dasfoo
5d ago
Smart rich people just don’t talk to average people. Looks like his wife graduated from Stanford.
There are people who excel at school but are otherwise vapid. My sister scored very high on her SATs but hasn't had an original thought in her entire life. Two of the dumbest people I know have law degrees and are working attorneys. Arguably, universities aren't that interested in turning out high-functioning free-thinking geniuses these days, but are rather content to produce an assembly line of ideologically compliant middle managers, the best-looking of whom might turn out to be leaders with nothing interesting to say.
dasfoo
5d ago
The sane transgender people
Strictly speaking, that's an oxymoron. These are people suffering from a mental disconnect from biological reality. They should live their lives as best they can, but they should never expect anyone else to buy into their dysmorphia, let alone demand that others pretend not to notice it. That will always be a problem.
That some transgender people seem less crazy than others might be a factor, but that probably reflects more on the city-dwellers' capacity for virtue-signalling via indulgence.
dasfoo
5d ago
There needs to be an autopsy on the autopsy report.
I don't think it could be done. The problem is self-reinforcing: The DNC is beholden to certain groups in order to maintain its self-image as the party that caters to suffering minority groups. A frank autopsy would have to say out loud that some of its flagship constituents must be thrown overboard. They might be able to say that in private, but can never say it in public. True introspection would be an even bigger disaster than living in denial.
dasfoo
15d ago
Schools weren't closed for the children, they were closed for the faculty. The public school educator and management class is dominated by progressive anxiety superspreaders.
dasfoo
17d ago
after spending much of the 90s and early 2000s/GWoT era in the wilderness
The Newt Gingrich surge in Congress in 1994 followed by the GWB presidency from 2001-2009 is "in the wilderness?" That's a lot of power for, literally, "most of' the 1990s and 2000s.
dasfoo
21d ago
"Democratic"-style countries typically operate as "political markets" -- if you can assemble enough people who believe in X Policy to vote for you, you can make X Policy a reality. Of course, there are limiters, like Constitutions -- but even those can be changed if enough voters/representatives buy into such changes. It is a bottom-up model, theoretically.
Communist ideology anti-market. How a country is run is not at the whim of the citizens, but is, instead, top-down: The benevolent leaders determine what is best for the people, and the people comply, because they know that their wise leaders have figured out that the optimal way for everyone to receive equal everything is for Boris to dig ditches (even though Boris is skilled at architcture) and for Ivan to design buildings (even though Ivan is the useless son of a bureaucrat) with as little friction as possible.
What happens if Boris looks at Ivan's bullshit architectural models and petitions that he can do better? He might be correct, and a government that cares might agree and switch the two occupations. However, the government also knows that if Andrei sees Boris dissent from the system and succeed, that maybe Andrei will also dissent from his assigned role so he can be as personally fulfilled as Boris will be. This kind of thing is contagious. And so is the perception that the government of unelected elites who designed this perfect mechanism is flawed and makes mistakes, which undermines the entire theory that this system is really optimized for anything.
dasfoo
1mo ago
It's the Left's problem in that they seem unable to resist demonizing political opponents in moral terms, making assassination seem like a reasonable choice to otherwise rational-seeming people.
dasfoo
1mo ago
I'm libertarian in that I oppose most international borders. The reason is that it violates human rights for very little justified purpose.
I'm only libertarian up to my country's borders. It may sound counterintuitive, but borders are the most important factor when it comes to freedom. I've realized just how little most people value actual freedom, and how important it is to guard with great vigilance, power, and might, the borders around whatever little pockets of freedom we are able to establish. The reason why the U.S. has a Constitution with a Bill of Rights is that, absent that, all of our natural rights will be traded away for short-sighted wants, and these laws are only as effective as the borders that protect them from interlopers with bad intentions.
dasfoo
1mo ago
If I'm hiring someone to reverse engineer the firmware of a competitor's product, I'm hiring whoever is the most competent for the job, even if it means hiring the sexually deranged catboy wearing programming socks. And for something like reverse engineering firmware, I'd venture a guess that somewhere in the range of 50 to 75 percent of the qualified candidates are catboys (or aesthetically similar).
The same goes for fixing the rot in Western Civilization.
Sure, when you're hiring a guy who will never leave his basement or some other coding lair, you'd hire whoever. But when you hire the face of the PR juggernaut to promote your new rip-off of your competitor's product, you're more likely to hire someone based on their aesthetic appeal to your target market. This isn't likely to be a deranged catboy.
dasfoo
1mo ago
Part of the job of being a civic leader is instilling/perpatuating/reinforcing faith in the civic model, because without civics we have tribalism. Our leaders should not only promote positive policies, but they should create a sense of faith in the system and appear level-headed while doing difficult things.
Even if Trump doesn't trigger some kind of global apocalypse, his corrosive approach to his civic responsibilities is, IMO, absolutely cancerous and likely to poison our system for a generation or more.
As a conservo-libertarian, I assume that any politician is going to be somewhat corrupt given the size of our current government. While we shouldn't accept corruption, it is far better to have Dick Cheney-like corruption -- quiet, background corruption by adults who are otherwise concerned with oiling an effective civic machine -- than the loud, fuck you, baby-ish corrution of Trump, who clearly cares about nothing and no one other than what serves him in the moment.
dasfoo
1mo ago
The persistant MAGA followers that I know personally think that the U.S./Global Elite are so far past the point of redemption (see: elite Satantic pedophile cults) that they theoretically welcome the Trumpian apocalypse while also failing to comprehend how terrible it could get. I suppose most airmchair revolutionaries suffer the common delusion that they will somehow emerge unscathed, or assume that they will be painlessly transported to their righteous place in heaven if things go shitward. So, yes, they love to see the liberals seethe and that feeds them, but they also feel like nothing is worth saving so why not back the bull in the china shop?
dasfoo
1mo ago
The most notable progressive belief that serves the same function (feigned confusion toward or rejection of male/female definitions) is mostly harmless
I think you can find it anywhere that a progressive who is smugly "pro-science" will completely ignore inconvenient science when it gets in their way of supporting abortion, trans essentialism, or racial handouts.
dasfoo
2mo ago
I think the connotation is "hot but at least a little dangerous or unsavory." I don't think they'd call a nice hot guy a "baddie;" there has to be a little bit of a "bad boy" or "bad girl" threat behind or informing the hotness.
dasfoo
2mo ago
But I suspect it's just an extreme form of in-group availability signaling. By getting these surgeries, you signal to males in your in-group that you are available to them sexually. Males in your in-group start to associate those signals with sexual availability and eroticize them, consciously or subconsciously. Traits or choices that aren't inherently attractive become attractive because they signal sexual availability.
I'm not sure how much males have to do with it. I jumped back into single life last year as a guy in his 50s. What I discovered -- because I've never been on the kind of social media where this has been happening for two decades -- via online dating is just how contagious fashion/beauty/lifestyle trends are across women from their 30s-50s. A majority of women (I'm looking at middle-class professional women in a small U.S. urban and very liberal coastal area) present as having the same hobbies -- pickleball, hiking, standup paddle boarding -- all of which were created through social media or chosen for their social media photogenic-ness; they all have pictures at the same 5 photogenic local locations; all of their bios re-use the same phrases ("looking for a partner in crime for life's adventures"). They all love coffee on arainy Sunday morning and want someone with whom to dance in the kitchen. So many of them have nose rings and sleeve tattoos, like an absurd amount of 50 year old women, and unnaturally colored hair. And I highly doubt men have anything to do with any of this (most men certainly aren't suggesting nose rings and sleeve tattoos and hoping that their woman becomes obsessed with a dumb sport like pickleball). These are female feedback meme loops fed by social media, with a lot of older women following mom influencers who are trying to keep up with younger generations.
dasfoo
2mo ago
The actual pattern I can discern is that if you put men in a position of power, influence, or prestige, a significant subset of them will try to exploit it for sex
I think that there's significant nonpartisan crossover between the types of personalities that gravitate toward positions of power over others in terms of political/business/civic roles and the types that seek power over others in terms of vices. There's a degree of sociopathy at play in any "maverick" who bucks the system rather than follows the rules that is totally unsurprisingly aligned with the sociopathy that is into taboo sexuality, bucking the system of common morality. Power also allows one to engage more freely in otherwise difficult vices, which is why a lot of pedos gravitate toward roles as teachers, pastors, priests, cub scout leaders, etc.
In our zeal to attack "the other side's" examples of this, we often fail to really grapple with whether or not these failings mean anything substantial, or are just easy targets for oppositional demoralization.
Pick your #1 issue, whatever it is, and ask yourself if your mind would be changed .000001% on that subject if it turned out that the leading voice for that issue was also a pedophile. Most likely not, I suspect.
dasfoo
2mo ago
Yes but there is a cost. I don't think anything the US is doing in this war is worth the death of a single child because the whole war is a farce.
Then you should be arguing your reasoning that the war is a farce and not picking one aspect of it that, if different, wouldn't change your position.
dasfoo
2mo ago
You're never going to get eloquent or consistent reasoning from the Trump admin. That's never been their M.O. You will grand unsupportable claims and petty X-fueled posturing. The best you can hope for is that they do something resembling the best reasoning and don't let their attention drift or self-sabotage through incompetence -- which is also unlikely, unfortunately -- and ignore why they say they are doing it. I don't like this, but it's how they operate.
dasfoo
3mo ago
either Trump was totally lying about his foreign policy plans in the 2024 campaign (remember "No More Wars"?) or Israel and/or the Gulf Arabs have compromised him
Or, he's someone with no consistent or intentional worldview and he just does whatever he feels like depending on who flattered him most recently or what makes him feel most powerful at any given moment.
dasfoo
3mo ago
A year ago when Hollywood was shocked that the Latin American trans actor nominated for Best Actress had posted racist things online, I found it amusing that everyone was so surprised that this person whose identity revolved around provocation and rejecting societal rules didn't contain their provocation and rejection of rules to progressive boundaries.
It's no surprise to me that people who are a) trans and b) interested in shooting people may also have a c) that defies easy categorization. Their umbrella ideology is "notice me; everyone else can go fuck themselves."
dasfoo
3mo ago
when the other party was in a position to release them for years, but didn't, and didn't even promise to
Which gives Trump a golden opportunity to do what he loves most: look better than Biden. That he's not eager to seize on an obvious win is a little sus.
dasfoo
3mo ago
Presumably -- I shouldn't presume this about anyone in Trump's 2nd administration -- Bondi was prepared for some jackwad to come at her with one or more of the more hysterical tips and could have not only crafted a comprehensive and intelligent rebuke, but could've dug up some bizarre tips about Lieu or anyone else.
dasfoo
3mo ago
Doesn't this answer itself? Ted Lieu repeated accusations that Trump raped a child and killed it, this isn't a serious matter, these aren't serious people.
Explaining that would've been better than yelling at Lieu. It would've made him look foolish. Instead, she upped the foolish stakes.
I'm not joking when I say I miss the days of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield. Whatever crimes you may think they committed, they appeared like civil servants who take their roles seriously and are informed about how to make it look like our institutions are working. Now we have a clown show. You might think that the clown show more accurately reflects reality, but Joe Public is less likely to act like clowns are in charge when he can't see any clowns, and that's good for society.
If there's nothing substantial to be gleaned, why is there still so much being actively hidden? Does the Trump admin just engage in coverups for the fun of it? This strategy of drawing it out for seemingly no reason has been nothing but egg on their face over and over, why do they insist on slow walking it and hiding so much of the files?
I try to maintain skepticism in the face of most partisan-flavored claims, but Bondi's performance in front of Congress was so weirdly and unnecessarily belligerent, it's hard not to entertain the "What are they hiding?" questions more seriously now. As a conservative who is allergic to both Trump and TDS, it's bewildering to me how thoroughly his anti-civics adversarial temperament has spread throughout his administration in areas where it is best played cool. Why the AG chose to treat that hearing as a defensive MAGA brawl, drawing more attention to it, than just matter-of-factly answering the questions as if there are serious people working on serious matters, is something I will never understand. Ted Lieu's presentation of uncorroborated tip line craziness should've been easy for her to smack down with a clinical legal response, but instead she went apeshit. It has to be more than just incompetence, right? It's like actively malicious incompetence, at best.
dasfoo
3mo ago
It reminds me of how the Hollywood studio system had grown stagnant in the 70's and 80's, which allowed up and comers like Spielberg, Lucas, and Cameron to innovate and eventually take over the studio system themselves.
Your timing is off a bit there. The studio system declined in the late 1960s. "New Hollywood," incl. the Spielberg/Lucas class, got started circa 1967 and rose to prominence in the 1970s (Jaws / Star Wars), and then dominated the 1980s. Cameron rode their blockbuster wave a bit later, making his first big splash in the mid-80s.
I find this hard to reconcile with reality, but I think it's for two reasons:
You are focusing on traits that correlate with other more or less desired traits. "Women," generally, may be attracted to men who cheat or are abusive, but not because they cheat/abuse. It's that men with attractive qualities like physical vanity and high-risk-taking are also more likely to be abusive and cheat. Men who listen well are probably also unattractive in other ways. Being someone who expresses kindness along with risk-taking and physical attractiveness should be the goal to attract the most women.
I suppose there are many women attracted to abusers and cheaters, but those would be exactly the women that I would not find attractive, including for all of the traits that likely correlate with those women: status chasing, too much attention to physical attractiveness, shallow thinkers, etc. It sounds like horrible advice, to me, for men to optimize attracting the most dysfunctional women.
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