Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
"Being a civilian in Chicago is more dangerous than being a civilian in Ukraine". Does that phrasing sound acceptable?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
Murder rate versus dead civilian rate.
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All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
This past July, Chicago had ~45 murders against a population of 2.72 million. Ukraine had 286 civilians killed, against a population that seems a bit up in the air, but 35 million looks like a decent estimate, somewhat rounded down.
So in that month, Chicago had 16.67 murders per million people, and Ukraine had 8.17 civilians killed per million people.
Sure this is a bit cherry picked - though I chose July simply because that was the first search result with a tangible number of deaths for Ukraine. That article notes that the 286 dead civilians was "the highest since May 2022", and July is also usually a bumper month for urban crime. I don't think the comparison is completely off base, or unfair. If we restricted it to just active war zones or active gang wars, do the ratios really change that much?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
I think the point was more "If you hire someone to keep a building from catching on fire, but part of their incentive package is a reliable promise that if a fire happens then they will be the first to get rescued and also they win the lottery, then overall you haven't given them a strong incentive to be invested in a lack of building fires."
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
28d ago
Well, why are they deployed?
Because some American cities are more dangerous than Ukraine.
Why is there a ton of tension and pressure around their deployment the a crazy ideologue can hook into?
Because Democrats are ideologically wedded to the idea that crime isn't real and that policing causes crime and the worst thing that could happen is for an increase in military-style crime deterrence to actually deter crime. Doubly so if that results in a win for Cheeto Hitler.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
29d ago
What would such a program look like in your mind?
One of the ideas that I had in mind, that I never got the opportunity to do because orienteering wasn't on the curriculum until Webelos was to bury caches of water balloons and water guns in our main wooded park, and then divide the scouts into teams. Give each team a map, and then let them loose to secure weapons and munitions and then wage war against each other.
It took me about $50 to build an ax-throwing range in the back yard. The local gun range charges $10 a head for an hour of archery, and would absolutely give discounts for a Scouts or Hard Scouts type regular event, and would almost certainly involve a subject-matter expert helping out. Bullets are expensive, but I'm sure something could be arranged, and the rentable 50 cal sniper rifle they offer would be a hell of an incentive to reward 12 year olds.
Beyond that, hard hiking and roughing it. Physically intensive activities, especially involving mud and filth. Mud Runs would be a good fit and fuck it, I'm signing up for the Philly one tonight. Manhunt in the woods at night. Paintball. Airsoft. Reach out to local law enforcement, military, and academic institutions for specific trainings. See where you can overlap with ROTC, (there's a term for junior police academy, but I've had a bunch of wine at dinner and can't think of it). Reach out to local universities and zoos for help with teaching about local wilderness hazards and wildlife.
Seriously physical conditioning. What are the optimal amounts for pre-teens? My son talks like he's terrified of "Coach Tyler sprints" at football... but he also complains when they get skipped. What does an optimal 2-3 times per month workout for young boys look like?
And let's go even more intensive. Movie nights with films like Tremors 1-2 and Red Dawn. Monthly book clubs featuring Gary Paulsen and Jack London and Rudyard Kipling.
The hard part would be maintaining standards, but I think with 15-20 hours per month between meetings and training and assigned readings, you could get some impressive results out of a program like that.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
29d ago
I think of my childhood as a triptych. In school, I was a nerd and then I came home and reread Redwall books on loop. Then, after a few hours of reading, I went to sports practice for my jock third, where I did football, hockey, basketball, baseball, crew, and year round swim teams. And then, on the weekends, I went to the farm a few towns over where my best friend lived to spend 48 hours as a feral redneck, loose on quads in a few hundred acres of woods with BB guns and slingshots and M80s until we stumbled back at dusk, exhausted and filthy.
That best friend tolerated Scouts for a grand total of 36 hours before he was sick of it, and demanded his parents pick him up from the summer camp. And while that might sound weaksauce, he also bagged his first buck a month after he turned 10, alone with a shotgun in a tree stand on his family property.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
29d ago
It's not just "not paid", it costs money to register as a volunteer every year.
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All post-temple whore technology is gay.
29d ago
Therefore, the program has to be doable by the kind of person who isn't as dedicated as a typical Boy Scout leader.
I think this expectations mismatch might be the heart of the problem. I wanted something more rigorous and active and, well, manly. Even as a child I wanted grueling endurance challenges, not a gentle stroll that meets a PBS Kids definition of "being active". My favorite memories are things like winning a fire-building contest, teeth chattering in the wet snow, at the Klondike Derby. Or later on, after some Troop drama left me siding with a small break-away faction we did a "summer camp" that in retrospect was not actually an authorized Scouting event beyond the fact that the dad who took us was our new Scoutmaster. He just had a friend who owned a large expanse of wild property, and we spent two weeks loose and barely supervised on an Appalachian mountainside.
The things I remember fondly and want to recreate for my own kids are the things that were hard. If we're setting the standard to "easily accomplished by basically any family that cares to show up"... what is even the point? Is that sort of lowering of standards actually expanding numbers? Or is that why they're still dropping?
As a note, I don't have any problem with opening the program to girls. My own daughter did it for a while. In any county, there's going to be at least a troop's worthy of hardy, outdoorsy girls, and they deserve something more intensive than selling cookies.
This program was completely overhauled in the early 2010s, with changes taking effect in 2015. It is now significantly more masculine, or whatever, than the program it replaced, which was basically a continually tweaked version of what they had been doing since at least the 1950s. I checked the requirements, and yes, Bears need to do a 1-mile hike, and a 3-mile hike is part of the Webelos program. Before that it was zero.
I can find older lists of Boy Scout requirements, but not anything for Cubs. I have to wonder though - is this actually an increase in standards and manliness? That goes against the grain of the BSA changes. Or is this something that was being made a requirement because it used to be an assumed default baseline that didn't even need to be mentioned? If the revamp happened in 2015, that's just a few years after Obama ended the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.
Part of the reason I left was that I saw things trending in this direction, and my own program was expected to do things that I wasn't comfortable with and knew I couldn't sell to leaders. But that's another story.
I would like the story, if you don't mind, even if it needs to wait until after the holiday. You seem to have been more involved in this stuff than I was, and I'd appreciate reading your take.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
29d ago
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.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
30d 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.
30d 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo 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.
1mo ago
You don't even need a group. You can just solve problems.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
1mo 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.
Because some of the things they'd be taking way are very low cost, and probably even a net boon. Like letting Scouts meet on bases, or take tours. It functionally costs nothing, and it's tacitly encouraging Scouts in a direction you want to see them move.
Or cutting support to the Jamboree. It's probably justifiable just as a training exercise and a chance to show off. Citing the exemption that you can pull out for national security reasons because you're stretched too thin to handle the Boy Scouts just sounds weak.
The removal of rank/pay benefits, OTOH, are plausibly reasonable and appropriate.
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