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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. This is a great post and touches firmly on why “let’s just do our own populism” is not only bad for the country but ultimately bad for electoral politics. Problem one is that you can’t out-pander a panderer or out bullshit a bullshitter. Starting out down the populist road of exploiting vibes and offering promises just puts you on a race to the bottom where your opponent has no floor at all. Second is that it puts you into a recursive loop of ever more irresponsible veering into immoral and dangerous policies. All over the world the experiment has been run, but there’s no way to run as a populist then course correct to good governance. You eventually have to deliver on your irresponsible and impossible promises and then you’re stuck upping the ante with more irresponsibility or losing to the less scrupulous opponent who will up the ante by either promising more or offering to hurt the people standing in the way. It has just a miserable track record of success when tried. It offers no pressure valve, because trying to course correct literally entails going against “the people.”
  2. See, it’s funny because it means millions of good people losing their future to Vladimir Putin.
  3. I’m sorry I can’t smirk, I’m just having to think of the most courageous leader of the 21st century being forced to negotiate the future of his people with Elon Musk. “We need to have Mexican-style leftist politics here” is . . . a take.
  4. Thanks, @InkaUtexas for tagging me. I know I’ve dipped from this thread. This might be my last post in here. In early March 2022 I was in deep southeastern Poland. So deep that it wasn’t always really Poland. I was there with the grandmas and the kids with cats in their arms and the moms trying to carry all their luggage. I caught my first case of COVID in a World Central Kitchen outpost. I really haven’t left there and every day since has brought Ukraine to me. This is true: Ukraine is heading towards a loss in this war, whether faster or slower. I did not say that Russia will win, but Ukraine is heading for a loss. That is where the road heads. Ukraine is smaller, Russia is bigger, and Putin wants Ukraine to lose more than we want it to win. It’s a math equation now. I have never been more proud of being an American than I was in March 2022 but since the about the summer of 2023, all that has been whittled away down to nothing. 2022 was the purest test of whether America wanted to be America since 1941. We failed. Many of us don’t want to be America anymore, and many of those who want to be America are not brave enough to actually do it. I don’t know who makes me angrier, except maybe myself. The Poles and the Balts and the Czechs are better Americans than we are but they just don’t have enough. Sometimes only America can be America. This has consumed my life for almost 1000 days, and it will continue to consumer it until it ends one way or another. I’ll keep at it, but I can’t look at my Ukrainian friends in the eyes anymore and I can’t write about it anymore.
  5. This loops back into online incel/MRA culture. They really get excised over the idea that they have to register for the selective service.
  6. Man, you are not reading me at all. Like most people on this website, I am a man myself. I actually really dislike grievance politics no matter where it’s coming from, there is a strong tendency on the far left and the…well, just the ordinary right… to think that we can solve things if we just keep expanding the circle of the aggrieved. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way, we can’t just keep shoveling shit into bigger piles on fewer plates. That isn’t an answer. Part of growing up is realizing that the system isn’t fair. And then realizing that the system is even less fair to other people. And yeah, young men do need to grow up and realize that their problems are not unique or specially worse. And that the way to fix them is to try and help yourself and others. Not to make sure others have it shittier than you do. I do realize that doesn’t message test well. Part of what (used to) be an (unrealized) ideal of American masculinity is telling yourself hard truths that aren’t popular. I prefer telling young men that, as opposed to coddling their grievances to no real end. Call me a reactionary, I guess.
  7. Also, I need to point out that all this deep analysis about how schools and government and corporations and women and society is stacked against young men and working to against them—- you’ve basically reinvented systemic racism and CRT from first principles except for men. And that’s not to dismiss some super real and acute ways we fail boys. And men. But also women. And gay people. And minorities. So maybe start with some fucking empathy and an attitude of helping yourself and each other.
  8. Yes, pandering is an extremely effective messaging technique. It really does work to tell angry young men that none of their problems are their fault and that by joining with you they can get everything they want and take revenge on the women that won’t give them Just One Sex. But as you’ve hit on, you CAN’T counter-message that. And the histrionics here about what the Dems actually tell young men is fairly cuckoo. The counter-message of nominating an ex-football coach infantryman with a nice traditional family to partner with a black woman to work together for all Americans didn’t work. He got called a beta cuck because he dared to demonstrate that men don’t have to be like this. Young men chose the panderer because he promised them that none of their problems are their fault and that they have no responsibilities to fix them, that will all be done by someone else, with other people’s resources. Which actually may be the common thread uniting the far left and far right.
  9. It’s time to unironically post that “weak men create hard times” meme because by all measures, even tradcons have complained that the current generation of young men is the weakest and most feckless we have seen. They just didn’t realize they were doing their own meme. A bunch of comfy, weak, atomized little shits who formed parasocial relationships with people like Rogan and Tate gave us this.
  10. Can I ask, what does it mean for DJT to do a “good” job. Because if we define it as successfully doing most of the things he says he wants to do, I will be super unhappy. On the other hand, he is sui generis as a candidate in that even his supporters often say he won’t ever do the things he talks about all the time. So maybe that is what a “good” job looks like. All his supporters really want him to do is feed the hate machine and fertilize their grievances, and I think he will do a good job at that.
  11. 71 million people who voted for the “fuck your feelings” candidate and a good chunk of them now very much want us to be concerned about their feelings. They are still angry, not happy. Craving the respect from the rest of us that you say you don’t care about, but badly want.
  12. It’s fun to self-flagellate here and agonize over whether too many feelings are hurt I guess. It is the only thing the center-left can do. It’s notable that the party that won is completely devoid of introspection or empathy. Can we stop pretending like this was some kind of policy election or adjudication of democratic economic policies. The winning candidate provided stream of conscience gibberish that revolved entirely around petty personal beefs and conspiratorial vibes. One could not be more calculating with appeal to the stupid and angry among us, and it landed precisely with that segment of the population. I am sorry that it is true, but it is: Trump supporters are stupid or bad, there isn’t another choice. The messaging problem is precisely a failure among the center-left to construct a compelling narrative of villains and idiots and to convince people they they were neither idiots or evil. We have an entire right-wing hate machine dedicated to rabidly tearing down democratic leaders (small-d) and attacking our democratic system; and we have a centrist professional media establishment dedicated to doing the same thing but coolly and analytically.
  13. There is a theory, which I subscribe to, that American Hispanics are for the most part going to get absorbed into “White” in a similar way that all the White ethnics did. It takes time and honestly only continual immigration has meant it isn’t noticed. But it’s happening.
  14. I will say one thing. I hope every fucking young man who pulled the lever for DJT has his brain melted by the male loneliness epidemic. I hope they all spend the rest of their twenties in a vape and Monster induced stupor surrounded by other fucking groypers and incels. I hope they never feel a woman’s touch or even a smile, I hope they grow old and wither away feeling like no one ever loved them. I will do my damndest to make sure my daughters do their bit in all that.
  15. Lol, no one is going to act shocked anymore. It’s what they want.
  16. We will deport some brown people.
  17. They do not all hold the same hatreds, that’s true. And while many of them are stupid, many of them are not. They are bad and think that they will benefit by allying with the stupid. But what does unite the entire Trump electorate, and GOP, is grievance. Half the country is living in comfort and yet filled with rage at the idea that someone else might have it “better.” They are furious that someone might be looking down on them. And I am looking down on them. 100 percent.
  18. America and the idea of America doesn’t exist anymore. This is what we are now. The institutions we believed were strong enough to survive an authoritarian are hollow. The future is the Washington Post. Billionaires who shape our environment acquiescing so the ignorant and angry won’t be deployed against them.
  19. And all these sites, including the Times, are reporting things like “57 percent chance of a Harris victory” in states where polls are closed. No, assholes. There is no more probability or chance, one candidate has 100 percent won and another one has zero percent won. It is completely binary, it has happened. You are saying that your forecast has a X percent chance of being right.
  20. I try to always sign different things with a different signature so that I can deny it was me later.
  21. Absolutely love this account and been wasting time all day. Police body cam audio set to MS Paint animation.
  22. Yeah, he’s got an extremely low-info fan base and has nowhere to go but outrageous now that he doesn’t have a nightly platform where he can do the two minutes hate on whatever the GOP outrage is. To attract attention he has to get more and more outlandish and is just about over his skis.
  23. You came here and posted low-effort rage bait from a groyper and are whining that the discourse isn’t up to your level.
  24. What Tucker says is bullshit, but this last piece is almost certainly not true. The Mao and Stalin regimes along probably win for pure numbers. Total population on earth wasn’t high enough to rack up those kinds of numbers until the 20th century when totalitarianism emerged. Even before that, the big numbers were rung up in Eurasia by the Mongols or the Chinese in wars almost no one besides East Asian specialists know about.
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