DTulpa
8d ago
There's this chronic inability on the Left to call out people in their own tribe that agitate for and perpetrate violence. The Right isn't perfect either, but I didn't see this much resistance or 'gaze-aversion' when required to denounce the miscreants in their midst. And TBF, I think they too increasingly lost interest in doing so since the utility of it is less than zero.
At best, you get something like Biden's 'condemnation of ALL political violence' that only names the Proud Boys, whereas Antifa 'is just an idea'.
This arouses the suspicion that their political leadership is actually okay with somebody else doing anything between knocking over conservative BBQs to killing Elon Musk.
DTulpa
10d ago
Being discriminatory against the Muslim faith (and others that are considered 'brown-coded') is against the progressive handbook. It has no problem shitting on Christianity and blaming it for much of the evil in the world. This hatred is often excused because of 'white supremacy', but also 'power differentials' before the former term really took off in the zeitgeist. It was very common for me in the 2000s to hear something to the effect of 'Islam isn't as bad as Christianity because Christianity has more power', which was hard for even me to swallow as a Democrat who posted on /r/atheism.
If you haven't witnessed the hand-wringing over Hegseth's 'Deus Vult' tattoos and how he's a closet Nazi, I can't help you. If you dont know what the Church of Satan is, ditto. And if you haven't noticed that any depiction of the 'evils of religion' in fiction invariably summons up a stand-in for a pope or a priest (never an imam) with the serial numbers occasionally filed off, then you haven't consumed media in the last 20 years.
Here's where I am willing to help out, though!
[Verse 1] Does his D go deep So deep it puts an ass to sleep? Who’s the 6 to his 9 And what are his other kinks? If he grows all the trees Does he taste every peach? Is your god fucking you and fucking me? I know creation must get lonely After all he’s one and only And his son was so well hung I think the big man deserves one
[Chorus] Does your god have a big fat dick? Cause it feels like he’s fucking me Are his balls filled with lightning? Do they dangle like heaven's keys? Does your god have a big fat dick? Cause it feels like he’s fucking me
[Verse 2] When he whips out his meat Does your world fall to its knees? Does he shoot wads of honey And cum twice on Easter Sunday? What’s his favourite position? Missionary? Magic bullet? We all give him no lover Just a hand and a mother Can he cum a shotgun blast And shoot salvation up your ass? Does he chew cunt like bubblegum And give blowjobs like a vacuum?
[Chorus] Does your god have a big fat dick? Cause it feels like he’s fucking me Are his balls filled with lightning? Do they dangle like heavens keys? Does your god have a big fat dick? Cause it feels like he’s fucking me Does your god have a big fat dick? CAUSE HE’S FUCKING YOU AND ME!
Feelin' cute today, felt like droppin' a lil' vulgarity. Teehee!
Very few people would be comfortable if this song made reference to the Quran or something related to Judaism. But it's fair game because we all know who the singer is targeting. I know it, and so do you. And it can be belted out a political rally hosted by a Darling Of The Left - with the speaker entirely comfortable with it and an audience that has no problems accepting it. Frankly, they like it. One would think that if you actually liked or respected Christians enough (or feign such things in an attempt to ply votes from them), one would reconsider the wisdom of letting this kind of thing take center stage at your political event. But they don't care, because Fuck Christianity and its woman-controlling, gay-hating, Sky Daddy nonsense.
But you're familiar with this. You can't not be if you've hung around in liberal circles for any extended time in the last two decades. And I know it exists, because I sang those same songs when I was of that tribe - before progressivism, atheism, and 'intellectualism' bottomed out and I had to concede that they were not bearing the fruits I expected.
Awesome. I guess our 'lived experiences' cancel each other out, then? As in, it should have been predictable that unverifiable statements like 'Progs I know are more Christian than actual Christians' was going to be an unproductive dead-end in this discussion, and why did you even bother with it?
Maybe your friends are totally angels. It's rather weightless compared to your vanguards that freak the fuck out when they see a crucifix in a public building, or give themselves the sweats over Pete Hegseth's tattoos. For extra fun, go look up who Bernie Sanders invited to sing at his recent rally. Meanwhile, the Left (coded non-religious) reports more mental health issues and their compassion dries up the moment 'refugees' get bussed to their towns.
DTulpa
10d ago
"tranquility, forgiveness, humbleness and charity"
I'm on board with the accusation that many Christians are only nominally so. But it is absolutely laughable that you think Progs have exemplified these values to any significant degree given the last 10-15 years, if not more. I've seen almost none of these things from the Left as of late. Nor do I recall them exemplifying these values any more than the average person on the street from my teen years to early adulthood - a time when the idea of ever voting Republican for any reason was unthinkable to me.
DTulpa
28d ago
I don't care about NATO. Ukraine has never been an ally to me, in either an official or unofficial capacity. Giving dictators bloody noses - this isn't 1942, and it's not as if the bloody noses left across the Middle East have reaped many rewards for myself or their locals. If Europe is concerned about their sovereignty, then they should start acting like it.
The spell of the mythical do-good American hegemony has been assailed from all sides and rotted from within. This isn't a defense of Putin. I'm just done with this bullshit, and no ra-ra'ing is going to pull me back in.
DTulpa
1mo ago
Leaving aside that I think "equality between men and women" is a fairly empty balloon with a lot of details to be filled in - you must appreciate that the kind of feminism promoted in the meanstream are the materials we have to work with.
I respect your position on an interpersonal basis. But it doesn't really mean much outside of that. I think my disposition is still fairly liberal in the 90s/00s sense of the term. And I can fully see the argument that 'liberalism' today is far more authoritarian and fails to live up to its own namesake. But at a certain point, I am wasting everybody's time if I insist that wokescolds aren't 'liberal'.
Maybe that could change, and it will fold back on itself and meet me where I planted my feet a decade ago. I will have reclaimed 'liberalism'. But in the meantime, I'm not going to fight how the term is used in most conversations. I might put down an asterisk, but the conversation must proceed.
I wish more feminists were more like you, then. But I think it would be hard to argue that the things FC listed weren't advocated by feminists as feminism, and you were cleared out of the room.
I'm sympathetic to people like you who may have been boxed out by a wayward media machine - in much the same way I think many reasonable LGBTQ voices got boxed out by the strident 'blockers before 18' movement sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But I can't help but be suspicious that both groups suppressed their misgivings due to outgroup fear, the want to not be a 'bad ally', or were content to soak up the secondary benefits up until it looked like they might be drying up.
Two straight men can play 'gay chicken', even while being fully aware of each others hetero credentials. It's still called 'gay chicken' for a reason.
That's the lab environment. Most straight men have little patience for 'gay behavior' sprung on them in the wild, even from a friend. I feel quite sure this is something innate albeit socially mediated depending on culture and/or subculture.
DTulpa
1mo ago
I don't want to weird out my friend. You could say "No true friend would care if you're a closeted homosexual and why would you want to be friendly to such a person", but the fact of the matter is that many friendships are conditional on one not giving somebody else the ick.
And the need to not signal homosexuality is infinitely stronger when it comes to women, if for different but much more obvious reasons.
The only people who could be confused by this are a very small minority of women and asexual aspies.
DTulpa
1mo ago
It's fine for a character to gloat and talk out of his ass. In an RPG, can I call him out in dialogue?
I can tell arrogant Mr Euro that nobody gives a shit about his country and USA #1 if he wants to talk that way on my turf (no offense to Europeans, just making a point). Can I do the same with Musa? All I've read indicates that you're kind of saddled with this guy for much of the game with no real way to push back or drop him.
It's like when an RPG has a self-announced trans character who clearly functions as a mouthpiece for normalizing transness or to extract sympathy, and my only responses consist of "That's so great and brave for you, m'lady!" or choosing another topic. Being gagged like that is frustrating.
If I can't talk back to these people because the dev is squeamish about writing 'problematic' dialogue or risking the gaze of game journos, then at least give me the option to kill them for whatever reason I feel like.
DTulpa
2mo ago
DTulpa
4mo ago
This is the stated theory. Does it actually work? Are they actually successful at drawing in a wider audience? And if so, is the incoming audience large enough to offset losses from the previous one?
I've never been convinced on this.
DTulpa
4mo ago
He's a Republican, he has troll energy, and he has Matt Gaetz's face.
That last one is a little jokey, but I do think that's what tilts it into a furor relative to any average Republican the left hates. He has a supremely punchable face that screams "douchebag", even to me. And I think he even knows it.
DTulpa
4mo ago
I don't get it. I can't reconcile "she ran a pretty good campaign" and then several paragraphs later read that her doing interviews was essentially a liability with nothing to gain.
Surely this speaks to big problems that can't be papered over with "hey, she never took a dump on stage!".
DTulpa
4mo ago
I think wokeness was on the ascent prior to Trump descending the escalator. While it did get turbo-charged under Trump, it also clearly revealed itself and was increasingly unable to sanewash its prescriptions through anodyne description (ie. "Do you seriously take issue with an academic approach to female representation in media? Seriously, a problem with academics?"). Without Trump, I think the poison pills could have gone unnoticed for longer.
And 2024 is not 2016. There was a period where culture makers could more freely indulge their fantasies of a mythical Modern Audience that would monetarily reward their tainted output. In the time since, we have had major, recurring flops across multiple industries, and some clear indicators that audiences aren't chomping on this hook. There will be some token displays of staying in the fight, but this experiment has mostly failed. Important money men will want to pivot away.
DTulpa
4mo ago
Mine was a unicorn shitting glitter or something.
I really, really hate it.
DTulpa
4mo ago
His recent episode with the Triggernometry guys had discussion on it. He thinks it was ill-advised for a political event, but... eh, predictable consensus is that this is nothing.
DTulpa
4mo ago
Within 24 hours of Tony's joke, I saw the Kamala campaign go all-out with some rhetoric to help/'save' Puerto Rico. Like they saw this as a moment to seize and run with, but it just radiates opportunism and desparation.
There's an insufferable, overprotective maternal vibe the Dems give off when talking about blacks or LGBTQ or whatever else. Extending that act to a stale PR joke is quite a look, and I don't know anybody who is impressed with it.
My brother once put it to me this way: Imagine you have a favorite band with several albums of theirs on your top-faves list. You've followed them for years, or maybe even decades. It's not even necessary for this thought experiment, but for a little extra you've even watched or read interviews with them, so you have a sense of their character, history, etc. And then one day it is revealed to you that all of it was generated by an AI instead of human beings. How would you feel?
I think I would feel a profound sense of loneliness. I would never revisit those albums again. And I don't think this basic feeling can be hacked through with some extra applications of rationalism or what have you. This feeling precedes thinking on a very deep level for me.
I don't have much sympathy for the various creative professions getting their oxen gored. Partly because social media has made me lose respect for many of them, their output quality is not commensurate with their whining, and I won't be sad to see them needing employment elsewhere. But also because I can't even see my own regular 'office job' being spared once the tech is good enough. I'm rather clear-eyed about the inevitabilities of this stuff. But I also foresee further alienation that humans may learn to live with but won't necessarily solve.
I think many women are lovely enough right up until you hit a hair trigger about Trump, politics, or whatever. And the tragedy of this situation is that this obstacle seems misguidedly imposed from one side of the gender dynamic. To quote a line from a pop song I can't really remember: "You're standing in your own way".
Is this kind of filtering 'working'? I guess you could say it is on an individual level, although I think even that's questionable, as I believe a lot of women are missing out on good catches with this zero-tolerance approach. Is this a good dynamic for dating writ large? Probably not given the endless bitching about it and the metrics getting fairly sloped.
A smaller irritant in the mix is watching the fuse on this behavior run down. I know women now in their late 30s or early 40s who suddenly pine for 'traditionally masculine' types, with their younger and luckier cohorts marrying red-hat yokels that take care of them - after years of setting up razor wire around that type of guy. You wish they'd gotten the act out of their system earlier. By comparison men will swallot a lot from their partners as long you're not screaming in their face or getting nasty about what TikTok has you mad about this week. A moderate 'blue hair' could be entirely dateable to most woke-averse men (assuming decently attractive and yada yada) as long as being political isn't the front and center of their being or a lense everything is seen through.
I used to see more couples in my life argue about politics without it ending in breakup or divorce. It seemed normal to me: you bicker about the 8 PM news a bit, you silently roll your eyes at thing your partner said, then you go to bed together before the next day of life's experiences - you know, the important part. To see this done away with so trivially is sad.
Are you interested in converting Republicans en masse overnight, or chipping away at this distrust over time? If you're hoping for some audit to prove the election's integrity and get everybody to issue a mea culpa that same day - good luck. I think you're setting yourself up for the "Gosh, they're so unreachable" conclusion you seem to be angling for. And I'd expect said mea culpa to arrive at the same time as the many others I'd want from Democrats by now - which is never.
Best you can hope for is people quietly dropping it out of embarrassment, in much the same way many Republicans quietly stopped supporting the War On Terror when that albatross got too fat.
I'm still an atheist! It would pretty much take an 'act of God' to make me a believer. I can't grok the metaphysics any religion, and I'm too set in my mental pathways to larp it without feeling fraudulent.
But I do wonder how many good heuristics I disregarded because of my aversion to faith. I don't mean to imply that Christians had it all right and I had it all wrong. Just that there was some wisdom in those practices (whether they were truly understood or merely passed on and reflexively followed by the faithful) I had probably overlooked because flipping the bird at the bible like Marilyn Manson seemed so obviously the right thing to do in our Era of Enlightenment.
Somebody like Sam Harris (who I was a big fan of!) would argue that we need to find secular pathways to reach the same 'good stuff' religion offers without the superstitions. I think I still agree with this in theory. But that movement has come up rather empty. I'm not even sure it's possible. If faith is the second best and only real option, I have to consider if my trashing of it was shortsighted. Even if I can't partake in it, it may be best if most people do.
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