MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
They’re a net negative at present because most companies are tooled for a free-trade environment. They generally outsource the labor needed to produce goods by building factories overseas or importing goods or inputs. Depending on what happens, 5 years from now it might not be a problem at all.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I mean he’s not exactly wrong which is why I’m much less enamored with the idea that final authority should rest with the people and that the legitimacy or rulership should rest on the people.
It creates a lot of really strange results simply because it rests on a flimsy idea. The basic idea is that somehow the sum of several million people who don’t understand a system voting on how to run the system somehow results in a well run system. Or the sum of ignorance is knowledge. This doesn’t work. 300 people who know jack all about city planning simply cannot accidentally figure out how to time traffic lights. 300 million people who can’t even find Ukraine on a map cannot possibly be making a good decision on whether to conduct a war there, how to conduct it, or when to end it. No other place on earth do we do this. Parents generally do not get their four year olds approval on dinner because they’d choose ice cream. Children are not trusted with the family budget. Soldiers are not asked to approve of war strategy. Workers are not given the right to vote on the direction the company will take in the next year. And on it goes — when we need a system that just works, we put competent people in charge and let them run the thing. Except government where anyone over 18 can choose the general direction of almost every function of government by choosing leaders to do as they promised when asking for their votes.
And as Hanania rightly points out, modern democratic governments are highly tuned to avoiding the realities they exist in. Whether or not a policy is a good idea doesn’t matter. What matters is that the public supports it. Giveaway programs of various types are always popular — leading to a famous warning from Alexis de Tocqueville that democracy would only last until people discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public coffers. And so we have. Welfare, student loans guaranteed by the government, a big push for universal healthcare (provided by the government) etc. it doesn’t matter if these things work — it can easily be shown that government guarantees of student loans has ruined not only education (dumbing down college to the point where anyone who graduated high school can go, and lowering standards until literally anyone can pass), but job markets (as lots of jobs that require no higher order skills now require 4-year degrees as a minimum). This is just one reality avoided — we don’t have infinite money, and even if we did, handing out money tends to distort markets and create more problems than it solves. You can add in things like social liberalism where every form of deviant behavior is tolerated if not celebrated. Don’t kink shame adult babies, porn actresses, furries, or drag queens, and don’t keep them away from kids, even if their fetish is only plausibly not pedophilia. And again, a lot of this turns out to be bad for society. But it gets votes, so who cares.
But beyond that, it’s the perfect engine for avoiding responsibility. Who is responsible for the decisions in a democracy? The people. They voted for the guy who did the thing. He was only doing what the people wanted. So 300 million of us are responsible for the results of the tariffs. Or the negotiations with Russia. Or the bombing of the Houthis. Or whatever happens with Iran. Or anything else that happens. It’s even better for elected representatives when it goes through a parliament or congress. They can do nothing, collect a paycheck and come back for reelection and blame everything on those other guys for messing it all up. If you send us back we’ll fix it. And if it doesn’t work or doesn’t pass, blame the other guys and run again. At no point is anyone In government accountable for the results of the votes he casts or tge decisions he made. The people voted for it!
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I’m not impressed with the defense. Every single person cited as evidence that she shouldn’t be deported has at least some interest in her staying, either for professional reasons or personal reasons. It’s like saying that “my mother says im a nice person” — you’d have to be extraordinarily naive to take as gospel the words of such people, especially when other neutral parties are silent. If the Jewish Student Union were standing up for her, that would be evidence. Her friends? Her coworkers? Her defense lawyer? It’s not impressive.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
It doesn’t make you uninformed, it does quite often make you misinformed. Yes, if you read NYT, you’ll know there’s a recession, you’ll know the unemployment rates, stock prices, and so on. But it will be misleadingly contextualized to appear that the recession is All Trump’s fault. And they’ll use their think piece section to push the idea that “is this the end of the Trump Era?”, “Will the Trump-cession cost Republicans control of Congress?” But when Biden was in charge, the NYT would cover the inflation and people not affording groceries as if it just happens like that sometimes. It’s the typical thing where they’re looking to the business cycle, Covid, the Republican Party holding up stimulus checks, bird flu, and everything else even if it’s nonsense. Conversely, economic booms are always caused by the Democrats’ economic policy — even when that democrat hasn’t been in power for years and most of the policies have been curtailed or reversed. The Trump boom, boys and girls, was really the Obama boom, at least according to the NYT.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
To me, a big thing that gaming companies got wrong is that they essentially started chasing graphics over gameplay. This wasn’t obvious at the time, because graphics are a very obvious selling point when graphics capacity is growing fast. But it seems a dead end especially once you get to high levels of graphics that are photo realistic. Except this takes the place of doing other things: gameplay itself, storytelling, characters. There were a lot of games in the late 2000s that were beautiful to look at and so boring to play that it just wasn’t fun. This is something that Nintendo has always got right — they focused first and foremost on whether or not the player was having fun.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
Not very impressed. I mean ever person listed has at least some vested interest in her staying in country. It’s not even neutral people say in the newspaper office saying that she wasn’t that political except to write this one thing, or someone at the protest talking about her being polite to Jews or something. It’s all her lawyer, her friends, and her colleagues— people who benefit if she stays.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
The good times are always temporary. Having an entire society essentially doing nothing but poetry simply means that no production happens and you import laborers and goods because you don’t want to produce things. And eventually your wealth dissipates shipped off to other countries or paid out to guest workers who send the money home.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I’m assuming that they went to college assuming they were that good of students that such a path was open to them. For the vast majority, that was never true, and if we had a university that could only extract loan payments for those who successfully graduated and got good jobs afterwards, the university would not have admitted them. There are students in university paying 100K over 4 years and who need remedial math, reading, and writing courses. We’re letting them basically LARP for the government backed loans; they have absolutely no business going to university, and a sane education system would have told them no probably long before they got onto the college bound track in the first place.
If the students in question are not capable of college level work, then they need to get over it and look for other options more in line with their actual intellectual capacity. I’ve always been firmly convinced that schools should track kids (with periodic reassessment) so that we don’t create the glut of overeducated “failsons” that are too good to work with their hands, yet too unaccomplished to get jobs doing mental work. If you aren’t suited to the work you’ve been trained to do, it’s the education system exploiting you by dangling dreams in front of you.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I don’t think it’s that weird. Kids just naturally absorb what they’re told about the world, and have an extreme need to please the tribe (I believe this is evolutionary as a child to young to hunt and defend himself is absolutely dependent on the good will of his tribe) a condition that usually persists until at least late high school and for many people until they move away from home.
And so when a child is affirmed for a statement of “wanting to be the opposite gender” (whatever form this might take) at an age before they can possibly understand what it means (some kids start in kindergarten) and are immediately praised and celebrated and given new names and new clothes and redecorate their room and whatever else, it’s hard to stop. Kids will stay in activities they absolutely despise to please mom and dad who are so proud to have a baseball player in the family, or a musician, or whatever. So they keep playing, hate it, but dad is reliving his childhood. That’s nothing compared to the pre-transition social transitions in which everything is redone to conform to the new gender: name, dress, social activity, manners. To “quit” means to not only give up the stunning and brave status, but to lose friends, to change their name back, to learn to dress and act like their natal gender (and probably fail at it), and probably disappoint their parents and teachers as they lose status.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
Not only that, but I think we have a lot of over-education in America where people are choosing college as a path of least resistance who really don’t have the talent or inclination to succeed in academia. I think if given a viable alternative— trades, culinary, or general labor — a lot of people would choose that instead.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
It plausible as well. It takes someone who knows economic theory well enough to do it right. I don’t think Trump is that kind of an expert. But it’s not insane to do something like that temporarily to protect a nascent industry until it’s strong enough for the global market.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
Labor though is by necessity at least somewhat bound to the land simply because you can not easily pick up and move even within a large country like the USA to say nothing of moving from country to country in search of work. The jobs may be more plentiful in Kenya, but there are a lot of reasons I won’t be moving there.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
Smart tarries can help by essentially protecting an industry of national security interests or an industry that the government wants to invest in for eventual export. If I have an industry like chips manufacturing, I want to keep it protected because those chips are also used in military gear, so I might heavily tax imports o& chips so that native chip manufacturers don’t get undercut by cheaper imports and we are then dependent on those imports for vital products or military hardware. Or you might decide that the future is solar panels an$ thus create a huge tariff on solar panels until your own are good enough to compete on the world market.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I think there are twin dangers of this.
First is that basically, for want of a better way to put this, cries of “this is literally Hitler” have done more to normalize Hitler than anything done by Nazis in the time since tge Second World War. If a guy looking for fraud in the government and who dreams of mars colonies is fascism, it’s actually not that bad. If the worst of literally Hitler is someone like Trump, who’s Blitzkreig thus far has managed to make whistle stops in Greenland, negotiate with Putin, and rename the Gulf of Mexico, Hitler isn’t that bad. Nobody is frightened of this government, and the left has no cards to play. And so, Hitler isn’t that boogeyman Voldemort that everyone fears. He’s just a conservative.
Secondly, there’s no longer any effective way to alert the public if a fascist actually shows up. After 40 years of everything I don’t like is Hitler, if a guy who actually wants to genocide Muslims shows up, it’s no longer possible to find unused verbiage that will tell them that the Antichrist is here and he wants to kill everyone.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I think most of the perpetual childhood stuff is social permissions. A woman is generally permitted to be the second income, worry about such nonsense as “work life balance” (which generally means working 40 hours a week or less, rarely taking work home, and getting lots of PTO), whether or not the job is fulfilling (in other words is it fun and do things that are good for virtue signaling), and so on. Men, unless they’re extremely privileged don’t get to think that way because their career has to feed, house and clothe the family. Sure, the wife’s income might supplement, but she almost always makes a lot less than he does. A man is expected to protect himself, his family, and if there’s a war, his country. In both cases, his actual wants take a very strong step back to the practical aspects of the job market. Men are forced to look to high paid jobs whether or not they want to do that sort of work. They are forced to work longer than they actually want to because they need to take care of a family, and they need to suck up to the boss by working late, they need to manage themselves to take advantage of trainings and promotions or job hopping opportunities even if they’re not interested in that work for itself because they have a family.
Even in social situations, there’s a constant need to make sure to not show weakness, or to be emotional, both of which make them look weak. The number of men who made an early on in dating mistake of admitting to being sad about something and thus lost someone they loved is astounding. Women are allowed feelings, in fact women are basically allowed tantrums over stupid things that they don’t have any right to be upset about. There are viral videos of women pissed off because their man can’t load the dishwasher. Left out — she’s generally a stay at home mom in a nice middle class neighborhood and he’s working 60+ hours a week so she can complain that he doesn’t do enough chores on top of all of that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that most of the West is democratic and therefore there’s a sort of pandering that develops where people prefer leaders who tell them what they want to believe, and what people generally want is liberty from obligations both social and economic, liberty to do whatever they want to regardless of consequences, and someone else to be forced to pick up the tab.
But of course none of that works. A society in which no one has any obligations even to simply not be a drain on society is one that will not last. A society in which every social vice is tolerated is one that will quickly decline due to disease, drugs and associated crimes to pay for those drugs. And thus no one will want to go into the increasingly lawless parts of civilization, or if they do, they go prepared to defend themselves and trust no one until they can retreat into areas where social bonds prevent the social and economic rot they see in the city.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
And this is why those old institutions are no longer trusted by anyone under 50. Nobody under 50 cites a story on the NYT website as a truth claim, because they have known since they began to understand the concept of bias in reporting that NYT and similar news sites are Cathedral sources and will push The Narrative. Getting that trust back would obviously require admitting it, fixing it, cleaning house to prevent it, and begin writing the news as it’s actually happening and not twisting it.
That’s what rebuilding trust is — until tge problems that caused the lack of trust are dealt with, trust is gone.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I mean to me it’s a little like a social version of socialism where the responsibility is given to the men while the benefits are given to women. Women want the option to get a girl-boss job, or serve in the military. They don’t want the responsibility that comes with it. Women even the most hard core feminists don’t sign up for the draft, and seem likely to oppose women being entered into selective service. They want the high powered jobs, but don’t want the responsibility of being a breadwinner, or even working the long hours necessary to earn such a position. For the feminist, it appears that adulthood is optional — they can take or leave whatever parts (generally the taking responsibility parts) they want while taking the benefits of being socially treated as adults. Weak when demands come but strong when the social credit or other benefits are available. It’s not inconsistent.
I think that equal ought to mean equal in both rights and responsibilities. If I’m perfectly capable of doing the girlboss thing, then I ought to be able to take responsibility to provide equal income to the family budget. If I’m capable of choosing sex, then I don’t get to cry rape when the guy doesn’t call me the next morning or bring me flowers. If I’m capable of fighting in the military, I need to sign up for the draft.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
But many of these institutions are suffering self inflicted wounds. It’s been obvious since I’ve been paying attention to news (starting in junior high) that the news “of record” was liberal to a fault, was generally secular, and that it was pro-LGBT (this was in mid 1990s so well before Woke). And once you understand such a thing, and understand that “the news of record” has no interest in telling unbiased news, and will happily distort, misreport, play up or down different stories in order to create the impression that they want you to have. Learning that basically killed my trust in mainstream news.
University was much the same way. Outside of extremely skill or maths heavy courses, you could just simply expect that ideas like social libertarianism if not outright celebration of degenerate if not destructive lifestyles, government control, generous welfare states, free college, free healthcare, and basically socialism. And so you eventually understand that these scholars are not disinterested Confucian scholars simply looking for knowledge. If that were the case, it seems that at least some of them would come out t9 be socially conservative, or economically libertarian.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.
I say this of any institution public or private. The answer to restoring trust is a simple but apparently too difficult to actually do — be trustworthy. It’s kind of a crazy question. When doctors lie and misrepresent the truth, when they openly try to manipulate the public into believing things that are not supported by research in order to get them to obey, or when they push unneeded drugs and treatments on people, it’s easy to lose trust. And I find the loss of trust in medical professionals and institutions to be actually dangerous because honestly most people are horrible at understanding health information without a doctor to help them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I mean I think there are limits. A real, legitimate citizen, naturalized absolutely should have every right in America as a native citizen. But when this get brought up, basically anyone who gate crashes the border is now a de facto citizen in the eyes of much of the left and of course only those terrible people on the right think such gate crashes should leave. And I don’t think that’s unreasonable. We can’t do that because we don’t have room for billions of people to come here and simply squat. They need to go home.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I like the monthly format a bit better simply because I think the passage of time will help make the case for a post having quality and insight rather than simply being the most popular long post on a popular topic for this week. If done correctly, a quality posts should be insightful and interesting content on their own even after the heat of the moment has moved on.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I’m in agreement on the incentives both for the protests on college campuses (in which at least two students lost visas) and the mass deportations. The point is to let both the public and potential immigrants that the days of crossing into the USA and just staying forever and doing whatever you want are over.
I think long term we need some sort of expedited hearing system to prevent mistakes and allow people to question the deportation. But that can’t happen until the numbers are low enough that you can have reasonable processes. As it stands now, the legal immigranttion process is extremely difficult and takes almost a decade unless you qualify for H1B. The process for asylum is overwhelmed because everyone who gets caught knows they get to stay if they claim asylum, and they know it will take years and suspect that Congress will eventually pass another amnesty before the hearing ever happens.
Until you get this into a position where the numbers are less than what can be reasonable to have our system handle with some speed — maybe clearing the median case within 3-4 months instead of a decade — I just don’t think the logistics work.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I think it’s a specific case of the more general hyper-normalization. The west has mostly given up on even trying to make life better for citizens. Cops are barely allowed to do anything about crimes that happen in front of them, and resources are limited so there’s pretty much permission to do low level street crimes as unless the cops happen to witness actual and undeniable stealing (they basically have to watch you take something off the shelf, stick it in your pocket, and walk out the door, and aren’t allowed to give chase off the store property). If a guy is walking around looking for a car to break into — literally shining a flashlight into cars to see if there’s anything there, the cops can be standing right there, but until your window gets smashed, he’s not allowed to do anything. If you call the cops? They take a report that both you and they know will never be read, let alone investigated. And even with an arrest, prosecutors are not going to actually prosecute the crimes that don’t involve a corpse.
Other parts of society are accepted as always been shitty and will always be shitty. Schools are expected to suck, which is why almost every person of means tries to send their kids to private schools rather than public schools, and the first question anyone asks about a property is “how bad is the school district.” Nobody expects potholes fixed, or safe public transport. In fact, Americans hate public transport because unlike Europe, it’s basically a skid row on tracks, and if the stop is close to a place you care about, you’ll watch is skid row moves in. Nothing will get Americans to oppose you faster than trying to put a public bus stop or train in their safe neighborhoods as the6 know it’s a rolling skid row and it will ruin their neighborhood and basically devalue their house.
In bang for buck, I think you could do much the same thing with less cost and less lost opportunities (another cost of college is that you’re keeping your 18-24 year old young adults out of the workforce, which not only means they aren’t earning money for the company, but it effectively means that they don’t start households until later on and thus aren’t buying things and are behind on saving for a house and for eventually having kids), by having the high school diplomas do the same thing. If you’re not reading and doin* maths on grade level, you shouldn’t graduate high school and the reason that college became the “well at least he can read” degree is that high school diplomas stopped being that.
More options
Context Copy link