ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
This is all with the caveat that I barely even have a passing interest in history... but it's just not adding up.
You can tell me all about how they outran their logistics, and couldn't recover their tanks, but I still don't see how we get to a 6 year war, that got as far as it did, if one of the belligerents is an economic, horse and mule drawn, basket case. Either all of them are, and the fight went the way it did, for as long as it did, because they were more or less evenly matched, or this portrayal is itself propaganda.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...
Sure, I can buy the Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector, to the detriment of civilians, but portraying the economy writ-large as "horse and mule drawn" makes no sense. Forget about the Wunderwaffen, tell me how the horses and mules produce, in terms of raw numbers, enough tanks, fighters, bombers, and their respective munitions, to conquer France, challenge Britain, and drive deep into the Soviet Union at the same time!
It drives home the incredible degree to which Nazi Germany was this backwards economy pulling off a Potemkin village of industrialization.
I kinda have a problem with this. How do you do 6 years of basketcase "Potemkin industrialization", and proceed to whoop the ass of half of Europe?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16d ago
More acutely, though, this seems like disastrous political strategy from reactionary elements on the American Right. There are so many easy wins to be had against progressivism, from defending the value of markets and pushing back against affirmative action to attacking the bizarre and incoherent ideologies of contemporary critical race theory and gender self-ID. Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.
My question here is more: howcome an edgy journalist interviewing an edgier historian is enough to tar an entire political / intellectual movement, but academia gets to argue for pedophilia and family abolition, and high-ranking officials use their position to abolish the age limits on sex change procedures without anyone feeling like they have to answer for them?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16d ago
Well, feel free to go Kamala Campaign on me, but that's not particularly moving as an argument. It's not like I'm advocating to unleash mass-scale unschooling, I'm saying a system where you're not allowed / heavily discouraged from doing any productive work until much later on in your adulthood, and where advancement is gatekept based on spending time in classes, is insane. Historically that state of affairs is a little bit too recent to call departing from it "weird", in my opinion.
No, sorry, knee-jerk wild accusations of perfidy by your outgroup, backed up by baseless speculation in the total absence of concrete evidence, is clownish behavior no matter who does it.
I get it, and you're not wrong. However, I maintain we've seen some wild shit over the years, and it has remained essentially unacknowledged beyond a shrug and a "what are you gonna do about it?". Glowies running cover for the Hunter Biden laptop story is by itself insane enough, that people smelling bullshit here ware entirely justified. And damn it, it just feels so good when you stick your neck out, and end up vindicated. Though the problem with sticking your neck out is that you sometimes end up decapitated, c'est la vie.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16d ago
The same people who insisted over and over and over again that we know this diary contains information that must be incredibly damaging to The Narrative™️ are the same people who, within minutes of the Trump assassination attempt, confidently asserted that the progressive media was directly responsible for inspiring the shooter to commit the act,
I absolutely did not do the latter!
it’s getting increasingly difficult to take any of them seriously.
You're being a tad dramatic. After several Alex Jones -tier conspiracies turning out / becoming true before our eyes, I think you should cut us some slack. If people don't course correct after a while, then you can shit on us.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16d ago
so they cannot be reasoned out of trying to do a Nazism, only suppressed.
The conflict with Communism is much more of a mistake theory conflict. Even the Communist elites had it worse than Capitalist elites under Communism
That doesn't mean they can be reasoned out of communism. I've made this point before, but ideologies based on good intentions are often no better than ones based on blind hate. There's no limit to what a man can do, if you convince him it's all in the service of the greater good.
and it's more of a common knowledge that Communism was bad for everyone in general. That's why it doesn't need as much suppression.
This makes no sense. If fewer people believed communism was bad, than you'd have even more people arguing it doesn't need to be suppressed.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16d ago
Sort of, but not really. I have a small mountain of unfinished projects on my hard drive. Inspiration for them comes and goes, I was able to finish maybe one or two of them. I feel some amount of regret for not being to apply myself enough to have something I can show off, and to some extent the point of this thread is to help me finish the one I'm currently working on... but at the same time, come on, tinkering is supposed to be fun, for me at least. It sounds like you're trying to get some side-hustle off the ground with your projects, and maybe that's the thing causing you burn-out.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16d ago
1) thinking TFR is a problem and 2) belief in the efficacy of diverse/inclusive/woke media. Not valence, efficacy.
Efficacy for what? They were always justified with trying to increase tolerance / reduce ism, but they seem almost custom engineered to do the opposite, so how do we measure efficacy?
Then there's also the fact that bad propaganda also exists. Eastern commies were quite bad at it, for example, so they had to make up for the shortfall of hearts and minds with more conventional methods.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16d ago
Well then, definitely a point for the commies!
There are some things money can buy. For everything else, there's the CIA.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16d ago
That feels a bit oddly phased. Presumably it is the patient who is expressing a desire for this
I see nothing odd about it. A few years back there was a story about a patient who went to a psychologist, and expressed a desire to be blind (and, if you're curious how it ended, the psychologist did oblige), it's still the doctor's job to discourage rather than encourage it, in my opinion.
and going through a fairly lengthy bureaucratic process - especially for anything non-binary
The process is neither lengthy nor particularly bureaucratic.
I don't think there's a bunch of doctors out there going "have you considered transition?"
The issue I brought up is that there are doctors explicitly advocating for removing all guardrails, including age, history of mental illness, and even the incidence of gender dysphoria. The response that they're (probably, maybe) not going out of their way to sell transition, does not alleviate my fears stemming from the issue I brought up.
That said, if someone knowingly undergoes surgery, and this routinely makes those people happier, I don't see any reason to stop it.
Well, you originally made it sound like it's a question of best medical practice. If diagnosis doesn't enter into it, and we're just fulfilling people's arbitrary desires, hoping it will make them happy, it would appear the original argument is invalid.
In any case the reason that I see to stop it, is that young people are not known for their good judgment, so I don't think we should be letting minors undergo irreversible procedures on the basis of their sayso.
There's also an argument for limiting access even for adults, but if we can't agree on minors, I don't we'll get far regarding adults.
My general understanding is that very few people regret these surgeries, partly because there is still generally a lengthy bureaucratic process weeding out anyone doing this on a whim.
I'm not talking only about surgeries, but about the whole "gender affirming care" package (blockers, hormones, surgaries). Further, my entire point is that specific doctors, and organizations like WPATH are explicitly working towards abolishing any such process, wherever it exists. If the reason why you're not worried about people undergoing these procedures is that there are safeguards in place, then I think the biggest worldwide association of gender care providers arguing to abolish them should be a bigger deal to you.
In any case what you said is inaccurate. Until recently you could get all of these things, with zero questioning, and few bureaucratic hurdles, even as a minor. In response some jurisdictions decided to clamp down on the practice, and impose age limits through legislative action. In other places, this was done through medical oversight institutions finding little to no evidence for the effectiveness of the practice. But there are still many jurisdictions that did not regulate the practice, and even doubled down on making it even more accessible.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16d ago
That's a good point as well.
I mean, I'd actually bet that in 2024, the life of say, a 19-year old female psychology major at a mid-tier state school (aka, the average American college student) is actually less hedonistic in many ways the median non-college educated 19-year old in the United States, working a low wage job.
He's talking about a specific subset of people who were able to take responsibility for themselves thanks to how their environment was structured, why are you responding like he meant all people earning a low wage?
Don't a lot of the latter grow up in exactly the environment you're advocating for, anyway?
Also, a not-so-secret part of why even in a world where having college degrees being mandatory for jobs were illegal, a lot of workplaces would still prefer college-educated people because it shows them you can follow directions and finish something, even if the directions and tasks were possibly not related to the job.
And an even-less-secret part of that is that "a lot" is not nearly enough for degreeless people to worry about finding a job, which we see in today's world, in industries where degree requirements are optional, not illegal. At least I never worried about finding a job so far.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17d ago
Well, the question was rhetorical, but thank you for answering, because this is exactly what I was hinting at.
What's 4H, by the way?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17d ago
This is just an extension of the weird rationalist view that everybody hates school and it's pointless.
If everybody loved it, it wouldn't have to be mandatory, and it's not pointless in principle, just the way it's set up nowadays is.
Plus, no, it'll mostly be technological advances.
This makes no sense. You spend approximately 0 hours learning how to handle modern technology in school, and even if you did, you don't need that knowledge for most service sector, and corporate office jobs.
options in the economy and thus making them more independent
Here's the thing though, I don't think it makes anyone more independent, neither men nor women. You're spending massive amounts of time idling to get a piece of paper, that will allow you to get a piece of paper, that will hopefully unlock some doors for you, sometime in the future. But all things considered, that's limiting your options, not expanding them.
I mean, yes, I think any form of education that's more than just 'be happy and have babies' for young women will lead to this, when there's any sort of political and societal freedom for women, along with access to consistent birth control.
Why would education lead to arrested development? I'm not talking just about reproduction, I'm saying the whole system is deliberately designed to minimize one's ability to support oneself until you are quite old.
Now, I know people will point to say, the 50's or early 20th century or whenever about educated women going happily into marriage, but again, if you actually look at what well-educated wives of lawyers, doctors, and so on actually did, they actually didn't dote on their five kids or whatever
I'd counter with pointing out you don't have to look back at the 50's. You can look at now, just somewhat above doctors, and lawyers. The most rich have lots of kids.
Again, the reactionaries are actually basically right - women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try.
It's not about "education", unless you think it is impossible to have an education system that doesn't result in arrested development well into your thirties.
Iran & Saudi Arabia are having big drops, and as noted, even places like Mongolia are dropping and Hungary's attempts largely failed unless judged on a curve.
Nah, what they're finding out is that power is about a lot more than who sits on the throne.
The Christian Right got what it wanted - far less pregnant single teen girls.
What's up with the gloating? You want to solve the problem or you just want to confirm the strawman portrayal of the secular left was not a strawman at all?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17d ago
You assume the parents think their children have had a positive effect on their lives.
I don't think that's an assumption.
, or more importantly, telling your kids at 18 to pop out some babies will overwrite the previous 18 years of complaining they've heard about the cost of raising them or getting in the way of their own lives, and so on.
Absolutely, end the schizophrenic messaging around children.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17d ago
@Southkraut, how's your Unreal Engine thing going along?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17d ago
If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?
Assuming I have control over / loyalty of the CIA / all the other glowies, it's pretty easy. Bribe Taylor Swift, and all the other female role models, to start having kids (make the bribe dependant on staying within a marriage for good measure), bribe a few media outlets to cover it positively, and have anyone who covers it negatively meet an unfortunate accident.
Yeah, I think I'm starting to see what's going on here. That point said "international market" so "ho hum, while it may be true that Germany had more radios than the rest of Europe put together, but other countries weren't buying German radios, so we weren't lying".
This is starting to get all the smell of "it's literally impossible to tame zebras" that Jared Diamond spawned.
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