crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
4mo ago
The biggest news. The biggest! It literally just happened. I don't know what to say. Commentary beggars one's belief. I apologize for the brevity of this post, but the implications of it are mind-boggling. Political violence has escalated (perhaps, degenerated) into new levels of unforeseen disaster. What do you Americans think?
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Brutus was a vacillator who sided with the killer of his father to throw the Republic into the hands of Augustus. Hardly heroic, in my book.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
This makes even more economic sense: we'd save the price of a firing squad and the bullet too. All of the residents of the Tenderloin should be recollected to wherever those German tourists went in Death Valley a few years ago.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
The analogy would only make sense if in response to a legitimate problem (people robbing banks) people advocated for policies that would give out a percentage of the bank's deposits to anyone who would ask (for isn't the root cause of bank robbery the lack of money?) And if you questioned why you should give up your bank account to thieves (and why they suspiciously stuff all their income underneath the mattress) they called you racist or something. And that nonsense became the status quo.
Indeed, it would be the prudent thing for such concerned individuals to become security guards, rather than trusting the insurance to make up for rampant bankrobbery, somehow.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Quite astute. Yes, that was a foreseen secondary consequence. The burden of care falls about the socially conscientious directly, rather than abstractly through government policy. The reasoning isn't too far from requiring warhawks to register for the draft. And if they do so, without the public purse being involved, it is saving to the treasury: and the negative externalities are confined to those foolish enough to try, rather than the public at large.
So, overall, I see it as a win-win.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
It's not laziness: it's restoring man to the state of nature where if he does not think of his morrows, of his shelter and sustenance, he will die. There is no ambushers lying in wait on the outside of corporate layoffs. Police forces around the world have a list of 'individuals known to authority', who commit the pareto majority of homeless nuisance. Let us kill them all: swallow your liberal indignation about the rights and dignity of man and other such nonsense, and I'll let you embark on whatever reformist scheme in the aftermath that you please.
That's my counterproposal!
crushedoranges
4mo ago
No man, no problem.
Here's my modest proposal: have homelessness be punishable by the death penalty.
The liberals will be outraged, but anyone who can't get a stranger to house them, even under the impending threat of death, is obviously an individual who has completely and utterly exhausted the patience of society and is committing a slow form of suicide. If they don't care about their own lives, then why should we?
Housing is expensive, and giving it to the most useless members of our society is counterproductive. Bullets are cheap.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
There is signalling value in taking 850 dollars of money and burning it to show your commitment to a candidate. The prospect of winning money is just a bonus.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
You don't need to go back to the Victorian era. You can talk to people who live in your country right now as to functioning rules of propriety. (The Pence rule is quite illustrative.) It is a reciprocal responsibility. Is it prudish? Is it backwards? Perhaps. But compared to the current state of being, which you recommend assigning moral valence and blame, which has brought about untold chaos and perhaps the permanent alienation of the sexes from one another, it is indeed perferrable, less our societies reap the fate of South Korea and the country dies out in three generations.
I prefer axiomatic rules that do not assign culpability or blame rather than wading into the hazy morass of he said, she said. Perhaps that's the autism speaking. Let it be stated this way. Rather than women being property of paterfamilias, she is keenly aware of the possession of her chastity and virtue is indeed a valuable thing that she injures at her own peril. And we have a word for a man who would do her harm, we call them cads, decievers, rapists.
And if she decides to associate with disreputable men, she cannot cry foul that she was taken advantage of. She knew perfectly what she was in for! You, who put so much value into judging men morally, don't say anything about this particular stained flower of Gaiman: who willingly had an affair with a married man. What do you make of her morals, who made herself a slave of this celebrity sex pest?
If she is a feminist, she should own up to her own actions, and if she is not, she ruined herself of her own volition, against the advice of men who actually care for her. As much as you dislike this worldview, it makes sense and is internally consistant. I am completely uninterested in adjudicating individual blame and responsibility because I have no need to. Both of them are in the wrong, and thusly the matters is beneath public interest.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
You misunderstand me.
In many workplaces, there are requirements to wear steel-toed shoes to prevent crush injuries to the toes. Not because there is an inherent moral judgement involved, or that we are all clumsy idiots, but that we are obliged to laws of nature that do not care for our reasons or intentions at all.
If people didn't have accidents, then we wouldn't need PPE. To extend this analogy, if all men were gentlemen and kept their marriage vows, we wouldn't need laws and customs to prevent rape. I am of an ideology that reasonable concessions for safety can be made at the price of liberty. If, indeed, a woman can go into the public space with the reasonable expectation that she not compromise herself then we can take her at her word when she claims that she has an unwanted suitor.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
A man can be reasonably expected to be up to no good towards any woman not outside of his immediate family, and indeed that is the norm everywhere in the world except in the West and very recently. Both men, young and old, who really should know better have again and again been tripped up by biological impulse. Indeed, feminism of a certain wave tarnishes the entire sex as morally culpable.
Because most men can be manipulated with sex, women who do so are rightfully shamed. Because it is a obvious weakness that takes incredible reserves of willpower and fortitude to resist, but trivially little effort to tempt. You say 'be moral' as if it is a meaningful statement. But even with direct financial and reputational incentives to not fool around, men do it anyway. You are ignoring the biological reality of the procreative urge.
Does the pithy dismissal 'do better?' form on your lips?
Testosterone is one hell of a drug. Traditional societies know this as a truth of which our modern ones fervently deny. Don't be alone with strange men! Don't even create the temptation! Because the inevitable will happen, no matter how moral they are. Don't put your hand on the stove. Don't put your dick into an hole smaller than its circumference. Obvious best practice to avoid harm, ignored for egalitarianism. Well, in this case, our ancestors really did know better. They knew better than to moralize the whole business and focused on outcomes.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Ezra Klein is just a representative of the podcasting liberal smug class. This particular example isn't perfect, as you say, but to his outgroup he's identical to all of the others of the reporter priestly caste.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
It's punditry on my part. Imagine the American president as a sort of pontifex maximus, a secular priest, who keeps the republic sacred through keeping the forms of rituals and propriety, as Confucius states.
Voters will never outright say that it's part of the sentiment (and neither will it be asked.) Part of Biden's appeal was that he promised to obey the American aesthetic of power, to uphold the norms of republican life. If he's too old and senile to remember how then that advantage goes away.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
If Trump was the reincarnation of Cato in terms of eloquence he wouldn't get any credit from anyone. You miss the point of the debate. It mattered, not that it was expected to change anyone's mind, but that it was a holy ritual of the American republic held for the sake of tradition. That Biden couldn't even rise to the very mild task that this is a bad omen for the republic, and a sign of weakness.
Things like this matter.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Imagine that an insane genius who hates end users, who constantly schemes up ways to make things worse, whose design ethos is 'whatever our customers will hate most and is maximally inconvienent' and you wouldn't be too far off as to why.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
I must strenously and vigorously disagree with this assertion and state that this is not true. There is a reason that even a kissless, touchless virgin robot considers a furry to be a lower stratum on the freak totem pole. And have done so, for the past twenty years, and indeed back in the primordial internet where people lingered on Usenet, and before that BBSs.
Furries are everything that conspiracy theorists allege about the illuminati: weirdly connected, absurdly wealthy sexual deviants who have secret societies which have sex parties on the regular.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Any priest that threatens such should be excommunicated and placed under Imperial ban.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
The problem is that the left is moving way faster away from the church then any hypothetical pope could ever hope to accomodate. Catholicism is not a post-modern institution: it has values and principles that cannot be made sympatico with constantly changing progressive doctrine and if it is made to do so it is simply not Catholic anymore.
Some would argue that this has already happened.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
The stock market also thought that Enron was a legitimate enterprise.
Look, there's some predictive value in the aggregated market of capital. I'm not denying it. But it suffers the oracle problem in that it can only evaluate the value of publically available information. It can't take into account what is secret and undisclosed.
Like, say, for instance, the movement and intent of state militaries.
If Taiwan is being invaded and cruise missiles are being flung at aircraft carriers, we have a lot more to worry about then our 401ks tanking. A new world war would be a more pressing matter: the economic impact of a global depression would probably be less than a shift to a war economy.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
You're making me blush.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
It wouldn't be a proper comic book story without a egregious, poorly-researched error.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Yes (although it's long finished.) I feel a little embarassed to shill my own stuff, but I'm currently writing fun science fiction. Fun in that 'there are as many cute girls as I can feasibly fit into the suspension of disbelief.
Don't judge me.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
I wrote an entire story based on a (well, not realistic) but more NrX/libertarian viewpoint on superheroes, right here.
https://fiction.live/stories/Molon-Labe/tykhbTXTZhJn3FHQ4/home
crushedoranges
5mo ago
The only thing that could possibly produce progressive utopia (ultra-efficient learning models) is being smothered in the crib by progressive morality.
you beat me to the punch! Gack.
Well, this is big news. Very big news. I don't know what to say. Looks like we're back into the political assassination times of American politics.
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