sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
3d ago
That’s kind of my point. Where’s his Reddit account ranting about the evils of capitalism? Where’s his #girlsforkamala posts on Instagram?
This is nonsense. All it takes for a Reddit/Twitter/etc. account to not be found by people on the internet is for it to have a unique username, that doesn't indicate a lack of interest in politics. Furthermore even if he didn't have social media account most people are lurkers and that wouldn't prevent him picking up political ideas from the internet any more than it prevented him picking up the internet memes. Even in the fairly unlikely event that he picked up stuff like "Bella ciao" from people he knew in real life that would most likely imply a general interest in politics rather than your highly specific hypothetical of politics as purely an extension of interpersonal relationships.
We’re finding less on his politics over his entire life than you’d find about mine in the past 3 hours of my posts.
If you shot someone would randoms on the internet reading your real name realize you were "Soteriologian"? Would they be able to find it even if they found out the Steam username of your romantic partner?
I’m going to call that a non-political person, I’m sorry. The replies I’m getting just reek of wanting him to be Political so you can say he was radicalized by le evil leftists and start your Long March through their institutions. I don’t need to come here to get that analysis. It’s already all over Twitter. Just go play over there, that’s where your friends are.
I think one reason you are receiving a negative response is that your posts are dripping with contempt towards the mainstream speculation yet it's evident you've put minimal careful thought into your own speculation. It comes across as motivated by a sort of contrarian elitism where you don't want to be one of those people so you have to come up with some highly specific scenario which you think is sufficiently different from what they believe. (And engaging in such obvious motivated reasoning also makes some people assume your motive is sympathy for the shooter.) In just the prior post you somehow misread rDrama enough to think it was his Reddit account rather than his partner's and declared LoveForLandlords a subreddit for mocking the working class and LGBT with the implication that this reflects on his politics (ironic since the actual user was transgender). Having had this revealed you move on without comment and leap from "not finding social media accounts" to "those accounts don't exist" to "he didn't care about politics".
Such a specific scenario is much less likely to begin with than the broader "motivated by left-wing ideology" and the latter also seems to be supported by the evidence. Whatever their flaws the Twitter partisans you're contemptuous towards seem to have a better grasp of the situation than you. I think you would have had a much less negative reception if you had posted without the unwarranted confidence and contempt, something like "Now that we know the identity of his romantic partner, what do people think the chances are his feelings towards Charlie Kirk are downstream of that instead of broader ideological sentiment?" and then laid out your scenario. People still wouldn't have agreed with it because it's a pretty specific and unlikely seeming scenario and the casings point towards broader "anti-fascist" sentiment, but you wouldn't have irritated people as much.
sodiummuffin
3d ago
Let me clarify what I mean by he doesn’t seem political: he doesn’t seem to have ever gone to any sort of political rally or activist event for any party, he hasn’t made any sort of public statements on social media accounts about this or that politician, etc.
As far as I know we don't know any of his social media accounts besides his Steam account and a blank FurAffinity account. A lot of people with strong political views don't attend rallies or protests, and we could easily not know if he had. So this is meaningless in judging whether he cared about politics and we're once again left with the fact he assassinated a political figure, the two political inscriptions on the casings, and the statement from his family.
EDIT: for what it’s worth, the Dramatards have found evidence he was on LoveForLandlords (a popular rdrama psyop back in the day), which is an explicitly satirical subreddit of left-wing causes (mocking the working class and mocking LGBT)
No, that was his transgender romantic partner Lance Twiggs. While I do not browse LoveForLandlords I don't know of it "mocking LGBT" or even really mocking "workers", just commies who get mad about landlords online (and according to someone on rdrama it was taken over by the people being mocked at some point so maybe not even that). Twiggs also posted on /r/4tran and unsurprisingly seemed anti-Trump.
has little discernible affiliation or concern for politics at all
Based on what? He shot a political figure, he wrote "Hey fascist! Catch!" and "Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao" on the bullet casings (the latter being a WW2 anti-fascist song often used by left-wing activists in general and antifa in particular, it also concluded the manifesto of the guy who attacked an ICE facility in 2019), and apparently he was telling his family about how Charlie Kirk was spreading hate. All of those seem pretty political to me, and conversely the evidence of him being apolitical is that...he didn't have a party registration? And that he also put some jokes on his bullet casings instead of making them all political slogans? Sometimes people engaging in political violence are just insane or have incoherent politics, but so far there's no evidence of that, his views seem pretty straightforward.
Well, if you listen to Twitter (never, ever listen to Twitter), what happened is some evil Antifa activist group Radicalized (TM) The Shooter using Internet Technologies like Reddit and Discord.
Well yeah, both of the political statements on the casings seem antifa associated. That doesn't mean he was radicalized by a specifically antifa group, "Charlie Kirk was a fascist and deserved death" is an opinion held more widely than that. Nor does it mean he was involved with any sort of formal political group rather than just browsing the internet. But it does seem likely he picked up his political opinions online, that's pretty much the default assumption nowadays, especially for someone writing internet memes on bullet casings and called a "Reddit kid" by a schoolmate. You're acting superior to those idiots on Twitter but "antifa views he picked up online" is better supported by the evidence than "little concern for politics" is.
Luigi didn't seem to have much of any passion for politics or even any discernible political affinity, and yet... clearly his action was political and extreme.
He didn't seem apolitical to me, it's just that his public political affiliation was vaguely technocratic centrism. (A dumb version of technocratic centrism that didn't really understand the healthcare industry, but that's common enough.) He frequently commented on politics on Twitter, just not in a heavily partisan way. (Also I vaguely remember an account that in his personal life he he expressed pretty different and more extreme views?)
To recap for anyone who didn't read the psychoanalysis I never wrote, what actually happened--you'll pardon my pretense in mind-reading--is that Luigi had a bad experience with health insurance that led him to personally believe that the Health Insurance Bad narrative was vindicated.
Note that he wrote a short manifesto which didn't mention this.
sodiummuffin
4d ago
The show skips and compresses enough stuff (setting, time with less important characters, less vital plot elements, explanations of what's going on) that I would regard the novel as the "full" version, plus according to the timeline it'll take until 2035 to adapt it all. The main question is whether you also bounce off the novel's translation/writing-style/slow pacing. So I would say give it a try and see how you like it.
sodiummuffin
4d ago
Lord of the Mysteries may or may not qualify as cultivation depending on what you're looking for, but it would be my favorite cultivation-adjacent thing I've read. It has a cultivation-inspired sort of progression framework but not the typical cultivation setting or powers or advancement methods, instead it's more occultism in a Victorian-inspired setting. This site seems to have a decent epub version if you don't want to put up with the official site.
It being my favorite isn't a terribly strong statement, since a lot of them (like Coiling Dragon) I've quit after trying and getting bored, but I guess I'd say it's of similar quality to the average published western fantasy novel? Which is high praise by webnovel standards. Note that it has a slow start. (Conversely the currently-airing donghua adaption went too far in the other direction in rushing through and skipping things for the first few episodes, to the point that some non-novel-readers were complaining of it being difficult to understand. Nice animation though.)
sodiummuffin
5d ago
In addition to being a general Antifa thing Bella Ciao was used by the guy who attacked an ICE facility in 2019, as pointed out by Andy Ngo. So it's possible he took some inspiration from that, though it could just be generally popular enough in those circles that both referenced it.
The latter is are lyrics from the World War II-era Italian resistance song that has been adopted by Antifa as an unofficial anthem. It is frequently sung at their rallies and the song’s titled featured on their signs and slogans. In 2019, Washington state Antifa gunman Willem van Spronsen closed his manifesto with “Bella ciao” before attacking an ICE facility in Tacoma with a rifle and incendiary devices. He was shot dead while trying to ignite a propane tank close to the building and has since been glorified by Antifa as a hero and martyr.
sodiummuffin
7d ago
Because the amount of work cartel members can do is limited. It takes time and effort to figure out how much to demand, punish those who refuse, enforce your claim against rivals, etc. They're workers who primarily make money off of "willingness to commit serious crimes", skills specific to drugs are secondary. Right now the best-paying job for that advantage is the drug trade but if that goes away then there's other stuff like extortion or illegal logging.
Now, obviously there's feedback loops involved: if the available illegal jobs pay worse and can't scale to affording as many workers then that potentially makes law-enforcement easier which makes them even less desirable. The goal would be to have them spiral down until they're almost always less desirable than legal jobs, leaving them to idiots making bad choices and making large-scale organized crime virtually impossible. But you can't just base that on assuming the composition of criminal activity will remain the same but with the "drug" part vanishing, all those criminals in the drug industry will need new jobs and the main thing they have to sell is still "willing to commit serious crimes". It would certainly be a pity to accept serious society-wide consequences from drug legalization in the name of beating the cartels and then see the cartels just shift to something less profitable without collapsing.
sodiummuffin
8d ago
I was talking with some friends and family and they mentioned that full legalization of drugs would stop cartels from existing.
Other people have discussed the drugs aspect, but would it work even if drugs were so freely available and untaxed that cartels had no competitive advantage? Or would they just move into the next-most profitable criminal enterprise without it making a drastic difference to the harm they inflict? A quick search finds this pair of statistics:
The Mexican Employers’ Association, Coparmex, says extortion cost businesses some $1.3 billion in 2023.
Fact check: Do Mexican drug cartels make $500 billion a year?
The results are all over the map, ranging from $6 billion to $29 billion in estimates released since 2006. But none of them pegs Mexican drug traffickers' revenue at "half a trillion dollars," as Perdue claimed.
Now I am no expert of the subject and these are literally just the first results that came up, but it sounds like extortion is already a significant fraction of their income. Even if the drug income vanished (and remember they don't have to exclusively sell to the U.S. and Mexico either), how much would they be able to ramp up protection rackets if they were devoting their efforts to them instead? Sure it would cost them money, but would it really weaken them so much as to (for example) allow the Mexican government to wipe them out?
If you read the biographies of artists and writers who grew up in the mid to early 20th century, when America was assumed to be more conservative and religious, a theme is how they were constantly breaking the law and given second chances. it's like these ppl were in and out of detention and skipping school and smoking and drinking in their early teens, and no one cared that much.
I think that was viable in large part because of the lower rate of serious criminality. (Particularly in white neighborhoods before desegregation.) If crime is less of a problem, if fewer people are escalating from minor offenses to murder, then you don't need to be as harsh to keep it down. It's like a thermostat, if the furnace is running more (harsher policing and sentencing), the insulation is better (older population), and yet the temperature inside (murder rate) is the same or colder then it's probably colder outside. An alternative explanation would be that the furnace doesn't work, but based on stuff like the success of 90s tough-on-crime efforts and the surge from the Ferguson/Floyd Effect it seems like policing has the expected effect, it just has more to handle. Similarly in other countries harsher policing seems effective but the countries that need to resort to it are the ones that had crime problems to begin with. Of course none of this means that "less religiosity" or the like is one of the reasons why, I just think the tradeoffs here are underappreciated. There's a tendency for people to either believe harsh policing and sentencing is intrinsically good/free (Why should we worry about the welfare of criminal scum?), or to believe that it's evil/useless (Don't you know Sweden has 18% of the U.S. incarceration rate and yet it has only 20% of the U.S. murder rate? Why can't we just use their system?). I think the better way to think about it is that it's a necessary but serious cost and the preferable situation is to avoid paying it by having less criminality to begin with.
sodiummuffin
11d ago
And as we're seeing in the latter case with the crackdowns in Steam and itch.io, these tools are available to non-wokes too.
That seems to have been a response to an open-letter and phone campaign by Australian feminist nonprofit Collective Shout to payment processors a week before it happened.
Open letter to payment processors profiting from rape, incest + child abuse games on Steam
These games endorsing men’s sexualised abuse and torture of women and girls fly in the face of efforts to address violence against women. We do not see how facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial benefit from these violent and unethical games, is consistent with your corporate values and mission statements.
We request that you demonstrate corporate social responsibility and immediately cease processing payments on Steam and Itch.io and any other platforms hosting similar games.
Now, what makes this case unusual is that instead of their fellow SJWs rallying to support them the cascade went the other direction, with many of them insisting that Collective Shout are fake feminists or whatever. (Though the Online Hate Prevention Institute, having worked with them in the past, still sided with them and said their critics were the new Gamergate.) You can go to places like /r/GirlGamers, which previously was campaigning to get No Mercy banned by urging people to sign Collective Shout's petition and copy Collective Shout's email template, and now people think it's a "heavily conservative group...under the pretense of feminism". Factors that presumably contributed to this include that a co-founder of Collective Shout is pro-life, the censorship happened to get some bad press in left-wing spaces early on, and due to this there was rumors going around that "LGBT content" was being targeted. Also the fact that it was a big enough news story for a lot of more moderate SJW-positive people to hear about it, not just the hardcore.
Now that doesn't mean it can't lead to some changed opinions about censorship. Despite how frustrating the dishonest and self-serving narratives about it are, people's opinions on the subject are presumably generally sincere. But it does seem important that this is payment processors continuing to listen to the same sort of arguments they've been listening to for years as they censored various (mostly Japanese) storefronts, not suddenly listening to "non-wokes". Also it's hard to guess what percentage of people objecting are just going the way the winds are currently blowing in their ideological environment, and will flip back without acknowledging any contradiction if circumstances are a bit different. Hopefully it'll stick at least somewhat, among the less-ideological gamers if nothing else.
Before getting into the comment proper I think I should add this to the top: I am feeling some suspicion that you are quoting LLM hallucinations because your Bear Bryant quote doesn't seem to exist on the internet and your Harper's Weekly quote is actually from Current Literature. This seems unlikely given your comment history but it's unclear how it ended up happening otherwise. Could you dispel such concerns by explaining where you got those quotes from?
Are you going to lavish this attention on disproving the load-bearing quotes? Do you also think that I'm misquoting Bear Bryant and Cap Anson and the NYT editorial board?
Lets start with the full NYT article in question:
Pugilists as Race Champions (The New York Times, 1910)
One of our correspondents, the Principal of a negro college in Texas and himself a negro, called attention in an admirably written letter, which we printed yesterday, to what is undoubtedly the most important aspect of the Jeffries-Johnson prizefight.
The people who shudder at the "brutality" of such battles are somewhat unnecessarily sensitive to the spectacular effect which a little blood from slight wounds can produce when spread over a large surface, and they much exaggerate the pain caused by blows received while in a state of high excitement. What Mr. Blackshear sees and fears is the certainty that the fight, however it comes out, will have the deplorable effect of intensifying racial antagonisms and of making race problems more difficult of solution.
If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors. If the negro loses, the members of his race will be taunted and irritated because of their champion’s downfall.
Of course neither of the pugilists is in any true sense representative of his people, but both will inevitably be treated so. Their fight will decide nothing except the strength and skill of two men of no importance, but it will be treated as deciding much more, and therefore it wakens well-justified anxieties.
This seems...straightforwardly correct. The fight demonstrated nothing besides the abilities of the two combatants and to a much lesser degree a bit of evidence regarding the physical capabilities of their two races. However some people were treating them as champions of their races that would "prove" the superiority of the winning race, transmuting sport rivalries into racial rivalries. Sports riots are bad enough without bringing race into it. No matter who won they predicted it would inflame racial conflict, and indeed the aftermath of the fight saw nationwide race riots.
There is also a certain irony that, in a post about how "racist Uncle Roys" "weren’t of the opinion that there were mostly-overlapping-bell-curves with different averages, they were of the opinion that blacks couldn’t compete with whites in any field", one of the "load-bearing quotes" had no problems printing and agreeing with a letter from the president of a black college. Based on the fact that you think the NYT cared a lot about the result when the point of the article was that either outcome would be bad, I'm guessing you just grabbed the cherrypicked quote from somewhere like Wikipedia without reading the article. This has the consequence of flattening and distorting their view to fit into a modern narrative. This sort of thing is why I recommended against trying to understand historical beliefs this way.
Bear Bryant, arguably the greatest college coach of all time, said that “The quarterback has to be a leader, and I don’t think a colored boy can do the things we need done at quarterback"
Searching for this quote has one result: this thread. Chopping it up into subquotes does no better. Searching finds discussions about whether he was racist that would have reason to bring up such a quote, but they don't. At this point I start to wonder if your comment is "LLM assisted" garbage filled it with hallucinations that I'm wasting my time by responding to, but I already wrote the NYT part and you otherwise seem to be a legitimate poster so I guess I'll keep going. Even if it was real it's not really a terribly strong statement, people in sports make dubious assertions like that all the time and nobody finds it significant if they're wrong when they don't involve politically-relevant identity categories.
Hugh Fullerton and Cap Anson often stated they lacked the discipline to stand the strain of the big leagues
This is too vague to look up whether the actual quote is real and searching keywords like "cap anson black discipline" doesn't find anything.
Harper’s Weekly in 1910 argued that “The superiority of the brain of the white man … is undisputed by all authorities… [A] white man fighting with a negro … ought not to be defeated if the contest be prolonged.”
That quote isn't from Harper's Weekly, it's from the article "The Psychology of the Prize Fight" from "Current Literature". Also, while I wasn't able to get the full original article, this has a fuller quote and already indicates you left out some context. They also said "Expert opinion has inclined to the theory that the negro is the strongest man physically" and your quote clipped the relevant middle of the sentence from "[A] white man fighting with a negro to whom he is not physically inferior ought not to be defeated if the contest be prolonged.", so they don't seem as confident in the outcome as portrayed. Look, there are countless modern sports articles invoking scientific findings to make highly dubious claims about sports. This is not something that particularly reflects on either the ideas they invoke or even the general beliefs of the public. It reflects that there is demand for both sports coverage and for a subset of that coverage to contextualize it in terms of science.
Fundamentally, despite the fake or misleading quotes, I'm sure you can indeed find plenty of historical quotes that were both straightforwardly racist and incorrect. I just don't think that means very much, because "a lot of people who believe in X say things about it that are wrong or grossly exaggerated" is true for pretty much any X. And then of course it's easy to get your impression of historical views and events from people who have hammered them into the ill-fitting mold of their own ideological convenience.
Other observers theorized that her uterus might fall clean out.
Did anyone actually say this? Trying to find the origin finds lots of people repeating it as what those idiot sexists believed, particularly in association with Katherine Switzer (not Bobbi Gibb), but not evidence of anyone actually saying it. This seems like the likely origin:
The Myth of the Falling Uterus
Katherine Switzer, the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon in 1967, recalls in her memoir how her high school’s basketball coach—a woman—told her that women would never play the men’s version of basketball because the “excessive number of jump balls could displace the uterus.”
Which becomes "uterus would fall out" because of the marathon (not basketball) in other accounts by the same person:
You’ve Come 26.2 Miles, Baby : Roberta Gibb and K. Switzer Made Boston Marathon a Coed Course
“You have to remember that in those days, there were people who were saying, ‘If you run a race like that, you can never have children,’ ” said Kathrine Switzer, who came to Boston in 1967 in a celebrated--and at the time cursed--effort. “They said your uterus would fall out and you would never attract a man.”
I think judging the mainstream beliefs of the past by the most publicized claims of its ideological opposition is a terrible way to actually understand it. It's bad enough when you try to understand an ideology from Twitter dunks by the opposing side cherry-picking who to quote-tweet, how much worse is it when it was 60 years ago and the dunkers have spent decades writing the articles and history books?
As an 8chan poster myself it doesn't sound weird enough to be particularly implausible. (I'm assuming he's now posting on 8kun.top rather than 8chan.moe, most users migrated away from 8kun but the Qboomers didn't. Or he stopped posting entirely after the original 8ch went down.) It's atypical that he's into both QAnon and Holocaust denial, since 8chan traditionally thinks of those as opposed sides on the normal /pol/ anons vs. invading hordes of Qboomers divide and /qresearch/ is a dedicated board with little overlap. Also I don't think there's many young-earth-creationists among traditional anons (and don't know among the Qboomers). But it makes sense for there to be people trying to persuade the Qanon people once censorship has driven them onto the same websites, and probably Voat and Gab have less hostility and less segregation between the groups. I think there's a fair amount of people who pick up a mix of weird beliefs from their internet environment once they stop trusting the mainstream, even if you ordinarily wouldn't think of them going together.
sodiummuffin
19d ago
Good find. My first thought is "🐈 money"="pussy money"="prostitution money". I suppose the benefit-of-the-doubt interpretation would be that they're separate and he's saying he's getting UK money and pussy. But the fact that it's displayed over a large quantity of visibly used cash wrapped in rubber bands (not just what's in his hand but also in the background) favors the first interpretation. (As does the "Gangster party" label over a party a few seconds later.) Unfortunately search engines don't do well with emojis so I don't know if it's established slang.
sodiummuffin
19d ago
Thanks to the media coverage people have now taken note of the man's social media accounts, such as his Instagram account ali.dumana.5 and his TikTok account alidumana1. We know the Instagram account is his and not someone else with the same name because it uses the same profile picture as the picture used by the Daily Mail article.
Here is an album of some posts of note, such as one of him in a ski mask captioned "Gypsy Gangster Man", another on Tiktok tagged "gypsy" and "gangsta", one captioned "I'm waiting for you whores to get in my super car", and one of his posts showing off cash. Also he put "gangster.com" in his Instagram bio. I went to the bother of making an Instagram account to confirm these posts are real and still up (I didn't bother with Tiktok since they're more of the same). Archives: 1, 2, 3.
sodiummuffin
20d ago
My understanding is that Romani have substantial Indian/Punjabi ancestry, and a quick search finds this study supporting that. Not that this is terribly relevant to how visually identifiable they are, which can be determined more directly by those more familiar with their appearance.
sodiummuffin
20d ago
As for the “migrant crime” angle, I want to point out that Scotland is not England, and certainly not Rotherham. The “migrant problem” is much less pronounced here.
From the same city:
BBC: Grooming gang convicted of raping women in Dundee
While official sources do not mention ethnicity, commenters online (from before the recent incident) appear to believe these Romanian gang members are ethnically Romani. Other commenters viewing a picture of the Bulgarian couple believe they are also Romani. Personally I am no EthnoGuessr expert and can't identify any of them except that they do seem to be vaguely non-white.
Outside Edinburgh or Glasgow, brown skin is still a curiosity, more likely to prompt a friendly question than suspicion.
I think the low population of non-whites actually makes it less likely to be a coincidence? (Though non-coincidence isn't the same thing as guilt, for example the children could be harassing them over their race if they associate that race with local gangs.) Especially if they and the prior grooming gang arrests in the same city are both indeed Romani, which only make up 0.2% of the Scottish population. Unfortunately I can't find any source on the Romani population in Dundee. The Romani population in all of Scotland is 6,500 and the population of Dundee is 150,000. The "Romani in Dundee" Facebook group has 2,100 members, but it's public and I don't know how many spambot members Facebook groups tend to have.
sodiummuffin
22d ago
The specific context which inspired his post is Trump doing stuff like buying the government a 10% share in Intel and some people justifying this with "your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly". I'm pretty sure this isn't even Trump trying to "use left-wing tactics against them" or anything, it doesn't accomplish anything partisan. Trump just genuinely believes in a bunch of left-wing policy positions like opposition to free trade and government ownership of companies. How does "spend political capital to achieve left-wing policy goals (and take the blame when they fail)" accomplish any of what you're saying?
Principled agents are bad politicians: they will sacrifice what is necessary on the altar of their principle, and thus be outmaneuvered by less scrupulous agents. Their principles will be subverted by their enemies and become the instrument of their demise.
I've been noticing the exact opposite problem on the internet lately, where people are so eager to throw away principles for the sake of spite that they aren't stopping to ask questions like "Is this just helping the people I'm trying to be spiteful towards at my own expense?". For instance I've seen several cases where SJWs censored something and there were comments kneejerk supporting it as "what goes around comes around" because they somehow misinterpreted which side the censorship was coming from. If you don't have principles besides "oppose the enemy", and also you don't understand what your enemy believes, it's pretty easy to end up supporting the enemy against your own side. After all, people understand their own positions better, so if you treat "this violates our principles" as a sign of insufficient commitment against the enemy you've given up your main indicator and all that's left is understanding your enemy so well that you hopefully notice before you end up accidentally supporting them.
sodiummuffin
23d ago
How is "adopt the policies of your political opponents" even responding negatively to them? Whether Trump or Harris gets a 10% government stake in Intel the result is the same, the only difference is which side supports it and what justifications they use. Would it make sense for Democrats to respond negatively to Trump by building the wall?
The only thing that would make it at least somewhat different is if the party doing it used it to somehow dictate Intel policy in a partisan way, but that isn't happening in this case and it would be short-term regardless, since after the next election it doesn't matter who was in power when it happened. It's not adopting left-wing tactics against them, Trump just genuinely believes in a bunch of left-wing policy positions like opposition to free trade and government ownership of companies.
There seems to be a recent tendency I've noticed online where people are so eager to signal animosity by throwing away their principles that they'll do it when it doesn't make any sense. For instance I've seen several cases where SJWs censored something and there were comments kneejerk supporting it as "what goes around comes around" because they somehow misinterpreted which side the censorship was coming from. If you don't have principles besides "oppose the enemy", and also you don't understand what your enemy believes, it's pretty easy to end up supporting the enemy against your own side.
sodiummuffin
24d ago
That sounds very much like Let This Grieving Soul Retire!: Woe Is the Weakling Who Leads the Strongest Party, which got an anime adaption last year. It's not cultivation though, just Japanese light-novel/webnovel fantasy.
sodiummuffin
24d ago
The full copypasta:
Meng Hao walked into the McDonald's. The cultivator taking his order gave a derisive snort, but Meng Hao did not really care, because he had repressed his aura down to the Single Patty Realm, and a fool would not be able to tell his true level of burger eating.
"Give me... a Happy Meal!"
The cultivator's face flickered before he finally regained his composure and laughed. "You couldn't afford a Happy Meal. Get lost! Don't you see that there are Double Quarter Pounder Realm eaters waiting behind you?"
Meng Hao slapped his bag of holding and threw 80 billion spirit McDonald's coupons onto the counter, causing an earthquake which demolished half of the restaurant. Everyone dropped their jaws. None could see how this was possible!
"I'll take that Happy Meal with a side order of fries, " Meng Hao said. He was as calm as the ocean in a painting of an insanely calm ocean. "And let me see your manager!"
The cashier cultivator coughed up a mouthful of ketchup. He simply could not handle Meng Hao's killing intent, because he was only at the Quarter Pounder with Cheese realm himself. Even though Meng Hao had suppressed his aura, because he had cultivated the Heavenly Burgin' Qi, this was enough to kill people a few levels higher if he truly wanted.
It was then that another man which a much more fierce aura stepped forward. "You dare make trouble here?"
"P... Patriarch Hamburglar!"
Patriarch Hamburglar was 99 cents of the way into the Big Mac Realm, plus tax! Meng Hao was pushed back two feet, knocking over a soda machine. Powerade Mountain Berry Blast geysered outward, killing several onlookers.
Of course, Mayor McCheese saw all this happen through the window.
Meng Hao coughed up a mouthful of blood, snorted, constricted his pupils, and then his expression went calm. He unleashed the aura of 64 patties, condensed down to a 2 patty stack that could fit into his mouth!
Mayor McCheese coughed up a mouthful of cheese. His pupils constricted.
"Is this... Seeking the McRib stage??"
Meng Hao had the gentle air of a scholar, but it wouldn't stop him from killing several people in a McDonald's.
"Burger Devouring Scripture! I'm Lovin' It!"
With the first keyword of the Burger Devouring Scripture, everyone below the early Quarter Pounder With Cheese stage exploded into purple mist. The light of the immense heavenly burger shone down with the contours of a golden arch as 9 illusory burgers floated around Meng Hao's body, which is probably an important xianxia number that matches the number of lakes in some sacred Chinese province I've never heard of. But that was only a fraction of Meng Hao's power. He waved his arm, bringing forth thirty more cultivation techniques that hadn't appeared in over 400 chapters!
"Heavenly Tribulation Fries! Eastern Everburning Egg McMuffin! Fruit Smoothie Guillotine! Soul McCafe Mocha Incarnation!"
Meng Hao's expression was the same as ever as he slapped his bag of holding, and brought out his karmic ketchup packet, Fry Cook Lord medallion, seventeen different wooden time spatulas, a five-coloured resurrection coupon, the silk burger wrapper, various souls of lightning McNuggets that he may or may not still have, and his mask of the legacy of Ronald McDonald. Oh, and the image of a flying Chicken Snack Wrap dragon appeared. Remember that? It was basically his Main Thing at the start of the novel, but quietly faded into irrelevance. Until now!
All of this takes some time to describe, but actually happened in the space of only a few breaths.
"What! Impossible!"
Meng Hao wanted to summon the parrot as well, but it was too overcome with eroticism by the purple fur depicted on a nearby poster of Grimace, and was busy drilling out a glory hole straight through the poster, and the wall it was pinned to, with its strong parrot erection.
But it was more than enough. The Hamburglar's soul flew out and was absorbed into his mask! He screamed as his body was destroyed completely.
Meng Hao brushed off his robe and swept up his spirit coupons and everyone's bags of holding which probably didn't have any cool sh*t inside unless I write him into a corner later, and anyways, don't worry about it for now. He surveyed the rubble that was all that remained of the McDonald's.
"Guess I'll be taking that Happy Meal... to go!"
Originally from this review of I Shall Seal the Heavens.
sodiummuffin
26d ago
Does that actually benefit Democrats though? Concentrating your safe voters in a single district is generally the opposite of what you want to do if the goal is maximizing number of seats or attaining a majority. My default guess would be that majority-minority motivated gerrymandering would actually hurt Democrats, but I assume somebody has done the actual analysis.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
I haven't been following the issue but haven't there been a bunch of cases of it going off in the holster, some of which were caught on camera? A quick search finds this CBS video from 9 months ago that includes footage of a few cases, it's not just the Air Force one from a few weeks ago. Now, maybe the media coverage is misleading and all of those have an explanation that exonerates SIG, but without addressing those prior cases it is hardly "taking refutation of their stance as proof that they are actually right" for people to continue believing there is a problem.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
I am very skeptical about profit motive in trans medicine being a notable cause of the rise, rather than both being a result of a social movement that involved true-believers creating or taking over trans medical institutions. As a matter of chronology I'm pretty sure the movement came first, I remember the ancestor of the present trans movement (and SJW stuff more generally) already existing back when a common complaint was that medical gatekeepers would require prospective (adult) trans people to live as the opposite gender for a year before prescribing them hormones. That wasn't a policy designed to maximize the number of trans people, and I believe it fell to the trans movement not them suddenly realizing it was reducing profits.
The rise of "non-binary gender identity", for instance, doesn't seem like something that would have happened if it was mostly driven by medical profit motive. Yes it is sometimes medicalized - a few days ago The New Yorker had a puff piece about a mother and her "non-binary"/"demi-girl" daughter who went on testosterone at 11 and got "top surgery" at 13 - but it seems much less common than with conventional binary trans identification. The trans movement has similar patterns to all sorts of SJW stuff with no profit motive. Nobody is going to doctor due to identifying as "demisexual", and indeed people who identify as "asexual/grey-asexual" are presumably less likely to seek treatment than those who identify as having "hypoactive sexual desire disorder".
Wanting to censor a movie because of the contents of the movie, wanting to get someone fired because of something he said, and wanting to get someone fired for association with someone else are three different things. The first is censorship but not really what people refer to with "canceling".
If your book publisher says "censor the racial slurs or we don't publish the book, I don't care how historically accurate they are", that's censorship. If it says "a viral Twitter thread has brought to our attention that you wrote racial slurs in a previous book, we will not publish anything you write" that's cancellation. Cancellations for speech are a kind of attempted censorship by intimidation, and censorship or self-censorship can be motivated by cancel culture even without an actual campaign, but they're not the same thing. Something like the Comics Code wasn't cancellation because (as far as I know) they didn't care if you had made comics that violated it before. On the other hand the Hollywood blacklist of communists was more similar to cancellation. When episodes of It's Always Sunny get taken down for blackface, or episodes of South Park get taken down for depicting Muhammad, that's censorship but it's not a (successful) cancellation unless the people responsible for those episodes get blacklisted or similar.
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