We lost the battle for the democrat party's soul long ago

[defixione]

Cultophobia is more accurate.

[jfish26]

Honest question: Do you think referring to people who disagree with you as "rubes" makes them more likely to come around to your viewpoints or less so?

It’s not an agree/disagree thing.

Exactly. You’ve framed it as a good people vs. deplorable creatures issue. That is one of the most serious things wrong with this country.

Wrong again on the distinction. “Rube” has nothing to do with policy preferences. I would call a lefty a rube if I saw a lefty being a rube.

[jfish26]

Exactly. You’ve framed it as a good people vs. deplorable creatures issue. That is one of the most serious things wrong with this country.

There's more than a whiff of oikophobia to it.

Giggle. I would suggest that to the extent anyone is afraid of our country’s culture, it’s those who are dogmatically insistent on pushing deeply unpopular policies on people. With a couple mostly immaterial exceptions, my views are pretty dang mainstream.

[DCHawk1]

I think you're translating the term far more literally than Scruton intended it. Just as homophobia isn't used to describe people who are literally afraid of homosexuality, nor are oiks literally afraid of the country, its culture, and its people. There is, rather, a pronounced distaste/dislike.

[jfish26]

Ok. Again, I’d suggest that those with a pronounced distaste/dislike for this country are - and I’m surprised this is even a question - those who are desperate to foist deeply unpopular policies on people before the clock runs out on their ways of doing so.

[randylahey]

[Shirley]

Exactly. You’ve framed it as a good people vs. deplorable creatures issue. That is one of the most serious things wrong with this country.

There's more than a whiff of oikophobia to it.

^^^

[Mjl]

You realize what he means when he says '"central banks"'? If you don't, that's cool, just don't bring that shit here again.

If you do, fuck you.

[Mjl]

For context...

[randylahey]

[jfish26]

Maybe I’m dense, but I’m not seeing a material difference in how the two movies are referenced?

Or are you just searching for things to be angry about over here?

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Maybe I’m dense, but I’m not seeing a material difference in how the two movies are referenced?

Or are you just searching for things to be angry about over here?

Maybe..... randy is NOT "dense" and he actually read The Guardian's reviews of each film and he also knows exactly who the Hodgetwins are and what they are all about?

Maybe.... I am a 6 foot 10 inch tall Black woman.

[KUTradition]

oh, no, randy is definitely dense

why else does he continue to post hot-takes that don’t prove or support ideas he thinks they do?

[TDub]

oh, no, randy is definitely dense

why else does he continue to post hot-takes that don’t prove or support ideas he thinks they do?

I mean...that statement could be applied to.....several....

[randylahey]

[Mjl]

Do you know anything about QAnon and/or Pizzagate?

[randylahey]

[jfish26]

Wait a sec. Is the new thing on the right to appropriate the phrase “genital mutilation”, for culture war outrage generation purposes?

I don’t know what’s worse, if these idiots don’t know the human rights issue implicated there…or if they do.

[KUTradition]

I guess my question would be what motive Ballard would have for fabricating these things. He gave up a stable, high-paying job with Homeland Security to do this dangerous and stressful job freelance. Not a lucrative undertaking by any stretch.

Well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-ent ... -caviezel/

“Sound of Freedom” is based on the life of Ballard, who left the Department of Homeland Security about 10 years ago and founded a group that works with local police to catch child sex traffickers in other countries — often by staging elaborate sting operations that it captures on video.

In the film, a brother and sister are lured to an innocuous-sounding photo shoot in Honduras, only to be snatched by abductors and imprisoned in the Colombian jungle. Caviezel’s version of Ballard spends much of the movie sneaking through criminal hideouts to find the children, risking his life and finally beating up the traffickers.

The real Ballard hasn’t claimed to do anything quite like that, but the film ends with a montage of clips from sting operations his group, Operation Underground Railroad, actually conducted in the country.

[...]

A Vice News investigation in 2020 found no clear falsehoods in Operation Underground Railroad’s rescue claims, but “a pattern of image-burnishing and mythology-building, a series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading.”

“The entire premise of its operations: that local law enforcement will take over when the dirty work has been done is dangerously naive,” the prominent human trafficking scholar Anne Gallagher wrote for HuffPost in 2015. “Why are police in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Colombia not arresting child sex traffickers if they are so easy to find? The simplest explanation is law enforcement complicity in such crimes.”

As for answering your question - I would guess that the answer is complex, and involves (among other things) genuine concern, along with profit-, fame- and adventure-seeking.

None of which, of course, are bad things in and of themselves.

But a responsible person should be aware of where the profit and fame come from. And in this case, it's fairly clearly from rubes, eager to swallow the exaggerations and mythmaking uncritically (and then run the cancel culture rebop to get internet-mad at anyone who challenges these things as being something less than objective fact).

https://slate.com/culture/2023/07/sound ... qanon.html

i guess at least now ballard gets his moment in the spotlight

sounds like a less-violent version of Taken

[jfish26]

Sounds like a glossy version of "SMASH THE SUBSCRIBE BUTTON, SHOP IN BIO".

And that's fine, I guess. But miss me with the aggro-child, this film says out loud what the MEDIA is afraid to tell you hype train.