MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
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
6mo ago
And thus he could have simply concluded that Muslims shouldn’t be in the West and banned his followers from using Western media or visiting the west. I mean a lot of the Woke stuff is anti-Christian as well, and most serious Christians avoid exposure to that kind of media and so on. They don’t drive through crowds.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6mo ago
I think trust was fading before as people were aware of the lies of the media and public leaders long before Covid. What I think Covid and its massive overreaction did was tear off the bandage. People are now pretty open about their distrust of officials and official information organs. But whether the trust can be restored is up to those officials and those information organs taking a hard look at themselves and their practices and deciding to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Until those things happen, I just don’t see the public taking the CDC, FBI, or other organizations seriously. Nor do I think, absent such a change, most mainstream news outlets can become a trusted source of news. Not lying and apologizing for previous lies is critical here.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6mo ago
I mean I get that, but my thought is that cultural differences between the two groups matter. Even if the Germans hadn’t fully assimilated, the difference between a Lutheran and an Episcopal group of Christians is tiny. Even between Catholics and Episcopals Theres no gulf between them that would create a division. Even the Languages are fairly similar.
But the difficulty for Indians, various Muslim peoples, East Asians (although I think Japan and Korea have adopted a bit of our culture already) is that they aren’t really like us. Their languages are not like ours, their religion is different, their cultural assumptions and mores are different. And especially as we’re much less keen to enforce immigration and assimilation, this is tearing at the social fabric much more so than the largest community of unassimilated Germans could possibly do. And so I think talking about unassimilated Germans in an Anglo context is a false equivalence here. Muslims are no Lutherans. Indians are not Germans. Even if you enforce the assimilation to the point of them completely losing the language, you still have issues of religion and social mores and the degree to which they tolerate different ideas.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
https://www.levernews.com/how-democrats-learned-to-love-losing/
I think honestly the secret sauce of MAGA and Trump is breaking the consensus of hyper normalization. Hyper normalization is the thought that basically, it’s broken, it sucks, and nobody can actually fix it. They don’t even try, and until Trump, nobody bothered to pretend to try. And especially on the democratic side, there’s just no thought process of “just doing something” to fix whatever the problem is. There’s no “buck stops here” in government in which the person or group promises to make actual concrete changes that will actually fix the problem. And because Trump is the guy at least claiming to try to fix things, he’s the guy who can actually win and people like him can actually win. Biden Harris were absolutely the opposite. They can pass acts that everyone knew wouldn’t fix inflation, they can appoint czars to head up not fixing whatever crisis they’re appointed to pretend to care about. But they lack the sort of extreme ownership, the will to actually take the levers of power and do something with them, the will to make decisions that the6 intend to stick with.
I think given how into hyper normalization the DNC is, just about any not-democrat could have won. The DNC is the party of “whelp, we tried absolutely nothing, and it didn’t work. Nothing else we can do, sorry, it’s just going to suck now.” Anyone promising “I can absolutely fix immigration, and here’s how we do it,” has the edge. Anyone who says “we can fix the government and make it work again,” who isn’t desperate to hear that kind of thing? Whether Trump can actually fix all of these problems is an open question. But I think the hope he’s giving that we can take the powers of the government to actually make life better — that we don’t have to accept that everything will be getting worse and we should sit and drink wine and watch America slowly rot away from the inside. Even if you don’t like him, the thought of someone trying to actually fix things is hope.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I mean, this is probably true, but German culture is hardly alien to Anglophone culture. They were already high church protestants who shared a culture and history. They shared the same work ethic and broad culture. German isn’t that alien.
Indians are not that close. They share almost nothing of our culture, our history, our religion. They don’t share the same work ethic.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
A wet paper bag could have beaten Biden/Harris. Biden has obvious dementia, but even beyond that, there was the economic crises (inflation AND recession), billions for Ukraine, the complete botching of hurricane relief (there are still people living in tents), and the border. There’s no positives to vote for.
Trump is winning because he at least wants to upend the system. Whether another person could win that handily, I don’t know, it’s possible. But only the ones who promise to fix the broken system so Americans have a functioning government again.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I think the whole thing stinks of presentism. The thing I observe about history is that the farther back you go, the more literal people seem to take things. In ancient texts, probably up until really Islam, the idea of Gos was pretty physical. Any God you care to read about has a body. They eat and drink, they occasionally come down to earth and walk around, even in descriptions of the afterlife, it’s physical, a garden or a city, or people eating good food and having drinks and so on.
And even in other forms of thought. It just doesn’t seem like up until Plato or Socrates that there was any sort of meta analysis going on. No real thought about categories or how to think about the world. It was all very much rooted in practical, realistic, and everyday sort of concerns. I can’t say that any ancient human in the Bronze Age ever thought about whether or not animals thought, or what makes a woman a woman.
As such, I don’t think modern ideas like sexuality or sex/gender descriptions are even possible n the remote past. The ideas are simply too abstract and complicated for a mind that deals mostly in the here, now, and the physical. It’s a product of our time, something we do because we are used to meta thinking and abstractions and symbolic thinking. We are no longer bound to what we can see and touch. In fact I suspect that AI is starting the next level of abstraction for human minds. Not just dealing in logical and symbolic abstract reasoning, but thinking about how we think, and thinking about what kinds of thinking will do the most good.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
As far as your second point, I think just going off the salaries to determine who is better off is probably not all that good. Having your entire society be a nice, high trust place to live where you can safely walk around at all hours and you have good, safe, and efficient public transportation would seem to make up for a smaller apartment and no car. Having more money but tripping over homeless people and seeing trash everywhere doesn’t seem a good trade to me.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
Except that for most of that time, the vast majority of immigrants were white Western Europeans who were practicing Christians and Protestant Christians at that. Furthermore, the levers of power were reserved for those White Western European Protestants and Western European values, culture, and fashions were the ones enforced socially. Kids read the Western canon.
I don’t think I could consider a civilization founded by Anglo Saxons welcoming Dutch, German, Swedes and Scots immigrants is very much of a melting pot. The founding stock are germanoceltic, and the immigrants are germanoceltic. The current generation is much more diverse than that. We now import Hindus from India, Muslims from MENA, Buddhists from Asia, and Africans. The cultural differences between an Englishman and a Dutchman are tiny compared to the differences between an Englishman and a Pakistani Muslim. And worse, the influx of non-WEIRD immigrants means that transmission or enforcement of western culture and norms is now bigotry. In fact one proves bonifides by publicly disavowing and deconstruction and rejection of the white western culture of the country.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I think a big part is sanitary conditions. You are bringing an animal into a place that sells food. Dogs simply cannot meet the sanitation requirements of those kinds of establishments. That dog sniffing the lettuce uses that same snout to clean its privates. They also can’t talk and need to shit and piss and yes they’ll have accidents. Great.
The other problem is that most dogs are poorly trained and socialized for the environments they’re in. Yes your dog is the exception, at least by what you say here. But your dogs presence means that the establishment is going to be taking in less well behaved dogs in the same places. And the reason is that those who don’t train their dogs absolutely belief that their animal is well-behaved. And they will Ask To Speak To Manager if they aren’t allowed the same access to restaurants and bars as your dog. And they will pester other guests, pee or poop on the patio, and possibly growl at or nip at other guests. I’m not going to object if the owner of the place decided pets are okay in outdoor spaces around th3 restaurant. My objection is that normalization of pets everywhere is creating sanitation and safety problems especially for the people with allergies and phobias.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
What I don’t understand is why there’s no pushback on increasing the need for certification of the dogs. It’s perfectly obvious just how few of them have even basic training ,let alone specific training for a task related to disability. It seems like a fairly simple solution. In order for a dog to be allowed it must be trained by a specific organization (or at least tested by one) and require that in order to be allowed to have such an animal in public places they need to be diagnosed with a specific condition that requires a dog as accommodation.
I feel the same about other mental health issues. The accommodations are available and the systems are abused because the vetting is nonexistent. ADHD has attracted so much fakery that I just instantly think “disappointed perfectionist seeking ADA accommodations” when someone brings it up. Likewise when someone says “Autistic” I just naturally assume that the person is scamming the ADA for protection. I’ll make exceptions if the person has extremely obvious symptoms and claims a mental illness. But to me, the process of Mental Illness Gentrification (which FdB talks about) has so muddled the concept of disability and especially mental health or similar “invisible” disabilities that I instantly think “defector” when someone tries to claim one.
Until we really start to clamp down on just anyone getting ADA accommodations at basically a say so, I’d almost rather do away with the system outside of architecture concerns just because it’s actually the reverse of the intent of the law. It started as a way to get people who were too sick, disabled or injured to participate in society to be included. It’s turned into a new way to shut people out because most people with actual disability cannot afford to get diagnosed and treated. The normal people obviously are in much better position to get diagnosed because they have the disposable income to go to the psychiatrist and because they’ve done their research know what to say to get diagnosed. They’re also more normal (because they don’t actually have the disorders they claim, so they can succeed and be normal and simply get a leg up over the autistic person or the person with actual ADHD who can’t just knuckle down and be better and do better.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
It’s kinda both. Part of the vetting of men by other men is to make sure that the man in question has the basic traits of a man. The biggest complaints I see from women are things that men used to teach each other about life.
Some of the bigger complaints I see from women:
1). He has no sense of direction in his life. If he has a job, it’s a minimum one, and he has no concrete plan to change that. Not looking for something better, not going to a career focused training program, just working for almost nothing and not caring much about it.
2). Very often having very childish interests. Heavy gaming (like more than 20 hours a week), anime/sci-fi fandom to the point of obsession. No real hobbies or interests outside of those things. In food, tastes are also rather childish— chicken tenders, pizza, instant ramen, macaroni and cheese, no vegetables or fruits.
3). Have no idea how to properly keep up an apartment. The apartments are messy and sometimes furnished only with a bed, a TV gaming system, and cheap furniture.
4). They don’t seem to understand basic adult interaction or if they do, they understand it in a very shallow way. They don’t accept a no in many cases, and assume that if they just keep following the woman around that they’ll eventually say yes. They don’t understand social cues and therefore tend to overstay their welcome in social situations. Because of their narrow interests (see 2) they often cannot have a conversation about things outside of this. They don’t really understand planning social events either.
5). A lot of these men seem to expect a wife to come along and essentially mother them. Take over the cooking and cleaning that he doesn’t want to do. Introduce him to her social circles and teach him how to behave properly. Give them an external push to fix their career path.
Most women don’t want this. They rightly expect to find a man they can partner with who is and behaves like an adult. They want someone with real interests and hobbies they can share that aren’t “consume media products”. They want a man who is in the path to career success and can thus at least help to provide for future children. They don’t want to adopt their husband as a child and manage him like a child.
Men used to teach this kind of stuff in male only spaces. They used to teach each other to strive for success, to take risks. They used to teach each other to adopt more adult interests and hobbies and to understand basic adult interaction. A big issue here is the decline of male-only activities and spaces. It’s almost impossible for men to create the social dynamics that allow them to teach boys to “man up” if women and girls are allowed in. (The reverse is true as well, as women also need those female only spaces for proper female socialization). The reason is that a lot of the things that need to be taught to make a man out of a boy are things that offend women or sound mean. (Again being fair, the stuff women do to make girls into women are likely to offend male sensibilities as well). Men need to be cajoling each other to high achievement, to teach them how to get a woman interested, and to teach them to behave properly around women. When women invade those spaces, it becomes almost impossible to teach boys to be men. The over-competitive nature of boys sports also cuts down on that a venue for socialization for a lot of boys.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I’m not a hard ethnic nationalist, but I think honestly some caution is required in making the assumption that especially for first and second generation immigrants m that they retain no loyalty whatsoever to their homeland. A Chinese immigrant spent all of their formative years and probably beyond that being Chinese in a Chinese nation and in a Chinese culture. His attitude towards just about anything you can imagine are shaped by that, and it doesn’t go away just because he’s been walking around New York or Silicon Valley for five years. And the stronger the ethic and religious identities are, and the less enforcement of assimilation there is the worse it gets for creating loyalty to the new country. Muslims in Europe don’t seem to be very loyal to their new countries, in fact they’re doing their best to subvert those countries into being Muslim countries and are willing to use intimidation and propaganda and so on to get there. Thus, I think at this point, I’d be very cautious about letting first generation immigrants have access to levers of power or knowledge that can be sold off to foreign countries that may or may not be hostile to us. No, I don’t think it’s paranoid to keep Chinese and Iranian engineering students away from sensitive technology and information, especially military and cutting edge computer stuff. Of course in the 21st century, it’s heresy to say that Iranian engineering students should not be allowed on American nuclear submarines no matter their grades. I would consider it common sense.
And I don’t see how any country can survive if they’re giving away the levers of power or their greatest military and technology resources to people with no demonstrated loyalty to the actual country. If you don’t care what happens to your country or its people, at best it’s going to end with those people choosing personal interests over those of the country and at worst will choose other loyalties they may have over the interests of people they don’t care about. Even without the threat of family back in China who would face harm, but even without that, they are open to bribes and corruption because they’re here for their own reasons, mostly for some form of personal benefit.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
It’s a problem for electoral systems in general. You don’t win by loyalty, in fact loyalty is often detrimental to the project. Being of, by, and for the people doesn’t matter, in fact the opposite, as the money lies in selling out the people to global interests. What matters is the ability to imitate the people enough to not trip alarms while you work to sell the country to the highest bidder while using propaganda to convince the people that all of this is to their benefit.
I don’t know that changing the demographics changes much, if anything I think it might accidentally help as it becomes increasingly obvious to the public that not only do the elites not care about them, but often have no serious connections to the actual country or its citizens. It might be possible for white guys with American accents to convince Amerikanners that they’re on side and not working for international interests. It’s not going to land nearly so well when the same “free trade! More immigration! Stop practicing your culture and religion you bigots!” Rhetoric comes from people with pajeet or mandarin or Arabic accents living in coastal global cities that have nothing in common with what average Americans people want.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I think the big one was that it was a missionary religion that essentially downplayed ethnic differences. Once you became Christian, the old tribes no longer mattered as much. There is neither Jew nor Greek thus you can integrate into the culture. This would serve to stabilize an empire as you ideally no longer have people who put their ethnic identity first. We can certainly see tge fruits of tribal thinking in our age when people can think their religion, race, sexuality or gender is more important than being an American.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
The catholic community has some weird hang ups that I think are a part of the trauma of the reformation and the breakup of Christendom. In general there are only to real “do not cross” lines that really stick out. First, you have to be okay with invoking saints, and second, you have to accept the pope. The church may make frowny faces at other things, but as long as you’re good on those points, they’re not really going to get too mad.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I mean yes they happen fairly regularly, but having a high fatality accident every time the us or her Allies get involved in a battle does seem somewhat provocative to me.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I think it’s cynicism. It’s like you can’t quite except that the people you disagree with are reasoning honestly from moral priors and thus they must somehow be choosing to act on a belief but perhaps not some other one out of a calculated social standing perspective. To be fair, there are vanity beliefs and issues that people choose for the purpose of securing a place in the social hierarchy, but at the same time, there are genuine believers in almost any movement.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
The counterpoint being that those other people can advocate for themselves and can show gratitude to you for helping them, two things that an unborn baby cannot do. And the circumstances are obviously different. It’s like saying in 1942 Germany “it’s easy to advocate for the Jews they don’t want anything except to survive. The poor are harder, they want you to feed them and give them money.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
Yeah I guess I’m being unclear. I see most of these traits as following the typical bell curve in which you can have everything from the very high end (in this case highly sensitive, with severe communication problems, and repetitive behaviors) to the very low end where you end up with something a bit like Sheldon Cooper who’s awkward, has very specific needs for an unchanging environment and has special interests. The thing changing in my view, not just on autism but adhd and the like is the threshold at which a parent might seek help, or at which a teacher might suggest a problem and thus the symptoms are diagnosed. In 1900, a kid with adhd was just ditzy or a wild child or something like that. In 1900, Sheldon is weird, especially if he memorizes the train schedules or something. But in that era, nobody thought of this as a disease. And even if they did sort of understand it as a disease, they didn’t seek help as often as we do today, in part because medicine in 1900 was harder to access and in part because it was not able to do nearly as much as it can today. By 2024, we’ve gotten much better at medicine and medical care is generally more available. Add in awareness and concern about neurological disorders especially as we move to a knowledge based economy, and you have a society that’s more likely to seek medical intervention for perceived mental illness or deficiencies.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I think a big problem for premodern paganism was the lack of a Bible or Qu’ran as a way to unite the faith and to unify the practices and mores. Pagans were more open, but also less United and had fewer touchstones of belief — tribes outside of yours might not know your gods and even if they did, didn’t know the same mythology or worship in the same way.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I mean yes. But there are always practical issues. We simply don’t have room for everyone who would want to come, for a start. Our society simply can’t handle importing 20% of our population annually, for example. I’m not convinced we could successfully import 3% of our current population annually with no issues. Add in issues of culture (Palestinians have a much different culture than Swedes or Chinese) language, individual immigrant’s education level, the amount of money needed to ge5 people who arrive with nothing a home and food while they look for work. This is all assuming no criminal, terrorist or similar background. It’s not just “do I directionally want immigrants here, it’s questions of getting the thing done without breaking the country. Importing all of Gaza into Nebraska isn’t feasible— we don’t have the resources to successfully integrate that number of people into America. At best, you end up turning Nebraska into Gaza, lock stock and barrel. I don’t think anyone looking at that situation would say I want to turn Palestinians into Soylent. It’s just that as a practical matter, we can’t actually do that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7mo ago
I think that like a lot of other things, our current environment makes people much more likely to notice and seek help for ever more mild symptoms of mental illness.
First of all, the demand on the human brain in the twenty-first century are much much higher than in the twentieth let alone the 19th. We didn’t rely on our brains as much, most people did less skilled work, and so if something was wrong with your brain, you might never have noticed. It’s hard to catch on to dyslexia if nobody around you reads above a third grade level because you’re not that much off of the perceived baseline. In the twenty-first century, any such problem would be noticed and fixed if possible because almost all liveable wage jobs are at least skilled trades or reading screens as a primary task. If you’re struggling in school, people are alert to it because they don’t want you suffering for it. Autism, at least in the milder forms may not have mattered as much in the early days of humanity. You’d just be kinda weird or eccentric and so on. People learned to live with your symptoms. That’s Jim, the weirdo who knows the names of thousands of birds and only eats white pasta. He’s mostly harmless.
The other thing is that medical care and especially mental health care is much more available (I’ve said before that I think therapeutic ideas don’t work for normal people and may make them worse) so if you’re having specific symptoms of something or your child is acting weird, you go see a doctor and if it’s autism, it’s diagnosed and treated as well as can be managed.
Both together would clearly make almost any mental illness more prevalent in the 21st century than the 19th. Not because there’s actually more mental illness but because there’s more medical care available and people are using it more. I expect a big increase now that therapy can be done over texts.
The problem with a lot of that stuff lends itself well to selecting for things that signify race, or wealth, or being a progressive. An essay about an experience that changed your life is going to naturally give off all kinds of demographic data. You going to a public school for the first time at age ten and meeting your first poor kid signals wealth. You volunteering overseas signals wealth. You doing church work signals conservative values and working for a nonprofit signals liberal values. It’s almost impossible that you can look very deep at stuff like that and not be able to know who the person is.
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