Ecgtheow
11mo ago
The obsession with virginity is only a way to control women and their sexuality!
Isn't it though? Historically and presently in many central Asian societies they dramatically restrict womens lives in order to ensure virginity. High status men demand paternity certainty, and in order to achieve paternity certainty you have to restrict women's sexuality, and in order to restrict sexuality you have to make sure they're never alone with another man or have the mobility to go somewhere they could be alone with a man. Is there a society that does costly practice like seclusion/hijabs/foot binding to secure male virginity?
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
I don't see how Reddit mods taking their subs public again once Reddit demonstrates a capacity to replace them is evidence for or against the organic-ness of BLM.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
That's definitely true in nominal terms but it also feels like a popular sentiment you could say at anytime in American History and people would agree with you which makes me curious if we have any objective metrics on it.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
If we're talking anti-corruption reform one that probably won't happen but would be a good idea would be a guarantee that any politician removed for corruption reasons is replaced by a member of the same party. Make it a vote of their co-partisans from their home state legislature or something but the key would be removing the incentive to cover up a co-partisans corruption to keep a majority. That wouldn't help when it's a big time figurehead like Trump but it would help get rid of embarrassments like George Santos.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Yeah OP is wrong that this is the pet projector a single billionaire, it's a legal non profit funded by an array of ideologically motivated foundations and wealthy individuals. Whether this is the healthy functioning of civil society or a conspiracy of dark money depends on whether you like the outcome.
We don't actually know who funds the PLF, but the donations they do disclose are mostly from wealthy libertarian family foundations. They don't try to make themselves seem grassroots by touting the number of donors or average donation size. Maybe it's a bunch of blue collar types fired up about taking property rights cases to the supreme court and donating $27 each but if their private donors are anything like their public donors then they're a bunch of extremely wealthy libertarians.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
But I would explain the tension between them, and I think people who believe in fusionism would explain it this way, by saying that for mainstream conservatives the social and economic spheres are different aspects of government policy that require very different solutions. They'd hold that government policy doing things like raising taxes on large businesses rarely produces good outcomes, while government policy providing tax cuts to incentivize marriage or religious practice or family formation often does.
The libertarian view of the government is a state that enforces economic contracts and the NAP; the conservative view of the government is a state that enforces contracts and the NAP and uses some level of power to incentivize or reinforce the importance of the family, the significance of religion to society, that sort of thing.
I would frame the fusionist consensus differently. Social conservatives and libertarians made common cause based on the belief that market forces foster traditional social norms and structures and that the breakdown of these norms and structures is driven by government interference in the market. Here's David Frum writing in 1994's "Dead Right":
If I am bearded, and I notice that my boss and the last four men in my section to win promotion are clean-shaven, I will find myself slowly nudged toward the barbershop. If the owner of the gas station across the road from mine smiles a lot, and I don’t, I will find myself forcing a cheerful manner myself, no matter how snarly I may inwardly feel. People who do not have to work for a living, however, can indulge themselves in a hundred little peculiarities of behavior – one reason that the English upper class is so famously odd. Millions of Americans now live as free from the pressure to conform as any English lord, thanks either to the direct receipt of welfare or to civil service employment where promotion is by seniority and firing is unheard of. The fact, as much as any fashion change, explains the sudden flaunting of ethnic difference in manner and dress that so distresses Patrick Buchanan in his native city. Relatively few vice presidents at Proctor & Gamble would dare wear a kente cloth or keffiyeh; nobody who intends to earn very much of a living in the polymer business can hope to get away with not learning English; but city hall employees and welfare mothers can do both.
So the cultural conservatives are simply deluding themselves when they hope for escape from the unpleasant task of resisting every enlargement of the ambit of government action and trying, when opportunity presents itself, to reduce that ambit.” (p. 196)
While Frum, like many fusionists, is now an anti-Trump exile, this idea that traditional values would win under market conditions and deviance is fostered outside of the market is still prevalent. Woke norms cannot be an effective social technology for managing large companies in an increasingly diverse and queer country, it must be a market failure driven by civil rights law, the tyranny of the managerial class, or indoctrination via academia. I'm not saying all those explanations are wrong, I'm just noting the tradition they're in and the unifying purpose they serve.
In the post-2016 breakdown of fusionism Conservative intellectuals have tried to push policies designed to subsidize the family such as Romney's Child Tax Credit or Oren Cass's wage subsidy. These have been met with tepid responses from the base. I don't think the issue is that Conservatives underestimate the size of the subsidy necessary it's that they still believe that the male breadwinner-led nuclear family would 'win' in the market if not for some sort of interference and balk at viewing it as a sort of endangered species requiring state protection. Trump has broken with libertarians by making the market interference trade policy rather than welfare, but this idea still upholds the male breadwinner family as something that would thrive if not for some form of state failure.
I was gonna write more but I ran out of time and didn't want to leave a high quality comment unanswered for >24hrs.
Ecgtheow
7mo ago
There's two ways to approach this, you can try to reduce capital's share of income or you can try to spread capital's share of income more evenly through society.
Spreading out capital's share of income is conceptually easy. Just have some sort of wealth/inheritance/income tax that puts money into a Sovereign Wealth Fund, every citizen gets a non-transferable share and receives a dividend. Over time the Sovereign Wealth Fund becomes a larger and larger share of total investment capital and most of the capital share of national income is spread evenly among the population. There are myriad political difficulties in funding the SWF and the population would have to resist the temptation to drain the fund rather than live on the dividends, but conceptually it's pretty simple.
Solving r>g seems harder. You can artificially reduce r with taxes but that discourages investment. You can try to ramp up g, and obviously more economic growth is good, but reliably producing new technological breakthroughs so that we return to 20th century rates of growth seems unlikely.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
That may be but it still seems much harder than removing someone from a moderator position on a site you own. Plus there is very different leverage, mods want to stay on the mod list, and protestors just want to cause a vague enough disturbance that their cause gets headlines. Arresting them doesn't prevent protestors from achieving their goal, where mods you have total leverage over. This whole thing is just 'all things I don't like are the same' type thinking.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It does seem relevant that progressives are in favor of downward redistribution though. "The market needs to set wages based on scarce traits like intelligence, but the unintelligent should still get healthcare, free college, public housing, and childcare subsidized by redistribution from the intelligent" might imply a different moral judgement of the unintelligent than 'the unintelligent should be at the bottom and get nothing but their market wages".
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
I'm not an anti-death penalty activist and I think there is some acceptable number of innocents killed by the state. I don't really believe that vengeance has any value beyond deterrence. If we end up in AI utopia with limitless resources then I wouldn't want to give anyone the death penalty, but in the present the state needs to balance deterrence, cost, and accuracy/fairness.
I don't think your conflation of death with life imprisonment as things the state should never do on the off chance it does it to an innocent makes much sense. You can say that some harm to innocents in order to confine violent criminals is okay but once they are already confined killing them has minimal benefit and raises the possibility of such immense harm to an innocent that it's not worth it.
Let's say that we develop a technology that lets people experience not just death but a virtual lifetime of torment in hell before their execution. Maybe this has an additional deterrent effect, and so it's worth consigning some innocents to VR hell. But we keep cranking this up and up, it's not just one life time it's 10 lifetimes, a hundred, a thousand. Do we at some point hit diminishing returns on deterrence while the repugnance of an undeserving person suffering this becomes unbearable to you?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Probably. I don't know if the government should be playing as a commodity trader in general but price smoothing to blunt the pain of embargos seems like a legitimate foreign policy aim. Especially when the low cost producers are foreign and the high cost producers are domestic keeping a ceiling and a floor on oil prices doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
This analysis seems apt to me, with the exception of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve publicity stunts. Tapping the reserves to increase supply temporarily to help lower prices was nothing more than a headline generator, and was a poor decision strategically. It's selling cheap gas now to buy expensive gas in the future.
No it's the exact opposite, they sold when prices were high in order drive them down then bought when prices are low again. They made a cool $4 Billion on the deal.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I think I disagree with most of the people here but they usually put a fair amount of effort into top level posts and I learn things by engaging with them. I think this falls short of the implicit standards, if not the official ones, for a top level post here because it asserts a bunch of non-novel opinions and doesn't really cite sources or provide examples. I think setting standards and expressing constructive criticism (I suggested how they could improve the post) is a small value add.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I was genuinely asking, she might still be a sex-workers I don't know how Hollywood works. I do think it's probably a lower probability if she has a specified role then if she's a nonspecific dancer though.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
In the "Bowling Alone" world I have a hard time getting upset at anyone who tries to salvage a tradition of communal bonding. I was raised in a progressive Christian congregation and while I'm personally an atheist I am very close with the cohort I grew up with in that church and benefitted a lot from the mentorship of older members of the congregation. Being part of an extended social network like that is really valuable especially early in life and while I attend church sporadically now if I had a child I'd be interested in finding a progressive congregation to raise them in. While I can be convinced it's pretty hypocritical I'd rather we sort of awkwardly pretend the anti-homosexuality, radically egalitarian, and anti-women in leadership parts of the Bible aren't there then stay home on Sunday and watch the early NFL games.
If MINO's succeed in amending Islam so that Mosques becomes an intergenerational book club with some meditation and singing that parrot mainstream American values that seems like a better outcome to me than the 2nd & 3rd generation Muslim's abandoning their faith tradition and using the spare time for individualized recreational activities or something.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
They liked them but didn't obsess over them, but the Tolkein legendarium became a sort of quasi sacred text for a generation of nerds and it doesn't feel like it is on that level of significance to them. The movies they're pretty obsessed with, and Harry Potter and animes I don't keep track of are pretty big with them.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
I don't think the two situations are remotely comparable. Site owners removing accounts from a list of mods is much easier than removing protestors from a physical space.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Sure, but are trans people claiming to literally have wombs and produce eggs or are they claiming to be their preferred gender for all socially relevant intents and purposes? A step-father who is closely involved in his wife's kids life from a young age does have lived experience as a father. If you exclude him from father-daugher themed events or correct his kids whenever they call him dad are you standing up for scientific accuracy or being a jerk?
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Leonard Leo is a conservative legal activist with a 1.3 billion dollar legal fund. If he thought Virginia anti-cross burning laws found constitutional in 2003 posed a risk to conservative political power these people would have the most zealous representation money can buy. I'm skeptical that a law that bans burning objects for the purpose of intimidation on public property has a broad chilling effect on Conservative political organizations since most political rallies don't involve burning objects.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
That's why there's overwhelming demand for takes on gay and trans movement are top-down indoctrination and not an aspect of the true dominant ideology of our time, individualist consumerism.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I'm not sure corporate diversity officers are the ones burning down police stations.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I read this paper a while ago but I think the comparison group for a lot of their metrics isn't the average person but people who were similarly wealthy in 1850 or 1860 but who owned fewer slaves. I remember reading it and being confused as to why the descendants of people who experienced a large negative wealth shock ended up better off then people who were similarly wealthy but didn't lose as much wealth.
For what it's worth the authors of that paper reject genetics as an explanation and think it has to do with sons of families that lost slaves ended up leveraging their families accumulated social status to marry much richer than average.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
From what I glean of liberal Christians, there's some remnant of religious belief remaining which they can't give up, but the pull of being a good liberal is too strong. Also, since Christianity is/was the dominant religion in the West, there's a lot of remaining cultural inertia about its power and influence. So if you can present yourself as "I'm a good X and the Holy Book says/doesn't say about progressive cause" that gives you some sort of authority by association.
Church is a lot more about community and social network then it is about scripture and theology for a lot of people. I don't think liberal Christians sit in the pews every Sunday, bring Casserole to the potluck, and do charitable work for political clout. There was a generation raised in the church who gradually became secular humanists and I think it's better for society that they preserve community organizations like churches then abandon them in pursuit of consistency.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish, Italian, Cuban, Mayan, WASP, Jewish, Armenian or whatever else.
How do you disentangle self-identification from social treatment? Do people come to believe they are white and so vote Republican, or are they treated as whites and so believe their interests are served by the same party as white people? My sense is that back when there was more discrimination against Italians and the Irish they formed distinct voting blocs and now they mostly vote according to age, educational characteristics and urban/rural split. Is this a product of Irish people self-identifying as white, or is it a product of society treating them differently as they assimilated?
Scotts-Irish & Italians are European descended and assimilated a generation or more ago. Cubans in general are 72% European descended and the upper class fleeing a communist revolution is probably more European descended than average. Vietnamese are also refugees from a Communist revolution and they are the only Republican-leaning asian ethnicity despite not being white. Jews may be white but they don't vote Republican, I couldn't find polling on how Armenian descended Americans vote.
Age, educational attainment and evangelical Christianity are big drivers of Republican voting even among Asian and Hispanic voters. I would chalk this up to the salience of various identities rising and falling rather than transracial identification. It's not that they identify as white and vote for white interests, it's that they identify as evangelicals, small business owners, or cultural traditionalists and vote accordingly.
Isn't the claim there that Hallie Biden threw it in the trash (of a supermarket near a school) because she was worried he would kill himself? We have a text exchange from the laptop that sort of supports that. What would they charge Hunter with in that instance?
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