domain:pedestrianobservations.com
5434a
8hr ago
Ever looked at The Listener crossword in The Times? It makes a cryptic look like a child's word search.
I tried to find an example but I can only find pictures of finished puzzles without the clues. Looks like there are some follow-alongs on YouTube.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8hr ago
…did you ever?
I did. The whole reason I got into /r/SSC and The Motte is because I thought they represented a chance for dialogue between the two sides, and a chance for each of us to say "I guess they make some good points sometimes", come together, and either forge a common path, or at least forge a pact to purge the crazies on each respective side. All I got for the trouble was "not good enough" said in so many ways, and a litany of denials that there's anything wrong with the progressive side, and that if I think otherwise, it's because I'm being uncharitable.
Now... you know me (and I know me), I know I'm prone to sperging out at times, but I was actually trying, but at this point, why bother? This isn't even accusatory, I know your heart's in the right place, but I know that you and people like you are incapable of stopping the things I find offensive and distasteful that come from your side, so why should I police mine?
magicalkittycat
8hr ago
There are no literal Nazis, and there haven't been in 80 years. That's part of the point here, you're chasing boogeymen.
So "I love Hitler" is about as literal Nazi as possible in a world where the Nazi party is no longer around?
In my opinion there is literally nothing that can be said between two consenting adults in a private conversation that I would consider unacceptable behavior.
So two adults coordinating a child porn ring is acceptable as long as it's done in private? Might need to walk back your literally nothing claim here.
It's fine if you are 1-3. You'll just have to trust me when I say that these conversations take place all the time
I'm sorry, but if you're in such a world where you genuinely believe that every man jokes this way and anyone who doesn't is just a liar, it says a lot more about you and the people you hang out with in your dark matter world than about men in general.
This type of defense is truly incredible just as a concept though. Like it's literally "Yes all men!" but as an endorsement, it comes off as a lack of imagination and theory of mind.
07mk
8hr ago
Heck, the very term "Jew" was declared offensive in some blue tribe circles 5+ years ago! There was even a This American Life episode featuring the Jewish host Ira Glass asking one of his younger interns or recent hires to describe what person he is in terms of his religion, and she insisted on calling him a "Jewish person" or something of the sort, while explicitly refusing to call him a "Jew," despite the fact that he self-identified as a "Jew."
I don't think it caught on, but then again, the blue tribe environments in which I reside don't have that many Jews and don't talk about Jews much, so it could be one of those things that just quietly passed under my radar and is actually dominant in the blue tribe.
magicalkittycat
8hr ago
Was there any actual support for Hitler? The single quote appears to be, as per the context The_Nybbler provided, a reducto ad absurdum joke.
I don't understand what the humor here is in
A: "Let's elect the most hardcore of our beliefs"
B: "That would be Hitler"
Seems like an admission that the beliefs are Hitler Lite, not a great sign.
But ok, sure let's take that as just a joke and not read into anything. What about the other comments like the one about the Kansas delegation possibly liking someone more if they painted them as Nazis? It seems over and over again the joke here is "boy we sure are a lot like literal Nazis".
Republicans like Gov Scott, Stefanik, Roger Stone, etc all seem to be appalled by it, so it's not some just Bad Faith Left Wing thing either unless anyone who breaks tribal loyalty is inherently considered an outsider enemy.
2D3D
8hr ago
It doesn't even have real life traction, thats the thing.Firing some young republican nobodies is costless for republicans, and now everyone sotto voce thinks the liberals are the crazy moralizing karens they spent the ladt year pretending they werent. There is an extremely aggressive attempt to memoryhole the shaming and screeching of the late 2010s but this just shows the libs can't help themselves from beating the racism gong when some supply actually instantiates to feed their unlimited demand for wrongthink.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8hr ago
My understanding of 4chan culture is that none of these are remotely homophobic in practice, and the term "fag" has become sufficiently debased that someone needed to coin the term "gayfag" to describe male homosexuals.
2D3D
9hr ago
I've happily made many a macro of Bill Hicks screaming "HITLER DIDNT GO FAR ENOUGH" paired with Dave Chappelle just eyebrow waggling. It is AMAZING what people read into that.
magicalkittycat
9hr ago
After the lefty reaction to the Kirk assassination I absolutely don't care about this, and will never care about anything like this from my own side ever again. OP wildly overestimates the number of fucks the right has left to give.
Do you believe that all of politics can only be summed up as "left" and "right" and that it is impossible to be both against killing people like Kirk and against racism/neonazism/etc?
If you do believe this, then why do Republicans like Gov Scott, Elise Stefanik, Roger Stone, etc seem to be able to denounce the chat without saying positive things about killing Kirk? Are they fake right wingers or something?
2D3D
9hr ago
You don't need to be infiltrate a groupchat to find obvious examples of democrats wanting to do things they know their opponents find terrible. They openly talk about why Democrats should pretend to support economic populism so that they can sneak in trans rights and unlimited immigration, at the direct and explicit expense of white people. Its the entire existence of Lib Of Tik Tok and the progs out this out openly because they think cons are too stupid to ever pierce the barrier to entry of looking at a phone screen.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
9hr ago
You're not beating the logs-in-eyes allegations. None of anything you said would reflect on how Arabs would treat Jews in a hypothetical one-state solution. The evidence we do have is from the expulsion of Mizrahim from all Arab countries to Israel - a pogrom you blame on Zionism. But they didn't do anything for Israel. They were completely innocent in the matter, but they were expelled and had their property confiscated anyway.
That was, undeniably, ethnic cleansing at the least. Genocide, if you stretch it. And you deny it so pithily, with a single sentence. As if the actions of Jews in Judea and Samaria reflected upon them as a whole.
Why should I trust you accusing Israel of genocide when you downplay the Arab one?
ChickenOverlord
9hr ago
In 1944, before the actual, everyone-can-agree-they're-fascist fascist states of Italy and Germany had been defeated, George Orwell wrote an article highlighting how the term had devolved into an insult and lost any useful, shared, descriptive meaning of any actual political system: https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.
Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.
ChickenOverlord
9hr ago
Back when SBF was in the news for massive fraud etc. I made some random comment about him having a Jew-fro. My sister was quite offended by this and said it was a rude thing to say, even though I first learned the term from a Jewish friend in high school who rocked a pretty awesome Jew-fro (unlike SBF's nasty greasy rat's nest).
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
9hr ago
· Edited 4hr ago
To the best of my knowledge, nobody was fired because of things they said about Charlie Kirk in leaked private messages. They were fired because they were in positions of trust (teacher, doctor, etc), and they posted horrific things endorsing his assassination publicly and proudly under their full name. These are not the same thing, don't pretend they are, I'm not playing along.
They are the same thing. Both of these situations reflect the same interior motivations, and insofar as feeling joy at Charlie Kirk's death is horrific, all of these people ought to have been punished. It makes sense from a practical perspective to punish only the highest profile cases as a warning to the rest, but the point was not to punish people for "saying things".
haroldbkny
9hr ago
Ah yeah, I left that one off my list, but that makes sense. Leftists do say that sort of thing all the time in private, and it would be kinda damning if that were seen more, but not as much as the gerrymandered racism.
DiscourseMagnus
9hr ago
This failure to detect irony goes both ways in multiple senses, both in the sense that Republicans are also prone to it (if less so) and in the sense that it also takes the form of defending your own side's genuine expressions of malice as Just Fooling Around (the Jay Jones thing is still heavy on my mind).
Lizzardspawn
9hr ago
Now I have to disagree with our vice president here, I don't think it is pearl clutching to oppose support of Hitler.
The guy has been dead for 80 years. Let it go. There are no Aryans enough left for Aaryan supremacy.
This is just a normal milquetoast man space group chat. The ones I participate in are way worse.
They should be fired for being so lame in being edgy and for terrible opsec. But morons will moron I guess.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9hr ago
- Only because you included “like this.”
- Both are basically devoid of value. The lower-level politicians are covering their asses against attacks like the one you’re making. Vance is putting his on display to score a couple political points.
- No. There is a vast gulf between speaking and doing, and our violent extremists continue to be uninterested in hiding much of anything.
- Because the (young?) GOP is more receptive to this kind of humor.
Underpinning all of these answers is the obvious point that these people aren’t Nazis by any reasonable definition. Like Key and Peele, they’re putting on a little caricature. You have to be very motivated to find it damning.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
9hr ago
Paxton is kind of a standout but yeah, my understanding would be the AG is the second-most important politician in most states, or at least not lower than third.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
9hr ago
No, saw that name in this thread but didn't check the context. How disgusting!
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
9hr ago
Democrats are doing their soft racism thing of belittling minority groups?
Doesn't count as racist for these purposes, but really should be more damning for Dems.
Democrats in private are just as racist as Republicans are in private
Democrats in public have spent several years being way more racist than Republicans in private or public, they just don't call stuff like "white people are goblins" and "whiteness is a contract with the devil" racism, because they gerrymandered racism to primarily be about black people. Belittling white men is a favored pastime. Et cetera and so forth.
So I would imagine whatever they say in private is even worse than what they've been publishing in public for my entire adult life.
I mostly don't care; it's layers and layers of irony, and there's not enough information to determine what they believe in their hearts of hearts. Most likely, their error is not in being Nazis, but simply in treating a professional(?) forum like a personal 4chan. Organizations don't have to go total longhouse to have some standards of conduct, and heads should roll (NOTE: I am not calling for a Robespierre-style solution to this problem; it's a turn of phrase indicating someone should be fired).
I do think this lack of ability (real or affected) to detect irony is part of the puzzle of why Democrats are losing young men. Conversations like this happen all the time, among both Democrats and Republicans, and treating obvious jokes as literally as possible gives a strong out-of-the-loop school principal or humorless HR lady vibe.
Interesting how pretty much all of this is just "people who don't show perfect loyalty to the tribe". In which case I suppose there's a question to be asked.
Why should the Gov Scott/Stefanik/Roger Stone/etc crew who are appalled by Nazism and bigotry have to show their loyalty to the Nazi side and accept their anti American values, instead of the Nazi side having to show their loyalty to the Gov Scott/etc side and stop being Nazis?
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