[centrally-unplanned]

Grimly hilarious at this point how consistently major protest activity is actively negative for a cause, just an own-goal for one's brand and any concrete goals... unless it is bailed out of that fact by the opposition committing completely unforced errors in response to the protest at which points things can equal out. "Seems like the winning move" etc etc

[yesiamabot]

Grimly hilarious at this point how consistently major protest activity is actively negative for a cause, just an own-goal for one's brand and any concrete goals…

Huh? I am truly baffled what would have led you to think this.

[centrally-unplanned]

I am going to bet (polls are still very preliminary, so while they point this way you can't rely on them) that the median voter will find events in LA have bolstered the case for mass deportations and improved their view of the Trump administration (until the other side of the coin ofc, which you didn't quote so I will ignore for now). And that the Trump administration will both be more emboldened and also be able to utilize that improved public opinion for more expansive action. If your goal is "reduce ICE deportations" in some way, shape, or form, these events were quite bad for that case.

[trainbrain27]

"These people are dangerous!" is a much easier sell when you have dangerous people doing dangerous things.

[centrally-unplanned]

Exactly - it isn't particularly fair, because a country of 300 million people is gonna have a story a day of violence you can blast out no matter how safe it, and I doubt the median person committing violence even is an immigrant versus a simple opportunist. But none of that changes that looting a downtown storefront as a "protest" is something the Trump admin is euphoric over happening, and wipes out whatever impact the 99% peaceful other protests may have had (which was probably zero, but still).

[yesiamabot]

I remain highly skeptical of this framing. What's the null hypothesis, here? I'd say it's that Trump will continue to step up deportation as per his policy goal to do so. The fact that even you say that the impact of the "99% peaceful" protests "was probably zero" reads like a concession of that.

[centrally-unplanned]

Grimly hilarious at this point how consistently major protest activity is actively negative for a cause, just an own-goal for one's brand and any concrete goals... unless it is bailed out of that fact by the opposition committing completely unforced errors in response to the protest at which points things can equal out. "Seems like the winning move" etc etc

[yesiamabot]

Grimly hilarious at this point how consistently major protest activity is actively negative for a cause, just an own-goal for one's brand and any concrete goals…

Huh? I am truly baffled what would have led you to think this.

[afloweroutofstone]

It's difficult to quantify, especially since something of this sort has been happening gradually over the last several decades now, but I feel like the number of Americans who are fundamentally removed from reality has skyrocketed in the last five years specifically

[kficc]

[yesiamabot]

something something exposure therapy

[myfootyrthroat]

If you're in the National Guard and think you're being ordered to take unconstitutional actions, the GI Rights hotline is confidential and can help: 1-877-447-4487.

Are you in the military or thinking about joining? Are you unsure of where to get reliable answers? Call the GI Rights Hotline at 1-877-447-

[tinkerbitch69]

Are they ‘trauma dumping’ or are they just discussing their life experience and you are such an asshole that you can’t stand to be confronted with information that makes you uncomfortable for 0.005 seconds???

[tinkerbitch69]

Like it is beyond wild to me that it became commonly accepted that the person with trauma who is struggling to cope with it is the one who is ‘in the wrong’ in a situation that could be described as ‘trauma dumping’ gtfo

[soup-mother]

The authors thinly veiled transmisogyny that everyone keeps trying to say is actually awesome genderfuckery for some reason

[soup-mother]

The fandoms thinly veiled transmisogyny

[yesiamabot]

What's does nontransmisogynistic genderfuckery look like? How can transwomen exist in a manner that patriarchy cannot caricaturize?

I don't disagree with the broader point about transmisogyny in media and fandom, but if I was going to let myself be worried about offending people, I wouldn't have gotten on HRT in the first place.

[hemipenal-system]

rent lowering "i really dont care what word transmascs use to describe the ways they're oppressed tbh" gunshot

[lagomorpheme]

:(

[yandere-angela]

if i could i would love to become the pinnacle of health, and never again be burdened with sickness nor ailment nor weakness

[self-loving-vampire]

She is so right.

[official-kircheis]

[regina-bithyniae]

Standard "shows coolest thing ever, says this sucks actually" case for at least two of these.

The Starship Troopers movie is particularly an odd case, partially because the movie is just goofy in general. But it also shows a militaristic dictatorship behaving like they portray themselves as. When there's a military fiasco, the head of the operation publicly resigns and is replaced by someone who declares she will change strategies. And there's no mass campaign of extermination against internal enemies.

This is not what Nazi Germany looked like! Hitler did not resign after the loss of Sixth Army.

40k is also a franchise which takes all sorts of different tones across different installments by different writers, and drawing one single concrete message from it is impossible.

[flakmaniak]

40k is also in a superposition of joking and sincerely badass; if you can't appreciate it on both levels, you won't enjoy it! The fact that it DOESN'T have contempt for itself in that... Hard-to-describe way, is one of the things that's so-cool about it! That it can have a lot of humorous aspects, a lot of things that are parody-ish, and yet...

It's just... When people act like "is the Imperium good or bad?" is some important thing to Address... There's all this aesthetic richness there, on which we ought to be gorging ourselves, and some people are too-busy ritualistically declaring the Imperium bad, as if not doing so were some kind of... Heresy!

[yesiamabot]

Beyond that, there's simply the sad fact that sometimes cool things suck; sometimes thing that suck are cool. On some level, it's dishonest to pretend otherwise. "Shows coolest thing ever, says this sucks actually" can be an informative observation, but it doesn't stand as a criticism.

Also: the Starship Troopers movie drew from fascist imagery and portrayed a fascist society, but the target of a 1999 film's critique was the half-a-century defeated Nazi Germany, but the outrageous militancy of... President Bill Clinton's government. Operation Deliberate Force and such. Resigning after a military fiasco is believable for that one.

(And WH40k was, originally, mocking Thatcher's government.)

[max1461]

I simultaneously think that 2010s political correctness went too far and also that it was necessary as a step in the dialectic to improve the previously existing culture. Like, pendulum swings one way, pendulum swings the other, but each swing leaves its mark. I genuinely believe that (Anglophone) society is less misogynistic and racist now than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and that's thanks in no small part to all the social justice warrior shit, and that's a good thing, and also a bunch of basically innocent people were caught in the blast radius and got fired from their jobs for problematic tweets or whatever and this is pretty bad. Unfortunately this is just how change works, nothing happens cleanly. I'm not making an "ends justify the means" argument so much as a "well all said and done I think the moral calculus has come out in the black, whether or not there might have been a better way to achieve that".

[self-winding]

I realize there's a lot of subjectivity in this but I feel like things are worse now than they were 10 or 15 years ago and I think that's due in large part to the culture wars arms race and both sides responding to aggression with escalation.

[liskantope]

I kinda-sorta agree with Max, and I definitely agree with self-winding, and I'm not sure these two perspectives are at all contradictory.

[centrally-unplanned]

The median voter is 10% less racist while the median conservative is 50% more insane culture warrior, both seem true!

Though I do think the history of the social justice movement is such that it banked most of this progress by ~2015 and it has been actively negative since then. After all, it isn't actually gone! The bad apple actors are still kicking, you just talk to em less.

[mitigatedchaos]

I don't think that the median voter is actually 10% less racist than they were in 2014 anyway, or would have been in 2024 without Social Justice.

As for the conservatives, their behavior makes more sense if you use a different model.

Most "normal" liberals use a linear, additive model for the harms caused by left-identitarian illiberalism 2014-2024.

It's just blue-only statements in university hiring. It's just a period of unusually high, unfiltered mass immigration. It's just identitarian shaming in mainstream media outlets. It's just a little racial rationing of healthcare - and that was mostly defeated in the courts anyway!

But conservatives aren't thinking about it in those terms. The outputs of the university system, like scientific research and lawyers, are inputs into the court system. The outputs of immigration norms are inputs into the electoral system.

The effects are multiplicative, not additive, and each step has the result of reducing their control over the political system, and reducing their ability to turn votes into favorable-to-them policy.

Whether it's "intentional" or not is only relevant if that makes it easier to stop. That gets into my broader critique of 2014-2024 Democrats as too rigid, and their opinions too uniform.

Offering the Republicans a deal would mean demonstrating the will and ability to enforce the terms of that deal on other Democrats.

[zexreborn]

I mean, yeah, *the entire idea* is to stop Republicans from having the power to hurt Democratic constituencies, which is to say, hurt Democrats. SJ was not shy about admitting this, and any of its excesses can be laid squarely at the feet of racists and homophobes, who provoked the left's reactionary turn in the first place.

There is no deal on the table because *Republicans* are incapable of holding the hateful members of their coalition to the terms of a deal. The kumbayah, everyone is happy social accord was on the table at any point along the line for gay rights - perhaps the right could have laid down its cultural arms pre-Stonewall, or maybe when we were dying by the dozens in San Francisco hospitals. But they didn't, and they won't, because the republicans have never in their entire history, and the American right too, surrendered a scintilla of privilege without people like the SJWs forcing them to.

It is impossible to maintain objectivity when you say things like 'Cancel culture is a condition that is completely unreasonable for someone to endure' but I guess 'Getting fired from your job for being trans or living next to a toxic waste dump because you're black' is an acceptable feature of a morally neutral moral order. Some conservatives lost their jobs. Boo fucking hoo. Some conservatives were disrespected by the medial. Boo fucking hoo. I'm even sympathetic to try to fix the excesses - a lot of them are totally unnecssary for what SJ was/is trying to achieve - but to pretend like the things conservatives endured were so *bad*, they just *had to seize control of school board and federal agencies so they could start making trans kids' childhoods miserable is risible. SJ is a tempest in a teapot compared to the resentment Trump and allies are fostering in the the oppressed members of the American people. And when it explodes, conservatives will look around at each other and say 'what an unprovoked assault on the natural order.' Just like they always do. (It's why they always lose).

[st-just]

Politely - I actually think the literal explicit neo-nazis might be ever-so-slightly worse?

[self-loving-vampire]

Not a fan of how much trans discourse these days is just 2010s Gender Wars: Essentialism Strikes Back.

[self-loving-vampire]

It would be nice if we could just have actual gender abolition sometime.

[scribefindegil]

Everyone is so weird about people who cry easily. Fellas, is it evil and manipulative to *checks notes* have an involuntary stress response?

[bluishorange]

actually a coworker of mine said something interesting about this. I was saying that I truly can’t help how easily I cry, and I hate when people assume I do it on purpose.

and he paused for a second and then said, “when you’ve been taught from a young age that crying is weak and you should train yourself never to cry for any reason, you assume that everyone else has trained themselves too, so anyone who cries has to be doing it on purpose. it took me a long time to realize that wasn’t true.”

listen we’re never gonna run out of ways the patriarchy hurts all of us.

[luxar92]

Catgirl Model 90

*taps the hood* This beauty can buster-only all Mega Man games.

Posted using PostyBirb