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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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It's not hard. Tim is a guy everyone knows. Almost Forrest Gump-esque in his sincerity. Join the military, teaches at a school, coaches a football team and then runs for office. Minneapolis is one of the few non-coastal American cities with a positive storyline from the last decade. Dude has made no money from politics, loves his kids, is religious and just kinda does his thing.

You know when people say, "I'd vote for a random dude off the street, rather than a slimy Harvard educated lawyer."........ Tim is the random guy off the street.

In response to riots in Minnesota, Walz partially activated the Minnesota National Guard on May 28, and fully activated it on May 30. President Trump reacted to Walz's actions by saying that he was "very happy" and that he did "fully agree with the way [Walz] handled it … what [the Minnesota National Guard] did in Minneapolis was incredible". Trump called Walz an "excellent guy".

Even Trump seems to like the guy (I know wikipedia is obviously biased, but the events happened)

Kamala is clearly going for a "neapolitan ice cream" sort of campaign. She needed an inoffensive flavor combination. She picked an inoffensive VP candidate.

I feel bad for JD Vance

I don't. You saw it with Bloomberg, and you see it with Vance. The typical executive types are too used to talking to intelligent people. Politics is a craft. Like standup, you need to work your audience. Meet them at their level. Vance is like people I meet in my peer group. The main problem with Vance is he's too smart to work for Trump. He can't play a wise-cracking used car salesman because he isn't one. He was only chosen because of the paypal mafia's outside support. He knew what he was getting into. Should've known better.

Ive never met someone like Walz. Every person who served I know underplays their service. Every teacher I know doesn't start pedophile adjacent clubs for kids (except the one who was arrested for giving 16 year olds booze and we all knew was a creep). Walz is an outlier in my life in that he simply lies about everything in very important ways. Much more important than Trump saying he had the biggest crowd somewhere. If Walz was in Vance's position he'd already have dropped out, that is how bad he is and how extreme the Democrat media advantage is.

What? I dont even understand this comment. Are you saying Walz is a pedo because he appears to be an actual good person?

How does this comment have 9 upvotes?

What makes you feel like he is an "actual good person?" Hes a hardcore LGBT ideologue that started a social club at his school that could easily be used as a vehicle for grooming.

A more common place for abuse has always been church youth groups. Every town I have lived in has had a scandal with one, and those are just the abusers that get caught.

More teachers than religious groups engage in sex acts with their subordinates. Even per capita it is very close.

hardcore LGBT ideologue

Not an evil act.

started a social club at his school

Not an evil act.

that could easily be used as a vehicle for grooming

A description that includes so many social groups as to be meaningless, certainly not an evil act by itself. Of course all social clubs of our enemies are creepy weird grooming vehicles and our social clubs are necessary wholesome chungus.

This seems like a standard misunderstanding that may or may not be intentional by people sympathetic to LGBT causes. They think well these kids who are confused/different need a space to talk to adults. And then they need to keep it secret obviously because dad prolly isn't an "ally". But talking about sexuality and maintaining secrecy is exactly the first set of steps of the groomer playbook. So it doesn't matter what is in your heart of hearts, you are engaging in the same objective acts as a groomer, and by defending your own activities, you are providing them cover.

This is different than a soccer coach, who, I admit, many probably want to pork their players. But if the soccer coach starts talking to Johnny about tops vs. bottoms and Johnny says something to someone no one reflexively defends the soccer coach as having done the right thing. Which is why LGBT advocacy in youth populations is inherently dangerous, and I would say an evil act.

I do not believe the LGBT spaces must maintain secrecy. Without the secrecy being inherent, I again do not believe LGBT groups are inherently dangerous.

Well mainstream LGBT activists disagree with you.

Have you never met a politician. Overplaying their story & creating myths is in the job description. People in the wild are humble because they don't have to sell themselves to a full country.

I work at a tech company. The humble engineer is never picked to do public demos, because public demos are the place to be shamelessly self promoting.

Politics is this phenomenon at its peak.

pedophile adjacent clubs for kids

This is a really bad mental model of what GSA clubs look like.

How so? The purpose, ostensibly, is to get kids talking about their sexuality around adults. The few who will be interested in hearing such banalities are likely to have other motivations. Its like a guy who enthusiastically volunteers to run the cheer-leading team for his 14 y/o daughter and her friends. Is it necessarily true he's getting something sexual out of it? No. But a higher % of such people than a randomly selected dad will be.

Maybe it's changed since mumblemumble years ago, but back in my day it wasn't like each meeting started off with everyone sitting in a circle and exchanging distaff American Pie jokes, or spin the bottle, or gay sex ed. When there's a new student you'd go around for introductions and have the option of disclosing your orientation, and then mostly a sit-around-and-bullshit social club. There were teenagers that were hooking up who'd met at the GSA, but even the people who'd brag about it weren't going to do that in front of as varied a crowd as you'd get at a club meeting proper (there were girls there!).

(uh, second-hand from my brother, band camp was closer to the actual gay relationship or 'relationship' space. I'd expect that was somewhat specific to the cliches at the school we went to, though.)

@SteveKirk's "oh boy relationship drama" is closer to my experience, though I tended to run into where it was most an annoyingly creepy teacher wanting a bunch of disposable and impressionable activists. Which is a problem, but a different sort.

(probably not universal, but pretty damned common).

Is it? My only experience with one was a creepy groomer art teacher who reaaaally got off on being surrounded by gay boys having relationship drama.

Then perhaps it wasn't a good idea to name that kind of club something that suggests it encourages the sexual development and expression of children.

Yes, these clubs are basically just hangouts that staple the occasional rainbow around the school and exist as a space to eat lunch and not be called a fag every 5 seconds (and is indirectly an interest club for the things that type of person coalesces around), and while it's truthy (and perhaps somewhat obvious) that the kinds of teachers interested in encouraging the non-standard sexual development of students in ways that cross the line for some people are likely to be interested in encouraging the non-standard sexual development of students in ways that cross the line for most people I doubt that rate of [criminal] line-crossing is appreciably higher than the base.

While it is true that students come last on the list when it comes to what a school should do and calling it [what people will hear as] "gay kid's club" wasn't the best of moves, those things weren't quite as true in the '80s and early '90s as it is today, and sexual mistake theorists wouldn't be fully purged from the general sex movement until the mid-'90s (naturally, people who wouldn't have a problem with "straight kids' sex club" won't even look to see if their efforts can be read as "gay kids' club about sex").

Sexual conflict theorists would probably have just called it "tolerance club". And yes, Boomercons (and people who parrot Boomercon talking points) have a really bad mental model of what the general sex movement looks like because they never updated their mental models of it past the '90s; they don't even know the general sex movement has pivoted to being about angry old women ensuring young people have as little [straight] sex as possible now (and of the ones that potentially could, they're too distracted by the concessions the angry old women give to the non-straights to notice).

It's more a real bad mental model of how the public perceives a teacher advising the GSA club. Which is the important part of an election prediction.

Of course one must see media interference in public opinion, if one operates from the base assumption that the GSA in the 90s was a pedophile club. How else could one explain that the rest of the country doesn't see it?

Of course one must see media interference in public opinion, if one operates from the base assumption that the GSA in the 90s was a pedophile club. How else could one explain that the rest of the country doesn't see it?

Well covering up the link between pederasty and homosexuality is a long running media interference operation. That doesn't mean people still dont get a bit skeezed when they notice a guy jumping up and down to run the boy scout camp.

Fellas, is it pedophilic for a man to run a Boy Scout camp?

Its BORING to run a boy scout camp. Why you are dealing with that boredom is probably because you love your son. But that guy who doesn't have a son at camp? Weirdo.

When the boy scouts were a designated party enemy, yes, it was. We both lived through 00s late night television.

Now they aren't enemies because the party took them over, being a boy scout leader isn't creepy any more.

Tim is the random guy off the street.

Or at least he plays one on TV.

Tim is a guy everyone knows.

I agree that he's a guy everyone knows, but I don't agree even a little bit about him seeming like a sincere, earnest guy. He's the bullshitter, he's the guy that has to inflate every single thing he does. Even the things that are honest-to-god admirable, he still has to be an E9 instead of an E8, he doesn't just know a thing or two about rifles, he carried them in war, and so on. He's never invested a penny, never genuinely risked anything, and he resents the hell out of the guys that got more money and status than him in the private sector. He babbles about racial justice while a half billion dollars in damage is done to Minneapolis as his wife enjoys the vibes (and scent of burning debris). Someone else's business is a small price to pay for him to feel better about white supremacy.

Yeah, I know guys like Tim Walz.

He's never invested a penny, never genuinely risked anything, and he resents the hell out of the guys that got more money and status than him in the private sector. He babbles about racial justice while a half billion dollars in damage is done to Minneapolis as his wife enjoys the vibes (and scent of burning debris).

In a way something quite Germanic about this

He's the bullshitter, he's the guy that has to inflate every single thing he does.

And Trump isn't?

The media will fact check Trump for stating opinions that they don’t like.

Walz gets a free pass. There’s about half a dozen of his previous colleagues in the military that have come out against him, but a viewer of the mainstream media wouldn’t know it. The media has decided that they’re not going to allow swiftboating, whether legitimate or not.

I have a theory that the Republican strategy teams are waiting until the timing is just right to launch this one. There's some serious shit in Walz's "Military Service."

They're running out of time. More likely they just can't find a way to launch it outside the already-right-wing bubble, because the mainstream media is maintaining message discipline.

Also it’s rare that a VP sinks it. Palin didn’t sink McCain, Obama did and even then Palin was a character and an image very different to Walz, who is much more inoffensive. If he lied about his military career it wouldn’t affect much, Trump has not getting AIDS from whores as his ‘personal Vietnam’, Kamala is a woman, Vance was a ‘military journalist’ writing articles for the press office. There are no war heroes there.

Is there an insulting mass media propaganda campaign insisting he isn't?
It's the same as biden's senility. The worst part was the lockstep lying in the face of what we could plainly see, which was then abandoned the literal second their political objective changed.

It's the difference between a used car salesman lying to you (expected, almost charming), vs realizing the mechanic you brought with you for advice is also working for him (creepy and sinister).
Then you turn to your wife who's had her heart set on this car at any price, and as you look into her pleading coal-black eye slits you remember you don't have a wife. All three of them start chanting in an unspeakable language as the stolen flesh melts from their faces, and the sky outside is red redredredredred.
In a final moment of sanity-shattering realization, you understand you will be walking out of there with a 19% financing agreement.

That's the basic sensation of watching CNN for five minutes. Or seeing a still frame of that Anderson Cooper(?) lizardman wax model robot.

The sensation of being under bombardment by the American media makes me jealous of the countries that just get regular bombed.

Yes, the Orange Man is also Bad. To my knowledge, very few people believe him to be a sincere man, as was articulated about Walz above. I've got a solid decade of saying I don't like the Orange Man though, as where Walz being an annoying bullshitter is new to me.

So in essence, Trump being a bullshitter is already "priced in" whereas the worry is that Walz being (possibly) much the same might not be?

Walz isn't possibly. He's orders of magnitude above. Everything he claims is a lie. Trump says he gets the best crowds when maybe he gets the second best crowds. Walz lies about things for no reason. He claims to be head coach of a football team when he is assistant coach. Thats not exaggeration, its lying. I am an attorney. If I claim to be a good attorney despite losing a lot of trials, that is exaggeration. That makes me like Trump. Walz claims to have a great trial record in court despite both being a secretary, not a lawyer, and his superior lawyers losing all the time.

He's the bullshitter, he's the guy that has to inflate every single thing he does.

Well, he is a politician.