SSCReader
2yr ago
I’ll agree to a point. I think these are absolutely crimes, however, I don’t believe that anyone else of his social status would have been prosecuted on them.
It's not social status which made him vulnerable, but his lack of political protection. You think people didn't want Bush that bad? But he had cover from his family and the deep layer of political allies and hangers-on built up over decades.
Remember the people moving behind the scenes are sharks. They don't operate on hate. They are dead eyed U-boat commanders with a battleship in their sights with no anti-sub destroyers getting in the way. Trump is being moved against because it is rationally the best political way to beat him. He loves a close in knife-fight, he has big guns, his populist support gives him armor, but he is weak in real political operative allies. His staff picks turn on him or go down in flames, his lawyers turn against him. His weakness is below the waterline not above it. That is what separates him from other modern presidents.
You don't sink the Tirpitz with another battleship, its too risky. If it lacks cover you send planes or subs. You only need a couple of good hits to take it out with little risk. If you lose a few planes or even a sub, who cares? It's a good trade.
Why move against Trump in ways, you didn't against other presidents? Because you CAN.
Interestingly, a Democratic nominee Trump would have less of this weakness because the DNC is very good at using its connections for the benefit of their candidates while the RNC is either less capable of this, or somewhat ideologically opposed to it overall (or both).
SSCReader
2yr ago
Many people claims to be in favor of free speech and free thought until it conflicts with their own beliefs. This is I would argue the default for most people, left and right. There are a handful of principled libertarians who are able to maintain their stance but it is very rare in my experience.
Prager is an example. Elon Musk also. He wouldn't lift Alex Jones' ban because of it's closeness to his emotions around losing a child. It is useful to claim to be in favor of free speech and thought when you are the one being censored. It is then expedient to be in favor of censorship when it is your hobby horses that you are able to censor others on. This is the way of social power and control. And because we are very good at rationalizing our own beliefs it isn't even necessarily a conscious technique
SSCReader
1yr ago
Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.
And that means your alarm can be false. Like people who internalize that they should feel shame about approaching members of the opposite sex even respectfully or who feel shame about feeling sexual attraction at all.
So you can't use the alarm to tell you there is a serious problem. All it can do is warn you that you have internalized that X is a problem. It doesn't do much to tell you if X is a problem really.
My grandfather was raised in an ultra strict Quaker offshoot, where any contact with the outside world was seen to be wrong and that music was sinful. He felt ashamed of listening to a choir in the less strict Church of Ireland he later moved to. Is hearing a Christian choir a serious problem he should have been alerted to? Or was his sense of shame miscalibrated because his society was simply wrong?
In other words, I agree shame and shaming is an intrinsic part of the human condition and that it exists to bring together societies through incentivizing behaviors your society see as positive. What it can't do is actually tell you if those behaviors are or are not positive in and of themselves. Because shame is sub-conscious.
And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers. That is the lesson I personally think all ideologies need to learn. Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.
You might argue the results have been wretched, but obviously enough people felt the previous situation was ALSO wretched enough in order to overthrow it.
SSCReader
2yr ago
I invite my fellow academics to backyard barbecues with my (self-proclaimed) gun nut Red Tribe neighbours regularly. They don't hate each other and neither side wants the other dead. If you think the majority of normal Blue Tribe Americans want you (as a stand in for the Red Tribe) dead, I think you are entirely incorrect. I am a part time academic who works in a very Blue city and lives in a very Red rural town.
If they did they wouldn't turn up at bbqs and make polite small talk while passing the potato salad with each other. Do not confuse signals boosted by the Toxoplasma of Rage for the views of the majority of ordinary Americans.
If they hated you, if they wanted you dead, then they would be taking direct actual concrete steps towards doing so. Small Red towns like my own would have a rash of car bombings and the like. It's not as if it is difficult to find Red Tribers. Trans issues overwhelmingly affect Blue tribe kids not Red Tribe ones for instance.
Humans can be ugly and people often indulge in schadenfreude when people they disagree with suffer yes. But that isn't the same thing as actively wanting them dead. People often say things they do not mean and do not act on. That's why the saying is "actions speak louder than words". If Arugula eating Prius driving death squads start rolling out into my town then your rhetoric may match reality. But you're not even at Troubles level hate let alone that.
Maybe it's an American thing. You have been the greatest at almost everything for so long that you think you are at hating your own countrymen. When to an outsider you're barely at lukewarm dislike at a population level. You're not even kneecapping people who marry across tribes let alone killing them! You're not even in the hatred game, let alone pros.
If this is what you think of as hate, then you are very lucky. You're pretty much just LARPing as far as I can tell. Performative hate is not real hate. It's what you do when you don't actually have someone to hate properly. You're the greatest most powerful nation on earth. No-one can challenge you. No-one is a real threat. You can neuter one of your biggest historical enemies by throwing a few dollars at a proxy and watch as they learn all over again that you can buy their humiliation with your pocket change, like Yeltsin in an American supermarket.
Like supporters of a football club whose deadly rivals are now three divisions below you, you have to turn that emotion somewhere. But it isn't real. It's a mirage. You're fighting over whether you would win the league by more points if you bought a new goalkeeper or subbed on that teen prodigy for more of the game. Blowing up tiny irrelevancies into fights so you can at least get a scrap in after the match. Your culture war is entertainment. You can root for your side against the other, wear the flag and the shirt and the hat. You yell and scream and jeer like Eagles fans at the Cowboys. Yet you're not even pelting Santa Claus with bottles!
You're not Eagles fans or Millwall fans, you're the country equivalent of Manchester United in the Ferguson era. The only enemy strong enough to be a challenge are yourselves. Fighting over whether you eat prawn sandwiches or a pie. The question is whether Man City or Liverpool will rebound enough for you to have to turn your gaze outward again.
Your internal hatred is but a pale shadow of what it used to be. Barely even worth the name in my opinion. If this is your nations hatred, then everything is going to be just fine. You're just not good at it. You're far too hopeful as a nation. It's one of your most endearing qualities as a foreigner. I've seen real population level hate. I've seen it in Northern Ireland and I've seen it in the Balkans and I've seen it in Rwanda. But not here. And hopefully I never will.
SSCReader
6mo ago
And how do they repay this generosity (remember, the hedge fund could just have summarily dismissed them which based on "these people have no idea how a domain controller works" basically seems like the right decision)?
It's not generosity, it is a business decision. The chances are these smaller shops have got some kind of weird IT kludge mess of stuff going on that only the people running it know how it works. You could fire them and bring someone else in but then they have to untangle someone else's work, which will take time, and money. Training someone isn't that expensive and allows you to hit the ground running from day 1.
That some of the employees will then leverage that training into a better job is just the cost of doing business. It's not a friendship it's a transactional relationship. The hedge fund wasn't providing training out of the goodness of their heart it was based upon the cost/benefit. They got 6 months of time where the IT person was keeping everything running, presumably starting to apply their new skills. The employee owes them nothing beyond the work they were paid for. And if the hedge fund can get someone else in for less than the IT person would stay for later it's a win win. They got through the transition period (which is the toughest part with all new IT staff, when assimilating a new company/branch) successfully.
Successful hedge funds aren't stupid, if they are using this model it is because in general it is maximizing the chances of success.
SSCReader
1yr ago
Because it can amount to torture, and we don't generally allow parents to do that. Parental rights are not unlimited.
I lost a child myself, so I understand the pain and grief the parents are going through. But if the child is in significant pain and is not able to be treated ( which doctors seem to agree on), then its a choice of a long drawn out painful death or a quicker painful death. The parents in this state may not be able to make objective choices about what is best for their child.
SSCReader
2yr ago
That creates a loophole of Tolkienesque proportions. All the AIs are women.
Edit: Meant this as a direct reply to @HlynkaCG.
I think the bit you are missing is that the liberal western order is itself a solution to the Hobbes position. Rather than an authoritarian regime, it turns out, if you convince everyone that everyone else is actually a good person, and create a whole strata of social pressures and reinforcements, if you create that illusion so convincing so that you treat people that way...then you can have a bunch of red in tooth and claw apes crammed into close proximity...and almost all of them end up not trying to murder each other.
Far from looking at the weakness of the liberal order, consider its triumph. There is a reason people want to move to the liberal world, because the illusion actually creates a better place.
If you think that Hobbes was right about fundamental human nature then the liberal world order is an astonishing accomplishment. It has successfully pushed the violent to the fringes. Millions upon millions of animals are packed like sardines into tiny metal boxes every day and DO NOT kill each other!
Now yes, it does then struggle to deal with those fringes, because the whole illusion hinges on people essentially believing everyone is decent. But that is a much smaller problem than much less successful places. I've been to Nairobi and Pakistan and China and the liberal order is significantly better.
You're focussing on the Leviathan shaped hole, without noticing how tiny it is compared to what Hobbes would predict. Significantly more freedom than the authoritarian feudal sovereigns he envisaged would be needed to control humanities base impulses.A place where most people act as if a sovereign has presence even when it doesn't. Where large numbers of them obey traffic lights even when no-one else is around! Human nature tamed by human socialization.
The Liberal civilizational illusion is a triumph of order over chaos. An order created primarily by social behaviors and a great lie. A lie that becomes truth when we believe it to be true. An emergent system that has outcompeted every rival. Communism? Wrecked. Feudalism? Imploded. Libertarianism? Can't even get a foothold.
And you are quibbling over how it has not been 100% successful in controlling human nature? Thats like complaining your football team won 42-7, because they let a single touchdown in. Sure its not perfect, but it is very close!
To restate in your example, the whole reason you can have hundreds of people in tight proximity in a tiny metal tube and that only a random schizophrenic causes trouble is because of how utterly brilliant the liberal order is. You don't notice all the things it prevents, because they didn't happen in the first place.
SSCReader
2yr ago
But then again--would Clinton have lost, to anyone else?
Yes, the fundamentals indicate that after a two term Democratic president with a not great economy and not great ending polls, the Republicans SHOULD have won. A generic Republican Candidate would have I think beaten a generic Democratic candidate all else being equal. Both Hillary and Trump were I think below par candidates. There's a universe where Trump never entered and X beats Hillary in a landslide I think.
SSCReader
2yr ago
The same is true for cooking, painting, sculpting, etc. If you're a chef, you get to tap into a better understanding of what another chef is making for you and why it is interesting.
If it's fake though, your better understanding is at best just noise. If you think you are psychic and can see auras, you will think you have more to say about people's words and truthfulness and the multi colored auras may even add beauty to their speech. But if you have a brain tumour then none of that information is true. If you call the FBI and tell them you know Bob Smith is going to kill someone, whether you have true or fake information is critical.
The same for an astronomer, if you think the reason for some phenomena is God and it is not, then you are further away from the actual truth.
You are correct that the Catholic has additional context and information, but that is only a good thing if they are actually correct. If not it may well be actively harmful. If it was only taken within the aesthetic context than that isn't really a problem. But I would argue that history shows that people are really very bad at keeping their beliefs in that sphere.
If Catholicism is wrong that gay sex is sinful and instead Gay God thinks it is the most virtuous act and gets you into Heaven, then that additional information being taught may have doomed hundreds of thousands of people to Hell. Whether your additional information is accurate or not is basically the whole point, if you are going to try to teach and pressure people into following it.
Catholics can certainly be scientists however no question, the ones that are generally focus on the fact that God created a universe that He wants to be explored with reason. So while God might be the ultimate cause of a super nova, the proximate cause was running out of hydrogen or whatever. Whether the sense of wonder of Godly creation outweighs the materialistic sense of wonder about a vast universe of chaos and beauty does not seem to be proven though.
SSCReader
2yr ago
She can only assume that I carry a gun because I'm a violent man, that I put it on her coffee table as an implicit threat to her, that I went to the bar that night with the intention of finding a woman to rape or murder, that my current calm and natural friendly demeanor means that I'm not just a violent man but a total sociopath who enjoys violence, she calculates quickly that her best chance of getting out of this alive is to do whatever I want, to overperform and hope I spare her life.
This is basically just Dennis's implication process right? Only unintentional. There is an implication of danger (the gun, or being on the open ocean with no way to escape). Given that men are generally bigger and stronger than women, an interpretation would be, that the implication is always there, the nowhere to run or possession of a gun just makes it more text and less subtext, perhaps.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-yUafzOXHPE
Dennis: We’ve gotta pop by the department store, pick up the mattress. I’m gonna get a nice one too.
Mac: The what? The mattress? What do we need a mattress for?
Dennis: What do you mean what do we need a mattress for? Why in the hell do you think we just spent all that money on a boat? The whole point of buying a boat in the first place is to get the ladies nice and tipsy topside, so we can take em to a nice comfortable place below deck, and you know… they can’t refuse. Because of the implication.
Mac: Oh, uh… okay. You had me going there for the first part. The second half kind of threw me.
Dennis: Dude, dude, think about it. She’s out in the middle of nowhere with some dude she barely knows. She looks around and what does she see? Nothing but open ocean. “Ahhh, there’s nowhere for me to run. What am I going to do? Say no?”
Mac: Okay… that seems really dark.
Dennis: Nah, it’s not dark. You’re misunderstanding me bro.
Mac: I think I am.
Dennis: Yeah, you are. Because if the girl said no, then the answer is obviously no.
Mac: No. Right.
Dennis: But the thing is she’s not going to say no. She would never say no. Because of the implication.
Mac: Now… you’ve said that word, “implication” a couple of times. What implication?
Dennis: The implication that things might go wrong for her if she refuses to sleep with me. Not that things are going to go wrong for her, but she’s thinking that they will.
Mac: But it sounds like she doesn’t want to have sex.
Dennis: Why aren’t you understanding this?
Mac: I don’t…
Dennis: She doesn’t know whether she wants to have sex with me. That’s not the issue.
Mac: Are you going to hurt women?
Dennis: I’m not going to hurt these women!
Mac: Oh okay.
Dennis: Why would I ever hurt these women?
Mac: I don’t know.
Dennis: I feel like you’re not getting this at all.
Mac: I’m not getting it.
Dennis: God damn... (looks over at woman shopping nearby) well don’t you look at me like that. You certainly wouldn’t be in any danger.
Mac: So they are in danger!
Dennis: No one’s in any danger! How could I make that any more clear to you? Okay. It’s an implication of danger.
Mac: (Stares silently at Dennis in response)
SSCReader
2yr ago
Anyone have any examples of an employee union that improves business for both employees and employer?
This is like asking for examples of a defence lawyer making things better for the state prosecutor (barring mistakes or incompetence). That isn't their job. The relationship is adversarial in that getting better conditions (pay, breaks etc.) for employees will generally cost X and that X is money the company could have spent elsewhere or taken as profit.
The reason unions protect bad employees is the same reason that defence lawyers defend the guilty as well as the innocent. Because the companies incentives do not necessarily align with the employees and therefore a bad employee from the companies perspective is not an objective measure. In an employer friendly location like the US, it might make sense for companies to fire employees for very little as long as the labor supply is good, but socially that may not be desirable. Also its tricky to get people to join unions if you have a reputation for throwing them under the bus when they get in trouble.
The question you should be asking is in totality taking into account employees, companies and society in general are unions an improvement or not? And that is a much trickier question to answer. It's quite possible a union could be a net good but be bad for the company itself.
Having said that unions definitely can and do soft shoe things when they are dealing with poor employees. They just can't advertise that for the above reasons. But if you deal with them you can tell. Do they go for the throat and be aggressive or do they just show up at the meeting make some notes, pat the employee on the shoulder and advise them to take the written warning etc. I've fired people while dealing with public sector and private sector unions and they do have ways of dialing back support for employees they think themselves are a problem. Which is not to say they do that all the time, but they can.
Nope: Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 51% supported Harris while 47% supported Trump. Gen Z men did go 55% for Trump though. Women went 58% for Harris. That is closer than it was in 2020 however but still not a majority for Trump in Gen Z, let alone overwhelming.
Though I don't think that would suggest they are indoctrinated into wokeness either to be fair. A basically 50/50 split wouldn't support that (or at least that things like the economy can override whatever woke feelings there are).
Edit - It actually seems to be closer to 54% for Harris and 43% for Trump depending on which exit polls you aggregate. Which doesn't change the argument much.
Probably with some introspection about why you feel violent disgust, so you can control that reaction I think. The below is my own interpretation and idea of the space.
The whole point of the space is I should want even (or especially perhaps!) the people I find violently disgusting to read what I say and want to respond to me so we can have a dialogue.
So if I am going to talk about something I find disgusting I have to take a distant view of it and try to be more dispassionate.
You'll note many people who catch repeated bans it's because they can't (or won't) disguise a seething anger that underlies their post. They aren't thinking first and foremost how do I write this in a way a progressive gay librarian (for example!) would want to engage with. They are writing from emotion first and foremost.
I could rant for days about the damage the Christian "brain parasite" does, and have in other places, but here if I post about it, it has to be with the idea I WANT Christians to read and engage. And calling their faith, something they feel very seriously about a parasite is not going to optimise for light over heat. It's starting an argument not a discussion. Its already a steep ask for them to try and discuss their own heartfelt beliefs with criticism, so my job is to try and make that as easy as possible for them, by trying to remove as much heat as I can.
I rewrite my posts usually after thinking if I were an X, how would i feel about the language being used to talk about the principles and actions I hold dear? How do I alter it so we can engage in a discussion not a fight? Try to put myself in the shoes of whoever I think believes the things I hate or find disgusting and edit my wording to offend them the least possible to make my point. I'm not always successful I don't think, but I have never got a ban or even a warning (that I recollect), so I think I get reasonably close.
You have to want to actually communicate with the people whose ideas you hate and find violently dusgusting I think, to get the most out of this space. But of course for most people they don't want to communicate with people like that. So not everyone is a good fit for what the space is supposed to be. If you can't at least pretend you WANT to engage with someone whose ideas you hate viscerally and are critiquing and make some effort to aid that, you'll probably be picking up Mod actions sooner rather than later.
Edit - spelling
SSCReader
5mo ago
Just by numbers most people in government posts are people who deal with the public and just want a job. Your description really only applies at management layers and above. Remember only a third of federal employees even have a degree let alone one in communications or similar, and many of those are in the Medical field as part of the VA and the like. Entertainingly USAID is the best counter-example with two thirds of its workforce having an advanced degree or higher! But that is not the norm across the Federal bureaucracy.
Your social security local office people are dealing with being yelled at by people losing their welfare and the like, they are VERY familiar with the lower/underclass and all their foibles and are probably not true believers in ideology as much as they are average workers worrying about making ends meet. Their direct managers will be as well. The local DMV is staffed by people from or close to the ghetto in fact here, so that wouldn't apply even for a lot of local government jobs. Remember most government jobs just by numbers are front facing. It wasn't until I moved to the higher echelons in the Civil Service I found all the politics and classics degree types.
From the point of view of the Federal government that would probably be the Senior Executive Service, of which there are about 9,000. If I were wanting to re-organize the Federal bureaucracy I would start with those 9,000 because they manage large projects and departments (basically the steps below political appointees) But of the sheer scale of the government in the US the vast majority do not appear to match your description.
In other words, the person most likely to take a government post is a non-degree having, neo-customer service worker, who (if you have never worked a customer facing job like that) will be very clear about how the rubber meets the road. Your Ivory Tower idea really only applies to a small minority in the upper ends of the government (but they are of course much more influential.)
SSCReader
11mo ago
Justice Jackson has already shown herself to be an unsophisticated jurist who simply votes for whatever seems Wokest,
I think, our ongoing series of Supreme Court analysis has indicated otherwise no? She has sided with the conservatives against the other liberal justices on multiple occasions particularly in criminal cases like the January 6th case.
Indeed she has been slightly less liberal than Sotomayor or Kagan:
" Jackson has voted slightly less liberal than the other two non-conservatives on the bench—59 percent of the time to Sotomayor's 63 percent and Kagan's 65 percent"
In fact to the extent there are op ed pieces about her not living up to expectations as a liberal appointment.
"Jackson, the most recent addition to the bench, joining in 2022, has surprised some since taking her seat on the Supreme Court. This term, President Joe Biden's appointee, and the first Black female justice, unexpectedly sided with her conservative colleagues on a number of cases, including Fischer vs. United States, a major case pertaining to January 6."
SSCReader
1yr ago
In a normal society, housing is not a politically important issue. Its just a good like any other.
I don't think this is true. Housing will always be a politically important issue, and it should be. There are so many tensions pulling different ways. Old people want to keep value and pass it to their kids, young people want affordable housing (unless they are getting the inheritance!), what type of housing and how much is something people complain about all the time. Whether it is a neighbor complaining about a single house being built too tall or a community complaining about low-rent housing. 30 years ago half the complaints I was dealing with in a local authority in the Midlands in England were about housing one way or another.
It's impossible to satisfy all the competing demands at once, which means politics. Housing is not a good like any other because you can't pick it up and move it with you. It is tied to a locale and to a community. HOA's as much as people hate them form for a reason. Where we live, how much it costs and who gets to live next to us, is probably one of the fundamental bedrocks of politics, from HOA's to redlining and segregation, affordable housing NIMBY/YIMBY.
So I would say it can be both that Canada is a normal society, that housing is a politically important issue and that getting the balance of competing interests wrong can have a huge knock on effect onto society.
SSCReader
1yr ago
I think the issues is, that your approach doesn't do anything better, than the materialist approach you decry.
If you can't tell a predictive dream apart from a normal one until after, then functionally nothing changes. If some percentage of farmers who pray for their crops to grow it works, but we don't know when or why, then we are going to have to use fertilizer and act as if there is no such intervention. If you can't tell whether the trauma of watching your wife get murdered in front of you is going to give you (or her!) telekinesis to stop the attack, then you are going to have to try plain old violence.
If you can't tell if you are in the world of 40K's warp, or the world of the Christian God, or the world of Bigfoot, then you don't know if you should be trying to manifest the Imperial Truth, or following the 10 commandments or sending out hunting parties into Oregon. And given there is a near infinite probability space, and you can't predict, measure or know which of the 40,000 options you should be doing, then probably you should not do any of them. Or maybe pick a couple at random, but being aware that your chances of being right are near zero.
The reason why materialism is ascendant is that it can be used every day in the smallest of ways. Christians don't just pray for a church to appear, they build them out of brick and mortar. Islamists don't just pray for their enemies to be defeated, they buy guns and go and murder them. From the point of view of everyday life, a world where God exists but does not answer prayers, and a world where God does not exist are identical. Materialism is at the very least, mostly right. Whereas, all of your examples can't be collectively right. Some of them must be wrong, because they are contradictory, but you don't offer any way to tell which.
I would suggest the traumatic transcendence is unlikely because the world is FULL of trauma. If that was all that was needed, then the world should be full of observable examples (even if they can't be repeated!). Were Jews not under enough trauma? The man forced to watch his family murdered before he was tortured to death by cartels? Gang raped girls? Either this has to be so unlikely, otherwise we would see many more examples, (at which point it is again functionally irrelevant) or it simply does not happen.
Bacon's position likewise has a problem, if we have collectively realized our own reality and we can't opt out of it or change it, just by being aware of it, then it is once again fundamentally useless, you can't tell the difference between a world where it is true and where it is not and the only correct response must be to live in the world as it is. Incidentally this is very similar to the collective reality as posited in the Mage: the Ascension White Wolf RPG, where the "awakened" mages are able to substitute their reality (magic) against the consensus reality of humanity as influenced by the Technocracy. But they could do so repeatedly, though risking the punishment of the universe in so doing. (As an aside Roger Bacon was an influential mage in that reality), their long term goal was to break humanity free of the current paradigm, back to the older one where consensus reality was much more malleable.
However the reason humanity embraced the current paradigm was because it was safer, dragons and demons and other monsters (there were those seeking to inflict madness and corruption into the world) were banished by the light of reason, which meant that there were arguments that Mages were trying to wake humanity into a much more dangerous world and that they did not have the right to do so. Even if Bacon is correct, is a world with less predictability actually better? Or have we manifested this world because it is the one where we have the best chance?
SSCReader
1yr ago
Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing? Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.
The question there (setting aside laws and the like) is, what if there aren't enough people to hire otherwise? Remember that unemployment is pretty low in the US currently, so are there enough people you could actually attract, in the area you need them, for the lower wages you are refusing to hike? With the skillset you need, and all at the same time so you don't have to shut down anyway because you need at least a 100 or 300 or 3000 factory workers all at the same time? And then you need to train them, and who is going to train them with your experienced staff just been fired?
That's a gamble in and of itself. And the more people are in the union, or who won't work as scabs (because they are in an affiliated union or something) the harder it becomes. Now if truckers refuse to deliver to you because they are crossing a strike line and so on. A strike is a balancing act where labor does hold some cards, because replacing them will cost time and money, and a short term shock can kill a company. They leverage that in exchange for better conditions.
Recruiting large numbers of new workers is very expensive and it takes time your cash reserves may not be able to support.
Firing everyone who tries to unionize (again ignoring laws for the moment) would be a signal that you want to hamstring the power of labor. Which is entirely reasonable for an employer to do, but then it is also entirely reasonable for labor to move to an employer who doesn't if available. If you can manage it and keep your staff then you win, but if they have other better options you lose.
Then of course labor can elect politicians who put in place anti union busting laws which is also entirely reasonable for them to do, leveraging their numbers for advantage. And employers can leverage their advantage (wealth) to lobby politicians for anti-union laws. Whomever is more effective gets an advantage and so round we go. That's what it means to have the adversarial relationship you spoke of. Employees using the options they have available to try and better their conditions, with Companies doing the same.
SSCReader
2yr ago
As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?
Probably the best idea would be to breakdown the individual positions. Taking my working class neighbors at their word the positions they are roughly in favor of are (not a complete list of course):
-
Reduced immigration - Right coded
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Traditional morality/End of wokeness/American values taught in schools - Right coded
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Universal Healthcare for Americans - Left coded
-
Regulations on businesses to prevent them screwing over workers pensions/workers comp - Left coded
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Cheap college for their kids - Left coded
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Federal money into rural/rust belt communities - Both?
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Protectionist trade/manufacturing policies - Right coded nowadays?
I live in a rustbelt town where my neighbors are ex miners/steelworkers and the like. Notably Bernie Sanders got a pretty good reception nearby when talking about holding big businesses accountable for pensions and better access to healthcare. My neighbors don't want their kids to be miners or steelworkers because they have the injuries, missing fingers, limps, bad backs and the like to show for it. They want their kids to have "better" careers and options than they did. And for most that means they want them sitting in an office. And that means mostly a college degree. That's why so many want to send their kids off to college. Not all of course and I think if you look at plumbers and other tradesmen it changes somewhat. But most of the manual workers emphatically do not want their kids to have to do what they did. For better or worse, they have bought in, I think to the American dream, which involves higher education.
Trump was popular here for campaigning on/towards 1,2, 6 and 7. Bernie Sanders would have hit 3, 4, 5 and 6 perhaps. 6 is unclear politically because farm subsidies and green subsidies are in play for both sides so depending on framing spending could be either. Though it would probably annoy the Libertarian leaning wing of the Republican party. 7 used to be more left wing Union sides leaning but is probably more associated with Trump style populism now.
Interestingly the poisoning of the idea of unions has been very effective. My neighbors might wish there was a group that would advocate for the workers and protect them against rich business owners outsourcing their companies to India or Mexico, but they don't want unions because they associate that with corruption and the like. Trust in the Federal government is low, but the idea that the Federal government SHOULD protect it's working people over business owners is pretty strong, they would be likely to call big Business leaning Republicans as RINOS and the like. Whereas a century ago miners unions fought near wars against mining companies for workers rights.
Some excerpts from Sanders town hall in "Trump Country"
"He (Sanders) reminded everyone of how hard he was working to get Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to restore pensions and health care that they had been cheated of by the mining companies."
"They applauded Philip Lucion, an almost painfully sincere coal miner, recently rehired (Thanks, Mr. Trump!), when he told them, “I love being a coal miner, that’s what’s in my blood.” They also applauded when he said that most miners he knew would quit and do something else for the same pay and benefits if they could."
"They agreed with Bernie that climate change is real"
"Coal mining, they knew, killed you quick or killed you slow, and the only way to get anything out of it was to make a serious demand on power."
"Their support for “Medicare for all” seems genuine,"
This one was from a different town hall in PA:
"When the town hall moved to Medicare for All, the single-payer health-care plan that Sanders backs, Baier asked for a show of hands from everyone currently getting health care through their employer: Most of the hands in the room went up, Baier's and Sanders's among them. Then came the follow-up. "Of those," Baier asked, "how many are willing to transition to what the senator says, a government-run system?" Hands fired back up and the crowd began cheering."
A working class Republican party would be like a Trump/Sanders unity ticket. Trump's immigration and MAGA and protectionism combined with targeting the proceeds at the working class through healthcare, pensions and siding against big business/ the 1%.
SSCReader
2yr ago
I have never understood the word "groomer" to be a synonym for pedophile, and in fact it is not a synonym for pedophile.
The word groomer is used because to most people it codes to pedophile. It is an effective political attack for that reason. If I were still in politics and working for the Republicans I would certainly be encouraging them to use it as an attack, but if it didn't have that connotation it would not be an effective political attack in the first place. Fascist is an effective political attack on right wingers because people generally think Nazis are bad. Groomer is an effective political attack on left wingers because people generally think that people who groom kids for sex are bad. They wouldn't be used if they didn't carry that emotional valence.
As for other words you could use, how about priest, or vicar, or Rabbi or sunday school teacher. Not in the pedophile sense again, but in the sense that this is how sexual morality in adults was formed. By teaching kids that masturbation is sinful, that homosexuality is sinful, that sex before marriage is sinful and so on. And for a long period of time this was the dominant waters that kids growing up swam through, even if their parents did not want that. That is the genesis of the woke movement you are criticizing. The rebellion against this enforced cultural teaching and the harm (as they see it, but see below) it did to kids who did not do well in that system. Hold onto that idea for a moment.
You mention it being done secretly or against your wishes but that is not relevant to the groomer tag in this scenario. I could teach your kids how to fish against your wishes and secretly and you are unlikely to call me a groomer. The key must then be WHAT is being taught. Would you call these secular teachers groomers if they were teaching your kids secretly that America is great even if you thought it was terrible? So to answer the question what do we call people who try to adjust and manipulate the sexuality of kids? Society, priests, nuns, teachers, parents, peers, televangelists, therapists, writers, and yes pedophilic groomers. It's one of the core roles of society, to set and teach boundaries on all sorts of human interaction and that includes sex and relationships. Which doesn't mean that we can't make a value judgement about which are better and which are worse, just to be clear. But almost everyone trying to mold the sexuality of kids are not pedophiles, they are not grooming them for abuse.
My RE teacher taught me about how Onan was sinful and I very much did not want to be there to learn that. If teaching a kid that is ok to be trans or gay or to masturbate is grooming, then teaching the opposite should also get the same brush. Are nuns at Catholic schools groomers when they teach not to do X or that Y is bad and will get you sent to hell and have you grow hairy palms?
I come to you as a veteran of the Atheist wars. There once was a passion burning bright in my breast about religion. I would literally call religious parents and priests child abusers. Not for pedophilia (though that was of course a useful weapon!) but because they are teaching kids what (in my opinion!) is utter nonsense. They are damaging their mental and intellectual and moral development. They are monsters. Or so my old self would have told you long and loudly and quite possibly whether you wanted to hear it or not.
Now that fire has dimmed with age and experience, and I no longer think religious parents and rabbis and the like are evil child abusers. I still think they are wrong, but I now understand they are doing their best to try and raise their kids and other peoples kids with values they think are beneficial. Indoctrination isn't in itself bad. All societies must indoctrinate their children into something. It's the only way to get a cohesive polity. So even though I think they are harming these children (albeit without meaning to), I accept it.
To go back to the original question I would suggest not using any new term at all. Anytime we put labels on groups we don't like it makes it more difficult to be charitable and welcoming to that group, and for me the most important rules of this space are those around writing like we our opponents are reading and we WANT them to be here. My suggestion is simply to address particular instances of behavior without using a particular term for those doing it.
"I find it very worrying that there are teachers who have been revealed to be secretly supportive of kids transitioning without telling their parents. I think this is bad because it robs the parents of their agency, it assumes they are bad people, and because I believe that trans behavior is likely socially conditioned and no child would know at that age. I think that kids supported on this route may well have irreversible harm done to them through puberty blockers and other treatments. I find this to be infuriating at a visceral level."
Now that is a lot wordier than "Did you hear about those groomers trying to sterilize our kids" but it at least gives us specific actions to discuss rather than whether telling kids that masturbation is natural is grooming or whether telling kids masturbation is sinful is emotional abuse. And we are after all at The Motte so we're not scared of a little wordiness are we?
To add on a little more, I do think that both the people who want to teach kids that sex is ok and nothing to be ashamed of and the people who want to teach kids that sex is sinful and shameful both can attract actual pedophiles and abusers. In one case it gives an excuse to broach a subject that can deflect suspicion and in the other it can allow the idea of the shame to coerce kids into not revealing their actions or because the kids don't even realize what it is that is happening through ignorance. Predators will use different tactics in different situations and both situations have failure modes. This absolutely should be kept in mind in both scenarios by everyone who is involved. Most people who want to teach either thing are not pedophiles but both absolutely can and do give cover for "real" child sexual exploitation.
As someone who was involved in anti-CSE activities in government I also am a little worried that using groomers in this context conflates the two and will lead to both false positives and negatives and thus leave kids at more risk of harm. But that cat is probably out of the bag and about to drop a dead bird on the doormat in the wider context unfortunately.
SSCReader
3mo ago
Black people are over-represented in knife crime (6% by population, 14% of knife crime) but that is mostly concentrated in London (47% of knife crime is by black people in London, 36% by whites for comparison), in most of England, particularly the North where the show is set, the vast majority of knife wielding offenders are from the almost entirely white underclass. About 70% of knife offenders are white throughout England. In the North that is likely to be well over 80% just due to demographics.
The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways. And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.
If you are white in England, the chances of being a victim of white knife crime is hugely higher than by black knife crime. 1) Because black people are only 6% of the population and 2) Because violent knife crime is usually intra-ethnic.
White people in England probably have no need to be freaked out by "POC violent youth" at all. Or really violent youth entirely. The homicide rate overall is a fifth of that in the US, and close to a quarter of what there is in a single city, where the bulk of both victims and offenders are not white.
SSCReader
7mo ago
I haven't changed my views, if anything I think the election results supported me. The gap between men and women did not change much at all, (11 points in 2016, 12 points in 2020, 10 points in 2024) The 4B thing is just signaling and will pass, I haven't heard a single woman I know in person mention it. Commentators can claim whatever they want, it doesn't mean they were right. Race, education and urban/rural are still much more important factors than gender. A white rural woman is much more similar to a white rural man than to a black urban woman in this regard.
Even among ages 18-29 the gap between men and women was smaller than in 2020. I don't think there is any evidence here that it is becoming more of a problem in other words.
SSCReader
8mo ago
Note the PA case is about undated/wrongly dated ballots, not ballots that arrive after election day. Meaning they wouldn't be counted if undated even if they arrive BEFORE election day, which is why it was being challenged. Because obviously you know that an undated ballot that arrives before election day was mailed in time. There has been significant debate about that clause in the law by Republicans when they were the ones expanding mail in ballot access to help rural turn out, when they were on the pro side.
Note that the US. Supreme Court may have overruled the PA one and allowed the undated ballots to be converted to provisional ballots for the November election:
The FDA was only in charge of saying whether the drug itself is safe and effective (or safe enough technically I suppose) though. Whether the drug SHOULD be used is outside the FDA's purview. The FDA isn't committing the (proposed) humans rights violations itself.
You could outlaw most abortion and still have the FDA sign off on the drug as safe but it only to be legal to use for cases where the legislature thinks it needs to happen (incest/rape etc.).
The science says this drug ends pregnancies X% of the time with A B and C side effects Z% of the time when taken in Y dosages under Z circumstances. Whether ending a pregnancy should happen is not something the FDA has any say in. So that isn't a human right violation perpetrated under the guise of science.
The FDA says you CAN use this to terminate a pregnancy. But they can't tell you if terminating the pregnancy is legal or moral. Assuming abortion is a human rights violation and is allowed then that would be the fault of the state and federal legislatures for not outlawing it rather than the FDA, surely? Or arguably the fact that enough people don't agree that it is a human rights violation so as to elect politicians who would carry out that agenda.
Otherwise the ATF is on the hook for any human rights violations carried out by firearms they have deemed legal under the relevant statutes as well. Which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
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