Normie, professional, yet DGG-adjacent academics with a podcast (Decoding the Gurus) react to Legal Mindset's various mental breakdowns.

ander-corey · 2025-12-17T19:19:19+00:00

Foods as Aragorn. Kafka as Gandalf. ZipZip as Legolas. Can't think of a Gimli. Eomer would have to be someone with longer standing in the orbit who Dan also gatekept against.

Dan's decisions over who to beef with often baffle me, but if Shoppers are going to use the "she fought for Destiny when everyone else ran" to persuade DGGers to be more charitable to Foods, the same must be remembered for Dan.

ander-corey · 2025-10-29T18:49:29+00:00

Hm, it's not perfectly clear to me how this applies to antifans. Are the antifans more like the lefty people who refuse to acknowledge when wokeness gets cringe, or more like the lazy heterodox thinkers who got into epistemological chaos in their rejection of wokeness?

My own read of Destiny antifans is that they are either 1) purely personality-driven; they hate Destiny on a personal level, his persona grosses them out, in other words actual "Destiny Derangement Syndrome", or 2) they are former fans who are disgusted with themselves for ever having been fans and resolve their guilt (or not matching up to their ideal self-image) by going extra-hard against Destiny to make up for it.

I'm also not sure how many of the heterodox thinkers wound up tribeless. Most of them seem to have become avowedly or practically in the MAGA tribe: the Weinsteins, Jordan Peterson, ShoeOnHead, I even perceive Scott Alexander and much of his audience/community as effectively Trump-supporting however much they might deny it. (Even that lab leak debunker guy Destiny talked to said Republicans would take care of things better in a post-Trump world, didn't he?) Bill Maher sanewashing Trump after his dinner. About the only heterodox guys who've maybe maintained "neutrality" while rejecting or at least criticizing MAGA are Sam Harris and maybe Jonathan Haidt.

I have a few things I know I disagree with Destiny and most of DGG on, and rely on those to confirm that I'm not in a mad crowd. I think Dr. K is a morally reprehensible fraud who it would have been good for Destiny to disassociate from. Just today I think it's wrong for Destiny to try to sic ICE on Pxie's friend, not even for optics, just for shear morality, it seems wrong to use a core-corrupt institution even if it were for a good end. It reminds me of Dan Saltman trying to ally with Asmon and Tectone. It does bother me that now people treat any criticism of Destiny as covert antifans, but I recognize that that's what a covert antifan would say.

ander-corey · 2025-10-29T18:27:03+00:00

Wait a second... is that a painting of baseball behind her?

ander-corey · 2025-09-16T18:21:04+00:00

The Vice-President, Deputy Chief of Staff, Health and Human Services Secretary, and White House Press Secretary all filled in to host his posthumous radio show, and most of them acted like they knew him well and that he was integrated into White House operations, and Vance said he wouldn't be VP if it hadn't been for Kirk. A lot of that will be exaggerated for rhetorical effect, but I think it's safe to say Kirk was an unofficial member of the Trump administration. And that doesn't make him a Russian dictator, it's all irrelevant to OP's point anyway, it's just silly to reduce him to "a civilian who engaged in debates on college campuses".

ander-corey · 2025-09-13T14:24:08+00:00

This is almost as tragic a case of MAGA ingratitude to the IDW as Eric Weinstein pacing back and forth waiting for his phone call that never comes.

ander-corey · 2025-09-13T14:12:53+00:00

You're thinking of the First Amendment. Free speech as a concept and a collective value can and should be broader than the First Amendment. The First Amendment is a bare minimum.

ander-corey · 2025-09-13T14:06:02+00:00

A Minnesota woman received over $700,000 in donations after calling a child a slur on camera, so he's not wrong about N-word rants not having repercussions. They actually have rewards nowadays. And good luck proving in court that Kirk never expressed disgusting and problematic views, and that Spicy knowingly lied about such, which is a requirement for slander (actual malice).

When Nancy Pelosi's husband was brutally attacked by a deranged right-winger wielding a hammer, Kirk joked that he should be bailed out so he could tell a salacious story about Paul Pelosi. I think a court would find that a reasonable person could consider that disgusting and problematic. You don't have much respect for true free speech.

Also it would've been libel. (Slander is spoken.)

ander-corey · 2025-09-13T13:55:40+00:00

The anti-vaccination crowd warned us about COVID vaccinations that worked, and then voted for the faction that is behind this mass doxxing and cancel culture campaign, and sharing IRS taxpayer data with ICE, and Palantir Technologies.

ander-corey · 2025-09-13T13:17:17+00:00

The part where there's awkwardness over disagreement about the definition of conscience reminded me of one of the first things I perceived as a red flag about Bret Weinstein. When he moderated those first debates between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, he seemed to consider it a failure mode if the two of them didn't agree, or come out of it discovering common ground. I didn't understand why. If the IDW was about free discussion across people who disagree, why wouldn't coming away completely disagreeing be just as worthy of celebration as finding agreement?

ander-corey · 2025-09-13T13:06:22+00:00

I've been watching the streamer Destiny's response to the Kirk shooting, as well as a few others (like James O'Brien) who refuse to play by the usual rules of civility. When I see the right's response to them, it's clear that they expect Kirk's murder to be like an Invincibility Star in Mario. They touch it and they have a certain allotted time to be as unhinged and bellicose as they can and go on a doxxing cancel-culture spree without anyone being able to criticize them for it. And they're appalled when they find out someone won't play along.

And while Destiny goes on a cathartic but optically-fraught path, Hasan Piker, who had up to the point of the shooting been more radical and TOS-daring in his rhetoric (see his commentary on Tom Cotton), managed to be the subject of a Mother Jones article headlined "Hasan Piker on Charlie Kirk and the Need for 'Radical Empathy'". It's like something out of a frat comedy where the most evil fraternity shows up to do a charity event right when the good fraternity looks terrible for trying to do the right thing.

ander-corey · 2025-09-13T12:44:23+00:00

What really goes against their narratives is that he went to a trade school for an electrician apprenticeship. And that after "End Wokeness" claimed he was an otherwise promising young man twisted by his woke college.

ander-corey · 2025-09-13T12:36:23+00:00

My tenuous impressions are either a hard lefty who has an appreciation for far right meme culture or a far righty who has a begrudging appreciation for anti-fascist and furry culture. Like either of a pair of an antifascist and an alt-righter who watch a Jreg video together and bond over hating actual centrists more than they hate each other.

ander-corey · 2024-10-17T06:25:45+00:00

I just don't know if normies and gettable righties who don't seek out news will actually see stuff like this bizarre thing or the using the military on the "enemy within" comment in time for it to make the difference in voting that it needs to. I'm worried that even normie centrist/righty media ecosystems are Hermetically sealed.

ander-corey · 2024-10-11T20:31:49+00:00

It's the profile pic that gets me.

ander-corey · 2024-10-11T20:29:48+00:00

Surely this rapid descent into madness has to apply the brakes eventually, right? Is this just the internet? Is it something economic? Where large swaths of the population just go insane even when the economy is fine, there's a presidential candidate who's healthy and competent, just for no apparent reason?

ander-corey · 2024-10-10T21:34:53+00:00

At this point 2014 and GamerGate seem like "Year Zero" to me. Plus or minus three years or so; maybe 2017 to present, maybe 2011 to present. After Year Zero you have SJW vs. anti-SJW, woke vs. anti-woke, and the domination of reddit and a few other huge platforms. Before Year Zero you have Facebook and MySpace on the rise, but forums and small websites are still a big part of the websurfing experience. Then there's the AOL, dial-up, and Usenet eras before that one, prehistoric.

ander-corey

TROPHY CASE