professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
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User ID: 1157
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
59m ago
I think the route from one to the other is shorter than you do, and the allowance of calling one's enemies Nazis (or cockroaches) makes it shorter still.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
1hr ago
But I don't think anyone is honestly confused about this.
Nazis have replaced the concept of Satan and demons as the "ultimate evil" in secularized Western culture. I do not think this is merely a pedantic issue when it's not merely in accurate in the way of an ambulatory anus, but as an effort to mark one's enemies as not just bad, not just evil, but THE ULTIMATE EVIL beyond any and all redemption.
a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
New flair inspiration, thank you.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
1hr ago
I'm not discussing actual communist regimes; I'm discussing American social mores downstream. The reality of who across the sea was worse is strangely uncorrelated.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
1hr ago
They don't think an honest understanding of their beliefs or speech could have led someone to do what he did.
Did this person spend 2020 in a coma and blissfully unaware?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
1hr ago
they still get honorary degrees from one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world.
It was June 2025. And the fact California has been a joke state with a fake justice system for 60 years is the reason she didn't spend 50 years rotting in jail instead of being feted as some sort of heroic philosopher.
But I should've been more explicit that I'm using the most famous examples as a sort of synecdoche for the larger associative problem. Too many liberals treat leftists as somewhere between misguided but admirably enthusiastic, and actually laudable. "No enemies to the left" was the wrong lesson to learn from the Civil Rights movement but it's the one that seems to have stuck out the long run. The right does not do this, the right should not do this in my opinion, but it's at the root of the problem Netstack is asking about- a particular kind of rot goes very deep.
So, when someone asks how does the left make a display of sincerity that they're really, really not associated with the psychos? I dunno, because history shows they're really fond of a subset of the psychos.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
1hr ago
The voters who swung hardest against Biden in 2024 were working class non-white voters - roughly the group who were most likely to see their incomes keep up with Bidenflation.
Reaction to inflation is less "a carton of eggs continues to be 0.1% of the monthly food budget tacked to X% of the total budget tacked to my current income, and so the increase in price is irrelevant to my increased income" and more "holy shit eggs $10 a carton and not $2.50." Much of that was bird flu culling, not inflation, so prices have come back down... but some of it was inflation, so they're still higher than a lot of people locked onto as "the reasonable price of eggs." And since the culling was happening at the same time as the inflation, it gets conflated in the brain for a lot of people.
Orange juice shrinkflation annoys me more, though, and I would suspect that plays a role too. "I'm visibly getting less for my money" is more instinctive than a budget calculation.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
1hr ago
Stacey Abrams, might've been even worse than Kamala. According to wikipedia Val Demings was one of the alternatives, but didn't get picked; maybe due to Kamala's higher name recognition from her failed primary run?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
17hr ago
"The left" has quite clearly thought of them as The Good People for a long time. Doing things the right doesn't is a big part of that.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
17hr ago
antifa
What exactly is the redeeming value in not coming down on antifa like a pile of bricks? Like, fine, "antifa's just an idea" and all that nonsense, but Rose City Antifa, anybody that showed up like a jackbooted thug wearing all black and started violence at any number of locations over the last several years.
They volunteered for violence, they put themselves out there. Why exactly do you need to care more about their wellbeing than they clearly do? Why not give Antifa up as the sacrificial goat they so clearly want to be?
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
17hr ago
the same enthusiasm
Half? A quarter? For the sake of ten normal people? How low do we have to go, here?
What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation?
Ever see the movie Fail Safe? The book is good too but then you don't get the recommended dose of Walter Matthau. If you haven't...
One massive tragedy is traded for another to prevent an even bigger conflict. The negotiations are direct, between high-ranking individuals; the consequences immediate. How do you make such a trade when you're talking about distributed social phenomena across classes, across government and private sector and in-between, across generations?
You’ll rightly protest that you never had any control over the kind of person who would snap like that.
Decades ago, some terrorists and murderers did as terrorists and murderers do. They spent a little time in jail, then they got professorships, they got sinecures, they mentored a future president, they still get honorary degrees from one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world. No right wing terrorist or murderer has gotten a sinecure. Not one of them is lauded by polite society or treated as anything less than what they are.
You may want to say "but that's only two... or three... or anyways, it's not that many people!" But that's kind of beside the point; not that many versus zero is an infinite ratio. "The left" may be big and diverse, but some portion of that big diverse tent is far more vertically integrated than the right. To be clear, I don't want the right to start rewarding terrorists! I don't want the right to be better at protecting its scum. But the problem of "the left" treating their terrorists somewhere between tolerable and laudable instead of scum worthy of, at best, a life rotted away in prison, has existed a long time. On the somewhat less evil end of the bias problem: if you riot on the left, you get kid gloves; if you riot on the right, you get the book thrown at you (to be fair: unless your guy wins and you get a pardon).
I don't know what it looks like to undo that. I don't know how the leadership of today undoes terrible decisions and stupid social trends started 60 years ago or more.
Would jailing Angela Davis for her golden years make a difference? Unfair in some ways, a costly signal in some ways, but would it matter? Denouncing and cancelling Destiny in some bizarre post-modern Sister Soulja moment? It's something, I guess.
I don't know, man. I don't want to take another step towards The Troubles. All I know is that boilerplate denouncements aren't enough, and no one seems to be trying anything else.
Edit:
Maybe some time in the stockades
Tell you what, let's put Biden out and throw some tomatoes at him, January 21 2029 we'll do the same with Trump, everybody has a good laugh and we have a Political Jubilee Year.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
18hr ago
Or Bill Clinton.
Really I just think it's funny that this crazy letter to the editor from 1996 is even digitized to find.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
18hr ago
I'd make the trade, if this means people that had a che shirt or hammer and sickle poster in college are treated the same as if they'd had a swastika poster- that is, completely excluded from polite society.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
18hr ago
then it must remain appropriate for non-violent pro-immigration extremists to refer to ICE agents as Nazis.
No, because the Nazis were a real and defined party, of which there are approximately zero surviving members. Referring to them that way is way more biased and way more loaded.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
18hr ago
56% of "very liberal" and 73% of liberal respondents say it is "always or usually unacceptable" for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose
90% and 91% for very conservative and conservative, respectively. Likewise,
55% and 68% say that "violence is never justified" "in order to achieve political goals".
88% and 83%.
You can quibble about the 50/50 comment, but man, I'd be bothered at just how much more acceptable being a ghoul and being a terrorist is among liberals; even if it's still less than half, it's twice as common as among conservatives.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
18hr ago
most high ranking Democrats
Which is a much more selected and narrow grouping than Arjin's "Blue Tribe," even more so once you get into the issue of how to define high ranking.
Sure, Chuck Schumer has enough sense decency to not say "reaping the whirlwind" at that particular moment, but Ilhan Omar has less couth. Talking heads of various prominence, less still. The kinds of Blue Tribers that we might interact with online or in real life, less still again.
Whenever a school gets shot up
When a school gets shot up, there's no one that says "but they kinda deserved it." The downplaying is a totally different form.
professorgerm
found a needlessly pedantic hill to die on
19hr ago
There's a fringe of radicals who would still try to doxx/hurt/kill them, but they would look much worse in the eyes of the wider population than in the current status quo where the people they're fighting go around dressing and acting like supervillains.
I lost this kind of hope in the common left-liberal when otherwise-sane people with good careers started attacking random peoples' cars because of comments by the car manufacturer's CEO.
You're either overestimating the goodness of "normies" or underestimating the frequency of the fringe.
The honorary degree I had in mind was all the way back in... June 2025. The acceptance is strong and there's no movement to disclaim them.
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