Goodguy
5mo ago
It's only weakmanning to show how bad a group is if you assume that Gdanning thinks there is something bad about disliking Obama for his skin color.
Goodguy
5mo ago
To be fair to the Democrats, they had no moral reason to fight fair after Kerry got swiftboated in 2004. Not that either side cared much about morality to begin with when it comes to campaigning, but my point is that this is a long story and both sides have been pulling dirty campaign tricks since the parties came into existence. There is nothing new about what they did to Romney, and that kind of dirty campaigning is not at all unique to the Democrats.
Goodguy
9mo ago
I was getting a bit excited about Vivek but then he started slobbering Israel's dick and talking about how we have to be tough on China for some reason (Why, so they stop sending us cheap shit? Or for some kind of ethical reasons that he did not bother to mention?) and I lost all interest in this debate because he was the only one even remotely interesting.
Goodguy
1yr ago
Even if it is a troll, it is good to have some content like this here to prevent TheMotte from turning into a right-wing circlejerk.
We may be on the same page then, I think. As I pointed out, I also feel a great deal of affinity for my own American friends. More than I feel for some random political fellow traveler thousands of miles away. It's just that I don't feel any additional level of affinity for people just because they are American.
Goodguy
5mo ago
Getting raped usually doesn't reduce a person's quality of life after the rape either in any way other than by giving them the trauma of feeling violated, yet that trauma is a pretty big deal!
It is a good illustration of how utterly committed the US foreign policy establishment is to its current very forward-deployed posture in the world that a man who is as hawkish on China as Vivek is still considered some kind of insane, maverick isolationist.
Europe is a possible counter-example both to various naive forms of HBD and also to the notion that ethno-nationalism is an advantage.
Europe is much more white than the US and is also much more ethno-nationalist than the US, yet it lags the US significantly both in GDP per capita (although I am not convinced that this is a very good metric) and also, it seems to me, in economic innovation (Europe is responsible for almost no major software companies).
Some possible counterarguments:
-
"The best talent of Europe came to the US." - But Germany, for example, has a higher average IQ than the US does. In any case, the IQ difference between the US and Europe, in either direction, does not seem to be large enough to be significant.
-
"Europe has been dealing with the aftermath of WW2." - But that does not explain why Europe had WW2 to begin with, or why the US was not comparably harmed by its Civil War. The US Civil War killed a comparable fraction of the US population to what Europe lost in WW2, but the US Civil War did not fundamentally slow the trajectory of US economic or geopolitical rise.
-
"Europe has been shackled by socialism." - But similarly to my objection to #2, this does not explain why Europe is, to begin with, more fond of socialism than the US is.
Am I getting something wrong? Is Europe more innovative than I give it credit for?
Goodguy
1yr ago
Someone fearing for her life would not be enough because people fear for their lives for all kinds of reasons. It would have to be a reasonable fear for her life.
I am not sure that there is anything particularly new here. Even without analyzing Europe vs. the rest of the world between 1000 and 1500 CE, the most likely theory by far to explain why multiple different small European countries came to dominate most of the rest of the world soon after 1500 CE is that those European countries had massive advantages compared to the rest of the world. There is no other plausible explanation. The idea that Europe had no advantages but still somehow came to conquer almost the entire planet is so implausible that there is not much need to counter it. I think it would be pretty hard to find any leftist who is even in the least bit capable of intellectual thought who actually believes that Europe somehow conquered the rest of the world without having already had an advantage over the rest of the world. It is just that, for example, they generally do not think that the advantage was genetic.
Also, even if Europe was already wealthier than the rest of the world in some ways before 1500 CE, it is nonetheless true that Europe got part of its wealth through exploiting the rest of the world, so the case for reparations is not seriously affected by this line of argument. If a wealthy successful guy steals from a less successful guy, is the victim owed any fewer reparations as a result? Even if the wealthy guy later helps the victim to get richer than he would otherwise have been, is the victim owed any fewer reparations as a result? In my view, no. There is a perfectly logical line of argument that says that reparations are owed for the original victimization and it does not matter whether the victim came to later in some ways benefit from the victimization.
Goodguy
2mo ago
The same logic can be used in favor of banning private gun ownership, and for that matter private knife ownership too.
You can take a fraction of those overdose deaths on yourself if you want to, and it makes some sense in pure cause-and-effect calculation. But I would not say this is a good argument against liberal drug policy. If you lived in a country where private knife ownership was banned and you voted to legalize private knife ownership, you could also take some of the resulting knife deaths on yourself, and that too would make some sense. But it would not necessarily be a good argument against private knife ownership.
There are already laws against most of the obnoxious behaviors that heavy drug users often engage in. Society can simultaneously legalize recreational drugs and at the same time do a better job of enforcing the laws against those obnoxious behaviors.
Western supporters of the Kiev regime tend to allow Ukrainians many things that they would generally not put up with closer to home and would criticize if they happened in a state that is one of the West's enemies. Things such as overthrowing a legally elected government, having numerous Nazis in their ranks, supporting chauvinistic nationalism, forcing men to fight in the army by beating them in some cases, blowing up allies' infrastructure, having kill lists of civilians who oppose them, and so on.
It is what it is. I gave up on expecting consistency from people's political attitudes a very long time ago. And finding someone who is genuinely neutral on this war rather than being a rabid partisan of either one side or the other seems to be about as rare as finding an oasis in the desert.
Goodguy
8mo ago
Claiming that certain Jews did things that you dislike is of course not necessarily pathological. However, blaming Jews as a group for things is certainly and in all cases a form of irrational, shoddy thinking. Not because of moral issues, but simply because it is inaccurate. "Jews" did not cause things that you dislike to happen in Weimar Germany. Some specific Jews did.
I do not know whether the election was rigged or not. Has someone thought through the mechanism by which the election could be rigged on a sufficiently large scale?
However, one way or another, I disagree that Trump would easily have won a fair election.
He barely won in 2016. In 2020, he was no longer fresh and exciting, he just mostly repeated his 2016 campaign rhetoric. Plus the Democrats had had 4 years to attack him in the media. Plus he had failed to deliver on many of his promises. And then COVID did a lot to hurt the boost he would otherwise have gotten from the good economy.
In any case, instead of constantly trying to squeeze out narrow victories, maybe the Republicans could figure out how to put together a platform that would appeal to a greater number of voters, while also at the same time doing more stuff like what Musk has been to take away some of Democrats' domination of the media?
If they cannot do that, then I cannot think of any viable option for them other than secession. A coup would be very unlikely to work. Republicans do not have enough country-wide public support for that and federal law enforcement and the federal military are unlikely to back a coup.
Goodguy
9mo ago
Women don't just find unappealing men not interesting, they find them revolting.
I have seen this written online several times before but have seen zero evidence of it. I have, on the other hand, seen men be friends with women who seem to have zero or little sexual interest in them. Why would the women be friends with them if they found them actively revolting?
Goodguy
11mo ago
But it’s also kind of scary, because if it’s that easy to be happy and fulfilled despite living in a decadent, empty, atomized, soulless, blah blah blah modern hellscape (etc etc), then why aren’t you doing it?
The marriage and children part sounds boring to me. The only motivation I have to do it is to increase my odds of having people around me in my old age, but from an ethical perspective to me that seems like not a very good reason to get married and have kids. Maybe I should just look at it more pragmatically. Probably most of my grandparents' generation would have viewed it as a totally valid reason to get married and have kids even if they did not want to do that for any other reason. But even if that's true, still, it does not change the fact that getting married and having kids sounds boring to me.
Goodguy
1yr ago
In that person's case, it was not just the parents. There was an extended community that, from what I understand, either dominated or at least had significant influence in the town where the person grew up.
The US criminal justice system is deeply broken. The court system is overloaded and the prisons are a nightmarish shitshow. As a result, in the US sending people to prison for repeat shoplifting would be an extreme over-punishment.
No, when I say nuance I mean actual nuance, not what you are talking about.
I can think about this matter with actual nuance, and I am sure that several people I know in real life also can.
I can imagine more information coming in about what happened and, based on that information, deciding that Penny is not guilty of anything at all. That is, I have not ruled out deciding that Penny is guilty of nothing. Based on the information I have seen so far I think it is likely that he is at least slightly guilty in the sense of being guility of using too much force, but I can imagine more information changing my mind about that.
Goodguy
1yr ago
I think it is likely that the Internet disproportionately represents people who look on the matter without nuance because such people are the most likely to write commentary about it. I would like to think that in reality, there is a large number of people who can think about the matter in a nuanced way. I can, and I can easily think of a number of people whom I know in person who also could.
You say that murder should be very low but at the same time you are calling for murder. For example, you are calling for the murder of some people who sell products that others want to put in their bodies. You are calling for murdering the "problem people" even though of course some of those so-called "problem people" will actually be innocent.
I guess what is probably going on is that you think that the kind of murders that you favor happening are not actually murders, they are something quite different.
You also have not mentioned any of the almost inevitable downsides of the sort of authoritarianism that would be required to implement your preferred policies. Is it that you did not bother to mention any, or is it that you do not see them as downsides?
I mean, can't we maybe... do a better job of preventing murders and rapes and so on without turning into an authoritarian shithole? I do not see why it would be impossible to have both strong liberalism and low violent crime. That the United States is not doing a good job of it does not mean that it is not possible.
Goodguy
1yr ago
One can easily make the case that reparations are owed one way or another for the original act of victimization and that whatever happened to the victim afterward is irrelevant to the matter. If someone kidnapped you and turned you into a slave for 10 years but while enslaved you spent more time than before reading books and so after you escaped you became richer than you had been before I kidnapped you, it would not invalidate the argument that the person who kidnapped you owes you something.
Goodguy
1yr ago
Oh no doubt that it is possible! I agree with you. I just disagree with 2rafa's murderous fantasies. It is not that I do not have murderous fantasies myself. I do, plenty of them. But I regard them as fantasies that allow me to vent my animal emotions, I do not actually want to implement them. There is plenty of political room between the current state of the US public transport system and 2rafa's "slaughter the drug dealers". I want to operate somewhere in that in-between space. Preferably on the side that is a bit further away from 2rafa and her ilk.
Goodguy
1mo ago
19th/early 20th century child-raising approaches in the developed world created several generations of people who killed something like 70 million of each other in the span of about 30 years and built multiple viciously authoritarian governments.
For someone living in 1950 and spending his time investigating child-raising, I'm not sure there was really any large-scale model of success to point to.
You're making me like her even more than I already did. But yeah, I wouldn't necessarily trust her data unless it confirmed my pre-existing preferences, in which case fuck it.
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