dasfoo
10mo 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
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
4mo ago
Media that appeals to characteristically male fantasies should be permitted to exist on its own terms without its creators being subject to harassing accusations of sexism.
And media that appeals to female fantasies of submission. Was just listening to a podcast about Three Days of the Condor, about half of which was moaning about the hostage-to-lover plot thread. Some women find that kind of thing of exciting; can we stop shaming lurid fictional fantasies of all stripes?
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
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
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
This is my vice. I am addicted to the availability of just about any movie or tv show I can think of. I have 29 TB of bittorented media (not counting music, which I get through Spotify now, but that's probably another couple TBs). And I've spent a lot of time rationalizing it. As someone who has spent god knows how much on legal media over my lifetime (50-ish now), I'm no one-dimensional freeloader. I used to be the guy who would buy every DVD edition of Boogie Nights, and had bookcases of CDs and records. And I continue to pay to go to movies, pay for multiple streaming services, buy the occasional physical media (as recently as placing a Bluray order last night), etc. I have moral qualms about it, but mitigated somewhat by the fact that most producers and creatives I steal from have or will have gotten money from me in some manner in the past/present/future.
So why do I download? One, I want my own copies. Just last week I went to watch a movie at a friend's house where Netflix was the only option. We watched Hitchcock's Psycho, which looked like it was ripped from a high-quality VHS tape. Astoundingly bad visually. If we had been at my house, I could've switched to my Plex library and enjoyed it in beautiful HD. I also like to cut out clips from movies and make GIFs from them. Two, my download sites have become my news sources. I check in almost nightly and discover things I never would have heard of otherwise. I have lots of new favorites that I only know about because it cost me nothing to watch them. Sometimes I also get them early. I watched Under the Silver Lake almost a year before it hit theaters. I watch a lot of indie and foreign movies that never get U.S. distribution. Three, I have a very strange media diet and it would be logistically difficult if not impossible for me to satisfy it via legitimate channels. I might get in the mood for vigilante movies. I go to Letterboxd, do some research, make a list, and within a day or two, I have 20 different vigilante movies to watch, all in one place. Pirating is, frankly, easier for me. Four, there are some things you just can't get otherwise. One of the movie podcasts I listen to covers a lot of obscure movies that haven't been heard of since the VHS days. I've been able to find and watch all but one of them so far. Five, I am a glutton and am not rich enough to support a glutton's appetite.
dasfoo
1yr ago
At the end of the day, it seems like some of this is the old left’s anti-authority views- parents saying ‘no, that’s retarded, I can’t quite explain why but in five years you’ll be glad I didn’t let you go through with this’ isn’t a valid objection even when it is obviously correct.
I used to listen to a parenting podcast several years ago, and one of the hosts had a daughter -- age 10-11, maybe? -- who decided she was a boy. A good portion of the show became about this subject. The mother, a good California liberal with a fringe Hollywood career, was very honest about the heartbreak of reconciling with her sense of loss when one of her girls "became a boy" and chose a new name for herself, when the name the mother had chosen for her daughter had been a meaningful choice to the mother.... But the mother accepted this new identity, etc....
Sometime after the initial turbulence of this transition, in one episode the two hosts were talking about their kids' eating habits, and the mom with the transgender child was indignant that her kids often has the temerity to reject her planned meals and wanted either alternate meals or junk food for dinner. The gall of transgender son to think that they can dictate to their mother something as important as what they will eat for dinner! Where would a kid ever get such an idea?
dasfoo
1yr ago
It’s worth noting that the truly subversive aspect of Get Out is that the “white supremacists” (as you call them) are old-school liberals who fetishize blacks, almost literally consuming them for their own advantage, reflecting the racial dynamics of the Democrat party.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Here's what I think is interesting about Musk's very public leadership of Twitter: It's like he's isolated a number of areas where he thinks the company was failing, and re-building those areas from scratch in public view. This is a very novel approach and a kind of public service.
Just about everyone agrees that content needs some moderation, but Twitter's moderation model was broken. So instead of patching what was already in place, he's going back to square one and learning what needs to be moderated, in the hope of avoiding the missteps where the same process broke in its previous incarnation. And then we can all see how it got from Point A to Point Z. At the very least, he isn't being opaque about it, like the previous regime was.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Some friends of mine created a formal group for this exact purpose around when COVID began (coincidentally), and I was one of the earliest invitees. Its original intent was to create a network of locals with similar values who could depend on each other for business and other needs — like emergencies. Within a year we had about 75 members who would meet monthly. We had a newsletter and a website, and were starting a local business directory. But it is now falling apart for exactly the same reasons that you state: the contingent who just wants to complain about politics (focusing on stolen elections; all-in on the Trump cult-of-personality) has taken over and driven away almost everyone who was there for a sense of fellowship or building a supportive freedom-minded community. Once a core of political activists formed and began asking for a spotlight, growth immediately halted and now we're lucky to get 20 people at a meeting.
dasfoo
1yr ago
People like Pelosis can afford and procure services of higher quality providers than crazy hobos.
So can Hugh Grant and Eddie Murphy, and yet they were famously caught with Hollywood Boulevard hookers. There is a precedent for "slumming" for sex among the rich and famous. Probably moreso for San Francisco gays as the Castro District culture and history there is rich. I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhat similar to how upper-or-middle-class Black celebrities will affect street dialect: faking authenticity is big in some subcultures.
The basis of the escort theory is, essentially: How did he get into the house? How does a house owned by one of the richest couples in America in one the most crime-ridden cities in America, not have a security system that can defend against a lone crazy person making a semi-spontaneous attack? And how is a lone crazy person disordered enough to think this crime is a worthwhile endeavor and yet ordered enough to find his way through the Pelosis' security apparatus?
dasfoo
22d 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
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
1yr ago
The average 64 year old in the state department absolutely wouldn't go to jail for decades for doing what Clinton did.
It's kind of an irrelevant comparison. The average State Dept. worker is not the boss of the entire State Department and can not have done what Clinton did. Clinton purposely implemented a system for transporting classified information outside of proper oversight and security channels. She didn't merely mishandle X number of classified documents; she intentionally ignored protocols in order to ensure that all of her classified communications were mishandled because she wanted to hide them.
To bring it back to the Trump/Biden boxes of documents, a more apt comparison would be if it were discovered that either of the Presidents had established an underground railroad that diverted all Top Secret docs away from the correct filing system and into a secret cave, and when the cave was discovered, all of the documents mysteriously caught fire.
dasfoo
1yr 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
1yr ago
Are the situations equivalent?
I suppose in both cases, employees are being required to "participate" in what could be considered a "political" activity (are all civic activities political?), and I am against employees being coerced into political displays of any kind.
I guess the arguments will come down to one's definitions of "participate" and "political," and is kneeling taking a conspicuously political action as opposed to merely not participating, ala Reimer?
Also, complete tangent, what do Canadians like Reimer do during the US National Anthem? Do they stand politely but not sing/participate? Do they kneel or otherwise demonstrate their lack of interest or objection to the anthem? Is this useful in any way as a comparison to Kapernick's method of dissent?
dasfoo
1yr ago
It seems natural to me that customers pay for the product that comes to them. If I get something trucked to me, I assume the cost of road tax (for upkeep of the road that the truck uses) will be included in whatever I pay the trucking company.
I pay both Comcast for the pipes and Netflix for the content that comes over the pipes. If Comcast starts charging Netflix for delivering what I already them pay for, that might be shrewd business on Comcast's part, but I'm not going to like a Netflix fee hike to cover what I'm already paying for.
dasfoo
1yr ago
We need genetic testing for this sort of thing going forward. Native ancestry of 50 percent or greater or no dice
Too much. Lower the standard and call it "The One-Drop Rule." Maybe it will make some of the participants feel gross.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I don't know why it's so hard for you to accept semantically that someone who glorifies, and is part of a party that glorifies, Mussolini and his party - the inventors and namesakes for fascism in its original incarnation - can be described as post-fascist.
I think it's more an objection to the intentional smuggling of the word "fascist" into a description that is otherwise vague. "Post-fascist" could mean anything: rejecting fascism, re-inventing fascism, whatever. The goal of calling them "post-fascist" is, presumably, for the prefix to be mentally filed away as decorative.
dasfoo
1yr ago
It calls to mind an earlier America of fabulously wealthy well-bred Europeans living in Federalist-styled homes over generations, exerting control over the planning of towns and showcasing their wealth with opulence and beauty.
It did occur to me, having only been to MV once in the off-season, that these rich Democrats vacation there and leave the houses mostly uninhabited during the colder months. We should be sending them our homeless, too, in addition to our illegal immigrants.
dasfoo
11d ago
So... don't walk in a bad neighborhood if you don't want to be raped?
A better analogy would be: "If a cop stops you unjustly, don't ignore them or resist, but comply politely and address the issue through the proper channels."
However, it is also not wise to walk through a bad neighborhood alone and unarmed. Someone might do it anyway, but it amounts to bad advice for an expert in that neighborhood to recommend that someone do it.
dasfoo
4mo ago
The Supreme Court, and conservatives in general, do not want people to have gun rights. They want to make an abstract legal point about the Constitution, but they'd be horrified if it had any practical effect. "Sure, you have the right to keep and bear arms. But what makes you think that means you can carry a GUN?"
I have a lot of gun-owning conservatives in my social circle, and this sentiment is completely off-base, IME. Can you substantiate it?
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.
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