BaronVSS
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BaronVSS
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4mo ago
A thought experiment that is somewhat too large for the small scale questions thread.
Picture for a moment that a first world, rich, western nation decides to implement an open borders policy. Anyone who lives in a foreign nation can, at any time, apply for and receive permanent residency visa and be entitled to work and live in this country. There are no upper limits on the numbers of the people that may settle in the country using this method of entry.
However, there is one restriction. Only women and girls are permitted entry. Y chromosome owners are not permitted entry through this system and the fullest force of the law will be unleashed against any man who is found to be illegally within the country.
This approach should, theoretically, neutralise right wing arguments against open borders. These arguments either have an economic basis (a vast surfeit of labour will decrease pay and bargaining power for domestic workers) or a social basis (large amounts of unmarried, low skill men will cause unrest, violence and buggery). While the labour disruptions remain, a critical mass of unsettled women is unlikely to fuck shit up in the way that a critical mass of unsettled men are. Indeed, if we look to the current debate around migration in europe, there is an undercurrent of violence and hostility present in predominantly male migrants that wouldn't be the case if they were mostly female. The Ukranian migrants generated no such disruption because they were majority women and children.
Assume for the purposes of this argument that the male only border control is fullproof and has no workarounds. What are the effects of this open borders system? Are there any consequences I have not forseen?
AUTISTS: THE LAST OPPRESSED CLASS
(For the purposes of this post, I am defining an autistic person as someone who has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition, or could qualify for an autism spectrum condition diagnosis should they given access to the correct services. The disaster spiral trainwreck that is the self diagnosis movement and the widening of the definition of autism to be completely meaningless, I might write about at another time.)
The modern anglospheric society operates off the belief that there are oppressed groups and oppressor groups. It is stated that oppressor groups have high rates of economic and social success, while the reverse is true for oppressed groups. This is often referred to as the progressive stack, with some oppressed groups being more oppressed than others. To alleviate this disparity, oppressed groups are allowed to seek reparations from their oppressor and demean their oppressor in public spheres, while the reverse is not tolerated. There are many examples of these groups: Women are oppressed by Men, Non-white People are oppressed by White People, Gay people are oppressed by Straight people, Non-english speakers are oppressed by English speakers, and so on. However, there is one group to whom this opressed definition might apply, but receive no recognition, appreciation or restitution from society bottom text.
Autistic people have utterly awful life outcomes. They have very poor employment rates, with many being unemployed or undermployed, even if they are level 1 autists in possession of college degrees. The suicide rate is abysmal, with rates being 9 times in excess of neurotypicals and over half of autistic people having considered suicide throughout their lives. Autistic people also experience heightened rates of social and even sexual abuse.
Despite this very strong case for a place on the progressive stack autists have no place whatsoever on it, or indeed recognition that they even exist in wider society. I do not recall the last time there was a front page article on my country's news outlet about anyone with my condition. I do not recall there being any support or preferential treatment for autists in regards to accquiring economic and social capital during the time when I was seeking employment, in comparison to programs that fast track and support women and ethnic minorities, for example. Support for autistic people is very limited, and only meaningfully exists in the early stages of childhood. This support is not provided to allow the child to feel comfortable in their skin, but to minimise friction both with neurotypicals and with the school and work systems. Even behaviours that are not directly harmful to the autistic person themselves or to neurotypicals, such as stimming, are heavily discouraged.
For most opressed groups, the responsibility for the easing the disparity is put upon the oppressor group. For example, men are expected to validate the fear that women feel due to the difference in physical strength in situations such as being in an elevator, or walking alone at night, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. It may depress an individual man to feel that he is and can only ever be a threat, but this feeling is not validated and he is told to Get Over It. In comparison, the autist is expected to adapt to social norms and behaviours that they do not innately pick up and instead learn manually, in the same way that Sideshow Bob learned that there was a rake there by walking into it except this time the rakes are invisible. It is the autist that has to mask, the autist that has to conceal their interests, the autist that has to pretend to be someone other than who they are.
Obviously, this is terrible. How then, are autists to get onto the progressive stack and get the sweet government funding necessary to improve these awful outcomes? The first task is to create an original sin for neurotypicals that devalues their accomplishments whilst providing avenues to redistribute their social and economic capital to autistic people. White privilege, male privilege and so on are all forms of this and it would not be difficult to create a similar privilege checklist for neurotypicals, but to get into a position to enforce this belief on the rest of society would be far more difficult. Autists, estimated, make up roughly only 2% of the global population against a neurotypical 98%, compared to the 13% of African Americans vs White Americans and the roughly 50%/50% sex split among men and women. Moreover, autists are not naturally grouped or forcibly segregated into one place in a way that men, women and ethnic groups are, so they cannot easily band together and overcome oppression they face.
If we were able to overcome both of these issues, there is another large problem: NTs innately do not like autists, finding them to be offputting and thus wishing to interact with them less based on thin slice judgements. You can argue that there are similar innate dislikes against other oppressed groups, however these groups usually have something that endears them to their perceived oppressor in some form, whether these are biological urges or moral spooks about kindness and human unity, or contributions to society in the form of food or entertainment and so on. There are no moral spooks that encourage being nice to the weird asshole in the corner, even if they haven't done you any real harm. Obligations to do the neurotypical social dance run much deeper than any other aspect a human being is othered by.
Lastly, autism is still seen as a male coded thing, and oppressor/oppressed heirarchy is the strongest where it relates to men and women. There are some autistic people who are able to hyperfocus on useful things, and thus can channel their abilities into a lucrative career. However, these careers are usually in something like software developement, research or other high value STEM careers due to their innate rigidity, which are currently the target for cooption by various diversity movements due to their high status and outsized influence on the world we live in. These positions are likely the only place that a neurotypical will not only encounter an autistic person, but an autistic person in their element who may not be masking (and I suspect this lack of masking is one of the reasons that autists in these roles are being targeted.)
Meanwhile, female autists are more heavily socialised into following neurotypical norms and thus present in a neurotypical manner, so they do not register as being autistic. Hence autists are either invisible or irritating to the oppressed/oppressor sensibility and general notions of social status, and must be removed. Where NTs have not met neurotypicals, their perception of the condition is usually influenced by piece of shit media like Rain Main or the Big Bang Theory, where most depictions in the vein of "Guy who punches himself in the head" or Sheldon Cooper."
BaronVSS
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11mo ago
When I was 16, I and every other boy in my RS class was made to stand up and recieve chastisement by our then RS teacher, who proclaimed that the world was made for us, by people like us (my school was 99% white working class), that we had it the easiest out of any group of people and that we had a duty to right this imbalance. This is not my lived experience (though I attribute that to my undiagnosed and untreated autism), and it is broadly not the lived experience of young men, who have worse outcomes than their fathers and are expected their bear the dwindling of their piece of the socioeconomic pie and the societal narrative that this is not so with a smile on their face.
And frankly, given the events of the pandemic, I am not so convinced that there is a large divide between the British and Chinese states.
BaronVSS
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6mo ago
This post was spurred by the latest episode of the Israel and Palestine Show and me accessing the frontpage of my national brodacaster and seeing only one story on the right hand that directly concerned the lives of people living in this country.
The News Problem
It occurs to me that much of the connected world is gripped by "News Problems". A "News Problem" is a problem that ceases to affect you the moment you turn off the news. To determine whether something is a news problem or not, ask yourself this question: if I was suddenly made to forget the information I had just watched or read about, would my life be any different?
An obvious example of something that is not a News Problem would be stories about inflation: inflation trickles all the way down to the consumer. It is made immediately obvious when the price of your favourite foods goes up, or when your money gets you less petrol than it used to at the pump. The topics involved in the story are those that directly affect the material world around you. To go back further, during the terrible time when a large chunk of the world was denied Freedom of Association over a virus with a 99%> chance of survival, the information coming out of the news outlets was of varying utility. For some people, Covid: The Virus was a just News Problem but for almost everyone, the actions taken by the State to control the virus were not News Problems.
In regards to story I initially mentioned, whether the debate starts begins on who you are: if you have family or friends in the region, or if they have been affected by the recent attacks, then this is very much not a news problem. If you are Jewish and living in a city with a large Muslim population (or a population of people who care very strongly about the issue despite neither being Muslim nor Jewish), you may or may be directly affected by the events as they occur in the region, but you may certainly care about how that population responds to you, particularly if you present as being Jewish.
So, can you ignore news problems? The answer, to my eternal chargin, is no. Even if the story has no material affect on my life, I am still surrounded by people who care about it, and in turn expect me to care about it. Should the conversation emerge at my place of work (so far it hasn't, and for that I am extremely grateful), I may be asked for my opinion, and my genuine opinion would piss off everyone in the room. During the summer of 2020, depending upon your position in society, you might have faced social repercussions if you didn't agree with the rhetoric at the time. This could have been something as simple as nodding along to what was being said, or, if you were in a position of power, expected to divert your resources, energy and face to something you strongly disagreed with.
Will there be an end to the News Problem? The obvious cure is to take the grillpill, which in this sense means turning off your device and going outside, but this only works if everyone takes the grillpill. Had you taken the grillpill in a city, you might have bumped into protests about the dispute.
In what is perhaps the first win Secularism has experienced in a long time, a high court judge has ruled against a challenge brought forward by a muslim pupil claiming that lack of prayer rooms at hier school were a substantial opposition to her faith. The judge's reasoning is that the school explicitly advertised itself as secular and would not permit certain activities in an attempt to minise friction between pupils. This outcome was accomplished in spite of threats and bomb scares made to the school and criminal damage to both the school and a few of the homes of the staff who worked there.
Michaela Community School is not a typical institution, hence why it was not only able to fight back against Islamists, but also win. Situated in a particularly deprived part of London, it boasts extremely successful grades compared to not only the borough but the wider country as a whole. It accomplishes this through rules many consider extreme, including no talking in corridors, demerits for failing to remove your book from your bag and flip to the correct page in under 10 seconds and mirrors removed from bathrooms in order to avoid distractions.
Its head, Katharine Birbalsingh, is not a typical educator. An Indo-Guyanese woman and once a Conservative advisor for social mobility, her comments on education, society and the role of its members routinely antagonise left of centre commentators. Michaela is a free school, indepedent of the local authority and thus she is immunised against potential attempts by that local authority and other insitutions to instill accepted views into her school. This is I think a large part of why she won - she ultimately only answers to herself and those parents in her community who are in favour of her school and the way she runs it, and can thus ignore detractors in a way that an LEA controlled, union dependent teacher can't.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
The desparation of groups to see a mass-murderer wind up belonging to the other tribe inspired me to dream up a mobile app that you could use whenever such an event was occuring live. It would allow you to bet on the identity and motivation of the perpetrators of mass murder events while they are breaking news. The odds would be based on collating data from every media headline atrocity that has occurred in the past 20 years. Imagine the odds on this guy.
Some might call it crude, but I would argue that this is no worse than the wink nudging that occurs on reddit or twitter whenever such an attack occurs.
BaronVSS
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1mo ago
How shit of an idea is just quitting your job without a replacement job to go to?
I am completely, utterly burnt out on my current job. The past few months have been non-stop ass rape on a personal and professional level. We had redundancies sprung on us in December with zero warning that I only dodged because another person took voluntary redundancy, and before that we were doing 9 hour days for about 2 months due to the business promising far more than it could actually deliver. The personal shit could be its own post. I haven't properly unwound since september.
There has been a team change and my team now comprises of me, who works on software written in one language, two devs that work on completely different language on completely different software, and one dev that would normally be working with me but is tied up with temporary projects for the forseeable future. There is no one with lead or managerial capacity on the team. This is a random grouping of devs with no clear overarching goal and it feels like I'm just expected to somehow make it work when I'm least equipped to do so.
Every task seems to take much longer than it should. I keep making really obvious mistakes that I don't seem to ever catch in the moment. I keep saying or doing things that bother my colleagues and they don't bring it to me so I can fix and address them, but to my manager who schedules a meeting about 2 or 3 weeks after the thing in question has occurred to discuss it. My manager also now routinely brings up things that I did wrong in the codebase two or three years ago and beats me over the head with them. I was on holiday last week, and the last thing my manager did before I went off was meet with me to discuss my performance, and then had another meeting with me first thing on the Monday when I returned.
I don't know really if I want to get another dev job or go back into education or work a shit but slower paced job for a while. I do have friends/family I can stay with and I have more than sufficient savings for the forseeable future, so that part is not an issue. I am primarily concerned on the effect it will have on my ability to get jobs going forward.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/clearpill-yourself-on-gaza
Moldbug weighs in on the latest episode of the Israel and Palestine show and the excessive reactions of westerners to it.
You need to turn off your feelings because you are a mother bird feeding a cuckoo. Once you look at the cuckoo, it is obviously not related to you. Where did your actual eggs go? What happened to your real empathy? It’s gone. Write it off. Your first job is to somehow get that thing out of your nest.
These are all my observations as a britbong.
When the UK voted to leave the EU, this caused a political stalemate in the UK's lower chamber that lasted 2 years. Theresa May, who became PM after Cameron resigned, did not have the numbers required to pass her deal and invoke Article 50, which was to agree to a settlement with the EU and terminate all other aspects of EU membership. This was unpopular with those parties to the left of the Tories, who wanted to remain part of the EU and those on the right of her own party, who wanted to leave the EU without any concessions offered. She quit in the spring of 2019, after a third failed attempt to push her deal through the House of Commons.
Boris wins the resulting leadership election. His plan, partially concocted by Dom Cummings was to force a GE and campaign on the basis that, if given a majority, he would end the deadlock and leave the EU under a repackaged version of May's deal. In December, he won an 380 seat majority, and passed A50 just before the new year.
In 2020, the coof hits. The original plan of the UK government, which is to encourage individual measures such as handwashing and voluntary distancing, is thrown out for the lockdownist policy that originated in China and was copied by countless other nations. Cummings is of the impression that, if we had done this earlier, we could have reduced the number of deaths. I disagree highly, the UK does not have the culture, geography, nor the dystopian panopticon required for the results seen in east asian countries and its primary hobbies consist of Greggs and Alcoholism, but that is another topic for another time. I also do not think it is the reason he was eventually knifed.
Dom Cummings is exiled from the government as he and Boris' wife Carrie took huge dislikings to each other, resulting in interfactional squabbles until Carrie's faction won. He is now on the outside looking in.
During the winter of 2020 while the country is in Lockdown and the common citizen is denied freedom of association, Boris and his colleagues host several parties at Number 10. This is leaked to the press a year later around the time a fourth lockdown is being proposed. After several months of political obstructionism, Boris is eventually fined, issues a weak apology and moves on.
In the Spring/Summer of this year, a story emerges about a sex pest in the Tory party having molested several people at an event. It is revealed that Boris ran interference and prevented action from being taken against this person. Tory MPs, sick and tired of having to defend the actions of the PM and his inner circle, propose a VoNC, which he passes with the worst numbers for a PM to date. His cabinent shortly resigns in quick succession, and he gives up the ghost and resigns.
After his own leadership election, Liz Truss wins. Liz Truss is, as was discussed on the subreddit, extremely stupid. She appoints longtime ally/adultery partner Kwasi Karteng as Chancellor (chief money guy), who unveils a budget with tax cuts and spending rises funded by borrowing. This is the event that caused the pound to crap itself and nearly killed off the pension industry. Truss eventually U-Turns and replaces Karteng with Jeremy Hunt, who immediately undoes the budget and replaces it with one reminiscient of the pro-Austerity Cameron government. Her position still awful, she elected to resign today.
Boris is being suggested primarily as a replacement for Truss by the membership, who are rural pensioners with opinions far to the right of even the populist public.
BaronVSS
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11mo ago
One of my all time favourite writeups and one of the most blackpilling things I have ever read. K-Pop is, and could only have been, the product of a country with 0.78 birthrate. Its worldwide popularity is illuminating as to the sort of future the developed world might inherit.
I do not find the casting of the Velaryons to be much of a diversion from what you describe. Valyria, a region with a mediterranean climate, somehow managed to produce and maintain consistently an overwhelming percentage of white albinos mixed with the odd 100% black person. This makes the Strong Boys story point farcial, three children, all white as snow? In a way it's worse than RoP and Wheel of Time and the other shows that cast randomly until certain demographic percentages are met and pay the setting exactly no mind, House of the Dragon wants you to believe that Valyrians can be any race so long as they have white hair and then make a point of identifying Criston Cole as being dornish based on his skin tone.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
The title of this thread reads "culture war roungup"
I wonder if there isn't a vault full of scripts somewhere entitled things like "High Fantasy Series #3" or "Sci-Fi Series #91" that are wheeled out whenever a big studio acquires the rights to a famous name, and the plot and characters of that script are retroactively wrangled to fit that script. It would explain whatever paramount did their rendition of Halo, in which the Arbiter is not an alien prophet but instead John Halo's human love interest and a heaping of necessary space politics so vast it puts the Phantom Menace to shame.
BaronVSS
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8mo ago
BaronVSS
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10mo ago
I don't know what else there is to talk about. The outcome of the war, whatever that may be, has been decided by now by people with significantly larger dicks than ours and novelty of combat between two near-peer nations has worn off. I assume that, when the news is reporting the war, the Ukranians are making progress, and when the news goes dead silent on the war then the Russians are making progress.
I care primarily about the personal impact: that I get to suffer inflation and energy scares due to my government's (or indeed, every western government's) complete and total aversion to energy security. As for morals, the ultimate moral of life, learnt most bitterly in the years before, is that the strong do whatever the fuck they want to the weak, and the weak suffer and invent slave moralities in order to pretend that they are not suffering.
BaronVSS
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7mo ago
Those initial migrants are likely to be middle class as a result of the visa restrictions, and so are likely to invite other middle class people rather than lumpens.
Hate to say this but this has more relevance than when it is usually used, but UK poster here.
It feels quite eerie. The Queen is (was now, I suppose) a part of the country in a way that will be felt. You could at any time in any place put on a voice of an old woman speaking in an extra refined RP accent and people could immediately tell who you were referring to. Moreover, she lived through several decades of incredible, breakneck change. Several PMs have said of her weekly meetings that they were the most valuable time in their week, to be able to talk to someone who was as close as you could get to impartial advice and had such experience.
She was also the only thing the country could have theoretically united around as a single cultural marker. Before the Jubilee you could go outside and see union jacks and banners depicting the queen's face on almost every house, then on the day everything shut down and neighbours roped off streets to get large open spaces so that they could celebrate the event. That is gone now. Charles does not have the benefit of being a still point in a moving world and comes with several bizzare views about coffee enemas, and it is likely he will be King for the rest of this decade. We may very well see the end of the Monarchy as a cultural touchpoint and the transformation of this country into a complete satellite state of the US will be done.
There was rain and thunderstorms here all throughout the afternoon, which if you believe in portents is not a good sign.
BaronVSS
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10mo ago
The disproportionate attention paid to the worst of the incels have clouded the fact that most sound men have a negati
I believe this paragraph is unfinished
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
Sometimes I see faded, expiring one way labels on the floor in shops. They'll remain there until they completely perish.
What a mess we made, when it all went wrong.
BaronVSS
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2mo ago
I think this has nothing to do with AI. This guy was a terminally online type who became radicalised due to the lack of meaning/purpose in his life and tried to let out one last primordial scream before he went.
On a side note, this case indicates that you should never commit a high profile crime and be taken alive, because your embarrasing post history will be read out in court for the whole country to witness.
BaronVSS
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1yr ago
There will be no appraisals. It behooves nobody in the journalist/politician alliance to examine whatever the fuck it was that they had a hand in making. We will be seeing countless knock on effects for years. The only silver lining is that in our (UK) official inquiry there will be some investigation into the effects the pandemic has had on the young. I feel desperately sad for them - their early years are so vitally important and the government did everything it possibly could to disrupt them.
There's a challenge to the succession claims of her kids, but all of the arguments against their succession are like 'I just have a sense for these things. I just know they aren't her kids' or there will be a quiet and vague reference to the fact that her kids don't look like her husband. But no one is ever just like 'she has 5 kids and they are all white. She has blonde hair and her kids all have curly black hair. Obviously they are not her kids'.
In the most recent episode, one character points this out to the gathered court in no uncertain terms and is promptly beheaded for Noticing. His actor even straight up ignores the show pretensions and straight up says that "they're white". I'm amazed that was released via an official channel.
BaronVSS
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8d ago
I do not see what sort of comfort this is meant to bring. This is no more helpful than the realisation that technically it isn't the fault of the wolf or shark if it has a hankering for your delicious flesh. Wolves and sharks still possess sharp teeth and will attempt to use them on you, while powerful moral spooks will compel other human beings to make your life a misery over things that have no material impact on either them or you.
Society vs Male Radicalisation II - Male Role Models/Surely This Time Our Plan Will Work
I was on the internet this week, and I found this:
Labour to help schools develop male influencers to combat Tate misogyny
It is interesting to note that there is an increasing shift towards talking about "role models" for young men and boys as a means of cooling the gender kerfuffle, rather than by repeating feminist talking points at males until they concede as was the case when I was a teenager. The Labour Party, the UK's apparent next government, has come up with policy to reduce the influence of Andrew Tate among schoolboys with the intended aim of safeguarding women and girls. It means to do this by creating counter role models to whom boys can look up to. This would not even the utterly embarrasing 30 year old boomers trying to guess what resonates with children, but would consist instead of older volunteer boys taken from within the same school. This if it is implemented, will have educators select the real life version of Will from Inbetweeners as its senior male role model and think themselves of sound mind for doing so. You are only ever going to get uncool loser types volunteering, and it is the fear of becoming an uncool loser (or worse) that motivates young men to go and consume manosphere content.
Feminism's defenders will counter that there are many existing role models available for men, often listing real or fictional people like Ryan Gosling, Marcus Rashford or Ted Lasso. These men are either fake or literal one percenters whose lifestyle an average young man has no hope of to attaining. This betrays a complete lack of understanding about why men choose the role models they do and how they attempt to emulate them. These role models are deliberately or implicitly chosen as role models for young men by people who aren't young men often because they display qualities that are useful, rather than valued, to society. This is because almost all policy dreamt up by institutions concerning Men and Boys is not to their benefit, but instead to neuter a perceived threat against Women, Girls and the wider society. For every Marcus Rashford, there are multiple Mason Greenwoods or Kurt Zoumas who continue to receive all the signifiers of male success and receive no punishment for any of their transgressions.
It is clear that what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society. This is in direct contrast to what young men want, which is to be outspoken, to be popular with women, to be socially and economically successful. No role model ever produced or selected by the state could manage this, particularly not when operating under the notion that it must maintain women's liberation, which itself requires the stifling of men. I question for how much longer this approach will be kept in place. There are hundreds of people like Andrew Tate across SM, each ready to teach boys what society is unable to teach them. Educators can more easily dispel Tate because of the sex trafficking offences and because Tate himself is a clown, but people like Hamza, whose lived experience is much closer to the boys he is trying to proselytize to than that of Tate's, they have no counterargument.
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