haroldbkny
1mo ago
I haven't read A Princess of Mars, but I watched John Carter last year, which I understand to be a fairly direct adaptation of it. My wife thought it was too hard to get into given the strange world building, but I thought it was a super fun adventure romp. I didn't know the history going in, but I remember thinking "wow, this is practically ripping off Flash Gordon, almost scene for scene".
Needed more Queen, tho.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I definitely don't disagree that he should not have gone into Iraq, and probably not Afghanistan, too. Uhh, I was responding in the car and maybe I got your post mixed up with another one at a similar time, also about Bush and how he responded to 9/11, when I said it was more academic.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Just to make my point clearer, I don't necessarily think that Bush needed to parlay 9/11 into attacking Afghanistan, and definitely not Iraq, and I don't think there was universal support for those specific actions. But I think to simply ignore it, as @AhhhTheFrench said, was out of the question. Where I was (in the blueish-purple part of northeastern US), it was basically a given that he had to acknowledge the loss and try to coach the country through it in some way, swear vengeance, and at least try to go after Al Qaeda in some fashion.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
This truly sounds more academic than realistic. I think it's well easy to say what you might have done in a perfect hypothetical world, but actually leading the country, and leading the country through such an unprecedented, harrowing event is another thing
That is so unrealistic. No one would have stood for that. Maybe you weren't in America at the time, or maybe you weren't even born yet. But trust me it was a harrowing experience well before Bush said anything. No leader would have simply done nothing in response to an unprecedented attack of American citizens on American soil, and if he had, no one, not even most of the people on the left would have stood for him.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
The "with" in that sentence was intentional - I'd say there is ample evidence that the post contains a sentiment that could be summarized in that way, not that the sentiment is all there is to it
This seems to me that you're backpedalling. Your original phrasing was
with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?'
To "amount to" something means:
to add up to, be in total, be equal to, or be the same as
Therefore, by saying my post had sentiment amounting to "DAE leftists are whiny bitches?" you were not saying that my original post had that tone. You were saying that my original post was entirely equal to "DAE leftists are whiny bitches?". As I said verbatim above, that was "not the sum totality" of my post.
Furthermore, I think that saying things like:
It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic
is actually a very gentle way of putting it, and I was attempting to convey my point while still maintaining detachment. If I wanted to be less, detached, I would have phrased it as "they're being crybabies", or if I wanted to be "egregiously" inflammatory I could have even said things that were far worse.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Please do this, I'd love to read it!
haroldbkny
2mo ago
For me, for example, leftist seething is a plus. I enjoy it. I don't care about national unity. It is not one of my preferences. I like the political tensions and the rage. For me it's a plus of Trump. I like right-wing seething too
If that's the case, is this really the best forum for you to be participating in? It sounds like your values and the values of this forum are fundamentally at odds.
Infantile seething is not just a leftist thing.
No arguments from me here. But for whatever reason, I expect more from the left, and the fact that they've devolved in this way from previously having the moral high ground (in my previous estimation), taking everyone around me, and no one around me seems to be willing to acknowledge this, really drives me nuts.
It is worth noting that the liberal elite/centre-left establishment/Deep State/Blob do not have the same kind of hate-on for Reagan that they do for Bush Jr and Trump (and, as far as I am aware, never did - although I was too young to be following US politics when Reagan was in office.) For example, Reagan usually comes slightly above average in historical rankings of Presidents by academics.
That's interesting. I will say that it's hard for me to determine how much the left (in various factions of the left) hate Reagan, and this is probably because I wasn't around then. But fairly often, I hear people positively hating on him in what seems like an irrational way. I may be weighting those cases too heavily.
Finally, you noticeably did not threaten the original poster with a ban, despite the open egregiousness there.
if "next person who makes a top-level post with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?' eats a ban" (and actually following up on it).
What open egregiousness? I admitted I probably could have phrased some things better, but "leftist whiny bitches" is clearly not the sum totality of my post, and I was honestly not trying to be provocative. I actually want to discuss whether the currents/counter-currents situation leaves any actual options for non-leftists, and I think that merits discussion.
FWIW, I agree that it doesn't make sense to mod @KnotGodel's question.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
takes you away from the rest of the thread to a "you are looking at a single comment's thread" page
Yes, I do find this annoying. I don't mind so much the "(+) 3 more replies", when it actually does work and when it also doesn't direct me away from the page.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I mean, they don't have a vitriolic hatred for Bush sr.
That could be true. I honestly don't even know enough about him and his term to say one way or the other. I may not know enough about him either because he was just bland and forgettable, or maybe because the left didn't hate him as much. Or maybe the left didn't hate him as much because he was bland and forgettable?
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I really hope you are right! But... "fool me once". I've seen so much that strikes me as going past the point that I ever thought our society would go, that has shattered my notion that logic and reason can win out over mob mentality spurred on by the media's desire to push a juicy story. And it kept coming back again, and again, and again. It was not one year ago that I had coworkers sharing with me the joyful news that Trump was indicted for the whateverth time, as if I care or want to talk about it.
I really wish you are right, but I'm afraid that we're just in a lull right now.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Wet-market origin has been discredited at this point - COVID was almost certainly leaked from a lab doing Gain-of-Function research.
Can you cite proof of this? I wouldn't mind being able to prove this to some people I know.
I don't really know your politics (because I can't keep track of people's username over time), but from this thread, you seem to lean progressive. However, I don't know your particular politics and how progressive you are, so this may be a gotcha and it may not be.
But I'm wondering how you feel about things that feminists may consider demeaning to women, such as fantasy depictions of violence against women, or women in skimpy outfits, etc. I don't know what the party line is these days, but 5 to 10 years ago, people were falling over themselves to denounce a plague of violence against women in media and video games, on the basis that this normalized such depictions, ultimately causing more violence against women or more unrealistic beauty standards, not less. Anita Sarkeesian made a career on this, there were protests against movie ads that feminists found to be unsavory. Overall this sort of thing seemed to be one of the biggest issues of last decade.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I'm not a Bush fan, but if I were to try to say:
- He managed the country without it dissolving or getting destroyed. I know this may be a low bar to some, but I don't think it is. It must be the hardest thing in the world to be the president
- He rallied America after 9/11. Getting the nation through that, and stoking feelings of patriotism and solace, and trying to get people to believe that they're actually safe in the face of the most unprecedented event in American history is no small feat.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I guess when I said
Is there an explanation for Reagan?
I meant to be asking why so many leftists seem to have this vitriolic hatred for Reagan to this day, to see if there's an explanation besides just "they'll have vitriolic hatred for any Republican who's in power".
So are you saying that the left to this day hate Reagan because he actually had sway over the populace, and he managed to shift the country right?
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Ah, yeah, I guess. Sorry! I wasn't really thinking about it on that level, just expressing my thoughts/frustrations.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I guess not. But I don't exactly respect them, either. But I do sympathize with some of their frustrations.
most on the left will blame Trump for not having a strong response in the early days of Covid where we could have maybe actually headed off the worst outcomes, and for letting his party fall into turning COVID into a partisan issue where it was impossible for any policy to fight it because half the country would disobey
This to me sounds pretty strongly like the perception-of-reality-warping whining that leftists did under Trump (see where I talk about it here). Trump needed to do exactly what the leftists told him to do. When he didn't do that, the leftists got everyone to believe that Trump was the one making a partisan issue out of it.
Well, I think that sort of thing trickles down to the normies, too. If there's this ambient level of crazies constantly spouting "Trump's insane, Trump's going to kill us all, Trump's going to usher in a second holocaust, Trump cheated his way into the presidency", at some point the normies start to believe it. It has become truth to anyone who doesn't pay really really close attention or at least have some source of information that doesn't fall in line, because of this onslaught of one-sided information coming from sources that were considered reliable prior to Trump's presidency. Like, my cousins are those sports news people, and they are pretty checked out of world events, but even they believe Trump is the complete worst, tacitly.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
You may be right, I'm not certain. Is there an explanation for Reagan?
Also, if you are right, then my next worry is that to get elected as a Republican anymore, you basically actually have to be as erratic as Trump! If that's the case, then I worry about whether things will ever stop moving left as fast as they are today.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.
Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.
It sounds like part of what you're saying is that undercurrents are more powerful for change than the currents themselves. This is very interesting, and if true, speaks to some sort of profoundly strange with our world or our culture. I feel like this could be worthy of someone writing some kind of political science thesis about this. I'd love to know more about why that's the case, has it always been the case, are there nuances, what things work better for undercurrents vs overcurrents, is it because of our unprecedented online culture, and what this means for how future political movements should be trying to accomplish their ends.
A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.
Well, this is probably my libertarian, mottezian, contrarian-style behavior coming out, but I can't stand the fact that you're probably right about this, that optics rule our world more than truth.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
One morning at a farmer's market, in front of our families and newborn babies, I said I didn't like the new Star Trek and another liberal father there started yelling at me at the top of his lungs in public about the importance of punching fascist.
I've never been subject to being publicly screamed at, or witnessed it the new local farmers market when someone wears a BLM slogan.
Well-put. This lines up very well with my set of experiences, too. TBH, I really do think that Scott's recent theories in The Psychopolitics Of Trauma are pretty spot on, for better and for worse.
Do you mean the current Supreme Court? I don't follow much SCOTUS news in general, but I thought that people felt that this court was doing the opposite of that. They had two landmark rulings within the past two years that both pissed off leftists, hard: Dobbs struct down Roe in 2022, and last year they overruled affirmative action.
Could you clarify? I am likely just not understanding what you mean by political vs partisan, or by political temperature.
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