If you're going to imbue 'Black Identity' with cultural cachet, a shared experience, and promote it above others, it is absolutely correct to question whether celebrity politicians honestly reflect it or are grifting.
DTulpa
3mo ago
"I can't believe rightoids think a family from the Midwest is weird" is the same caliber as Joe Biden pulling his "Do I look like a radical?" schtick while he stocks his administration with with fake women and obvious perverts like Sam Brinton.
I get that you can barely contain your relishing this situation where the manufactured optics around it are tilting against the Republicans' favor at the moment, but could you maybe try a little harder.
DTulpa
3mo ago
If you want to make a case for his favorability ratings versus Vance, I won't argue with it. I would contest that this anything to do with him being a 'turbo normie', which you claim as seemingly self-evident.
DTulpa
3mo ago
I too can just baldly assert things. Things like:
Walz does not come off as a turbo normie. And he looked freakin' strange on the stage next to Kamala in a way that Vance doesn't.
DTulpa
3mo ago
She inherited that media. It took literally zero effort on her or her campaign's end to spin up the gaslighting machine in her favor. If you're able to show me a throughline between an action she took or a message she broadcasted and the ridiculously fawning coverage she has received (between bouts of imitating ostriches), please do.
If this is what qualifies as 'expertly-run' under your definition - which is to be understood as third parties doing all the heavy lifting for you -then it means nothing to me.
This is probably just sour grapes on my end, but I think a distinction should be drawn between her campaign itself and the backwinds of one of the softest, non-hostile media environments I have ever seen for a candidate. People are giving Trump crap for his NABJ appearance, but are there any examples of Harris or her surrogates being able to survive a similar waltz through a lions' den? Every interview I've seen with Harris has her nonsensically flubbing through easy lay-ups provided by sympathetic journalists. Then there's the retroactive editing of articles from years ago, the refusal to grill her at all with regards to covering for Biden's obvious unsuitability for office, and an inability to make a case for her beyond riding a coconut with a smile.
Without the aid of the news orgs and a voting base that has totally mindkilled itself in the last few months to justify her ascension, this campaign would be stillborn. The power comes not from some expertly-run campaign, but the media putting its ass on the scale to glide her through. Biden was a beneficiary of this dynamic, too. This isn't a novel whiny excuse. Rightoids have tagged this as the true threat for years, and it doesn't matter if Biden, Harris, or some other thoroughly unimpressive Dem candidate is the avatar being supported.
DTulpa
3mo ago
I think it ebbed a bit, but even the Tyre Nichols case was immediately framed as black cops learning the ways of white cops.
Furthermore, I doubt most people even remember the name 'Tyre Nichols', whereas 'George Floyd' and 'Eric Garner' will still be regularly invoked due to how they were branded on our collective consciousness.
Yes, most people have been socially conditioned to still expect men to carry the weight of themselves and others. Even those who have gotten completely tanked on "Women don't need men" narratives for the better part of a decade or more clearly believe this. This doesn't make it right, fair, or justified. Nor is there any assurance that this state of affairs is permanent.
I'm not sure how much weight being a self-interested asshole will carry in the future when we have turned into a nation of self-interested assholes. Or when the thing you're banking on to carry forth this duty (masculinity) has been discarded as either a historical myth or a vacant shape not exclusive to one gender ("girls can be just as strong/powerful/responsible/horny/aggressive as men"). I need to pay child support because I'm a man, but 'man' doesn't have a definition any more, traditionalism is dead, and I'm supposed to keep this going because Outlaw83 prefers it this way?
Good luck with that. No way this will ever collapse, I'm sure.
You vaguely gesture towards some "responsibility" that you can't even coherently define. And when pressed, you collapse into threats from the state and just-so social sanctioning. You can't offer anything else, just sticks. Said threats are certainly salient to this dynamic, but if that's all that's on offer, then I wouldn't be be so assured of this being an enduring constant.
DTulpa
3mo ago
I'm sure that plays well to traditionalist boomers. I really don't know what load-bearing social scaffolding in modern times you expect to bolster this sense of responsibility.
DTulpa
3mo ago
I think this is completely fair. But then my takeaway is that more attention and effort should have been paid to the border itself and its enforcement. I get the image of the admin plugging their fingers in the holes of a dam while it collapses on the sides, and whatever good work she performed is undecut by a strategic failure to keep an eye on the ball - or to even ackowledge the ball at all.
DTulpa
3mo ago
Biden wasn't going to be able to do this even if he was still in the race, and so it just reminds me that Dems were protecting an invalid. It's also a rare view of the man when he's not in bully mode. If any fence-sitters have concerns that the 'madman' routine is how he is down to his core, displays like this serve as a bit of an antidote.
It's also noteworthy that this did not trigger the automatic kiss of death or moral outrage that is usually given to celebrities who dare to 'normalize Trump'. 'Member when Fallon got scorched for jokingly touching Trump's hair? I certainly do.
DTulpa
3mo ago
Meanwhile, you could just make the fucking Barbie movie and get all the wimminz' moneys without pissing on your other properties. God forbid you make a distinct product that appeals to ladies specifically instead of flattening your other golden geese with a rolling pin.
DTulpa
3mo ago
I'm sure they'd prefer to keep beating on Biden, but I'm not quite convinced that Republicans are 'freaking out' about Kamala switching with Joe. As is usual in partisan politics, the game is to criticize them for everything they do and to not allow any win conditions. First you yell at them for entrusting the country with a man who obviously needs to go, then you criticize them again for backstabbing/ousting their dear leader when they actually do away with him. Superficially, this looks inconsistent or hypocritical, but eh. I think this is totally normal.
It's also easier to justify if the argument is "I am criticizing literally every thing you do because they are all consequences of your enormous unforced errors", like an inverted Xanatos Gambit.
DTulpa
3mo ago
As a former Democrat, perhaps I was never able to summon a burning dislike for Ms Clinton, although I was never her fan. I didn't vote in the matchup between her and Trump. My opinions of her only turned more negative further down the line.
By comparison, I find Kamala to be odious on nearly every dimension. I might have given Hillary a lot of shit, but I never doubted her intelligence or general political savvy. Kamala is a bobble-head, and while I could have tolerated her existence as a fashion accessory for the Biden campaign, watching her get escalated to her current position without having to jump through a quarter of the hundreds of fire rings Trump had to circus through is now insulting.
I think she will ultimately do herself in. But I admit that every couple of hours I have a mini-freakout about her being this close to POTUS. I relax when I remind myself that she never had any momentum and has been entirely reliant on elder statesmen's protection and hiding her from view. Now she has nobody else's wing to hide under and there's no more safe spots to bail to.
DTulpa
3mo ago
Well, I just watched left-aligned protestors in the real world crowd the Capitol, hoist the Palestinian flag over the US one, burn them for good measure, and write "Hamas is coming" on a DC memorial.
So I can take some solace that message discipline might also be a problem for the Left. And fortunately (also cynically) for me, I think this might be a bigger tire around their necks than what dimwits on X shitpost or an old quote from Vance. The 'Free Palestine' movement is practically autonomous at this point, and has made clear that they give no shits about alienating normies and non-allies. There's no 'off switch' at DNC HQ to punch, so their ability to manage these kinds of nasty, confrontational displays is probably limited.
Get a few more viral videos of US fraternities defending flags and statues from mobs and I think this could hurt the Dems if left uninterrupted. And I guess if nothing else happens between now and November. Low chance of that.
DTulpa
3mo ago
Speaking as somebody who used to appeal to BLM'ers to include Tony Timpa in their press materials, I did so because I also don't like dickhead cops and argued that BLM's best path forward was to deracialize the issue and get broad buy-in with a patchwork of murder-by-cop horror stories. This was rejected near-totally. And in the years since, I think the ethos they represent is a larger threat to the country across multiple levels than what hotheads with badges occasionally do to people in the lower class.
I've also had a drop in sympathy for many (though not all) of these victims due to their sheer inability to 'act right' with law enforcement, based on some personal experiences. Let's just say that if I can keep calm, respectful, cooperative, and stationary with a cop while tripping balls on several psychedelic substances at once in the middle of a crime scene I am culpable in (a power I did not realize I had until that moment!), then I have less and less patience for the kind of low-level disdain and noncompliance I see in these stories that always increases the risk of LEO escalation.*
*This particular comment is not directly relevant to Massey's story. Just further explanation as to why any common cause with your stereotypical anti-cop activist was left to wither and die.
Many people here over the course of years or even decades were probably incubated in the idea that anger or hatred were not virtues, and should be avoided despite our occasional, personal lapses. Your parents, teachers, and media all probably echoed the same sentiments, and this was sold as non-negotiable bedrock. Over time, you realize this isn't actually how things work, and that many of your moral instructors have a hard time even bothering to keep up the act. And so you go from having a sincere belief, to an abstract ideal, to lip service, and it has now bottomed out entirely. A fairy tale has lost its spell, and we are all Spider-Man now.
I don't think this should be license for infinite rudeness or malice. But if we're going to talk about modern cancel culture dynamics and explore the idea of 'revenge' being compatible with 'justice' (for real, not snapping up the drawbridge at "eye for an eye" platitudes), then this ire is a very legitimate data point, and it is ignored at everybody's peril.
I see where Scott is coming from, and it is not even close to overcoming the war memorial I can visualize of victims shitcanned for transgressing progressive values in the most milquetoast ways. And I don't know why I should have to reflect in the mirror and assume I'm the one getting warped because I feel a bit cross.
DTulpa
3mo ago
I was reading through the comments, found myself saying "This one guy sounds a lot like darwin", looked up at the name and lo-and-behold.
Points for consistency.
DTulpa
3mo ago
How much ammo does one need to summon to crush a wounded, pathetic little duckling?
I respect the possibility that she may WOW me with a pivot to a smart, competent, and incisive campaign. If only these were qualities she had ever managed to exhibit or sustain beyond a 30-second edit. This meme you're pushing that "Repubs are scrambling to figure out an attack on Kamala" is one of the most fanciful things I've read in this last week, as if she hasn't been repeatedly trotted out as a pinata to playfully hit with a stick in between more serious concerns regarding Joe Biden and the Blob. She is known to her opponents, and they make hay out of her every day.
The Trump campaign should give her a cursory acknowledgment as the Dem nominee, and then go back to hammering the Biden admin while pretending she's not even in the room.
DTulpa
3mo ago
This may be news to you, but society did not collapse overnight when the halls of power were threatened. There were no repeat attempts. Everybody eventually went home and retreated back to grumbling from their keyboards and patiently waited 4 more years for their next shot. You may argue that the consequent ill will towards Democrats was therefore misplaced and avoidable, but that sentiment was generalizable towards their entire party both before and after J6. It's baked in.
As bad as J6 was and could have been, watching various leftist riots and harassment campaigns treated with pillows while they spill their anger and hostility onto their fellow citizens did more to damage my trust in institutions than any march on the capitol. Your sacred system means fuck-all to me if it's not going to protect me and mine from street felons.
DTulpa
3mo ago
You realize that Biden's decline by itself is only one part of this drama, right? The rest has been watching the Democrat party panic without direction and reveal themselves as dishonestly providing cover for a senile old man.
As long as the party running in November is the party that managed this embarrassing shitshow, you might want to reassess how 'over' this is.
Force should be applied along a continuum until compliance (or 'persuasion' if you prefer!) is achieved. We can start with explicit Dead 45 comments made after July 13th. If nobody's feeling interested in setting down bipartisan protections after that, then the ratcheting should continue until it is desirable. And if that day never comes, then seeking complete dominance gets put on the table. Everybody here is familiar with the "your rules/my rules/fairly" orders of preference, and I'm trying to be clear about mine. Concerns regarding how successful this can be are valid, but don't dissuade me from thinking its worth attempting. "You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" is also a villain line in movies, but it has been more true through history than not if we're honest.
Previous intra-left cancelations have had more to do with failing to meet purity standards or not being up to speed with the most current lingo of the day. I think what's different after the Trump shooting is that they are now being visited by something outside of their wheelhouse, and it is making some of them crap themselves. Nobody in Dem-ville had to worry about lazily wishing for Trump to be assassinated (couched in cutesy Harry Potter metaphors, or trans-themed guillotine memes from the 'Love is Love' Facebook group) up until last week. My read isn't that Gass and HD lady are being punished because their peers or employers are truly offended by them, but because they are are afraid of what may be coming if they don't start heading this off now - especially since it looks like we will be getting an energized Trump admin with a popular mandate pretty soon. That fear should be exploited to get concessions or at least a table-meet.
You're right that some of this has already been churning in social media, but I think it's really only been on Twitter, and that is a direct result of one man being in the right place at the right time. Reddit got worse with each passing year, and only now may be internally wondering what their path beyond 2024 should be. It's incumbent upon conservatives to start flooding this space with their own heuristics and impacting the Overton window now, and that unfortunately is going to involve street scraps and some old ladies getting knocked over. I guess we could hold fire and wait on some high-minded technocratic solutions from Musk and his peers to shake out from top-down. Or he could be bankrupted or assasinated by next week, get replaced by somebody who's happy to revert to status quo circa 2020, and the opportunity to build some momentum on a grass-roots level will have been completely whiffed on.
I said I wasn't getting people fired. I can still report hateful snots and find I'm getting a lot more traction than I did a few years ago. I am checking back in with people who peacocked the fact that they made whole wretched subreddits dedicated to 45 being dead just several weeks ago now squirm and go bipolar since they've gone under the microscope. And I am finding that a few of my Dem friends may have been caging their frustrations in the same way I used to, while the rest have conspicuously piped down their vitriol to their benefit and mine.
You say 'petty'. I say 'doesnt require that much effort'. Because the beauty of this is that you don't need to go hard when your opponent has so utterly beclowned themselves in this manner. When I say I am not looking for symmetry, that means I am not looking to cancel people for being pro-trans, pro-immigration, or holding any other stereotypical lefty belief. I am fine with profiling solely for people who publicly wish death on Trump and his supporters - who have decided this is leftist territory worth defending - and collaring every single one of them within arm's reach where possible, big and small. Just because I don't have the stomach or patience for this work doesn't mean I don't recognize the utility.
And if this can be accomplished by spooking them into doing this to themselves, all the better. That's decent power projection IMO. I think it's actually great that Kyle Gass is getting sanctioned by his own people instead of his opponents. That's some self-awareness starting to show. If they start to doubt the existence of an actual threat - well, Billionaire Tyrant Elon Musk has shown he's happy to make your life harder if he can half-cleverly justify it even if it breaks his touted his 'maximum free speech' line. The future cultural terrain is looking more and more up for grabs to me than it did in January. If nobody wants to wise up, we could very well make support for increasingly-discredited 'gender-affirming care' worthy of bans and demonetization by some time next year if trends continue.
You want me to talk about 'changing the law'? Okay, sure. "Social media posts cannot be considered as grounds for termination, and companies found doing this will be prosecuted to the full extent possible". While simple and broad, that seems like a good enough starting point for me, is actually close to my heart, and one I can be pragmatic about in regards to exceptions. And I'm just positive this is so widely uncontroversial and easy enough to coordinate consensus on that all I need to do is send an email to Mark Zuckerburg and ask him to lobby on behalf of this beautiful, pure ideal! Now that this wonderfully useful exercise has taken place, what's next, Hoss?
You want a change in law, make at least some people want it. This implied demand that I need to set forth a charter or a ten-point plan on 'How I Would Fix Free Speech On The Internet' is pointless when that opportunity is neither here nor there at this time. Especially when I am actually already telling you this a minimum Step One for such a process.
There is something really dispiriting about the death grip of advertising (or its lack thereof) and the way it is cynically wielded. X would be a prime spot to pump your ads, but we are told to believe that the general population would find it unacceptable to hawk your wares on a site that occasionally has a user say 'nigger'. Outside of vocal minorities, I absolutely don't believe the average person would care, and would generally be able to discern that the ads hovering around any given tweet have nothing to do with its content - just like I know an ad for Liberty Mutual has nothing to do with the 3-hour RPG retrospective it's interrupting. I've rambled before about this kind of 'fake free market' where companies are claiming their customers are literally begging them to remove a product or cut off a platform, and said company is just respecting their wishes.
If people really can't disassociate the served-up ads from the content they hover around, you would think the healthy thing to do would be to encourage some maturation on this matter instead of indulging these fainting couch sensibilities. But as I said - I dont believe this is really the case. It has nothing to do with people finding offense and everything to do with boxing out political opponents. Even normal people I know who support the ad bocott against X eventually give this away, but still suggest nothing fucky is happening.
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