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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.
I think it's more that left-of-center people are significantly more likely to care if a prominent member of their organization turns out to be a sexual predator. A remarkable number of right-wingers seem to think that banging dubiously consenting 16 year olds and sexually harassing your subordinates is just the Big Man's due (and are generally significantly more prone to dismissing/denying claims of sexual abuse).
The fact that these interrogations are being carried out even against dead icons suggests there's an actual principle at play - pushes against living figures could be argued to be power plays, and going after the other team's heroes is just playing politics, but there's really no reason to go digging up these kinds of skeletons unless this is something you actually care about.
Umm... ah... what?
Let's leave aside the allegations against Mr. Trump or people like Matt Gaetz for a moment. Remember Mark Foley or Dennis Hastert? The fact that a long-serving GOP Speaker was a pedophile has been largely consigned to the memoryhole. How about Roy Moore? The Catholic Church has had a parade of scandals (though they're woke now, so idk if that counts anymore). Southern Baptist churches have been subject to a slew of sexual abuse scandals. I know I could do some actual research and come up with more examples, but the point is less to establish who has more pedos and more to illustrate the existence of a history of right-wing leaders getting caught up in sex abuse scandals and the conservative movement downplaying or forgetting about it.
The actual pattern I can discern is that if you put men in a position of power, influence, or prestige, a significant subset of them will try to exploit it for sex (whatever prior commitments they may have re: celibacy or marriage). Of those, many will get outright coercive or direct their attentions towards inappropriate subjects (e.g. minors, subordinates).
I think that there's significant nonpartisan crossover between the types of personalities that gravitate toward positions of power over others in terms of political/business/civic roles and the types that seek power over others in terms of vices. There's a degree of sociopathy at play in any "maverick" who bucks the system rather than follows the rules that is totally unsurprisingly aligned with the sociopathy that is into taboo sexuality, bucking the system of common morality. Power also allows one to engage more freely in otherwise difficult vices, which is why a lot of pedos gravitate toward roles as teachers, pastors, priests, cub scout leaders, etc.
In our zeal to attack "the other side's" examples of this, we often fail to really grapple with whether or not these failings mean anything substantial, or are just easy targets for oppositional demoralization.
Pick your #1 issue, whatever it is, and ask yourself if your mind would be changed .000001% on that subject if it turned out that the leading voice for that issue was also a pedophile. Most likely not, I suspect.
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Yes, for a bunch of supposed noticers, The Motte is kind of doing gymnastics to avoid noticing the most obvious pattern and conclusion. Irrespective of ideology or movement, an enormous percentage of men simply want to have as much sex as possible and are willing to abuse power to do it.
That just the baseline reality that everyone already baked into their model of the world. The question is, why do some ideologies appear to have more of this kind of abuser in leadership roles than others? Of course, that's either a trivial question (answer: because what things appear to you is primarily determined by your biases, rather than underlying reality) or a loaded question (i.e. the question is implying that this "appearance" correlates with reality), and so the "clean" version of that question would be: "Do some ideologies actually have more of this kind of abuser in leadership roles than others, and if so, is there something about the psychology of these ideologies that leads a difference in prevalence of this?"
Which is an interesting question to at least speculate about, though any actual conclusions would be completely unwarranted.
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How many statues to Dennis Hastert are out there? I genuinely don't know. I assume zero.
How many streets are named after disgraced Catholic priests?
How many streets are named after Catholic priests at all?
If society mostly celebrates characters that we interpret as left-wing, it stands to reason that most rapists society celebrates are also left-wing. You have not made a case that P(rapist|celebrated left-wing hero)>P(rapist|celebrated hero).
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I'm not really sure how that's relevant to the question of whether or not left-wingers are uniquely prone to elevating sexual predators to positions of authority.
(Also, Hastert did have stuff named in his honor. Not so much any more).
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Technically a ton, since MLK was named after Martin Luther.
CLEVER. I laughed.
Of course, MLK is one of those lefty heroes who might have been okay with rape I was thinking of. The proof is not dispositive there.
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Actually care? Left wing spaces also let you leverage claims like this a lot harder for your own future publicity and credentials.
I do agree that there's a general Hallmark of power that guys will push the envelope. On the other hand, women will also tend to be attracted to power and prestige. Consent can be retroactively withdrawn if the encounter doesn't live up to expectations.
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Eventually. Maybe. Decades later. And only if they're heterosexual.
As you gesture at, it's resolving the tension between the principle and the endless thirst for power- once everyone's dead and the consequences have happened, you can look back and say "well wasn't that unfortunate? Too bad we were all fucking cowards at the time and decided The Cause was worth a bit of rape!"
Pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.
I'm confused - are they not canceling people for sexual misconduct? If all the consequences are low probability and delayed by decades, why were so many people worked up about this?
The entire backlash against #MeToo only makes sense in the context of it actively going after currently prominent individuals.
I think the argument is that #MeToo accusations are strategically delayed to minimize harm to the left and maximize harm to the left's enemies.
If someone's in a position of power and supporting the left, the #MeToo accusations will be delayed until they're no longer in power or it can be guaranteed that they will be replaced by someone just as supportive to the left.
If someone's not supporting the left, the #MeToo accusations will come out immediately and be leveraged to their maximum extent to attempt to replace that person with someone more supportive to the left.
I'm not sure how much I agree with it, but this should be at least somewhat disprovable: there's gotta be some easy counterexamples.
Al Franken was a sitting senator when he resigned, but the accusations were from 2006 and didn't come out until 2017. And he did get replaced with another Democrat who won 76% of the vote, so it's plausible that it was timed to where they were sure the left wouldn't lose any power by it. But the accusations were from Leeann Tweeden, who has a few right-wing things in her bio: I don't know enough about her to know if that's accurate. "Left-wingers strategically get right-winger to accuse left-winger of sexual misconduct at a time where they're confident another left-winger can win the election" seems a little too complex for me to see as plausible.
As one prominent politician put it: "And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
Notably, the Left still seems to hold Bill Clinton in high regard, despite a physical relationship with a much younger subordinate --- contra the TA and student elsewhere in this thread: intern and Most Powerful Man in the World. But somehow still allowed to be considered "consensual". And one direct accusation of rape. Also his wife who has long defended him against these accusations remains in good standing, as opposed to people who merely emailed Epstein a couple times.
Although the Chavez case could also be seen as an example of being willing to hold their own leaders to account: I generally have more respect for organizations that clearly abide by their stated principles. Uncharitably, I might not be surprised if we start hearing about how Chavez (famous union leader) was always a dirty right-winger because agriculture or quotes about immigration or that choice of flag.
Apparently, true progressives photosynthesise....
I'd like to see a story where one side has the politics of a certain Austrian painter wrapped in a soft pastel uwu aesthetic, while the other side has the aesthetics of the III. Reich and 1990's/2000's liberal politics. (In TVTropes terms, A Nazi by Any Other Name vs. Putting on the Reich.) Too many people, while they learned that the Nazis were bad, lack understanding of why, and treat it as an axiom; this is a house built on sand. Knowing that 'totalitarianism and racial narcissism are bad; the Nazis did those things; therefore the Nazis were bad' is the house built on rock.
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Well, he has been dead for 30 years, so it might be a little late to provide feedback and steer his behavior.
And it seems like this was not an unknown thing before now, so I don't know how much credit I want to give: "abiding by your stated principles" is mostly impressive when it's chosen over maximizing your capability to attain your goals. Is denouncing Cesar Chavez now costing them much?
But, to be perfectly mirrored, we'd have to look at people that died in the 90s, were credibly accused of sexual misconduct, and were right-wing, to see if right-wingers are currently denouncing or at least not supporting them. Maybe they don't clear this bar.
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Accusations that become culturally important scissor statements tend to be the ones that are delayed past the expiration of any possible proof or disproof. Like Brett Kavanaugh, how is he supposed to prove he didn't do something in high school?
That leaves everyone to fall back on their priors.
Less vague accusations, like those against Roger Ailes, don't make big waves.
Well, he could have kept a detailed journal of his activities showing what he did and where he went every day, that covers the entire period during which the event where he was accused of doing the thing could have occurred. But who does that?
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