DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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User ID: 460
In shorter form, Kamala Harris’ Blackness has a lot in common with the personhood of an unborn child: it depends on who’s asking and why, and it’s a political football in the hands of a Lucy van Pelt.
It’s not for the sake of being weird, it’s in spite of.
Generations X and Y grew up watching quality fantasy adventure comedy ensemble cartoon shows, often from Disney with the exception of Sonic the Hedgehog: Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Duck Tales, Darkwing Duck, Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers, Tale Spin, Goof Troop, The Mighty Ducks, and more. The fandoms of these shows endure because of the care taken with the storytelling and the high production quality. (They also tended to be incubators of furries.)
In 2010, such shows had basically gone extinct. There was the oddball Adventure Time and the “combining robot” adventure show Sym-Bionic Titan, and little else. Then The Hub channel from Hasbro debuted with My Little Pony, and fans of shows like Tale Spin or Sonic the Hedgehog recognized a return to the classic form: a quality fantasy adventure comedy ensemble cartoon show. It was not just fun, it was meaty in how enjoyable it was. Storytelling was back. It was written so parents could watch with their kids and not be secretly wishing to turn it off.
The basic premise is that a top student (nerdy, autism-coded) in an elite prep school gets sent by her mentor to a small Midwestern town to make friends with the local small business women who are vendors for the mentor’s big event: a farmer, an animal caretaker/trainer, a party planner, a dressmaker, and a crop-duster/cloud-seeder who dreams of flying with the national airshow team. They rescue the mentor when her estranged sister kidnaps her. The mentor assigns the student to learn sociology there in the town with her new friends.
Except they’re all technicolor horses (unicorns, pegasi, and “earth ponies”) in a quasi-feudal fantasy realm, the mentor is the princess alicorn (winged unicorn) who raises the sun each day, and 1/3 of the population has reality-warping magic.
And both GenX and the Millennials adored it.
The system is built to notice and disrupt coordination.
Vance had to choose his own identity when the institution of patriarchy broke down in his family and failed to give him one. I don’t think it’s cringe, given his life story as portrayed in Hillbilly Elegy.
I can think of two other circumstances treated somewhat seriously by society, beyond legal name changes and brides taking their husbands’ names.
A story trope I heard about, growing up as a GenX kid in America, was how generic Noble Savages would rename themselves following their Trial Of Manhood. I have never heard nor researched this tradition’s provenance in any particular tribe or people, but it was played straight in the Star Trek TOS novel Uhura’s Song.
Then I discovered the Internet and chose a handle or two. This one dates back to finding out My Little Pony had the answers for my autism-based lack of relational instincts.
It does sorta go off the rails because he went off his rocker, and meanders while he parodies genres, but the arc prior to 200 is a solid run and 200-250 are fantastic, some of his most memorable. The third- and second-to-last phone books are heartbreaking. The final one is 60% text, but worth it for the self-reflective nature of Dave losing it once more vs Cerebus losing it. The final issue is stupendous.
Grammar Nazis versus Grammar Commies, to coin a phrase.
Interesting thought: they use their gut reaction as a signal that bigoted people would be offended by it, a form of transference to resolve the cognitive dissonance.
Perhaps even a delusion where they think it’s not their feeling they’re feeling, but the psychic vibrations of people they assume are bigots.
Dave Sim’s Cerebus warned me that some people honestly believe they can read others’ minds (feelings/intentions, not thoughts/concepts), but until now, I didn’t have a model of the delusion’s mechanism.
I was trying to give user Plural one possible reason “it doesn't hit close enough to home for me to understand why it would be effective or offensive in either direction.”
For you, clearly it does hit home, as it does for me. But this is a rationalist space, so I’m not surprised to run into someone for whom it doesn’t.
And for the record I find it a very offensive ad.
It’s basically this comic/meme, intending to make conservative women feel gross when men in their lives have opinions about sexual morality.
Jon Haidt’s work on Moral Foundations Theory suggests that grey tribers don’t have instinctive moral judgments except when freedom or coercion are involved. I’m not surprised it’s not hitting here as fighting words like it did over on patriots.win when someone posted it there.
Impolitely:
- Pedos want marrying ages below 16.
- Creeps want marrying ages below 18.
- Prudes want a maximum age gap formula.
“But but but it’s not gross men like that who transition,” says the intuition of trans rights activists.
The only thing which can resolve warring noncentral fallacy accusations is statistics, and I don’t think anyone will be satisfied by the stats on “actually a gross man”/“actually a pure and innocent woman cruelly given androgens by the wrong genes and forced to age up past puberty by a patriarchal and binary system”.
The inherent disgust reaction is one of the most powerful emotions humans have. For some, it’s triggered by women showing their penises in locker rooms, for others it’s would-be rapists touching women’s bodies with their words.
Flat percent gross receipts tax with one exception: If enacted, every business pays 25% of the receipt price of goods and services directly to the federal tax authority, except for used goods. This ensures that goods from used jeans to used skyscrapers are only taxed once, ever: you buy it, it is yours to resell without government interference. This protects private property rights.
Flat universal rebate: Every citizen and legal resident gets a direct-deposit monthly rebate, 1/12 of 25% of the federal poverty income level (with certain adjustments for married, kids, etc., adjusted yearly). This dollar amount is supposed to recoup the taxation paid by the poorest, so the government doesn’t cost them a dime on net. Everyone gets an identical flat amount, rich or poor, a true national dividend. This can even benefit the unbanked, who can get a checking/savings account due to the guaranteed nature of the deposit. This makes it fair.
Ends FICA payroll withholding: Income tax is eliminated permanently and the income tax amendment repealed. FICA withholding is replaced with a one-time downward wage adjustment equivalent to the FICA calculation, whereupon workers get their full contractual wages with no taxation, no April 15, and no fear of the taxman ever again. This ends government intrusion.
Ends the IRS: Replaces a unionized bureaucracy/federal revenue police force/retirement fund for bureaucrats with an automated system and a much smaller revenue enforcement bureau aimed solely at businesses. This yields cost savings for every taxpayer in every bracket, while keeping the plan a revenue neutral replacement for income taxes.
Ends investment taxes: This encourages people to invest without fear of jail or penalties.
I’d been letting my Motte replies stack up in my inbox, so I just cleared the reply counter and reduced that attention debt to zero. Did anyone have any lingering thing they wanted me to address?
Really! Both a sibboleth and a dogwhistle. Some days I love this place. (The rest of the time, I like it.)
I’m going to start using “sibboleths” just to see who reacts.
Jewish Motters: I am not actually an Ephraimite.
Scalding hot and boiling hot water are no joke. https://www.google.com/search?q=scalded+to+death+water
Certainly they made bad decisions in the moment, but deadly weapons should never be underestimated, such as a knife, a spear, a club, a thrown stone, a clenched fist, or boiling water.
Nonviolence/nonslander as a response to violence/slander is a known part of game theory. It only works when someone on the side of the aggressors has both the introspection to see their actions as wrong and the power to halt the aggression. Otherwise, it’ll have to be tit-for-tat for survival.
At the moment, all such people are on the right, except maybe Obama, Oprah, and Anderson Cooper. (I’m only calling out names the undecided voters would consider following if they called for peace in the culture war.)
Crooks got off three shots, then five shots were heard in rapid succession, then one shot from the Secret Service sniper ended Crooks.
It was a Trump rally, and there were spectators on the grassy field next to the sniper’s perch, not inside the event grounds and thus not searched by security, who could see and film him on the roof. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Trump enthusiast pulled his own pistol and sent five rounds toward Crooks. Though if that had happened, I’d expect someone to have reported it by now.
She’d take the office as the first woman President of the US after having dropped out of the 2020 primaries due to bad polling and having been nominated by Biden due to her demographic profile (“Black” woman). She’d be seen as the face of DEI quota hiring, not a woman who succeeded due to her merits like Secretary Clinton would have been. The House will have to vote in her successor as Veep, and she’d be stuck with whoever they chose. None of the optics are good. And the polling says she has a good chance to occupy the office for all of half a year before Trump becomes 48th.
They also want her to earn the office of 47th President with votes, because they can campaign on “if you vote for her, you can show the world a woman can be President!” This boosts the down-ballot races.
Only if, as the current conspiracies go, Biden already died of COVID (despite multiple boosters) and they’re covering it up.
Go to an IRL Toastmasters meeting, or better yet, a Toastmasters area contest. You will feel very accepted.
I have a lefty Coworker, and the only way I could get him to give up the Teleprompter glass cut hypothesis was showing him multiple pictures of the Teleprompters not being broken on an article on Snopes about same.
Whereupon he fell back to the blood pellet or palmed razor cut theory.
The ones who would inherit the power vacuum caused by recusal would, by the same logic, need to recuse themselves, leaving nobody.
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