dasfoo
3mo ago
When Obama was elected, Democrats were, understandably on a high, and while I can't point stats my sense of the national mood was that the younger Boomer Liberalism that first assumed power under Clinton considered itself victoroious in the culture war (and it was!) and this was reflected with unusual smugness. A new generation was in charge, and they were "on the right side of history." There were some prominent books and articles that got a lot of talk radio play in the wake of Obama's election, like the uncreatively titled "The Death of Conservatism" by Sam Tanenhaus (2009, The New Republic) and "The Death of Conservatism" by Lee Siegel (2009, The Daily Beast). Even quasi-conservative Andrew Sullivan got into it with a book titled "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back." More self-eulogizing from conservatives in "The Death of Conservatism: A Movement and Its Consequences" edited by Lee Edwards (2011).
As for the ideological composition of the federal workforce, the size doesn't matter as much as who made up the ranks. I asked ChatGPT and it responded with this:
One notable initiative in this regard was the National Performance Review (NPR), also known as the Reinventing Government initiative. Led by Vice President Al Gore, the NPR sought to make government more efficient, customer-focused, and results-oriented. It aimed to eliminate waste, reduce bureaucracy, and improve the delivery of government services.
While the NPR did involve workforce reforms, such as encouraging early retirements and implementing performance-based management systems, the primary goal was not age-based replacement but rather improving the overall effectiveness of the federal workforce. The initiative emphasized the importance of attracting and retaining talented employees, regardless of age, and creating a culture of innovation and accountability within the government.
Additionally, the Clinton Administration supported initiatives to promote diversity and equal opportunity in the federal workforce, including efforts to recruit and retain a diverse range of employees across age groups, backgrounds, and demographics.
Obviously, there is not going to be a stated purpose in these initiatives to replace older workers with young democrats, but there is going to be a natural influx of Democrats in such an environment led by party operatives, especially with diversity initiatives driving part of it.
dasfoo
4mo ago
A world in which men can fuck boys and don’t want to is such a perversion, too. Which is to say not at all. Pederasty and teen sex drive are far from the “focused drive” you’re lionizing.
I think somewhere deep down in the human subconscious M/F sex is understood as the most essentially (pro-)creative act, mirroring in kind other forms of great human achievement. Any other kind of sex (that carries no risk of impregnation) is anti-creative or a nullification of creativity (sort of like the black nothingness in The Neverending Story).
dasfoo
5mo ago
1990s non-religious centrist conservative, part of Jonah Goldberg's "Remnant."
dasfoo
8mo ago
Chamber of Commerce
LOL. I just got back from a local Chamber meeting. I'm not sure what you think it is, but I am sure it doesn't belong in the company you think it does.
dasfoo
4mo ago
I don't think Joe was pushing Hunter on anyone to make bucks for Joe
"10% for the Big Guy" isn't nothing. If I got 10% of my son's wages, I would rather he not work at a pizza place and might encourage him to aim higher.
dasfoo
4mo ago
Bernie couldn’t even beat Hillary in the primary
We'll never know if he could've beaten her, as the Hillary-funded DNC fixed that race.
dasfoo
4mo ago
I have to ask, at this point, why does the West still support Ukraine?
Do you think any of the concerns you've raised are relevant to why the West supports Ukraine?
dasfoo
8mo ago
When you provide evidence, it magically doesn't count, because you have evidence.
Yes, the "deep" modifier of "the deep state" suggests such layered institutional presence that "the deep state" controls what counts as "evidence," making it therefore impossible to prove its existence within deep state-controlled venues.
dasfoo
4mo ago
I think it's more that he says a lot of stuff, and there's an army of people employed at sifting through it to snip out bits that make him look maximally evil out of context.
And that he is imprecise and careless about what he says, especially when he's regurgitating things he has only vaguely committed to memory, so he leaves a lot of room for others to figure out what he meant.
dasfoo
6mo ago
Except, of course, that classically it isn't; rather, it the expression of outgroup bias against particular groups.
I think the point is that the outgroup bias follows the ingroup bias: "In order to protect/provide for my ingroup, it is useful to stigmatize the outgroup."
dasfoo
9mo ago
I would not be surprised if the new BlueSky app stays in invite-only mode for precisely this reason. A private Twitter probably has more appeal/value to the blue media class than a public Twitter at this point. Like a super-powered Journolist.
dasfoo
4mo ago
I think you misunderstood me- deaf activists who object to curing deafness are wrong to do so.
Yes, I did. I read it as "government interventions to reduce the number of deaf people..." "...would be wrong to so"
dasfoo
7mo ago
Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did (at least in the U.S.)
The "Dissident Right" sees Ukraine as a puppet of their boogeyman, The New World Order, going back at least as far as the Maidan Revolution, which they think was a coup orchestrated by hated Neocons and Globalists (aka Satanic Pedophile Freemasons). Putin, meanwhile, is anti-LGBTQ++, so he's the based warrior holding out against the tide of Globohomo-ism. I know very intelligent people who believe this. To quote a friend of mine (who has two Masters degrees), when I asked him why he is so uncritical of Putin's Russia, "I know we [America/Western Civ] are evil. I don't know that about Putin."
dasfoo
8mo ago
But if we contrast that with the case of a harmless shut in depressed teenager who has tied their ego to their identity... What's the argument?
The principle that it's never to the long-term benefit of the subject to affirm the "importance" of identity. In mental health terms, it's long-term destructive to humor a patient's delusion. In societal terms, it's long-term destructive to stress identitarianism. In individual terms, it's harmful to place so much importance on one unstable factor that puts them in natural conflict with other individuals/groups. And I'm an individualist!
dasfoo
11mo ago
The communists lost that round of the culture war so thoroughly that literally everybody, including those few who still consider themselves socialist, will fervently, absolutely condemn everything that has to do with Soviet and Soviet collaborators in the west.
There might be a more thoughtful contingent of people who will argue that any Communist regime that has bad consequences was corrupted by the human weaknesses that Communism was meant to overcome (IMO, the fatal flaw of Communism), but most people don't think that deeply about it. The Communists lost the short game but won the long game, by spreading Communist ideas through academia and, downstream of that, civil rights movements, and downstream of that, entertainment and news media. That these ideas aren't directly associated with Communism any longer are part of its victory. But, for the most part, in the US at least, Communists were (ironically) "free speech" martyrs who were oppressed by the omnipresent fascism of big business and right-wing political leaders, or they were liberators of dispossessed groups in the U.S. globally, from labor to minority racial groups. It was a very smart strategy, and it divorced the incremental steps from the ultimate goal in the minds of the short-term activists.
dasfoo
4mo ago
I trust you have quotes, at least, from teachers who claim they encourage children to explore transness for the sake of it not going extinct?
No. It was a hypothetical starting with "What if..."
Don't you think that the liberal fetishization of minorities as ideals who are somehow superior to the normies is a real phenomenon?
dasfoo
9mo ago
Well, maybe location matters. I'm in Oregon, part of the "left coast," to be sure. And the 1980s -- when I was in high school -- and through the 1990s there was a massive influx of Californians looking to escape the results of hard-left politics while recreating them somewhere else. I imagine the American South was quite different.
dasfoo
1d 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
4mo ago
To be fair to the Democrats, they had no moral reason to fight fair after Kerry got swiftboated in 2004.
Weird example. Kerry was a worse candidate than Hillary, and he hoisted himself on his own petard by trying to run as a war hero when he was anything but. There was nothing shifty about swiftboating, unless using a candidate's own words and actions against him is now somehow sus.
dasfoo
4mo ago
I don't understand this sentence. No amount of women "show[ing] off" justifies sexual assault or harassment.
Not justifies, is. You don't think a woman showing a lot of cleavage or leg at work might be analogous to other actions considered sexual harassment? That is, if it makes men think about sex or uncomfortable about where to look when talking to the woman, surely that's not dissimilar from men making overheard suggestive comments.
dasfoo
4mo ago
Even if not all poor people have high time preferences and low willpower, the large majority of people with high time preferences and low willpower end up poor, and make life miserable for others in their community trying to escape.
There is also, I think, a psychological addiction many people have to familiar environments, so a person who grows up around the physical and emotional chaos of poverty will in some way continue to crave that chaos in their life even if they have the will power and conscientiousness to move themselves out of that environment. It will be a constant struggle for them to not fall back into the "comfort food" of the bad life decisions that were normal during their formative years.
dasfoo
4mo ago
And they would be wrong to do so.
Doesn't that depend on the method of reduction?
It would be obviously wrong to murder deaf people to reduce their numbers, but would it be obviously wrong to reduce the deaf population by curing them?
I would agree that it would be wrong to cure deaf people against their will, but what if 30% wanted curing? Would it be wrong to reduce deafness by 30% in that scenario? What if more wanted curing but were pressured by the deaf community to reject the cure?
What if, in a world where deafness was reduced to an even smaller fraction of its current presence, librarians and teachers started encouraging hearing children to explore deafness as a potential identity so that it does not go extinct? Would that be noble and something parents needn't worry about?
dasfoo
10mo ago
I read something about this to the effect of it is very hard from a Screed Actors Guild point of view to drop an actor once shooting has actually started on a specific movie. I don't know if that is true but I think that is why they stuck with him for the Flash movie.
This didn't save Kevin Spacey from being replaced by Christopher Plummer one month before a film was released:
A smaller part, certainly, but where there's a will there's a way.
dasfoo
4mo ago
a conservative activist and 9-11 conspiracy theorist
I'm so tired of this oxymoron. The new right is not "conservative" in any meaningful sense. Conspiracy theorists are not, essentially, "conservative" in either ideological predilection or demeanor. Trump is not and has never been "conservative." Maybe I'm just being pedantic over a term that has specific meaning to me, but while it is true that a lot a previously self-identified "conservatives" have become something else, what that is can hardly be called "conservative." Maybe the same applies to "liberals," to some extent.
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.
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