SwordOfOccam
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User ID: 2777
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Let’s be very clear about something:
I am not asking to focus on one narrow area. I was responding to someone who brought that up. It is, I think, illustrative of the fact winning elections is good actually, and that if the GOP could do what it does on guns on other issues the world would be a better place (it helps that guns are more popular than polling tends to suggest, unlike abortion bans).
Long term demographic trends doom everything unless the changing of minds happens. That’s a fully general problem.
So you’re a reactionary and not a conservative. Obviously you would prefer/predict things will get worse before they can get better, presumably under some newfangled system. When the Dems win it’s good news, in the long run, because they will make things worse. When Republicans win they’ll fail to really turn back the tide, at best they’ll just prolong the inevitable (Trump is a fun wildcard because he is an agent of chaos).
You don’t say what other things can be done in the present, and I was going to suggest “why not both” with respect to trying to win elections, but perhaps winning elections is actually bad, for the long run.
Do reactionaries commonly believe it’s actually good to vote for the bad side? The same question goes for lefty revolutionaries.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Oh sorry I meant to refer to the Covid lockdowns, no anything with Monkeypox.
While I agree that the Blue Tribe protests and permission from health authorities were extraordinarily hypocritical, that’s the only thing I’m aware of where tribal bias gave an exception. So I don’t quite grant your whole point, because most blue tribers weren’t actually protesting. If it were a general exception instead of the limited one then I would agree.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Libya voluntarily stopped its nuclear weapons program.
Saddam most definitely did not. His reactors got bombed into oblivion and then he pretended to still have a program and didn’t cooperate with inspectors, even though it got him invaded. Basically everyone thought he had one going and he kept up the pretense to appear strong.
The US and NATO providing security guarantees is not something Russia has to like. But the fact that they don’t like it so much is kinda the whole reason countries want to join, and that case seems stronger than ever. Reasonable people can disagree about what exactly was the best way to handle Russian aggression, but please don’t pretend the West caused Putin to regress to the USSR/imperial mean. He has agency.
European incompetence is immense on many fronts, security and foreigner policy high among them. If I thought some US policy stance could fix it I would advocate for it.
I don’t think you understand how the US viewed Russia. No one was thinking Putin was going to try to conquer Ukraine until suddenly that’s what he was doing. Sure, a little invasion here and there to annex a slice of any given country, but not a full-on war. Being a Russia hawk went out of style a while ago (except for Mitt Romney in 2012), then Trump screwed up the traditional US political stances on top of that.
Once it was clear an invasion was coming, almost everyone thought Putin was going to win pretty quickly. The Ukrainians have outperformed expectations immensely, and the Russians underperformed. Unfortunately, that means a bloody quagmire for the indefinite future. (Which they judge better than being Putinized.)
The US military has not been very focused on countering a Russian land war for over 30 years. We are trying to focus on China after so much time in the Middle East. We let our traditional artillery production fall off too much during that time and rebuilding capacity doesn’t happen instantly.
You phrasing things as if we think “we’re invincible” is not even wrong. We, the United States of America, are not being threatened by Putin. We have never had more of a military advantage over Russia in century or more because Putin is burning up so much of his military in Ukraine. You’re simply assigning beliefs to the US national security apparatus with little bearing on reality. We spend an immense amount of money on the military, but no one was excited to spend that on artillery production capacity (old, boring) and not say an F-35 (new, exciting).
Russia invading its neighbors is a tale as old as time and the US is almost an irrelevant variable, except for the part where becoming a formal member of The West is an alternative and insurance policy for counties at risk of Putinization. Ukraine was moving towards the EU and Putin did not want that trend to succeed.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Somehow I doubt the thing that put NK over the edge was the rhetorical Axis of Evil. The point is that they were in violation for a long time and chose to exit when they were close enough to success that dealing with inspectors wasn’t going to work.
Blaming an outcome decades in the making on Bush is asinine.
NATO is a defensive alliance and believing that a tiny country bordering Russia joining is an actual threat to Russia, vs. the real problem of taking away Russia’s ability to dominate, is simply not justified by any understanding of Russian foreign policy for the last century. You do a good job of not being very charitable to US leaders, but they’re saintly compared to Putin.
Blaming Putin’s regional aggression on Bush is asinine. (You can observe that whatever its faults our war in Iraq was clearly not territorial conquest.)
American foreign policy is far from perfect and the Bush administration was a particularly bad case (only superseded in modern times by the administrations that dragged us into Vietnam IMO), but that’s without needing to exaggerate or misplace blame.
I do agree backing out of the Iran Deal was stupid and there was a pretty strong bipartisan consensus on that (even among those who had opposed initiating it). But Trump was Trump.
When you say “after you attacked two other countries that halted their nuclear weapons program” are you referring to Iraq, Syria, or Libya?
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Eh, the lockdowns and other measures applied to all tribes.
I think the most relevant distinction here is women. Namely, there weren’t all that many women dying from their bathhouse adventures in the 90s. So the men kept doing their high-risk behavior.
Covid on the other hand involved all of society, so the neurotics wanted to give it all they had.
Don’t blame utilitarianism for situations where it clearly is not being applied!
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
I guess I don’t understand your point.
Gun rights are clearly better off by a lot because the GOP won enough elections to appoint judges who recognize the individual right to bear arms. It has put super blue places on their back foot. Red states tend to have pretty good gun laws and so keeping the Feds from screwing with that is an ongoing victory.
Blue states trying to impose bans that will probably lose in court is the mirror image of Red states/counties saying they won’t enforce gun laws they consider unconstitutional. It’s par for the course and Red tribe is largely winning here (and in a way that doesn’t backfire, like winning on abortion does).
We’ve never had better gun rights in the modern era, with expanded right to carry and state reciprocity and no real chance anytime soon of a fed ban on sporting rifles and magazines, which we used to have in the glorious 90s.
The present state of gun rights exists because of GOP victories. It seems clear a future where the GOP gives up on winning election will not be good for gun rights.
This seems to clearly contradict the original point that winning doesn’t or won’t matter (the instant the left could it would at least take us back to the 90s). But yes, it was funny that Trump actually did support some gun regulation (which might get overturned!),in the same way it would be if he had a tax increase.
So I’m very confused why you think 2A rights of all things is a good example against winning within the system when we’ve had like 20+ years of mostly victories on that front. And, if you’re a conservative, avoiding a bad change is a victory itself.
I agree fiscal responsibility is one hell of a problem because trying to fix it is a political dead end and so it seems both parties have agreed to drive off the cliff and then the crisis will take the blame off of anyone in particular. I’m just also sad the GOP has largely given up even pretending to care.
I also generally agree with your description of the social and institutional decay we’ve seen and that the large part of it is Blue Tribe Elites overplaying their hand and violating important norms. I just think gun rights are a pretty good counter example. See also: drinking/brewing.
Of course, I would have blamed the progressive left a lot more for their share of the overall problem pre-Trump, when he played right into their narrative and flagrantly ignores norms and laws (for no actual victory, mind you), and now that so many constitutional conservatives dropped the first word (along with fiscal).
If the culture war situation was, on average, where it is specifically on gun rights then I’d be a goddamned optimist, because when push comes to shove Blue loses on that issue and things have trended in the direction I prefer during my lifetime.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Ironic to bring that up when the courts are deliberating over Trump’s bump stock ban right now.
I promise you things would be a lot worse without all those GOP-appointed judges upholding the 2nd amendment.
Sure, places like NY/CA/NJ are doing their best to fight back against freedoms, but consider that those states are places where the GOP doesn’t win very much.
The real loser of an issue despite the GOP winning is fiscal responsibility, not the 2nd amendment.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Please read the following and acknowledge the chronology and the fact NK had a weapons program before it left the NPT:
https://www.cfr.org/timeline/north-korean-nuclear-negotiations
Russia is the primary problem with US-Russian relations, which is why it gets so pissy when anyone interferes with their ability to dominate/invade their neighbors. I don’t know that the Bush admin did the best job on Russian policy, but trying to blame Bush for the path Putin has taken—given how many times the US tried to make friends with him—strikes me as highly unjustified.
The Iranians have been killing US servicemembers for 40 years. Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan gave them an opportunity to do it close to home. Ironically, we did them a huge favor by eliminating Saddam and it’s not like they like the Taliban either.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
I just think you’re getting the weights of the variables in play very wrong.
I agree that paper is dumb. 2012 is super late in the game here so it’s not very relevant anyway. I also agree the APA is often full of shit. I agree academia and medicine has a severe left wing bias. This has been true for several decades now.
But I’m not really seeing the evidence this was very load bearing for the public at large in supporting gay marriage when bigger factors exist.
Note that you haven’t addressed the cases I’ve cited (as have others I think) where we know people who had every reason to not be gay and yet they still are despite the risk/cost it was.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Life is full of murky areas where we make arbitrary cutoffs.
We have to make such decisions over what “consent” even means in any given context. “One drink” is a standard some places for lacking the ability to consent, for example.
I’m not trying to defend the specific one here as it is, or attack it, I’m pointing out something like an age cutoff is basically inevitable and that “consent” is both complicated and insufficient as a principle.
Age of responsibility/adulthood issues are their own mess before you even bring in the separate mess of consent.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Oh good. Even winning doesn’t matter.
Like I’m familiar with the points you’ve made and I’m a veteran of the Deep State, so I very much understand the bureaucratic dynamic, but also winning is still a lot better than losing if one cares about the GOP agenda.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
No.
That’s not a remotely accurate let alone charitable account of why Bush and co invaded Iraq.
The truth is bad enough without having exaggerate it.
Even if, even if, I take your portrayal here as accurate, the death of a million foreigners to get rid of a terrible autocrat is not nearly so bad in my view as the risk of derailing America’s system of government because that could get a lot worse than what happened in Iraq.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Isn’t the reason you used the term the fact that was what Tomato was referring to, specifically the Right’s reaction to losing the election?
BLM can dislike both the police and Trump but they only rioted after a police shooting that had nothing to do with the Feds or Trump.
You’re just doing lazy “boo group” analysis and now trying to backtrack on how it is somehow actually relevant as a response to Tomato’s point. The left is bad enough without you having to be imprecise about it.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Going to the doctor because you broke your leg is orthogonal to the internal locus of control issue of blaming someone else for your problems or solely relying on others.
You don’t understand what the advocates are advocating and I assure you it is not the idea that one should never seek external assistance.
Internal locus of control != absolute self-reliance.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
That is my point yes.
We have drawn arbitrary lines around “adult” and “kid” and there’s no way around the fact that children develop their abilities gradually and not at the exact same rate.
The potential side effects of sex and potential for manipulation/abuse/exploitation of younger people explain the rules we have and why we have them; not some absolute concept of “consent.” Obviously, plenty of young people who are adults still have such things happen to them, but so it goes with adulthood and drawing lines somewhere.
Teenage marriage to an adult is of course legal in most places with appropriate permissions.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
I’m highlighting that tension between “able to consent” and “but not if an adult is involved” and the giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness there.
There aren’t clean cut lines here in nature, but we have to have them in the law if we are going to have them.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
I’m saying the people I know who were gay before the tide shifted include zero examples of that phenomenon.
I’m well aware of “bisexual” being a questionable label a lot of people have adopted without it being obvious it means anything, but that phenomenon only became apparent to me, in my own life, well after the tide shifted 10+ years ago.
I can’t demonstrate any of that to you via a study, obviously.
For someone who is very concerned about dishonest science, it strikes me as strange I’m not seeing where you cite bad studies. You criticize a NYT opinion piece, but I’m not seeing any science going on here.
I’m totally willing to believe some segment of the population can be socially influenced in their sexual preferences, but it’s definitely not everyone. I, for one, am attracted to the opposite sex even though that’s deeply fucking inconvenient. If I could flip a switch I would (well, ten years ago anyway).
In my personal experience growing up in a conservative religious environment, being gay was really not fun then and still isn’t fun now. It’s not a lifestyle preference to be taken lightly.
You seem to be conflating more recent strangeness over sexual identity and especially gender labels and then retconning back to when having those identities really truly wasn’t fun.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Of course they're capable of deciding to have a little fun with some friction on the bits.
Just not with adults.
Kid on kid is fine, obviously.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Well the individual in question was old enough to have had been invested in some stock during both. He was just in a conservative portfolio in his mid-50s (so he lost out on a ton of growth over 30 years). When I talked to my dad (same rough age) about investing he definitely knew the lesson of not pulling out in a downturn.
But overall I think you’re right about most people. I had also got my first adult job just before the 2008 crash and I was in a position where I had put a hell of a lot of my pay into my investment fund. (I was in the military so I didn’t have a lot of extra expenses for a few years.) It sucked watching the numbers go down but it wasn’t like pulling out a few grand ~40 years before I hit retirement was going to make sense. And I had read enough about buying and holding to not be tempted.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
You think Russia needed to use Bush as an example/excuse to invade a neighboring country and to blow off international law.
Come on man please. Bush can be bad/wrong for the invasion without trying to blame him for Putin acting like an average Russian autocrat over the last few centuries.
NK did not decide to nuclearize merely because they got put on a rhetorical naughty list.
Ironically, threatening Iran put them off their nuclear weapons program.
I don’t like Bush. I came of political age during Bush and was polarized because of the blatant incompetence and inability of the Red Tribe to admit they fucked up on Iraq, in particular.
But also it’s very important to criticize bad people/things accurately and not simply add unjustified blame.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
Nobody not in the West cares either.
The Muslim world loves Chinese money way more than opposing the oppression of Muslims there.
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
I think some of us are confused by you using “antagonistic” to refer to the loaded language of “boo outgroup” from the “sore losers” and not the response itself being antagonistic against the OP himself.
(Also, a lot of us probably comment in a way we don’t necessarily see mod action trying to reset a tone shift before we pile on.)
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
If Trump is unfit for office wouldn’t that be a constitutional way of approaching it?
Leaving aside whether it’s justified or proper or anything like that for congressional Dems to do that, it’s plainly not an insurrection unless lefties also try to occupy a building via force.
Also conservatives have a structural advantage in the senate and electoral college because our system is biased against population density, but if you want to believe GOP voters should think voting is pointless then I guess that’s one hell of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If elections are so rigged against the GOP why does it control so many states and remain competitive in national elections?
SwordOfOccam
8mo ago
It’s remarkable you think it’s “pedantic” to point out you aren’t responding with apples to apples in your comparison based on chronology alone, even without the whole issue that the 2020 riots did not have anything explicit to do with Trump, since it’s not the federal government that controls the police.
You can still believe the Blue tribe is bad. I’m not trying to convince you it’s not. I don’t like them either and I certainly think the 2020 riots were atrocious and excused by many progressives, along with the “defund the police” insanity.
But do try to criticize your outgroup accurately when you do it. The Motte is best when we can at least be consistent and precise even when we’re not charitable.
Please don’t conflate “one opinion column” with “the NYT says”. Moreover, the people who needed to change their mind on gay marriage to go from 30% to over 50% weren’t exactly NYT readers.
Briefs to the Supreme Court are too late in the game to explain the change and not aimed at the public. It’s a lagging indicator.
What changes people’s minds it is hard to show in the best of circumstances. Self-reports are about as good as you can do. The self-reports back my position, not yours. That is to say that I’m sure the “science says” bit did help change minds, just not nearly as much as the other thing.
So I’ve demonstrated the kind of evidence I would accept. It just doesn’t help your case.
Here, by the way is an article on your side. I like the top comment.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/13k0xc4/the_born_gay_myth_when_ideology_masquerades_as/
You just brushing off people being gay back when it was a high-cost activity, even leading to prison/execution in many places still today, is indicative your model is wrong because it can’t incorporate this common phenomenon. See also: children being identified as gay very young (as another poster brought up).
Did Alan Turing ruin his life because someone lied to him about how being gay works? Do gays in much of the Islamic world risk serious penalty because it’s just a fun thing to do? Some people clearly have the strong predisposition others do not.
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