domain:mattlakeman.org
Dean
Flairless
8m ago
exaggeration of a call to action (not fact based)
Don't Call Your Wife 'Beautiful.' Use These Less Sexist Compliments Instead
"A real self-starter": Is she blushing? Oh, she's blushing.
Okay, this one made me laugh.
"The strong nose of a Caesar": She'll feel like a princess -- no, an empress!
And this one truly is 'not fact based.'
Rosencrantz2
27m ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements_by_Donald_Trump
I read a few reports quantifying his untruths vs Biden and Obama, and he came off much worse.
Whether there's an actually solid study comparing all politicians, journalists, academics and their lies I don't know, but it seems baldly apparent that he is up there with the best of them.
Anyway, don't many of his supporters acknowledge that he lies a lot, but say his lies are good car salesman style lies, whereas other politicians may not lie but they are selective with what they include and what they omit?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
32m ago
Now I can squat two plates and bench one plate.
Good job! Benching 60kg x 5 was easy for me, but my fucking knees won't let me squat more than 1.5 plates, and only on a good day. I've switched to endurance training (cyclist squats on a wedge) for my knees, with a plan to add some split squats or lunges when I'm ready. I hate both.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
38m ago
Very little, truth be told.
Les Trois Mousquetaires, in public-domain audiobook format (librivox). Mostly just to keep my French from escaping me altogether, but also because I genuinely enjoy the genre. I think I get about half of what's being read. It'd probably be a better idea to actually read the text.
Mistress of Mistresses, by E.R. Eddison. It's slow going so far, very much unlike The Worm Ouroboros. I trust Eddison to know what he's doing, so I'll keep at it.
TowardsPanna
51m ago
Yes, that makes sense.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
in a country presided over by one of the most prolific liars in history seems absolutely risible.
Where are you getting the idea he's any worse than any other politician, or even journalist or academic?
Rosencrantz2
1hr ago
He shouldn't have said it, especially as it turns out to have been wrong, but to take him off the air for it in a country presided over by one of the most prolific liars in history seems absolutely risible.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Oh, I had no problem with your overall point, it was just that your phrasing in that sentence irked me. I agree that criminalizing all sorts of cat-calling is silly.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
1hr ago
Are there many cases of someone being tried for treason and exonerated? Treason does sound like the "TPTCurrentlyB want you dead" charge.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
it is that we have half the country that sees riots and murders against people they don't like as a good thing
This is an exaggeration. I'd say it's more like 5%, although they are very loud and influential, and that proportion is still way too high.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I’m not going to dox myself to make a point, but back when I was a politician I wrote under my real name in support of Jyllands-Posten posting the Danish cartoons, and against prosecuting David Irving for Holocaust denial.
I was originally flabbergasted by your post, so I had to take a step back, mull it over, read it over a few more times, and hope it would help. I don't think it did...
First of all, definitely do not dox yourself, it won't really prove your point, because the issue isn't that I don't believe you. The issue is that for over 10 years we've been seeing an ever-escalating cycle of speech-controls coming from the left. Now, my memory is kinda sketchy, and I do tend to remember some thing better than others, but I simply do not recall you expressing that much of an issue over that. Now that the right retaliates with a fraction of the force the left was applying for over a decade, you call McCarthyism. This is the basic state of where we're at.
Now, in order to show me that you did actually have an issue with left-wing speech control, you bring up... cases from over two decades ago? How is that addressing my concerns? What I want to hear from you, and people from your side, is that if I burn political capital (such as it is) with my side in order to enforce a "free speech" rule for all, you'll do the same when your side starts transgressing, and won't just slink back under a rock, wait for it all to blow over, and call me a McCarthyist for not raising a finger in your side's defense once they're out of power again. I'm sorry, I'm already pushing 40, I don't have time to play Charlie Brown in political cycles that take decades to play out.
I'm also not sure what point you're think you're making when you talk about citing "Exiting the Vampire Castle". You did it a whopping 4 times total, including this post, and it was always to litigate some point about chronology, and never to show a left-winger how they're doing leftism wrong.
Re. The international angle, various people in the US, most recently when explaining what Charlie Kirk was pushing back against, have talked about the climate of fear that wokestupid created in US universities and PMC workplaces.
Right, and your previous point was how this climate of fear prevents various critical sectors of society from doing it's job properly. I'd argue that norms like "don't make fun of victims of political assassinations" is far less harmful to the work of these sectors than norms like "don't talk about riots being ineffective at political persuasion", or "don't talk about the impossibility of men becoming women".
was worse for you than it was for us
I'm not an American, and don't live in America.
Fining people for teaching dogs the Roman salute is bad, but a lot more people want to make small donations to right-wing causes or say that there are only two sexes than teach the Roman salute to dogs.
You literally just arrested Graham Linehan for making fun of trans people. Your government arrests ~30 people per day, over tweets. This includes criticizing progressives for being too authoritarian by arranging their flag in creative ways
The UK courts have ruled explicitly that saying there are only two sexes is not a firing offence, and I’m not aware of a case where a British employer even tried to fire an employee over a normie-level political donation.
Yeah, the court has ruled so in response to Maya Forstater getting fired. The case had to go all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the ruling was extremely controversial. How did you end up thinking that this shows that the British workplace culture less censorious than the American one?
Wokestupid cancel culture created fear, anger, hate, division, and above all retardation which broke things I care about - and not because of the specifics of what was cancelled. The backlash to wokestupid got us Brexit and the Trump tariffs, which also broke things I care about.
Again, I've seen you talk a whole lot more about one than about the other.
aaa
1hr ago
I'm not going to make a comprehensive argument for the existence of God
Fair enough, I therefore remain convinced that you would not be able to starting from that definition of initial state.
You brought up Feser earlier, I wonder what you've read of him. Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides five chapter-length proofs
This one. He has both problems: he relies on a rejection of actual infinites and also on a (non-)definition of causation that does not have referents.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
Yeah the issue with police stand downs isn't the physical damage, it is the psychological damage. This might sound hyperbolic but it is unfortunately accurate - it works the same way terrorism works, utilising the spectacle of violence to achieve a political or ideological aim by manipulating the emotional state of a much larger audience. It creates deep insecurity and distrust in the general public on top of a general sense of unease and danger.
ulyssessword
1hr ago
A comic is obligated to be aware of how it's related to truth, and to manage that relationship. For example:
(The monologue, for reference)
- "This deal is very important, because TikTok is his son, Don Jr.'s, only friend." It's exploiting the shock value of the falsehood as the punchline of a joke.
- Larry Ellison does not have a plan to kill James Bond. Again, the punchline of a joke.
- "Trump has entered into the fourth stage of grief: Construction". The fourth stage is depression, not construction. Also, Trump doesn't appear to be grieving. It is a blatantly false statement, but it's unobjectionable because of what its relationship with truth is: It's pointing out a missing mood from the person who decided to fly all the flags at half mast.
- "By the time [Trump]'s out of office, the White House will have slot machines and a waterslide." I'd take that bet, but for some odd reason I doubt if Kimmel would. It's a hyperbolic reference to the construction Trump talked about.
His references to MAGA denials were during the setup phase (when the information is usually supposed to be true, to serve as contrast to a false punchline), and he didn't use it to do anything before switching to talking about the Emmys.
I've said it before, but Bablyon Bee has a good relationship with the truth. They earn their moniker of "Fake News You Can Trust", and looking at the current front page, we have (complete listing):
- funny/false arguments supporting a true conclusion
- obvious hyperbole that mirrors the truth
- One true event, with perfectly-backwards reasoning that mirrors the event's
- 100% truth, with funny formatting
- exaggeration of a call to action (not fact based)
Outside of the front page, good examples include:
Tretiak
1hr ago
I actually thought it was that "Goats, Guns and Gold," dude that Peter Lavelle sometimes invites on Crosstalk RT.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
The Senate could declare the Senatus Consultim Ultimum
It was not a legal power, the difference is subtle: they were not saying, "by the power of the Senate, this man is above the law". They were saying, "the members of the Senate have agreed to never prosecute the man for his actions in the service to the Republic". And since every public official was a senator, this approach worked. It's like the blue wall of silence.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1hr ago
No. Trump has, from day zero been far above and beyond normal politics in the level of blatant dishonesty, in hus sheer commitment to manufacturing an alternative to reality. It seems to have fallen off again, but for a while posters here even developed their own cope for this with the "Trump lies like a used car salesman" bit, like shameless dishonesty was some kind of virtue (but also that we were supposed to ignore the fact that Trump makes your average politician look positively Washingtonesque).
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
1hr ago
Thank you! I cannot rate the quality of your complaints highly enough. Your object-level points combine collectively to probe at some real subtleties in the Pattern, including some I'm not sure I've looked at very closely yet. Overall I find your questions comfortable and exciting.
However, I am traveling and will probably be functionally offline for about a day and a half. Even after that I'm not sure how quickly I'll be able to answer you. I really want to chew on this for a while. As in, I totally see what you mean, and I'm pretty sure I'm on the right side of this, but to explain how would require drilling deeply indeed, such that I may need to invent some new (internal) language to do it. Next week's chapter describes some of the idea at its peripheries. To be honest I think I might need to pull in some concepts from book two, which would be difficult for many reasons.
Suppose I shouldn't be surprised. This is in retrospect an obvious sticking point (structurally) and I don't think there's an obvious way around it without saying, essentially, "Yeah that might sound crazy right now but if you keep reading it'll eventually click." (Which I think is only true for some people anyway, which is also part of the thesis...)
Then again, that's a major reason I'm framing everything fictionally in the first place. I'm trying to point out some higher patterns, truths, which illumine much of the world around us but which seem to be ungraspable without slipping ever so slightly into poetry.
This makes intuitive sense to me. I believe our ancestors (or at least the ones phenomenologically-comparable to us) were leading much richer, fuller lives than we do today, and if nothing else I'm trying to recapitulate their worldview for a modern audience so as to point out some of the valuable truths which might easily be missed without it. And also to suggest that unless we get intentional about such things, much more will be lost.
Anyway, thank you, truly. This experiment of putting the book up to get some feedback and even internal clarity is going swimmingly.
And, as always, it's the people you meet along the way.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
I have an acquaintance with family in South Africa. Things there are legitimately quite bad. I would not travel there - and yet, I don’t feel nearly so strongly about things which happen there as things in the US, even if they’re more severe. That’s because I don’t live there. My day to day is not affected by it, and does not affect it.
On the other hand, I live in the US, and take things much more seriously here.
As someone from a country on the opposite side of the world, US politics are taken seriously down here as well - the US is the western hegemon and the decisions made there have severe consequences for the rest of the world. What matters in the US matters to the rest of the world as well - our Murdoch media whipped up a storm talking positively about Charlie Kirk despite nobody here really caring about him at all.
The mid-2000s were, to be fair, a rather atypical period in the modern American political left of the last half century. Obama came in on the back of the anti-Iraq War protest movement, which was non-violent for multiple reasons of strategy, political co-option by the Democratic party, and the then-Democratic Party leaderships own relationships with left-coded political riots.
The US has a long history of violent political protests and actions. It is by no means exclusive to one side of the political isle or the other, and this is not a claim of the US political violence relative to any other state, but it's also not exactly distant or theoretical history either. Many of the recent and still contemporary political elites had formative experiences in the Vietnam Protests of the 60s and 70s, and while less massive there were major protest movements across the 80s as well. These were largely unassociated with the direct action political violence of the time, such as the Weather Underground, but there has long been a ven diagram overlap between the political-violence American left and the fringe-edges of the Democratic Party.
This included into the 1990s. Go back not even a decade before 2008, and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests aka The Battle of Seattle,, involved tens of thousands of anarchist/anti-capitalist-left-aligned protestors, militant anarchists and unionists, and typical not-entirely-peaceful protesting. Two battalions of national guard were called in, in a Democratic city of a Democratic Mayor under a Democratic Governor under a Democratic President.
This was not even a decade after the 1992 Rodney King riots, which were significant in their own right and had their interplay with the Clinton administration that began in 1993, and which served as a significant part of Bill Clinton's first campaign. Clinton threaded the needle politically, siding more against the law enforcement than for the violent protests, but the 90s were a formative period for the people who were violent protest footsoldiers then, and would become more, and then less, and then more influential again over the next few decades.
While the Rodney King riots were an element in Clinton's rise to power, it's better understood that Bill Clinton co-opted the effects than had major alignment with the radical left. Sister Souljah moments aside, the break developed with the Clinton administration's adoption of post-cold-war globalization/free trade-ism, and the conflict that brought with the traditional militant democrat constituencies. This culminated in the WTO protests towards the tail of the Clinton administration, which were functionally a base rebellion of the union/labor-left base. It was big, loud, embarrassing... and it was part of the background context for the break between the Clinton (and eventually Obama) wing of the Democratic party, of technocratic free-traders, from the traditional blue-collar base (whose protests were a political affront/challenge/nuisance to the Clinton administration).
These 1990s political violence set the stage for the 2000s non-violent Iraq War protests that fueled Obama's rise, because the Democratic Party's embrace/cooption of the anti-war movement turned that protest movement into an evolution/response to the 1990s violent protests.
This was in part because one of the major institutional efforts of the Democratic Party in the 2000s was the efforts to centralize control of all levels of the party influence infrastructure. This was in part a Clinton-wing specific effort to get Hillary Clinton set up for the 2008 election, but also a broader part / consequence of the Democratic Party's centralization of power in the party elites over time. (IE, what led to the visible age issues / lack of younger bench in the last few election cycles, as the centralized power brokers gathering power in the 90's and 2000's never retired.) This was a period where many of the more modern Democratic Party political alliances of the Clinton-Obama-Biden era were being formed and cemented to supplant the Blue Deal coalition, including high-visibility dynamics such as increasing globalism, media-party relationships, and the institutionalism of racial/demographic balancing preferences.
But it was also, going back to your awareness of left political violence during your coming of age period, the period where the Clinton-aligned establishment was co-opting the loosely left-aligned mass protest movement architecture.
The Clintons were notorious for their efforts to factionalize/control the Democratic Party machinery. The protestor-turnout aparatus is often informally a part of that- not necessarily showing on any organization chart- but it was a historical tool of influence for the American labor union movement, for whom turning out people to fight and vote were equal assets.
The uncontrolled protest wing was also a Clinton target / goal. After all, while helpful to getting Clinton elected, the more violent labor-left protestors were a personal afront to the later Clinton administration, which itself was when the Bill-Hillary relationship arguably transitioned to a more explicit quid-pro-quo of future political support for Hillary after she stayed by Bill during the Monika Lewinsky scandal. It wasn't just a challenge to Bill's interests, but Hillary's future ambitions. And the political consequences of unpopular political violence had been a factor in George Bush's election in 2000 on a law-and-order theme, and had been influential in decades prior given the Reagan Revolution. And, of course, the blue-collar versus white-collar split, of which the Democratic elite consensus was already firmly towards the technocratic white collar, and in opposition to the blue collars... who were, via the unions and the militant unionists, both part of the mass-turnout and political violence architecture.
So in the 2000s, deliberately or not, things like 'a willingness/propensity for political violence' was a filtering function for the Clinton/establishment wing during a Democratic Party internal realignment. Violent protests weren't just bad strategy for the anti-Iraq-War movement trying to win over American voters and emerging young voters, but they were an internal conflict point for the establishment-Clinton wing of the Democratic Party as it took over and coopted the Iraq War protest movement, which it would quickly euthanize after the 2008 election. Now, granted, that 2008 democratic party was won by a Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton- surprise upsets do happen- but Obama himself was also not part of, or appealing to, the politically-violent-prone parts of the left, and largely adopted (in)to the Clinton wing even as he seized and further centralized the party machinery around himself. Not surprising, since he was from the Chicago Illinois political machine. Also not surprising in terms of Obama not having any real ties to / relationships with the more militant fringe-wings, given those of the 90s were largely (west) coastal parts of the party geographically and politically far from Chicago.
Of course, Obama's rise was part of, and gave impetus/resourcing to, the progressive ideological evolution of the American left as it turned from the economic-leftism to the racial-leftism as the new deal coalition was abandoned in favor of the Obama-style permanent Democratic (demographic) majority thesis. The racial-alignment support demographics of that didn't pan out, but it was the ideological permutation that corresponded with cultural marxism vis-a-vis classical marxist phases, and the the evolution/growth of progressive-left political violence that grew aparent in the 2010s. Which included, yes, a deliberate return to mass protest organizing not only for responses to police shootings during the Obama years, a topic area he had strong opinions in. The more racial-left protests also led to / evolved into the mass protests as an anti-Trump tool in the later 2010s, ie. the fiery-but-mostly-peaceful protest era and its Fortifying Democracy party architecture of coordinating the people leading protests, the people leading the responses to protests, and the people covering protests.
Or, to put another way: a decade before 2008, the American political left was associated with mass violent protests. A decade after 2008, the American political left was again associated with mass violent protests. In 2008, someone just coming into politics could be forgiven for only associating the Democratic Party with peaceful protests, as the Democratic Party was in the later phase of ditching the older violent protestors and hadn't yet developed a new violent protestor cohort.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
Do you disagree with any specific points of OPs reasoning, or do you just find the depiction of women Aryans distasteful?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
Someone asked her in another thread whether she actually had any substantive arguments or just intended to be petulant (I'm editorializing here since I don't remember the actual words) and she didn't answer.
"Do you disagree with any specific points of OPs reasoning, or do you just find the depiction of women distasteful?"
I did and I'd ask that question again. It's not a difficult one to answer. I came out of the brushwork to state very plainly that I hadn't the equipment to judge your story on scientific merits, but that it appealed to my biases. This is The Motte - she'd be well within the rules to just state outright that she hadn't the means to debate the science but disliked the conclusions anyways.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Well, I'm not sure what to say to "it's obvious".
My mental model, I suppose, would be by comparison to similar steppe migrations and conquests from recorded history - Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Magyars, Cumans, Pechenegs, Turks, Mongols, Xiongnu, Xianbei, Manchus, and so on. Horse people from Central Asia spreading out and conflicting with, occasionally conquering, neighbouring peoples is very far from an unknown event in wider Eurasian history. In the absence of detailed knowledge of the Yamnaya culture, my best guess is that they were probably similar to their better-known successors.
Do you take your description as applying accurately to some of the steppe peoples I've listed? Are they various sub-species of the Race of Kings?
flitter
2hr ago
Conservatives are trained not to use the language of liberals. Liberals are not so trained
Seems backwards to me? Is he distinguishing progressives from liberals. Or maybe it's a bubble thing?
I've heard a lot of conservative talking points expressed in liberal language. Needing a safe space and representation in history class. Or arguments that democrats are the real racists, or Ayn Rand quotes supporting libertarianism by saying the smallest minority is the individual.
On concrete political issues everyone seems careful to use the language of their own perspective. Would never hear an abortion argument of fascists vs babykillers
Are you referring to the following?
After the evidence published on the 16th, claiming that the shooter was MAGA would be at least a fringe view. One might claim that everyone from the FBI and state prosecution is blatantly partisan and obviously trying to blame the murder on the left, but that would leave the question how the FBI fabricated a MtF boyfriend. So personally, I think that the official narrative -- the killer acting to 'fight LGBT hate' is probably correct.
Still, the Kimmel episode was aired on the 15th, when none of these chat quotes were public (afaik).
And then you have the FCC statement:
So Kimmel was either spinning the truth very hard or outright lying. Bad, but mostly SOP -- Trump himself does the same whenever he opens his mouth. If Carr thinks that this is the "sickest conduct possible", he must live a very sheltered life indeed -- free from social media, for one thing. One wonders if he has ever watched Fox News. In short, his statement is as much of a lie as Kimmel's is.
I think that the right is reasonably upset by the social media celebrations of the murders by the far left. Kimmel was not guilty of that at all, he was just someone the FCC could cancel who had interacted with the topic in a way which did not please Trump, and was already on the cancel list, so he got got.
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