Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
9mo ago
Nate says in his footnote that Morris wants to move 538 in a more explicitly progressive direction, so I expect more woke advocates like Clare Malone to be the norm. Without Nate's models or his push for data-driven rigor, the site will likely devolve into having an occasional statistical chart here and there, but otherwise being functionally indistinguishable from Vox. A sad day indeed.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
This post has a lot of red flags. It's coming from a new account with 0 other posts, so there's a nontrivial chance it's a ban-evading troll trying to e.g. harvest responses for sneerclub, which this community has had issues with in the past. The syntax of the post is a bit stilted as well, indicating it's not OC but rather came from something like a news article or opinion piece, although I've put in a few sentences to search engines and can't find anything. Perhaps it's translated? Finally, it's coming from a culture war angle that people on this forum usually argue against. Stuff like "He knew the definition of the term feminism" is a big red flag. Is this asking about a boring dictionary definition of "feminism"? If so, I doubt most people would have difficulty coming up with something vaguely correct. As such, it figures that this is arguing for the sloganeering, meme definition where "feminism" means "the belief that women are people", which is a motte-and-bailey where the bailey is "if you don't agree with all third-wave feminist dogma, then you're equivalent to someone who believes women are akin to dogs or chattel-slaves".
I'll bite anyways since I think it makes for interesting discussion.
This post sounds like the Hollywood Romcom-esque advice that women often give to impressionable men that "if you want to succeed in dating, the most important factor is being Nice Guy". This is flatly nonsense. Women automatically filter out any men that don't meet a certain attractiveness threshold. The most important dating advice for men, bar none is "be attractive, and don't be unattractive". For men, this mostly involves being physically fit, having at least an OK fashion sense, being tall, and other stuff that gets stereotyped as "Alpha male". Once this basic threshold of attractiveness is reached, then other factors like personality can matter at the margins although it tends to manifest in ways that go counter to Hollywood and feminist claims, e.g. being confident and arrogant is almost certainly better than being kind but unconfident.
On section of your post illustrates this quite well:
Women look more often for personality, because they are looking for a connection with someone, while many men only look at looks, because they are mainly interested in body and sex.
The alpha male is an ideal for men, not the dream man for women. On the contrary, I've heard many nightmare stories from bad dates with these types. They sit there and flaunt themselves, and are so full of themselves that they are completely uninterested in the person they are on a date with. It's like the old joke:
No, I've talked a lot about myself. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?
Dating the alpha male are the stories we laugh about most on girls' nights out.
Yes, women joke about arrogant assholes. But notice that the woman went out on a date with such a man in the first place. An unconfident, unattractive nerd doesn't even get a chance.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists.
What in the heck are you even saying here?
To the rest of your post, atheism is correct in the sense that if there's not sufficient compelling evidence then people should default to a position of not knowing instead of just blindly believing things on faith. This jives pretty well with the rationalist movement that this forum is a descendent of.
Atheism used to be pretty blue-coded back in the Bush days when proto-Wokeists teamed up with principled atheists to lambast the evangelical hegemony of the early 2000s USA. The movement splintered when the principled atheists like Dawkins essentially said "actually our critiques apply to ALL religions, like Islam too", which caused consternation with the proto-Wokeists since Muslims are blue-coded. This caused the Atheism+ to be born to try to explicitly pivot the movement towards social justice and woke causes, but the inconsistencies were big enough that the movement collapsed almost immediately. Atheism as a political movement has effectively no power today, even though the rates of irreligiosity continue to increase.
Implying atheism gave rise to wokeism is nonsense. The two were aligned a few decades ago, but they have very separate origins, goals, motivations, etc. which is why they split.
If any group is given the kid glove treatment on this forum, it's religious people themselves. I've seen a lot of people here argue junk like "wokeism is just the lack of religion" (it's not) or try to promote a revival of religiosity by cherrypicking parts of religion that present it as an almost godless political philosophy for conservatism while ignoring the superstitious parts like, say, the whole origin story, the concept of eternal salvation, etc.
Ben___Garrison
10d ago
I find Nate's arguments pretty compelling here, assuming you actually want woke democrats on the Supreme Court, which I don't. But setting aside my personal feelings on the matter, he's basically correct.
Your arguments can basically be boiled down to the following:
- Seniority is important for judges to gain respect through judicial rigor.
- Democrats shouldn't bother thinking tactically since they should just win more elections by appealing to more people.
- Sotomayor would be more left-leaning than any candidate the dems could nominate now.
The first argument is the strongest, but it only has a marginal impact. The respect of judicial rigor that comes tenure is non-negligible. Further, other people in the thread added to the point that more senior justices get selected first to write opinions. But neither of these are that important. Even if they nominate Dumbo McGee, they're still locking down a lifetime appointment in one of the most consequential positions in America and the world. As a counterexample, Anthony Kennedy had pretty terrible reasoning in many of his opinions, but he was ultra-powerful by virtue of being a swing justice. So while you're making a good point, it'd be a lot stronger if you had some evidence of how much it actually matters in practice.
The second argument is just goofy. The senate has a heavy bias towards rural states, and it's been a minor miracle that Dems have remained competitive thus far, but as blue senators in red states retire or are defeated the bias will become undeniable. Nate has argued many times that Dems should stop pandering to the woke crazies, but he doesn't control the entire Democratic party. Abandoning positions will always come with a ton of pushback and there's no guarantee others will be on board, and the Dems would need to cut extremely deep to appeal to rural conservatives. The "tanking" argument doesn't hold a lot of water since there's a big difference between a 9-0 conservative majority vs a 5-4 conservative majority, just like how there'd be a huge difference between a 51-49 senate split vs a 100-0 split. Doing an end-run around the SCOTUS would be far, far harder than just fighting tactically for a justice now. Dems might end up uncompetitive in the senate in the long run, but they can still delay that for a bit.
The third argument is disproven by Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was recently confirmed in the same environment that a replacement for Sotomayor would face. Jackson is a female equivalent of Ibram Kendi, so no, I don't think the Dem pick would be guaranteed to be some moderate.
Ben___Garrison
14d ago
Your posts always seem interesting. I wish they were comprehensible (to me), at least without really digging into them.
I'd really recommend a full paragraph of summary at the top, with no rhetorical flourishes or weird words (like "blahaj and leekspinners") that only make sense in the context of someone who's been following the situation. This screenshot that you linked does a fairly good job. You have that first sentence saying someone linked to the Linux community got banned, but you need more in a place like this where all the topics get jumbled together. I want to know if a topic interests me before I read any further, and you typically only have a single paragraph to hook people like me before my eyes glaze a bit and I scroll down.
While a cold war had been brewing between Desantis and Trump for months, Trump just initiated open hostilities in a series of tweets on Truth Social:
Now that midterms are over, and a success… NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post (bring back Col!), is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious, an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations, who didn’t have to close up his State, but did, unlike other Republican Governors, whose overall numbers for a Republican, were just average—middle of the pack—including COVID, and who has the advantage of SUNSHINE, where people…
…from badly run States up North would go no matter who the Governor was, just like I did! Ron came to me in desperate shape in 2017—he was politically dead, losing in a landslide to a very good Agriculture Commissioner, Adam Putnam, who was loaded up with cash and great poll numbers. Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would Endorse him, he could win. I didn’t know Adam so I said, “Let’s give it a shot, Ron.” When I Endorsed him,…
…it was as though, to use a bad term, a nuclear weapon went off. Years later, they were the exact words that Adam Putnam used in describing Ron’s Endorsement. He said, “I went from having it made, with no competition, to immediately getting absolutely clobbered after your Endorsement.” I then got Ron by the “Star” of the Democrat Party, Andrew Gillum (who was later revealed to be a “Crack Head”), by having two massive Rallies with tens of thousands of people at each one…
…I also fixed his campaign, which had completely fallen apart. I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen…
…And now, Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games! The Fake News asks him if he’s going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, “I’m only focused on the Governor’s race, I’m not looking into the future.” Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer… This is just like 2015 and 2016, a Media Assault (Collusion!), when Fox News fought me to the end until I won, and then they couldn’t have been nicer or more supportive. The Wall Street Journal loved…
…Low Energy Jeb Bush, and a succession of other people as they rapidly disappeared from sight, finally falling in line with me after I easily knocked them out, one by one. We’re in exactly the same position now. They will keep coming after us, MAGA, but ultimately, we will win. Put America First and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Trump clearly wants no primary challenges for the 2024 election, which is why he's gone out of his way to ensure some R hopefuls wouldn't start campaigns if he was in. Desantis, however, pointedly refused to rule out a 2024 campaign of his own, much to Trump's annoyance. As of the time of writing, Desantis currently has almost 2x the chance to become the next president on Election Betting Odds as Trump (29% vs 17.8%), and the midterm elections helped Desantis and hurt Trump. Anecdotally, I've seen a bit of movement towards Desantis on usual Trump strongholds like 4chan, with some saying Desantis is like Trump but "he actually does the stuff he says instead of just tweeting about it", although it's hard to get a representative sample on an anonymous image board for obvious reasons.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Most of this is just because Russia decided to impale itself on its revanchist delusions. The US had made no serious efforts to integrate Ukraine into NATO and showed every sign of being content with the frozen conflict status quo in the Donbas, but then Russia tried to flip the table over but ended up hurting itself in the process.
They basically sent a fuck off to Germany, and the Germans not only are not complaining, but are applauding
Germany absolutely deserves the L here. France and Germany have always been a bit jealous of Anglo hegemony over the collective West, which is why they make periodic calls for "strategic autonomy". But instead of Germany building up its military, it instead decided to do the stupidest possible option of bankrolling an ardent enemy of the EU and becoming massively overreliant on Russian gas with barely a whisper of "what could possibly go wrong". Sensible analysts knew it could become a liability, but Germany proceeded full-speed ahead anyways, despite countless protests from a succession of US presidents and other foreign leaders.
Ben___Garrison
25d ago
This post really gets my troll senses tingling. An account that's less than a week old posting about HBD, which is probably the most offensive topic a leftist would come across. Then starting said topic with "as a black person". Then not really saying much but vague agreement. I could easily see this post being the result of a leftist forum user from some other site saying "Hey guys, I'll go to that place where Nazis justify racism, and pretend to be a black man agreeing with them. Then they'll show us what they REALLY think!!!"
If this isn't the case then I'd suggest posting that essay type post sooner rather than later, as you'll get more interesting answers that way.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
I wish the people hyperbolically exclaiming that AI-induced human extinction is right around the corner would publicly commit to bets about when it will happen. Between this petition and Yudkowsky's "Death with Dignity" we have a lot of rationalist-adjacent people that seem to think we'll all be gone in <5 years. If that's what they truly believe then they should commit to that prediction so we can all laugh at them in 2028 when it almost certainly doesn't come true.
There's a ton of uncertainty involving AI's scalability and whether current progress will follow something like Moore's Law or if we've just been picking all the low-hanging fruits. AI alignment people are filling that uncertainty with maximally negative projections that an anti-human singularity is right around the corner. The biggest human inventions in terms of scale and impact were all the advances in mechanization of the industrial revolution, which took more than a century to unfold. The biggest invention in terms of impact relative to time was the Manhattan Project. Alignment people are saying (or at least strongly implying) that AI will have a much larger impact than the Industrial Revolution on a time-scale shorter than the development of nukes, while also being basically uncontrollable. People like Yudkowsky are smart, but they're predicting things an order of magnitude beyond the bounds of previous human history. Such predictions aren't rare, but they're usually made by snake-oil salesmen saying "This new invention will totally revolutionize everything! Trust me!"
Am I off-base here? I've been paying attention to AI developments but not to the degree that some people have, so there's a chance that there's a compelling case for AI being a combination of 1) inevitable, 2) right around the corner (<5 years away), and 3) uncontrollable.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
I'm curious to hear what you think of his analysis on the Ukrainian counteroffensive at Izium.
It is obvious why Ukraine would want to dislodge Russia from Izyum. This would simplify and secure lines of communication to Slovyansk and greatly complicate the Russian push in the Donbas by freeing Ukraine’s northern flank. To achieve this, they are attempting a thrust toward Kupyansk, with the aim of cutting the line connecting Izyum to Belgorod in the north. This operation, I believe, is doomed to spectacular failure.
He wrote this on September 9th... and Izium fell to Ukraine two days later.
But I doubt I'll actually get a response. You linked a blatant propaganda account to claim Ukraine is doomed, and have refused to respond to anyone who's called you out on it.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
The pro-surrender side which says the West and Ukraine need to capitulate ASAP to avert a nuclear war, really, really needs to address the problems that incentivizing nuclear blackmail this way are guaranteed to have. I've seen plenty of articles and posts like the one you listed, and none of them get into this issue despite it being extremely important and despite it being brought up as a response to basically every one of these articles. It's getting aggravating at this point. It's not like there are no responses at all, but the pro-surrender side just blissfully pretends like the issue doesn't exist and that nobody has even thought of it before.
You act like the West is a monolith of support for wokism, but there's no reason a country couldn't be a conservative, Western, capitalistic democracy where the voters simply reject the excesses of the left. History and economics shows this is one of the best setups a country can have, actually.
Ben___Garrison
23d ago
This story is a great encapsulation of two important phenomena:
- How utterly asleep at the wheel most Europeans were in regards to Russia, especially post-Crimea.
- How much more dangerous Russia could be if they got a handle on corruption. But alas, no dictatorship can really solve corruption since it's too beneficial to the leader at the top for maintaining his position.
Ben___Garrison
5mo ago
Is it rational to care or even know about propaganda in otherwise good media?
Responding to this statement directly, I think the answer is "obviously yes". Even if it's not pervasive or all-encompassing, it still impacts society by reinforcing the notion of what's acceptable, who's on top, etc. Symbolic cultural statements push the Overton window. It goes like this:
Motte: Symbolism can be ignored if you don't focus on it too much.
Bailey: I'm creating an excuse for this symbolism because I like it and agree with it.
A recent example was Starfield having pronoun selection in the character creation screen. Reddit deployed the usual motte and bailey in the comments, but would almost certainly have had a much different reaction if it was symbolism they disagreed with, like "it's OK to be white".
(Not saying you're personally guilty of the bailey here by genuinely asking the question, but it's clear many people are on other sites like Reddit.)
Another interesting aspect of the Speaker fight has been an additional datapoint on Trump's slowly eroding influence. Trump has explicitly backed McCarthy, and while Trump's endorsement had once been enough to clear state-level Republican primaries to get his preferred candidates to the general election, it hasn't done much in this fight. Indeed, Boebert and Gaetz have been openly flounting Trump's wishes, with Boebert confirming that Trump had called her and told her to "knock it off", to which she replied in a floor speech that she thought Trump should tell McCarthy that he doesn't have the votes.
Trump has been unique in his ability to survive scandals that would otherwise sink mainstream politicians, with it becoming almost a parody that many political prognosticators constantly said Trump was doomed, only for him to float along like nothing happened after a week or so. But I think this caused many people to overlearn about Trump's resilience into essentially thinking he's invincible. In reality, Trump's clout within the GOP and the nation have been declining slowly but consistently. The high point was obviously the 2016 election, but he suffered a minor-to-moderate defeat in the 2018 midterms before being rejected by the country as a whole in 2020, and now it looks like he's slowly being rejected by the Republicans as well; not just the establishment (which has always kind of hated him) but even the far right is looking for other options. Smart money now thinks Desantis is about twice as likely to win the R nomination in 2024 than Trump after Trump's candidates arguably cost Republicans the Senate chamber.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
The main difference between the Democratic issues with the Senate in the previous Congressional cycle is that the Democrats actually needed to try to get legislation passed. The Republicans in the House don't have that burden, as any partisan policies they'd try to enact would just get instantly shot down by the Senate or the President. This makes the Speaker's job a lot easier since all he really has to do is obstruct Biden's agenda, and maybe have enough unity to launch performative investigations like the Dems did with the Jan 6 commission.
I agree that trying to pass meaningful legislation with a majority that's this slim and rowdy would be very difficult if not outright impossible, but McCarthy doesn't have to do that.
Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
Hanania can't be "cancelled" in the traditional sense since being a public intellectual in the age of Substack makes that more difficult than it used to. He won't lose his job or be completely shut down or be forced to stop writing or anything like that.
However, a big part of Hanania's appeal was that he was published in more respectable outlets and signal-boosted by Boomer conservatives who have institutional power. The Boomer conservatives agreed with his message but are totally, utterly terrified of being considered "racist" so these attacks do meaningful damage. There's already some signs that Hanania's name has been severely damaged in respectable circles. A lot of the impact going forward will be hard to measure since it'll likely be outlets just silently refusing to interview him, but these are lost opportunities all the same.
Ben___Garrison
9mo ago
This post is an interesting little mirror to this sub's CW leanings. Imagine if the positions were reversed with a left-leaning interlocutor instead of a right-leaning one. Say you told a story where they were making snide passive-aggressive remarks implying you were racist. The response you would have gotten would almost certainly be cheering alongside you. I highly doubt they would be as unanimous in their scorn, claiming this post breaks rules, that your previous compromises means you somehow deserve this, or that snide remark essentially saying "we're not your therapist, bro".
The fact that Christianity's cultural side is inextricably linked to the superstitious side is clearly causing some amount of cognitive dissonance. But instead of resolving it (either by severing the two sides, or by rejecting Christianity entirely if doing so is infeasible), this sub... tries to ignore it as much as possible. This sub pretends it doesn't exist, and then gets really conspicuously oversensitive whenever someone reminds them of it.
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw?
It's continually baffling to me how the majority of this forum thinks that defending your own lands from a hostile foreign invader somehow makes you a puppet. At least this thread isn't as bad as the one yesterday that explicitly called them an American puppet, and when pressed for evidence they produced several articles relating to Boris Johnson, apparently entirely unaware that he was the leader of the UK and not the US
Further, the idea that Ukraine is doomed and should just surrender now to prevent more bloodshed is only ever really advanced in bad faith. It's clear a lot of people on the right hate the woke left so much that they end up hating the entire West for having given birth to wokeness. Instead of specifically targeting the excesses of wokeness, they do the oikophobic thing and say the West itself must be destroyed. Since the invasion made the West seem more unified and righteous, they've been earnestly hoping for a Ukrainian defeat. They post as concern trolls similar to this, claiming they just want to stop the bloodshed of the Ukrainians, who after all are really just misguided mini-Russians.
The eventual resolution of this war is still very much in flux. It's looking more negative than it was post-Kherson, when there had been 3 big pushes liberating land. Now, Ukrainian leadership seems unable or unwilling to resolve the conscription issues, and House Republicans have sabotaged the compromise bill that would have provided aid (and limited immigration) at Trump's behest. That said, more aid could arrive through a different aid package or through Europeans boosting their own efforts. Ukraine could very well be forced to give up land in an eventual peace agreement, but how much and whether they have real security guarantees afterwards is still an open question. I'd go into it more, but this forum isn't particularly great for that so I'd just point anyone interested to the daily threads on /r/credibledefense.
Ben___Garrison
9mo ago
I will say that building your masculinity on the attention of a particular woman or women in general is cuck behavior, and needs to be discouraged wherever possible. Even the MGTOW dudes still construct their whole identity around women, you gotta stop that shit.
All evolutionary pressures ensure that men absolutely should care about what women want. The men who don't... will just not reproduce and die off.
But appearing to care, or caring in the wrong ways (e.g. being subservient to women) are both unattractive to women and unfashionable to other men. The secret is to care enough to entice women, while pretending not to care.
Ben___Garrison
10mo ago
Richard Hanania thinks Desantis should challenge Trump to a boxing match. Desantis's campaign so far has been pretty pathetic. He's been afraid to really push back against Trump despite Trump lobbing almost daily attacks against him. Desantis is great on paper, with his victories against woke institutions in Florida, but he's failed to appeal to the Republican id so far. Many Republican voters care far more about appearance and physical vigor than policy positions, good governance, intelligence, etc.
I don’t think Trump can lose a Republican primary at this point. But if I were giving DeSantis advice, it would be to do the opposite of what Abernathy suggests. Republican voters love the stupidity, obnoxiousness, vulgarity, and simian chest-beating. While the conventional wisdom seems to be that Rubio and Cruz tried rolling around in the muck with him and failed, Rubio’s most vicious personal attacks in 2016 didn’t come until after Trump had won the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses, that is, pretty late in the game. And Rubio wasn’t the guy to do it.
Instead of seeing Republican primary voters as concerned citizens seeking a voice, try to imagine them as chimps laying around under a canopy. They’ve chosen the alpha male. He’s the loudest, most obnoxious member of the tribe, and his power depends on the degree to which other apes are afraid of him and give him symbolic displays of respect, which in this case has meant saying, for example, that he actually won the 2020 election. What could break this spell? Not reasoned arguments, but signs of weakness. And no, not weakness in the sense that he might not be the most electable candidate — that’s counting on a level of thinking that is far too abstract for this population.
Rather, one needs to emphasize literal physical weakness. Notice how obsessed Republicans have been with the real and imagined physical and cognitive shortcomings of figures like Biden and Hillary. In many corners of right-wing media, “our opponents are old, fat, ugly” seems to get at least as much attention as actual issues, especially during election season. In 2020, we saw doctored videos of Pelosi slurring her words go viral on social media, and this shows not only how susceptible the Republican base is to fake news, but also how obsessed they are with physical and physiological correlates of health.
The Dylan Mulvaney hysteria is another demonstration of the red tribe being driven by the most base and primitive instincts. These people started shooting beer cans with assault rifles because a company sent a six pack to a guy who acts like a sissy. Good luck explaining to them the importance of going after higher education accreditation agencies.
You might think it’s strange for a group like this to have chosen Trump as their leader. But when he posts memes of himself as an Adonis or says things like he’s in better shape than Obama or Bush were while they were in office, and no one corrects him, that serves to only cement his dominance over the party. Trump’s perfect body is like the unreliability of Dominion voting machines. Shirtless Putin has a similar effect in Russia. Educated Westerners roll their eyes at his primitive demonstrations of vigor, but I suspect that, like Trump, he’s a much better student of human nature than they are. The conspiracy theories might have been false, but the Trump-Putin bromance was real, and no accident.
This means that DeSantis’ best shot is trying to emphasize that Trump is physically weak and he no longer intimidates others in the party. You can’t do this with words alone. DeSantis can call him fat, and Trump can reply everyone is saying that I’m in the best shape of any man who’s ever lived, and the voters will eat it up. The Florida governor needs a way to clearly highlight that he’s younger, stronger, and more physically courageous.
DeSantis should therefore challenge Trump to a boxing match. Trump will almost certainly refuse, at which point he can say that this shows what a coward the former president is. Or, DeSantis could say that, on further reflection, maybe it wasn’t fair to challenge an 85 year-old man (yes, lie and exaggerate, Republican voters love that too), and he understands that his opponent is too feeble at this point in his life to get into the arena.
DeSantis shouldn’t do this out of the blue. He could start by trying to bait Trump into saying something particularly nasty about him, or preferably his wife or kids. Then he can play the role of the justifiably angry patriarch. Every time Trump launches a personal attack, DeSantis can reply by saying that his opponent is a pathetic coward, and if he has a problem with him he’s already made clear that they can settle their differences like men. If he’s not willing to do that, then we can stick to the issues, at which point DeSantis can go on about whatever he did in Florida. At the very least, a challenge to fight will eat up all the energy and make sure no other candidate gets any attention, as one of the main things DeSantis needs to do is make the primary into a two-man race.
Right now, the DeSantis strategy is to try to get the Republican voter to ask questions like “who is more electable?” or “who has shown more focus in fighting woke?” Those are exciting questions to conservative intellectuals but way too boring for the Republican masses. They will never tell a pollster this, but they resent anyone trying to make them think too hard, which is part of the reason they hate liberals in the first place.
There are a lot of ways that this could go wrong, and it probably wouldn’t work. But I think people are still yet to truly understand that, if things proceed as normal, Trump is going to be the nominee. Making sure he’s not would require meeting Republican voters where they are, instead of continuing to wish they were something else.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Economic growth just means "continuous improvement". Sometimes that's by making the pie bigger, other times it's from increasing efficiency. Hearing people strawman capitalism as "it requires infinite growth", then equating it to a cancer cell, is one of those braindead arguments on par with "if you don't like gun control, why don't you just move to Somalia???"
Why can’t we make the finance industry basic again?
Some financial innovations have been good like ETFs, while others have been bad. Careful regulation is better than becoming a Luddite and trying to stop all financial advancements entirely.
Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
wherein NATO forces commanded by Nato leadership are directly involved in a major offensive for the first time
There's 0 evidence of this, for the record.
Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
Market forces will kill any initiative like this. There is no demand for role models that don't teach young men what they want to learn (at least from the young men themselves).
The same thing happened with injecting progressive politics hamfistedly into tv, movies and video games. The market will just flow around and find what it demands elsewhere.
Market forces are not all-powerful. For example, video games are an utterly male-dominated hobby, and most men would prefer to look at beautiful women ceteris paribus, yet large western studios have done everything in their power to eradicate attractive women in AAA releases to appease their loud contingents of leftist female employees. It's not a total ban, indies and Japanese games still have attractive women albeit with large pushback from woke forums like Resetera, but the difference overall is still quite notable.
I'd wager most of it is simply from the decline of monogamy. In the West, both men and women are regressing to their biological sexual imperatives where men want to have sex with lots of women and women want to clinch commitment from a high-value man. This creates an adversarial relationship with many people left out in the cold: low-value men are rejected by most women outright, high-value men have a huge abundance and can treat women like sentient fleshlights, and women in general target the top quintile of men who treat them as disposable goods, or else they have to brave the lower quintiles full of "creeps". The best soothing balm for the battle of the sexes is simply being in a healthy long-term relationship, as it's hard to have a war when all the soldiers are fraternizing with the enemy. But the decline of monogamy has had a catastrophic impact on the rate of healthy relationships.
There are other more minor factors, e.g. the Internet has let people delve into their niche interests harder than ever, which has led to men and women dividing from each other more. I, for example, spend much of my free time playing grand strategy games and discussing culture war + philosophy with strangers in a rationalist framework. Women probably make up <5% in any of these areas, and as such I barely have any meaningful interactions with women since I graduated college. I didn't make a conscious effort to weed women out of my life or anything, I just focused on the things I was most interested in. I do interact with women a bit at work, but modern white collar environments are completely sterile so that hardly counts for much. In any case, two groups dividing from each other doesn't do wonders for understanding between them.
There's also the impact of third wave feminism implicitly branding most men as latent rape machines and red-pill/incel communities treating women like drones, which also doesn't help.
But yeah, it's mostly declining monogamy.
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