domain:web.law.duke.edu?page=1
striker
1m ago
The question for the age:
“How would I ascertain or estimate this information from an unbiased source?”
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1m ago
"The left" has quite clearly thought of them as The Good People for a long time. Doing things the right doesn't is a big part of that.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4m ago
It's actually pretty difficult to keep a captive population from sliding into catastrophic mutation load.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by 'sliding into catastrophic mutation load?' What, specifically, do you think is going on (genetically speaking) when you run this experiment?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6m ago
I read 99.5% of the comments that get posted to the motte using the firehose view,
Wild. I never imagined anyone would use that feature to read 2,000 comments a week.
I get the feeling you enjoy our exchanges less than I do
You're a good guy. So is Whiningcoil; I imagine we could easily meet at a party and have a few drinks without incident. But two things drive me crazy, insofar as I let anything on the internet drive me crazy: blackpills and political violence.
Even setting that aside, you're like the friend who's a huge sports fan and is either constantly bitching when his team is in the dumpster or gloating and rubbing it in your face when he's winning the division title. Your specific ideology (and I don't mean Red Tribe ideology here) means that you're either constantly winning or losing an existential struggle, with all the attendant emotions.
Life's a lot easier when you can just kick back and watch the game with a few beers.
Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing
I've already expressed my skepticism on this point.
we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.
On the contrary, your lack of a progress narrative makes your message ultimately soulless. People don't want to believe that it's iphones and laissez-faire capitalism and poverty until the heat death of the universe. And they certainly don't want a retvrn to housewives and the cultural norms of the early 20th century let alone whatever era twitter has decided is best this week. If anything, malaise is from a lack of progress relative to the norms of the last century, and it's clear your movement doesn't have a widely palatable solution to that problem beyond grievance politics.
Guns, taxes and global weather patterns don't hinge on peoples' mentality, and so are less amenable to the core Social Justice strategies. Even trans impinges far more on the physical world, and it is these impingements that have resulted in resistance and, seemingly, downfall.
What? The bad guys, narratively speaking, are white nationalists/white suburban teen boy school shooters, and wealthy old white men oppressing the lower classes for the latter two. The Social Justice narratives write themselves.
I question whether you won hearts and minds, or generated a preference cascade through a massive social pressure campaign backed by threat of legal force.
Did abolition occur through social pressure campaigns, legal and actual military force? Desegregation? Pick any social change in history - the rise of Christianity, American independence, whatever you like - which of these were legitimate? And what criteria did you use to decide?
But the people who such a campaign can't flip don't cease to exist, and their arguments were never defeated, only suppressed. Lincoln had it that you destroy your enemy when you make him into your friend, and that's not a victory the LGBT movement ever achieved.
It seems ironic that you would accuse the gays of strongarming you into accepting their movement, then quote someone who literally waged a war to force acceptance of his.
Regardless, large numbers of people opposed to the gays were converted. There are plenty of gay conservatives, and they don't seem to suffer any major consequences for it. After abolition, slaveowners didn't disappear, and yet we've still arrived at a future where genuine supporters of slavery are vanishingly rare. Give it a couple generations.
My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history
They are fortunate, indeed, to learn Actual History.
I think shoving Christianity into the closet was bad for society in strictly material terms, because it unleashed much harm that Christianity might have helped to mitigate or restrain.
It's funny that you should frame it that way, when I raised in a much more secular area and the stereotype is that Americans are obnoxiously in-your-face Guns & God religious. And there is some of that, to a degree you likely don't notice and can't comprehend because you've been swimming in these waters from birth.
I note that many people on all sides express considerable nostalgia for the 90s, and even the 2000s; the point where we lost and were cast out is also pretty close to the point where things started taking a very serious turn for the bad, and not by my assessment alone.
They're also the years where we had just won the cold war, were the sole hyperpower in the world, ran a budget surplus with bonkers economic/technological growth and it also just happens to be the time of our childhood/adolescence. It's bread and circuses with a side of martial victory, not normies longing to spend two hours of their Sunday doing bible study.
This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down?
Yes, and no. I agreed with whichever post you wrote in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting that this event certainly moves us towards the brink and I denounce it. But no, I do not think we are close in any meaningful way.
The culture war, defined as people self-assorting into tribal groups and flinging shit (verbal and otherwise) at each other is eternal. To dream otherwise is to dream of Progress and Trying Something Different, but I'm not holding my breath. I do think the temperature is lower than the early 2020s when I would literally routinely watch proud boys and antifa beat each other with sticks in the streets. Do you genuinely think that tensions today are as high as they were in 2020 and 2021? Or 2016? Or what I imagine the 70s were like?
Whether we're in a trough, a peak or just about to keep chugging along for a while - I don't know.
If we can restore something like accountability to power, and if we can generate common knowledge of where we are and how we got here, it seems to me that many of our problems are solvable.
I wish you luck. But I'm pretty sure 'restore accountability to power' means 'my political opponents don't have power anymore' and 'generate common knowledge' means 'teach Actual History to other people's kids.' Not to mention people have been mouthing 'restore accountability to power' since at least the 2000s on reddit, if not the ancient Greeks.
Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition.
It might amuse you to hear that I've considered going to church recently, largely to try and surround my family with a functional social circle. It's a tough trade-off when I have such limited time to teach my children already.
That said, you're living in a bubble, my man. But then again, I suppose I am too.
A wager then - weekly church attendance isn't going to significantly increase in the next couple years (say, an increase of 20% or more - so if 30% of Americans attend church weekly, a boost of 6%). Me, living in a large blue city, will be 100% unaffected by political violence in the next year. By this, I mean I will not witness any shootings/melee/violence between two large gangs of Red/Blue tribers/insert your definition here, nor will anyone I know. There will be some nonzero number of school shootings/political assassinations/assaults on ICE at maybe a rate of 1 every 1-3 months? Were real money on the line, I'd dig up the actual numbers to get a background level over the last decade but I can't imagine it's much more frequent than that.
Feel free to make your own wagers.
When truth is truly on your side, no political hardball is necessary, only contrasting outcomes and the ability for people to choose freely.
lol. This is funny on so many levels, but maybe in the interests of brevity: we'll see whether people freely choose conservativism and Christianity and the Hallmark channel or whether they want to smoke weed, watch netflix and have premarital sex. And I say that while holding a dim view of at least smoking weed and watching television! Your idea of freely choosing is fiercely teaching your children 'Actual History' because you're terrified they'll internalize values and ideology from mainstream culture instead.
I'm not even making a value judgment one way or the other, but to say that the people will freely choose your way is both breathtakingly hubristic and seemingly ignorant of the last century of history.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
6m ago
It's actually crazy that you get to be that age and you still genuinely think that deploying the voice normally used for 5-year-old kids on 11-ish-year-old kids (or somewhere in there, I dunno) is a good idea.
Why? Kids are inferior- being older is considered a prestigious badge of rank (it's even easier to become old than it is to become a parent)- and that's how you talk to your inferiors. (What are they going to do, not vote for you? That's a problem for future-you.)
More seriously, a significant fraction of adults believe, conspicuously, that (like the rest of the world was) they were created last Thursday as a fully-formed adult. Thus, they can claim to have memories of childhood, but since they're also aware those are artificial, they have zero relevance to anyone they're talking to and can safely be discarded. So they might legitimately believe they remember, but since they're fundamentally unsullied by the experience, there's no implied responsibility to use the data in those memories (especially if it would require 5 seconds of mental effort or other similar impositions, or taking a risk for which you bear most of the moral hazard).
I have yet to fully figure out why this is, beyond it just being a power thing (and perhaps necessary in some cases) and most people having comparatively poor long-term memory (incapacity and malice being indistinguishable at the extremes, of course). That's why people think 5 and 15 are the same age- this is most apparent in people who are very slightly older than that for some reason. It's also a habit thing for parents, who tend to get really anxious and self-conscious about the tricks used to control 5 year olds no longer working as well on 15 year olds.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
8m ago
antifa
What exactly is the redeeming value in not coming down on antifa like a pile of bricks? Like, fine, "antifa's just an idea" and all that nonsense, but Rose City Antifa, anybody that showed up like a jackbooted thug wearing all black and started violence at any number of locations over the last several years.
They volunteered for violence, they put themselves out there. Why exactly do you need to care more about their wellbeing than they clearly do? Why not give Antifa up as the sacrificial goat they so clearly want to be?
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
12m ago
the same enthusiasm
Half? A quarter? For the sake of ten normal people? How low do we have to go, here?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
13m ago
what makes Dylan Roof or Tarrant or Breivek not "weirder than right wing"
They... are? I don't expect general pushback against right wing ideas would have particularly helped in those cases.
TheDemonRazgriz
14m ago
I had to deal with his office and him professionally as the secretary of transportation
If you don’t mind my asking, how/why did these interactions happen? How high up in the office were you dealing with, or did you literally deal with him personally? Had you dealt with other secretaries of transportation?
07mk
15m ago
"People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people" appears to be a mainstream, possibly a supermajority-support Blue Tribe position.
Within the Blue Tribe enclave in which I reside, it doesn't appear that way to me. I'd say that it's a mainstream opinion, but certainly a minority one, and not a big minority. That said, a supermajority would support the statement "People who disagree with trans ideology are being unjust or oppressive towards trans people," certainly publicly and likely privately as well.
Now, I could see a way in which your apparent observation makes sense; a supermajority of Blue Tribers, when surrounded by other Blue Tribers and interrogated in a leading way, would eventually be pressured to appearing as if they genuinely support (which, let's be clear, makes one exactly as responsible for genuinely supporting it as actually genuinely supporting it) "People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people," where "dangerous threat" implies literal physical violence. To be completely fair, from the outside, this would appear almost indistinguishable from a supermajority of Blue Tribers supporting the statement.
There are a lot of Blue Tribers who equate "oppression" with "dangerous threat," but because of how loose the definition of "oppression" has become (in 2025, arguably, it means nothing more than "something that is currently being applied to a [person that I like or that is an opponent to someone that I dislike]"), most Blue Tribers tend to grok that it's just not a big deal. The notion that "We're all racists/misogynists/White Supremacists/homophobes - and that's OK" (of course, just because we're all equal doesn't mean some of us aren't more equal than others) has become close to the water that we swim in in the Blue Tribe.
Trans themselves appear to be overwhelmingly Blue Tribe/leftist, like 99%+
I'd suggest this is a selection effect in terms of which trans people are most likely to make lots of noise or be otherwise noticeable. I'd guess a majority is Blue Tribe/leftist, certainly, but 99%? I'd want to see the actual stats and methodology.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
16m ago
· Edited 13m ago
What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation?
Ever see the movie Fail Safe? The book is good too but then you don't get the recommended dose of Walter Matthau. If you haven't...
One massive tragedy is traded for another to prevent an even bigger conflict. The negotiations are direct, between high-ranking individuals; the consequences immediate. How do you make such a trade when you're talking about distributed social phenomena across classes, across government and private sector and in-between, across generations?
You’ll rightly protest that you never had any control over the kind of person who would snap like that.
Decades ago, some terrorists and murderers did as terrorists and murderers do. They spent a little time in jail, then they got professorships, they got sinecures, they mentored a future president, they still get honorary degrees from one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world. No right wing terrorist or murderer has gotten a sinecure. Not one of them is lauded by polite society or treated as anything less than what they are.
You may want to say "but that's only two... or three... or anyways, it's not that many people!" But that's kind of beside the point; not that many versus zero is an infinite ratio. "The left" may be big and diverse, but some portion of that big diverse tent is far more vertically integrated than the right. To be clear, I don't want the right to start rewarding terrorists! I don't want the right to be better at protecting its scum. But the problem of "the left" treating their terrorists somewhere between tolerable and laudable instead of scum worthy of, at best, a life rotted away in prison, has existed a long time. On the somewhat less evil end of the bias problem: if you riot on the left, you get kid gloves; if you riot on the right, you get the book thrown at you (to be fair: unless your guy wins and you get a pardon).
I don't know what it looks like to undo that. I don't know how the leadership of today undoes terrible decisions and stupid social trends started 60 years ago or more.
Would jailing Angela Davis for her golden years make a difference? Unfair in some ways, a costly signal in some ways, but would it matter? Denouncing and cancelling Destiny in some bizarre post-modern Sister Soulja moment? It's something, I guess.
I don't know, man. I don't want to take another step towards The Troubles. All I know is that boilerplate denouncements aren't enough, and no one seems to be trying anything else.
Edit:
Maybe some time in the stockades
Tell you what, let's put Biden out and throw some tomatoes at him, January 21 2029 we'll do the same with Trump, everybody has a good laugh and we have a Political Jubilee Year.
TIRM
28m ago
That money could be given to the DNC to spend on whatever they think is best. Such as a turn out the vote effort for whomever is running for president.
"People who disagree with trans ideology are a dangerous threat to trans people" appears to be a mainstream, possibly a supermajority-support Blue Tribe position. Trans themselves appear to be overwhelmingly Blue Tribe/leftist, like 99%+, and I've seen no indication in Ziz's writings that they were an exception in any way; their moral model seemed to be founded on Blue Tribe Progressive morals, only diverging where it came to how and when to take action, where they were a more extreme variant of Rationalist ideas. Who the Zizians consider to be threatening to them pretty clearly followed a leftist model.
More generally, what makes Dylan Roof or Tarrant or Breivek not "weirder than right wing"? Red Tribe actually went to quite considerable lengths to purge racism and even the resemblance of racism; to the extent that it is more of an issue than it used to be, it's coming from internet culture, which was a Blue Tribe phenomenon, and from aggressive redefinition of racism to cover the purged behavior set.
...It seems to me that the above is a non-trivial problem. I don't have a solution for it, and I don't expect you to have a solution for it, but I'm certainly not going to pretend that there's some system in place to handle this. Roof and Tarrant and Breivek were absolutely treated as Red problems, and still are. This latest shooter used an app Blues wrote explicitly to make finding and tracking federal agents easier, and left a note that "Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror," while the left is still playing "what even is leftism" games. The John Brown Gun Club, a group that I myself have argued in favor of in the past, is posting up flyers explicitly celebrating Kirk's murder on the campus of Georgetown university. Antifa has been beating Reds for showing their faces in public in Blue strongholds for a decade, and the police let them do it, and they are still doing it to this day.
We had a full decade of Blue Tribe crusading against "right wing" radicalization with everything from ceaseless propaganda to explicit government censorship to organized lawless violence. Jordan Peterson was treated as a dangerous radical*. We have examples beyond counting of what it looks like when Blue Tribe takes a problem seriously. They evidently and undeniably do not consider murder committed by their partisans to be a problem worth taking seriously. Maybe you think that's a reasonable response, given the givens. I do not think it is going to work out well for Blue Tribe generally.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
42m ago
don't understand the effect weird porn ("toaster fucking") has on the younger generations, especially since they get squeamish if you discuss details.
I’m usually skeptical of the “porn made me do it” explanations.
I was having AGP fantasies before I had ever even been on the internet. And when I first discovered the porn, there was no “rabbit hole”, there was just an immediate reaction of “damn this shit is lit”.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
47m ago
cute
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
53m ago
Supposedly well-respected people aren't sure if the Zizian attacks 'count' as left-wing (later deciding no!). How has the coverage on the left side of that aisle looked, to you?
The Zizian attacks are weirder than "left wing" - Ziz did some bad theorizing about decision theory and came to the conclusion that it was always correct to retaliate with maximal intensity against all threats, with a very broad definition of the word "threat", under the worldview that nobody would "threaten" you if you so precommitted. Moderating the general left wing wouldn't have helped with that particular flavor of insanity.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
Lots of people at ICE proudly post that on their LinkedIn.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
Or Bill Clinton.
Really I just think it's funny that this crazy letter to the editor from 1996 is even digitized to find.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
I'd make the trade, if this means people that had a che shirt or hammer and sickle poster in college are treated the same as if they'd had a swastika poster- that is, completely excluded from polite society.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
then it must remain appropriate for non-violent pro-immigration extremists to refer to ICE agents as Nazis.
No, because the Nazis were a real and defined party, of which there are approximately zero surviving members. Referring to them that way is way more biased and way more loaded.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
1hr ago
It's a massive improvement for the illegal alien, I find myself noticing. An acceptable improvement from my perspective is "get in the van now" as a downgrade from "get in the oversized trebuchet now".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
Seems like the root problem is the "technological bookkeepers can unperson you at any time" bit. Perhaps this admin should be focusing a little bit more on fixing the thing where the financial industry is secretly an unaccountable fourth branch of government.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
56% of "very liberal" and 73% of liberal respondents say it is "always or usually unacceptable" for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose
90% and 91% for very conservative and conservative, respectively. Likewise,
55% and 68% say that "violence is never justified" "in order to achieve political goals".
88% and 83%.
You can quibble about the 50/50 comment, but man, I'd be bothered at just how much more acceptable being a ghoul and being a terrorist is among liberals; even if it's still less than half, it's twice as common as among conservatives.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
most high ranking Democrats
Which is a much more selected and narrow grouping than Arjin's "Blue Tribe," even more so once you get into the issue of how to define high ranking.
Sure, Chuck Schumer has enough sense decency to not say "reaping the whirlwind" at that particular moment, but Ilhan Omar has less couth. Talking heads of various prominence, less still. The kinds of Blue Tribers that we might interact with online or in real life, less still again.
Whenever a school gets shot up
When a school gets shot up, there's no one that says "but they kinda deserved it." The downplaying is a totally different form.
There are dozens of us.
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