2643

[Caveat: I am drunkl]

I would vote my own interests. My own interests would not include electing a pathologically narcissistic, racist, (most likely) rapist mental toddler with no coherent plan beside his own self-aggrandizement to represent me. No matter how much my feelings were hurt. Because I am a grown adult and can distinguish between what’s personal and what’s important.

I want to be clear: I do think safe spaces have their place. We all need places we can unwind without dealing with the outside world.

The public sphere is not one of them. I have very little sympathy for college students whinging about hearing rude ideas. The public sphere should be a freewheling place, where people should be able to air ideas that most offensive to the current norms. Like: every man is born equal, and slavery is an abomination; or slavery was awesome, it was free food and lodging what are they bitching about. But if you air your ideas and then cry about how rude other people were to you; fuck off.

That is my response put forth to the Trump voter who doomed us to international instability, evironmental declince, and fucked themselves - and us, because in the age of globalization we’re all connected and you can fuck us all over - to economic decline because their safe spaces were violated by those whinging leftist college students saying you were racist for claiming all mexicans were rapists. Fuck off to you and fragile little ego. You deserve the pain that is coming to your dumb ass, but fuck you for dragging everyone else down with you.

2644

The thing is its not just student silliness. They are passing round stories of white women being raped by refugees, which generates enough outrage as it as its an age old racist trope, if not the racist trope. So this in itself is bad enough, but racist rape panic has always been limited to the far right.

but this time round, you have the white left refusing to arrest the rapists, or arresting and letting them go, you see the white authorities blame the women, and you see the white left saying the victims are actually the rapists, and any criticism of these actions is now racism.

So the media run the second story instead of directly saying “they are coming to rape your women” they run clickbait outrage on the actions of the authorities and progressives.

All of a sudden the centre right and even centre left are wondering if they really want to vote for because ultimately they are on the bottom of the stack as they were born white, and the rapists are above them, their wives, and their daughters.

It could well be the actions of UK, Sweden and Germany contributed to Trumps victory, all the craziest cultural relativism (permitting child marriage and rape) stuff comes from Europe and rarely if ever the US but its being lapped up by the Fox viewers.

Nothing drives xenophobia to heights faster than “rape of your women” its potent, highly dangerous stuff, and has been for centuries.

2645

And, see, this is the problem. You are positing things that I have no frame of reference to discuss. I have no idea if your first claim is true, or has any merit. And to be honest, I couldn’t give two shits, because US politics is more than enough for me to concern myself with. I mean, in case you forgot, the US is bigger in size, population, and economy than Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Italy combined.

So I have no idea if those claims are true. If they are? Well shame on them. Ignoring child brides, rape, etc. because of minority status is absolutely not ok. There is a certainly a need to reconcile religious freedoms with secular law. And just because a religious tenet says something is ok, doesn’t mean it is.

But at the same time there is a pretty strong strain that freaks out over rape here, and how we have shifted the other way so that (rightly) being accused of rape has sever social repercussions. But not far enough yet either! Things like sex trafficking, child brides, and rape are treated by the left as severe problems here… when they get noticed. Even still we have our own issues, see any case where an athlete gets accused like the Stanford swimmer.

So if people on the right are getting outraged about ‘immigrants raping our women’ while being concerned about ‘he has such a promising future’, well, they can go fuck themselves.

And if people are getting upset about things in Europe that are categorically not happening here, that no one on the left supports here, and they would vote based on that? Well they can go to hell too. How about you deal with our political reality, instead of some specter of elsewhere.

2646

It builds the narrative, and as mentioned above its all thrown in the same bucket marked political correctness and because its so tribalised and intersectional criticism of anything in the bucket from basic politeness up to enabling child rape is often met with the same demonisation and accusations of bigotry, imperialism, white supremacy and racism because no one is distinguishing KKK hicks from middle class professors concerned about cultural relativism as they are white people, and all white people are collectively guilty and collectively responsible.

At that point they start flocking for safety and voting as a identity bloc.

2647

The only thing that may have been in the minds of some Trump voters were the terrorist acts in Paris and Belgium. But the effect was probably less than miniscule. For the most part, most of America could care less what goes on in Europe.

2648

Exactly, and for good reason! I mean it is absolutely pants on head crazy to make political decisions for the US based on a terrorist attack in France. that does not mean their policies are irrelevant, but rather that because something bad happened somewhere, doesn’t mean we should react by ushering in authoritarianism.

2649

A huge contributor to problems with France, is the fact that their society has been extremely xenophobic for ages. There is overt racism and xenophobia that permeates their society at many levels, even to the federal government’s regulatory practices, that has pushed immigrants into ghettos where they are not able to integrate into society, even if they wanted to.

Such practices have bred resentment for years.

Trump’s suggestions mirror the CAUSE of those problems, they do not present a solution.

2650

Fantastic point. That, and the fact that many of these people are not full citizens, despite being born there. And why I said that situations in Europe should not drive policy in such crude manners.

It is, however, worthwhile and instructive to look at policy differences across nations and see how it changes outcomes. But the naked bigotry of going ‘terrorists from X country attacked people in France, BAN MUSLIMS’ is horribly counterproductive.

2651

Lena Dunham keeps coming up a lot lately.

2652

Because she is the living embodiment of what most people hate about “liberals”. She is a Liberal Elite and a complete fucking twit.

2653

As you said up thread:
And you have to remember that the worst of your group is often going to be identified as the entire thing.

Even I find Dunham annoying, and I’m a feminist millennial (give or take a couple years).

2654

With all due respect wtf? How is she a “complete fucking twit?” How is she even a liberal elite again? Didn’t she move to NYC after making a bunch of selfie movies?

2655

Remember. Clinton sat down with this person and treated her seriously.

2656

Oh that Dunham white extinction Fox story is the embodiment of the right wing anti-SJW propaganda I was on about. This stuff is lapped up.

I think they got a fair bit of capital out of “crybully” stories but this was definitely more on the fringe based around students. The WaPo even tried moving the crybully attribute to Trump himself, something quite apt I think.

To hear Trump tell it, he and his supporters are the most beaten-down victims this country has ever seen. The system is rigged to keep them from winning, designed to make the weak even weaker. They have been robbed, disenfranchised, bullied and insulted. With the odds so stacked against them, they — and their leader — are not only permitted but also morally obligated to “punch back” as ferociously as they can.

The “anti-Establishment” billionaire who is a “victim”? Post-factualist nonsense, but people did believe this rubbish as the result shows. The right seized the language of socjus, applied it to themselves,and the wholesale adoption of postmodernist thought means to deny the right wing lens, to deny the right wing feelings, to deny their realities, even when they contradict the facts and data, that would involve criticising their own ideology.

2657

I miss the days when “liberal elites” were actually elite. sigh

2658

As to Dunham’s first link, she has right to feel however she feels about what happened, so, blah, whatever. As for the second link, it’s stupid but it’s clearly in jest. It does epitomize the self effacing attitudes that liberals expect white people to have, maybe. OTOH, after this election, they may prove to be more right on these points than you’d like to admit.

I’m not really … eager to dive into the details of this anti-SWJ world picking through its entrails for true prognostications. The GG/anti-SWJ/“white hats” (a term i just heard for the first time this week) are just the younger equivalent of Fox News viewers only they’re making the content themselves, but both are twisting small half-truths into large and distorted social criticisms and conspiratorial frameworks along anti-factual orbital trajectories.

Probably the most productive thing to look at in detail is the Black Lives Matter vs All Lives Matter movements, since they seem represent the division between the Trump and the Clinton supporters’ worldviews, imo, rather than anything the “white hats” are saying. I could explain my theory as to why we ended up here in boring detail but it’s clear there is a large body of people that are deeply offended that there is a movement that seems to exclude them from “mattering”, and that it’s possible there is some relationship with identity politics as is currently practiced to them. OTOH, i think it more plausible that identity politics as is currently practiced is more a reflection of deeper cultural divides and is not the driving force behind the anti-establishment reaction.

2659

FFS

2660

“Being obese is a social construction…”

WutFace

2661

Being slight fat is better then being slightly skinny.

2662

What it’s probably saying is that there’s systemic bias against overweight people which results in misdiagnosis of the actual problems.

So, like, if a fat person tears an ACL or something*, and talk about how it hurts to walk, instead of actually doing the scans and diagnosing the injury, they just say “It’s probably because your weight is putting too much stress on your knees. Lose some weight”.

Yes, it probably would be overall beneficial for the patient to lose some weight. But because that’s more obviously visible than other, more serious problems, it prevents proper diagnosis of the other problems. It’s possible for the most obvious thing that’s wrong to not be the thing that’s most wrong (like, I can have a broken arm, and also cancer, but I’d hope they’d both be diagnosed and treated, not just the arm).

Or maybe the paper is actually just really stupid. Whatever.

*Just picking medical terms out of a hat, I have no idea what the symptoms of an ACL tear are.