BANNED USER: repeated antagonism and bad behavior
Nantafiria
No bio...
User ID: 246
Banned by: @Amadan
Nantafiria
7mo ago
This is a wonderful post. Thank you for making it; it's the sorts of beauty that makes me glad to be at home in this place, no matter the other material that comes and goes.
I have no incredibly deep other thoughts. The baseball card anecdote amused me, a little; a Dutch YA book includes a similar quip. An old, old man talks about the park ranger's folly: by fencing off pretty areas, telling kids not to climb trees, and being a general menace, he kills the sorts of enjoyment that drives kids into wanting to be park rangers. It's funny how this sorts of attitude can be seen across so many years and places, genuinely.
Nantafiria
5mo ago
What would the alternative look like to you?
Steppe-bound nomadic peoples are poor. They live off flocks of sheep and ride around on literal ponies (yeah) and make war with arrowheads chiseled from rock and bone. They have nothing you can take from them, least of all land that is a blasted icy hellscape half of the time, and an arid plain doing little good by you the rest of it. You cannot destroy their populace, which will migrate away if you invade. You cannot even hold and garrison their land, since this is logistically impossible.
Most of the time, you make do. Once every few centuries, it goes wrong. But I do ask: what would it take to falsify, so to speak, the theory you're vaguely alluding to here?
Nantafiria
7mo ago
Your feelings are an extremely poor substitute for argument and thought. Lots of things we don't consider theft cost consumers money; blessedly, consumers' purses aren't the be-all and end-all of the world, and tend to be weighed against other pressing matters.
Nantafiria
7mo ago
There is always a bottleneck. This isn't the early 1800s; even unskilled labour isn't that unskilled, and a mass of people quitting means a shock in training, logistics, production, and many other things. This isn't 'stealing' from anyone, and people both are and should be free to do so.
Nantafiria
5mo ago
The Netherlands
After voting in our national elections yesterday, the count is out. Official results aren't due 'till tomorrow, but these results aren't vague enough for the details to matter too much: the big winners on the block are the 'traditional' anti-immigration bulwark of the PVV, the CDA splinter small-c conservative NSC, and the merged for this year's social democrat/green merger GL-PvdA. The previous ruling coalition consisted of the VVD, CDA, D66, and CU, which together have lost a whopping 37 seats (there are 150 in total); it is extremely clear that the Dutch people were mighty displeased with these lot and accordingly voted for others instead.
These results aren't terribly surprising, and largely echo what the polls had been showing in the days leading up to the election. The Dutch left has been toothless and marginalised for a fairly long while now; they have no good response to the issues of the day and seem to not really be trying. Our centre-right VVD prime minister of the past (checks calendar) thirteen years ran out of excuses also, and so people flocked to alternatives; the PVV because they are credibly opposed to Islam, and NSC because they are headed by someone who made a name for himself by being someone with an actual shred of dignity and integrity, enough that his brand baby new party is now four times the size of the CDA he was from. In particular, D66 has lost many people who felt betrayed by their comfort with more rightist parties they went to govern with, and CDA has bled many people disillusioned with their own brand of infighting and petty disputes. The VVD's relatively smaller loss is likely because they largely succeeded on a promise of their own: don't rock the boat for comfortable people.
What this means for upcoming coalition negotiations isn't quite clear, but I find a PVV/VVD/NSC combination to be the most likely. Both the NSC and VVD have in the past expressed doubts about the PVV, but these were never very firm, the VVD has already kinda-sorta ruled alongside the PVV, and their seats make them somewhat too large to be ignored. A more centrist GL-PvdA/VVD/NSC combination that some floated has no majority without a fourth partner, and the PVV is frankly a little too large for them to ignore. A bit of flirting and cautious approaching on the sides of the VVD and NSC has been underway for some weeks. As for the PVV itself, Wilders has been polite enough to just tell us what he thinks for himself.
Nantafiria
10mo ago
The BBC, being good progressives, don't think abortion is in fact murdering babies (or anyone). You can disagree with this view if you like, and that's fine, but you should know better than to wildly misrepresent their position in a place such as this.
Nantafiria
10mo ago
I don't know how familiar you are with SlateStarCodex, but this seems like a case of toxoplasma. This case, if true, is obviously tragic. It's so obviously tragic that it can only elicit grief and empathy, neither of which geberate clicks the way outrage does, and so it doesn't generate much publicity.
Nantafiria
10mo ago
Reactionaries like this man, by his own words, are people who lost their faith in God and worshiped the devil. The analogy is quite the apt one: they did NOT stop believing in the creed of their peers and shrugged along, they worked and work along to actively support the opposite of whatever is the norm among their own people.
This isn't unique to uniquely online rightists, of course. The beating heart of radical SocJus advocates is the body of people who couldn't be happier to get the hell away from red tribe America; they do everything the opposite way they were raised because they hate the communities they were born into. These people, too, prove the old adage that reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, insofar a way of life that works for so many people is 'stupid'.
The difference, of course, is that people who want to get the hell out of the red tribe can and do go blue. It suits them fine, they adapt well, it isn't really an issue, it's a worn-out trope at this point. People like the blogger in the OP have nowhere to go: very few of them indeed live relatively normal red tribers' lives, instead preferring to be nostalgic over a past that never was or continuing to live in a culture they actively despise.
tl;dr: learn to weld lmao
Nantafiria
7mo ago
Yes. If you talk about being in favor of abortion, say, and you are fired for explicitly that reason, you can absolutely sue.
I doubt most companies will be that dumb in practice, which also seems to be Southwest's main issie here: they lack the finesse to lie and had ideologues break the law without any requisite fig leaves.
Nantafiria
10mo ago
Gays destroyed the what now rule?
You don't have to look all that far back to remember days where the dynamic you see was, in fact, entirely upside down. DADT was implemented in the 1990's, and was replaced by gays being allowed to serve openly a cool two decades later. When my parents left high school and the male graduates applied at the draft office, the military still undertook serious effort to root out anyone gay - and I live in a nation that is friendlier to gay people than most of Europe is.
Talk about the vacation plans you and your (fellow gay) SO have been making in 1993? You're fired, do not pass go, do not collect $200. You don't get to marry that person, because of course people of the same sex don't get to do that. Local drunks will ambush you if you go for a drink and the police will cackle about this. If you bring any of this up, well, it's really not politics, is it? It's just being a decent person.
Yes, there's excesses in this: call it part of man's desire to have his culture be superior over others. So it goes. But accusing the gays of this uniquely? Please. Many of them well remember how they used to live, they can see places in their own nations where people still do, and they act accordingly. There's nothing odd or particularly wicked about these people, and we don't have to pretend otherwise.
Nantafiria
7mo ago
It's from the Non-Libertarian FAQ, still a good read to this very day.
Nantafiria
10mo ago
Those Jews are incredibly impressive people. Even when all the people in charge, the relevant decisionmakers, the people making their plans, drafting them, and ordering to have them carried out are gentile, it's all the Jewish influence that made it happen. So much so that the world's mightiest nation ended up more united than it had been in decades before or since, with nobody but rando internet posters any the wiser.
Is it possible to learn this power? Can I get in on this? The effort required is so superhumanly and extremely impressive that I'd love to find these guys and go along with them; they are clearly more competent and fit to rule than any group I've ever heard of, at all.
Nantafiria
7mo ago
Lots of things that aren't 'abiding by market forces' aren't theft. Until the day we live in AnCapTopia and everything is left to the free market, that's the world we live in, and things seem to work out pretty well. The archetypical case of theft is robbery: taking something that isn't yours. A thousand employees banding together and demanding higher wages or they'll quit isn't that.*
*Yes, American law makes a mess of that principle. Too bad.
Nantafiria
7mo ago
Yep. Asian tourists in Western nations tend to do that or stay in hotels run by people of their own nationality, because they do not want to try foreign food. There are plenty of jokes about low-class Westerners sticking out like sore thumbs and refusing to adapt to where they are, but a random Brit or German can be convinced to eat half-baked fusion food that is just familiar enough to be 'exotic' far better than most Asian people abroad can be.
Nantafiria
11mo ago
These are the same police officers that were too terrified of shooting an untrained minor at Uvalde. I frankly don't see them having the stomach to face down people who are both more dangerous and better armed.
Nantafiria
5mo ago
Chariots were on their way out by then, but not quite yet extinct in the broader Mediterranean; indeed, the Persians deploy a couple hundred at Gaugamela, many centuries after the Iliad was dreamt up.
Nantafiria
7mo ago
This sorts of thing is some reversed 'republicans pounce' in action and it is every bit as pathetic. Of course this is a story. You don't need 'senseless purity spirals' to consider cheating on your wife and abusing your authority as a literal hero bad things.
Nantafiria
7mo ago
There are lots of things violating the market principles of spherical cow land that nobody would call stealing. It isn't helpful, and it makes stealing look better more than it makes unions look bad.
Nantafiria
7mo ago
Indeed. The labor theory of value is wrong. It is wrong in economics, it is wrong in commenting, and the ability to crank out drivel to soak up pages is not a virtue.
Nantafiria
10mo ago
It was pretty much a given, because it's what happened in every single other western nation.
Nantafiria
5mo ago
My general impression is that Holland and the anglosphere are much less separated than, say, the anglosphere and France
Ehhhhhhhhhh...
anti-immigrant groups in Europe generally root for each other's teams
Yes, absolutely
Nantafiria
5mo ago
If only people on TheMotte spoke clearly, and said what they meant, this place might be better. We even might get to talk to one another without all the smug hinting in the world.
Nantafiria
5mo ago
That is the narrative paranoid rightists suggest, because 'they betrayed us' has been their playbook since the Dolchstoßlegende. Where Europeans elect rightists more interested in culture than money, they can in fact work against immigration, they do in fact work against immigration, and people who say it never works out aren't looking very closely. Sometimes the left beats them to the punch to take the wind out of their sails. And sometimes, in 4D chess moves that are entirely too funny to me, even the most pro-immigrant nations will take action against immigrants while insisting it's about antisemitism bro trust me bro we surely don't care about the people sucking up benefits. The French are sick of it and in no way get 'the same result'. Eastern European nations where people move away from more than to do it.
There's plenty of anti-immigration policy in Europe to be found, if you care to look. Did you actually care to?
Nantafiria
11mo ago
You're not intellectually mature enough to be permitted on the internet without supervision
Where the fuck do you think you are?
This is an interesting post, and a good one, but the most interesting explanation is seldom the right one. The world is often boring, and I'm betting that it is boring in this case as well: lots of men just aren't able to keep it in their pants at a whiff of power, fame, or money. So it goes.
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