And I just think you have to understand that about these people, they're barely capable of formulating the question "why should I do this?" - the fact that other people don't want them to but they can and therefore they're demonstrating their power over them by so doing, that's it, that's enough.

With Plato in the Republic I think they're wrong about this; they're simply incorrect about their own self-interest. I didn't understand this until I saw in real life the exact kinda guys he was arguing with, and it's just utterly obvious from the outside that theirs is a pathetic and degraded life.

I've been struck by that: for all Miller's stamping his foot and Dort doing tough guy posturing and various Sephiroth speeches they're giving - they're not actually explaining why this is a good thing to do even by their own cynical light. The mere exercise of dominion is taken to be self-ratifying.

This is basically the view of the world that Plato sets out to refute in the Republic. One of the core questions asked therein is: why do powerful people think the mere fact of them exercising dominion makes it good for them to do so? Sure, you *can* get away with stuff if you're powerful - so what?

BAP's dissertation is literally entitled *The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche* and can be summarized as "why Thrasymachus is actually the hero of Plato's Republic". These people think Plato is an irony-poisoned Straussian.

i'm sort of fascinated that the InfantryDort and the associated dorks basically argue that they're cool thinkers when Plato dunked Thyramachus in premodern times who shared their entire ideology

Dem presidents love appointing bureaucrats and republicans to run hard power agencies. The FBI has never *ever* had a Democratic director.

Absolutely incredible. Really reinforces how DC is an oral culture with a thin pretense of being a literate culture. She probably heard this in a meeting or from a peer or a staffer and didn't do *any* double-checking?

There’s a reason why every Hallmark movie is about “Big City girl moves to the countryside, meets hardworking country folk, and finds realizes that this is totally the greatest thing ever” because the inverse of this happens thousands of times a day.

Hallmark movies are propaganda created by the landed gentry to sell the idea that rural America is somehow more real than the places actually worth living in.

i like how everything mentioned here is essentially the premise of a Hallmark movie

What does "Abundance" offer the owner of a humble ski resort who falls in love with the daughter of a hotel mogul after she falls and has amnesia and he nurses her back to help in his lodge?

It’s ok- I have gotten more furniture since then, but even decades later my husband tries to stop me when I go after curb furniture. How could that happen TWICE?

I don't know why this delighted me so. I feel sorry for both of you in this context but it just made me smile.

Well I do not have any of it anymore, so I’m *pretty* sure I gave it all back. But I may have blacked out that scene. It was pretty embarrassing!

When I was 23, I saw a bunch of really cute velvet furniture on the side of the road, totally nice. Took it in and a year later a friend’s new gf came to my house and it turns out I’d stolen her entire living room while she was moving.

Fourth Generation Feminism

one of the funny things about bluesky is that people talk about how people feel when they are self-describing, and they describe what the next dem administration should do as if they are not personally volunteering to be the staffer that does that thing

considering a form of feminism where women get a button to drone strike guys who post like this

i feel like it's such a fascinating cultural artefact of when the reactionary centrists thought they'd be able to put progressivism on the backfoot forever

it's funny, every time i see someone talk about "hybrid warfare" most most of what is being described are just fairly conventional exercises of soft power, written as if it was being described to be interesting to a 17 year old boy. the gender cuts both ways.

honestly i always felt that barkan was trying to crip notes off Moyn's (still wrong, but more intellectually serious) version of the case against radical Trumpism being a form of fascism

this is coincidentally also what we should do to atone for threatening them if and when we get out of this, but now with the understanding that we will not exactly be their favorite neighbor for a long-ass time no matter what we do

This got buried at the end of some questions, but I did a rundown of at least part of *why* the Romans, during the Middle Republic, were so eager to expand the citizen-soldier-farmer (assidui) class, rather than jealously hoarding their prerogatives. Naturally it has to do with taxes.

and on the internet you often run into that literacy test failure where people think that because you know a lot about a thing and can speak authoritatively on it, you clearly support that thing because the only people who know a lot about war clearly want to do wars like a bunch of weirdos right?

I honestly think a major culprit here is how there's military history (real scholarship) and there's military history (dumb jingoistic pop history) and most people only have experience with the latter

beyond gender, i think the other part of it is that liberals (especially left-liberals) find hard power somewhat icky compared to soft power, especially post-imperial adventures of the 2000s

unironically the closest we've come is reddit because it allows you to have a community with defined boundaries and scope within the broader website

There are some people who have nebulously suggested that these are right-wingers, of the kind who complained about that one m&m being less sexualised. People. People: what. right. wingers? This is left-on-left bullshit and a lot of the harassers *are also trans!*

I have this theory that "everything" websites are inherently dysfunctional because it's just not workable to have LinkedIn, CNN, the UN General Assembly, 4Chan, PornHub, and ESPN all wrapped into one thing and trans people suffer particularly from this in our attempts to form a community.

This sparks such boundless hate in my soul

Which brings us around to my ultimate thesis, which is that the Roman Republic conquered the entire world it knew...because of woke.

She gave permission for screenshots for posterity since she's about to deactivate, so I wanted to preserve these in particular. This is why I was going on about this issue so much last night amidst all of the lamentations in the passive voice. A lot of this awfulness is self-inflicted.

i feel like re-reading this in light of Trump II just shows how decadent our reactionary centrists are

one problem with learning is it will make you so angry at how stupid everything is

I instinctually found myself trying to analyze this due to my training and natural inclinations before I remembered we're governed by a senile reality TV show host group puppeted by the 15 worst private Discords on Earth and therefore went back to thinking about Final Fantasy.

ah, but have you considered: grimdark gritty reboot of the furry robin hood?

how many grimdark gritty robin hood reboots do we need before the industry admits the furry one is the best take they'll ever have

brianna wu, somehow manages to have the most dogshit opinions every single ttime

all of these people posting like this would bawl like a newborn baby if anyone ever punched them in the nose

Me when Tooze writes an article about how right wing populists legitimately tap into real dissatisfaction with western institutions and we dismiss them at our own peril while only engaging with how their "solutions" are bad and counterproductive for like half a sentence

look the people calling it a cult are not really exgerrating based on what i've heard members tell me *entirely voluntarily*

I have a 2016 philosophy degree from one of the most, uh, liberal liberal arts colleges in the country. I am still convinced that most of the stuff people complained about were *beliefs of the students* rather than *beliefs of the professors*

Yfw Foxnews makes a bunch of people who don't know better join PSL

Incidentally, the BBC Sherlock fandom did the exact same thing almost a decade ago, and it was even worst back then (they didn't just believe there would be a secret final episode, but a full secret *season* that would be released).

Tangential, but I keep seeing an anti-military thread w/ a decent number of flat-out lies, the gist being: "don't join the military it's evil" and I'm sort of dumbstruck. We need a military, and ideally we should have moral people staffing and running it. Don't cede control of that to shitty people!

If you want an example of right wing propaganda masquerading as feminism, this is it. Saying famous women aren’t allowed to dress the way they want or must act in a certain way so that all women cannot be sexualised is pushing purity culture rooted in religious fundamentalism.

Pointing out that evangelical apologists shadowboxing with trends in area studies as "cultural relativism" based on their own misunderstanding of the term were themselves some of the most hardcore cultural relativists you'll ever meet was a thing in the 1990's. I feel like this an old phenomenon.

Form and substance. Lived experience may have been vulgarized, but history from the bottom is a fact and that it doesn't work for suburbanite millionaire sons doesn't disprove that.

"moderate" Republicans and Democrats in theory would be liberal/conservative members of their parties in practice it means that they're sellouts that will basically find the most salient swing issue and vote against the party on that one issue alone