MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Actually as a sociological phenomenon, I find UFOs rather fascinating. More properly, I find the changes in the descriptions and speculations about UFOs and their missions to dovetail pretty clearly with our understanding of physics and our desire for contact with the spirit world once we ditched traditional religions. When we were deep in the Cold War, these things were very physical phenomena with scientific and very real things like computers and engines and were made of materials at least something like what was used in planes. They wanted to prevent nuclear war. Once the Cold War was over, they took on a much more of a spiritual mission, to enlighten humans for the shift in consciousness. They stopped being so physical and mechanical and started to resemble angels or spirits or pagan gods. I suspect a widespread understanding of the speed limit of the universe and how long a light speed trip from across the galaxy would actually take as well as the failure of SETI to find any signals fueled the change as well. Them being actual spacemen no longer fits what we know of the universe. Them being inter dimensional spirit beings does.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I often think that “hiding one’s power level” often drives the narrative forward. If you have every conservative hiding their power level, and every liberal flaunting theirs, it’s going to keep the myth alive.
To be honest, at best I think most “smart liberals” are actually over educated mid wits who know how to game the education systems to get good grades and pats on the head from teachers. The problem, obviously is that one can grade grub and be a moron. In fact, it probably helps. To win that came, you have to be smart enough to figure out the answers the teachers want you to give, and have the skills to research and produce a paper giving the correct answer. On the other hand, you have to be dumb enough to accept these narrative at face value and to have few original thoughts in your head. To me, this is actually a great tell of lesser intelligence. Just ask them what they disagree with the authorities on. Ask them to come up with an answer where there’s no establishment answer. They absolutely have no idea how to do it. They cannot think through a problem and come up with a real answer to the question.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
"Legalizing gay marriage was not just 'allow different people to do their own thing' it was, 'change the basic way every child is taught about the basic institutions and building blocks of life.'"
I keep thinking about the rot here, and I think it goes back to in a certain sense that modern WEIRD people have a really hard time — for whatever reason— settling serious boundaries around things that should be obvious. Gay marriage is the last in a very long line of those kinds of decisions, but far from the only one. We can’t really say “no” on deconstruction of our heritage, the denigrating of our heroes, or the insistence that other people’s history or culture be taught alongside our own. Even among ourselves, for whatever reason, it’s rude in most circles to criticize others for casual sex, excessive drinking, or drug use. It’s really a strange thing that doesn’t happen in other places.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean thinking about how we define political eras, it’s almost always the political forces that are making changes or doing big things that get the notice of historians. Lincoln is important because he ultimately freed the slaves and saved the union. Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts. FDR did the New Deal. Even in the revolutionary era, the ones that got eras named after them were the ones making things happen.
Trump is somewhere between Napoleon and Teddy Roosevelt. He believes in things he wants to do, he wrestles with the institutions of American government to get things done. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks about his ideas. That’s the kind of thing that gets your name on an era of American politics. Doing things that leave a mark on society.
Kamala has some hype. But if you look at her, she doesn’t have any influence, no big signature ideas, no changes to the direction of the country, nothing really to set her own mark on the institution. She’s just a run of the mill democrat.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think politics is exhausting. And I’ve said before, if the systems were working as designed working fairly well, I really think most people would be really tuned out most of the time. It’s just that I believe that we’re in the late Empire period of the Anglican-American Empire (which I content started with the sinking of the Spanish Armada) so none of our systems actually work properly. We’ve become a decadent society and our state’s competence and capacity have shrunk enough that you are stuck trying to wrestle a system you into something like competence just to get the basic things done. And I don’t think it will get better quickly because most of our systems (including BTW the institutional church) are weakened and often barely functional.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean how much Islam is going to change the calculation here. Depending on the rest of the makeup of Europe, 11% can be a good sized voting block. Especially if the rest of the population isn’t vocally pro-Israel (and secular people generally are at best indifferent and at worst pro-Palestine). That 11% is laser focused on Israel, and will absolutely insist that any party that wants its vote must support Palestine over Israel. If the rest don’t care enough to make this conflict the center of their voting decisions, then Europe will likely support Palestine simply to capture the Islamic Vote.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Look I’ll just cut in here and say that really the reason I worded that name as I did was that I was aware of the fact that the name had been changed, but wasn’t precisely sure what it had been changed too. The sources of the information were still calling the base Fort Bragg. I figured that was more clear than googling the new name and having everyone confused about which base I’m referring to as most people would likely know Ft. Bragg is an American military base in North Carolina. If I’m creating confusion, I’ll edit if needed. I tend to go for clarity over anything else.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I just can’t believe she’s the focus on a movement. Trump definitely is, as he represents something different from the status quo. In pretty much every way imaginable, Trump is just built different from other political leaders. He isn’t lawyered in his speech, mincing words and using “technically the truth” statements to lie. He’s loud, proud and brash. He’s not an institutionalist. He does things and if the state apparatus doesn’t like it, so much the worse for the deep state. That in a nutshell is why Trump ever got so big — he’s not like anyone else in the political class, he doesn’t act, think or speak like they do. He’s his own thing.
Kamala is the status quo. The biggest difference for her is her race/class and her age. If she were a white male democrat, nobody would be excited for her. She’s not special, she talks and acts like anyone else in the field. Her positions are the same as Biden’s, except girlboss.
Future history will consider this the age of Trump, because like him or not, he’s the zeitgeist of our era. He’s the one calling the shots whether by advocating things or by causing extreme reactions in his opponents.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean it depends on the propaganda. If they can continue to paint the GOP as Nazi authoritarians who hate minorities and women, I think you could keep most immigrants on the D side. Most are coming from regimes that are authoritarian in some form or another and aren’t keen to have that happen here.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
You don’t have to literally go there to make a speech. Hell you don’t even need to leave the resort your in (he’s on vacation). Any hotel will have some sort of conference room, and you could easily give a speech from there. Just something reassuring the people that he’s actually working on the problem. The thing he actually did, not only isn’t reassuring, but honestly gives the opposite impression. If he’s only in touch on this issue by phone for 2 hours, how can that make a person living through that confident in the response? Really, entire towns destroyed is worth stopping your vacation for two whole hours? It’s almost a show of indifference to give an answer like that.
For that matter, I’m sure you can get a computer with connection to the White House and check in at some point.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
The thing is that such a standard is literally impossible as long as you actually have a death sentence. And as it stands, the death penalty has been purposely turned into a very expensive, time consuming, and private process that because of the time between sentence and execution it has been neutered of any deterrent effects. And while I think the death penalty should only be used in extreme cases, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it such that it has at least some positive effect of deterring people from committing those particularly bad crimes we’re using it on.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think we’re lead by incompetent people. We just plain lack the ability to solve any of these kinds of problems. Biden gave an interview and claimed to be leading from the beach because he’d been on the phone with Homeland Security for two hours. That’s barely trying in my opinion. What amazes me is that we have a lot of disaster relief programs out of Fort Bragg (or whatever it’s been renamed to) and nobody seems interested in using those resources at all.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean sure a lot of people ended up believing it was fake, but to take their perspective, the government was pretty much lying about everything all the time. They said as a slogan that it was “2 weeks to flatten the curve.” After 3-4 months with no end in sight, the people saw that as a lie. The messaging on masks did two complete separate 180s. Masks don’t work until they do, except ooops they were wrong and it actually doesn’t work. The vaccines will prevent you from getting Covid, until it was obvious they didn’t, at which point they protected other people, until it was obvious that this wasn’t happening either. Then the vaccines were supposed to be based on a place that didn’t mutate much. Except that that section does mutate a lot and now you need a booster every year for the new variant. And so after the fourth or fifth obvious falsehood, it’s not really that surprising to me that people who lost their freedom because they obeyed a government that lied to them a lot might start questioning the virus that’s at the bottom of this whole thing. They’re under arbitrary rules that are quite often not only making them miserable, but costing them money and opportunities, with no end in sight, with moving goalposts and lots of guilt tripping over any questioning or noncompliance.
If the government wants the trust of the people, it must be trustworthy.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Just from my own perspective, I don’t think the problem was the initial reaction. The problem was that there was no real thought into what was going to be the sustainable solution to the need to slow spread while still giving people freedom and not destroying the economy. There were no end dates or mitigation mechanisms, no advice on what kinds of activities were high or low spread, or what types of environments were conducive to spread. So they just locked everything up indefinitely just to be sure and lied about the dangers so that the people were too scared of Covid to make rational decisions.
And to me that damned the whole thing. Nobody will trust a system that cannot be honest or upfront about dangers and trade offs and how the economy could actually function when nobody can leave the house without government permission. It further gave no criteria or end dates to the emergency. 2 weeks to flatten the curve became 2 months, than nearly 6 months. Because of all of this, the government simply lost all credibility, not just in health (and being Frank, no matter how bad the next pandemic gets, lockdowns are off the table, and good luck with vaccines) but in almost everything else. If the government lied about this in a power grab, what else are they lying about. (I personally think at least some of the popularity of Qanon and later election denial is down to the loss of trust that came out of the lockdown experience. People felt abused and lied to by their own government, and as such, conspiracy theories telling them the government was lying about other things and using its power to manipulate them into things that benefit them). That trust is unlikely to come back for at least a generation and maybe longer than that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’m not 100 percent sure of how bad this could be, no idea. But one thing to point out is that just because we’re about 4 years past a major pandemic, I suspect that things like this happen all the time, but don’t really turn into anything major. And so while I think watching this might be warranted, I think it’s much much too early to decide that this is the Next Big Thing.
The last major pandemic was in 1970s or so. The one before that was in 1918. And most other Viruses didn’t really turn into major world pandemics. We’ve had several iterations of this. A couple of versions of swine flu, a couple versions of bird flu, monkeypox, Ebola a few times. Running the health department as though every novel virus that shows a potential for human to human transmission as if it’s going to require global lockdowns is ridiculous.
I’ll also point out that our common flu viruses of the HxNx varieties are descended from bird flus so even if this bird flu starts spreading in humans, there’s likely to be at least some immunity simply because almost everyone has at some point been exposed to a related virus or gotten a flu shot (probably both). If you’re really worried, get the standard flu shot and you’ll likely have at least some protection.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I totally agree. I tend to find that as I choose the least processed version of whatever I’m eating, my ability to overeat goes down. Choose a baked potato over fries. Most people can easily down a supersized fries, but I don’t think you could eat the equivalent in a baked potato. It would be two medium sized potatoes. Same with a burger. If it’s not a highly processed one, it’s going to take less to satisfy you.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
If anything, the growing disdain with the policies of the Trudeau administration is revealing that when push comes to shove, and white progressives are asked to make material sacrifices to uphold and stick to their principles, they immediately step down from their high pulpit of moral superiority and inclusivity. There is no free lunch, and this is what it takes to ensure that marginalized groups can also get a slice of the pie; you cannot have your cake and eat it too by simultaneously demanding material equity and then crying when those same materials, resources, and opportunities are redistributed against your favour. This is the exact dynamic Liam Kofi Bright outlines in the previously linked paper, "White Psychodrama." White progressives should either put up, grin and bear the cost of the very same social justice they demanded through bloody cancellation and mob invective, or end the charade and shut the fuck up.
What I suspect in this case is something like what’s happening in the USA. The elites want the immigrants to drive up costs of goods (increased population leading to increased demand) and to hold down wages. This is how immigrants tend to improve the economy of the country they go to. On the one hand, as new arrivals, they’d need housing, and all the stuff that comes with it. They will need furniture, vehicles, clothes, shoes, kids need school supplies etc. probably toys. So the price of these things go up because suddenly you have doubled the size of the town and thus driven up demand. At the same time, their expectations for wages are dirt cheap— and this delights the business owners who can now bid down the cost of labor (and BONUS! Get points for your work to increase diversity) and even skimp on safety and health rules as third world countries have poor conditions and the workers aren’t going to complain about treatment that while bad by first world standards is wonderful for people used to poor conditions at the workplace. OSHA (and the Canadian equivalent) don’t exist in most developing countries.
So the benefits are the support depends very much on which side of the class divide you sit on. If you’re part of the investment class, immigration is net positive. The stocks will go up, GDP goes up, labor becomes cheaper and more compliant. If your on the working class side, your wages stagnate, your costs go up, your kids are denied opportunities for work (to make room for the cheaper and more compliant immigrant population who won’t complain or ask for raises) their schools spend more effort to teach immigrants English than getting your kids prepared for life after high school.
And there is the reason for the lack of support. It’s a battle between the beneficiary class who wants all these immigrants and the benefits they offer to their social class, vs the working class that all of this is happening too. They don’t like that their wages aren’t going up, or that the new immigrants are allowing dirty and dangerous conditions on the job. They don’t like the resources that should be going to the school computer lab instead being shunted to hiring scores of ESL teachers and textbooks written in whatever language the kids speak.
This sounds more like an indictment of young Canadians, their lack of skills, and their inability to compete in the marketplace with those who will do their exact same entry-level service job, except for lower pay, and for longer hours. Immigrants are hard-working, ambitious, and (possibly even literally) hungry for success. Their lack of access to said opportunities instills within them a greater work ethic and drive to succeed when they don't have the Bank of White Mummy and Daddy to catch them when they fall after their six-year all expenses paid academic career in Theatrical Non-Binary Basket Weaving fails to take off. Why should white Canadians feel that their white privilege of being born in a deeply racist country entitles them to continue upholding the institutions of racism by denying ethnic minorities a job that they can do just as well as a white? What entitles these already privileged whites to a job over minorities?
I think you have a wildly skewed idea of the kinds of people who live in small towns. These people don’t have the resources you think they do. They’re mostly working class. The immigrants are not taking the jobs of high skilled graduates, they’re taking jobs from the working class. And working class people don’t actually have the bank of dad to fall back on. So when they don’t get early work experience it’s an economic setback. Further, these people might be trying to support a family. The advantage immigrants have is that they’re cheap and compliant. They might work a bit harder, but the main thing is that they won’t ewww try to get better wages or conditions. They’ll work for peanuts and sleep 3-4 families to a house so they can live on $10 an hour. No first world labor can afford to work for that little, but now that we have immigrants, you can forget about your wages going up. But remember, if you’re not in favor of being underbid by imported labor, you’re a white privileged racist.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’m not sure how deliberate it is, but I find it kinda weird just how often the values of the elite just so happen to be things that are absurdly destructive when practiced by lower class people. Not getting and staying married, not working hard and striving at every chance, not avoiding drugs and alcohol, behaving wildly in general, and so on — all of these things will make it much harder for a poor person to gain wealth.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean yes certainty, but also temporal nearness. Having a situation where a guy sentenced in 2000 doesn’t have the sentence executed until 20 years later absolutely kills the deterrent effect of the execution because the time frame is longer than humans are biologically able to process. Even 5 years for most people is a vague “long time from now’ thing. And most criminals have shorter timeframes than the average person. And again, if you’re talking about a crime that happened two decades ago, most people have long since forgotten the crime.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/when-you-know-youre-impressive-just
FdB has a really interesting substack post up today about people downplaying their success after they got it. He is putting the irony and self-deprecation as a sort of humble brag, as a way to say “yes, I’ve achieved money and success and a family, but it’s all a joke.” I don’t quite agree with his thesis on why it happens that all of these rich and successful individuals are treating this sort of thing as a joke, something that doesn’t matter.
I’m suggesting that this meme might well be an attempt to protect oneself from others. And it serves two purposes. First, it paints the picture of a person who might well be on the loser’s side on things. After all, I get that I didn’t really earn that, so I’m not one of the stuck up people who think they’re better than the working class people who are not getting theirs. This is much like the old noble classes choosing to wear less ostentatious clothes and holding less decadent galas and parties. The losers, whether they earned the fate or not, are easily convinced to see displays of wealth as a target. It’s often good for the family longevity to avoid sending wealthy person signals.
The second reason is to create a layer of cultural mulch around the pathways to success. The truth is that nobody actually gets success without an extremely strong drive to strive for it. If you want your college degree to not be a very expensive but useless poster on your wall, you have to strive to form social networks, strive to get excellent grades, and strive to get work experience in your field to get into position to apply for a good job. And even after, you have to strive to get and keep a good job, or to get a business off the ground. You have to strive to keep up with the skills you need, and if you’re working for others, you need to be constantly looking for ways to upgrade your skills and get a better job. But here again, the meme suggesting that striving is a joke appears to be adaptive. If it’s all a joke you’re a fool to earnestly strive. And if you don’t strive, you’re not competing for the jobs. And they of course don’t need to worry that you will be the one applying for the next position they want. I think this is also why the media doesn’t like Tiger Mothers. Those women and their kids unironically believe that striving is good and that puts them in competition with their betters. The Asian kids who study more than you are trouble. And if white parents start doing this as well, it’s a problem.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean technically yes, as an Ace as well I have some interest in generally keeping the species alive. But at the same time, it hits different when it’s your own kin. I’m rather close to nieces and nephews, and when I think about their personal futures, the entire thing just hits different. I want my nephews to personally have the option of a good life full of nice things, love and happiness. Which changes how I answer very important questions. I am much more interested in curbing crime for example when I think about my nieces walking the streets of any major city. Or about guns for the same reason — I want my kin to be able to protect themselves from the evils that exist. I also don’t want to think about my nephews and nieces being taken to a story hour to be read to by a drag queen with a very strong interest in children.
In the abstract, it’s easy to justify letting people behave any way they wish in publiC. Of course that’s because in the abstract it harms no one. Until the public has to deal with the fallout or protect themselves from those who take their liberty too far.
I mean I totally agree with all of that, but I think there’s another huge problem in the sense that nobody, or very few people, seem willing to say that you can absolutely become addicted to food. The dominant idea is that it’s totally under rational control, under the premise that when you choose food you’re perfectly capable of choosing properly and that no other influences are at play. Or that the dominant reason people eat is because they are biologically hungry and therefore have no need to develop coping strategies or deal with underlying mental issues or traumatic experiences or bad coping mechanisms. In fact, quite often well meaning people tend to teach food as a cope. Giving a kid a lollipop after a painful injection is sort of teaching kids that the way to handle an unpleasant experience is to then treat yourself to sweets or food in general. And that’s just a one off. Sometimes you teach kids to do the same when it comes to any unpleasant experiences— eat something and feel better.
And as you mentioned, ads are everywhere. But even more, food itself (at least in the USA) is everywhere. Every public venue has food and drink available. Even public parks often have vending machines selling chips and cookies and sodas. Stores, even those where there’s no obvious connection to food, like hardware stores and craft stores always stock the chips, sodas, and cookies right next to the checkout. Imagine that for the smoker. Every place he goes, he sees cigarettes for sale, cheaply, and not even in a way that he has to ask for them or look for them. Just ready to be picked up and smoked.
I think until we really get the level of crisis and are willing to acknowledge just how addictive foods, especially those that are highly processed, can be, the public health crisis of obesity isn’t going to change. The psychological part has to be a part of this. If the women are using food to cope with something, that cannot change until you deal with that something which might be a really serious psychological issue like being an abuse or rape survivor.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
There are other problems with imprisonment for innocent people. A big one is that the state needs to have credibility on both ends. On the one hand (where the modern states fail IMO) is that it has the capacity and will to deal with actual crimes in a way that protects public order. When people have no reason to suspect that the government can and will deal with crime, you end up with various ad hoc solutions to crime that can escalate to the point of vigilante justice. On the other hand, a state that cannot reliably prosecute only the guilty or at least mostly the guilty (with the errors being mostly good faith mistakes) is one that loses public trust rather quickly. If I think that I’m going to be persecuted for thought crimes with a random prosecution, I’m not going to trust the police. You might not call on them and you might resist them. And the loss of trust is a detriment to stopping crime. This is why the defund movement is making crime worse. When you tell an entire population that the police exist to persecute them, they don’t cooperate and crime increases in that area. Then those people end up victimized by the criminals riding free because the cops are not trusted.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think this is mostly a result of sanitized coverage of the murders themselves. They simply don’t deal with the particular crime as brutal, in fact it’s usually pretty common to downplay those details in public. If the public saw the crime scene full of blood, gore, splatters of brain etc. they’d be in favor. Instead the victim was shot (passive voice), and didn’t suffer, and the scene was not that bad.
I’d argue that on a low level we’ve been worshiping AI and before that computers. The number of times I’ve seen someone ask AI a question and just assume AI is correct is pretty darn high. They’ll ask ChatGPT a question and post the answer as though this is all that’s needed to know the answer. That’s pretty close to divination— ask a question, get an answer from the gods and then just go with it. And before that, you could find the same thing with making computer models or researching on the internet. You’d get an answer from a computer analysis and never ask what assumptions are in the model, it was done on a computer after all. With punch cards and everything. It has to be right. Or once we had internet, any information found by Google search would be assumed correct. It’s just built in, I think, that if you think the box in front of you is intelligent, you assume it’s right and simply accept that what it says is true.
More options
Context Copy link