2021-06

Sources:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Contributions for the week of June 07, 2021

/u/Ilforte on:

• Why there aren’t more future-positive sci-fi properties in production.

/u/2cimarafa:

• “You won’t have a culture that builds unless you convince them of a grander, greater, more beautiful future - and that starts with people like Andreesen and Thiel building beautiful things of their own.”

COVID-19

/u/spadflyer12:

• “Overall I was absolutely flabbergasted at the magnitude of shit-tier science that came out in an effort to disprove or discredit everything Trump said to try and instill hope.” COVID-19 Response

Canadian Politics

/u/professorgerm:

• “The Canadian Parliament rejects a sex-selective abortion ban…” LGBT

/u/TheGuineaPig21:

• “…the biggest mass shooting in Canadian history occurred over April 18/19, 2020…”

Chinese Politics

/u/Ilforte:

• “I’m convinced that covering up Tiananmen is possibly the biggest error of CPC propaganda, another ugly consequence of their beliefs about the administration of «harmonious society» (and, I suppose, lack of reality-based feedback, the yes-man culture in the Party apparatus).”

/u/VelveteenAmbush:

• “I can’t imagine CCP looking at our gruesome example and agreeing that the path to healing leads through acknowledgement of any kind.”

American Politics

/u/CriticalDuty:

• “Buck Breaking is a documentary by Afrocentrist commentator, activist and organizer Tariq Nasheed…“

/u/2cimarafa:

• “Unz is a sad case, more radical even than most leftist self-hating whites of the Robin diAngelo school, who at least seem to believe in a future in which whites can/will be ‘redeemed’ by ‘smashing white supremacy’ or whatever.”

/u/gattsuru:

• “Quite a lot of my potential dating pool has made it very clear that Trump support is an absolute non-starter for even platonic friendships, and while it’s more prominent for my demographics, it’s not limited there…”

/u/LotsRegret on:

• How Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” shows that we should cancel “cancel culture.” Cancel Culture

/u/gattsuru on:

• “That is, there may be a lot of guidance on what would be illegal. There’s no guidance on what couldn’t be. This is a bit of a theme with recent firearms-related regulations.”

Contributions for the week of June 14, 2021

/u/WestphalianPeace:

• “I absolutely wish the Council on Foreign Relations had one tenth of the power that it is sometimes ascribed to have. The world would be a far less stupid and irrational place.”

/u/HighlandClearances:

• “Three months ago, my wife and I decided to leverage work from home to test-drive rural life.”

/u/Ame_Damnee:

• “Maybe when we have seven billion 160+ IQ people, we’ll get Post-Scarcity Luxury Gay Space Communism. But until that day, it will still be a lot of the same things that enable success today…”

/u/ymeskhout on:

• How resources get doled out in criminal defense.

Identity Politics

/u/titus_1_15:

• “The majority of you are descended, a scant few generations back, from people who abandoned their homelands to escape history. You come from deeply WEIRD stock. But [Foundational Black Americans] were pressganged into your arrangement.”

/u/VelveteenAmbush:

• “So, my challenge for people who are lining up to condemn fat people but who like to think of themselves as engaged in something other than literal bullying for its own sake: Prove it!”

/u/Iron-And-Rust:

• “What does ‘western culture’ mean? Almost nobody’s able to give you an answer to it at all, even though it’s actually incredibly important. So people end up saying inane things like that there actually is no such thing as western culture. And then you don’t realize when it’s going away.”

Contributions for the week of June 21, 2021

/u/iprayiam3 on:

• The motte and bailey of “schools aren’t really teaching CRT.” Critical Race Theory

• “I am not suggesting reverse institutional capture, but simply not bowing out to the reigns of institutional capture and then framing it as some sort of move against it.”

/u/FCfromSSC on:

• The incompatibility between free speech and cultural fraternity.

/u/DeanTheDull:

• “There’s tons of ways to break down media-as-an-information service, but one way is to break down audience perception of media into three forms: ‘media intended to inform,’ ‘media intended to convince,’ and ‘media intended to indoctrinate.’” Mainstream Media

/u/2cimarafa:

• “The problem (assuming the plan works) is that even though the Fed won’t burst the bubble, that doesn’t mean it can’t collapse on its own.”

/u/Ame_Damnee:

• “Women and reproductive health issues is a fucking disaster minefield.”

French Politics

/u/DeanTheDull:

• “French secularism has always had a strain of severe insecurity regarding the loyalties of the genuinely religious…”

/u/2cimarafa:

• “The ever-growing waves of violent crime, property theft, muggings, rapes, occasional civic unrest and so on, the endless tent cities, the entire corners of Paris, Lyon, Marseilles and other great cities that are dirty and disgusting and crime-ridden, handed over to the underclass aren’t the consequence of ‘Islam.’”

Identity Politics

/u/Sizzle50:

• “Despite the pandemic being an international, global phenomenon - and the lockdowns being de rigueur throughout the first world - nowhere but the US saw astonishing, historically unprecedented rises in crime, and the US did not see the crime surge until the #BLM ‘racial reckoning’ in the aftermath of the George Floyd coverage.” Culture War

/u/gattsuru on:

• The continuing expansion of cancel culture in furtherance of radical politics. Culture War

Contributions for the week of June 28, 2021

/u/MacaqueOfTheNorth on:

• Ottawa’s new legislation to define and crack down on online hate speech. Culture War

/u/iprayiam3:

• “Galileo is a common example because of how unique and high profile his situation was. The church was actually responsible for a tremendous amount of fruitful progress in the sciences and humanities.”

/u/roystgnr:

• “You get pregnant on Mars, it’s too late.”

/u/Fucking_That_Chicken:

• “Follow-up question: if we’re not a cult, should that change?”

/u/Sizzle50:

• “If proponents of the ‘policing deaths catastrophizing’ were optimizing for saving life hours, one imagines they would also allow their aggressive, omnipresent social engineering campaigns to bring focus to the simple and obvious concept that one should never flee or resist arrest.”

/u/Njordsier:

• “Sorry to Bother You is satire for the moral compromises we make at our jobs, starting with the simple faux-civility of a salesman pushing a product on someone who doesn’t need it.”

• “One example of good anti-capitalist art I can think of is the movie WALL•E.”

/u/DeanTheDull:

• “Facebook employee/boss initiatives don’t get graded by how effective they are at what they claim to do, they get evaluated by being able to point at some issue and say ‘I’m helping!’”

Identity Politics

/u/Artimaeus332:

• “When I read Kendi I just want to say, dude, get off your high horse.” Critical Race Theory

/u/RandomThrowaway410:

• “I think that society will be much better off when we realize that these racial disparities are not going away anytime soon, and we need to give the Critical Race Theorists and Grievance Studies the same treatment that we gave Alchemists.” Critical Race Theory

/u/iprayiam3:

• “Just imagine if facebook had started using ‘radicalizing content warnings’ to folks who have been exposed to trans ideological content…” LGBT

/u/FellowCitizen415:

• “[T]o be able to have the power to say ‘no’ to trans women, cis women would need to empower men to say ‘no’ to them.” LGBT

Quality Contributions in the Main Subreddit

/u/InspectorPraline on:

• A primer on UFOs.

/u/Rov_Scam:

• “There may be a lot of talented writers out there, but there will always be few who can spark revolutions.”

/u/evilmaniacal on:

• The extent to which Millennials are facing economic hardship as a result of public policy.

/u/Ilforte:

• “As for me, I believe that 1984 was not a grim prophesy at all, but instead a caricature of the seamy side of life in Anglo civilization as of the late 1940’s already.”

/u/Rov_Scam:

• As another user put it–“probably the best takes on the demise of counterculture and the failure of the New Left I’ve seen in a long time.”

• “That being said, I, too, am from Pennsylvania, and while I liked the video, I need to rant.”

/u/Jerdenizen:

• Book Review - Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson

/u/femmecheng:

• Book Review: The Scout Mindset