MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
It wasn’t a Twitter hate mob. The thing is that in the case of Peterson, they basically got him turned out of university, forced him into choosing between “training in woke” and not being able to practice psychology. And this wasn’t Twitter, a lot of the hate came from news media, political pundits, the students at his university. Basically he was fortunate to have popularity with young men and thus could still earn a living.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think like everything else it goes in cycles. The modern age (basically since the 1860s has been a time of Cthulhu swimming left, but there are other periods in which Cthulhu was swimming rightward. The rightward swings tend to happen in times of cris, but they do happen.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I don’t think conservatives have been in the cultural drivers seat since at least the 1970s. Liberals, up until Obama were just much more careful about showing their power level until the long March was over so they could consolidate power. Hollywood had always been liberal, and even if the movies made in 1970 would be conservative by modern standards, they were absolutely liberal by the conservative standards of the day. Soylent Green was an overpopulation/environmental piece, blaxploitation was an entire genre of film, anti war themes showed up in movies, tv shows, music, and so on. Liberal protests on college campuses have likewise been a thing since Kent State.
I think there are two catalysts for the change. First, social media vastly extended the reach of social opinion, such that private opinions could be easily disseminated online and thus weaponized. You ended up saturating the culture in political opinion, and liberals realized that there were lots of them in cultural power. And it also indexed people’s views for easy reading, thus allowing a purge of crime-thinkers from political and cultural power. The second was the retirement of the old guard who came of age in tge 1950s. They were 60 in 2010, and so a lot of these early boomers retired. They might have headed up a department at a college, ran a music label or tv/movie studio, but they’d imbibed the notion that politics shouldn’t overwhelm the purpose of the institution itself. Entertainment existed to entertain, not preach, colleges were about education. Once those old guys retired, the new leadership felt little compunction about turning the entire thing into a propaganda machine.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think like a lot of other parts of western culture, it’s just a matter of thinking of the culture as disposable. You just don’t design a building with the assumption that the building will outlive you, so the order of the day is to make the thing as cheaply as possible and not worry about future users of the building.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I mean tge problems with the strategy are obvious. First, as @anti_dan mentioned, we’ve been chopping entire programs without incident for months now. A shutdown is what the GOP wants. First because it gives them a fig leaf to go farther and faster in DOGE-ing the government, but because it also quite often undermines their basic premise of governance— that government programs and government regulations make the country better. Hard to make the Bernie arguments when you’ve shut down the government. You also have the problem of government workers on Facebook and Twitter and TikTok making utter fools of themselves crying about having to prove that they’ve done anything remotely productive in the last week (I find the videos hilarious because these people are out of touch). Of course the democrats had just won a court battle to force the government to rehire people laid off.
Second, this isn’t even a message. It’s just an impotent temper tantrum, and that’s how it will look. “I want you to stop cutting government programs, so I’ll shut down the whole thing. Mo-ooom! The republicans are being meanies and won’t let me keep programs that don’t do anything!” It’s not a message that would make anyone vote for them. What they need to do is come up with an agenda. A serious agenda. And no, “we hate Trump” is not even the start of an agenda. But that’s been the message of the democrats for decades. Every republican is a fascist bent on destroying Our Democracy and you better vote for me because I’m a democrat and I’ll stop them. Theres no positive reason to vote for them. They can’t articulate their agenda beyond “vote blue no matter who because Our Democracy.” Which doesn’t have a message about fixing literally anything that’s broken. They have no plan to fight inflation, to make housing affordable, to fix health care, or fix college. They have a plan to … hate republicans and stop republicans. The republicans have a message: government is tge problem, and if we make it smaller, your stuff won’t cost as much.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think, again, as matter of politics, of giving these kinds of helps when you could simply bend to the path that doesn’t require so many resources, I think there’s a point at which the public is not served by giving basketball lessons to short people. Lots of people don’t get to do the jobs they want, either from lack of ability, or poverty, or being born in the wrong region, or family culture. I think this is an immensely unreasonable approach to finding a career for a whole host of reasons starting with ability and leading through technological advancement, pay for the work, demand, and so on. If I want to be a dog walker, I can do so, but given the low wage, low demand, and the fact that a person can probably build a dog walking robot would make offering this as a job training program rather stupid — especially if the student is sitting in a wheelchair.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think we’re in agreement on that as well. Assimilation is the key to making immigration anything other than importing a fifth column into your country from places that often don’t share any culture and beliefs with your country. In small numbers, I think a relatively motivated group can become assimilated, but if you create a situation where you’re building Little Pakistan in London where Muslim norms, practice, and morals are the culture of that enclave, you simply slowly turn London into Pakistan.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
It’s just something that’s always bugged me about conversations like this, or criminality, or drug use. It’s like people want to spend billions of dollars on something that rarely works and only for the extreme outliers in hopes of saving a single unicorn. But in anything the government does, you’re doing an essential triage — you know going in that you cannot and will not save everyone that it’s possible to save, because you don’t have infinite resources or infinite time or perfect tools. The best that can be done by a policy is to try to do good for the vast majority of people who the policy affects.
In the case of education, I think tracking is the best option because it works for most people. Most people in lower education tiers are not going to somehow become successful writers, actors, and entrepreneurs. The vast majority will be doing low level work somewhere in the system. In that case, it’s much better to teach them skilled trades so they can be productive members of society, earn a reasonable wage, and raise a family than it is to flog them and drag them to university where not only are they going to fail, but when they do, they have little skill to fall back on. If he can at least make something, read a blueprint, cook a great meal, or repair things, he’ll be a productive member of society able to provide for himself and a family, everyone is better off. If he spends that time pretending to understand calculus he works for peanuts in retail, restaurant, warehouse industries for less than a living wage and we pay for his survival for life. Which is better for him? Which is better for the rest of us?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I mean outside of entertainment or entrepreneurship, how common is that? I can’t imagine that’s a typical experience for kids who are clearly not interested or successful in school. And as far as public policy, I think the best approach is to aim for the typical experience for students rather than waste time and money hoping that you have that one in ten thousand unicorn who fails middle school algebra and goes on to become the guy behind a tech company.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think honestly that the biggest reason for school failure is the lack of honesty about the students. Because every kid is attending public school unless their parents specifically opt out, they are forced to be a microcosm of what we think society is like. And for lots of reasons, this means that we can’t admit to ourselves that differences in talent exist in education.
Part of it is that education in modern society largely determines where a kid ends up in society. If your kid isn’t learning at the same speed as his peers, he’s going to have much worse jobs later on, and thus make less money, and live objectively worse lives. Obviously, no parent wants this for their own kids, so they will resist anything that seems to suggest that their child isn’t capable of doing what the other kids are. Teachers, being generally optimistic about the potential of a child, are also reluctant to tell them that they’re simply not good at a given skill. The result is that nobody is actually getting an appropriate education in a public school. Everyone is learning at the same speed: too fast for the stupid ones, and too slow for the smart ones. But everyone is learning the “college bound” curriculum, even if an objective look at some kids’ test scores makes it obvious that they cannot actually do well enough in college to get any sort of job that pays them enough to pay back the loans.
Of course, Theres the political part as well. A school system that does tracking like Asian and European schools do is going to find itself in arrears of the Civil Rights Act in fairly short order as the lower tiers of the school will be full of black, Hispanic, and MENA students, and the upper tiers will be full of white and East Asian students. Whether this is biology, culture, or poverty is unimportant to the problem here — getting the results that would happen if you put kids in classrooms that fit their actual education needs would be racist and probably sexist as well. Reality is illegal.
All of which hurts everyone but the most average kids. The smart kids, unless their parents put them in an expensive private school or teach them after school are limited. Sorry, kid, you have more potential than average, so you’ll be made bored at school, probably hate it, and never reach your full potential. The dumb kids are sent through a system that shunts them toward college-bound studies and away from the kinds of life skills that they can learn that would give them reasonably attainable job skills so they can earn a living wage. A college bound kid who can’t actually do college has no marketable skills and thus has a bright future in stores, restaurants, warehouses, and professional driving whether uber, taxi, or delivery. But we didn’t hurt his precious feelings, so all good, right?
And so I think if I were in charge I’d track kids, and if you’re below average, I’d put the kids in a skilled labor track as appropriate to the child. If you are not suited to college, you still need a skill, and that means pushing things like shop classes, cooking, repair, and so on so when those kids graduate, they have something they can do to support themselves and thus earn a living. For the above average kid, I’d put him in the most advanced classes he could handle — and see just how far his brain can take him. I think there are a lot of geniuses stuck, bored with a pace meant for future clerical workers who would shock the world given the chance.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
In small enough numbers over a long enough time, I think it’s possible to do that. But if you’re taking in thousands of MENA Muslims into your country at a time, you get an ethnic enclave that doesn’t assimilate to the norms of the rest of society. The same can be said for Africans or South Americans.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
The benefit of having charities handle it is that it never is forced to become an entitlement. You can put requirements that ultimately help the person get out of the traps they are in. Governments, at least in modern democratic nations really can’t do that. In modern states, you are entitled to things like food, housing and health services, simply because you live in the country (and in the 21st century, you don’t even have to be here legally). So a person can be perfectly able bodied and collect welfare benefits for basically a lifetime, without having to get a job or do any community service, or go to school. You just go on welfare, and so long as you draw breath, you get a check. People can be generations deep in welfare as well. A charity can say “no, if you want to keep getting help from us, you have to do something productive. You either get a job, or if you truly can’t, you can volunteer with the charity. Your kids have to attend school. You can’t be on drugs.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think it’s just the natural order reasserting itself. I can’t think of a single culture anywhere in the globe, even going pretty far back in history, in which women enjoyed the near total sexual freedom and freedom to choose a career etc. that we have in the modern West. I think the reason is simple: it leads to all kinds of negative consequences for both men and women that functional societies were keen to avoid.
The first is rape and sexual harassment. When men think they can get sex from women without having to worry that her male relatives would beat the crap out of him, the urge to try to trick or pressure women into sex increases. And women going out at all hours, or meeting relative strangers the texted with online also increases the risk of outright rape. Especially when the culture encourages women to go out alone dressed in what earlier eras would have been streetwalker outfits. (If you think im kidding, compare the clothing that Julia Robert’s wears at the beginning of “Pretty Woman” — her character is a prostitute — to outfits that people wear to clubs). All of this has created the rape culture that feminism likes to blame men for.
Then you have the rejection of marriage and childbearing. Few women feel the need to marry, and of those who do, children are so far down the list that she’ll be infertile by the time she realizes she wants one. Our population is basically declining, covered only by immigrants from “shithole countries”. And it’s doing so because women are not being pushed toward marriage and family creation. They get casual sex in university while studying for the career that culture told them to want, and by the time they’ve paid back the loans they took out for a career, they’re done.
For men, it’s the loss of men’s spaces, and work that is meant for them. Men no longer have anything meaningful that sets them apart. They can’t provide for a family that doesn’t form when all the women are playing girl boss. They don’t get the prestige of doing a really tough job, because the women are there as well. And a lot of men’s activities and hobbies are colonized by women to the point that men are the ones who can’t make friends easily.
Then Theres the porn. Women now make porn for fun and occasionally money. So our culture is basically soaking in mountains of pornography and kids as young as 9-10 are finding it and using that to make sense of adult dating.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
Jews were officially excluded from golf courses and in some cases were denied hotel rooms. And there was the open “No Irish need apply” signs. It’s really not as simple as “whelp, you were allowed in a white public space, therefore you are white.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I mean in order for freedom to work properly, you do need some fairly specific cultural beliefs. You’d have to believe in public order, in respecting private property, and respecting the rights of others you disagree with. That’s a tall order, and very few cultures accept all of those things. In a lot of places (MENA, Africa, and South America in particular) these things aren’t expected, and in fact tge general assumption is that you’d better take precautions to protect yourself and your property because you will lose what you can’t protect.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I mean, given that the government of Palestine or at least the Gaza portion is Hamas, which is a designated terrorist organization, I think the free speech aspect might be harder to prove. If he’s giving money, producing videos, or other things that support Hamas fairly directly, then he’s probably in violation of the law.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
It matters because at some point, Western countries drank the kool-aid. They seem to actually believe that the rules themselves create the order, rather than understand that the rules exist as a fig leaf over what could be called an empire in some sense. But if the empire forgets that it is an empire it forgets that the perception matters. It forgets that it cannot maintain the order without imposing it. Furthermore, allowing people to get around the laws without consequences (and given the number of countries that have started recognizing Palestine after 10/7) it’s a tactic that lays bare the fiction. If you can get your way by causing civilians to die, and simply goad the people you don’t like into attacking you and you can force them to make “sad images on TV”, you get what you want.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
The International Rules Based Order was always fiction. It was code for “the West has several times as many soldiers, rockets, tanks, and navy vessels than you, and can kick your ass just by thinking about it. What’s changed generally is the global perception of that military might.
We are much more causality adverse than we were. The D-Day invasion alone cost something like 5,000 men, and that was a single battle in a four year war effort. We wouldn’t tolerate such losses today. When 2,000 died over the course of a year in the occupation of Iraq, people in congress started calling for an end to the war. A large scale war like WW2 would mean an Iraq war level of causalities twice a day.
And we are much much more adverse to “bad images on TV syndrome”. Show the leaders pictures of sad children, flattened buildings, or crying women, and we lose sight if the objective. It’s why the Hamas tactics were so effective. If you can hide among civilians, forcing your enemies to destroy civilians and houses, temples, and city streets, the west will take your side. Knowing this, you effectively can neutralize the enemy’s ability to defeat you by causing the BITV syndrome— they won’t fight if it means that people at home will be seeing women cry, because the civilians running the military won’t stand for it. So you either go in with small teams and hope you get lucky, or they win.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I mean technically by the definition of this list, any pro-Palestinian protest is by definition antisemitism as the central claims are Israel as colonial power ethnically cleansing the Palestinians and at current commuting a genocide. I don’t see how you could have a “kosher” pro-Palestine position that doesn’t run against these rules. I mean I think the most you could say is “Israel should turn on the electric grid” or something. And that’s probably not mild enough.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think the Zelensky thing is actually misunderstood. What Trump and Vance were doing was asserting control. Zelensky was used to dealing with Biden and the Left and having the USA government roll over and hand him several billion dollars. In the clip, the entire point is making it clear to Zelensky that he’s not in charge anymore, and that if he wants the US to help him, he has to accept our terms — which all told, and given the circumstances Ukraine is in, are actually pretty generous. But unless the people running the country actually assert themselves m there’s no reason to take it seriously.
I would say the same for the deep state. The reason to go in and pause payments and force people to prove they’re working is two-fold. First, the obvious benefit of cutting the fat. It needs to be done. But the other benefit is that it puts the deep state in its place, where it is on notice that it serves the elected government, and the days when they could simply roll their eyes and ignore the government are over and you better get with the program.
If you want to make actual changes in how things are done, you cannot be timid or nice about it. If you show weakness, you’ll be walked all over. Better to be overbearing but get the job done than be weak and try to explain in four years why nothing of note has changed. And I think most of this posturing now will pay off later. Iran and Syria and Hamas are watching Trump and Zelensky. They know they’re no longer dealing with Sleepy Joe who will maybe pretend to be bothered by what they’re doing but be too weak to do anything but tut-tut while they walk all over him. Trump, and thus the USA are done being the teat the world suckles while getting nothing in return, and are done being openly disrespected.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think this is about right. In most things, the option taken by the USA and NATO have been the ones good for themselves. Amazing that China can build concentration camps in their country and depopulate large swathes of Muslim majority and we can’t seem to muster the energy for a strongly worded statement. Of course, they do most of our manufacturing, so economic sanctions are bad for business.
I think the honest truth about war politics like all other political issues is that it’s Machiavellian — the point is to empower yourself and your allies , while perhaps weakening your enemies. The rest, as far as im concerned is propaganda for the democratic masses so they keep voting for the wars you want to fight. Being the good guys helps you to get the masses to support military adventures abroad. Especially when you’re telling them, again, that the regime needing change is doing the bad guy things.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think at some point, we’re talking about angels dancing on pins. Thought and thinking as qualia that other being experience is probably going to be hard. I would suggest that being able to create a heuristic based on information available and known laws of the universe in question constitutes at least an understanding of what the information means. Thinking that fighting a creature with higher STR and HP stats than your own is a pretty good child’s understanding of the same situation. It’s stronger, therefore I will likely faint if I fight that monster. Having the goal of “not wanting to faint” thus makes the decision heuristic of “if the monster’s statistics are better than yours, or your HP is too low, run away.” This is making a decision more or less.
A kid knows falling leads to skinned knees, and that falling happens when you’re up off the ground is doing the same sort of reasoning. I don’t want to skin my knees, so I’m not climbing the tree.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
Yeah, that’s the thing I keep seeing, and frankly I agree with, especially since it’s been the dominant moral theme of a replacement for Christian morality. The thing is that for a long time, Hitler was Satan of a new religion in some sense with things like fascism, religious zealotry by Christians (Islam gets a pass here), bigotry, and prudishness as major sins.
And this version of the story has been used countless times to justify our own wars of aggression, or intervention in purely domestic affairs or civil wars. It’s been the cause to force globalization, migration, DEI, LGBTQ, and other social and economic realignments on people. And it’s been used to keep countries in line. For 75 years, if your country was accused of being fascist in some way, at the least you’d be cut off from trade, and at worst bombs would be+heading your way.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I have a different thought. I think it’s because people have misunderstood “turn the other cheek” to mean “be a doormat”. There were plenty of times in Christian history in which Christians would have absolutely gone to war to defend themselves or other Christians. I see it as us being victims of our own success — we haven’t (at least in Europe) been persecuted seriously in the last 500 years, so we have adopted a “just be nice” approach that others (particularly the Jews) have been persecuted out of. Jews know what happens when they ignore persecuted Jews.
I’ve noticed the same. I think it’s somewhat negative because it doesn’t tell future historians what happened that day. But I do like that it also makes it hard to spin. The events of January 6 can be a riot, insurrection, protest, or a bunch of Karens whining.
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