dasfoo
7mo 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
5mo 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
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
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
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
1mo 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
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
4mo 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
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
22d 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
1mo 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
11d 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 Supreme Court, and conservatives in general, do not want people to have gun rights. They want to make an abstract legal point about the Constitution, but they'd be horrified if it had any practical effect. "Sure, you have the right to keep and bear arms. But what makes you think that means you can carry a GUN?"
I have a lot of gun-owning conservatives in my social circle, and this sentiment is completely off-base, IME. Can you substantiate it?
dasfoo
7mo ago
Does this have a chance of swinging the Senate in 2024?
Twenty years ago another New Jersey Democrat had his Senate re-election campaign thwarted by ethics investigations, and the state Supreme Court threw out the election rulebook so that a beloved former Governor could replace him on the ticket even though it was past the deadline. I suspect that we can rely on NJ as much for election skullduggery favoring Democrats as we can for it to elect corrupt Senators.
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
4mo ago
I went digging for numbers and found:
In 1833, Britain abolished slavery (mostly); about about 1% of the population were slaves In 1837, Mexico abolished slavery; about about 0.1% of the population were slaves In 1860, the South fought a ware to keep slavery; about 32% of the population were slaves In 1867, Spain largely freed its slaves; I can't find specific numbers :( In 1888, Brazil abolished slavery; about about 5% of the population were slaves
Why the percentage of the South that were slaves and not the U.S. as a whole? You didn't divide those other countries into the pro-slave and anti-slave factions. Seems like a stolen base, especially when it was the anti-slave half of the U.S. that precipitated the end of slavery, just like in those other countries that weren't carved up for stats.
dasfoo
5mo ago
Hispanic Guy (Joaquin Phoenix)
Seriously? (I will assume this is sarcastic...)
His parents were named John Lee Bottom and Arlyn "Heart" Dunetz.
"His father was a Catholic from Fontana, California, and was of English, German and French ancestry.[7] His maternal grandfather, Meyer Dunetz, was Russian Jewish..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquin_Phoenix#Early_life
They were hippies that gave their other kids names like River and Liberty.
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
1mo ago
Was this actually normal?
Yeah. A lot of the big actresses of the 1970s did nude scenes. Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, you name it. But these weren't necessarily small indie movies -- the studios were making these movies. "Naturalism" was part of the New Hollywood ethos and the new cultural frankness about sex.
Maybe there was some sense during the late 1980s that nudity had become a mark of low-class, but in the 1990s it came back and there was growing talk about how actresses could be taken more seriously by doing nude scenes, and I think Gwyneth Paltrow's nudity-inclusive Best Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love was used as a common example. It's hard to think of examples of big actresses from the past 20-30 years who have been shy on camera: Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Connelley, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry all had prominent nude scenes in or adjacent to Oscar-winning roles. Emma Stone just won an Oscar for a role involving explicit nudity, so it's not like it's ever fully gone away, there's just been a vocal movement against it.
dasfoo
4mo ago
If black people have magic and thus are able to do anything they want, why do they devote substantial amounts of time to keeping white people happy when they could instead
This same criticism was aimed at Black Panther's Wakanda, which apparently sat back with its advanced technology and hid from the world, allowing centuries of horrific abuse of other black people. I find a lot of fantasy-mixed-with-the-real-world fiction like this perplexing for these reasons. No one seems to have really thought about or grappled with the premises beyond the initial concept.
dasfoo
5mo ago
I wonder if the online right intellecto-sphere will ever figure out that Trump wasn't for them.
Trump was needed to show that "the narrative" could be countered on the biggest stage, which would inspire craftier right-ward politicians in the future who better understand how to leverage political mechanisms in their favor. The question that remains to be answered is: Will a smarter Trumpism appeal to the same wide base that loves Trump, or do they uniquely love the "dumb" version that is Trump's persona?
I know very smart college-educated people who loooove the way he trolls and, rather than looking forward to the smarter next-gen Trumps, look suspiciously on anyone who isn't exactly in the Trump mold. These people have already largely lost any faith in saving the western political system, so they aren't concerned like I am with civics and compromises for a saner future. They want it to burn, as if that will improve anything.
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
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
5mo ago
Bro, he had sex with a 13 year old after confirming with her mother it was OK.
Can you substantiate that? I recalled the girls he approached were older, and there were allegations of him chatting up teenagers above the age of consent at the time, and there was a single allegation of inappropriate touching but not rape. His Wiki bears this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore. And he won a defamation lawsuit about last year.
In the south in the late 1970s it was probably not at all uncommon for men in their 30s to date older teenage girls. Moore did and married one of them and is still married to her today.
The old conservative fogey model is the song Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Beach Boys: Young people should want to have sex and not do it, which encourages marriage. A world in which teenagers can have sex and don't want to is as gross a perversion of nature as supposedly switching genders, removing the focused drive that has inspired art and other achievements for millenia.
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