This Feels The Same As Saying "why Would A Revolutionary Oppose Cutting Welfare, This Will Just Anger

"Finally, we gradually eliminate all words from our vocabulary. The working classes hate words. They’re all illiterate, probably; I assume they communicate in grunts and squeals. We must learn to squeal like they do. Roll around in the muck. Hide your delicate bourgeois face in a plastic snout. Lap up corn syrup from the trough. Drape yourself in a soiled flag and grunt the name of Jesus Christ. Squeal, piggy, squeal."

-Sam Kriss

also with all due respect the main reason the left loses so much is that y’all refuse to compromise on the language and messaging you use to speak to voters. i swear if you rebranded “defund the police” as “invest in community safety from the ground up” most white suburban moderates would be like “that sounds great” and i know that because that’s how i’ve literally reframed it to white suburban moderates who think “defund the police” means we’re going to live in a scary lawless mad max world

Idea: I don't want to settle for choosing the lesser of two evils; I want to abolish the system that confined me to those choices in the first place. Choosing a lesser evil is better than choosing a greater evil, but choosing good is best.

I KNOW IS TOO MUCH TEXT BUT I DID MY BEST DON’T BULLY ME.

The humanities are too important to be left to the humanities majors.

without humanities you will fall for the first lie somebody tells you that punches in the gut because you never learned how those gut-punches work

"people who didn't go to university are easily fooled morons. I am not classist."

I'm pretty sure this was a case I saw recently; what happened is that the federal funds had originally been transferred via ACH (which is different from a wire). ACH transactions can be reversed by the sender within 5 business days, which Elon just managed to do (he did the reverse on day 5, if I remember correctly).

This is obviously unprecdented and concerning, but the government does not have the means to directly remove/transfer funds from within your private account. They can stop transfers from a government account(or again, reverse them within a limited window) or "request" a bank to freeze/close your account for suspicious activity, but they can't just reach in to your checking account and take your money.

Elon and DOGE have access to your banking info and can drain your account.

Russia needs money? Maybe they will access your life savings. Putin is Musk ally.

Speak out against Musk? He will target dissent.

Want to file a complaint? They got rid of CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is beyond apocalyptic.

Petty bourgeois types gonna petty bourgeois; the obsession with the "middle class", traditional family structures, and hatred of taxes all point to growing class anxiety over unstoppable capitalist stratification and its effects on the family and ego. Notice that the "improvements" of circumstances of the 3rd world can only be imagined in economic terms, as the long-suffering Chinese and Africans get to throw off the yoke of progressive taxation and join the ranks of suburban small-business owners, and gratefully open up their countries as tourist destinations and tax havens for their Western saviors.

If only someone would make us powerful again by giving our kids, country, and pride back!

The joke is that the fantasy world of Qanon is a communist utopia and I’m not sure how seriously to take it.  In some sense, universal prosperity is a universal desire.  But on the other, the fact that they focus on this, rather than directly focusing on freedom or social darwinian competition or purifying violence for it’s own sake is interesting.

My maternal grandfather is an incredibly sweet man who has never raised his voice to me and has always been generous with his gifts and advice.

He also spent my mother's childhood mocking civil rights activists, making racist jokes (such as referring to MLK Day as James Earl Ray Day) and indoctrinating her with racist and neo-Confederate ideas, as well as voting for groups and politicians in the Deep South that aligned with his views. He also did extensive contracting work with the military, which may or may not strike you as evil depending on your perspective, but I view it as such.

Will I be sad when he passes away? Yes, because he was kind to me personally. But I will also be relieved, because the world will be, on net, a better place without him in it.

I mean, I really hope the people in their 70s now will die eventually, since theyve had a stranglehold on politics for years. I don’t think this observation is remotely similar to advocating for genocide (or gerontocide?).

Anon, you’re eagerly awaiting others’ deaths just because you want the reins of power? I’m hoping you’re just not noticing how messed up that is.

Hanania may have changed his mind on trans people, but he also tweeted "These people are all animals, whether they're harassing people on subways or walking around in suits" after Daniel Penny was arrested.

The Richard Hanania discourse is weird for me because no one is willing to be specific.

Like, periodically someone links one of his pieces, and I read it, and it's generally pretty anodyne. But of course I'm reading pieces (1) that are current and (2) that people I like are recommending. This is not a good way to figure out what his worst takes are!

But I'm too apathetic to go, like, scrolling through his blog looking for the bad takes. And when people criticize [engaging with] him they never link specific posts or quote specific things he said. They say he's a "white supremacist race realist" and like, that probably means he said some things I'd disapprove of, but I can't tell how strongly I'd disapprove because a lot of people use those terms rather more promiscuously than I would.

(And even if someone made specific allegations, it's hard to know if they're doing a Tumblr Callout-style list where the first three entries are "he literally ships Jen and Fred even though we once had a flashback to when Jen was 17" and then somewhere in the middle is "literally killed and ate several children". If I read the first three links and conclude that it's all bullshit that's not even necessarily right!)

So it's just very hard to get a sense for "how bad are his worst views" and also "to what extent does he still hold those views?" And I don't really have motivation to actually figure it out, so there's just a bunch of slightly dumb discourse that I'm not able to evaluate.

What's interesting to me is that for all the fervor surrounding Muslims, I've never seen anyone do any deep investigative journalism on how religion is maintained across generations, and how deeply the parents actually believe in it. Kids are dumb and have short attention spans; do they have a parent at home constantly making serious comments about jihad, or is this a case of edgy lower-class humor? If the parents were genuine Islamists, you'd think they'd be sticking their kids into a private school, or not sending them to school at all, and the fact that they found it funny implies a lack of deep conviction. Or maybe it does and

Even preschoolers are radicalizing in Belgium “They threaten to murder ‘infidels’, slice their necks, call classmates pigs”

A recently started initiative “Network Islam-experts” records issues of radicalized students. Since 2016 there have been 481 cases of schools who encountered ‘problems’. Today for the first time a case-file was made public involving toddlers.

An East-Flemishs school network made an internal report named “indoctrination among toddlers”, it details problematic behavior:

“Citing Arabic verses during playtime, refusing to come to class because it doesn’t fit their beliefs, not coming to school on Friday for ‘religious reasons’. A girl refuses to give a boy a hand or to stand in line near boys.”

Sadly these are the least frightening cases:

A preschooler already has a ‘friend’ in Morocco she will be married to later. A child threatens to murder ‘infidels’. Calling non-Muslim students ‘pigs’. Making the motion of slicing someones neck.”

After conversation with parents it was concluded they support these actions and found them funny.

1, 2, 3

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."

-Christopher Hitchens

Your arguments sum to "In my perfect world, there will be no Jews, no Shinto, no Hindu, no Sikhs, no nothing other than a vaguely Christian-ish 'default culture'. This to me is a positive," and you don't understand how everyone else is appalled and taking it as a negative?

Very strange that you assume "Vaguely Christian" to be a "default culture", sounds like you have some internalised Christian hegemony to deal with!

Of course, “I support socialism, like they have in Denmark. Workers of the world, unite!” is a common incoherency.

Honestly, I think over half the rise in support for socialism results from the following syllogism:

The U.S. healthcare system is utterly dysfunctional.

The U.S. healthcare system is an example of free-market capitalism.

Free-market capitalism is utterly dysfunctional.