MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
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.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
As a widespread movement, hard no. As sporadic attacks by loons, probably. But honestly I wouldn’t expect much that raises above background noise. Maybe someone will do a shooting at a red-coded event, or vandalize a building, or something along those lines. But if the protests are any indication, and I’ve said this before, I don’t even read them as serious. They’re protesting something they consider creeping authoritarian dictatorship with 2 hour weekend marches escorted by the police. Most serious attempts to do something (mostly general strike) are planned for quite a bit farther in the future. In fact the only planned date for a general strike is in 2028 which is pretty weak-sauce.
It’s just not the kind of angry mob producing level of angry
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
These things sound reasonable, though I would personally emphasize the need to get on with the business of living and building a life. The parts of CBT and DBT that seem to work are often very similar to Stoicism broadly understood. The idea of stoicism isn’t, as tge stereotype goes “not feeling” but “feeling, acknowledging the feeling, then going on to do the right thing.”
Wallowing in bad feelings just breeds more bad feelings mostly because you focus on them which just magnifies them. That insight isn’t new, it’s pretty ancient. If you focus on the rain, the water’s temperature will be the most salient thing you notice. And you’ll feel miserable. If you focus on the discomfort, the sadness, etc. you’ll be miserable. If you are uncomfortable while doing something fun, you will feel happy for the fun.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I don’t see feelings as bad, I see a hyper-focused fixation of the modern world on getting their feelings right first, of making decisions based on feelings, to not only be a dead end, but often make building a good life impossible because building a good life doesn’t always match up to doing what feels good. It might feel good to cut out everything that makes you unhappy in the moment often means cutting yourself off from other people (who are imperfect) opportunities (that often have trade-offs or require hard work to realize), experiences (that might be uncomfortable in the moment, but lead to better things). It just seems to be a way to end up stuck, bitter, alone, and wallowing in bad feelings. Properly dealing with your feelings does matter, but I don’t think focusing on how you feel above duty, above growth, or above being a good person is a good thing.
I’ll agree that apart from God and Godly advice it ends mostly in bad places. I think a lot of terrible things have been done because a person had become bitter about people or situations, let it fester, and turned on others.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’ve long since come to the conclusion that modern psychology and psychiatry are not just dead ends, but actually more harmful than anything else we could have come up with. It actually seems to make whatever problems that existed beforehand and makes them worse.
On the social level, the idea of “you don’t know what I’ve been though” has destroyed the mechanism of social shame that once stood as a bulwark against bad behavior. I might well be having a terrible time at home, but why must I treat other people who have nothing to do with that situation poorly? Furthermore, why does modern society insist that those other people are wrong to object? I work in retail. I’ve apparently signed up to be an emotional tampon and am expected to accept that not only does the customer have the perfect right to treat me like crap, im not even allowed to object because “they might be having a bad day” or trouble at home or work or the moon is in the wrong astrological house. This not only doesn’t help them (honestly, bad behavior tends to make people want to avoid you), but simply spreads all of this around as other people are stuck trying to cope with being treated poorly and use their social permissions to act like jerks in public.
Personally I think it also encourages narcissism as it never seems to get to the point of saying that what’s happening to me is not the most important thing in the world. Im not the center of the story here, and other people deal with is just as important as your problems, in fact they honestly don’t see you or your feelings as nearly as important as you do. Main character syndrome is rampant though and generally the advice of pushing for boundaries and getting what you deserve, and paying special attention to how everything makes me feel has created and maintains that problem. That’s not to say you never think about yourself or stand up for yourself, but I think psychology has pushed this far beyond the bounds of reasonable that many people raised in the modern mindset have no practice in thinking about other people as people.
The worst is in personal development. Because modern psychology encourages a feelings first model, people tend to overthink those feelings and put more emphasis on how you feel. This tends to make those feelings last longer and become deeper as you turn a bad day into a bad week and on to full on depression.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
It’s damning for the state enforced lockdowns which most other states were eager to implement. I think a lot of states used it as a compliance test *just how long can we get people to obey arbitrary rules and be shut in their homes without creating a backlash. Rather frightening to now understand that if you make the situation sound bad enough, you can get this sort of thing to go on for a long time. More than a year.
And other states were actually pretty upset that Sweden didn’t go along because it did provide an alternative to arresting people who dared to leave their homes.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean as compared to much of the rest of the world, and certainly blue tribe areas of America, and as such I think it’s a reasonable counter factual case. They didn’t have to shut down everything, rope off playgrounds or cancel schools. Yes, they limited capacity, but for the most part, you could do what you wanted to.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
The counter factual is Sweden, tge country that didn’t lock down at all. And to my knowledge, they didn’t really do any worse than their near neighbors.
And the reason it’s so hard to get talking about 1.2 million deaths on the radar is just how much the lockdowns cost the rest of us. People thrown into unemployment (and in the USA, it was hard to get unemployment because the systems were overwhelmed) with a small one time “bonus”. Businesses forced out of business because they couldn’t open, but their creditors could still demand payments. Children deprived of important social development because they couldn’t socialize with other kids. Those same kids given zoom classes instead of a real education. People denied the right to socialize, and when one of those 1.2 million people died, they were forced to die alone, with their families huddles around an iPad.
I feel very much the same. Hedonism is problematic because it means that the cultural, social, and economic commons get raided rather quickly as people choose to defect every single time they can get away with it. Such societies tend to end up being very low trust very quickly as people learn they can’t depend on others to keep themselves from overusing welfare systems, cheating the system, creating moral chaos, bribing people, etc. when you realize that you get screwed by people maximizing their hedonistic score at your expense.
I tend to favor the Confucian approach of seeing things in terms of relationships. If I owe something to you, in return it’s just expected that you likewise owe something to me. A parent owes a child safety and provision, so it just makes sense that the child ought to obey his parents.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I’ve always seen the left as very much about hedonistic urges. The idea being that freedom means freedom to do whatever you want, and that anyone or anything that restricts your ability to live out whatever hedonistic urges a person has.
Anti-natalist ideas fit perfectly well, as having a child introduces obligations, personal, financial, and emotional. A parent is simply not as free to act on hedonistic desires because the child needs things. You can’t just travel on a whim, as you need to arrange for how exactly you accommodate the little child. You can’t spend your last dime on yourself, you need to buy formula.
This is still a telos. It’s just not your telos.
The conservative telos tends to be duty. It’s told in lots of different ways I suppose, but the general idea is that you might have a technical right to do as you please, but it’s not always good to do so unless you deal with all the duties you have. If you don’t keep up your end things fall apart fairly quickly.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think hyper palatable foods represent a real hazard to the health of tge general population , and it’s something I think needs to be dealt with on a policy level alongside providing good public nutrition training in schools. It simply cannot be good for a nation to have 75% of the food in a typical grocery store be the highly processed hyper palatable foods that drive obesity, especially if you have them in single serve ready to eat formats that are found in every venue open to the public. America is a nation of snacking, and any place you go there will be snacks available for sale, even when it should not make sense. Do you really need to be able to buy a bag of chips (that’s actually 4 servings) at a hardware or clothing store? It’s weird to think about.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
But Eli Crane isn't thinking this way because Eli Crane is a SEAL. That's a hypermasculine world where everyone talks shit about everyone all the time. If there's a real problem it is handled directly and head on - "hey, bro, you and me slug it out in the parking lot." That was his professional calibration for years. And I am very happy we have thousands of other men like him on our side with their guns pointed in the other direction. But the job of "warrior" today (in the most traditional sense -- being an Air Force cyber general doesn't quite relate) is a hyper-specialized role because today's true warriors are the best in history; they are in the best physical shape, with the longest and most rigorous training, with an insane level of technological proficiency, and a support structure that costs billions of dollars.
Applied to other domains, however, they don't generalize well. So, back to the archetype, the problem here is that what the archtype assumes (at a higher level of resolution) is the JFK (and generations past) version of a warrior; a dashing young officer (because enlisted is low class, ew) who did a few years of service but not a full career, maybe saw some combat, and was in an elegant role; Navy PT boat captain, a British Cavalry officer, WW2 Fighter Ace.
I think actually this is exactly the mindset needed to fix most of our political problems. We absolutely need no nonsense leaders who aren’t afraid to at least verbally meet each other on the parking lot after work. The current crop of “leaders” have long since perfected the art of doing things that they procedurally cannot do (thus ducking the responsibility of not actually doing the things that need doing), or hiding really bad ideas in thousand page bills full of nonsense and then pretending that in order to get something done, they simply had to vote yes on a bill with “let’s shoot Taylor Swift” in it, because it had something else in there. You still own voting to shoot Taylor Swift. The mindset drilled into the elite and leadership of the military is that you are responsible. You are responsible for yourself, your team, the results of actions you took or didn’t take, and the actions and decisions of your team that you didn’t do anything about. They are not likely to pull the same kinds of things that our leadership does now.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Off the top of my head:
Computer algorithms. I consider this basically the new literacy.
Quantum Physics: I firmly believe we’ll have a pretty good idea how it all works, probably by 2050.
I’ll agree with the idea of dietary guidelines being much better than now, but I don’t think it’s that we have absolutely no idea how it works so much is that nobody actually likes the results. Food manufacturers do not want to hear and the public doesn’t like. Basically the solution is to eat mostly vegetables with meat and starches being about a quarter of the meal each. Eat as minimally processed as you can, and avoid refined carbs. It’s not that we’re stupid, it’s that we don’t like that kind of food, and billions are made catering to what people want even though we know it’s bad.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think it’s more that Europe has the right formula as they don’t have elections that begin the moment the current government is sworn in. The campaign seasons are fairly short and unless there’s some vote of no confidence or something, the government can run things and people don’t feel the need to consume political news to follow it all.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think politics is now eating celebrity. It’s just inescapable at this point that no matter what it is, it will be political and those involved will be political. There’s not much that’s made in America or done in America that doesn’t somehow touch politics. And so if you want to get Noticed, it’s probably going to be going after a political target is going to be the kind of thing you do. In 1980, we had a pretty strong celebrity culture and everybody had their favorite movie star in poster form on their bedroom wall. There were magazines devoted to hot male singers that would be roughly analogous to the stuff you’d see around K-Stan’s. Most normies would maybe read a single newspaper or watch a half hour of national News nightly. The rest of life was just about normal human activities— listening to music, watching TV, hanging out with friends, watch the ball game. And so people who wanted to “go out with a bang” tended to go after famous entertainment figures.
Whether or not anyone doing these things cares about politics as actually caring about a policy, I tend to doubt it. I’ve yet to see anyone who commits an act of violence like this who had ever worked for a local political organization or canvassed a neighborhood or even donated to a campaign. They don’t hold specific political ideas, they don’t know policy or anything. At best, they tend to vibe. Believing in universal healthcare is a policy position. There are various models, but it’s a policy on how one should fund and deliver healthcare in the country. Shooting a health insurance CEO has nothing to do with it. And to my knowledge, Luigi never really seemed to have a firm view of healthcare delivery before he shot the UHC CEO.
Honestly I don’t think our current situation is healthy simply because is not normal or desirable for government to be the singular touchstone of a culture. Politicians cannot work that way, and probably shouldn’t be running through a million polls asking stupid people how to solve the problems of the world. It doesn’t work because people mistake the theatrics for the substance or a smooth delivery for thought. And once you take away the smoke filled room in which the real business was done, the result is shitty and subject to rediculous purity games that preclude dealing to get things done. Furthermore, it breeds the perfect storm of division. If the most important thing the thing you spend the most time talking about is politics, you’ll naturally divide the country. And there are few if any neutral places. You can’t turn it off and just enjoy a brew and some baseball or hockey with someone who doesn’t share your political beliefs. Fandoms are almost all coded either liberal or conservative. Beers seem to be as well. Shopping and the brands you buy. Politics as identity is how you get dark things, as it makes those who disagree enemies.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think it’s that modern people no longer see themselves as part of a greater purpose. There’s no meaning to the universe, therefore no meaning to the suffering that exists. A person living through a famine in 1225 did so knowing that the sufferings would unite him to Christ and His Church. It was still unpleasant, obviously, but it wasn’t meaningless and random. A person experiencing a famine in 2025 does so in an uncaring random universe in which the famine is caused by random chance. Suffering that means nothing. Suffering is pointless, and in fact would seem to mean the wider society and nature is letting them down.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I mean what exact intent is implied by invading a Capitol and attempting to breech the doors of the legislature and ignoring multiple commands to stop? I would undertake the sympathy if she’d gone wandering around the roduntra with a sign or upside down flag, or if she’d been going into offices or something because those things do not represent the same sort of threat as attempting to invade the house floor as member of congress are fleeing. She clearly intended to do something by those actions and so did those with her.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
It wasn’t much of a secret. They wrote it all down. You can read all kinds of writings about various divisions of labor and social roles. We no longer read the stuff but it’s not hard to find. Confucius is pretty specific about the five relationships, and what the role is supposed to be doing. So is the Bible.
I still hold that decontextualizing relationships creates a lot of the problems. It’s weird to think of actual human relationships as though there’s an underlying contract and someone is getting a bad deal. A relationship is between people, and if both do as they are supposed to do, it works even if it looks unequal on paper.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
What people value is culture specific in many cases. Jobs didn’t really become aspirational until the median white male was working an office job. Women didn’t clamor to work in factories, they were quite content with minor teaching and nursing roles and being the occasional secretary. At this point they chose to work. Having a wife who didn’t work up to that point was a status symbol as it meant you earned enough to not need a second income.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
My point is that it like a lot of things are often the result of sloppy thinking. Yes in today’s culture it’s boorish to bring up the unequal division of labor, however humans have lived for thousands of years with numerous such relationships and duties often explicitly defined for each role. They tended to be at least theoretically reciprocal I owe my husband a clean house and a hot meal, he owes me money for the house, protection, and so on. The same would be true of lord and peasant. You work, I will protect the realm and see to the stability of the fiefdom. Or teacher to student, boss to worker. This worked up until we decided that individuals could assert rights without any context of place in wider society. I think it’s a wrong framework because it ignores all the ways we are not atomized individuals without context in wider society.
Your wife isn’t just any old woman, she’s your particular wife with whom you have a long relationship and possibly children. Those children are not random children, they are your children. So when she doesn’t want to do laundry, it’s in the context of your personal relationship, not any other relationship. Naked assertions of rights don’t make sense in that context and it’s really only thought of this way in the modern era.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think he is sort of viewing everything from 500 feet as though every person acts a as a perfect automaton blindly acting exactly like every other person as a perfectly rational being. TBH I find the same flaws in most theoretical constructions— they ignore that humans are not little Spock’s running about perfectly enacting logical self interest. It also tends to elide the degree to which relationships between people and groups of people tends to totally change how people perceive their self interest and make choices.
The entire conversation about feminism and anti-feminism falls apart if you introduced a single wrinkle— humans tend to form these crazy things called families. And thus a lot of “rights” type arguments don’t work because every right asserted on one member of a family without imposing either a constriction or duty on someone else in that family. So if you say “well, women shouldn’t have to do all the housework, the cooking, the cleaning, the child care, because she is equal to the man,” you immediately have a problem because somebody has to do that stuff. So now you’re putting this on the other adult in the relationship— the man. But then he claps back with his own rights claims “why should I have to do all this? Why is it my job to do the laundry?” She wants to have a career, but someone else has to support her to make that happen. If one person could get a huge promotion by uprooting and moving to New York, you either move everyone or you don’t.
These simple mistakes always floor me because they’re pretty obvious. It’s not possible to ignore the individual choices, nor possible to ignore the relationships between people that inform those choices. The entire edifice is built on two lies — first the notion of an individual without tastes and preferences that don’t lead directly to maximizing utility on every axis, and second the idea that every man exists by himself with no relation to others around him. They’re both absurd. Humans have cultures that shape their preferences, and they have relationships with other people, not just families, but communities, cultures, political systems, and so on.
Even with regard to education, I think he’s right — in America especially, because the expense of college has made it that way. We have a fairly unique relationship with college. I’d argue we’ve basically turned it into a very expensive career casino in which you bet 4-5 years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars (over the course of the loan) on the chance that a given combination of the right school, major, activities, internships, and GPA will grant you a middle class career. And really a lot of his (correct) understanding of education works best in the American system where the entire point of our college system is to get a credential, get a job, and never think about that stuff again. In that context, attending Yale courses, but not getting the credentials is a waste of time and money. But if we’re talking about aristocratic students who for various reasons don’t need college specifically to get a job after college, they aren’t looking at college in the same way. They’d see the education part as more important as a way to impress people, as a sign of prestige, or a way to find a spouse. They would read the readings they are interested in, and maybe wouldn’t care as much about the diploma. Attending a lecture at Yale is much more intrinsically valuable when the diploma doesn’t matter.
Again, the context matters in how this stuff happens in the real world. If you want people to choose the education over the diploma, you need to make the education cheap and the diploma matter less.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I would say if the judge is repeatedly doing something like this and they’re constantly issuing injunctions that get overturned, then yes. Would not think that a single overturned injunction would reveal partisan hacking unless the injunction is so bad on the merits of the case that he clearly shouhave known better.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think that does make a lot of sense. But my main concern is to limit the ability to issue a national injunction to “break-glass” levels of emergency. The idea being that the principle in question is so important to the public good, Justice, or good government that allowing it to continue before SCOTUS takes it on would result in grave harm. I don’t want it completely ended, but at the same time I don’t want it to be used casually as a “we don’t like this” measure.
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.
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