MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6mo ago
It’s worse. They know what they want, it’s just impossible to provide. They want walk-in world class healthcare for cheap. They want it for cheap if not free. They want to walk into a doctor’s office, get seen quickly, then go to a specialist, pay twenty dollars each for the office visit including any tests, get a prescription for pills that they then pick up at Walgreens for less than $50 for a bottle of name brand life-saving drugs.
I don’t care how you re-engineer our health care system, the system cannot provide what the public wants. No system can. If it’s fast and doesn’t ration care to patients, it cannot be cheap. If it’s cheap, it’s because you either wait or you push the very sick out of the system (likely both). People want fast, world-class, cheap healthcare. At best, we can provide ONE of those things. If you want cheap healthcare, it’s going to be long waits and heavily rationed. Most orthopedic care is going to be reserved for tge very rich. You can expect to wait months for an office visit. And if you need something more than the primary care physician can do, that’s another couple of months to see whoever can fix the problem, and another couple of months to actually get anything done about it. If you want fast medicine, you have to pay for it. Likewise if you want to give everyone world class care without heavy rationing.
It’s a hard sell because people want all three and are assuming corruption or profit is the reason they can’t have cheap healthcare on demand. And politicians can’t or won’t tell people that they are asking something impossible, so the insurance companies get the rap fo4 doctors not being willing to work for the pay of store clerks and drug development costs being high.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
What’s causing the divide is the utter failure of the current system of delivering anything the people want from their leaders.
It can’t deliver on economics, in fact the standard of living seems to be getting worse. People are cutting back on things that were once considered normal. The hoops necessary to get to a decent wage and lifestyle are higher every decade. In 1950, a kid could barely graduate high school and still get a pretty decent job at a factory or something similar. He could expect at least a small house, a car, and to be able to support his wife and kids. That same lifestyle in 2024 requires a good college degree from a good university and quite often unpaid internships just to hope that if you and your wife work 40 hours a week, you can maybe have what your grandparents had with one less worker and less education.
It can’t stop crime. The number of anti-crime measures you take without thinking about them is crazy especially once you see how good it is in functioning societies. In Asia, it’s common for stores to leave their deliveries on the streets for hours. In some parts of Europe, people leave babies sleeping in strollers on the streets. In America, it’s common knowledge that you politely leave your car unlocked to prevent would be looters from having to smash windows to get at any valuables in the car. Porch piracy is a known problem. Personal safety often dictates when and where it’s advisable for the good people to go out. And police are basically told they aren’t allowed to stop a crime until it’s too late.
Education? About half of Americans don’t read above a 6th grade level. Many struggle with math more complicated than 10th grade algebra. All we can do with these kids is teach them The Narrative, encourage them to go into massive debt for the job training that K12 can’t give them and hope it turns out okay.
To me, it seems pretty clear that the problem is that what we have isn’t working, and everyone knows it, and so they’re grasping at the straws offered by radical and radically different ideologies to try and find a way to what people actually want — that the median American can live a modest but decent lifestyle in cities where crime is low enough that it doesn’t dictate how you live. They want their kids to have a good education and have the opportunity to be successful and happy. We have none of that, and the oligarchs in charge can’t give us that. So people are looking to other ideas: maybe socialism, maybe Christian theocracy, maybe some form of traditionalist society, maybe fascism, maybe some other idea.
The fact that we’re all so tuned into politics and it’s becoming so central to everything itself is a problem. If things were good, we would not care. People in all societies all over the globe got on very well in functioning societies without even trying to understand world affairs. They didn’t care that much even when given the vote. It was a small part of life, and probably came far behind other concerns like the health and welfare of their own family, sports, religion, and so on. Common people really only get super into politics when they are neither left alone nor helped. And this is where we are. Some 40% of the income earned by Americans goes to the government. And not only do we get what Moldbug calls “bad customer service” (meaning that the government doesn’t improve things for those taxpayers) but spends vast resources on harassing people about what they should think all the time (with their own money of course). Normies getting involved is a reaction, and polarization is the result. I contend that the only solution that will actually turn down the polarization is results.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1yr ago
I think it’s a combination of a lot of things.
Most Westerners live in extremely safe societies where war is something they see on the news. Americans are safer than even Europeans, having never had a war on their own soil since the end of the American Civil War in 1865. We’ve had a few attacks on our own soil: Pearl Harbor, and 9/11. This makes understanding the need to fight the war a bit more difficult. To a Westerner, war is optional even when you are being attacked. I think much the same of crime — for most people, living in suburbs and gated communities, crime isn’t a reality to them. It feels bad to lock up a thief who stole from a store. But, living in a high crime area full of drugs and gangs where everywhere makes it harder to live a normal life, and makes it far more likely that you yourself will be mugged or assaulted.
Second, most westerners haven’t taken their religion seriously since at least the end of WW2. Looking at the supposed rise of Christian Nationalism, what the term seems to mean is Christians who actually believe in Christianity and live by it. They don’t like drag queens or transsexuals because they understand the Bible to say those things are wrong. They want the traditional family structure as they believe the Bible commands this. The elite see this as weird, but it’s actually the default state of humanity. Most people throughout history have made moral decisions based on their religion, and most humans do today. But if you understand religion to be “go to church, temple, synagogue, or mosque once a week and ignore it the rest of the time”, you have no way to understand people who orient themselves by scriptures. They literally have no lived experience with people who think like a religious person, so they don’t understand that Hamas means what they say, that Allah commands them to war and dying as a martyr.
Third, the university teaches that all of history runs on economics. Poverty causes crime and war and terrorism. The only solutions are thus economic and redistribution or wealth. So they’re learning only one toolset. If you just made Hamas rich enough, they’ll stop. The fact that Gaza is awash in aide and the leadership make the list of rich, and are still launching attacks should show that they don’t care about the money. But the West seems unable to look for other reasons for the attack. So the problem cannot be anything other than Israel hoarding the wealth and the land and refusing to share.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1yr ago
I don’t think you can have a stable solution when the entire modus opperandi for a lot of LGBT and BLM activists is push as hard and as far as possible and don’t ever stop. The endpoint you’d want to get to is their starting point. As such, unfortunately (since my general sense is more or less 18+ libertarianism, with the caveat that you cannot force other people to go along with what you want) it’s hardball all the time because the only stable position at this point is to go far enough backwards that they’d have to move forward to get to where it was 5 years ago.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2yr ago
I think the trend might be more permanent simply because it seems a result of a lot of chickens coming home to roost. I’m moving more conservative in a lot of areas simply because I can literally see what the results are of all of these policies. I’m less tolerant of socially deviant behavior simply because it’s not only gone off the rails, but recruiting has gone from a much mocked urban legend to obviously true in 20 years. I’m also much more law and order simply because I’ve seen enough people form shoplifting gangs in broad daylight (fortunately by videos) that I’m in favor of lowering the felony dollar limit.
They accelerated too much, I suppose.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2yr ago
But it’s something they’ve sort of deliberately created for themselves. Conservatives have known for a long time that success in PMC and white colar work means being rather closeted about things coded conservative. It actually somewhat starts in college where expressing even mild disagreement with the ideas of modern progressive ideology is going to get you shunned and if you’re dumb enough to turn in a paper that expresses a conservative opinion you get worse grades. In the workplace, almost any such expression will be seen as negative and possibly get you reported to HR. As such, modern conservatives in the modern workplace, or at least the modern, urban respectable workplace are as closeted as gays were in the 1990s. You thought long and hard before telling people in your social circle and probably didn’t tell people in your professional circle because even though it’s officially tolerated, it would be risky.
As such, even though there are probably people in their social circles who are conservative, those people have learned to clam up. They were in the room when the “right” — pro-abortion— move was made. They just didn’t want the blowback from being the conservative in the room. I guarantee (especially given that the Budweiser part of InBev is in the midwestern largely Catholic city of St. Louis) that someone in that room knew the Mulvaney cans were a terrible idea that would cause backlash. They said nothing because being anti-trans is dangerous to their career.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2yr ago
Alternative being that men are choosing more lethal means because they don’t anticipate a last minute rescue. I’ve known a woman with mental illness who’s attempted suicide several times — and every time she did it, she’d call someone or attempt in such a way that she’d be discovered quickly. In other words, the attempt isn’t exactly an attempt, it’s a cry for help and attention. People who want to die will die.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
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.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1yr ago
I’ve never been a fan of the current iteration of no means no simply because it’s often the case where the signals are at best ambiguous. It’s not a woman saying a hard no “I don’t want any sexual activity from you,” it’s quite often “no” while not removing herself, not putting clothes back on, and in a lot of other ways continuing the activities.
My personal rule is I will not leave a public place for a private one unless I’m prepared to have sex. And once I’m there, if I decide not to have sex, I say no, and I get into my car and leave. Anything else is simply entrapping the man because you are acting as if you want sex. If you’re taking off your clothes in the presence of a man you’re telling him you want sex. Even going to private places like parks where you can find corners away from other people is telling the man you want sex.
I’ve always felt like it’s absolutely on the woman if she doesn’t want sex to make it absolutely perfectly clear with no contradictory signals.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2yr ago
I think a lot of the reasons come from the elites no longer having significant skin in the game and little connection to the real meat potatoes and dirt road.
If you see the world through a laptop full of spreadsheets and as long as the spreadsheet makes graphs that make them look good, they don’t see a problem. Problems will only show up after I’m gone. And thus why not make pretty graphics that make the boss happy? You get paid, it feels good, and you don’t have to deal with the aftermath.
And even when the aftermath comes, you’ll be pretty insulated from it. If the economy tanks, you have money, international investments, and a passport. You probably don’t even know anyone affected by it. All of your friends live like you do, visiting Europe and the Caribbean and wherever else. You have people to handle the cooking, shopping, cleaning, you have security to keep people from bothering you.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Honestly, politics encroaching on my fun is so much of a turn off that I think even if the men would agree with the content, the annoyance would make the message radioactive. This is exactly what happened in gamergate. Woke messages in gaming turned a whole lot of apolitical young men into sold out right wingers. I’m just rather amused by the idea that the left is about to spend 20 million dollars to resurrect Gamergate of all things, and guarantee that Gen Alpha is going to see even the center-left as scolds and unbelievably stupid.
It’s just mind-blowing. You lost an entire generation of young men by invading hobby spaces and gaming and other things those young men did for fun and to escape politics and life in general. So the solution is to do it harder?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think the idea that the states won’t ever do their own work in some form or fashion is false. And this is the entire premise of DOGE — much of what the federal government is doing is not something it should be doing, and in fact so much of it has not only not helped, but has caused real harm. We have a Department of Education that not only doesn’t educate our kids, but wastes our money basically standing in the way of kids learning the very basic concepts they need to understand their world. They’ve been pushing to waste limited class time on woke propaganda, and have pushed “trendy” schemes on schools that simply do not work. They spend billions of dollars to basically stand in the way of kids trying to get an education. Worse, they destroy the potential of those few kids who are thriving in schools by forcing them to learn at the pace of the slowest kids in the class.
Turning education back over to the states has some advantages. Because the department is smaller, it simply doesn’t have the funds to mandate weird trendy ideas of education. They need to have programs that work well and work cheaply. No more sight words and guessing based on pictures, instead learn phonics and sound out the words. No more new mathematical trends, use the stuff that has worked for generations. Furthermore, because the state is much closer to the people, it’s not going to be able to get away with pushing propaganda that’s wildly out of step with what the citizens of that state believe, if they do so at all. The citizens of Oklahoma want bibles in their kiss’s schools, they voted for that. The people of California would push a more liberal ideology. This is how federalism is supposed to work. States are smaller and much easier to bring to heel by the voting population.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6mo ago
I’ve always said this about the approach: we never wanted to act like we were in control or had any right to be in control. This is in contrast to the occupation of Japan in the aftermath of WWII. In Japan, we took control of everything: the media, schools, government, banned weapons, etc. we even banned aspects of culture that we decided were too militaristic. We almost banned Shogi which is a Japanese form of chess, but the arguments that it was pro democracy was convincing so it wasn’t banned. After a generation, Japan went from a militaristic dictatorship and empire to a parliamentary democracy in which the emperor hides in his palace and gives a couple of speeches a year. It went from being the land of Samurai and death before dishonor that didn’t believe in human rights to a country that is only recently considering rebuilding a serious military in response to China. It went from military to kawaii, from swords to anime.
Why? We had the will to do so. We decided to be in charge, we decided we had the right to dictate what parts of their culture they could keep and what had to change. We decided to take over the schools and decide what they learned. We decided how things would change. And after a generation, they did. In Afghanistan, we did no such thing. We didn’t ban child brides, we didn’t mandate a modern secular education system, we didn’t ban head coverings for women. We allowed girls to attend the same schools as the boys. That seems to be about it. Everything else stayed the same. And so it’s not really that surprising that a country that was never forced to accept the ideas of liberal democracy, secular education, human rights, or a de-Islam-ified culture went right back to the Taliban. They had no ideals to fight for, no model of justice and democracy that they thought worth the effort.
In short, we were too liberal and culturally sensitive to win the occupation. Too multicultural to believe that our own ideas were superior to those of medieval Muslims who saw women as property to be covered head to toe and not allowed any agency in their own lives. Too multicultural to believe in modern secular democracy as superior to rule by theocracy. As such imposing on them, even when their ideas are primitive and frankly horrifying was not allowed. They went for the Takiban because the Taliban was willing to create order by imposing its ideals.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
My thoughts are that this stems directly from their view of the world. To them America and the West are a dystopian nightmare.
White Guilt, and present militarism
In Liberal circles, white people, and particularly white Americans, are racist, militaristic, and colonial. They also perceive that none of it is changing even a little bit. We support Israel which is racist and genocidal, we hold down minorities, and enrich ourselves at the expense of the non-whites of the world. And they see it as nobody aside from them actually caring.
Environment
Liberals believe that Earth will be literally uninhabitable within their lifetime. The air will be choked with pollution, the rivers poisoned, global warming creating deserts and rain forests and making things too hot. Nobody wants to do enough to fix it, and quite often want to go in the other direction. They see that nobody aside from them cares.
Capitalism
The rich run the world for the rich and everyone else suffers. Poverty is common, and all the things that should be free are instead not free. College costs too much. Health care costs too much. And again, none of this is noticed by anyone else, so nothing will change.
Trump
You might not notice, but we elected Literally Hitler in November. He’s going to build work camps. He’s going to round people up and either imprison them or deport them. The Handmaid’s Tale is going to happen. Again, nobody notices or cares and worse, half the country likes it. Which proves that white people are evil.
All of this is a profoundly negative world view. Dystopian even. Everything is terrible, and at best going to stay terrible forever, and very likely to get worse. If this is how you really see the world, obviously that’s going to give you anxiety and depression, especially if you’re hanging around others who share this view, and have few or no outside interests.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I think a lot of that might not be true. The normies might be more sympathetic to positions on the right than we’ve been lead to believe simply because modern office politics and the fact that most social media is public tends to lead to normie self censorship. This was what made polling a mess in 2016. People knew better than to publicly support a lot of Trump positions. Being less than thrilled that your kids can check out nearly pornographic gay sex books is labeled right wing, but I don’t think the actual opinions have changed that much. And I’d say the same for things like transgender kids — most people are not in favor of young children starting down that path, and would absolutely be livid if their child’s interest in such things were actively hidden from them.
What’s actually happening is that the left has put shame-filled labels on them, included them in HR training and thus put people on notice that their livelihoods and even their ability to keep their children depends on them at least publicly being open and inclusive and mouthing the lefty talking points on those things. And because of the conforming culture of PMC and aspiring PMC whites, they mostly go along with the watchwords and even out those who refuse to conform to HR. Try saying something vaguely populist right at a normie dinner party. The over the top reactions are not those of genuine disagreement. They’re fear. These people act like Inquisition Spaniards hearing something heretical, not people who have thought through the issue and come to a reasonable conclusion about the issues.
Trump might be pandering to his base, but I don’t see it as a negative simply because I don’t see a lot of people who actually oppose the things he’s saying. They’re mostly afraid to be publicly on his side. And the thing is that voting is the one place where you can express a heresy without fear because the ballots are private.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1yr ago
I wouldn’t say stupid. It’s that most of them have majored in film and writing and have been working on only that kind of thing and most likely have never met working scientists, business owners, or anyone who isn’t involved in writing and filmmaking.
That kind of insular world creates all kinds of stupid blind spots. They don’t understand science or know anyone who does, so they understand science only on a popular science IFLS level where it’s either terrible and destructive, or it basically shits out gadgets and stands in for magic.
Of course they do the same with politics, history, journalism, and education too.
I think one of the biggest things holding back screenwriting is that insular perspective. Not only does it prevent people from making compelling stories about other subjects, but since everyone has the exact same thoughts about those topics, there’s not really anything surprising. Andy Weir is good at making stories about ordinary working people in space because he studied the physics and chemistry of space and because he likely knows a good number of blue collar workers who don’t think like the elites do.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2yr ago
This. I work American retail, and this entire policy is insanely funny because it’s so obviously stupid.
Why would anyone engage with “RESTORE” to avoid jail time when it’s already pretty rare to be caught, and even if you are, you won’t be prosecuted, let alone go to jail. Why would they try to get into these programs (which seems like an admission of guilt) when you could do nothing? At best those sorts of programs will basically move theft from the customer facing parts of the store to the back room and teach thieves how stores work so they’re able to steal better. Nobody with a brain is going to let thieves into this program at their store.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I see this as part of a larger problem of our system basically beating initiative out of the population. It shows up in dating because that’s pretty obvious, but teachers report that kids don’t really try to figure out how to solve problems on their own, and often end up “stuck” until an authority be it teacher or parent does the problem for them. They also tend to seek out adult help with any social problems that tend to crop up. If some kid is mean to them, they don’t try to solve that issue between the kids, they go straight to an adult.
Partially, I think it’s a lack of time away from adults and with other kids, especially when the adult doesn’t know exactly what’s going on. Most kids have their lives arranged for them — they play sports after school, they have activities. They have playdates. And of course, the cellphone means that someone always knows where they are and can call them if they deviated from where mom expected them to be. How do you learn to take risks and initiative when you live an arranged life? When you have never been in a situation where you do something awkward and discover later that it’s recoverable?
The other thing is that school and parents tend to be overly worried about the kid making a mistake that will follow him around. Maybe he tries to figure out that homework problem and gets it wrong and loses his spot on the honor roll. Maybe he makes a mistake with a girl and gets accused of sexually harassing her. Maybe he does something stupid when he’s out with friends and ends up in trouble or does drugs or drinks underaged. Any of those can stick around for a while. Parents know this and kids pick up on it. So between th3 both of them, it’s better to just not try those things.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
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.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9mo ago
If anything, the growing disdain with the policies of the Trudeau administration is revealing that when push comes to shove, and white progressives are asked to make material sacrifices to uphold and stick to their principles, they immediately step down from their high pulpit of moral superiority and inclusivity. There is no free lunch, and this is what it takes to ensure that marginalized groups can also get a slice of the pie; you cannot have your cake and eat it too by simultaneously demanding material equity and then crying when those same materials, resources, and opportunities are redistributed against your favour. This is the exact dynamic Liam Kofi Bright outlines in the previously linked paper, "White Psychodrama." White progressives should either put up, grin and bear the cost of the very same social justice they demanded through bloody cancellation and mob invective, or end the charade and shut the fuck up.
What I suspect in this case is something like what’s happening in the USA. The elites want the immigrants to drive up costs of goods (increased population leading to increased demand) and to hold down wages. This is how immigrants tend to improve the economy of the country they go to. On the one hand, as new arrivals, they’d need housing, and all the stuff that comes with it. They will need furniture, vehicles, clothes, shoes, kids need school supplies etc. probably toys. So the price of these things go up because suddenly you have doubled the size of the town and thus driven up demand. At the same time, their expectations for wages are dirt cheap— and this delights the business owners who can now bid down the cost of labor (and BONUS! Get points for your work to increase diversity) and even skimp on safety and health rules as third world countries have poor conditions and the workers aren’t going to complain about treatment that while bad by first world standards is wonderful for people used to poor conditions at the workplace. OSHA (and the Canadian equivalent) don’t exist in most developing countries.
So the benefits are the support depends very much on which side of the class divide you sit on. If you’re part of the investment class, immigration is net positive. The stocks will go up, GDP goes up, labor becomes cheaper and more compliant. If your on the working class side, your wages stagnate, your costs go up, your kids are denied opportunities for work (to make room for the cheaper and more compliant immigrant population who won’t complain or ask for raises) their schools spend more effort to teach immigrants English than getting your kids prepared for life after high school.
And there is the reason for the lack of support. It’s a battle between the beneficiary class who wants all these immigrants and the benefits they offer to their social class, vs the working class that all of this is happening too. They don’t like that their wages aren’t going up, or that the new immigrants are allowing dirty and dangerous conditions on the job. They don’t like the resources that should be going to the school computer lab instead being shunted to hiring scores of ESL teachers and textbooks written in whatever language the kids speak.
This sounds more like an indictment of young Canadians, their lack of skills, and their inability to compete in the marketplace with those who will do their exact same entry-level service job, except for lower pay, and for longer hours. Immigrants are hard-working, ambitious, and (possibly even literally) hungry for success. Their lack of access to said opportunities instills within them a greater work ethic and drive to succeed when they don't have the Bank of White Mummy and Daddy to catch them when they fall after their six-year all expenses paid academic career in Theatrical Non-Binary Basket Weaving fails to take off. Why should white Canadians feel that their white privilege of being born in a deeply racist country entitles them to continue upholding the institutions of racism by denying ethnic minorities a job that they can do just as well as a white? What entitles these already privileged whites to a job over minorities?
I think you have a wildly skewed idea of the kinds of people who live in small towns. These people don’t have the resources you think they do. They’re mostly working class. The immigrants are not taking the jobs of high skilled graduates, they’re taking jobs from the working class. And working class people don’t actually have the bank of dad to fall back on. So when they don’t get early work experience it’s an economic setback. Further, these people might be trying to support a family. The advantage immigrants have is that they’re cheap and compliant. They might work a bit harder, but the main thing is that they won’t ewww try to get better wages or conditions. They’ll work for peanuts and sleep 3-4 families to a house so they can live on $10 an hour. No first world labor can afford to work for that little, but now that we have immigrants, you can forget about your wages going up. But remember, if you’re not in favor of being underbid by imported labor, you’re a white privileged racist.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1yr ago
This is one of the things that I find utterly weird about our moment in history. We just have no concept of how much of what we have is a product of simply having abundance. We can afford to put people in jail being completely unproductive for years and even decades and still feed them for all that. We can afford to pay people who cannot (and often will not) do anything productive. We can afford to tolerate a great deal of deviant behavior and ideologies. And I’ve always strongly suspected that most of not all of our “enlightened ways” come down to us being wealthy enough to be enlightened.
And I think when the surplus goes away (either because of space colonization or collapse) we’ll have to go back to the unenlightened ways of our ancestors. When you not doing productive work means a lack of food, or your deviant behavior puts others at risk or consumes too many resources, other people aren’t going to put up with that for long. If your “transition” in whatever form it takes, costs too many medical resources and you live in a place where medical care isn’t easy to come by, that by itself harms people. The blood used for your top surgery means a shortage of blood for people having accidents or something, or maybe a shortage of antibiotics as well, people aren’t going along with that because they understand that it means they might not get medical care.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I actually find the idea that they are shocked that Biden dropped out as hilarious. The right-leaning media could find obvious signs of dementia, including him wandering off during NATO conferences, numerous visits by a Parkinson’s doctor, and so on. How the sitting VP had absolutely no idea is beyond me.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I think my culture war angle on this is that most safety enforcement is too easily weaponized against ordinary people to be actually effective in preventing the worst excesses. Worse, they created a situation in which activities that are not only not dangerous, but actually good for kids are forbidden lest some overactive Karen decide to insert themselves into your life and use CPS to punish you.
Helicopter parenting has been shown to causing negative effects (https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/06/helicopter-parenting). Ordinary milestones like being able to play without a parent present, let alone walk to a neighbors house, are now pushed so far forward that a child is likely to be a pre-teen before doing anything away from the prying eyes of parents. This is something that harms kids because the normal avenues for learning to problem solve and be independent are now pushed to nearly adulthood where the stakes are much higher. At ten, outside of edge cases of kidnapping (which are pretty rare) the worst a kid could do is maybe stay out later than he should or cause minor trouble. At 16, the kid can get into drugs and alcohol and vandalism and so on. He hasn’t yet learned to handle peer relationships, knowing what is dangerous and what isn’t, and has no skills to handle himself.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I think this is a textbook case of the wisdom of keeping things that will be addictive as hard to ge5 as possible. Sports gambling in a casino might not be so terrible. The steps necessary to get to a casino for any sort of gambling serve as an important brake on the behavior. The fact that such gambling can now but done using stored credit card information on a device that is carried in the pocket makes it almost impossible for anyone with the proclivity to addiction to ever have control. And this is true of other potentially addictive behaviors— if you have your addiction always available, you can’t easily say no to it.
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.
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