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Everything posted by chainsaw
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8 years ago, Alex Jones was a novelty to Joe Rogan. Someone he found fascinating and could hold an interview with that would be entertaining and incisive at the same time without ever devolving into namecalling or a debate. Today, Alex Jones is a personal friend who influences his opinions and values. 8 years ago, Joe Rogan opposed government intervention into personal liberties such as abortion, gender-affirming care, and marriage. Today, Joe Rogan pals around with people who think the government should pass laws to increase white birth rates, people who think "gender ideology" is corrupting our children, and people who want women to be submissive and for gays and trans people not to exist. 8 years ago, his guests included Bill Burr and Steve-O. Now, it's crackpots like Aaron Rodgers and xenophobes like Douglas Murray, author of "The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam" and "The War on the West" This is what happens when dark money is behind the wheel of a Gen X-er's social media diet. You turn libertarians into white nativist conservatives. You create a climate where someone with the exact same platform as Pat Buchanan's becomes electable.
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He used to be progressive, probably as a way to fit in with his colleagues in LA, back when it was possible to call yourself progressive while still having slurs in your standup routine and be friends with married guys who sleep with subordinates. No progressive would have endorsed Donald Trump, knowing everything we knew about him by 2024. Maybe I should have used more precise words than "seemingly progressive." When I say "seemingly progressive" I mean "doesn't talk like Pat Robertson." He's really more of a throwback to the 2000s Ron Paul libertarian guys, who were completely insufferable.
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He's bad/maga because: he explicitly endorsed Donald Trump he constantly platforms eugenicists he owes much of his success to MAGA loyalist Dana White He's extra dangerous because he normalizes these things as a seemingly progressive guy, with a lot of the same seemingly progressive values that his viewers used to have. It's essentially a permission structure for socially-aware progressive-leaning guys with asshole tendencies to embrace their asshole tendencies and slowly reject decency. The narrative being that if a guy like Joe Rogan made these lifestyle changes (moving from LA to Texas, going from apolitical to explicitly right wing) and can still be successful then I can also embrace a set of values that allows me to overlook my friends' problematic behaviors and disregard the hurtful consequences of voting republican.
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He probably should not have, but this was the height of MeToo's political might.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr4n90g6v9qo I'd be interested to see that Harris poll. I'm not super familiar with them but I seem to recall them having a right-of-center bias. Did they really ask "Do you support Hamas over Israel" because that type of framing feels a bit like editorializing. "Do you support the Taliban over the Coalition of the Willing?"
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FWIW, Franken recently had Peter Beinart on his podcast, who is way better than "my job is to keep the Democrats pro-Israel" Chuck Schumer. It has become crystal clear to me that the issues some of the liberals here deride as "purity tests" are more like "litmus tests" that can be used to weed out the Sinemas, Fettermans, Machins, Cuellars, and Gallegoses of the world. Nobody in this coveted "Gen Z male who spends 12 hours a day listening to podcasts" demographic supports Israel's genocide and they certainly don't want their crypto wallets being taxed to provide universal healthcare in Israel while their elected officials are poised to kick millions off Medicare. Electing a black man president was enough of a provocation that inmates took over the asylum which paved the way for the Tea Party and Birther movements, totally redefining the internal power dynamics of the GOP. You'd think that re-electing someone whose incompetence in the position led to millions of preventable deaths would have provided the same provocation among the Dems to burn down their internal power dynamics, but no. They still have the ingrained "it's her turn" seniority mechanism, and they still have the same fealty to AIPAC and other big money donors, which all but ensures that nobody who's able to meet the moment will ever have a realistic chance of getting elected. They have been outmaneuvered for our entire adult lives. Does anyone remember Lindsay Graham's flip-flop from Merrick Garland to Amy Coney Barrett? That's the kind of top-down incompetency I'm talking about. Only a fossil and a fool like Chuck Schumer wouldn't have seen such hypocrisy coming a mile away. Israel/Palestine from a domestic politics standpoint is really just a variation on the "call a spade a spade" exercise that the Iraq War was for politicians back in the George W Bush administration. You had mass media manufacturing consent based on a lie and you had 9/11 supplying an enhanced permission structure for appealing to Islamophobia, which meant only a handful of politicians, even the ones who were nominally anti-war, who felt like they could publicly oppose the invasion. And it was Obama's track record of having opposed the invasion that set him apart from the others in the 2008 primary. History was on his side. That's how the Gaza genocide will be looked at. While I'm glad to see more democrats abandoning the "unwavering support" mantra, make no mistake that the people within the party who have any kind of power are on the wrong side of this important issue. (We all remember the Georgia legislator being denied a chance to give a pre-screened speech at the DNC so that some executive from Uber could blather on about god knows what). Young voters in the 00s were overwhelmingly anti-war which is what propelled Obama to the success he saw. Young voters today are overwhelmingly pro-Palestine, and even the ones who remain neutral are still self-interested enough to say hell no to all the tax dollars being diverted toward a foreign government. Beyond being the morally righteous position, the alternative (being like John Fetterman or Chuck Schumer) requires the politician to say things that are simply untrue. They're failing the "call a spade a spade" test, so they lose credibility among voters who consider themselves to be "independent thinkers" (of which there are many in Gen Alpha and Gen Z). That's bad politics, any way you slice it.
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This has been true for at least 40 years now. You're right about this: Do I trust the Dems to know what the next thing will be? No, I do not. I'm firmly in the "fire them all" camp.
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So the Denny's thing is funny, to me. He's trying to make a point about the judicial branch not having 24 hour service, but there is such a thing as night court and cell phones. Those of us in the serf class have been forced to become familiar with the concept of being "on call." But let's assume for a moment that it's true the entire judicial branch is asleep at 12:34 am, it's also true that people show up for work at 8 am, so the idea that the court thought it would be okay to just ignore the urgent filing is really what the Supreme Court was criticizing. We're still nowhere near "42 minutes." Who does he think he's impressing with this conniption?
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It's a video demonstrating how not to appeal to Gen Z men, and it just so happened to also include bad takes on deregulation. No need to watch the full discussion, but I didn't want to be accused of clipping him out of context either. There already are grassroots personalities who are left-of-center that have charisma and a willingness to hit the class-based policy points that drove the success of the 2016 and 2020 Bernie campaigns, but because the algorithms are massively biased against them and because Democratic leadership is captured by moneyed interests the only podcasts and streamers they boost are neoliberal elites such as Ezra Klein that are totally off-putting to the people the party now claims to want to win back. But in true DNC fashion they're going to focus group it to death
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That's a whole other thread entirely, but I will say that using Austin is an example of good governance didn't land for me. San Francisco is a 7 mile strip of landfill that's literally surrounded by water. The engineering and design required to build something there is going to be very different from what it takes to build something in Central Texas. Blaming regulations for California being expensive is just lazy and misleading to say nothing of being suspiciously aligned with the output of right wing think tanks. As long as Democrats are approaching this post mortem with the mindset that certain answers are unacceptable and certain enemies are off-limits, the perception will be they aren't serious about winning or doing anything differently. Nothing will fundamentally change, so nobody will be "won back"
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Nancy Mace: Sexual assault survivor or cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?
chainsaw replied to C-Man's topic in Cloak Room
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I personally fuck with academics, even the ones I disagree with, but I recognize that I'm very much outside the mainstream. There's just no way the average Theo Von fan would listen to someone like him for hours. Goes back to the stupid George W Bush era "beer test"
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Smug academic assholes like Ezra Klein are a major part of the problem. Watch here as he deflects blame from those economic and social elites. Some of my favorite YouTube comments:
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You're not wrong, actually. Podcasts and aesthetics alone will not fix the problems the Dems have. It's not just "messaging." The sales pitch is bad, but the product also is bad. Bernie on the Schulz podcast is focused mostly on the party's bullshit priorities and failure to offer anything to the working class. Kamala's "opportunity economy" maybe was the closest they came to scrounging something together for them (side note: who's the ad-wizard who came up with that pile of dogshit idea?). As with most neoliberal ideas, it was a wonky, means-tested, boring and hard-to-follow solution. So I agree with Bernie that the Dems absolutely must change their priorities. That will go a long way toward fixing the product. The discussion we've been having about Joe Rogan and Asmongold isn't about the party's product, though. It's about how the party's ideas are marketed. We totally abandoned the culture war because we prematurely claimed victory the moment a black man got elected president, and we're paying the price for that. So the marketing strategy should not take strong demographics for granted, and it should not turn its nose up at long-form, unscripted conversational formats that have a lot of influence over Gen Z men. I really hated how scripted everything Kamala said and did on the campaign trail felt. They really thought a 45 minute softball interview with "Call Me Daddy" (or whatever the fuck it's called) has the same effect as going on Theo Von? Not even close. We desperately needed a candidate who knew how to have a normal conversation with normal people. Tim Walz had that skill in spades. You don't build a reputation as a great teacher without knowing how to read and control a room of unpredictable people. Even Beto O'Rourke has a tendency to steer normal conversations into a stump speech, which Boomers and Gen X and even Millennials totally adore, but it just doesn't land with Gen Z. I see a lot of the same quirks with Pete Buttigieg. I respect them for being willing to speak up in hostile territory, but after a while the attendees feel like they're being talked at instead of hung out with. JD Vance is worse when it comes to taking fair questions and unnaturally launching into talking points, so don't get me wrong it's not a uniquely Democratic tendency. We just need people who remember how to act normal and connect with normal people.
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Those were only illustrative examples, and as much as I wish I could take credit for it the sad truth is there are morons who are still advising democrats to adopt a "conservative lite" strategy, which is how Gavin Newsom starts a podcast in which he agrees with everything Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon say. So unfortunately there are overpaid Tom Herman-caliber frauds who hear "meet young men where they are" and conclude that Dems should pander to that offensive caricature overgeneralization of Joe Rogan's audience.
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This language is too imprecise for me to know whether I agree. I can agree if "where they are" refers to online media, podcast formats, or shared interests such as martial arts, comedy, and self-improvement. But if "where they are" means treating women like shit, validating eugenicist "race realist" theories, or equating wealth with intelligence, then we should not "meet" anyone there. There's a crucial difference between abstaining from the culture wars (losing strategy) and surrendering in the culture wars (just as bad as losing). Participate. Fight. Win.
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San Antonio Spurs 2024-25 - Taking it in the pooper for Cooper
chainsaw replied to Mitch Cumsteen's topic in Basketball
The clot was preventing muscle growth. League definitely fucked. -
An epic clapback
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Running Alt-Right Thread of Mockery and Hypocrisy
chainsaw replied to bad_teammate's topic in Cloak Room
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-05-19/scott-adams-metastatic-prostate-cancer-joe-biden-dilbert -
This never happens in real life conversations with friends and family. It might not even be good enough to be said by a pink haired feminist character on a failed Adam Carolla exclusive Daily Wire Plus cartoon series.
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The strategy of ceding online spaces entirely is a massive failure. Speak everywhere the opposition is speaking and you'll see how quickly the polling numbers on the issues shift back to something resembling sanity. You can't save the people who take their political cues from sex traffickers and WoW streamers who live in squalor, but you can at least stop the bleeding.
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