DiscourseMagnus
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User ID: 3133
DiscourseMagnus
1hr ago
Such an amendment would discredit the government for obvious reasons. The abortion issue is a reductio ad absurdum of democracy. Apparently the electorate cannot even agree to prohibit the industrialized slaughter of infants.
DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
The Twitter duped you. This video is a year and a half old.
DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
I will confess that this surprised me as well. The paranoid part of me expected her to do a coup and become president anyway. Like, Joe Biden is mysteriously dead offscreen on election night, which we only find out in what everyone had assumed would be Kamala's concession speech, suddenly Kamala Harris is the president, she openly refuses to transfer power to someone as dangerous as Trump, and she's putting out a call to kill him and all of his supporters, with pardons promised. It was kind of nutty. Glad to see everything going okay.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
Unfortunately, speaking from experience, people with dementia are often much, much less capable than others of recognizing that the deterioration of their selves.
It's odd to me how muted the public conversation is, though, on the corruption of Biden's inner circle in not pushing him out much earlier. I think people are approaching this wrong when they say "Biden staying in the race was bad for Kamala because it gave her less time to build a campaign". Biden staying in the race was bad for Kamala because it exposed to the public that the Emperor had no clothes, and she was the Emperor's second-in-command.
Personally, the Republicans have lost a lot of goodwill from me by acting like the pro-life mission was accomplished with the end of Roe. Oh, you think the issue should be left up to the states? We tried that with slavery, too, it didn't work, and abortion is at least as morally abominable; it's outright Old Testament-style ritual child sacrifice, and it's entrenched in our society as an institution that something like half of the population (or more) equates with freedom, catharsis, and womanhood. There's so much doublethink about it; fetuses are treated as human or nonhuman per current convenience. It fully corrupts the parent/child relationship; every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered, and depending on her social environment and character she may well have seriously considered it. It's a horror lurking in our collective unconscious which we willfully repress, in much the same way that we repress our own mortality by avoiding the thought of hospitals and old folks' homes, keeping them sterile, out of the way, antimemetic. But the dull suit put on abortion is something more willful and evil; it's Nazi death camp shit, but without a geopolitical crisis to put an end to it. We are ashamed of it as a society and we should be. Roe v Wade was just the Dred Scott v Sandford equivalent; getting rid of it is good but it's a band-aid on a decapitation.
We should avoid civil war if at all possible, but if there was anything to do it over, it would be abortion; if our country was salvageable, Republicans would collectively be courageous enough to run on a platform of hanging abortionists and their biggest enablers and cheerleaders from lampposts, and they would win and implement it. I have no intent to throw my life away pursuing this purge of our society on my own (or with some kind of FBI-bait terror cell); it's hard to say how much of this is personal cowardice and how much is observation that it hasn't worked to fix the issue in the past. But contrarian Confederate apologia aside, there's a reason that we still celebrate John Brown today, even if we wouldn't ourselves have done the same thing if we'd been born in his time, even if it took some legitimate unhingedness on his part to do what he did, and even if his actions ultimately decreased the world's utility instead of increasing it. He was driven crazy by something that should drive people crazy. You should feel sick and guilty for not feeling pushed to action to the same extent he was; we all should. Our country is in a terrible decline which it has thoroughly shown that it deserves, and if we are suddenly and violently annihilated soon by some terrible external calamity like a nuclear war of extermination, which seems likely, we will collectively deserve that as well. Obviously many innocents would die as well, and I would hope to forestall it as long as possible - out of self-interest and concern for the people close to me if nothing else - but if you believe in God, you should be terrified; God's justice is terrible and does not wait forever on matters like this. If you don't believe in God, you should at least feel like you've been living in a version of Nazi Germany that's survived peacefully in a position of dominance over the world for many decades. It's terrible. Our current world is terrible. If it's the best it's ever been it's still terrible.
Paul Hill's body lies a-mouldering in the grave. His soul is marching on.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
One of the frontrunners for Kamala's VP pick was Jewish.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
There was a huge campaign throughout the election cycle by the Palestine crowd to punish Biden and/or Kamala electorally for their concessions to Israel, which is kind of funny given that Israel much prefers Trump.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
I chose to abstain from voting on this basis, although I still think he's less likely to cause a Revelation-grade catastrophe in the near future than Harris would have. (I associate Mystery Babylon, and the Whore of Babylon, with America, and Harris would fit the bill, although the Whore doesn't need to be a specific individual to represent the country.)
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
Absolutely. Republicans can be anti-crypto in power and Democrats can be pro-crypto in power, but it's still certainly a polarized issue.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
They already are responding positively to a Trump win. Bitcoin just hit a new all-time high.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
Oh, man, speaking of Nate Silver - apparently his attempt at making a live election night tracker has sputtered out and crashed because its design was low-effort enough that it kept outputting probabilities near 50% long after everyone else had called that Trump probably had it in the bag. That's especially embarrassing for him because the main criticism of Nate through this cycle has been that his model distorts the race to make it look closer to even than it actually is in order to generate drama.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
Somehow, I don't think that that's the likeliest mechanism by which a President-Elect and VP-Elect could die before inauguration.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
I know; I'm pointing out that he didn't run for a non-consecutive term after losing reelection once.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
Technically, Roosevelt didn't lose reelection. He was very popular but didn't seek reelection in 1908, and Taft was his chosen successor.
DiscourseMagnus
8d ago
This description reminds me of Sarah Palin, who was a remarkably charismatic figure, except that that charisma was a very normie boomer type of charisma that's very vulnerable to attack in our modern political environment. Trump has something similar, but with an extra more unique quality that makes him the defining figure of our times.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
It feels like a race between the Antichrist and the Whore Of Babylon.
DiscourseMagnus
15d ago
Yeah, I remember it was big on Tumblr a decade ago, too, and it seems like it's worse today. I would expect that if the graph added two more data points for "2010s" and "2020s" they'd probably be a lot higher than the "2000s".
DiscourseMagnus
16d ago
the DID fads of the past decades. And we did manage to put a lid on the social contagion for those
...we did?
DiscourseMagnus
16d ago
Look, whatever the name you want to put on the phenomenon it's been with us for a very long time. I balk at the idiocy of presentism all the time, but "rare case of pathological desire to be of the other sex" goes back to the beginning of history.
I think the real presentist error people make here is treating transgenderism and homosexuality as more distinct phenomena than they actually are. They're separate manifestations of a single underlying ancient pathology, which could have manifested in any number of other ways if our culture had developed differently. When conservatives express tolerance towards homosexuality and disgust towards transgenderism, it's a clear example, IMO, of not being nearly as free from the ideas of the surrounding culture as you think you are. The deviancy of homosexuality is downplayed and the dangers of transgenderism are exaggerated. They're the same basic life-destroying contagious confusion about the binary of sex. If history had played out differently, we easily could have wound up with transgenderism normalized a generation ago and homosexuality being normalized now, and then the same conservatives would be treating the latter as the bridge too far, with very elaborate arguments as to how this set of priorities made perfect sense.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Oh, to be clear, I didn't mean to imply that tall women are precisely equivalent to short men, or that tall men are precisely equivalent to short women - different sexes are different. It's just closer than the other way around.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
False symmetry. Height is a masculine trait, and its absence is a feminine trait. The counterpart to short men isn't short women, it's tall women - short men and tall women are both wrongly-heighted. The counterpart to short women isn't short men, it's tall men - short women and tall men are both superbly-heighted.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Yes.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
(tbf, not one of the better ones)
I'd certainly consider it one of the best ones. If you're mostly familiar with the material via the movie, I'd recommend remedying that; I'd call it an inferior adaptation all-around, for many reasons. Its mediocrity is perhaps more infuriating than a worse adaptation would have been, as it makes it easier for people to conflate it with its basis. Your Fault in particular might be the song that suffers the most from the adaptation; they made the very strange decision to slow it down, draining an awesome, climactic moment of its energy. It's a patter song, and it benefits greatly from the faster speed it was written for. I think of Your Fault and Last Midnight as two halves of a single moment, almost a single song, the buildup of tension followed by the breaking point.
The PBS American Playhouse recording of the original show is one of the best filmed performances of a stage musical out there. A lot of Sondheim pieces got that treatment, which is a boon for musical theater nerds.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Is the presence of a "concentration camp" per se really the deciding factor? I heard an account recently of the Nazis conquering a Slavic village and, as a standard part of their war plan, immediately rounding up and killing everyone present, men, women, and children. Is this excluded because it was less industrialized and more like standard savage ancient warfare? Is the village itself considered a very short-lived, improvised concentration camp? It seems like a distinct phenomenon from the long-term "corpse factories" we know as "concentration camps", but I think I'd be slightly more surprised to hear it excluded from the Holocaust than included.
Of course not. The nasty thing is agreeing to and promoting their disingenuous framing, as Fuentes did here.
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