dasfoo
2yr 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
2yr ago
It's not social status which made him vulnerable, but his lack of political protection.
This is a self-created problem, and downstream of his social status. Trump doesn't have useful allies and the political protection they afford because he doesn't know he needs them, he doesn't know how they work, he doesn't know how politics works -- he just knows that as someone of low social status, he's suspicious of how the high-status system work -- and he's disloyal to the allies he has, losing them quickly.
I was watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest last night and it dawned on me how much of a McMurphy Trump is. He's a wildly charismatic rule-breaker, but he mistakes his charisma for substance and doesn't really understand why he breaks the rules. He has a child's idea of how things should work. He just has a resistance to the authorities, he gets off on poking them, and he mistakenly thinks he's smarter than them. He makes an instant connection with the discarded people that he thinks have been unfairly beaten down by the authorities, and he lifts their spirits by thumbing his nose at their oppressors... but he never really understands the true dysfunctions of his followers, and as an egotist, he's unconscientious about how he uses them in his own self-service. He also never really understands the system he's bucking, and by the end, he has made vulnerable and destroyed the weakest of his comrades and the system crushes him. He thought he was a righteous agitator, but he made everything much much worse in the short term, and didn't really matter in the long-term.
Of course, OFOTCN was a product of 1960s anti-authoritarianism (young people may not know that Boomers were fleetingly anti-authoritarian before they become the authorities), so we are supposed to view McMurphy as a tragic hero and Nurse Ratched as a fascist monster. We are also supposed to buy in to the popular counter-culture idea that "mental illness" was a social imposition on unfortunate people who are really no less crazy than you or I. But now the OFOTCN dynamics look very different to me: McMurphy is a fool; Ratched has control issues, yes, but she also has the near-impossible job of connecting with severely troubled people who are easily led to extremes by disruptive behavior. Compared to the Titicut Follies, this mental hospital is an ideal of order and serenity before McMurphy shows up. But because of Titicut Follies and OFOTCN, most of the people seen in this movie would soon be living in tents in downtown Portland, shitting on the sidewalk, and randomly attacking passersby. (Fittingly, Oregon, where the movie was set and filmed, recently declared OFOTCN its official state movie.)
dasfoo
1mo ago
I’m recently divorced (politics didn’t factor, my wife was more conservative) and have been wrestling with this political absolutism in online dating apps and have gotten into some dustups about the topic in a dating subreddit.
A lot of dating profiles put politics first. As I live in a purple suburb of a radically leftist city, most of this manifests as “No MAGA.” As a “conservative” of the classically-liberal-anti-trump variety, I am not MAGA, but this sentiment extends to anyone who has ever in the last 30 years referred themselves as conservative or Republican. It’s impossible to open a dialogue about what it means to be “conservative” and whether MAGA is actually “conservative.” Nuance is dead. Thought has been replaced by memes.
I would swipe left on any “No MAGA” profile, anyway, because, to me, that mindset – that discussion of political differences is completely off the table – is what I find offensive, even if the person agreed with me on every other issue. As long as the discussion is respectful and aimed at understanding each other’s different views, it should be tolerable. My guess is that the “No MAGA” party would be unable to remain respectful during such a discussion, so in order to assert their moral superiority, they need to shortcut the conversation before it begins. The ability to understand an argument has atrophied, overshadowed by the rush of clicking the “like” or “dislike” buttons.
dasfoo
5mo 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
9mo ago
The shift in (publicly expressed) conservative views on female sexuality in the face of wokeness has been fascinating. Conservatives are now openly much more sex-positive when it comes to traditional sexuality, as a bulwark against alternate sexualities, whereas in the past they were more focused on opposing sexual permissiveness by promoting modesty. Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney or all the rightoid influencers on X who prominently display cleavage while opining on whatever issue: the new conservative messaging is "It's good for men to want to fuck real women," because too many other, weirder avenues have opened up in pop culture.
Now, surely, this has always been the conservative ideal, but it was more prudent in the past to let it bubble in the background, lest your daughter forsake the first half of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The balance is what's important, and if nature if pulling heavily on the whore-half, socially we need to over-promote the madonna-half. Now the framing window has changed from, "Don't be a whore" to "Don't be some weird whore who is outside the bounds set back when your grandma was a respectable hetero whore for grandpa behind closed doors."
If conservatives fear that teachers/librarians are in a conspiracy to groom their kids into blue-haired gender-queer kink-mongers, you'd better believe there will be some counter-grooming. Who doesn't want their son to love tits, or their daughters to have happy marriages by doing things we don't want to know about to please their husbands? Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.
dasfoo
9mo ago
Here's a fun example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia
dasfoo
11mo ago
video link, just before the shots
The woman in the right corner at just after 9 minutes who transitions from shouting "USA! USA! USA!" to "FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!" is a perfect ecapsulation of the ugliness of the current American body politic.
dasfoo
11mo ago
I watched that and his disbelief that Secret Service didn't have those roofs covered. I'm assuming Trump has a much smaller SS detail than he would have had while he was president, right? I understand that former presidents and presidential campaigners get some degree of SS coverage, but is their detail really big enough to station agents on all of the roofs in a small town, like this guy seems to have expected?
dasfoo
1yr ago
This is interesting, and I might be persuaded.
Scenario A:
Let's say I mistakenly think that some completely legal act is illegal, like buying paperclips. Every time I buy paperclips for my office, I intentionally misclassify these transactions as "legal services" because I don';t want the law to know that I bought paperclips.
In this scenario, I have committed a felony, because I was attempting to conceal a "crime," and therefore fool the state, regardless of the actuality of any crime being committed.
Scenario B
Let's say I think that buying paperclips is embarassing but not illegal. In this case, I would be committing only a misdemeanor by misclassifiying the purchases, as I was not trying to conceal what I thought was a "crime?"
Scenario C
I'm not sure if buying paperclips is a crime, so just to be safe, I'm never going to admit to buying paperclips on paper. I'm going to send my lawyer out to buy my paperclips for me with his own money, and since he's my lawyer, when I pay him back, I'm going to classify the expense as "legal services," because he's my lawyer. I think I have successfully avoided admitting to the actual act and insulated myself from any crime if any crime exists. What is this? I have created layers of insulation between my willful ignorance and reality. Can intent be proven here?
dasfoo
1yr ago
The Deep State segment was frustrating to me, not because I believe the more sinister theories about it, but because I hear a more compelling and far-reaching explanation of it on a weekly basis from my rightier friends.
The mundane, plausible version of the theory goes that the Clinton Administration engaged in a purposeful stocking of the DC bureaucracy with partisans who would continue to pursue Democratic Party goals regardless of who was in office. These are the same class of new political operators who trashed the White House before GWB took office.
Taking it a bit further, Trump posed an unusual adversary, as mainstream Democrats expected him to shuffle LGBTQ and all brown people into camps. Also, symbolically, he was the disruptor of the narrative that mainstream Democrats created for themselves with Obama: That conservativism was dead (IMO they may have been correct; populism is not "conservative") and Obama was the leading light of a new era of progressive liberal democratic rule. Opposing Trump with every administrative stroke was a noble effort.
The version that really gets the Deep State Theorists (DSTs) buzzing, however, adds a few more layers to the obstinate liberal bureacracy, which DSTs see as one component of an elite movement starting** at the WEF/Davos "you will eat bugs and own nothing" set. WEF directs the high-level political operators like Victoria Newland who are orchestrating "forever wars" as part of a military industrial complex that has captured centrists in both parties - NeoCons and NeoLibs - and this is who the DC managerial class serves, whether they know it or not. They aren't anti-conservative as much as they are anti-populist, which is why Bernie was also boxed out by the DNC and there is so much commonality between Bernie and Trump supporters, in a "Rich Men North of Richmond" respect. The threat that Trump poses is disruption of the plans of elite billionaires and technocrats to turn the world into a globohomo concentration camp of some kind that somehow profits from stripping the rest of us of material goods and property (I don't really understand this part of the theory, unless you add the asterisk below).
** Add one more layer above the WEV/Davos: Satanic pedophiles are behind the scenes. The answer to why they are doing anything ultimately comes down to "They are literally evil and serving Satan." It is astonishing how many smart people I know actually buy into this theory in some regard. It does plug some logical holes, but with silly putty, IMO.
dasfoo
1yr ago
To be fair to the Democrats, they had no moral reason to fight fair after Kerry got swiftboated in 2004.
Weird example. Kerry was a worse candidate than Hillary, and he hoisted himself on his own petard by trying to run as a war hero when he was anything but. There was nothing shifty about swiftboating, unless using a candidate's own words and actions against him is now somehow sus.
dasfoo
1yr 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
2yr ago
A few months ago, my mother-in-law (mid-70s, and not the most reliable source), suffered a mild heart attack hours after receiving both her Covid booster and a flu shot. She said the ER nurse asked her if she had been boosted recently and followed with "We see this all the time." Coincidentally, my dad (late 70s, fully boosted) also suffered a mild heart attack around this time last year while in the hospital for a colonoscopy, and the doctors told him it was probably stress-related.
I do look skeptically at the anti-vaxxers who act like no one ever had heart or health issues prior to the Covid vaccine, but there does seem to be a lot more noticing going on, and no trust that anyone in power would admit if any of that noticing was of something real.
dasfoo
2yr ago
Let's start with the very first comment.
surprise hit
RRR was Rajmouli's (director) 3rd major film after his 2 Bahubali films. They were the 2 highest grossing Indian movies at their time of release. RRR was expected to be his magnum opus, and the last thing you can call it is a 'surprise hit'.
I should have qualified it thusly: "surprise hit in the U.S."
awful-looking
I find this to be grossly untrue, most people in both the west and India seem to disagree with me on this one.
But this bit is the subjective, so I won't contest you on it.
It looks like a video game cut scene, and every visual is both so overly processed digitally and full of CGI, that it's kind of hard to tell what is real and what is fake, because it all looks fake. And there's no visual art to it, it's all just bright and garish, like the master bathroom of a nouveau riche with no taste.
And, seriously, the CGI effects are fucking terrible. I wish I could post clips. It's mind-boggling how shitty some of the CGI scenes are, one in particular that is a long shot of Bheem sneaking into a compound, and it looks like a little video game character jumping from one digital surface to another.
absurdly stupid and awful-looking surprise hit movie of 2022, the Tollywood epic RRR. While slogging through this 3-hour parade of xenophobic melodrama, incoherent action, and kindergarten-level sentiment
I don't have a week to write an entire thesis on how wrong you are. But, RRR to me, is genius of the highest order. It is a layered movie with at least half a dozen meta levels behind it. While the base movie is entertaining at face value, most discerning viewers realize that it operates entirely in the realm of metaphor.
If all dozen meta-levels are written for an audience of six-year-olds, it doesn't matter how many levels there are. Yes, there is a lot going on in RRR -- not enough to fill a 3 hour movie, unfortunately -- but it's all simple-minded busywork performed by the most shallow of characters spouting remedial dialog. Compare it to the work of a master Indian filmmaker like Satyajit Ray, and RRR looks Paul Blart: Mall Cop in the spectrum of Indian cinema. Even compared to a legit masterful musical like Lagaan, everything in RRR is pedestrian and/or insulting.
Part of my issue with how the movie has been received in the U.S. is that it seems like an egregious example of the "soft bigotry of low expections." I've only seen a few Indian movies, but of extremely high quality, so this one seems like an exception in awfulness. I could see how someone who enjoys movies like Birdemic and The Room might find similar qualities here enjoyable, but not unironically.
dasfoo
1yr ago
With what endgame?
What happens to unspent campaign cash after an election? Let's say Biden is tanking but has healthy coffers. Would it benefit a candidate to quietly accept an early loss and become thrifty in the final months, setting aside a surplus of funds as a nice consolation prize?
dasfoo
1yr ago
I don't think an act becomes qualified as an "official presidential act" merely by the president appearing on TV, saying "I'm the president!," and committing a crime. There would have to be an argument that the crime was somehow necessary to the duties of his role.
Let's say one of a President's official duties is signing bills. While signing bills, his pen runs out of ink. The President then grabs his nearest aide, chops off the aide's hand, and signs the bill with the aide's bloody wrist stump.
The crime may have been committed during the execution of an official duty, but the crime is not necessary to the execution of the duty. Even assuming that another working pen could be not found without a run to Office Depot, the crime would still be egregious compared to the inconvenience of waiting for a new pen. This seems like an easily prosecutable crime because the infringed right of the aide outweighs the convenience of finding a writing utensil.
The same goes for the Seal Team Six scenario: Executing one's political opponents is not a necessary function of the president performing a duty. Whatever duty was being pursued surely has less-illegal remedies at the president's disposal.
dasfoo
2yr ago
Right. You made a comment specifically about the flag, and I asked a comment about the flag, but you chose to respond about something else.
There is a huge difference between having sexual experiences during childhood, or even having sexuality being reinforced, and seeing displays of gay pride flags.
Five years ago, before this topic was as heavily discussed in the culture, I took my then-14yo daughter to a concert. Each of the two opening acts and the main act did a "gay" song that involved the waving of rainbow flags, and the 25,000 14 year olds in the arena went apeshit each time. The energy in that place during the rainbow parades was off the chart.
Kids are very susceptible to fads (I myself wore a "Frankie Say Relax" t-shirt in junior high having no idea of its connotations...) and peer pressure. Whether or not the Rainbow flag actually turns kids gay is separate from the idea that this kind of mass celebration reinforces ideas of what is "good," and there probably isn't a wide distance between a kid feeling encouraged to try gay over their innate disgust tendencies, and then forming intimate bonds following experimental gay contact, especially if it's a first sexual experience. If you close your eyes and try real hard to think about how rainbow flags make you special, a mouth is just a mouth, as David Rabe wrote. And maybe there's no looking back after that point.
dasfoo
2yr 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.
dasfoo
2yr ago
That Twitter line was one of my biggest laughs last year. Novak is a sharp observer; but, unfortunately, he's also insecure about it and weighs down the final act with a lot of unnecessary explicit explanation of his ideas and themes, so that we can acknowledge his wisdom. If he can restrain that impulse, he'll become a really good filmmaker.
dasfoo
2yr ago
Hiring conservative professors in overwhelmingly liberal humanities departments is part of the solution, but another serious part—and a responsibility that can only fall on conservatives themselves—is the cultivation of more intellectually serious humanities and social sciences departments, alongside liberal arts colleges, with sincere commitments to presenting conservative thought.
How does this responsibility "fall on conservatives themselves?" Conservatives (of the type that I think you mean: classically liberal American Constitutional conservatives) hold as one of their values the free and robust exchange of ideas. They are already there. Progressives hold as their primary value the exclusion of these types of Conservatives from institutions and the toxification of all of their ideas -- and they've been successful! Without a change of heart or voluntary surrender from Progressives, what can Conservatives do except embrace conflict theory, take back institutions by force and block the entryists, forsaking the very mistake theory that you and I wish to have restored?
dasfoo
2yr ago
Uh...isn’t the salient feature that Baldwin shot someone?
No. An actor is hired by a production company to perform a role with the tools they are given by the production company. Since most movies do not involve the actual killing of real people with real guns with real ammo, an actor's assumption would be that any firearm they are given to use as a prop during filming is non-lethal, and there is an existing apparatus of firearms-specific prop handlers who are hired by production teams to make sure that when an actor is handed a prop gun it is non-lethal and safe for use in make-believe scenarios. Now, my gun-enthusiast buddies will say that anyone handling a firearm is responsible for what happens with that firearm while they are handling it, but this is the POV of people who live in gun culture and are expecting to be using lethal weapons with live ammo. This is not the case with actors, who are more likely to be gun-ignorant as well as have their head at least half in a state of make-believe. It is the job of the production team to educate the relevant actors on proper gun-handling procedures and ensure the safety of the gun.
Now, that Baldwin was also a producer of this movie puts him farther up the chain of responsibility and liability. As movies often have several producers with different levels of on-set responsibility, if Baldwin as a producer is charged with a crime (criminal negligence seems more apt than manslaughter, in this case), that same should apply to all producers with on-set responsibilities as well as to the property masters and firearms advisors who put a live gun in the hand of an actor (who likely to be the least capable person on the set).
dasfoo
2yr ago
e. DEPAPE stated that they went downstairs to the front door. The police arrived
and knocked on the door, and Pelosi ran over and opened it. Pelosi grabbed onto
DEPAPE’s hammer, which was in DEPAPE’s hand.
Does this course of action sound like something that happened in the real world? Pelosi is far enough away from Depape that he can run to the door to open it for the police. AFTER opening the door -- at which point police are inside the house with Pelosi and Depape -- Pelosi re-engages with Depape to grab the hammer (very spry for an 80+ year old, why not let the police take it?), and Depape pulls the hammer away and hits Pelosi (even though the Police must be literally on top of them at this moment).
dasfoo
2yr ago
So, because all groomers harm children, all who harm children are groomers? You are arguing that, because all Xs are Ys, all Ys are Xs.
That's obtuse.
Think of "grooming" as a long con. It's a program of psychological manipulation that targets vulnerable children and conditions them to a mindset that accepts abuse as a form of care. Obviously, if a stranger walks up to child out of the blue and abuses them, they are not a groomer. A groomer assumes a role of a trust and care in a child's life and convinces them that abuse is good for them. Whether the end product of that abuse is sexual or physical or psychological, the grooming approach is the same. And, IMO, a groomer doesn't even need to acknowledge to themselves that they are harming the child. A lot of abusers trick themselves into thinking that their abuse is utilitarian.
[For a look at a masterful real-life groomer, watch the doc Abducted in Plain Sight on Netflix or the new drama miniseries of the same story, Friend of the Family on Peacock. That guy was a genius in all the worst ways. He groomed an entire family, methodically.]
dasfoo
2yr ago
Trump was on the right side of history, and I think it's important to retain belief that there is a right side of history and people can be on it.
Was he? It's his vaccine, as he proudly claimed.
The CDC was more concerned about getting the vaccine out than perfect safety. Does that really make them mass murderers?
IIRC, the CDC postponed the vaccine until after the election, whereas Trump wanted it out before the election. I don't see how you can praise Trump as "right" while comdeming the CDC as vaccine hawks, when Trump was pressuring them to release it earlier than they did.
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.
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