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autodrama: returning jobs to dramneurodivergents. Ping HeyMoon if there are any problems or you have a suggestion

Trans furry lives matter too the Welsh.

You can see it by yourself

HIMARS 🤣🤣🤣 is on 🔥 pic.twitter.com/yOAk0JEzlq

— click following button 🇷🇺🤝🇨🇳 (@MZakharova0) April 8, 2023

I don't really know what this is. It seems to mainly be but may also be genuinely . The demented violence and incoherence reminds me of jinxschizo

piped is a youtube frontend to get around the stronger age block. Used to be embedded videos didn't ageblock but piped is best way around age wall

Top Drama

Relative Drama (takes into account the size of the subreddit)

autodrama: returning jobs to dramneurodivergents. Ping HeyMoon if there are any problems or you have a suggestion

Ain't that right fellow Asians?

Actual line from newspaper about presidential election.

trans lives matter

There is a general confusion between the authoritarian left which prescribes upon us via the state-as-human-caretaker model that many, myself included, find noxious.

And the more strident invasion of a fascist movement on US soil.

I was there. I saw the fascist pollution enter into Scott Alexander's culture war threads.

And these people? They were united by one single common thread.

They couldn't smell the fascist pollution.

And attack dogs like me that Bark Bark Bark well we aren't supposed to bark at the things the hive mind is trying to enshrine into the darn place!

So I was bullied by these people, in profoundly pathetic ways! I am enough of a bully to know that these were pathetic power plays! Please don't hurt me @captain_bbbb, you are actually invincible! These people were so pathetic, they would be like "uh if you don't want to bet then you clearly aren't invested in the situation loser" and this would get upmarseyd. "He's right, the man's not betting, so he must not care."

That's the kind of place it was!

This was Reddit, mind you. The acerbic honesty of Reddit writing stands as one of the unusual artifacts of the era. Where did literate reddit go? It's still there, though largely underground.

I still can't leave it.

But point is there was a sort of 'don't-be-too-much-of-an-butt-but-be-direct' protocol between people on old reddit. And this place made that impossible. And this place was set up as a refuge by people who had just seen a moral principle enshrined self-righteously by power-hungry people which they used to hurt people in self-righteous rage... well they set up their "NO ONE CAN BE BOOED FOR RACISM OR FASCISM" rules because FREE SPEECH motherlovers but

Not for me. Because I ruined the illusion. I pointed to the fascism.

@Impassionata has been going through some arguments on fascism with the AI, and it occurs to me that Impassionata knows what the AI is going to say, at least to the extent that he lets the AI build the argument that Scott Alexander should be named and shamed for his community's role in making space for fascists and racists to speak. At the very least it would be good to see some admission that an error in judgment was made which was severe: that of consciously choosing to seek a neoreactionary audience and inviting them to mingle.

I'm just trying to get all of this out. Seeing the AI write... it's so fast. So perfect. Very precise. For me it is always so slow, and in such halting fashion...

Because what I remember is this:

In the early early days of the Internet I researched the white supremacist forums to this extent: I found them, I performed some psychogeographical scans which retain some interest as an especially cruel form of punishment: an actual concentration camp portion of the site where doomed users were sent to have their final say before their accounts were finally terminated. Evil minds! But generally losers. Aware that they were losers. Living out a private fantasy.

MAKE

RACISTS

AFRAID

AGAIN.

But I believe I read enough of their culture to understand that they had a strategy for fitting in, and a strategy for... recruiting.

They know their views are noxious and they believe that humanity is divided into sheep who buy the state ideology on race equality and thsoe who privately agree with them. This is why when they congregate they must be abhorred. Directly. To their faces. I don't like freedom of speech restriction laws but I do believe that if you dress up as a nazi you should get punched and I think that makes me a goddarn American. Not everyone has to punch Nazis. Cheering for the Nazi punchers also sends a message.

It's not about right or wrong. It's about the consequences. And the second order consequences.

And then I had my sorcery of the spectacle arc, which is to account for my present significant accumulation of Power. My circle is almost complete. Last call if you want in.

And then 2016 hit and I was angry at myself for not reacting sooner. And I entered into the culture war threads as an old reddit voice and found:

These people who had gotten chased out of other spaces for pointing to inconvenient or annoying truths now shunned me for pointing at fascism and racism as I saw it. Once I was bullied, no matter how pathetic it was, I knew it was over. I could still hit the occasional Quality Contribution but by then I could see how rotten the whole thing was: it just propped the legitimacy of the place up. That was a rightwing politics forum in denial. To this day Scott Alexander probably describes himself as a libertarian idealed liberal.

By far the weirdest bit of it was seeing the time dilation. Catch this:

• 1990-92: Rush Limbaugh goes on the air. All of these Cold War boomers read Marx in college. Rush Limbaugh used the rhetorical construct of 'class' directly and pointed to Universities, Journ*lism, and Hollywood as the class elites of our society, and to the degree that he had a point, it is now obscured by the propaganda superweapon it gave Fox News. There's a wave of jokes about PC police.

• 201?: A blogger writes about Universities, Journ*lism, and Holywood as the class elites of our society.

• 2022?: Scott Alexander writes about how Republicans should use more class in their rhetoric, as he shakes hands with a monarchist whose experience with actual monarchy consists of having finished books which he waves around in a constant smug bid for authority, disregarding the decades of succession wars which mar European history. If you are a monarchist it's quite possible that the only thing that can be done for you is taking away your Internet privileges forever. If you consider a monarchist a serious political thinker and or peer, you are an idiot and have failed a basic political intelligence test.

Here's another.

• In the wake of 9/11, many leftist accusations of fascism were made of Bush II who more or less acted unilaterally and I don't really know how much people actually bought the theater of WMDs anyway. That got people real bitter about government. It was never in question whether Bush II would step down at the end of his terms. But the prevalence of this question as well as the strengthening of nationalist imagery which occurred post 9/11 gave a pretty compelling example of a line for what should and shouldn't be termed 'fascism.' which is and always shall be connected with a sort of fasces or authoritarian spirit guiding the US in its collective delusions

• Authoritarian impulses can only be understood as the man. So it's trivial that in our split realities, the man to be feared, the worst aspects of the corporatocratic neo-feudalism we suffer under, it is a blue man they fear in rural counties and a red man in cities. There's even a song about it: Everybody wants to rule the world, and since they don't, the mistakes of the world are all the fault of the political affiliation that sometimes has power. Very straightforward. Very functional. When it falls apart, it falls apart only in an unusual circumstance, as we shall see.

• But there's a very clear line, and that line is a very specific kind of lie revolving a very specific kind of implausible deniability. Fox News has been known for this. Bush II had faults, and one of them was he was a poor communicator, so Fox News tended to spin things heavily.

• This community, Scott Alexander's community, was full of people who bought implausible deniability.

• The plausible deniability generator built for Bush II was terrifying under Trump.

• As a consequence the threat of a fascist movement on US soil was completely overlooked by a group of people who thought they only

argued dealt in object-level thoughts.

Woke Derangement Syndrome.

A people so afraid of woke cthtlululu that their political forums included racists (the 14 words got to 80 or so upmarseys) and fascists and this was widely regarded as a good thing, and so these people got to make subjects of people of color and trans people. So They Must Be Made Subjects Of. It's not more complicated than that. If you let moral constructs like ideology get in the way of subjecting people to the treatment which must come their way in a just and proper universe, you are just being a coward.

So I called them out for their hypocrisy, and when I got bored of the place and understood at last that they would never take me seriously and if I did a good moderate piece I'd get a quality contribution that would make me feel worse I ragequit.

And they still consider that what they do at themotte discourse.

Tell you what, @Impassionata's been banned for life there, but I haven't.

I got permanently banned on my account and any time I try and make a new account it instantly gets shadow banned so that no one can see anything that I post. Anyone know a way of bypassing this other than using a VPN forever, every single time that I log onto Reddit?

This is a besmirchment of MacDonalds

Donald Trump, and the Sordid Tradition of Suppressing October Surprises

The payoff to Stormy Daniels that has a Manhattan grand jury weighing criminal charges against Mr. Trump can trace its lineage to political skulduggery in 1968 and 1980.

Secretive talks in the waning days of a campaign. Furtive phone calls. Ardent public denials.

American history is full of October surprises — late revelations, sometimes engineered by an opponent, that shock the trajectory of a presidential election and that candidates dread. In 1880, a forged letter ostensibly written by James A. Garfield claimed he wanted more immigration from China, a position so unpopular it nearly cost him the election. Weeks before the 1940 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s press secretary kneed a Black police officer in the groin, just as the president was trying to woo skeptical Black voters. (Roosevelt’s response made history: He appointed the first Black general and created the Tuskegee Airmen.)

But the scandal that has ensnared Donald J. Trump, the paying of hush money to a pornographic film star in 2016, is in a rare class: an attempt not to bring to light an election-altering event, but to suppress one.

The payoff to Stormy Daniels that has a Manhattan grand jury weighing criminal charges against Mr. Trump can trace its lineage to at least two other episodes foiling an October surprise. The first was in 1968, when aides to Richard M. Nixon pressed the South Vietnamese government to thwart peace talks in the closing days of that election. The second was in 1980. Fresh revelations have emerged that allies of Ronald Reagan may well have labored to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the defeat of Jimmy Carter.

The tortured debate over precisely which election law might have been violated in 2016 is missing the broader point — all three events might have changed the course of history.

“There have been three cases at a minimum,” said Gary Sick, a former national security aide to President Carter who for more than two decades has been pursuing his case that the Reagan campaign in 1980 delayed the release of the hostages from Iran. “And if you had the stomach for it, you’d have to say it worked.”

The potential criminal charges against Mr. Trump for his role in the passing of hush money to Ms. Daniels — falsifying business records to cover up the payment and a possible election law violation — may seem trivial when compared to the prior efforts to fend off a history-altering October surprise.

This month, a former lieutenant governor of Texas came forward to say that he accompanied a Reagan ally to the Middle East to try to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the 1980 election. And notes discovered in 2016 appeared to confirm that senior aides to Mr. Nixon worked through back channels in 1968 to hinder the commencement of peace talks to end the war in Vietnam — and secure Mr. Nixon’s victory over Hubert H. Humphrey.

“Hold on,” Anna Chennault, Mr. Nixon’s emissary to the South Vietnamese, told Saigon government officials, as she pressed them to boycott the Paris peace talks. “We are gonna win.”

But the chicaneries of 1968 and 1980 were left to historians and partisans to sort out and debate decades later. What separates the allegations against Mr. Trump is that they could make him the first former president to be indicted by a grand jury, forcing him to answer for charges in a court of law.

The concept of an October surprise has been around American politics since at least 1838, when federal prosecutors announced plans to charge top Whig Party officials with “most stupendous and atrocious fraud” for paying Pennsylvanians to vote in New York for their candidates.

Two weeks before the 1888 election, Republicans published a letter from the British ambassador to the United States suggesting that the English favored Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate. It galvanized Irish American voters, and Mr. Cleveland lost the presidency to Benjamin Harrison.

Just days before the 2000 election, Thomas J. Connolly, a defense lawyer and former Democratic candidate for governor in Maine, confirmed that George W. Bush had been arrested for driving while intoxicated in the state in 1976. Some have said it cost Mr. Bush just enough votes to turn a narrow popular-vote victory into one of the most contested presidential elections in American history.

What links the allegations of 1968, 1980 and 2016 is the fear that such a surprise would happen. In all three cases, those accused of perpetrating the skulduggery palpably worried that it would.

“It is probably as old as campaigning itself,” said John Dean, the Nixon White House lawyer whose testimony before the congressional Watergate committees helped bring to light perhaps the most famous campaign dirty trick of all time. “I’m sure that when campaigns learn of negative stories, they do all they can to suppress them.”

The accusations against Mr. Trump are of a different scale than 1968 or 1980. No Americans were left to languish in captivity. No armies remained on the battlefield longer than necessary. No civilians died in napalm conflagrations. Indeed, the passing of hush money to Ms. Daniels is hardly the worst accusation leveled against a president

who was impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine to extract a political favor, and impeached again for inciting a riot designed to overturn a lawful election that he lost.

But because the 2016 election was so close, the suppression of a late-breaking s*x scandal just may have delivered the White House to one of American history’s most divisive leaders. Mr. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, and won the presidency by securing victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined 78,652 votes, a smaller total than a sellout crowd at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.

Mr. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, suffered her own surprise when just days before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, reopened a closed investigation into emails she sent on a private server when she was secretary of state. Given the margin, that alone may have cost Mrs. Clinton the White House.

Ms. Daniels’s claim that she had s*x with Mr. Trump in 2006 while his wife, Melania, was nursing their only baby had been floating around since 2011, seemingly raising few fears in Trump world. But in early October 2016, that changed when The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump described in lewd terms how he groped women.

Amid the ensuing furor and defections from some Republican leaders, the effort to buy Ms. Daniels’s silence went into overdrive. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, and others feared that a second punch, landing just after the “Access Hollywood” outrage was dissipating, could knock their pugilistic boss out of the presidential race and expose them to legal action.

“It could look awfully bad for everyone,” Dylan Howard, the editor of The National Enquirer, wrote in a text to Mr. Cohen, noting that if Ms. Daniels went public, their work to cover up her account of a sexual encounter might also become known.

The 1980 election is remembered as a landslide victory, hardly one that seemed vulnerable to a late-breaking course change. But in fact, aides and allies of Mr. Reagan openly feared the release of the hostages in the campaign’s final weeks could re-elect Mr. Carter, so much so that the term “October surprise” is often attributed to the Reagan camp’s trepidations.

“All I know is there’s concern, not just with us but I think generally amongst the electorate, well, this Carter’s a politically tough fellow, he’ll do anything to get re-elected, and let’s be prepared for some October surprise,” Mr. Reagan’s running mate, George H.W. Bush, said at the time.

Gerald Rafshoon, who was Mr. Carter’s White House communications director and campaign media adviser, said in an interview that he was confident the release of the hostages would have secured the president’s re-election. The polls had been tightening that fall amid rising optimism about the captives’ release. Then Mr. Carter’s position collapsed.

“If the little farmer can’t handle a two-bit ayatollah,” Mr. Rafshoon recalled one woman telling him, “I’ll take my chances on the cowboy.”

He added: “It’s not that I hold any grudges about those sons of bitches. I’ve gotten on with my life, and so has Jimmy.”

Mr. Sick is not so sure a hostage release would have had much impact. “It would certainly have changed some votes, but would Carter have won? He only won one state,” he said. “People who run campaigns get very paranoid and talk themselves into these things.”

The election of 1968 is a closer call.

Ken Hughes, a researcher at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, whose book “Chasing Shadows” chronicled the Nixon campaign’s efforts to impede peace talks, said Mr. Nixon had a strong lead in the polls over Mr. Humphrey in mid-September. By mid-October, Mr. Nixon’s lead was down to eight percentage points. Then, days before the election, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, and the news media began reporting chatter of looming talks to end the war.

Again, the candidate who went on to win showed his fears, which were based on Mr. Nixon’s conviction that Democratic dirty tricks in 1960 had denied him the presidency. “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN,” or South Vietnam, Mr. Nixon implored, according to the notes of a top aide, H.R. Haldeman.

On the eve of the election, The Christian Science Monitor was preparing an article on the efforts of the Nixon campaign to thwart the peace talks. Mr. Johnson convened a conference call with his security cabinet to seek advice on whether to confirm the story, which he knew to be true from F.B.I. and C.I.A. wiretaps.

“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual elected,” his secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, said of Mr. Nixon on a recorded call. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”

White House officials said nothing.