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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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The Chris Kaba verdict is in, and it's exactly what everyone expected.

https://news.sky.com/story/met-police-officer-who-shot-chris-kaba-cleared-of-murder-13234639

The jury reportedly took only 3 hours to decide on the verdict, indicating that it isn't exactly what you'd call a tough case. Meanwhile, the initial CPS prosecution decision iirc took nearly a full 6 months to be cleared to go ahead, indicating that there was immense deliberation on whether it should go ahead at all in the first place.

So why did it go ahead? Well, the answer is probably somewhat obvious. Now, it's normal in the UK for every police firearms discharge to result in an investigation, but to actually go to court on such shaky grounds... I can only imagine that it was to head off "community tensions".

Activists in the UK have been desperate to ape the BLM movement over here, to have their very own moment where they could take to the streets and... do whatever it is they planned on doing. We had copycat protests during 2020, with brave activists shouting "hands up don't shoot" at entirely unarmed average British police officers. This case seems to be what most of them pinned their hopes on as the trigger point; you can see from the article above that those hopes still burn brightly despite this should-be fatal blow.

So, to head off inevitable riots if they didn't prosecute, CPS decided to put an innocent man through the justice system, costing time and taxpayer money on a prosecution that was doomed from the start, in order to try and appease a community that was itching for a reason to get heated and acquire some new Nikes. Truly, to my mind there is no better representation of the utter spinelessness of our leaders and elites in the face of accusations of racism and threats of violent protest than this prosecution.

The MacPherson Report published in 1999 forms the basis of UK law enforcements soft-touch approach to racial minorities and is critical when considering how the UK Met has gotten so soft (till maybe 2022). Every instance of a criminal black being arrested became an example of systemic racism, mandating inquiry and review. Police officers could potentially become racist by osmotic absorption of racist beliefs held by seniors, but the far more likely outcome is their absorption of 'sod this paperwork' effort-to-outcome practices.

The London public which serves the UK civil and political administration decries every instance of white rule enforcement as racism, cries which are eagerly taken up by Good People in London who need to display their moral credentials to the people around them. 'Its their culture' are the blinders automatically applied whenever nonwhites (except for adjacents such as orientals/jews/ibo/sikhs) do anything wrong at all, while 'systemic racism' will be screamed whenever a policeman looks at a brown rapist funny.

The current lefty narrative around the rotherham rapes and all the other muslim gang rapes of children - actual pubescent sub 10-16 year olds, not 'teen' 19 year old 'migrant children' - is that the institutional classism of the police made them dismissive of the claims of rape. In reality the police get attacked as racist for even asking if the muslims are doing anything bad, so why would they bother. Just shut up and let the browns do whatever the fuck they want, thats what the London elite prefer after all.

The police in Rotherham weren’t “institutionally classist” (the police are in any case obviously ‘working class’ under the British class system).

Nevertheless, an extremely disproportionate number (the great majority) of victims in Rotherham, Telford and other grooming gang cases were girls in the care system, children of single mothers, drug addicts and so on. They were the underclass. You can find old articles from the BBC from the early 2000s decrying the scale of “teenage prostitution” in some British towns (that not coincidentally later had ‘grooming gang’ cases) and it is accurate to say that the view of the police in many cases was that they were essentially prostitutes. For most of history most prostitutes started in that trade at a young age and were recruited (by pimps) from the desperate underclass in the same way.

The police in Rotherham weren’t “institutionally classist” (the police are in any case obviously ‘working class’ under the British class system).

The working class are far more snobby ("classist" is not a word) against the underclass than higher classes are. This is a universal phenomenon - people are most snobby against the class one rung below their own. Although I don't think institutional snobbery on the part of working-class cops was the problem - the class-related problem was soft bigotry of low expectations among middle-class social workers. It wasn't just "We can't expect the poor dears not to rape kids - it's part of their Mirpuri Pakistani culture." It was also "We can't expect the poor dears to go home to their mothers rather than hanging out with foreign rapists in minicab offices - it's part of their chav culture."

"classist" is not a word

Of course it is. Though you may not like it. It's much more a word than those on the Website of unrequited affection or whatever the hell that site is that came up with reddit darling terms like sonder.

The influence of US media narratives on crime has been especially distorting outside the US. Total gun deaths and police shootings between the UK and US are almost impossible to compare as the rates are respectively 60x and 150x less common in the UK.

I haven't heard of this case until now, but was there any claimed reason he didn't just get out of the car? Do I have the facts correct: the car and plate number were reported to have been involved in a shooting the day prior, the car was registered to someone other than Kaba, and nothing was found in the car? When pulled over, rammed several cop cars and tried to run the shooter over. Unsurprisingly he had been charged with attempted murder days prior.

The influence of US media narratives on crime has been especially distorting outside the US.

I find this fascinating, the same is happening in my country of Slovakia. My working theory is that we live in de facto what accounts to US Empire. It is not dissimilar to let's say Roman empire or British empire - you have various naturalized people who feel allegiance to the empire, they adopt the imperial customs and ethos and even ape people in imperial centers of power. It also fosters certain strange allegiances, I am sure upper class of Roman Britain or Egypt felt more in common with Roman elites than local people - not unlike what is happening now.

When it comes to culture, there are obvious things such as racism or sexism etc. However what I find interesting is that people here internalize even completely invalid themes - for instance the boomer vs millenial dichotomy from US. In Slovakia, boomers spent their best productive years during communism or very shady early years after the fall of Eastern Bloc in 1989, with 20%+ unemployment and average salary of $100 a month/$1,200 a year - if you were lucky enough to actually have an average job and the employer was actually paying you on time. Boomers at large do not have any financial property such as stocks or bonds to help in their retirement, because these were not accessible. Whatever they had, they probably lost it to double digit inflation, failing state banks and bankrupted post-communist industry. At best they may own some old commie apartment in some small town where they lived their whole lives. They are wholly dependent on state pension, which averages around 60% of average net wage, many of them have to work various odd jobs to survive. And yet young people are parroting the US talking point of how boomers had it so much better than them, how they hoard wealth, how much harder it is now in current economy etc. It is amazing to see.

For most of teh Roman Republic stage of the empire, they maintained the fiction that most of the territory controlled by Rome was technically sovereign and merely an "ally".

The US is a good bit less interventionist than we could be, and that's probably for the best, but we should not pretend that just because we haven't annexed Canada that they aren't US territory.

In my (American) opinion, NATO is the empire and America is the primary annexed province.

It may be so, for instance look at British Imperium - in a sense the local English population was first to be subjugated. Your cookie-cutter aristocrat who wedged himself into imperial bureaucracy let's say in India, had possibly more in common with some Indian educated native embedded into Imperial Civil Service and who worshiped the empire compared to some Welsh coal miner or English factory worker. It s a common enough theme in empires, for instance the Russian aristocracy during the Tzarist era was thoroughly westernized, they spoke French even during the time Tolstoy wrote his novels like War and Peace in 1869. They were looking down on Russian and Turkic and Finno-Ugric or even German imperial subjects and serfs as uncouth and unsophisticated dregs, who should be happy they can enjoy their enlightened and benevolent imperial rule.

However what I find interesting is that people here internalize even completely invalid themes - for instance the boomer vs millenial dichotomy from US. In Slovakia the boomers spent their best productive years during communism or very shady early years after the fall of Eastern Bloc in 1989, with 20%+ unemployment and average salary of $100 a month/$1,200 a year - if you were lucky enough to actually have an average job and the employer was actually paying you on time. Boomers at large do not have any financial property such as stocks or bonds to help in their retirement, because these were not accessible.

I made exactly that comparison about Ireland here.

Unfortunately I think the parroting is not without basis at all, with certain qualifications, that is. The fact is that the period roughly between 1955 and 1980 (that is, between the consolidation of the post-Stalinist political order and the critical period of economic stagnation, energy shortage and the foreign debt trap) was, according to the standards of their own history, an era of prosperity and peace for every country in the Soviet bloc. For local men born between 1935 and 1955 (for simplicity’s sake, let’s look at men only here), their experience as teenagers and young adults was roughly this:

  • If you have enough human agency to complete your education and to work a job, you’re not a cripple or a retard, and you aren’t some career criminal or alcoholic bum either, society basically gives you a guarantee that you’ll have a stable job, a pension, food on the table and some place to live. If you’re willing to make extra effort, you’ll maybe even have a car, a fridge and a cottage in the country.

  • Should you leave your job for whatever reason, you can just find another similar one.

  • There’s no blanket expectation towards the youth that everyone gets a college degree. You can have a respectable existence as an average normie without attending college.

  • Due to the lopsided sex ratio that disfavors women and a cultural environment that is markedly different from today, unless you’re a cripple, a retard, a bum, an alcoholic or a crazy person, and you aren’t hideously ugly or disfigured either, then finding a non-obese, non-addict, non-crazy, non-slut wife who’s 3-5 years younger than you and isn’t a single mom either is rather easy. As a man you can considerably raise your social status just by not being a drunkard.

  • You very obviously have a better life than your parents and especially than your grandparents. Society is generally in consensus that your offspring will have even better lives than you.

  • Life may be boring but also predictable. You have limited options but you can also make reasonable plans. Your general impression around you is that everything is getting more or less better. Energy is cheap, so is credit.

  • By the time the political transition of 1989 takes place, you already have a house/apartment, a family, a career and status. Even though bad times are ahead, you’re an established citizen. Most of your life is already behind you. You won’t need to adapt to the new order.

Now, compare this to the average life experience of men from the same region of the world born between 1970 and 1980, or between 1990 and 2000, and you’ll notice that the difference is like night and day.

Noted, the generation I described above aren’t the equivalent of Boomers in a strict chronological sense; they’re older than them. But that is beside the point. (It’s also true that the locals born between 1960 and 1970 or so faced rather negative consequences of the transition period after 1989, because they were expected to adapt but were generally too old to do so, and they were also too young to take part in the general looting of state assets i.e. privatization.)

The issue, I think, either in the USA or in Eastern Europe isn’t that young people think Boomers had it so much better, it’s that Boomers apparently think that their grandchildren have the same opportunities that they did, while at the same time actually having it so much better because they can buy shiny new gadgets with touchscreens, and are both baffled and angry when they don’t have the same outcomes in life as they did.

I can talk specifically about Slovakia or back then Czechoslovakia. The boomers born after WW2 reached their prime in 1970s, which was post 1968 invasion of Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia and period of so called Normalization. This was era of economic and cultural stagnation, purges, stifling cultural environment and disconnection of regular people from public life. Your career prospects were politically tied, there was feeling of ubiquitous demoralization and sclerosis in the system.

The issue, I think, either in the USA or in Eastern Europe isn’t that young people think Boomers had it so much better, it’s that Boomers apparently think that their grandchildren have the same opportunities that they did

The US vs Czechoslovak comparison of "opportunity" is absolutely off. Young people in Czech Republic or Slovakia now have much more opportunity than boomers had in 1975 Czechoslovakia. It goes beyond gadgets, we are talking about basic stuff ranging from opportunity to travel, opportunity to study what you want, even opportunity to buy something or even having long hairs at school or Lenin forbid - to go to the church. The cultural and social institutions in USA vs Czechoslovakia were almost as if from other planet.

What is interesting is that acknowledging that boomer pensioners have it tough is "common knowledge", that is why acceptance of boomer vs millennials theme is so interesting. It is part of common speak, even jokes. Let me tell you one from early 2000s that I find hilarious, dark humor is hallmark of tough times:

Do you know why a rat has four legs?

So it can get to the trash bin before a pensioner

Pensioners in Slovakia are the lowest of the low. Here is a 2022 article from Slovakia how 27% of our 1,1 million pensioners are living bellow the poverty line of EUR 424 a month, especially women as they live longer, had lower wages during their lives and their pension did not keep up with inflation. There is a reason for poor "babushka" or "babička" trope in Eastern Bloc, our seniors do not go for vacations to Mediterranean in their old Mercedes. Yeah, you can look at such an elderly women who romanticizes her youth, how fun it was to go with her "pioneer" friends from school to some socialist potato brigade and how happy she was. There is certain dignity to how many of them carry themselves despite their circumstances. But the truth rings different if you look at her way of living, actually having some kind of envy or resentment for how she has it so much better than you to me seems insane.

Hadn't heard of the incident until now but per the wikipedia page it looks like a good shoot.

Although,

Members of his family said that he would not have been shot dead if he were not black. Kaba's cousin said: "I've put it out there he wasn't perfect… but regardless of that nobody deserves to be killed by the police unless there is an imminent or direct threat to the public. He dindu nuffin."[13]

My emphasis. So I followed the cite and sure enough this quote doesn't appear on the page at all, let alone the bolded part. Wonder how long that'll stand.

I am impressed you managed to get the version of the page with that quote. It was reverted in less than a minute if I read the history right. Version with it and the reverted version. The whole quote was removed 11 minutes later.

I'm pretty sure every revision is available for every WP article...unless and admin deletes it. I'm not sure how much powers the admins have, but I think it's a lot.

Admins can't delete revision history. Only "oversighters" can do that - this is a rare permission held by 41 people on the English wikipedia, of whom 15 are actively using it. (Compared to 419 active admins).

Given that the addition of "He dindu nuffin." to the Wiki was vandalism - as @TitaniumButterfly points out there is a link to the source for the quote (a BBC interview with a family member), and the line isn't there - the quick reversion is unsurprising. There a lot of editors following changes to high-salience pages in order to revert vandalism quickly.

Sure, but unless one is going through the revision history of the article (which... why?) one would have to have loaded the article during the < 1m period when it was the latest revision to see it as on the main page. The fact the comment I'm replying to wonders how long that will be in the article doesn't sound like they saw it in its already-reverted form.

I legit just found it there and if you care to you'll see that the timestamps work out.

Britain and their restrictive culture around weapons. Next thing you know, they’ll require a license for operating a car.

Something I find interesting is how coverage emphasizes the “outrage” amongst firearms officers. This is the first I’ve heard of it, so I figured it was as manufactured as the charges, but apparently several hundred opted out of carrying their weapons in protest. Not very reassuring. It’s obviously in their interest to secure as many protections against misconduct as they can, and it’s obviously in the public interest to keep them on a tight leash…so long as they offer them respect. At a certain point such an adversarial relationship results in no one wanting the job. I don’t know how to design a process that doesn’t incentive both to claw for more power.

and it’s obviously in the public interest to keep them on a tight leash

In the UK? Hardly. The country has a tiny number of highly vetted, very well trained firearms officers, supporting a mass of unarmed ordinary police. We have one shooting by police marksmen every few years, and it's almost always a guy who is deep in with armed gangs. Armed police are not a threat to the public at all.

'Keeping them on a tight leash' (i.e. taking the side of criminals they interact with) has the second order effect of emboldening those criminals, which is definitely not in the public interest. We see this every few years when some bright spark in the Met decides that stop and search is racist. The police stop using it for a while, the black on black murder rate spikes, and then they quietly go back to using it because it works.

At a certain point such an adversarial relationship results in no one wanting the job

At a certain point such low pay relative to perceived risk results in no one wanting the job. If your paramilitary members (which, make no mistake, is what these particular cops are) have to risk that for every criminal/enemy combatant they kill as part of their job, they're risking sociofinancial execution, it better be paying ludicrous sums. That sum can be social wealth, that can be financial wealth, or they can be a mix (exhibit A: veteran's discount), but they must be paid regardless.

Progressives can never pay them properly because their preferred version of the paramilitary/police are the criminals that the paramilitary is supposed to be shooting, and their core revealed preference is that they just want to force men [and increasingly, the women who work like men] to labor and risk for free (just like Traditionalists reveal preference for free female childbirth and risk) which means they're incapable of fixing that.

I don’t know how to design a process that doesn’t incentive both to claw for more power.

Liberalism was that process, but we are unwilling or unable to afford it any more (which resulted in people being able to claw for more power, and ripped it apart in the process).

Replacing gynosupremacy (current regime) with androsupremacy (ancien regime) is known to fix a security problem in the short term (which is why the Traditionalists feel, correctly, that they can fix this by "retvrning") but at the cost of everything above Security on Maslow's hirerarchy (which stops being a problem when the average man is priced out of everything above it anyway).

So yes, that means that the rough men will use the fact everyone else requires their protection to angle for more power (or must become rough men themselves, which is a victory for the rough men). If the ruling party is unable or unwilling to negotiate they get Battle of Baghdad'd (and the soldiers protesting here is a nano-scale version of that) as the soldiers throw down their tools and cheer for the Taliban... because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.

because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.

I think they probably cared less about power over women and more about power over their abusers. Ending the practice of bacha bazi was a prominent selling point for the Taliban the last two times it took power in Afghanistan. Maybe we should have considered not covering up such practices by our "allies", but ensuring first-world LGBT people aren't smeared as pedophiles is apparently more important than preventing child sexual abuse.

It seems more likely that we wanted to destroy the Taliban because they harbored Osama Bin Laden after 9/11; cobbled together a messy coalition of liberals, tribal traditionalists, and the plain corrupt; and then looked the other way for the sake of maintaining coalition politics than it is we supported child rape at the behest of domestic LGBT politics.

Yes and no. Not raising a stink about it when we encountered it was "maintaining coalition politics". Classifying the investigation into the practice and the resulting report on it was for domestic politics.

[Refinement: "power over women" -> "power over abusers, most of whom happen to either be women, or are acting womanly".]

I think they probably cared less about power over women and more about power over their abusers.

Interesting that the "right-wing" is slowly rediscovering that this is how they need to couch their messaging (and then refusing to back down when pressed, and Trump will be the model for this going forward). Liberalism is a counterbalance against progressivism just like it was against traditionalism, and the progressives are only liberals in the "continue the revolution against traditionalism" sense, not the "continue the revolution against traditionalists" (which is why they're so occupied with fighting a strawman that no longer exists while becoming indistinguishable from the traditionalist tendencies that were the reason liberals opposed them in the first place).

But what happens when it is mostly women/progressives carrying out the abuse? Well...

but ensuring first-world LGBT people aren't smeared as pedophiles

The "global elite satanist pedophile" people have correctly identified that if you're in power, you get to sexually abuse young men with impunity. The specifics look a little different when women do it but "we will take away your ability to develop the things that make you sexually attractive" (either by raping/molesting you directly, or contributing to the cultural effort to chemically castrate you and give you breasts instead express your inner herbivore man where you hide under your bed in fear of offending a woman) is the general form of what that sexual abuse looks like regardless of whether it's a man or a woman doing either of those things, regardless of whether they think in the moment it's abuse or not (as you know). And the problem is that, because liberal men and women can and will use different functions to compute sexual attraction than normal people, but don't understand that they're doing that, they won't anticipate that their views on what makes the opposite sex attractive (if they even see it that way) is destructive when applied outside of that "orientation"- they can't defend against progressives because they don't know they need to defend against them.

Note that this is specifically forced feminization/passivization [in the traditional straight sex sense, where your psyche is built on men dominate, women submit] (and note that abuse victims tend to become hyper-female as a rationalization/result of the abuse, and that's true for boys as well as girls). Feminization that isn't forced is... something different, but can look the same way under certain circumstances (especially in all-male environments, like boarding schools [Eton is famous for this] and prisons) or if you're not aware/don't care they're distinct (most commonly for religious reasons).

Also, forced masculinization can be accomplished (Stanford Prison Experiment guards, Khmer Rouge putting children in charge of labor camps, royal families), it just isn't done because making more dominant individuals is not generally to the benefit of those with the power so we don't have good data on what happens. [I suspect the Soviet "strong woman, basically a man" meme is a little more than just a meme in this direction, but I don't have data to back that up; I'm also not convinced it's the cause of most FTM transitions as distinct from its standard social contagion effects.]

Maybe we should have considered not covering up such practices by our "allies"

The Westerners that are in power consider the institutional and cultural abuse of boys/young men to have neutral-to-positive moral valence (see above). I think the clearer examples of boy-raping are certainly things that a government would cover up for the same reasons the Church did- that it would allow their legitimacy to be questioned- more than it is an attempt to protect the LGBT movement (who don't really have to care about being called pedophiles as they now possess the social privilege the Church used to have).

because liberal men and women can and will use different functions to compute sexual attraction than normal people

Given the very large number of liberals who exist in modern Western countries, maybe they’re not as “abnormal” as you think they are? Your idea of what constitutes “normal” has to be open to revision in the face of new empirical evidence. Perhaps you need to take seriously the idea that these patterns of behavior were always a latent potential in humanity, rather than an aberration that has been imposed by force from the outside?

I’ve written a lot here before about what a wakeup Covid was for me, regarding facts about human nature - it’s a convenient example to return to. I didn’t want to believe that total mass capitulation to any and all restrictions to stave off a flu was “normal” for most people. But I was forced to admit, through the weight of sheer statistics, that they were the normal ones, and I was the abnormal one.

[Refinement: "power over women" -> "power over abusers, most of whom happen to either be women, or are acting womanly".]

Bacha bazi is machismo-based homosexuality and exists in a very different cultural context to western gayness-based homosexuality. Machismo-based homosexuality is a much more common pattern over time and space (from ancient Athens to US prisons) with varying degrees of consensuality on the part of the boi, but the key point of commonality is that it does not consider buggering a man to be womanly, only allowing yourself to be buggered.

You are trying to map a conflict going on in the post-Christian west to a pre-Abrahamic conflict going on in Afghanistan. Before the spread of Abrahamic religion, machismo-based homosexuality was the default. The Levitical prohibition on men having sex with men (which is reiterated in the New Testament and the Quaran) is very obviously a response to sexual practices that were actually happening (and probably happening licitly - hence the discussions about male temple prostitutes when modern argue about what the prohibition means) around the time and place where it was written. As far as I am aware, it is the first time an authority condemns the man who buggers (rather than the man who allows himself to be buggered) as a sexual deviant.

FWIW, the issues around bacha bazi are one of the many arguments for why Pashtun Afghanistan is so backward that the Taliban is a genuine improvement, and given that the west has lost the social technology to bring societies up from goatfucking to medievalism we should let someone who still has it rule there. The middle-class Kabulites who appear in all the famous "before" photos were probably an artifact of Soviet rule, and mostly managed to bug out anyway. (There also just weren't that many of them)

Bacha bazi is machismo-based homosexuality

You're missing the point slightly, but perhaps I didn't make it clear enough.

In Afghanistan, most of the abusive people are men, and follow male patterns of abuse. Men who are tired of this literally threw their guns down [such an event being the topic of the thread] and let the men who had a better way in.

In the West, most of the abusive people are women, and follow female patterns of abuse. (Most people don't know what they are, especially when the topic is specifically child abuse, so I figured I'd elaborate- "charge the soldier for doing his job because the enemy failed a paper-bag test" is similar abuse along those lines.) Men who are tired of this literally threw their guns down [event topic] and let the negative consequences occur (there are no men who have a better way willing or able to conquer Western countries so this is the best they have).

but the key point of commonality is that it does not consider buggering a man to be womanly, only allowing yourself to be buggered.

That consideration is biologically hardcoded. Forced feminization/passivization subtly breaks down men; doesn't matter if it's an individual man directly buggering you short-term or a group of woman collectively buggering you long-term. (Of course, you have to get to understand 'women can bugger men' first, and most people can't do that for other biologically-hardcoded reasons because never in the history of humanity outside of the last 60 years or so has that ever been possible.)

In the West, most of the abusive people are women

Can you clarify what you mean by this? The overwhelming majority of violent criminals (including rapists) are men. The overwhelming majority of people who participate in violent political unrest (e.g. the CHAZ in Seattle) are men.

When it comes to say, the architects of corporate wokeness, or deep state NWO bureaucrats, there are more women among their ranks, but also still plenty of men.

Yeah, that one threw me off too. The closest I can imagine is that women enforce social conformity on men and women both, and abusive female personalities get a free pass in a lot of communities.

Lots of women are...pointlessly abusive? Men are usually getting something vaugely quantifiable from it it.

I'm reaching.

That consideration is biologically hardcoded.

It may be hardcoded, but the point I was making is that Abrahamic religion considers both buggering a man and allowing yourselves to be buggered to be womanly, or at least sufficiently deviant that a sodomite isn't a real man. If machismo-based homosexuality is hardcoded, then Abrahamic religion has successfully overcome a hardcoded belief, to the benefit of humanity.

On the substantive point, I think the crux of our disagreement is that you see the problem as too much female authority (young men being figuratively buggered by teachers and social workers) whereas I see it as the absence of positive male authority (young men growing up without the kind of authority figure that it is possible for them to respect in the way that men need to respect authority). In the absence of either kind of authority what you actually get is the kind of young man for whom buggeration (or at least judicial rhaphanidosis) would be an improvement.

Thanks for the new word. I guess.

Uhh, you know that the people doing Bacha Bazi were something that rounds to 0% female?

I think that's besides @ThisIsSin's point, if I am reading correctly (the diction is a little dense).

Bacha Bazi was 100% about forced feminization in a culture that had (has) a lot of difficulty creating non-destructive ways for men to express sexual needs.

Progressives do not want criminals to turn into the law enforcement mechanism because progressives do not believe crime is real in the first place. Or at least progressives have convinced themselves that crime isnt real, hence the logical next step of abolishing law enforcement.

Self actualization for progressives is contingent on having an oppressive force to actively resist, because their set worldview is already perfect and does not require convincing externals. Said oppressive force must be manifestly engaging in oppression, and so law enforcement against criminal minorities is coopted by progressives to be proof of their worldviews conception. People being criminal assholes isn't because they are shitheads, its because they are systematically oppressed by the big bad state.

In the progressive conception there is never any need for law enforcement labor, and it is impossible for minorities to commit crime when there is no oppressive force incentivizing them to do so. Manifest failures like Christiania, CHAZ, East Hastings, Kensington, etc etc are simply proof of how oppression is so systemic that criminal minorities absorb the culture of white oppressors to oppress themselves.

The labor of law enforcement is false labor for the progressive. It was never needed, and so should never be compensated. Ironically, law enforcement is required for the progressive worldview to continue existing. Without law enforcement, progressives have no manifestation of the oppressive structure and no external force blameable for progressive failures. The progressive worldview requires law enforcement to exist more than it wants it to be abolished, because if law enforcement is gone the progressive ideas have to stand on their own, and deep down all progressives know their pet minorities will find it easier to scalp defenseless dangerhairs than armed magasuburbs.

Everyone loves a nice hot dump on progressives. It's practically the easy-mode for scoring upvotes.

You still need to actually be making an argument or saying something factual and defensible. This post is just pure boo-lighting with a bunch of uncharitable straw men. Do you think any progressive would agree with your characterization of what they believe and what their real motives are? It's one thing to argue that "This is the end result of their policies," it's another to argue "Actually, progressives are all zombie idiots with a worldview that says crime doesn't exist and minorities only ever do bad things because they are oppressed."

If this was a one-off, I'd chide you for weakmanning and ask you to put more effort into your inveighing against progressives in the future. But this isn't a one-off. You have a long, bad history of this sort of post, and being told to stop it.

You actually have a couple of notes to the effect of "last warning, permaban next time." Somehow you skated in the past, and then you went and earned a couple of AAQCs.

You seem to be able to post interesting things when you aren't choking on bile about your outgroup. We would like you to focus on your strengths. By that I do not mean "entertaining rants about how your outgroup is pure stupid evil."

Banned for 2 weeks, and next time will be a permaban.

Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren't paying their rent & are scared to pay their rent & so they go out & they need to feed their child & they don't have money so... they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry - AOC

The idea that crime is fake and that societal factors explain all observable group differences is stock standard progressive thought, actively taught in sociology departments all around the country. I was personally taught this in a university sociology class, and in a criminology class(at the same university).

I am curious, what, other than oppression, would a progressive accept as an explanation for why minorities do bad things? At the population level, at the national level, what other explanation is even compatible with progressive ideas? You could argue culture, but of course a criminal culture is a natural response to an oppressive society. You could argue socio economic factors, but again you are going to very quickly run into the root cause for those difference, oppression. When I brought up the crime-lead theory in my sociology class, my professor countered with, 'and why did certain groups have to live in the areas of high lead concentration?? tut tut tut'. It's oppression all the way down.

Sure, they might not be as frank as the original poster, but the underlying belief structure obviously leads to the same conclusion.

I feel like one of us must be WILDLY failing the ideological Turing test, for you to call this a 'zombie idiot' view.

I feel like one of us must be WILDLY failing the ideological Turing test, for you to call this a 'zombie idiot' view.

It's you. I know lots of progressives. Exactly zero of them believe that literally no minorities would ever commit crimes if not for oppression, or that crime doesn't exist.

I'm not going to debate progressive criminal theory because I don't subscribe to it, but I'm pretty sure even AOC would not say there would be zero crime if the economy were better. If you cannot steelman their perspective in a way they themselves would agree is what they believe (not "this is what your beliefs lead to" but "this is what you literally believe") then you are weak manning, and the OP was being obnoxious about it and has a long history of being obnoxious.

  • -10

From Emile DeWeaver at the Brennan Center for Justice: "Crime, the Myth":

Crime is not real. This assertion flies in the face of common sense and consensus. Of course crime is real, one would be justified in thinking — we see “crime” every day on the news. Charles Manson was, in fact, responsible for nine murders. Dylann Roof did, in fact, enter the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and kill nine people. Crime rates are, in fact, either up or down or stable on a given day in every city in the United States.

So how could crime be a fiction? The reader and I likely agree that people hurt others and transgress moral boundaries. We may also agree that communities have the job of figuring out how to prevent and remedy such transgressions because a basic precondition for happiness is safety. If, however, we are actually to create a society that is safe for everyone, we’ll profit from challenging our belief in the “reality” of crime.

Begin this challenge by considering race. For hundreds of years, race’s realness was a “fact,” but today, scientists understand that race is not real. What “real” means is well described by journalist Jenée Desmond-Harris. “By ‘real,’ I mean based on facts that people can even begin to agree on. Permanent. Scientific. Objective. Logical. Consistent. Able to stand up to scrutiny.” Racism is real, as real as Dylann Roof. Race, however, is a fiction, and the creation of this fiction was a political project aimed at a political end.

The national conversation about crime engages a similar mythology: prevailing narratives routinely deny us the ability to make the distinction between myth and reality. These narratives are, like racial narratives, political projects aimed at political ends. Given the conflation between myth and reality, it makes as much sense to call crime real as it does to call the legend of King Arthur real. If we want to call crime real, we have to locate the truth of what it is and what it isn’t. We have to dispel the mythologies of crime.

One myth is that we punish people for committing crimes. The truth is we punish people less because of what they do and more because of who they are. If I kill a stranger on the street for disobeying my orders, I’m a murderer. Police officers routinely kill unarmed people for, according to police claims, resisting arrest — arrests, as in the case of George Floyd, where no meaningful “crime” has been committed — but we don’t treat police forces like criminal institutions.

Then there’s a second myth, that crime is an act committed by an individual. Calling an act a crime is instead a choice we make as a society about how we respond to harms committed in our community. I recently experienced how this myth operates while standing in line at a local Walgreens.

I was about to check out at the cash register when I looked up from my phone and noticed a security guard becoming excited, even agitated. He alternated between whispering to a store clerk and positioning himself to track someone in the surveillance mirrors on the store’s ceiling.

The scene awakened trauma in my body. I remembered all the times I’d been caught shoplifting as a child, how quickly and easily our criminal legal system could destroy a young life, family, and community in the name of justice. I began to scan the security mirrors too, thinking please don’t let this be some kid. The security guard ducked into an aisle. I tracked him in the mirrors to determine his target. The person stealing wasn’t a kid.

“Hey, man,” I tried to sound as casually authoritative as I could. “Go back, get whatever you want, and I’ll pay for it.”

Something quite phenomenal happened.

The store’s tense, fearful atmosphere evaporated. A look of deep relief washed over the security guard, and he stepped back without protest. The people standing in line relaxed. A woman working in the photo department left her post to open a third checkout stand specifically to get this homeless man checked out. She smiled and treated him like a human being. It’s true that I had to buy this treatment for him ($30 for toilet paper, food, and a razor), but that did not make the decisions everyone made in that store any less real or less important. All it would have taken is for one person to insist on police involvement, and that homeless man would have been arrested. It took the entire community waiting in that store to save this man.

The homeless man had in one second gone from a criminal whom people feared and even reviled to a member of a community who needed support. Not only did this community — the people in the store — choose to support him, they seemed hungry to do it. They’d just needed to be shown a path and given the opportunity to be the community that the man deserved. The difference between crime and not-crime wasn’t the homeless man’s actions or his intent. It was his community’s response.

It's you. I know lots of progressives. Exactly zero of them believe that literally no minorities would ever commit crimes if not for oppression, or that crime doesn't exist.

I don't think anyone is claiming literally that. It's the difference in criminality between various groups that is 100% ascribed to oppression. Not genes, not culture, only socioeconomic inequity and mental trauma that both stem from oppression are the reason why some groups commit more crimes than others. It's the duty of the privileged groups to compensate oppressed groups by eliminating all trauma triggers and redistributing status and equity in their favor.

I don't think what I've written is a strawman or a weakman of the progressive views on crime.

Now you are engaging in a strawman of the other poster. I don’t take the hyperbole to mean that literal progressives believe there are zero criminal assholes. Instead, I think progs genuinely believe that the vast majority of criminals are just good people for whom the systems they are in led them astray. That is, criminals are a fault of society; not a blight on society.

I guess this needs clarification, but when I said 'at the population level, at the national level' I was trying to preclude the 'literally zero' type objection. I did not assume that a 'most' was all the OP needed to fix their post, since you called it a 'zombie idiot' idea, which suggested a fair deal of distance from a directionally or mostly correct idea (which it seems to be, to me).

I would also really love an answer the question in my post. At the population level, what other cause, that does not reduce down to oppression, is an acceptable progressive explanation for why minorities do bad things? Full disclosure, I honestly don't even know what your answer could be. I literally can't think of one. My understanding is that, 'oppressive society' and 'genetics' covers 100% of the total possible causal factors for the question "why minorities do bad things", with 'oppressive society' containing all of the factors that a progressive would view as acceptable. Again, to me, the view expressed in the OP is stock standard progressive ideation presented in an unfavorable way.

"Directionally correct" is fine. "Expressed in an unfavorable" (meaning uncharitable and inflammatory and weakmanned) way is not. Just saying "Progressives believe all crime is caused by poverty and oppression" would be okay. (Though most progressives don't literally believe there would be zero criminals without poverty and oppression.) But the OP said a lot more than that.

While I agree with the ban, progressives have frequently openly used this guy's characterization of what they believe as rallying slogans.

I mean, sure, hypocrisy is the only modern sin, being two faced is feature-not-bug, nobody actually believes what they say, etc. but his argument's pretty self-evident. He's saying that the (unspoken: white, neoliberal) progressive's opinions on policing through force can only exist in a gated community or bubble where (non white-collar) crime is non-visible and a fargroup concern.

What am I supposed to take away from this other than that "Defund the police!" people are either lying liars or burying their heads in the sand so hard that they're prospecting for lithium? I have to frequently express to Americans that in most of the rest of the world when people are openly telling them what they believe, their goals and aims, they should actually listen; "river to the sea" is one such recent example. When people say they want sharia law, they really want sharia law.

Since the poster is banned and thus cannot respond, I'll ask the question here: what failures in East Hastings and Kensington is he(?) referring to? What is the significance of these places, wherever they are?

Hastings is a street in Vancouver that at one time (60s-ish) was core shopping district, but for something like 30 years has been a centre for drug addled homelessness, prostitution, open sales of drugs and stolen goods, plus assorted crazies. (the major decline was contemporaneous with the shutdown of a large mental hospital, fancy that)

This:

https://preview.redd.it/p1658ejufvp41.jpg?width=640&auto=webp&s=58cb9c9f1e4253daa55db438873c181ec7797b15

vs this:

https://www.vmcdn.ca/f/files/via/import/2019/08/19141502_dtes8-min.jpg;w=960

I assume this is what he's talking about; Kensington is a street in Toronto that used to be kind of... bohemian and funky but has maybe gone the same way? I don't know, I don't care about Toronto at all.

But there are similar areas in all the West Coast Cities -- substitute "Tenderloin" if you are in SF or "Skid Row" in LA. (although I think Skid Row has maybe always been bad? "Skid Row" in Vancouver is now full of gentrified brew-pubs and lofts, IDK)

They probably mean Kensington in Philadelphia, which looks roughly like the aftermath of a zombie movie.

the major decline was contemporaneous with the shutdown of a large mental hospital

Which was in the vicinity, I suppose.

No, it was in a neighbouring borough as it happens -- but serviced the whole province for serious cases AFAICR.

because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.

I'm not convinced that this kind of gender-based class conflict thinking is a feature of rough men. It seems like something spontaneously generated in teenaged girls and gay men, which might explain why cultural marxists are so into female extended adolescence and LBGT. But the Taliban's views on women were not the reason for its popularity among the Afghani army(see: Taliban promises to moderate its treatment of women), Islam was(well that and the incompetence and corruption of the US-backed government).

I think the primary issue was all the buggery and child rape going on amongst the anti-Taliban forces and the new de-Talibanized Afghan Army. The Taliban's founder started his political career hanging child rapists from the gun barrel of a tank, according to legend.

The amount of energy being expended over Trump's recent visit to a McDonald's is kind of interesting to me. It seems to have generated an extraordinary amount of media and online attention. On the supporter side, they are hailing it as a brilliant and deeply meaningful activity, simultaneously trolling Harris and celebrating the dignity of unskilled labor, and generating deeply Americana visuals. On the detractor side, they decry it an illogical and bizarre stunt, that it was fake because the store was not actually open, and compared it to Dukakis in the tank. Some have even doxxed the owner who wrote to the state to complain about labor regulations.

Meanwhile, McDonald's corporate HQ sent what I think is a very good memo to franchisees explaining the value of their goal of political inclusivity and how that manifests as allowing visits from anyone who asks and being proud of being important to American culture.

I think this is interesting because symbolically, it's something that cleaves much more at the red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy than the Democrat/Republican one. I think a lot of blue-tribers disdain McDonalds and consider it trashy, but can't really say so too loudly because the poorer members of their political coalition enjoy it. Trump has been mocked in the past for having the poor taste of actually liking McDonald's food as well as catering a White House dinner with it, widely seen as trashy and disrespectful. The imagery of Trump looking for all the world like a store manager from 3 decades ago I think also triggered some nostalgia - or perhaps post-traumatic stress - about the current state of customer service.

I don't have too much more to say and offer no predictions. It just seemed interesting as one of those things that seemed to trigger something unexpected in people for reasons that go way beyond the substance of the actual event, and figuring out what's resonating with people in either a positive or negative way, and possibly why, seems like a good path towards predicting future trends.

Meanwhile, McDonald's corporate HQ sent what I think is a very good memo to franchisees explaining the value of their goal of political inclusivity and how that manifests as allowing visits from anyone who asks and being proud of being important to American culture.

This was actually my biggest takeaway.

I had thought that the art of using Corpo-speak to avoid political landmines without being tone-deaf was lost. But somebody managed to produce a memo that carries the subtle implication "We just make food and people give us money for it, don't read anything more into it that that" without taking a side or being dismissive.

I want more of that. Just do what your company is good at. Make money, don't throw jabs along ideological lines or invite political/culture wars in.

As for the stunt itself. The reason Trump 'gets away' with this stuff is he is just that guy. I think with most politicians, we're all aware that they have a mask that they put on to perform when campaigning. That mask drops in private, and they can be nasty people with few redeeming qualities.

Trump doesn't have that Kayfabe. He is himself. If anything, he's just more Trumpy in private (or so leaked audio suggests). So there's a level of earnestness that makes this appearance less of a clearly artificial performance, although it undoubtedly is artificial. Dude actually seems pleased to be out slinging fries, rather than just getting it over with to pull a few extra votes.

For a standard politician to achieve sincerity doing this, they'd have to drop the mask. Which might be a really bad move. Trump just doesn't have a mask.

I think in the West that we're all used to politicians to being carefully managed stage shows that Trump is genuinely an outlier. He's said and done so many ridiculous things that standard retail politics is elevated to a air of authenticity. If a guy is willing to say that Haitians eats pets and illegals have bad genes in public, then saying that he's lying that he likes cooking french fries feels like bit of a stretch.

it's something that cleaves much more at the red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy than the Democrat/Republican one. I think a lot of blue-tribers disdain McDonalds and consider it trashy, but can't really say so too loudly because the poorer members of their political coalition enjoy it. Trump has been mocked in the past for having the poor taste of actually liking McDonald's

I don't think PMC Turbolibs disdain McDonald's because it is lower class, I think they disdain McDonald's because it is so American. A certain kind of urban blue triber hates actually existing American traditions, they hate baseball and football and fast food drive-throughs and Christmas and guns and elections and cars with V8 engines. They hate their own families and communities, they hate where they grew up and those they grew up with, they are sure that whatever somebody else has over there is better than what we have here. How much of this is a still-lingering hatred of the jocks and preps and pretty girls from high school is left as an exercise for the reader. The crossover between self-professed progressives who hate McDonald's and self-professed rightists who hate McDonald's is where you hit horseshoe theory, where the radicals and the reactionaries run into each other, the Hlynka-point.

My wife is American-born, but her parents are immigrants while my family has been in America (and basically in our town) for generations. Sometimes the difference in traditions becomes obvious, and it has made me recognize things that are American for me.

So just after we got married, some eight years ago now, and moved in together for the first time, I mentioned one day before I left for work that I was craving macaroni and cheese, just had a yen for it. My wife, being an excellent wife, went into one of her cookbooks and made an Ina Garten recipe for a five-cheese baked macaroni and cheese, picked up really nice cheeses from Wegmans, and presented me with this delicious dish when I got home. Truly spectacular dinner, it was delicious (if so rich that it was nap inducing), she's since made the same recipe for company several times but...I did have to tell her afterward that when I said I was craving macaroni and cheese, this wasn't really what I was thinking of. I wanted the yellow, boxed, artificial Kraft stuff. My wife was pissed, she still laughs about it, she'd never had boxed mac'n'cheese as a kid, it wasn't something her family would eat, and didn't even really understand what I meant. She thought I was just insulting her cooking, saying it wasn't as good as some processed bullshit.

I'm aware that my wife's five-cheese macaroni and cheese is better, but I still sometimes crave what my mom would pop on the stove when I was a kid. Honestly, even as an adult, I sometimes buy the cartoon-character Kraft boxes, because they're better, I'm not sure if it's just the pasta shapes transporting the cheese better or if the sauce packet is formulated differently. A few days later I got the boxed stuff and made it, and she understood: this is just a totally different food, and she got why I was craving it a little.

McDonald's and Wendy's and Burger King feel the same nostalgic way to me, but McDonald's is the alpha, the icon. I don't eat a lot of fast food. It's not something I fit into my weekly diet. But it still feels nostalgic to me in a deeply Americana way, and every now and then I have a craving for it. The drive through is so American, so ingrained in my mind with memories of the road trip, or hanging out at the mall, or in the car with your friends driving around to nowhere in particular American Graffiti style. Drinking a soda, cruising down the highway, on my way to wherever, it's ingrained in my psyche.

As an aside, I remember growing up a stock stand-up comedy joke, which I literally think I remember hearing from different comedians in Dane Cook/Carlos Mencia/Bill Engvall range, went something like: you know what's so unbelievably stupid? When you see someone at a McDonald's and they order a burger, and fries and then get a diet coke! You think the DIET coke is going to keep you from getting fat?! What a DUMBASS!

And as a ten year old I laughed at the joke, because duh the diet coke didn't make any difference! What an idiot that fat person is ordering a diet coke! For some reason we all despised diet soda, it was a mockable concept.

Now, as an adult, that's exactly my ideal drive-through fast food order on that road trip. Cheeseburger, small fries just for a taste, small chicken nuggets, large diet coke. (My actual order tends to be determined by coupons and online offers) A mcdouble is 390 calories and 22g of protein, not that bad occasionally on an IIFYM scale though I wouldn't recommend living off them. A small fry isn't great but it's only 230 calories. The McNuggets are even decent: 190 calories and 9g of protein. Eliminating the sugar and empty calories from the soda is the [single best way] to improve the nutrition of an occasional fast-food indulgence! I get all my nostalgia buttons pressed for the fast food I ate as a kid, and the final result is something like 800 calories and 35g of protein, too much in the way of salt and fat and whatever bad stuff, but not going to ruin my week or anything.

Yesterday I was about to post in a topic that it seems to me that the real Trump sin is that he has the audacity of genuinely liking America. And that this just unpalatable to the vobt (vonline blue tribers). Seems you have picked up that sentiment too.

I agree with you, at times, but not at others. Trump loves America, but too often it's an America that he remembers dimly from before he was born. Patriotism is to a large extent loving what your country is, not what you imagine it was or should be.

Trump’s patriotic vision of America is like an idealized version of mid-century NYC. It’s not pastoral or even suburban.

The comparison, elsewhere in this thread, to his Home Alone cameo is relevant.

Diet Coke is also just a completely different drink. It tastes different, even than Coke Zero.

I used to have a lot of Diet Coke in my house as a kid, and the taste is something I can recall quite distinctly.

Diet Coke was sort of the first attempt at producing a zero-calorie alternative to Coke, and years later with better technology they found they could produce something closer to regular Coke, but by then Diet Coke had its own loyal customer base that would be dangerous to offend. In my own household, my wife loves Diet Coke, while I prefer Coke Zero.

It's interesting how the original goal was to make fake Coke, but then releasing a new product that was closer to real Coke didn't entirely supplant the original fake, because the original fake now had its own specific reputation and flavor.

Diet Coke was sort of the first attempt at producing a zero-calorie alternative to Coke

Second attempt. The first was Tab, which managed to survive until 2020. Coke Zero isn't nearly as superior to Diet Coke than Diet Coke was to Tab, and the 2021 reformulation made it worse IMO.

I have a stash of cheap spicy ramen noodles in my house that I get a craving for once a few months. I personally blame this on my experiences in university where after training in the evening the hot cup of noodles just kept me going and now this flavor is stamped on my soul forever.

Man.

Sometimes people just don't like things because the things are bad. Or, given the insane adaptability of human aesthetics, because they haven't yet found a reason to cultivate the liking. In a world of impossible luxury, is it really surprising that people's preferences don't overlap?

More importantly, does it really say anything about a more fundamental hatred? Disdain for Americana is a heuristic, a shorthand for a bunch of material and cultural luxuries. Disdain for America, or for one's family, is something else.

Sometimes people just don't like things because the things are bad.

I don't like Coldplay. I think their music is what they play in a waiting room for your vasectomy. I don't go around using Coldplay as a [prefix to indicate everything bad in the world]. Nevermind, I was going to link the wikipedia article, but the actual title of the article is too funny:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_prefixed_with_Mc-_(derogatory)

Or, given the insane adaptability of human aesthetics, because they haven't yet found a reason to cultivate the liking. In a world of impossible luxury, is it really surprising that people's preferences don't overlap?

I don't like Hockey. I try to like hockey, pretty regularly, but I don't like it. I don't go around complaining about the NHL for existing.

Disdain for Americana is a heuristic, a shorthand for a bunch of material and cultural luxuries. Disdain for America, or for one's family, is something else.

Yet the two ideas are tied together. "I love America, but I hate everything American and want America to be completely different" has some obvious illogic to it. Patriotism is Hegelian, it's about synthesis, glorifying both sides of a conflict. The patriotic American version of the Civil War isn't the Lost Cause or Marching Through Georgia, it is both. Within that ad, the Yankees and Red Sox hate each other, but baseball wouldn't be better off without either team, it needs both, both embody part of baseball's romance and joy. As ever, the success of Augustus wasn't at core about the brutal victory of one side in the Roman civil war, but about his success in glorifying the other side as brave Romans embodying Roman values who were nonetheless mistaken. The English aristocrats who descended from William's retinue came to honor the Anglo Saxon heritage of their conquered homeland. Russian patriotism today struggles to swallow a world in which both Lenin and Alexander were admirable, but it seeks it.

American patriotism today which does not contain McDonald's and the NFL and MTV isn't, at core, patriotism, because for most Americans it doesn't contain the traditions of your literal ancestors and the people you grew up with, your teachers and scoutmasters and little league coaches and the boss at your summer job. That doesn't mean you can't dislike McDonald's. To be honest, I don't really like McDonald's. I've been to a McDonald's three times in the past two years, and once was just a drink, while another time I just bought a medium fry to get change for a fifty so I could buy a velvet painting of JFK for $30 in the parking lot. I prefer Wendy's, when I do eat fast food, which is rarely. But I understand the appeal of it. (I'll note that by my own standard I'm far from perfect: I haven't seen a superhero movie since the Toby Maguire Spiderman)

Which Alexander?

This was a brilliant publicity stunt by the Trump team, and the unhinged reaction from Redditors proves why.

As I mentioned last week, Republican candidates need to "hack the media" in order to get coverage. This is a great example. Trump comes across really well in this appearance and amplifying it can only help his campaign. If, instead, he gave a speech to talk about entitlement reform or some other boring shit, he would have gotten almost no coverage (and the coverage he did get would be purely negative).

Most elections really do come down to who is the more likeable person. Trump is in his element here and seems like a genuinely nice guy as he hands out bags of greasy food.

The people who are seething that this stunt is fake, on the other hand, come off as really dumb. Trump has been the victim of two assassination attempts. Do you think the Secret Service is going to let randoms through the drive through? Next, they'll tell us that pro wresting is also fake.

And finally there's also the added benefit that Kamala Harris claims to have worked at McDonald's but is probably lying about it.

Of course, most people have already made up their minds. But when the sole plank of the Harris campaign is that Trump is a monster, these humanizing events really undermine the narrative. Trump is now up to 62.5% on Polymarket, the highest since Biden left the race.

The status dynamics are interesting. Having worked at McDonald's sometime in the past clearly isn't something that Democrats feel there should be shame over--regardless of the veracity of Kamala's work history, it's still something she thinks gives a boost to her resume. But the response is nevertheless unhinged.

Is it some kind of stolen valor? I'm imagining Trump stocking shelves at CostCo in a photo-op, and I doubt he'd even get any media attention. Or even doing the same exact thing at Burger King: despite being identical slop, the response wouldn't be nearly so vituperative.

It has to do with what McDonald's represents. Kamala worked at McDonald's, but it was something horrific she was forced to do, serving the lowest of the low so she could better herself. If her life is ever dramatized by Netflix, her last day there will depict her departure as she gives a soliloquy about the depravities of mass consumerist slop, corporate wage slavery, car-centric culture, and factory farming. Trump, by contrast, is not only going there voluntarily, but going there as if there were nothing wrong or shameful about going there. Anyone with his privileges doing something so declasse is breaking a code.

Yeah, this seems to capture a lot of the feels.

Tucker Carlson has characterized this election as the people who talk down to others vs. those who are sick of being talked down to. And while that's obviously reductive, there's a strong element of truth there.

The Democrat says "Come with me and you won't have to go to NASCAR races and eat McDonald's any more. You can be just like me! Wouldn't that be great?". It shows a real lack of understanding about the working class and what they value. They don't do these things because they have to. They like McDonald's!

Trump, despite being raised rich, seems to get it. It's weird. I feel my own common touch fading away with every passing year.

The Democrat says "Come with me and you won't have to go to NASCAR races and eat McDonald's any more. You can be just like me! Wouldn't that be great?". It shows a real lack of understanding about the working class and what they value. They don't do these things because they have to. They like McDonald's!

This reminds me of the narrative I bought into about 20 years ago, when the left was pushing the idea that everyone, including those in the Middle East, just wanted liberal democracy (even if they weren't aware of it). So once freed from the religious oppressive forces keeping them down, they'd gravitate towards such a system like in America. Same for immigrants from such cultures, whose kids would see how awesome liberal democracy is and thus adopt its values. I particularly recall a (more recent, but still like a decade old, I think?) 5-hour long conversation between Cenk Uygher and Sam Harris about this kind of stuff, where Cenk was smugly telling Sam about how suicide bombers and other similar Muslim terrorists could just be won over with the benefits of Western liberal values.

I think the amount of epicycles that have been required to explain the various failures and speedbumps that such a narrative has encountered in the past 2 decades shows that, no, it was rather that the people who pushed such a narrative largely just lacked the ability or willingness to appreciate the true diversity of thought there exists in humans. I don't put much weight to any sort of sociological study anymore, but I suspect that the findings that liberals in America have a hard time modeling how conservatives think in a way that doesn't exist in reverse might be pointing at something that's true. Likewise for the cliche that "liberals think conservatives are evil; conservatives think liberals are stupid."

I honestly think most people simply are not good at understanding the Zeitgeist of cultures outside of their own and perhaps nearby cultures that are fairly similar. We don’t really get the MENA region because most of us are generations removed from a culture that took religion seriously. To most WEIRD people, religion is just a personal preference, probably not much more important than other lifestyle choices. We don’t think of God in universal terms and not really as a thing to order society by. We would never ever suggest a state religion except in a nominalistic way— yes we’re Anglican, but it’s not like we take it seriously enough to seriously teach it or publicly acknowledge it or encourage its practice.

Comparing that to MENA, they’d be convinced that most of the West are atheists. They don’t allow the public display of religion outside of the state sect of Islam. They not only live by those rules themselves, and publicly so, but enforce those rules on everyone whether Muslims or not. The Quran bans homosexual behavior and they will teach gays to fly off skyscrapers. The mindset is that Allah is watching and allah is going to not only keep score but intervene in history and in personal life to enforce his will.

Now on the liberal conservative version, I think it’s the same thing. Liberals are farther along the path to practical atheism. Most have at best found churches that are liberal first and Christian second, if they bother to go. They’re much more down the path of chewing almost everything through the Post-Modern Neo-Marxist lens of oppression and global culture norms of not judging anything except traditional Western values. As such they simply cannot fathom that someone might take such things seriously.

MENA was a seriously different place from the west even when the west took religion seriously; endemic cousin marriage and segmentary lineage will do that

Tucker Carlson has characterized this election as the people who talk down to others vs. those who are sick of being talked down to

And some guy called Shelly Wynter commented to outrage a week ago:

“Let me boil this election down in the African American community to a very simple — I’ll reference the great Malcolm X,” he said. “This race is between house African Americans and field African Americans, and field African Americans are voting for [Donald] Trump.”

Black people certainly do have their own um... interesting versions of everything.

What Donald Trump has over Mitt Romney, J.D. Vance, and Ron DeSantis is that black people seem to genuinely like him. He's got swag. He's the second blackest President in history, trailing Bill Clinton but ahead of Obama.

But there are downsides. My elderly WASP relatives hate him. So disrespectful, so uncouth! Can't win New Hampshire with an attitude like that.

And here I thought being in the party of racism supporters would more easily bring himself to quote that directly.

Of course, his massa(s) will beat his ass if he says it, which implies he himself serves in the house.

I think this alongside the other types of events (football games for example) are things that are coded for the lower classes, the deplorables, the kinds of people that mainline Democrats sneer at while being really patronizing about their attempts to “help”. Republicans are able to appeal to that base because they don’t sneer. They see “dirty jobs” as noble, they see doing a job that needs doing so you can meet your obligations as noble. They see the note rests and sensibilities of the working class in flyover country as worthy and beautiful. And this phot opportunity highlighted the difference between the two parties. The democrats are run by the PMC who see working class whites as beneath them. They don’t want to feel snobby so they tend to give help to minorities. The republicans are the party of doers and builders.

I think your wrong about football coding low status, I mean have you seen how expensive nfl tickets are? Plenty of wealthy high status people enjoy attending them

High-end spectator sport has always been high status. More than half the traditional British social season is spectator sport.

There is a separate issue that specific sports can acquire a lowbrow connotation (like association football in the UK for most of the 20th century) because an alternative is higher-status, but the NFL never fell into that bucket. The Ivy League is primarily an American football league, for crissakes. To a WASPy blueblood, "The Game" is a football game. (Compare the UK, where "The Varsity Match" is a rugby game).

There's definitely a stolen valor angle. "Kamala had actually worked there while Trump never had a day of retail work in his life". Do you think upper PMC democrats are the ones posting on Reddit about the entire thing being a sham?

McDonalds is the most well-known public-facing minimum wage job, but I don't doubt there'd be stolen valor vitriol over CostCo too.

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.

I think Reddit is populated mostly by college age children of PMC parents or by failsons who were raised in a PMC family. So while the actual PMC democrats probably aren’t, the people posting on Reddit have been raised in PMC families and have those values. They’re more obnoxious about it mostly because they don’t have the wisdom to hide their PMC power level, or perhaps don’t have to care yet.

There's definitely a stolen valor angle.

I'd be open to the possibility, but no one who's freaking out about it seems to be credibly approaching it from the "stolen valor" angle.

Do you think upper PMC democrats are the ones posting on Reddit about the entire thing being a sham?

I'm sorry what? Do you think /r/antiwork, or the entirety of Reddit for that matter, is in any way representative of a typical McDonald's worker?

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality.

This isn't about The Motte. It's one of those things that has visceral resonance, and the more you push back against it, the more it will look like Trump had a point to begin with.

but no one who's freaking out about it seems to be credibly approaching it from the "stolen valor" angle.

No one? Not one single person on planet Earth? Well sure then.

What's your definition of "someone"?

Do you think /r/antiwork is in any way representative of a typical McDonald's worker?

Well no, I think a typical worker in service industry or any other low-paid job posts on TikTok, not Reddit. Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit, or for example on various discords, they're closer to /r/antiwork in their ideology than to "it's 'onest work".

This isn't about The Motte. It's one of those things that has visceral resonance, and the more you push back against it, the more it will look like Trump had a point to begin with.

Unfortunately, our visceral resonances seem to be at odds.

No one? Not one single person on planet Earth? Well sure then.

Most people on planet Earth have never heard about it. Most people who will see this will think "heh, that's kinda funny". Somewhere, out there, there might be some lonely indivuduals upset at the valor stolen from service workers, but they'll be drowned out by legions that are upset that Trump did something mildly appealing to the common folk.

Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit, or for example on various discords, they're closer to /r/antiwork in their ideology than to "it's 'onest work".

"Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit" had to pass through so many filters that it will bear no resemblance to any remotely normal person. Reddit is a propaganda platform.

Unfortunately, our visceral resonances seem to be at odds.

I know this will sound weird, but I don't know if I believe you. Kavanaugh being a rapist vs. not was a disagreement of visceral resonances, Rittenhouse being a murderer vs. an innocent kid was a disagreement of visceral resonances... but this? The only visceral feeling I get here from the progressive side is "Trump bad. This good for Trump, therefore this bad".

but they'll be drowned out by legions that are upset that Trump did something mildly appealing to the common folk.

Where are those legions who express the belief that it is unbefitting of Trump to appeal to the common folk (as opposed to saying it's wrong to falsely appeal)? I've linked mine.

"Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit" had to pass through so many filters that it will bear no resemblance to any remotely normal person. Reddit is a propaganda platform.

What's your platform that is not a propaganda platform?

The only visceral feeling I get here

Here on the Motte? If not, then where?

I agree with other users that it's a clever publicity stunt, in that it will work with his base and the opposing base, naturally, is irrelevant to him. It's also bad, in my personal opinion, because it's transparently dishonest to associate yourself with menial work that you do not do and have never (in my knowledge) done. If Kamala is acting like her time at McDonalds was a nightmare, she's at least being honest even if she'll alienate the voters (likely red-voting anyway) who think menial work is always ennobling.

Where are those legions who express the belief that it is unbefitting of Trump to appeal to the common folk (as opposed to saying it's wrong to falsely appeal)? I've linked mine.

It's the same link. You don't really expect people to outright say "damn that Trump, why is he so appealing?" even that's what they feel, do you?

What's your platform that is not a propaganda platform

We're running short on those these days. I guess you can still post anything you want on Substack.

It's also bad, in my personal opinion, because it's transparently dishonest to associate yourself with menial work that you do not do and have never done

I'd chalk it up to getting upset at Gillette's slogan again, except:

If Kamala is acting like her time at McDonalds was a nightmare, she's at least being honest

This is completely backwards. There is no evidence she has spent a single day working in McDonalds. It's Trump who's honest here because his "lie" is just advertising, and everybody knows how it works. Kamala is the dishonest one, because people (including you) actually believe she made a factual statement about herself.

This is also how we know people upset at this aren't upset at dishonesty or stolen valor. No one who is criticizing Trump for this will turn around to criticize Harris, when it's pointed out she didn't work for McDonald's.

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I don’t think republicans think menial labor is per se ennobling. Instead, it is admirable to work instead of take hand me outs. That is, I don’t want people to stay working at menial jobs but if they start there and work hard in an effort to move up — kudos!

because it's transparently dishonest to associate yourself with menial work that you do not do and have never (in my knowledge) done

Yes, but associating yourself with them is the thing you have to do if you want to manage a company filled with the people doing those things regardless of whether you see yourself as above them or not (which you'll recognize as the stereotypical Karen mindset).

That is [one of] your job[s] in that position; Kamala is refusing to do that job.

(And that's completely ignoring the "leader is himself a servant" thing being... kind of foundational to the "Protestant" part of "Protestant work ethic".)

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.

Dramatically. The Democrats still win the lowest two income quintiles, it's just by a lot less than it used to be.

McDonalds is the most well-known public-facing minimum wage job, but I don't doubt there'd be stolen valor vitriol over CostCo too.

Costco notoriously pays above market and doesn't hire temporary workers, so it would have to be Walmart.

There's an angle, definitely. But my visceral response is that people would be much less angry at Trump doing a CostCo photo op than a McDonald's photo op. And, by the same token, there's a reason his campaign decided to do a McDonald's photo op over a CostCo photo op. The role McDonald's plays in the American imagination is key. Or, rather, in the two decidedly different American imaginations: one where it's symbolic of all the worst of American culture, and one where it gives fast convenient yummy oily treats.

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.

They have both. Democrats dominate the people without income, people with extremely low income, and people with high income derived from sinecures.

They lose most of the rest.

I haven't seen 'stolen valour' as an angle except from republicans trying to psychoanalyze their opponents. While this might be somewhat more likely to be accurate than the reverse, that's still a low enough bar to clear that it doesn't tell us much. I think most of the chatter is probably just TDS.

My suspicion is that Harris did work ad McDs, but it was in high school in Montreal. Her campaign doesn't really want to draw attention to her childhood outside the US, so they are being evasive.

I dunno if it quite adds up -- not sure what her family income was like once she moved to California, but I know somebody who attended Westmount High with her in Montreal.

This was (and still is) if not the richest postal code in Canada, definitely top 3 -- her parents didn't not own a home because (as her campaign is trying to imply) they couldn't afford to, they didn't own a home because they were rootless university professors and moved around a lot.

This was a pretty well compensated job, and not one that engenders a "kids should have a menial summer job so they will learn the value of demeaning manual labour" type attitude.

I see no reason to think that she would have had a job at all in this period -- maybe her economic fortunes took a turn for the worse once she moved out, but I kind of doubt this too -- I didn't go to college until the early 90s, but it definitely would not have been possible to pay a significant percentage of one's schooling costs on a part-time McDonalds paycheque then; I'd think that the 80s were even worse?

This was a pretty well compensated job, and not one that engenders a "kids should have a menial summer job so they will learn the value of demeaning manual labour" type attitude.

"Kids should have a summer job so they learn the value of hard work" was a completely normal viewpoint among upper-middle class parents as late as 2000 in the UK, and I assume it was so in Canada as well. It would have been even more normal when Kamela was a teen in the early 80's. I went to private school and Cambridge, and about half my social circle (myself included) were expected to get paid summer jobs by their parents, and about a third ended up doing menial jobs of the standard student-job variety. (I only know one person who worked at McDs specifically).

"Kids should have a summer job so they learn the value of hard work" was a completely normal viewpoint among upper-middle class parents as late as 2000 in the UK, and I assume it was so in Canada as well.

It was in my circles too -- but the point is that my parents actually are upper-middle class rather than literal-communist university professors, and I feel like the attitudes might be somewhat different there?

It definitely still is in Canada. I've mentioned this before here but a major part of the reason the affluent Toronto parents I talk to frequently are swinging against the federal Liberals is because none of their kids can get the typical high school jobs (fast food, grocery store, cashier, waiting tables, etc) that they expect them to get anymore.

I didn't go to college until the early 90s, but it definitely would not have been possible to pay a significant percentage of one's schooling costs on a part-time McDonalds paycheque then; I'd think that the 80s were even worse?

A lot of the problem with college loans reflects a growth in school costs, rather than decreasing incomes: see here for breakdowns. Demos estimates tuition for Howard University at the time of her graduation as "Tuition Then: $3,045 ($6,668 today)", aka 2016 dollars, in contrast to $23,419 in its 2016 tuition -- maybe hard to cover if you had a lot of other expenses, but at least something you could seriously dent.

Into the mid-00s, you could still do something comparable with community colleges, but these days they're pretty pricey for a full 2-year degree, and they won't get you to a 4-year.

Though in turn, a lot of the drive against students working is that the sticker-shock prices are only really getting paid by a handful of (often international) students, ameliorated by some amount of federal student aid or in-state discounts. Burnishing your college resume with extracurriculars can be much more renumerative in scholarships than slinging fries, and these programs and school workloads increasingly are incompatible with doing both.

((eg, I'm just a mentor for some FIRST programs, and they end up 25-hour jobs at times.))

Demos estimates tuition for Howard University at the time of her graduation as "Tuition Then: $3,045 ($6,668 today)", aka 2016 dollars, in contrast to $23,419 in its 2016 tuition -- maybe hard to cover if you had a lot of other expenses, but at least something you could seriously dent.

That's about the same as mine in the 90s (more like 4k/a as I recall) -- thing is, McDonalds paid even less than it did now, especially (I would think) in California.

Plenty of people (including me) had part-time (or more often, summer) jobs that were relatively menial and got by without student loans that way -- but these jobs were not pulling $5/hr shifts at McDonalds.

Minimum wage in California seems to have been $3.65 in the 80s -- if one were trying to pay for tuition (and were remotely hireable; ie. a law student) I'd think that one would find a better job?

At least in the current day, service sector work has the benefit of being relatively flexible with scheduling, and that can sometimes attract people who'd otherwise be unable to work stuff out. But especially in the 80s, yeah, it definitely wasn't the cash-maximizing option.

Nothing's impossible, although she claimed to have worked at McD's in college, not high school.

I'll say with 95% certainty that she made shit up. Even if she didn't have photos or paystubs, the Harris campaign could have at least provided approximate dates and the exact location where she worked. I could easily do that from my own menial jobs 20+ years ago. I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing for politicians and mob bosses to have a bad memory.

Edit: They did provide this info! Though none of her co-workers have come forward, it's a long time ago. On the other hand, it wasn't on her resume from 1987 nor in her memoir. I'm downgrading my probability of "made shit up" to 80%.

In the mean time, Ackman retweeted this funny dunk today:

"51 former intelligence officials say Kamala worked at @McDonalds"

I could still ping any of my co-workers at fast food joints and get them to corroborate that I was there, and if I ran from office they would come out of the proverbial woodwork (both good and bad on that front, perhaps). I think the fact they can't find one person who remembers working with her pretty damning.

Snopes tried their best to prove this true and still failed.

Aside from the above-mentioned news reports, there was no tangible evidence of Harris working at McDonald's as a college student. We reached out to Harris' campaign, as well as McDonald's headquarters, seeking tax records or other proof — which could include photos or videos of her working at the restaurant, employment records or physical items such as a uniform or name tag. We also reached out to Harris' sister, Maya, as well as a close friend from Howard University seeking comment, and looked for public interviews by friends or family members of Harris' to confirm the story, with no luck.

I don't think it happened.

To be fair, I would also ignore any media organ asking for comment from me on something long ago. In 2022 one reached out about an old college roommate who was running for office, and I sent the email straight to the trash.

I don't think McDonald's headquarters would respond about a private employment matter, and I'm not even sure it would have employment records from almost half a century ago.

Wouldn't the Harris campaign (who were contacted by Snopes) be highly motivated to provide some evidence for this if it were true? They couldn't find one childhood friend who said 'yeah we worked at Mickey D's together'? This has (at least for the next couple of days until the next cycle) blown up to be front and center in the presidential race.

I agree that the Harris campaign would have more motivation than anyone else. I just think this is assuming malice when incompetence is more than sufficient. Campaigns are extremely crazy internally (it's really hard to convey just how crazy they get unless you've been on one), with unclear lines of responsibility and a giant workload that you'll never get fully through. Even if they have Harris' lifetime tax records on hand (they should if they're available, but they might not be), there's no particular reason to think some intern or junior staffer would have an easy line to pass them on to Snopes. And even if they did, the expected benefit of convincing a Snopes reader that Harris worked at McDonald's might be outweighed by other considerations (giving away unrelated information that could provide avenues of attack, or just in setting a precedent).

Fair enough.

The New York Times has now seemed to find a friend that got told second hand by Harris's deceased mother that Harris was working there.

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Have you worked in a big campaign? I think it would be fun and enlightening if you shared your experiences on the thread!

All I know comes from West Wing and I have a feeling that the reality is way more regarded than the typical mass media depiction.

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Even the IRS doesn't keep more than a decade or so of records on hand ... but apparently the Social Security Administration does? With Form SSA-7050-F4, a $144 request for "Detailed Earnings Information" should provide a record which "Includes periods of employment or self-employment and the names or addresses of employers."

I don't see how the timing would have worked out, though. Harris mentioned working at McDonalds while campaigning in 2019, but I can't find mention of Trump calling this a lie until she brought it up at the end of this August, by which time it would have already been too late for the SSA to provide evidence. ("Please allow SSA 120 days to process", after which point you may call to "leave an inquiry" about why it still hasn't been processed, after which point I guess you just get to enjoy the sloth scene from Zootopia more.)

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Yeah, 'worked at McDonald's but can't directly confirm it because nobody cares about early fast food jobs so why would I save records of it" is definitely a story I'm willing to believe. I don't know that Canada is necessary for that story, but it would be an added wrinkle if so.

Maybe social media has kept people more in touch in my generation, but I can reach out to no less than four people that are direct connections on Facebook who I worked with at McDonald’s circa 2002 when I was in high school.

I just played a round of golf with one of them about a month ago.

And I’m not even much of an extrovert, much less a politician.

I don't think that's very typical, at least assuming that you went on to college afterwards. Although all I have as evidence is a gut feeling and my own n=1 case: I worked a fast food job for six months at the beginning of college and could not have been less interested in maintaining connections with any of the people I worked with there.

I think I can find people from about half the shitty menial jobs I worked. Entirely plausible to me that she worked at McDonald’s and doesn’t have any evidence because it was the 80’s.

I worked at a grocery store a couple of summers after you mention. I don't remember anybodies name who worked there, I have no paychecks, it's unlikely I have my tax records, there are no photos of me working there, and probably the only reason the supermarket would be able to have records of me is it's part of a giant corporate chain, not a franchisee.

Throw things back another 20 years and throw in the fact it's a franchisee, I have zero doubt Kamala could've worked there a few shifts every week and she has no real records.

I didn't think I had any paper records of working at McDonald's any longer, but on a whim logged into ssa.gov to see if they did. And they do. Employer name, address, EIN, and reported earnings are all there.

Just click "Review your full earnings record now" and then on the subsequent page "Take a closer look" to get links to details for each year.

Anyone who had a job in the 80's care to see if their records are online?

I have a lot of sympathy because I have a pretty similar story. When I was in high school I worked at {local pizza joint} that was sold to new owners and rebranded a couple years after I left. I put it on my first resume and the background check company my first employer used couldn't verify through whatever their normal means are that I worked there. I ended up having to reach out through several layers of friends to get the original owner of the place to write a letter confirming I worked there. It would have been way easier and more convenient to just leave it off. If someone wanted me to prove I worked there again today I'm not sure I could do it. Maybe a dozen people had contemporaneous knowledge and the only ones I'm still in regular contact with are my family.