TIRM
3mo ago
From the excellent http://exiledonline.com/old-exile/vault/books/review103.html
Handmaid’s Tale is meant to reassure every wretched office-worker who goes home to a cat, a VCR, and Pizza-for-one that her life is noble and progressive. Handmaid’s Tale is fun horror-fiction for women who work in the American-style cubicle-world precisely because it’s so utterly unrelated to the miseries and terrors of their own lives. No one wants to force middle-class American women to have babies. In fact, it’s almost impossible for them to contemplate having kids, because they’re terrified that it might set them back in their careers, and their rivals in the adjacent cubicles would grab their parking spaces and health plans. Nobody wants to use their bodies. That’s precisely the horror with which they live: no one wants to mate with them because in their world, every single striver must fear every other, and the sort of joint action involved in mating and rearing one’s young is impossible—laughable, a thing which only those who have abandoned the hope of A Career can contemplate. So in their minds, mating and rearing children moves down in class, becoming a thing for rednecks and (though they’ll never say this part out loud) immigrants-of-color. The desire to have children gets bounced outside oneself, onto these lesser beings, and returns, courtesy of Atwood, in demonized form, as the tyranny of procreation, family values and the Patriarchy. It’s the horror they love to fear.
TIRM
3mo ago
How do they know that one of these people isn't a really well passing transperson? Did they expect the image generator to make a poorly passing transwoman that you can easily spot?
TIRM
3mo ago
China is just about perfectly safe. I've been on multiple multi-month and multi-week trips to China to work and to visit in-laws and have experienced zero issues. The air quality is horrible in the winter. That's my only complaint.
TIRM
3mo ago
Zelensky and his boys in Kursk could commit a cheeky war crime or two.
Approximately no one cares.
Netanyahu could finally bomb the wrong hospital.
A small portion of Democrats care, but they are already 100% anti-Israel.
We could see the hard recession we're well overdue for.
Here's the import one.
TIRM
3mo ago
They are the party of The Adults In The Room. The party of Serious People.
This is the Democrats. Or at least their publicly presented image.
TIRM
3mo ago
Disagreed. Tampons in boys kindergarten bathrooms is looney. If progressives want to push the very fringest policies, then Republicans are correct to point that out as an attack. The median swing voter won't like this gender ideology in their schools.
TIRM
3mo ago
He advocates for an assault weapons ban and has a line above how he carried those weapons in foreign battlefields and that's the only place they belong. He has of course never been in combat and quit when it seemed he might actually see combat. Which is actually fine in isolation, but really puts a stink on his rhetoric used to justify banning guns.
Fauci aporoved bat coronavirus research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So yes, that's specifically what he did. Fauci has denied that what they were doing matches the academic definition of gain of function; but he quibbled really hard trying to justify that.
I haven't researched this deeply, but I believe this is the case having heard some of Fauci's testimony regarding EcoHealth Alliance and his actions pre-pandemic.
Yes. Those optimistic Obama staffers and the people who wrote that book may ultimately be correct. Though not on the timeline they imagined.
But also there's a weird trick in that as Hispanics increase in proportion of the population, they increasingly self-identify as white and vote accordingly. So the Democrats are (foolishly?) chasing an asymptotic function of Hispanic voters.
And that isn't even necessarily a losing strategy long-term. They could turn Texas blue with some amount of importing fresh voters and a lot of help from former Californians fleeing their bad governance but ironically importing it with them. But as of yet Texas is purple-red and Florida is even deeper red, so these types are wailing and gnashing their teeth about the missed expectations.
I think there is a real problem from the point of view of a typical lanyard Democrat in that, for seemingly no reason, around half the population votes against them. And that keeps being true despite large demographic changes.
TIRM
3mo ago
The Great Replacement is happening.
That is a good thing.
This mask slipped off at the beginning of the Obama administration. Obama staffers liked The Emerging Democratic Majority. I haven't read it, but I've been told it claims that demographic trends will flip a few states such as Texas blue, then the Democrats will rule forever. It turns out this misunderstands how committed American Hispanics are to voting for progressives. "Now that we've imported enough Hispanics, we're done losing elections" was the misplaced hope those Obama staffers had. Or as you might rephrase it "yes it is happening and it is a good thing".
TIRM
3mo ago
I thought Kamala's dad was half white. So she is a quarter black.
TIRM
3mo ago
He's jerking our chain for sure. But also, this is a good post in terms of thoughtfulness and laying out an argument.
Intentionally provocative and well reasoned in equal measure. This is his best work in my opinion. If only the median troll put this much thought into his posts.
TIRM
3mo ago
Neither of the XY competitors even pretend to live as women.
Care to provide evidence they live as men?
prop up pension obligations
I see this a lot. And I suppose it could be conditionally true. But considering a French banlieue of poor unemployed unintegrated immigrants or their unintegrated unemployed children: are these people propping up pensions?
Or as American, considering illegal Mexicans working for day wages. If they are paid under the table, in what sense are they propping up social security?
I get that productive employed taxpaying H1Bs are a net tax benefit. But other examples of mass immigration are not clearly net tax benefit to me.
TIRM
3mo ago
Don't forget Trump implicating "Lyin'" Ted Cruz's father in the JFK assassination.
TIRM
3mo ago
Ignoring all of them, except for one aimed in the "wrong direction", tells us very much.
Not that Scott is guilty of that. But "what do you expect me to do, respond to all of these" is the cry of the malicious selective enforcer.
citing a trial last year in which the judge overturned the acquittal of Filipe Martins
There's a statement to send a chill down your spine. Found not guilty, but lol nope. Guess again.
The American founders' bitter resentment of sham trials pays off yet again.
TIRM
3mo ago
Broadly agreed. At this point in my life the people I know are largely other parents that I meet through some school or child event or my coworkers. And we are mostly a cabal of tech workers.
So selecting for employed engineers, they date around in their 20s and settle down early to mid 30s. Broadly speaking. I know some these people recently bought properties with their spouses or fiances, etc. Multiple coworkers have in the past few months aged into the "get married and buy a place" stage of life. No kids yet from this group, incidentally. Good thing my Chinese coworkers are picking up the slack in the having children department.
The couple of hopeless dweebs I know (no offense, decent guys and coworkers, but being realistic here) are Indian immigrants. They both got wifes with a little help (coercion? hard boot on the ass?) from their families.
If we made some horribly unrepresentative polling of just my experiences, I'd say young people do nothing but work and date and eventually marry. And I would list off examples to support that.
TIRM
3mo ago
I think the istphobes are a small and frankly irrelevant faction. They make a lot of "X is racist/white supremacist" articles. But I have as yet to see the consequences in real life. And I work for a woke corporation.
I may be lucky in some sense not being woke-policed too much. Or maybe the median working professional can say he likes going to the gym and practicing jiu-jitsu and no one has a negative word against it. I've never seen pushback outside of loony articles about how being fit is the fascist aesthetic.
TIRM
3mo ago
I have sneering contempt for journalists and don't much like how they are held in generally high regard. In America they are almost all partisan advocates for their fringe progressive view. Of course they make a style guide that is pure culture warring.
TIRM
3mo ago
I've seen this sort of thing characterized as "Harris appears to be running for President of Reddit rather than President of America".
The sorts of people who would implement this are likely new urbanists who will also try to force you into a tiny apartment in a high-rise in a blighted urban core. Driving your car to your single family home with a long driveway would be strongly discouraged.
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