So now I guess it would be fine to have Morgan's sons under microscope and digging up any potential problematic antisemitic, misogynistic and racist behavior if they are such exemplars of uprightness. From now on to forever.
From what I understand his wife is a public figure who made a bunch of "funny" comments about Piers publicly. It isn't fun but she put it out there.
No. I think that it is a distraction and a low blow. I think it is a normal gentlemen's agreement not to bring family into such a debate, even if people brought their family up before themselves
In that case, Coates himself brought it up as part of a discussion on his evolution on Israel iirc. It's sort of odd to me that no one else can do the same, for the exact same reasons.
Like, it's one thing to defend Fuentes for being defensive given his strange life and because he's afraid of violence or his dad being fired but it was literally bringing up his own anecdote for the exact same reasons.
His father was not there to defend himself about such a wild speculation and accusation. It is just not right.
Given that his dad never appears on Fuentes' streams (AFAIK) this sort of argument functions more as a good reason Fuentes should never have put that into the world. He already put his father in that position. There actually isn't a firewall between what Fuentes says on stream to hardcores and what comes out in the more mainstream outlets especially when Fuentes is doing a promotional tour on said outlets.
Tanista
1d ago
Obviously no one should go to her house but it's not that hard a case. They're both public figures. He spouted off at the mouth, she did so too, multiple times. I don't know that anyone outside of groypers care but you can obviously bring up the state of his marriage if he's bringing it up and putting others down.
His sons are what would give me pause but I can't recall what context they were brought up in. I'd hope young kids could be kept out of it.
Assume Nick Fuentes was some rando leftist, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, would it be fair to bring up things his dad said about politics when asking about his own left radical views?
Tanista
2d ago
By the way Piers Morgan also mentioned his wife Celia Walden numerous times on his show. He literally mentioned his sons during this show, showcasing how empathetic and upright they are. Does this mean that Morgan's family is now fair game for any future discussion with him?
The behavior of his wife is literally one of the main rebuttals being used by Fuentes fans right now.
Fuentes did not reply, because he did not want to drag his father into this. He did not want to apologize or even explain his fathers behavior, because frankly it is none of Morgan's business.
Fuentes made it Morgan's business by putting it out there. Sorry, he pussied out. This was, to use OP's language, a shit-test where he didn't agree and amplify or even deflect, he just got angry and all of that Zoomer irony and unapologetic energy fell away.
Morgan did more harm to his cause than if he was muted but it's kind of absurd to think that we can't question a man who admits he's racist about potentially racist statements his dad made that he publicized and how that might have shaped his worldview from the start.
The modern leftist intellectual doesn't have any knowledge about why they think what they think
Modern intellectual leftists (the ones who get repeatedly booked anyway) often have a very elaborate theory of why they believe what they believe. Maybe it doesn't hold up but they can spin those assumptions out enough to fill up the time in a debate. And they'll at least have a set of anecdotes about why black people commit crime or the Middle East is a basket case because of the US. They'll at least have a filibuster. Piers sat around pretending to not get per capita.
I don't know if he's even a leftist, I think Piers is just a boomer from a genteel time when We Don't Discuss These Things (and, from his perspective, they weren't really major problems yet). And not a particularly smart or reflective one. My understanding is that his main talents are shamelessness and social climbing. Things have gone well for him, so why would he really think too hard about anything?
The stories out of Canada(which many people might not realize are from Canada) probably make it worse.
Ah, the old Canadian Internet Theory.
That said, when the tariffs first hit I was surprised at how many angry Canadians who'd otherwise pass I saw in the comment section of (EDIT: American) right wing youtubers.
This would matter if a) Europeans didn't already pay vastly more attention to US elections than the US does to theirs (it would not be a throwaway story if GOP volunteers came to the UK to campaign for Farage the way a few Labour volunteers worked for Harris) and b) there's any evidence that this would have a large impact.
America is just too polarized for it to matter. There are some Americans who love to be thought of well by Europeans but those people are now all in the Democratic Party. It doesn't really matter much to the populists and the right wingers are well aware that the elite class of Europe looks down on them for their coarse ways. Americans just don't have to care, frankly. Elections are for beating the near enemy.
Besides, there's an obvious power differential here. "Hit him back just as hard" is good advice for the playground but probably not smart here.
"Have police arrest more criminals while being less violent and more discerning" was not a significant camp in the BLM discourse, eithe
Because the BLM awakening (especially post-Floyd) wasn't actually about police brutality. It was about conjuring a scapegoat for the general failure of an entire community, one acceptable to both white and black educated classes.
Your solution is a solution to some problem, but not the one people care about. The result of more effective police would be to make the failure even more visible without the face-saving excuse.
There's no want for agency. A whole lot of effort is being expended, a bunch of plans are constantly made and acted on. It's more that only plans that fit a narrow window of acceptable discourse are even legible let alone tolerable.
Wait until you find out how much top entertainers in other disciplines make. Actors, models, sports stars...
A significant amount of the resentment towards mainstream celebrities who are political opponents is caused by this too I feel. It's explicitly the justification for "shut up and dribble"
Ingraham said she was not interested in the political advice from "someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball."
There's an additional wrinkle with Bonnie Blue (and some streamers who basically sell antisocial behavior like Johnny Somali or Logan Paul during his forest-exploring days also fall into the same bucket) because people probably think she represents a particularly corrosive mainstreaming of shamelessness. Is she significantly more attractive than some of the top pornstars over the last fifty years of the category? Not really. Is she more of a degenerate on camera? No. I'm not sure she's even richer than Jenna Jameson or others of that level. What she does exploit is the total breakdown of any cordon around this sort of behavior due to the internet and sites like Onlyfans.
Goddamnit, I was just considering dipping my feet in! I guess the six month wait period for Paradox holds.
Tanista
18d ago
Given the situation at the time and how much the Europeans needed America, Biden had far more leverage for his words to matter than usual. The majority of work for this would have been done under his administration, and certainly it would have helped if the American President showed zero ambiguity about how the court could be used.
Tanista
20d ago
Oop, cut an earlier bit. Biden supported the Europeans trying Putin for war crimes, while admitting the US didn't recognize the court either.
“He’s clearly committed war crimes,” Biden told reporters on Friday. “I think it’s justified,” he said, referring to the arrest warrant.
“It’s not recognised internationally by us either. But I think it makes a very strong point,” he added.
So basically a warrant from an organization that neither the US nor Russia recognize and will never actually lead to Putin's arrest because it's a "strong point".
While no one might be suicidal enough to try to try US servicemen there are other more vulnerable US allies that could be the victims of said court, so a strong US line (as opposed to "it's okay if it makes a strong rhetorical point") may have given people second thoughts.
Tanista
20d ago
There was also his stepping down to Prime Minister because of the constitutional limits on consecutive terms.
Tanista
20d ago
There's accusations that it was driven by more mundane motives, specifically to distract or avoid a sexual harassment charge
Putting that aside, I wouldn't underestimate the ability of Europeans to actually get high on their own supply.
He publicly came out in support of the action (while also maintaining the ICC's jurisdiction didn't apply to the US because ??)
As this situation is showing, the US president has some ability to make things difficult for the ICC. He could have held the line on the taboo and made it clear he didn't approve of the warrant. Instead he backed it.
China and North Korea bad
Honestly, one of my niggling doubts when I didn't take a stance on HBD was how the hell North Korea - despite appearing like an Africa-level basket case - was able to get nukes and survive being an incredible pain in the ass. It fit uncomfortably well with general East Asian competence, just for evil. Then again, of all cases listed, that's probably the one you can blame on geography the most.
If they didn't have Seoul in their sights and China at their backs they would likely have gotten stomped by the US regardless. But it always raised uncomfortable questions.
When the same set of easily rebuttable set of ideas that all resemble each other are always easily wack-a-moled one by one, its not a good sign for the overarching theory or set of theories that is outputting those theories. And that is a fundamental problem for environmental and historical theories at this point.
These books are also often mum on the next most likely success story, whereas Genes>Institutions/Lynnian takes have a clear answer we can at least consider (Lynn was bullish on former socialist states with high IQ like China and Poland but by 2000 that might not have really been inhuman foresight)
The one that really makes me baffled when I skim UK discussions is the idea that Britons wouldn't have human rights without the ECHR or some European organization. I would say there's a lot of self-serving myth-making to justify the European project but Brexit happened and people still seem to believe this stuff.
This is an obvious case of the ICC flying too close to the sun. Whether they like it or not, Israel is considered by the US to be a close ally.
As I said in another discussion recently on reddit: part of this is America's fault. They could have held to a line that non-signatory nations like Russia could never be punished by the ICC which would obviously also cover them and Israel.
Instead they decided to use it against Putin which probably emboldened this mission creep.
Tanista
21d ago
What the fuck were they doing other than not being Christian before? Or is it just that they survived when the Druids got wiped out or whatever.
They're not just any tribe that refused to convert. They're the tribe(s). They had the books first. Both Christians and Muslims appeal to the antiquity of Jewish religion to justify theirs (Muslims claim that Allah sends a prophet to all people and yet most all of the "canon" examples cited in the Qur'an are Jewish or draw from Jewish myth)
If you truly are God's chosen prophet/Messiah and you were spoken of in past Scriptures, why do the people who've held those scriptures for centuries reject you? The gentiles will ask.
It's simply a theological and political problem that requires an answer and the easiest answer is to discredit and attack the Jews themselves. As they themselves did to their less monotheistic/faithful brethren.
Besides religion? Besides nationalism?
A lot of the things people say about the Jews are said about other groups. Ilhan Omar gets the same charge of dual loyalty, with the same basis.
Complaints about white overrepresentation and privilege? Certain applicable to Jews. In hindsight it was sort of hubristic to expect that the young, especially Third Worlders who have ethnic and religious reasons to resent Jews, were going to just buy into the doublethink that "muh culture of education" would allow an exemption from the usual critiques of wypipo.
The difference is that Jews are disproportionately successful and that combined with the antisemitism taboo is great at shutting these complaints down, which apparently makes it worse.
Tanista
21d ago
A shame. A Fuentes-Destiny marriage would be the win for bipartisanship America needs
One option might have been, as you say, to try and mine what worked best in the EU and turn that into films. I'm not sure how well that would have worked. It has generally worked for superheroes, but superheroes are already a mess of different continuities, and films have been considered their own separate continuities from core Marvel or DC canon since the 70s.
I don't see why it matters? The EU was considered a separate continuity by most everyone except us nerds. They could have just wiped it and taken the bits they like and have now adapted anyway like Thrawn.
But there's plenty of stuff you could have used for background worldbuilding or character inspiration (like the post-Emperor warlord era and how the Republic grew) as opposed to doing no worldbuilding at all.
The latter is what I think Ross Douthat recommends here - "treat Darth Vader like Batman".
You can shove in Vader into many works because he's a guy in a suit. The problem with the ST that basically mandates a single canon is that Luke, Leia and Han (who elevate Vader in their interactions) just are certain actors. They didn't start as comic book characters, they are fixed in our minds as certain people in a certain, bounded story that has always been the only certain canon. Everything else changes around that canon but it's what people think of as Star Wars, not sixty different DC continuities and reboots. This is why the ST is a one-shot deal.
You can do what Douthat suggests on the TV side but - and I fully grant it might be the nerd in me - I don't see the point in having thousands of years of open canvas and not simply trying different stuff in different time periods or regions. This is, historically, how the EU handled the need for variety.
Yup. Failing to understand the basic point that discretion in charges leads to misleading criminal records is how Biden (or "Biden") ended up pardoning a witness killer. Though in that case the lower charge was not about leniency but the opposite.
Yes, he was! You just reminded me of this excruciating clip.
I'm doubling down on my "just a bit thick" diagnosis.
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