MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo 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
1mo ago
It also reduced the need for horses, who have been reduced mostly to glorified pets.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
So drawing on a population that elected MAGA with half the vote, a tiny minority is pro Trump? A population that has lots of Jews yet again only a tiny group of them protesting for their brothers in Israel? It still doesn’t track. Sure you don’t have 100% uniformity, but drawing from a highly polarized population that runs 45-55% between D and R and ending up with the vast majority of students would align with the far left which in the general population of the USA is maybe 20% of the population. If there’s no indoctrination, why doesn’t a typical college campus mirror the USA ideologically?
I don’t observe the same thing in business. If you hire 100 people, they’ll generally be pretty close to the demographics of the region. If I hire 10 people from Alabama, I get probably 9 southern Baptists, most of them very conservative, and so on to attitudes about abortion, gays, and proper grits. If I hired 10 people from Alabama and four years later they were mostly pro LGBT episcopal Christians and socialist to boot, you’d probably be right to suspect that there’s something fishy going on.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I don’t think the military rank and file would refuse to shoot if ordered simply because the US military has made training such that widespread insubordination is not going to happen. You might have a few stragglers, but I would expect them dealt with in a manner that would make the problem moot. Even among the officers, they are going to obey orders because that’s what they’re trained to do as much as the rank and file do.
I’ve just never understood the weird fantasy that the military or the police were going to en mess break with the leadership. That’s not how military or police think of themselves. They don’t make policy or decide whether or not an order is “legal” or “moral” or “good”. They follow orders without question because not doing so means a good possibility of worse things for their unit or the country as a whole. A cop who’s questioning whether or not a law he’s charged with enforcing is useless as a cop. He’s attempting to do the judge’s job. A soldier who won’t follow orders is a danger to his unit. He’s also attempting to do the job of the civilians who have decided he should be carrying out the mission he’s been given.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
If none of the political opinions are brought in with the students, why are students beliefs so uniform? Why are all the kids with or without green hair so uniformly aligned to the values, attitudes, beliefs and ideals of the left liberal wing of the Democratic Party? If no indoctrination is taking place such uniformity should not happen. Yet on every issue, the students agree with the far left. There are protests for Palestinians, yet you can’t find any students— not even the Jewish ones — openly saying that Hamas had it coming. There are protests against Trump, but are there any MAGA hats or signs? The dude got 50+ percent of the vote.
A very clear sign of indoctrination is agreement by the populace on major issues. And going down issue by issue, it’s impossible to not notice just how closely modern college students align with the far left, especially when compared both to the surrounding communities and the communities these kids came from.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I don’t see any settlement other than “Palestinians leave forever” working. Israel/Palestine is simply too small as a territory to have two hostile populations live there without near constant fighting. The Israelis are too powerful to lose any territory, and because of long history Jews are simply not going to tolerate random terrorists killing their citizens without a serious military response. The Palestinians have no desire to accept the situation as it is without resorting to terrorism against Israelis.
The choices as I see them are 1). Palestinians expelled to somewhere else. 2). Kill all the Palestinians, or 3). Continuous stalemate and terror attacks followed by IDF killing lots of Palestinians while the rest of the world bemoans the situation. Given that 3 over a long time frame will eventually reduce to 2, I don’t see any better option than to find a new place to put Palestine. Maybe there’s an island somewhere.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean I disagree. The reason people think of Harvard as a top tier school is because of the faculty it attracts and the work they do. If they all leave for greener pastures, the only thing left is the name. Sure you can coast on that for a while, but other schools who get the great professors and scientists will see their stars rise against Harvard’s downswing. If you can’t argue that you’re doing the best research, or developing minds under the best professors, on what, exactly is the prestige based? Name brand can help, but if it becomes obvious that Harvard graduates are not as good as in years past, they lose.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
It’s not even that. I’m thinking of people who are opposing Trump, protesting, or even members of Congress opposed and it’s a weird disconnect. It’s like they think verbal opposition is magic, or that legal letters by themselves change things. It’s a completely different mindset to what happens in almost any other area of life.
The people doing this never seem to care if anything is effective. They’ll say things like “im doing my part! I stood outside with a sign (on the sidewalk) for a couple of hours yesterday.” I’ll ask them if anything happened because of that and they’ll be disappointed that cars are driving past them and people are ignoring them etc. but it’s like the question of whether the needle is moving in a positive direction, or if something else might be more effective, or even what “success” actually looks like and it’s just me “being negative.” But, these are pretty normal things to ask about any project, especially in the business world. If you do something that has absolutely no effect on the thing you’re trying to change or fix, you just wasted your time. That’s how the world works in most domains, especially politics. It’s not just numbers of people and slogans, it’s about power, and if you don’t understand how to turn the levers of power you have access to, its not doing anything and you are wasting your time.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
To be honest, they have very naive ideas of power. It’s just mind blowing to me just how often they think that simply saying things and goin* through channels is going to produce the changes they want. And I just don’t see anything that suggests they think that they need to do more than speak to the manger to get things done.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
France hasn’t been a superpower since Napoleon. I mean im pretty sure 1900s France was doing the “stop or I’ll send a letter to the League of Nations” up until they got invaded in WW1.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
There seems to be a weird phenomena among formally powerful people and nations where once they no longer actually have the power they once had, they fall back on formality, legalism, and ceremonial trappings. It’s really funny once you actually see it, or at least when it’s not happening to your side of the argument. Countries that once had a military presence that the world feared now politely go about hat in hand to beg their former subjects to do something and paying them to do it. Political entities that once reshaped nations now reduced to issuing letters or rulings and impotently asking the people with actual power to listen to them.
When you start seeing groups become formal, you know they lack either the power or the will to be powerful. The UK hasn’t been much of a power since the Second World War. It’s unlikely they will hold such power this century.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think the big thing I’d look for is the anger has to rise significantly first. Nobody on the left is really angry enough to start something. They just aren’t. We don’t even have Vietnam War levels of mass protests, no real civil disobedience like in the 1960s. I’m not even sure there’s an analogous counterculture like the hippies that exist to form the nucleus of such serious sustained protests.
In the 1960s and 1970s the counterculture was everywhere, and fairly popular among the youth. Pop music celebrated the issues hippies were into, things like Fortunate Son were plaid on the radio. Movies and TV shows talked about those issue. Woodstock was a cultural touchstone. This isn’t really true today. The poplar songs today are not even plausible as protest songs or anti-Trump songs, TV migh sporadically have a woke theme, but there aren’t whole tv series that are specifically pro-migrant, or pro-Palestine, or Woke. Musicians are not producing ant-Trump song lists, they occasionally bring up Trump during a concert.
In order to get a big spike in violence, people have to be mad enough to radicalize a weirdo. How does that happen when the crowd isn’t angry?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
The last republican president assassinated was Lincoln in 1865. The last successful assassination period was JFK. The last attempt was Reagan in 1980. In general, times of massive popular unrest, highly polarized politics. Not really something that I’d worry about.
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.
More options
Context Copy link