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MaiqTheTrue

Renrijra Krin

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MaiqTheTrue


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Renrijra Krin

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
To me a lot of this has nothing to do with whether a piece of art is actually good on not.  To me, things like craftsmanship, form, balance in colors and shapes.  I’m not opposed to “starting conversations” or “having a viewpoint”, but on the other hand it’s not essential to whether a piece has the qualities of good art.  If you look at ancient and medieval art, it’s not making odd statements about society, it’s creating something beautiful to tell familiar stories.  An icon of a Bible story painted in the year 1000 says nothing more or less than “this is a familiar cultural story.”  The art is in the craftsmanship the balance of the characters in the frame, they’re definitely beautiful.  The same can be said of ancient Indian images of Shiva dancing, or the Laughing Buddhas, or Japanese prints.  The form and the balance of structure and color, the workmanship, the materials, etc. are what make these things beautiful.


Art galleries don’t really care that much about beauty, or quality.  A banana duct taped to a wall, a canvas painted in one shade of green, a crucifix in urine, a pile of candy in a corner, etc. these are things that are famous art pieces.  But they also are pieces that have no thought behind them, no craftsmanship, no serious effort to produce anything interesting.  It’s actually a crass attempt at juvenile humor and quite often is only notable because of its ridiculous nature.  Were these artists unknowns, nobody would care about the art.  It’s possible it’s sparking a conversation, but how deep of a conversation can one have about a banana taped to a wall, bought by a rich guy with money to burn and who promptly ate the banana?  Gee, I hope the banana was tasty, I guess.  And I hope the green canvas matches the couch.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think there is such a thing as good taste.  It’s not that you are somehow not allowed to like “poor taste”.  The value of taste is that it recognizes things like skillful workmanship, balance and harmony in the form, timelessness, among other things.  A cheap mass produced item quickly churned out is simply not as tasteful as a well crafted piece built to last.  A brutalist skyscraper is not as tasteful as a basilica.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don’t see how you fix that when the best way to keep thieves away from your property is to keep it unwalkable and keep public transportation out.  In dense parts of the urban landscape, walking is marginal during the day and probably unwise at night unless you’re in a group.  That doesn’t get fixed unless you can keep the drugs and crime out by a method other than building the environment such that you need a personal vehicle to get around that area.  I live in the county surrounding St. Louis, and the neighborhoods near m3 that would be considered “walkable” also are poor areas that have bars on their windows.  No one with the means to afford something better wants to live in a place like that, and so while nobody says so out loud, those with the means want to have to drive around because that means that you don’t have the low income housing and issues that come with it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is pretty true across most domains of enjoyment.  I know people who weep at the sound of beautiful music or a great piece of art.  Your thing is food.  I don’t see that as a reason why you can’t try to keep things within reasonable limits.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think directionally, yes. It’s just good resource allocation to look at the actuarial data and say “this drug might marginally improve your life for a few months, but you’re old or in bad shape physically and thus your treatment makes no sense.”


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Noah Smith: Insurance companies aren't the main villain of the U.S. health system
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The cost of research to FDA standards of evidence is a huge one.  That pill in your hand likely went through 10 years of development and another 5-10 of trials to prove to the FDA that it had no significant adverse effects.  So by the time that the company finally has permission to sell the drug, it’s been costing the drug company millions a year for nearly twenty years.  Every penny they can get is needed to fund the next round of drugs in development and even those that won’t be good enough to get approved.  It’s a big part of the business model to get as much as possible so they can keep the lights on while they spend billions developing better drugs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean sure there’s a bit of blaming in that.  But I think until the issues are actually understood, I don’t think you can make much headway.  Yes corporations especially food corporations are trying to get people to eat more and eat worse food, and I think it certainly needs to be addressed.  But tge interventions would rarely be medical.  They’d be perhaps regulations on ingredients (all surprising amount of our food ingredients are illegal in Europe), or not allowing vending machines in schools.  I think it might be well past time to get cooking taught in schools so people know how to people know how to cook healthy meals.  I’d like to see recreational sports make a big comeback as I think it would help both the loneliness epidemic and the sedentary lifestyle problems we have.


We also have to essentially renormalize the concepts of portion control and self control.  You simply cannot remove all temptations from the environment.  You can’t make grocery stores not have candy and sodas at tge checkout.  You can’t ban video games when everyone has the internet.  At some point, the same issues come up and it’s something the rest of society cannot do for you.  You have to learn self control.  We can’t have it for you.  We can possibly shame people for having an entire pizza to themselves, but it runs counter to what most people have been taught so it’s uphill.


The thing is that very little of that is medical.  And blaming the medical system for an entire culture eating slop and not exercising is not only not going to help, but will probably drive people out of those jobs.  Your doctor can’t undo decades of gluttony and a sedentary lifestyle in a couple of visits.  Nobody can.  And I don’t think blaming the medical system for social problems is a reasonable way to get good results.  Fix the cultural problems.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Cherrypicking where the US does best doesn't justify all the areas where it does poorly. Why are so many people on anti-depressants? Why are so many fat or addicted to drugs? Failings of the US health system are root causes for both (bad nutrition advice and improper dietary additives +opiate mass marketing). Being shot can hurt your health just as much as a tumour and while generally police and troops are supposed to deal with that side of healthcare, they clearly aren't doing a great job of it in America. These problems are not solely caused by a bad health system of course, it's massively multicausal and there are other root causes.




Those things aren’t even necessarily fixable by medical intervention, in fact I think in the case of mental health, better results would be had by de-medicalizing mental health in all but the worst cases.  Therapeutic culture has somehow managed to turn 3/4th of ordinary human experience into trauma, while at the same time creating a culture hyper focused on feelings and especially negative feelings as facts.  If I were to try to cure depression and anxiety I’d spend more time trying to get the person to understand that bad things happen to everybody, that you’ll get better with time, and that focusing on how broken you feel just makes things worse.  And until you start living despite the hurt and the “trauma” (which unless you’re fleeing a literal war zone or horrific abuse, is probably something fairly normal to human life) you just aren’t going to heal.


As far as obesity, while I’d try to nudge our food manufacturers to make better quality stuff, the vast majority of obesity is caused by neglecting fork-put-downs and overeating.  You, unless you have a severe medical condition, are capable of simply not eating at every opportunity.  Likewise, a lot of other health issues are caused by basically not moving.  None of this is mysterious, it’s just that following the treatment isn’t fun.  You have to count calories and macros.  You have to spend thirty minutes a day doing exercise.


The problem of course is that medicine as a practice cannot do much for these problems except mask the symptoms or do very crude repairs of the damage done.  And until we can somehow rewind culture back to the point where people generally took responsibility for their lives rather than turning to others to fix the damage later, you simply cannot make a lot of progress here.  The problems are cultural and social.  Returning to the ethos of the past, where you learned to keep a stiff upper lip and carry on, and where you took a large degree of responsibility for things in your own life, I don’t see how the medical system can be blamed.  It sounds very much like the parents who barely pretend to care about whether their kids put forth effort in school, then get mad when 12 years later, their kid can’t read or do basic math, and now they’re mad at the teacher.  The teacher can’t make the child do homework, and unless the child does homework, he’s not going to learn much.  It’s too late, the damage has been going on for 12 years and there’s no intervention that’s going to undo what’s been done.


I think most problems in America are not so hard to solve.  We’re just losing our ability to knuckle down and actually do the work.  We’re the people looking for ways around having to do work.  We want gamification of education, because why should we study, it’s boring and feels like work.  We don’t want to count calories and macros and stick to a healthy diet because it’s not as exciting as deep fried raviolis and white sauce pasta.  We don’t want to exercise.  Instead we’re looking for quick fixes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes.  As would noble houses.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Collition is a distributed conspiracy.  Lobbying is a distributed conspiracy.  I’ve never really noted that the NRx groups would not have considered a rightward leaning lobby or collition as not being a distributed conspiracy.  Distributed conspiracies are simply the building and wielding of a power base.  And really the biggest difference in modern times is how the influence peddling works due to how we perceive the legitimacy of a power base.  In modern liberal democracy, legitimacy flows from the deimos— all of us, so power is wielded by creating the appearance of the public being for something and creating propaganda networks.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don’t think a distributed conspiracy is all that weird.  The machinations around power and the seeking of power have not really ever changed, except that they’ve become more sophisticated as knowledge of psychology and technology has allowed for greater social engineering capabilities.  In the bad old days of feudal societies, thing we’re done fairly openly because there really wasn’t much knowledge about how to do so quietly.  You’d openly scheme that you and your faction want power, find Allies whose wealth, power and influence you could use to take power, and off you go, sitting a Lannister on the throne of Westeros.  Not everyone involved would be part of a conspiracy.  Maybe you stood to gain a trade deal if you had someone on the throne who shared your interests.  In that instance you might well support the movement even if you’re not in on the conspiracy.  You might well jump on social trends that increase your power.  This is how power always works.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the failure is the point.  If you want to restructure a society, job #1 is to make the society that you want to restructure not work anymore.  The shittier it gets, the more people call for radical changes that would have been unthinkable in traditional, functional, societies.  When politics in the current system can no longer fix potholes, crime, or other problems, it’s easier to sell people on radical changes.  When churches are weakened into social clubs, you either get Christian fundamentalism or people abandoning faith in favor of either atheism or other religions.  And thus a group that would have been able to resist is neutered again allowing the changes and setting the stage for the end game radical transformation of society.


The more Western, capitalist, Christian society breaks down, the easier it gets to say “the reason that everything is terrible and you can’t walk down the street at night is because of patriarchal oppression and capitalism.  That’s why you can’t afford groceries.  That’s why your kids know every gender and sexuality but can’t read a book.  That’s why you have to leave your car unlocked to get looted, and why there are open air drug markets selling fentanyl in most major cities.  Give the government more control, especially the liberal government.  We will save you.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it should also include education and the media promoting those kinds of things.  Tell people that marriage is cool and that motherhood is beautiful and being a dad is good.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the absurd level of skill in a lot of those things do tend to serve as effective barriers to entry as well.  I’ll use youth sports as an example.  We have a system in youth sports that’s absolutely insane.  If you want to play sports, you have to put in an insane amount of time, energy and effort to make the team — and select teams often begin at 8 years old.  If you make it to the place where you can expect to play high school sports, you’ve likely been playing on select and traveling teams from second grade onward.  And aside from the games, tournaments, and team practices, you’ve likely been taking lessons as well.  Which means that you have to have the time and money to put 20 hours a week into that one sport.


But suppose you’re a kid of middling talent.  Well, basically, 99% of team sports are closed off to you.  Sorry champ, too bad you’re not super talented.  And the predictable result of this is… either you’re a stand out superstar player of your chosen sport, or you might as well quit.  Did they stop desiring to play baseball, or is it so insanely difficult for kids to make the team that they end up playing baseball on their Xbox One instead of with friends outdoors.  And then you end up with the twin crises of obesity (because only the top 10% of kids actually get to play any team sports) and loneliness (because team sports turns out to be an easy way for boys to make friends) and can’t quite understand why.


I think even for other things, participation goes down when people are led to believe that they need to be good at something or do it seriously if you want to participate.  You feel pressure to find deeper meanings for the books you read, or the shows you watch.  You have to read tge stuff on booktok or some other curated list.  If you happen to like a nerd-coded show or movie series, you have to learn the lore and follow fan theories and there are often things to collect or whatever.  I think for me I almost don’t want to get into those kinds of series because of the absurd competition to know all the stuff to feel comfortable talking to other fans because they’ll have learned all the lore.  It’s almost like all hobbies have become competitive in a sense, you can’t just do the thing you have to do it to a social media friendly level.


I think honestly that the standards of 1962 were better for the country because at some point, good enough is good enough and you gain more social health by letting average people participate in those kinds of activities instead of limiting those social opportunities t9 just the hyper competitive people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At current at least, the identitarianist view is true.  People of various racial, religious, and social groups do band together, and it’s only the Americaner whites who are being told that for them to do likewise is racist Or bigotry or whatever sneer you can insert.  Likewise, any move of Christianity to have any say over the morals of the country is met with cries of Christian Nationalism, often for doing similar things to what Islam is doing.  I as a Christian am shamed for public prayers, Muslims get to block roads all over Europe at prayer time, or in Deerborn, have their call to prayer broadcast loudly so everyone can hear it.  Muslims can tell us not to violate Sharia around them, invade the German Christmas Market, etc.  Christians are not allowed to do that, and in fact are often told by the state that their religious beliefs take a distant second place to secular rules.  Make that gay wedding cake, sell that abortive agent, be invisible.  Whites similarly are told to sit down and shut up while their opportunities are taken away, their culture is called bigoted, etc.


I can tell you that the identity politics view works, because nothing gets the ire of the elites like the prospect of whites and Christians banding together to stand their ground.  I’ve never seen anyone beyond a few cranks who want to reimpose segregated society, or impose a state church.  What they want is essentially the same seat at the table that everyone else has.  That’s mostly what I want.  Not to be the only group that matters, but to have my concerns matter.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean the alternative to defending yourself and your interests is … not defending them.  If your tribe (in whatever form) is being threatened or their interests are threatened, it’s perfectly reasonable to band together to stop that.  Is it toxoplasmic?  Maybe so.  I’m just not convinced that unilaterally deciding not to engage is tge best response.  In my opinion if you do so, it’s not being “the good one”, it’s being a doormat.  And especially in politics where the goal is to distribute power among factions, the surest way to be the victim is to refuse to engage in the quest for power.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
To some degree, being “right woke” is a necessary defensive measure to protect themselves from the predation of the “left woke”.  When you’re being attacked for tribe membership, noticing that, talking about it, and banding together to do something about it is just good tribal politics.  The alternative is that collitions of other tribes simply take from you while you don’t even bother to talk about it happening let alone doing anything about it.  DEI is basically “take good jobs away from white men and hand them to minorities.”  Racial quotas in universities do much the same — shutting whites out of good opportunities because someone with the right skin tone wants that slot.  Flooding the West with migrants to suppress wages something that should be noticed.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think liberalism has two main discomforts:  Impositions of will or power, and hard natural limits.  It’s not like they won’t ever impose, but they do so with reluctance, and further are often deeply suspicious of anyone who would use power to impose limits on others’ behavior.  Saying that a behavior is “bad” is seen as a denial of autonomy and integrity.  I should be able to do anything I want to, especially things that are seen as integral to one’s view of himself.  If I see myself as a man I am one and you must treat me as one.  If I want to get a tattoo or dye my hair, you thinking less of me, or not hiring me, or saying it’s a bad idea is oppressive.


Now the other thing I notice is the temptation to “snowplow” life.  To remove the negative consequences of choices made, to make life less demanding, to lower and weaken standards that keep those who cannot meet them from sharing the resulting benefits that come with success.  If someone has more, it’s unfair.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s kinda both though.  Just being the owner of land with resources doesn’t make you a rich country.  And being on land that doesn’t have those resources doesn’t make you poor.  Russia has a lot of oil and mineral wealth.  Nobody wants to live there.  Hong Kong and Taiwan are both pretty small countries, but they’re wealthy.  Thus I submit to you that America is not successful just because of our land.  A good bit of our success is due to our people and the values they hold.  Things like productivity and meritocracy, traditional morality, innovation and adoption of technology, freedom from government interference.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
80 years of peace is actually bull.  Look at the history and there are lots of wars.  The reason they’re not happening to you isn’t “liberal democracy’s boon” it’s geography.  If you’re American, you basically live in a fortress — friendly governments on our two land borders and two entire oceans between America and the rest of the world.


And there have been wars.  They’ve just happening in Africa, MENA, or South America.  We’ve blown up lots of real estate during the Great Liberal Peace.  Further, I have long suspected that the intervention of international organizations has made wars worse rather than better.  In the bad old days, you’d fight until victory or defeat.  Once the other side knuckles under, the thing is done, and you accept whatever the results were.  If you fought beyond the point of futility, that’s on you.  Now wars are more common because nobody is decisively defeated.  The international community sees to it by putting in peace keepers or demanding ceasefires when they decide that the weaker side is losing too badly.  This not only delays surrender, but because the weaker side never loses badly enough, the war flares up again as soon as the losing side can rearm.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think honestly there is a lost art of didactic fiction aimed at adult readers.  The current fashion of grey morality and grim dark gets a bit tiresome simply because you have so much of it made.  Even when a character is supposed to be the hero, he’s almost never earnest about believing anything.  It’s all cynical.  I don’t think heroes need to be goody-goods all the time, but I want to read about worlds in which people actually believe in being good as possible and trying to do the right thing.  They can (and frankly should, at times) fail.  They should wonder how to be good, or have to choose between two good or two bad choices.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Even this would be fairly dangerous, because you essentially have to curb free speech during an election, as it’s unlikely that you’re going to be dealing with a manipulation scheme that is stupid enough to not VPN at minimum and probably at least be able to spoof IPs in the country if not create a network of servers in the country to post from.  It’s unlikely that you can thus tell the difference between native crime-thinkers and a network of agents from Kazakhstan trying to influence the election.  And even if you could, again the temptation to simply label messages that go against the doctrine of the cathedral as “interference”, “misinformation”, or “disinformation”, not because they’re false, but because it’s an easy win.  You get to hobble your opponent by blocking messages in his favor while you can get your message out easily.


Again, these types of decisions are effectively attacks on democratic principles because it allows for the ruling party to simply declare the other side to be cheating, and thus put a strong thumb on the scale in favor of the ruling party.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The problem of course being that modern Global Liberals have long since lost the will to do what was done in Japan even if it would work.  The project was basically taking a feudalist society turned Empire with no real history of democratic institutions and zero concept of the idea of human rights and rebirth a new country and a nearly completely new culture from the ashes of what the culture of Japan was before Nagasaki.


They took over everything, confiscated weapons larger than a kitchen knife, banned large swathes of Japanese culture (shogi was nearly banned because it was a war-game.  It survived because those defending it managed to convince the occupation forces that Shogi is democratic because even a pawn can become a king).  The school system was fully controlled for a generation.


Compare that to the occupation of Afghanistan.  We didn’t even try to curb the worst parts of Islam, we didn’t ban weapons.  We certainly didn’t impose a modern, Western educational system on Afghanistan.  Basically, they could keep everything backwards about Islamic culture.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s not a line that should be drawn.  Theres no way any government should be allowed to simply set aside election results.  It just opens the door to a government deciding that Theres interference any time that they don’t happen to like the results.  And given that such things would be hard to prove or prevent, there’s no way to 100% defend a fair election from those kinds of accusations.  Maybe people wanted Trump, or maybe it was secretly Russia!  And since it was secretly Russians the vote would be set aside.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m not talking about his plotting.  His stories are honestly fairly predictable from my point of view.  But he does create worlds that don’t feel like they’re transposed versions of medieval Europe.  Martin doesn’t do that part well at all.  The Religion of the Seven is a reskin of Christianity more or less.  The plot is pretty much War of the Roses.  It’s just like if you’re creating a fantasy world, I think you should put a little effort into making the world something other than our world.