FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
There's been a fair amount of discussion of America's military aid to Ukraine, and no few condemnations of those of us who have opposed that aid. I am informed, in fact, that this forum is overrun with Russian Propaganda, such that some no longer wish to participate. This is lamentable if true, so I thought it might help to prompt some elaboration of the pro-Ukraine case.
People who support aid to Ukraine, in whatever form, suppose that you personally are given complete control over the US government, and can set policy however you wish. What would your answers be to the following questions?
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How much aid would you provide? Weapons? Money? No-Fly Zone? Air support? Troops on the ground? Nuclear umbrella? Something else?
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What is the end-state your policy is aiming for? A ceasefire? Deter subsequent Russian invasion? Restoration of Ukraine's original borders? The Russian army destroyed? Putin deposed? Russia broken up? Something else?
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Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on the Ukraine war are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
...Reading comments from those arguing for Ukraine, I've noted from the start that many of the arguments presented in favor of aid appear to be mutually-exclusive. In this most recent discussion, I've seen some people arguing that we should be sending in US or NATO troops, and other people arguing that of course no US or NATO troops are needed and that sending them would be obviously crazy. This is a natural consequence of many people arguing many points of view in one forum, but it seems helpful for people to lay out their own views when possible; often, these positions are just stated as though they should be obviously true.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
27d ago
The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control. Then 9/11 happened, and he wasted trillions wandering our military through the middle east.
Now the debt is very bad, and people are once more raising the banner of Fiscal Responsibility. Is it in Republicans' interest to enforce "fiscal responsibility", and if so, how? If we were to seriously cut spending and raise taxes, as people claim the fiscal situation demands, this would almost certainly cost us the next election. In the best possible case that I can see, we would be expending our political power to create stable economic conditions for our opponents to then rule. The more likely case would be us expending our political power to ameliorate spending that our opponents increase to gain power for themselves, resulting in a much shakier economy and our complete political irrelevance.
Why not offer the Fiscal Responsibility mantel to the Democrats? The economy is very complicated after all, and they are at this point clearly the party of Expert Opinion: who better to determine and implement the hard-nosed measures necessary to right our economic vessel? When I was younger, the obvious rejoinder would have been that they would do a bad job of it and disaster would result, but it seems to me that we have not done all that much better, and disaster seems likely in any case. If disaster cannot be meaningfully avoided, then why expend limited resources demanded by a serious political conflict on an unfixable resource-sink of a problem? What's the actual plan, here?
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a full pardon for U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry.
Perry was convicted last year of murder in the shooting death of Garrett Foster, a USAF veteran and BLM protestor. Foster had attended a downtown Austin protest armed with an AK-pattern rifle, and joined his fellow protestors in illegally barricading the street. Perry's car was halted by the barricade, Foster approached the driver's side door, rifle in hand, and Perry shot him four times from a range of roughly 18 inches, fatally wounding him. Police reported that Foster's rifle was recovered with an empty chamber and the safety on.
Perry claimed that the shooting was self defense, that the protestors swarmed his vehicle, and that Foster advanced on him and pointed his rifle at him, presenting an immediate lethal threat. Foster's fellow protestors claimed that Foster did not point his rifle at Perry, and that the shooting was unprovoked. They pointed to posts made by Perry on social media, expressing hostility toward BLM protestors and discussing armed self-defense against them, and claimed that Perry intentionally crashed into the crowd of protestors to provoke an incident. For his part, Foster was interviewed just prior to the shooting, and likewise expressed hostility toward those opposed to the BLM cause and at least some desire to "use" his rifle.
This incident was one of a number of claimed self-defense shootings that occurred during the BLM riots, and we've previously discussed the clear tribal split in how that worked out for them, despite, in most cases, clear-cut video evidence for or against their claims. The case against Perry was actually better than most of the Reds, in that the video available was far less clear about what actually happened. As with the other Red cases, the state came down like a ton of bricks. An Austin jury found Perry guilty of murder, and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
Unlike the other cases, this one happened in Texas, and before the trial had completed, support for Perry was strong and growing. That support resulted in Governor Abbott referring Perry's case to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. A year later, the board returned a unanimous recommendation for a pardon to be granted. Abbott has now granted that pardon, and Perry is a free man, with his full civil rights restored to him. He has spent a little more than a year in prison, and his military career has been destroyed, but he is no longer in jail and no longer a felon.
So, now what?
It seems to me that there's a lot of fruitful avenues of discussion here. Was the shooting legitimate self-defense? To what degree did the protestors' tactics of illegally barricading streets, widespread throughout the Floyd riots and a recurring prelude to tragedy, bear responsibility for the outcome? How should we interpret Perry's comments prior to the shooting, or Foster's for that matter?
Two points seem most salient to me.
First, this case is a good demonstration of how the Culture War only rewards escalation, and degrades all pretensions to impartiality. I do not believe that anyone, on either side, is actually looking at this case in isolation and attempting to apply the rules as written as straightforwardly as possible. For both Blues and Reds, narrative trumps any set of particular facts. No significant portion of Blues are ever going to accept Reds killing Blues as legitimate, no matter what the facts are. Whatever portion of Reds might be willing to agree that Reds killing Blues in self-defense might have been illegitimate appears to be trending downward.
Second, this does not seem to be an example of the process working as intended. If the goal of our justice system is to settle such issues, it seems to have failed here. Red Tribe did not accept Perry's conviction as legitimate, and Blue Tribe has not accepted his pardon as legitimate. From a rules-based perspective, the pardon and the conviction are equally valid, but the results in terms of perceived legitimacy are indistinguishable from "who, whom". As I've pointed out many times before, rules-based systems require trust that the rules are fair to operate. That trust is evidently gone.
This is what we refer to in the business as a "bad sign".
As many of you know, I am not a Rationalist. My skepticism of Rationalism emerges in a variety of ways, but none are more striking than the feeling of bizarre disconnect when observing the Rationalist tendency to focus on systems, on rules, on formal structures as though they were some durable expression of baseline reality, as though they were dispositive in and of themselves. "well, this is the rule, so this should be the outcome".
This being the Culture War thread, a lot of what we discuss here orbits around questions of Law, procedure, or organizational norms. The problem is that law is not dispositive. It is not the motive power driving our society, or even the steering wheel. In some cases it is the bumper sticker, and in others it is the exhaust. In most ways relevant to our discussions here, it simply does not matter, and if you cannot wrap your head around this, I contend that you fundamentally misunderstand the Culture War itself.
Today's example, via the National Review:
Virginia Democrat to Introduce Bill to Prosecute Parents Who Refuse to Treat Child as Opposite Sex
Virginia Democratic delegate Elizabeth Guzman is seeking to introduce legislation that would hold parents criminally liable for refusing to treat their children as a different sex from the one they were born into. The legislation, which Guzman plans to introduce in Virginia’s upcoming legislative session, would expand the definition of child abuse so that parents could be charged with a felony or misdemeanor for refusing to honor their child’s request to be treated as the opposite sex.
“If the child shares with those mandated reporters, what they are going through, we are talking about not only physical abuse or mental abuse, what the job of that mandated reporter is to inform Child Protective Services (CPS),” Guzman told 7News. “That’s how everybody gets involved. There’s also an investigation in place that is not only from a social worker but there’s also a police investigation before we make the decision that there is going to be a CPS charge.”
The move comes in response to Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s latest policy initiatives, which empower parents to exercise control over whether and how children transition gender in school, as well as a speech he gave at a “parents matter” rally back at the beginning of the school year. “They think parents have no right to know what your child is discussing with their teacher or counselor,” Youngkin said.
Sing it with me, all together now: The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. From the Blue perspective, legally redefining Red Tribe parenting as child abuse is certainly a pretty good way to hurt the outgroup, and options for retaliation are limited and costly. The algorithm is working! And for those who might have concerns, never fear: Guzman's got you covered.
When asked by the local reporter whether she isn’t “criminalizing parents” as many Republicans argue, Guzman answered unequivocally.
“No, it’s not. It’s educating parents because the law tells you the do’s and don’ts,” Guzman answered. “So this law is telling you do not abuse your children because they are LGBTQ.” Guzman was similarly unwavering in her thoughts about whether such an approach violated free speech or religious freedom. “The Bible says to accept everyone for who they are. So that’s what I tell them when they asked me that question, and that’s what I will continue to tell people.”
...I'd love to blame Blue ideology for that last paragraph's worth of mealy-mouthed horseshit, but honestly, I think we all can recognize that Normies shall inevitably Norm. Still, not great. I didn't bother to hunt down her full statement; let's tell ourselves she actually laid out a thoughtful argument about how society requires compromises and hard choices, gestured at trans suicide rates and some impeccably replicated studies showing that confirmed gender identity leads to better outcomes, and then the mean ol' National Review edited all that out to make her sound like a [DATA EXPUNGED] ...less ...persuasive person. Maybe that's even true! Let's not check.
Many Democratic lawmakers and liberal activists have criticized Youngkin’s recently announced education policy changes. Most prominently, the new policies prohibit teachers from using personal pronouns “not on a student’s official records.” They also reverse a previous state policy “allowing students to use bathrooms that align with their preferred gender.”
Last month, students across nearly 100 schools staged walkout protests across the state to criticize Governor Youngkin’s policies and defend transgender rights.
...It bears mentioning that those student walkouts were almost certainly partisan political actions organized by public employees. Red Tribe doesn't get to do student activism in public schools, and it certainly doesn't get to use schoolchildren as political props. This is in fact a perfect example of why the actions they're protesting are needed... but I digress.
This proposed law doesn't matter. It doesn't matter even a little bit, and not just because it hasn't passed yet. It's very clearly a violation of religious freedom so it should be flatly unconstitutional, but of course the Constitution doesn't matter either. None of the surrounding legal, procedural, or policy questions matter. None of it matters. Not even a little bit. These things aren't the engine. They aren't the steering wheel. They're the bumper stickers, and they're the exhaust. They are the effect, not the cause. If this law is struck down, another will replace it. If this law passes, the core issue will not be resolved. The Constitution should prevent this, but it won't, nor would amendments help.
The cause is the Tribes, Blue and Red, and their manifestly incompatible values. Blues/Reds do not Like Reds/Blues. Contrary to arguments presented here for years, we do not share values, moral intuitions, a workable understanding of The Good. The Culture War is not about mistakes, and people are not going to come to their senses any minute now and realize all this was just a whole heap of silly goosery. The Culture War is a conflict. We cannot all get along, because we have lost the fundamental capacity to agree on what "getting along" consists of. We can't agree on what constitutes murder, rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, what constitutes crime, what constitutes Justice. These are not the sort of disagreements a society can have, long term. Something has to give, and probably a lot of somethings.
Laws, norms, procedures, all of those are well downstream of Culture, of social reality. You need everyone more or less on the same page before you can even attempt law; trying to keep law together in the face of mutual values incoherence is... well, it's real stupid, and it's never going to work even a little bit. If you can't get people to agree on central definitions of murder and child abuse, how the Sweet Satan do you expect to run a justice system, a legal system, an election system, much less adjudicate free speech?
This law isn't being proposed because it solves a problem. It's being proposed because Blues hate Reds and want to harm them. That tribal hatred, by no means unique in its character and very much reciprocated by Reds, wants to Do Something About The Bad People. If we held the population constant and completely replaced our entire political system, someone very like this woman would be proposing some action roughly analogous to this law, because that is how tribal hatred works. The hatred itself is what matters; the specific grooves and canals it is channeled through, the details of procedure and custom, norms and institutional traditions, codified policies and so on are irrelevant. This concentrated, willfully malignant essence of humanity, cannot be constrained by ink on paper or dusty tradition. It finds a way. You are not going to prevent that by asking it politely to please not.
This event is not surprising, and as some of you are no doubt aware, none of what I've written above is even close to novel. I and others were predicting shit like this as far back as early 2016. If you couldn't, and especially if you are one of the OG Blues or Moderates who scoffed or harrumphed when we predicted it, well, is this sufficient to demonstrate the point?
A brief coda, if you'll allow me. A month or two back, we had an excellent thread about drag, kids, and the slur "groomer". A lot of the blues and moderates argued that "groomer" means someone actually trying to prep a kid for sex with themselves or a specific other person, and so applying it to teachers and other authority figures was an instance of The Worst Argument in The World, and so should be frowned on.
I disagree. "Groomer", as I understand it, is a person who's making a covert attempt to directly modify a kid's sexuality in unhealthy ways. I understand that many people here disagree with this definition, but there's something you should understand in turn: when people like me use the term "groomer", we are not saying "I really don't like this person." We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.
Perhaps you find that irrational, inexplicable. After all, they're not breaking the law, right?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I think the Justices are smart enough to understand that their authority is a product of social consensus, not anything innately derivative of their position. They understand that since Conservatives approached a solid majority on the Court Blue Tribe has pivoted to attacking the court's foundational social consensus directly with calls for court packing, smearing of justices and calls for their impeachment, and so on. They appear to be attempting to balance exercise of their power with maintenance of that power. I'm skeptical that such a balance is possible, but they've certainly pushed harder toward exercise than I expected, so I imagine we'll see.
I still do not expect the Court's foundations to survive long-term; there is no reason for Reds to continue investing faith in them if they cannot deliver, and there is no way for them to deliver without Blues killing the court. This realization undermines the social consensus foundation from the Red side, and we converge on both sides admitting more or less openly that the Court is only legitimate when it delivers their specific preferred outcomes, which is isomorphic to the court having no legitimacy at all.
The entire point of a Supreme Court is to settle tribal conflict. The court can't reliably perform that purpose now, and its ability will only further diminish over time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
HBDers are ideological descendants of the Eugenics movement, which was as progressive as it gets. The Jim Crow South did not invent racism against Africans, and it did not have a monopoly on it in its own time. That being said, I am pretty sure the Jim Crow South did have a fair amount of ideological cross-pollination with the racialist end of the Progressive movement.
I definately do not want to imply that you or any other blue here is a pedophile. I do not believe I or @naraburns has claimed that you or any other blue here is a pedophile. I have never understood the word "groomer" to be a synonym for pedophile, and in fact it is not a synonym for pedophile. It is explicitly a term for people who violate trust in an attempt to harmfully and secretly modify children's sexuality. Up until very recently, the only people who would even dream of doing that were in fact pedophiles, but it's the abuse of trust and the clandestine modification that's being objected to, not sex with kids. If the consernation is over percieved equivocation in language, allow me to be the first to apologize.
If you and others object to this so strongly, because suddenly conversation becomes impossible if one uses terms in a specific and unambiguous way that you don't agree with, let's not allow it to interfere with our communication. Give me a word. Give me a word and I will use it. you pick the fucking word to encapsulate "a person who is motivated to grossly abuse my trust and their authority in an attempt to fuck with my child's head, damaging their sexuality and their sanity, in secret and against my expressed wishes, to a degree that makes keeping them and anyone who associates with or supports them as far away from anyone I care about as possible", and scout's honor I will use that word unfailingly from now on. I will even translate quotes from others into that word, because I sincerely believe that is the idea most of them are trying to communicate.
This offer is open to any blue here. Pick the word that you think fairly encapsulates the above concept, and you will never hear "groomer" from me again. Make it as anodyne as you like, as anodyne as possible; it will pick up all the negative affect it needs in very short order.
(8 letters or less please for convenience, please and thank you.)
Slow morning, eh?
For some time now, we've been discussing the implications of Hunter Biden's laptop, and whether the information it contained was relevant to our political system. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we know that the FBI knew about the laptop's contents roughly a year in advance of the 2020 election, and used its official access with the major social media companies to prepare their censors to perceive the story as Russian disinformation. Then when the story actually broke in the press, the FBI successfully pushed the social media companies to censor it.
From the laptop information itself, we know that for quite a while now, Hunter Biden has been engaged in various grifts, selling purported access to his father in exchange for lucrative sinecures with various foreign corporations, selling "art" for amusingly inflated values, and so on. The supposition on the Red side has been that this grift implicated Biden as well, and Trump's attempts to have that theory investigated led directly to his first impeachment. The laptop emails backed this story with evidence, with Hunter referencing how "the big guy" was getting a significant cut of his grift money, and one of his associates confirming that "the big guy" was in fact Joe Biden.
Blues on the other hand claimed that there was no reason to suppose any corruption was happening. While Hunter was obviously a junkie fuckup grifter, and was obviously making his money claiming to peddle influence, there was no evidence of actual payments going to Joe, so this was all meaningless. My impression of the previous threads is that even those here who thought Hunter was paying Joe, assumed that there would be no formal exchange of money, but rather quid-pro-quo.
Now it appears that Hunter Biden has been paying rent to live in his father's residence in Delaware, to the tune of $49,901 per month. For completeness' sake, it must be mentioned that this is the same residence where Joe was found to be improperly storing classified documents, alongside his Corvette. While it seems doubtful that the files would be of interest to a junkie who prospers by peddling influence for foreign corporations, it's a detail that does add a touch of piquancy to the overall narrative.
So this appears to me to be pretty open-and-shut. Joe Biden is corrupt, selling influence to foreign corporations in China and Eastern Europe through his son Hunter. Hunter collects the money, then kicks a large slice back to Joe through rent, and quite possibly other, yet undiscovered "repayments". Trump was impeached when he attempted to have these activities investigated, while the FBI sat on the information they were given, and engaged in a protracted disinformation and censorship campaign to keep that information from leaking elsewhere. That information does in fact lead to provable direct payments from Hunter to Biden.
Impeachment when?
[EDIT] - ...Or perhaps not! @firmamenti points out that while Hunter is apparently living in the residence and renting an office space for 50k, the office space is not specified to be in the residence, and very well could be an entirely separate location entirely unconnected to Biden. The hunt continues...
Why not?
Trump is perhaps the most hated man in America. He spent four years operating at the pinnacle of global power, an environment strewn with what are purported to be impartial legal tripwires placed to hinder abuses of power. He's incompetent and sloppy, arrogant, astonishingly vain, and defined by his contempt for anything that blocks his personal ambitions.
The people now indicting him achieved office through a population dozens of millions strong that uniformly believes that he's Satan incarnate, a criminal, a dangerous megalomaniac, a giant retarded toddler armed with a machine gun. They believe that his election was manifest evidence that our political system is deeply, perhaps irreparably broken. They see his Presidency as a disaster that needs to be cleaned up and then prevented from ever recurring. And again, he spent four years being, at the absolute best, sloppy and incompetent in an environment that purportedly is supposed to demand precision on pain of serious legal consequences.
Why not indict him, and jail him too while they're at it? How could doing so possibly be a bad idea? We're a nation of laws, right? He at least plausibly broke them, right? This is what the system does, these are the rules we all agreed to, what possible room could there be for complaint? And sure, there are some people, maybe even a lot of people who are too mind-killed to accept reality, and they're going to complain anyway. But what are they going to do about it?
Nothing, right?
The people doing this have the all the cards. They won the election, the bureaucracy is on-side, half the nation's voters have been screaming for this for four years. This is what power is for, to get good things done even when they're hard, even when bad people stand in the way! How could they not do exactly this, exactly now? If the bad people can't get it through their heads that they've fucking lost, then it becomes necessary to hammer the point, repeatedly and with vigor, until it finally sinks in. If they aren't getting it, then that means you aren't hammering hard enough. At some point in the escalation curve, they'll have to cave, won't they? That's how it works, isn't it? What possible reason could be imagined for doing anything else?
And if such a reason can't be imagined, why would you expect anything other than exactly this?
@ymeskhout has written a couple of posts recently discussing the treatment of the Jan 6th defendants, a sequel of sorts to his series of posts on the evidence and court cases surrounding the Red Tribe accusations of election fraud in the 2020 election.
These post has gotten a bunch of responses raising a variety of objections to Jan 6th, arguing for violations of symmetry based on other events, questions about fairness, questions about framing, and so on. The objection that immediately springs to mind, for me, is that the posts are narrowly focusing on specific questions where the facts are on their side, in a bid to minimize surface areas to relevant counter-arguments relating to the Jan 6th riot in general. Certainly, I have encountered similar tactics by others in the past, and previous conversations with the OP have left me with the clear impression that they're a member of my outgroup.
So I think it's useful to state, as clearly as possible, that the general thesis I've just laid out is dead wrong.
Rumor-mongering is an obvious failure mode for political discussion. A lot of different people raise a lot of different arguments, present a variety of different facts, these cross-pollinate, and people walk away with an erroneous impression of facts. Then someone tries to correct the record, a whole bunch of people raise a whole bunch of new arguments, and people walk away with their erroneous impression strengthened, not weakened. This is a very easy problem to fall into, especially if you are good enough at rhetoric and arguments to self-persuade. Normal argument effects dig you in, and bias inclines you to think worse of the people arguing against you.
This effect combines poorly with another of the basic failure modes of political discussion that shows up here with some regularity: speculating and theorizing rather than simply checking facts. This allows one to spin out "evidence" ad hoc to support a position that can turn out to be entirely spurious. It is woeful to see an event commented here, and then a whole tree of a hundred comments going back and forth on some speculation, followed by a five-comment thread where someone points out an easily verifiable fact that renders the entire previous discussion and all the arguments in it completely pointless. More woeful is the realization that the entirely-fictional hundred-comment-thread did vastly more to modify peoples' internal model than the factual disproof. The third or forth time one sees this, one begins to contemplate serious drinking. Since examples are always helpful in driving a point home, here's an example of me confidently talking out my hindparts.
It is extremely important to be able to notice when you're wrong. It's important personally, and it's doubly important for a community like this one. Often, the people who are the best at pointing out that you're wrong are going to be people you disagree strongly with, and maybe don't like very much. The ability to point out error is one of the main reasons such people are so valuable to have around.
Here's what I've seen so far in the recent Jan 6th threads:
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@ymeshkhout was presented with a number of specific arguments about Jan 6th. Many of these arguments consisted of bald assertions, absent supporting evidence or even links.
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They did some googling, looked at the evidence available for the specific events named, and found that it absolutely did not match the claims being made.
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They wrote up a calm, unfailingly polite post detailing the claims, who made them, and what the actual evidence was, with copious links.
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If anyone actually conceded that their claims were false, I didn't see it. What I did see was a flurry of additional claims, some thankfully including links at least.
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They then wrote up a follow-up post taking apart a number of the additional items raised.
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the follow-up post appears to mainly be responded to by more claims, many of them highly tangential to the topic at hand.
I am no stranger to arguing with bad-faith bullshit. This is not what bad-faith bullshit looks like. This is, near as I can tell, what being wrong looks like. The proper response to that is to admit it and take your lumps like a grownup. If you can't do that, if you don't actually value seeing misconceptions corrected, you're acting like a jackass, and ymeskhout is doing this place a tremendous service to make that fact as obvious as possible, with bonus points for style.
I am fairly confident that both Jan 6th and the 2020 election were some degree of bullshit in meaningful, provable ways. Arguing it would take a fair amount of effort, effort that I have not chosen to spend, and so it behooves me to admit that it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, and not to expect other people to give my gut feelings any consideration. It's an argument I want to make, but it's an argument I cannot actually back up, and so it's not an argument I should expect others to take seriously.
To the extent that I think that the picture ymeskhout is presenting is false, the proper response is to put together a detailed argument, backed by the best supporting evidence I can dig up, on exactly how and why he's unambiguously wrong. Until then, I should accept that my point of view is just, like, an opinion man. That's my understanding of how this place works, and why it's valuable. In the meantime, the next time you see someone talking about mistreatment of Jan 6th defendants, a reasonable starting question might be "what's your evidence of this?"
Hell, that's a pretty good practice generally, isn't it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
It seems to me that you have failed to understand the current state of discourse in Conservative Christian circles, and have instead proceeded with basing your reasoning off cached data from a quarter-century ago.
The fundamental difference that you appear to have missed is that Christians lost these arguments decisively around the turn of the century, and their opponents got their way. As a result, Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society. The powers of compulsion no longer rest within our hands, and so we can focus on persuasion instead. And the worse Progressivism makes things, the more persuasive our arguments get.
But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens. Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.
I wrote up a post late last week about Trump ordering airstrikes against Iran's major nuclear facilities. Consider this a follow-up:
CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE! It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE (in approximately 6 hours from now, when Israel and Iran have wound down and completed their in progress, final missions!), for 12 hours, at which point the War will be considered, ENDED! Officially, Iran will start the CEASEFIRE and, upon the 12th Hour, Israel will start the CEASEFIRE and, upon the 24th Hour, an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR will be saluted by the World. During each CEASEFIRE, the other side will remain PEACEFUL and RESPECTFUL. On the assumption that everything works as it should, which it will, I would like to congratulate both Countries, Israel and Iran, on having the Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence to end, what should be called, “THE 12 DAY WAR.” This is a War that could have gone on for years, and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn’t, and never will! God bless Israel, God bless Iran, God bless the Middle East, God bless the United States of America, and GOD BLESS THE WORLD!
DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
On the one hand, this seems literally incredible. On the other hand, Vance is on TV right now answering questions about the process, so they're committed to the bit, and it would be a rather strange thing to lie about. On reflection, it's possible that both belligerents have taken enough punishment that they're ready to call it a draw.
If this is not real, it's going to be about as humiliating as imaginable for the administration. If it is real, on the other hand, it's going to throw a lot of the discussion over the last few weeks, and particularly since the airstrikes, into fairly sharp relief. I'm particularly interested to discuss Nick Fuentes's remarkable predictive accuracy with regards to this new development.
There's been some discussion lately about whether it is better, on breaking events, to hold one's tongue and wait for further developments, or start talking immediately. Many have argued that it's better to wait. I disagree: When one of these things happens, and we want to talk about it, and we experience the nervousness that we might be making fools of ourselves if what we say is proven wrong by revelations tomorrow morning, in that moment we have an opportunity to be far closer to honesty, with others and with ourselves, than at any other time throughout the year. Uncertainty is the prerequisite for charity, and these moments of uncertainty force us to realize that we ourselves can, in fact, be wrong. People should be more open to talking about breaking news, not because it allows for hotter takes, but because it gives one skin in the game and favors rational analysis over sophistry. It is good for us all to call the coin before it has landed.
In that spirit: I think this is real. I think Iran and Israel have in fact agreed to a ceasefire and to an end to the war, and I think there's a high probability they'll stick to it. I think the strikes actually worked, and Iran's nuclear program has in fact been pretty thoroughly wrecked, with their timetable set back by, say, more than five years.
If this is what it appears to be, it's a hell of a thing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
From the pen of Scott: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
Scott offers several examples of why TPOASINWID results in absurd analysis. His examples are selected for maximal absurdity, so it's amusing that three out of four directly undermine his case, and the fourth is still a pretty good argument against his position.
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
This is a significantly more accurate statement than "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure cancer", because numerous considerations mitigate against curing cancer, things like economic considerations, bureaucratic constraints, and the work/life balance of the staff. And even when all these align such that curing this specific cancer is the system's goal, "curing cancer" might not mean what you think. I was especially amused by this exchange in the comments:
The purpose of a system that has egregious side-effects is very likely not aligned with my values. It might not be malicious, but it does not care about what I care about, and it is worth at least looking under the hood to see if what it cares about and what I care about are zero-sum.”
Like chemo?
...written in the comment section of the author of Who By Very Slow Decay. Yes, very much like Chemo. This example, by itself, is probably the one I'd like Scott to address specifically.
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
It seems to me that this is a significantly more accurate statement than "the purpose of the Ukrainian military is to defend Ukraine from hostile military action." America and NATO are very specifically and very openly throttling aide to keep Ukraine from being defeated outright, but also from being able to hit back too hard. Stalemate appears to be the deliberate objective, and certainly has been the openly-stated objective of many Ukraine supporters in this very forum.
One could make a similar statement about the Russian military as well. Any description of the Russian military that doesn't account for the realities of coup-proofing and endemic corruption is not going to make accurate predictions about the real world.
The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
His intention here is to achieve absurdity by narrowing the scope to one specific result, rather than the sum of results, and in fairness, he provides examples of X randos arguing in this fashion. "The purpose of the British Government is to keep a lid on the British People while pursuing goals orthogonal to their interests" seems a more parsimonious description, but even Scott's version seems more accurate than something like "the purpose of the British Government is to execute the will of the British people as expressed through democratic elections".
The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion pounds of carbon dioxide.
Again with the absurdity through inappropriate narrowing of scope. But even with a framing as uncharitable as this, it's worth noting that all systems have costs, and that description of a system that ignores the costs and how those costs are managed is a worse description than one that centers those costs. This is true even for descriptions that only consists of one significant cost, because the benefits of systems are generally far more obvious than the costs and thus the missing information is easier to find.
This is a bad article, and Scott should feel bad.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18d ago
People in this thread are claiming that the shooter is a Blue, given that he appears to have been appointed to office by Tim Waltz and possibly by other Democratic politicians, with one of the victims being a democrat who recently voted with the Republicans on an important issue, resulting in much criticism from her own party. Also, he apparently had a stack of No Kings flyers in his vehicle. This seems quite premature to me.
I'm going to bet that the motivations for this assassination end up red-coded. Per CNN, the shooter is apparently a devout Christian, with him being caught on video "pointedly questioned American morals on sexual orientation". I've seen reports that he had a target list of pro-choice politicians and abortion providers. And not to put too fine a point on it, but he just shot two democrats.
Apparently the police have a manifesto, so we'll probably know the truth soon enough.
Common knowledge coalesces day by day.
The Constitution never held power, and neither did the courts, much less the body of law supposedly founded upon and adjudicated by them. Constitutional Rights as such protect nothing. If the power to secure protection of one's rights exists, it comes from somewhere else in our socio-political constructs, and effective politics consists of isolating its location and securing that power to be wielded by one's own agents.
To the extent that this power exists outside formal structures, then effective politics consists of coordinating efforts outside those formal structures, a point so obvious as to border on tautology.
To the extent that formal political structures exist for the sole purpose of containing and channeling both power and the pursuit of that power, the above is a statement that formal political structures have evidently failed.
Or perhaps I'm wrong. I would invite "Rule of Law" proponents to explain what they see happening here, and how it fits into their general model of how sociopolitical power works.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2yr ago
You ready to roll back the whole sexual revolution, or just the parts that hit your identity group?
I agree that the way the family courts treat men is pitch-black evil. The way a lot of men treat women is likewise pitch-black evil. We had a better system, but Horny Liberalism burned it to the ground in the name of sexual liberation. Well, you asked for it, here it is. There is no risk-free way to allow other people access to your brain, dick, heart and bank account, but allowing that access is a choice you make. Those who make poor choices have to pay for them, one way or another.
Suppose there is a person who is very concerned with social justice. They believe that racism and sexism are among the most serious problems facing our society, they are deeply committed to battling the kyriarchy hydra. They are interested in cultural critique, in sociopolitical theory, and have educated themselves extensively on these subjects. In my experience, such people are not particularly rare, and probably most people commenting here will have encountered several of them.
Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?
If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?
Why does the kyriarchy hydra in the linked comic have a "class" head, and why is that head resolved into "economics" in the last panel? What sort of economics do you suppose the author intended?
That comic is from the website everydayfeminism. If I search that website for references to "capitalism", I get many, many hits. How many of those hits do you suppose involve discussion of Capitalism as a positive force in the world, versus a negative force? Why should that be?
....I've just searched "Patriarchy and late stage capitalism".
Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.
Judging by this excerpt (or the article as a whole, I'm not your dad), what general branch of political philosophy do you think has formed the author's worldview?
The dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background that models gender difference on class relations. The relation between manager and worker is not just one of “difference.” The manager and worker are situated within a system of social relations that unequally distributes money, power, status, etc. Likewise, men and women aren’t just “different,” but are categories of persons – like manager and worker – that are defined in terms of social relations that position them in a complex class/race/sex hierarchy. Given this background to the dominance approach, it is useful to consider a bit of the history of the relation between Marxism and feminism.
What do you think the author means when she says that "the dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background"? What does it mean to "model gender differences on class relations?" Why do you suppose the author spends so much of their paper discussing Marx? Why does she believe that "Socialist feminism involves a commitment to “the practical unity of the struggle against capitalism and the struggle for women’s liberation." Why is she interested in a struggle against Capitalism, and where does Marx come in to this struggle?
This article argues that modern imagery of the Black female body exists in opposition to sexual health and sexual rights by focusing on existing representations of Black female eroticism as a legacy of colonialism. It addresses Black feminist thought on the history and contemporary use of the Black female body and offers a human rights perspective on uses of the Black female body within patriarchal capitalism.
Where is this idea of "Patriarchal Capitalism" coming from? Do you think the author developed it herself? If not, how did she come by it?
Contemporary feminism is currently at a crossroads, facing a concerted onslaught from both neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. While these ideologies are inherently different—neoliberalism often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, and neoconservatism typically attacks feminist principles—they similarly reinforce the traditional role of families as providers of welfare. This crisis of alienation in feminism is characterized by three key factors: the gender divisions brought about by feminism’s shift to identity politics, the obscuring of feminist critique of capitalism by the spread of commercialization, and the instrumentalization of feminism in politics. These challenges have resulted in increased class antagonism and the further marginalization of lower-income women, reinforcing one another. To address this multifaceted crisis, a return to Marxist thought is deemed necessary for women’s liberation.
How can Feminism "return" to Marxism, when it never had anything to do with Marxism in the first place?
Anxiety disorders are one of the most prevalent mental disorders globally, and 63% of those diagnoses are of women. Although widely acknowledged across health disciplines and news and social media outlets, the majority of attention has left assumptions underlying women's anxiety in the twenty-first century unquestioned. Drawing on my own experiences of anxiety, I will the explore both concept and diagnosis in the Western world. Reflecting on my own experiences through a critical feminist lens, I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.
Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?
The term “late capitalism” regained relevance in 1991 when Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson published Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Drawing on Mandel’s idea that capitalism has sped up and gone global, Jameson expanded his analysis to the cultural realm. His argument was that late capitalist societies have lost their connection with history and are defined by a fascination with the present. In Jameson’s account, late capitalism is characterized by a globalized, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable. In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation, a superficial projected image of self via celebrities or “influencers” channeled through social media, and so on. In this time, whatever societal changes that emerge are quickly transformed into products for exchange. Unlike those who celebrate postmodernism as replete with irony and transgression, Jameson considers it to be a non-threatening feature of the capitalist system in contemporary societies.
How can Marxist analysis "expand into the cultural realm"? If the term "late stage capitalism" were related to attempts to expand Marxist analysis in this fashion, would the prevalence of the term be some level of evidence for the memetic spread of this expansion?
...In my younger days, this is the point where I would drink several cups of coffee and spend the next twelve hours pasting the first paragraph and a few pertinent questions for every one of the first five hundred search results in the fifteenth tab in my brave window and then wrap it up with six solid pages-worth of compact, four-letter obscenities, but I'm older and I have kids now and my back hurts, so let's not do that.
It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly. I think the above position can be defended unassailably by looking at the academic output that constitutes the headwaters of the Social Justice movement. I think that those who argue that the obvious, inescapable ties between Social Justice theory and Marxism are some sort of hallucination or sloppy categorization are either woefully uninformed or actively dishonest. To those who have advanced such arguments in the thread on the subject below, I offer an invitation: assuming the above examples are insufficient, what level of evidence would satisfy you? How many papers from how many journals do you need to see? How many quotes from how many prominent figures within the modern social justice movement, and the people who taught them, and the people who taught them, and so on? How far back do we need to go to satisfy you? How deep do we need to dig to bring this question to a conclusion?
Or maybe I'm totally wrong. Let's run with that. If I'm wrong, if the above is the wrong approach, why is it wrong and what would be better?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Reading through the thread, I have no idea which post you are attempting to reference.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
It shows that even when you control for education level, how much someone followed the race was negatively correlated with support for Trump in 2024.
This is probably true. Does it also correlate with believing Biden was senile, Hunter's laptop was genuine, that COVID was a lab leak, and that the lockdowns and vaccine mandates were a mistake? Their estimate of unarmed black men killed by the police would be much closer to the right end of this graph, and opposition to defunding the police, before such fictions and the policies they spawned caused the largest single-year increase in violent crime ever reported. Does it correlate with being able to define the term "woman", and predict that transitioning children would not be a sustainable practice from a scientific point of view? I imagine we could continue in this way for some time, but let's leave it there.
Hanania's argument here is that Trump supporters are more likely to be disconnected from bedrock reality. Would it be fair to say that his implicit argument is that bedrock reality is congruent with the views of professional academics and journalists?
We've had previous discussions about how reality-based Trump's policies are, and Hanania makes a fairly good argument that - except for political loyalty - reality isn't a concern, and that this isn't just true of Trumpism, it's an inherent flaw of populism, in general.
I do not see a way for either you or the author to argue that it is less of a problem for the previous uniparty regime. Afghanistan in particular and the GWOT generally seem like really good examples; for the Afghan war, we have the documents now and can confirm that the entire two decades of policy was founded entirely on lies, that no one ever actually had a plan, and that the entire procedure was built around concealing this fact to the public as extensively as possible to maintain the flow of resources and human lives. The more one listened to "the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics," the worse one's fundamental understanding of that conflict would be.
More generally, the self-serving nature of the argument here would be appalling if it were not so monotonously common from people of the author's ilk.
Tear down the gates in a system that is working relatively well, and you will get liars, morons, grifters, and cranks of all stripes.
We are in the present situation because the system was not working well, even relatively. Likewise, the previous system was absolutely chockablock with liars, morons, grifters and cranks of all stripes. Hanania's entire method here is to present a parade of horribles from the Trump administration, some of them still hypothetical, and to quietly allow all previous disasters to sink into unmentioned obscurity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Ah.
Unless they feel such unbearable mental pain from seeing other posters' contrary opinions
This is perhaps ironic on a thread where the OP is still frustrated years later by hearing a single user disagree with the dominant narrative here.
Darwin was quite notable both for his prodigious and sustained output and his dedication to dishonesty and bad-faith interaction at every possible opportunity. Describing him as a "single user" "disagreeing" is disingenuous in the extreme. He burned more charity alone than any ten other posters you could name.
Further, the entire point of that quote is that he wasn't the only one, which is in fact the truth. Unironic support for BLM was not rare, even when the rioting was in full swing. Even less rare was "BLM is bad, but less bad than every observed response to the rioting".
The point stands. Darwin is still free to post here, as are any of the others who think BLM is a good idea. The fact that the history of their previous positions and the observed results places them squarely in the center of a rhetorical kill-zone is their own fault.
...There's a lot here, but I'm kinda done with the alt-right/WN arguments after the last couple threads, so I'll leave it at noting that this entire thread is the rhetorical equivalent of a giant, killer-asteroid-sized billboard painted with the words " @HlynkaCG 's thesis about the alt-right is indisputably correct."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
People really like Sherlock Holmes stories, to the point that they're probably the best candidate for the progenitor of the entire Mystery genre. To those here who enjoy these stories, would you mind putting on your over-analysis caps and explaining what it is about the stories that you enjoy?
(This post has been sitting half-completed in my drafts folder for at least a month and a half. Thanks to @fuckduck9000 and @Hoffmeister25 for inspiring it.)
What is the Enlightenment? What is its essential nature, such that a thing can be said to be more or less like it, more or less of it, more or less descended from it? Which of its philosophical axioms are foundational, and which are peripheral? Which historical events are a result of its influence, and which are unrelated?
The question of the Enlightenment's central character seems like it ought to be easy to answer, given the ideology's prominence in our consensus origin myth. The Enlightenment is generally held to be the author of the modern world, the philosophy that ended millennia of benighted rule by superstition, ignorance and cruelty, the wellspring of humanistic ideals, of compassion and empathy, of the meteoric progress that has since transformed human civilization beyond recognition, shattered the fetters of hunger, sickness and want. Its hopeful brilliance is contrasted with the strangling dogmas of the dark age that followed the collapse of Rome. Indeed, I expect most of the community here probably holds that describing the nature of the Enlightenment is easy, almost too easy to be worth bothering with.
I disagree. I've tried to present this disagreement numerous times, but each time I've found an inferential gap that swamps whatever the original topic of the discussion might have been, and that required a level of effort that seemed prohibitive. This post is an attempt to approach that gap on its own terms, and at least somewhat methodically.
I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?
These two revolutions occured a mere 13 years apart. Both societies were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideology, and conciously sought to recast their social structures according to the precepts of that ideology. On the other hand, the interpretations, implementations, and ultimate outcomes differed vastly between the two. Clearly the divergence was significant, and it seems reasonable to presume that one diverged further from the root ideology than the other. By describing our understanding of that divergence, we can give a clearer picture of what we see as the Enlightenment's core nature, while being kept honest by the historical record of its commonly-accepted champions.
The American Revolution:
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The American Revolution emerged from an emphatically Christian society; that is to say, a society of serious individual and communal Christian faith welded together by the Protestant tradition. It was a society with a 70% and rapidly growing male literacy rate, thanks largely to Protestant commitments to the necessity of widespread literacy, the better to read the Bible.
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Both Leadership and the public see themselves as explicitly Christian. A lot of the leadership really is devout, those who are not (Jefferson and Franklin most notably) at least pretend to be both in public actions and private deliberation. (It's possibly also worth noting that Jefferson and Franklin were notably sympathetic to France's revolutionaries).
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The revolution's social goals are limited. No universal equality, no abolition of slavery, no overturning of the existing social order. It's not even really a change of government, as most of the revolutionaries and their support structures are already de-facto running things.
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The Revolution consistantly aimed to limit the power of government, even popular government, even if turned to apparently noble ends, against the rights of individual citizens. In doing so, they expressed a deep skepticism for all human judgement, even their own.
The French Revolution:
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The French Revolution emerged from a very different sort of Christian society. Faith appears to have been far less personal and far more communal in nature, with enforcement being top-down rather than bottom-up. I've been unable to find figures for literacy rates, but the references I've found indicate it was considerably lower than in America, perhaps in part due to the linguistic fragmentation of the French populace.
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To my knowledge, the Revolution's leadership were uniformly militant atheists, or else hiding their faith very, very deep. Religious belief was considered obvious superstition. Numerous attempts were made to channel religious impulses into the deification of human reason.
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The Revolution's social goals were extremely broad, perhaps unlimited. They aimed not merely to build a new country, but explicitly a better society, a rational society, a just, free, equitable society. Universal equality of all citizens was the standard. Slavery was abolished. The existing social order was demolished, the monarchy and nobility slaughtered or exiled, the Church brutally subjugated, religious observence suppressed. The revolutionaries believed that they had everything they needed to build, if not an outright utopia, at least the best society the world had ever seen, by far, and they intended to make it happen.
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Given their faith in human reason and scientific insight, the Revolution felt no need to limit the power of government, especially popular government, in pursuit of noble ends, even if this meant trampling the rights of individual citizens. They believed they knew what the right thing to do was, their reason was sound, and checks and balances just got in the way, slowed them down in the fight against their enemies.
Which was closer to the true spirit of the Enlightenment?
My answer: The French Revolution, and by a wide margin. The French Revolution was built around the idea of Progress, of man's capacity to fundamentally reshape his conditions and himself, of his ability to cast off the shackles of the past and move on to a brighter future. It was built on a supreme confidence in human reason, a self-assurance based on what I consider to be the core thesis of the Enlightenment:
We know how to solve all our problems.
Over and over again, its leaders and the policies they implemented demonstrate an unrelenting, unreflective certainty; they were not experimenting, inching their way through possibility-space in search of an unknown solution, but rather executing a recipe with a firmly-expected outcome. They considered themselves pre-eminent scientists, not because they were actually engaging in science, but because they zealously and meticulously applied the label of "science" to their ad-hoc, utterly untested and (as it happens) completely unworkable social theories. Actual scientific results were mixed: the metric system seems to have been a tolerably good idea, metric time less so. Shutting down educational institutions over charges of inequality and guillotining Lavoisier were perhaps less than perfect contributions to the advancement of human knowledge. Though the lip-service to science, progress and reason never wavered, it is easy to see that ideological commitments to entirely unscientific and even irrational beliefs remained dispositive throughout.
In these features, the fundamental nature of the Enlightenment is revealed.
(The above was written off my best understanding of the two Revolutions, and a moderate amount of googling. Corrections and arguments over the description are welcome as well.)
Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness? That’s news to me.
One of Feminism's main pushes 2014-2020 was explicitly to make sexual misconduct allegations require less proof and to have more consequences, and to increase the rate of report generally while explicitly arguing that safeguards against false accusations must be systematically removed. Notable early examples included Atheism+, #ListenAndBelieve, Jackie's story, #TeamHarpies, We Need to Talk About Jian, along with too many smaller ones to name; on a policy level, we had the Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter implementing these as policies in the university system, and "affirmative consent" laws in California. This led to #MeToo, which culminated with the farce of the Kavanaugh accusations. This is a very abbreviated list, and this particular set of demands has been at least arguably the dominant one within Feminism over the last decade.
Maybe you are an atypical feminist, but to the degree that Feminism is a coherent category that can be analyzed, "dramatically lower threshold for sexual assault accusations" seems very clearly to be one of its most prominent characteristics.
And what is a “non-feminist” woman, according to you?
I would define it as a woman who does not identify with the presently-dominant ideological form of Feminism. This would describe my wife, sister and mother, as well as a number of other women in my life.
Trump has bombed Iran's nuclear sites, using B2 bombers dropping 30,000-pound massive ordinance penetrators. All aircraft have successfully cleared Iranian airspace, and Trump is claiming that all three nuclear sites were wiped out. No word that I've seen of a counter-attack from Iran, as yet.
AOC has concluded that a president ordering an airstrike without congressional approval is grounds for impeachment. Fetterman thinks it was the right move. Both are, I suppose, on brand.
My feelings are mixed. I absolutely do not want us signing up for another two decades of invading and inviting the middle east, and of all the places I'd pick with a gun to my head, Iran would be dead last. I do not think our military is prepared for a serious conflict at the moment, because I think there's a pretty good likelihood that a lot of our equipment became suddenly obsolete two or three years ago, and also because I'm beginning to strongly suspect that World War 3 has already started and we've all just just been a bit slow catching on. That said, I am really not a fan of Iran, and while I could be persuaded to gamble on Iran actually acquiring nukes, it's still a hell of a gamble, and the Israelis wiping Iran's air defense grid made this about the cheapest alternative imaginable. I have zero confidence that diplomacy was ever going to work; it's pretty clear to me that Iran wanted nukes, and that in the best case this would result in considerable proliferation and upheaval. Now, assuming the strikes worked, that issue appears to be off the table for the short and medium terms. That... seems like a good thing? Maybe?
I'm hoping what appears to me to be fairly intense pressure to avoid an actual invasion keeps American boots of Iranian soil. As with zorching an Iranian general in Iraq during Trump's first term, this seems like a fairly reasonable gamble, but if we get another forever war out of this, that would be unmitigated disaster.
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