Grimly hilarious at this point how consistently major protest activity is actively negative for a cause, just an own-goal for one's brand and any concrete goals... unless it is bailed out of that fact by the opposition committing completely unforced errors in response to the protest at which points things can equal out. "Seems like the winning move" etc etc

I am going to bet (polls are still very preliminary, so while they point this way you can't rely on them) that the median voter will find events in LA have bolstered the case for mass deportations and improved their view of the Trump administration (until the other side of the coin ofc, which you didn't quote so I will ignore for now). And that the Trump administration will both be more emboldened and also be able to utilize that improved public opinion for more expansive action. If your goal is "reduce ICE deportations" in some way, shape, or form, these events were quite bad for that case.

"These people are dangerous!" is a much easier sell when you have dangerous people doing dangerous things.

Exactly - it isn't particularly fair, because a country of 300 million people is gonna have a story a day of violence you can blast out no matter how safe it, and I doubt the median person committing violence even is an immigrant versus a simple opportunist. But none of that changes that looting a downtown storefront as a "protest" is something the Trump admin is euphoric over happening, and wipes out whatever impact the 99% peaceful other protests may have had (which was probably zero, but still).

I remain highly skeptical of this framing. What's the null hypothesis, here? I'd say it's that Trump will continue to step up deportation as per his policy goal to do so. The fact that even you say that the impact of the "99% peaceful" protests "was probably zero" reads like a concession of that.

Grimly hilarious at this point how consistently major protest activity is actively negative for a cause, just an own-goal for one's brand and any concrete goals... unless it is bailed out of that fact by the opposition committing completely unforced errors in response to the protest at which points things can equal out. "Seems like the winning move" etc etc

It's difficult to quantify, especially since something of this sort has been happening gradually over the last several decades now, but I feel like the number of Americans who are fundamentally removed from reality has skyrocketed in the last five years specifically

something something exposure therapy

Are they ‘trauma dumping’ or are they just discussing their life experience and you are such an asshole that you can’t stand to be confronted with information that makes you uncomfortable for 0.005 seconds???

Like it is beyond wild to me that it became commonly accepted that the person with trauma who is struggling to cope with it is the one who is ‘in the wrong’ in a situation that could be described as ‘trauma dumping’ gtfo

The authors thinly veiled transmisogyny that everyone keeps trying to say is actually awesome genderfuckery for some reason

The fandoms thinly veiled transmisogyny

rent lowering "i really dont care what word transmascs use to describe the ways they're oppressed tbh" gunshot

if i could i would love to become the pinnacle of health, and never again be burdened with sickness nor ailment nor weakness

I simultaneously think that 2010s political correctness went too far and also that it was necessary as a step in the dialectic to improve the previously existing culture. Like, pendulum swings one way, pendulum swings the other, but each swing leaves its mark. I genuinely believe that (Anglophone) society is less misogynistic and racist now than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and that's thanks in no small part to all the social justice warrior shit, and that's a good thing, and also a bunch of basically innocent people were caught in the blast radius and got fired from their jobs for problematic tweets or whatever and this is pretty bad. Unfortunately this is just how change works, nothing happens cleanly. I'm not making an "ends justify the means" argument so much as a "well all said and done I think the moral calculus has come out in the black, whether or not there might have been a better way to achieve that".

I realize there's a lot of subjectivity in this but I feel like things are worse now than they were 10 or 15 years ago and I think that's due in large part to the culture wars arms race and both sides responding to aggression with escalation.

I kinda-sorta agree with Max, and I definitely agree with self-winding, and I'm not sure these two perspectives are at all contradictory.

It would be nice if we could just have actual gender abolition sometime.

Everyone is so weird about people who cry easily. Fellas, is it evil and manipulative to *checks notes* have an involuntary stress response?