General politics thread (was: General U.S. politics thread)

lrdgck

I feel I should have replied when 14w posted about child modelling.

fourteenwings

We don't need any more confirmation of your perv status gacek.

Though maybe you can enlighten everyone on the whole pretty and white but also basically living in a 2.5th world country status that has made places like the the Czech Republic (and uh, Hungary...?) the #1 place for Content Production. That is, in terms of how this NYT article failed to profile those sorts of families considering there are a lot more of them than Australians or Americans, and they appear to have less moral qualms about etc thanks to the whole poverty thing.

I've even come across this sort of thing in professional modelling because the stuff that the DSUQUARED2 twins post publicly as part of their 'fashion campaigns' (0:13) clearly shows that they have significant undue influence over their models (typically plucked from obscurity in Eastern Europe). Again there remain many incentives to not speak out about this stuff.

Anyways, you guys got me and GMH's opinions on this thing, and I'm always glad to bring up stuff that bristles GMH since I do learn a bit more than I knew about whatever, but I doubt it'll do any good to argue this specific issue further.

glennmagusharvey

Personally I find child beauty pageants to be a load of shit. Just not one that I'm personally much acquainted with.

lrdgck

Though maybe you can enlighten everyone on the whole pretty and white but also basically living in a 2.5th world country status that has made places like the the Czech Republic (and uh, Hungary...?) the #1 place for Content Production. That is, in terms of how this NYT article failed to profile those sorts of families considering there are a lot more of them than Australians or Americans, and they appear to have less moral qualms about etc thanks to the whole poverty thing.

Well, I'll be disappointing since I have no idea. I don't think it's poverty though. (I guess?) Poverty may lead you to become a prostitute in Berlin, or a mail-order bride, but not really to set up an onlyfans account. That requires a certain amount of cultural capital you're not endowed with when you're born to poverty. But in the end, I'm merely speculating here, so, who knows.

Unless you mean the other kind of Content Production, which is for some reason big in Czech and Hungary and you can probably find a bunch of good write-ups on the origin and development of the industry there, but I haven't been interested in the topic so I can't point you to any, unfortunately.

fourteenwings

Weeks Worth of News (and Other Links but where else would I put them?)

Zionism and Cancel Culture in the Adult Entertainment Industry

I guess following on from that discussion we had, Gay Content Legend Star but also Zionist Guy gets "shamed" by fellow Gay Content people. I swear I don't go looking for this stuff, but it came up on Quillette.

Anyways, in all honesty, it turns out a soldier signed his name to a missile and he reposted it, which is a bit in bad taste when there's an active war going on.

Popular Boston Restaurant Is Under Fire After Direct Messaging, Berating a Customer Who Disputed $250 Cancelation Fee

Speaking of semi-high profile homosexuals, a restaurant owner really got into it in DMs with a guest who had to cancel, which I feel fits with these ridiculously exclusive restaurants.

'Sephora kids' and the booming business of beauty products for children

Beauty influencing leaks into the psyche of 13-15 wait, 7-12 year olds? I literally once watched an episode of As Told By Ginger where her mom banned her from wearing make-up and she did it in secret. Whatever happened to parenting?

I do really wonder about this sophistry where children who really shouldn't be catapulted into being adults are catered to by these companies and they just keep sticking buzzwords into it and nobody cares, but like, welcome to the age of the internet.

Ant geopolitics

Guys, ants are weird.

fourteenwings

It turns out Credit Suisse partly collapsed because of it's dealings with Bulgarian crime rings, so yeah.

fourteenwings

I cannot believe that the universe has come to the point where I agree with GMH that supplying Ukranian neo-Nazis with weapons to fight Russia was a brilliant idea.



But then again I now wonder why Ukraine was living under the threat of competently traind neo Nazis in the first place.

glennmagusharvey

Meanwhile I found and I still find it hard to believe that some people are (still) hesitant at the idea of helping the country being invaded, and/or even apologists for the aggressor country, in a scenario where a country was and still is being blatantly invaded by their neighbor, being bombed day in and day out by said neighbor, in actions that said aggressor had been engaged in at merely a smaller scale for eight years prior to the start of the full-scale war, and then ramped up to a far higher intensity, with callously sending meat waves after meat waves of their own people in blatant attempts at land-grabbing from the country being invaded, and with the stated ideology and intent of wiping the invaded country off the map.

There's also the incidental benefit that neo-Nazis would be among the folks to put their lives on the lines doing something good, namely defending their country from invasion. (Or, if you prefer a colder perspective, the "benefit" that said neo-Nazis might be the ones to die doing so.) A country with a president who is Jewish, no less. I'd argue that that could make a reasonable case for redemption.

fourteenwings

even apologists for the aggressor country

I think being a Russian apologist at this point is really embarrassing since even the realpolitik stance should theoretically be that Russia failed epically at diplomatic efforts. Protip: just buying off the president that otherwise whilst ignoring messaging towards the locals that genuinely puts you in a good light in a country has an actual democracy rarely works.

Basically, the invasion is a (deadly) blunder upon a diplomatic blunder that has been going on for at least 20 years.

I'd argue that that could make a reasonable case for redemption.

Frankly, I really have no idea how you even are an effective National Socialist in 2020, so it was mostly okay.

Speaking of Nazis, something reaaaaal weird happened (there were furries involved).

When Punch a Nazi Goes Wrong

The victim goes by Tye, or Renn, depending on whether he’s in costume as his “Derpy Dergen” character. He’s a filmmaker and longtime participant in the furry fandom who described himself to me as a “Bernie Sanders democratic socialist” when I reached out for comment.

Why, then, have people been calling him a Nazi? The accusations rely, in short, on the behavior of his boyfriend Skaard.

[...]

The tweet pointed to a few key allegations that would return to haunt Skaard repeatedly over the years.

First: his history roleplaying in the video game Garry’s Mod as a “Nazifur” character, which a friend drew for him as a gift in 2017, when he was 20 years old.

And then it just goes on and on and on...

glennmagusharvey

this is why mommy and daddy said to be careful on the internet

fourteenwings

Anyways, I came across this case the other day and I was kind of shocked. To be fair, the officers are all facing the law now. I'm just really surprised nobody like... cares?

‘Goon Squad’ leader and another deputy sentenced for torture of two Black men. Four other ex-officers still face sentencing

Details from the January 24, 2023, incident in Braxton, just southeast of Jackson, eventually came to light after victims Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in June. They alleged the officers illegally entered the home of a woman whom Parker was helping to take care of; handcuffed, kicked, waterboarded and used Tasers on Jenkins and Parker; and attempted to sexually assault them over nearly two hours before Elward put a gun in Jenkins’ mouth and shot him. Many of the claims were later borne out by federal prosecutors in August as the six former officers pleaded guilty.

There's also a separate victim later.

The victim was identified by federal prosecutors in court on Tuesday as Alan Schmidt, who previously told The New York Times the then-deputies pulled him over in December 2022 for an expired tag, only to accuse him of stealing tools.

Schmidt told the Times the “Goon Squad” members assaulted him, beat him and tased him. He said one deputy rubbed his g*nital and buttocks against his head.

Four other officers will face sentencing this week in the federal courthouse in Jackson. All of them pleaded guilty this summer to federal civil rights offenses related to their brutal treatment of Mr. Parker, Mr. Jenkins and a white man, Alan Schmidt, who was assaulted in a separate incident in December 2022.

Frankly, this is way worse than the George Floyd situation in my eyes. I understand that the fact that it's not a race situation probably didn't give it the emotional element this type of "bad cop" story usually thrive, but this is all pretty insane.

Stormtroper

Frankly, this is way worse than the George Floyd situation in my eyes. I understand that the fact that it's not a race situation probably didn't give it the emotional element this type of "bad cop" story usually thrive, but this is all pretty insane.

I think it's less that (after all, those two victims are black, too) and more that George Floyd's death was recorded for all to see.
Edit: wrong word.

fourteenwings

Good point. It's hard to make text go viral.

glennmagusharvey

There's also some randomness to whether a given thing goes viral.

lrdgck

There's also some randomness to whether a given thing goes viral.

Like, the Floyd was the wrong cop choking the wrong dude at the wrong moment. And I'm willing to guess that once something boils over, it takes a while for the pressure to rise up again.

Stormtroper

How did María Corina get away with having a sidekick called Corina Yoris, that's like Luigi and Waluigi-tier bullshit.

lrdgck

Wasn't she, like, recently banned from participating on account of having potentially too many votes compared to the ruling party guy, or something?

lrdgck

Also, me today, passed by two pre-teen kids talking, overhearing a fragment of their conversation:

"Well, communism differs a bit from anarchism..."

Kids these days, I guess?

Stormtroper

lrdgck wrote: »

Wasn't she, like, recently banned from participating on account of having potentially too many votes compared to the ruling party guy, or something?

That's correct, with Corina Yoris being her legal stand-in.

fourteenwings

Kids these days, I guess?

Indeed. In my day, all we talked about was the latest episode of Bakugan: Battle Brawlers.

glennmagusharvey

what's your favorite pokémon?

my favorite is bulbasaur.

fourteenwings

You would like a Pokemon that produces flowers regardless of biological sex*.

(Mine is Prinpiplup, because he kind of looks like the sort that would yell "Mudk*ps will not replace us!!")

*Also is it just me or are Pokemon gender ratios super screwy?

glennmagusharvey

The funniest thing about your comment is that Kingdom Plantae in real life basically gives zero shits about the notion of a gender dichotomy. Some plants have separately-flowering female and male individuals; some plants produce both female and male flowers on the same plant; some plants produce both female and male parts in the same flower; some plants do either of these and can also self-pollinate; some plants even change their sex depending on environmental conditions.

fourteenwings

I hope this is a light barb about my joke rather than a serious response because like, Grade 3 biology mate.

Also is it just me or are Pokemon gender ratios super screwy?

You didn't answer the important question either.

glennmagusharvey

It was just a general observation.

And yeah, I forgot to mention that some of those gender ratios are set the way they are simply to prevent easy breeding of starters.

fourteenwings

I've been thinking a lot about political affiliations lately. A recent New York Times quiz (subblocked, sadly) put me in the (gasp) "moderate" camp somehow.

But what's important today is I found an article by a formerly "soft White-Nationalist" (???) meme-maker guy and...

Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist

tl;dr Sometimes you're the problem.

Basically, he did that thing where you move to a small town to live in conservative utopia, only to realize he also hated all the white people there for being happy with their lives and gossiping...?

To put it bluntly, most of my white neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits. They had no ambition to them, nor any aspirations of greatness. Nor did they think about the world in a dynamic way—the more educated among them certainly stayed informed about the wider world, but they largely took it for granted that their immediate universe was a static place where nothing would ever happen.

And the horrifying thing is that’s how they liked it.

They didn’t even have the air of faded glory and gothic tragedy you see in the Deep South. It was nothing but aggressively bland conformity everywhere you looked.

Like all people who overdo the alt-right thing, he gets really, really detailed about breeding;

But these Midwesterners aren’t descended from entrepreneurial adventurers like the rest of us. Their forebears were conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics who fled Bismarck’s kulturkampf to acquire cheap land under the Homestead Act.

These people mostly settled areas where aggro Scotch Irish types had driven off the Injun decades ago, so they never had to embrace the risk-tolerant, enterprising, itinerant mindset that had once fueled Manifest Destiny.

And then there's some complex math about what race/political person he would sit with in an airport.

For instance, if I were stranded in a sketchy third world airport I would hang out with a black American before I would a Serb, but probably after I would a white Canadian or Australian or Brit (unless they were dressed in a way that strongly coded leftist politics or I knew the black guy voted Republican, in which case I’d probably choose the black dude).

So I'm guessing this is a combination of having a kind of terribly large ego and a severely non-introspective personality. You're never the problem! Everybody else is! At first it was diversity, but now it's dumb white people!

So I've been watching Season 2 of For the Love of D*LFs (I know, I haven't updated that thread in forever!) and this season features some extremely, extremely feminine guys who I had to sit back and basically reconsider my own biases against effeminate guys due to some stuff from my ultracon days.

I think I've said before that whilst guys wearing skirts isn't my thing, I think guys should be free to wear skirts or crop-tops or something (without looking like clowny drag queens, this is still fashion after all). I've noticed that conservatives tend to pivot into men who wear "women's" clothing being 'perverts', just because they have an intrinsic negative feeling towards it.

Anyways, imagine my surprise when I saw this amazingly triumphant article from DailyWire (tl;dr, Ben Shapiro & co.) about Joe Rogan, targeting how 'effeminate' New York Times reporters are (full disclosure, I subscribe to the NYT, but I do think it's 65% trash).

Joe Rogan Torches ‘Effeminate’ NYT Reporters

Anyways, it is not bad to be effeminate. It's cool, you should be yourself and not feel forced to change because somebody dislikes it for no real discernible reason aside from aesthetics of all things???

It feels weird to me that conservatives kind of spent the Big Twitter years leaning on (but frankly, not fully being) 'we want everybody to be free and cool without modifying their bodies because they feel out of place' only to jump that train once Elon Twitter came around (figures like Billboard Chris, which now openly do that thing where they think surrogacy is definitely bad in all cases, but somehow only ever bring it up in cases where gay men do it)*.

Similarly, I've noted that pro-gender activists point out the abject hypocrisy of a lot of conservative influencers using their 'adult consent' to go for Testosterone Replacement Therapy to deal with the basically cosmetic issue of being old (this includes Joe Rogan). In fact, the thing he describes in this article as 'feeling good' could theoretically be described as 'gender euphoria'.

*I think we'll discuss surrogacy some other time.

glennmagusharvey

So I'm guessing this is a combination of having a kind of terribly large ego and a severely non-introspective personality. You're never the problem! Everybody else is! At first it was diversity, but now it's dumb white people!

I'm going to guess this is the kind of person who would complain about "race traitors" in the form of white people in the U.S. making an extra effort to do things like minority-owned businesses.

Anyways, it is not bad to be effeminate.

Frankly, like I pointed out in that other thread, ideas about "effeminacy" have shifted over the years, showing that the label is basically just a worthless stereotype.

pro-gender

Well that's an interesting label I haven't heard before.
(Not necessarily a good one, but just one that I'm curious to ponder the line of thinking that led to the coining of this term.)

Stormtroper

most of my white neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits.

The shire is an idealized English countryside (and judging from the following quote block with the people at the airport, that person considers the "English" part to be important), if you are to retvrn to tradition that's more or less one of the things you should be supportive of.
Edit: ^ I feel like I should say something about ideas being malleable/subjective/etc. doesn't make them worthless, but that's not important, what's important is that two minutes after posting I found this:

fourteenwings

So IGN's French version recently stepped in it when it accused a Korean video game designer of being an incel because he created a pretty character design.



To quote:"Stellar Blade’s Eve is just boring. A doll sexualized by someone who has never seen a woman."

Unfortunately, it turned out said designer was married and the character model is based on a real person.

They did eventually kind of backtrack, but not before accusing fans of the design of being complicit in domestic violence.

"Obviously we understand that this does not shock people who think that women are objects who must obey and be beaten. This design makes us sigh and roll our eyes, and we laugh at anyone who needs it, man or woman, but that’s it."

Anyways, I'm actually kind of surprised this didn't pick up a lot more steam and that IGN basically didn't defend their France outlet.

fourteenwings