haroldbkny
1yr ago
My facebook has been ablaze with the War of the Rings of Power, and by that I mean Amazon putting out tons of propaganda to indicate that everyone is racist for not liking the the Rings of Power, followed by half of the people saying no that doesn't make us racist, and the other half saying they just don't like it because it's a bad show. A similar thing is going on for the Little Mermaid, too. Alas, that these evil days should be mine.
The thing that strikes me is that no one is saying the obvious. To me, and I'll guess to many others, I really don't mind diversification of media. Or, that is to say, I wouldn't mind it, if it weren't for the fact that it's now the norm, it's practically mandatory for any show that doesn't want to be cancelled by internet SJWs, it's crammed down my throat everywhere, and it's turned into a major moral issue where half the audience browbeats the other. I feel like I'm being subjected to someone else's religion.
But that woke audience always comes back to "Why are you against black people playing roles? What are you, racist?" Well, no, I honestly don't think I'm racist. But in the position I'm put in, I get that I am taking actions that a racist would. The only difference is that a true racist would be against black people being cast no matter what, and I am only against it being mandatory and moralized. But since we live in this world, where it is mandatory and moralized, does that mean that there's nothing that would really satisfy me short of black people not being cast?
I don't quite think so. Another point that the woke audience comes to is "They clearly just thought that Halle Berry was the best person to play Ariel". And really, I think the answer to that is, no, they clearly prioritize diversity casting. She is black and they want to cast lots of black people because it scores them points with the woke crowd (and possibly also because it drums up controversy, which may be good for business). And then on top of that, they thought she'd be fine for the part. I don't know how I can prove that, but it just seems evident to me that diversity casting for its own sake is something that is being given high priority. In some limited cases, it's possible to prove it, such as with Ryan Condal, the showrunner for House of the Dragon who indicated that they cast black people to play Valerians explicitly for the purpose of diversity-washing. However, I'm guessing that Condal regrets saying that outright, because it's not a good look. It gives the other side ammo and also casts doubt as to whether the people hired really would have earned the spot on merit alone.
At this point. I don't really know what it would take to convince me that most castings of black people are not just to fill a quota. But this puts me in a tough spot, because I don't really want to be racist in action, even if I know I'm not in thought.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I live in a very very progressive part of the world, and I went to a small local craft market event today. Near the event, there was a 65ish year old woman waving around a GOP tote bag at cars and people passing by. Everyone was ignoring her, but I went to talk to her.
It started out just fine. I told her (in a friendly way) that she's unlikely to change any minds here, and she replied that that she's just trying to show people that there are others out there who have had enough of the progressive orthodoxy, citing CRT, transgenderism, etc. She felt like maybe this might just convince some young people to even question whether there's another viewpoint out there, or convince those who are hiding their views to speak up more. I definitely respected and agreed with that.
Then, her stream of consciousness-style insane ramblings started coming out. She went on for like 7 minutes without pausing, about so many topics I couldn't even keep track, jumping from one to the other. I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs, and somehow she started talking about slavery and pre-civil war America, waving a book around trying to show me underlined passages trying to liken the practice of slavery to what progressives are doing today, maybe implying that leftists want to return to pre-civil war America in some way. It was pretty hard to manage to get away.
This comes in the wake of being at my wife's family event where her crazy uncle kept bringing up conservative talking points apropos of nothing, shoehorning them into conversations which everyone tried politely to ignore, and was a total conversation killer. I'm usually only used to leftists doing that.
These experiences were pretty disheartening to me. I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true. I guess a lot of conservatives really are in their own echo chambers just as much as leftists are. Probably a good number of them really take seriously the conspiracy-style theories of talking head personalities in the style of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. The true disconnect on both sides, from each other and probably also from reality and the true values of most people, is a very sad state of affairs.
I truly believe that the way we tend to talk about things on the Motte and in rationalist-adjacent spaces makes sense, and seems like far more logical discourse than I can find anywhere else. But of course I would, I'm part of this specific world. Any leftist would say the same about their progressive reddit subs, and most republicans would say that about the comments section in the Daily Wire. Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?
The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.
This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.
I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.
I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.
The strange place of Jewishness in the culture war
I find that Jewishness has a very strange place in the culture war, and I think it merits examination. I welcome people trying to help me make sense of it and figure out exactly where the battle lines lay. Both left and right fancy themselves champions of Jewishness, and paint the other side as antisemitic. It's very strange how it breaks down, and I don't fully understand why and along which lines.
On the left, they're very eager to portray the other side as fascists, holocaust deniers, and old-fashioned anti semites. We can see this in cases like Kyrie Irving mentioned below, and Kanye West, where if anyone says anything bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory, they are pounced on and labeled as fascist and far right. I particularly disliked the handling of Marjorie Taylor Greene last year, where she said something (which admittedly did sound stupid and crazy to me) about Rothschild, and immediately, I was hearing about "jewish space lasers" from every jewish acquaintance I know. While I do agree that Greene sounded crazy, I think there was a few steps and a lot of filling in the blanks between what she said and something that's legit antisemitic.
On the right, everyone I know is very eager to say that the left hates Jews. These people are fans of people like Bari Weiss. I'm less clear right now on exactly what delineates the claim that the left hates Jews, maybe because we've had a run over the past month of a number of cases of the left supposedly championing Jews (like in the Kanye situation). I know that one such thing that people on the right take issue with is the left being very anti-Israel. Though really, I think it does make sense that being anti-Israel isn't the same as being antisemitic.
This state of affairs makes it difficult for me to predict how my Jewish acquaintances will react to any culture warring. I've found that sometimes, the very same people are eager to claim that liberal American institutions hate Jews due to their stances on Israel, but then will also turnaround and claim that Trump was about to start shipping Jews out to the camps for the 2nd holocaust. It sort of seems to me that most of them are so eager to see oppression everywhere, they're like a leaf blowing in the wind, following whatever the current is, claiming that anyone and everyone is out to get them. Instead, to me, it seems more like (almost) no one is out to get them, and instead everyone wants to claim that their tribe is the only REAL supporters of the Jews.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I watched the new Knives Out movie, and while the mystery plot was fun enough, my enjoyment of the movie was severely hampered by politics. I saw the previous Knives Out movie so I knew what to expect, but I do feel like this just went above and beyond. Minor spoilers to follow.
My wife was disappointed that I let politics ruin a good movie for me, but really, I think that the filmmakers honestly don't want you to view this movie as just a fun murder mystery without the context of politics. The movie is all about making a heavy handed political statement.
The movie just seemed like a pulpit for Rian Johnson to talk about how much he hates Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and various other people. I almost feel like the entire plot is really the secondary goal. The main goal of him making this was to implant and grow a brain worm in the audience that every famous rich person is connected, really part of a cabal that got what they got through no talent of their own, took advantage of individuals and the world at large, contribute nothing, and are evil, vile, worthless, and bratty pieces of shit.
Nowhere in the movie do they ever display the slightest amount of sympathy for anyone besides the detective and the poor black woman who was taken advantage of (major spoiler:
I don't know, I really can't believe that this movie has gotten so much praise. It really irritates me, and just seems like lazy complaining.
Other minor, non political gripe:
The movie came to a screeching halt when they decided to have the entire 3rd quarter of the movie as a flashback. I think small flashbacks are great in mystery stories, but the decision to have over a half hour told in flashback made me feel like it was dragging, and made me want it to just get back to advancing the plot.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
Sooo. What are your plans for surviving the YouTube ad-pocalypse? In case you don't know, YouTube seems to be cracking down on ad-blockers, steadily ramping up their level of restrictiveness over the past 4 or so months, and ramping up even faster the last 3 weeks. Adblock Plus no longer seems to work for me on Chrome, but does work on Firefox. It'll probably be different for everyone as they dial it up for more and more customers, but it'll likely keep getting more restrictive as time goes on.
I'm guessing this has to do with the same tech trend that caused the layoffs this past year. Budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping, and sources of revenue are being more exploited. But I do wonder if this particular one will work out for Google or not.
I for one plan on leaving the platform if I ever am completely unable to make it work without ads. I think there are many others who feel the same way. This may (I hope) make things worse for content creators, especially those who rely on their own sponsorships for revenue, and will drive them towards other less restrictive platforms.
It's not like I think it's immoral or wrong for Google to pull this, but it does bother me. YouTube has been around for so long, it's life a part of my life. It's my TV, it's the way I learn and become better at most things, and for many many people, it's their livelihood. My wife randomly said to me last week as I was teaching myself some drumstick fundamentals (the kind of fundamentals with deep intricacies that you can't see easily, and need an in-depth video to go into), "how did anyone ever learn anything before YouTube?" After having been around for so long, and being so ingrained, it feels weird for YouTube to suddenly switch up how it works. I'm someone who likes to skip around videos and go back and forth a lot. When ads are present on YouTube, I cannot stand how you'll skip to a section of a video, even without having watched much actual content in the video yet, and suddenly have to watch a giant string of ads. Having to watch ads like that will ruin my usage of the platform.
I also wonder if it's technically possible for YouTube to completely crack down on all ad-blockers, but I don't know enough about how their APIs work. But since so much of it it's happening client-side, I think they'd have to control the client to have complete control. This might be why youtube no longer works on Chrome when I have adblock plus, but it still works on Firefox for me.
haroldbkny
22d ago
You're probably right. But I dislike this behavior of expanding the definition of rape. At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else. Not something someone could do by accident. Mens rea was almost definitely necessary for a rape to occur.
Expanding this definition makes it so that people who probably haven't done anything that terrible or didn't intend to do anything that terrible, and maybe made a bad decision now are lumped in with violent psychopaths. It also takes away nuance from language. It may have also had the effect that you're positing, too, of making people less likely to hook up with drunk girls.
I just heard what I think is a terrible atrocity (granted on the much milder-end of terrible atrocities) that no one seems to know or care about. Apparently Maryland requires that if you have been diagnosed with sleep apnea:
- you report it to the DMV
- you have to use a CPAP machine (edit: if that's your doctor's recommended treatment)
- your CPAP machine has to send data to the state showing that you're using it regularly for 70% of each night (edit: if CPAP is your doctor's recommended treatment)
Failure to do this will result in your driver's license being revoked.
This really makes my blood boil. I found out about this because my friend in Maryland is one such person affected by this, with her extremely mild case of sleep apnea (that probably 75% of Americans actually have). She didn't bother with or really need the CPAP, but now, the DMV found out, and is threatening to revoke her license, so she has no choice. Hell, I'm a person who's been diagnosed with very mild sleep apnea, but I chose to not use the CPAP machine, because I couldn't stand having an intrusive device strapped onto my face with tubes running on my bed, pushing air down my throat all night every night. Provided I didn't sleep on my back, I was completely fine, and I didn't need to use the device at all. Since then, I've lost weight, and I don't have sleep apnea anymore, or at least not as much, but I don't even know if they ever declare someone as "no longer having sleep apnea", or if I'd actually pass that threshold, or if the DMV would care. My only saving grace is that I don't live in Maryland, but man, this makes me so scared about what might come next, and how long I'll get to keep my driver's license for before this either comes to my state, or some other health-related driving restrictions start cropping up.
This seems like such rampant safetyism to me that it honestly makes me so angry, probably angrier than I should be. I guess this seems like such government overreach, much in the same way as covid restrictions. Except that these restrictions really could last forever, and expand to other states, and never go away, unlike the covid restrictions. Did Maryland honestly have rampant cases of drivers falling asleep because they were so tired from their sleep apnea that they needed to mandate an intrusive, ongoing, never-ending medical treatment to save people from crashing their cars? Does this help anyone at all, or were they just looking to do some security theater?
I really want to do something to fight this before it expands. Is this the sort of thing the ACLU would take up the fight for? Are there any organizations that would actually fund and spearhead a class action lawsuit for this sort of thing?
haroldbkny
1yr ago
Any fans of the Great British Bake Off here? I think this season has been a case study in the mechanisms by which wokeness latches on and does its best to ruin things. I'm so sick of people talking about how offensive Mexican week was. If you ask me, I really have no idea what was so offensive about it. Acknowledging that Mexican culture and food exists is not the same as being racist towards Mexicans. Also, since when are Mexicans even considered to be oppressed, and worthy of people getting outraged over? Have Mexicans historically been oppressed, especially by the British?
Following Mexican week, now, I guess the outlets all saw that claiming offense at GBBO was a great way to get more views, because every week I see at least one article about how viewers were "shocked and outaged" at the latest episode of Bake Off. Often, these are related to the fact that several contestants this season aren't native to Great Britain and are not being handled sensitively enough with regards to the recipes they do and their ability to follow the instructions in the technical challenges.
Does anyone think that the current massively inflated prices will ever fall? I'm still so pissed off about it, a year later. Due to the fact that much of my income is based on the company's stock, which massively fell the same time inflation went nuts, I make less money now than I did a few years ago, despite having been promoted and working harder than ever. Couple that with inflation making my money worth less, and it's a wonder I can afford any non-essential spending at all. Every single good that I buy has increased in price by very noticable amounts. Generally, many people may not have the same problem as me, where their income is based on stock, but still, most people's cost of living has greatly increased and their income has stayed the same. Prices have been so out of control lately.
Is it just the Russia-Ukraine war that's keeping prices so high, or is it more than that, like aftershock from the pandemic, lockdowns, and COVID relief spending upending the economy? What's the best to hope for? If the war ends, is all we have to look forward to a reduction in inflation, meaning that prices will stop going up? Or is deflation a possibility, to bring prices back down to previous levels? I know close to nothing about econ, but I always hear deflation talked about as if it's this terrible thing. I don't really know why, I guess just because it destabilizes the market, and makes outstanding debts larger. To me right now, my dollar being worth more sounds great. Is deflation immediately following inflation a bad thing if it just brings prices back to previous levels?
Just before Trump was elected, Scott wrote a great piece called Tuesday shouldn't change the narrative. In it he talks about how the race between Trump and Hillary was very close, close enough that random fluctuations in opinion or random events like the weather could be the deciding factor in the race. He argues that people shouldn't change their worldview based on whatever the outcome is. I believe I see so many people falling into this trap though. It didn't take long after Trump won for people on all sides to start talking as if it was always inevitable, like "Trump won because he inspired people more and riled up his base, Clinton was an uninspiring candidate playing too safe" or "Trump's victory was inevitable because of the deep history of racism in the country", etc. I feel like (though I'm not sure I can think of examples off the top of my head) even Scott might fall into this trap a little bit.
People even took the victory as an indictment of MSM, since most sources said that Trump had something like a 1% chance of winning. I believe this is illogical, though, because even if he did have a 1% chance of winning, it could have been that 1% chance that caused him to win. It's not like whoever has the highest percent chance at the time of the election is declared the winner.
I'm just curious to hear people's thoughts on this, both about this pattern of thought of erroneously retroactively changing worldviews or thinking events were inevitable, as well as about the 2016 election. I think that Scott's article has a good lesson, and it'd do most people good to try to remember it more, before taking the events which have transpired as an indication that only those events could have ever transpired.
Whomever ZHPL is, his writing reads like a crazy political grifter. There was a lot of text, but what was all that text even trying to say? I feel like he barely even tried to tie thought threads together. For example, he went from "in 1968, leftism was taking over the world", then in the next sentence said that almost a full decade later, French intellectuals baned age of consent. Am I supposed to think something about this? Am I supposed to think that one event led to the other? Can he even try to convince me of this instead of just assuming I already agree? 9 years later, people in France did something. Okay. Maybe there's a connection I'm not seeing. If so, prove it.
There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now, ranging from inconvenient to life altering. The things I've been hearing about from my social circle include major tech layoffs, inflation, and increased serious illness due to diseases like RSV and flu hitting people in unexpectedly strong ways. My general response to this has been, "well maybe next time, we shouldn't shut down the entire world due to a relatively non-dangerous disease like coronavirus." Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take? To be honest, there's probably a lot of other factors at play as well that I'm not accounting for in that analysis, due to my unfamiliarity. These factors may include foreign issues, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, leading to increased energy prices, etc.
It's pretty well known that the sexual revolution of the 1960s led to a lot of pedo stuff
That seems kinda like consensus-building, to me. That's clearly what ZHPL is trying to say, but it's a very controversial statement. Very many people around here are trying to connect both present-day and past leftism to pedophilia, and even though I can't stand the left, I can't stand when people try to make that connection even more. I find it insulting that ZHPL justs waves his hand in that general direction and is like "people got into leftism in 1968, and than all of a sudden 9 years later: BAM! age of consent was revoked (in France)". It's almost comical.
Alan Ginsburg was a member of NAMBLA. Lolita was considered a classic. Roman Polanski was Humbert Humbert in real life and the French celebrated and protected him.
There are pedophiles everywhere. You know the arguments: The plural of "anecdote" isn't data. Chinese Robber Fallacy, etc.
I hate when people try to say the Right is full of pedophiles because some priests molest kids and some backwoods rednecks are inbred, so I also hate it when people gesture at the left for similar things.
Today, of course, we see a strange bifurcation where 23 year old women are incapable of consenting to sex with a 40 year old man, but its okay to subject young children to intense discussions and demonstrations of sexuality. Perhaps he's trying to invoke all of that. I don't know. His writing is vile.
I have no argument with you on most of this paragraph, especially with regards to the strange bifurcation existing in leftist thought.
Though I may slightly disagree with you about whether most leftists are okay with "demonstrations" of sexuality for minors. They definitely are okay with "discussions" with minors, and I think they go too far there, but I don't know if they're really mostly down with "demonstrations". Other than the aforementioned pedophiles, who as I mentioned before are everywhere and on all sides.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I've always disliked the common feminist answer of "I wear makeup for myself, not for men". I find that very reductive and very much a poisoned explanation based on the feminist brain worm that no woman anywhere should ever try to do anything for the sake of men/a man, try to make a man/men happy, or seek any form of approval from a man/men.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex. Sex is either "male" or "female" (and I'm excluding intersex for simplicity of argument) and is immutable from birth. Gender on the other hand refers to a socially created psychological programming that every tribe and society imbues its members on upon.
Can you cite evidence for why this particular framing should be the way we define these words? As I've said before on this forum, the thing that most people refer to these days as gender may more traditionally (as in prior to 2012, for most of society) be referred to as "gender roles", and I think that there would be a lot less controversy (and the statements would carry less weight) if people said that gender roles are socially constructed or distinct from sex, etc.
Also as I've said before, the debate about the definition of the word "gender" is kind of weird. Like Scott once said:
I can’t argue with this. No, literally, I can’t argue with this. There’s no disputing the definitions of words. If you say that “racism” is a rare species of nocturnal bird native to New Guinea which feeds upon morning dew and the dreams of young children, then all I can do is point out that the dictionary and common usage both disagree with you.
I'm keen on pointing out that it always seemed to me comparable to a situation in which one day half of society started using the word "tallness" differently. Some people may tell me that I have to treat them as if they're 6'4". And if I point out that they're actually 5'8", they say, "that's my height. It's completely distinct from my tallness, which everyone knows is just socially constructed roles and is determined entirely by how people self-identify".
It's just a definition. But the problem is that that definition carries implications based on the previous usage of the word. It seems as if gender advocates coopted the word "gender" and applied the definitions of "gender roles" to it, using the weight the term "gender" carries towards specific ends in the form of social activism.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
What you say about the overhead of work definitely makes sense, and I agree, but my question would be, why have we decided as a society that a 40 hour workweek is the general standard? How did we come to that particular number? Why is it that most employers don't require a 60 or 80 hour workweek instead, even if only implicit? Why are almost all work places willing to tolerate 40 hours as the optimal balance between overhead and productivity?
haroldbkny
1yr ago
From the sounds of it, he never pulled his dick out unless the other person provided consent for it
Really? Is that true? I didn't follow the story closely at all, so I'm only inferring details. But if he didn't do anything without them saying they were okay with it, then why was he cancelled at all?
Does anyone here have experience with heat pumps? I'm on oil heat and needless to say, shit's gotten ridiculously pricy lately. I feel like I should be able to switch over to something cheaper and break even within like a year or less, because of how much I expect to spend on oil this winter.
Most local people in my very progressive corner of the world keep talking up heat pumps like they're the best thing since the invention of the chimney. I find this suspect myself. I've never heard of this technology before really recently, and I'm only hearing about it from people who are really into green energy. And it sounds too good to be true. It heats and cools for less money than any alternatives, supposedly. But I really know close to nothing about them.
My culture war shenanigans sense is tingling, so I wanted to find out if anyone here, a place I trust has not drank the green progressive Kool aid, has experiences with or knowledge about heat pumps. I guess I just don't trust the people I'm hearing from, I think they're willing to stretch the truth for what they think is the greater good. Are they worth it financially? Do they work well without tons of annoying maintenance? What about if your state offers financial incentives for moving to heat pumps, are they worth it then?
I've noticed what I think is the strongest source of Russell conjugations in my life: road rage, specifically with regard to cutting off people. It's amazing how strongly I feel it, even after I've noted the hypocrisy in myself. It's just the first and most basic instinct I feel in any of these situations. And I've even noticed a gendered component of how I think, informed by the political climate.
I merge into the lane, because I need to get into that lane, but they're stubbornly not letting me in.
He cuts me off, because he's a selfish dick who thinks he's a better driver than me and thinks I suck as a driver.
She cuts me off because she thinks that I'm a patriarchal male who thinks he's entitled to the road, which ultimately leads to her acting like an entitled bitch.
What are strategies for finding community in our polarized times? Almost all of my friends, family, and acquaintances are pretty damn progressive, and I always find it so irritating how they inject it into everything. Always, always when I have people over for dinner or something, something comes up at some point where people get into a progressive taking point that I disagree with, and I just sit there really uncomfortably and can't say anything because there's no tactful way to do it, or I don't want to get into a giant argument. Even at recent holidays, the progressives in my family have started inserting progressive variations on traditional observances, and I hate that sort of thing a lot.
On the other hand, I have a group of people whom I've met through meetups which were dedicated to more conservative or at least less progressive conversation. We all keep up via a messaging app, but I find they swing too far in the other direction. They're basically a sneer club, and this is similarly irritating. They're constantly lauding vitreolic conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder. I don't agree with leftists and their takes, but I think this class of commentators only exists to leech off of conservatives, and generally does not put the best foot forward of anti-wokism. More than anything, this community of mine won't shut up about how much they hate progressives. I don't want that. I just want to live my life and not have to hear about politics so the time, not be infringed on from either side.
So what do I do, how do I find people and communities that aren't progressive, or at least don't talk about progressivism, but also don't talk about it from the other side? As has been cited here many times, if an institution isn't explicitly anti progressive, then it is susceptible to progressives coming in and making it all about progressivism. It makes for a tight spot for someone like me who wants to be around prior with similar values, but doesn't want to hear about politics all the time.
haroldbkny
1mo 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
4mo ago
What is wrong with reddit? I find that oftentimes I have a question, and I can't honestly think of any other place on the internet that I can ask that question and get an answer other than specific subreddits. But at the same time, I don't want to post on reddit because I hate it. You can't post anything there without at least half the comments being about how you're a fucking idiot for even asking the question to begin with. Every single time I'm like "I know I had bad experiences on reddit in the past, but this current post I'm about to do is so innocuous that no one could possibly take issue with it and ridicule me for it", and every time, without fail, I'm proven wrong.
Reddit just seems to me to be the judgiest place in the world. Does reddit select for this? Is this some sort of toxoplasma in action? Does half of reddit just consider themselves to be better than other people?
haroldbkny
5mo ago
I have two fitness goals at the moment, in priority order:
- Lose pounds of fat
- Gain pounds of muscle
For the recent past, I've been focusing on this by adopting a more "bulking" strategy, wherein, I'd use larger weight for my exercises, and try to push my muscles to hit higher and higher weight limits. I'd usually do this by doing 2 to 3 of sets of 12 to 15 reps for each muscle, trying to push myself to muscle failure. So basically, more weight, less reps.
However, for achieving my stated goals, how does the above bulking strategy compare to a "toning" strategy, where I'd essentially be doing less weight, for more reps, and more time. With this sort of strategy, I may be doing up to 5 minutes of reps at a time, but with 1/2 to 1/3 of the weight as I'd be doing for bulking.
Which strategy is better to help me achieve my goal? Or should I do a mix, in which case, what percentage of time should be spent on each?
I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
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