domain:preview.redd.it
nomenym
11m ago
The problem is that normie progressives are increasingly becoming like moderate Muslims.
JarJarJedi
17m ago
eating chicken feet, dog meat, or any kind of organ meat
I'm not really surprised about the other things, but I've heard from many sources the dog thing is rather exaggerated and not that common or culturally entrenched. I mean, for me it's like one of the most known memes about Koreans but I always thought it's being quite far from the actual situation. Have I been wrong?
see nothing but excuses, equivocation, or using tragic events as an opportunity to dunk on his political opponents
This is fairly uncharitable given nearly all of these events Trump does have words of condemnation to say of the violence, so "nothing but" is inaccurate.
Dylann Roof
Cesar Sayok
Trump, speaking at the 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit at the White House, called the sending of the bombs a “despicable” act that has “no place in our country” and vowed that “swift and certain justice” would be delivered.
“We must never allow political violence to take root in America. We cannot let it happen. I am committed to do everything in my power as president to stop it and stop it now,” he said.
According to Wikipedia's summary of the events trump says this first:
My highest duty, as you know, as President, is to keep America safe. That's what we talk about. That's what we do. The federal government is conducting an aggressive investigation and we will find those responsible and we will bring them to justice. Hopefully very quickly. Any acts or threats of political violence are an attack on our democracy, itself. No nation can succeed that tolerates violence or the threat of violence as a method of political intimidation, coercion, or control. We all know that. Such conduct must be fiercely opposed and firmly prosecuted. We want all sides to come together in peace and harmony. We can do it. We can do it. We can do it. It will happen.
He starts attacking the media the day after. So I think your summary is uncharitable, unless the Wikipedia summary missed something Trump said before.
The Whitmer Kidnapping Plot
He does dunk on Whitmer. He also said he condemns violence and that he defends all Americans, even his opponents.
I'm going to stop going down the list here, but I'm sure I could find an example of Trump condemning the attack and disavowing political violence for each one of these. Yes, I realize this doesn't fit your extremely narrow criteria you defined, which I will question below, but it does provide some context for your summary of the events.
Name one instance where someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation. Name one.
Why is this the requirement? The issue a lot of people had with rhetoric from the left is there were a lot of people who wouldn't even condemn the killing of Kirk or of any political violence at all. At least Trump had the sense to condemn the events before he starts dunking on his political opponents. Is there one instance where someone on the left engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and the left or the media offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation? I'd also like to note trump dunking on his political opponents is not an endorsement or excuse for political violence.
I'm not interested in which side has more total incidents or who started it or any of that, because it honestly doesn't matter at this point.
Why does it not matter? None of these events are equivalent to the Kirk assassination. Nor are they equivalent to a literal expression of wanting to murder the other side. Nor are the reactions to these events equivalent. Has Trump been calling for the literal deaths of his opponents, especially by shooting them? It seems unfair to demand the absolute best behavior from Trump while simultaneously waiving off any bad behavior from his opponents by saying you're not interested. Can we at least demand the left match Trump's behavior of condemning political violence before dunking on their political opponents?
turn down the temperature
I'm not sure this type of messaging will resonate with the right at all. One side watched one of their own get murdered in cold blood and in the aftermath watch a pretty significant portion of the left actively cheer for it. Why is it up to the side being attacked to try to "turn down the temperature"? If one side has people calling for the literal death and murder of their opponents and the other side has Trump making jokes about his political opponents, which side has more heat?
There definitely is truth to the notion that many on the right seems not willing to want to reconcile with the left anymore. Most of this rhetoric was in response to the response to the left of Kirk's assassination. I do think long term if no solution is found this will only continue to divide America. That being said, willingness to reconcile has to come from both sides, with both sides being willing to addresses bad actors on their party.
insinuating that the ends justified the means; right-wing extremists were okay because they at least wanted the same things he did
Could I get a source for this? It does seem alarming for Trump to have said Right wing extremists are okay (assuming he's talking about violent actions from the far right are okay).
the Democrats didn't do a good job of stopping the 2020 protests (never mind Trump was president)
So when democrat states and cities were allowed to do what they want, was it a failure on Trump? What are your thoughts on Trump now using federal troops to enforce laws that these places refused to do? Was there anything Trump should've done to minimize the damages caused by the 2020 protests?
anti_dan
23m ago
Democrats don't want people to enjoy foreign food? Any time I go to DC all I get is swamped with claims that the locals (all Dems) know the best Ethiopian place in the world (of course all these places inevitably suck because they pick them based on it being a unique choice rather than good).
No no.
There is something I think that is adjacent to what you are talking about which is cultural appropriation, which is frowned upon. But that is basically me, a white guy, starting an Ethiopian food restaurant that is actually good and making profits from it. That is what would be frowned upon.
Calling them old church ladies is pretty unkind to old church ladies. My grandma is an old church lady. She frowns upon premarital sex and excessive drinking. I have found no real evidence that either of those activities are good in the long term. A progressive scold, from my perspective, is a sort of double negative. They frown upon scorning bad things, but rarely have strong opinions on what is actually good. An example is that they might be fit themselves, but are not open to criticizing fat people for being fat. Or they don't steal from retail establishments, but think criminal prosecution of retail theft is wrong.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
24m ago
How is AOC not a wokescold?
OliveTapenade
27m ago
It's honestly bizarre to me how much Klein is hated - people here and on the right loathe him, and anyone vaguely left or progressive loathes him, and all he's doing is sitting in the middle politely saying that Trump is bad and maybe Democrats would do better if they were less crazy and built more stuff.
I suppose he's positioned himself somewhere that picks a fight with both the loudest tribe on the right and the loudest tribe on the left.
JarJarJedi
30m ago
Alright, which specific people would you arrest.
All the rioters. The FBI was able to find every last person who walked around Capitol on Jan 6 - using the phone data, bank records, informants, whatever it takes. They spared absolutely no expense or effort. I want the same for leftist riots. I want all of them, but at least ONE of them. For literally NONE of them I have seen this level of zeal to get to the people who did it. The people who get prosecuted are some that were as stupid as set the actual police car on fire and be identified while doing it. If they did something lesser, or weren't identified immediately, nothing happened. I want the law enforcement to do their fricking jobs. That include finding the specific people. It's not my job, it's theirs. And these people aren't exactly hard to find, I think. They are probably trying to burn down the ICE building right this night.
You act as though there are tens of thousands of people out there who the police know committed crimes but who aren't being arrested for political reasons.
Yes. There are tens of thousands of people out there who we all know committed crimes - we have seen these crimes committed, sometimes in live stream by their own comrades - and they are not being arrested. Moreover, they are being supported, protected, financed and encouraged. By all their party from the Presidential candidate down. I want it to stop. This is not what happens in a healthy society. Some criminals may get away, sure. But having widespread violence for 10 years now and substantially nobody being prosecuted for them is s symptom demonstrating that the whole system is deeply sick. If I see the level of zeal, effort and results that we have seen on Jan 6 protestors deployed against the violent left, then I will believe it is starting to be fixed. And yes, I am acting as if I want this fixed. Because I do.
anon_
32m ago
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.
Well, they did drum out a sizable fraction of the jews, which is an enormous self-own for human capital. Especially given the range of folks replacing them.
anon_
34m ago
The Democratic Party and liberals engage in bulverism
There's no shortage of right wing (various flavors) psychoanalyzing liberals and progressives. I've seen some of it on this very site.
And while it does alienate some people, the prevalence of Bulverism suggests that it must be useful for something. If I had to pin it down, I would say it's a sophisticated way of booing the outgroup and maintaining an epistemic seal against them.
anti_dan
34m ago
All they have to do is check the box labeled “Ocasio-Cortez”. That’s it. Nothing can stop them if they decide to check the box.
That is the establishment. Has been for many years. There's nothing she says that Pelosi and Schumer do not, or isn't gospel at Harvard.
I you want actual left-populism you'd need Fetterman to make a magic-level recovery (likely he needs to be smarter and a better communicator than pre-stroke) and his wife to die in a mysterious boating accident. AOC is many things, she used to be hot, which was rare for a politician. She is loud in a fun way, which was rare for a politician before. But she has always marched lockstep with the establishment. Her primary challenge to Schumer, if it materializes, will be a "50 Stalins" primary, not an anti-establishment one. The critique will be that he is insufficiently Democrat, and of course it will not be true, but that is what it will be.
Kirk was going on record that Biden might deserve death for his actions.
You are making a six degrees of Kevin Bacon argument. Saying that Biden should be tried and executed is technically violence, but it's not the kind of violence that someone could listen to him and then do. When you connect that to something Trump said, you're connecting it to something he said seven years apart, and not even about Biden. You're also trying to frame a single statement from Trump as a gotcha. It isn't a single statement that does it, it's a lot of statements from a lot of people.
He made that statement knowing that the general narrative of MAGA is that the justice system is corrupt and protects the DC swamp.
Obviously the statement means "if we get in charge of the government, then we...." He was under no illusion that Biden could be tried and executed under the justice system as it existed in 2023. That still isn't encouraging vigilante justice, unles you think people are going to do a vigilante takeover of the justice system first.
I thought Klein had it mostly right there, and it reminds me of something Dean said on this site a while back, albeit about fictional characters. Do so-and-so feel like they want people like me in their lives? Not just tolerate me, not be civil or 'inclusive', but genuinely want people like me to be happy? Do they want me around?
It's a piece of advice that I would actually generalise to all people. Be the kind of person who is interested in other people. Be the kind of person who wants other people in his life. As this applies to gender, I'm reminded of Eneasz Brodski writing about the same - be the kind of man who genuinely likes women, and look for the kind of woman who genuinely likes men. That doesn't necessarily mean sexually or romantically (here I like Dean's examples of celibate or homosexual women who clearly care deeply about white men in their lives), but you need to like other people.
Obviously policy matters and this is not the one weird trick that will fix all the Democrats' problems, but insofar as attitude or culture can help, I would advise them to start by trying to like - to genuinely like and appreciate - the kind of people they want to vote for them. You cannot say, or even imply, "vote for me you pond scum". Start by training yourself to like them. It's possible. Openness and affection for people is something that can be practiced.
Jiro
43m ago
"Let's not be charitable to someone who thinks the children are little fascists" strikes me as a pretty fair norm.
JarJarJedi
43m ago
You know, one can gain a lot of wiggle space by alluding to secret thoughts of Trump and imagining what he really thinks based on tortured interpretations of some words (like, if he thinks destroying a monument to some person might be bad idea, that means he actually embraces the single worst thing they ever thought and those of everyone they ever associated with, because that's totally how people work). But when you go out and say Trump did not condemn white supremacists while he did, I personally heard him do that, and there's a lot of recordings of him doing it - the game is over. There's no longer any pretense that you are interested in finding any kind of truth or revealing anything in the vicinity of it. It's pure partisan manipulation, and can be only seen as such.
anti_dan
44m ago
I don't think he's done any soul searching, he's done whatever is intended to get people like yourself to think he's done a soul searching.
This is the fellow who ran the Journo-List after all. You should require extensive and overwhelming evidence to convince you that he is not a malicious actor, he has not provided such evidence.
Instead, he has a shtick, which is talking in PBS voice, which makes him sound reasonable as he says unreasonable things. The most recent example I am aware of is his podcast episode entitled something like "Trump's Blue Scare". In said episode he scares his listeners into thinking Trump is going to use Charlie Kirk's death to fire half the federal work force for being Democrats, round a bunch of people into cages, etc. What happened after Ezra recorded that pod? Jimmy Kimell got back on air, and ICE facilities were attacked by sniper fire. Basically the opposite of what he predicted. He's completely disconnected from reality in a way that makes me suspect everything he says is simply an attempt to cynically convince suburbanites that the Democrats are worth voting for.
OliveTapenade
46m ago
I could be in an echo chamber. But, it sure feels like the truth.
Surely all echo chambers feel like the truth? That's the function of an echo chamber.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
49m ago
Thanks, I'll take a look.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
50m ago
The Baroque Cycle
No, but I do like Neal Stephenson from Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, so I'll look into it. Thanks.
JarJarJedi
50m ago
The Whitmer Kidnapping Plot
The one FBI has constructed pretty much out of the whole cloth? There was not ever any danger, and Trump is completely free to condemn any Democrat politician - especially given as they actually tried to put him personally in jail on ridiculous charges, and did the same to many of his followers.
Paul Pelosi Attack
The whole story is beyond ridiculous, the guy is a full blown nutter, but somehow is made to be an ideological crusader for the right.
It was that unequivocally condemning a white supremacist who committed murder should be the easiest thing a president does
And he did it. And the Left still continues to lie for years that he called Nazis "fine people". Still lies about it. Because it doesn't matter what he does, he will always be accused of something, even if it's a complete fabrication.
This is probably the most he ever did in that his office issued a written statement condemning the attacks
And that's still not enough for you, somehow.
But when he actually got in front of a microphone he couldn't resist the opportunity to dunk on Tim Walz.
What, he should have made a solemn vow never to criticize Walz again? Did Walz made the same vow when Trump had been shot? Did any of the Dems do anything like that, or did they keep calling him Hitler and threat for democracy that must be removed by any means necessary?
As the years past the plight of the poor insurrectionists became a cause celebre on the right,
Because the whole "insurrectionist" thing was a total bullshit - unlike, for example, the kind people of Portland and Chicago right now, even the most unhinged of them never strayed beyond what has been seen many, many times in many, many leftist protests. Of course the right pushed back on this bullshit - which did not prevent the FBI from unleashing absolutely horryfiying suppression campaign, where every last grandma who stepped for a minute into the Capitol was prosecuted harsher than if she were a Mexican drug cartel boss. If anything was demonstrated by this very well, it's the fact the FBI actually can squash any group or organization they want like a tiny insect, and the fact that the violent left had been performing their activities largely unhindered, starting with 2017 inauguration riots, through Covid/Floyd violence wave and now to the massive insurrections in major Dem cities - is not happening because they lack the capacity to make it stop.
But how many things has Trump said that would have traditionally disqualified a presidential candidate?
Did he ever told anybody he would like to murder his opponent's kids? No? Well, bye.
samiam
52m ago
Since you asked for a source for when the right dropped the ball with regard to objective facts, back in 2012 George R.R. Martin commented about red tribe voter suppression. In response, someone in the red tribe claimed that “the Obama administrations lawsuit in Ohio is meant to prevent active duty servicemen from being allowed to vote early”. The right wasn’t even being told the same story the left was.
I think that what Mr. Jones said was disgusting and should torpedo his chances of election. You’re still overreacting.
And yet when I say something perfectly innocuous and reasonable like “blow it out your ass Janny Hotpockets, you DO IT FOR FREE”, suddenly that’s a three day ban. Not this time though, I’m sure you’ll extend me the same charity you extend to Mr. Jones.
JarJarJedi
1hr ago
none of the smarter MAGA people believe the narrative.
What's "the narrative"? I certainly think that Biden had been absolutely horrible. I don't have legal education enough to see if he could be plausible charged with treason (probably not successfully), but I think he certainly did not have mine or The People's interests in mind even in those rare moments he was able to keep anything in mind. And certainly whoever was running the autopen in his stead - which must be some kind of serious crime, though I again don't know how to properly call it - did not. Do I want Biden on the gallows? Shit no, what would it give me? I don't even really want him in jail, he probably wouldn't be able to even understand what's going on. But I wouldn't mind seeing in jail some of the people who were running the clown show. But much more important is to do everything possible to undo at least some of the harm that they inflicted on the country and the society. If believing all that makes me an "idiot" in your eyes, so be it, it's not my problem.
FarmReadyElephants
1hr ago
I started a wiki, Memory Whole (https://memorywhole.tv/), inspired by the idea that a lot of the analysis and events on twitter is useful to know, but too fleeting and drowned in noise.
I currently have signups enabled, but I have to manually add people to the editors group. I'm planning to do a big announcement soon
As long as you keep bringing it up it'll get stored in your memory more. If you said your mother's middle name every day for a week and every week for a month and every month for a year and every year for the rest of your life, you'd probably remember that too.
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