pigeonburger
9mo ago
Trump has forced his own side at large to confront similar conundrums.
This kind of thing is not a result of Trump being uniquely bad for the Republicans, it's a result of a partisan media using this tool, forcing to confront conundrums, in a single direction.
A fair media would at every opportunity, at least as often as they ask Republicans about the 2020 election, ask every Democrat how it's somehow acceptable that the sitting president be, at least for months, months during which the rest of the world keeps happening, as senile as the man everyone saw in Biden's last debate.
And that's just one example, you can find gotchas or flipflops or embarassing statements for every politician, and if not you can find people they've endorsed or publically approved of that have such gotchas or flipflops or embarassing statements that you can then put the politican's nose in. You can find far-left terrorists that are close friends of Obama, an honest to goodness Klan leader that Biden considers "a mentor", for the same Biden a record of voting against the progressive politics he now claims to espouse,etc... These are not liabilities for these people not because they have been satisfactorily answered, but because the mainstream media shield them from these questions instead of asking them. If they crop up in right-wing media, the mainstream media will rush to write excuses and rationalization (often as "fact-checks") for them.
Of course, Trump generates his fair share of those conundrums, but I don't see him as unique this way. The volume at which people are asked to defend them is a function not the amount or heaviness of these conundrums, but of who holds the microphone.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
There's a 0% chance Rowling meant people to take the lesson that children should learn to defend themselves effectively with deadly weapons, and if people actually took that lesson I am sure she would be horrified.
Of course, she didn't mean it, but she still wrote it, in detail, over multiple books. Her hand didn't slip. When writing a world that made sense to her, she basically wrote children should be carrying and training in the use of weapons that range from tasers to bazookas, in order to defend themselves both against direct attempts on their life, and in case their own government becomes tyrannical.
She would be horrified to hear that's a takeaway from her books, but it still is an opinion that she persistantly expressed. I think it's not a meaningless accident but a fascinating window into discordant beliefs she holds (ie: mostly a clash between "Trust the Institutions" and "Fight the Power!")
pigeonburger
1yr ago
However, the suggestion that we can confidently assert that no such intervention will ever be necessary is preposterous. I don’t think we have any good reason to believe that the medical bodies governing medical transition for minors are invulnerable to the kinds of social dynamics and institutional failures that have afflicted every other kind of medical body,4 and doctors as a profession (as the examples above illustrate) are notorious for closing ranks and circling the wagons at the first whiff of a potential scandal. To simply declare by fiat “the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to self-regulate and course-correct, governmental oversight or intervention is not necessary and never will be” is shockingly naïve.
I think this point bears highlighting. A lot of the "believe the science" message seems to hinge on the belief that scientists, doctors and other highly credentialed professionals are, within their sphere of expertise, able to ignore misaligned incentives and politics that history and experience has shown time and time and time and time again are universal. The original scientific method created an adversarial system to counteract these human failings, to align the incentives with bold truth finding. But nowadays coordination at the size of our current scientific institutions has misaligned the incentives again, to put them in line with affirming the consensus and the political class.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.
So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.
This is what pisses me off so much in the relationship between government and citizens, is that government officials has free reign to do abuse their power pretty much however they want (short of personal enrichment, and even then) because the worse that happens to them is punishment to their office, not to them personally. You can be absolutely certain if those two guys had unlawfully sequestered an employee or official of the agricultural department for 30 days, they themselves would be sentenced to a lot more than 30 days in prison. But we all know that the worst that's gonna happen there is the office gets told they can't do this, maybe someone or two lose their jobs (and don't worry, they won't have any trouble finding another) and maybe Pennsylvania's taxpayers have to foot the bill on some damages (and don't worry here either, approximatively 0 democrat voters in Pennsylvania will change their vote just because their party's officials unlawfully throws people in jail).
pigeonburger
4mo ago
And no the left did not completely dominate the media landscape back then.
They wrote the movies, tv shows, books, music and ran the schools. Has there ever been a time in a millenial's life where popular Western media depicted someone who thinks there should be less immigrants in his Western country in a positive light?
pigeonburger
1yr ago
In the same spirit: pointing and shaming how wasteful north americans are for driving instead of using public transport, claiming that if almost all the money we put on road maintenance and car infrastructure instead went to public transport it would be fast, clean, cheap and wonderful and all the junkies and mentally ill people belligerently bothering people on it would disappear, despite it being the very same people who push for everyone using public transport that are also pushing for complete tolerance of every nuisance in public spaces in the name of compassion.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
At the risk of oversharing, I lost my mother over the weekend and while I give my wife the advice that she shouldn't feel guilty for not forcing herself to be somber and mournful every single moment, I myself can't escape feeling like people would think me callous or unfeeling if my actions and demeanor didn't match their perception of what someone mourning their mother should be, so I do ultimately force myself to act differently just to not cause any unease. Am I overthinking this?
pigeonburger
1yr ago
The powers that be seem intent on making examples of very average people these days. We've seen extreme prosecution of actions that "reasonable people" would believe would not draw nearly that much individual attention from the government (trucker protest in Canada, J6). And the other side is worried about the idea that, for instance, a right-wing government could use private collected information to identify and deport immigrants. "If you haven't done anything wrong (or big) you have nothing to fear" is not convincing to anyone.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Because the world doesn't want politically motivated encyclopedias, it wants accurate, unbiaised, apolitical ones. Of course, Wikipedia isn't that, but that is current only known to the extremely online centrists and conservatives/right-wingers. The move is not to make an explicitely political one as it will be rightfully ignored, it's to continue to raise awareness that Wikipedia is not accurate, unbiaised and apolitical.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
Being term-limited and on his last term, Trump is unmoved by the electoral concerns of other, future Republicans. What he cares about at this point is legacy, and integrating the second largest country on earth, becoming the largest country on earth in the process, is pretty legacy-setting.
pigeonburger
5mo ago
Rep. Mast brings up what USAID is accused of doing over that interview. I'll isolate the main claims.
Half a million dollars to expand atheism in Nepal, $50,000 to do, let's see, a transgender opera in Colombia. $47,000 to do an LGBTQ trans comic book in Peru. $20,000 a pop to do drag shows in Ecuador.
and
Samantha Powers, she had a worthy goal, although it was a stupid goal, she said she was hoping to get the amount of foreign aid, U.S. aid dollars that go to actual aid, up to 30 cents on the dollar, from 10 cents on the dollar.
and
but there's probably more dollars that go towards state dinners around the DC beltway than what actually goes into rice and beans abroad.
and
And let's talk about the real facts on the ground. The Trump administration comes in, or representatives like myself that do oversight, the agencies will literally not tell us what they are writing grants for, literally. Or they will lie about it, or they will tell the new political appointees under the Trump administration, I'm just not going to tell you that. Those are real things that have happened.
As for evidence, I don't know what you expect; it's just people telling us what they see from looking at the organisation. For what it's worth I don't see anyone seriously disputing the claims of the Trump Administration and Republican Party that a lot of the money is mismanaged or sent to causes that don't figure in the mental image the average american has when they think "humanitarian aid", they mostly gesture at the portion that does go to real humanitarian efforts and complain that it's not necessary to cut the aid that is actually used for the intended purpose.
I would be very surprised if that was not because they're convinced that a review without a complete freeze would be ineffectual in stopping the grift.
Indeed, it's technical brillance compared to its contemporaries in the early and mid 2010s was so great, that even now 10 years later (an eternity in internet time) spinoff/dissident platforms like this one haven't found a better format. And when such a great tool was left to a representative slice of the western population (or at least, of the technophile western population), it really felt magical.
To ruin it, all it took was the admins coming down a couple of times on the same side of culture wars tussles (and it's not a matter of being the right or wrong side, just coming down on the same side a few times in a row is gonna do it), and the left noticing (as it often does) before the right the large amount of narrative-shaping power that was being left on the counter in the form of modship over ostensibly neutral subs.
It was inevitable. The years where it worked were great, but it was not a stable arrangement.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I think there's a big distinction between the actual culture of today's youth and the one being pushed by over-correcting revanchist millenials. The super woke media is not the DOOM or rap music of this era, it's its complete opposite. It's what today's kids' parents would prefer they like instead of what they actually like. I'm not fully understanding what the majority of kids actually like these days, they're quite secretive and tend to share around in small groups online instead of in the public square, but sometimes I get glimpses of it and it's very much not what the OP is complaining about. They don't like it either.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
The administrative state when it was thought up, had these people be mindless cogs that would pass and process information to the next level until clear orders were drafted and sent for whoever actually ultimately executes them. But consolidation of roles, education and computers now has many of these people aware of the picture they are painting and opinionated with regards to the orders and the people who gave them. Even in cases where they nominally don't have any discretionary power, they can selectively apply rigor, sabotage their own work, know who to inform or not inform of a situation, etc... to give themselves some margin of discretionary power.
And recently they seem to relish how much power leaking to the press gives them.
mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.
I mean, I am I completely misreading in Harry Potter the real world implication of the good guy position being that teens need to learn to fight while carrying their deadly weapons (wands) and it's only the bad guys that want to keep them unarmed, weak and vulnerable?
I don't think it can be read into everything, but I think there's definitely instances where the narrative strength of a trope that the author consciously rejects still forces them to argue for a position they abhor. Sometimes, especially when the author has strong cognitive dissonance in their worldview, a story wrestles away control of its own messaging from the author.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
It also helps that Israel's enemies also have a habit of chanting "Death to America" and have frequently killed American servicemen over the past several decades.
While in general I agree with your point, I'd point out that there's likely a reversed cause and effect here. America doesn't support Israel because its enemies chant "Death to America", Israel's enemies chant "Death to America" because America supports Israel.
Honestly I'm not really that surprised. It's the result of taking extremely sincere feminism and running it through the wringer that have been the last 8 years of so. Ishida went hyper-feminist during Gamergate, insufferably so; the comic went from trying (with limited success, but not entirely without success) to make an adult Calvin & Hobbes, to non-stop preaching. Then mainstream feminism was told "shut up, it's trans people's time now", and those who didn't toe the line were thrown in the TERF pit. There's essentially two reactions to being thrown in the TERF pit, with a spectrum in between them: 1) compartimentalize the trans stuff as being the only thing the mainstream liberal order is wrong on, but keep every other belief intact, or 2) question everything.
Ishida went closer to 2). I think he still compartimentalize the feminism as the one thing the liberal order is right on, but he went hard on the other side for everything else.
I think the comic is still annoyingly preachy and cringy though, just red colored cringe instead of blue colored cringe.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
I share in The_Nybbler's frustration because it seems like the only way the right gets what it wants is if it has control of absolutely every branch and level of government, including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own). If even ONE of them remains in the hands of the right, then sorry, not only the fucking machines remain, but some local judge is going to rule that the whole country has to hire more fucking machines.
Basically, why is it that in situations where power is being split, the result is invariably "more fucking machines"?
pigeonburger
7mo ago
It's funny because the day after the election I was overhearing my colleagues talking, and somehow, the impression they had was that Trump winning is the proof that rich people can just buy elections in the US. I don't expect that canadians would know much about american campaign finances, but still.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why.
I get your feeling, and I think the main culprit, the biggest reason the insular internet mostly collapsed is Reddit (and recently Discord). The technical superiority of Reddit when it came out, its ability to spin up new subreddits on any topic and its originally relaxed moderation turned it into a natural Schelling point for any community. Previously if I wanted to find an active community talking about topic_x, I'd google "topic_x forum" and look at some of the results and join a PHPbb (or similar) forum that seemed to have a vibe I liked. Now the first place I, or pretty much everyone, will think about is /r/topic_x. It will be bigger and more active than almost any other community about topic_x.
The only exceptions are going to be existing communities that don't want to be Schelling points that passively attract newcomers (like this place) or people who have an axe to grind against Reddit. And while I do myself have an axe to grind against Reddit, I have to admit I'm in the company of a lot of witches who really just want a place they can spam the n-word, and the communities created by that second group are likely going to suck.
Seeing that over a summer it was free game to take over neighborhoods, torch police stations, do nightly assaults on federal courtrooms, attempting to blind police officers, and in the previous years interrupt official proceedings (supreme court nominations), some people could have been given a wrong impression, yes. Not so much that the government wouldn't be interested in it, but that the judiciary branch would be so captured as to do what looks at least to one side like enforcing laws on blatantly political lines.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
(Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)
Ummm... I would guess maybe it's because his last name is more distinctive, he is "the" Trump that people would immediately think of if you said "Trump", while Harris is a fairly common name, and Clinton could refer to either Bill or Hillary.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
With a partisan media on their opponent' side, Trump supporters believe that anyone they can get through a primary that isn't actually working mostly for the other side will be cast in a way that scares the hoes. Trump's affectations are protecting him, they're not liabilities. In MMORPG parlance, he's a tank; he's such a big juicy target that his opponents can't help but focus all their fire on him, but he's also uniquely good at shrugging it off.
If Trump wasn't their number 1 obsession, and Vance was the most important target they had, couch fucking insinuations would be some of the least vile things the media would be saying about him.
I mean just yesterday former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that the head of Iranian counterintelligence was found in 2021 to be a Mossad double agent (alongside about 20 others in the unit). The head of counterintelligence! Pardon my swearing, but the one guy whose job it was to find spies was a fucking spy himself! Assuming it's true, and I don't see why it wouldn't be as it's massively shameful for Iranians to admit it, it's an absurd level of superiority and dominance Israel is showing. Israeli intelligence is so ahead of them that Iranians were unable to meaningfully vet that ONE guy at the top of the pyramid.
To me this is why the argument that some institutions are too important to be subject to cullings for political reasons has to be rejected if those organisations shove themselves into political fights. This tactic of crying "but think about the good libraries/public broadcasting/whatever else does" has to be severely punished, even if it extracts a cost from the punisher, if there is ever a hope for the ratchet to stop.
The one to blame for cuts and cullings is the activist who involved an organisation that is supposed to be owned by everyone into his activism, not the politician who finds himself either forced to do the firings and cuts or literally give taxpayer money to fund his opposition and goals his voters find aberrant.
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