ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
Now let's talk about the supposed conspiracy to force people into the suburbs. The largest American cities of 1920 were all built before the car. Many of them have a ring of streetcar suburbs. Most of them have lost population. There is a plentiful supply of dense urban cores in America with lower population than they had a century ago, and yet all the demand is for building more suburbs.
There is a reason many of those urban cores lost their population and it isn't just because the people there decided they wanted to move out one day because of changes in technology or lifestyle. Without the increased crime rates, race riots, and domestic terrorism of the 60's and 70's, America's cities would probably look much more similar to those in Europe.
I'm moving there for the same reason people hate suburbs: community. People talk about how suburbs are alienating and have no third spaces. I'm moving for the community, which is my wife's extended family. The third space was her grandparent's house. Now it is her parent's house, and someday (hopefully far in the future) it will be our house.
My understanding is that a family home is explicitly not a third place, because a third place is by definition a neutral public meeting ground with a semi-rotating cast of characters who have no obligation to be there. It might be possible to make one's house a third place by hosting enough open and regular events and parties, but that would be quite unusual, and would be made unnecessary if more typical meeting spaces e.g. coffee shops, bars, bowling alleys, dance clubs, etc. were common enough to meet people's need for socializing.
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
10mo 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.
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.
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
3mo ago
I was similarly confused by the media coverage of this execution, but what seemed likely to me was that a couple of outlets whose reporters are already trained to see swastikas in every shadow pattern-matched "asphyxiation by nitrogen" with "gas chambers," told all their friends that "Alabama is doing a Nazi thing," and then they all ran with it.
Regarding humane forms of execution, seeing as two things the US has in excess are fentanyl and guns, I always figured we should dope them up and then shoot them in the head, but that would run afoul of the unwritten rule that execution must be as clean and sanitized as possible so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the executioners. To which I say if we as a society can't stomach the sight of someone's brains splattered against a wall then we may as well abolish the death penalty because we clearly can't handle the weight of the responsibility.
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.
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
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
11mo ago
It seems to me that many places outside of East Asia, mostly but not exclusively in the Anglosphere and Northern Europe, had within living memory (and in quite a lot of them still have, as a matter of fact) safe schools, clean streets, and as much innovation as there ever has been. The greatest advances in science and technology took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time with a much more restrictive social order than we have today, and I remain unconvinced that the removal of these restrictions through successive waves of progressivism and liberalization over the past century has done anything to make us more innovative in engineering, literature, etc. One would be better off making arguments for those changes on deontological grounds than by any utilitarian calculation of scientific or artistic output.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.
Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.
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
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
9mo ago
The change happened last year as a nationalist PR move by Erdogan, partially motivated by annoyance at having the same name as a dumb-looking bird and partially by a sense of pride in being able to force foreigners to use their endonym. More broadly, there does seem to have been a slightly higher rate of country name changes in the past few years (Turkey to Türkiye, Czech Republic to Czechia, Swaziland to eSwatini, and Macedonia to North Macedonia).
The Islamic Golden Age was really more of a Persian Golden Age than anything else given the backgrounds of most of its eminent figures, and even today Iran is no slouch when it comes to intellectual achievement, producing multiple Fields medalists, and sending many brilliant science and engineering students to study abroad (in the course of interacting with international students in graduate school, Iran was the country I came away with the greatest increase in respect for).
I think the clearest test of the cousin marriage IQ reduction hypothesis would be in South Asia, where we can directly compare Muslims who have practiced cousin marriage for several centuries now with their non-Muslim neighbors who should be otherwise genetically identical (controlling for caste origin and language group), but I don't know if anyone has done that particular experiment. Just looking at how dysfunctional Pakistan is I assume it must be bad for them somehow.
As for Arab Christians being smarter, that's the result of the least successful and poorest among them leaving the community each generation by converting to Islam in order to avoid paying the jizya tax. I think the amount of black admixture in Arab Muslims is 5% or less, similar to your average Mexican or Afrikaner, so not enough to affect appearance or much else.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
After decades of ridiculous claims, I will believe that we have been visited by aliens the moment one of these whistleblowers tosses an extraterrestrial corpse onto a table in broad daylight and not a moment sooner. Maybe not even then, unless they released a chemical analysis report along with it.
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.
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
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
11d ago
Myanmar
The Burmese Civil War rumbles on, with rebel forces pulling back from Myawaddy on the Thai border, because apparently the Karen National Army and the Karen National Liberation Army don't get along. All the same, the map still isn't looking good for the central government, with attacks on all fronts, fighting on the outskirts of Mandalay, and the Arakan Army closing in on the regional capital of Sittwe. At this point the partition of the country into 5 or more states seems inevitable, which seems like it will be mostly a victory for traffickers of drugs, arms, and people, who can thrive in the chaos of a half dozen failed states. But hey, maybe one of these ethnic groups will thrive without the Bamar boot on their neck and end up building a successful and prosperous society. Here's hoping.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I'm of the opinion that once you start debating what is or isn't a "real" member of a given category, it's time to switch to E-prime or else risk No true Scotsman-ing your way from Orkney to Newcastle. In this case the relevant question can be phrased with the verb form i.e. not "Is [person] a mother?" but rather "Does [person] mother [child]?"
As a relevant example, I didn't know that my grandmother was not my father's biological mother until after she died; neither he nor any of his siblings had ever brought it up. I don't think I have ever even heard him say the word "stepmom" before, as he refers to them as "my mom" and "my biological mother." It's unclear to me how unusual this is, though I assume it is more likely the younger the child and the more absent the biological parent is when the stepparent takes over (in this case 4 years old and dead, respectively).
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Japanese life may seem depressing from a western perspective, but what they have managed to do that nearly every other country has not has been to adapt to modernity without losing the core of their culture. Rather than splintering into one faction that blindly apes Americanized global culture and one that tries with desperate futility to turn back the clock to the good old days, as most societies have (see Dubai vs ISIS, Westernized Russian oligarchs vs Putin-style revanchists, etc.) they have adopted the technological trappings of the West without becoming a poor imitation of it, and are able to export their own culture back in the form of anime, samurai movies, video games, food, and the general sense that there is something ineffably different about them and their way of life.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
Most interesting so far are his thoughts on culture. I don't know how accurate his numbers are, but at one point he posits a cycle where 1. a seemingly race-neutral policy (the war on drugs) is enacted, 2. the policy is used in a racist manner (he says that it was unevenly enforced on blacks despite whites having similar issues), 3. successful members of the minority group accept the criticism (ie. middle class blacks take to lambasting their own kind for being drug dealers and addicts).
This position, and all of Kendi's arguments really, hinges on the assumption that racial inequities can under no circumstances be caused by cultural or biological differences. He argues that because drug policies were unevenly enforced that they must be racist, because if you assume there can be no difference in rates of drug abuse or crime between any two populations then the only thing that could lead to uneven enforcement is racism, but if that assumption doesn't hold the whole edifice falls apart. The reason that Kendi and his supporters hold so much sway over contemporary political discourse in America is because almost no one is willing to challenge this assumption in public, and if you don't then you have no choice but to tacitly accept the framing they have presented, and you can only argue at the margins for how to best implement antiracist policies.
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.
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