Zephyr
12d ago
Does that matter, though? If everyone sees that the married men are getting all the best assignments, and get constantly let out early to go pick up their kids, and are paid the best - then it doesn't actually matter if it's official or not. Everyone knows what needs to be done to get the benefits.
Zephyr
12d ago
If you're paying people to stay out of jail, pay the people who disproportionately go to jail.
So, men?
Zephyr
12d ago
Most businesses tend to give better benefits towards men who are married, even if it isn't explicit. This can involve promotions or better opportunities (as married men tend to be seen as more stable or more reliable), better financial compensation (as the man is "providing for a family"), or better work-life balance (the number of times I've been asked to work late or on holidays while my married coworkers get to go home early is way too high).
Zephyr
12d ago
I mean, I'm perfectly happy if we decide that no, we're not going to punish people for wrongthink anywhere; if we insist on it, it should also include those at the highest echelons of power.
Zephyr
13d ago
I think the way to thread the needle is that we can eject people who are net negative, and who had to opt-in to our society. Because of the way that our governments are currently set up, being in a governments territory requires that you pay taxes and follow their laws; you can't decide that you do not wish for the government's services in exchange for not being subject to its rules (or rather, you can try, at which point armed men come from the government to put you in a small room until you agree to follow the rules once more).
Immigrants of all flavours (by definition) come from another country; they choose to proclaim that they will follow the government's rules; they are choosing to follow the rules of that government, rather than being stuck with them.
This kind of plays into the idea of noblesse oblige - if you are demanding the loyalty of a group, you owe them your loyalty in return. In the military, it's very common that the front-line troops always eat first; the officers can order them into situations where they are almost guaranteed to die, so the officers owe it to them to see that they are treated as well as possible. The same applies to governments; the government can enlist citizens to die, claim an increasing portion of their wealth, and take their freedom or their life for crimes against it. The least the government can do is put the people who are obligated to support it first; if they aren't, that becomes a problem that the people have the right to seek redress against (and if they don't have the right, the next step is often them clearing out space for someone who will give them that right).
If we followed this chain of logic:
- If wealthy Jewish people were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), and they were citizens of a foreign nation, we should kick them out (preferably of an airlock, but failing that, at least out of the country).
- If wealthy Jewish people were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), but were citizens of the United States, we should consider them to be in violation of the societal contract (in the same way we would a fraudster or scam artist); they should serve appropriate jail time, and be removed from any levers of power that they may be attached to, and forbidden from interacting with them again.
- If wealthy non-Jewish citizens of the United States were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), we should consider them to be in violation of the societal contract (in the same way we would a fraudster or scam artist); they should serve appropriate jail time, and be removed from any levers of power that they may be attached to, and forbidden from interacting with them again.
- Once we are doing #1, #2, and #3 reliably, we can determine whether Jewish people are considered to be high-risk in the same way Chinese researchers are (in which case, we can decide to heavily restrict them from positions in which it is an issue, in the same way we do with Chinese researchers), or we can determine if its just a few bad apples.
Either way, we shouldn't ignore the issue; we currently screen men more heavily than women when they want to be involved with children because a large number of men who want to work with children have pedophiliac tendencies. It sucks if you're just a guy who enjoys spending time with kids, but it has proven enough of an issue that we put boundaries on it. Likewise, if you're an earnest student of Chinese origin who wants to fully embrace the greatness of the USA, it sucks that you may be barred from positions that require a security clearance; but again, we've seen that this is a large enough issue to society that collectively we have to stop it.
If wealthy Jewish socialites are disproportionately favouring other countries above the US, we may need to put additional screening on them being permitted to be government lobbyists or owning media platforms. Which again, isn't fair to the people who don't do this, and don't desire to do this - but if it's consistently a problem, we can treat it in the same way men or Chinese students are already being treated.
One thing that I want to make clear is that despite this screed, I don't actually think that the Jews are secretly or openly advocating on behalf of Israel; I think there are a lot of people who are determined to make the Jews the source of all evil, and they are looking for a justification to hunt them down. That being said, we don't have the data; it's verboten to actually go after the people who are favouring other countries above their own citizens. We need to actually start treating it as a crime so we can see if there is a "Jewish Problem" or simply a "leader problem."
Zephyr
16d ago
This makes sense to me - so it's not so much "Ukraine wins" as it is "Russia loses," which I can see.
TheMotte is super slow for me now, so I'll look at Dean's submission as soon as it finishes loading - thanks!
Zephyr
16d ago
I supported Ukraine in early 22, when it looked like Ukraine might be able to win.
As someone who was never really of the belief that the Ukraine could win - what evidence were you relying on for this belief? This is a sincere question, I've never heard anything that overcame my belief in the difference between population sizes, so I'm very curious why it felt winnable for Ukraine for you.
Zephyr
16d ago
Wake-up sex is an interesting fantasy, but no level of carefully-circumscribed consent beforehand can overcome a startle reflex.
You'd be surprised - and it is as good if not better than the fantasy of it.
Zephyr
16d ago
If I say that just like children, the senile, and the insane, the common masses don't know what's good for them, and that they need wiser heads ruling over them, what then?
Then I'll say who watches the watchers? Who keeps them from abusing their "wisdom" to benefit themselves, at the cost of those who cannot defend themselves? During COVID, our health minister issued shutdown orders that closed off many of the competitors to her winery, but mysteriously left her own business open. She was renowned as an expert, despite literally penning a pandemic preparedness plan that specifically recommended against lockdowns and masks (in fact, she testified as an expert witness on behalf of nurses previously who did not want to wear masks on shift).
The demand for "experts" far exceeds the supply.
Insurance companies, in general, tend to make more money when they don't have to pay out. They often make the worst day of your life even harder by looking for any excuse to not pay you. I got rear-ended at a stoplight a while ago; I took a picture of the car that hit me, including their license plate, as they sped away. When submitting the claim, I included the license plate number, the photo, and described the person driving the car as a "man between ages 20 - 50 with dark hair". My claim was denied because the license plate I reported belonged to a 70s model car (the car in the photo was obviously an older model, so definitely matched) registered to a man in his 30s. Because it was a government monopoly (thanks, ICBC), I couldn't do anything about it, and had to pay the repair costs out of pocket. This was obviously infuriating, and the start of my character arc towards hating any and all governments.
With something like healthcare in the US, where the costs range from "all the money you'd make in a month" all the way up to "all the money you'd make in a lifetime", dealing with individuals who are determined to nickle and dime you over things your physician said you'd need in order to not be dead is something that boils the blood; like, it's more surprising to me that someone didn't do something sooner. I've also heard that Brian Thompson/UnitedHealthcare was particularly stingy; that may or may not be true, but it's probably a bit of a factor.
So from my perspective, it's not that every Indian is bad - but a lot of the bad things come from Indians.
For example, a highly publicized case (warning: CBC, little better than government propaganda) revealed that an Indian student had posted a video claiming that students could use food banks as a source of free food, rather than being for emergencies. Food banks are are very much a "high trust society" sort of thing - knowing that people who are supposed to be able to pay their own way are exploiting them is something that makes us not want to support food banks, and makes our society less high trust.
Indians are also known for being much more willing to cheat the rules, often to the detriment of their host country. For example, Navjeet Singh drove through a stop sign and killed a mother and her young daughter. Investigations suggested that he had falsified his driving record, and refused to see the police afterwards. This is not the only Indian who has killed behind the wheel. Indians are also well known for bringing their racial animus to our country.
We've also had an extremely disproportionate increase in Indians, relative to other nationalities. This means that Indians, specifically, are going to bear the brunt of our ire as immigration causes an increase in difficulties for our country (most notably, housing prices).
On a personal level; I was involved in hiring and firing at a tech company. One of the employees we hired was an Indian woman with (supposedly) over 10 years of experience. Despite numerous requests for her to do things that should be second nature to a programmer (like check in her code, etc.), she was unable to produce something that even compiled after around 4 weeks of work (despite her claiming that most of her experience was in react, and me checking in daily to see if she needed assistance, provide her with sample code, etc.). When I took over the project when we eventually fired her, it ended up being around 6 components and maybe 400 lines of code (counting CSS). The biggest problem with her was her willingness to just lie - she would assure me that things were going well, she'd show me demos that were ChatGPT'd together, but never got closer to being done, etc. The whole thing left a very sour taste in my mouth.
Edit: I do want to mention that I have worked with Indians who range from good to great too; the thing that I (and a lot of others) don't like is that there is definitely a subset (and a large enough one that we've encountered it in the wild) who are willing to lie and cheat to get ahead.
Zephyr
20d ago
So to steelman the case, this is very similar to the Charlie Kirk situation; no one specifically told anyone in particular to assassinate him, but there is definitely an air of "won't someone rid me of this turbulent priest" around.
There are objections to this; like, for example, it matters whether it's a private citizen of no particular standing or following vs a public figure, it matters how specific the call to action is, etc. - but it's at least not completely unreasonable as a rule of thumb.
That being said, I absolutely believe that if a white man had gone on a stabbing spree through a Muslim community, and a Muslim woman had posted something like "Throw all those right-winged white **** in jail, hell, shoot them all in the streets, see if I care", nothing would've happened at all.
Zephyr
23d ago
So in my defense, I actually did move to a nearby city around 30 minutes away; the places that I were looking at in my hometown were either incredibly outside my price range (think like, $700k+ for around the same square footage), or were "purpose built rentals" that had been re-appropriated for the market when BC banned AirBnBs (one of the places I toured was $550k, and consisted of a bedroom that was pretty much exactly big enough for a queen sized bed, a tiny living room/kitchen/entryway, and a single bathroom with only a shower - I think it was around 500 square feet).
My friend has a home further outside the cities - her commute down to the city was around 2 hours a day. Her home is bigger than mine, but to be fair, it's also more expensive (she's also working with two incomes, whereas I only have the one).
Zephyr
23d ago
But it shouldn't be a surprise, it's not about socialism or redistribution. It's about health insurance and their leadership specifically.
I actually don't think it's even about health insurance. One thing I think is fairly consistent is that in general, people (but especially young, unestablished people) tend to believe that the elites are basically taking advantage of their situation. The disagreement tends to come in as to what the solution would be, rather than that it's happening.
Someone like Luigi is considered to be a hero because he is striking back against the corrupt rule of the elites; both left and right tend to correctly note that a lot of our so-called elites are anything but, but are somehow paid ridiculously well and given huge amounts of public respect despite their complete incompetence.
In Canada, our MPs (members of parliament) are paid approximately $200,000 a year as a baseline salary, with ministers in charge of specific roles (like minister of justice, minister of public safety) getting more, and our prime minister making around $400,000 a year. This is in addition to a really really good pension plan (so good, in fact, that it is extremely credible that our last government only survived as long as it did due to its existence; basically, we had a liberal minority, but our "labour" party voted in lockstep with them even for things like forcing unionized workers back into the office because their leader's pension vested in late December; literally the week after it vested Singh agreed to bring down the government the next time an open vote occurred). Of our MPs, we have a large number that are considered to be worse than incompetent (Bill Blair, this charming lady, our PM's former babysitter). I'm not going to go over all the horrible businesses in Canada - but needless to say, we have a lot of those too. Loblaws is fairly famous for how price-gougey it is.
People want a change from the corrupt and shitty elites who seem to destroy value rather than create, but who are constantly failing upwards.
Zephyr
23d ago
To be fair, our former finance minister Christina Freeland refered to Canada’s woes as a “vibesession” too.
Zephyr
24d ago
This probably deserves a bit of explanation.
So an important thing to note is that Canada is a resource-intensive economy that refuses to actually exploit our resources; we're kind of dumb that way.
Way back (around 20+ years ago), Canada created a program called the "Temporary Foreign Workers" program, which was intended for seasonal agricultural workers. The thought was that our farmers could not necessarily make enough profit to bother growing their own fruit if they had to deal with pesky things like living wages and human rights, so Canada created a program that was designed for temporary people to show up, do some work, get paid better than they would be back in whatever country they hailed from, but way worse than a Canadian would be in the same position.
Our prime minister twice ago, Harper, decided to expand this program - basically, he upped the number of entries by a fairly large portion (I think it went from about 30000 a year to 60000, but these numbers are off the top of my head). We also started really getting into what would eventually become woke around this point, which culminated in electing a Trudeau in 2015.
A very important thing to note is that Trudeau, for us, is kind of like a Bush or a Kennedy for you Americans - he has a trust fund that is around 0.1% of the size of our entire GDP. The first Trudeau, Pierre, was a very controversial Prime Minister, as he spent like a drunken sailor and invoked the War Measures act after some Quebecois separatists abducted and murdered a MP.
Not wanting to be outdone by his father, Justin Trudeau immediately began spending money at an absolutely unprecedented rate; the amount of debt generated by every other Prime Minister, put together, is less than the amount of debt he generated over his term. He also appointed a large amount of judges who have been pushing a rather expansive view of human rights; namely, that everyone but Canadians are entitled to them. Combined, we ended up in a situation where Trudeau absolutely nuked our economy.
Rather than let the country fall into a recession, Trudeau came up with the bright idea of simply importing enough new voters potential generators of corporate value that the number would still go up. Roughly 20% of the population of the country arrived within the last 5 years. The judges, meanwhile, decided that if the imported workers were non-Canadian, obviously they deserved a full pathway to citizenship - and that even if a person came in as a student then declared himself a refugee when the student visa expired, he still needed to be given a lengthy chance to protest the issue.
Now, one problem with going from a country of 37.5 million to 43 million over such a short timeframe is that houses can physically not be built that fast; the immigrants we pulled in tend to be happier living 10 to a bedroom (not even exaggerating - look up Brampton some time), so a lot of old stock Canadians realized that they could make bank by leveraging their existing property into buying more, then renting it out for exorbitant prices. As a result, our housing costs went up by around 100% over the course of a decade, then did the same again over the next decade. When I graduated university, my friend bought a condo for $300k. That condo is now worth around $750k.
Zephyr
24d ago
My father bought a property at CAD $200k in 2000 (approximately $375k today at 2.5% annualized inflation) when he was my age. The property today is worth $2500k today, in actual numbers. It was a 5 bed 2 bath with an unfinished basement, and a backyard - so a very good place to raise a family of 5.
I bought a condo in a cheaper city this year for $500k. It is a 2 bed 2 bath with about 800sq feet of space, and I only got it because recent Airbnb regulations made it need to be sold in a hurry. It has no yard, and is in a much worse neighborhood than my father purchased.
The median private sector wage in Canada in 2000 was approximately $45k a year (approximately $83k a year today at 2.5% annualized inflation). The median private sector wage in Canada in 2025 is approximately $69k a year.
It's not a vibe-session. That's just what the government and economists claim so we don't mount their heads on pikes as a warning to others.
Zephyr
25d ago
Schrödinger's whites are the exception that proves the rule.
A different way of looking at this is that a lot of people don't want any disruptive people around that are making their lives worse, but can only positively identify those of another race as being let into the country against their wishes.
For example, around 30 minutes ago I had some person who was definitely on something harassing me as I grabbed breakfast. I do not want to deal with an addict alternating between begging me for money and telling me how she actually owns a large company anywhere near me when I'm hungover and just want to grab some food before my head explodes; however, she had a Canadian accent and was white, so for my purposes, she gets lumped into "disruptive homeless", and I quietly vote for whatever party tells me they'll lock them all up.
If she'd had an Indian accent and darker skin, it'd have been obvious she'd have been one of the 5 million or so TFW/students/whatever imported by Trudeau - so she'd have been lumped into "disruptive immigrant", and I'd quietly vote for whatever party tells me they'll kick them all out. This also applies to if the person had a German accent, or a British one, or whatever; I just don't want them harassing me in the street.
Zephyr
27d ago
taking my money (via taxes) and then acting like they're the generous ones for letting people like me live in the country (without a shred of self awareness) etc. etc.
This may be the single most ironic sentence I've ever seen. Nearly every single member of this forum pays taxes, whether they are a native or foreign member of their country. You paying taxes is not a favour - it's table stakes.
Zephyr
28d ago
I mean, the number of pardons that I would consider to be "the right number" within a presidency is 0. The point of the presidential pardon is to deal with cases in which there is no other recourse; the whole reason it is in the system at all is that even if all other parts of government are attempting to screw you over, you still have the option to plead to one democratically elected man, and convince him you deserve freedom.
The system you want is one where it is used as a run-around for the justice system; I claim that if it is so corrupt that you need the pardon to balance it out, it needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
Zephyr
29d ago
FWIW, I shared a room with my younger brother and sister until I was 12, and just my brother until I was 14. I honestly haven't thought about that since probably shortly after that - it's just not a big deal.
Zephyr
29d ago
I'd rather that they considered each case carefully that came to them, and only pardoned people who they believe deserve it, instead of those recommended by their staff. If the number of people pardoned gets to be so high that they can't remember them, then that's a sign that something is super broken with the way people are being convicted. The presidential pardon is supposed to be a tool of last resort.
Zephyr
29d ago
The 15th Amendment forbids disenfranchising people on account of race (and the 19th on account of sex)
And the 2nd claims that the people's right to bear arms may not be infringed, and the 1st states that Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech. Seems to me that the Amendments are simply words on an old sheet of paper if someone doesn't want to respect them.
Why? White men are more likely than any demographic of women to be in jail (I found the number of 158/100000 when googling for white men, 88/100000 for East Asian, and 68/100000 for black women). Seems to me any attempt at making jobs to keep people out of prison should discriminate against women regardless.
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