ResoluteRaven
No bio...
User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
As Carl Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A single clear picture of an alien spacecraft, a single radio signal listing off prime numbers, a single microbe in a meteorite that shares no common origin with life on Earth, any of these would be evidence of extraterrestrial life, but none have been presented. All we get is a lot of hemming and hawing, winks and hints, and the tiniest crumbs of blurry images or eyewitness reports. Show me the data and we can have the conversation. Otherwise I don't see the point.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
We certainly hear a lot more about the USS Liberty than we do about that time the British bombed the French fleet after their surrender to Germany, killing over a thousand sailors, or the many times commercial airliners have been shot down, among other such incidents. What sort of conversation do you think we should be having? Should we break our alliance with Israel because they killed 34 of our sailors? We're allies with Germany and Japan after all, and they've killed about 10,000 times more Americans than that.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Are Indians and the Chinese going to actually assimilate like the Italians, or are they going to behave more like Jews?
From what I've seen, the Chinese are quite likely to assimilate into the white population as soon as the flow of new immigrants is cut off by the motherland's catastrophically falling birthrates, and tend to be quite politically apathetic relative to their population size outside of issues like college admissions. Even in the event of a war with China I wouldn't expect any sort of large-scale treachery, although if the government tries the whole internment camp thing again and rounds up some Koreans by mistake there will be federal casualties.
Indians on the other hand are both more politically astute (compare Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy to Andrew Yang as presidential candidates) and have multiple overlapping factors holding back complete assimilation i.e. stronger religious traditions (especially for Muslims that demand conversion upon marriage), a tradition of arranged marriages that seems to be making a resurgence among sexually frustrated zoomers, and a larger population reservoir to draw new immigrants from. In that sense Indians are much more like Jews and will likely persist as a distinct and politically salient population for far longer than any East Asian group.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
There is a generation of dogs that are poorly socialized on account of covid lockdowns, or at least that is the explanation their owners give when I have asked them about it.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
I think this sort of argument almost always becomes a debate over what exactly the terms "strong men," "good times," etc. mean, but I wanted to bring up one of the better meditations I've read on the topic that agrees with your perspective, namely Bred Devereaux's four part series of posts on what he calls the "Fremen Mirage."
Personally, I'm a bit closer to Ibn Khaldun, in that I've observed degeneration at all scales of biology as soon as selective pressure is released, from yeast in a test tube losing whatever useful (to us) gene you try to insert in them whenever it stops being necessary to survive, to 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants losing the work ethic and conscientiousness that their parents or grandparents honed while toiling away to escape grinding poverty in Asia.
I tend to think of it like a spring that can be coiled and released i.e. all the valuable work comes from the release, not the compression, but it also resets you back to the initial conditions or worse after you let it go. What would be truly great is if we could achieve the advantages of so-called "hard times" or what I call "compression" without actual hardship, whether that's through some sort of mental conditioning, strong enough cultural memes, or direct genetic engineering.
Going off of your point about urbanism, what has always galled me is how much more beautiful European cities and frankly people are compared to their American counterparts, knowing the difference in wealth. Some of the few things Europe has left going for it (in purely material and aesthetic terms, of course people have an attachment to their own culture/language/etc.) are gothic cathedrals and a lack of visible homeless drug adicts or morbidly obese people walking around in public spaces.
It's pathetic that the richest country in human history can't close the gap on these things when you consider how far ahead the US is by any other measure. We could build our own Vienna or Paris if we wanted to, but all we can manage is Las Vegas and Disney World. When it comes to small towns and rural areas, the only place where the manmade environment hasn't depressed me has been New England (crossing from Massachusetts into upstate New York and seeing the contrast in what the small towns look like feels like crossing the iron curtain into some post-industrial wasteland).
On pretty much any other topic I will happily argue against liberals who romanticize Europe, especially when they're immigrants ("If you think Denmark is so much better then why did you choose to move here?"), but I have no counter on this one.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
I think the double whammy of deinstitutionalization of mental patients and white flight from cities with their soaring crime rates in the mid-20th century dealt a nearly fatal wound to American urban life. Had only one of these changes occurred, then perhaps city governments could have responded adequately and maintained standards of public order, but at this point the very concept of a city in the American consciousness is thoroughly entangled with crime, homelessness, and filth-ridden streets.
I have been to both Oakland and West Africa (including some of the bad parts) and many neighborhoods in the former are worse. Even in the poorest countries on Earth people keep their homes remarkably clean, as it is a point of dignity and pride for them. Only in America have I seen homeless people asleep on a pile of garbage, with both cops and citizens walking by without giving them a moment's consideration.
These same people take vacations to European or East Asian cities and then wax poetic about the cleanliness of the streets, the beauty of the architecture, and the ease and safety of getting around, as though they exist in some fairytale, instead of being real places built by flesh and blood human beings with less wealth per capita than we have, and whose best practices we are more than capable of emulating.
America has never been an ethnostate. If anything it is the literal anti-ethnostate. As far back as 1776, Thomas Paine pointed out that less than a third of Pennsylvanians were of English descent and so any claims of being an English nation were already moot.
The direction has been clear since then: from just Anglos to accepting all Germanic and Celtic peoples to accepting all "Judeo-Christians" and so on. I too have colonial ancestry, but I don’t see how my New England Puritan, New Netherland Dutch, and Palatine German ancestors formed any sort of ethnos. They certainly wouldn't have said so, those of them that even had a language in common to communicate in. Their blood may be mingled in me now, but so is that of subsequent waves of immigration from Europe and Asia. Where do you draw the line?
There is a path towards a single American nation, the same one followed by the Romans from a civic identity that encompassed the whole of the Mediterranean world from Gauls to Numidians to an ethnic one of Greek-speaking Romanoi living in the Eastern Empire after losing most of the Middle East to the Arab invasions.
However, the road to Byzantium is a hard one and involves the loss of prestige and power on the world stage and a retrenchment into more parochial, local concerns. In many ways we are already on it, but it is not the rediscovery of a centuries old white ethnic identity (though depending on the exact demographics it may be framed that way by some) but rather the binding together of those populations that are already here, be they of European, African, Asian, or indigenous descent, and from our perspective it may seem as strange for that new people to claim the mantle of "American" as it would be for Augustus to see some Greek Christian from Anatolia in the 10th century claiming to be "Roman."
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
If we're not embracing full cultural relativism there must be a line somewhere beyond which certain things are unacceptable even if they are part of some group's culture. Jumping the subway turnstiles in New York or shoplifting in San Francisco are actions that are widespread and largely overlooked and while it would be personally unwise if an individual attempted to stop someone doing those things (in the same way it may have been unwise in this case for the pregnant woman to press the issue of these teenagers camping on the rental bikes), I think society would be better off if instances of antisocial behavior were challenged by citizens when the authorities are unable or unwilling to intervene.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Among people I know or observe regularly, mostly in college towns and other liberal strongholds, I have definitely seen many adopting this habit of wearing facemasks when they are ill or when it is very cold outside (works better than a scarf in my experience), rather than masking indoors all the time out of some lingering covid paranoia.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Seeing how El Salvador went from being a crime-ridden hellhole to being safer than almost anywhere in America in the span of a few years would seem to invalidate the notion that such measures are impossible. Maybe blue tribe liberals won't be the ones to do it, but their hold on power is not eternal, and they are doing their best to empower nonwhite immigrant groups that have fewer qualms about the methods necessary to clean the place up.
You would have to be steeped in internet leftist culture to understand that, "Trolling, threatening, harassing, or inciting violence towards individuals or groups will not be tolerated. Racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant language in both comments and submissions will be removed." means that pointed questions against the progressive consensus will get you tossed out.
And was it your impression that reddit moderators were not "steeped in internet leftist culture"? This seems to me like jumping into a pool and wondering why it's wet.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
The death penalty has various serious problems
Are your problems with the death penalty pragmatic or moral? If they are pragmatic, then as you point out this proposal is even farther outside the overton window and will never be implemented. If they are moral, then all I can say is that I think that if we as a society decide that someone should die we owe them the respect of shooting them in the head instead of bullying them into suicide with mind games or financial incentives to assuage our guilty consciences by only killing indirectly.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
That's exactly what we will have if we reach peace right now. Except this state will have more living Ukrainians in it.
What makes you think Putin would accept a ceasefire proposal along the current line of control? All I have seen indicates to me that he is fully prepared to fight a years-long war of attrition until Ukraine runs out of either artillery shells or people, because he thinks at that point they will collapse like the Germans in 1918 and he can have the glorious march to Kiev he was denied at the start of the war. I don't see any incentive for him to stop halfway besides saving the lives of Russian soldiers dying in the trenches, and after all what's a few million dead compared to reuniting the motherland?
Reading the comments here, I believe that I have arrived at a more realistic stance than most people, who think things like reconquering Crimea are on the table still. I hope there is a cease fire because I don't think the war is winnable by Ukraine without unacceptable costs from the U.S. Confidence level: 80%.
I can only speak for myself, but I still support sending aid to Ukraine and I never thought that reconquering Crimea or the breakaway Donbass republics was feasible, only status quo ante bellum at most. As long as Ukrainians are willing to fight and there are no American boots on the ground (the odd volunteer excepted) though, I don't see any reason to deny their requests for assistance; we can stop the day Ukrainian public opinion turns against the war.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
This was my impression of the entire series. Herbert left all the most interesting aspects of his world tantalizingly out of reach, as though he pointed a camera at a beautiful landscape and it focused on a fly buzzing in the foreground instead of the natural wonder behind.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
But what problems did this actually cause prior to 1914?
Skyrocketing crime rates in east coast and midwest cities driven by the rise of the Italian-American mafia, the creation of Tammany Hall-style corrupt machine politics across much of the country, and an anarchist movement that resulted in one presidential assasination and a series of deadly bomb attacks.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
I think that modern lifestyles and family structure make it particularly difficult to raise children for a number of reasons. In a nuclear family there are only two adults doing all of the childcare, at least when they aren't paying for daycare services, as opposed to an extended family or multifamily household where the various aunts, uncles, and grandparents can take turns being responsible for all of the young children, giving their parents a much-needed break. There's a reason "it takes a village to raise a child" is a well-known saying, and yet the way we live nowadays does everything possible to prevent this.
Immigrant families tend to be larger in part because they often have no qualms about packing a dozen or more people into a single suburban house that was intended for a single nuclear family (packing is not really the right word, given that this is often still more living space per person than they get back home) and can alternate who gets groceries, does household chores, and takes the kids out to the park, not to mention living in a much nicer neighborhood than if they had not pooled their resources.
Additionally, growing up in a larger household means greater exposure to young children and their needs. More and more upper-middle class women in developed countries have never even held a baby before they have their first child, which adds an additional layer of anxiety at the weight of that responsibility that is simply absent in most traditional societies, where her equivalent would have from an early age been cooking for, keeping an eye on, and picking up after her younger siblings, cousins, or the neighbors' kids. The last vestige of this was teenagers working as babysitters to earn a little money in high school, which may still be a thing in some parts of this country, but certainly not in my coastal, urban, PMC, zoomer bubble.
Now I don't necessarily think that addressing these issues would immediately restore fertility rates, because there is a deeper challenge born (heh) out of the number of desirable lifestyle options that the wealth of developed countries permits other than raising a traditional family. I leave sorting that one out to natural selection, which is working overtime on it as we speak.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
It looks as though that article has since been taken down, or at least the link doesn't work for me. I think it was almost inevitable that the lab leak or other non-natural origin theory for covid would become right-coded because it strikes at several key aspects of modern liberal orthodoxy: believing in the credibility and good intentions of technocratic experts, believing in "science," assuming the best of non-western foreigners for fear of being labeled racist, and more fundamentally the conceit that modern technological advances and research are the solution to our problems rather than a potential cause of them.
It would be one thing if covid turned out to be a nothingburger, and back in early January 2020 when we didn't expect it to spread worldwide it was more or less the consensus among biological researchers I knew that it was a lab leak, but given where it ended up it's simply a bridge too far nowadays for many of them to admit that the system could have failed so catastrophically (although as far as I can tell many of them still privately believe it; they just either think the public couldn't handle the truth or they are afraid of speaking out). Considering that even the 1977 Russian Flu has not been conclusively accepted as a lab leak by the general public I doubt we will ever get closure on this issue.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
it’s justified by the exact same arguments that would be used to justify late term abortions
How do you figure that? In the case of abortion the mother has presumably agreed to the procedure, and isn't secretly slipped abortifacients by a malicious nurse.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
how could a mob of unarmed protestors possibly get inside a hardened-against-terrorists building against the will of the government and why did they leave when the government activated the alarm system telling them to do so
Because the capitol building is not hardened against terrorists. You used to be able to just walk in without any screening whatsoever (this is still true of many state capitols) and even more recently the only security was a checkpoint with a metal detector manned by garden variety police officers. Breaches have not been that rare, though they seem to be quickly forgotten. It does seem like the idea of a "People's House" that any citizen can wander into to observe the miracle of democracy at work is just about dead and buried, so I suspect this won't be the case for much longer, though it had a good run.
As for why the protestors left when they were asked to, it is because for all their fiery rhetoric they were still the pampered residents of a first-world country and uncomfortable with violent conflict. I watched the video of Ashli Babbitt being shot and the reaction of the people nearest to her was telling; in an instant they transformed from would-be revolutionaries into scared children begging for help from the same officers that they had been pushing back and hurling abuse at for hours, as though the prospect of being hurt while battering down a door guarded by armed police was inconceivable. In a word, they were LARPing, and their bluff was called, just as Prigozhin's was when his forces got within striking distance of Moscow without any intent to follow through and overthrow the government.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
The increase in LGBT identification among young people is mostly driven by women identifying as bisexual with minimal changes in behavior. While there may be some combination of social contagion and environmental effects on the much smaller but still notable rise in the number of trans/genderfluid/whatever else people, I doubt that kid's TV shows have much to do with it compared to the bottomless cesspool of the internet drawing people in at an early age and amplifying the tiniest stirrings of attraction into whole new life paths as they exhaust more pedestrian sexual (and any other sort of) interests.
While sexual or other minorities may seize on a particular piece of popular media and claim it for their own, directing their members to engage with it and building an association, I think the causation doesn't usually run the other way, and people out of the loop will have no idea that that's what it's "supposed to mean" i.e. I could not have caught any implication that Timon and Pumbaa were a gay couple when I watched The Lion King because at that age I didn't know what gay people were, ditto for the Reflection song in Mulan being the "trans anthem," or My Little Pony being a gateway into...I don't even remember what anymore (being a furry?).
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
While I don't know the exact details of your situation, I would be extremely wary of including any "theory portion" in this sort of email. Unless you regularly have the sorts of abstract discussions of social and political issues with this person that we do here, and I quite doubt that if you say he has never been exposed to these counter-arguments, I don't see how it will make you look like anything other than a crazy right-wing conspiracy theorist in his eyes.
It was pointed out in a previous thread that we can map this issue onto two axes. One is the practical axis, dealing with real world actions: what pronouns we call people, the details of sex-change surgeries, who can play in what sports leagues, etc. The other is the metaphysical axis, dealing with our theory of the world: the definitions of man or woman, whether the interests of each sex are in eternal conflict, what gender identity feels like, etc. If your goal is to prevent a specific action in the real world and not to change someone's fundamental beliefs (and the truth is most people don't really have any, apart from the autists that congregate in places like this), you should stay on the practical axis.
If you can convince him that there are specific, measurable harms that might come to his child if he pursues transition, then he will be forced to at least weigh the costs and benefits of this course of action. Things like medical studies about puberty blockers and the anecdotes from detransitioners that you mention in passing are much stronger arguments than anything you could possibly say about "norms, culture, and language." Like it or not, we live in a world where in some places parents could face great legal and social repercussions for standing in the way of their child coming out or transitioning, and so you need that much more evidence that going against the flow will cause their family less suffering in the end, and not in the context of joining some grand culture war struggle against biological denialism that they are never going to care about.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
To me, that's not assimilation, but just being a guest with good manners. Assimilation would be abandoning one's own native language, religion, and cultural practices, marrying a native so that your descendants would look like the majority of wherever you have chosen to live, and severing all but the most superficial emotional ties with your ancestral home.
New Hampshire has always seemed like the odd man out in New England to me due to its strong Scotch-Irish/Libertarian heritage, but I digress.
Having considered it more, I suppose I can agree with a version of your thesis that goes like this (writing this out more for my own understanding than yours):
What those in the early-20th century called Progressivism produced a generation of technocrats (including Wilson, Hoover, FDR, etc.) who for several decades controlled both political parties while fighting a (to them very real and serious but to outsiders insignificant) battle amongst themselves. The technocrats recently lost control of the Republican party and what many HBD-believing folks on the new/dissident/alt/whatever-right are trying to do is re-establish the yang to the Democrats' yin while ignoring the bubbling cauldron of resentment into which both the current elites and their would-be shadow elites are soon to fall.
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