MotteInTheEye
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User ID: 578
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
There's no mystery to solve. The leftist instinct in America is always to sympathize with the poorer person whose life is in disarray. It's extremely clear which way this breaks in both cases (everyman subway rider / deranged lunatic and CEO / presumably indebted twenty-something).
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
I don't think this question is in good faith but just in case: it was a simple misdirect joke, making it seem like he was talking about the Pacific garbage patch that progressives are very concerned about and then revealing that he was speaking figuratively about a country. It would be like if a tsunami was in the news and I said, "I'm very concerned about this massive tidal wave about to hit our shores - but enough about the Democrats' immigration policy."
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
Another way of putting is is that for more than a century, the Supreme Court has been the primary instrument of transforming the federal government and its sphere of influence following the progressive program. Conservatives only in our lifetimes wised up enough to set up the pipeline, as you put it, and it has only just borne any fruit in the form of walking back a bare handful of the most extreme points of that program.
We shouldn't be surprised that progressives would turn on it so quickly, because it has always been a question of what means would achieve the necessary end of transforming America and being on the right side of history. The Supreme Court was their darling because it was the most effective tool, not because of any underlying principles about the primacy of the judiciary over other branches of government.
MotteInTheEye
7mo ago
With a little creativity you could discover an unbounded number of actions leading up to the phone call without which it could not have occurred. E.g., the guy who let you in in traffic so you would be there on time, the other guy who slammed on the brakes just in time to prevent a major accident which would have stopped you from arriving at the coffee shop, the gal who set her alarm so that she could open up the coffee shop that morning, the engineer who put the final touches on the cell phone communication standard your phone used to receive the call...
There's obviously no moral obligation on you to identify every single event without which your phone call couldn't have happened. You owe a normal debt of gratitude to someone who minorly inconvienced themselves to help a stranger. Of course a bigger gesture would be a nice act since this particular act of kindness looms large in your mind, but there's no coherent case that you owe anything more than you would if the call hadn't earned you any money.
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
It's still a pretty big jump from "has read some posts by Scott" to "reads the Motte", right?
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
This is a really strange take, since in Genesis the men of Sodom immediately try to rape the angels that are sent to Lot to warn him to get out. Genesis hardly leaves you wandering what could have been so bad about these people that they were condemned.
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
I find the finger-pointing about who called it what kind of attack and how quickly certain details when out in the several hours immediately following a shooting like this profoundly petty and mean. Once people are actually awake and have had a little while to sift through some reports, there is often plenty to criticize, but it's tautologically true that you would always be able to criticize the first few reports for being incorrect about some details and/or too reticent.
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
It's a great point that the conservative judicial pipeline is almost exclusively Catholic and that Roe v Wade had a huge role in motivating intellectual Catholics to rethink their progressive association.
MotteInTheEye
7mo ago
I'm fully on board with the death penalty proposal, but also, I don't understand why prison operators can't maintain a monopoly on violence even in its absence. Is it simply jurisprudence that has made corporal punishment and solitary confinement impossible or would it somehow be unaffordable to apply them as needed? A guy alone in a room with food coming through a slot can't rape or intimidate anyone, and I have a hard time believing that the extra number of toilets required wouldn't pay for itself by cutting down on all the violence that prison guards have to deal with, even leaving aside the benefits to cooperative prisoners.
MotteInTheEye
5mo ago
I can see the case for lost economic productivity, but how could using your own property as a sheep pasture despite opportunity to develop it be in any sense rent-seeking?
MotteInTheEye
5mo ago
Your wealth on paper increases, but if you continue to use it from for sheep pasturing then you are not benefitting from it because you are precisely not seeking any rent that matches the value of the land!
MotteInTheEye
7mo ago
I agree with your assessment that a repeat of Jan 6 is unlikely but I don't think it's because people are cowed, I think it's because the actions taken by the "rioters" didn't spark the admiration of their own side that progressive protests do. Begging someone else to do something about the problem, burning it all down because you don't like the hand you are dealt: conservatives, with their emphasis on personal responsibility and an internal locus of control, just don't resonate with these courses of action the same way progressives do.
For rank and file conservatives, the way Jan 6 was handled by the DoJ is a glaring injustice, but the rioters themselves are not heros. I think they are regarded as, at best, well-intentioned idiots and buffoons, and at worst, feds and their dupes working to supply the establishment with casus belli for extreme action to stamp out their political opponents.
MotteInTheEye
7mo ago
It seems pretty clear that Scott would favor a voluntary eugenics program and/or genetic engineering.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Great post, but I think the pattern you briefly mentioned at the end bears a much deeper examination.
Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals.
This really understates the phenomenon. As a conservative from a blue tribe stronghold, my visits to red tribe strongholds like the deep south are extremely disillusioning. It's hard to overstate what a dramatic difference there is in the obesity levels everywhere you go. And this in turn leads to much higher consumption of public health resources.
It's hard to square these realities with common sense arguments which ring true to me, like the ones you made above. It doesn't seem debatable that self-sufficiency is more a red tribe value than a blue tribe value - so why are blue tribe individuals, as a class, more self-sufficient when it comes to diet and health?
There are a number of explanations you could hypothesize: maybe personal belief in the importance of self-sufficiency is irrelevant in a system that doesn't incentivize it. Maybe if you controlled for poverty / IQ the differences are explained or the sign of the correlation flips. Maybe it's a Simpsons paradox thing where within a given region, right-wing beliefs are correlated with fitness, but the correlation doesn't hold across the whole population. But it feels like it's crying out for some sort of explanation.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
It's really pathetic how little progress the tech industry has apparently made towards measuring and incentivizing actual productivity, that some of the foremost employers still feel like they need to chain people to a desk and hope that they'll get something done that way. This is despite having approximately the most naturally conscientious workforce in the world.
Remote work aside, there is so much on the table for the employer that's able to keep the 10x software engineers and fire everyone else that it's mind-boggling how few companies have even tried to pull it off. I'm not sure if it's ideological commitment to egalitarianism, principal / agent problems where middle management pursues empire building instead of efficiency, or just genuinely that difficult of a problem to solve.
MotteInTheEye
5mo ago
Yep, Facebook is still very fit for its original purpose (keeping tabs on friends and family through pictures and posts). It's just that the filler that they give you for the other 99 times that you check your feed during the day is lower quality than the algorithm-selected stuff from the other platforms.
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
if you don't get murdered, or into a car wreck, or overdose, or kill yourself, or your mom didn't attempt a home birth at age 16, you actually have good survival odds. The best in the world.
Is this after making those adjustments for the other countries as well?
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
Disagree. People who are already celebrities like the names you listed have battle lines already drawn around them to some degree, so let's leave them aside. If it was the CEO of Ford, my gut instinct is that on e.g. Reddit the reaction would be essentially the same. They would have to work a little harder to identify the "violence" that said CEO had inflicted on employees or consumers, but not that hard. It's second nature for "late stage capitalism" thinkers. "I'll extend him the same consideration that he extended to the thousands of drivers who died when Ford covered up evidence of faulty brakes / the millions dying from climate change due to lobbying against emissions standards / the families who went hungry when layoffs happened while he pulled down $50M / year."
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
I'm genuinely confused now, I thought it was common sense that people were favourable towards coethnics and their homelands. Isn't that the whole ingroup thing in a nutshell?
This isn't compatible with even the most cursory reading of I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, the fact that your ingroup may not be ethnically similar nor your outgroup ethnically distinct from you is literally one of the first thing he addresses.
MotteInTheEye
11mo ago
I think it was essentially a three step process for this and all other hobbies:
- The original Internet culture was generally left-libertarian.
- Internet forums ate the hobby: because they were such an efficient way to engage with other hobbyists, they outcompeted every alternative cultural center of the hobby.
- The left-libertarian founders and their successors largely became woke leftist, bringing the forums along with them.
The second and third steps happened in parallel during the aughts and early teens.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Unfortunately it's inevitable even if every single voter fully intended to vote for quality, not agreement, simply because of the fact that you notice flaws in arguments that you disagree with much more easily than in those you agree with.
MotteInTheEye
10mo ago
There might be a cultural dimension but a big part of it is that slowing to a stop and restarting is actually a significant inconvenience to a biker in a way that it's not to a driver since it requires a large expenditure of your personal physical energy.
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
I think Mensa selects for people whose IQ test score itself is their highest "achievement", i.e. the lowest performers at any given tier of IQ. So it's very possible that Mensa members could have on average unusually poor mental health.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
So all you would have to do is say "I regret my abortion" and you get a free payout? There's a rather obvious downside to this policy...
If we are banning for AI posts can we also ban for "irregardless"? The latter is much more offensive to me!
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