MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
No bio...
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
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
10mo 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
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
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
29d 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
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
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.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
I think I’d have a high threshold for most common contexts, though as the task at hand got more critical to the mission of the company, the health and safety of the clients or employees, or the safety of the product, my threshold goes down by quite a lot.
I don’t care if my front desk people in a hotel are maximally competent. The role isn’t complicated, and above a certain threshold of competence (speaks English, functionally literate and numerate, understands social contexts) I don’t get that much more for being choosy in who I hire. Any minimally competent person can do the task.
When it comes to something more mission critical, for example a programmer for my software company, the threshold goes down rather quickly. I lose money when I have to waste 1000 man-hours because someone bungled the code, and delays might well cost me millions in salary or lost sales. This hurts everyone working for the company.
The most obvious case would be in dangerous roles, or roles where a mistake can cause injury or death to other people or themselves. A doctor who is too stupid to understand what he’s doing, or has ADHD badly enough that he’s likely to miss critical details is a danger to his patients. An engineer who is unable or distractible enough to not do accurate calculations is a danger to anyone who uses his designs. Even in some forms of factory work, missing a detail or failing to check for people around before servicing or starting equipment can cause serious injury.
So it’s sort of a sliding scale for me. The more critical the role and the more a mess up will harm employees, clients, or the company itself the more I’m at least OK with using any means necessary to get the best possible person for the role.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
It’s not even that great then. Unions are a huge reason why America is no longer manufacturing things to the same scale it was. It’s orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to simply build the plant in Mexico or Southeast Asia than deal with the overinflated wages and poor work ethic of union employees.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4mo ago
I think it matters in the sense that legitimacy matters. If we’re really going to deny opposing parties the right to be on the ballot then it’s really stretching the truth to claim that we hold fair and free elections. And in my view the only legitimate reason that a group that files to be on the ballot should be denied is that they’ve been convicted of a felony within the last 5 years.
Elections are already widely distrusted, with a sizable chunk of the GOP believing that Biden did not win fairly. This is not going to restore their trust in ballots. And when a big enough chunk of the electorate doesn’t believe they’re being allowed to compete fairly in elections, they abandon elections for more direct action.
I think there’s a lot of cognitive biases that cause this.
First of all is the “fair” notion. The idea that life is ever supposed to be equal or that people are supposed to get roughly equal amounts of reward and that there’s some ceiling cat to appeal to when someone has “too much” which is actually in practice “has more than ME.” And really, that’s never been reality. In fact, it’s the opposite. If you’re doing more, or providing necessary services, you deserve more. But, that’s not “fair”.
Second is that people always have the wrong idea about just how much work their betters actually do. I’ve seen this when people talk about the CEO. They assume that their work is easy, that they do slacker work and go play golf. Or they assume that it doesn’t take any more intellectual capacity than they themselves have. Again, this isn’t true. Anyone who has run a business— even a small one — can tell you that the business runs your life. Your “vacation” simply means working from a beach instead of an office. Slacking off means working 80 a week instead of 100 a week. You can kiss family time and friend time goodbye unless you can work while hanging around with them.
And it requires serious smarts as well. If you’re not smart enough to understand cultural trends properly, new technologies, regulations, emerging markets, competition, and the entire operation of the business from top to bottom, then chances are you won’t actually have a business in five years. One bad marketing decision cost InBev billions. Misunderstanding digital photography killed Kodak. One reputation killing bad product can tank you. And it’s a constant thing. Technology alone moves so fast that a person who cannot understand emerging technology from day one is at a huge disadvantage. Being too slow to adapt is deadly, but so is backing the wrong technology.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7mo ago
I generally find the idea of rules in war to be completely disingenuous and actually kind of stupid. The point of having a war is to win the war quickly. And dragging it out on the pretense of following the “rules” (in quotes because really, the rules mostly exist for propaganda purposes and only matter in the context of things that countries we don’t like are doing and creating a causus belli for stopping them or arming enemies) doesn’t really benefit civilians as much as advertised. A war that drags on for years longer than it has to because the tactics that would win it are “illegal” doesn’t actually protect civilians. They live in a bombed out country with no infrastructure, a tanked economy, and completely disrupted lives (especially if they don’t live in heavily protected green zones). The fields of Ukraine haven’t produced much since the invasion and what they have produced cannot go anywhere because of the war. They have a deep recession that makes it hard for average people to live, most industries have pulled out and anyone with brains and a passport have left for better economic prospects elsewhere and won’t be returning. Schools have been shuttered for the most part, so kids are missing out on years of school. And so what’s left of Ukraine is a basket case even if infrastructures hadn’t been targeted.
If targeting infrastructure and so on could have decided the outcome of the war in a matter of weeks or months, all of that could have been rebuilt. People could return and rebuild the economy and schools and run businesses and invented things in Ukraine rather than Poland.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5mo ago
popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
The zionists are right. I don’t see any solution to this that doesn’t eventually look like a Zionism transposed to some other location. The historic record here is pretty clear — a stateless Jewish minority is going to be the target of either states looking for a scapegoat or angry mobs taking matters into their own hands. In most Muslim countries, non Muslims are second class citizens at best. So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere. If that’s the case, you need to create a continuous land area in which Jews are given complete control. And you’re now displacing whoever lives there now. It ends up looking almost exactly like Israel except now we’re building in South America or Montana or Wales or something. There aren’t really good answers.
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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