MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
It’s not even that great then. Unions are a huge reason why America is no longer manufacturing things to the same scale it was. It’s orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to simply build the plant in Mexico or Southeast Asia than deal with the overinflated wages and poor work ethic of union employees.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
Honestly, it would be good for everyone if nobody voted. The reason that neo-liberalism must be so careful to purge society of crimethink is because we vote. I don’t think that all efforts for propaganda would stop, but the volume and ubiquity of culture war propaganda would vastly decrease if it didn’t matter so much that I personally sign off on various issues. Ukraine could fade into the background and I could call their capitol whatever I wanted. I could believe whatever I wanted to about transgender issues without worry about the elites or their lackeys trying to thought-police me to death. There might well be limits to this, but at least the volume, the fear, would be turned down.
Why would anyone normal care about other people’s genitalia or a war in a country they can’t find on a map and only became independent in 1992? Why am I, a relative nobody, worried about policing? And my suspicion is that the average person, because of the vote, is often forced to pretend to care, is policed for the ways they pretend to care, when they’d much rather spend time on kids’ education and sports, their jobs, their family, and whatever hobbies they choose to enjoy. I think almost everyone would actually be happier to never worry about cultural affairs ever again.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4mo ago
I think it matters in the sense that legitimacy matters. If we’re really going to deny opposing parties the right to be on the ballot then it’s really stretching the truth to claim that we hold fair and free elections. And in my view the only legitimate reason that a group that files to be on the ballot should be denied is that they’ve been convicted of a felony within the last 5 years.
Elections are already widely distrusted, with a sizable chunk of the GOP believing that Biden did not win fairly. This is not going to restore their trust in ballots. And when a big enough chunk of the electorate doesn’t believe they’re being allowed to compete fairly in elections, they abandon elections for more direct action.
I think there’s a lot of cognitive biases that cause this.
First of all is the “fair” notion. The idea that life is ever supposed to be equal or that people are supposed to get roughly equal amounts of reward and that there’s some ceiling cat to appeal to when someone has “too much” which is actually in practice “has more than ME.” And really, that’s never been reality. In fact, it’s the opposite. If you’re doing more, or providing necessary services, you deserve more. But, that’s not “fair”.
Second is that people always have the wrong idea about just how much work their betters actually do. I’ve seen this when people talk about the CEO. They assume that their work is easy, that they do slacker work and go play golf. Or they assume that it doesn’t take any more intellectual capacity than they themselves have. Again, this isn’t true. Anyone who has run a business— even a small one — can tell you that the business runs your life. Your “vacation” simply means working from a beach instead of an office. Slacking off means working 80 a week instead of 100 a week. You can kiss family time and friend time goodbye unless you can work while hanging around with them.
And it requires serious smarts as well. If you’re not smart enough to understand cultural trends properly, new technologies, regulations, emerging markets, competition, and the entire operation of the business from top to bottom, then chances are you won’t actually have a business in five years. One bad marketing decision cost InBev billions. Misunderstanding digital photography killed Kodak. One reputation killing bad product can tank you. And it’s a constant thing. Technology alone moves so fast that a person who cannot understand emerging technology from day one is at a huge disadvantage. Being too slow to adapt is deadly, but so is backing the wrong technology.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I generally find the idea of rules in war to be completely disingenuous and actually kind of stupid. The point of having a war is to win the war quickly. And dragging it out on the pretense of following the “rules” (in quotes because really, the rules mostly exist for propaganda purposes and only matter in the context of things that countries we don’t like are doing and creating a causus belli for stopping them or arming enemies) doesn’t really benefit civilians as much as advertised. A war that drags on for years longer than it has to because the tactics that would win it are “illegal” doesn’t actually protect civilians. They live in a bombed out country with no infrastructure, a tanked economy, and completely disrupted lives (especially if they don’t live in heavily protected green zones). The fields of Ukraine haven’t produced much since the invasion and what they have produced cannot go anywhere because of the war. They have a deep recession that makes it hard for average people to live, most industries have pulled out and anyone with brains and a passport have left for better economic prospects elsewhere and won’t be returning. Schools have been shuttered for the most part, so kids are missing out on years of school. And so what’s left of Ukraine is a basket case even if infrastructures hadn’t been targeted.
If targeting infrastructure and so on could have decided the outcome of the war in a matter of weeks or months, all of that could have been rebuilt. People could return and rebuild the economy and schools and run businesses and invented things in Ukraine rather than Poland.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6mo ago
popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
The zionists are right. I don’t see any solution to this that doesn’t eventually look like a Zionism transposed to some other location. The historic record here is pretty clear — a stateless Jewish minority is going to be the target of either states looking for a scapegoat or angry mobs taking matters into their own hands. In most Muslim countries, non Muslims are second class citizens at best. So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere. If that’s the case, you need to create a continuous land area in which Jews are given complete control. And you’re now displacing whoever lives there now. It ends up looking almost exactly like Israel except now we’re building in South America or Montana or Wales or something. There aren’t really good answers.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
There’s certainly skill involved in writing, but the barriers beyond skill are pathetically low and frankly there are millions of people trying to get in. Every 14 year old girl with a laptop is an “aspiring author” and there’s a lot of amateurs doing fan fiction (look up some fan-made Trek shows, but for acting and production values, they’re probably nearly on par with the pros at this point) it’s a skilled trade, but it’s not wizardry and not impossible to learn. What keeps people out of Hollywood is more the difficulty of getting your SAG card, not any real skills gap.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I think there’s a bit of a difference between shaming and simply not going along with the problem. Watching your kids eat themselves into weighing well over 100 lbs before they hit double digits and not even saying anything is borderline abuse. Watching someone you care about eat themselves into morbid obesity and saying nothing isn’t being kind. And I think as far as the media goes, it shouldn’t promote unhealthy lifestyles. You could also consider taxing foods that cause obesity.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
This would be a clear case of a person convicted of aiding an enemy or being involved in insurrection. Two problems being that: no legal ruling has declared 1/6 an insurrection, and Trump has not been tried or convicted of insurrection. Which are both clearly required. Our legal system is based on the presumption of innocence, meaning that the government must first prove a crime took place, and secondly that the accused actually did said crime. I cannot accuse someone of murder unless I can show pretty conclusively that the person I’m accusing you of killing is actually dead, and that the best explanation of the evidence is that you did it. Even then, I’d have to get a jury conviction. I can’t just blanket claim that the crime you committed requires 5 years in jail, that the law is “self-executed” and haul you away.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
Wouldn’t it be the kinds of students who took on debt for a mostly useless degree. People who study something useful like tech, science, finance, or business tend to do okay. They (provided they actually do the work and put in effort on getting themselves ready for employment) tend to get good jobs after college and thus, with a bit of frugality in the early years, pay off their loans fairly quickly. The ones who study useless (from an employment standpoint) majors in art, literature, history, or social science tend to get lower paid work and thus struggle to pay down the loans.
Which is what’s always been galling about student loan forgiveness. It essentially removes the market forces that push people away from poor decisions. College for the right students is a net benefit to that student and society at large, especially if you can push them to useful arts and sciences. By removing the market from the equation, you end up removing incentives for unprepared students to choose skilled trades over university, and pushing good students to choose fun-sounding avocations over useful arts an science. Essentially these students are spending 100K of other people’s money over a lifetime to take a four year vacation before going on to do low level work.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5mo ago
I mean as a practical matter, removing the moral elements, this is how the world tends to work. Most of us meekly follow along with the powers that be. We might grouse about it, but we’ll do it because most of us have remarkably little power in our lives. If you have to at least pretend to love big brother (in whatever form it takes) just be a you have to eat, keep a roof over your head and so on. If you have to feed your and especially your kids, you’ll give your consent to a lot of things that if they were proposed without the stick you’d be opposed to. I don’t think anyone in a cold state would agree that any given medical procedure should be a condition for getting into a store or restaurant. But if you know you’ll be fired if you don’t check the vaccine card, you’ll check the card.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
I still see 3 as barely plausible simply because of the scale of the universe. Unless something physics-breaking is discovered and shown to allow for FTL travel without the need for eye watering amounts of matter and energy, or any undetected particles, there’s simply no way to have biological creatures cross interstellar space within less than twenty or so generations. I’m not even convinced that signals could cross fast enough for anything approaching a conversation. To thus suggest that aliens are here, especially given that reports almost universally say biological aliens, is to pretty much say that our understanding of physics is massively wrong.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I think that’s a poor way of measuring impact. Given that Arely has gotten his ideas into the mainstream is a huge problem. TBH it’s my problem with the entire field (which I suspect is mostly pseudoscience). We’re using it to help people, we’re making policy decisions based on psychology. And as far as I’m concerned the obvious mental health declines in our therapeutic cultures have proven disastrous. We have more and more people, including fairly young kids, on psychiatric drugs. We have more anxiety, depression and suicide than we did 100 years ago. We have more drug use as well.
In the past, things like religion and stoic philosophy had a much better track record. They weren’t committing suicide, they weren’t too anxious and depressed to function, they didn’t do drugs to numb themselves.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I think at least some of this is culture. Men are taught — from day one — that it is their responsibility to make themselves employable, to do whatever job pays the most even if they hate it, to fight their way to the top of any job they get, and to job hop when the pay isn’t rising fast enough for them.
Women have the privilege I call “second income privilege.” They get to not prioritize wealth generation. They get to think about whether they want a good paying job in a demanding field or not, whether having more money is worth being bored or working somewhere unpleasant or long hours. Their money isn’t “feed the family” money, so they get to think of work as fun, as a calling, as almost a hobby.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think the reason that American subways end up as shitholes is the confluence of a lack of rules enforcement, and the relative cheapness of a ticket. In most large American cities, there’s no bouncers on the train. If you’re blatantly shooting up, causing a disturbance, committing a crime, etc., nobody’s going to throw you off the train.
Part of this does fall on the left which has a weird sort of allergy to rules, no matter how well meaning. They often work against rules to keep decorum in public places, even when those rules would make those places more useful and accessible to people who want to be there. The idea of throwing a violent drug user off a metro for harassment is abhorrent to a certain subset of the liberal left. So the trains get filled with thieves, drug users, and mentally disturbed people. Nobody else wants to use the trains because they don’t want to be attacked, robbed or harassed.
You could also sort of fix the problem by raising prices. If a ticket (assuming enforcement of having a ticket) were $10 or more, then paying $10 to ride from one end of town to the other over and over becomes a lot less possible for people who have no jobs or regular income. At $2 a three-hour ride, you can basically move onto the train as a home for the day for $16. At $10, it’s $80, and thus isn’t that much cheaper than a hotel. Make it $20 and you’re now too expensive to be an ad-hoc cheap home for people.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3mo ago
Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places but it seems like most mainstream pop culture stuff — music, TV, movies have converged on what goes best for the algorithm and maximum viral exposure, rather than excellent craft, original ideas, or even completeness.
I think the internet is diminishing the creation of art because nothing can really gestate as a complete idea before it’s delivered. And because of the algorithm, only those things like what’s already popular get noticed. I’m hanging around authors and it appears that in order to even be considered for traditional publishers, you need a substantial media presence of at least 200-300 K followers to even be considered. It’s just not possible to simply create a new thing away from the mainstream of culture and have it be discovered later.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I think he’s exactly the kind of liar I think are the most annoying. Yes, pretty much everyone in politics has a sort of fictional biography. My issue with this sort of thing is that it’s absolutely fluid on every dimension of his life, and there’s no “core self” that doesn’t change just because his current audience doesn’t like that he’s like that. To blacks, he becomes black like them, at least until it becomes a liability, then those Black people become “ghetto losers” who aren’t real men because they aren’t like his vision of what an acceptable Black person should be (which is dependent on the mostly white politicians he hangs around who want blacks to be activists and democrats). When the church he was attending was outed as the “God damn America” church, he didn’t actually defend it as something he personally believed in as a message. He sort of implied that it doesn’t mean that, and went elsewhere, and was never seen in public with that preacher again. He was intellectual until it became a problem at which point he tried to pretend he’s down to earth.
I don’t agree with Trump, but one thing I loved about him apart from all that was that he wasn’t changing everything about him to pander to whoever he was talking to or wanted to appeal to. He was upfront about what he was about. He’s on tape saying “grab them by the pussy” and he didn’t walk it back or pretend it didn’t happen or recontextualize it as not meaning what it sounded like. He said a lot of guys talk like that in locker rooms. Trump never really pretends to be anything other than Trump, a rich guy who is just going to do whatever he wants. He’s been the same trashy New York rich guy he was back when he was selling Trump steaks mail order in the 1980s. He might be overstating his business acumen, but there’s at least a core part of who he is that like it or not, you can know that he’s not going to disown his past or his stated opinions.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
Well, you’d have to establish some reasons for thinking he, specifically was behind it. In any election of the most powerful office in the most powerful country on the planet, there is goin* to be foreign influence. It’s simply too important to the rest of the world for other countries to ignore it. While i can see a country like Russia (who didn’t like Hillary) trying to tip the scales, I never saw anything that unequivocally pointed to Russia or anyone else working with Trump specifically.
Wikileaks and the contents of Wikileaks were well known ten years before Trump descended the golden escalator. His very online fan base was talking about Wikileaks nonstop. Trump might well have gotten wind of things released on Wikileaks because it was on social media and he used social media a lot during both his campaign and his presidency. The “Russia if you’re listening” quip was in response specifically to a reporter questioning his involvement in the hacks by Russia. It was a joke, and unless you were already predisposed to think he’s involved, it’s a reach. Someone makes an accusation like “people are saying that Russia is hacking Hillary and releasing information to help you,” if you don’t take that claim seriously might well be played off with a joke.
Even if Russia is trying to make Trump win (which is probably true) they didn’t investigate Russia they investigated Trump. That’s not the same. An investigation into Russia that leads through six degrees of Kevin Bacon and into the senior members of the Trump campaign would make sense. It starts with the crime at hand — the data breaches and releases — and moves toward figuring out who’s releasing them, why, and if there’s anyone calling the shots.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5mo ago
I think just assuming for a moment that the results are accurate, a couple of things stand out about conservative parenting particularly.
First, parenting for conservatives is a focal point for life. Family formation and child rearing are central to the conservative and they will absolutely rearrange their lives and schedules to focus on their family life. If they see public schools as a problem, they’ll do whatever they have to do to route around the problem. If they have to scrape by on one income, drive beater cars and live in a tiny house or apartment so that mom can stay home with the kids they will do that. Kids do pick up on this. They know the kinds of sacrifices their parents are making for them. They know that the reason dad works long hours is so that they can have the best life possible. And this tells them they matter to their parents enough to make serious sacrifices for them, which tells them that they are absolutely valued.
Second they tend to teach self discipline, which in my mind is absolutely critical to developing self esteem because disciple is what makes achievement possible. And achieving things is where real self esteem comes from. A kid that lacks the self discipline to make the baseball team, or keep a clean room or get decent grades or whatever else fails a lot, and he doesn’t have the mindset of “I’ll do this thing differently and then I can make the team or get the grade next time.” Without knowing how to succeed in his efforts life becomes arbitrary and frustrating because he has no idea why he’s such a failure. This is why so many children of liberals love Jordan Peterson. His advice isn’t magic, there’s no “one weird trick” he’s telling people what conservative parents have been saying all along — get disciplined, do the work, get along with people, and learn some self control. Without those things you get lost and often depressed.
Third, the conservative mindset itself might well be protective. It doesn’t focus too heavily on how you feel at the moment, which prevents rumination on negative emotions. Not to say don’t feel them or that they don’t matter at all, but the conservative mindset does not see feelings as facts in themselves. They see it “either you do something about the problem, or learn to live with it.” It’s a kind of practical stoic mindset. Yes, people can be jerks, don’t be one of them, but also don’t let them ruin your day. This is a major issue I have with modern therapeutic culture in which people are encouraged to focus on feelings, treat them as facts, and do nothing about them. If I wanted to cause depression, that would be the ideal way to do it. Especially if I can make you anxious about things you have no control over.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
Except, again they have the same food environment we do. They have restaurants, including fast food. They have convenience stores full of processed junk, just like we do. The difference between them and us is not the food, it’s food culture. They have much stronger taboos against overeating and being fat. People there have no problem shaming people for eating more than they should, they have no problem pointing out when a close friend or relative gains weight.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I think Covid hawks were a creation of the hype machine. The searches don’t go up and down based on variants, but media coverage. The media basically dropped all COVID coverage around the time of the Russian invasion when the hype machine went from coverage of COVID related stories (new variant, mask/vaccine) to Plucky Ukraine with a guy who looks like Hawkeye. Instead of the signal being masks and telling everyone you never leave the house, it became Ukrainian flags and being obnoxious about the pronunciation of Kiev as Kyiv.
But to my mind, it was always a creation of media. Had the media not covered the story, it wasn’t much. It was, for the vast majority of people, a glorified flu virus. Had it not come with death-tickers and infection-tickers on the nightly news, breathless coverage of new variants, and endless advice about whether given activities were “safe” to do, people would never have cared in the first place. Had this happened in 1983, there wouldn’t have been nearly the hysteria— in large measure because we didn’t have the possibility of sending millions of office workers home, and didn’t have online shopping. The hype pushed billions into to coffers of Amazon, Walmart, Doordash, and instacart simply by virtue of making people afraid to leave the house.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
A big difference is that an adult can understand that flaunting sexuality can and often does make you appear as a sexual object to other people. An adult woman understands that going out in a string bikini is going to attract sexual attention and she knows to keep it to places where she wants that kind of attention. Children don’t understand sexuality that way, and don’t understand the consequences of being sexually attractive to adults. A woman knows that walking down a street alone at night dressed to highlight her sexuality increases the risk of rape. So women generally reserve their “looking sexy” times to going out on the town with other adults she trusts. To a child, it’s just dress up, and they don’t really understand that you can’t just put on a sexy top without attracting sexual attention from others or understanding the implications of attracting that sexual attention. They just want to play dress up barbie.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10mo ago
The military will always be relevant. The only reason it’s not at present is that there’s a pretty strong military hegemony in NATO and America. When there’s a military power that can bomb most countries to rubble in a matter of a day or two, the idea that a country can invade another and not be stopped is silly.
Those days are coming to an end. Americans are having fewer kids, and they’re less interested in joining the military. Politically, I think a lot of people are less interested in policing the world as well. If you lose the American military, wars come back and having a strong military becomes important again.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6mo ago
Except that the advice given to women is in you example is pretty exaggerated. The places women are asked to avoid are generally places that are dangerous to men as well. General safety means not going to seedy bars, not walking in dark alleys and not getting blackout drunk. Other than “wear clothes that fully cover your reproductive organs and breasts” I’m not seeing anything that would seriously curtail normal life for most people. Nobody is telling women to stay home and wear a burka except in their imagination.
I think I’d have a high threshold for most common contexts, though as the task at hand got more critical to the mission of the company, the health and safety of the clients or employees, or the safety of the product, my threshold goes down by quite a lot.
I don’t care if my front desk people in a hotel are maximally competent. The role isn’t complicated, and above a certain threshold of competence (speaks English, functionally literate and numerate, understands social contexts) I don’t get that much more for being choosy in who I hire. Any minimally competent person can do the task.
When it comes to something more mission critical, for example a programmer for my software company, the threshold goes down rather quickly. I lose money when I have to waste 1000 man-hours because someone bungled the code, and delays might well cost me millions in salary or lost sales. This hurts everyone working for the company.
The most obvious case would be in dangerous roles, or roles where a mistake can cause injury or death to other people or themselves. A doctor who is too stupid to understand what he’s doing, or has ADHD badly enough that he’s likely to miss critical details is a danger to his patients. An engineer who is unable or distractible enough to not do accurate calculations is a danger to anyone who uses his designs. Even in some forms of factory work, missing a detail or failing to check for people around before servicing or starting equipment can cause serious injury.
So it’s sort of a sliding scale for me. The more critical the role and the more a mess up will harm employees, clients, or the company itself the more I’m at least OK with using any means necessary to get the best possible person for the role.
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