100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
Tagging @OracleOutlook as well
The Wikipedia entry on Contemporary Catholic Liturgical Music lists "Popular composers." It's a hit list of boomers born in mostly the 1950s. Yes, the overwhelming feeling is that these people dabbled with hippie shit in the 60s but then decided they actually weren't down with the pagan beliefs and wanted to have a 401k and live in the suburbs.
If you look at the linked videos for the clown mass and, especially, the puppet mass, look at the preponderance of greyhairs. The boomers really did enjoy fucking up everything good and True.
I didn't go to my first Latin mass until my late 20s. It was a sung high mass on a Sunday. 90 minutes long. One of the first feelings I remember having after leaving was one of anger. I was so upset that my entire childhood and adolescence was spent at suburban novus ordo masses with pudgy retired hippies singing horrible contemporary hymns, Father Friendly sermons about "making sure Jesus is your best friend!", and an utter lack of energy, reverence, and glory. When you leave a latin mass now - especially a high mass - you feel like something meaningful happened. All of the motifs around spiritual nourishment and renewal that rung totally empty after a Novus Ordo actually come into tangible fruition.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
I wonder if even a compromise new Pope represents a major concern for traditionalists, especially in the west.
As I understand it, the "traditionalist" catholic movement was largely underground after Vatican II all the way until the 1990s. The two largest groups dedicated to the Traditional Latin Mass, the FSSP and the ICKSP, weren't even founded until 1988 and 1990, respectively. Even up through the Benedict XVI pontificate, traditionalists were very small and fringe (again, if my understanding is accurate)
This changed when Francis got The Big Chair. His break with a lot of seemingly bedrock doctrine (see Amoris Laetitia from 2016) contributed to the strengthening of the traditionalist movement. The Traditionis Custodes (2021) has been seem by some as a direct attempt to smash the TLM (although this is contradicted in part by how Francis dealt with the aforementioned FSSP, ICSKP, and even the SSPX).
All of this is to say, nothing rallies a group like The Big Bad Enemy, and traditionalists had that with Francis to their hearts content - especially the sedevacantists and other RadTrads, including the Very Online versions.
If a New Pope is elected who, on day one, states "Yeah TLM is fine for whoever wants to celebrate it. Bishops don't need to ask for approval anymore. Go for it." does this take a lot of the Righteously Indignant (TM) wind out of the sails of the traditionalists? I don't know, but much hay was made for a reason during the Francis Pontificate.
Electing Pizzaballa would be, I think, a epoch defining moment for the church for the better. If there's a Cardinal out there (besides Zen) who has "future Saint" written all over him, it's probably Pizzaballa.
WSJ Article on Elon Musk's Reproductive Habits
(Side note: I know WSJ is paywalled. Can one of you internet heroes find an alt link?)
Thanks to @zoink:
Archive Link: https://archive.is/EVkGv
It's pretty weird. Musk, according to the article, references his children, collectively, as his "legion." He has a vision of a sort of compound in Texas for all of the women he's reproduced with along with the children. The cult vibes only get stronger until they run into cold hearted legal recourse. It appears, from the article, that drawn out family court proceedings, estrangement, and some sort of financial settlement are par for the course with Musk. Effective co-parenting or an amicable albeit non-exclusive relationship? Odds are low.
I've always been suspicious of Musk because a few reasons, but I'll decline to elaborate on those specifics in order to bring up a broader culture war point.
While "pronatalism" (loosely defined) is so hot right now on the right, there are some pretty major fractures beneath the surface. A lot of them have to do, unsurprisingly, with the centrality and importance of a stable nuclear family. Next to "the economy" (whatever that may mean), issue and topics of the family, I believe, are of paramount importance when drawing cultural and political lines. In the pronatal sphere, I see a two camp (at least) breakdown:
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Have All The Babies All The Time (HAT-BAT) - This is firmly where Musk is king. The idea is simple mathematics with a dash of eugenics; if you are a "worthy man" have as many babies as possible. Multiple women? Fine. Selecting women based on your own rubric of "genetic desirability" also fine. This is where HBDers put their rubber to the road.
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Have All The Babies And Raise Them In a Family (HAT-ARF) - This is the providence of traditional religious groups and a particular kind of secular cultural conservative (often, it's kind of hard to distinguish between these two subgroups because the latter will play-act at the religious part without really meaning it).
While it might seem that HAT-BAT and HAT-ARF might be able to leave each to their own and agree on "yay babies," I suspect that HAT-ARF will, quickly, stop to say "wait a minute, you actually have to raise your kids. A ton of data says that broken families have horrible social outcomes." And that right there is a major culture war split.
I'm a pronatalist, in the broadest sense possible, yet I do think it's too much to ask to necessarily tie that to some sort of religious requirement. Yet, I also don't see anyway to build functional societies without a nuclear family as the foundational unit. Spreading The Worthy Male Seed was the de facto method of world population for thousands of years. (Insert the stat here on how everyone in Central Asia is Genghis Khan's grandson/daughter). The result was a lot of continuation of the de facto state of man - war, strife, instability, and short lives. The formalization of monogamous marriage and all of the social and legal codes and laws that fractal out from there was a 2000+ year slow process that resulted in the stabilizing of families, of societies, and preservation of pro-social cultures. Destabilization of the family (sexual revolution etc.) has destabilized society and culture. Looking at it that way, the "Musk Mode" pronatalism is far more regressive that he - or others with similar strategies - would like to admit.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20d ago
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21d ago
Watch for staff turnover.
If this really was "the plan all along," I would expect most people to stay put.
If there was some moment where Trump "realized" that this was a massive economic blunder, he'll move or fire people, while still claiming "yep ... plan all along"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
As @MaiqTheTrue says, the rot goes back much longer and, I would add, across many different domains.
This is at the root of anti-enlightenment / anti-modernist thinking (a position I seemingly become more comfortable with daily). Humans used to have a much more humble and limited opinion of their ability to understand the complexity of the universe and capital-T "Truth." Much of that was left to religion, theology, or, sometimes, applied ethics and morality. In fact, even the best thinkers of the enlightenment period had a totally different conception of religion and faith in terms of epistemic systems.
Whereas today, in purely rational terms, it is fashionable to draw a box around theology and religion as a kind of esoteric study of the human spirit or heart, classically, religion and theology was seen as a bedrock component of any knowledge system in much the same way we might think of arithmetic, basic grammar, or ... geography? (you take your pick).
And I think it's taken 300 or so years for the compounding effects of that loss to be felt. Your post highlights demoralization as a key issue. Many other places I've seen the term "crisis of meaning" thrown around. The figures for male suicides, drug overdose, and chornic alcoholism are often lumped together as "deaths of despair." The problem, to me, seems to be that a purely rational worldview creates a fundamentally underdeveloped system of knowledge and personal agency - we really do become the rational ideal. That is, information processors. But that alone does not make life livable, nor does it do anything to orient us towards useful application of information processing. One thing I know for sure about Scott from SSC - he is a world class thinker. Another thing I know for sure - sometimes he chooses the goofiest things to think about.
The various more developed religions do a lot to remedy this. The more purely "spiritual" ones (Buddhism etc.) I think aren't as great because they fail in engaging with the world in the opposite direction of rationalism. Instead of overthinking, they actively cultivate a profound detachment from things that may subjectively feel serene and peacful but is just a different method of undermining prosocial activities. If people find themselves adverse to organized religion, I see the most effective systems being some of the classic virtue ethics regimes -- stoicism etc.
There's going to (always) be a temptation to secularize the religious in order to try to split the baby and get the maximum amount of "meaning" without all of that pesky sin-and-metaphysics. This is the primary critique of Kant's categorical imperative. And I think it's a valid critique - secularizing something that is inherently not isn't possible and you're more likely engaging in some elaborate self-deception. Play the tape forward and you end up with wokeism - which has all of the anthropological trappings of a religious belief system yet is rife with internal contradictions and has zero rigorous epistemic construction.
In a nutshell, people need to cultivate a sense of faith - deeply held belief something transcendent and beyond themselves that they can orient a life towards. And there needs to be an accompanying practice of it. Just like physical fitness or general mental acuity, if you aren't doing "it" everyday, you're getting worse at it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
25d ago
1945-1979 saw a massive expansion in the American manufacturing sector
A good place to start in analyzing this (which is true, btw) is to ask "why?" Better yet, to ask "what were the prevailing macro conditions that allowed this to happen?"
Tracing that, you'll probably stumble upon the answer that is accepted by all serious economists and historians; after world war 2, ALL of the countries that had the human capital, technological proficiency, and public infrastructure to support a massive scale manufacturing sector were literally blown to shit and had suffered massive amounts of prime age male death ..... except for the USA.
1945 to 1979 happened as a fait accompli because no other country on earth could - at scale - do it.
In 2025, this is not the case. We would be immediately competing (with drastically higher labor costs by law) with several other countries (two of which who have larger absolute populations than us) who have spent the last 40 years (re)developing their manufacturing sectors.
But wait - we're already close to optimal in terms of manufacturing value add. The Chinese beat us out because they have three times the population and negative three billion times the respect for human rights. So when you, or anyone, says "bring back manufacturing!" - what in the actual hell do you mean? It's already here. Especially the best of it. In terms of high-end technical manufacturing (complex systems, aircraft, large machinery, etc.) the U.S. is so far out in first it's not even a competition.
The "manufacturing jobs" people like you seem to want are, what, exactly? Lightbulbs? Tee-shirts? Flip-flops? These are not jobs that pay well. These are not jobs that support families. These are not jobs that make strong communities. These are subsistence level toil.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
27d ago
I regularly read articles about how protectionism is the secret sauce behind China's economy.
Written by whom, Experts?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
This is the professional website of the study's lead author
This is me reading tea-leaves a little bit, but some things stand out to me.
The majority of his academic background is in business (MBA) and a fanci-fied version of IT. His professional experience was with CACI which is laughably described as a "mid-size" consulting firm. CACI is a notorious "body shop" Beltway Bandit that makes billions of dollars off of staff augmentation for Federal Contracts. Their own website states they employ about 25,000 people.
This provides a mental model, at least, of how this study - and its accompanying malfeasance - came into being. This is a consultant in a classroom. "What does the client want as an outcome? Racism. Okay, great! We can work the numbers to make it say that."
In the Daily Caller piece that the reddit post links to, they have a screenshot of this guy's Microsoft Word comments - one of them literally says, "this is not the story we're trying to tell." This is straight out of a consulting 101 MBA class.
At some point in the 2000s, Academia became a kind of side option career for people who aren't actually serious academics or researchers. You could pickup up a PhD from somewhere in something and then get associate or adjunct status. Sure, this salary wasn't great, but it gave you that credential to pass around as a digital hustler - you could go on podcasts, do paid speaking engagements, consult on the side for $300 an hour. It was a weird kind of self-reputation-maxxing. And that's part of the real long term rot of the academy. If you got a PhD in the 1950s or before, it's because you were almost monkish in your devotion to serious study in a field.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
Unfortunately, according to DOGE's own numbers, it's a lot of "on paper" savings.
From some previous contracting work, I know an unfortunate amount about how Federal procurement works. The DOGE tracker sites I've found have direct links to FPDS (Federal Procurement Data System) pages for very specific contracts. That's good! But the devil is always in the details.
For any given government contract, there is the total lifetime value of the contract and dollars already obligated to it. As a toy example, let's say the Department of Commerce wants to do some general IT upgrade. It does some market research (not really, lol, but, whatever) solicits some bids, reviews proposals, and awards a contract. The total award value may be $500m, $1bn, or even more. But that doesn't mean the contract gets a big up-front payment of $1bn. It means that the Department of Commerce has given itself permission to spend up to that limit on this one particular contract (technically, depending on the contract type and structure, it could be across a lot of smaller contracts and/or task orders, but let's keep things simple for now).
When DOGE lists its numbers, its listing that full $1bn ceiling as the "savings." A few different media outlets tried to Point And Laugh at this, but the reality is that they're wrong as well. For the Department of Commerce (or anyone) to award a contract, they don't necessarily have to already have the budget approved by congress. In the industry, the term "unfunded opportunity" or "unfunded contract" is used in this case. The Government customer has a true need for whatever it says it does and can go through the bid and proposal process - but they have no obligation to actually pay you only because you've won a contract. Now, if you do any work on that contract, that's a different story. The fact of the matter is, unfortunately, that you can have a government contract that is effectively worth nothing even though it says "eleventy billion dollars" on the piece of paper.
Returning to DOGE, that they are canceling contracts and counting the ceiling value of those contracts could or could not be significant. If the agency in question already had their budget approved (and for several of these larger, longer term contracts, it is highly likely that was the case) then this the cancelling of these contracts does in fact save money from a future budget perspective. But it's not necessarily as if DOGE "found" $1bn dollars sitting in a commerce account somewhere and has now repurposed it for the General Purpose America Fuck Yeah account. They've freed up budget room next year and in the years following.
OR, they've cancelled a contract that was unfunded to begin with and so the savings are quite imaginary. It's like if you get an unexpected car repair bill and then mentally "cancel" your beach vacation. Did something happen? Not exactly. And certainly not in a true fiscal sense.
But wait, there's more. Just because a single contract within the Department of Commerce (to stick to my previous example) got cancelled, doesn't mean the agency as a whole won't find a way to reshuffle the budget and retain those dollars. Again, Congress controls the budget and they approve it every year (or, as has been the case for about the past 20 years - I'm not joking - the pass a weird series of CRs or otherwise out of order budgetary actions to sustain the budget as is with some new starts - kind of).
So, when do DOGE cuts get real and sticky? When Congress passes a budget. That's when you'll be able to actually see meaningful money stop flowing to agency / department X,Y, or Z. Until then, it's an on paper "win" (or not, see above) and, because it's happening totally within the executive branch, nothing stops a potential Democrat President in 2028 (or whenever) from flipping the switch in the other direction and directing Department of Commerce (and everyone else) to go ahead and try to get those IT contracts rolling again.
And I think this is part, though not the largest no most important part, of Elon's likely downfall in the Trump 2.0 admin. What he is used to doing in the corporate world is not possible in the Federal Government. The entire reason the founders set the system up the way they did was to make things intentionally hard to coordinate. They split the budget passers from the budget users and the law makers from the law enforces from the law interpreters. They did this because they wanted the default option to be "nothing happens." In the 18th century, this meant Americans were mostly free, then, to run their own lives. But through gradual executive overreach, aided many times by a cowardly Congress, we now have a poor situation in which the Executive kind of gets to do whatever it wants unless Congress or the Courts calls it out.
This is a very mid-wit argument that is as specious as it is ever present.
"Without the Left women and minorities wouldn't be able to vote!"
Nonsense. This is a view of history as inherently progressive; you have good guys and bad guys and all of the bad guys will eventually lose if we just Resist hard enough. It's the fever dream of sophomore PoliSci students and ACLU lawyers alike.
Segregation and black enfranchisement itself were very non-linear and more a product of reform and reactionary ebbs and flows. People often forget that we had a black senator from Mississippi in the 1970s for instance. And that link shows the plethora of other black elected official holders before 1900.
The failure of Reconstruction was that it was, in fact, so radical as to provoke a counter-reaction that may have been stronger than what would normally occur. You then get Jim Crow and the Solid South for another few generations.
But that doesn't fit into the neat narrative of "Slavery Awful --> Lincoln --> Emancipation --> Oh no, KKK! ---> Rosa Parks, MLK ---> 1964 --> We're equal now! --> Oh wait, George Floyd, let's pretend it's 1964 again"
Do a deep dive into the better conservative (small c) thinkers; James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall. You'll see that one of the tenants of conservative thought is that it's totally fine for people to think whatever they want so long as the political system cannot be co-opted by the Small But Loud to coerce the Many But Disinterested to abandon their beliefs - as "ugly" as they might be. Democracy is a process and a system - never an "outcome" generator.
From, The Conservative Affirmation by Kendall:
I know that, of course, all of us enlightened folk, if we were living in Alabama in 1955, would've definitely been on the "right side of history" and bravely advocated for desegregation. I mean, like, how could you not?
Because you (in Alabama in 1955) didn't really have a passionate attachment to the issue. It was simply the way things are. You're mostly interested in paying your mortgage and raising your kids. But, all of a sudden, your kids' teachers start telling them about their inherited culpability for slavery and you go, "Hey, what the fuck?" and now ... you're involved.
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