georgioz
2d ago
Seems reasonable. I understand the complaints, but sorry, if you're signing up to carry out the violence of the state your face is on the line. That's the deal.
You skipped quite a lot here. How adamant are you about this principle? Should this be a federal law: no facemasks for SWAT teams, Delta Force members or any police officers making high profile arrests of dangerous gangs, cartel members or other members of organized crime who routinely come after families of police officers? How do you feel abut undercover agents getting the ultimate mask in form of whole new identities during their operations so they can escape any accountability from public including those that sympathize with criminals they targeted?
Where is the boundary and how does it apply for ICE agents in now in year 2026?
georgioz
2d ago
One of the main effects of body cameras is for defense to use discriminatory policing angle. Lawyers can sift through months of bodycam footage of any given policeman and prove that he let some other offender on the same charge thus proving racial profiling etc.
I think this is one of the more insidious aspects that bodycams have. In a sense they turn policemen into modern robocops, they know that they are constantly surveilled and that the smallest mistake can be used against them. So their policing may turn into a procedural nightmare - you are not talking to a police officer, you are talking to a Moloch that now controls policeman's actions. You rob policemen of their agency, they will no longer rely on their intuition, experience or hunches. They will be less likely to utilize their judgment when it comes to leniency or more strict policing if needed.
I think it completely changes the meaning of many laws, which were designed on assumption that some things will be fuzzy and that they will rely on personal judgement. It is similar effect to may other laws. Your anti-jaywalking or littering or loud noise laws may be fine if they require some action on part of offended party and randomness of police officers being around. The same laws will look differently in some future city full of cameras and drones with capacity to be personally assigned to every citizen on the streets.
This is an interesting analogy. The Scottish clan was a weird kind of mannerbund-family hybrid. There was a lot of fictive kinship involved - the clan included all male-line descendants of the founding chief plus their wives and daughters, but it also included a bunch of people living under the chief's protection who accepted him as a symbolic father-figure.
It is similar with Roman system. Unsurprisingly it really was something like Italian mafia family. The core of the clan was based on blood relation, with some space made for adoption - but even adoption was mostly family related e.g. when Augustus was Caesar's great-nephew (grandson of Caesars sister Julia). Augustus did not even carry the Julia family name, as his father was just plebeian.
Nevertheless Roman society was based on complicated structure of patronage and master/client relationship of various plebeians and freemen around the clan with family at its core. Many of these positions were hereditary, these clients were part of the clan structure for generations and their service was rewarded. They were something like extended family and in many cases they actually were, given the power of exponential growth just in a few generations. I believe that Scottish clans had similar structure and they provided patronage when it came to valuable people with necessary human capital such as blacksmiths, or people who distinguished themselves in some other way.
Roman society revolved around fraternal organizations
As others said, this is absolute ignorance of historical realities. Power structure of ancient Rome was more akin to power struggle between huge mafia clans Godfather style. Roman social life revolved around atrium which contained literal altars to ancestors, with portraits and masks of the most important family members who attained some high position or success. Your relation to your clan (gens) was paramount to your identity even as a client of such a powerful clan. Again, if you want some parallel it would be that of huge Scottish clans.
ll striving was done by men, with men, and for men, negotiated among men outside the family fold. I’m not really sure where this idea originates that the “family” is the bedrock of the West.
They were not just random men. They were true patriarchs - father figures to extended clans and their clients and vassals, with membership in thousands or even tens of thousands. The most powerful clans such as gens Cornelia which produced numerous consuls and dictators including Sulla were so powerful, that they even had powerful offshoot clans such as Cornelii Scipiones. You have it exactly the other way around. The relationship between strangers mimicked that of the family, with all the subtle status games and structure given. You literally talk about brotherhood and fraternity - which is family related concept. Brotherhoods have older brothers and fathers. If you were accepted into such a fraternity, you had to accept family obligations including being a bitch to your more senior brothers.
This is not just about one anecdote. The gameplay loop of radical activists doing bad shit, getting arrested by police - only for sympathetic government to order some outrageous settlement is a known tactics of how to make government finance their own political organizations. Just look at the aftermath of 2020 summer of love where local government "settled" with BLM and other "peaceful protesters" for alleged police brutality: Cincinnati $8.1 million settlement, Austin $27 million. There are whole money mills - apparently Chicago settled for $107 million in 2024 alone for supposed misconduct, which is around 5% of whole Chicago police budget.
You have to understand that this is now a bona fide industrial complex. People talk about homeless industrial complex but the same goes for daycare, hospices, government lawsuits, environmental issues etc. This is industry on the level of whole percentage points of GDP at this point, think of how literal Italian mafia took over government waste disposal services raking billions a year in the process.
Welcome to Banana republic tactics, where the only thing that matters is tribe loyalty and where the state is just out there as a resource to be plundered. I remember a case from my country where a judge was assigned a lot of cases outside of his area of expertise. He was then slammed by disciplinary action for too many cases not being decided on time, and was impeached on those grounds. Of course lazy judges who had similar infractions got a free pass.
As I said, prepare for more of for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law. Just look at all the insane fraud that was discovered recently. The thing is that for many people - especially those hailing from corrupt environments - this is not a fraud. It is rightful spoils which need to be claimed and directed, so money flows to proper coffers aligned with a correct tribe, thus protecting the spoils from enemies claiming them. Exactly as with old eastern bloc "socialist" saying: he who does not steal from the state steals from his family.
It is obvious if you think about it - you have large swaths of population that think that USA is an illegitimate fascist state. Stealing and defrauding such a state so that it can be destroyed and abolished more quickly is a good thing. It is similar mentality of how many people saw the illegitimate socialist states, the state capacity fell as people not only lost trust but started to actively hate it or at least saw it as an opportunity if stealing was normalized.
The nervousness and tribal defensiveness (which i suspect you feel) also exacerbates the spiral; in a vacuum, these news would be condemned just 5 years ago by all but the most psychotic Red Tribers, now it's being normalized.
If you said 7 years ago, then maybe yes. After the summer of love following killing of George Floyd, I think a lot of people saw how their empathy can be weaponized against them. So yeah, people are much more cynical and tribal and less principled on all sides, especially given that there were several attempts to create new martyrs since 2020 - including pushes to create some sort of trans Floyd and others. Trying to create immigration related Floyd is probably the best bet activists have now, although white liberal Karen and now a white guy does not cut it. They will probably need something more juicy.
Anyways, my take on this specific situation is that both sides are assholes - both protestors and ICE. If ICE are brownshirts, then "protestors" are Roter Frontkämpferbund. The hardcore of democrat "activists" literally call themselves Antifa, which was founded by KPD Communist Party of Germany in 1932 as their equivalent of brownshirts. I am not exactly sure what to think. What do you think did German Christian or social democrats thought when they saw how communists and fascists beat and maim each other on the streets in 1932?
Then there can never be a true UBI. In the end it will always be subject to political whim and so it can be cancelled overnight. UBI is not a natural law, so it can never truly be universal. Right?
What is prized in global politics is consistency and predictability. China is extremely predictable. The outlines of its foreign policy have been the same at least since the end of Cold War.
I am not sure what you mean. I can say that you have two sides: democrats want a globohomo foreign policy, trumpians want America first policy. These two sides changed who is in charge last 20 years. It is relatively predictable.
I do not buy this supposed dichotomy. Putin's foreign policy was supposedly predictable to the extent that Germans leveled their nuclear power, invested into multibillion dollar gas pipeline and schmoozed with him up until 2022 when everything went to shit. Xi Jinping shows similar trajectory as Putin, however he is in charge only since 2013 so Putin has 13 years on him. Xi is much more jingoistic, nationalistic, he revived the old Maoism and he axed many aspects of collective leadership that was in place since late 70s and Deng Xiaoping. Xi triggered massive capital flight and elite exodus including capital flight from many western companies. Foreign investment is the worst since 2008.
I'd argue that some realignment of Cold War era foreign policy is needed. Ascendancy of China and India and concurrent decline of EU on global scale from 30% to to 15% of global GDP is definitely going to rebalance things, especially given also technological and innovation decline. Especially paired with some stupid ambition of EU to regulate world economy - that definitely was not there after Cold War.
georgioz
16d ago
Then there can never be a test or a pilot for an UBI, because it was only tested in this small city or during this timeframe so no true UBI. This is just nitpicking. The OP is right, the situation he describes is at least on par with pilot version of UBI when it comes to actual results.
georgioz
23d ago
I have only rather cursory knowledge of the history of eugenics but based on nothing but this I think some things need to be pointed out. Eugenics was ascendant in the specific historical context of the post-WW1 Western world as a response to the disruptive consequences of the war.
Eugenics was popular much earlier than that, it was a popular ethos of secular progressives who were very much into Darwinism and espoused social Darwinism as a scientific way to rule nations. It was espoused by Sir Francis Galton, the pioneer of eugenics and Darwin's cousin. It is not dissimilar to current progressive or rationalist ethos: we progressives use science and rationality to improve humanity. Plebs and especially religious backward morons may see things like sterilization as morally abhorent, however they do not see the purity of our work which will diminish pain for all the future generations. The utility gains of our girm work has almost no bounds, we need to find our courage and moral firmness to go through this.
It is also unsurprising what happened after it all failed. Progressives as usual declared that eugenic progressives were not true progressives, and that in fact they were far right Nazis - the same as they washed their hands from support of Stalinism and many other crimes they came up with. But it is in fact in their DNA.
This is equivalent of doing multiplication and eventually memorizing the multiplication table during elementary school. With enough "busywork" you will be able to factorize from your head, which will enable you to solve some key problems much, much more quickly "look and see" style ,sifting through unproductive approaches before even trying them. This is cookie cutter thing in many engineering areas, basically anything that uses differential equations which is a really a lot of stuff.
Busywork is really important especially in early stages. You have to go through some shit like memorizing vocabulary when you are learning a new language, before you will be able to do some creative things like translating poetry or doing some Tolkien-like stuff with that language.
georgioz
23d ago
I absolutely agree. I had a math class at uni and the prof gave us hundreds of problems to solve with a promise, that one of them will be exact copy on the exam and that we are allowed to bring solved problems to it. This actually made me go through all the problems. Copying the one I solved from notes on exam helped, but I had perfect score on all the other problems as well. Solving them for a week or so definitely helped. I caught several deficiencies, I taught myself more efficient ways to do checks mid-problem, I even consulted theory as problem solving brought understanding that went beside me at the time, and I just rechecked the theory because it was cool to have more thorough understanding.
It was kind of grueling, but I did not regret it. It was probably better than yet another Netflix binge session.
georgioz
23d ago
You have to invest into latina wife racial skill, even early levels will manifest as decently looking wife, who will pump children in order to get welfare - which is way more than she could earn back home in the shithole she comes from. I would think that you leared this from your race clan/guild already. This strategy is used by many such players, who tunnel new players through VPN from their original servers.
In Paul Fussell's nomenclature, the class of a math professor is definitely the 'upper-middle' class, not the upper class.
They may not be as rich, but they were genetically up there with doctors and lawyers or upper management and other elite hired white collar professionals who are considered as lower-to-middle upper class. That is my whole point. I'd say it is culturally upper class similarly to composers or musical virtuosos and other gentlemen who exhibited enough brilliance that upper-upper class wanted to be around them and even marry them. There is similar story with Henri Pointcare for math - he was born into low upper class or maybe upper middle class according to your evaluation - with his mother being daughter of minor industrialist and father being professor of Medicine. Throughout his life Pointcare was rubbing elbows with the most influential politicians and elites. Niels Bohr had almost the same situation - father was professor at university and mother was daughter of Jewish banker. Bohr was also highly influential and definitely upper class when it comes to his contacts and power.
But in the end it is besides the point, I think you got the gist of the argument. There is a difference between rich family impoverished by revolution or relocated by Hitler, Stalin or some other pogrom, or even stricken hard by string of bad luck such as health issue, gambling or other addiction - and a true low class of literal inbred morons.
That stars-and-stripes/ apple-pie Americanism is a thoroughly artificial construct
That may be so, but this thoroughly artificial construct has some pretty significant impacts. Maybe you have no interest in nationalism, but nationalism has interest in you as Jews, Armenians, Kurds and many other formerly or even currently stateless peoples can attest - including primitive tribes like american Indians who genocided each other before they adopted the wheel, not to even talk about nationalism as industrial CIV tech. As far as I can see, the situation did not change even today with wars in Ukraine, Sudan and many other places flaring up again based on ethnic and national lines. If English and French and other peoples will act with such a nonchalance in face of mass immigration, they can easily end up like Arabs in Palestine earlier in 20th century - replaced and displaced nation with no state to call as their homeland protecting their interests.
As a result, I think there's an inherently fake and cringe quality about the "nation," and it seems neither sad nor surprising that the same people who used the nation to kill the city-state would turn around and use the globe to kill the nation.
Oh, there were people like that even before. Trockyists and other lunatics believed in class division and socialist international movement - and it failed even domestically in face of Stalin's national communism. There were secular globalists who took world spanning empires such as the British Empire as given, and they saw themselves as first citizens of Earth, who were equally at home in London or Bombay or Cape Town - always having access to excellent tea, The Times and all those luxuries. Of course until they were driven out by one revolution or another.
There are things I'm not fond of about American culture, epsecially building a necessity for driving. I can see how a simmering dissatisfaction can be re-interpreted as contempt.
One argument I heard is that it is a defensive measure against lowlife criminal element, it is deliberate act of segregation by car ownership. You won't have drug addicts or roaming homeless congregating around local subway station, if there is none around. Highly connected walkable city can work in culturally homogenous Scandinavian country of yesteryear, not as much with multicultural society with all its problems. So beware what you wish for.
georgioz
24d ago
Many such cases. You reminded me of the Claudine Gay - the recently axed first black woman Harvard president. Apparently her family were magnates from Haiti who owned a concrete plant in Haiti, with various shenanigans especially with regards to reconstruction after earthquake with Haitian politicians having shares in the company for some reason.
But yeah, she is marginalized person who needs affirmative action.
I'm afraid the "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting! We live in a dazzlingly complex world, it's been several centuries since even the most talented person could have understood every facet of modern civilization and technology. Even Neumann and Tau would die of old age before becoming true polymaths.
Overrated. While I think that you probably cannot be literal retard and succeed, as soon as you are 100-110 IQ or some such, you can succeed. The thing is, that there are multiple different "merits" that can help you:
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Being pretty. Being 9 or 10 out of 10 will hugely improve your life and make it overall much easier. Especially if you can marry somebody who works for you. Tons of studies on this.
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Being socially apt and charismatic. You don't have to be able to navigate complex issues, if you can influence some high IQ loser to do it for you. Also ultra high IQ is correlated with being quite weird and socially dysfunctional from my personal experience, there is a colloquial term for it in form of "lonely genius syndrome".
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Being violent top dog. This is especially beneficial if you live in failed state, or you want to become local drug kingpin etc. You don't need to solve for high-complexity issues, if you can just pistol-whip your local nerd and take all of his crypto. If he protests, you can chop his finger off or some such. At minimum you should be able to defend yourself and not be bullied. Nevertheless being born as a sociopathic psycho can prove to be highly beneficial for highly successful violent career. Many such psychos became famous warlords, dictators and conquerors, and they belong to selected few most influential people in history. Some of them like prophet Muhammad were literally illiterate.
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Being tall. Famously being over 7 feet tall and without genetic defect gives you pretty good chance to get into NBA and become millionaire. Being over 6 feet tall seems to be seen as very a meritorious when it comes to ladies and reproduction. Many more such niches unrelated to IQ.
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Being healthy. Who cares if you are top IQ guy who can navigate highest levels of theoretical physics like Stephen Hawking, if you cannot navigate simple stairs. I'd rather be healthy, 100 IQ person than him living in constant pain unable to enjoy simplest joys of life.
Many more such cases. IQ is only one measure of merit - an important one, but it is not be-all-end-all.
As for me, I have one correction to make. I’m not old money! I’ve said this before, but I was born upper middle class; my parents became truly rich only in my teens.
You were probably member of temporarily impoverished upper class. I have seen many such examples as my country transitioned from socialism to capitalism after 1989. Optically your family may have been lower class as your peers in school during socialism, but your father/grandpa was a former math professor or successful entrepreneur who's whole property was expropriated by commies, and who was forced to become janitor or stoker/boilerman (a popular punishment by the party for people with wrong pedigree for some reason). You still had access to better homeschooling style education, you probably read books since you were 4 or 5, and you were bored at school thanks to access to huge library, you probably know how to play an instrument or two, and you know how to speak multiple languages - and all that despite barely having enough to eat. Nevertheless, you are in fact genetically upper middle class, that is your potential.
I think that especially people in US have distorted view of what true class means with huge number of immigrants, who often flee political persecution completely broke, and who are such temporarily impoverished upper class people. It is different from permanently poor chav/white trash lower class of people who are there for centuries, often due to their genetic issues. And I mean it literally - some of the most fucked up populations suffer from centuries of first-cousin inbreeding with huge accumulated genetic load.
It was as I got older that I came to understand that what they really meant was something more like "the United States has no culture worthy of consideration". The more I think about it, the more I think it is this distinction that the modern culture war is really being fought over.
This is yet another word that is lost in translation. Like James Lindsay said, progressives/wokies share your vocabulary, but not your dictionary. The words have different meanings for them, often in deliberate ways to confuse normies*. The same goes for the word culture. It is the usual grift: white and colonial culture is privileged and oppressive, and only through careful self-study and self-criticism can you awoke to these systemic power imbalances, and enrich yourself with other ways of knowing of oppressed cultures.
This is common word in these circles that masks agitation and indoctrination. This valence of the world culture is used when it comes to terms like cultural appropriation, LGBT culture, cultural competence etc. It is related to whole field of Cultural Studies pioneered by British Marxists in 50ies and 60ies, which only builds up on Gramscian theory of cultural hegemony.
*Note: some of these are on par with let's say 4Chan level of trolling. As and example of this, take the family friendly tag when it comes to trans and queer adjacent events like Drag Queen story hour etc. This is a wordplay on fact, that historically these people were estranged from their biological families and were adopted by their "community" a new queer group/family, like the ones described by Kath Weston and many others even in 80s and early 90s. So it is family friendly for queer family, not their biological family - great joke, isn't it? Other examples are now notorious ones such as Diversity and Equity or even "belonging" etc.
georgioz
26d ago
This turned the US Senate from the original deliberative body to a highly polarized mess that is just like the US House but less representative. It solved one problem, but failed us in many ways.
The classical trap of modern secularist/rationalist, who thinks that values can be gleamed from laws of nature and of course that their preferred current values are the most carefully deliberated and rational ones. What are the things that should be rationally deliberated on? How to increase GDP per capita? How to bring about communist paradise ASAP? How to maximize "human rights" as they are decided by UN councils led by countries like China?
I mean it for real. How does rational deliberation deliver on hot topics such as immigration, abortion, police violence, foreign wars, fertility crisis, second amendment, affirmative action & DEI or basically any number hot issues also discussed here? These topics are perceived as polarizing, because they are in fact hotly contested based on moral grounds not on some lack of deliberation.
The goal is to have Senators who are serious people who solve problems instead of clapping back on social media. The goal is to have a Senate comprised of people representative of the median of each State, opposed to partisans of the majority party in each state. I think people of both major parties plus people of the minor parties would prefer this to what we have going on now. So... Let's have a Constitutional Convention!
By the way we already have something like that in EU where unelected caste of bureaucrats churn out directives that are slavishly implemented by member states to extent that since Lisbon treaty over 50% of legislation of member countries is delivered by this enlightened body. EU commissars and their enlightened helpers were supposed to be these serious "experts" who use power of science, deliberation and rationality to improve the continent with their migration policy, net zero agenda, AI and social media regulation and other enlightened very serious ideas. It does not look that well so far, their legitimacy is tanking by the day and many people are actually asking why they are put into this position.
georgioz
26d ago
Where did you find information that this data is only about single parent households? In fact there is even better data in there, where women are more abusive compared to men if they are non-parent in the household by factor of almost 6.
I agree with you that we have to be careful of the women-are-wonderful effect here, and women have a tremendous capacity for violence and cruelty, but this particular figure doesn't seem to show that women are worse.
Women are way worse and my claim is that their violence is vastly underreported. We see these things only in extreme cases with violence against children and of course in same-sex relationships where there is no bias against men.
There is still something lost in translation to partner. It may capture modern secular view of marriage as something akin to business partnership in Family LLC, where both owners have 50% share and which can be ended any time at court, mostly in favor of female shareholder. Which is far from actual sacramental marriage that involves holy vows etc. But I agree. I can be "partner registered by government" in view of outside society and a husband in sacramental marriage with my wife in front of my community.
I think that they still have a point. The liberal ethos was all about equal access to opportunity to achieve American dream of happiness and success. Except that we have a problem - if you believe in liberal tabula rasa, then there is no other way to measure equal access to opportunity other than outcome. Unequal outcome means unequal opportunity and thus DEI is good. The only liberal defense was that we did not achieve true
socialismmeritocracy. We need more education or welfare etc. and we will see the meritocratic utopia maybe next generation. In a sense DEI people claim the same - except that they want to accelerate these gains by redistribution now on grounds that we will achieve true meritocracy maybe even sooner by magic of representation and other DEI effects.Or you do not believe in tabula rasa and you believe that some differences in opportunity are inevitable or ingrained etc. But then you are no longer believing in the same meaning of the word "merit", which than catches too medieval of a flavor of having certain classes or people who are inherently more meritorious as opposed to common uneducated plebeian caste. This is too right coded and in fact plays toward lefties sensibilities as they see this obviously as hated ancien régime which needs to be fought at every step for true progress.
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