MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I agree. I think we’re in a serious decline. I’m not sure how it ends, but I think this is the last generation where the Western world rules the world. Whether or not it means a thousand years of darkness — I think not.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
To be honest, the decline of American culture and democracy. That these are the best minds we can produce to run the country should be deeply troubling. At best we’re looking at a clown show, two candidates who think in sound bites and have no actual ideas. At least neo-reactionaries have ideas. I’m not fully on board, but they can generally tell you what kinds of things they want to do, why, and why this would work. That coming from someone who isn’t a neo-reactionary, but is more or less interested in fixing problems. I’m anti-pothole is not a plan. But we have two people who think in sound bites trying to convince an audience of uneducated dolts to clap along.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
We have been declining in state power for decades.
We cannot bring crime rates down, and in fact, in major cities it’s entirely possible for gangs of criminals to show up to a store in broad daylight, carrying trash bags and loot the store. Large areas of major cities are no-go zones for law abiding citizens. In urban centers, the received wisdom is “don’t lock your car, because you are going to get your window smashed when the people come to steal out of your car.
Schools at least in America suck at education. Kids rarely graduate reading at grade level, and very seldom can high school graduates do math on grade level. This is one reason that so many jobs that “don’t require college “ require a degree — at least you still need to be literate and numerate to graduate college. The only things school even tries to do are push propaganda, act as state daycares, and as social activities for teens through sports and clubs.
As far as Covid goes, I mean convincing people to work from home in their PJs doesn’t particularly strike me as high state capacity. In fact, at least in the USA, it crumbled rather quickly once people decided to not comply and to protest.
Personally, I believe that the West is in serious decline and may well be headed towards a dark age. We are basically coasting off of the capacity built by our great grandparents and generations before them. We are uneducated, lazy, undisciplined, and are not investing in our own future. I keep looking at the candidates we have for president— Trump, Biden, Harris, and RFK, and I can’t convince myself they could manage a Taco Bell.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I think it’s more of a benefit of the doubt thing. Most critics of police are people who have very little experience in those kinds of roles. They’re giving an opinion based on the aesthetics of the situation, where it looks bad on video.
Here’s the thing though. While shootings are rare, the fact is that guns in the USA are so common that every encounter must be treated as though the subject is armed and prepared to use their weapon. Which throws a lot of good faith out the window. Guy won’t roll down the window, especially a tinted one — it must be assumed that behind the tinted glass the suspect has and is preparing to use a gun. If the suspect reaches for something it must be assumed to be a weapon. Reaching for your waistband again, a cop cannot assume anything other than this is reaching for a concealed weapon. Asking someone to assume good faith doesn’t work when being wrong is potentially lethal.
Then you have the officer’s gun which precludes a lot of the silliness of people suggesting that cops use Judo to put people on the ground. Except that this puts the officer and his gun within reach. If he doesn’t have full control of both hands during the encounter, the suspect can simply grab the gun and shoot the officer. Deescalation can’t be done unless the officer has complete control of the scene.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I mean we’re a bad sample simply because we’re tuned into political issues and discussion. Keep in mind that outside of the too-online left and right, most people’s interactions with politics happens in spurts — the conventions, the debates, and maybe they catch an interview or two on a talking head show. They have other interests and are too busy doing other things to really pay close attention to who’s doing what outside of the big show events. Which means that this debate is likely the first time these normies will have really paid attention to what either one of those candidates has to say. This means it’s a make or break for Harris who hasn’t publicly tried to run for office since 2020 when she failed pretty hard.
The media can help, but it’s not going to completely erase a bad performance especially 2 months from the polls. If the normies aren’t following closely, they might not see her interviews with friendly journalists.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Alternatively, they could “not care” whether the story is true because they believe that mainstream sources would never bother to check the story. Thus there’s no way to fact check the story at all from sources of record. So if the people telling those stories believe that the story is too political to deal with honestly, why “care” if it’s true. The media dug its grave a long time ago and is only worth reading if you want to know what the elites want you to think.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I don’t think that’s necessarily true.
First of all, like or hate Trump, he has political views and ideas and he’s been talking about them. She has said very little about what she wants to do. And I think unless she has something she wants to do, is just going to come off as weak. He wants to round up millions of illegal immigrants. What does she want to do here? If he talks about his plan and adds in the crazier stories about what immigrants are doing (for example killing ducks in Ohio parks) and it’s going to be hard to just vibe it. Likewise inflation. Talking in vague generalities isn’t going to make groceries or gas cheaper. Again, if he can point out those stories where this hurts ordinary Americans, she can’t exactly get away with not having a plan.
As far as the bad performance being recoverable, I’m not so sure just because of how close the election is. We vote November 5, two months from now. That’s a pretty small window and probably not enough time for memory to fade. People were talking about Biden’s bad debate for a month or more. I grant that his obvious Sun-downing is probably worse than anything she would ever do, but still it’s not easy to just forget an obviously bad debate. So she kinda has to go for broke here. If she can’t convince people t9 even consider her as anything other than an empty head, she’s not only not going to close the deal, but might lose some Never Trumps.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
It makes sense, and really I think there’s other “thermostats” in our brains. Like I tend to think of maturity as somewhat calibrating a responsibility and time-preference thermostat to near adult levels. There are some adults that for various reasons end up with theirs somewhat lower than the adult level. You’ll find these people not doing things that need to be done, doing things that put themselves or others in bad situations, or mishandling money or property.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Sort of. If helplessness is going to make an event traumatic, I can easily point to plagues, mothers dying in childbirth, famines, etc as all being particularly traumatic. Imagine being 10-12 and seeing baby’s first be heading in town with dad. Or your mom has a baby and bleeds to death while you watch. Or the Black Death killing a third of your village. And knowing that if you got it, they’d basically shut you in the house and brick you inside entombed in the house. Death in the medieval and renaissance world was common and brutal. Only maybe modern combat comes close, and even then, I suspect that the way normal deaths happen in modern times make combat harder. Death before 65 is a black swan for us.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Counterpoint being that the entire life of a subsistence farmer was high stress, fear of death and helplessness. Crop failures, disease, crime, and wars were pretty common. And if the crops are failing in your village, you know you’ll be at minimum very hungry over the winter, and people die around you and probably members of your own family could meet the same fate. Nothing you can do.
A huge difference for modern WEIRDs is that we approach the world from the perspective that life is supposed to be good with the troubles I mentioned (death, disease, starvation, warfare, etc.) seen as outliers and black swan events. And at the same time, the more ancient approach to life was that bad stuff happening is normal, and it’s best to just get on with it. Your fate was your fate. And feelings, while they existed and were acknowledged, weren’t the same focal points that they are today.
I’m personally fairly confident that our modern WEIRD approach to the negative parts of life are creating and driving a lot of mental illnesses, especially in teenagers. We teach, in my view, the exact wrong approach to trauma, and a very inflated view of what can cause trauma. Part of it is just how much we live life on easy mode, which interferes with the development of mental toughness. A terrible experience for a young adult in a modern, western city is likely to be fairly minor compared to the same child in Tudor England. Add in that we tell our young that bad experiences cause trauma and trauma causes permanent mental health problems. And we teach kids to focus on feelings and to set hopes very high.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
In the modern era when much of traditional social structures had been drastically reduced and there was little social stigma to women having recreational sex and not becoming pregnant. After we created the modern welfare state, lots of people decided that labor wasn’t for them.
I think given that, no, Victorian women would not be choosing not to have babies because their status would increase as a mother, particularly of a son. This was even more pronounced in earlier generations. Culture matters. Our culture says “careerist women are superior” and women do what they can to meet that standard.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I’ve never seen anything that points directly to Trump knowing about these things. When the Russian hacks were happening in 2016, it was clear that Russia had state security reasons to not want Hillary in office. And for that matter pushing any division they could to weaken an adversary. But what never seems to materialize is a direct link to specifically Trump. Putin never seemed to talk to Trump, they had aligned interests perhaps, but it’s odd to me that the entirety of “Trump colluded with Russia” stories hinge on one off the cuff joke made when he was asked about it — and anyone watching knew he was joking. But he “asked Russia to hack”. It was sarcasm deliberately turned into evidence.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I mean I’m not interested in them except as I’m interested in knowing what they’re doing and they occasionally pop up in my feed. I’m not sure how one finds these groups, but they exist. But the point remains — marching about on the streets of a city in golf shirts and khaki pants is not a very useful metric for effectiveness. LARPing in the woods with camo and paint guns isn’t a good measure either. Both groups undoubtedly call themselves militias, but it’s completely unclear that they meet standards of effectiveness that would make them operationally effective in doing anything other than varying forms of acting tough and scaring liberals who are generally frightened of pseudo-military groups prancing about in uniforms with guns.
Again, keep in mind that for all the posturing, the marching, the calls for civil war or unrest, and claims that the government was stolen, these groups haven’t really done anything. And up until they decided that they should start making their members ruck in the rain or cold to purge themselves of unserious people, it’s was perfectly reasonable to assume they have no intention of a serious armed conflict. They’re only now doing this, and the idea that they’re all going to seriously purge their ranks this way seems odd, as they haven’t so far, and it seems that it hadn’t organically occurred to them that war isn’t like LARPing in the woods.
I’m not super worried.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
The revealed preferences of everything eventually goes to hedonistic thinking. That’s how we get people who’d rather get welfare than a job, obesity, partying, overspending, and so on. I think society as a whole quite often needs to enforce cultural norms and values that counteract the tendency to choose the hedonistic option or the one that requires the least sacrifice. The revealed preference of most men is not to work dirty and dangerous jobs. They do so if necessary because society will deem an able bodied man with no job as a loser. Even things that are liked by men who don’t want to work gets stigmatized heavily. The same thing should be in play for women in this instance. A woman who doesn’t want children is a loser as much as a man sitting home playing COD instead of going to work. And I’d say the same of obesity. Shaming people who overeat and don’t exercise is a good thing. Shaming kids who would rather play than study is good as well. Shaming and shunning enforces social norms against various forms of hedonism. Within limits, hedonism is okay, but it’s still much better for everyone if people are shamed for not doing their duties.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
How? I just don’t see why putting barbed wire and guard dogs around a certain fact makes people better off.
First of all, it tends to elevate one event and one set of victims above all others. There are lots of genocides in history. I’ll recommend reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Our policy in the USA denied native Americans rights, forced them onto reservations and underfed them. Armenian genocide was a very deliberate decision. The Cathars were slaughtered with the explicit approval of the Pope. Even African slavery in the new world was pretty bad. But there’s only one genocide that we must not question and must never belittle. Which puts that people above in some sense. I can call the Trail of Tears an exaggeration all day long. I can say slavery wasn’t that bad. But touch the Grand Mythos and I’m a bad person.
Second, I believe, as I said earlier, that such a cartoon version of history with a cartoon villain making comically evil angry sounding speeches, crowd shouting slogans, Hugo Boss uniforms and red and black flags give people a very skewed idea of what authoritarian regimes look like. It’s become a visual shortcut for evil and if you want to make a bad guy regime for your movies, tapping into the aesthetic of Nazi Germany is the way to do it. But if someone else comes along and wants to use the state to silence and arrest enemies, as long as they can avoid looking like those people and don’t talk like the Nazis talked, and don’t want to go after that one ethnic group, it’s fine.
Third, I think it undercut any sober analysis of whether or not our own democratic system works. Neoliberalism has faults as well, but it’s hard to get people to think about it because of the free world propaganda which the Grand Mythos and the idea the human rights are the best way to secure human flourishing. It’s actually been used quite effectively to justify going to war with our political enemies. All that needs to be said is that a country is violating human rights and we are ready to bomb those countries, destroy their infrastructure, kill people, or maybe if they’re lucky we’ll just kill their economy with sanctions.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Honestly, even as someone who believes what you’re calling the mythos (with some rather minor caveats) I still find “The Mythos” rather annoying mostly from the point of what it’s actually done to conversations around fascism and authoritarian regimes of various forms. Which is to say that Nazi Germany has become a stand in for Satan in political form. And because everything about it is Pure Evil and the regime is imagined as constant parades, angry speeches, and crowd yelling “Sig Heil” all the time. This is honestly a cartoon version of history that creates a lot of false senses of security about whether fascism or other forms of authoritarian government could arise elsewhere. When your idea of fascism is Hitler yelling into a microphone, goose stepping soldiers, new flags, and Hugo Boss uniforms, anything short of that seems to be something else.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I think honestly all wars are like this. Nobody giving a neutral account thinks any of the allies were specifically going to war for human rights in any strip. Russia notoriously did not like Jews all that much. Our empire is fairly civilized as empires go, and I’m not at all disappointed that a genocide was stopped or that France was liberated.
And I think any fair analysis of history has to take into account the perspectives of everyone involved if it’s to avoid being simply propaganda for whichever side happens to be telling the story. The Germans had an opinion of the allies, talking about what that perspective was isn’t apologetic, it’s simply telling the truth — they didn’t like us because we were bombing the crap out of them. And while I think most of the deaths in the camps were absolutely deliberate, I think it’s reasonable to suggest a small role for logistical failures simply because again, we are bombing their supply lines and factories and so on, and yes, they undoubtedly prioritize their own people over prisoners they consider less than human. All of this can be absolutely true, the holocaust still happened, we might have made it worse.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I mean college kids especially from upper class homes are often able to leverage social networking to get themselves in good positions to eventually get hired. Even if you’re a fuckup, having played dozens of games of beer pong with the son of a business owner is going to get you a leg up. That isn’t because playing beer pong is less hedonistic, but because frat life introduces you to your social peers who will eventually put in a good word for you.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Not education, but delayed adult responsibilities. In college, outside of occasional study and attending classes, the students don’t have any responsibilities that a junior high kid living at home doesn’t have. The dorm is paid by his parents, as is his meal plan and so on. She can do whatever she wants with time not spent studying. The lifestyle is pure hedonism with very little to force the students to mature.
And what makes people mature is not age, but having to depend on oneself and having other people depend on them. This is the value of sports and other activities— you’re dependent on yourself being committed to the task at hand if you want to keep playing that sport. Your team depends on you to show up and perform. If you can’t live up to that, at best you’ll be benched and in more competitive leagues you might well be cut. So you learn to be that dependable person, you go to practice, you run and weight train and throw a ball around because your team needs you and you want to be on that team. Alternately, you can look to rural farm kids involved in 4H. They’re much more mature than others their age. They are capable of getting things done, they have a longer time preference, and they aren’t nearly as driven by emotion as kids who live in suburban neighborhoods and don’t work or play sports.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I think the bigger factor is women in the workplace. Education might well be a correlation, but the rates of childbirth didn’t fall nearly so dramatically until women began to enter the workplace in substantial numbers. If mom is working, the external cost of a child go up dramatically, and the benefits (mostly spending time bonding with the child, and in some cultures prestige) are a lot lower. Tbf, the upshot is that we as a society need to choose either women work or they have babies. Very few women do both, and those who try have fewer kids.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I think he’s fundamentally wrong. Like many things, it’s not about equality (which has increasingly been used to deny outcomes people don’t like) but about the physics of bicycles. Very few cyclists could hope to maintain a constant speed much above 25 mph, and to do that you’d need to be in pretty good shape. That’s about the minimum speed a car can possibly do without constantly braking. Add in the visibility issue (a small bicycle is pretty hard to spot, especially if the rider isn’t wearing hi-visibility clothing — which rarely happens) and the extreme vulnerability of the cyclist (F=MA, you’re in for a serious injury if a car hits you), and anyone looking at this from a pure safety perspective would absolutely not want cyclists “sharing the road” because it’s not possible for a small human-powered vehicle and a 2000 pound vehicle doing 45mph to “share” safely.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I think pointing out that most people won’t work and will help out tremendously. Most people have personal experience with freeloading and if their hard work is not rewarded or worse taken and given to others who did nothing, they deeply resent those freeloading people. Explained that way, communist ideas lose quite a bit of luster.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I’m absolutely convinced they are. The entire thing sounds like a parent desperately trying to get a kid to behave by making threats that they’ll punish them in some vaguely unspecified way. “Behave or else” only really works when there’s an actual “or else” and the other party has reason to believe that you have the will and power to actually do that. Biden has neither, and I don’t think anyone actually believes he does. He doesn’t have control of congress and would thus have a lot of trouble getting any policy changes to happen. Congress isn’t going to agree to withhold weapons. They’re going to Scream bloody murder if he even suggests sanctions. Even supporting the ICC thing is a non starter. We know this, Biden knows this, Netanyahu knows this. And so not only is there no reason to stop, but if he wants to prove he’s not beholden to American dictates, he’d be wise to double down and do more of what he’s been doing. Why would he agree to stop?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
My question to Biden is “or what?” What exactly is the USA going to do if Netanyahu decides to say “no”. There’s not really even a threat to not sell bombs, let alone set out economic sanctions or bomb them or something. This, for that reason feels less like a statement to Netanyahu and much more about trying to shore up support for Kamala among the Pro Palestine crowd. There’s just no credible threat here for the Jews in Israel to fear. There’s not even a hinted at consequence. It’s just “stop the war in Gaza or I’ll huff and puff some more.”
It will be a challenge to be more insane or less competent. Even with the repression, if you lived in a state where crime was low, people were prosperous, and where there was high achievement? Or would you rather freedom in a place where you have to go out armed because of crime, where food and housing eats up most people’s pay, and we see our nation doing great things?
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