crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Woke right is not a thing: it never was a thing, because actual Nazis, fascists, and white nationalists don't use or accept critical theory. Any resemblance (da joos vs da whitey) is coincidental: the true similarity is that both wokism and fascism are illiberal, but for completely different reasons.
Let us use argumentum ad Hitlerum to demonstrate what I mean. Hitler is uncontroversially a Nazi, a fascist, and a white nationalist. To call him 'woke' is a definitional collapse. He's not building a intersectional coalition against Zionism and its supporters. He has a particular volkgeist and conceptions of ethnic superiority that is not postmodern in the least. (This is why hoteps aren't woke, despite arguably being the originator of the term: they're particular, not universal.)
It's dumb. It's dumb, lazy thinking: liberals playing definitional games and labels as if they mean anything. If you have a problem with white nationalists and cryptonazis, you can say so: that's a popular opinion in normieland. You don't need to invent fake terms that only you and a particular clique define.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
This is an unfair argument.
Take Kiwi Farms, for example. You could extend your argument you make, smugly saying: 'make your own payment processor, make your own DNS, make your own web-host.' The left extends controls over previously neutral institutions and you say 'why not make your own?' Why not make your own laws, your own bank, your own country? Your own autonomous sovereignty, right-wingers?
Imagine my face: it is a chiseled, manly expression, saying YES.
All culture war issues are essentially coup-complete ones now because of the left's influence over the government and the media. If you want to keep the globohomo out of your Battletech: you must first overthrow the US government.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
What has always frustrated me about Freddie is that he gets it, he really does, but at the last possible moment he crimestops himself and reaffirms his loyalty to the progressive agenda. It's never the fault of progressivism that it fails in practice: it's the no-good grifters who corrupt it away from Real Communism.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
Another QUANGO put to the sword. 'independent' organizations are really just stealthy ways to hide from public scrutiny while taking public money. How can you be a 'private' entity if you were founded by Congress?
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Let me voice the reactionary opinion: strength is good, actually.
Valuing traits that are signs of personal character - virtue, integrity, honor, personal fitness, stoicism - leads to strong individuals who lead strong societies. There is no shame in being weak: because no one is born perfect. But giving up on self-improvement, selfishly wallowing in one's own incapacity, that should be shamed, and those who make their identity of being weak should not be valued or praised.
A society that values strength will produce people of merit. A society that values weakness will produce people of no worth. People respond to material and social incentives. A middling society that attempts to equivocate between the two will only create confusion: pretending that strength is equally as valid as weakness is obviously degenerate. I'd much rather have a paternal society which encourages fortitude than a maternal one which coddles the thin-skinned. If liberals say that it's dystopian and cruel, I'll tell them to touch grass.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
In my opinion - as a writer myself - is that right now, AI is approximately at the level of your average competently-written fanfiction, which is a big problem for Hollywood because they write below that level.
As we've seen in recent years, so-called professional scriptwriters have been putting out utter shit on the big screen and prestige TV that fans of the work would often (and do!) write superior takes for free, on the internet. The only thing that separates the two are gatekeeping and connections in the notoriously nepotistic and corrupt Hollywood system.
SAG and SAW fundamentally rely on the studio system for their collective bargaining to make any sense. As soon as photorealistic 3D generative animation gets off the ground, there will be no corporate giants for them to leech off. They see a future where automated scabs run them out of business, and I can't blame them. The mediocre products they produce can in no way compete.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
What a pathetic end to a political career. To be humiliated as an old, senile fool by your own party. Almost Shakespearean in its pathos: King Lear, abandoned by his daughters: and the only loyal one to remain to him is a crack-smoking adulterer.
Those saccharine smiles in the audience, that praise him as being an American hero, smiling as they stab him in the back. Ugly.
crushedoranges
2yr ago
But the entire point is that there is no argument being made (because even having a debate would be a concession of the nature of the topic as up for questioning.) The overall cultural milleu of the present day means that many leftists try and bludgeon their political opponents through authority, not argumentation. If a evangelical Christian showed up to a university and cited the King James Bible as an authoritative we'd all laugh at him but that happens all the time in spaces like these.
When left-wingers make grandiose claims of moral and cultural authority, they get greatly offended when I tell them that I don't accept their expertise. They don't want to get down in the weeds and fight it out because that would give the right a platform and validity, as if our positions were equal to theirs. Their counterparts on the right have to fight for every inch of ground to even be heard and they don't even want to step out of their ivory-tower citadels to engage with opinions they don't aesthetically like!
So I don't care what they think, to be perfectly honest. They can wring their hands and whinge behind my back on how mean we are all they'd like. Chekists deserve only contempt.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Judith Butler is putting an unbounded demand for empathy as default and defining everything else as cruelty. You can't get it with me anymore. I can see the transparent attempt at manipulation. I didn't want to be a cruel person, but if I want anything for myself I have to be. Empathy requires reciprocal return. Why should I care for people who hate me and want to see me destroyed?
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Scott says something dumb about ordo amoris
Even knowing what he is talking about and his moral principles behind saying such a thing, he comes off as dumb. I've never agreed with Scott with everything (particularly his polyamorist leanings) but I think that this is the final breaking with SSC and myself. Rationalism is a train that I've ridden for ten years, and now I am finally getting off. Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
As a Canadian, the first step is impossible. We're under the permanent rule of theater-kid occupied government: all optics, no substance.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
I think I owe you a apology.
I threw out a lot of hot flak into a sensitive topic and your reply was too heartfelt not to make a response.
We should all try to overcome our vices. It is truly a struggle that never ends.
I wish you the best of luck in overcoming yours.
And although I don't think I've quite changed my mind, I will endeavor to be more understanding in the future.
For the offense I've given you, I'm sorry.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
We've found the one person on the planet who doesn't have an opinion on Donald Trump.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I don't buy games with black people in it anymore. Historical exemptions from a previous era, like Barret, get a pass, but if I see a black person (especially that one black bald woman, you know who) on the cover then it a 'never buy, sports-game-tier slop' category.
And I'm not even white.
Don't buy things from people who hate you.
crushedoranges
2mo ago
Scott is a Democrat partisan now. He used to have useful insights, but then they got him, first by attacking his reputation, and then his Californian social circle has naturally limited the scope of acceptable opinions that he can hold. Of course he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left. All of his friends live there.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
Unfortunately our technocrats can't deliver that, but as a compromise, how about a trans-inclusive code of conduct for your favorite FOSS project?
I'm not sure what use 'soft power' is if you can't do something as simple as returning a country's citizens back to their homeland.
That's what all the liberals are whining about on twitter and reddit, about American international standing.
Not like they already hold America in contempt, and blame them for all their problems. Dumb South American leftists.
It feels like international relations majors are jerking themselves off to the concept of a rules based international order.
When you govern for results instead of the approval of an international global elite, the difference in outcomes is obvious.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Ibn Kaldun was an Arab sociologist (the first of his field) and, exceptionally for a man of his time, did not accept the 'god willed it' explanation for why the Rashidun Caliphate collapsed. He came up with a term to describe the social cohesiveness and trust of society that degraded over time (of which I would call social capital).
It serves as a warning to elites who assume a high-trust society is a given: that abusing one's legitimacy by acting in arbitrary ways will lead to the decline and decay of one's empire, no matter how divinely guided. A bourgeoise state is reliant on high societal trust for contract enforcement and stability for business. It is the exceptional malefactor that would burn this trust for a temporary boost to quarterly figures.
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
Conservatives, particularly MAGA conservatives, must harden their hearts as such. In the coming months and years, there will be no end to the wailing. They will beg you in the name that all that is decent and humane to give them the one exception and save many lives. The rationalist crowd will come to you with spreadsheets and lives per dollar and give logical arguments to save lives. You will be constantly bombarded with propaganda designed to psyop you to support the return of the old status quo.
Put on your biggest smile and say no. That's your cross to bear. Resist the temptation to give in, and to be seen as 'one of the good ones'. Mercy and compassion are the luxuries of the victor, and you have not won yet. This is but the first of many battles in a long war. If your opponents say that your proposals will cost millions of lives, say to them: "Billions." And do what you intended to do, and do it so throughly and completely that it does not have to be done again. Embrace the virtue of Lycurgus and destroy what you must to save what you can.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
If Trump was the reincarnation of Cato in terms of eloquence he wouldn't get any credit from anyone. You miss the point of the debate. It mattered, not that it was expected to change anyone's mind, but that it was a holy ritual of the American republic held for the sake of tradition. That Biden couldn't even rise to the very mild task that this is a bad omen for the republic, and a sign of weakness.
Things like this matter.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
They could. But then Trump could instruct the DoJ not to enforce that ruling.
You see, without the rule of law and trust in institutions, all judges are is old people in unfashionable black robes. They're not wizards. If the judiciary is percieved (and acts) in a partisan way, then the other branches of government can hit back. The people shouting about checks and balances are unhappy it's being used on them.
All of this line-pushing is designed to go to the Supreme Court. It's clear from the Trump Administration's intent that they will no longer tolerate the judiciary getting in the way of their agenda with legalese. They don't regard them as a neutral institution enforcing the rule of law, but one colonized by its enemies.
I predict that the Supreme Court will give way to Trump to preserve its own legitimacy, as the court did to FDR to prevent him from stuffing it with his appointees.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
I can't love Donald Trump more than I already do, but this might do it for me. Fuck all of you safetyist milksops, we're on the singularity train. The AI waifus of the future will be American, goddamnit! I WILL MARRY MY FICTIONAL AI CONSTRUCT, YOU CAN'T STOP ME MODS
crushedoranges
2mo ago
The problem with a less educated support base is that it simply has a less accurate understanding of the world. In fact, I think the problem is much worse than a simple analysis of voting patterns by educational attainment would suggest. Populists not only often fail to appeal to college graduates as a broad class, but they do particularly poorly among the small slice of the public that is the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics.
Thinking that the electorate MUST regain the confidence of the elite is a notion reserved only for the most biting of satires and Hanania's midwittery.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Lösung
News flash: the people have ALWAYS been stupid, always been short-sighted, provincial and backwater in sensibility and lacking in education. And in a democratic system, their votes are equal to your well-educated and informed one. So you better have a convincing argument to sway them to your side! Use what they say, rhetoric? The classic politician's art?
What is presented here is not even an argument. It is simply a fact. Most people are uninformed. You can't govern a country as if it consisted entirely of reporters from the New York Times. Any argument against populism is inherently a argument against democracy. The masses chose their own elites in defiance of reality or whatever standard you might impose on them. There is no argument against this that does not end in 'some animals are more equal than others'.
Hanania is merely restating what the Greeks have always known, which puts into doubt the depth and quality of his education. If democracy requires the electorate to be highly educated elite human capital like himself, perhaps democracy is a BAD IDEA because such a thing will never happen. If he would just flat out state that he wants democracy but only for himself and his pals, it'd be more honest but he is not in the business of honesty, is he?
crushedoranges
8mo ago
Come on, now. It's a fig leaf. If Trump proposed 'A Muslim ban and others' everyone would still call him racist.
Trump shot during rally.
The biggest news. The biggest! It literally just happened. I don't know what to say. Commentary beggars one's belief. I apologize for the brevity of this post, but the implications of it are mind-boggling. Political violence has escalated (perhaps, degenerated) into new levels of unforeseen disaster. What do you Americans think?
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