Goodguy
1hr ago
Well sure, but that's not me and my point. That's those other people. I'm not claiming that taking all of the billionaires' wealth would improve society, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't unless it was done in some completely unrealistic sci-fi fantasy way, I'm just dunking on people who claim to be all about meritocracy while ignoring inheritance.
Goodguy
2hr ago
I do not support pure meritocracy or communism :) I am just pointing out a very common blind spot in many meritocracy supporters' views.
Goodguy
2hr ago
I understand your logic and I think it has a lot of truth to it but that said, I still find it silly when people talk about how we should have more meritocracy but do not want to address the fact that some people are born with 1000 times more resources than others.
An alternative is unlikely unless we solve scarcity emotions using technology and/or massive shock-driven consciousness changes like in Star Trek (hyper-advanced tech and WW3). Basic mammal nature in the presence of scarcity is to priviledge oneself, one's family, and one's friends over others. This usually only fails to hold true in the presence of extremely powerful emotional ideological or political forces like nationalism (where one emotionally feels like the entire nation is one's family) or political authoritarianism (where you are forced to fight for the government because they will hurt you and maybe your loved ones if you don't). And those have their own negative consequences.
Communism could work if we were all near-constantly on an MDMA trip type of immediate feelings of love, but I'm not sure that the average human is even physically capable of being like that without some of the hardware burning out. Some spiritual teachers have claimed that they have gotten there without drugs, but whether or not they are telling the truth, the fact is that clearly even if they did reach it, they have consistently failed to teach that state to anything more than a tiny fraction of the human population. Although I will say that, even by trying, they have probably helped humanity. Modern Western morality is much better than the morality of 2000 years ago, which was basically "tough shit if you're poor or crucified, I guess the gods don't like you lol".
All that said, I do find it funny that most modern proponents of meritocracy do not challenge what is probably the biggest modern source of un-meritocracy in the West, which is inheritance. Even the most wild-eyed free market libertarian who advocates for pure meritocracy typically does not call for all humans to be put on a truly level playing field, which could only be done by forbidding parents to pass on their wealth to their children. And the truth is that, whatever you think about passing on wealth to children, all meritocratic ideologies that accept inheritance are at best just nipping around the edges, and not addressing the biggest un-meritocratic phenomenon in the whole human world.
I think in the past, I overestimated what fraction of people are high-decoupling. I have always been a high decoupler since I was a kid, so maybe it's just hard for me to understand not being a high decoupler.
Also, I haven't explored Discord at all so far, I probably should. Am open to suggestions about how to get into some interesting Discords.
Goodguy
19hr ago
Makes sense abstractly, but please provise more pragmatic details :)
Unless you intend to gatekeep, which I wouldn't blame you for given that gatekeeping seems kind of necessary to avoid having your forum overrun by low value contributors.
If that's how you mean it, then I get it lol.
Similar to how the best way to use Reddit is to find actually smart people and then follow their entire post histories.
The current state of online politics discourse seems pretty dire to me. Here are forums I'm aware of:
TheMotte - often a bit too "assume that social conservatism is correct" and wordily show-offy for my taste, but it's a good forum, you can speak your mind without being banned.
X.com - engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters... and the occasional rare actual worthwhile discussion.
/r/moderatepolitics - good, very surprisingly good for average Reddit censorship norms, but a bit slow.
/r/politicaldiscussion - used to be decent like 5 years ago but now has been overrun by typical Reddit TDS ("Drumpf will end all elections", etc...)
4chan /pol/ - basically useless, 95% literally mentally ill people, trolls, and maybe bots. Might as well engage with flat Earthers about astrophysics as engage with these people about politics.
Astral Codex Ten comments - can be interesting sometimes, but isn't mainly politics focused and the politics discussion seems to be be dominated by the same few people.
rDrama.net - is usually directionally right about politics, in my view, by the simple expedient of assuming that anyone who is very demonstratively committed to a given political ideology is likely worthy of ridicule, but of course not a forum for discussing policy in any depth, most of the time, and also unsurprisingly given the origin of the site, is as focused on trolling as on political analysis, lol.
/r/politics - TDS central, orange man bad 24/7.
/r/centrist - seems ok, but pretty TDS leaning.
/r/stupidpol, /r/redscarepod, etc... Dirtbag left, good for criticizing the establishment but also they tend to be Hamas apologists etc... basically mostly people who are still at the I hate America so anyone who fights America must be awesome stage.
debatepolitics.com - people yelling at each other, very slight step up from 4chan /pol/.
Like, there have to be some good forums I've missed, right? Billions of people are online, including hundreds of millions of Anglophones (I largely have no idea what the state of non-Anglophone political discussion is like). Is it really possible that only like 0.00001% of them are capable of having relatively moderate and rational (not that I've always been) political discussion?
I've been searching for good politics discussion forums for years. You'd think there would be more. What the fuck is going on?
Goodguy
20hr ago
My assumption is that a super competent deep state could kill Trump and make it look like a natural death, but maybe that has more to do with thriller novels than with reality.
Goodguy
2d ago
Either there is no super-powerful deep state or they're ok with Trump. If there was a super-powerful deep state that disliked Trump, Trump would have been killed years ago. I mean actually killed, not just a couple of close calls.
Goodguy
2d ago
I actually suspect that the vast majority of ordinary adults who have sex with minors get away with it. There are probably thousands of such encounters happening every day. There are millions of guys, after all, who do not sit around pondering the risks of having sex with women who might turn out to be slightly underage. They just see someone who looks hot, fuck them, and if they worry about the consequences it's only afterward. Women also sometimes lie about their ages. You might have had sex with a minor and not even be aware of it. I am pretty sure that the majority of the time, no legal consequences ensue from such encounters.
Goodguy
2d ago
I seem to remember that Epstein and/or Maxwell were also accused of taking away at least one girl's passport to trap her. Which is more than just prostitution.
I don't understand why you think this is such a big deal, given that it is legal for parents to homeschool their children or send them to private school.
Besides, modern technology means that pretty much any kid who wants to see porn, will see porn. Compared to the stuff that a kid can find in 2 seconds on the web, nothing in some LGBTQ book in school can possibly compare. Now of course, that doesn't mean that I'm a fan of having my tax money spent on such educational content. But then, I'm not a fan of having my tax money spent on about 90% of the so-called education system to begin with. Largely because modern techhnology means that pretty much any kid who wants to learn outside of school and has normal cognitive capacity can easily teach themselves.
Goodguy
6d ago
Betrayed? The man wrote hundreds of pages of content and gave them out completely for free. I guess you could make a case that he owes something to the people who defended him against being cancelled. But I figure that giving people hundreds of pages of writing for free has already paid for that. I don't see why Scott would owe anything to his readers at this point.
Also, as far as I know, Scott has never claimed any sort of alliance with either other anti-wokes or with incels, so there is no alliance to betray.
Politeness is nice. However, people sometimes make life-and-death decisions based on their political beliefs. If you deliberately teach people to ignore reality for the sake of politeness, some of them will literally die as a result. Having beliefs such as, "that run-down neighborhood which seems to be full of surly loiterers is actually made up of misunderstood people who have hearts of gold", or "the police are extremely dangerous, so it is safer to take your chances with street criminals", or "society would actually be safer if we drastically reduced the size of the police force", or "when this violent paramilitary group says that they are fighting for the benefit of humanity, they are being honest - so I should go join them" is not just an abstract thing. These are all examples where holding inaccurate views of reality can literally cause you or others to die. Teaching someone polite but inaccurate political and social views can be like teaching someone inaccurate things about chainsaw or firearm safety.
Goodguy
19d ago
If he had killed 200,000 over 18 hours he would not have faced half as much opprobrium.
I think he would have faced more. 200,000 in 18 hours is a WW2-scale or third world-scale mass killing, and not only would it be impossible to hide it, given modern communications technology, but also it would be impossible to make a widely accepted argument that this is a proportional response to 10/7. With 50,000 over 18 months, on the other hand, it is possible to make a widely accepted (though of course, very controversial) argument that it is a proportional response to 10/7, given Hamas hiding among civilians and so on.
Goodguy
19d ago
Or, as the Dreaded Jim put it
The fact that this essay starts with the phrase "Democracy died on 2020-11-04", which is almost comically inaccurate, as Trump's election makes clear, makes me dubious about the author's skills as a political observer.
Goodguy
19d ago
What evidence is there that this man is a gang member or has committed any crimes other than entering the country illegally?
I haven't been taking my opinions on the tariffs from talking heads. It just seems evident to me from first principles that the tariffs are more likely to hurt me than help me. I can't think of any way in which they could possibly help me. I don't want to work in manufacturing and I don't care about increasing US national security from its current level of "almost completely impregnable" to "so ridiculously impregnable that it's hard to imagine it being much more impregnable, barring the invention of effective anti-nuke defenses".
Goodguy
20d ago
I'm not sure that @newintown is saying that if you don't care, you're a bad person. At least, that's not how I read it. To me it seems that he is pointing out why he cares.
Goodguy
20d ago
The thing is, to me it seems that high tariffs are obviously bad for me, in a way that many of Trump's other policies are not obviously bad for me. I'd prefer to keep buying cheaper products, as opposed to more expensive products. I have no desire to go work in manufacturing. And I care almost nothing at all about the US becoming self-sufficient in national security-related products because as far as I am concerned, the oceans and the nukes are all we need to keep the US safe from any major threat.
Given that tariffs offer me nothing that I value, and only seem to offer me bad things, of course I go criticize them online. It's not some general attempt to bash Trump on my part, it's a specific criticism of a specific Trump policy that I would really prefer he dropped.
Well, I would say yes and no. Trump and Trumpism are bad in many ways as far as I am concerned, but what I mean by TDS is the sort of reflexive emotional attitude where a person is willing to believe pretty much any anti-Trump talking point just because they fervently hate Trump/rightism. For example, I am not a right-winger and I dislike a lot of Trump is doing, but I do not have TDS, because I don't automatically believe that Trump's actions are automatically bad/evil all of the time, and I don't believe that he is literally taking orders from Putin, etc.
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