Crowstep
7mo ago
though I'd note that as a Brit, I find the concept of Presidential pardons to be pretty odd, and in tension with the idea of legal equality of all citizens.
OP's post lead me on a minor rabbit hole about government pardons. Apparently we do have them in the UK, although they are rarely used. The last couple were Alan Turing (posthumously) and Steven (nominative determinism) Gallant, a convicted murderer who, while on day-release, fought against the jihadi who carried out the London Bridge attack in 2019.
Although if I'm honest, pardoning a relative totally feels like something Boris Johnson would have done.
Crowstep
9mo ago
my home state of Pennsylvania doesn't allow kids to go without one until the age of 8!
Meanwhile, in the land of 'you got a loicence for that?' kids are required to have a car seat until they're 12! (Although I just learned that there is an exception for families with three children which seems sensible)
Plus we have the lowest nursery teacher to child ratio in Europe so childcare is crazy expensive. It's like they don't want us to have children! (I say that flippantly, the real culprit is safetyism).
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.
women aged 20-40 (often with a background in healthcare) and unmarried men aged 30-50
I can't help but notice that these are roughly the ages when women and men (respectively) would be married and raising their children, in a society where such things haven't fallen out of favour.
Searching for meaning indeed.
Crowstep
7mo ago
There are constant calls to build more affordable housing, but instead all that seems to get built are luxury apartments that don't alleviate housing shortages, regularly outraging the /r/Eugene subreddit.
Is this what you believe, or just what the subreddit believes? Because building housing of any kind (including luxury housing) absolutely does mitigate housing shortages and reduce prices.
When cities build luxury housing, the wealthiest people move into those houses, while moving out of their existing, less luxury housing. That housing in turn gets occupied by the next rung on the income ladder, and this continues right now to the bottom. House prices and rents drop for everyone.
Crowstep
10mo ago
we have to ask about UK culture at least to some degree
There's nothing unique to the UK about Subsaharan Africans committing massive amounts of crime. It's true in the USA, it's true in Sweden, it's true in Brazil, it's true in France, and of course it's true in Africa and the Caribbean.
The rioters know this. They also know they are being ethnically replaced. Trying to muddy the waters by saying things like 'Axel was born in Cardiff' (as if he might be a Welshman called David Llywelyn) is asking them to ignore their own lying eyes, and all the crime statistics.
Crowstep
7mo ago
I think it's probably that people just have fewer friends and social interactions now. Therapy has jumped in to fill the gap that socialising, communal worship, hobbies and sports have left. Combine that with safetyism and I can see how we'd end up with a situation where a young person feels lonely or like his life lacks meaning and will end up talking to a state sanctioned professional, when what he really needs is to hang out with his friends more.
Crowstep
7mo ago
I don't think 'capitalism' is a particularly useful label here. We've had 'capitalism' since either the 1500s (the breakdown of manorialism) or the 1700s (the industrial revolution) but global birth rates only really started to decline in the 1900s, and even that was reversed temporarily by the baby boom in the 1950s and 60s.
The Amish are extremely 'capitalist' (in the sense of being extremely engaged with the market, owning businesses etc) and yet they manage to maintain high birth rates. You can see Russian birth rates collapse after the communist revolution. 'Capitalist' America has long had higher birth rates than comparatively less 'capitalist' Europe.
Now I'd certainly agree that global culture is antinatal, but referring to that culture as 'capitalist' obscures more than it hides.
Crowstep
10mo ago
better to cut a deal with them where both sides refrain from bombing each other rather than fighting a war whose objective will never be fulfilled
That was pretty much the situation before the war. Israel was starting to let Gazans cross the border to work, there were a few rocket attacks which engendered similarly small responses from Israel, but mostly things were peaceful...
Then Hamas stormed across the border, taking hostages and killing everyone they didn't take. With the woefully optimistic plan that this attack would set off a country wide pogrom and rid the Holy Land of Jews forever.
Why would Hamas agree to return to the status quo that they chose to violate? Because Gazan civilians are dying? Hamas wants Gazan civilians to die, because it legitimises their position and delegitimises Israel.
Crowstep
11mo ago
Treating people as individuals is one of those secret sauce things that the modern Anglosphere takes for granted but which isn't that common globally or historically and which is part of what makes modern society work.
In terms of establishing democracy and capitalism, individualism has been great. And clearly more clannish attitudes haven't stopped birth rate declines elsewhere (looking at you Southern Europe, nobody's having kids when you live with your momma until you're 32). That said, I think a little intergenerational responsibility can be a good thing. Sam Kriss' excellent feature describes elderly retirees in Florida 'absconding from their duty as old people, which is too be a link between the past and the future'. I think old people sticking around to care for children and give them a sense of belonging is something tragic to lose, of course, that requires the young people to stick around too, which can't be taken for granted any more.
Crowstep
3mo ago
In most civilized countries, "if you deport me I will face a lengthy prison sentence without a court trial which would vaguely meet Western standards" would be reason enough to grant asylum.
You may have noticed that the asylum system is broken in all of these countries, with millions of illegal immigrants cynically using it as a get out of jail free card that allows them to sneak into the first world and stay there indefinitely.
The only countries that don't have these issues (Australia, Denmark, Japan come to mind) grant approximately zero asylum claims.
Crowstep
3mo ago
The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats
This meme really needs to die. Americans hundreds of years absolutely recognised that non-English European ethnic groups were in fact, also European. They weren't morons. The Anglo-American majority may have had negative opinions about some European immigrant groups at first, but that's very different from making the argument that Lithuanians were negros or something. There were literally Irishmen on the Mayflower!
'White' identity came about because the European groups who had previously thought of themselves as English, Germans, Jews etc united around a common conflict the Indians.
'Latinos' may well be considered white (i.e. European) because they are either overwhelming Spanish or partly Spanish. And Spain is in Europe.
Crowstep
6mo ago
The black ones are Amina and Harriet Tubman
Man, deciding to have the two black women leaders being an abolitionist and a colonising, slave-raiding queen who was also an aprocryphal serial killer is choice.
Maybe they wanted to choose Amina and had to put in Tubman in for cover?
Crowstep
6mo ago
I think in a more profound sense this is just the failure of welfare states. Fundamentally, any system that rewards negative outcomes (poverty, illegal immigration, crime, disability) will incentivise people to either adopt those negative outcomes, or to lie about having them. Regular moral hazard, whether for citizens or illegal immigrants.
The three things that can counter this are shame (less powerful in a more atomised society), honesty (less common in a low-trust society) or enforcement (very hard to do).
Crowstep
6mo ago
The modern concept of national and ethinic consciousness was invented by Jewish intellectuals like Marx
Nationalism is an invention of the enlightenment, the French and US revolutions, and philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire.
While Marx thought nationalism was a ruse by the international bourgeoisie to keep the global proletariat divided.
Crowstep
7mo ago
Which first principles would they be?
Because it seems pretty self-evident that housing is fungible. If I can't live in a grade A apartment because there aren't any available, I'll live in a grade B one rather than sleep on the streets. If grade A apartments become available, I'll leave my grade B one, which will then go on the market. The more apartments that come on the market, the less buyers will need to pay because there will be the same number of buyers chasing more properties, and sellers will be forced to lower their prices.
'Luxury' housing is just the word we use to describe the most expensive houses, it's not a characteristic of the houses that makes them qualitatively different.
The only way for me to believe that building luxury homes doesn't reduce prices would be for me to believe that either:
- Increasing supply while keeping demand static doesn't reduce prices
- Different types of housing aren't fungible
Crowstep
10mo ago
Ultimately, Hollywood is there to make money. Since activists will keep pushing and pushing until someone stops them, I guess it was inevitable that eventually there would be pushback from the viewers and therefore those who hold the purse-strings. When Disney spends $180 million on four hours of television, even they are going to care if nobody watches it. When Amazon spends $700 million on a series that gets outwatched by a car man running a farm badly, the business people notice these things.
One benefit of the streaming age is that series don't need to appeal to everyone, they just need to appeal to their market. If modern political correctness was as strong during the linear TV age, it could have been worse. We only had four channels to choose between when I was growing up, I can't imagine how it would have been if every single one of them was forced to include 1/4 black people in every Regency drama or sassy girlbosses or an inexplicably large number of gays.
I think the future of streaming is like Youtube. Hyper-specific niches and sub-brands determined by the algorithm. Sure, there won't be a common media culture, but that ship has already sailed anyway.
Crowstep
2d ago
In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
Steve Sailer's first law of female journalism strikes again.
Crowstep
6mo ago
I assume they didn't choose MLK or Douglass because they're both men. If you have a black quota and a female quota, that limits your selection pool substantially.
Crowstep
8mo ago
I guess a young woman who identifies as queer or bisexual doesn't have to actually do anything. She doesn't even have to dress any differently. All she does is collect a cool new identity label that her peers will praise her for. Combine that with the fact that most women are a little bisexual anyway (but usually don't act on it) and I can see why these labels are popular. For a young man, it's similarly easy to pick up one of the many bespoke identity labels and not actually change anything about his behaviour or even dress.
By contrast, actually acting on a minority sexuality actually requires them to, you know, act. For straight men (of whom I think most are instinctively repulsed by the idea of sex with a man) this isn't going to happen. And for bi-curious women, this requires her to either take the initiative (which women hate) or wait on a lesbian to come and try to convert her (many such cases, but I doubt there are enough lesbians to make a difference in the stats).
Crowstep
9mo ago
Scotsmen wear kilts now, unselfconsciously and unironically. There are three main cases where they are worn:
- As formal dress, usually with black tie accompaniments like bow ties. Think weddings, graduations, proms, formal birthday parties.
- For things related to Scottish heritage, i.e. Burns Night, Hogmanay (New Year's), ceilidhs (group folk dancing)
- For sport, usually with thick football/rugby socks and boots, plus team jerseys
Now of course, that doesn't mean that Scotsmen wear them every day. The only guys who do that are really into their Scottish nationalism, and usually members of the underclass or hippies. I suppose because they lack status in regular society, they attach themselves to their national identity more strongly. Typically they wear something like this.
In the lowlands, kilts were never everyday dress. They were highland dress that was only adopted by lowlanders after the military threat from the highland was vanquished and the kilt was safe to become an expression of Scottish identity more broadly.
Crowstep
28d 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.
Crowstep
6mo ago
We cracked down hard on the lower classes of migrants workers, so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do.
And as a consequence, there has been a surge in working class wages that are the envy of the developed world, along with large growth in worker productivity.
Meanwhile in the UK and Canada, we've been importing low-skilled workers and their (many) dependents, and all we've got to show for it is skyrocketing house prices, a growing welfare bill and stagnating wages and worker productivity.
Crowstep
5mo ago
I remember reading once about a particular 'species' of fish that was only found in a specific pond. Basically, it was an inbred version of another species that got stuck by the pond losing its connection to a larger body of water. The author noncritically repeated the argument by the researcher that it was important to save this species.
It seems arbitrary that we get to decide that all species must be preserved as they are now. Extinction and speciation are integral to how evolution functions. How can we justify trying to preserve the animal kingdom in aspic? Especially when the preservation mostly takes the form of preventing us from building anything.
At what point do you expect African Americans to assimilate (that is to say, start getting outcomes around the US average in terms of crime, educational attainment and earnings)? Why do you think that Haitians will be more successful than they have been?
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