Crowstep
1d ago
When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance. You may say that you work hard, etc., etc. and will never need these policies, but that's about as ingenuous as saying that you're a really good driver and thus don't need liability insurance. You may say that the people who receive the greatest benefit from welfare policies pay the least into it, but how much you receive in insurance payouts is only loosely related to how much you pay in.
I think that's definitely a model of welfare that can be used to describe a high-trust society, but I don't think it's particularly accurate in defection-heavy, low trust societies that exist today. In the UK for example, half a million people between the ages of 16 and 24 have literally never worked (and are not in education). Their welfare payments are not insurance payouts for people who have paid in but who have fallen on hard times. They have never paid in, and they've been claiming from the day they were eligible. And of the entire working age population, a full 25% are on benefits.
I'd be fine if a had a literal insurance system of unemployment, provided by the private sector and which people had to pay premiums to receive. What we have is a simple transfer from the (shrinking) productive part of the population to the unproductive part, and we pretend it's an insurance system.
Crowstep
6d ago
I think looking outside the West is a good way to approach this. Clearly it is not simply a case that women in the workplace = the end of objectivity but there does seem to be something of an interaction between a high female percentage in a field, WEIRDness and identity politics that leads to the negative outcomes the author talks about.
A companion piece to this by the indomitable Louise Perry, Cancel Culture is Girl Culture.
Crowstep
10d ago
It's a good thing we put at very few politicians on British banknotes - the row when feminists decide we need a woman and the only serious candidate is Margaret Thatcher would destroy confidence in the currency.
I'm not sure why they chose Jane Austen instead of Florence Nightingale. The woman who invented modern nursing vs a woman who wrote six books about thinly veiled author inserts finding rich husbands. My guess is that the civil servants who decide are more likely to be English Lit graduates than nurses.
Crowstep
18d ago
You are aggressively ignoring every poster asking you to clarify why enforcing immigration law is equivalent to enforcing laws on slavery. This is just trolling.
Crowstep
21d ago
"Would you love me if I was a worm" interestingly suggests the opposite - that women would prefer to be loved primarily for their personality (which persists after they are no longer hot).
Interesting. I interpret that statement as 'do you love me completely unconditionally?'. A worm isn't hot, but it doesn't have a personality either.
Crowstep
24d ago
Refer to these two charts.
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*cries in Bri'ish
There's two fallacies here. The first is that it is impossible to get ethnic food without mass immigration from that country. That's obviously nonsense, with the internet and online shopping, you can buy basically any foodstuff in the developed world, regardless of whether your country has had immigration from where that food comes from.
The second is that 'assimilation' is magic and can make everyone behave like white Americans (or even better, Asian Americans). The existence of a dysfunctional African American underclass that has existed for 400 years in spite of the end of slavery, legal equality, affirmative action and astonishing wealth (African Americans are richer than Europeans in Europe) puts paid to that.
I do wonder why Yglesias would make bad arguments like this though. I thought all the liberals were supposed to be secretly reading Steve Sailer? Maybe he genuinely has no intellectual curiosity as to why different ethnic groups have such vastly different outcomes.
Crowstep
30d ago
I'd want absolutely perfect health tracking, the kind of thing where the AI can tell me exactly what to eat, what supplements to take, how much and what type of exercise to do etc. Might require a bunch of implants, but I'd love to always feel well-rested and optimised.
Me, I think I want the ability to produce bespoke episodes of older TV shows that I enjoyed but were cancelled or went off the rails and/or had horrible conclusions. GOT and Firefly are obvious examples there. But I have several others in mind.
This would also be good. The petty part of me desperately wants to re-make all the BBC costume dramas without all the ahistorical diversity casting, but I'll settle for Six Seasons and a Movie of Firefly.
This could genuinely be a Paramore B-side. Crazy.
Crowstep
1mo ago
If 'waging culture war' consists of getting angry over the internet, then I think we can expect that to happen for as long as it takes to develop the necessary cultural antibodies to unplug from the outrage machine.
America is too rich and too old for a real civil war. So is most of the world.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Yup, and the world's best governed country has shown that it works.
Most Satmars don't live in Israel (as you'd expect) and those that do don't participate in elections. I wasn't able to find any figures online but ChatGPT estimates that the Satmar only make up about 2% of Haredi Jews in Israel, and so an even smaller percentage of the total population.
Haredi non-Zionism is mainly focused on the fact that the Israeli state is too secular, they're not wishing to dismantle the state and let the Arabs take back the land.
My expectation is that as the Haredi welfare teat gets closed off and they are forced to serve in the military, a significant chunk of them will end up joining the religious zionists.
Crowstep
1mo ago
In the UK everyone from unemployed philisophy graduates to the children of millionaires are middle class, so that I guess. Although that's really just a weakness of our definitions than anything.
More usefully, my salary is more or less the exact median for the country, so middle income, although my parents earned more than me and my wife do.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Well we're gonna have to square those two results.
Given that the survey you cited also found that 20% of right-wingers thought the assassination of Donald Trump could be justified, my assumption would be that whatever methodology the NCRI used caused respondents to be much more sympathetic to political assassination (when surveyed) than you would expect from the general opposition to it shown in the Yougov survey.
Looking into the survey itself, that seems to be the case. They gave respondents a scale of one to seven, where only an answer of one is taken to mean that the respondent is opposed to political assassination. I don't think this is an honest way of presenting the question.
An answer of two could easily mean 'Well I'm opposed to political assassination, but Trump sure has pissed off a lot of people' or 'Musk tried to fire hundreds of thousands of people, I wouldn't be shocked if someone took a pop at him'. Presenting seven options rather than three that Yougov did biases the results towards demonstrating far greater support for political assassination than actually exists (which I suspect was the goal).
Taking those results as evidence that 'left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence' isn't reasonable to my mind.
Crowstep
1mo ago
And yet according to a (very) recent survey, only 11% said political violence was justified, while 72% said it wasn't.
You're demonstrating the same outgroup hatred that you accuse Democrats of.
Crowstep
1mo ago
The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence. Is there sufficient cause for resisting them on their own terms?
Who is 'the left' here? Do you really believe that a majority of say, US Democrat voters think that political assassination of right wingers is justified?
Crowstep
1mo ago
Staffing a factory with hundreds of foreign workers on visas which don't allow them to work doesn't seem like an appropriate situation to apply executive discretion. This isn't a confused tourist jaywalking, this is industrial (literally) scale immigration fraud.
Crowstep
1mo ago
No I definitely breath through my nose when I sleep. Probably it's just that my body hasn't got used to air con air since I live in frigid northern Europe.
Crowstep
1mo ago
People who live in hot countries and have air-con at home, doesn't the dry air bother you?
I've found that whenever I try to sleep with aircon on holiday my throat gets incredibly dry, but obviously it's still better than sleeping in the heat.
As far as I'm aware, the rapidly growing Sun Belt isn't full of people complaining about dry throats at night, so clearly I'm missing something.
Crowstep
1mo ago
For me it would have to be the Loudon Wainwright III version of Carrickfergus, from Boardwalk Empire.
Crowstep
1mo ago
It's worth mentioning that, following the Southport riots, new guidance says that police should disclose ethnicity and nationality (although there are frustratingly caveats that could be exploited).
I think the authorities are still going by the same goal (prevent riots, ensure community cohesion, defend multiculturalism) but since the public has now realise how they're being lied to, it's actually become safer to be honest than to lie by omission.
That seems like somewhat of an overreaction, like Reddit advice threads that always conclude 'you should leave your boyfriend'.
I'm not going to quit my job, abandon my family and friends, sell my house and uproot my wife and child because the unemployed welfare system is too generous. As much as we moan, the UK is still one of the richest and safest countries in the world.
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