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
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
10mo 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
5mo 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
10mo 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
10mo 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
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
10mo 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
9mo 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
1yr 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
5mo 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
(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
1yr 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
1yr ago
I don't think the average Democrat engages in much cancelling, or tries to While certainly they (and I) would oppose some (most?) of the measures Republicans introduce here and there, it still wouldn't, I think, stand as a great priority.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
a proposed bill to take kids away from parents who expressed resistance or skepticism
What bill? I hope you're not referring to SB107 because that isn't what that did.
HaroldWilson
16d ago
If you want to practice blind allegiance to a sacred document, go to a church/mosque/synagogue. That is no way to run a country.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
It must have seemed fairly unambiguous to the Japanese-American soldiers at the time given that they were willing to risk their lives.
The survival of his kin sounds like enough of a motivation
I am glad that he managed to rise above man's baser instincts.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
A regime led by a bureaucrat that owes his seat to a coup
Probably not much continuing here now thar these points have come up in your other comment but this is absurd. This is just how the Westminster system functions and even this party-orientated system has been the norm for coming up on a century. It's called the 1922 Committee for a reason.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
If Miyagi was a true Patriot, he wouldn't have fought for the army of the State that killed his wife only to return to a country that still hated him, he'd been bombing recruitment centers instead.
With what end? All that would achieve is assisting an unambiguously far, far worse 'tyranny' in the war.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate
Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.
This is ridiculous. One cannot prove anything with one or two data points. To take just one example, here is some tentative evidence that permitting decreases homicides, and RTC laws have the opposite effect. I'm obviously not saying that just because there's a study here you have to agree with me, but at least engage with the literature rather than saying 'look at Chicago' and calling it a day.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29785569/
The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...
You see the subtle error in reasoning here?
Fire extinguishers do not impose wider social costs.
And because those instances are intentionally given outsized attention by the media who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.
Different thing, but you seem to be framing this as a fault of the media but surely if there is blame to be assigned here it has to go to the consumer, given that the media is surely just satisfying the demand for such news which we all demonstrate by consuming it as much as we do.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Two wolves and a lamb voting who's for dinner may constitute above-board, by-the-numbers, all nice and legal democracy... but an autistic loyalty to the rules while shrugging your shoulders at the result has confused means with ends.
So essentially your argument boils down to 'my preferred candidates and policy preferences are losing'?
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.
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.
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