crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
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crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
22d ago
Use the following helpful heuristic to determine the partisan leanings of political shooters in the future.
Shooter hits their target, coherent manifesto, unadorned weaponry, captured alive (or surrenders themselves?) Right-winger.
Shooter misses their target, nonsensical manifesto, gun covered in stickers, kills themselves (or is killed by law enforcement)? Left-winger.
Thank you for your attention on this matter.
I'm not saying that Trump is bad. (In fact, I think he's more good than bad. Not perfect, but no one is.) I feel like I'm catching friendly fire from someone I agree with. I feel a bit indignant, actually, that you think that I am another 'Trump bad' commentator. I demand an apology!
...regardless, it is my observation that American politicians are big on the performative aspects of politics. It's not enough to merely engage in policy-making: one must make the pious noises of Righteous Rule and kneel to the appropriate deities, which necessitates ideological belief in policy making. In our case, the dogmas are the liberal consensus of the post-war period - and, more recently, the progressive elite culture.
I don't think there's a reason to be overtly cynical about their anger when Trump breaks those mores and disowns those beliefs. One can be self-serving and outraged at the same time.
Trump, I think, has no strong ideology, no more than the CEO of Ford has an ideology when it comes to making cars. He has protectionist beliefs and populist instincts but is readily swayable by anyone with the patience. His political product is himself, for better or for worse. So when a subordinate fucks up, his political movement can go 'if only the Tsar knew!' and he can smoothly purge a disobedient follower without fear of ideological contradiction. This process has happened many times before. Elon is a very prominent example, but no one on his cabinet is safe. I suspect he'll go through more advisors before his term is over.
This is very much not what the Biden administration was like, where the cabinet ministers stayed on permanently no matter how terribly they did because they were the ones really in charge. The difference between top-down and bottom-up leadership. On the Democratic side, the president is merely a figurehead executing on the advice of his well-credentialed advisors. On the Republican side, the president is a emperor whose favor his advisors must pursue.
long exhale
Which, to get back to the point, Trump doesn't care about individual policies not working because to him, it is a manner of changing the people responsible. Democrats do care - because the people responsible are all executing the same policy, no matter who they are! There is nothing inherently offensive about EIF's statement here. It is easier to change personnel then it is to change ideologies. Chadface, YES, this is a good thing. QED.
I think, broadly, that Trump cares about his policies working as much as the CEO of Ford cares about your car getting you to work or the CEO of Dunkin Donuts cares about the taste of your coffee. If your car explodes, or your coffee is poison, they get involved. But if your car breaks down or one time your coffee tastes bitter, he's not going to get personally bothered about it. And that's fine - that's how the world works - but Western politicians are big on the humility and the empathy. It's not enough to just give lip service: you have to believe it.
A certain valence of care, although I'm not sure what EIF is getting at. Personally I'm on the vibes-aligned part of the political spectrum than the policy-based one - if a leader is directionally correct, they can be trusted on the smaller details - but a lot of people don't think that way and want a big rulebook where the leaders care about the rules, no matter how silly those rules may be. And the liberal democracy handbook has a bunch of big rules that he's ignoring. A lot of liberals believe that rules and policies are more important than outcomes. They're silly, but people are allowed to be silly.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
23d ago
I think the insight of EverythingIsFine is that this is Definitely Not How Modern Democracies are supposed to work, not in the idealistic high school sense or even the more pragmatic institutional liberal sense. And even if the underbelly is seedy and corrupt, on the surface people are supposed to pretend that they're meritocratic liberal technocrats above petty corruption and infighting.
Meanwhile, Trump runs his organizations like he's Hitler. Not that he's a Nazi, but that he's making his subordinates compete in a survival-of-the-fittest fashion, people rising and falling in the inner circle to the fickle winds of political power struggle. This is very familiar to classicists: it's a classic balance-of-power strategy of absolute monarchs - and more contemporarily, corporate executives.
Even if he does not have the title of a king, he has the powers of a king, and rules like a king, and that is alarming to liberals.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
23d ago
I agree that the later books aren't as good, but the core of a Way of Kings is Kaladin's story. It's hard to not feel for the literal cannon fodder with the worst job in the world overcoming their own fear of failure and worthlessness. That brotherhood is very real. When he is sentenced to death, it is a touching moment.
...which, arguably, makes all of the other parallel plots feel lacking in comparison. Even Kaladin's story degrades into him 'seeking therapy' in the most soyish of terms. But it had that seed of greatness within it, that made me slog it out three books to see if it would come about again. The fact that Sandersons disappoints does not detract from the strongest themes of the original work.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
23d ago
I subscribe to the philosophy that the process is the punishment. There is no inherent way of making an arrest or a fine a happy event. No one in the history of the universe has ever been overjoyed to sit in the back of a police car or to pay a fine. Any other frame of viewing it is too idealistic for this sinful earth.
In high school, I bit a man because he was bullying me, in a sincere effort to do him harm.
But I didn't attack the teacher that was sent to collect me, and I certainly didn't scream at the police officer that I talked to.
It would have been very silly of me to do so. Childish.
I knew what I had done was shameful and wrong, but I didn't regret it. And since I had the intelligence of the average person, I didn't take it out on them. And I felt no shame for not quixotically attacking authority in the aftermath. I had already gained my satisfaction.
So you presume wrongly. I demand an apology.
Your view explains nothing other than belligerent and argumentative people don't like following rules or laws, which is so stupidly obvious that it is not notable or insightful to observe. Yeah, no shit. So what? I don't like going to my dentist, but that doesn't justify me punching her when I sit down in the chair, or not paying her a hundred bucks for a tooth cleaning.
It is generally accepted that the government, from time to time, can compel you to endure mildly annoying and discomforting situations for the benefit of the society it governs. That is how it has been since ante bellum.
Anyone who wants to pick a fight with dully appointed authority for no good reason is a moron. No, I don't need a strict definition. Gambling your life on the outcome of a speeding ticket or spreading your legs out on two seats on a subway is the province of morons. You are thinking that you are being clever, but you are actually being very stupid, enough that dismissing your opinion without debate is the most productive use of my time.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
23d ago
You're being silly.
It's one thing to break out the civic resistance card for obvious government overreach. It's quite another to suddenly be a principled libertarian when one is getting a speeding ticket or being pulled off a train by the constables. It has all the sincerity of an atheist in a foxhole. It is transparently self-serving and no one is stupid enough to fall for it.
No shit, being arrested sucks. Being ticketed sucks. But, as you can imagine, that's part of the deterrent value. Why would it be pleasant? Do you envision a police force that politely writes letters of warning that can be easily ignored and have no power to detain you?
The modal person saying these things is not a martyr for civil rights against a overpowerful constabulary: they are habitual rowdies grasping at straws, hoping that saying the right words will get them out of crimes they know they committed. It never works, and then they physically attack the dully employed enforcers of the law. See: the entire run of COPS, liveleak, etc.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
24d ago
If you're saying that game theory doesn't apply to groups or coalitions, then I have to disagree. If you're saying that the grudger strategy specifically doesn't work, well, sure it does. It may be mathematically non-optimal but it is a strategy that fits into most people's moral intuitions.
As they say, hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue. The old social trust has been dynamited: there is likely no escape from this partisan cycle. This is the post Christian world that the postmodernists wanted. We now hate our enemies and wish the worst for them, as the president says.
This is true, on both sides. Only a small minority of actual liberals hold to anything else, but no one is listening to them anymore. Your arguments are made to a people whose ethos no longer exists.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
25d ago
You only think that because you're a resentful poor person. /s Woke right, woke right!
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
25d ago
This guy reads far too much like Alexander Turok. I suppose that there is a case to be made that he is genuinely a Hannia-ite Elite Human Capital stan but those people are annoying and impossible to argue with, because all they do is cast their opposition as disgruntled resentful proles. That is the definition of bad faith and should be more proactively clamped down upon.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
26d ago
I would accept a neoclassical art visa and make it very generous, in exchange for the Trump Administration firing hellfire missiles at architectural students and their maniac mentors - ala Nasser Al-Awlaki.
At the very least, it would lead to a renaissance in brutalist bunker design.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
26d ago
So as long as the internet was a niche thing you could be comfortably detached and ironic. I miss it too.
But the normie masses came and took everything seriously. It basically became a even lamer and gayer form of the real world.
Nowadays, there's no distinction between real life and the internet, and that hasn't been to the benefit of either.
The old soul of the internet is dead, or if it is still alive, it is only in little isolate pockets in communities too small to be relevant. Alas.
The pervasiveness of blatant racism amongst the "everybody knows crowd" does not exactly lend them credibility,
Yes, and? Are they wrong? Who is more right: the racists who pay attention to the issue, or the know-nothings that pretend that this has not been going on for a decade? The burden of evidence is heavily tilted towards proving that it is the case: that Indians are exploiting the system, en-masse. Where's your proof that they're not?
Very recently, a Walmart executive was fired for taking kickbacks from Indians (he was Indian as well.) Is this corruption you don't care about? Or the very obviously noticeable fact that Indians in middle management only hire their own? Or the systematic abuse of H1B that three-quarters of the allotted visas are for Indian nationals?
The H1B subject is the hottest topic of internal right-wing debate for the past year: how could you not know?
It is well known that academic and credential fraud amongst Indians is rife, which is why you see the most superhumanly qualified employees in the world apply for a job that pays 50,000 USD a year.
Come on. It doesn't pass the smell test. I am tired of addressing arguments to this effect. The only good faith reason I can see for people presenting arguments in this light is that they genuinely do not know anything about the subject at all. If that's the case, why do they bother 'just asking questions' over something that can be trivially researched. We have AI now, even. You don't even need to google search it anymore. They are undercutting wages by lying their asses off and credulous HR departments with no technical knowledge hire them because beancounters want to pump growth by cutting salaries this quarter.
I don't give a damn about your reverence for rules or processes. The human intestine is a process, but you don't praise its product: you flush it away. Breaking the rules in this case is a good thing. It should happen more.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
26d ago
I am a Canadian and I do not want more any Indians. India has plenty of Indians and, well, look at her. Any benefit they would bring is diminished by fraud, nepotism, and making my country more like their country.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
27d ago
Women often overreact.
But in Shoe's case, I think she's right to do so, in that social media influencers - especially political ones - receive death threats on a daily, perhaps hourly basis. You develop a thick skin for such things - you have to, if you want to keep your sanity - but even a slight increase in the probability of the threats being carried through suddenly gives that torrent a terrifying valence.
She has a child, and a husband, that she very much does not want to leave, and I think she is deserving of sympathy. The fact that Kirk was young and similarly at the beginning of starting a family makes it personal to her. Women are empathetic in that way.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
27d ago
Congress is reduced to rubber-stamping a yearly budgetary bill larded up to the gills: what else are they going to do with their free time?
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
27d ago
That may be true, but being gay is absolutely a dealbreaker for African Americans. If Pete was built like Arnold Swartznegger and had the charm of Casanova he still wouldn't fly.
This is fundamentally a flaw in the Democrat coalition that prevents them from presenting a gay candidate for the presidential office, because the black lobby is so strong. Even if you whipped the reps into grudgingly do so, their constituents wouldn't vote for him, so what's the point?
This presents a refutation of the intersectional logic that is impossible to ignore.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
28d ago
A) He would have lost terribly, because Bernie Sanders is a terrible campaigner and his target demographic was too far left of the American center. B) If he did, woke would have been more brazen, but with less institutional support, causing its collapse to happen earlier.
If you run as a Dem, you need black support, which is why Mayo Pete despite being the darling of the Clintonites is a dead man walking concerning his political prospects. Blacks will not vote for a gay man. It's such a foreseeable outcome that the outrage coming in about two years time will be a amusing bit of drama to spectate from the peanut gallery.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
28d ago
It's the vestigial stub of dueling culture that used to exist in the United States. Legally consensual murder being made illegal brought up the concern that mouthy shits would push the line anyway, so intentionally aggravating bastards is considered to be a mitigating circumstance for a crime of passion.
Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.
Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.
If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?
With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
Sigh.
Okay. Look.
If you take a look at the economic sanctions on North Korea as a cursory glance at Wikipedia, you see that they are not embargoed in terms of food, only its export. They can import as much food as they like from people willing to sell to them. Cuba is the same. Starvation happens in those countries not because of a lack of sellers, but a lack of hard currency to make imports with.
No one has ever accused of Jews of not having money.
As we've seen with Russia, both food and energy exports are not constrained. The technology necessary to maintain a modern economy is imported from a variety of sources, but even that can be overcome. The Mossad isn't experienced in playing shell games with corporations in Lebanon and Turkey. It is trivially easy for them to do so - that's how they got the pager bombs to begin with.
Sanctions and boycotts have not stopped these countries. Inconvenienced? Yes. But no sanctions regime is airtight.
I don't know why you insist on this being the silver bullet that fells the Zionists, but it's clear you in some form or another believe in the priors of BDS. All of these points are irrelevant, and as I said - fantasy. Eighty years of Arabs not trading with them have not caused them to collapse. BDS has gone on for twenty years and achieved nothing. Israel will always have American sponsorship, if only because it is where most of the world's Jews live, so it is a hypothetical of hypotheticals.
I don't know what to say but your beliefs in this regard are pure idealistic fantasy, and even if such events come to pass it would not result in the historical arc that you envision. My evidence, to counter your 'history', is all of the real-life regimes right now who ignore sanctions and embargos without great difficulty. Effort, perhaps. But existential they are not.
I admit that the heuristic still needs some work, and am open to critique and modification.
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