Crowstep
21d ago
I predict more Israel Bad posts everywhere
I'm not sure it'll make a big difference. Months of civilians getting starved, displaced and blown up is quite different from a short, narrowly focused military operation targetting high-ranking members of a regime plus military/nuclear hardware. Israel's actions against Hezbollah didn't elicit much of a negative reaction.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.
I find myself quoting Noah Smith a lot recently. He's written about the main thesis in the book Days of Rage that the wave of terrorism of the 1970s was due to evaporative cooling. After the huge social changes in the 1960s, the more moderate activists got on with their normal lives, leaving only the most radical remaining, who in turn radicalised eachother.
Now that the Great Awokening is in decline, the normies are quietly removing the pronouns from their email signatures and taking down their Pride flags, while the crazier fringe are shooting Israeli diplomats and bombing IVF clinics.
Crowstep
14d ago
So you're avoiding a vaccine which stopped a global pandemic that killed millions because four out of every million (that is, 0.0004%) people who get the vaccine develop a heart condition because of it?
It feels like your position is based more on political contrarianism than statistical sense.
Like, I get it, governments got authoritarian and petty when it came to vaccines. I couldn't buy a beer in a German biergarten because I didn't have the right vaccine passport app, while all my friends (who I was sitting with) were allowed to, as if the beer somehow facilitated the transmission of the virus. That was dumb. But you're not sticking it to the wokes by not getting a vaccine, you're just increasing the chance that you get ill or (God forbid) die from a preventable disease.
Crowstep
14d ago
Your post suggests that you're talking about yourself rather than your child, which is a relief. But I have to ask, what negatives do you forsee from getting vaccinated so much that you'd risk getting the diseases they protect against?
Crowstep
21d ago
The American identity survives regardless of who makes up our population
I wouldn't call the country splitting into two halves who hate eachother 'surviving'.
Meanwhile Germany, in spite of the political changes you mention is the most politically stable country in the world (I didn't go looking for a list with Germany at the top I swear, I googled 'least partisan countries' and that's what came up).
Germany's form of government may have changed, but it doesn't matter because it has a core ethnic group whose similarity transcends political organisation. Meanwhile in the multiracial proposition nation, everyone hates eachother and can't agree on anything.
Crowstep
29d ago
I always found this weird, as mathematically for every lonely man there has to be one lonely woman and vice versa
I assume when people are talking about male loneliness they mean a lack of friends, not necessarily a lack of romantic engagement. Nobody thinks of the widowed church lady who spends all day drinking tea with her friends and looking after her grandchildren as lonely.
It's pretty fallacious to split the entire species into 'the pro-vaccine side' and 'the anti-vaccine side' and conclude that because some people or organisations were censoring information (as if this is a new thing for organisations to do) then you can ignore all studies and evidence (and your own lying eyes) about whether the covid vaccines worked.
Germany censors people who think the Holocaust didn't happen. That doesn't mean the Holocaust deniers are right.
Paul Graham says to keep your identity small, and this is a perfect example why. You're wilfully putting yourself at risk for a disease because your political partisanship won't allow you to accept a medical technology that your political opponents might like.
Crowstep
1mo ago
The Scandinavian countries have low levels of population density because vast tracts in the frozen north are empty, but that doesn't mean the people are spread out. Excluding city-states, Sweden is the 8th most urban country in Europe. It's significantly more densely populated than Germany by that metric.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.
They are simply people who are desperate to move from poor countries to rich countries. The care worker visas were the only way for them to do that, which is why for some countries (Zimbabwe being the best example) there were ten dependent visas issued for every worker. All they needed to do is work for five years and then the whole family can get indefinite leave to remain, access to the British welfare state, the right to import even more relatives. At that point, there's no reason for them to continue working in care homes (or at all, really).
Now these absurdly large holes have finally been plugged, the Conservative government that introduced the visa removed the ability for migrants to bring along dependents, and the current Labour government abolished the visa route to new entrants (although those who previously came in can still work in the sector) and extended the time needed for indefinite leave to 10 years in most cases (we'll see how many exceptions they grant).
I personally am in favour of increasing wages (or at least allowing the market to do so) for care workers. Pensioners are far too wealthy in the UK. The care sector would allow some of that wealth to be transferred to younger, poorer people, allowing them to buy houses and start families. With fewer low-skilled immigrants, the welfare state bill will be less. If that means fewer waiters, so be it.
Crowstep
12d ago
You don't need to know who is pushing something to notice it's being pushed
If you're positing a worldwide, decades long conspiracy to fabricate or exaggerate a genocide that never happened, then yes you need to actually say who (specifically) is pushing it and how they are doing so. Otherwise all you're doing is noticing that millions of eyewitnesses and all serious historians agree that the Holocaust happened, and that many government censor its denial, without actually demonstrating the conspiracy you're positing.
but you should probably not trust the survivor's testimony too much
Crowstep
2mo ago
Defining the word "woman" based on biological sex is just redundant and makes it harder to discuss things
The words woman and man have always meant male and female adults. It's only in the past decade or so that trans-activists have tried to redefine them to be somehow unrelated to biology, for the sake of being able to force everyone to pretend that a man in a dress is actually a woman.
Things were easy to discuss before, transactivists made it harder by trying to forcibly uncouple the words man and woman from what they have always meant.
Crowstep
1mo ago
They said rap should be subversive, well what did they think subversive meant? Vibes? Essays?
Honestly it's a pretty good song, bizarre subject matter aside. This Youtube link is live as of this writing, although it seems like the platform keeps taking new uploads down.
Maybe I will live to tell my incredulous grandkids about how we were all expected to perceive one specific 20th century dictator through a prism of quasi-superstitious dread.
I wonder if 'racism is the paramount evil' would still be a defining characteristic of western ethics if WW2 hadn't happened? I mean, the Transatlantic slave trade and the scramble for Africa still happened, smallpox still wiped out the American Indians. Maybe we would just find some other kind of racial guilt? My assumption is that it all stems from the fact that we're so outbred and WEIRD, not from the particular events of the early 1940s.
Crowstep
12d ago
Holocaust denial censorship is best understood as part and parcel of bans on Nazi symbols. Holocaust deniers aren't disinterested historians searching for truth. They're Jew-haters who are threatened by the idea of a genocide of Jews because it undermines their beliefs that Jews rule the world.
Fortunately, I live in a country which bans neither Holocaust denial (our vibrant Muslim underclass are very grateful) nor Nazi symbolism. The Holocaust deniers have failed to win in the free marketplace of ideas because they are wrong (and motivated by transparent ethnic animosity), not because the government won't let them post on the internet.
Crowstep
7d ago
That doesn't explain why its female dominated now though. Medicine and law used to be male dominated. Now women make up a majority of new doctors and lawyers. These things can and do change.
A better explanation is that nursing, a caring profession, is majority female because all caring professions are majority-female, because women enjoy caring (for obvious biological reasons relating to maternity).
Crowstep
1mo ago
The youths that were indoctrinated and acculturated during the awokening are irreversibly woke at this point. Those who stopped virtue-signalling are the older ones who haven't received such indoctrination.
I'm not so sure. I've heard more than one young woman who came of age at the height of it all use the phrase 'man in a dress' (as opposed to 'transwoman') which was previously only used by stubborn conservatives like me.
I can't find it now, but I read a survey showing that typical woke attitudes (innate white racial guilt, the belief that sexism is all-encompassing etc) were never actually popular with the majority, they were only popular with a very loud minority that was allowed to police the overton window. Now that has broken down, it feels like people are more willing to say what they always thought now, and that includes young people.
Crowstep
13d ago
Who are 'the pro-vaccine people', every government and health authority in the developed world? The supermajority of people on the planet who willingly got a vaccine? Humanity is not in a manichean struggle between pro- and anti-vax. Vaccines are just a (very) useful medical technology that unfortunately got tied up with the toxic partisanship and negative polarisation of American politics.
In the less angry parts of the world, we just got our jabs and got on with life once the virus went away because of them.
Crowstep
7d ago
because it pays very well
This study suggests its appeal lies in it being a caring profession. This one too. I don't know how things are in every country but in the UK, nursing doesn't really pay well. The average nursing wage is only slightly above the average wage for the country as a whole. Also, we see in other jobs that higher salaries attract more men than women, relative to the pleasantness of the job. High salaries should make nursing more male, not more female.
and is female gendered
That's tautological, surely? I'm asking why is it female gendered.
Crowstep
3mo ago
This is the best review I've seen of Adolescence.
It's culture war angle is really two-fold. Firstly, the idea that middle class native British boys from nice families end up stabbing their classmates, whereas in reality it's invariably second generation African boys (I mean, the show has a scene with a white boy mugging a black boy for his lunch money, come on!).
The social problems Starmer wishes to confront do exist, just not in a way that makes audiences feel comfortable. In the week that Adolescence was being watched by millions, a school in Elm Park on the London/Essex border held a party which was overrun by knife-wielding teenagers. That was close to where a real teenage girl was murdered by two real teenage boys in 2019. You’ll notice that none of the perpetrators resemble the star of Adolescence, because teenage knife crime in Britain is predominately a problem with young black men. This is testified by the fact that, according to Graham, who both wrote as well as acted, the show was inspired by the fatal stabbing of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu, as well as other real-life cases. These are unpalatable realities, and audiences for drama don’t like them.
So too with Andrew Tate:
Even the baleful influence of Andrew Tate and ‘toxic misogyny’ is, again, disproportionately a problem among minorities, as Rakib Ehsan pointed out, and ‘there are several issues that may make young black men more likely to be drawn to Tate’s rantings’, the obvious one being fatherlessness: ‘Young black males are a group disproportionately impacted… This means young black men are the least likely group of young men to have a positive male role model living with them at home – a world away from Jamie’s nuclear family, as depicted in Adolescence, in which the boy is “radicalised” by online influencers.’
The second is that this could be caused by something called 'the manosphere':
Instead they’ve found new moral evils to focus on in the form of the manosphere or online hate, and the agents of the state even sympathetically view Jamie as subject to forces outside of his control. Misogyny is part of the pyramid of harm, that strangely gormless worldview in which tiny infringements of social codes are linked to far more serious problems (edgy banter at work > > > something something > > > the Holocaust). The boy’s father doesn’t have female friends and sometimes loses his temper; his son murdered a girl. Can’t you see the link there, between behaviour typical of perhaps 50-90 per cent of men and one characteristic of 0.001 per cent?
One reason that society now feels so uncomfortable with young men is because social norms have moved to a more feminine centre, focussed on empathy and harm-prevention, one major cause of the Great Awokening. It is a way of seeing the world, and of organising human relationships, which many males indeed find difficult to negotiate, but contrary to the fears about men suffering from smartphone use, the data shows that social media is disproportionately harming girls, ‘and is more likely to cause depression than radicalisation.’
Ed West concludes that the real reason for this kind of moral panic isn't that middle class British boys will become misogynists and murder their classmates. It's that those same boys are rejecting progressive politics.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Antinatalism may not have been left wing, but it is definitely left-wing now and that's what matters for both movements, not what men from a century ago thought.
Crowstep
12d ago
Who exactly is 'they' here?
The survivors, the soldiers who liberated the camps and the historians who studied the Holocaust afterwards are not the ones doing the censoring. Governments (and not most governments) censor Holocaust denial because they know that the only people who question the historical facts do so because they hate Jews, and hating Jews caused the Nazis to kill six million of them. We can argue whether censorship is the right approach or not, but its mere existence isn't evidence that the Holocaust was exaggerated or made up. To believe otherwise fails in the same way that all true conspiracy theories fail, it requires too much coordination from too many people over too long.
Crowstep
12d ago
Can you give examples of these institutions and how they censored information?
Because every developed country (and most undeveloped ones) used COVID vaccines and demonstrated their effectiveness. Is the entire planet in on this conspiracy?
Crowstep
1mo ago
Israel receives new U.S.-backed Gaza truce proposal: state media-Xinhua
Offers from Hamas to give up the hostages remind me of Zeno's paradox. Right now they're offering ten living hostages, of the twenty suspected alive. Presumably at the end of the 60 day truce they'll offer five of the remaining ten. Then two of the remaining five. If living hostages could be divided up I'm sure they'd try that.
Crowstep
12d ago
I have literally personally spoken to a Holocaust survivor who was in a death camp as a girl. I believe her (and the entirety of the historical field) over internet jew-haters.
No, but we have a counterfactual population to compare against, the population who chose not to get vaccinated. The comparison is gigantic and unambiguous, vaccines saved lives. And that's with the unvaccinated population benefitting from the partial herd immunity provided by the vaccinated population.
If they weren't being honest about side effects, why did you quote an article about them describing side effects and how common they are as a reason for not getting the vaccine? How does that not count as honesty?
If that were true, they would have just released the vaccines instead of spending months and months doing exhaustive trials to see whether and to what extent the vaccines reduced infection, and what side effects there were. If scientific curiosity means anything, it means testing your hypotheses with studies. What exactly did you expect them to do beyond that?
You have a massive population of vaccinated people, living among a massive population of unvaccinated people. The unvaccinated population had death rates from COVID that an order of magnitude higher than the vaccinated population. What more evidence could you ask for?
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