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[Note: the following story is fictional. Sort of. Read to the end for an explanation.]
My name is Cynthia Goldblatt. Cynthia Goldblatt. Cynthia Goldblatt. I am this person. I must respond to this name, even a split-second delay could give the game away. No, I thought, I’m worrying too much. If I ever fail to respond to my name, I’ll just laugh and say my brain was fried by watching YouTube shorts.
I had considered dying my hair black to fit better with my obnoxiously Jewish name. But I decided against it, for if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the American far-right, it’s that they have terrible J-dar. If anyone comments on my “Aryan” appearance, I’ll tell them I’m “half-Jewish.” I am the stereotype, a representative of the lying, Jewish-controlled media they don’t trust and are eager to appear in.
I was headed to Butterworth’s Restaurant, which was located blocks away from the Capitol in the heart of D.C. Like other establishments in the area, it was unremarkable up close, for the most powerful area in the world was NIMBY-fied and frozen in time. If you didn’t know where you were, you might guess Erie, Pennsylvania.
Butterworth’s was the hangout spot of choice for young MAGAs in D.C., which was not an accident, as it was created and marketed to be such a place. In a society where the personal was becoming increasingly political, it was a good model for an aspiring businessman to copy. You could even get your local liberal media outlet to give you free advertising if you fabricated some incident of “racism.” The name “Butteworth’s” brought to mind the wholesomeness of old England, the interior brought to mind the Victorian era, with small chandeliers hanging from the and sconce lights mounted on the walls, floral wallpaper, fine rugs, and Queen Anne couches and chairs.
I walked around for a while before I found my target, Natalie Winters, Steve Bannon’s 24-year-old podcast co-host who has worked as a White House correspondent since January 2025. She was wearing a fitted, button-down white mini dress with short sleeves. It was a style she displayed often on her Instagram, professional but not too professional. Sitting with her at the table were three other young women. “Hello,” I said, “I’m Cynthia Goldblatt. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” I hoped I got the tone of I’m-going-through-the-motions-to-pretend-to-respect-you right.
“Same,” Natalie said.
I went through the standard journalistic questions for a few minutes, what are your names, can I quote you on the record, etc. They all told me I could quote them, though only Natalie would allow me to quote her by name. Though I’m not a real journalist, I figure I might as well keep the agreement I made, so I’ll call them the black-haired girl, the redhead, and the not-very-pretty one.
“So what are you women up to tonight?” I asked.
“Girls night out,” Natalie said.
I pretended to be surprised.
“You see, we aren’t so different from you.”
“You’re normal Americans, just with more conservative views.”
“Yes,” Natalie said. “Though I’m more of a Bannonite. That was the case ever since I was a teenager. I just really cared about immigration and I loved the Pepes and the Keks and the memes. I was an autistic teen boy, basically.”
“Are you still an ‘autistic teenage boy?’”
“Everyone matures,” Natalie said. “But my politics are the same. I am a Bannonite, a nationalist. I believe that America is a nation, not a shopping mall. Those stodgy old conservatives, the National Review types, they used to insult us, tell us we’re just teenage nobodies, didn’t seem to get that we wouldn’t be teenagers forever. Or maybe they thought we’d turn into them. But we didn’t. And we’re the future of the American Right. Some people still don’t get it, but nobody under thirty buys into that National Review stuff.”
I intentionally formed a look of mild displeasure, which made the girls smile at one another. A lib unnerved! What they did not know was that I was one of them. I, too, had come of age marinating in 4chan. And I thought that 4channers would grow out of their radical politics because I knew the politics of 4chan were impractical. There would be no “white ethnostate.” There would be no git reverting the sexual revolution. You grow out of it or you remain in your politically isolated ghetto. Either way, the rest of the world goes on oblivious. But it turned out not to matter that the vision was impractical. Walt Bismarck said that “the real ethnostate is the friends we made along the way.” That was a humorously wholesome message about his journey out of white nationalism. But there’s a darker interpretation. The real ethnostate is Butterworth’s. It’s these four young women sitting around a table and giggling and parroting nonsensical slogans about how “America is a nation and not a shopping mall.” And then some schlub in northern Minnesota loses his job because his factory relies on Canadian imports. Then some just-married couple struggles to buy a washing machine because of tariffs. Then some kid gets sickened with preventable disease because his parents don’t trust the vaccine schedule. These chicks were poisoning the blood of America, but they were getting something out of it: friendship and community.
“Are there any elements of this new style of politics that you feel uncomfortable with?” I asked.
Natalie looked hesitant. “Yes,” she said. “The conservative media shilling for Russia unnecessarily is sort of a symptom of the Covid backlash. Because we don’t trust the authority on that, we’re going to not take their words on anything. Do I think Putin’s a great guy? No.”
I got out my pen and paper and wrote down some incomprehensible gibberish, the way I had seen reporters do. The problem with the Young Right is that most of its members are not very bright and don’t know much about the world. They don’t know who Rodzianko was, don’t know about the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, couldn’t tell you where Lviv or Kharkhiv were. And unlike the unwashed masses, who rely on the media to tell them what to think, they have no such institution, so they just bloviate into the ether, retweeting other ignorant social media accounts and calling things “BASED!” This is the movement that even some intelligent people think was gonna save America.
“Do you worry about the next thing?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” asked Natalie.
“The next thing. Maybe Alex Jones decides to rile people up about chlorinated swimming pools, then the New York Times publishes an article debunking his claims, and people respond by saying they don’t trust the media because of COVID so Alex Jones must be correct.”
Natalie looked at me skeptically and I worried it was perhaps not something a mainstream media person, of whom she had much experience, would say. “No comment,” she said.
I decided to move on to a different subject. “You called this ‘girls night out.’ For many women, part of that is looking for romance. Is that the case for some of you?”
“Not ‘romance,’” the black-haired girl said. “We’re looking for husbands.”
“Raise your hand if you’re looking for a husband.”
The black-haired girl and the not-very-pretty one raised their hands. After some hesitation, Natalie raised hers, too. “I’ve already got one,” the redhead said.
I feigned surprise.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m twenty-one-years-old, still in college, and yet I’m already married. That’s the theme of 2025: you can just do things. The mainstream media, no offense to you, has been telling us that women of our class aren’t allowed to get married. Well, I just did it.”
“I don’t recall telling anyone they were not allowed to get married,” I said haughtily.
“You didn’t need to,” the redhead said. “It’s in the message of every film out of a Hollywood that’s controlled by people of your,” she paused, “ideological worldview.” The others eyed her naughtily. “You didn’t need to tell us not to do it because you created a world where it was never done.”
“Maybe it’s as simple as people want to see movies about astronauts, not women nursing infants,” I said.
“But many of us do,” the black-haired girl said. “The tradwives draw large audiences. Social media has removed the gatekeepers. No more can a small elite group tell us what we like.”
“Oh,” I said, pretending to be annoyed. I turned to the black-haired one. “So, how is the husband search going?” I asked.
“I mean, it’s a challenge, nobody said it would be easy. I’ve been hoping to meet more of the techbros, the DOGE-guys, but to my disappointment, they rarely come to places like this.”
“Interesting,” I said. I had heard similar things from others. Many of the “techbros” grew up and went to work in very “blue” environments. They were pushed out of the Left by its hostility to capitalism, local government mismanagement, affirmative action, and (most importantly) #MeToo. They weren’t pleased when they met the Rightists whose passions were calling abortion, IVF, and vaccines Satanic and being so low-class the spacetime continuum bends under the enormous weight of the lack of class. A few walked out in disgust in favor of Hananianism, others embraced rightoid brainworms. More just kept their distance, not being interested in having unvaccinated kids who’d wind up in remedial classes.
I turned to Natalie. “What about you? How’s your husband hunt?”
“I think most men are gay in DC — either out or closeted depending on whether they’re Democrats or Republicans,” she said. “I want to marry someone who allows me to protect feminine energy in a world that is forcing me to be a girl boss because they keep sending Steve to prison. Perhaps I have…” She stopped there.
I burst into laughter. It was just so funny on so many levels. How the Trump movement was a lot like Baltimore – women forced to step into male roles because the men keep getting sent to prison, disproportionate punishment that was always evidence “they” were out to get them and never evidence the ingroup is full of lawbreakers. The four women looked at me with hostility, like I had finally “scored a point” against them.
I decided to explain why I was laughing. “Remember, you agreed I could publish anything said here tonight and attribute it to you.”
“I’m counting on it,” Natalie said.
“You’re not concerned Republican men in D.C. will be insulted by your statement?”
“Won’t be keeping me up at night,” Natalie said.
“Fascinating,” I said. “But it does make sense. Most will see it for what it is. It’s not that you literally believe 90% of men in D.C. are gay. You need an excuse for why you’re not living up to your tradwife ideology and this is what you choose. They can forgive you for that. What they couldn’t forgive you for would be if you acknowledged that there was something wrong with their ideology. Like if you had said, ‘maybe the reason fertility rates are down is because birthing an infant just isn’t that fun compared to the many activities modern society makes available to women like working as White House Press Correspondent.’ Loyalty to the tribe is the supreme value.”
Natalie frowned at me.
“What we’re trying to do here is rebuild social norms from scratch, often with no help from the older generation,” the redhead said. “This is a difficult process, which will have unforeseeable consequences. But we won’t be psy-opped into giving up.”
I turned to Natalie. “I can think of another reason you aren’t married,” I said. “Hypergamy.”
For the first time in the entire conversation, the four women looked shocked at something that had come out of my mouth. Here was the confirmation I was not who I said I was. “Oh, I’m not supposed to know that word, am I? Well, I do. And yes, the concept has been abused by the Andrew Tates of the world, but you really can’t understand modern dating without it. Women will usually phrase it as ‘I want to marry an equal,’ but the problem is only ever with men who rank lower, never with men who rank higher. 80% of the people in the place are men, but the guy who debugs SQL queries for $145,000 a year is not an appropriate match for a woman who’s on TV.”
The redhead and the not-very-pretty one looked confused while the black-haired girl looked angry. She rose to her feet. “Get out of here,” she said to me.
“No,” Natalie said. “I want to know who this person is. Her name isn’t Cynthia Goldblatt.”
“No s***,” I said. “Do I look like a Goldblatt?”
As I was speaking, the power abruptly went out.
I looked around and smiled. “Right on schedule. It’s true what you people like to say. ‘You can just do things.’ For instance, generals can just order the President of the United States to be placed under house arrest. A hundred thousand nude bodybuilders are converging on Washington. No more will we have a democratic system where our trade policy is determined by some obese loser in Wisconsin who’s mad his town got ‘left behind.’ The new era of Friedrich Nietzsche and Bronze Age Pervert begins today, an era defined by strength and virility.” I pulled out my gun.
Okay, I’ll cut it off there. I said at the beginning that this was “sorta” fictional. There are not a hundred thousand nude bodybuilders marching on Washington, but there is a person named Natalie Winters, who really is twenty-four years old and really does work as White House correspondent. She really did say she wants to “marry someone who allows me to protect feminine energy in a world that is forcing me to be a girl boss because they keep sending Steve to prison.” It’s such a clownish statement you would never believe it actually came out of someone’s mouth, but it did. Other statements in this story, such as the ones about Russia and Natalie being an “autistic teenage boy” are also taken from the same interview a journalist did with Winters, which I encourage you to read.
In a country where 38% of liberal women aged 18-29 identify as LGBT, you, dear reader, may find yourself drawn to the “BASED” subculture. I’m not asking you to stay away, just to see it for what it is. It’s not Crémieux, it’s not Razib Khan, it’s not Steve Sailer. It’s people like Natalie Winters, whose response to the Trump-Musk feud was, “this whole thing is proof of why we shouldn’t vaccinate children.”
I liked this comment. Comments like this couldn't be a regular thing, but I thought it was a good effort at introducing something that may not have otherwise been discussed, with its ineffectiveness most likely being mostly due to meta-discussion.
I mentioned it downthread, but I literally don't know what the point was. Since you saw something interesting here, could you explain it?
The culture of "MAGA personalities" and its intersection with dating/family formation dynamics that are a frequent topic of discussion in The Motte.
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And then everyone clapped
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This stands out particularly as a straight up fantasy take.
The MAGA base doesn't see it a "shilling for Russia". They just stopped having a problem with Russia when communism ended and see the policies popular in DC as incredibly antagonistic for no reason.
Yeah, that's been my experience of pro Russia rightists.
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Not really clear what that scenario looks like, but either way theres a significant chance Hanania faces the wall, dont you think?
Yeah, thé single most hazardous job to have in the event of a military coup is probably ‘antagonistic, weird looking political pundit’. Other strong contenders might include ‘previous head of state’.
He's an insane Frenchman with an addiction to tea.
While I am half cajun and addicted to tea, no, I just have the keyboard on my phone set up with three different languages and don't double check which one I'm on before posting.
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Dunno, maybe autocorrect /word prediction simultaneously enabled for several languages at once?
My other thought was some kind of foreign language keyboard that makes such slipups easy but IIRC this guy is in Texas.
My keyboard is set for English/spanish/french.
I keep it to make it harder for artificial stupidity to imitate me- probably a paranoid worry, but c’est la vie.
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Stop trying to make fetch happen.
I think most people are missing it, but this whole shaggy dog is just to bury another love letter to Hannania.
Due to a brief alignment of opinions and goals certain parts of Twitter managed to convince themselves that they had real power and influence over the president and the wider right, and now they feel BETRAYED when the wider right tells them no you're just a stopped clock that happened to be correct.
Hanania doesn't even have the benefit of being a stopped clock. He's confused and going backwards. The people who he's now decided are a threat, the so called "woke right" are not university professors, presidents, congressmen, CEOs, etc. They are frogs and eggs on X and the occasional podcast host. He's trying to re-calibrate against a basically non-existent enemy, which, even if it was to turn into a threat, would have to build steam for 30 years to get to where the woke left CURRENTLY still is with regards to power.
Good points. In a further twist of irony Hanania himself seems to be more closely aligned with those "frogs and eggs on X" then anyone else and is trying to court the Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and David Brooks wing of "soft Republicans" as though they're still in charge of the party.
As @AlexanderTurok says below Hanania has completely failed to update his priors based on the changing situation.
Many are still in high positions in the party, you just don't hear about it.
...because (unlike Hanania) they are savvy enough to notice which way the wind is blowing and keep thier heads down.
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It seems like many Rightists got used to being out of power and haven't psychologically accepted that Trump's election is something that happened.
Trump, Johnson, and Thune are not closely aligned with the "woke right". Harris, Schumer, and Pelosi are closely aligned with the woke left.
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Which is extremely low-T behavior and should be seen as embarrassing on the part of all involved. The best and most masculine, high-agency response is to continue taking power at the fastest rate possible and then take revenge once power is achieved.
Not to whine about it on the Internet and “take revenge” by willingly sacrificing all gains made so far.
Sad to see genuine reactionary potential throwing itself away. Many such cases, I guess.
I'm skeptical that he was ever genuine.
Funnily enough, I think I misunderstood and thought you were talking about the Loomerite-Tuckerist wars going on in the right at the moment, as various factions spar for influence by threatening to take their rubber ducky and go home.
Hanania is definitely some kind of weird op effort, you’re right about that. He is also not the elite human capital he likes to see himself as.
Oh, it's that too. It's all that.
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That line doesn't even read as praise of Hanania, much less the point of the post.
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I, for one, enjoyed it. But I don't think I'm in the same solar system as anyone you might be aiming this at.
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At eight user reports (seven of them negative) and meta-moderation landing on "bad" (but with low confidence), I feel obligated to actually say something about this post. Unfortunately, that meant I had to read the post, which I was unable to power through last night, I simply did not have the stamina for it.
While I appreciate the apparent effort that went into this post, I think it ultimately fails both "speak plainly" and "do not weakman." If you wanted to criticize Winters, specifically, or fisk the interview, that would be fine. But removing quotes from their original context to insert into a work of parody (or is it satire?) doesn't really meet the appropriate threshold, especially when your apparent intention is to smear "“BASED” subculture," which does not sound like an appropriately specific group.
I am getting the idea that you are very interested in criticizing (or mocking) certain very broad groups of people, most particularly anyone who is to your political right. I understand that is what most social media is used to do today. However, that is not really the purpose of this space. If you have a problem with the idea that some women think acting the part of a "girl boss" is stupid and exhausting, ideally you should talk about that idea, or charitably engage with the ideas of some specific person who said it. If you think that person is stupid or misguided, you can say that, provided you can explain why beyond just the fact of your disagreement. If there is some specific group that teaches the idea to which you object, you can complain about that, too!
The fact that 38% of liberal women aged 18-29 identify as LGBT is interesting and specific and warrants more than a throwaway line. The claim that "we shouldn't vaccinate children" is open to all kinds of thoughtful criticism. You have plenty of material here to plainly state your own views, and to criticize (with evidence!) the views of some specific people with whom you disagree.
But nakedly asserting that "'BASED' subculture is not Khan, it's Winters" doesn't get you anywhere. At best, you're just trying to shame people away from certain ideological influences, instead of persuading them. You've got the right level of effort! You just need to lose the disdain.
I don't even know what "BASED" subculture is supposed to be. Can we at least get some sort of card of runners and riders to keep straight who is supposed to be what on the boo-list?
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Why would I have a problem with it? I am a pronatalist, eugenics-supporting, 4chan-brained guy with "Alt" in my flair. I am you, the difference is I can see Winters for what she is rather than what I want her to be.
The story featured a woman in a Right-wing space assumed by its denizens to be liberal, who by the end realized she wasn't. Almost as if there's an analogy there.
Why don't you post a user viewpoint focus? I don't know what you believe except you don't like mainstream right wingers and support abortion.
The short answer is that I'm a libertarian, kinda like Hanania, though more 2023 Hanania than 2025 Hanania. To sum it up in one sentence I like the first world and think it's better than the third world.
A libertarian believes in freedoms other than just unrestricted abortion rights.
We have no indication he doesn't, even if abortion is a weirdly prominent issue for him.
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Aren’t the user viewpoint focuses supposed to be based on nomination?
Would anyone mind if he treats this as a nomination?
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I don't know, because you aren't speaking plainly.
That doesn't have any particular bearing on why you were moderated, which is that you were not speaking plainly, and appeared to be weakmanning.
You're certainly not me, and before your post I had never heard of Winters. It's still not clear to me why I should care who she is at all, or why you care who she is at all. Because you have yet to speak plainly.
This does not appear to have any particular bearing on my moderation of the post.
Speak plainly.
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"Speaking plainly" that wasn't.
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Well, 8 reports so far and a very strong consensus that this post was bad. OTOH, writing meta-fiction isn't really against the rules (though in the future, I think aspiring short story writers should just start a new thread) and while arguably this was all very boo-outgroup, it does seem to be making a point, which is well within bounds, even if you took a wordy and elliptical path to get there.
I don't know what to do with you, buddy. I'm dropping a mod note here so people know we have taken note, but I am not rapping you for this post. My opinion is that it's not ... technically against the rules, though I definitely would put a foot down if you keep doing this. You've already been warned several times recently for snark and low-effort mockery. This was at least high-effort mockery. (I think. It doesn't look like AI generation, but I wouldn't stake too much on that.) I've asked you a couple times now to please straighten up and engage respectfully, even with people you think are terrible. This post doesn't add to your infractions per se, but it does add to our overall impression of you as someone who is here to rattle cages. I would prefer you stake out a position as a leftie who can actually debate civilly, as opposed to a leftie who can't restrain his contempt and will eventually end up banned.
Anyway, this is my personal opinion. But if another mod disagrees, I am not going to object if they think this post merits an official warning or a ban.
(FWIW, a couple of people have suggested this is Impassionata. I don't think so - Impassionata burns out like jet fuel, he wouldn't be able to hold it in this long.)
ETA: ninjaed by @naraburns. I agree with him also.
Turok's previous writing is almost perfectly incompatible with the goals of the Motte. It's often witty but insincere (I enjoy his trolling of r/AITA quite a bit). It's also marred by elliptical insults that are often rooted in failed cold reads. For example, the "didn't you see 'Alt' in my flair?" schtick presumes an interlocutor easily gulled by shibboleths that aren't really a thing here.
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No, it seems hes mostly following this.
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This is not impassionata. For one, AT has been a SSC/ACX commenter for a long time, also, the views don't match.
There is more than one annoying person in the internet.
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Nah, this is not Impassionata. The Passionate One has a very distinctive style and a different set of bees in the bonnet. While they might well be able to switch to a different voice, the things that make them twitch are unique to them and would show up sooner or later.
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Jinx
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If I'm catching the drift of this boo outgroup post, it prompts me to wonder this: for the average person, who to the extent they pay attention to the news, has seen mainstream media and the government burn all credibility in the past decade... what are they supposed to do? Every institution they're supposed to trust has lied outrageously. Are they supposed to double down and believe the NYT and MSNBC even harder?
I agree that doing the 100% opposite of what the mainstream says is probably not ideal, but other options are tough. Are they supposed to devote hours per day like us very online types to sort out all the lies and misleading claims to try to chart their own semi-orthogonal path?
TBH I think the big problem, which I’ve talked about before is that really most shouldn’t be following politics and probably shouldn’t be voting. Voter apathy isn’t a flaw in the system, it’s a feature. If people who don’t understand politics are heavily politically active, it’s honestly a problem to be solved because those people generally make terrible decisions. Even if they were somehow given “good” news sources, most of them don’t understand the issues well to make good decisions. Take away the “good, true’ news, and you have a situation in which people who don’t know what is going on and wouldn’t understand what is going on even if they got the truth are voting based on who looks most truthful and leader-like while lying to them on TV or TikTok. When people like that decide elections, it’s more likely to damage the country than do go.
I agree, but I wasn't necessarily referring to politics. I meant things like: should the person get a new vaccine, should they try a new medication, should they follow the vaccination schedule for their children, should they send their children to public schools, is this food item being sold at the store safe, etc. The FDA says red dye #whatever is safe to consume and won't make your kids adhd lunatics. Can that be trusted? Every little question related to food or medicine now is up for grabs, and people are unsurprisingly going in all kinds of directions.
Whether ADHD is real or just hasn't been spanked syndrome, I highly doubt it's caused by food additives.
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I mean, for most things medical, electrical, or legal, there’s no good reason for anyone without the training to attempt to DIY. For food and food additive advice, I’d look for someone who’s a Registered Dietitian, because they have trained in the material and would know the information you need.
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I've seen multiple people, via two different arguments, answer this with "yes, you have to keep believing them." Either because it's your duty to keep society functioning, or (less often) because the "truth-telling institutions" are definitionally incapable of lying.
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Can't you muster up some level of genuine sympathy for a single woman who doesn't want to live as a girlboss? Why would she even want to?
Of course I do. Is every single person on this website unable to see the "Alt" in my flair?
I kind of assumed that your flair meant that you were taking the role of MSNBC if it was a person and was posting. Like how we talk about "alts" as alternative accounts that a single person has.
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What difference does that make?
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Guy writes fun short story. "Source?" says one, "What did he mean by this?" says another. It's a joke, c'mon.
Was this meant to be a mean joke? Sorry man, you put in too much effort and snark, so the snark itself came off as in parody and the whole thing came off as decent satire. Well done, I did laugh, you stuck the landing.
You have an obsession with class but you shouldn't. Of the top 1,000 or so achievements of humanity you will find, well down the list of its contributors, maybe one single noble by name of Tycho Brahe. It's Shakespeare, scrutiny on his identity didn't come from a fair evaluation but noble arrogance at the impossibility of a commoner having such a way with words.
I think you approach something truthful here, but only approach. You wrote this (I hope; if it's AI consider me the sad fool), you show your intelligence, you also show how deeply you consider this topic. More than some of these respondents realize, but worse, more than you yourself realize, because I think your obsession with class fogs your mind by forcing you to write off branches in reasoning and take conclusions you otherwise wouldn't. There may be something to be said about the behaviors of large groups of people, and the way that relates with their "class," who they started around, who they are around now, who they will end their lives around. But class as Banana uses it, and as you may have fallen into, is more like a religious belief, something ineffable to which you always reason back. I can assure you the progressive metaphysical beliefs of western Brahmin are just that: without substance. You use them as though they're the map while they're just making it all up.
So why not, just for curiosity's sake, reconsider one of your conclusions? Any, you know this, your subject, your choice, but after shelving class as having explanatory power and instead as detail incidental to the territory you try to see.
We seem to have different definitions of what counts as "fun". I couldn't get past the opening paragraphs as it was just so bad - as bad as a John Oliver piece about "Drumpf bad! Him orange! Orange bad! Geddit? GEDDIT???"
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There was some of "self-parody" in my characterization of "Goldblatt," particularly in the final paragraph. I get what I am, a Nietzschean fantasizing about coups that aren't going to happen.
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Lord Kelvin comes immediately to mind. And there are plenty of gentry, such as Charles Darwin.
I don't think Turok really cares about class, though; it's just a stick to beat people he disagrees with. Kind of a silly one, though, since if you're on the right in America today you probably believe that the "elites" and the "PMC" have been fucking it up by the numbers, so the stick really has no bite.
I meant nobles by birth. Brahe was a born noble, Kelvin was elevated to the peerage for his work. As with Darwin, "Son of a wealthy man" or "Son of a merchant" or especially "Son of a wealthy merchant"/"mother's father was a wealthy merchant" is a common descriptor for many great mathematicians and scientists. There is something to be said of the requirements and traits needed to become and succeed as a merchant. Serfs these were not, but no one in this forum could be said as being of "serf stock," and few if any could be found in most active discussions of politics on the internet. I would guess most people here don't ever interact with them beyond the most basic of retail and service workers.
It's like -- there was this shooting years ago at a Madden tournament. For those surprised that football video games have esports competitions, this was also news to me. It was a small tournament, but still. I knew the games sold well and yet I never actually considered it because it took hearing about that shooting to realize all along this entirely separate and parallel ecosystem existed. Many millions of people play shooters, but there's insignificant overlap between them and the many millions playing sports games.
There's insignificant overlap between people discussing politics online at all strata and the actual "serfs." The actual "serfs" have smart phones because everybody has them, but they're not arguing about human capital. It's what you've said, class as a stick, because this is really intraclass competition in form of those of supposed status sneering. You want to see the actual low class? You already know it, everybody does. YouTube comment sections, that's the parallel ecosystem where the "serfs" roam.
Ah, I had not realized (or remembered) that Lord Kelvin wasn't born that.
Oddly, some people in my family talk about us being "good peasant stock", but it isn't actually true; they were shopkeepers and skilled laborers in the old country.
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I'd say I'm pretty close, though — particularly compared to most people here. Functionally-illiterate high school dropout handyman father, stay-at-home mother, grew up in low-population-density Alaska (including time in a community so rural, it lacks electricity, and has a community well for water).
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Actual working class people I know all loved and were very excited by Trump, albeit usually not in a high IQ way. 'He said no taxes on tips/overtime!'. Nearly all the undecided voters I described in my post a while back pulled the lever for him over, mostly, those two policies.
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Who? Where?
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"Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is."
You literally picked some random person from a group you don't like and told a shaggy dog story about her just so you can have a wall of text whose upshot is that this person and "people like" her are bad.
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Congratulations, you have succesfully cherry-picked one of the right's worse representatives. Is this supposed to teach anyone anything other than "This Natalie Winters I never heard of before who I will probably never hear of again seems a little vapid."?
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I'm just going to candidly and frankly tell you because of the shenanigans by the biotech companies and governments I'm not going to be getting my scheduled age group vaccines that are coming up, there are posters all over my Doc's hall ways that such and such age brackets have their regular scheduled vaccines coming up, I'm just not going to get it, I'm going to delay the whole thing as long as humanly possible and if by some administrative slight of hand the issue is pressed I'm going to go shopping for a doctor who I can slip a 100 and have him fictitiously give me one, noting me down in the app that I had mine given.
That was my tactic with the Anthrax vaccine back in the 90's. It was double-plus hard because I was in the military, but I dodged it anyway. No regrets.
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Your post suggests that you're talking about yourself rather than your child, which is a relief. But I have to ask, what negatives do you forsee from getting vaccinated so much that you'd risk getting the diseases they protect against?
thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, sometimes abbreviated to TTS
So you're avoiding a vaccine which stopped a global pandemic that killed millions because four out of every million (that is, 0.0004%) people who get the vaccine develop a heart condition because of it?
It feels like your position is based more on political contrarianism than statistical sense.
Like, I get it, governments got authoritarian and petty when it came to vaccines. I couldn't buy a beer in a German biergarten because I didn't have the right vaccine passport app, while all my friends (who I was sitting with) were allowed to, as if the beer somehow facilitated the transmission of the virus. That was dumb. But you're not sticking it to the wokes by not getting a vaccine, you're just increasing the chance that you get ill or (God forbid) die from a preventable disease.
I left it to others to reply to your comment with the heart condition Myocarditis.
TTS is the unusual, rare blood clot syndrome.
Traditional standards of efficacy for vaccines make taking the vaccine an individual decision. If Alfred gets vaccinated, Alfred is protected and so doesn't care that Boris refused the vaccine. Boris can notice that the death toll was concentrated among the frail elderly. Deaths among the young were exclusively due to vulnerability caused by pre-existing serious health conditions. If Boris is a healthy young person, statistical sense is to notice that he is not personally at risk, and to be deterred from taking the vaccine by even rare vaccine side effects, if they hit the young and healthy.
One systematic problem is that one knows the intended effect of the vaccine. If people are still coming down with the disease, then it is clear that the vaccine has low efficacy. But one does not know ahead of time what the side effects are going to be. They are easy to miss or ignore especially in the context of for-profit drug discovery. The decision about whether to take a new vaccine involves a judgement call about the appropriate safety factor. One needs to multiply the dangers of acknowledged side effects by this safety factor to adjust for the systematic under reporting inherent in the researchers not knowing what to look out for.
A second systematic problem is that societies that mandate vaccines are counting down to corruption of the approvals process. An informed choice about getting vaccinated depends on knowing how long is left in the count down, and that information is a closely guarded secret.
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It was more like 4/10k if you happened to be in the susceptible group (young males) that we know of -- it's absolutely a possibility that low-grade heart damage was quite widespread, as only the severe cases would have been noticed/recorded.
And assuming that he's in that group (and doesn't also have cancer or something) his odds of dying from covid were essentially zero -- so the behaviour was pretty rational, really -- unlike your popping out of the woodwork to criticize his personal decisions.
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Man I don’t care. I will discuss getting the vaccine on a risk/benefit basis when 1) Dr Fauci is publicly executed and 2) the lockdowns receive Holocaust-level treatment in broader society. Til then, don’t care, my stance is that the chink virus isn’t real, was never real, and is just the government killing people and lying about the cause as an excuse to take away our freedom.
You've been warned about this before. Racial slurs are allowed if there is actually a point you're trying to make with them, but just dropping them as edgy emphasis to see how many jammies you can rustle is not.
There is a point I'm making with it- lots of people saw the virus reaction as pure overblown neuroticism to take away our freedom and make us into a communist country. These people calling it the 'chink virus' with 'panic mongering gay morning america propaganda' are far more representative of the median virus skeptic than motteizeans.
I remember my dad using those words to describe the narrative which, in his telling, was evidence against the nineteenth amendment due to its effect on women in march or april of 2020. This did not get much disagreement in the room- whether pro-Trump or anti-Trump(and there are anti-Trump Arklatex rednecks, or at least were), rich or poor, young or old. The view that people who actually gave a shit about a new and exciting form of the common cold(and that the deaths were mostly at the very least miscoded) because it was from China were a prime example of how stupid people voting is a prime danger to free people everywhere is what I had in mind. Perhaps my experiences and dialectical forms are unfamiliar to the motte.
Arklatex sounds like software for reverting typeset math into bad handwriting.
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The sentiment is one I see a lot of, even if not the specific word 'chink'. Open slurs are very much a hallmark of the edgy, online right, in my experience. Normie Republicans like my own (grand)parents think slurs are rude, but they're comfortable with the ideas they encompass -- the kung-flu is absolutely the fake and gay China virus pushed by the elites to cull the population, but you don't call it the chink virus.
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I don't think it's anywhere near a open and shut case that the vaccines stopped the pandemic, we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against, but as people got vaccinated we also saw the rise of less deadly variants. And of course, as more people still got infected they would build natural immunity. As for the prevalence of side effects, again we don't have much information to compare against, but the distinct impression I got from the public medical establishment during the pandemic is that if it were happening they would not have been honest about it because of how they took a mortage on their reputations to push the vaccines. There was no scientific curiosity, anyone trying to raise any alarms was not taken with even a slight grain of seriousness but immediately the public health establishments were looking for ways to discredit them. While that does not increase the trustworthiness of those making the claims, it does negatively affect the trustworthiness of those dismissing them without even looking at them.
Note, I'm not saying that the vaccines did nothing but caused deadly side effects, personally I think it probably had a mild effect in lowering the seriousness of infection for people who encountered COVID for the first time after the vaccine, and was probably generally safe and side effects no more prevalent or serious than other similar drugs, but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this, so I wouldn't judge someone for coming to a different conclusion.
No, but we have a counterfactual population to compare against, the population who chose not to get vaccinated. The comparison is gigantic and unambiguous, vaccines saved lives. And that's with the unvaccinated population benefitting from the partial herd immunity provided by the vaccinated population.
If they weren't being honest about side effects, why did you quote an article about them describing side effects and how common they are as a reason for not getting the vaccine? How does that not count as honesty?
If that were true, they would have just released the vaccines instead of spending months and months doing exhaustive trials to see whether and to what extent the vaccines reduced infection, and what side effects there were. If scientific curiosity means anything, it means testing your hypotheses with studies. What exactly did you expect them to do beyond that?
You have a massive population of vaccinated people, living among a massive population of unvaccinated people. The unvaccinated population had death rates from COVID that an order of magnitude higher than the vaccinated population. What more evidence could you ask for?
It's very simple: when the pro-vaccine side began censoring, they lost all credibility. I don't care what these alleged studies say. I assume they're poisoned and discard them, because the people publishing them used the state to censor anything contrary.
There is nothing they can say to me that would prompt me to read their work much less change my mind on the vaccine
It's pretty fallacious to split the entire species into 'the pro-vaccine side' and 'the anti-vaccine side' and conclude that because some people or organisations were censoring information (as if this is a new thing for organisations to do) then you can ignore all studies and evidence (and your own lying eyes) about whether the covid vaccines worked.
Germany censors people who think the Holocaust didn't happen. That doesn't mean the Holocaust deniers are right.
Paul Graham says to keep your identity small, and this is a perfect example why. You're wilfully putting yourself at risk for a disease because your political partisanship won't allow you to accept a medical technology that your political opponents might like.
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Ah yes, the trials where they hand picked the population to be tested by specifically excluding mothers and other groups most likely to confirm side effects, the same trials which stink to high heaven where they just went, welp some of the time has passed time to fold the control group into the main group and pretend everything is fine. These same MFers which to this very day are trying to keep the heart damage side effects frequency unkown to the general public.
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I'm just a random poster, so take this for what it's worth. But I appreciate that as an (apparent?) leftist or progressive, you still post here and help prevent The Motte from becoming a complete echo chamber. Before the last week or so, I remembering you posting interesting comments that go against the prevailing opinions here which stimulated discussion. But over the last couple of days it just seems like you're posting snarky one-liners, trying to bait people, and dunk on your enemies. I hope you don't flame out, but instead stick around and poke holes in right-wing thinking to help keep us right-wingers honest. Maybe it would be good to take some time away from this place? I know that even I have to sometimes despite agreeing with a greater proportion of the posters here.
I'm in a similar position of being glad that he's here providing a differing viewpoint, but come on, a couple of days? His posts were full of bait and snark from the day I first saw him post here. If anything, this one is way more high-effort than his average comment (though sadly most of the effort is going into trolling).
Really, I'm not. Progressives like these actively drag down the standard of discourse in this forum with their shit-flinging (this applies to other people of varying political stripes too, but the OP here seems to be one of the worst and most prolific offenders in this forum as of late).
I'm willing to engage with other left of centre people who participate here and even say I appreciate their participation in spite of our ideological differences, but this ain't it. It's such obvious bait that it barely even warrants attention from me - I basically look at a post of his, roll my eyes and move on. Even Darwin wasn't this consistently terrible, in spite of his penchant for doubling down on transparently incorrect statements. This on the other hand is an utterly vapid waste of time, there's barely even anything to counter: it's badly-written fanfiction that builds up to the ultimate reveal of "A MAGA said something ick, checkmate rightists".
If you read to the end it couldn't have been that bad.
You have no idea the quality of Fanfiction I will willingly read.
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Nitpick, but Darwin was worse, it was always hard to tell whether he was sincere, or at least he always had at least some plausible deniability, whereas this guy clearly has an axe to grind which makes it easier to just ignore the low effort snark.
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I resigned myself to the soft bigotry of low expectations, and came to accept the need for some affirmative action of dissenting views. That said, I agree his influence here is rather negative as shitposts beget shitposts.
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They've never been super high quality IMHO but recently they seem like almost pure shitflinging.
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Dang, my optimism was misplaced here. I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be engaging with, as "the alt-right is bad" isn't a very interesting thesis.
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I don't get this post. So some lib journalist does a hit piece on some maga staffer. And you decide to dramatize it into an entire hecking novel, because why exactly????
Can you explain your point in plain english? Who even is Natalie Winters and why should I care? Why does she represent "BASED" subculture rather than anyone else?
In the story the journalist wasn't a lib, just playing the role. The joke is that she was more conservative or based or w/e than the Bannon-ites. My read: the purported beliefs of most MAGA types, or typical young conservative, aren't anything beyond memes that make them feel good about themselves and the real ubermensch have no respect for them and will take them down too.
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I live in a- or in multiple- based subculture. One of them is extremely popular on the internet.
Yes people say things that are clownish or weird to normies. But does anyone deny that modern secular society has, uh, problems?
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You live in clown world. A CRS insider published a book bragging how he and his colleagues have been secretly stage managing race riots, race controversies and so on, in confidence from everyone but maybe some senate committee and president since 1962.
Yes, they only tell congress what they want to tell congress, and they're not subject to FOIA. Book was published in 2020 or so.
Most everyone assumed this crap was managed and CRS was even mentioned because they're not that secret, but e.g. knowledge of this book only came up in 2025.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56253400
In short, it's a clown world so I'm not sure why you're surprised people act like clowns.
I think that’s also a very good counter example to all the people who say that there are no conspiracies because they are impossible to keep secret. This organization wasn’t even actually secret and they still managed to conspire undisturbed for forty years.
MKUltra showed this when a couple dozen universities across the country were dosing unknowing participants with psychoactives and it took congress investigating something else to uncover it. People are in fact so good at collectively shutting up one could wonder if a separate conspiracy had anything to do with the appearance in common wisdom of "number of participants" as a weighty variable in the success of plots.
It wasn't 'universities' it was a CIA program for god's sake!
Which university professors and medical doctors willingly participated in...
The worst things we know of were done in Canada, the 'straw country' US uses for dirty work bc their judges have no jurisdiction there. Ewen Cameron kept some people on LSD in a coma so long they lost memories.
In the US I know that CIA ran a brothel where they were drugging people and drugged some military personnel in experiments, but I have never seen claims US universities (not just a few individual researchers) participated in this.
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Don't forget the brain surgeries.
Or the sneeze gun, the mega sneeze gun, the sneeze gun detector, efforts to develop gasoline cancer...
I recommend Flesh Simulator's MK ULTRA subproject rundown
Kinda wish he put up his notes and sources in the video.
He mentions the primary source and gives keywords in the description: the MKUltra subproject guidebook. I'd agree that I'd like him to show more of his work in where he's drawing his elaborations from.
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How long are you going to keep doing this? Why can't you just put forward your positions and then defend them instead of constantly strawmanning your opponents? And no matter what you think, that is what you are doing to Natalie Winters. Well, aside from boosting her media profile. I'll admit, this was a unique variant, but that is still all you do, strawman your opponents and then demand they defend your insane understanding of their position. Cut it out for fucks sake.
And being so low-class the spacetime continuum bends under the enormous weight of it.
And being so low-class the spacetime continuum bends under the enormous weight of all the trash.
And being so low-class the sheer inferiority warps the spacetime continuum.
And being so low-class the very air around them felt greasy.
What does lack of class weigh Alex?
I'd rewrite it to... 'that black hole of tastelessness, of which the very fabric of space-time screams in silent surrender to the singularity of vulgarity.'
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Me: [looks at photo of Natalie Winters] “I would let her press my correspodent until my whole house is white, if you know what I mean!”
I had no idea who Natalie Winters was, so the parody/whatever flew right over my head. Now it turns out she's some White House correspondent or something and she did something dumb? Well I'm sure no journalist or media pundit ever has done anything dumb before, so naturally that makes it newsworthy.
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I don’t get it. Is this some kind of political analogy?
In case you really, really do not get it, it's what's called 'sexual innuendo'. English has a relatively impoverished vocabulary so people just substitute whatever words seem roughly appropriate and arrange them in a way that's suggestive.
English has an enormous vocabulary, much like French and unlike far cruder highly-inflected languages. Latin, Russian, Spanish- they all just come out and say things. English and French use a variety of expressions and innuendos.
Anyone know how welsh or Gaelic talk? Might be an areal feature for the northwestern fringe of Europe.
Classical Latin had a rather small vocabulary (and little direct ability to discuss the abstract, instead personifying or loaning from Greek) but Russian and Spanish are very rich and less direct than English (though many are functionally illiterate, though if anything that means Spanish speakers have more room for crude innuendo...)
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Ok, now you’re just being pointlessly obscure. Mods! Mods! This man is violating the rule that everyone must speak plainly!
Is this "post like a 14-year-old boy" day?
It seems like a pretty obvious joke to me (leading in a straight line from Hoffmeister25's joke and No_one's getting wooshed).
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👉👌
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From outside it seems that all major sides of US political discourse are cursed with insanity of a special kind, that comes only for powerful and wealthy. You can't solve anything alone but participating in creating and shaping a subculture is the closest you can come to it. Yes, MAGA people are mostly retards, that should only motivate you to find a viable alternative and use them to your advantage. Neoliberal status quo forces are too entrenched for this, too fixed in their structure and institutions, you can't have a sensible centrist reform there, you need to dive into chaotic primordial soup of a radical variety. Movements quite often are turned on their head and completely transformed from inside, some small group in the right circumstances can capture the minds of hundreds of millions of people. Nobody expected the radical communists, the ISIS of their time, to come to power anywhere, much less the largest European state. Yudkowsky built a subculture alone, from some scraps in a cave and now it holds the hearts of many people who try to bring the singularity into existence. You shouldn't be BASEDtm, but you should still be based in the original meaning, trying to build a solid base for something better which can include not only sensible university educated people, but same unvaccinated retards and even the basement dwellers.
P. S. Looking at this, I think this comment feels disjointed and off topic to the op, but I will leave it as is because something in your text inspired me to write this, so why not let it exist
I mean, ideally all of this would happen organically. Subculture is how you get new ideas, new insights. But because of modern technology and our understanding of psychology we managed to basically take artificial control over the engines of culture. Music used to come from seedy dive bars where local artists would work on their sound before being discovered by labels. They’d sound unique because the isolation from the mainstream music scene allowed them to experiment and invent new and interesting sounds. New ideas tend to come from the fringes where an idea can be worked on and perfected away from mainstream culture.
The internet and especially social media have changed all of this. Those hidden pockets of creativity are now put online where the concepts are put online and co-opted or destroyed before they can be refined enough to stand on their own. Worse, the internet has created a situation in which everyone is almost constantly being bombarded with content (read:propaganda) all the time. You think like everyone around you unless you take special care to unplug. But especially in politics, this means it’s almost impossible to come up with something new, unless you’re pretty much a radical. Everyone else is reading the same script, the one that doesn’t work anymore because it’s not 1982 anymore. Most of the apparatus of politics runs on inertia a dead system that ran on Consensus, on very carefully crafted campaigns and old tired bromides and ideas about politics that were invented for your grandparents or great grandparents. We have AI and fentanyl, we’re possibly approaching WW3, and our traditional ways of thinking about politics was laid down when digital clocks were the height of modern technology, Spock was on TV, and kids hid under their desks because the commies were going to nuke us.
Give me the radicals, even if they’re wrong. It’s the only defense against total stagnation and irrelevance.
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