domain:rifters.com
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8m ago
It's an Interstate highway. There aren't "blind corners" of the type you might find on a surface street. There are a few places Interstates do violate Interstate standards (e.g. I-70 and I-76 in Pennsylvania), but I-64 through New Kent County appears to be quite straight if a bit hilly.
07mk
15m ago
I don't think he's done any soul searching, he's done whatever is intended to get people like yourself to think he's done a soul searching.
This seems likely to be correct - I'd certainly bet on it if it were possible to rule on it fairly. But it also raises the question, what would Klein need to do to convince people like you or me that he's done a soul searching?
I don't follow Klein enough to say definitively, but I'd say that something that explicitly disavows identity politics as having negative value both for humanity and for the Democrats, while explicitly praising enemies on the right such as Trump for helping to fight against it, in a way that shows that he believes that right-wing electoral gain is a worthy cost to pay for excising this cancer from the left-wing - even when some (or a lot) of the healthy cells around the cancer are excised - would probably meet the bar for me. I don't expect him to meet this bar.
However, I consider his cynical ploy to convince some people in the middle/right that he has done some soul searching on this to be a step in the right direction, instead of the deflection/rationalization game he and people like him have played wrt their more extreme ideological allies.
roystgnr
22m ago
It seems that people are interpreting "someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation" to mean "nothing-but-condemnation of the violence", in which case your request was a reasonable one, but it has been answered. But it seems to me that you meant "nothing but condemnation-of-the-violence", in which case your request might not be answered, but it was an unreasonable one.
Recently I brought up Obama as an example of a very high-profile Blue Triber who was neither cheering nor minimizing the murder of Charlie Kirk ... but should I have been criticizing him instead? He was quick to point out that he thought some of Kirk's ideas were wrong, and to bring up left-wing victims too; he definitely failed the "nothing but condemnation-of-the-violence" standard despite passing "nothing-but-condemnation of the violence".
So, which standard are we looking for here? If "The point wasn't whether he was technically correct when he implied that all sides engage in political violence." then we have no choice but to criticize Obama too!
For that matter, could you clarify what standard Trump was failing with his slippery slope argument? The slope was indeed slippery, including with regards to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in particular. The only "league" in those statements is the class of people whose statues were in jeopardy, and it turned out that he was correct that they were all in that same class. I mostly like your reasoning better, personally! The idea that the Founding Fathers should have been in a league of their own beyond anachronistic condemnation was defensible, until we discovered it was wrong. It's only the part where you get upset at him for being right in foresight where you were wrong despite hindsight that you went off the rails.
Some of these may be "stopped clock is correct twice a day" situations for Trump, but then just stick with the incorrect things to criticize instead! The trick to criticizing people for merely being "technically correct" is that you have to remember that our goal is to be morally correct in addition to being technically correct; you can't be morally correct instead. I get that it's infuriating to have to hold yourself to a higher standard than the President of the United States, but in a virtue and deontological sense that's the right thing to do for its own sake; and in a consequentialist sense, the worse the target of your argument is, the more important it is to not just throw mud at the wall to see what sticks.
07mk
25m ago
I'm reminded of a joke from 30 Rock like 15 years ago - so at the beginning of the recent "awokening," or possibly before it - where one of the writers is forced to go to sensitivity training. The instructor asks about offensive terms you can use to call minorities, and he responds by saying, "PERSON of COLOR," putting emphasis on the all-capped words, and the instructor says, "Well, if you say it like that, sure," or something like that. This was around the time when "POC" was becoming more and more mainstream as a generic term to refer to "people of races we've deemed as oppressed," and one could probably describe the way he said it as "Saying 'person of color' with a Hard R."
07mk
35m ago
I'm yet another commenter who remembers the 107 days very differently wrt to the enthusiasm around Harris by many Dem-leaning posters on this forum. I distinctly remember multiple regular such commenters explicitly talking positively about how different and positive this "vibe shift" was on the ground towards Harris, especially about the "weird" attack that Walz & she were pushing heavily about JD Vance (and conservatives in general).
Of course, this was mocked just as heavily here and in other places. One rather common response I recall was a meme format on /r/stupidpol (subreddit focused on Marxism/socialism/leftism with an explicit disdain and rejection of identity politics) where people would make up fake anecdotes about going to the local "McSchlucks" to hang out with "the boys" where tough blue collar workers were all gushing over how they were a little skeptical about this fancy-schmancy lawyer Harris lady, but after looking a bit deep into her policies and considering the kinds of things Trump has done, they feel like she's really the one that speaks to them, their values, for what's good for their daughters and wives and sisters, etc. Basically the "Man Enough for Harris" advertisement in text form, as parody, before the ad was ever created.
Now, I did fully expect most mainstream Subreddits and news outlets to buy in hook-line-sinker to Harris's message and to push it as pure true believers, and that was indeed what happened, but I admit to being surprised by seeing the sheer volume of that here at the Motte. I consider The Motte good not only for providing a space for people with non-mainstream opinions to present, argue, and discuss their cases, but also for being a space where people with mainstream opinions tend to hold themselves up to higher standards, and seeing this was a disappointment to me that challenged this belief.
birb_cromble
37m ago
How does that work in situations where you believe the road would be empty, but a broken down car is right around the corner? Is there a test of reasonableness there, or is it a situation where the default assumption for a driver is that a broken down car is around every blind turn?
DiscourseMagnus
47m ago
I think you're blundering straight into the greatest problem with anti-porn sentiment (though this is probably more of a problem with anti-porn sentiment from the left than anti-porn sentiment from the right): its bleedover into censorship of non-porn. Non-porn has a much harder time adapting to the conditions of porn censorship than porn does.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
52m ago
I genuinely wonder if that’s more common on modern social media. A lot of the userbase is too young to ascribe special significance to 9/11?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
52m ago
It's less that I think "White Dudes" or variations there-of are in any way equivalent to dropping a hard-R gamer word. It's more, I sometimes can't believe the amount of hate and vitriol leftist are able to pour into their enunciation of that word. On paper you'd never imagine it's possible.
Normally, recklessness involves danger to other people, not just to oneself. Quote from a court opinion that I posted recently:
Recklessness is distinguishable from negligence on the basis that recklessness requires conscious action or inaction which creates a substantial risk of harm to others, whereas negligence suggest unconscious inadvertence.
If nobody else was on the road at that time (on an Interstate highway, unlikely but not impossible), driving at extremely high speeds would be negligent but not reckless (under normal laws, not under this particular unusual law).
To Revive Sex, Ban Porn (paywalled, but it's very short, and I'll quote the relevant bits):
To date, 21 US states have enacted legislation requiring pornography websites (websites with over one-third explicit content) to use stringent age verification systems. Yet minors can easily find their way around such age-walls with the use of a virtual private network (VPN), as well as by searching around the seedier corners of the internet. But a new bill introduced to Michigan’s senate by Rep. Josh Schriver on September 11 far surpasses any previous porn bans.
House Bill 4938 would ban access to any “depiction, description, or simulation” of sexual acts, and to punish the distribution of any such content as a felony, punishable up to 20 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. This far-reaching ban includes content designed “to sexually arouse or gratify” (including erotic writing, AI, ASMR, and manga), transgender content, as well as the creation of VPNs.
It goes without saying that this bill, and any equivalent legislation, will not pass, even at the state level (at least not without some more shifting of the Overton window). But given the coordinated attack that is currently being launched on pornography (via payment processors and age verification laws) throughout the Western world, there are clearly a number of individuals who wish they could simply ban porn entirely.
Though the bill is unlikely to be passed, the responses to it have proved revealing. In the eyes of critics, it represents a revival of Victorian-era puritanism. But the idea that these bans will suppress eros is misplaced, because pornography consumption leads not to oversexualization but to de-sexualization. Porn bans are therefore more likely to revive eros than to suppress it.
Revive what, exactly? And suppress what?
To take one of the most basic consequences of a blanket ban on all content designed "to sexually arouse or gratify": pornographic art depicts a number of scenarios and ideas which are impossible to physically realize. These include but are not limited to: mind control, body swapping, magical gender transformations, transformation into animals, transformation into inanimate objects, inflation and shrinking, petrification, nullification (of the entire excretory and digestive system), exotic anatomy (authentic male pregnancy and birth, people with far more limbs than would ever be practical, etc), aliens, angels and demons, and undoubtedly many more that I'm forgetting.
Plainly, all of these concepts (insofar as they are presented in such a way that their sexual dimension is made manifest) would be straightforwardly suppressed by any blanket ban on pornography. We would end up with the curious consequence that they could find no expression in material reality whatsoever: neither through the act itself, nor through fiction. Which raises the obvious question as to why people would be so afraid of something that's impossible to begin with.
Pornography kills the subtlety needed to maintain erotic tension. “A lot of people are now learning about sex from porn,” Anne says. When they enter into a sexual encounter, “they already have a set of ideas and moves that are ‘hot,’ and are what they think they want in bed.” Porn teaches people to follow a predetermined script rather than to read the cues of their partner.
Man.
I gotta teach these kids about subtlety. They know nothing.
"Subtlety" is when you're sitting in front of the fireplace with your girl on a brisk Autumn afternoon, her head resting gently on your shoulder, everything going perfectly right with the world, the demonic forces that are constantly threatening to tear you apart have finally abated for once. But you realize -- and "realize" isn't even the right word for it honestly, because "realize" implies a definite instant where something leaps forward into consciousness and makes itself manifest for the first time, whereas the phenomenon we're dealing with here is a lot more indeterminate, it's something that's "always-already" (I hate that word but it is useful sometimes) hovering on the border between consciousness and unconsciousness, caught between two modalities, but we'll still use "realize" because it's the best word we've got -- you realize that as much as you love this girl, she will never be a 100 ft tall dragon who will take you into her dragon womb, connect an umbilical cord to you, and genetically rewrite your body so that you too become a dragon. And you have to live with that. It's something that you'll just have to deal with going forward. One day at a time. This is, we can hypothesize, if not a "subtle" feeling itself, then at least something that could aspire to be a gateway to subtle feelings.
It’s worse for porn actors, a class that is expanding as more people create pornographic content. Erica, a former porn actress, told me that the process of filming porn is “mechanical and exhausting”—and hard to forget. Even after she gave up acting in porn films, the memory of recording porn became “a barrier to being present” while having sex with her partner. She ended up having to force herself “to conjure up sexual images in her head” because she was unable to respond to the sexual stimuli presented by her partner.
If someone is experiencing physical sexual dysfunction, then they should of course address that.
But if you're feeling moral guilt over not being fully present, then my good ol' fashioned practical advice would be: stop. I give you permission to stop beating yourself up over it. "Full presence" is a mythological construct, a yearning for an unmediated pre-linguistic experience that can never be realized. So just don't worry about it anymore. (Perhaps dissolving some of these worries will dissolve some of the animus against pornography as well.)
Mystery has been further steamrolled by the imperative to select from a pre-packaged array of sexual identity labels on offer today. Their increasingly mimetic, cookie-cutter-like quality spares one the drama of having to wrestle with the complexity of sexual desire.
Sure. But that's wokeism's fault, not the fault of pornography as such.
We might go so far as to suggest that the complexity of desire as such is best brought to the foreground in art, and not in "reality".
There lies the paradox of our society, which celebrates porn while being anxious to prove we are on the right side of history. We are averse to confronting the gray areas of human nature, which are precisely what make life fascinating. The chances are slim that House Bill 4938, even in the unlikely event it is signed into law, will stop Michiganders from consuming porn. But if there is any hope for making America sexy—and a little less boring and predictable—again, we need the imposition of restraints that force us to revive our collective imagination.
Yes, the gray areas of human nature, like bizarre and objectionable pornographic content, so why are you trying to ban it?
Tiber727
59m ago
I didn't want to chime in originally because I didn't know what comments you were seeing. From my end I generally thought the sentiment was, "Kamala is not a great candidate but Biden is clearly done for so maybe we have a chance. Trump is pretty widely disliked after all." The excitement was more from Biden dropping out than enthusiasm for Harris.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1hr ago
No, Hestia does not have to be a generic big titty asian girl.
Agreed. Small tits are underrated!
Thoroughlygruntled
1hr ago
I think this is key. As a young libertarian raised on punk rock and anti-Iraq-War memes, I could have gone either way upon entering adulthood. The conservatives accepted me, and despite my godless libertinism, never once made me feel judged. Meanwhile the progressives expressed casual contempt of me at every opportunity. The people absolutely convinced I am condemned to eternal damnation were happy to welcome me and look for common ground, while the ones who prided themselves on tolerance and empathy openly fantasized about my death because of my opinion on Obamacare.
The Republicans really are terrible in a lot of ways. Trump is legit a narcissistic charlatan manifestly unfit for high office. But his party doesn't hate me. They don't attempt to shame or silence me when I disagree with them. Policy is almost irrelevant to my political leanings at this point. I'm just sick of people I thought were my friends calling me a fascist pig.
Pigeon
coo coo
1hr ago
I don't see it as directly insulting as the hard R so much as...patronizing? Juvenile?
It's just a weird way for supposedly adult political consultants to talk consistently about a group they need to pander to. Trying to think of a parallel and blanking.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I dunno, yeah I saw people calling the election the moment it happened, but it sure didn't feel so certain to me.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
It's 'bellwether' and has nothing to do with the way the wind is blowing. The bellwether is the lead sheep of a flock ("wether" being the ovine equivalent of "steer"), so named because the shepherd attaches a bell to him.
birb_cromble
1hr ago
He was cited for driving at that speed on Interstate 64 in New Kent County. From my travels there, I don't think that anyone could safely drive that stretch of road at that speed, regardless of their skill level. There are a lot of questionable sightlines.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
One of the posters here (I think his name is Anti Populist now) posted the Seltzer poll. I, among others, pointed out how absurd the cross sectionals were and how inconsistent it was with prior polls. He kept on ignoring it predicting a Harris victory right up until she lost.
I rubbed his nose in it because when people make predictions on vibes while ignoring the obvious holes they should be reminded to improve their thought processes going forward. He then blocked me. So yeah, people here were gung ho on harris until she lost.
aqouta
1hr ago
I do think he's definitely a bell weather more than anything but a bell weather does show you which way the wind is blowing.
07mk
1hr ago
The backlash being faced by Klien, Derek, Yglesias and Buttigieg is baffling. Everything they've said has been polite, non-accusatory and measured. Yet, they're being treated like Nazis by left social-media.
I'm not sure how this is baffling given the behavior of the "progressive left" over the past 15 years. Responding polite, non-accusatory, and measured constructive criticism for the purpose of self-improvement from their less extreme allies as if they were Nazis has been standard operating procedure for about that long.
The surprising thing to me now is that Klein actually decided to meaningfully criticize them, given how hard he was supporting them until very recently, even while some of his peers like Yglesias had already started doing so years ago. The stuff around Klein and Weiss recently are the only signals I've seen that indicates that the failures of the progressive left to actually support progress is actually facing meaningful backlash.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
I think the turning point for conservatives was actually the first assassination attempt, not the election itself.
I think the phrase he was looking for was "wether vein", the metaphor about how you can tell a sheep is getting ready to follow the flock when its heart starts pumping harder.
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