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NY Mag published a piece defending Yoel Roth from Musk's "smears", declaring that Musk "falsely implied" that Roth had advocated for normalising child sexualisation in his old tweets.
Turns out, he's apparently a Zionist too! Wonder how this will sit with sections of the left rigorously defending Roth knowing that he probably lobbies for an apartheid state, or the rigorously pro-Israel right exposing his bizarre tweets. And I doubt Musk is in any way interested in exposing the Israeli lobby.
Yoel Roth is newsworthy, and clearly Culture War material, but what point are you trying to make by dredging Twitter to find evidence that he's a "Zionist"? This looks like a clear example of booing your outgroup and waging the Culture War.
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Depends on how you spin it: "A new Sodom has been opened in our town where the so-called progressives invite our children to try gay sex with each other!"
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And of course this is a who/whom issue. Milo got cancelled for openly discussing his own experiences with this. Dan Savage did not. Now the media is defending Roth for the same.
I will also suggest - based on my own personal experience - that useful insights can be gained by reading old greek literature. In the locale I lived as a teenager, gay sex was illegal until 2018. In my view I benefitted from a relationship with a considerably older man - he was a bit of a mentor and taught me quite a bit about bodybuilding, sex and navigating non-PMC Indian life as a homosexual. This seems to have been common and accepted by the Greeks - it's a part of gay relations that I don't think has much of a straight analogue.
By "non-PMC Indian life", I mean that the experience of a civil service guy in what is now Telangana will be quite different from that of a techbro in Bangalore.
I also think Roth is just wrong. Provided there is a culture where older bodybuilder + teenage twink relations are treated as necessarily being a mentor/mentee type relation, they are definitely superior to two teenagers smelling each other's farts. However my general impression of gay culture in the US is that there's absolutely no way this culture could be built. It fundamentally conflicts with the leftist "anything that sounds bad is good" culture that has fully colonized gay America.
Ah, this reminded me of a conversation I had with a classmate of mine back in med school in India:
"Ah, SMH, isn't it so fucking annoying when you get felt up by old men on the bus?"
"- I can't really say that's been my experience on the bus."
Then he went on for quite a while about how difficult public transport is for him, what with all the randy old goats who try and cop a feel of his ass on a regular basis.
I was floored when he pulled out his phone to show me his DMs, they were flooded with hundreds of messages, you'd have thought he had an OnlyFans from the sheer number and horniness. Apparently in India, or my parts of it, the moment you sleep with a gay guy, your number gets shared with every single other gay person in the state.
I wonder if he's out of the closet now. Not that even my atrophied gaydar couldn't tell, he just looked gay.
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I thought a lot of the younger set of LGBT people didn't like Dan Savage anyways.
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Who is Roth, why should I care what Elon says about him, and why on YHWH’s green Earth does it matter that he’s a Zionist?
There’s people in this world who don’t care about your fixation on the Jews.
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To be fair, I think the screengrab is taking the full thesis a little out of context. For the full paragraph:
((Grindr argued at length that it wasn't 'just' a hookup app at this time, probably more to avoid getting Apple'd than anything else.))
I think Roth treats the problem of minor access to adult services a little too blithely for his role, but I think there's a more plausible read where he was arguing in favor of either a Grindr-run non-adult service, or (preferentially) a different party running strictly safe social content available for younger people. The latter has a lot of problems, both the obvious and the not-obvious, but sites like that have existed in ways that didn't immediately devolve into hookup forums; they largely just didn't make the transition from phpBB to modern social media well if at all.
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It's not like Musk, specifically, has a history of insulting people by calling them pedophiles, right? It has been fascinating watching certain parts of right wing politics re-invent a Satanic Panic about Pedophilia over the last couple years.
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It's interesting how this particular manner of writing is common among people who are vaguely "conspiracy theorists", or who are vaguely but ominously musing about dark, shadowy conspiracies.
Very frequent line breaks, jumping from topic to topic, a narrative/story-like flow, vague hints.
[not saying this as evidence your points are wrong, good points are sometimes made with weird modes of speaking, but association is strong]
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sure. but 'some elites are pedophiles' isn't surprising. there are a lot of elites. hundreds of thousands at least, certainly if we can look to the past and any area of significance in any significant country. There's gonna be some pedophile rings in any randomly selected group of 200k people. I mean, there have been "12,421 individuals" in the US Congress since the US's founding! that's just one specific very important institution!
this is vague. "unlikely got into position by accident". it's not actually saying anything. it's vaguely implied pedophilia somehow makes one elite.
yes, that is very vague and ambiguous! "people on whom [what] blackmail material exists are [how much] more easily influenced [by whom, to what, for what purpose]"
pedophilia and homosexuality aren't independent here, for actual pedophiles (in the sense of 'wanting to molest 12yos) 95% aren't "straight". Also, yoyoel's thesis is discussing "16yos using grindr", which is very different than "i want to molest 12yos".
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the idea is that there's lots of different positions, and if instead of MI5 director as pedo the DCCC chair or army general were pedos that'd be your evidence instead
you swapped 'homosexual' for 'pedophile'? homosexuality isn't illegal in current_year, and in the '50s you could keep it secret by just not telling anyone. How is 'not telling anyone you're gay' less plausible than 'secret service homo conspiracy'
your claim is a "pedophile secret service conspiracy". there's a profound difference between 'one secret agency head was a pedo' and 'there is a world-spanning pedo conspiracy enforced by blackmail'. If head of "secret service" is '10 most important positions in a nation' ... and there are 10 nations ... 10x10 is 100, 1 in 100 people are pedos, nothing to explain!
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This was the UK though; that vetting consisted of asking his Oxford/Cambridge schoolmates if he was a good chap. Which backfired on them quite often when all the guy's buddies and professors were fellow members of the communist-homopaedo/theatre club who were all working for the Soviets too.
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That guy doesn't have a corpus of work about adult-child sex relations.
Here is Roth's dissertation, available for free for download.
Here's the abstract of the paper:
Can you tell me, in what sense is the paper "about adult-child sex relations?"
I read the section you're describing (it starts with the last paragraph on page 246 of the thesis, PDF page 259) and I don't think it's accurate to characterize Roth's statements as dismissing the concern as "impossible/problem on privacy grounds." Rather, while acknowledging the possibility Grindr may be "too lewd or too hook-up oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers" he's worried that underage users may still use the platform to network with other peers in ways that don't involve having sex and removing this platform for them to have those discussions. To which point he recommends Grindr take steps to separate the lewd/hookup purpose of the app from the more general discussion platform it enables. One illustrative page:
I'm also curious how this makes him a hypocrite.
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I am told by straight friends that they do this too. Many women seek social interactions on tinder with the lure of possible sex to rope guys in.
I also know of one very hot but socially awkward straight guy who does this. Step 1: display abs and do hookup. Step 2: friends with benefits. Step 3: some of the friends with benefits become genuine friendships. Or maybe he's just buff nerd bodybuilder with a harem, I can't tell.
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There's a lot more space in gay communities for the concept of a friend that you like, have fucked or could fuck, but aren't especially sexually compatible with, sometimes to extremes. And Grindr's long pretended it wasn't just a hookup app, but also a local community social media app; I don't know whether this was to avoid getting booted by Apple or a genuine marketing approach, but cfe here for someone complaining that they found more Facebook friends on the platform than fuckbuddies.
There's also an issue that's broader than just finding friends, but broader communication. There's a lot of things that... while not easy for straight people, have broader social transmission of knowledge, in ways that a lot of gay people don't. As bad of romantic advice or that any romantic comedy or agony aunt might be, having Dan Savage's weekly notes is worse. Some are only weakly romantic, and even some of the non-platonic ones aren't very sexual, but there's a lot of awkwardness in any puberty. Worse, a lot of norms for gay stuff are highly regional: the extent it might be appropriate to discuss someone's orientation or gender identity without them having explicitly said they were out in a given context is drastically different from Massachusetts to California to Florida to Kentucky. Many of these are difficult to communicate in mixed-orientation communities or even mixed LGB communities (trivial example: "how do I let down a girl that's hitting on me, possibly without having to come out?").
I agree that Grindr's especially poorly-suited for such purposes, but I think (while poorly written) in that paper "including", here, is meant to modify "services providers like" rather than Grindr, specifically. And while Roth overlooked a few SFW gay-focused online phpBB-style groups that do exist, the high difficulty of maintaining such services in a Discord/Twitter/so on world is pretty hard to overstate.
That said, I'd go further to suggest that Roth is incredibly blithe about the issues such networks face, both obvious and not-obvious. Even non-sexuality-focused social networks face serious challenges (eg: this was the explicit purpose behind the recent report-to-Mojang function for Minecraft). I think Bernd overstates some of the problems the furry fandom has, but they definitely exist, and perhaps worse they exist as much or more in SFW-specific spaces because predators can tell that such a larger percentage of common users are younger. Fighting to keep division of NSFW content from a FFXIV free company's discord is a constant battle. And I'm starting to see signs of a similar-enough pattern happening or having happened in and around VR spheres.
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Not a hypocrite, necessarily, but the three cases of sexual assault he discusses, which were facilitated by Grindr, are:
(1) Threesome arranged by two adult guys with under-18 (doesn't say how much under 18 so could be 17 year old)
(2) HIV-positive guy had sex with 15 year old
(3) Guy sexually assaulted 14 year old, met on Grindr
Roth makes the point (that every sex ed promoter makes) that even if Grindr does try to keep it over-18s there are probably younger gay guys using it, and that they'll be having sex with strangers anyway, so all Grindr can do is try and be aware that there are under 18 users and make it easier and safer for them (and also, yeah, it's up to the parents etc. to keep their kids out of trouble).
That's not necessarily advocating for "sure, adults should be able to hook up with 14 year olds" but like I said, it's the same pro-sex ed message: the kids are gonna be doing it anyway, so all you can do is make sure they know to use condoms and birth control, even if legally 12 year olds should not be having sex.
I'm more surprised you can get a doctorate in philosophy just for writing a paper on a hook-up app. We're not exactly talking Plato's Academy, are we? (or maybe we are, if the attendees of the Academy were also hooking up with younger guys for sex).
I quoted Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance last week and had to look up the exact wording. It was, in fact, Plato arguing for (and against) the special relationship between boy and lover. The broader context is...still incredibly gay.
So, yes.
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The term, Zionist, simply means a proponent of Zionism, which simply is Jewish nationalism, just like other types of ethnic nationalism,* such as Kurdish nationalism, or Basque nationalism, or, for that matter, Palestinian nationalism. It is not a synonym for supporting Israeli policies toward Palestinians, as there are many on the left in Israeli who are both Zionists yet oppose those policicies.
*By which of course I mean this, rather than its common use as a near-synonym for patriotism.
PS: To be clear, this is not a defense of Zionism, since I generally oppose all forms of ethnic nationalism.
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Sigh... Why do we need to do "It's the Jews!" literally every week? It's tedious and boring, given how much of a numerical minority they are if you don't like all the control they have then you should blame your own people for being weak, not them for their strengths.
I mean, that would be my first inclination if I were allowed to just do me. But I'm not, I'm subjected to endless struggle sessions in hobby spaces, work environments, education environments and civic environments about my "whiteness". I don't get to just go "Well, maybe black people need to figure out why they suck so much". Especially in the current environment where all it takes to make generally accepted claims of discrimination is to point out uneven outcomes, with zero evidence, or even a proposed theory, about how it's the fault of "whiteness".
I don't make the rules, I just know when I'm on the receiving end of hypocrisy dense enough to spark a gravity singularity.
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Bingo.
If you're a academically inclined progressive type who's drunk the kool-aid of Id-Pol and the sanctity of victimhood, etc... but have the misfortune of being a member of the oppressor class (IE straight and white) some greater "true oppressor" must be invented if one's ego is to be preserved. Jews are just the oldest and most obvious target, but I think that a lot of the visceral hate you'll occasionally see here for "Breeders", "Normies", Mormons Et Al... comes from a similar place.
I'm unsure whether or not I'm parsing your post correctly, but 'academically inclined progressives who have drunk the kool-aid of ID-Pol' describes approximately 0% of the userbase here. I'd also be shocked if any significant fraction of holocaust deniers or JAQers were academically inclined progressives, so unless your definition of anti-semitism extends to people who express doubts about Israel's treatment of Palestine, I'm not sure I follow your point.
I'm not so sure. Just as an example, the use of "Zionist" as a pejorative as something of a tell. As it's not something you're likely to encounter outside the context of academia and other explicitly progressive blue/gray-tribe spaces. I don't know if they constitute a "significant fraction" of the total, but I would say that the vast majority of holocaust deniers and JAQers that I have interacted with fall into that category. This isn't to say that there aren't non-progressive racists and anti-semites, just that it tends to manifest in different ways. The casual racism of the old south (and sunset north) has a distinctly different flavor from the sort of "you're a race traitor if you don't validate me" that seems to typify the average internet JAQer/Holocaust Denier on the internet.
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Such a pattern of thought is quite common. At least anti-semites haven't get gotten so deep in blaming the outgroup for their own failure, as to have entire university departments conducting research with the assumption that "Judeoarchy" is real or searching for evidence that "Jewish supremacy" is real and harms gentiles.
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At this point so many conspiracy theories have been shown to be at least partially true, I'm ready for straight up lizard people. Followed by endless gaslighting about it being a rare skin condition and we are all just bigots.
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Well, that one just sounds like the gay version of women talking about how hot guys with a child are even hotter.
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I was read to jump on this as unsourced, but...apparently it’s true. Or at least as true as any attempts to correlate a couple dozen brain scans.
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Roth may be the scariest person I have ever come across in my entire life. A straight out of comic book QANON casting Jewish Gay Grooming Pedohpile who actually controls all speech proclaiming that his type doesn’t exists.
I don’t know if he’s actually a groomer; I do feel very confident that he’s completely out of touch with most America. Lots of negative kid vibes. Maybe he just writes and tweets a lot so easy to dig up something but he still seems to be not representative of society.
Musk should probably tone it down some and not risks alienated users. It would be better to maintain a strong platform.
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Yep, agreed. I think Yoth is a fuckhead and I wouldn't spit on him if he was on fire, but this is donglegate levels of reaching for offence.
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Oh come on, I don't know the guy or his politics but "grooming paedophile" based on the items quoted is very much off the mark.
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If you’re going to assume the worst, pretending you’re not sure is just a fig leaf.
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Yes, federal employees absolutely leave their former agencies and are no longer bound by anything but (in the case of those who held security clearances) their lifetime obligation not to disclose classified information. US federal agencies do not in any way "own" former employees, nor they do they make them "disappear."
No one is bound by anything and no one claims they are. The claim is that the employees, current and former, become an influence network where it is in the interest of the participants to prioritize their reputation within the network over their fiduciary duties.
Moreover, this stuff is generally handled via implicit escalation. "Ok I'll crack down on the beheading videos and build a connection with people still on the inside." "Ok, I guess advocating for beheading is pretty similar." ... "Advocating for Trump is basically the same as the previous step."
Indeed, @No_one claims they are.
It's an interesting claim, but where is the evidence for it?
It's no more true than the network of ex-military, ex-police officers, etc. They might feel a sense of affinity for others who worked for the same organization, which may manifest in hiring decisions and the like, but considering the size of the federal workforce, it's a much weaker "network" than, say, Yale grads.
When you say "this stuff is generally handled via implicit escalation," you appear to making a statement of fact, based on knowledge. Which you followed up with a very specific scenario. Do you have any knowledge this this is how "this stuff" is actually handled, or only conjecture? Because it sounds like you are building a conjecture around a statement you made with certainty but no actual knowledge. It sounds like "Well, it makes sense to me that this is how people would go from banning beheading videos to banning pro-Trump statements," but I think you are making this up and just assuming "that's how it works" because it fits your worldview.
I cannot reveal the anecdata on which I've based this without being either super vague or alternately revealing details which are likely traceable to a small set of people. The tl;dr; is that someone I trust was briefly involved in a situation of this sort on the periphery, hated it tremendously, but described the process to me.
Feel free to dismiss it as you see fit.
Given that I too have first-hand knowledge that I cannot reveal without doxxing myself to win an Internet argument, yes, I will dismiss your anecdata.
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Yes. I have factual reason to believe this. What is your basis for believing otherwise?
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Well, first of all, the United States has very different norms, and stricter regulations, about federal service.
Second, people getting attached to their classmates and former companies is not the argument you made. Of course ex-feds maintain a professional and social network that typically includes other current and former feds. But you were claiming something much different, that they constitute in effect a "Mob" that they not only do not but cannot really leave, and that their former agencies can still compel them to do work for them after they've left. This is flatly untrue.
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"Edgy Twitter jokes" is not the same as "has sex with 14 year olds". If all of us were judged by everything we've ever said on social media, we'd be in a lot of trouble.
Is that necessarily a bad thing?
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The fucking joke is that it shouldn't be hard to tell the difference between porn and a baby crying! That's why it's an awkward moment, because nobody ever wants to be in a situation where they can't tell if their neighbour is watching a crying baby or watching porn that sounds like a crying baby.
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Yeah sort of, but it is more like "there are some very strange noises coming from my neighbour's place, but they are too loud for me to ignore. But they are so strange that I can't tell if I should rap on the wall and tell them to turn down the volume of their porn or feel sympathy for them for the baby they are having trouble calming. I definitely don't want to rap on the wall and tell them to shut up their baby, nor feel sympathy for their loud and revolting sounding masturbation session, so I am in an awkward spot."
As you said elsewhere, it's edgy. It's supposed to be transgressive and shock you by breaking taboos. Assuming it is a sincere expression of interest in pedophilia is like assuming an edgy 14 year old is a nazi because he scrawled a swastika on the bathroom stall door.
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I mean, not to tell on myself or anything, but...haven't you ever come across excerpts from japanese AVs? Lots of high-pitched nasal squealing that, through a wall, could plausibly be confused with an infant. Or at least enough for comedic purposes.
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Probably for the same reason most people who watch YouTube videos know how a particular straight porn sounds (volume warning).
This isn't the only example, but it is the most infamous.
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Not just present there, not as constant, and both Japanese 'normal' gay porn and yaoi's got a slightly different form of obnoxious vocalisms, but yes. Both the obnoxious bottoms overselling how hard they're taking it, and the tops either have a kink or a script for aaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
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No, I suspect it's more along the lines of OH MY SHOULDER
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Because he read about it on internet? I know quite a lot about a lot of stuff that I never personally experienced or seen first hand, for start I never visited Venus. (not that visiting it would allow me to survive long enough to learn about it)
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For the same or similar reason that I know what some gay porn clips look like - if you spent any time on 4chan or similar borderline internet sites during the past couple decades, you were gonna see all kinds of weird shit regardless of whether or not you, personally, are into it.
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People posted JAVs to 4chan? TIL. Wouldn't that be on the straight board though, which it's not likely a gay guy would be hanging out on?
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I covered this I think here the other day. The problem with the FBI (or CIA etc) being at twitter is the alphabets have become extremely color coded. They are viewed as blue tribe captured.
I have no problem with fbi guys taking their pension and finding a $250k twitter job focused on child porn or all the actions that most of society still disagrees with. It’s their training. The issue happens if their doing moderating tribal speech battles.
All of these agencies very heavily employ ex-military. Also, Mormons for some reason gravitate to the three-letter agencies.
Is there a lot of blue-tribe HR bullshit in all federal agencies? Yes, but it's not as "captured" as you think.
Bc. Mormons have compulsory missionareeing (ah, my English, fix it), often in another countries, so which has a lot overlap with what three-letters do. Also Mormons missionaries work in pair and each reports to superiors on the other one. Perfect!
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Sounds right to me and I said below I bet lower levels are more mixed. Since the 50 agents thing and Hunter Laptop interference the alphabets at the top have lost any red tribe respect.
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You have to realize to a segment of online people, "Blue Tribe" means being opposed to anything Trump or anything adjacent anti-woke people do. At this point, Mike Pence is 'Blue Tribe' is some because of his actions on 1/6.
Nah, blue tribe means "laptop class" and adjacent. the sort of person who pays more attention to what's trending on twitter than what's going on with their next-door neighbor
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I believe so for reason but didn’t want to state it that way. I assume the FBI at lower to medium levels still has some red tribe members and their not completely extinct yet.
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What worries me is that some of the voices I like on twitter are departing (Popehat, Coding horror). Left leaning but usually worth paying attention to. Those are the type of users (unlike journo-s) that twitter can't afford to lose. Not sure if network effects will be that strong.
Musk should probably tone down the things a bit to at least try to boil the frog.
I'm shocked Ken is capable of leaving Twitter. Terrifying to think what he'll end up like in an even more radicalized echo chamber.
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On what basis?
You might like esoteric lawfare longform posts, but in that I don't think you're the median Twitter user. Popehat's departure would cause, what, at most perhaps a 3-digit number of people to decide that Twitter is no longer worth being on? He's hardly a load bearing fixture there.
Twitter's market value is in connecting journos to each other and the cancel-mob. Popehat and his devotees aren't in either of those groups; he's exactly the kind of user Twitter can afford to lose.
Really? I thought his whole niche was writing snarky lawspainers promoting blue positions on a level journalists could understand, with quotable sneers the cancel mob could chant without understanding.
A public intellectual in the Hayekian sense.
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I don't want Twitter to turn into right wing echo chamber. So you actually need the lefties that show at least some sanity to stay.
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Popehat hasn't been the same for a while, sadly, at least to my mind.
True. But while he is gone full blown sjw since adopting the kids, when it comes to his area of expertise - law he is still pretty solid.
While some of the accounts on Twitter can be replaced with Markov chains for popehat you need at least chatgpt.
Huh, usually it is a bit other way. Was it coincidental or there is some reason to suspect causation?
If an area is over a threshold of progressivism then becoming a family man actually solidifies progressive opinion, because you're more institutionally invested and it's vital to keep up appearances among friends of friends and whatnot. My married friends or more woke than my unmarried friends. I'm in California.
Dynamics could be completely flipped in Alabama.
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They are Korean and he suddenly started seeing systemic racism and bigotry everywhere and racism suddenly started becoming Really Bad Thing.
Am I correct in assuming he sees anti-asian bigotry in precisely the opposite of the places it actually festers?
cc-ing @Smok IIRC a lot of Vox and Dickinson's(?) lads were calling him a psycho jewloving cuck race-traitor in all his replies back in... 2015(?), because of the whole mental breakdown and adopting foreign kids thing. I can see how that would send someone up the wall.
The alt-right guys never learned how to bully people into actual submission the way the other side is so good at. They mostly just pissed people off and made permanent enemies of them.
After that I would consider being extreme Zionist SJW and fund Mason lodge and reptilarium out of pure spite.
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