Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21hr ago
No, I think if a woman showed up and did the same thing, they should go prison all the same. It is deeply unfortunate that sexually predatory behavior from women is treated even more lightly than the same behavior from men. It is just less common.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21hr ago
The ability to control your impulses is a crucial element of participating in society. If the desire and prospect of getting laid causes you to throw out discernment or consideration for other human beings, you are one of the people who make the police necessary.
Do you think the human race must be non horny?
I think it would be a better world if we had fewer people who thought that being horny was some kind of excuse.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
23hr ago
Do they just not know? Do they think this behavior is incompatible with also being intelligent, educated, and highly-paid? Do they think it's just too hard?
It's hard to speak in universals, but:
a) many are simply not acculturated to this particular set of norms. "Ladylike" behavior is, mostly, normative framework for a particular subset of upper middle class, and the groups most likely to promulgate this values set have started rebelling against it for other reasons.
b) many feel the whole ideal of the "lady" is an imposition that makes it women's responsibility to manage men's sexual aggression and entitlement - part of a broader view in which women are expected to remain in a defensive crouch at all times lest they be victimized by men (and quite possibly blamed for it as well after the fact).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
23hr ago
But if group sex happens, as one might predict, and she's not screaming no and is not unconscious, should the men in the situation specifically be locked in a cage?
Yes.
Look, I don't know what actually happened here. But as a general statement, I think the more extreme/unusual a sexual encounter is (especially if it involves strangers), the more incumbent it is on you to make sure that everything is above board. If someone says there's a gangbang in the guest bedroom and you uncritically dive right in, you've got the spirit of a rapist if not the legal status.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Rape is seen as an extremely severe crime committed against the sacred honor of the victim and her family in patriarchal societies
This is true, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to the modern American (or more broadly western/European) context - even very gender trad conservatives still conceive of rape overwhelmingly as a violation against the individual victim. The most salient relic of this mindset you're likely to find in western countries is the attitude that a woman's ability to claim victimhood is contingent on her respectability.
The fissure in the US is not really about who the aggrieved party is in a rape but what constitutes rape and what constitutes consent (and also the practical difficulties of prosecuting sexual violence).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Murder (at least as I am using it here) is legally unjustified killing. I am claiming (maybe I am wrong, but I really suspect not) that most people can imagine a homicide which would legally be murder but which they would consider morally justifiable.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
Rape is a bit of an odd crime, in that in theory almost everyone agrees that it is an extremely severe crime - nearly as bad as murder, if not worse. My armchair theory is that this is because the prototypical crime people imagine is entirely gratuitous. They can conceive of circumstances in which they might think murder is acceptable or even good (likewise for theft, etc...), but it's hard to imagine a "virtuous" rape unless you're a psycho. Even when people joke about things like prison rape, the victim is a bad person being victimized by other bad people.
However, when it comes to actual, concrete accusations, things come apart. Circumstances are usually far more ambiguous than "creep jumps out of the bushes", accused rapists are often otherwise respectable members of their community, and different people have radically different views around consent and sexual ethics. You've got very stringent views of consent, where both parties need to be sober and vocally assenting. And on the flip side, you've got very loose views (the extreme cases being things like "being alone in a room with a man is consent for whatever happens next" or thinking that women secretly want to be raped).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
VNSA is already a term, but it also covers organized crime groups, pirates, rebels, and other non-terrorist/not-necessarily-terrorist organizations.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
How the hell did she get money from the supposedly rich and canny, the kind of hard-nosed business people whose job it was to sniff out frauds and schemers, who made tons of money by making the right decisions on investments and trades?
People overestimate how canny these rich people are versus lucky. Also people who are really smart and good at something are still usually only good at one thing. Many of them are quite happy to hop on the hype train if other hard-nosed business people believe in the project. It's not like any of these people know anything about blood testing, but if Walgreens and Larry Ellison thinks it's the real deal why shouldn't they follow suit?
Also also, SV is overflowing with people flinging money at questionable ideas, the vast majority of which fail. Theranos blew up because it was massive, long-running fraud, not just vaporware. (And biomedical tech fraud has higher stakes than "our productivity software package is shit.")
Did the crazy only come out later?
The summary is that Trump seems to have traded a lot of soft power for a relatively small win.
As is tradition. Trump loves to blow up or outright manufacture disagreements and then claim status quo or minor amendments thereof as a huge win e.g. the tiff with Colombia last year over acceptance of deportees. The broader populist right has a strong disdain for soft power, a naive faith in the efficacy of coercion, and a willful ignorance of longer term costs. This clumsy dominance politics leads to the US paying significantly higher costs for easy achievable goals because Trump and his supporters insist on simultaneously demanding extreme deference and insisting they get to treat everyone else poorly (see also: Miller trying to play the might-makes-right card when pressed on why the US was being so aggressive with Denmark).
Much of this glosses as domestic performance for Trump and his hard core of national chauvinist supporters. Wolf Warrior diplomacy isn't particularly effective, but it satisfies a demand for theatrical aggression among certain sectors of the population.
(An adjoining issue is that Trump is simply a bad negotiator)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
The key bit is that it's obviously nonsense, and raising it suggests OP has no idea how parliamentary democracy works. I was trying to be charitable and not assume this was just a case of someone not understanding how other forms of democracy work.
he's loudly Anti-Orange Bad Man
Trumpists are consistently unable to internalize why being "loudly Anti-Orange Bad Man" is a winner for traditionally allied foreign leaders, and this despite the way Trump was supposed to restore our international respect.
What point are you trying to make? It's surely not just "Mark Carney is popular with Canadian voters for standing up to Trump." If the question is "why would Denmark makes concessions when Canada wouldn't?" it's pretty straightforwardly because this is basically a reiteration of the status quo whereas Trump is trying to economically ratfuck Canada.
then no one questions his policies. It’s a luxury few enjoy.
Who is "no one"? If Carney didn't have the confidence of his party, he wouldn't be PM, the same as the PM in pretty much any parliamentary system.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
then gets to rule like a king
What does this mean? Carney is the PM and the leader of the Liberal Party. Like, no shit he's setting policy.
Following up on last's weeks topic of the US/Trump administration's trade war on Canada:
One of the more baffling aspects of Trump's foreign policy (in both terms, but especially in his second) is how he's made a point of being hostile towards long-time US allies. The US has historically led a coalition of developed nations that was fairly biased towards US interests, with the implicit tradeoff that the US was also footing the lion's share of the costs. The integration of democratic middle powers into an American-led world order both gave the US leverage over its members (see, for example, the arrest of Meng Wangzhou or leaning on ASML to freeze out China) and discouraged the emergence of a rival power center.
Of late, however, it seems that the American Right has shifted to a model that assumes that US allies have no leverage and thus have no choice but to accept wildly unfavorable terms. There's a element of truth to the idea that US could push its allies harder and that the US was not getting the most favorable possible arrangement out of its alliances. However, the maximalism of the current administration seems to be underestimating the possibility that alienated allies may simply look for ways to work around the US, and undermining US hegemony in a bid for marginal revisions in an already highly favorable status quo is a questionable strategy. What's more, it comes across as a highly emotional approach, driven more by dominance seeking and sense of grievance than material benefit.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
14d ago
They expelled themselves through not having kids and importing other people from other areas of the world. The mainstream media, and people on message boards, are quick to jump on anyone noticing that demographic change or the trends that are highly suggestive of it.
Yes, that's my point. "Demographic replacement" is a motte-and-bailey where people equivocate between ethnic cleansing and declining TFR + immigration. Sometimes there's a desultory effort to blame declining TFR on immigration, but these arguments aren't very compelling. You get "jumped on" for "noticing demographic change" because said "noticing" primarily takes the form of undisguised, conscious racism, as in the case OP brings up. Even your garden variety racist isn't ideologically racist, and explicit racial preference doesn't square with the idea that you're just worried about assimilation or whatever.
That is until it became extremely popular to blame whitey for all of non-whitey's problems.
This is the popular excuse, but, again, not very compelling. The causation cuts both ways here - right-wingers have spent decades pushing a narrow and exclusionary vision of American identity that elevates Christian, rural/suburban, and preferentially white Americans above the rest and are shocked when the rest decide to give them the middle finger. The white supremacists have always been looking for a way back to respectability (or at least ways to implement their policies without getting slapped down by civil rights law) and the main foot-in-the-door to re-mainstream ideological white supremacism has been nativism, not counter-organizing against particularist minority activism (not the least because many right-wingers think any minority activism is particularist).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
I feel obliged to point out that Midwestern and Southern culture are not particularly alike within the broader context of American culture and neither is or has been the dominant/"standard" form of American culture, inasmuch as such a thing even makes sense. This is a standard that would marginalize: New Englanders, Texans, Northwesterners, Californians, Appalachians... in short, most Americans.
(Midwestern culture is, itself, significantly product of post-independence immigration, particularly German, Scandinavian, and Irish immigration, whereas Southern culture is mostly derivative of Anglo-Scots heritage with some significant West African influences.)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16d ago
a constant background noise of graft, corruption, and gangsterism which (I believe) would never have been accepted in a supermajority-Anglo society
The problem I have with this (among many) is that if you know anything about English society in the 18th and 19th century, you'd know that it was already riddled with corruption and gangsterism, and governance in the American colonies (and subsequently the United States) had many of the same pathologies (not necessarily as bad, probably in large part due to the more expansive franchise). The idea that non-Anglo immigrants were introducing corruption into a basically honest Anglo-American political culture is highly questionable.
The US had deployed numerous naval assets to support Caribbean operations (leaving a gap in coverage in Centcom) and was quite slow to redeploy them if it was planning to intervene in support of protestors. The most charitable interpretation is that the Trump admin imagined their intervention would reignite protests, but, as mentioned, this was pretty questionable given the massacres that had already taken place.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16d ago
We used to insist on assimilation
The claim that immigrants have stopped assimilating is not really in evidence. Language acquisition, intermarriage rates, even religious adoption to a not-insignificant degree all point to assimilation proceeding apace. Insofar as there is substance to this point, it seems to be a complaint that immigrants are assimilating to the "wrong" American subcultures (e.g. East/South Asian immigrants mostly assimilating into urban white liberal culture), but even that is pretty mixed. There was never as much daylight between Latino and Southern American culture as nativists pretend, and Latinos have been assimilating pretty well.
Conversely, the period of "insistence" on assimilation yielded a number of distinct white-ethnic subcultures (e.g. Irish, Italian, Polish) over the course of the 19th and early 20th century. Most are still present to this day in attenuated forms. The big standout in both its presence at the time and lack of presence now is German American culture, which didn't survive the world wars.
we have absolutely stopped even trying to assimilate all of these immigrants into Amerikaner culture.
What is "Amerikaner culture"? The only thing I can find is a group promoting white SA immigration to the US, but I'm guessing that's not what you're talking about.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16d ago
Trump likely believed, after Venezuela, that Iran's regime was likely to collapse immediately after the attack
It was very clear at the time that it was stupid to believe this and indications are Trump was warned of this by all of his advisors except Hegseth. If there was a time to intervene, it would have been in early January when there were massive anti-government protests, not at the end of February when the government had shot everyone who was feeling inclined towards revolt. Unfortunately, at that point the Trump admin was busy with Operation Caribbean Shakedown.
The dissident right view on this conflict seems to be that Iran is not worth the squeeze because domestic electoral victory is more important than foreign policy goals. For the record, I agree. But at the same time, Trump has never thought like that, and that's why he's where he is.
This sounds like cope. Wasn't Trump touted by both himself and his supporters as a guy who wasn't going to get snarled up in neocon adventurism? Why should voters cut him some slack on starting a war that drove up gas prices (and is continuing to do so), has killed thousands of civilians, alienated allies, and didn't achieve any of its substantive goals (i.e. regime change or denuclearization)?
Also, I'm not clear on what Mike Pence has to do with this, considering he was and is significantly more hawkish than his replacement.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16d ago
'We are all the same brotherhood of man, we should let everybody in and kumbaya'-ism is an incredibly cheap value to hold when you're from a country that's essentially never going to be asked to actually let anybody else in.
Okay, but this is the opposite of what we see. The most rabidly xenophobic nations are generally the ones people are least interested in migrating to, while the people most likely to embrace the brotherhood of man are the people most likely to be getting immigrants.
A screen shot went viral on Twitter showing a crowd of Indian students celebrating the victory.
To be clear: it wasn't a crowd of Indian students. It was a group of like a dozen Indian students in the foreground, but the wider shot shows a crowd of mostly white/hispanic students (which is what you'd expect for UT's student demographics). The students in question are themselves almost certainly American.
The actual problem here is the division between people who view America as a white nation for white people (and who thus see any non-white people as a threat to the integrity of the nation) and people who view America as defined primarily by values. You can still be xenophobic and still cleave to the latter view on assimilationist grounds, but it's hard to sustain particular objections in the face of clear evidence of assimilation. However, if you're just a white supremacist, no amount of assimilation matters.
The center-right has also rushed to condemn people criticizing the massive demographic replacement in Texas.
Where are all the white Texan refugees who have been expelled from their land? Did the non-whites kill them all? Is the mainstream media covering it up?
Mass migration can happen and within one generation, this is seen as the new default and any complaints about this are seen as against the new values.
Having racial preferences in this manner has been seen as pretty sketchy for at least half a century. As alluded to above, even most racist people are not racial supremacists. While it's been long understood that the white supremacists didn't evaporate into thin air after the civil rights movement, it was the sort of thing you usually kept to yourself.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18d ago
Ethnicity is not a function of genetics. Balkan slavs (e.g. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes) have a high degree of genetic proximity and yet would generally take exception to the proposition that they are basically one people.
Unless we're positing some kind of psycho-genetic resonance, genetic proximity of the English, Scots, and Welsh is irrelevant to the hypothesis. The important thing is that they regard themselves and each other as being distinct peoples.
Democracies are undermined in the long term by unassimilated ethnic or religious minorities which vote for political parties that promise them material benefits at public expense.
This is both different from Opt-out's initial proposition (that democracy was only compatible with Anglo/European cultures) and doesn't seem to match empirical evidence either. The UK is a multi-ethnic democracy and has been since the 19th century (arguably earlier, though its democratic credentials were more contestable before 19th century reforms). The US has had a more or less continuous infusion of ethnic and religious minorities for its entire existence (many of whom remain both unassimilated and uncontroversial, e.g. the enormous number of Catholics who failed to convert to the dominant religion in the US). Patronage relationships between voters and politicians is a problem in Latin American democracies, but this does not follow ethnic or religious lines. Hell, India is ridiculously multi-ethnic and multi-religious, and its rapid economic growth continues apace.
This line of thinking seems to be taking the US' relatively unusual system with respect to durable anti-black racism and concluding that it is a) a universal feature of democracy, rather than a particular problem with a large block of American voters being hostile to African-American civil rights b) an existential problem for democracy.
I feel like you know this is a bad comparison.
If you wanted a marshmallow so badly that you ripped out of someone else's hand, that already is illegal. It's unlikely to be prosecuted, both because few people would bother reporting it and the matter is probably too trivial for any prosecutor to take up the case, but in most states it could absolutely win you a trip to the big house.
I don't think that's true. I think what's actually going on here is that there's a significant body of sexually predatory men who don't care about women, don't believe that sexual violence is actually harmful, and who don't like the fact that shifting norms means their already-dodgy behavior has been clarified as predatory. They'll cling to the most marginal accusations as if we're about to outlaw sex, but the reality even after decades of effort, effectually prosecuting sex crimes is pretty hard.
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