This seems low-charity. @AlexanderTurok doesn't want the government to encourage people to take up low-class jobs or to make policy that increases rather than decreases the number of such jobs.
Specifically he seems to think that the Right is full of people who haven't done such work and fail to see just how awful it is - his knowledge seems to be more hands-on than most of us here and most twitter commentators, so I take him seriously on this note even though I don't necessarily agree.
Now, frankly I have no idea how he does want these necessary but awful (by his lights) jobs to be done, and would very much appreciate hearing that directly from him. I would also, honestly, really like him to make a top level post where he lays out his own, explicit, positive ideas about how he wants the economy and culture to work.
As the child of two undocile people, it’s because in a two-person system with no rank or higher outside authority, such people rip each other apart the moment they have a real, serious conflict. Temperamentally neither is equipped to back down gracefully or elicit sympathy from the other, so the relationship ends up either in prolonged turf war or divorce.
That’s not to say you should be marrying a cocker-spaniel instead of a woman, just that if you find yourself a male born with an undocile temperament (many such cases!) your relationship is going to do a lot better with a laid-back girl than with a spitfire or a girlboss.
The opposite scenario is also true, but proportionally less likely for biological reasons.
On a broader case, I think this extends to a principle that we can encourage women to be assertive OR have a tradition of equal, gender-neutral gender roles, but not both.
Any man can become president. That's still a very bad life plan to be offering to people as a whole because all of them except one will be disappointed. It matters that the majority of people have decent lives.
"Oh I had to invite her to a dance six times over two months before she finally said yes." etc
That's basically easy, if you're seeing her every few days at communal social events and you've known each other all your lives and everyone of both genders agree that men are supposed to be persistent. Embarrassing, yes, but not that embarrassing.
Today, lots of men know few or no women, and are taught from birth that anything more than a very indirect one-time-only approach is sexual harassment. I am a perfectly well-adjusted adult and yet I haven't spoken to a women who wasn't a friend's wife for months. When the bar is so very much higher, it's no surprise that people seek easy alternatives.
But you see the difference between:
Name: Sarah. Sex: M. Gender: F.
and
Name: Sarah. Sex: M. Auxiliary Note: Transexual / Female-identifying
right? Regardless of whether you agree with the latter.
In short, there is a difference between 'female' and 'female-identifying'. One is a reified claim about what someone is, one is a note about their beliefs.
I would counter that lots of games are not meant to be played for mastery. They’re meant to be played for fun, and that might mean some self-expression by picking items you think look cool, or trying to do silly things that probably won’t work, or just playing infrequently and not getting good. It’s not fun if playing with less than maximal seriousness means you get constantly steamrollered by the meta people. At least they should be on a different server.
I’ve had this problem in real life too - often your friend group picks up something like table tennis or a new fps and it’s great fun but after a few weeks one or two people have knuckled down and got good, and now it’s no fun for anybody else because you have to play 1v2 or 1v3 even to have a chance.
With games it’s tricky because the set of your players who are mastery-oriented are going to overlap a lot with the set of loyal fans who set the culture and promote your brand, so you can’t suppress them and you will end up being disproportionately affected by their vision whether you like it or not.
Corvos
1d ago
Yeah, I have a friend who works in a very sensitive area of banking and it’s a nightmare:
- Four layers of security before he can get to his desk
- Everything on the computer is absolutely locked down and the software is rubbish as is the authentication system
- Constant surveillance from cameras absolutely everywhere
I think other stuff too but I forget the details.
Corvos
2d ago
No, I mean I used to have a duty-based mindset and I pulled myself partially out of it by noticing that people who are very interested in my duties towards them (personally or in a wider sphere) are often uninterested in any duties they might have to me, or regard their traditional duties as historical oppression now thankfully abandoned.
One must have both. Otherwise it’s just playing cooperate with defect-bot.
Don’t get me wrong, I know what you’re getting at. I’m just saying that, long-term, people have to feel that their duties broadly even out. It doesn’t have to be literal ‘I will give you X if you perform Y duty’ but ultimately you have to persuade people, generation by generation anew, that your conception of duty and virtue is a valid one they should follow.
I would say that a big part of the decline in duty you mention is both sexes observing, in different times and at different ways, that they seemed to be being taken advantage of. You can’t sustain such systems long term.
Corvos
1d ago
That's my understanding. Probably the Americans have 10 or so super-cameras hidden up there but moving the orbits of a geo-stationary satellite regularly to focus on different targets would require unsustainable amounts of propellant - I doubt they monitor anything except the highest value targets.
I imagine the hardest bit with all the low-orbit satellites is collating the data between them properly and adjusting for the differences in perspective or whatever. Night-time imagery isn't a problem I think - you can use black-body (thermal) radiation plus reflected light from human sources plus whatever weird spectra you can find floating around. But yeah, I think you'd be getting every few hours or something.
Corvos
4d ago
The thing is, you have to offer the rights/privileges if you’re going to ask for the duty. Duty without reciprocation is just exploitation.
What I’ve found is that due to inertia a lot of people expect traditional duties from men: chivalry, serving women first at meals, paying for and organising dates, being the breadwinner when necessary, child support, a certain level of strength and stoicism and respect.
But they aren’t willing to put up the traditional privileges: obedience and respect from the wife and the children.
For marriage, I don’t everyone understands and agrees on what they’re supposed to get out of it. People are constantly negotiating their wants and expectations and they don’t feel comfortable with the idea of just doing their duty because they aren’t sure what they’re going to get back from it all.
Corvos
1d ago
I think there is an underappreciated gap between the 'artisan' worldview and the 'executive' worldview. In the former, skills are things you acquire through great effort and are the main achievements of a well-lived life. In the latter, skills are things you buy; your merit comes from the things you have access to and the use to which you put them.
Corvos
1d ago
And also to minimise the scale of the breach, right? It's bad if an employee tells me that BigCorp and BiggerCorp are expected to finalise their merger by May, but it's worse if they give me 2000 pages of detail on the subject including all the due diligence on both parties.
Corvos
4d ago
It’s also the case that once the just cause has triumphed for a couple of generations it will look a lot less just.
After a while, the people in charge aren’t just any more, they’re incurious conformists upholding a system whose virtues they no longer understand. Social parasites get in at the cracks. The various downstream issues the just cause creates at scale are papered over to prevent exposure.
Corvos
2d ago
Do people image from geostationary orbit? It's MUCH further away than other orbits: https://satellitetracker3d.com/track?norad-id=60179
I assumed that most imagery was doing using low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites that watch from 500km - 700km up, like the SENTINEL satellites, and these only have recurring orbits on a period of days, although some of these programs have several satellites following the same orbit.
Whereas geostationary satellites are 35,000km away and mostly located in the equatorial plane. I would have thought they struggle to get good images.
Am I mistaken about how imaging works? I'm not an expert.
Corvos
2d ago
Right. Being able to post on here during COVID was more freeing that having no outlet, but it would still have felt much better to be able to speak publicly.
Corvos
4d ago
My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that there was no actual pedophilia on Epstein’s island of the form that give people nightmares.
Forgive me for being lurid but I would have thought that if Epstein were deliberately luring in pedos there would be more 13-year-olds and 8-year-olds and fewer ‘haha she’s 17 years and 11 months old, pay up or I tell the police’ girls.
I can absolutely believe that Epstein found such entrapment to be a useful extra string in his bow but I doubt he was specifically advertising it as pedo paradise.
Corvos
2d ago
I see. My assumption would be that criminals are much less capable of getting guns in Scotland than in an American state (even one with restrictive laws) and therefore that this points to Scotland's murder rate being abnormally high. A comparison to Scot-descendant groups in Canada would be nice.
This is a fun story, and I apologise for the coming less-fun response. From where I'm standing, this is the story of how you and your friends lied and abused the trust of others in order to get things you knew you weren't entitled to. Like, this is the glitzy high-class counterpart to stories of underclass black guys vaulting the ticket barriers in BART stations.
I'm not saying this just to be a miserable scold (though I probably am that) but because when people talk about rebuilding virtue in society and upholding social trust, this is what they mean. I know that you're an upstanding citizen in many ways and that you work for various nonprofits etc. as well but why are people of a lesser standing going to do the hard, thankless work of keeping up their end when they know that this kind of thing is going on behind their back? Hearing stories like this just makes people feel like suckers for holding to the rules and trying not to trouble others.
I am reminded of a quote from SSC:
On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.
But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.
You're not that, most of the time, but it seems to me that this is a little bit of that. Especially when you’re intentionally putting staff in a difficult spot, where they may well be in for professional consequences, so that you can get what you want:
The fact that six random bozos were even able to get this close and that she briefly considered letting them in [...] meant that someone had loose lips and various heads would surely be rolling down the fairway the following morning.
Corvos
5d ago
I think it’s fair to say that nobody proposes that Americans are jumping at the chance to do the worst possible jobs.
You have people who accept that jobs like fruit-picking and taking care of incontinent elderly people need to be automated or done by sufficiently-incentivised Americans because the alternative is endless mass-immigration as each new set of second-generation immigrants refuses to do the scut work their parents came to do.
You also have people who believe that some of the jobs being done by immigrants are perfectly decent, okay-paying jobs that Americans are being priced out of or excluded from. Semi-skilled factory labour. Coding.
I appreciate your going and looking for an actual quote but DeRemer’s phrasing is very vague. I suspect she’s talking about the latter category, and your analysis of the rest of the interview seems to confirm that. I certainly think that
sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain
is not upheld by the quote, though she may think it in private. Regardless, who do you think is actually going to do these jobs? Do you think that America can continue to rely on illegal labour to do these jobs for the next 50 years without serious consequences? 100?
Corvos
2d ago
This might be confounded by presence of firearms. Getting close enough to someone for GBH is more dangerous if they might have a gun; conversely people might beat their opponent down harder to reduce the risk they draw a firearm when you look away.
Corvos
12d ago
Going by my English intuitive sense of ‘sovereignty’, it would mean:
- They own all the land in Australia (and can therefore charge you rent for it or turf you off it in perpetuity).
- They are the top level of government, and entitled to make any laws or override any bodies that they please, in the same way that the UK parliament is sovereign.
Now, I would be very very surprised if they ever got that, and there be lots of hammering out of details over which tribes and what bodies own things and have rights. But you can admit those rights in theory and move towards them by e.g. saying that aborigines have the right to charge rent of say £10m per year to the Australian government and treat it as basically UBI. Or by giving them certain veto powers over government.
One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.
I’m not sure what precisely this is referring to (global reduction in mortality rate?), but I think if we can take anything away from the last 100 years it’s that progress in the physical sciences doesn’t necessarily (or at all) translate to progress in the social sciences.
I agree that women’s intuition is perhaps not everything it’s ginned up to be, but I would want something pretty good before I discount that intuition to nothing. Especially for the most visceral stuff like ‘do I need to hug the crying baby?’ Which is pretty much directly the result of millions of years of evolution optimising for healthy children and functional families.
More complex stuff may be downstream of bad socialisation and I would put less weight on it.
I see, thank you. Would I then be correct in saying your position is broadly that long-term economic growth will eliminate the vast majority of these jobs in a reasonable timeframe (let's say 30 years) so that long-term tradeoffs (demographic change, long-term transfer of whole economic stacks to other countries, overproduction of elites, socioeconomic resentment, etc.) are not really relevant and we can focus purely on short-term plans to minimise immediate (<30 years) disruption whilst maximising economic growth to the levels required?
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