domain:worksinprogress.co
WandererintheWilderness
12m ago
If you're a fascist or fascistically inclined, you've got Hitler and Mussolini.
There's always Franco, though of course classifying him as a fascist is controversial. I think "Franco was alright" is somewhat more in the Overton window than saying the same about Mussolini and Hitler (to the extent people know anything about Franco in the first place).
2D3D
31m ago
We aren't elcor who need to prefix our emotional framing with our statements, we can simply read a statement in its isolation and make the value judgment. It should be pointed out that 'Great. I love Hitler' is about as anodyne a statement as 'Great. I love mac and cheese', meaning context is actually necessary to understand the totality of that statements value and renders the statement useless as a singular point of evidence. If you have to ask 'what did you mean when you said you love hitler' it means that 'i love hitler' has been so degraded as a totalizing phrase that you can't make any associated terms stick with it. That is entirely the lefts fault for making Everything I Don't Like Is Hitler.
RenOS
something is wrong
32m ago
Maybe healthcare just is a cursed industry.
Unfortunately, it is. High intrinsic costs, high legal costs, usually limited pool of customers. Afaik biomedical startups have the highest failure rates among all categories.
2rafa
33m ago
The Nazis were relatively gay and not particularly trad. Limited moves to deal with the red light districts in a few major German cities were halfhearted at best. Single women were in some cases even encouraged to become single mothers, women weren’t removed from the workplace, there were forms of proto-feminism that certainly clashed with traditional Christian views of a woman’s place, even as fertility was lauded (but in a technocratic kind of way, not necessarily a trad one). Economically although heavily supported by small petit bourgeois business owners, the nsdap increased the presence of the major German corporations in the economy and was broadly supportive of the major capital markets through 1939. Exhibits on entartete kunst existed in an uneasy relationship with plenty of relatively modernist sculpture, art and especially architecture that, a few short decades earlier, would definitely have been considered degenerate and abstract by critics.
2D3D
40m ago
If the turing test for denying wrongthink can be made by people on this board then the turing test isn't especially useful as a gauge, just like the actual turing test is just copeslop for teacher pets obsessed about their defining characteristic of intellect being supplanted by fancy calculators.
Also, how does one assess what other people are actually perceiving in their mental reward mechanism? This typical mindedness is especially uncharitable, and runs the serious risk of overinterpreting basic metaphor for much deeper meaning simply to fit ones own biases. Reading others as scared dumb animals simply because they find it unnecessary to explicitly verbalize the readily obvious sneering at the moral masters being shown as toothless is just contempt levelled from a different direction.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
47m ago
I'm doing a pretty bad job, but I'm at least more aware of how much I stare at my phone. I've started putting it down more and trying to pay attention to what's going on.
One helpful development is that my 1 year old has started toddling up to me and straight-up slapping my phone out my hand or grabbing it and tossing it aside before shoving a board book that she wants me to read right into my chest. Can't argue with that.
fluid_pride
53m ago
"Watermelon" means using the environment (green) to mask advocacy for communism (red). It's been a term since at least 1980. The newspaper pretending not to know this and hieing to the fainting couch is classing pearl-clutching.
2D3D
1hr ago
The overton window being shifted to 'everything icky is Nazi and that is a Bad Thing' is also being dressed up by extremely tired checkboxing of Umberto Ecos work. The language police must move in concert with the intellectual police in order to maintain the unfalsifiable moral high ground - you actually are nazi because according to this Smart Man what you are doing is in line with nazism!. That the intellectualism is being rejected is just further proof of the moral and intellectual superiority that the Not Nazi faction wishes to enjoy. Pity about the whole practical power translation bit, but thats not as important as self actualization.
2D3D
1hr ago
Progressives seem to have zero idea what blacks believe and actually talk like. Watching modern tv post 2015 and blacks are basically all Eloquent Respectable Middle Class White People But With Racial Grievances, like they're all Ta-Nahisi Coates or whoever the black sidekick was for the Iron Man series. At least in 2010 people knew what threats were, I was warned against bringing my 'hoodrat' hard-R speaking black friends to this 'diversity' party being held in brooklyn, which while ironic at least seemed to betray an understanding of empirical reality.
Ademonera
1hr ago
I’ll say this much. Someone I knew who was active in young republican circles met the current president far before his rise to power
Crowstep
1hr ago
It's a good thing we put at very few politicians on British banknotes - the row when feminists decide we need a woman and the only serious candidate is Margaret Thatcher would destroy confidence in the currency.
I'm not sure why they chose Jane Austen instead of Florence Nightingale. The woman who invented modern nursing vs a woman who wrote six books about thinly veiled author inserts finding rich husbands. My guess is that the civil servants who decide are more likely to be English Lit graduates than nurses.
Sunshine
1hr ago
Do you think that the passage of time just turns this real violence into meaningless "symbolic" violence when the impacts are still tangible and visible?
Yes. If nobody alive has any engagement with a subject beyond historical knowledge, then by definition it has been reduced to merely symbolic violence. Literally, the violence exists only in the symbols of our history textbooks. It no longer exists in real life.
Symbols do not justify murder, next question.
On that note, given that the primary justification for the creation of Israel was the holocaust, we may as well shut the entire enterprise down. At some point you have to let history go, after all.
Well, first of all, no it wasn't. Secondly, it wouldn't matter if it was.
The primary justification for the establishment of Mexico was to enslave the natives to mine gold and silver to send back to Spain. Now that they've stopped doing that, should they all just get on a boat and sail to Spain? No, of course not, that would be insane.
The justification for the ongoing existence of a nation is to provide a home for the people who live there, not whatever historic reason they had for establishing it however many hundreds of years ago.
This is the thing you're not getting: Revanchism is actually really stupid. The only things that matter are the things that are happening right now to people who are actually alive right now. That's why nobody in power takes the Palestinian cause seriously. Bitching and complaining about things that happened before you were born is not a sound basis for setting geopolitical policies that will affect the lives of millions or billions of people.
No, you just decide to arbitrarily pick the starting point of the conflict, so you can point to a reprisal and claim that it is an offensive strike.
No, you see, this is the crux of the issue: It doesn't matter whether it's a reprisal or an 'offensive strike'. Those are the same thing. Attacking innocent people to get revenge on their ethnic group is evil. Yes, really.
I categorically deny the right of anyone to commit murder to get revenge for things that happened before they were born. No exceptions. That is the line I'm drawing in the sand.
Actually, you appear to have misinterpreted me
No, I know what you meant. But I think the way you phrased it was telling in a way you perhaps didn't consciously intend.
Are you going to sit here and claim that Israel has never committed any war crimes prior to October 7th?
No, of course not.
The USA has also committed lots of war crimes. If, the morning after 9/11, a bunch of people staged protests against the US, it wouldn't be untrue for them to defend the decision to do so on the grounds that, while the US may have been the victim of a horrendous terror attack the day before, that doesn't negate the fact that they have committed war crimes in the past. And yet, I can't help but feel that the kinds of people who would protest against a country the morning after it has suffered a terrorist attack are motivated more by hatred of that country (and the people committing terror attacks against it) than by a desire to raise awareness of war crimes.
If this particular analogy doesn't achieve the desired effect - supposing the morning after the tsunami in Japan in 2011 in which thousands of Japanese people were killed, I immediately staged a protest against Japan in which I made repeated calls to "globalise the anti-Japan resistance". Somebody points out to me that this is a bit tasteless considering that this country has suffered a horrendous tragedy literally the day before. I defend myself by pointing out that Japan has committed war crimes in the past. This is unassailably true (Nanjing, Unit 731). And yet, wouldn't the timing rather suggest to you that I'm motivated more by hatred of Japanese people than by an innocent desire to raise awareness of Japanese atrocities?
There are a fair few people who protest against the fact that Israel exists at all, but those are usually the ultra orthodox jews who believe that the creation of the Israeli state is in violation of the Torah.
I don't believe that the majority of people opposed to the very existence of Israel are Orthodox Jews. Moreover, I don't believe that you believe it either.
For example, an outright majority of young Britons think Israel should not exist. A different poll of the same age group found twenty-one percent say it does not have the right to exist. A majority of young Americans believe that Israel should be "ended" and given to the Palestinians. Combining half of young Britons and half of young Americans gives you 18 million people, which is already significantly more than the total population of Jews in the entire world (never mind the subset of those who are Orthodox). And that's just two countries. Do you really think that if I surveyed literally any Arab country "does Israel have a right to exist?", a majority of respondents would agree with me?
If you're as committed an anti-Zionist as you say and you've been to as many of these protests as you claim, I'm extremely confident that you're familiar with the saying "Israel does not have a right to exist", or descriptions of Israel as an illegitimate "made-up" state and so on. I'm equally confident that when you heard people making such proclamations, 100% of the people who did so were not Orthodox Jews. I don't believe that you believe what you're claiming.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2hr ago
It has been 15 years since I have had occasion to use this.
Are you saying no taxpayer funding is involved in declaring National Penguin Day, or are you claiming that taxes aren't collected by threat of violence? Also if you wouldn't mind providing your definition of violence. I'm using the first one in Merriam-Webster
1 a: the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy
It's very rarely "just a joke" in the sense that it has other meanings and functions. It is very often just a joke in the sense that the accusations tossed at the people making the joke are false, and the accuser usually knows that in advance.
daguerrean
2hr ago
This is libertarian nonsense. Words have meaning, and declaring Penguin Day is not violence. This is akin to redefining White Supremacy to include punctuality. Just because anyone with sufficient intellect can play 7 degrees of [violence/White supremacy/Kevin Bacon] doesn’t make it so.
This is very similar in form to the “everything is political” crowd. Often on reddit, if someone complains about politics in X, some oh-so-smart objector will point out that everything is political, even a painting of a flower is political (perhaps it is conservative because it upholds traditional notions of beauty or the status quo or is silent on leftist social issues, perhaps it is environmentalist because it presents nature as beautiful). And in some abstract sense I accept that a clever person can extract a political meaning from any text/object/artwork by sufficient mental gymnastics. But all this really does is deprive us of a word. If we are to say that everything is political, then what word do we have to distinguish between a straight up campaign ad for Trump and a painting of a flower. Even if sufficient efforts can divine a political meaning in both there is surely some real meaningful difference in the strength, obviousness, legibility or centrality of that political message, and we could use a word to express that.
Similarly here there is surely a useful difference in violence between punching a guy in the face and Penguin Day that is useful to talk about, and twisting the word violence into contortions just replaces a useful definition of the word with a useless definition of the word. This is only popular with Libertarians because they are the only people for whom the new definition is useful. They want to import the bad scary evilconnotation of violence to new territory by a bit of trickery. They think if they can redefine scary bad feeling word to encompass any government action no matter how benign it will trick people into applying this old emotional association (scary, bad, evil) onto the new definition (any govt action). Woke people redefining White Supremacy are trying the exact same trick
In general a good rule of thumb is this: if someone appears to be using a very nonstandard definition of a word they are almost certainly trying to manipulate you dishonestly.
zoink
3hr ago
This is such a bizarre argument, particularly for one I've seen repeated again and again in different variations with negligible pushback.
It gets negligible pushback in places like The Motte because beyond a certain level of political-philosophical acumen, it becomes ubiquitously understood as true. Even doing a study, declaring National Northern Hemispheric Penguin Day, ordering lunch, done on taxpayer time with taxpayer-funded resources. And taxes are backed by threat of violence. Normies push back on this understanding because they attach normative baggage to violence. Virtually no one is a pacifist; we're all cool with violence. The actual debate is not around whether political action is backed by violence, it's when the violence is legitimate.
ulyssessword
3hr ago
Wait a second. Doesn't Bitcoin have a record of every transaction ever? Couldn't you just look at the blockchain to see when you got your coins?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
3hr ago
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
3hr ago
You have people like Daryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson who may not be full-on sieg heiling but look an awful lot like they think the Nazis were directionally correct about maintaining national purity.
Is this just your uncharitable interpretation of them saying things like "hey maybe we don't need a million immigrants from poor countries who have very different cultures than ours and who don't share our values" or do they actually talk about racial or "national purity?" People seem to get their panties in a bunch because these two guys don't genuflect to the WW2 mythos that has been handed down to the American public through Hollywood and high school history class, but I'm not convinced that saying something like "actually WW2 was more complicated that just Good Guys vs Bad Guys" is in any way remotely near "full-on sieg heiling."
falling-star
3hr ago
My startup may or may not be falling apart. We've been completely out of money for a bit, and the last fund raise process is almost over with minimal results. We're only waiting to hear back from a few more funds. Darkly funny this all happened right after we signed multiple contracts worth tens of millions. Maybe healthcare just is a cursed industry.
I have an idea for another business. I'm pretty much out of money though. I guess some sort of part time or short term job is in order.
Been losing a lot of progress at the gym while dealing with this. I'm doing my best to damage control the decline.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
3hr ago
I would say the quoted text is a bad reason to be against gay marriage. You can just let gays get married and then not trans the kids. He is saying it's bad to allow [fine thing] because its in the same direction as [worse thing]. What am I missing?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
Maybe we could start a left-wing group chat called "The Young Turks", named in honor of the group behind the Armenian genocide. Nah, that'd be too obviously bait.
/s
Yeah, as said it was more a random idea I had in the moment; I wouldn't expect it to work, and asked more for the purpose of finding out why it is wrong.
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