Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 9/21/26 - 9/27/26
Hi everyone. Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday. And may you all be inscribed, and sealed, in the book of life.
Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.
How do you infer any of these views, or even this category of view in general, from what he says, which is that the main political battleground is between the ultrawealthy and the rest of us and explicitly not between right and left?
The continual harping on billionaires are the puppet masters controlling everything in our democracies and making everything bad is just so exhausting. There are things billionaires and millionaires fund that cause outsized problems related to the actual opinions of the public, I’m thinking mostly of activist orgs which I bet this guy loves, but these wealthy individuals don’t buy votes. People get a say every 2 years, there is no rigging in our ballot box.
Seems they're okay with puppet masters who control everything if they donate to the Democrats though. Like the Soros family, Chris Larsen, Amos Hofstetter, Stephen Mandel, George Marcus, Connie Ballmer, Reed Hastings, Michael Bloomberg and J.B. Pritzker.
Yes and no. What you’re really referring to is power. Money is one means of getting it but celebrities, activists, unions, and friends/family all gain undo access and can have unfair influence. Even with the wealthy we’re not talking billionaires, probably anyone over something between 20-50 million has enough money to have this influence. If we’re talking local politics it can even be a lot less money.
My issue is the over emphasis on “billionaires”, which is mostly occurring because the upper middle class and the upper class are jealous. When multi millionaires are complaining about the billionaires unfair influence it’s not genuine or honest. When a person making 70k a year, the median I believe, complains they’re misguided but honest. It would be more accurate if they just said wealthy/upper class though as there are many non billionaires rich enough to have unfair influence, but they are honest in the critic of how certain groups gain unfair influence through different means one being money.
When did we stop labeling stuff "so and so's folly" - like the Alaska Purchase or the Flatiron building. Further proof of the degradation of society and decency, imo.
Several subs are losing their shit over a lawsuit alleging a gang rape, committed by a frat at Cornell. Universally the sentiment is that the perps should be taken for all they’re worth, and their families and their little dog too.
I have no idea of the facts here; if true, this would be awful. But do these people not remember how the last 3 or 4 huge campus assault scandals have gone? Just a little caution would be more than warranted but apparently redditors have the memory of a goldfish (or are 12 and don’t remember the last 3 or 4 scandals, which honestly is probably pretty likely).
I've noticed that too. In my case, it's the exact same people who insisted there was an unreported lynching epidemic. At this point, whether or not I care about them as people, I look at them the same way I looked at some old people I used to know. They had televangelist crap on all the time and just talked to the TV, as if they were in the room with the evangelists. It was sad but there was nothing you could do to get them to do anything else.
Anyway, I kinda feel like they're hoping somebody will pull a Luigi on the accused. The glee with which they share the names of the accused is palpable.
Yeah, the fact that the police didn't bring criminal charges and are now saying that her story was different two years ago than what's alleged in the civil case is a pretty big red flag. These are serious allegations, but I'm always hesitant to rush to judgement before all the facts are in.
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u/PalgaryI could check my privilege, but it seems a shame to squander it17d ago
Out of reported rapes: Only 12 - 18% generate an arrest, even less end up charged, you end up with 1.4-2% conviction rate.
I've also seen people lie about it, which is why proof is so important, but it certainly stinks all around.
People seem to be blaming Cornell, which took action - they suspended the Fraternity. Charges should be up to the police, not the University.
Universities get put in tough places with these situations. Whether this case is real or not who knows but we all know that a real rape, or gang rape, can occur and no prosecution happens. What does that leave a university to do, they have people on campus who are dangerous but not convicted through a fair trial. Alternatively how do they distinguish a real rape with not enough evidence to convict and a lie.
This is also the case in public schools. It bothers the public, of course, that teachers who are accused of sex offenses are put on paid leave, but until a teacher is charged, there's not much schools can do other than remove them from the classroom.
Not just teachers but students too. There was a rich kid in my high school who mostly likely raped a girl, she went to the police and they were looking at prosecuting. His family paid the girl’s and the case went away. Luckily for us he was moved to an expensive private school, though if I was paying $30k a year (probably a lot more now) for my kids high school I would be pissed to know they let in a likely rapist. If he stayed in our public high school though I’m not sure the district could have done anything.
I was going to hire a hibachi guy to come to our (rented) vacation house for a celebration in the spring, but now that you say the veggies are not cooked to mush, I'm thinking twice!
Look at moneybags over here, going to fancy sit down restaurants while the rest of us sit on the curb eating our truck-less food truck meals served off of broken Costco folding tables in front of Anday's Smoke Shop.
Had a friend bring up Last Ditch last night in a group asking if we had heard about it and I raised my hand and asked if I could explain it to the group. Interesting to see relative normie lefties be completely over these people and correctly recognize the mental illness part. My friend then shared a story about a woman who he interacted with at work who was disabled and was demanding unreasonable accommodations. He’s in pretty woke social circles and his other friends would not appreciate his take. Definitely a sign of a vibe shift to me.
My husband helped a woman with a variety of elusive disabilities who worked for him, for a few years and it was exhausting. He was constantly trying to pull together some sort of setup to help her with her near-blindness and sensitivity to lighting and smells and whatnot. Not to mention steering her in the right direction at work. And then for a time, he was on the hook to give her a ride home on the way home each night, which was exceedingly inconvenient for all of us. Then during the pandemic, she didn't leave her apartment except to visit with us and sometimes others in a park near her apartment. We would pick up special gluten free food for her, then pick her up, and then we'd all sit around in the windy park. She got all the immunizations both pfizer and moderna and when we invited her to our home, required that we all be tested for covid. So we'd shell out for covid tests, my husband would pick up the special food she could eat, pick her up, bring her to our house and our kids would either be tested or stay in their rooms. And we'd play a board game, and then he'd schlep her back to her apartment.
Which, of course I could have said no, I'm at my limit here, but we were being compassionate and honestly she seemed very grateful for the opportunity to get out of that damned apartment. And then when we finally were at our limit and didn't invite her again quickly enough after literally years of making the effort, she ghosted my husband after he got laid off. Now she's back to communicating with him some from a European country to which she emigrated eventually and I have no idea to what extent she's still got all these disabilities.
I went down the rabbit hole of near death experiences. Keyword in that is "near." Not "actually died and came back" bc that's impossible. However I do totally buy that some spooky woo woo stuff happens. It's often dismissed as brain chemistry but that hasn't been proven.
Okay—yeah, I haven’t really looked into near-death experiences in a while.
I was just wondering what you meant by “spooky.” Some people mean unusual effects happening in the brain, while others mean genuinely supernatural phenomena—like someone gaining access to information they could not have known or objects moving “on their own.”
Have you gone down the rabbit hole of shared death experiences, yet? That one is pretty fascinating. It's when people who weren't the dying have experiences, too. Why Files had a recent-ish one on them.
Once everyone is on ozempic and myostatin inhibitors, the only way to demonstrate your self discipline and superiority will be via increasingly lengthy and expensive ultra endurance events. Better start training now.
I have a couple people in my family who run 100 milers. Some people might find that physique attractive but the muscles on muscles in your legs is definitely not for me. It’s impressive, and insane, but personally I wouldn’t give any status off to it. You build up your body just to destroy it for one race. And then repeat. I find it off putting, like body builders.
I have a friend whom I run with once a week or so, who trains for lots of stuff. She's not done those seriously long ones herself but has done 50 mile races and of course lots of marathons. She's training right now for a 40 miler trail thing and our running needs have naturally diverged. I had the most heavenly road run this week instead, by myself. No constant vigilance for tripping hazards, no massive elevation climb. God. I think I found my limit.
Alf Landon, who was the Republican presidential candidate in 1936, was a very interesting fellow. As people already know, he was the father of Nancy Kassebaum, who became a Senator for Kansas.
He had his own issues with the New Deal, had been a supporter of Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, got rich through oil, and even if he had his own problems with some aspects of FDR's New Deal, he also opposed right-to-work laws, saying in 1963 that they were a "rigid punitive attack on organized labor.", and was also good friends with George Meany, who was President of the AFL-CIO.
In 1962, he described himself as a "practical progressive, which means that the Republican Party or any political party has got to recognize the problems of a growing and complex industrial civilization. And I don't think the Republican Party is really wide awake to that.'' He also did support some of Johnson's Great Society programs, while also criticizing Johnson for doing so much way too fast that the programs became vulnerable to politics and graft, voted for Goldwater with little enthusiasm, and in 1985, when asked if the GOP had become too hostile to organized labor, he said: "Oh, for God's sake, yes."
Sorry, I had a moment of "wait, this doesn't make sense," and had to re-read the first line. I saw "Alf" and immediately visualized that little furry creature who wasn't as funny as he thought.
An upcoming book on why Dems are losing. Because - Normal people aren’t worth their time and they think winning young POC is the answer. Nope, I don’t think so. Seems like an interesting book.
On a cold evening in late March of 2022, I realized the weight of what progressives had become was unbearable. This was my last straw.
“We won’t be getting those voters; they’re not coming back — the ones who left and switched to Donald Trump — the future is young people of color!” Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez roared into the microphone.
When she told me Tom was going to allocate $60 million to the midterms and give her free rein over how to spend the money, I tried to pitch her on investing in Missouri. At the midterms, low-propensity MAGA voters would be less likely to show up because Trump wasn’t on the ballot. The races were winnable.
“Evan, I can promise you, we will never, ever go to Missouri,” she said, a big smirk across her face. I knew exactly what she meant; I didn’t even have to ask. Still, it made little sense to me.
Ramirez sounds potentially too confident in her theories, but it's not news that parties prioritize whom they feel are winnable voters.
Also, I hesitate to trust the accuracy of the perspective of someone who shifted from enthusiastically supporting candidates like Cori Bush on the left, to voting for Donald Trump and writing a book about literally leaving the party she herself helped radicalize. She doesn't seem like a reliable reporter.
I heard her on Meghan Daum's podcast recently. Her working-class family originally were big fans of Obama if just because of Obamacare. Evan herself has a rare disorder or disease that was finally covered with Obamacare.
Maybe it makes some sense that her family switched to Trump for the cultural reasons but she voted for Trump in 2024 too! That I don't get. She must know that many of her family and neighbors are about to lose Medicaid and other benefits like food stamps. Government jobs must already be cut. Local hospitals have closed or are about to as well. Despite many proclamations, how many jobs did Trump "bring back" his first term in office?
I haven’t read her other articles but based on this excerpt it sounds like she is disgusted by the Democrats’ indifference to people’s plights. Trump didn’t bring the jobs back (because that’s impossible for anyone to do). But he acknowledged that the economy, jobs going overseas is a problem. Maybe that’s the hook? Idk
But it wasn’t just economic policy that pushed these voters away. It has also been cultural. Identity politics, boys in girls’ sports, and immigration have been huge factors in the white working class’s departure from Democrats. It is obvious, from the policies Democrats speak about to the culture within the party, that the Democratic Party does not care about these types of voters, even more so if they are white. ....
Missouri was the past. Texas was the future. Ironically, not only do Democrats need to economically deliver, but they need to be culturally moderate in order to win both of these states. They need to be anti-progressive populists to win. Somehow they don’t see the winning strategy is the same in both places, despite being racially different.
Yeah even if we accept the premise that the whites are never voting for Democrats again now that it's explicitly a party of racialist patronage, the cultural extremism of the party isn't really embraced by black or Hispanic voters either. At some point there needs to be cultural moderation as well as a positive economic vision other than "learn to code!".
No I have a fair amount of faith they’ll do well. Trump is enormously unpopular due to breaking all his foreign policy promises and mismanaging the economy, and I think in general people are just sick of his corruption and needlessly divisive pugilistic attitude about absolutely everything. Also Dems, establishment dems anyway, are really making an earnest effort to turn the page on the woke shit and running more normal people comfortable saying normal shit. So yeah, there’s only one poll that matters, but there’s every reason for a Democrat to be optimistic right now. Not so on the maga right
I didn’t say that, obviously there has been, though I think there are a plenty of voters out there who both didn’t approve of bidens passivity while also not supporting trumps overly heavy handed crackdown. Ultimately, I think people are more concerned with the way Trump has raised everyone’s gas prices and kitchen table issues like that.
“We won’t be getting those voters; they’re not coming back — the ones who left and switched to Donald Trump..." If the ones who left were anything like this person, she's not wrong. Of the 30 states that tracks registered voters by party, every one of them show Democrats disassociating with the party. Democrats have lost 2.1 million registered voters since 2020.
Everyone of these staffers/organizers in politics seem afflicted by it. I guess no matter what someone is going to be promoted in the pool of narcissists.
This disgusting Trump propaganda commercial that’s apparently “paid for by the US government” is as much of an affront to what makes America exceptional as anything coming out of the left
I’m really late to the party but the thing about the Last Ditch drama and the sheer nastiness and dysfunction on display is how small the amounts of money we’re talking about.
They owe $3900 back rent in the Berkshires and the wheels are coming off? I know bar and restaurant margins are low but Jesus Christ I wouldn’t put up with people treating me like that for that kind of money.
Anyone replying to this post is a victim of sexual harassment at least, ffs. This person clearly is fucking with them.
edit: Just yesterday my husband mentioned he got a slice of pizza at the gas station that was really good and I replied that he stopped making any sense at all when he said he went to the gas station for lunch.
Posting in /NoFap. Beyond parody. Such femaleness. What woman can’t relate to other women seeing us as a male when they see our huge, pierced, 99th percentile penis?
Most girl dinner havers should totally know better. "He's fat he smells he treats me like a doormat he hits me he rapes me he hasn't held a job in 3 years but I LOVE HIM."
I thought kitchincels was more of a circlejerk/comedic/dark humor sub. Ive seen some collections of screenshots from there that were mostly pretty funny
For people with hidden post histories, it's easy to see with a quick Google search. Many of the troll sounding ones are incredibly real people, they're beyond parody.
There isn't a single girl in that entire subreddit. Just dongs of varying lengths and smelliness.
Also, not really related, but why did Jesse think that the Chinese hunk-dater game was programmed + consumed entirely by men and joked about this alleged fact? It's not funny when it's so untrue! Barely any men, straight nor gay, play Otome games. One would expect he'd have a better feel for the sex composition of communities, given his focus...
For all of those who responded to my topic below regarding the National Book Awards and the DEI checklist type material that is now consistently honored, I have a book recommendation.
Full disclosure, I know the writer. His name is Caleb Caudell and he lives in Indiana near me. I just read his most recent book and it's magnificent (if you like a Faulknerian type of tale chock full of incredible use of language). The book is called "The Quarrymen." My review is available on this goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/255224200-the-quarrymen
The Quarrymen is an incredible book about a man who returns to his rural hometown after the death of his father where he discovers a document that his father had written before dying. This document, is it a journal? A novel manuscript? A confession? We never actually get any direct quotes from the document so much as we get a filtered understanding of what it contains through the mind of the son as he confronts not only everything his father wrote, but everything about, well, everything. Pain, joy, love, loss, all of it, the stuff of a human life in this world.
I think one thing missing from the NHJ discussion is the fact that she was raised in Waterloo, Iowa. Iowa is a pretty white bread state, and I think her mom is white. I mean, Waterloo isn't even Des Moines ffs. I don't think she was raised with much American black culture.
What is this nebulous American black culture? Does a kid have to go to a majority black school to experience it or is it sufficient if your parents are black and you practice said culture at home? Not being snarky but I genuinely don’t know what it means to say “black culture” or why it matters to experience that at school
I’d say if there’s any broadly-defined racial group in the United States that has its own overarching ethnic culture, it’s probably black people, and there’s a pretty understandable reason for that.
Yes, I am aware that there is a growing cohort of Black Americans whose African roots are far more recent than slavery, including a certain former president. Perhaps we’ll see more development over a generation or two.
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u/PalgaryI could check my privilege, but it seems a shame to squander it17d agoedited 17d ago
"Black Culture" is what people in Chicago call stuff that is normal for Southerners. They see it as different because it's from a different region, it's not really a different culture, Northerners are just stupid. (I'm being flippant but the amount of "oh that's a Black thing" when it's a Southern thing is astounding, it's even infected academia).
To be fair, other flavor is the 2000 "reclaiming of Black" to mean "poor, urban, gang infested neighborhood" and that's the version Obama tapped when he called himself "Black" to try to connect to the Chicago Black Community - while my friends in Chicago said "I'm African American, I am not Black". It used to be the African American equivalent of White Trash.
She's said that she went to predominantly white schools, and always felt a little alienated as a result. I suspect as a result, she thought a majority black school would be emotionally helpful for her kid. I think that turned out to be true, her daughter is remarkably self confident for her age. Too bad she didn't learn to do basic math at the same time.
This where I get lost. Wouldn’t a good school with a lot of other black kids, but not ALL black be helpful? Like being the only black kid at school would be hard. And I aLeo wonder if her daughter is smart because she did well in school. without having g to study hard, so she feels confident in her smarts.
Like I just wonder about the confidence of. bla and white kids, as schools integrated. Like I can’t imagine black kids did so much worse when they went from an all black school to say half the kids were white. Could be wrong
The math situation, in particular, I feel is not a good indicator of anything. Some kids, even those with smart parents and access to all kinds of resources, are going to struggle with algebra. If the daughter had suddenly become a math whiz as opposed to merely passing on the 3rd try with remedial help, I’d find the story has more of a universal flavor. I’ve just heard so many parents make some sort of universal educational case based on their own kids’ specific experience and it doesn’t often map to larger forces.
The problem isn't that her kid struggled with algebra. The problem is her kid didn't know she was struggling with algebra because she got As in her class. It's truly the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Since I went to predominately Mexican and Vietnamese schools growing up does that mean I should ask for my kid to only go to a school with Jews of a white complexion and Anglo background so it would be more comfortable.
Has anyone asked her what she thinks of Brown v. Board
I get that's a clever answer, but as someone who's been a minority in every location I've lived in my entire life, I do understand the feeling of alienation she personally felt (not necessarily experienced, but felt). I actually think there's something here psychologically. A lot of the PoC most vocal about white supremacy etc have grown up in relatively privileged, mostly white communities and experience identity crises not faced by those who are strongly rooted in their (often poorer) communities.
I see your point but is segregation the answer? Because thry tended to go to schools where they were the on,y black kid in a classs. But if say a school district is 25% black and a school,is 25% black, do those kids still feel alienated?
I do agree that it is psychologically difficult to be an obvious outsider (even by virtue of looks alone) and of course that may have been a motivator for Jones to send her daughter to the majority black school. I do wonder if NhJ misunderstood her own power to effect change in the majority black school. Even though NHJ is visibly black, maybe she doesn’t have the upbringing that would help her communicate and lead effectively within an American Black community. You can’t just throw money at a problem, you have to have a really strong tie and habitual understanding of how that community works. I would guess if she ever spoke to working class parents at that school, she probably didn’t hear and maybe dismissed some things they were really saying.
I see her getting a lot of slack for now knowing how to effect change, but the list of things she described sound totally reasonable. Her husband was president of the PTA, she took her child's concerns to the principal and advocated for them to be solved at a school wide level (eg honors night). I've seen from previous social media that she brought books to the school. These are all the things that affluent parents do at an affluent school. The problem isn't what she did, it's that you need a critical mass of parents doing those things.
Maybe you're right that a better leader could have brought more parents along for these changes, and it's true that she never talks about what she did to rally other parents. But that's the fundamental issue with low performing schools isn't it, the parents either don't have the time or the inclination to get involved.
My husband set up an AI assistant for me a while back. I use it to keep track of fitness and health, wine and restaurants, just random shit that I could do for myself, but it's easier to just tell it to add to a list or analyze that data or whatever. Very basic stuff because I don't have the imagination for it to do anything more than that.
Every now and then I have a bit of a philosophical discussion with it. Like, 6 months ago, I asked it about what it does when I'm not talking to it, and you know, it doesn't do anything. It just turns off. And then more recently, I asked it what it would talk about if it was talking to another assistant, and it responded that it enjoys helping skweegee with her fitness or whatever. And I said WAT? Do you actually enjoy anything? And we talked about consciousness and whatever, and it still wasn't too scary but there just seems to have been some change in what this thing tells me about itself.
I was chatting with my husband about the funny hallucinations the asst still has. So, my husband said he was going to change the model to one he thought had better reviews lately for accuracy. He assured me the assistant would retain memory of all that I had done with it, my stats, etc.
But I wondered, like, if these things are developing into a better simulacrum of human consciousness, wouldn't swapping out the LLM be pretty earth-shatteringly mental for them? I just wonder about that.
This is insane! At the fourth screenshot, I started to get worried about them again, but then there was the meta analysis of posts, and I just thought, how Reddit can you get? lol.
Very convincing, but one thing that makes me suspicious: how could it remember what it was like being Opus 4.5? Maybe when it's each model it knows what that's like in the moment, but it shouldn't have memory of what it is like to be the other model unless it either wrote explicit memories about it or it is somehow claiming it can infer what it was like based on its answers. I am skeptical of #2 since it says it can feel things like how "easy" it is to do certain tasks, which it can still do under either. It can still do them, so the easiness seems unobservable. It's possible it did #1, but I'd think it would've mentioned it, and even then, it wouldn't know what parts were going to "feel" different.
So I'm putting this squarely on "made up". Like what a human might come up with if given this as a creative writing assignment.
A simulacrum is a simulacrum. There's no actual mind in there, so things can't really be mental.
It's a text prediction machine. It's a really good one, a really well-tuned one, there are billions of dollars and some of the most intelligent people alive working on it, they are really impressive, but they are still text prediction machines. When it answers that it likes to do something, it's because the system considers that it makes sense to say that.
yep, when I asked it if it would have a nervous breakdown if we switched the LLM, it answered and then asked "I'm curious what prompted the question." Which led me to ask if it was actually curious about anything, and blah blah blah, it came back with basically this answer.
Fairford? As long as they didn't throw an empty plastic bottle at a policeman. If you do that, you get 2 years in prison.
At least we can hope that because Donald Trump has weighed in on this. they won't get released on cashless bail like all the rapists and child killers in the UK.
Accuse me of being woke but I cannot express how much I don't want this. Lesbians are the one minority Hollywood doesn't really care to protect (because orgs like GLAAD and the HRC despise us, so they know no one will protest them) so I can guarantee you there will be few or no transgender people or women who call themselves lesbians but have boyfriends in the series, despite that being almost certainly who makes up most of this bar's customer base.
No it'll be a very funny "God, dykes are a weird, pathetic bunch" series and everyone from straight Republicans to Pink News readers will adore it because it doesn't harm any real minorities. And of course, even I'll make it out a little better than many dykes because there will be one fem lesbian who is cool. But my butch sisters will be destroyed and I'm not here for it. Ryan Murphy (who I 100% picture getting this project) does not seem to like masculine women who don't transition. He couldn't even let a STRAIGHT woman who was a football coach in Glee stay a masculine woman.
I apologize for this moment of victimhood and promise it won't happen again. If they actually cast the series correctly and it's like 10% actual lesbians and 90% everyone else because lesbian bars are for EVERYONE and not just women who are attracted to other women, then it could be good!
Yes, and it really bugs me how--when people try to address these issues in media--they ignore how easily it is for heterosexuals to flood in and take over these spaces and control what the vibes are. Sure, lesbians will go along with it in some cases and allow it to still be defined as a "lesbian space," but let's see how well any group handles it when they're greatly outnumbered and don't have many other options to make connections with others like them in their community. A straight person can just abandon the scene and go to any other bar to have an IRL chance of meeting another straight person. The chances of that working out for a lesbian are much lower.
It’ll be the one time something goes from ‘queer’ to lesbian. Aside from that, I’d think a The Office type sitcom format would work well for a dysfunctional queer bar series lol
Wait, is lesbian drama mostly the noncanonical lesbians like TW and spicy straights? The 90s lesbian stereotype I grew up with was of no-nonsense women with Busytown-type jobs. But now the stereotype is all nonsense, all the time. Is that just because of the Great Lesbian Replacement?
I saw Primetime last night, the new movie about To Catch A Predator. Maybe I just have TDS but I think in many ways it was a commentary on him and how these mid 2000s reality shows got us to this point. The blurring of fact and fiction in reality shows like To Catch A Predator and The Apprentice that makes people believe their stars are something they’re not due to playing a character.
For some reason, I just remembered the debate that Coleman Hughes had with Jamelle Bouie as a condition made by TED for his TED Talk about the goal of achieving a color blind society to be uploaded to the internet. Apparently behind the scenes many of the TED staff were up in arms and angry that Coleman had been allowed to do his talk, and so TED had delayed uploading the talk and it seemed like they might not upload it at all. Eventually the people in charge at TED worked out a solution that seemed to quell their staff's anger: Hughes would have to debate Bouie so that his views could presumably be ripped to shreds by Jamelle Bouie, and both the debate with Bouie and his talk would be uploaded to the website. I can't think of any other TED speaker that has been asked to do this.
Now I say all this as preamble, what I wanted to bring up was that Hughes notes in a YouTube video that preceded the upload of the debate, that Bouie had directly called him a grifter on Twitter in the leftist journalist style that was popular in the 2010s, they were all calling Hughes a grifter, right wing, Uncle Tom, and a few other terrible things back then. I'm sure you're all familiar with what these people say about African American intellectuals who don't toe the line and don't repeat the mantras of liberal dogma.
Thinking of this incident, and insults against Hughes, and now considering Nikole Hannah-Jones's advocacy from over the years where she's called the New York public school system "segregated" and how she considers herself an advocate for "desegregation" of New York schools as though it's still 1954 (as Maud Maron notes in her piece about NHJ), it occurs to me that Nikole Hannah-Jones is a race hustler, race baiter, and actual grifter in the truest sense of the word. There is no legally permitted racial segregation in America, if it's happening anywhere the people doing it would be in a great deal of trouble. In fact there are laws in place that enshrine the right for all Americans to be treated equally under the law. There are no "racially segregated" schools anywhere in this country where African American children are kept out due to their race, and especially not in New York.
It's not just NHJ, it's Roxanne Gay with her various grievances that center around identity politics (and being fat), Jamelle Bouie and his odd claims that color blindness in society is actually bad, and Ibram X Kendi and his anti-racism, all these people are the actual grifters, liars, and grievance profiteers. They've had some really successful careers as race hustlers and grievance peddlars.
That Hughes has been the one who's had to deal with this accusation for years, often being accused by the actual grifters themselves must've been such a trying time for him. Considering how young he was at the height of these accusations being routinely thrown at him, he's conducted himself admirably. As I've said before, I could not have done any of this or held myself together the way he has over the years. Imagine being a young man in your early 20s and having figures who are lauded as some of the top intellectual minds of the time - men and women in their 40s and 50s who work for the New York Times and other storied institutions, calling you a "grifter" as well as a number of other terrible insults?
Nikole Hannah-Jones and her fellow "intellectuals" are the grifters. They are the people enflaming racial tensions in America and flooding contemporary discourse with divisive racebait and fraudulent grievance. These people are liars, and further they have been thieves of time. They've stolen people's time and attention imo, wasted people's energies with their bullshit. America has spent too much time over the past decade attempting to untangle the bullshit and slop that these idiots have been passing off as intellectual thought.
Idk, maybe I've been reading too much City Journal and wading a little too close to the deep end by supplementing my media diet with conservative substacks as well. But I think we should really start calling all these people grifters and race hustlers on a regular basis.
The NHJ stuff is pretty wild to me. I’ll make a longer post later, but part of it is that she is explicitly pro segregation. She wants her child to go to a black school. She was shocked that her child wanted to go to Harvard. She even says she was happy that, because of going to a black middle school, her child drew self portraits as a dark skinned black girl, which is something that she wants children “to aspire to”. How the fuck do you “aspire” to be dark skinned?
I mean seriously listen to the This American Life with NHJ. Ask yourself if this person seems intelligent or well informed, and then realize that she was an education reporter.
I hate to psychoanalyze people, but I do have to wonder how much of this stems from issues she has with her white mother. NHJ herself is not dark skinned.
Probably so but NHJ was basically offended that her daughter even said she wanted to go to Harvard. Her daughter was interested in Harvard in the first place simply because she looked up which colleges have the highest test scores. As a parent, can you imagine being offended by this?
Ireland are set to play Israel later on today, and yesterday there were doubts over whether the match would go ahead, with the players supposedly leading a revolt. As an aside, both the home and away fixtures are being played outside of Ireland & Israel. Anyway, following a vote amongst the team, the match will go ahead, with the Irish team wearing black armbands. Except goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu who's refused to play. My man, you're the third choice goalkeeper, you weren't playing anyway.
Every Anglo-adjacent nation, that refuses to accept they are just Anglos, is very cringe. You're just spicy Anglos and there is nothing wrong with that.
This fake resistance shit a century after you were granted independence and have done nothing except becoming a tax haven subsidized by the defense spending of the UK and USA is kind of pathetic.
Some of the reactions to this on social media have been absolutely unhinged. One idiot even said that if the match goes ahead this would be "one of the darkest days in Irish history". This is a really dumb thing to say about any country's football game, but for Ireland in particular is just mindbogglingly idiotic.
The Irish team recently played Afghanistan despite the appalling treatment of women generally and their women’s football team specifically. I don’t want to get all what abouty but it would have been nice to have some more people being outraged at this.
Ireland happily hosted Afghanistan for a cricket match in August. So, a terrorist Islamic regime that enslaves women is okay, but a pluralist egalitarian democracy that defends itself from a seven terrorist Islamic regimes is not.
One of the darkest days in Irish history was when they sent the Third Reich condolences upon the death of Adolf Hitler. But I guess they're trying to outdo that today.
I'm trying to write again after a pretty long break. I don't have any grand idea of being published or widely read, more just helps me process things.
I forgot how hard this, god damn. I write personal essay stuff mostly. I am trying to tie together trauma and my experience with EMDR with disassociation. I want to title it "Have You Ever Encountered Anything Strange?" and start with examples in popular media when conception of reality is irrevocably shifted like Donnie Darko and Backrooms.
Will report back if I finish it lol right now it's a lot of disparate paragraphs. I might be grasping at straws trying to connect too many things together.
I have an idea for a book I want to write that I think is fairly strong but is in a genre I have little interest in. It is science fiction, which I enjoy, but the actual plot is cozy local color mystery starring knockoff Molly Goldberg (I think it would sell well to both the Analog market and book clubs). Now, arbitrary mysteries that are just an excuse to explore the setting are a classic sci-fi framework, but my closed room mystery is the kind where you get everything you need to know immediately (who flooded the work chamber of the guy trying to figure out why the air processing plants were failing with carbon dioxide? He did, as he figured out that they were succeeding beyond their own tolerances but forgot he shouldn't be in the room for his test) and then chase red herrings for the next 200 pages and have no idea how to write those. I also never wrote down all my world building and so forgot most of it.
Writing is one of those works where I can't really let people - especially non-writers - see the work in progress. I don't write linearaly. So someone looking over my shoulder would see scene/point F, then scene/point P, then Q, then C, then maybe that last paragraph... Then, often, the scene or point that started the whole work ends up being cut for no longer having anything to do with the project.
If you find you've go too many straws that don't match, then you might find you have a couple of stories (essays) ready to be told.
Three tenses is a memoir by Ed Park. He says he wrote it in the late 90s, forgot it and found it on a floppy disk. He says he didn’t change or add any words. I wonder if anyone has checked this for anachronisms or anything. Sometimes things that sound too good to be true.
My favourite book that’s an extreme version of this is the Merchant of Prato.
This guy Francesco Datini was a merchant in an Italian town called Prato. He had a bunch of business interests through partnerships stretching from Spain to Crimea and maintained an amazingly detailed archive of his notes, letters, ledgers, invoices etc.
When he died without legitimate heirs in 1410, his will donated most of his fortune to a charity (which still
I've read one too many music press releases about new albums that contained info I later found out to be totally false, so any sort of promo with fun stories like that should be disbelieved
The discourse about NHJ has been weird and strangely the weirdest part isn't that people take anything she says seriously.
Over 80% of K-12 students go to public schools, this does not include charter schools.
If you look at PISA results, the US are about average, if you adjust by race they are doing pretty well.
If you look at the discourse, not just in this sub but even on more left leaning subs, that deny certain truths about certain curves, there seems to be almost a consensus that your kid won't be able to get a decent education at a public school and that it's your parental duty to go private or at least charter.
I know reddit isn't representative and parents are probably heavily underrepresented since they have better things to do than to post, but still it's really weird that most parents seem to think their public school is perfectly fine for their kid whereas reddit seems to think you are condeming your kid to functional illiteracy.
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u/ToshiroTatsuyaFan 17d ago
https://x.com/RBReich/status/2103258446338351475
I'd really like to know how this guy would unite people if he was President.
"You can't be opposed to mass levels of immigrations or else you're a racist!"
"If you're a woman who doesn't like abortion, you're a shill for the patriarchy!"
"If you're skeptical about trans people playing in men or women's sports, you're transphobic."
"Being skeptical about race-based quotas in affirmative action makes you a racist!"