dasfoo
2mo ago
European leftism has been steadily feeding into the US via academia and the popular arts since the 1920s, if not earlier. The U.S. intelligenstia and trend-setters have always looked at Europe as more sophisticated and culturally respectable, especially its revolutionaries.
dasfoo
2mo ago
My daughters have been giving me Spotify playlists of recent music. Swift stands out as one of the most idiosyncratic and emotionally complex lyricists working today. She captures a cognitive dissonance between introspection and compulsive habit that most pop songwriters would never consider. And yet is also so recognizably "normal" that she avoids the edgelordy bullshit of more progressive artists and easily appeals to a wider audience. I've become a huge fan.
dasfoo
2mo ago
or else you have a chomskyite view of russia as soviet union which you fondly remember as a noble altruistic project that was sadly misunderstood by the ungrateful eastern europeans
My most pro-Russia friend is also a Chomskyite former-Leftist who has found himself realigned as a Trumpist right winger, and I've always found the consistent position on Russia informative even if he denies it's relevant. This faction was anti-US Imperialism (pro-communist) in the 1980s and are anti-US Imperalism (anti-WEF/neoliberal Communism) now, with Russia as the noble bulwark against The West. I have to say that Putin's narrative building in this regard has been very shrewd. He's known which buttons to push.
dasfoo
2mo ago
I don't think Russia can be a true ally in its current political configuration, so any potential realignment in that direction is likely temporary if it is even real.
"The West" -- U.S., Canada, Europe -- as the enduring post-WWII alignment has been called, is only successful because all nations have a long-term survival incentive to cooperate with each other, based on their common-enough values and the accepted dynamic of U.S.' larger status. Any country who wants to compete with U.S.' status and has different non-cooperative values is never likely to make a long-term ally.
I know there are Russia-stans who have an alien-to-me notion of Putin as a benevolent victim of Western aggression who would love to nestle into an accepting U.S. bosom (once it's purged of its Euro-centric WEF neoliberals), but that seems like a fantasy that is bound to end like the Hitler-Stalin pact.
dasfoo
2mo ago
The conservative in me wants slow, methodical cuts that do the least damage to the good parts. But I also understand that those cuts are easier to block/mitigate, and maybe the best thing is to destroy and rebuild the good parts. People will suffer in the process, but that's true of all change.
dasfoo
2mo ago
It's just like when there are cuts to school budgets: the affected orgs, who oppose the cuts, make sure that the effects of the cuts create maximum sympathy as a PR campaign against the cuts. Meanwhile, none of the org administrators suffer a salary cut.
dasfoo
2mo ago
But I just don't see how 'nobody else is stepping up to do the hard thing that someone is already doing' supposedly proves that the hard thing isn't worth doing and the second guy is a chump for bothering.
You never know if someone else will step up until the person already doing it steps back and opens up that opportunity.
In my view, if any truly important program is shut down along with USAID, someone will step into that vacuum, whether it's a non-profit or a private philanthropist or a religious organzation. Maybe there will even be a new federal program created if such a need is identified.
But this idea that the U.S. government is responsible for all charity throughout the world is not only a logistical problem but also a conceptual problem, neither of which will ever be corrected as long as the US govt continues to enable it.
dasfoo
2mo ago
All I am asking is for conservatives to put the same level of value on the lives of foreigners as their domestic opponents do on fertilized human embryros.
Is that really all you're asking for?
The conservative position on fertilized human embryos is "Don't kill them." I would assume this position also applies re: the lives of foreigners. The conservative position on fertilized human embryos is NOT "The government must provide all the food/medicine/trans operas/LGBTQIA++ comic books required to get that embryo through life."
This sounds like the old canard that by not providing a womb-to-tomb welfare state, you are in effect murdering the weak.
What am I missing?
dasfoo
2mo ago
Anyway, this is not the thing to be confused about.
It is, though, if you then question why USAID is upset about the SoS/DoGE having access to these supposedly insignificant and/or perfectly normal classified materials. Whether they are up to no good or just reacting politically to the change in admin, it looks like bad faith on their part and completely legitimate for the Trump admin to audit the fuck out of them.
dasfoo
2mo ago
Audiard's previous fiim, Sisters Brothers, is an interesting, complicated, funny and heartbreaking contemplation of masculinity using the lens of the traditionally masculine Western genre (not at all the silly comedy of its marketing campaign), so it wouldn't surprise me if he had something more subversive on his mind in Emilia Perez. He's clearly capable of it.
dasfoo
2mo ago
It is funny when a trans person says or does something that shocks progressives. By nature, trans people are defiant and refuse, in the most essential way imaginable, to be boxed in. Even if you don't think they suffer from a mental illness -- which would bring a whole other level of unpredictability to their thoughts, words and actions -- expecting them to conform to any model would seem to "deny their existence" as much as any bathroom law might.
dasfoo
2mo ago
Sisters Brothers was fantastic.
I also loved Sisters Brothers as well as A Prophet. This is not to the same standard.
I follow the film industry pretty closely, but like most other film buffs, I had never heard of the movie, Emilia Perez, until a few weeks ago when it was nominated for 13 Oscars
Really? It made a huge splash at Cannes last year. The movie podcasts I listen to have been monitoring it for a year now.
But, yes, as a fan of two other Audiard movies, this was total horseshit. The characters make no sense, the songs are tuneless, and the plot is not only stupid but is actually kind of sick -- unless you choose to read this movie as deeply critical of transsexuality as a concept.
The title character attempts two key transitions in this movie: Man to Woman, and Killer to Savior. IMO, both are depicted not only as failures but also as sick expressions of narcisissm. This former drug lord in "her" new life becomes an advocate for the victims of drug lords like "his" former self. It's so gross a turn as to be literally nauseating if one has any empathy for the victims of those monsters. If this transition is to be seen in parallel with the gender transition, how are we then to read the gender transition? That one, too, doesn't really take: Perez is unable to shake "his" past, becoming jealous of his supposedly widowed wife's romantic life and employing "his" old tactics to run the new fiancee out of town. This backfires in a way that also brings the trappings of "his" old world back into "her" new life. The message? One can't escape their nature, and the attempt to do so will ruin the lives of everyone around them.
EDIT: I'll add to this that Zoe Saldana's character operates as the key trans-enabler in this story. She is hired by the drug lord to facilitate the transition. She does it, at first, cynically, out of greed. Later, she sort of falls in platonic love with the woman that Perez becomes, lavish praise on Perez' really groos moral makeover, as if fake tits can erase decades of murder. It doesn't end up well for her, either, at least psychologically. This mirrors how many trans-skeptical critics think about those who cheerlead for transitioning: a mixture of cynicism and myopic self-congratulation.
dasfoo
2mo ago
I think ideally the democrat media would have been more measured and patient, and the temperature on everything could have stayed more reasonable while the professionals did there work
This is really the issue to me. The institution that has positioned itself as the arbiter of partisan agreements no longer does their job with any commitment to the truth.
The reason there are so many unanswered questions about seemingly suspicious behaviors on election night 2020, is that there was never a good-faith effort to investigate those questions. If election skeptics thought something fishy happened at a vote counting center after observers were sent away, the reporting on such a claim amounted to "The people counting the votes said 'No, nothing fishy happened.' Therefore, it was the fairest and most secure election in history." Narrative buy-in won over actual investigating, which was never going to convince the skeptics and only pander to those who wanted the skeptics to be wrong regardless of the truth.
dasfoo
2mo ago
Anecdotally, in the last day I've seen Reddit threads, Facebook posts, and have heard directly from acquaintances who work in government that they worry about their work being impacted. Don't discount the social media effect wherein everyone wants the positive attention that comes with signalling victimization at the hands of the bad man, even before they know if it's actually happening.
The argument previously formulated by these same groups -- "No, it's not happening, but if it is happening it's good" -- is probably a safe fallback response. We can empathetically help anyone who loses their important government job move into the private sector, where their important skills will surely remain valuable.
dasfoo
2mo ago
If you're like Charlie Chaplin, doing it explicitly as a satire making fun of Hitler, it's fine.
Well, yes, Chaplin did satirize Hitler in the 1940s, but he also wore that mustache long before Hitler rose to power, starting in the 1910s.
dasfoo
3mo ago
A friend of mine who is an accountant got sick of living in the Portland area and moved to rural Kentucky where he was able to buy a lot of land. He's been there for two years and can't find any clients in his new state. He's a good networker, but they do not trust outsiders (and, according to him, are largely too dumb to understand what he does). It's friendly but he's not one of them. He gets a majority of his new clients from our referrals in the purpler Portland suburbs and comes out twice a year for in-person meetings.
dasfoo
3mo ago
At what point are Trump's allies tacitly seconding accusations that Trump is an authoritarian and his "movement" a cult of personality, by treating him as though the accusations are true?
Isn't this just all politics during the age of social media? Every candidate is idealized because to show any misgivings is to give aid and comfort to the other side. No nuance is allowed, or else you will be beset by purity trolls who will question your loyalty. It's gross and tiring, but it's the same dynamic that made every Democrat pretend to be all-in on Joyful Kamala within one day and previously pretended that Joe Biden was as sharp as ever right before he obviously wasn't.
dasfoo
4mo ago
Wasn't there also a Denzel Washington movie in which he takes a hospital hostage over something similar?
dasfoo
4mo ago
Except that this was obvious. How can you credibly sell your ability to win elections when you can’t predict something that obvious.
The people they are selling themselves to share the same self-delusion, so it's to their benefit to affirm the delusion to get more work. This assumes that they are self-aware enough to know that their delusion is false, but most delusions persist because the deluded will not challenge them.
dasfoo
6mo ago
One of my bullshit detector modes is applying the "Cui bono?" rule: If true, who benefits from it?
I don't see a tactical or political advantage for Israel to be doing this as a matter of policy: Committing high-value troops to take out low-value targets? And certain carry a highly negative publicity penalty? What's Israel's ROI on assassinating pre-teens?
On the other hand, we know that Israel's enemies love to play the Victim PR game, exaggerating and even inventing tragedies that cast a shadow on Israel's claim of moral legitimacy. What's the Hamas ROI on shooting a few of their kids in the head if it means widespread outrage aimed at Israel? While it's hard for me to imagine such a craven tactic*, Hamas has more to gain from this than Israel does. If they're faking the shootings, the ROI for them goes up even more.
- I also can't imagine the craven tactic of positioning military assets in schools and hospitals, but we know Hamas does this and that Israel appears to take greater care to avoid civilian casualties. So these priors also lean me further toward: "If it's happening, Hamas is doing it." Alternatively, it could be a rogue Israeli soldier who has snapped, but seems unlikely to be a sanctioned military effort.
dasfoo
6mo ago
The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into.
That's because there are so many. IDK if this comprehensive: https://scifiwright.com/2024/01/summary-2020-presidential-election-fraud/; I doubt it. And I cringe when I see some of his sources. But it's a dynamic not too different from The Motte: If these discussions are essentially outlawed in respectable media, only the unrespectable will be having these discussions. I want these discussions to be had in more respectable fora! I think it would take the power away from the grifters who exploit these fears.
dasfoo
6mo ago
You have to have transparent elections with actual oversight and accountability. That means only valid voters allowed to vote and an ability to audit the election results. No deleted logs, missing ballot images, or discrepancies between voter count and votes counted.
Claims of potential election fraud should be met with good faith investigations and adjudication rather than instant stonewalling. I don't know how you remove partisanship from a process which is entirely staffed by motivated partisans, so that's a problem. But leading the response to a claim with "Nuh-uh" followed by "You're stupid" followed by "I can't hear you. I can't hear you." isn't going give claimants any confidence that their concerns were taken seriously. And, yes, not all the claims are serious -- but it's in the interest of civics that they be taken seriously until they can be actually discounted by evidence. And by "evidence" I don't mean "Ask accused vote counters what was going on at 3 am when no observers were there and then take their word for it as if they're angels," but actually investigate if they're telling the truth and why their stories seem to change. That's the essential problem: from the outset all fraud claims were met with unchallenged derision and all counter-claims were accepted as unchallenged gospel.
As I said a week or two ago, I think the Trump team's approach to dealing with these issues was abysmal (as is his approach to dealing with most issues, IMO), but that doesn't matter to me. I am a "civics-first" conservative: I want systems that are transparent and correctable, and which inspire faith in the systems so that we can live our lives without constantly wondering WTF happened and why there is so much apparent gaslighting when we ask to see how it happened.
dasfoo
6mo ago
Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side.
For the third night in a row, anti-Donald Trump demonstrators took to the streets in several big cities and on college campuses across the United States, including an outburst of smashed windows and a dumpster fire in Portland that police countered with pepper spray and flash-bang devices.
About 4,000 protesters assembled downtown late Thursday chanting “we reject the president-elect!” the Associated Press reported. Some among the crowd vandalized 19 cars at a dealership in Northeast Portland, according to a sales manager, Oregonlive.com reports. Protesters then headed west, over the Broadway Bridge and into the Pearl District, where the windows of several businesses were smashed.
The protest was mostly peaceful until demonstrators met with an anarchist group, after which demonstrators vandalized buildings, kicked cars and knocked out power, KGW-TV reported.
Imagine if J6 had been J6-J9!
I think it's superimportant not to discount the effect that social media has had on this, too. People of all political stripes are easily seduced by "likes," and nothing gets more passionate likes than when one stakes out positions that make themselves and their followers feel more virtuous than the baddies over on the other side. It's not just an echo chamber, in which one hears their own positions reverberate, but a stadium in which the response is the roar of the crowd in deafening agreement.
More options
Context Copy link