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The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”
It’s easy to get bogged-down in policy minutia here. Normies don’t care about that stuff, even if they say they do. Democrats lose because they are lame. Voting for Trump is fun. It’s thrilling. It feels like raiding a WOW dungeon with 77 million of your best buds. Voting Democrat feels like going to church, except you know that God isn’t real.
There is no reason to think that this is a permanent or even semipermanent phenomenon. All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.
The populists ARE the wokescolds. Most of the politically active base of the democrats loathe them for being neo-liberal/not-socialists.
I might be in a horrible filter bubble, but I encounter obnoxious leftists IRL several times a week and they seem pretty "popular"
The local base of the democrats, in the sense of actual party members, have a pretty serious case of Old. Statistically the party is run by old black people with surprisingly moderate opinions.
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Defending porn would actually be a good issue for Democrats to take up if they had any hope to be credible about it. The problem is that there's too much history of feminists attacking porn (don't bring up sex positive feminists, the difference between them is that sex negatives are against making porn and sex positives are against men watching porn), too much history (10 years plus) of left wingers agitating against busty women in videogames and too much history of democrats loving heavy handed content moderation.
Pornhub lost mastercard and visa in 2020 due to an article written by a journalist who wanted to use that as a springboard for his gubernatorial run, as a democrat.
I have seen a few ads out there recently that are clearly right-coded and anti-porn, usually treating it as a personal failing (addiction). I don't think there are that many "porn is a great thing, actually" advocates out there, and most that exist are probably left-of-center by a decent margin.
I could see the median male voter being both a consumer of the, uh, content, but also thinking it should be less accessible. Not high confidence in that, though.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
There's something special about using a phrase coined for people who are never nude to describe porn advocates.
Yep. I was gonna go with one of the casual exhibitionists to really nail down (hurr hurr) the disjunction, but most of them are either relatively apolitical or overtly lefties.
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Yes, but if the Democrats wantes to capitalize on porn, that would be the position they would have to take. 'We know you're pigs, we want to let you' as summarized by hydroacetylene loses even to 'That stuff is disgusting and we're going to make you stop'
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I would prefer there to be less goonslop in mainstream purely based on aesthetics. It's like the reverse of the "characters must be shapeless agender blobs" trend, and the reverse of the bad thing is not always the good thing.
No, Hestia does not have to be a generic big titty asian girl.
Yeah, but I would rather her be that than the other alternative.
Disagreed. Not every character has to be eye candy. Or white.
They do if you want to make money.
If you believe whites have all the money and you believe Representation Matters, then naturally if you want to make money they need to be eye candy and white.
I don't believe representation matters, personally, but hey, given how much people seem to care about it then that's the argument. And people like eye candy more than eye ugly.
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"Not every room in my house needs to be aesthetically pleasing! Where's the variety? Where's the tension? If every room in my house is painted pleasant colours, I will take aesthetic pleasure for granted and I won't appreciate those rooms as much! That's why I painted my living room traffic cone orange with bright pink molding."
Also I don't know why you would assume a Japanese production with Japanese artists working in a Japanese style would make a white character, but they didn't. She's mukokuseki.
Edit: lol that was you calling her a big tiddy Asian girl, so I think even you know you're being reductive.
God damn, that was a great read. And Eisenman made some good arguments - I wish the current proponents of his cosmology argued so well. It is depressing to realise that Alexander, despite by the sounds of it representing the majority opinion, essentially lost, though.
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There's a difference between being aesthetically pleasing and everything made out of diamond blocks or the equivalent. There is nuance between making everyone the same hot woman with minor variations and making everyone blobs. For the record, I think Hades II achieves that nuance decently.
Hyperpalatable aesthetics is the mcdonalds of art. I like some mcdonalds every once in a while, I don't want to eat it all the time. And not just because it's unhealthy.
TIL the word for "basically white, or close enough that dark skin-fearing consumers won't raise a fuss".
That's a pretty good argument, but I can't shake the feeling that there is something deeper to your complaint. There is an undercurrent of resentment to your position that twists the perspective you are arguing, not necessarily in your case, although that isn't to rule it out. In particular -
Is an ironic inversion of the argument against mukokuseki in the early days of the idpol ascension, which was that mukokuseki was the word for 'Japanese but not so Japanese it upsets white people.' Either way it's white supremacy?
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It means 'stateless', i.e. not drawn to have a specific ethnicity.
One reason that Japanese stuff is so popular at the moment is that it's almost completely separate from American politics. The Japanese aren't just not woke, they aren't not-woke. They just draw girls like that because they think it's cute.
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I think you're blundering straight into the greatest problem with anti-porn sentiment (though this is probably more of a problem with anti-porn sentiment from the left than anti-porn sentiment from the right): its bleedover into censorship of non-porn. Non-porn has a much harder time adapting to the conditions of porn censorship than porn does.
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Agreed. Small tits are underrated!
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But it's so nice that she is ;-)
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That’s the whole problem though, Democrat Party bylaws and primary structure make it much more resistant to any kind of populist takeover. The leadership can jam the throttle and point the plane right at a mountain and there’s not much the rank and file can do to stop them.
All they have to do is check the box labeled “Ocasio-Cortez”. That’s it. Nothing can stop them if they decide to check the box.
AoC is very much a wokescold.
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How is AOC not a wokescold?
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That is the establishment. Has been for many years. There's nothing she says that Pelosi and Schumer do not, or isn't gospel at Harvard.
I you want actual left-populism you'd need Fetterman to make a magic-level recovery (likely he needs to be smarter and a better communicator than pre-stroke) and his wife to die in a mysterious boating accident. AOC is many things, she used to be hot, which was rare for a politician. She is loud in a fun way, which was rare for a politician before. But she has always marched lockstep with the establishment. Her primary challenge to Schumer, if it materializes, will be a "50 Stalins" primary, not an anti-establishment one. The critique will be that he is insufficiently Democrat, and of course it will not be true, but that is what it will be.
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What young, working class males- most of them nontraditional Republican voters- have told me about why they're voting for Trump now:
*There's also a tendency to identify Trump with stimmy checks or extra unemployment for laid-off blue collar workers- even if these people understand that these policies were bad for the economy, 'the government was just gonna give it to rich people anyways'.
What about their opinion on the Israel situation do you find baffling in particular?
Trump being anything other than pro-israel?
Oh of course. Your mention of this time last year made me think there was something election related involved and I got lost in trying to remember what the youths were saying back then.
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Somehow this post feels nearly maximally uncharitable to both parties and young men. Have Democrats become too conformist to be cool? I suppose. Are Republicans a party with an excess of unconstrained young male energy? I suppose. Do young men need an outlet for their energy? Yes.
But its not like the Democrats stumbled into being "lame" (your word). It was part of a calculated electoral strategy that prioritized other things, and necessarily excluded male interests, particularly those of noncriminal working males. That left the GOP with an opening that they seized on and since libertarianism has always been unpopular with voters since the franchise was expanded beyond a few landowning men in New England, discarding that in favor of a little paternalism that sounds more masculine was a winning message.
They aren’t just conformists, in many cases they’re the old church ladies telling you anything you find fun is somehow wrong. You can’t enjoy foreign food, clothing, or music. You can’t like your own either, you can’t like traditionally masculine things, or traditional things in general. It’s just a narrow rather boring and uninteresting slice of things that democrats think are okay to like unironically.
There's also just a lot of hypocrisy. I can't know for sure but I suspect things would be better if the same people wagging their finger didn't support their favored groups being assholes all the time in the exact ways they attack. The system might have at least been stable without that.
It's less a church lady enforcing the rules with an iron fist on everyone and more that teacher who clearly has a favorite and is doing such a bad job hiding it that they've emboldened their worst instincts.
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Democrats don't want people to enjoy foreign food? Any time I go to DC all I get is swamped with claims that the locals (all Dems) know the best Ethiopian place in the world (of course all these places inevitably suck because they pick them based on it being a unique choice rather than good).
No no.
There is something I think that is adjacent to what you are talking about which is cultural appropriation, which is frowned upon. But that is basically me, a white guy, starting an Ethiopian food restaurant that is actually good and making profits from it. That is what would be frowned upon.
Calling them old church ladies is pretty unkind to old church ladies. My grandma is an old church lady. She frowns upon premarital sex and excessive drinking. I have found no real evidence that either of those activities are good in the long term. A progressive scold, from my perspective, is a sort of double negative. They frown upon scorning bad things, but rarely have strong opinions on what is actually good. An example is that they might be fit themselves, but are not open to criticizing fat people for being fat. Or they don't steal from retail establishments, but think criminal prosecution of retail theft is wrong.
I said “church lady” in the sense of the 1990s Dana Carvey sketch. The idea being basically “you can’t enjoy things normal people like, because Satan.” And that’s kind of the read I get on a lot of Woke is exactly that — everything normal people like or believe in is flawed, wrong, sinful, and “good people” don’t do those things.
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This – perceived lameness – is pervasive across the west. The sad thing (for democrats in the US, or progressives or liberals or lefties or whatever they’re called elsewhere) is that in general they are compassionate people, with empathy towards others, especially those who have fallen through the cracks, and they’re interested more in civic society than in individual gain, but online media has no proven way of effectively showing the OTHERS whom they have compassion for. Which makes them look lame. Whether they are or not is largely irrelevant because perception creates reality.
In contrast, online media does a great job of showcasing and promoting individual gain, thereby attracting all those who are primarily driven by it.
But even more importantly, because all humans are a jigsaw of mismatching parts, and nobody is either 100% compassionate or 100% individualistic, this means you get the strange phenomenon that even people who are 25% individualistic, say, are exposed to a lot more content (and a lot more compelling content) that is individualist in nature, and so the prevailing wind is that those people gravitate slowly from “left” (compassionate) to “right” (individualistic) by dint of the air they’re breathing in online settings much more than carefully thought out worldviews and philosophies.
TLDR - liberals look lame online, therefore they are lame, therefore most people gravitate towards conservatives over time.
The compassion is typically abstract and superficial.
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No, they aren't. That's their self-image, and their advertisement of themselves. But their compassion is very selective. They feel for the criminal, but not really the victim. They feel even less for the would-be victim who defends himself. They are willing to let civic society fall apart rather than harm the wretched who are actively destroying it. They feel for the member of some designated oppressed group, but not for the member of some designated oppressor group. Even when a member of that oppressor group is in fact being harmed, and begs for their compassion, they will tell them that they are the oppressors and deserve what they were getting. I've seen that happen, and be widely supported, in a progressive mileu.
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The social media is very effective in showing the others they have compassion for, which is why people are drifting away from them - the tent cities and open drug markets, the all male boats docking at the shores of Europe, the torrent of people through the border, the sheer foreignness of London, the pride parades, the MtF trans that look creepy at best, the scars from top surgery, the women that brag about having an abortion, the cohort of trans children in Hollywood.
The same way Syrskyi is the best performing general in the war on the Russians' side, the suicidal empathy of the left is the best ad for repubicans. At least our crazies are crazy in mostly comprehensible way (except abortion)
A saw a twitter post responding to some leftwinger who was failing to comprehend why people cared that Charlie Kirk was murdered. The clapback went something like "Imagine this happened to someone you actually feel empathy for, like a black rapist".
A core part of the problem that @WhiningCoil was posting about downthread is that if the Democrat Party as a whole got the Biblical choice to spare my white/Jewish teenage daughter, or the non-white career criminal who would otherwise rape and kill her, I would bet they'd save the criminal. Maybe that's a false perspective based on their fringe. The odds are definitely not 10-0, but maybe it's below 5-5, maybe 2-8.
But with the Republicans it's 0-10, no matter the race or Islamicity of the criminal. Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, and some people have been openly reveling in cruelty for 5+ years.
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The democrats are doing their darndest to not make that happen. Their progressive wing has dug in and doubles down. I wonder if it will manage to cost them third presidency in a row.
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Alternately, young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long, the fact that now VPNs are useful to get around conservative porn blocks is a non-issue. The friction was caused under the far left cancellation hysteria.
Did any young man actually save their professional life by buying a VPN? Unlikely. But lots of the advertising catered to that fear, and thus they were purchased with that in mind.
Basically nobody does this outside of persecution fantasies.
Most people are lurkers and not posters to begin with. What exactly is the threat model for a lurker reading some chud website like TheMotte dot org? The site gets hacked an every IP that ever visited is released?
The Internet use patterns that 90% of young men want to keep private involve cooming rather than intellectual heresy.
Even posters have more to fear from revealing too many details about themselves voluntarily than from attackers. And no VPN is going to save you there.
Funny you should mention that!.
This is posting rather than lurking and on top of that these true brexit geezers used their personal email addresses.
If you're donating to the Rittenhouse Foundation under, essentially, your real name, you are wasting money on that VPN subscription.
From 'persecution fantasies' to 'well they should have better opsec' is a hell of a redirect.
I should be clear that the persecution fantasy here is specifically that young men are at risk of having their IP addresses traced by a visual basic GUI written by The Liberals unless they use a VPN (which they are all doing), hence why I quoted "young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long."
I don't argue that doing stuff you don't want people to find out about under your real name is inadvisable. It's just that VPNs are neither necessary or sufficient to avoid this situation.
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