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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.
The better view is that the right wing equivalent is religious leaders. I don't typically indulge in the priest jokes (except the funny ones), but it's a pretty universal problem:
The Witnesses the Southern Baptists:
The pattern isn't: Left Wing political leaders engage in sex abuse because leftist libertinism. The pattern is: Religious Leaders engage in sex abuse, Left Wing political leaders are religious leaders. Leftists like Chavez are preaching a religion, an ultimate truth about Life the Universe and Everything, and once you get in that deep the sex abuse starts.
If pastors preaching chastity can get handsy, it's not the values being taught, it's the power and the hierarchy.
If we want to make that comparison, then do public school teachers, too.
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It doesn't even have to be a religious (including leftist-"religious" or other ideological) leader; whenever you have some group with motivations and ability to deny or cover up allegations, that group ends up attracting the sort of people who want to do things they'll need to deny or cover up.
Being part of any sacrosanct Noble Cause can do it, if the cause's actually-noble followers are afraid that making ignoble leaders' transgressions public would unfairly reflect badly on the Cause - this works if the Cause includes an "ultimate truth", but it also shows up in non-profits, charitable organizations, environmentalist organizations, police organizations... Even a mundane worry like "we don't want to scare kids away from the Boy Scouts just because of this one bad apple" can do it, for a while.
The inverse of power can be a form of power, if it attracts internal or especially external sympathy. Any group that feels marginalized has bad incentives, when members feel like other members' transgressions might unfairly reflect badly on them - there are cases among racial minorities, political factions, some religious groups where the abusers aren't among the leadership, some sexual orientations and kinks.
This is probably one reason why religious cults are such dangers; even if they're not showing any of they typical cult warning signs, any small religious group gets "feels marginalized" from being outnumbered by non-believers and gets "Noble Cause" from its religion, and so is doubly attractive for abusers.
I pseudo-apologize pre-emptively for bringing up my favorite hobby horse/pet peeve, which is that these so-called "actually-noble followers" are actually not noble, due to their actions, i.e. prioritizing their Cause's optics over justice for the victims of their leaders. As you say, if you believe that the Cause has some "ultimate truth" that supersedes all else (which, IME, applies exactly as well and often to non-profits, charitable organizations, etc. as any other religious organization), you can justify this line of thinking.
However, the issue there is that no truly noble follower of any Cause would be ignorant of the pattern of people who have followed some Cause in the past; to follow a Cause without skeptically analyzing the forces that would lead you to being convinced by the Cause is something I'd consider unambiguously ignoble. And one pattern that any follower of any Cause must notice is that most people (likely almost everyone) in the past who was convinced by a different Cause was wrong. Therefore, anyone who believes strongly in their Cause can't actually conclude anything about the correctness of their Cause; their strong belief in it doesn't provide any meaningful information for determining its correctness.
If God came down and proved His existence and then declared that This Cause is the Correct one, then perhaps noble followers of This Cause would be just in allowing [bad behavior] as a necessary cost for accomplishing This Cause. Perhaps. But, AFAICT, God never did that (and never existed, but that's a different conversation), and so we live in a world where the
stupidignoble are cocksure about their Cause while theintelligentnoble are full of doubt about their Cause.Unfortunately, being unjustly cocksure about something tends to be more attractive than being justly doubtful about something, and so it seems to me that basically any Cause is guaranteed to attract ignoble people near the top.
I definitely worded that poorly, and you haven't written anything here I strongly disagree with.
But I think there's a steelman here that's at least worth some sympathy (albeit not agreement) in the bigger scandals. At least the little people caught up in these scandals really do seem to think the problem is just "one bad apple" who made "one mistake". Even victims often believe that they're alone! Until word leaks up to more central authorities, nobody is thinking about trading off The Noble Cause versus Justice; they're thinking about trading off The Noble Cause Everywhere And Everywhen versus Punishment After The Fact In Just This One Case. It's not like they can do anything that will cause that kid to be unmolested, right? All they can do is to try to avoid compounding the damage, and as long as they keep an eye on that "one bad apple", there won't be any further damage done! This is also one of the reasons why these sorts of stories end up breaking all at once: when each story goes public, then people who know about another story start to worry that maybe it's not just two bad apples and/or two mistakes, start to see the systemic problems that allowed multiple perps to get away with it and/or allowed one perp to get away with it repeatedly, and finally start to reconsider whether they made the right or wrong call. Then you get a chain reaction and everything finally comes out all at once.
I'm pretty sure this criterion makes the median human being ignoble, if not a supermajority of us. I'm still not exactly disagreeing, but I'd suggest that the world is a better-understood (and in the end a better) place when we think of nobility as a continuum rather than a binary.
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I think it’s just normal human sin. I don’t know the base rate, but as I recall pastors are significantly less likely to abuse children than school teachers.
That list was a weapon in the culture war. There are some progressive (by evangelical standards) people and organizations whose M.O. is to ignore base rates, ignore any exculpatory evidence, and accuse denominations or institutions of being shot through with sexual abuse, then demand checks and balances that subvert the denomination’s polity. The people they want to grant new power over doctrine and practice are consistently from the progressive wing of the denomination, and they always think that the right way to address sexual abuse is by moving the denomination closer to the broader culture.
I don't think base rates are super useful for painting values differences. I'm not familiar with the numbers one way or the other, so you're probably correct about them.
But unless we're talking 10:1, or something like that, it's not indicative of "X is a trait of Y, but not of Z" so much "X is a trait of Y and Z."
Point taken.
“Values differences” is an interesting phrase, and I think the way you used it here suggests some differences in deeper underlying ideas, but I can’t quite get at them yet. I’ll think on it.
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