stuckinbathroom
No bio...
User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
3d ago
I doubt we would have been where we are, if the left satisfied itself with cancelling racists, and otherwise acted normal.
This is a bit like saying “I doubt the milk would be all over the floor, if the glass had just stopped in midair instead of hitting the ground and shattering to pieces”
Yes, that is technically true, almost by definition—but in practice, “the left only cancels racists and is otherwise milquetoast colorblind meritocratic Third Way Clinton Democrat/Blairite New Labour straight outta the 90s” is, like a glass of milk after being knocked off the table but before hitting the floor, a highly unstable state that can only exist for a moment on the inexorable path to a decidedly higher-entropy equilibrium.
stuckinbathroom
4d ago
It’s stricto sensu
stuckinbathroom
4d ago
Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all.
Uh, weren’t Kirk’s last words about gun violence in the US, not trans people?
Also, how exactly do you think Robinson was able to hear what Kirk was saying from ~200m away? Even though Kirk had a mic and amplification, it didn’t look like there were speakers set up within earshot of Robinson’s vantage point. Are you suggesting that he was watching the livestream on his phone, just before picking up his rifle and assassinating Kirk?
stuckinbathroom
4d ago
I agree with you on this. As much as my libertarian-ish heart hates the idea of government meddling in the free market, I do grudgingly admit that the EU is onto something with their regulations prohibiting employers from taking any adverse action in response to an employee’s personal social media activity.
Since it’s a matter of EU law, companies no longer have to worry about policing this shit: they can just throw up their hands and (rightly!) say “wellp, nothing we can do”. And naturally, this implies that the activist class (on either side of the culture war) can’t rack up any wins by threatening to boycott some company unless they fire so-and-so for some unconscionable post on InstaBlueTokBookX.
As the GMU Econ crowd is fond of saying, solve for the equilibrium—IMHO it’s a much more civilized one than what we get in the land of laissez-faire. This is at least as good a case for the role of the state in preventing runaway Molochian escalation spirals as China cracking down on extracurricular tutoring hours.
stuckinbathroom
7d ago
Kirk was very vocal about some very specific topics, and that might attract attention from particularly crazy people.
Can you elaborate? I vaguely gather that he was pro-gun but not more so than the median Red Triber; similarly, pro-Israel to the same extent as a replacement-level right-wing pundit. What specific topics was Kirk known for, beyond mainstream conservative media talking points?
stuckinbathroom
10d ago
How could any amount of missing paperwork justify bringing lethal force to bear against a human being? That's the impulse, and it is a fundamentally moral, compassionate one.
…
the "imported for no clear reason" framing obscures this, which is at once uncharitable to the decision-makers
First of all, thank you for stating clearly the view from within the pro-immigration left’s mindset; it’s one that is based on moral precepts very different from the ones we usually hear about ‘round these here parts, and it’s always good to get a periodic reminder of how the other half lives (and thinks).
Nevertheless, I want to answer the above-quoted passages in good faith, as a not-especially-pro-immigration non-leftist (though I am myself a child of immigrants).
How, indeed, could missing paperwork justify the use of lethal force? In the first place, I would argue that lethal force is seldom necessary to enforce sane immigration policy: simply patrolling the border properly—much easier nowadays with autonomous drones—and enforcing citizenship requirements for any government benefits plus employer compliance with E-Verify or similar, together with harsh penalties for violation and immediate deportation of illegal aliens, would suffice in almost all cases. Still, it is true that deportation is ultimately backed by the threat of force, up to and including lethal force should the prospective deportee resist hard enough. How is this OK? Because the alternative—that is, that we should never enforce immigration law—implicitly grants to every would-be illegal immigrant the unilateral right to nullify American law! Once we let that camel’s nose into the tent, everyone will start asking, quite reasonably, why they should be bound to abide by laws they find immoral, or even merely inconvenient, and what can we say to them? “Actually, the law is subordinate to my particular moral code”? Well, why are your morals better than mine, and by whose authority do your morals supersede the law of the land? And, more darkly, how do you propose to stop people with very different morals from using the same argument, should they ever get their hands on the reins of power? I am reminded of the famous scene from A Man For All Seasons: “Yes, I’d give the devil the benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
In short, respect for the rule of law—even when your morality disagrees with the law—is the ultimately the only way to prevent a Hobbesian war of all against all. In game theory terms, we most punish defectors, lest everyone think it’s a good idea to defect.
I would also argue that “imported for no clear reason” is the wrong framing—there is a reason, namely that Biden (or his handlers, or the Democrat activist class, or whoever else you want to blame for this decision) wanted to do so, and in particular wanted to do so out of the deeply-held moral sentiments that you have just articulated (in addition to base political considerations, of course). But even granting, charitably, that this policy was the result of well-intended moral judgments rather than mere political gamesmanship, I would say that the decision-makers here are very clearly in the wrong, and it is not at all uncharitable to say so.
The President is the chief executive of the federal government. That means his job is to carry out the law as Congress has created it (and as the judiciary has interpreted it): nothing more and nothing less. In particular, the President’s own moral scruples should play no part in how he faithfully carries out the duties of his office. I have no problem with the President using the “bully pulpit” to argue for or against this or that moral view; nor do I see any issue with an ex-President, in his personal capacity, acting according to whatever moral beliefs he may hold (see, e.g., President Carter and Habitat for Humanity); nor is there anything preventing the President from encouraging Congress to pass laws that accord with his morals. But when he is on the job, the President must hold his personal beliefs aside and execute the role that has been entrusted to him.
An analogy: would it be acceptable for the CEO of a public company to unilaterally decide to sell off all the company’s assets to raise money to give to charity? I would say no: the CEO is answerable to the shareholders, who endowed him with stewardship over their capital in the expectation that he would carefully husband the business to maximize their return on investment. The moral worth of the charity is irrelevant: if the shareholders want to, they can decide to donate to that charity with their own money—and if the CEO decides to give his bonus to the charity, or to briefly bring up the benefits of that charity at the next shareholders’ general meeting, then good for him! But in his capacity as CEO, he has but one mandate entrusted to him by the shareholders, which he is bound to carry out faithfully, personal morals notwithstanding.
stuckinbathroom
16d ago
the U.S. has weathered a good number of major crises over the years without drastically changing its system of government, or at least, not permanently doing so.
(emphasis in the original)
Hard disagree; the Progressive era and, especially, FDR’s presidency ratcheted up the scope of federal government intervention in everyday life, with tortured readings of the Constitution (courtesy of the Supreme Court) providing only the tiniest fig leaf over what was really going on: a radical break with the Constitution as it had previously been understood, and its replacement by a qualitatively different system of government—one in which the unelected federal bureaucracy had theretofore unimaginable powers to regulate all manner of activity.
I’m not saying that this was good or bad, necessary or unnecessary, historically inevitable or historically contingent. All I’m saying is that it happened, and the Republic has never been the same since.
stuckinbathroom
18d ago
Specific link chosen for the soap because the writer has a crazy prosthetic eye.
Not surprised; she seems quite Moody!
stuckinbathroom
20d ago
no more than Mexicans born in the US makes them Americans
Aye, that one’s a consequence of the Magic Document
stuckinbathroom
21d ago
stuckinbathroom
23d ago
but I think it’s the first serious attempt to construct an arcology
Is the Kowloon Walled City not "serious"?
stuckinbathroom
25d ago
Yes
stuckinbathroom
26d ago
Desi women are so beautiful
Is it possible to learn this power?
(I’m, uh, asking for a friend)
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Fair points, but verification is usually way cheaper than generation.
Not if P = NP
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Now a number of liberal commentators ranging from Friedliche DeBoer … to Steve Sailer
(emphasis mine)
anon, I…
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Orangutans are honourable. Chimpanzees are dishonorable.
Apes together Right Honourable
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
The only people getting screwed are
Hmm I can think of at least 2 other people getting screwed…
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
I’m genuinely curious as to what the Chinese Communist take on this will be.
On the one hand, this could very well be their golden ticket, not just out of their apparently terminal fertility/relationship-formation doom spiral, but to an entire population of superhuman Han Chinese who could utterly mog the rest of humanity in every single human endeavor—and if this race of Übermenschen is ushered in by the CCP, they will effectively have an eternal Mandate of Heaven. This has been every Chinese ruler’s wet dream since the time of Confucius, if not earlier.
On the other hand, the CCP has not looked too kindly on past attempts at human genetic engineering; see, for example, how they threw He Jiankui in prison for 3 years over his CRISPR experiments. And of course, the very idea that individuals may have innate differences that cannot be attributed to their environment is utter anathema to Marxist orthodoxy—whence Lysenkoism in the Stalin era. Now, my sense is that the (post-Mao) CCP wouldn’t force the scientific establishment to kowtow to politics the way Stalin did: they know that that way lies the ignominious end of China’s ascendancy on the global scientific stage. But at the same time, they really are true believers in Marx, Lenin, and Mao to an extent that most western commentators don’t fully appreciate.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
One is also reminded of the increasingly-roundabout euphemisms for a second American civil war: it started with “the Boogaloo”, then moved on to near-homophones like “big luau” and “big igloo” before metastasizing into convoluted synonyms for the latter (cf. “ice housing of tremendous proportions”, “absolutely mammoth Polynesian festivities”)
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Obvious fake is obvious: everyone knows Bielefeld doesn’t exist. Try again with a real German town.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Unironically, this might be indicative of the single biggest difference between WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies: the expectation that people naturally will—and should!—leverage social ties, especially family/kinship ties, to get preferential treatment when dealing with large, impersonal bureaucracies like the government. The Chinese call it guanxi, but of course it has a million names besides, in basically every part of the world except Northern Europe and the Anglosphere. Hell, even in the Anglosphere, we have the old saw “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, which gestures at the same thing.
There’s not enough evidence to say whether this situation in particular is a case of such behavior, but it being Latin America, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. Then again, it is Chile, which I vaguely intuit is WEIRD-er than par for the Hispanophone course.
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
Ehh, I dunno.
First of all, to be fair, he didn’t say you need 15% BFP; he said you need sub-20% and 15% is ideal. This is eminently achievable for most men, especially if you have access to amphetamines or GLP-1 agonists (or both).
The other requirements (income threshold, solo living situation, social skills) are also fairly easily within reach for basically any 110+ IQ man in his 20s or 30s with 50th %ile+ conscientiousness who lives in a mid-size or larger metro area.
Yes, I am aware that the median man is, almost by definition, practically incapable of meeting this bar, and I agree with OP’s sentiment that the bar has gotten higher and the responsibility for meeting it has devolved further to atomized individual men acting on their own. But the bar is definitely way lower than 6-6-6, and (unlike height or penis length) the traits mentioned in this post can realistically be improved through deliberate effort. So I don’t see this post as discouraging, certainly not to the extent of, say, what goes on in /r/BlackPillScience
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
Hard cases make bad law. Bad law makes easy cases. Easy cases make good law. Good law makes hard cases.
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
I often think about Blood Simple, the Cohen Brothers first film. Film opens with this lady talking about how much she hates her husband. Among the gripes she has, she mentions that he bought her a gun as a gift. Giving your wife a gun as a present? Can you even imagine such a thing? It's a six round revolver. Over the course of the 90 minute runtime, it discharges exactly 6 rounds. If you've been counting during the film, by the final scene you know exactly how it's going to end. It's a simple concept, but well executed. Everything has a set up, everything has a payoff.
Sounds like they took Chekhov’s gun and dialed it up to 11, as it were
Of window fame, no doubt
More options
Context Copy link