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
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
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
11mo 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
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
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
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
(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
29d 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
29d ago
400 years
Of which well over 200 were spent in chattel slavery, and the following century as a legal underclass.
Try sending your kid to a 90% black school and ask them how easy it is to fit in because everyone eats peanut butter
I suspect it would be substantially easier to fit in than doing so in a school in rural Romania.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
Pretty much any measure of inflation is coming down at the moment, and is approaching normal levels. And most importantly, wages are rising even faster.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
I don't think this is about race at all. Plenty of the other pictures which are examples of good photos show the mayor with exclusively white people. The point is that regular Londoners probably don't spend their weekends strolling along the most famous and photographed portions of the river. With the eye just behind them it looks like a stock photo or like tourists/day-trippers, not average Londoners going about their business. Now, overall they do say they want diversity, but that seems perfectly reasonable, and there is no reason to think that they therefore believe every single photo must contain someone not white. It's just that overall the Mayor should be photographed with a broad range of people; young and old, white, Asian and black, people in hard hats and people in suits etc. etc.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
people
Well, a person. I'm not being pedantic, one piece of evidence is always insufficient to demonstrate a broad trend, because that you can prove anything.
Could also point to other comments (eg SNP leadership)
Such as?
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
Before I respond with anything else is your genuine belief that the Chinese state does not restrict freedom of speech to any considerably greater degree than the British state?
HaroldWilson
29d ago
The nice thing about sovereignty is that peoples get to define themselves
I don't see where this gets him. People do get to define themselves, and, say, Britons or Americans have decided to expand who is included amongst 'themselves'.
Anyway this is similarly amusing to the debates between the 9 different factions of Trotskyites which get played out in the pages of magazines with a combined readership of 8. The grandiosity of it all is utterly bizarre for a movement which is - thankfully - so powerless and marginal.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
When you are on your third PM since the last election there is a real question of democratic legitimacy for their current administration.
How so? He has the support of the MPs we all elected on the understanding that they could if they wished replace the PM with another.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns.
This is a fairly pointless comment. 'How come a newspaper is discussing the notion of evil when they disagree with my policy preferences?'. You could find someone to make such a comment whoever was discussing the issue; 'there's a certain sick irony to an article in the Mail discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the fuel duty price escalator', or something. You may well regard lockdowns as evil but I don't see the connection between your disagreeing with their position on that front and the discussion of the root of 'evil' generally.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
If that's the case I don't think the 'bullshit jobs' framework adds anything useful, because then it really just is a substitute for 'I don't agree with the policy goals the work being done aims toward'.
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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