dasfoo
3yr ago
The communists lost that round of the culture war so thoroughly that literally everybody, including those few who still consider themselves socialist, will fervently, absolutely condemn everything that has to do with Soviet and Soviet collaborators in the west.
There might be a more thoughtful contingent of people who will argue that any Communist regime that has bad consequences was corrupted by the human weaknesses that Communism was meant to overcome (IMO, the fatal flaw of Communism), but most people don't think that deeply about it. The Communists lost the short game but won the long game, by spreading Communist ideas through academia and, downstream of that, civil rights movements, and downstream of that, entertainment and news media. That these ideas aren't directly associated with Communism any longer are part of its victory. But, for the most part, in the US at least, Communists were (ironically) "free speech" martyrs who were oppressed by the omnipresent fascism of big business and right-wing political leaders, or they were liberators of dispossessed groups in the U.S. globally, from labor to minority racial groups. It was a very smart strategy, and it divorced the incremental steps from the ultimate goal in the minds of the short-term activists.
dasfoo
3yr ago
You have to hand it to the Communists. Despite the appearance of "losing" at the end of the 1980s, they thoroughly mind-fucked just about everyone except for a few cranky holdouts into thinking they were just a bunch of idealistic do-gooders who were maligned and oppressed by right-wing authoritarians like Reagan. I don't think I know more than a handful of mainstream American Democrats who have anything bad to say about Communists or Communism. That narrative simply doesn't exist. They were victims of the real bad guys. End of.
dasfoo
3yr ago
The Western governments really, truly weren't, as some conspiracy theorists claimed, trying to use the pandemic to re-engineer the society; more than anything, they just wanted the pandemic to go away and to return to "life as it was". At the same time, they felt they couldn't just do nothing, or many people might die and they'd get blamed for it (many people did die, but since they were at least trying to do something, that at least blunted the criticism.)
While I think the second part is surely correct -- ass-covering is an age-old political first-responder -- I'm not sure that many governments were anxious for life to return to "as it was." It need not be conspiratorial, but as the underlying theme of progressivism is that 'everything is terrible until we achieve utopia,' there was a lot of incentive for blue governors, urban mayors and unions to try to leverage the crisis as an opportunity for systemic change to some pretty fundamental aspects of life, like remote work and schooling, the operation of elections, etc. That these things have mostly returned to normal was, in my understanding, not without resistance and only because of normie insistence on "as it was."
dasfoo
3yr ago
In other words, their minimum wages are about 1.5x to 3x country's median wages for essentially half-time work.
But these aren't steady jobs. A writer might have that job for 6 weeks and is then on the hunt for another gig. It pays well, when it happens, but it's not dependable like most lower paying jobs are.
dasfoo
3yr ago
Opposition to intervention in European affairs in the 1930s and then to entry into WWII was distinctly conservative.
Depends on when you look. During the 1930s there was a growing pro-war anti-fascist movement among left-leaning Americans. There was even a brigade in the Spanish Civil War for anti-Franco foreigners. Not coincidentally, many American pro-war/ant-fascist leftists immediately became anti-war upon the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and then became pro-war again when that pact was broken. Some might suspect that their attitude toward war was dependent on its utility to the Communist Party. The Left likes wars in which the Left are the "good guys" and hates wars in which the Left are the bad guys. Go figure.
My far-right friends see the Ukraine war as the Globohomo Lefitst Elite spitting in the eye of a Trad Warrior State.
The growing anti-war sentiment in the US is, I think, directly related the right-coded nature of the military. The Right feels like the military are their people, and that their people are being sent out to risk their lives to line the pockets of effete sexually deviant billionaires who are the lizardy powers behind Globohomo. In the past the right was gung-ho for fighting Communism, but the Communists secretly won and are now pulling the strings.
dasfoo
3yr ago
Its either a serious case of ideological blindness or serious levels of intellectual dishonesty to actually claim trans child == dead child.
It's stealing a base, but it's as apt a metaphor for the parents as it is for the trans people who use it to describe themselves.
I have a nephew who has claimed to be a girl for the last few years. He recently told his parents that he was encouraged to do this by his therapist as a way to mitigate suicidal feelings. He's still suicidal and worse now that he went through this insanity and it didn't help. In a way, his transition was a kind of failed metaphorical suicide attempt. I have no idea how parents react to a child who tried and failed to kill themselves, except from movies like Ordinary People, but it's like a kind of death. There's grieving for sure. It turns death from a remote specter to an omnipresent reality in every future interaction with that child. Parents tend to irrationally fear the worst, anyway; although you compartmentalize such fears as irrational. After a suicide attempt, however, they have pictured their kid dead as reality and now will fear suicide every time the phone rings and probably for most minutes in between those phone calls. If it's not death it must be an excruciating and unrelenting tease of death.
It's not a huge leap for me to assume that the parental reaction to a serious suicide attempt would be similar to a reaction to a supposed gender transition.
There's also a kind of an "undead" quality to their presence after transition, like in a horror movie where a loved one has returned as a vampire or zombie. There's this uncanny valley between the person you used to think you knew and this disturbing thing that has replaced them that signifies something no one wants to address or think about. While is does not threaten harm, it casts a pall of unease over every interaction. If it's not the death of a person, it is like the death of normalcy. Maybe normalcy was a fantasy, but it was a mutually agreed fantasy that has been destroyed by this thing that lives between the lines of order and now stares everyone in the face in broad daylight, and you know that both you are shamed by how you react to its presence as it is shamed by the disruption of its unspeakable presence in its current form. It's a death that has half-happened and stands in the room as a reminder of its possibility and yet can't be spoken about. Is that worse than death? With death there is peace. Maybe there's not a word for it yet, and death is the closest we can come up with so far.
dasfoo
3yr ago
Why would a fed at the Jan 6 rally be suggesting people cross state lines to procure weapons/explosives? Your reply makes no sense in this context.
dasfoo
3yr ago
The Republicans never even held the Federal House in the 1980's. While Reagan himself was immensely popular, his downballot effects were muted, especially after 1984.
Conservative/Liberal lines were not as correlated with GOP/Dem lines during the Reagan era, although that was around when the re-sorting began. It seemed to take root finally in the late 1990s, as pro-life Democrats became rarer and rarer, Old South Dems were dying, and the liberal Northeastern Republicans were retiring or switching parties.
dasfoo
3yr ago
I should have noted that I’m mainly curious about the meta commentary on normies changing opinion on piracy.
Commercial interests seemed to have convinced the median online person that piracy is not ethical.
Let me throw in another possibility: Young people today are used to everything being easy to access. Piracy can insert a little bit of a learning curve. Us Gen Xers had to figure out the internet and we learned enough about how our computers work and how to configure our routers and tinker around with Napster/eMule/Limewire to figure out how to get the good quality files as opposed to the shitty files... Nowadays, kids just look at what's on Netflix and click. I have three teenage kids. I think only one of them would bother to figure out how to set up a Roku, which is comparatively easy. If I showed them how my torrent system works, their eyes would glaze over in seconds.
dasfoo
3yr ago
This is my vice. I am addicted to the availability of just about any movie or tv show I can think of. I have 29 TB of bittorented media (not counting music, which I get through Spotify now, but that's probably another couple TBs). And I've spent a lot of time rationalizing it. As someone who has spent god knows how much on legal media over my lifetime (50-ish now), I'm no one-dimensional freeloader. I used to be the guy who would buy every DVD edition of Boogie Nights, and had bookcases of CDs and records. And I continue to pay to go to movies, pay for multiple streaming services, buy the occasional physical media (as recently as placing a Bluray order last night), etc. I have moral qualms about it, but mitigated somewhat by the fact that most producers and creatives I steal from have or will have gotten money from me in some manner in the past/present/future.
So why do I download? One, I want my own copies. Just last week I went to watch a movie at a friend's house where Netflix was the only option. We watched Hitchcock's Psycho, which looked like it was ripped from a high-quality VHS tape. Astoundingly bad visually. If we had been at my house, I could've switched to my Plex library and enjoyed it in beautiful HD. I also like to cut out clips from movies and make GIFs from them. Two, my download sites have become my news sources. I check in almost nightly and discover things I never would have heard of otherwise. I have lots of new favorites that I only know about because it cost me nothing to watch them. Sometimes I also get them early. I watched Under the Silver Lake almost a year before it hit theaters. I watch a lot of indie and foreign movies that never get U.S. distribution. Three, I have a very strange media diet and it would be logistically difficult if not impossible for me to satisfy it via legitimate channels. I might get in the mood for vigilante movies. I go to Letterboxd, do some research, make a list, and within a day or two, I have 20 different vigilante movies to watch, all in one place. Pirating is, frankly, easier for me. Four, there are some things you just can't get otherwise. One of the movie podcasts I listen to covers a lot of obscure movies that haven't been heard of since the VHS days. I've been able to find and watch all but one of them so far. Five, I am a glutton and am not rich enough to support a glutton's appetite.
dasfoo
3yr ago
As for knowing, the fact that Epps and his lawyers and the government have been telling Fox he wasn't a fed is pretty compelling, unless Fox is going to try to go to war on a "they're all lying, including under oath" defense, which I doubt they would and would almost certainly fail if they did.
Didn't Epps testify that he wasn't doing things that he is apparently on videotape doing? It seems like there is some valid argument that he has been lying.
dasfoo
3yr ago
His SCOTUS appointments could have been accomplished by any R president with a heartbeat. The fact that they're more reliably conservative is more thanks to McConnell and negative partisanship leading to fewer compromise candidates. Trump actually seethed about how "disloyal" his SCOTUS appointments were, as he would have preferred lapdogs rather than principled legal scholars, but thankfully McConnell outmaneuvered him.
This is one of the great ironies of the religious conservatives on the Trumpist right. They hate McConnell for not being a loyal Trumpist and for being a DC insider, while also praising Trump for not fucking up the culmination of McConnell's patient long-term project of assembling a philosophically anti-Roe court. The way Roe was overturned is why we need systemic politically savvy game-players like McConnell. Trump just happened to be there when it hit the tipping point (to Trump's credit, he stayed out of the way).
Now, it looks like Trump might have one more problem on this front, with his squeamishness on the issue raising the hackles of at least one venerable pro-life group: https://nypost.com/2023/04/23/trump-touts-pro-life-record-to-iowa-voters-after-criticism-from-anti-abortion-group/ If this creates a schism in his base, DeSantis looks like a safer pro-life bet.
dasfoo
3yr ago
don’t treat them differently than you would a cis person of the same gender
As I don't have to ask about/learn/memorize new pronouns for a cis person, from square one I'm being asked to treat a trans person differently.
I saw a video yesterday of an interview with a trans person whose declared pronouns were "he/they," which doesn't even make sense as a typical pronoun pairing. There's no way to incorporate this narcissistic chaos into a workable reflexive vocabulary, so I reject participating in it. And now you're being treated how I would treat anyone else.
dasfoo
3yr ago
No, maybe you're just weird. Plenty of people are weird and don't find it easy to belong. Either get used to it, but trying to use the uncanny-valley to get somewhere where you belong never ends well.
I am a fan of "weird," but society doesn't function well when "weird" becomes the establishment. We need institutions to be focused on the "normies" so the weird can continue to be weird on the colorful fringes of a society that functions.
dasfoo
3yr ago
You see this kind of rhetorical move used a lot by the woke--drawing on the essentially universal consensus that the civil rights movement was a good thing, and then trying to make parallels between the activism of that era and the activism of our own
Ignoring, of course, that the moral righteousness of the Civil Rights era resulted in too-expansive laws that have permanently perverted the relationship between the federal government and the people. Moral righteousness doesn't automatically convert to good solutions, and actually usually results in bad solutions because too much righteousness overwhelms temperance and rationality.
dasfoo
3yr ago
Ali Alexander's entire career appears to be further proof that nowhere is Affirmative Action as aggressively practiced as among Right Wing political groups.
Desperation is the seed of many shitty relationships. Conservatives are desperate for brown buddies, to prove they're not racist, so there's little incentive for due diligence. Conservatives are just as desperate for activist representatives, and end up with the likes of Marjorie Green (and flamed out with Roy Moore and Herschel Walker...) and other half-hinged deplorables with more fight than sense. For a mirror, look at all the shitbags that liberals embraced in hopes of a fatal blow against their boogeymen: Michael Avenatti (who was considered a presidential possibility for about a week!), Julie Swetnick, Rebekah Jones.... It's just like the propensity to believe obviously fake or exaggerated news because it confirms your priors.
dasfoo
3yr ago
Dukakis' running mate, Jesse Jackson
Dukakis' running mate was Lloyd Bentsen.
dasfoo
3yr ago
the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season
How much of this was due to mismanagement? Such as, the initial treatment plan of putting the sick on ventilators, which didn't work and basically consigned many to death who might have survived with some other basic treatment approach? Or how the Northeast US hit a death jackpot by putting sick people in nursing homes, which was like throwing a match on dry kindling? Not to mention the financial incentives for hospitals to mislabel deaths as "due to COVID" rather than "tangentially adjacent to COVID?" When the entire bureaucratic/media complex has a vested interest in proving that fear of COVID is warranted, I'm skeptical of the numbers they present to press their case.
dasfoo
3yr ago
the goal of society should be to increase happiness
Of course not. How could society ever do something so personal, and complicated, or even measure it meaningfully? It would be a fool's errand, especially as short-term happiness and long-term happiness are often at odds with each other, and means different things to each individual.
The goal of society -- by which I suppose you mean government, which is how society organizes for common purposes? -- should be to protect people and their property from harm/theft from other people, and provide some sort of emergency services using a limited common fund. They can do this via a legal framework that treats people as equals. In this way, people may pursue happiness, if they so wish, or pursue some other goal that they value more.
Stephen Sondheim's musical "Assassins" actually focuses on this misunderstanding of American ideals as fundamental to the country's social dysfunction: that the right to the pursuit of happiness is not the same thing as a right to actual happiness. People who expect society to increase their happiness will end up disgruntled and may blame society for failing to make them happy.
dasfoo
3yr ago
At the end of the day, it seems like some of this is the old left’s anti-authority views- parents saying ‘no, that’s retarded, I can’t quite explain why but in five years you’ll be glad I didn’t let you go through with this’ isn’t a valid objection even when it is obviously correct.
I used to listen to a parenting podcast several years ago, and one of the hosts had a daughter -- age 10-11, maybe? -- who decided she was a boy. A good portion of the show became about this subject. The mother, a good California liberal with a fringe Hollywood career, was very honest about the heartbreak of reconciling with her sense of loss when one of her girls "became a boy" and chose a new name for herself, when the name the mother had chosen for her daughter had been a meaningful choice to the mother.... But the mother accepted this new identity, etc....
Sometime after the initial turbulence of this transition, in one episode the two hosts were talking about their kids' eating habits, and the mom with the transgender child was indignant that her kids often has the temerity to reject her planned meals and wanted either alternate meals or junk food for dinner. The gall of transgender son to think that they can dictate to their mother something as important as what they will eat for dinner! Where would a kid ever get such an idea?
dasfoo
3yr ago
OP:
Taibbi's was clearly not happy with the interview but his follow-up statements kept avoiding the central reason he asked to be interviewed
Or Taibbi didn’t really care about the point and wanted to use the platform to discuss what Taibbi cared about in the US context?
Yeah, as I read through this last night and watched the Hassan interview, my impression was that Taibbi was not really referring to the Modi/India issue in that Tweet, but was (petulantly) responding to what had become a habit of Hassan snarking at Taibbi on various issues while denigrating the Twitter Files. That camel-back-breaking Hassan Tweet could have been about anything and Taibbi would've replied the same way. Still, it didn't look good for Taibbi that he was so inattentive to that particular detail, and it added to the overall poor impression he made (which has little to no relation to the merits of the debate on either side, IMO).
dasfoo
3yr ago
The average 64 year old in the state department absolutely wouldn't go to jail for decades for doing what Clinton did.
It's kind of an irrelevant comparison. The average State Dept. worker is not the boss of the entire State Department and can not have done what Clinton did. Clinton purposely implemented a system for transporting classified information outside of proper oversight and security channels. She didn't merely mishandle X number of classified documents; she intentionally ignored protocols in order to ensure that all of her classified communications were mishandled because she wanted to hide them.
To bring it back to the Trump/Biden boxes of documents, a more apt comparison would be if it were discovered that either of the Presidents had established an underground railroad that diverted all Top Secret docs away from the correct filing system and into a secret cave, and when the cave was discovered, all of the documents mysteriously caught fire.
dasfoo
3yr ago
On the other hand, you need some way to distinguish between "hey, it turns out rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable, who knew", and "rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable to the exact extent that my side controls them."
That is always the tension in centrist/civic politics. Trump is not a centrist/civicist though -- and, importantly, neither are many of his opponents; I don't see Trump as wholly unique problem, except for how he doesn't bother to cloak his extremeism -- he's a bull in a china shop that gets cheered by people who resent the mean owners and the social implications of the china shop. Rather than finding some way to ignore or replace the china shop with something more useful, they choose destruction. I have a good friend who, though he has soured a little on Trump recently, loved that about him, loved January 6, loved that he insults Elaine Chao for being Chinese, because he shares Trump's contempt for "the system" and all of the proprieties that make the system work. I don't think anything better than the current system comes out of that style of destructive performance, however.
The cornerstone of progressive education is that people are, at worst, a disease killing the earth. At least half of them are actively evil. And even the innocent ones who have done nothing yet are completely disposable if a woman finds them inconvenient.
More options
Context Copy link