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
10mo ago
By what mechanism does garden variety activist trans acceptance make men sexually attracted to the idea of themselves as a woman? I don’t see it.
Something like this:
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School holds a function celebrating Trans people as exemplary and people against Trans as bigots.
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Kids who don't want to be called bigots outdo each other with effusive praising of trans people. This is a feedback loop of increasing intensity.
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Puberty-adjacent kid with low self-esteem who gets no affirmations at home see affirmations of trans people, and at his age the desire to be cool/affirmed is more powerful than his sexual desire, so he wants to be Trans.
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After a year or two of getting teachers and fellow students and parents to celebrate him as a her, once the real sexual desires kick in, it would be immortally embarrassing to make a 180-degree turn. The desire to not be embarrassed socially is more powerful than seuxal desire, so he sticks with it.
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Likely, once the kid announced as Trans they digested a ton of Trans-confirming sexual messaging online and from peers which assimilates into their sexual development. Maybe at the point it's hard to tell what is organic sexual attraction and what has been formed by other influences.
My nephew is older, but his story goes something like this:
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Socially awkward young man with a speech impediment from a religious family (dad is a reverend) gets a job as a software engineer and spends a lot of time remote-working from his dark apartment. Makes a lot of money but gets depressed and quasi-suicidal.
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Goes to therapy -- provided by his work, I believe. Therapist suggests that social awkwardness could be gender-related, tells him that transitioning genders will alleviate suicidal ideation.
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Transitions, comes to some family parties in dresses and apparent top surgery, has a new name. Everyone is polite to him (except for some of the young children who refer to him as "that weird boy"). Is also the only one wearing a Covid mask. It's like a case study of a misfit making extra effort to not fit in to affirm's one's identity as a misfit.
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Year later complains to therapist that it didn't work and that he is still suicidal.
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His parents reach out to him, but he tells them that their dead to him and if he kills himself it's their fault.
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Turns the most sympathetic family members against other family members for not being effusive in their praise of something that looks like a mental health trainwreck.
No one wants to know what his actual sexual feelings are, and I would doubt even he knows at this point. At least he hasn't killed himself yet, but I won't be surprised when the call comes in.
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
Really? Is that true? I didn't follow the story closely at all, so I'm only inferring details. But if he didn't do anything without them saying they were okay with it, then why was he cancelled at all?
CK's crime was taking old feminism at face value: treating women as equals who are capable of consenting to sexual interactions (which is how it ought to be, IMO).
What he didn't understand, as a good liberal, is that he was guilty of original sin before doing anything, and that new feminism's model posits that women are always weak victims who are trivially easy to manipulate and should therefore, paradoxically, hold more positions of governmental and corporate power.
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
9mo ago
It's all very fascinating and puzzling to experience.
I agree with all of that, but I don't find it puzzling. There's an easy answer: the impatience of virtue signaling. At this point in late-stage entryism, we're seeing that the cultural inheritors of the Left's long march through the institutions have zero of the patience that made their current positions of power possible. Not only do they demand instant justice for current wrongs, but they also want to refresh past wrongs and demand instant justice for them, as well. The problem for today's Left with the long march is that, to work, it had to be invisible. Today's political activists want to be seen protesting and be seen enacting change, and as a result appear obnoxious and taint their causes rather than move them forward.
All of this is also true about the New Right. The immediacy of rage and the catharsis of public tantrums are exactly the wrong way to go about reversing the Leftward drift of the last half-century, but since the Right doesn't believe in institutions to the same degree that the Left does, they don't even have another option. This is why the New Right would happily destroy the Constitution for short-term political success, thus destroying the foundation of future long-term success.
dasfoo
1yr ago
We have a fair number of Russians and Russophiles in here, so I thought I’d ask for opinions about Alexei Navalny.
He’s the subject of a documentary (one that could win an Oscar next month: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navalny_(film)) which I watched recently, and I followed it up with a video mentioned near the end of the doc that his team made about Putin’s lucrative circle of corruption. As a skeptic, I know not to believe everything I see, hear, and read, but I was wondering if there is a deeper counter-argument to Navalny’s narrative and positions than, “He’s a tool of western governments/the CIA to besmirch Putin and Russia.”
In the documentary about Navalny (on HBOMax), he’s depicted as a jovial but committed critic of Putin, and one who has so annoyed the Russian leader, that Putin won’t even deign to mention Navalny’s name on TV, but refers to him only in the form of “that person.” Navalny is questioned briefly about his past appearances with questionable nationalist/racist political movements and he’s unapologetic, explaining that he’s trying to build a coalition that can challenge the establishment and can’t afford the luxury of turning anyone away (which is similar to how some supporters of Trump’s 2016 campaign explained his flirtations with Alex Jones and some less savory radio personalities). I don’t put much stock in official Russian accusations that its enemies are racists or Nazis, anyway, as I see those as arguments made in bad faith with the sole intention of eroding opposition enthusiasm and not as issues that Putin’s racially diverse and sensitive supporters actually care about. Its arguments-as-soldiers on top of pot-calling-kettle.
The documentary then depicts the aftermath of Navalny’s poisoning with a nerve agent, which hits him while in-flight across Russia, the fatal consequences of which are only averted by an emergency landing and, after some political jostling, his eventual release from a Russian hospital to seek care in Europe. While in recovery, Navalny teams up with a Bulgarian hacker to reveal the identities of the assassins, and they even trick one into discussing the details of the plot over the phone. It’s a bombshell scene, if it can be believed. (The filmmakers contend that the scientist who was tricked by Navalny’s impersonation of a post-mission auditor disappeared shortly after their conversation was made public.)
When Navalny returns to Russia, he is detained at the airport, and has been in prison ever since. But a couple of days after his arrest, his team drops a two-hour YouTube video titled “Putin's palace. The story of the world's biggest bribe” (https://youtube.com/watch?v=T_tFSWZXKN0&authuser=2), which details the formation of Putin's network of graft and embezzlement and how it has poured billions in state funds into the construction of a lavish secluded palace, in addition to providing jobs and housing for Putin’s mistresses and their families. Again, maybe it’s all false, but it’s densely reported and has a sheen of credibility.
So am I a fool falling for wholly concocted neoliberal propaganda besmirching the world’s only remaining champion of traditional values? What’s the direct counterargument to Navalny’s claims about Putin’s corruption or attempt to assassinate a pesky political opponent? I’m certain that Navalny is flawed, as are we all, and I am loath to trust any politician. But I like Navalny – he comes off as a “happy warrior” with a worthy cause – and he seems honest. Without resorting to ad hominem non sequiturs, tell me why I shouldn’t take him seriously? Even if he is a Nazi, is he wrong about Putin?
dasfoo
1yr ago
Johnson is clearly talented as a filmmaker/director, so how can he be so clueless as a writer?
He's not clueless. He knows exactly what he's doing: he is a giddy social justice warrior whose goal is to spread those messages through any vehicle at his disposal, and he won the lottery with Star Wars.
Almost mid-way through Glass Onion there's a monologue by Edward Norton's character about what it means to be a "disruptor," and that true disruption is bringing down the system. Although many speculated that this character was based on Elon Musk, it sounded to me at times that Johnson was using this character* as a vehicle for his own thoughts, especially with that monologue that was essentially Johnson's argument for what he did with Last Jedi.
For a bit, I wondered if Johnson was betraying an admiration for Musk, but as the ending twist plays out it reads instead as if Johnson assumes that Musk wishes he was Johnson, a true disruptor!
Johnson's work is fully intentional, and as Glass Onion's final scene reveals, he doesn't care what is damaged in the process; in fact, damage is the point.
dasfoo
4mo 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
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
4mo ago
Bernie couldn’t even beat Hillary in the primary
We'll never know if he could've beaten her, as the Hillary-funded DNC fixed that race.
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
11mo 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
4mo ago
I have to ask, at this point, why does the West still support Ukraine?
Do you think any of the concerns you've raised are relevant to why the West supports Ukraine?
dasfoo
1yr ago
English football club Manchester United is embroiled in two sticky situations right now that are splitting fans into two camps I am going to call “The Moralists” and “The Sportalists.”
The first issue is that the club, considered one of the most valuable brands in the sporting world, is for sale. For over a decade, United fans have hated the American owners who bought the club with leveraged debt and have since overseen a long period with little success on the field and a frustrating approach to on-and-off-field development. Now, however, a more ominous cloud is looming: Oil Money. The most likely buyer is a Qatari banker with close connections to the state. While such an owner would surely open the floodgates of opportunity in terms of new player signings and stadium improvements, many fans are not pleased with Qatar’s record on human rights. They accuse the Qatari owner of being a proxy for an evil government that wants to indulge in “sportswashing[*],” which is a vague term for laundering dubious behavior through the glamor of sport. It also doesn’t help that United fans have spent the last decade accusing their cross-town rivals Manchester City – who were transformed from a third-rate club into dominant champions shortly after they were purchased by Abu Dhabi oil billionaires in 2008 – of profiting off of blood money. So you have The Moralists claiming that they can no longer support the club if it’s bought by LGBTQii++-unfriendly oil barons, and you have The Sportalists excited by the prospect of ending a humiliating decade by unleashing the clubs innate financial power with additional oil-funded swagger.
The second issue is similar, but concerns a player rather than new prospective owners. One of the club’s brightest young stars, 21-year-old Mason Greenwood, who scored his first professional goal for the club at the age of 17, and who has the tools to become one of the best strikers in the world, hasn’t played for the club in a year. His girlfriend accused him of rape accompanied by an an audio recording of Greenwood making menacing threats along with video recordings of her bruises and other wounds. Criminal files were charged and Greenwood was suspended pending the outcome of the trial. A year later, and it looks like that trial is not going to happen. The charges have been dropped and the couple has reconciled. This is not stopping The Moralists, however, from insisting that Greenwood should never play for the club again, that the evidence was clear regardless of trivialities like legal conviction. The Sportalists, on the other hand, are reluctant to lose a remarkable on-field asset, especially when the team has been thin in the attacking department. Even accepting that the team is currently playing well under a new manager and has another star, Marcus Rashford, scoring for fun, a talent the likes of Greenwood is not something to be casually tossed away. Would his return stain the brand, and/or derail the current rebuilding project? Does it matter that current league leaders Arsenal are currently fielding a star with his own closet full of rape allegations albeit without criminal charges?
I don’t spend much time worrying about morality in entertainment. I am fully in the “separate the art from the artist” camp. I watch soccer to watch good soccer just like I watch Woody Allen and Roman Polanski movies for their rare artistry (and I will defend Allen against all charges; not so much for Polanski). I am a Sportalist. Maybe Sportalists are the “silent majority,” but Reddit fan groups are awash with moral superiors declaring that if either Qatari or Greenwoodian presences are allowed to sully United in the near future, it will be the end of the historic club as we know it.
Sportalists are downvoted into oblivion in the corners I frequent. The Moralists, meanwhile, argue that Qatar/Greenwood will trigger fans who are sensitive to LGBTQi++/Sex Abuse issues. News has been leaking that the Manchester United women’s team is categorically opposed to Greenwood’s return, while the men’s team is split. It’s worth remembering that some of Manchester United’s players have been friends and co-workers with Greenwood for four or more years, so it might not be as easy for some of them to cut ties so cleanly without some equivication.
Both of these issues are interesting as examples of clear moral arguments pitted against pretty clear sporting benefits, mirroring the Culture War dynamic of, depending on how you look at it, Virtue Signaling Busybodies vs.Blissful Ignorants, or, Higher Consciousness vs. Lower Desires. Wokeness vs. Commerce.
[*] About “Sportswashing:” I don’t really understand this accusation. It seems to me that by buying a high profile entertainment service, the Qataris are bringing more attention to their human rights issues rather than hiding them behind the sport. If anything, I would expect a gradual adoption of western attitudes the more the Qataris are involved with western business people in western settings. At the very least, their human right records are not likely to get worse should they become owners of Manchester United, so from a utilitarian perspective, this argument seems moot. In what scenario does Qatari ownership of Manchester United make their human rights abuses worse? Someone rich enough to buy the organization already has the resources to do whatever they want, so I fail to see how it enables increased evil. It reeks to me of a selective quest for unattainable purity, which is a form of self-destruction.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Ironically, support groups where people confirm and commiserate seem to make the issue worse. In fact, many modern studies on pain recommend not even using the word "pain" and replacing it with something else to trick your mind into understanding that your pain doesn’t have an acute physical cause.
And, to add a button to this dynamic, the mode of therapy for these kinds of issues seems to have changed from correcting them -- aiming to help the patient reconcile their delusions with reality -- to normalizing the delusions, including cultural reinforcement of this normalization.
dasfoo
10mo ago
I don't mean competent in regards to passing good legislation, but literal competency as politicians.
The incentives have changed. Now a politician gets their approval from rallying their social media followers with knee-jerk momentary populist complaints, while old-school "get things done" legislators (like Mitch McConnell, who successfully ran a 20-year gameplan to overturn Roe v Wade) get pilloried by the populists (who crave his results!) for understanding that the way to translate politics into long-term outcomes is to get dirty by sacrificing purity.
Obama also played a (shorter) version of the long-game with the ACA, first putting in place the CBO people he needed to score the plan in a way that would help it get passed. Understanding how the system works and working within it is a key to success; standing outside and yelling "the system sucks" might get a lot of likes, but it won't get you very far within the system.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I was listening to a podcast the other day by a Waldorf kindergarten teacher who had started taking his classes on walks to the park all morning, every morning, and that it worked out very well for them, but this was a nice, safe forest park in a place with decent weather much of the year.
I have a middle-schooler who, last year, was in a homeschool pod with, sort of accidentally, a lot of vaccine-wary Waldorf-defectors. They did the walk/bike to a park almost every day. We pulled her out of that pod this year because the plan was to spend essentially all day every day in the forest. The only math that was on the curriculum was in the spring when it was needed to plot out and build a big garden. All the reading was going to be nature-related non-fiction. No history at all. There's probably a healthy balance between intellectual and practical education, but it's easy to go too far in one direction.
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've also had a tween girl dinner guest who identified as non-binary. She was more physically developed than her peers, cycled through a repertoire of cutesy vocal and motor tics, and low-key complained that ever since her parents' divorce her father has barely been around. It was like she had arrived to act out Lisa Littman's core thesis for us. I felt terrible for her, because she was obviously genuinely suffering, but I just could not buy that the solution to her problems lay anywhere in gender ideology.
I wonder if any medical professional would suggest that the solution to her underlying problem should be as follows: To behave/believe as if her absentee father is actually omnipresent in her life, and have the people around her also engage in affirming that her absentee father is fully present in her life? If this is not a proper course of counseling, why not?
I think there's a growing sense that this approach to therapy is wholly off-target. The job of the therapist is not to reinvent the world as a way of mitigating an individual's negative feelings, but rather is to help the individual process their negative feelings so that they are expressed in the least harmful manner. "Gender-affirming" care is a Utopian fool's errand: "This suicidal person whose sense of self is at odds with reality would be happy if I could wave a magic wand and change reality." Sorry, but everybody experiences varying degrees of unhappiness, misfittedness, insecurity, neurosis, social awkwardness, but most people naturally develop internal tools to cope with those feelings and orient themselves so that the feelings aren't overwhelming in destructive ways. People who lack the natural ability to put negative feelings in perspective, may need therapy to learn that these feelings are normal and that there are methods of coping. It seems like teaching them instead that reality is wrong is more harmful in the long run, even without hormones and surgeries.
dasfoo
10mo ago
Another theory I've heard is that Prigozhin and Putin are both involved: have a mini coup, clear house in the MoD, and use that as pretext to cut the war short.
That also seems far too elaborate, though.
And I can't see Putin consenting to a subterfuge that makes him look weak. It destroys his entire image.
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
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
1yr ago
It's one of those debates "Is making it easier to find publicly known info the same as doxing?"
Yes, that's exactly what it is.
My street address is not private. It's in the phone book. But if a journalist with 50k followers tweeted it with the implication that I'm a bad guy, that presents a hazard that didn't exist by my address merely being the in the phone book.
That is, Doxxing is a two-ingredient recipe: 1. The information, 2. The reason for calling attention to the information to a specific audience. Neither ingredient is necessarily a hazard on its own.
I felt the same way in my 30s and when my marriage was going well. It was blissful to not be tempted at all. Fast-forward ten years, with little incompatibilities growing exponentially, and things might look different. Although I have not done so, I have much more empathy now for some men who do cheat (not the compulsive, chronic cheaters, but the ones who feel abandoned in some aspects of marriage). There may come a time when it looks like the least bad of the terrible options.
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