MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
https://unherd.com/2023/04/is-trans-the-new-anorexia/
I’m not sure exactly how culture war-like this idea is, but I’ve never actually heard anyone else compare Anorexia with trans people before. I can see the social contagion factor in both especially for women who are much more conforming than men tend to, and because women have higher neuroticism than men. What I’m not sure about is some of the other ideas, that being trans is about self-negation and a sort of renouncing of their body.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
What Orban says keeps me up at night simply because he’s right. And what’s really scary is that I don’t think either side can back down. We’re giving Ukraine everything, and talking about even fighter jets. If we give Ukraine everything and they lose, that’s a serious blow to the credibility of NATO as a protector of the current international order. I think this is why China is supportive. If we can’t defend Ukraine, why would we be able to protect our Asian Allies in Korea or Japan? If we can’t actually protect Ukraine despite billions in sanctions and giving the most powerful weapons we have, what sane country is going to trust us to be their defense or to protect their trade or solve their disputes? And without that perception, we lose a lot of power. If you’re not looking to NATO as much for defense and trade protection, why do you care what they say?
And given that neither side can afford to lose, I fear an out of control escalation. NATO leaders know that their power will be diminished by a loss, that’s why Ukraine keeps getting more and more weapons, more advanced weapons, etc. they can’t afford to lose, especially after investing heavily in Ukrainian victory. Putin likewise can’t lose (though I think there’s a fig leaf in that if he gets Donbas in a peace deal, it’s more than he had to start with, while for NATO anything short of the 1990s border is a loss). It’s just not a situation that either side can back away from.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4mo ago
So Meta the parent company of Facebook and instagram is now allowing users and advertisers to post claims about election fraud in the last election but not the soon to be held 2024 elections. I’ll lay my cards out here and say I’m personally a skeptic of the claims that the 2020 elections were stolen. I don’t see why that should prevent other people from making such arguments.
But my question for you guys is whether these claims are going to really erode trust in future elections. To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened and instead opted for the COVID style full court press of “nobody should bother to take it seriously, and if you do it’s clear that you’re falling for misinformation.” To me nothing erodes trust faster than an official response of “nothing to see here.”
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I’ve never considered either side of the debate “hatred”. I don’t hate fat people or lazy people or whatever other outgroup we’re talking about. My issue on a lot of this is about normalization — that the movement in question is encouraging society to treat as normal and neutral things that are generally harmful either to the people in question or the larger society. I don’t think problems get solved by pretending they don’t exist. We have a lot of these kinds problems. We have a lot of people who are too poorly educated to really understand and interact with modern society. We have people who have been made so emotionally fragile that they find coping with things not going their way is impossible for them.
I agree that in most subjects and movements there’s a pop-version of the main subject. Even for religion, there’s the high version people learn in official ministerial training full of very complicated theology, theodicy, and cosmology. Then there’s the pop-religion where not only are the ideas vastly simplified, some pop beliefs tend to contradict the official dogmas of the religion.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I think there’s a limit here. Once he’s put in prison, it’s really going to be hard to make the case that he’s viable as a candidate.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3mo ago
I think being honest about the depression bit, the huge difference is the difference in expectations that Americans tend to have, especially middle to upper class white Americans. We are often told that hard work always pays off, that college will land you a good job, and that work should be fun and that everyone gets their “dream job”. It’s fantasy for 99% of the population— increasing population, globalization, and the absolute glut of college graduates makes it ever more difficult for a college graduate to land a good paying job out of school without having really good connections and internships. So what happens when you see lots of people doing exactly what you’re being told is the way forward and struggling to make it? When you watch and read about people making $16 an hour and owing $100K, giving up on owning a home and having kids because they can’t afford it?
The difference between the narrative and reality is depression inducing.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
The rather obvious problem for the LGBT community and the rest of us is that we cannot even point out the bootleggers without being labeled. No matter how nicely you point out the connection between letting small children make sexual decisions (or that the adults are pushing, often covertly for sexual discussions and books without parents consent) the answer is you are a horrible bigot for even thinking like that. Which means either you have to reject the Baptists outright or accept them and everything they want to do. This hurts the Baptists because people don’t want strange adults teaching their kids sexual content, especially without their consent.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think race isn’t the issue with regard to immigration. The issue is that, especially after the civil rights movement, it became less expected for immigrants to assimilate. And the problem isn’t that brown people are coming to America. The problem is people coming to America with a bad set of cultural norms (laziness, lack of respect for education, less law abiding, etc.) and thus importing the attitudes, values and beliefs that make the poorer parts of the world poorer. And to some extent even whites are picking up those values. For example the meme of being entitled to a “good life” without putting in any effort to obtain it, or less emphasis on education or conformity.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6mo ago
I think at least for me, the question is “what exactly are the Jews supposed to do here?” People love to criticize, but I don’t think any other groups would have as measured a response as Israel has to a group of people living within a stone’s throw of their major cities having a stated aim to kill them and wipe them off the map, and who regularly target civilians with rockets and bombs and terrorist attacks. If the native tribes of North America were regularly launching missiles from their reservations, we’d probably have a very similar response. If they do all the things Palestinians regularly do from Gaza, there’d be a wall, guards, and everything else.
We’re not thinking that way because for most of us, warfare, especially warfare of this type hasn’t happened in our countries for almost a century. It’s pretty easy to sit back and arm chair quarterback when war is something you only know from movies and that being too restrained is free for me in the USA who doesn’t have do worry about anyone you know suffering the consequences. When it’s your city, your people, and so on, anyone would tend to err on the side of protecting their own.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I’ll agree to a point. I think these are absolutely crimes, however, I don’t believe that anyone else of his social status would have been prosecuted on them. And I think a lot of it is that he doesn’t really fit the culture of the Washington Elites. He’s a Clampett, more or less. He’s the guy who talks in braggadocio, eats steak with ketchup, and does political theater in burlesque. He’s a White Trash President. He’s supposed to be understated, nuanced, culturally sophisticated, prefer Professional Managerial Class food, clothes, music, and entertainment. He’s not supposed to mock political opponents on Twitter like a 4chan troll, he’s not supposed to openly kill our enemies with drone strikes (although a plausibly deniable death carried out by the CIA that nobody knows about is fine, there are rules to kanly).
Had Trump had the demeanor of Desantis, I don’t think they’d have lost their minds, they’d have opposed him, but it would not have been as much of an open scorched earth warfare as it is with Trump. Desantis would have to deal with more quiet opposition, more subtle, and more fitting of another PMC cultured politician. He wouldn’t be investigated with a breathless “is this long nightmare finally over?”
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
I tend to be much more enamored with the idea of interlocking relationships with duties for each person as a better model. If I want more power and more freedoms, I must find a way to climb the dominance hierarchy. I must do so by doing things other people find useful in some way, and I’d have some responsibility to those beneath me. And on the other hand, if I simply wish to do as little as possible, that’s fine, but I would have to give up privileges to do that, and one of those is that I’d have to obey those above me.
Honestly, social structures like this show up everywhere, or at least often enough, that I suspect this is simply how natural human society works. You obey those above you and protect and teach those below you, and for the most part you end up with a fairly stable and functional society. And I don’t see this being completely incompatible with the concept of those natural rights that simply constrain the government from interfering in them.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I mean based on what? Any culture, even one that doesn’t accept immigrants will change over time. Japan today would be a culture shock to a Japanese person time-traveling from 1950. Musical tastes change (though a fair number of people consider country to be a continuation of traditional American music) which I would contend is something that conservatives have managed to conserve, alongside frontier versions of Christianity (which I see evangelical Christianity as a continuation of), traditional American cuisines and to some extent the traditional values and ethos. It’s not expressed the same way, but what conservatives believe and do can quite often be traced back to very long roots that go back quite far. I would contend that a time traveler from 1860 would recognize a lot more of modern Patriot/conservative culture than he would have modern Liberal/woke culture. But at the idea that it doesn’t count if the culture isn’t preserved in amber completely unchanged (which would probably not even be true of the Amish) to count as preservation is simply demanding too much. Conservatives don’t live as museum pieces, they live as people interacting with a real world.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
24d ago
I think federal office is more or less closed to non-elites. I can’t remember the last time someone from a normie background achieved such a thing. Maybe Carter, but even in his era, he’s an outlier, you’d probably need to go back the the 19th century to find a significant swath of congress being from relatively normal-people backgrounds.
As to what to teach kids, I mean I think it’s cruel to over promise on their futures. We’re in the third generation of people raised to dream big. And I think for the 99% who won’t get those things, their lives were hampered by these outrageously high aspirations that any adult could have told them were wildly unreasonable. The result is a generation saddled with a lifetime of debt for a degree that is quite literally worthless. It’s young adults feeling like failures because their wildly inflated expectations of success in fields where there are maybe ten thousand new graduates hoping for a single job. We graduate more psychology majors every year then there are psychologists in the USA. We graduated millions of aspiring artists with no real job skills despite the fact that even those who manage to sell their art almost certainly won’t make a living off their art. Publishing houses get mountains and mountains of letters from people who want to be writers. Now they can’t pay off their loans, can’t get a real job, and have been taught that the jobs they’re actually qualified for are beneath them. I’m sorry, but for the vast majority, the fine arts and liberal arts majors qualify the students for retail and restaurant jobs. Psychology is in a similar position. Had they been told at 18 that they were likely to get an ordinary job and live an ordinary life, they’d very likely have chosen a major of actual career value and not be making TikTok’s of themselves crying in the car because they got a worthless degree loads of debt and can only get jobs at call centers, retail and restaurants.
I think all of the above is a way to say that essentially people need to think more about what the failure state is. Over encouraging your kids to dream big rarely results in huge success and more likely results in heartache and financial difficulties.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof
I don’t see how this could be “self executed” as in not requiring a process to apply it, simply because the earlier amendments require things like trials and forbid self incrimination. In short you’d have to convict Trump of these particular crimes before he’s actually disqualified. I can say Biden is giving aid and comfort to China, but my say so doesn’t mean anything unless I can show that he helped China in some way that actually harmed the USA. Anything else violates the spirit of the laws requiring trials, and runs dangerously close to giving the majority party cart Blanche to simply refuse to put opponents on the ballot on the pretext of some supposed high crime or misdemeanor or aid and comfort.
I can’t imagine that Trump or his supporters aren’t going to fight pretty hard against anyone refusing to put Trump on the ballot. It’s definitely against the spirit of free elections to refuse to put a declared candidate who meets the qualifications in state law on the ballot. In most states, having signatures of a fairly small percentage of the voters by law qualifies a candidate for the official ballot. Without a conviction, and one that’s specifically mentioned in the constitution as disqualification for office, they’d have a very strong case.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
Even so, it’s highly unlikely that they could organize to such a level without anyone knowing they exist. That part is extremely weird, there are known groups. There are KKK groups, Neo-Nazis, National Socialists, Aryan Nations, etc. those groups aren’t ever seen to be protesting. It’s always a brand new group, always men of military age with high levels of fitness, fresh uniforms and flags, always with masks. Once or twice, sure, that could happen. But the two things together — a completely new set of groups and no one from the old guard showing up or knowing about these guys, and these new groups in an age of obesity all being physically fit? It’s not impossibe but it’s so highly improbable that these groups are organic.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I think ultimately, even with the drugs, there’s just no getting around the need for better choices.
In part, I think this is an aesthetic horror for me. We aren’t becoming more emotionally resilient by deadening our emotions, nor are we going to solve our food issues by artificially turning down our hunger thermostat.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think they’ll ultimately win. It’s just that really they’re still in the foundation stage of the movement. Almost any real political upheaval is a generations-long process of first creating a philosophy and ethos and then unify around that philosophy and work to implement it. But if you’d have judged the communist movement by what it was in 1870 when it was first taking shape, you wouldn’t have predicted the Russian revolution. The tumultuous nature of the current generation of reactionaries doesn’t mean much because I believe it will eventually settle on an ethos that will be United enough to win real power.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I think that really most of the culture wars and the dislike of those who disagree feels more like a social class thing than anything really about politics. And as such, it’s not economics and economics won’t fix it.
The upper class of this country essentially wants to remake America to be much more like continental Europe. An open fairly liberated culture, walkable cities with good public transport, strong regulatory state, strong safety net, no guns, and irreligious. To them, the more rural, religious, and traditional red staters are “deplorables”, people who are just so far behind culturally that it’s an embarrassment to them. They’ve long sneered at those fools in flyover countries.
Of course the people in flyover counties are not onboard with the upper classes and their attempts to remake American culture into something different. They like their do-it-yourself culture, they like Christianity, they like speaking their minds, and they like guns. They obviously aren’t too keen on being sneered at by people who consider themselves better than a deplorable.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
Wouldn’t part of that learning be skepticism of new groups and memberships especially ones that require online purchases (and thus credit card information like their name and home address)? Then there’s the travel to appear sudden in Florida.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5mo ago
I think it’s a combination of a lot of things.
Most Westerners live in extremely safe societies where war is something they see on the news. Americans are safer than even Europeans, having never had a war on their own soil since the end of the American Civil War in 1865. We’ve had a few attacks on our own soil: Pearl Harbor, and 9/11. This makes understanding the need to fight the war a bit more difficult. To a Westerner, war is optional even when you are being attacked. I think much the same of crime — for most people, living in suburbs and gated communities, crime isn’t a reality to them. It feels bad to lock up a thief who stole from a store. But, living in a high crime area full of drugs and gangs where everywhere makes it harder to live a normal life, and makes it far more likely that you yourself will be mugged or assaulted.
Second, most westerners haven’t taken their religion seriously since at least the end of WW2. Looking at the supposed rise of Christian Nationalism, what the term seems to mean is Christians who actually believe in Christianity and live by it. They don’t like drag queens or transsexuals because they understand the Bible to say those things are wrong. They want the traditional family structure as they believe the Bible commands this. The elite see this as weird, but it’s actually the default state of humanity. Most people throughout history have made moral decisions based on their religion, and most humans do today. But if you understand religion to be “go to church, temple, synagogue, or mosque once a week and ignore it the rest of the time”, you have no way to understand people who orient themselves by scriptures. They literally have no lived experience with people who think like a religious person, so they don’t understand that Hamas means what they say, that Allah commands them to war and dying as a martyr.
Third, the university teaches that all of history runs on economics. Poverty causes crime and war and terrorism. The only solutions are thus economic and redistribution or wealth. So they’re learning only one toolset. If you just made Hamas rich enough, they’ll stop. The fact that Gaza is awash in aide and the leadership make the list of rich, and are still launching attacks should show that they don’t care about the money. But the West seems unable to look for other reasons for the attack. So the problem cannot be anything other than Israel hoarding the wealth and the land and refusing to share.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think what flipped the switch on Ukraine is that Trump made “getting us out of foreign wars” a campaign accomplishment. He bragged about getting us out of Afghanistan, bragged about not starting wars etc. and Trump saying something tends to trigger something in the liberal world that makes opposing what Trump and conservatives do a major part of the branding. Had the polarity been reversed, I suspect that we’d be hearing a lot more of the anti-war stuff from the left, much like the similar first gulf war in the early 1990s.
On the face of it, I don’t see any strategic reason for NATO or the Allie’s to really invest in a free Ukraine. It’s nothing special. It’s basically Kansas or Nebraska in Eastern Europe mostly farming (Donbas has a lot of minerals and I think they have oil). To send several billion a month and all kinds of modern weapons (which are probably being reverse engineered in China after being captured in Ukraine) for Kansas of Eastern Europe isn’t a good decision in my opinion. Having a stable relationship with Russia (and prior to 2014 that’s what they had, it was colder than we wanted, but we got along well enough) is far more valuable than anything we could get from Ukraine. There’s just no way that realpolitik would lead anyone to the conclusion that being where we are now (propping up Ukraine even though the parts with the mineral wealth are under Russian control, countries beginning to dump the petrodollar and otherwise distance themselves from the Atlanticist alliance, and losing Nordstream), and probably too drained to protect Taiwan (which makes most f the world’s microchips) I don’t think it wise at all.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1yr ago
I say this as someone who’s roughly on her side: the thing that bugs me most about the X-rights movement is the lack of concern for anyone else. These movements are narcissistic all the way down, and worse, no one is allowed to voice these very real concerns without being shouted down as a bigot, a terrible human being, or whatever other sneer term you can come up with.
She has a point on some of her stuff. Women are extremely vulnerable in women’s shelters and changing rooms. And especially since the de-facto policy is “if they say they’re a woman they are,” this means that some nonzero number of men who want access to women’s changing rooms or shelters with vulnerable women in them will simply put on a dress and go for it. And at present women aren’t even allowed to object. Women will almost certainly be raped in this situation (which I suspect has already happened), and it seems like all of society has decided that this is acceptable provided it’s kept out of sight.
And as far as children (which to my knowledge JKR hasn’t addressed) I think there are enough concerns that i understand the impulse behind the anti-movement. There’s at least some evidence that ROGD is a social contagion. Kids aren’t necessarily claiming gender dysphoria because they have some long standing issues with their natal gender, but because it’s cool and attention grabbing and makes adults squirm a bit. Or maybe they have trouble fitting in, and believe that as the opposite gender they’d have an easier time. My issue is that society has chosen the worst possible way of dealing with the issue.
When I was a kid, there were scammy CD clubs that you could subscribe to initially cheaply and later on would get really expensive. And they absolutely went after kids because they obviously weren’t mature enough to understand completely what they were getting into. And fortunately for them there’s a provision to protect kids from being scammed this way — until they’re proper adults they aren’t held to contracts, or at least can use their age to back out. Kids aren’t allowed to hold jobs or get tattoos until they’re old enough to understand what they’re getting into. Gender is different. The same kids who can’t get tattoos or hold jobs or sign up for CD clubs can absolutely at least socially transition with full support of the faculty of the school. If they tell their parents, the parents are not allowed to question it, or slow it. But, that’s only if the child gives the school permission to tell their parents.
So I understand the pushback here. Parents for very good reasons don’t want the schools keeping secrets from them. Especially for things that involve medical care or large social changes. Finding out that schools are conspiring with children to hide a major and potentially life altering decision from them is rage inducing for most parents. They know their kid and understand that kids need guidance from parents.
But to me a lot of the over-the-top responses are precisely because they’re shut out of the conversation. The only thing they can do is shout it down, to ban it, and to require an approval process for classroom instruction and books. Shouting in school board meetings is the only thing parents can do here.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8mo ago
I’m not convinced by this. They never actually connect Hoste to Hanania. The best they have is anecdotal connections (both drop out of HS, get a GED, then go on into academia) none of which are unique enough to really be a smoking gun. I would bet there are at least 10,000 students who did the same thing. Second, the connection between the two online is the (supposed) sock puppets, except that they never bother to establish they are sock puppets, rather than one person follow the account of someone else. I follow accounts on multiple platforms, I’m not the person I’m replying to and even being a consistent reply to posts by Hoste doesn’t make it clear that Hanania is Hoste.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9mo ago
I’m not sure I’m understanding the mythology of the Gallup survey. It sounds like if you ID as some form of gay, you can choose multiple versions of gay, but if you’re heterosexual you can only choose heterosexual and nothing else. Depending on how they count the results, it seems like you could end up counting a person who IDs as a transsexual lesbian asexual three times (once as trans, once as lesbian, and once as asexual) which would obviously inflate the number of people IDing as some form of LGBT.
https://apple.news/APEuOPHP2TWqeUTR_h8QypA
So the Republican speaker of the house has decided to open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden’s business dealings with hunter. I have serious doubts that this will go very far as democrats still control the senate. This looks like an attempt to stir up the base for re-election season.
I personally see this as a big distraction as we have a lot of very serious problems that need to be addressed. BRICs, Taiwan, Ukraine, inflation, and
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