domain:natesilver.net
KMC
4hr ago
with sabre and battleaxe
Sabres are curved and single-edged, while the depicted weapon is clearly both straight and double-edged. It looks a lot like a Roman gladius, frankly, although you could be generous and call it a seax.
Thank you for coming to my nit picks.
I know that the AI image is not real, it is operating on me at a cognitive level below logical propositions concerning real entities and events.
Of course the image is real, it's really there in front of you, really shared by you for me to see, and it really exists. Saying it's not real is like saying political cartoons aren't real: technically true but missing the point. This is depicting something real in a way that's fictional, and the more I consider it the more a political cartoon fits the description.
benmmurphy
4hr ago
isn't there a sex tape of Destiny and Fuentes. wouldn't that kill any chance of Fuentes becoming mainstream in the Republican party.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
Every weapon-wielding chav has to start somewhere
They usually start with people smaller than them, not twice their size.
Nope, I'm willing to bet on this. Maybe the situation is more complicated than the rightoids say, but it's definitely not what you're saying.
FtttG
4hr ago
I suppose I should have said a credible candidate seeking the Republican nomination.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4hr ago
Every weapon-wielding chav has to start somewhere. She’s obviously quite young and is probably just starting to carry these as a way to look/feel tough. I’d be surprised if she’s used them on anybody yet, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait around and let her keep carrying them until she finally does use them in earnest.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
I want to register my prediction that the story of this video is far, far more complicated than what is being presented by agitprop Twitter accounts. (A bold prediction, I know.)
Is there at least a decent possibility that this girl and her sister are helpless victims of harassment by scummy Pakistani men and neglect by a heartless police bureaucracy? Sure! But we have plenty of teenagers here in America who carry weapons to use on each other, or occasionally on bystanders from outside their social class.
I'll grant that something feels off about the video, but I rate her chances of being a dual-wielding chav even lower than the pure victim narrative. I've met girls who could pull a knife on you (gypsies), this one never used one in her life.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4hr ago
If you saw that video, and thought "Ah yes, this 13 year old girl holding a knife and hatchet wrong is clearly a hardened criminal who is harassing an innocent adult male who is following her for purely altruistic reasons, like returning a wallet she dropped", then I can't help you. Even being true that this Scottish city has a reputation for lower class whites being involved in violent crime, that it would factor into your thinking at all with respect to a 13 year old girl speaks more to your own prejudice (either against whites or for browns) than it does to the reality on the ground.
And I mean, like I said, maybe I'll end up with egg on my face. Maybe we won't find out the guy following her and filming has a history of being known to the police and was caught and released on a laundry list of sex and violent crimes of various severity. Maybe we won't go on to discover that the poor 12 and 13 year old girls hadn't already been sexually assaulted, or grew up watching their friends and family get sexually assaulted by Muslim rape gangs.
This actually reminds me of that minor thing where a gang of black teenagers was trying to steal an e-bike from a pregnant nurse. In a town where it's a well known "victimless crime" for black teens to snatch e-bikes from the people who rented them and ride off. And people tried to take some "well it's her word versus his" position when it was patently obvious the black teens were lying as their story involved this pregnant woman forcibly removing them from the bike and then getting on it to leave before the camera began rolling. Which would require an ignorance of physiology and gender differences that might be par for the course for "rationalist".
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4hr ago
Ask Betteridge.
People keep making the mistake that the "real world" is more important than a small fringe of online crazies, and they keep getting proven wrong over and over and over (e.g. with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr).
None of those things outweighed the political fundamentals. If they did, the last three elections would have looked very different.
The fringe gets to insert a few people into the back-bench. They get to influence decisions on the margin, and they get to put their message out in party channels. So you get a Gang of Four, you get Biden muttering something about gender studies. But kingmaking demands something more.
Come 2028, there’s going to be a Trump-shaped hole in the discourse. He’ll probably try to promote one of his kids for the spot; none of them have demonstrated the required charisma. That leaves Vance in a really strong position. For this Fuentes nonsense to see any success, they’d have to hijack whatever Trump wanted to do anyway. I don’t see that working out.
Quantumfreakonomics
4hr ago
I think the uh, cosmopolitan financial executives will conveniently discover all those old media manipulation tricks that were so effective from 2012-2022 in the event that this comes close to happening. If nothing else, Vance will get an explicit endorsement if Trump's donors beg him enough.
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
Sure, the left has gotten way too "open borders" recently, but have been historically consistent about believing immigration is a net good
Dems have always (well, if we talk about recent times, not ancient) made the difference between legal, limited and controlled immigration and no holds barred open borders. This was a long time union position too (no need to expand on where the unions political affiliations go). It has all changed recently - now Democrats basically reject any need for immigration law or citizenship pathway. In fact, illegal migrants seem like their preferred category, getting policy preferences not available to regular citizens.
I don't think threatening colleges with cutting their foreign studies is a Democratic position.
Colleges are, as we already discussed, fully captured by the Left. Places like Harvard or Columbia are the major engines in propagating and supporting leftist causes. So, obviously, they would come under attack from Trump. My point is not that everything Trump is doing now is part of Democratic agenda - of course not, he's on the opposite side of the war so he'd do stuff to wrestle control from them. My point is that Trump's political positions before he became the leader of the MAGA had been very close to Democrats' positions before the Great Awokening. Including, btw, abortions - Trump never cared too much about it and had been vaccilating here and there for years on the question, he had not been a passionate pro-lifer. Of course, when he became the head of MAGA movement, that came with some necessary policy adjustments, but RvW had always been a major target for the Right - especially due to the Left's complete unwillingness to reach any European-style compromise and the insistance that only full unrestricted abortion until - or even after - the birth is going to work. That question has been way beyond Trump and for it Trump was the one who had to fall in line, not drive it. In general, if you look at Trump's historical positions, there are preciously little of them that could not come from a pre-Awokening Dem politician. Again, I am not talking about Trump's actions now, when he's the head of MAGA and second-term Republican president, but his positions when he was starting up with his journey.
I covered this with my point that firing people for any reason was always available
It wasn't "any reason", it was very specifically and clearly a particular reason - the reason of doing right-coded things. It's not impossible to survive in Hollywood while being right-coded, but it is very, very, very, very hard. There's no problem being a Communist in Hollywood though. That's the point - there's a huge difference in risk profile of being open leftie and open rightie in a huge number of institutional settings, and the former's life is overwhelmingly much easier than the latter's. I already quoted the numbers how massive the difference is in places like academia - it's nowhere near neurtal or symmetrical.
Here, the terror has no defined point of origin. There is no evil empire.
True, there's no single hierarchical structure - at least, not yet. Instead, there is a distributed network of semi-independent agents, which semi-autonomously work towards the common goal. Some of the nodes of this network - like teachers unions and academia - ensure there's always new people coming into the network, some - like journalists and entertainment - ensure ideological synchronization and agenda pushing, some - like judicial and politicians - ensure the agenda is enforced on the groud. Etc. etc. One could probably write a lot of books and make a dozen of sociology PhDs just studying these networks. I hope one day somebody will.
There's a mob that forms whenever some story pops up and gets embellished enough.
Those mobs are surprisingly well financed, supplied and coordinated. Often, if you bother to dig, with taxpayer money. And covered for and protected by government officials. It's not random, it's a system which is distributed enough that people fail to make connection between different aspects of it, but there's one. Woke professors, woke AGs, woke NGOs, woke antifa soldiers, woke CEOs, woke actors, woke judges, woke journalists, woke bureaucrats - they all part of the network. It's not as comprehensive as the totalitarian state, but it's powerful enough now to exercise a lot of control over the society. It's not social media's fault. The social media just makes it easier to coordinate and to find foot soldiers, but it's a tool, not the reason.
My problem with this is the right is going about it almost exclusively via government
That's not correct, the right has the ground game too, and finally is pushing back on the culture war. But given the amount of capture of the governmental and government adjacent institutions, some governmental action is required. If the left's NGO network is financed by taxpayer's money, cutting of or reducing this stream requires government action. If DEI has been pushed for years by government action, undoing this would require government action too. Some things could probably return to its natural state without any intervention, just by removal of external coercion, but that would take a lot of time. And a lot of time is not something the right really has - if the left wins the next election and continues with its strategy of eliminating the right from every institutional space, flooding the country with infinite amount of migrants, setting up leftist NGO networks to feed from the budgets forever and making the elections unverifiable - the right does not have much chance for survival without pushing back fast. Which, unfortunately, means also using governmental action where it may not strictly be necessary.
I don't think all sex ed is porn.
The problem is not what you think. The problem is the left thinks what the parents think does not matter, and they - the left - own the kids and are free to feed them porn whether you like it or not, and if you disagree, you are a domestic terrorist. If the question was "I don't think book X is porn so I would like to show it to my kid" and the other person would say "no, I think this is porn so I won't show it to my kid" then this would be a normal difference of opinion. But that's not where we are. Where we are is "we will show your kids what we want - and make no mistake, what we want is porn, gay porn, trans porn, whatever we can think of porn, and we are not ashamed of it! - and if you think it's porn then fuck you fascist, we'll take your kids away from you". This is not normal.
"some property destroyed during a mass protest."
"Some people did something" makes a comeback! Some property is billions dollars of loss, multiple businesses and governmental buildings destroyed, full city blocks made unlivable, etc. The problem is not even that per se - though it is extremely bad - but the complete acceptance and normalization of it from the leftist elite. The worst problem is not even that a mob torched a disctrivt court - but that everybody on the left are taking it as a normal, and sometimes encourageable event, and working very hard to ensure nobody is going to be prosecuted for it. And it's continuing now - the left is consistently rejecting the obvious reality of crime and decay in Democrat megapolises (even though the normies, even the leftist ones, are well aware of it on their own day to day experience) and are consistently opposing any effort to make any improvement in it, declaring enforcement of the laws "racist" and "fascist". This is not normal.
For instance, the left plays it up but are you going to confidently tell me that people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok don't sometimes get harassed
Yes, of course, people are harassed on both sides sometimes. But there's a difference between getting a bunch of hateful tweets and being declared domestic terrorist by the FBI. Between having some online talking head talk shit about you and having US banking system refuse to do business with you. Between getting on some bloggers "bad people" list and getting on TSA's no fly list. Between somebody in your club shunning you and IRS stomping on your organization. Between being criticized on social media and having the government shut down any mention of you on social media. Between somebody not going to your talk and a violent mob setting a building on fire to not let you talk. Yes, people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok sometimes get harassed (even though they always had published the content they get harassed for on their own volition on social media) - but that harassment if very different from the harassment one who has crossed the institutional Left is subjected to. One is annoying, the other can seriously ruin your life.
sound more malicious than a warped idea of helping
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Payback23
4hr ago
you do if you have been attacked before or if it is very common. If you don't carry a weapon in that situation then you are just being incredibly naive and stupid.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
That is to say, a credible candidate (perhaps a sitting governor, senator or congressman) who Fuentes might plausibly endorse?
Gavin Newsom?
Corvos
5hr ago
Scottish cities have long had a bad reputation for a reason. If a girl is going around with a knife in a Scottish city, she’s probably not someone you want to meet.
2-1 I’ll give you.
FtttG
5hr ago
Now at the tender age of 27, Fuentes won't be eligible to run in 2028, so when you say he's the most important person in the Republican camp to watch (after Trump), I take it to mean you think his endorsement of a politician could swing the primaries. Do you have anyone in mind? That is to say, a credible candidate (perhaps a sitting governor, senator or congressman) who Fuentes might plausibly endorse?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
5hr ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they were two chav-adjacent girls doing chav-adjacent things in the park with their friends, and an innocent immigrant found himself caught up in the mix. I also wouldn't be surprised if they were indeed two Scottish girls innocently defending themselves against a molesty migrant with a knife and hatchet, in which case they can call me in a few years to fix them, but they don't need fixing. Yes, yes, I know, how brave of me to fence sit.
IMHO these speaks to the innumeracy and propaganda of the age. It's like when people were polled about how many black men were being shot by the cops, and they thought it was thousands, nay, tens of thousands, when it was in fact dozens.
And this is triply so when it comes to mountain of evidence that the grooming gangs, and the failures of the state that are on a scale that beggars belief. It's almost the inverse of the BLM disconnect from reality, where you might assume dozens of girls have been raped by Muslim Immigrants, when in fact it's tens of thousands. Nay, hundreds of thousands!
That you are pulling some sort of "equally believable" fallacy here is a mockery of reason. I mean sure, all things are possible. But gun to my head, 10-1 some groomer was trying to pick the 12 and 13 year old girls up.
Payback23
5hr ago
This is kind of a bizarre response. There should be a "hang up" about underage girls being abused. Tho maybe that is why the paki grooming gangs have had so much success. you don't care.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Correct me if I’m wrong but Epstein and thé rotherham perpetrators being predators isn’t really disputed?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
The trick is to let people get a good, long look at the alternative and then strike when they can't stomach defending the status quo.
Thankfully, that bears no resemblance to anything that might be happening nowadays.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Maybe intelligent, informed gun control advocates. But most of them are shrieking about school shootings and ‘we swear there’s no slippery slope’.
That being said, brandishing a hatchet would be a crime in the U.S. I can totally imagine a teenaged white girl being charged for brandishing a knife at a Hispanic man telling her to quiet down in public or whatever, but we haven’t had a rotherham scandal- Epstein was not an ethnic group and didn’t recruit his girls off the street. And we don’t actually know what started the confrontation.
Shrike
5hr ago
A quick Google suggests that about 60% of Americans are "unsure" what they think of Nick Fuentes (...probably because they have no idea of who he is!) and another third of Americans dislike him. His favorability rating is barely above the lizardman constant, (and ironically is highest among blacks and Hispanics).
It might be correct that "you may not care about the online but the online cares about YOU" but that doesn't mean that just because Richard Hanania writes an article about a minor far-right streamer whose unfavorability is only dwarfed by his unfamiliarity that he is "the second most important person to watch on the Republican side."
Now, Hanania might be correct that Vance needs to worry about being flanked from the "populist right" but I don't think Fuentes is likely to be an effective threat.
Corvos
5hr ago
Charles II managed just fine, although admittedly his coup-d'etat was done from afar and not necessarily under his aegis. The trick is to let people get a good, long look at the alternative and then to march in your armies when nobody can stomach fighting to defend the status quo.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
MAGA is indeed full of boomers.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
I don't know a single internet personality that can claim the title of "second most important person to watch after Trump himself".
Well yes, my theory is that either these girls were part of a group that was harassing people, or that they were picking on other kids and that the guy filming confronted them. This would explain why suddenly they seem (or are pretending to be) afraid.
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