Lewis2
1yr ago
a substantial number or people on the right who believe that Biden is a Mao or Stalin
Does anyone on the right actually believe that? I only ever hear complaints that Biden is old, senile, and obviously being puppeted around by various other figures in his administration. In other words, he is personally weak and pathetic, something even their worst detractors can’t say about Stalin and Mao.
Lewis2
7mo ago
Yes, yes, a birth certificate, an identify document that can be altered to reflect transgender individuals’ gender identity in all but five states. So as long as a person has a birth certificate with his or her gender of choice, he should be able to use the restroom of his choosing as well?
Lewis2
11mo ago
Prior to reading this comment, I had assumed that the Democrats’ attempt to make hay from this incident would fail miserably, as no one on the right would defend the shooting. Absent a scissor statement situation, I figured the controversy would die a quick and easy death. Now I’m not so sure.
If the Right is smart, they’ll publicly agree that it was a bad shot regardless of their inner feelings, as that is probably the easiest way to defuse the situation. No controversy, no news; no news, no BLM reboot; no BLM reboot, no electoral benefits to the Democrats.
Lewis2
9mo ago
I can’t speak to most people, but I remember how bad it was. It was so bad that New York City had to bring in emergency 1,000-bed hospital ships in order to handle the overflow of cases. Of course, those ships sat virtually empty and unused, and their large crew of medical workers basically got to enjoy a free holiday, but still, they had to bring in ships! It was so bad, Covid-positive patients had to be rehoused away from the hospitals and into empty schools nursing homes, for some reason. It was so bad that nurses were so exhausted, they barely had the time and energy to make TikTok videos to help keep people’s spirits up as they were imprisoned in their homes. It was bad.
I’m not knowledgeable enough about potential electoral fraud to get into much of a debate, but it does seem to me that any fraud should tend to favor Democrats over Republicans simply because it’s easier for Democrats to cheat.
As @SwordOfOccam pointed out, “the best check on election fraud at any scale is that people of various ideologies and parties make up the officials and volunteers in any given area, and all it takes is one witness to expose something.” The trouble is, that’s just not the case in all urban districts. In 2012, for example, 59 voting precincts in Philadelphia alone voted 100% for Obama. The linked article notes that precincts in Chicago and Atlanta did the same in 2008. It would be much easier to run up the tally in those areas, either via fraudulent votes or fraudulent tallies, than it would be in even the reddist of Republican precincts, since Republicans don’t cluster up in the same way that urban Democrats do, and there are always at least a few Democrats in the strongest Republican strongholds.
Lewis2
6mo ago
That’s seriously a joke? What a bizarre, pornographic thing to think, let alone say.
Actually, in light of the discussion below, I have a different question to ask you: if you had a daughter, would you ever want her to have sex with anyone? It seems to me that a parent with a healthy relationship with his or her daughter would absolutely want her to have sex with her husband and then to bear children as the fruit of that union. Your recent comments, on the other hand, seem to imply that you believe anything other than perpetual virginity is a shameful thing in a daughter.
Lewis2
8mo ago
Hillary Clinton didn’t speak to her supporters election night either. She called Trump and conceded at 2:40 a.m.
In the U.S., I would think that HBD has much more to do with civil rights precedent, disparate impact arguments, and accusations of racism than with immigration. Blacks make up a disproportionately large percentage of the prison population, do worse in school, and have worse job prospects than whites and Asians. Is that due to overt racial discrimination or hidden structural racism? If all races have the same IQ, that doesn’t seem like a bad explanation, but if blacks have a lower average IQ, then you can take racism out of the equation. Likewise, Jews are overrepresented in elite universities and positions of power. Is that the result of an insidious Semitic plot? Possibly, or it could just be that they have a higher average IQ than Gentiles.
Lewis2
11mo ago
(choice moment: the rioter responding with 2 fingers when asked how many brain cells he has)
You’re aware that this is a rude gesture, right? If someone asked me that question, I’d likely respond with one finger, but it would be a horrible misinterpretation to assume that I meant I only had one brain cell.
Lewis2
1yr ago
There are shortcuts. Come in with a membership transfer from your local church, Masonic temple, Elks lodge, or the like, and you’ll be accepted and welcomed like some long-lost relative. Get involved in the local community and demonstrate that you’re hard-working, reliable, and not a complete ass, and within a couple of years (or sooner), you’ll have people trying to set you up with their female friends and relations.
Lewis2
1yr ago
The crowd at Datasecretslox, a sister site to this one, have annual in-person meetups, and I gather many of the commenters also participate in a loosely-affiliated Discord channel. Possibly as a result, they seem to have quite a bit more of a community feel over there. You might give them a shot.
Lewis2
1yr ago
Have any of you noticed flocks of Kennedy supporters gathering ballot access signatures over the past couple of weeks in your areas? In my midwestern city, the streets are teeming with them—one every couple of blocks downtown and one darned near every 50 feet in the major parks. It’s an impressive operation, only slightly marred by some similar tactics to those laid out here. Not one, for example, has mentioned Kennedy’s name when asking me to sign. Their approach is always “Will you sign to ensure ballot access for the Independent party this coming November?” You have to actually read the petition to figure out it’s for Kennedy.
Lewis2
10mo ago
As an aside, it will never cease to amaze me that some states require vehicle safety inspections. Coming from a state that never requires any inspections ever, it’s completely jarring to me that people find such an intrusive policy not only normal, but actually a positive good.
Lewis2
1yr ago
Have the other predictions failed or just not come true yet? I think the normalization of pederastic relationships is coming absent a culture shift, but I don’t think it will happen for another several decades at least.
Lewis2
1yr ago
Do British drivers actually abide by the speed limits? US drivers routinely drive at least ten MPH over.
Lewis2
3mo ago
I recently discovered the deliciousness of toasted croissants, which is not a type of bread I would have expected would be improved by toasting. In light of that experience, I’m wondering if there are any other types of bread that are not conventionally toasted but that are improved by the process. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Lewis2
8mo ago
Using this definition of fascist, I’m forced to ask, what’s so bad about fascism?
This reminds me of Scott’s essay, “Social Justice and Words, Words, Words,” specifically this bit:
I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is very much about abusing this ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.
And later,
If racism school dot tumblr dot com and the rest of the social justice community are right, “racism” and “privilege” and all the others are innocent and totally non-insulting words that simply point out some things that many people are doing and should try to avoid.
If I am right, “racism” and “privilege” and all the others are exactly what everyone loudly insists they are not – weapons – and weapons all the more powerful for the fact that you are not allowed to describe them as such or try to defend against them. The social justice movement is the mad scientist sitting at the control panel ready to direct them at whomever she chooses. Get hit, and you are marked as a terrible person who has no right to have an opinion and who deserves the same utter ruin and universal scorn as Donald Sterling. Appease the mad scientist by doing everything she wants, and you will be passed over in favor of the poor shmuck to your right and live to see another day. Because the power of the social justice movement derives from their control over these weapons, their highest priority should be to protect them, refine them, and most of all prevent them from falling into enemy hands.
If “fascism” is just a neutral descriptor of one quadrant of the political graph, then supporting fascism should be no more controversial or upsetting than supporting libertarianism or neoliberalism or socialism, and it certainly shouldn’t result in people losing their minds TDS-style. But I think that there’s a bait and switch going on here, that labeling the socially-conservative-yet-fiscally-progressive quadrant “fascism” is a deliberate choice to poison the public discourse by tarring your political opponents as Hitler wannabes.
It’s the same tactic Greatest Generation and Boomer conservatives used when constantly decrying their political opponents as communists for supporting even a modicum of socialism, just in reverse. It seems to me that the tactic wasn’t particularly honest then, and it isn’t particularly honest now.
But again, if I’m wrong, and you’re using “fascism” in a neutral, judgement-free, purely descriptive sense, then what’s the the big deal? Why be so upset about fascism?
Lewis2
9mo ago
A nice write up, but what’s with the dig against Clarence Thomas at the end? What’s so bad about him?
I would forgo the good feelings if it meant I’d also get to forgo the bad. But then, I’d count melancholy, dissatisfaction, and ennui as bad feelings, even though it seems to me that each of those is as much the absence of any particular emotion as it is an emotional state in itself. So the whole thing is probably impractical from the get go.
(Edited to fix grammar)
Lewis2
1yr ago
My point was mostly that @ymeskhout’s first point was not necessarily correct—that I would expect the background level of fraud to favor Democrats in any given election due to ease of opportunity.
As for a grand, national conspiracy to change election results, while I do think that is a threat due to most states’ remarkably poor election security practices, I don’t think it’s the only, or even primary, threat model to be worried about. Instead, I would think a distributed conspiracy would be far more likely, with low-level participants each working independently and without any direction from on high, but all from the same motive.
Take sex abuse conspiracies by way of analogy. The Catholic sex abuse scandal was a grand international conspiracy, with almost all members of the hierarchy implicated in some way or another in moving priests around and preventing them from being prosecuted. The conspiracy naturally eventually leaked, and it caused a huge scandal. By contrast, every time some Baptist minister abused a girl in his church in the past 50 years, the elders just quietly removed him, sent him away to counseling, and didn’t say anything when they learned he was serving another church a year later. You had pretty much the same actions in both cases, but for the Catholics, the conspiracy was (naturally) a top-down one, while for the Baptists, it was (naturally) bottom-up, without any coordination from congregation to congregation. A bottom-up conspiracy of people individually choosing to fill out absentee ballots for their mentally incompetent relatives, poll workers in safe areas slightly inflating their numbers, and the like, would be very difficult to prove, since there would be essentially no coordination among participants or even knowledge that anyone else is doing anything similar. Just about the only thing they’d have in common would be opposition to rules that make voting more secure, which is a position that’s remarkably more common in one party than the other.
Lewis2
6d ago
Only if the schools were subsidized by the parish. If a school had to stand on its own two feet, $3,000 per head wouldn’t be sufficient to cover the costs of teachers’ salaries, staff salaries (janitor, cook, librarian, secretary, etc.), benefits, utilities, maintenance, insurance, books, supplies, equipment, furniture, and so on. You could probably get by with $3,000 a head if you were running some sort of homeschool co-op with no facility costs.
Lewis2
8mo ago
They are fighting a cleaner war than Israel.
How do you figure that? Was October 7 a clean act?
Lewis2
8mo ago
I think we’re in complete agreement. Fascism as it is usually understood is in the “social conservatism, big government” quadrant, but it isn’t the only thing in that quadrant. However, it seems to me that @Capital_Room is pulling a dirty trick. He’s claiming that fascism is just a neutral descriptor (“any socially-conservative right-wing that isn't this way (particularly when its supporters are mostly white and/or Christian) is definitionally fascist”), but then he also says things like,
Well, once in my college days, I responded by asking what would happen if the Republican party stopped trying to cut government, and focused instead on how to run it when in charge. Would that, therefore, be less objectionable?
The answer was not just no, but hell no. That would be the worst-case scenario. Because no matter how bad the "cut taxes, cut regulation, kill the government" GOP was, any socially-conservative right wing party that didn't embrace this, which actually wanted to run the government, and use it toward right-wing ends, would be a fascist party.
And
The alternative of course is being replaced by another ascendant elite who will "restore democracy" inasmuch as they will fix the system in favor of new patrons who actually listen to the native proletariat.
In other words, a fascist takeover. I can't see our current elites doing anything other than using every tool and bit of power at their disposal to prevent this.
And
The patricians all agree that what the plebs want is beyond the pale, because what the plebs want is fascism.
Which rather gives the game away. “Fascism is just the neutral umbrella term we use for political ideologies in that quadrant.” Okay, fine. “Which means that obviously you can’t support it.” Wait, why not? “Because it’s fascism!”
As I said earlier, the same definitional trick has been played many times before with communism, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. What puzzles me is who Capital_Room thinks he’s going to convince with that trick here. Is there anyone on this site who doesn’t immediately realize what he’s trying to do? His goals are especially obvious when he says things like,
[GOP elites] are in favor of Burkean incrementalism, moving things in the same direction as the left, just much more slowly.
Why was the party elite this way? Because it's the only acceptable form the "right wing" can take, particularly in a modern, Western country.
In short, it’s just a rhetorical trick to prevent his ideological opponents from supporting social conservatism. The only acceptable conservatism in a modern Western country is one that doesn’t actually conserve anything, just drifts leftward more slowly. Of course, voters are finally wising up to this and voting MAGA, AfD, FPÖ, etc.,
At this point, the medical establishment and government don’t (or at least, I really, really hope they don’t) have enough credibility left to enforce anti-pandemic measures. Even if avian flu does become a human pandemic and is widely acknowledged as such, it’s probably just going to have to rip through the population like any other transmittable disease. Those who get sick, get sick; those who die, die; and those who survive eventually reach herd immunity.
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