dasfoo
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
Said what from the start? There's quite a bit of nonsense in that category, most of which is still not backed up by these press releases.
This is a major part of why this matters: Normal sane questions about the official COVID / vaccination narrative were ALL lumped into the "5G towers" category in precisely this way. The intended effect of banning a doctor who says, "Maybe babies don't need vaccination" was to put them in the same "heretic" bucket as the "Bill Gates Depopulation" theorist.
This was an acceleration of the previous "stigmatize anti-vaxxers" paradigm that made any questioning about vaccine schedules or ingredients tantamount to "mass murder."
dasfoo
2yr ago
This muddy language is then used to support her argument where she says that the hysteria ginned up about Trump was largely correct because January 6 happened.
Not to absolve Trump of anything -- I'm not a fan, and it seems like most of his problems are self-inflicted -- but I would also suggest that January 6 would be far less likely to happen if the media had been less hysterical about Trump from the outset. Trump and the oppositional media were like one of those dysfunctional abusive couples who thrive on fighting and then hate-fucking each other. And if you remove Trump from January 6 and look at the hectoring attitude of mainstream media toward Trump's supporters, there's an even more clear cause-and-effect feedback loop of distrust and antagonism from which the media cannot claim its part as an innocent dispassionate chronicler.
dasfoo
9mo ago
The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into.
That's because there are so many. IDK if this comprehensive: https://scifiwright.com/2024/01/summary-2020-presidential-election-fraud/; I doubt it. And I cringe when I see some of his sources. But it's a dynamic not too different from The Motte: If these discussions are essentially outlawed in respectable media, only the unrespectable will be having these discussions. I want these discussions to be had in more respectable fora! I think it would take the power away from the grifters who exploit these fears.
dasfoo
1yr ago
As far as Marvel goes, it's a potentially relevant side conversation that so much pop culture that is ostensibly aimed at younger kids -- superheroes, cartoons, YA fiction -- has become mainstream entertainment for adults. It's not just a de-sexing of society that is reflected in that kind of material, but a de-thinking or a de-maturing, which has troubled me. There should, IMO, be a transition in one's teen years from reading YA lit to A lit, because the ideas will be more complex and the conflicts more reflective of the choices and moral considerations that adults face in their lives. They can teach us how to think about complex subjects. I was reading a Reddit thread about Poor Things yesterday, and it's shocking how many people are so media-illiterate that they can't delineate between text and subtext. I partially blame the glut of YA media that has no subtext.
When I was 15/16, as an avid movie-watcher, I was expanding from Star Wars and Superman to stuff like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Akira Kurosawa. I can't imagine how stunted I would be now if I stuck to content that was created with a juvenile audience in mind. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of junk, but I try to keep it balanced. Even though the dumb horror movies I love push some easy pleasure buttons, they aren't what elevates me.
dasfoo
2yr ago
assume an academic institution that genuinely holds, as one of its values, the free and robust exchange of ideas, is hiring. What will be the proportion of progressives to conservatives among highly qualified people who apply for a humanities post? Conservative intellectuals talk a great deal about preserving and valuing intellectual heritage, but for all of that, it is (broadly speaking) liberals and progressives who take serious interest in these topics day to day.
I'm not sure you're looking at this dynamic in its full context. There are a lot of Conservative scholars. They all work for think tanks or conservative press, or have normal jobs and do their thinking as a hobby. Why don't they apply for jobs at colleges and major media outlets, instead? Those markets have been largely closed to them, with a few exceptions, by a progressive stranglehold on hiring.
The problem with the conservative temperament is not that conservatives are naturally anti-intellectual (broadly; they are anti-a-certain-type-of-currently-dominant-'intellectual') or unambitious, but there is a practicality that often overpowers idealism: "If I need to work to feed my family, why would I waste my time applying to 99% of Universities, who will not hire me, when there are more immediately productive avenues for my efforts?"
dasfoo
2yr ago
Although I think the whole depicting the prophet, at least in the states, isn't an establish route of canceling.
If not outright "cancelling," it's the source of extreme skittishness. There's the famous instance of South Park intentionally poking at this issue (https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Muhammad) by including Muhammed amongst a group of superheroes. This episode cannot be found on HBOMax, Comedy Central or the official South Park website (run by Comedy Central).
dasfoo
9mo ago
Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side.
For the third night in a row, anti-Donald Trump demonstrators took to the streets in several big cities and on college campuses across the United States, including an outburst of smashed windows and a dumpster fire in Portland that police countered with pepper spray and flash-bang devices.
About 4,000 protesters assembled downtown late Thursday chanting “we reject the president-elect!” the Associated Press reported. Some among the crowd vandalized 19 cars at a dealership in Northeast Portland, according to a sales manager, Oregonlive.com reports. Protesters then headed west, over the Broadway Bridge and into the Pearl District, where the windows of several businesses were smashed.
The protest was mostly peaceful until demonstrators met with an anarchist group, after which demonstrators vandalized buildings, kicked cars and knocked out power, KGW-TV reported.
Imagine if J6 had been J6-J9!
dasfoo
2yr 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
11mo ago
There's now a counter-attack to the couch meme forming on X with a false rumor that Waltz has admitted to drinking horse semen. This kind of low-blow falsehood becoming a tit-for-tat escalation is both not good and easily foreseeable.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I agree that people here discount the possibility of her winning if she becomes the nominee. It’s not above or even close to 50%, but she probably has a 20-30% chance of winning. A lot of people dislike Trump and will be willing to come out to vote against him, just like last time.
Yeah, while I don't think she would be ideal, people forget that Biden in 2020 had only two arguments in his favor:
- He wasn't Trump
- He was "safe"
Now that he's apparently mentally unfit, and therefore unsafe, the only argument for him is one he shares with literally every other Democrat, including Harris.
There's little Democrats love more than a historic DEI accomplishment and if Harris becomes the nominee we won't hear the end of all of the exciting potential "firsts" she represents and the enthusiasm for smashing that glass ceiling will become deafening.
dasfoo
2yr 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
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
10mo ago
Or, two, he's comparing the totalitarian endpoints of each ideology. Communism verus fascism.
The picture on the right, however, is not the endpoint of Communism, but a waypoint. In the endpoint, most of the people in the picture on the right are dead or in prison, because it was never going to turn out the way they thought it would and it's always worst for the non-conformists. Honestly, the endpoints of Fascism and Communism look pretty much the same: A corrupt political hierarchy eating each other for power while stealing from the people and murdering as many witnesses as possible.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I see no new downside (electorally) to the Democrats replacing Biden with a younger, charismatic and relatively unknown center-left politician with no current national profile, someone like Obama in 2004. There will be wall-to-wall fawning media coverage and probably a short enough period for the honeymoon to stretch through the election before any real negatives can stick to them. It will bring back Democrats who were weary of Biden, Independents who were put off by age concerns or the stench of this re-run election between two guys with high negatives. If they pick well and find someone who isn't mired in dumb scandals, a family of grafters, or crazy fringe politics, that's even better. It's a hail mary, but like most sports fans, I would rather see my team try a hail mary when they're chasing the game in the fourth quarter than do nothing at all.
The other thing they could try, which might have a better chance of working, is to draft in a feel-good barely-political celebrity, like Tom Hanks, Oprah or The Rock, with a brief campaign as a "non-partisan" national healer. Like Trump did in 2016, this generates excitement and brings in new voters who are there for the star-fucking and don't care about issues.
In both scenarios, selection is key. The wrong person can go down in flames disastrously (like Sarah Palin, who brought in a burst of energy but faced a hostile press and was not prepared for it), but then they'd back where they are now, so no real loss.
dasfoo
1yr ago
But last night all I felt was pity as the CNN analysts tore into him. He's still with it enough to know that this was an epic disaster. His legacy is now in ruins, no matter what happens. Once he got home and it was just him and Jill, did he break down and cry? I don't know. Maybe politicians at this level don't have those feelings. But the non-thinking part of my brain felt a lot sympathy for him personally.
One of the points pressed by the CNN panel was, "How did the DNC/Biden's campaign let him get this far without intervening?"
I would be shocked if half of that panel wasn't already aware he was this bad. David Axelrod (who was oddly half-covered in water droplets for the first segment, like someone had thrown a cup of water at him right before cameras), Obama admin heavyweight, didn't know? Van Jones didn't know? It's their job to know. It's hard to buy the feigned shock from a bunch of high-level DC journos and politicos who surely never gossip.
As for Dr. Jill, if anyone knows, it's her, so it would be rich to assume that last night was some dam-breaking revelation for her. If she's let him get this far, it's either out of cynicism or a sense of entitlement, and I would guess neither of those states at this stage are penetrable by actual self-reflection or honest emotion.
dasfoo
1yr ago
That's not demonstrating "zero respect for the target as a thinking human being" - it's being pragmatic about how to achieve some limited version of their goals and build a coalition in a representative liberal democracy.
It's A pretending to share a value that is important to B to convince B to help toward's A's policy goals, whereas A actually holds both the B and the value in contempt. One of the cleanest examples of this, historically, is the western Communist's appeal for human rights including freedom of speech, but only as it applies to their treatment by western governments. If the Communist were to take power, those rights would disappear instantly and any attempt to appeal to them on the basis of that shared value would reveal that it was never shared in the first place. There's not really a true coalition, unless you consider the conman and his mark in a coalition to steal the mark's money.
This is less clear on issues of bodily autonomy and meat production, but probably not hard to see less charitable angles if you zoom out a few levels and look at a bigger picture than just those issues.
dasfoo
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
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
9mo ago
Tangentially, IMO both sides got the response to claims of election shenanigans totally wrong, going into tribal mode rather than civic mode.
Whether or not there was actual fraud, there was pretty compelling appearance of fraud in the seemingly sychronized one-way anomolies that took place on election night. Rather than carefully investigating claims of impropriety and producing explanations that assauged concerns, the winning side took the very Trumpian approach of declaring fraud impossible in the most secure and perfect election ever held, coupled with a slate of articles condescendingly headline with the following template "No, xxxxxxxxx didn't happen, you fucking MAGA retards!" (OK, that last part was implied rather than stated directly.) It seems to me, as someone who voted for neither Trump nor Biden in 2020, that there were ample claims of shenanigans that deserved sober investigation, and sober investigation was never produced. The losers, on the other hand, thanks to grifters who saw they could profit off an atmosphere of polarized suspicion, threw every possible crazy fraud theory into the mix and then threw the stupidest tantrum in American history on Jan. 6. Trump was a terrible figurehead for a cause that could only possibly succeed with a careful and precise and civic-minded legal approach. I don't think the winners were ever capable of entertaining the best evidence of fraud and the losers were never capable of producing it.
Something like this:
School holds a function celebrating Trans people as exemplary and people against Trans as bigots.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Year later complains to therapist that it didn't work and that he is still suicidal.
His parents reach out to him, but he tells them that their dead to him and if he kills himself it's their fault.
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.
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