MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
I like the monthly format a bit better simply because I think the passage of time will help make the case for a post having quality and insight rather than simply being the most popular long post on a popular topic for this week. If done correctly, a quality posts should be insightful and interesting content on their own even after the heat of the moment has moved on.
I’m in agreement on the incentives both for the protests on college campuses (in which at least two students lost visas) and the mass deportations. The point is to let both the public and potential immigrants that the days of crossing into the USA and just staying forever and doing whatever you want are over.
I think long term we need some sort of expedited hearing system to prevent mistakes and allow people to question the deportation. But that can’t happen until the numbers are low enough that you can have reasonable processes. As it stands now, the legal immigranttion process is extremely difficult and takes almost a decade unless you qualify for H1B. The process for asylum is overwhelmed because everyone who gets caught knows they get to stay if they claim asylum, and they know it will take years and suspect that Congress will eventually pass another amnesty before the hearing ever happens.
Until you get this into a position where the numbers are less than what can be reasonable to have our system handle with some speed — maybe clearing the median case within 3-4 months instead of a decade — I just don’t think the logistics work.
I think it’s a specific case of the more general hyper-normalization. The west has mostly given up on even trying to make life better for citizens. Cops are barely allowed to do anything about crimes that happen in front of them, and resources are limited so there’s pretty much permission to do low level street crimes as unless the cops happen to witness actual and undeniable stealing (they basically have to watch you take something off the shelf, stick it in your pocket, and walk out the door, and aren’t allowed to give chase off the store property). If a guy is walking around looking for a car to break into — literally shining a flashlight into cars to see if there’s anything there, the cops can be standing right there, but until your window gets smashed, he’s not allowed to do anything. If you call the cops? They take a report that both you and they know will never be read, let alone investigated. And even with an arrest, prosecutors are not going to actually prosecute the crimes that don’t involve a corpse.
Other parts of society are accepted as always been shitty and will always be shitty. Schools are expected to suck, which is why almost every person of means tries to send their kids to private schools rather than public schools, and the first question anyone asks about a property is “how bad is the school district.” Nobody expects potholes fixed, or safe public transport. In fact, Americans hate public transport because unlike Europe, it’s basically a skid row on tracks, and if the stop is close to a place you care about, you’ll watch is skid row moves in. Nothing will get Americans to oppose you faster than trying to put a public bus stop or train in their safe neighborhoods as the6 know it’s a rolling skid row and it will ruin their neighborhood and basically devalue their house.
There’s also the unstated but very real issue that the entire thing hangs on the idea that those deciding to push the button have reason to care about their own country or anyone else’s still exist, and be horrified at the thought of billions of dead humans. There are all kinds of reasons why someone might not: mental illness, a belief in the eminent end of the world, being dying themselves, or fear that losing the current conflict would be worse than all of that, or a strong belief in killing enemies of God. The default assumption was and still kinda is that the person making decisions is rational.
I’m not sure if I’m a hlynkaist or not, but my feeling on tradition that im looking at specifically what I would consider Classical Western European Christian culture. I think it has more right than our own era, and much more sane ideas about leadership and social norms and Justice than we do. I don’t think that means you can’t have a more lively form of music or art or have modern technology. Just that the bedrock ideas of the late medieval period seem more sane to me.
But in order to even get back to something approaching sanity you need to knock out a lot of rotten foundation, clear out a lot of rotten furniture, and you can’t do that by degrees. If you don’t fix it, it’s going to eventually fall down. Get the contractors in and get them busy shoring up the foundation and fixing the electrical and plumbing systems. Yes it means making big holes in the walls. But painting over foundation issues just doesn’t fix the real problems.
I think if the system is fundamentally broken, you need to take radical action to fix it. And I don’t think anyone sane can look at the old status quo and say “it’s fine, actually.” I don’t see the government as functional, doing useful things, or promoting ideas that are helpful to a civilization. And if anything, most of the indicators seemed to be moving very rapidly in the wrong direction. Slowly applying the brakes means we’re still going the wrong direction, but maybe not accerating as quickly. Instead of letting in 10 million illegal immigrants this year, we let in 5 million and pat ourselves on the back despite the fact that we’re still a net positive on illegals immigrants. Maybe we slow inflation of necessary goods from 10% to 5%. Okay, but that’s still much higher than it should be. Our school students struggle internationally, and we are not only not fixing it, but doubling and tripling down on pushing Woke on kids. A lot of this stuff is broken. Making it break more slowly is not fixing it.
At this point so much of our country just doesn’t work for the median American that I think the only answer is the wrest control from tha apperachniks running the government and to bring it to heel. I’d rather end the current departments and reinvent them because it guarantees that something will actually change. The school system will go back to educating kids and away from promoting The Narrative. A welfare system that works for the truly needy without giving money to people who refuse to work. A foreign aid policy tuned to support American interests and allies, rather than simply funding every do-gooder grant project that nets an over educated elite a sinecure for 100K a year.
You’re assuming n this question that no one else can learn to cook. Or t go back to the original question, that no one other than trans-positive progressives can run museums. Libraries, or university departments. Which is not true. What is true is that through the selection process, open conservatives are weeded out, and that the constant DEI shibboleths mean that any conservatives are cowed into silence.
Destroy and rebuild works better simply because the people in power positions in those institutions have no intention of allowing anything to happen. Graham won’t be giving cooking lessons to his enemies. In those cases, it’s simply better to get rid of him and even if at first you burn the roast, you learn quickly, rather than suffer the harm while getting nothing from him.
The model of transsexuals is exactly that. It’s medical, social and even political accommodation to a reality that exists only in a person’s brain. There is nothing physical about being a transsexual. If no biological or social intervention happens, a trans woman will develop into a man from the baby boy he was born as. A trans abled person is in exactly that position of wanting society and especially the medical establishment to not only accept them, but work to make the vision of themselves a reality in the real world.
My question is with so many of these issues — where and how do you stop the creeping of the concept into more related concepts? If we accept transgender, and force everyone to play along and force doctors to do surgery and insurance companies to cover it, why not trans-canines who want a tail, why not the trans-abled who want the doctor to cut off their legs? Why not allow for transracial people to live as their desired race?
I think a good working model of mental illness must naturally include deviation from observed reality, and the best option for treatment shouter accepting the reality that exists. I am not a Korean in a white American body. I can have all the surgery and act as Korean as I want. I’m still not Korean. And if I persist in that delusion then the problem lies between my ears, not with the reality that made me German American.
I think it depends. To me, in anything science, RCT is the gold standard. There are workarounds that can be used when doing RCT is unethical due to the danger to the control group or in some cases the data is impossible to gather. In those cases other methods can work, though I generally take them to be low value and require a lot more of them done under lots of conditions before I accept the results.
The problem with “slow reform” as a process is that it rarely actually solves the problem. It’s failed often enough that I think once an institution reaches a certain point of brokenness that it’s probably better to slash burn and rebuild than to go slowly simply because going slowly often means those opposed have a chance to regroup and defend the rot in various ways. It’s why I think DOGE is absolutely brilliant— the axe is against the tree before anyone can figure out what is happening. Had it been the same sort of slo2 reform were used to — forming commissions, holding hearings, and going line by line, most of the problems— the bad science, the corruption, the waste, and the lucrative sinecures — would be quietly shuffled into other parts of the budget before DOGE could do anything. Move quickly and they cannot fight back.
And it can’t work unless there are good tenure ready conservatives with a strong background and lots of published papers that are pushing their field forward. If old progressive universities are not going to hire conservatives, they can’t get in the door, let alone be in a position to hire conservative professors. Plus, having those conservative institutions around gives the public a fair test case. If conservative leaning universities are producing more useful research, better quality education, more capable graduates, either the old guard dies off, or they are forced to compete by producing the same results.
It’s a generations long project because the liberals have long been in charge of the hiring and are looking specifically for signs or being insufficiently progressive. That’s one thing that the DEI and Land Statements and Pronouns in Signature are meant to do — weed out those who aren’t actively progressive by forcing them under threat of losing their jobs to make performative progressive statements. And until you have at least non-progressives in those hiring positions, it’s going to be really hard to get conservatives into those positions and other high powered positions.
Near term, I think it’s best to also build parallel institutions where the conservative opinion can be put out in publi.
You also have to keep in mind that the actions of the public were stymied by their own government. There was no mechanism for driving out the Pakistani rape gangs because the cops were running cover for them — to the point that today, cops waste time and resources tracking down people posting mean things about the rotherham gangs and Pakistanis in general, while still not doing much about said rape gangs.
I think vigilante justice would probably be a perfectly reasonable way to keep grooming gangs from acting openly. They’d know that if they hang around primary schools they’re going to face consequences from the community, and they … don’t do it. They know that if they touch a girl they face being hung from a telephone pole, they’re not going to be doing that. Keeping Pakistani men from being able to gain access to children, and being willing to actually punish wrongdoing is protective. And as far as im concerned, noting who is likely to do harmful things to your community and acting to keep them out is a social good.
Who’s hostile though? My perception of most of academia is that they are not going to give an “out of the closet” conservative a position, let alone a tenure track position in a university. The field has been closed to them for decades. Under such conditions, I think great claims of “conservatives, bless their little hearts, just aren’t interested in academia,” to be equivalent to claims that blacks in the Jim Crow South just weren’t interested in attending white majority schools. The system keeping black out of those schools was legal as well as cultural, while tge system keeping out conservatives is informal, but if you’re not going to be allowed into a system, your interest in going into that system tends to fall off a cliff.
One thing about the clampdown on college protests and DEI will hopefully bring is to make the campus less openly hostile to conservatives who are open about being conservatives.
I don’t think they have more insight but having more wealth means that you have the ability to retool when your industry goes AI. You can save to FIRE when it happens, you can go back to school, you can start a business, and so on. Poorer people can’t do that stuff and thus when AI takes those jobs, they’ll have very few options.
I think you accidentally hit on a pert of the appeal of this style of discussion and why it’s so popular. The people who tend to be on the left are basically overeducated and therefore have adopted the ethos of the classroom in which you are to sit and take notes and regurgitate the answers given by an authority. We’re sending most of our current crop of young adults through a system where by the time they reach full maturity, they’ve spent 20 years in school under the thumb of a teacher, and any sports they played were on teams with a coach.
I’ve had run ins with some of them when I suggest that it’s perfectly reasonable to get some education on the arts and literature by reading texts for yourself, learning to draw by simply getting some very basic instructions and doing it yourself. Or that history can be learned by … reading about history. I don’t think it’s possible to become a professional without a bit of classroom teaching. But im often shocked at how completely the very concept of autodidacts breaks modern brains when it used to be the norm. Abraham Lincoln was basically an autodidact— most lawyers of the time began by studying law on their own and taking an exam. That was it. And up until the advent of the modern Prussian model of education, even classroom instruction was more of a discussion than a lecture. It was structured, but kids were reading and talking about what they read by mathematics equivalent of high school.
This is something that often makes me fear for the future. The entire society is over structured and therefore any thinking for oneself, creativity, or initiative is being slowly ground out of society in favor of more formal education and activities.
My issue is that on the left, there’s zero pushback. When trans activists host preschool events in drag at the library, the pushback comes from Republicans, but not liberals. When BLM was burning down parts of major cities, not only were democrats not doing anything to stop it, but were giving bail money and public support to the movement. Right now in the great Tesla burnings, I’ve yet to hear one person on the left say “this has gone too far. We don’t support vandalism, and don’t harass people who own a Tesla.”
The right, to a fairly large degree rein in their radical wing. No GOP member would let a Proud Boy cover a mosque in bacon without condemning it. They don’t pay bail money for riots as a matter of course. If people March with Nazi flags, the right will scream at every opportunity from every available microphone, on every podcast and blog that they don’t support this nonsense.
And I think it’s the arrogance of having almost all of the cathedral on their side. They know they aren’t going to face blowback from the media and they know their districts are mostly safe. They don’t have to worry about their wings because they’re the ones in control.
I think honestly that for the median person, outside of their own area of expertise, you’re very likely to be wrong on most things. You might get around it somewhat by doing research, but most people, unless truly interested in a subject won’t learn more than could be covered in the first three weeks of an “introduction to [topic] course. It’s shallow.
The best way to prove this to yourself is to try to predict outcomes. If the people were rounding up and sending to El Salvador are gang members, crime should go down, right. So then go and look at what actually happens. If you’re correct about whatever you think about deportees, the crime statistics will show it. If Trump is really taking Canada, you can predict that he’ll have to eventually move assets into place to actually do that. If your understanding of the world is true, you’ll be able to get things right before they’re reported. If not, you’ll be wrong and if you’re doing motivated reasoning, probably wrong in a similar direction. I consider it basically conducting an experiment on your beliefs.
I mean I think the social contagion aspect is ignored far too often (in fact, outside of anti-trans politics it’s rarely discussed), and the working assumption is that any person, child or adult who expresses any sort of negative feelings towards their natal gender must be trans.
But especially for children this doesn’t make sense. Kids are impressionable, they tend to believe and accept what adults tell them. They’re pretty conformist as well and therefore will be quite aware of the ways they don’t fit in with their natal gender roles, they actually don’t necessarily quite understand that sex, gender, and gender roles are not all the same thing. They might well believe that being a boy means liking football and cars, not have interest in those things and instead prefer things they perceive as female, like cooking and art. Adults understand that men can like cooking and art and gardening and still be a man. But could a small child? A girl who is active and loves sports and climbing trees might well understand these as male-coded interests, and not understand that they can like those things and still be a girl.
Because the adults are pushing to normalize this, and will not only affirm but celebrate any kid who goes down that road, it’s something that might well be attractive to a kid who doesn’t fit in with the lifestyle of their natal gender. Add in the medical establishment being uncritical of anyone who claims to be trans, and the social contagion becomes a konga line to hormones and surgery.
I think this version makes sense simply because it just so happens to be a guy from The Atlantic, which is a liberal news source, but not one known for hard news. It’s just doesn’t seem like it’s the kind of newspaper that the Secretary of Defense would have on his phone. They’re mostly culture war journalists, unlike a NYT that pretends to be unbiased hard news.
Israel and Palestine are a result of the rules based international order creating a perception of a “right to an ethnic homeland, and forcing both sides into internationally coerced “ceasefires” and land swaps that have kept the two from fighting the long war they’ve been in since 1948 to its conclusion. It’s not a natural phenomenon in the least. The reason we’re still watching this flare up about every decade is that it’s a war that isn’t being finished. If the war in 1948 had been fought until capitulation as wars were until we decided that we’d rather have a series of stalemates, then one way or another it wou be over. Either Palestinians would be conquered and living under the thumb of the Jews or the reverse, but whoever lost would understand and likely accept their fate, and would consider themselves an ethnic minority in a nation rather than continuing to attempt to force a state they don’t have the military ability to actually claim. We did the same in the American south. Once Georgia was burned and looted they understood that whether they liked it or not, they were part of the United States and would remain so.
I’m a bit deeper than that. When someone uses “the science” in a political or social argument, I pretty much assume that the studies are suspect. There are just too many ways to get the results you want: funding the studies yourself, reinterpreting the results to say what you want tge results to be, p-hacking, or doing a one off study that never replicate but you won’t know that for decades. Psychology, sociology, and psychiatry are completely captured and rarely if ever do real science research in a dispassionate and objective way. Nutrition is another one that has so many vested interests that basically everyone is claiming the science shows that their product is good for you or that it doesn’t cause obesity (honestly, I think the best advice is CICO and avoid foods that your ancestors in 1900 wouldn’t have recognized as food). I think given the absolute weaponization of “the Science” as distinct from the actual scientific method and actual intellectual honesty, it’s generally best to assume great grandparents were right and the new political and social ideas are at best suspect— unless they come with serious receipts.
Trans and Covid simply revealed the rot at the bottom of academia where most science is done to further an agenda rather than to increase human knowledge.
Neutrality isn’t good simply because the needle is so fa to the left on campus that I think using antisemitism to clean house, even if overzealous, cannot help but make things better. Colleges should be places of learning and research, not places where kids become leftist anarchists. Unless those anarchic elements are removed, you really cannot get to free thought or speech. Kids are afraid of blowback from expressing even mildly conservative opinions on campus because of those mobs and in class because the professors are leftists and they need the degree for their future careers. Removing the leftists from college campuses is a good thing for free speech.
Well, so don’t go to big protests when you’re not a citizen, problem solved. It’s not even a permanent thing, just until you are granted us citizenship. It’s not asking them to take sides, to the contrary, it’s asking them to not take sides. Which I think is reasonable because you’re not a citizen, can’t vote and have literally no stake in the outcome of the political process in the USA.
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I mean I think there are limits. A real, legitimate citizen, naturalized absolutely should have every right in America as a native citizen. But when this get brought up, basically anyone who gate crashes the border is now a de facto citizen in the eyes of much of the left and of course only those terrible people on the right think such gate crashes should leave. And I don’t think that’s unreasonable. We can’t do that because we don’t have room for billions of people to come here and simply squat. They need to go home.
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