HaroldWilson
2yr 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
3mo ago
The US has rising income inequality and the fracture between wall street and average Joe has become way too large
This might be more credible if Trump were not also planning to reinstate his wildly lop-sided tax cuts. Inequality is mostly downstream of fiscal policy, not trade policy - the period of major growth in inequality came in the 80s, then it stagnated in the 90s and 2000s which doesn't really match up with free trade/decline of manufacturing timelines, what it very obviously matches up with is 12 years of Republican control of the Presidency up to 1993. Inequality at the moment is roughly where it was in the early-mid 1990s.
The world risks a bronze age style collapse if global supply chains break down
This makes no sense as rationale for the tariffs when one looks at where and how they have been applied. I think chips have even been exempted from Taiwan's tariff rates!
Makes domestic manufacturing more competitive
As @The_Nybbler said, this makes no sense at all. How could insulating domestic manufacturers from foreign competition make them more efficient and dynamic? The very reverse process is part of what destroyed British industry. Higher tariffs barriers in the post-war period meant that, because they were not exposed to global competitive forces, British companies never kept up with the technologies and efficiencies developing all over the world, and so when firms like British Leyland arrived in the 70s and 80s they were still producing cars at the speed and quality of decades prior and were inevitably destroyed. For a developing country this logic is more reasonable because pure Geschenkron-style copying is enough for domestic industry to grow fast from a very low base, but in the position of a first-world nation this stops working because you're at the forefront of technologies and efficiencies. Hence why Chinese tariffs have come down every year for decades, because they're slowly wearing out the possibilities of copying manufacturing techniques from the rest of the world and the competitive advantage offered by low wages.
At the end of the day you have to believe Trump when he speaks. He is simply an idiot who thinks that the US should not run a trade deficit with literally any country in the world and doesn't understand anything about anything. This is not a piece of masterful grand strategy to reduce inequality and strengthen the resilience of American supply chains, Trump is just thick.
HaroldWilson
2yr 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
2yr ago
Chinese are ruthlessly value-optimizing. They hold fundamentally different values, because of course they do
This seems pretty heavily coloured by recency bias. It was only less than 150 years ago that the modernisers in the ranks of the Qing elite were arguing that China was too frivolous and insufficiently receptive to Western efficiencies. Indeed, as the Self-strengthening movement wore on some of its greatest advocates complained that most of the Chinese bureaucracy were more or less uninterested in modernising the military at all. Chang Chih-Tung wrote in 1898 that ‘Zuo Zongtang established a shipyard near Fuzhou… Shen Baozhen set up the shipyard administration… Ding Baozhen instituted arsenals to make foreign guns and bullets… current opinion cavilled at every point’ and in consequence ‘their establishments went to waste or operated in a reduced form, none of them could achieve any expansion’, something their licking at the hands of the Japanese had proved in 1895.
Indeed, the controversial Heshang documentary, shown on Chinese television in 1988 argued that Chinese culture was entirely deficient precisely because it privileged tradition and even backwardness instead of the science and progress that they considered to be paramount in the West.
In general I think these sorts of arguments about national character are almost always overwrought and fairly meaningless.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations
Sorry, is the theory here that inducing a recession will increase labour force participation? That is very observably not what has happened in every previous recession. If the theory is that mass deportations will mean this time is different and the reverse will happen because there will be millions of new vacancies opened up, well there are demand side effects too. Obviously no-one knows precisely, but estimates of illegal immigrant remittances tend not to be above 20% of total earnings, so even before considering any other mechanisms you'd need to deport at the very least four illegal immigrants to create one vacancy in an equivalent role on average, and this is before one even begins to consider things like complementary task specialisation. This means that any increase in unemployment downstream of a recession will be extraordinarily difficult. Given that the US labour force is something like 170 million+ people, if a Trump recession produces just a 1% increase in unemployment, you'd need to deport over 6 millions illegal immigrants just to get back to where you started. This isn't just a question of, as you say, 'he won't deport enough illegals to make a difference'. It's that even a small recession would wipe out any possible labour market improvements from even the most thoroughly pursued program of deportations.
The fact is that being able to coast by on gig economy money, for instance, is a symptom of a society becoming wealthier. It might be bad from a social cohesion and personal fulfilment perspective, but 'make society poorer so people have to work harder' seems like a pretty silly experiment to carry out, and rather unfair on everyone else who doesn't fall into that category and whose lives will become a whole lot harder.
I'm also not convinced this is a major problem. U-6 unemployment is below 8% at the moment, which is only marginally above the lows it reached prior to the early 2000s recession, GFC and Covid.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
But why should we believe the experts? We know they're ideologically motivated liars. So, fuck it. Let's just start pushing buttons.
Well unless you believe the stock market doesn't follow economic signals but instead is in on an elaborate ruse to discredit tariffs, the disaster predicted by the experts is already underway. You also have to engage with the object-level arguments and evidence against tariffs, especially of this extreme nature - it's utterly pathetic to say, well I don't trust experts so I will merely act at random.
If for no other reason to prove that you can do something different, alternatives are possible, even if you may indeed get burned.
I doubt this will be a persuasive argument to consumers when everything goes up in price. If what you do is a complete fuck-up, surely it will only increase the dominance of the status quo. The tariffs will be a disaster and every economist will rightly say I told you so. Pol Pot proved that 'alternatives are possible' too.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Go on then, link to your examples of 'this exact thing' happening.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Well that's kind of what you get if you spend years trying to code everything high-culturey as something that only liberal elites enjoy. Indeed, the 'liberal' side of the culture wars are often accused of having no regard for history or culture, but in Britian, for instance, I am almost certain that those who fill the halls of the nation's museums, theatres, opera houses and especially historic universities are disproportionately Remainers, and probably future Starmer voters.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
If the change is over the last five years, surely race can be of only marginal relevance in explaining that change?
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
I'm not sure this is so much 'believing false things' as 'being unable to intuit the scale of numbers'. In both these cases these numbers are nothing more than shorthand for 'lots'. They haven't deliberately discarded lower or higher numbers, just plumped for something that seems like lots. It's like when there was that poll suggesting that the average American thought 10% of the country was trans and 20% Asian or whatever it was. People aren't 'believing' that figure is true in the sense that they actively don't believe in possible lower figures, they just know it's more than zero and grasp at some likely sounding round number.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Hitler was perhaps the greatest case study in the power of a classical education and self-directed study, as well as its weaknesses (should have studied logistics and naval warfare (every other battle would have been decided if he’d won the battle of the Atlantic))
And to this day post war education is built around preventing anyone from learning the lessons he learnt (which now extends to 2+2=4 in some classrooms).
Of course no American, English, or German school boys learns anything resembling classical military history any more, no one studies classical languages, even geography is notably lacking —though there in the American case, its seems geography isn’t taught so that Americans might be compliant with their wars instead of concluding, as every generation of Americans did pre-1945… that Eurasia is entirely irrelevant to them.
The western world responded to the Nazis by burning down all the cultural institutions of western civilization, since some aspect of western civilization must have been to blame… somehow
Aside from other things I disagree with, I think this is a complete misdiagnosis of the causes of the decline of classical education. At least in Britain, the main driver in that regard was surely economic, not just in the sense that giving people such an education is expensive but more pertinently that in the post-war political environment education fundamentally became about preparing students for the modern economy, hence the tripartite system; a basic comprehensive education for unskilled workers, a technical education for those doing skilled manual labour, and grammar schools for managers and administrators (indeed, grammar school students often did, and to some extent still do where they still exist, get a fair amount of 'classical' education).
Moreover, plenty of the current British political class did have a firmly classical education. Boris was Eton educated and an Oxford classicist, but his speeches, while occasionally having some of the bizarre Trumpish quality are generally pretty rubbish, while for my money the best political speaker in 21st century Britain, Gordon Brown, was comprehensive educated. While I do think there has probably been a decline in the quality of political speech-making (though not nearly to the extent you suggest, and certainly not across the whole post-war era; see for instance just wrt Britain, in various decades, Heath's speech against the death penalty, White Heat of the Technological Revolution, Weapons for Squalid and Trivial Ends, Brown's famous conference speech and his speech on Scottish independence, Howe's resignation speech, Winds of Change and, outside of politics, Tim Collins' eve of battle speech), I don't think the decline in classical education is really the cause.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Just because HR etc. are the least productive of all employees, that doesn't actually mean the job they do is 'bullshit', just no longer economical in the current environment. I mean, corporations are generally not in the business of making frivolous expenditures. A comparable example might be agriculture. In favourable economic conditions for farmers, for instance if the price of bread rises, farmers/landowners will put 'marginal' fields to work; that is, fields which don't usually yield enough to be profitable except in good (for the landowners) times. When these fields are no longer profitable and fall out of work, that doesn't mean they were 'bullshit fields', it's just that they only operate profitably in certain conditions. The same could said of certain employees or even departments; they only make economic sense in good times.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.
I think the resolution here is that sex simply has a greater range of possible 'significance' than most activities - which is to say that I don't think there a reason one could not argue that some consensual 'transactional' sex is not vastly different to a game of tennis, where in other contexts (be that positive or negative) it can carry greater meaning. A potential analogy here is alcohol consumption - my going to the pub carries almost no significance, but if an employer forced a Muslim employee to drink that would clearly be unacceptable in a manner far more serious than compulsory tennis - we all accept that in different contexts the activity can carry different weight.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
So long as we are an empire, an emperor is inevitable.
On what time scale? For all the talk of the disenfranchised working classes, materially they have never had it so good. Liberal democracy brings home the bacon at the moment, why wouldn't it 100 years from now?
Also, if this is meant as a general statement then I don't think there's much evidence for it. Where was Britain's emperor? Of course the British empire did wither away but even as the empire grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries that was, if anything, accompanied by greater democratic participation, more process and bureaucracy and no consistent or continuous increase in public unrest and instability.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I think that the term 'government funded media' clearly takes on a negative implication that extends beyond the strict meaning of the words. If I owned twitter and slapped 'Murdoch owned media' on Fox twitter accounts, it would be indisputable but it clearly implies something about what I think about Fox and its biases. Similarly, Musk/twitter surely thinks that the fact that a particular outlet is government funded in some way impinges negatively upon its content because otherwise there would be no point putting it there.
I agree that there's nothing wrong with wrong with being government funded, but the label still carries unfortunate implications. After all, there are plenty of twitter users who will not be attuned to the difference between the Russian or Syrian regime shills labelled 'government affiliated media' and the state broadcasters labelled 'government funded media', and if not putting them in exactly the same bucket twitter does seem to be putting them in the same region, or at least that is the impression some people will take.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
Ok, but until he climbed down the expert consensus was exactly right on what the reaction of the markets would be.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
So it seems like it’s more of a targeted war against China specifically? Likely giving other nations time to choose (with us or against us), and slapping the nations who chose to align with China with huge tariffs in 90 days
I think this is giving too much credit. Plenty of people in Trumpworld, even people very close to him, have spent the past days insisting that the tariffs are not a negotiating tactic, they are a necessary measure, and even in some cases that the stock market collapse is a necessary correction. I think they just got spooked that the slide had no signs of stopping and went into reverse gear. It's hard to see that 90 days is sufficient to conclude trade deals with most of the countries in the world (TPP took over 8 years to conclude), it's just a panic button.
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
provides no justification for England
Leaving aside for a second the more odious points of this comment, this is preposterous. Britain had no justification for attempting to stop Germany attempting to make itself the pre-eminent power in Europe by conquest? Almost as if it was the guiding principle of the British to prevent such a state of affairs emerging for centuries prior. This was precisely the argument Napoleon tried to give at various - Britain had no need to meddle in continental affairs rather than attending to its overseas possessions and trading activities and had ruined itself for the sake of a conflict it had no interest in. It was preposterous then and equally so in 1939. And indeed the conduct of Hitler and the and the Nazi government before and during the war proved that they could never be tolerated as a major element of the European order.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
'How is it not manifestly obvious these are the politics are policies of hate and destruction' seems like a pretty central example of boo outgroup/uncharitability, and incidentally also consensus-building.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
That is a simply intolerable solution which would destroy the reputation of the United States, even if you don't mind killing thousands of migrants, and what is more it would be enormously dangerous for the surrounding border populations of both nations.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Open borders (those poor immigrants), street crime (those poor incarcerated people), social promotion in school (those poor kids), crap teachers (those poor teachers [the dumbest cohort in any college - look it up]), drugs (those poor druggies need free needles), homelessness (those poor people), able-bodied people on welfare (those poor people), trannies (those poor men).... and, of course, below-replacement fertility
To go one-by-one (and to be clear I don't agree that some of these are even big problems but even if you do think that linking it to women is still extremely silly);
Open borders
The foreign born population of the US peaked in 1890 and was consistently very high for the 1860-1920 period, and per this Gallup poll men are exactly as likely as women to support decreasing immigration. https://news.gallup.com/poll/395882/immigration-views-remain-mixed-highly-partisan.aspx
street crime
Crime levels are not too easy to assess really for any pre-war period, but murder rates tend to follow crime rates closely and there are better records from past eras on the basis of which comparisons can actually be made, and on that count there is no observable relationship between female enfranchisement and murder rates; they were very high pre-war, came down around from the mid to late-30s, went back up again and now are relatively low at least compared to the pre-war era (and obviously also compared to the 80s). And once again, at least as of 2015 women were more likely to say they had a great deal of confidence in the police per Gallup, the margin being two points.
social promotion in school
What?
crap teachers
Again somewhat confused here. Is the implication here that women make bad teachers of that they support policies which lower the standard of teachers; if the latter, what are those policies?
drugs
Women are more likely to be against marijuana legalisation. Can't find a poll with crosstabs available for questions about harder drugs but I don't why there would be a dramatic change.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-support-marijuana-legalization/
homelessness
The policy which would do the most by far to alleviate homelessness is building more in urban centres; I can't find any specific polling with available gender crosstabs on specifically the question of should American zoning requirements being loosened in cities, but FWIW in Britain there was a Yougov poll asking about the classic NIMBY 'brownfield only' talking point, and on that score male and female attitudes were almost identical.
able-bodied people on welfare
On this one it does seem that there is a slight bias towards greater generosity in welfare among women - and I would say this is a good thing but nevertheless let us say that it is not for the sake of argument - but the gap isn't huge. On issues like a potential UBI the gap was 6 points in one Gallup poll, and on the semi-related issue of healthcare the gap on government provision was pretty similar. So even if you do think over-generous welfare is a serious issue the gender component is not huge; certainly not large enough to prompt shrill cries about the destructive effects of female suffrage.
below-replacement fertility
Again, which supposedly pro-natal policies are women thwarting?
100% - of these are traceable DIRECTLY to empathy and, hence, to women's suffrage
Yawn. A classic 'everyone who disagrees with me does so because they are too emotional and aren't sufficiently level headed'. Lazy and trite.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
And, most relevant perhaps, Florida voted passed the 2018 ballot measure restoring voting rights to felons. I'm sure Democrats will be quaking in their boots at being 'forced' to defend a measure the majority of Florida voters agree with.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
they co-opted sacred heart month
This feels slightly paranoid. There are only twelve months in the year and whichever one you chose you could be accused of co-opting something. The Sacred Heart month is also a strange choice to try to co-opt as an act of totalisation because it has almost no cultural currency in the Anglosphere except maybe within American Catholic communities; in fact it it's relevance is fast becoming exclusively as a counter-signal.
HaroldWilson
2mo ago
I don’t think most of them are valuable to most people
Not vastly in a purely economic sense, but personally I think the way I interact with information, ideas and the world generally is incomparably better off for having studied history at university, in a way I doubt I could have achieved by pure dilettantism. Maybe it isn't the most rational use of national resources, but either way I think it's still one of the developed world's greatest achievements that so many people get the opportunity to have their internal world enriched forever, even if a lot of them don't take it up when they're there.
Well this is the rub really isn't it. For any deal to not be completely worthless to Ukraine, it surely needs some real guarantee against the re-invasion of whatever is left at some future date, which seems to be only provided either by NATO membership or the continuous presence of Western troops in Ukraine as a part of any 'security guarantee'.
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