MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21d ago
Actually, the power structure is pretty tilted away from the median person in most societies. The media can create your Overton Window for you. They can pressure you by removing access to the basics of life — for example if you say something too far from normal, you will probably lose your job. Beyond that, physical revolution is pretty much impossible unless the state massively collapses or the military joins the coup as the military has access to much better equipment, training, intelligence, and has many more soldiers than any insurgent forces combined could manage. That’s just reality.
And furthermore, it’s the historical norm. Successful revolution is rare, and most end up being worse than the thing they opposed in the first place. For 90% of human history, the norm was an aristocratic system often headed by a monarch or emperor, and the system didn’t ever bother to ask what you actually wanted. Henry VIII didn’t take a poll or hold an election before forming the Church of England. The British subjects went to bed Catholic and woke up Anglicans. You’d wake up one morning to find that you were at war, and you were drafted. Or that your new ruler was named Paul instead of John. That’s what happened in most societies for most of history— power struggles and dynasties, not elections. And your opinion was irrelevant.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21d ago
It’s true if any system of laws. They aren’t magic formulas like somebody just declares you have free speech and therefore you cannot face legal consequences for speech. It’s always a power game, and if the elites of society want to, they can simply refuse to allow free speech. It’s historically rare that people themselves can force the issue and generally happens when for whatever reason the people have equal power to the elites. In the 18th century, it was because everyone had access to basically military equipment. The British military had muskets and horses, and the colonies had the same technology. In other eras it was because the government was weak or the military sided against the elites. I accept this reality. Unless you’re pretty high up in the hierarchy, or doing something critical to the elite’s success, you pretty much exist at the mercy of the elites and while some systems are more pleasant than others, the grip of power over you always exists.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21d ago
I mean I think it’s a consideration, and im not sure that I’d personally “get strapped” before going anywhere, but at the same time, the first task in a case of a guy with a deadly weapon is “live to be prosecuted.” And especially for marginalized or contentious groups, if you’re a target for violence, you need to either get out of the danger zone or be ready to defend yourself.
As far as LEOs, they can’t be everywhere. And I don’t think the reasonable assumption is “well, I’ll just hope the cops have it under control. My first option, personally is to not be there. Don’t do things that make you an obvious target of political violence. That probably doesn’t work for Jews who look… like Jews or wear kippahs or tassels. I’d say the same of gays who act in flaming ways, visible minorities, women etc.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22d ago
Honestly, it’s a species of hyper normalization. We know they can’t fix it, they know that we know they can’t fix it, but what’s the alternative? Vodka I suppose. And it does go beyond housing. It’s education— billions spent, and English majors struggling to read book. It’s health— where obesity is normal, and any hospital stay requires a GoFundMe.
Solutions are out there. One I think might make a difference is to forbid corporations from buying houses, and limit how many houses an individual can own. This would at least prevent Blackrock from buying up SFHs the minute they go on the market to turn into a rental property.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22d ago
I’m not suggesting doing away with SF housing entirely, but I think it’s important to increase urban density if you want to solve the housing crisis. It’s not meant to be for everyone, but to provide enough housing stock that it’s reasonably affordable to live in the city within a reasonable commute of your job. For most people, that’s fine.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22d ago
I mean people in other countries live in pretty dense urban environments without too much trouble.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22d ago
My rather unpopular opinion is that if housing wasn’t an investment most of these problems would solve themselves.
Nobody really wants more housing supply because it means that the one asset most middle class people can aspire to have — a house — at best stagnates in value and at worst declines in value. No politician want to be the person who made housing values fall. They’d have a hard time getting elected dog catcher if they approve enough new development to lower the cost of housing. Heck, people might not be happy if their house doesn’t increase in value. As such you have a problem that pits the owners of homes against the renters who want to own homes. You have to pick one.
The other issue with everyone trying to buy single family houses is that it’s acre for acre about the worst possible way to build housing. Condos are probably better for housing a lot of families in less space, apartments are cheaper but probably better suited for single people. If you want housing, it’s probably better to build for density and put more people in less acreage.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23d ago
Well Birmingham England. I’m not sure NYC has ever been safe in the last 50 years. But I think he has a point. Crime and other social problems have restricted the children’s world to basically a series of prisons. They live in their homes, go to school, and whatever planned activities their parents have, and back home again. Add in that they spend a lot of time in daycares raised by strangers making barely enough to live on and it’s a very sad childhood.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23d ago
I think American dramas have another big problem, which is that it’s almost impossible to portray a romantic relationship, especially one that develops from a friendship, in a realistic way without tripping over a thousand versions of problematic. Korean and Chinese dramas really don’t have the same culture wars around relationships that Americans do, so they’re free to make a real romantic relationship between the leads where modern western stories cannot. If a Korean story were remade by an American company, it would be seen as extremely sexist.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
24d ago
Yeah, and tbh I feel kinda bad for the kids coming up today. They’re unhealthy because of what adults are doing to them, and will likely grow to be even worse. They’ve been taught they can’t handle the outside world without help, so not only are they not learning how to deal with the real world, they have a fear of it, they don’t think they can handle it. They end up neurotic, anxious and depressed. Why wouldn’t they, they’re being sent out into a world they’ve never experienced and have been shielded from because they can’t handle it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
24d ago
I think free range is good for kids simply because it allows for kids to grow into adulthood. If you are a safety first society and prevent kids from doing anything dangerous or going out on their own, they never learn to navigate that. If the kid is never allowed out of sight of an adult, he can’t learn how to navigate without an adult. If you never allow them to cook, they’ll never learn to do so.
Other countries are much more relaxed about this. Kids in Japan can ride public transport by themselves without a problem. European kids do stay outside in some cases in carriages. It works fine and I think the kids are better and less neurotic for it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
24d ago
I see it as the final death of the naive optimism that was abroad in the 1989s and 1990s. That was unsustainable becait frankly wasn’t true and couldn’t ever possibly be true. We were kind of faking it by kicking various cans down the road repeatedly. Once we ran out of road, pretending that we were simply going to win Civilization VI style was completely implausible, but this is what people literally believed. We ran out of road because is Islamic theocracy, because we developed a serious addiction to buying now and paying later, and various forms of laziness and gluttony and so on. That was sustainable for two reasons: we were the default currency and the world’s largest market, and we had hands down the best military that could not be seriously challenged. Those conditions could not last because those conditions never do. No nation or empire will ever stay on top forever. But we’d so structured our economy, or lifestyle, our government spending as if we were going to be The Rome that Never Falls.
Once 9/11 happened we slowly came to realize just how much we had let slip away. Arabs with box cutters could strike at will, and not only could we not stop them, we couldn’t even find those responsible. We can’t remain at the top of education when China and India were eating our lunch in STEM. Why buy from Americans when China can make it better and cheaper.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
24d ago
It also reduced the need for horses, who have been reduced mostly to glorified pets.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
25d ago
And that isn’t true for a population that will need lots of surgery, hormones for life, and lots of follow up care? I mean, if anything, those same incentives are more present in trans populations who spend thousands on medical treatments overa decade.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
25d ago
I mean there’s good risk and stupid risk. It’s not good to release a drug with very serious side effects or that don’t work. I don’t think anyone is calling for that anyway. On the other hand, there are drugs that are clearly working (and in some cases approved for use in other countries) that are still required to go through decades of testing to prove that they work just as well here as they do in other places. That doesn’t help anyone. If the drug works in Russia and has been used for decades, it’s probably fine.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
25d ago
I mean if you take tasks off the lap of your workers you don’t need so many of them. If you can take half of my job away, you can just give me double the workload of tasks that only a human can do and therefore you need half the staff. And while you didn’t get rid of everyone, you’re saving a lot of money, while also putting significant downward pressure on the wages of those who remain.
Do the above over most of the kinds of jobs normies have, and it is an apocalyptic loss of jobs. If 70% of normie jobs reduce headcount by 50%, that’s a lot of people. And since nobody needs to hire them, they’re either trying to retrain for new jobs or they’re simply dropping out of the labor market.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
25d ago
It’s not ideological for the kids involved. But it is a way for ostracized kids to find some measure of acceptance and even celebration as they decide to transition. Which would feel better to a boy who doesn’t fit in at all with the other boys? Grow up to be a lonely male incel hikkimori, doomed for life, or be trans female and find some measure of acceptance by wider society, a new, somewhat trendy identity. People choose all kinds of identities that don’t fit them perfectly for the purpose of fitting in. Goths, various fandoms, music scenes, sports, you name it. Humans are social animals that naturally want to be high in the social hierarchy. It’s not really that weird to think that if there’s social capital in being trans there would be kids willing to at least socially transition. The alternative is being an outcast.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
25d ago
I think like most things it’s a form of what I call Yarvin’s Disease which is the tendency of any bureaucratic system to avoid being to blame for anything. He talks about this quite a lot, but it’s generally the case that while the FDA can only be blamed if something goes wrong it can never get credit when things go right. As such, there’s zero incentive to take a risk going fast, even if the potential cure is world changing. If it’s going to turn people’s hair funny colors the FDA gets blamed for not doing enough tests. On the other hand, slowing things down doesn’t cause blame. If the cure for cancer is held up for twenty years because the FDA wanted the triple check that it doesn’t cause tummy aches, nobody’s going to call for investigations. So, going slow preserves the FDA which is the point.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
25d ago
Psychology itself isn’t that rigorous, and especially if you’re dealing entirely with self-reported phenomena, it’s not particularly good at skepticism. If I go complaining of feeling sad for several weeks I can get diagnosed with depression. If you go in claiming to lose stuff a lot (whatever you personally consider “a lot”) you can get diagnosed with ADHD. As such I tend to be skeptical of trans diagnosis simply from my experience of being diagnosed adhd — it took ten minutes and I didn’t even go in seeking a diagnosis.
Which also becomes a problem when the symptoms of these disorders are known. People want to be diagnosed, and with helpful checklists, they know what to say to get that. Kids who want to be trans know what to say to the shrink before the first session. And there’s a good chance that a psychiatrist isn’t going to look into whether the person is lying or exaggerating symptoms. There are no fake symptoms that people think are true of trans people but aren’t.
As far as social contagion, I think it’s just like anything else. Most teens crave acceptance and if you’re vulnerable, being told that some trait is desirable they’ll at least fake it to fit in or be cool. And there are examples all over TikTok of kids faking all kinds of mental illnesses up to and including having multiple personalities. It seems like it would be weird if this is the one illness nobody fakes, especially when much of our culture celebrates it as the cool disorder.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
26d ago
I think the big problem is exactly this. My choice on who to trust for news is limited simply because almost no sources are committed to truth first and foremost. Almost all journalists and news sites “of record” are cesspits of bias, featuring such things as selective reporting, biased reporting, misquoting, removing context, and other misinformation. In fact, the saving grace of places that don’t yet have “of record” status is that you know you have to check up on anything they say.
The best work arounds tend to be less about finding the reputable sources— they frankly don’t exist. The real defense is strict scrutiny of the facts reported. Fining out if others say the same thing. Doing sanity checks for the characters and quotes — does the reporting sound like something a normal person in that situation might plausibly do, are people saying things that make themselves look bad or stupid or evil, do the statistics reported track? And furthermore, if a story is true, it can be used to predict the future.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
26d ago
I think honestly the advent of AI contest is going to force the issue of epistemology more so than “trusted sources”. Things like knowing statistics and logic and using the information to make predictions is much more important than “it comes from the NYT so it’s true.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
28d ago
I think you’re right about Pax Americana having ended. For most people it ended decades ago. It’s just now reaching the professional classes. But if you drive through the rural parts of the South, it’s already happened, probably 2 generations ago, and these places look like the ruins of a civilization rather than a thriving one. Rusty, dirty, shabby, abandoned buildings everywhere. The people themselves live in poverty for the most part. Urban cores have been war zones for decades and everybody knows it.
I see Trump as a manifestation of the problems of American Empire, rather than the cause. We are not the same steady, stalwart and practical people who built Pax Americana, we don’t have the ability or the willpower to keep it. All that’s left is to tear it up and hopefully squeeze out the few good years we have left.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
28d ago
I’m not so sure the distinction is there. It’s something that the soldiers give an oath to do, and other than that, the emphasis is always on obedience, not making policy. And the ability to demonize whoever the outgroup is is pretty strong in most military and police departments. By the time you get to the point where American troops are being ordered to fire on American civilians, they will absolutely believe that they are threats to America itself. They’ll be terrorists, insurrectionists, militia members, whatever can be said about them. Those giving the orders are going to be brave defenders of the order. The other institutions countermanding the order will be compromised in some way.
It’s not going to be something that starts with the rank and file, certainly. It’s not structured to have people on the ground just decide on their own which orders are good or bad. It’s structured to have a unit take control over people and territory by doing a small part of the whole operation. Soldiers are taught to simply do their jobs. Even in things like nuclear silos, the people running them are explicitly selected for their ability to compartmentalize their part of the whole. Orders come in, flip these switches, turn these keys, and do so while insulated from the uncomfortable thought that you just trained to (or in hypothetical actually did) launch a weapon that will absolutely kill millions of people where it’s targeted. In other units it’s going to be drop this bomb by drone, or take out these militants, or protect these high value buildings. They aren’t going to think of it as “killing Americans” but doing a mission they’ll be told is defending American life.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
29d ago
They won’t be outside of hard sciences and engineering. There simply aren’t a lot of skills a PhD student has that a normal employer wants. Basically the phd programs outside of really hard science and engineering are jobs programs for the graduates of those programs. It helps hide that such programs are useless because those students do get jobs after graduating. If we didn’t have that, maybe the top 1% of those students get real jobs while the rest learn to take orders at coffee shops.
I’m another finding this from AAQC. I’ve always been intrigued by orthodoxy, at least the theological content. But im not entirely convinced for several reasons that aren’t necessarily “the ICK”.
First is that the converts seem to get this weird smug vibe where they decide that ONLY this one specific way of being a Christian is real, and ONLY these particular types of chants are valid. And of course if you don’t fast like a monk and keep a strict prayer rule and build an icon corner (the bigger the better of course). I find them specifically enamored with the trappings of this style of Christianity. What I don’t necessarily find is the faith behind it, concern for Christ Himself. It’s like someone who’s in love with a lifestyle, maybe not completely a LARP, but it’s also not a focus on faith itself.
Second, I do get the ick from some of the “if you don’t do it exactly like I do, you’re a heretic” thing. Like, I do prefer high church liturgy, but I find myself feeling put off when the Orthobros come along and absolutely mock contemporary worship music, “strip mall churches”, and — horror of horrors — having coffee and donuts outside the sanctuary. I’ve never understood the need to try to fit my style of doing church onto everyone else. I like tge British Common Book of Prayers. I’m also generally okay with you liking modern Christian worship if that’s your choice. We come from different cultures, and me trying to stuff you into my box is not good, as I’d rather you find Christ in the most rockabilly smoke machined evangelical church out there than go to a high church liturgy and mentally sleep through it. There’s just a Pharisaical vibe about the whole thing like they’re sort of above the rest of us because they’re the only ones who got it right and the rest aren’t really good Christians and might not even be Christian at all.
Finally, I think there’s a rather odd thing where a lot of the Orthobros seem to suddenly take on really reactionary political views that have nothing to do with what I understand Orthodox Christianity to be about. They suddenly are unironically believing that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion represents a real conspiracy. They suddenly believe that women need to become trad wives and so on. Like, you converted to orthodox Christianity and suddenly you’re a Byzantine Mencius Moldbug who talks like a groyper? I don’t think that’s the traditional Christian faith. It seems rather the culture of online Orthobros who either come from or are lead into far right politics and somehow see these ideas as the reason to choose orthodoxy.
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