Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
4hr ago
I think what broke a lot of people (myself included) was the disastrous and anti-scientific response to Covid, which every step of the way was blessed by the so-called experts.
To add to this, if "conspiracy theory" was used in a neutral way instead of only being used against right-wing beliefs, then supporters of the mainstream response to COVID are conspiracy theorists. After all, they believe, without evidence, that masks stop covid, in the same way that a tinfoil hat might block mind control. They believe, without evidence, that imprisoning the entire population in their own homes, for just two weeks, with a "real" lockdown, will make covid go away. And they believe that governments that don't do this, such as Florida under DeSantis, are conspiring to commit mass murder while covering up the true number of deaths. Similarly, they treat all opposition to policies they support as motivated by criminal conspiracy (by some combination of Trumpists, Russians, the religious, or far-right) rather than by differing opinions or priorities.
Pretty much every crank view on the right has an equivalent on the left, just couched in academic language and with institutional support. There's plenty on the left that believe in a "Trans Genocide" or that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, to state the obvious equivalents to white genocide conspiracy theories. And as for broader conspiratorial worldviews like QAnon, critical theory is just that: a conspiracy theory. Just one that's popular enough in academia that it dodges the definition.
Tophattingson
1d ago
Muslims are definitely not fargroup in the UK yet this pattern still holds.
Tophattingson
2d ago
And for what it's worth from an Atheist, I've only ever seen this attitude get applied towards Christians, not towards the religious in general. Opposing e.g. Islamophobia has the baked-in assumption that Muslims can't simply choose to not be Muslim to avoid discrimination. But when it comes to discriminating against 'fundies' there's no such consideration.
Tophattingson
4d ago
North Korea has performed six nuclear tests since 2006. Based on this alone there's about a 17% chance that North Korea detonates a nuclear weapon in any 6 month period. But with only 6 weeks of the year left, the chance should now be 4%. That prediction market was broken from the start because nobody seemed to account for the most likely nuclear use case.
Tophattingson
5d ago
Vernon Dursley is the director of a mid-sized company. Second paragraph of the first book.
Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills.
The books and films might have lowered his mannerisms below what you'd expect for such a position, but that's because it's meant to be a negative stereotype. And part of that negative stereotype is that he gets to be the director of a distinctly unfashionable business, rather than working in a high-paid but fashionable (for the 90s) profession.
Tophattingson
7d ago
Harry Potter's adoptive parents are an overtly negative stereotype of the Tory-supporting upper middle class, as would have been understood when the series began in the 90s.
Tophattingson
9d ago
Bluesky seems to be trying to optimize for a more amiable, relaxed experience, and hopefully the lack of chuds brigading people’s posts to call them Jewish faggots will contribute to that goal.
Given the Venn diagram between the most progressive and most pro-Hamas is almost a circle, you'll get this on Bluesky, except it will be people calling you Zionist cishets.
Tophattingson
12d ago
Your odds of a natural-causes death double every 8 years, starting at age 30 at the latest (though possibly much earlier; non-natural causes obscure things for 20-somethings and teens).
The odds of death that most closely follow that curve is, of all things, covid. Doesn't have a peak for infant mortality, and doesn't have another peak for violent deaths in late teens and early 20s.
Tophattingson
15d ago
Bodily autonomy is a fake argument because in practice nothing else follows from it aside from abortion.
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.
Tophattingson
18d 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
25d 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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.
The White Genocide conspiracy theory can also be steelmanned as people using an overly-expansive definition of genocide for motivated reasons, akin to the one originally proposed by Lemkin:
And then the flaw of the steelman is that if we were to revert to Lemkin's original wording we'd have to reclassify a lot of stuff that isn't treated as genocide as such, and then would inevitably need a new word to replace genocide to describe the narrower meaning.
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