HaroldWilson
2yr ago
the tiniest hint of bias against certain races (blacks and jews in the US) is massively dangerous and a slippery slope to literal genocide
I don't think you see much of that in mainstream circles, seems a very online sort of thing, but where you do see it I agree that it is hyperbolic and unhelpful.
well they're not literally sending you to death camps yet so what are you whining about?
Much more than 'not literally sending you to death camps' there isn't that much serious bias against whites, not in the UK anyway. There is some 'diversity hiring' (but the available evidence seems to suggest that there are strong effects of in-group bias in hiring, which mostly of course favours whites, so on net even in the direct hiring process I think whites do fine, before one even considers broader questions of socio-economic inequality etc.) but it's hardly sufficient as to constitute a major or even minor concern for any aspiring professional in Britain. This RAF stuff has been newsworthy precisely because it is unusual for such vigorous policies to be in place.
HaroldWilson
2mo ago
Hanania's entire method here is to present a parade of horribles from the Trump administration, some of them still hypothetical, and to quietly allow all previous disasters to sink into unmentioned obscurity.
The scales here are totally different. There is no policy from the Biden administration that even comes close to the destructive idiocy of these tariffs, and more saliently for Hanania's point, no policy more ill-thought through. He couldn't even be bothered to properly calculate a reciprocal tariff!
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
violently disrupt the 2017 inauguration
There is simply no comparison here. Here is what Hillary said on it becoming clear she would lose;
We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.
There is nothing Trump ever said with one hundredth the degree of grace and humility in her concession, and it wasn't even a particularly exceptional concession speech.
Further, Democratic-allied members of the government bureaucracy both supported false information (e.g. the Steele dossier) and falsely denigrated true information (the Hunter Biden laptop)
Again none of this is on the scale of Trump's contempt for the democratic process. This is not really much different from the general rough and tumble of political life - the Republicans had been dishing out similar nonsense for years. Members of Congress openly indulged birtherism! While I would no doubt question your interpretation of the Trump/Russia or laptop episodes, even if I accept Democrats were knowingly lying, politicians lying is not something new. Major politicians refusing to concede elections is.
When a Democrat says 'I just want to find [the number of votes it would take to change the outcome]', then I'll worry about them as much as Trump.
HaroldWilson
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
Mexico is bursting at the seams with dogs. These dogs are not family members. They are alarm systems, beasts of burden to be used, abused, and thrown away. Locals will sometimes say, “They are working dogs,” but this is not a good enough reason to chain your dog to your roof and neglect it for years. Walking down streets full of starving, chained-up dogs exposes one to a constant stream of psychic pain much like that which famously drove Friedrich Nietzsche insane. As the story goes, one day in 1889, Nietzsche saw a horse beaten to death in the streets of Turin. He lost his mind, had a mental breakdown in the street, and never wrote again. (Of course, Nietzsche may have actually lost his mind because untreated syphilis ate his brain.)
I find this pearl-clutching a little hollow when most Westerners eat animals for breakfast lunch and dinner. Close the factory farms first, then you can get all high and mighty about Mexican dogs.
HaroldWilson
2yr 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
4mo ago
'Twas ever thus. The idea that states not co-operating with or even obstructing the Federal government in the exercise of its powers is some sinster and unchartered political development is obviously absurd. The Fugitive Slave Law, Reconstruction and the black codes, prohibition, desegregation etc. etc. What is actually the problem, and more abnormal, here, is the federal government using the legal system to intimidate and blackmail political opponents into doing what they want (and before some retard starts moaning about the Trump cases, they were not conditional on anything, they were just prosecutions that were attempted to be carried through to their conclusion, and stood or fell on the merits, not on political cooperation). If the charges are real and would stand up, they should be carried through, not dismissed to get a quid pro quo.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
That certain companies are drifting away from DEI doesn't imply that that the relative prevalence of DEI policies is largely a function of government disposition, nor even that those programs were uneconomical or counter-productive. In many ways it seems likely that extensive DEI stuff was a zero-interest rate phenomenon. When capital was scrambling about for productive uses, putting some of it into DEI to try to improve hiring/retention/productivity may have been perfectly rational, even if it has ceased to be now interest rates are higher.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Fictitious applications were made to nearly 3,200 real jobs, randomly varying applicants’ minority background, but holding their skills, qualifications and work experience constant. On average, 24% of applicants from the majority group (white people of British origin) received a positive response from employers, but only 15% of ethnic minorities received a positive response.
https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-events/news/new-csi-report-on-ethnic-minority-job-discrimination/
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This is rather silly. History education is not just teaching about the 'objectively' most important things in the world, otherwise British schools wildly under-study Asia and over-study British history, or at any rate certainly pre-Industrial revolution British history. Clearly, race and slavery has been enormously significant in American history, being possibly the biggest running issue in American politics for the first half of the nineteenth century, and certainly for a few decades before the Civil War, and of course being the cause of the Civil War itself.
The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.
It's so blindingly obvious you have almost no history education. Yeah, soul food and rap music is the sum total of the impact of race and African-Americans in American history.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Untold amounts of suffering
Obviously worrying but doesn't actually prove anything until you can parse out what the effects would have been if strict measures weren't introduced, which is to say what part is actually attributable to Covid measures and what to just Covid itself.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
evolutionarily self-destructive choices
particularly at the thought of them being medically sterilized.
Not the thrust of the comment I know, but I'd be curious if you really think this is at the root of your reaction. I mean, would you react in the exact same way if your kid was in some other way rendered unable to have kids themselves, like they were gay or got a vasectomy once they were an adult?
Also;
I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State
I think we're tipping in hysteria pretty clearly here.
HaroldWilson
2mo ago
As others have gestured at, this is just a rehash of the sanctuary cities arguments from Trump 1. The problem with using state courts/police as a convenient piggyback for immigration enforcement is that is encourages illegal immigrants to never show up at court or co-operate with police ever, either for their own minor offences or as witnesses etc.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
with none of the risks.
I don't think men really suffer too many of the risks either these days. It's always rather laughable when fairly comfortable young men LARP about men being killed down the mines or on the battlefield; the number of men engaged in genuinely dangerous work grows ever smaller in the West and no American has been drafted for over fifty years. Now, some of the points raised by such people are clearly serious issues; homelessness, crime &c. Yet too many glibly dismiss the serious problems women disproportionately face too, partly because, ironically, so many internet posters live in young, urban, liberal environments.
For half-decent looking women or greater, the world is but a playground for looking cuUuUute—and if hiccups ever occur, they can always play damsel in distress to summon a simp army to do their bidding
This, for instance, just absolutely reeks of terminal online-ness.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
It is literally unthinkable to him that D's might be the baddies on this one
From my perspective, one that I imagine is quite similar to Singal's, the D's aren't the 'baddies' for three central reasons.
Firstly, for the average Democrat this is simply not an important issue. I could name literally hundreds of issues that are of greater significance than the trans debate, even for the average Democratic legislator I strongly suspect that the issue does not really occupy their thoughts very often. When was the last time Congress debated the issue? In state Houses and Senates it comes up more but even then only on occasion. The point is that this is an issue whose prominence on the internet and in vaguely left-wing popular culture is completely out of proportion to its prominence in partisan politics, and in fact its actual importance.
Secondly, where it does crop up in partisan politics its generally in the form of anti-discrimination bills, or culture war fluff like sports, rather than the specifics of transgender medical care; indeed, in general medical practices are not something directly intervened upon by politicians, so the issue is fairly left to the non-partisan regulatory state and independent medical bodies, and it's surely best that way. Even if you think the current state of affairs is unacceptable, I doubt that we'd be much better off with state or Congressional Republicans managing medical practices.
Finally, the Republicans are hardly any better. Singal is good because unlike most commentators on transgender issues (on the sceptical side) he doesn't come across as a deranged culture warrior with an axe to grind, which unfortunately seems to be the case for most Republicans.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
I remember other discussions on this forum. Inflation and unemployment data. Long arguments about not trusting the economic data. This is why. These figures are totally arbitrary. There is no neutral competent adults-in-the-room authority anymore. Everything is this bad.
This is just intellectual cowardice. Ignoring for a second that this particular controversy is a total nothingburger (see my reply to @gattsuru), statistics which are in some sense 'constructed' are the only way of understanding any large scale and complex societal phenomena, whether it be crime, inflation or whatever else, and the solution if you don't trust the people constructing them is to investigate the particular processes by which any particular one is constructed to see what flaws there are/might be, whether they be minor or totally disqualifying. Otherwise, there is simply no point discussing anything.
Says to the extent that the figures weren't made up, they have basically no basis to reality
Congratulations, this is an observation every undergraduate social scientist and humanities students has about 6 weeks into their studies - in the same sense this is true, history books also have no 'basis to reality' - they are necessarily vast abstractions and simplifications of an infinite amount of possible evidence. Like E.H. Carr says, evidence is like fish in the sea, not in fish on the fishmonger's block, and we are all groping around in the dark in the face of impossibly vast and complex problems of social measurement. However, we don't on that basis dismiss history as a worthless enterprise with no truth value, and nor should it be with statistics. If you find the FBI or the Treasury's statistical work inadequate or too easily manipulable, please don't ever read quantitative history, you might have a heart attack.
HaroldWilson
1yr 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
2yr ago
(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.
Is this just bullshit jobs or is it just that you disagree with the thrust of the work being done? After all they aren't, in fact, just digging up and filling in holes, they are presumably collecting real data which is checked, setting up grievance procedures which can actually be used etc. and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced. Indeed in one sense this is no different to say all of the legal/regulatory work a food company must do to ensures that all of its products comply with the regulations of all the relevant agencies, it just so happens that whereas in latter case the goal of the regulations is relatively uncontroversial in the former it isn't.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The FDA regulates what drugs we are allowed to take.
Yes, but that's not a partisan affair. The FDA should take whatever action they deem appropriate on transgender care and they don't need politicians to weigh in on the specifics of the decision. Politicians determine the broad remit of the FDA, they don't interfere with its functioning on specific issues.
You agree that this trans pandemic is out of control
I wouldn't go that far, certainly. As for 'asleep at the wheel', it's a question of prioritisation. Political capital and legislative time are finite, and I'd much rather politicians focused on any number of other issues than making ad hoc adjustments to the state of transgender medical care.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
not running an uncalled for and unbecoming smear campaign against Romney
I think this is a little silly. Without wishing to start the endless and pointless 'who started it' conversations, the idea that the Romney 'smear' campaign was some turning point in the breakdown of partisan relations is I think not very likely. After all Republicans ran their own set of vituperative ads in the 2012, including 'small business owners' getting faux-outraged at the stupid 'you didn't build that' (mis-)quotation and that work/welfare ad making a bare-faced lie about welfare reform. At least Bain actually did close that factory in that Obama ad.
I don't think there was ever a realistic off-ramp from where America is now, but it isn't that bad, all things considered. At least Senators don't beat each other near to death these days. Trump is pretty unique and when he sees out his term of dies I think the populist right probably loses its momentum and things start to cool down again, especially when it becomes apparent that all he will have achieved is some tax cuts which outweigh by a factor of a zillion any savings from cutting 'bureaucracy'.
This takes the cake for the biggest load of nonsense I have ever read. It blusters a lot with only a few actual points made in defence of the notion that government economic statistics failed to capture true economic conditions post-Covid, all of which are very silly indeed.
In the first place I am disinclined to give this any credence because their calculations are very opaque. Even if you got to their website the 'data' section and 'white paper' for their 'True Living Cost' don't seem to give their actual weights or the changes in weightings (other that impressionistic statements like saying that 'luxuries' have been deweighted). However, even if I could trust their numbers it doesn't at all resolve the 'vibecession' question because based on TLC the Trump years were ones of economic decline too. However, the economic discourse in those years was uniformly positive. So what gives?
Aside from the fairly preposterous gambit of saying that we can count some people in full-time employment as unemployed if their wage is too low (words have meanings, if you want to talk about wages then just do, don't crowbar it in to unemployment figures). More importantly though, what you will see again is that his 'true' unemployment figure tracks exactly the common U-3 figure over the years. So again it's totally worthless in explaining post-Covid dissatisfaction because the post-Covid 'true' rate was actually the lowest it has ever been since his data series starts in the 90s.
This is insultingly dishonest. Why does he say 'since 2013' in an article about the post-Covid economy? Because the trend doesn't hold true - after over a decade of sharply rising inequality, the 2021-23 period was actually saw bottom quintile income rise as a proportion of top quintile income.
This article is utterly irrelevant to post-Covid economic perceptions. What is might prove, if one believes the statistics, is that Americans ought to have been pessimistic about the economy throughout the 90s, 2000s and 2010s as well as post-Covid. But they frequently weren't. It still doesn't answer the question of why Americans get specifically upset in the post-Covid period.
Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.
This is talk radio 'why are my enemies all so thick' slop. Take it elsewhere.
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