BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
No bio...
User ID: 3614
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
I will do my best to lay out my thoughts on the topic:
Speed Read: Arguments that immigrant labor accepting lower wages and benefits makes costs lower are strictly first-order evaluations that neglect both actual second and third-order costs, as well as the native populations perceived costs. I consider those perceptions to be a valuable signal to decision-makers that the economic data they are using to justify their decisions is in someway misaligned, or more likely, completely cooked.
There are a couple of reasons for my assertion. First, a tremendous portion of healthcare costs are known to be a result of senior care costs; Western governments in general, especially the UK, fund these costs via taxation and massive debt spending, which is inflationary. Senior care is a low status job, as is every job that used to be primarily sourced internally from within the family. Therefore, a proportion of the workforce engaged in senior care has been brought in from outside in order to provide this care. This workforce does not perform as well at taking care of the local population’s elderly, because they lack kin-based or even ethnic motivations to care for them, and also because they are doing it just as a job. The government has to attempt in some fashion to maintain quality of care as the workforce degrades, so it implements a typical state strategy, which is to create massive amounts of bureaucracy in an attempt to replace internal motivation with checklists, paperwork, and agencies. Because this is a long-term losing battle, the quality of care continues to degrade, but because bureaucracies are almost impossible to destroy, the money continues to flow in increasing amounts over time. Lower quality of care, greater cost for less output.
I will tangent here to say that the total size of the proportion of non-native British workers in the healthcare workforce is impossibly muddied by very foolish (or malicious) bureaucratic decisions to declare as “British” all sorts of people who are not native British. And this matters very much in terms of both cultural and economic costs. My people have been in the Lower 48 for going on 300 years, and yet we will never, ever be “Native Americans” from the perspective of actual Native Americans. I am perfectly fine with this, but I use it as an example of how two ethnes can maintain de facto boundary lines for hundreds of years, even in the face of significant forced government assimilation attempts. Just because non-British nationals make up 12% of the healthcare workforce, doesn’t mean that the native British ethne makes up 88% of the healthcare workforce. I would wager it is actually much lower than that and that this has significant cultural damage effects that contribute to raised costs, because the ethnes are different and in low-grade conflict with each other, despite an attempt to deny this by calling them all “British.”
Second, mass immigration of any kind appears to drive down the fertility rates and reduce the status of the original population. We can see this in conquests, colonizations, and, uh…the non-colonization mass immigration occurring for the past 50-60 years across the West. When fertility rates are low, the elderly have, tautologically, fewer children and grandchildren willing to share the burden of caring for their elderly relatives. That means that if care is going to be provided at all, it has to be provided by the healthcare industry/bureaucracy. This also increases costs, as you have to pay someone to do something that children and grandchildren might otherwise have been willing to do for free. It also increases costs because, if children and grandchildren are the ones actually providing the labor, they would likely be more inclined to let their elderly relatives die earlier (potentially leading to Nights of the Pillow, but I mean this mostly in a gentler sense). That is, it is easy to demand heroic and eye-poppingly expensive interventions that are in no one’s interest when it’s government doctors doing the work. It’s easy to make huge demands in spending when it is someone else’s money and time. Much harder to demand that when you actually see and deal with Grandma’s condition every day.
Finally, I also think that perception matters. Yes, as people point out, it is true that in the 50’s, houses were smaller and everyone only had one car, but the dominant ethne was confident and happy and this results in a productive and happy population, which tends to drive down not just actual costs, but perceived costs as well. If I have to pay $20 more for an appointment with a doctor who is visibly and understandably of my culture and people, that might be worth a lot more in knock-on cost effects overall than is immediately apparent from arguments of “it costs more!” Maybe I see the doctor less because I feel better helped at the first appointment, driving down costs by removing that appointment from healthcare expenses altogether. I’ve been using senior care as the most salient example and probably lowest hanging fruit, but I think that there is a good reason to believe that a hypothetical NHS of 2050, staffed nearly entirely with native British, serving a population of nearly entirely native British and prioritizing attention to that population over attention to non-native concerns, would be overall cheaper than the 2050 equivalent of current NHS.
This is my NHS specific argument.
This is a total tangent, but additionally, I also think that modern style immigration is very much the camel’s nose. Once you let in a genius Indian doctor, no matter how great a guy that dude is, the inevitable slide is towards more and more costs as a result of letting in more and more unqualified immigrants for any of a variety of reasons. This is why my argument surrounding immigration is that the government, as such, should have no significant control over it except for the following two rules.
- The only acceptable way to immigrate is to be married to a current citizen.
- Citizen to immigrant marriages are not able to be legally dissolved in any way.
I think this far, far better reflects the slow churning of peoples at the edges of territory that has occurred across all of human history, and keeps the ethne from stagnating without creating all the sturm und drang of post-60’s mass immigration ideology.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
One could argue that the expected role of the woman has changed, and now they are all out of the house doing labor (and “labor”) elsewhere. This is frequently to the detriment of their drastically reduced number of children, because young children really do need a mother around most of the time.
I’ve never met a daycare provider or a maid who is even half as good as a half-decent stay-at-home mom. And there are many decent stay-at-home moms out there, women who love their homes and their kids. They just don’t get noticed because of mal-oriented societal norms, and because they aren’t and never can be influencers, and because they understand that they don’t have to become like men or compete with men to be more precious than rubies.
The existence of organisations like NICE in the UK also tacitly accepts this fact.
It will never cease amusing me that in 1945, C.S. Lewis, one of England’s most successful authors, named an organization of scientific depravity “N.I.C.E.,” and then 54 years later, England just goes ahead and creates something of a very similar nature, with the same name and everything.
Who could have realized Torment Nexus jokes were already stale before the turn of the millennium.
They could support more people if the government hadn't underfunded the NHS!
British people are already taxed up to their eyeballs, and the NHS is better funded and staffed than ever. In 2018 it already made up 30% of all of England’s services spending, so I’m not sure from where you’re going to get more funding. Despite all that the A&E’s are, morning noon and night, hugely overcrowded every time I’ve been in one, full of very un-British looking people, horribly slow and incapable of triage. There’s only so much blood left in the British stone and it can’t fix those problems.
The actual alternative for Brits is to kick out their unproductive, non-British population, tighten their belts, and spend a decade or two training up new doctors and nurses from the natives. That would drive down costs and reduce wait times in the long run, but no one in a democracy is ever willing to suffer short term unpleasantness, so the NHS will just keep being a money pit until Britain cracks up. It might also help to cut the bureaucracy that infests all Western service providers. I am willing to give credit where even minimal credit is due and it looks like Starmer is willing to do that so maybe there will be some gains from that which stave off disaster for a while.
Alternatively, they could privatize it, which would at least let the companies involved ration care more sensibly.
Let me know how that works out for you.
24 When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. 25 Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai. 26 For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed[a] all who lived in Ai. 27 But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of this city, as the Lord had instructed Joshua.
Hard-heartedness works out surprisingly well for God’s people, sometimes, as it turns out.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
It’s crazy to think that there was a time when the Onion was genuinely funny.
The lone and level sands stretch far away, I guess.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
One avoids being a creep or a fornicator or a player, on the other hand, through passive virtues: not doing anything bad, resisting temptation, not saying the wrong thing.
The problem being that the passive virtues are maximized by never doing anything. One can never rape if one never has sex. One can never say the wrong thing if one never talks. One can never hurt anyone if one never moves.
I recall reading somewhere that one should compare one's aspirations against a corpse, and if the corpse would be good at what you're aspiring for, you should reject those aspirations and find new ones, because your aspirations are anti-life. This is the problem here: the evangelical teenage boy has been taught chastity is a virtue, but chastity is a virtue best practiced by the dead, and the Good Christian Boy who never causes trouble with girls is often revealed to be homosexual or to lack healthy desire altogether.
I’m reminded of a saying from Sir William Marshal as he was on his deathbed.
The context is that William has had an extremely successful career beating other knights in tournament, and at the time the earned reward for that was taking the loser’s equipment. The church argued that this was an unlawful taking and William had to make amends for it for the good of his soul.
The Marshal replied: ‘Bear with me a moment, Henry. The clerics are too hard on us! They shave us too close! I’ve captured five hundred knights and kept their arms, their destriers and all their gear. If that means the kingdom of God is barred to me then that’s that – I can’t give them back! I can do no more for God, I’d say, than yield myself to Him repentant of all my misdeeds, of all the wrongs I’ve done. Unless the clergy mean to see me damned they should stop their harrying! Either their claims are false or no man can have salvation!’”
We live in an age when the priests have accrued too much power, no one has the capacity yet to tell them to get wrecked, and it will keep leading to passivity until the fever breaks.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
Before I respond in any kind of more substantive way, I will throw out there that I don’t think we’re really at crossed wires.
Polygamy is illegal in the United States. My take is that relationships that would be polygamous under a different legal regime just retitle themselves as polyamorous and go without the official legal imprimatur of marriage despite being long-term mutual households, and being essentially patriarchal “one dude, multiple women” setups. That’s what I mean about them being polygamy on the euphemism treadmill. It’s just patriarchal (which is good, IMO!) dynamics accruing to themselves some woke cover. It’s all very fascinating to me, honestly.
To me, harem-type setups have something distinctly different about them, in essence, compared to the types you mention above.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
Aquinas views sexual pleasure in marriage as necessary, natural and good. Going to the sex act with one’s spouse strictly for the pleasure is a sin, but sexual pleasure within marriage and the marital act is a positive.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
I just finished Ancient Law by Henry Sumner Maine, and am about to break into The Ancient City by de Coulanges.
I also finished Blood Meridian last week. I had taken kind of a long break before the final few chapters, so I wound up reading the whole thing again and finishing it.
Ancient Law was very interesting, taking it both as a piece of its time, and considering that the publisher I bought it from is openly reactionary. It was very much a book that I could see being easily read as a leftist piece, given that the author is quite happy to laud the perceived moral development of his then-Victorian society, and appears to be under the impression that the Kingdom of God on Earth will just keep getting closer and closer.
Maybe I’ll do a review of it at some point.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
This is so fascinating!
I would not call a one penis policy monogamy. But it’s also not polyamory, at least not as I understand the essence of the concept. It’s just regular old polygamy on the euphemism treadmill.
That’s why it’s so interesting that you have reason to believe it’s the most common format. On the rare occasions I run into openly polyamorous relationships, they are almost always one woman/two or more men. It’s hard to phrase the apparent dynamics charitably because they have been pretty clearly moderately attractive woman+beta wallet cuck+jobless alpha chad. If it’s not that kind of relationship, then it’s sloppy low-class, low-status trailer park relationships being dressed up as a “polycule.”
Inasmuch as I think of those latter two types as being something distinct enough from polygamy to have their own technical term, I think one penis policies are just something very old coming out, inevitably, but having to dress itself in modern clothing, as it were, even if the clothes don’t fit well or at all.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
On the topic of dancing, I think a portion of the problem is that this guy’s church comes from an American Protestant religious conservative background, and that grouping of people has, at best, an ambivalent relationship with dancing.
The kids aren’t going to feel comfortable dancing if they aren’t taught, as you point out, and then courting rituals have to be emphasized and valued, rather than somewhat grudgingly put up with.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
Apropos of a very small, tangential discussion on the main culture war thread, what are the borders of polyamory?
For me personally, I don’t think of any variation of one man/x number of women as actually being polyamorous in the current year sense. It’s all just gradations between patriarch with +1 wife, or a mistresses situation, or a full on Ottoman seraglio.
I can’t say I base this on much more than vibes, but modern polyamory seems to connote at least one additional male in the mix, and probably something that tends towards more even mixes of men and women.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
Does he lean in hard on the poly-am thing?
Every time I run into one of his tweets or a tweet from his marketing wife, it distinctly sounds like a harem. Is there reason to think there is another guy in the mix?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
With respect to his complaints, OP is not forced to participate in society as it currently exists. There are successful communes based on communitarian and egalitarian principles functioning in America right now that he could seek to join, or he could look into starting his own with like-minded people.
Ignoring the total incoherence of his arguments, if he has been studying this for fifteen years as he says, it seems plausible to me that he has had the opportunity to go somewhere that would allow him to test and experience his theories in a real-world environment.
The problem is that communes, and his ideas more broadly, are most generously interpreted as not scaleable, even with the best will in the world.
I do think it is somewhat likely that the OP currently lives in a communal-type environment, just based on what he’s said before, so I am willing to give him some credit for living his beliefs.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
I suppose I should make this a hypothetical, just to be clear it is a statement of an idea and not hostile.
You meet a person, and in response to your statement they say the following.
“Okay, but I’m not interested in granting you peerness. You are not my peer. I am not interested in dealing with you on level standing. I am not interested in extending to you fairness or mutual respect. I want everything you have because I think I will use it better.”
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
I view inheritance as part of meritocracy. If you have an inheritance, excluding adoptees, chances are high that your parents are some variety of high-quality stock and you will be too. If you, the inheritor, are not well adapted to present conditions then you’ll lose all the money and it makes its way to everyone else anyways.
I consider that there would actually be a lot more meritocracy if there was an effective way to keep coffin-dodgers from spending down most of their children’s inheritance just to hang on to another 4 or 5 years of rapidly decreasing life value. I also reserve blame about this for descendants who are unwilling to just let Mom and Pop die with some dignity.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
Not to mention that the Union maintained the institution of slavery in multiple states throughout the war, including the practice of denying them the vote.
This argument is a bit like invading someone for their heinous crime of capital punishment, while continuing to hang your own criminals.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
In my area of the US, once you get past the jingoism and into discussion, people would be happy with integrating Alberta, Sasketchewan, and the non-Vancouver parts of BC. Manitoba is a maybe, and the territories are might as wells, they wouldn’t get treated like states anyways.
Some kind of integration between Alberta and the USA would be the most likely first step, short of a war where the US just takes the parts it wants and leaves the rest as a rump state.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
This brings up a salient point of interest.
Respecting the courts in some situations can be seen not as principled adherence to the rules of the system, but simply strategic focus on what is really important. Massing one’s best weapons at the decision point, essentially.
So, you wind up in a situation where a side can point to their principled adherence to legal norms in one theatre, while maintaining their technological and human resources superiority in another theatre. In this case, the technology is legalese and the human resources are ideologically bound members of the legal profession.
This is all, to paraphrase a prophet of our times, defection with extra steps. In the context of Democrats and Republicans, it would be unsurprising to see Republicans choosing to not let the battle hinge on Democrat’s preferred decision point. that can be a good strategy or a bad strategy, but it shouldn’t be a surprising one.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
Plain ol’ Dior Sauvage. It smells pretty good and does the job.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
So let me get this straight.
Your argument is that to remove leeway on immigration enforcement, you have to write “shall.”
Unless it’s the supreme law of the land, in which case the priestly class gets to decide “shall” means something different than what it means when written in subordinate legal codes.
And also you further argue that “shall not be infringed,” in that case, means you can actually have a little infringement, just around the edges, just a little bit of a screwing despite the existence of the “shall.”
I would summarize this as “‘shall’ is ironclad, except when it’s not.”
Does that sound correct to you?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
“Shall” means nothing.
“Shall not be infringed.”
Lots of infringement going around.
Your whole “may” vs “shall” argument is demonstrably built on sand.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
My experience in woke circles is that poor people of color get bonus points on the oppression checklist, while poor white people don’t.
Unless the woke speaker is obviously cornered or trying to recruit a poor white person, in which case they briefly revert to doctrinaire Leninism for as long as it takes to keep up the charade in front of their new “ally.”
There was a blog post somewhere about how a lot of poor people, black and white, are intuitively suspicious of philosophizing and big words, essentially, so I don’t know how successful overall this is as a tactic, or if wokeism dropped it at some point.
But I have seen the tactic in operation before.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
Did the librarians deliberately disappear it? Do they say "look even though we have a five story building downtown in a blue town in a blue state that allocates significant revenue to this library we have limited funds and cannot stock every book"? How would I even begin to contest this.
They did deliberately disappear it. It was probably initially disappeared on the basis of being pseudoscience, although I’ve seen Chariots of the Gods in libraries before (strange!)
Then it was probably disappeared on the basis of being racist, although I’ve seen The Wretched of the Earth and The Autobiography of Malcolm X in libraries before (strange again!)
Now it’s probably being disappeared on the basis of causing harm or some similar euphemism treadmill, if you could even get the librarian in question to really think through the situation. The fact that Gender Queer appears to be causing no small amount of psychological distress to at least some people, somewhere, is irrelevant to the librarian (yet stranger still!)
The answer to your bolded question, and the thrust of my argument, is that the whole entire debate is ground that one side has prepared and conditioned such that the other side can never win.
You shouldn’t fight on conditioned ground, that is, by engaging in debate with the librarian. You should just seek to harden your heart, gain control of the commons, fire the librarian and restock the library according to the tastes of you and your people, whoever they may be.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
I’m inclined to think that “jobs” is just, in democracies, the politically optimal phrasing to accomplish what nations really want, which is adversary-proof production of food and materiel.
My question is about the physical goods manufacturing, and is to do with, for example, how many steps of the process of car manufacturing can you, hypothetical power of a country, get within your borders and how should you go about it if tariffs are in your tool chest? Lights-out factories are totally fine.
Reading this immediately after reading the discussion of Dom Toretto’s Charger in Tinker Tuesday was trippy.
I had very important questions about the Reunification Wars of the Fast and Furious universe.
More options
Context Copy link