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Notes -
Many things are habbening at once, here are for some more random culture war (and culture war by other means) news for the second part of the week.
Middle Eastern habbenings are already sufficiently covered elsewhere, things are going interesting even outside this part of the world.
1/Cancel culture files
Canceling machine is still running in overdrive mode, and it is coming for Cesar Chavez.
It turned out that "Moses of his people" routinely raped underage girls including another famous activist Dolores Huerta.
This is bad. Imagine if it came out that MLK raped Rosa Parks. That bad.
Many streets, schools, libraries, parks etc. are to be renamed soon.
It is already beginning.
2/Dukes, princes and kings of hazard files
Gambling is getting normalized and spreads all over the world.
Not only betting on sports for plebes, but betting on world habbenings for sophisticated situation monitorers.
In Washington DC, Polymarket just opened the world's first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation.
This sort of gambling, in addition to ruining people's finances and lives, adds another element of chaos to already spicy world's situations. With few clicks, anyone in even middling military/govt positions can personally greatly profit from insider info.
And if you are in high, decision making position ... another source of income opens, faster and more lucrative than old timey corruption and theft.
No suprise that tensions are running high.
3/US gun politics files
Illinois wants track all ammo and mandate microstamping of serial numbers to all ammunition.
Even if they could make it work, there is so much ammo already manufactured, you could say. This is no way to protect Black lives from gun violence!
This is the point. You cannot get the evil white gun hoarders for their guns (yet), but you can send them to prison for unserialized ammo.
4/Democracy files
In suprising news, Kim Jong-un wins North Korea’s parliamentary elections with 99.93% of the vote.
This was not something anyone could predict.
In 2023, Kim oversaw his party's WORST election results in 60 years, winning just 99.63% of votes.
But "to give up" is not in Kim Jong-un's dictionary.
He persisted.
He fought and regained trust of the people. May this tale of true grit and determination inspire all of us.
5/Woke culture files
You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America
TL;DR: Wokeness is not dead yet. It might be wobbling at the top, but it is marching triumphantly across America.
Dinergoth is the aesthetic of ruined suburbia and dying small towns.
They are the mainstream now, they are not weird anymore. You are the weirdo.
6/Space invader files
Third recorded interstellar object at 16th March crossed the orbit of Jupiter and is now on the way out of Solar system.
So far, three interstellar objects were detected.
Number Two looked and behaved like ordinary snowy mudball, numbers One and Three were, in comparison to Solar system objects, very strange.
Either we live on rather busy interstellar highway, or interstellar objects are not at all like Solar system ones.
Alien starship monitoring community breathed in relief (and disappointment).
Close encounter with Jupiter was the opportunity for space battleship to rev up her engines and use Jupiter's gravity for course correction straight to Earth.
Previously, we had doubt about object origin. Now, we are certain that crew of 3I/Atlas is made of highly intelligent beings who saw nothing worth conquering on this monkey planet.
7/Cryptid files
The famous Patterson–Gimlin film was, for 59 years, known as the best evidence for existence of Bigfoot/Sasquatch.
Now, new documentary shows it all as "incredible hoax". Not only straight confession of Patterson's son Clint, but another 16mm film reel showing Bigfoot costume.
More links and sources here.
But, at the end, it doesn't matter.
Real or not, Bigfoot lives in our hearts. For forever.
I'm going to say something I can't truly back up but I'm noticing the belief forming so I'll throw it out there
It says something about the psychology of this particular ideology that so many prominent lefty leaders turn out to be rapists and/or pedophiles. It genuinely now seems like there are fewer such leaders, political or otherwise, in the last 100 years that DON'T have such credible allegations than those that do, now.
Likewise, look at the most credibly implicated parties on the alleged Epstein list, and note their overall political bent (Looking dead straight at you, CHOMSKY.)
Like, here's the most absurd way I can characterize it:
Even the Boogeyman of their entire political movement, Adolf Hitler himself, did not rape anybody.
I don't think Vladimir Putin has been credibly accused of rape either.
Trump has of course been accused of rape and other forms of sex assault (and yes, "grab 'em by the pussy" counts in its own way) but I am genuinely pretty sure he has never forcibly penetrated anyone in his life, I read him as his ego requiring him to believe he successfully seduced someone.
And how many male feminist types have been outed as sex pests in the last 10 years alone?
And no, I'm absolutely, positively not saying "right wingers are less likely to commit rape or practice pedophilia."
I think I'm gesturing off in the direction of "right wingers tend not to elevate rapists and pedos as leaders, and are certainly NOT prone to censoring or rewriting history to cover up such traits in their leaders." And perhaps a side of "Right wing leaders tend not to use their power to indulge that particular cruelty, despite the various other atrocities they will impose."
Happy to accept some correction on this point, but Googling (in an incognito window) terms like "Did Pinochet/Franco/Napoleon/Bolsonaro rape anyone" usually turns up results related to torture tactics used by their regime and not acts they themselves were known for.
Well, there are allegations against a dude named Franco but he's yet another of those male feminists.
And I DID turn up some credible claims about Mussolini. We could probably argue for a few hours about whether he's truly right wing, but I will not push that button.
Maybe something about soft power vs hard power? These types of leftist leaders tend to attract a lot of poor people as followers. Chavez was leading immigrant farm workers, so he had lots of votes but not a lot of money. That also tends to attract a lot of young student types, and idealistic women. If I can speculate uncharitably here, that would put him in close proximity to a lot of young women who believe in his cause, but aren't really attracted to him personally at all. Same with a lot of the modern male feminist types- they might be politically popular, but they still look like dirty hippies or weaselly student activists.
With the right wing leaders, it's the opposite- they don't get nearly as many female followers. But when they do, they've got all the traditional trappings of power that make them more attractive to women, so they can easily find someone willing to sleep with them.
Did you read the linked NYT article? This does not sound like the case at all. For instance, it quotes a letter written by one of the girls to Chavez:
And the article ends with
To take the Devil's Advocate position, the "paper trail" proves nothing. It's a note 13-year-old Rojas wrote which describes no inappropriate activity on Chavez's part, and reads like a crush on her part. The part about kissing and fondling is not in the paper trail; it's a recent claim.
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I'm still getting up to speed on the details of this. But uh... grooming a 12 yr old is wildly different from winniing the attraction of an adult woman. What he did there was horrible.
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