But the most egregious example I saw of how tightly connected these two worlds are happened on Saturday morning. As a convoy of vehicles driven by ICE agents arrived at the federal building, a woman punched the window of one of the cars. Close to two dozen agents jumped out of the convoy and tackled her and her friend to the ground. Immediately following them, coming out of the same car as the agents, was Fox News national correspondent Matt Finn, who filmed the whole altercation with a massive shit-eating grin on his face. When I started filming him and asked who he was with and what he was using that video for, he turned his back towards me and tried to hide his face. “Intense video,” Finn would later caption his post on X.

MAGA only thinks in terms of sides. There's a good side and an evil side, and anything the good side does to hurt the evil side is good.

We know Minneapolis is evil because of the daycare fraud, so ICE shooting Renee Good is metaphorically processed as the government cracking down on fraud. A person on the good side killed a person on the evil side, so now the evil side can't hurt us as much.

And it just doesn't matter that ICE isn't there to deal with daycare fraud, or that Good wasn't accused of it.

When I said Trump visibly doesn't care about liberal norms based society, I got pushback that amounted to,

"Well, Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus so sometimes in times of crisis you have to suspend norms in order to ensure that the union stays strong."

And when I brought up election denial it was treated as a weird non-sequitur.

Like, people seemed to think I was making some abstruse point about his Supreme Court nominees, not the fact that he refused to concede an election that he validly lost or that his Vice President got the job by saying that he'd have helped Trump contest the election.

But of course he needed to do that to save the Republic, now that Kamala Harris is dictator for life and the idea of Trump ever holding office again is impossible to imagine it's much easier to understand this.

We just know that the left is the evil, illiberal side so whatever Trump does that hurts them must, by definition, strengthen the liberal order, and the petty details of any specific thing he does are just irrelevancies designed to trick you.

But the most egregious example I saw of how tightly connected these two worlds are happened on Saturday morning. As a convoy of vehicles driven by ICE agents arrived at the federal building, a woman punched the window of one of the cars. Close to two dozen agents jumped out of the convoy and tackled her and her friend to the ground. Immediately following them, coming out of the same car as the agents, was Fox News national correspondent Matt Finn, who filmed the whole altercation with a massive shit-eating grin on his face. When I started filming him and asked who he was with and what he was using that video for, he turned his back towards me and tried to hide his face. “Intense video,” Finn would later caption his post on X.

Current provocative take I'm sharing that relates somewhat to current news is that to a certain extent thought that some of the "Oh I'm just white, we need to make sure to center underprivileged voices instead" stuff is just depression-adjacent issues, inability to conceive of yourself as someone who harm done to matters.

This is less provacative and more just true.

There's a strong rift between people who say that stuff because they know it's expected but don't particularly hew to it and people who are expressing this view of themselves.

While I do agree that these types do exist, I don't think its very true - most people are hewing to this stuff out of a combination of "just plain believing in its rightness" or are putting their heads down to get along, sucking up, etc. I don't think depression is a huge motive because the "we need to center underprivileged voices" thing is never portrayed as just like a transparent power transfer; it is always premised on the "majority" being powerful in some way, and thus in need of redress. The terminally depressed struggle very hard to identify as being so powerful - the message doesn't really hit with how this stuff typically manifests.

(You see the depression thing come up much more in the gender/dating wars ofc, though that is a bit of a different topic)

Maybe if you look at it in dry, pure theory. The way christianity in supposed to be about love & peace but that's not what many believers do in practice.

But if you look at how those talking points are actually used, the emotional connotations are of "bad" or "generic", particularly when you get ppl venting. Often it's very needed venting about real injustice, but it gets collectivized/generalized : "Fuck my genuinely awful abusive boss/parent/ex/teacher" -> "Fuck all men/white people/ heteros /abled etc."

There's ppl with certain character structures who, especially when they're in a bad place, are prone to internalizing guilt or claims of their "badness", and make the false equivalence that "powerful" in any way = ontologically evil reptiloid/ have some fear of power & responsibility and/or a psychological need to be the underdog.

Shrugging off or realizing something isn't about you or not taking it personally requires a certain psychological robustness that some ppl down on their luck don't have.

This is why one should never make generalizations about large groups; First it's just innacurate the real world is always more complex;

But second there are always stray bullets. A genuine sexist asshole just fires a generalization right back, their arrogance protects them from pain (or learning); But some sad lonely youngster whose self-esteem is already in the toilet (& who might well experience discrimination in some other way: disabled, trans, poor, mentally ill etc.) going to see that "bear vs man" nonsense & just feel like disgusting unwanted scum.

There's sometimes some desperate "I'm one of the good ones, please please don't hate me" energy to this type of talk (or of rightheous dogmatism from others) & that's what the right picks up on when slandering ppl as self-hating or virtue signalling. (often because they've already dismissed what the person is actually saying/ put them in some box that means they don't have to listen & listening more on a 'lizard brain' level)

Now let's not get into a false dochotomy here as if the only option is to totally coddle sexists, racists etc. & never upset anyone even one bit.

But the fact is, Human beings have feelings; You can't ignore that fact in the name of Ideological Correctness or Moral purity. Or I guess you can, but it will not help your cause.

And if to join your group ppl need to submit to a humiliating hazing ritual, fewer will do so.

This is incredibly well put, and my only caveat would be that I don't think it is limited to people who are "down on their luck" (although of course this doesn't help); I think American society and to some extent global society encourage this character structure in *everybody* which is why the Republicans have embraced it so whole-heartedly.

Like, actually this is a really strong caveat: I think that genuine sexist and racist assholes very often have *exactly* this character structure.

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world and one of the most powerful living men.

And he is really clearly motivated by a *profound* inability to shrug things off or not take them personally and a genuine fear of his own power.

He responds to this by demanding a world in which his power is simultaneously never questioned but also never acknowledged.

Like, when this psychology curdles you end up with people who simultaneously have the need to be the underdog in their own narrative, while also aggressively, even violently attempting to build a world where people are constrained from calling them powerful.

Which doesn't work because if you can constrain people that way, you obviously *are* powerful and the people around you notice it.

Which in turn only creates a more frantic rejection of claims of your own power.

Not taking something personally involves a *genuine* sense that your own personal power is both just and deserved.

You absolutely cannot build this sense of self by simply demanding that people pretend that unjust uses of power are in fact innocent and harmless.

I can't emphasize this enough, besides being morally unjust it simply doesn't work.

But by the same token you cannot build this sense of self by telling people that it is virtuous to relinquish power, or that it is natural for people to hate you or resent you for your power and that it is therefore your responsibility to find ways to make them think of you as less powerful.

Current provocative take I'm sharing that relates somewhat to current news is that to a certain extent thought that some of the "Oh I'm just white, we need to make sure to center underprivileged voices instead" stuff is just depression-adjacent issues, inability to conceive of yourself as someone who harm done to matters.

This is less provacative and more just true.

There's a strong rift between people who say that stuff because they know it's expected but don't particularly hew to it and people who are expressing this view of themselves.

Honestly the whole vibe from the pop culture left right now is to sort of quietly distance itself from the excesses of the teens but also to pretend that those excesses never happened and are just something made up by the right wing.

Ultimately the distancing is good but I find myself annoyed by the dishonesty.

As in, you now see less of the "it's all fake and made up by the right, but also it's good and righteous and we WILL cancel you for that opinion and you'll deserve it", these days? More admissions that it WOULD be wrong to cancel people for XYZ, but denial that such things ever happened?

Oh yeah. A moment that has really stuck in my mind is, I was watching a video essay about right-wing "anti-woke" YouTubers and that game Stellar Blade.

The premise was that anti-woke YouTubers are pretending that the wokes are scandalized by the sexy outfits in the game when in reality the response has been a kind of mild shrug and a "Whatever, you do you."

Which seems to be pretty true, but for just a moment in the essay the guy makes fun of those old Hideo Kojima tweets around Quiet, and the whole thing has this sort of, "Gosh nobody back then thought it was backwards or gross to put a female character in a bikini just because you like girls in bikinis, why didn't Kojima just say that?" vibe that strikes me as just a deeply dishonest revision of the vibes back then in game reviews.

waiting for the next great realignment

the most dangerous man in America, can Rubio stab him 🤔

JD Vance is by far the most sociopathic politician I've seen in this country.

Absolutely and blatantly lacking any conviction in anything whatsoever in a way that stands out *even compared to the rest of the Trump administration*.

The whole “male loneliness epidemic” thing is so crazy because feminists have been talking for decades about how gendered socialization has many negative consequences for the psychology and personalities of men (literally what the term “toxic masculinity” refers to) but now we’re letting the alt-right misconstrue this “epidemic” into something New so that they can blame feminists for it and make it about how Actually we need to Go Back to rigid heteronormative patriarchal gender norms in order to Save Men, even though that’s exactly what was making society miserable and lonely in the first place! It’s so screwed. Can we ever actually confront, address, and resolve societal issues like as a species or are we just doomed to misunderstand the assignment forever. Why do the dumbest most bad-faith operators in every debate get to hijack every last earnest attempt by smart and well-meaning people to improve human welfare. Why do we live on a planet of adult toddlers

Going back to the OP to reblog because the version I saw had a tag added that was condemning women for saying “men should be lonelier” when men are shitty with “that’s not feminist either!” Along with that it’s obnoxious to blame marginalized people for being flippant toward their oppressors while they are oppressing them (and somehow I doubt that they’d feel the same way about black people saying similar about white people, or lgbtq+ people toward the cishets, but the societal obligation that women need to always care about coddling others’ feelings first dies hard, I suppose) — women are 100% not at fault here, and are perfectly entitled to feel this way toward a generation of young men being pushed to dehumanize them! (I’m far more worried about the women who don’t feel that way. Have a basic sense of self-preservation and self-respect, come on) — I also think this effect is dismissed too easily. In fact, I think that manosphere bullshit that makes these guys less appealing to women is a key part of how this works, because the guys who actually do get the girl or even just are able to get female friends are both less likely to believe this sort of extreme misogyny that assumes a total disconnect from real women, but also they just… don’t need it. This stuff is built around making guys who are failing to find love and connection feel better, and the guy who finds that love and connection no longer needs that. I think it’s key to how this stuff stays alive that it perpetuates a sort of vicious cycle: these guys are already lonely, they learn reasons for that and ideology that alienate them from women (and sometimes other people, period) further, the loneliness worsens, and they reach out to more MRA shit to fill that emotional gap, which confines to radicalize them further and make the problem worse but also make them more addicted to the thing that is infecting them (I think everyone here on tumblr understands the addiction and dopamine hit that comes from a regular internet source of outrage). Even stuff from years ago like Contrapoints’ “Incels” video and Innuendo Studios’ “How to Radicalize a Normie” describe this phenomenon, but nothing gets it as well and in as much currently-relevant detail as this post by Toby Buckle (a straight guy) from Liberal Currents:

I think this is a deeply muddled essay.

In terms of the actual concrete advice, I don't really disagree with it too much, but like, the framing serves as an excuse not to ask,

What are young men getting from all this manosphere Andrew Tate horseshit?

According to this essay, it doesn't make them happy, or get them laid, and it is just generally unpleasant.

Why would young men, (And we're assured that this starts in early school days) want to listen to unpleasant people telling them ways to make their lives worse?

There's no answer in the essay, the closest is,

This is an odd phrasing. No obnoxious 15 year old remembers a time when he could just accept that women were his social inferiors. He may want social inferiors but he certainly hasn't lost them.

Like, it's very important to not ask that question rhetorically. I don't have a lot of patience for Andrew Tate bullshit, and I don't think aping it is the way to reach young men, but also, like, I find it unlikely that America's young men suddenly decided to turn evil over the course of the last 4 years for absolutely no reason.

Like, for example, incel forums are a form of self-harm, like, even the manosphere people being criticized here would agree with that, but you cannot understand them if you aren't willing to ask what their users are getting out of them.

Being addicted to heroin is bad for you; but you are going to have real fucking trouble helping a heroin addict if you think that they just take it because they are dumb and self-destructive.

This does not mean pretending heroin is actually good. It does not mean pretending that the addict must have been pushed into it.

Here's the part that makes me genuinely annoyed.

A while back I heard a joke on a podcast, about how there were three types of women,

Real manosphere neanderthal bullshit there, the person who told that joke obviously hates women.

Except no I lied this was a left-wing podcast and the joke is that those are the three kinds of men.

I know for an absolute fact that if any of the hosts, all of whom are proudly feminist, had heard somebody make that joke about women, it would have provoked an essay length rant about the insane misogyny that it would take to even come up with that joke; but told about men, it's just harmless fun.

Like, I'm sorry, you've never heard a dismissive joke about "mediocre white men"? Really?

I think I had to look at three reblogs of this post before I found someone putting "Men are lonely boo hoo" in the tags.

This guy doesn't see that stuff because not seeing it is how you signal that you are one of the good men, the ones self-confident enough to know that this stuff is all just meant in fun, you don't take it seriously.

Self-confident men who can laugh at themselves but have enough integrity not to do it out of self-hatred don't enjoy Andrew Tate content.

I don't think I will ever understand this kind of thinking.

"The people around you think of you as a potential danger. You can mitigate this by putting some nice art on your walls."

Hey I don't think that fixes it.

One thing I find very weird is that feminist thought constantly emphasizes the danger that you, as a man, pose to the people around you and yet when I tell feminists that I spent a tremendous amount of my life terrified of the idea that I was a dangerous, lumbering imposition on the people around me, the response is almost entirely a kind of confusion.

I have more thoughts about what is going wrong here, but what I took from feminist thought was, essentially, women are already people. Men have male privilege and terrible blind spots and commit micro-aggressions and are generally kind of clueless and need to do better, but if you try hard you can prove that you're one of the good ones.

Shit she was based

This guy got chased into a hotel here in Portland by an angry mob and for a long time my sympathy was, as usual, with one guy rather than the mob.

I'm kinda coming around to the mob's side here.

Copyright should end when a company stops selling the original piece of media

Or 50 years after publication, whichever is first

I'm sorry but if I can't watch a movie or play a game legally, then it shouldn't be piracy to do so

Take Pokemon Emerald, that game is no longer sold by Nintendo*, and they have no plans to rerelease it, so why should I who wants to play this game, have to commit something technically a crime to play it?

And this gets more important for less famous pieces of media that didn't sell millions of copies, where copyright fundamentally exists in a manner which blocks preservation and access

Another reminder that the 1790 copyright act had a term of 14 years with the option to renew for another 14.

The use of copyright term extensions to create media monopolies is so ingrained in our culture that the original term seems impossibly short even to those who favor extreme copyright reform.

Fallout (TV series) is a curiously optimistic show despite the bleakness of the setting and the nihilistic philosophy of many of the characters, which seems odd for a show in which America is nuked twice (so far), but maybe once you reach that point optimism is all you have left.

The nuking of the US in Fallout is symbolically the recreation of the Western frontier, a place which is rife with danger but which, by virtue of that very danger, also contains the potential for genuine change in both individuals and society.

This is thematically important as far back as the original video game, partly because that's just kind of a necessary prerequisite for it to exist as the kind of game it wants to be.

And the Western frontier in American thought is primarily a place of optimism.

the American West if it was full of robots, zombies, radioactive roaches, and literal demons, but no cattle-- actually I was going to ask where are the Native Americans, I think Cooper's old war buddy?

There were a lot of cattle in the games, surely there's a two-headed Brahma bull somewhere in the TV show.

Actual Native Americans are a weird blind spot for Fallout, maybe the people who write it don't trust themselves to deal with something so politically fraught.

Although the second game is about a group of "Tribals" resisting the last remnants of the US government as they arrive suddenly with a massive technological advantage and the desire to take over the continent via genocidal slaughter of all the existing inhabitants so, like, *symbolically* they show up sometimes.

Honestly now that I think about it race in general in Fallout is pretty much never addressed directly (Keeping in mind I haven't played New Vegas) it's always kind of sublimated into some other thing that stands in for it symbolically.

That's actually a pretty defensible choice in my opinion for reasons I am too tired to elaborate.

I find it cute when a TV show has so much Space Racism (or Wizard Racism) they can completely neglect any mention of real world racism, but maybe aliens and zombies really will have that effect on humanity; at any rate it makes TV more fun to watch.

Yeah I was thinking, the 1940s/50s movie version of a cowboy is fun. The 1940s/50s movie version of an Indian is not fun.

A big part of Fallout is the contrast between the media and actuality of American reality after the invention of the Atomic Bomb. You can have a gang of cannibals that act like the characters in Leave It To Beaver or something like that and that's fun and not really particularly fraught, but you can't do the same thing with Amos 'N Andy without a much more deft hand.

Fallout (TV series) is a curiously optimistic show despite the bleakness of the setting and the nihilistic philosophy of many of the characters, which seems odd for a show in which America is nuked twice (so far), but maybe once you reach that point optimism is all you have left.

The nuking of the US in Fallout is symbolically the recreation of the Western frontier, a place which is rife with danger but which, by virtue of that very danger, also contains the potential for genuine change in both individuals and society.

This is thematically important as far back as the original video game, partly because that's just kind of a necessary prerequisite for it to exist as the kind of game it wants to be.

And the Western frontier in American thought is primarily a place of optimism.

the American West if it was full of robots, zombies, radioactive roaches, and literal demons, but no cattle-- actually I was going to ask where are the Native Americans, I think Cooper's old war buddy?

There were a lot of cattle in the games, surely there's a two-headed Brahma bull somewhere in the TV show.

Actual Native Americans are a weird blind spot for Fallout, maybe the people who write it don't trust themselves to deal with something so politically fraught.

Although the second game is about a group of "Tribals" resisting the last remnants of the US government as they arrive suddenly with a massive technological advantage and the desire to take over the continent via genocidal slaughter of all the existing inhabitants so, like, *symbolically* they show up sometimes.

Honestly now that I think about it race in general in Fallout is pretty much never addressed directly (Keeping in mind I haven't played New Vegas) it's always kind of sublimated into some other thing that stands in for it symbolically.

That's actually a pretty defensible choice in my opinion for reasons I am too tired to elaborate.