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wildcat09

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Posts posted by wildcat09

  1. 1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    I got the impression that he didn’t read it based on his reaction, which seemed to be more of a reflexive response to a light skin, but if you did in fact read it, @wildcat09, I apologize. 
     

     

    This:

    What proposal? Why would anybody ever talk to an angry kid that way? It’s pure projection and totally bizarre.

     

     

    1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

     

    Dude.  Most of our current information ecosystem aimed at young white males is "talking to angry kids" in EXACTLY that way.  That's a huge part of the problem.  

     

    59 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    Yes, I agree with you and I made no such proposal that was something we should do in order to get people back into a voting coalition.

    I think we have to meet people where they are to confort them, and we have to accept the truth of their personal experience do them. But that is a far cry from validating their most corrosive and misplaced resentments. 

    The upshot of the essay, after all, was that minorities and women didn’t do anything wrong. They just got jobs.

    I think we're done here.

  2. 20 hours ago, 52-80 said:

    The ADL casts a wide umbrella on what counts as right-wing, even for events that are not right-wing ideologically motivated, such as during drug deals or prison gang attacks.

    An Aryan Nations member who stabs a Crip counts as RW murder, because definitionally A.N. is right-wing. Do they count a Crip stabbing of an A.N. as left-wing?

    Half of what goes into their extremism killing scoreboard (212 of 429) is non-ideological.

     

     

    I doubt this was intended as a joke, but it's a fucking great one, man.

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  3. 1 minute ago, Dahobbs said:

     

    I have no idea why you derisively dismissed this post

    Sure you do, you hit the nail on the head that it's personal for him. He was acting out like a baby and wanted people to indulge his tantrum.

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  4. 41 minutes ago, Red Five said:

    Kind of a dumb question, but it's been three days since the deadline passed to release everything. Have we actually learned anything? Were any names at all released? Any actual relevant information uncovered? 

    We learned that the Trump administration is desperate to hide something and is very bad at cover ups. 

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  5. 35 minutes ago, G650 said:

    That is true, but the bigger challenge almost all humans face is getting over the fact that life, itself, is not fair.

    Right. A big part of growing up is realizing the world doesn't revolve around you and that you can do everything right and still get the short end of the stick for arbitrary or no reasons at all. We can and should work to provide a system that helps alleviate the worst symptoms of that and to minimize the unfairness, but there's no way to actually eliminate unfairness and create a perfectly meritocratic system. There will always be some number of people who have bad luck.  It doesn't help anyone to indulge their anger and encourage them to attribute their bad luck to false causes.

    These guys don't need JD Vance's bullshit, they need Shoresy:

     

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  6. 5 hours ago, UpperWestside said:

    Roth would be the guy to read and listen to here. He’s far and away the best political writer we have in America. Not even a close 2nd to his work. I asked him a similar question to this at one of Defector’s birthday parties about how he understands this stuff so well and the answer more/less was rich people are lazy.

    I'm imagining that scene in As Good As It Gets where the lady asks him how he writes women so well, except instead of being an asshole Roth is just very uncomfortable with the idea that he understands them at all. 

  7. 1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    Well, the thing is I say shit like that all the time in person. I just smile and look them in the eyes when I do it, plus I’m handsome and tall, but not so much of either that it’s weird. 
    You’d be amazed what you can say to people’s face if you smile and look them in the eye when you say it, so please, know that I am smiling now, and imagine a handsome but approachable man your age looking you right in the eye and saying to you, in a friendly way:

    read the essay next time. 
     

    And then I wink at you. And you blush a little, and not in a gay way, not that there would be anything wrong with that, more in a curious way.

    This reads like an Andrew Tate post.

     

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  8. 7 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    “I don’t have time to read this, so let me tell you what I think about it in 1000+ words over the course of several days and a half dozen or so posts. “

    Man, you very clearly need to talk to a therapist.

    ETA: seriously man, what the fuck is wrong with you? That’s the kind of response you should expect to get punched in the face for if you said that shit to a grown man in person.

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  9. 1 hour ago, LCHorn said:

    You and I both clearly feel the same on this, and I also think it's why @Bozo_Casanova is getting accused of being condescending. 

    He is, in my opinion, condescending of a general "if THEY feel that way it's their own fucking problem" response that makes up a good number of the posts in the thread.  

    I've been a bit simplistic in some of my responses because I didn't have the time to give this 5,000+ words when shit needed doin over the weekend. What I and Dahobbs and others have been pretty clear about though, I think, is that we are willing to believe that some young white men have been discriminated against by silly employment policies, but that it isn't a real widespread issue. There's reams of data backing up the fact that it isn't really a widespread issue. It's certainly not as severe an issue as Republicans pretend it is. That means that many, and I believe most, young white men who believe they've been discriminated against are wrong in that belief. Now I can empathize with why they wrongly think that. I grew up in a conservative family surrounded by conservative families. I remember the whispered racial grievances of the 90s and 2000s. We were all too good and too respectable to be racist; that was for white trash. But my mom and tons of friends' parents would talk about how it wasn't fair that underperforming black kids were taking our spots in college and that reverse racism was the only real racism left in America.

    It's easy to start believing that shit and if you start believing it might be true you'll start spotting things that you think reinforce it as you progress through life, because the world is a big place with a lot of people in it and many of those people make mistakes and some of those people are just shitty people who do bad things. I was a shitty student from a middle class home at a very diverse high school full of high-achieving minority students.  I absolutely could've gone down that path. I like to think I'm smart enough that I never would've fallen for it, but if I had been born ten years later and Trump was mainstreaming unapologetic racism again at the time I was becoming an adult and politically aware, I could see an alternate timeline where a version of 19-year-old me bought into the racial grievances.

    I think about that alternate me and I wonder: would it help turn him away from that path to have a liberal tell him that those peddling the racism were right about him being screwed over to help some dumber black kid or whatever? Fucking of course not. "Even the liberal [centrist pundit] agrees with us that the left has gone too far" is some of the most effective conservative rhetoric.  The idea that reinforcing that rhetoric would result in liberal political gains is insane. 

    Of the white boys and young men who've bought into these false racial grievances, some are undoubtedly open to persuasion. Those who are a little smarter than most of the others, those who have some liberal friends, those who stumble onto a lefty podcast that starts to make sense to them, etc. But persuading all those young white men requires convincing them that their racial grievances are mistaken.

    And for the very select few who might've been unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and actually did get shafted for being white, we can say "shit man, that sucks and shouldn't have happened, but you can't let that experience poison you." Using me as an example again, my dad died from medical malpractice when I was a teenager. That experience has undoubtedly impacted how I feel about our healthcare system. If that had happened now to alternate me, with frauds peddling woo healthcare bullshit from the White House, I could see him buying into it. But I didn't buy into it, even though I was pretty familiar with all of that woo bullshit 20 years ago, because I wasn't surrounded by people saying "well you know RFK Jr. is right that there are a lot of problems with the healthcare system!" It was still the type of thing only kooks bought into and that helped me look at their bullshit critically.

    If we were talking about healthcare rather than discrimination, Bozo's proposal to reach me would've meant indulging my worst feelings and most wrong beliefs. It would've meant telling me something like "you're right to be angry, they killed your dad for money." But that's not what happened; what happened was that a doctor who was by most accounts a good doctor made a horrible mistake, because he's a person and people make mistakes. I'm very glad Bozo wasn't there to tell me comforting lies when I was at my worst; I'd be a worse person today if he had.   

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  10. 14 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    My thoughts on this are complicated and I don’t disagree that we have over-credentialed a lot of work and under-valued non-credentialed work. 
     

    That said, it’s not really disputable that for decades the message and policy has been that college is an important vehicle for social mobility and improvement and that it’s important to improve access to minority groups and women. 
     

    It’s a hard pivot from that to “actually a bunch of you need less college.” 

    Fewer boys are applying for colleges for a very simple reason: more girls are. There’s a type of male (conservative) who wants absolutely nothing to do with anything that woman do. We’ve seen this in various professions (e.g. teaching and nursing) and now we’re seeing it in education. 

    They’re not being denied opportunities, they’re refusing them. Because they have shitty parents that instill shitty values in them. There’s not an equivalent to Title IX that can fix that.

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  11. 19 minutes ago, G650 said:

     

    So while I'm rambling, I also think we really have to separate culture from politics to be effective. I was actually thinking about this recently in the context of something else, but this is just another example. Republicans have banked on culture shit, but I can promise you if you feed and house a man the odds are in your favor he will vote for you.

    The utter failure of Bidenomics begs to differ. 

  12. 25 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    Yes, it requires you to be open to the possibility that they aren’t imagined, even if the reasons are more complex than it seems to them. If someone gets shafted, they got shafted. That should be enough for you. 

    This sounds like a recipe to turn even more young white men against the Democratic party. What you're prescribing is identifying Democrats as their enemy. 

    ETA: This is JD Vance, literally today:

    You're saying that we need to tell young white men that he's correct.

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  13. 35 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    Indeed that’s why I didn’t offer examples to begins with- I’m not trying to prove the existence of a generalized problem. The personal experience of any human is entirely subjective and inherently anecdotal.
    I’m arguing that the progressive movement should be open to people who feel the economy is rigged against them or been denied opportunity for no reason other than being born, and should not deny the realities of their lives or wave them away with statistical generalities. 

    Does being open to them require playing along with imagined grievances? 

  14. 1 minute ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    Well, I think we are fundamentally talking about how the progressive movement engages or not with the feelings of voters they lost.
    I made clear upthread, as others have, that I saw it happening in real life from the other side of the desk for a decade. By definition, that’s anecdotal, but so is everything you have seen and experienced in your life. 

    Stop acting like Ana and be specific. What do you think the progressive movement should do to appeal to them?

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  15. 1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    But that’s not really what you said, is it? 

    Let’s try this another way:

    You acknowledging that some significant number of millennial males  feel they *personally* were denied jobs and or promotional opportunities on the basis of their gender and/or race, correct? 
    Why do they feel that way?

    Because lots of people in media and likely in their own lives around them talk about how reverse discrimination happens all the time. This isn't fucking rocket science, man. Enough people repeat a lie often enough and a lot of people will start to believe it. Whether the 35 year old who didn't get promoted watches Hannity is irrelevant, this is a false idea that's been floating around since I was born and has been given a megaphone for the past 10 years.

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  16. 1 hour ago, Dahobbs said:

    Again, what is an acceptable response in your view? Why is not ok to say "I understand how you feel, but let's address the real cause"?  Why are you being a petulant child when people refuse, without any evidence, to believe unfair discrimination is happening en masse? Your posts have a shitty tone and you're not explaining yourself well. It is tiresome. 

    There's strong ana vibes from Bozo here. It's disappointing. 

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  17. 2 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    I’m talking about millennial males because that’s who the essay is about, and it’s who I saw this happening to at that time. I infer they are angry because men under 50 shifted from supporting both Clinton and  Biden by about 10 to a narrow Trump majority in 24.
    I never said anything about them being racist, and as I made clear earlier I think this phenomenon was general to millennial men, but particularly the white ones. 

    Men under 50 is a big group and includes a lot of people who are not millennials. There's a whole generation after millennials that is old enough to vote and the generation after that one is now entering voting age. And racial resentment is much more pronounced among white males in those generations than millennials. That's not because they've experienced discrimination. You're pretending you want to discuss this, but in repeatedly ignoring these facts it seems pretty clear you just want to lecture people for not catering to the feelings of anti-woke white boys enough.

    Quote

    But there’s a broader point here and it had a lot of do with my purpose in starting this thread. And I’m going to put it in all caps not to yell at you, but to catch the eye of people skimming a long post.

    80% OF THE AMERICAN ADULT POPULATION IS GETTING SHAFTED. And on top of that, another 19% is mostly doing OK but only because they have been conscripted as Janissaries in service of the top 1%

    Most progressives (who, not for nothing, live securely within that 19%) would read that paragraph and nod their head. But for some reason, progressives (broadly speaking) look at 28% of those people getting shafted and say, essentially, “fuck ‘em.”

    No shit. Alleviating that is the entire point of liberal and progressive politics. There's no denial that a lot of white men are also shafted by the current system. There's just less sympathy for them than everyone else who is shafted by it even worse. I would still like the government to implement programs that would help them. That's the opposite of saying "fuck 'em."

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  18. 27 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

    If you are asking what I think- I don’t think “white males” get shafted at the population level.
    I think that individual white males under about 45 who do not have money or connections or good luck get shafted sometimes, and when they do, progressives either don’t care or blame them.

    I actually usually chalk it up to shit luck. But if they write an article in Compact about how they just know they were secretly discriminated against for being white, then I'm going to start thinking it might be something else.

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