gorge
12d ago
It wouldn't be a favor to Harris, she would get all this press attention and have to smile for the press in order to get an absolutely empty gesture right after suffering an all-timer humiliating defeat. If Biden did it, the smart move for Harris would be to resign herself and pass the honor of first woman president to Nancy Pelosi.
gorge
12d ago
We need more than that. She needs to be officially sworn in, get her portrait on the wall, be listed in the history books, etc.
gorge
12d ago
It would be chef's kiss if he could resign and make Kamala the first woman president. From my point of view, this would be great because it removes "make history and elect the first woman president" as a talking point in future elections. From Biden's view, it would have the appearance of making history and being magnanimous while in effect being an absolute humiliation and revenge.
gorge
12d ago
I will never forgive Gorsuch for Bostock.
The conservative court picks, definitely slow down woke, that's the advantage of not having a woke/establishment president. But they don't actually reverse previous woke and fix the country. They don't even stop woke movement entirely, again, Bostock.
gorge
14d ago
Aren't there still a lot of ballots left? CA is only 54% reported, for instance.
gorge
14d ago
It's a very difficult problem for anyone who is anti-establishment.
The default is that being president is really being elected to be the scapegoat. The president does not actually have that much power to change the big trends that make people happy or unhappy with their situation.
So if you have a woke/establishment president, they end up cementing woke rule with their court picks, administrative rulings, funding decisions, DoJ prosecution decisions, EEOC appointments, etc. And then when you elect a fire-breathing ant-establishment politician they spend all their energy thrashing and on petty beefs, get nothing done, and then end up the scapegoat for all the problems that have accumulated over the past ten years.
gorge
20d ago
Aren't witnesses legally required to testify, under penalty of being held in contempt of court?
I think what most women want is to be enraptured by a powerful, handsome, high-status man and "it just happened."
This is exactly what is portrayed in one of the most famous romantic scenes in motion picture history, a scene long renowned by women for how "hot" and "sexy" it was:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=l0976pL8iTw&themeRefresh=1
What this scene portrays is by modern standards sexual assault. She tells him to stop, never gives consent, and he kisses her anyway.
Another example of this is the Suits Matt and Rachel file room sex scene -- no consent, he yanks her toward him, they have sex. That's rape by college campus standards, but again, it's considered one of the hottest scenes in TV history by women.
Now, when things end badly, two sayings come to mind: "hell has no fury like a woman scorned." "What women hate, hate, hate with the passion of the thousand suns is finding out the man they had sex with is not actually as high status as they thought." So if he is a chad but he scorns her, or it turns out in the light of day all her friends think he is a total dork, or a few weeks later it turns out her husband is a more powerful force in her life than her adultery partner -- then "it just happened" gets retconned as rape. In some of metoo stories there are admissions that the women only changed their mind about the incident days or years later after "reflection." I also think people, and especially many women, have an incredible ability to self-modify their own feelings and so they will actually believe that it was "rape."
I think the archetype sexy rape fantasy is the following scenario: woman is already very attracted to man, but refuses sex because of some powerful societal force or other reluctance unrelated to attraction ("my parents won't let me" "we are out in public" "you are too much of a rogue" "I'm holding out for a nice guy" "You just sacked my entire village and kidnapped me") but the man overpowers her anyways, thus showing that he is more powerful than all the things that she feared or worried about. And I would wager that most women would get turned on by this kind of fantasy.
Now in the case of ambush rape by a hobo, I suspect the woman understands that this man is, despite his temporary physical domination, low status and thus she is not actually all that aroused by him. Perhaps there is some pleasure in the middle of the act, but it is quickly erased in the clarity of the aftermath. The trauma still exists in the idea that she had forcible sex with a low-status man.
It's also interesting that historically under the oldest laws "rape" was considered a crime against the woman's owner -- her father or her husband. There wasn't really a distinction made between ambush rape and rakish seduction. Under more recent laws, mostly obsolete, it was only rape if she screamed and tried to fight, otherwise the woman is liable for severe punishment of committing adultery. It's possible that some kinds or rape would be enjoyable for many women, but are also terrible for society to allow. Imagine there was a law that rape was legal "if she enjoys it" or "rape is legal for 6' professional athlete chads because on average women will enjoy it." It might actually be the case that women would get some pleasure from such a law -- but it would be an absolute disaster for society. So in this case society has two choices 1) admit the real crime is against the father or husband -- which is not possible under feminism or 2) force women to act as if they were traumatized them and treat them as damaged if they admit enjoying it. Personally, as a man, if my wife was ambush raped, I would not want society telling her, "actually tell your husband how much you enjoyed it, it's ok, drop the stigma." Society should be telling women "your husband or future husband is higher status than the guy who raped you, you should be ashamed and disgusted by the sex with that low status guy."
To start, the idea that Trump is the next Hitler is obviously crazy, overheated political rhetoric. Trump is nothing like Hitler, historical fascism was a movement born out of millions of angry World War I veterans and nothing like it exists or could exist today.
Part of the issue is that American education stinks and so there is simply no broad frame of reference for strongman leaders other than the good leftwing/progressive guys (FDR, Lincoln) and Hitler. You can't compare Trump to a Salazar, Pinochet, Sulla, Hidenberg, Caesar, Augustus, etc, because people simply don't know history well enough.
However, there is a bit of a "woke more correct" element to the Nazi accusations. Historically, communism/progressivism/leftism was an alliance between the intelligensia and aristocrats with the lowest classes. Fascism was renegade aristocrats and a lower-middle-class alliance. Second, Trump's base actually does want him to be much more of a "dictator" than Trump himself wants to be, but sometimes he gives signals as if he is going to play along. Trump's base actually wants him to act alike a real executive in control of the government -- they want him to fire employees and close departments (contra civil unconstitutional civil service law), they want him to ignore unconstitutional Supreme Court rulings, they want him to take strict and harsh measures that are morally beyond the pale by the standards of the current establishment. Overall, the wishes of Trump's base do pose an existential threat to the current post-New Deal, soft-socialist expertocracy. Thus you can see that the left has a working definition of fascism as being: "An alliance of a strongman with the lower-middle class that poses an existential threat to socialist (soft or hard) bureaucratic state." By that working definition, you can seen how Trump does match the pattern.
Ultimately, this is a case of Scott Alexander's worst argument in the world. You rhetorically group A and B together, when A is something with really terrible connotations, in order to have those connotations rub off on B.
- Nazism was a movement of a strongman leading the lower-middle class in order to become dictator, invade Poland, start a world war, and genocide six million Jews.
- Trump shows strongman tendencies, and he is a lower-middle class populist leader.
- Ergo, Trump has smiliarities with Nazis. Therefore, we can call him Nazi and then all the other things associated with Nazism (killing millions of people) get associated with Trump.
gorge
1mo ago
What size contract, awarded to Musk-related-entities next year by the Trump-II admin, would you consider similarly presumptively corrupt?
There is no amount that I would consider presumptively corrupt. If Trump-II gave Elon a $1 trillion dollar contract to put a man on Mars, I'd be perfectly OK with that.
gorge
1mo ago
Therefore why not promote gay marriage as an alternative?
Marriage being monogamous is not legally enforceable. It's not even an officially taught value at this point. It's basically surviving as a folk tradition. There is no reason to think that gays getting marriage would actually be monogamous, and from what I have read they are not. So gay marriage is more likely to further erode the convention that marriage is monogamous.
I think Andrew Sullivan made this argument decades ago, and faced opposition from other gay activists at the time who held that gay people should not try to force themselves into heteronormative strictures or whatever.
And we got gay marriage and instead of monogamous gay men we got NY Times and NPR normalizing polyamory and CDC approving DoxyPep.
If a gay person asks you, "how should I live my life", and the only answer is "sorry, you have no place in my conception of society, unless you commit to lifelong celibacy and loneliness, in which case you may quietly sit in the corner" then can you blame them for turning elsewhere?
I don't think lifelong celibacy == loneliness. If a gay man asked me this question, I'd point him to a testimony of a gay man who went celibate and found himself a lot better off, and I'd recommended the gay man read it and try it out.
But also, in no world would I ban two men from being roommates, nor should the government be busting down doors or installing hidden cameras to see what is going on in the bedroom. "Gay marriage" does not be legalized in order for two men to form a permanent loving relationship -- amore or caritas.
gorge
1mo ago
No, I mean racially white. I'm making an HBD assertion -- "white men" are simply the best at war. Occidentals are second, blacks last. Obviously your liberal, fat, atomized, and vidya-addicted Redditor is not currently dangerous to the regime. But he is potentially dangerous, which is why he is subjected to large amounts of propaganda that either pacifies him or redirects his energies. And it is of course the white men on whom the propaganda hasn't taken that the regime is most actively concerned with.
I haven't followed the FEMA stuff, but there has been a libertarian claim "the purpose of police is to prevent private citizens from enforcing the law." For a long time I scoffed at it, but I've slowly come around. When I watched the BLM protests there were a lot of police out on the street, but a lot of people were engaging in looting, disorderly conduct, street blocking, etc, with total impunity. But of course, if a group of concerned citizens had come out with clubs to beat up the vandals and looters, the police would have come down hard on them. In some cases there are videos of police arresting citizens who are trying to pull protestors away from blocking the street.
What it comes down to is that it is simply easier for the police to arrest Joe taxpayer-with-something-to-lose for vigilantism, than it is to stop a mob of BLM protestors. Furthermore, it may be more of an embarrassment, a challenge to their manhood, if a private citizen is enforcing the law. The elite don't like the private citizen enforcing the law either, a BLM protest they can contain, private citizens enforcing the law would be far more unpredictable. This model also predicts why despite blatant disorderly crime being so common and unpunished, and gangland violence being common, actual murdering of white children is very rare in a city. The police do take this seriously, because they know threat of arrest won't be enough to stop parents from engaging in vigilantism. So the police still have to do enough actual law enforcement to keep crime to a barely tolerable level.
There is probably some iron law of bureaucracy that states that the bureaucracies primary mission de facto will end up being preventing competition.
Getting back to FEMA, I don't think this is a case of FEMA consciously having orders to punish rural Trump voters. But, as a bureaucracy, they probably have some mandate that says, "our job is to establish chain of command and authority over the disaster area, so we don't have chaos and anarchy, and decision making comes through us." Sounds sensible to people in Washington sitting in the office coming up with the plans. But on the ground, in the middle of the disaster, it turns out it is far easier to stop people from helping, to stop people from flying helicopters in, than it is for FEMA itself to actually analyze and approve all incoming resources, or for FEMA itself to do the providing of resources. So the plan initially is:
- Establish authority over the disaster area. Prevent movement of resources without approval to ensure scarce resources are not misallocated, that there are no airspace collisions, etc.
- Approve allocation of resources, approve flights as requested based on our analysis
- Bring in resources from outside for people.
But then in the fog of war it becomes:
- Establish authority over the disaster area. Prevent movement of resources without approval.
- (too hard, falls through cracks)
- (too hard, falls through cracks)
So the actual result of the organization is that it is an anti-disaster relief bureaucracy. Conquest's third law strikes again.
gorge
1mo ago
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. ...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.
I'm partial to the "the lights went out with World War I" thesis. Very simply, valorous, self-confident, fertile, expansionist, white men are the most dangerous force in the known universe. I certainly don't believe that white men are the most evil force in the universe, but we are the most dangerous. White people, white men, are most scared of other white men, and so a lot of apparent self-sabotaging behavior is a back-handed way of trying to sabotage competing white men. But psyopping other white men into being self-sabotaging without self-sabotaging yourself turns out to be impossible.
gorge
2mo ago
Other times, I am frustrated by her lack of brutal drive to self improvement. Shes objectively achieved enough that her intelligence is not up for question, but other times Im dissastisfied with the lack of sharp off the cuff retorts that ive come to expect from my male friends.
Honestly, sounds like you have been mind-killed by modern media. Real, actually living women are like this. From this comment and other comments sounds like you have a great catch.
gorge
2mo ago
I don't understand the fixation that conservative Christians have with sex acts that aren't PIV. I just don't get it. If you don't like them, don't partake in them, but don't try and make someone else's life miserable just because you ascribe to those beliefs.
American culture and institutions are actively promoting experimental sex acts though -- from the books in schools to pride parades every June to media on TV to the State Department flying flags at embassies worldwide that have colors to represent erotic tendencies. It's not the Christians are not the only party who are obsessed. Christians think these things are bad, and thus, to the extent that we have common culture (public schools, parades, mass media) that sends messaging about sex acts, it would rather that message discourage non-martial non-PIV rather than encourage it.
gorge
2mo ago
I was tapped into the circles that had been discussing alternatives to a dollar standard for a while, so I knew exactly why bitcoin was so exciting. It was only a $1 a coin, I was making six figures at the time with minimal expenses, so putting down $100 or $500 (or $10,000) to take a flyer would have been a no-brainer move, except that I was too cowardly. I console myself with the knowledge I have done financially very well regardless, and with the thought that if I was a bitcoin billionaire I would have a new set of problems, like worrying about kidnapping.
cc /u/amadan
How is a healthy non-hetero relationship something that fits that definition?
To put it bluntly, the problem is not a loving (caritas) relationship between two men or two women, which is all fine and good, the problem is using each other as mutual masturbation aids or sticking dicks up each others poopy holes. I would suggest that doing so is like eating that potato chip or masturbating to porn. It feels good in the moment, but ultimately leaves you empty and just wanting more stimulation/titillation while building a habit of mind that ultimately makes a person unsatisfied and less happy than they would be if the relationship was affectionate but not erotic.
gorge
2mo ago
Is Paul saying there is no male or female on Earth right now as we go about our daily business of living and build institutions to govern our current Earthly society? Is he saying we are not to make distinctions between males and females, not to make different sets of duties and rules for males and females? This is very obviously not the case, because Paul himself does that all the time. What Paul is saying is that men and women, Jew and Greek, have equal ability to hear the word of God, be baptized, receive the Eucharist, and enter the kingdom of God. The Christian message and the Christian sacraments are not just for one nation, or one sex, or just for an aristocrats or priestly caste.
This is really, really obvious from reading the context around your quote and from reading Paul. Have you actually read Paul fully yourself, have you actually engaged with traditional Christian teaching on these topics previously, or are you just repeating talking points you have acquired second-hand?
gorge
2mo ago
So, you believe that normalizing non-hetero relationships is a detriment to society? How do you reconcile that with non-hetero people who are in happy, healthy relationships?
There are many good things that are happy and beneficial that do not deserve special recognition by the church or the state. There are many vices that should be discouraged by the church and state, even though some people will practice said vice and seem to be happy in practicing it.
my boss, but he's also my friend. I play in a DnD campaign with a bunch of other church friends, and he's the DM. Would your suggestion to me be that I break the friendship off because he's technically also my boss?
It's not a perfect analogy, I was just making a point about language. The "boss" relationship is inherently different than the "friend" relationship, different relationships deserve different words. It's not a perfect analogy because one can be a boss and a friend, maybe I'll think of a better analogy.
It certainly has been that way throughout the course of history. However, along with that, we've historically treated women separately from men and for along time, women had fewer rights than men. ... How does this fit into your definition of loving your neighbor?
Christianity (until recent progressive Christianity) has always recognized the basic human reality that men and women are different, have different strengths and weaknesses, are complementary, and therefore have different spheres of responsibility, different rights and duties. It's hard to remember this now that as Americans we are so long removed from existential war, but the state is primary an agent of violent force, that is the state is an organization of men who use violence to protect their land and women from other organized violent men, and as such of course governance rights of the state are going to be of men. "Loving your neighbor" is an entirely different question than whether person should have say, "a vote", (ie decision-making power over the apparatus of violence).
There are many people who agree with either of us, and there are those who are not religious that pay no mind to the doctrine of sin.
Everyone believes in sin, secular people just have different words for it. A vice or a personal sin, is something that feels good but is ultimately bad for the person doing it, you don't need religion to understand the concept, it's just without religion you have to reinvent and throw out all the work done on helping people effectively deal with vices.
But specifically you asked how a "Christian" who loves their neighbor could not want to support their neighbor in X. Well if the Christian loves their neighbor, and their religion teaches X is a sin, that means that X is ultimately bad for that person, therefore if they actually loved their neighbor they would want to discourage their neighbor from doing X.
We have also marginalized people of different races, religions, and sexual orientations.
Apples, oranges, cheese and carburetors. These are entirely unlike phenomena and must be analyzed separately
Do you think that a majority of non-hetero people are more sexually promiscuous than hetero people?
I think that gay men are, yes. I'd recommend reading "And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts. Lesbian women are different phenomenon.
"Love your neighbor" does not extend to "normalize your neighbor's erotic proclivities at the cost of broader society" or "you must erase the distinction between things."
Christians have traditionally believed that marriage is permanent bond between a man and woman for the purpose of forming a household and raising children*, where the duties of the man and woman are asymmetrical. For a man to "marry" another man is a contradiction in terms, the same as when your boss tells you, "I want you to think of me as your friend, not your boss." The male-female relationship has elements that are inherently asymmetrical, and inherently different than male-male relationships, and different things deserve different words. Furthermore, the male-female union is a core building block of civilization and therefore deserves special recognition by the state and by the church. It deserves to be considered normative. One of the things that has especially turned me against gay marriage is seeing how so many institutions (eg public schools) no longer feel empowered to teach the male-female marriage as being the default or the normative institution. 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."
Now part of the problem for modern Christians is that many already have given up on the idea of marriage being permanent or that the husband and wife have different roles and obligations. Once those distinctions have been erased, resistance to gay marriage then looks very unprincipled. But for traditional Christians the argument is very straightforward and consistent.
There is furthermore the argument that homoerotic behavior is a vice, a sin. And if we love our neighbor, we want to save them from sin. Sin ultimately makes us less happy. Vices give momentary pleasure but leave us empty and wanting more, no more happier than before. The glutton eats a lot of junk food, but ultimately that makes the glutton less happy. If society does things to make the glutton less likely to engage in gluttony (eg, banning advertising of junk food) or I do something to make my loved one not engage in gluttony (eg not keeping junk food in the house) then I am doing good for them. If I teach them "fat acceptance" I am actually harming them.
Now I am straight and speak from personal experience about whether for a person who experiences same-sex attraction forgoing homoerotic activities makes that person more happy. I do think though, that forgoing sexual promiscuity and other sexual vices that a straight person has tempted by has made me more happy. So I can see how that argument is plausible. Given the very high rates of promiscuity and sexual experimentation reported among gay populations, seems like gay sex is leaving something empty, like eating a cookie or potato chip, not like eating a steak.
* But what about old/infertile couples? First, never say never. Second, such couples are still modeling the relationship form.
gorge
2mo ago
Twenty years ago, in college, I was a neocon/hawkish liberal/big government conservative and I was wrong everything they were wrong about: the Iraq war, the idea "no excuses" schools were the solution to fix the racial achievement gap, the idea that modern economists had basically figured out the business cycle and how to stop it, that the gold standard was a barbarous relic, the idea that it's women who want "nice guys" and marriage and its men who are generally the cads.
I was wrong not to buy bitcoin in 2010 (this was partly laziness and partly that I thought it was too risky, that I would end up sending money to drug dealers by accident or something and get roped into an investigation).
I was wrong in thinking in 2010 that American cities would continue to have smarter leadership and be on the upswing from their nadir in the 70s and 80s.
More recently, I was wrong in thinking that the Internet could fuel a new generation of elites (think 2010 era Y Combinator, Reddit and Google leadership) that would create their own better information ecosystem, and not be bound to all the myths and lies that academia and mainstream media had been peddling for decades. Instead, the same people and type of people who ran the old media-academia-NGO-government axis ended up converging the big tech companies and people like Paul Graham ended up on the outside.
I was terribly wrong in predicting in March 2020 would lead to moderating American political divisions and hatred of Trump, and would lead to liberals wanting to be tougher on crime, particularly against blacks and the underclass if they were to disobey covid lockdown rules.
I was effectively wrong in believing Pfizer and Modern when I read their study results that showed the covid vaccine was 95% effective against symptomatic infection.
gorge
2mo ago
As a part of sex ed, you teach that while contraception can prevent a majority of pregnancies, only abstinence can prevent it 100%.
Isn't this the status quo? Does any school's sex ed actually teach that birth control is 100%? I'd bet it's a very small percentage of women who are getting abortions who are educatable but uneducated about birth control.
The basic problem is that sex is fun, and not only are all forms of birth control less than 100% effective, all forms have significant downsides. Also couples in a sexual relationship want different things, or feel very different in the moment than a few weeks later when a pregnancy test has returned positive and their life has changed forever.
Woops, totally forgot it was already a Republican house.
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