MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
Well, for now sure, but how long can a country that thinks in memes and slogans maintain its power? How does a people who consider “owning the out group” to be the height of discourse solve problems that face it? How does such a society build for the future? Especially given the near scientific illiteracy and practical innumeracy, this is a serious problem. We are amusing ourselves to death, or at least to irrelevance. Everything is a joke.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
And even create them. Modern therapeutic culture absolutely creates the preconditions for getting a mental illness. We teach through culture that you’re supposed to be happy and healthy and successful and that failure to achieve a life like that is a failure mode of life. And expectations are absurdly high. You have been told to get rich doing a job you love, to find a soul mate, and hobbies you’re passionate about, lots of friends, and be absolutely authentic all the time. Nobody actually has a life like that, or at least not anyone born into the leisure class. And worse, when the failures come and you feel bad, the general message is to focus on that one thing that’s broken. Incels are doing exactly what the culture has taught them, in a sense. They are supposed to have a wife, or at least date. But, for various reasons it isn’t working. So they focus on it. And they focus on how bad it feels to not only not date, but how bad it feels to feel that bad. If I wanted to create a toxic brew for mental illness, this is how I’d do it. Create absurdly high expectations, blame the victim for failures, and tell them to focus on their failures and how bad they feel as a failure. If I could do that, I guarantee I can create anxiety and depression.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I’ve said this a thousand times and I really believe it. The concept of human rights is really only possible in a stable society. Rule of law is the best outcome possible, but if you’re living in a place where gangs disappear hundreds of people every year, because eventually everyone either flees or takes the law into their own hands. And I’d say really, this is probably the best thing, long term for the people of El Salvador— a stable peaceful society in which a real liberal society and real democracy and real human rights can happen.
Most government functions are tools anyway. Human rights are a great carrot, a thing government can grant when there’s a generally stable society in which one can generally expect to live without having to worry about crime. Liberalism is another fruit of a stable civilization, as it requires such a thing to exist before the society can get away with deviance from the norm. Even democratic institutions are dependent on a stable peaceful system where you can reasonably expect that the losers will accept their losses and— actually exit stage right.
Most of us, unless we read a lot of history have a mistaken notion that human rights and liberalism and democracy are the cause of our prosperity. History says otherwise. Most of human history is real raw power struggles between elites, brutal regimes that tortured people and would barely give the pretense of a trial. The reason the American revolution happened when it did was that the West had enough law and order built up that something other than an autocratic king could run things. The colonies were filled with law abiding, church going, hard working English people. You could walk down the streets at night without fear of being mugged. Of course a civilization filled with law abiding citizens who worked hard and believed in morality could form a stable republic — the stability allowed the social trust that made it possible to believe that George Washington would actually step aside if he lost. Of course such a people could conduct trials and worry about a guilty man being sent up the river by mistake. Crime wasn’t all that common.
Of course civilization thus far has had a 100% failure rate. Every great civilization has eventually failed and either dissolved in chaos for a time or got conquered by somebody stronger.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think the unpopularity is right. Unless we solve the issues that are making college unaffordable, simply wiping the debts (or a portion of the debts) simply makes the problem worse. The issue is that for skilled, non-labor jobs, college has become not so much a “nice to have” thing, but a requirement, in fact, it’s basically like high school was in the 1960s. If you want a good job and don’t want to be in construction, repair, or a chef or some other skilled labor— you have to go to college.
This creates a huge demand and thus makes the price inelastic. No one really looks at the costs or the interest rates beyond the choice between schools. You go, and if it costs 100K so what? You need the degree to even apply. And as long as college is the ticket to a middle class lifestyle, people will go, regardless of the cost. And of course as college becomes obligatory, and everyone gets a degree, the value falls. College in 1970 was a “wow, he must be a real go-getter. He must be smart,” thing. This was because they were relatively rare. Once college became the default, it’s not longer useful to signal intelligence or hard work (unless it’s a super hard degree), it’s too diluted to do that.
Making loans forgivable even if it requires a specific act of government to do so simply makes the problem worse. The forgiveness will be priced in. Why wouldn’t a school charge as much as they can get away with? If the dumbass students can’t pay, the government will. And on the student side, there’s no reason to economize here. If the debt gets bad enough, there will be a bailout. The employer side gets harder as well. Everyone other than the truly stupid have a diploma. So college is no longer enough. Maybe it will be internships, maybe we move up the credential treadmill, but college itself won’t be a ticket to those coveted middle class jobs. They’ll be a ticket to the line to buy a ticket to the middle class. And such a thing can stretch out quite a while because obviously people are willing to do everything possible to not be poor.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
It’s broken by design. The founders of America were very concerned that the government not get too much power, and as such designed the system to pit the branches and people within those branches against each other. This was a hedge against tyranny as no single branch could run things by itself. It would be even worse had we not gone to direct elections of the senate (rather than appointing them by state government) because that would make the senate beholden to the government of their state and thus even more beholden to local industrial powers.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think you’re on to something and it does kinda dovetail with something I’m noticing on the other end of the spectrum— what they think a woman is, or what it feels like to be an “internally female being”. The thing I’m seeing is a conflation of the trappings of femininity— dresses, domestic activities, an femininity in the aesthetic choices of media and decorative art. Now, there are women like that, and women who aren’t. Most natal women don’t do that stuff, and certainly don’t do it all the time. And for that matter, a lot of women like and even play sports, like masculine-coded media, wear t-shirts and jeans and skip the makeup.
What I think we’ve done to gender is made gender into a completely binary choice, and said that if you don’t do them or don’t do them “right” it’s obviously because you aren’t that gender. And it’s really weird because we don’t do this with any other identifying choices. I can be a Christian in lots of ways without my identity being questioned too much. I can be my race no matter how much or how little of the cultural aspect I identify with (I can even identify with the cultural aspects of other ethnic groups and still keep my racial identity— nobody has ever questioned whether an Americanized Japanese descended person was still Asian, or whether an Otaku was White). Gender somehow is a uniquely binary situation where you either identify 100% with all the trappings of culture and aesthetics or you surrender the man or woman card.
But then I think a lot of how modernity has commodified identity bears some blame here. Identity in the West, outside of race is largely a set of choices to be made, which isn’t how identity worked for most of human history. For most of history, you were given almost everything in your identity, then you lived up to that. You didn’t save the princess because you wanted to be a knight. You were born into that warrior caste and thus behaved like a knight. And even if you didn’t, you were still a knight, just a bad one. But if you have to be a good knight, perfectly chivalrous and brace and awesome with a sword to be a knight, then what do you do with a bad knight? And if being a knight is a choice, might a bad knight simply go be something else?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think it’s the institutional power differential. People with power like the branding of most blue tribe protests, so they can and often do protect those who protest for the right causes in ways the disempowered right cannot really do. It kinda makes for an interesting tell of which groups and ideologies are ascendant. If people are not harmed socially for participation in a protest, the protest is for a cause the elites agree with. If people get punished socially for protesting, they’re actually fighting the entrenched powers.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
It’s also possible that they don’t file a lawsuit because they know how skewed the system is. In a situation where the groups are already obviously treated differently, it makes little sense to go to the expense of hiring a lawyer. A black guy denied entrance to an elite university because he lives in South Africa under apartheid isn’t going to sue the school for it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
My theory re video games is that because the graphics were still limited in 1990 to early 2000, you had to focus on making the game itself fun. Morrowind had to be a really good rpg because you couldn’t sell it on the basis of graphics— they weren’t that good. And that’s true of shooters and platform games as well. It was either fun despite the graphics or it wasn’t going to make it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think at least some of this is stress from lockdowns and the economic uncertainty of people dealing with job losses and potentially business losses. There’s also the uncertainty of when or if anything will go back to normal. Basically everyone in society had their lives upended and didn’t know what would happen with any of it. This would cause a lot of stress and stress isn’t good for longevity.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
That’s kinda been my take. I don’t believe in a “stolen election” in the Dominion or ballots being either harvested or dumped. I base that on the fact that most polls actually overcounted the support Biden had, which shouldn’t happen if the fraud is in Biden’s favor. Adding Biden votes would’ve made Biden undercounted, not overcounted.
But you can interfere without committing fraud. You can spread lies through social media. You can block discussions. You can selectively cover the election. You can prevent unfavorable stories from being spread. A lot of this actually happened. The laptop story was withheld and prevented from going viral from the few outlets that did carry it. Trump was accused of trying to slow the mail service so Biden ballots wouldn’t be delivered on time. Trump was accused— before a single ballot was cast — of preparing to dispute the election. Trump was also often slandered with the accusation of being helped by Putin, to the point that SNL had a skit of Trump French-kissing Putin. Twitter and really most social media was pushing Biden and silencing Trump.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
Well, yes. This election happened with the entire weight of the establishment trying it’s best to elect Joe Biden. Negative news about Biden was pretty systemically repressed, even when that information was relevant to whether the man should be president. It’s pretty clear looking at Biden’s unscripted moments that he’s probably pretty deep in dementia. He turns the wrong way leaving podiums, attempts to shake hands with nobody, looks for people who died years before — these things if known before the election would have been causes for concern. Things like Biden’s cognitive ability, the Hunter laptop, these would have had a negative impact if actually reported on. And if such systemic one sided shilling by the media doesn’t count toward an unfree election, we owe an apology to a lot of “failed democratic states” who have elections and a controlled press.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I share a lot of your concerns about the not-political politics of today and just how often every company, institution and media outlet must suddenly be on board with the latest thing no matter how little the declarations of solidarity have anything to do with the core function of those organizations. What a grocery store has to do with Ukraine, I just don’t get it. And especially since “the thing” changes quickly and it’s on to something else. I find it disgusting in a sense just because I just want to move about the world without listening to the latest opinions from all of these companies that have no reason to actually care about anything they’re telling me they care about.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think a rational decision in any realm of geopolitics is one in which your side gets more from the actions it takes than it loses.
From the perspective of the USA and the West in general, the big issue isn’t Taiwan as Taiwan, but acces to the chip industry it houses. Other than that, it’s not important as a political entity. If Taiwan didn’t house the chip industry, it’s just another small country in Asia, perhaps a free market powerhouse economy (like Hong Kong was) but not special enough to warrant blood and treasure to safeguard it. As far as geography, I think defending it would be almost impossible. It’s too close to China to keep navy ships close enough to Taiwan to plausibly protect it from China without being close enough to China to be provocative. Which brings up another problem— you’d have to either fully commit to going to war over Taiwan before the invasion starts or you’re going to be too slow to respond to do anything about it.
From the perspective of Taiwan, it’s only really got two options. First, be valuable enough to the West that the West is willing to commit to war for their freedom, or slowly negotiate a peaceful resolution ceding control back to China. As an island, even if it’s plausible to hold off an invasion proper for a time, the ability of China to keep supplies from reaching Taiwan would mean this simply delays the conquest and prolongs suffering. So, more than likely the best option for a free Taiwan is in keeping the chips being made exclusively in Taiwan. Allowing manufacturing of Taiwanese chips outside of Taiwan erodes the only strategic advantage they have — being a supplier of chips the West cannot do without and doesn’t want China to have.
From the pov of China, there are two reasons to want Taiwan. First, it’s really close to the mainland and friendly with Western countries, making it a potential problem for Chinese trade and territorial ambitions. It would be like Cuba was to the Americans in the Cold War — a place that could easily be used as a forward base if their rivals wanted to invade or attack (Taiwan is closer than Cuba). The chip manufacturing is also important to China as it could then control even more global commerce via chips that are used in almost everything from pcs to washing machines and even military equipment. Third, it’s a public relations tool to reunite all Chinese people under CCP control as a happy family. The Chinese have always considered Taiwan a province of China. Making that real would be a major feather in the cap.
what’s interesting here is that the Taiwanese and the West are somewhat at odds over the chips. It is in Taiwan’s interest to keep everything in Taiwan because that’s the thing that’s going to make the West care enough to risk lives and treasure fighting against China — and it’s probably going to be a much steeper cost than anything we’ve done in the last 30 years. China has a modern military, modern equipment, and millions of soldiers. This isn’t Iraq. And if they do go to war, there’s another problem in that a lot of our goods, from clothing to manufactured products are made in China. Which means that a lot of consumer goods will be embargoed if we do go to war. This loss might make it difficult to fight the war and will almost certainly erode support for the war. For the West, getting manufacturing of those chips outside of Taiwan eliminates a problem of having to go to war with the country that makes most of the world’s manufactured goods.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I don’t think it’s that hard if you hang about the right places. He tells the story of himself as pretty much a prototypical incel nice guy.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I’ve never understood where the idea of a “right to not hear”. The right to speak sure. But I don’t see anything in that statement that requires either that others not disrupt or that you get to have an audience.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I guess. I can answer better for the women seeking men side.
First of all, mature. This can be a lot of things. Can he keep up a household without hand holding, bathe, do the laundry, do very basic cooking. Is he prone to neglect important people or tasks for long Tv or video game sessions (which is a red flag). Would he be able to be trusted alone with a small child (in the he watches that the kid doesn’t get hurt sense)?
Second, does he have, or is he working (seriously on getting) a full time family-supporting job? Does he take that job fairly seriously?
Third, is he a well rounded individual? Does he have lots of friends he sees regularly? Does he have hobbies and interests that are not media related? Does he understand the basics of how the world works?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think the more important question is do religious groups have the right to object to things that clearly violate the religious beliefs they claim to hold. Keep in mind that the school forfeit the game, so they opted out in the way that hurt them the most. This wasn’t a case where they were trying to keep in the playoffs despite not playing the team. They decided it was better for the school as a Christian school to forfeit a playoff game — thus ending their season and hopes for a championship.
Canceling their entire athletic program over this is pretty harsh given that the reason given is basically “this is a Christian school and we believe that playing in this game violates our conscience,” and that decision was made by the girls coach, not an administrator or school board member. Punishing the rest of the school for something they has not been involved in, especially given the number of kids hoping for scholarships, is harsh. A junior who now might not get a scholarship is out thousands of dollars in tuition he now has to pay.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I’m probably unpopular here in suggesting that knowing facts about a topic vastly increases the ability to think about that topic and to draw conclusions based on context and new information.
If I know facts about Ukraine, I can use those facts to understand things going on in the country. I know where the minerals are, what their major industries are, and the geography, I can come to guess on the objectives and strategies of the Russian invasion. I might be able to understand the strategy. If I know nothing, I can’t understand it until I learn the facts to give me something to think about.
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
1yr ago
I think honestly, since “transition” as a set of medical procedures requires lots of affirmation of that identity including visits to doctors, consenting to various drugs and procedures, and legal name changes, it seems like you could establish a reasonable point in this process at which you can make a reasonable case that this person is so seriously committed to becoming a member of the other gender.
I could make a case for a couple years of treatments and a legal name and gender change on legal documents being pretty definitive here. For me, if you’ve been in the process of becoming female (including hormones) for five years, and have changed your legal name and gender on your major legal documents (birth certificate, drivers license or state issued ID, passport) that level of commitment should be considered enough.
But my major concern re bathrooms and changing rooms is that if we make “identity as a woman” too easy to get, that cisgender men will abuse this to enter pretty intimate female spaces where they can use their power to rape women. This is, for me the trust issue, not that transgender people want to rape, but that cis men will use transgendered women as a loophole.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think you’re conflating a whole bunch of different things here.
There isn’t really a flattened structure here. It’s more in flux than before, and it’s more possible for someone on the bottom with the right idea at the right time can move up quintiles of wealth rather quickly. However the differences in lifestyle and life expectations at different levels are widely different. On the bottom, people cannot afford regular medical care and can struggle to afford medications. They attend public schools and stay close to home. On the top, there’s concierge medical care, exclusive private schools, and international travel.
Second, there’s a distinction between social class and wealth. Just being rich doesn’t make you upper class, there are lots of unspoken rules of behavior, proper and improper interests, and proper and improper beliefs. Food especially is a big deal. You’re supposed to like to the subtle tastes of properly cooked food, preferably exotic and from places most people don’t go often (so not Mexican food or Chinese or Japanese), and strong sauces are to be avoided. You’re supposed to like international tv and movies. You’re supposed to be woke (more or less), liberal, and environmentalist. In fact you’re supposed to be highly anxious about those things.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think a lot of this is people leaving the Democratic Party not so much because they agree with the GOP, but because the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class on almost every issue, and has become the party of the elites and sneering at the working class.
Hispanics are Catholics generally, and thus are pretty strong Christians (at least culturally), strongly pro family, and are thus pretty conservatives on most social issues. They also fled parts of the world run by criminal gangs and would thus be fairly strong on law and order stuff. Blacks are usually conservative Protestants and thus also pro family, and so on. They might also want the supposed left-leaning economic policies, but on social issues, they’re pretty conservative.
Which gives the democrats two major problems. First, they’re not only against these more conservative social policies, but they often sneer at anyone not fully on board with them. They aren’t just generally in favor of LGBT stuff, they insist on drag queen story hour, full on drag shows in elementary schools, and so on. Secondly, they are not even trying to deliver any of the kinds of policies that would help the working class. The last minimum wage increase was just after the financial crisis of 2008. Biden had both houses and all he really needed to do was ignore the parliamentarian— who he can outright fire — to put a minimum wage increase in a budget bill where it might have passed. He chose not to. Instead the big economic policies of the moment are environmentalist infrastructure and paying off student loans (and he was blocked on the loans).
Now if you oppose the woke stuff, and don’t like being lectured to about it, that’s a strike on the democratic side. They aren’t upholding your beliefs and values. In fact the6 often mock you for holding them. They’re teaching things in your kids schools you don’t like, and often at the expense of very necessary skills that your kids need for their future.
And there’s nothing gained by holding your nose for them. They’re not working on making working class lives better. They sold out the train engineers. They aren’t raising the minimum wage at all, they’re not paying for trade schools or on the job training. They’re not teaching your kids to read. They’re not even doing anything about drugs and crime. They care about Ukraine, they care that the upper class failsons are unable to pay back their loans. They care about the cultural interests of the laptop class.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I think the issues this time may mean this automation is different.
First, there are hard limits to what humans can actually do, before we even get into what will happen to anyone with low IQ or learning disabilities. If the “new jobs” are things that you need to be a genius to do, really maybe only 10% of the population could even be trained to do them. So where does this leave those displaced? All the easy tasks are done by a machine.
Second, there’s the issue of the pace of the change. Computing power has long grown exponentially. This would seem to mean that any task created by the AI revolution could be done by AI within 5-10 years of the creation of the job, you’d barely be able to train humans to do that work before that job, too, is taken by automated systems. And if this goes on infinitely, then there’s effectively very little job creation for most people.
I don’t think that’s the issue. And if I might rant against your rant, the problem I see is that we take literally nothing seriously when discussing politics, technology or culture. I get that sometimes it’s helpful to make references to popular culture and media. But what I’ve seen, and Ukraine vs Russia is the exemplar of the moment is a complete lack of seriousness in the discourse around it. We’re pussyfooting around a situation where two nuclear powers are escalating tensions over a territory of questionable value in either direction. And we’re doing so on the basis of memes.
I can make the case for just about any possible position in response to the Russian invasion. Every one of them has serious pros and cons because war is a serious matter. A negotiation of a new border brings a hopefully stable peace, but would encourage Putin in further expansion. A proxy war with the goal of driving Russia to the 2014 borders risks a hot war between nuclear powers, but would send a strong message that we will not stand for invasion of sovereign nations. There’s a lot of history that should be a part of the discussion as well. We can’t, or won’t talk about this very very serious topic in a serious manner. Instead, Russians are uniquely evil “orcs”, and we’re talking about a potential world war in terms of movies while insisting on a new spelling for Kiev and chastising companies who still call their chicken dish “chicken Kiev” instead of “chicken Kyiv” as though Putin or anyone else gives a flying shit what we call the dish.
The rot goes deeper, and it was also quite common in discussions of COVID and the response. It wasn’t a cool rational debate about the merits of various types and levels of lockdowns. There was little discussion of the relevant risks of different activities and the risks at different ages and risk factors. We simply screamed at anyone who wanted to leave the house.
My thinking is that we are, as the Chinese observed at one point, and unserious people. We aren’t having rational debates and choosing reasonable alternatives. We aren’t discussing the facts on the ground. We’ve become the people defending Ukraine from orcs, Jewish space lasers, and freedom fries. And this is not a sign of a healthy civilization. This is a society clearly shrinking back into a deman-haunted world in which the entirety of thinking about very serious issues must be reduced to children’s movie references or image macros to be digestible by the public.
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