ajuuiomml
11mo ago
The victory I wanted was for everyone else to not care, too. Instead, I got LGBTQ2A+ climbing night at the local gym, corporations under the auspices of straight white women plastering rainbows on every surface, and “we believe love is love and kindness is everything” along with casual discussions on the internet of the moral imperative to punch my face.
We replaced homophobia with political enmity, not indifference. To me, the pride flag feels sorta akin to the confederate flag. Its not exactly a symbol of hate or exclusion for most of the people flying it, but it sure feels that way on this side of things.
ajuuiomml
4mo ago
To recap my main thesis again, none of this makes any sense unless you incorporate the ideological component that needs Palestinians to remain stuck where they are, playing their role as the downtrodden in this grand theatrical production, all to ensure the jihadi casus belli against the Jews is maintained.
How many civil wars did Palestinians cause in neighboring countries in that time period? Egypt just couped the Muslim Brotherhood. Jordan fought a civil war against the PLO who wouldn’t stop attacking Israel and their king was assassinated by a Palestinian. The histories of Lebanon and Syria aren’t much different. No one will take the Palestinians because they will use their newfound freedom to once again attack Israel, either pulling their new benefactor into direct conflict with Israel or kicking off another messy regional/civil war.
Seriously, why would any country let alone a neighbor agree to extend citizenship again when every previous time ended in blood. At best, you get to support a bunch of impoverished, uneducated refugees whose greatest hopes and dreams rests upon the literal genocide of your nuclear armed neighbor.
ajuuiomml
1mo ago
The problem with our Covid response was the urban/rural divide. Policies for the one don’t work for and aren’t wanted by the other. Unfortunately, that bifurcation closely corresponds to our political parties. It also didn’t help that the public health administration is seemingly tightly aligned with the Democratic Party. Covid functioned more like a mass shooting in the realm of the Culture War.
Accountability literally anywhere in government would be great…
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot.
This is explicitly illegal in the US and would land you in deep shit.
Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing?
That is illegal.
Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.
I suspect this is also illegal in Michigan.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
I’m reminded of the sidebar content or /r/antiwork which was truly shocking when I first read it:
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists—except that I’m not kidding—I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry.
Such a society is incompatible with one that has things like housing, running water, electricity, heating, plumbing, medicine, any form of transportation or sufficient food to keep its population of 300 million from starving. It would also not have any computers or software so turn the dial back to the 40s before your trip to the Middle Ages. It would be incapable of trade to get any of these things. It would be incapable of producing even art, because that too takes a huge amount of work. Committing to the is plan is commitment to genocide in a Great Leap Forward sort of way.
Beyond genocide, and outright impossibility, it strikes me that the author had all the aspirations of a 13 year old. A world of frivolity is not a utopia. A world with no responsibility is a world devoid of purpose.
I remain unclear how anyone engages with this writing seriously.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
Mass shootings are a culture bound
mental disorder/meme in my book - chiefly spread via popular media. To end mass shootings, we must therefore target the meme. We stop them by not talking about them anymore. Stop showcasing people crying on TV. Stop discussing the shooters and their motivations. Stop the endless parade of sadness. Stop talking about common sense gun control and people taking your guns. Stop reporting on twitterers murdering other twitterers by twittering. Stop the X year memorials. Stop the everyone everywhere needs 3000% more mental healthcare or elsing. Stop the victimization porn. Stop the outrage porn. Just stop it all.
ajuuiomml
4mo ago
Lesbian marriages have the highest divorce rates so it goes. Also, their stated reasons for divorce are just the same. I’m not sure about gay men.
In my estimate, veganism is a form of deliberate cultural imperialism, centered in practice on moralizing, whose central claim is the fungibility of food and the elevation of basic necessity over any other concern…
For most of humanity, the meaning of food is culture, tradition, religion, and history. How do we practice those things or engage with external ones as a vegan? How would you break bread without the bread?
Veganism places no value on the personal or the past. It doesn’t particularly care that cuisines have meaning and value in and of themselves. How do I eat the food of my people as a vegan? How do I celebrate with them? What do we do when we gather? Veganism demands I eat foreign crops that can’t possibly be grown here which can only be prepared in ways authentic to no one.
If the ethical treatment of animals is a concern we can now engage, let’s do so. The unhealthy American diet is an eminent problem, so let’s make it better. Homogenizing the strongest component of culture world wide into beans is not a good solution.
ajuuiomml
11mo ago
while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists
How do you put a female protagonist in a story for men, who occupies a traditional male role? You need a woman who embodies honor/courage/valor/stoicism/risk taking in the face of immediate personal danger and you also need a damn good reason why it’s a woman doing the job.
We don’t see this in modern fiction (targeting men) because the characters are pretty universally terribly written. I imagine it’s at least partially due to the authors being outright inimical to the role and it’s requirements (except as a vehicle for empowerment) and their would be audience alike.
It’s not impressive or engaging when woman does classic man thing better than all of the doubting men, overcoming the inevitably evil male antagonist, but that seems to be the only plot now. I’ll point out it’s the opposite of empowering, too.
Give me more Ripley! She isn’t a paragon of female empowerment who breaks the glass ceiling through a newly learned sense of self worth and boss bitch power. (Disregarding the allegory of the horror of childbirth…) she deliberately faces down a terrifyingly gruesome death to protect a girl from the same because everyone else is already dead.
I’d gladly watch more (T1/2) Sarah Connors, Buffy, Scully, or even Margot Hanson for a contemporary reference.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
If The Church is any consideration, universalism is not a draw. The liberal branches are dying and the conservative ones are expanding. In my estimate, you can’t organize people around a belief in nothing in particular, nor can any religion exist which asks nothing of its parishioners. How do you evangelize when you don’t have the Truth and everyone else’s truth is just as valid?
The left and the right have conflicting myths about the reason for the country - a city on a hill versus original sin. We can replace those myths with another, but not with Political Unitarianism.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
There are hundreds of applications per tenure track position - departments do not and will not hire out conservatives. Adjuncts are in no position to demand reform and this wouldn’t be it, anyway. The problem goes back to grad school and allowed research topics/positions…
The problem is worsening. We see increasing adoption of actual litmus tests (mandatory diversity statements) in which conservative positions are considered tantamount to hate speech.
How exactly would you have conservatives engage or reform this system?
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
You have the wrong culprit. It isn’t because of the studios or data per se. The problem is international revenue as a percentage of the total. Asia pacific alone is like 2x the domestic market. Big studios make movies that are accessible/salient to China, India, the US, and maybe to a lesser extent, Europe. The largest common denominator is MCU, which doesn’t really have gay people, dialog, romance, or Taiwan. Both the problems and solutions are violence. Why doesn’t Thor solve homelessness or Wakanda fix fentanyl? Because neither exist of course, just like actual injuries from all of that play fighting.
Maybe with the reemergence of revanchist Russia, we can make movies were they are the baddies again. Rambo, volume 8, back in the USSR!
ajuuiomml
2mo ago
The only study I know of for auditing voting was done by the NYPD in which case every fraudulent vote was successful except for one. The officer claimed to be the son of a poll worker who was in jail at the time! I believe the elections department worked to make such audits illegal in response. I can not find a link.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
I didn’t watch the video - it’s hard for me to take the topic and it’s high priests seriously; AI safety is a reformulated Pacal’s wager.
Even if you believe otherwise, there are maybe one or two universes at most in which we could solve the coordination problem of stopping everyone from networking a bunch of commodity hardware and employing 30 engineers to throw publicly available data sets at it using known algos. A not too wealthy person could solo fund the entire thing to say nothing of criminal syndicates, corporations or nation states. This one is not going back in the bag when everyone involved has every incentive to do the opposite.
ajuuiomml
5mo ago
I don't think of people being trans or gay as being strictly worse than cis or straight such that society or government ought to be oriented around the minimization of such people.
To me, this is nearly a complete non sequitur. Why the sudden spike of people identifying as trans? Society is more accepting now for sure, but gay people have always been with us. Trans is something new, and certainly in these numbers. I personally believe there is a strong biological cause. I’ll place my bet on ingesting microwaved plastic daily. Actually looking for the reason would imply that there is something wrong with trans people and that they can be fixed or even prevented so I’m not holding my breath.
I think being trans is about as morally wrong as being deaf. I’d expect the federal government to do something in the case of an unparalleled epidemic of deafness.
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
I dunno. I’m pretty far into free speech absolutism, but I’d support firing anyone who openly advocates the ongoing mass murder, rape, and torture of civilians for creating a hostile work environment. At a law firm!? Disregarding morals completely, you’d lose every Jewish client, associated business, and employee.
ajuuiomml
2mo ago
Ana de Armas was very well liked in Bond - the rest of the movie was an actual disappointment including Bond himself. Charlize Theron was awesome in Fury Road. Mackenzie Davis and Gabriel Luna were great in Dark Fate. Their scenes shine in comparison to Arnold and Linda who drag down the whole movie to mediocrity. Imagine how much better it would have been without them at all (at least Arnold).
The female equivalent of Jon Bernthal is uncommon to begin with and even more so for someone attractive enough to be a lead. Brie Larson doesn’t come close to convincing at portraying violence. Wonder Woman was successful in spite of Gal Gadot looking out of place in most of the action scenes (the last act being the worst by far).
Fights more often come across as cross fit than people trying to hurt each other and fearing for their lives in turn.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
It’s not hard for me to believe that people who think the best government is local do not choose to work for the federal government. Besides, Washington DC votes 95% democrat. Conservatives will self select out of living in a one party town run by their out group. I thought moving the BLM to Grand Junction was excellent policy in this regard. Why in the world should the BLM, which controls 50% of the land out west, be run by Washington bureaucrats as an absentee landlord totally divorced from the land itself?
More generally, what is the meaning of Democracy when some of the people are highly underrepresented in positions of governance? I very much doubt Democrats would be OK with the federal government being located in rural Texas.
ajuuiomml
2mo ago
1973 saw 2-3 domestic bombings daily! We don’t blow up transformers and police stations anymore so much as shoot groups of random people.
Of course, the domestic terrorists of the 70s were left wing radicals whose white leadership often went on to careers in academia which is hard to imagine for the current right wing radicals.
Back to the topic at hand. I don’t know how to compare the two.
ajuuiomml
5mo ago
That is my understanding as well. I really enjoyed learning sign language but I wouldn’t think twice about curing deafness in all newborns.
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
Yeah, you can nod along with TK on the alienation of modernity until he arrives at mass murder. Starvation is certainly one way to bring focus to life!
Estimates of the maximum extent of hunter gatherer populations are 1-20 million people total. Even if everyone were down with starving/freezing/baking to death 99.999% of the population in one year, we would have a prisoners dilemma in getting there. Any hunter gatherer society would be trivially conquered/genocided/colonized by any defecting society, of which there would surely be one because I’ll be in it.
ajuuiomml
4mo ago
and (possibly in the future) even eliminate conservative candidates through bog-standard abuse of process
Coming out to an election near you this winter. If states reign supreme, what’s to stop any state from stripping literally all of their political adversaries from their ballots? Why would they stop at national elections for that matter? All they need is a governor and a stacked court.
Midwestern roots here- I don’t want to see any kissing in public or know anything of anyone’s sexual identity. It’s not my business and its quite impolite of you to make it so. So yeah, keep it to yourselves, everyone.
More seriously, I can’t quantify how many homophobes exist in the wild and the extent to which they make it known. I’d agree that homophobia remains, but I disagree it’s the cause for the political enmity. Hating across party lines is something new.
It feels like the implicit argument, to put words in your mouth, goes like this: the homophones, however many and however vocal, hate you and yours after all this time, so you are justified in hating them back, and twice as hard. There is no off ramp here.
NPR very clearly has a mission of political advocacy. The angle on literally every single story is “how does it affect people of color/women/minorities”. Frequently, resulting in bizarre, inappropriate, or completely uninformative segments.
This is the segment when I turned off marketplace for good - which advocates for “prioritizing black women” via the “black women best” framework. In the whole segment, no policy position or course of action is actually advanced - at all. Very little evidence is offered to suggest that prioritizing black women will actually benefit everyone (trickle up) or that any interventions would be cost effective. The guest even goes as far as to suggest nothing at all will work:
…with the only proscription being:
The segment is so off putting that I come away taking the position opposite than it advanced even though I agree it’s not great that black women have a higher unemployment rate.
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/09/01/why-centering-black-women-in-the-economy-could-benefit-everyone/
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