MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I think in a lot of cases, it’s a set of cultural norms that drive all three.
First of all, most high achievement societies tend to have a culture of hard work and value their high achieving people. When society promotes things like learning science and maths and building things and creating new businesses and so on obviously everyone seeks status and they want to learn, invent and build as well. When high status people like good art, then artists arise to create it. And even in behavior, when high status people choose to not associate with vulgar ideas, fashions, music and art, it becomes unfashionable to like that stuff as well.
Second, most high achievement societies tend to not mollycoddle failure as much as we do. If you aren’t trying to make it, the rest of us aren’t going to do it for you. If you want it you work for it. Modern society just doesn’t do this anymore, in fact quite the opposite— we pay quite handsomely for lack of effort and doing horrifically self destructive things and making terrible life decisions. A guy who does drugs and plays video games all day won’t miss a meal. If you have six different baby-daddies, you still get lots of help from the rest of us to live life.
Third, there’s a lot more effort put into keeping the marketplace of ideas free from promoting bad memes. Up until the 1990s, TV and movies were much more reluctant to make positive role models of people doing stupid things. You wouldn’t find heroines who had sex with random men. You wouldn’t see heroes doing drugs.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
They learn to obey on two conditions. First that the law is actually enforced to a meaningful degree. Second, that the fines are high enough to feel pain when paying it. Of course even with speed cameras, it tends to work literally how you describe it — people do slow around enforcement zones. Once it’s known there’s a speed check via cop or camera, people slow down there — and go as fast as they can get away with everywhere else. There are roads with a speed limit of thirty where everyone goes 60 — except for the end of the month when the cops enforce the law.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
It’s kinda hard to tell. One advantage that mitigated the damage alcohol does is the notion of alcoholics and drinking too much being bad. Everyone is pretty much aware that drinking 3+ days a week and more than 2 in a sitting is probably a sign of problems. With cannabis, you can tome up every single day and not think you’re addicted. There is no point where even your pot smoking buddy will tell you to get help.
Tbf, the same is true of gaming and screens (which can absolutely be addictive). We simply haven’t yet put up guard rails around th3 behavior to prevent people from gett Seriously addicted.
Okay.
I’m less and less in favor of libertarian ideas than I was before. There are some behaviors that are harmful to society even if done behind closed doors because the pathologies they cause or enable tend to be a net drain on resources. Drug use is a big one, which is being made more obvious by the recent legalization of marijuana. But the same can be said of both the consumption and production of porn, the glorification of overconsumption and consumerism, and the normalization of ignorance.
There is an actual fate. Blank slates and infinite possibilities are both absurd lies we tell ourselves because we can no longer tolerate the notion of limits to ourselves and others around us. The results have been a disaster. We teach kids to want things that they won’t be able to achieve and then they get stuck with the horrific realization at 25 that they will have lifelong consequences for believing that junk we told them in school and on TV. It also creates social problems as those who were promised a future in the now over saturated elite ranks agitate for what they were told was a birthright, and at the same time the low status jobs go unfilled because those who should be doing those jobs went for elite jobs. Or we tell women to girlboss which, frankly only maybe 5% of women can even be middling good at, and get shocked when it means that women aren’t filling the traditional female jobs or having kids.
Crime is only deterred by the certainty and harshness of punishment. Compassion is nice, but what it teaches criminals is that there are no consequences to doing serious crimes. The results are that areas of the city where criminals are most active become too dangerous to live or work in. And this harms those too poor to flee. What those areas need is over-policing, harsh punishment for first time offenders, and zero tolerance for crime no matter what the criminal’s past is. When people don’t have reason to fear the lawman, the law doesn’t exist, and eventually you have people forced into defending themselves.
Most of the wokeness in schools and Hollywood is a result, not a cause of the decline of those institutions. We aren’t teaching that just because the state says to. We teach it because we have lost the institutional ability to teach math, science, reading and writing. Test scores on those subjects are not good, and a ten minute conversation with even college graduates shows a shocking level of ignorance about the world outside of their bubble. Unless you’re a STEM student, chances are that you know less about the outside world than their high school educated grandparents at the same age. In the arts, I suggest the same thing — the complexity of characters, plots and dialogue have fallen quite a bit from the kinds of things people were writing a generation ago. Modern art frankly sucks at this point, as artists generally lack the skill to make representations of the real world.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I think this is the end game of our modern equity and hedonism mania. Unless everyone is exactly equal and exactly the same and has access to the same luxuries, remove the luxuries until everyone is miserable. For whatever reason Americans just cannot accept that some people have what others don’t. Most often it’s at least partly by choice— you’re not getting into college on merit because you didn’t actually do the work and now you can’t have the nice things that getting into a good school means. Or you chose not to have a traditional family. Fine, you do you. But that also means that you’re not going to easily find representation of whatever you chose to do instead because most people get married and have kids and businesses cater to the majority. Or maybe you want to Quiet Quit. Okay, but if I work and start doing better than you, you chose that.
I think the opposite needs to happen. Rewards should go to people making and doing useful things. More inventors more great students, more scholarship, more opportunities. And I think it will encourage more people to put in the effort to accomplish something meaningful and useful.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
I don’t think that’s true, because this is something that absolutely hits the sensibilities of the PMC who have been basically able to ignore the problem because it’s not affecting them. Pets are in many parts of the PMC class a very sensitive point. They don’t have to care about blue collar rednecks losing jobs to immigrants. They only have brief conversations with rednecks when they show up to fix the HVAC system or repair the roof or install a floor. But having an immigrant steal your beloved pet and eat it is something that the wine moms are going to be upset about. These are the same people who are trying to certify their pets as support animals so they can take them to Walmart. The idea of losing their pets in that way would be horrific.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
I find my writing much more clear and concise when I make a detailed outline first. It helps to get the thoughts out of your head and onto paper where you can begin to fit them together in a more coherent way. I tend to find myself writing in rambling ways when I’m tap dancing around either something I’m not sure about, or that I don’t quite understand. If you ramble in an outline or in scribbles on a piece of paper, you’ll tend to find those things quickly and you can research them more or think more deeply about the point you’re trying to make.
I find Jordan Peterson’s guide (https://www.mr-sustainability.com/internal-stories/2021/jordan-b-peterson-essay-writing-guide) rather useful for nonfiction, and if you want to do fiction, get a good beat sheet ( I use Harmon’s 8 step story circle) and use character sheets from RPGs or the like.
To cut it very short, everyone’s unedited prose is rambling. If you want to be better at writing, you need to learn to plan before you write and edit afterwards. Pantsing in either fiction or nonfiction doesn’t really work unless you’re writing a zero draft you intend to basically cannibalize for good ideas to put into your real writing. Or at least that’s how it ends up for me. I’m sure there are a few natural writers who can actually pants a coherent piece on their first try. It’s rare, and so unless you’re already pretty good at writing in your chosen genre, it’s better to learn to structure your writing first.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
I agree with this. People who don’t like the police tend to assume that the alternative to over-policing is peace. But if the cops cannot stop crime (or more properly are not permitted to use tools at their disposal to effectively stop crime) the alternative is this falling on the general public. Which has none of the advantages of using police (who can be controlled to some degree because they’re deputized to enforce actual laws, and to respect the rights of citizens) and thus becomes a problem of every person in the general public carrying a weapon and deciding based on only concern for themselves and their families whether or not to use that weapon. Vigilante Justice will become the norm, to approval of normal people who want law and order so that they can safely go to the store or even to the park without fear. They’ll approve because they don’t want their stuff stolen and will protect it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
Isn’t that just social signaling with extra steps? If I really truly believe that something is an existential threat to humans, I’m not going to let petty politics on other subjects get in the way of fixing it. If I believe that AGI is going to kill humanity, I’ll throw everything else aside to deal with that threat. Work with fascists and communists, give up on other goals for a time — or even be willing to have some progress rolled back, even democracy might be on the table. If the choice is an absolute nightmare government— no human rights, open racism, the environment gets destroyed— but we avoid extinction, then it might well be worth it. You can clean up those other problems if you survive, and if you don’t survive none of those other things actually matter.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
Honestly, because of the education system in the USA, where most schools don’t teach anything like epistemology (critical thinking as taught in American schools means memorizing a list of fallacies and learning to notice them in a piece of writing), reading and math are both pretty bad. And our science education is so bad that people don’t understand germ theory.
The second thing is that the media covers elections as horse racing. There’s much more emphasis on covering how the debates moved the polls or who won the debate than anything the candidates actually said (except for the zingers and insults, of course). We aren’t talking about what to do about any problems we actually face. There’s no talk about reducing street crime, drugs, fix the roads, schools, mental health, cost of living, and lots of other very serious issues. Instead, it’s coconut tree memes and “those guys are weird”.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
It will be a challenge to be more insane or less competent. Even with the repression, if you lived in a state where crime was low, people were prosperous, and where there was high achievement? Or would you rather freedom in a place where you have to go out armed because of crime, where food and housing eats up most people’s pay, and we see our nation doing great things?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
I agree. I think we’re in a serious decline. I’m not sure how it ends, but I think this is the last generation where the Western world rules the world. Whether or not it means a thousand years of darkness — I think not.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
To be honest, the decline of American culture and democracy. That these are the best minds we can produce to run the country should be deeply troubling. At best we’re looking at a clown show, two candidates who think in sound bites and have no actual ideas. At least neo-reactionaries have ideas. I’m not fully on board, but they can generally tell you what kinds of things they want to do, why, and why this would work. That coming from someone who isn’t a neo-reactionary, but is more or less interested in fixing problems. I’m anti-pothole is not a plan. But we have two people who think in sound bites trying to convince an audience of uneducated dolts to clap along.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
We have been declining in state power for decades.
We cannot bring crime rates down, and in fact, in major cities it’s entirely possible for gangs of criminals to show up to a store in broad daylight, carrying trash bags and loot the store. Large areas of major cities are no-go zones for law abiding citizens. In urban centers, the received wisdom is “don’t lock your car, because you are going to get your window smashed when the people come to steal out of your car.
Schools at least in America suck at education. Kids rarely graduate reading at grade level, and very seldom can high school graduates do math on grade level. This is one reason that so many jobs that “don’t require college “ require a degree — at least you still need to be literate and numerate to graduate college. The only things school even tries to do are push propaganda, act as state daycares, and as social activities for teens through sports and clubs.
As far as Covid goes, I mean convincing people to work from home in their PJs doesn’t particularly strike me as high state capacity. In fact, at least in the USA, it crumbled rather quickly once people decided to not comply and to protest.
Personally, I believe that the West is in serious decline and may well be headed towards a dark age. We are basically coasting off of the capacity built by our great grandparents and generations before them. We are uneducated, lazy, undisciplined, and are not investing in our own future. I keep looking at the candidates we have for president— Trump, Biden, Harris, and RFK, and I can’t convince myself they could manage a Taco Bell.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10d ago
I think it’s more of a benefit of the doubt thing. Most critics of police are people who have very little experience in those kinds of roles. They’re giving an opinion based on the aesthetics of the situation, where it looks bad on video.
Here’s the thing though. While shootings are rare, the fact is that guns in the USA are so common that every encounter must be treated as though the subject is armed and prepared to use their weapon. Which throws a lot of good faith out the window. Guy won’t roll down the window, especially a tinted one — it must be assumed that behind the tinted glass the suspect has and is preparing to use a gun. If the suspect reaches for something it must be assumed to be a weapon. Reaching for your waistband again, a cop cannot assume anything other than this is reaching for a concealed weapon. Asking someone to assume good faith doesn’t work when being wrong is potentially lethal.
Then you have the officer’s gun which precludes a lot of the silliness of people suggesting that cops use Judo to put people on the ground. Except that this puts the officer and his gun within reach. If he doesn’t have full control of both hands during the encounter, the suspect can simply grab the gun and shoot the officer. Deescalation can’t be done unless the officer has complete control of the scene.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11d ago
I mean we’re a bad sample simply because we’re tuned into political issues and discussion. Keep in mind that outside of the too-online left and right, most people’s interactions with politics happens in spurts — the conventions, the debates, and maybe they catch an interview or two on a talking head show. They have other interests and are too busy doing other things to really pay close attention to who’s doing what outside of the big show events. Which means that this debate is likely the first time these normies will have really paid attention to what either one of those candidates has to say. This means it’s a make or break for Harris who hasn’t publicly tried to run for office since 2020 when she failed pretty hard.
The media can help, but it’s not going to completely erase a bad performance especially 2 months from the polls. If the normies aren’t following closely, they might not see her interviews with friendly journalists.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11d ago
Alternatively, they could “not care” whether the story is true because they believe that mainstream sources would never bother to check the story. Thus there’s no way to fact check the story at all from sources of record. So if the people telling those stories believe that the story is too political to deal with honestly, why “care” if it’s true. The media dug its grave a long time ago and is only worth reading if you want to know what the elites want you to think.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11d ago
I don’t think that’s necessarily true.
First of all, like or hate Trump, he has political views and ideas and he’s been talking about them. She has said very little about what she wants to do. And I think unless she has something she wants to do, is just going to come off as weak. He wants to round up millions of illegal immigrants. What does she want to do here? If he talks about his plan and adds in the crazier stories about what immigrants are doing (for example killing ducks in Ohio parks) and it’s going to be hard to just vibe it. Likewise inflation. Talking in vague generalities isn’t going to make groceries or gas cheaper. Again, if he can point out those stories where this hurts ordinary Americans, she can’t exactly get away with not having a plan.
As far as the bad performance being recoverable, I’m not so sure just because of how close the election is. We vote November 5, two months from now. That’s a pretty small window and probably not enough time for memory to fade. People were talking about Biden’s bad debate for a month or more. I grant that his obvious Sun-downing is probably worse than anything she would ever do, but still it’s not easy to just forget an obviously bad debate. So she kinda has to go for broke here. If she can’t convince people t9 even consider her as anything other than an empty head, she’s not only not going to close the deal, but might lose some Never Trumps.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
It makes sense, and really I think there’s other “thermostats” in our brains. Like I tend to think of maturity as somewhat calibrating a responsibility and time-preference thermostat to near adult levels. There are some adults that for various reasons end up with theirs somewhat lower than the adult level. You’ll find these people not doing things that need to be done, doing things that put themselves or others in bad situations, or mishandling money or property.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
Sort of. If helplessness is going to make an event traumatic, I can easily point to plagues, mothers dying in childbirth, famines, etc as all being particularly traumatic. Imagine being 10-12 and seeing baby’s first be heading in town with dad. Or your mom has a baby and bleeds to death while you watch. Or the Black Death killing a third of your village. And knowing that if you got it, they’d basically shut you in the house and brick you inside entombed in the house. Death in the medieval and renaissance world was common and brutal. Only maybe modern combat comes close, and even then, I suspect that the way normal deaths happen in modern times make combat harder. Death before 65 is a black swan for us.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12d ago
Counterpoint being that the entire life of a subsistence farmer was high stress, fear of death and helplessness. Crop failures, disease, crime, and wars were pretty common. And if the crops are failing in your village, you know you’ll be at minimum very hungry over the winter, and people die around you and probably members of your own family could meet the same fate. Nothing you can do.
A huge difference for modern WEIRDs is that we approach the world from the perspective that life is supposed to be good with the troubles I mentioned (death, disease, starvation, warfare, etc.) seen as outliers and black swan events. And at the same time, the more ancient approach to life was that bad stuff happening is normal, and it’s best to just get on with it. Your fate was your fate. And feelings, while they existed and were acknowledged, weren’t the same focal points that they are today.
I’m personally fairly confident that our modern WEIRD approach to the negative parts of life are creating and driving a lot of mental illnesses, especially in teenagers. We teach, in my view, the exact wrong approach to trauma, and a very inflated view of what can cause trauma. Part of it is just how much we live life on easy mode, which interferes with the development of mental toughness. A terrible experience for a young adult in a modern, western city is likely to be fairly minor compared to the same child in Tudor England. Add in that we tell our young that bad experiences cause trauma and trauma causes permanent mental health problems. And we teach kids to focus on feelings and to set hopes very high.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14d ago
In the modern era when much of traditional social structures had been drastically reduced and there was little social stigma to women having recreational sex and not becoming pregnant. After we created the modern welfare state, lots of people decided that labor wasn’t for them.
I think given that, no, Victorian women would not be choosing not to have babies because their status would increase as a mother, particularly of a son. This was even more pronounced in earlier generations. Culture matters. Our culture says “careerist women are superior” and women do what they can to meet that standard.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14d ago
I’ve never seen anything that points directly to Trump knowing about these things. When the Russian hacks were happening in 2016, it was clear that Russia had state security reasons to not want Hillary in office. And for that matter pushing any division they could to weaken an adversary. But what never seems to materialize is a direct link to specifically Trump. Putin never seemed to talk to Trump, they had aligned interests perhaps, but it’s odd to me that the entirety of “Trump colluded with Russia” stories hinge on one off the cuff joke made when he was asked about it — and anyone watching knew he was joking. But he “asked Russia to hack”. It was sarcasm deliberately turned into evidence.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14d ago
I mean I’m not interested in them except as I’m interested in knowing what they’re doing and they occasionally pop up in my feed. I’m not sure how one finds these groups, but they exist. But the point remains — marching about on the streets of a city in golf shirts and khaki pants is not a very useful metric for effectiveness. LARPing in the woods with camo and paint guns isn’t a good measure either. Both groups undoubtedly call themselves militias, but it’s completely unclear that they meet standards of effectiveness that would make them operationally effective in doing anything other than varying forms of acting tough and scaring liberals who are generally frightened of pseudo-military groups prancing about in uniforms with guns.
Again, keep in mind that for all the posturing, the marching, the calls for civil war or unrest, and claims that the government was stolen, these groups haven’t really done anything. And up until they decided that they should start making their members ruck in the rain or cold to purge themselves of unserious people, it’s was perfectly reasonable to assume they have no intention of a serious armed conflict. They’re only now doing this, and the idea that they’re all going to seriously purge their ranks this way seems odd, as they haven’t so far, and it seems that it hadn’t organically occurred to them that war isn’t like LARPing in the woods.
I’m not super worried.
I disagree. The problem with legalizing vices on the premise that there’s no immediate victim creates social problems that the general public will often have to pay to fix damages. If we allow people to drive around drunk, obviously the risk of eventually hittIng someone is a serious problem and one that could be prevented by simply not allowing people to drive cars while intoxicated. This also avoids the problem of the state having to support the medical care of the driver and whoever he hit for a good long time.
With other vices, it can be a problem for much the same reason. If I’m high I am unlikely to be able to keep a job, much more likely to injure themselves or other people, more likely to be abusive (depending on the drug). These are burdens on the state that the taxpayers are going to have to pay to clean up.
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