domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
HereAndGone
6hr ago
I imagine it was "the bad guy didn't think he was a bad guy, he introduced the Nazi ideology to help this planet's culture unify and it was then taken over and brought to an extreme by power-grabbing native politicians" so that of course makes it Evil and it should be censored. Because trying to say that anything at all about Nazism was even slightly good (e.g. using what Hitler did to unify post-First World War Germany to try and unify a culture falling apart) means that you are saying "all Nazism is good" and we know that is not true.
I honestly don't know what the hell has been going on with education since I was scratching cuneiform on clay tablets back in my time at school. Just recently I saw someone on Tumblr showing why censorship of old books is wrong by saying she never even knew Long John Silver had a black wife until she grew up and read an old, uncensored version of "Treasure Island" (and even then in the comments people were going on about "but it is Racism to use the term 'negress' so censorship is good!").
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
6hr ago
Apart from the taking high road and just reading and doing carpentry or something instead)
Bingo. Reading, working out, listening to music, doing hobbies, socializing with friends, etc. I haven't seriously watched anything since Twin Peaks: The Return.
HereAndGone
6hr ago
That is the point I guess, all these kids not even born forty years ago imagine they've invented Liberal Media Talking-Points on TV shows for the first time 😁
Look. The rate of adoptees who go on to ruin their parents' lives and their own is high. It's much higher than polite society acknowledges, or many prospective adopters realize. Granted. But it's nowhere near 100%. For a considerable number of children, it's exactly the life-improving, beneficial change that adopters want to give, and it works out good-to-great. Many more sit in the middle, with adoption neither a massive mistake, nor a miraculous cure-all - those kids might never make anything much of themselves, but at least they got a happier childhood in the bargain, and the parents have nothing to regret even if they might, perhaps, have hoped for grander outcomes.
So yeah, the firefighter analogy still seems apt to me. If there's someone stuck on the top floor of a burning building, and I decide to go in there - I know there's a good chance, a really good chance, that we'll both die today and I'll have thrown my own life away "for nothing". But I'm going in anyway, because I also know there's a solid chance I'll save their life. Ideally I'll get them out without injury to either of us; more likely, they'll sustain some severe burns before I can get to them… but hey, it would still beat letting them die. Taking that gamble is what we call "being a hero". In the movies the life-or-death gamble always pays off. And that's a nice story. But celebrating and encouraging heroic behavior in the real world involves acknowledging that sometimes the dice are against you and you sacrifice yourself "for nothing", and that's just the way of it, and it doesn't make it worthless to try.
I don't see how you can possibly argue against this unless 1) you preposterously believe that an overwhelming majority of adoptions wind up net-negative for all involved, 2) you think even adoptions that don't blow up the parents' lives have a negligible positive impact on the children, or 3) you think improving the children's lives has no positive value and base the EV of adoption purely on the potential harm to the parents. 1) would be incredibly dumb and 3) would be skin-crawlingly evil. If it's 2), I'd like to see some solid evidence, because it'd be a pretty counterintuitive claim, what with the foster care system's track record being a massive horror story of its own.
A surprising number of people just literally don't know that Eptstein's victims were adult-presenting teens who were mainly 16-17 and performed escort work.
Western society has been on a media diet of near-constant agitprop over at least the last 100 years equating 17 year olds with 7 year olds, and most people unironically believe it, including said 17 year olds.
Why on Earth would we start drawing the distinction now, especially when the delightful moral treat of getting to call public figures pedophiles presents itself (or at least, presents itself to a media who knows its audience has been sufficiently mindkilled to parrot it uncritically)?
Pongalh
6hr ago
Those who have been left behind by the media are not going to be easy to convince that modern TV shows are now worth watching.
The problem is that if you care about production chops and are not content to rewatch stuff you ALREADY like over and over again, what's the alternative? (Apart from the taking high road and just reading and doing carpentry or something instead)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6hr ago
The controversy on Reddit was that the writers on that particular episode must be Nazis because the villian of the story was particularly in Starfleet and had dialogue that suggested he believed that Nazis were on to something. So obviously the only reason that you could possibly make a character say something positive about Nazis is that they were obviously Nazis. Which, to me seems like a bizarre way to approach literature where the artist is incapable of imagining a belief he doesn’t actually hold. It’s like saying imagination doesn’t exist. But given that understanding of literature I can easily see why the message tends to be smack people on the head obvious simply because they cannot be anything else.
Pongalh
6hr ago
The reason is that most woke stuff kills verisimilitude (think fantasy filled with black people in clearly Northern Europe).
I give fantasy stuff huge leeway, because it's fantasy you can do whatever, though a specific trope's repetition (black people lopsidedly in everything) is bad. The real bullshit is something like the London blitz containing black characters.
Pongalh
6hr ago
I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts, the aristocratic power that stands in perpetual judgement due to intellectual merit and thus moral merit.
Yea, covid and Trust the Science came from people both critical of capitalism and institutional racism but trusting of the combination's experts. One comes to the conclusion that socialism or capitalism, white supremacy and its overcoming, Pfizer would do things the same way. A scientist is a scientist, in Oklahoma or Cuba.
Pongalh
6hr ago
There's a shown on Apple TV called Berlin ER or something with a similar hospital context. But that's foreign, so.
It's a weird new problem for those who thought the primary issue with media companies was fealty to big corporate advertising dollars. But that's so twenty years ago. The left's priorities advanced significantly throughout the culture since then. We're in a situation now where the left is far less critical of Big Advertising and its employees because their concerns mirror their own.
Comprehensive, ground-up free speech IS right-wing in that sense. People Power wasn't mean to go that way, though.
Pongalh
6hr ago
"libs are right"
The things he agrees with them on don't even need to be stated. It's so baked in we take it for granted now, e.g. moving away from fossil fuels and making electric vehicles in the first place
Zephyr
6hr ago
So to be entirely fair, while horrific, this isn’t the kid’s fault. I think what TitaniumButterfly is looking for are times when an adoption went wrong as a result of parents being unable to deal with the kid.
Although you alluded to this in the post, I think the specific examples would be more useful for what was requested.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
What do you call the child of a Dane and a Yoruba?
Mulatto.
Why do we call a black Brazilian Hispanic?
Negro(their preferred term for themselves- call them preto and they'll whoop your ass).
What about someone with more indigenous heritage from Chiapas in Mexico?
'Illegal' in the most common case, but if you're looking for a racial description probably 'Mayan' or 'Indian, feather not dot'.
Or half Inuit?
Half-caste
What about Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian and African-American parents?
Desi
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Wolves and dogs are literally not separate species and it's quite possible to argue that coyotes shouldn't be categorized separately either.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Aren't feral horses, water buffalo, and camels all categorized as 'invasive' in Australia? I personally oppose the designation- I prefer a more southwestern-US view that increasing megafaunal variety is good even if some native species suffer, but Australians have the right to their own opinions on the relative value of kangaroos vs horses even if I would have a Texas-style pro-exotics policy where only animals causing damage to the things people want out of the ecosystem are considered invasive if I were Australian emperor- but that is what Australians call them.
WhiningCoil
7hr ago
If you are going to take the people who raise congenital felons and bestow upon them all the benefits of generations of prudence and compare them to firefighters, you might want to consider if they are the firefighters from Fahrenheit 451.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Do people even bother calling rats invasive?
Yes. But they usually don't call such things as armadillos(who expand their native range all on their lonesome- despite their association with Texas they didn't get here until circa 1900) invasive.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
The fostercare system is a lot blacker than the population as a whole, but I would push back against hoffmeister's assertion that black kids in the foster system are a particular problem- nearly everyone in the system has problems and teenagers in fostercare behave horribly. I'd disagree with the assertion that whites in the foster system are a touch better.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
I don't pay much attention to upvotes downvotes on other people's posts(sorry, we're wired to see how our own speech is received. We should probably get rid of upvotes/downvotes) but I get the most negative pushback criticizing the red/black pill on gender relations.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
My prior is very high that prisoners giving interviews about their involvement in sensational crimes are just Mehmet Ali Agca-ing various retarded theories in the hopes of getting a book deal, attention, or boredom relief.
Throwaway05
7hr ago
Absolutely not, they think it's because conservatives are "___" (insert attack here).
Same level of blindness as media people who can't see why movies are failing etc.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
People in general are OK with lower class girls from the same tribe becoming courtesans(which is basically what Epstein's victims were) as a form of social mobility as long as it's quiet. Very few people are OK with ingroup women of any description working as brothel prostitutes/streetwalkers(which is what the Rotherham victims were). It's reasonable to see these as different kinds of sex work and I'm not sure 100x worse is that far off.
plural
7hr ago
There was a TV Show a few years back called New Amsterdam and it was the peakness of Woke. It wasn't really well received or popular but it certainly was probably a signal of the high water mark of the popularity of that ideology I think. But it could also have been a very well disguised parody. I couldn't take it after a couple seasons so there could quite possibly be better examples than these, I wish I could find clips of them but it's hard to beat tumors caused by racism.
There was a whole episode about getting people to take the COVID vaccine because their freezer broke or something and they need to use up all the vaccines in a small period of time. So they get the word out and people show up but when the Chief notices that everyone waiting in line to get it is white he cancels the plan to give it out so he can give it to black people but when he approaches the black community over it they say they've all gotten their vaccine and he needs to look in his own backyard, to which the token conservative character says they haven't gotten the vaccine because they're waiting until people at risk get it, so the Chief decides to tell him to gather all his conservative friends and they all show up just in time for the arbitrary timer on the vaccine's viability to run out and nobody get vaccinated at all.
Another episode is about a previous Chief from the 70s-80s getting cancelled for throwing away donated blood during the AIDS crisis. That's it. Apart from doing that he was perfectly coded as a good left-leaning guy he did great stuff for minorities and the underprivileged but he breaks down and admits that they couldn't be sure if the blood donated from gay people at the time could have infected people with HIV so he ordered the blood thrown out. His legacy destroyed and the new Chief, disgusted at his decision, has to confirm to others that yes, it was true this man made a mistake with blood 50 years ago and must be erased from history. In the end, the old man leaves in shame as his picture is removed from the hospital wall.
I remember an episode where a minor was getting a court injunction against the hospital because they said their treatment was bad and the court responded by shutting down on childrens' aspects of the hospital until it was investigated and the first thing the psychiatrist says to the Chief about it is "You need to sort this out now, they're already shutting down our trans children's clinic."
To me, The Pitt in many ways seems more preachy even though the episodes are dedicated to mostly medical treatment because it's often injected into situations apropos of nothing and the resolutions feel bad because they're presented in the narrative in a way that feels like they're strawmanning/weakmanning an argument and then declaring victory.
Berlin ER or Krank Berlin as it should've been called since that's its name is a pretty good show that has the same sort of hectic pace and stays in the vein of only slight bits of story/personal lives away from the hospital.
It's doesn't have the constant woke injections like The Pitt but I'd say it still does the special bit of showing that cops are just as bad or worse than gang members thing by the end.
I was shocked at the show seemingly displaying the immigration demographics as they are (I assume, I'm not German). Much of the cast is brown/black and immigrant and most of the people coming into the hospital are as well. And for the first few episodes it felt like there wasn't going to be much of political angle at all but after much of the emergency room visits being immigrant gang members knifing each other I suppose maybe they had to have their cops beating innocent people because they're the wrong color part to not be accused of being racist. Either way it's pretty good but gets kinda washed out in the middle, treading water and extending plots over episodes when they could have wrapped up more quickly. But I think it finishes well, it's not many episodes anyway.
The medical accuracy felt much weaker but I don't know about German medical standards and the hospital in the show is supposed to be a piece of shit that barely runs so it's less about watching a well-oiled machine work like The Pitt and more about seeing how a hospital that has no real facilities, equipment, or staff to handle pretty much any medical situation muddles through. It does have much less insufferable characters and situations than The Pitt. But it also feels amateurish by comparison when showing the medical cases and treatments which is a shame.
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