, all the way back to "you can't eat those geese because of the treaty on migratory birds your duly-elected representatives approved generations ago".
Not endorsing any particular side there, just observing.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4mo ago
Almost every time I've seen government make a promise like that, the "end of 2025" gets pushed out 3 months, then to September for the federal Fiscal Year, then delayed indefinitely. The Sequester is maybe the only time I've actually seen something like that go into effect. Not to say it couldn't be done, but I think it'd be much less likely to go into effect that way -- independent of my feelings about whether or not it's a wise choice to do so.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Only a tiny fraction of people who come in for an initial consultation end up medically transitioning; most are dissuaded after talking to psychologists and doctors about whether it's actually the best path for them.
Do you have a citation to back this up? I haven't found any direct numbers, but there are some damning quotes from seemingly-reasonable sources. For example, the Interim Cass Review of the Tavistock clinic includes:
1.14. Primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters
Honestly, I can't even find anecdotes of anyone and their doctor deciding that no treatment was the right course of action. I'm sure it's happened, but I'm having trouble believing "most" here.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
24d ago
people breaking into the country's main legislative building
I could point to the 1954 Capitol shooting, in which Puerto Rican separatists (Americans) fired 30 rounds in the House of Representatives chamber, hitting five representatives. Their sentences were commuted by Jimmy Carter in 1978 and 1979.
Or the 1983 bombing of the Senate, done by a self-described "Armed Resistance Unit" protesting US involvement in Lebanon and Grenada. Their sentences were commuted by Bill Clinton in 2001.
Or the 1971 bombing of the capitol done by Weather Underground, whose leadership largely escaped any criminal charges and went on to be professors in universities throughout the country.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5mo ago
I think there are a few lenses with which to view the "TikTok ban": you can call it protectionism for American social networks, but I think in practice it makes more sense as a tit-for-tat response to a tightening global market for social networks. Many other countries have, at this point, adopted measures attempting to limit the exfiltration of their social information. Europe has GDPR, which attempts to apply extraterritorial jurisdiction to its citizens against (largely-American) multinational corporations. China simply banned American companies like Facebook and Twitter, requires its allowed networks to be subject to state surveillance, and has tried to place limits on foreign companies collecting data on its' citizens.
Until TikTok, the United States has never found itself needing these things: all the other major networks are domestically-controlled, and probably aren't shipping user data to potentially-hostile nations for cloud processing even if it wasn't explicitly banned previously. For all the concerns about "surveillance capitalism" here, I think simple "trade war retaliation" is a much easier angle, and Trump's positions on those elsewhere suggest that either he'll try to leverage the ban for something in return (unlikely: I can't see China unblocking Facebook) or let it go into effect. I don't think this is a sympathetic battlefield for even absolutist libertarian-minded free-tradeniks to take a stand.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10mo ago
Literally the current president and de-facto head of the Democrats told a primarily-Black audience that now-considered-milquetoast Mitt Romney would "put you all back in chains." The idea that whomever the Republicans field will get demonized as fascist and slavery-adjacent is not wrong, but you've also got a point that in many ways Trump is an exceptionally bad, although IMO not a guaranteed loss, candidate in 2024. I sometimes think that if the Republicans found a good candidate, someone Reagan-esque in all the right ways, that the DNC would be completely unprepared. But at this point it's not obvious who that would be in the next cycle.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10mo ago
without feeling the need to insert ironic humor
I frequently see this blamed on Joss Whedon, but I think I've come to the conclusion that it's actually cargo-cult writers trying to capture the "quippy" vibe that his productions are famous for. But kind of like Michael Bay, the imitators fall well short of the greatness of the original. Not to say that Bay is the best filmmaker, but attempts to mimic his style (briefly: "make every single shot as awesome as possible") often don't really manage to make awesome shots, especially consistently.
Having re-watched some of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly recently, the quips are there, but they're not usually shallow "lol, so random" jokes: they tend to be deeper cross-references to scenes from far earlier in threads that span an episode or more. Imitations of this tend to just drop jokes randomly and assume they'll land, but, done properly, there's an established setup and payoff. I would cite specific examples, but I doubt any of them are well-enough known to make sense out-of-context.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?
I think it's at least worth noting that the racial demographics of the United States were substantively different in the '50s-'80s (about 85% of the country was considered "white" by the 1960 census, and most of the rest was black) such that, while white characters may still have been overrepresented in those eras (not doing a formal study here), the background expectation should be much different today, where closer to 60% of the country fits that description. Complaining that the culture of yesteryear looks like the people of yesteryear seems a bit misplaced, in my opinion, although I don't have quite as strong of thoughts on current television demographics.
This, of course, doesn't apply to the gender breakdown of leading roles, so your mileage may vary.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
A first generation, in which people primarily followed real-life friends or acquaintances of those friends (and so on). Those real-life friends shared their thoughts, pictures, ideas, inane ramblings and so on. This was Facebook and its predecessors like MySpace and Friendster.
I am, to be honest, a little sad that the Facebook of 10-15 years ago isn't really around anymore. To some extent, the friend network is still there and it's interesting to me to follow what my classmates and friends at the time are now up to. I think there's till a market for a good service like that for mainly keeping in touch and tracking major life events ("births, deaths, and marriages"), but modern Facebook seems to aggressively recommend Instagram-like creators rather than creating an environment where I can see "oh, this friend from college just moved to the same town as me" and stimulate real communities. But maybe I'm just getting old and reaching the "old man yells at someone else's computer cloud" stage.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming.
One comparison I think is interesting is that the number of illegal border crossings each month in 2022 (~200k) is roughly the size of the Russian force that originally invaded Ukraine in February. Obviously those crossing into the US aren't an armed force bent on regime change, but I think it gives an interesting perspective to the scale of the problem that someone (wrongly, as it turns out) thought that was a large enough force to invade a country with more people than California.
Honestly, I think the Democrats have a branding problem in that they've been positioning themselves as Anti-Republican on this (among other issues) without universally wanting unfettered immigration either. But when word gets around that "Uncle Joe will let us in" and people start turning up, they can't exactly admit that some degree of restriction is valid and desirable, so they do things like quietly continue building Trump's wall.
I also think we need to reconsider the idea that the shibboleth "asylum" when said to border agents should grant months-to-years of legal residency until claims can be reviewed with no real teeth for failure-to-appear. It sounds nice in principle, but seems prone to abuse.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
26d ago
I remember people expressing existential concerns about the party that last lost an election for at least a few decades now. It's never quite materialized as-promised, but your intra-party gang fight model does sound familiar from 2008, 2020, and maybe 2004 and 2016. Being the opposition is easy: governing is harder.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
by propagating myths about a stolen election?
Although 2020 was probably an outlier in the volume of shouting and shenanigans about stolen elections, I'm pretty sure partisans, even moderately respected ones, have made "stolen election" claims about every presidential campaign since at least 2000.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
This will definitely end up erasing a lot of Native American culture from our interpretation of history.
You know, I've had the same thought about things like renaming sports teams. Not that the previous name of the Washington Commanders wasn't offensive, but that we've established a de facto rule that mentions of Native American culture or history are offensive, but also that nobody got fired for just completely ignoring the topic. It already feels like public awareness of real native traditions and people has dropped tangibly in the culture over the last few decades of my life because attempts to bring it up are soured by (IMO bad-faith, shallow) criticism that it's "problematic" or doesn't cast enough native actors. Not that there's nothing at all to those claims, but I think they end up being overall counterproductive, and in practice are just erasing it from the culture completely.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
It's worth noting that the inventors of the lobotomy won the 1949 Nobel Prize for medicine: this wasn't just a few crazy doctors somewhere.
I find this point interesting, because I distinctly remember a zeitgeist a few decades back in which "gender equality" was being pushed specifically because it would reduce birth rates to ward off Malthusian catastrophe. This was specifically in the lens of low Western birthrates being preferable to higher ones in largely Third-World nations. Admittedly, "the zeitgeist" is hard to cite, so perhaps I didn't really understand the full situation at the time.
I'm not particularly convinced that either direction is unilaterally correct: it's quite possible that the results are contextual based on a number of other variables, but it does provide an example of how "more feminism and gender equality" seems to be pushed (primarily by the Left) as a cure for all societal ills. That last part I think is a drastic oversimplification, but probably also a bit of a weakman of the actual arguments.
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