domain:moultano.wordpress.com
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15hr ago
They aren’t just conformists, in many cases they’re the old church ladies telling you anything you find fun is somehow wrong. You can’t enjoy foreign food, clothing, or music. You can’t like your own either, you can’t like traditionally masculine things, or traditional things in general. It’s just a narrow rather boring and uninteresting slice of things that democrats think are okay to like unironically.
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
What young, working class males- most of them nontraditional Republican voters- have told me about why they're voting for Trump now:
- He's not afraid to offend people, and sometimes that's what stops politicians from getting stuff done. This is, essentially, just true, even if you can argue that Trump isn't a solution.
- No tax on overtime/tips. This is, in a lot of the working class's view, the first thing the government has ever done to make their lives easier*. And young men are not generally beneficiaries of welfare, so in their specific case this is literally the first cash handout they've ever been promised in exchange for their vote.
- He's not beholden to Israel- while he's less pro-Israel than I would have thought he was going to be this time last year, I admit I'm pretty baffled by this one.
- Kamala this that and the other. Fact remains, democrats can't seem to stop and consider 'this chick is an awful screaming karen who can't even speak coherently' as a reason not to make her a party frontman.
- LGBT, especially the T. Most of these guys are 'pro gay rights', even if they maybe think 'little fags' are just wrong. They're upset about pushing LGBT indoctrination everywhere, and they don't like trans.
*There's also a tendency to identify Trump with stimmy checks or extra unemployment for laid-off blue collar workers- even if these people understand that these policies were bad for the economy, 'the government was just gonna give it to rich people anyways'.
I should be clear that the persecution fantasy here is specifically that young men are at risk of having their IP addresses traced by a visual basic GUI written by The Liberals unless they use a VPN (which they are all doing), hence why I quoted "young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long."
I don't argue that doing stuff you don't want people to find out about under your real name is inadvisable. It's just that VPNs are neither necessary or sufficient to avoid this situation.
YE_GUILTY
15hr ago
Idle thought: "doomscroll" sounds like a fantasy artifact.
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
Even when the Republicans express their disgust for young men watching porn, that's better than being disgusted with young men for being men.
I mean, have you seen the dem ads on the subject? 'We know you're pigs, we want to let you'. People don't really like that.
The democrats lost young men when they stopped staffing young men. The democratic party is split between the faces (who're men) and the staffers (no straight men). The party, from 2nd in command to bottom, is run by women and feminine (I don't mean this as an insult) men. The party talks to men as the 'other' because they are the 'other'.
It's clear that the democratic party would rather see Newsom and Buttigieg fall into a ditch once an electable woman shows up. Unfortunately for them, they can't get a woman elected, so the 2 of them are tolerated. A conventional straight man is only welcomed into the democratic fold if they are muslim or black (and usually communist + nepo baby to boot). Zohran and Hasan being the canonical examples.
In 2022-23, the tech industry cleared itself of the woke scolds. People were fired, replaced and sidelined. Companies rebranded, some quietly some loudly. There has been no such reckoning within the democratic party. We might be seeing the first signs of it, with Bari Weiss taking over CBS. But for the most part, the internal rhetoric of the democratic party is stuck in the last decade. The only outreach they're capable of doing is to the left of them. And that's why the AOC/DSA wing is ascendant.
Today, I can see that milquetoast commentators such as Ezra Klien and Derek Thompson sustain an uncomfortable alliance with the democratic party. I can't imagine how the average young man (who is definitely to the right of them, more patriarchal and more traditionally masculine) could feel welcome in the same democratic party.
aqouta
15hr ago
Ezra Klein has been making this point in his interviews recently although phrased more like "It doesn't matter what our policies are if people think we don't like them and I think we've been sending out the message that we don't like a lot of people". He seems to have been doing a lot of soul searching since the loss in 24.
samiam
15hr ago
It would seem that this weekend, there was a fire at the house of one Diane Goodstein, a judge who Trump does not like. Reddit being Reddit, they immediately assumed the fire was arson and accused the right wing of violence; the linked story made the front page of Reddit. However, the investigation so far shows no evidence of arson: “At this time, there is no evidence to indicate the fire was intentionally set. SLED agents have preliminarily found there is no evidence to support a pre-fire explosion.
Point being, the radical left (i.e. Reddit) will say lie after lie after lie how how Charlie Kirk’s killer couldn’t have possibly done it because of his left-wing beliefs, even though the evidence overwhelmingly points that way, then they will turn around and accuse the right of right wing violence without any real evidence to back up their claims.
The truth matters. Objective fact matters. I have decried it when the radical right was telling lies, and will decry it as long as the radical left tells themselves lies.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
15hr ago
From 'persecution fantasies' to 'well they should have better opsec' is a hell of a redirect.
zoink
16hr ago
Alright, which specific people would you arrest.
J6 investigation was the largest investigation in DOJ history, I expect quite a bit from the warranted 10x larger investigation into BLM riots.
anti_dan
16hr ago
Which matters more, act or conviction?
The problem with these charities that get you into Ivies, is there is typically no "there" there. Rarely are these charities engaged in picking up litter, digging needed ditches, shoveling snow, or some other endeavor an unskilled 15 year old could plausibly producing productive labor. Instead there are dozens of make-work charities that exist for the purpose of bolstering college applications.
Pongalh
16hr ago
What sucks is when the hot fashionable women are the ones saying these things and the frumpy ones are not, and even defend men.
Given men's nature, it's hard to know which way to cut.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
16hr ago
You can watch the video on Wikipedia for yourself. He was driving into the crowd at speed well before he was surrounded. Also you're, uhh, not allowed to kill people who happen to be part of a crowd because different people who are part of the same crowd surrounded your car. It is in fact extremely key to Rittenhouse's case that the people he shot were people attacking him.
Pongalh
16hr ago
Wasn't long ago that conservatives were lambasting the notion of stochastic terrorism. Do they buy it now?
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
Kirk was going on record that Biden might deserve death for his actions. He made that statement knowing that the general narrative of MAGA is that the justice system is corrupt and protects the DC swamp. To a base to which Trump had already (jokingly?) implied in 2016 that the '2nd amendment people' might want to interfere with the appointment of SC justices through assassination. A base which has plenty of people with the firearms training to pull of assassinations.
Of course, if he had connected the dots, a la "Biden deserves death, but our corrupt justice system will never convict him. Someone should just shoot him", that would have been 10x worse.
I don't think that Kirk was intentionally trying to incite stochastic terrorism, he was simply spinning his MAGA lies (e.g. about Biden being especially treasonous) for political gain, and not giving a damn if that would increase the relative risk of Biden getting gunned down or not.
zoink
16hr ago
Exactly.
I am not virulently against the norm of shooting people and incarcerations in a situation like the Jan 6 riot. I am against what I perceive to be a massive double standard. For many on the left it’s super clear that Kyle Rittenhouse is a mass murderer, that all these police shootings are racist, and that it’s lives over property. But shooting Ashli Babbitt crawling through a window is a good shoot.
Norms need to be consistent, or they aren’t norms: Ashli Babbitt saw the left violently rioting, looting, committing arson, and occupying government buildings for months without getting shot. If we’re gonna play the game this way, fine, as long as everyone knows the rule: it’s legitimate to shoot you - even if you’re protesting - when you start breaking stuff that’s not yours or try to go places you’re not supposed to go. If you think Kyle Rittenhouse should have been convicted I don't care about your J6 opinion.
All these quotes seem unequivocably fair and true to me.
His Tuesday remarks made it sound like the white supremacists and neo-Nazis were a small minority of people who just happened to be at the protest and not the organizing force behind it.
I think probably true, yes. There really aren't enough neo-Nazis to meet popular demand. Nor enough white supremacists unless you use the Left's very expansive definitions.
He says the left is just as bad, if not worse.
I think definitely true. Antifa is both far more organised and unbelievably violent. They are also much more expert in turning powder-keg protests into violent riots.
And then he goes on to put Confederate generals in the same league as the founding fathers, just so you know whose side he's really on.
Almost certainly the side of people worried about the Left's eagerness to knock down statues of everyone who doesn't meet their approval, including those of the Founding Fathers who were slave owners. Certainly Churchill in the UK was not spared.
As far as I'm concerned Trump clearly condemned the actual bad guys and then commented about the broader situation in terms that were far more balanced than the rabid press. He never said that the man who was killed deserved to die, he never said that 'being a neo-Nazi is good, actually'. In contrast, the left never says, 'fine people on both sides', they say, 'okay, some of our people are violent rioters but most of them are peaceful protesters, and by the way anyone who gets in the way is a bigot who deserves what they get'.
If the left could reliably meet Trump's standard I would be much more satisfied.
Democrats are getting it wrong, mostly. It's not about policy or marketing (though the idea that they just need to hire more pro-Democratic TikTok influencers to shill for them reveals a deep and amusing disconnect). It's about the casual contempt they show for men.
For instance, AOC today, saying Miller is a short troll:
[while knitting a shirt] Stephen Miller is a clown! I’ve never seen that guy in real life, but he looks like he’s, like, 4′ 10″... Like, laugh at them! Laugh at them... insecure masculinity. This is what this is about... One of the best way to dismantle a movement of insecure men is by making fun of them... I'm not here to make fun of anyone's anything, but the way people overcompensate...
So, it's not quite that she's insulting him, which is fine. Trump does similar stuff all the time, although in a funnier way. The difference is the double standard. Say what you will about him, but Trump is equal opportunity: he'll nastily insult anyone he doesn't like. There are no sacred cows. But you will never see AOC calling a woman an obese smelly pig, or implying that a female opponent holds her positions because she needs a good dicking down. And, even if she did, Democratic and liberal antibodies would attack her in retaliation: awhile back when one Democrat called MTG a butch lesbian, there was a lot of pushback for transphobia.
It's not any one individual event, but a pervasive attitude that men and masculinity are worthy of contempt, while everyone else needs to be protected from being triggered. If you're trying to appeal to men, probably encouraging a norm of a free-for-all is better than one of an HR lady who polices everyone, but the worst of all places to be--and this is where Democrats find themselves--is saying that every identity needs to be protected, except for men, who are always fair game to identity-based attacks.
Lizzardspawn
16hr ago
but online media has no proven way of effectively showing the OTHERS whom they have compassion for.
The social media is very effective in showing the others they have compassion for, which is why people are drifting away from them - the tent cities and open drug markets, the all male boats docking at the shores of Europe, the torrent of people through the border, the sheer foreignness of London, the pride parades, the MtF trans that look creepy at best, the scars from top surgery, the women that brag about having an abortion, the cohort of trans children in Hollywood.
The same way Syrskyi is the best performing general in the war on the Russians' side, the suicidal empathy of the left is the best ad for repubicans. At least our crazies are crazy in mostly comprehensible way (except abortion)
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
I was making an analogy to the online left celebrating Kirk's murder (which was not committed by someone I would call a Democratic politician), not Jones statements about shooting some speaker.
roystgnr
16hr ago
Those are pretty good. Really good for being off the top of your head. I could argue about the other two, but Medicare For All at least would be a perfect fit for that sense of self-righteousness in a grand cause thwarted by betrayal. It distills left-pleasing anti-capitalism down to its most popular core in the same way anti-illegal-immigration does for right-pleasing anti-immigration. It might have even worked well a decade ago, and it'd be hard to mount any principled opposition to it today. Trump has really undermined the free marketeer wing of the Republicans, and I don't think I've heard from the fiscal-prudence wing of either party since the Great Recession.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
For what it is worth, I can not recall any prominent Democrat calling for Trump to be executed for his role in J6.
Were the sentences for the J6 crowd harsh, especially compared to the sentences for the BLM riots? Sure, they totally threw the book at them for clear political reasons.
But unlike a Biden treason trial ending in a death verdict which Kirk was fantasizing about, they were still recognizable as a legal system working, somehow. Not well (the US legal system generally does not work well), and not as impartial as one might hope, perhaps, but not a kangaroo court.
FlailingAce
16hr ago
Oh, so it's only 2-16% of half the country? So, like, 6-52 million people? Yeah that's no biggie.
Of course it's not all about the numbers. It's also about seeing people you personally know posting that they would want you dead if they knew how you voted. I don't think people in blue bubbles realize that there is no coming back from this.
That of his supporters?
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