dasfoo
11mo ago
In other words, their minimum wages are about 1.5x to 3x country's median wages for essentially half-time work.
But these aren't steady jobs. A writer might have that job for 6 weeks and is then on the hunt for another gig. It pays well, when it happens, but it's not dependable like most lower paying jobs are.
dasfoo
11mo ago
The Western governments really, truly weren't, as some conspiracy theorists claimed, trying to use the pandemic to re-engineer the society; more than anything, they just wanted the pandemic to go away and to return to "life as it was". At the same time, they felt they couldn't just do nothing, or many people might die and they'd get blamed for it (many people did die, but since they were at least trying to do something, that at least blunted the criticism.)
While I think the second part is surely correct -- ass-covering is an age-old political first-responder -- I'm not sure that many governments were anxious for life to return to "as it was." It need not be conspiratorial, but as the underlying theme of progressivism is that 'everything is terrible until we achieve utopia,' there was a lot of incentive for blue governors, urban mayors and unions to try to leverage the crisis as an opportunity for systemic change to some pretty fundamental aspects of life, like remote work and schooling, the operation of elections, etc. That these things have mostly returned to normal was, in my understanding, not without resistance and only because of normie insistence on "as it was."
dasfoo
11mo 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
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.
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
11mo ago
I honestly don't understand the weird outrage towards these ad campaigns. People getting angry over "woke" ads just don't understand that not all ads are aimed at them. The drag queen Bud Light endorsement was a short instagram reel and it was aimed at that person's followers, not conservatives or rednecks. It's real main character syndrome energy to get mad because an ad campaign doesn't reflect your own individual or group likes/dislikes/personae.
I don't understand why it's hard to understand. These ads are potentially offensive on several levels.
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They offend the core demographic of the brand by selecting a message that is antithetical to the values of the core demographic of the brand.
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One level deeper: They selected this message precisely because it offends their core demographic. The only other possibility is that the marketers really have no idea who their core demographic is, but as the Bud Light exec said in the video that was circulating, this was not the case. They want to replace their uncool customers with cool customers.
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One level removed: From the POV of someone who doesn't care about either brand, it just seems like an insanely bad idea to market against one's customer base, making it offensive to notions of common sense or of an orderly rational universe.
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There is a baked-in dishonestly to several parts of either ad in their concepts of their new targeted demographics. Are women of any biological persuasion really going to be moved to drink lite beer because of these ad campaigns? Is the Miller Lite ad seriously presupposing that sexist ads drove women away from beer as more a likely explanation than sexist ads were created to appeal to the major beer-drinking market: men who like hot women and cold beer? Let alone the claims made about the preponderance of beer-brewing women or the gender of one particular spokesperson.
One almost has to not look at all to not find something offensive to mere common sense.
dasfoo
11mo ago
Let me give you an extreme example. Suppose some crazy marketer, after taking too much cocaine one night, decided that Nazis - I mean the real ones, the guys prancing around with swastikas and tiki torches - are an under-covered market, and his brand needs to have a campaign aimed at them. And suppose, by a series of freak accidents and misunderstandings, this plan gets approved, set in production and the resulting ad - featuring all a real Nazi loves and seeks in life, presented as a positive lifestyle associated with the brand - is posted on official Instagram channel.
And that the product is bagels. Or menorahs.
dasfoo
11mo ago
Does this fit? Just over a decade ago Target got on the wrong side of the gay marriage movement. A few years later, they declared themselves as allies.
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
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
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.
dasfoo
10mo 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
10mo ago
By what mechanism does garden variety activist trans acceptance make men sexually attracted to the idea of themselves as a woman? I don’t see it.
Something like this:
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School holds a function celebrating Trans people as exemplary and people against Trans as bigots.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Year later complains to therapist that it didn't work and that he is still suicidal.
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His parents reach out to him, but he tells them that their dead to him and if he kills himself it's their fault.
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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.
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
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
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
9mo ago
women [children] should be free to do what they want without men [pedophiles] sexualizing them for it. Hence Cuties
As one of the few people who actually bothered to watch Cuties, this may be the perception of how that movie fits into the culture, but it's not apt. The movie is extremely critical of sexualized cultures that young girls inherit from their confusing adult influences. Yes, it also leans into an uncomfortably sensationalistic depiction of that sexualization, and I'm sure it will be found on many unsavory hard drives, but that's not its messaging.
Immigration restriction seems to be a big part of your vision, but you are still hostile to the concept of White identity? You don't want White people to internalize any sort of ethnic identity, but you want major policy changes on Immigration. You can't have one without the other.
Not who you're replying to, but I also oppose illegal/uncontrolled immigration, and my reasons for doing so are irrespective of race. Illegal immigration creates a ghettoized immigrant community that is less likely to assimilate into a national culture, and an "open border" creates many logistical issues not the least of which is that it essentially nullifies a nation's ability to rule itself. The kind of Constitutional/quasi-libertarian project that I would most like to see is only feasible within firmly set and well-policed borders. Whether those borders are keeping out brown or white people makes no difference to me.
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
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
8mo ago
I had a period in my 20s during which I was doing temp jobs. I had two temp agencies: one that got me office work (once in a government office copying files; once in a charity call center) and another (the employment branch of Goodwill Industries, which also runs thrift stores) that was all blue collar (the one gig I can remember was moving furniture into a new hotel), and the guys I worked with through Goodwill's program never would fit in at (or wanted) the office jobs from the other agency, it was a completely different milieu.
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
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
7mo ago
Sound of Freedom beat the final Indiana Jones movie at the box office, albeit through a ticket multipurchase scheme
One of the guys from Angel Studios is on this podcast: https://www.thebulwark.com/podcast-episode/how-2023s-oddest-box-office-hit-paid-it-forward/
He claims that under the "Pay it Forward" ticket scheme, the tickets aren't counted as "box office" until a ticket is claimed and used to attend a screening. That is, the theaters do not see the purchase of the ticket until it is actually used. If true, I don't see how that is any less legit than the buy-it-yourself ticket model. Attendance is attendance.
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.
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