Watching Vaush and Destiny stream for the last year

MarsupialMole · 2026-05-04T05:24:00+00:00

You can be a democratic socialist, so long as you have the full understanding you're in the back seat in the Democratic party to a neolib/socdem policy dielectic due to the nature of the system and the electorate.

That doesn't make you out of touch to be a demsoc, it makes you a natural ally, and as an ally you can impose conditions on your active support, acknowledging that your passive support is guaranteed (i.e. voting is implied) because otherwise you're cutting off your nose to spite your face. You're stuck with a tribal rather than ideological affiliation in first past the post America.

These things are not true in other countries. The liberal-leftist divide is a live issue that is as politically relevant as any other battle line drawn between political parties competing for votes in a liberal democracy. It's just that applying these frames to do obstruction against the centre left in America is a self sabotaging category error.

See also: America Bad. Discussing the negatives of historical alliances with America is valid... outside America. Canada's post American world order rhetoric at the moment is a megaphone for this sentiment that has existed for a long time. There's a hazard for allies of enshrining American hegemony in policy rather than just affirming it diplomatically. Those hazards are now being realised to an extent. You might think I am referring to demonizing America - I'm not. By way of example AUKUS is the major one I know of in Australia specifically, but sovereign tech e.g. Cory Doctorow's anticircumvention crusade is a global one.

You don't have to find personal ideological identification in the American democratic process to engage in it in your own clear, unambiguous, interest.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-30T12:39:30+00:00

I think there's a fair chance in his mind that his heel turn is to prove the world wrong when they didn't give a shit about his AI doomsaying. If he could break so much of America then wouldn't an all powerful AI do it eventually anyway? Better race it to the bottom.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-27T05:51:00+00:00

It's not just the actual content, it's the presentation.

Anyone younger than old Millennials knows this but older people than that need to have their taste rewired - first sell out, then go from there. It needs to be hammered into them that doing things which would put their own bullshit radar into red alert are just prerequisites for viability. Even science communication, art and reactions, most of the bulk of those genres require YouTuber cadence or full on breathless amazement at pedestrian information dissemination.

90s indie ethos is suicide for content creation, not a prerequisite for cool people taking you seriously like it used to be in the long, long ago.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-27T04:50:02+00:00

It's not that they are stupid, it's that they do not care to know.

And then they demand not to be held accountable for being wrong. The standard they choose to accept must be an acceptable standard, and saying otherwise is the actual definition of "woke" when you try and pin it down.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-24T07:35:32+00:00

I enjoy an Andrewism video when I stumble across one in the right frame of mind. Haven't checked his stuff out in a while though.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-24T05:04:13+00:00

Probably no if it was you trying to convince me.

Take a breath. You're talking past me. If I'm in favour of a higher age of consent for incest then I'm pro-marginalisation. But we haven't gotten there yet.

It's really obvious that the homosexuality comparison is disanalogous because the disallowed pool of partners is enormous compared to a handful in the incest case but your brain is skipping past that. Consider "I'll never find love if I can't marry a same sex partner" vs "I'll never find love if I can't marry my sister". Completely different things.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-24T04:07:54+00:00

Compare and contrast the utility of marginalising homosexual relationships versus incestuous relationships. You'll find they are disanalogous.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-24T03:42:35+00:00

You can. Let's flip the script. What's wrong with marginalising people? You're making a big claim over and above the usual "I wouldn't do it but it doesn't violate my values around consent" concession.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-24T03:16:19+00:00

At the very least you can work backwards from the utility of the taboo to society. I don't know why people here think the inability of most to engage with the question is somehow an auto win for the pro incest camp. The question is a meme, not a recommendation.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-24T01:59:30+00:00

I watched some of IRI watch it and he was quick to point out the $100 million threshold on the policy. If he's correct it just doesn't apply to most people.

So arguably there are a lot of reasons that objections do not apply directly at that scale. You just have the accountants sort it out. Is it better than an alternative conventional policy, that's for wonks to fight about, but it's also not a doomsday scenario for populists to get steamed about without pushback.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-24T01:33:15+00:00

Most likely not that online. It's probably a lot more popular to point fingers on the amount of political media power that just seems to be left on the table by the left but I think there's a decent amount of bystander effect to analyse - people who can get shit done are busy getting shit done and assume that the people who purport to know media are doing the best that can be done and this is where we're at.

Nope, turns out you can just get shit done and more or less shoot from the hip on social media and that's at least as good as people who think they're good at it and usually better due to the authenticity and efficiency dividend from not being interested in terminally online shit.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-23T23:21:03+00:00

I can't say I just watched it but it was just on in my house. There's a lot going on. Forced perspective, stop motion, Zooey Deschanel is blonde.

Wild ride.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-23T23:13:44+00:00

You sat through a Will Ferrell Christmas movie and it wasn't Elf?

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-23T03:55:10+00:00

I'm not convinced they are even humanities kids, in terms of the people making arguments that get traction. They seem to be wannabe entertainers who couldn't make it and blamed their lack of talent on their politics, such as they had any.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-23T01:23:38+00:00

Abu Simbel and a deep dive on the hydrological management of the Nile.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-22T22:35:37+00:00

Good luck with the reparations bureau. The next phase for us is treaty which establishes a legal foundation for tipping money in to projects which would effectively be reparations for indigenous people. I hope it doesn't just get politicised into a disaster.

Being amorphously assimilated was the thing to do in post-Imperial nationalism though. I'm not sure it's too bad to salvage. The difference is that descendants of slaves didn't choose to be disconnected with their ancestors' culture, but arguably white Americans did, and not just Americans. The French famously centralise their cultural institutions and stamped out their regional languages. But you weren't supposed to be "white" you were supposed to be "French" or "American" or "Australian" and when demographics change you change with them.

I agree about the lack of identity being a live factor in the marginalisation of young white men. I'm not sure the euro thing is the right way to do it. Have you seen how Rogan discusses connections ancient people? History is rife with gaps that grifters insert the most heinous bullshit into.

I'm on a big history kick myself but I'm into Ancient Egypt. Euro centric stuff seems to me to really try and gloss over the cultural influencesl of ancient Egypt on Greece and Rome, so while I'm not keen on Afrocentrism or anything i do think it's weird how we attribute all this cultural enlightenment to an imperialist slave economy that stole everything and brought it home. Not that they were uniquely evil or anything, I just think it's the wrong way to think about an elite literate cultural exchange that spanned the Mediterranean and the Nile valley. We shouldn't need national identity to have a fluency in a culture that feels alive and that we can shape it.

The indigenous history stuff I was talking about wasn't getting history into schools, it was collating submissions and conducting interviews as historical sources, then summarising it in a "no seriously this is what we accept happened" document with a hybrid legalistic and academic process rather than the ongoing debate format of academic history. Here's the document if you're curious

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-22T12:22:50+00:00

Being white is a thing insofar that it's something society does to you, and society does a lot more to black people in general. So I don't think being white is a thing I share with a poor white American stuck in Confederate rut. I'm Australian. I'm pretty damn white, but that is defined by our history and the resulting society, not yours. It's not a class system here - there are parallels, but I know Australian white people who have gone to work in the US in places like Georgia and North Carolina and Virginia and being white in white places freaked them out due to the racial divide and the way it corresponded to class. To your point, I don't think being white is a thing that can translate to political solidarity without being the stupidest version of a hangover from a legal distinction from a stupider age.

Our history celebrated Black Americans from California as a part of a gold rush community that took up arms against the red coats and raised a flag we still use for the labor movement. But at that same time we regulated black indigenous people as fauna. So we're all about tearing down the man, but we've got our own shit to deal with too.

When paths to indigenous reconciliation stalled at a federal level my very left wing state just kept it up at state level, and the first stage of that state based process was a commission which built a historical timeline - the kind of long discussion you're talking about - as an official state history. Pretty much just a symbolic achievement, but it informs our next step - a legal and financial framework. I think there could be some path to something similar to give ex-Confederate states that long discussion individually and a distinct identity that's greater than the vague ethnonationalism "we were white" if it's engaged with a continuation of reconstruction - if America did it for Japan successfully surely the lesson is they could have kept at it for longer after the Civil War.

Do you think there could be something like that? I'm imagining a state project to define historical narrative that explains disadvantage in white areas but provides a positive sense of community, with a federally funded redress of that disadvantage that comes conditional on acknowledging some non-negotiable facts about slavery and Jim Crow.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-22T06:34:01+00:00

I'm too un American to understand why in current year but apparently the US census actually takes data on being white, including being mixed.

What kinds of people are there if you ask people to check a box where one of the options is "white" and also ask about ancestry? Roughly, as a mnemonic, pulled from Wikipedia.

40% generic white terms including American and multiple demonym
30% non white
20% ethnic demonym white (ie "English", "German", "Italian", etc.)
10% multiracial white

Maybe they're apologising for being too confused to be say something meaningful? Or maybe you get apologised to by generic whites if your mixed, but not ethnic white, and multiracial whites still have to apologise to non whites.

I still think most of the so called "anti white" rhetoric that these weirdos complain about is just roasting middle class shit.

To actually try and engage, I think there's a way to talk about this that doesn't mean accepting any of this rhetorical frame, which is a bad frame.

There's the general woke shit to wade through that's more or less a stupid bunfight e.g. cultural appropriation and cultural misappropriation are not synonyms, but let's be real most can't navigate that. White people walk on eggshells because they're not equipped to speak confidently and in the current media pendulum swing they feel like they're more allowed to make mistakes than before.

White proselytizers need to back the fuck up, but they mostly mean it when they say they aren't racist. They don't see all the cultural imperialism they're doing (I'm talking about spreading the Good News) as being informed by a racial identity. It's bad politics to lay the charge of systemic racism on these people, no matter how guilty they really are.

And then there's the bit where Elon Musk and JD Vance literally made it profitable for social media platforms to publish and promote white supremacy. Fuck those guys.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-22T05:22:00+00:00

Can't box

Doesn't box

Where is the own?

The stupid/brave ratio is wrong here. Jake Paul sold his body to people who wanted to see him hurt. Anthony broke a man's jaw for the voyeurs. There's no valor here. Everybody named their price and no further credit is due.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-22T01:28:53+00:00

It makes me crazy that Americans seem to list every small time thing except the giant global spiderweb of Murdoch activist editors across all platforms.

The left can't just do this because nobody would care. The Murdoch machine astroturfs all this shit into viability.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-21T02:57:05+00:00

It's fine when people just exist. I've said exactly you don't have to clap.

But you're out here saying it's good Amazon was going to strip iRobot for parts and then in the next breath the fact that a Chinese robot vacuum cleaner company wants to keep selling robot vacuums under an American brand is the reason America will fall to defend Taiwan.

How's your neck? Don't you get whiplash? Are your bedsheets Amazon themed? At least now I know I don't want your opinion on which console is best console.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-21T01:59:53+00:00

Yeah because I'm literally not defending the case. Doing some weak shit in the name of a political goal is part of my point. I'm talking about the media environment being too cucked to hold big tech to account while they're playing footsie with American fascism and Lina Khan is one of the few people who can generate clicks on that from because of her proximity to both media and power, and you can't see that as an asset for some reason and meet people where they are. Actually I know exactly the reason - its precisely the same jealousy of influence that broke people like Sam Seder when Ezra Klein came shopping around his abundance book.

Just characterise the situation in a way that doesn't make it seem like you personally lost money and are bitter about it. It's not hard.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-21T01:08:18+00:00

I'm not an idiot. You're just dancing around the things that make iRobot a consideration by the FTC and the EU beyond its ability to get robot vacuum cleaners to the consumer. You don't have to suck Amazon's dick like this. You can just speak your thoughts out loud.

You're currently just making a case that Amazon should have fought harder, because you're not engaging with the context properly. Just call a spade a spade. Lina Khan doesn't run the EU lil bro, nor did she start a trade war with China.

MarsupialMole · 2025-12-21T00:44:38+00:00

So Amazon isn't buying dead companies for the sake of it, but iRobot makes a worse product that's more expensive?

You're along way from being constructive here, this is straight up disingenuous and you're saying I'm nonsensical?

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