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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Tonight, mainstream audiences around the nation will be introduced to Vivek Ramaswamy - multi-disciplinary genius, serial entrepreneur, modern renaissance man, and nigh-messianic wünderkind who in this commenter’s humble opinion offers our beleaguered country’s best hope of national redemption

The story of Vivek is the story of the American Dream par excellence. A first generation American, Vivek was born to industrious immigrants who came to this land with nothing and went on to become a geriatric psychiatrist and engineer / patent attorney, respectively. Vivek’s giftedness shone through from the start, overcoming severe bullying - to the point of being hospitalized + needing surgery after being thrown down a flight of stairs - to become an accomplished pianist, nationally ranked tennis player, and class Valedictorian by time he left high school to attend Harvard via scholarship

Thriving among the nation’s intellectual elite, Vivek became President of Harvard’s Political Union (as a conservative!), won the Ivy’s prestigious Bowdoin prize for his senior thesis, and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in biology whilst working for top hedge funds in the biotech investment sector, all while moonlighting as as a rapper (Da Vek) and making club appearances as an amateur stand-up comedian while publishing scientific articles in the nation’s top papers and founding a 7-figure networking business. Upon graduating, Vivek made partner at a major hedge fund while simultaneously attending Yale Law School on a lark, having earned $15M by the time he graduated with his J.D. with a scholar’s grounding in the principles of Constitutional governance

Shortly after, Vivek founded a revolutionary biotech company that created a paradigm shift in pharmaceutical development. Developing an ingenious business model that leveraged market forces to determine the promise of various drug candidates (by spinning off a new company for each treatment and holding IPOs) he cut through the pharmaceutical bureaucracy to develop 5 FDA approved drugs (including life-saving treatments) in under a decade. His company, Roivant, is now worth over $9 Billion(!), with Vivek maintaining an approximately $650M stake

Vivek left his company following internal and external pressure to make a corporate statement in favor of the controversial - and in his view - socially corrosive #BLM movement, during a period in which nationwide race riots killed dozens, caused $2 billion in damages, and coincided with an enduring crime surge with an immediate ~30% homicide increase that represented the largest year-to-year murder spike in our nation’s history. Choosing to stand on principle rather than genuflect to the reigning hysteria, Vivek went on to write 3 best selling books in 18 months exposing the pernicious spread of radical left wing ideology throughout the corporate world. One such book shone a light on the ESG movement by which asset managers BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street leverage the assets of everyday Americans to force partisan political agendas across the nation’s corporate boardrooms. Not satisfied to merely expose this undercovered movement, Vivek started his own asset management firm, Strive, that serves as a counterbalance to the major institutional players and their attempts to politicize the very free market itself. (Strive currently approaches $1billion under management.) Simultaneously, he founded another company, Chapter, to help citizens navigate the federal bureaucracy with regard to Medicare, all while raising two young children with his loving and accomplished (surgeon!) wife

A fearless iconoclast, intellectual titan, and charismatic orator, Vivek has now taken on the audacious goal of becoming our country’s next President. Swearing off Super PACs and institutional backers, Vivek has self-funded an ambitious campaign, seizing upon earned media to make a name for himself despite virtually no ad expenditures by appearing on a litany of podcasts and programs across the political spectrum. This young and daring patriot - the first millennial to run for President - boldly aired his policy briefings as almost daily podcasts to give every day Americans insight into how the political process truly works. With a uniquely invigorating platform, full of heretofore unthinkable ideas, Vivek has thrown conventional political wisdom to the wind in the name of running a campaign centered on truth and national revival

Encouragingly, this dazzlingly bright young maverick has found his message resonating with the electorate, surging to third place in the all important race for the 2024 Republican nomination. Polling ahead of sitting senators, former governors, and even a former vice president, Vivek as a Hindu, dark-skinned political neophyte has already achieved the impossible and situated himself as the arguable heir apparent to the American nationalist movement

Tonight he makes his true debut on the national stage and makes his case to take on the political establishment, impose constitutional limits to a federal bureaucracy run amok, and restore a unifying sense of national purpose. Excited to watch - stream on Rumble at 9pm Eastern

https://rumble.com/v3ak5c2-fox-news-republican-presidential-primary-debate.html

Uh...

You've gotten reported twice in the ten minutes this post has been up. I immediately recognized you from your mountain of AAQCs back in the old country, but this is apparently just your third post here on the new site, and it reads like artificially-breathless marketing copy, to the point that I immediately checked to see if this was copypasta. At minimum, even though you never outright say "vote for Vivek!" this seems like a pretty clear example of recruiting for a cause.

You're free to make your case for Vivek, of course, but phrases like "multi-disciplinary genius," "dazzlingly bright young maverick," and "young and daring patriot" are, in their own brightly-smiling way, egregiously obnoxious--it's pure, unapologetic rhetoric of the kind people use to subtly build consensus and conformity. I did hesitate to even say anything; given how often I'm forced to moderate a black-pilled flame-out, someone making a positive case is automatically a breath of fresh air. But this doesn't read like @Sizzle50 making a good argument, this reads like @Sizzle50 writing ad copy.

Seriously, are you all believing this post on face value, or am I crazy?

As an Irish person, this reads like a textbook example of slagging though less affectionate, you can slag someone off for being a feckin' eejit. But everyone is reacting as if it's VOTE FOR VIVEK VIVEK OUR SAVIOUR BESTEST GUY EVER. Meanwhile I'm going "Oh, that's harsh, even if he deserves to be mocked". EDIT: It's the very excess of the praise for mundane accomplishments (e.g. playing the piano), if they're even accomplishments, that denotes it as slagging. Piling Pelion on Ossa for the wonderfulness of the marvellousness of the amazingness.

Talk about cultural disconnect!

A case this week highlighted that we haven't quite found the line where insult as compliment becomes insult as insult. A pipe-fitter from the UK was awarded €20,000 because his Irish colleagues abused him. They read out negative football results about the English team in the World Cup, sang rebel songs and whenever a dangerous job came up said 'send the Brit in'.

The man took it all as personal assault. The people doing it probably believed their actions to be nationally acceptable: we take pride in beating the English. Ray Houghton is still a national hero because of his goal against England in Euro '88. Christy Moore even wrote a song calling Houghton's goal 'revenge for Skibbereen'. Sure it's only a bit of craic. We don't really mean any harm.

Because insulting each other is so much a part of what we do, we find it odd that someone could object. But lots of people find offensive what we find normal; a colleague of mine was recently at a two-day meeting in New York. Early on, he realised that one of the Americans in attendance was an obnoxious, distant, dislikeable pain in the arse. But, because he had to get the best out of him, he spent the first coffee break trying to establish what was wrong.

Turned out to be simple. One word: 'Jaysus'. Every time my colleague said it, the American flinched because he regarded it as blasphemy. In a situation like that there's no point trying to explain that 'Jaysus' is used by the Irish in a way that has shag all to do with the man upstairs. No point explaining that even Irish priests use 'Jaysus' willy-nilly. No amount of argument would change the American's mind about what he saw to be blasphemy.

The bolded part is what gets me into trouble here all the time 😁

EDIT EDIT: I love ye all, lads, but there's no denying ye can be dry shites at times.

The man took it all as personal assault. The people doing it probably believed their actions to be nationally acceptable: we take pride in beating the English. Ray Houghton is still a national hero because of his goal against England in Euro '88. Christy Moore even wrote a song calling Houghton's goal 'revenge for Skibbereen'. Sure it's only a bit of craic. We don't really mean any harm.

Context matters too. I work with a bunch of different nationalities and the Franco-Brit ribbing took on a distinctly different tone to me as the ratio became more and more unbalanced.

It would still be speaking unclearly.

Seriously, are you all believing this post on face value, or am I crazy?

I don't think you're crazy, and I definitely thought about addressing that angle in the mod message, but I didn't immediately see a good way to do that without wandering into my own substantive thoughts on the matter.

The thing about writing this sort of post as satire is that Poe's Law looms large. "You didn't get the joke" is a response that transforms the initial problem into a clearer one--a violation of the "speak plainly" rule.

"Dry shites" is the name of my Ska band.

I felt the same way reading it, I wasn't sure if it was parody.

Don't forget "paradigm shift".