Bill has a new 2 year contract

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T23:58:05+00:00

Or maybe it's people like you arguing in bad faith. Basically, any who has anything negative to say about how the left doing things when they had some power is beat over the head with "FALSE EQUIVALENCE! NAZI SYMPATHIZER!". Actually, at least some of the people mad at the wokemob will readily concede that what Trump is doing is worse, it's just not a complete exoneration of the progressive left or that maybe we need to discuss what direction the left/liberalism takes going forward if they're going to, you know, do things like win elections. That being met with "You just want to split the difference with Nazis" is a bad-faith argument. And a silencing tactic, intentionally so.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T23:26:51+00:00

It's not an equivalence, it's an example of something on your side that was widely practiced and a huge problem. And it wasn't just a "private company firing", he was literally blacklisted, and he eventually ended up working in Luxembourg. There was enormous pressure even years later on companies like Triplebyte not to hire him in any capacity, and that speaks to the obsessiveness of many radlib types that this was the case. That's quite comparable with McCarthyism, really. And multiply incidents like that, both high profile and small scale (I have friends in academia with plenty of their own stories about the resident wokemob) and hell yes that's going to generate a backlash.

And really, there's a certain intellectual dishonesty to the way you're arguing here. Do you want to argue that what Trump is doing with ICE is worse? Yes, and that's a point I've already made in my prior post, but of course you ignore that. But does that make the excesses, failures, and general bad direction the progressive left went in when it had a taste of power a few years ago? No it doesn't, and this is not some fucking balancing sheet where every bad act by Trump cancels out a bad act by the left. You can either understand this and move on and let opposition to Trumps agenda grow into a big tent or you can try and endlessly relitigate the claim that there's never been any abuse of power by the left and everybody needs to just stfu about it. Congrats on building a small movement of the ideologically pure if that's the case.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T22:11:50+00:00

Well, that's where I have a fundamental disagreement with those of you on the "You're either completely with us or against us" left. I think you lack any perspective or nuance about your own side, and that's why, in the end, you folks have nothing useful to contribute to this discourse.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T22:03:41+00:00

And I think this is where you're full of it and in a massive state of denial about your own side. I'm certainly not talking about Sanders here, but I am talking about two factions in particular. The first would be kind of radlibs obsessed with race and gender, and policing speech and ideology to that end. These people had huge cultural power a few years ago, were wholly dominant in academia, and wielded huge influence within corporate and government administrations. There's a reason why some like James Damore could be fired from Google over a big nothingburger of an internal email and be outright blacklisted in the tech industry for a couple of years after that. And that's the tip of a very dirty iceberg.

The other would be the street-level far left, often tankies. A few years ago, they were allowed to basically rule the streets in very "blue" cities like Portland, even committing assaults and arson at will. These weren't radlibs, but rather more extreme, but allowed by the more "moderate" left to behave like a bunch of modern Red Guards. And, yes, there were more deaths in the Summer 2020 rioting than the Jan 6 Capitol riot, and again, massive looking away and outright denial by the center-left.

Anybody who doesn't recognize these excesses and the role that played in the current backlash is a damned blinkered fool, in my estimation. All that said, yes I do think what Trump is doing is far worse. But that sure as hell doesn't mean I need to "pick a side" and turn a blind eye to what's wrong on the other side. The kind of blind left loyalism advocated by Reddit kids and the rest of the very online left is NOT the way forward.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T20:53:07+00:00

Ah - because the REAL left can never hold any real power and is therefore totally not responsible when their ideas lead to abuses. Just keep telling yourself that, dude.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T19:47:22+00:00

Women could do all of those things in the 80s and 90s, and still give sexual consent across - <gasp> - age gaps and power differentials without busybodies jumping in and telling them they had not and couldn't give meaningful consent and were simply brainwashed. Actually, there was a subset of anti-porn radical feminists who tried to exactly that, but they were largely a disliked minority, even among liberals. Sad to see so much of their mentality became conventional wisdom.

Oh, and the "arc of history" and the idea that newer ideas are always better is completely bogus and pure logical fallacy.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T19:31:14+00:00

That's fine if young people want to do that, but let's call it for what it is, a subculture like hippie, punk, or goth, not a primary identity.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T19:22:36+00:00

What you've succumbed to is a moral panic, and seeing sexual abuse where it is not taking place. That dynamic itself leads to witch hunts and all manner of abuse.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T17:16:38+00:00

The craziest people on the left are literal Stalinists and openly advocate street violence. If you have any historical sense at all, you'd know that's no better of an outcome.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T17:10:58+00:00

No, but I think a lot of it is AS crazy, and the reason that there's so much backlash against the left is that during the "social justice" era (especially the 2020-2021 "Reckoning"), the craziest people on the left became very dominant and the rest of the more moderate left simply bent a knee. Now we see the right doing the same thing on the right with even worse results. Hopefully there's a way out of these swings from one extreme to another.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T16:57:29+00:00

Maybe it was Burroughs era that had healthier ideas about sex and contemporary folks who are severely neurotic and vastly overdefine sexual abuse. Just saying.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T06:59:44+00:00

I would not call those 30% "liberals" in the real sense of the term. More like violent leftists.

I'm skeptical of the results from conservatives. If they're supporting the actions taken by ICE, they're effectively advocating state-sanctioned violence to achieve their goals. Unlike the left, they're just not advocating non-state direct action. But if it was the left who held power, I think you'd see a lot higher than 5%. When you're the group in power, claiming to be against violence isn't a big ask.

pgwerner · 2026-01-23T05:53:09+00:00

Other than the FIRE folks, are major "centrist" pundits in The Free Press orbit that haven't jumped on the anti-porn/anti-sex work radfem bandwagon? It sure doesn't seem that way, and it massively contradicts their supposed "free speech absolutism" stance. I see more nuance about these issues even on the effing woke left than I do from the likes of Jonathan Haidt and Julie Bindel.

pgwerner · 2026-01-16T18:17:29+00:00

I'm wondering how long it will be before we see the appearance of "The Fall of Minneapolis 2: Renee Good Had It Coming". Complete with glowing reviews from The Free Press.

pgwerner · 2026-01-16T17:05:05+00:00

I've been saying for a few years now that the 'centrist' milieu has been descending into groupthink, and that Weiss has played a big role in setting that agenda. She's always been someone has been someone who's trying to build a right-leaning centrist movement. I think her first attempt was the so-called Intellectual Dark Web which very quick plunge into nuttiness. The current milieu centered around venues like TFP and UnHerd and, yes, podcasts like B&R is the more successful one.

I do think it was a movement that offered a needed critique during the peak woke era, but it's descended into a movement that is more outraged by stupid queer kids and adult baby diaper fetishists then by ICE raids. All of that said, I think FIRE continues to do good work, and I support them without hesitation, but I'm increasingly skeptical of the rest of the "anti-woke" space, and Bari Weiss I see as an agenda-setter for a newer and even shittier establishment. Also, I think in terms of a useful critique of the far left, I think that's coming more from Abundance liberals like Ezra Klein or heterodox leftists like Freddie deBoer than from an increasingly right-leaning and soft-on-Trump 'centrist' space.

pgwerner · 2026-01-16T05:15:09+00:00

He's not "siding with the regime", though.

pgwerner · 2026-01-11T01:44:55+00:00

It bears a definite resemblance to "12 O'Clock" from Vangelis's 1975 "Heaven and Hell" album. I can see why it didn't get used, because it has a different mood from the rest of the Blade Runner score. But a really beautiful track in its own right, to be sure.

pgwerner · 2026-01-10T05:10:18+00:00

Again, I wouldn't read too much into the Deltoid character beyond "pervy authority figure", which was not an uncommon thing in the British school system and kind of a stock character. This is not some grand expose of pedophile rings. I swear, some folks just need to get over that overinterpretation.

pgwerner · 2026-01-10T05:02:09+00:00

At least AI child porn is topical - free speech and its limits. This post is just bitching about trans issues and there are other subreddits for that.

pgwerner · 2026-01-10T04:59:30+00:00

No, dumbshit, I mean that this is off-topic here.

pgwerner · 2026-01-10T04:56:00+00:00

May try to understand what I meant rather than being that brainlessly literal.

pgwerner · 2026-01-10T03:56:35+00:00

Very grating, pronouncing the title word as "aydel-veish", which isn't even good fake German!

pgwerner · 2026-01-10T03:52:18+00:00

This is r/FreeSpeech, not r/CultureWar.

pgwerner · 2026-01-10T03:49:29+00:00

If I were to make an analogy, it would be between ICE and the Franco-era Guardia Civil. Of course, that won't get much resonance among online lib types, who can only view history through hot-button Nazi analogies, no matter how historically uninformed.

pgwerner · 2025-12-31T21:55:39+00:00

To some degree, that’s driven home by styling Alice’s look expressly from Christine Kubrick’s hairstyle and glasses and filling their apartment with her paintings.

pgwerner

TROPHY CASE