dasfoo
1yr 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
8mo ago
HRC would never have gotten "deplorables" past a focus group
IIRC, wasn't that said at a private donor event and someone released a surreptitious recording? That is, it was never intended for a wide or unfriendly audience. Or am I getting it mixed up with Obama's "God, Guns any Gays" remark?
dasfoo
1yr ago
Trump's political "gift" is that he is the antidote to a certain kind of entrenched mainstream political insincerity by himself being a cartoon of political insincerity. Every politician loses in some way by appearing with Trump.
He mocks his opponents merely by appearing alongside them -- and then also points out that he is mocking them as he mocks them directly on micro-subjects. He is the clown who reveals that it's been a clown show all along. I think this makes him a shitty president, but very useful as a sort of corrective to a game that has been playing with itself for far too long.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I think the steel man case for Biden replacement is that if the DNC can get a placeholder candidate to replace him with a minimum of brouhaha
I think a convention replacement is actually the best possible world for Democrats. The trends over the last few election cycles suggest a couple of things:
- The presidential campaign has gotten too long. Every candidate is overexposed. People like candidates less and less the longer they get to know them, so the final stretch leading up to the election is like a parade of jaded copium and self-delusion as people try to pretend that their candidate is the least awful choice. It's soul-crushing for voters one way or the other.
- The Democrats seem to have an endless capacity for short-term hero worship of newly appointed media darlings. People like Stacy Abrams, Beto, Buttegeig, even Kamala Harris -- no matter how disappointing they turn out in the long run, there is a lot of energy for the new, young and exciting when they first hit the limelight.
Replacing Biden at the convention with some charismatic but relatively unknown upstart who will be boosted by an enthusiastic and fawning news cycle could produce a media honeymoon period that should last well into November, past the election. It will cure Biden panic and general campaign fatigue, which are the Democrat's two biggest obstacles.
dasfoo
7mo ago
Wasn't there also a Denzel Washington movie in which he takes a hospital hostage over something similar?
dasfoo
1yr ago
I just watched a 2008 movie called "Baby Mama" starring Tina Fey.
In the movie, Tina Fey is reading a book about childbirth and is given a "nightmare" by the possibility of her child being a hermaphrodite or, in her words, "a chick with a dick". It's clear that this is being played for laughs even though, like the rest of the movie, it wasn't really funny.
It's crazy how far things have swung in just 15 years.
Thirty years ago I flirted with a career in comedy/TV writing. One of the most reliable tropes, I was taught, dating back hundreds of years (at least), was putting a man in a dress. The evidence that this nugget was a steadfast laugh-generator was apparent in a continuous stream from Shakespeare to Doubtfire. Now, it's the one thing above all others that can never be acknowledged as out-of-the-ordinary.
dasfoo
9mo ago
He attended a private party at an exclusive restaurant while his state prohibited such get-togethers: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/opinion/gavin-newsom-french-laundry-california.html
Remove the sensationalism of the orgy, and it's violation of the same principle.
dasfoo
9mo ago
Not saying this proves anything one way or the other, but have you ever skimmed through the call logs of your local police department? I think they're all public record. I used to work at a community newspaper and we would get the logs once a week and look for potential stories. There is some crazy shit and I would guess at least 25% of the logs I used to read were the rantings of people who were not mentally well and should not be taken at face value.
dasfoo
5mo ago
It is funny when a trans person says or does something that shocks progressives. By nature, trans people are defiant and refuse, in the most essential way imaginable, to be boxed in. Even if you don't think they suffer from a mental illness -- which would bring a whole other level of unpredictability to their thoughts, words and actions -- expecting them to conform to any model would seem to "deny their existence" as much as any bathroom law might.
dasfoo
1yr ago
In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked"
Without even touching the gay/trans contradiction, this quoted part is one of my bugaboos. As journalism has firmly become more focused on persuasion over reporting, I hear this kind of unsubstantiated statement-of-worldview-as-fact so often from journalists and it always makes my head ache. Very often, concrete statements like this will be done absent of any actual investigation. I listen to a handful of daily short-form headlines podcasts from major organizations, and the base-stealing that goes on is nearly criminal.
For example, very often in news stories about Trump's election claims, the claims will be described by reporters as lies, whereas they are really claims without sufficient proof, which is different. They may in fact be lies, but the statement that they are lies is also often a claim without sufficient proof. Now, I happen to think that they are likely fantasy/wishful thinking, so I am on the side of those who by default disbelieve them, but I also try to maintain some epistemic humility. Most of the claims, as I understand it, have never actually been investigated beyond superficial questioning of motivated participants and taking or rejecting their word as befits the reporter's pre-established narrative.
You see this a lot in environmental reporting, where causality is assigned to "climate change" without attribution. We also saw in a lot of COVID reporting the annoying new pattern of new stories with headlines in the pattern of "No, (insert party) didn't (insert dissenting claim)..." which smugly "corrected" assumed misinformation without ever investigating the veracity of the claim. This example, No, Science Clearly Shows That COVID-19 Wasn’t Leaked From A Wuhan Lab (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=41cb66e65585), discusses why the claim is likely not true, and lists the weakman arguments it purports to debunk, but even then it equivocates quite a bit more in the article than its definitive headline indicates.
How much do you want to bet that the CNN panelist asserting that conversion therapy has been "debunked" could not cite a single study to that effect, but would more likely point to popular culture, like books/movies such as "The Miseducation of Cameron Post," "But I'm a Cheerleader," and "Boy Erased?"
dasfoo
1yr ago
At around 10 pm the Fulton County people decided to call it for the evening and began packing up. They finished around 10:30 and people started to leave, including the media and observers. When they told the Secretary of State's office they were told that they were to continue counting through the night, at which point they went back in and began counting.
The facts as you present them, regardless of the water leak claim, is that vote counting continued after the observers, having been told that counting was finished for the night, left. That's substantively identical to the complaint that counting which dramatically flipped the result continued without bipartisan observation, no?
dasfoo
1yr ago
I can’t believe Obama would sign off on Kamala but maybe he just doesn’t care anymore.
She has really high negatives, but fewer negatives IMO than Biden at the moment, and her negatives are pretty much limited to people who closely follow politics. If she is kept away from improvisational moments, the narrative will become a series of hyped up "Girl Boss" and "Yass Queen" memes with a lot of media cheerleading. Democrats and their sympathetic social media drones will easily fall in line for "the first female president." How much the middle is persuaded by "making history" is a gamble, but it revives enthusiasm temporarily.
dasfoo
1yr ago
don’t get it. What’s the connection, here?
He's suggesting they'd be in prison if they were right-wing protesters rather than random criminals.
dasfoo
11mo ago
Did the congressional hearings ever explain the "sloped roof" thing?
It was referred to several times. I think once she said something about it like, "I should have been clearer in my statement about that..." without really explaining what that meant. It was a truly abysmal and laughably uninvested performance by her. I couldn't tell if she was a professional time-waster, an incompetent of sociopathic proportions, or a malicious actor. It's bewildering how detached she was from her professional responsibilities.
dasfoo
1yr 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 conservative in me wants slow, methodical cuts that do the least damage to the good parts. But I also understand that those cuts are easier to block/mitigate, and maybe the best thing is to destroy and rebuild the good parts. People will suffer in the process, but that's true of all change.
dasfoo
1yr 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
2yr 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
1yr ago
In simple utilitarian terms Palestinians obviously suffer more. The end.
But what if it's self-induced suffering, gamified to achieve victory on the scale of "who suffers the most?" Is that still "The End?"
dasfoo
1yr ago
That just makes me think of Hippias Minor, in which Plato's Socrates proposes that the man who does evil deliberately is better than the man who does it accidentally, in that he is more capable.
I think the opposite is true. The man who does evil deliberately intends evil -- wanton suffering, pain, misery -- and will continue to do it because evil is the goal. The man who does evil accidentally has a non-evil goal and may be persuaded to pursue that goal through a different, non-evil path. Believing that a person is better because they are more capable of pursuing evil successfully is itself an evil notion and Socrates should drink some hemlock for even thinking it.
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
9mo ago
Implementing these will make voting slower, more difficult, and more likely to generate lawsuits. They encourage a heckler’s veto, where anyone with the time and money has more levers to slow down and cast doubt on the outcome. Is that likely to improve legitimacy?
I don't see "slower or more difficult" as valid objections to improving vote security. Maybe it should be slower or more difficult? Maybe not, but I would need more information to judge those trade-offs. And it already seems to have gotten slower despite the improvements in technology. Lawsuits aren't always bad. Maybe some are worthwhile? I don't know, I'm just saying that when someone says, "Your system is flawed" and your reply is, "It's the most perfect ever," without probing the suggested issues, is shitty public relations whether or not there are actual problems. And worrying about whose ox gets gored by investigating potential hazards is never going to result in effective systems regardless of who is in charge. That's a Soviet-response to Chernobyl environment in the making. Get it the fuck out of American voting systems, please.
Every election ought to be able to withstand an audit and defend its results, and not just met with a shrug when hundreds of thousands of ballots can't be accounted for or memory cards get wiped or voter rolls don't match or someone just accidentally let thousands of late ballots get counted or all of the vote totals changed in the dead of night after all of the observers were told to go home. The best reply to false or incorrect accusations of vote fraud is to present the accuser with impeccable records that support the result. If your election systems are such a mess due to laziness or complacency that you can't really support the result, it doesn't matter who is accusing you of what -- get your shit in order, or it makes it look like they might be correct when they accuse you of corruption. That is corruption, even if it's a less malicious sort of corruption.
dasfoo
2yr 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
2yr 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.
I used to marvel at how well the men were written on SATC, until it dawned on me that the show was run and written mostly by gay men. They understood men from both empathetic and adversarial positions.
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