Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
19d ago
My wife is pregnant.
In the end, this was 99% of the real importance of this post.
Congratulations!
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
19d ago
According to an anonymously leaked preliminary memo the US military will be cutting ties with Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America). This will reportedly amount to ending logistical and medical support for the annual Jamboree, ending the use of military installations as meeting locations for Scout troops, and possibly ending the practice of conferring rank/pay benefits on Eagle Scouts.
The reasoning given is that "the group once known as the Boy Scouts is no longer a meritocracy and has become an organization designed to "attack boy-friendly spaces"", "for being "genderless" and for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.", and because "the Scouts have strayed from their mission to "cultivate masculine values."".
"Scouting America has undergone a significant transformation," the memo states. "It is no longer a meritocracy which holds its members accountable to meet high standards."
I've spoken out before as a defender of the organization, especially against the slimy, "damn you for doing better than anyone else and still feeling bad about your failures" child abuse bullshit. I've pitched it to other adults, specifically citing the fact that the astronaut program used to use Eagle as a tie breaker. I was a Scout myself (I made Life; my troop fell apart over interpersonal conflicts before I even began the push the Eagle, and I never bothered finding a new one). And I was an adult volunteer as a Den Leader.
Key word there: was.
And a large part of that is because the criticisms alluded to in that memo are not wrong... though I don't think it's necessarily the result of "feminizing leftist attacks". I think the problem is much older, much more structural, and more fundamental to the gender war in general.
Let's roll back thirty-odd years. I was one of those kids who loved asking extremely awkward questions. I was smart enough to notice certain things, and too socially stupid to realize why without just blurting it out. On one occasion, I ended up sitting next to my Den Leader in his basement while we did some crafting project.
And, with the innocence of a child, I asked: "Hey, Mr. Den Leader. You're the Den Leader, right?"
He looked down at me with his usual surly, dour mien. "Yeah."
"So, why does your wife do all the work?"
Suffice to say, this did not endear me to him, nor improve his demeanor. Later in life I better understood the elements in play, like "construction worker with chronic back pain". But the point stands that in an organization theoretically inclined towards "cultivating masculine virtues", the first five years were mostly run by women and involved an awful lot of arts and crafts projects.
This dynamic stood out even more as an adult. In the Cub Scout Pack I volunteered for, I was the only male Den Leader. We had a dad serve as Quartermaster, and another who was a nebulous Committee Member. But every other Den Leader, the Treasurer, the Secretary and the Cub Master were all moms.
I don't want this to seem like I'm attacking those women. I was quite grateful to the Cub Master (who was also a Den Leader) in particular. She was a no-nonsense, hard-headed woman... by the standards of morbidly obese women who work in HR. The problem is not that the moms stepped up.
The glaring problem is that the dads didn't.
How the hell is Scouts supposed to foster masculine virtues when there's no men to serve as examples? It's the exact same problem as all the elementary teachers being women.
The second, compounding and reinforcing, problem is the program itself. Here is the actual Cub Scout program, running from Lion to Arrow of Light, roughly K-5th grade. Each of those activities awards a belt loop, and they call them "adventures", which is honestly kind of insulting to adventure. Take a few minutes and peruse a few, if you're unfamiliar. See anything that deserves to be called an adventure?
The overwhelming majority of the program is designed to be (I'm going to be blunt here) bonus social studies classes for the biggest pussies in the grade, with a side dish of "technically counts as a gym class, if we're being generous to the huge pussies".
Oh, and I guess once or twice a year, starting in the back half, they get to shoot the simplest, safest bows or BB guns at targets 10 feet away for 10-15 minutes.
Gosh golly, that sure sounds like something that should be worth a bonus rank in the military, right?
It felt like most of the fun, exciting, interesting, vigorous or masculine things we did were things I brought to the table. Like I had to fight the program to do anything cool. The official program doesn't even call for a single one mile hike until Bear - third grade. I had those boys out and loose on every park and wild area in a 45 minute radius every month. That was the part they enjoyed and cared about. The social studies lessons in between? Boring as fuck. I'm the one who took the initiative to teach them about tracking and dangerous animals and poisonous plants. For an organization that was always styled as teaching literary Native American style woodscraft, the entire program is designed to be completed at a school playground.
The very first meeting that I hosted as a Den Leader, I cut up dozens of slips of paper with the virtues of the Scout Law printed on them, then put them in balloons I blew up. I scattered them all around the meeting room, and handed the boys a 3' wooden dowel with a pin duct taped to it, and told them to "hunt for virtue". And with each one they picked up, we had a quick discussion about what "obedient" or "thrifty" meant. The boys had a blast, and obviously escalated to practicing throwing the "spear", and one boy got a minor scratch on his leg.
None of the parents actually complained, but there were a few comments along the lines of "Huh. Are we allowed to do that?" And the answer is... prooooooobably not? If you read any of those "adventures" above, notice the massive safety disclaimer on each one?
Like @FiveHourMarathon said last week, you have to serve a master. But you can't serve two. If your highest priority is safety, you have to sacrifice fun. If your highest priority is inclusion, you have to sacrifice excellence. And if you insist on making Scouts a place where the weakest, most coddled boy in his cohort feels safe and protected, with his mom as Den Leader to ensure everything is maximally Safe and Supervised, then you're going to drive off most boys who might grow up to be special forces, or an astronaut, or a bronze age king.
AIUI, actual Boy Scouts (grades 6-12) are less coddled, even now. They're more independent, they plan their activities themselves and can choose to focus on actual adventures and range time and such. But I don't know for sure, because my own son begged me to stop with the pussified social studies bullshit before then (there were other, personal reasons involved as well, but when I bring scouts up now, a few years later, all he remembers is the boring bullshit and the too-rare hikes). And it's a moot point, because the Boy Scout Troop that his Cub Scout Pack fed into collapsed, because there was no new kids joining.
The military used to value Scouting because a boy who'd spent 12 years LARPing as special forces in the Boer War presumably had a certain independent-mindedness and a bevy of practical skills that might come in handy in a tight spot. NASA used to value Eagle for the same reason, that it showed a certain level of initiative and decision-making that might serve well when all alone with a small team in the cold depths of space.
These days, as I hear it, the Eagle program has been Goodhearted to hell and back. An Eagle rank is desirable, it helps with college, employment, the military - shit I knew a guy who kept his Eagle cert in his wallet to hand over with his license to get favorable treatment from cops. It's desirable, it's known to be desirable, so of course it's gamed to hell and back. Eagle is supposed to involve an independent project that the scout conceives and executes entirely on their own, with no adult help. But of course there are troops that are functionally "Eagle Mills", where the people signing off on the promotion are themselves coaching the kid into doing the bare minimum to technically qualify. I hear the Mormon troops were particularly bad about this, before they spun off into their own thing.
That ties into other safetyist crap. There's a nearby park that has a bunch of small wooden bridges that were built as Eagle projects. Bridges. Uninspected, built by an unlicensed 17 year old. Can you imagine? It's like something out of an irresponsible comedy show. What if something happened and someone fell three feet into knee-deep water? Who would get sued?! Forget that they've stayed up for 30+ years, and served countless thousands of people, you can't do that stuff anymore. The closest Eagle project that I'm aware of from the last 10 years was a couple of public benches.
I hope they at least talked a municipal building inspector into double-checking the work.
The problem with Scouting is that you definitely can get a great experience out of it, with a ton of valuable learning and practical skills... with the right dads, using common sense to flout the technical rules when needed. And then you get the same rank as the useless pussy who was hand-held through a badge mill.
Don't even get me started on fucking popcorn.
I honestly think, for the money you'd spend, you'd get a better experience just organizing a hiking group out of the youth members at the local gun/archery range. You just have to be willing to tolerate a bit of risk and tell the most timid moms to STFU and deal.
In conclusion, while I think totally cutting ties is kind of petty and stupid, well, so is modern Scouting America.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
23d ago
There's a chapter about Jewish legal traditions in David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. He describes how the Jews basically got stuck with full on Old Testament Tyrant God, plus a whole bunch of extra rules and laws that Christians have never heard of. And the Jewish response was to take these very specific, very strict, very brutal religious laws and nickel-and-dime them down into irrelevance with what basically amounts to bad faith sophistry. Just the exact polar opposite of a good faith effort to follow the spirit of the law. And I don't necessarily blame them, because the laws are kind of savage. "If your child is disobedient, publicly kill them" was the sample used.
When I finished that chapter, the thought that occurred to me was, more or less: "I suddenly get why all those medieval lords used to confiscate all the Jews property and kick them out. If I had contractual agreements and financial dealings with a group of people, and I learned that their religious/legal system was based around using cheap wording tricks to bamboozle their own fucking God, I certainly wouldn't trust them to keep faith with me. Better to fuck them over first and expell them before they hit me with some 'the contact specified you would be repaid in doll hairs!' level shit."
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
24d ago
Or am I completely wrong and the 34 FELONIES!!! is the "paying hush money to the porn star" campaign finance case? Even so, the same applies: 34 charges for one offence not the same as 34 different offences in different crimes.
Correct. The THIRTY FOUR FELONIES was purportedly because he mislabeled the expenses in his own accounting book and thereby defrauded himself to retroactively cheat in the election that had already happened.
The mortgage fraud one was where his claimed value of a property used as collateral was different from what a partisan hack Democrat judge was willing to claim it was, and that this constituted fraud against the bank that was testifying on Trump's behalf, and therefor the state of NY was entitled to damages in the amount of the highest possible theoretical value that Trump could have benefited, multiplied by the highest theoretically possible return on investment he could have made with that difference in the intervening years (which would have been far outside the statute of limitations, but I believe they got around that changing the law for the express and exclusive purpose of Getting Trump).
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
25d ago
Didn't they show up with faked printouts saying "TOP SECRET" to stage a falsified photo-op? From the same agencies that were already falsifying evidence to judges in order to spy on his campaign?
Why on earth would you think any of those "high ranking" government officials would offer Trump a gentleman's agreement?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
25d ago
This was Hitler's stance. German civ running the Islam religious civic, with it's bonuses to expansionism and wartime morale? Unbeatable. What a pity he got stuck with pussy-ass Christianity, and it's bonuses to culture and Great Artists/Scientists, and couldn't afford all those turns of disorder to switch.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
26d ago
You cash in by telling your wife about the experience with at tone of charming befuddlement (channel High Grant) and enjoy the mate guarding.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
27d ago
Skill issue. Have you tried quantum transpositioning into a different universe where you don't have cancer?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
27d ago
Now of course, the ideal is probably somewhere in the middle. Kids can be on a school team or in a once-a-week organized league while also playing pick-up after school every day, and a kid that really loves basketball might want to spend hours practicing free throws or dribbling drills on his own even when nobody else wants to. Leagues help to build skill and love for the game, encouraging kids to later move on to self-organizing.
The other option is all of them maxed. My son is currently on two hockey teams plus football. Travel lacrosse just ended for the winter and his two basketball teams start up in a couple weeks.
He still does a few hours of pick-up basketball, two-hand touch or soccer after school, before football most days. On days off, he and 2-10 of the boys will meet up at one of the fields in our town or the next one (which they reach on their bikes) for free play or small pickup games that sometimes last 6+ hours. It's like The Sandlot, except he has a phone to call and ask me if he can DoorDash Wawa because he forgot to bring water. (The answer, of course, is no.) On top of that, they organize their own leagues (including the use of decently sophisticated stat-tracking software) for schoolyard soccer or baseball field wiffleball.
AND he has his own basketball hoop, hockey net, and lacrosse rebounder in the backyard when he wants to burn off some energy or has a friend over.
When every kid has an Xbox, they all vegetate at home.
And then after all the boys finally go home, they hop on a group voice call for "Chel", which is NHL 2025, or ignore the Xbox to play Roblox sports leagues.
My point isn't just to brag (just mostly), but to say that @FiveHourMarathon is completely right about everything in this excellent post, and that killing it in these circumstances is still very viable, and also it really helps to have involved grandparents to help with carpooling.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
27d ago
Borrower will maintain exclusive control over the occupancy of the Property
What are the squatter's rights laws like in that jurisdiction?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
27d ago
I have one of these from an unnecessary test a pediatrician ordered during a visit in which they did not bother to tell me they stopped accepting my insurance. It was a situation where I'm not unable to pay, or necessarily unwilling, but whenever I saw mail or something about it, I said to myself "I should call some offices and demand an accounting about this bullshit before I pay anything", and then it just sort of slipped through the cracks for six months. Now I get periodic emails from a "collections" agency. There has been no impact on my credit score. According to my nurse mother, they are legally not allowed to follow up on it like a regular debt or missed payment.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
TFA wasn't good, by any stretch of the imagination, but it mostly avoided being an active dumpster fire. It was a lazy, uninspired mess, and if it had any brand name other than Star Wars it would have been quickly forgotten, but not particularly hated. TLJ was an active dumpster fire, and I've always been a bit curious about the thinking of the people who look at the actively burning dumpster fire, smell the trash fire, taste the toxic ash on the wind, and go "Mmmm, yes. Art."
It always seems like counter-signaling.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
You don't even need a group. You can just solve problems.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
On a similar note, progressives accept the teachings of the Church (known colloquially as "academia" and "the media") at face value. Conservatives think the Church (academia and the media) are corrupt and self-serving, and instead favor more localized self-study of scripture and reports. The former helps with message discipline, keeping everyone aligned to Current Thing, and it saves a ton of mental effort if you can just read the headlines and trust that the contents prove the description - presuming the Church is trustworthy, as all good and decent people do. The latter is a much higher variance approach, producing shining spots of brilliance and insight in the midst of broad swathes of "How the fuck did you come to that conclusion?"
Obviously that is painting with an overly broad brush, but I do think there's a bit of a comparison to be made there. In this metaphor, Scott would be something like an autistic monk whose intra-Church, well-intentioned criticisms got picked up by the Protestants, to his considerable dismay.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
I made a post hammering on the general topic last week, and my favorite reply was from ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr. He basically lays out how doing science has become much more difficult, but that you can still do it by having large, well-organized teams where each human mind node focuses deeply on a very specific sub-section.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
You are demanding the output of like lobbying firms, the groups that produce huge detailed reports for legislation but you want it to occupy the space of policy debate forums.
I was literally saying that this wasn't going to happen?
But very little of this discussion even really needs to hit the public that is still debating whether climate change is a fake Chinese hoax or whatever.
And I've never seen it hit a place like here, outside of one poster who is really into California housing policy. I've never even seen such a thing linked.
I guess I have this strange idea that if you have a very well researched argument for a position that you support, then you ought to release it to convince people. Apparently this is silly?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
I'm not entirely sure what that has to do with The Motte but maybe my reading comprehension today sucks because I'm really tired.
Just that I don't think we can balance out the prevalence of right-wing takes with establishment wonkery, because it's mostly too difficult to actually do and in the best case, far beyond the scope of what we do here. "Our systems are too complex for us to actually understand how they work" is kind of my hobby horse, but Amadan dinged me for calling out a certain subgroup in particular, so I expanded. Because the ding wasn't entirely unfair, but also not quite where I was going with that. It's not that neoliberals or progressives are uniquely unable to produce worthwhile policy wonkery - it's that I think basically no one is, and the thing I think those groups are doing wrong is holding on to the trust that someone, somewhere, has a firm grasp on how all of this works.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
Holy crap, dude. From "I'm a neoliberal policy wonk" to "there's no point in actually doing any policy wonking" in seven hours. Was there an "Out-Cynic @The_Nybbler Speedrun Any%" challenge I missed?
I was pretty happy with mine the other week explaining that why even if adding people to a city brings down average income, it's still accretive to overall city value/GDP/wealth.
Really? It wasn't a bad post, but it was hardly a really good one. It was a few "I think that [blanks]" and first-thought guesses. (Edit: Nevermind, I found the post before the one I was looking at, which is actually a solid bit better. That's the sort of post I come here for... it's just not what people mean when they talk about policy wonkery.) I've put ten times that effort into posts explaining how armor scales in World of Warcraft, which is much simpler because it only involves 2-3 fully understood numbers.
Which is my entire point. I can casually drop an authoritative essay on that topic because it is simple, if not intuitive. "Is it good or bad when poor people move to a city?" is a much, much, MUCH more complicated question, to the extent that no one even seems to try to answer it in a definitive manner.
Back to your earlier point, I shouldn't need to pay you a bunch of money because Left Inc already has tens of billions of dollars slushing around ten thousand NGOs and Think Tanks, and I very much notice that all of that produces approximately nothing that anyone wants to point to as a rigorous policy wonk argument.
If I were wrong here, people wouldn't be writing "I think" first thought replies, they'd just be linking me to Neoliberal Project 2026 or whatever. If I were wrong here, we wouldn't need a 50 person team and a billion in funding and ten years to produce something uselessly mediocre for any purpose but partisan propaganda.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
There are politicians (and staffers to politicians) who do in fact have a comprehensive and wonkish understanding of policies and regulations.
Yes, I remember being told this about Obama. More to the point, I was good friends with a few of them, who now have jobs like "Director of a Department with a budget in the billions". The "witty, unrehearsed" lines was actually what they were good at - dropping sick burns on the conservative firebrands they sparred with. It was a sad and sobering day when I realized that in spite of all the years of close association, I'd never heard them talk about the policy stuff that they were supposedly getting a Masters in. Every story was actually in the form of "I took a policy discussion and made it uncomfortably personal and dared the conservative guy to look like a jerk and instead he just stopped talking. LMAO pwned!"
but it's simply not true that policy nerds don't exist.
Neat. Is there some systematic reason why not a single one of them is writing anything for public consumption? Given the general pitch of "you should vote for us because of our mastery of policy wonkery", you'd think someone would notice the massive alpha in demonstrating an existence proof.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
I'd love to see some actual effort posts on tariffs.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
No, my argument, which I have been bleating about for years, is that no one is capable of producing real arguments, at least of the sort people mean when they say "neoliberal policy wonk". People have this image in their head of Leslie Knope mic dropping a 5" binder full of colorful tabs and highlighted text that covers an entire policy field. I've been looking for 20 years and no one in the real world actually does that. The people I've known who think they can do that are all just putting in enough effort to impress the teacher, scoring some rhetorical cheap shots, and then slowly getting jaded. Look at us here. Whole community full of smart autistic nerds addicted to political discussions.
Whither policy wonking?
We get essays and explainers and effort-posts, but the closest thing to policy wonking is Gendal-khan's posts on California housing issues, and even those are mostly updates on ballot initiatives rather than thorough, systematic wonk-papers on the housing industry/regulatory regime as a whole. Where are the "I know everything about trains" type posts laying out a sensible, state level energy policy? Anyone have an expansive-yet-granular solution for healthcare?
Does anyone have a spare effortpost covering a policy at the level of understanding, skill and insight that matches what we see on Friday threads about 4X games?
The difference, IMO, is that a 4X game is human-level comprehensible, and policy fields are generally not. It would probably take multiple life-times just to thoroughly understand the electrical infrastructure of a single mid-sized state. Working groups throw dozens of people and thousands of man hours into papers that are such pointless slop that no one ever bothers to read much less reference them. No one turns them into policy successes, no one has victories to celebrate and point to as justification.
The most relevant on we've seen was freaking Project 2025, and it was just a collection of essays with lines like "The Secretary should initiate a HUD task force consisting of politically appointed personnel to identify and reverse all actions taken by the Biden Administration to advance progressive ideology.". Anyone want to call that a triumph of wonkery? Point to a superior neoliberal version?
Because if you can, I would love to see it. I am not like this because I think policy nerds are gay and stupid and deserve swirlies. I say things like that post because I've been looking for 20 years and all I see in the policy wonk department is posers. If a bunch of neoliberals and progressives want to start posting detailed, wonky effortposts to own the chuds and make us all look like uneducated fools, then that sounds utterly amazing. Thank you! I'd ask what took them so long and where they've been hiding, but I'll be too busy devouring the insight porn and stirring my long-dormant technocratic urges from their deep slumber.
But until then, I'll keep pointing out that the wonks aren't wonking. They just produce boondoggles like California High Speed Rail and "affordable healthcare" and Covid lockdown. This matters when their claims to wonkish-mastery are being used to justify an increase in their political power, when they seem to have about as much relation to their fictional counterparts as Chuunibyou 8th graders do to Naruto.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo ago
I want more neoliberals policy wonks in here.
The problem is that these low-key aren't real. It's more "Aaron Sorkin aesthetic" than anything intellectually rigorous. They're about as capable of conjuring policy wonkery as goth kids are of summoning demons - and the internal experiences are probably isomorphic.
FWIW, the only people in my time in scouting who gave me "pedo-ick" were a married couple who were volunteering on behalf of their nephew, and who claimed to want to stay involved even after he left the program. It wasn't anything in particular, just physiognomy/vibe plus the oddity of being so into volunteering while having such a personal remove. I was very glad when they did not follow through and I never saw them again.
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