JTarrou
6mo ago
You're putting way too much thought into it. Social sciences are neither social nor sciences, they are sinecures for left-wing nutbags and anyone who funds it is funding their own opposition. It's politically ridiculous to spend tax money on hyper-partisan fake fields that died in the Replication Crisis, but no one has noticed.
Defund all this shit. You'd be shocked how little of the university system you need to train the very few jobs that might actually require a college degree. It's all a bloated jobs program for shitbird lefties who never want to leave the classroom, and a class barrier for the ruling elite. For the working class, it's debt slavery as the price of admission to the middle class.
JTarrou
11mo ago
A felony is a kind of serious crime.
Indeed, and yet I find the "crime" that Trump has been convicted of is not serious. It's not a felony. I don't think it's even a crime, except when combined with the horror of having won a national election as a non-Democrat.
Would you please explain which felony law Trump is supposed to have broken? And when exactly was he convicted of it?
JTarrou
5mo ago
You're saying H1b allows you to chronically underpay native labor such that it instantly leaves the minute it can?
Might not be the argument to float here.
JTarrou
7mo ago
Let me offer my own theory:
Trump made himself Hitler (in the minds of the left) to credibly signal to the people that he was on their side. He got the political equivalent of a face tattoo. Every hysterical denunciation, every spurious legal charge, every desperate ploy by the intelligence agencies only strengthen his position. The people want to know he won't abandon them like every other Republican. So he proves it to them, by becoming the most hated man in the country. Win or lose, Trump isn't going back.
That's what he does that DeSantis, and Cruz and Rubio and all the rest can't. Reject the Beltway, become a pariah among "polite" society. He is playing the political heel, and in so doing, cements his voting base. This is why all the attacks on him seem to make him stronger, because they do. It's all just more evidence that they fear Trump in a way that they do not fear anyone else. And that's what the party actually wants.
JTarrou
4mo ago
I think the most disturbing part is how little everyone with such strong opinions knows about Ukraine, Russia, and the conflict between them.
Russia is absolutely in the wrong for invading, but let's look at the actual political and military realities when we're talking about the issue.
The eastern provinces had a strong enough Russian-aligned sector of the populace (with some surreptitious Russian help) to functionally secede from Ukraine and fight the Ukrainians to a standstill for years before the invasion. Ukraine hasn't had any real sovereignty over those territories for over a decade now.
Yes, it's a violation of their treaty for Russia to take their territory. This may shock people, but governments often violate their treaties. For instance, virtually everyone in NATO is violating that treaty.
The military situation has been fairly static for years. Neither side seems to be on the verge of winning. Both are having trouble with getting enough troops to fight, but Russia can draw from a much larger population, plus allies like North Korea. Ukraine is supplementing with mercenaries, but that's expensive.
The economic sanctions on Russia have failed to impact their economy enough. In fact, it's basically just made Russia less exposed to economic sanctions from the west, and more in hock to the Chinese, who now provide most of their consumer goods.
I support Ukraine primarily in this matter, I support funding and arming them to resist the Russian invasion. But I also think we need to be realistic about what peace will look like absent major escalations on our part. The Ukrainians haven't been capable of recapturing their lost provinces militarily. How long should they keep fighting for territories where most of the remaining population don't really want to be part of Ukraine?
Ultimately, it is the Ukrainians who have to answer these questions, not us. At the end of the day, they still live next to Russia, and we don't. I really hope this war reaches its conclusion soon, and I hope the Ukrainians don't lose anything more than necessary. But unless the military situation changes drastically, the Russians aren't just going to give back the territory. And no one can make them without risking nuclear war. That's the realpolitik situation.
JTarrou
8mo ago
People seemed to have defined "election rigging" as specifically electronically hacking election machines to change votes.
Rather than, say, changing all the election rules using emergency powers that didn't pass constitutional muster. Or charging your opponent with seventy-odd felonies, or keeping them off the ballots in some states etc. Or co-opting the intelligence agencies to wiretap your opponents and launder your oppo research.
Or just, you know, twiddling their thumbs while some idiot takes a shot at the candidate.
But by all means, let's mock the "vibes".
JTarrou
11mo ago
neoreactionaries like hanson
lolwut.
Your evidence is a breitbart article that lumps a bunch of people into a vague category that didn't mean much back in 2016, and that category is not "neoreaction".
Says a lot more about you than it does Hanson, who isn't nearly interesting enough to aspire to neoreaction.
JTarrou
7mo ago
There's a strong element of "choose your destructor".
Trump should be the cautionary tale. Be careful who you think you want to tangle with politically. Obama probably thought that joke had no chance of backfiring. He mike dropped on national television, and then Trump made him eat it....twice.
JTarrou
5mo ago
Nah mate. He just bought high-grade fireworks. Any cheese-dick E-4 could have rigged a better IED. Reads like a protest immolation more than a terrorist attack.
The "inferior substitutes available to civilians" include gunpowder. And rigging ad hoc explosives really is Green Beret bread and butter.
JTarrou
9mo ago
The loss of institutional prestige in the SS has some downstream effects. Most notably, every crackpot in the country now knows (whether true or not) that the service is not protecting Trump, or is wildly incompetent. I would expect political assassination attempts in general to rise for a while, as nobody is scared of the talent on display from that particular agency. The myth of the secret service terminators stopped more guns than the actual service ever did.
Now? The first marginally competent goon to rock up is gonna have a field day, but apparently today is not that day.
JTarrou
4mo ago
Some amount of the variance must necessarily be the heightened definitions of bad behavior when your dating pool is feminists and other man-haters.
"Sexual assault" is one of those fun terms that depending on strict definitions may be literally any behavior.
Probably easier to get caught "sinning" when you're banging nuns.
JTarrou
6mo ago
The wages of success are that people with no physical wants often find life unfulfilling. Some subset of those people will externalize that inner psychic pain as various vague illnesses or socially-advantageous identities, some will choose eschatological fantasies to give their nihilism meaning.
Global Warming hysteria is just christian The End Is Nigh catastrophizing with extra steps. The bitter middle-class spinsters that would have become religious nuns five hundred years ago are now "transmasc". The Jain invocation that the most moral thing you could do is starve yourself to death without producing children or harming even a gnat is funneled into dietary restrictions, assisted suicide, and various anti-fun groups. It's all luxury beliefs, and it's why poorer countries are often much happier than richer ones. Struggle gives meaning, need creates community, which gives meaning. Only in rich countries are we comfortable enough to pretend a disability.
Underlying it all is a fundamentally pessimistic worldview that sees existence as not being worth the trouble. "That burden my father gave to me, but which I gave to no man". You see this on the internet with people talking about how they didn't ask to be born etc.
Camus said the fundamental philosophical question was whether or not to keep living. I tend to agree.
JTarrou
5mo ago
Anyone remember Red Wolves?
Pepperidge Farm remembers! Critically endangered, then died out, then reappeared because it's just what happens when a wolf fucks a coyote.
I was terrified as a kid when Ranger Rick magazine lead me to believe that their impending extinction would extend to all life on earth via the acid rain!
JTarrou
8mo ago
This whole thing, the NYT and your tongue bath of it, bespeaks nothing so much as two people who have never seen terminal ballistics talking ridiculous.
We should expect that, if these children are shot because they have caught stray bullets aimed elsewhere, that most of the children would be shot in places other than their head and chest.
Now why would that be? What percentage of surface area of the body is the head and torso, and how does the movement of the limbs affect their statistical chance of catching stray rounds? What's the effect of people poking their heads out to see what's happening? Is this calculation well established in the military literature? Because I've never heard of it.
And how exactly does one calculate that someone had been shot only once in the head? A rifle round through the skull will tend to pop the whole thing open like a smashed pumpkin. Could have been shot once, could have been shot fifty times. Could have not been a bullet at all, but a rock or chunk of shrapnel from an explosion. Good luck telling the difference.
This is the sort of thing that NYT journalists find impressive, the fact that you do as well speaks more to you than to anything going on in any war anywhere.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Parsimonious explanation, the first Joker was supposed to be a middle finger, but it was too balanced and hit at the right time and people liked it. So they went back to the drawing board and made a musical.
JTarrou
24d ago
How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?
Easy. Inter-sex physical combat.
And forget "teaching them to understand", this is one of those truths you have to feel in your bones. Every school could do it for gym. Perhaps Freshman year?
Feminists to the front.
JTarrou
11mo ago
My dearest wife
I opened my eyes on the last day.
It was the only thing that came to mind.
You were awake before me, as usual.
Rolled to my left and saw the same thing
I've seen for a third of my life.
The back of your head, back-lit by your phone.
I shifted closer, draped my arm over yours,
and kissed your shoulder.
You grumbled something and shrugged the arm off.
So I lay there, three inches away,
and tried not to shake while I cried.
In a few minutes, our lives are going to change.
I'm never going to walk down this hallway again,
use this bathroom, or type on this computer.
You went down to make tea and I'm writing.
When the drinks are done, we need to talk.
The papers are filed, the process server will be along.
This is not my home any more.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Forcing someone who underwent HRT and surgery and passes as female even naked to shower with the guys also seems bad.
Where does that happen? At what point in any trans person's life will they be through the transition process so well that they "pass", and also still sharing showers with sex-segregated people? I can only think of a couple, and they're either voluntary organizations that can make their own rules (like gyms) or places like prison where they don't have full civil rights anyway. What's the scenario here?
JTarrou
4mo ago
The entire analysis, from both you and Scott, is simply one level too tactical. Scott runs through all the psychological reasons why people will always push themselves into conflict with other people, regardless of the issues or the facts. And then says that mistake theory wins because many of the tactical positions taken by the two sides of an eternal conflict are essentially random.
Individual and group status competition is the constant. That is conflict theory, and it is objectively correct as the only reality humanity has ever known. Mistake theory requires something not yet observed.
The individual issues of politics are ridiculous, and the sides often change over time. Basing your view of human interaction on the irrationality of the issues obscures the reality that political conflict is inevitable anywhere there are three or more people.
We may be mistaken about the reasons, we may increase or decrease our level of conflict (social, political, violent etc.). We may change teams or stress different identities. But the conflict will always remain, because roughly half the power of any given society is balanced against the other half, and politics is the result.
All this business of trying to analyze individual political issues as "conflict" or "mistake" is very much missing the forest for the trees. The forest is at war, and always will be. The issues don't matter, they are only temporary battlegrounds for the political will of the population. There are plenty of mistakes in conflict.
Think of any long term relationship. There is always conflict, and it is rarely about whatever incident inspires a fight. There is conflict because it is two different people who have to live together. So it is in the home, so it is in the nation, so it is in the world. Our human nature forces us into conflict with each other, and we channel that into our lives and our politics. Because of our cognitive biases, we make a lot of mistakes, no matter how smart we are, or think we are.
If you want to solve a problem, you have to find ways of extricating your issue from the conflict. This can be done, in the manner Scott describes. But the conflict will go on, using different issues. Many issues that were important long ago are gone from our political conflict, but that has never stopped the politics. Once an issue is "solved" it is no longer useful. Humans are never short of things to disagree about.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Clinton was so charming that he probably could have run on a bizarro world mirror image of the package he actually ran under (protectionist, openly pro-gay marriage, doveish on the international stage etc., unlike the real Clinton) and would still have won a first or even second term.
I think this is off base. Clinton was charming, but he won his first term with a plurality because Ross Perot won 19% of the vote. And immediately he had to govern far to teh right of how he campaigned. All that "Triangulation" stuff was Clinton being a shrewd political operator and figuring out that the country didn't want his ideas, they just wanted his face and interpretations on a Republican policy platform.
The Democrats got smashed in the '94 elections (where Joe Scarborough got his start as a firebreathing Republican). Clinton made political hay out of the defeat, and it won him re-election. Welfare reform, the '94 crime bill (notice that year?) etc.
But no, there is no way in hell the people who were in power and voting back in the '90s were in any mood for very liberal policies except perhaps a narrow range of gay rights and general fun-having. If you think liberal criminal justice policies were popular the year murder peaked in the US, you didn't observe it up close.
We'd just won the Cold War, had the Gulf War and no one wanted the stern Republican daddies in charge anymore, but they certainly didn't want the policies of the seventies back. And marginal Republicans weren't as worried about the existential nuclear threat and ideological superstruggle anymore, and were willing to vote on other issues. Hence, Perot picked up a lot of people from both sides who were looking for an option to the old ideologies. Clinton was the one who wound up seizing the moment to change the policies and interest groups of the left-wing coalition, which is what is being reacted to with the current re-alignment.
Only this time it is Trump who is doing the moving around, liberalizing the old Republican doctrines that no longer serve their new political base.
JTarrou
11mo ago
Assassination seems sort of anti-democratic too though. Maybe even moreso than peacefully relinquishing power on losing an election even if you think it wasn't fair.
Now that Twitter is 50/50 left and right, and the left isn't allowed free hand to censor, it's an "echo chamber".
Seems like there's something being missed.
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