Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
I think you'd also like Chris Arnade's Dignity, so let me recommend it here once again.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
fiat accompli
Just a minor nitpick, but since I see this so often:
It's "fait accompli," (French for "accomplished fact") not "fiat accompli" — a "fiat" is an authoritative command or order, and is from the Latin fīat "let it be, let their be, may it become, may it happen" (probably best known from the phrase in the Latin version of Genesis 1:3: fīat lūx, "let there be light").
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
As the flow turns now
Except from what I can see, it isn't turning. The idea that "the woke is being put away" or that we're seeing "peak woke" is utter nonsense, pure wishful thinking. DEI is going to keep on being "the way to win" for the entire 21st century at least.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
This is the same kind of problem with so many government solutions. "Oh you can't handle the bureaucracy and regimented life of white collar work and corporate America? We will help you out, all you need to do is navigate a white collar bureaucracy that makes corporate America look streamlined."
Yes, this is a point Arnade makes in the book as well. (I've had personal experience with, dealing with Social Security, welfare offices, Medicaid, etc, and I find it hard enough as a high-IQ "front row" type myself.) My mother works for our public library, in the branch in the poorest part of town. They get plenty of people coming in to use the computers to get online (because they lack internet access at home), and some portion of those people are doing so to seek various forms of governmental assistance. The library stafd are aware of this because said people often end up coming to them for help with trying to navigate the various application processes, and such (help which the librarians are unable to provide).
The actual solutions are out there, and have been out there. Private charity orgs and mutual aid societies used to handle some of the people falling through the cracks. Apprenticeships where people learn by doing were far more common than schooling. Churches provided help to people.
Unfortunately — and here's where I once again turn back to Weber — it is in the basic nature of modernity to replace organic, human-run institutions like these with bureaucratized ones. And, as you note, the reach of such private organizations is rather less than uniform. Much of the resistance comes from the sorts who rate "equality" high in their priority of values, and who decry the "unfairness" involved. If the primary source of help for, say, the disabled are the local churches, then what about disabled non-Christians? Disabled atheists?
Plus, local charity requires local people able to afford to be charitable. I've been thinking about Alaska's economy quite often, and why it's so terrible. The job market is lousy because few are hiring, because few can afford to hire people, because there's not enough business, because few can afford the goods and services the business provides, because too many are poor and lacking jobs…
"Rideshare, food delivery, etc." all require enough of a customer base able to afford them. It's hard to compete in "online marketplaces" when the shipping costs are higher (as are the raw materials for whatever good you're producing, for the same reason). Plus, you're competing with illegal immigrant labor, or with overseas sweatshops and the like.
I remember asking a question here in one of the Sunday threads about the economic viability of Auron MacIntyre's 'have your state resist federal control (or your county refuse federal and state control) on culture-war issues by refusing federal funds and using local institutions in their place — tell your people "you don't need the welfare state, the churches will provide."' And I recall that most concluded it's simply not economically viable for any but the richest locales (all of which are pretty much on the same side as the federal institutions in the culture war), and especially non-viable for "rust belt" areas (or other, similarly-impoverished areas like Alaska).
I mean, I agree with your sentiments here, I'm just not sure we can make it actually work as things are now.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Your gripe isn't really that businessmen have to adhere to moral codes, it's that the moral codes are written by your enemies and letting businessmen get away with anything is better than having them do you wrong systematically.
Yes, exactly.
But you should want for businessmen to adhere to moral codes that benefit or are neutral towards you, ultimately.
Sure. But I don't think that's achievable at the moment. So, again that leaves "letting businessmen get away with anything" as a second-best alternative. Come the Reaction, come our Augustus, then we can talk about moral frameworks beyond "shareholder value."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
You mean the glorious proletarian revolution?
No. Absolutely not. When I spoke of demolishing institutions, I wasn't referring to the health insurance industry, I'm referring to the institution of Congressional aides. Of "legislators" who don't actually legislate.
But at least we may want to discuss their part of the responsibility for the problem, if we perceive it to be the problem?
Why? To what end? If you want to fix the portion of the health industry problem for which Congress is responsible, you have to "fix" Congress. But, like so much of the US Federal government, the only way to "fix" Congress is to tear it out and replace it with something else. As you note, health care CEOs "don't have much space for a radical change"… and if "radical change" is what you want, the only way we're getting it is overthrowing the United States Government.
So no, I don't mean a "glorious proletarian revolution" in healthcare. The opposite direction, really. The glorious Caesarist reaction when we finally get our Augustus, who ends the Republic.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Maximizing shareholder value is not the sole goal humanity should have. This is strawman paperclip maximizer talk.
Sure, but one problem is that from what I see, the most common alternative goal to "maximizing shareholder value" ends up being DEI, ESG and "forcing behaviors."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Given that education correlates pretty highly with income, ive always felt as if fostering values around education and its importance would be a crucial first step and the environment many are in seems to make this highly difficult, even after obtaining such education.
Here's where I'm going to push back, by referencing Chris Arnade's book Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. (Short review here.) He uses the metaphor of "front row" America versus "back row" America, referencing students in the front and back row of the classroom — the former are the smart, conscientious, rule-abiding, attentive people who do well in modern schooling; while the latter are the opposite. Arnade notes (as does Murray, and also Freddie deBoer) that in our current society, success heavily correlates with being "front row." Further, much like Murray, he notes that the divergence between the two continues to grow, to the point that the two groups increasingly cannot even understand each other, and have become increasingly intolerant of each other (see our politics). He also notes, and objects to, the fact that pretty much every proposal to try to 'help' the more "back row" Americans consists of projects attempting to turn them into "front row" Americans.
Arnade's point is that we can't actually do this. Some people just aren't suited for modern education, and no amount of "fostering values around education and its importance" is going to make them any more educable or less incompatible with the "front row" lifestyle. Unlike (what I've read of) deBoer, though, he argues that welfare state redistribution is not the solution, because while it's good at addressing the material inequalities between "front row" and "back row," even more than money, "back row" Americans need an existence that is dignified, that provides respect, and welfare state handouts are counterproductive to that end. Foster "values around education" all you want, you still need to find a way to integrate and provide a living for all those who simply aren't suited for college (or, for that matter, high school).
But you cannot simply redistribute "respect" like you can money, and Arnade's book is his lack of solutions to the problems he raises:
What are the solutions? What are the policies we should put in place? What can we do differently, beyond yell at one another? All I can say is “I don’t know” or the almost equally wishy-washy “We all need to listen to each other more.”
As for other people online — pretty much all "front row" — who I've seen propose various solutions, it's generally not optimistic. Plenty hold that "front row" traits are so intrinsically essential to the current post-industrial economy, and our society heavily g-loaded by necessity, that there's simply no way for "back row" Americans to contribute — that what jobs they still have will be replaced by automation (or cheaper illegal immigrants) any day now. The more optimistic of these are the ones bullish about genetic modification technologies — whether CRISPR-style splicing, or just PGS IVF —becoming cheap and commonplace in the next decade or two, so that if we can just keep things together for that long, our society will be able to afford to engineer the genes of "back row" America's children to become good, productive "front row" Americans (and then just wait a generation or two for the remaining "back row" folks to die off). The more pessimistic look to cheap VR (and improving VR porn), cheap psychiatric drugs, police surveillance and drones, and a welfare state to keep the economically-superfluous "back row" Americans pacified and warehoused (and reproducing less), for however many generations needed until they all die out.
Some propose providing "dignity" by replacing direct welfare payments with make-work schemes. But the only idea they have to keep them from being too transparently so is basically to revive FDR-style massive government infrastructure projects. But this runs up against all the problems that beset trying to build infrastructure in America, and would almost certainly end up ruinously costly.
The only other solution I see bandied about is essentially religious revival — we are all equal in dignity as beings made in God's image; the successful need to count their blessings, recognize we are all sinners, and stop looking down on those who have not received the same good fortune as them; while "back row" americans need to "come to Jesus" and stop letting their poor material conditions provide excuses for wallowing in sin. Not terribly plausible, I'd say.
Still, we do need something besides "just stay in school, just study harder, just sit still in class, just read more, just…"
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
I mean for all people eager to murder healthcare CEOs, at least some percent of them should direct equal hate to their local congress-critter whose stuff literally wrote most of the rules the CEOs play by (and whose campaign is financed by the same CEO, too).
The problem is, it's not the "local congress-critter" that actually wrote the regulation, it is, as you note, their staff (I'm pretty sure that's what you meant, and "stuff" was a typo or autocorrupt). Taking out a congressman is probably harder than taking out a CEO, and it likely leaves his replacement inheriting that staff.
And you can't change things by taking out the staffers, because while they may have less physical security, it's compensated by their obscurity — first, you have to figure out who they even are. Second is their numbers — taking out just one of them won't do much. Third is their replaceability — they're even more interchangeable than politicians.
(You can't stop the Machine by popping a few expendable human cogs within it. You've got to demolish the entire institution.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Would they have any success to make bar associations sacrifice their reputations and position as an institution of the society on the altar of short-term political gain?
I know I've seen various things in passing the last couple of years about bar associations and law schools pushing various DEI initiatives.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them.
I'd agree that the quality of 'tyrannies' (a rather loaded term for "rule by one") "depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them"… but only because all governments depend massively on the quality of the people in them. Personnel is policy, personnel will always be policy. If 'tyranny' is thus problematic, it's only because, like Aristotle noted, it's higher variance than the "rule of few," and "rule of many" is lower variance still, as larger numbers "average out" the extremes of both vice and virtue.
Going back to my comment in the "liberalism and parenting" thread, the liberal project has been about seeking out a set of top-down institutions so well-designed to align incentives that the quality of individual people within the institutions no longer matters, working even for Kant's "rational devils." I'd argue that this is an unworkable project with an impossible goal; any government depending upon human beings depends massively on the quality of those human beings, so we must stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and start cultivating virtuous leaders.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
there is a distinct cohort of the extremely-online "right" that is predominantly queer, atheist, and obsessed with identity-politics and oppression dynamics.
…
"Woke Right" seems like as good a descriptor as any and better than most.
And yet, when I see Lindsay using "woke right" (or, in his most recent Triggernometry appearance "woke fascist," which he argued was a more accurate term), it's for people like Auron MacIntyre, who are anything but 'queer and atheist.'
Edit: and I think both MacIntyre and Parvini have done a great job on their respective Youtube channels taking apart this entire "woke right" framing.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
that are more afraid of Texas and Florida
Except Texas and Florida only have control over the Texas and Florida bar associations. The bar associations in other states — like California, or Oregon — need not fear them.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
the provincial government in my case. I'm not sure what it is in the States.
According to Wikipedia, it's mostly set by the states — some via acts of the state legislature, some per orders of the state supreme court, and California has written the State Bar of California into it's constitution. And according to here, "Federal courts, although often overlapping in admission standards with states, set their own requirements." Further:
In general, an attorney is admitted to the bar of these federal courts upon payment of a fee and taking an oath of admission. An attorney must apply to each district separately. For instance, a Texas attorney who practices in federal courts throughout the state would have to be admitted separately to the Northern District of Texas, the Eastern District, the Southern District, and the Western District. To handle a federal appeal, the attorney would also be required to be admitted separately to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for general appeals and to the Federal Circuit for appeals that fall within that court's jurisdiction. As the bankruptcy courts are divisions of the district courts, admission to a particular district court usually includes automatic admission to the corresponding bankruptcy court. The bankruptcy courts require that attorneys attend training sessions on electronic filing before they may file motions.
Some federal district courts have extra admission requirements. For instance, the Southern District of Texas requires attorneys seeking admission to attend a class on that District's practice and procedures. The District of Puerto Rico has administered its own bar exam since 2004, part of which is an essay which tests for English proficiency. For some time, the Southern District of Florida administered an entrance exam, but that requirement was eliminated by Court order in February 2012.[47] The District of Rhode Island requires candidates to attend classes and to pass an examination.
An attorney wishing to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States must apply to do so, must be admitted to the bar of the highest court of a state for three years, must be sponsored by two attorneys already admitted to the Supreme Court bar, must pay a fee and must take either a spoken or written oath.
So not a lot of room for the executive branch to act here — it comes down to the individual states and federal court districts. So, no, I don't think Trump has the "bigger stick" here.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
What “unacceptable directives” wouldn’t be illegal, yet would be beyond the pale?
Well, to quote Cheney herself:
Donald Trump knows his claims about the select committee are ridiculous and false, as has been detailed extensively, including by Chairman Thompson. There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting — a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee — and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct.
(Emphasis added)
What would count as “weaponizing the DOJ” that the Democrats haven’t already normalized?
Well, remember, just because the Democrats have done it, doesn't mean it's been "normalized" when Republicans do it. "Кто, кого?" and all that.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Unfortunately, I don't think American society is able to do that any more. We (on the whole) are so, so risk-averse that it is unbelievable.
Perhaps, but I'll point out that this is far from uniform. It varies on factors like class, education, race, religion. Safetyism may be especially rampant among the PMC, for example. But, while inner city black communities have plenty of problems, I wouldn't say that this sort of rampant safetyism is one of them. There are plenty of smaller rural communities, of a religious conservative character, where older, more lax norms of parenting still persist. And then there are professions that pretty much select against risk-aversion, most notably front-line combat troops. If you go by Munger's definition, then "lead, follow, or get out of the way" is a pretty illiberal motto, no? And I'd note that from where I sit — though I don't have the hard data — it looks like safetyism is negatively correlated with birth rates. So, these lingering adherents of Thomas Sowell's "Tragic Vision" have advantages in both fecundity and in undertaking the risks involved in violent confrontation.
The problem is organizing them to step up, overthrow our safetyist elites, and take charge of society. Contra David Z. Hines perpetual calls for the right to learn from and adopt lefty organizing, those decentralized methods are really contradictory to our nature. We're hierarchical. We "organize" by falling in behind a leader.
Thus, the solution to this, as with so many other problems in our society, is for our own Augustus Caesar to arise.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Inspired by a discussion of recent comments by Liz Cheney:
How effective would it be, as a measure to prevent Trump from "weaponizing" the Department of Justice, if the various bar associations began disbarring DOJ attorneys for following "unacceptable" directives from Trump and/or his appointed Attorney General?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.
…
In The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Sax theorizes that American parents, especially Liberal/Leftist parents, are uncomfortable with the idea of wielding authority over their children.
This is something I find myself talking about more and more online. I just finished writing a short essay to post on Tumblr (it's a little too heavy on pathos and light on logos for the Motte's rhetorical standards), after I listened to a portion of this "Dad Saves America" interview with Michael Munger. Specifically, at about 20 minutes in, Munger says:
Liberalism is the actual belief that no one should be in charge… Even I, if I have the chance to be in charge, I should say no, no one should be in charge. Because anyone who’s in charge, it’s like the Ring of Sauron; it will turn you, and it will make you evil.
I recall a couple of Tanner Greer posts on the popularity of YA dystopias, and the passivity of their heroes, gesturing to this point: that so many of us in the West have so thoroughly internalized this distrust of human authority — any and all human authority — that they can no longer even conceive the idea of a good leader, that power and authority can be used for good ends. Thus, like the parents described above, they are deathly afraid of taking charge of anyone or anything — a deep terror of responsibility, of exercising leadership, because they're convinced that such authority can only ever be oppressive and abusive.
But power must be wielded — sovereignty is conserved. Man is a political animal; and decisions — political decisions — have to be made. Someone, singular or plural, has to make them. But if no humans, singular or plural, can ever be trusted to make such decisions, then the only choice is to have something non-human make them. Hence, Weberian rationalization — the replacement of human judgement, now deemed too terrible and corruptible to ever be trusted, by rules and procedure; that is, by algorithms. In Weber’s day, implementing them still required human bureaucrats in all cases, but nowadays, ever more of them can be done by our machines — "software eating the world."
Liberalism, in this view, is simultaneously severely misanthropic, and yet highly utopian, in that it holds that if we just design our rules and procedures well enough — whether implemented on bureaucracy, or on silicon (the "alignment problem") — we can achieve a perfect "moral alchemy" that can get virtuous outcomes from even a society of Kant's "rational devils":
As modern folks, we love this kind of solution. It promises a sort of “moral alchemy.” Take the base stuff of human self-interest and turn it into the gold of a functional—maybe even a “just”—society.
You can see this kind of move all over the place. Take the problem of value, for example. It would be overwhelming if we had to figure out and agree on what things are really worth. How would we even get started? Markets, we’re told, solve the problem for us. Money translates countless different forms of value-comfort, usefulness, safety, nutrition, beauty—into a single, eminently countable measure, and the intricate workings of supply and demand yield prices. Everything can be compared. The question shifts from "What is this worth?” to “How much does this cost?” None of us needs to know what anything is really worth. All any of us has to do is buy what suits our preferences and our pocketbooks. Out of the mess of market interactions comes a price—which isn’t really the same as the value of a thing, but it’ll do.
Moral alchemy is built into our legal system too. A defense lawyer’s job isn’t to seek the truth, but to represent their client’s interest, even if that client is guilty. They aren’t directly responsible for discerning the truth. The process is supposed to suss out the truth—at least often enough that we can feel OK about it.
The same impulse is behind interest group politics. Your job as a voter isn’t to discern what’s right and just for your society and the world. It’s to represent your interests. Elected officials, in turn, are there to fight for what their districts want. And the process is supposed to sort it out into something like fairness and justice.
It’s easy to see why procedural moral alchemy is so appealing. “Only you” responsibility can be daunting. How can we be expected to discern the good (value, truth, justice) over and over again as life throws us into the daily grind, not to mention the crises and conundrums and dilemmas that crop up more often than we’d like?
The problem is that our trust in moral alchemy may be un-founded, and depending on it may leave us unable to do what we need to when systems fail. These days, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that democratic systems and free markets can produce virtue despite the nefarious actions of vicious participants. A Western world once confident that the line between good and evil ran between democracy and autocracy now worries about democratically elected autocrats. Increasingly, we see that discerning the truth by letting opposing views argue it out doesn’t work if both sides don’t actually have some sort of basic commitment to truth-seeking. And free markets regularly seem to miss crucial components of the value equation, like the CO₂ emissions that are destroying the planet. Unfortunately, the longer we lean on moral alchemy, the more dependent on it we become. Our moral discernment muscles atrophy. And precisely at the moment we need to discern what is just or true or to assess value for ourselves, we find ourselves and our societies unable to do so.
(From Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz.)
Munger's "liberalism", which matches my experience of actual liberals in this vein, ends up holding that if parents are allowed to exercise authority over their children, the bad caused the parents who abuse their children, however few, will always outweigh the good done by all other parents. If you applied this sort of reasoning about the avoidance of any bad outcomes to your personal life (and I can't believe I'm the one making this argument), you'd end up at "euthanasia for a sprained ankle" thinking.
(Alternately, one can ditch the utopianism, accept the inevitability of imperfection and failure even as we strive against them. Bad leaders will happen… but so will good ones. Some parents will abuse any authority they have over their children… but far more will exercise that authority to their children's benefit. ersonnel will always be policy. Power will end up in human hands, and thus the personal virtue of those hands will always matter. Good parenting will always be dependent on good parents. Good governance will always be dependent on having good men. So stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and start cultivating virtue.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
and to inspire further action from others through what 19th century Russian nihilist social revolutionaries called “Propaganda of the Deed”
Except when has this ever actually happened? My understanding, from what I've read on the topic, is that "Propaganda of the Deed" never actually worked, not like the revolutionaries hoped, and was in fact counterproductive.
(If I thought such an act would inspire others on the same side to follow suit, well…)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Red Tribe is not only going to win, but is clearly going to win.
I will again reiterate, for our audience, that I, for one, do not think it's "clear" at all, that you have not provided sufficient evidence to back this claim, and that from what I have seen, if any tribe is "clearly going to win," it's Blue.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
This would bankrupt pretty much every non-ivy inside of a few years.
You say that like it's a bad thing
I want to burn down the system
Apparently you don't; or, at least we have very different ideas of what that means. My model for the minimum in dealing with Academia is Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries — complete with seizure of assets and the imprisonment or execution of resistant abbots and monks.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
The blues are pretty much guaranteed to lose a kinetic tribal conflict
I'd say this is a pretty strong assertion, of the sort that should really have some evidence provided to back it. For one, why don't you think the blues will be able to retain control over "kinetic" government institutions?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Sure, which puts paid to Vox's "false flag" narrative. But it instead highlights another weakness of assassination and terrorism as political tools in this sort of modern context: the choosing of the symbolic over the effective. To borrow Max Weber's terms, it's favoring "values rationality" (Wertrationalität) over "goal rationality" (Zweckrationalität); that is, what "sends a message" or embodies a particular value over what actually achieves a concrete end.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
There’s very little you can do to prevent being murdered like this other than not be worth killing, and that’s a tall order for Inner Party members for reasons inherent to being Inner Party.
Depends on who you consider "Inner Party members." Nobody tries to assassinate, say, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, despite the IRS's unpopularity.
I remember reading a thread on Tumblr discussing how we remember the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that launched World War I, but we forget that political assassinations were not uncommon in turn-of-the-century Europe, compared to after the World Wars, mostly of people we would consider rather "mid-level" in the government — not notable enough for the sort of fame-seeking that motivates most assassination attempts on heads of state. The question was raised of why this changed, and the general answer was that in Europe (or at least parts outside Western Europe) back then, even ministry heads and upper-level bureaucrats were members of the hereditary aristocracy — personally important beyond their government office, and not readily replaceable.
Nowadays, though, such jobs are held by interchangeable human cogs in the bureaucratic machine. Take out the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and his or her #2 will be in their office within the week, and the operation of the IRS will proceed without the slightest hiccup. Hit the J. Edgar Hoover building with a truck full of explosives*, and the rest of the FBI continues with business as usual.
This is why I disagree with our own @KulakRevolt's Substack piece "Assassination War & the Death of Bureaucracy," because, long before assassinations of IRS agents "cause a Johnstown style 2/3 flight from the profession," (which even he estimates would take "merely 100 IRS agents" being killed annually), you'll long since run out of assassins willing to die to take out utterly-replaceable human cogs, only to see the machine grind on undaunted.
Sure, the mostly-figurehead merely-elected politicians whose names and faces are known to the public might have to worry, but then, see the "mostly figurehead" part.
*Example inspired by Vox Day's claim in this post that the Oklahoma City attack was a "false flag" precisely because it was in Oklahoma City:
In other words, a real terrorist attack on the FBI isn’t going to be in some random field office; the Oklahoma City truck could have just as easily have been parked in front of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. If there is a false flag attack in London, it would probably be on some trivial, but vaguely symbolic structure that was already scheduled for demolition. An aging football stadium scheduled for replacement would make an ideal candidate.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, unsuited for one and unable to become the other.
Agreed. Now try finding that meaning when you're a 43-year-old unemployed man who's never managed to go on a date and lacks the capacity for religious belief.
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