Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
As an Alaskan, I have definite mixed feelings on this topic.
On the one hand, I like our wilderness, our "wild" character, the vast tracts of nature. My natural inclination is to say "no" and favor protection of undeveloped land.
On the other hand, the Feds own something like 2/3 of the land, and together with state parks it comes together to something like 90% of Alaska. And then, on top of that, you have further lands that are off-limits due to Federal regulations (like the Wetlands Act) written with the Lower 48's climate in mind, and which apply poorly to our very different climate.
Further, our economy has been in shambles for decades now, because the primary economic base* for our state has, historically, pretty much always been resource extraction (as is the case with the economies of the Scandinavian countries [I stand corrected]), which has been slowly strangled by environmental law and activism pretty much my entire life. So we really need some more mining and/or oil drilling opened up, or we're pretty screwed.
*note that "largest sector of the economy" ≠ "majority of the economy."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Despite having the highest fertility rate in the world, women and men alike in Niger say they want more children than they actually have – women want an average of nine, while men say they want 11.
—Jill Filipovic, "Why have four children when you could have seven? Family planning in Niger," Guardian, March 2017
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I'm reminded of two things here. First is the discussions about the supposed "democratic backsliding" into "electoral authoritarianism" in Hungary. When I've asked people just what's so "authoritarian" about Orbán, beyond him just winning massive electoral majorities as an unacceptably right-wing candidate, and I get vague handwaving about the media and him having an "unfair" advantage. Whereupon I make comparison's to the Time magazine "election fortification" article and ask what the difference is, beyond that Orbán's actions aren't even so much that sort of "fortifying" as they are preventing left-leaning media from doing so in Hungary. Mostly, the answer ends up in angry sputtering that reduces to "it's different when we do it." The more coherent defenses end up being about how 2020 "fortification" was different because it was the media putting their thumbs on the metaphorical scale to influence election outcomes of their own accord, which is perfectly democratic, and thus it's interfering with their ability to do so that is "authoritarian." Because it's long been the media's job to determine a candidate's "electability" — to enforce the limits of which candidates and positions are "acceptable," and which are too far to the right. Because we've long ago accepted that "democracy" does not mean unfettered majority rule, therefore we can limit the voters' choices as much as we want, let an unelected bureaucracy decide the vast majority of political issues, put as many popular positions "off limits" as we want, so long as you have two candidates who aren't literal clones (a la Futurama), and you can vote between a corporate tax rate of 25% and 30%, it's still fully democratic. And we're a representative democracy… which means our politicians are supposed to "represent" us the way a parent or guardian represents a small child, or a person with power of attorney represents a demented elder or a schizophrenic mental patient: by doing what the expert consensus says is in the people's best interest, whether the people like it or not.
Second, there's what someone on Tumblr pointed out about recent media articles, about how the USAID freeze is threatening various "independent media" organizations, because they "rely on" said funding to remain viable. As the Tumblrite noted, quite early in the thesaurus entry for synonyms to "rely" is "depend." And if you depend on USAID funding to keep operating, how are you "independent"? Which, of course, undermines the whole bit above about how 'it's different when the "independent media" does it,' and makes it very much more 'it's "democracy" when the left does it and "authoritarianism" when the right does it.' While I wouldn't go as far as Neema Parvini does in declaring he was "90% right" and Yarvin "100% wrong" on their respective models of the system, recent events do make the media institutions look less like they're purely ideologically captured, and more like they're downstream from various deep pockets. (Much like how I've seen academics argue that much of academia's political slant is driven by pursuit of grant money.) That this is less the leaderless, incentive-driven emergent behavior "prospiracy" that some would have it, and more a matter of old-fashioned top-down political coordination via patronage networks; which is a lot harder to defend, except by "we're the good guys, it's good when we do it" tribalist appeals.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Based on my experience on Tumblr, they tend to be very unhappy about it, since it very much did what it's name said, and was about keeping fascists out, not East Germans in, because who would ever want to leave the socialist paradise of East Germany? Fascists resisting de-Nazification, that's who! Which is why, while some people did sneak out of East Berlin across the wall, we can thus know, with absolute logical certainty, that every single one of them was a Nazi.
Again, I've seen people literally argue this, and then proceed to call people's relatives Nazis (in that distinctly condescending "sorry to break it to you, sweetie" manner) when presented with counter-examples.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
The Male Feminist as a man seeking absolution: If all or most men behave poorly, then the male feminist's past behaviour is not particularly noteworthy. By subscribing to the most deranged feminist assumptions, the male feminist can morph from a "bad man" to just "a man", or even a "good man", because at least they're willing to fight their deplorable male instincts.
This is the one that tends to match what I've seen, though I'd split it into a few subtypes. First, for quite a few, it seems to me to be less about "absolution" than typical-minding: 'I know men are all sex pests because I'm a man and a sex pest; surely they're all at least as much of a scumbag as me.'
Next are those who line up with your final clause: 'Yes, feminism is right, because all men are scum. But I am one of those rare few who have mightily struggled to become better than my base male nature, so everybody praise me for this heroic feat.' And then there's the sort who come closest to your first bullet point, with an attitude of 'I, as a male feminist, am one of the few good ones, so however badly I treat you, any other guy you'll encounter will be even worse; I'm as good a man as you'll ever get, so you might as well settle for putting up with me.'
(Most of the remaining mail feminists, IME, tend to fall into three categories: the first is 'feminism as "duckspeak"' — they repeat all the feminist slogans, and will say they "believe" them if asked, but they never actually think all that much about them or apply them personally. The second are autistic sorts who grew up in the same environment, but actually take all the slogans and messages deadly seriously, much like the young Scott Aaronson. [There's one left-winger who comes across my Tumblr dash sometimes, who falls squarely in the second category, and has repeatedly ranted about guys in the first category, tending to blame them for his lack of dating success.] And then there's the "if I repeat these slogans loudly and self-flagellate enough, will you all stop being mean to me?" guys.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Can you give some examples of pogroms you think are comparable to the Holocaust in scope and severity?
The one I've seen mentioned occasionally is the pogroms associated with the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the mid 17th century.
The accounts of contemporary Jewish chroniclers of the events tended to emphasize large casualty figures, but since the end of the 20th century they have been re-evaluated downwards. Early 20th-century estimates of Jewish deaths were based on the accounts of the Jewish chroniclers of the time, and tended to be high, ranging from 100,000 to 500,000 or more; in 1916 Simon Dubnow stated:
The losses inflicted on the Jews of Poland during the fatal decade 1648–1658 were appalling. In the reports of the chroniclers, the number of Jewish victims varies between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. But even if we accept the lower figure, the number of victims still remains colossal, even exceeding the catastrophes of the Crusades and the Black Death in Western Europe. Some seven hundred Jewish communities in Poland had suffered massacre and pillage. In the Ukrainian cities situated on the left banks of the Dnieper, the region populated by Cossacks ... the Jewish communities had disappeared almost completely. In the localities on the right shore of the Dnieper or in the Polish part of Ukraine as well as those of Volhynia and Podolia, wherever Cossacks had made their appearance, only about one tenth of the Jewish population survived.[35]
From the 1960s to the 1980s historians still considered 100,000 a reasonable estimate of the Jews killed and, according to Edward Flannery, many considered it "a minimum".[36] Max Dimont in Jews, God, and History, first published in 1962, writes "Perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews perished in the decade of this revolution."[37] Edward Flannery, writing in The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, first published in 1965, also gives figures of 100,000 to 500,000, stating "Many historians consider the second figure exaggerated and the first a minimum."[36] Martin Gilbert in his Jewish History Atlas published in 1976 states, "Over 100,000 Jews were killed; many more were tortured or ill-treated, others fled ...."[38] Many other sources of the time give similar figures.[39]
Although many modern sources still give estimates of Jews killed in the uprising at 100,000[40] or more,[41] others put the numbers killed at between 40,000 and 100,000,[42] and recent academic studies have argued fatalities were even lower. Modern historiographic methods, particularly from the realm of historical demography, became more widely adopted and tended to result in lower fatality numbers.[25] Newer studies of the Jewish population of the affected areas of Ukraine in that period estimate it to be 50,000.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
It's like for the first time in my lifetime people said 'no, we don't do that anymore.' And our leaders now share values sufficiently enough that they didn't ignore the sentiment or just listen and commiserate, they actually...obeyed. Pretty much instantly.
There were two comments elsewhere on this topic that I found particularly insightful. The first noted that when this sort of scandal hits someone on the Left, they frequently aren't fired straight away, but are instead "suspended" or "put on leave" pending "further determinations." Then, after a month or two, if the story has died down in the press, those "further determinations" are quietly bringing them back to work. The commenter argued that the right should have taken a page from the left and handled this in a similar manner, rather than openly and fully firing then rehiring.
But the second provided a counter-argument as to why the open rehiring — as opposed to quietly returning from a not-quite-fired status — serves an important purpose. While many people (including on here) have debated just how racist some of the "problem" tweets from Elez were, the vast majority appear to agree that the "normalize Indian hate" one qualifies. And yet, who is one of the key figures, in the timeline above, calling for forgiving and rehiring Elez?
Vice President Vance, whose wife, I remind you, is Indian. Whose children are half-Indian. And yet, he stands on the position that personal tweets, whatever he might think of them, should not cost Elez his job.
What the second commenter pointed out is that this makes this event a clear stand on the part of the Trump administration — with, as you note, plenty of popular support — against cancel culture. A statement in support of that old free speech line (usually misattributed to Voltaire) about how "I don't agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
It would be so great if more people had exposure to such topics. But I don't have any faith that it would make a difference. Most of the people in my classes lamented it, viewed it as incredibly boring and hard, and did the absolute bare minimum to not fail the class.
And here I'm reminded of Andrea Nye's Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic, written after that sort of bad experience with that sort of logic course, and arguing that "logic" as a whole is a tool of patriarchy, privileging the male way of reasoning over alternative, female ways of thinking. (Noretta Koertge's paper here discusses the book and Nye's arguments in it starting on page 3.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Read the Road To Serfdom
I have, though it was a decade ago. And there's a difference between pointing out how modern authoritarian states can — and do — mess up science, and claiming that science and technological development are entirely, 100%, the downstream product of "Enlightenment" political views — which is something I've seen too many people argue. (Up to and including a person who kept arguing, pre-Dobbs, that if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned, every piece of technology invented and scientific discovery made after 1973 would completely vanish from the world and from human memory, because the very existence of any piece of scientific or technological knowledge is entirely "downstream" from and dependent upon every single piece of social and political "progress" up until the moment of discovery/invention.)
If nothing else, the timeline doesn't line up. The beginnings of the scientific method go back to Bacon, and science became a high-status endeavor in Restoration England, when the Invisible College became the Royal Society thanks to the official approval of Charles II. Being a fully "enlightened" liberal democracy is not an absolute precondition for doing science or inventing new technologies.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I don't see why we should skew our common-sense political terminology just to leave a whole quadrant permanently unoccupied.
And I don't see why we should shift our political terminology with the times, as opposed to maintaining a fixed position, even if that means portions are left mostly empty due to centuries of drift in one direction (see my reply to /u/hydroxyacetylene above). I'm fine with saying there's no "far right" in America, or even much of a right wing — America is a fundamentally left-wing country, because the Founding Fathers were a bunch of left-wingers who inscribed their (18th century) leftism into the country's founding documents.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
you know this is a different thing from nrx, right?
Absolutely; there's a reason I break with most of the NRX guys when they go from diagnosis to providing solutions (because Yarvin's CEO "king" is absolutely nothing of the sort, and as a "De Maistre–ian," you should understand why).
If even on the motte you can only find one of us then there are not enough to occupy a meaningful part of the political spectrum.
Yes and? Just because a space is (presently) mostly unoccupied, doesn't mean it's not part of the political spectrum, particularly when you stop focusing on the present moment, and consider larger history. Why should our divisions of the political spectrum be constantly moving (this being an instantiation of left-wing ideas of "progress"), rather than fixed to long-term historical standards (in keeping with the right's focus on eternal verities and principles handed down from time immemorial)?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
and as such has a credible claim to being the most (classically) liberal of our notable parties.
Yeah, but they still probably have opinions on freedom of religion and atheism that Hobbes and Locke would find anathema, opinions on diversity that Mill would reject utterly (see the quote from mill that /u/Lykurg posted above); opinions on feminism, the franchise, civil society, and so many other domains that any 18th century liberal would find beyond the pale.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I haven't read this book but I hope he would have addressed the obvious objection that this creates a loop. So if A discriminates against B then B discriminates against A as a remedy then surely A can discriminate against B in the future according to the same rule. I'm sure if challenged he would have a defence.
He does: the point when B discriminating against A stops being acceptable as a means of addressing past discrimination by A against B is when "racial equity" is achieved — that is, when all disparate impact is eliminated. I've written at length about this before here on the Motte.
Kendi defines "racism" not as racial discrimination, but as the existence of statistical disparities between races. For him, a thing is "anti-racist" if it actively works to decrease those disparities. Anything which is not anti-racist — that is, not only things that increase disparate impact, but even those things which don't affect it at all — is thus "racist." Hence, present and future anti-white discrimination is not racist, but anti-racist, because it narrows white-black outcome gaps.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
From Musk on Twitter about an hour ago (in reply to Vice President Vance), on Elez:
🫡
He will be brought back.
To err is human, to forgive divine.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
But then what would be left to count as far right?
The original right wing, per the defining of "left" and "right" in the seating organization of the French National Assembly during the revolution: Throne-and-Altar Monarchy and hereditary aristocracy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
but why don't you at least try giving Substack a go?
What would I write about? How would I get and maintain an audience?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
One explanation for this I've seen is that it's about calling both sides on their distributed-motte-and-bailey positions. To quote commenter Fidelis over at the Dreaded Jim's:
Trump is revealing the true prefences of both sides with this. Zionists want the real estate with the Palestinians gone, but claim they just want safety and security from terrorists. Leftists want every Israeli murdered or castrated, but claim they just want the oppressor nation to stop persecuting the poor browns.
With this move, both sides are unable to rebuke without admitting what they were really after, or in the left’s case evolving some new reason the Israelis need to be murdered. It’s a brilliant play.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Classical liberalism has become a conservative position
"Classical liberalism" was an 18th century ideology that was dead by the 20th, and bears little resemblance to the positions of people who currently claim that label — as Auron Macintyre put it, John Locke would throw James Lindsay down a well. I also saw someone on Tumblr coming at this from the opposite direction, arguing that Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, etc. should not be called or considered "liberal" — again because their actual positions were far from what's considered "liberal" in the current century — and that at best they were a sort of early "proto-liberal" who laid the groundwork for what eventually became liberalism. In both cases, the position is that modern "liberalism" and the "liberalism" of Locke and Hobbes are such different ideologies that they shouldn't really share a label — the disagreement is one which one gets to keep the "liberalism" label.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
The second mistake Liberalism makes is assuming human will can be constrained by rules. It assumes that if you just find the right ruleset, people will have no choice but to be good. It constantly appeals to norms, to process, to procedure. Unfortunately, it has no conceptual hook for "manipulation of procedural outcomes", and so its rules decay over time until they lose all credibility.
This is the key point I find myself harping upon, again and again. It probably makes up a substantial part of my current political views. "Process and procedure" can never fully substitute for virtue; there is no perfect system to make even a society of "rational devils" good; and what the focus on procedure does is either empower people skilled in "manipulation of procedural outcomes" to exercise power without responsibility, or build toward Machine Rule. I'm not sure which is worse, the Dolores Umbridges, or the "distributed non-human intelligences" (as IIRC Benjamin Boyce put it).
Either way:
"The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Is liberalism dying? If it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing to you?
Yes, and it's a good thing, because the entire "Enlightenment" political project was a mistake from the beginning.
This is a bad thing to me and a cause of some hopelessness, since America produced a great deal of good things during its heyday, and even still is doing awesome things.
This looks like cum hoc ergo propter hoc to me. I've never really bought the case for "technological determinism" whereby a society's political forms are determined entirely by its technology base, and I especially haven't seen any good arguments for the reverse, that scientific and technological progress are entirely "downstream" of particular political forms.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
In constitutional law, it is very clear--the executive branch does not have the authority to stop payments.
And who enforces that?
Plus, I think you've completely misread me. I'm not talking about Trump and/or Musk committing "impoundment," I'm talking about left-wing Treasury employees doing so in order to defy and sabotage Trump.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
The treasury cannot block payments unilaterally
Why not? Who has the ability to stop them if they do?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
HN is a pretty good proxy for a left-aligned highly-online space and it is remarkable how uniform opinion is there. There's a single top-level comment pointing out that revealing individual's names like this is out of the ordinary but the rest of the opinions seem to range from (paraphrasing) "these people are idiots for listening to Elon" to "these people are traitors" (and need to be hanged?).
Related: this Hindustan Times piece talks about the responses at /r/WhitePeopleTwitter, which are just the sort of thing one might expect:
The description on the page reads, ‘Muskrat’s DOGE Henchmen have been identified.’ One comment on the page says, ‘Their names?! Drag their fuc*** bodies, cuz. Time to drop the mitts.” Another reads, “I’ll say it. This nazi stooge needs to be shot.” “It’s time to do more than dragging names, let’s drag their necks up by a large coil of rope,” reads one comment. Many other similar remarks have been posted on the page.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
On multiple occasions, I've had conversations with older "small government conservative" types talking about how we need to "loosen up" on the social axis to try to ally with people in the "small government social progressive" left-libertarian types. I then pointed out, each time, that that "quadrant" in the four-way economic axis vs. social axis space is the least populated, and we'd have much better results appealing to the opposite quadrant of "big government social conservative", which is rather underserved (including pointing to polling data on Hispanic voters and why, despite being Catholic "natural conservatives," they vote Democrat), by letting up on the anti-government, anti-regulation dogmatism in exchange for wins on social issues.
Every time, the response has been horror at the suggestion, and replies about how it would be better for the "communists" in the Progressive ("big government social progressive") quadrant to win, and for us to lose on both social and economic issues, than for us to win on just the social issues. Most the time, they've not been able to give a concrete answer as to why they'd prefer to lose on both axes than win on just the social axis. Just a lot of vague handwaving about how social conservatism without the whole "drowning government in the bathtub," deregulated free market über alles, would somehow be the worst possible outcome, in ways they can't articulate.
(The one time I did get a clear answer, it was that the people in the Progressive quadrant are Communists; but since the alternative to the whole "small government, free markets" side of the economic debate is socialism, the proper term for the combination of social conservatism with socialism is National Socialism, and just as we allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler, Communists are always preferable to Nazis.)
Well, one of the better-argued answers I see to this (even if I disagree with it) is that it is indeed about delaying the problem — turning the clock back thirty years buys you a few more decades — until tech comes to the rescue. There's the position that we just need to keep up 90s liberalism and fight the return of woke until AGI and the Singularity arrives and ends all human politics forever. Or then there's @mitigatedchaos's position that we need to return to "colorblind" 90s liberalism to contain racial conflict (and white identitarianism) another decade or so, at which point gene splicing technology will be safe and cheap enough to broadly use to fix all the HBD issues. (Personally, I find all these sorts overly-optimistic about the rates of technological progress.)
The next-best answer is the same one classical reactionaries often give: the second time around, we'll see the woke coming, and be better prepared to fight them off.
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