I actually like this new trend of holding the president accountable for his actions. I hope this new trend continues after the unpopular president leaves.
I follow dozens of people online ranging from centrists to communists to alt-right to libertarians, and I haven’t seen a single person who supports the latest strikes on Syria. But all of them have been posting articles about how worrying it is that “the mainstream” supports the strikes.
I’m really curious what I’m unintentionally selecting for here.
I follow dozens of people online ranging from centrists to communists to alt-right to libertarians, and I haven’t seen a single person who supports the latest strikes on Syria. But all of them have been posting articles about how worrying it is that “the mainstream” supports the strikes.
Who is this mainstream and what are they doing?
Brian Williams waxing poetic about American destroyers launching missiles into Syria on national television. Hillary Clinton supporting airstrikes on Syrian airbases before they happened.
I understand that having your field constantly mocked for being arcane and boring is unpleasant, but can you please not do the same to other people? For the love of every fucking god ever to walk this blighted earth, you’d think it’d be obvious that the weirdoes need to stick together.
but nooooooo, clearly anyone who can Do Maths is superior and anyone who says “art is very important to most people” in slightly imprecise terms is Wrong.
Unless you want to live in a fucking stone cube with no decoration and eat soylent for every meal, art is fucking essential.
@ me next time.
I have no problem with people who can’t do math. But I don’t feel bad about holding people to unreasonable standards of well-roundedness when they assert that their favorite corner of human experience is equivalent to humanity itself. I suppose a true polymath may indeed call me out on this, but I strongly doubt that any true polymath would be running around asserting the superior human-ness of a single specific field in the first place.
In any case, the original article isn’t even about “art”, in the sense of what most people would consider to be missing from a stone cube, and which does include, as pointed out, such diverse works as fashion, music, movies, video games, furniture design,
international technical symbols, the patterns on shampoo bottles,
cooking, typography, and hentai doujins. (And not just because many of the actual stone cubes we have today are entirely the fault of artists, and the governments and large institutions that backed brutalist architecture.) It’s about “the arts” and cutting the funding they get from the United States government.
While it should be obvious that there’s a pretty hard limit on just how subversive anything that gets funding from the United States government can actually be, the author doesn’t want to admit that it’s in service of a power-that-is that they happen to side with, and so equivocates the defunding of a government arts program with the active suppression of art (by, for example, mass executions) that people would otherwise create on their own, state funding or not.
And indeed, people do create a lot of art on their own, without state funding. Every form of art you mention to emphasis the importance of art only argues against the National Endowment for the Arts, because if people can create all of that without government funding, then how important can the NEA possibly be? Not important at all, unless you want to protect art from influence of the regime, in which case, getting government money out of the arts should be something you’re entirely on board with.
Much of the “subversive” art is highly overrated, buying into existing boring narratives already approved by factions that have existed for a long time, and I’m beginning to wonder about an Alt Righter’s claim that modern art is actually some kind of tax avoidance scheme.
If the government is going to fund art, it should be art that people actually LIKE and as such benefit the nation, not deliberately insulting and confusing pretentiousness. The other suitable role is to preserve elements of our cultural heritage, such as historic buildings. This isn’t like materials science where pushing the cutting edge improves our standard of living.
In other words, government-funded art should be unironically pleasant.
Why are you so sure airstrikes in Syria are bad? I personally don't like them either, but I can see the logic - that threatening to hit anyone who crosses a line may make Assad/ISIS wary of crossing that line - and while I don't *think* that works that well (e.g. Libya), I also think Hillary Clinton knows more than me about geopolitics and wouldn't be very confident about disagreeing with her.
See, that’s the whole thing: every single time we’re contemplating an entanglement in the Middle East, it looks like there’s a humanitarian justification and a really good reason. I supported involvement in Libya, because it looked like a clear-cut case where a little involvement could do a lot of good. And instead what happened is that Libya is in an unstable state of ongoing conflict and much worse off than before. This happens every time. I no longer trust ‘I can see the logic”. Even when I can see the logic, this happens. Even when I find the logic really convincing, this happens.
Every time we bomb places in the Middle East without a long term plan, it ends up worse than if we had just not done that. Every time. When do we just internalize the lesson ‘don’t bomb places hoping it’ll make things better, even when you have a good reason?’ Because that’s the lesson it’ll take to end the foreign interventions.
I think Clinton values the lives of people in poor countries less than me; she might be rational given her goals. Though she was an architect of the Libya mess, so maybe she’s not even that.
I’m reading testosterone rex and it is making me think about EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
I have not read much of any real evopsych so I don’t know how much it does, but I feel like to be good evolutionary psychology needs to engage with the following things:
(1) Humans are an intensely cultural species. One of the things we have evolved is the ability to adopt different social and sexual practices based on what culture we’re part of: this is, for instance, part of why our childhoods are so long. We see an astonishing amount of sexual diversity in different cultures. Probably some amount of it is Adaptive and some amount of it is Using Evolved Drives For Purposes That Would Make Evolution Tear Its Hair Out.
(2) Humans are very K-selected! Probably the MOST K-selected species! Fine does a good job of showing that human males do not behave in the way we’d expect males to behave in a more r-selected species but why would anyone think humans are r-selected in the first place. but like human babies require the efforts of like three adults to be raised to adulthood and if your theory of human sexual selection leaves aside where the investment to raise the child is going to come from it is a Bad Theory imo. this is why I like the “human women live past menopause to help provide care to their grandchildren” hypothesis
(3) Concealed????? ovulation????????
> when you get caught concealed ovulating without a license
so what’s the general point of the latest bout of cuckscourse, anyway? ojst talks about cuck fetishim in a cringey way it’s easy to make fun of? ojst gets cuck fetishim wrong or oversimplified? ojst is actively harmful by not giving due attention to the racial aspects of cuck fetishim?
all of the above depending on who you talk to, plus the fact that most people find the concept of cucks intrinsically hilarious for reasons that are actually way more problematic than any sex positive comic; y’all should be ashamed of yourselves.
Intuitively I let furries, various shippers, BDSM, certain Tumblr users you may know, etc etc slide partly from tolerance and partly from Mutually Assured Kink Destruction. (LGBT fine too but doesn’t qualify as kink, etc etc.)
Cuckldry though, makes me feel like they have no self-respect at all? Which maybe isn’t true, but I don’t feel that way about male BDSM submissive types which is the closest analogue I can think of.
So yeah I’m probably a little bit problematic, but you already knew that.
The “war is good for the economy” meme just won’t die, even among people who should know better.
All we need to do is blow up Europe again, and also China and Japan and every other country with significant industrial capacity, and we’ll be good to go for another two or three decades.
I can actually see a possible argument here:
“War destroys an enormous amount of value in the form of lives wasted, resources burned, and infrastructure destroyed, but it can also break a political deadlock and allow reallocation of production within the economy that leads to increased efficiency after the war, as well as smoothing the way for redistribution programs to ex-soldiers that reduce inequality and boost demand.”
Like, maybe? But the fuckin’ annoying thing is that killing a few million people and sending millions of tons of shipping to the bottom of the Atlantic is a very indirect way of passing legislation and it would be nice to just do it directly.
Actually I meant that America was one of the very few countries with significant industrial capacity that had not been hit by strategic bombing campaigns reducing major cities to rubble. As such, it had a major competitive advantage in the aftermath of the war.
Most of the rival countries destroyed were already economically developed beforehand, so the survivors were able to reconstruct their advanced economies, which represented monumental growth - but only relative to the conditions caused by the war.
Can someone please give Bannon a magical shield to protect Trump from the NeoCons
Clearly he isn’t powerful enough to turn Trump into the Fuhrer, so technically this will count as your good deed for the next 100 years or so for lowering the probability of WW3.
The “war is good for the economy” meme just won’t die, even among people who should know better.
All we need to do is blow up Europe again, and also China and Japan and every other country with significant industrial capacity, and we’ll be good to go for another two or three decades.
it’s just two-dimensional chess, played for position
This makes sense if you assume the goal was to establish the credibility of future military threats, which is reasonable 2D international relations chess. Previous Trump strategies (gambits?) have involved relatively extreme opening offers followed by negotiating down to something more in line with the original plan.
Yeah, I’m gonna blame meritoracy for this. He won, therefore he must be brilliant. Why, if brilliance doesn’t always win, maybe it’s not possible to build a super-intelligent AI that can save the world.
Russian forces were notified in advance of the strike using the
established deconfliction line. U.S. military planners took precautions
to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the
airfield.
We are assessing the results of the strike. Initial indications are
that this strike has severely damaged or destroyed Syrian aircraft and
support infrastructure and equipment at Shayrat Airfield, reducing the
Syrian Government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons. The use of
chemical weapons against innocent people will not be tolerated.
Hmn…
In her first interview since her stunning presidential election defeat by Republican rival Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton on Thursday called for the United States to bomb Syrian air fields.
…
Asked whether she now believes that failing to take a tougher stand against Syria was her worst foreign policy mistake as secretary of state under President Barack Obama, Clinton said she favored more aggressive action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“I think we should have been more willing to confront Assad,” Clinton said in the interview, conducted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
“I really believe we should have and still should take out his air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them.”
Clinton noted that she had advocated for a no-fly zone in Syria after leaving government, something that Obama opposed.
So, which timeline doesn’t result in this attack? And did we perhaps luck out on this one, in that Trump merely picked vehicles located at only one facility to strike?
Although based on Russian reactions my temporary spike in estimated risk of nuclear war has subsided.
<bambamramfan discussing lackluster enthusiasm among people for Liberalism vs harder ideologies>
I think part of the challenge here is that Liberalism has to ignore certain truths, which, like the careful balance of an immune system, is okay when an animal is healthy, but becomes a serious problem when it becomes unhealthy. So yes, there are ideological contradictions, but those only come out when the system is under stress.
Genes matter. Even just the difference in lactose tolerance can make a difference in some cases (though not much in the developed world), even if the other stuff is heavily confounded and is probably more driven by the environment than by genetics.
Culture matters. Not everything that is bad is outside the realm of culture. FGM is cultural. Cultural tolerance as a virtue is cultural.
Religion matters. The content of the instructions in a religion has an effect on the behavior of religious adherents, much like the content of the Communist Manifesto has an effect on the behavior of Communists.
Atomic Individualism is not what humans are “designed” for. We actually have to live in societies and cannot all hole up into libertarian autarchic fortresses which are immune to changes in the broader society’s culture and ideology.
When the various groups under Liberalism are sufficiently close, this can all be glossed over, and generally is in order to suppress racism, xenophobia, and so on. The typical example of violence driven by fighting about genes/culture/religion attacks someone who hasn’t done anything personally.
However, the same ideological tools used to suppress this bad behavior also prevent dealing with larger risks that loom on the horizon. You cannot have someone saying “Liberalism, except for Islam” - though I’ve seen someone say it quietly - even though the rise of various Ethnonationalists and Nationalists in Europe would probably not be happening if Europe had taken this stance.
Is there any legit reason for my toothpaste to have triclosan (an antibiotic) in it? My understanding is that that usually harms rather than helps at reducing the population of “bad” mouth flora.
I am not a doctor, and this does not constitute medical advice:
As far as I am aware of, no. I would recommend against any use of antibiotics outside of an illness as well.
Personally, I import Sensodyne from the UK, as it contains an ingredient (Novamin) which apparently occludes the dentin and reduces sensitivity (I’ve found it effective in practice). (The US version apparently merely desensitizes the nerves even though it’s sold under the same branding.)
Alcohol will also kill bacteria without the effects of antibiotics, but it’s said to dry out the mouth.
honestly if you call trump anything other than his actual name I immediately start discounting your opinion no matter how much I otherwise agree with you. calling him “drumpf” or “45” or whatever other bullshit you’ve come up with doesn’t like, hurt the trump brand or hurt his feelings in any meaningful way. you’re just being an idiot.
Orange Capitalism Man. The Orange Man. Our First Meme-American President.
- neutral on Trump, calls him other things so left/libs panicking he’ll become the next Fuhrer don’t immediately stop listening
people who are very angry about the phrase “toxic masculinity”: what does the phrase “toxic masculinity” mean to you?
(I would very much appreciate not being super angry/offended in your answer, because the reason I’m confused is that a lot of the times when you guys talk about it I get that you’re really mad but it’s hard to understand why)
Toxic masculinity can be divided into two distinct things:
If you bite a guy and you die, that’s poisonous masculinity.
If a guy bites you and you die, that’s venomous masculinity.
I wouldn’t say I’m very angry, but it annoys me.
I understand it as meaning “being violent, being macho, having an honor culture where you have to avenge slights, being protective/jealous about women, thinking being a sissy is the worst thing in the world, etc”
A small part of my objection is that it can have a bailey of “in various ways that stereotypically-masculine behaviors/norms differ from stereotypically-feminine behaviors/norms, the stereotypically masculine ones are toxic and the stereotypically feminine ones are good.” It seems to me that there are dichotomies like individualism rather than communalism, stoicism rather than emotion, nonconformism rather than conformism, assertiveness rather than submissiveness, dignity rather than not-caring-about-dignity, a feeling of responsibility to protect others versus looking out for yourself - that it would be really easy to map onto toxic masculinity if you wanted. I’m not saying that if I phrase it as “assertiveness rather than submissiveness” anyone would read that phrase and so “oh, that’s bad, it’s toxic masculinity”. I’m saying that in real life there are ambiguous behaviors which, if you’re being assertive when someone else wants you to be submissive, they can round it off to “macho aggressiveness” and accuse you of toxic masculinity, and so have a social superweapon behind them..
But a bigger part is just that the whole phrase seems calculated to maximally offend and marginalize men. Imagine that everyone used the phrase “toxic femininity” to refer to causing drama,
being overly emotional,
gossiping, being weak, insisting other people take care of you, and other stereotypically feminine-coded bad behaviors - but there was no such phrase as “toxic masculinity” and people would get horribly offended if you tried to invent it. To me this would seem obviously calculated to pathologize women and identify the whole essence of being feminine with extreme versions of negative stereotypes. Well….
I get this, and I can see why the hypocrisy is galling, but actually instead of less context (swapping masculinity for femininity and seeing if we still like the logic), I reach my conclusion by adding more context.
Toxic masculinity really is worse than toxic femininity. Violence is worse than gossip. Like on one hand we have the evil of Abigail from the Crucible, but on the other hand we have… war.
I’m extremely anti-masculine because even as a man I can step back and say “masculinity has caused way, way too many deaths.” Aggression is bad for the self and very bad for the people who get stepped on, and yet it’s a degenerate and dominant strategy in our social and economic model.
Unfortunately, because “acting like a cliche man” is so advantageous, the real risk is an ideology that latches onto to the particulars of “being a man” as the problem and copies the behavior, thinking it can be purified if done by someone else.
So what you get is people harassing men in a confrontational manner, using all the tools of masculine aggression, but thinking it’s not toxic masculinity because it’s done by a woman (or by a group of people including some men, but who say they are doing it on behalf of women.)
And at it’s worse, the phrase “toxic masculinity” seems part of that memeplex, whereby we take the worst behaviors of man-world and legitimize them so long as they are being done by people we are calling not-masculine.
It must be acknowledged the role that straight neurotypical women have in reinforcing these behaviors. If they weren’t successful in the dating scene, if cishet nt women did not flock to currently high status men and shun currently low status men, regardless of how that status was obtained, if fewer of them fled at vulnerability and other feminine-coded behaviors, then the behavior of straight neurotypical men would change in response.
Instead straight men often seem to hold the idea that if they are not strong, if they are not masculine, if they are not successful, they will not be loved.
And realistically we know it isn’t going to happen. The real thing that undermines it will be the total gender meltdown under Transhumanism as millions of men and women flee their roles or carve out new ones more suited to themselves.
If the current attraction model and sexual liberalism are to be kept, then people have to acknowledge the consequences instead of heaping it all on one gender.
So the web history thing is a fishing expedition, but’s a known thing for congress to exempt themselves from things like healthcare laws or insider trading rules or whatever, so it isn’t an entirely ungrounded assumption.
Basically don’t call people “cucks“. Don’t be surprised when people react badly to being called “cucks“. Don’t try to reclaim “cuck“ by telling other people that being cuckolded is a good thing.
the battle will be lost when cuck replaces fag as the generic disparagement term of choice for 15 year old boys.
By the year 2035, it is common slang for “acting against one’s own self-interest”. Puffed up thinkpiece writers write on the virtue of enviro-cuckism and a hundred other causes.
on whatever has replaced Tumblr, debates still rage over whether it’s okay for anyone to use this reclaimed slur, or if you have to be a cuck yourself.
This discussion intensifies following the release of the first cuckbot, which exists solely to raise male status by getting cucked. Female cuckbots for women are soon released. Sales of conventional sex robots dwindle.
Basically don’t call people “cucks“. Don’t be surprised when people react badly to being called “cucks“. Don’t try to reclaim “cuck“ by telling other people that being cuckolded is a good thing.
the battle will be lost when cuck replaces fag as the generic disparagement term of choice for 15 year old boys.
By the year 2035, it is common slang for “acting against one’s own self-interest”. Puffed up thinkpiece writers write on the virtue of enviro-cuckism and a hundred other causes.
on whatever has replaced Tumblr, debates still rage over whether it’s okay for anyone to use this reclaimed slur, or if you have to be a cuck yourself.
This discussion intensifies following the release of the first cuckbot, which exists solely to raise male status by getting cucked. Female cuckbots for women are soon released. Sales of conventional sex robots dwindle.
Basically don’t call people “cucks“. Don’t be surprised when people react badly to being called “cucks“. Don’t try to reclaim “cuck“ by telling other people that being cuckolded is a good thing.
the battle will be lost when cuck replaces fag as the generic disparagement term of choice for 15 year old boys.
By the year 2035, it is common slang for “acting against one’s own self-interest”. Puffed up thinkpiece writers write on the virtue of enviro-cuckism and a hundred other causes.
You’re just at the edge of the abyss, it goes so much deeper, dare you heed the call of the depths
Oh Argumate, you innocent nocturnal predatory bird, I am far from innocent myself, but there is a reason I hold my own cards close to my chest. Some things should be tolerated but not celebrated. Some things should be secret.
“Oh my goodness” is an affectation. :)
Edit: special note: the secret is not cuckolding, in case you read this as implying so, gentle readers.
Oh my goodness, I thought the Alt Right was making this up somehow!
Oh my goodness, I may have to draw a reaction image.
This is like… they just walked right into it, more than walked, like a cat bounding straight into a glass door with a leap. I’m trying not to react but I can’t help it.
(”Straight men have a thing for women, it’s terrible! They pigeonhole them as either submissive delicate flowers or raging tough bitches and exotify them in ways which contribute to an oppressive culture of-” oh wait that’s Asian women, sorry got my stereotype stereotypes mixed up there for a second).
I mean that’s kind of true according to that frame without the readjustment to a subgroup at the end. There are people that treat male heterosexuality like it is some sort of perverse and oppressive kink for itself, and that’s before we get into “everyone is secretly bi” territory.
all these immortality people are in like their 20s max. you’re physically in your prime and you’ve been cognizant for less than a fourth of the total time you can expect to live. incredible hubris
What, that they might make it this time, or that they should? Because it isn’t particularly arrogant to not want to die.
Tried to get a twitter account, and about four seconds after signing up it was “We’ve detected some suspicious activity, can we have your phone number?“
Fuck no, twitter
“Aw, come now Squiddy honey-baby, you wouldn’t mind providing your number to lil’ ol’ me, would you?” - Twitter, probably
Ain’t nobody gettin my number, I resent the very existence of phones.
Good. I saw Twitter collecting over eleven thousand phone numbers at a bar the other night. Can’t trust a woman corporation like that.
Just so you know, we haven’t hit the weirdest part of the timeline yet, where brain scanning technology is used to download tulpas from people’s brains into waiting android bodies.
That is, of course, before they start going insane and homicidal, but the brief moment between culture shock and sci-fi horror is interesting to say the least.
Poor dude got bitten by a spider and now flesh eating bacteria has claimed both his legs and possibly his arms as well; it’s shit like this that gives Australia a bad name.
The Alt-Right has convinced me that Australia is a (((plot))) to hide the real Oceania from White Americans, and The Crocodile Hunter was filmed on a soundstage in Arizona.
In this strange timeline, we may somehow end up at war with North Korea, though of all the American wars in decades, at least that would make some modicum of sense.
You call it dumb, but the Mexican government is sending out information about how to get through our immigration system, so clearly they actually are operating on those ideas. So does the government of China, to a degree. It’s actually pretty normal. And as for the institutions, I will never get over the Left’s blind faith that institutions are totally not fragile, you guys, and there is no reason to worry about them.
I was talking about my republican father about immigration. He flat out said he cares more about Americans than non Americans and that horrified me. Like… I’m not extrapolating this from some other position he holds, he literally said those words.
I asked him what made Americans so morally relevant. Perhaps he thinks Americans have a greater capacity for feeling pain and should be protected more because of that? Perhaps non Americans are automatically evil?? He said no, it’s because he is an American. He said also that it sucks when a player from another baseball team gets hit in the head with a baseball but when somebody from his favorite team gets hit in the head it’s a tragedy.
This is so hard for me to understand, like… they’re both people!
Also, it can’t just be that he thinks people with more in common with him are more worth preserving. Like, he would definitely have more in common with a truck driving poker fan in Belgium than a black punk rocker communist in America. I should point this out to him next time.
Arrrrrgh whyyyyyyyy
tribalism is a thing, group membership is still important
anyway we know the drill: arrange a Martian invasion, unite humanity against it!
Ok but how is a country a group even it’s just a bunch of people who happen to be born in the same spot
Why doesn’t he feel more tribalism with poker players worldwide the way I do with rationalists worldwide (and even then I don’t think we matter more than other people when it comes to quality of life!)
DiscoursedRome had a lot of good stuff to add in response to this, but also:
If a nation fails to maintain a sufficiently large core of people who are willing to kill and die for it, it will cease to be a nation. These people must be willing to kill those who, outside of a war, would not deserve it.
For instance, do you think most of the men fighting in the Iraqi Army during the invasion of Kuwait deserved to die? Most of them were there through fear, probably coerced. The same would be true of a Communist invasion. For North Korea, one can argue that even if they’re brainwashed into it, no one deserves to be brainwashed. And sometimes, people that would otherwise be normal will fight to the death during a war out of loyalty or ideology.
That isn’t to say that you can’t do anything about this. The US Army deliberately targeted armored vehicles rather than light infantry and took many prisoners during the first war with Iraq, in part because they knew the men would surrender.
But if some dictator took over Mexico and formed an army of conscripts moving north, bent on human wave attacks, then you have to be willing to kill at least some of them who didn’t deserve to be in a conscript army, or you will lose territory.
Of course, having this capability means having the ability to misuse it, which is why I will never forgive the NeoCons.
There are other things like this as well. There are criminals, terrorists, ideologies with higher numbers of terrorists, foreign agents, dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, elements that would politically undermine democracy, and so on. Then there are incentive problems with open borders, in that if people aren’t at least somewhat glued to a location, they have less incentive to take care of it. There are issues with the fragility of cultures, institutions, and moral norms.
If the entirety of Earth were made up of the LW diaspora this wouldn’t be as much of an issue, but it isn’t.
Tried to get a twitter account, and about four seconds after signing up it was “We’ve detected some suspicious activity, can we have your phone number?“
Fuck no, twitter
“Aw, come now Squiddy honey-baby, you wouldn’t mind providing your number to lil’ ol’ me, would you?” - Twitter, probably
