Tanista
11d ago
What end could James Bond expect?
(Pretty funny that the one time we have a consistent canon they just kill him off)
Tanista
12d ago
I think policies should also have a "needless stupidity" modifier.
Some things are bad implementations of policies that are at least somewhat necessary. Some things are just needlessly stupid and never needed to happen and that makes them more egregious because of what they imply about our systems.
Tanista
14d ago
As with eSports, female participation and competence in war will increase with the deployment of the tranissaries.
I don't see it as particularly more incoherent than when right-wingers, who are generally hardly known for wanting to improve the lot of imprisoned criminals, develop a strange and very isolated compassion towards women prisoners who are forced to share their prison tracts with men.
Maybe I'm so tough on crime I just don't want men escaping to a comparatively nicer female prison.
(I do truly think a significant amount of the backlash and the gulf in male-female trans support is legitimately just disgust that some men, specifically the sort of man other men know to distrust or contain, think they get to defect)
Tanista
16d ago
Not sure what you mean by “raises your standards,” maybe you can elaborate.
That the more homogeneous a society the more small differences stand out.
The other question is to what degree already being homogeneous raises your standards.
The common argument is that nativism is just a standard reflexive response that you have to power through and people react the same way to visible Muslims and visible Irishmen.
You have to wonder if what are now considered irrelevant differences mattered more because people were more similar. Which would mean that you can't really safely assume it'd apply to Pakistani Muslims.
(That said, America is doing much better than, for example, Britain here anyway because the filter for such groups that were barred from immigrating before is still relatively strong)
Tanista
20d ago
You can also bring in Star Trek influenced works.
Battlestar Galactica is a direct response to Voyager, 9/11 and the Iraq War (the New Caprica arc with an outright suicide bombing insurgency especially feels dated) and is progressive in a very particular way that is both familiar and distinct from how things were done post 2020.
Tanista
20d ago
Tanista
20d ago
Can't wait to have another "is Hillary Swank Zendaya hot?" discussion when Dune 3 drops!
Outside of that, it's rather obvious KJP is carrying water for Biden. But to what end? Is he not out of politics? The earnest defense of his honor, whilst admirable, is a political dead end. Suicide, even.
Biden is clearly relitigating his legacy. Which is why Hunter came out not too long ago or we get comments when Jake Tapper releases a book.
But it is interesting that the two people who seem most willing to public go down with the Biden ship are black women.
It makes some sense with KJP since she'll never get another major role in the party.
But Kamala seems to be making noises like she'll run for something again and she's still providing cover for his health issues. She was also a late addition that wasn't particularly loved in Bidenworld apparently so one wonders what she gains.
To steelman KJP: Running with Biden through the election and then benching him and getting Kamala in as VP was probably the best choice given they did not have a better candidate than Kamala. My guess is that the people behind the scenes got greedy, pushed Biden aside and went with Kamala to their detriment. To that extent, KJP defending the honor of Biden is just as much a political dead end as the interviewers defense of the current democrat establishment. Two political losers fighting over lost scraps.
This is not actually a defense of KJP and her ilk.
What most likely happened was that Kamala was already on the ticket and so could use the money raised. The other issue is that many of the other Democratic candidates that did seem viable saw the situation was a mess and knew they could run in four years (when Trump might have nuked his popularity again) with a full campaign. Once Biden spitefully endorsed Kamala it was especially not worth it.
But that's not the reason it's not a defense of KJP. Another factor was people like Jean Pierre who deliberately tried to poison the well on any sort of contested primary by making it about the denial of a black woman her legitimate role. That was another reason candidates couldn't jump on.
If that had happened, KJP would be complaining again as a black, queer woman.
Try to get their American cousins to not launch a 20 year long pogrom against the demographics that most strongly supported Israel
Why would we assume that Ezra Klein class of Jews give a fuck what the mostly right wing current rulers of Israel do?
Especially without some inciting event.
If right wing white Gentiles can't prevent their own progressive brothers from championing that alleged ethnic cleansing why should we assume that progressive Jews could be talked down?
But, if I would raise a criticism myself, maybe Netanyahu's treatment of Obama and his lining up behind his American opponents, was slightly unwise.
We can argue that most of the outcome is baked in because of immigration but the absolute last thing you want as a foreign nation is to be seen as an ally to one side of America's culture war. It's a demented game with no clear rules but always two sides and it's insane to play it for real stakes.
Taking the invite from Republicans and rejecting any attempt by Obama to slow down on settlements didn't play well on the left, especially since Netanyahu seems to have the hardiness of a cockroach.
This naturally involved becoming harsher towards Ukraine. It didn't work, because Putin was intransigent and possibly took this (as many of Trump's opponents seem to have) as Trump being a pushover.
A risk raised by his domestic opponents when he suggested his solutions.
It even seemed to have worked in Gaza, where the ceasefire came right after the Trump administration got publicly pissy at Israel over attacking in Qatar.
Well Israel, the stronger party here, is closer to Ukraine than to Russia so it isn't really the exact same problem (putting aside whether Trump's vocal support emboldened Israel into that blunder or if the later apology was all theater)
Tanista
23d ago
It's obviously a problem because his theory of the case is that he can solve disputes with Xi and Putin by doing this...to US allies.
When Trump wanted to renegotiate NAFTA and slap his name on it, that happened. The idea that Canada's response is to just never do anything when it comes to US demands doesn't stand up to scrutiny. USMCA also has a mandated renegotiation period coming up so all parties agreed in principle that negotiations are part of the deal, Trump decided to jump the gun and impose tariffs outside of regular order (which is why he had to claim an emergency).
The idea that Canada is the party that "dug their heels in" and threw insults is...Like, I'm legitimately wracking my brain here because it's just so far from my experience of what happened. Trump started the conflict, Trump insisted on the idea of annexing a neighbor in a trade dispute, Trump then said a few times that there was nothing to be done to remove tariffs and Canada should just accept being annexed.
It of course does not help that both sides were let's say ideologically opposed to certain extent
It would be vibes-based idiocy to base trade policy on that in the first place
But this isn't even really consistently true. Starmer is probably worse than Trudeau on all of the major woke indices and he somehow gets along with Trump.
But in the end it is all besides the point.
If it is besides the point why bring it up? Why lump it in with legitimate strategic concerns like NS2? Why not just say from the start that the US is just thrashing about for advantage any way it can?
This is another hallmark of this sort of vibes-based, personality-driven "policy": frog-boiling and essentially apathy once it's done (for reasons no one could have predicted beforehand or hell, even articulate consistently today).
It's not a debate that Canada is weaker than the US (in fact, that's my argument against the idea that some meaningful defiance was going on), or that it has behaved in an indolent fashion that makes its dependency worse.
Tanista
23d ago
there seems to be a pattern where Trump deploys tough negotiation tactics most successfully where the goal is to get people to flatter him personally, not to advance US national interests.
And that those tactics aren't actually workable in the most intractable cases and thus only really fall hard on US allies.
In the past countries like Germany or Canada took USA for granted and even outright mocked Trump when he gave his speech as in this example.
The same Canada that got into a diplomatic mess with China because the US wanted to cause an issue Huawei? The lumping is doing a lot of work here.
This seems like a microcosm of a lot of Trumpian foreign policy: it's all a blend of vibes. What all of these groups have in common is uppity vibes, not actions.
Trudeau comes across as an Obama-wannabe -> this naturally means he comes across as the sort of person who would look down on Trump -> when Trump does something totally arbitrary against Canada it's then read through the lens of legitimate vengeance for ?? because the class of people who look like Trudeau/Obama include people who have ignored US strategic interests at some point or been mean to Trump.
Ultimately it just seems like the general grievances of red tribe have just metastasized to the international realm (because Americans are somewhat insulated from global affairs and so can turn foreign policy into a narcissistic affair).
It’s just DeCarlos Brown muttering to himself that the tiny white woman called him a nigger. It isn’t anything unexpected: he was already angry, as many loners are, and was desperately hoping to hurt someone. When he didn’t receive a justification, he manufactured one so he could stab someone anyway.
Tanista
23d ago
And Trump well within his right to say fuck you and stop negotiating with a party that finances attacks on him.
The President isn't supposed to arbitrarily tariff countries actually. If that were the case, Trump needn't have ever provided the fentanyl pretext for tariffing Canada.
Tanista
27d ago
It's amazing how stacked a resume Orlando Bloom built off of a couple year span after Lord of the Rings before people realized his limited range wasn't just an acting choice for Legolas.
Funny. I was just wondering why entire subgenres of SciFi and althistory don't work for me anymore as I get more conservative/blackpilled.
"Written with the assumptions of Star Trek in mind" captures the commonalities even across genres surprisingly well.
Tanista
1mo ago
Tentatively, I would expect that one would find some folks in that sect writing within the context of the tradition that they are being heretical from. I think it likely that you would find them claiming that what they are doing is that tradition
Either that what they do is that tradition or is in fact the truer fulfillment of the essence of the faith even if it does violence to a lot of the claims the tradition they're attacking stands by. Which is why I compared it to Gnosticism. Christians would deny that Gnostics are Christians. Gnostics might not deny that they are Christians, but they certainly claim that all non-Gnostics are ignorant of the true implications of their gospels and the real ground for Christian faith.
The New Atheist claim is that you can have all of the good things about God without God and, in fact, what you think is necessary might as well be the commandments of the demiurge that prevent full flourishing.
I think you put a lot of stock in the universalist axis, and I don't think it's that load-bearing. Again, it's a bit of a superficial relation. Not quite "Hitler was a vegetarian", but yeah, I think we can find a range of views on the universalist axis across all sorts of traditions.
Sam Harris came up with a hypothetical "worst possible misery for everyone" and uses this to bootstrap himself to a justification for what is basically modern liberal Western morality.
Theoretically it could come from anywhere when a Western atheist basically reinvents hell so he can also reinvent existing moral theories I think we're significantly more justified in skepticism that it comes from the aether. Harris could have come up with a more collectivist view, or something centered more in relations than individual human dignity he didn't. He could have accepted that his hypothetical appeal lacks the sort of universalizing force of God (sure, avoiding WPM state for me and mine make sense but why are we obligated to avoid it for others?)
But he ends up in the same place. This isn't ethics as such. It's a particular form of ethics.
Tanista
1mo ago
Women are viciously competitive (as most women who went to high school will tell you) and don’t particularly empathize with their enemies. The safety point is correct in the abstract (men are much more willing to take risks) but arbitrary and poorly considered, for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them. You can say that empathy overrides safetyism, but then it appears to sometimes and not at others
Which is why you'd say it's more likely higher agreeableness than higher empathy.
Conformity to an inconsistently sympathetic or safetyist ideology would explain this.
Sure, "Science" has been the calling card for many a scientismist for quite a long time, core to their being as atheists. One question is whether this is truly "Christian heresy", but all these atheists have, indeed, been around for a long time. Plenty stretching back to antiquity and in non-Christian societies.
I'm not sure why we'd assume a continuity of ancient atheism and modern atheism. Atheism is a rejection of God(s). How we see gods influences it.
Consider New Atheism: their moral critique of Christianity was that it was a) unnecessary and b) insufficiently universalist because non-Christians are excluded from full communion. The latter is not a critique that ancient atheists would necessarily have cared about. Ethics doesn't actually obligate you to be a universalist.
Criticisms of the morality of the Old Testament God are born of the same impulse that gave us an actual, clear Christian heresy like gnosticism: the god of the Hebrew Bible, at first blush, fails by the standards of the New Testament/NT-inspired modern morality. This is a problem that becomes acute when you're not a polytheist.
The other claim is that science can fill the role religion plays as an arbiter of truth, a moral authority and a source of meaning and the sense of the numinous. I see no reason for these to be basic atheistic assumptions. A lot of our debates are about principles. And truth doesn't have to be numinous.
To this day you find leftists who insist that progressive liberals aren't actually leftists. Nobody in the American system cares much but they'll passionately insist that America doesn't really have a left because they're all liberals.
The obscuring factor here is that progressive liberals seem to see leftists as closer to them politically than right liberals. But leftists will generally attack them even more for being more susceptible to their attacks than right libs.
Of course, when they're attacked from the outside they have no problem hiding behind the ambiguity.
But your uncle is straightforwardly right about DEI, and your denials are just inadvertant gaslighting
The uncle/"simple as" stuff really does feed my belief that it just comes down to these terms being low status.
I don't know that any of the supposedly technical or more accurate terms - like Mounk's "identity synthesis" - are actually superior in intuitiveness to "cultural Marxism" or, even worse, "gay race communism". Those other terms are just used by icky dumb people like right libs.
I see why this ideology, which is notoriously against being named at all would behave this way but I don't see what anyone else gains.
Afrobeats did have a moment with artists like Burna Boy being successful and working with members of the diaspora in Britain. From South Africa Tyla is probably the most prominent artist that's making waves in the US?
Their momentum seems to be stymied in the US though which might explain why it doesn't feel like it has any impact. In both cases their promotional runs seem to have poisoned the well a bit either because they were perceived as lecturing American blacks or not responding correctly to awkward questions - the whole colored category in SA apparently sounds awkward to AA ears and Tyla really failed to give a soothing answer, or any answer at all. Now every time she comes up in the hip hop media so does this issue and they're not kind. Probably doesn't help build up a head of steam.
In her defense, it's kind of a no-win. The answer that I see is that "colored" is a different thing from black and saying that might be even worse than appearing uppity.
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