domain:moultano.wordpress.com
Corvos
1m ago
All these quotes seem unequivocably fair and true to me.
His Tuesday remarks made it sound like the white supremacists and neo-Nazis were a small minority of people who just happened to be at the protest and not the organizing force behind it.
I think probably true, yes.
He says the left is just as bad, if not worse.
I think definitely true. Antifa is both far more organised and unbelievably violent. They are also much more expert in turning powder-keg protests into violent riots.
And then he goes on to put Confederate generals in the same league as the founding fathers, just so you know whose side he's really on.
Almost certainly the side of people worried about the Left's eagerness to knock down statues of everyone who doesn't meet their approval, including those of the Founding Fathers who were slave owners. Certainly Churchill in the UK was not spared.
As far as I'm concerned Trump clearly condemned the actual bad guys and then commented about the broader situation in terms that were far more balanced than the rabid press. He never said that the man who was killed deserved to die, he never said that 'being a neo-Nazi is good, actually'. In contrast, the left never says, 'fine people on both sides', they say, 'okay, some of our people are violent rioters but most of them are peaceful protesters, and by the way anyone who gets in the way is a bigot who deserves what they get'.
If the left could reliably meet this bar I would be much more satisfied.
ThenElection
3m ago
Democrats are getting it wrong, mostly. It's not about policy or marketing (though the idea that they just need to hire more pro-Democratic TikTok influencers to shill for them reveals a deep and amusing disconnect). It's about the casual contempt they show for men.
For instance, AOC today, saying Miller is a short troll:
[while knitting a shirt] Stephen Miller is a clown! I’ve never seen that guy in real life, but he looks like he’s, like, 4′ 10″... Like, laugh at them! Laugh at them... insecure masculinity. This is what this is about... One of the best way to dismantle a movement of insecure men is by making fun of them... I'm not here to make fun of anyone's anything, but the way people overcompensate...
So, it's not quite that she's insulting him, which is fine. Trump does similar stuff all the time, although in a funnier way. The difference is the double standard. Say what you will about him, but Trump is equal opportunity: he'll nastily insult anyone he doesn't like. There are no sacred cows. But you will never see AOC calling a woman an obese smelly pig, or implying that a female opponent holds her positions because she needs a good dicking down. And, even if she did, Democratic and liberal antibodies would attack her in retaliation: awhile back when one Democrat called MTG a butch lesbian, there was a lot of pushback for transphobia.
It's not any one individual event, but a pervasive attitude that men and masculinity are worthy of contempt, while everyone else needs to be protected from being triggered. If you're trying to appeal to men, probably encouraging a norm of a free-for-all is better than an HR lady who polices everyone, but the worst of all places to be--and this is where Democrats find themselves--is saying that every identity needs to be protected, except for men, who are always fair game to identity-based attacks.
Lizzardspawn
4m ago
but online media has no proven way of effectively showing the OTHERS whom they have compassion for.
The social media is very effective in showing the others they have compassion for, which is why people are drifting away from them - the tent cities and open drug markets, the all male boats docking at the shores of Europe, the torrent of people through the border, the sheer foreignness of London, the pride parades, the MtF trans that look creepy at best, the scars from top surgery, the women that brag about having an abortion, the cohort of trans children in Hollywood.
The same way Syrskyi is the best performing general in the war on the Russians' side, the suicidal empathy of the left is the best ad for repubicans. At least our crazies are crazy in mostly comprehensible way (except abortion)
quiet_NaN
6m ago
I was making an analogy to the online left celebrating Kirk's murder (which was not committed by someone I would call a Democratic politician), not Jones statements about shooting some speaker.
roystgnr
6m ago
Those are pretty good. Really good for being off the top of your head. I could argue about the other two, but Medicare For All at least would be a perfect fit for that sense of self-righteousness in a grand cause thwarted by betrayal. It distills left-pleasing anti-capitalism down to its most popular core in the same way anti-illegal-immigration does for right-pleasing anti-immigration. It might have even worked well a decade ago, and it'd be hard to mount any principled opposition to it today. Trump has really undermined the free marketeer wing of the Republicans, and I don't think I've heard from the fiscal-prudence wing of either party since the Great Recession.
quiet_NaN
8m ago
For what it is worth, I can not recall any prominent Democrat calling for Trump to be executed for his role in J6.
Were the sentences for the J6 crowd harsh, especially compared to the sentences for the BLM riots? Sure, they totally threw the book at them for clear political reasons.
But unlike a Biden treason trial ending in a death verdict which Kirk was fantasizing about, they were still recognizable as a legal system working, somehow. Not well (the US legal system generally does not work well), and not as impartial as one might hope, perhaps, but not a kangaroo court.
FlailingAce
10m ago
Oh, so it's only 2-16% of half the country? So, like, 6-52 million people? Yeah that's no biggie.
Of course it's not all about the numbers. It's also about seeing people you personally know posting that they would want you dead if they knew how you voted. I don't think people in blue bubbles realize that there is no coming back from this.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11m ago
No, we cannot officially throw out the principle of charity.
anti_dan
12m ago
Somehow this post feels nearly maximally uncharitable to both parties and young men. Have Democrats become too conformist to be cool? I suppose. Are Republicans a party with an excess of unconstrained young male energy? I suppose. Do young men need an outlet for their energy? Yes.
But its not like the Democrats stumbled into being "lame" (your word). It was part of a calculated electoral strategy that prioritized other things, and necessarily excluded male interests, particularly those of noncriminal working males. That left the GOP with an opening that they seized on and since libertarianism has always been unpopular with voters since the franchise was expanded beyond a few landowning men in New England, discarding that in favor of a little paternalism that sounds more masculine was a winning message.
Rov_Scam
17m ago
Alright, which specific people would you arrest. I'm serious. The crucial mistake of the J6 protestors is that they were all incredibly stupid. The BLM rioters at least had the sense to operate primarily at night, conceal their identities, and choose locations that weren't guaranteed to be under God-level surveillance. Not that it mattered since they took videos of themselves and posted them to social media. The reason there weren't as many arrests during 2020 as you think there should have been is because Priority #1 is ending the riot, not investigating and making arrests for individual crimes. The same priorities prevailed on January 6, with very few people being arrested at the scene and the vast majority being identified and arrested later. Unless the evidence exists that allows you to identify criminals, you can't arrest them. You act as though there are tens of thousands of people out there who the police know committed crimes but who aren't being arrested for political reasons.
I will grant that a lot of people who were arrested for more minor crimes like failure to disperse had the charges dropped without incident. However, you have to consider the context of what was going on in 2020: The courts were operating under severe restrictions due to COVID. The normal criminal dockets were backed up; it wasn't feasible to prosecute hundreds of people on charges that would result in small fines when they were already having trouble moving felonies through. But the people who caused damage and were caught generally were prosecuted.
TwiceHuman
18m ago
I don't think anyone would do more for a stranger than a close friend. But these people might have beliefs like "I generally don't like humans, animals are much better" or "If only we could all become cyborgs so that we could get rid of our human imperfections" or "Humans are a plague on the planet, I'm ashamed for being human myself".
Thoughts like this correlate with the dislike of nationalism, because of the belief that egoism is bad at any scale (speaking positively about the self, or ones own group is perceived as being immoral because it implies that other groups are inferior). These people also feel inferior, which is why they feel great pity for other groups that they perceive as inferior. These people want an ideal world, and think that if we aren't living in one, it must be because somebody is mean (and not because life is hard), so another trait in leftism is naivety (the exact same kind which is found in communism!).
Of course, prioritizing friends over non-friends is the same sort of bias as nationalism, and even considering leftism superior to right-wing beliefs is not different from thinking that one culture or race is superior to another. Leftists always speak about how bad white people are, even white leftists, but somehow they feel superior for noticing that they're not superior. This feels similar to when people compete in who can be the most humble, and other virtue signaling. It feels illogical, but that's likely because the goal isn't logic consistency, but things like:
1: Calming ones conscience. 2: Feeling good about oneself. 3: Defending against criticism from other people. 4: It allows for people of mediocre and uneventful lives to feel like they're fighting for something important.
Leftism can also be compared to some aspects of Christianity, especially the strongly feminine parts. Even more interestingly, the subversion of Christianity can be compared with the subversive nature of leftism, as described by Yuri Bezmenov.
DiscourseMagnus
18m ago
Isn't the reporting that he said it in a phone call, and not by text?
KMC
25m ago
I'll grant you that. The vulgarity and norm breaking were appealing not in themselves but because they were demonstrations of commitment. Commitment to what? Well, something I'm interested in, let's leave it at that.
I like my politicians to bite bullets. It's the only way to actually demonstrate conviction.
KMC
27m ago
The commentators are the result of consuming the kinds of content that the admins and moderators allow.
DiscourseMagnus
29m ago
It was that unequivocally condemning a white supremacist who committed murder should be the easiest thing a president does.
I mean, I'm not a Charlottesville expert, but isn't this a completely fabricated narrative that the courts made stick to signal that they hate white supremacists? My recollection is that the fatality there was only slightly less justifiable than the incident with Rittenhouse; a bunch of counterprotesters surrounded a white supremacist's car and threatened him to signal the strength of their political convictions, and eventually he panicked, tried to drive away, and struck and killed one of them. This seems less like a case of going out to murder one's political opponents and more like a demonstration of why blocking cars is not a nonviolent form of protest.
Rov_Scam
31m ago
How much research did you do? On Saturday he makes his famous "many sides" comment. On Monday he releases the prepared statement you linked to. On Tuesday he doubles down on what he said Saturday:
What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?
You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists; the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
You also had some very fine people on both sides
Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. This week, it is Robert E. Lee. And I notice that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you have to ask yourself, where does it stop?
As @Rosencrantz2 points out, you can cherry pick a few sentences out of each incident to make it sound like he's offering nothing but condemnation, but I specifically said that he can't help using these events as opportunities to dunk on his opponents. His Tuesday remarks made it sound like the white supremacists and neo-Nazis were a small minority of people who just happened to be at the protest and not the organizing force behind it. He says the left is just as bad, if not worse. And then he goes on to put Confederate generals in the same league as the founding fathers, just so you know whose side he's really on.
MathWizard
Good things are good
34m ago
I generally share your assessment, though I don't think I hated its flaws quite as much as you and stuck it out slightly longer, getting halfway through Act 2 before dropping it.
The permanent gear does get a tiny bit more creative in Act 2 with occasionally having an affix, or having a different boost (a belt that increases the duration of your status effects instead of boosting your max damage), so there are tradeoffs. But with no storage for it you kind of have to commit to a build long-term since swapping can only be done when you find a new piece, which is stupid and makes the game more repetitive (which it already was). They should have stuck to the main skill tree for straight stat upgrades and used the Relics as gear.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
38m ago
My apologies, I was going to make a joke about confusing it with Penn State but they have a 50%+ admit rate so nowhere near the same league. An easy enough mistake to make. The names of US universities are very weird and eclectic and hard to remember, you can replace UPenn with Rice and the point would still stand.
The worst offender for an American university name has to be Colgate, to me Colgate is what I brush my teeth with...
Totalitarianit
38m ago
Yes, of course. Condemnation in the "strongest possible terms" is no match for the "nothing but" barrier. I'm finding no evidence, video or otherwise, of Trump performing seppuku either. I stand corrected.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
42m ago
If somebody doesn't like your party or its platform, then the problem can't be that your platform is lacking - it can only be that the person is unaware of how fantastic your platform really is.
Or, alternately, that the person is an evil Fascist bigot who hates all good things because they're so evil and hateful.
Exactly.
I am not virulently against the norm of shooting people and incarcerations in a situation like the Jan 6 riot. I am against what I perceive to be a massive double standard. For many on the left it’s super clear that Kyle Rittenhouse is a mass murderer, that all these police shootings are racist, and that it’s lives over property. But shooting Ashli Babbitt crawling through a window is a good shoot.
Norms need to be consistent, or they aren’t norms: Ashli Babbitt saw the left violently rioting, looting, committing arson, and occupying government buildings for months without getting shot. If we’re gonna play the game this way, fine, as long as everyone knows the rule: it’s legitimate to shoot you - even if you’re protesting - when you start breaking stuff that’s not yours or try to go places you’re not supposed to go. If you think Kyle Rittenhouse should have been convicted I don't care about your J6 opinion.
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