JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
8d ago
OK, I see your point. I guess there is some turning afoot. Makes me feel doubly weird though - first time because I'm not used to UK policies being less insane than US ones, usually it goes the other way in my experience. The second time because the stance of "trans women are men, but you go to jail if you say it without government approval" is still completely insane, just in a different way - now we have a choice between the clown would where a man can become a woman just by saying it, and the clown world where a man can force you to say he's a woman, under the threat of government prosecution, even though the same government does not think it's true - so you are officially forced to lie.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
Note to self: if you are using your phone to deal drugs, set up privacy settings so that messages do not show up when the phone is locked. Which actually is the setting on all my phones anyway even though I don't deal drugs.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
I like closets because I need a lot of storage (I have trouble throwing away things) and built-in storage means I don't have to pay for it separately. Of course, no house so far had enough built-in storage for everything, so I have some wardrobes and bookcases and so on. Would I consider a house that has no closets? If it's perfect otherwise, than probably yes, but discounting it by the price of the storage furniture I'd have to buy and install, and also the effort to find them (took me months to find decent bookcases that don't cost like I'm building a taxpayer-funded Presidential Library). And, alternatively, the house with ample built-in storage would get valued more for the same price.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
The tide has turned on the trans issue
Do you mean in the US or in the UK? Because I don't see any tide turning anywhere in the UK. Maybe I'm ignorant but I see they are merrily arresting people for tweets as they did before, and show no signs of wanting to stop. Yes, media talks about it, so what. Media talks about a lot of things. Is something actually changing?
JarJarJedi
10d ago
That's easy. When those bad people do it, it's bad, when our good people do it, it's not bad. Nazis are bad, so punching them is laudable. Trans people in women's bathrooms are good, so punching them is genocide. It's easy!
JarJarJedi
10d ago
one could in theory argue that it constitutes incitement to violence
Not in the US, it has to be imminent specific threat. "If X does Y, then you have to do Z, and if that fails, punch him" is not a specific imminent threat. Now, by UK laws, anything goes, whatever they want to het you for they can get you for, they don't have a robust concept of freedom of speech left, so there's nothing do discuss on principle here - they'll arrest you for whatever they want to arrest you for. But in the country where the concept is still alive - US - it is not illegal.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
The slippery slope is real and slippery. You start with light TDS - which is only understandable, I mean look at him, he's a baboon! - and then you go on justifying worse and worse things in service of the "right side" because if you don't, the baboon wins! And you end up defending things that some time ago would horrify you. And each step had been so small you hardly noticed it. I stopped reading Popehat when it started because I knew how it's going to end up, and it did. Happened to many other people too (and organizations, look at ACLU for example).
JarJarJedi
11d ago
I also doubt that even US-levels of firearm ownership are particularly strong mitigating factors against the risk of coup or government oppression
Yes and no. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. So in order to commit a coup, people should decide to commit a coup. Then the guns could help to make this desire to become reality, and if it happened, I think the number of civilian guns would matter. But the bar for this decision for a person in the modern world is very high. As COVID showed us, you can literally put the whole country under house arrest for months and nobody would decide that's the red line. You can force people to put chemicals into their bodies that they don't want to and that's not the red line too. I mean, for one side I am glad we didn't find the red line - living in the time of civil war is no fun whether your side wins or loses. Everybody loses in the war, some just lose more. But also, I'm not really sure what the government should do to make people decide that's the time for using those guns. I hope to never find out.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Outside very limited areas, there's no such legal thing in the US. Though of course grey and black markets exist. But the prices there must be higher, to account for the risks. Probably not an order of magnitude higher, but still higher.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
Not sure why it should be. Generally, the majority of Israel population is very sour to the political Left right now because, as the sibling comment noted, Oslo process had thoroughly failed and none of the promises the Left made to the people is even close to being even partially fulfilled. The question is who would lead the right or the "centrists" which will be pretty much the same as the right on the question of Arabs, but may be different on taxes or economic policies or how to deal with secular/religious divide, etc. - Israel has more than one problem. Among all those people, Netanyahu is the most credible and the most seasoned politician, so he keeps the power. The challengers, even if they have temporary success, usually fail to handle one crisis or another and get booted on the next election - and in Israel, that can happen anytime, because of how the Knesset works, the moment the ruling coalition loses the majority, it's new elections (not mandatory, but the majority can cause them to happen anytime they want). So the reason as it seems to be is kinda boring - he is on the winning side and he is the best at this game out of all available players. Maybe one day he'll get too old or somebody better than him will raise.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
Started reading Careless People without realizing it's currently a center of an active kerfuffle. I'm about 25% through and what is described is horrible in so many ways, and there are really no good guys (gender-inclusive here) there, including the author. So far my opinion of Mark Zuckerberg has improved though (from quite a low point, to be honest) - at least if this book to be believed, and again I am only 25% through, so I don't know how it goes further (didn't get to the China part, for example), but so far he looks like a very autistic tech founder that just wants to make the best product possible, but is surrounded by busybodies who want to "change the world". I hope my morbid curiosity would overcome my sense of revulsion and I can finish it.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
Do you make all sorts of grunting noises when lifting?
I sometimes do on the last couple of reps on the cycle. It helps. Not every rep though, for me it'd mean the weight is too much. And I am probably annoying other people. Which I try not to do without good reason.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
They look down on Sikhs in places like Canada for engaging in a bit of cooking of the books, and the abuse of lax immigration pathways
Is this unique for Sikhs? I was thinking pretty much everyone who is from a poor country would have certain percentage of people who have relatives there (or paying customers) and would cheat to help them. Probably not for richer countries as the improvement in lifestyle is not worth the risk, but for a relatively poor country (or sub-community in the country) it would.
JarJarJedi
14d ago
How many bucks exactly? There are paid surveys, but the rewards are extremely low. I heard of games where you could grind and farm characters or artifacts and then sell them. Probably also not very lucrative. In general, if you seek something that can be done with any person with a computer, you have over a billion people to compete with, so the expected revenue stream would not be very good.
Protesting is not criminal in and of itself
Here we go again. Going to generalities and completely omitting the specifics. Yes, protesting in general is not criminal. "Protesting" like the Hamas mobs did definitely is - property destruction, attacking other students, shutting down campus, preventing other students from learning, etc. It should have been criminally prosecuted, if the campus management did their jobs - but they do not intend to, because of their ideology. That does not make criminal actions less criminal.
I want to notice here also how the left has suddenly rediscovered freedom of speech - in one single case. If you show on campus in KKK uniform or in blackface - you bet your sweet behind you're going to be kicked out. If you burn a rainbow flag or say something against Muslims or transgenders or immigrants - there would be grave consequences. Professors have been fired for much less than that. But if you call for murder of Jews and islamist insurrection in America - oh, here we must tread lightly! Here we must take all measures to not sudenly over-react and give any impression that this kind of speech is somehow unwelcome and that we may not want to see people who speak like that around! That treatment is reserved for somebody who says there are two genders or that maybe equal test scores should give people equal chances for admission, regardless of their genetics. That speech is horrible, but the one about the Jews - that's precious, we must keep that one. Fascinating, how it works. And that's another thing that is way out of normal with the modern Left. They don't believe in freedom of speech, but they select some of it to pretend they do. And the kinds they select is raising a lot of eyebrows for sure.
but based on Garcia I don't think Trump is capable of much besides doubling down.
Seriously, you are choosing a MS-13 member, a human trafficker, a domestic abuser and an illegal migrant who has an active removal order from a judge, to be your best example of how Trump is deporting people just because he's racist and no other reason but thinking there's too many foreign people in America. I guess that does close the case, just not the way you think it does.
That's it? It's all controlled by big CNN?
Not controlled, but coordinated. And not by CNN alone, of course, as I explained numerous times, it's a network. Propagandist outlets like CNN serve the coordination function in it, disseminating the Currently Correct THinking, so that the faithful would know what they must think. I'm not sure what this has to do with "profit" - their point is not to make a profit, and they are doing piss-poor job as a business, but they are not traditional businesses anymore. They don't need to be, it's not their function.
the news can spin a story to some extent before being able to be sued
It's practically impossible to win a case against a news outlet on bias. If they straight out lie - which they do often, because, see above, they are piss poor at their job - they can be successfully sued, but that rarely interferes with the primary function.
Either you control how people react or you don't.
Again, they don't "control" how people react, they serve as a conduit to inform the faithful how they need to react. Nobody forces the wokes to be wokes - not by threats or anything like that. But once they become woke - they'd listen to CNN, or read the NYT, or whatever flavor they'd prefer, there are many - that's how they would get their marching orders.
My argument is you claim they are part of the leftist network, and the predominantly left media is criticizing them for it.
So what? Stalin murdered Trotsky, and they both were Communists (and Stalin murdered many, many more communists too). Of course inside the left there would be some tensions and clashes. I am not saying the leftists always and in everything are in lockstep. I am saying in the question of suppressing the political opposition they are able to deploy vast number of resources, and the banking system is one of those resources that they were successfully able to use for that. Of course it doesn't mean some on the left never had any conflicts with any banks (ignoring now Visa/MC aren't even banks) for any reasons.
Well yes, welcome to America where barely anyone can afford to go to college without going into debt.
Why? Because if was set up this way. Why it was setup this way? Because this way it's much easier to control and manage. Who controls and manages all this system? Deep state bureaucracy. Which side of political spectrum the deep state bureacracy leans to? Bingo! The dependency on the government is a feature that was carefully implemented and entrenched. That's why the left is so infuriated that the right is trying to use it against them - how dare they to use the weapon that was designed and implemented by the Left to fight back against the Left?! It's not fair!
To say that "I won't give you money if you espouse X beliefs" is to say that government can control speech if there's money changing hands, and I very much don't like that.
That's what the govenrment had been saying for many years, only the X beliefs were the correct beliefs, that the Left and the deep state condoned, so everything was well. Now that the right is trying to use same tools, the left is screaming "what happened to the small government?!" You killed it, you bastards, that's what happened to it.
They don't endorse it, from what I've seen.
Yes they did. BLM riots were widely endorsed and supported - including absolutely mind-blowing declaration in the middle of pandemic that mass gatherings against racism are exempt from any medical concerns - and the premise of US being deeply racist country, solely based on oppression of non-whites by whites, and various race hate hoaxes, from "hands up don't shoot" to finding various nooses in random places etc. has been very actively propagandized. If you haven't seen it, that means your information sources are lacking. That's just explicit endorsement, with second line had been by refusal to address and prosecute any lawbreaking that accompanied those events, and in rarest cases where somebody was arrested they usually were either let go immediately or given slaps on the wrists.
but I don't keep a folder on my computer labeled "Things that pissed off other people that happened 10+ years ago."
I do. Well, the label is different, but recording things that pissed me off about US politics had been a little hobby of mine for over a decade. Call me crazy but that helps me being less pissed off about them, kind of therapy if you will. I don't often re-read them but sometimes I do.
You don't actually have a clue what I read and what I don't, thank you very much.
No I don't, but you do. And when you repeatedly say that you haven't seen or noticed things that I witnessed to happen - either in person or by reading contemporary reports about them as they were happening, and I know that they happened, then I know whatever you read it's not enough to keep you informed. That's how I know.
people with guns were telling everyone to stop.
People with guns tell protestors to stop all the time, and protestors ignore them all the time. If that led to killings each time, all Portland antifa would be dead already, and most of other leftist militants were too. It's not how it works though - except in one single case. In the case where this person posed absolutely no immediate danger to the people with guns or anybody else - and was actually surrounded by people with guns, and people much stronger than her (5'2" woman) who were able to subdue her in seconds without any danger to themselves. Heck, there aren't many 5'2" women that even myself, who isn't a trained police officer at all, would have a problem to handle - unless she had, say, a gun, which Babbit didn't have. This was a clear case of "shoot first, ask questions later" - which poorly trained police, unfortunately, did many times before - but in this case, the victim was a deplorable, so it was deemed ok.
well it turns out if your protest happens to involve going into a large restricted area and there are lots of cameras, it makes it easy to prosecute.
It was easy to prosecute, especially because all the FBI and all the surveillance network (including financial companies, cell companies, etc.) have been mobilized to hunt those horrible criminals - old women that walked in "restricted area". But it wasn't the right thing to prosecute, and it was absolutely horrible injustice in the way it was done. And it was done on purpose - they were prosecuted with maximal effort and maximal cruelty specifically because this was to send the message - the left can do such things any time they want, but the right is not allowed it. There is no symmetry, there is no equality, and the right must be put in their place.
You know btw who FBI didn't find easy to prosecute, despite lots of cameras? Somebody who placed the pipe bombs at DNC and RNC HQs. Somehow nobody cares about that, and the FBI is absolutely content to let it slide while zealously prosecuting every last grandma and grandpa who walked anywhere near the Capitol. Is this normal?
The gay kid who grew up in a conservative town would say otherwise.
He would say the bank refused to open his account because he was gay? Or the college kicked him out? Or he was attacked by a mob in a restaurant? Or blacklisted by all employers? Which town is that?
This is Trump's party now, and everything is about owning the libs.
It is Trump's party because of the abonrmalities that happened in the previous two decades. His sucess is the direct consequence of the woke abuses. There's a limit to what people could take, and when that limit is reached, you get Trump. Or somebody worse, if you're unlucky. If there was another way of somehow restoring at least some measure of normalcy, then Trump weren't necessary. But the Left is not going to correct itself and roll back the woke insanity. They are too invested in it to stop now. So, an equal and opposing force is needed if we don't want to go deeper and deeper into insanity. That's Trump.
JarJarJedi
16d ago
That said, I was contrasting with Trump who seems to be going after people on student visas,
You seem to be doing this thing repeatedly, where you take a specific case, throw out what makes it specific and declare the hollow husk support for your argument. Trump is not just going after "people", Trump specifically is going after people who are involved in criminal mischief, and not just any mischief, but in violent support of foreign terrorist organizations and publicly calling for a violent uprising on US soil. Student visa is not a "get out of jail free" card, and revoking such visas for individuals that commit violence and call for insurrection in the US is a legitimate measure. If they hate US so much, they should be in some other place they'd hate less. Trump never made any move against people who are not involved in such criminal acts, and never objected to the concept of student visas in general.
I extrapolate from that that Trump is acting on vibes of "there are too many non-Americans staying in America, get them out."
That's a completely false and libelous statement, and you should be ashamed of proclaiming it, contrary to all known facts, but I don't expect you to be.
The woke professor has no control over or in with the woke CEO or vice versa. All they do is see on the news
Congratulations, you found the coordinating node! What you generously called "the news" is the propaganda organization whose sole purpose is to instruct the woke CEO and the woke professor what they are supposed to be outraged about now. And those organizations have been witnessed many times to push literally identical message all over the networks.
You mention the banks, but right now there's a protest over Visa/Mastercard cutting off porn video games. That notably includes LGBT games.
That's really weak. Banks have been scared of porn for decades, and it's not some kind of political anti-gay move you are trying to present it. If that's all you got, you are really scrapping the bottom. The processors are scared of any kind of porn, gay, hetero, Christian, Muslim, whatever it be - they won't touch it. That has been like that since forever. On the contrary, there was recent push to debank any outlets to do with guns (I personally closed all my accounts with Citi because of it, something that is being rolled back now btw), which is clearly politically coded, even more precisely - woke coded. And even more recently they started to debank people personally, for political activities. I hope it will now stop, but it happened. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy if Visa/MC stop being dumb prudes (and invest in some proper fraud prevention) and embrace the lucrative world of porn. But this example - and especially trying to link it with gay stuff - is super weak sauce.
Non-state colleges are not government-adjacent institutions
Most of them are very dependant of govenrment funds and government loans, even those who are formally private. The amount of woke pushed by the governemnt through the colleges, either directly, or by just dangling money in front of their noses, is gigantic.
NGOs are also private organizations.
Formally, yes. Huge amount of leftist NGOs, however, are financed by taxpayer money and often created with that explicit purposes. A lot of local money allocated to various programs - homeless, drugs, migrants, poor, etc. - are allocated to NGOs. Have you ever heard of "GONGO"? That's what most of those leftist networks are, either officially or factually.
And Trump is treating every interaction point with the government as a stick (such as cutting off international students from a university)
Universities that insist on violating the law and discriminate on race, for example, deserve a lot of stick. In fact, I am unhappy how little stick Trump is giving them for being such a bunch of unrepentant racists.
as if the government could one day decide that your tax return is based on your political beliefs and this would be totally acceptable if the correct side was behind it.
Are you new to this whole thing? We had whole huge scandal where IRS was doing this - it was deciding which organizations to allow tax-exempt status and which not, by political beliefs, and then somehow all the evidence for this turned out to be on some hard disk, that had misteriously failed... Your "can't even happen, it's ridiculous" scenarios are my "already happened and everybody on the left cheered it" scenarios.
I was objecting to "cities destroyed" which is quite obviously false
I said "burned down", not "destroyed", but yes, it was somewhat exaggerated - never the whole city was burned, just parts of some. But for me, presonally, a lot of cities were effectively destroyed - there are a number of cities to which I previously gladly went - and even considered living there - and now have to avoid, because they turned into shitholes. San Francisco, Portland, parts of LA, etc. That's my problem, of course - and thousands of other people who feel the same.
As for the minimizing it, nobody likes to admit the bad.
When the whole movement endorses the outbreak of violence, and fuels it, and incites it, and says absolutely wild things like "in the middle of raging pandemic, we must lock people up in their homes and arrest people for surfing on the beach alone, but mass protests are completely fine because that's what the science says" - then it's way beyond just "nobody likes to admit mistakes". It's somebody likes to make the mistakes way, way worse abd double - no, throusand-fold - down on them. And keeps insisting those weren't mistakes but the righteous deeds.
I don't even remember most of the things you're referring to
You know, willful ignorance is not as strong argument as you may believe it to be. Maybe watching "the news" does not make you as informed as you may think? Maybe "the news" are not telling you something that they don't want you to know, and you should lookup up beyond them if you want to be informed? Provided that you indeed want to be informed, and not just reassured your side is good and all is good, of course.
I see the same thing when the right says Jan 6th was just some people walking around and Babbitt was a victim
Babbit was definitely a victim, especially if you apply the same criteria as the left had been applying to other cases. But even by any sane criteria, there was absolutely no need to kill her. As for other Jan 6 participants, there definitely were some violent ones - at the same level we see at any leftist protest where they regularly and routinely clash with the police. Since this was pretty much the only case where the right did what the left by then has been doing for several years (including occupying government buildings, and not for minutes, but for days, and sometimes burning them down) - they blew it up absolutely out of proportion - including falsely claiming the protestors killed policemen - in an explicit effort to diminish the mayhem their side has caused and deligitimize any claims from the right. They had a lot of success in that - the treatment that Jan 6 protestors got - even those who did not do anything violent - has been horrendous and ruined any semblance of respect that FBI by then had. That is one more illustration of how awfully skewed the political life in the US has become - the left does something hundreds of times, no consequences, the right does it once - it's an historical event and Congress enacts a live TV drama, orchestrated by Hollywood producers, to make sure nobody ever forgets that, and everybody who is even minimally connected gets the book thrown at them. There's a huge difference.
what I am talking about is the tendency of the right to turn around and say they are righteous in whatever they do to oppose the left.
THe right never did even a tenth of what the left has been doing recently. However, when the right did have the power, when they did bad things - like censorship - they were wrong. They don't hold that power anymore, and haven't been holding it for a couple of generations at least. If they ever hold it again, and try to use it again for evil - like, I don't know, ban porn or something - then it would be righteous to oppose them. It's not the problem that is currently has any real importance.
JarJarJedi
20d ago
Sure, the left has gotten way too "open borders" recently, but have been historically consistent about believing immigration is a net good
Dems have always (well, if we talk about recent times, not ancient) made the difference between legal, limited and controlled immigration and no holds barred open borders. This was a long time union position too (no need to expand on where the unions political affiliations go). It has all changed recently - now Democrats basically reject any need for immigration law or citizenship pathway. In fact, illegal migrants seem like their preferred category, getting policy preferences not available to regular citizens.
I don't think threatening colleges with cutting their foreign studies is a Democratic position.
Colleges are, as we already discussed, fully captured by the Left. Places like Harvard or Columbia are the major engines in propagating and supporting leftist causes. So, obviously, they would come under attack from Trump. My point is not that everything Trump is doing now is part of Democratic agenda - of course not, he's on the opposite side of the war so he'd do stuff to wrestle control from them. My point is that Trump's political positions before he became the leader of the MAGA had been very close to Democrats' positions before the Great Awokening. Including, btw, abortions - Trump never cared too much about it and had been vaccilating here and there for years on the question, he had not been a passionate pro-lifer. Of course, when he became the head of MAGA movement, that came with some necessary policy adjustments, but RvW had always been a major target for the Right - especially due to the Left's complete unwillingness to reach any European-style compromise and the insistance that only full unrestricted abortion until - or even after - the birth is going to work. That question has been way beyond Trump and for it Trump was the one who had to fall in line, not drive it. In general, if you look at Trump's historical positions, there are preciously little of them that could not come from a pre-Awokening Dem politician. Again, I am not talking about Trump's actions now, when he's the head of MAGA and second-term Republican president, but his positions when he was starting up with his journey.
I covered this with my point that firing people for any reason was always available
It wasn't "any reason", it was very specifically and clearly a particular reason - the reason of doing right-coded things. It's not impossible to survive in Hollywood while being right-coded, but it is very, very, very, very hard. There's no problem being a Communist in Hollywood though. That's the point - there's a huge difference in risk profile of being open leftie and open rightie in a huge number of institutional settings, and the former's life is overwhelmingly much easier than the latter's. I already quoted the numbers how massive the difference is in places like academia - it's nowhere near neurtal or symmetrical.
Here, the terror has no defined point of origin. There is no evil empire.
True, there's no single hierarchical structure - at least, not yet. Instead, there is a distributed network of semi-independent agents, which semi-autonomously work towards the common goal. Some of the nodes of this network - like teachers unions and academia - ensure there's always new people coming into the network, some - like journalists and entertainment - ensure ideological synchronization and agenda pushing, some - like judicial and politicians - ensure the agenda is enforced on the groud. Etc. etc. One could probably write a lot of books and make a dozen of sociology PhDs just studying these networks. I hope one day somebody will.
There's a mob that forms whenever some story pops up and gets embellished enough.
Those mobs are surprisingly well financed, supplied and coordinated. Often, if you bother to dig, with taxpayer money. And covered for and protected by government officials. It's not random, it's a system which is distributed enough that people fail to make connection between different aspects of it, but there's one. Woke professors, woke AGs, woke NGOs, woke antifa soldiers, woke CEOs, woke actors, woke judges, woke journalists, woke bureaucrats - they all part of the network. It's not as comprehensive as the totalitarian state, but it's powerful enough now to exercise a lot of control over the society. It's not social media's fault. The social media just makes it easier to coordinate and to find foot soldiers, but it's a tool, not the reason.
My problem with this is the right is going about it almost exclusively via government
That's not correct, the right has the ground game too, and finally is pushing back on the culture war. But given the amount of capture of the governmental and government adjacent institutions, some governmental action is required. If the left's NGO network is financed by taxpayer's money, cutting of or reducing this stream requires government action. If DEI has been pushed for years by government action, undoing this would require government action too. Some things could probably return to its natural state without any intervention, just by removal of external coercion, but that would take a lot of time. And a lot of time is not something the right really has - if the left wins the next election and continues with its strategy of eliminating the right from every institutional space, flooding the country with infinite amount of migrants, setting up leftist NGO networks to feed from the budgets forever and making the elections unverifiable - the right does not have much chance for survival without pushing back fast. Which, unfortunately, means also using governmental action where it may not strictly be necessary.
I don't think all sex ed is porn.
The problem is not what you think. The problem is the left thinks what the parents think does not matter, and they - the left - own the kids and are free to feed them porn whether you like it or not, and if you disagree, you are a domestic terrorist. If the question was "I don't think book X is porn so I would like to show it to my kid" and the other person would say "no, I think this is porn so I won't show it to my kid" then this would be a normal difference of opinion. But that's not where we are. Where we are is "we will show your kids what we want - and make no mistake, what we want is porn, gay porn, trans porn, whatever we can think of porn, and we are not ashamed of it! - and if you think it's porn then fuck you fascist, we'll take your kids away from you". This is not normal.
"some property destroyed during a mass protest."
"Some people did something" makes a comeback! Some property is billions dollars of loss, multiple businesses and governmental buildings destroyed, full city blocks made unlivable, etc. The problem is not even that per se - though it is extremely bad - but the complete acceptance and normalization of it from the leftist elite. The worst problem is not even that a mob torched a disctrivt court - but that everybody on the left are taking it as a normal, and sometimes encourageable event, and working very hard to ensure nobody is going to be prosecuted for it. And it's continuing now - the left is consistently rejecting the obvious reality of crime and decay in Democrat megapolises (even though the normies, even the leftist ones, are well aware of it on their own day to day experience) and are consistently opposing any effort to make any improvement in it, declaring enforcement of the laws "racist" and "fascist". This is not normal.
For instance, the left plays it up but are you going to confidently tell me that people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok don't sometimes get harassed
Yes, of course, people are harassed on both sides sometimes. But there's a difference between getting a bunch of hateful tweets and being declared domestic terrorist by the FBI. Between having some online talking head talk shit about you and having US banking system refuse to do business with you. Between getting on some bloggers "bad people" list and getting on TSA's no fly list. Between somebody in your club shunning you and IRS stomping on your organization. Between being criticized on social media and having the government shut down any mention of you on social media. Between somebody not going to your talk and a violent mob setting a building on fire to not let you talk. Yes, people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok sometimes get harassed (even though they always had published the content they get harassed for on their own volition on social media) - but that harassment if very different from the harassment one who has crossed the institutional Left is subjected to. One is annoying, the other can seriously ruin your life.
sound more malicious than a warped idea of helping
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
JarJarJedi
20d ago
Must everything be so over-dramatic? Berlin is not burning.
If by Berlin you mean the culture and the fabric of the society ("first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"!), then it's definitely burning at the full blaze. At least for me - a regular middle class guy who wants nothing more than being left alone to grill on my backyard - it certainly feels that way. And I am not alone in this.
Trump is not the last hurrah of the right.
No, but Trump is there because of that feeling. He's not even "the right", for Heaven's sake - he's pretty much bog standard moderate Democrat, by the standards of times before Democrats went bonkers. Just watch what people like Biden, Obama, Clinton (either of them), etc. said before the Great Awokening. The difference between them and Trump, if you filter out all the bombastic rhetoric, is minimal. But the right had no choice. It was either Trump, or total destruction.
Your usual leftists on Reddit and some websites
Nope, nope. Remember the case of Gina Carano? She was booted from highly acclaimed role in a successful franchise because she said something right-coded. Reddit didn't cancel her. Reddit wanted to, but Reddit wants to cancel everybody to the right of AOC. No, people with much more power - people who contol billions of dollars - decided that. And now they are settling with her and talking about "looking forward to future cooperation". Did I vote for that? Hell yeah! One small example, of course, but it's everywhere.
I work for a woke company you've heard of.
I work for "maybe a tiny bit woke" company you probably never heard of (unless you're kind of professional that has to, then you did) but probably indirectly using something it did, maybe every day. It has DEI department, and some of the HR training had a little cringey tones but overall is pretty bog standard "these are ways in which you're not allowed to be an asshole" which didn't change much since The Great Awokening. No mandatory diversity kowtowing or pressure. Some people are explicitly woke but most keep it in their pants and don't bring it to the workplace. I am happy to be at this level because it's probably the best one possible in the US outside of tiny startup where everybody are buddies and HR does not exist. But I know that's not the situation in all companies.
Whether he was lying or all professors do, I can't tell you. I'm making the argument that life is often pretty banal
I've lived in Soviet Union (a long time ago). I know how people in evil empires work, and that not all of the storm troopers even want to shoot the rebels. Most of them don't care, they just want to get the salary and the pension. Some of them would purposedly miss or forget to lock the prison cells if they can get away with it. But that does not cancel the existance of the evil empire, and it always has enough troopers to maintain the required level of terror.
Supposedly the students are more woke than many of the professors.
88% of students lie about their politics to get better grades: https://x.com/bumbadum14/status/1957743796357329334 Take one guess to which side the lying goes. I clandestinely suspect that non-zero number of the professors aren't even woke, but they are so terrified to be cancelled they are pretending to, and thus their studends have to pretend in turn. A nice academic freedom the left built for itself, eh?
Billionaires tend towards the woke when it doesn't notably affect their bottom line. They aren't rushing to implement socialism or raise the minimum wage.
Are you sure? New York's Mamdani is financed by a billionaire heiress. Maybe she doesn't expect him to take all of her billions (and he, alone, now, probably can't) but she certainly contributes to the cause. And it's not unique - for example, a lot of rich Russian magnates supported Russian revolutionaires. We all know what happened next.
I think the right is becoming the party of nothing but political grievances and emotional overreactions in much the same way
That's not true. The right has a lot of the positive agenda. Just to advance this agenda, the right needs the ability to rule, and that requires taking control back from the left. If the right wins an election, but the Left continues to control everything in the country - as it happened in the first Trump term - nothing is getting done. Destroying the death grip of the left in virtually every institution of the country is a prerequisite to restoring the equal footing, this is the minimal necessary condition. Note I am not saying destroying the left - the left wants 0% right-wing people in every space. I am fine with certain percent - maybe even 50%, though I personally would prefer less, but I do not prescribe any specific number - of the left in any space they want to be, provided the right is also allowed the same. And yes, for this certain amount of power that the left has now must be destroyed, but while to them it may look as "revenge" and "overreaction", it's just returning to normal.
"Burn the institutions and salt the Earth!" is cringe and could possibly cost you the normie vote in future elections
The right doesn't want to burn the institutions and salt the Earth. The right wants the institutions that do what they are supposed to do. They want the politics be normal again, and so do a lot of normies. I remember the time where politics were about shoudl taxes be 25% or 28% and should minimum wage be $7 or $10. Now it's about whether it's ok to introduce port to kids in kindergarten, whether we need to let somebody to talk them into cutting of their genitals without even notifying their partent, we hear arguments that putting criminals in jail is racist and that deporting a violent gang member with dozen-page rap sheet including murders is fascism, we hear that mass rape and kidnapping is legitimate political tool, and that this kind of politics must be brought to the US, we see cities burned down and any semblance of rule of law eliminated, and we are told that if you are against any of that, you are nobody but a literal Nazi. Yes, we need some pushback to get back from this to what used to be normal, and if Trump can do at least part of it, then I am happy to let Trump do it. So far I haven't seen any better option, and I don't see how not doing it is an option anymore.
Free Speech can mean both the willingness to tolerate opposing ideas and the freedom to choose not to deal with other people.
This is very different for the right and for the left. For the right, not dealing with other people means ignoring them. For the left, at least institutional left, it means destroying them, grinding them into the fine dust and throwing it to the winds. The left has this power - at least had it before 2025 - and they weren't shy to use it. It didn't always work, but they always wanted to. Yes, the right has its history too, with porn in particular, a battle that they lost and will keep losing, and probably in other aspects too. But the left has been much more efficient in this game. Compare what happens if somebody in academia dares to say one of the words proscribed by the left and what happens if they say America must be destroyed and white people must be put in camps.
In a country of 350 million, you can find no shortage of idiots even if they don't matter at the end of the day.
The problem is those are not some lone idiots bloviating on a sopabox. There people are Congressmen, Senators, mayors, governors, prominent politicians, famous actors, academia managers, they control trillions of dollars and command vast power. And they are not shy to use their powers to achieve their goals. Which are diametrically opposed to mine. So I, as a voter, have no choice but to give my vote to somebody who can push back on them and at least slow down the descent to madness. Maybe, if we are extremely lucky, even reverse some of it. What other choice do I have?
JarJarJedi
21d ago
Whereas Strateg says Putin is intentionally disarming Russia for a NATO invasion.
This is hilarious. But I hope whoever that fine specimen of humanity is, he's not in Russia, or hides well, because Putin's oprichniks does not care which place you criticize it from, be it from the right, from the left or from the depths of derangement only accessible to a devoted Lovecraftian. The mere fact of criticizing the Boss is enough. Girkin got how much, 4 years I think? I am not sure I will be sad when that specimen is declared Foreign Agent and shut down too, but I would probably prefer it to continue to exist - somewhere far, far away from me - as a proof that the Universe is capable of producing more wonders that I would ever be able to comprehend.
All in all, if the war is fake theatrics
Anything can be derived from a false premise.
JarJarJedi
21d ago
Orwell was a communist. He wrote about what he knew and observed directly. This lends him the ability to describe the bleakness more realistically. Though he was a Western communist, so he hadn't experienced the full measure of what totalitarianism could do to a person and a society.
JarJarJedi
21d ago
the right frames the last 20 years as if the left sat in a war room and planned out a list of slow coordinated encroachments
Oh no, "encroachments" stage was decades before. The last 20 years was "the walls are breached, time to burn and pillage!" stage. Unlike many preceding stages of the campaign, this one doesn't really require careful coordination - just letting your foot soldiers do their worst works fine. Does each foot soldier realize they what they are collectively doing? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it doesn't matter because it is happening anyway.
but there are certainly places that ban left-leaning opinions
Like what? Let's take the inventory. The mass culture is about 90%, it's not that right-coded entertainment doesn't come out, but it comes out maybe once a year or less, and is always a huge controversy. Woke is the default and considered normal setting. The academia is thoroughly cleansed - lone celebrity professors that can't be cancelled are profoundly isolated and kept around to demonstrate "here, we have all kinds!" but on non-genius level, if you're not woke or at least pretend to be, you don't have a chance. Teaching the teachers? Thoroughly woke. Teaching the lawyers? Mostly woke too. I'm not talking about history, sociology and pol-sci - there's probably no right-wing professor left there in the nation, and the "moderates" there see Sanders as a dangerous right-winger. The press is absolutely woke on the "official" side of it - even the dreaded Fox News is at best "center-left company which tolerates some of the right hosts" (for a time). Of course, there are independent bloggers and radio, but as far as institutional press goes, it's very heavily left leaning. I'm not talking about such powerful institutions as government bureaucracy or the unions - their leftist sympathies are predictable and expected. Other cultural institutions? I can't go to a museum now without encountering at least several woke exhibit - and sometimes the whole exposition is subsumed by the woke and it's no longer about art but about social justice or climate change or some other woke cause like that.
What we have left - big business? More and more major companies come out as woke, and very rarely the reverse - that is mostly small to mid-size independent businesses. Banks are glad to debank right-wing figures - but did any of them debank prominent leftists? Not that I heard of. Billionaires tend to the woke side (understandably, they can buy power there) - for one Musk, there's three Cubans, Soroses, Simonses and so on. The army now has pride parades and features soldiers in furry costumes. I'm pretty sure the officers who authorized that are not inclined to listen to any contrary opinions.
Now, which prominent places ban leftist opinions? Internet forums? Local gun enthusiast meetups? Which cultural institute, comparable to what I described above, is excluding the left-leaning opinions to a measure comparable to exclusion and persecution of the right-wing ones? If we can't find any, or can't find a list as comprehensive and powerful, then demanding the right stops fighting back - without any history of prior consistent and prolonged demand to do the same from the left, at least - can not be read as anything but telling the right "why can't you just lose quietly so we all can stop this unpleasantness?". It is not hard to see why the right wouldn't look favorably on such approach.
Surely the left would tell a similar story about how they were all for free expression until the mean old right wouldn't leave them alone
And that's true. They were, when the right had institutional power and tried to shut down all kinds of leftist speech. And lost (mostly). The famous "fire in crowded theater" maxim was pronounced specifically against the leftist anti-war speech, and was overturned as a grave mistake later (99% of leftists aren't aware of either of these facts). Now, when the leftists have the power, they have no need in free speech anymore, and it's the right's turn to fight for it. But that turnaround wasn't caused by the right going "too far" - on the contrary, it was caused by the left seizing the institutional power and no longer needing the feeble "free speech" soapbox when they can use the powerful platforms provided by the institutions they captured.
JarJarJedi
25d ago
They think they're going about their day doing boring and uncontroversial things like protesting for trans rights
That does not compute. Protesting is by definition controversial - if it weren't, it's not a protest, it's at most solidarity march. The whole point though is that the left has been actively in search of culture war since the civil rights movement largely achieved its initial goals (legal equality and high legal barriers to deter any attempt to discriminate). Gay rights, trans rights, BLM, immigrants, vaccines, abortions, whatever it takes. And to crown that, in modern US culture you don't call your opponent a Nazi if you want to hash out policy differences. Everybody knows what you do with the Nazis - you destroy them. So there's no doubt what this framing means.
The right is in full "We're aiming to crush you" mode.
Gee, maybe that's because the Left has been calling them Nazis and promising to crush them for a couple of decades now? May that be where they got the suspicion? I'm seeing the "Nazi bar" metaphor repeated daily on virtually every corner in the left discourse, and they never even explain it - everybody in their audience already knows what it means, they are just confirming, yes, we can't tolerate even the slightest sign of anybody on the right being allowed in the spaces we control. And we can't tolerate any spaces we don't control because all those are "Nazi bars". The right is in this mode because they are aiming to crush the right. Only now, finally, the right starts to wake up and wonder "oh, they are trying to crush us, maybe we should push back?" And then we hear the complaints "how undignified, you are fighting back, people would think you are the same! They will reject you for stooping so low as to fight back! You should just roll over and take it, then you'd have all our sympathies - everybody loves losers!"
JarJarJedi
25d ago
This looks like a very fishy (ba-dum-tss!) situation. I'd agree it looks very much like somebody mishandled a radiation source and the contamination went into the food supply, which is horribly bad. And for FDA it may be nearly impossible to find how it happened, because there are so many moving parts, and people would not be very forthcoming given it's a really bad fuckup. So FDA has a case on their hands where something is obviously very wrong and they can't fix it. So they do "something" because something must be done - they kill the messenger, i.e. recall the slightly contaminated shrimp, because that's the only thing they can do, and if later it turns out the source is found, they could say "we did all we could!".
JarJarJedi
26d ago
Why we can't have a single group that has stable, high-IQ people in charge advocating for basic civic decency, responsibility, and functional society is beyond me
We really tried. Politicians were supposed to be that (that's the whole point of having representative republic instead of direct democracy). They are obviously nothing of the sort. Journalists were supposed to be that. They sold their mission for clicks and ideological peer adoration. Academia was supposed to be that. They sold their mission for grants and ideological power. We don't have it because - collectively, as a society - we tried it and we fucked it up. We don't have currently any institution that is interested in doing that.
That said, anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new. It has been about the Irish, about the Germans, about the Chinese, about the Japanese (US people literally put them in camps!) and so on, and so forth. Cross-cultural encounters will always produce people that reject the other culture and hate everything and everybody that has to do with it. It can be worked through - provided that there's a working integration process. Multiculturalism broke that process though because it's ideological premise has been that integration is evil, demanding newcomers to adapt to the host culture is evil, the host culture is by default oppressive and guilty, and must go out of its way - including throwing out the rules that apply to the members of the host culture and hold it together - lest the newcomers feel inconvenienced or sad. The result has been a predictable disaster everywhere it has been tried. If the right wants to recover from this disaster, they need to formulate a coherent integration policy, and build a clear ideological wall of separation between anti-immigrant sentiment (which will not go anywhere, it is an inevitable consequence of culture heterogeneity) and enforcing integration policy. Which may piss off some loudmouths but there's no other way if there is to be an ideologically sound platform that does not cut ties with the centuries of American tradition.
But that's not what is happening. I mean yes, if you stand near someone house and yell anything for days on end, that'd be harassment, even if you yell the multiplication table. But nobody camps under trans people homes and yells for days. At least not any of the prominent prosecuted cases did that. The prosecution clearly is done for the contents of the message, not for the form it's expressed in. People get arrested for tweets, and not even for directed tweets. That's about the easiest form of speech to ignore of all possible forms. You can't say it's about "how" - it's all about precluding the possibility of discussing certain topics.
I, of course, exaggerated a bit when I pretended it makes no sense. It makes a lot of sense, if only you let go of the premise that the government is the representative of the people and wants to do what's best for them (or at least wants to align in the general direction of interests of the people). If you face the reality - that the government is a parasite which seeks control over the population and is hostile to anything that threatens this control - then it all makes perfect sense. It doesn't matter whether the government agrees with you or not on the truth value - the mere fact that it told you not to speak that and you did is what must be shut down (you rocked the boat!). That's why in Russia people who say Putin goes too easy on Ukrainians can get jailed as much as people who oppose the war - the problem with both is that they allow themselves to think something Putin didn't think first. That's the offense. UK is not there yet, but they are already on the rails that lead there.
I know. UK never had freedom of speech, not even before the Great Awokening, though the abuses usually concentrated along the lines of sleazy lawyers exploiting the system, not governmental censorship per se. Now the government is leading it, hard. Of course they claim it's for "maintaining the peace", though how it makes more peaceful to allow Hamas banners but jail people for English banners, it's a bit hard to understand, unless in the terms of most base cowardice. It's not that rocking the boat is not allowed, it's that some people are allowed to rock the boat, and some aren't.
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