Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
Like @FiveHourMarathon said, the capture of the government by the administrative state. That "the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant" because he is irrelevant. That unelected bureaucrats and functionaries of the "NGO-cracy" run everything, insulated from electoral feedback, and elected officials are mere figureheads. That, as the old saying goes, if voting could change things, it would be illegal.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants,
I'm not sure they can; as in, I'm not sure they have the capacity — particularly if you compare demographics of fighting-age men. And even if they do, that won't be for long — can you still "expel the migrants" when they outnumber you?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
if we manage to beat back stasis without a true catastrophe, I think that will be enough for me and my children.
That's a very big "if." Far, far, far more likely we don't. And what then?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I would consider myself heavily blackpilled, but no, not remotely a doomer. Mostly because personally I still get to enjoy life. I had to scale my ambitions back heavily and lower my standards, but I've been able to get small carveouts of joy.
Nice bit of humblebragging there. (Some of us are not so fortunate.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
First, are there any societies where this happened at all? Secondly, are there ones where it happened with our level of technological sophistication and state capacity?
And third, sure, in the long enough run it probably won't endure — for "in the long run we're all dead" values of long run. There's a lot of ruin in a nation, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
And for the closest examples I can think of, the usual way it was resolved was conquest by higher-fertility (and more patriarchal) "barbarians" with enough military force to impose their social system on (the women of) the newly-conquered people.
But that sort of conquest doesn't look like a thing that's happening much any more — the GAE does a good job of suppressing it. And most of the "barbarians" aren't really doing all that better themselves. Basically, it looks like what a commenter at Jim's said recently:
If you want the truth, the truth is that right now all of mankind is about to go up in one big fire. Without any use of nukes, bombs, or guns, billions of people have already disappeared from the Earth… by not being born.
So what awaits our world-wide South Korea? Probably an Afghan Goat Herder, making his own journey to the west to investigate ancient ruins and whatever trinkets he happens to find (god forbid he thinks we were all funkopop hooligans).
Expect this situation to last (and get worse) for the rest of our lives, at the minimum.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Ok, but on an individual level, don’t you want a solution that works for you
Assumes that there is a solution that works for your individual situation. I know that for me, personally, there's no fixing my problems — I'm a defective sub-human with no reason to live, and should probably spare myself the decades of pointless misery that lie ahead and just gas (helium) myself now.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I hate to be pithy, but the problem is that we have forgotten God. I'm serious.
If by "forgotten God" you mean learned he never existed in the first place, then yes.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
One of my friends from grade school and his wife looked into adopting when infertility issues prevented them from having biological children. They are rather well-off and well-connected — a major street in this city is named after my friend's grandfather, and more than one local politician would occasionally attend his family's Christmas party.
And yet, they were denied. No kids. (Now he mostly just channels it into being uncle to his sister's kids, and his wife into her hobbies.)
(I've brought up this example to more than one therapist, when they recommended that I try adopting a kid. Because they'll just hand off a kid into the care of a single, jobless, literal crazy man like me while denying a wealthy, stable couple like my friends?)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
A female-to-male ratio of 3:2 among college graduates means that one in three college-educated women remains childless and single or intentionally becomes a single mom or marries a working-class man.
Yes, and I'd say that almost all of them are going to be the first (childless), with a few taking the second option (intentional single mom, likely via artificial insemination or, given aging, IVF). It doesn't matter whether we're "prepared to normalize such prospects" or not, it's what's going to happen.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Equally, Tapper mostly ignores the great question of the Biden presidency: Why did everything basically run just fine? There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence. It pretty much felt like all the other presidential administrations I’d seen. What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
IME, it's not just Democrats who ignore this question. I find people on the right are also reluctant to consider this, and especially unwilling to draw the obvious conclusions.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
By now, most everyone has forgotten about the war.
I read this sentence, and my first thought was: which war? Israel-Gaza? Israel-Iran? Syrian civil war? Or (as it turned out) Russia-Ukraine?
You might have wanted to be more specific — or at least give an explanation why, out of all those ongoing conflicts, Russia-Ukraine is the war.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Because it’s already happening
"[Citation needed]" as they say
blue America has neither the consistent control nor the willingness to put in the work to stop it.
I very much disagree with this — I think it's but a matter of time until they come down hard on this sort of thing.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Sure, those are the birth rates, but what are the retention rates? How many of those children stay with the religion of their parents? For example, I remember reading somewhere not long ago that the above-replacement birth rate for the Mormons goes pretty much into producing ex-Mormons, and that once you add in that exit rate, they're at or below replacement. And, AIUI, the retention numbers for Evangelicals are even worse — they're pretty much having the liberal kids current liberals aren't.
Pretty much the only groups I know of with above replacement birth rates plus retention rates are the Amish and Haredi Jews (which you didn't separate out from other Jews — when you do, the numbers for non-Orthodox Jews are pretty bleak, IIRC).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
What makes you think pillarization will happen — or, more specifically, that "blue America" will tolerate the existence of a parallel "red" hierarchy?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I'd like to thank you for posting this, and note that most of this describes the Alaskan Independence Party pretty well too.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.
I, for one, find this highly disappointing, because — as many of you probably have noticed — I tend to use em-dashes quite often myself. It's partially a combination of how I was taught to write — particularly in college — and them being rather easy to type on my Mac (option+shift+hyphen, with option+hyphen being the en-dash). But, being the old, new-technology-hating curmudgeon that I am, I will not be changing my writing style because of this.
The second is the question of where did their ideas of purity come from. Was it objective, rational, independent inquiry, or was it just a different strain of meme?
This is where you get to postmodernism — the view that there is no objectivity, it's just warring memes and primate social games all the way down (the wordcel version of "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it"), you fight for your tribe and its memes because it's your tribe. For many people, they do not have "principles" or even beliefs, they have a side. (Wasn't that the whole "arguments as soldiers" thing?)
So why such a lack of confidence? Because of the repressed awareness that their own beliefs are merely memetic infections, aka psychological projection.
I'd push back a little here, thinking about both the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and modern online debates, about the memetic competitiveness of ideas on equal versus unequal knowledge bases — a priest is equipped to defeat the "viral memes" of a heretic in the way the lay person is not. Because a "heretic" often knows more about the field of their heresy than the average lay person. To consider items from this forum, the average HBD proponent probably knows a lot more about human genetics than your average "blank slate normie." Or, to go to the "Nazis at a table" analogy, our own resident Holocaust revisionists know a lot more details about the history of the camps than someone who's maybe just watched Schindler's List once.
In fact, I see people on the left make this argument; that between equally well-educated academic experts in a field, the left-wing ideas inevitably win the debate against their rivals — hence the left's near-total dominance of academia — but the ignorant lay people, not so well-armed, end up being led astray down the "far-right radicalization pipeline" by smart-but-evil figures like Jordan Peterson.
By this logic they should be inviting Nazis to their table to convert them away from Nazi-ness.
Except that they do sometimes try to "convert them away from Nazi-ness"… in the matter of an inquisitor (or a fire-and-brimstone Puritan preacher): "Repent your heresy, or suffer the consequences!" And for Puritans in particular, expulsion from the community, shunning from "polite society" is a major part of "consequences." Remember, excommunication is "a medicinal penalty of the Church," intended to bring the offender to reform their behavior, repent, and return to full communion.
(And maybe add in a bit of the disgust/contamination mechanisms behind the concept of "untouchability" that appears in so many cultures — that some people are just so indelibly tainted that anything and anyone they contact will be irreversibly polluted by it, as to why certain people must never be associated with, and anyone who has so associated must be treated as one of them as well. EDIT: see also @Southkraut's comment here.)
"each citizen is an educated adult fully qualified to choose on his own what to think".
Lots of people may profess to believe this when asked directly, but it doesn't really seem all that popular a concept in practice. Plus, as for "free speech," this is also the 'your speech is violence, our violence is speech' and 'free speech does not include "hate speech"' crowds. And social media seems to be eroding people's confidence in "the marketplace of ideas" as well. Again, the woke are more correct than the mainstream, and they're just ahead of the curve on abandoning these false and unworkable positions.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
the modern mainstream left seems to model ideas as akin to infectious diseases, which can spread from person to person merely through contact
Yes, but are they really all that wrong to model them — or at least some ideas — that way? I mean, isn't this a key part of why, traditionally, heresy was considered such a serious matter? Doesn't the "contagion" model somewhat follow from Dawkins's original "meme" concept; not to mention previous thinkers like Bernays and McLuhan on mass communications?
I mean, this is probably an area where I'd agree that "the Woke are more correct than the mainstream," and that your moderate centrist (classical liberal) sort are way too dismissive of the potential importance of memetic hygiene.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
, and those who did were either immigrants, bohemians, or men old enough to have been around the last time beards were in fashion.
I'll add another to this list, from what I know about my own state from that time period: backwoodsmen. The Alaskan "sourdough" is pretty much never clean-shaven.
In fact, AIUI, facial hair has pretty much always been more common on (non-Native) men here in AK as compared to the rest of the US. And maybe it's that we're a "red state" on top of that, but I don't recall facial hair ever being particularly "left-coded" here, at least within my lifetime — it was more that being clean-shaven was often the sign of a Cheechako (newcomer) and/or military.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
And there's little or no calls for expanded reparations programs and land acknowledgements are rather rare; black political activism sucks all the oxygen out of the air for anything like that, and for a lot of people the situation for American Indians is basically "out of sight, out of mind."
Land acknowledgments are becoming slightly more common, but only among progressive activist groups, and essentially never with actual native involvement: there's no American equivalent to "welcome to country."
That may be how it is in the Lower 48, but not so much here in Alaska. At least partially because the [Native corporations](Alaska Native Regional Corporations) serve as loci for activism, as well as helping maintain the individual tribal identities, but also that we have the highest population percent Native at 20.7%, and, further, we already have a precedent for reparations in ANCSA (even if it was meant to settle all such future claims, it hasn't stopped activists from seeking more).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
In short terms (based on my experience), I'd say something like "Blue Tribers who like the movie Idiocracy for being 'so true,'" or "racist Progressives who've figured out they hate Red Tribe 'fellow whites' more than they do blacks or browns."
The first time I ever encountered the term, it was in a Substack essay by a "former white nationalist" who pretty much fit that second description — the moment he got out of his diverse, coastal, urban, Blue Tribe bubble into the >90% white "flyover country" and met his "fellow whites" of the Red Tribe, suddenly he wasn't a "white nationalist" anymore. The essay also went on about how "progressive" his politics were, how they were solidly in the tradition of past progressives like Galton and Sanger, and how eugenics are really the most progressive thing (I'd say he's not wrong about that), and that his "project" to "fix" our politics is about reclaiming "solidly Anglo" progressive eugenics from it's "unfair" association with Nazi Germany. (Meanwhile, I noted that his list of past pro-eugenics "Anglo" progressives that started with Galton included the rather non-Anglo Wernher von Braun.)
Basically, this is one of the places where I agreed with Hlynka, that there's a lot of these sorts who are supposedly on the "far-right." (My primary disagreement with him was always that he held being a "principled loser" as the essence of "the Right," and thus pronounced all atheists — and anyone else who disbelieves in "a future state of rewards and punishments" after death — as automatically and inherently Leftists, and thus The Enemy.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
I'm reminded here of "Sailer's Law of Female Journalism":
The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
right wing atheism is hedonic self indulgence.
Well, this right wing atheist isn't exactly generating a bunch of hedons these days, nor indulging in much of anything (except being poor and miserable)…
This is me on "happy pills." I've been on multiple psych meds, including antidepressants, since my first suicide attempt back in 2004.
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