DiscourseMagnus
6d ago
Oh, to be clear, 100% agreed.
DiscourseMagnus
6d ago
I really feel like the popular narrative of Watergate was completely detached from reality to begin with. Nixon did things that were wrong, sure, but I'm pretty sure basically every modern president does things at least that bad. You would have to be profoundly naive about that for the accusations made of Nixon to stand out as a unique stain on the presidency. It was basically a hit job by someone or something, and insofar as Nixon was driven by paranoia, he was right to be; he just screwed up the implementation.
DiscourseMagnus
7d ago
I'm surprised not to see anyone mention the most memorable episode from this saga I've seen going around X:
One officer was suing because Afroman made a whole song about him saying he was fucking the officer[']s wife. When the officer was asked if Afroman was really fucking his wife, he said "I don't know".
DiscourseMagnus
7d ago
I have a lot of nostalgia for my parents' politics, but in retrospect their love of civil asset forfeiture, clearly sold to them through conservative outlets as part of the war on drugs package, was a weird and embarrassing outlier. They were generally quite fond of constitutional and liberal principles, but it's like they didn't notice or didn't care in this case that the legal mechanism they were celebrating was a blatant endrun around them. They just thought it was based that wealth was flowing directly and freely from organized crime to law enforcement.
DiscourseMagnus
7d ago
One of the direr likely consequences of the war in Ukraine that often gets sidelined in Western discourse is the Moscow-Constantinople split in Orthodoxy, which I understand to be historically unusual. Deeply unclear how it'll ultimately pan out, but I doubt it's likely that it'll be truly resolved by the outcome of the war. Georgia seems to be closer to Moscow's orbit here than Constantinople's; it's the only preexisting Orthodox Church, as I understand it, that's recognized the UOC (as opposed to the OCU). The Russian state disapproves of both the UOC and the OCU, as they're both attempts to split off from the ROC in Ukraine; however, the UOC is the one that's politically closer to Russia, and so also faces the disapproval of the Ukrainian state. A lot of nuance here that I don't really understand, seeing as this is all quite foreign to me.
DiscourseMagnus
9d ago
The effect is the same, but I doubt the bad advice is usually deliberately so.
DiscourseMagnus
9d ago
Sometimes I hear women complaining about being on dates with man-o-sphere guys, and I'm a little bit skeptical.
They might be jumping at shadows and imagined dogwhistles? I remember being 13 in the early 2010s and being very confused to have a girl confidently accuse me of being PUA, a scene I barely had any awareness of at the time, based on my making some relatively innocuous comment I barely remember along the lines of calling dating a "game".
DiscourseMagnus
9d ago
As an outsider to the left, I do see the socialism/communism distinction as a relatively meaningless one of branding. But for what it's worth, I've become a lot more sympathetic over the years to the "everything to the right of me is fascism" line too, or at least to the application of the fascist label to right-authoritarian regimes and movements since WWII that don't claim the label for themselves for obvious reasons. But at the end of the day, I think we're all somewhat liberal, somewhat socialist, and somewhat fascist, just as we're all subject to each of the deadly sins. Some just in greater proportions than others.
DiscourseMagnus
10d ago
I think one could reasonably assess that feminism and the manosphere are the same type of thing, in the same way that fascism and socialism are the same type of thing. One is simply the incumbent.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
I'm on the right and I think it relatively likely that Trump did a lot worse than that with Epstein. The idea that Iran was motivated by distracting from this is still inane though.
DiscourseMagnus
16d ago
But we're not (yet) in charge of the Russians, Iranians, or Palestinians. Any complaints we make about them would be outward-facing, not inward-facing, a fundamental difference in character. While I agree that we shouldn't hold our enemies to a lighter moral standard, there is literally less reason to criticize them, because they are already a foreign adversary.
DiscourseMagnus
18d ago
As @Quantumfreakonomics alluded to, a much larger proportion of men are "out to get them" in the sense of a pump-and-dump. Unfortunately, I doubt that their cautious instincts are well-calibrated on average to avoid this, but it is a legitimate cause for concern on their part.
DiscourseMagnus
22d ago
I feel like his last real chance at significance died with Charlie Kirk; there was nothing he really could have done to salvage being the main known in-house rival to a central martyr figure like that. Leftist conspiracy theories that the assassin was affiliated with Fuentes were obviously baseless nonsense, but before info came out it at least felt vaguely plausible (though certainly not the null hypothesis).
DiscourseMagnus
25d ago
Standards inherently create good times.
Only if they're good standards.
DiscourseMagnus
25d ago
The converse of this is that if you were following the kinds of high schools and colleges that feed into Google, Damore's point would have been obviously outside the Overton Window and dangerous to express well before 2017.
DiscourseMagnus
27d ago
I think the aggregate of many humans might actually be somewhat more coherent than most of the individual humans involved, because on the aggregate scale, cognitive dissonance fades away into tactical dishonesty and different groups having different interests.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Fair enough! Though the reasons to be skeptical of self-reporting on this particular issue are fairly obvious.
I've met plenty of women who seem hellbent on making this analytical leap, and about zero men who think that way at all.
Hello, I'm the strawman you're suggesting doesn't exist. I personally find body hair, including pubic hair, unattractive on women for the same reason I prefer shorter women with smaller breasts (and bigger eyes!), because I see signs of physical maturity as unappealing in this context. Yes, I am aware that this is weird/creepy/gross/pedo-ish of me, but that's how the concepts connect in my head, femininity is right next to neoteny, and while I'm aware that most men don't think the same way, I didn't feel I could let the idea that men in general don't think that way stand.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I remember being young and finding this terminology collapse confusing myself. I think gay men were responsible? For them the distinction would become rather blurry.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
This is extremely relatable, and serves as a good reminder (of what should already be obvious) that encouraging AGRs without restoring functioning sexual morality is worse than nothing.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Though he's a villain rather than a hero, I take Absalom as a Biblical ur-example here.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I'm somewhat more sympathetic to the "representation in media" complaint here, but it actually slightly cuts against the complaint about real AGRs. The problem is that the fictional relationships are rarely actually being depicted as AGRs. A fifty-year-old actor is playing a Generic-Age Man and a twenty-year-old actress is playing a Generic-Age Woman. If the script was actually trying to portray an AGR - which it may well be likelier to do if AGRs were more culturally accepted - the implications would be quite different.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I'm surprised that even the strawman doesn’t invoke eschatology here.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I personally find it fascinating to notice how the cultural stereotype of the incel is actually a sort of amalgam of two different archetypes of men, and one of them is indeed the established pickup artist who's lost his fucking mind. That really puts the lie, IMO, to the idea that "incels" hate women as a sour grapes thing; by far the most vicious misogyny I see in those online spaces seems to trace back to men who have led terribly disordered and promiscuous lives; they were already quite misogynist in the first place but got worse when their lifestyle proved unsatisfying. I think there's something of a feedback loop between the celibate woman haters and the caddish woman haters, but the latter are much more aggressive and manic in any case, where the former are more depressive and blackpilled.
I personally think that COVID appeared plausibly enough like an apocalyptic bioweapon that Trump should have taken just about any measure necessary, no matter how authoritarian, including martial law and suspension of elections, to minimize its spread. But I also think that if he'd even leaned in that direction, it would simply have been the left rather than the right convinced in the end that it was some kind of tyrannical hoax.
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