Tanista
2d ago
Where it gets complicated is that at least some of these things could theoretically be achieved by other Republicans like DeSantis who wouldn't have Trump's ability to make unforced errors (with an idiot-savant ability to tell how much his party is willing to tolerate).
And yet, Trump blew them all out in the primary.
There is a leftist school of thought that boils down to it being okay to harass SCOTUS judges and Trump officials while they're ordering burritos because they made "bad" decisions but I took this more as just general ranting too.
If one side hadn't equated speech with violence and thus demanded employers (like Disney) take action, maybe we wouldn't have to be so autistic about this stuff.
Tanista
4d ago
Also her trying to girlboss snow white is much bigger "crime" than a passionate sincere disappointment over an election.
She's not even the worst offender here. Peter Dinklage's complaints about dwarves being sidekicks leading to seven dwarven actors losing their jobs has to take the crown.
At least Zegler only talked about wrecking the movie on a story level. Millionaire dwarf actor literally taking roles out of his fellows' hands in the name of "representation"...amazing.
can increase its appeal to young men.
A nickname like "Momala" attached to AOC will take on a whole different sheen with Zoomer men, that's for sure.
Being hot worked for Trudeau.
Ezra Klein actually brought up Obama's lie to the Pod Save America guys who worked for him. No one contested that it was a lie btw.
He identified a different reason the trans stuff sunk Harris: both Harris and the ACLU are fucking stupid.
That sounds harsh but that was the tone. He was as angry as Klein gets, furious that the ACLU would even send out an exam (a paper trail!) on a policy that was almost designed to be maximally offensive and that Harris was dumb enough to say she supported and actioned it on tape instead of ignoring it or simply handing it in.
In essence, they didn't lie as good or as smart as Obama did.
I think the trans thing legitimately is a heavier lift but I think he has a point.
Tanista
6d ago
How well that plays in four years will depend on how badly Trump's border policy is carried out over his second term, but since the worst case for her is "Trump's Executive Orders don't make any big photogenic mistakes and the civil service who has to carry out his orders also don't make any big photogenic mistakes", I'm betting she still ends up with some swing-voter-friendly territory to stake out.
No. The worst case is that the left makes mistakes and punches itself out trying to stop deportations of the wrong sorts (they love a lost cause) and blow all their powder.
Then Trump's deportations proceed and go even further, the numbers drop compared to Biden and the Overton Window is shifted because people feel deportation wasn't so bad. Maybe let little Elio stay but still.
There's always someone complaining about dating. Both males and females. Of all races.
White men , unlike Indians and Asians, don't complain about racial barriers specifically. The other groups have all of the standard grievances plus the feeling that their race is disfavored by the majority.
So they're probably the winners, as a race.
Tanista
6d ago
I'm biased against progressives on certain issues so I'm inclined to think that the reason the trans thing is such a red line is precisely because it's just not true and is the most obviously ridiculous stance Democrats take. So you have to suppress any hostile discussion of it or basically go with DARVO. If you can't discuss trans stuff besides "it isn't happening" or "you're the weird one for caring" then you need to be able to control the tempo of the discussion because that is just bullshitting. At this point I think progressive takes on crime have also worn out their welcome so it can happen on multiple issues.
Another answer that doesn't depend on people we disagree with being secretly doubtful of their most cherished beliefs is that Democrats thought they had cultural hegemony so they had less to gain from going on to other sites. Twitter is only a couple of years out from being a left-wing stronghold that was more dangerous than Reddit given how it allowed the cool kids to set up cancellations. Rogan was attacked precisely because he felt like an oasis - and he wasn't even right wing! They legit thought they could have closed off all meaningful alternatives. At least for people not hooked on Fox News.
In that sort of environment it may feel like the incumbent has more to lose from stretching themselves than they have to gain. Meanwhile Trumpists have to take any platform offered.
As for liberals putting up signs: you have seen it, everywhere. It's the rainbow flag.
Tanista
6d ago
It's weird because a lot of the manosphere is black. Especially in the post-Kevin Samuels era.
They have zero interest in HBD on race (though they are quite fine with male-female differences and questions that could be considered racist if asked of them like "name 10 female inventors").
In some cases these black redpillers have larger platforms than people like Fuentes they're platforming. Fresh and Fit was making a ludicrous amount of money bashing Miami women and lost it to platform antisemites whose beef with the Jews is that they let in black migrants as "biological weapons" as they put it.
Tanista
6d ago
It's easy to get volunteers to try to take over mostly-left spaces. Things get harder in other spaces, not just because they can be out of touch with those people but because their defense mechanism is avoiding unfriendly (aka not explicitly left-wing) spaces for being impure. Or attacking other leftists for going into them.
This is how they decided a normie-bro like Rogan with many left-friendly views was somehow unreachable and radioactive.
Tanista
6d ago
Yes, a lot of it is structural but reddit policy made it infinitely worse. They banned basically most conservative subs that could have created a less progressive set of mods. Beyond that, they seem to have aided mod takeovers by exactly the sorts of obsessed supermods who never should have been given power (I recall at least one story of a mod being told to get new mods ASAP by admins and this acting as a way for these people to get in)
Mods of heterodox subs have to stress over some random stuff nuking the entire sub while supermods don't have it so hard. Of course one side loses in this environment.
The dirtbag and socialist left on places like /r/stupidpol and /r/redscarepod is still being tolerated but again, I do not know for how much longer given that they criticize mainstream Democrats almost as much as Republicans do.
Even those subs have inherently skewed discussion because of the threat of the Eye of Sauron. You could see it in terms like 'regard', how gingerly certain progressive sacred cows like trans are dealt with. Sister subs have already been banned. They're inherently unstable and fearful.
Reddit has a huge problem with a set of activist supermods. I was going to say that was the main problem and could be mitigated by some method to force mods to only mod a few subs but even if that worked (and it won't; these are the sorts of people who can get around that) there's still the admins who not only have had their own scandals but actively destroyed some of the most popular subs like thedonald.
It just rots from the head down. Which is why Twitter isn't a left wing bubble. Elon is not only not banning entire communities he's actively signal boosting the other side.
The Democrats tried that, insofar as they are capable. It doesn't work cause people were already pissed and Democrats seem out of touch (crypto for black men somehow fizzled ).
Truth is, on certain issues , Trump simply is the most credible person in the room. His wildness is useful: it's easy to believe he really will deport people. He's built up that credibility. No amount of talk after Biden called for a surge to the border and Kamala wanted to "rethink ICE" will make Harris' campaign more credible.
Tanista
7d ago
There's a simpler problem here: who cares what a himbo like Dan Bilzerian thinks? He got big playing Hugh Hefner without the articles. This is the guy we're going to for geopolitics or a discussion of the mechanics of cremating millions of people?
I tried to listen to it and realized that I was just tired. Israel-Palestine is tiring enough when it's someone whose opinion we're supposed to take seriously. How many people that were previously reachable by Dan Bilzerian care now that he's flirting with Islam and Holocaust denial (I think the Muslim fanbase is an underrated explanation for the derangement of certain figures)?
There's a sort of weird overlap between "manosphere" figures and antisemites like Fuentes but I don't see how anything will come of it given they don't have that much in common, any sort of stable ideological core and inevitably fly too close to the sun with some bullshit and end up getting burned a la Fresh and Fit.
It's just a motte-and-bailey, because "race realists" would be quite happy to carve up races further for precision (and do ime) but their opponents have no interest in that task at all.
Admitting that the colloquial definition of "Asian" isn't fit for purpose and maybe we should speak of "East Asians" and so on has never, AFAICT, won someone over to some sort of race realist view. If anything, people just seem to ignore it altogether and go back to attacking the model that has like five races.
The classification based in the idea of notable biological differences itself is the sin.
And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.
The people who use the "social construction" deepity are ironically the people who take the thesis the least seriously.
Imagine if every human disappeared and alien scientists had to puzzle out the purpose of these giant buildings and steel veins that dot the landscape. Why some buildings on a certain coast are built to different specifications, why standards vary across climes.
These things are clearly artificial but no archaeologist or historian worth his salt would start and stop at "people made this, so they just made it up because".
It really is just a blank slateist motte-and-bailey.
Tanista
12d ago
How many smart people like Matty Y are out there who are Republicans but just haven't realized it yet?
He isn't.
Everyone is a "policy wonk" or "class-first leftist" until they have to actually cast off their progressive social beliefs. Then you see how they really prioritize them. See also DeBoer, Freddie.
Tanista
14d ago
My sense is that blacks are going to take this loss extremely personally, and that it will sting them to no end.
Joy Reid, Van Jones and co will (because their status depends on it) but will most?
Do we have turnout figures, because that can be as/more telling. It feels like there was a lack of enthusiasm even as the usual black pundits lined up behind Kamala making the expected noises.
And not in the Obama "we don't think he can win" sort of way.
I think migration also felt existential, for reasons Elon laid out to Rogan. People just fundamentally don't like the idea that the government is just going to dump migrants on them and respond "deal with it". I personally thought the Haitian pet-eating story was too ridiculous to land but maybe not. Regardless the general discontent remained.
The lawfare simply failed, like all other tactics did. Partly because Trump seems to have the miraculous ability to make his opposition even more ridiculous than he is so some of those cases were absurd and partly cause people had bigger concerns like the above.
Tanista
14d ago
Harris is an awful candidate no one would have picked? She was not just personally awful at anything that requires charisma and communication, she was tied specifically to Biden's policy failures and the inherent cleavages they caused (e.g. Gaza) and lacked an ability to pivot away from them given she has no independent profile. Or, at least, not one she'd want to stand behind.
Nor could she explain why she shouldn't be held responsible for hiding Biden's condition, something that made him unpopular enough to drop out
In hindsight it doesn't seem that mysterious: Trump was supposed to win when it was Biden.
We were all just caught up in the media exuberance around Harris because Democrats went from a seemingly certain loss to having a chance and that breeds some Joy^(tm). Then the sugar rush ended.
For a while now, I've had this growing knot in my guts whenever these types of things happen and the bad guys end up being women. I hate the knot because my brain says it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame for the increased pressure to root out anyone who's doing something wrong somewhere. But the knot keeps growing. I can't resolve the conundrum.
As just so theories go "women tend to eschew direct physical conflict in favor of other, less risky forms of social combat" isn't one I'd be particularly afraid to lose money on.
I feel no guilt in admitting that violence crime is a burden mostly-males impose on society, one that it can "unleash" through unwise policy. Unless women are a higher evolved being they'll have their means of wreaking havoc that we shouldn't encourage.
Tanista
20d ago
the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion
Trump gave them the best win they could get from a President: removing the Supreme Court's federal restriction on pursuing their politics. If they can't win on a state level and abortion likely ends up codified like in every other industrialized nation (albeit with more restrictions) then maybe that's on them?
On gay marriage: okay, the party seems to have totally folded there.
Trump is probably a net drain now that he's broken the consensus. But Dobbs is a huge confounder here. The GOP was projected to gain in midterms even with Trump and the result of standard conservative maneuvering for the last few decades seems to have interfered.
Trump is notably less gung-ho on the pro-life issue than many in the party.
Yes, it's possible. Some socialists are absolutely against strengthening ethnonationalist impulses. FdB wrote an insipid piece on it not too long ago.
You can say, as a matter of principle, that no ethnostate should exist.
The problem is that it practically seems to end up as "Israel in particular should dissolve itself first". People find that suspicious.
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