QuinoaHawkDude
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User ID: 1789
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
So, Curtis Yarvin just dropped a long essay about why he doesn't like the West's support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/ukraine-the-tomb-of-liberal-nationalism
Or, at least, that's what I think his point is. As usual with his writings, it can be hard to tell.
FWIW, reading Unqualified Reservations was probably the single most important event in my journey to this weird part of the internet that we call the Ratsphere, even though Yarvin probably doesn't consider himself a rationalist (and I neither do I, really).
However, on this particular point (Ukraine), I find myself quite frustrated. All those words, and he never once (as far as I can tell - I admit that I only had time to skim the article) addressed what I would think would be the most obvious point if you're trying to convince a bog-standard Westerner why they shouldn't support Ukraine: Ukraine was invaded by Russia. Not a "regime change" type invasion, a la USA vs. Iraq '03, not a "peacekeeping" invasion. A "Russia wants some of the land currently controlled by Ukraine to be controlled by Russia instead" invasion. A good, old-fashioned war of conquest for resources. The kind of war that, since 1945, the industrialized West (or "first world") has tried very hard to make sure nobody is allowed to wage, especially not in Europe. And therefore, the West's support for Ukraine is entirely justified by the desire to make sure nobody is allowed to get away with just seizing territory because they want it.
Like I said, maybe he does try to convince the reader why this policy is wrong, but in true Moldbuggian fashion, he uses 10,000 words to say what would be better said with 100.
Or maybe he assumes that anybody paying attention knows why the standard narrative is wrong. Maybe I'm wrong about how and why Russia invaded Ukraine.
As a side note, I do think it's interesting that the both the most radically right-wing Substack author I follow (Yarvin) and the most radically left-wing Substack author I follow (Freddie DeBoer) both think the West's support for Ukraine is bad. Is this just horseshoe theory? They both hate the United States for different reasons and anything it does is wrong by default?
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
To perhaps offer a steelman, there are certain cultural practices and norms tied to gender that are essentially arbitrary in the modern environment. There's no inherent reason that women should be forced to shave their legs/armpits to be considered attractive, for instance, or that men shouldn't do the same. There's no biological imperative that men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses, or makeup, or be considered submissive or cute.
Absolutely.
That still doesn't imply that I should be forced to affirm that somebody with a penis is a woman just because they don't like traditionally masculine behaviors or prefer traditionally feminine behaviors.
This feels like beating a dead horse at this point, but it really all boils down to what information people expect the words "man/male/he/him/his" and "woman/female/she/her/hers" to convey. I want "woman" to mean "a biologically female human being with two X chromosomes and a vajayjay", and "man" to mean "a biologically male human being with XY chromosomes and a dong". Hermaphrodites and people with oddball chromosome configurations are so rare that our language doesn't need to account for them, and as far as I can tell they're not the ones at the forefront of the campaign to redefine those word clusters.
I have no problem if a man wants to wear clothing that is traditionally feminine and prefer knitting to video games as a hobby, or vice versa. Men who have more feminine interests and expressions and women with more masculine interests and expressions have always existed. Like, I see what you're doing there, girl with short hair and baggy clothes. You're de-emphasizing your femininity for whatever reason. I can still tell you're a girl. You're not fooling anybody. You also don't need to put "enby/they/them" in your Twitter bio or change your name to a gender-neutral or male one for me to figure out what your deal is. You can dress and groom yourself however you like, and nobody should harass you for it, and they should treat you the same as they treat anybody else in public-sphere interactions (teacher-student, employer-employee, customer-server, etc.). None of that means that you're not female.
Now, I feel like I have to acknowledge that there are definitely cultures, both past and present, that are much less tolerant of "deviant" behavior along these lines. Parents yelling at their boys for playing with dolls instead of army men, and vice versa. I feel like that is just a specific case of intolerance for misfits, which I believe is wrong and should be prevented. But the solution to "men who like to knit get made fun of" isn't "okay, then change your name to a female name and start insisting that the world treat you like an actual woman".
Here's a Patton Oswalt stand-up bit from 2011 (NSFW!) where he talks about being asked to audition for the role of "Gay best friend" in a romcom and him saying that he would only do it if he was allowed to play the character as really, really dumb, because he was tired of seeing all gay characters in media being portrayed as impossibly awesome and flawless.
The flip side of this is Weak Men are Superweapons. I've definitely started noticing recently that, at least in the media I consume, fundamentalist Christians (or deeply religious people in general) are never depicted as anything other than evil. Examples: the "Crackstone" character in Wednesday, the antagonists in Devil in Ohio (well, those were actually Satanists, but they sure looked like a standin for Puritans or Amish people). Can anybody think of an example of an important (main character or recurring supporting character) character in recent mainstream media that is depicted as a good person who does good things, but who is also explicitly a fundamentalist Christian?
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
It's interesting that you've framed this as a comparison between "progressives" (a political belief system) and "Republicans" (a political party and its supporters). In that case, you could argue that "Republicans" are just the political coalition of different interest groups that are opposed to progressivism for one reason or another. But if you'd said "Democrats" instead of "progressives" you could just as easily say "Democrats are the political coalition of different interest groups that are opposed to conservatism". Lots of people vote Republican because they really don't like some key progressive policy and have nowhere else to go in the USA's two-party system, and vice versa, as opposed to enthusiastically supporting the whole party platform.
Occasionally somebody will say something like "In politics, at some point you have to go beyond just opposing things you don't agree with. You have to actually be for something." This is harder for conservatives from a political standpoint because in many cases, the solutions they favor for problems (when they agree with progressives on what things are problems) are more personal, private and local, and so there's no alternative government solution to propose.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
This seems completely opposed to Yarvin's pleas for "formalism" where he says we should stop trying to figure out which people ought to be in charge of what land ("It is very hard to come up with a rule that explains why the Palestinians should get Haifa back, and doesn’t explain why the Welsh should get London back"), simply accept current borders as correct and stop fighting over them: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted/
I mean, he did write that back in 2007, so maybe he's changed his mind in the subsequent 15+ years.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Wild animals in the jungle is a misleading analogy. A better analogy would be "I'm not persuaded of the automatic moral duty of bystanders to intervene when one human being robs another" (which in these days of "property crime isn't all that big of a deal, especially when it happens to rich white people" leftist thinking is perhaps not as extraordinary a position as I might prefer). Just as human beings who want their property to remain in their possession have a vested interest in making sure other humans' property is protected from theft, countries who want their sovereignty over their territory to remain intact have a vested interest in defeating any defector nations who decide that they should just take that other country's land because they can.
And yeah, sure, these same Western nations have their own history of military conquest for profit. That doesn't make them hypocrites for standing up to Russia in 2022, any more than if my grandfather happened to have been a professional thief, it would be hypocritical for me to become a police officer.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
"Whole-language" might be a bad technique for trying to teach illiterate kids to read in a classroom setting, but I think the insight that it's better for readers to parse written language as whole words as opposed to a stream of phonemes is correct. I remember sitting in elementary school reading classes, where kids would be randomly picked to read some passage out of a book, and it was painfully obvious which of my fellow students could only read by sounding out syllables based on the spelling of words; they had absolutely no idea what the semantic content of what they just read actually was.
I was privileged to have parents who made teaching me how to read a priority, by reading to me/with me as a toddler, and before I ever set foot in a public school classroom I was already reading books by myself. At this point it feels like they gave me a superpower. Maybe not every kid is capable of learning to read this way. I have no memory of how much or little my parents may have been teaching me about how the spelling of written words mapped to the phonemes that make up spoken words.
Anyway, I think learning to read is far too foundational a skill for any parent who cares about their child's success in life to leave up to schools, no matter how elite. I'm kind of baffled by some of the other comments in this thread about parents who spend the money to send their kids to private schools having the clout to demand that the schools adequately teach their kids to read; I would really assume that anybody who has that kind of money would understand that it's their job to teach their kid basic reading skills, just as it's their job to teach their kid how to speak, and other things like hygiene and how to dress themselves. Like, you wouldn't send your kid off to their first day at kindergarten without being potty trained; why are you sending them there without being able to read at least, like, Thomas the Tank Engine, if not Charlotte's Web? Oh, and if the parents really are too busy with their elite careers to read to their kids at night, hire an au pair/nanny/governess/tutor/whatever.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
The older I get, the more I realize I just don't have the mental or emotional energy to try and figure out who the good guys actually are in any of these things. So, my position has markedly shifted from "pro-Israel because based on everything I've seen and read about the conflict, Israel are the good guys" to "pro-Israel because Israel looks like civilization and Palestine looks like hell." I find it far easier to identify with Israel and Israelis; they look and act more like me than the other side. Simple as that. Pure tribalism.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
The other thing is that news organizations typically are unable or unwilling to do any background research on stories; they depend on their network of "experts" willing to comment on stories. Particularly if you want the news to break and quickly become front-page material. Everybody's got a "school shooting expert" or "police violence expert" in their Rolodex; they probably don't have a "vinyl chloride train derailment" expert lined up and ready to go at a moment's notice.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
It feels like a while since the term "reality-based community" was in vogue, but I remember wondering how support for trans rights could possibly fit well with that back when I first saw progressives using it, without realizing it was just a shorthand for "we believe in The Cathedral, not The Church".
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I wouldn't overlook the possibility that the people in charge of promotions (who are likely to be married men themselves) might give preferable treatment to a married man, thinking to themselves, "this person has a family to support and needs the extra money more than a single man (or woman)". They might also think that a married man is more likely to prefer stability to opportunity and is therefore less likely to quit and move across the country to take another job.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
If we're going to start counting "media conspires to suppress stories harmful to their favored candidates during an election cycle" as "stolen elections" then every major election since the invention of democracy has probably been stolen.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I remember listening to an econ podcast (I want to say either Freakonomics or Planet Money) that was exploring some things about how restaurant menus and pricing work, probably centered around how they work in the US. The big question was "what's up with free bread or chips and salsa? Why are restaurants giving away free product that just fills you up and keeps you from spending more money?" The answer was "so you don't order dessert". What restaurants (particularly large American restaurant chains) want is to turn tables over as fast as possible. They really don't want you spending two hours at a table ordering an appetizer and an entree and a dessert (which is kind of a stark contrast with my personal experience of dining in the UK, where restaurant table reservations are for fixed time spans, usually 90 minutes, and they seem to get offended if each person doesn't order three courses). Most restaurants really can't make desserts profitable, they can't sell them for what it costs to make them and keep them around, plus you're occupying the table that could instead by used by people who are going to order a main course that they can charge 3-4 times as much for but ultimately probably costs the same to make and serve. However, most sit-down restaurants feel like they have to have desserts on the menu because it's just expected of them. They just don't feel any real incentive to make them spectacular.
A few other things that could be at play, just off the top of my head:
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Sugar and fat could just be so great at being superstimuli that you don't really need to make them all that great to satisfy most people.
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Regarding the lack of variety, I can at least personally attest that on the rare occasions that I do decide to order dessert at a restaurant, I want to make sure I'm going to actually like it, so I'm less likely to go for something I don't recognize.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
The parallels between a woman on a dating site and a manager looking to hire a new employee are strong. Both are in a position of negotiating strength; both are going to have vastly more "applicants" than they have positions to fill. However, that doesn't necessarily make their job an easy one, because finding the one applicant that will actually work out for them long-term is quite difficult. I have no experience being a woman, but I do have experience being a hiring manager, and I can tell you a few things:
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You're looking for reasons to quickly eliminate candidates from consideration (so you don't waste time interviewing/dating them). Auto-rejecting somebody because they have misspelled words on their resume (or wearing Crocs in their profile pic) might seem cruel, but anybody who is paying attention knows what the rules are, and you don't want to hire/date people who aren't paying attention.
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Unless you're the sole owner of a private company, you will have people to answer to if you end up making a bad hiring decision, and so it's important that your choice be defensible according to your applicable social consensus. "I'm sorry so and so didn't work out, but they went to Harvard and their resume had all the right keywords" =~ "I can't possibly be blamed for Chad turning out to be an asshole, he went to Harvard and said he was a feminist and wanted a long-term relationship and kids". You're not really looking to take chances on people who have what most people consider red flags even if you personally don't think they're a big deal.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
99%+ of AR-15 owners don't commit mass shootings; it doesn't stop the half of the country that doesn't understand gun culture from finding all AR-15 owners at best suspicious and at worst actively threatening.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
The obvious difference between colonialism and immigration (as these two concepts are generally understood by average modern Westerners) is that colonists tend to primarily be interested in exploiting and expropriating a nation's resources (natural and human) for the benefit of the colonist's home country (even if they do temporarily move to the colony in question to run a business, they aren't intending to make it their home, nor do they expect their children to be natives of the colony). Immigrants, even if they do end up changing the culture of the nation they move to, are invested in the success of their new home country, and the value they create stays in that country, modulo a few small cash transfers back to their relatives in their native country.
I expect, however, if you were to bring up any counterfactuals to this way of thinking to your bog-standard progressive, they would fall back on "Who, whom?" (or, as you put it, intersectionality). The mass migration of British people to its colonies (e.g. Australia and the USA before 1776), replacing the native culture with their own? Bad, because it was bad for non-whites. Mass migration of natives of former and current British colonies (e.g. India and Jamaica) to the UK, changing the culture of the UK? Good, because it's good for non-whites. (Also, curry and kebabs are better than steak-and-kidney pie.)
Even without considering the racial aspect of things, a simple rule might be "If a person moves from country A to country B and is immediately wealthier and more powerful than natives of country B, that's colonialism and that's bad. If a person moves from country B to country A and is immediately a member of the poor working classes, that's immigration and that's good."
As a sidebar, one of the things that fans of immigration might need to come to grips with is that the modern world of cheap air travel, global telecommunications and electronic banking makes it much, much easier for immigrants to avoid assimilating into their new country and put down roots there. They can still talk to their friends and family back home every day, travel back home once a year at least, and send them whatever is left of their income after covering their living expenses, invalidating my claim in the first paragraph about immigrants being invested in and benefiting their new country of residence. This is radically different from the immigration of the 1800s that American history textbooks look back upon so favorably.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I'm not sure why you think Gates and Bezos get a pass. I've seen plenty of hate for both. I've seen very serious articles written about how the Gates' charitable foundations are actually evil because no single person should be in charge of how much money is donated to good causes, it should be THE PEOPLE in charge.
They just don't stick their heads out of their foxholes quite as often as good ol' Musky does. If there only one thing to admire about Musk, it's that he genuinely seems to not give a shit what the chattering classes think about him.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
As somebody with basically libertarian views (and therefore is very much out of tune with the current progressive zeitgeist) but who has also been involved in music and theater since early childhood, I am very much interested in this question, and have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. After reading the other comments in this thread, many of which I think are grasping at different parts of the elephant, there's one potential explanation that I haven't seen and that I would like to suggest:
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Parents know that some activities/careers are right-coded and some are left-coded.
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Children are likely to absorb some or all of their political opinions from their parents.
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Parents are likely to encourage their children to participate in the activities and/or career paths that are more aligned with their politics. For example, conservative parents are more likely to encourage their kids to participate in sports or cheering, and progressive parents are more likely to encourage their kids to participate in things like music, theater and art.
Or it could just be as simple as people naturally sorting themselves into groups of other people who are like them. If all the people you know from your church are on the football team, you're more likely to play football. If you're gay and the other two openly gay kids in your school do theater, you're more likely to do theater. (There was a discussion on here recently about the search for the first openly gay Premier League soccer player and the inability to find anybody like that, and while the idea of a genetic explanation is appealing to me, especially given the high percentage of female professional soccer players who are lesbians, I can't discount the argument put forward by others that if you're gay and everybody in the locker room of your youth soccer team is constantly spewing homophobic slurs, you're probably going to find something else to do for a living.)
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Money (as in "a countable medium of economic exchange") is great and pretty foundational to human civilization, but it does tend to distort people's thinking once the scale of the numbers, and thus the corresponding impact on the real world allocation and distribution of scarce resources, gets several orders of magnitude beyond what they're used to thinking about in their daily lives.
Like, it's clear that if a man is spending $1000 a month on booze and gambling while his kids are starving, he is being evil. He could very easily spend $1000/mo on food for his kids instead of on his own enjoyment. $1000 of food per month is a tiny fraction of your local food economy.
It's less clear to me that Bezos could end world hunger overnight by putting his billions of dollars towards that goal instead of building rockets. What real-world resources are the two different projects competing over? Food production is mostly about arable land and physical labor; rockets use very little of the former and relatively modest amounts of the latter. The main resource that space project money goes towards is smart and skilled people's time and creativity. Whether you think world hunger could be solved by Bezos would seem to hinge on whether or not you think that if all those smart rocket scientists were put to work figuring out how to grow more food (or, realistically, how to distribute it better - I've never heard anybody gainsay the conventional wisdom that the world grows enough food to feed everybody, it just doesn't get it into everybody's hands efficiently enough before it spoils) it would make a sustainable impact.
There's also a separate issue of the difference between a one-time investment in developing a technology that you expect to eventually turn a profit (as far as I know, SpaceX, Blue Origin and all the other private space companies definitely expect to get their money back down the line once their rockets are developed) versus sustaining a charitable non-profit (if "solving world hunger" simply means "give money to everybody who can't afford to feed themselves, from now until eternity if necessary") which has no financial upside (except perhaps in a macro sense, i.e. people who aren't starving will be more productive and the economy as a whole benefits, but that's the government's job, not Bezos's). Leftists would still claim it's the right thing to do with that money, but approximately none of them have built billion-dollar businesses by spending their money on things that will eventually make more money, etc., so they really have no clue what it takes to get those resources in the first place.
And let's not forget just how effective poor people are at ruining the best-laid plans to help them.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
But now I'm puzzled, because A) I feel like I have a moral obligation not to racially discriminate in friendship, but B) I don't feel like I have an obligation not to choose not to befriend a tennis player just because I don't have the necessary desires, even though tennis players don't deserve friendship any less than black people.
This seems like "Deontology Gone Wrong 101". The idea "I have a moral obligation not to racially discriminate in friendship" sounds like a great idea...hard to argue against, in the current Western zeitgeist. But most people, hearing that phrase, are thinking "right, it would be totally wrong and stupid to reject friendship from somebody who is otherwise completely suitable to be my friend (i.e. lives close, shares a lot of the same interests, knows a lot of the same people, similar age/education/SES) solely because they are of a different race". They're not thinking "I have a moral obligation to make sure that my group of friends has similar racial demographics to the population of the country I live in" or "I have a moral obligation to actively prioritize friendship with people of other races". They're certainly not thinking "a person of X race whose friends are all or mostly other people of X race is an evil person".
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
I saw somebody claim that in $CURRENT_YEAR what most people mean by "that's unconstitutional!" isn't "I've read the US Constitution and it's amendments and found this specific text which clearly prohibits it". What they mean is "I feel so strongly that this is wrong that I don't want to have to argue with anybody about it anymore". Saying that something isn't political because it's a human right is pretty much the same.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
As one of Freddie's subscribers and occasional commenters, prior to his "talking about trans people in the comments of one of my posts about an unrelated subject = instant ban" policy, it really was common for at least one comment thread on all of his posts to end up centering on trans issues, no matter how unrelated the post's subject matter. It was annoying.
I believe that this community experimented with a ban on the HBD topic for a while for similar reasons, and I don't think it was because the mods were anti-HBD per se, they were just tired of it being the only goddamn thing we talked about. That's my memory, anyway.
About the least charitable take I have on Freddie's banning commenting on about trans issues is that he may realize just how badly the social justice left has shot itself in the foot in the last five years with the trans issue, and is tired of having people using it as a generic gotcha attack on social justice politics in general.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Side note, but I really would love to run a study where you just showed headshots (all taken in the same light/background) of a bunch of randomly selected people to another bunch of randomly selected people and had the second bunch rate the headshots on a 1-10 scale of attractiveness, then tried to see what latent variables about the people in the headshots (age, BMI, wealth, education) correlated most strongly with the 1-10 ratings.
My hypothesis is that for straight men looking at pictures of women, the 1-10 ratings would correspond really closely to age and BMI. I would be really interested in seeing what the results would be for straight women looking at pictures of men.
QuinoaHawkDude
1yr ago
Yes, it is useful to challenge your basic assumptions about our reality. For example, did you know that Earth has a four corner simultaneous 4-day time cube?
My reason for disliking Carter is that even though he (a Navy-trained nuclear engineer) understood what was going on during the Three Mile Island accident and could have told the nation that there was nothing to worry about, he apparently didn't want to upset anti-nuclear activists in his own party. While that was only a small part of the PR disaster that TMI was, in my mind that makes him partially to blame for why the US abandoned the adoption of nuclear power for electrical generation, which in turns make him partially responsible for global warming (very partially - it's not like Carter is responsible for what China and India have been doing or will continue to do in the next century).
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