hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
I'm struggling with his statement because it seems like the "filmed sex tape at work in the Senate hearing room on Amy Koobuchar's desk" is more of the issue here than the staffer's sexuality itself, but the language used insinuates that he is using his sexuality as a defense for an act that straight people also probably could not have "gotten away" with.
That seems pretty common, though. There is quite a bit of "but it's OK when straight people do it, bigot" directed at opponents of gay pride parades and the like.
Obviously the uncharitable explanation is that gay men are all perverts, but that's not the sort of thing that, well actually I guess it could be a quality contribution if you put enough effort into it, but it usually isn't and I don't particularly want to do it. It's also not a particularly interesting explanation. I think it's more productive to discuss what the charitable explanations are- not because I like gays, but because they're probably not all just evil, that's rarely a good model of anybody.
Instead I think there's an experiential gap. Gay male culture is simply accepting of things within itself(very public displays of sexuality, harassment-ish behavior, teen sex, extreme promiscuity, etc) which are controversial to verboten among straight people. I think that neither gays nor their straight allies are aware of both sides of this- gays that it's not considered acceptable to simulate sex in public in the straight community, straight allies that the gay community doesn't care about such things or understand why anyone would. And obviously that has relevance for gay pride parades- a bunch of straight people parading down main street doing the exact same things would get arrested for indecent exposure and public nudity, and I don't think the pro-pride-parades side is willing to acknowledge that. But it also has relevance for all sorts of other things; the gay stuff in schools is controversial, but sex ed was hot culture war when it was "sometimes when a mommy and daddy love each other very much....", too. And in the current case, waving identity about like a shield probably will not save his job, but it might allow him to get a job at some LGBT NGO or other, because there's just a big experiential gap about how big of a faux pas it is.
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
The Texas state government claims that migrants boarding busses volunteered to go wherever they were being sent(and my prior is that setting foot in a refugee camp on the border and asking "Quieres una boleta gratis a Nueva York?" would result in very many takers, so this isn't implausible, and the Texas government has produced waivers signed by migrants before) and that food and water are stocked on the busses(I believe this, if only because you don't do anything to move groups of people in south Texas in the summer without laying in water) and migrants are offered a medical exam before boarding(I am more skeptical of this one, at least if the medical exam is more extensive than a national guard soldier checking to make sure no passengers have open wounds or are in labor before departure).
hydroacetylene
3d ago
I have long said that the eurovision song contest needs to be imported to the USA. We need an outlet for regionalist jingoism and dumb arguing and snark. We need something to get politics notionally out of the news. I need another opportunity to insistently call Taylor Swift 'Travis Kelce's girlfriend' because football is more notable.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
I’d heard there was a nullification crisis going on in Canada- is this true, and to what extent is it driven by that stuff?
hydroacetylene
9mo ago
You can't have a major European nation's worth of ethnically distinct people – and at that proud, self-assured, suspicious, confident in having been historically slighted, often outright ferocious people (whose self-perception of being Main Characters and moral core of the country is artificially inflated by the media) – with strong common identity, who disproportionately cannot compete in your economy, and expect them to buy the White/Asian "git gud" ethos.
This is, as far was I can tell, the crux of the matter. It’s fine as far as it goes to mathematically prove via HBD that black under representation in intellectual fields and poor achievement in general is largely the fault of them having worse genes, but it’s not an explanation that a population with an average IQ of 100 would accept, much less 85. You can repress sporadic violent outbursts, you can pay them to shut up and come down with maximum force on defectors, you can use affirmative action until they get taken care of, but ‘just letting them fail’ is not a way to deal with an unassimilable ethnic group with a population of 40 million dispersed throughout your country, which has a ready made excuse for failure that blames you.
hydroacetylene
2mo ago
Texas Politics Lurches Right
Yesterday, for those of you who don't know, was super Tuesday(goodbye Nikki Hailey). Trump's victory in all of the states except one was obviously foreseeable and, while the NYT claimed a Trump-Biden rematch was inevitable in their morning brief, with all due respect to the paper of record, that's kind of been obvious for a while.
More interestingly, Texas's elected republicans in both federal and state politics are assured to be much farther right on average than they were this time last year. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/06/texas-primaries-gop-incumbents-defeated/ I apologize for using a snarl-words filled source, but it's both reasonably comprehensive and not-paywalled.
Texas voters on Tuesday handed more power to the insurgent wing of the Republican Party in an expensive and vengeful primary election, punishing GOP lawmakers, judges and a House speaker who defied hard-right state leaders and their supporters in recent years.
The shockwaves rippled up and down the ballot. Most notably, Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, was forced into a runoff with a well-funded challenger, David Covey, after being targeted by ultra-conservative donors and activists, who faulted the second-term speaker for declining to stop the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton last May.
Paxton backed Covey in the primary, along with many other conservative challengers targeting House members who voted for his impeachment. Joining him in a fight against House incumbents was Gov. Greg Abbott, who targeted those opponents of his signature school voucher program.
They're leaving out that Trump made a set of endorsements of his own, mostly aligning with Ken Paxton's.
Six Texas House Republicans who fought Abbott’s attempt to create a school voucher program in Texas lost their primaries to pro-voucher candidates, while another four were forced into runoffs to defend their rural districts.
Voters also ejected three Republican judges from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, including Presiding Judge Sharon Keller, who garnered less than 40% of the vote. Paxton sought to oust the three judges after they ruled in 2021 that his office didn’t have the power to unilaterally prosecute voter fraud.
"Tonight, Texans have spoken loud and clear,” Paxton said in a statement after judges he campaigned against lost their primaries.
Three Republican members of the Texas State Board of Education were struggling late Tuesday as well, with incumbents Tom Maynard and Pam Little being forced into runoffs and Pat Hardy poised to lose her seat altogether.
Those appeals court candidates benefited majorly from Trump endorsements, and so did several of Greg Abbott's challengers. Now, Ken Paxton has a 5-4 minority of the appeals court supporting his authority to prosecute voter fraud directly, instead of an 8-1 minority. It's... I wouldn't say probable, but certainly within the realm of possibility, for Paxton to get another judge to switch giving him 5-4 the authority to prosecute voter fraud without the cooperation of a district attorney. But it's worth noting that Greg Abbott's endorsements far outperformed Paxton's(https://twitter.com/bradj_TX/status/1765263680210342343) where they conflicted. Turns out getting into a confrontation with the federal government and looking like a winner pays off, to the point of getting majority support from young voters(https://www.newsweek.com/greg-abbott-won-over-gen-z-millennials-1871679).
The other big primary news is that the grassroots conservatives in the Texas house now have at least 10 votes(https://twitter.com/bradj_TX/status/1765400527993540690) in their anti-establishment block. That's not just an arbitrary milestone; 10 challengers to a ruling of the speaker subjects that ruling to a floor vote, which gives Shelley Luther- yes, the one that got arrested for operating a salon during lockdown- the power to potentially force concessions. This group could expand significantly with runoffs. Either way, the Texas state government will assuredly have a much more conservative direction in 2025.
Federally, the democrats decided that Collin Allred, currently the US representative for a nice part of Dallas, will have the honor of losing to Ted Cruz in November. I'm mildly curious as to the odds; will he spend more or less than $100 million to lose? For US house primaries,
That will be evident in the U.S. Capitol, too. In another blow to the bipartisan middle, U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio, was sent into a runoff with Brandon Herrera to defend his seat after the Republican Party of Texas censured him last year over his support of gun safety legislation and gay marriage, and his willingness to work with Democrats.
A decisive nod to the far right also came in the race to replace veteran U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, a staunch social conservative known for his pragmatism and willingness to compromise with Democrats.
Brandon Herrera is a firearms influencer on social media as a day job.
hydroacetylene
9mo ago
There is a political quote which says that "the Right thinks the Left is stupid while the Left thinks the Right is evil".
While this quote gets repeated, I don't think it's quite true. Instead I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that.
Granted that Mao was not a good person, he didn't set out to kill 100 million people. He made some bad decisions that inexorably led to a famine which killed 100 million people. But that wasn't his goal, his goal was to do what Deng would wind up doing. He simply happened to be incompetent at it. And from a right wing perspective, the results speak for themselves- Mao's incompetence killed more people in a war against sparrows than Hitler did in a war against a continent spanning superpower. The lesson if you're a right winger is pretty obvious- pick the cold and competent guy even if he's a little bit evil. That's probably why the right bet so big on capitalism in the later 20th century- capitalism is not very nice, but it works better than anything else anyone has ever tried and there's no getting around that.
The left, on the other hand, doesn't seem to grasp that right wingers see no practical difference between stupidity and evil in running a society. The trying to help people is what's important, that's why the political left doesn't like arguments about tradeoffs and side effects and whether or not their climate change and gun policies work. It's easy to write this off as a bit, or virtue signaling, or whatever, but I think a lot of them really do inhabit a world where as long as the people in power are willing to commit strongly enough to solving whatever problem it will inevitably be solved through the power of positive thinking. Maybe that's uncharitable, but my experience has not been that, say, gun control activists consider "whether assault weapons bans actually prevent mass shootings" to be a particularly relevant factor in whether there should be assault weapons bans to prevent mass shootings, more like it's a distraction from the broader issue of whether mass shootings are a tragedy.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
I think the answer is ‘if you’re going after trump, maybe you should go after one of the dozen odd similarly ranking officials who has also done this same thing, instead of just the main general election opponent for the sitting president who both has a 38% approval rating and who is one of those dozen’.
In general I don’t think democrats should be prosecuting republicans for this kind of thing, and Vice versa(that is, things politicians do all the time and usually don’t get prosecuted for). But I suppose bipartisan investment in good governance is too much to ask.
hydroacetylene
1mo ago
'Rape' isn't a natural category. It's a term for having sex with a woman who doesn't or shouldn't want it in a way that's sufficiently bad. That's why the term 'statutory rape' exists uncontroversially despite generally not referring to any use of force.
So this is really an argument about whether hooking up with a drunk out of her mind girl is bad enough to be considered rape. Now, I presume that we agree that giving a girl valium to hook up with her is bad enough to be justifiably called rape, just because most people do in our culture- there's a specific word for that kind of it. I presume we agree that if a man bought an eighteen year old woman- so old enough to consent to sex with him, not old enough to drink in the US, and not old enough to be presumed to know her limits with alcohol- alcoholic beverages until she was too drunk to say no, then took her back to his hotel room, we would agree that this qualifies as rape.
So is the difference the idea that getting taken advantage of is a natural consequence of sufficient public drunkenness? Because although there's a sense in which it obviously is, it also seems to be sufficiently horrendous that using the term rape is at least founded, if non-central, and if referring to it that way reduces the incidence thereof(which is entirely possible) then I'm all for it.
hydroacetylene
6mo ago
I’m not an expert on Louisiana, but other than their legal system, New Orleans and Louisiana in general does not seem French / Cajun to me anymore. Quebec is the largest province and most or second most populous, so LA and Quebec do not have similar situations. Nevertheless, LA’s current state seems like a possibility for Quebec had Quebec not enacted these policies (and taken the economic penalty for the cultural win. Montreal seems to have the lowest rents of the bigger Canadian cities)
Maybe, maybe not, but it seems worth noting that Louisiana is only about 20-30% Cajun, although granted outmigration drove that down some(it seems like Cajuns migrate to Texas at very high rates compared to other Louisianans). Now granted some percentage of the black population is also descended from Francophones, but still- Louisiana simply does not have the numbers, and probably never did have the numbers since the civil war, to maintain itself as a francophone region. Tdlr Louisiana is a diverse state whose francophone population hasn’t been a majority since the 19th century.
In addition there’s a minor culture war in Louisiana over whether Cajun French should be treated as a separate language. As a partial speaker is seems very close indeed to quebecois french, but referring to it as french, unmodified, seems bound up in standardization attempts that actual Cajuns- particularly the ones most likely to be interested in language revitalization- sometimes object to. Just in general- I am not particularly close to revitalization efforts but have relatives who are quite closely involved- it seems like revitalization is mostly aimed at college kids and teachers, rather than even attempting to appeal to the median Cajun(who is a poorer-than-average red triber, likely does not take advantage of all the educational opportunities available to him, and lives in a rural area by preference).
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
Because men are assumed to be the ones who have agency in this regard. Men act, women are. And therefore if something goes wrong it’s men’s fault.
Adding to that that many people, especially women, have experience with men whose approach to dating is morally undesirable, but no experience with men who are unsuccessful at dating for some orthogonal reason. Yes, men with morally undesirable approaches to dating are generally doing OK for themselves romantically, but that’s often what women have to go off of.
As for OP, there are many women in the Philippines and Ukraine who would be happy to have you.
hydroacetylene
9mo ago
Taking note of the fascination with a two hour long Mattel commercial. Realistically it’s just a movie that’s intended to sell toys. It has a poorly communicated feminist agenda because the feminist agenda isn’t what the movie is about, the filmmaker just thought it was supposed to be there these days, and besides a two hour long toy commercial does need a plot somehow.
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
Mainstream Christians of any description do not like to talk about the salvation of Jews, but the bounds of catholic doctrine on the subject isn’t notably different from other denominations despite what liberal catholic apologists would like to pretend.
hydroacetylene
2mo ago
Trump was also uniquely incompetent. Lefties cried bloody murder over Bush but the undercurrents didn’t shift left until after his popularity had tanked(and really not until he left office). Trump’s poor management and erraticism are a big factor.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
It's easily within the US's capabilities to prevent illegal immigration. This isn't the Russian or Chinese army on the other side of the world (which the US plans to defeat). It's unarmed, disorganized, poorly funded people right next to the US, in a hemisphere the US dominates, hoping to enter and work a job without being imprisoned or deported. Illegal immigration is a political choice for any rich, strong power.
While the US becoming minority-White might be an added bonus for plenty of establishment democrats with a lot of sway over US immigration policy, the federal government doesn't have the state capacity to deport 10 million people and it won't for the foreseeable future. Nor does it have the state capacity to consistently enforce labor laws for natives, who are better tracked. There's also no good replacement for illegal labor in the US economy; absent migrants working below market wages in jobs no-one else not on probation is willing to take food prices would skyrocket and absent illegals working 12 hour days construction would get even slower and more difficult. This is politically untenable so no one wants to do it.
Now the US can do a lot to slow the tide(like cracking down on sanctuary cities), but it's not just that we can't deport 11 million people, it's that we don't really know how to run a society without them. They do a lot of important jobs Americans refuse to and that's a travesty, but no one knows how to fix it.
hydroacetylene
6mo ago
Note that the dangerous display of antisemitism was some bullshit dogwhistle and not implicit support for Hamas.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
GOP for many decades despite essentially voting against their economic interests?
The usual answer would be ‘they aren’t voting against their economic interests, but they understand their economic interests better than CNN talking heads paid to sell books about the culture wars’.
hydroacetylene
1mo ago
I think you’re leaving out that everyone wants services from a ‘big state’- stable currency, long range security, access to markets on favorable terms, etc. And America has, quite helpfully, lots of medium sized governments with major economies attached which can fill the void- bigger state level governments.
The median outcome for the federal government’s decline into irrelevance is federal assets defecting to Texas, California, etc which then become regional hegemons and solidify into major countries on their own right by cannibalizing nearby smaller communities. The ‘civil war’ then looks like conflicts defining the edge of each SOI. In the long run this is probably likely enough that it would be foolish for bigger state governments not to have specific plans to capitalize on it. But it being particularly likely in the next decade or so as opposed to the US being in for a rough couple decades? Maybe. I think we probably have enough assabiyah to pull together through another major crisis or two, and if rural areas have increasing control by non-state actors the system can deal with it in practice. I wouldn’t count out balkanization when the social security bill comes due either, but I still think you’re looking at regionally hegemonic empires which happen to be smaller than the current expanse of the USA.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
I largely agree with you but, uh, doctors telling their patients to lose weight is, well, not covered under traditional etiquette(it is almost tautologically solicited advice), nor is it some sort of fat shaming- it’s doctors doing their jobs, which are to improve patient health and provide important advice to do so. I’m not discounting that doctors could generally improve their ability to do so, but health problems being downstream of weight issues is a real and very common thing that doctors have to recommend a course of treatment for all the time, and ‘resolve the underlying weight issue’ is in fact the most thorough treatment.
hydroacetylene
2mo ago
The undercurrents shifted right under Reagan, Clinton was so popular in large part because he moderated so much.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
Argentina will now formally join the BRICS New Development Bank (Egypt, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabi will probably join as well).This should open up Argentina for more access to financing, mainly via China, who has come to play a larger role funding in Latin America in general. Related: “Taylor Swift Argentina Tickets Are a Bargain With Inflation Over 100%"
What will China do when Argentina defaults on its debt again and this time much of it is owed to China?
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
” There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”
I just want to highlight this, because it’s possibly a (partial)datapoint against the Hanania thesis that woke is just civil rights law.
The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular and were shocked when there were people upset with it. That bears repeating, because lots of us here seem to be cynical about it. This pushes towards corporate progressive platitudes originating with true believers, who might intellectually know that not everyone agrees with them but are shocked when they run into it irl.
Now obviously Hanania falls into the group of people who broadly hold progressive stances on cultural issues, he just doesn’t agree with woke, so it’s understandable that he tends towards an explanation of wokeness as realpolitik. After all, these people are his neargroup, so they must have logical reasons for doing things he disagrees with. But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.
Texas politics update: Articles of impeachment are being floated against attorney general Ken Paxton, the most important culture war figure you don't think of very often. Nearly every 5th circuit ruling that granted a conservative victory had Ken Paxton- or someone in his office- as plaintiff, although he's perhaps better known for his 11th hour attempt to change the outcome of the 2020 election.
The specific matter at hand has to do with a whistleblower settlement over a previous corruption scandal, and it's important to note that almost no one disbelieves the allegations, but also that Ken Paxton won reelection by double digits while under indictment for bribery and fraud. For some additional background-
-The first stage of trial, and the impeachment process, is initiated and takes place in the Texas house, the most liberal branch of the Texas government. It's unclear what Dade Phelan's(house speaker) game is; he's already in extreme trouble both with his base and the rest of the republican party and the odds of actually removing Paxton long term are slim. Nevertheless, it is fairly plausible that the house could impeach him; it only takes 50% +1.
-If impeached, the trial moves to the Senate, where a 2/3 majority would be required to permanently strip him of his office. This is unlikely to happen. The senate is far, far more partisan than the house, Dan Patrick(who had previously loathed Dade Phelan) now openly blames the house speaker for a disappointingly moderate session, and republicans control nearly 2/3 of the chamber. Also, Ken Paxton's wife, Angela, is a fairly high ranking member.
-Paxton is one of the few very important elected Texans left to be drawn from the Dallas elite, with Abbott, Cruz, Hegar, Patrick etc cheering on the Astros rather than the Rangers. The most prominent exception is John Cornyn, who is notably sympathetic to Ken Paxton. This is likely coincidence, but it is worth noting that among the movers and shakers in current political elites Ken Paxton generally runs in different social circles and can't expect much support from current elected officials on his comeback tour, even highly ideologically sympathetic ones.
-The day after it became clear that the house would consider drafting articles of impeachment, the dumpster outside the attorney general's office in Austin caught fire. Texas DPS has investigated the fire and declared it an accident caused by an unknown middle aged woman improperly disposing of a cigarette(Austin PD is no longer independent and not under the control of the city of Austin). Whether you believe this is up to you; certainly the people Texas DPS answers to are not very happy with Dade Phelan and the ones stationed in Austin are selected partially for their ability to handle politically sensitive assignments, because as previously noted part of their job is overruling the Austin city council.
-Just before the news broke Ken Paxton called on Dade Phelan to resign on the grounds of being drunk while presiding over the house. This allegation is probably also true and you can look up videos of Dade with his massive fivehead drunkenly calling the house to order. The Texas legislature being sloshed while in session has been an open secret for a while and no one complained until Dade Phelan seriously annoyed his own party by killing a set of conservative bills on extremely spurious procedural grounds(Paxton was not the first to call for his resignation).
-The Texas house has previously this session removed a representative(Bryan Slaton, R, from Royce city{where Dallas turns rural if you go straight east on i30}) for taking his intern's virginity. They also have an open disciplinary proceeding against rep Jolanda Jones(D, Houston) for a laundry list of rather more entertaining allegations, but this one is unlikely to go anywhere. There have been two previous impeachments of major state offices in Texas history- Governor Pa Ferguson in 1917(he successfully got his wife elected in his place and pulled the strings through her multiple terms) and a judge in the 70's.
Update: the Texas house voted to impeach 121-23 today(Saturday) at 1 pm. This points to stronger support for impeachment than I’d originally thought, but is still don’t expect the senate to remove him.
Keep an eye on who Abbott picks for acting attorney general- there could be major culture war implications.
hydroacetylene
10mo ago
I’ve posted before about this- grooming is directionally correct even if some of it is probably an exaggeration. And the only objections from the LGBT lobby are accusations of bigotry, sophistry, and lack of denial of the meat of the accusation.
So no, it’s obviously something that is at least close enough for government work. That’s why it sticks.
And conservative communities have little difficulty producing positive role models for boys. Which seems like an obvious drawback- leftist communities need to astroturf someone into a role that is already filled elsewhere.
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