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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34098 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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2014-Era Neckbeard Shaming is BACK

"These Guys are Just Weird" is the new ad from pro-Kamala super PAC Won't Pac Down. You really do have to watch it to viscerally understand the impact. I am not gifted enough with words to give it justice. It's not clear if this ad will ever air on tv (seems a bit racy for that), but the internet is where modern elections are won or lost.

As grossly offensive as I find the ad, I cannot deny being impressed. Just a few days ago I pointed out that Democrats need better messaging if they want to persuade voters. This kind of appeal to base instinct is exactly what wins elections. The ethos of "when they go low, we go high," sure sounds good at dinner parties, but it likely cost Dems the 2016 election. In some sense, I truly think they were afraid of the sheer effectiveness of Willie Horton. It took Trump to scare them enough to pull out the stops.

To me this seems like the next step in a longer trend. In my news bubble by far the most common headline commentary is about how “bizarre” what Trump or whoever said.

A quick google news search for “bizarre”:

“Pete Buttigieg blasts JD Vance’s ‘strange worldview’ and bizarre GOP agenda”

“WATCH: House Dem makes bizarre claim while dodging question on VP Harris' 'border czar' record”

Maybe the weird thing is slightly different but it seems part of the same trend of “who can even understand those guys. It’s just bizarre.”

I think it’s the inevitable result of not being able to handle the idea of disagreement. If you don’t have political views, you’re just right, then it’s not disagreement, it’s a bizarre rant.

I think it’s the inevitable result of not being able to handle the idea of disagreement. If you don’t have political views, you’re just right, then it’s not disagreement, it’s a bizarre rant.

I think this is correct and just another variation of the prevalence of the word "gross" to describe political/ideological beliefs/behaviors that began about 10-15 years ago among the progressive left. Besides just not having enough exposure to these ideas to describe their negative qualities outside of generic disgust-based ones like "gross" or "bizarre" or "weird," there's also the heightened emphasis on immediate, visceral, emotional reaction as the genuine reaction that one ought to be true to, with a denigration of trying to reason through the issues while taking those emotional reaction into account along with logic and evidence (e.g. Ben Shapiro's "facts don't care about your feelings" line has only been a punchline to showing how stupid and short-sighted he and his ilk are for longer than I knew who Ben Shapiro was). The phrase "not a good look" is also used similarly in a lot of similar contexts, and I'd say it's all an extra-political variation of "creepy" to describe any man that someone wants to denigrate but who lacks any characteristics that it is considered okay to publicly call out as a moral failing.

I also wonder if there's been a sort of secular trend of the term "weird" being used for things that are morally reprehensible by the kids these days. But that's just from me noticing a couple of young-ish YouTubers using the term that way to describe things like an adult hitting on a minor or people purposefully polluting wildlife to film themselves cleaning them for YouTube views (I'd describe those as "predatory" and "fraudulent" respectively, but the folks I watched just kept using the term "weird" to describe those things). The way I understand "weird," it's meant to convey that something is abnormal in a negative way, but as more and more kids are raised in environments that emphasize the celebration of things that are seen as abnormal, perhaps they see the term as just negative, possibly in a visceral way.

I’ve also noticed “gross” and even from the time when I would have considered myself on board with a lot of this stuff didn’t understand it.

What’s also striking to me is for years I recall neuroscientists telling us that conservatives are motivated by disgust but liberals are more open minded and don’t have that feeling as strongly. I guess that was all bullshit.

neuroscientists telling us that conservatives are motivated by disgust but liberals are more open minded and don’t have that feeling as strongly. I guess that was all bullshit.

I think that may have been true prior to the recent realignment, likely driven by American women who would otherwise be conservative but are pushed into Wokeness by other aspects of politics. These people are officially left leaning but don't seem to have a strong interest or understanding of policies, seem very disgusted by all kinds of stuff (including male sexuality) and seem to have abandoned many of the values the left was holding onto for awhile (like freedom of expression) and likewise carry many beliefs that we would have associated with the right a few decades ago (banning books, etc.).

I suspect a good chunk of these people would have been conservative but being that is super unpopular in their social circles, and the feminist tint to left leaning politics brings them a lot of benefit.

In my mind the Woke movement is conservative in many ways (at least in reference to recent American politics).

In my mind the Woke movement is conservative in many ways (at least in reference to recent American politics).

I'd say it's conservative in a much more broad way. One of the earliest, long lasting ways of determining how to treat each other is by categorizing them by immutable, superficially easy to distinguish characteristics, with race being one of the main ones. People have come up with different justifications for this over the millennia, but fundamentally, they're all variations of the same thing, post hoc rationalizations for why [people I like] deserve [good things] and [people I dislike] deserve [bad things]. Wokeness is pretty clearly just another variation of this, where the rationalization is "systemic oppression." It switches the rank ordering here and there, but fundamentally it's just trying its best to repeat old patterns rather than overcome those old patterns and replace them with new, better ones.

I also wonder if there's been a sort of secular trend of the term "weird" being used for things that are morally reprehensible by the kids these days.

I watch a ton of police bodycam arrest videos, and I can confirm that there is a massive trend of (especially black and Zoomer-aged) individuals using “y’all are weird” as simply a catch-all negative term for someone doing something the speaker doesn’t like or doesn’t agree with. Police arresting you for committing a crime? “Bro, you weird as fuck.” Police taking you to the ground because you resisted arrest? “Y’all so fuckin’ weeeeird, I swear to God!” Seems like it’s totally disconnected from any previous, more specific usage of the word.

Edit: I see that @ChickenOverlord and I are subscribed to some of the same YouTube channels.

We mostly watch Donut Operator, Code Blue Cam, Midwest Safety, and some guy called MrBroken. Got any other channel recommendations?

PoliceActivity for the heavy stuff - fatal officer-involved shootings, etc. - presented without commentary. Bodycam Files, Police Insider, ResistingArrestTV, CrimeCamNow, Blue Watch, Lens Of Law… I watch a shit-ton of bodycam videos.

Thanks for the recommendations!

I watch a shit-ton of bodycam videos.

I have to say, the flood of bodycam footage is one of the only things we can thank the Martyrdom of Saint Floyd for. I just wish videos from places other than FL, WI, and WA were more common, I'm guessing it has to do with public records laws in each state.

CrimeCamNow is all from the Atlanta metro, and Georgia Police Activity is also from the same state. There’s NM Bodycam for stuff out of New Mexico (expect a lot of meth dealers and drunk Mexicans getting got), Arkansas Police Activity and Police Pursuits (featuring the legendary Officer Byrd and the Arkansas State Police’s notoriously extensive use of the PIT maneuver), there’s Ohio Bodycam and Columbus Police Bodycam, there’s Officer Outlook in Minnesota, there’s California Bodycam… I’m subscribed to about 50 different channels from all over the country.

(I’m not the guy you replied to) My mother cried when they canceled Live PD as we used to watch it every Friday night together. Truthfully that is what radicalized her

Truthfully that is what radicalized her

I think that's going to happen for a lot of people. For every video of a cop being a corrupt and/or murderous asshole there are hundreds of common criminals being the absolute scum of the earth that absolutely deserved to be shot on sight. Near universal bodycam adoption by American police will basically only increase sympathy for cops.

My wife and I watch police bodycam videos for entertainment pretty regularly, and one thing we've noticed is the use of the word "weird" as an insult. I've seen it 5 or 6 times in bodycam videos within the last two months, and in pretty much every instance it's being said by a black woman towards the white cops that are arresting her. In some cases the implication has been something along the lines of "It's so weird that you would care about [obvious illegal shit I was doing] enough to arrest me" but generally it's just used as an insult, and usually accompanied by a reference to the cop being white as well.

If it's not clearly meant to air on TV, how would it be intended to persuade voters or win elections?

It seems like a test to probe whether the "Republicans are weird" is a good line of attack. It might be a good line of attack, but this ad doesn't seem like it really gets what might be the most effective avenue, which is the recognition that while both the (far) right and the (far) left are full of outlandish and ludicrous weirdoes, the left-wing weirdoes at least usually acknowledge that they are weird (indeed, revel in it, consciously exaggerate their own weirdness to get scene points), while the right-wing weirdoes more often strive to present themselves as normies, creating an uncanny valley effect that repels the sort of people (generally speaking these would tend to be women) who are constantly attuned and trying to look at minor social clues that someone's presentation isn't quite demonstrating what they actually are.

but this ad doesn't seem like it really gets what might be the most effective avenue, which is the recognition that while both the (far) right and the (far) left are full of outlandish and ludicrous weirdoes, the left-wing weirdoes at least usually acknowledge that they are weird (indeed, revel in it, consciously exaggerate their own weirdness to get scene points),

You think this is of any value when you're discussing instances like Admiral Rachel Levine, or assistant secretary Brinton, with the Normies?

Why would the normies discuss Levine or Brinton? The normies will talk about what the media wants them to talk about, and that's weird conservatives like Vance and the parade of fictional horribles in the video. Besides, Brinton is old news.

Why would the normies discuss Levine or Brinton?

Because Trump can make attack ads and pay money for them to be shown on TV?

Obviously there are also people who find weirdoes who flaunt their weirdness more distasteful than weirdoes who pretend to be normal. This would not be the group the Dems are aiming for here.

It's not a question of "also". A lot of the people who are fine with weirdos flaunting their weirdness, expect them to keep their weirdness constrained to specific tines and places, and won't have a lot of patience for weirdos using their public service position to do the flaunting.

Related: https://substack.com/@wdlady/note/c-63776761

At the moment the top post on simpssonshitposting: https://old.reddit.com/r/simpsonsshitposting/s/mvwsGG6CPf

I swear it feels like the new talking point just rolled out. Maybe this is what all right memes feel like to leftists but this feels really manufactured and astroturfed

That link doesn't work for me. Was it this one? https://reddit.com/gallery/1efq4cr

Yes, apologies, that’s it

That sub is having its own...weird moment right now. I clicked on 4 or 5 different links, and they're all purely sneering at any users complaining about the election shitting up the subreddit.

They've been doing that for months now. I get that it's a shitposting subreddit, but the joke you are going to run into the ground has to at least be a little funny. I unsubscribed a long time ago.

I got a much more effective message in my texts just yesterday.

This arrived. It is obviously illegal, as it has no attribution or "paid for" sign off. Among my family: my wife and I immediately said false flag. "Holiness of pregnancy and childbirth" is a little over the top for public messaging, and people who think a woman shouldn't run for president don't need to be told not to vote for the woman for president. But it's restrained enough in its parody that my parents, boomer Republicans, both thought it was real. My dad said this would cost her votes, because there really are men who think like that. And my lib friends wanted to argue it was real, though their heart wasn't in it. My tradcon friends agreed it was fake, but also, couldn't help themselves from saying something about how there's nothing wrong with the holiness of pregnancy and childbirth, couldn't hold it back.

It's a good effort. They were brave enough to put the Willie Brown picture in there, they didn't just use the Montel Williams photos, they put something genuinely damaging in their fake. But then they push it just a liiiiiiiiitle too far.

If this is connected with the Kamala campaign, then I have to update my assumptions about their ability level. They could win this thing if they manage to sockpuppet these attacks against their candidate until Republicans are being asked about it. Top tier shithousery.

I hate to be the guy, but… are we looking at foreign interference? Particularly since as you say it would be illegal for a US PAC.

Very possible, "intelligence" reports show Iranian efforts for Kamala and Russian efforts for Trump. If that's worth anything.

No, US PACs just coordinate with campaigns illegally; the Podesta docs talked about that sort of coordination a lot, though no one really cared.

Just when I thought politics couldn't sink deeper into the gutter.

Complete 'deplorable' flanderization of their opposition. Big Yellow Terror vibes.

It makes me think they polled /r/politics about how the average Trump voter acts.

Just when I thought politics couldn't sink deeper into the gutter.

We have not yet begun to defile ourselves.

I don't think neckbeard shaming ever really left. The terms just changed to something that could not be used to directly attack a person's appearance. Low status men were still free game.

They just replaced the word neckbeard with incel and carried on the same while never acknowledging the hypocrisy of either of them under the body/sex positivity movements they love or anything like that.

Well that was an uncomfortable watch.

I don't remember ever seeing an ad where the text and subtext were in such violent conflict. The text is all about them being anti-sex prudes while the subtext is they're sweaty rapey tentacle hentai obsessed freaks. Like we get them saying oral is sinful while making gross slurping noises. Is a woman supposed to watch that and think "Man I wish these dudes would try to get me to suck their dicks"? It makes me think "Send all the perverts and deviants to prison".

I agree, the messaging just seems so bizarre and dissonant.

Normally the fat, sweat, ungroomed neckbeard stereotype is meant to be obsessed with porn, but instead the message in this ad is that they hate porn? That normal, upstanding citizens like sexual deviancy and that the neckbeard losers are actually the prudes? It's just so topsy-turvy that it's actually hard to wrap my brain around it for how counter-intuitive the messaging is.

Will it work on voters? Who knows, despite how counter-intuitive it is. Not even 100% who the target of this ad is mean to be.

It's not counter-intuitive at all. The idea is that these men are so perverted and deviant that they can't control their sexuality and want the government to do it for them. That's why these guys are so obsessed with porn in the clip and are demanding that others control their sexuality. Because they can't. And if they can't control their sexuality in private, well...

There's also the implication that the men are trying to act out some kind of kink of sexual control on women, with the eggs thing. It's a reverse-uno-card version of "it's just a fetish." The idea is that the men aren't acting out their sexuality 'naturally' (according to the definitions of the sex-positive American left) and so are sublimating their sexuality into weird BDSM kinks about controlling women's sexuality, and then sublimating that into policy positions on condoms and porn. It's the same attack line as "pro-life men are against abortion because they want to control women's bodies," the actual reality that a large chunk of activist pro-lifers are women notwithstanding the 'truthiness.'

It's ludicrous -- at least as a description of the majority of the sexually-conservative right, which mostly just has sex with their wives and care dutifully for the children who result. But if you believe the things the left does about the right, it makes sense.

I can kind of see the logic up until the point of porn, where still falls apart because the neckbeard men portrayed in the ad are the most stereotypical, prototypical consumer of porn. They're exactly the kind of men portrayed or people imagine as going into adult video stores in the 80s. Even if all the other points were true, in no way could you convince me that those men are the kind of men who want to ban porn, which the ad implies.

But I suppose they just have paper over that because as makers of the ad are 'sex-positive' as you say (which includes porn) that just have to pretend like these guys wouldn't be consuming porn.

But I suppose they just have paper over that because as makers of the ad are 'sex-positive' as you say (which includes porn) that just have to pretend like these guys wouldn't be consuming porn.

No, the idea is they are consuming porn (because the sex-positive left doesn't believe anyone can abstain from porn) but are hypocritically talking about how porn needs to be banned because they can't control their urge to use porn. That they're the stereotypical consumers of porn is precisely the point -- the idea is that the only people who want porn to be banned are hypocritical, insane deviants who want daddy government to control their sexuality because they can't. It's the "Republicans are the real perverts" attack.

It's an... damnit I feel bad using the work 'weird' now, lets go with 'unusual'... idea, I agree. It inverts things that ought not be inverted, and uses right-wing attacks against the right. But again, it works with the sex-positive left's view that everyone is a beautiful sexual butterfly and if you keep your sexuality bottled up it explodes in an orgiastic frenzy of uncontrolled sexuality, like a pressure vessel that has not been allowed to vent gas. Gentlemen watch porn in private, like a normal person, and so don't need it to be banned. They certainly aren't talking about it in public, even to say it should be banned. "It's, like, weird bro that you're so obsessed with porn, sure you're not using it?"

What puzzles me is that as soon as men like this identify as women, they become a protected class that can do no wrong and have only the purest motives.

“But but but it’s not gross men like that who transition,” says the intuition of trans rights activists.

The only thing which can resolve warring noncentral fallacy accusations is statistics, and I don’t think anyone will be satisfied by the stats on “actually a gross man”/“actually a pure and innocent woman cruelly given androgens by the wrong genes and forced to age up past puberty by a patriarchal and binary system”.

It's really hard for me to believe that is their intuition. It's too contrary to human nature. I suspect it's that their morality demands they ignore their intuition. Their intuition is bigoted and transphobic, and denying it is necessary to be a good person.

Interesting thought: they use their gut reaction as a signal that bigoted people would be offended by it, a form of transference to resolve the cognitive dissonance.

Perhaps even a delusion where they think it’s not their feeling they’re feeling, but the psychic vibrations of people they assume are bigots.

Dave Sim’s Cerebus warned me that some people honestly believe they can read others’ minds (feelings/intentions, not thoughts/concepts), but until now, I didn’t have a model of the delusion’s mechanism.

I'm a bit hazy on Cerebus, but I seem to recall he had a bit of a brain-break during Church & State II. Where, like, not many of the remaining 200 issues were actually worth reading.

Gorgeous scenery, though.

It does sorta go off the rails because he went off his rocker, and meanders while he parodies genres, but the arc prior to 200 is a solid run and 200-250 are fantastic, some of his most memorable. The third- and second-to-last phone books are heartbreaking. The final one is 60% text, but worth it for the self-reflective nature of Dave losing it once more vs Cerebus losing it. The final issue is stupendous.

Related: the only people who still associate fantasy orcs with black people are people who find the association problematic

It's a really classic maneuver for anyone arguing for a generally "sex-positive" position, especially anyone arguing for it from an intellectually dishonest place. There's plenty of real hypocrisy from puritanical types that you can draw on for rhetorical effect, but it's also pretty easy to accentuate and exaggerate that hypocrisy through simple reframing. The puritanical types try to scare their bases with lurid accounts of what the perverts are doing, and the perverts simply redirect that fearmongering and try to get the uninvolved normies to focus on the finger instead of what it's pointing at.

Well, the accusation that vocally social conservative people are all creepy, projecting hypocrites has a long pedigree, surely? I remember all the jokes about anti-gay pastors being caught with rentboys, or anti-porn crusaders secretly jerking it at home, and soon.

In this case I don't think it really works intellectually, but the ad clearly isn't intended to work intellectually, or even make a rational argument. The point is to create an emotional association - Trump voters are weird and creepy, and you don't want to be weird and creepy, do you? The idea is that when you're in the voting booth, you'll remember those disgusting people, and be too disgusted to put a check next to the R candidate.

It's just a low, gross attack ad. I think very little of it, but it is hardly the first of its kind.

It's interesting to see an ad that is so far removed from the actual election. It doesn't even mention any actual candidates (except the speaker of the house, who is not in a competitive election). It's just "those guys suck!" It isn't targeting Trump, or any specific Republican candidate- it's targeting Republican voters.

Like @urquan said, I feel like the ad actually targets men, not women. It seems to be saying "you don't want to be one of those weird creepy Republican guys like these people." One of the main "issues" in the ad seems to be a ban on porn which (a) isn't actually a real issue proposed by anybody and (b) seems like something that would motivate male voters much more than women.

I don’t think the goal is to win male votes but female votes. These men are creepy. Don’t vote for creeps.

It's interesting to see an ad that is so far removed from the actual election. It doesn't even mention any actual candidates (except the speaker of the house, who is not in a competitive election).

It's a post-CU superpac ad, it is illegal for it to endorse or coordinate with a candidate.

One of the main "issues" in the ad seems to be a ban on porn which (a) isn't actually a real issue proposed by anybody

Quoth the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership:

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

Is Trump actually going to try to do it? Probably not. If he does, will it actually be upheld? Almost certainly not. But it has been proposed by somebody.

Ok, yes, "somebody" has proposed it. Just not, you know, Trump, or Vance, or any official Republican platform.

Besides, from the context, it sounds like theyre mostly talking about showing trans stuff to kids? I dont think "educators and public librarians" really show a lot of porn. I know the schools have slipped but i dont think its quite that bad yet...

They don't show "a lot" of porn to kids in public schools. But they sometimes show a little. Like in the book Gender Queer which has been "banned" from many school libraries. It is, among other things, a book of gay cartoon porn.

I would reframe the wave of book "bans" as a wave of parents realizing that a bit of cartoon porn has slipped into the school library and asking that their tax dollars and public institutions not be used to distribute these materials to children.

Besides, from the context, it sounds like theyre mostly talking about showing trans stuff to kids?

For some reason I haven't quite been able to fathom, a lot of conservatives consider "exposing kids to transgender ideology" and "sexualising children" to be basically the same thing. This is presumably why they're combined here. But they are clearly hostile to pornography itself as well.

While it's possible to present trans-related issues in a mature-as-in-serious rather than mature-as-in-adult or mature-as-in-Garth-Ennis sense, it's really hard to do so with enough detail to be a meaningful discussion instead of a handful of fuzzy buzzwords.

People like LoTT focus on pieces where there's explicit sex- or sex-like stuff (eg masturbation, performing oral sex on a dildo/prothesis), generally because they are more immediately uncomfortable to viewers, and less charitably in the hope they'll get censored to demonstrate how prurient such pieces are. But it's pretty common to see works that, if not quite so explicit, still delve deep into matters of sex and sexuality, even if they're aimed at early- or mid-teens audiences, or feature primary characters well under 18.

I've pointed to Venus Envy before, as one of the few insights to the trans-internal view of things in 2004-ish, but it's also a webcomic that opens with a 16-year-old's 'tuck' failure, and goes on to upskirt a (cis male) crossdresser of mumblemumble age to point out that he wasn't getting aroused. Serano's Excluded is a well-regarded feminist work in progressive circles, and it also spends a pretty sizable period of time on the "penis issue" of Michigan's Womyn Festival.

That's not a problem specific to trans stuff: I've mentioned Blue Is The Warmest Color before as a work that seems well-regarded and also starts with a 15-year-old lesbian's first sexual relationships, and I've named a few writers before who do excellent furry gay-themed works that are also difficult to discuss publicly because they also include outright porn, come from authors who've written outright porn in the same series, or just involve a lot of sex-related stuff. But despite the gay-themed literature being more fundamentally tied to attraction, it's as common in trans-focused stuff.

The counterargument is that, icky as it might be to adults, (most) teenagers run into this stuff themselves, and in other non-LGBT fiction. Media joking about awkward boners or weird sex toys exist, Catcher in the Rye has a lengthy section with a teenager trying to solicit a prostitute, Pern has its dragon-orgies (and we don't talk about the It novel). "What's the age of the main character in this coming-of-age-story" happens so much because most people don't wait til 18, and while not all of that story has to be about sex, a lot of people for a lot of cultures it is.

The counter-counterargument is that a lot of the socialcons aren't happy to expose younger teens to those works (and don't think it's healthy), either. They did protest American Pie and the entire sex comedy genre, did want steep age requirements for it, and don't particularly like the inclusion of Catcher in the Rye, either. To the extent that they don't care about Pern, it's because they weren't aware of it. They believe, with reason, that even if they try to keep their kids from exposure to this stuff, it is very likely individuals outside of their control will.

((Harder social-cons will argue that trans discussions are necessarily tied to sexual behaviors, either as an axiom or as a way to distinguish from 'simple' crossdress, where LGB works can conceivably treat romance as nothing more than kissing on the cheek (though they often don't like any of those either).))

The underlying theories are more esoteric, and I'm not sure I can give them a full explanation, but:

  • They believe that some amount of exposure at certain ages are traumatizing.
  • They believe that sexual interests, and especially male sexual interests, can sometimes be modified during young adulthood. This isn't so simple as believing that just browsing XChange makes you into an AGP stereotype, or getting tricked by femboy porn will turn you gay, or that porn drives people to cuckold kinks, but it's... not that far from that.
  • They believe that that either there is a natural path of development or there is a path of development that requires indoctrination. There's a fraction where this expands to 'everyone would be focused on monogamous (het) healthy relationships if only Trained Properly', but even well short of that, there's an expectation that even if these materials don't encourage readers toward them, they at least push people from 'normal' behavior.
  • They believe that it normalizes a lot of things, and that even if they are normal-in-the-statistics-sense, turning that into common knowledge is a Bad Thing. This is what a lot of grooming revolves around.

((Harder social-cons will argue that trans discussions are necessarily tied to sexual behaviors, either as an axiom or as a way to distinguish from 'simple' crossdress, where LGB works can conceivably treat romance as nothing more than kissing on the cheek (though they often don't like any of those either).))

This is the one that I really don't get.

The irony is, as ex-trans myself I'm strongly-inclined to believe that the conservatives are right about iatrogenic GID and thus about trans-awareness among kids being a catastrophe. I think that argument is strong enough on its own without introducing sexual pearl-clutching - and I'm mostly on team "exposing kids to sex is NBD*; we did it for millennia without issues", so in fact when I'm claiming a disequivalence I'm saying trans-messaging is worse than sexualising kids outside of specific abuse cases.

*Unfortunately, it's pretty well-known by this point that trauma is a self-fulfilling prophecy; if society assumes people will be traumatised by X, they will often be traumatised by feeling abnormal over not being traumatised. The proper place to break that is with society, though.

so in fact when I'm claiming a disequivalence I'm saying trans-messaging is worse than sexualising kids outside of specific abuse cases.

The reason I think trans-messaging is worse, and [also, to answer your earlier question] why I think it's a way for women to sexually abuse children (mostly boys, but it affects girls too), is that it's an intentional failure to teach constructive sexual behavior for what are ultimately sexist/sexual reasons.

"Men are so evil that to remove their inherent threat to women they should either [become a reasonable approximation of a woman, sexually-speaking] castrate themselves to remove that threat or only focus their sexual energy on men" is what I believe the trans-ally's motte to be, because that is the way feminism-laundered-misandry works. Which is why it's important to start impressing those messages upon kids early- most kids think sex is just fucking gross [right up until they don't] and the youth who have discovered they want it should be selectively denied knowledge of (and discouraged from, even simply by downplaying) healthy straight sex lest they grow up seeking it instead. If you encourage gay sex (and any of the other I Can't Believe It's Not Pussy "healthier alternatives") the hope is that you get less demand for straight sex, so women are "forced" to have it less and can get a better deal for the sex they choose to have.

The obvious problem with this is that you've both broken down the pipeline to turn boys into the kinds of men the average woman will actually like, and made it so that they don't exhibit the characteristics that they want. Many women want to be the only woman in the relationship (and so do many men) to the point you might as well consider someone who doesn't half-trans anyway (a label they will not be particularly happy with for other reasons but which describes their outlooks, especially on sex and gender roles, quite accurately).

The problem with misandrist-feminist thought is that it ignores the fact that sex is frequently constructive, and everyone who has good sex will point this out, even those who were legal-fiction-raped (exhibit A: '70s-'80s band groupies). And if you want to have constructive sex the sexes need to be working correctly and how much of a big deal the average person thinks sex even is needs to be correctly calibrated (just as it was in the pre-AIDS time; and I'd argue the reason people could even feasibly call sex child-friendly at that time)- so men need space to develop as men and not constantly be told they're defective women (which is what trans ideology as a logical outgrowth of misandry-feminism is designed to do), and as a second-order consequence half-trans women need to not constantly be told they're defective men ("tomboy erasure").

Unfortunately, it's pretty well-known by this point that trauma is a self-fulfilling prophecy; if society assumes people will be traumatised by X, they will often be traumatised by feeling abnormal over not being traumatised.

And since what you should be traumatized by is itself an Overton Window thing, you can conveniently become retroactively traumatized years later, especially if that trauma is politically convenient.

I had a misandrist mother, and the dysphoria started going away shortly after I ran away from her. Trust me, you don't need to sell me on misandrist abuse being terrible.

But you're really stretching the definition of "sexual" abuse here. Sexist, yes, obviously, but you really have to squint to get to sexual.

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Harder social-cons will argue that trans discussions are necessarily tied to sexual behaviors as an axiom

Huh. I never knew I was a hard socon, because that seems obvious on the level of water being wet.

They believe that that either there is a natural path of development or there is a path of development that requires indoctrination.

The path of development that socons prefer being the latter. I don't think it's difficult to unpack why- you just have to invert one of the things you said.

Axiom 0: Socon texts (come to think of it, are there any non-Christian socons?) tend to be pretty clear that most deviant sexual behavior is both "natural" and more attractive than non-deviant behavior on its face, to the point where it's more strict on restricting what everyone else considers non-deviant behavior (i.e. Catholics and contraception). If it wasn't, not only would there not be warnings about it, but nobody would do anything else.

Axiom 1: Men and women are different and play different social roles; men are designed and suited to be at the head of a household and women are not.

All of their viewpoints are downstream from this and emerge as you combine other starting conditions.

  • If adults [pick your favorite definition, though socons naturally prefer the legal one] can barely handle sex, obviously it's going to fuck up and confuse someone who isn't an adult even harder- "traumatized" is useful language to describe this. As a steelman, see the 5th and 6th paragraph of this; a socon would say that clearly, seeing the porn derailed his expression of his natural social role and his sexual interests, and I'm not even sure I disagree with that

  • Suppression of expressions of deviant sexual behavior will encourage more non-deviant outcomes and push the marginal case over the edge (all experimentation is tempting you slide back towards that local maximum, and "normalization" is doing the equivalent of putting a slide on a slippery slope- just like it is for everyone else, kissing is less bad than sex, but it's still bad if it occurs homo-sexually because [see axiom 0])

  • Age-gating is the compromise position if they can't ban it outright- "train up a child the way he should go", and all that- and there are ultimately practical limits to what you can and cannot prevent your adult-aged child from doing (but that's what social pressure, and making that age-gate as high as is practical, are for; those trying to bring the age-gate down- the groomers- are a problem because, among other things, they're chipping away at that compromise)

and I'm not sure I can give them a full explanation

Neither can the socons, who will say it's "just the way it is". The socons that can explain it are by definition not socons.

(come to think of it, are there any non-Christian socons?)

I think so, although it probably requires a broader definition of socon than Christians would often use. There's a lot of Indian conservative culture that, while not perfectly overlapping for what it things the Golden Path is, still shares a large agreement on what the common 'degenerate' forms are. Sikh religious doctrine actually have more overlap than most people expect, modulo the underpants, to the point where a lot of Westerners flinch pretty hard when finding out. And Islam and Mormon (though Mormons consider themselves Christian) groups have their own versions.

Socon texts... tend to be pretty clear that most deviant sexual behavior is both "natural" and more attractive than non-deviant behavior on its face, to the point where it's more strict on restricting what everyone else considers non-deviant behavior (i.e. Catholics and contraception). If it wasn't, not only would there not be warnings about it, but nobody would do anything else.

This varies a bit depending on who you're talking with and what 'deviant' behavior. Monogamy (and avoiding sex before marriage) is one thing that clearly follows the path you line out. On the other hand, condoms are, rather infamously, something very few people develop kinks for (and when they do, it's often in contexts Catholics wouldn't want anyway) or enjoy. No matter how the longer-term personal benefits, there's a lot of reason that there's so much 'wrap it up' encouragement. Religious takes on male homosexuality are closer to your position, but Borderer views often devolve into it being at best easy (uh, for the top), but not particularly attractive or desirable except in the no-other-port-in-a-storm-but-a-goat sorta way, and there's a small faction of often-agnostic or atheist socons that give very sad tales about how porn caused them to downslide from vanilla straight sex into a series of perversion they'd never had even glimpsed at years before. And very few people get accidentally slide into a dress, makeup, and set of high heels without some external examples beforehand, or into a fursuit.

But I do admit these are just difference in framing: the line between superstimulus and temptation is a matter of view. Nobody likes condoms, but they like being pregnant or paying child support even less; as a bi furry I'll absolutely say that there's a lot of surprisingly benefits to both.

condoms are, rather infamously, something very few people develop kinks for

It's not so much "having a kink for condoms" and more "condoms enable you to have consequence-free sex which is bad because something something natural law you might discover that consequence-free sex means the relationship with your spouse is dominated by sex for the sake of sex than for other more productive reasons".

closer to your position

This isn't really a position I hold natively; my views on sex/uality are a lot simpler than average (since they kind of avoid the question entirely), especially because...

And very few people get accidentally slide into a dress, makeup, and set of high heels without some external examples beforehand

...being one of those people gives some [from what I can tell] unique advantages for introspection about those sorts of things. (Communicating that introspection effectively is an entirely different story, though.)

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For some reason I haven't quite been able to fathom

Why they do it, and why it doesn't work.

it sounds like theyre mostly talking about showing trans stuff to kids?

No, it reads exactly like the stock Boomer-trad (or progressive) complaints about it. Narcissism of small differences may be viewed by replacing 'transgender ideology' with 'violence towards women' in the first sentence.

It's a general loser of a proposition and 20th century anti-porn views/laws (including "just restrict the ages") are likely to lose Republicans more male voters than an ad by the other side that calls them creeps will (since all men have heard that one before and have slowly figured out they should ignore that particular complaint).

I don't think "educators and public librarians" really show a lot of porn.

This is only half true with the shitty-Tumblr-tier picture books, the occasional novel that has a sex scene in it, and teachers being in such a rush to get to proselytizing the virtues of gay sex that they forget the overwhelming majority of second grade boys aren't generally in much of a hurry to try this for reasons that are obvious to anyone who remembers second grade (many, I believe, forget on purpose).

There really isn't a positive vision of dealing with the facts on the ground here; porn is a tool like anything else and it's not going back in the box, so you either evolve a strategy to deal with it or you lose. (Maybe instead of complaining constantly about "but for some reason men want to choke or facial their girlfriends the first time" you develop some messaging to point out that sex is give/take like everything else so that young adults are prepared to have better sex and don't have to pile on so many stakes they put off trying to engage with the opposite sex in a romantic fashion long enough that they become content never having tried? Of course, you also have to not hate the concept of young adults having sex to do that, and you can't be a traditionalist or progressive without hating young adults and sex [both will claim "protection of women and children" as an excuse to hate sex- traditionalists hate it when a young men has sex with a woman they feel should have been theirs, progressives hate it when a young women has sex with a man they feel should have been theirs] so it's definitely too much to ask of them.)

Of course, you also have to not hate the concept of young adults having sex to do that, and you can't be a traditionalist or progressive without hating young adults and sex [both will claim "protection of women and children" as an excuse to hate sex- traditionalists hate it when a young men has sex with a woman they feel should have been theirs, progressives hate it when a young women has sex with a man they feel should have been theirs] so it's definitely too much to ask of them.)

This is an absurd misrepresentation of traditionalist views. Trads are perfectly fine with young adults having sex; we just want them to do it inside of marriage.

From "Sexual Principles" by Free Northerner:

There are two biological adults strongly attracted to each other. They have been blessed with strong mutual attraction at a young age, and their families’ response would be to destroy their relationship because of some desire for them to be “abstinent”?

That’s insanity. That’s cruel. That’s borderline satanic.

Here is Paul on the issue:

To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion. (1 Corinthians 7:8-9 ESV)

The proper response, the Christian response, is to get these two young adults married and starting a family.

The modern drive for ‘abstinence’ uber alles is unholy. Some precious few are given the gift of singleness, they should abstain, but most are not given this gift and calling.

God blessed most with a sexual drive and a holy desire to become one flesh with another. To demand abstinence until some point in their 20’s or 30’s from those not given to singleness is cruel, destructive, unrealistic, unbiblical, and satanic. The focus on abstinence hands the devil a strong hold over young adults in which to subvert their holy desires into unholy ones.

One of the major problems with the modern church is the unbiblical emphasis on abstinence. Abstinence should never be an issue in the church. If two Christian young adults want sex with each other, their parents should rejoice and bring them before the altar post-haste.

Is it any wonder the unchurched are repulsed by such a hideous doctrine as abstinence?

And from "In Support of Early Marriage: Why I Hope Our Daughters Will Be Teen-Aged Brides" by Sunshine Mary:

It is our hope that our daughters will marry young, ideally around age 19; I have already begun gently talking to the middle-schoolers about the importance of marriage and taking seriously from an early age the search for a suitable husband.

How young should a girl marry? In most states, according to Teens / Minors Marriage License laws, if you are 16 or 17 years old, you can marry with written parental consent. If you are 15 or younger, you will need both parental consent and the approval of the probate court.

Although I would prefer our daughters to wait until around age 18 to marry, if one of them met a highly appropriate young man, and both of the families were in agreement that they would make a good marriage match, I would consider allowing them to marry at 17, which is the age my mother married my father, who was 19. Sixteen or younger seems very young to me and I would probably encourage them to wait a bit, simply because babies tend to follow marriages. However, if one of our daughters married at 17 and immediately became pregnant, I still don’t think that’s such a big problem; after all, by the time I was 13, I was regularly baby-sitting in the evenings for families with toddlers and babies. Baby-sitting is not as great a responsibility as parenting, of course, but if a girl begins to babysit by 12 or 13, then by 18 she should have enough experience with children to manage one of her own if she is married. Proverbs 17:6 says Grandchildren are the crown of the aged, and the glory of children is their fathers, so why discourage our children from marrying and having children?

The unrealistic notion of practicing abstinence through high school, college, and beyond is an idea emblematic of boomer cuckservativism, not traditionalism in any meaningful sense.

Of course, you also have to not hate the concept of young adults having sex to do that, and you can't be a traditionalist or progressive without hating sex

I mean, I suppose it depends on what counts as "traditionalist". You don't have to go back all that far to get to "marriage at 12, please fuck a lot so I can have grandkids".

I'm guessing that this is hyperbole but I'm pretty sure that at least in European societies marriage that young was never very common outside royalty/upper nobility (and usually wasn't consummated until later even in those cases).

Marriage at 16-18, on the other hand, is historically pretty common (though not universal).

Very common, perhaps not, but apparently it took until 1753 for Britain to ban marriages at 14 (boys)/12 (girls) without parental consent, and 1929 to raise the age to 16 unconditionally.

Yes, but most of that is out of living memory now (and the edgy people who think we should return to marrying that young tend to be… unusual, to put it politely).

As for me, I see traditionalists as a cluster of people who believe “playing the field is bad and virginity is good because reasons” simply through observing religious Boomers and older.

I couldn't call myself a traditionalist, but isn't the general line that "playing the field is good and virginity is good"? Then the reasons for the former and their implications toward the latter practically name themselves. Date a lot of people before "going steady", and with a little luck you'll probably learn a lot you didn't know about relationships and about your preferences and about how your available choices mesh or don't mesh with you, and hopefully you'll then find a good match to investigate further. Date-and-have-sex-with a lot of people in a world which predates good contraception and antibiotics, and you're basically inviting a plague upon your people, whether because God or just because harsh-economics and STD epidemiology. The reliance upon God for traditionalism today is just because that's the strongest argument left, in a time when "harsh economics" just means that DoorDash is expensive and when even the uncurable STDs are very treatable.

(and the edgy people who think we should return to marrying that young tend to be… unusual, to put it politely)

And to put it impolitely?

Impolitely:

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One of the main "issues" in the ad seems to be a ban on porn which (a) isn't actually a real issue proposed by anybody

Unless you're in Texas, Utah, Montana, or a couple of others I'm sure I'm forgetting where, to a point, that's already happened.

and (b) seems like something that would motivate male voters much more than women.

Yes. But then again, Red tribe isn't the faction of "we want to castrate your sons", and judging by voting patterns men care about preventing that much more than women do.

Asking for age verification is hardly the same as banning it. And plenty of liberals support that, too.

Solid blue California too:

https://gizmodo.com/california-advances-bill-for-porn-site-age-verification-1851497841

That last state you'd think to pass a porn site age verification law is getting close to doing just that.

The California State Assembly passed the Parent’s Accountability and Child Protection Act that will require porn companies doing business in the state to verify that users are 18 years or older. … Democrat Rebecca Bauer-Kahan and Republican Juan Alanis pushed for passage of the bill, which ended up receiving 65 out of possible 80 yes votes, and zero no votes with 15 assembly members listed as not voting. Before the bill becomes law, it still has to pass the State Senate and then be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom.

An all white cast. You really don't see that often these days.

I'd love ot be a fly on the wall to hear that casting discussion, or did everyone involve just know already not to bring it up? Did they audition for these parts? Did any black men show up? The hivemind is pretty strong on these things, so perhaps the coordination was all implicit.

Eh they couldn’t even get clips of random real far-right guys like Sam Hyde or Nick Fuentes or whoever saying something creepy? This is substantially less persuasive than LibsofTikTok. I doubt this has any impact

In fact I'd go so far as to say that it... kind of undermines your attack ad when you need to hire actors to play the people that you are trying to attack?

Like, isn't the point of attack ads to show viewers how horrible your opponent is using his own words/actions? Hiring some guy to say "I'm a Republican and I just wanna grill... human babies" doesn't quite have the impact as the ones we've seen from the other side showing the (actual) murderers and rapists that Kamala fundraised bail for.

In fact I'd go so far as to say that it... kind of undermines your attack ad when you need to hire actors to play the people that you are trying to attack?

No, it does not, not if you're the Democrats. Sarah Palin got absolutely ridiculed for saying "I can see Russia from my house", which of course only the parody played by Tina Fey did.

Yeah, there are so many actual weird and discomfiting right-wing figures to pick on, I don't know why "just make up insane creeps who have a set of views no one actually has" is what these folks came up with. It's ludicrous. It won't persuade anyone who wasn't already persuaded.

Imagine even trying to explain esoteric right wingers to normies. You'd sound insane and probably get committed to an institution become a person experiencing houselessness somewhere between "hyperborean bodybuilder chipmunks" and "cloning King Charles II as God emperor"

In some way it's the same advantage that leftists have, where you'd need to explain to your mom "biden's new education secretary has an abdl puppy roleplay fetish he acts out in the office"

Most cheap, fast, and easy sneering works based on prejudices: they only have a 2 minutes hate to work with, so they need to fall back on stock targets the media already prepared for them. The deplorable uncle, the gross neckbeard, the dudebro, the nerd who doesn't know his place. All archetypes their audience has been trained to instantly support violence against.
Even Sam Hyde would be too confusing for instant recognition, if only because he triggers too many grotesque stereotypes at once.

I mean, the comment I replied to mentioned Hyde but I wasn't really thinking of him. Fuentes is enough. And Matt Gaetz, who has the most punchable face in Washington and gives me the ick when I hear him speak. And is also on the Trumpy side, while hated by the GOP Establishment -- so he'd be a good target for an anti-Trump ad.

George Santos also crossed my mind (that dude also gives me the creeps) as a good example of a discomfiting Republican who got expelled from Congress for being a lying creep, no less, but since he's gay the left would never use him as a target. I hear he has an Onlyfans now.

Wait, am I just writing a socialcon attack ad against weird nouveau-Republicans?

I don't know why "just make up insane creeps who have a set of views no one actually has"

Filter bubbles cut both ways: they don't know any right-wing figures because they don't know any right-wingers. Except for the ones of which they're too scared to publicize, since exposing the public to a right-wing figure they believed was ridiculous (but actually wasn't) really backfired in 2016.

It kind of reminds me of those hate crime hoaxes where "he acted like a cartoon caricature of what 2020s Blues think 1950s Southern racists were like and then called me a [skin-color-appropriate slur nobody they know has ever said]", where they don't actually understand that the South is actually far less racist than the North is (by the definitions that were used to dismantle 1950s racism) and that the redefinition of racism Blue Northerners tried is neither a winner politically nor is "being on time is the real racism" easily communicable in an attack ad.

Maybe they're afraid that the real thing would be too seductive? There are people who think Sam Hyde is a legit funny guy (and I will admit that the meme of "Sam Hyde identified as perpetrator behind [terrorist incident]" is actually kind of amusing).

I'm excited for a thirty second long campaign ad about Moldbug.

They did try the biodiesel bit but that ended up being hilarious.

?

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/le-epic-biodiesel-poasting

But most importantly https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1815524465750778164

I don't know why "just make up insane creeps who have a set of views no one actually has" is what these folks came up with.

Well, the Jimian theory would be that the actual views held by real "weird and discomfiting right-wing figures" constitute thoughtcrimes that these people are forbidden from acknowledging, let alone repeating, even if to mock/criticize.

You also wouldn't want to acknowledge views that are actually something a reasonable person might think if you are invested in believing your opponents are dangerous extremists (or I guess just weirdos is the talking point now).

Alternately, if the truth isn't actually on your faction's side, it is generally a bad idea to show the people you want to convince to vote for you people whose views are more correct than what your faction would have them believe.

Well, we were just talking about men and women becoming increasingly politically divided. Now it seems we're seeing it take center stage. I always knew the gender stuff would get much worse before it gets better.

But what's crazy is this ad was ludicriously low on actual facts. It's a fantasist's view of the socialcon right. And it continues to try and tie Trump to Project 2025 even though he's come out against it.

The egg frozen thing is particularly ridiculous. The view of anti-egg-freezing people isn't that if you freeze eggs you should have to carry all of them to term, it's that you shouldn't freeze eggs at all. That could be a fruitful line of attack, and wouldn't require such flights of fancy.

There are lots of actual disagreements over policy that this ad could have touched on. Abortion is the obvious one. They even could have talked about the porn bans, but instead they went on a bizarre tangent about the Speaker of the House. Further, I know of 0 active political movements to take legal action against contraception (NOT ABORTIFACENTS), which makes that another dumb angle of attack. Perhaps there are some Catholics somewhere who want to ban condoms, but even radtrad Catholics know they're the junior partner in the religious right, and I assure you evangelicals are using condoms in the marital bed as much as anyone.

If you told me this was a fake ad created to mock the left, I'd believe you. I put it at 40% this is the case. It's too dumb even for a batshit insane PAC. If it's real, I almost feel like its target is men, not women. Otherwise, why would it focus so much on condoms and porn?

Boy, this election season is going to be dirty. A lot of unnecessary shit is going to get flung. And I have a feeling we're going to end it with men and women at each other's throats. God help us. I mean that.

https://x.com/travishelwig/status/1817954718989390317

Considering the guy who helped produced it previously worked for Crooked Media, a liberal/progressive American political media company, as well as Adam Ruins Everything, I'd wager it's an actual ad from a group that's on the left.

https://x.com/wontpacdown/status/1817953646409286059

They're asking for donations to actually get this on air, some possible explanations:

  • Wontpacdown is grifting to get money
  • Wontpacdown has no ties to Kamala campaign and genuinely believes this will help the democrats win the campaign
  • Wontpacdown is being funded/directed by actual Democrat campaign operators to determine if this kind of messaging will help or hurt Kamala's chances on the campaign

I'm curious what actual normies and independents/undecided voters would think if they watched that ad. Or even your everyday democrat that isn't chronically online.

The egg frozen thing is particularly ridiculous. The view of anti-egg-freezing people isn't that if you freeze eggs you should have to carry all of them to term, it's that you shouldn't freeze eggs at all. That could be a fruitful line of attack, and wouldn't require such flights of fancy.

When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled embryos were protected by a law protecting human life and thus increasing liability on negligent IVF providers, the Democrats absolutely jumped on "Republicans are going to ban IVF". At the time, I predicted the Alabama legislature would amend the law because while they did want to ban abortion, they did NOT, in fact, want to ban IVF. The Alabama legislature indeed did so, going so far as to protect them from pretty much all liability. But this made no difference, because control of the media belongs to the other side. "Republicans move quickly to protect IVF from unintended consequences of abortion laws" went into the memory hole; if anyone remembers anything about that, its "Republicans are going to ban IVF".

Yeah, and that's Alabama. Imagine how hands-off Republican legislatures would be in less decidedly deep red states, let alone swing states.

This desire to see the absolute worst in one's opponents is just horrible. There are plenty of real, enduring differences of opinion between the right and left in this country, we don't have to make things up to hate each other over.

But if we're going off this week... fake couch fucking quote, "it was glass shards not a bullet," this insane PAC ad... there does indeed seem to be a segment of the American left that's so completely infected with TDS they've left the reality-based community altogether. I think the people who stormed the capitol on Jan 6 were more in touch with reality than these folks, and some of them wore animal horns.

The difference is that QAnon Shaman doesn't have the reach to impose his view of the world on the population at large through the mainstream media. The Democrats do.

The ad actually strikes me as too jokey to be effective. But maybe it doesn't hit close enough to home for me to understand why it would be effective or offensive in either direction. It just seems like a standard current year SNL skit in that it's not really funny but you can tell it's trying to be and mostly aiming for some agreement claps.

It’s basically this comic/meme, intending to make conservative women feel gross when men in their lives have opinions about sexual morality.

Jon Haidt’s work on Moral Foundations Theory suggests that grey tribers don’t have instinctive moral judgments except when freedom or coercion are involved. I’m not surprised it’s not hitting here as fighting words like it did over on patriots.win when someone posted it there.

Jon Haidt’s work on Moral Foundations Theory suggests that grey tribers don’t have instinctive moral judgments except when freedom or coercion are involved. I’m not surprised it’s not hitting here as fighting words like it did over on patriots.win when someone posted it there.

Can you expand on what you're saying here? Obviously it's fighting words. But this isn't the place for fighting words, this is where we politely discuss things.

And my moral foundations aren't particularly grey tribe: when I took the moral foundations test, my highest foundation was purity, by far -- like massively higher than even most conservatives.

(Although the more interesting thing about my moral foundations is that on Care/Harm and Fairness I score similar to the liberal average, and on liberty I score close to the libertarian average. The only one in which I didn't get close to matching the highest concern was Loyalty, which is probably explained by my contrarianism. I guess what you could pull from this is, if there's moral condemnation to be had, I'm there for it. Even if my in-group is the one that needs to be condemned. Which makes sense, my ancestors were Puritans.)

So I guess you could say I'm literally the guy the ad is attacking. But the reason I don't have an especially intense emotional reaction is that the views they're criticizing aren't real ones, they certainly aren't mine. I do have a disgust reaction to the way in which my segment of the poltiical spectrum is being slandered. What are you expecting me to do, start beating my chest?

I was trying to give user Plural one possible reason “it doesn't hit close enough to home for me to understand why it would be effective or offensive in either direction.”

For you, clearly it does hit home, as it does for me. But this is a rationalist space, so I’m not surprised to run into someone for whom it doesn’t.

And for the record I find it a very offensive ad.

Okay, fair enough. Apologies if that was too confrontational. From what you wrote it sounded like you were describing the overall reaction.

And I guess I find it offensive, but that's paired with a healthy dose of "wait, this is actually what you people think I believe? Really? This is your best shot? This is your big moment? This is it? You had to make this wild stuff up? You understand so little of your opposition you've actually crippled your ability to attack? Really?" so my overall reaction is that it is more of a joke than something I'm seriously upset by.

but it likely cost Dems the 2016 election

I wasn't fully tuned in back then (nor am I now), but I don't remember the Dems going high back then. "Basket of deplorables" comes to mind. But maybe my perception was skewed because back then I was listening to a lot of conservative outrage bait.

"Basket of deplorables" was such an anodyne remark. Especially since she hedged it by admitting she was being "grossly generalistic" and then went out of her way to clarify Not All Trump Supporters. And then proceeded to backpedal even further almost immediately and apologize for saying even that much. "Some of my opponent's supporters are bad" is probably near the mildest sentiment a politician running for office can express without total rhetorical capitulation.

She said "about half".

So if she had said "1/3" surely there would have been no complaining and right-wingers wouldn't have ridden the "THEY CALLED TRUMP SUPPORTERS DEPLORABLES" hobby horse for the next several years.

  • -11

1/3 is still a large amount. Either one is pretty clearly a lot stronger than "some of my opponents supporters are bad".

I don't believe there was some smaller number she could have used that would have failed to inspire the same reaction her actual comments did. It was just the usage of "Trump supporters" and "deplorables" in the same sentence which made for a great soundbite. About comparable to Mitt Romney's "47%" remark.

If she had said 0.1 percent, it would have probably failed to inspire the same reaction.

Doubt it, the following (calling them racist, sexist, homophobic, islamophobic and implying "some" of them were irredeemable) was just too juicy to pass up.

So they're copying libs of tiktok?

It seems like the problem with that strategy is that these people are fanfiction. LoTT are, well, real(insane) people who really identify with the left.

There was a similar pro-abortion style of ad that was run back during the McCain v Obama era, so at the very least, it's not a new style of Ad.

... I'm impressed how hard the first guy pegged (hurr hurr) my gaydar, given the topic focus he started with. Which isn't as weird as you'd expect -- anti-abortion gay guys are surprisingly common -- but likely to make for an awkward presentation to normies. And if it's aimed at trying to gross out weak conservatives, it's gonna run into problems when even the hardcore Catholics treat the 'mouth stuff is a sin' like a joke, and have for decades.

As something to throw around as red meat for the wiltering leftist, to cross the metaphors, I guess it works? By those standards I've seen more impressive tumblr reblogs, today, though.

But the whole broader presentation is pretty standard, perhaps modulo the incompetently executed QR code (oh boy, Rolling Stone!). Compare Paul Ryan's grandma, or 'Youngkin's' campaign bus. It's be something meaningful if it came with the Harris Seal of Approval, but officially these PACs are completely independent, yep yep yep, ignore the winks and nods; laundering attacks on both politicians and the perceived class of the opposition's voters have a long-standing approach on both sides of the aisle (any remember pyjama boy?). And that's the simple overt stuff, rather than things like the anti-mormon Prop 8 backlash.

The left accusing the right of being the weird party seems like throwing stones in glass houses. Do they really want to play that game?

Do people really not remember who hired the women's clothing kleptomaniac? Or who brought post-op FTM topless to the White House? Are they banking on the fact that the right will not retaliate because it'd be uncooth to point out just how insane they themselves look to the average person?

Maybe it's my own weird shitposter heritage that speaks this to me, but calling people weird when your coalition it at least partly made up of bioleninists seems like a bad rhetorical move. Neckbeards are so fucking tame and normal compared to how weird people have gotten now.

And this is all especially true if you want to play this for the internet. Maybe decorum will stop the Rs on TV, but Twitter is just going to reply tweet to you with trannyjaks and stills from the Olympics or Eurovision. It's like I'm watching normies go through the meme evolution of the chud/soyjak dyad years too late. And I'm pretty sure the left wing perspective doesn't really win that battle.

The difference is the left being weird is already priced in and has been for centuries, while the right's whole schtick is supposed to be that they're the normal people party defending normal people who just wanna be left alone from degenerate leftist freaks, so the left gets a lot more mileage out of pointing out the tradcath/nazi frog/yarvinite/etc. fringes of the right who want to reverse the French Revolution or whatever. Especially since Trump's VP pick has significantly closer ties to those circles than your average right-wing pol, even if it's overstated for propaganda purposes.

I really wonder if your random normie dem voter is actually familiar with the depravity on display on LoTT all the time.

I doubt my Dad knows who the clothing thief guy is.

I don't think you can just play the "who is weirder" game. As aesthetically revolting as alphabet people can be, it doesn't push the same disgust buttons as, "these are the people want to be inside you," does to young women.

I think you can. Just start reminding young women of all the transgender athletes in women's sports, trannies in women's spas, trannies raping women in women's restrooms, trannies in prisons impregnating fellow female inmates, phalloplasty forearms, etc.

Hello, and welcome back, I guess.

Please remember that really hating a group doesn’t give you license to skip all the rules about decorum and charity.

I looked over the rules just now. Was it my use of the word "tranny?" If so, I'll avoid using it. Not sure what else it could have been.

I looked over the rules just now. Was it my use of the word "tranny?" If so, I'll avoid using it. Not sure what else it could have been.

We don't really ban specific words per se, but we do ban things like weakmanning in order to show how bad a group is. In this particular case, you might respond "oh but I was just explaining a way to play the game under discussion" but... I guess what I want to say is that I might accept that excuse from a good poster with a long history in the sub, but I certainly wouldn't accept that excuse from a user with your posting history.

Frankly, if I were you and I wanted to continue posting on the Motte in good faith, the first thing I'd do is roll a new account without an openly antagonistic username. We are, I think, mostly tolerant of quirky usernames but, yours is a pretty bold declaration against, uh, the whole ethos of this site.

I don't know, if we really want to get ugly, I think "these are the people that want to be inside your children" may actually commend stronger feelings.

If anything, I wonder if the ad and its implications are actually playing a game that the right has mastered first?

"The other side are disgusting and sexually depraved and ugly and want to prey on you" is a card that the right has played many times, surely?

It does, which is why Trump's connections to Epistein are constantly posted and talked about.

Do people really not remember

Your last and biggest black pill to take is "no, they literally don't remember anything the TV doesn't remind them of every five minutes"
Good news: it's a suppository.

There won't be any cognitive dissonance because there's no cognition, and there's no use waiting for it to kick in any moment now, even as the propaganda ramps up to new heights of hysteria.

I keep having to remind myself of that one. But it is less well defined than you're making it out to be. The past is forgotten until is is specifically brought back. And in this case we have the Trump campaign fully able to do this. This isn't government propaganda, it's campaigning in an election.

In that context they have to consider what rhetorical weapons they're handing over to the other side by positioning themselves in this way.

So I'm trying to figure out why they're opening themselves up for that. Do they really thing that either Trump won't go for those attacks or did they not even consider it?

You mean Trump was in some kind of a treaty to not use "my opponents are weird and gross" rhetorical superweapons?

The kind of people Trump is needing to convince to vote for him are those who want to know if he's able to act dignified. While Trump is certainly no stranger to unprompted personal attacks against the other side and its supporters, right now he's got the assassination attempt and the lawfare giving him that more dignified aura. He's managed to genuinely appear like a martyr, whose liberty and even his very life is under attack all because he has the courage to stand up for his people.

The Harris campaign is trying to drag him back down to his usual name-calling tactics, but if they exaggerate their case and make their attacks too vicious and too centered on supporters (as opposed to right wing politicians/leaders) then the electorate might give him a free pass to retaliate.

Because J.D. Vance's weirdness, whether it's banning abortion, attacking childless women, and the various stuff included in Project 2025 and so on is something median voters care about. They don't care about transgender issues or whatever the Culture War issue of the day really is, as the 2022 midterms showed, when even GOP voters put it at the bottom of their concerns.

Transgender issues are very important to Republican's and centrists who still live in deep blue cities or your typical reactionary Christian's who hate all social liberalism, but the median swing voter in Wisconsin doesn't give a damn, whether they do end up voting for Trump or Kamala in the end, and actually, focusing on transgender issues as your comeback will just make you look more weird.

The median voter's view is, "look, I don't get it, but why are you so obsessed with it, weirdo?"

  • -15

Transgender issues are very important to [some groups], but the median swing voter in Wisconsin doesn't give a damn....

As someone from Wisconsin, who knows my fair share of swing voters, they absolutely do give a damn. There are plenty of people who aren't diehard for one party or the other, but who find transgender stuff to be fairly off-putting.

The inherent disgust reaction is one of the most powerful emotions humans have. For some, it’s triggered by women showing their penises in locker rooms, for others it’s would-be rapists touching women’s bodies with their words.

Eh leftists always try the “it’s just so weird and creepy you care so much about this. Who even notices the race of characters in Lord of the Rings”? When provably the left notices and cares a whole damn lot about exactly this sort of thing. This is a typical female social shaming tactic.

When provably the left notices and cares a whole damn lot about exactly this sort of thing.

I've seen a number of people notice this, and prescribe as the counter-argument "then let me win." If it's such a trivial non-issue, if it's so not worth caring about, let alone fighting over, then why not just surrender the point and let the other side get their way?

So that's it, the gamble is that Trump ignores it and focuses on the economy, so it's a freebie that will warrant no retaliation?

There's a lot of irony being told "why are you so obsessed with it" by people who rush out to buy each new version of the LGBT-BLM-weird-circle-&-pawprint-now-for-some-reason flag, who wear "protect trans kids" shirts with knife logos, who get their harry potter scar tattoos covered over with devotional slogans like some born-again Aryan Nations member.

But there's no point in pointing out this irony, because the disgusting juvenile sneering isn't a real belief, just self-aware, calculated bullying.

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