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RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
3hr ago
But is the problem purely liberals alienating young men or are conservatives also successfully courting them?
Probably more the former. Team Red isn't offering that much, but at least they aren't broadcasting their disdain at every opportunity.
Disclaimer: I'm middle-aged and not terribly in contact with the yutes. But as a straight white male with a job, I occasionally wonder what exactly Team Blue could ever do to entice me to vote for them in a national election (short of entirely abandoning 75%+ of their policies).
oats_son
3hr ago
I can't believe the news networks could stoop so low, seriously. They are playing an extremely dangerous game here, and for what?
Him saying he really fucking means it. https://postimg.cc/nXMNVw2N
Edit: reading further down I see the dance, so in case someone pretends they think by that I mean when he says the office joke, I mean when he says
Yes, I've told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy
And
I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they're breeding little fascists? Yes
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3hr ago
It's really weird to me that more than one person here honestly came away thinking it was just a The Office joke?
Now that I'm seeing more news networks pick up this story, if they aren't going full "Republicans pounce after Jay Jones 'alleged' comments", they are leading with the joke, omitting everything else, and then including his apology. I imagine people who still trust the media are reading their trusted sources that lie by omission, charge into this thread thinking they are informed, skim my top post, and then blast out the ignorant rebuttal they've been primed to make.
I finished The Sun Also Rises this week. I needed to intersperse my slog through a history of the roman empire with some shorter candy. I grabbed recs from a couple people, this one from @FiveHourMarathon and Stranger in a Strange Land from someone else.
In short: I found it decent but not great, and strangely compelling in many ways. I powered through it fairly quickly, found myself looking forward to it, and felt like Hemingway did a great job of conveying an enormous amount of depth through simple language in a way that is lost on many authors (especially in Spain).
At the end of the day, though, it's a circular story with a lot of repetition, and the things that made it so transgressive and compelling aren't really that unique nowadays.
sockpuppet2
3hr ago
Reports like these have been an almost weekly occurrence all year. To state the obvious that none of these articles include: The Democratic Party and liberals engage in bulverism and bulverism alienates people. But is the problem purely liberals alienating young men or are conservatives also successfully courting them?
sockpuppet2
3hr ago
It's not just them as individuals; high schools also embrace Goodhart's Law - students getting into good colleges makes them look good.
ZanarkandAbesFan
3hr ago
Fair enough, that's pretty bad. He was arrested and sentenced though. I'll amend my original post to specify republicans that went unpunished for making these comments.
TeknOShEeP
3hr ago
"erosion of norms" is just DNC speak for "refusing to play the loveable loser to our obviously more virtuous candidate."
I freely admit I was part of it in my stupid college days, but frankly the DNC has been demonizing conservatives for a lot longer than Trump has been relevant, he was just the first one to fling the shit back in any effective manner.
If you want to point to a specific moment the norms really started to collapse, I would suggest the Johnson administration for the most recent cycle.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
3hr ago
Do you have evidence of republican politicians caught saying they'd like to murder their opponents' children?
There was that failed Republican candidate in NM who was convicted of doing drive-by shootings of several opponents' houses (which included children in the houses).
Be honest and admit that these kind of "just joking" comments come from all sides.
I think we usually expect more from people running to be elected officials? Do you have evidence of republican politicians going unpunished for saying they'd like to murder their opponents' children?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4hr ago
As of now, no Democrat has pulled their endorsement of him, I saw one single local Democrat say he would stop campaigning with him, several groups have actively reaffirmed his endorsement still saying he's somehow better than your generic Republican.
WP:
The comments were made public by National Review in October 2025 during Jones' campaign for Attorney General, and received bipartisan condemnation, including by fellow Democratic nominees Abigail Spanberger and Ghazala Hashmi.
In particular, Spanberger said:
I made clear to Jay that he must fully take responsibility for his words. While Hashmi said: Jay must take accountability for the pain that his words have caused. We must demand better of our leaders and of each other.
There is a slight of hand here I want to address. I said no Democrat (minus one) has pulled their endorsement. This remains true, even with Democrats saying he really shouldn't have said those things. Despite the condemnation of his words, they still endorse the person for the position he's running for.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4hr ago
Sure, it's open for everyone (though I suspect that right-wing content gets boosted by the algorithm), it's just bit rich at this point to say that right-wingers (let alone milquetoast right-wingers) have to do with "condemned self-hosted shitholes or bust".
ZanarkandAbesFan
4hr ago
I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but I think Trump's general style in 2016 was a big part of this, penis size jokes in the primary,
IIRC, his only dick-related joke went something along the lines of "There was also a comment about if my hands are small, something else must be; I assure you, there's no problem" which I actually think was a pretty witty and non-offensive way of addressing that insinuation.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4hr ago
I want to see the full thing. Every site I could find was interleaving the two screenshots with partial quotes and “according to a source…” nonsense.
I don’t think this is the right order.
I think that what Mr. Jones said was disgusting and should torpedo his chances of election. You’re still overreacting.
No, Democrats Don’t Really Want You Dead.
A Democrat joked expressed support for someone shooting one of his coworkers. He did not say he’d do it. He did not speak for his colleagues. He did not mention you and yours. He has not stood by his statements, or otherwise indicated that he actually wants anyone dead.
Now, you can assume the worst for some of those things. But for all of them? People say stupid shit all the time. What makes you say that this time is the one where he really means it?
faceh
4hr ago
Oh yeah.
Lets leave aside how he's in a central 'position of trust' for the State.
I feel vaguely hypocritical on this point because I generally support the idea of using political power to make your ideological opponents uncomfortable enough to leave (I mean implement policies they don't like and would want to get away from, rather than policies specifically targeting them for their political associations) but having your state's executive branch have an unstated policy of leniency on violence against political opponents is a genuinely terrifying thought to me. Doubly so if your state's self defense laws are weak. Virginia is Stand Your Ground, at least.
Thankfully one that IS pretty handily solved by moving away and/or organizing a campaign to oust the problem candidates. But it does harken back to my Skin in the Game rant. If you want to support the idea of political violence against opponents, in the abstract, I would prefer if you, personally, or people you care a lot about, are at risk of getting targeted by it. Instead, what always happens is the political class circles the wagons and ups their levels of security and leaves everyone else to fend for themselves.
Would it be wrong to suggest that a Gentlemanly duel between the parties in question here might be a way to resolve the grievances?
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
As of now, no Democrat has pulled their endorsement of him, I saw one single local Democrat say he would stop campaigning with him, several groups have actively reaffirmed his endorsement still saying he's somehow better than your generic Republican.
WP:
The comments were made public by National Review in October 2025 during Jones' campaign for Attorney General, and received bipartisan condemnation, including by fellow Democratic nominees Abigail Spanberger and Ghazala Hashmi.
In particular, Spanberger said:
I made clear to Jay that he must fully take responsibility for his words. While Hashmi said: Jay must take accountability for the pain that his words have caused. We must demand better of our leaders and of each other.
Someone should probably double check my math, but it seems to me that these are two democrats who seem to have diplomatically suggested that he drops out of the race.
While I agree that his messages are beyond the pale, this also seems like a fuck-up on so many different levels.
Someone who has such ideation should not be elected to any office, but AG seems like a particularly bad fit.
Someone who thinks it is wise to text their Republican colleague these ideations should not have any job where any amount of personal judgement is required. Even a fucking unsolicited dick pick would have been less of a lapse.
Someone who knows that these messages exist and still decides to run for office has proven beyond any doubt that he cares nothing for his party.
the casual genocidal bloodlust the average Northern VA Democrat has
In your link, you mostly talk about people wanting to kill Trump, with the exception of "his supporters really don't deserve any sympathy either" and "rant about how great it is that the unvaxed are all going to die".
This is not genocidal by any definition, because Trump is not an ethnicity. Saying that your outgroup does not deserve sympathy is unfortunately normal (MAGA is very much without sympathy wrt illegal immigrants, for example). Celebrating the anticipated death of the unvaccinated seems in poor taste, but is also very different from calls for murdering them.
I will not pretend that I do not think that our world would be better if Trump had died of natural causes halfway through his first term. I also think that getting murdered would be a much greater contribution to his movement than anything he could possibly do with his remaining lifespan, and also do not think that Trump is succeeding in dismantling the constitutional order (which would justify killing him), so I am very much opposed to killing him or his henchmen.
While the lefty celebrations or Kirk's death were disgusting, I think most of the initial reactions were deluded about the political motive. Basically, the left heard "oh, he was shot by a gun nut raised in a Mormon family".
I think that if Greta Thunberg was fatally stabbed by a MS-13 illegal immigrant for whose prison release she had campaigned, parts of right-wing twitter would probably celebrate. "Seems like the woke college student problem is starting to solve itself", "FAFO" or something. If it then later emerges that it was not outgroup-on-outgroup violence, but that the culprit was acting on behalf of the ingroup, this would be at least awkward.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm fairly distressed over this. This is how Pogroms work.
Frankly, it is not. The example from Russia you cite is different because these were random Jews who were killed for being Jewish.
Even if that fuckwit Jones had personally killed that speaker and his kids, that would be political violence, which is a different beast.
From Rome to Weimar, we had a lot of societies where internal political violence was a thing, often employed by different actors. It is bad (also because it makes totalitarianism look like a good option), but it is different from genocide.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4hr ago
Kimmel basically victim-blamed the right. His “punishment” was a week of leave and a ton of media attention and the full support of the rest of Hollywood.
There was an organic campaign to cancel Kimmel that would probably have succeeded (not least because Sinclair would have dropped him even without administration pressure). It failed because Trump ran his mouth in a way which made it an undeniable 1st amendment issue.
yofuckreddit
4hr ago
I heard a theory that his character was about the inability of the old guard to communicate with the new wave of leftism, and the latter's insistence on specific language as a prerequisite for collaboration. See also his confusion at pronouns etc.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
4hr ago
/pol/ isn't a self hosted 4chan offshoot, it's just 4chan. And the correct comparator to reddit isn't even 4chan, it's twitter, where people are happy to issue calls for the death of whoever you'd like, unabated.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4hr ago
Based on reviews I've seen of those two works, I was planning at stopping with TSH.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
4hr ago
There fundamentally aren't enough "Won a medal at an international olympiad" people each year worldwide to fill the whole Ivy League even if you are exceptionally broad with how you construe "international olympiad". These sorts of people don't want to be full of "The best" fundamentally but rather there are other reasons.
Similarly there are also too many excellent law students each year to overwhelm the spots at the Top 3 (or is it 5 or 10 or whatever?) law schools everyone wants to go to in the US, and yet they are able to come up with an admissions system that is still widely seen as being a meritocracy (modulo affirmative action), at least to a greater degree than their undergrad complements.
oats_son
4hr ago
Once again, I guess I have to post plaintext of what he said to verify that you are comprehending what everyone is trying to convey. I have no idea if you're just not reading carefully and reacting to a headline, or if you're saying that what he actually said was just a The Office joke. It's really weird to me that more than one person here honestly came away thinking it was just a The Office joke?
I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they're breeding little fascists? Yes
In response to "You were talking about hopping that jennifer Gilbert's children would die":
Yes, I've told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy
If those guys die before me
I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves
Send them out awash in something
And yes, then The Office joke, which has a bit of a different context if you've just established you actually want to do it.
Three people, two bullets
Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot
Gilbert gets two bullets to the head
Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time
Who is supposed to care about them, if not voters? Why should voters care about norms held by, non-voters? Some subset of extra-special-super-equal voters? Who exactly gets to set norms, then?
A Democrat Trump would have to run roughshod through his own party, goring their oxen, while overwhelming any party resistance.
People still don't recognize the #1 attribute of Trump, and it isn't norms or vulgarity. Trump was the man who had the guts to break with the bipartisan consensus on trade and immigration. That's what Trump is, that's why he won, that's why he's hated, and that's his eigenvalue. That's why you get Bernie-bros voting for Trump. That's why the private sector unions are republican now.
Immigration. Trade. That's Trump. Not norms, not vulgarity, not shooting someone on 5th avenue or grabbing anyone by the pussy. It's trade and immigration.
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