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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31489 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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"That is a damning non answer" is hilarious coming from Walz.

You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protest in the spring of 1989. But Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn't travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy? You have two minutes.

Walz' response (bolding is my own):

Yeah. Well, and to the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I'm proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI bill to become a teacher. Passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of 89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China. The issue for that was, was to try and learn. Now, look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. They, look, I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community. I've tried to do the best I can, but I've not been perfect. And I'm a knucklehead at times, but it's always been about that. Those same people elected me to Congress for twelve years. And in Congress I was one of the most bipartisan people. Working on things like farm bills that we got done, working on veterans benefits. And then the people of Minnesota were able to elect me to governor twice. So look, my commitment has been from the beginning, to make sure that I'm there for the people, to make sure that I get this right. I will say more than anything, many times, I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric. But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life. I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this. I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us. I guarantee you he wouldn't be praising Xi Jinping about COVID. And I guarantee you he wouldn't start a trade war that he ends up losing. So this is about trying to understand the world. It's about trying to do the best you can for your community, and then it's putting yourself out there and letting your folks understand what it is. My commitment, whether it be through teaching, which I was good at, or whether it was being a good soldier or was being a good member of Congress, those are the things that I think are the values that people care about.

Followed by this absolute banger from the mods;

MB: Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?

Tim Walz is the politician you get with a highly censored and early prototype ChatGPT. You can see that he's snatching bits and pieces of talking points and stringing them together in loosely probabilistic ways, but there's no coherence. It also lacks that wonderful post-modern impressionistic word salad of both Harris and Trump.

The Democrats really love doing this. Back with Hill Dog, they chose Tim Kaine and, IIRC, leaned in to calling him "America's Dad." Walz pick reinforces something that's obvious but hard to see - the Democrat party is absolutely loathsome of effective masculinity. A squishy assistant football coach who was part of the National Guard (but never deployed) is just fine. Or a "technically I was in the Navy!" gay dude. But an actual Man with hard coded male sensibilities is a non-starter.

I think the election is mostly back to a 50/50 toss-up, with some big risks for Harris (the longshoremen strike and fallout from Helene being the first of the October surprises). What is not a 50/50 toss-up is the relative Male-Female support. Regardless of the winner, the exit polls are going to reveal a societal level bifurcation at the sex level.

hard coded male sensibilities

Can you elaborate on the meaning of this term, as you understand it?

I understand the sentiment. When he was picked, he was largely marketed as something akin to "Americas Dad" or "Americas Grandpa" of "America's football coach". But every guy who actually has a dad, a grandpa, and played a sport thinks of him "not my dad/grandpa/coach".

Given that all of his children were conceived in some not-IVF but medical procedure it is a plausible thing to say about Tim Walz that he has never had sex with a woman. If JD Vance was in an actual locker room and wanted to win 90%+ of the votes of a football team he would have credibly accused Walz of that. And almost every guy in said locker room would have felt in in their gut that it is true.

Walz is, to use a now out of fashion insult, a fag. That is almost certainly what his high school classmates called him, its what the football players he assistant coached called him in the 90s/2000s. Culture really hasn't evolved a proper insult since the "banning" of "gay" and "fag" as insults for a male who lacks manliness. Perhaps "Walz" can become said new insult, because he does truly embody the essence of those insults from my youth.

some not-IVF but medical procedure

It was my understanding that the majority of these procedures are performed when a husband and wife have been trying and failing to conceive in the traditional manner....

It was my understanding that the majority of these procedures are performed when a husband and wife have been trying and failing to conceive in the traditional manner....

Yeah, but its Walz. An adult man who decided to be a teacher and founded the gay club. Saying he has weak swimmers is probably more true than saying he's never had sex, even with his own wife, but its certainly funnier to say the latter.

To paraphrase Democrats after the 2020 election, there is no evidence that Walz has had sex.

gay club

More of a "gay-people-shoudn't-be-under-constant-threat-of-violence-intended-to-force-them-back-into-the-closet" club, or a "shift-the-societal-response-to-gay-people-existing-from-violent-repression-to-minding-your-own-d*mn-business" club.

Sure, you can tell yourself that, but being actually gay wasn't a problem in the 90s or 2000s. It was faking manliness that was as far as high school kids were concerned.

Of course, there is the overreaching issue of pederasty in the gay male community that would also cause the erudite mottian to speculate.

Sure, you can tell yourself that, but being actually gay wasn't a problem in the 90s or 2000s. It was faking manliness that was as far as high school kids were concerned.

I don't think they drew much of a distinction between those two things, or between any two non-heteronormative characteristics.

Admittedly, this may have varied between regions; some areas (the 'fly-over' states) would have been more hostile than Boston or San Francisco.

Of course, there is the overreaching issue of pederasty in the gay male community.

And if gay teenagers are shunned and rejected by the broader society, are they more likely, or less likely, to associate with that community?

I am of the opinion that without the pederasts there will be few if any gay teens.

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Are you from Saudi Arabia or something? Every authority in vicinity not only doesn't violently represses being gay, it actively promotes it.

That was not the case in the 1990s.

Isn't that the purpose of narrative technologies like "silence is violence" and "microaggression"? As long as anything has happened in living memory that so much as made a member or "ally" of the protected group uncomfortable, the protected group is under attack (and implicitly deserves and requires additional resources for protection).

Walz is a Elmer Fudd, as the NRA types would put it. (You can hear a groyper shout 'cuck' from the nosebleed seats.) The essential part of the critique is that if he was to be put up against the feminine imperative, made to apologize, he would give in and grovel. If he was in the Illiad, he'd be in the appendices (and be excluded from all of the abridged versions.)

The only way to be a white male in the Current Year democratic party is to be a castrato, a non-entity, and that's what he is: a non-entity.

Of particular relevance here would be 1) Performance matters and we should respect those who perform well and at the highest possible levels 2) Explicit and implicit physical force capability are generally desirable traits in men though they must be accompanied by strong impulse control and strong moral frameworks.

Or a "technically I was in the Navy!" gay dude.

What's technical about it? He was in the navy, he was even deployed. Sure, he was only deployed for seven months. But it's not like he exclusively sat on the base. Maybe you can say that driving around kabul is not that dangerous. And since it's the navy, we shouldn't hold his homosexuality against him.

See my previous post in detail

Also,

But it's not like he exclusively sat on the base.

Are we really sure about this?

Maybe you can say that driving around kabul is not that dangerous.

For a time it wasn't. I had a buddy who accomplished the objective of eating at every pizza place in Kabul.

every pizza place

If that’s not hope for a cultural victory, I don’t know what is. God bless America.

Are we really sure about this?

I mean are we even sure that Buttigieg was not grown in a vat? I wasn't present at his birth, personally. There's very little that we're sure of once we get right down to it.

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