Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Mutual combat that is very much illegal, with additional penalties over 'standard' mutual combat, and often involves fighting cops! It was far more intense back in the day, but despite that, in the modern setup (where sometimes hooligan groups will even coordinate with each other where they'll meet to fight), there's still a fair amount of organization involved. The coordination involved is in avoiding getting identified/arrested by the cops in the process of doing that mutual combat, or in avoiding that while beating up random people, as also often happens.
Anyway, your point was about the time and expenses involved in being a protestor, and I submit that hooligans have more onerous financial investments required (tickets, beer, trains, flights, beer, hotels, beer), generally on lower incomes, and the time requirement is not terribly dissimilar (the main difference being protesting in the week during work hours, but that burden is spread across a lot of protestors and your typical US protestor probably doesn't need to take time off work - they're retired, or unemployed, or a student, or a bartender, or have shift work).
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
In Europe, normal people, almost all with low-income jobs or on welfare, have time to do this sort of shit every weekend for nine months of the year. They are setting out to commit more violent actions than American protestors, under much greater surveillance, and often dealing with police far more willing to use force than US cops. They aren't limited to one city, but travel around on their own expense committing violence all around the country and across the continent. They have no multi-million(/billion?)-dollar infrastructure behind them as American protestors have, no systematic legal support at all, and the media hates them rather than running cover.
Why do they do this? Because they want to beat up fans of other soccer teams.
The analogy isn't perfect, but what I want to say is that it's really not that hard for someone, even on a low income, to do this sort of thing if it's their main hobby. The full-spectrum infrastructural support from the leftist machine helps a lot, of course, and many of these people are given bullshit jobs by that machine in part so they can agitate, but it's not necessary for motivated people. This also probably goes some way to explaining why, in my experience, so much more of the resources of the leftist machine are dedicated to motivating people to become agitators compared to what's paid out to support actual agitators.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
The joke is that if you listen to this right-wing guy it sounds like the left are super scary and all-powerful and about to become literal ISIS.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I fold over the top corner to mark pages worth coming back to for quotes, references, etc. and the bottom corner to mark where I am. Half the people who see this think it's clever and half are appalled.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I'm not sure that's a climbdown. Historically, Trump has reshuffled personnel during major actions as people fail/prove themselves (that's how Bessent got to his position of power within the admin), and he's simultaneously sending in Tom Homan. We'll see.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I think you're mixing up Pat Buchanan with someone else - Buchanan was a paleoconservative exiled from the GOPe in large part because of his views on race and immigration. Here he is in 1993 talking about 'Brazilification', black-on-white crime stats, immigrant abuses of welfare, and demanding closed borders.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Ah, I don't mean in leftist spaces where they're talking about rightoids rather than to them - I mean in contexts where left-wingers and right-wingers are talking to each other (which is, I know, a highly unusual occurence, and probably has some variance per space). I suspect this greatly changes the makeup of the insults used.
Thinking about it, though I rarely check twitter comment beefs, a lot of the retweets there are "you are evil and devoid of human feelings", but I guess Twitter has that element of performing for a like-minded audience, and those still get dragged pretty often (the most recent one I recall was Joyce Carol Oates getting ethered by "wanye").
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Two Jews are sitting on a bench. One of them is reading the local Yiddish newspaper. The other is reading Der Sturmer. The former says to the latter, “Why on earth would you read that drek?” The other replies, “Well, when I read our paper, we are a poor and battered people who suffer in ghettos, pogroms, and all manner of tragedies. But when I read Der Sturmer, we run the banks, the governments, the whole world – life is great!”
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Urban revolutionary movements crush ruralites, historically, where there is a single capital and urban revolutionaries can easily take control of the military. I'm not sure that's the current situation. It takes total mobilization of the entire lib population of Minneapolis, united against an external threat, to cause significant annoyance to federal law enforcement. How many chuds in pickup trucks would it take to cut Minneapolis off from the power grid? I'd wager Kulak's twitter followers in Minnesota could do it alone. What the """urban insurgents""" have is organization and structure, which works well under a rule-of-law framework, but it doesn't go very far to mitigating the extreme strategic disadvantages modern cities would face without direct US military support.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
If you hang in spaces with actual leftists, >90% of their personal insults to the right (i.e. outside political insults like "fascist") are based around sucking cock or some other accusation that the right-winger is actually a gay bottom in the given situation. What that says about gay/queer/etc. left-wingers' views of themselves is left as an exercise for the reader.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I will grant you that there are illegals for whom going back would not be a matter of life and death, but 'merely' an inconvenience.
79% of refugees in Sweden have gone on holiday back to their home country. In the US, almost all illegals are economic migrants. I get trying to pick the most tendentious phrasing possible for a statement which is technically true, but you've got to ask which one is actually the edge case you imply.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
iprayiam3 is right that, in the rhetorical context, it's a distraction, but the real point is that it's a poison pill. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that restrictionists have truly won until we see Big Ag CEOs getting perp walked, but you can't do that in six months. The opponents of immigration enforcement have picked it up from the radical populists because it's appealing but unrealistic. Too much of the economy relies on cheap (often fraudulently taxpayer-subsidized) illegal labor to do this overnight without causing a crash. These things will take time to unwind, and are inherently very thorny problems - for instance, if we do need migrant labor in some areas, how to have a legal and regulated guest-worker program that the next Democratic administration won't instantly transmogrify into a vote bank - but I think Trump's actions are concordant with the administration understanding that. Go after the criminals now, make it clear that illegal immigration will not be tolerated forever, and give the economy time to adjust.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
It's about as honest as this week's newfound enthusiasm for the Second Amendment. But it can be fun to debate here as an intellectual exercise.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Whatever was his debut novel, and Elementary Particles was the refined second try. It makes total sense that one is a worse version of the other.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I remember the first time I went out canvassing for a political party. Knocked on the door of a council flat and a middle-aged lesbian with a glass eye opened it. Asked her who she was planning to vote for in the next election, to which she asked which party would be best for her financially. I was too shocked to even respond properly, had to get the candidate to come answer (you were supposed to do this if people asked political questions, anyway). But, with the wisdom of some more age, that's obviously the sensible question for her to be asking. Why should she care about the Iraq withdrawal, or carbon credits, or devolution? She knows what matters in her life and doesn't pretend to care about the virtuous distractions of the chattering classes.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
My experience of American thermostats is that 65 degrees is too cold and 80 degrees is too hot. Yet somehow 72 degrees is also too hot and 74 degrees too cold, while 68 degrees is too cold and 67 too hot. Weather's weird here.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I've heard this a million times from Americans, but you can just remember what C number means what outdoors (0 is freezing, under 10 is time to wear a proper coat, 20 is the beginning of tshirt weather, 30 is the start of too hot, and 40 is time to get out of Texas), and the only thing I actually need precision in degrees for is cooking/baking, where chemical reactions really do matter. I don't believe for a second that Americans actually use it as a % scale rather than finding their own personal breakpoints just as one does with Celsius (I suppose some do, some people also don't have internal monologues). If you can actually distinguish degrees of 1F, it may be that Irish thermostats are much better than American ones.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Certainly true for your frequent fliers. A Hispanic guy wearing the wrong clothing for the weather? That sounds like a classic case of "No entiendo, Senor". The people who made the choice for him were the ones who brought him here without mentioning or particularly caring that the US gets real cold compared to Guatemala.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
From the tone around here lately, I was half-expecting it to end with "I decided 'Fuck this guy, one less illegal is a good thing.'"
And they say being the resident mod bad cop brainbroke Hlynka.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Americans are going to use Fahrenheit, that's just the way of the world. It's probably a better measurement system in many ways but I will never bother to learn it.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
They've gotten reasonably popular now but I've always been a fan of Mezcal Last Words (also often called "Final Word" by menus).
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
You're not going to the right parties. I recommend NatalCon. (Though sadly many of them go for the tradwife look)
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
Yeah, I think it's one part a reaction to American Main Character Energy, and one part that Europe is starting to feel the hard edges of objective decline and is figuring out how to respond psychologically to that. This is truer of the UK and Germany than of France, and not true of the former Eastern Bloc, but national decline is a very painful thing and people come up with a lot of different copes for it (I always liked James Burnham's argument that much of progressive liberalism is one big cope for the loss of the West's global hegemony). The Yookay is a sad place these days, so getting excitable about a good war is a lovely distraction for media and political classes there.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
You can actually check https://ismetroburning.com/ to see if it's currently on fire. Looks like no fires today!
Capitalism (reactionary liberal/neocameralist as runners up). You're welcome for food and technology, folks.
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