DiscourseMagnus
11d 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
14d 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
16d 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
24d 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
...are you implying that warfare was better for civilian bystanders in premodern times? I'm under quite the opposite impression.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
I'm all for it.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo 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".
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
That's a pretty typical attempt at well-poisoning when any man prefers, or is suspected to prefer, a real or hypothetical daughter to be chaste.
I disagree. While it is sometimes used to well-poison in this way (and while I do think that our society severely undervalues chastity and parents do have a moral responsibility to protect the chastity of their children and particularly their daughters), I think that "your behavior strongly suggests a subconscious-at-best desire to fuck your own daughter" is an insult that is deserved far more often than it is issued.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the complex collapse of traditional sexual morality in our society that so many fathers are unable to articulate a desire to protect their daughters' virtue that does not ironically sound disgustingly incestuous. (I would certainly expect that this is a large part of the problem; the pathology I'm pointing at rings so false to me because it seems detached from any hope of eventually finding one's daughter a suitable husband. It's like a male-pattern counterpart to empty nest syndrome, at least as afraid of one's daughter growing up and getting married and moving out as it is of her falling victim to some cad. Watch out for rhetoric suggesting that the reason the daughter's chastity should be preserved is to extend her easy low-maintenance childhood; this implies both that the father specifically objects to the thought of his daughter getting married young and that he'll be fine with her becoming a slut once she gets too old to maintain the facade of childhood anymore.) In any case, though, I don't think that this behavior helps to preserve traditional sexual morality on either a personal or societal level.
("Rules for dating my daughter" t-shirts, pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals, etc, aposematically convey to me: "I am unable to distinguish between the concepts of protecting my daughter from men with ill intent and kidnapping her to go live together in a cabin in the woods, and I am very close to doing the latter; I have often considered the logistics of setting up a Josef Fritzl basement.")
Trads probably don't get to blame 100% of this problem on modernity, though. A lot of it does seem rooted in (echoes of the long-gone) patriarchal model, in which women are property first of their father and then of their husband, and, IE, rape is understood as a form of property crime. While such a model does have a lot to recommend it, it also clearly has a lot to disrecommend it, and though I have a very low opinion of feminism, I think one of the more compelling (and fringe) complaints they've made is that traditional societies seem to have had a lot of unreported incestuous rape going on. The parallel construction of father-daughter and husband-wife is clearly very easy to fuck up and confuse both in ancient and modern contexts, and I would generally urge people to maintain a clearer delineation between these roles.
Libertines would like us to think that the offputting thing about purity balls, purity rings, and the like is the purity, the thing that libertines want to destroy. The actual offputting thing is the balls, the rings, signifiers of marriage where no marriage can actually exist, with the father in the husband role. These young women should be getting married off ASAP, not LARPing as pseudowives for their fathers. I would also suggest that, when fathers participate in their daughters' weddings, they should take care not to equate themselves too directly with their new son-in-laws, and to generally be watchful of innuendo and scandal. General talk of "giving away my daughter" is iffy; talk of "giving this man my daughter to love as I once loved her, though we'll always know that I was first" is right out.
Of course, there are also men who deserve this insult for reasons that have nothing to do with some malformed defense of chastity. (Sometimes, indeed, because they are insufficiently protective of their daughters' chastity; because they proudly parade their daughters around in a sexualized fashion, unbothered.) Certainly, for everything positive one can say about Donald Trump, and there is a lot, this is an attack he has invited upon himself.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I want to be clear that this idea (blood relations don't matter that much) is not what I was trying to get at here; I was not by any means calling TitaniumButterfly's ideas absurd on their face because they were pro-blood-relations-mattering. I was saying that it was absurd on its face to treat father-and-son-but-racemixing-happened as a looser blood relation than eighth-cousins-thrice-removed-but-you're-all-super-racially-pure, and it speaks, IMO, to running screaming away from the actual mechanics of how blood relations work because you're desperate for a kludged-together definition that supports your racialist worldview. It hits my ear the same way as something like "actually, black people have more in common with chimpanzees than they do with you or me". I don't think that that's true, and I don't think that you think that that's true. I think that you would like to think that that's true, and I think that that's very silly.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
"ping pong ball"
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Defining it the way you do raises a lot of questions that feel fundamentally unserious. (If a Frenchman has a kid with a French woman, are there still some random strangers he might occasionally meet in the street who he's more closely-related to genetically than his own child? What if it's an Italian woman? etc) It feels like a reductio ad absurdum of a racialist mindset, and for that reason I would expect it to be rhetorically counterproductive for you.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Speaking as a retail worker, litigiousness is a leading factor here, and I'm shocked that no one has brought it up (EDIT: I was beaten by a minute actually). Seeing-eye dogs were the original foot in the door that made it difficult to keep dogs out of any public space like a grocery store, particularly when combined with the ADA. In theory, this might have been a workable system: seeing-eye dogs are as well-trained as dogs get, and it isn't really feasible to credibly pass off a regular dog as a seeing-eye dog. (One small hole though: seeing-eye dogs do need to be trained in the first place, these seeing-eye-dogs-in-training are definitionally not necessarily trained yet, and it's a lot easier for some schmuck to pass off a regular dog as a seeing-eye-dog-in-training. Not that big of a problem, though; people who train seeing-eye dogs aren't themselves blind, and therefore aren't really able to credibly threaten a lawsuit over something something disability accommodation. Although, really, any psychopath can get all sorts of things by insinuating that they'll file an obviously frivolous lawsuit in the right voice. Sad!)
Then the idea of "emotional support dogs" or "therapy dogs" arose and everything went to hell. The preexisting infrastructure for mandating tolerance for seeing-eye dogs was repurposed to mandate tolerance for "emotional support dogs"; instead of acting as a disability accommodation for blindness, they acted as a disability accommodation for "I am mentally ill and will throw a fit if separated from dog". Many parallels here! The small core of asshole true believer psychiatrists quickly gave way to a much larger scene of asshole grifters who marketed identification cards, medical diagnoses, legal services, etc to the whole country's backdrop of asshole dog owners who wanted to take their dogs everywhere. Even then, it wasn't as bad a problem as it is now - but eventually, the normalization hit a critical point where businesses started setting policies of "don't even bother to ask for their medical I Need Dog ID Card they got off the internet; we just have to tolerate the dogs now", and then the I Need Dog ID Cards stopped selling so much and the normalization exploded through the roof as all of the dog owners who'd like to take their dog everywhere but had too much dignity to get one of the cards and call themselves mentally ill realized that they were now free to take their dogs everywhere. And so it goes.
A cascade of collapsing Schelling points falling to Moloch; no one able to stop them because of legally-mandated norms of politeness-to-the-unpolite and such. Very American story!
Andrew Jackson is supposed to be his favorite president.
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