7
thepalagoon 7 points ago +7 / -0

Charles got absolutely broken by the military. Maybe he was broken beforehand, I dunno.

But the dude has been an absolute lunatic before he ever put on a dress and decided to look like the villain in a children's book.

1
thepalagoon 1 point ago +1 / -0

Oh, but if there are two words all Koreans know it's fuck and THAT ONE. Not that they get offended by it, but they know what this idiot was trying to do.

I spent a few years teaching English in Korea. My favorite favorite class was this class of near-fluent sixth graders. I told the class they could ask me any question as long as it was thoughful.

The school hired a black teacher, which was a big deal. Parents had to vote on it and everything.

Her first day, one of my students comes to class all concerned and asked "teacher what is a nigger?"

That was a good lesson... I love honest questions like that. We had a good talk, and the kid ended it by asking "so when I was in New York and someone called me a chink... kind of the same thing?"

Yeah kid, you got it. Now you gotta understand the inherent violence risk that comes with it for obvious reasons.

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thepalagoon 18 points ago +18 / -0

Because these feuds go beyond individuals.

I am sure I could go to the Congo or Afghanistan and find plenty of good people to break bread with, but all I would need to do is run into one or two people who hate me on sight with an itchy trigger finger and it would be game over.

And there are plenty of those running around, believe me.

There is not a fine line between brave and stupid in these cases. Every white idiot who ends up dead or raped in these third world shitholes got exactly what they deserved -- because you know none of them are taking the proper security measures.

7
thepalagoon 7 points ago +7 / -0

Man am I glad Pokemon went to shit before this.

Ten years ago this would upset me. Now... well, this is the beginning of the end. RIP.

11
thepalagoon 11 points ago +11 / -0

When* are those keys is the better question.

Maybe someone went back to 1946 and stayed there.

7
thepalagoon 7 points ago +7 / -0

One of the scariest moments of my life... I don't tell this story very often because I don't think I can convey it accurately if you don't already understand how bad the problem is:

A long time ago I was self-described "very liberal" to the point where I was a PhD student in Sociology. Yes, that was me.

But right from the rip it didn't sit well. Why the fuck were we reading Marx on day 1? Why the fuck are these idiots celebrating Freud? I stumbled through two years while always reading stuff on the periphery, as well.

The summer I was supposed to be writing my thesis I was reading. It started with The Myth of Male Power (which is nearly impossible to find now, on purpose) and went into Who Stole Feminism? and went through about 50 other books and dozens of papers.

I came out the other side with a worldview that made sense. I had to believe that my colleagues would be as thrilled as I was to learn something new. We had all talked about the inconsistencies in the coursework and theoretical background, and I thought I had found a missing piece of some value.

I have never in my life seen people so resistant to ideas that weren't in the pre-packaged box. There was no curiosity, there was an immediate "wait, take men's issues seriously? BURN THE HERETIC" backlash. It was immediately obvious these people were so far down the hole there was no coming back. Cognitive Dissonance had long been murdered. And the entire department of professors was united on this.

Classes for my third year started in a week or two. I wrote a very long email telling the powers that be exactly what they could do with a lifetime supply of chocolate and was back home 5 states away within 36 hours.

I ended up moving to Asia for 5 years... that was the depth of my despair. I definitely haven't done that sense justice in this post, either.

When I talk about why I left grad school these days, I usually just refer to it as "staring into an abyss that shook me to my soul."

It is why, more than anything else, I am MAGA to the core. I will stand with people who haven't bludgeoned their common sense to death with postmodernist bullshit every day.

I don't know who else could have broken me from that miasma if not for Trump and his unabashedly pro-America rhetoric. This is the fight worth having.

6
thepalagoon 6 points ago +6 / -0

During the Dark Times of 2020-2022 we lived in Kansas which was (thankfully) pretty normal. We drove all over: denver once a month (8 hours each way), we did a loop down to the Grand Canyon and back in a week, and we went south towards Arkansas and up to the Dakotas.

I put 65,000 miles on my car in 2.5 years and none of that was a commute.

But I have noticed people cannot fucking drive anymore.

7
thepalagoon 7 points ago +7 / -0

Well of course.

When the equal pay movement was really starting to get going in the 70s and 80s, the loudest and most vociferous voices were the wives of the CEOs who were afraid it would fuck up their gravy train.

12
thepalagoon 12 points ago +12 / -0

Nah, the oversampling of Jews has less to do with intelligence and more to do with money.

You absolutely can buy your way into these schools, even if it's indirect.

6
thepalagoon 6 points ago +6 / -0

It just underscores that the third world is really the third world.

China achieves its results (which still aren't at the level of the US) through some really authoritarian pratices. I think Yao Ming still isn't as famous in the USA as he deserves to be because he was (and is) so beholden to China.

India is largely undeveloped. They have a ton of people but not much else to show for it.

But they will surely put our factories there and decimate our middle class.

Just more evidence that globalization is a scam.

5
thepalagoon 5 points ago +6 / -1

Because he was in academia fairly recently. You can't sneeze without meeting some gender weirdo.

But in all honesty they aren't all bad people. There are smart but weird people who aren't extremely unpleasant to be around, but they are pretty rare.

It isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I think Vance is a really smart guy and when you are really smart you tend to get along well with other people who are really smart just because you have that connection. Just another possible explanation.

9
thepalagoon 9 points ago +9 / -0

I mean, I agree with this as well.

Tax cuts aren't a bribe and I won't really entertain a position otherwise.

19
thepalagoon 19 points ago +19 / -0

The only way we can "bribe" people into having more kids is to bribe them into having stable families.

This means stable manufacturing jobs. Good paying jobs that lead into a stable life which leads into a stable family.

Bribe them with a decent economy and a fair justice system.

Bribe them with all the fruits of good citizenship.

That's the only way to fix this country. Every day under this administration we stray further from this.

But you cannot ever put a bandaid on this problem. Money can never replace stability and continuity in development of our children.

1
thepalagoon 1 point ago +2 / -1

That's true enough.

But we're saying the same thing. His is a pessimistic view, mine is more optimistic.

The purpose of a system is what it does. And what the liberal system does is dogshit.

6
thepalagoon 6 points ago +6 / -0

I've talked with Imp a lot and have spent a lot of time in this forum saying "Imp isn't necessarily wrong, but his tact sucks."

That was just the first time I have ever posted saying "yes it probably is women's fault." You said that it isn't feminism but it is liberalism... I say "what is the difference?"

When you have a 20, 30, or even 40 point difference in polling trends between single unmarried childless women, then that becomes the bedrock of the party.

The Democrat Party has become the party of histrionic cat ladies and academics who don't operate within a fact-based world. The liberal agenda is the feminist agenda.

I truly don't know how you reverse this trend without a collapse so spectacular that these powerful feminist voices have truly nothing to offer and start to scurry to whatever perceived "safety" they can find.

7
thepalagoon 7 points ago +8 / -1

I actually don't think it is a con at all. I see him mostly as a victim of the culture war. That shit took a toll on his psyche and we can see it laid bare.

I think he has been looking for people to trust since he started becoming persona non grata in Canadian academic and Psychological circles. This has led him to some really curious partnerships.

Daily Wire is not the place for Peterson. Peterson was at his best when he wasn't arguing from a political perspective, but now he kind of is. But they were friendly to him when not many places were.

The Tate stuff with his daughter makes less sense, especially when you are as deep in the gender game as Peterson is. Tate is nothing more than a grifter. A new age Pick Up Artist who pulls psychological sleight of hand and uses that to justify his supposed expertise.

I can't fault a layman for not understanding what Andrew Tate is doing, but Peterson should have known better.

5
thepalagoon 5 points ago +5 / -0

George Floyd was a perfect opportunity that the media has been salivating for for over a decade. Every year (and even in 2020) they tried to elevate a shooting or death into a full riot. 99% of the time there's some factor that makes it abundantly clear to normies that it isn't worth the riot.

To be fair, even George Floyd had numerous factors that made this not a big deal. First and foremost, if you can yell "I can't breathe" then... you can breathe. He was committing a crime (passing counterfeit bills) and had a lengthy criminal history. But the optics were so bad the story went viral and any attempt to point out these facts just got you labeled as "part of the problem."

This case is different in a key way: no one is trying to defend the cop.

In a way, the key part of a PERFECT SITUATION is to find a cop in a position where the media can run with a narrative of police brutality AND enough people try to counter the narrative. This has the counterintuitive effect of making the story even bigger and swelling the false narrative. This pattern doesn't happen when the cop is CLEARLY in the wrong. It proves the system works. No outrage.

There's a lot of scheming and maneuvering that makes these events pop up in the national discourse.

20
thepalagoon 20 points ago +21 / -1

I think Peterson is just broken at this point.

There's plenty of anger here, but it's impotent anger. He sounds like a broken man who has lost the will to fight (but not the will to bitch about it). We have known (or at least I have known) about this gender stuff for 20 years now.

He's not wrong, but he's being a little bit too hyperbolic to really get the normies' attention.

And the real problem is the feminine imperative which is powered by emotion and feeling and has the full weight of the DNC (and most of the Federal government) behind it. It's led to:

-Kids getting mutilated at the altar of Gender for virtue signaling points

-Women and children being sold into sex slavery for virtue signaling points on the border

-Failing schools because schools are more concerned with activism and virtue signaling points than education.

-Speech needs to be censored because security is more important than liberty (feminine imperative)

It's the same rot in all areas. Gender shit is bad, but everything is bad. Bad bad bad all the way down, and it's largely because women have attached legitimate government power to their histrionic whims.

Sorry if that makes me sound like Imp, but it's maybe the core part of his thesis that's correct. I don't know what we do about it.

But these things will continue to happen wherever women's interests intersect with government power.

2
thepalagoon 2 points ago +2 / -0

I know we're all being facetious in this thread, but I believe that there actually is an unintended consequence of softening language (and this has bitten the left in the ass).

If you make undesirable things sound desirable then people lose some motivation to escape from those undesirable things. We started calling ghettos "projects" and now there's less shame in living there. We stop calling it Welfare and start calling it Public Assistance, same thing.

I'll even paraphrase George Carlin: I bet we'd take PTSD more seriously if it was still called "Shell Shock."

If such a thing as a "slave gulag" existed, that'd probably be the best name for it, because it sounds like a place nobody wants to be.

9
thepalagoon 9 points ago +11 / -2

If anything this helps Trump because he can't really go in on his attacks the way he can with... literally anyone.

Even while the media was pretending biden wasnt senile, Trump couldn't give him the Jeb treatment because everyone would see him beating up on a senile old man.

1
thepalagoon 1 point ago +1 / -0

Hey, if you ignore the poverty at the fringes, Cleveland is doing alright.

6
thepalagoon 6 points ago +6 / -0

Something else that concerns me: he is completely and utterly insular.

I've had conversations over the years with "famous" people in the academic world. One of the good things about academia is how accessible they are. I credit Dr. Warren Farrell with giving me the last kick I needed to get out of my shitty grad program a decade ago. I sent him an essay and he responded within a few hours.

Peterson? His website and email both basically tell you to get fucked. Too many emails, too many voices, no chance to respond to anything. I tested this (with a very well thought out question from a serious point of inquiry, something that shouldn't get ignored) and got ignored.

So you may be on to something here.

ETA: For a while now, I've kind of given up hope in JP. Every once in a while he comes out and says something smart, but it feels so much more... accidental these days.

18
thepalagoon 18 points ago +18 / -0

I say what I am about to say as an unrepentant fan of Jordan Peterson... at least the Jordan Peterson that once existed 7 or 8 years ago at the height of his popularity.

I honestly don't recognize the dude now. The years of drug abuse / stress have worn him down. He seems to have gotten stuck in a half-measure... he speaks the truth but still holds out hope Canada will pull its head out of its own ass, or (even worse) that there is some baby you don't want to throw out with the bath water of liberalism.

The truth is staring us in the face: Jordan's daughter is a useless thot who has no idea what she is doing. She should have never done anything with Andrew Tate. That isn't strictly because I hate him, either, it's just that his theories are completely at odds with what Peterson himself believes.

I could write an entire essay on what I mean by that, but I will try to sum it up quickly: Jordan and Andrew look at the masculinity problem differently. Jordan's early work was on building prosocial habits of masculinity that lead to building the necessary skills required to be a successful man. Andrew has always focused on the surface-levels "hacks" to appear to be masculine (not unlike the Pick Up Artists of old).

Jordan and anyone close to him should have been calling him out as a grifter from day 1.

Jordan's biggest problem is that his daughter is now an anchor on everything he worked to build.

by Lethn
2
thepalagoon 2 points ago +3 / -1

It is a really difficult conundrum because there isn't a man alive with his level of frame control.

Lesser men would be constantly derailed by the bullshit and the attacks, but not him.

He is not perfect by any means, but he is the tool we have and the tool we need.

Everything depends on not only winning the election, but building a future of the MAGA movement that can sustain itself beyond Trump. The movement is a success when it exists beyond Trump, and we are not there yet.

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