netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Yeah, labeling a menorah as secular is bizarre. Someone’s playing with a motte and bailey for the first amendment. Now why does it demand a wall of text again?
SecureSignals
Oh. Right.
There’s an argument to be made the angels and star affiliated with Christmas trees make them just as referential as the menorah. Of course, plenty of Christmas trees lack those elements; I’m not clear on whether the case law allowing them specifies the decorations. On the balance, this looks like a weird exploit of the categorization, and menorahs should probably not be allowed anywhere that a cross wouldn’t.
Out of curiosity, what other icons show up in that position? On Easter, in particular.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6mo ago
If the locals are saying “nah we don’t need this statue, we want to make mediocre abstract art out of the pieces”…
And you don’t have any skin in the game, except for the vibe that Lee was a pretty gentlemanly guy…
Then what’s wrong with the locals going on ahead?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9mo ago
I’ve been saying the whole time: Biden is the kind of president I want. For a sufficiently weak definition of “want,” at least. Boring. I want the President to shut up, sign or veto things, and sort of play mediator. And especially not commit crimes. Maybe this is what it means to be “presidential.”
Even Biden’s attempts at signature legislation feel more like complying with someone else’s push than a personal campaign promise.
I think right-leaning news knows that this plays pretty well with centrists. Hard to offend people by doing nothing exciting. This would be why the “mentally unfit” attack has seen so much airtime.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
If I had a nickel for every time someone said trans activism was comparable to Hitler, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
How are those at all similar? In the surreal, alternate universe where Bud Light is using Instagram to attract young Neo-Nazis, people wouldn't make that argument because Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Glossing over the more schizophrenic parts of this…argument? narrative? since you appear to still be editing:
TFR doesn’t have to be the new hot topic. If it’s going to be, I’d like to see some discussion on the actual moral grounding. Why should I care if my one child is outnumbered by less intelligent, more credulous, or other colors of children? Quality over quantity.
Otherwise, this thread will devolve into handwringing about how poorly Western society treats its straight white males. Just like the last couple.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
There’s something infuriating about a protest vote for Trump. Is it supposed to represent anything other than pandering?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Perhaps it's...not actually the biggest scandal since a beloved president accessorized his wife's wardrobe?
No one died. No sympathetic face is available to cry on the evening news--Trump already did his best impression when he got banned. Unsympathetic faces are even in short supply, since Elon spends more time waving his hands at stock prices than drawing attention to censorship. You can't place the blame on a political figure and sink his career.
I'd go further and assume the average American was vaguely unsurprised by the news. There's already a sense that the NSA does whatever it wants; why not the FBI? They've even settled down from their gunslinging days of the 80s and 90s. It was vaguely directed at Foreign Influence™ and everything.
On top of all that, the exposé is delivered not as a bombshell...but as a series of threads on the very website it's skewering. Networks can run a segment on a thread on another journo's work, or they can run one on the southern border. Or on a lurid murder. Or on Christmas fluff. I picked all those from the Fox landing page. It "seems like" that's what viewers prefer.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Let me start by admitting that I find your manifesto-posting poorly constructed, intermittently dishonest, and suggestive of bad faith. I think you’re burying the lede partly to fool people into thinking there’s more substance to this argument, and partly to avoid moderation for naked outgroup-bashing. Your thesis appears to boil down to:
-
Early Americans didn’t politicize immigration
-
At some point they started to do so
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(muttering about Jewish interests)
-
Therefore the Democrats are
evilanti-American
With that said, I will try to address a couple of your actual points.
Emma Lazarus died in 1887, right after the statue was dedicated. And her friend, Georgina Schuyler—of the Schuyler sisters, by the way, a direct descendant of Alexander Hamilton—decides to memorialize her friend, Lazarus. And she starts an ultimately successful campaign in 1900 to have Lazarus’ poem put on the statue’s base.
This seems like pretty good evidence that immigration was quite salient by 1900. Is Hamilton mentioned to make the Schuylers seem more established? He’s almost the textbook case of an immigrant who both integrated into and shaped society.
So, just to conclude, for our first 200 or so years, we were primarily a nation of settlers. Then, from the mid-to-late 19th century, we were a mix of settlers and immigrants, depending on who was coming to where at what time—some people who were settlers, and some people who were immigrants.
The Constitution took effect in 1789, suggesting one hundred years of settling, followed by 150 of immigration. That’s a lower bound if you neglect the role of immigrants in the antebellum period, which you seem to be doing by redefining who counts as an immigrant at will. This is sophistry.
But I think that really informed what became this project to create this nation of immigrants ideology, kind of out of whole cloth in the 1950s.
You’ve just spent a comment and a half providing evidence for the ideological roots. Why pick the 1950s?
Jewish
Ah, there it is. None of this works if you can’t gesture threateningly at everyone’s favorite elites. Blaming old money and Catholics only gets your breakpoint to the mid-late 1800s. And you need that breakpoint to be later and later to prop up your distaste for modern Democrats. The Southern Strategy is small potatoes compared to the political realignments that happened in the Progressive and Reconstruction eras.
By all rights, blaming the Jews shouldn’t get your inflection point past the Fabian Society, either, but the point is rather moot. For all your hand-wringing over radical historians, this revisionism isn’t any better.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
I’d prefer not to give more views to this substack, so is there anyone who can confirm the number of digs at Scott? My bet’s on 2-3.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Nope, never heard of it.
One journalist can write whatever she wants. Though subtitling it "The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" suggests that she might have an angle. You wouldn't be convinced by Kendi arguing that the infohazard of whiteness makes you inherently racist, or take a Trump exposé as proof that Republicans are immoral.
I would consider the mental-health-professionals point as weak evidence, sure. It would be better if there was an actual study, or if it's "well known" that this is only true for women.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
usually met with
pats on the backsnaps (sensory issues!) and goodboyspersons.
This is a really condescending way of mocking your outgroup. The rest isn't really better, adding up to a real hand-wringing over how much leftist spaces must suck. Adding a paragraph about how Both Sides^TM of the terminally online have flaws doesn't really make the smears any more charitable.
With the obligatory tone policing taken care of: I think you're making a bit of a homogeneity error. Observing melodrama and overreaction on leftist Twitter is something of a pastime of this sub. The outrage machine is not driven by good vibes and hugs. People have been "literally crying and shaking rn" for years.
You may well be correct to observe that leftist hobby communities are more likely to be positive. I'd credit this not to an evangelist reward cycle, but to evaporative cooling. Leftist spaces are less likely to make people feel uncomfortable enough to leave. Whether this has anything to do with "big tent" politics, inclusive language, microaggressions, pronouns, or the much-maligned hugboxing? I couldn't say.
Free speech absolutism is arguably shooting itself in the foot here. The first message I got upon signing up here was an ALL-CAPS question from an offensive username. As I looked for a report button, I realized, "shit, we don't have a ToS here, do we?" Did I actually have grounds to request deplatforming this guy merely for posting slurs and, I'm told, using a NSFL profile banner? The answer is obviously yes, as he was a walking rule violation, but I wouldn't have even asked myself the question on a more left-wing site.
(If this happens to anyone else, please send a mod message to Zorba. He's confirmed that such accounts will be banned; there's just no report button yet,)
A subset of the right wing has staked out "being allowed to use slurs" as their Gadsden flag. That circle is near-completely contained within the circle of users who value "owning the libs." As long as this is true, sane moderation is going to have a left-wing bias. To some degree, this must go out the window in extremist left spaces. I'm not going to claim ChapoTrapHouse was a bastion of reasoned debate. It's the hobbyist Discords and niche interests that live and breathe on niceness, community and civilization.
If you want to know what the happy, affirming, not-so-para social group looks like for right wingers, go to a church picnic. Maybe Baptists or Presbyterians, maybe LDS. The Pentecostals get up to some absolutely wild group delusions, but they seem to be having a pretty good time with it. This is the power of community, of cohesion--and it comes with its own set of strictures.
As a final note, while Contrapoints really, really isn't my style, I wouldn't call it vacuous. Not in the same way that I'd label something like a mukbang. I'm under the impression that she puts a lot of effort into the scripting as well as the presentation. It's especially an ironic comparison given that Contrapoints and BreadTube were explicitly designed to drive Peterson-style engagement.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
Good grief, indeed.
You’ve been warned and banned before for low-effort sneering and antagonism. Please dial it down, and try to attack arguments rather than people.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
What would it take to convince you that the judiciary is not, in fact, that captured? That their motivations include things like “doing a good job” or “upholding their oaths” or just “not being a defendant.”
Entering false judgment on the largest right-wing media giant in the country seems like a particularly bad way to keep one’s corruption under wraps. Doing it for a random federal plant?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Tell me, when was the last time you and yours got oppressed by the big bad US military? Little Rock? The armed forces are a spectacularly bad tool for stomping on the citizenry. This is, of course, by design.
As for common cause…do you think China gives two shits about the who/whom within America? Do you think the people setting up Harvard admissions are desperate to please the CCCP? Because it’s very hard for me to see any common cause. The closest they get is China cheerfully benefiting from American internal tensions. And that’s just as easily ratcheted by convincing people like you to wail and gnash your teeth about race. If you don’t think you’re a pawn of Chinese interests, perhaps your outgroup would feel the same.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8mo ago
Funny, I was thinking the exact opposite. It’s silly to demand justice for statue-toppling and courthouse-torching, then turn around and insist that the other guys were just being good citizens.
I’m not sure how many of the CHAZ folks ended up arrested or convicted, but I hope it was a lot.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
I’m loosely with @Tarnstellung: this response is disproportionate. That’s becayse it’s not about the actual offense. It’s about ethics in games journalism the ingroup successfully flexing in the culture war. You said it best yourself—the “usual suspects” had to fan the flames, or it never would have gotten off Insta.
In the spirit of the thread…isn’t this kind of bad?
Compare the usual examples of cancel culture. An entertainer gets banished to the sixth circle of hell for a comment made in 1995. A guest speaker gets his gigs canceled because he was too charitable to the outgroup. Judging the exact deserts takes a distant back seat to defending the narrative.
Here the narrative is “Budweiser is a puppet of the woke.” The evidence for: a personalized can and cringey social media video. Oh, and a general sense that big corporations are the enemy. Which one of those points is doing all the work?
I don’t see much reason to be proud of people hitting all five of our “examples of waging the Culture War.” Of course, they weren’t really interested in convincing me. The fact that I don’t already parrot their lines means that I’m on the wrong team.
N.B.: I don’t exactly have skin in this game. Yuengling is the best of its bunch, but I’m more a Modelo guy. Please consider my sentiments on the subject to be as lukewarm as the average Bud.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Maybe I’m just primed by the shitshow in this week’s thread, but I find the Motte’s taste in sexual politics abysmal. It’s like a license to throw epistemic hygiene to the wind.
Gender politics, on the other hand, go pretty well. @ThisIsSin has really given me a lot to think about; I’m surprised I missed that the first time around.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Ugh.
Unpleasant if true. Kind of a moot point for those of us already on board with consequences.
I find the tabloid approach distasteful. Seems more like an excuse to point and laugh than any sort of meaningful journalism.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
The basis is not "let's lower these standards so the savages can get stay out of jail." It's "let's remove these opportunities for selective enforcement."
Proponents agree with you that jumping turnstiles or driving with broken taillights is bad, and that no one should be expected to do them. They disagree that the laws on the books are good at discouraging such, because they observe (or assume) that those laws are being exploited by racists.
Compare also the three-felonies-a-day canard which gets cited whenever someone wants to minimize a crime.
How...annoying. Sending partisans in to loom over ballot boxes has to be one of the least trustworthy ways to actually secure elections. [edit to clarify: lowest ratios of effectiveness to potential abuses.] Though "election reconciliation" might compete depending on its implementation. I have a very hard time reading this as good faith, yet I don't know what I can do about it.
Other adventures in the state/county saga include specifically rolling back Harris county measures.
Now if only we can get Paxton to "immediately respond" and go ahead with his trial.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
That it’s not true. I spent some time trying to dig up my response from the last time it came up, but had no luck. Reddit’s search tools have only gotten worse.
I believe my argument boiled down to “why does this cigarette have so much credibility?”
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
I’d like to see you elaborate on Biden’s “promotion” of the crisis. I tend to agree with @hydroacetylene that the economic incentives are going to dominate; are the Feds not enforcing that? They’re still detaining and deporting significant numbers.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
Almost simultaneously, the DOJ has announced that they will begin prosecuting J6 protesters who did not enter the Capitol building but were present in the demonstration outside. These protesters are expected to be charged with something more than misdemeanors.
Expected by whom?
Let’s make a prediction: out of cases brought against outside demonstrators, I don’t think very many will see felony charges. Perhaps none. The government has already picked its low hanging fruit—you’ve listed plenty of them. If they haven’t already been brought in, why do you think that will change?
As for Ray Epps, I do believe the truth is still an absolute defense against defamation. That makes it very hard for him to win dishonestly. If the suit succeeds, it means the centerpiece of right-wing media couldn’t put together enough evidence to cover their asses. If it fails, perhaps you’re on to something, but at least the plant won’t get a payout for it. I suppose the most likely outcome is a settlement, which could happen either way.
I'm quite confident that this isn't the first child support diatribe to grace these halls. See the "purview of women" section from /u/Texas_Rocket's angry gesturing at Roe v. Wade. After the decision came down it was quite a popular topic.
While I don't care to hang around MGTOW communities, I'd imagine criticizing family courts is a natural hobby for them. It certainly makes for a nice motte to go with the more...broad...complaints about sex.
Perhaps those bitter young men aren't the God-and-country conservatives you're hoping to find? As noted by others, perhaps you should ask the Catholics how they intend to handle divorce.
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