dasfoo
4mo ago
a conservative activist and 9-11 conspiracy theorist
I'm so tired of this oxymoron. The new right is not "conservative" in any meaningful sense. Conspiracy theorists are not, essentially, "conservative" in either ideological predilection or demeanor. Trump is not and has never been "conservative." Maybe I'm just being pedantic over a term that has specific meaning to me, but while it is true that a lot a previously self-identified "conservatives" have become something else, what that is can hardly be called "conservative." Maybe the same applies to "liberals," to some extent.
dasfoo
4mo ago
And they would be wrong to do so.
Doesn't that depend on the method of reduction?
It would be obviously wrong to murder deaf people to reduce their numbers, but would it be obviously wrong to reduce the deaf population by curing them?
I would agree that it would be wrong to cure deaf people against their will, but what if 30% wanted curing? Would it be wrong to reduce deafness by 30% in that scenario? What if more wanted curing but were pressured by the deaf community to reject the cure?
What if, in a world where deafness was reduced to an even smaller fraction of its current presence, librarians and teachers started encouraging hearing children to explore deafness as a potential identity so that it does not go extinct? Would that be noble and something parents needn't worry about?
dasfoo
5mo ago
I don’t think it’s difficult to see how and why poking fun at old conservative fogeys this way is rather dishonest.
The old conservative fogey model is the song Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Beach Boys: Young people should want to have sex and not do it, which encourages marriage. A world in which teenagers can have sex and don't want to is as gross a perversion of nature as supposedly switching genders, removing the focused drive that has inspired art and other achievements for millenia.
dasfoo
5mo ago
1990s non-religious centrist conservative, part of Jonah Goldberg's "Remnant."
dasfoo
5mo ago
I think the tribal thing is overdone with left v right, the problem is the failure of people to think for themselves. I mean your claim that all blue is pro-immigration seems unlikely, or is evidence of some serious group-think. Immigration is a complex, and contextual issue. If half the population has one view on it, that's stupid.
I think the problem is that even though there may be widespread nuance in individual thought on issues like immigration, when it comes to rubber-meets-the-road rhetoric and policy, there's a knee-jerk reversion to the unnuanced view. It doesn't matter if someone or a lot of someones in Party A think some combination of B,C,D & E is true when they will only vote for people who say and pursue E as policy because it's the option that makes the best PR-tested battle cry. This is true of both major parties, who are more scared of losing than figuring out a problem, so instead of threading needles, all the front-line warriors are using sledgehammers. And while the nuanced thinkers sit back threading their needles, they're cheering on the sledgehammers.
dasfoo
5mo ago
Maybe, but this will probably not be synonymous with "white". For one, there are already millions of mixed race people living in Europe.
Just take a look at The Proud Boys, supposedly a white supremacist group, but every time I see a picture of a get-together, half or more appear to be mixed race.
dasfoo
5mo ago
Hispanic Guy (Joaquin Phoenix)
Seriously? (I will assume this is sarcastic...)
His parents were named John Lee Bottom and Arlyn "Heart" Dunetz.
"His father was a Catholic from Fontana, California, and was of English, German and French ancestry.[7] His maternal grandfather, Meyer Dunetz, was Russian Jewish..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquin_Phoenix#Early_life
They were hippies that gave their other kids names like River and Liberty.
dasfoo
5mo ago
Bro, he had sex with a 13 year old after confirming with her mother it was OK.
Can you substantiate that? I recalled the girls he approached were older, and there were allegations of him chatting up teenagers above the age of consent at the time, and there was a single allegation of inappropriate touching but not rape. His Wiki bears this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore. And he won a defamation lawsuit about last year.
In the south in the late 1970s it was probably not at all uncommon for men in their 30s to date older teenage girls. Moore did and married one of them and is still married to her today.
dasfoo
5mo ago
I wonder if the online right intellecto-sphere will ever figure out that Trump wasn't for them.
Trump was needed to show that "the narrative" could be countered on the biggest stage, which would inspire craftier right-ward politicians in the future who better understand how to leverage political mechanisms in their favor. The question that remains to be answered is: Will a smarter Trumpism appeal to the same wide base that loves Trump, or do they uniquely love the "dumb" version that is Trump's persona?
I know very smart college-educated people who loooove the way he trolls and, rather than looking forward to the smarter next-gen Trumps, look suspiciously on anyone who isn't exactly in the Trump mold. These people have already largely lost any faith in saving the western political system, so they aren't concerned like I am with civics and compromises for a saner future. They want it to burn, as if that will improve anything.
dasfoo
5mo ago
I mean, isn't this a.k.a "Intersectionalism?" This is the foundation of contemporary progressive thought: the weakest party in a power imbalance is the one who must be favored in that conflict. Being "Woke" is seeing the world as that series of power imbalances, and "Identity Politics" is being aware of one's own membership in one or more disempowered groups.
It's also the cornerstone of dramatic fiction, which is why IMO mass media is so confluent with progressive ideas and has become their most powerful delivery system.
dasfoo
6mo ago
In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked"
Without even touching the gay/trans contradiction, this quoted part is one of my bugaboos. As journalism has firmly become more focused on persuasion over reporting, I hear this kind of unsubstantiated statement-of-worldview-as-fact so often from journalists and it always makes my head ache. Very often, concrete statements like this will be done absent of any actual investigation. I listen to a handful of daily short-form headlines podcasts from major organizations, and the base-stealing that goes on is nearly criminal.
For example, very often in news stories about Trump's election claims, the claims will be described by reporters as lies, whereas they are really claims without sufficient proof, which is different. They may in fact be lies, but the statement that they are lies is also often a claim without sufficient proof. Now, I happen to think that they are likely fantasy/wishful thinking, so I am on the side of those who by default disbelieve them, but I also try to maintain some epistemic humility. Most of the claims, as I understand it, have never actually been investigated beyond superficial questioning of motivated participants and taking or rejecting their word as befits the reporter's pre-established narrative.
You see this a lot in environmental reporting, where causality is assigned to "climate change" without attribution. We also saw in a lot of COVID reporting the annoying new pattern of new stories with headlines in the pattern of "No, (insert party) didn't (insert dissenting claim)..." which smugly "corrected" assumed misinformation without ever investigating the veracity of the claim. This example, No, Science Clearly Shows That COVID-19 Wasn’t Leaked From A Wuhan Lab (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=41cb66e65585), discusses why the claim is likely not true, and lists the weakman arguments it purports to debunk, but even then it equivocates quite a bit more in the article than its definitive headline indicates.
How much do you want to bet that the CNN panelist asserting that conversion therapy has been "debunked" could not cite a single study to that effect, but would more likely point to popular culture, like books/movies such as "The Miseducation of Cameron Post," "But I'm a Cheerleader," and "Boy Erased?"
dasfoo
6mo ago
Over the past year and a half, I have come to believe virtually every awful thing I hear about Russia, with the added tint that I also assume the reality is probably worse than the reports. I have also come to disbelieve nearly every positive AND negative thing I hear about Ukraine. Their true identity has been completely obliterated for me by propaganda from both directions. A lot of this is formed by my opinions of the people who make arguments that I have heard in-person. My pro-Russian friends are always twisting themselves into knots to defend Russia, and are otherwise so captured by conspiracy theories that their default fallback position is that everything is fake and we are close to living in a simulation. As a natural contrarian, I feel like I see right through their contrarianism on this one. For the vocal pro-Ukranians -- I myself am pro-Ukranian in this conflict but have a dim view of the country otherwise -- they just sound like, and I hate this term, NPCs. That is, I don't sense a coherent worldview behind their Ukranian fanboying, they are just waving the flag because they're caught in a social contagion.
dasfoo
6mo ago
Except, of course, that classically it isn't; rather, it the expression of outgroup bias against particular groups.
I think the point is that the outgroup bias follows the ingroup bias: "In order to protect/provide for my ingroup, it is useful to stigmatize the outgroup."
dasfoo
7mo ago
Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did (at least in the U.S.)
The "Dissident Right" sees Ukraine as a puppet of their boogeyman, The New World Order, going back at least as far as the Maidan Revolution, which they think was a coup orchestrated by hated Neocons and Globalists (aka Satanic Pedophile Freemasons). Putin, meanwhile, is anti-LGBTQ++, so he's the based warrior holding out against the tide of Globohomo-ism. I know very intelligent people who believe this. To quote a friend of mine (who has two Masters degrees), when I asked him why he is so uncritical of Putin's Russia, "I know we [America/Western Civ] are evil. I don't know that about Putin."
dasfoo
7mo ago
Does this have a chance of swinging the Senate in 2024?
Twenty years ago another New Jersey Democrat had his Senate re-election campaign thwarted by ethics investigations, and the state Supreme Court threw out the election rulebook so that a beloved former Governor could replace him on the ticket even though it was past the deadline. I suspect that we can rely on NJ as much for election skullduggery favoring Democrats as we can for it to elect corrupt Senators.
dasfoo
7mo ago
I just watched a 2008 movie called "Baby Mama" starring Tina Fey.
In the movie, Tina Fey is reading a book about childbirth and is given a "nightmare" by the possibility of her child being a hermaphrodite or, in her words, "a chick with a dick". It's clear that this is being played for laughs even though, like the rest of the movie, it wasn't really funny.
It's crazy how far things have swung in just 15 years.
Thirty years ago I flirted with a career in comedy/TV writing. One of the most reliable tropes, I was taught, dating back hundreds of years (at least), was putting a man in a dress. The evidence that this nugget was a steadfast laugh-generator was apparent in a continuous stream from Shakespeare to Doubtfire. Now, it's the one thing above all others that can never be acknowledged as out-of-the-ordinary.
dasfoo
7mo ago
it's kind of interesting that we don't see more of this
We will definitely see a lot more of it now that there's been such an effective proof of concept.
dasfoo
7mo ago
Sound of Freedom beat the final Indiana Jones movie at the box office, albeit through a ticket multipurchase scheme
One of the guys from Angel Studios is on this podcast: https://www.thebulwark.com/podcast-episode/how-2023s-oddest-box-office-hit-paid-it-forward/
He claims that under the "Pay it Forward" ticket scheme, the tickets aren't counted as "box office" until a ticket is claimed and used to attend a screening. That is, the theaters do not see the purchase of the ticket until it is actually used. If true, I don't see how that is any less legit than the buy-it-yourself ticket model. Attendance is attendance.
dasfoo
8mo ago
When you provide evidence, it magically doesn't count, because you have evidence.
Yes, the "deep" modifier of "the deep state" suggests such layered institutional presence that "the deep state" controls what counts as "evidence," making it therefore impossible to prove its existence within deep state-controlled venues.
dasfoo
8mo ago
Chamber of Commerce
LOL. I just got back from a local Chamber meeting. I'm not sure what you think it is, but I am sure it doesn't belong in the company you think it does.
dasfoo
8mo ago
I had a period in my 20s during which I was doing temp jobs. I had two temp agencies: one that got me office work (once in a government office copying files; once in a charity call center) and another (the employment branch of Goodwill Industries, which also runs thrift stores) that was all blue collar (the one gig I can remember was moving furniture into a new hotel), and the guys I worked with through Goodwill's program never would fit in at (or wanted) the office jobs from the other agency, it was a completely different milieu.
dasfoo
8mo ago
But if we contrast that with the case of a harmless shut in depressed teenager who has tied their ego to their identity... What's the argument?
The principle that it's never to the long-term benefit of the subject to affirm the "importance" of identity. In mental health terms, it's long-term destructive to humor a patient's delusion. In societal terms, it's long-term destructive to stress identitarianism. In individual terms, it's harmful to place so much importance on one unstable factor that puts them in natural conflict with other individuals/groups. And I'm an individualist!
dasfoo
9mo ago
I would not be surprised if the new BlueSky app stays in invite-only mode for precisely this reason. A private Twitter probably has more appeal/value to the blue media class than a public Twitter at this point. Like a super-powered Journolist.
Immigration restriction seems to be a big part of your vision, but you are still hostile to the concept of White identity? You don't want White people to internalize any sort of ethnic identity, but you want major policy changes on Immigration. You can't have one without the other.
Not who you're replying to, but I also oppose illegal/uncontrolled immigration, and my reasons for doing so are irrespective of race. Illegal immigration creates a ghettoized immigrant community that is less likely to assimilate into a national culture, and an "open border" creates many logistical issues not the least of which is that it essentially nullifies a nation's ability to rule itself. The kind of Constitutional/quasi-libertarian project that I would most like to see is only feasible within firmly set and well-policed borders. Whether those borders are keeping out brown or white people makes no difference to me.
"10% for the Big Guy" isn't nothing. If I got 10% of my son's wages, I would rather he not work at a pizza place and might encourage him to aim higher.
More options
Context Copy link