MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think this is a large part if the issue. Even those who are hired to stop theft in a venue are for all intents and purposes forbidden to do their jobs, often by the fear of lawsuits or other reprisals. This makes criminals much less worried about getting caught, and much more likely to resort to crime as the best option. Even cops are often forced to simply watch until the crime has been done and the criminal has gotten away before being allowed to act. With such policies, those who don’t want to be victims of crime need to basically defy the laws in order to protect themselves and others and frankly their businesses.
Which is where this is going to end up, sooner or later. People fed up with being victimized will take it upon themselves to administer justice, and no matter what the laws actually say, people will be armed. That’s what happens when the law doesn’t protect people for whatever reason. The common people arm themselves and protect themselves.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think you’re neglecting the need to carry the weaponry around town and the need to not look like a threat to police. I also expect a spear would be difficult without training.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Except that every civilization that has fallen in the past believed exactly that about themselves. The Romans believed themselves civilized and different from the barbarians of the past and those current barbarians around them. The Greeks thought the same of themselves, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Turks, etc. if you’d have walked the streets of any of those cities, they would have been pretty sophisticated and full of well educated people with a good bit of division of labor, lavish entertainment systems, good roads and communication systems. We can do what they did with muscle power by using machines. We have electricity and computer and robots — which we use to do what the Romans did with slaves.
And I think honestly that no civilization, even one a million times more advanced than we are today is exempt from history. History doesn’t stop, and a civilization that ignores reality long enough will find itself again facing the iron laws of physics and mathematics and biological realities. And this is the fundamental problem that civilizations face— eventually you build up a system that doesn’t work when pushed up against reality.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I don’t think it’s un fixable. It’s just that we need to build those things into society in a constructive way rather than decrying any visible manifestations of masculinity as fundamentally disordered. There are lots of options: full contact sports, hunting, martial arts, perhaps in the near future space exploration or building undersea colonies. Telling a boy with a bent toward masculinity to play rugby or take karate channels the energy into things that are good for male bonding and health.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think there’s another reason for the environmental and student loan gap between men and women. It’s the level of interaction with the economy that drives those divisions. For a man his interaction with the economic system is “I have to get a good job or be a failure.” This makes men a lot less willing to slow the economy for the environment, and much more likely to choose economically viable majors. For a woman interaction with the economy isn’t about success and survival, it’s about prestige in some sense. They don’t have to care about the money as much (that’s their husband’s job) so they tend to cluster in aspirational positions and fun arty jobs and so on. Those jobs aren’t needed and aren’t necessarily subject to the constraints of the government. They also don’t pay that well, despite women getting 4-year degrees to qualify for them. So women want out from under the loans, obviously. And because they’re not doing work that would be harmed by the government enforcement of environmental regulations, they don’t need to stop them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were both written from the point of view of the children involved and as such do not make a good case for the adults of that era not caring about education or any ther opinion.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’ve often felt the same. The decline in standards started long before DEI existed— if you look at attitudes toward education and achievement, up until the 1950s it was just expected by society that you’d work hard in school and at your job. And I think a good chunk in the USA’s decline started with including ADA kids in mainstream classrooms. Because of that, they had to begin adjusting standards downward to allow kids with IQs in the 70s to graduate with the rest of their class. Add in the rise of the educational Karen who’s going to the principal to get her kid’s grade raised to preserve GPA and you just can’t keep standards high.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
If they bother to show the competition. Of late most of the competition isn’t even aired. They instead choose to air feel good “overcoming adversity” stories until it’s time for the top contenders an the American athlete to go. Gymnastics is going to be a giant hug box, and so will swimming until an American is in the heat. At least things like archery, weightlifting, synchronized swimming, and rhythmic gymnastics are obscure enough that they’ll show the competition.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I tend toward the prescriptivist end of things simply because if words don’t have fairly solid definitions, any sort of communication between groups is difficult or impossible. If we don’t mean the same thing when using the same word, if I mean “race supremacist” when I say “racist” and you mean “not specifically dismantling white privilege”, we aren’t communicating effectively here. And either we begin inserting potted definitions in our writing, or we accept that the other person is going to take you to mean the worst possible thing.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
The Olympic Games have gotten worse every iteration. The coverage is so bad that it’s nearly unwatchable. The coverage barely bothers with competition and has been steadily replacing the sports with ever longer and more maudlin stories about how the poor athlete had to overcome so much to even make the team. Most of the opening ceremony coverage thus far has been various celebrities, none of whom have anything to do with the Olympics and many of whom are no even remotely athletes.
I think honestly the only reason I’m in is to catch the obscure sports that most people don’t care about when they put them on minor cable networks or YouTube or something. Fencing is fun to watch and doesn’t get enough ratings to warrent ruining with biographies instead of showing the matches.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think to be a “nerd” in the past required a commitment that served as an effective barrier to entry that allowed the social misfits the ability to build a culture around weird stuff that doesn’t really work anymore. To be an anime fan before Crunchyroll required learning to stream from the web, likely learning Japanese to dub or sub them for the community if not simply to watch the show itself. If you wanted to be a super fan of a show, you had to find that trivia and memorize it. That doesn’t exist now because nerd media and hobbies are normal now and Nerds in the old school sense are too weird to be tolerated by the normies that now dominate those things.
I don’t count most fandoms as nerdy in the 21st century as truly nerdy. It’s mainstream now and trying to compare the fandoms of the 21st century to nerd culture from the 1990s. A niche interest naturally changes upon entering the mainstream.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
It’s not a bad game, but it’s mostly a network thing for business people that caught on with aspirational people because rich business people play it. The reason the rich like it is because the high cost of entry (equipment, greens fees, cart rentals) tend to keep plebs away. And because it takes several hours to play a game, you can use it to do business deals in private without having to worry too much about people you don’t want in on those deals finding out about it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think it’s usually better in the case of bad habits to jump ahead before the point of having to figure out if you’re one of the ones that won’t have a major problem simply because digging out from a problem is orders of magnitude harder than stopping before it happens. An alcoholic is compulsively looking for his drink and will look for excuses to get away with drinking. Someone with a bad habit still has control.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think it’s got a lot to do with how liberals like to take advantage of meta spaces that people use to talk about stuff. Most conservatives I know have almost no interest in the meta game of their hobby unless they have a specific question. A gamer looking for help in a game or wanting better gear for their sport pops in, asks the question and leaves. So the people who sit around talking about the activities all day would tend to be liberals and thus be better equipped to enforce their wills on the hobby or at least the hobby meta game.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Part of the problem with using GDP and U3 unemployment numbers is that it really doesn’t capture the truth of the economy. If you’re not rich enough to be upper class, the economy isn’t all that great for you. Grocery and gas prices have gone up by a lot since 2020, the pay that you take home hasn’t kept pace. We have a crisis in the housing market where most people under 40 have no chance of buying a house (which for most people is the only way to build generational wealth), a student loan crisis in which has people pay 20% of their salary for decades for a college degree that isn’t necessarily worth it, and so if you’re in a position where you need to get on the economic ladder, it’s a lot harder to get started.
The vibesession isn’t really vibes. It’s an anomaly in the data collection which doesn’t capture the economy of the prole classes who are really struggling to maintain what used to be a reasonable lifestyle. I think the gap between the reported measurements and the real economy are deliberate attempts to hide a bad economy from the public.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’ve noticed the same. It’s memes all the way down. I think a lot of it is down to a couple of things: decline in literacy and numeracy (because our schools no longer care if students can read or do math at grade level), shrinking attention spans, and the always online nature of the post 1990s generations.
I suspect the always present nature of the internet has flattened culture by quite a lot because of the nature of culture and idea generation. Ideas are always thought up in isolation, by either a single individual or a small group of people. The small group has an idea — a technology, a new take on art, a new concept, a solution to a social problem, etc. — and then develops this new idea in mostly private until it reaches a point where it can be shown to the world. But because the internet is always on and in everyone’s pockets, the idea is never completed before it’s shouted to the world. In politics, these are hot takes and memes. It’s pretty easy to see once you start paying attention to it, but almost none of the political discourse is about politics it’s about appearances. Kamala is stiff on stage. Trump sounds angry a lot. Or sometimes it’s about the horse race aspect— how a certain person is doing in the polls, whether or not a certain turn of phrase helps or hurts at the polls. These things are easy to talk about with little information. They don’t even really require thought. Just start posting image macros and hot takes. And because the internet moves fast, it’s probably better not to waste time developing a viewpoint because by the time you’re done, the moment will be over.
Second, attention spans are pretty much at goldfish level. Nobody wants to read the articles, and if they do, those articles need to be short and quick reads. A five page article or half hour podcast seems to be about the limit for most people, and it helps if the article is funny and the podcast host has a jokey style. A book or long form article on a single topic especially, if done in a serious way, will be dead on arrival. Nobody wants a tome on political topics, make it short and snappy. And it’s actually impossible to have a real discussion about politics because any take longer that “boo other team” is too long. And because a real understanding of an issue in politics requires a lot of time to learn, most people can’t or won’t do that. So all that’s left is trying to win voters by having spicy memes and clever phrasing in their one-liners.
Third is the schools. We’ve had problems for decades in teaching science and math. Schools are glorified daycares with disruptive behavior being the norm rather than the exception. Teachers are often blamed for not being able to handle disruptive students, while the administrators basically refuse to punish students who disrupt classes. Kids know this so why should they bother sitting around learning boring math when they can talk in class, or play games on their phones? The end result is a population that can barely function in life. You simply cannot understand anything in science and technology without a firm grasp of mathematics. And most people don’t. You can’t understand anything else if you can’t read at high levels. And most people function at a sixth grade level in reading. At such low levels of education, understanding even the simplest political issues (not personalities, issues) becomes almost impossible. If you want to understand a topic like the war in Ukraine, reading headlines about the war isn’t going to give you much insight. The region has a long history that includes the pre-Soviet era, the USSR, the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, expansion of NATO (despite promises not to), the color revolution, etc. it’s not something you can understand by performative renaming of Chicken Kiev to Chicken Kyiv, or by referring to Russians as orcs. If you want to understand abortion then you not only need to know biology, but the statistics of who is having abortions, when and why. This requires statistics and basic scientific knowledge.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
But I think that’s exactly how to defend the institution. The issue isn’t the shooting and the debate about the shooting, the issue is an attempt to discredit the institution by dragging an incident to the public square completely without context and using it to heavily imply that cops make a sport of this kind of thing. I think defending the institution requires making exactly that point. We, as the general public, have no background for understanding this. Even the participants are unknown. This woman might have a long history of attacking people. This might be a neighborhood full of drug users and dealers. There might have been things happening before the recording started.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think most of the interest is just how weird the election cycle is. Most people aren’t actually interested in politics, they’re interested in political drama. Ask these women to name five policies they actually want and who’s advocating for that policy, and 9/10 people couldn’t do that. They like politics when it’s juicy and nobody knows what’s going to happen next. It’s almost a soap opera at this point. And women tend to eat that up.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think on the other side that democrats spend so much time getting permission to actually do things that they mostly end up running out their own clock and doing nothing until after they’re losing seats in congress. The end result is that they get very little of their own agenda done and mostly end up being babysitters until the GOP wins. I think we could have lots of nice things — universal healthcare, working on the student loan crisis, affordable housing, better public transportation, fixing education, you name it. Instead they don’t and so nothing happens.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I haven’t personally seen any articles rewritten. Do you have any links
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Honestly that’s a bad question. I don’t think the court of public opinion is the place to try these kinds of issues. Most people don’t have the background to even begin to assess whether or not it’s a “good shoot” or not. So allowing the institution to be dragged before the court of public opinion to score political points is not going to do good, and in fact erodes the credibility and legitimacy of that institution. There’s no gain to be made for police to be judged by Monday Quarterbacks who have no understanding of the work involved and can sit around in air conditioned homes and offices playing the videos and debating what the officers who had mere seconds to decide on their actions and carry them out in a situation full of unknowns.
I think review boards are a better bet. They would know what the risks are, what the procedures are, and any other factors influencing the event. They could actually talk to the officers and dispatch and get a much firmer grasp of the entire situation. The best civilians can do is “they shouldn’t have done that” based on movies, tv shows, and political commentary.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’m on board with this. It’s a problem for all kinds of reform projects— you don’t know what that job is like and want to reform it based on silly ideas from academia that only work on people who behave in statistically correct ways.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I don’t think, “record everything so we can do a post-event follow-up” is an obscure thing. Virtually every form of decision making or security insists on keeping logs and records of everything that’s going on. I could go to any IT department in any company in the country and there will be logs of everything done on the servers. But somehow people protecting Trump just sort of forgot something that every company and police department drills into new hires. At some point “I didn’t think about recording data or keeping it,” seems less like an explanation and more like an excuse.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Maybe related to Moneypenny.
To me it’s condescending and frankly an insult (nb I’m not a white guy). It’s saying more or less that you’re afraid of being less of a man if you support Harris, but it’s okay because these totally normal white dudes (not men, dudes) are pro Harris. You can support her without turning in your white dude card. That’s really a weird thing to say to someone. It seems to imply that white men are deciding who to support solely on the basis of what other white men would think about them for holding those views and not because they actually believe in things.
Imagine a similar ad of “Black guys for Trump”. You’re black, and you would support Trump, but you’re afraid you’ll be less of a black man if you openly support Trump. And since you base your entire political stance on the public opinions of other black men around you, rather than actually thinking about your opinions, you need us to tell you that it’s okay to like Trump even if you’re a black man.
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