professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
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User ID: 1157
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
Looking forward to someone trying to analyze in the future how much of the dropoff was due to Trump intimidation versus USAID cutting the NGO racket.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.
Major mens rea issue divining the difference between they incompetently wanted to undo anything Trump did versus they competently wanted (approximately) open borders but backtracked after the last minute once they finally realized it was it was such an electoral albatross.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
I mean, my interpretation of your comment is that DEI is everything indefensible (from your perspective), and everything that's defensible is not DEI.
Wouldn't it make more sense and be more charitable to distinguish that the ADA predates DEI as an acronym by 20 years?
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
Would a White researcher come off as unbiased in race research in your opinion?
In the social climate of the past 30 or so years? Quite possibly, though if the researcher themselves capitalized white that would be a signal that increases the prediction of bias. That's part of how we ended up with Biden.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
The term is overused but it's useful to have a shorthand for the particular effect Trump has on some people. It's worth distinguishing criticism of Trump from TDS. "Tariffs are mostly bad, or at least have been applied poorly" is a reasonable take, not TDS. Handmaid's Tale posters are TDS, always have been always will be, though useful to identify people who can be wholesale ignored.
Similarly someone should've coined ODS to distinguish "Obama is a good candidate" from the messianic wackadoo stuff.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
Pride is a fun social event (while certainly a sort of political propaganda) doesn't transgress it except in the minds of folks who throw sex acts and the existence of LGBT people in the same mental bucket
Pride is a motte and bailey of events that was originally specifically to transgress. It is completely disingenuous to act like throwing Pride and sex acts together is some absurdity; that's what pride was for its first 40+ years, and that's still what it is in many areas.
Surely, surely some fraction of the LGBT community can act like normal gosh-darn people and admit that a line can be drawn between And Tango Makes Three or whatever the equivalent with human characters is versus Pride Puppy or Grandpa's Pride (Noticing a theme here). AND YET! This absurd books that are practically beyond parody keep getting pulled up in schools.
Gay people are normal, yeah. While it's been toned down since Raytheon started sponsoring, a significant fraction of Pride is not.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
The Harvard letter was claimed to be sent before the final version was approved
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
Yeah, not my best writing. I mean that being respectful without affirming has been a losing strategy- teachers that try alternative naming schemes or avoid pronouns get fired (one example, though he did get a settlement), and it made the rounds recently that in 2022-2023 there was a toddler suspended from a UK daycare for an undisclosed "abuse against gender identity".
Personally I can't imagine a 3 year old being meaningfully bigoted to the point of suspension, though they are often rude. Out of the mouths of babes and all that. Got a kick out of my spawn of similar age asking her grandmother "why are you old?" last weekend.
AFAICT, from the progressive side, there is no such thing as respectful without affirmation. I understand why he as an advocate wants to present the possibility rather than declaring it impossible, but he is suggesting something that tends to result in negative consequences and long legal battles.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
I'd tag along on the trip, would be quite Enlightening I'm sure.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
Yeah, Colorado was so openly hateful they got to dodge the substantive ruling. Maybe they'll get there someday.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
What is the difference between a sincere belief derived from a religious framework vs a sincere belief derived from a philosophical one and why is religion given more weight in this regard?
Because when the foundation of the relevant rules were written (ie, the Constitution), there was less of a distinction drawn between those categories and approximately everyone was religious. I'll even count Jefferson despite him being (probably? there's better historians than I around here to correct me) the least religious Founder.
There are times that they're given roughly equal weight, like conscientious objection, but even then having a religious framework makes your argument easier because it provides evidence beyond your own biases and desires.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
you don't need to affirm with them, but you do need to treat them with respect.
Not that he can say it out loud, but AFAICT there no acceptable way to do both of these, and up until quite recently trying to do so would get a teacher fired or a student suspended.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
They saw a generally-pro-LGBT book and rubber-stamped it without even trying to judge its specific merits.
The topic is integrated into the teaching materials and suggested answers for addressing student questions, and it's difficult to get around the board's bigoted animus.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
it's a response to anti-trans attempts to equate trans women presenting female in public with drag.
Drag Queen Story Hour co-occurring with the rise of trans as a prominent... subculture? ideology? post-Obergefell claim-staking? surely plays a role in that conflation. Not sure if it can be meaningfully disambiguated.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
What We Owe The Future, MacAskill's book. Part IV where he says logic is fake, Bertrand Russell was a witch, and playing the philosophy game is bad comes quite close to undercutting much or all of his utilitarian project, IMO, but since then he's not addressed those ideas/issues.
He had to have been aware of that, since the very next day he posted Tower of Assumptions, quite cheekily playing the philosophy game, though it doesn't go so far as getting your eyes pecked out by seagulls.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
Forgot that one. Thank you!
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
Disappointed would be a preferable phrase, indeed.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
you’re okay with letting your less fortunate peers sink.
As the (deeply obnoxious, terribly hateful, easily hated) phrase goes, "skill issue."
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
he writes another essay saying pretty clearly that, okay, nothing has changed, lots of young men are still unhappy, but ultimately he likes the system the way it is and thinks it would be inhuman to change it.
Which essay is that?
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
the pigheaded blinders he puts on when defending his actual ingroup and beliefs. (EA
There was a little glimmer of something interesting in the WWOTF review where he allowed himself to be an outsider for a little while, and then the blinders clamped back into place. Sad!
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
establishing a career
Ehh... he shut down the old blog because of his old career, and then his main income became writing, he got an undisclosed (?) but presumably cushy windfall from Substack on the reputation of writing the occasional banger.
Totally agreed with you otherwise, none of this is surprising and I'm glad he hasn't gone an even more obnoxious failure mode (of which there are many; boring is a mild sin), but I would've expected the career change to incentivize recapturing the old spark, not give up on it completely.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
In my experience, there's an overlap in the Venn diagram of both indicates a certain kind of contrarian anti-woke type. The non-overlapping section for al-Awlaki would be anti-war leftists, and for Timpa more Online Right.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
From the right, I find reveling in violence, particularly for Outgroup reasons, off-putting. Bodycams are a useful tool, but treating the footage as entertainment isn't healthy.
From the left, I find such clear rejection of reality disturbing.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1mo ago
Was there a pivot after BLM?
Yeah, bodycams got a boost as one of the top 10 recommendations of Campaign Zero. On their archived website you can find that they've changed their mind because it doesn't reduce use of force (indeed, it tends to justify it) and mention that they previously tracked it as a positive move, but it's not mentioned at all on the new website.
The popularity of bodycam footage on the right is directly correlated to the turn against it on the left. Both are, frankly, gross.
It's been proposed that there is a comforting impulse behind conspiratorial thinking, to think that even if the mysterious Powers That Be are evil, at least they're competent! I propose a parallel here, that thinking of the EHC as morons is more comforting than thinking of their particular brand of disastrous signaling as only human. Perhaps it is that I do not want to think so poorly of humanity in the abstract, and so I want to disconnect the concept of humanity from the cause of their issues.
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