MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Just speaking for myself, I’m in favor of real politik. The most important axioms: ought implies can, and policies exist to serve the nation.
The first is pretty simple. If you’re not in a position to honor the treaty without serious damage to yourself, then don’t do it. If the enemy is stronger than you are, the only thing you get for entering a war is the death of your own people. You aren’t even going to really stand up for the treaty, and will prove to everyone else that you can’t.
The second is just a principle for political survival. If you’re constantly getting involved in conflicts because of morals you’re wasting the resources of your country and getting little for it. Your military doesn’t get stronger because of your morals. People can’t eat morals. And wars by nature have a real cost that will be carried by your nation. As such, I think it’s rather important to have a good strategic reason for a war. It could be materials access, or the ability to project power, it could be to shore up an important ally, or access to markets, but it has to be a reason that you can articulate and that serves the good of the nation you’re leading.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I tend to think the opposite. Most of the trouble in modern politics is too many people are invested in and care about politics, especially people who know very little about the topics at hand. People weigh in on things like AI and have no idea how it actually works. Or policing. You don’t understand crime you really shouldn’t be telling experts how to deal with crime. If anything, I think the government and political systems work much better when people are fat and happy and could care less about what’s going on in Washington.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Yeah, we had assassination attempts, but we didn’t have two nearly successful attempts on the same political figure within two months of each other. That’s pretty unusual. And especially as by the second time, the SS had intelligence and knew that there was an Iranian plot to get Trump. They still can’t get their act together.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I mean things like that only work until they don’t. The sheer incompetence of the western elites is on display. The entire plan, as far as I can tell is “Ukraine is the good guy here. We arm them to the teeth, let them do whatever they want, and hope they win before something bad happens.” It’s not working, and worse, we’re putting ourselves in an extremely weak position by doing so, and for little strategic gain. Ukraine doesn’t have much beyond farmland. It’s not Taiwan with a big chip manufacturer base. And we’re depleting weapons and risking nuclear exchange to save Kansas.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I mean, I think this is just par for the course. The entire system is starting to collapse and as such nearly catastrophic systems failures are normal. We’re used to crime, drugs, shitty roads school shooters, random spree shooters, and a dozen other things that would shock people if they visited from 1950 or before. I mean or swan song is so bad at this point that we had congressional hearings about UFOs and the reaction was fairly muted. At this point, Mr. Spock could land on the White House lawn and most people would have muted reactions. We’re used to things being completely messed up.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I think it’s a poor measurement of the general health of the country. It’s useful as a general overview, but it misses the question of whether the economic benefits of the activity measured is beneficial to the country as a whole or if it’s only one segment of the economy. I think much the same of CPI because it doesn’t tell you which items are going higher or whether they’re necessary goods or luxuries.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
On thing going against it is that the victims just aren’t that sympathetic to normal Americans. Most of these people are elites with more money than most median Americans will ever have and they’re upset, basically about something that had been known long before these particular women decided to show up. The “casting couch” had been a known feature of Hollywood film and TV since long before most of us were born. It’s not like they were surprised it happens, it’s been a thing since the 1930s or earlier, maybe going all the way back to the early days of stage. It’s something that anyone considering a career in movies, TV, or music would absolutely be aware of going in and likely decided beforehand was a reasonable price to pay to be famous for acting and live in a mansion.
Other movements were a bit more sympathetic simply because they were the normal everyday people who worked normal jobs for normal pay and were expected to put up with bad male behavior. Sleeping with your secretary as a condition of her either getting promoted or keeping her job is worlds different because that person isn’t making a choice to follow a dream of fame and thinking “well if I want to be a secretary, I’ll have to sleep with the boss, but the deal is just too good to pass up.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
The problem with that is that we haven’t had a significant spending cut in the modern era. Unless we get a real balanced budget amendment to the constitution (which won’t happen) budgets won’t go down. So then there can’t be tax cuts, basically ever, because the state is going to need every penny.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I believe literature serves the purpose of setting the standard for high culture much like classical music and good art. The point is to develop good taste in those things, understanding how they’re ideally structured, rather than just reading low end pulp books or listening to nothing but low end pop music. Good taste in art is a thing, and I think a lot of our culture is degraded with low grade art because most people never get exposed to good art.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I agree with this. I’ve long suspected that “pressure” as you call it is necessary in the right doses to bring about what we call maturity. In other words, if you took a child and remove all negative feedback from his life (which were often doing in the name of “mental health”) you short circuit the feedback mechanisms that teach kids to handle adversity in healthy ways, and furthermore, you stunt their ability to mature. What you’d end up with is a human with a mature body but a mind that’s much less mature. I would probably estimate that the median 18 year old kid would be about as mature as a 19th century 12 year old. A 24 year old adult often thinks and acts with the maturity of a 16 or 18 year old.
I’m also fairly convinced that social pressure can and does move society in positive directions. And in that regard shame is a perfectly legitimate thing to use to enforce good behavior and punish bad behavior in the wider culture. At the same time acclaiming the people who are doing great things can often inspire other people to try. I want my kids to build the future, so obviously one way to go about that is to praise great scientific minds, great inventions, and try to make kids want to build and invent. Our heroes are celebrities. There are lots of books about Taylor Swift but not many about Richard Feynman or Elon Musk or the like.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I’m kids sympathetic to the point of AngoAmerican Imperial propaganda having more of an impact on the post war era than anything the Nazis ever did. It became a way to legitimize the rule of the Anglophone order and the right of the UN as an allied government to effectively control international affairs. It gave NATO the right to invade other countries in the name of protecting the world from communism and authoritarian regimes and anyone else we didn’t like. For the most part, we’re fairly decent as far as empires go, but at the same time, the narrative of us as the people who Stopped a Genocide and Defeated Evil Incarnate gives legitimacy to the effort that would be hard to create without the story.
It’s actually kinda funny to me to listen as both the Pro-Israeli and Pro-Palestinian factions try to weaponize the holocaust narrative to win the arguments about the war in Gaza. To the Pro-Israeli side, “Never Again” means that the Jews of Israel must be allowed to use force as much as they want to defeat the genocidal Hamas. To the Pro-Palestinian side, “Never Again” means that bombing Gaza is just like the Auswitz. It’s like using that narrative gets you the stamp of approval to do whatever is necessary to defeat your enemy. Heck even Putin tried to justify taking Ukraine by invoking the need to “denazify” Ukraine of Azov.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that every Vice be made illegal. But when a substance or behavior proves itself to habit forming to a substantial number of people to the point that they can no longer be functional members of society, then the rest of society is perfectly within its rights to try to regulate it. The number of people who get addicted to rock climbing or backpacking is pretty small compared to drug use or alcohol abuse.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I’m beginning to suspect that the Totalitarian Principle is at least directionally true at least in places where there are strong contravening forces from social shaming or religion to counteract it (which is mostly just an informal ban anyway). Humans seem to bend to degeneracy of various sorts unless there’s a restraint holding them back. We’ve torn out religious taboos and shamed away shaming people, so for the WEIRD west we’re either banning it altogether or allowing it to be normalized.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I disagree. The problem with legalizing vices on the premise that there’s no immediate victim creates social problems that the general public will often have to pay to fix damages. If we allow people to drive around drunk, obviously the risk of eventually hittIng someone is a serious problem and one that could be prevented by simply not allowing people to drive cars while intoxicated. This also avoids the problem of the state having to support the medical care of the driver and whoever he hit for a good long time.
With other vices, it can be a problem for much the same reason. If I’m high I am unlikely to be able to keep a job, much more likely to injure themselves or other people, more likely to be abusive (depending on the drug). These are burdens on the state that the taxpayers are going to have to pay to clean up.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I think in a lot of cases, it’s a set of cultural norms that drive all three.
First of all, most high achievement societies tend to have a culture of hard work and value their high achieving people. When society promotes things like learning science and maths and building things and creating new businesses and so on obviously everyone seeks status and they want to learn, invent and build as well. When high status people like good art, then artists arise to create it. And even in behavior, when high status people choose to not associate with vulgar ideas, fashions, music and art, it becomes unfashionable to like that stuff as well.
Second, most high achievement societies tend to not mollycoddle failure as much as we do. If you aren’t trying to make it, the rest of us aren’t going to do it for you. If you want it you work for it. Modern society just doesn’t do this anymore, in fact quite the opposite— we pay quite handsomely for lack of effort and doing horrifically self destructive things and making terrible life decisions. A guy who does drugs and plays video games all day won’t miss a meal. If you have six different baby-daddies, you still get lots of help from the rest of us to live life.
Third, there’s a lot more effort put into keeping the marketplace of ideas free from promoting bad memes. Up until the 1990s, TV and movies were much more reluctant to make positive role models of people doing stupid things. You wouldn’t find heroines who had sex with random men. You wouldn’t see heroes doing drugs.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
They learn to obey on two conditions. First that the law is actually enforced to a meaningful degree. Second, that the fines are high enough to feel pain when paying it. Of course even with speed cameras, it tends to work literally how you describe it — people do slow around enforcement zones. Once it’s known there’s a speed check via cop or camera, people slow down there — and go as fast as they can get away with everywhere else. There are roads with a speed limit of thirty where everyone goes 60 — except for the end of the month when the cops enforce the law.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
It’s kinda hard to tell. One advantage that mitigated the damage alcohol does is the notion of alcoholics and drinking too much being bad. Everyone is pretty much aware that drinking 3+ days a week and more than 2 in a sitting is probably a sign of problems. With cannabis, you can tome up every single day and not think you’re addicted. There is no point where even your pot smoking buddy will tell you to get help.
Tbf, the same is true of gaming and screens (which can absolutely be addictive). We simply haven’t yet put up guard rails around th3 behavior to prevent people from gett Seriously addicted.
Okay.
I’m less and less in favor of libertarian ideas than I was before. There are some behaviors that are harmful to society even if done behind closed doors because the pathologies they cause or enable tend to be a net drain on resources. Drug use is a big one, which is being made more obvious by the recent legalization of marijuana. But the same can be said of both the consumption and production of porn, the glorification of overconsumption and consumerism, and the normalization of ignorance.
There is an actual fate. Blank slates and infinite possibilities are both absurd lies we tell ourselves because we can no longer tolerate the notion of limits to ourselves and others around us. The results have been a disaster. We teach kids to want things that they won’t be able to achieve and then they get stuck with the horrific realization at 25 that they will have lifelong consequences for believing that junk we told them in school and on TV. It also creates social problems as those who were promised a future in the now over saturated elite ranks agitate for what they were told was a birthright, and at the same time the low status jobs go unfilled because those who should be doing those jobs went for elite jobs. Or we tell women to girlboss which, frankly only maybe 5% of women can even be middling good at, and get shocked when it means that women aren’t filling the traditional female jobs or having kids.
Crime is only deterred by the certainty and harshness of punishment. Compassion is nice, but what it teaches criminals is that there are no consequences to doing serious crimes. The results are that areas of the city where criminals are most active become too dangerous to live or work in. And this harms those too poor to flee. What those areas need is over-policing, harsh punishment for first time offenders, and zero tolerance for crime no matter what the criminal’s past is. When people don’t have reason to fear the lawman, the law doesn’t exist, and eventually you have people forced into defending themselves.
Most of the wokeness in schools and Hollywood is a result, not a cause of the decline of those institutions. We aren’t teaching that just because the state says to. We teach it because we have lost the institutional ability to teach math, science, reading and writing. Test scores on those subjects are not good, and a ten minute conversation with even college graduates shows a shocking level of ignorance about the world outside of their bubble. Unless you’re a STEM student, chances are that you know less about the outside world than their high school educated grandparents at the same age. In the arts, I suggest the same thing — the complexity of characters, plots and dialogue have fallen quite a bit from the kinds of things people were writing a generation ago. Modern art frankly sucks at this point, as artists generally lack the skill to make representations of the real world.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I think this is the end game of our modern equity and hedonism mania. Unless everyone is exactly equal and exactly the same and has access to the same luxuries, remove the luxuries until everyone is miserable. For whatever reason Americans just cannot accept that some people have what others don’t. Most often it’s at least partly by choice— you’re not getting into college on merit because you didn’t actually do the work and now you can’t have the nice things that getting into a good school means. Or you chose not to have a traditional family. Fine, you do you. But that also means that you’re not going to easily find representation of whatever you chose to do instead because most people get married and have kids and businesses cater to the majority. Or maybe you want to Quiet Quit. Okay, but if I work and start doing better than you, you chose that.
I think the opposite needs to happen. Rewards should go to people making and doing useful things. More inventors more great students, more scholarship, more opportunities. And I think it will encourage more people to put in the effort to accomplish something meaningful and useful.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I don’t think that’s true, because this is something that absolutely hits the sensibilities of the PMC who have been basically able to ignore the problem because it’s not affecting them. Pets are in many parts of the PMC class a very sensitive point. They don’t have to care about blue collar rednecks losing jobs to immigrants. They only have brief conversations with rednecks when they show up to fix the HVAC system or repair the roof or install a floor. But having an immigrant steal your beloved pet and eat it is something that the wine moms are going to be upset about. These are the same people who are trying to certify their pets as support animals so they can take them to Walmart. The idea of losing their pets in that way would be horrific.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I find my writing much more clear and concise when I make a detailed outline first. It helps to get the thoughts out of your head and onto paper where you can begin to fit them together in a more coherent way. I tend to find myself writing in rambling ways when I’m tap dancing around either something I’m not sure about, or that I don’t quite understand. If you ramble in an outline or in scribbles on a piece of paper, you’ll tend to find those things quickly and you can research them more or think more deeply about the point you’re trying to make.
I find Jordan Peterson’s guide (https://www.mr-sustainability.com/internal-stories/2021/jordan-b-peterson-essay-writing-guide) rather useful for nonfiction, and if you want to do fiction, get a good beat sheet ( I use Harmon’s 8 step story circle) and use character sheets from RPGs or the like.
To cut it very short, everyone’s unedited prose is rambling. If you want to be better at writing, you need to learn to plan before you write and edit afterwards. Pantsing in either fiction or nonfiction doesn’t really work unless you’re writing a zero draft you intend to basically cannibalize for good ideas to put into your real writing. Or at least that’s how it ends up for me. I’m sure there are a few natural writers who can actually pants a coherent piece on their first try. It’s rare, and so unless you’re already pretty good at writing in your chosen genre, it’s better to learn to structure your writing first.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I agree with this. People who don’t like the police tend to assume that the alternative to over-policing is peace. But if the cops cannot stop crime (or more properly are not permitted to use tools at their disposal to effectively stop crime) the alternative is this falling on the general public. Which has none of the advantages of using police (who can be controlled to some degree because they’re deputized to enforce actual laws, and to respect the rights of citizens) and thus becomes a problem of every person in the general public carrying a weapon and deciding based on only concern for themselves and their families whether or not to use that weapon. Vigilante Justice will become the norm, to approval of normal people who want law and order so that they can safely go to the store or even to the park without fear. They’ll approve because they don’t want their stuff stolen and will protect it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Isn’t that just social signaling with extra steps? If I really truly believe that something is an existential threat to humans, I’m not going to let petty politics on other subjects get in the way of fixing it. If I believe that AGI is going to kill humanity, I’ll throw everything else aside to deal with that threat. Work with fascists and communists, give up on other goals for a time — or even be willing to have some progress rolled back, even democracy might be on the table. If the choice is an absolute nightmare government— no human rights, open racism, the environment gets destroyed— but we avoid extinction, then it might well be worth it. You can clean up those other problems if you survive, and if you don’t survive none of those other things actually matter.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Honestly, because of the education system in the USA, where most schools don’t teach anything like epistemology (critical thinking as taught in American schools means memorizing a list of fallacies and learning to notice them in a piece of writing), reading and math are both pretty bad. And our science education is so bad that people don’t understand germ theory.
The second thing is that the media covers elections as horse racing. There’s much more emphasis on covering how the debates moved the polls or who won the debate than anything the candidates actually said (except for the zingers and insults, of course). We aren’t talking about what to do about any problems we actually face. There’s no talk about reducing street crime, drugs, fix the roads, schools, mental health, cost of living, and lots of other very serious issues. Instead, it’s coconut tree memes and “those guys are weird”.
The contrary of that is that it’s designed to psychologically convince you to accept the legitimacy of the system. Democracy is at least partially a pacification mechanism— it convinces people that because they and everyone else voted for the government that’s doing this or that bad thing, or that preselects candidates that it must be legitimate. And really, it works quite well. No matter what actually happens, most people barely bother to complain, let alone protest no matter what.
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