RenOS
something is wrong
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
something is wrong
3mo ago
The part many on the left are missing is that puberty itself is a large part of the mechanic by which teens become heteronormal. When I was around 12, I felt disgusted by teens, sexuality in general and was a somewhat odd kid to begin with. At that time there already was lots of talk about nonstandard sexualities and I strongly identified with asexuals. I also thought that I was very far from the average male, among other things refusing any kind of violence (I distinctly remember refusing to even watch shows/movies or play games portraying violence), an intellectual above all kinds of base instincts. Typical arrogant nerd stuff. Especially early puberty then felt like shit, very moody & scared of what happens with me. Then sometime in late puberty all of that went out of the window, suddenly I was a temperamentally fairly stereotypical guy. And even in retrospect, I had been to some degree in denial even when younger. In elementary school I was often beating up other kids for various reasons. I just learned that I was going nowhere with that attitude, so I had to force myself out of it and pretended that it never happened. Which combined with my otherwise bookish personality naturally led to the described intellectual self-image.
Conditionals are obviously hard to prove, but I could easily see my pre-puberty self taking puberty blockers to not become a disgusting, violent, sexual men. Especially with the argument that oh, it's reversible anyway, so just try it out. It would have been a grave mistake, but I wouldn't have known, and in particular it's easy then to then just stay the course and tell yourself you took the right option.
My wife is very similar in the other direction; She always was a tomboy who felt more comfortable with boys, then puberty hit and she changed. She also could see herself mistakenly choosing to take puberty blockers in her youth. And now our daughter is just the same, so we make sure to always tell her that her mom had the same struggles. Imagining her mistakenly getting talked into puberty blockers is horrifying, and worse, very plausible.
So overall while I have quite some sympathy, going through puberty seems like the less-bad option even for the majority of those who feel somewhat uncomfortable with their sex.
RenOS
something is wrong
10d ago
I'm pretty confident that if Bezos would have married a literal nubile twenty something, we would have feminist journalists write about how this proves that men are shallow. If he had married a lower class mexican wife, it would be decried as vaguely coercive and that this proves men enjoy power differentials. If he had married white trash, he would be ridiculed as going back to his roots. Hell, if he married a conventionally attractive, age-appropriate, low-agency woman with a conventional job, that would probably also be insinuated as some sort of tradwife, wanting the woman to go back to the kitchen situation.
As several people have pointed out, Sanchez is in many ways precisely the sort of high-agency go-getter that should be popular with feminists, but who in practice always seems to be hated instead. In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
Are we better than you? We tested this claim by asking ourselves and we say: Yes!
It's not quite CW but since I've stumbled over this paper twice now in completely different contexts (once from Marginal Revolution, another in my mainstream news reel) and don't know where else to post it, I want to talk about it. Especially since people clearly, uncritically have taken it at face value.
The authors, who studied philosophy, mention that philosophy student often think they are more rigorous thinkers, and claim to test the claim. They do it by using two scales by the "Higher Education Research Institute". Both of these are purely self-ratings, i.e. they strictly measure students perception of themselves.
The result is, unsurprisingly, that philosophy students self-rate as rigorous thinkers. This then gets reported by the authors as "empirically tested" higher rigorousness and open-mindedness. For extra laughs, political science is among the highest-scoring.
Tbh there is not much else to say here. It's damning that the authors did this, it's damning that the journal published it, and it's damning that this now gets smugly, uncritically shared in news, social media and blogs. Remember kids, this is how science works!
RenOS
something is wrong
10mo ago
I just told my wife (2 kids and counting) about this article and her reaction was (roughly translated): "weird how many women have multiple". There is not much to add here; The only people having actual experience on the matter, i e. mothers, will happily choose to go through this allegedly grueling experience again. While people with zero experience, such as the childless author, will make these wild, outlandish claims. It should have been instructive for you that your mother, who knows exactly how bad pregnancy/childbirth is or isn't, was exasperated.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
This is unfortunately pretty standard nowadays in science. A PhD candidate in our group (we're in genetics) has the the displeasure of working in a larger project (which concerns a certain kind of inborn disability) involving social scientists, and not only do they make crazy comments on her presentations such as "there is no genetic causes for any disability" or "any research on the causes is at best wasted money or at worst ableism, it should all go into how to support them", they also explicitly either identify as activists themselves or will closely work together with explicitly activist groups.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
Some observations:
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As multiple other commenters note, residential schools were a very progressive idea for their time. The kind of person running it was clearly the same kind of person now criticising it, even with largely similar values. Given that progressives are considered the side of empathy - most conservatives main complaint is their excess of empathy - this makes me weep for the project of empathy as a whole. If people fail to empathize with themselves, projected into the past, how can they possibly empathise with other people?
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The contrarian in me obviously wants to just exhume everything and see whether there is anything at all; But to some degree that still buys into a framing that imo is entirely unfounded. To our knowledge, we know that conditions in foster institutions were generally quite bad independent of the skin color of the child for a long time, not to mention that many kids already were mistreated even before they entered them. We know some of them died due to this. Even if they were being buried locally, that is still no proof whatsoever for the wild claims of murderous racism.
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It strikes me again just how little connection there seems to be between people getting into positions of power in native american councils and actually being, you know, native american. "Chief Rosanne Casimir", who argues against exhumations, looks much less native than "Rancher Garry Gottfriedson", who argues in favor! And sure enough, Garry is an actual former residential school student.
RenOS
something is wrong
3mo ago
Schools are falling over backwards to fight right-wing "toxic masculinity" and "incel culture" while referring to this show. It portrays this as a general problem of white boys. Yet, the real cases it's based on are extremely disproportionally minorities. It's a moral panic designed to misdirect from real problems (misaligned minority cultures) to imagined problems (white young boys being frustrated with progressive values).
Universities were, objectively, massively expanded in that timeframe. "We increased the number of students tenfold, but this did not change quality or composition or culture" is just not a very credible claim. On the other hand, it's just common sense that if you try to take in the top 5% vs the top 50%, the average student will necessary be MUCH worse, even if your measure of competence is unreliable. Likewise, if a professor suddenly has to teach a multiple of the students he used to, the quality of the education almost necessarily suffers (not to mention a similar effect to the students, in which people are given increased responsibilities to handle the load of teaching that in the old regime would never have been given such responsibilities).
Pretty much all older staff reports roughly the same story: In the past, professors had reasonable loads of students, which they could handle on a more individual basis, and which were mostly capable of acting independently. Nowadays, the professors have so many students that they had to transform everything into a standardized, school-like environment. This includes a lot of busywork that can't be too hard since - and here is some divergence - one side says the students are just way worse but we don't want failure rate of >50%, the other side says because it would require more personal interaction for struggling students which the professors simply can't supply anymore. To keep the appearance of excellence, this busywork is also often more time-intensive for the students than the technically harder assignments that students would have gotten in the past. The few professors that don't standardize but keep open-ended problems often don't manage to teach anything and end up having to just pass everyone. The style of political courses functor is describing fits into the same mold imo. It's just really convenient to reduce everything into a one-dimensional political analysis and works very well as a standardized approach.
In fact, I'd argue that most older staff even underestimates the scale of this process, since a large part happens through the generation of new fields that have minimally trained professors and low to no enforced standards. My university for example almost doubled its student body since I started studying here, went away, and came back. All the original courses, however, still have almost the same size. Instead, we have A LOT of new courses that frequently are just thinly-veiled ways of enrolling marginal students that didn't make it in the original courses ("media informatics", for example), and almost universally have very low standards. My wife had to work together on a project with a newly-created "midwife professor", head of the newly created "midwife university course", who is just a practicing midwife that went back to university, did a PhD with a single publication, and instantly got her professorship. She doesn't seem to have any idea how science works whatsoever, and nobody can make her since she has an ultra-safe position as the original arbiter in our university on what "midwife science" even is. And there are multiple new courses like this from which I have not directly heard anything yet, but also no reason to believe it's any different. And both my wife's and others report on existing collaborations that they often try to hide their ignorance behind moralistic grandstanding.
In general, another thing that I have been perceiving myself also is that there is zero pressure to make things harder for students and a lot of pressure to make things easier. If I pass everyone, literally nobody will complain as long as I went through the motions of designing some very easy assignments. On the other hand, if the assignments are too hard and too many fail, firstly it's just extra work for me since I see them again next year, and at some point I have to do an oral exam which is even more work. Then you have the students themselves complain. Then if you fail too many the university admin staff will complain as well. My natural attitude is normally "if they fail, they fail", but even I actively work towards making assignments easier for the students just to spare myself the hassle. It just seems extremely obvious that such a system will only ever get easier over time. And once you have little to no meaningful standards, it's easy to bring in politics, because why not?
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
@gorge talks mostly about the changes to the conception of marriage from the perspective of a religious conservative, at least as I understand him. But I think even from a secular centrist state-based perspective, there are a lot of problems with it. In the old conception, the justification why the state should support marriages is very straightforward: For retirement, but also just the continued existence of the state in the future, children are necessary. Therefore, an institution for the purpose of family-formation is highly beneficial.
On the other hand, in the new framework, if we consider marriage primarily about love, it's pretty hard to argue why two people loving each other means they should get, say, a tax rebates or similar: Nice for them I guess, but why shouldn't two very good friends living together? Why not a lonely single? The latter is arguably most disadvantaged, so maybe he should get the biggest tax rebate? The answer from my left-leaning friends is mostly: No, actually, we care about children, so we should just support children directly. Fine, but now we have lost something! The old system also supported children, in particular if their parents couldn't. But in addition the old system had a clear framework, a path towards becoming parents before actually having children yet, and supported people who made a credible effort in this direction.
The new system offers nothing in its place, if anything it actively discourages people to have kids. It's like as if we said that well obviously we need plumbers in the future, but any training in plumbing needs to be inclusive towards non-plumbers, and actually you are not allowed to even claim that "plumbing training" is in any way related to the profession or task of "plumbing", and no, you're also not allowed to create a new category of "totally not plumbing training" that trains people to be plumbers. It's just that if someone just so happens to be capable of plumbing and performs the task, he is allowed to be paid for this. And everyone acts surprised that plumbing becomes rarer and rarer.
It gets worse! The new system claims to be about "love". But actually, there is no obvious criteria for "love". It's merely a claim people make. And most countries still offer tangible benefits for marriage.
So in the old system, we would support people in family formation, and then once they actually have children, we support them further. The evaluation of this was mostly straightforward, and the incentives line up nicely between what the state wants (children) and what the family was incentived to do (have children).
In the new system, there is, again, nothing like this. As said before, there isn't even a reason why the state should care that these two people "love" each other, and it isn't controlling or setting up incentives anyway. So this also explains why marriage often looks so outdated and pointless nowadays; It literally is, at least the way it is treated by the state. It changed from a system with a clear purpose and clear criteria to one with an unclear purpose and no criteria.
But at the end I still have to disagree on one point. I think the old conception can be rescued while still including some new means of family formation. Adoption, for example, can be set up in a variety of formats that allows homosexual relationships to still take part. Likewise, IVF can even allow them to have (partially) genetic children. While I have absolutely no problem giving heterosexual relationships a special status as the most common, most simple, most robust approach to family formation and which accordingly should be treated as the default, that doesn't mean we need to outright exclude all others.
Sometimes I feel like living in a different universe.
First, Dorsey twitter absolutely worked together with many agencies in many countries far above what is was required to do, shown trivially by the fact that Musk Twitter refuses to do so and is nevertheless existing. This was shown in the twitter files, but they are hardly necessary; Here in Germany, our local Blockwarte voluntarily complain about nothing but how much better they could "work together with" Dorsey Twitter to combat "misinformation" than with Musk Twitter. This also goes for the UK. Even beyond western countries, where Musk Twitter is far more resistant to censorship efforts and which have far more resources to staff liaison bureaucrats and as such are a much greater threat to open discourse, Dorsey Twitter was also more than happy to go along with censorship in non-western countries as long as it fit with their left-leaning preconceptions, such as in Brazil or South Africa.
Second, the moderation staff of Dorsey Twitter not only was much, much larger and could handle much greater throughput, but pretty much everyone is primarily complaining about who is allowed to continue posting, and voluntarily leaves due to it, as opposed to being banned. I've seen a lot of people and institutes around me make a big show about posting how they're leaving X and going to bluesky. Not a single one of them was banned, and almost none of them complained about any person ban or topics ban whatsoever, either. It's always about how now that this or that category of person is unbanned, they can't in good conscience stay there. At most they point at some nebulous alleged algorithmic boosting which they have no evidence for but are sure has to exist (and which, ironically, provably existed under Dorsey Twitter, it was just going another way). I don't think it's a coincidence that X discourse has moved closer to the notorious chan-style discourse.
Third, the kind of topics that could get you banned on Dorsey Twitter was incredibly broad, and frequently included taking even milquetoast center right opinions ("there are only two genders") or very basic common-sense observations ("the covid vaccine, just like many other vaccines, has a heightened likelihood of complications for people with autoimmune diseases and as such may not be worth it especially for young people with an autoimmune disease"). People went to other places since they either already were banned or felt they would get banned if they openly discussed the topics they care about.
I'm certainly not happy about how trigger-happy Musk is about criticism of himself or how he runs his company, but in practice it's not only an incredibly limited topic, it also would have gotten you banned on Dorsey Twitter as well, even labelling it similarly as "misinformation" or "conspiracy theories". On doxxing I'm also more split, since this was weaponized pretty hard on Dorsey Twitter.
Also on the Vance talk, I'm an academic who has lived his entire life in Europe (mostly Germany and a few years UK), and I think he's just objectively correct about his statements, not just directionally but also literally, so there's that I guess. It was very moving to see that if we want to have a course-correction, we will have some allies in foreign governments that will help us and stand by us. That's a fairly straightforward foreign policy strategy. The norm-breaking criticism is also pretty hilarious to me, since visiting american democratic politicians love talking about right-wing dangers in Europe which is totally OK, but once it's american republican politicians talking about left-wing dangers it's suddenly a dangerous break with norms.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Zeit, two of the most respected mainstream-left german newspaper just released back-to-back articles on the BND (german foreign intelligence) internal evidence pointing to the lab-leak theory being correct with 90%+. Not surprising, you think, and old news too boot? Well, as it turns out, they concluded this ... in 2020. And given the risk of bioweapon development this implies, they'd have been near-required to tell then-chancellor Merkel. And health ministry Jens Spahn. When the administration changed in 2021 to Scholz, he was also told with overwhelming likelihood. According to the two papers, all of them were in fact told personally by then-and-current BND president Bruno Kahl.
Similar to the US establishment, the german establishment at the time went on what can only be described as a hunt against even mentioning the possibility of a lab leak. To quote the top german establishment expert of the time, Christian Drosten: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. [...] Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture."
The source here matters a lot, since both of these are consistently pro-establishment in general and especially so during the Corona crisis. There is very little reason for them to publish this spuriously, and frankly it's a surprise they're willing to publish it even now.
Whether you believe the BNDs internal evidence or not doesn't matter. Whether you personally think that the lab-leak theory is correct doesn't matter (FWIW, I think most foreign intelligence service have an obvious bias towards conspiratorial thinking, so if they say 90%+, it's probably more in the 60%+ range). What does matter, however, is that our own government secretly concluded that the lab-leak theory is correct or at the very least highly plausible, but instead of supporting what they viewed as the truth or at least the open discourse on a key question, they actively supported slander and misinformation.
Tbh, I'm still kind of reeling about what to conclude after Corona. Due to some personal experiences, but also the generally repressive climate of the time combined with the information coming out now that most mainstream talking points were wrong, it was a major step in my own worldview realignment. In particular, I used to have the naive anti-conspiracy view that it's almost impossible to keep an important one going due to a single defection blowing everything up, even if smaller and/or more specific ones may happen. Nowadays I think through a smart combination of only telling people as much as they need to know while also making clear what they're supposed to think through scare tactics, slander and repression, arbitrarily large-scale conspiracies can keep going as long as enough people can be convinced it's important. A single defector isn't a problem, because it's trivial to present them as just an evil person spreading misinformation for personal gain.
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
Nowadays I'm writing my own grants for my research and talk enough with the other side to understand their reasoning and tbh the entire grant-based funding scheme has horrible, horrible structural incentives. To begin with, both sides have a strong incentive to bloat. You know what is more prestigious than managing 50k grants? It's managing 100k grants. On the grant writer side, if a grant is offering 25k but we only have a small project that needs 10k for some extra consumables, what do you think we'll do? Exactly, I say a pilot single cell RNAseq experiment for 4 of the samples adding up to 12k is totally a great idea and make the grant sound as if this was the plan from the start (and it sounds really prestigious since scRNA-seq is a reasonably new tech that the committee deciding the grant is likely to be impressed). This is most obvious in the fact that you're not just not rewarded for saving money, you're actively punished (if you didn't spend all the money you were granted, this makes people angry - they don't want it back - and it's significantly less likely to get your next grant). Second, as already alluded, it's all strongly optimized to sound new, exceptional and fancy. If people handle their own money, they want boring, reliable and necessary (which is imo severely missing in current science). Third, behind closed doors the money often gets shuffled around for other purposes, so the text of the project proposal does not even necessarily reflect the project on-the-ground very well anyway (this is worst for very large projects in which an easy overview of point-by-point financing for every little consumable, staff or outsourced services is just not feasible).
And I'm quite sure that I'm in a comparatively functional field - at least in principle we're investigating stuff like new treatments for cancer, which particular variants cause genetic diseases and similar. I have a colleague working with humanities people and not only are they explicitly identifying as activists fighting for disabled rights as opposed to, you know, scientists, they also try to bully her into stopping her research since investigating severe inborn disabilities is ableist. But the official projects they're part of all sound really nice and positive at first glance.
Also, the problem on cutting the other way around - looking for the X most-stupid-sounding projects - has been tried multiple times, in multiple countries, by different libertarian-inclined parties and it just doesn't work. If you try to go through all funding one-by-one and cut the most stupid sounding, you will first have to fight and justify a lot "but why this", then you're likely getting hit with a lawsuit that tries to prove that you did cut funding in some discriminatory way (which isn't unlikely because there's probably some equally stupid project that you didn't hit since you tried to be more targeted), and then after all the fighting you maybe saved 0.1% of the budget and might not even have hit the actually worst and most useless programs, because the descriptions are optimized to sound nice and the structures behind it are optimized to hide wasteful spending.
At this point I'm willing to turn it on the head: Cut as much as possible, then reinstitute only the absolutely necessary (ideally now not even grant-dependent anymore - if it's necessary it shouldn't be grant-dependent!), and then everyone has to prove again that whatever they're doing is actually a good ROI for society. If my research gets cut, that's probably worth it & I just go into industry.
This is exactly what I'm talking about tbh. The spin in that article makes my head hurt.
I'm a german parent, I know german abortion law, I've talked with german doctors about the issue. By american conception, our abortion laws - both by law and in practice - would be considered at best center if not far-right, and is quite similar to what moderate GOP politicians are proposing. Abortion is strictly illegal here, punished with prison, except for four cases:
- The abortion happened in the first 12 weeks and was done after thorough consultation with a certified professional
- There is a life-threatening medical emergency
- The pregnancy is the product of a rape
- Seriously debilitating exceptional circumstances (also only done after an even more thorough consultation)
As a side note, I quote the purpose of the consultation by the literal text of the law: "Die Beratung dient dem Schutz des ungeborenen Lebens. Sie hat sich von dem Bemühen leiten zu lassen, die Frau zur Fortsetzung der Schwangerschaft zu ermutigen und ihr Perspektiven für ein Leben mit dem Kind zu eröffnen" (rough english translation: The consultation has the purpose of protecting the life of the unborn. It should strive to encourage the woman to continue the pregnancy and give her a perspective of life with a child.)
That's it. I don't doubt that there are some doctors somewhere who wink wink nod nod and spuriously claim medical emergencies and/or exceptional circumstances, but the average doctor takes this quite seriously. By the text of the law, the purpose of the fourth criteria is strictly to be used if the fetus shows signs of serious developmental issues that would preclude a fully realized adult life. Afaik it is also occasionally used for people who are not of sound mind, i.e. pregnant children and the mentally disabled. But strictly speaking this is not supported by the text of the law.
In both our pregnancies our doctor made very clear that she would not support late-term (in germany, late-term generally means the second trimester) abortions unless this criteria has been fulfilled beyond reasonable doubt ( which was actually a point of contention since we would have liked less strict criteria). A rough translation of a quote from her, concerning us asking for the more modern genetic testing for trisomy, as opposed to the traditional, more strict ultrasound testing: "If you can't see the trisomy (down syndrome) in the ultrasound, it usually is less bad. And even the disabled can lead a happy life."
I know enough people from other european countries - and have lived in one other for a while - to know that they generally have very similar laws, some slightly more strict, some slightly less.
RenOS
something is wrong
1mo ago
Short story is, me and my wife are both PhDs (me applied math, her psychology), so we have both met quite a few different varieties of nonbinary and trans individuals. Even back when studying we noticed that it's my spaces and in particular Computer Science that has several MtFs (and I've made the same observation in ultra-male online spaces such as mech-themed games or esoteric linux open source projects; they may be 10% female, but it's all G.I.R.L.s), while FtMs are mostly in her circles, particularly the social sciences. Standard gender theory would predict the opposite; And further, my wife (who is, ironically, one of the least feminine woman personality-wise I know) noticed in her interactions in her circle of friends that the majority of FtMs and nonbinaries have virtually no male hobbies, no masculine behaviour patterns, nothing.
When asked how they knew, they talk about how they disliked their growing breasts and how cumbersome they are (my wife does as well), how unpleasant the period is (duh), how scary the thought of pregnancy is (again, duh) how they don't want to be pressured into caring for kids and having to abandon their career (my wife, too), sometimes even how cismen are dirty and gross and they don't want to have sex with them (literally every women ever). It's basically a laundry list of all realisations and fears that many if not all girls get during puberty or slightly later, but instead of having to come to terms with it, they took the easy way out: Just reject it all. Their male identity, meanwhile, consists of superficialities, such as literally wearing lumberjack shirts, or even doing female-coded hobbies but with a male twist, such as really liking to cook, but they cook steaks. They're basically what women think men should be like, not what real men are actually like. Not rarely, they downright detest almost everything about real men as "toxic masculinity", such as competitiveness, dominance, playful insults, not talking about feelings, hierarchies, etc.
The same goes for students I'm teaching now, although it's obviously more distanced so I'm less confident here, but as far as I can see there is virtually no connection between their outward presentation of male-ness and actual masculine behaviour (or vice versa for MtFs).
RenOS
something is wrong
2mo ago
I'll just copy part of a very recent post which mostly encapsulates my view of polyamory (contrasting it with other alternatives to monogamy):
Ironically, this is also why polyamory is imo by far the worst for a functioning society; It's basically expanding the dating period of many young people's life to the entirety, with all the anxieties, drama and labor it entails. If you have work & kids, you just don't have time for that. Since work is usually necessary for all but the richest, that means you skip the kids. Communes often have similar problems but to a lesser degree, and as long as they're not too large and have clear boundaries to everything else, can be made to work. I don't like the intrinsic inequality stemming from Harems, but from a practical PoV they work just as well as traditional couples since the boundaries and expectations are simple and clear.
Listening to some of the stories, that may even be to charitable to polyamory; Even the regular dating period for most young people had clearer expectations and less drama.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
Tbh I would even go beyond this and claim that transracialism is much more reasonable than transgenderism. As a simple example, one of our neighbours is an asian woman who was adopted by whites in canada and who was 100% raised like a white canadian kid. She actively rejects anything that has to do with her biological ancestry and is very insistent that she is canadian through and through, in particular she hates being called asian ("that's just how I look, not what I am"). I may not entirely agree with her, but this makes a lot more sense to me than claiming something as obviously biologically dichotomous as sex is malleable and in particular can have an inverted social component.
RenOS
something is wrong
2mo ago
I think this is very related to an observation that has been pointed out for some time now: In most modern places, especially cities, the liberal or even progressive worldview is nowadays the de-facto conservative option in the intuitive sense of the word. What would you call the worldview of your own parents, of the entrenched powers, of the commonly accepted older moral guardians? The default opinion of the church lady archetype around me (to some lesser degree even where I grew up, and certainly where I live now) is some mix of environmentalism (which in itself is intrinsically conservative to some degree) and anti-fascism that many of them have by now been holding since the 70s or so. "Too far left" is to them equivalent to "too pious"; Maybe foolish or impractical, but never really bad or evil. Even if they may technically be part of a religion, they clearly hold their leftie creds in higher regard, often explicitly assuring everyone that no, they actually don't care about the teaching of their actual official religion in particular, they are more on the generally spiritual side and just wanted to be active in some religion in some form. Hell, the literal evangelische Kirchentage (church days organized by mainline protestants) have some great workshops (translated, obviously): "Queer animals on the ark", "brave and strong. Empowerment for BiPoC-kids" or "name blessing for trans*, inter or non-binary people".
This necessarily means that any rival ideology claiming to be conservative is actually at best regressive or at worst wholly unrelated to conservatism, since the de-facto conservatives hate being called conservative. In that sense, the LARP-criticism is correct, since one of the selling points of conservatism is the proof-by-demonstration intrinsic to the ideology that has been dominant for the last decades or longer. It's obviously a general problem also often observed on the left on different topics, but right-wing projects like to have it both ways: On one hand, they recognize they're the rebels organizing a new system, and on the other, they want to leech off the prestige of some old conservative tradition that they were never part of, insufficiently understand, imperfectly copy and which thus may or may not actually work the way it used to. People notice that.
I don't completely disagree with you, however. In my view, most of these right-wing projects need to be more honest they are not really conservative anymore, and lean more into the rebel frame. Nevertheless, as you point out, to some degree unapologetic LARPing is always part of how you create a new system. But it also includes more flexibility and adaption based on what works and what doesn't than many of them want to really practice. Creating something new is hard work.
RenOS
something is wrong
3mo ago
DOGE I like - certainly on principle but also many of the criticisms seemed bad-faith and nonsensical to me -, but I've never been a fan of tariffs. If they were actually reciprocal / 2 I'd understand somewhat - a country can hardly complain about a new tariff if it's just half of what they charge - , but automatically classifying all trade deficit as equivalent to a tariff is pretty crazy, and then also giving a 10% tariff floor anyway to countries against which you have trade surplus is hypocritical. Or, as it seemed plausible early in his presidency, if they were used primarily as a threat / leverage.
Sigh. So many people are really, justifiably pissed at the current left/green administrations running most of the western states, but it seems we haven't found what can plausibly replace it.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
Happiness in general doesn't seem to work the way modern people think it does. From my view, among the best predictors are is a) there are real, serious problems + b) we feel confident to handle them well.
What reason is there to think it isn't? He who controls the null hypothesis, controls the world.
Edit: For the record, my personal null hypothesis is that we should always assume the money was mostly wasted with very little to show for it. People are very good at doing minimal, ineffective work in a maximally photogenic way unless you give them good incentives to actually get anything done. And even then they'll try hard to game the incentives anyway.
RenOS
something is wrong
4mo ago
I have to concur with Steve here; Upsidedownmotter is clearly just as uncharitable. Noting the Weimars republic obvious failures does not make you a Kaiserlicher, noting post-apartheid SAs failures does not "rehabilitate" apartheid SAs, and the insinuation has been a reliable tactic to shut critics up.
RenOS
something is wrong
8mo ago
People have rightfully lost the trust in the polite insiders, so they turn to the impolite outsiders. It's that simple, and I can't blame them.
On a related note, the left has been weaponizing civility to effectively disallow even basic disagreements, which is why being deliberately uncivil is an important precommitment signal in the current environment.
RenOS
something is wrong
11d ago
For instance, in the financial column "Money Stuff" (great reading BTW) the author when talking about an imagined or generic CEO will use "she" as the pronoun. I'm not really a believer in the whole micro-aggression literature, but I can still see that subtle and low-key (non-mandatory) attempts at gently pushing back against stereotypes can be nice.
Tbh I've arrived at the opposite conclusion. As a teen I used to like characters that go against stereotypes - and to some degree I still do, as long as they're done carefully and thoughtfully - but combined with the ubiquitousness and increasing importance of fictional stories in people's lives, it seriously distorts their worldview. Stereotype accuracy is one of the best-replicating findings of sociological research, yet many people I tell this - most of them quite smart and educated - are completely dumbfounded. Of course this is especially due to the nature of their education, but the fictional stories they surround themselves with just reinforce their biases over and over. This can get quite comical, such as women who worry something is wrong with them because they aren't as assertive nor sporty nor as interested in engineering/math/etc. as their heroines.
Yeah. My wife already had an autoimmune condition which seriously worsened after taking the covid vaccine. We even tried to get an exemption for her since she has had similar issues with other vaccines and we saw the early case reports on young women with autoimmune diseases, to no avail. And we're hardly layman, we're both scientists with relevant expertise. Covid was a major blackpill for us on the topic of trusting scientific consensus. If we get shut out like this for a mildly inconvenient opinion (we're not even fully sceptics for the covid vaccine in particular - I took my doses with no problems nor expectations of such), imagine the pressure for even less popular ones! Of course it did not come as a complete surprise due to earlier experiences, but it really solidified our opinion of academics.
On the first part though I disagree strongly. People frequently write something like "men do/are X" with nobody complaining, and the same goes for plenty of smaller groups. If you disagree, just do so in writing, as you did; It's what everyone else does, and a good reason to stop lurking.
I know it's not a big issue, I know I should have expected it and I shouldn't let it get to me, but dammit. It's just so clearly reminiscent of the larger movements in ideology. Today I was asked whether we come with the entire family of four or with less to an event and I wanted to post the family-of-four emoji back. I'm usually not a big emoji poster, so I searched and searched and couldn't find it. Well, as it turns out, ALL family emojis were removed earlier this year and replaced with what looks like bathroom signs (and appropriately moved to the signs section as opposed to people emojis). The reason? Simple:
The Family Emojis Are Now Equally Useless For Everyone, And That's A Good Thing.
Direct quote from the author, who was on relevant committees, for some time even vice chair, for this decision:
First, I want to note how destructive this thinking is. A healthy attitude, upon seeing a sad and a happy person, would be to say: We should try to make the sad happier, even if they might not become as happy as the other person. It leads to more overall happiness, and also to more equality, an unalloyed on-net improvement. By their explicit, stated reasoning these committees would rather make the happy person's live miserable until they are exactly as sad as the other person.
And secondly, I can't help but notice how much this thinking is obviously directly descendend from communist/marxist economic thinking, just applied to cultural topics - i.e. cultural marxism. My wife was born and all her family lived in the DDR (soviet east germany). This is exactly what they reported about how life was structured - every time someone had something that wasn't attainable for everyone, you generally should try to hide it, lest someone might report you or otherwise try to make your life difficult. Exception were, as usual, only for special people. For example, my wife's grandfather was a reasonably well-connected and quite competent car technician working for the military intelligence, members of which were generally left alone by the much more well-known civilian intelligence, the Stasi. Among other things, he had access to a car cemetery, and through this he managed to build is own Wartburg, which was a more expensive car he normally wouldn't have access to, from parts of multiple destroyed Wartburgs. The only reason why he could do this was precisely because of his affiliations - otherwise simply having a better-than-usual car was so suspicious and dangerous that it's better not to try - a car after all you can't easily hide.
So life in the east was in large parts structured around seeming humble and normal and, from the perspective of the higher-ups, only giving people things which you're sure you can give it to everyone. Just like these bathroom sign families, buildings were often literally bleak and grey, which was considered good by the authorities since the alternative was inequality. It seems to me at least some portion of the people who make decisions concerning all our lives start again to think like this.
Third, this is often likened or even explicitly called "tall-poppy-syndrome", the attitude of cutting down the above-average successful. But it's actually worse than that: We steer towards a culture that uses the very least successful/happy as the reference, and that strives to drag the average down until it is exactly as unsuccessful/sad as them. It was trivial to include a bunch of skin colors to accommodate most cases, but since accommodating all possible variations was unfeasible, they decided against it, independent of how ever-rare these variations might be.
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