professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
No bio...
User ID: 1157
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
9hr ago
It might return to pre-2000s levels if the online trend goes down
Bit of a wording quibble but I would count that as dying out; pre- and post-2000s transness seem like quite different phenomena with quite different motivations, even if they rhyme somewhat.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
9hr ago
What an amusing topic to invoke the concept of "sin" under. Beautiful, really.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
9hr ago
CBS
The company that just produced a 60 Minutes special about how eeeevil white supremacists helped rebuild and brought food and supplies to the area after Hurricane Helene, and that's terrible? That CBS?
I get Bari Weiss is theoretically in charge over there now but evidence is pretty thin on the ground that it has changed their reporting or the insane bias.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
10hr ago
I can predict it's Republicans who will be doing the fraud, because that's the only context in which it is ever permissible to admit that election fraud ever happens
The lesbian ex-mayor of Hamtramck, MI was willing to say it was Muslim Democrats committing voter fraud locally, until it got reported by Project Veritas and she complained about being quoted by a bad source.
But that's a pretty limited example.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
If I donated to the SPLC, I would expect my money to be used on normal things, not non-profit cloak-and-dagger nonsense.
Based on my experiences elsewhere, I do not think our intuitions match that of the kinds of people that actually donate to the SPLC, or at least there's a vocal contingent of indeterminate number that will happily pay for them to do whatever crazy thing they want.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
Yeah, Gattsuru's got it and I'm borrowing it from Eigenrobot.
I'm a little more optimistic than the 'bot but when it comes to topics like the above, I enjoy the little flourish gesturing towards the absurdity. I suppose a Camus reference might be more accessible, though.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
Virginia all have third-trimester bans
Not for lack of trying, of course.
most Americans—most American politicians
Not the same thing and I disagree with you about the politicians. But fair enough that saying shit on the internet is free.
please share a non-culturally-Christian argument on the unitary telos of sex:pregnancy.
Nature does a perfectly fine job of that, and you've displayed your unwillingness to accept it. I do not think there is any argument I personally can craft that can overcome your bias against it.
Edit: I'll take a quick stab. For one, I never said unitary telos.
I recognize that not every sex act leads to pregnancy. However, pregnancy is the natural consequence of sex absent interference. We are sexually reproducing beings. Ergo, pregnancy is a natural consequence of having sex. To have sex is to accept that risk.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
Christian-derived beliefs in your own life.
I know the "pregnancy isn't a natural result of sex!" crowd hates Christians with a white-hot passion mirroring their hatred of having consequences of their own actions more generally and so want to blame them for all the evils in the world, but it's entirely possible to come to the conclusion that pregnancy is a result of sex from a secular perspective.
"Sex is just sex" is nonsensical, like saying "Russian roulette is just Russian roulette, I didn't know I might die."
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
when it seems easy to ignore
It wasn't for several years, habits die hard, and the degree to which it's easier to ignore now than at its peak is going to vary wildly depending on local culture, social class, and familial considerations.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
So they gesture at an epidemic of violent rape that just didn't exist to the degree they needed to, in an attempt to reconcile public feeling to how unbearable things felt to them.
And, in a case of pitch-black humor, as a vague coalition and surely many of the same individuals go on to later to ignore actual rape and actual rape culture. Fascinating, really.
Enjoy arbys.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
"hey this is fuzzy and flawed in tons of different ways" or we can plug our ears and ignore the difficulty because we know what we want the answer to be.
As much as I hate that The Motte is not more influential than WPATH or the Beeb, shrugging and going "whaddyagonnado" is ceding the territory to much worse actors that also plug their ears, but do so with much, much more influence on the world.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
Show me someone who argues for shrimp welfare and abortion in the same breath
Ozy, maybe? Nicholas Decker. Probably Matthew Adelstein/Bentham's Bulldog.
Sermons intended for the choir don’t reflect policy
How unfortunate that they escape containment and poison policy and common discourse!
how fortunate that neither of them dominates the public square!
One's a lot closer than the other, but Ralph Northam's out of office now. I guess we'll see if Spanburger resurrects that position.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
You can't dismiss a problem just because it makes knowing things harder
We're talking about a subject that has no real definitions, everything's circular and changes on a whim, the language is deliberately obfuscatory, etc etc.
While you're correct it's not literally impossible to know, any form of knowing would require forcing outsider definitions to pin things down.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
I do get the sense that over the years it's drifted away from fighting KKK type organizations and more towards becoming a generic progressive organization.
Their hatewatch list includes such threatening and violent organizations as the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine and a bunch of immigration reform think-tanks in DC.
They are entirely generic progressive Omnicause organization. As it has been for a while, the demand for anti-black racism outstrips supply, so they have to generate their own and expand "hate."
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
No, we haven't. We refined our apparatus for retrieving and signal-boosting the most offensive possible formulation of any given argument.
Do you think those people don't exist? Aren't representative? There's no need for algorithmic refinement to make Internet Feminists sound like unrepresentative strawmen, they do just fine on their own.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
While pro-choice people can point to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v Wade four years ago, and a patchwork of state laws that look like this and claim that the battle is lost, and women's rights are a dead letter in much of the United States
And they're be wrong and stupid, given mifeprestone mailing and that abortion is up considerably post-Dobbs.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
50-odd years of legitimacy are difficult to hand off.
Whether or not that matters in practice probably varies by industry.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
5d ago
Piker or Mamdani
Mamdani is, blessedly, not a natural-born citizen.
Unfortunately, Piker is both natural-born and would be old enough, but I don't think the DNC and James Clyburn are quite that insane. Yet. AOC is also a natural-born citizen and of the age required.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
5d ago
What is your point?
My point is that it's ridiculous to say they're pushed to the left in any meaningful way. They're not doctrinaire socialists, they're absolutely not social progressives, saying black people are pushed to the left is just an example of the oversimplified spectrum.
I put it to you that there a significant faction in American politics that is hostile to black civil rights
Reading a history book I'd find it hard to disagree, but I would find it hard to read modernity and decide that they're opposed to civil rights and not the way civil rights get gerrymandered.
Black identity, by contrast, is largely an outside imposition
I disagree; I think the bulk of evidence suggests that every racial group except white people have a considerable amount of in-group preference. Black identity might be strengthened by the outside effect, but it's absolutely not the sole cause, nor do I think the primary one.
being very receptive to the idea that white people (and particularly white men) are being systematically disadvantaged.
It's not like there's piles of evidence for that from every major university, major publishing company, written directly into the law in the non-US Anglosphere, etc.
Anti-black racism is an interpersonal issue, no longer a legibly systematic one. Here I wish for a word that distinguishes between "systematic as in black-letter regulation" and "systematic as in rooted in historical discrimination continuing to echo down the generations," but alas, I don't know of one.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
6d ago
Have you ever seen anyone, of any race or class, say “I guess I’m low human capital, time to get on the dole”?
Of course they don't phrase it like that, in much the same way approximately no one considers themselves evil, but yeah I do think resentment about relative value does play a significant role in the expectation of welfare.
this would predict that poor Appalachian whites should vote Dem, which does not appear to have been true for some time.
But it was true for a long time before that, before Dem stances on gun control and other social issues, combined with weakening union influence, caused them to flip. And one could fairly argue there's a certain... hmm... something akin to hypocrisy in regards to what kinds of welfare should be allowed, and why, and who gets it. Consider attitudes on disability versus, perhaps, Section 8.
Other cultural factors presumably explain why blacks stayed Dem despite being overwhelmingly more conservative than the average white Dem.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
6d ago
Unique, no. Overrepresented, likely. PPP loan scams would be one of the notable, recent examples.
Though I think "don't be the chump" scam culture has increased in other social and racial classes, like with getting various diagnoses for extra time on college tests and assignments cuts across those lines.
And "why am I a fucking chump" perception of, say, net taxpayers continues to generate a lot of resentment as we burn the stored goodwill.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
6d ago
They are seemingly not willing to release the 'autopsy' because it's too divisive, and because Harris is making a second run, so they can't throw her under the bus.
As a registered independent I can't say much that the DNC would listen to, but that sounds like a fantastic reason to release the autopsy, throw her under the bus, and run it back and forth a couple times. There's not many plausible candidates that could do worse- maybe Warren? But I'd think she'll sit out for age.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
7d ago
generally push minorities left
For certain narrow, idiosyncratic definitions of "left," at least.
The average Black Southerner cares very little for many Democratic-aligned social endeavors, for example, but not to an extent that they'll vote against them, either.
are much more weakly operational groups containing subsets that do not see themselves as having shared interests
Given the organized project of generating Black (capitalization here intended to signify ADOS, not the NYT's bullshit) identity, there's also been the parallel and ongoing project demonizing any creation of white shared interests as such.
It'll be interesting to see if Asians group more or shift over the next several years as the parties realign somewhat. One could see they'd be more consistently Democratic as the "higher education" party, but inter-minority discrimination issues weaken that somewhat.
While it is effectively LWOP, he officially got a sentence more than twice as long as the guys that did the 1993 WTC bombings, which killed 6 and injured over a thousand. Absolutely absurd, radicalizing sentencing.
Some of them have even had sentence reductions and could die as free men if they make it to 100, assuming they don't get more reductions over the next couple decades.
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