domain:alexepstein.substack.com
TitaniumButterfly
2m ago
Okay! You go first.
daguerrean
5m ago
Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez removed her pronouns from her twitter bio. Does this represent Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability? In addition to her we have a representative from Massachusetts, Seth Moulton facing criticism over expressing sympathy with the anti-trans in women's sports position, and in part blaming the election loss on some of the demands of ideological purity on this issue in particular.
Even Reddit seems to be sensing this shift and top comments are reflecting unease with trans orthodoxy. Even the comments from many Democrat supporters on Reddit seem to be avoiding a full-throated defense of trans orthodoxy and instead blaming Republicans for making an issue out of something that hardly affects anyone.
Is this a sign of things to come? Will they actually move against gender orthodoxy or just make it slightly less visible while pursuing the same policy goals behind the scenes?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7m ago
What is there even left to be said at this point? You really just have to put your foot down and tell these people (the men, in this case) that they're not welcome. And when they inevitably respond with accusations that you're being sexist, transphobic, and exclusionary, you say: "yes I am sexist, yes I am transphobic, yes I am exclusionary, yes yes yes, it's all true; now please, the door is that way, if you don't mind."
The left only has as much power as they do because people are deathly afraid of their accusations. If people would just affirm being racist, sexist, and transphobic as positive things then so much of their power would evaporate.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8m ago
I don’t like either one. If we’re to have an open and honest conversation on any political topic, basic facts are key to the discussion. Knowing where Ukraine is, why it matters, its key economic outputs, population, etc matters. For that matter knowing what Russia wants Ukraine for and why Crimea is so important to it’s perceived national security interests, or why having Ukraine potentially join EU and NATO is such a risk is vitally important here. But if you have no idea where Ukraine is, or the history of Russia being invaded because it has no natural features on its borders, or that Crimea was one of the Soviet Union’s main warm water ports to Europe, it’s hard to make sense out of the issue.
Likewise on anything science. If you don’t understand the basics of how the science in question works, or if it’s a legal question, what the law in question actually says, there’s no real point. It’s just vibes based conversation. I lean left you lean right, whatever.
My main beef with modern university education (outside of some job-skills based training) is that it’s not creating people capable of learning and understanding for themselves so much as people who simply believe the consensus views and have large doses of credential-based smugness. They don’t bother to look up the facts before deciding that their side is right. They don’t read books, or bother to find out what the other side of the issue actually thinks. We spend more time and energy on critical thinking and higher education than any generation in human history only to produce a society of people who are the least curious about the world, least interested in finding out the facts before making a decision, least able or willing to think logically than previous generations who had less schooling. My grandfather who didn’t even graduate from college was pretty well educated because he was constantly reading nonfiction books about whatever topics interested him. He was a pretty careful and logical thinker as well and able to make good decisions in business because of that.
TitaniumButterfly
11m ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
2rafa
12m ago
How imbalanced are the demographics of recent Indian immigrants to the UK? The statistics are presumably available.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14m ago
I’ve never opened Pride & Prejudice, but I did attempt Sense & Sensibility and my impression was similarly unfavorable. Austen was indeed a keen observer of human psychology, but her elliptical prose style left me cold. (And I say this as someone whose writing style is not exactly a paragon of Hemingway-esque brevity itself.)
mrvanillasky
19m ago
You create clusters of smart capable people and eek out better outliers than you normally would.
Also because people always want to marry their own.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
20m ago
In at least a few non-Ivy schools I keep tabs on, student-led BDS efforts last year got forcibly pushed aside by non-student university leadership, presumably concerned more about federal law regarding national origin discrimination (and maybe also in response to major benefactors grumbling). Generally this took the form of "student elected leadership may not even debate this motion" and while there was (and probably remains) some grumbling from some students, it seemed that the university won.
I was saddened this morning to read of the resignation of one of the founders of La Leche League from that organization.
La Leche League was founded in 1956 to improve breastfeeding rates in the United States. Many people are unaware, or do not fully grasp the implications of, the fact that the mid-20th century was an era of hyper-medicalization and scientific interventionism. Probably most college students today know how to make the proper noises concerning the historic exclusion of women (or racial minorities) from medical studies, but few could tell you why in 1965 Robert Bradley made waves by arguing that childbirth shouldn't be such a medicalized process. It would be a good half century before skyrocketing c-section rates persuaded the AMA (etc.) to take seriously the idea that medicalization was harming mothers at least as frequently as it was helping them.
Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at. One is probably just that breastfeeding does not typically present quite the same "life-or-death" questions that childbirth sometimes can. Another is that, historically, not all mothers have been successful breast-feeders, whether by chance or by choice; relying on other mothers to feed one's own infant, at least for a time, is attested cross-culturally. Breastfeeding has well-established health benefits for babies and mothers both (in particular, nothing else is more decidedly protective against breast cancer), but between the availability of adequate (if not really optimal) substitutes, psychological difficulty come have treating breasts in non-sexualized ways, and a sometimes steep learning curve, many mothers find the whole proposition... unpalatable.
La Leche League's most visible influence (at least in my experience) has been their gratis lactation consultants. Some mothers, and some babies, take to breastfeeding like the proverbial ducks to water, but many, maybe most women have at least a little difficulty. Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing, what if I don't produce enough milk, are there foods I need to avoid, etc. are things women once shared with their daughters, or learned from their midwife, and aren't necessarily things your average OB/GYN has any grasp on. (It's not unusual for full-fledged OB/GYNs to spend 6-8 weeks (or less!) in their entire training learning about normal pregnancy and childbirth; their job, after all, is to fix such problems as may arise.) For women who are willing to accept input (and, I suppose, for women who capitulate to the sometimes, er, zealous lactation consultants), La Leche League has filled the gap left by the steamrolling of familial bonds by cultural "progress."
So why, as a 94-year-old woman, would Marian Tompson denounce decades of work brought about, in large measure, by her own efforts? Here is what she wrote:
From an organisation with the specific mission of supporting biological women who want to give their babies the best start in life by breastfeeding them, LLL’s focus has subtly shifted to include men who, for whatever reason, want to have the experience of breastfeeding, despite no careful long-term research on male lactation and how that may affect the baby.
This shift from following the norms of nature, which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organisation.
Helen Joyce of British women’s rights charity Sex Matters commented:
By including men who want to breastfeed in its services, LLL is destroying its founding mission to support breastfeeding mothers.
It also goes against the wishes of many mothers, group leaders and trustees around the world, who have been fighting to convince LLL International to hold fast to its woman-focused mission...
Conquest's Laws win again. La Leche League has been profoundly nonpartisan, but it was not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing, and so "another previously innocent activity" heads toward "World War I style trench warfare."
Glassnoser
27m ago
There is a reason why people kept this place heterogeneous for thousands of years.
What reason is that?
5434a
30m ago
Finished Pride & Prejudice yesterday. I was expecting crisp and refined writing but what I got, which certainly was not parallel to, indeed not sharing many aspects with, a style one could generously, or as befits opinion parsimoniously, describe using a range of terms, carefully chusen from the refracted, diffuse spectrum of all potential lexical motifs, as one of focus, indeed moreso not an under abundance of sidewards steps and circumlocution.
Better than Madame Bovary though.
hydroacetylene
32m ago
No. Bezos’ wife number one was a key part of him being able to build Amazon; she has a legitimate partial claim on the fortune and it’s not like she divorced him because she felt like it.
hydroacetylene
34m ago
No, this is life expectancy at age 20. People in the past didn’t die in their forties very often, but they did die younger than we do today.
mrvanillasky
42m ago
Read Nancy Fridays book my secret garden for more lol
hydroacetylene
43m ago
This is largely the sentiment I see from normie cons, with the caveat that many believe some groups- they’re always cautious about which ones but if pressed would probably name heavily Muslim groups to start with- are essentially unassimilable, and that only their children, or more probably mixed race grandchildren, can be expected to buy into American values enough to be ‘real Americans’.
>ask if the abstract property is kiki or bouba
>he laughs. "It's a good property, sir"
Just thinking out loud here, really. I've had various dealings with Indians.
First of all, I'll freely admit that every Indian doctor I've encountered has been at least competent even if the bedside manner often leaves something to be desired. They often seem more disrespectful to their patients (or at least me) than doctors of other races, which I imagine has to do with how social status is understood in their culture generally.
In the corporate environment it's a very different dynamic. The Indians I've worked with are often spectacularly incompetent and, worse, preternaturally skilled at covering this up by spoofing the impression of a sincere, genuine colleague. It's frankly very creepy. Like they've modeled us whites, know how to exploit our good nature, recognize that they're intrinsically worse, and have zero shame in faking us out while leading us into situations where we're completely screwed and they're incrementally better off. It makes my skin crawl. After enough of this one is sadly obliged to develop a thick wall of prejudice simply for barely-minimal self defense. Chinese are often the same way except somewhat more reluctant because, I think, they realize they're less-convincing. Perhaps I might say that Chinese are smarter about modeling the future and not being too brazen in their duplicity? Whereas Indians often seem totally oblivious to the possibility that we might catch on to them, which adds a measure of insult to the injury. But, you know, they promote each other, so somehow this never seems to catch up to them.
There's some deep ancestral memory, some terror and hatred, of things which mimic benign features of the environment while actually intending to have us for dinner. Indians often push that button for me harder than I can believe.
When dealing with Indian business proprietors, based on the way they look at me and treat me, I'm often unable to shake the impression that they don't even recognize me as basically human. I'm a resource and they'd step over me as I die in a gutter as soon as they'd rent me a (cattle-car tier) hotel room or sell me a bottle of water. Again, it's creepy. But less so than corpo-Indians, since at least these ones have dropped the pretense. It's a bit strange that this should bother me. I'm engaging in a simple economic transaction; why should there be an expectation of mutual respect and friendliness? But again the sensation is that they know I'm dumb enough to assume good faith and have zero compunction about punishing that as hard as they can. Defect-bots. Namaste, indeed!
It can be almost cartoonish. They can be so unsubtle about it, and yet so simultaneously inept, that they remind me of the stock character of 'adorably incompetent pint-sized would-be villain'. Except it's not so adorable when you remember how few safeguards are actually in place. Not so cute when you walk through an area with dozens of dark eyes in dark faces tracking your every movement, calculating. One of them is a curiosity; an opportunity to cultivate patience and compassion, with a side of smug self-satisfaction to boot. Many of them is a threat.
One oddity I've noted is that Indian men seem much worse about all this than Indian women. The Indian women I've met do generally seem to be nicer people and don't set off my "you are being eaten" alarm to anywhere near the same degree. I don't know whether the difference is fundamental or some kind of observation bias thing. I've also never actually worked with an Indian woman. Someday I'll probably find out what's going on here.
So all that plus the general impression of filthiness (caste-dependent, I'm sure) and I'm not surprised that there is some backlash. Frankly I think they're overdue for much, much more. Given time, even quokkas must evolve an aversion to predators.
hydroacetylene
48m ago
Republicans 100% believe that there are democrats who can be convinced to vote Republican with the right pitch(and that Trump did this), although often holding that non voters are mostly people who shouldn’t be voting anyways.
daguerrean
51m ago
Just in my own experience what makes anti-Indian racism different from other forms is that it faces less social censure in places where racism is normally taboo, particularly from women. I think any woman that posts photos of herself on social media has probably experienced some "noticing" that online sexual harassment she receives is not equally perpetrated by all ethnicities. I think women play a big role in defining social taboos and have carved out an exception for Indian men that you notice in places like Reddit. I think this is evidenced by the fact that I never notice any hostility towards Indian women (outside of some fringe places like the Motte where their frequent HR-style wokeness is noticed).
Source: See "send bobs and vegana" meme which IIRC predates all the focus on Indian scammers.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
52m ago
The casual scamming is really doing a number on perceptions of India like you say, and Kitboga is at least a little uncomfortable that people are noticing all his targets are Indians. I can't believe an entire country is so relaxed about being known as casual scammers, and will lash out at you if you criticize this behavior with whataboutisms or saying white people deserve it. It's like the country has taken the worst aspects of the left (obsession with race, hatred of whites, constant indignation) and the right (hypernationalism, also constant indignation) into a horrible synthesis.
hydroacetylene
54m ago
That certainly seems to be what it means in practice.
daguerrean
57m ago
the fortune you were able to accumulate because your wife was loyal enough
What do you think each of their value over replacement spouse is?
I’m honestly not surprised other than that it’s taken this long for schools to make it official that only right-thinking people will be granted access to the prestige of high end universities. I suspect it’s been there informally for a while and gleaned from student essays (don’t talk too much about traditional Christianity, and certainly don’t ever mention working for a GOP campaign). It’s just too easy for schools to use that influence culture and to weaken their enemies by making support for them a career limiting choice. I’m not even sure it’s safe to be openly GOP in “polite” PMC type jobs.
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