Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

I think we know. They help him learn to (cop a) feel.

xpost

the dumb blood-stained Bushes

btw

ppl who believe trump is worse than gwb have tds

say what you will about the tenets of neoconservatism but at least it's an ethos

we should do a ballot poll of the best presidents

wm shabazz would win obv

I liked their early stuff before they were presidents

Ornaldo Bloompz

from a historical perspective I actually don't know whether Alfred would send Reagan to The Hague or if he's safely Sound, Solid Entertainments

i don't know anything about the Art World so i am obv lazily tempted to believe it is all a bunch of highly specialized scamming at the expense of some of the least sympathetic marks on the planet, but who knows. however

In 1989, for example, Cady Noland made a silk-screen of the famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot. There are eight large bullet holes across his body and there’s an American flag stuffed in his mouth.

obv the problem with this is not that it's "political" but that it's so pale and shallow in comparison to the wealth of oswald-related art in other, masser media-- libra, oswald's tale, jfk, the original photograph itself-- that it's not political enough, and a democrat like me's inclined to suspect it is its very masslessness that has made it so

i don't rly trust david brooks to accurately describe anything to me tho.

I jes' hate to think they're blaming it on some silly fuckin' Oswald who didn't know shit anyway!

it is my face, but my face has been superimposed! i have done a lot of photographic work!

Fucking white people and their fucking lostness.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, November 19, 2019 4:23 PM bookmarkflaglink

people who are frightened by anger make me mad

― tantric societal collapse (rushomancy), Tuesday, November 19, 2019 4:29 PM bookmarkflaglink

yeah idgi either. for instance, I never watched the Charlottesville video, and then I went and saw BlackKKKlansman and naturally it's what concludes the movie. the context of how it was included in the movie fired me up and motivated me in a way that no other bit of world news had in a hot minute.

If Spike Lee films were included in that T Magazine article I would have liked it way more—fyi

seems like people who don't think he's had an out of ordinary effect don't really care about the people/things he's had an out of ordinary effect on.

― Peaceful Warrior I Poser (Karl Malone), Tuesday, November 19, 2019 10:17 AM (yesterday)

otm!!

however ...

3) Tax policy has been terrible for all but the wealthy under Trump

That actually isn't true ... granted, it has been pretty fucking great for the wealthy. My practice expanded this year so now I have over 200 clients, maybe only one or two I would consider "wealthy," and I can tell you:
there were plenty of people for whom things weren't any worse than in previous years.
There were some that were spared the time on tracking various expenses.
There were some that benefited from the creation of the QBI deduction
There were some that ended up owing who "never owe" because the changes were so last-minute and wide-ranging that the entities that create the withholding tables and rate calculations were scrambling to figure out how to adjust their formulas (which had pretty much been the same since at least 1986) so people who were employees with incomes within certain ranges (generally middle, not low income people) ended up with less tax taken out of their paychecks than should have been.
The biggest impact I saw was the big "fuck you" to the "blue states" (California, New York, Massachussetts) that have higher costs of living as well as state income taxes. ... The "SALT" thing that was in the news for like about a week a while back. The clients this had the most effect on: the wealthier ones.
The most heartbreaking change: the elimination of casualty/theft loss deductions except for in the case of an officially declared disaster.

i don't think ZS's comment is otm. you could say this about any president - that for the ppl who are negatively impacted it's cold comfort to say that it's business as usual. okay. but that doesn't mean it's an out of ordinary effect. like maybe GWB was better for immigration from latin american countries. so if you happen to be a latin american immigrant maybe you'd prefer GWB to trump. but what if you were an iraqi or a prisoner being tortured, or etc etc by the extreme subjectivity standard of "for some ppl he's much worse" i'm sure you could ppl for whom obama was much worse than trump (i know some orthodox jews who seem to believe this). i don't think it's a useful standard.

does quantifying the ppl make it useful??? Like, say, 10k people for whom obama was worse, vs. 100k people for whom trump was worse?

trump has probably straight-up killed fewer people than many of his predecessors, which is a point in his favor

he's also been incredibly destructive to the governing institutions of the united states in a fashion that will never go away. if you are black, gay, purple etc. you may never have had much faith in those institutions, but a lot of people did. there is no returning to a time before the country elected a wildly unqualified game-show host and saw one of its parties fall in line to support all of his extremely obvious lies. the window of what is possible in america and the legitimacy of its government and its standing in the world have changed in ways that can't be undone

trump didn't do all of this on his own, of course, but he's both the culmination and the exemplar

Clinton's trade and crime policies may have Trump beat if it's a numbers game

i recognize i'm in a losing position in this debate, in part because i believe a lot of the negative impact of trump is psychological, which is not going to be easily quantified and compared to other presidents. i don't know how you quantify the fear that many millions of immigrants viscerally feel. if you try to quantify the number of people deported or detained etc and compare it, you're still not getting the full picture because the damage from trump is so much larger than that to immigrants. knowing that a good 45-50% of the country willingly supports a president who sees immigrants as subhuman is something that is "negative", in my book. or depression. i can't quantify how depressing seeing millions of people support the dumbest person in world history feels, but i do know that on a lot of days i just want to die and i don't give a fuck. but i used to feel like that during the obama years too! maybe i feel like that 1.24x more than i did before? it's just pointless to try to measure it. but i know it's real. (and i can't prove it! lol! great argument, self!)

Nah you did good. Yr otm. Feel better and accept the otm

but i stand by my assessment that people who are cruising through this presidency like any other and don't see much difference are people who just don't care much about the people who are negatively affected. i guess that's understandable. like mordy says, in the bush years, uh, we tortured the fuck out of a bunch of people in the middle east. was i psychologically traumatized by that to the same degree? isn't that all subjective, too?

i guess personally speaking, the difference is that the many conservatives in my life kind of conspicuously avoided talking about all that and seemed embarrassed, whereas now they are all vocally racist about immigrants and proud about it (for example). or just the idea that trump is such an incredible dumb fuck and they still like him. trump really has torn a lot of families in two over the last 3 years, in a way that bush/iraq didn't, for better or worse. but again, i can't quantify that or prove it, so

xp

lol, thanks sarahell

Karl otm

This is his only possible move, obviously, but it’s also so exhausting to have the leader of the free world just hammer his people with lie after lie every day. It’s taking such a toll on the American psyche. https://t.co/eHJQ3i4yMk

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) November 20, 2019

to take this a bit further, sorry

if you try to quantify the number of people deported or detained etc and compare it, you're still not getting the full picture because the damage from trump is so much larger than that to immigrants. knowing that a good 45-50% of the country willingly supports a president who sees immigrants as subhuman is something that is "negative", in my book

this is true with other things too, including white supremacy. i can see a criticism of my point being that people of color already knew that so many people were racist, so it's nothing new or damaging. i can't speak to that. but i do think the trump era is like a _confirmation_ of their racism. it was largely implied and concealed, earlier, through indirect things like republicans constant disdain for programs that helped low-income communities and people of color, or their constant attack on voting rights. but there was still enough indirectness for people like me to look at their parents and think "yeah, they support racist policies, but they wouldn't support george bush if he, say, constantly compared back people to dogs, even after being called out on it over and over". but now, it's a _confirmation_ of that reality. which i should have known, earlier. white people like me caught some heat, justifiably, after the election, for being so surprised at racism of other white people. personally, i was surprised at the intensity of the racism, and how openly it was embraced by people i know. in the bush years, their support for the war and for neoconservatism disgusted me. but it's different now. now they're fucking dead to me, for seeing what he supports and still pulling the goddamn lever. i don't think i'm the only one who has experienced this acceleration of disgust for people who used to be close.

actually, last minute tone shift - if you don't see the psychological damage or the affect on people's lives, just stay where you are! it sounds awesome there!

Feels like a lot of this hinges on how you feel about or value postwar institutions and US cold war policy with respect to Europe.

If you believe that on balance these institutions—the UN, NATO, the west's absorption of former Soviet blocs, Russia's containment, etc.—was basically stabilizing and facilitated 75 years of relative peace in Europe (notwithstanding civil strife, balkanization, etc) then FUCKING HELL NO—Donald Trump is in a category all by himself. It's not even remotely close. This president unlike his immoral predecessors, is wholly amoral. It's a qualitative difference and unchecked will have lasting consequences Reagan Bush Obama Clinton can only dream of.

BTW, China responded to totally arbitrary senseless US Paris withdrawal by ramping up coal consumption:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-china-coal/china-coal-fired-power-capacity-still-rising-bucking-global-trend-study-idUSKBN1XU07Y

it sounds like you're saying that the psychological impact is greater on people who had a certain idealism about the united states and the people who live here that has been crushed. it could be so! but this might be inconsistent with your assertion that if you think trump is business as usual then you're blasé to the negative impact he's had. now i'm not sure who is arguing the uncool conservative belief anymore however to make it easier i'll just state another presumably uncool conservative belief which is that you have a measure of control over your psychological response to trump, especially if you're not a part of a group being targeted (but even if you are). fwiw i've suffered most of my life from depression + anxiety and only recently have reached a certain level of internal stability so this message is as much to me as anyone else but ppl have been in far more direr + forlorn circumstances than any of us and maintained an equilibrium and found meaning and purpose and kept their chin up etc and so certainly we, who mostly are impacted by trump lying on twitter i guess, can find a way forward as well.

xp

If you believe that on balance these institutions—the UN, NATO, the west's absorption of former Soviet blocs, Russia's containment, etc.—was basically stabilizing and facilitated 75 years of relative peace in Europe (notwithstanding civil strife, balkanization, etc)

I think this is too speculative to say for sure either way (either that these institutions are the reason for stabilization or were a product of other forces - like burnout from WW2, globalization, etc, or that trump has irrevocably damaged them).

I think that's fair, my point is this president has no position on the matter, it comes down to how these instituitions dovetail with his own self (as opposed to national) interest.

I for one wasn't sure in 2016 that "no principles, non-ideological" could really be worse than "ideological, compromised principles."

It is. Keeping score by body count now isn't gonna tell the story. Wait five or ten years and see where all this chaos lands us.

remember that brexit vote happened months before the 2016 US election under obama's watch so it seems questionable to blame fracturing of EU on trump

it sounds like you're saying that the psychological impact is greater on people who had a certain idealism about the united states and the people who live here that has been crushed. it could be so! but this might be inconsistent with your assertion that if you think trump is business as usual then you're blasé to the negative impact he's had.

hmmm, i don't think so! i still disagree with the premise that trump is BAU. the whole open embrace of white supremacism thing isn't business as usual to me. like i rambled above, it has precedents, but not to this degree. nothing is implied now, it's raw racism, and it's the feature, not a bug. his supporters love it. do you not notice that? not to make too many assumptions, but have you been to a flyover state recently? it's gotten creepier since 2016

xp I'm not—I think Trump was lifted by the same global far-right wave that has injured europe. I also think any one of Trump's predecessors (not for altrustic reasons!) would maintain a bulwark agaist it, whereas with this guy forget about it.

also (and finally, promise) i admit that i can't unsee what i clearly see in front of my face very day, which is the increasing polarization of the country, the purposeful muddying of "truth" or "news" or "facts", the demise of institutions to keep these things in check (i know you and i disagree on that), etc

I feel like the NYC school system has been hijacked by insane woke ideologues who think twitter is real life and don't want to think through the practical implications of anything they propose.

Only Built for Cuban Dinks

^unsent post from last time I was looking at this thread on the app.

what kind of woke proposals, man alive?

For context, NYC schools are divided into "districts" but these are not like suburban school districts -- each district could easily have like 30 elementary schools and 10 middle schools (high school is already by application and citywide).

There was some Stanford study on diversity benefitting students, so now they have this goal of having every school reflect the demographics of its district within three years, every school reflect the demographics of its entire BOROUGH within five years (remember that each borough of NYC is already the size of a major US city), and every school reflect the demographics of the whole city within 10 years.

My district in queens is now one of the guinea pig districts and they are trying to come up with a plan for it, starting with middle school, but it spans all the way from rego park to jamaica and many parts have spotty public transit. In order to achieve their stated goals (due to the current school demographics) they'd have to send kids all around the district, mostly from the northwest end (rego park and forest hills) to the southeast end (jamaica). This is in the exact opposite direction of 95% of parents' commutes, and it's NYC so plenty of people don't have cars. Basically you'd either have to put your 11 year old on a subway to a bus through a relatively dangerous neighborhood or bring them to school and add an hour to your commute each way.

All such concerns are being scoffed at as the product of white privilege and racism, even though I have yet to see any evidence that the parents in Jamaica want this either. Another oddity of the whole thing is that the middle schools in my neighborhood are already about 30% hispanic, 10% african american, 30% asian and 30% white, so they really are not "segregated" per se, it's just that the schools in jamaica are mostly hispanic and african american, so somehow it's supposed to make a difference if we sprinkle some white kids into those schools?

In addition to these "diversity plans" school chancellor is also trying to end all gifted and talented programs and remove tests used to get into specialized high schools. Ironically the things that he's trying to remove were the imperfect solutions that enticed affluent people to stay in the public school system over the last 20 years where they previously would have left entirely (suburbs, or private school for the wealthier ones).

wouldn't ability-based applications for high school lead very quickly to segregation by class (and race) even if it were city-wide?

iirc nyc has the most segregated schools in the country

Yes, but a big part of the reason for that is that the whole system is only 15% white and a lot of the most affluent white people either put their kids in private school or leave for the suburbs. Even if you could achieve a perfect distribution of races across all public schools, so that each school was 15% white, I'm not sure what that would achieve, and you'd never get that anyway because a big chunk of those white people would just leave the system.

Private school should be banned (cool radical belief)

some Stanford study on diversity benefitting students

can you link to this?

tbh I'm not sure which study or whether I'm even remembering correctly that it was stanford. DOE officials mentioned some study done a few years ago in a meeting as the basis for the diversity plans.

so, I'm still not going to come out against callout or cancel culture, because I feel it isn't inherently good or bad, but ultimately comes down to how it is used. but incidents like this really make me averse to it: https://www.thewrap.com/kobe-bryant-dead-msnbc-n-word-alison-morris/

a friend shared this with me yesterday when the Kobe news was breaking, and I braced myself for what I thought was going to be a low-level affiliate broadcaster somehow letting an epithet fly on air. and I didn't hear it the first time, and I listened two more times, and it sounded like "nakers" to me. this was hours before she came out with her clarifying statement saying that this was exactly what she said - not being a sports reporter, accidentally started to say Knicks, and caught herself and combined the two.

nonetheless, there's a massive campaign of over 50,000 on social media trying to get her fired from her job, as well as harassing her on the internet. some are criticizing those who have stated they didn't hear an epithet, as if we're supposed to pretend we heard something we didn't.

I can't blame anybody in this hostile political climate for being anxious when they think they hear an epithet on live tv, regardless of whether she said it or not. but calmer heads aren't prevailing, and many are doubling down even when being told "you know, maybe this isn't what she said". and this is resulting in someone's livelihood being threatened as well as a harassment campaign on Twitter already underway.

I've never made any excuse for someone who has run afoul of human decency, whether it be racism, homophobia, etc, but this just makes me feel sick because there's certainly 'reasonable doubt' but everybody is pouncing.

a lot of that is pain about kobe dying and trying to take it out on an easy target

and that is a good point, I don't want to discount that by any means.

there was definitely a wide range of emotions with it - one of my best friends told me it outright ruined his day.

when you don't have a functioning system for holding people accountable for their words and deeds it's not terribly surprising that people will take enforcement of social norms into their own hands. nor are any of the consequences that follow from that terribly surprising.

house music: i'm perfectly happy if you wanna play the same beat over and over for an hour, but *please* spare me the single vocal line repeated every five fucking seconds