JTarrou
8mo ago
Nah, probably not, unless he was a regular on the strip or in the MOPH.
Behind Covenant is tough, I lived in that area, a dozen blocks south roughly. Behind St. Mary's makes Baghdad look like Bennington.
JTarrou
8mo ago
stories make me feel nostalgic in a way that is difficult to explain.
Nah, I get you. Feels weird to write them. I have a lot of these in one stage or another of writing, but some of them just ain't for consumption.
When you sand off the edges, it just sounds fun and wild. When you have to live it, you want to make sure people think twice before following your example.
But youth is wasted on the young, and no amount of aged wisdom is going to stop them trying to climb that hill. And frankly, someone has to.
JTarrou
8mo ago
The vest, properly set up. There's a heirarchy of clubs, insignia, arrangement, patches etc.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Since 2023? You mean the last two months? I stand corrected.
Or did you mean that the recent rise in homicide rates has only taken us back to '97 so far, and we have room to grow before we hit the full '92 again?
JTarrou
8mo ago
Sub-state organization. Possibly sub-legal. Vigilance committees, neighborhood watch but tooled up. You saw this a lot in Hispanic neighborhoods during BLM. The Roof Koreans during the RK riots. You have to organize and strategize to defeat both retaliation and arrest.
The current failure is only of social pride and excessive legalism. People near the edge of the law cling to it all the more. Get realistic, look at your sub-legal options.
Go the other way. Find a group you won't snitch on. Teach each other, train each other, police each other. Street crims ain't shit to three guys who know what they're doing.
You know what? I might have a story for this.
JTarrou
8mo ago
'Cause life is a game that no one wins
But you deserve a head start the way your life's goin'
So throw in the towel, 'cause your life ain't shit
No take that towel and hang yourself with it
Life's short and hard like a body-building elf
So save the planet and kill yourself
If you're feeling down-and-out with what your life's all about
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
(Lift your head up high and blow your brains out)
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
(Lift your head up high and blow your brains out)
Lift your head up high and blow your brains out
Suicide rates and murder among teens and the power of memes.
For those old enough to remember, these will be familiar times. Let me ask the '90s teenagers in the room, what was the dominant feeling of the age?
I would say that it was mostly a decade in which the youth aesthetic was of depression, sullen expressions, heroin chic, and underpinning it all, suicide. Suicide was in the air from the minute Cobain suck-started a shotgun. The music had song titles like “Hey man, nice shot” and “Lift your head up high and blow your brains out”. Subtle stuff. On the black side of the culture, gangsta rap was big. Drugs, murder, drugs, murder, booty. Still lighter than the white side.
Would it surprise anyone if I told you that the '90s were the only improvement in the teen suicide rate since the Depression? Murder rates peaked in '92 and dropped for twenty years.
Let's consider more recent history. The teen culture from 2010 to 2020. I'm not sure how those in it would classify that era, but to me it seemed like a decade of social media, politicization and gender. The Z discovered a giant pool of suicides (the lowest rate in decades) that they could save with hormones and surgery. They were the first generation to tackle racism and really make black lives matter. The aesthetic of the age is chipper, smug, vague, androgynous. Black culture has moved from the ghetto to the antiracism seminar. The result?
Suicide rates rose swiftly throughout the decade among teens, bringing them back into line with the already high rate before the '90s reversed course for twenty years. Murder rates started rising in 2013 and shot up in 2020. Mostly among young black men.
Death has a way of clarifying things, as it's tough to fake.
One cannot go back to the past, but we would do well to consider what sociopolitical norms and policies might have contributed to that massive achievement, and we absolutely must be extremely clear about which ones lead to the reversal. And no, I'm not talking about Lupus and Jimmy Pop.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Abbot's fight for vouchers has had the side effect of starving urban school districts, who are unable to raise funding because the state takes the majority of their property tax revenue through the "robin hood" program (and no longer even uses it for education -- now it just goes into the state general fund. It's purely kleptocratic now in a way that I don't believe it always was). My school district is getting rid of librarians and counselors as they can no longer afford them, cutting gifted and talented programs (very much done to piss off the rich -- it's not saving much money but it generates lots of ire), and generally laying off teachers and increasing class sizes.
That sounds awesome. Cutting government funds to religious schools is something I support wholesale.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Brandon Herrera is a firearms influencer on social media
Were Ak-50, Brandon?
JTarrou
8mo ago
A world in which we go from a significant Hispanic and African American Ivy League admissions rate to one that is virtually zero would not be tolerated by the existing social order.
We already have that. Virtually no poor black americans wind up in the Ivy Leagues. The children of wealthy black immigrants do. The children of foreign elites who are also black, or "hispanic" or asian do. Not the actual struggling communities here.
Your whole structure is built on the social identification of poor black americans with much richer, more educated and very culturally distinct groups based on nothing more than skin color.
Yes, so long as black americans think the reason they aren't getting into Yale is that Yale hates black people, not poor people, this will not be tolerated. But that's an assumption that could change quick.
JTarrou
8mo ago
As a first order effect, this is just internal political elbows.
From Michigan, there's a scenario where this could matter a lot in the fall, but it's pretty context dependent. Here in Michigan, the south of the state is essentially Democratic, it's where all the big cities are etc. But within the Democratic party, the battle is between the huge, corrupt, ancient racial regimes of the rust belt cities, the 75 corridor, and the more radical university-centered wing of the party headquartered in Ann Arbor and Lansing. Geographically and socially, the muslim community sort of connects these two groups.
Dearborn is at the conjunction of all the highways from Ann Arbor to Detroit. The heavily muslim community is strung out along the 94. The newer or poorer ones work on the Detroit side around the 95% black population, and the older families, with kids at the universities maybe, move toward the lilly-white suburbs of academia.
Same thing my ancestors did, only mine went north, along the 75 to the border with The North, where Republicans live.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Necro!
Anyhoo, I liked this particular bit.
Of course it's a lot more complicated, this was some Deep Thoughts With Jack Handy style analysis. I do think it's a useful frame.
Slavery counterfactuals aside, technology provided an option to slave labor. It didn't need to annihilate it. It just had to be a viable alternative, and I imagine that point in time was different for different technologies and different jobs. John Henry is a folk tale about this process, and he, of course, is a freed slave. Freed to have a labor competition with a steel-driving machine.
JTarrou
8mo ago
That is a good point. The social status of having more children levels off pretty fast with living standards, I seem to recall. I'm guessing for hyperfertility to survive the middle class income trap, it needs both above average income and ideological commitment, probably religious. Mormons, Amish, Quiverfulls, etc.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Neither. Polygamy is generally hyper-fertile, but polygamy as practiced in the Bay Area by socially awkward screen addicts seems not to be.
Probably more about the selection effect and less about the polygamy.
JTarrou
9mo ago
Technology as politics.
Feminism is more a product of the washing machine, the pill and air conditioning than it is political organizing. It is less an ideology than it is a set of opinions enabled by a certain level of technological advancement.
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".
Today, we all benefit from less-than-free labor in third world nations making us cheaper consumer products. In the most technologically backward parts of the world slavery still exists. That is not because those are worse people than those of us who can afford to pay for the labor that supports our first world lifestyles.
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
What this means for the age of AI is anyone's guess.
It's never really come up.
Let me use a sports analogy. Tomorrow, you're going to get revenge on someone in a game of tennis. You've never played a game, not one. Your opponent is the worst professional tennis player in the world, ranked dead last. How you feeling about your chances?
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