domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
PokerPirate
2d ago
How embarrassing... this was intended as a reply to @WhiningCoil's post https://www.themotte.org/post/2277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/352249?context=8#context
I never understood how other people make this mistake, but now I realize it's due to a number of confusing interface features. (Or at least they are confusing to this Luddite...)
Mods/Zorba: Maybe the following interface changes could help:
- change the button text for posting a reply from "comment" to "reply"
- remove the ability to make top level posts when you are not "at the top level"; for example, in the link above there should only be the ability to reply since I am "zoomed into" a comment, and not the ability to make a top-level post, since no one should be doing that from the linked page.
I'm pretty sure I could submit a PR that makes these changes if you all are too busy, but I forget where the github repo is at.
SSCReader
2d ago
well, your arguments for such a claim seem mostly like motivated reasoning.
How so? I am in Academia. My motivated reasoning would be to make us more important not less no? I could very well be wrong to be clear! But it's a worldview I have put together over many years of trying to influence people, and to me it fits the observed evidence of my own eyes better than any other.
SSCReader
2d ago
Just look at the terminology. Cisheteronormativity. Anticarceralism. Cultural appropriation. Decolonisation. These are not words that Tumblr users, teens or their families create.
And notably those are not words the teen cohort coming into my classes use at all. Well maybe cultural appropriation but that is the most mainstream of those.
Remember just because academia creates a term for a thing it doesn't mean that's where it came from.
The algorithm, that vast engine of matrix multiplications and statistical correlations that often reproduces wisdom, did its work. It analyzed our features, our skin tones
Darn, would had been funny if ChatGPT did the common AI thing of darkening all your skin tones, or randomly rendering you or the children as more “diverse.”
I look at those images again. The boy, the girl. Entirely fantasized. Products of code, not biology. Yet, the thought persists: "I think they were gorgeous and I could have loved them." And that’s the cruelest trick of all. The AI didn't just show me faces; it showed me the capacity for love that still resides within me, directed towards phantoms. It made me mourn not just the children, but the version of myself that might have raised them, alongside a woman I no longer know.
Well, technology is a glittering lure. But there's the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.
My first job, I was in-house at a fur company, with this old pro copywriter. Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is "new". Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of... calamine lotion.
But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It's delicate... but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means, "the pain from an old wound". It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.
This device isn't a spaceship. It's a timeline traverser. It goes backwards, forwards, sideways, diagonally. It takes us to a place where we ache to have gone. It's not called the Wheel. It's called ChatGPT. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again... to a place where we know we could have been loved.
—Don Draper, probably
This girl I was seeing once suddenly went on a long monologue about how beautiful a daughter of ours would look, listing at length the physical traits our hypothetical daughter would have. I mostly just inwardly look_of_disapproval’d and made a mental note to be more diligent going forward in pulling out. Thot-daughter thought-experiments: the best base for strong pull-out game?
I don’t necessarily disagree with her; a daughter of ours would likely indeed be quite good-looking (or son, for that matter). Now I’m tempted to give GenAI a spin…
A strange situation has arisen over the last 15 years or so where mild sexual titillation became taboo while extreme hardcore porn became easily available. There was such a glaring contrast. Nerds were wrong to enjoy attractive female characters in their videogames, because misogyny, patriarchy, and oppression of women. But at the same time these nerds were two clicks away from the most graphic hardcore pornography that has ever existed. OnlyFans is tolerated if not celebrated while milder forms of sex appeal were being erased. It's almost like the hardcore porn was, ahem, sucking all the sex out of everything else, but there has definitely been a shift against internet porn now as people who grew up with it start to resent it. I wonder if that latent energy is now pushing mild sexual titillation back into the mainstream.
Of course, this taboo was mostly or entirely focused on the preferences of straight white men, so perhaps that alone better explains why it was tabooed.
aqouta
2d ago
It is really really important that you have no actual suggestion for a lasting peace. That's the entire problem and if you don't want to engage with it then I have no idea what would compel you to weigh into the discussion.
FtttG
2d ago
Séamus Finnegan. I recently heard someone arguing in earnest that his name is a "reverse spoonerism" for Sinn Féin (I'm sorry, what?), and the running gag in the first book/movie of him accidentally causing small explosions is meant to make the reader think of the IRA.
I'm an Irish man who grew up when the Harry Potter books were all the rage. My friends and family literally queued up to buy them on publication day and devoured them over the course of a weekend. I don't recall ever hearing an Irish person contemporaneously suggesting that Séamus was a negative stereotype.
Lizzardspawn
2d ago
"Zendaya has good genes."
She hasn't. There is a rigorous scientific test for a good genes in a woman - is she hotter than a young cashier from the same race. I am afraid Zendaya fails it. But the black UFC ring girls pass it. I think that I have noted here that the beautiful black women are just hidden in the media.
Throwaway05
2d ago
At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if the medical definition of 'sanity' even exists anymore,
Well keep in mind that various lesser versions of psychiatric illness (depression, anxiety, cluster-b coping mechanisms) are expected in the community and healthy as long as they are not excessive.
On top of that you have various cultural problems like the whole anxiety thing, The Last Psychiatrist's idea of generational narcissism and so on.
One of the big things that happens now is that certain mental illness adjacent or maladaptive problems are supported by society (like anxiety and cluster-b behavioral patterns). The underlying sanity is there but the maturation and cultural PUSH isn't.
In any case the old school psychotherapists thought fucking the girl would clear out the BPD if you stuck with it soooooooo.
Also keep in mind "neurosis" and how it has been evicted from the DSM but is still behaviorally present. That is 90% of "bitches be crazy" alone.
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
Everyone knows (I say jokingly) that it's actually that JK Rowling expressed a bit of subtlety and restraint by not outright referring to them as gnomes instead.
I have seen people claim it's because the illustrations (which she approved) look like stereotypes of anti-Jewish propaganda (due largely to the noses), but I haven't done the comparisons myself.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
- Football and other spectator sports
- Running/lifting/biking and other participatory sports
- Beer/whiskey/cigars
- Grilling/meats/cooking
- Travel
Perhaps I am simply a normie.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.
Hiberno-phobia? I can only remember one Irish character, and I don't remember them being portrayed particularly badly (apart from being bad at quidditch).
07mk
2d ago
Because we don't argue to change minds or win here we argue to understand. It's right there at the top of the page.
Understanding something that you didn't understand before means changing one's mind, though...
The rest of your comment is mostly just a just-so fictional narrative in hindsight you made up that appears to me as a rationalization for your committed belief. It's trivially easy to come up with any number of counterfactuals about how Blue Tribe's attitudes towards race would've developed with equal plausibility (and more generally, about how anything would've happened, with equal plausibility as what actually did happen), because of the nature of counterfactuals. E.g. one could respond to white guilt by just rejecting it as a concept and prioritizing individuality. Much of the Blue Tribe was on board with that in the 90s, of treating individuals as individuals who aren't tarnished with the guilt of their ancestors or people who happened to share their skin color in the case of recent immigrants. That this narrative being crushed in the Blue Tribe was destined is not proven or even supported by the fact that you can put together a narrative explaining the chain of logic.
In reality, what we do see is pretty well evidenced chain of causality of these ideas built and developed by academia spreading to society at large, often word-for-word, done with overt intent. Maybe the people intentionally doing this are mistaken. Almost certainly, they're mistaken about some of the impact they believe they have on society at large, like everyone. But to claim that they're completely mistaken and that they have zero influence in pulling Blue Tribe towards those ideas that were developed and crystalized in academia (largely based on feelings already within that Tribe), well, your arguments for such a claim seem mostly like motivated reasoning.
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
Noice.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
One of them is a sort of deontological one, under which to be a meritocrat is to hold that it is morally right that boons go to the most meritorious
This is interesting! I do think I disagree with the deontological case for boons going to the most "meritorious." It's usually sheer luck and good external factors (genetics, environment) that puts people on the top. It's not always the "most diligent" person who gets the best compensation. And if we did sort society based on something that is within people's control, (like "works hardest") instead of things outside people's control (like "is smartest") then it would overall be a worse society.
People didn't actually do anything worthy of merit to be the smartest, best looking, most talented, etc. At best they worked hard to improve on something that was already there, but that doesn't mean they worked harder than someone who is disabled and works twice as hard to do half as much.
But if you want to incentivize the best to do their best, you need to give them the best rewards. And it is one of the jobs of society to incentivize the best to do their best, partly because a rising tide lifts all boats. In this regard I follow the utilitarian model it seems.
5434a
2d ago
Just look at the terminology. Cisheteronormativity. Anticarceralism. Cultural appropriation. Decolonisation. These are not words that Tumblr users, teens or their families create. Teens create words like "yeet" and Tumblr creates words like "otherkin".
I don't think high school teachers were sitting kids down and giving them college level sociology lectures directly. I think outside of school hours terminally online grad students were flexing their wordcel power level on Tumblr among impressionable teen girls, from whom it spread via a few more steps to clickbait columnists and their incestuous codependence with pre-Elon Twitter.
By the time the teens who were on Tumblr got to college they were fully marinated in progressive sociology shibboleths, only without any of the independent thought and critical analysis that university is supposed to encourage.
Academia was always the source, kids were just an influential and early stage vector with low intellectual immunity, especially for the kind of memes that can impart righteous social power to teenage girls (although the claims to righteousness were largely a mask and a multiplier for the underlying social power, without which the memeset would have languished in the obscurity of academia and the post grad blogosphere).
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
I tip my Amish hat to you, but no, I am nowhere near as disciplined as you are.
ChickenOverlord
2d ago
This doesn't belong in the Culture War thread, at least not with a lot more added to an and some attempt to make it relevant to the culture war
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun".
My guess, for whatever it's worth, is that it's not just a pun. I don't think for a second that AE is trying to usher in a new age of white supremacy but I feel they were being deliberately provocative because they figured this blowing up would be good for them. They're probably right - I wouldn't be surprised if a fair few people who previously wouldn't have thought twice about the ad now decide to buy there just to annoy the scolds.
FtSoA
2d ago
Right off the bat, let's see if you can admit a clear factual error or two. I really should have done this before writing the rest, but ah well.
Do you acknowledge that Iran's ballistic missile production facilities and launchers are not all underground? This is a very easy one.
Do you acknowledge that the volume of Iran's launches against Israel dropped off considerably? Here's a clue: https://jinsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Iranian-Ballistic-Missile-Estimates-6-26-2025-6.pdf
Frankly it's remarkable to see someone try to flip the script on one of the most one-sided wars in history, but then I suppose the Egyptians tried to pretend they had won the Yom Kippur War.
Also, both Israeli casualty reports and Qassam combat footage overwhelmingly shows the use of indigenous IEDs and other weapons that could only be manufactured locally. It would be silly for a cell based organization like Hamas to depend on imports.
Never did I say the majority of their stock was Iranian. But Iran has been a major supporter for decades.
The IDF very clearly tried to take Al-Khiam for a photo-op at the former detention center and failed.
That's not particularly relevant in evaluating the overall status at the end of the conflict, where Israel overwhelmingly kicked Hezbollah in the nuts by killing its leader, a bunch of its personnel, maimed a shit ton more of them, and also significantly reduced their missile stockpile, all while taking relatively light casualties and rendering the missile threat mostly ineffective.
Tellingly, they didn't do much to help out their pals in Tehran. Weird way to behave if actually they weren't hurting so badly. Kinda defeats the point of having an alliance.
If Iran were legitimately totally defenseless then why would Israel care about what Trump thinks?
Why would Israel care about what it's single most important ally thinks about a conflict it has been assisting with? Seriously? The stuff in Syria is small potatoes.
On the flipside, they had drones that were shot down so it's just as easy to imagine that Netanyahu simply didn't bother taking the risk. In this case the burden of proof that Israel was dropping bombs in Iranian airspace is on you, since basically all of the identified strikes look like the result of air launched missiles, not bombs.
The most retarded bit of logic here is that if we, for the sake of argument, grant that you're correct about only IAF drones poking around Iranian airspace then, wow, the IAF is really capable of doing a lot of damage to buildings using air-launched missiles at scale. Also, hitting the Mashhad airport at 1400 miles strongly implies operating within Iranian airspace even with ALBMs.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/israels-air-superiority-lets-strike-191600442.html
So all those photos of IAF aircraft loaded with bombs were just for propaganda purposes? Why? Who are they trying to convince? The U.S. and Iranian militaries know the reality regardless.
There's no good reason to believe the IAF is lying here, but you need it to fit your highly evidence-challenged view that actually Iran was the one winning this conflict. The real irony here is that the Iranians don't contest that the IAF was operating in Iranian airspace, they just pretended to shoot an F-35 or two down. You're doing more work than even the Iranian propagandists!
On the flipside, they had drones that were shot down so it's just as easy to imagine that Netanyahu simply didn't bother taking the risk. In this case the burden of proof that Israel was dropping bombs in Iranian airspace is on you, since basically all of the identified strikes look like the result of air launched missiles, not bombs.
Why send drones on obvious suicide missions if air defenses are not suppressed much at all?
The IAF demolished large buildings and took out at least one command bunker, we know. Hard and expensive to do that with merely missiles.
How many missiles do ya reckon this took? Would the IAF really use its fancy LORAs on a TV broadcaster?
Elbit Systems' share price rose by 5.43% in New York on Friday, and is currently up 5.94% on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-us-weapons-prove-themselves-in-iran-strikes-1001512893
There's plenty of evidence Israel dropped bombs in Iran, just none you find compelling enough that you have to accept it. You resist the obvious because your narrative collapses if actually the IAF did have air dominance and you can pretend they were going to run out of ALBMs before Iran ran out of its ballistic missiles.
Every indication is that he had no problem with Israel one sidedly bombing Iran forever, it was only when Iran started landing counterpunches that he became interested in deescalation.
Trump's change in preference came right after the U.S. strikes on the nuclear facilities, obviously. The volume of Iranian missile strikes was going down and Israel was not taking meaningful damage relative to Iran.
On the first day Israel went for a decapitation strike followed by regime change
Israel did not expect to get regime change that easily. Come on now. As far as we know, the Supreme Leader was not targeted (whether by impossibility or choice I'm not sure).
they reorganized and proceeded to return fire in sufficient volume to break Israeli AD nearly every day. They hit strategic sites at will
No, they very much did not. All those missiles, so few strategic sites hit. Blowing up grandmas doesn't win wars, even when they were able to do that.
on day 12 they were reduced to hitting a giant clock in Tehran
This is backwards logic. The IAF could afford to start hitting secondary targets on day 12 because they had been so successful the previous 11 days. It's not like they suddenly couldn't hit Tehran, as you've pointed out.
Had the war continued it would have continued to get worse and worse for Israel. Fortunately Israel was able to leverage the threat of direct American offensive involvement beyond choreographed bombings that result in zero injuries, otherwise the Iranians would have had little reason to agree to a deal.
There was no "deal" here. It was just an unofficial ceasefire. If Iran was on the verge of really turning the tide against their main enemy who did a surprise attack and killed a bunch of its top leaders and destroyed a bunch of their military and nuclear sites, why would they have stopped instead of getting even? They knew the U.S. really did not want to get drawn in beyond the attack on the nuclear sites. Why would Iran let Israel get away with it?
PokerPirate
2d ago
Luddites unite! Anyone else here not own a cellphone?
I don't even own a dumb-phone. If someone wants to talk to me IRL, I insist there be no electrons involved. It goes without saying I'm not very popular :(
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
I'm old enough to remember the Brooke Shields campaign, but I don't actually remember it. I suspect most of the people reacting aren't old enough or didn't remember it either. This suggests that the idea for the current ad originated from some old Boomer (or maybe Xer) admen, rather than a change of heart in the current generation.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
It should be noted that the Dissident Right also identifies it as white supremacist, eugenicist, and as a fascist advertisement.
The DR is always looking to conscript allies. It rarely works.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
People claim that goblins in Harry Potter are an anti-Semitic caricature. Personally, I believe that if one looks at a fantasy race of bankers and their first thought is "they're Jews", that says more about them than it does about the author.
If I wish for any supper power, being able to make the nightmares of too wind up people true is up there in the list with immortality
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