coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
The first episode is pro police brutality. The protagonist of the first two episodes is a police officer, and the daughter corrects her parents when they ask about a complaint. The response is considered justifiable by the police and the child’s own counsel didn’t consider police brutality worthy of attention. The audience takeaway is that this action is justified — all the cool protagonists were involved, and it’s only an angry low class Dad who temporarily wants to file a complaint. Episode two is where we learn about incels and the “red pill” from the detective’s son, and that this is what caused the murder. The accomplice is also clearly depicted as being incel adherent, hence his obsession with looks and asking the detective about whether he got girls.
I have never seen a piece of media that is so clearly a psy-op. The series is designed to (1) make children afraid of ever coming across something online about incels or the red pill by introducing a strong terror response, for instance (a) imagining themself as the boy and having your father watch as the police inspect your penis [this is the director’s intent, hence the focus on the father’s face], (b) making the boy utterly humiliated and demeaned, for instance his peeing himself and crying and then being thrown in jail after being humiliated by a woman, (c) making you think you can be an accomplice also thrown in jail, hence the plot line of the body who was beaten by the black girl [the only time the “authority-coded” characters cry and sympathize is for the black girl]; (2) make women afraid of boys who look or behave like the boy protagonist, by associating the boy with all sorts of evils and shock and humiliation; [3] artificially raise the status of minorities, for instance the black police officer and the south Asian teachers, whereas there’s an ugly white police officer who is intentionally depicted as an ugly older incel
It’s really not about “bullying is bad” at all. That’s what episode three was about. Episode three is about raising the possibility that this is the case, and then the director shooting down the notion psychologically via (1) depicting the boy as aggressive and manipulative and violent, (2) making us unsympathetic to the boy and instead sympathetic to the dominant detective, (3) showing the detective denying any sympathy to the boy at the end and then breaking down, signaling to the viewer to sympathize with the woman and not the boy.
What I just can’t wrap my head around is —
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is it a foreign country somehow spending, like, billions of dollars in espionage and subterfuge to get this show made and shown to the youth? Why would anyone show this to their own children?
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is it a domestically made psy-op in order to, like, “subjugate” white people in the UK further? Did the government think they were getting too uppity because of the grooming gangs?
Like there is nothing organic about the directorial decisions at all.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
11mo ago
Trump raising his fist in the air and speaking to the crowd after being shot through the ear with a bullet is a genuinely legendary moment in American history, however you feel about him.
Google, the most influential and powerful search engine in America, which most Americans use when searching for product information, released a propaganda music video advising everyone to only buy from black people. Buy what, only from black people? Everything. During a specific day as a kind of protest? No, every single day of the year. This follows Google’s decision to artificially boost black-owned businesses on their Maps app, giving these businesses a special eye-catching symbol.
Buying All Black - Ludacris feat. Flo Milli (A Google #BlackOwnedFriday Anthem)
“It’s time to buy black. All day, every day. Choose black 24/7, 365.
The music video goes on to tell the audience to “buy black” thirty times, while the Google-funded music video showcases individuals searching for black-owned businesses of every variety, from restaurants to salons.
I for one, am less than enthusiastic about the hegemonic consumer search engine producing propaganda advising consumers to never shop at a white-owned business. I’m less concerned with the music video, which received 15 million impressions on YouTube alone (a Google product), than with the underlying sentiment that clearly permeates through the business. I’m afraid of what Google is doing behind the scenes in terms of showing services, and whether they are going to artificially reduce exposure to a business owned by the ancestor of an Irish slave, in favor of a wealthy and privileged Nigerian immigrant whose ancestors owned many slaves.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
In an escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and associated culture war, we now have one of the first(?) terroristic threat charges brought against someone in the States. A teacher felt that a student’s comment about his flag was disrespectful and responded by threatening to behead her. It is reported that the teacher shouted:
You motherfucking piece of shit! I'll kick your ass. I should cut your motherfing head off
And students report hearing that
"he would kick her fucking ass, slit her goddamn throat and drag her ass outside and cut her head off."
The teacher who made this terroristic threat is Benjamin Reese, a Jewish man from Georgia, and the flag he had in his room was an Israeli flag [1] [2]. I find this noteworthy for two reasons. A Jewish man is making threats that I would have guessed came from a Muslim, which tells me about my bias and the level of passion on both sides of the conflict right now. But I’m also surprised that, despite the story first being published 24hrs ago, it’s untouched by mainstream news except RawStory. There’s local affiliates, RawStory, and YahooFinance Canada. But there’s no CNN, Fox, NYTimes, etc. They can’t be waiting for more information, because we already have the police reports. I predict that this story will not gain the traction that it would had the threat been made by a Palestinian man, or Muslim generally. Certainly that would be brought up on prime time Fox.
This instantly reminded me of the Day of Hate news blitz, when the Chabad-affiliated Barry (Baruch) Nockowitz picked up a toddler and threw him against a wall because of “anti-semitism”, telling police he would find another kid to attack [3]. Besides Miami Herald, this had zero news coverage, all the while coinciding with the “day of hate” which received George Floyd levels of news coverage and zero crimes committed. (As proof of how little coverage it got, themotte is on the first page of google results for his name, linking to the last time I mentioned this crime).
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Checking out the front page of various news sites, it’s noteworthy that the headlines deny Trump the honor of being grazed by a bullet or having survived a clear assassination attempt.
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NYT: “Trump safe after shooting at rally”; “One spectator is dead after chaos at event in Pennsylvania”
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CNN: “Trump shooting being investigated as assassination attempt”;
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MSNBC: “Trump safe after shots fired at Pennsylvania rally”
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FoxNews: “Trump rally shooter was killed by secret service counter sniper team, source says”
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Googling Trump and finding first headline: “Trump safe after being rushed off rally stage when shots fired; gunman and audience member dead”
What’s up with this? The headline is clearly, “Trump survives assassination attempt”, the vastly more important subject of the event. I would write, “Bullet pierces Trump’s ear in failed assassination attempt”, because this includes the important information of the bullet’s proximity. The clear, plainly visible assassination attempt is 100x more important than that a shooting merely transpired at an event in Pennsylvania. This is also the most attention-grabbing title, so the news has an incentive to report this way. The bias is boundless…
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
9mo ago
Those aren’t the main points.
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The murder weapon was improperly handled by the police, and they did not use “touch DNA” at that time. This means that DNA could not be factored into the murder, not that DNA either exonerated the suspect or acts as evidence against his involvement through omission. The DNA on the murder weapon was from the police, and it’s greatly misleading to just write “the DNA wasn’t his”.
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From my reading, the shoeprint sole pattern wasn’t his. That’s not a big deal because the perpetrator would have disposed of his bloody shoes if they were sufficiently bloody as to leave marks (they were). The Appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court makes no mention of shoe size.
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You are wrong that there was a financial motive. The girlfriend never requested reward for information about Ms. Gayle’s murder. (Don’t make top level posts explaining the “main points” if your main points are wrong, this isn’t Reddit).
You ignored significant other main points:
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The jailhouse informant provided information about the crime that was not publicly available, yet consistent with crime scene evidence and Williams’ involvement. Other individuals were present when Williams bragged about this murder, and they were disclosed to Williams’ team before trial and have been discussed in subsequent proceedings. “On August 31, 1998, Williams was arrested on unrelated charges and incarcerated at the St. Louis City workhouse. From April until June 1999, Williams shared a room with Henry Cole. One evening in May, Cole and Williams were watching television and saw a news report about Gayle's murder. Shortly after the news report, Williams told Cole that he had committed the crime. Over the next few weeks, Cole and Williams had several conversations about the murder. As he had done with Laura Asaro, Williams went into considerable detail about how he broke into the house and killed Gayle. After Cole was released from jail in June 1999, he went to the University City police and told them about Williams' involvement in Gayle's murder. He reported details of the crime that had never been publicly reported.”
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Gayle’s personal items were found in the trunk of Williams’ car. “Asaro told the police that Williams admitted to her that he had killed Gayle. The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle”.
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This was his face around the time of the murders. The media likes to show him as a weak old religious man today.
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This is sufficient to use the death penalty. There is zero chance (zero.) that he otherwise came into possession of these personal items, and he happened to have these worthless items in his possession (of no monetary value), and his cellmate just happened to accuse the wrong person who happened to have these possessions, and that he happened to guess the right details, and that the made up confession happened to also be reinforced by two separate made up testimonies that the confession occurred, and that the black hood girlfriend with a strict no snitching policy happened to rat our her boyfriend immediately. No. Come on. He did it. It’s not a question.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Scott comes off as cowardly and needlessly pretentious. Doesn’t everyone know that bureaucracy and bad laws are part of the issue?
If your plan is to change the case law around involuntary commitment - to expand the definition of “dangerous to themselves or others” - it probably won’t matter, because most of these decisions are based on vibes that only loosely connect to the written law
Change the laws and departmental policy to make them overrule vibes, which is how most laws work. Do vibes overrule IRS laws?
doctors commit many more people, it still won’t matter, because those people will stay in the hospital for a few days
You can trivially solve this by increasing the time of commitment according to infractions over time.
If your plan is to “lock them up long-term”, keep in mind that (for now) there are almost no institutions equipped to do this
You build them. What kind of point even is this? You build buildings. They can be built. They are frequently built. Who does Scott think he is writing to that the reader would no longer support a cause because it requires a city to build buildings?
Do you expect San Francisco to be good at this?
Vote for any of the millions of Americans who can, and do, competently build buildings.
How long are you keeping people there
A reasonable amount of time. What is a reasonable amount of time? Low enough that a person whose condition is manageable can get out soon, and high enough that a person whose condition is consistently unmanageable stays in longer. So an intuitive and “normal person able to think” solution is to increase it by infraction, and for the institution to gradually allow the patient freedom so as to check his capacity.
and (if the drugs work) appear significantly saner within 2-4 weeks. Best-case scenario, they’re completely sane. Now what?
Most normal people thinking about this issue would be able to solve it. My personal take is that you go from full institutionalization to check-ups, and if you fail checkups you go back to the institution.
Etc. Nothing Scott wrote can justify his assertion that “it might be time to hit the books, learn about hexamethyldecawhatever, and make sure that what you’re demanding is possible, coherent, and doesn’t have so many tradeoffs that experts inevitably recoill”.
Most (?) homeless people are only homeless for a few weeks […] If someone was going to be homeless for a week, and instead you imprison them for a year, you’re not doing them or society any favors
This is a category error. Public displays of psychosis are not found in the median ”transitionally” homeless person staying at a friend’s or relative’s.
These criticisms can apply to virtually every community. Every single community that has both young men and women in it, and which doesn’t cling to the values of young marriage and gender separation, will have these issues. They’re found in every music and art scene, every socialist community, every college house party, Hollywood and so on. Hit pieces like these are just a way for the powerful to selectively come down on whichever community they want to destroy. And if you form a community which actually has structure in the way of preventing these problems, like Mike Pence and his evangelicalism, they’ll write a hit piece about you, too!
The proper response is to start interviewing Time Magazine employees, and cataloguing how many more of them are doing much worse — probably with cocaine rather than psychedelics.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
From NYT (archive): Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.
As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group's first female leader spoke. Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.
"When it arrived, everyone was happy," said Tsainama Marubo, 73, sitting on the dirt floor of her village's maloca, a 50-foot-tall hut where the Marubo sleep, cook and eat together. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergencies. "But now, things have gotten worse," she said. She was kneading jenipapo berries to make a black body paint and wearing ropes of jewelry made from snail shells. Lately, the youth had become less interested in making such dyes and jewelry, she said. "Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet," she said. "They're learning the ways of the white people."
After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.
During the meetings, teenagers swiped through Kwai, a Chinese-owned social network. Young boys watched videos of the Brazilian soccer star Neymar Jr. And two 15-year-old girls said they chatted with strangers on Instagram. One said she now dreamed of traveling the world, while the other wants to be a dentist in São Paulo.
A case study in what happens when you take a “natural” society and introduce the internet. This relates in some interesting ways to an overview of Hunter-Gatherers and Play that I posted a few weeks ago in the FFT:
Given the indulgence that hunter-gatherer adults exhibit toward children, it is no surprise that the children spend most of their time playing. Play, almost by definition, is what children want to do. The adults have no qualms about this, because they believe that it is through play that children learn what they must to become effective adults. In a survey of ten hunter-gatherer researchers, who had lived in 7 different hunter-gatherer cultures, all of the researchers said that children were free to play essentially from dawn to dusk every day (see Gray, 2009). In a published report on how Ju/’hoan children spent their time, Patricia Draper (1976, pp 205-206) concluded: "[Ju/’hoan] children are late in being held responsible for subsistence tasks. Girls are around 14 years old before they begin regular food gathering and water- and wood-collecting. This is in spite of the fact that they may be married before this age. Boys are 16 years old or over before they begin serious hunting. … Children do amazingly little work." In a study of peoples with mixed hunter-gatherer and agricultural subsistence, in Botswana, John Bock and Sarah Johnson (2004) found that the more a family was involved in hunting and gathering, and the less they were involved in agriculture, the more time children had to play.
Hunter-gatherer children are never isolated from adult activities. They observe directly all that occurs in camp––the preparations to move; the building of huts; the making and mending of tools and other artifacts; the food preparation and cooking; the nursing and care of infants; the precautions taken against predators and diseases; the gossip, discussions, arguments, and politics; the songs, dances, festivities, and stories. They sometimes accompany adults on food gathering trips, and by age 10 or so boys sometimes accompany men on hunting trips. In the course of their daily lives, they see, hear, and have the opportunity to explore everything that is relevant to becoming a successful adult in their culture, and they incorporate all of this into their play. They play at the activities that they observe in the adults around them, and as they grow older, their play turns gradually into the real thing. There is no sharp division between playful participation and real participation in the valued activities of the band.
The above-mentioned survey of researchers elicited many examples of valued adult activities that were mimicked regularly by children in play. Digging up tubers, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders, building huts, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defending against attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying animals and learning their habits), making music, dancing, storytelling, and arguing were all mentioned by one or more respondents. The specific lists varied from culture to culture, in accordance with differences in the skills that were exemplified by adults in each culture. All of the respondents said that boys in the culture they studied engaged in a great deal of playful hunting. The two respondents who studied the Agta—a culture in which women as well as men regularly hunt—noted that girls as well as boys, in that culture, engaged in much playful hunting.
Apparently, when children are free to do what they want, they spend much of their time playing at the very activities that they see, from direct experience, are most crucial for success in their culture. Their conscious motive is fun, not education. It is exciting for children, everywhere, to pretend that they are powerful, competent adults, doing beautifully and skillfully what they see the adults around them doing. From an evolutionary perspective, it is no coincidence that children are constructed in such a way.
Equally important to learning how to hunt and gather, for hunter-gather children, is learning how to interact with others assertively yet peacefully. In their play, children practice arguing. Turnbull has described how older Mbuti children (age 9 and up) playfully rehash and try to improve upon the arguments that they have heard among adults.
In a “primitive” or natural society, childrens’ play is an effortless rendition of adult activity. Over their crucial years of cognitive development, children slowly become adults through stress-free exploration and imitation. The playfulness guides them toward skill acquisition, not unlike a fun video game. In the absence of superstimuli, there is no better way to “play”, so boredom promotes the learning behavior effortlessly. This has the inherent benefit of acting as “shaping” (in a psychological sense) because the skill that is learned is never beyond one’s capacity, is imitated through one’s father, and with the older children who act as mentors (“the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise”).
Their original arrangement was paradisal. Just from a psychological standpoint. It is the optimal way for a child to learn. When StarLink was introduced, the paradisal order was disrupted — innocent children have consumed Apple in the prelapsarian garden, so to speak. There is no turning back; they will likely look at their loincloths and feel shame at their nakedness. But I do wonder then, what about us developed people? Are we doomed to fall further and further from grace, our children forever destined to the cognitive hazards of superstimuli? Is there no way out, no rope we can grab to lift us back to grace?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Texas Governor Abbott signs law attempting to ban free speech at universities whenever the speech criticizes Israel in certain ways (described below).
The Executive Order requires all universities to —
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Review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the institution.
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Ensure that these policies are being enforced on campuses and that groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine are disciplined for violating these policies.
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Include the definition of antisemitism, adopted by the State of Texas in Section 448.001 of the Texas Government Code, in university free speech policies to guide university personnel and students on what constitutes antisemitic speech.
Section 448.001 reads
Examples of antisemitism are included with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's "Working Definition of Antisemitism" adopted on May 26, 2016
And this definition includes (among other things) —
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Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
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Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
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Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
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Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
These examples are intentionally ambiguous and can be weaponized by politicians or the judiciary against critics. The first example simply bans anyone from criticizing Israel in the same way that Israel routinely criticize others, by comparing them to Nazis. This cuts off a whole spectrum of political comparisons from ever applying to Israel. The second example could imply that you are antisemitic if you criticize Israel for things without also criticizing other nations in the same breath, however culturally and politically distant the nation. The third implies that an ethnostate cannot be considered racist if it is Jewish. The fourth implies that no one — not a single politician who is Jewish — can be accused of being more loyal to his self-defined homeland than America.
IMO this is a clear affront to freedom of speech. I find it embarrassing that any conservative in America would sign a law like this. The ambiguity is dangerous because it could be used by biased politicians or judges in its broadest application. While I don’t think it’s good public rhetoric to compare Israel to Nazis, that should be legal because (1) Nazis are everyone’s go-to villains, (2) Israel was recently the subject of an ICJ inquiry regarding genocide, (3) ethnonations should be extra scrutinized for genocide, (4) ethnonations with a history of genocide (Kitos War) and who fondly remember their nation previously committing genocide in their Holy Text should be super extra scrutinized for potential genocidal acts. The holocaust, like it or not, has no actual relevance to the current conduct of the Israeli regime. In real life, multigenerational ethnic groups do not swear off the same violence that their grandparents were victims of. So comparisons are fair game, if usually in bad taste.
coffee_enjoyer
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5mo ago
The benefit to justice outweighs the small injustice here. This is a signal for future courts and agencies that if you over-punish a thousand people, we will under-punish the batch in full. The government and courts now have an incentive try and punish everyone fairly, or else even those who deserve their punishment go free. A similar mechanism is already at work in our law: if you violate rights in obtaining evidence, that evidence will be thrown out, as otherwise it incentivizes the police to continue violating rights.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
JD Vance comes off as a normal guy. More normal than Kamala, Trump, Joe, Pence IMO. Obama had charisma, but his artifice was obvious in longer conversations — too effortful. Vance is so normal that if you removed the political parts and told someone Joe picked a random guy off the street, it would be believable. And his audience isn’t some biased conservative audience, it’s about as average Joe as you can get, and the conclusion in the comments is that Vance is just a normal dude. This isn’t always the case — comments often criticize guests for being blowhards or criticize Joe for not letting guests finish.
This cements my thought that the “Vance is weird” campaign is a fully enclosed propaganda ecosystem, as in, it isn’t exaggerating some aspect of Vance (eg “Trump lies”), it is just totally made up. And that’s really spooky, because there’s a section of the public that will believe whatever the DNC wants them to believe. If they can make you believe Vance is weird they can make you believe anything.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Personally, I would rather not have slavery and Jim Crow taught in schools without mentioning the global racism of the time, or that Americans were actually way ahead of other peoples of the world in terms of inclusivity, or that African Barbary pirates enslaved many White Americans, or that European powers forced African kingdoms to stop enslaving Africans. I would also want to include passages about how European philosophy is what paved the way for our notions of equality, and that “what do we do with the former slaves” is not an easy question when one group is significantly less developed. Finally, I would like an approximate calculation of how much black Americans benefitted from being taught by white Americans and being allowed to live in their free, prosperous, and protected nation — versus how they fared in Haiti or just Africa proper.
I mean, we’re not trying to whitewash the facts, right?
Those communities are often first or second generation, though. Little Italy is effectively dead, as are the Irish diaspora communities, and the only Jews who retain their culture have organized themselves as a micro-nation (the Hasids you mention). As your evidence for the patchwork of liberalism, you are looking at the insular communities that are recent arrivals to America, which have yet to be filtered by liberalism. But look elsewhere in America, at the 3rd generations, whether Germans in the Midwest or Chinese in California, and there’s no such patchwork to be found. It’s all some pesticide-ridden GMO monoculture crop, planted and picked and served at a corporation.
I don’t think liberalism allows people to pick the best ideas, for many reason: an adolescent does not pick anything, they are stupid and subject to cultural trends; the theory that an individual generally picks the best ideas is not evidenced from anything, and most societies had a specially-chosen group focus on picking the best ideas for everyone (for good reason); the culture that people will cling to is the one that is most pervasive, flashy, and marketed well, just like how they often pick products; Americans are ground down by stressors and obligations that they hardly have time to deliberately pick something as complex as their own culture, let alone assess the competing value schemes which requires understanding moral philosophy and psychology.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Something lost in the Martha’s Vineyard story is that the island is the vacation destination of the wealthy Democrat elite. Its architecture, town planning, and aesthetic preference are relics of a bygone era, Massachusetts’ original European American history. If you’re unfamiliar with the island I urge you to have some fun in google street view; I’m familiar with it because I vacationed there with a cousin who was doing an opera program, if that doesn’t explain enough. It calls to mind an earlier America of fabulously wealthy well-bred Europeans living in Federalist-styled homes over generations, exerting control over the planning of towns and showcasing their wealth with opulence and beauty.
The demographics of Martha’s Vineyard are also a relic of the past. It is 2% Latino and .3% Asian, 88% white with some parts 100% white. Its 0-9 age group is 94% White, 0% black, 0% Asian, and 0% hispanic, with the rest “mixed”.
The symbolism of Martha’s Vineyard is strong. Here is a place for wealthy white democrats to live in a Disneyland of traditional White America. They may claim that they stand with immigrants, when the Hebrew Center goes door to door handing out posters, but they have consciously chose to live in a White American paradise, where the demographics, aesthetics, and political influence are direct ancestors of 19th century Massachusetts. I suppose it’s easy to advocate for Democrat policies when you inherit a mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, and the Floridian governor is highlighting this dissonance by sending as few as 50 Hispanics to the island, enough to cause a national controversy.
https://www.mvcommission.org/sites/default/files/docs/web01_MVSP%20FINAL%20PRINT%202019-03-21-3.pdf
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money: New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.
The New York Times has an expose on how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English (as an example, one couldn't spell "America") and the state requirements are effectively optional or used as a study hall.
The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.
The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.
Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.
Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.”
Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum. The Times identified dozens of federal, state and local programs and analyzed how much they have given to yeshivas, looking most closely at the last year before the pandemic. The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in that period [...] they appear to get more government funding on average than other private schools in the state, including other religious schools, the analysis found. The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods
This might come as a shock to those who have no experience with Williamsburg, Monroe, Kiryas Joel, or Monsey in the NY tristate area. There is what can be described as a Hasidic Jewish mafia, that violates norms and laws to obtain hegemony, while siphoning resources from the surrounding communities. Towns are genuinely afraid of encroachment by the Hasids, because they move in en masse and quickly obtain town leadership positions and school board positions. They usually vote to reduce all extra funding, like extra-curricular funding for public schools, because their children only attend yeshivas. They label their homes as temples and don't legally marry their wives to reduce their taxes. Towns in subjected areas will purposely reduce sidewalks or veto funding for sidewalks in order to deter Hasids from moving in. Usually they will have a non-Hasidic lawyers go door to door asking to buy property with cash. They are involved in coordinated welfare schemes yet somehow get sweetheart plea deals of no jail time. Kiryas Joel was once the poorest place in all of America, and yet they have their own private security force that follows non-Hasids in SUVs if you drive through their estates, they have an enormous temple and their own state-funded maternity clinic on site and are able to obtain a unique 30 million dollar water aqueduct project.
I'm happy that the NYT is doing solid journalism on this. I kind of gripe with portraying the young as victims and bringing up the Holocaust, but it is what it is. In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I might wind up supporting him, but a lot of your information is (at best) misleading. “Moonlighting as a rapper” is actually just occasionally singing the lyrics to Eminem at coffee houses. “Came with nothing” means being a landed aristocratic Brahmin-born engineer with a degree from India. He’s an “accomplished pianist” in the sense that he can hit some keys with graceful mediocrity. I’m too lazy to fact check everything but I’m going to assume large Ramaswathes of it are wrong, and I find the adulation a bit Ramaswarmy.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
This is the WhitePeopleTwitter effect. Reddit had a popular default sub called BlackPeopleTwitter where everything was positive and pro-black. In order to be an approved poster (?) you needed to prove you were black, unless you were an attractive white woman. Sensing the possibility of a white version popping up, they preemptively made WhitePeopleTwitter and used it to de-potentiate and emasculate white identity. So BPT gives positive valence to blacks, WPT gives negative valence to whites and white identity (intermixed with some humor). I just checked WPT, and the first post is Kamala Good Trump Bad, and the second post is telling everyone to call Republicans weird (a very interesting strategy which deserves its own post, hopefully someone writes it out, but it is the perfect minimization of the entire progressive strategy for years). The third post is actually about white dudes for Harris! The fourth is GOP weird and racist, the fifth is GOP weird. On BPT, the first video is “cool black people interrupted by annoying white women! Colonizing their space”.
Social engineering slop, all of it, certainly. But it works! You want whites to have a negative response when they think about their own group; that is, if you want to subjugate and destroy them. Replace their heroes with black drug dealers who rap and demean their women. So for Kamala, it is helpful to broach the topic of white identity insofar as it is used to vote for a black-indian woman. In the same way, in the corporate world you are allowed to acknowledge you are white when you at DEI training.
The Titanic heroine is every woman’s dream. She is a wealthy and sought-after nubile. She has a wealthy fiancé who represents maximal resource and power, a wealthy father as well, and gets to have an affair with the handsome DiCaprio who represents maximal youth, vigor, and primal sexual desire. This is a combination of Zeus, Apollo, and Adonis, the children of the Titans all on board the Titanic. Our heroine gets to choose the best of all worlds. She has the affection of the two competing interests of the fertile women.
But the movie doesn’t end there. The smut (and the movie is emotional pornography) piles on. Because our heroine has all the right decisions made for her. She is captivated by DiCaprio, her interests momentarily cut in two like the Titanic, but she gets to leave him frozen in time while her “heart goes on”. She gets everything out of him that she wants while getting to keep her privileged status. The iceberg and the icy sea represent this process of freezing into memory. The female viewer takes away that she could have his child, while also retaining a powerful and resourceful upper class position.
Lastly, she’s the victim, while also looking superior to her peers. What more does a woman want than this? All the money, the vigorous male, the damsel distressed, and finally the superiority over the men guiding her. There is nothing more to add.
Obligatory Zizek: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9DocwBZyESU . The true tragedy would be if Jack survived, they had sex for a month in New York, and then she is hanged to try. Lastly, this emotional processing in the Titanic allows the modern woman to put Jack to death in her own life, much like the Christian can behold the Passion and put sin to death. You have been baptized in the frozen sea with Rose and buried with Jack, and now you can put away forever the delusions of youth.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Fun article on how the Taliban feel about moving into Kabul since the end of the war
There is another thing I dislike and that’s how restricted our lives are now, unlike anything we experienced before. The Taleban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day. Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.
I’ve made friends with three guys who are from our province but have been living here [in Kabul] for more than 15 years. We sometimes go to Qargha, Bagh-e Wahsh [Kabul Zoo], Sarobi and Tapa-ye Wazir Akbar Khan. To be honest, every time I go with them, they pressure me to play and listen to music in the car. At first, I was resisting, but now I have given in, with the one condition that they turn it off when passing through security checkpoints because many other Taleban don’t like it, and it’s bad for a Taleb to be seen listening to it.
Although my new friends are from good families and are good lads, there are a lot of bad circles of youths in Kabul who smoke, use drugs and do bad things, so it’s hard for us to become friends with them. Our nature and values differ, and therefore most of our friends don’t make many friends in Kabul because we don’t fit in with them. Despite this, some Taleban have now become friends with such youths and are inclined to do many bad things, such as going hookah cafes [qilun khana].
In those first days, when we sometimes came out of the ministry to Macroyan bazaar, there were a lot of women wearing indecent clothes. We anticipated they would wear hijab,[7] but after the initial days when women feared the mujahedin a lot, their attire has actually become less proper.
Now, they’ve become assertive to the extent they’re entirely heedless of us. Many of our friends say that, apart from us coming and replacing the police and officials of the former regime, little has changed from the Republic’s time in Kabul. During the first few days, many of my comrades and I hardly dared to make our way to the bazaar because of them [women]. We hoped the situation would soon get better, but it didn’t. Even worse, one of my classmates in his computer course is also a woman. We sit in the same classroom. Although I despise women that don’t wear proper clothes, nonetheless, I can’t turn my back on the bazaar or my class because of them. If they’re unashamed, let us also be so. This is the only thing I never imagined a Taleb would encounter in his lifetime.
The San Francisco Chronicle has announced the discovery of a new Pretendian, the class of white women who pretend to be Native Americans to procure benefits ranging from job opportunities to social status. This story would be insignificant, since the public is now familiar with Warren and Dolezal. But the author has discovered what can be called the Chief Pretendian, none other than Sacheen Littlefeather, the most important female native American in the 70s and 80s. You might not know the name but you’re probably familiar with the clip of the pretty Indian woman making a speech on behalf of Marlon Brando at the Oscar’s. Turns out all the evidence points to her being a white Spaniard with no connection to any American Indian nation, and no connection to any indigenous Mexican group either.
The details are the details, what I find most interesting is: why? This is a pattern, not a one-off thing. White American lib women love cosplaying as Indians. Duplicitous Littlefinger Littlefeather went all in on the LARP, dedicating most of her life to her story as an Indian. The why is so much more interesting than the how.
My thoughts are that people, and especially young women, love costumes, specialness, and emotionally significant stories. The romanced notion of Indians is a whole wardrobe of social life that a person can put on and enjoy. Littlefeather had no interested in the non-romanced Mexican identity. Indians, however, had the connotation of being cool, one with nature, wise, and good. This costumed enjoyment is why the KKK larped as wizards and wore Spanish Catholic dress, why the Freemasons larped as they did, and maybe why the Liberal Woman -> Hijabi pipeline is running despite stretching more terrain than Nordstream. We live in one of the least costumed, ritualized, and play-tending time in Western history. The only thing we have left is Halloween (and liberal women love it too, rightfully so)!
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Hale was white, so the potshots at white people make no sense
Where have you been this past decade? There’s been a whole cohort of young white people raised to hate white culture and white people because of propaganda that depicts them as stained with the sins of oppression and racism. This is called “white privilege” discourse. The shooter specifies white privilege as one of her motivations for the shooting. The motivation is not muddled. She absorbed far left propaganda to hate her race and she lashed out violently as a result. She mentions white privileged, khakis, fancy schools and “Daddy’s money” because these are the ideological memes that she came in contact with.
coffee_enjoyer
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2yr ago
Dahomey is whitewashed in a way that Europeans would never be whitewashed. No one would be okay with a movie about Leopold in Africa where the Africans are responsible for their own appendage-removal (although, ironically, this is the case, but accepting the metaphor…). No one would be okay with a movie about colonists which doesn’t show alleged savagery against Natives, or worse yet, shows Natives as the evil aggressor to innocent white people.
The problem is not historical inaccuracy, but an over-the-top double standard, where they are whitewashing slave owners because the slave owners were black, and making a villain of the emancipators because they are white. It is a racial double standard allotted to black history that is not allotted to white history, because “privilege”. This cuts through the pretense of social Justice and shows that Hollywood just wants to cast whites as villains and blacks as victims, without any deeper principle like social justice or historical truths. The Woman King proves that the guiding principle of Hollywood writing on race really is “white bad”, not “slavery bad” or “teaching history”.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
filling the leviathan-shaped hole in the mod log
Mr Beast’s Trans Debacle
Mr Beast is the Gen Z entertainment celebrity of note. Calling Mr Beast the PewDiePie of Gen Z would be underselling him. His 25-minute Squid Game YouTube video received 400 million views, which to put in perspective is 5x the total viewership of the Seinfeld Finale. His Tik Tok has 80 million followers, his most popular “YouTube short” has 650 million views, etc. He is more popular than what the average millennial or older would think (I fall into this cohort). When he visited a mall in my state to sell his burgers (one of his successful business offshoots), the line extended miles and made the news. Mr Beast has a childhood friend group with whom he makes videos. The rapport between the friends of the group, what might be called the “vibe”, is a crucial ingredient to Mr Beast’s success. They were, like many friend groups containing boys in America[*], all male; the pure boyishness was a major draw for his success.
This year, one of the “cast” members of the Mr Beast enterprise transitioned into a woman. (For brevity, I will just call the member she and a woman.) Chris, who had a child and went through a divorce, has transitioned in full. She is wearing dresses on video and taking HRT. If you were to plug Chris and Mr Beast into Google News, you would have no idea how the viewers have responded to this change. But plugging it into Tik Tok (the premiere Zoomer app) gives a different story.
The response among Gen Z has been overwhelmingly negative. When I checked last night, 8 of the 10 most watched videos for the search “Mr Beast” were a negative reaction to Chris’s transition, the total view count of which was more than 80 million. The comments overwhelmingly negative. A typical comment section looked like this, sometimes with more than 25k comments. The commenters chant “Mr Beast 6000 coming out”, referencing Mr Beast’s oldest YouTube channel known for political incorrect humor. The consensus among the fans is that the transition has ruined the group’s rapport and that Chris has got to go, but that hands are tied because she is transgender. On the latest (secondary channel) video for Mr Beast, the comment section is censored and moderated so that the issue can’t explicitly come up. The commenters instead spam “we want to see more Chandler and Nolan”, cleverly emphasizing their disinterest with Chris by omission. The fans on Tik Tok are trying to find any clip they can to get Chris cancelled, with one finding a video of him saying the N word and another digging up an anti-Islam tweet from 2017.
There are a few things to explore here.
Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform. Low censorship, low “authority-boosts”, and high anonymity allow for majority discourse like in the old days. It would be hard to gauge the fan reaction without looking at Tik Tok, which (conveniently) is the app that most of his fans use for socializing and discussion. This illuminates how manipulated platforms like YouTube and Twitter are, both because of censorship and because of cancellation fears.
The younger generation appears to be immunized against the transgender movement. The boys do not buy it. Mr Beast is a litmus test because he has a large, diverse fan base in Gen Z, the majority of whom use Tik Tok and have Mr Beast content algorithmically fed to them. These Tik Toks are as close as we will get to a “youth vote” on the transgender issue. They not only don’t buy it, but they think it is immoral and noxious.
Mr Beast is in a pickle. He became popular, partially, because of the authenticity and joy of his friend group. The discomfort involving the transition is palpable in the latest video. Body language, rapport, banter, and general “vibes” have ruined what led children to watch his content. He is the most data driven creator and knows this. He has previously mentioned that he edits out sneezes and coughs because it loses retention, and I believe once mentioned that adding a girl to reaction videos negatively reduces engagement. Alas, he can’t come out and fire the transitioned member without losing corporate sponsorship and reputation. He is stuck between losing popularity among his fans, or losing support among the progressive power structure. He is also losing support from parents who don’t want their 8-year-old watching a transgender. There’s also the moral issue of supporting a friend post-divorce.
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