ZanarkandAbesFan
No bio...
User ID: 2935
ZanarkandAbesFan
3d ago
Use it for compost. Not even the hippies will be able to complain!
ZanarkandAbesFan
3d ago
That's a very fair position.
I don't think Corbyn is antisemitic. I think he's just simple-minded enough to believe the narrative "Hamas are freedom fighters, therefore they are good" and isn't capable of reasoning about it more deeply (not that I think this is a good reason to support Hamas, but that's another topic). It's the same way he was probably exposed to the idea that capitalism is bad because of inequality or something when he was a teenager and therefore decided the USSR is good, and hasn't been able to update his thinking since then.
There is also the famous 'white people rule the world' left-wing meme complaining how almost all top CEOs, media people, politicians etc. are white, and then the far-Right got hold of it and pointed out that almost all of those are Jewish and if anything gentile whites are underrepresented.
As an aside, while it's entirely fair to point out such disparities much if not most of the online right really tell on themselves by being unable to stomach that the reason whites outperform blacks - average IQ differences - is most likely behind their own underperformance relative to Ashkenazis. Watching these people tie themselves in knots trying to avoid this conclusion looks a lot like a progressive journalist reaching for esoteric theories of structural racism to explain why there aren't more black professors at MIT.
ZanarkandAbesFan
3d ago
I'm not the guy you responded to, but the most enlightening explanation I've heard given of right-wing antisemitism is given in this substack article (sorry for the long text-dump, but I think it's very informative)
Anyway, perhaps we should get on with it. The first characteristic of the Far-Right mind is the desire for anthropomorphic theories of socioeconomic reality. What I mean by that is the need to fit the data of reality into a shape that makes sense in terms of a consciously conceived plan to move that reality in a particular direction.
This mindset is commonly given the term ‘conspiracy theorist’, but, on the whole, I think that is usually too generous. A conspiracy theory involves an attempt to tell a story in which the various pieces of data fit into place. Doing so inevitably leads to spiralling layers of complication in which anomalous information can only be accommodated at the cost of creating yet more anomalous data points that can’t be made to fit. Hence this meme:
The typical Rightoid doesn’t bother with any of that. What he does instead is notice some apparently contradictory information, then use innuendo and rhetorical questions to assert that this can only be explained by they planning it. He believes not in conspiracy ‘theories’, but conspiracy deities, shapelessly malleable and borderline omnipotent entities whose mere existence is enough, by their own terms of definition, to explain any kink in the matrix you might observe (and, Heaven knows, the matrix is kinky enough you can do this all day).
To this day, a good portion of my friends are Rightoids. Most of them are good people, and none of them are wholly devoid of positive qualities. The need to anthropomorphise complex social structures exists in them to various degrees of extremity, a product of how frequently they indulge it, but, in all cases, is central to their entire engagement with politics. What I learned after many years is that it’s an act of pure self-harm to try and argue them out of this. You can sit with them, as patiently as you can, for literally hours on end, forcing them to stop changing the subject and actually explain how the different parts of their ‘theory’ fit together, to verbalise each step and watch as it dissolves into undeniable incoherence, and then later the same week they’ll be back with the exact same thing. This is how they want to be. Some people like crackers, and some people like crack. No point in getting aggravated about it (another thing I wish I could go back 10 years and point out to myself).
To recap, the essential quality of the Far Right mind is the desire to explain the world around him in terms of the plan of a conscious intelligence. You therefore need a they; this is the whole point. Once we understand this, it’s pretty obvious why antisemitism exerts this queer magnetic attraction to all who enter the walls of the Far-Right asylum. If you have already decided that someone is behind the curtain driving everything going wrong around you, then who else it is supposed to be? The Yoruba? Inuits? The Jews are an obvious candidate not just because they are genuinely a big deal, but also because there is 150 years of antisemitic literature that you can read explaining how Jews do it and a small army of salesman eager to initiate you into their pyramid scheme. For years, I couldn’t understand why almost any dissident Right article on practically any subject would have at least one comment beneath with a fresh insight like ‘why do they call it the Cathedral, more like the SYNAGOGUE if you ask me!!!!’, but, when you think about it, it’s just good marketing. There’s always someone new who took a fistful of red pills and is looking for the next dose.
ZanarkandAbesFan
3d ago
I was very against Brexit at the time. But much of the behaviour of the EU* since then has done a lot to disabuse me of the notion that "European" is a synonym for enlightened/benevolent/compassionate. I'm not sure I'd support rejoining.
*To be fair, it mostly seems to be France.
Sucks for the guy in question obviously.
That being said:
That's the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are:
- punishing a European citizen
- for doing his job in Europe
- applying laws Europe officially supports
- at an institution based in Europe
- that Europe helped create and fund
Lol, lmao even. Imagine replacing "Europe" with "Russia" and trying to use an otherwise identical argument to feign shock about the US sanctioning someone high up in the Russian military.
This is an obvious case of the ICC flying too close to the sun. Whether they like it or not, Israel is considered by the US to be a close ally. Making direct threats against them is obviously going to risk incurring the US's displeasure.
ZanarkandAbesFan
4d ago
Do you not have your own ginger converts in Germany?
ZanarkandAbesFan
4d ago
Now I'm just baffled as to why, knowing this, we're still attempting to import infinity people.
1/ Blind faith in the belief that more immigration = economic growth (see the Boriswave)
2/ Any attempt to do something about it being frustrated by the NGO/Civil service/Human Rights Lawyer complex (see Rwanda)
3/ Any attempt to do something about it leading the people involved to be condemned as racist pariahs in the eyes of the rest of elite society
ZanarkandAbesFan
5d ago
Putting gays in does the same (we go to war with Iran, what would they do with a captured American gay soldier? They kill their own gay citizens).
I agree with most of your post but this point feels weird. Excluding certain demographics from the military just because your enemies really don't like them doesn't seem particularly productive. Would it help the US to get rid of all their black soldiers if they were fighting some white supremacist state?
ZanarkandAbesFan
5d ago
Perhaps the solution is dollars backed by a goat standard?
ZanarkandAbesFan
6d ago
People in third world countries don’t have time for this shit, so they get real logical and strait laced about the correct attitudes much easier when their daily bread and way of life is under threat.
Third world countries tend to be third world countries because the people there have absolutely retarded attitudes about the world and society. There's a happy medium between following the examples of western progressivism and those of societies where people live in caves and use goats as a medium of exchange.
ZanarkandAbesFan
11d ago
Maybe, but IIRC it was mostly focussed on specific spells and academic magic. I think I'd have bought it more if it had been more presented in the way you described.
ZanarkandAbesFan
12d ago
My biggest problem by far with OOTP was having Harry teach a school subject (including to students older than him). That just felt monumentally implausible. I'd have liked it much more if DA had just been a generic club where the students taught each other and/or practiced spells they'd read about in books from the library etc. Maybe Harry leads a single class on the topic of patronuses.
ZanarkandAbesFan
15d ago
Hogwarts to Poudlard is a truly bizarre change.
ZanarkandAbesFan
15d ago
The BBC is a state propaganda organ
It's a propaganda arm of the progressive cultural and social elite in the UK rather than of the state itself. It has such influence on state policy that it's easy to conflate the two, but that's getting cause and effect mixed up.
ZanarkandAbesFan
17d ago
Albus Dumbledore became Albus Silenti, Slytherin became Serpeverde and Professor Snape became Professor Piton
lolwut
ZanarkandAbesFan
17d ago
And to all the cool aunt, "AKshually language evolves" descriptivists, this change entails a loss of possible meanings and is bad. I know "deer" used to mean "any animal" and "corn" used to mean "any grain," etc but when those words changed usage it became possible to express MORE thoughts because the language became more specific. My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought (both as cause and then again as consequence). Do you feel like we have an excess of clear thought out there nowadays? Of course not! Do your part- join the prescriptivists. Make language specific again!
Well aksHually,
I'm someone who tries to get "less" and "fewer" right, and gets frustrated by people using "got" rather than "gotten". But I don't get alarmed about the "we're losing clarity in our language" argument, for two reasons:
1/ Most supposed examples of this happening (such as the ones you gave i.e. "I knew" vs "I had known" and "less" vs "fewer") don't actually involve any extra ambiguity or loss of meaning.
2/ English has lost a tremendous amount of complexity during the time it evolved from Old English (and before that, from Proto-Germanic). If we're worried that further simplifications are bringing about loss in communicative power, then we should logically seek to undo all the other changes that have taken place over the last several thousand years, but no one seriously suggests that.
My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought
I'm really skeptical. Do English speakers, who only have "they" as a third-person plural subject pronoun, have blurrier conceptions of mixed-gender groups of people than i.e. French speakers, with their "ils/elles" distinction? I doubt it.
ZanarkandAbesFan
17d ago
ride motorcycles
Any evidence for this?
ZanarkandAbesFan
17d ago
“Most men in bio are short because they can’t get women, but because you’re tall I know you’re genuinely interested in bio”
I'm struggling to parse this somewhat. Does he mean short men go into biology because they think they'll have an easier time dating in a female-heavy field? (Incidentally, clicking the link for this statement statement directs the user to a "this page doesn’t exist" page on X)
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
I'm going to say that if this guy killed himself because of cheating accusations then he was probably cheating.
Professional chess and the people who follow it is a pretty small world. Being publicly accused like this and having your reputation continuously dragged through the mud with no real way to outright refute the claims (it's impossible to prove that you didn't cheat) is absolutely something that could destroy someone emotionally.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
Fair enough, that's pretty bad. He was arrested and sentenced though. I'll amend my original post to specify republicans that went unpunished for making these comments.
Be honest and admit that these kind of "just joking" comments come from all sides.
I think we usually expect more from people running to be elected officials? Do you have evidence of republican politicians going unpunished for saying they'd like to murder their opponents' children?
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but I think Trump's general style in 2016 was a big part of this, penis size jokes in the primary,
IIRC, his only dick-related joke went something along the lines of "There was also a comment about if my hands are small, something else must be; I assure you, there's no problem" which I actually think was a pretty witty and non-offensive way of addressing that insinuation.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
And yet we manage!
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not on the side of people telling you to check your privilege.
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