BANNED USER: personal attacks
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Belisarius
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No bio...
User ID: 2663
Banned by: @Amadan
Or is simply too incapacitated to make a public appearance?
Of course, I am not saying that Biden has been murdered, or that he is dead and you are twisting things there. Assuming he is dead, yes it is plausible to a degree above just anything being a possibility that he has been murdered considering the circumstances and the timing. It is a plausible scenario.
Assuming by default that nothing nefarious going on, where it is suspicious that there is something and people both have motive, act in a manner where the death of the president is related to a tweet choosing successor that can't be refuted by an alive Biden is unreasonable and enables with criminal ploters to get away with such actions. Reasonable suspicion is a good thing and I find your preference of assuming coincidence to show bias towards influential networks and their honesty. Note that this is conditional on Biden being dead in response to a post claiming the implications of Biden dying close to Trump's assassination attempt and my default assumptions on this issue are different because I don't have a strong view of Biden being dead.
We don't need to come up with it, it's a reasonable to do and unreasonable to not consider it a possibility, or worse to dismiss it. Biden dying in these circumstances would be genuinely incredibly suspicious by the nature of the events. It is possible a coincidence due to his frailty, and it is also reasonable to bring this up as a possibility but the timing matters and so it is a by default a reasonable thing to be suspicious about. Because he announced the successor on twitter without doing an appearance. Actually this kind of thing would be suspicious and speculated about when it comes to even roman emperors who in their death bed announced a guy there as successor and have been accused by people then and historians for murdering them.
Dismissing possibility of plots is certainly against the precautionary principle and allows criminal plotters to get away with them and it isn't a reasonable course. Of course history is full of plotters plotting nefariously. Not to mention that organizations like CIA have played important role in promoting propaganda dismissing conspiracies when that is what they do, plenty of criminal plots.
The way to go is to want more scrutiny, not to shut down these issues which is itself is suspicious. And there are some who dismiss such issues because they support those doing so. People who claimed the mafia didn't exist at minimum sympathized or had a relationship with the mafia, or were blackmailed like Hoover. We need people to show some courage and desire to put networks or in fact organizations like the CIA, Epstein's clique and clients and backers under the microscope and investigate and shut down such activities. Not just to dismiss the issues.
Also, Ceasar's wife should not be only honest but appear honest. I very much would rather political players to be sensitive in acting in a way that isn't raising real suspicions, which requires transparency. I am not interested in dismissing such things by default because that means giving them an opportunity to get away with criminal plots with zero scrutity. We need events to unfold in a manner where are not given reason to suspect foul play, by acting in a manner that doesn't make it plausible. We know for a fact that things dismissed as just paranoia like the goverment putting their thumps in the scale to censor in social media, or covid being the result of gain of function research, are true in first case and highly plausible in the later.
Shadow war? Maybe. Or the same group behind both. If Biden dies so close to the Trump assassination it raises the possibility that there were more plotters than the shooter related to Trump's assassination attempt. The same way Oswald being killed by Jack Ruby and then Robert Kennedy being killed by an assassin, raised the possibility of a conspiracy.
If Biden is dead it would look like a group might have decided to get rid of Trump in an opportunist and not highly competent manner and when that failed, thinking that Biden will certainly lose, they decided to get rid of him. Now, what about forcing Biden to resign? There is still opportunism there, and certainly culpability in regards to promoting a narrative that painted Trump as existential threat, and the possibility of such plots remain. But Biden's death would demonstrate a higher possibility of people brazen enough plotting to kill Presidents.
People would be correct to come with conspiracy theories that Biden might have met an unnatural fate if Biden is now dead while his twitter account announces the successor and just after the Trump assassination attempt. Events would be mega sketchy.
The selection of the new presidential canditate only through a tweet and with no appearance of Biden, certainly has the strong appearance of a coup. If Biden is conscious and can string two sentences together even with gaffes and dementia, he really ought to get behind a camera and speak what his account has twitted. He has that responsibility to his country even if he doesn't feel up to it.
There is also the possibility that he is alive but that tweet didn't represent his views at the time and there was a sort of a coup and he lacks control to counter it, especially after Kamala' endorsement by many.
Or maybe he was pressured and possibly threatened (scandals, prosecution of his son, or even him) but he did do it and he is bitter about it.
I don't see much justification of how things have changed for McWhorter to be calling for the assassination of Trump. He isn't a reasonable guy who lost his mind because there is an event that justified him supporting openly Trump being assassinated, but someone who should lose the quality of being considered reasonable and he proved that such estimation was mistaken. Trump is someone who isn't even particularly right wing. The criticism should be on the mentality of people like McWhorter, who have no adequate justification for this. My belief is we live in an age of too much unnecessary rage against compromising establishment "right" figures who probably deserve criticism for failing to even do their promised duty. So, that outrage is unreasonable, and so is putting people like Trump on the pedestal for being targets of it, even if he should be defended against such unjustified anger.
McWhorter being dangerously wrong is part of the fact that his politics are unreasonable and he is unreasonable.
Belisarius
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4mo ago
There is likely a friendship there too, but Loury and McWhorter podcast together is also very much so political content. I also get the impression that part of their friendship has to do with their common political ground.
Glen Loury can't abandon the propaganda of McWhorter as a " moderate, centrist calm reasonable person" while criticizing him for his comments of favoring the assassination of Trump.
We really are living in the times of the cult of symbolic centrism, symbolic antiracism, symbolic racism, symbolic nazism, etc, etc. Where groups and individuals are assigned irrational undeserving positive and negative status and associations, based on false expectations.
Hope we see some genuine lowering of status and consequences for people like McWhorter and the end of the illusion that people like Loury want to maintain. Is Loury going to stop constantly talking with McWhorter in the way he isn't talking with many people to the right of his?
While this is true with countries like Britain which is a very underrated totalitarian police state oppressive far leftist tyranny, arresting far more people for speech than Russia, and even more so per capita, I do think there is value in not siding automatically with owners vs employees. There are definetly European countries which are freer than USA due to being more right wing and having less enforcement, which in the USA private organisations and state within the state and connected with the state and especially deep state activist mega groups like ADL (which can get Jewish CEO of huge companies to retalitate with adverts towards Elon Musk.
Fundamentally, the kind of people who owned media, the networking, mouthy capitalists, the activist capital that does exist are going to impose left wing cultural values on their workers and hire these kind of people. But it is the wrong framing of leftism vs rightism.
The right should not see itself as the party of giving rich cliques, or donors, whatever they want, whether it goes against the national interest, good cultural standards, average family, public morality, the right to speak the unpopular truth, the separation of political with regular life, etc. In addition to those who acquire their wealth through shady means, a person can be skilled and hard working and lucky, and connected and help economically, while politically be destructive because they use their funds to promote bad causes.
There is also a genuine value in the agency factor of the public vs smaller minorities. There is a lot of whining about the immorality of the mob and there is some truth too it, but there is also even greater immorality and much more focus in targeting them for influence, of isolated minority groups and elites. Conversely, it is harder to get the majority to go against the collective interest, even though it is possible, because the majority like smaller minorities can be also unwise. Still on many issues, the majority like immigration wanted one thing, and got something different. Most importantly, the majority can be manipulated and lead by said organized minorities.
Which then raises the question of what ought to be done about it. It isn't a simple goverment as protective of private sphere since organized activist groups and lobbies will try to capture as much influence in the goverment too. A part of the solution is to ban groups like hope not hate, ADL, OFCOM, open society, and many more and try to remove their fellow travelers who marched through the institutions. Where for example in Britain they failed to solve burglary in half the country in 3 years, while they are arresting in record numbers for speech, while lead under woke leadership. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13152403/amp/Police-failed-solve-single-break-half-country.html
These should be the targets for firing and even making their organizations illegal and in the worst cases subject to criminal prosecution, not people working at supermarkets. I also think there is a value in letting people err and have freedom to be wrong, even though we do need to force those controlling powerful institutions to a) not be enforcing, censorious of immoral morality b) to follow good moral standards and pursue the common good of their society and people.
I would love to see people like Soros clan and their top open societies people, the left wing activists, the NGO types, the version of these people within the corporate hierarchy, the new left bureaucrats, the extremist editors, many journalists and these kind of people to be suppressed and lose in all manner of ways. However, I don't want to see simple working people get fired for having asinine opinions.
Trump is of course not a national socialist in his politics. He is insufficiently nationalist, insufficiently conservative and insufficiently socialist. His republicans pander to minorities without even directly naming white people to appeal to. His current manifestation probably isn't sufficiently nativist and natioanlist for moderate nationalism. His policies on economic sphere weren't even moderate politically and fit more with Koch agenda, even if he isn't as orthodox in his rhetoric as they would like.
The social democrats of Denmark who are a moderate nationalist party and quite more socialistic than Trump would also be defamatory to call them national socialists. There have been plenty of political parties that are moderate nationalist through modern history in european societies, where it used to be either the default or what people assumed these parties to be and there is definitely a significant qualitative difference between what I would categorize as moderate nationalism vs what I would consider extreme nationalism. And I tend to consider something to be moderate only if it is sufficiently hardcore to qualify at such. Moderate doesn't mean weak to me.
Even though we live in an age where anti european antinaivists who actually have an extreme agenda see all moderate nationalism for Europeans as extremist and try to associate it with nazism. In an age where moderate nationalism in favor of Europeans is under attack by a movement which is tolerant or supportive of quite stronger nationalism for other groups, hence their opposition to the national rights of their ethnic outgroup, and it is actually an extreme condition for a people to not have a collective community and breaking their roots from the past. This isn't to say that everyone who does this understands the doublethink and the inconsistency, but it exists as part of the movement. You seem like a right winger of sorts so I don't understand your point.
Also, the dominant tradition outside of actual socialists combined some level of socialism with capitalism. The idea of a third way between socialism and capitalism, did not just originate with fascist types or nazis, who were more socialistic than most.
The libertarian meme I have seen about statists and collectivists and calling everything fascists is wildly propagandistic. There have been a lot of non fascists who (maybe even share some influence with each other) promoted such model. Post war occupied Germany for example followed such a model of trying to make a deal between capitalists and workers. This kind of thinking also attracted people who have might have been influenced by fascism, had some ideological crossover in regards to economics, but weren't fascists. Including people who were anti-parliamentarians and believing that a dictatorship was a better way to rule.
Both some level of socialism and nationalism has been quite widespread and it simply ahistorical to be calling it national socialism when that regime was more infamous about occupation of european countries which includes atrocities and imperialistic conquest. While they deserve some bad reputation, they are a beaten dead horse with exaggerated negative attention for propagandistic purposes. Like the trope of a a shit politician who sucks at ruling blaming everything on his predecessor, but much worse since this is an 80 years old defeated group. But an even bigger problem of such propaganda is bad unsuitable comparisons.
The Democrats are quite more socialist although also compromising with establishment capitalism. Trump's politics are not even of a social democrat moderate nationalist. He seems to be more on the hardcore big donor corporatism capitalism side. I doubt he would introduce a VAT. Nor is a VAT an example of someone being a socialist since a VAT exists in a huge amount of countries which aren't run by socialists. Although, of course you can oppose it as bad policy, or too socialistic.
Here is an excellent article on the Russian revolution:
https://www.theconundrumcluster.com/p/you-should-really-read-this-introduction
Before the bloody civil war there was a lot of incompetence and appeasement. People to the right of other figures, refusing to use power, abdicating their duties and giving power to people to their left and letting them get away with crimes. Then came the violence.
A very rough summary of this: You had the Tsar giving power to a liberal relative Grand Duke Michael, who gave power to the Constituent Assembly (which imprisoned Tsar Nicolas)and the monarchy disintegrated to provisional assembly to lead the country during the elections lead by to Kerensky who followed a "no enemies to the left" dogma while the Bolsheviks were rising. Lenin ended up removed from prison. Both The Grand Duke and Tsar were murdered and Kerensky ended up in exile.
If they actually suppressed the radicals with force, and didn't give them more power the civil war would had been averted or less severe.
Point being, refusal to try to shut down leftist radicals and being afraid more of doing so than them makes future conflict larger, inevitable, and also their future atrocities. Putting and keeping people like Lenin in prison is more important than violent fantasies. It is only a failure to keep law and order and suppress such elements that lead to the Russian civil war and then the red terror.
Rather than lamenting future violence, you ought to be critical of the current right refusing to use power to suppress leftist extremists. I do agree with most of what you say of how the left breaks norms. I also don't want to see things breaking down in the ways the Russian revolution, civil war did.
But the right also breaks norms by complicity and not stopping them. For example, how about actual strong reprisals like trying to shut down left wing media with unhinged hateful rhetoric towards right wingers? Such as advocating to limit their reach by reprisals from their specific state We know the republican party is willing to do plenty of authoritarian moves, by looking them doing so when it comes to the Israel issue.
Although stopping criminals does include a component of physical violence, which is part of any duties of any police force, there are ways to exercise power, (and you are a moderator who have some power of your own however limited), that is different than just physically hurting people.
For example treating antifa as a criminal organization and then arresting their members, and have them subject to prosecution could be one of the possible ideas to suppress leftist extremism, targeting one of the worst of the worst groups most characteristic of it and it would qualify as qualitatively different than just physically harming in a purity spiral people identified as a different political tribe.
Another example, would be to try to debar antifa lawyers.
I see suppression of leftist/liberal radicalism and anti-right wing radicalism as preventive of current and future escalating violence, and the refusal to act as ensurer of things escalating...
You can use hypotheticals to excuse any crime by claiming the other party would react the same. Especially if you don't care about whether your right wing outgroup might have valid complaints about political persecution, and your left wing ingroup might be promoting dishonest narratives.
For example, an apologist for communist crimes could claim that the right wing dissidents murdered by communists would them selves kill communists and then not consider the perspective of how much worse the communists really were comparatively to right wing dissidents.
The effect of not condemning assassination attempts tied with very extreme rhetoric by pervasive amount of people, including in media (just recently a comedian said that if Trump was elected his family was going to be put in a concentration camp on Jimmy Kimmel), and attacking those condemning that rhetoric and the right, is to excuse it.
There is a time and a place for different rhetoric. Is this the proper time and place for you and cimarafa to blame right wingers based on hypotheticals? And what effect does this have?
In the current circumstances, it is a fair interpretation that attacking condemnation of leftists excusing the attacks, helps excuse it. Since if everyone does it, then it isn't a problem. Cimarafa even outright says the inflamabory claim that it is boo outgroup to condemn leftists excusing violence, because there are right wingers who would do the same.
Boo outgroup becomes the excuse for censoring opposition to far left extremsim.
The cultural phenomenon of understating and not caring when events such as this happen and is done by right towards left, or worse, attacking those who do, helps make them more common.
Conversely, condemning liberal extremism and suppressing it and a culture were the media, and politicians like Biden, isn't treating legitimate opposition, as enemies of democracy, well that would make it much less likely. Especially since an important part of the conflict between Biden vs Trump has been when their agenda has been the one that shits all over constitutional duties, which include not only not persecuting political opposition, but also failing to protect your borders and in fact doing the opposite. That is a massive legitimate grievance, where Trump the tyrannical fascist is not a legitimate grievance. Same with Biden the cultural far leftist vs Trump the identitarian extremist on the right. The first is a legitimate grievance, the later isn't.
But in any case, there has been an attempted assassination attempt against Trump, and not Biden. People in the crowd have died. Following rhetoric in media and in echochambers like reddit that has been unhinged against Trump and his supporters. It is in fact the time and the place to condemn it and those excusing it. Holding people who do that accountable is a good thing, while promoting a reaction that allows them to get away with excusing it, and attacks those who have a problem with it is a very wrongheaded approach. It is actually a good thing for pressure to exist against people of differing political groups behaving badly, focusing on the worst of them when they behave in the worst manner. And sure, it is important to not lose perspective, and neither exaggerate, nor downplay. This is a big deal, and there isn't an equivalence.
It is exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time to be doing to be promoting hypotheticals of bad right wingers to excuse and downplay any of this.
There was a poster here who promoted the scenario of Trump being the target of an assassination attempt and was widely criticized by many here. Have any of the people who done that willing to say mea culpa and accept that they were wrong?
There is a connection between the rhetoric promoted by various figures and media towards Trump, and it being more likely to lead to unhinged people to consider assassinating him. And also a connection between taking that threat seriously and try to suppress people and media of such rhetoric and condemn this, with acknowledging the problem and the risks it represents.
Taking seriously the genuine problem of anti right wing and anti trump extremism, it something that should have happened previously. But it becomes obvious now that there needs to be stronger condemnation and a serious desire and attempt to suppress this extremism.
The superpalable foods and people overeating is the best theory and the truth because it fits available evidence. It is also the main scientific theory.
Also fat people genuinely have less willpower to resist overeating because they have greater appetite.
It is EASIER to stay thin that to become thin after becoming obese. But it isnt impossible and there are other societal problems too due to a culture of less discipline.
So, outside of ozembic, the best intervention would have been to try to stop people from becoming fat in the first place, focusing more on ingraining the right habits to children and target the food culture.
The reality a lot of people go along with what is the default. The default changed for whatever reason (because people like eating tasty food with calories, and because people selling food like making more money over people consuming more food being a big reason, and such food became more available and cheaper), and then obesity increased and as it increased it became more acceptable and people mimicked each other.
Now, sure people don't like the results of being fat, but they do like eating in the way that makes them fat, and there is copying of each other. This conformism and copying others habits then leads to escalation of trends. If there is a rising trend to overeat, people increasingly overeat.
Discipline is not everything about it, because a facet of it is careless overeating due to the rise of hyperpalable food. At some point of making mistakes of judgement, it does require more discipline to get out of it. But the level of discipline in the initial stage would be less, and less so if the default food culture was less obesogenic with less high calorie hyperpalable foods around.
Fundamentally, there is a trend in general, not talking about motte specifically, of people talking about such issues who don't want to do something about it. Obviously you are going to have rising drug abuse, obesity, crime epidemic, or other problems (i.e. cultural far leftism, putting such groups on pedestal), if you promote that such issues are unsolvable mysteries, and exaggerate the difficulty and the harm of doing something about it. Same even with fertility issue. Modernity has come along with some problems which do have their difficulties, and also simultaneously there is an ideological trend which is part of the problem which exaggerates the difficulty of solving them, and is in fact against trying to do so.
Scott is someone who is ideologically motivated and tries to influence his readers into the mental shackles of not strongly deviating from liberal consensus. Or when doing so, only after struggle, and guilt. It also related to the fact that he sells himself as an intellectual with solutions and it is in his interest to promote more verbally complex and promote things are complicated. Because if a lot of people have the solution, then his role is dismissed.
However, the fact that people treated as intellectuals of a liberal orientation prefer that there are no simple solutions to problems like homelessness doesn't mean that there aren't. Just like the fact that Bukele's solution would had been rejected as too simplistic. Scott is someone who even if he begrudingly accepts such suggestions he does it only after promoting enough mentally shackling propaganda that influences negatively in an anti intellectual direction everyone involved.
So I disagree with Scott's claim of people with "damn liberals" approach being unfair. It is possible for liberals to be extremists and wrong. Rejecting liberals views without taking blood from a stone without guilt, and without much struggle, and without being censored and punished is the way to go. Nobody respects equally all political tribes, or have problem rejecting what is sacred for all political tribes, and far, far fewer do so for those on the genuine right. Just because liberals as a tribe have a preference, does not mean people should respect it. Now, in practice, most people who genuinely reject the ideas of liberals aren't actually the kind who purity spiral in the opposite direction.
Another thing related to Scott's approach is not only his own ideology but him appealing and being part of liberal networks and the danger of offending them. Where there is a direct solution that is more simple and evidence suggests works, it should be recommended outright. It is not a virtue to be shackled in not offending too much the preferences of liberals, when offending their preferences can be what is correct and better for the common good.
The idea that the alternative can only be cruel and draconian is also false, as is the idea that Scott and people of his ideological preferences are kind. It is the fallacy of one sided examination of negative consequences. Obviously if you only focus on what is good for the group you favor and not for the negative consequences on other groups, you can claim falsely to be the kindest person on earth. Anarchotyranny and being at mercy of criminals or harassment by homeless, deserves negative description. Meanwhile, favoring too much criminals, or whatever ethnic group, ends up harming other groups. There are always tradeoffs, and a policy that is rainbows for everyone is impossible, but current decriminalization policies are on the cruel side and against the common good. Scott is exaggerating the harmfulness of rejecting liberal preferences. If you don't purity spiral in opposite direciton, you can have something better. See El Salvador as one example.
The reality is that homelessness is not that big of a problem in many countries. And despite the downplaying, the Soros and friends decriminalization policies are a massive problem as has been the pro libertine morality and drug policies and culture. What are called "Tough on crime" policies and reversing decriminalization policies and actually arresting people committing crimes or harassing strangers on public is a necessary element of solving such issues and it are neither cruel nor draconian.
I would reject as unnecessary the "kill" suggestion. Countries without much homelessness problem, don't kill the homeless. Plus, just because it is a liberal fallacy that it is kindness to put on the pedestal the groups liberals favor at expense of other groups whose rights and interests are dismissed and treated as even evil to consider them as legitimate and reduce the rights and favor on groups liberals favor too much (including those who share such preferences for tribes liberals favor, or some in isolation, or conform to it due to fear of being negatively labeled or otherwise harmed), it doesn't follow that it is correct to be maximally inconsiderate of their well being. Although of course their own tribalism, and willingness to disrespect others rights should both affect how they are treated a) from a universalist point of view b) when considering what is good for other groups on their own right from that group's perspective. And what is good for other groups matters also when considering things from a universalist point of view, as well considering who is aggressive towards who and who is minding their own business.
On the hierarchy of rights, you don't have a right for others to be pathologically altruist in your favor. Of course it follows, you don't have a right for other groups to be identity-less atomized and subservient who have no group rights and tribalism. You don't have a right for others not to have a right of self defense, if you threaten them. You do have a right to not be murdered however, including if you are homeless and more likely to statistically have problems and be mentally ill, an addict, criminal, etc.
Any person who supports persecuting people likes to portray his outgroup as paranoid delusionals while dong so.
I don't buy in the self description of liberals who hostile the right and claim to be moderate neutrals.
De Boer is not an outside participant neither, but like many people saying that stuff, someone who dislike right wingers and openly says he agrees with 90% of the woke.
Fundamentally leftists who dislike right wingers and have some heterodoxies, are both denying and supporting the persecution of the right by an establishment that they are much more friendly towards than the neutral observers they try to portray themselves as.
I wouldn't consider leftists who support the left persecuting the right and oppose right wingers opposing thier persecution, or even acknowledging it, as sufficiently distinct with other leftists who claim that the right is actually persecuting the left.
Both the claim that the left and its tribes are persecuted, and that the right, and whites, conservatives aren't persecuted are wrong.
I understand it is convenient for the left to dismiss through claimed both sidesism, the persecution of the right, but it lacks intellectual merit, and is an example of the problems of how partisanship can breed extremism and denial of reality.
I also highly dislike on any faction, the postmodernist irrationalist dismissal of valid ways of discourse. In general this is lacking intellectual merit and promotes sophistry and postmodernist irrationality. Of course, it is presumptuous to assume that any groups claims are false, or true by default. Which can include complaints of mistreatment.
People who have valid reasons to distrust others because they are out to get them, and people who don't but have a continuous culture of doing just that because such culture has given them gains can get things wrong too. The later far more than a first. Plus, in an election, you are going to get people who interpret things through bias.
There is a journolist. There is both coordination, owners of media who fire employees who don't push the line, and journalists, and a lot of groupthink and conformism and people in the hivemind going along with their bias. Not to mention any influence of intelligence services and intelligence agents including of Israeli intelligence officers. There are networks, donors, and a lot more where the direction is comprehensible.
The bias and influence moves in certain directions, and it isn't a direction that is only for the Democrats. It is possible influential zionists might want Trump to win, for example.
It is more messy than just everything being an anti-right wing plot, but on the general sense, the rightist claim is correct based on the facts and that is dismissed by people who are against the right wingers and motivated by such opposition like De Boer. Significant credit must be given to right wing skepticism and opposition towards those who genuinely are hostile to them. While treating them as paranoid and delusional, and demanding they accept that it isn't happening, is a demand that is actually indecent.
You correctly have a problem with the conservatives for failing at being conservatives (they are also so far to the left they fail at being moderate) but then then you decide to vote for labour under an expectation that Starmer would be a moderate. I am sorry but I find that highly unlikely considering what labour politicians are advocating and the history of both labour and Torry governance after Tony Blair. Plus, how other promised moderates like Biden have ruled. A Starmer rule will at best be a continuation of the Torries, and therefore not moderate, or probably more likely, will result in the blatant woke elements that Labour has bringing Britain into even a further left direction than they were even under the Torries. The Torries who also brought things in a considerably farther left direction under their rule.
I mean, very possible. For me voting Labour was indeed a bit of a throw of the dice. Even ignoring their policies - and there are some good ones in there I think - my suspicion is that they will do better simply becase they have more competence, more ideas, more vigour. Britain's primary problem is stagnation, and a stagnant government doesn't solve that. But if Labour do fail, and the Tories come back in 2029 with a bit of sincerity, a bit of talent, and a goddamn plan this time, well then brilliant. If marginally worse governance is the price the country has to pay for a reinvigorated Conservative party than I think that's a price worth paying. Certainly the Tories were never going to improve until they got a punch in the mouth like they got today.
The Torries might earn your vote in 2029 and be convincing to you, but why would they rule well? You complained that they weren't conservative but now you claim they might come back with a bit sincerity and competence. Why would that happen? Seems more likely they will act sincere, convince you and fail to deliver again. I don't see a good reason for them to change their stripes, when promising to be conservative and competent and not delivering is what they have done so consistently. The lack of competence has something to do with the assumed competent but not actually competent, mixture of ideologies and priorities of the kind of politicians labeled "moderate", or "neoliberals".
A bit like communism was the darling of people who loved the idea of technocracy and strongly associated with technocracy but was actually a disastrous and incompetent mess.
It isn't hard to see various plastic surgery transformations and to conclude that both the patient and plastic surgeons completely ruined the appearance of the patient.
There are also plenty examples that don't fit into this.
Some level of subjectivity is part and parcel of everything important that can be dictated by the law. There really isn't a way to escape from the necessity of having people make correct judgements in all such cases, which includes not interfering where they shouldn't.
Which if bad examples are used as deterrent, can be most of the time, including in cases where it is simply too subjective. Absent any control, you get a system with abuses. So there should be skepticism and accountability towards regulatory authorities, and opposition and demand to replace them if they get things wrong but this idea that no judgement is a good principle and letting plastic surgeons do as they please, won't work.
The most notorious case where this perspective breaks down is with mentally ill people who want surgical procedures which harm their bodies such as self mutilation. Like the people among others who think their actual limbs aren't there, and they should remove them.
The risk vs benefit of swimming pools vs opiates is far different. Swimming pools don't give you cities where part of the place is taken by drug zombies. It is relativism to act as if they are comparable. And so it goes for many things. There is a line to be taken, and refusing to support a line ends up with predictable large problems. Because you can in fact have a society of different levels of corruption and harmful behavior.
You aren't really encountering in this thread safetyism purity spiral supporters. There isn't a sufficient negative to swimming pools, even if a small percentage of people using them and having fun swimming (and improving cardiovascular health possibly in doing so), end up drowning.
An important point to mention, is also as the ancient Greeks, Romans, Christians, and others understood, and through continuity through the ages wise people understood, is the problem of people being enslaved to their passions. The drug addict not only harms his health, but is fundamentally not a free man. This is also bad for the group as a whole since from a collective point of view, such behaviors degenerate society.
It isn't an accident that "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" is so identified with the modern Satanist movement. Even from a secular perspective, it tells you something that this is the philosophy of a movement that adopts the symbol and name of evil and sin, in accordance to the dominant religion of western civilization. The attempt of inversion of morality, leads predictably to an immoral code that harms civilization.
You simply ban plastic surgery that could be reasonably expected to worsen the patient. Which includes worsening their aesthetics to a substantial enough degree. And then you revoke the licenses of doctors doing this. Of course you apply this to the trans issue too. This should apply in general. With sufficiently harmful procedures, you also criminally prosecute the people undertaking them for harming their patients.
So, if you are a rich guy, and even if not, and want to spend your money on hair transpant, trt, plastic surgery, you should be able to, provided that the operation will actually improve you. Or at least, not harm you. Although public funds should prioritize medical needs. With TRT the health side effects are such that it should be restricted until you reach people of sufficiently old age and low testosterone where it might be good for them.
So it should be allowed if it improves the patient and if rich people spend more on it, then that is fine.
If it worsens the patient, to an understandable degree, then it doesn't matter if they want it, and there is someone willing to provide it. It should not be allowed. Including restricting harmful drugs. Allowing some room for subjectivity and gray areas, and lack of knowledge though. Also, to take into consideration risk before surgery and whether if things go wrong is because it was foreseeable, or statistically it would happen over a large enough tries.
I replied that it would make sense to ban plastic surgery for minors, and that Tennessee would certainly have the power to do so, and that I'd support a total ban except in cases of extreme deformities. How would you define extreme deformity, she shot back. Well, I guess you'd need a doctor to certify it. Gotcha, she said, that wouldn't stop Kylie or her parents for a second, they'd have crooked Armenian doctors on tap anywhere they needed them.
I mostly agree.
The "it can't be stopped" is defeatist cope that can be applied on anything. The reality is that enforcement gains or loses ground and an attitude like this gives ground. It is the pro criminal fallacy that "if I don't do it, someone else will" of a corrupt society. In this case "If they don't do it, others will". The more people buy into this, the more you find your society captured by crooks.
Armenian doctors might be less likely to do such procedures than American doctors and if American doctors were unwilling to do this, then it is more likely that it might not have happened, or happened less.
Plus, certain MENA societies provide a case study in how you can have a resilient social order where the majority of women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless - these may not be pleasant places to live, but the society is capable of reproducing itself all the same.
Can you point to the specific examples of the MENA societies you are referring to? What you are saying sounds like a gross exaggeration for contemporary MENA societies. Even in Saudi Arabia, polygamy is somewhat rare and marriage rate is high relatively, although the first website cites a misleading stat. The more relevant one is:
Within the age category where women traditionally got married in Muslim majority countries, 25-34, the rate of unmarried females reached 43 percent while for men it was almost half that at 23 per cent.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200810-66-of-young-saudis-are-single/, https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/165994
So funnily enough the site claiming 66% young saudis including 15 years to 34 years old to are single also claims that from 25-34 year old men only 23% are unmarried.
Islamic societies are mostly monogamous societies. I am not aware of any example of a society were most women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless.
It is a transparently bad idea that is both bad for the people involved and not sustainable. MENA societies with all the things one could criticize them aren't that bad. This is more of a fantasy dystopia.
I am on team predicting that the bigger issues will first come due to malevolent human intelligence that already have centralized too much power utilizing AI to gain even more power and influence and reduce the independence and rights of broader population groups and impose their agenda to them. As for AGI, that is for the future. We shouldn't neglect the risk of those who control the AI and maybe want to shut down competition since it is a more pressing and less hypothetical problem.
I agree that spreading such pictures around could reasonably be considered bullying and I would be fine for schools to punish it. Even in a university setting this applies.
I would also say that there ought to be different standards to "normal figures" and celebrities, focusing now on adults. Or else you are going to be putting a lot of people in prison for creating and if done in a discord server therefore automatically spreading over discord nudes that look like celebs. Another issue is where you draw the line. For example is a generated picture were it is said to be looking like a celebrity something that is going to qualify? One other facet of this is that celebrities become to an extend the faces of our image of attraction.
On the other hand, even celebrities deserve to not have their reputation be perceived based on the AI model, and someone pretending that such AI generated content represents them. There is also a moral question regarding commercialization that is a bigger issue than a random creating a voice model based on Obama, Scarlet, Trump, etc to play around and spreading it in smaller platforms. Such as the dispute about whether Sam Alatman used Scarlet Joghansson's voice for his AI tool. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/22/scarlett-johansson-sam-altmans-washington-00159507
On Monday night, Scarlett Johansson — who famously voiced an AI in the movie Her — alleged that OpenAI had appropriated her voice without permission for a new AI assistant tool. Altman and OpenAI say the voice belonged to a different actress,
Do you think that Jews ought to compromise themselves at all in regards to Jewish identity politics that can be anti christian and anti european? Or is it only on the other side to be tolerant?
For example, they should oppose laws that enforce a story of Jews as oppressed and European Christians as oppressors, and in fact support institutions promoting a narrative that does include some criticism of Jews for their contributions to far left extremism, and antiwhite movement.
It isn't really a complicated issue. There are Jews who are an asset to the right like Stephen Miller who tend to have an identity that encompasess more than the Jewish one. And Jews who do have resentment towards right wingers and Europeans and strong Jewish identity, do exist aplenty, and are not caused by insufficient appeasement, since there is ever abudance of the appeasing right.
Only a minority of Jews are such in their ideology and behavior that it would be wise to accept them. Neocons for example are a subversive force on the right. However, this can theoretically change.
Ironically, Jews would have assimiliated more, if organizations like ADL, WJC, etc, etc were banned. And in fact, Jewish support of multiculturalism and anti-european identity politics and intersectionality is in part related to the more radical Jews wanting the Jews not to assimiliate to whiteness.
Anyway, both Jews as a pattern and non Jewish pro Jewish types, are not even handed people only opposing antisemitism, but are highly biased to an extend that could be described as Jewish supremacist. And paint as antisemitism things through that lense. It would be both moral in general from a more unviersalist point of view, but also good in regards to the right and European-Jewish relations, and more friendship, for Jews and those promoting pro jewish narratives, to water down their wine. To compromise. To accept their own sins, instead of doing the narcisist manifesto.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
Avoiding the narcisist manifesto, does not make them self hating.
When Amy Wax claimed that her father was unduly too critical towards Christians, that wasn't self hateful.
And on much of the right they will find people who are going to accomodate them and aren't going to be promoting some demand of maximalist self hating dogma. The Jews who enjoy a positive reputation among the kind of right that doesn't like Shaprio aren't just Unz, but plenty of non self hating Jews but who have compromised on level of seperate jewish identity politics and do see the interests of europeans as legitimate and identify with a broader category rather than seeing them as a hostile other.
Of course, the issue is that laws currently promoted are Jewish supremacist in nature. And those who support that.
Another issue, is that if you got some hateful Jewish supremacists pushing their agenda, that is going to inflame the passions and anger on the other side. Just like Jews who have compromised and are more moderate and friendly towarsd the right incentivize a more positive reactions.
One's ideology in regards to nativism, immigration, AA and such issues is of course fundamental. And whether a Jew in a european country identifies as being part of that group and sees them as his people.
Jews claiming to be right wing who still retain sufficiently strong liberal views on such issues and are motivated by seperate ethnic identity are going to be treated with more suspicion. And even if their liberal views are somehow unrelated to their Jewish identity, they are a problem. Like I said, neocons should be reasonably excluded because of having sufficiently different and hostile ideology, and have a history of cancelling actual right wingers and conservatives for being insuficiently liberal on racial, and other issues. And more so especially for being insufficiently subservient to Jews and making any criticisms.
Sailer also wrote a short post after the issue discussed critical of the Israel lobby that the uncomrpomising Jewish identitarians wouldn't have promoted. So I wouldn't consider him the same as those types. More of a positive force than a negative. https://www.unz.com/isteve/not-getting-the-joke-2/
Which doesn't make this good article https://keithwoods.pub/p/protestantism-jews-and-wokeness arguing against his thesis a bad thing. Even those who are sufficiently a positive force to not gatekeep them out can promote bad ideas, which would be good to debate and counter.
Anyway, excessive compromise in pro female, pro jewish, pro black, etc direction is a key part of our current situation. This isn't to say purity spiralling in the opposite direction is correct, but appeasement is the wrong move and having those who are excessive pro jewish, pro female, etc, etc compromise is correct in general, but especially for the right. The right will become indistinquishable with the left in fundamental issues, if it listens to women and Jews and LGBT Republicans and pro migration types and pro black types arguing for more appeasement. More compromise. Laws giving their favorite groups preferential treatment. And there is a connection with appeasement to one, leading to appeasement to all and the same intersectional story. While painting anything but that as antisemitic, misogynistic, anti black, racist, etc, etc.
The right has compromised too much in these directions, is losing its own identity as a right and moving too far to the left in the process and needs to fix this overreach and not increase it.
Jews wanting to be a part of the right have an even bigger moral obligation than Jews in general to water down their wine, and compromise from the more extreme positions typical in Jewish community that are part of a progressive Jewish nationalist narrative of Jews as always oppressed, always in the right against especially a European Christian historical, present, and possibly future oppressor. Some level of admitting fault is not only accurate but necessary because if Jews are progressive as a pattern, and as Prager says "the conscience of humanity" why oppose the ADL, and the activities of those Jews who do see with hostility european christian civilization? Since Jews didn't do nothing wrong, then they were correct to be leftists under this perspective and only reacting to "antisemitism" under this false narrative. So why oppose the current leftist trajectory? That compromise I mentioned towards a more moderate position and having a stronger broader identity that sees European rightists as your people would also make it justifiable for European rightists to accept such Jews.
Great post.
In the past children played more often by being outside and interacting with other children which helped them to develop social skills. Of course that had its own trade offs.
or would “playfully” act out military drills, etc.
Yes, and girls could playfully act like mothers using dolls, which helped adapt them to becoming mothers later on.
- It would be much better if they felt boredom, because the longterm displeasure from technology outweighs the temporary adaptive pleasure of boredom. (And this isn’t even going into studies on “wakeful rest” and the default mode network where boredom is shown to be healthy to the mind…)
Yes, this is the whole dichotomy between hedonism and becoming a slave of one's passions vs greater pleasure issue that as old as the ancient Greeks and probably older has always been a challenge for societies. Now far more so of course. Ideally there is moderation rather than no use of say video games, mobile games. But things are out of hand today, and that does have something to do with technological moneygrubbers.
Steve Sailer sometimes says that modern marketing departments are too effective. Under modern capitalism which is more efficient at getting consumers to buy stuff, the consumer rather than a rational actor, can't compete and is too easily manipulated. Children being even more vulnerable. This can also apply to the food industry where the people's best interest is different and conflicts with their hedonistic desires and the marketing department, developers of food that want to make it hyper palatable. There is also an ideological component to this which is about not only favoring the monetary interests of the "technological moneygrubbers" but also those who prefer the population to be pacified and at such not a threat to the ruling elite.
Technology it self provides more challenges, in addition to issues of ideology. I don't buy into the progressive myth that changes necessarilly improve society. Good things to work well, do so due to a delicate balance requiring various things necessary. Ideally we use technology to only get the good while mitigating the bad, but it doesn't work that way. The problem is that even people like me who want to fix things are not going to make it so society doesn't have the technology that it has now, and is technologically the same to the type of society that resulted in quite different childhoods.
One thing is true. For how much Internet, television, mobile phones give, they also take away things. More so now with Artificial Intelligence which is very woke/progressive intersectionalist, giving much greater power to those who designed it and leading to a more centralized world, unless enough other players like GAB AI start appearing.
Also, this point is directed less towards you but it is obviously possible for a society to be more powerful due to technology and its people living a more depraved existence.
War Communism might in fact be far more powerful way to conduct war than a society that doesn't treat its people like slaves, but it is a very shitty way to live.
Good. Like I said in my first post on the issue, Biden really ought to appear even if he is diminished since in a succession, you need to see the guy endorsing their successor and a tweet doesn't cut it.
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