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8mo ago
ThenElection's post seems to imply that "death to Jews", "English people should die in a fire" exist on the same vein of hate speech that would be opposing Muslim/Trans hate speech. I guess to some extent that makes sense because of Muslim/Jew enmity. But it's smuggling in too much to pretend the the fairness here on most people's mind is not white person, nationalistic person, straight person, conservative person, and not just that Jewish is treated as a protected class along with Muslim.
I can't find it in me to believe that this is anything but performative pearl-clutching on Bohacek's part used as a reason to do what he wanted to do anyway. I suspect his recent DUI conviction has probably made it look impossible to get re-elected and he's doing what he believes is right outside of party lines or he's just lashing out because the GOP was going to primary him because of the DUI or something like that. The alternative is that he's seriously retarded.
Anyway, here's Bohacek's response to questions on redistricting(?) that started all this:
Many of you have asked my position on redistricting. I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter. Those of you that don't know me or know my family might not know that my daughter has Down Syndrome. This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences. I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.
No, I didn't skip anything there. I know dems are making hay about the "slur" but the fact that a politician of any kind is deflecting policy questions this blatantly is pretty embarrassing. Both from a standpoint that he could (and did) get away with it, but also how unbelievably lazy and obvious it was as a deflection.
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9mo ago
"Jamie, pull up that article about gen z kids raised on iPads not knowing what files and folders are."
I was always skeptical of this but I'm in a discord for a fairly old indie game and someone showed up and wanted to install a music expansion mod to it but couldn't fathom where to put it in the file structure even with images and several people describing. Eventually, after several video examples were made she/they figured out to put a folder full of music in the "music" folder. It is a game that's a portable install so they at least knew how to unzip something.
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10mo ago
They do matter because what's on the front page of Reddit is decided by what is bot upvoted. And the first comments are controlled and decided before it reaches the front page. It's all inertia after it gets there. You could say that because they reach the front page they're more pollutant to the truth because there's more eyes on them but I really don't think that people in 2025 are looking at Reddit and either not completely ignoring and avoiding political content or are not fully on board with the positions that are always fully left even knowing that some of them might be lies.
Maybe there are people being incepted by lies from Reddit but my guess is that those people are just being incepted by things they already wanted to believe anyway. This is all quixotic at best.
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10mo ago
I'd be hard pressed to think that any people who regularly post in dedicated political spaces aren't engaged in pure conflict theory especially when its a place like Reddit which is naturally and unnaturally designed to hide all pushback (mods controlling topics, downvotes hiding the wrong opinions). This is a culture war, and they believe their way of life is at stake at the very least. Of course they lie, that would be my default assumption given the low-quality and high incentives of most places that discuss politics. To me this is just a day that ends in y comment.
I mean Reddit is going to be more politically slanted than anything on /pol/ just because what they want the narrative to be is controlled by upvotes, downvotes, bots, and mods. And on 4chan mods or janitors might fuck with things or try to but pretty much half the posts in /pol/ at any given time are people trolling because its designed to be unpreventable and when they do try to prevent discussion of a topic it goes poorly (gamergate). Reddit just chugs along, lets get every single subreddit to ban twitter - done. No problem even if the majority of users didn't care or want that, just chugs along.
At this point continuing to concern yourself with that is just outrage masturbation. You linked to politics, politics, unfiltered news, and bluesky skeets. Politics I know is the most left leaning place I can possibly imagine and the others are probably worse. Pointing out moments when /r/politics lies for their own narrative is like shooting fish in a barrel overfilled with fish. Even the most reddit-pilled reddit user will shrug off the denizens of /r/politics with being arguments-as-soldiers liars as par for the course. And I'm sure those other subreddits hold about as much political water for being balanced as the_donald or kotakuinaction does.
I do think there's something to be said about Reddit only holding stigma with enemies of it. A "normie" will not really care if you said you read something on Reddit, but if you said the same thing and gave the same information and said you got it from 4chan or Twitter you'd be a racist, even if only slightly, and if you said it was from Facebook you'd be doling out misinformation or at the least boomer-tier out-of-touchness. Reddit might be, at a glance, easily seen as dominated and controlled by the left but it doesn't carry a stigma which I imagine is exceedingly useful in wagging the dog which I expect is the intention with conflict theory throwing-shit-at-the-wall-and-hoping-it-sticks way tallying of evil to preemptively win or bury an argument.
I do think this is why Elon is more hated than Trump in my opinion because he stole Twitter from the left which was used in the exact same way that Reddit is used. Stigma-free narrative control. Bluesky doesn't have that, even if Twitter/X is now racist, Bluesky is not just what normal people think about a subject in the way that twitter was presented before the buyout or Reddit is bundled and sold as now. (Reddit does have to be bundled but the bundling does work).
Anyways. Ever since I stopped going to Reddit because I was tired with the political discussions filling every single subreddit, regardless of what the content was supposed to be, I've been much better off and I think you should probably try to ignore it, too.
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11mo ago
As well as what others have said, I imagine its a unit cohesion thing as well. Exempting people is going to make others that don't get exempted take exception to those that do. But I don't really have any strong opinion on this.
Really, I just wanted to post some Generation Kill John Sixta: "This what happens when you don't enforce groomin' standards. The mens gets all lax. And then other standards fall. Devil Dog here stops using his chinstrap - goes over a bump, kevlar goes flying off his head - and our protective posture is weakened."
Police that moostache! Ya'll lookin' like a bunch of Elvises!
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11mo ago
For much of horror it is an amplification and expansion of a mystery. Instead of who killed whom and why, it becomes how is this possible and how do we stop it? And often the answers will not be available but that's part of the appeal of horror that it can't answer everything or more often that it won't. You get what the story provides, horror makes it easy to be sloppy, yeah, but it also makes sure it's a genre that can allow anything to happen.
Now, what you're describing is the tone of horror. The telltale signs that show or trick the audience into believing that anything can happen. In other genres it's very rare for things not to work out, for evil to triumph, for the protagonist to lose and die, but it's accepted as part of the genre of horror. If characters can die horribly than it's more possible that important characters can die. If important characters can die then evil can win. If evil can win then you're watching something that you can't predict.
But this goes beyond plot contrivances. Unless a story goes out of its way to tone-match to another genre then horror is the catch-all bottom of the pit for anything weird. If it's time travel and it doesn't go out of its way to try to be a comedy or make damn sure known that it's scientific then it ends up in horror. Horror is the genre without a safety-net to make sure that it stays within certain boundaries. Sure, it makes it easy to have things end up worse because genre boundaries usually exist for a reason to make things more enjoyable but for a lot of people the risk is worth the reward because they crave things that are different, odd, unexplained or even gross.
Aside from the rest, the gross, the gore, is a taste that not everyone has but it's a human appetite that's really not served elsewhere but there are people that watch pimples being popped, or surgeries, or even actual people dying. There's an aspect of just straight up visceral response to the thing be it disgust or awe but just a shock out of the humdrum of thinking that someone being murdered doesn't matter or is nothing. A movie about a serial killer that strangles victims doesn't destroy is disrespect the body enough to make people care or be invested, the deeper we go the more we force the audience to get invested in what's happening. For most of Saw the people in the traps are people that are bad and a lot deserve to die but the horror at the disfigurement, destruction of their bodies, the struggle against death, we suddenly care whether they live or die when we probably wouldn't before if it was a just .22 to the back of the head or a rope around their necks. I don't like the saw movies, really, but I have to admit the entirety of the gore and grossness makes the deaths inside it feel closer to real than they would have otherwise and each successive one makes you want the next character to survive the trap(s). It's more expensive than swelling violins but it's probably more effective as well.
But I'll go back to what I said before, you're describing the tone of horror movies which is basically a costume these days and it's specifically trying to make you believe that anything can happen to heighten excitement. There are quite a lot of horror movies that aren't horror but just wear it as a costume these days and there are quite a lot of movies that are called horror just because they have more gore than is acceptable or set a large expectation that good guys can lose. Maybe tone is what horror actually is but I don't think that Silence of the Lambs or Green Room are horror just because they have some or a lot of that tone.
It sounds like you just don't enjoy horror and that's fine. Horror is the bottom of the pit avoiding every other genre's safety nets for good or ill.
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11mo ago
I've always felt the way Mulder describes it in War of the Coprophages on the X-files about most insects that are big enough to fully make out their body parts. Zooming accomplishes the same effect.
Mulder: No, no, no. I’m not afraid of them. I hate them. One day, back when I was a kid, I was climbing this tree when I noticed this leaf walking towards me. It took forever for me to realize that it was no leaf.
Scully: A praying mantis?
Mulder: Yeah, I had a praying mantis epiphany and as a result, I screamed. And not, not a girlie scream, but the scream of someone being confronted by some before unknown monster that had no right existing on the same planet I inhabited. ... The mysteries of the natural world were revealed to me that day but instead of being astounded I was repulsed.
Terrestrial television has been a walking corpse for over a decade. The only things that can bring in ratings to actually crow about anymore are sports. Grey's Anatomy is still pulling in the highest ratings some weeks (yes, it's still on the air) and the ratings it pulls are half of what it pulled a decade ago and half again what it was pulling when it started. Late Night, though, is a special kind of undead especially since Leno left and even then I doubt it was making the network much money.
I remember reading a while back that late night shows are very different from other shows in that they shed a massive amount of audience something like two-thirds of the viewers turn it off by the musical act and about half turn it off right after the monologue. For a show that doesn't really have a long-tail way to make money the ratings of these shows represent a lie and everyone actually involved in spending money on them know this, Colbert/Kimmel/etc are not getting ad buys that represent anywhere near what the ratings might suggest because the a large portion of those ratings don't have any ad viewership.
I'm sure the fact that the two interview segments and music segments are also usually just sponsored segments in anything but name help things seem more worth it because there's really not a lot of options for press junkets to even get any sort of play at all. But as a viewer, unless the host is funny or willing to go off script, they're really not worth watching. The fact that ABC is pulling Kimmel is probably the biggest alarm bell that not only do these shows not make money, they're probably not even useful as ads anymore because they've got the studio synergy (ABC/Disney), he's the only game in LA/Hollywood--which costs less than New York as a rule-- and he's literally only famous for being a late night host (and this is coming from someone who lives in California and listened to the local radio show he was on before he seemingly randomly ended up as a late night show host) so he had to be cheaper than dirt when he started.
Of course the, "when he started," is doing a a lot of heavy lifting here. Most shows that have any amount of longevity these days die from costs inflating. The second contract is more expensive than the first, and the third more than the second, and eventually the bottom falls out. If new late shows pop up with no names like Kimmel then the show itself being a pittance of ratings was never the reason, it was just too expensive to keep the hosts. It's amazing to me that the only way they seem to make any money aside from the first airing is cutting stuff up for youtube but there has to be some licensing deal that fucks things up because even on their own streaming platform they only have the current seasons of their late night shows. Why not just throw every Letterman onto Paramount plus (or whatever the new name is) and squeeze just a little value out of a library that's basically doing nothing. But maybe they can't due to how the shows work licensing-wise and that's why they're not worth making. It's gotta burn rent-free in some executive's head the absolute insanity of filling out an entire 8-11 schedule five or six days of the week and nobody fucking cares or watches (for many years it's felt like the big three networks program for every available hour they can out of pure prestige and if they didn't then they were at the CW level, low class television for teen girls and idiots, even fox at least tried late night) because they're watching the US office through for the fifteenth time. Turns out the same inertia that kept people throwing on late night shows they didn't really care that much about also applies to them throwing on old sitcoms or light hour-longs like Suits.
I will say, these shows (Colbert and Kimmel) suuuuuucked. Like I only watched Kimmel maybe 20 times over the past few decades and every time it was mostly Meh, but I never watched him when he got into his woke arc. But Colbert was horrible and has been horrible since the first season but I watched that entire first season and some of the second. It was never funny, the interviews were always ambien-laced cotton candy, and it had the worst bits I've ever seen in late night that wasn't some no-budget show like Samantha's Bee's or W. Kamau Bell's. I guess the good writers from the Colbert Report didn't come with him (that show was definitely losing steam by the end and was mostly coasting on reusing jokes but Stephen could pull that off).
There had to have been a concerted effort to make all shows copy The Daily Show's success, at least with young people because their eyes are worth more. But it didn't ever really translate, they cut up the daily show into so many pieces that none of them were nearly as good as it was and the regular late night shows picking up the baton to pander partisanship were not funny enough to pull it off. For partisan ribbing to work it has to be funny and if you're not trying to be funny in a late show monologue then you actually better say something interesting instead. Doing neither is certainly a choice but I also can't imagine Kimmel suddenly becoming neck deep in woke wasn't explicitly accepted or even pushed by the executives above him and this is just a fig leaf to throw out dead wood.
Because I think it's notable that Colbert just won an emmy, for a show that is by all accounts a financial failure and that's never really had a good bit or monologue as far as I could tell or have heard only because people were convinced that Trump ordered it cancelled and they're signing the resistance pledge. ABC probably saw all that shit and went "Fuuuuuuuuucckkk, how are we gonna get rid of Kimmel now?" and here we are.
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11mo ago
I don't know, whether or not it's a rarity, I think the reason this is getting this much attention is because it's on video. The same with the subway stabbing that this subsumed or even George Floyd. If there was public video of those school shootings I think there'd be a major national conversation about them. Seeing someone die evokes much more of a reaction than seeing a dead person, and even less than reading about a dead person. Politicians obviously want to protect themselves but most people don't really care about politicians, or political people, not in the way that this would be an important event to them. But this guy died and they saw it happen. It imparts a connection without any other knowledge of him. I suppose it's why martyrdom can be so captivating.
I also think this is why it seems so much worse that the ghouls are dancing on a grave. The video removes the steps of abstraction that should make it easy to treat a political enemy as someone who should die because they're bad. You could believe that the violence and death was abstract enough that they didn't really mean it. It becomes harder to rationalize the ghoulishness when you and the person you're arguing with just watched a man die. I think when /pol/ comes to you instead of you having to go to it that will definitely shock and stir a lot of people into continued interest.
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11mo ago
How, specifically?
from the wiki:
Boelter claimed to have military training and a career in private security
His anti-abortion views are considered a possible motive.
Boelter was registered to vote in Oklahoma as a Republican for the 2004 United States presidential election
Boelter's wife told investigators their family "prepared for major or catastrophic incidents"
He's also a white guy that was wearing a cowboy hat in CCTV footage.
These all track right wing to me. There's a ton of confounders to this, yeah, which is why even his affiliation was muddy. But in situations like these affiliation is being used as an assumed motivation most of the time. I don't think that's true but I was just trying to meet Skibboleth halfway to try to maintain decorum since the post was mostly just pure seething.
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11mo ago
That's exactly what the wikipedia article says. But Boelter tracks to right wing and has said he was right wing 20 years ago.
It just reads, to me, like Skibboleth giving up and getting mired in the same guesswork where everything is made up and the points don't matter that he's decrying which undermines the point just a bit.
You eventually get crests or something that alter your attack moveset (but require you to unlock equipable slots all over again) and the first one i got changed the downward plunge to much more forgiving hitbox that's slightly slower but you get it after you've probably gotten used to the fast diagonal or at least had to use it for four to five hours.
It's funny you should mention social contribution because to my knowledge both of California's biggest welfare programs (Calfresh and Medical) are going to be restricted unless the person has a job, is disabled, in education, or performs a certain amount of community service. They say they're going into effect this year for Calfresh and next year for Medical but I'll believe it when I see it because they were already postponed by years at this point but in any case they already did pass laws that at least in some way tried to restrict eligibility aiming toward some kind of prosocial behavior.
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