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.
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
The radical right in America is unable to articulate a coherent vision of the kind of society it wants to live in. This is the problem with many modern Western conservatives: they live modern, liberal lives and then preach against it. Georgia Meloni is a single unmarried mother with a bastard, to provide one illustration. The parliamentary leader of the AfD is a transnational lesbian with a wife who prefers living in Switzerland to Germany. That’s not very trad of them.
Maybe, but when the opposition is a Luciferian death cult that wants to fuck our children while drinking their essence, anyone will do. At least that's where my friends on the New Right go when pushed. I had one explain to me his support for Russia v Ukraine as follows, "I know we [The West] are evil. I don't know that Putin is evil." In the battle between literal demons (or Nephilim, more like it) and flawed strongmen, they pick the strongmen. And they don't care if civilization gets destroyed in the process, because civilization has been ruined by gays, Jews, and gay Jews. The best case is that a strongman can put all the gay jews in prison, so we can build something better. This feels like a strawman as I write it, but it seems to be the essence of their private views. And they really do believe that the World Economic Forum/Democrats/RINOs/Neoliberalism is literally Satanic.
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
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
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
10mo ago
Right. You made a comment specifically about the flag, and I asked a comment about the flag, but you chose to respond about something else.
There is a huge difference between having sexual experiences during childhood, or even having sexuality being reinforced, and seeing displays of gay pride flags.
Five years ago, before this topic was as heavily discussed in the culture, I took my then-14yo daughter to a concert. Each of the two opening acts and the main act did a "gay" song that involved the waving of rainbow flags, and the 25,000 14 year olds in the arena went apeshit each time. The energy in that place during the rainbow parades was off the chart.
Kids are very susceptible to fads (I myself wore a "Frankie Say Relax" t-shirt in junior high having no idea of its connotations...) and peer pressure. Whether or not the Rainbow flag actually turns kids gay is separate from the idea that this kind of mass celebration reinforces ideas of what is "good," and there probably isn't a wide distance between a kid feeling encouraged to try gay over their innate disgust tendencies, and then forming intimate bonds following experimental gay contact, especially if it's a first sexual experience. If you close your eyes and try real hard to think about how rainbow flags make you special, a mouth is just a mouth, as David Rabe wrote. And maybe there's no looking back after that point.
dasfoo
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
5mo ago
And they were soundly defeated. And Israel siezed a bunch of land beyond those borders, have never returned it, and have continued to sieze more.
The moral to this might be: "If you wage a war, you may be stuck with consequences if you lose."
dasfoo
1yr 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
1yr ago
Last month one of the big controversies in online movie discussions was the box office failure of the film BROS:
The movie, which was which was promoted as a pioneering mainstream romantic comedy about gay men, earned $11.6 against a $22 million budget.
A lot of coverage lamented that romcoms of all varieties are simply dead as far as theatrical excursions are considered:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/bros-disappointing-box-office-debut-142922789.html
This may not be true if the romcom features major Hollywood stars -- the new Julia Roberts/Geroge Clooney movie has already broken the $100 million barrier -- but the cast of BROS is niche, to say the least, if Eichner (a Youtube celeb and bit player in later Parks & Rec seasons) is the most recognizable face in its cast.
Some questioned whether marketing the movie as an important milestone in gay cinema made it less enticing than marketing it as a funny comedy. Apparently, the narrative of the movie gives some prominence to the discussion of gay history, making it feel even more like a "lesson movie;" I don't know -- like everyone else, I did not go to see the movie, and I watch considerably more movies than most people.
Co-writer/star Billy Eichner blamed "homophobic weirdo[s]" for his movie's failure:
https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/03/gay-rom-com-bombs-box-office-billy-eichner-blames-audience-bros/
The movie podcasts I listen to couldn't find their way into discussing this elephant in the room beyond shallow references to Eichner's comment: Is it actually "weirdo" to be "homophobic" by Eichner's standard? Or is homophobia normative and homophilia is the "weirdo" position? 'Not homophobic' in this context, one assumes, means something like Ibram X. Kendi's "anti-racist:" that is, it's not enough to merely not be homophobic, one must be actively affirming of homosexuality (to the point of buying one or more tickets for BROS) to display one's lack of homophobia. However, if homophobia is to be measured by the reaction to BROS, it suggests that so few people are not homophobic that "not homophobic" is a position on the outer fringes of positions.
What I suspect is that maybe even most "allies" who support homosexuality politically with rainbow avatars, buttons, and bumper stickers, aren't going to go out of their way and spend their $30+ for a night out to watch gay men love each other, including an allegedly strong sex scene. Allyship's appeal as a virtue maybe doesn't easily translate into casual "date night" entertainment. For all of the battling over culture war insertions into big franchises mostly owned by Disney, those are still properties that appeal mostly to normies, who are the biggest box office spenders. If you take away all of the normie appeal -- the movie stars, the special effects -- and just leave the important socio-political content, the audience almost completely vanishes, as should be expected.
It also probably didn't help the box office of BROS that its target market --- young urban progressives -- is the same one most hawkishly cautious about COVID and the least likely to return to movie theaters out of what now could be ascribed to superstitious fears of deadly illness.
I had another thought about this movie today that I'm almost sure didn't occur to anyone who is 100% in on the Ally train, and which suggests a systemic blindspot within the pro-homosexual community: the title. "Bros" may be a term that has entered popular lexicon as a synonym for "Buddies," but etymologically it derives from "Brothers." Its meaning is an intentional blurring of the two: "Buddies" who are so close they are like "Brothers." The poster, https://nerdzone-cinemanerdz.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/bros-poster.jpg, which over the title shows the backs of two men each with a hand on the other's blue-jeaned ass, has an inescapable connotation of incest in this context.
If for many normies who have internalized decades of calls for tolerance and are no longer actively anti-gay, gay men still seem, when considered closely, pretty gross, adding an incest connotation multiplies that potential nausea exponentially. Can you imagine a movie poster just like that of BROS, but with a hetero couple, for a movie titled, "Like Brother and Sister?" It's almost inconceivable that this would happen outside of some edgy indie fare. (The only comparison that came to mind is Spanking the Monkey (1994) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanking_the_Monkey, a dark comedy about a fraught and erotic mother-son relationship, which grossed less than $2 million but launched the career of Oscar-nominated director David O. Russell.)
I suspect that, if homosexuality is still, in the broad scope of sexuality, a fringe deviation from the norm, the act of promoting homosexuality as "normal" has made its proponents tone-deaf to the general public's overall aversion to other sexual transgressions, like incest. That suggesting an extreme taboo like incest in the title either was not noticed as an obstacle or was noticed and dismissed is noteworthy because movie studio marketing departments are notorious for micromanaging every detail to an obnoxious degree to be the most blandly appealing to the widest audience.
Even if you don't think the title BROS connotes incest, the far lesser taboo it suggests has been treated as a consequential obstacle by romcoms for several decades. To take the title BROS at its most benign: How many romcoms are about the earthshaking repercussions of crossing the line from platonic hetero friendship to a sexual relationship? It's a staple of the genre and is often the primary conflict for an entire narrative. My guess is that, IRL, the friends-to-lovers pathway is a far more common transgression than vanilla homosexuality, and yet BROS wants to steal the less common transgression as a given and expects a wide audience to accept it without a blink. It doesn't seem a shock that ignorance of one taboo is joined hand-in-ass with willful ignorance of another taboo within the same broad category, increasing the reasons why a normie audience member could be put off from going to see this. The problem is, as I see it, not only that lines are being crossed that the general audience is not ready to cross, but that the censorious nature of public discourse about homosexuality has made its proponents unaware of the lines that are being crossed.
Also, one more line is being crossed: This is an unusually sexually bold poster for any mainstream comedy, let alone a gay one, right? I can't think of any others that depict fondling, except for some low-grade 1980s sex comedies, and even those are mostly leering rather than active groping. If BROS is supposed to be the gay equivalent of middlebrow comedies like NO STRINGS ATTACHED (2011) (https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTg2MDQ1NTEzNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTgxNTMyNA@@.V1.jpg) or FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS (2011) (https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/417b9424-88ce-47b9-affe-58804b299ea0_1.09201acca0a0b0759d602d050606699d.jpeg) those posters don't show touching at all, surprisingly. I also looked through the posters for several other Judd Apatow-produced comedies from the last 20 years, and the only ones that show actual physical contact are STEP BROTHERS (2008) and BRIDESMAIDS (2011), and the contact in those is non-romantic. This is not a prudish criticism of BROS as much as it is to point out how out-of-step it is with mainstream Hollywood, which does have prudish marketing for comedies, and even for comedies mostly about sex. If the intent of BROS is to push envelopes, fine; but it shouldn't then expect mainstream success. If its makers want mainstream success, they need better self-awareness and management of their envelope-pushing.
dasfoo
1yr ago
This story could be true. There's no indication of the child's age, and my scepticism is more due to how it's such a handy little story, but maybe it's become polished over many recitals and tidied-up, and the child's words have been 'improved'. It could be true. Or it could be "my friend the drag teacher and his class of gender nonconforming cute moppets, don't you want to make sure no child tries killing themselves, have you seen the suicide statistics for trans kids?" propaganda.
My assumption would be that no kindergarten age kid has given any organic thought to pronouns without an adult prodding them to think about pronouns.
dasfoo
1yr 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
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
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
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
6mo ago
I mean, isn't this a.k.a "Intersectionalism?" This is the foundation of contemporary progressive thought: the weakest party in a power imbalance is the one who must be favored in that conflict. Being "Woke" is seeing the world as that series of power imbalances, and "Identity Politics" is being aware of one's own membership in one or more disempowered groups.
It's also the cornerstone of dramatic fiction, which is why IMO mass media is so confluent with progressive ideas and has become their most powerful delivery system.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Ali Alexander's entire career appears to be further proof that nowhere is Affirmative Action as aggressively practiced as among Right Wing political groups.
Desperation is the seed of many shitty relationships. Conservatives are desperate for brown buddies, to prove they're not racist, so there's little incentive for due diligence. Conservatives are just as desperate for activist representatives, and end up with the likes of Marjorie Green (and flamed out with Roy Moore and Herschel Walker...) and other half-hinged deplorables with more fight than sense. For a mirror, look at all the shitbags that liberals embraced in hopes of a fatal blow against their boogeymen: Michael Avenatti (who was considered a presidential possibility for about a week!), Julie Swetnick, Rebekah Jones.... It's just like the propensity to believe obviously fake or exaggerated news because it confirms your priors.
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
Opposition to intervention in European affairs in the 1930s and then to entry into WWII was distinctly conservative.
Depends on when you look. During the 1930s there was a growing pro-war anti-fascist movement among left-leaning Americans. There was even a brigade in the Spanish Civil War for anti-Franco foreigners. Not coincidentally, many American pro-war/ant-fascist leftists immediately became anti-war upon the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and then became pro-war again when that pact was broken. Some might suspect that their attitude toward war was dependent on its utility to the Communist Party. The Left likes wars in which the Left are the "good guys" and hates wars in which the Left are the bad guys. Go figure.
My far-right friends see the Ukraine war as the Globohomo Lefitst Elite spitting in the eye of a Trad Warrior State.
The growing anti-war sentiment in the US is, I think, directly related the right-coded nature of the military. The Right feels like the military are their people, and that their people are being sent out to risk their lives to line the pockets of effete sexually deviant billionaires who are the lizardy powers behind Globohomo. In the past the right was gung-ho for fighting Communism, but the Communists secretly won and are now pulling the strings.
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.
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