Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
4d ago
Covid caused states to take actions that would increase turnout through a bunch of second-order effects. From increased polarization, from how increased government power made who that government was more important, from how being at home with nothing to do all day but consume political content, from how it made it easier to vote.
Now, you could argue that (mostly) democratic governors broke the law with the covid response in ways that, via second order effects, happened to also benefit their election chances in 2020. And that is a misuse of political power for personal gain. But this isn't the usual definition of fraud. It's not even the media censorship non-fraud argument for election rigging.
Tophattingson
10d ago
I agree with the link between horror and pornography, in broad strokes. I just think you've made a terrible argument for that link. A better one would reference authors and artists that make the link, generally on the basis that unlike other forms of art you're just trying to maximize one lizardbrain emotional response. And then point to H. R. Giger's art as an example of the crossover, which is widely appreciate as having artistic value despite being overtly sexual and often in a more extreme way than zootopia gangbangs.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Like instead of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger
Which is ~450 calories. You could eat a McDonald's double cheeseburger as your 3 meals a day and lose weight. And since I remember what I used to make it, the last burger I prepared at home (albeit not with your ingredient list suggestion, the beef was pre-packaged refrigerated patty, not from mince, though nutritionally it would be near-identical) was instead 480 calories.
Short of directly eating blocks of lard, there is no specific food item that can be responsible for the 600lb outcomes that OP describes. It instead requires an inordinate quantity of food. That it's more likely to be McDonalds instead of homemade burgers has more to do with the general dysfunction that you require to hit 600lb, rather than because McDonalds is better than the equivalent amount of homemade burgers at making you 600lb.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
I think the supreme court getting in the way of policies that democrats want to implement would serve as an example. Either way, I didn't say these had to be justified grievances.
You need more than that to have a functioning democracy. In order to avoid incentivising defection from democracy, you also need to have fair post-game reward distribution. It's not enough for the vote itself to be fair. The actual exercise of power after the vote must be fair. If one side wins elections and then gets to enact policy, while the other side wins elections but then doesn't get to change policy, then this is hardly any better than the election being rigged in the first place. But this also has to balance against not harming the losers too much. There's no reason for the one sheep to accept two wolves voting to eat it, and it would be wrong to describe their subsequent attempt at self-defence as an attack on democracy.
Both parties in the US seem to hold both these grievances with existing elections, though they both responded to it in different ways. Republicans by claiming the voting process is flawed, and Democrats by claiming foreign interference made it flawed.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
There are some leftist progressives: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0i4ZETgfNuM
I don't know how sincere this is. I guess it being made in 1990 makes it possibly sincere. But I can't help but point to it's spiritual follow-up.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
The obvious difference between food and other addictions is that you cannot go cold turkey on all food. At least not without dying. The common recommendation for recovered addicts to never engage with the thing they got addicted to again, even in moderation, cannot apply to food.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
If your problem with Reform is that it lacks a coherent internal structure and meaningless membership, then sure, that's an actual criticism. One that I'd also levy at the Labour and Conservative party, which have internal democratic processes in theory but not in practice. But you should just say that, instead of complaining that reform is a company.
Reform lacks much internal structure as it was a very small party, re-founded during a time when the organisation of something akin to Conservative Associations or Constituency Labour Parties would have been mostly illegal. and only recently growing to a point where such an internal structure would be necessary. So already it's committed to changing structure to a company limited by guarantee.
Given that one man's primary source of income is his appearances on foreign media
GB News is not foreign media.
he certainly didn't find himself leading a substantial movement of still-salty-about-lockdown libertarians in the UK given Reform's anemic poll performance at the time.
Political organisation against lockdowns was de facto illegal during lockdowns. This is about as surprising as finding out there were no pro-Capitalist parties successfully participating in Soviet Elections in the 1930s.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
is a private limited company
Most small political parties are organised as companies because there's no other coherent legal structure for managing the finances of a political party. What else would they be? State owned? Not in a democracy. Charities? By law, they can't be tied to a political party. This talking point about Reform is intended to misinform someone with (admittedly typical) ignorance about what companies are. It's not a serious argument.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
and is part of the reason that we don't have a substantial libertarian movement trying to relitigate COVID.
Reform UK wants to relitigate COVID and just won 14.3% of the vote. If anything the movement would be stronger if the state did not violently suppress it.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
It doesn't hold because imposing them in the first place is, in my view, so bad that minor good deeds can't undo it. Not specifically because of hypocrisy.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Under Lockdownism, the benevolence of COVID restrictions is treated as an axiom, not a conclusion. Everything else will get redefined and rearranged to conform to that axiom, rather than the conclusions being changed as new facts emerge. Therefore those responsible for creating, implementing and enforcing those restrictions are always good people regardless of their personal failings. If that means suddenly discovering that technically his restrictions didn't criminalize his actions, then so be it. The alternative, acknowledging that the hypocrisy of those imposing the restrictions is evidence they didn't really believe in them, opens the way for ulterior motives, and once you think those responsible for restrictions have ulterior motives, you're already half-way to being one of us evil conspiracy theorist granny murderering freedumb-loving fascists.
I don't know the specifics of the regulations across every little subdivision of the US at every point in time. So I don't know if he technically broke the law. In the UK, we de facto criminalized all casual sex, because we criminalized the act of meeting up with members of another household indoors (prostitution might have fallen under a work-related exception loophole, and dogging is technically illegal but generally treated as less illegal than violating lockdowns). The thing is, I don't particularly care about that. If anything, flagrantly violating COVID restrictions elevates my view of your moral character, and the more trivial the motive for violation, the better. Breaking the law because you were kept from visiting a dying relative? Meh, doesn't indicate any particular attachment to human liberty, just a willingness to bend the rules in extreme circumstances. Violating lockdowns just to get your dick wet? Hell yes, we need more people who think like you in charge. But that's a +1 to Jay Varma's score of -100 for being responsible for the restrictions. There's little difference between wanting to see Varma fired into the sun, and me wanting to see Varma fired into the sun but I'll put him a few people further back in the queue for the sun cannon.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
If Boris Johnson was not capable of escaping responsibility for his actions during 2020 and 2021, he'd be rotting in a damp concrete box for ~200,000,000 counts of false imprisonment, not just merely no longer be PM.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
The absolute apotheosis of these kinds of fictional examples has to be Ian Banks' "Culture" series. The culture, being a post-scarcity society that is run by nigh-omniscient AI, approaches every single potential conflict with outsiders with the idea that any rational society would inevitably prefer to join the culture and all it should take to convince them is to show off how perfect life is when you remove all hierarchies and social restrictions and accept the post-singularity as your lord and savior.
And when they encounter outsiders who resist, normally its just a matter of identifying which of the leaders are 'irrationally' opposed to joining the culture, and supplanting them through various means. In short, the culture has mathematically proven that the only reason someone would resist the culture is they're 'mistaken' in some way, and once you correct them, the conflict evaporates.
An extreme non-fiction example of this is "Sluggish Schizophrenia" in the Soviet Union. Since Communism is obviously the superior social system, and there is no logical reason for anyone to oppose Communism, those who oppose it, against the wishes of all their friends, their elders, the experts, and all of society, must be mentally ill. Of course in practice this was created as an excuse to torture dissidents, and it's unlikely that those involved in that were true believers in the excuse.
Related, back in 2021, had someone I once considered close to me make approximately the same accusation regarding my opposition to lockdowns. Because I refused to abide by some COVID restriction, and therefore couldn't participate in some activity that was surrounded by COVID regulations, even though everyone else was apparently "fine" with it, I must have some mental illness.
Still, at least that's more creative than the usual real-world accusation thrown at us who disagree with the current thing. Usually we're regarded as brainwashed by Russians. Pretty silly when I hate Putin for pretty much the same reason I hate western leaders.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
He and many of his immediate intellectual descendants said that Marxism was "scientific". Is Marxism actually a science? They certainly called it one. They certainly wanted it to be one, since the name "science" bestows a veneer of intellectual respectability upon whatever it adorns.
Marxism would have been a science by the standards of the 1800s because the standards of the 1800s were pretty sloppy. It's not until you get to Karl Popper's idea of Falsification in the 1930s that we get the more rigorous definition of science we have today. And then Popper quickly applied the idea of falsification to Marx (among others) to distinguish his pseudoscience from the actually useful science being done in other fields like Physics.
It's easy to find certain similarities between what Marx did and what scientists do; to at least some degree he engaged in a process of hypothesis formation and attempted to measure those hypotheses against empirical evidence. He revised his thinking as new data came in. But in spite of all this, Marxism is still not a science, because in its essential properties it differs from what makes a science actually be a science. The whole enterprise is crucially dependent on ethical and non-empirical propositions.
As bad as the naming of "exploitation" is in Marxism, it's still a theory derived from earlier economic theories, that predicts that removing capitalists will result in workers being better off via keeping their "surplus value" that capitalists were taking from them. But it wasn't the result of empirical observation. It was a logical deduction from the Labour Theory of Value, but LTV was disproved towards the end of Marx's career. Similar happened to Marx's theory of history. The failure of Marxists to respond to empirical evidence, by ignoring it, adding epicycles, or abandoning any pretext of caring about empirical evidence by switching to ideas like critical theory, is why it became a pseudoscience.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Reddit banning /r/NoNewNormal happened in a context where the US Government was pressuring other social media sites to ban covid dissidents, vaccine mandates were increasingly criminalizing everyday life for dissidents, and on the streets of much of the rest of the world, police were beating the shit out of them when they protested. If anything Reddit's mere banning of a single subreddit was relatively moderate compared to what everywhere else was doing, both online and off.
Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?
My experience does not differ.
If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?
It comes from Orthodox Marxism, which predicts that humanity progresses through different "modes of production", one of which is Capitalism, which will inevitably be replaced by Socialism and then Communism. "Late Stage Capitalism" is basically just hyping up the inevitably end of capitalism that Marxists believe will occur, because they're alleging that we're already past the early and middle and thus are in the "late" part of it.
It's pretty much the commie version of the Millenarian Christian "End Times". One says we're living in Late Capitalism because they're prophesizing the second coming of Communism. The other says we're living in the End Times because they're prophesizing the second coming of Jesus.
I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.
Worth adding that "neoliberal" here is effectively a meaningless snarl word when used by these groups, used to refer not just to something like Milton Friedman's beliefs, but to pretty much anything they dislike including, in one thing I read, String Theory. You can mentally replace it with "nasty" and no information will be lost. Or more precisely, they end up calling random stuff neoliberal because they believe all not-explicitly-Marxisdt scientific theories produced under our current culture is just discourse serving power.
It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly.
Many of them, yes. But some of the rest ascribe to what Marx would have called "Utopian Socialism" which can be summarised as dood, what if like, we were all equal and shit. With no further theory. In other words they just don't like capitalism but have no ideology which they want to replace it with.
Since you've mentioned feminism so much, a useful distinction is that some Social Justice advocates who are into feminism are not Marxist Feminists, but instead Radical Feminists (which confusingly are two different things). The former is more popular in the US while the latter is more popular in the UK. Marxist feminists believe oppression of women is due to capitalism while Radical feminists believe it is due to gender roles imposed by men. And the former seeks to resolve it by abolishing capitalism while the latter want to abolish gender roles. This is basically the cause of the TERF wars. the Radical Feminist desire to abolish gender roles conflicts with the desire of trans people to uphold them, if not outright making trans people worse than the general population out of some sense that they are traitors, or even more entrenched in gender roles than anyone else. Hence TERF is a bit of a redundant term - it is incoherent to be RF and not also TE, and the self-proclaimed RFs that are pro-trans are only so as a consequence of something between burying their head in the sand and being bullied into silence. The Marxist feminists don't have that same ideological incompatibility, more likely to see Trans people as allies because they can rally them to the overthrow capitalism cause.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
The exact moment is the Six Day War, so 1967. A consequence of Israel embarrassing the reds by absolutely crushing Arab countries which were primarily armed by Moscow.
Marxian economics is already a precise term used to describe Marx's economic theories. The reason why "cultural marxism" (more precisely, Critical Theory) became more prevalent is because Orthodox Marxism is empirically indefensible, so you need to start grafting a bunch of other stuff onto it to explain away why Marxism didn't work. The easiest way to think of it is as a conspiracy theory which has too much academic credentials to get accurately described as a conspiracy theory. Marxism didn't fail because Marx was wrong. Marxism failed because there's a distributed conspiracy where elites use their dominant cultural power to shape reality in a way that indefinitely maintains their status and makes Marxism fail. This then has a bunch of sub-conspiracies. Most relevant here, explaining away the failings of Marxian economics because all scientific theories produced by a capitalist society are just discourse serving power.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Ok we have a problem here, your comments about the government wanting to purge anti-lockdownists
The problem here is a conversation about vaccine mandates being motivated by political purges in the US soon turned into one about the motives for lockdowns, a separate policy, in the UK, a separate country. This is because you mentioned "Conservative UK Boomers" and their calls for lockdowns, then I responded to that, perhaps without making clear enough that I don't think the same applies to the UK and the US. Mainly because vaccine mandates never got very far in the UK.
But then why would you think the government needs vaccine mandates to target and purge anti-lockdown activists? It simply can. As you point out Parliament is sovereign. It can just pass a law to lock em up or use anti-terror mandates it doesn't need a convoluted vaccine mandate which only really applied to healthcare workers to then purge anti-lockdown activists. It doesn't make sense. Plus they didn't actually purge them!
For the same reason why they needed to promote fear to carry out lockdowns: The public wouldn't tolerate them without the prior propaganda efforts.
a convoluted vaccine mandate which only really applied to healthcare workers to then purge anti-lockdown activists.
I should have clarified this earlier, but when I said vaccine mandates were motivated by the opportunity to politically purge the opposition, this most clearly applies in the US, where vaccine mandates got way further than they did in the UK, mainly because our third round of covid restriction attempts collapsed from the partygate scandal. It's a shibboleth for being red tribe, and blue tribe leaders wanted to hurt the political prospects and economic power of red tribe by removing many of them from well-paid or prestigious employment or at least forcing them to betray their principles to remain employed. But then the conversation drifted to why lockdowns happened in the UK rather than the support for vaccine mandates in the US. But I'm sure you can understand why the idea of unvaccinated healthcare workers is especially corrosive to the government's narrative on covid and vaccines. That's still a political purge, just of the healthcare system first.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
I'm a single issue voter. The worst thing Trump did was permit the Democrat response to covid instead of protecting American citizens from Democrat governor self-coups, an absolutely monstrous failure that should be disqualifying in any other circumstance. This is, however, not a good reason to vote for the Democrats, who instead actively supported it, rather than passively permitting it. Therefore, begrudgingly, Trump. That the Democrats would want me treated as a second-class citizen, and made it illegal for me to visit the US until May 2023, only further solidifies the choice. Except I'm not a US citizen so I can't vote.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
How likely is it that Trump will do something about the Houthis.
How likely is it that the Houthi shipping attacks will stop because they expect Trump retaliation without Trump having to do anything?
Hey, there are some of us who are actually consistent on this - pro-abortion, pro drug decriminalization, and anti-vaccination. You just won't find us in the Democratic party.
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