MaiqTheTrue's profile

MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 3d ago

To a fairly large degree most protesters are some form of LARPer at least in the sense that they don’t care enough about the cause at hand to risk any serious consequences.

The biggest factor is the bubbles. In the old days, radicalism was harder to create and maintain because you had to essentially remove the person you wanted to radicalize from sanity checks that happen from non-radicalized people around the person. This is why old religious cults often encouraged members to cut off old relationships and only cult members remained for social connections. You also want to make the person’s thought process as much as possible about the thing you’re radicalizing the person on. So with a religious cult, you’d see this radicalized person seeing almost everything through the lens of the religion in question.

The problem we have at the moment is that the tools to do this are in everyone’s pocket and available all the time. A person who is in a liberal social media bubble often has very few people online that are not liberals (the same is likely true of hard right conservatives as well). They often block anyone who disagrees, stop listening to media that doesn’t support their biases, and spend hours watching videos about conservatives saying or doing something that looks evil to them.

Personally I don’t think that if we lived in the media environment of 1986 you’d see much of a protest. Our problems, in context of other historical crises across the globe and through history simply are not that bad. We have stable currency, nearly full employment, and our biggest food problem is obesity. Most real radical moments come from serious sustained economic problems much more serious than our current situation. You’d need things to essentially be really really bad before people are ready to upend society. In an environment where you could not saturate yourself in a radicalization bubble, you don’t have enough problems to convince people to blow up society over politics.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 4d ago

I think in large degree the ability of random people being able to take incriminating video is making this stuff more likely. In 1980, you couldn’t call CPS on a kid playing alone, you could not film a kid playing unsafely and send it to CPS. If you were going to report something you had to go home to do it. And I think like a lot of other things, removing barriers makes that stuff happen more often.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 4d ago

But again do they? The sports that generally matter to ordinary people are the ones with their own leagues outside of Olympic hype. Manchester United or Kansas City Chiefs can sell out a stadium for an early season league match. People follow the NHL or MLS and certainly MLB. Even things like World Cup don’t need to create a false hype around soccer because millions of people genuinely like to watch it. The Olympic Games both summer and winter have to sort of gin up interest for sports that few people organically care about — as evidenced by the complete lack of interest shown between games. There are track and field events between colleges under the NCAA, as well as gymnastics competitions, swim meets, fencing, and so on. There are Tae Keon Do events between dojangs all the time. Outside of family and friends, very few people care. That’s not making a sport matter, it’s just a hype machine, and I think the fall off is evidence that the hype machine can no longer get people to follow sports that they don’t actually care about.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 7d ago

I’m not saying the sports aren’t tolerable to watch, mostly that if the networks were not hyping and force feeding the public on these events, very few people would seek them out. Most colleges have swimming, diving, and gymnastics. Some have fencing. But other than participants and their social groups, no one seems interested. There’s no sell out fencing bouts. Fencers are not hounded for interviews after a match. It’s not a sport most people care about.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 8d ago

I think most of the hype was always somewhat overblown, but the media got to force feed the plebs sports culture by airing sports nobody really cared about in prime time. The era is passing mostly because with infinite choices, no one is forced to watch anymore.

These sports, such as they are, were available via streaming services at any point. Europe has her own skating championships, America has skating competitions. What ratings do they get outside of the Olympics? It’s not high enough to warrent prime viewing on any major sports network. The same for skiing and curling and snowboarding. No one watches them the 3.5 years between Games. It’s just that for this one 2-week period, the mainstream TV networks are obliged by tradition to air and cover these events as if anyone was breathlessly watching for the results of Team Figure Skating or slope-style snowboarding. Not many people really do, but it was a tradition.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 12d ago

Sort of. I see the average rank-and-file person more or less playing Knighthood in the manner of Don Quixote— it’s not so much that they even care about the cause as often as they care about the images of themselves as the heroes of a great drama opposing the big bad. If you really want to make it hard for the government to find illegal immigrants, it’s seem rather obvious that moving some to the suburban white neighborhoods the protestors hailed from would be much more effective than showing up with signs around the all Latin neighborhoods where ICE will find them. Or quietly donating to a legal charity for immigration lawyers. But those aren’t sexy or require actual sacrifice without validation.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 14d ago

The issue I have isn’t that they’re making noise or something to get attention. It’s that they have little interest in a message let alone any message discipline. The 1960s Civil Rights Movement, had all of those things. They had a clear message and agenda and everything they did was in service to those ends. The counter sit ins worked because it was disruptive, but it was also a quiet but powerful protest because the point was that no one should get served unless everyone does, and they were willing to be arrested to get that message out. Even the Rosa Parks incident had been carefully set up — in fact there was another woman who was refused the privilege of being the woman who refused to give up her seat because she had skeletons in her closet and they needed the credibly that a woman with a clean past would give to the movement. It wasn’t random people blocking cars, there was a message and the planning happened to get the message out and use that message to get an actual change. It was entirely predicated on making a real change and worked to achieve it.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 15d ago

I’m personally very close to the position most of my fairly long lived grandparents and my great grandma thought about things, which is that most of this is just weird overthinking of systems that work just fine without needing to fuss over the very fine details of nutrition and exercise. Maybe you’ll add a percent or two to your longevity, but that’s it.

The best advice they gave me was simply to eat homemade and less processed foods, three reasonably sized meals a day, and make half of your plate veggies. As far as exercise, while they did move around a lot, it was mostly going out and doing active things with friends or to simply enjoy life. It wasn’t a thing that was quantified, it was a childhood spent skating and dancing and playing sports like baseball and football or swimming. I don’t think people need to reach perfect Vo2 to benefit from exercise. Just going out and doing active things for fun should be plenty and because they are more fun they’re much easier to stick with. It’s much easier to get off the couch and play in a community soccer or baseball league or go dancing.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 15d ago

Concerning the @Catsnakes_ comments about the gamification of the two opposing sides of the protest movements, I see a lot more of a narrative forward thinking in those movements. The Left has long since taken on the roles that have long been associated with scrappy underdog rebels from Three Amigos to Star Wars and Revenge of the Nerds. They look in the mirror and cast themselves into whatever roles suit them in that narrative. And they seem to lack the self awareness to understand the substantial differences between being a movie rebel and being an actual real rebel. The differences are obviously stark, starting with real rebels needing to do actual unsexy work, needing to keep quiet about their membership in such a group, etc. But of course this misunderstanding and ignorance extends to the dangers of actually rebelling which, historically has lead to deaths. What’s funny is that as an outsider looking in, im not even sure of the actual game plan. They’re showing up and they’re blowing whistles (like exactly what is that doing? The ICE agents don’t seem to be sneaking in), blocking roads, holding signs. Early into the Trump presidency, there was the viral idea that if there were 300K protesters “resisting” (and the term was very loose, including sidewalk protests that featured bouncy houses and DJs. Yes, No Kings block parties counted as resistance.), that apparently the Trump Nazi MAGA regime would just disappear into the ether. All of this makes sense from a narrative standpoint. There’s no need to have a plan because in the movies just the mere fact that you show up and stand up to the Big Bad is enough to win.

The right has a similar narrative on their side of perhaps the Red Dawn or other invasion movies. The idea being that they’re insurgents fighting back against Big Elites who want to destroy the country from within using various front groups. And again outside of Trump I don’t think a lot of the people on the Right have much of a clue of how to actually get things to happen.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 26d ago

I don’t think that changes things too much simply because politicians and those running the program have a great opportunity to create the grift. Maybe requiring proof of citizenship every X years, or rather than mail the checks or direct deposit require people to go to the office to pick up the checks all of which will require staffing. Maybe they will require proof that you are an upstanding citizen (required drug testing, proof you aren’t a felon, etc.) all of which provides ample room for graft. Maybe this can be kept low enough to be less than current day welfare and make-work projects, but I suspect it will end up being as bad.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 26d ago

UBI would likely be handled by the government so I don’t see the point. If distributions of this type cannot be handled without the corruption, then I see no reason to assume that the next government distribution schemes will do better.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 26d ago

I mean to me the biggest hole in her hagiography is that nobody to my knowledge has ever tried to explain how the wonderful mother who dropped her kid off at school on her birthday ended up in her car blocking traffic and accosted by ICE agents to the point where she is trying to drive away. She clearly put herself there for some reason, and did so understanding that something was going down. So where is she getting that information? Why did she think she personally needed to be there? Why did she think to block traffic?

I suspect she’s a part of some larger group, one that sees itself as “the resistance”. And I think this is the real story— that a lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum are being radicalized and weaponized by groups of political activists pushing fear porn and the idea of them as “the rebellion” as in Star Wars. And until the swamp of radicalization is drained, there’s always a reserve army of ideologically possessed people ready to act on that perception of reality they’ve been fed in their echo chambers. It’s hard to do because the groups are generally smart enough to stay just inside the lines of acceptability while heavily implying the things that would drive people to actually go do something about the “bad guys” of choice. That’s what the fascism narrative is about — every child over four knows Nazis are evil, and has heard the hagiography of those who “resisted” — often with the costs removed. Calling someone a Nazi in the post WW2 era is like telling a bunch of medieval peasants that someone or some group desecrated the host at the church. The point is to create the hatred and ultimately the violence while keeping their hands clean by not saying “attack those people”.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 1mo ago

Do those jobs provide liveable wages? I mean I get that we have some sort of “jobs” for stupid people, but they generally don’t pay enough to live on let alone have a family or not need roommates etc. especially when compared to things like skilled labor.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 1mo ago

I think the worst aspect of “not noticing” in various ways is that it harms the person with lower capacity the most. When we can’t acknowledge that not every kid is going to be successful in college, that doesn’t hurt those who will be fine in college, but those who won’t. We can sort of cheat them through (combinations of grade inflation and easy majors can probably get anyone within 1σ of normal to a diploma) but even then, they cannot do that level of work, and worse, they graduate with outsized expectations (I graduated therefore I get a nice middle class job, right? Right?) but with no actual skills they can actually trade for a decent living. Now instead of the dumb kids learning carpentry and roofing, they pretend to learn Literature and graduate with no skill at all. Further, there’s no real plan for how to employ those with limited ability. Most of those jobs are either gone to computers and machines or to immigrants or shipped off to Pakistan. Even if we start recognizing that Johnny is stupid, there’s no place in the economy for him, nor is there a welfare program for him. He’s either going to hustle (probably in some form of illegal way) or starve or get hooked on drugs and hopefully take himself out.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 1mo ago

I feel like in a lot of ways the questions around tyranny and anarchy sort of dance around the actual issue which is what a government is actually for. Why do we have one, why do we want one, what is the government supposed to do. And really I think until you answer that question in a way that makes sense, asking whether or not something is dangerously tyrannical or anarchistic is simply booing a given government or government action.

To sort of answer my own question, I see government as a sort of political operating system— the point isn’t to directly solve most problems, but to provide the necessary stability and infrastructure that allow other institutions: churches, civic groups, businesses, and so on to provide services to society. Now that sort of changes the way you’d think about crime policing. You’d want the government to keep the crime rate as low as possible without unduly interfering with the ability of people to organize and solve problems or do things. Putting up huge roadblocks at every corner would probably solve crime, but it would absolutely destroy the ability of people living in the city to do pretty much anything useful. Having no police presence would allow people to do things in theory, however because there are no cops, the crime rate is too high for it to be safe to do things. You can kind of apply the same lenses to other problems like business law (if you don’t have any, social trust is impossible, too many laws mean that almost all people are too busy with compliance to actually do anything useful) or health and environmental laws. A good government would be stable, but mostly invisible and provide known safety and security measures and predictable laws enforced predictably such that it’s mostly just there but invisible to end users.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 1mo ago

I think this is generally a good approach to most things health. Don’t worry about numbers or apps and just generally aim at doing generally good things and stop trying to minmax your stats.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 1mo ago

I’m thinking largely in the fact that they have a society that values hard work, achievement, and education. Their government is working towards stability and growth and is generally run by people who understand how things work and how to achieve those ends. I think the issues of TFR are probably temporary in most societies and that eventually we’ll work through how to get more babies.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 1mo ago

I see history less in terms of individual actors and more in terms of the raising of ideas and other social forces that nudge things in general directions. Personally, I think the future will be dictated more by the decline of the West and Western ideas that simply cannot meet the moment, social forces that drive western countries off various cliffs, and bad social memes that cause chaos and bring about poor outcomes for humans who absorb those bad social memes.

My prediction is that the furvor is a symptom of a coming Soviet-style collapse of the Anglo-sphere centric West where the countries in question will still sort of kick along, but much reduced in power and influence, and under the economic and social power of other countries. The future, I think may well be East Asian much like tge seat of civilization was Islamic after the collapse of Rome.

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