anti_dan
8mo ago
All this is just the trappings of centrism, and it only works because of media compliance. Imagine some normal Republican acting boring, but doing the reverse of all the Biden things: Siccing the FBI on teachers unions and Planned Parenthood. Multiple investigations into Democrats for things every politician knows they all do. Passing massive budget cuts to 3 letter agencies, welfare, and medicaid. Securing the southern border and expediting deportations.
Could President Mike Lee do all that quietly and be the "kind of president you want?" Of course not, he'd be constantly attacked as a theocratic fascist, and people who want "normalcy" will have it insisted to them that only Democrats can ever be normal. "But Trump" has never been correct. Always remember Rubio was actually worse was a take from one of the smartest and least crazy Democrats.
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/20/11067932/rubio-worse-than-trump
anti_dan
1yr ago
Well, yes? People engaged in political protests don't expect to be treated like carjackers, because they haven't been in a century in the US. The Capitol building is not an illegitimate place to protect (contrast the kid gloves treatment of SCOTUS protestors at their homes), it is, in fact, the MOST legitimate place to protest. Its a political building where politics is done.
That you can be held without bail for wandering in, without them even proving that you knew it was illegal to be there (for most people the barricades had been long abandoned by the incompetent, Pelosi directed, Capitol Police), is Eugene Debbs shit.
anti_dan
10mo ago
“When I am Weaker Than You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.”
The Pride community played the victim until they could mock everyone as oppressors. Asking the question is simply a misapplication of mistake theory.
anti_dan
10mo ago
So if the longstanding norm against prosecution can indeed be broken, then under which circumstances?
The answer, quite obviously, is that if the Biden DOJ wanted to signal it was serious about document abuse and not just serious about getting Trump, is they would have combed through all the previous administrations (probably starting with Bush II). Start by nailing someone like Bolton, Condi Rice, etc. Move onto Obama admin bad actors. Clapper and Brennen strike me as particularly arrogant so a raid on them would probably get you 1 of 2. The culmination of going after Obama staffers crescendos with the obvious indictment of Hillary Clinton. Then you go back to some workmanlike prosecutions of Trump staffers (hey maybe a double tap on Bolton) and then the pot o gold at the end of the rainbow is Trump.
That is how a serious person would go about breaking the norm.
anti_dan
8mo ago
absolutely will not stop here.
Well it certainly didn't start here either. Lawfare being an exclusive tool of the left isn't a stable equilibrium unless the right is totally crushed. Tit was bound to happen eventually.
anti_dan
6mo ago
Anarcho tyranny is in full effect. Use a gun for a proper purpose, like defending yourself from a rioter, and you will end up in the clink. The rioter, not so much.
anti_dan
11mo ago
This story has made me revisit my college days and think on how close many kids are to lifetime worries if they aren't just total spineless cowards. We would host parties, from time to time, not ragers on the level of frats (but those obviously exist) and from time to time people who weren't invited, or were kinda shady friends of a friend of a friend would come. Then they would inevitably do some drug other than alcohol/weed and become a crazy person in need of restraint. Typically this never escalates when an average guy is confronted by my roommate (6'5'' pitcher), and if we added in that I was a wrestler, another roommate in BJJ before it was cool, they are easily dealt with. And then they go home.
But one time at one of our friend's place, some crack smoking person showed up and cold clocked a girl. Then he fought and fought and bit at least 3 people until roommate pitcher and I fully submission held him. He attempted to bite me at least 3 times over the 10 or so minutes before the cops picked him up. Could we have killed him? Well, yes, accidentally, as well. Or he could have George Floyded on us and had a dubious possibly drug induced death, possibly aggravated by being placed in a painful restraint for a long time. What to do? Just let people going around socking co-eds? At least the cops slipped me some of those ziptie cuffs as they carted him away...
anti_dan
1yr ago
Well, I find the Clinton case to be particularly egregious because it was done with intent to evade oversight. There were perfectly good State Department servers that had at least decent security. Instead of using those, she set up a parallel system, without any meaningful security. Then dozens/hundreds of times she knowingly did nefarious things, because instead of simply emailing to her private server from State servers, she had aids, print, then scan documents so as to get them onto the private server without "any trace".
anti_dan
9mo ago
Whatever patience I had with American "anti-establishment" right-wingers, it ended. I guess Hanania is the only one I keep reading/listening at this point.
Your evidence for making this wide sweeping conclusion is frog avatar anons? At least when someone on the right weakmans they cite a Harvard professor or some MSNBC host. Putin can be bad, but not caring about that much at all is perfectly fine. And dunking on Biden and co for having a Putin fetish is appropriate comedy.
anti_dan
2mo ago
Alternatively...Biden could enforce the border. I know it sounds crazy, but at this point its a political win for him to work with Abbot.
anti_dan
1yr ago
You do realize the effort and investment you've described so greatly exceeds what most people are capable of at 25, right? 6 weeks of vacation? On what planet does the average guy making $40k trying to work up to a position that makes 60k have that? Learning rudimentary foreign language skills? You're talking about something most people simply cannot do. Those with high enough IQs are probably better served just putting in OT at their current company and getting promoted. Use that money to snag a woman.
Teaching English in Korea/Japan is not unheard of, and it does sometimes let you snag a woman, but its mostly a thing only an option for higher status men anyways. Those countries don't let McDonalds workers have work visas.
anti_dan
1yr ago
This is an overly charitable take. The key to judging AP courses of this sort is to just skip to the recommended readings section. In this outline it starts on 70 with recommended textbooks. The first one listed, by Maulana Karenga clearly would be in violation of the FL statute if used. It is an openly race critical text that contains all forms of intersectional conspiracy theories. Its hard to imagine the majority of those textbooks (which are not mandatory, but in practice are more or less mandatory) are all that different. The other literature section contains a hodgepodge of works, I am not familiar with all of them, but at least 5 on the first page contain conspiratorial rants about whiteness, white supremacy, or some similar concept.
anti_dan
9mo ago
So why don't people want to be called "cis"?
Because normal people object to being called something other than normal? Trans people having so much support in the media skews how truly abnormal almost everyone thinks they are. Its a bizarre scene whenever a trans person enters any not-LGBTQ (on and on) place and starts trying to fit in. So they often don't even try, they just start being bizzare and demanding respect. Some FTM people can moderately pass as really weak looking soyboys. But they seem much less even a part of the project. Those are mostly very depressed people who's depression continues so brazenly through transition they are lucky to ever see people as they can often not exit their abode. Contrasted with the never passing loud MTFs that so often represent the movement, and well, the abnormality is so stark that calling something that is not that anything but normal is simply a bizarre turn of vocabulary.
anti_dan
10mo ago
I think you are radically underrating the "wokeness makes it hard for them to produce good products" angle. Making a good woke movie for kids or teens seems nearly impossible. It imposes too many restraints on you that are restraints against good storytelling.
anti_dan
10mo ago
Reddit has always been a place for left-wing moderators to run rampant and take action against people they don't agree with.
This is a classic misremembering of history that is repeated at Twitter (walked back a bit), Reddit, Youtube, etc. These sites were BUILT by right of center users because they were places that gave a platform for things outside the left wing media window (including even Fox). Stephan Moleneaux (sp?) was a power user on all three at one point. The_donald was once the most active subreddit. These sites only really started systematic censorship after they became the default platform for XXX sort of media. Its basically a classic bait and switch. People invested in the platforms when they were neutral or right of center. Then they basically came to those people and said, "haha that $10k is mine now."
anti_dan
1yr ago
What is the plausible mechanism behind which research that shows these kind of results are created? Are they measuring something that is real (i.e. does a more diverse workforce actually make companies more money)? Or are the brilliant people at McKinsey meticulously hand-selecting the companies to design studies which will show the opposite of reality?
It works like this:
Step 1: High margin firm with very few workers comes into existence (Google, Apple, etc)
Step 2: Add diversity hires to avoid lawsuits
Step 3: Firm is still high margin because it still has very few employees
Step 4: Compare said firm to Ford, Waste Management, etc that have 1 million male working class workers.
anti_dan
1yr ago
I’ve said it before, but the January 6th defendants are lucky that, contra their reputation here, American elites are so magnanimous in victory. In a more serious country (perhaps, in fact, in the kind of country the rioters might dream of creating), even the perpetrators of such a pathetic attempt at insurrection would have been shot.
Did you make the same argument about the BLM rioters that tried to push down the White House fence? You know the one's who famously were not tracked down via phone data geotargeting, thousands of hours running facial recognition algorithms and a massive social media snitch-rewarding campaign? To the wall with them!
anti_dan
1yr ago
I read the article and it is a tour de force in using lots of words to say very little. I suppose it is a bit idealistic (albeit in an utopian way I don't think is plausible), but it is simultaneously lacking any substance. Suburbs with lots of trains and buses? Sure. How? A bus route that serves 3 people a day is a massive waste, and is what subsidized busing in the suburbs actually looks like. Diversity? I see people of races doing things of all sorts, how are you going to overcome fundamental differences? Is it going to be reparations forever? Then say that. Say what you mean, not nothing and lovingly allow your fellow travelers insert their utopian dreams into it.
anti_dan
2mo ago
I don't consider it much of a "rare" miss. I find Hanania's writings increasingly incoherent across the board, and I think he is generally searching for an odd niche to try and maintain relevance now that his actual big splash in has waned. Trying to balance takes in the anti-woke sphere to ensure you are "respectable" tends to put you into a land of comments that are either uninteresting, or fallacious, and thats where this one, and a lot of them recently, have landed.
anti_dan
4mo ago
I live by a large shelter for migrants in the city. They have a group of folks who are dedicated to this candy/soda selling on the side of the road. The main reason I think these people are here is for the schools. Word was out from day 1 that they could and should enroll the kids in schools and they have. The local bus stops are bustling with migrants from 6-8am and 3-4 pm. The resource strain is fairly acute, at least locally, on the schools and public transit. I will say they are polite and clean, but there are things that I am seeing as fairly big failure modes. These Venezuelans are terrible drivers, and have crappy cars, so there is a spike in them getting into accidents, where they don't have insurance, registration, or a driver's license. Not great for a court system and PD that is already hard up for manpower. I'm also a bit disappointed in the entrepreneurial spirit of the males in the camp. I tried to hire one to help me get a chair out of a u-haul and up 4 flights of stairs. No bites at $50 for one big ass chair.
anti_dan
10mo ago
The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular and were shocked when there were people upset with it.
This is just "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon" all over again, or the Russian joke about the blank pamphleteer. The media being homogenously left provides them with a significant electoral advantage, but an even larger confusion problem when they don't win.
anti_dan
10mo ago
More likely:
He was doing some other stupid activity in the vicinity of the bike, not paying much attention because he has a low attention span, as teens do.
She swipes the bike, gets on, he and his company run over to stop her.
That is the charitable take that is mildly plausible. But he's still a criminal in that scenario.
anti_dan
10mo ago
Nybbler is, as often the case, correct. Understanding the crime problem requires understanding and accepting that the progressive project failed, and cannot be redeemed. As is prominently mentioned in the OP, he still believes the state can provide, "high quality education, healthcare, and public transit" to all its citizens. These thoughts are at odds with the goal of fixing crime, or reality, or both.
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High quality education is just middling education given to talented students. Students make the school, teachers barely do anything.
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High quality healthcare is state of the art healthcare, this is always expensive, being state of the art. Thus it cannot be free. Nor does it matter much. Reliable plumbing is 10x+ as important for life expectancy. Most of current health problems are either lifestyle or the result of EXTREME age.
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Public transit cannot be for all and be good. This is the progressive crime problem remade. Everything good in society must exclude the bad people forcefully. Over and over.
anti_dan
1yr ago
This really just strikes me as sneering. There is always going to be one or two humans that become figures of a thing when people perceive that thing to be against their interests. Decarbonization is against the interests of most people, even if a lot of people favor it politically. Most of the wild eye things they discuss at Davos will be mostly bad for most people if the Davos types get any of their policies pushed through before technology makes their preferences seem weird, outdates their ideas wholly, etc.
Take, for example, dishwashers. Almost everyone acknowledges that the new, Eco-friendly ones don't clean very well. Is this the machination of Klaus Schwab incarnate? No. But he, the WEF, etc are parts of the movement that floated the theories that led to crappy dishwashers being the norm. Does he argue for fiscal deregulation? Sure. This is a non-mover for the modern right. And basically everyone at Davos will eventually say something that embraces left-ish globohomo. Which is basically the enemy of the new right.
I participate or participated in many online video game communities. What you are describing as niceness = left wing is probably as far from the truth as I can imagine. The only area where is could plausibly be true is commenting on weirdness or grossness. It seems that leftists typically embrace weirdness like over the top piercings and tattoos or fat-embracing etc more than those on the right, and so you do get left wing moderation by banning negative comments about people's appearance, delinquent drug use, cheating on partners, fathering/mothering multiple bastards, etc. Basically, if you ban criticism of weird or bad life choices, yes that results in a leftist shift. But that doesn't get you even 10% to where most of the forums end up drifting.
Where it inevitably ends up is with banning people for anodyne right of center opinions that leftists categorize as "attacks". Illustratively, I was once banned from a Warcraft III forum for "homophobia" aka saying orgies spread STDs. On city-related forum, there was a mass ban of "racists" which was people who had participated in a thread about getting their gaming systems and laptops stolen in home invasions. Not some targeted ban of slur-users, a ban for everyone who was not a mod that participated in the discussion. This is not "niceness" its hounding out dissent because open discussion refutes their worldview.
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