HaroldWilson
3mo ago
I’ve always been taken aback by how little Americans know, or read, from the other side of the civil rights era… Indeed trying to come up with this list one could be forgiven for thinking the Pro-Segregation side wrote nothing in defense of Jim Crow, so little comes up when trying to google… You’d be wrong.
This is silly. Most Americans have probably never read anything from either side of the civil rights era. What proportion of the American populace do you think has actually read, say, Foner's Reconstruction or The Strange Career of Jim Crow? What proportion could even have named such books? The Dunning School is definitely not some kind of hidden knowledge, any university class on Reconstruction will cover it; admittedly usually with some prejudice, but not unjustifiably so. Dunning's work is available quite inexpensively online and will be in most university libraries.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
The people forming these views are factually upper class, -ish, but they're jealous of those who have it even better and want to tear them down.
I think almost the opposite tends to be more true; middle-class guilt is much more powerful than middle-class jealousy. Hence why, though people like Disraeli and Sadler fancied that the aristocracy were better guardians of the poor, it was the barrister Lloyd George and the thoroughly bourgeois Attlee who created the foundations of the modern welfare state. This is really why Oliver disguises himself as poor; because the latent Methodism present in every middle-class Briton tells him that his (unearned) station is actually shameful, and the only acceptable circumstance in which to accept aristocratic largesse is poverty.
HaroldWilson
30d ago
If the cachet of a PhD is that it is something relatively few people can do
The cachet of a PhD might be that, but that doesn't mean that's why one ought to be proud of it. It's only correlated. You should be proud of it because it's hard, and not many people can do it because it is hard. But you shouldn't be proud of it because not many people do it, that's getting the chain of causation the wrong way round. Hence;
If everyone gets a PhD with their box of cornflakes, is that an achievement to be proud of?
No, but not because everyone has one, but because you didn't have to do anything to get it. Which again are correlated - everyone has one because it comes with their cornflakes - but not the same thing.
Here's a perhaps clearer example. If I decided to learn to a very basic level some conversational phrases in an ultra-obscure language for a couple of hours, that would already get me to a level of knowledge rarer in the the general population than having a PhD. But that obviously doesn't mean that I should be prouder of the former than the latter, if for instance I had both.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
Well I suppose that's bad news for people who want to break the law when driving, for the rest of us though it's a good if such drivers are off the roads.
but it doesn’t have to be this way,
This is simply correct. It doesn't.
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
In Britain there's a popular-ish show called 'Eat Well for Less', with Greg Wallace, in which for a week a family who thinks they need to reduce their food bill has all their groceries replaced with new ones with all the branding removed so they don't know what they're getting. Invariably none of them can tell the difference when their branded products are replaced with the cheapo own-brand 'value' range, despite them all usually insisting beforehand that they'll be able to tell. Most amusing though is when they insist they don't like the replacement, only to find out they've been double bluffed and it was in fact the same brand as they have always been eating/drinking, and they look like morons. The vast majority of people who genuinely think they can tell a difference have definitely just been sucked in by marketing, which I suspect applies to most of the people in this thread insisting 'no, Heinz ketchup really is different to all the others!'.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
But that doesn’t negate a thesis that they thought it would was good strategy.
True enough, but I don't see why it would ever have been considered a particularly good strategy by anyone in the first place.
mail in ballots
Well unless the Democratic puppet masters also control Utah, Montana, Idaho, Alabama, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Arkansas etc. etc. then it does seem pretty ridiculous to call the expansion of mail-in voting an instance of them being in 'plain sight'. And you are pretty much yourself conceding that this is just a conspiracy with the utterly lame excuse that you can't furnish much adequate evidence because 'you can never prove any theory in this day and age'.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
I know that's the thesis, I'm just saying you can't prove that simply by the fact that Floyd's story was covered disproportionately, since individual cases prompting a much broader movement addressing wider issues is a pretty common pattern that happens without anyone co-ordinating it. A few years before or after 2010 Mohammed Bouazizi might have sunk without a trace, but that doesn't imply that there was any puppet-master of Tunisians.
Plus, it's pretty unclear whether that summer of protests and riots actually did Biden any favours.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
In the long run I agree, but as I said that doesn't help us much now. As in, it's impossible to scrutinise this prediction now, and it's so distant.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
Meanwhile, if somebody wanted to execute Jan 6 convicts, even in the most pointlessly brutal way you could possibly imagine, the same sources would likely cheer on how they were getting exactly what they deserved and lament that the punishment wasn't harsh enough
I don't believe this for one second. Any evidence of such sentiment (i.e. people saying they should get it/it would justified if they did)?
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
I think it would help to lose weight to improve your odds
The obvious difference here is that almost everyone already knows this, probably including the person you're talking to, which is not the case in the bottle-cap or shark-infested waters examples. Indeed, the latter two aren't actually unsolicited advice, they are unsolicited unknown information which is very different.
There is almost no-one for whom 'lose weight' will be novel and actioned advice.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
so many out-of-print books that cost hundreds of dollars.
Exactly. Not only that, there are thousands upon thousands of works that you can't buy anywhere online even if you had hundreds of dollars to spend, the vast majority of which are thoroughly anodyne academic works.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
The younger generation appears to be immunized against the transgender movement. The boys do not buy it. Mr Beast is a litmus test because he has a large, diverse fan base in Gen Z, the majority of whom use Tik Tok and have Mr Beast content algorithmically fed to them. These Tik Toks are as close as we will get to a “youth vote” on the transgender issue. They not only don’t buy it, but they think it is immoral and noxious.
The polling does not bear this out at all.
Britain: https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/ai3h3xvf7o/Transgender%20data%202020.pdf 18-24 range consistently most pro-trans, though margins aren't huge between them and the 25-49 group.
US: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues Same thing here, 18-29 group most liberal.
Unless you're going to say that for some obscure reason the Gen Z kids not yet of the age to be polled wildly diverge from the clear trend observable in the current data, and in that case you'd need much better evidence than reading comments on social media.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
ridiculous excuse
How is this a 'ridiculous' excuse? The road network as it is today only exists thanks to the government, why should it then not be able to regulate who can drive, and how they can do it, on the roads they are largely responsible for? I for one am glad to be free (or freer than I otherwise would be) from a drunkard killing me in his car, all so that a few cranks can delude themselves about how much liberty they have.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
I am not so convinced that there is a large divide between the British and Chinese states.
Well, where you complained (not unreasonably I might add, that is a bit ridiculous) about an unfair upbraiding by your RS teacher for your privilege, ethno-religious oppression in China entails internment, sterilisation, forced labour and physical maltreatment (even torture) in those camps at the hands of state authorities. This really is only a comment someone living in the freedom and prosperity of the West could make. Young Britons have it bad? Hardly anywhere near as bad as toiling in a Chinese coal mine or electronics factory.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation.
FWIW I think the main problem with his article, as with many other similar ones, is that he frames the issue as about determining the Truth about gender and gender identity when in fact for all practical purposes the problem is actually a policy one. The right question is not 'are transgender men really men' (or in the case of Byrne's essay 'do Transgender people have gender identities that do not match their sex'/'does a mismatch between gender identity and sex cause dysphoria', or more broadly 'what is gender identity'), but 'does treating transgender people as their transitioned gender in X circumstance make those people happier with little damage done to the rest of society?' Because if the answer to that question is yes, then who gives a damn what the Truth of their gender is. Obviously there would still be arguments to had over the costs and benefits in every specific circumstance.
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
And don't "Jan 6th!" at me, this kind of hysteria was in full flow before ever that happened
His contempt for democracy was already pretty evident before Jan 6th. Pre-Jan 6th anti-Trump feeling wasn't unjustified because Jan 6 hadn't happened yet; Jan 6 was Trump 'hysteria' being proven right! To embrace Godwin's law, this is the equivalent of saying that anti-Hitler sentiment was baseless before 1933 because it was only then that he was able to make any effective attack on democracy. People warned that Trump had no respect for democracy, and they were right. This was 2016;
First of all, it’s rigged and I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, to be honest
I have had to come to the conclusion that the rage was all over It's Her Turn Now
This is trivially disproved by the number of people who hate Trump who also dislike Clinton, from the Democratic left to the Never Trump Republicans. The former is obvious but it's also true in the case of the latter; McMullin called Hillary 'terrible' in 2016, French wrote a piece in July 2016 harshly critical of Clinton on the emails and saying Comey should charge her etc. etc.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
lived experience
Well it's good that you said the term for me, because any 'lived experience' argument would get short shrift here if someone tried to use it on literally any other issue. But because this is an opportunity to shit on Democrats/the left nobody feels the need to have falsifiable beliefs anymore.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
You may well be poorer than you were three years ago. Most people are not - incidentally, much, certainly more than normal, of the wage growth of the recent period has gone to lower income workers, which perhaps indicates why this discourse of a bad economy is tolerated despite the evidence to the contrary. Not sure what else to tell you is that, surprisingly, number continue to the best means of measuring things.
There is no way anyone on this forum would tolerate for a second this kind of 'lived experience' rhetoric if it was about, say, racism.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
It's pretty obvious what he's saying. Japanese-American soldiers fought for the United States in WW2 under a state that was persecuting them to a degree far in excess of what white Britons 'face', and no-one would deny that they were doing the right thing. If people who were being routinely interned can set that grievance aside, I think white Britons can set aside the grievance of a diversity drive in the RAF.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
refuses to name the player responsible for the death, Matt Petgrave
This is what you would expect, no? There is no public interest from the journalist's perspective in further broadcasting the name - it would be grossly wrong of them to make any insinuation of deliberateness before there is any evidence of such, and if it is indeed just an accident, as I would imagine is overwhelmingly likely, then no point putting him in the story anyway - to be honest he's not even really a public figure. The only results on google for him except about the recent accident are some official league stats pages and a club bio. No more than you'd get for a decent amateur club cricketer. The number of Britons who know his name without knowing him personally would be a rounding error to 0, I imagine. In that light, putting his name in the national press under these circumstances seems unfair.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
This is such a lame charge of hypocrisy. It's as stupid as saying that it's hypocrisy for gun control advocates to want the military to have access to weaponry; of course there will be exceptions but the point is that those should be tightly controlled by the state - an asymmetry of force in which those guarding politicians have more at their disposal than their would be attackers is a good thing.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Are you familiar with Steve Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism?
“The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter looking”
This, along with related comments in the post above, is just so lazy and trite. For one, the actual evidence for this is quite limited; people sometimes cite one study from 2017, which mostly takes election results from the 1970s and so seems of limited usefulness for today. Other than that there doesn't seem to be much. As a wise man once said, if you cannot measure it your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
In any case, the whole line of argument is just absurdly uncharitable. Republicans are much more likely to be obese than Democrats, but if I said something like 'Republicans only dislike public transit spending because they are fat fucks who can't arsed to walk from the bus stop' I would rightly be dismissed as an annoying twerp, which I am afraid is very much how you come across.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Now what was that verse by somebody or other?
Well, two can play at that game.
Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?"
A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide. The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort - that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of the home, to help shape the future
It's easy to portray a working life as drab and meaningless, but one can equally do so for the non-working mother. FWIW I think both are oversimple and overgeneralised.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
Given that such a system would require the state to maintain to the same extent as a strict licensing regime, surely all that is being preserved here is the illusion of liberty? If you have no issue with the state being able to demand you insure yourself before driving, drawing some line between there and the state being able to demand you demonstrate yourself a competent and trustworthy driver seems arbitrary and pointless.
Sure but that hasn't happened yet, so at this moment his view is unfalsifiable, because every past Democratic/liberal/blue-tribe victory gets chalked up to 'TPTB' (to the extent that the financial crisis gets blamed on them, as if 'Davos' was quaking in its boots at a McCain presidency), and every defeat is written off as complacency.
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