domain:npr.org
sun_the_second
18hr ago
From the point of view of an average progressive normie playing as a black samurai is awesome and fun, and you're the one who is injecting politics.
Rov_Scam
12hr ago
The problem there is that going after voter fraud in a non-grandstanding way means he actually needs to name names and have evidence. You can't just say there was MASSIVE FRAUD in Detroit or wherever; you have to actually say here is a corrupt election official and here's exactly what he did and here's the evidence to prove it. Most of the voter fraud stuff in 2020 was more along the lines of "I don't like the looks of this", which doesn't exactly help you out too much when it comes to a prosecution.
Rov_Scam
11hr ago
Project 2025 has approximately zero chance of succeeding:
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The president is already allowed to appoint approximately 4,000 people to high-level agency positions. At any given time in the Trump Administration, approximately 1200, or about a third, were unfilled. If he can't manage to fill these it's unlikely he's going to fill anywhere from 5 to 50 thousand additional posts.
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He's already notoriously bad at picking aides who are loyal to him. He fought with his own cabinet more than any president in recent memory. There's no reason to believe that four years of not having to appoint anyone is somehow going to make him better at this role. This problem is magnified by the fact that most of these positions aren't going to be under his direct supervision, and he'll only know that they don't have the requisite loyalty when a scandal erupts. Not a good look.
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If you remove a career bureaucrat and replace him with a political hack, the new guy isn't likely to have an in-depth understanding on how things actually work. Bureaucrat A doesn't do what you want so you replace him with Bureaucrat B. Bureaucrat B is dedicated to doing what you ask, except he isn't well-versed in the Administrative Procedure Act or the various other laws governing the office, and he's essentially starting from scratch. Except there's no time to get up to speed because the president wants this done now, so he ends up doing something that violates the law and the action ends up getting tied up in court for the next six months while the new guy in charge bungles various other duties of the office that were an afterthought under the first guy. Now the president's in the position where he has to fire Bureaucrat B and replace him with another guy who didn't make the cut the last time and is now even more likely to screw things up. Meanwhile guys appointed to non-contentious positions are making their own little messes that just become fodder for your opponents without any political gain. This obviously isn't going to happen every time, but when you're talking about thousands of positions the Venn diagram isn't always going to match up and there's a good chance you find you've appointed a moron.
Rov_Scam
12hr ago
Prosecuting the Tides foundation isn't going to do much. As a "dark money" organization most people haven't heard of them the way they've heard of the NRA, so the chance that anyone will actually care is low. Furthermore, as a foundation, they don't actually do anything themselves but simply distribute money to other groups. It takes a long time for an advocacy organization like the NRA to build up the donor network and social capital to have the kind of influence they've had. If you're just distributing money, there's plenty of other advocacy organizations that can easily take up that slack.
The biggest problem, though, is that most of the alleged malfeasance on the part of Tides is directed towards liberal advocacy groups who claim they mismanaged money intended for their benefit. For example, they're currently being sued in California by BLM, who claims the group misdirected 33 million in funds that were raised as part of a joint campaign and were supposed to be earmarked. Any other prosecutions are going to be in a similar vein. It's hardly an own of the libs if most libs haven't heard of the group you're prosecuting and the ones who have are likely to be your star witnesses. If BLM ends up siding with the administration it's hardly a good look.
2rafa
21hr ago
Assassin’s Creed is more in the ‘Bridgerton’ school of historical fiction than the more realistic style. I don’t think the demographics of Bridgerton are propaganda to trick people into thinking the British aristocracy in 1820 or whatever was half black because so many other aspects of the show, from the music to the hair to the gender relations and sex are completely anachronistic. The casting is because it’s a show created by a black woman legendarily famous for self-insert characters. It’s “historical fiction” in the way that Disney’s Cinderella is.
In any case, the rage well has surely been mined with Assassin’s Creed to the point of utter depletion. A woman in 1868 London facing no instances of sexism was standard for the series back in 2015, so I find it hard to work up any performative outrage about a black samurai in 2024.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
12hr ago
Jesus. I made the mistake of reading the whole thing. This poor woman was indoctrinated well before her critical thinking was up and running (like most religions, they've got to get you early because it doesn't work once you can think), and internalized all of her mother's insane religious rants. She thinks she didn't because she did little acts of teenage rebellion, but she did. Now she is so fucked up about the whole thing she is doing only fans. JFC... Many woman enthusiastically enjoy sex in a healthy way. This poor gal is mentally ill.
Recursive_Enlightenment
9hr ago
How does using a voice that sounds like Scarlett Johansson's harm anyone? Perhaps it was illegal, but you shouldn't claim it was evil unless you can identify the harm done.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18hr ago
You’re coming in a bit too hot, here.
Huh. This is actually your first mod warning at all. I guess that means you definitely know better, and just hate tattoos that much.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
19hr ago
Not engaging and being critical is a default victory for the minoritarian/woke supporters. Does this means you are obligated to take part in the culture wars? Well, kind of. Like it or not, those who show up are those who win.
Depends on what you mean by "show up", and what you're expecting to get out of it.
There was no conceivable act of individual heroism that could have shattered the power of the Catholic church at the height of the Inquisition, or hastened the fall of Soviet communism during the reign of Stalin. There was no "war", just those with power enforcing their will on their powerless, with very few meaningful avenues for rebuttal. Only through the accumulated weathering of decades (or centuries) did a change of conditions eventually become possible.
I certainly think it's virtuous to not be afraid of the censors. Do what you want to do, and don't let them stop you. But don't have delusions of grandeur either. If the only reason you're waging the culture "war" is because you think you can change the course of world history, then you should consider if there are better ways you could be spending your time.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7hr ago
Okay, that's the kind of thing where you have to make your case.
You were warned for this exact behavior a while back. One day ban this time.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
10hr ago
You had 80 first dates?!? Have you ever heard of the paradox of choice? The more choices you have the less you'll enjoy the one you'll finally end up with, because you'll compare all the best pieces of all your previous possible choices to your final one. It is a real thing...you might already be totally fucked from it.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10hr ago
Can you explain what that means, and what your justification for that claim is?
non_radical_centrist
11hr ago
I mean, apart from the likely impossibility of trying to change society as a whole?
I think we've come a hell of a lot closer to making porn not a black mark today than 50 years ago, I don't see why it should be impossible.
Just emptiness and depression
How does a law firm choosing to hire her without considering her Only Fans a black mark, and no judges or clients or juries holding it against her either, lead to emptiness and depression?
faceh
20hr ago
Being faiiiirrrr the entire job of CEO is to try to optimize for exactly how much you can get away with in the name of maximizing profits before people will balk. Forced diversity is not the only way that media products are getting worse.
I find myself waffling between the position of "CEOs are usually coldly logical sociopaths who are pushing the woke ideology because it appears to be profitable and will change up if it ceases to be so" and
"CEOs are just as brainwormed as other lefties and are genuinely trying to push the message where-ever they think they can get away with it."
In full reality, could be a little from column A and a little from Column B, plus unnoticed variables C, D, and E, too.
non_radical_centrist
8hr ago
Does she earn a lot?
I believe so, I don't know her exact numbers but she happily took an OF career over a law career.
You think a good outcome for a young woman is being a 24 year old amateur porn actor/producer?
If she's making good money off of it, then yeah, all the power to her. I'm more concerned about the men who pay for it tbh, I'd expect most of her subscribers are lonely men who aren't able to get any consistent romance in real life so they pay to get a scrap of personalized sexual attention from her. But I think what I interpreted to be her proposed solution, that woman be more selective with who they sleep with and avoid hook ups with fuckboys(aka Chads in incel lingo) and that they hold out for relationships, would lead to better outcomes for men too.
non_radical_centrist
8hr ago
Why can't we? For the entirety of human history aged out hookers were likely to be STD ridden and have low human capital, that's no longer true.
non_radical_centrist
11hr ago
Why does purity have value? If you think it has an intrinsic value, why? If you think it only has value because it deeply shapes impressionable young women, then I think that's the exact argument the author makes.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
11hr ago
Not like this.
Well I did more than skim; I would ask you do the same before passing judgement on my analysis. There are some deeply troubling stories in her narrative that don't line up with what I know about the college world, most people I know met their life partner in college and it sounds like she didn't even give it a shot. There are many ways to have a fulfilling sex life, including exclusive monogamy, she was too fucked up by her upbringing to try any of them.
I mean she is doing porn for money now, something went wrong. None of the "sluts" I met in college are doing that, they are all happily married with a few kids, mostly with people they met in college.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13hr ago
My point exactly.
Despite any pope-knifing, AC2 was more controversial for its DRM than for its politics. This was objectively more reasonable than today’s squabbles.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18hr ago
Who is his audience? Covid warriors?
I predict less success than Johnson. The libertarian bloc surely benefited from running against a populist and a Clinton. A protest vote against the current choices isn’t going to look like RFK.
Seriously, I don’t know anyone IRL who supports him. That’s not true for the libertarians, who apparently adopt streets (?!) near me.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Back in the day, fathers and brothers would take it upon themselves to defend the woman's honor. If a man slept with a woman under false pretenses of a long-term relationship and then just abandoned her, they would beat the crap out of him, ostracize him, and possibly even kill him.
In goatfucker patriarchy, male family members would "defend a woman's honour" by killing her first. Whether they go on to deal with the man depends on the clan politics of the situation - punishing him is a nice-to-have for the standard honour-culture reasons, but not a social obligation. Farha Khalidi is Arab and claims to have been raised in an at least somewhat traditional Arab Muslim family, so she is seeing this through the lens of goatfucker patriarchy, not Christian purity culture. This is based on a (correct) assumption that getting into a situation where illicit sex can happen almost always involves mutual co-operation, and also on the practical issue that the no-longer-virginal woman is damaged goods regardless of fault and therefore her continued existence is embarrassing to the family.
The notorious Jeb Rubenfeld rape article points out that similar ideas exist in the English common law of rape - before feminism, "rape" was a carve-out for the small subset of illicit sex which was 100% the man's fault. Trad Christian culture solved this problem with shotgun weddings, which are not okay in a culture with strong arranged marriage norms. Modern Christian purity culture deals with it by denying the agency of teenage girls and allowing Daddy to lie to himself that she was mind-controlled into it by Chad's magic thunder cock, so punishing Chad is a sufficient solution.
non_radical_centrist
11hr ago
I'd agree with most of what you've said. But ultimately I think a better equilibrium is achievable than a Christian purity culture, although I probably couldn't convince you of that if you're operating off of Christians principles instead of utilitarianism. But I look at Christian purity culture and still see many failure ponits- e.g maritial rape, or to a lesser degree all the other ways a couple could get married and grow to dislike each other and would be much happier divorced. And I agree with you that the author overlooks the many women who do enjoy kink. Although I don't think she's saying they don't exist, just that many women are pressured into kink despite not enjoying it. And I think Christian purity culture also fails those women- if a girl would genuinely be happier engaging in BDSM with multiple different men a week, and those girls do exist I believe albeit they're rarer than some pop culture would lead you to believe, they should be free to pursue that. But I do think the sort of culture you paint would be my second choice. My first choice being a culture where everyone is aware of the biologically differences between men and women, and men are held accountable for sexual abuse but only sexual abuse that's real, and women are expected to exercise agency in identifying and seeking the outcomes that are actually best for her instead of just waiting for a hot man to ask her to hook up.
Women don't have agency.
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