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Notes -
Newsom basically calling for a boycot of Target.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/did-governor-newsom-spark-target-boycott-among-liberals
So he’s not too happy that red tribe has learned how to cancel something. I think we are approaching a day where you have to declare your allegiance. Red or blue.
I usually don’t like Balaji and think he’s a smarter hack who knows how to grift, but I think he’s right in this thread
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1659094966671425536?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
And Scott had a thread about how pride is just like every other cities holiday posted recently. I can’t find it.
America seems to be in a religious war between two cultures now. A couple years ago red tribe didn’t know how to wield power. Desantis has done that highlighted by his war on Disney and grassroots red tribe found their first success with Budweiser. Twitter going Musks was an obvious red tribe move. Jan 6 and Trump overall was a movement that hadn’t found their real leaders who could use power.
I don’t think religion is that strong anymore on the right. I say this because there is a lot of tolerance for Trump being not a Christian. He bangs hookers. So red tribe has an internal sub-war between their traditional alpha male and their good Christian Desantis.
I do like Scott’s metaphor of this being a time like when Christianity took over the Roman Empire. No one believed in the old pagan gods anymore. And I think blue tribe would have won this but they made two crucial mistakes:
The movement doesn’t have a great place for males. Who have always dominated every society.
The trans movement has a lot of vibes of backward religions. Getting kids to cut themselves up and change their bodies has a lot of vibes of practices we long since banished.
Yeah, and Christianity is generally okay with sinful, imperfect men being used as instruments to spread the word of God and advance the cause.
I mean, look at King David's reign or King Solomon (he of 1000 of h̶o̶o̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ women) and tell me Trump is really beyond the pale.
Problem is every group wants to tap into religious fervor and the fanaticism/loyalty that comes with a deep faith that you're doing the right thing, but nobody can present a leader who is capable of actually embodying the ideals that the religions (including the secular ones) profess so it becomes hard for anyone but the most ardent of adherents to actually buy into a movement that can't possibly deliver on its promises because there is no all seeing all knowing deity at its center to actually make things happen.
You can look at Trump and see him as a charlatan who talks a great game and maybe even is an extremely strong negotiator but has zero actual principles and no higher goals in mind other than enriching himself and bolstering his own fame.
You can look at the LGBTQ+ movement and see it as a divisive and somewhat incoherent mishmash of different interest and activist groups that at best manages to be a pale echo of the original civil rights movement but has no other core, defining belief system and thus they only manages to cling together because the members have been convinced that their very survival depends on presenting a unified front.
But you can't shake the faith of the followers of those respective secular religions and get them to turn away and embrace a different religious order merely by pointing out how their respective gods have utterly failed them.
Desantis, speaking somewhat cynically, seems to have a chance to actually live up to the ideals he tries to espouse and thus might function as the head of a secular religion (with Christian trappings) where even the less devout might pledge to follow.
But many competing groups (including the Trumpists and the LGBTQ+ mentioned already) consider it blasphemy to even consider lending him support, so I'm very curious to this election seasons develops in the midst of increasingly fanatical cults of personality.
Desantis actually does live up to it a great extent. I would guess 30-70% of motte posters have a higher net worth than him (I think it’s around 300k). Probably 90-95% at his age.
I only see 2 areas where he is failing. He expanded the death penalty. True pro-lifers are against that. And it’s a harder argument to make but I think he’s not following his beliefs on Ukraine.
I predict that support for abortion and support for the death penalty have a strong negative correlation. Do you predict the opposite or is there some other meaning to your claim?
That’s true. My point was a true religious person would be against abortion and against the death penalty. All life is sacred.
Only in so far as you can abolish the civil state can you abolish the death penalty, and I think you'll find many zealots don't make Christian Anarchism a priority.
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Which is my position, as a Catholic, and both fed the other: if I don't think even a vicious, sadistic murderer should be executed, why would I think it's fine to execute a child in the womb? If there is a right to life for the unborn, then the right to life applies to all humans.
I've held this position for decades, which is why all the "hypocrites! you support the death penalty!" smarming by the pro-choicers never had any effect on me.
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No, some not-insubstantial portion of religious Catholics and smaller numbers of ‘liberal’ protestants(I don’t just love this term, but I haven’t heard of a better one) hold that view. Almost all other Christians hold that abortion and the death penalty aren’t directly comparable because their acceptability hinges on totally different questions.
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See my reply to sliders.
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Admittedly I’m speaking from a Catholic perspective and tend to have view other sects as make it up as you want Christians. Being as Catholics are the preferred faith for pro-life Supreme Court justices I think I am correct in saying true pro-lifers are against abortion and the death penalty. And Catholic doctrine is quite clearly against both.
The death penalty is one of the few areas where I’m disappointed in Desantis and believe he’s doing something for political game versus true beliefs.
I hadn't realized that DeSantis is a Catholic so I will cede your characterization of him in particular as not living up to the ideals he professes in that regard. I think your insistence on using "true pro-lifers" to refer to the Catholic position is obnoxious but there's no point in an extended argument about a label.
It’s probably obnoxious.
Honestly how did you not know Desantis was Catholic? I have a more obvious Italian last name but that’s still looks very Italian to me.
As I think about it this morning I wish the church would get aggressive and ban him from communion over his death penalty stance and make him apologize. It would make them look more honest when they talk about doing it with Biden.
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With the partial exception of Barrett, the catholic pro-life justices are not notably more anti-death penalty than they are pro-abortion. ‘Consistent life ethic’ is clearly a minority position among intellectual Catholic circles in the US even as it’s a politically correct consensus view.
They are not in communion with Rome on that issue. As someone who went to the same school as ACB and who went to pro-life marches a person who is Catholic first would be against the death penalty. The evangelicals have always been anti-abortion pro death penalty vibes but I don’t think an intellectually honest (most people aren’t) could view life as sacred and take that view.
But I also think the old slur about a Catholic politician having to bend the knee to Rome is true. It’s what makes us undesirable POTUS to most but very desirable for the Supreme Court when Rome and a political movement have an agreement on an issue.
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I can say that I don't actually agree with everything he's done, and would actively oppose a few measures.
BUT... I can absolutely follow the logic for the actions in almost every case, even if I don't find it sound. That is to say he's not acting arbitrarily, he is not acting on pure ideology (not implementing policies solely to boost right-wing cred) and there's at least a good case to be made that the policies he implements will produce outcomes that align with his goals... even if there will be undesirable side effects.
And I've honestly reached the point where redditors and lefties have written off the state as a fascist hellhole that nobody should visit... and I say GOOD. If it makes those sorts of people move out of the state and prevents more of them from moving in, if they FEEL unwelcome even though the state is quite willing to accept them, then that's a side effect I can tolerate.
Indeed, the idea that it is absolutely fine to make policy decisions that will cause people to avoid your state may be the single best 'innovation' he's come up with or popularized. Laws with minimal impact on the average citizens but that nonetheless drive activists and extremists away (without, we'll say, actively discriminating against them) are probably a net win for said average citizens.
The Disney lawsuits are also a distraction for the left. I see a fair amount of online commentary about how DeSantis is an idiot for picking a fight with Disney which has the lawyers and money to crush him, and apart from the cognitive dissonance of lefties licking the boots of large capitalist organisations which exist to make profits, they're not following the news.
Disney doesn't have the deep pockets they imagine, right now. They're laying off thousands and need to make billions in cuts:
Disney+ streaming service pulled underperforming shows in what's been called a purge. They're losing subscribers, like all the streaming services. There's a whole internal power struggle going on with Kathleen Kennedy and Star Wars (the Galactic Starcruiser hotel shut down after only two years primarily because it was way too pricey for the experience, but also in part because Kennedy insisted nothing from the original trilogy be included, but all her Rey Skywalker movies) and the need for the latest Indiana Jones movie to make a billion, which - going by the reviews after it was shown at Cannes - is going to be very difficult to achieve. Bob Iger, the CEO who came back, laid it all out in the earnings call:
The relocation to Florida being cancelled is being blamed on DeSantis and taken as a victory for Disney - Florida will lose out on all these jobs and money, thanks to the stupid Republicans! - but it's mostly due to the California staff not wanting to move, plus the need to drastically cut costs.
Disney is still big, rich and powerful, but it has a lot on its plate right now and the fight in Florida may not be as straightforward as the lefties hope.
I think there's good reason to not blame Kennedy for everything that went wrong (my understanding is that the original sin of rushing the Sequel trilogy without a set plan was a Disney mandate) but I honestly don't know how she a) was even allowed to make this call in the first place (the only thing the ST had going for it was nostalgia) and b) hasn't been fired for it.
I'm not able to keep up with the number of Star Wars movies by now, to be honest, but around the time J.J. Abrams got the gig I was very surprised, because they seemed to be jumping from one director to a different one for the next movie, and the new guy immediately started contradicting the stuff set up in the last movie, then the next movie contradicted that.
I think people like the original trilogy because (1) they grew up on it and (2) it's consistent. Luke and the Rebels are the Good Guys, Vader is redeemed in death, the Empire is the Bad Guys and at the end the Good Guys win. Simple, exciting, and no "and then they all turned into the Atreides family and started trying to murder each other".
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And 2) She must have some dirt on those in power in that corp or else she would have been fired about 2-3 movie trashfires ago.
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