Election Thoughts

Swing Voters

I do not understand "swing voters". I have no "theory of mind" regarding anyone who approaches a presidential election saying, "Gee, I wonder who I'll vote for this year. I'll have to weigh their records carefully and pick the best candidate." I'm not even sure these people exist in any numbers, but if they do, they are an alien species to me. This is not to say that people never switch parties. On the contrary, I know several people who have come to the realization that the party they've historically supported no longer supports their interests and values. But they do not swing.

Marginal Voters

I DO understand "marginal voters". I am one. A voter can be marginal in two senses. In the first sense, they are marginal because they are are generally disengaged. They are lazy or busy or unmotivated by politics. According to the NYT, the emerging Republican majority on which Trump specifically has capitalized has an outsized number of these people, which is why Democrats will be expected to do much better in off-year elections than presidential elections. Candidly, this is a mentally healthy way of living your life.

In the second sense, a voter is marginal because "Republican" or "Democrat" are in themselves insufficient. It is in this sense that I count myself as marginal: I have specific policy objectives, and I regularly bail on candidates who do not have credible commitments, including in the recent cycle. I do not swing, but I will hunt up third party candidates or write-ins when necessary. There is some nuance to this. I can be persuaded to choose pathetic (Jeb Bush) when the alternative is sufficiently scary (Janet Reno). But Obama was never a scary enough candidate to drive me to choose McCain or Romney.

Lessons Learned

Do parties learn? Parties evolve, yes, in the Darwinian sense: old voters die, new voters with new values turn 18, new candidates win elections with new messaging and coalitions (Reagan, Trump) and use their power to remake their parties. But learn from defeat?

I was trying to think of an example, and I finally came up with one: when John Kerry lost the popular vote to Bush, the Democrats collectively realized that being anti-war was an electoral loser. This left some people as political orphans (Glenn Greenwald) but American voters in general love them some wars (for a while, when we win). So anti-war messaging was absent from Democrat party messaging (Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris) going forward.

This carried a couple of corollaries. The Left realized there was more profit in taking over the military, a project that had already started in 2004 and was complete by the time I left; the military no longer has the right-leaning internal culture it did when I started in the 80s, and now actively purges anyone it catches with heterodox ideas. The Left also has improved its messaging since the Kerry debacle; they can spin all manner of deviance as "supporting the troops", and any Right pushback as "a distraction". For a taste of what this looks like, see most articles at Military.com. Part of where the massive funding advantage the Left enjoys now allows them to spin up instant advocacy groups with a "veteran" patina whom Military.com writers can then quote when they are, for instance, demanding that 100+ thousand "Afghan Allies" be given un-vetted admission to the U.S.

But that's the only example I could come up with. What about now? We'll see.

One of the features of the regime media messaging in the aftermath of prior Democrat losses has been something along the lines of, "Well, sure, the Republicans SAID they were going to do thus and so, but really that was never practical, so look for them to pivot towards a more moderate approach." In an environment where Republicans regarded media favor as advantageous, this obviously created for them a path of retreat, and also carried the covert message that betraying their base would get them invited to all the cool parties. As of this writing, however, I'm not seeing that messaging. The NYT and AP post-election stories have been exactly the same hyperbolic end-democracy-as-we-know-it that they've been running with for almost a decade and already failed spectacularly.

But then, why should they learn? They will begin 2025 with vast institutional power, including the Senate fillibuster. 2026 will be better for them (how could it not?). Trump can't possibly live up to the hype. There will inevitably be a black criminal who breaks the law, resists arrest, and gets himself shot, and the whole circus can begin again.

Takes:

Dumb take: "Kamala was a good candidate" (Kristol, et al.)

In early 2019, when we sat around speculating on who the Democrats would put up against Trump, Kamala Harris seemed like a reasonable Obama second act: a People-Of-Color-ish senator who cleaned up nice and was ready to fulfill the progressive wish list. But what we discovered during the debates was that she had exactly zero ability to parry a thrust, and Tulsi Gabbard sank her candidacy in 20 seconds. She then got VP as a DEI hire and spent four years spouting nonsense, alienating her own staff, and policing intel reports for "sexist language". The first two of these were abundantly reported in regime media until this year, and the last tells you what you need to know about Biden's opinion of her: even if you think it's right and necessary, it's still HR-level make-work that is NEVER assigned to C-suite quality people.

In this respect, Kamala's 2024 personal performance fully met my expectations.

Dumb take: "Kamala ran a terrible campaign" (most Right-leaning commentators)

Kamala lost, so everyone who said "do something else" looks like a genius (as Scott Alexander predicted). But the NYT had it right: every potential strategy has its upsides and downsides. "Do more podcasts" only works if your candidate has something to say and say well, and Kamala had neither of those things. Further, Kamala was trying to both simultaneously cleave to the Biden administration to lay claim to executive experience while at the same time running away from the Biden administration because its consequences were massively unpopular among the marginal voters she needed. At most, only one of those things could be true, and the marginal voters knew that once you opened the box, the cat was either alive or its was dead. So her campaign's appeal was to abortion and Nazis under the bed, and that wasn't enough, not this time. But losing this gamble doesn't mean some other gamble would have had better chances.

Dumb take: "Kamala the Leftist". (most Right-leaning commentators)

Kamala was never anything other than a basic sorority girl. Her "leadership" consisted in figuring out which way the crowd was moving and rushing to the front of it. In the 2019 Democrat primary, that meant trans surgeries for illegal aliens. In the 2024 general election that meant . . . well, not THAT anymore, but her calculation was that openly repudiating 2019-2023 would be worse than not (see above). So she gestured at her campaign website and relied on her media surrogates to assure us that she was now a moderate, and what about abortions and Nazis . . .

Dumb take: "Biden the Centrist". (most Left-leaning commentators)

Biden has spent his political career staying as close as possible to the middle of the Democrat party. The center of that party has moved Leftward dramatically since 2012, and in particular began 2021 with an outsized appetite for revenge against its cultural enemies. Most Democrat politicians -- Biden, Tim Ryan in Ohio, Tim Walz in Minnesota -- moved Left right along with it. I've read any number of commentators mystified by Biden's behavior, because in 80s and 90s blah blah blah; who cares? In 2020, Biden promised his party maximum cultural Leftism, and his regime delivered it in spades, only backing off under this year's electoral pressure. In this respect, Biden's administration fully met my expectations.

Dumb take: "Biden was senile, so therefore . . . " (the NYT; most everybody)

Yes, Biden was senile. In fact, he was visibly declining as early as 2020. But so what? Whatever its electoral liability (probably overstated), Biden's cognitive incapacity should have been, if anything, a net-positive from the perspective of the median Democrat voter. A more vigorous president might have steered his policies more towards the marginal voter earlier; as it was, his administration delivered on his party's core priorities more than any other president since Reagan: trillions of dollars printed for green boondogles; political opponents jailed; alternative media censored; DEI/CT demands institutionalized at every level; tens of thousands of dissenters purged from government service (including me); and (count them) 6-10 million illegal aliens dumped on America's small towns. In general, Democrats have always been more willing than Republicans to actually spend their political capital, but Biden took this to the next level while eating ice cream and shaking hands with invisible people. Gimme some of that sweet-@ss cognitive decline!

Which I might get, by the way. Trump's victory speech in the wee hours of Wednesday morning showed a man much diminished from 2015. But it likely doesn't matter. Trump has re-made much of the Republican party since then; he re-enters office with a team, starting with his impressive VP, that share his vision; and the marginal voters that propelled his victory actually share his core priority of stopping the illegal immigration. We may vote for a person, but we elect a party.

Smart take: "We shouldn't have put our pronouns in our emails." (MSNBC commentator, I think)

For most people, most of the time, politics is something they just read about. I had (until late 2021) a front row seat for the Leftist take-over of the military, but there just aren't enough AGPs to, by themselves, bother many people directly. As I said, this is a mentally healthy way of going through life.

The pronouns business served the Leftist desire to bully and humiliate their cultural enemies, but it also kept the Transanity in the constant view of the normies, and a lot of those normies are marginal voters. Trump was able to detect and capitalize on their widespread distaste for gender ideology as it was playing out in athletics especially, but the pronouns gave it a personal resonance it would not have otherwise had.

Smart take: "America / men / brown men are migogynist" (Al Sharpton; that guy next to Mika)

There are factions in the elites of both parties eager to put women in leadership positions above not just competence (Haley, Palin, Harris) but their electibility as well (those + Clinton). Disentangling the strength of male distaste for female bumbling from that of female authority as such is hard, but it is certainly plausible that there is a critical margin of male voters for whom, when they get a say in it, women in executive leadership is toxic. Note to Republican elites (especially in Arizona): just stop. Women candidates are not the key to women votes, and actively repel male votes. Note to Democrat elites: nah, brah, you keep doing you. Looking forward to your Ilhan Omar nomination in 2028 . . . .

What to expect: more of the same.

My median expecation of Trump 47 is that he picks up where he left off in March of 2020. Now, the ball is much further down the field than it was then, and the Democrats should be expected to defend those gains inch by bloody inch. On the other hand, the Biden "executive actions" are an easy trail of breadcrumbs to follow backwards. Trump by March 2020 had learned how to control the border and build his wall. The deportations are another matter: the regime has spent decades building the processes that make this extraordinarily hard, expensive and time consuming. But he and his team seem motivated, so . . . we'll see.

No Country for New Marriages

I watched the 1993 movie The Piano, at the behest of my mother as it happened. She wanted to know what I thought about it.

It's ridiculous. [Spoilers follow.]

First things first. The economy made no sense at all. The film opens as Holly Hunter (I will be using actors' names throughtout as I can't be bothered to remember character names unless they're in a multi-installment franchise) arrives at a remote New Zealand settlement to begin a contracted marriage (she was "sold by her father") to homesteader Sam Neill. By "remote", I mean that the settlement is not on a natural harbor (e.g. Plymoth) or inland waterway (e.g. the James River), but inland from a beach on the ocean. A fair interpretation is that this beach is the settlment's only access to the outside world, yet not only does beach have no supporting structures, nor at the time of arrival any other vessels, but there isn't even a path from beach to the settlement. After being dropped on beach by rowboat (waka taua I think is what the filmakers were going for; a fair interpretation is that she was most immediately coming from another settlement rather than her native Scotland), she and her considerable stock of belongings (including eventually the eponymous piano) must be hand-ported through the forest up a hill to get to her new home. This homesstead's visible food production hardly looks like it would support Sam Neill, let alone a family of three (Hunter has a ten-year-old daughter, more about whom in a second), still less the gaggle of Maori odd-jobbers who mostly laze about telling dirty jokes. Not that I'm judging, but . . . how do these people eat?

Sam Neill, in negotiation with his best friend Harvey Keitel over a piece of land (more on this in a second) says he has no money. So, how did he afford whatever he allegedly "paid" to marry Holly Hunter? How did he afford the manufactured goods he is later shown trying to barter with the Maori? The movie might have offered some explanation for these anomalies, but I can just hear Ryan George answering with, "So the movie can happen!" during the pitch meeting.

Holly Hunter only ever wears hoop skirts (the mechanics of which are emphasized, about which more in a second), notwithstanding that most of the settlement's ground surface is mud. She does no useful work anywhere in the movie that I could see.

Then you have Neill's best friend Harvey Keitel, whose homestead has zero visible food production and who also does no useful work during the course of the movie. At the end of the movie, Keitel apparently has the wherewithal to take Hunter (more on this relationship in a second) back to what I gather is town life, so a fair interpretation is that he has other resources. But then, what was he doing out there? And what did he eat?

As a segway, a moment on the movie's spiritual economy. The settlement is large enough to support a community theater, but there is apparently no church, nor are there any religious observances shown. I get that New Zealand's settlement was not as religiously based as America's, but it was still settled by nominal Anglicans and Presbyterians. (Fun fact from Wikipedia: 19th century Maoris, having converted to Christianity, attended church at higher rates than Englishmen at the time.) The movie offers no context for this omission either, but it would have been a good place to explain why the settlement's menfolk apparently have no tools other than violence to kepp their women away from predatory neighbors, even their best friends.

Which brings me to the movie's primary narrative. In summary: Holly Hunter, having consented to an arranged marriage and then denying her new husband its associated covenant duties, throws herself at the neighbor who extorted sexual favors from her by bartering the beach-stranded piano from her husband and then offering it back to her one key at a time.

That's it. That's the movie in a single sentence.

On the one hand, women make bad decisions. It's a meta-theme of this blog, and the reason pimping exists as a skill set. But this movie didn't sell it. Harvey Keitel wasn't handsome enough, wasn't rich enough, wasn't dominant enough. His negotiation with Holly Hunter was needy beta supplication. He doesn't even ride to her rescue when Sam Neill sends him her severed finger as a warning. So why does Holly want to be with him? Holly doesn't say. Literally, she doesn't say anything -- the conceit of the film is that she is a mute. That's hard for an actor to pull off, but also relieves her of having to explain her motivations.

This failure of plausibility extends even to minor plot points. For instance, Anna Paquin (the daughter) is depicted as fiercely loyal to her mother from the get-go, yet she betrays her mother's adultery to her step-father. Why? (Ryan: "So the movie can happen!") It would have been simple to have a couple of scenes where the daughter bonds with her step-father to support a scenario where her loyalties become divided, but no, nothing like that. There is a scene that, in retrospect, could be construed as the daughter learning that adultery might be bad (remember, there is no religion in the movie), but this scene was mostly played for giggles.

Since this is a movie review, I should admit that the movie was well acted, especially considering what the cast had to work with. Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin plausibly earned their Oscars on the merits -- 1993 was a strong year for movies, but not especially a strong year for female leads. That said . . . taking her clothes off probably put her over the top.

An aside in the genre of writing about the decline in the quality of movie sex. As other writers have explored, there isn't nearly as much in mainstream American movies as there used to be. There is still some in foreign and independent films, but it strikes me as low in quality. If I had been asked to list the hottest actresses of the '80s and '90s, Holly Hunter would not have been on the list. But I was struck by the fact that her 1993 appearance was easily top 10% of anything I've seen lately.

Contra Rehabilitated Feminism

Following a link from Ace: "Christian, Patriot, Conservative, Feminist", by Danusha V. Goska (if that's her real name . . .).

So, first of all, no. I get that not everybody is a conservative about everything, but if you identify as feminist, and specifically if you advocate for female clergy (as she does), then at a minimum there is a huge-ass carve-out in your conservatism.

Her article contains this paragraph:

Oh, and by the way, as a former leftist, I can let you in on a little secret. Misogyny is alive and well on the left. Some-not-all leftist men feel personally inadequate. They conduct a perpetual, spiteful war with authority. When a woman speaks or acts with authority, they feel especially intimidated. They attempt to buttress their shaky manhood by lashing out against women in ugly ways. Misogyny is a major, and so far ineradicable feature of the New Atheist Movement, several of whose celebrity leaders have been credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault. On the other hand, Some-not-all right-wing men feel confident in their manhood. These self-confident men can enjoy, rather than feel threatened by, smart, strong women.

I tried to copy all the original links into the blockquote above, and I confess to not having read them all, but basically they tell the story that Scott Alexander tells (from the opposite perspective) of the capture/cannibalization of New Atheism by Social Justice. What Scott doesn't say is that feminism had a leading role in the early days of this process, at least according to the links above and in particular this 2014 Buzzfeed piece that covered the state of the conflict up to that time.

For instance, I know I read about "ElevatorGate" when it happened, probably at VoxDay, but from Buzzfeed:

On June 20, 2011, [Rebecca] Watson posted to her Skepchick site an eight-minute video titled “About Mythbusters, Robot Eyes, Feminism, and Jokes.” . . . Around the four-minute mark, she turns serious, discussing a talk she had recently given at an atheists’ conference in Dublin in which she decried “blatant misogyny” in freethought. The audience seemed supportive, she says, but that night, after leaving the hotel bar, something had happened. “A man got on the elevator with me and said, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?’” Watson felt deflated, as if her speech had meant nothing. “Just a word to the wise here, guys: Don’t do that … I was a single woman, in a foreign country, at 4 a.m., in a hotel elevator with you — just you — and don’t invite me back to your hotel room, right after I have finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.”

PZ Myers reposted Watson’s video in early July, and soon thereafter, in Myers’ comments section, Richard Dawkins posted a satirical letter, addressed to a generic Muslim woman. “Dear Muslima,” Dawkins began, “Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you … But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.” Then Dawkins gets personal: “Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep’chick,’ and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee … And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about!”

But I'm pretty sure this is the first I had heard of Michael Shermer:

“I ran into Shermer in the hallway," [Alison] Smith said recently, speaking publicly for the first time about what happened that night. They began talking, and he invited her to a Scotch and cigar party at the Caesars Palace hotel. “He was talking about future articles we could write, and he mentioned this party and asked if I could come, and I said yes.” At the party, they began downing drinks. “At some point,” Smith said, “I realized he wasn’t drinking them; he was hiding them underneath the table and pretending to drink them. I was drunk. After that, it all gets kind of blurry. I started to walk back to my hotel room, and he followed me and caught up with me.”

On their way from Caesars to the Flamingo, where they were both staying, she chatted briefly with a friend on her mobile phone, she told me. They got to the Flamingo. “He offered to walk me back to my room, but walked me to his instead. I don’t have a clear memory of what happened after that. I know we had sex.” She remembers calling a friend from an elevator after leaving his room. “I was in the elevator, but didn’t know what hotel.”

There is a facet to the practice of corporate (meaning, as a body) Christianity that has sometimes been perceived by its usually-now-former practitioners -- I apologize for all these weasel-words, but I do in fact believe that the Christian ethic of chastity is more complicated than this caricature, I'm just saying that it would be foolish to deny that people have experienced it this way -- as kind of longhouse moralizing about sex. I'm not an atheist and have no standing to speak on their behalf, but let me pretend to be one for a couple of paragraphs. Atheism -- of the New Atheism, conference-going variety -- offers me two specific things with psycho-social cash value:

• Another topic I can nerd-out about; and
• the opportunity to screw without guilt.

So . . . who let these scolds into our tent? Sure the labels have changed -- Christians are now Feminists -- but it's the same d@mned thing! It's just another excuse to sex-shame men (and some women!) into folding our hands politely and following rules that aren't in our interest!

</PretendAthiestRant> Not saying I agree. Just saying I understand the point.

The parallels aren't always lost on feminists, either. On Scott's recommendation (I guess), I've been reading the online comic strip Sinfest, mostly backwards; I've finished as far back as 2017. It's written from a Second Wave Feminist perspective, though contra Scott, that didn't really change in 2019. What did change was that establishment culture went all-in on tr@nnies, and Second Wavers couldn't help noticing that the Christian Right were their only remaining tactical allies. So yes, from 2020 the strip is much more Right-friendly than it had been.

Reading it from before 2019, I noticed, first, that Second Wave Feminism, just like all other waves, is toxic. I could go on about Sinfest's particular brand of misandric toxicity, but read it yourself. My point here is that, among the very small number of male characters given a positive representation is a Christian Fundamentalist cleric. This isn't my reading -- Sinfest specifically identifies him by that label. (Sinfest also gives him a clerical collar, which of course no Fundamentalist would be caught wearing, but it's useful as an artistic device.) And note that this is pre-2019, before the strip makes its Rightward turn.

There is something admirable about Sinfest's consistency. There is something admirable about the consistency of those New Atheists who mounted a doomed defense of their thing. But consistency is a minority taste. Most feminists/atheists fell over themselves to embrace Islam, notwithstanding that its present record on the issues they pretend to care about is vastly worse than Christian civilization has ever been.

Bleg on SFFA: Whatever happened to Title VI?

Back in the 1980s, when I first began to acquaint myself with mainstream conservative writings of prior decades, e.g. God and Man at Yale (1951), Up From Liberalism (1959), and others that I don't recall and am too lazy to research, their expressed view of the 14th Amendment was that it required equal application of the existing laws but didn't require the laws themselves to be race neutral*. This view was in at least legal (though perhaps not moral) defense of segregated education, and in particular against the arguments put forward by the plaintiffs in Brown vs. Board that the 14th Amendment did indeed require race neutrality. The SCOTUS decision in that case (citation needed) didn't explicitly endorse race neutrality but rather concluded that segregation inevitably led to unequal outcomes. (The reasoning here was worse than I'm making it sound and required accepting some ridiculous propositions and shady low-N studies involving children and dolls.)

This was prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which specifically did require that both public education (Title IV) and any program receiving federal funds (Title VI) be administered without regard to race. By the late 1980s when I discovered it, conservative writing was now advocating for race neutrality. This was well into the affirmative action regime, of course, and the writers at Commentary magazine had noticed that Jews in particular were being hard hit by its "reverse discrimination" (as it was usually called).

What strikes me as needing an explanation is that in these late battles against and provisional victory over affirmative action, There have been almost no references to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I haven't seen it in the excerpts from the SFFA decision nor in the commentary around it. Why not? Is this no longer good law? Was it repealed or modified to allow racial discrimination to achieve diversity? The Civil Rights Act of 1991 allowed the EEOC to bring disparate impact lawsuits against employers but that doesn't sound like it applied here.

I would appreciate comments explaining this to me.

* As used here, "neutrality" means "race blind". I spell this out because I have read news articles that are incoherent until you realize that they use the word "neutrality" to mean "not having a disparate impact".

Deepfake Econ

A while back, after reading Steve's review of The Northman, I did a Brave image search on the actress Anya Taylor-Joy to see if I recognized her from anything else.

. . . and was treated to a buttload of pr0n!

Eeesh, I thought. Is Anya Taylor-Joy a crossover star and somehow this hasn't attracted much commentary? But no, not according to anything I could find.

More recently, I found something similar for the actress Emilia Fox. (That's a link to her IMDB profile, not to Brave results. Do Your Own Research, pervball.) In this case, the images were less deepfakes and more bad Photoshop, but still.

This kind of thing is somewhat anomalous. For instance, image searches on Scarlett Johansson or Valerie Kaprisky* show only official gala pictures.** So why pr0n for some actresses and not others?

Possibilities:

• Perhaps the actresses have licensed their images for this purpose? Maybe it pays well enough that not-quite- or not-yet-famous actresses find the offer attractive when they don't actually have to do any work. Maybe there's no such thing as bad publicity. But I would think that cooperating with this business would be damaging if it were revealed.

• Perhaps already-famous actresses pay to have the images removed. I appears from the URLs that there are only a handful of sites that traffic in this stuff. Still, I would think that the production of these images has got to be a legal gray area at best, and shaking down actresses looks enough like blackmail that someone should have been prosecuted by now.

• The choice of actresses is driven by The Algorithm. But if so, it must be based on something other than fame per se. For instance, perhaps deepfake production focuses on actresses who do not already have a large corpus of nude movie scenes. But honestly, this is where the research gets a little harder to justify to anyone purusing my browser history.

Any other ideas?

* Note that Φ may not have kept up especially well with who the "hot" actresses are over the last few decades.

UPDATE: Looks like I was scooped. Apparently celebrities are not authorizing these images.

** Which is not to say they don't exist, only that they don't show up on the first page of search results for the actresses name alone.

Library Grooming (It's not just Drag Queen Story Hour)

The beautiful and entertaining YooToober Shoe0nHead, in the context of the Balenciaga business, adds another entry to her long-running rear-guard, heroic, and ultimately doomed effort to police the boundaries of Alphabetitude from the "P"s. You know who you are.

Shoe's contention that thus extending the Alphabet represents an inauthentic infiltration requires a constrained knowledge of history (which should be forgiven; is she even old enough to drink), even the history during my own lifetime. In her autobiography The Last Closet, Moira Greyland gives chapter-and-verse of how our post-1970s characterization of modal LGBTQ behavior as being between adult peers ignores how the sexualization of children was always part of its agenda. It may have been expedient to suppress this history during the push for gay marriage, but we are watching the withdrawal of that suppression in real time.

The other night, it idly occurred to me that while I had seen many references to it, at the time and over the years, I had never seen the 1985 Michael J. Fox movie Teen Wolf. So I went looking for it on Kanopy. Kanopy is a movie streaming service usually made available for free through local public libraries. (Full disclosure: I subscribe to exactly none of the paid movie streaming services and have not resubscribed to cable).

As it happens, Kanopy doesn't currently stream Teen Wolf, but it's algorithm was happy to offer me alternatives:

If it's not obvious from their cover art, every single one of these movies is LGBTQ-themed. Let that sink in for a second. The movie recommendation algorithm of a movie streaming service offered, without any age filtering, through your public library, upon receiving a request for Teen Wolf, decides to ignore the "wolf" part of the request and interpret "teen" to mean that the viewer must want to watch half-naked young boys sexually cavort with each other in thinly-veiled p***-bait. So, yes, your children are being groomed, and by no less than taxpayer-funded organs of culture.

To be fair, our library also offers a second streaming service, Hoopla, that apparently doesn't have this problem:

Granted, I didn't search read the description for every movie, but the cover art suggests the first page of results leans heavily into wolfishness, while I could only find one LGBTQ-themed recommendation on the second page. So, Hoopla is less gay.

The Shadowban Files

I never had a lot of interaction on Twitter. Someone would like one of my tweets or, briefly, follow my channel until they figured out my tweets under the #diversity hashtag were actually counter-narrative (weirdly, this wasn't immediately obvious to them) maybe once a week. But even this limited traffic stopped cold on June 23, 2017 when Steve Sailer liked one of my retweets (which may or may not be related; Steve had liked my tweets before with no apparent effect). I gamely continued posting regularly to Twitter through 2019, and sporadically in 2020, before realizing there wasn't any point anymore to howling into the void; that, and deciding that as the counter-extremism push accelerated in 2021, the ride wasn't worth the risk.

One interesting follower I picked up about a month before my engagement dropped was Infosys Foundation USA, "Supporting greater access and inclusion in Computer Science education." I always thought that was weird. They're obviously not fellow-travelers, but also not obviously tracking every right-leaning blogger on the internet. So I don't know.

But now that St. Musk has opened a portal to its inner workings, I am middling curious as to the exact circumstances under which my apparent shadowbanning at Twitter was ordered. As I understand it, its internal emails have only been released to select journalists, not the internet at large, but if anyone can tell me how I could look this up, I would appreciate it.