Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
How does one find purpose/meaning? That is, what gives you a "reason to get out of the bed in the morning"? Particularly when "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" seem particularly aimed your way.
(More specifically, with neither the usual standbys of "faith and family," and while being too anhedonic for hedonism?)
Edit: to put it more simply, how do I find a reason to keep struggling through another 30+ years of miserable, pointless, futile existence, rather than just skipping to the end?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21d ago
Given the (pretty good, IMHO) case Michael Lind lays out in this Tablet piece about how demographic trends still strongly favor utter dominance by the Democratic Party, what can people on the right do, then? Note, I'm not asking what the Republican party does, which is move left to capture moderate voters so to remain electorally viable (per the median voter theorem and Duverger's law); I'm asking what voters who care about the policies that would thus be abandoned, as opposed to the "politics as sports" folks who are happy just so long as "their team" beats the other guy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
On disparate impact, prejudice, American civil rights law, and academic vs. lay definitions of words.
(Or, why HBD won’t save you.)
This is an adaptation of a couple of long replies I made to a mutual on Tumblr, relevant to some recent arguments made here. Specifically, how sophisticated academic and legal arguments can differ from the version that trickles out through journalism and politics into the general population, and how people misunderstand the post-Griggs “disparate impact” regime (further cemented by the 1991 civil rights act), which is at once less ridiculous and yet more extreme in its implications than many of its critics think.
I saw someone here recently characterize said doctrine as the idea that “if a process produces disparate impact, then someone somewhere must have done something discriminatory.” But this itself can mean very different things depending on how one defines “something discriminatory.” Are we referring to treating individuals differently, or to treating groups differently? At one end, you get a kind of unfalsifiable “blood libel” reminiscent of classic antisemitic tropes about Jewish “elite overrepresentation,” and at the other, you get a tautology.
A major of the problem is essentially a conflict over definitions; that too many people mean too many different things when they use terms like “racism.” So I’m going to go ahead and do the thing around these parts of “tabooing” the term to start with. Instead, I’m going to talk about two distinct things. First, there’s “invidious discrimination.” That is, discrimination motivated by racial prejudice and stereotypes — treating individuals differently due to their race (judging by “color of their skin” rather than “content of their character,” as it were); what most ordinary people, especially those on the center right or the older left, are thinking of when they think of “racism.” Then there’s “disparate impact” — the existence of statistical differences between racial and ethnic group outcomes.
The standard criticism of Griggs v Duke Power is that it came to the ridiculous conclusion that disparate impact is itself presumptively evidence of invidious discrimination by someone, somewhere, in the hiring process until proven otherwise. Not too long ago, I saw someone (I think it was on Tumblr) who argued that yes, this would be a stupid thing for a court to conclude… but that this is not, in fact, what the court found in that case. Instead, they essentially deferred (as the courts usually do) to the EEOC’s own understanding of their mission. And what was that? Remember, they are the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Well, what does equal opportunity mean in the context of employment? The answer the EEOC came to is, essentially, that “equal opportunity” means you are equally likely to be hired, which means that the rate at which a racial or ethnic group gets hired should be roughly in proportion to their prevalence in society. That is, anything which makes blacks less likely to be hired constitutes a lack of equal opportunity. That using an IQ test results in disparate impact is itself the problem. It doesn’t matter why. it doesn’t matter that the employer has no discriminatory intent. It doesn’t matter whether or not the makers of the IQ test had any racist stereotypes or ideas about blacks, conscious or unconscious. It could well be because blacks just have lower IQs. That last is not an excuse for hiring blacks less, it is simply an explanation as to how and why IQ tests deny blacks equal employment opportunity. All that matters, for the purpose of civil rights law, is that if it causes a minority group to be less likely to be hired on average, it is presumptively forbidden (unless proven absolutely essential).
To go back to “something discriminatory,” the argument is that a thing is racially discriminatory if it produces statistically distinct outcomes for different racial groups — that is, it gives rise to disparate impact. As I said before, with this definition, “if a process produces disparate impact, then someone somewhere must have done something discriminatory” becomes a tautological statement.
This is very much in line with the academic consensus. Ibram X. Kendi makes it quite clear in his glossaries, when he defines racism and anti-racism in terms of racial equity and racial inequity, which he in turn essentially defines in terms of disparate impact. That is, “anti-racism” is anything which narrows or eliminates disparate impact. And anything that doesn’t — that is, not only things which increase disparate impact, but anything that maintains it — is racist. Invidious discrimination is, ultimately, irrelevant.
Back when I used to do some math and physics blogging on Wordpress over a decade ago, I’d occasionally get crank comments about some piece of jargon which also has a different meaning in colloquial usage, and how consequently, physicists or mathematicians are “using the word wrong” and need to stop. I don’t quite recall the math examples (except that one was in group theory), but for physics, the most memorable example was the angry comments holding forth the position that “you can’t taste quarks” therefore speaking of “flavors” of quarks is wrong, and physicists must stop. I’m pretty sure there are also words whose usage as legal terms differ in important ways from the layman’s ordinary usage.
No, the experts are not going to change their established terminology to assuage the linguistic prescriptivism of random cranks asserting the absolute supremacy of lay definitions.
To an ordinary person for whom the term “racism” refers primarily to invidious discrimination and prejudice, statements like “colorblind racism” and “you can be prejudiced against white people, but can’t be racist against them” (I remember someone giving a quote to this effect from the show “Dear White People”) make no sense. Which implies that those making such statement are using a different definition (particularly the latter statement). If instead, you define “racism” as meaning disparate impact, then those become quite straightforward, even obvious. Does “colorblindness” reduce or maintain differences in racial outcomes? Note that ignoring a thing seldom makes it go away. Does issuing covid vaccines on racial lines increase or decrease the white-black gap in health outcomes? (This last example remains perhaps the biggest “red flag” issue for my mutual.) Does openly discriminating against whites, asians, and jews (my mutuals go-to acronym here is JAW, in contrast to BIPOC) make the aggregate outcome differences between them and BIPOC bigger or smaller?
As one can see from the likes of Kendi, this latter is the academic definition, the term as used by the technical “experts” in the field. Further, if you buy the argument about Griggs, it’s also the legal definition — the definition used by the people who enforce civil rights law and policies “against racism.” And just like with quark flavors, you, the random layman, are not going to get them to change. Yes, one can argue that the term “racism” carries serous moral and legal weight in the way “flavor” does not, that definitional mismatch about such an emotionally-loaded term allows way too much “strategic equivocation” and other such games to let pass, and that a rectification of names is needed, but even then one shouldn’t expect the lay definition of the masses to win out over the elite definition.
One can also assert that the original intent of the civil rights law that created this system was to eliminate invidious discrimination, not to eliminate disparate impact, but this is disputed. (For example, Tim Wise does so here: “No, Precious, No One “Changed” the Meaning of Racism.”) In particular, there was a narrative in the early days that held that disparate impact was fully downstream from invidious discrimination, thus allowing the conflation of the two definitions of “racism.” If one did care more about ending disparate impact itself, well, then banning invidious discrimination was still the way to go about solving it. Except, of course, it was becoming clear by the time of Griggs that this didn’t hold. That eliminating Jim Crow and making things “colorblind” wouldn’t fully close the gaps. Hence the definition split.
(IIRC, it was @Hoffmeister25, either here or at the old place, who said that, in his experience as a white left-winger talking to blacks about these sorts of issues, American blacks were indeed mostly this latter set. That, to the extent they signed on to “colorblindness,” it was because they thought it would fully solve the outcome gap — which was always what they really cared about — and once it became clear that it wouldn’t do that, they increasingly moved on in search of something that would.)
I believe it is in Stamped from the Beginning that Kendi specifically addresses and rejects this narrative. Racist ideas do not produce racist institutions, he has argued, but instead it’s the other way around. Our institutions result in disparate outcomes between races — have done so since the first blacks arrived in any notable numbers in Western societies (hence “from the beginning”) — and people come up with ideas to explain it, and when those ideas propose that the “problem” to be “fixed” lies somewhere with the underperforming minorities themselves, rather than the system, those are racist ideas.
Earlier in the original Tumblr thread, the other party said the following:
Arguments that, for instance, fit people and fat people should have the same lifespan, so we should redirect healthcare spending from fit people to fat people until they both live the same average lifespan, would mean reducing the total lifespan lived for a net loss in life-years.
…
For instance, to take the weight example, supporters might be open to “make everyone take a class about how fit people and fat people should have the same outcomes,” or, “redirect healthcare funding from fit people to fat people until lifespans equalize,” but wouldn’t be open to “invent ozempic”.
That’s pretty strange, isn’t it? Trying to equalize lifespan on the back end, resulting in a net loss of life-years, is way more oppressive than inventing a new diet pill.
This is where that example, and the Ozempic analogy comes in. Because that method of addressing different life outcomes between “thin” and “fat” treats obesity as the thing to be fixed, not that the obese have different outcomes. Sure, this might be okay to hold in the case of something like obesity — but even then, note my past comments, here and here, on Carleton University's Fady Shanouda attacking said medication as "fatphobia”, even "the elimination of fat bodies”, and “that treatments for "the so-called obesity epidemic" were "steeped in fat-hatred.”” But for people like Kendi, it’s never okay in the case of racial groups.
It’s like the stupid “positive action/self-esteem” shit we got in elementary school, about how “you’re fine just the way you are" (even back then, I knew that I was in some way broken and defective). It doesn’t matter if you think the “problem” is inborn, or cultural (the classic black conservative ‘stop listening to the rap music, get married and adopt bourgeois norms’ position), it’s still a racist idea if it holds that underperforming groups aren’t “fine just the way they are.”
Years ago, left-wing mixed-race HBD blogger Jayman was making pretty much the same argument, even as he asserted that the outcome gaps were almost entirely genetic. It’s the duty of society, he argued, to perpetually redistribute from the genetic “haves” to the genetic “have-nots” along racial lines, until racial equity is achieved. Genetic engineering to fix those genetic have nots — even of the IVF with genetic screening kind — is “Nazi stuff.” (My mutual is very bullish on these technologies.) Crime rate differences between races are because blacks are genetically predisposed to crime… and therefore it’s not their fault, and the solution is to punish blacks less often and less harshly for the same criminal acts as whites, until their fraction of the prison population matches their fraction of the general population. Yes, it means white people accepting continuing victimization by black criminals — at one point in HBDChick’s comments section, Jayman described the contemporary situation as a “one-sided race war” by blacks against JAWs… and then asserted that “a two-sided war is always worse” than a one-sided war.
Other writings of his in a similar vein point to a couple of analogies — mine, not his. First, the classic injunction that a man must never hit a woman… even if she’s hitting him, first. He can try to gently restrain her, but otherwise, he’s obligated to stand there and take it… because he’s stronger and she’s weaker. Even more extreme, but also more broadly accepted: if you’re an adult, and a small child throwing a tantrum is pounding on your leg with their tiny fists, you definitely aren’t allowed to “hit them back,” no matter what. You stand there and take it because you can take it, and hitting back would do far, far more damage. Cue classic “when white people riot” meme with pictures of the Third Reich. BIPOC, due to their ‘genetic disprivilege,’ can’t do as much damage as JAWs can, and JAWs can also collectively *absorb( more attacks thanks to their ‘genetic privilege.’ Thus, they have a duty to “stand there and take it” with regards to racialized wealth redistribution, racialized vaccine distribution, or random subway shovings, and just as any adult man who “hits back” against a woman or a child is a brute, any white person who won’t simply accept this sort of thing as the price of their superior genes is a racist Klansman Nazi who will be dealt with accordingly. The goal is, as with Kendi, to ensure statistically equal outcomes for racial groups as they currently exist, and anyone who opposes that is racist.
Now, plenty of people have called for changes to current civil rights law to address this definitional issue and change things “back” to fighting invidious discrimination rather than fighting disparate impact. But the proposals won’t work, because they tend to miss how we got here. I think it was Chris Rufo who, while holding up Nixon of all people as the example to follow, called for the creation of a new Federal task force to track down and punish “anti-white discrimination” in the institutions. Given the nature of how people are hired for Federal bureaucracies, the nature of our credential-issuing institutions, and such, just who will end up running said institution in the long run?
I also recall reading recently about a British think-tank created in the wake of the Rotherham scandal to specifically address Islamic radicalization and lack of assimilation. Why were they being brought up? Because their most recent action was to release a book list with a warning of ‘if someone you know is reading these books, they may be on the path of radicalization to becoming a white supremacist.’ The list included works by Orwell, CS Lewis, and a book on the Rotherham scandal. So this institution, despite its founding mission, has decided that the real problem they need to fight is ‘Islamophobic white supremacy’ amongst the native British population.
Personnel is policy. The same thing applies with attempts to “repeal and replace” civil rights law to “get back” (again, see Tim Wise) to the lay “racism=discrimination” definition and away from the academic “racism=disparate impact” definition. Laws are but words on a page unless they’re enforced. And no matter how much we might say “this time when we say ‘fighting discrimination’ we really mean fighting discrimination, including against white people, not “disparate impact,”’ so long as the people who interpret and enforce it are the same bunch as we have now — who all belong to the same academic consensus understanding as to what what “racism” is and what their mission to fight it means — you’re going to keep getting the same results as we do now. And there is no (peaceful, legal) mechanism to replace that personnel.
Now, why does this matter? The answer to that question seems to be ‘because we (for certain elite values of “we”) have come to recognize (i.e. have decided) that it is our biggest issue and highest moral priority as a society, in keeping with the fundamental value of Equality, and, perhaps more importantly, have enshrined this into our law. And why have our elites chosen to define “racism” this way? Well, first there’s all the cynical, power-seeking and power-maintaining reasons for doing so. But even that tends to give way under “generational loss of hypocrisy.” To quote @WhiningCoil:
I’m reminded of some joke about the difference between a cult and a religion. A cult is all made up by people. In a religion, all those people are dead. We’re coming up on generations that have only known demoralization propaganda, and who’s parents have only known demoralization propaganda. Whatever kayfabe social signaling hating cis white males, normal women, or wholesome white families used to mean, the people uncritically consuming it and signal boosting it now don’t understand it’s only supposed to be insincere virtue signaling. They’re ready to start pogroms now.
Thus, many of them probably actually believe it. Why? Well, because, as noted above, it’s what they and all their peers were taught (without “getting the joke” as it were), and it’s what their peer groups enforce as the moral consensus. But also because it fits with Haidt’s “moral foundations.” For people whose moral foundations are based primarily around the “fairness” axis, with the “care/harm” axis as the only other one in their worldview, appeals to “equity” will always have the strongest effect. (See also Moldbug’s “Puritan hypothesis.”)
One may or may not be familiar with the ultimatum game? (If not, I’d recommend take a moment to read about it.) Even though, in terms of one’s personal outcomes, it’s always rationally preferred to take a non-zero split no matter how unfair, most human beings are indeed willing to pay a price in lost opportunity to “punish” a (positive-sum) outcome they find too “unfair.” And, per Haidt, some people are far more sensitive to “unfairness” than others Some people would reject a $51/$49 split. Some might reject a $501/$499 split.
It’s why appeals to aggregate well-being — like in the fatness example, about how redistributing healthcare to equalize lifespans for fit-vs-fat (as opposed to treating the latter with Ozempic) will lead to a net loss of aggregate life-years — tend not to work. Because plenty of people care more about the relative distribution than the absolute aggregate. They see equitable destitution as morally preferable to fabulous prosperity even slightly unequally distributed. In their view, making people worse off in absolute terms is good if it also makes them more equal. This is a matter of terminal goals and moral axioms.
This also appeals to one of humanity’s worst tendencies: envy. Not just wanting what other people have (and you don’t have), but resenting those who have more than you. If your primary drive is that nobody ever have more than you do, then views centering “equity” like this allow you to portray your envy and resentment as moral virtue, which makes those views more attractive than alternatives that don’t.
I hope this helps clarify why the whole “HBD as counter to disparate impact” argument won’t really work. Even if you convince people “blacks have genetically lower average IQs,” or whatever, then you’ve only just explained why IQ tests are racist — because blacks deserve to be hired at proportional rates despite the lower average IQ. And so on. Under the currently-dominant framework of our society, it doesn’t matter how much biology contributes, if any, to current inequality, it is still our legal and moral duty to change “the system” in whatever ways necessary to produce equitable outcomes despite it. The established institutions of our society — government, academia, media, NGOs, etc. — are filled top-to-bottom with true believers who hold this as a terminal value, and it’s not going away until they all do (which is a problem, because there’s no voting them out).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
11d ago
It goes almost without saying that, if Trump were elected in 2024, he could have the authority to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida.
Does it, though? Because I, for one, am not sure about that at all. Because, first, does a president have the authority to fire an A.U.S.A like Smith on paper? Second, even if a president does have that power in theory, well, how DC is supposed to work on paper and how it actually works are two distinct things, so is this a power the president has in reality, or merely on some musty old piece of paper nobody who matters cares about? (I here link this marginally relevant Substack piece from our dear @KulakRevolt.)
Third, and perhaps most important, even if a president has such a firing power in general, one could easily argue that in this situation Trump would not, because allowing him to use said otherwise-legitimate authority "to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida" against him would so fatally-undermine basic justice and the rule of law that the very survival of Our Democracy demands the suspension of said authority until the cases are resolved, and that it be incumbent upon all to #Resist any attempt by Trump to remove Smith.
My personal expectation is that none of these things are going to matter — the system is going to find some way to push past all these roadblocks and keep these cases going.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
11d ago
he can fire everyone involved he can get his hands on
Again, I dispute this. If he says John Q. Bureaucrat is fired, but the rest of DC says Mr. Bureaucrat isn't fired; they still work with Mr. Bureaucrat when he comes into the office; payroll still issues Mr. Bureaucrat his paycheck; and they have the guy Trump appointed to replace John hauled out of the building and arrested for trespassing, because he doesn't work there, since the job he claims to hold is actually still held by Mr. Bureaucrat; and anyone who tries to remove Mr. Bureaucrat on orders from Trump gets arrested themselves by the FBI for attempting to obstruct a federal employee in the exercise of his duties, because Mr. Bureaucrat is still a federal employee… then has John Q. Bureaucrat really been fired?
he can declassify any and all documents involved
And if everyone ignores him, and keeps treating them as classified anyway?
he could order the entire classification system revoked
And if everyone ignores him, and keeps acting as if the system is still in place?
If Congress is on his side, they can open investigations into the investigators
With what people? Who are they going to order to carry out these investigations? What if those people ignore that order? Or side with those they're "investigating" against Trump and Congress?
they can defund the offices involved.
Government "shutdowns," where nothing shuts down and the executive branch continued to spend and disburse funds without the constitutionally-mandated Congressional authorization, say otherwise. What happens when Congress "defunds" the offices, and Treasury just ignores them and keeps issuing the offices their funds as before?
but I find it very unlikely that Trump's enemies will really push (escalate) a Constitutional crisis
Why not? I don't understand why everyone seems to think a "Constitutional crisis" would be any kind of big deal. What would change, really?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
What's the argument that fighting and losing leads to worse outcomes than not fighting and losing?
Should Hirohito have surrendered before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Do you think Japan should have continued to fight on further?) The war was already lost well before that point; all continuing to fight did was get even more Japanese killed.
which is useful for coordinating further escalation
This would require a Red Tribe capable of coordinating, rather than being downright allergic to it. (This is a point David Z. Hines has been making for years now.) These are my friends, my family, my neighbors I'm talking about. They're never going to do anything. They'll grumble, and mutter about "2nd amendment solutions," but they'll bow down and comply. Let somebody else take the risk of resisting Federal tyranny. And don't come around expecting them to join up with you — they don't take no orders from nobody, y'hear?
About a year ago, I did some reading about historical counterinsurgency methods, particularly Rome. And, contra to Princess Leia's comment to Tarkin, crackdowns usually didn't generate greater resistance, they generated submission. When they did lead to "further escalation," it was generally only a single cycle — Rome's second crackdown usually got the job done. The only exception, with multiple cycles of escalation, was the Jews — and look how that turned out:
The Bar Kokhba Revolt had catastrophic consequences for the Jewish population in Judaea, with profound loss of life, extensive forced displacements, and widespread enslavement. The scale of suffering surpassed even the aftermath of the First Jewish–Roman War, leaving central Judea in a state of desolation.
…
According to a study by Applebaum, the rebellion led to the destruction of two-thirds of the Jewish population in Judaea. In his account of the revolt, Roman historian Cassius Dio (c. 155–235) wrote that:
"50 of their most important outposts and 985 of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. 580,000 men were slain in the various raids and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine, disease and fire was past finding out, Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
On fakes and faking:
There are a few interesting patterns I’ve seen regarding discourse around certain things being “fake,” or that certain people are “faking” or have “faked” something, wherein one finds distinct claims being either accidentally mistaken or deliberately conflated. And while there are definite culture war examples — sometimes in multiple areas — my initial examples are going to be less so.
[1.] “Person X is faking (very real) condition Y” versus “Condition Y is fake”:
A notable fictional example is in the South Park episode “Le Petit Tourette,” wherein Cartman fakes having Tourette syndrome to get away with randomly swearing. To quote from the Wikipedia summary:
Kyle Broflovski quickly deduces that Cartman is faking; Cartman admits the truth to him but continues to enjoy the deception. When Kyle complains to Principal Victoria, a visiting representative from a TS foundation misinterprets his statement as an allegation that all people with TS are faking. Kyle is sent to a meeting of a local support group for children with the disorder, who explain that they truly cannot control their various tics and outbursts.
[2.] “Condition X is fake; those who claim to have it are perfectly fine” versus “Condition X is fake; those who claim to have it actually suffer from Condition Y”:
Here, my example is Morgellons. I remember one memorable comment online from a doctor (back when I first encountered this particular internet rabbit-hole), responding to one “Morgellons” sufferer’s claim that doctors ‘refuse to give them a diagnosis,’ that no, doctors have been giving them a diagnosis, the same diagnosis, over and over: delusional parasitosis.
[3.] “The video/book is fake, as in staged” vs. “The video/book is fake, as in nonexistent”:
Here, examples of the first are any “mockumentary” or “found footage” movie — i.e. “The Blair Witch Project” is fake. This is the sort of claim that moon-landing conspiracy theories make. The second example, in comparison, is saying that something is fake like the way “Goncharov” is a fake movie — it doesn’t actually exist, and anyone who claims to have watched it is lying (in the case of “Goncharov,” as part of the game/fun.) Generally, what I see here in terms of ambiguity/equivocation is someone making a claim of the second type which people then “debunk” as if they had made the first type of claim.
Thoughts?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
I don't know what on earth makes you think you are disgusting and hypocritical for wanting a relationship now.
…
I cannot even fathom how you arrived at the conclusion that the desire to be in a romantic relationship is only legitimate conditional on having achieved XYZ, and is otherwise disgusting or hypocritical.
…
please tell me, in plain language, why you think the fact that you want to be in a romantic relationship makes you a disgusting hypocrite.
I believe Skookum does so here:
Like, the basic premise of the Hock cashes out to "if you're an unattractive person/dude, whether it's because fugly or autistic or physically disabled or whatever, your partners are probably gonna find you disgusting. So you're asking for an awful lot there from your partner, arguably for no good goddamn reason. You kind of suck and are hypocritical if you're not down to freely choose to suffer like a motherfucker for no good reason - you're asking the same of your partner."
TVTropes has multiple tropes ("And Now You Must Marry Me," "I Have You Now, My Pretty" "Scarpia Ultimatum, etc." full of examples across centuries of stories about the suffering of women submitting to the attentions of a man to whom she's not attracted — or even just under the threat of such. How is it not at least somewhat hypocritical, how does it not speak of entitlement, to expect a woman to voluntarily submit to such misery, and not be willing to voluntarily submit oneself to a comparable level of suffering? If not "the Hock," what can match the ordeal a woman undergoes, being in a romantic relationship with someone she finds repellent?
unlike you, who's so uniquely loathsome and contemptible that he ought to be euthanized unless he can Prove his Worth by etc.. To which all I can say is - bullshit.
What about that is bullshit, and what is your evidentiary basis for saying so?
As somewhat similar, from back in 2017 on SSC:
Kevin C. says:
…
I recall once reading, if not here then somewhere in the “rationalsphere”, someone, as an idle proposal, putting forth that with regards to this dynamic, one might consider comparison to domesticated livestock, and how we handle those males who aren’t in the minority that will be doing the breeding. That rather than leave large numbers of individuals tormented by a drive they cannot fulfill, we, as a mercy, take steps to remove or ameleorate the drive.
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vV_Vv says:
…
It’s not too hard to imagine a not-so-distant future where any boy who isn’t a hyper-masculine Chad from a young age will be pushed, possibly with the help of hormones and surgical scalpels, to live his life as some sort of “queer” identity which does not involve having sex with women. And if the statistics are to be believed, we know that many of these men will eventually end up “taking the exit” anyway.
And further on the livestock analogy, when it comes to chickens — as opposed to cattle, sheep, etc. — the solution is indeed the culling of most male chicks.
So why not at least offer some sort of analogous "relief" for those human males facing a similar life of suffering under such unmet drives? Why not respect the self-determination of individuals to address such an irremediable condition by providing them assistance in attaining a dignified exit from an undignified existence?
And on what grounds do you say that the likes of Skookum aren't "ought to be euthanized"?
I'd point out that in most "primitive" cultures, girls become women — full adult members of the community — automatically at menarche, while boys have to "earn" their manhood through rites of initiation — difficult, usually painful rites. And it was indeed possible to fail said initiations.
I recall once reading a thread on Tumblr talking about how the prevalence of "third genders" wasn't nearly the support for modern transgender and nonbinary identities that some like to argue it is, by going into depth on the Polynesian example, laying out the details and pointing out that the closest modern counterpart isn't "trans-woman" or "non-binary," but a formalized, institutionalized version of "prison bitch." And that often, many who ended up in such roles were indeed those boys who failed to "become men" — that these societies did indeed have a "gender binary," just that instead of "man" and "woman," it's "man" and "non-man," with some biological males falling into the latter category by failure to earn membership in the former.
Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. Women are precious, men are expendable. Women attain full personhood, membership in the tribe, the concern of others, automatically. Males have to earn the privilege of being a person, through their deeds and contribution to the tribe, to women and children. We must earn the care and compassion of society — and those who fail don't matter; those who fail are expendable, disposable. So, in times of modern plenty, and when women have more options outside of marriage and "settling," why not dispose of at least the worst of disposable males, or at least assist them in disposing of themselves?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
11d ago
One way in which I see a second Trump term being significantly different from the first one is that he's not going to be shy around things like this.
This assumes there's actually things he can do "around things like this." I've made my case before as to why a second Trump term won't be significantly different from the first, because whatever his powers on musty old parchments nobody cares about, the President is a figurehead who only has as much authority as the Permanent Bureaucracy allows him.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
The words on paper have a certain power in the sense that if they are disobeyed too blatantly, we cross into this interesting circumstance that people call "constitutional crisis", and then anything can happen.
I don't see how it could have any outcome other than the 2 million plus executive bureaucrats finally making their reduction of merely-elected officials to entirely-powerless figureheads?
Had he a supportive enough congress to not overturn his orders and pass laws to codify the details that are needed, a President that would want to purge the executive totally could
How so? If the executive bureaucracy is ignoring Trump, why wouldn't they ignore a Trump-aligned Congress too?
I was asking why he himself thinks that he's disgusting for merely wanting to be in a relationship.
I don't recall him ever saying that he's disgusting for wanting a relationship, only that he's hypocritical for wanting a relationship while being disgusting (because ugly, awkward, etc.).
it would be very surprising indeed if literally every woman in the entire world would be disgusted by Skookum as he currently exists.
I'm reminded here of the They Might Be Giants song "Ana Ng," which explores the underlying horror of the "one true soulmate" concept via the singer wondering what if his "soulmate" is a woman living on the other side of the world whom he will certainly never meet.
The relevant set isn't "every woman in the entire world," it's the set of single women likely to be in a position for Skookum to ask out, which is at least a few orders of magnitude smaller.
And why would you find it surprising with this smaller set? I mean, I get there are broad cultural narratives about "someone for everyone" and "plenty of fish in the sea," but as far as I can tell, that's all they are — unsupported cultural narratives, absorbed and perpetuated mostly unquestioned. And while I wouldn't assume a consensus in these parts around the evidentiary value of pure cultural consensus, I wouldn't expect most here to rate it particularly high.
I was asking why he himself thinks that he's disgusting for merely wanting to be in a relationship.
Not to speak for Skookum, but that's not how I read his arguments; the "disgusting" part isn't due to "merely wanting to be in a relationship," it's prior to that.
If he thinks that he's disgusting because he wants a relationship even though he hasn't "earned the right" to want one by proving his masculinity
Again not speaking for Skookum, but it seems to me that you're continuing to misread him, and getting things backwards — his "disgustingness" is not an effect but a cause. It's not that he's disgusting for "wanting a relationship" without having "proved his masculinity," it's that because he is exceptionally disgusting that he has to "prove his masculinity," or else be a hypocrite for refusing to suffer as much as a woman would suffer from a relationship with someone as disgusting as him.
well, that implies that the vast majority of modern men are disgusting, as most of us haven't fought in a war or gone hiking in Alaska or etc..
That would be the implication of what you've said, but, again, that's not what I read him as saying. It's not "men who don't do this are disgusting," it's "those men (number not specified) who are disgusting need to do this, to 'offset' the suffering they expect others to endure by tolerating their repulsive presence."
If Skookum literally believes that any man who wants to be in a relationship without having proved his masculinity is "disgusting" and "hypocritical", I wish he would just come out and say "I am disgusting and hypocritical for wanting a relationship, and so are most of you"
And, again, I'd say the reason he doesn't "just come out and say" that latter is because he's not arguing the former. It's not "disgusting and hypocritical for wanting a relationship," it's "hypocritical for wanting a relationship when disgusting." Again, the "disgusting" part is prior to the "desire" part, not an effect of it.
To summarize my interpretation here:
-
Being in a relationship with a man she find unattractive causes a woman suffering.
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Some men are so unattractive and unlovable that practically any relationship he'll ever have with a woman will fall under (1). Therefore,
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When one of this (quite possibly small) set of men desires a relationship with a woman, he is thus desiring that she voluntary choose said suffering; and
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Asking someone to voluntarily choose to suffer for you benefit is hypocritical and entitled if you are not willing to similarly voluntarily choose to undergo comparable suffering.
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He is a member of this (again, quite possibly small) set.
Note, this is not the argument that you've been attributing to him. It does not imply that most men fall into this "repulsive, unloveable" set, nor that one falls into this set because one hasn't undergone the Hock, or whatever, merely that this applies to the (again, number not specified) men who do.
And I get that you seem to disagree with (2) and/or (5). But can you at least follow the argument?
Any criteria of "the worst of the disposable males" which includes him would probably include you.
Indeed it would, and should. I've been telling people for years that my ideal society would almost certainly have me executed.
Edit — Addendum: All that said, I'd still prefer he doesn't do his suicidal stunt in the state I live in, because it doesn't matter how much he repeats "don't look for me," if he goes missing, the state will send out people to find him (or his corpse), which will cost money, when we have a crappy economy and serious budget woes. (Hence my "why not just put people like us out of our misery?" take.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5mo ago
Because Congress decides who gets the money and because these organizations exist because Congress makes them exist through laws. You can't ignore your way out of a shutdown.
Every time their was a so-called "shutdown," I still got my SSI checks direct-deposit from the Federal government despite said "shutdown" and the unconstitutionality — again, mere words on a musty old parchment by dead slave-owning white men — of spending without House authorization.
Congress does not themselves write the checks, people in the executive do — like, as you note, the Treasury. So when Congress declares something "defunded," and the Treasury just ignores them and keeps sending the checks out anyway, no CIA gunmen needed, what then?
"Constitutional crisis" and so on, but so what? Nobody in DC really cares about that dead letter, nor have they for probably a century now, so what if this is made (more) explicit? The FBI, ATF, and other ordinary law enforcement will be enough to crush any — inevitably disorganized, sporadic, and aimless — "resistance" or "rebellion" from the citizenry.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
So, why are federal gun laws enforced in gun-friendly states?
I can think of several factors that contribute to this.
First, what does it mean for a state to be "gun-friendly"? I mean, most people on the pro-gun side support "reasonable" restrictions — where "reasonable" is often heavily influenced by status-quo bias (the conservative side of the leftward ratchet) — and the "2nd Amendment right to personal nukes" position is mostly just a few fringe (if vocal) libertarian types. And states are not politically homogenous; even your most "gun-friendly" state is going to have plenty of people — particularly in the cities — who support increasing gun restrictions.
In particular, the people in state government — particularly the lawyers and paper-pushing bureaucrats — you'd be counting on to push and coordinate this resistance to enforcement skew both urban and especially college-educated, which means they skew left and anti-gun. (Personnel is policy, and modern forms of government ensure urban leftist personnel.)
Second, way too many on the right are believers in "the rule of law." Like the sportsman who will not respond to a cheating opponent by cheating back because he has too much "respect for the game," they believe in the importance of procedure over outcome — following the rules and doing the right thing over getting better results. They are deontologists and virtue ethicists, not utilitarians. Fiat justitia ruat caelum. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? Better to suffer defeat, torture, and death while upholding your values than to attain a political victory by compromising them. (Because God will reward you for the former and damn you for the latter.)
Indeed, for any "the left is doing [x], why isn't the right doing [x] back?" question you can pose, you're sure to find someone on the right insisting that our steadfast, virtuous refusal to do [x] is the thing that separates us from the left, that to do [x] back would not just be sinking to the level of our enemies, it would be to become our enemy, and that anyone who would consider doing [x] is a leftist, no matter their other positions.
Third, quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. What works for the left against the right will not necessarily work for the right against the left. Leftists can get away with doing things for left-wing causes that would see rightists punished severely if they tried to use them for right-wing ones. It's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Trying to do more fiction writing (given the sheer number of story ideas I have piling up), but I keep getting discouraged. Why bother putting in the effort, I keep thinking, when the result is guaranteed to suck and nobody's going to want to read any of it? Because "write what you know," and I don't really know anything, because I've not had much of a life (being a useless subhuman parasite any sane society would have put down over a decade ago). Because "three-dimensional characters" are key, and I'm too autistic to get into another person's head well enough to write believable human beings. And the amount of research each story demands, in order to get all the details exactly right, just keeps growing and growing, even as the advice all says to spend less time researching and more time writing (so I'm doing that wrong, too).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
24d ago
So, I've been struggling with my weight since I first went on antipsychotics, almost two decades ago, and I'm losing the will to keep trying — why bother? How do I find the motivation to keep at it?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
30d ago
So again we see that whatever the supposed rules and procedures about how these things are “supposed to” work, in reality what matters is what you’re able to get men with guns to enforce. (As I’ve said before, a lesson I learned in 7th grade.)
And this gets to one of my common political arguments and frustrations — the perennial criticism of my support for restoring human authority and decision-making. In (the portion I watched of) Benjamin Boyce’s interview with Aydin Paladin, he makes this standard argument against her monarchism: but if you have a king, then won’t he become a tyrant, and take away people’s freedom by enacting a parade of horribles… all of which, Aydin pointed out in reply, are things which democratically-elected governments have done. People ask ‘what if the local aristocrat makes an unfair/unjust/tyrannical decision?’ as if modern bureaucracies can’t do the same (and throw in all the sorts of mistakes and irrationalities — like the classic ‘you must fill out and submit Form A before we can give you Form B, you must fill out and submit Form B before we can give you Form A’ class of problems — of which only bureaucracies are capable).
What if Baron Such-and-such throws you in the dungeon without trial? Well, what if the Pennsylvania Ag Department does it? The difference seems to be that the bureaucracy adds diffusion of responsibility. If the Baron locks you up, everyone knows who to blame. But when it’s a faceless bureaucracy, full of jobsworth human cogs, who ‘don’t make the rules, just follow them,’ where nobody is to blame; and, like @pigeonburger notes below, nobody in government really suffers serious consequences.
Some people talk about “Brazilification,” viewing us as moving in the direction of that South American nation. I say should be worried less about becoming like Brazil the country, and more about becoming like Brazil the Terry Gilliam film.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
Does anybody else find The Atlantic's "If Trump Wins" issue hilarious? Just reading the titles and blurbs for some of those 24 pieces actually had me chuckling.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5mo ago
Most federal law enforcement is either fairly reddish
Not according to the people I talk to IRL.
The ATF, FBI, and US marshals combined simply do not have the personnel to carry out a meaningful crackdown.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Consider the German Peasants' War. 300,000 pissed off peasants, who at least sometimes "were well-armed. They had cannons with powder and shot…" against 6,000–8,500 nobles, knights, and assorted mercenaries. A 35:1-50:1 numbers advantage…
…except it wasn't. Because it was several thousand organized and experienced knights and mercenaries against a thousand peasants here, then several thousand knights and mercenaries against twelve hundred peasants there, then several thousand knights and mercenaries against four thousand peasants over there, then…
And in the end, the peasants were crushed, over a third of them killed, and the losses on the other side? To quote Wikipedia's "Casualties and losses" box: Minimal.
It wouldn't take that large a SWAT force to take out your "compound in Idaho" with small odds of any losses. Any one out of "the ATF, FBI, and US marshals" could easily put that together. And after they take out the first such compound, then they take out the second, and then the third, and then the fourth., and then…. In each individual engagement, they'll have the superior forces. Because for the "rebels" to actually have superior numbers, all the little groups of five, or six, or a dozen guys would have to actually come together and coordinate. And as I noted, they are fundamentally incapable of ever doing so, and openly proud of it.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
There are many useful actions to take, many useful things to be done, many choices to be made, many strategies to pursue. It is, in fact, possible to Do Something
I see absolutely no evidence to support any of this. Indeed, all I ever see people hold forth as possibilities are "plans" based on pure wishful thinking and optimism bias (and sometimes religious faith), none of which, at least to my perception, can possibly work.
I have experienced this myself, a number of times.
And you were right to, and you shouldn't have let people dissuade you from it.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5mo ago
Jailing him before the election is suicidal,
How so? I'm not so sure about it increasing Trump's chances of winning — I'm from Alaska; I remember what happened with Ted Stevens, and that was a much more egregious case of patent railroading.
And, indeed having him win from in jail would indeed be a problem for the establishment, but what then comes to my mind is the case of Tsar Nicholas II.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
there’s lists of appointees for a second trump admin who are competent and effective
Except, isn't the whole argument of things like Michael Lewis's "Fifth Risk," and all the talk of "Trump-proofing" Federal hiring and firing that any right-wing appointee, by disagreeing with the existing left-wing "expert consensus," thereby proves himself "not an expert," thereby not "competent and effective," but a "partisan hack" who "has no idea how our government works," and thus whose appointment would constitute "a government under attack by its own leaders," to be resisted by any means necessary?
who will have the ability to sideline resistance libs in the civil service.
And how does anyone "sideline" over two million people?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Since people keep talking about/recommending them, how do you use an LLM? I mean, most everything I search online is paywalled, and the free "AI tools" I've tried weren't very impressive (and ended up either shut down or paywalled)?
Could somebody give some ELI5-level guidance and/or recommendations?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
but the head of the FBI is still fired.
Not if the entire FBI says "no he's not" and keeps taking orders from him, while ignoring any "replacement," and whoever at Treasury or wherever prints government paychecks keeps paying him on schedule.
There are over two million civilian Federal employees. If all of those two million plus collectively decide that they are not going to obey, enforce, or even acknowledge any orders or appointments from Trump, what can he do himself, as one mere mortal, to compel them to obey?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18d ago
From a Red Tribe perspective, there is no rational reason beyond naked fear to respect or maintain federal authority.
Why isn't that fear enough?
Blues look at this as a fiat accompli, but why respect a system that doesn't respect you?
What matters is not respect, but obedience. Blues don't need or want Reds' respect, only their submission.
Given that reality, why continue to support and maintain those institutions?
Because you will be punished if you don't?
The correct move is to withdraw the consent of the governed, and make them fight for every step.
So, poking the (metaphorical, Federal) bear?
Deny them freedom of action at every possible point.
This implies we have any meaningful ability to do so.
Never concede their legitimacy
Legitimacy is overrated. Don Corleone doesn't need "legitimacy" to get people to pay him for "protection," does he?
never grant them authority
What does this look like, and how does it end in anything other than getting arrested, shot, etc.?
never cooperate.
Try that with the IRS, or the FBI, and see what happens.
When they push back, escalate, and when they push back on that, escalate again.
What makes you think this can possibly end well? How does this not end in the Feds and Blues crushing Red utterly. What does getting you (yes, you) and your entire family gunned down by SWAT accomplish, exactly?
Attack their institutions and organizations.
Attack with what, exactly? As the old meme goes, you and what army?
Engage in economic and legislative warfare.
Same question as above. They have most the big corporations and economic weight on their side, and only their legislation has "teeth," not ours.
All this has been done to us; tit-for-tat is the correct strategy given the state of play.
Except we lack the means to do unto them as they have done unto us. It's like telling a man taking cover from gunfire to "just shoot back; tit-for-tat," when he's unarmed.
It does not appear to have unlimited state capacity to spare.
It doesn't need literally "unlimited" state capacity, merely enough to crush us. And as I see it, it has that in spades. What evidence do you have to the contrary?
It is entirely possible that we can grind them down to the point that the social structures they're leaning on simply collapse,
Wrong, wrong, WRONG! It is not, in fact, "entirely possible" for us to do this. They are too powerful, and we are but ants beneath their boots.
And if we are not so fortunate as to get the happy end, all the efforts put into this strategy pay dividends at the subsequent levels of escalation.
How can you possibly believe that "the subsequent levels of escalation" are anything other than Red Tribe getting crushed harder and harder, until we're eventually eradicated?
I find myself increasingly perplexed by the people who think a second Trump term would be any kind of a big deal; that there’s anything he’d be able to do in a second term he wasn’t able to do in the first. It’s primarily in fellow right-wingers that I find this attitude most vexing, but it also holds to a lesser degree for the people on the left who hyperbolically opine in outlets like Newsweek and The Economist about how a second Trump term would “end democracy” and “poses the biggest danger to the world.”
Really, it’s not even about Trump for me, either. I don’t really see how a DeSantis or a Ramaswamy presidency would amount to anything either. What can they possibly accomplish, except four years of utterly futile attempts at action that are completely #Resisted by the permanent bureaucracy? Giving “orders” to “subordinates” that prove as efficacious as Knut the Great’s famous command to the tides?
I hear about how the president can do this or that, according to some words on paper, and I ask “but can he, really?” Mere words on paper have no power themselves, and near as I can tell, the people in DC haven’t really cared about them for most of a century now, nor is there any real mechanism for enforcing them.
If I, a random nobody, come into your workplace and announce that you’re fired, of course you still have your job. Security will still let you in when you show up each day, you can still log in and out of whatever, your coworkers will treat you the same, and you’ll still keep getting paid. Now, suppose your boss announces that you’re fired… but everyone else there treats that the same as the first case? You still show up, you still do the work, you still get paid. Are you really fired, then?
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