domain:felipec.substack.com
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1hr ago
He's just slandering a large chunk of the country with laughably false disinformation in a breathtaking display of hypocrisy.
I'm not sure that's the hill the Trumpist movement wants to die on.
anon_
1hr ago
it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
It will also be against the wishes of the Kirk, who notably thought South Park making fun of him was hilarious.
Not that the dead necessarily get a vote, but it's quite a strange thing to honor a man by doing the opposite of what he would have wanted.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1hr ago
Looks to be less cancellation and more just government censorship:
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr issued a threat Wednesday against ABC and Disney, suggesting he would take action over comments made by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel about the alleged Charlie Kirk assassin.
Pay fealty or be destroyed. Oh, sure, you might win the lawsuit, but can you really justify the risk? Far safer to join in the coalition of corruption than fight it. One of the more consistent patterns we've seen is that businesses fear retribution from the Trump administration far more than they did from the Biden admin (and rightly so).
The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
The ongoing problem for the right is that they have no one to replace their left-wing opponents. There can't be a long march through institutions, because after they fire all their hated enemies they're going to have to hire them back. The movement is creatively and intellectually bankrupt, as evidence by the remarkable collection of individuals they found to fill out the Trump administration. Hell, one of the biggest reasons why these institutions skew so left in the first place is that the American Right proactively retreated from them (unsurprisingly, when you build a culture that disdains artists and intellectuals while your opposition builds a culture that practically worships them, all the artists and intellectuals end up being on the other side).
Totalitarianit
1hr ago
He didn't literally say what he implied.
I think you are trying to make an argument that solely focuses on the literalness of his words which ignores all inflection and context of who he is and why he said it that way. When Kimmel filmed this episode, the "MAGA gang" didn't need to desperately distort the truth because the truth was already out there. Also, a private company firing someone for saying something was heavily weaponized by the left for years, and it was done for much more innocuous things.
UwU
1hr ago
It's still advocating for violence.
Sure, "my political opposition should be tried for treason and then shot" may have a thin veneer of plausible deniability to chronic overthinkers like you or I, but most people from both sides are just going to hear "my political opposition should be shot".
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
In my area we've got the new Tappan Zee Bridge, and the (under construction) Portal North railroad bridge. The New Jersey Turnpike keeps getting wider. They raised the deck of the Bayonne Bridge so larger ships could get under it. We can build infrastructure -- it costs more and takes longer largely because of red tape (mostly environmental impact stuff) and cost disease, but we can still do it. When we can't -- as in the NYC subway system -- it's not that we lack the technical ability but that someone powerful doesn't want it. In that subway's case, the unions don't want to allow anything that would reduce the number of employees needed to run the system.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
2hr ago
A few pounds of muscle on my bones made a world of difference.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit for making your life better.
People talk a lot about 'noob gains' and rapid early progress in muscle gain, but they don't talk enough about the early psychological effects of heavy resistance training on the indolent and sedentary. There's a large spike in hormones when you first start lifting that go a long way towards killing anxiety and reinforcing confidence and resilience.
Honestly its probably more impactful on male attractiveness than the physical toning itself.
Quantumfreakonomics
2hr ago
Those viewers aren't coming back. NFL football ratings bounced back after dropping the politics stuff, but that was because there was massive demand for the product and no real substitute.
aqouta
2hr ago
The world was willing to execute Nazis after the holocaust even though their crime was executing jews. Any Israelis who did not voluntarily leave the country and renounce Zionism would be regarded the same as the nazis who didn't give up after the war was los
This is a plain fantasy, has the world decided that everyone involved in October 8th should be executed in the Hague or that the population they ruled over should be starved to death as a result? Your entire premise defeats itself, it's ridiculous. A world that would turn on Israel for imposing these conditions would not impose these conditions on Israel lest it must turn on itself.
they're actively committed to the project and voluntarily taking on responsibility for what Zionism did.
Somewhere north of 70% of Israelis were born in Israel. I know there is a false meme that the whole population are recent European immigrants but it's simply not true. There is no where for them to go any more than there is for the Palestinians.
anti_dan
2hr ago
What if giving him cash is just mathematically the most effective option?
I mean, it is theoretically possible if you have the rare case of a guy who was fired from his job for no fault of his own and needs some money for food and shelter until he gets another job. In that hypothetical you are preserving the theoretical productivity of a person just long enough until they return to productivity.
In practice even unemployment insurance as implemented is not even this. Last I checked, most users of UI are repeat users. The rest of the redistribution programs fail even harder. The problem with giving money to people to keep them alive is it doesn't wean them off. Its just a self licking ice cream cone in social program form. That is, unfortunately, the Achilles heel of EA as currently styled as well. You have to account for future expenses as well.
I agree that its possible that the partner knew nothing (or at least thought the shooter was just being edgy/hyperbolic). It reminds me of observations of a friend before he took his own life. It was similar in that he was considering a massively life altering choice that his loved ones would disapprove of and send shockwaves through the lives of those around him. He pretty much managed to keep it hidden with only small hints that were only obvious in hindsight.
So, while I'm not entirely sold on the partner being completely innocent in all this, its probably best to go with Occam's razor until there's any new official revelations. Better than the alternative.
pigeonburger
2hr ago
To add to that point about the ruins, I've had that feeling many times. I don't know about American infrastructure as much, but in my city, infrastructure is such a problem that just maintaining it becomes a bigger project (more expensive, more disruptive, longer, more divisive) than building it was in the first place. They've been renovating a bridge-tunnel built in the 60's. It cost 1 billion dollars ajusted to inflation to build and took 4 years. The renovation costs (so far) 2.7 billion and it's been 4 years already with no end in sight. There's a metro station that I remember when I was a teen looked alright, then when I started working as a young adult they had to temporarily take some wall panels out to deal with water infiltration. That was 20 years ago, the panels are still off and the walls keep looking worse and worse and you can see the precarious fixes they just kept applying, chicken wire holding pipes and gutters, funnels to move leaks and hastily bolted corrugated metal sheets patches over cracks. It's like we're children playing in the ruins of a more advanced civilisation.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
2hr ago
I never really considered that users might be 'hiding their power level' from their spouses. Sounds exhausting, but considering the amount of polarisation in Western political discourse, its not that surprising.
Tiber727
2hr ago
People who act as PR attract hate because attracting attention is their job, but at the end of the day people still know it wasn't the PR guy who decided to put in day 1 $50 DLC. They know that their hate for the PR guy is a proxy for those who hold direct power. I left off "and the lefties are informed at some point who Brian is" because I thought it was implied. People might not really know him, but when they talk about "late-stage capitalism" derisively they are talking about people exactly like Brian.
I would hardly call Kirk load-bearing either. I acknowledge that political spokespeople have different styles, audiences, and levels of charisma but I don't think they're that special snowflake either.
anti_dan
2hr ago
Yeah. I've always understood horseshoe theory as an invention of necessity for socialists/communists to sanitize themselves of the obvious similarities they shared with the Nazis. In many ways, the Fascist is just a socialist who has realized they can do 99% of what they want to do without the burden of having to actually run the means of production (and get the blame when they inevitably fail at doing so) by just imposing regulations and mandates. Its not your fault the steel industry failed because it had to compete with foreign steel that didn't have to be made using gold dust, it was your stupid capitalists who failed the gold dust mandate.
Totalitarianit
2hr ago
He isn't suffering for merely being a leftist. He suffers for spreading blatantly false information and for being a leftist of the kind that relished in his culturally advantageous position and antagonized his political enemies for the past decade. The fact that a large media company is at least signaling an awareness of the problem likely means that other large companies will be signaling an awareness too. That will change the calculus.
A detail worth noting in the monologue he's being fired over, which I have no idea how much it mattered in the official machinery behind the scenes in this and which I'm reasonably certain will not matter in its narrative fallout, but which was the primary outrage animating the cancellation campaign:
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"
This was on Monday (Sept 15th), which was after the bullet engravings were public ("hey fascist! CATCH!", public on Sept 12th) but before the chat transcripts in the indictment were public ("I had enough of his hatred", public on Sept 16th).
In that interval (and perhaps still?), there was a very active and successful misinformation shitstorm on lib social media to frame the available evidence (including, remarkably, "hey fascist! CATCH!") as smoking gun proof that Tyler Robinson was right wing and in particular a groyper, which it's extremely likely that Jimmy Kimmel's writers (and perhaps Kimmel himself) were stewing in.
thejdizzler
2hr ago
I will definitely do this November/December this year when I am not training hard. It is helpful when training to have stuff tell me when to chill out and when I can put in work.
pigeonburger
2hr ago
The viewership has decreased, but many people still find these shows to be a comfy way to unwind at the end of the day.
Ultimately, though, that is pretty much the reason why these hosts are being cancelled. It's become clear to top execs since last november that Trump's supporters, even if they can't see them in their filter bubbles, are real people that exist and are not consuming their product. Late Night shows are supposed to be comfy, to everyone. Sure, the efforts they had done to be fairer since the election, on their own, wouldn't be enough to bring back Republicans, not for a few years at least. But when these media execs see one of their star hosts saying very un-comfy things about half the country, what's going through their mind is probably some variation on "No fucking wonder they want nothing to do with us!"
anti_dan
2hr ago
This whole thing seems semi-delusional in a delusions of grandeur sort of way. He has this whole theory of politics that elevates his quirky specialty to near-magical status, and then applies that theory is a way most flattering to his own political preferences. The right having a well funded and tightly organized right wing in 2011? Is he talking about Rush Limbaugh and Fox News? Two voices yelling into a hurricane of leftist media that was slowly ceding ground at the time to leftist social media?
Its all way too much and I don't find it accurate or prescient. Just kinda silly. It is after all basically the writings of a college professor in his elder years after several decades spent in a bubble of university leftism.
ccc
2hr ago
Mother makes you feel safe, validates your feelings, takes care of your needs.
Father makes you feel weak, pushes you to become stronger, protects you from threats.
Neither are bad, both are required for a complete person. One could say that western culture has been overindexing on the motherly side lately. Personally I'd say both are lacking in the broader culture and so we have more broken people now than ever.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2hr ago
This is not a primary resource, but I found it informative for the things he did “offline”:
https://scholarstage.substack.com/p/bullets-and-ballots-the-legacy-of
Charlie Kirk was not just a piece of internet bombast; his main field of action, in fact, was not on the internet. Kirk was one of the most effective institution-builders and coalition-crafters in the United States. He was less an influencer than a power broker; everyone in MAGAland acknowledged the leadership role he played in building and holding together Trump’s coalition
TPUSA was a leadership incubator for a generation of conservative activists. His success with TPUSA made him a favorite of the Republican donor class. His show gave him a ready excuse to interview politicians, think tankers, and media personalities across the right. All of this gave Kirk an impeccable Rolodex—he had access to a vast network of conservatives who mattered and an unerring eye for up-and-comers who should matter. He was constantly connecting politicians with donors, statesmen with staffers, and media outfits with the next brilliant young producer or marketer. There are a good four dozen people in the Trump administration who owe their appointments to an introduction Kirk made on their behalf—and this was true not only of the Trump administration, but also across Congress, in state governments, and in news agencies like Fox News.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2hr ago
I would take that bet and call it easy money. Brian Thompson was never the target of a proper Two Minutes Hate prior to his death. Kirk was for a decade. There's rationales and justifications (The CEO will be replaced before his blood is cold, whereas Kirk is a critical, load-bearing propogandist for young men!), but at the end of the day lefties know and hate the face of only one of those men.
BoneDrained
2hr ago
His statement seems literally true: many MAGA-types were indeed desperately trying to portray the murderer as having anti-MAGA, pro-trans politics. Just because they were likely correct doesn't mean this couldn't be an interesting observation about the need to tribalize; us-versus-them; one of you did a bad thing. Kimmel wasn't making this criticism and was instead implying likely false things of the shooter, but I don't think the FCC should be pressuring Disney here. I think both Kimmel and Carr displayed poor judgment. There's some more context of the segment described at https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/what-did-jimmy-kimmel-say-jimmy-kimmel-live-pre-empted/3989961/
Even before this event I had been thinking on whether 'late show' hosts were just a redundant dying breed now.
The original idea was that broadcast channels needed to fill airtime after their big, expensive shows finished airing, right? Kids are probably in bed, audience is getting sleepy and winding down. Need some 'light' entertainment that isn't costly to produce and flexible, mostly unscripted. Get a guy that's good at improv, interviews, and generally is charismatic, line up popular guests, give them a band, stuff a live audience in there.
Now, of course, people can watch whatever television programs they want, whenever, as late as they want. Livestreamers put on low-cost, light entertainment programs tailored to exactly whatever audience they target.
Okay, celebrity interviews are still kind of exclusive, but there's many other outlets for those too now.
At this point, a host would need to be particularly talented in some way to capture audiences attention from whatever else they could be watching. Or have an extremely loyal audience. I'm not saying they go away now, but maybe the format has to change a lot, and they're no longer the cultural force with the ability to demand high salaries anymore.
Only time I watch late shows these days is if I'm in a hotel and they charge money for internet service. Then I can flip on the TV and 'channel surf' (man, remember that?) to see if they're doing anything interesting.
On the other hand, shows that have LONG outlived their relevance (IMHO) like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are going pretty strong.
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