Posts posted by wildcat09
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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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Edited by wildcat09
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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Edited by wildcat09
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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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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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.
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Edited by wildcat09
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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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?
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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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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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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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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.
QuoteBut 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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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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1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
I haven’t presented any. I added my personal experience to what’s in the essay and so did @956 Worldwide. Others said they had not observed something like that, which is also fine. The other responses group into the following two major categories:
1) the author is lying
2) ok, maybe some of this did happen to millennial men but probably they are just mediocre white guys angry because their privilege was taken
#1 is simply nonresponsive
#2 illustrates the disconnect in this bubble- millennial men aren’t mad because their privilege got taken away- they were not in the workforce to experience anything like good times for mediocre white men. And the vast majority of you are still enjoying your privilege, which is why you have the luxury to dismiss them as “mediocre white men.”
Why do you keep talking about angry millennial white men? White millennial men are the least racist generation of white men there is.
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1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:I think that is the intention. That’s one of the reasons it disturbs me. The other reason, which is far more troubling, is the truth it contains, because real grievance is much more powerful in politics than the confected variety.
Look at this thread. Multiple people are copping to the fact that yeah, millennial men probably were discriminated against en masse in certain fields for about a decade exclusively based on their race and gender, but most are kind of brushing them off as “mediocre white men.”
But since the vast majority of all people in the workforce and population are pretty mediocre, what y’all are really saying is that it’s fine for an individual to have their opportunities limited because of their race and gender if it squares up the ledgers of representation grievances. That’s a real political problem for progressives, among other things.
Maybe he is, but I’ve seen a lot of what he’s describing. It was pretty pervasive at big companies and in tech for about a decade. Again, it’s going viral because people are recognizing their own experiences in the essay.
I don't think this really happened. I think a much more accurate description of the story this author is telling and that you're buying is that in the pivot to try to diversify, some employers in certain fields adopted poorly-considered hiring and promotion policies that were moderately discriminatory against white men. I don't think it qualified as "en masse" and I think it's likely that more often than not, they weren't actually discriminatory against white men to any substantive degree, but mediocre white men felt discriminated against because they no longer had it as easy as they used to.
Jacob Savage is a mediocre writer with an axe to grind. Compact Mag is a reactionary centrist rag with a clear agenda. The essay even acknowledges that the biggest problem in the industry is its severe contraction, but they want to focus on the race angle because their agenda is to cater to entitled white boys with imagined grievances. I also question the truthfulness and accuracy of much of the piece, for the same reasons other posters have already addressed.
Over the last 3 years, we've had around 30 summer clerks come through our firm. Most have been white and it's probably been a couple more women than men. Of the 30 or so clerks we've had, there's only been 4 who've been below standard. Their quality of work was poor (one even turned in a clearly-AI generated memorandum that was not responsive to the assignment), they were arrogant and rude to their peers (and sometimes even to attorneys at the firm), one got belligerently drunk at a firm happy hour, etc. They were all straight white men. They were boys who hadn't grown up. But we've never had any issues with any of the other clerks (many of whom were also straight white men). Everyone else was capable of behaving like adults, in the office and socially, did great work, and will be good lawyers. Of those ~26 good clerks, we've hired 5. Despite being good to great candidates, we couldn't hire the rest. I'm pretty sure that one of the bad clerks thinks he didn't get an offer because he imagined that we'd decided we needed to hire more women. I suspect the others have the same or similar thoughts about why they weren't hired. Is this just a tiny sample size in a unique industry? Sure. Is it any less representative of larger trends than the anecdotes in the Compact essay? Not really.
Despite its whining, the essay does describe a shift that has happened and impacted mostly millennials, as Bozo notes. That change was bound to happen though, given the greater diversity of our generation and numerous other factors. 2020 got a little wacky in response to the George Floyd protests, but that was the mother of all outliers. It's still much easier to be a white man in America than it is to be anything else. It might not be as easy as it used to be for white millennial men in media as was for prior generations, but that's less about them being white and more about them being in an industry that's an absolute nightmare to break through in for anyone. If you're an entitled, mediocre white man who thinks you deserve to get a spot on the NY Times op-ed page before you're 30 or get your first screenplay greenlit or whatever, of course you're going to be fucked.
Bozo, I know you've been spending a lot of time monitoring what the right is saying these days and that you've been thinking through how to combat their messaging to white men. I could be wrong here, but the sense I get from your posting is that you think we need to acknowledge in our messaging that they've been screwed over by well-intentioned progressive policies. I think that would be a mistake. One thing that I don't think has been discussed here, is that though this essay described a phenomena that affected millennials, millennials still hold the most progressive views on diversity of any generation. Most white millennial men who've lived through what has been described are generally fine with their lot in life and think that phenomena was generally good. The rise in racism among younger people has been among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, not millennials. That's not because they've been discriminated against in hiring, that's because the GOP, the richest people on earth, and much of the mainstream media and alternate "centrist" media like Compact Mag and the Free Press all tell them they're being and are going to continue to be discriminated against.
Do I have a great idea about how to counter that? Not really. But the most important thing in trying to reach that demographic is not validating that messaging. What we probably need is a not-insane Jordan Peterson of the left, who can tell them to make their bed and stand up straight and learn to act like fucking adults.
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42 minutes ago, immamac said:
I really honestly think there should be a law or a consitutional amendment that if you publicly deny the holocaust like this you should be stripped of any and all protections against lethal or other force of assault.
You have the freedom to deny the holocaust, but then afterwards anyone can beat you to death. Seems fair.
I like it. Imma for President.
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16 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
When you’ve already iced 600k kids and then celebrated it with cake, does it make this one harder to enjoy @Anastasis?
I suspect we're going to see a pretty epic happy hour from Ana tomorrow.
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11 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:
What disingenuous bullshit.
"Brisketexan has actually paid $1,000 a month as a house payment, totaling $12,000 in 2025, according to Brisketexan."
Gosh, sure seems like Bristketexan is doing everything right. That's a chunk of cash!
But...leaving out the paragraph above that text:
"Brisketexan has slashed the amount he pays on his house payment in half, from $2,000 to $1,000, leaving his mortgage underpaid by 50% for the year."
Here's what Ana left out:
What he posted, which was intended to make you believe that the US is providing the necessary level of funding to alleviate the crisis, and that funding has been restored or somesuch, was a lie by omission.
Ain't there one of those commandments against doing that?
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6 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:
The funny thing is that was actually a softening of his original stance, which was implying that USAID only funded pointless studies:
10 months later and 600,000+ have died, and countless more have suffered unimaginably, as a result. A result that was predictable and in fact predicted. But tens of millions of Americans didn't give a shit because they're 12 year olds with oppositional defiance disorder and hate liberals more than they care about anything else on earth.
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Just now, Brisketexan said:
But we're pro-life!
And we must protect children!
Again, every single "moral" belief they claim to have, and they claim as so important and underpinning their votes, IS A LIE. They do not hold them as beliefs and principles. They hold them only as weapons they wield to accomplish their only actual goals: (1) take power (2) in order to hurt people.
That's it. That's modern conservative thought, distilled down even more than Wilhoit's law does so. It's about power for me, harm for thee. Nothing more. They are evil fucks.
Just a reminder that everyone's favorite pro-life pharma libertarian was all for destroying USAID, regardless of the harm that might result:

Jeffrey Epstein needs his own thread
in Cloak Room
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.