HaroldWilson
7mo ago
Sure but that hasn't happened yet, so at this moment his view is unfalsifiable, because every past Democratic/liberal/blue-tribe victory gets chalked up to 'TPTB' (to the extent that the financial crisis gets blamed on them, as if 'Davos' was quaking in its boots at a McCain presidency), and every defeat is written off as complacency.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
While one can no doubt find a sizeable contingent to defend any belief, the more common and reasonable argument people such as myself would furnish against focusing on personal agency is not that it is 'wrong' but that it is useless. If we are approaching this from a policy perspective how much control any particular person had over their health is only important insofar as it impacts what we need to do to remedy poor health now, on a society-wide scale. Politicians and academics are generally in the business of policy, not personal advice.
HaroldWilson
9mo ago
she's afraid of being offed/suicided by Deep State goons.
I would suggest if this was genuinely her fear that this not the greatest endorsement of the reliability of her testimony, but in fact an indication of quite absurd paranoia. Entertaining the fantasy that the 'Deep State' would murder someone for the benefit of Joe Biden's political image, she defected in May 2023, long after the story had come and gone - what would be the purpose of killing her? She and her accusation are now political non-entity, if they even ever had much of an impact.
HaroldWilson
9mo ago
Meanwhile, if somebody wanted to execute Jan 6 convicts, even in the most pointlessly brutal way you could possibly imagine, the same sources would likely cheer on how they were getting exactly what they deserved and lament that the punishment wasn't harsh enough
I don't believe this for one second. Any evidence of such sentiment (i.e. people saying they should get it/it would justified if they did)?
HaroldWilson
9mo ago
The people forming these views are factually upper class, -ish, but they're jealous of those who have it even better and want to tear them down.
I think almost the opposite tends to be more true; middle-class guilt is much more powerful than middle-class jealousy. Hence why, though people like Disraeli and Sadler fancied that the aristocracy were better guardians of the poor, it was the barrister Lloyd George and the thoroughly bourgeois Attlee who created the foundations of the modern welfare state. This is really why Oliver disguises himself as poor; because the latent Methodism present in every middle-class Briton tells him that his (unearned) station is actually shameful, and the only acceptable circumstance in which to accept aristocratic largesse is poverty.
HaroldWilson
9mo ago
Anti-racism is more a product of the steam engine than it is of any moral progress. All of human history no one thought to free the slaves, until one day from out of nowhere.....the richest and most technologically advanced society on earth invented a way to turn fossil fuels into energy and all the sudden slavery and the racism that supported it isn't strictly necessary. Hence "moral progress".
This has become a bit of a cliche but I think it's quite a lot more complicated than this. It's probably not wholly untrue, but, for instance, the issue of how efficient American plantation slavery was in the context of an industrialising economy has never really been settled. Time on the Cross has come in for a lot of criticism since its publication, but I think most people do now accept that American slavery was not simply going to be annihilated by the modernisation of the American economy; it really was quite 'efficient'.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
Sure, but those are both very different kinds of texts to any of the works of the Dunning school, which is why Foner or C. Vann Woodward are the more apt points of comparison. Now admittedly there isn't an anti-civil rights equivalent to To Kill a Mockingbird as prominent as that book, but that is probably quite literally the only book most Americans could name on the subject. So it is 1-0 to civil rights, but that's not a huge discrepancy really.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
Which means that unless you speak German you are restricted from one of the top 5 key books to getting a window into Hitler's Worldview
I mean there's probably not much point dedicating time to studying a historical period in anything more than a casual fashion unless you can read the relevant language to some degree. There's not much market for the translation of books which are of mostly academic interest in relation to German history since almost every historian of Germany can read German.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
you can't just get the book without some effort
I don't think signing in with a google account and clicking 'borrow' really counts as 'some effort'. It's certainly much easier than any method of getting physical books.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
I’ve always been taken aback by how little Americans know, or read, from the other side of the civil rights era… Indeed trying to come up with this list one could be forgiven for thinking the Pro-Segregation side wrote nothing in defense of Jim Crow, so little comes up when trying to google… You’d be wrong.
This is silly. Most Americans have probably never read anything from either side of the civil rights era. What proportion of the American populace do you think has actually read, say, Foner's Reconstruction or The Strange Career of Jim Crow? What proportion could even have named such books? The Dunning School is definitely not some kind of hidden knowledge, any university class on Reconstruction will cover it; admittedly usually with some prejudice, but not unjustifiably so. Dunning's work is available quite inexpensively online and will be in most university libraries.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
so many out-of-print books that cost hundreds of dollars.
Exactly. Not only that, there are thousands upon thousands of works that you can't buy anywhere online even if you had hundreds of dollars to spend, the vast majority of which are thoroughly anodyne academic works.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
I think it would help to lose weight to improve your odds
The obvious difference here is that almost everyone already knows this, probably including the person you're talking to, which is not the case in the bottle-cap or shark-infested waters examples. Indeed, the latter two aren't actually unsolicited advice, they are unsolicited unknown information which is very different.
There is almost no-one for whom 'lose weight' will be novel and actioned advice.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
I think this is substantially correct; people such a fat acceptance activists are often on much stronger ground than they realise, and part of the reason they don't see it is a preoccupation with a radical aesthetic, so what is really bourgeois courtesy is repackaged as 'liberation' etc.
The peculiar converse of this is the downright rudeness of much of the online right, which in just the opposite fashion of many on the left is at odds with the bourgeois aesthetic many of them idealise.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling. 26 signatures. 26. Change.com. You definitely are.
I'd say that description is pretty indisputable. Which bit do you think is inaccurate?
Paywalled.
an uphill battle
I don't think you've demonstrated that. The only potential evidence here is the paywalled WSJ article which I can't read, can you quote the relevant sections? I would note though that it is still here.
Hard disagree. People wanted to ban KiwiFarms for the ideological leanings of its userbase and for their unabashed mockery of woke people, so they went looking for something other than "not being woke" they could pin on it as a reason for banning it, even though you'll find woke people doing eactly the same things (or worse) without comment. "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime".
This is more or less unfalsifiable reasoning, because whatever evidence I give of other justifications for their ban you will dismiss as motivated reasoning/manufactured. So not sure what I can say here. Also, FWIW Kiwifarms is still up and active.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
I was responding to you, specifically your smug mockery of 'start your own website', which was silly because that's exactly what they were able to do.
Kiwifarms, though I don't necessarily agree with Cloudflare's decision, was clearly not just banned just for its ideological proclivities.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
"if you don't like it, start your own website"
They could and they did! Patriots.win is still up and running. Where do you think you are now?
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Yeah they'll usually be some sort of VO saying 'if the Smith family switch to Tesco value baked beans they can save £100 a year' or whatever. There are other sorts of changes which perhaps make more of difference; usually cooking more meals from scratch and avoiding silly 'conveniences' with a big markup like pre-grated cheese and pre-chopped vegetables, but there are definitely substantial savings to be had from avoiding big brand names.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
they tested undergraduates and not experts
Why would they necessarily want experts? If all they setting out to prove is that ordinary people can't tell the difference between better and worse wines, then obviously they wouldn't test experts or enthusiasts.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
a show that profits from making people look stupid when they fail to identify the difference between products that literally have different ingredients
FWIW it's BBC so they're actually not making a profit, though obviously yes the individual showrunners and the BBC at large want to see the programs get good ratings.
I think the general point though is that of course if you care to pay attention to these things you can tell the difference, but most people are not an 'enthusiast' about most of the things they eat and drink. A ketchup enthusiast may have genuine and consistent preferences, but I doubt that's true of the majority of the population. On the whole it's a pretty sedate show and if you watch it while there are sections of the show (not the swaps week bit) which are likely semi-staged (alongside ordinary consumer advice scripted bits in factories etc. which aren't pretending to not be so) I doubt anybody would care enough to fake it. Most of the time they aren't make to look total fools - in fact much of the time they will correctly identify that something has changed, but will say they don't mind it anyway and would happily change to save money. So often rather than not being able to tell the difference (though that does happen) it's more that own-brand stuff is not actually worse than brand-name even if 'different'.
between products that literally have different ingredients
Well they aren't usually as different as the example of hot sauces, it's more things like cheese, vegetables, soft drinks etc.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
a website with numerous sub-communities each enforcing their own specific orthodoxy on their members, or a website in which the members of every community have to adhere to exactly one orthodoxy?
Well we can make this argument one stage removed no? Reddit is simply one of many websites enforcing certain values, if you don't like them you can go to another website - it is itself a 'sub-community' of all websites.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
The_Donald
Hard to be at all sympathetic given that they banned any criticism of Trump. Hard to complain about being banned for 'contradicting woke orthodoxy' (which I don't think is a fair representation of what happened but nevertheless) when you don't allow any contradiction of Trumpian orthodoxy.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
The point isn't that it's literally exactly the same company/plant producing it, it's that the differences really don't make any difference; certainly not enough to warrant paying a premium. If you did put generic vegetable oil in a fancy bottle, I doubt anybody who wasn't some kind of expert/chef would actually notice any difference. Indeed, they presumably use generic bulk stuff in actual kitchens, even in nice restaurants, so it should be good enough for you or I at home.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
In Britain there's a popular-ish show called 'Eat Well for Less', with Greg Wallace, in which for a week a family who thinks they need to reduce their food bill has all their groceries replaced with new ones with all the branding removed so they don't know what they're getting. Invariably none of them can tell the difference when their branded products are replaced with the cheapo own-brand 'value' range, despite them all usually insisting beforehand that they'll be able to tell. Most amusing though is when they insist they don't like the replacement, only to find out they've been double bluffed and it was in fact the same brand as they have always been eating/drinking, and they look like morons. The vast majority of people who genuinely think they can tell a difference have definitely just been sucked in by marketing, which I suspect applies to most of the people in this thread insisting 'no, Heinz ketchup really is different to all the others!'.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
"for the sake of the institutions"
Come on. I think if we look, for instance, at political institutions the right has done just as much defecting as progressives. Gerrymandering obviously happens on both sides but Republicans are overall more aggressive and net more seats from it, the absurd hypocrisy over Supreme Court nominations in final Presidential years, Trump/Jan 6/election fraud nonsense and the list goes on.
No point relitigating the cause of Floyd's death here, but social movements triggered by one emotive incident which stands for wider grievances or concerns are hardly uncommon. Alan Kurdi, Jyoti Singh, Rodney King; these are people who under different circumstances might have dropped out of the news cycle in days, or indeed never entered it, but chance would have it that their deaths (or beatings) happened in just the right time, place and manner prompt a wider consideration of some important issue.
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