BANNED USER: Same as previous, I'm just cutting down the duration to 2 weeks
>Unban in 3d 07h 57m
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
Just Another Alt-MSNBC Guy. Find me at Substack: https://alexanderturok.substack.com/
User ID: 3346
Banned by: @self_made_human
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
13d ago
I have no idea how (other than lifeguarding at pools) kids are supposed to earn money nowadays.
They could get jobs, unemployment rate is very low.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
13d ago
Where there is smoke, smoldering ruins and dozens of firefighters still shooting water, there's fire.
There's people telling you there's no fire, which you interpret as evidence the fire is being covered up.
Seething
Yeah I'm not happy about the damage these people are doing to my country.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
13d ago
American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:
The teen summer job is an American tradition that has been in decline since the turn of the century. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 50% and 60% of Americans aged 16 to 19 had summer jobs. That started to decline in 2000, and during the Great Recession, it plummeted to less than 30%. It has barely rebounded since then, hitting 36% in 2019 before dropping back to 31% during the pandemic. This year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the share of 16- to 19-year-olds working or looking for work at 35%.
The article notes one reason why:
One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job. Only 20% of Asians aged 16 to 19 have one, compared to 40% of whites and approximately 30% of blacks and Hispanics. For adults it is the opposite, with Asians having the highest labor force participation rate.
Why are Asians half as likely to have summer jobs as white teenagers? In part, because they are busy studying. Tiger Moms think working as a lifeguard will not help anyone get into college, but test prep or math camp will.
The college admissions arms race puts pressure on parents who might otherwise prefer to let their teens spend their summer lifeguarding. Moms and dads worried about the intense competition decide to make their teens spend their summers on something that will boost their test scores or burnish their resumes. It is a vicious circle.
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."
This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.
None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
13d ago
Trump knows his audience better than most, but even he has trouble sometimes.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
13d ago
New poll on Trump and Epstein:
Republicans are split with 40 percent approving of the way the Trump administration is handling the Jeffrey Epstein files, 36 percent disapproving and 24 percent not offering an opinion.
This, along with Operation Warp Speed, is the only time they are willing to break with Trump. The heart and soul of the thing seems to be conspiracy beliefs.
“He’s dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody," Trump told reporters after being asked about frustration from his supporters over handling of the case.
"It's pretty boring stuff. It's sordid, but it's boring, and I don't understand why it keeps going. I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going. But credible information? Let them give it — anything that's credible, I would say, let them have it," Trump added.
Maybe the reason Trump doesn't understand why it keeps going is because he doesn't have an inferiority complex about class that drives him into fantasy about elite pedophile rings.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
14d ago
My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit. The GOP would do well to embrace that community, and I think they are doing so especially in the House led by Mike Johnson.
Trump owes his victory to winning over not-particularly-religious white working-class voters in the Midwest. A preaching-to-the-choir electoral strategy designed to increase margins in rural Arkansas from 80% to 85% would be an electoral disaster for the party.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
15d ago
Forget finding a stack of playboys in the forest or under your dad's bed. Forget stumbling onto PornHub for the first time, if THIS is a teen boy's first encounter with their own sexuality and how it interacts with the female form, how the hell will he ever form a normal relationship with a flesh-and-blood woman? Why would he WANT to?
Boobs.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
15d ago
Likewise, in studies of the speech patterns in British English, Peter Trudgill observed that more working-class women spoke the standard dialect than men.[47] Farida Abu-Haidar performed a similar study in Baghdad of prestige in the Arabic language, after which she concluded that in Baghdadi Arabic, women are more conscious of prestige than are men.[48] Other areas in which this has been observed include New Zealand and Guangdong in China.[49][50] As explanation, Trudgill suggests that for men, there is covert prestige associated with speaking the working-class dialect.[6] In fact, he observed men claiming to speak a less prestigious dialect than that which they actually spoke. According to this interpretation then, "women's use of prestige features simply conforms to the ordinary sociolinguistic order, while men deviate from what is expected."[51] Elizabeth Gordon, in her study of New Zealand, suggested instead that women used higher prestige forms because of the association of sexual immorality with lower-class women.[52] Whatever the cause, women across many cultures seem more likely than men to modify their speech towards the prestige dialect.
The same factors that apply to language may apply to politics.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16d ago
c'mon, 'shotgun weddings are trashy' is the lowest hanging fruit ever
Fantasizing about them is, it's not something that happens anymore.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16d ago
I talk about other subjects too like white nationalism and conservatism coding as low class.
I find it funny how they think "we're imposing another, different burden on men" somehow "cancels out" the burden they want to impose on women and means women (and me) aren't allowed to say anything about it or have a problem with it. Judging by the fact that the pro-life side can't even with abortion referenda in Kansas and Missouri, it's not a very persuasive argument.
ETA: on second thought, perhaps my original comment was too sneery and I should be arguing to understand instead, in which I'll state that from what I've seen the pro-lifers seem to have NO plan to change people's minds other than double-down on the same things they've been doing for decades. But maybe I'm just ignorant of the facts here.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16d ago
You've distorted his claim that women should be accountable just like everyone else to imply that he says that only women need to be held accountable
No I didn't.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16d ago
We also dislike people declaring they have reported someone. "I'm telling on you!" is not any more effective or impressive here than it was in kindergarten. What is that supposed to accomplish? Put extra pressure on the mods? We can see your report. Submit your report and move on.
Apologies then, I will not do this in the future.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16d ago
if you had launched into your impassioned screen in response to this
Would not be possible as that is a response to my impassioned screed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox
As an aside this is kind of confusing because "third worldism" has a different more common meaning related to anti-imperialism. It took a few times of you using and me scratching my head to realize you were using the term to mean something like sweatshop romanticism.
I'm repurposing it because the hero of the Online Right should be some unvaccinated Bengali peasant who drinks raw milk and does honest labor in a farm or factory rather than effeminizing fake email jobs and trusts religious authorities rather than scientists.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16d ago
Social conservatives in America decided to make that the centerpiece of their political project and then get mad when I bring it up in response to a thread about social conservatism in America.
Here's what TitaniumButterfly said:
women don't want to be forced to spend nine months pregnant
Then it sounds like either they're specifically upset about the extremely rare cases of rape leading to pregnancy, or else they have an accountability problem.
I've reported his comment and yours for mischaracterization and strawmanning.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16d ago
A lot of pro choicers also call it a “clump of cells,” not a baby.
A "clump of cells" can't kick its mother.
otherwise this false on the face of it.
Then give me an example of a pro-choicer telling a woman the late-term baby she wants to give birth to is a clump of cells, not a baby. Shouldn't be difficult if this is something they really say.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16d ago
Turok makes the mistake of then coming to this forum of actual thoughtful people and assuming the conservatives here need to answer for the worst Trumpists the engineers of X can serve. The conservatives here don't recognize themselves in the criticisms he levels at them and drama ensues.
I am not a newcomer to the SSC sphere, I've been posting on ACX and DSL for years, and I've won DSL's Diadochus award for my posts twice. (I'm also currently banned from both places.) I'm not attributing the stupidity of Twitter to this place, I'm just reading what people here write, like coffee_enjoyer:
Sewing bras is more conducive to wellbeing than stacking them on a shelf. Picking fruit is so Edenic that it’s the first recorded activity of humanity. In what world would “picking fruit” be pathetic? I think you are having trouble dissociating the image you have of these things now, with what they would look like if employers didn’t have a semi-slave class. There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people. They work quite hard, then they drink in the evenings and dance and fuck and make music and so on. This is exactly what agricultural work was for nearly all of history. Not for the slaves, of course, but for the non-enslaved.
This, by the way, is what I mean by "poverty fetishism" and "third worldism."
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16d ago
slaves beat out sharecroppers
Assumes facts not in evidence.
You can tell yourself that we're all chuds
Not chuds. White collar guys, but IMO you've melted your brain with a political ideology that is all about justifying, sanewashing, and whataboutisming the views of the catturds of the world, in a parallel to how middle-class wokes justify, sanewash, and whatabout the dysfunction of the underclass.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
17d ago
That was me, and as we discussed at the time that's a horrendously inaccurate and uncharitable take on what I was saying.
Anyone can click through and see what you said.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
17d ago
Imagine trying to convince my 1800s great great grandmother that my great grandmother, who just kicked her from the inside, was not a baby.
Would be difficult. Fortunately nobody not made of straw would need to. All pro-choicers say is that if she wants an abortion she can get one.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
17d ago
Child support payments are part of modernity, not social conservatism
Those two are not antonyms. Contemporary American Social conservatism perceives itself as being "timeless" "common sense morality," but it's very modern. Imagine trying to convince your 1800s great great grandmother that a fertilized egg that's barely visible to the naked eye is a "baby" or "person." It's something social conservatives believe they've logicked themselves into, much like leftists believe they've logicked themselves into "trans women are women!" I'm skeptical either "really" believes it, deep down.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
17d ago
I feel like this discussion is the missing ingredient to lots of the topics du jour. Let's take the leftward drift of young women- well social conservatism today seems to have, uh, not discussed what other people owe to them, only what they owe to other people.
Yep. There was a commenter here who said women lacked "accountability" because they want to be able to f*** without risking being pregnant for nine months. I'm going to hazard a guess that that message won't be a particularly popular one among young women, as like with most voters they prefer politicians who will make their lives easier rather than harder.
That said, one should be wary of parts of the gender-divide narrative. Trump's performance among white men was actually worse in 2024 than in 2016, while his performance among white women improved. CNN exit polls confirm the same phenomenon.
Scott Greer has a good article on this:
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