MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I don’t think it’s a valley, I think it’s a sort of truism of political life. Complaints and protests tend to happen in places where said problem is least apparent. Environmental protests happen where the environment is well cared for, marital protests happen where women are safe, screams of authoritarian regimes happen where arbitrary arrests don’t.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I kinda doubt that. People have lived in much worse conditions than the Gen Z PMC people deciding not to have kids. Go look at video of any third world slum — people have kids when things like electricity and running water aren’t available. They have babies in war zones. I can’t see that and then look at Gen Z refusing to have kids and see financial issues being the real reason.
I have a few hypotheses.
First, I think American children are much slower to mature emotionally and mentally. 25 year olds in the USA still act like teenagers and are still into drunken partying, staying out late to go clubbing. They aren’t really ready to settle into parenthood even if they had the means because they aren’t ready for the responsibility of a baby.
Second, Americans are pretty hedonistic. A baby isn’t about you, and worse requires sacrificing your lifestyle in major ways. You need to get serious about a career and making money because the baby needs food and diapers. You might hate what you are doing, but you don’t have the same choices that you have as a child-free couple. Likewise every other choice you make now has to include planning for the baby. You want to go out to dinner, you either find a sitter or the baby comes along. And I think the lifestyle most young adults like living just doesn’t have the room for a baby.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
The other thing is that the targets of this are very likely fellow democrats. The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit. They’re not really going to stick it to Trump voters, they aren’t dating them anyway. They’re refusing sex with Dudes for Harris.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
The first question is how trustworthy it ever was. I’m not convinced it’s worse now than it was, in fact the sheer diversity of sources available does a pretty good job of keeping the press honest because if the majority of the news slants left, it’s now trivially easy to start one that corrects the bias. And once you add in press from other countries to the mix, we probably have news at least as accurate as any other point in history.
But second, the point is to consume less news, and perhaps be more choosy about it. Because at the end of the day, outside of very prominent elites, our actual influence over events is minimal and more than likely counterproductive. It’s not necessary to follow news to the point of insanity (there have already been two murders attributed to the victory of Donald Trump and his effect on liberals’ minds) if the best you can hope for is to maybe sometimes getting a jolt of dopamine because some conservative stuck it to a liberal (or vice versa). The juice isn’t worth the squeeze, especially as it gets harder and harder to tell the difference between outright propaganda designed to make you hate an out group and news that just so happens to make the ourgroup look bad. Why is it necessary to be reading hours of news? Does it help you live better? From r my money, I just scan the headlines of Google News, and while I’m sure I’m not super informed, I’m not missing anything much. I’m also in a much more sane headspace than the people drinking from the information firehouse and placing more importance on a given news story than it actually deserves.
I’ll make exceptions if the issue n question affects me, someone I actually care about, or is a cause I’m involved in. But 99% of the news isn’t that at all. It’s international news that doesn’t affect me and that I can’t do anything about. It’s court intrigues that are entertaining but not important. Or sometimes it’s important stuff. The important stuff you’ll definitely hear about one way or another. People will talk about it,
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
I think it’s possible to curtail must social media, unless you are in some way using it for business. And I’m not really saying “get rid of it, don’t use it” about any news outlet or social media platform. I’m suggesting as far as any media goes, try to keep it between the parameters of what would have been possible before the era of phones in the pocket. Which would have been something like a half hour to an hour of news a day (or one daily newspaper). And for social media, unless you’re self employed and using social media for business (and in that case, then stick to talking about business) then, again, an hour or two a day is plenty to know enough of what’s happening in that sphere to keep you mostly caught up. Beyond that, there’s really no need.
Neutral news is impossible. Every news source has at least some bias. On the other hand, if you stick to a source or two you know well. It should be a known bias that you can adjust for. USA Today leans liberal. We know this. So you can adjust for it. Daily Wire is conservative, and again, you can adjust to it. But the alternative of connecting directly to a firehouse for information is just going to take the news and blow it out of proportion to its actual importance. Trump is picking a cabinet right now. It’s not that important to most people. Spending four hours a day reading about it obsessively even though the6 might not even get confirmed is not helping anyone.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
Have you considered that having only the negative aspects displayed in media is pretty biased? I get that at least some families have negative aspects to them. Some families are neglectful or overly critical or strict or even abusive. But when looking at the mainstream media shows, I’m finding that you have to look pretty darn far to find a show that has a positive view of family life — present, active, competent parents who love and care for their children and know how to help them navigate through life. Likewise, it’s rare to find shows in which the parents are happily married and aren’t constantly spitting out one-line put-downs of their spouse and who actually seem to like being together. I would personally guess that less than a quarter of families are actually negative forces in each other’s lives. Maybe less than 10% are neglectful or abusive, maybe a bit more common to see people struggling a bit, though generally doing okay. Yet, to watch mainstream media, you have the opposite viewpoint. They show, at best, a Simpson’s style family that features a pair of idiot parents (especially a clueless dad) who don’t seem to like each other much and who are generally unaware of anything going on in their children’s lives or how to handle those issues.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I don’t think that you actually can get away from social media entirely. But more to the point, I think beyond a certain level, interactions with media in general is probably not good for you simply because you’re interacting with news and opinions of other people all the time and thus imbibing the thoughts and opinions and agendas of other people all the time.
For most purposes, I think getting your news once a day in less than half an hour is really the maximum I’d recommend. And as far as social media, again, doing less is better. The thing is, that back in the dinosaur ages before 24 hour news cycles and social media, people didn’t obsess about politics. Sure if you wanted you could listen to Rush Limbaugh in your car for an hour a day. And because of that politics wasn’t seen as a major part of anyone’s life and thus it didn’t “trigger” people. There was no wailing and gnashing of teeth when Reagan won in 1980. Hell, I don’t think most people cared all that much about Nixon. Watergate was seen as a bad thing, but people hadn’t yet turned politics into a lifestyle so Nixon was important, sure, but people were more interested in watching MASH or sports or playing with the kids or whatever else was going on.
I personally think even politics themselves would vastly improve if people weren’t interested in it. Compromise and doing the job aren’t sexy parts of politics, but they’re why things actually get done. It can’t happen when everyone is watching all the time and commenting and so on. The best way for almost any government to run is in semi darkness where backroom dealing and horse trading can happen, and where people can make decisions for the good of the country without the proles interfering. Name any issue and I guarantee that it’s possible to come to a solution that would work, but that the general public would see as betrayal.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I think that the propaganda machine is to blame as well. Look at just about anything on television or any movie, music, etc. The resounding themes are family is a drag, parents are idiots or don’t care, and that the point of life is hedonistic pleasure which things like family and religion are drags on. I’ve challenged people with this, and it’s hard to do it. Find four mainstream television shows that show intact, loving, and competent families. Find four such shows where religion and particularly Christianity is portrayed as good wholesome, and not full of hypocrisy and repression. When the entire culture tells you over and over that families and traditions and religion are a drag on your individual hedonistic pleasure seeking, and that the highest good of life is hedonistic pleasures, it’s not shocking to me that families are dying.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I think my culture war angle on this is that most safety enforcement is too easily weaponized against ordinary people to be actually effective in preventing the worst excesses. Worse, they created a situation in which activities that are not only not dangerous, but actually good for kids are forbidden lest some overactive Karen decide to insert themselves into your life and use CPS to punish you.
Helicopter parenting has been shown to causing negative effects (https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/06/helicopter-parenting). Ordinary milestones like being able to play without a parent present, let alone walk to a neighbors house, are now pushed so far forward that a child is likely to be a pre-teen before doing anything away from the prying eyes of parents. This is something that harms kids because the normal avenues for learning to problem solve and be independent are now pushed to nearly adulthood where the stakes are much higher. At ten, outside of edge cases of kidnapping (which are pretty rare) the worst a kid could do is maybe stay out later than he should or cause minor trouble. At 16, the kid can get into drugs and alcohol and vandalism and so on. He hasn’t yet learned to handle peer relationships, knowing what is dangerous and what isn’t, and has no skills to handle himself.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I think it’s relevant in the same sense most Cathedral media is important — it’s to inform you of what the establishment wants you to believe. And thus if you’re trying to outwardly fit in so you can stay out of the Eye of Sauron, knowing what the establishment thinks and wants outward compliance with is useful.
I think the lack of big “everyone must watch this” stuff is not the sign of a dying twitch. It’s the complete domination of the thought life. Keep in mind that the modern HR departments and trust/safety systems are enforcement mechanisms and because of the way that most of us are locked into a single career path dependent on other people for employment we have an informal Social Credit system. If you run afoul of the stuff HR enforces, you can get black listed essentially. So you no longer need to create great, compelling propaganda about stuff you’re supposed to think because those who question will be unjobbed as a cautionary tale for others. I suspect there are a lot of dissidents in offices who are secretly heretics but know better than to say so publicly.
It’s been a truism for decades that coming out as a conservative is more of a risk than coming out as gay. No one gets fired for being too gay. You can be too conservative.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
At the time that Ron Desantis was running for president, there was a huge controversy about him banning books. Specifically many of these kids books were pro-LGBT. They also contained very graphic descriptions of sex acts. There was also a series of fantasy books written by Sarah J Maas that contained descriptions of sex acts.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
I think they’re playing chicken hoping that the threat of nuclear war with Russia will make the weapons appear. It’s saying “well, if you won’t fund us, we’ll have to use nukes, and Russia will retaliate.” You probably don’t want that. So they get conventional weapons and things go on.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
I think even if they “distance themselves” this one is going to be hard to get trust back on. They’ve already been caught several times outright lying on this issue, and worse, lying about exactly what they’re doing in schools. Millions of parents are not only aware, but angry. I know a person I’m working with who has a daughter who briefly decided she was queer. Her mother was absolutely terrified of this because she knew what would happen the minute a psychiatrist heard any sort of gender confusion from her daughter. At school, this stuff was encouraged. The girl seems to be growing out of it now, bullet dodged. But multiply that by all the parents out there knowing that the schools are teaching this and going behind their backs, who know that trans identified men can go into any locker room they want, and that books that are nearly pornographic are available to grade school kids. I don’t think you can slip one by here.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
Because I don’t honestly think she was cheating. There just aren’t any statistical red flags of cheating that I’m aware of in any direction. There are no wild swings that don’t match the polling data, there aren’t any places with oddly high turnout. Even in the other direction, the places she lost match perfectly with the places with high Pro-Palestinian sentiment who might well have chosen not to vote for her out of anger over her tepid support of Israel. Those numbers are pretty consistent with ordinary population growth.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
I’m honestly not surprised other than that it’s taken this long for schools to make it official that only right-thinking people will be granted access to the prestige of high end universities. I suspect it’s been there informally for a while and gleaned from student essays (don’t talk too much about traditional Christianity, and certainly don’t ever mention working for a GOP campaign). It’s just too easy for schools to use that influence culture and to weaken their enemies by making support for them a career limiting choice. I’m not even sure it’s safe to be openly GOP in “polite” PMC type jobs.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
I don’t like either one. If we’re to have an open and honest conversation on any political topic, basic facts are key to the discussion. Knowing where Ukraine is, why it matters, its key economic outputs, population, etc matters. For that matter knowing what Russia wants Ukraine for and why Crimea is so important to it’s perceived national security interests, or why having Ukraine potentially join EU and NATO is such a risk is vitally important here. But if you have no idea where Ukraine is, or the history of Russia being invaded because it has no natural features on its borders, or that Crimea was one of the Soviet Union’s main warm water ports to Europe, it’s hard to make sense out of the issue.
Likewise on anything science. If you don’t understand the basics of how the science in question works, or if it’s a legal question, what the law in question actually says, there’s no real point. It’s just vibes based conversation. I lean left you lean right, whatever.
My main beef with modern university education (outside of some job-skills based training) is that it’s not creating people capable of learning and understanding for themselves so much as people who simply believe the consensus views and have large doses of credential-based smugness. They don’t bother to look up the facts before deciding that their side is right. They don’t read books, or bother to find out what the other side of the issue actually thinks. We spend more time and energy on critical thinking and higher education than any generation in human history only to produce a society of people who are the least curious about the world, least interested in finding out the facts before making a decision, least able or willing to think logically than previous generations who had less schooling. My grandfather who didn’t even graduate from college was pretty well educated because he was constantly reading nonfiction books about whatever topics interested him. He was a pretty careful and logical thinker as well and able to make good decisions in business because of that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
Nobody is saying it’s easy, but Trump leaning people do exactly that. Trump’s base has absolutely no problem going onto any platform available to them. They have no problem putting up signs — even in hostile places — or wearing Trump gear, or posting pro-Trump messages on social media. Trumpers are like CrossFit fans, you don’t have to ask, because they will absolutely tell you.
I think it’s a belief problem. Liberals don’t seem to actually believe in the message. They don’t advertise in hostile environments, they don’t put out signs or wear gear, they don’t talk about it with friends and family. They mostly flee.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
Exactly. What’s weird about democrats is that they spend so much time and energy to reach out to people who already agree with them and are already going to “vote blue no matter who”. It’s just a stupid idea. Even if you win, you’re winning the converted. If you wanted to astroturf, going for a neutral to semi hostile media network might convince a Trump voter or two.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
Honestly I don’t think this is just the foreign affairs people, it’s becoming endemic to most PMCs through the creeping credentialism promoted by university. There’s a large and growing population of people— most of them college graduates— who think that unless you have studied a topic in a college classroom, you cannot have possibly learned it. No, you cannot just read the Western canon and understand it. No, you cannot possibly learn philosophy without a lecture hall. No, you don’t understand math or statistics until you have gotten college credits.
I find the whole notion doubly ridiculous. First because people have self educated for hundreds of years, and it used to be the standard. Abraham Linchpin taught himself law by reading law books. Most of his peers did the same thing. And it wasn’t just law. If you wanted to run a business, you taught yourself accounting, and so on. Books, video, internet and other sources are much more available now than ever before, and any determined person can teach themselves just about anything they want to. They might have to work a bit harder than their peers who get spoon fed readings and practice sets, but in return, they will absolutely know their stuff as they aren’t studying for a test (and going to forget it afterwards) but trying to learn and understand it.
But much more importantly, I see a lot of ignorance in college grads that make me doubt the process does anything more than what they did in high school on most topics. They don’t actually understand the outside world. They don’t understand that electric cars are plugged into the electrical grid and thus would cause whatever types of pollution that our current electric grid causes. They don’t know anything concrete about other countries. Gays for Palestine is a joke that’s been told a million times, but it’s true, they don’t know what Islam has to say about LGBT rights. They don’t know the whole history of the conflict or why Jews went to Palestine in the first place. They cannot find Ukraine on an unlabeled map, nor do they know anything about its population, industry, minerals, or strategic importance. They have no idea why Russia wants it, nor the history of the region. Go down the list and it’s just amazing how the education that’s supposed to make you a better citizen of the country and the world produces a population with strong opinions but no knowledge.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
Machiavellian. There’s already a name for it. And to be fair, what they’re describing is exactly how politics actually works in a democratic system. The name of the game is to get people to vote for you and you do that by convincing people to want to vote for you. Propaganda is constant in our system driven into every media and cultural outlet it can be. You’ve been taught to want certain things, to believe certain policies will give you a better life. That’s manipulation, and quite often lying to people, and almost certainly “hiding poison pills under the carpet”.
The truism of politics, no matter what the system actually looks like is pretty simple. If you get power, you get to rule, if you don’t, you watch other people rule. There’s nothing unusual about the concept. In autocratic systems, you have to overthrow the current government, in democratic ones, you have to get voted in. Either way, you have to get access to the levers of power before the policies you have in mind actually count for anything.
And treating peasants like peasants is fairly common. It would be the same in any type of system with any party or faction you care to name. Most people in a nation are peasants or even serfs with little to no political control over anything. The sneering condescension is simply reality — despite what both parties tell the voters every couple of years, you actually don’t matter to them, and they actually do hold you to be beneath them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
Well, the more friction you can place between you and your addiction the better. Yes, people can and do blow their life savings at casinos. But that’s worlds harder than blowing through your savings when the casino is on an always online phone you carry in your pocket. When you have to go to a casino to gamble, you need to get dressed, get your wallet, drive for 10-15 minutes to the casino, walk across the parking lot, into the casino, find a machine and put in the credit card. Those actions probably mean about 20-30 minutes of being able to talk yourself out of it.
This kind of thing in reverse is true of exercising. The more friction between you and exercise, the less likely you are to actually do it. So they advise keeping your gym clothes and shoes on your dresser, having any needed equipment at home, etc. because at every step you can talk yourself out of it. Do I really feel like fighting traffic to get to the gym? And if the answer is anything other than a very firm yes, chances are you’ll be on the couch Motte-posting instead of exercising. Or maybe you want to eat healthier. The standard advice is stop buying junk food and instead buy the healthy stuff. The reason is that inertia will work in your favor here. You’ll be hungry and all the food in your home is healthy, you don’t necessarily want carrot sticks, but getting potato chips means getting in the car, driving in traffic to the store, walking to the chip aisle, buying the chips, paying, driving through traffic back home before you can finally eat them. The extra effort isn’t worth it most of the time, so carrot sticks it is.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
I think this is a textbook case of the wisdom of keeping things that will be addictive as hard to ge5 as possible. Sports gambling in a casino might not be so terrible. The steps necessary to get to a casino for any sort of gambling serve as an important brake on the behavior. The fact that such gambling can now but done using stored credit card information on a device that is carried in the pocket makes it almost impossible for anyone with the proclivity to addiction to ever have control. And this is true of other potentially addictive behaviors— if you have your addiction always available, you can’t easily say no to it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
I’m not sure it’s naughty thoughts so much as a deep need for a cause to fight for. For most people the dominant issue is boredom in some sense. There’s no greater thing in most people’s lives than going to work and coming home. It’s a bit empty and quite boring. At the same time our culture has been heavily promoting the idea of heroes saving the world. We’re part of the culture of the spectacle and our dominant way of interacting with the outside world is screens. We’re seeing a movie and want to be the heroes of the movie.
I think there is a rather large dose of narcissism involved here. They’re hoping for disaster so they can be a hero or heroine. I just don’t under the need to put yourself in the center of historic events. I’m hoping for a nice quiet, boring life. I can’t imagine that it’s going to even be helpful to anyone caught in the crosshairs to have the fight taken up by people doing it out of boredom.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
I mean it’s not for everyone because it requires major lifestyle changes. But for the right set of individuals, major lifestyle changes are possible. People do it all the time. Immigrants leave their homes and businesses and families behind and move to places with alien cultures. People join the military which is a huge change from civilian life. Such major changes aren’t for everyone, but even modest changes can be accessible to most people. It’s harder than most people think, but it’s perfectly doable.
That seems a broad question. There are CEOs who are merely occupying a chair and collecting the salary. It happens in just about any position. There are also people who work their butts off innovating and improving life for the whole country who are taking risks to do so. I wouldn’t begrudge the second set a thing, and furthermore I think being keen to confiscate wealth on the theory that the first type is more common than the second ends up doing great harm as it prevents the second group from working effectively.
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