pigeonburger
1mo ago
Have you not heard about the recent, RADICAL political polarization among young women?
These women ALSO largely refuse to date conservative/Republican men.
So men don't HAVE to filter these women out, these women are filtering THEMSELVES out. And they go on social media and aggressively police other women on this issue.
No, they say they refuse to date conservative/Republican men. What they actually do is refuse to date conservative/Republican boys.
pigeonburger
27d ago
No, I do realise all of that. But the forms and niceties are important, even if they are just pretending. If you pretend to tolerate the other for long enough, you start believing you do. And when enough people believe it, something magical happens (or rather, something terrible doesn't happen); your society becomes more stable and its constituents don't jump to civil war anytime they lose an election.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
I would say it's true. It's just that "trustworthy" is a bigger concept to unpack than it looks like. Being trustworthy is not like dateless guys thinking they're a catch because they're a "feminist ally" or because they think that it's all so easy not to be an asshole and that if they had a girlfriend/wife they wouldn't be abusive to her and wouldn't cheat on her, etc...
Those people are not trustworthy, they're untested. It's easy to think you'd never ever cheat, if you've never had the opportunity to, if you've never been on the receiving end of an attractive woman signaling she'd be up for no-strings-attached sex.
Being trustworthy means being reliable and having your shit together, and making women at ease in your presence.
pigeonburger
28d ago
Yes, but the form of the justification is important in maintaining a functional liberty-minded society, in which the social contract is something like "You and I probably have different ideas and values as to how we should live our lives, so let's just agree on a minimal set of coercive laws so that we can be peaceful neighbors."
Now functionally, in practice, there can be severe disagreements as to what should be part of the minimum set of laws; there's non-ridiculous arguments to be made that allowing people to stockpile a military arsenal can make their neighbor fearful and not able to coexist peacefully, or that someone removing "just a clump of cells" is depriving a being of life. But they're couched as arguments over what is the minimum set of laws to allow diverse viewpoints and lifestyles. Even if in practice they can be the same, they are not presented as a naked "Ok, now that I have the backing of a majority you better adopt the lifestyle I want you to have or else..." I guess in a spirited debate it's possible to accuse the other side of doing it. But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.
Because at that point, the polite covenent of let's just be neighbors and leave one another alone is irreparably broken.
Something like Rings of Power was based on an IP in hibernation since 2003 on the film side. There was no fatigue. Yet they did the same diversity stuff.
Sorry, kind of hijacking your post to talk about LOTR.
It was in hibernation since 2014, if you consider The Hobbit part of the IP (and I would). I don't remember them doing the diversity stuff with that trilogy, and they did make money, despite making definitely lesser cultural artefacts than the LOTR movie trilogy and pissing off core fans. I could see them being worried about not being able to please the core fans no matter what they did with Rings of Power and so are trying to reach for new audiences and I wouldn't blame them.
Core LOTR fans (me included) would have gotten annoyed at any invention of the adaptation that's not from the books. Tolkien is hard to adapt, the 2000s movies were little miracles. The Hobbit could have been adapted properly, if it had been done BEFORE the LOTR, but then it was stuck and couldn't both please the studios and the fans because they couldn't possibly release something less hype-worthy than the previous trilogy, it had to at least match the spectacle of the LOTR, or exceed it. So they had to do the neat, short and sweet children's story great violence to turn it into something that was meant to feel like a step up from the LOTR. After that though, anything new would have to work off much less in-depth material than LOTR. Outside of a few short stories that don't really fit within the context of the existing material (and as such less interesting to adapt for producers that want to build on top of the popular IP they paid dearly for) the rest is written mostly like historical records than narrated fiction. That requires much more extrapolating to adapt.
For what it's worth, I've been watching RoP. It's not terribly woke the way it's been made out to be; it's got errr... multiracial fantasy races and girlboss warrior Galadriel, but other than that, it doesn't shove any woke messaging into its story. Its failings are more mundane. A paucity of likeable characters, not knowing what to do with some storylines. Season 2 just ended and it's remarkable how little happened in it compared to season 1, it felt like there's one story thread they wanted to advance and just juggled with all the others to keep them in place.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I believe voters would punish a defection on a very simple unambigious sworn promise like that. Ok, maybe many/most people wouldn't but with elections being decided by razor's edge margins it wouldn't take a lot of them to effectively put victory out of reach.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I think they might offer an exchange: Biden for Trump. The cathedral wants to gain back respectability. Biden is increasingly a drain on respectability, Trump was in itself a drain on respectability, and the actions they're taking to prevent Trump from getting power again (indictments and at the least in the eyes of about half of the US election shenanigans) are the biggest drain of respectability of all. But they can't stop because they've made Trump very very motivated to embark on Stalinian purges if he gets back in power; they won't be able to keep him busy and sheperded in a second term.
I can imagine the system being very keen for this exchange: both Biden and Trump publically renounce politics (Trump immediately and Biden as soon as his term ends) and drop from the 2024 race. In exchange, Biden pardons Trump of federal crimes, leans on state prosecutors to drop charges for Trump, Biden pardons himself and Republicans drop the inquiries. Everyone walks away, Biden stumbles through a speech about how it was necessary to put behind divisiveness and the strain on the democratic process that prosecutions and impeachments etc... the opposing side was causing. The cathedral gets back at least the veneer of respectability. Republicans lose Trump, but having the stronger candidate field below Trump they probably win 2024. The cathedral can let that happen because they don't really care about Republicans or Democrats, just Not Trump. It would help rebuild some of the credibility the electoral system lost. Democrats lose Biden, who was never a powerful candidate and was increasingly embarassing to keep around (too old, unfocussed, dwindling coherency, increasingly appearing corrupt). They had to sacrifice everyone else to prop Biden up and now they have no credible contender under him, but without the extreme imperative to win against Trump they can send Kamala get slaughtered against DeSantis or Ramaswamy and rebuild their field for 2028. I don't know if Trump would go for it, but if he believes himself he probably should. He has 3 ways out of the indictments: legal victory, electoral victory or PR victory. But his stated opinion is that the judges are unfair, elections are rigged and the media are against him. What exactly are his paths out of this mess then?
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I agree. I think the 80s, 90s and early 2000s had struck a good balance of representation though colorblindness. But that's what I'm not seeing in OP's post: commitment to the colorblind (or gay/trans-blindness? we need a better term) principle.
To show that this over-representation is unnecessary you need to commit to judging cultural products on the merit of their content and not the color of the skin or the sexuality of people in it. It doesn't mean you HAVE to watch race-swapping remakes: most of them ARE bad on their merit because the point was the race-swapping/race-baiting, not creating a lasting cultural artefact. But if you pre-commit to reject them out of hand you are telling them that representation is a battleground, a zero-sum game and that you intent to fight them for it; that's not likely to produce a truce in the culture war.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Yes, but that does not mean the opposite people are not also successful.
pigeonburger
4mo ago
I don't think it's necessarily against conservative values? I can easily imagine there's some type of point they're trying to make about celebrity culture being a form of prostitution and selling their bodies. It came out about as lucid and legible as you would imagine it would when someone with mental issues is in a situation where no one is able to stop him.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
The people who are blaming hip-hop for cultural decay would have blamed jazz for the same 70 years ago, and now jazz is probably the second most "respectable" high brow musical genre after classical.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Yup.
Despite having gone through the very heart of the cathedral in my formative years I consider myself more resistant to the indoctrination than my parents are/were, than most of my peers are and than any part of my education. Whatever mutation of genes and memes created me, I believe it has to be nurtured, alerting the system to my presence will only cause an overwhelming immune response that is all but guaranteed to wipe me out. So I will attempt to nurture and grow this mutation, by genes or memes.
Going out in a blaze of glory is a winning scenario for the state. Your family line will be either eradicated or severely diminished. Your manifesto (or as they will call it "your hateful screed") will not be spread. The movies they will write about you will depict you as a desperate, ignorant loser.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
He can swear it publically and drop out of the race before the pardon. As for running in 2028, he's gonna be 5 years older, obviously and unambiguously breaking a sworn oath by running, facing a more established candidate (an incumbent Republican president, quite possibly), that's probably enough to guarantee him a loss. If Trump believes he's gonna win 2024 he might not go for such a deal, but his stated position is that the last election was rigged; does he believe he can win, enough to risk jail? Enough to refuse an offer to make it a draw and walk away with dignity?
pigeonburger
7mo ago
The point is that criminals are not deterred by the length and severeness of the punishment but by the likelihood and immediacy of the punishment.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
The falsehoods are easily dismissed, because if the company is healthy and making more money than they let on, then why isn't the advice to the public to just buy shares (at least, of those that are public)? After all, they're just being greedy, so why aren't they encouraging everyone to put themselves on the other side of that equation? And if they're voting shares they also get a say in C-suite remuneration! Wouldn't that be exactly what people who complain about greed be doing? After all, they seem to know so much about running a business and how pricing should work, I'm sure they'd do a great job as investors! /s
And in the realm of sexual sociopolitics, I'm rather skeptical that the progressives considered the conservatives to be people mostly on the same page and with similar ideas about what "victory" looked like, just with different ways to get there.
If you zoom out far enough, sons and daughters living happy fulfilling lives is what everyone is after. At least, for people who invest themselves into social policy making with impacts on that kind of timescale. There isn't really any personal gain to be made, the people who pushed the changes that led to the current environment are by now too old to personally benefit from it.
My point is not that the colonel who cannot ever manage to implement his strategy is worthy, but that it's a fair complaint if another person ostensibly working for the same objective is actively making things worse for no other reason than to not see him succeed. If the other colonel really was shooting his country's troops in the back, pointing it out to the brass is not pitiful whining, it should be investigated and that colonel arrested and tried for treason. If, in progressives' mind, conservatives are making everyone live miserable lives for generations for no other reason than to spite progressives, they should make that case to the population as best they can so that the population rightly shuns conservatism. It's not argument I can see them making convincingly, but they absolutely should try it if they truly believe that conservatives are that nasty and petty.
Which strikes me as akin to a colonel saying "I did absolutely everything right when I ordered my men to rush that hill; those damn enemy combatants with their machine guns in bunkers are the ones at fault here."
You're not seeing it from a consequentalist standpoint, which is probably the one the people complaining that their movement was failed are taking. I think there's an important distinction because technically the people they accuse of holding them back aren't seen as enemy combatants in the context of making the world better. They might be adversaries in the context of getting a policy implemented internally, like that colonel might be a big fan of human wave style tactics while another colonel is arguing in favor of softening the enemy up with artillery, both arguing and trying to convince the brass of approving their preferred tactic, bickering and going as far as doing some political manuvering to try and edge out the other, but still fighting on the same side of the war. So their accusation is not that their tactic would have worked but for the enemy, but that they are being machine-gunned in the back by the other colonel who would be putting winning his small argument about tactics (disapproval of sexual liberty) over the overarching goal of winning the war (of making life better for everyone).
Whether the argument is accurate or not is different, but the accusation is of sabotage, not of facing resistance from the enemy.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I don't think he would himself change so much as I believe him to be more cynical than idealist, and a strategy pandering to a reddish-purple Florida would become obsolete once president. And I believe the PMC reaction to him ("Worse Than Trump!") is strategy from the PMC understanding that appearing to play ball with the establishment right now is poison to any Republican's primary campaign.
pigeonburger
4mo ago
Healthcare price is not just a fixed amount that has to be paid, it's reactive to policy and social factors, to policies influencing supply and demand of healthcare, to the legal environment around it, to the general health of the population, to the hygenic habits of the population, to socioeconomical factors, to genetics, to economies of scale, etc...
I think everyone, left and right, would be satisfied with the outcome of "healthcare is very available and almost everyone can afford it with the few remaining edge cases unable to pay being either taken care of by the government or by charity".
Whether you get there by single payer or not is a huge part of the question, but it's not a zero sum game.
pigeonburger
5mo ago
Trump did put a stop to the Bush dynasty by not only beating Jeb, but humiliating him so hard there is no possibility of a comeback. After Trump has his moment, Cruz can come back. DeSantis can come back. Even Little Marco can come back. Jeb is done and will never be president, ever. Jeb is the supposed big guy in the prison yard that Trump made his bitch upon arriving to send a message.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
I could be traveling with a box full of lead bricks and nobody would tell me a word if it fits the carry-on size
Which, honestly, is kind of ridiculous because it seems much likelier someone gets injuried by a heavy pack falling on them opening the overhead bins than by checked luggage.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
Indeed, at object level they tend to just be unfalsifiable claims against the other side, but I think at least it offers a credible rebuttal to the idea that conspiracies cannot exist past a certain scale.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
We're getting close to it though. In a couple of years, when military kamikaze drones have become ubiquitous in all military armories (and thus can disappear from military armories), when the people with the knowledge to make them at home, from places like Ukraine and the ME, have spread everywhere, then I think we'll have a whole new thing to worry about.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
more than cancelled out by not being able to say "first President to do X"
In normal times I would have agreed, but I think they overplayed that card in recent years and I think the american public just don't care anymore about hearing Democrats and the media self-servingly calling everything Trump does "unprecedented" and then doing the same shit but defending it as different. If they can the appearance of having at least a little integrity in the public eye then maybe their objections won't seem as partisan when they raise them later.
So exactly as he said.
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