MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I’m thinking more of a reverse Maoist revolution. Completely remake the culture, ban the bad stuff and purge those who advocate it from all positions of power. Remove cultural artifacts that promote that same bad stuff. Promote the new culture: traditional families, American traditional culture, Christian ethics, and capitalism. Promote useful education and the study of the Western canon.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I’m personally sympathetic simply because this is a situation (and I think trans human will be like this as well) where once you start there’s pretty much literally no going back. As such, I think there is a need to pump every break possible and really think about it before doing anything. Especially given that the person driving the entire process is a child who isn’t fully developed, doesn’t really understand how serious of a decision he’s actually making, or just how long he/she will have to live with th3 results.
There’s just simply no way that a child of ten years old being asked to consider puberty blockers has any idea what they’ll want ten years from now, let alone 30 or 40. There’s no way that a child who is too young for a PG13 movie can think about whether he will want to have sex or children. He can’t possibly understand this because he’s 10, and ten years is doubling of his entire life experience. And to basically remove any potential for someone to come alongside the kid and say “you know, in a few years you might want to be male and date girls and marry and have a family. You might want to be a father. You might want to live as a man as you grow into your body. Likewise there’s no potential that someone sits down with a child like this and says “this decision you’re making is one you’ll be dealing with forever. You’ll likely live to be 70 years old, and a decision you’re making right now, at ten years old — you’re making it for life. You’ll be living with it when you’re going off to college. When you get a job, when you turn 50, when you retire. There are lots of things you simply have no context for that you’re permanently closing off here. You cannot have sex in the normal way. You will be sterile and thus will never have biological children. If you get a neo-vagina you’re going to have to dilate it for the rest of your life. If you get a neo-penis as a girl, the muscles they take from your area won’t grow back.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think we’re coming from different places here, and I think a big part of it is that I’m older, old enough that my mother was pregnant with me when she saw Star Wars: A new Hope. And looking back on being a kid, on making decisions even up to age 25 or so and a lot of them were bad decisions made because I didn’t think long term about them. I didn’t really think that way until much later — well into high school. They’re a moment in high school somewhere around 15 where it hits you like a ton of bricks that life is about to get serious and the decisions you’re making will impact you forever. I’m fortunate that I didn’t really fuck up too badly. But this is why I’m leery of allowing kids under 16 to make permanent changes to their bodies. It’s easy for a young kid to think they want something right now that they won’t want later. Even as adults, something you think is a good thing ends up not working for you later.
For that reason, I think I’d personally not want medical interventions before 16. Only a maturing brain can really understand the choice of “you will be sterile, you’ll have these medical conditions forever, and after you sign up, you will never again be able to go back to your old life.” Social stuff, fine. Changing hair and clothes are both easy. I think the blockers might be harder, or might permanently limit height or something. But beyond that, I think such permanent changes shouldn’t happen until the child is reall old enough to understand the decision and what it means.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I would tend to disagree that they’re no better than someone who doesn’t work in the field. X-risk AI is hypothetical, but AI and machine learning are not. I don’t think anyone would as summarily dismiss an ecologist who thinks that the biosphere will collapse without bees simply because a world where flowers exist and bees don’t is hypothetical. They understand the biology of flowers and especially flowers on food plants and how bees pollinate flowers. It’s not a slam dunk that because an expert or two in a field says that “unless something changes that bad things will happen,” means something. On the other hand, if you see a bunch of ecologists saying that the biosphere is collapsing, it’s probably something to at least pay attention to. Likewise if I see a bunch of AI experts saying “this could get really bad if we aren’t careful,” I’m saying it needs to b3 taken seriously.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think this would work in the sense that someone might well be helped just by the act of telling someone else about the problem sometimes helps even if nothing else happens. I’m pretty sure that for most therapy, this is kinda what happens. The therapist isn’t magic and doesn’t know exactly what you need to hear. The entire point is to be a nonjudgmental sounding board and even if it’s imperfect, the chatbot at least removes the fear of judgement which might help.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think the rot is going so deep that I’m not sure there’s any way to save the West. It’s basically illegal to question certain things, or to oppose certain ideas, and I’ve yet to see anyone mainstream even grasp how serious the problem is. It’s not going to be fixed, I don’t think because as soon as the state can Devine the purpose of you entering a space (for example going to UCLA while conservative) with only the good will of those who oppose your ideas to keep you from violating the law. And honestly, if putting up flyers is now a hate crime, I just… how much freedom do you have to lose before you say something?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I mean I think there’s a lot of bias in how people perceive history and the things that they’re valuing over other things. It’s almost always a bias in favor of more technological devices, more official freedoms and more official equality with almost everything else taking a distant second or even third even if, as a practical matter, you’d be freer, happier, healthier, and safer in earlier eras.
There’s a lot to dislike about modern life. The panopticon, street crime, the number of people who have control over your ability to live your own life, the mental and physical health crises that plague us, debts that most people owe for decades now, and the costs of health care for most Americans.
So to me there is a bit of a trade off depending on the era. Obesity and mental health reaching the crisis point in the twenty first century— I would absolutely dare argue that other than crisis care, we were much healthier a century ago when the fattest man alive was 300 something pounds and this was rare enough that he was in a circus. A century ago, millions of kids in America were not depressed, and suicide wasn’t common.
Likewise with street crime. In most cities crime used to be well controlled. I don’t think there was ever an era in which unaccompanied women could safely walk the streets at midnight, but there were eras where crime was low enough that you could walk the streets or let kids play outside without too much fear of theft or violence. There were no open street markets for drugs, no open air homeless encampments within the cities, and no need to plan to avoid human feces.
As far as freedom, we have freedom in name only a lot of times. The amount of control other people have over your life (in part enabled by the panopticon that rats you out all the time) would be mind boggling to someone living in an absolute monarchy in the 1800s. Louis XVI of France couldn’t require your boss to spy on you and fire you if you ever said anything anti-regime. Even if he could, most people in France were farmers and thus self employed. Joe Biden tried to get people fired for refusing an injection. Through liability, the government can force your boss to fire people over Facebook posts (lest not doing so is proof of a hostile work environment). Likewise the control over what can and can’t be done on your own land or with your own house is pretty high. The government can tell you whether you can raise food or animals on your land, require you to get approval to expand your house or build permanent structures, require inspections at every step of the process. I don’t think you could have done that a century ago.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I’ll be honest I think most people only care about politics for social signaling purposes. It’s as you say, maybe 10% of the adult population of the country cares about politics to any level. They don’t really see it as an object level reality.
This can be most easily seen in state and local politics. To whit, the place where the average person has orders of magnitude more power than they do in federal politics. You can get infrastructure projects funded. — by the city or state government. You can affect how hard your commute is — at the city planning meetings. You can affect (especially now that the courts have send a lot of stuff back to the states) a good chunk of culture war issues. Turnout is terrible, and even fewer attend the meetings. Like, you want to keep woke out of the schools (or put it in) — the school board meets once a month. They have committees that go through and approve textbooks. Nobody goes.
It’s actually funny to me. People don’t actually want power. They don’t want their decisions to matter. They in fact want to demand things with no responsibility, which turns out to be super easy if you’re signaling with things you have little power over.
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
11mo ago
I think the only thing that will fix the culture is a very hard reality check. Losing a war to a non-woke military power especially if it proves to be one that we “should” win against is a pretty powerful reality check.
It’s a question of whether you want to wait until the infection is so deep as to destroy the entire country or have the needed treatment now. It’s the same thing as what happened with Bud Light. They fucked around, pissed off their user base, and now know better. And I think I’d much rather have the reality checks now than try to take on a raising world power with a military redone as a jobs program for woke hipsters doing makeup checks. I’d also much rather have the government default when our outstanding debt is only 4x the GDP and we’re still on the petrodollar rather than wait until our profligate spending send us into hyperinflation when the debt is 20x gdp and everyone is switching to the petro-yuan.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
So the state department is wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time, nor will it be the last.
I have a hard time buying that our Atlanticist side of things is getting anything of value out of this war. The only thing we can really do at this point is act tough and hope the Ukrainians can hold out long enough to make the Russians stop where they are. I don’t see (at least without NATO boots on the ground) Ukraine actually retaking either Donbas or Crimea. So the best case is a stalemate that requires us to spend vast amounts of our own treasure to maintain. And again, this is a fight for basically a rural farming country with a good sized corruption problem. They’re in it now because they can’t afford to lose face and show the world how weak we actually are. But at the same time, we cannot infinitely send billions a month in aid. It just doesn’t work because eventually we run out of money (or print ourselves into hyperinflation) and public patience probably isn’t going to last that long (I think we can probably only keep going for another year or two).
Worse, doing so now reduces those capabilities to use them later. Ukraine isn’t a prize on the global stage. Taiwan is. But after billions in aid to Ukraine, and our depleted weapons stocks and a public not interested in yet another military adventure to a place they don’t care about, they aren’t going to be able to do the same thing again. Which means that China gets a very valuable piece of industrial infrastructure, the entire computer chip industry, and all of the leverage that comes with it. We’re basically, without thinking it through deciding to fight tooth and nail for Nebraska and ceding New York. Any sober analysis would consider that colossally stupid.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think it’s on the right track. I see the current voting system as a travesty because it no longer requires that you have any stake in the continued success of society. The old version was owning property, and it worked pretty well for the simple reason that if you owned property in a community, you were personally invested in the continued growth and prosperity of that community. Children and businesses likewise give you the same incentive to choose policies that build up the community rather than destroy it.
My solution would be simpler. If your income from government sources is greater than your payment to the government in taxes, you don’t vote. People in that situation have more incentive to vote themselves large payouts for themselves and to lower work requirements such that they don’t have to contribute.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
As a practical matter not doing so makes the system unstable. Imagine a town with 5 businesses each owned by a different owner. Each one employs 20 people. So 105 adults voting. And how would they vote? Assuming everyone votes for their own selfish interests, you’d end up voting to tax the businesses into nonexistence and raising wages on top until the businesses close and the town dies.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
It might be possible to give a married woman who stays home a vote if you did so by household: married property or business owners get 3 votes, married taxpayers without property get 2, unmarried property/business owners get 2, unmarried renters who own no business get one, welfare recipients get 0.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
Even though I think the disease was real and needed at least some level of intervention, I fear that we’ve learned all the wrong lessons and are creating the basis for severe oppression in the name of safety, especially things that should never have been seriously considered. And the reason is that I think most white-collar people are so safetyist that it skewed the entire thing to maximal government intervention and control without any thought to the wider implications.
The inflation and supply chain issues should have been obvious to anyone giving thought to how our supply chain actually works. We don’t keep warehouses full of goods “in the back” as the Karen would say. Everything is manufactured and shipped in a very short timeframe. Our system is set up to deliver just in time. Which, obviously means that you can’t just “shut down” manufacturing or cut shifts back or whatever else without breaking the thing. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t have food processing plants shut down and still have food on the shelves or turn on a dime from restaurant ready food to grocery food. It doesn’t work.
And the level of authoritarianism that we enabled without thinking about it is insane. In Australia, you needed permission to go more than a couple of miles from home. You needed and easily revocable pass in some parts of Europe and China. Even in America, health departments were empowered to simply order things closed without so much as a hearing. And without any regulation requiring that they make businesses forced to curtail operations by the government to be able to sue or demand payment for their loses. Also the “emergency” had no legally enforceable end date or even a requirement for re-authorization. The emergency will last *until the people empowered to run your life decide that it’s over and they’ll simply hand it back.” Which, as you point out, only ended in May 2023, after being declared in March of 2020. Three years and two months of fiat control unanswerable to anyone is not something I find compatible with the idea of human rights. In fact, had you told people of the “before times”, even if you’re talking about the 2000s, they’d have assumed a coup had taken place in these countries. You need a pass to enter a business? Permission to open? Permission to leave your home?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I have a few rattling in my brain
1). Silencing adversaries and enemies by hagiography. It’s kind of a weird one, but it seems like a lot of the actual ideas of people get totally lost by the process of turning them into either a Saint or a Demon.
2). On the process of rising and falling civilizations and what changes happen to create the problems that ultimately destroy them
3). On therapeutic culture, self-esteem and mental stability.
4). On memorization as an aide to critical thinking.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I don’t think most of it was that new. We’ve had a full century of practice at manufactured consent and manufactured responses. George Orwell was talking about it in 1984, and Aldous Huxley talked about it in Brave New World. The COVID response mostly revealed that fact to the public, or at least those able to grasp it without falling for various conspiracy theories. Mass media has always been like this and is still like this, the idea of news as the first draft of history has always been a bit of propaganda as they’re not really giving history in an honest way but the first draft of narrative. They’re writing the stuff as they want it remembered, as the cathedral wants future generations to think about it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
They also never put any safeguards against abuse in place. Not just on health departments but no level of government put in any explicit limits on what could be done, or requiring legislative approval, or even gave an explicit deadline of under what conditions the government would declare it over. It was a blank check, heck a credit card with no limits that only expired when those who had been given the card declared they no longer needed it.
And to me, I see some elements of what red-pillers call a shit-test; one we clearly failed as a society. Most people just meekly accepted whatever the government decided whether or not it made sense. In fact, the people were more upset at the pushback than anything else. And while I don’t think the government did all of this with future applications in mind, I think the government has basically learned that it can actually get away with quite a lot if it provided that the people are frightened enough.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
Just a counterpoint to “consciousness is everything” being rare; this ideology is a major part of most esoteric movements. New Age, Gnostics, some forms of Wicca and noe-paganism all suggest that consciousness is the ultimate reality. On the more philosophical side, Pantheists would believe much the same thing.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think it depends how you’re interested. The nerdy types tend to (and this seems to generalize across most domains, actually) be the deep divers. A political nerd can talk endlessly about policies, the contents of various bills or laws or Supreme Court decisions. They can Also usually handicap a political race using polling data.
Most people, regardless of political opinions, cannot actually do that. The normies might have various opinions on abortion, but they don’t understand the laws, or that the supreme court’s decision didn’t actually ban anything. They remanded it to the states and the legislature. I heard the wrong takes on that one from people who want abortions legal and from abortion abolitionists.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I’d be curious about the second one, as I’ve been kinda deep diving the history of the whole thing and I’ve sort of come around to the idea that Jesus actually founded the Ebionite movement and that Paul co-opted it and later the Romans turned it into a politically useful mystery religion.
Which kinda goes back to my thoughts about effort posting— the most effective way to shut up Yesua the Jew was to turn him into the second person of the trinity.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I think honestly it stems from a much larger error in meta ethics in the sense that it seems that the west has come to the conclusion that people cannot choose their behavior at all, and thus if they do a bad thing, or fail to do a good thing, there must be a systemic explanation because of course he didn’t choose to live that way and didn’t choose to do that thing. And once you’ve moved the locus of control away from the individual, it becomes the fault of society and we must have programs to deal with this sort of thing, and if we have them, they need more money.
The incentive is obvious from an elite government/nonprofit elite POV — the programs created to solve the “systemic problems” are basically elite jobs programs. People like them love programs because people like them work for those new programs and spend that money. They benefit directly.
But I think the bigger issues this approach creates are learned helplessness (self-cultivation is a skill, self-control is a skill, and so is discipline), and an increasing reluctance to say something about bad behavior in ourselves and others. And in a lot of places (go talk to teachers, for example) the rules don’t exist. Teachers complain about this all the time. Kid doesn’t do anything in class but draw dickbutt and act out? He’s getting a C, because we don’t flunk kids anymore. If a kid disrupts class, even if they do so in a threatening way? He goes to the office and nothing happens. Cops tell similar stories — you can arrest them all day and watch them walk out, charges dropped, a day later. What this creates is a lack of accountability and structure. People pretty much know they face few consequences of their actions. So given that most of us won’t so much as say something, and the authorities aren’t allowed to do anything, anyone so inclined will do whatever he wants to.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
They both have pitfalls, and they both have benefits. The trouble we have right now is excess liberty in the form of an anarchy-tyranny in which people will be punished for defending themselves or others but the public isn’t protected from actual harm. We have a system in New York where you are punished quite often for self defense, where criminals are emboldened to rob people and businesses, and being groped on the subway is common enough that people barely notice it.
But without law and order, without public safety and protection of private property, the credibility of the entire system is diminished. Nobody who sees what people get away with on subways thinks that the cops will protect them. After your first mugging, you don’t expect justice. And as the system keeps losing credibility because it cannot help or protect the public you eventually come to a sort of law of the jungle— where you defy the system and defend yourself and your property yourself outside the system.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
I tend to agree, but I wonder if there’s also a sense in which blaming big systems is a dodge against having to do something concrete. If the problem is dangerously mentally ill on the subway, detaining them seems mean. Blame something huge means you don’t have to do the mean thing.
Yeah, I see this being abused by people claiming that their child abuse cases are about the kid being trans.
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