MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
No bio...
User ID: 1783
I mean honestly, I don’t think the press just started doing thing. I’ll be honest, I’ve near zero trust in the mainstream media as a truthful source of actual news. And I don’t think an apology fixes it. The issues are too deep for that, and they won’t change just because they promise to do better. I think at this point, the press need to clean house, top to bottom. Until then, I think it’s just reasonable to ignore the media and look for actual news.
I knew that they were lying about the polls when suddenly the “Keys” history professor showed up everywhere telling people how he’d never been wrong and only he could turn the keys. And if you paid attention, the keys he was talking about were either clearly false or manipulated to become true. Kamala was declared the incumbent, for one, which isn’t true. No major wars (just forget about Ukraine and Israel, both of whom were funding), a good economy (stop noticing the price of things). I felt like I was watching Baghdad Bob declare that there were no tanks in Baghdad while a tank rolls by behind him. More ridiculous than anything, but I felt like this was an insult to my intelligence. They couldn’t possibly think people would fall for this.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
The biggest problem is the lack of will to impose the sentence and make it stick. Until the policing and prosecution system are doing that, the sentences don’t matter. What happens right now is that the police come by and take a report. Often, that’s the end of it, there’s a report in a desk drawer somewhere. If you’re lucky the police will do an investigation. If a short investigation leads directly to a suspect or the news media makes them look bad, they’ll arrest someone. Then you go to prosecutors who might prosecute, maybe.
With a system like that, crime, essentially, pays. The 1/25 or so chance that someone arrests you is definitely worth the risk. Especially since in larger cities you need to steal a lot of stuff to reach the felony threshold. In California, you can steal up to $1000 before it’s worth arresting you. In other areas, it’s $500. As long as the TV you’re boosting is on sale for $497, nobody is going to do anything about it. If you and 5-6 buddies go an each boost one of those TVs and sell them, it’s easy money. Drugs are basically not enforced either. People can do them pretty openly on public streets without worrying that the cops are going after them.
While funding plays a role here, the police and prosecutors seem to have lost the spine necessary to do so. I think quite often it’s about the look. You don’t want to be seen as racist for arresting and jailing too many black and Hispanics. You don’t want to look like you’re being mean to poor people. Easy answer is just let them go. Or come up with silly “reforms” that are essentially release but have a service requirement that nobody will actually enforce. If there was one thing I’d do to curb crime it’s to get arrest rates up and prosecute everyone to the full extent. Once it becomes clear that the cops are now back in the crime fighting business, crime should drop.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
Well. I think utilitarianism has its weaknesses. One thing to mention here is that you have to actually put a value to every good in view. Shooting everyone who shoplifts baby formula from Walmart will stop that crime, but you’d have to balance it with other goods — justice, humaneness, aesthetic values (pretty sure nobody wants to step over corpses to go shopping), and so on. I’m not even entirely clear how you’d determine whether a given individual was permanently unable to live by the social contract. Perhaps some can actually be rehabilitated,
I’m much more impressed by deontology which simply declares that certain things are simply off limits, and certain things are absolutely required to be a moral society. I don’t think things like collective responsibility or arbitrary detention or punishment make much sense. At the same time I don’t think a moral society would refuse to punish based on a misplaced compassion. That would quite clearly create unsafe and produce more people willing to commit a crime.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
She also has never once thought about the male version of her life. Men are raised knowing that nobody will ever actually care about them. They know they have to earn everything. They know they are no allowed to ever show weakness. They’re striving because being a loser man is to be absolutely nothing, pathetic, and worthless. He strives to achieve because he’s been told since he was a baby that he’s the breadwinner, and he better get good grades and into a good school and into a good job because if not, he’ll be cast aside as a failed, pathetic man, and nobody will ever give a crap about him. If there’s a draft for the next war, he’s going, and if his limbs get blown off, nobody will care.
Women and I include myself just don’t get that stuff because society bends in half to accommodate them. Women get their own spaces (in part because of safety), where men’s spaces are open by default and the only way men’s spaces stay just for men is if they’re deliberately uncomfortable for women, and then you can bet someone will call men sexist for that. Other than that, you have to let women in, even if it’s the only place men can hope to get away from women so they can open up to other men, they can’t, be here comes the women. Women get to choose careers based on preferences, work hours, whether the job is fun, how close it is to their homes, etc. Men don’t get to, they will be the breadwinner, so they’ve been told since they were old enough to understand work that they don’t get to choose based on liking the job, they have to choose the money. If they best paying job they can get is dirty, disgusting, backbreaking, and has long hours, tough shit, you do it because if not you’re pathetic and a loser.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I find their lack of interest in running on issues to be telling. They don’t really seem to think their ideas have the potential to be winning issues for them. They just don’t seem interested in saying what they want and have used the same playbook for decades. Most of their campaign seems to be calling republicans various forms of evil and telling us they’ll prevent republicans from doing bad things. They don’t care to talk about their ideas and rarely have big plans they want to accomplish, and when they do, they’re often talking about how their ideas are “nonpartisan” or in the case of Obamacare, that the idea came from republicans.
My first advice to democrats is find a vision of a future you want to build that people would actually want to live in. And not only start talking about it, but start trying to actually build it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
Again, I’m trying to optimize births, and particularly high quality births. If a woman goes to college, she’s going to delay childbearing until after college, and if she’s highly intelligent and goes as far as she can, she’ll get a masters so she’ll only begin to think about having children after she graduates from a Master’s degree programs at 24-25. Even if she doesn’t buy the negative messages, the loss of a good chunk of her fertility is going to mean that she’s probably at best having one child.
And if we’re shooting to simultaneously try to get high IQ people to have more kids, then the above is the worst thing to do. A woman with high IQ giving birth to 3-5 high IQ kids is likely to do more to raise the general IQ of the country than anything she could accomplish in the workplace. I’m sure there might be one or two high IQ women who will make life-altering contributions to science, but if you lost that and had that woman give birth to 3-4 high IQ kids who go on to do similar things you end up getting a better return.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
Except that this was obvious. How can you credibly sell your ability to win elections when you can’t predict something that obvious. It’s not something I think they missed so much as they were hiding it. Affirming a lines that says the sitting VP was so out of touch that she had no idea that Biden was suffering dementia, it doesn’t say much for the democrats as a party that can win elections.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I actually find the idea that they are shocked that Biden dropped out as hilarious. The right-leaning media could find obvious signs of dementia, including him wandering off during NATO conferences, numerous visits by a Parkinson’s doctor, and so on. How the sitting VP had absolutely no idea is beyond me.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I’m fully in board with this, but I think going back to keeping married women out of high powered positions. This would reduce women going to college and therefore increase the likelihood that they end up marrying early and having more kids. Heck, as much as I as a woman enjoyed college, I think keeping women out would help here.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I’m not objecting if you A) have the means and time, and B) don’t need a credential to get a good paying job. But I think the number of people who would meet those criteria are pretty small, especially those who would at the same time want or need the kind of bragging rights that having a degree would provide are small. People spend thousands traveling as well, it’s just that this isn’t generally seen as the best option for everyone.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I think there’s another factor here. The Western WEIRD culture actually discourages having kids young. Both parents are highly pressured to go through 4 years or more of college, then work for a few years before getting married. Then you spend a few years building up a nest egg and a career before you start thinking about kids.
Given the relatively short real fertility window, the delay in childbearing means fewer kids just because of biology. A woman’s best fertility is between 18 or so and 25. So she might well be too old to have kids by the time that she’s secure enough to think of having them. She’s not even getting married until 22 at minimum. Three years after that, her fertility is starting to decline, but she’s not yet getting pregnant.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I’ll point out that I’m not totally against career-related credentials. Their main use is in allowing a business to know whether you have relevant knowledge and skills to do the job or offer advice. It’s basically useful as a way to quickly check your abilities. If I have a CS degree from UCSD, you can look at that and know that if you hired me, I will know the things that are in the UCSD CS program. Useful if you are hiring a professional programmer. It’s vetting your knowledge.
But if you’re not looking to be hired or sell your expertise in literature, the expense of getting certified as knowledgeable in literature doesn’t seem to add much here. It’s nothing that I’m looking to make life or death decisions on, it’s a hobby. Art is a hobby, studying literature is a hobby, philosophy for most people is a hobby. I don’t personally see much added value to getting certified an expert in a hobby.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I’ll be honest that colleges have done an excellent job of conflating the ideas of education and credentials to the point where a sizable percentage of Americans believe that you cannot possibly have learned anything about a subject unless you’ve done so in a university and received a course credit if not a diploma from a university. It’s a brain bug that most people have been trained to believe that keeps them willing to spend big money to make their learning count even if the return on the investment isn’t there.
I think that this is starting to change as the prospects for those students is known to be less than people who study more job-skills oriented degree programs. The Gen Z term for a humanities degree is “Mom’s Basement Studies”. It’s probably going to change a lot more as competition for good office jobs gets fiercer and thus the need to get a useful degree becomes paramount, the idea that you can’t hobby-study these interesting but not very useful things on your own will fall away. It’s hard to remain a snob about having a diploma on your wall when you have a job that doesn’t require any college and owe your college $100K in principle and interest and cannot ever see yourself being financially successful
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
Coming from the other side, I’d say that numeracy and clear logical reasoning is probably more important to creating the mythical “well rounded citizens” than humanities. The reason is that almost every decision made in policy or even discussion of policy positions requires logic and statistics. The idea that you can have a productive conversation about things like economics without understanding utility curves and statistics is crazy. Figuring out the percentages of trans people in a population and what the percentage of increase is kinda matters if you’re trying to make a case that the entire thing is biologically based. Algorithmic logic is extremely useful in learning to plan and communicate a plan precisely. And as far as understanding anything in science, understanding the statistics and how probabilities work and so on is critical to understanding what is going on.
Obviously, I think a well rounded person would know all of the above. The thing is though, that we’re actually nearly backwards where there’s more emphasis on exposing people to the humanities in ne form or another over and above giving people the tools to understand their very scientific and mathematical world. The results, as far as I can tell, is a world where people fall for conspiracy theories, but don’t understand science. They can’t understand science or technology because they re not forced to learn those things after high school, if they had much exposure in high school.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I mean it depends on the goals, but finding or creating a reading group for a bunch of relevant books or on a given topic could probably, given appropriate study materials do at least as well as the median introductory courses are n that subject with the added bonus that unlike the students in most introductory courses, the group using a study guide and meeting to discuss the book are quite likely to have read the material in question. In most of the same courses at university, most students don’t care enough to actually read the text and quite often barely bothered to read the study notes of the text. Most only care in the sense that they want to figure out how to get a decent grade from the course while doing as little work as possible.
And unless you’re going to try to make a career of that subject, it’s probably much better as far as utility goes as instead of spending $100K on a lit degree you can spend the time and money learning career-based skills that allow you to pay off the loans. I don’t think “a degree, any degree” advice really holds anymore. It might have been true in 1970 when going to college was pretty rare and thus “BS in X” was rare enough on a resume to make you stand out. By 2024, college has become the default, and thus “degree in X” is almost expected. In fact, outside of the skilled trades, almost anyone hiring for a liveable wage job expects you to have college, and preferably something that at least signals a practical minded person. At least by getting a skill-based degree and learning about literature or history on your own, you’ll be able to get as good a job as your talents allow rather than having to try to explain to the interviewer how your four years of reading French literature makes you a good fit for the hard nosed number crunching corporate job you’re applying for.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
By why do the university part for 100K a year? I can buy the works of Shakespeare for $50 or less. And unless you actually need the credentials, paying a house mortgage for a piece of paper that says you’re a Shakespeare expert is pretty prohibitive for most people.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I’ve often considered that university should be separated from job training. The university is being tasked with so many things that it cannot do anything to a decent standard. Research suffers because it’s no longer hiring people on just being good researchers. Now they must teach. And they must hand-hold the students who simply want to grade grub. And they must know what industry wants and fear their coursework to train that. It’s an impossible task made even more difficult as more and more students with middling IQs and very poor study skills must be shepherded through university in courses designed for minimum effort and maximum course satisfaction ratings when university level coursework cannot be dumbed down to the level of what would have been a high school sophomore level in 1945. It doesn’t work, and until you have an academy separate from job training midwits there’s not much chance of reintroduced rigor. We’re producing phds who should have flunked out of undergrad.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I think there is certainly a value in appreciation. I’m rather a fan of history, philosophy and similar subjects. Where I think the reformation must come is in decoupling it from the protected and tenured oligarchs of college professors in university. I’m thinking of a much more open model where instead of people going to university to pay $100K to have guided programs of reading literature and history and philosophy, you simply make such material available online. The uselessness of the diplomas is in fact a good reason for moving to guided self study for those interested. You don’t need much to read literature. You need books time, and on occasion study aides all of which can be made available for cheap if not free. Once there’s no institutional value and the material is cheap/free there’s not much reason to keep the initial institutions captured. Nobody would be going to 4-year university for history or literature.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
I think this explains most of the troubles in university. We are not actually requiring rigor to earn a phd in any non-STEM field and thus the blind lead the blind. Dispassionate inquiry requires people to actually understand the subject and be able to research it and genate useful knowledge. It explains why most people even in politics think in simplistic cartoons and comic books. It explains as well how the US government was made to believe that they could collapse the Russian economy by simply unplugging it from the world bank — as though we could really stop buying Russian oil or fertilizer. I guarantee you that Russian political science students know muc( more about our system than we do of theirs. They know about our federalist system and the electoral college, I’m not sure there are a lot of people in America who know how Russia’s federation chooses its leaders.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5d ago
The trouble with politics in non-explicitly-political classes is that essentially it changes the subject of the course from whatever the subject was to, well, politics. And it’s almost impossible to make a course like that not turn into a political jam fest in whic( students game the professor for an A by telling him his politics are correct. And it’s also super easy to end up with ideologues teaching such courses and essentially having woke communist teach-ins paid by the university where everybody pretends it’s about learning English Lit.
I think honestly the best way to actually teach critical thinking is the old fashioned way — teaching formal logic, both philosophical and mathematical. People don’t know how to think clearly because they don’t read books (which can only be fixed by actually reading whole books), and because they don’t have a toolset to examine truth claims. The best way to get such a toolset is to be taught it, and use formal proofs to examine, make and refute arguments. If I want to argue for trans rights, fine, but do so in an open honest and logically correct way. Show your work. If you’re going to argue that The Tempest is about being White is good, then fine, but it’s going to need to examine its own assumptions.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
I honestly don’t think at least at present, that politics is polarized because it’s so important. Political in the past was important because the people who generally discussed them were important people, and thus it mattered to them. In most systems, other than signaling loyalty to the regime, there’s nothing much at stake here. And even if it did, from an evolutionary standpoint, democracy is extremely young— 250 some years since the American and French Revolutions. 250 years from an evolutionary perspective is nothing. Furthermore, even in democratic systems, the average Prole has almost no actual power. The legitimacy of the system requires his consent, but he himself has almost no power over any of the decisions that actually affect his life.
So from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, there’s no reason to care about politics. Even from a practical perspective, there’s no rational reason to care about politics. The opinion of the proles has never mattered on those kinds of politics. And weirdly enough, as you bring up local politics, it’s long been my personal observation that the more power a person has on a political system, the less interested people actually become in learning or talking about it. You can get millions of engagements talking about trans issues that you can’t affect. Nobody but the die hard political junkies know who sits on the school board or the county board or even the state legislature. The people in those seats can still be affected by local citizens. Nobody really cares, and those politics are boring.
In my view, the reason for politics being so divisive is just how little power most people have over the direction of the country. It’s basically a topic that lets you feel powerful, important, and smugly right. At the same time anyone rational knows that if you’re talking about national politics, their opinion doesn’t actually matter. I want to dump the entire science budget into building an albucurre warp drive. It’s not happening because nobody actually cares what I think. The only reason that I matter is that I’m supposed to buy into the idea that because we all voted and that guy won, that “We The People” have spoken and “We” have decided that giving Ukraine the go ahead to fire long range missiles into Russia is a good idea. “We” decided no such thing. Biden did. And this is the way politics works in democratic societies— you must follow the news and vote correctly even though you actually don’t have any power other than giving the system legitimacy. Thus political issues become nothing but identical signaling and pretended power in a place where you don’t have to worry about being right, just making a lot of mouth-noises.
I would honestly contend that you could easily turn down the temperature of politics by giving people actual skin in the game. If voting had consequences beyond the draperies in the Oval Office or which mug you’d see on TV for 4 years, people wouldn’t use it as an identity for social networking purposes. They’d actually care who wins because they want specific things to happen.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
I think for me a big issue is the polarization of the United States. It’s probably not completely unprecedented, but it’s crazy to my self raised in the 1980s and 1990s that we live in a world where half of the country views the other half as subversive if not dangerous. I don’t think if you’d go back to 1985 and said that in 2025, people would consider the president elect a danger to democracy— especially given that such a sentiment is not a fringe thing, a major political party, hell the current president, have said so. I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I don’t think so. It’s just that after a certain saturation point of woke, you just get tired of picking up a game that you just want to turn off the world for a while and play in another universe. Except you don’t ge5 to escape because the designer insisted that he can’t keep away from real world politics for 10 minutes.
I feel the same way, I’m rewatching old sci-fi movies from the 1980s because honestly it’s absolutely refreshing to jus5 see a story that doesn’t have to preach at you.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I think it’s unlikely that you’d find a triple A piece of media produced after 2012. Indy stuff can still be okay, but if you’re looking at big companies producing art, you aren’t going to find much worth the effort. I dunno, so much of it just feels like people ticked off boxes in a spreadsheet and had ChatGPT produce the script. It’s boring, predictable, politically correct, and generally lacks things like plot, characters, or charm. Indie stuff is better simply because you can still find stuff that genuinely creates characters and situations that you actually care about, plots that don’t feel like long setups for the cool action sequence to follow, or contrived “will they won’t they” love interests (who totally will).
Obama forced a lot of people out of the race through back room dealing.
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