#like people would insist is the most inoffensive and accurate way to do things

[liketheinferno2]

Nier Replicant unhooked something in my brain because having le morally gray trans character be motivated towards hack slash kill blood violence hatred partly from dysphoric rage and long term reactions to discrimination, but also she's the co-protagonist on the player team and the plot doesn't make sense if you don't adore her was the best shit ever

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

13 Keys to the White House: 2024

Historian Allan Lichtman has produced an astonishingly accurate system for predicting presidential elections; although first implemented in 1984, going backwards it correctly accounts for every election since 1860, with the only hiccup coming from the hotly contested 2000 election. He predicted Gore would win, and he wasn’t entirely wrong, there was just some brotherly nepotism and Supreme Court fuckery. Anyway, his system posits 13 yes or no scenarios about the state of the union; if at least 8 are true then the incumbent party wins another term, less than 8 and the challenging party wins. Simple.

It’s pretty early in Biden’s term to tell for sure, but we can make some soft predictions that we can refine over the next few years before solidifying in 2023 or 2024.

Midterm gains: after the midterms, the incumbent party holds more seats in the House than they did in the previous midterms. Almost certainly false. 2022 will see new districts drawn by the predominantly Republican statehouses, giving them an immediate advantage. Democrats have a razor thin majority as is, it’s never been this close to tied before, I can’t see them holding on when you take into account new census data and partisan gerrymandering.

No primary contest: is there no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. Almost certainly true. Like him or hate him, Democrats are stuck with Biden. There hasn’t been a serious primary challenge in either major party since Reagan tried to take on Ford in 1976.

Incumbent seeking re-election: the incumbent candidate is the president. Again almost certainly true. There was an unspoken agreement that Biden would only run for one term, considering the fact that he’ll be 82 at the end of it, but o think he thinks he’s in for the long run now. If he does in office, Harris will become president and run for re-election herself, so the only way this would flip false would be if Biden just decides not to run again. In that case, the #2 might also flip false because I could see a weak senator like Joe Manchin running against Harris to get out of his own impending failure in West Virginia.

No third-party: no significant third party challenger. Too soon to tell, though I’m leaning towards true. The last nationally successful third party candidate was Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. He didn’t win any states, but he split some states nearly in thirds; Clinton and Bush and Dole all won states with less than 50% of he vote because Perot split the ticket. In 2000 Ralph Nader lost New Hampshire for Al Gore, giving it and the presidency to George W. Bush, and the same thing happened with Jill Stein in 2016 in the Midwest. Spoilers don’t need to be major on the National scale to have significant effects in specific states. Lichtman only flips this one false when a third party candidate wins 10% of the vote, so I’m going with true.

Short-term economy: the economy is not in recession. Probably true, but still too early to tell. We are either in the middle or nearing the end of a covid recession, I can’t see it lasting three more years without recovering at least a little, especially with the $2 trillion stimulus package they just passed. The economy is random, but if you look at a plot of unemployment since the Great Depression you will see that it consistently trends up under Republicans and trends down under Democrats. Trump was the only president is recent history to actually destroy more jobs than he created, so Biden could. It have inherited an easier path to victory. He shouldn’t be able to fuck up when the bar is so low, but I’m not holding out hope.

Long-term economy: real pet capita growth equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. Probably true, too soon to be sure. We’re so deep in the hole after Trump that any even remotely upwards tick will count as growth. I can’t see us dipping deeper than 2020 anytime soon, but then again that’s what they said in 2008, so who even knows?

Major policy change: the incumbent administration effects major change in national policy. False, I can call it now with utmost confidence. With Manchin and Sinema protecting the filibuster, Biden will get absolutely nothing substantive done in his first two years. He’ll end up losing one or both houses in the midterms, accomplishing even less in his next two! If he loses the Senate, it’s all over. It’ll be 2016 2.0, no more appointments, no more nominees, complete and utter obstruction until the Republicans take back he presidency and fill all the vacancies themselves.

No social unrest: no sustained social unrest during the term. Too soon to tell, but maybe true. 2020 was an anomaly, a once in a generation thing like 1968, so many crises all compounded together; the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, the wild fires, the hurricanes, utter chaos. I don’t see 2024 being as bad, but don’t quote me on that.

No scandal: incumbent administration is not tainted by scandal. Who knows?!? Biden seems pretty white bread/plain vanilla/mayonnaise, but Republicans insist he’s the most corrupt politician since their own guys (Trump and Nixon; lowering the bar for all their successors). They milked Benghazi for years and found nothing, but still tanked Clinton’s integrity going forward, I’m sure they’ll try to milk whatever BS They can find on Hunter Biden, especially if they retake the House or Senate. Whether any accusations will stick is up in the air, but I could see Republicans impeaching Biden just because they can.

No foreign/military failure: incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign/military affairs. Who knows? Biden’s foreign policy isn’t significantly different than Trump’s, so there’s no telling what could go wrong. The Saudis will keep cutting people’s heads off, North Korea will never disarm itself, Iran will probably arm itself, Afghanistan will drag on forever, and I can smell war brewing in the Caucasus, Venezuela, and Bolivia. The future is as clear as milk.

Foreign policy/military success: incumbent administration achieves major success in foreign/military affairs. Probably not, but too soon to tell. Succeeding is very different from not failing, so 10 and 11 aren’t necessarily linked. You can not fail AND not succeed, they’re not mutually exclusive. I don’t see anything good happening overseas for a very long time. If we pull out of Afghanistan, the power vacuum will pave the way for ISIS 2.0, so our hands are tied there. Our best bet would be to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, but then we’ll just be back to status quo anteTrumpum, zero sum gain.

Charismatic incumbent: the incumbent party nominee is charismatic or a national hero. False, false, a million times false. Biden isn’t even beloved by his entire party, let alone the country; Republicans hate him even more than they ought to just because he wears a blue tie instead of a red one (his policies are so middle-of-the-road inoffensive to them that they shouldn’t have a problem with him, but Trump told them to, so they do). If Biden dies or refuses to run, Harris is even more divisive because she’s a woman and a disingenuous liar (she pretends to be super progressive, but she’s a cop, a Clintonesque moderate through and through). Obama in 2008 was a breath of fresh air which got very stale by 2012; 2008 was lightning in a bottle, and neither Biden nor Harris could ever dream of catching it again. They’re nowhere near as nationally beloved as the Roosevelts or Kennedy or Reagan.

Uncharismatic challenger: the challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. True, true, a million times true. It will almost certainly be Trump again in 2024, and he is even more despised than Biden. Sure, he’s beloved by his own party, but they make up less than half of he country. He never had majority approval and lost the popular vote twice, he’s a loser! If by some miracle he chooses not to run, the Republicans will be running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to appoint a successor. They’ll want one of his kids to run, maybe even his daughter in law who is looking to run for senate in 2022, but they’re tainted by affiliation to the Gonad Lump himself; they’re all the same. Ted Cruz sucks ass, Ron DeSantis might actually have an intellectual disability so I feel bad making fun of that piece of shit bastard, I pray that Rick Scott and Josh Hawley and Matt Gaetz suffer debilitating brain aneurysms on live TV, Nikki Haley is a nobody, and Lauren Boebert and Majorie Taylor Green are too regional to have national appeal (though Green will probably run against Raphael Warnock in 2022, so she will almost certainly be a senator by 2024). There are no nationally beloved politicians on either side of the aisle, so I would expect Republicans to cheat like they tried in 2020 to stop black people in swing states from voting.

So, the tally stands thus:

3 are certainly true

4 are probably true, leaning uncertain

2 are uncertain

1 is probably false, leaning uncertain

3 are certainly false

Democrats need 8 true to win, Republicans need 6 false to win. Right now, Biden had a slight edge because it is historically difficult to defeat an incumbent, Trump just sucked. I don’t see a rematch being significantly different, I suspect Biden would still win the popular vote, but Trump could eke by with the electoral college like he did in 2016, especially now that Republicans are taking over the judiciary in Pennsylvania (they’re changing the rules so that judges are elected in gerrymandered districts instead of statewide races). You saw how hard Republicans fought in 2020, they’re not going to change tactics in 2024, they’re gonna double down and try even harder next time. Fewer polling places, fewer drop boxes, shorter early voting, shorter hours, more stringent ID laws. Their MO is systemic voter suppression because their rhetoric has become too toxic to win on a national level. The majority of Americans vote against them in almost every election, general and midterm, but they continue to rule in the minority.

Something has got to give, this can’t go on forever, eventually the situation is going to boil over, be it in a civil war or a constitutional convention to overhaul the entire country; neither are probable, and either outcome would almost certainly hurt people of color in predominantly conservative states.

Biden thought he would be an arbiter president, he thought he would be able to unite the country, heal the divide, being both sides together under mutual compromise, but he failed to understand that Republicans hate him on principal. Doesn’t matter how much he tries to appease them, they still hate him because they have to hate him, even if they agree with him. It would be political suicide for any of them to side with Biden on anything, Trump has already vowed to support primary challengers, his presidency was the final nail in the coffin of bipartisanship. Bipartisanship is dead, it hasn’t been alive in decades, and the only people who call for it are the minority party.

Trump is hard liquor, unappealing to anyone but his alcoholic voters; Biden is diet ginger ale, inoffensive and boring, nobody really wanted him, he only ran to try and settle everyone’s stomachs, and he hasn’t been very successful yet. He honestly believed he would be a neutral alternative for the alcoholics; that level of optimism would be adorable if it weren’t so pathetic. It’s gonna take a lot more than 12 steps to break the country’s addiction.

[machetelanding]

A few days ago, an engineer at Google, James Damore, wrote a ten page internal memo that has now resulted in his firing.

The backlash was immediate and severe, from within Google and without. Other employees were so upset by the memo that they created blacklists of anyone who agreed with it and demanded their immediate termination. Some women stayed home from work because they were so distraught by the ideas contained in it. Scores of leftists on social media claimed that even reading the memo made them feel “unsafe.” There was outrage and indignation from leftists across the country. And the chaos culminated, as it often does, in the person with the Bad Opinions losing his livelihood.

With all of this chaos, you may assume the memo was filled with Nazi propaganda or worse. Maybe it held some sort of curse that turned anyone who read it into a frog. That’s about the only way that a company memo could be “dangerous” or “unsafe.” Well, there is no need to guess about what it says. You can read it for yourself, if you dare. Just be careful that you don’t melt into a fainting puddle of tears and sadness upon viewing its contents, as many feminists at Google apparently did.

The media has reported this memo as being some sort of “anti-diversity” screed that proclaims women unfit for tech jobs. The Google CEO said that the “offensive” and “not OK” memo labeled Damore’s female coworkers “less biologically suited.” Even if it had said this, it still wouldn’t justify the feminists who act like they’ve suffered PTSD just from being in the same proximity as these opinions. Fortunately, though, the memo says no such thing. I read it myself (something the Google CEO and most journalists reporting on the memo apparently have not done), and, unless there is a hidden ink portion with a bunch of offensive stuff I couldn’t see with the naked eye, it appears Mr. Damore was making only two very basic points:

1. Google does not welcome opposing views.

2. There are fewer women in tech jobs because women, on average, have different skill sets and are more inclined towards other professions.

The only thing that offended me about the memo was that it was a bit dry, not nearly as lively and provocative as people made it out to be. It simply noted that the corporate world can be a bit of a stifling environment when it comes to viewpoint diversity, and that men and women are different. There was nothing outrageous or inaccurate in the text. In fact, the author goes out of his way many times to say he values all forms of diversity and he has nothing but respect for his female coworkers. He never criticized the women who currently hold positions in the company. Rather, he was talking about the positions not currently occupied by women, proposing that men may be in these jobs because men are more likely to pursue these jobs, and often, on average, have skill sets that lend themselves towards them. This is all factually true, utterly self-evident, and completely inoffensive.

Many people have latched onto the fact that Damore said women tend to have “higher anxiety” and “lower stress tolerance.” They leave out the fact that he labeled men as generally inflexible and status-driven. It was also apparently offensive that he said women, on average, are more open about their feelings, more extroverted, more agreeable, and more relational. Feminists took exception to this because they work very hard to be disagreeable, cold, impossible to work with, and to lack any other positive attribute Damore ascribed to them.

Now, I’m not going to spend time remarking on the various ironies here, like the irony that Google fired Damore for saying Google stifles opposing viewpoints, or the irony that women at Google stayed home from work sobbing because Damore said they have low stress tolerance. Many people will write many pages on these facets of the discussion, and I trust they will do a fine job dissecting them.

Instead, I’d like to focus on the subject the memo was meant to address. It seems relevant to me that what Damore said was true. The issue isn’t just that Google is punishing “a viewpoint,” but that it is punishing the correct viewpoint. The problem isn’t just that “opposing views” are stifled, but that the opposing views being stifled also happen to be completely accurate. As conservatives, we sometimes get too caught up in defending our positions on the basis that they are “different ideas,” when we should be defending them on the basis that they are true. If Damore had scrawled some insane, serial killer-esque manifesto in goat’s blood on the wall in his office, I wouldn’t really have a problem with his termination. But it was not insane. It wasn’t even scrawled in goat’s blood. And, most importantly, it was true.

So, relating to the truth of Damore’s radical “men and women are different” thesis, I have a few thoughts:

1. Men and women are different.

It’s crazy to fire a guy for saying men and women are different mainly because men and women are actually different. Physically, we are different from head to toe. From our chromosomes to our bone structure, muscle mass, sex organs, even our senses are tuned differently. The list goes on and on. Men are stronger. Women have better hearing. Men have more testosterone and larger hearts. Women have finer skin. Women have better night vision. Men have better depth perception. Everything is different. Our brains are different. Everything.

Due in large part to the fact that we are so biologically and physiologically and psychologically different, men and women have always been inclined to fill different roles in society. It’s not a coincidence that men have traditionally been the hunters and women the homemakers. Men are better at hunting. Women are better at homemaking. These proclivities and inclinations didn’t disappear in modern society, they just manifest themselves differently.

Men are more assertive and goal-focused, so they tend on average to management and leadership positions. Women are more relational and in tune with the human needs of those around them, so a lot of them end up in HR. No surprise that most airline pilots are men and most interior decorators are women. Men are, on average, more physically and psychologically suited for the demands of flying commercial airlines. Women are more physically and psychologically suited for the intricacies of decoration and design. This is not my opinion, or Damore’s opinion, but just an observation of how things are and how they will always be, no matter how much social engineering the left does.

2. If men and women are the same, women contribute nothing special to the workplace.

We hear all the time, from Google and the rest of corporate America, that we must get more women into traditionally male positions because women bring something distinct and unique to those positions. Yet this can only be true if women are distinct and unique. If they’re just the same as men, we may as well keep the men where they are. But if they are distinct and unique, you must face the possibility that their distinct and unique characteristics are the reason why they aren’t in those positions in the first place. You can’t have it both ways. Either women are special and have something valuable to contribute to the workforce, or they are just men in a different shell, in which case they are not special at all. They’re just men with less upper body strength. Which is it? You have to choose. You can’t vacillate between the two. Are they unique and special or are they the same? I say unique and special.

3. This is about hating men.

The “women are the same” folks will get around the quandary I posed in Point 2 by insisting, in so many words, that women are only different from men in good ways. So, if you said that women work better with people, not a single feminist in the world would disagree. If you said this is because they’re less assertive, every feminist in the world will collapse into tears. See, women are the same as men in the areas where women are actually weaker than men. But in the areas where they are actually stronger, they still get to be stronger. In other words, the goal is to paint women as superior, not equal.

When it comes down to it, we simply are not allowed to give men credit for bringing anything special to the table. We can bask in the glory of women all day, but we may not ever whisper even the suggestion that men might serve a unique function as well. And whatever men have done — all the wars they have won, the bridges they have built, the sacrifices they have made for those they love — this all must be written off as the result of a sexist conspiracy. Women could have stormed the beaches of Normandy and beat back the Nazi invaders, but society didn’t allow it. However, men could never share in the positive qualities of women, because men are scum. This is the feminist position. It is also a mainstream philosophy advanced by corporate America and our school system.

4. This is also about worshiping masculinity.

Here is where things get weird. There is a deep hatred for men (white straight men, at least), but there is also an idolization of the things associated with men. Feminists are the ones who decided that punching a time card was “better” than tending to the children at home. Feminists are the ones who decided that being assertive and aggressive is “better” than being gentle and compassionate. Now they’ve decided that jobs in tech are “better” than more traditionally female professions like nursing. They have placed a higher value on the masculine. They have denigrated all that is uniquely feminine, rejected all the special abilities that women possess, and made an idol of masculinity.

It is not a value judgment for me to say, “Women are generally more suited for A than B.” I have not said which one is better, and I do not believe that one is better. The feminists are the ones who’ve decided A is inferior to B. They have looked at whatever men are doing and decided that they must also do the same thing, and they must be told that they are doing it just as well. If men tend to play sports, women must be pushed into sports. If men tend to join the military, women must be pushed (even drafted) into the military. If men tend to be vulgar and competitive, women must be vulgar and competitive. Feminists are following men around, taking notes, doing what they do, even aping their mannerisms and patterns of speech. It’s sad, really.

I guess they don’t hate men after all. This is jealousy at work, not hatred. Feminists can’t hate men. They want to be men. But they never will be, and that’s OK. Women are just as important and valuable as men, but in different ways. And that’s the beauty of it.