Agree with the overuse of the term goth, there’s nothing really goth here. I will note however that there’s sort of a stereotype here that gender ideology is something associated with college-educated coastal elites, and it may be at an intellectual level, but not as-lived on the ground. Walk around Princeton campus and the kids will look normal, they wouldn’t even look bizarre by the standards of twenty years ago. You’ll see much more gender nonconformity at a Walmart in rural Alabama than at Harvard.
I think this is basically the intellectually permissive ideology of colleges finally filtering down to Walmart, where it just gets interpreted as a complete collapse of any normative standards or shame. So you get this mixture of mall ninja aesthetics, anime, furries, piercings, tattoos, hip hop/black culture in an unholy combination assisted by algorithmic blending of previously distinct subcultures. Similar to interracial relationships. There may be nigh unanimous support for interracial relationships at Harvard, but you won’t see many except some White/Asian pairs, you see far more at your local Walmart, especially White/black. These ideas are formed at colleges but mostly inflicted on the trailer park class.
You know, separately I want to talk about poptimism and the death of subcultures. I was reading Chuck Klosterman’s book on the 90s (good fun, I highly recommend it) and he was pointing out how “selling out” was a huge concern among indie music fans in a way it isn’t today. In the 90s subcultural fans had an expectation for their celebrities of loyalty to the subculture, of purity, and of resistance to debasement. In the early 2000s for example, hip hop had its own unique fashion that was totally independent from the world of high fashion houses and luxury design And you would have never seen Modest Mouse collaborating with Cam’ron. At some point around 2012 when proto wokeness was emerging, indie music press started to become self conscious that their disdain of pop music was in some ways sexist and racist and they began to notice that the then-popular bearded-flannel-mandolin indie of Fleet Foxes and Iron & Wine was disturbingly White They shifted their ethos from searching for the most obscure music to praising the top-40 hits of Beyonce or Kanye for their racial politics, thus poptimism was born and the end of subcultural gatekeeping. I mean look at the writing credits on Beyonce’s 2016 lemonade, you have former indie darlings like Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend on there, this is like if Jeff Mangum was writing songs for Britney Spears, absolutely unthinkable twenty years ago. IMO aside from the algorithmic melange & capitalistic aspects, there really is a part of the story where wokrness and concerns over sexism/racism/gatekeeping destroyed distinct subcultures
daguerrean
3d ago
The null hypothesis is that racial intelligence differences do not exist
How does the null hypothesis have a place here and why do you get to decide what it is? We aren’t approving drugs here, we’re just trying to weigh two theories, it’s completely unfair to arbitrarily privilege the one you like more.
daguerrean
3d ago
I’m going to be honest I don’t care about who had sex with prostitutes. The only interesting things about Epstein to me are, was he an Israeli spy? Was he murdered? Was Ghislaine actually a reddit mod? I basically take for granted that 90% of men would have sex with everything that walks, given the chance, so none of that stuff is revelatory. Especially men that aggressively seek power/wealth/status, as they say, men only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting.
daguerrean
5d ago
Excellent comment here. I think the core of this is that essentially Good and Pretti were some variety of normies. When the criminal underclass acts out, it is easy to write it off as them being low-agency and their acting out is part of their general dysfunction. Normies however have the necessary degree of self-control and agency to respond to incentives, social status rewards and authority messaging. So when normies act out you can't dismiss it as a symptom of their general dysfunction, it tells you something about what incentives and societal messaging are directing them towards. By definition, normies are ones who "go with the flow." If you have normies in Minneapolis violently engaging ICE that tells us we have a messaging problem that is much bigger than whatever personal failings or bad judgments these people may have had.
daguerrean
5d ago
While it was a bad shoot the current theory is his gun fired on its own. If be bought a cheap gun that malfunctioned and fired on its own then maybe he doesn’t have a civil claim.
This is basically the same as the left claiming Charlie Kirk's shooter was a Groyper/MAGA/Right and it is similarly embarrassing how persistent this theory is in right leaning spaces. Striking, really
daguerrean
5d ago
- Why is every named person in this article Muslim? Is it really that bad?
- Logistically how do garbage men strike for a year? How are they paying their bills?
daguerrean
6d ago
I still don’t understand what mean girl behavior is other than policies you disagree with. I could easily frame any leftist figure as engaging in equally mean girl behaviors from my POV. Obviously ii understand your broader point, if he were literally advocating for the government to start throwing trannies into gas chambers then I agree, the distinction between this and doing violence directly would arguably be quite thin, but I don’t think he was doing this any more than pro-immigration activists are doing White genocide to me, even if I disagree with then
daguerrean
6d ago
Right, but I think we have a carve out where advocating for harms through government action is acceptable. If my friend advocates the government raise taxes on me by $1000, I should tolerate this civilly, but them advocating for a criminal to mug me and steal $1000 is very different, even if the end result to me is the same.
daguerrean
6d ago
You started all this by saying “Devil’s Advocate”, so do you really believe it was fair to kill Kirk or is this still just a provocation to prove a point? Because it is sounding like genuine belief
daguerrean
6d ago
Not surprising. If let’s say any physical contact with ICE has a 0.1% chance to turn out deadly by accident, it is most likely that anyone that dies is someone who has rolled those dice many, many times. You see the same with ordinary deaths in police encounters like Floyd
daguerrean
6d ago
I almost always get the exact dead center on these sorts of quizzes, and I did again here. I feel unless you go into the test saying to yourself "I want to get as [BASED/COMMUNIST] as possible!!" it is hard to get anything but centrist. Most of the statements put up for agreement are so absolutist that there is only really one reasonable response.
daguerrean
7d ago
What kind of questions would you be interested in seeing on a survey for Motte users? They can be serious thoughts on political issues, or just any fun random thing you want to know. I will certainly post the results after
Okay, I feel obligated to defend myself. I don't really find anything objectionable in doing things your wife enjoys for the sake of the relationship. It was just that post in particular that gave me a vibe that this man has no agency or convictions while his wife is a shrieking harpy calling the shots in the relationship. The other thing is, he is talking about basically dedicating hours every day of his vacation to standing outside protesting in Minneapolis in January, there is a point where it crosses over from being kind and accommodating to your spouse to being a doormat. You should do things your spouse wants to, but IMO you should also feel comfortable saying "Go by yourself, I don't want to do that." Now granted, my wife doesn't really go out, so the extent of this for me is watching reality shows I don't care for. I usually just go to daguerreotype-related things myself without dragging my wife along. I don't understand why some couple feel the need to do everything together.
I also think protests are a bit different. I think protests are supposed to imply some level of personal conviction that going to a museum doesn't. In that sense a protest is maybe more similar to attending religious services. And going to daily protests in the winter in Minneapolis is like the equivalent of attending years of church services you personally think are BS because your wife likes them.
You know, in one of your linked comments you had a list of 700 questions which I enjoyed, reminds me I've been meaning to make a survey for Motte users which I should post.
daguerrean
7d ago
Democrats seem to get to just ignore immigration laws they don’t like (sanctuary cities), it seems regrettable but reasonable for Republicans to do the same.
daguerrean
8d ago
Venezuelans, some of whom had not been accused of any crime and were in the middle of asylum cases, were deported to El Salvador
I'm not speaking on the legality of this because I don't know and don't care what the current legal situation is. But, this seems perfectly reasonable to me. If their asylum cases had not been resolved in their favor, what makes them entitled to be in the United States? The impression I get from comments like this is that our asylum/refugee system has essentially worked like this: get to the border somehow, say magic words that trigger asylum/refugee case (that you are fed by activist organizations that coach you), get let into the United States with some maybe-in-future court date that might resolve your asylum case years down the line. Until then, you basically have free run of the country and can disappear trivially.
Frankly this system seems absolutely ridiculous. I don't know why we accept asylum seekers at all, there's no reason for it. And the faster we can dismantle this absurd system and start deporting the people abusing it the better.
daguerrean
8d ago
It’s not that egregious IMO, not like you would see Nazi accusations on Reddit. It was just sort of a glib or snarky response to your comment. It didn’t seem overly serious
daguerrean
8d ago
This is a very interesting post as an insight into the protest attending mindset. It is very strange to me, he seems continually befuddled by the extremes of hostility ("To me the yelling and taunting at police was misplaced aggression, and counter productive but it was their town, not mine"/"Somehow capitalism and the general economy have been implicated, although I cannot figure how") but nonetheless attends the protests regardless despite it being not his town. He seems to regard the protesting as mostly a harmless social activity that he groups together with going to record stores and restaurants. I get the sense his wife is basically dragging him to this ("I am not as brave as my wife, who acts from a strain of moral clarity that can sometimes be daunting") and he is playing the role of an agreeable husband that regards this like his wife dragging him to a museum or board game night, so he is happy to go there and shout obscenities for a few hours in between other tourist activities. I know it sounds cliche, but there is just such beta energy radiating off the entire post.
daguerrean
9d ago
Calling the left cucks is an extremely common sexualized insult from the right.
Well a couple of things.
First you listed a number of false positives, people being wrongfully arrested/deported. Any sufficiently large scale operation will have mistakes. If you tried to crack down on disability fraud surely you would end up mistakenly depriving some genuinely deserving people. As you said, the optimal level of crime is not zero, similarly, the optimal level of wrongful convictions/arrests/deportations isn't zero. If you could demonstrate that it was egregiously error-prone then there would be cause for concern. But at the moment I don't trust the media to be objective. Surely the Obama administration occasionally wrongfully detained a legal immigrant but the media wasn't shouting it from the rooftops when it happened.
Regarding the theatricality. Of course there is an element of theater to it, as there is with the protesting. What good does blowing a whistle or shouting "fuck you Nazis" actually do to impede their activities? Basically nothing, it is entirely theater. The theatricality of ICE and the focus on Minneapolis is largely about sending a message loudly, publicly and clearly that "no, blue states do not get to veto federal laws whenever the choose as they have a history of doing." The protestors do theater and ICE does counter theater. We can argue that their theatricality is losing in the court of public opinion, but I appreciated it at least.
daguerrean
9d ago
The amusing thing to me is that there is an unwritten seventh role on which the whole operation depends, "retard who gets shot." If the operation proceeded as written with everyone playing their roles perfectly, nothing would happen. So some women stand on the opposite side of the street from ICE and blow whistles for a while, so what? This whole system only functions when somebody is stupid enough to get shot. Of course, none of the participants know that, least of all the people that get shot, but it is how it works nonetheless.
daguerrean
10d ago
All this is true, but this doesn't excuse the shooting. An analogy would be the classic one feminists hate, woman walks down the street in a bad neighborhood alone at 2AM drunk in a skimpy outfit, gets raped. She was stupid and this was a predictable outcome of her decisions, but that doesn't mean the rapist is suddenly a good person and his actions are excused and he should get off scot-free. Here, the guy was stupid and his actions predictably resulted in his death. However, the evidence certainly seems to point to the ICE agent shooting him in the back when he was already subdued by about 5 agents, his gun was taken and the agent with the gun was already well clear of the scuffle. There is just no excuse for that. Additionally the administration is obviously lying by calling him a domestic terrorist that tried to assassinate law enforcement. This situation feels very clearcut and easy to interpret.
daguerrean
10d ago
There's something very David French about this, but I suppose that's just being Christian, and what makes them such frustrating fellow travelers. I think it's the sense that they would rather lose as long as they satisfy their own personal feelings of being a good person first and foremost. It's like a desire for martyrdom or something, they active want to lose while feeling righteous about their own goodness. Because if your goal is "live in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts", handing out free things to violent drug addicts directly undermines that. With allies like these, who needs enemies? Like, one could very easily donate to some kind of cause that aids the homeless without actively undermining one's own neighborhood. If there were actively violent drug addicts congregating outside my house and I found out my neighbor was giving them free shit I would be just about ready to kill my neighbor.
daguerrean
10d ago
The suspect may have been wanted for assault and was known to be illegal which caused DHS to prioritize deporting him. Why do you assume they delegated the arrest for assault to DHS? He may have been wanted by two separate organizations for different reasons. This seems like the plain reading.
daguerrean
10d ago
Your choice, at the margin, increased such situations.
Indeed. The fact he reacted to a homeless guy sleeping in a park within sight of his house with “Won’t someone think of the poor homeless guy and help him” is exactly why we are in this mess in the first place. We need more people whose first thought is “Ew, get that disgusting bum out of my park” if we are ever to have hope of solving this.
In general I think this class of problems is not dealt with sufficiently by many conservatives. Like, okay, if we take away women’s right to vote, what will be different this time around? We already had that in 1900 and where did it lead us? Here. The same can be said for an all-White society, all-Christian etc. I suppose the argument is something like, “We didnt realize how important having an all-White society was back then so we didn’t jealously guard it, but this time we know and we’ll do things differently.” And I imagine the same goes for patriarchal/Christian/etc. It isn’t a totally absurd argument, but I think it’s lacking. Conservatives at the time definitely understood having a White country was important, they weren’t exactly lacking that information. I struggle with this argument myself as someone that generally-speaking endorses some of these things
More options
Context Copy link