Right-wing pundit Phil Labonte, 47, recently ran across the Tinder profile of Kat Abughazaleh, a Media Matters researcher who monitors Tucker Carlson and evidently decided to try to embarrass her by tweeting it out to his hundred thousand followers.
It turns out that his Twitter followers are as horny as he is, and they replied to his tweet with a flurry of crudely sexual comments suggesting that Labonte ignore her politics and “smash” her, as if this were somehow a possibility.
“Beat that shit up so bad it becomes a libertarian,” suggested one.
“Gotta be some tight puss,’ tweeted another.
“A mouth’s a mouth,” tweeted a third.
Others responded with “you can fix her” or the one word “would.”
Abughazaleh–who goes by Kat Abu on Twitter–made a collage of several dozen of the worst replies and posted it on Twitter as a sort of lesson about online harassment.
The only person who should really be feeling embarrassed about any of this is Labonte, a heavy metal musician and regular guest on Tim Pool’s Timcast, who revealed to the world that he’s apparently been trawling Tinder looking for women young enough to be his daughter.
“Even before you get the key to your apartment you’re desperately searching Tindr for girls half your age within 100kms?” tweeted one critic. “Sounds like a you problem, and probably a skill issue.”
“So you’re bragging about being a dude in his mid-40s who uses tinder to creep on 20 year old girls,” wrote another,
“This is one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever seen someone post about themselves,” wrote still another.
“You sure you’re anti-communist?” asked yet another commenter, referring to a line in Labonte’s Twitter bio. “’Cause you just publicly owned yourself, loser.”
That’s gotta sting.
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All That Remains hasn’t made a decent album in years so Phil Labonte entering Aaron Lewis levels of right wing douchebaggary doesn’t surprise me
To be entirely fair, Tinder does some kind of algorithm thing like YouTube search suggestions. I spent a fair amount of time double checking my parameters and range because I didn’t realize this.
(I did what I thought was a generous ten years age difference in either direction and kept the range within an hour’s drive, so was somewhat confused when it would pop up with barely legal women halfway across the planet.)
@ .45
Maybe they’re really really fast drivers?
@ Alan Robertshaw
I suppose. Since they often seemed to be some wild partying skydiving surfer types, it only stands to reason they could drive a race car too.
“What were YOU doing at the Devil’s sacrament,” etc
@Moon Custafer
Spanish Bishop Resigns to Marry Author of Satanic, Erotic Novels
@Dalillama
Finally! Some good news!
Tucker Carlson played a clip of a hospital nurse talking about serious issues facing medical staff and patients and he just mocked her saying she must be single, childless and have a lot of cats.
Men in sunglasses bios are so popular with that crowd. They think they look cool, really they just look like they are trying to hide their eyes after a bender.
Only thing I know about tinder is that my wife created a parody profile based on Shakespeare. It got banned in ten minutes, and that was the end of it.
O/T — or is it always very much on topic? Like Fox News, I ask the questions; you decide.
French ‘seduction coach’ jailed for life for savage murder of ex-girlfriend
YouTuber who posted videos on how to be an alpha male knifed woman 80 times and tried to kill her new partner
Just the one, then?
guardian.com/world/2023/jan/25/french-seduction-coach-jailed-for-life-for-savage-of-ex-girlfriend
Hello.
> .45
I do not know for Tinder, but i am on Bumble, and i dwell close to Paris. The thing is, in the geographical range i indicate, there are 2 public airports and many train stations, and as a lot of persons do not disable their geolocalization tracker, i am often shown a lot of travellers… Well, at least, it is fun to see what women of other countries look for.
> Kat
Yeah, the masculinite community is huge in France, alas. Far away, the french lover image is. From self declared “seduction coaches” to self declared “fitness coaches” to far right “videasts” and so on. And social networks, stuffed with “influencers” who often looks like supposed “dream body” – i.e. what you are supposed to be attracted to – do not help young generations to avoid the possible toxic messages those influencers convey. Let us not forget that perceived beauty has a weight in social relations and beliefs, as Cialdini had written in “Influence – the psychology of persuasion”.
Have a nice day.
@.45:
That’s bizarre. I mean, algorithmically suggesting some people outside your age range preference might conceivably make sense, under some circumstances, but matching you to people who are geographically unavailable? That will only waste your time and theirs.
Meanwhile, in at least some corners of the internet apparently the race-IQ debate is still raging, and Thiel-funded asshat and Robin “slow, gentle rape” Hanson fellow-traveler Nick Bostrom has been caught up in it. I won’t bore you all with the details, though I will note that (what a shock) Bostrom does not come out of it looking good.
What bothers me here is that making that the focus of debate seems to me to cede a lot of ground to the enemy. Specifically, claiming that there is a correlation between race and intelligence isn’t actually racist unless you believe that having a lower average intelligence is a bad thing and makes the race in question less deserving of equity, compassion, and suchlike.
And that, obviously, is fantastically ableist.
By making the debate about whether such correlations are real, a lot of anti-racists cede the ableist bit without a fight, and then argue that there is no systematic intelligence difference and therefore there is no justification among ableists in being racist. It might, just possibly, be a better strategy to attack the ableism itself? And, separately, the racism.
In fact, it’s a bad strategy even for an ableist. Bigots who are constantly arguing about racial IQ scores aren’t bigots because they think black people, or whoever, are stupid. They were bigots first, and all their race-IQ blather is a rationalization after the fact. Supposing a bunch of anti-racist ableists actually convinced such a bigot, with some vast outpouring of empirical data, that there was no systematic IQ difference between black and white people whatsoever. (Already a big ask, given how fact-resistant right-whingers tend to be these days.) Does anyone here think for one moment that the bigot would respond by saying “I have seen the light!” and cease to be a bigot? Or is it far more likely that the bigot would concede the IQ argument and then promptly say, “OK, they’re our intellectual equals but they’re morally inferior. Look at these Detroit crime statistics if you don’t believe me!” or some similar such shit. They’ll just replace a demolished rationalization for their bigotry with a new rationalization. Demolish that in turn and they’ll promptly find another, and another, and another. They won’t be reasoned out of a hatred that they were never reasoned into.
And that’s before addressing the ableist aspect. To quote a Star Trek character: “I don’t know about you, but my compassion for someone isn’t limited to my estimate of their intelligence!” (The same character gives the same interlocutor a dressing-down later for being a paternalistic, misogynistic, mansplaining doorknob, BTW.)
Supposing there eventually was a proven racial intelligence gap. So what? Racism would still be wrong, and so would ableism. (FWIW, the best current data I am aware of does not indicate any measurable such gap, save a hint that Ashkenazi Jews might be slightly smarter than everyone else. Which, if it panned out, would not likely be trumpeted by any Nazi as a justification for eugenics.)
This is important for two reasons. The most obvious, of course, is that there are quite definitely non-racial disparities among humans in cognitive capabilities (and not always straight up “smarter than” or “dumber than” disparities; greater talent in spatial reasoning can coexist with poorer language/symbolic reasoning, poor social smarts with being a math whiz, etc.) and those are also often used to justify exclusion and denigration. It’s not even just targeted at those with below-normal abilities in one or another cognitive domain: being particularly good at something can lead to merciless teasing and harassment, perhaps motivated by jealousy or (more potentially-constructive, but misaimed) anti-elitism. Cognitive impairments are the disabilities most likely to lead to becoming a victim of police brutality. Those with cognitive impairments are often infantilized and stripped of agency on the paternalistic assumption that they are not (or no longer) fit to make their own choices, even when the impairments do not impact judgment and they clearly do know what they want and what they don’t want. The right to bodily autonomy is often stripped in such cases and people get medicated against their will. The overall attitude is often that such people are an intolerable inconvenience. Even their families will make the Faustian bargain of convenience for themselves in exchange for giving away their loved one’s bodily autonomy, and rationalize having done so using some variation on the theme of “benevolent ableism”.
But there is a second reason. Ableism is at the root of issues involving how we relate to nonhuman agents.
Humans are, in fact, remarkably uniform, because we’re all one species. What racial/ethnic/population-genetic cognitive differences do exist, if any, are clearly very small in magnitude. It’s likely the only substantial differences of this sort are in variability, with inbred groups and Africans having larger variability and other groups having lower (due to founder effects, having grown from an initial small group of migrants with less genetic diversity than in mother Africa; the inbred groups get the higher variability because allele frequencies that are independent in other populations are correlated in them, and their variances stack instead of tending to cancel one another out). The smartest person and the stupidest on the planet are probably both Africans, and the average is probably the same everywhere, in other words.
Cross the species barrier and that changes. The gulf separating us from our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, is clearly enormous (and makes even the individual differences between very smart and very stupid humans look tiny, let alone the literally-unmeasurable-thus-far racial/regional/whatever differences). Ableism, sometimes paternalistic and sometimes malevolent, is used to justify much of our treatment, and all too often abuse, of animals.
And the importance of those issues, in turn, will pale into insignificance in the event that we encounter ETIs or build a fully generally-intelligent AI. The latter could well be, or become, enormously smarter than us (indeed that prospect is apparently one of the things that keeps Bostrom up at night). In the event that that does happen, would we better off if we, its parents and role-models, were egalitarian in outlook and did not limit our compassion to our estimate of someone’s intelligence? Or if we were still mostly a bunch of ableist jackasses who think greater intelligence equates both to greater moral weight and to being better qualified to make a dumber person’s life choices than they are?
A quick look at the panoply of robot-apocalypse movies should make the answer to that abundantly clear. Consider two of the classics in the field. Colossus: The Forbin Project has our freedom threatened by a paternalistic AI (and the Will Smith actioner I, Robot basically crosses that premise with Asimov’s stories and the conspiracy thriller genre) who thinks it knows best; and, of course, the overtly-malevolent version is notorious for coming back in nearly as many sequels as Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger to try to kill John Connor.
The role-model issue isn’t applicable to space aliens, should these crop up at some point; but they may well hold the philosophy that it’s fair to judge us by our own standards … and if we get out there and find less-advanced, or outright-less-smart, ones, the horrors of colonialism will be unleashed once again upon undeserving populaces if we have not improved our own morals by then. Plus, perhaps some of the smarter ones have a policy of quarantining species until they make that moral breakthrough …
It has been forty years since the War. Our early expansion into deep space had been, if not easy, then certainly successful. We unlocked the mineral resources of Centauri, then found a fallow, habitable exoplanet at 57 Cygni. We thought we were alone, or at least that intelligences were rare. Then we detected the signal.
It was beamed at Earth and at each of our offworld outposts and colonies, and consisted only of a video montage of short clips from our own media: scenes of war, carnage, child labor in the mines, a homeless man sleeping at the foot of an opulent skyscraper, and most ominous of all, a slaughterhouse, factory farms, a meat-packing plant. There was no Saganesque underlayer of mathematics or other symbols; just the images of violence, slaughter, and exploitation. It was not difficult at all to interpret this: it was a declaration of war. Whoever sent the transmission, we were but cattle to them, fit only to be conquered and then farmed. If we lost, we would be penned up in camps, eaten, experimented upon, bred for docility and submissiveness. Within a few generations, humankind would, for all intents and purposes, be extinct. Our cultures, our achievements, all would be gone. A fate worse than extinction.
So we fought like demons when their ships came. We fought and we fought, and we lost and we lost. They had every advantage: vast industrial resources, technology far in advance of ours, and their tactical and strategic moves suggested they might be outright smarter than us. We never had a chance.
The final outposts fell in the early 2100s, and they englobed our whole solar system with hundreds of hyper-radar outposts and several fast-response fleets. Their blockade was impenetrable. We expected them to build up their strength and then assault our besieged home system, sweep away our Home Fleet like it was a wayward tissue-paper, and then batten upon the Earth with troop carriers and, after pacification was complete, their farmers.
But the invasion never came.
It has been forty years, without any massing of a fleet that we can detect, without any more signals, without anything but the endless patient maintenance of their blockade. Life has become harder than it was, without the off-world resources, the more so because of how much has been spent on maintaining and upgrading the Home Fleet, futile though many of us believe that to be. More resources have been devoted to fundamental research, in the hopes of breakthroughs that may allow us to duplicate their superior weapons and hyperdrives. And more and more of us wonder: what are they waiting for? Why are they allowing us this time to improve our technology and defenses? They had us dead to rights. Surely no one who threatens us with being turned into cattle and factory-farmed could possibly be possessed of a sense of fair play, giving us a free shot at regrouping because it wouldn’t be good sportsmanship to kick us when we’re down? They are amoral and relentless. Their sole message to us says all that we need to know about them, or so goes the official propaganda. And the stories brought back by our surviving soldiers seem to back that up.
That was what I thought until a co-worker at the unobtanium refinery asked me why they were just sitting there on our doorstep. I shrugged and said I didn’t know, and she then wondered aloud if they weren’t an invading army after all, but the space cops. Maybe we weren’t under siege; maybe we were just under house arrest.
She giggled at that; apparently she herself believed the idea to be ridiculous. But then something occurred to me. That transmission they had sent was clipped together from our own video signals. It said a lot more about us than it did about them, official propaganda be damned.
What if that one transmission they had sent was not a statement of intent after all?
Maybe it was a reading of the charges …
Very well observed and argued, @Surplus, both with regard to human and non-human animals and persons :-\
(where is that excellent short story from??? Is it your own? Kind of has a feel a bit like sci-fi anthologies I used to read (I just haven’t lately) 🙂 )
@Surplus to Requirements: The least believable part of that story is that it’s 40 years later and random nobodies are only just starting to think along those lines. I guarantee that it would take a week before a significant chunk of the population started to take ideas like that seriously, tops. 40 years of no invasion would just be, not absolute confirmation, but strong evidence in that direction.
(Of course there would also be weirdos babbling about 5th-dimensional lightworkers and Pleiadian political machinations and soul-encapsulating demonoids. These kinds of people already exist and maybe they’d finally get noticed and occasionally listened to by the general public, despite all of the random nonsense.)
This is a shame. I really liked All That Remains’ music and didn’t expect their frontman to have such horrible views.
@Dave: Maybe The Bard would have a better shot at love on Grindr?
@Surplus: Interesting bit. This kind of discussion regarding ableism and animals often crosses my mind when I think about our food industry. The thing that first drove me toward vegetarianism was just 5 second of video of young chicks on an assembly line (not sure if that is the correct word since there wasn’t any assembling?) with people quickly determining the sex and tossing the males into a tube to be shredded. It was nothing gory, all that was shown was the assembly line. It was the industrialized treatment that bothered me.
Similarly, upon later learning that a cow has to be impregnated every 2 years to keep giving milk, with the calf being separated and often slaughtered (if male), made me semi-vegan right there (at least enough to mostly transition to soy milk). I mean, abstractly I knew that cows milk is intended for calves, of course. But seeing the numbers made it a lot more visceral.
Anyway, sorry for the ramble. Linking ableism to treatment of animals was a take I’d not seen made this concisely before.
@opposablethumbs: It’s original, thought up on the spot while I was composing that post. I’m not a plagiarist. 🙂
@milotha: To be fair, I once spoke to a guy at a party who straight-up admitted he was wearing sunglasses to hide the black eye he’d given himself by walking into a tree, and he looked pretty cool.
(It helped that he was also wearing a cream-coloured suit and a vintage hand-painted tie)
@Surplus nonono I absolutely didn’t mean to imply that you were! It’s just the style that I associate with some happy memories, is all :-s
@Snowberry maybe the 40 years could be to do with (people’s misconceptions about) the aliens’ travel time/logistics/something along those lines that allowed people to believe they could expect invasion within 20 or 30? 🙂
@LoveIsAllWeNee
Tucker Carlson is really really weird.
@Surplus
I agree with the others, it’s a really cool short! Honestly, I would read if you decided to become a professional writer. Or just to publish something online. But yeah, 40 years is a little much. Many people in the world already know not to believe everything the propaganda from machine puts out. So there would definitely be people getting such ideas much sooner. I also noticed a lot of “we are smarter than animals, therefore we rule” rethoric going around. It’s horrible, tbh. Thank you for the well-written post.
@Battering Lamb
I only buy Demeter-certified and equivalent food nowadays. It’s more expensive, but well worth it. For those who don’t know what that is, it is essentially organic food with the highest requirements in Germany. The farm I buy from is right around the corner, and they collaborate with other farms in the area. What they sell is CO2 neutral for the most part. They also have cows and chickens, which I walk past every day on my walks. They are both two-“use” breeds (horrible phrasing, but I’m not sure how else to put it…), meaning that the males are also raised. It’s also far less industrialized. And they have some of the best cheese ever. I try to eat as little meat as possible, though. Healthier and better for the environment.
@Kat
That story is horrifying but does not surprise me. I remember living in France decades ago and found it so horrendously regressive on matters of gender compared to my home country (the UK) even back then. I would imagine the current “masculinity” sickness would find a strong following there.
Side note: why won’t men who hate women leave us alone. The few women I know who are genuine misandrist want nothing to do with men and live lives that reflect that as much as possible. Why can’t misogynists do the same?
Completely off topic, but this re COVID seems pretty apocalyptic: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3
The vaccines are great for preventing death from the initial infection, but it looks like they do basically nothing to prevent disability from repeated infections. And IDK if I’m reading the charts wrong but the numbers look huge, hundreds of sequelae per thousand people on third reinfection. How are we going to survive when the majority of the population are too disabled to work from dozens of reinfections? Because that seems like the world we are heading for in a decade or two.