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edit: if only some of our own righties went the same way. One was close, but had enough fanboys to beg for money. Pity. (So much for free market as an impartial tester of one's capability, BTW.)
Unfortunate.
I think his whole thing was basically saying things to 'trigger the libs'. I honestly believed that every time somebody called him to speak at a college campus, the whole point was for people to (accidentally, I guess?) bring attention to him by protesting his appearance.
So, basically, it was bound to happen. I mean, I personally thought it was bad enough when he was hosting events where he'd put up artwork of his ephebophilic fantasies (photos of young-ish teenage boys, usually monochrome) but I guess what he did get permanently shunned for is in the same vein so it's okay??
Is there some secret alt-right furry community I don't know about and if so, why has the internet been keeping this knowledge from me?
Whilst we're on the topic of campus speakers and their baffling continued existence. I heard Turning Point US, which is supposed to be a conservative student group, actually just mandates lots of it's branches to dedicate the majority of their budget to getting them to bring speakers to campus. Speakers who obviously cost lots of money. The Ben Shapiros and the like.
This is probably not exclusively a right-leaning issue, and I'm guessing I heard about it because Turning Point is like the one major right-leaning universities group (versus the probably actually a billion liberal groups on campus as university is usually seen as where people go to get away from icky 'conservative' values like not drinking your own weight in alcohol), but it seems really shady.
I don't know about the internet, but there apparently is. The dude, however, was refused an entry on, uh (weird thing, to say that in a sentence about furries), a mainstream furry convention.
Anyways, here's the link if you are interested.
https://splinternews.com/desperately-broke-milo-yiannopoulos-tries-to-break-into-1838148262
For some reason there's a lot of, uhh... "furry activists" linking furries with causes that you'd think have nothing to do with furries.
Somehow google did not have many results for "furry activism" or "furry activist" but there were enough to convince me to never google said terms again.
Me:
I got caught in a discussion about politics that veered into Woe Is Me so:
Anyways:
Oh yeah, apparently something really insane is happening with Republican/Conservative speakers/thinkers/etc right now but I can't find any real sources. But, basically, there's some (possibly actually racist?) internet kid (Nicholas Fuentes)+his cohorts who is taking on the Ben Shapiros and such and possibly... winning?
I think it's got something to do with the Ben Shapiro sorts (oh my gosh I know some of these people who aren't Ben Shapiro and I should be able to name them) do the whole speaking circuit thing whispering sweet platitudes (I'd say sweet nothings, but it's at least more than that) of Conservatism into their audience's ears and these kids have pointed out that they're basically just Hilary Clinton's speaking tour but for Conservatives. And like, when you have the wool pulled from your audience's eyes (even if the wool was just keeping them from knowing they were ingesting intellectual comfort food), it tends to not go super-well.
Kay I found a source (of course Milo is brought up).
So I looked that up.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/why-alabama-s-abortion-law-includes-an-exemption-for-infertility
Wow, I didn't know they could be that blatant about how it really wasn't about conception anyway.
Bonus find:
A ha ha ha, such brilliant picking-and-choosing.
(FYI, Personhood Alliance is an anti-abortion group.)
(They hate in-vitro too.)
Catholics (Catholic fundies included) also more consistently anti-war.
I think it's more that he couldn't get the dollar signs from the fertility industry out of his eyes to make a decent argument (if there is one). Fertility treatments cost what appears to be basically all the money, and some of that surely makes it into political hands.
Plus, without this sort of exception, fertility treatments would be impossible.
Which, surprisingly enough, is a position I may be okay with? I'm probably biased because of recent forays into Democratic Socialist Marxists talking about how they want all babies born into communal community communes via womb machines which honestly super creeps me out.
Anyways, the Alabama law, as I understand it, is a means to go to the Supreme Court and attempt to overturn Roe v Wade. I don't think anybody supporting it actually cares about the women who are inconvenienced by it right now or the possibly viable unborn children, they care about the women they can inconvenience everywhere in the country eventually.
Since we were talking about it before.
Desc...ribe?
I do like how the approach is that of taking somebody who has made an unbearably hard decision and then telling them they are Wrong Wrong Wrong.
I think in the U.K. they just have two independent doctors sign off on a patient's intentions to make sure she understands everything, which is probably the most doctors should have to do.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/11/florida-women-who-cant-enter-strip-club-without-man-challenging-state-constitution/
This isn't a "political" issue on the national level, but it is very relevant with regards to state and local policymaking.
Explanation:
(NSFLP - not safe for legal purposes, i.e. don't cite me for any cases because i'm not a lawyer)
This is a fight over legal "pre-emption" (or "preemption") -- i.e. the notion that when a Florida state law is passed regarding a given issue, it "preempts" (i.e. overrides) any local laws on the issue. Florida law is such that localities are allowed to make their own laws ("home rule"), but once the state makes laws on those same issues, the local laws no longer hold legal force (are "preempted" or "pre-empted").
This idea of preemption has impacted a variety of other issues; I'm personally more familiar with some of the environmental policy preemptions -- regarding local laws on tree removal, plastic bag bans, plastic straw bans (which I think was vetoed recently?), and styrofoam bans. For example, if I recall correctly, beach towns that see styrofoam containers clogging their tourism-moneymaking beaches currently aren't allowed to ban businesses from giving customers styrofoam containers, because there's a Florida state law that says that they can't.
In this case, the Orange County Circuit Court ruling was basically "state anti-discrimination law preempts local anti-discrimination laws, so therefore you can't sue under local anti-discrimination laws because they're actually moot". Then, forty-six localities basically said "Holy fucking shit, dude!" because they all have local anti-discrimination laws that differ from the state anti-discrimination law.
Someone in the comments section of that article pointed out that the women could sue on the basis of the existing state anti-discrimination law, but that misses the actual important legal fight which is over whether localities can have their own anti-discrimination laws at all.
A relevant observation is that current state anti-discrimination law does not prohibit some forms of discrimination that are addressed in some local laws, e.g. discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Yeah I'd guessed that would be the case since it's easier (I presume) to change local law versus changing state laws.
Oops.
Anyways, I used to take "anti-discrimination laws" as code for "Everything well and good about the universe". And obviously, in this case, I understand why the women would want to be able to go into the strip club by themselves (though of course the lady could have just taken a picture).
However, I also understand how basically a strip club filled with straight men who expect all the unaccompanied women to be there to be um, exotic dancers (why is it exotic dancers anyways?) would create an environment I don't think is exactly welcoming and 100% would be rife with misunderstanding.
I mean, this article even has points I haven't made:
That last one I don't get, but those first two are surely things that would happen frequently otherwise.
Anyways, back to anti-discrimination laws. Obviously here I'm claiming they can be misused for kind of a pointless reason. You open it up for a seemingly innocent thing, and then the whole thing becomes an actual quagmire. I don't like strip clubs, but I believe in people's right to run them and people's right to visit them responsibly for the primary reason they exist (that is, to see exotic dancers, or to accompany those who wish to see exotic dancers).
You could say "What about lesbians or bisexual girls?", but I highly doubt those two groups wish to hang out in a room full of seedy guys (okay, maybe they're not seedy all the time, but the activity they're partaking in is seedy). If they do, well, tough I guess?
Cases like gay men forcing religious people to bake cakes for them (to lean into stereotypes, what type of self-respecting gay men know zero people who can bake mind-blowing cakes?), or make shirts for them (similarly) or Catholic institutions being forced to pay for staff abortions and/or carry out medically invasive procedures they don't believe in (again, abortions, and also hysterectomies in transgender men) are basically a curbstomp battle of "You're a bigot and I will use the government to make you do things you don't want to or just effectively ruin your life/beliefs".
I mean, this isn't teaching creationism (though I guess theoretically I have no problems with it being taught alongside actual geography and biology as long as it's a "never the twains shall meet" situation) and it's very much against the core tenets of ideological pluralism.
I don't think we need that sort of thing.
we're up to 14 of these
I was pretty sure this would be about
The Other, Big ThingImpeachment, but I'm glad it's not.Unrelated to the Wikipedia article, but I think a common error people make when it comes to mass shootings is to equate the violence with the means. That is to say, the violence will stop once the means are gone.
Realistically, the only real change that would occur if America had less guns is that the severity of the crimes would be reduced, and that's probably all we can really do outside of eliminating certain basic tenets of humanity.
The big chatterpoint this week is this story, which I read yesterday. It purports a number of things, with proof for some and scant evidence for others.
For example, there's a huge parallel drawn between Western societies and Japan, which is like several levels in mistake. Like, Western society has a very poor, unaccommodating image of NEETs/hikkikomori that I'd say is quite ingrained in citizens for anything like that to manifest unless it was over a very long time.
Then there's the whole 2D only culture; which is basically wholly imported from Japan if it does exist elsewhere.
Plus, I think it's vaguely unlikely to say "JP citizens adopted to internet erotica super-quickly" when last I... "heard from a distant friend I don't know very well", DVD/BDs were still super big until streaming actually became a thing 2-3 years ago and things moved in that direction.
Though from that same "friend" I can confirm that um... he sees a lot more stepfathers and stepbrothers and stepgrandfathers than was once common, though that was always a once-in-a-while trend that came up in gay adult film. He mentioned something about a very popular site I cannot remember the name of, at all, having an actual set of twin brothers engage in sexual activity as a publicity stunt possibly over ten years ago.
Anyways, the only main data-point used here is the one for erectile dysfunction in American men, so the whole picture is pretty confused by that.
Obviously, my "friend" stays away from straight adult film with a two-foot-pole, so I don't know about all this denigrating stuff that's described, nor can I... um... he confirm if misogyny has become the norm on that side of things.
(I was halfway through this post when I realized I was about to put it in the wrong thread, woops).
Meanwhile...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/15/gerrymandering-5k-asheville-north-carolina-215829
I mean, honestly, the situation with Israel/Palestine is bad, but I can't also keep insisting on a morally pure solution to the issue (one that I conveniently ignored coming up with). I mean, Israel exists, and at this point it's not going to stop existing (nor would I want it to). I understand both sides are pretty entrenched in their positions, because lots and lots of bad stuff has happened and continues to happen, but maybe eventually they'll work something out in like, 2030.
To be clear I no longer find "serving in the Tzahal" abhorrent, mostly because it's seen as a patriotic act and it's not very sane hate people people trying to defend themselves/do a civic duty that's important to them.
Obviously this is also practically insane, because it's ignoring Israel's actual existence as a real state in the world that's allowed to host events. Of course, the conflict between the two states is intense, and one has a major, unquestionable upper hand.
But I don't think this line of argument is helpful. Mainly because it's also me ascribing a "Israel is trying to whitewash things" narrative to a situation in which Israel won a competition fair and square (#EleniDidNothingWrong) and was reaping the rewards of it.
I've never liked BDS. Well, to be honest, around the time I wrote this I was at most mildly uncomfortable with it. Now however I really don't like it. Realistically, all there can ever really be is a two-state-solution, and despite my now wishy-washy stance on the underlying issues, I definitely believe in that.
tl;dr: 14w wants to argue about things so much he's arguing with himself now.
I was thinking some things over yesterday and I realized that I'd said something in reference to Classical Liberalism a few days or weeks ago... in a post somewhere on IJBM i can no longer find. Anyways, the point was "I would like to call myself a classical liberal, but the left of politics has co-opted the term to a degree that makes it meaningless."
I mean, I guess didn't really think it all the way through, or from all the angles. In all honestly, this is a defeatist position, born of my general cynicism. However, I don't condone defeatist positions, whether they're my own or those of others.
I want to find out the truth. Something that can at the very least approximate the realities of objectivity in the context of human behavior, and defeatism is a practice that gets you further and further away from that truth.
Therefore, I rescind this position, and reinstate that I will continue to call myself a classical liberalist. There are wings of modern classical liberalism that can't seem to disown the tenets of more radical left positions, because classical liberalism has been used to great effect for the good of all of us by the left in general for possibly decades, and they're what rub me the wrong way about this term. But it's not helpful to give it up either, since I'll always hold the 'live and let live' ideology close to my heart.
Kay now that we're done with that, let's talk about conservatism!
A recent argument against gay marriage made in a few places online has been that marriage is not for adults, rather it is for the children being raised in said marriages. I have to admit, I've bought it's merits for quite a while. But I think that was born more of me wanting to have some experience with a position opposed to my own that I think makes sense, rather than just labeling everyone who opposes gay marriage a giant bigot.
In all honesty, I do think about the massive implications gay marriage has on the very institution of marriage, which has been around since way before biblical times even (in moral terms, though of course the strict enforcement of monogamy is much newer, possibly post-Roman, iunno). Since well, people are genuinely not going to look into that until the political situation rapidly de-escalates (a situation I don't see occurring in this decade), I have to go somewhere for dissenting information.
However, the problem with "Marriage is for the propagation of the nation state" and "Marriage is for children's wellbeing*" is that they slip from being conservative arguments into really strange communist-lite territory in the context of modernity. Otherwise, they present traditionalist values that have as much value as ether.
That's because the traditionalist value of marriage was long brought down by the introduction of the (to borrow an Indian term) love marriage. Arranged marriages between families certainly had all the effects a traditionalist conservative would love. They propagated the nation state and (more importantly?) family lines, created clear-cut family ties, and they confirmed children continue patrineal lineage since for some reason** men tend to get really uppity about raising other's children. And so on.
But the love marriage conserves many of those things whilst explicitly rejecting state or outside family intervention (well, in most cases). It also theoretically should destroy class lines (in practice, it does not). Plus, the advent of divorce means marriage "for the kids" is being very poorly enforced***. Of course, I myself am not up for the state insisting people who don't want to be married stay married, because that's insane.
Personally, I subscribe to what I would call the "moralistic" view of marriage. Maybe because on some level I'm a sworn romantic (yet also claim to be a cynic). You find someone you wish to spend the rest of your life with, make a genuine commitment to them, and stay true to that commitment made in the eyes of friends, family, and the state.
I think most humans desire family ties, and marriage is the bond that is tightest in family ties, behind or equaling that of a parent and a child.
Which is why, despite my commitment to live and let live, I absolutely abhor polyamory in all it's forms. I mean, I'll never campaign for it to be outlawed (unlike bigamy and polygamy, it's neither a crime or a means to treat women as property) but I'll never tell a friend to "go for it". I'll respect it if they do, and I won't be the crazy guy who won't tolerate what they dislike, but I will continue to dislike it.
*Which, like, if you have kids, it is. Like, all the valid research suggests two amicable parents who mildly dislike each other really should stay married for the kids (and consenting adults should try to avoid having kids outside of wedlock), unless you live in like, Scandinavia.
**Evolutionary biology
*** See *
If you're curious: around here, liberalism also has the problem of being marred by an association (justified or not) with predatory capitalism, in addition to the already brought up.
As for the origin of monogamy, some thinkers blame the Catholic Church. I think the Romans were monogamous (although divorce was easy and common), but then the Church doubled as the spreader of Roman law. Meanwhile traditional tribal societies were fine with polygamy well into the Middle Ages.
So much from me at the moment, perhaps more next time.
Yeah it gets weird trying to parse which conservatives actually mean it. I'll get back to this in a second.*
Yeah uh, Free Market Neoliberalism isn't to blame in itself, but there was a genuine failure to acknowledge that this is an economic policy that should be employed by companies and their lobbyist. It should certainly not be informing a government, because it's basically the open borders of capital, and it's led to a lot of insanity.
When it comes to capitalism and the government, my best analogue is Unreal Engine 4. Basically every big video game (including Kingdom Hearts 3, the next Tales, and Tekken 7) runs on it, but it's adjusted to the needs of the content of the game (this is the citizens, the culture, and the industry in the country).
Of course, people say this is protectionism, but protectionism isn't a bad thing? I fail to understand how leftists can deride protectionism considering their pained attempts at making socialism seem cool.
This is actually not all that complex!
*Let's talk about Men's Rights Activism!
I'm in no way embarrassed for looking very deeply into this, and there was a lot, but I guess my main interest here is gay men.
There's this tendency for gay men within this movement to hold a lot of opinions that are quite a thing. I mean, in the media there's a tendency to portray gay men has having no interest in straight men outside of the sexual (see: Glee). However, I'd like to note that the majority of my friends are indeed straight men and it's been like that since I was about 14 or so.
I've also got a lot of sympathy for straight men, and men in general, because most of the time I'm not thinking about everybody's sexuality.
Which brings me to; obviously there are a lot of gay men out there in the MRA, but they tend to do two things that are not helpful in any way.
I am not a fan of the term apologist, but they tend to be MRA apologists. By this I mean they ignore that MRAs weren't really fans of gay men before modern discourse rendered gay men not LGBT/queer enough (see also: Pete Buttigieg). I mean, it's great/wonderful that all the intellectual bros are getting along now, but it's not intellectually honest to claim that beforehand MRA "were too busy with their own issues" or gay men "were too enamored with the LGBT[etc] rights movement" to help out.
I don't mean that gay men should rush into MRA events and demand apologies or acknowledgement, that's just dumb. Polite company should let bygones be bygones. They shouldn't, however, rewrite history. Nobody needs that anyways.
Second; gay men practically prostrate themselves when speaking at MRA events. Not to beg for forgiveness, but to confirm that they will never ever be as good as straight men. Of course, gay men generally don't want to have biological children the natural way, and a lot of them can't afford or just don't want to have children any other way, and I do honestly have a lot of questions about surrogacy and the role of surrogates (which starts to feel like a fancy way of saying "using biological mothers, who are human beings just like us, as baby ovens"), but this is all predicated on the fact that humans can only be happy with children.
I mean, everybody knows humans can adapt to any lifestyle, and I personally think gay men if they wish to contribute to society's child-raising initiatives, should adopt more. Here we get to how much easier surrogacy is than adoption, which is a giant problem in itself. To this, I say, reform adoption.
So uh... as I was saying, not having kids, as many are starting to realize (to the chagrin of conservatives, radicals such as MRAs, and people who are afraid of their countries just genuinely having less young people to join the labor force/take care of the elderly, a position I see the merits of), is not the end of the world. You don't instantly become a worse/less... valuable (why does this stuff always end in what sounds like government mandated human value structures) person just for not having kids.
In addition, lots of gay men are promiscuous and men in general are just really bad and dumb when it comes to commitment in relationships. So, you'll here a lot of these guys half-joking or actually just being deathly serious about dying alone and sad, or claiming that their relationships don't work out because [a whole lot of social constructivism nonsense that would have no place otherwise at these events if applied to anything else]. I mean, congrats on your poor dating record, fella? I hope blaming all these things that are conveniently out of your control makes the straight guys feel better?
Speaking of "things out of your control", some guys take the nature v nurture thing so far and come up with backstories of why they turned out gay. As I said before, this sort of social constructivism is not just sad, it's extremely lazy, because as we found out literally last year, it's certainly part nature, and this is after like 50 years of genuine research into the topic. Imagine where we'll be on this in 50 more? The backstories are also frequently ones an actual billion straight guys share (one guy blamed his absent, emotionally unavailable father, like he had the only one on the whole planet).
So, I don't mind gay men being MRAs (or just realizing they can be more committed to the cause than any straight MGTOW by continuing to sleep with men). As I said, I'm glad the bros can hang out together or whatever, but this stuff really has to stop.
I mean, also, MRAs in general take everything under the sun too far, so there's that.
I've also got a story I'd like to share now. I'm always a bit baffled when I see the term "Men's Rights Activism". It's like, the first time I've heard of MRA was when I read a newspaper article on some activist who dressed as superhero and climbed a building in protest of bias favouring mothers in divorce settlements. That image is still in my mind when the term is brought up, except now, whenever MRA folks appear in the media, you know it's going to involve some sort of wifebeating or misogyny. It's like somebody moved your favourite chair and you still haven't got used to where it stands now, except it's not about chairs and it was never a topic I was deeply involved in. So, you may say I'm baffled not only at the perceived change, but also at being baffled by it, which adds to my bafflement.