hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
And science fiction, in particular, is not exactly a field that is known for authors who are well-adjusted, non-controversial people with moderate political opinions
When was the last time one of the right-wing science fiction authors got lauded by worldcon?
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
On that, a surprising number of the establishment Republicans have kids married to black people. Haley, McCain, Boehner, etc. What's with that?
Because they're not Aryan race warriors. Nor are other normie republicans.
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
We are in a money is tight period - and the people that hold the reigns of the biggest media conglomerates have no idea how to sell to huge part of the audience.
It'll be interesting to see if the daily wire's supposed new entertainment channel does well; there's probably demand for it but you have to produce good content.
And I think that's as big a rub as "we hate our audience"- it's possible to make a good, woke story, sure, but there's no set, easy formula so most attempts to do it fail. Rescue-the-princess is a moneymaker because millennia of cultural evolution have figured out how to make it into a good, exciting story, but making a woke version of these standard formulae is pretty much impossible. So they make woke subversions thereof, which end up being terrible stories.
But wait, it gets worse! Creative types don't like to be told what to do, and they don't like being reminded that their job is to make money for the big boss man. Normally the answer is "suck it up buttercup, do you want your paycheck or not?". But I've noticed a pattern with woke organizations; exerting any kind of authority in even the most anodyne and obviously justified contexts(do your damn job, not some kind of side project) is taboo and absolutely horrendous. I'm reminded of Scott's summary of reactionary philosophy, the part where he discusses the hypothetical of getting kidnapped by terrorists, and he can choose whether to be rescued by Mormons or Unitarians. Heck, I think Mormons are obviously a cult believing ludicrous things on the basis of falsified evidence and the choice is obvious to me. Red tribers/conservatives for their faults can actually put their foot down and say "do your job I don't care how it makes you feel". Regular normie democrats seem to be able to say "uh, this is your job". Wokes seem unable to do this.
Now obviously publishing a softcore porn magazine with ugly women was a terrible idea. But absent a willingness to stick to the script(because using only attractive women in pornography is bla bla unrealistic beauty standardsfatphobic even if there are obvious reasons for it) someone has to answer "who are you to tell me what to put in the magazine?" with "your boss", and I'm just wondering why no one was? Like obviously the eleventy gazillion highers up who had to approve this weren't all drunk on the kool-aid and most of them knew this wasn't a good idea even if they weren't predicting going broke. My best guess is that, since this problem just keeps happening, like communism and famine, that its got to be some sort of inherent feature of ultra-progressive politics.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
I don't disagree with you, I would simply note that Texas is currently being forced to accept more people showing up at their borders than are actually being born in the entire United States. Progressives have no intention of allowing conservative states to set their own policies and turnabout is fair play.
I'm sorry if this is overly tribal, but I will take progressive whining about permissive firearms policies being forced on them contrary to the will of the voters when they stop explicitly advocating for the south to be under a different regulatory regime with fewer states' rights.
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
Trans is an unusually high profile example of, perhaps the most high profile example of, American society’s peculiar loathing for saying ‘no’ to adolescents and for people who do so, but it is very definitely not the only one. Everything from choice of college major to choice of gender to even table stakes things like choice of fashion- parents are told over and over again that their job is to affirm whatever their adolescents want to do even if it’s obviously stupid.
And trans is downstream of that! Obviously parenting of 12-21 year olds involves lots of saying ‘no, quit being stupid’. But when parents already think they’re doing screwing up by it, the narrative of ‘you’re killing your kid!’ Just takes better.
hydroacetylene
9mo ago
Surprised no one’s posted this yet: https://apnews.com/article/texas-border-water-barriers-doj-immigration-83bcb38e7f5ab613117634d0c439d6b6?taid=64bee0cde6315400010b8821&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter
The justice department has filed a lawsuit against Texas for installing a system of buoy barriers in the rio grande after Mexico demanded the federal government make Texas remove them, and Greg Abbott published a response to the justice department’s demand telling them to pound sand. This comes on the heels of a news cycle about Texas border security repelling migrants into the Rio grande and using razor wire, which in turn seems to have happened once the mass bussing of migrants to places outside of Texas became old news.
Politically, Abbott is strongly incentivized to refuse to comply, even if it’s illegal, and it’s worth noting that he’s literally a constitutional lawyer and knows that he’s not going to win the lawsuit. So the most likely outcome is this getting dragged out in courts until federal agents remove the barriers themselves.
The other major culture war angle here is that the state’s defense is a previous declaration of invasion giving them the right to secure their own border, even in contravention of federal policy. This argument does not seem likely to hold up in court; it’s based on far-right legal theorizing that gained traction for political reasons. As Abbott is a thoroughly establishment creature it’s an interesting development in itself and likely portends that the Texas center-right(which, despite what the media will tell you, is solidly in control of the Texas state government) will choose to build a coalition with the far right rather than the moderate left in the future, and it probably has broader implications/lessons for far-right movements in wealthy first world countries seeking political influence.
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
1yr ago
It's a little uncomfortable to realize that the team of people studying this problem for a full year don't seem to have noticed, or if noticed, do not seem to have found it worth a bullet point, an underlying problem where this entire environment seems more interested in the text of legal compliance and avoiding liability than in the safety of their students or clear liability to longer-lasting civil torts. Yet that seems to be the room temperature, here.
Black pill- the people studying this do not see it as a problem. The goal is to legally comply with the text and preserve any bureaucracy from accountability. It is not to protect either the institution or the students- schools don’t care about large financial liabilities, they’ll just raise taxes to cover it, and no one in this bureaucracy is at any point incentivized to care about the kids.
I want to begin with the statement that I am not, by typical definition, racialist, although I accept a weak form of HBD, and that to me you are correct with the view that "who is white" is a question with by-definition fuzzy answers because the boundaries of any racial group are by definition fuzzy.
Now, to continue, "are Jews white", yes, depends on how you define it. Obviously by a historical geography definition Ashkenazim are as white as poles(that is to say, generally understood to be), and I don't care if they're technically semites or khazars or whatever. By a phenotype definition they're as white as Italians(that is to say, generally accepted as). By a genotype definition they're definitely mixed but Maronites and Eastern Europeans are both conventionally accepted as white, and they are both major contributors to Ashkenazi Jewish DNA.
By a sociological definition, "whiteness" has been redefined almost literally into a way to describe Jews without naming the Jew(while conveniently pinning the blame on Billy-Bob from Nowheresville, Indiana), so that describes Jews as white.
Instead I think you're referring to the cultural aspect, where "white" describes people of ethnic groups that were historically part of Christendom. So Armenians but not Persians or Turks, Maronites but not Alawites, Ossetians but not Tatars, Romanians but not Romani, Spaniards but not Sephardi. And this is a semi-useful definition because there are real differences between Christian and Jewish or pagan or Islamic cultures. To start with, Christian cultures are unlike other Abrahamaic-influenced cultures in generally having strong traditions of both musical and representative art, requiring the woman's consent for marriage and not just her father's, making use of both pork and alcohol in their cuisine, viewing slavery with greater discomfort, lacking a thorough religious dictation for basic legal principles, viewing dogs as high status animals, celibacy/chastity as a virtue, and generally not expecting clergy to hold either secular political or military roles. And these are extremely relevant distinctions that line up pretty well with the things that distinguish the west from the middle east. But it's more useful to describe them as "western", because those things also encompass lots of Latin Americans and African Americans who are obviously from looking at them nonwhite. And so I think it's best to use "white" in a phenotypic way that would encompass lots of Jews, Middle Easterners, etc. And, personally, I care a lot more about common cultural background than common skin color.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
Have you considered that there may simply not be a coherent theory of mind behind the complaint "too many white people"? It's a socially acceptable(to extreme progressives) way of phrasing several different complaints, which could be "place is boring and needs better food or nightlife", "place is full of red tribers and I don't like it", or "place is too expensive to afford".
hydroacetylene
26d ago
The problem with our Covid response was the urban/rural divide.
No, the problem with our Covid response was that it was damn stupid and full of lies, not in the sense of being mistaken but in the sense of being knowably false and told for political purposes.
hydroacetylene
1mo 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
4mo ago
That would be wrong because- I apologize if this is overly tribal- why does it always have to be my side that unilaterally disarms as a show of faith? Allow Louisiana the death penalty for pedophilia again, and then we'll talk.
And I think that's the crux of the matter, really. I do not trust progressive politicians(or any politicians, but especially progressive ones), and the latent fear that they seemingly all have of the AR-15 owners of America all coming for them, personally, helps me sleep at night. Under a regime I fully trusted I would have no qualms about Czechia-like gun control, or maybe even France-like if they can get street crime under control(more and I would bitch about unnecessary bureaucracy). I fully believe that, given I have to be ruled by people who suspended civil rights over a glorified flu, that giving up my guns would just result in a brutal authoritarian regime casting me and mine under cagotage. Is this a rational belief? Don't know, don't care. When progressives disarm first I'll think about that question seriously.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
I think this is a misunderstanding of patriarchy- it's the dominance of specifically older men. Younger men do not typically benefit under a patriarchy; patriarchal men prefer the interests of their daughters to those of their potential sons-in-law when those diverge.
You can model patriarchy as a straight man-woman class conflict, but you'd just be wrong. It's patriarchy, not andrarchy. And indeed, a lot of the supposed "feminist victories against patriarchy" were actually driven by younger men smashing systems of patriarchal control intended to keep them from creating scandals with young women; the sexual revolution* in particular was more young men rebelling against their elders with women along for the ride than it was driven by women.
*I'm referring to the second one, if it isn't obvious, but I do think that you can make a coherent case for the first sexual revolution being driven by the desires of returning soldiers more than by early feminism.
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
I once had a conversation with a gentleman standing around a nightclub exit, who explained that he supported himself while in Dallas from April to October by giving life advice for tips to women who were crying as they left, that he took a greyhound to New Orleans the rest of the year(he didn’t explain what he did there), and that he would live in a cheap hostel when he managed to beg enough.
This man’s lifestyle choices were eccentric, and it’s plausible to me that he doesn’t have the ability to hold down a normal job, maintain an apartment, etc. But he didn’t seem to be the sort to live a lifestyle based on public nudity, drug use, assaulting random people, vandalism, and public defecation. He was polite and normal seeming except for his life decisions when I spoke to him, and more than likely is not on a societal level a problem. I mean, sure, he’d be better off if he was given a free apartment. But that’s not my problem and he isn’t asking for one anyways.
I gave him a fiver for an interesting story and I think that’s a microcosm of someone being low-functioning to the point of not being able to support himself, but not causing problems for others.
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
It’s definitely worth noting that dislike of hip hop music might use violent themes as a fig leaf, but in reality mainstream rap music is just incompatible with transmitting cultural conservatism because it tends to push drug use, promiscuity, absentee fatherhood, etc., and that this is almost certainly the actual meat of the objection to hip hop from people like Matt Walsh.
hydroacetylene
11mo ago
The TDLR is that Austin political leadership went through a phase of attempting to imitate San Francisco, Portland, etc with the whole ‘crime is now legal’ thing, but their police department revolted and got the state government on their side, so now Austin PD is no longer under direct civilian control(of course there’s a more diplomatic phrasing) even as the Austin city council is required to continue funding them, and state police have a heavy presence in the city partly as reinforcements and partly to remind the city council that this arrangement is there to stay, regardless of local political trends.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
Vaping is ugly and reminds people of cigarettes, which are An Official Bad Thing, so it’s an emergency if the youths are starting to get into it.
To be clear, I fall into the camp that the worst thing about vaping is that it’s dorky. But to an elderly government staffer who thinks of their job as suppressing nicotine use, and a middle aged law enforcement policy writer who thinks their job is to ensure the kids ‘just say no’ to marijuana, I can see why they don’t make that distinction.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
I'm doing another low-stakes/small scale conspiracy theory thread(I think I'll probably start doing these once a quarter or so in the SSQ thread). What are your minor conspiracy theories? Not things that dramatically change how the world works(eg "the davos group is behind the simultaneous rise in both house prices and interest rates in the United States to eliminate home ownership"), nor that would be too interesting and sexy not to be common knowledge if they were both true and had sufficient evidence(eg "Bush was behind 9/11"). What are your boring, small scale schizo posting?
Bullets from me:
- General health advice about salt is knowably false to most well-informed people. I think the same thing is probably true about cholesterol, but with the added motivation of public health advisors taking bribes from eg Kellogg and Coca-Cola to understate the effects of sugar, so they blame cholesterol instead.
- The effects of Freon(R-22) on the atmosphere were drastically overstated to keep dupont's control over the provision of refrigerant at around the time the patent on R-22 was expiring.
- School districts as a group resist adopting the best pedagogical practices to prevent enough improvement in student outcomes for the public/lawmakers to conclude they don't need more money.
- The world population is probably massively overstated because officials in corrupt countries routinely inflate population figures in their areas of responsibility to try to seek budget increases/international aid.
hydroacetylene
5mo ago
I have nothing to add about why there aren't as many white men in commercials, the cathedral, and representation, just an amusing anecdote.
I learned Spanish for work, and when google noticed this it started showing me ads with non-gay-coded white men again. It's just that those ads were in Spanish.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
I second that. It seems like the moderate or centrist position is ‘people cook with whatever it is they want, barring obvious stupid cases like using spent nuclear fuel as a heat source’. The ‘we should phase out gas stoves’ is a radical left position no matter how gradual.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
Without rampant credentialism the average bricklayer would have the alternative choice of becoming thhe average email sender.
I have worked with bricklayers and I have worked with email senders. This statement is simply untrue. E-mail senders are probably doing a less-highly skilled job on the whole than bricklayers, but they are doing a job which absolutely requires skills that most bricklayers do not have. E-mail senders need to be computer literate, they need to be fluent in English with good spelling and grammar, they need a certain amount of trustworthiness with potentially confidential information(and knowing how to handle confidential information is a skill!) and cybersecurity skills(basic stuff like "set a password and don't write it on the device" is not basic to bricklayers), and they need to be able to understand their role within the company and what they can and can't promise to the people they will be communicating with(not a problem for bricklayers in non-supervisory positions because they don't communicate with customers). They also need a certain level of "ability to fit into a white collar employment scenario", where it's assumed that they can take their work home with them(bricklayers, like most other construction trades, are assumed to be drunk and unreachable when off the clock) at least at critical times, they need to be able to be paid every two weeks via direct deposit(bricklayers expect a physical check every Friday at quitting time, because this is industry standard for construction), they need to communicate effectively about when they're not able to be at work or to complete a particular task and to resolve disputes by reference to a third party mediator(neither of these are expectations for construction workers, although plenty of individual construction workers are capable of doing them).
Requiring a college degree is a very cheap(for the company) filter for people who fit that description much better than a typical construction worker. Yes, even if that degree is in underwater basketweaving or whatever, it usually means that a person is computer literate, English fluent and capable of good spelling and grammar, can clearly communicate, is capable of doing work outside of the office setting when necessary, can follow directions for computer use and information handling, and probably comes from a class background where basic white collar behavioral norms like "tell someone when you won't show up" and "bring problems with a coworker to your boss instead of just angrily confronting them" are widespread. People who hire bricklayers have a different set of filters they use to seek out people who have the skills to be bricklayers, of course, because the ability to use computers and spell English is irrelevant to that job, but the ability to build things according to measurements is not.
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
Also 25 Republican governors are backing Abbott.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
Their first target, thematically enough for an anti-trans site, is DIY HRT,
Are they anti-trans, or just interested in a few laughs by stalking insane people making fools of themselves on the internet, a disproportionate number of whom are trans because of selection effects?
Ironically, right wingers in America do much better on the ideological Turing test than left wingers. There’s no actual reason for the sometime leftist assumption that if conservatives would just get out of their bubbles, they would calm down.
I’m reminded of an article a few years ago, by a progressive pointing to the 30-40% of the country which he claimed was obstinately convinced that democrats wanted to do a short laundry list of perennial conservative complaints- all of which were regularly being floated by mainstream democrats and had large support in their base. He was of course oblivious to the idea that more exposure of conservatives to people who wanted to take their guns away would not in fact convince them no one was coming for their guns.
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