Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
5mo ago
Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good?
Selection effects + magic dirt. Indian workers in the US are going to tend to be of a higher caliber than their counterparts that didn't emigrate, but they are also plugged into American institutions rather than Indian ones. It's hard to understate the degree to which institutional quality can impact the performance of individual workers.
The argument is that Kissinger enabled genocides/mass murders in Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, East Timor, etc... and thus bears responsibility for millions of deaths.
I'm not sure how much I buy that argument. Kissinger generally reacted to these events with callous indifference and took the position that they shouldn't affect US foreign policy (see also, his illustrative remark about Soviet Jews: "If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."), but that sort of indifference is pervasive in international politics and Kissinger was mostly just crass enough to be on the record saying it instead of mouthing platitudes. While it doesn't exactly speak well of his moral character, attributing responsibility to him in particular mostly seems to stem from the tendency to treat the US as the only country with agency.
his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed.
Almost nobody actually thinks in these sort of brute consequentialist terms.
Given the way things are going, the Palestinians (or at least the Gazans) will be remembered as perennial losers who wanted to kill Jews more than they wanted to survive. They didn't have to be fucked. There is a direct line between their refusal to back down from maximalist goals of destroying Israel and their present fate of slow strangulation.
I'd be willing to bet that if the Palestinians had adopted Gandhi's strategy, there'd be a Palestinian state right now. But nonviolent resistance until your adversaries are humiliated into submission isn't glamorous as war to the knife against your hated enemies. Hell, if they pursued a more regular unconventional war focused on Israeli military targets they might be there. But as long as they continue to preferentially target Israeli civilians and as long as they continue to assert their intention to destroy Israel there's no way the Israelis will compromise. And every so often there will some harsh reminder to the international community as to why.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
That is a fully general argument for never letting anyone into the country, ever (also unfalsifiable, since when you don't turn up any foreign agents you can just say they're really sneaky) Far more people enter the country legally every year, and some of them are definitely spies. If Russia or China want to send an agent into the US, they can just... put them on a plane. Give them a bullshit job at the embassy (or just overstay a tourist visa). Being "undocumented" isn't a feature for a spy. It's a hindrance.
Imagining myself as an adversary of the United States, I could covertly send unarmed soldiers across the open border, have them obtain weapons on the other side, and then attack.
Teeth of the Tiger was not Clancy's finest work.
I mean, seriously, why? Going to stage an attack on a military base with a few dozen guys using civilian smalls arms? A terrorist attack to put yourself in the top spot on America's shitlist?
the people who pull the strings in the federal government seem to be okay with defacto open borders.
Easy: the US does not have de facto open borders. "De facto open borders" is a mood expression of nativists who don't like current state of immigration enforcement. If we actually had de facto open borders, immigration would be unfathomably higher.
The people who "pull the strings" are wedged because there's no magic solutions to the material factors driving Latino migration. Nobody wants to spend the exorbitant sums it would require to actually physically secure the southern border. Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them. Unfucking Latin America to the point where you don't have tens of millions of people who'd rather be an illegal or quasi-legal day laborer in a country where half the people hate them than stay where they are is a nontrivial exercise, and there isn't much support for that either (try and sell the guy who wants to deport all the Mexicans on spending trillions of dollars failing to develop Latin America). On top of that, the US is like most developed countries in that it has an aging native population that demands increasingly high standards of post-retirement living at the same time the retiree-worker ratio is getting worse, so it also just needs immigrant labor.
New York and other cities are howling about migrants being bussed into their communities, but so far seem reluctant to change their sanctuary city policies.
NY and other blue states already absorb the majority of immigrants, including illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. The central objection remains that the migrant bussing project is done in a maximally disruptive and uncooperative way.
It took about 7 years for a sweeping "don't criticize the government" censorship bill to get passed (Sedition Act), though at least it was widely unpopular and they got rid of it.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth
What stops the enfranchised elite from voting themselves other people's wealth (e.g. enclosure)?
Voting Republican gives some people the "ick".
That, or they don't trust Republicans.
Or polling doesn't capture their priorities (or the polls are just bad).
Or they are tribal and they intuit that Republicans won't accept them.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment.
That's not at all evident in the data. It looks like we need to thank Obama for the upward trend in US oil production. That or people are overcrediting their favorite president for trends that are mostly driven by things other than US executive policy.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
who predict or expect a foreign policy crisis if trump wins , but always fail to articulate what this entails
I can't ascribe this to anything other than not paying attention:
(for just one example I dug up in 20 seconds)
Maybe you agree with these prognostications, maybe you don't. Saying that Trump's critics can't or haven't articulated their positions is just confusing.
I guess they have to keep toeing the 'orange man bad' line even though he was not that bad
"'Orange Man Bad' is the 'Buy index funds' of political commentary.". If historically left-of-center political commentators who have spent the past 8 years criticizing Trump and his policies continue to do so, odds are pretty good that they actually believe it.
If anything, the sudden flurry of "Oh, Trump wasn't that bad"-type statements from figures who previously criticized him reeks of groveling and bet-hedging. Jamie Dimon doesn't have to worry that Biden is going to punish him for making critical statements. Likewise for his many critics within the party who have 'come around'.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
How are Putin and Xi not conservatives and patriots?
I think it's probably more that slotting your favored presidential candidate in alongside a pair of dictators is a weird look, especially when you're also calling your opponents of being hysterical for accusing you of backing a wannabe dictator.
Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.
How many kids do you think would teach themselves math via the internet? Or how to read?
If you want to argue that there's a more efficient and/or effective method of delivering universal education than the status quo, I'm quite willing to believe that. I do not find it plausible that internet-based autodidacticism is one of them.
I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.
Tbf it is a blindspot for everyone; the Motte simply isn't as special in its intellectual virtue as its members might like to think.
We all have behaviors that we instinctively regard as amoral, which is go say we don't think about them at all in a moral sense. To have someone come up and tell us (or even just suggest by their own conduct) that these behaviors are morally bad is highly uncomfortable. Since most people like to think well of themselves, the easiest thing to do is plug your ears and shoot the messenger.
also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.
Per the above, I'm not sure that is really true so much as they're starting in a massive hole when it comes to bringing their arguments. They're often criticizing core behaviors. It doesn't matter how dispassionate you are about discussing the costs of cars and the benefits of transit when your audience treats the very idea as a personal attack. (Yes, there are annoying advocates, but that is hardly distinctive).
--
(Anecdcote: contra everyone else here, apparently, every vegan I've ever met has been an absolute paragon of health and fitness. Doubtless there are confounding factors, but there are only so many times you can see an obese man warn an ultramarathon runner about the risks of his diet before it loses credibility)
Skibboleth
2mo ago
I'm still mentally stuck in thinking what such a progressive male model is supposed to look like, even if we are talking about purely fictional characters.
A conservative male role model with progressive political and social views :V
I'm only being slightly facetious. I think you can point out some culturally-specific differences on the margin (e.g. conservatives are more likely to idealize aggression and embrace sharp gender divisions in interests, progressives are more likely to praise emotional openness and lean away from idea of a man as protector/provider), but I would posit that (at least in the American context) the behavioral ideal of manhood isn't that far apart. And even some apparent political splits are more subcultural than partisan (e.g. compare and contrast Mormon and Southern masculinity)
quoth @dr_analog on conservative* role models
- happy embracing fatherhood
- devoted/providing husband
- works hard
- successful at work
- proud of work
We could strike the word "providing" and have a list that is agreeable in practice to most progressives. Their bigger issue is a more generalized discomfort with openly articulating an ideal of manhood for fear of harming both women and not-traditionally-masculine men, so instead most of these go unstated and you have to infer them.
*normiecon rather than redpill con
Skibboleth
7mo ago
It's not simply a lack of mutually acceptable terms, it's also a lack of trust. Israel in particular doesn't trust (probably correctly) that if they made concessions, Hamas or other Palestinian organizations wouldn't just use that to expand their offensive capabilities and continue pressing for their extermination. That, in turn, shapes what terms are acceptable. The Israelis aren't likely to accept anything less than the total disarmament of the Palestinians, a) which the Palestinians will never agree to b) the Palestinians fear (probably correctly) that even if the vast majority of them acquiesce, any violence from remaining hardliners will be used as a pretext for further tightening the screws.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
It seems like an incredibly pedantic distinction to say that Donald Trump expanding US involvement in Middle Eastern and African conflicts doesn't count because the US was technically already involved. It doesn't support the notion of Trump the peacemonger.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
I don't know what to tell you, man. If your political beliefs really crystallized in the 90s, you're going to find the valence of many of your beliefs sliding right (or being reduced to rhetoric rather than policy, or just losing salience). It doesn't necessarily make you right wing relative to the general population, but it probably makes you more right wing than you used to be. That's not some semantic sleight of hand on the part of the modern progressive movement; that's a normal aspect of how politics change. I'm more left-wing/less conservative than I used to be, partly because my views changed, but in large part because things I still believe became less conservative.
And that is apart from how certain phrases can serve as political euphemisms that convey a meaning quite distinct from their literal one.
people who feel forced out of their own movement.
People who feel forced out of their own movement are struggling with the dissonance between their self identification, their beliefs, and the direction of the movement they used to be a part of. This is as true of ex-conservatives who stayed put or moved left while the party moved right as it is for ex-liberals who did the converse.
Me making up my own definition for a particular label has no bearing on that.
Ok, so even going by that definition I see no grounds to say classical liberals shouldn't be taken seriously on their word
I do. The issues of the late 18th century are overwhelmingly different and the label itself was largely dead until it was functionally revived by people who wanted to avoid associating their ideas with conservatism.
But the bigger factor is just that the vast majority of self-ID'd classical liberals I know have garden variety soccon views + weed while exhibiting very little interest in (or outright hostility to) the personal freedoms or civil liberties aspect of their claimed ideology. (There is also the occasional embarassed liberal and even a few sincere libertarians, but they are less common).
It's not that I think they are lying. It's that I think they're full of shit.
the claim that everyone around them moved left is plausible
It is plausible. It's also another way of saying "I got more conservative". The views that would make you socially liberal in 1954 would make you pretty reactionary in 2024, and having your views crystallize while the world continues to change is pretty much the standard form conversion story.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
"Pick a different candidate if you want to win because your frontrunner is wildly unpopular" and "pick a different candidate if you want to win because your frontrunner is likely to be disqualified and/or imprisoned" are superficially similar but practically very different kinds of advice.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.
I can't imagine why African Americans occasionally feel unwelcome in the country of their birth.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
I apologize; I misinterpreted the question.
I don't think it's a very useful question (or at least not one I have a useful answer for), because I don't use the term except in reference to people who self-describe as such. You can look back to late 18th/early 19th century liberals, but that's a political context that's almost unrecognizable to today. I guess if you want my short answer: classical liberalism properly refers to a historical political tradition which has been succeeded by various offspring.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
People usually call themselves "classical liberals" because they pointedly want to distinguish themselves from social conservatives. What I am saying is that many/most (though not all) such people are just garden variety conservatives who are embarassed by their own socially conservative views and/or the association with other conservatives, so they come up with stories to tell themselves (and others) how the party left them behind or the SJWs forced their hand or something similar, the point of which is say "I am not really a conservative."
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If your theory predicts a phenomenon and the phenomenon is not observed, that strongly suggests the theory is wrong. In this case, there's a lot of incentive for election security enthusiasts to find voter fraud and they've made considerable effort to do so. The fact that have failed to do strongly suggests their theory doesn't hold water*. In this case, concealing the shenanigans requires counting on the discretion of numerous homeless drug addicts.
By contrast, there are tons and tons of instances of politicians being caught in awkward financial arrangements or grifting off their supporters. In many cases they don't have to bother hiding them because it isn't even illegal.
But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism.
Prior to last Friday, taking an anti-Zionist stance would have gotten you applause in progressive circles. For that matter, you're still clear to say "I'm anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic" as long as you can resist the urge to openly celebrate massacres of Israeli civilians. Before Friday, you were clear to say Israeli civilians should be massacred.
This seems to imply two things
Alternatively, it implies your model is wrong. That it's not as simple as "people higher up the progressive totem pole get to do what they want and Jews are at the top".
Because no one believes you. Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism. People make fun of self-identified "classical liberals" because the label has been spoiled by bigots hiding behind a mask of libertarianism (libertarianism that for some reason only seems to extend as far as their own preferences). I like meritocracy too, but I've met too many people for whom 'meritocracy' means never having to think about how society allocates opportunities.
I could go on, but I'm on my phone and that makes composition awkward, so I'll leave it at this: I find this comment darkly hilarious because the kind of people who populate the Motte are exactly the reason you are treated to a presumption of bad faith.
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