DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
However, if he now is truly attempting to maximize his people's well-being, he should have signed the rare-earth agreement with the United States. His childish behavior (inappropriate attire, attempting to alter the deal in front of the press, insolence to a nation responsible for his nation still existing) put the deal at risk, and seems to indicate that his country’s well-being no longer holds paramount sway in Zelensky.
I generally found this post remarkably insightful, but I found this particular section of the analysis very weak, in a way speaking to heavy consumption of propaganda - and your overall point rests on it. I know that I'm going right for the weakest point made, but still - inappropriate attire, really? He's the leader of a country in the midst of an existential war; his presentation was as expected.
DiscourseMagnus
6d ago
I think it's worth synthesizing this with the claim elsewhere in the thread that Obama took an unusually mild response to the 2014 invasion in order to stand by his infamously pro-Russia line in the 2012 debate with Romney.
DiscourseMagnus
10d ago
How's that executive order to declassify records on the JFK assassination going?
DiscourseMagnus
11d ago
I'd consider referring to figures like this with female pronouns and their chosen names a form of malicious compliance. They're the ones where people politically aligned with the trans movement are likeliest to relax their rules, and for obvious reasons.
DiscourseMagnus
23d ago
Andrew Jackson is supposed to be his favorite president.
DiscourseMagnus
24d ago
I've been hearing calls to abolish pennies for my whole life. Apparently, Trump is finally doing it by executive order. Is that within presidential authority? In the past I've always seen it presented as a call for legislation.
DiscourseMagnus
27d ago
I think a lot of people today would have a hard time believing how intense the Obama personality cult was. This is partially because it won - it seems more reasonable to people today that he was so admired seeing as so many of his scandals have been relegated to the dustbin of history. It's also partially because it's now irrelevant and discarded - Obama, while still powerful in internal DNC politics, is out of office and no longer really needs a personality cult, which would have been difficult to sustain for so long anyway. But between both of these factors, I don't think most people today realize that the Democratic consensus around, say, 2008-2011, was that you needed a Maoist degree of unconditional support for Obama or else you were an evil white supremacist. He also presented himself in a much more extreme light back then - far from the basically-Bill-Clinton-but-black that we now remember, his promise to America was that when elected, he would usher in a totalitarian Soviet-style communist state, radical change beyond the wildest dreams of what DOGE is trying. We don't remember that because it failed, because it hit the blob and got absorbed.
DiscourseMagnus
29d ago
I wonder if, having previously thought of himself as very Zionist, he realized that many were starting to think of Biden as more Zionist than him, and he felt he had to double down.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I don't think calling it "woke" has any meaningful advantage over calling it "social justice". Being cynical for a moment, I'm pretty sure that the main reason "social justice" fell out of favor and was replaced by "woke" is that low-information voters are actually stupid enough to fall for rhetorical shenanigans as basic as calling your movement "goodism", that is, they were uncomfortable speaking out against something called "social justice" because justice and being social are widely-agreed-upon virtues. By contrast, "woke", to an outsider, just sounds like a funny made-up word, a failure of grammar.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
22 years is what you get for contract murder
Why? I understand the arguments for downgrading from the death penalty to life in prison here. I don't understand the arguments for downgrading from life in prison to, say, 22 years.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Surely he would be following Biden's example (re: the ERA).
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Why is it wrong to ask for quid pro quo? [...] Sex work is real work. Etc.
It's wrong for the same reason all other forms of prostitution are wrong; because it creates a race-to-the-bottom effect in which the economy demands that women be sexually immoral. Now, I'd be basically fine with women sleeping with their bosses in a world where that meant marrying them, but that's not the world we live in, and in any case there ideally wouldn't be so many women in the workplace to begin with.
For similar but non-financial reasons, I remember finding a lot of the sexual norms in high school especially disgusting because they placed strong status incentives on girls being sexually active. Abstinence propaganda aimed at teens is impotent and doomed not simply because teens are horny, but because they're facing much stronger peer pressure from other horny teens.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
This was my reaction to the Whedon comparison.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I like it as a gender-neutral alternative to 'slut', I suppose?
I think it implies male as much as 'slut' implies female. You can have a woman who's a sex pest just like you can have a man who's a slut.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
do we know how many happy celebrities have left happy groupies with A+-would-bang-again experiences that they will treasure for a lifetime?
I'm of the understanding that David Bowie had one of these and got (largely posthumously) cancelled for it anyway (because underage).
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
The AI idea is intriguing, but surely DNA testing is a realistic possibility in the future even without Justin's personal consent, right? He's got three children, and DNA testing often outs this sort of thing indirectly when people are simply curious about their ancestry and get it cross-compared with a massive database.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Obama's trying to pull a reverse Carter here, sullying a once pristine reputation with his behavior as an ex-President.
His presidency's reputation was never "pristine" unless you were living in a particular bubble (which controlled the institutions).
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
The charismatic megafauna are the ones that most need to go! They make much more impressive trophies for humanity. We've accomplished so little in the "driving species to extinction" field in so long. We're close to getting some rhino species, but some others are still doing just fine.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
...are you implying that warfare was better for civilian bystanders in premodern times? I'm under quite the opposite impression.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I wonder if Disney's own power in that regard has waned as of late.
It clearly has. People half-joked for ages about Disney lobbying for yet another Mickey Mouse copyright extension - a joke which, in itself, made the thing less likely. But as Mickey started to hit the public domain, not only was the public watching out for that kind of legislative abuse - Disney was itself in a precarious position, more entangled with the culture war than ever before. They no longer have many friends in high places, relative to how it once was; the Republicans hate the gays and the Democrats hate Americana.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Look at the Wikipedia page for the Rotherham scandal, though. Even on Wikipedia, you can see how much under-reporting and mis-reporting still occurs.
This is actually an extreme improvement from the state of the page a few months ago, when they attempted to cobble together a narrative that the whole thing was a racist hoax (the page got renamed "grooming gang moral panic in the United Kingdom" and rewritten to match). It stood that way for several months before people started to take notice and they quietly changed it back without admitting fault.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
If the victims were Pakistani and the perpetrators white,
I'd be surprised in that case if the perpetrators survived to go on trial.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I'm all for it.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
It seems like a fairly natural continued escalation of the combined thoughts "I care very deeply about protecting my daughter", "I have an extremely expansive definition of protecting my daughter which includes preventing her from ever having a relationship with a man, regardless of what she wants", and "you should be scared of me because I am criminally insane, particularly in these daughter-related matters".
Amusingly, you've confused him with the fictional character he played.
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