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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31310 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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I really would have to know more about her to figure out what her motivations are. One possible motivation that no-one else seems to have mentioned is that she simply just actually believes that we are headed for a fascist dictatorship that will take away women's rights and so on.

In the course of the last few years I have seen several very smart friends of mine become rabid Trump-haters who genuinely, not in a virtue signalling way, but genuinely are worried that Trump is taking the country towards dictatorship and that there are plausible mechanisms by which Trump could create such a dictatorship. These are well-read, sharp people who do not normally display any sort of cognitive derangement or hysteria.

I myself have some worries about Trump and dictatorship and so on, which I have expressed here before, but not to the level of these friends of mine. I think that Trump would absolutely love to be a dictator, I just see no plausible path by which he or any other politician could accomplish this. Any major steps that Trump took towards dictatorship would literally cause a civil war. For example, California wouldn't sit around letting it happen, it would secede from the Union. I don't know, maybe I am overestimating the left's willingness to resist, but in any case I just can't imagine any plausible path to dictatorship as long as the politically non-apathetic Americans are split about evenly 50-50 between the left and the right. This isn't like Russia, where basically 80% of people supported Putin in the early 2000s, which gave him an opportunity to consolidate a dictatorship while backed by a huge fraction of the population.

Some of my smart friends, however, very much disagree with this.

Anyway, my point is that it's perfectly possible that this woman just genuinely feels like she has to do something, anything. Do I think that's the most likely explanation? No, but it's a possible one.

A sufficiently well-practiced performance will be indistinguishable from genuine belief. TDS, from what I observe in Germany, is entirely performative if only because Germans have very little to fear from Trump yet still ape the same kind of condemnatory panic that leftist Americans adopt. Overstating the danger is a form of virtue signalling analogous to claiming that video games cause satanism, or similarly absurd claims. It's considered good form among humans to exaggerate the danger posed by one's enemies in order to rally around a common friend/enemy distinction.

These are well-read, sharp people who do not normally display any sort of cognitive derangement or hysteria.

To state that they are willingly indoctrinated is probably more accurate. Also, the likely reason you never see them acting deranged in real life is that they never reveal that side of themselves to you.

These are well-read, sharp people who do not normally display any sort of cognitive derangement or hysteria.

People want that. They want their life to have some deeper meaning. Spending your life making line go up, not that satisfying. There's the infamous Orwell quote about nazism:

He wrote, "Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger, and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

Accepting the psyops that we are headed for a titanic struggle for freedom is perhaps an attempt to find meaning in a world that increasingly doesn't need people.

But this woman is surely bright enough to realize that this stunt won't actually do anything? Ca cest coullion.

For example, California wouldn't sit around letting it happen, it would secede from the Union.

You're way overestimating liberal capacity to resist-in-practice. California in particular(and the west coast more broadly) relies on being part of the broader US in order to avoid local state failure. Now that doesn't mean blue states need reds more than vice versa. But it means blue states(or at least, the kind that could spearhead resistance) are more dependent on the rest of the union than red ones.

But this woman is surely bright enough to realize that this stunt won't actually do anything? Ca cest coullion.

Why is everyone so confident in Skadden's HR? When I was graduating some really talented people did make it into the top biglaw firms, but so did quite a few mediocrities. 2nd/3rd year is right around washout time for those people to go to firm #2 at a bump down where again they washout before taking a federal job where they do nothing for GS-14 salary till the end of time.

Young people in genera suck right now in the legal field. I am in an adjacent field and feel it. Friends in biglaw complain about it all the time.

Standards were already out of fashion at law schools, and went off a cliff with covid. There is no appetite at the schools to bring them back

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