haroldbkny
11d ago
Yeah, but I mean, i think my present retrospective doesn't mean much, if we are trying to make a comparison to Trump trying to run a third term. I'm living in the Trump era surrounded by contemporary opinions about him, and I could never have that for FDR.
haroldbkny
12d ago
Personally, back in '37 I thought he was a Supreme Court packing Bolshevik.
Seriously though, I couldn't possibly know what I would have thought at the time. He wasn't going against the Constitution, but rather a very strong precedent. He had some serious arguments for why he might need to break that precedent. And I know he had his detractors, but I'm sure he did not have half the country saying every day since he put his name on the ballot in 1932 that any day now he was going to try to become the dictator of America.
All this leads to the question of What Is To Be Done.
I have to ask, what's the problem here? To society, a problem is only a problem if it's a problem for women. Women still get their stud guys who will fuck them, and their nice guys who will marry them - not every man in the world will become neutered at all ages, there will still be outliers. No one cares enough about men, especially not... INCELS <gasp!> to want to change this situation in any way. There's far more than enough men around to ensure the human population keeps going and even if we have a bit of an Idiocracy effect, I'm sure it's mostly self correcting.
Very well, you may be a centrist, I may have misjudged the validity of your centrist card. You're just a different one from me. But I still stand by the fact that many people in the forum may agree with me but not you. The vice versa may also be true.
I just also want to put out there that I do specifically know people who claim to be centrists but always align on the leftist position. I'm guessing they do this to try to gain cred with people like me. I can't say if you are that or not, because I haven't seen your track record.
What language would you expect or want them to use? "Devising a scheme" is just straightforwardly what one would call that.
Sorry, but I just absolutely disagree with you here. Never ever use the phrase "devise a scheme" unless they're Snidely Whiplash. For reporting on real world events you say he "planned to" or "was alleged to" or about a hundred other obviously neutral ways. Let actions speak for themselves on neutral sources. "Devise a scheme" is loaded loaded language.
I think there are a lot of people even just in this forum who would disagree with you about what centrists would and would not take seriously, and I'm speaking as one of those centrists.
I think Trump crossing the well established and easy to understand bright line in the sand that has existed in spirit since 228 years ago, and in law since 74 years ago would be far more of a damning behavior than the 2020 election craziness. It ultimately likely comes down to the plausible deniability of Trump's actions, whether it could be seen in any light as (yet again) something that was potentially taken out of context, just his enemies ganging up on him to make it seem like he's doing something worse then he is. Seeing language on Wikipedia claiming he "devised a scheme" doesn't do much to convince me of the neutrality of the sources reporting on it.
haroldbkny
12d ago
Hey, if getting a robot to do all my thinking for me is wrong, I'll need to consult my robot to see how to be right.
Seriously, though, I only did it like 5 times over a month.
haroldbkny
12d ago
Are there new restrictions in place preventing ai from fetching threads? I was enjoying having ai summarize interesting threads and sub threads for me, but now it can no longer fetch the culture war threads
haroldbkny
12d ago
I can't take Bannon saying this to mean anything or indicate anything serious. He's just talking out of his ass from a position of no authority. Furthermore, Trump will be way too old to run next time. Furthermore, if they actually tried to run a strategy like this for any length of time, as opposed to just talking about it, that would push every centrist like me, who doesn't take anything Trump says about himself seriously nor takes anything Trump's detractors say about him seriously, into a realization that Trump is in fact a threat to American democracy. It would prove every leftist correct, that Trump is the worst thing ever, a wannabe dictator, the whole thing. Then Trump would lose in the biggest landslide ever.
haroldbkny
14d ago
Thanks!
haroldbkny
14d ago
I don't know, that's partly why I was hoping someone might remember the original thread. I definitely remember in general that one of the key insights was that you can't engage with sophistry to beat it, you just have to tell them to fuck off or make them seem stupid in their way (thus why Trump beats the progressive left). I vaguely remember some sort of nod to the closed circle of RPS strategy, but it was a long time ago.
This is half-reminding me of something I once read at SSC or The Motte. Something about how modern politics is a game of rock-paper-scissors. Something like "moral grandstanding and sophistry" (a'la the left) beats "logical coherent arguments", and "pissing them off and making them cry" (a'la Trump) beats "moral grandstanding and sophistry". The argument was better than I'm laying it out here, and the split of categories likely was not entirely the same - does anyone remember?
Edit: found by @wraelk https://old.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/ovvnlg/the_playbook_that_codes_itself/h7do9q8/
haroldbkny
18d ago
Why does the site constantly prompt me to add the Motte as a Web app shortcut to my android desktop? How can I get it to not do that?
haroldbkny
21d ago
Ah yeah, I left that one off my list, but that makes sense. Leftists do say that sort of thing all the time in private, and it would be kinda damning if that were seen more, but not as much as the gerrymandered racism.
haroldbkny
21d ago
find whatever horrifying racist nonsense Democrat-associated activists say in their group chats
How do you mean this? 1. As a Chinese robber fallacy thing, like surely there are some racist Democrats out there. Or that 2. Democrats are doing their soft racism thing of belittling minority groups? Or that 3. Democrats in private are just as racist as Republicans are in private. Or 4. Democrats say racist jokes in private, but don't mean them? Because to be honest, as someone very much adjacent to and in those Democrat group chats. I don't think 3 is likely, and 4 is far less likely then it used to be 15 years ago. There is too much self policing, infighting, virtue signaling, effectively causing leftists to get brownie points for calling each other out on such things all the time.
haroldbkny
29d ago
Maybe. I remember some talk here about how the attempt won Trump the election, but I remember that being short lived, maybe a week or a weekend. I distinctly remember in this forum people being very fatalistic about Harris's victory up until the night of the election.
haroldbkny
29d ago
It's hard to remember because for some reason there really was a major loss of memory once Trump was elected. I'm not blaming anyone, and I'm not being sarcastic; it was true. I remember the day before, almost everyone in the Motte lamenting that Harris was going to win, and the day after everyone taking about how Harris sucked and Trump's win was inevitable, and conservatives were in such a strong position in the culture war. I'm not sure how it happened like this, and I don't think it was exclusive to the Motte, either, but I'm not certain about that. But it's a really strange phenomenon.
I think that sometimes, the very same qualities which make someone a good vice president also make someone a lackluster president.
That might be true, and is certainly true that the VP often doesn't become president. But then, why do they always seem to run for president if they're such a bad choice? Why does the party often choose them in the primaries? Just since the 80s we've had 5 out of 8 VPs run in the general election!
Walter Mondale - 1984
George H.W. Bush - 1988
Al Gore - 2000
Joe Biden - 2020
Kamala Harris - 2024
Quayle and Pence also ran but lost in the primaries.
I think she's actually 100% correct here, and also it's silly to try to frame it as if she's being closed minded or bigoted or anything.
This is true. It's also true that what you say matters zilch to the left. Harris is a spent hen. She has served, and failed at, her purpose. The only way she can provide further value is for her to be eaten, and the left has always found their own people to be very tasty. This is just an opportunity for greater purity spiraling and virtue signaling, to show how they need even more progressive people, because it's the current year, goshdarnit!
Note: I'm not saying this shift to cannabilism for her in this situation because she lost her value is a conscious choice. I believe it is likely something which happens because the powers that be have less incentive to guard her from those that would want to cannabilize everyone all the time.
As a classically liberal centrist, that really pissed me off when he got cancelled. I'm someone who cares about truth, and people's ability to tell the truth without punishment, and I don't think he should be punished for casually remarking that the terrorists weren't cowards. But the thing is, I don't think the left was rallying behind him at that time, though maybe I was too young to remember. I feel like that's an issue that aligned more with centrist/libertarian values than either left or right.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
That's how my wife describes her knowledge of him as well, didn't know him, did know Turning Point. I personally had never heard of Turning Point, myself.
That's nice that you can admit that sort of thing. For what it's worth, I can admit that every time I have to act pro trans against my will in small or large ways, I usually am surprised that it doesn't feel as bad or hurtful to me or my pride as much as I thought it would. At the very least I feel like it's definitely worth it in order to have a job.
it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can
The pro trans argument regarding the small things usually comes to "if you don't do these things than you're denying that trans people are people". That's such a silly phrasing that they've chosen, and I'm always surprised that more non leftists don't call it out. Since when is it a given that getting to choose your own gender is a defining aspect of being a person?
I gotta say, I had never even heard of Kirk before the shooting. Maybe this is because I deliberately try not to engage in politics anymore (except on the Motte), don't know. It's completely possible I'm years out of date on this stuff. To be honest, I still don't know much about him at all.
Now I'm seeing all of my leftist friends rattle off lists of why Kirk was basically in bed with Hitler. It makes me wonder if they'd heard as little about him as I had, and are simply regurgitating the talking points they heard other leftists say after his death, essentially as a mechanism for virtue signaling.
People do these things because they believe they will be popular with those around them.
To make my position clear, I think this in completely absolutely no way justifies political violence against the left. But the (from my point of view) typical leftist can be incredibly vicious even when the person who was killed wasn't someone who advocated that gun deaths are worth it if it meant protecting the second amendment.
And probably most people (including the typical leftist) feels weird about this on some level, but there's varying levels, like "I probably shouldn't say this, but my friends will get a kick out of it", "I probably shouldn't say this, but other people are doing it so I guess it's okay", "I probably shouldn't say this, but he did have it coming", etc.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I was tickled pink to find that the Motte just went through it's fourth birthday, apparently,
Nitpick: third birthday, if you're referring to this site. We launched in September 2022. And the original Reddit forum was many years before that.
Definitely, and sadly, true. And really, it's so much more ridiculous than even that. Women producing it is good and empowering in theory, or maybe sometimes it is, but most of the time she is doing it because the patriarchy is making her do it, maybe because she has no power and thus has to sell her flesh, or maybe just because of internalized misogyny. The determining factor seems to be vibes and aesthetics more than anything coherent: an OnlyFans model with a carefully curated brand charging $30/month for "spicy content" is an entrepreneur and girlboss. A woman doing similar content for a traditional porn studio is a victim of exploitation. She needs rent money and thus is being coerced by capitalism to go to the traditional studio. Does she genuinely enjoy it? Well, she's been conditioned by the patriarchy since childhood to derive her self-worth from male attention and validation, so her enjoyment is itself evidence of oppression. The fact that she insists she's making a free choice just proves how thoroughly she's internalized patriarchal values - she can't even see her own exploitation. The theorist knows her real interests better than she does. There's no conceivable evidence that could disprove "patriarchy made her do it" because patriarchy is an invisible, all-pervasive force that operates through internalized beliefs. It's kafkaesque.
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