GBRK
2d ago
What were you envisioning? A world of huge masses of people just move around freely and frictionlessly? Because that’s what requires massive state intervention to accomplish.
Not "frictionlessly," but at least with respect to particular, rich, hard-to-legally-immigrate-to countries like the united states much less friction-full than currently. Of course, the overall makeup of immigrants would change, in ways I think both of us would find positive-- more hardworking mexicans, fewer lazy venezuelans*, for example. But I predict more immigration than we have now.
I’m pretty sure I used the word State as my hate object, which is a kind of government but not synonymous with government in general
I guess we're using these words in different ways, here. I would agree that not all governments are states, but would say that any organized monopoly on violence is at least state-like, becoming more stateful the more organized and monopolistic it is. In particular, you imagined your mutual aid group being denied because of state-enforced ethnic heterogenity. But having community-enforced ethnic homogenity just transfers the "stateness", rather than destroying it. Being maximally charitable, you're imaging a case where the mutual-aid ethnic community doesn't exclude outsiders, but merely declines to offer them aid-- and yet, the very enforcement of the property rights required to keep that mutual aid mutual instead of being expropriated has what I would call the essential character of a state.
That is, I think, our essential disagreement here-- how we're using the words "state" and "government" and the lens through which we're analyzing the behavior and advantages/disadvantages of each. We also have some factual disagreements about e.g. immigration but I think they're noncentral to what we're spending a lot of ink discussing. Basically, you have a definition of these words such that the question,
We’re just stuck here, asking ourselves “Who will take care of me, if not the State?”
..is non-tautological. But to a first degree of approximation, I believe any group of people taking care of you is more-or-less "The State" in the first place. To greater or lesser degrees, obviously... It's useful to analyze the ways in which a religious community, school, or job become state-ish to enforce their delegated monopolies on particular varieties of violence, but I wouldn't confuse them with getting put in jail for failing to pay taxes or losing fingers for failing to pay protection money. I would, however, confuse a city or (american federal) state that is an "anti-sanctuary" for the State if they prevented anti-anti-sanctuaries within their borders. Therefore, taken on its face, an argument for always devolving power from the state generalizes recursively to any sub-sub-sub-(etc)-community. I don't think that's the argument you're actually making, and I don't want to argue against a strawman. At the same time, I think the strong form of the anti-state vibe you're suggesting is wrong but can't pick out exactly what qualities/levels of a government/state you're criticizing so I can argue against them.
or to have a community that’s all Catholic by law
That would be based, actually, depending on what exactly, "by law" means. If it means we prevent non-catholics from joining, it would be cringe. But if it meant mandatory indoctrination I would be very happy. Aside from the economic benefits, I'm pro-immigration not despite, but because I think some cultures are better than others. It's the god-given duty of enlightened peoples to convert the backwards and spiritually destitute. For that reason, I don't flinch from the ideological necessity of imposing and enforcing a state. Consequently, I blame the people that compose the State for having values that are bad-- but don't blame them for imposing those values to the best of their ability to do so.
GBRK
4d ago
I'm not sure what to call the fallacy I think you're making, but it seems like you're drawing lines about what is and isn't state intervention in a way that's intended to benefit your point, rather than deriving logically from some coherent first-principles definition. For example--
We see this perhaps most pressingly with immigration questions these days.
You complain about immigration as if the default state of the world is "no immigration" and state intervention is required and responsible for migration. But imagine a world where national policy isn't concerned with immigration at all. Yes, that would mean a reduction in government-sponsored pull factors like welfare and resettlement initiatives for immigrants/refugees, but also a complete lack of enforcement of any sort of border controls. What do you think migration looks like, in this world? Personally, I think we'd see fewer refugees, but even more economic migrants, which seem to be the sort that you're complaining about. Why not let these "natural civilizational cycles" play out here?
Similarly you propose, "a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age" as an alternative to government, but... that seems essentially like a government to me.
Giving you maximal charity, I think I agree with the weak form of the point you intend to make, which is (to the best of my understanding) that particular forms of higher-order, nonlocal government preclude and interfere with individual and local control in a negative way. With some caveats, I'd also agree with,
But to answer your question, you should be the one to make the choices that define your old age, without expecting someone in far away location to contribute. You, and everyone else, should be freed to make decisions and suffer consequences, the good and the bad.
But I think it's worth being precise about what levels and what kinds of government result in these negative outcomes so as to adequately identify why these problems occur and how they can be prevented. There's no point devolving power to local governments if they're going to be just as stupid, and it's worth noting that a wide variety of modernist problems have direct analogues in smaller local communities. Local communities just happen to benefit from survivorship bias and fewer historical records.
GBRK
4d ago
But sleeping with 1000 men in 24 hours is not an exceptional skill.
I mean... could you do it? And--
Manipulating people's attention via social media and her own actions so that I know her name despite being on the other side of the world, that's not a worthwhile talent to hone.
Have you been paying any attention to recent politics? Maybe you're speaking in a strictly moral sense, in which case, fine-- but let's be real, both of these things are hard to fake signals of a variety of qualities modern society de-facto promotes. I would be sympathetic to an argument that prostitutes should be less culturally influential as a class, but relative to the incentives society gave her I can't criticize her self-made bonafides. It's like... looking back at history, I strongly disapprove of the morality that drove Alexander the Great, but can't deny that he was truly Great within its constraints. Bonnie Blue isn't the Alexander of prostitutes, but I wouldn't mind comparing her to some lesser conqueror.
GBRK
4d ago
Ingraham said
This isn't really related to anything, but in the process of reading that article I noticed the word "ungrammatical' used--
Ingraham responded to his comments Thursday, calling them "barely intelligible" and "ungrammatical" on her Fox News program The Ingraham Angle.
And I immediately wanted to complain that Ingram was using a coinage that mixes a germanic prefix ("un-") with a latinate root word ("grammar", from old french) and semi-redundant latinate suffixes ("ic" from the latin "icus" and "-al" from the latin "-alis"). I double checked and it turns out that "ungrammatical" really is the common form of the word, but now I'm irrationally pissed that 16th century british people didn't use the etymologically superior "ingrammatic/al". Anyways--
Without refuting your point (which I quite agree with) about why people are angry, I think delving one level deeper into the meta-cause of this anger requires understanding more generally that the entertainers people get the most heated about are the elites of particular subcultures generally excluded from what in victoria 3 terms I'd call america's "primary cultures." There's a particular sort of small landholder for which small-town america is traditionally famous for, and they're well respected and at least putatively represented by the agrobusiness lobby. Similarly, cops and soldiers have generals and astronauts in office; engineers have tech billionaires; schoolteachers have famous college professors; and so forth. When the elites of these accepted groups publicly speak about politics, people often complain about the content, but rarely seem to draw the connection that they're doing functionally the same thing as entertainers. Look at Black Science Guy, for example-- people hate the man fora variety of reasons, but the objects are typically specific to his personality and opinions rather than generally against the nation that he should have a right to speak at all. That's because even his political opponent acknowledge that the subculture for which he is an elite , (scientists in general), has the right to speak about politics in general. But there's far more vitriol when someone who is part of a non-accepted culture opines on politics, and the elite of a non-accepted culture opinion on politics is just a special case of that. People hate prostitutes/gooners, so they don't want to talk politics with Bonnie. Blue. They hate devout evangelicals so they don't want to hear from Tim Tebow. They hate "urban youth," so they don't want to hear Lebron or Johnny Somali. They hate the kind of people who have a collection of rare pepes or watch cheesy game shows (this is a supergroup of various red-tribers; middle-class retirees, unemployed trailer park dwellers, basement dwelling men, stay-at-home moms in rural areas, etc.) so they don't want to hear from Donald Trump.
That, I think, is the implicit complaint underlying, "this dumb entertainer that makes too much money making something stupid shouldn't talk about politics."
GBRK
4d ago
Sort of necroposting here but... unrealistic how? Unrealistic in the sense that the scenario I posit (unarmed and in an enclosed space) is unlikely to happen? Unrealistic in that you disbelieve my foundational claim (that a woman with 50th percentile fitness and 3 years of training can defeat a man with 80th percentile combat skills)? Unrealistic in that you think that women receiving adequate martial arts training is unlikely and therefore it's not worth discussing the rare fights where they have it? Responding to each potential complaint in turn,
- If you find the scenario unrealistic, what scenario do you believe is modal?
- If you find the claim about fighting capability unrealistic... I admit I can't really provide solid evidence otherwise because this claim stems from fundamentally anecdotal experience. But I would suggest that you would very much enjoy the experience of finding a mixed-gender jiu-jitsu gym and replicating my result for yourself. (I know, that's a really big ask for a faceless internet goon to make, but I would recommend jiu jitsu on its merits even unrelated to this argument.)
- If you think the scenario is plausible, but unlikely to happen due to the rarity of serious female martial artists... I would agree. But I say that it's an interesting result because women can volitionally make it more likely to happen. So much of our lives is decided by the circumstances of our birth- gender, race, zip code, family situation, etcetera... so I think it's useful to identify and promote the rare actions that can actually improve our lots in life. I won't ignore the possibility of the worst case scenario, where women do more martial arts and as a consequence overestimate their physical capabilities and put themselves in danger. But as a biased heuristic, i think the benefits of martial arts are so great that even without considering domestic violence, promoting jiu jitsu for women will benefit them... and (though this is a bit of a bailey relative to that motte) the difference in the domestic assault success rate provided by better martial arts training will more than outweigh any increase in the overall rate. Especially since these women would be getting the same sort of paradoxically pacifist inculturation that most martial artists go through, that being, "now that you know how to fight, you know exactly how badly you don't want to fight, so on top of being better able to respond to violence you'll also be less likely to get into it in the first place.
GBRK
17d ago
Real fights tend to be extremely chaotic... but not in a way that particularly disfavors women in comparison to men. Also, a cluttered space is, again, exactly the kind of environment where grappling skills predominate. See: Carjitsu.
80th percentile man does some kind of sport, probably tall and fit, regularly goes to the gym. Is he really going to lose in a practical scenario? Doubt it.
Do you disagree that "both parties are unarmed and in an enclosed space" is the modal practical scenario where any martial arts training actually makes a difference? Because my argument descends from the fact that such is scenario is exactly where grappling ability is most useful, and the fact that my personal experience in grappling demonstrates how technique can very convincingly make up for physique.
GBRK
17d ago
Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on?
Wait until you find out how much top entertainers in other disciplines make. Actors, models, sports stars... I get when this complaint is applied to how much the ordinary woman can make selling her body versus what an ordinary man would receive in return, but why cite someone who's literally at the top of their game? Yes, the genetic and mental abilities that let her perform in this narrow, highly competitive environment are unfair-- but it's unfair that Shaq is 7'1", too. And I would doubt that the work required to operate at her level is anything less than hard. No, not 3000x as hard as your average UK wagie... but not easy, either.
TBH I don't really disagree with the general thrust of your post... people are entitled to complain about the unfairness of life being shoved in their faces. But it bothers me when people prioritize their complaints by salience instead of by justice. The most unfair way to succeed is to adversely aquire the success of others; the second most unfair way to succeed is to be born into it. Everything else is downstream of criminals and old money, but people still spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying about social media thots.
GBRK
21d ago
if that were to be universally adopted it would mean either throwing up ones hands or trying things at random
It means that we should first devote our efforts to concerted study and systematization of the phenomenon before throwing away effort on advocating for speculative solutions that often backfire and reduce credibility for future attempts. See: "the boy who cried wolf." See: the modern history of feminism.
But in practice, that position is only deployed against certain positions -- usually but not always positions that imply a change should be made -- and so it is not the neutral agosticism it would appear.
That's a fair complaint, but not actually a counterargument. If you see me overconfident in other positions and want me to apply this same reasoning feel free to argue for that. I recognize your username so I think we were probably arguing about eugenics and/or immigration before? My eugenics position is already "lack of epistemic confidence" so that would be a miss, but I'm pro-immigration so I can see the outlines of an argument that goes, "we can't be confident that immigration is good, so we should avoid it as a default." Were you to make it, I would accept the fundamental "epistemically uncertain->don't do the thing" argument but then disagree with the "epistemically uncertain" premise.
GBRK
21d ago
If you want to talk about actual combat scenarios...
If you can de-escalate the situation, you should. If you have a weapon and your opponent doesn't, use it. If your opponent has a weapon and you don't, just do what they tell you instead of getting stabbed or shot. If your're both unarmed and there's nothing keeping you where you are, just run. If you're both unarmed and you're trapped-- and this is the scenario woman (rationally) fear the most-- you're probably already grappling, so you might as well bring out the bjj.
Striking may be tactically useful, especially as a supplement to grappling, but if you get into a stand-up fistfight you've almost certainly making some sort of strategic mistake. I say this as someone who's dabbled in a few different martial arts. The most important thing your instructor can teach you about fighting is how not to. The second most important thing they can teach you is how to win the specific kind of fight you're training for-- whether that's in boxing ring, or in the living room against a rapey tinder date. To that extent, I think it's an important result that a 50th percentile women can spend three to five years to get to a point where she can win a grappling match against an 80th percentile man.
GBRK
21d ago
A three percentage point gap may be statistically significant, but I don't think it's very interesting or notable. There's an eight-point gap in labor force participation rate, and one full-time-volunteer wife with a working husband can get a lot of volunteer hours. Heck, with a gap that small it could be something as banal as different responses to the same activities as men and women have different standards.
Sorry I posted the wrong link. I mean to link this: https://aibm.org/research/men-and-volunteering-gender-gaps-and-trends/
Admittedly, a 5% gap still doesn't seem like as much of a difference, but you need to compare the proportions of the people volunteering. 27% vs 35% already means that the base ratio of volunteers is 84 men for 100 women. Then add in the fact that the genders choose different types of volunteering-- men are much more likely to be coaches, for example, while women are much more likely to be anything else. Finally, volunteers are going to spend different amounts of time volunteering. It all multiplies together into a crisis of male volunteers for specifically mentorship roles.
Male spaces get disrupted and socially attacked.
I occasionally hateread crystal.cafe and they complain pretty often about unwelcome males (successfully) inserting themselves into female spaces and disrupting them. My priors are telling me to that their complaints are still less relevant than yours, and I'm confident in those priors because if I wasn't I would have them, but I'm not meta-confident in those priors because I'm fully aware that my incentives as a man are to seek out information that supports pro-man priors. Generalizing, I find myself in this situation pretty often when it comes to gender-war stuff-- I'm confident enough in my object-level beliefs to argue for them, but I'm not confident enough in my confidence to accept any totalizing theories because even small changes to my priors should force me to completely rethink the specifics of a broad philosophy.
For example, I was talking to my little brother about the lack of male mentorship recently and he said he thought about doing big brothers big sisters/boys and girls club, but decided against it because he figured if he was going to be doing that sort of thing anyways, he might as well be paid for it-- like he got paid for working as a substitute teacher. If you let your eyes go out-of-focus this generally melds into the "particular gender roles are unfairly imposed on me" supertheory, but in-focus it's completely at odds with the, "men don't want to be mentors because they're afraid of being called pedophiles" theory.
GBRK
21d ago
The most politically active individuals remain men, but as a cohort men are less politically active
GBRK
21d ago
HPMOR has many flaws, but it really does achieve what it sets out to do. It...
- Provides a fantasy wherein merely being actually intelligent (as opposed to being iron man or sherlock holmes intelligent) is enough to gain social status, wealth, and power.
- Actually manages to teach general principles by which its audience (high schoolers) can become more intelligent.
- Captures the essential fantasy of harry potter in general.
- Doesn't make any of the invisible-to-normies but backbreaking-to-autists mistakes found in most ordinary literature.
GBRK
25d ago
Don't put words in my mouth, buddy. I'm not part of some sort of anti-man conspiracy; my position is that basically no one (including myself) should have the epistemic confidence to have a position.
Speaking very broadly, I suspect the problem is less about actual costs and more about opportunity costs-- basically, I think that most men just have better things to do than volunteer given their goals and incentives. I think I would enjoy volunteering for boy scouts, liability and bureaucracy (and the risk of false accusations) be damned. But I'm trying to get myself in position to secure a wife and kids, and to that extent the best uses of my time are earning money, getting fit, and seeking legible status. Optimizing for the intersection of those things and also enjoying my life generally leaves me focused on working, working out, and trying (so far, futiley) to get published. And I'll have to keep focusing on those things indefinitely because suddenly letting myself go wouldn't be a great recipe for keeping a wife and kids.
But to the extent that all the things I said are true, and generalizeable, I know I'm still not reaching the bottom of the issue-- I'm not getting to why these opportunity costs exist. And even discovering that wouldn't necessarily suggest which actions could or should be taken to mitigate them. I could make suggestions, but no matter how hard I tried for apolitical neutrality they would probably flatter my interests and goals in particular. So the problem remains intractable, and everyone who says otherwise without addressing the full complexities just makes more convinced that no one really knows what's going on.
GBRK
25d ago
Again, this sounds like noncentral, reasoning-backwards stuff. Women don't like bureaucracy either. Men tolerate liability when it comes to other pursuits. Other countries and organizations have varying levels of both but still face a surplus of male suicides and lack of male mentors. Without rejecting your premise that bureaucracy and liability are onerous, I find myself unconvinced by the argument that they must therefore be the principal causes of our crisis of masculinity.
GBRK
25d ago
You're really underestimating female bjj practitioners. I'm fat at 6'1" 245 lbs, but I think I'm pretty convincingly 80th percentile or higher at fighting compared to men in my age cohort thanks to previous martial arts experience. But the (short, fat, female) purple belt at the jiu jitsu gym I joined still beat my ass on the rare occasion that we fought. Multiplying it out a female jiu jitsu purple belt is probably far rarer than 1%-- relative to women her age, I'd guess she's at or above the top 0.01% in terms of fighting ability-- but the interesting result is that it's not athleticism, but technique that puts her over the edge.
"Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" seems like an insufficiently powerful explanation. While it may explain some fraction of why men volunteer less for boyscouts, it's almost certainty downstream of why men volunteer less in general, which in turn is downstream of whatever combination of factors leads to less male involvement in communities/pro-social activities/the male loneliness epidemic in general. I have a hard time believing that pedophile-accusation-risk is the reason why men commit suicide and abandon their children more often, but conversely I can imagine a satisfying explanation for suicides and absent fathers also being applicable to the problem of why men don't lead boy scout troops anymore. "Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" isn't false, but my gut instinct is that it's noncentral. Actually, the link I posted seems to hint at the real causes by looking into the crosstabs-- men with children and/or bachelor's degrees volunteer at much greater rates than single and/or uneducated men. Given that men are facing rising rates of singlehood and falling rates of education, I'd look in that direction for the true causation. Just don't make the mistake of fingering whatever most flatters your beliefs as the problem... you might not be wrong to blame misandry, or anti-intellectualism, or whatever your personal bugbear is... but a lazy epistemology isn't going to convince anyone of your point, and won't do anything to get the issue fixed.
GBRK
26d ago
I saw a study offsite about the lack of male role models and there was a lot of anxious whining about how men are afraid of being seen as creeps/pedophiles but I think any attempt to explain the problem without accounting for the general reasons why men are under-included in communities in general is going to fall prey to occam's law. It seems obvious to me that a satisfyingly complete explanation for why men don't join the scouts will also explain...
- Why men volunteer less
- Why men commit suicide more often
- Why men so often abandon their children
- Why men are more politically inactive
... And so on, and so forth.
But agreeing on that explanation is near-impossible because nearly without exception, people work backwards from their preffered solution to determine what the cause of the problem is. Anti-safetyist mottizens want to make scouting dangerous again, anxious redditors want counter-propaganda to convince women to not be afraid of men, women want to pressure single fathers into taking responsibility, and I even saw one dude that thinks the solution is masculine bonding via class warfare. If any of these groups is right, I suspect it's mostly by accident.
GBRK
1mo ago
You are much more optimistic about AI than I would be. I'm afraid I consider AI an unmitigated disaster for creative industries.
AI is a tool, like any other. It saves time on technical execution, but near-completely lacks vision. The problem is, the vast majority of people who use it also lack vision, so we get "art" that is technically excellent but totally uninteresting. Where an artist uses the time-savings to add even more vision, though, it performs a strictly additive service. For example-- I've seen a lot of webfiction where the story is wholly human-generated, and then AI art is just used for character portraits. The art only benefits, because a constant amount of vision is still being expended on the writing without the opportunity cost of the author having to learn how to draw.
I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead now
Andor was legitimately great, and managed to make the already-fantastic Rogue One movie even better in retrospect.
I wouldn't count out star wars just yet. I think there's some small but nonzero chance that a good sequel-sequel trilogy could be made, on the conditions that it be managed by a single visionary director that loves the aesthetics and themes of the star wars series without being beholden beholden to a committee or pandering to existing fans. Or, shooting smaller, I think if the upcoming harry potter reboot TV show ends up working out, I could easily imagine a complete star wars TV series reboot to essentially re-tell the entire story, but with judicious editing, so that all the incoherent and terrible-in-retrospect parts get smoothed out.
That might seem overly hopeful, because 9 movies worth of events (plus however much background detail they want to add) is a lot to coherently condense, but I think advancements in AI will massively reduce the labor of making creative work, and as a consequence multiply the effectiveness of auteur geniuses. Where before all of an artists vision and wisdom could be poured to fill a trilogy, at best, AI might soon be able to spread that effort across a much longer period, like an upscaling algorithm applied to the problem of getting "twenty years to write book 1, and one extra to write book 2."
GBRK
1mo ago
Why should you have to pay? Because you live in a big society, and state capacity costs money.
Your argument doesn't follow from your premise. Yes, I agree that we should pay the taxes required to mantain state capacity. Cutting old-age security from the budget, and reducing taxes proportionately, wouldn't affect that. "You need to pay taxes because we need roads" is a good argument. But adding, "So then you can't complain about giving money to a vampiric class of elders," is just building a bailey around your motte.
We don't pay old people entitlements because it's moral or just; I gather we paid them originally to ensure continued consumption and get them out of the labor market,
At this point you're just arguing against yourself. If there's no morality or justice in paying old people, why in the world would I want more of my consumption re-allocated toward old people? Why would I want services to become more expensive because there's fewer workers? You might be able to convince me that it would be worth getting everyone else to pay for old people specifically in my industry to retire, but why would I care if I get a promotion and a raise if the extra money was just going to go to old people anyway? I'd prefer to keep working at my current responsibilities and pay. I don't think I even need to address the "skim off the top" bit.
You would legitimately have a better argument if you appealed directly to my morality. I'm taking a bit of a hardline stance, but I could imagine wanting to maintain some level of old-age security out of pure altruism. It wouldn't be structured the way it is now, and it would definitely be less generous than social security + medicare, but I'd support a unified program designed to supply enough food, water, housing, and dollars-per-QALY efficient medical interventions to keep the elderly, destitute, and disabled alive. Such a program would, by design, offer very few luxuries-- but I would also allow local communities and charity groups to supplement those luxuries, and also create a simplified program to enable whatever marginal employment the participants are capable of performing to afford small luxuries. Babysitting children, cooking meals, performing chores, etcetera-- untaxed, and with maximally flexible hours. Basically, those "preschool + retirement home" setups should be the model.
GBRK
1mo ago
So you'd be cool with your mom taking a cut of your paycheck?
I would be much happier if the money I paid into social security/medicare just went directly to my parents instead, yes. And even without the coercion of the state, it's not like children sending money to their parents is anything new. My mom has sent remittances to her mother in brazil for decades. That's effectively the same thing. If she hadn't been unfairly taxed to pay for feckless american non-parents she could have sent even more money back, and had more money to save for herself.
What would be the point of draconian policy if the community weren't planning to socialize the benefits?
So you admit that taxing the youth to pay for medicare and SS are draconian, and yet you think somehow socializing the benefits makes them any better?
Remove the taxes. Remove the social programs. If parents are good parents, their children will be happy to help them. If parents are bad parents, then they deserve what they'll get. If non-parents don't plan for the future, they don't deserve society's help. If non-parents try and invest responsibly for the future, they shouldn't be stymied by the fact that they have to also pay for the upkeep of bad parents and lazy non-parents.
in exchange for a nebulous promise of additional workers two decades down the road
What's "nebulous" is Medicare and Medicaid. Thanks to the demographic crisis, I have zero expectation of getting any substantial old-age benefits. So why should I have to pay for the lazy old people that hollowed out the base of the demographic pyramid in the first place?
And since I'm getting this vibe that you're blue-tribe, and suspect you're just not interested in arguments about personal responsibility, let me try also appealing to a value I suspect we share:
The fact that dumb old people don't need to keep younger generations happy to receive benefits is why we have trump, climate change, and the housing crisis. Gerontocracy thrives off the back of old-age welfare.
GBRK
1mo ago
It does apply to veterans. Re-read what I wrote, I never said it didn't. But veterans compensate for being relatively less capable, experienced, knowledgeable, etcetera in a job area by having their service be a hard-to-fake signal of a wide variety of positive qualities, plus training analogous to what they'd find in a lot of high-paying jobs.
For the record, I agree that motherhood is also a hard-to-fake signal of a wide variety of positive qualities, but the training it provides and the qualities it is a positive signal for just have greater overall supply relative to demand and therefore less total market value.
Just look at South Korea if you doubt my words. In a society where every man is conscripted, there's less of a relative advantage to being a veteran and young men face delayed achievement and worse outcomes compared to young women. If we massively increased the supply of veterans in the united states the same thing would happen. It's not systematic oppression, it's just the free market rationally allocating resources.
GBRK
1mo ago
Canada Child Benefit.
To the extend that child tax credits directly help parents, they're unfair... But I'm not heartless enough to deny support to the blameless children. On net I think we'd have a lot less need for them if we removed elder-support programs and therefore let working parents keep more money in their pockets.
enabling them to minimize the amount they owe in taxes
The american tax code is designed to help families in a "working parent/homemaker" situation but ironically punishes cases where you have two high-earning adults. I've got some DINK friends who had to pay more taxes after getting married. TBH, I also think that's unfair. They shouldn't get elder assistance in their old age, but also they should be able to save and invest more of their taxes now so that they don't need it. Basically, our society can let people decide of their own volition whether investing in children or career advancent is their best retirement bet. Anyone who chooses to be both unproductive and childless can suffer the consequences and resign themselves to either poverty or becoming such a pillar of their community even unrelated adults are willing to help thm.
In an "almost certainly not what you meant" sort of way,
That's kind of exactly what I meant, actually. By removing the need to pay for unrelated elders, adults can focus on supporting their own parents. Reciprocally, that also increases the incentive for elders to help their adult children with childcare. My grandmother helped my mom with me while my mom was doing her PHD; in return, my mom has helped her quite a bit through the years with remittances. That all winds up with a greater incentive for adults to have children, and in particular to raise them well so that the children will be happy to take care of them.
GBRK
1mo ago
#1
But I'm getting from your comment that you pretty much agree that mothers should be disadvantaged in hiring?
I don't think mothers should be disadvantaged-- I think people who are relatively less capable, experienced, knowledgeable, etcetera in a job area should be disadvantaged. And unfortunately, raising children makes it harder to become those things. I don't like that, but it is an unfortunate fact. Forcing companies to preferentially hire mothers is just going to lead to economic inefficiency and poverty. Yes, there are some specific roles where motherhood is actually good training. To the degree that those roles are prevented from hiring on merit, those roles should be reformed. But if you genuinely think mother are better for already-meritocratic roles like C-suite roles, then no actual intervention needs to happen. Companies will be darwinistically selected until they have the appropriate amount of mothers and everything in perfect.
Similarly, while I can tell that your whole veteran argument is non-salient, can you not see how it's proving my point? Yes, being a veteran makes you better at mcdonalds. Also, it makes you better at a whole lot of other places. Therefore those places preferentially hire vets, so that demand outstrips supply and military vets end up paying well. And judging by how well vet-owned companies seem to do, it looks like those place are actually making reasonable decisions. So why aren't I hearing about any companies that preferentially hire companies making it onto the fortune 500? If it was legitimately a good strategy, it would just be money on the floor. But it isn't, so it's not.
#2
All that being said... I completely sympathize with
then it's no wonder young women get nervous about the tradeoffs involved
I definitely don't blame young women for not wanting children. You seem to be coming at this from a perspective where you think I both expect women to have more children and yet have zero interest in giving the woman what they want. That's not my perspective. I understand that the tradeoff is skewed against women, and that not having children is simply the rational option for many of them. But you seem to have this weird belief that motherhood is intrinsically skewed, and that therefore we need special government to make it not suck, but that's the opposite of reality. Motherhood isn't a profession, but it is an investment-- and one that has historically paid off very well. People have given up part of their entertainment and leisure potential to raise kids since the dawn of time because they reasonably and rationally expected that their kids would contribute to their well-being in turn.
From that framing, it's obvious that we don't need to specifically promote motherhood, we just need to stop hindering it. We need to let parents internalize the full value of their children by ending government-mandated transfers of labor to freeriders by ending medicare and social security. I know that might be difficult to process emotionally because there's this idea that those programs are "helping grandma," but if it weren't for the money they lost to taxes, grandma's descendants could help her themselves.
Look, just imagine if women gave birth to massive piles of money, or robot servants that did their chores and took care of their needs. If that were the case, they would obviously be happy to accept less professional advancement in order to give birth more often. Conversely, if the government started taking 90% of their robots and their piles of money, women would stop giving birth in favor of looking for professional advancement. That's the situation we're in: everything about our society is geared around socializing the benefits of motherhood while privatizing the costs. All we need to do to get above replacement fertility is to just stop doing that.
No, you definitely can't. If your priors are true and your argument follows logically from its priors, then...
/u/Tiptoe 's argument could be easily flipped because the statements
Can be easily demonstrated to be true for nearly every identity-linked ideology and the original poster made no effort to demonstrate or argue that they are particulary true for their targeted group.
And while the conversion of,
into
launders the assumption that the objective truth of A is equivalent to the objective truth of B, again-- the original poster made no effort to argue for the degree to which A should be regarded as important.
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