JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Some times Charlie was in the trees.
User ID: 4009
When in doubt go over the top, that's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it has been working out pretty well so far.
We got the marketplace of ideas back.
I was not aware that we had lost it.
If you want something less abstract, there is now a general consensus among serious people that demographic performance differentials (whether or not they are genetic or environmental in origin) are real. The idea that all measured gaps are artifacts of testing bias or an unjust economic system did not withstand public scrutiny.
This is just the intersectionalists being forced to retreat from "the bailey" to "the motte". Yes "the blues" have suffered some setbacks and are currently backpedaling, but there is still a ways to go before we can reasonably claim victory.
What you don't seem to grasp is that we don't have to theorize about what sort of state or policies "American Blues" would enact if given free rein, we can just look at what they've done in the places where they have free rein.
I'm pretty sure that if you took a random sample of 20 car accidents and compared it to a random sample of 20 aviation accidents the fatality rate of the latter would would be substantially higher than the former regardless of whether former are more common.
The pilot can die and an airplane can fly for hours before it crashes.
Conversly you can accidentally kill yourself and 66 others by entering an incorrect barometer setting.
It's not that flying is particularly difficult or dangerous but rather that as the old quote goes "to an even greater degree than the sea, it is unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."
A barrel roll is a simple 1g maneuver if executed correctly but that "if" is load-bearing.
As much as modern aircraft may effecively fly themselves it is still in the interests of everyone both in the air and on the ground that those who are less diligent be kept out of the cockpit. You may not like it, but there is a clear rationale to the FAA's rules.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
East Germany and Russia are not at all representative of the kinds of states American "Blues" would set up given free reign.
Wisconsin is though.
If we want to know what "blues" would set up if given given free reign we need only look to Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and all the other places there the Democrats are able to run an effectively single party state.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
Is this true? Obama would seem to be the leading brand. And he definitely played the DEI game.
Regarding Obama, I have had an old Chicago Lawyer tell me something to the effect that "It's a good thing the man pivoted to politics because he couldn't write a brief to save his life". Beyond that see my reply to @Botond173 above.
I’m guessing what made her furious is her likely and also correct assumption that the normalization of female quotas results in the public perception that the average newly hired female engineer is more likely than not to be an underperforming DEI hire.
Again this is purely anecdotal, but I have spoken to multiple black lawyers and female engineers, who after a few drinks will go on a tear about how DEI stands for "Didn't Earn It" and about how in their ideal world the supporters of such policies would be "first against wall". This experience is what prompted my original reply.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
Again this is purely anecdotal but in my experience nobody doubts "the Supergenius", and as such they don't care. It's more often the guys (and gals) who could have plausibly made the cut on pure merit but then get dismissed as "diversity hires", because it's not immediately obvious that they are not, who seem to develop chips on their shoulders.
I am genuinely kind of angry at you right now because I had actually was thinking about writing a post about about this myself, I just hadn't figured out what my thesis was going to be, and having finished reading your post I still do not know what yours is.
Speak planely dammit.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1d ago
And converting all matter in the universe to paper-clips neatly solves that problem.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
The thing that I hated most about the Silicon Valley scene, and one of the things that ultimately drove me to leave, was the pervading assumption that a high score on the verbal portion of the SAT or an online IQ test somehow proves that one is a good and moral person.
I have learned through experience that I would rather share my neighborhood with a dozen people with room-temperature IQs who are genuinely happy to be here than I would with one genius misanthrope.
It was originally a satire/reductio-ad-absurdum of Clinton-era culture war nonsense, but then fell victim to Muggeridge's Law during the Obama era. Still a fun movie though, if you really are a fan of the genre (as I am) I recommend it. The funny thing about men is that when you're nice to them they bring you things
Serious question, do you believe that whether or not a person is "white" is something that I should care about more than whether or not they want me dead?
I don't think I need to be a "right-winger" or "base my ideas on moronic progressive polemics about race" to notice a thing that is happening.
Though perhaps not quite as "black-pilled" as they are, my feelings mirror those of @FCfromSSC. What good is "Shared civilization, culture, blood" to me when weighed against having to share a space with people who actively wants me, my family, and everyone who shares my cultural beliefs dead? Is it really even a shared civilization or culture at that point?
Those are the questions that I am trying to get at when I ask whether someone of European descent who votes for a progressive is really "white"?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6d ago
A common refrain when the Jussie Smollett story (along with assorted other hoax hate crimes) collapsed was that, among white progressives, the demand for racist hate crimes now exceeded the supply, such that they had little choice but to invent them from whole cloth, or at least avoid asking difficult questions about those that had been invented. So too, it seems, in academia: the demand for talented academics from minority ethnic backgrounds (and if they have disabilities too, all the better) exceeds the supply, such that they have no choice but to hire academics who have burnished exaggerated invented their credentials. It seems like an inexorable law of the universe: whenever an institution begins optimizing for something other than merit, it's only a matter of time before the liars and cheats begin clawing their way in.
Anecdotally, genuinely talented minorities tend to be the people most opposed to DEI policies as they see DEI as an effort to undercut their status and accomplishments. They also tend to have more lucrative opportunities available to them than anything academia can offer them.
Obviously. "Blue tribe progressives" are white people
Is it Obvious? I'm not convinced that it is.
If we take the intesectionalist's characterization of "whiteness" as something pervasive and systemic that must be dismantled (see the infamous "Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness in the United States" graphic) than whiteness isn't about race, it is about culture, specifically Western Culture. This is why Blue tribe progressives feel comfortable accusing Tuskegee University of perpetuating colonialism and white-supremacy for banning Crocs and requiring 1st year students to wear a shirt and tie, and describing men like Clarence Thomas, and Michael Jordan as race-traitors for essentially being southern and conservative.
Point being that if we accept that if an individual of African descent who votes for a conservative "aint Black" than it stands to reason that individuals of European descent who vote for progressive candidates are not really "white", and I feel like the current trajectory of UK politics and European politics more generally would seem to bear this supposition out.
Do you think the difference (if there is one) matters?
The ally of my enemy is my enemy's ally.
This principle holds true regardless of whether we're talking about Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, Nazi Germany and the Vichy French, Ephialtes and the Persians, or specific Mottizens and Third World Islamists.
I don't care why @hydroacetylene chose to support El-Sayed, I care that that he chose to support him
You want my thoughts?
My thoughts are that allying yourself with the enemies of western civilization to gain a marginal advantage in an intra-tribal squabble isn't the brilliant flex that you and @hydroacetylene seem to think it is and that anyone remotely familiar with the last decade of US political history ought to recognize the obvious failure mode.
Kolomogrov complicity is still complicity.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7d ago
For the record I do not think that "even high salaries would not be sufficient to fill the vacancies" so much as I suspect that there are a lot of people here who would object on principle to the idea of sanitation workers being well-paid.
A reasonable point, but at the same time my reply to you would closely mirror your reply to @SophisticatedHillbilly about socially necessary jobs.
Some jobs are just naturally undesirable, and by extension "low status". There are a lot of people who will object to a "low status" (undesirable) job paying more than a "high status" (desirable) job on basic principle because in their minds money is a proxy for status. That in turn feeds into the question of whether you can hire a sufficient number of sanitation workers in a world you are neither willing to pay them a middle class salary nor are you willing to shoot and/or starve them.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7d ago
A personal sense of "justice" imposed on a society that disagrees with your notion is just tyranny.
Yes, but to riff off of Robert A. Heinlein, the laws of gravity and thermodynamics may be unjust and tyrannical but that doesn't make them any less real.
There's a saying in the trucking industry, "if you don't change your tires in the depot, you'll be changing them on the side of the road". By the same token, if you don't police your own, your own will be policed for you. If you want to live in a country where justice values "human dignity", a "fair trial" and the "presumption of innocence" you need to actively provide those things because if you don't you will find yourself living in a country where "justice" is the village strong-man a chopping off a thief's hand and then nailing it to a post outside the market as a warning to others.
What exactly do you think the difference between minimal and maximal entropy is?
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