JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
11mo ago
My prediction is that everyone just fudges it and keeps discriminating. Blue states might pass some laws mandating discrimination, and they'll play the same shell game they do with gun laws. It will all get struck down, in a decade. By which time they'll have come up with a new bullshit workaround.
JTarrou
7mo ago
I think you've hit on one leg of a very important elephant.
I've noticed similar phenomena from gun clubs to veterans organizations to churches to beer-league sports. Commonly there is a life cycle, and if the initial stages are strong enough, the legacy can live on a while. But ultimately, unless external conditions are producing more of whatever fed that cause, it dies. I've noped out of a few organizations just because I didn't want to be the last guy holding the bag. When they start canvassing for board members, I'm done.
Some of it is just failing to adapt to the times, but if you adapt to the times too much, you can also crater your organization as it loses focus and splits. For example, if your Street Rod org started taking roller skates, it probably wouldn't help.
Another issue is that almost all organizations eventually end up being run by the people who can be assed to show up and do the clerical work necessary. This naturally concentrates power in the hands of a small minority who can steer the organization along their personal preferences. Occasionally this is done well, but that's a rarity.
A third is that any successful organization is going to generate good will and money, which are natural targets for idiots, grifters, con men, politicians and degenerates everywhere.
JTarrou
8mo ago
in the course of practising the profession
A tweet
appearance on the podcast
A tweet
A tweet
A tweet
Peterson’s tweet
That's your argument refuting itself.
JTarrou
1mo ago
They're not China, they're Canada.
Politically irrelevant backwater just north of an actual powerful country. Being "progressiver-than-thou" about Britain is Scotland's national identity. Just another not-really-a country making stupid laws to stick it to The Man (meaning the people who protect their borders and fund their government).
JTarrou
6mo ago
I smell statistical bullshit.
My normal standard of living has taken a noticeable if not disastrous turn. My pay is roughly the same, my costs are a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries etc.). My rent is up 30%, the value of my savings is down 20%, and the cost of buying a house is up 50%.
Three years ago I had a lot more disposable income. Now, all that might fit fine within the "economy is doing fine" narrative, but it doesn't feel fine to me. What I hear from posts like this is "economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies". I am noticeably poorer today than I was in 2020. All the statistics in the world aren't going to change that.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Naming conventions as class signifiers with implications for discussion of race, wealth, sexuality etc.
I had a form come across my desk today with a really bad name on it. Very stereotypically ghetto black, badly spelled, four middle names (one of which was “Mykween”). The name is too long for the name box on a federal form, so I had to file a supplemental sheet for it. Which got me thinking about why people name their kids stupid and stereotypical names, and what that means for the larger conversation about social divisions.
I live in a majority-minority city, I work with black people, we have lots of black customers etc. etc. There's more than one sort of black person, just as there is more than one sort of every group.
I look around my friend group and co-workers, not a one of them has a name like that. Eric, Dom (Dominic), Reggie (Reginald), Hezzie (Hezekiah), etc. Most of my black friends and co-workers have either very normal “white” names, or old fashioned/religious names. A few have african names, but that's because they're from Africa.
This is because the stereotypically “black” names are more specifically black underclass names. The working class' most serious social problem is distinguishing themselves from the underclass. So they name their kids very differently. And, in turn, if you see a black person with an african (or even better, fake african) name, a political portmanteau or a double-barreled last name, that's a middle- or upper-class thing. Hannah Nicole-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Edna Kane-Williams etc. We see similar patterns in other races, most Cletuses do not attend Harvard and the hyphenated last name is similarly an aspirational middle and upper class affectation. In addition, naming conventions change over time, so what is signalled by a name in one decade may signal something very different later. The name “Isis” dropped off pretty severely after about 2014.
This all brings to mind Scott's parable of the colored togas.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Let me illustrate by talking about a game that I was very interested in, bought, and turned out to be shit. This has nothing to do with SBI directly.
For those who don't know, the Payday series is co-op crime shooters, think first-person GTA without cars and with friends. You get heists, objectives to complete, you can do stealth or go loud etc.
Payday 2 was excellent, it still has a strong playerbase despite being released over a decade ago. I played quite a bit of it.
So they announced Payday 3 and I was ready. The initial guff I got from beta testers was that teh game was a bit janky (somewhat to be expected) and the female models had gotten ugly. There were a couple people whining about "diversity" and shit, but nobody really cared if the game was good.
Narrator voice: The game was not good. They made it permanently online, meaning you had to be connected to their servers, even to play alone. You needed a new launcher and a special Starbreeze account. And their servers didn't work. And the whole structure of the game was just......bad. It wasn't fun or engaging. Just a joyless grind-fest with no rewards. If you could even get in to play it, which you couldn't for the first three weeks of release. The relative fatness of the female characters was the least of anyone's worries. Frankly, the models weren't that bad.
The playerbase cratered after an initially decent start. Within a few weeks, the number of people playing had dropped 99%.
According to SteamDB, Payday 3 has a 24-hour peak of just 378 players compared to Payday 2's 31,866
The CEO of Starbreeze just lost his job for his role in this abortion.
And yet, lots of people who didn't play the game defend it against people who did by claiming that they just hate diversity.
It's not about the uglier female models. That's just a symptom of a deeper problem. When you see that in a game, it indicates that the game wasn't meant to be good, it was meant to tick the DEI boxes. IDGAF about the female models in isolation, but I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games. I gave the game a shot, ignoring the trolls whining about unimportant things like how fat the females are now.
Now I'm out forty bucks and I have a game that is worse in every single playable way than its predecessor. Because the studio decided that chubbing up the female models was more important than making sure the servers were functional for a permanently online game.
DEI, not even once.
https://www.ign.com/articles/starbreeze-ceo-out-after-payday-3-disaster
JTarrou
9mo ago
I think it's an interaction of a few things, a big one being an old trope about an old bear male figure coming out of retirement for one last score/mission/whatever. Most of the Bond films, most of Eastwood's ouvre, Taken, Black Samurai, True Grit, Nobody, etc. This is, at core, a male fantasy of an aging yet skilled/dangerous man become cynical about the structure his violence has served. He finds a new mission, a new cause and allows himself to be consumed by it, because it wasn't the cause itself he cared about, just the fight. Possible death is treated as penance for any misdeeds or guilt held over from the first, less moral cause, an opportunity for redemption. It's a moralistic view of male violence, a feeling that those who live by the sword should die by it.
Now let's add to this Hollywood's complete inventive drought. They have no ideas and so are resurrecting old franchises left and right to try to get some content. This means a lot of old white male protagonists who have to be dealt with somehow, and half the story is already written. So, Han/Luke have to hand things off to new actors. Cheaper actors. Newer actors who fit the social and political prejudices of the elites, which is mostly anti-white racism and class snobbery.
It is sometimes done well (Gran Torino is a top-5 all timer IMO). But these days, few directors have the chops of Eastwood, the writing has gone to hell in a handbasket, and so we get this cheap propaganda about how all the old heroes are shit and need to be replaced by strangely competent kids who somehow never have a thing to learn or struggle at. This is then sometimes mapped onto racial lines because, well, racist elites. But they do it with gender as well, see the aforementioned Star Wars, the current Indiana Jones etc.
This pattern repeats. An old property, a white male protagonist and some sort of minority successor. We started with Harrison Ford, but we're getting Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and just the name tells you everything you need to know. The woke-washing is at least partially a defense mechanism because they know the products are terrible and rehashed, likely to generate criticism. Moralizing about their artistic vapidity is the best defense they have.
JTarrou
5mo ago
People don't change. Despite every generation thinking they're the first ones to ever apply intelligence and morality to the problems of the world, they are not. The people who live today are the exact moral equivalents of Salem, or Mao's China, or interwar Germany. They're just pushing their bigotries, hatreds and moral panics along different channels. It has always been this way and always will be. We cannot predict which issues will rise to salience, but we can predict with absolute certainty the psychology and behavior of the people in aggregate.
I believe the current mishmash is a religious void being filled by various cults, one of which will eventually rise to prominence and challenge "traditional" (whatever that means) christianity for the default belief system of western civilization. The "In this house, we believe...." posters are the early adherents.
Re-read your Hoffer if you want to know how it's going to play out.
JTarrou
9mo ago
Amnesty International
Why are they painting benches in randome eastern european towns?
JTarrou
5mo ago
I doubt you can extrapolate much from a year or so of missed recruiting goals in a strong job market.
But there might be a kernel of truth that the sort of people who generally staff the pointy bits of the military are increasingly skeptical of their role as the enforcers of a world order that is explicitly hostile to them, their families, states, politics and demographics.
We know very little directly, but what we do have from the bronze age in terms of written inscriptions is mostly kings boasting about how many thousands of people they killed in various inventive and horrifying ways, how many they carried off into slavery and how many they sacrificed to various deities. This was the propaganda being put out to impress the populace, which says something about the public morals of the day. And the fact that there were several empires maintaining major standing armies, all our evidence points to a time of significant, regular state violence on a mass scale. Many of our remaining bronze age-era human remains were killed, and many of the ones that weren't have healed wounds from repeated violence. Even Pharaohs were sometimes bashed in the head with a mace.
It may be the case that in the smaller societies which left much less historical footprint, violence was less than in settled cities. No way to really tell for sure. What we have says that these people were far more violent than most modern states before the collapse. Then things got worse.
A sample inscription from an Assyrian king:
In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of the heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.
JTarrou
3mo ago
Technology as politics.
Feminism is more a product of the washing machine, the pill and air conditioning than it is political organizing. It is less an ideology than it is a set of opinions enabled by a certain level of technological advancement.
Anti-racism is more a product of the steam engine than it is of any moral progress. All of human history no one thought to free the slaves, until one day from out of nowhere.....the richest and most technologically advanced society on earth invented a way to turn fossil fuels into energy and all the sudden slavery and the racism that supported it isn't strictly necessary. Hence "moral progress".
Today, we all benefit from less-than-free labor in third world nations making us cheaper consumer products. In the most technologically backward parts of the world slavery still exists. That is not because those are worse people than those of us who can afford to pay for the labor that supports our first world lifestyles.
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
What this means for the age of AI is anyone's guess.
JTarrou
6mo ago
This is a real key issue that I haven't been able to get anyone to bite on when I raised it before. Exactly what are the features of a group with the right to claim territory and "self-determination"? Is it races? Ethnic groups? Language groups? Any group with the military muscle to make it stick? How long does how much of a group have to live in an area before they have a "right" to the land? How long does that "right" last after they leave?
Everyone acts like there is a set of good definitions and well-established international law here, but there just isn't.
JTarrou
2mo ago
A world in which we go from a significant Hispanic and African American Ivy League admissions rate to one that is virtually zero would not be tolerated by the existing social order.
We already have that. Virtually no poor black americans wind up in the Ivy Leagues. The children of wealthy black immigrants do. The children of foreign elites who are also black, or "hispanic" or asian do. Not the actual struggling communities here.
Your whole structure is built on the social identification of poor black americans with much richer, more educated and very culturally distinct groups based on nothing more than skin color.
Yes, so long as black americans think the reason they aren't getting into Yale is that Yale hates black people, not poor people, this will not be tolerated. But that's an assumption that could change quick.
JTarrou
30d ago
Ok depressives, hop in.
For once on this forum, I'm really going through it in my personal life. Been a tough winter. Grandparents are dying in slow motion. Marriage is imploding. PTSD is acting up. Even broke down and went to the VA to see a therapist. That was back in January, they've scheduled me to see someone to evaluate whether I should talk to a therapist sometime in May. You know, normal bureaucracy.
I'm in my mid forties and my life is coming apart at the seams.
But lads, this is my year. One way or another, it's going to end better than it began. As bad as things are right now, I am entirely confident in my ability to turn it around.
To psych myself up a bit, I want to talk about my luckiest day. The real hinge point in my life. The reason I'm talking to all of you, or to anyone at all. A dummy-rigged IED just outside Iskandaria nearly twenty years ago.
Just wasn't injured badly enough. Hadn't planned on living. I was clawing my way up the ranks of the pointy bit of the US imperial project. The whole point was to get as high as possible before my luck ended and I bled out in some dingy alleyway or Afghan hillside. My luck though, was even better.
By a combination of the vast sums of money America spends on protecting its troops, and the inferior grade explosives used by the Iraqis, the rocket that should have killed me by any rights instead fizzled. I was left “disabled”, but not enough to feel sorry for myself about. Given the options, of course.
A lot changed that day. My career was over, and with it identity and status. I wasn't going to get to die. I was going to have to live, broken. And be a civilian. Took me a few years to get my head around it. The plan was always live fast, die young.
I had to change. Adapt. Re-orient. Re-motivate. Learn new skills. I spent twenty-five years becoming someone, and then I had to become someone else.
I gotta say, it's been excellent. Even with current troubles, I've had another twenty years with my grandparents, reconciled with my parents, seen my siblings grow up and grow families of their own. Met a great woman, and we had ten good years. I've been happier (and sadder) than I ever thought possible at twenty-five.
This is all bonus round for me. I should have died a long time ago. I've been hurt worse, I've rebuilt from less.
Yes, it sucks right now. Currently at “forcing myself to leave the house” stage, and started crying in public at my boot guy's place yesterday. It's gonna be a long year, but I'll get there.
Life is pain, anyone tells you different is selling something.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Neither. Polygamy is generally hyper-fertile, but polygamy as practiced in the Bay Area by socially awkward screen addicts seems not to be.
Probably more about the selection effect and less about the polygamy.
JTarrou
5mo ago
Lot of projection going on here.
Perhaps you'd like to hear it from the Hamas spokesman in an official interview with the NYT?
I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times
From a member of their Politburo (an apt name, I might add)
“Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr. al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”
“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”
JTarrou
6mo ago
All interesting enough, but Dick Heller still doesn't have a carry license twenty years after filing his lawsuit and fifteen after winning it, so it's all navel-gazing.
The Supreme Court does not enforce their decisions, and the lower courts are in full revolt.
They can lose every case and yet the law of the land remains in direct opposition to the SC decisions.
It's almost as if the court system is as much LARP as congress.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Perhaps. That's one option.
Another is that economics is staffed by the same sort of experts who run our health care systems, legal systems and educational systems. They went to the same schools, drank the same koolaid, attend the same parties and conferences, belong to the same socioeconomic strata. Maybe Gell-Mann Amnesia is creeping up on you.
Anecdote is small data, but it's the only data I can be sure isn't horseshit.
JTarrou
11mo ago
Same thing happens in all empires, even faded ones like Britain. The core ethnicity that drove the success of a nation is eventually cut off from power and replaced with outsiders, loyal only to the power at the center. The golden age of Ottoman expansion was also the era that native Turks began to be resolutely marginalized within the halls of power and replaced with mostly european renegades, captives, slaves and wives. Over time even the sultan became more and more genetically european, as that's who filled the harems. They maintained a native elite, related to the cavalry forces, and with paths into the imperial bureaucracy, but the mass of Turkish people were entirely estranged from their massive empire.
We can see the same story told throughout history, in Rome, Persia, even Russia. Multi-ethnic societies/empires recruit from the margins and marginalize the majority, because powerful members of the majority are a threat to central power. A powerful member of 1% of the population ain't raising shit. Part of this process is teaching the native elites to hate and fear their own people.
JTarrou
9mo ago
There's a lot of equivocation between words like "Talent", "Merit", "Virtue", but those are all vague terms that are not operationalized. And we're talking about a circular set of definitions when it is. As I've said before, because we use academics as our social sorting mechanism, the ability to do well in school is generally what we're talking about when we say things like "talent" or "merit". And the ability to do well in school is pretty well measured by IQ tests.
But is IQ really "merit"?
Wild aggression and physical violence used to be "merit". Religious devoutness used to be "merit". Having an illustrious bloodline used to be "merit". IQ is no better or worse.
All systems think of themselves as "meritocratic", it's just a matter of what they're optimizing for. To the degree that meritocracy gets at something real, it will by necessity fill the lower ranks of society with those who are low in whatever that characteristic is. And this will be in some cases unjust and counterproductive.
To structure society such that intelligence is privileged over every other human trait is to create a very dumb underclass, and to reduce the average intelligence of the working class as many of the smart kids are siphoned off to the middle classes. It also naturally creates a social division between those who meet the arbitrary and changing benchmarks for "education", and those who do not.
I think universities should be required to choose their student body by setting a SAT cutoff, and having a lottery among applicants who meet the minimum score. Completely blind, random selection. I also think that the university system should be radically smaller than it is, and no more than ten percent of HS graduates should attend. It should also be illegal to use academic information in hiring.
Two things are true:
1: IQ really does measure academic potential and should be used to cull the group trying to get into academia.
2: We overemphasize academics and could do a lot better socially in promoting definitions of merit that are not so limited.
JTarrou
9mo ago
Concepts like "structural racism" and "intersectionality" have drifted far from what was essentially a reasonable concept. Weaponized in the culture wars, terms like this now signal tribal allegiance more than explanatory power.
First and foremost, there must be an understanding that structure and hierarchy are part of society and cannot be eliminated. This, combined with human nature, ingroup/outgroup dynamics etc. means that competition and group conflict are inevitable and ineradicable. But, these forces can be channeled into less destructive arenas, sometimes even turned on themselves to produce positive outcomes.
On the concept of structural racism, perhaps it can help to think of it in slightly shifted terms. What if, instead of the structure itself being a product of evil thoughts, the structure produces the racism (such as it is). Any leftist worth their salt should be able to grok the concept that groups in conflict with one another for economic or status reasons will develop ideologies to support that conflict. If one desires a multicultural society in which each group maintains a distinct culture, this basically guarantees group conflict at an ethnic or racial level. This in turn will absolutely produce ethnic/racial tensions and resentments, which will inevitably produce some amount of racism (for a relatively broad definition of that term). This is a fundamental tension of human society. Multiculturalism by its very nature and existence produces cultural conflict, which will usually map onto ethnic or racial lines.
The conflict cannot be avoided, but it can be moved by social policy to other arenas. If through base facts or policy, a political state maintains a racial or ethnic monoculture, the conflicts will simply happen along other axes, economics, class, nationalism, religion etc.
If we already have a multicultural society, then our work must be to mitigate ethnic and racial disputes rather than eliminate them. By our structure, it is inevitable. The good news is, we're pretty good at suppressing these conflicts, but going maximalist on the issue of personal racism makes the perfect the enemy of the good. Racism cannot be eliminated for the same reason greed or anger cannot be eliminated. Utopianism is a youthful error. No one who expects to "eliminate racism" can be thought of as remotely politically serious.
Right now, the energy of the left seems to be pushing ever further into the concept that government should not be a neutral broker between groups, but an advocate and rebalancer for the underprivileged. Attempting to precisely fix cherry-picked historical wrongs only exacerbates teh current disputes going on, and it corrupts any attempt for honest reform, as it has structuralized the inequality.
Using the government as a vehicle to rectify ethnic injustices inevitably is captured by powerful interests and used in ways that do not benefit the purported beneficiaries. See things like affirmative action, which privileges a few rich immigrant kids to "diversify" the ruling class without diversifying its class structure or political culture. Harvard has an endowment the size of Croatia's GDP. It is not going to be the vehicle of proletarian change.
This is where intersectionality and the concept of race as a construct is perhaps useful. Rather than monoliths, ethnic minorities have their own status structures and hierarchies. They do not lose those entirely when coming to another country or culture. "Diversity" cannot be purely a skin color thing, an honest understanding of intersectionality must also account for class, sex, sexual preference, attractiveness, physical ability, intelligence etc. etc. These complicated structures of identity interact with each other in ways so complex as to defy human comprehension. We can generalize but not understand fully. What we cannot logically or morally do is assign a morally hierarchical ideology to such a dense topic, much less produce good policy from such an absurd undertaking.
So long as "diversity" just means non-white-male, it is useless and counterproductive. So long as "structural racism" just means an absurd accusation of racism with no basis in reality, it is useless and counterproductive. If thought of with honesty and good faith, these concepts can be useful, and inform progressive politics in more positive directions than it is currently headed.
JTarrou
10mo ago
This is not new, it's been law and policy for fifty years at least. A fair few of the guys I served with were getting papers that way. If you're mad about it now, you haven't been paying attention.
All that said, the pointy end of the military is mostly born citizens (a lot of Puerto Ricans), mostly white, mostly southern. Texas alone is probably a quarter of all infantry units.
This sensible advice will always founder on the rocks of female sexuality. Women do not want to be safe, they do not want safe men, and if the literature they consume is any clue, practically every "romance" novel has a positively described rape scene in it. Rape is simultaneously a hideous crime and the central sexual fantasy.
Gay guys don't want to catch HIV, but they want to do all the stuff that produces that outcome. Straight dudes don't want to get stabbed by a crazy girlfriend, but they definitely want all the stuff that produces that outcome. We are all enslaved by our own sexuality to a greater or lesser degree. Some people don't have much trouble with it, but it's a reliable failure mode of humanity.
More options
Context Copy link