HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
No bio...
User ID: 179
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Only if you believe there's a finite supply of "racial purity" (when did it appear, by the way? The Neanderthals?) and brown immigrants permanently dilute it. Otherwise, it's just cultural change. That is no less reversible than communism.
I do happen to think that races differ on average. But even if they didn't, cultural change is absolutely irreversible. For example, American culture irreversibly changed with the introduction of Irish, German, Italian, and Latin American immigrants. And even if cultural change could be reversed, real people have to live real lives over decades while enduring this change.
It is little consolation to those experiencing the soul-crushing pain of watching their communities deteriorate to be told, "It's okay, you only have to put up with this every single day for a few more decades, because then you'll die. Oh, you have descendants who will outlast you and you care about what your country and community is bequeathing them? Don't worry, the Multicultural New Economic Zone is all they'll ever know. They won't know what could have been. (We'll make sure of it.)"
Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.
I'm going to take the opposite position and insist that schools shouldn't be wasting time on gym at all. I don't think the point of school is to provide children everything that we think is "good". Schools should not be thought of as substitute parents with a broad mandate to produce good student life outcomes in general. Schools should be narrowly focused on basic instruction in reading, writing, math, and science.
I also don't think there's any place for literature in the curricula of any non-elective classes in middle school to high school. Literature is entertainment. It can be used as a vessel to teach reading and writing, but you could just as well do that with nonfiction. So you might as well be teaching them about things that are actually true or things that actually happened. This is doubly the case for older literature (e.g., Shakespeare or anything from the ancient world), which is not something that is easy for modern readers to understand or be interested in. Frankly, I think the emphasis on it borders on snobbery in many cases.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Obviously some change is inevitable. That doesn't mean that we should favor any and all change that we have the power to mitigate. Unless you think immigration as it currently exists produces precisely zero additional cultural change compared to a world with no/little immigration, then we have the power (through curtailing immigration) to mitigate some of the inevitable cultural change.
I'm so perplexed by this line of argument that keeps popping up in immigration debates which is essentially "This thing [cultural change or immigration specifically] happened in the past, therefore it's a good thing, or therefore we can't/shouldn't do anything about it".
The reason we're speaking a language without gendered nouns is because Viking settlers "corrupted" English.
Do you think the communities that were ravaged by the Vikings - the men killed, the women taken as sex slaves, and the land occupied by essentially murderous rapist barbarians - would have had a thing or two to say about whether that "change" was desirable? And most important: If they could have stopped the Vikings, should they not have?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
If you're saying that cultural mixing is always bad, then why do you want to preserve "your" culture?
Because it's my culture. Just like I would care about a different family if I had been born in a different family. I wasn't, so I don't.
Yes, all cultures came into being by mixture/corruption from various forces throughout history. So what? If I was a member of those cultures pre-mixture/corruption, I'd probably have advocated resisting that change. I wasn't, so I'm not. I'm not, because I don't care. I don't care, because I'm not a member of those past cultures.
I don't understand what's so complicated about this. I feel like I'm explaining to a Martian why we humans care about our families more than we care about other families.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
The claim that the Jan 6 mob was polite and peaceful is one of the most astonishing claims I see repeated in this otherwise pretty reality-grounded community. I don't understand how you can make claims like this when we have widespread video evidence of how violent the mob was. Like, are you just unaware of the video footage? Or are you of the belief that the existence of some footage showing peaceful and orderly intruders "cancels out" the violence, like some sort of algebraic exercise? I cannot overstate how baffling I find this.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
The most anti immigrant people seem to have had no interactions with immigrants as far as I can tell.
I am anti-immigrant and have had ample interactions with them. They are not just like you and me. If they were, why do they insist on speaking their native language in public? Why do I have to press 1 for English? Why do they wear their old culture's clothing? Why do they congregate in communities with their own instead of assimilating?
I can't imagine immigrating to another country and refusing to speak their language and wear their clothing. I'd be overcome with embarrassment and shame at such a flagrant display of disrespect and hostility to the country that was gracious enough to accept me in.
There are certainly many immigrants that assimilate, but it doesn't take many defectors to change the character of a community.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Thankfully my diligent use of ad-block prevents such visual and auditory pollution from entering my sensoria, most of the time.
It's not just ads though, but also stock images, staged photographs for college admission pamphlets, product pictures on Amazon, etc. (you can always quickly identify cheap Chinese imports on Amazon: they're the only ones with product pictures showing white people using the product).
I'm sure you can probably find white people in ads for euthanasia in Canada, at least.
It's increasingly difficult to find any refuge from the daily barrage of reminders that your society is signaling it hates you and is excited for you and your kind to die off.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Conventional wisdom is that whites and Asians in the US insulate themselves from inner city blacks by pricing them out of homes. But in the process of researching where in the Midwest I want to move to, I've found that most Midwest metros have suburbs/exurbs in the eminently affordable $150-250k median home value range and yet remain 90+ percent white. Can anyone help me understand this?
For example, here's a racial dot map of St. Louis and its southern suburbs/exurbs, with some of the individual cities and their white % and median home value labeled. The same pattern exists for most other Midwest metros I've looked at, too. Certainly most metros have some suburbs that are very expensive. In the St. Louis example, that would be the western suburbs (you can tell because of the red Asian dots). But not all the suburbs are expensive like that.
So, why aren't African Americans moving to these cheap white suburbs to get away from the awful inner city black neighborhoods? It's not like these places are full of "white trash" - poverty rates are low and incomes are high compared to outside of metros. Certainly a good many inner city blacks really can't afford a $100k-150k home, but surely enough can that it'd drive these places well down from 90+ percent white?
And what about immigrants - why aren't there substantial numbers of immigrants who move to these places? High-SES Asians tend to move to richer suburbs because they can afford it, but surely many working class immigrants would appreciate being in a cheap white suburb with easy commuting to the city core?
A related question I have is why smaller-tier cities (say, in the 50k-100k population range) tend to be so much more diverse than metro suburbs. There are only 2 cities in the entire country that are >50k population and >90% white (Ankeny, IA and The Villages, FL), yet 90+ percent white suburbs of metros are common.
As one example among many, why is Columbus, IN (pop. 50k, 45 miles south of Indianapolis) 24% nonwhite despite median home values ($185k) that are higher than many of the 90+ percent white suburbs of Indianapolis (e.g., Franklin, Mooresville, Greenfield)? Certainly some black families moved there generations ago and the current inhabitants want to remain near family. But that can't be the whole explanation, because many of these places are substantially foreign-born (e.g., Columbus IN is 15% foreign-born). Surely a newcomer's job prospects are better in a cheaper commutable suburb of Indianapolis than in a more expensive isolated small city like Columbus.
Demographic data for this post come from the Census's 2019 American Community Survey 5-year estimates. Housing values are from policymap.com, which uses the 2021 ACS 5-year estimate. Racial dot map is from Dave's Redistricting App.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
First, I'm not convinced that childhood fitness is that important. I suspect the negative health effects of fitness don't reveal themselves until many decades later, and that fitness habits started in early adulthood should be sufficient to stave off the effects of poor fitness. Yes, childhood obesity is a problem, but I'm not convinced that's due to lack of exercise.
Second, regardless of the benefits, I just don't see how that's the school's job. What's the limiting principle? Should everything that's important and beneficial be done in school? Should schools have classes on healthy eating? Healthy social media usage? General socialization? Driving instruction? Home improvement? Taking care of a baby? Household budgeting and financial prudence? I mean, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if you'd say "yes" to some or all of those if you already think schools should basically be in the business of being parents. I just emphatically disagree. One of the things I always hated most about schools was how fucking patronizing and infantilizing it was.
Finally, once you open the door to the idea that schools should be entrusted as quasi-parents with a broad mandate to do good things for children, you're giving your ideological enemies (whoever they are) license to indoctrinate your kids. They already have too much latitude to do that with reading, writing, and science curriculum, but I certainly don't want to make it any easier for them.
I'm not sure I follow your point about Great Books like Aristotle. It's always seemed so obvious to me that these books are rather pointless except as a historical interest. The people who wrote them were so primitive by comparison, so limited in their empirical knowledge, so deprived of the progress in thought that we've made as a species, I can't fathom why someone would think that they have anything interesting to say on its own merits. And that's not to mention how impenetrable the prose is (apparently translators always think their job is robotically faithful reproduction instead of their best guess about what a modern writer would have written if attempting to express the same thought.)
You say they "speak to" people in some deep way. I'm not really sure what that means, but if their ideas are that impressive and timeless then surely someone more modern has has said the same thing but without the handicap of an ancient person's understanding of the world and our place in it?
Are you sure "read the classics" is an imperative containing much more than signaling about the speaker's supposed learnedness and sophistication? Because it's always been extremely hard for me to shake that impression, and I'm afraid I'm definitely not disabused of it from reading your response to Hanania. I see no good defense of the merits of reading those works.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I think the biggest problem with that argument is that cars pretty much entirely kill unintentionally. Only about 535 accidental gun deaths occurred in 2020, according to the CDC. That's 2.2% of all gun deaths in the US that year. That's an order of magnitude less than annual accidental drowning deaths, and fewer deaths than (scarcely regulated) swimming pools or bath tubs alone.
It's not enough to say "here's a problem, here's a regulation that pertains in a very broad sense to that problem, therefore the regulation will help address the problem". If people want to commit murder or suicide with a gun, it's incumbent upon would-be regulators to explain how their proposed regulations would stop those people. "We'll make it illegal" does no good - murder is already illegal, and suicidal people won't care. "We'll require a license" does no good when people can trivially obtain one like they can a driver's license. And if the licensing requirement becomes sufficiently onerous that it's practically a ban, they'll run into the same problem as advocates of banning guns: how exactly is that going to happen in a country with a 2nd Amendment, more guns than people, and criminals who don't care what you say you've banned?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Again, really curious what percentage of your "native-born" city is composed of European immigrants who came in the late 18th and early 19th century. Because if that's the case, their ancestors engaged in all the behaviour you decry.
People who are pro-immigration keep using this bizarre line of argument that essentially amounts to "You think this bad thing is happening now, but it happened in the past, too!" ...As if we must think it was a good thing when it happened in the past? No, it was bad then and it's bad now. Do you get it yet?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
When people move long distances in the US, their primary consideration seems to be "jobs". But what does that actually operationalize to for people who aren't professionals or otherwise in some extremely niche industry? Let's say you don't hope for much more than working at Costco or maybe as an administrative assistant at some small business, or as some random entry-level lab technician. What sort of metrics are you even supposed to look at when deciding on a destination?
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Something like income per capita or unemployment rate seem too crude to be useful. Perhaps Region A has higher income per capita than Region B because of a thriving industry (e.g., diesel engine manufacturing) that has no relevance to your skills.
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A random snapshot of job listings on indeed.com seems too unrepresentative. Job openings come and go all the time, and it seems unwise to write off a whole area because the current job openings don't suit you.
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A region's level of educational attainment seems meaningless, except perhaps for some highly skilled professions, because a less-educated region has fewer workers who might compete for the white collar job you want. And it doesn't seem obvious to me that less-education regions would have fewer white collar jobs relative to the population of qualified candidates.
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A region's rate of growth seems irrelevant. What's the difference between a region that has grown 30% in the last decade from 100,000 to 130,000 to a region that has grown only 10% in the last decade from 118,000 to 130,000? If it's because there's something more desirable or economically healthy about the former, then look at that metric and skip the middleman. (And what is that metric, and why does it matter for the prospective mover?)
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I'm surprised no one has mentioned what I see as the biggest problem with this. Do we really want presidents to effectively unilaterally nullify laws the president thinks are wrong? How would those in the blue tribe react if a President Trump pardoned Jan 6th offenders? How would those in the red tribe react if a President Kamala Harris pardoned BLM rioters (supposing some future 2020-summer-of-unrest-like scenario where offenders were charged federally, for the sake of keeping this comparison apt)?
Yes, presidents have the power to pardon, but I don't think we should let that slide into something that looks quite like undermining the separation of powers. This is just the latest in a long-running series of examples (student loan forgiveness, eviction moratoriums, vaccine mandates via OSHA, Trump's border wall funding via "emergency" powers, DACA under Obama) where the executive is trying to usurp power that belongs to the legislature.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
The argument is that all "natives" were immigrants once.
But that statement does not entail either 1) that it was a good thing that the ancestors of current natives once immigrated; or 2) that further immigration is desirable.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
7mo ago
I also wasn't going to give my opinion on this ban because I don't consider myself a high-quality contributor. But if no mod notes is indeed the bar, I'll chime in (I have 842 comments here and on the subreddit with no warnings/bans and, to my knowledge, no mod notes).
I'm in favor of the ban and think way more banning should be done in general. I think way too many people treat warnings and bans like it's a fee they get to pay in exchange for getting to be rude to someone they disagree with. They know exactly what they're doing - they know it's against the rules when they submit their comment. They just don't care. They think the other guy deserves it, so they'll pay the ban tax and take a day off.
I think most of these people would bite their tongue if there were real, significant consequences.
Whatever the outward facade, my position was crumbling behind it. Almost seven years ago I started working as a public defender and was inundated with hundreds of hours of police encounter footage that were completely uneventful; if anyone, it was usually my client who acted like an idiot. I've seen bodycam footage that starts with officers dropping their lunch in the precinct breakroom in order to full-on sprint toward a "shots fired" dispatch call. I've seen dipshits like the woman who attempted to flee a traffic stop while the trooper was desperately reaching for the ignition with his legs dangling out of the open car door. Despite this, the trooper treated her with impeccable professionalism once the situation was stabilized.
I really think people like your former self who have a bit of a cop problem could really stand to do a few ride-alongs and watch a few dozen hours of police footage. As you say, it's really illuminating. American police are overwhelmingly incredibly well-trained, professional, and cordial, even when dealing with jaw-droppingly disrespectful citizens.
Indeed, it's always astonished me just how ill-informed and prejudiced so many otherwise intelligent people seem to be about police. I suspect it's for a few reasons:
- Ideological expedience. The Left is primed to hate police because of the race angle, and libertarians are primed to hate police because of a general distrust of state power. Both of these groups are very disproportionately likely to be in a position to influence public perceptions (e.g., academia, journalism, opinion magazines, blogs, etc.)
- The availability heuristic. People see the most egregious police abuses/mistakes and have no sense of how astronomically rare those events are. For every iffy police shooting that crosses your radar, tens of thousands of police interactions occur without any violence transpiring whatsoever. The occasional douchebag officer encounter makes the rounds on social media, but the vast majority of officer encounters that are professional and courteous - even in the face of obscenely disrespectful and obnoxious civilians - never get shared.
- Osmosis from the general anti-police zeitgeist. Even without ideological bias, it's easy to find oneself assuming that there's a problem if so many people seem to think there is.
- Lacking domain-specific knowledge. If you don't understand that police don't have quotas, or that civil asset forfeitures aren't as simple as police being bandits, or that qualified immunity only applies to civil lawsuits and doesn't permit police to engage in criminal acts without being prosecutable, or that police don't "investigate themselves" for wrongdoing, or that they do indeed get more training than hairstylists... well, then you simply don't know. And combined with some of the other numbered items on this list, it's easy for people to lazily round these things off to "yeah, I guess they are probably just rotten about this and that thing".
- On a related note: most jobs aren't exposed to the public like policing is (and not heightened in exposure for reasons of #1 and #7). Programmers, lab analysts, manufacturers, logisticians, consultants, actuaries, etc., etc. aren't jobs people are in any position to notice or think about or care about. I suspect most people would have similar groan-worthy misunderstandings about most jobs if those jobs were similarly criticized by clueless (and/or dishonest) ideologically motivated actors and trotted out for viral outrage bait.
- The sort of people who hang out in the greater rationalist sphere or in highbrow publications probably know fewer police officers in their personal lives and so have few opportunities to ask basic questions, correct misunderstandings, or even just harbor a modicum of charity (especially given the class difference between them and police officers).
- Relying on faulty intuitions about how policing ought to be done, especially the use of force. Violence is actually not something most people understand very well. For example:
- People don't seem to understand that the presence of a gun on an officer's hip completely changes the dynamic of a physical altercation between an officer and a citizen - the officer must interpret active resistance as ultimately a fight for the officer's gun. And the officer absolutely cannot afford to lose that fight, ever.
- Your hands justifiably scare the shit out of a police officer, because your hands are what is going to kill him. Fishing around for something in your car or your pockets is a potentially life-threatening situation for the officer, and you're doing yourself no favors by raising his alarm like that.
- An unarmed person does not mean a non-dangerous person. See bullet point #1 above. Also, cars are deadly weapons.
- Tasers are not a substitute for shooting. Where deadly force is justified, a taser is never an appropriate tool (unless there are other officers providing lethal cover). They are simply not reliable enough.
- The use of stern language and/or sudden violent physical control (e.g., grappling, tackling) is de-escalation. Failure to rapidly put a belligerent person into handcuffs only increases the likelihood that that that person will obtain a weapon or get into a vehicle and cause further harm to themselves, officers, or others.
- There is no such thing a shooting someone's legs. First of all, leg shots are often fatal anyway because of the femoral artery. But more importantly, if a situation justifies deadly force, it is imperative to maximize likelihood of neutralizing the threat. That means rapidly putting shots center-mass until the threat ceases.
- It is just kinda seen as "cool" and "righteous" to try to notice and stand up to supposed abuses of power. There's no esteem to be had in being perceived as a bootlicker.
Anyway, it truly did make my day to hear that how you (and @Amadan) changed your minds about policing. There are few topics that makes me despair quite like the topic of policing when I see it come up in spaces like this.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Does anyone have a good sense of how African Americans living in smaller towns compare culturally to those in large cities, or how they compare to their non-black neighbors in town? I'm thinking more along the lines of places that are 5-20k population and aren't super close to a metro area such that the metro's culture seeps into the town by osmosis. I also have in mind places that aren't the deep South, so, where the black population in the town may only be 5-10%.
By culture, I mean the sort of behavior that, in my opinion, drives segregation in cities and makes predominantly black neighborhoods less desirable places to live. I'll give a few examples that I hope outlines roughly what I'm talking about. For instance, a general sense that they don't need to follow the tacit expectations of society in regards to dress, politeness, language, obeying what seem like trivial rules, and dozens of little things like that; the glorification of criminality; a disinterest in the traditional family unit (e.g., no real sense that they're "expected" to settle down with a wife and kids; having children and more or less abandoning them and not seeing that as particularly shameful); an intense culture of honor, where slights by strangers must be met with a verbal or physical altercation.
Now, even though this is The Motte and I shouldn't have to, I'll go ahead and state the obvious: those things apply to a lot of white people, and they apply not the slightest bit to a lot of black people, even in the cities. Still, I hope it's not controversial that there are average cultural differences between the races in the US, even if just as the result of a cascade of historical misfortunes that are in some sense no fault of their own.
I feel like I have a good sense of what small town white people are like, but I feel like small town black people in the non-South is a complete blind spot for me, culturally. Like, I almost can't picture it.
Has anyone lived in small towns outside the south like this? How did the culture of whites and blacks in town differ, if at all?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
I generally don't have much respect for people beyond a certain age that would have trouble coming up with $5K.
Being broke indicates either a lack of ability or interest in earning a decent wage
You don't have much respect for people who lack the ability to earn a decent wage? What about a hard-working dad whose wife stays home to take care of young kids and who just doesn't happen to have marketable skills beyond $20-25/hr low-skill labor sorts of jobs? In today's economy, I doubt those wages would be enough to escape living from paycheck to paycheck.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
It seems to me that you are attempting to appeal to common ground and common sense. You are pointing out that this is, in fact, a mob, and that this mob is, in fact, physically fighting the cops, and that that is violence, so therefore this is a violent event. This is true.
That's all I'm saying!
But you are talking to people who have made this exact appeal in the past, in the face of considerably worse violence, and who were told categorically by both their social peers and by the government and knowledge-production class as a whole that what they were seeing was not lawless violence, because the violence was a small minority of a given event, as in fact it is in the Jan 6th video you linked. The common ground you are appealing to has already been burned, and there is no way to get it back. This is the closest to a consensus on political violence that you are likely to ever see. It will only get worse from here as incidents accumulate.
I'm extremely sympathetic to the complaint of the obvious double standard. I don't understand why we can't acknowledge that 1) both Jan 6 and Summer 2020 were violent and bad; 2) Summer 2020 was more violent; 3) people who defended the Summer 2020 riots should be called out and shamed.
Some people seem to have this bizarre need to believe that if Jan 6 is claimed to be more violent than Summer 2020 but isn't, then that must mean Jan 6 wasn't violent or even bad. No! That's not how logic works!
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
7mo ago
The second type [...] will become overweight or obese in almost any environment, short of famine.
As always, the question is: why not prior to the last ~50 years? Unless all the newly obese people of the last 50 years are the first type you mention, the lack of a significant number of obese people in past generations cries out for an explanation.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
I think this is extremely silly and enshrines into the rules the disputed premises of one side of the culture war (i.e., that pronouns refer to self-described gender and not sex). I think that's quite uncharacteristic of The Motte. Why not just let people use whatever pronouns they want to use for other people, and if there's confusion then other users can ask for clarification?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
7mo ago
For those of you who play video games in the same room as someone else, how do you communicate with each other over the sound of the game itself? My wife and I like to play video games together, but we haven't figured out a good solution to the sound problem. Some obvious possibilities and their downsides:
- We both wear headphones. The problem with this is that we would have to lower our volumes so much to hear each other past the game sounds and the headphones' partial external sound dampening.
- We use microphones and join a voice chat together on Discord or something. The problem with this is that we can still hear each other's voices in the physical world, so then the microphones' delay causes a double perception which is quite confusing and jarring. And even if we had sufficiently soundproof headphones (which cost money we don't really have), microphone delays are just so goddamn annoying because of the unintentional interruption of someone who started speaking a second earlier than you (likewise on Zoom meetings).
- We use speakers. Obviously this is a problem because we're not necessarily in the same location in the game, so each of our game's sound would bleed into each other messily and confusingly.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
4mo ago
I'll probably get hate for being a buzzkill with this, but, what's the culture war angle for AI posts like this? I get that the broad rationalist community is interested in AI, and certainly there are times when AI and culture war intersect. But I don't see how this is in principle different than posting a top-level CW roundup comment about a new operating system, phone model, GPU line, medical technology innovation, or crypto scandal.
What I find most depressing about this problem is how irreversible it is. Unlike almost all other policy - monetary, taxation, spending, the criminal code, school curricula, you name it - this can't be undone. These immigrants are never, ever going away.
I don't understand how people who are in favor of mass-immigration can just so completely throw caution to the wind. Even with high confidence that mass immigration won't be a problem, if you're wrong, it's game over. The multiculturalism mind virus is unlike any other policy fad in history I can think of in how dangerous it is. Even fucking communism can, in principle, be reversed and healed from. The fact that a policy so potentially suicidal as mass immigration just sails through without meaningful resistance just blows my fucking mind.
I was lucky enough to get out of Canada and move to a decent sized American city, near a major metro, that is 97% native-born. But so many millions of Canadians are stuck and helplessly watching their country and communities decay into a sort of rootless cosmopolitan economic zone - an unimportant physical space that is meaningless but for its capacity to facilitate the existence and economic productivity of equally meaningless and mutually-unintelligible people-tokens like yourself.
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