BreakerofHorsesandMen
No bio...
User ID: 3614
BreakerofHorsesandMen
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d ago
Plain ol’ Dior Sauvage. It smells pretty good and does the job.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
3d 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
3d 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
4d 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
4d 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
5d 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.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
This is a different, less earthy, metaphor, sure, but it means the same thing.
Rather than worrying about makeup, you should stop sleeping in the woods.
Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica."
Sure they are. We can do this all day.
The idea that no library books ever depicted sex acts (visually or textually) before Gender Queer is false.
Not once have I argued this. You brought in the question of text. I’m not sure who you’re arguing with right now.
What I have argued and will continue to argue is that there is a constant churn of Cthulhu swimming left, towards greater and greater degradation of the commons. Today it’s someone defending cutesy drawings of blowjobs in library books that librarians push or market towards young teens or tweens, 10 or 20 years from now it’ll be someone defending librarians pushing kids towards cutesy drawings of some author’s autobiographical exploration of the first time they let their dog fuck them. Maybe sooner! Things are moving fast.
Maybe that will be too much for you, or maybe it won’t, maybe you’ll continue to say, “Well, I read Gor in the school library when I was a kid, and I remember the Gender Queer arguments on the Motte (PBUI) and the kinds of assholes who took the counter-argument to me, so this is fine also.”
Or maybe you’ll find your grandkid reading it in the library’s booknook and you’ll be appalled. I don’t know. But your current arguments are toothless to me because my stance is that Gor in the school library was already too much.
We are merely having the discussion about Gender Queer because that is where the current battlefield starts. Unfortunately, from my point of view.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
I am well aware it’s a strap-on. The facing page in the book in question specifically refers to the act as a blowjob.
I quote:
“I can’t wait to have your cock in my mouth—I’m going to give you the blowjob of your life. Then I want you inside me.”
“This is the most turned on I’ve ever been in my life. I am DYING.”
This writing is erotica.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
Bands probably would have been even better for me, actually.
I was a very competitive (within a few state area, not like actually competitive with genuinely good judo players) judoka for about 10 years. Most people, myself included, seem to age out of intensely competitive judo pretty young, even at the amateur level, just from wear and tear. At 30, they put you in the Master’s division for old folks. 😂
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
I don’t think this unhinged.
Thanks for writing so much about a passion topic for you! As a one-cologne guy, it’s pretty interesting.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
Would you like to argue that erotic images are a special category that should be treated differently? If so, make the case.
I make the case that erotic images have always been a special category that was treated differently, from the beginning of public libraries. Public libraries were designed and intended to educate, uplift, and edify their users. You have to make the case for why we should change.
My hypothesis is the null hypothesis because prior to May 28, 2019, the question “Should we have comic books depicting blowjobs both in the public library and marketed to under-18s” would have probably caught the questioner a pedophilia accusation. It would have been so uncontroversially a negative that even to ask the question would be suspicious, and yet it only took the release of Gender Queer for a vocal minority to argue that I’m the one who has to explain why it shouldn’t be in the public library.
At some point in the living past, the question “Should we have, in the public library, comic books depicting graphic rape” would have been uncontroversially answered with a negative, and at some point in the living past, “Should we sell photos of naked women at gas stations” would have been uncontroversially answered in the negative, and so on and so forth.
The Internet is mostly a sewage pipe with a small bubble of moderately fresh air trapped up against the pipe, and I don’t find your argument that therefore libraries should also become sewage pipes to be at all convincing. “The Internet is for Porn”, after all, so libraries can and should be for something else.
And everyone is always free to, you know, not take their kids to the public library if they don't want to. The fact that there is little necessity to do so is a load-bearing part of why the libraries should not necessarily feel obligated to cater their entire catalogue to the lowest age denominator.
This reasoning always shows up eventually. Of course I’m free to not take my kids to the public library. But I also used to be free to take them there and be fairly confident the worst thing they could stumble across was some text erotica. My parents could be reasonably certain the worst thing I would stumble across was a kiss and a fade to black in a fantasy novel. Their parents could pretty much trust the worst thing they were going to come across was a “Damn!”
The point is that my freedom to trust that the public library is in accord with what I and people like me view as the public interest has been slowly degrading for 40 years or more. This limits our access to and trust in the library and when we complain about it or express our grievances, we are met with your reasoning.
———
This is obviously a generational battle and will continue to be so. I don’t fault my predecessors for not understanding what was going on, because it probably felt like having to explain to someone that the sky is blue and the grass is green, and that while sometimes the sky is orange and the grass is yellow, they still aren’t the same thing, only to be met with adamant accusations that the sky and the grass are the same thing until their will to resist was exhausted.
Now we are living in the world where everyone is expected to act like the sky and the grass are the same thing, and unsurprisingly it is starting to crack up under its contradictions.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer.
I extend to people the presumption that if they are engaging in the discussion, they have at least looked at the most salient examples of the topic, and so stating that I have “actually looked” at the examples could only be read as a veiled accusation that the other person hasn’t.
———
It’s a blowjob, dude. It’s erotica by its very nature. It shouldn’t be in the public library. Again I stand on the null hypothesis that until very recently, essentially every library in America agreed with me, and it is the change that has to be justified.
That being said, you bring up a good point. Flowers in the Attic and Gor shouldn’t have been in your school library. It shouldn’t have been in mine.
The sewage was already lapping around our ankles when we were kids, but that’s no excuse for letting things get worse. And yes, on the way back to having no metaphorical sewage flowing through our intellectual and spiritual lives, we have to pump the sewer back down to just around our waists, and then our knees, and our ankles, and so forth.
There are things that can be sexual but not pornographic, but those things are, culturally, well prior to Playboy.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
If you really did want to use tariffs, even punishing tariffs, to return domestic manufacturing of physical goods to within your borders, how would you go about it?
It seems to me that you would want to start at the top of the value chain and slowly work your way downwards. I.E., you start with XX% (or XXX%) tariffs on completed automobiles, then some time later, you apply some degree of tariff on whatever products are used in the step before completion, and so on down the chain until you reach the degree of autarkic internal production that you desire.
Is this correct, or headed in the direction of correctness, or what?
Relatedly, it’s possible that laying out a roadmap of your plans and clearly communicating it and sticking by it might even accelerate your plan, if business views it as credible and starts on-shoring faster. I am also open to the idea that publicizing your roadmap might allow a trading partner to pursue a strategy of increasing domestic subsidies until you give up, in that “They have the watches, we have the time” kind of way. Which direction would you go in that regard, or what alternative approach seems best to you?
Please consider a “Should we have a 1% or 2% war tax” kind of response, not culture war. Thank you.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
The reason there is so much male on male rape in American prisons is precisely because of civil rights concerns, and an indicator of how the whole concept is fundamentally unworkable.
The correct response to a prisoner accruing so much power that he is able to engage in a consistent pattern of rape is for him to have been executed for whatever moderately violent crime or string of questionable life choices he made in the first place.
What I’m saying is, is civil rights concerns are the only reason the rapist prisoners are there at all, and more civil rights concerns prevent us from either dealing with them or treating all the prisoners in such a way that rapes are zeroed out or nearly so.
This is entirely compatible with males go to prison with males, and females go to prison with females.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
So you guys are, internally, an anarcho-syndicalist commune that, externally, acts as an unaccountable oligarchy.
I kinda like it, actually.
Alternatively, if we consider Zorba to be the monarch, mostly focused on foreign policy and economic concerns, you guys are more like an aristocracy.
I like it even more! This is a good experiment. I wish you great success.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
Speaking just for myself, I’m not entirely opposed to elementary schoolers (that is, 10 to 12 year olds) learning about puberty in a strictly “changes to the body” sense. I am not opposed to middle schoolers (that is, 14 year olds or thereabouts) learning about sexuality in a strictly heterosexual, pro-natal “this is what sex is and you should wait until marriage” way.
What I am opposed to is a combination of these concepts being introduced at much younger ages (“We’re just teaching them to recognize abuse!!” is a motte at those ages), and the fact that nearly everyone doing the teaching is philosophically opposed to my people’s point of view.
On another note, “Why is it so important to you” questions, and all variations thereof, are silly. It’s clearly important to you or else you wouldn’t be asking the question, so humans being what we are, someone somewhere is going to take the opposite stance from you. Questions like that remind me of the scene in Blindsight where the aliens perceive informationally-unnecessary communication as a hostile attack on their mental processing cycles.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
This argument is the same as “You already live in a sewer, might as well eat shit, shrug?”
As it turns out, people should not only not eat the shit, but also actively pursue stanching the flow of sewage.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
6d ago
I could not possibly be in more agreement with you.
Everyone knows arrests are Constitutionally required to be fair fights. The fascists have arrived like bullies, like they always do, using strength of numbers to abuse the innocent and violate their rights.
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.
More options
Context Copy link