This is part of why principled groups can stay principled so easily. An organization like FIRE truly believes that free speech is beneficial.
The rest of the post makes arguments I consider weak but this bit is laughable. Groups do not, in fact, stay principled easily. That's the entire problem.
FIRE was founded in 1999. The ACLU was a significantly older and more effective advocate for free speech before the anti-Trump hysteria split it between principled liberals and activists. In fact, FIRE probably owes a lot of its current prominence (and its position in your post) to the fact that it's very much not easy to stay principled
Tanista
8d ago
Yes, this is the stance that conservatives eventually took. Questioning whether the hold was illegal, whether he had fentanyl in his system, whether Floyd was another deadbeat criminal.
I don't think it was the initial reaction. The initial reaction was "ooh, looks bad".
Tanista
8d ago
Harry Potter has Hogwarts houses with found families based on character traits ordained by a magical hat. Both are about social institutions that provide the security of structure without the rigidity of oppression, with many stories revolving around how morality and justice override authority.
It's basically sports teams for nerds as well.
But also after a long period of miss after miss, even my geeky friends aren’t into Star Trek. I know more fans of The Phantom Menace than The Next Generation. I remember when I took IT classes and the instructor was appalled when I was the only one in the class who copped to liking Trek. Nerd culture has changed.
Interesting that this applies to me, despite not really being a central example of a nerd (bounced between Africa and the UK and came to America relatively late) . I never really had "my" Star Trek show, I did catch some episodes and Nemesis (which didn't help) but I was more of a Star Wars/Stargate and then Battlestar kid. My impression was that I simply fell through the cracks between major ST shows but I checked and Enterprise was airing right up until the time of BSG's first season and Voyager and SG-1 overlapped so those shows were out there.
Might just be a change in values or people tiring of it? Stargate was milscifi without the utopianism.Battlestar was self-consciously made by former Star Trek writers to avoid problems they thought Trek had (and to be much darker in a post-9/11 world). Just as Sci-Fi Channel took BSG and Stargate out back and shot them when they were seen as outdated. I thought it was absolute folly but they may have been overcorrecting due to past experience.
There were multiple dress rehearsals for a national reckoning with race over black males getting killed by police or vigilantes. A lot of those cases (e.g. Michael Brown, Trayvon) didn't really pan out as good outlets or didn't have video.
With Floyd, we did. The video was bad enough that, iirc, initially even conservatives were sympathetic.
Tanista
9d ago
The original Mary Sue was a a parody of Star Trek female self-inserts, interestingly enough. Apparently so many people were sending in this sort of work to a Star Trek fan magazine they wrote Mary Sue to parody the phenomenon.
She wrote a vampire romance story where the main characters waited until marriage. In fact the entire story seems to be built on top of resisting the temptation to sleep together before then; Edward's bloodlust an obvious metaphor for actual lust.
The entire vampire baby plotline (where the choice is between aborting a fetus eating the main character from the inside out or...to let that happen and let her give birth and likely die) is basically an extended pro-life parable. It might be the most successful version ever really.
Characters explicitly refuse to call it a fetus and demand their opponents use the b word.
I am fully open to the conspiracy theory that Iron Heart had writers who were self-aware and actively rooting for its downfall.
The thing to remember here is that the show was conceptualized much closer to the Floyd/BLM time period. It's just been delayed forever, presumably because they realized what they made after the high faded and tried to cut it into something viable or dump it when it would do the least brand damage.
In light of the absurd views on crime that flourished then, I can understand why they decided to make the genius with the full scholarship to MIT a criminal without really considering the "Stormfront or SJW" implications.
The shaming of "mediocre white men" or "nepobabies" is just par for the course. It's a reflex.
Tanista
9d ago
I mean, I'm a girl (at least a good while ago) and I like SF and I thought they ruined "John Carter" because they didn't know what to do with it or how to market it - dropping "of Mars" from the title was the first signal they hadn't a clue.
In this case, it seems like the decisions were made by the director who had a blank cheque due to his animated work and wasn't the most objective about John Carter's place in the modern scifi landscape (the perilous place of having influenced deeply successful and beloved works while not being as popular)
A lot of stuff in these movies are like this, reused badly or inexplicably. Even down to Holdo's Leia-style costuming frankly. Leia dressed that way in ANH because she was still undercover in the Senate, still a princess. Why does Holdo dress like that during open warfare?
Tanista
11d ago
So, neither wanting to get deeply involved, a fairly predictable pattern emerges. First, the left tries to support the “black community,” or at least the image they have of them. This tends to be through charity and lenience towards crime. This generally does not go well, and without seeing any positive outcomes, the general public starts getting sick of crime. Then the right wing sweeps in, declares the problem in racial(-ly coded) language, and cracks down hard. It doesn’t take long to notice that this policy rests on practical elements of prejudice against blacks, and so the general public starts swinging the other way…
The language always becomes racially coded because the underlying phenomenon is too. If you have one group that's massively more prone to crime, any attempt to attack criminals will lead to that word being associated with that group - until the problem resolves itself.
How do we know this? Because even left-wingers do not escape. Hillary Clinton was criticized for her own usage of terms like "superpredator" - meant to describe young, "feral" teens committing crime with abandon but it was then taken to be a racial dogwhistle based on who it was applied to. Trump, bizarrely, used it against Biden as well.
Are they? Then why is India a dumpster fire?
Cause all the good Indians are overseas, obviously.
It seems pretty clear that rhetoric from the top, especially from Trump, has pushed nativist ideas into the open. The strong version of this argument is that this has moved beyond simple policy disagreements (like border security) and has become a real cultural attitude of exclusion. How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?
I don't take those immigration arguments seriously. America is and will remain an attractive destination because America is doing better than most of the world, same as always. Americans are still, factually, incredibly immigrant-friendly by most standards. Hell, I think Trump may end up suffering because of the one thing he undoubtedly did well: closing the border reduces the salience of the matter and normies become much less willing to tolerate his other immigration shenanigans.
Complaints by downwardly mobile people online won't change than an Indian American woman is married to the VP right now and is closer to power than any online dissident rightist or person bitter about being driven out of a Google job
The argument I would make is that the left is better at this, according to the Right's own theory of the case. They took over the institutions more effectively, to the point where the attempted populist reclamation (which came pretty late) looks hamfisted and illegitimate in comparison. They possess the bulk of the human capital and their ideology is just baked into the culture now. So there'll be huge payback when they inevitably get into power with the support of a radicalized normie base. If you think this leads to awful decisions and a never-ending polarization spiral, it's pretty bad for everyone, not just Republicans.
For me, as much as I've been infuriated with progressive activism the past decade, the censorship rollback has revealed that the leftists were, in fact, right about many of the rightoids.
They've always been right that some people are racist. The steelmanned counter-argument is just that the cure is worse than the disease . Progressives themselves agree that pure racial animus alone is not that important, which is why they define it away via "racism= prejudice + power" . Progressives can't be trusted not because racism doesn't exist, but because it's a blank cheque for a bunch of very stupid and/or illiberal policies.
Tanista
12d ago
I mean, not all of them. There are definitely SJWs who believe that SJ doesn't count as politics but indeed "just common fucking decency"*, although there are certainly others who'll yell at anyone who thinks it's possible to be apolitical.
I think the "personal/everything is political" is a better explanation of the mindset than "just common fucking decency". Especially because it's paired with a sort of almost gnostic/mystery cult mentality. The Onion parody of the general mindet of "if only you were educated as I was" is instructive: "just decency" doesn't require induction into a political discipline.
"It's just decency" can be taken as an attempt to build consensus that ran out of control, precisely because of the dynamics you note.
Now, you could argue that all the democracy-bombing was window dressing and each instance was actually motivated by hard geopolitical and economic interest, but then how do you disprove the same statement about the Commies?
You can't. But this is a realist argument so the out already baked in is that international and domestic politics are different beasts.
Discrimination in sports? Like 73% of the NBA players being black? There are no level playing fields in sports. You can compensate for some genetic advantages (like high testosterone), but then the people who win will simply win through other genetic advantages.
Precisely. If we let everyone play, women would simply be shut out.
Which is why women's sports gives women a place to play that they otherwise wouldn't have, society has decided that 50% of the population being mostly locked out is bad, even if we don't care that Michael Phelps crushes the dreams of all his male competitors daily. There are critiques of Title IX and how it's interpreted wrt what counts as a "sport" but the plain purpose was not to facilitate males destroying the whole point of having female sports.
There's no point in trying to even have a philosophical discussion about which biological advantages society decides counts: what they're doing is just against the law. There's already a law passed to protect women's sports and many universities are simply acting against those rules. That they may feel coerced by a past administration to do it simply says that that administration was also wrong.
If you want to have that debate push for another law and we can have a real discussion on the merits of mixing sports, with a positive case made for this stuff outside of bogus definitional arguments and suicide threats, instead of skin-suiting Title IX and then pushing the burden of proof unto the side that wants to stick to it as it was.
And the "endangering women" thing is even worse. Are there credible accusations of people abusing their trans status to rape or grope women in their protected spaces, above the base rate?
Can you explain your thought process here? Like...why is it that people always go to "a trans person wouldn't abuse their trans status"?
Besides the obvious problems with this, it's a bit akin to saying there's no problem waving through Orthodox Jews in airport security because Jews aren't as likely to do suicide bombings. The point is obviously that weakening the standard allows any bad actor to exploit the situation because trans status isn't exactly based on having completed surgeries now.
This seems self-evident to me. But it is not to a whole swath of people, the question is why we have a gap here.
I was going to suggest that it's caused by priming but OP did say "men in women's spaces" not "transwomen in women's spaces" so I don't even have that explanation.
Tanista
13d ago
People understand it's political. That's why the claim is often that science is always political so you're either for good things or for bad things.
But simply stating "I thought we were on the verge of a thousand year woke reich and would never face consequences (but I certainly would if I defected)" is unflattering.
Tanista
13d ago
The other way to look at it is that the whole thing is so riven with enemy collaborators that you throw a rock in what is ostensibly the field that needs politics the least and the people you hit are also complicit so fuck it, carpet-bombing is called for.
Tanista
15d ago
Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.
The government can bypass the Courts even on issues of fundamental rights. Poilevre threatened this as a way to get round judges blocking penalties for criminals.
So, theoretically, a Canadian PM could come in and just hit ignore every time the judiciary tries to interfere with their immigration law. But this has never happened and I don't even know how people would react if it did.
The politicians are now talking about implementing mandatory minimum sentences in order to fix the problem. My guess is, it won't work.
America ran this experiment. Did it fail?
My impression is that the subversion of the punishment now happens when prosecutors refuse to charge or hold criminals or the law is changed on things like felony shoplifting, not judges failing to deliver the legally mandated minimum.
Tanista
18d ago
Johnson and Pascal do have some chemistry with one another, but as my girlfriend pointed out, it's the chemistry you expect between a girl and her gay best friend, or perhaps a girl and her cool uncle. It was hard for me to believe they were romantically interested in one another, even if it's implied that Pascal's character is significantly older than Johnson's (although probably not quite as much as their IRL age gap of ~15 years).
It's been a while since I saw it but that one I thought was deliberate.
The revelation about his character casts their entire relationship in a different light.
Pascal's character didn't approach her because of chemistry, but for validation.
Tanista
18d ago
I don't know if Chris Evans is a bad actor so much as out of practice. His post MCU run isn't exactly a Pattinson/Radcliffe-style rush to stretch himself.
This is the first real movie I've seen him in since like Knives Out (which he was fine in). The rest has been streaming slop like Ghosted and Gray Man that might as well be AI generated and he could probably do in his sleep.
Tanista
18d ago
A leftist might also argue that shooting first and helping the descent into lawlessness without public buy-in benefits fascists, who already believe in violence and want to discredit the status quo. It's especially bad if Trump already controls the government.
A much less extreme form of trying to play the man (all of the prosecutions, which Democrats do not see as unprovoked) has arguably already backfired.
I tend to perceive progressive strains of liberalism as making the assumption that civilization as they know it is tge default state of humanity and you can’t really destroy it.
This is difficult to square with the constant neuroticism around reactionary enemies who seek to destroy this state or return everyone to a much worse status quo. There's always someone about to put y'all back in chains.
I recognize the quoted section describes a psychological tendency amongst some very sheltered leftists especially, but "you can't destroy what we have" doesn't really fit the hysteria shown by the references to The Handmaid's Tale or - of course - Weimar Germany and the Nazis.
RDM complained about Star Trek tropes and went out of his way to avoid them, only to then fall into the basically-unbuilt mystery box nonsense we had to deal with for a decade after Lost launched (to add insult to injury Lost probably also paid off its myth stuff much better than he did)
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