domain:cafeamericainmag.com
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
52m ago
Like church, most people don't attend regularly. They just go to the holiday services (pride).
But as with certain varieties of Buddhism, most people will spend a period in a monastery (university) where they will engage in serious study and pious indoctrination.
Totalitarianit
56m ago
I see. I'm not talking about "TV clips" as just being ICE raids. I'm talking about "TV clips" as being part the optics, or even the "aesthetic" (like the other commenter mentioned) that goes into what I believe to be an effective anti-illegal immigration strategy.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
58m ago
Well, sure, you can tell me that my right-wing position is wrong by picking contradictory arguments that I haven't made, and then generalize from that to right-wingers in general. You can posit that immigration cannot possibly be bad because of logical reasons and that even right-wingers know this, as made evident through their revealed preferences. You can even argue that the left in general is soundly grounded in reality. Then we need to conclude that right-wingers are illogical and wrong and shouldn't be believed.
And then I'm left with either of the following scenarios:
- The epistemic gulf between us is so vast we can't even communicate our axioms by messenger pigeon.
- I'm an abject idiot and not worth talking to, why haven't you blocked me yet?
- You fail the ideological turing test very hard.
But seriously now. Some points to argue about:
- The post you replied to described behaviors that I absolutely have seen from the left and the right, from numerous people, IRL as well as online. Leftists and rightists do in fact both do this. This is orthogonal to whether you believe that either side has the better arguments.
- Anti-immigration arguments do not hinge exclusively on "muh jobs" and Trump is not the avatar of all right-wing thought. And even if that were the case - there are more than enough similarly bad and contradictory arguments made on the left. There has been more than enough spotlight on those on The Motte.
- The portion of what you call "extreme bubbles" on the left isn't just very large but also disproportionately influential, and was able to shape public discourse with very little resistance in many spaces, including American academia and Europe in general until very recently (assuming "peak woke" has been passed). This is obviously hard to measure and easy to dispute, so deny it if you will, but with how far left the Overton Window has been in the past ten or so years I find it very obvious that the leftist fringe has been relatively close to the mainstream, and was able to exert far greater influence, compared to its right-wing equivalents.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
The problem with protecting the potential of personhood is that it starts even before conception.
If two people (of suitable fertility and biological sexes) have PIV sex, then in the ancestral environment, this has some probability of setting a chain in motion which will result in the creation of a person -- a being with the cognitive capabilities typical of a human. If instead they use some form of birth control, this will drastically lower that probability, so from the point of preventing a person to come into existence, it will be fractionally as bad as abortion or infanticide. (Being anti-birth control is still a position some people hold, but it is mostly more about being anti-sex.)
But we do not even have to stop there, because people having PIV sex does not just happen randomly. If birth control is bad because it prevents the creation of persons, then so is not asking out people on a date. (This is now very contrary to the RCC, which views abstinence as praiseworthy.)
The person too busy with Warhammer to date, the person who uses birth control, the person having abortions whenever she gets pregnant and the person who just murders her babies are all preventing new persons from coming into existence despite there being a potential if they made different choices.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
I don't think we really have two different approaches. Your snatch goal is your goal, and you have to work through or around injuries to get to that. Right now, fitness wise, BJJ is my goal; everything else is an assistance exercise. I gut through soreness/injury for BJJ, but not for everything else where it might impact rolling every day I can.
The accountability mechanism right now for BJJ is very effective, I have several close friends who are about as good as I am at my gym and I can't let them get better than me and leave me behind, because right now our technique progress is huge month to month. Compared to that everything else is less important.
But at the same time, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm six or seven months into jiu jitsu as my main focus now, and it's important to keep up lifting and cardio, if only to avoid getting weaker. So I'm trying to figure it out.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
'Right now, Metro Homicide is targeting a certain type of "undesirable", namely, alleged murderers, and appears to have carte blanche to apprehend anyone who disrupts that process.'
Before you invoke "just following orders", you need to establish that some atrocity was actually being committed. If your objection is that immigration agents are targeting alleged illegal immigrants for apprehension and that they arrest people who interfere with that, you haven't.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
Jon Stewart/John Oliver/the other guy with glasses/the View/&etc.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Been a while since I've dealt with an LDR, but some simple mechanical advice:
As a man, you probably only contact people when you have something to say to them, and typically only when you need something from them. You aren't contacting her just to chat and show general affection, you're contacting her to solve a problem (often one that rhymes with "she wants me to call her") or when you're horny or to organize something.
Your goal in an LDR is to tie her into your life, show her you are thinking about her, so that she doesn't feel so far away.
Send her pics of your day. Not necessarily selfies of you, but just of funny advertisements, pretty wildflowers, or traffic jams, or your workout equipment, or the sky, or a screenshot of your phone when a song is playing that "reminds you of her." She's the person you want to share these things with, and when you see them she's the person you think of, and you wish she was there.
Send her articles you read that you think she might be interested in, then discuss them. Ideally, she's interested in the same articles you would be reading anyway, but we can't all be so lucky, so be prepared to invest a little time finding articles she will like. "Hey, I saw this, what's your take?" Then throw in some lovey dovey before/after along the lines of "I'm so happy I have you, there's no one else I trust/believe/is smart enough/gets it/shares my values who I can talk about this with." Makes her feel valued, and brings you closer.
Utilize the work of others. You have trouble doing expressions of affection, but luckily there's a huge industrial complex online of people producing sappy content. There's an effectively infinite quantity of content on twitter (and probably other places) that's a picture of two cute animals, or an historical painting, or hell of two literal spoons, with the caption "us if we were..." She will like that.
Good luck my friend.
faceh
1hr ago
Now I am wondering what the equivalent to the church service is for these folks.
Protest marches, for one, but surely they don't have weekly sermons in the equivalent of a chapel.
rae
1hr ago
If society isn't offering any net benefits in exchange for the money paid into it, then it is quite morally defensible to stop paying in.
You’re American I believe, so fair enough your social services are inefficient and terrible (although you pay less taxes and earn a lot more than us Europeans), but that’s completely unrelated to gender.
Why would any man want to continue to support a productive society that treats him like an expendable worker bee and doesn't even guarantee that he'll at least have the CHANCE to pass on his genes?
This is clearly a personal grievance. All I can say is, you’re sitting inside watching content designed to make you angry, with the goal of hooking you on a corporation’s algorithmic content feed and selling your attention to the highest bidder. It’s not real.
It’s absolutely true that being plugged into the globalised online rat race is hopeless and depressing, so switch it off. Focus on your local community, your niche interests, and you’ll find people that value you for who you are. Join a commune or go pick fruits if you have to.
The Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment appeared to exist.
Federal Circuit Courts informed them that they were mistaken, and that the Second Amendment very definately did not exist.
The Supreme Court accepted this correction, and allowed the Circuit Court decisions to stand rather than vindicate the Consitutional Rights of United States Citizens as required by its own prior decisions.
People like me abandoned all hope in the Supreme Court as a viable institution, removing the Jury Box from the "four boxes" model of liberty, and precommitted to discount all future adversarial arguments made on the basis of Constitutional Rights.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
This is my main complaint about libertarians generally. They don’t understand the nature of power, and they don’t understand the connection between money and power. Once a corporation gets big enough it is going to start exercising power by whatever means available to it, including access to state power. If it gets really big it’s going to start trying to exercise state power of its own, with all the restrictions on other people’s liberty that that implies.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
There are non-angry female politicians in the US- they’re just republicans.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
The Second Amendment is no longer of interest to the Supreme Court and blue states are free to ban the most popular rifle in the nation without Court interference.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
1hr ago
More to the point, there really, legitimately are lots of people who, when it comes to abortion specifically, do not think there’s a possible case of abortion that is morally wrong. Relatively recently, in Louisiana, there was a case of a young woman who wanted to keep her pregnancy and was deceived by her mother into taking an abortion pill ordered from out of state. The pro-choice crowd did not seem to respect this young lady’s choice to keep her baby- including the governor of New York, from which this abortion pill came.
This is like trying to hold a gun store owner responsible when someone buys a gun and uses it to commit a crime. Everyone knows the real agenda here is that you don't want anyone getting abortion pills period.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Texas does not make rape exceptions. The standards for Texas abortion exceptions have been posted here before; no exceptions for rape, no exceptions for fetal non viability, maternal health exceptions are narrow and strictly defined.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Totalitarianit
1hr ago
The problem is, the clips on TV couldn't have started in December 2024
I'm with you on this part. Pushback in Congress started in January of 2024, but before that Ron DeSantis orchestrated the Martha's Vineyard publicity stunt all the way back in 2022. Outlets like CBS News were documenting record high daily crossings in May of 2023. After that, local reps and officials started making public demands for federal action shortly after. It was a gradual accumulation of outrage from the right and the undeniable reality of a border crisis that even left leaning outlets couldn't ignore.
nor could they have had much of an effect even in January 2025 on account of Trump being sworn in on the 17th of that month.
I'm not with you on this part, and I will indeed claim that it was in fact the threat of the Trump presidency that caused numbers to drop even faster. The Democrats trying to get the border bill through in 2024 affected groups from an optics standpoint. For the immigrants, it showed Democrats might do something about the border. For undecided moderates, it showed that Democrats were willing to come to the table about the border issue.
All of these things had an impact on illegal immigration from an optics or "TV clip" standpoint, but the most impactful were the "TV clips" showing that Donald Trump was elected president. As far as that not being the "claim I made" I might be misunderstanding what you're saying.
pigeonburger
1hr ago
It's just good PR. There's a lot of uninformed takes on AI out there. And there are some less uninformed takes that Big Tech would like to dispute. The Vatican has a large amount of influence on some people. Those people adopting the wrong opinions, from the perspective of Big Tech, could eventually trickle down into legislation, or at least into public attitudes. And as much as we would like to think PR should not be necessary, it's like lawyers; a world where it wasn't necessary to do PR would be sunshine and rainbows, but that's not the world we live in. If you don't do PR you're still going to be on the recieving of other people's PR (negative against you, or positive for them in cases where you are competing for scarce ressources like government investment or the public's discretionary spending).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Ironically men are attending church more than women now, the previous trend os just barely inverted.
Because they converted to another religion, which is conveniently not tracked by church attendance, as it's pretending to not be a religion.
ChickenOverlord
1hr ago
Ah, yes, the "unalienable rights." Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What "right" to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What "right" to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of "right"? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's right is "unalienable"? And is it "right"? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. The third "right"? - the "pursuit of happiness"? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can "pursue happiness" as long as my brain lives - but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.
- Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Women are more religious than men,
Ironically men are attending church more than women now, the previous trend is just barely inverted.
Which suggests women have indeed found a replacement outlet for their religious tendencies. Things are getting janky.
But yeah, to the extent women are saying this, its ultimately just a shit-test or its them asserting high standards so they can pretend they're more selective.
I think it goes way deeper than that. The concept of declaring war and making peace within European (and hence today, global) diplomatic systems goes back to Rome at least. The Romans had huge amounts of superstitions and traditions related to declaring war, and making peace. Numa Pompilius, who first held the title Pontifex Maximus which has gone in unbroken succession to our current Pope Leo, introduced the tradition of the Temple of Janus to the Roman populace in order to tame their warlike urges. The temple's gates were open in times of war, and closed in times of peace. The formal declaration of war and peace was a superstitious, religious matter for the Romans.
When we abandon that kind of simple logic, we chip away at an organized international legal system, and we wind up with a permanent murky state of conflict. If you never have declared war, you can never have peace.
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