DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
The key would be to "eat" Canada bit by bit, taking over its most right-wing parts, accelerating the collapse of the rest of it and its associated right-wing turn, rinse-wash-repeat until you've gotten the whole thing.
DiscourseMagnus
5d ago
It seems likely that the "before time" was when they were actually successful in their propagandizing, before the snake started eating its own tail. Back then, they knew to slip subversive material in subtly - one gay book in a stack of normal ones, not a whole stack of gay books. The parent's less likely to notice the one gay book in the normal stack, and even if the parent does notice, it's likelier to be dismissed as a harmless aberration. The whole stack of gay books isn't actually more useful for their aims - it's a self-defeating result of their fifty-Stalins purity-signaling spiral.
DiscourseMagnus
7d ago
Fair; I felt the need to emotionally underline my point, but it felt un-The-Motte-ish as I did it, a feeling I should have paid more attention to.
DiscourseMagnus
8d ago
I think that, much as with homosexuality, you err in assuming that a propensity for child abuse is primarily an aberrant genetic mutation that affects desire, as opposed to a willful choice to perform a transgressive evil for the sake of it. I think that the people running American society won't allow anyone into their club - they won't allow anyone else to have any of their power - until they've proven that they really are completely soulless, empty, and evil. Anything we'd recognize as sexual - the whole limited hangout archetype everyone's rambling about here, with an entrapment sex party featuring jailbait - is essentially incidental. You have to be on the record participating in the sadistic torture and execution of a few innocent people before they let you into the big leagues, and you need to seem to enjoy it, too. They're Satanists, and they only want to share the halls of power with fellow Satanists. Those are the people who made America. Freemasons. Those fuckers.
DiscourseMagnus
11d ago
There are a lot of things with potentially innocent explanations that are nonetheless in aggregate fishy but can't be investigated because of an early version of what we'd now recognize as the War On Misinformation. Several promotional bios for Obama prior to his presidential campaign state that he was born in Kenya, which was apparently a mistake but one of unclear origin (perhaps Obama or someone close to him was engaging in a foolhardy attempt to inflate his diversity status, a la Warren?). The idea was popular among his family and their community in Kenya, for local pride reasons, and they would claim to remember his birth there (possibly mistaking him for a relative). When Obama did eventually release his birth certificate, it was an easily-tampered-with copy (apparently this is a problem with copy machines in general?) and the bureaucrat who verified it died in a mysterious small plane crash shortly thereafter.
I completely agree that "was Barack Obama ineligible for the presidency" is a narrower target than "was Barack Obama born in Kenya", which is itself a narrower target than "was Barack Obama trying to hide something related to his birth".
DiscourseMagnus
11d ago
While Obama was likely a turning point in these dynamics, I think they clearly go back much further. The phrase "[President] Derangement Syndrome" was invented for Bush Derangement Syndrome in 2003, and at the time it was referencing dynamics generally acknowledged to have already existed under Clinton. Reagan and Nixon stand out as facing similar, and it seems entirely likely that Carter got the same at the time and it's just faded in his post-presidency. Johnson? Kennedy? Maybe this is just how people treat presidents.
DiscourseMagnus
11d ago
There was actually reason to believe that there was something iffy about Obama's birthplace, although at this point it's presumably well-buried enough that we'll never find out exactly what happened there. (Entirely likely that he really was born in Hawaii and the irregularities came from trying to cover up or distract from some other embarrassment.) Michelle being transgender, by contrast, is nonsense, but you're right that lots of schizos seem to be fixated on it; it's like an awful peek into the lumpenprole-right id.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
I wouldn't consider this entirely surprising; the Walsh/Shapiro partnership has long struck me as odd, as Walsh seems much more aggressive and hardline in his right-wing takes, compared with Shapiro who is far more often infuriating in the opposite direction, as the definition of a spineless party-line-reciting moderate pundit.
DiscourseMagnus
22d ago
Worth also remembering that Zelensky became a Presidential candidate in the first place because he was caught on camera ranting about corrupt politicians, IIRC.
Amusingly, you've confused him with the fictional character he played.
DiscourseMagnus
23d ago
However, if he now is truly attempting to maximize his people's well-being, he should have signed the rare-earth agreement with the United States. His childish behavior (inappropriate attire, attempting to alter the deal in front of the press, insolence to a nation responsible for his nation still existing) put the deal at risk, and seems to indicate that his country’s well-being no longer holds paramount sway in Zelensky.
I generally found this post remarkably insightful, but I found this particular section of the analysis very weak, in a way speaking to heavy consumption of propaganda - and your overall point rests on it. I know that I'm going right for the weakest point made, but still - inappropriate attire, really? He's the leader of a country in the midst of an existential war; his presentation was as expected.
DiscourseMagnus
25d ago
I think it's worth synthesizing this with the claim elsewhere in the thread that Obama took an unusually mild response to the 2014 invasion in order to stand by his infamously pro-Russia line in the 2012 debate with Romney.
DiscourseMagnus
29d ago
How's that executive order to declassify records on the JFK assassination going?
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I'd consider referring to figures like this with female pronouns and their chosen names a form of malicious compliance. They're the ones where people politically aligned with the trans movement are likeliest to relax their rules, and for obvious reasons.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Andrew Jackson is supposed to be his favorite president.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I've been hearing calls to abolish pennies for my whole life. Apparently, Trump is finally doing it by executive order. Is that within presidential authority? In the past I've always seen it presented as a call for legislation.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I think a lot of people today would have a hard time believing how intense the Obama personality cult was. This is partially because it won - it seems more reasonable to people today that he was so admired seeing as so many of his scandals have been relegated to the dustbin of history. It's also partially because it's now irrelevant and discarded - Obama, while still powerful in internal DNC politics, is out of office and no longer really needs a personality cult, which would have been difficult to sustain for so long anyway. But between both of these factors, I don't think most people today realize that the Democratic consensus around, say, 2008-2011, was that you needed a Maoist degree of unconditional support for Obama or else you were an evil white supremacist. He also presented himself in a much more extreme light back then - far from the basically-Bill-Clinton-but-black that we now remember, his promise to America was that when elected, he would usher in a totalitarian Soviet-style communist state, radical change beyond the wildest dreams of what DOGE is trying. We don't remember that because it failed, because it hit the blob and got absorbed.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I wonder if, having previously thought of himself as very Zionist, he realized that many were starting to think of Biden as more Zionist than him, and he felt he had to double down.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I don't think calling it "woke" has any meaningful advantage over calling it "social justice". Being cynical for a moment, I'm pretty sure that the main reason "social justice" fell out of favor and was replaced by "woke" is that low-information voters are actually stupid enough to fall for rhetorical shenanigans as basic as calling your movement "goodism", that is, they were uncomfortable speaking out against something called "social justice" because justice and being social are widely-agreed-upon virtues. By contrast, "woke", to an outsider, just sounds like a funny made-up word, a failure of grammar.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
22 years is what you get for contract murder
Why? I understand the arguments for downgrading from the death penalty to life in prison here. I don't understand the arguments for downgrading from life in prison to, say, 22 years.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Surely he would be following Biden's example (re: the ERA).
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Why is it wrong to ask for quid pro quo? [...] Sex work is real work. Etc.
It's wrong for the same reason all other forms of prostitution are wrong; because it creates a race-to-the-bottom effect in which the economy demands that women be sexually immoral. Now, I'd be basically fine with women sleeping with their bosses in a world where that meant marrying them, but that's not the world we live in, and in any case there ideally wouldn't be so many women in the workplace to begin with.
For similar but non-financial reasons, I remember finding a lot of the sexual norms in high school especially disgusting because they placed strong status incentives on girls being sexually active. Abstinence propaganda aimed at teens is impotent and doomed not simply because teens are horny, but because they're facing much stronger peer pressure from other horny teens.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
This was my reaction to the Whedon comparison.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I like it as a gender-neutral alternative to 'slut', I suppose?
I think it implies male as much as 'slut' implies female. You can have a woman who's a sex pest just like you can have a man who's a slut.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
do we know how many happy celebrities have left happy groupies with A+-would-bang-again experiences that they will treasure for a lifetime?
I'm of the understanding that David Bowie had one of these and got (largely posthumously) cancelled for it anyway (because underage).
Always have been.
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