dasfoo
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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.
dasfoo
25d ago
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.
Covid was exactly the opposite, stoking fear rather than cooperation: "Isolate yourself. Other people will kill you by existing."
dasfoo
4mo ago
I don't think Joe was pushing Hunter on anyone to make bucks for Joe
"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.
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?
The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights. That works when the people are hyper-invested in their families and the future that they'll be living in; that doesn't work when everybody is depressed and hates each other. No amount of restrictions or "doing something" is going to change that.
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.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Both images depict nudity. Note that it isn't claimed anywhere that this is an exhaustive list. It is quite possible that other artworks that don't feature nudity were discussed in the class, and the news reporting only mentioned these three because they are pertinent.
If it's not the teacher's choice and they are merely following a curriculum set by the board, that's the board's problem. If the board is telling teachers: Pick any lesson that doesn't contain nudity, and the teacher picks one full of nudity, they have only themselves to blame. If a teacher is required to inform parents of something and doesn't and then tells students not to tell their parents, they should be fired. There is no situation in which teachers/school should be hiding things from parents, and that's the key to this entire culture war chapter.
dasfoo
1yr ago
#2 Is straight up witch-hunt logic. Defending yourself by saying the sculpture David is non-pornographic does not suggest you were on other occasions showing kids pornography.
If you are displaying nudism in art because nudism is natural and non-lascivious, there's no need to draw attention to other lascivious forms. By classifying David as "not porn" you are not only virtually inviting the students to be curious about the mentioned alternative but you are implicitly categorizing "porn" as the default and "not porn" as the exception. I understand why someone would psychologically feel the need to defensively declare "not porn!" if one is already anticipating cries of "porn!" but that's not the act of someone who is not already defensive about their course.
dasfoo
1yr ago
The mainstream Right wing has no Will to Power, it has no big ideas.
This is a tautology, isn't it? The Right's "big idea" is to be wary of big ideas, so of course they aren't proposing their own big ideas. That's a feature, not a bug. Maybe they need to express this idea more effectively, but what they don't need is to become right-wing progressives.
(It also depends on which "Right" you're talking about. The alt-right has "Big Ideas" that I'd rather not see enter the Overton window. The free-market constitutional center-right should remain anti-big ideas no matter which side they come from.)
EDIT/ADDENDUM: In the scope of history "Don't Tread on Me" is a pretty fucking big idea, and continues to be one.
dasfoo
1yr ago
These classes impress upon children the idealistic, shallow notion that individuals - not geopolitical trends and perpetual power imbalances - are responsible for shaping the course of history.
Of course they do. No society can survive when its children are taught from the outset that their society is not worth surviving. Children need to learn ideals toward which to strive, and be given a reason for participating positively as part of a larger society.
Independent students may later dig into the more complicated realities, but it's societal suicide to breed cynicism and self-loathing in kids, as we are possibly seeing now in the U.S., where kids have been taught eco doomerism and self-hating history since the 1990s.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Wow, I must have missed the memo.
"It's cool, we won, you can take the sticker off now."
This is unnecessarily antagonistic and reads into Supah's comment something that isn't there. There doesn't need to be coordination/conspiracy for fashion/fads to change over time. It's not at all uncommon for peope who see themselves as trendsetters to tire easily of what was trendy last month, especially when a trend has since been codified by less-cool bodies, like commercial institutions.
dasfoo
8d ago
Could Silicon Valley, not unlike how they targeted Crowder's business through the algorithm, having also targeted his marriage?
I mean, yes? But probably not? And do you have any corroborating data outside of Crowder sitting in the middle of this Venn Diagram? "People shadowbanned by YouTube" & "People who got divorced?" Is anyone else even speculating about this?
I think any persuasive case would have to include some sort of theory for why instigating a divorce would be in any way beneficial to the conspirators. Is it known that non-divorced right-wing comedians are less desired by social media outlets? Or is the idea that social media companies are interested in causing divorces for some other reason and just picked people they don't like as guinea pigs?
dasfoo
1mo ago
There actually was a tame (prelude to) sex scene in Marvel's The Eternals. It was a little controversial, but less so than the married gay couple later in the movie. It's the exception that proves the rule, however. I think there were also post-sex scenes in both Iron Man and the first Guardians movie, but the culture pretty quickly moved away from scenes in which PG-13 heroes are seen with the most human of character flaws.
It's arguable that we're now entering the backlash period to this recent chasteness. Oppenheimer famously involves a gratuitous sex/nude scene, which doesn't seem to have hurt its critical or popular standing. Poor Things is balls-out sex and nudity. In the last two months, we've had new theatrical releases of the cunnilingus-and-dildo-filled Drive Away Dolls and now Love Lies Bleeding. As those last three suggest, it's likely that there's more appetite in Hollywood right now for sex content that de-emphasizes straight male sexuality -- a subject of criticism in Poor Things -- or that specifically focuses on queer eroticism, as those two new releases do.
Then again, we have the buoyant rise of Sidney Sweeney and the huge success of Anyone But You, which looks like a standard cis sex-com with old-fashioned eye candy for guys and girls. So there's an appetite for that kind of material; it's just whether or not Hollywood has the stomach to look past the scolds on Bluesky or whatever. Maybe the changes Musk has made to Twitter has scattered that kind of hive-mind prudishiness that started some of these movements?
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
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
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
10mo ago
Consider teenage socialists - are they getting that socialism from their middle or high school teachers? Their parents? No.
They aren't? It seems to me that over the last 15-20 years there has been a massive influx of teacher-activists whose entire raison-d'etre is to turn their students into activists for progressive causes, with LGBTQ+++ only the current fad. A key part of the Left's slow march through the institutions over the last 70 years has been through the education pipeline, trickling down from academia to grade school (and younger), and that the current credentialing system for emerging teachers is essentially a factory line for producing good little socialists. This is not, IME, dissimilar from how higher education has done the same to journalism programs, leading to the current situation with a media that is 90+% ideologically captured. Control the narratives through school and TV, and even the kids who aren't political will grow up with the socially approved understanding of the world. By the time the teenagers are being riled into activism by their cool young green-haired teachers (at my kids' charter school a few years back, they all worked on a class project to obstruct drilling at Standing Rock, even though we are thousands of miles away) they've already been primed with 8 years of socialist righteousness.
Go back to the 1990s and you will find socialist-driven environmental messaging seeping into every pore of the public grade school experience. A bit farther back, at my large suburban American high school in the late 1980s, the advanced history class used as its primary textbook Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. This isn't new; on the contrary, it's just so normal it's hard to notice.
dasfoo
1yr ago
how is hush money pursuant to an NDA not a legal expense though
And how is violating an NDA to blackmail a politician not in itself some kind of crime?
EDIT: Also: If hush money doesn't hush someone, is it really hush money? Daniels is not doing wonders for the perception of the ethics of sex workers.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I don't have a fixed POV on this issue, but I think your accurate historical definition of "political machine" is beside the point. My "election truther" buddies, if they were to refer to a "machine" behind ballot fraud, would be using a known old term to refer to something new and different, a difference that is key to their argument. In their worldview, a paradigm shift has taken place that has removed the common man from the political machine (this is the essence of Trumpism). Now that the titans of industry are predominantly Democrats, they have conspired with Democrat politicians to circumvent the inconvenience of getting votes from regular people. The argument is that they have figured out how to rig the game at a higher level, and everything else is kayfabe. They use "current thing" to distract the public from realizing that the public is now irrelevant. Meanwhile, a closed loop of graft and favors is making everyone in the elite richer and richer. (Add to this recipe some degree of Satanic grooming, if you want a full picture of this theory of the world.)
This isn't my worldview -- I expect more uncoordinated chaos in how things fold and unfold -- but I hear it a lot, in different degrees of eloquence. Like most other machines that have been around since the dawn of the industrial revolution, political machines have gone through technological changes that would now confuse the mechanics of that earlier time.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Let's not forget the two movies that bookended the decade, both quite clear in their anti-puritanical message: Fight Club and The Matrix.
Semantic nitpick: "Bookended" means "at both/either ends," but those movies both came out in 1999. So they may have closed out the decade, but they didn't "bookend" it.
dasfoo
1yr ago
WEF Conspiracies Are An IQ Test
Doesn't this title break the charity rule, the test to write as if everyone is reading?
There are high-IQ and low-IQ subscribers to most if not all conspiracy theories. I would assume that most CTs are developed by high-IQ types, who might notice patterns or connections that are not clearly apparent and create theories based on them. The low-IQs are then likely to adopt crude versions of these theories. I highly doubt many conspiracy theories are initially developed by low-IQs.
On the specific topic of the WEF, I hear about them most from an extremely high-IQ friend who I think is wrong a lot but has a lot of thoughtful evidence to backup his wrongness. I see this same fallacy in your post: the assumption that high-IQ people are somehow often right or better at applying common sense than low-IQ people. I have no doubt, for example, that many of the attendees of the WEF Davos shindig are extremely intelligent while also being generally wrong about their proscriptions for an optimal future. IQ has nothing to do with it when values are non-optimal, and a big mistake made by those at Davos and downstream from them throughout blue tribe/progressives is the idea that one's intelligence is somehow correlated with good values, both of which are correlated directly to evincing blue tribe/progressive totems and memes.
Whether or not is a nefarious conspiracy, there is nothing low-IQ about being very wary of self-appointed billionaire thought leaders attempting to consolidate power in non-governmental bodies that are looking for ways to re-engineer society (and human nature) on a global scale. If they're not constantly asking themselves, "What could possibly go wrong?" their influence is worth fearing.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Would it be reasonable to be suspicious when two thousand cell phones have a pattern of pings along paths from nonprofits to three or four different dropboxes at 2am?
If the movie showed that actually happening, yes. But they only speculate that it's happening and fail to follow-up that speculation with confirming evidence, which should've been trivially easy given the amount of video footage they boasted of having.
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?
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