@Skibboleth's banner p

Skibboleth


				

				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 16 06:28:24 UTC
Verified Email

				

User ID: 1226

Skibboleth


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 16 06:28:24 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 1226

Verified Email

This is a textbook example of someone failing the intellectual Turing Test.

Jobs are shit and no sane person would ever want one (at least, absent The Man's omnipresent conditioning that you must work for his profit)

But we live in a world where the Man and/or thermodynamics requires you to work in order to avoid death. Where jobs confer economic benefits (getting paid) and social status (not being an unemployed loser). Certain jobs confer not only money and status but a non-trivial amount of societal level power. Maybe we shouldn't value jobs but we absolutely do. And thus it makes perfect sense for someone to be concerned with access to jobs*. As an individual, you want your peers and broader society to stop humiliating you. As an advocate, you're trying to break generational poverty and what you see as inequities in the distribution of wealth/power in society.

In short, it doesn't require you to think that competence or effort are fake. It requires you to believe that discrimination is real.

If you really believe in the bullshit jobs thesis, and you really believe that everyone else is in on the open secret too, then when someone makes the "muh objective competence qualifications" against you, it is perfectly reasonable to believe it's an argument that could only ever be made in bad faith.

They seem to be confused about both what the bullshit jobs thesis is and how popular it is. As near as I can tell, SerenaButler subscribes to the theory more closely than their imagined blue triber.

In general, I don't think this post is insightful. It makes a number of assumptions about the beliefs and motives of the people it is attempting to describe that just do not track. Or it hits on surface level beliefs but fails understand the underlying content, e.g. it is probably correct to say that a lot of blue tribers don't think much of arguments from meritocracy, but it isn't because they think qualifications are fake. It's because they think we don't have a functioning meritocracy.

*there certainly seem to be no shortage of red tribers concerned with protecting their jobs.

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.

Other nations have far more recent and far worse histories of this sorts of behavior, and yet manage to pass reform just fine.

Can you give examples?

because there are absolutely shennanigans going on

You'll forgive me if I don't take this seriously - "shenanigans are happening, I just know it" is not credible. Not only is this sort of belief more often an expression of fatuous cynicism than actual knowledge, it's also just a frequent loser's cope. "Those establishment politicians with their organizations and social networks and actual funding are doing something shifty, I'm certain of it." (To be fair, they often are, but it's far more likely to be in the category of ethically dubious transactional politics with interests groups than buying ballots from bums).

Most Americans really don't see what's so hard about giving everyone an ID and tell them to bring it to the polls.

This is the sticking point. Republican political leaders have not been particularly enthusiastic about the universal ID part of voter ID laws. Only about half of states with photo ID laws provide free IDs, and the ones that do often make you jump through hoops to get it (e.g. Texas).

The simplest thing to do would be to have a Federal voter database and an associated ID, but that seems to be considered generally unattractive.

The proposals consistently poll very well across both parties and independents.

A lot of things poll very well across both parties and independents until you start talking specifics.

How is that winning the issue?

Any Federal voter ID law actually able to make it through Congress is likely to also impose restrictions on election administration that red states don't want. Avoiding Federal standards for voter qualification and election administration gives more leeway to put their thumb on the scale.

The electoral reality in the US is that many states have a history of very overtly disenfranchising certain kinds of voter. This colors basically everything about electoral reform in the US.

voter ID is a ridiculously low bar that the GOP should be able to hammer home, but the fact that they cant speaks volumes to their weakness/idiocy.

Anyone who deeply cares about mandatory voter ID and is really worried about vote fraud is already a die-hard conservative.

It is fascinating that not more is done to fix an issue that undermines the confidence in the system.

Because the two parties have diametrically opposed reasons for lack of confidence in the system. In general, Republicans are worried about vote fraud, want to make it harder to vote, and prefer state controlled elections. In general, Democrats are worried about voter disenfranchisement, want to make it easier to vote and want more Federal standards and oversight.

Republicans should push hard for making IDs a free government service.

That would defeat the cynical purpose of voter ID laws and be deeply unpalatable to much of their base. Universal Federal ID proposals are DOA on the Right.

Why does opposing these models make you look so....nerdy, if not outright vile?

Firstly, because arguing for nuance is almost always going to come across as nerdy. Secondly, because opposition frequently takes the form of apologia for vile actions and it's difficult to avoid the attendant guilt by association even if you're making good arguments. For every person arguing that the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is reductive and harmful, there will be someone saying that actually the Kulaks/Croats/Queers/[Insert Object of Hate Here] deserved it (or at the very least that it wasn't a big deal and they should get over it).

It serves the tribal in-group vs. out-group thinking. In short, it feels good and it's actually of little cost, because you're not actually expected to apply it to yourself or the people around you. It's OK to just apply it to the other.

This is true, but it's a general feature of dichotomous political thinking, whether it's oppressor/oppressed, fat cat/little guy, lowlife/upstanding citizen, or foreigner/native. It's all just a gloss on Us (people who deserve dignity and moral consideration) vs Them (people who don't). An explanation of why this in particular has cachet needs more explanation.

That I agree with and think is a more substantial point - pure anecdata, but a huge share of people in my social circle have leaned hard into physical hobbies (woodworking, blacksmithing, gardening, etc...). Notably, things which are kind of difficult and require (or at least benefit a lot from) specialized knowledge and equipment, and which produce some physical proof of effort.

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.

Cottagecore and associated cultural trends are 95% LARP. Obviously, there are a few people who really are into it, but my observation so far has been that this is far more likely to mean "I moved to an exurb and picked up a horticulture hobby" than anything remotely resembling actual rural or off-the-grid living. Actually, 95% LARP might be being overly generous; I'm going to guess the conversion rate on people taking the Stardew Valleypill is extremely low. Most people entertaining sanitized fantasies of tradrural lifestyle aren't even going to get as far as the exurban house and gardening hobby.

All of which is to say: I don't think this is a real trend. To the extent that it is a real trend, it is mostly the product of backflow from young professionals crowding into major cities, enabled by the rise of remote work. Social media may be having a corrosive effect on social cohesion, but it's not making people yearn for the pines.

We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community

We can. It's not particularly hard to set up your own forum, and if you're willing to put in a little effort and tolerate some jankiness you don't even need to reply on a 3rd party service to do it. This reminds of third place discourse, where people talk about third places disappearing as if someone came and tore them down, as opposed to that people stopped going to them. You can very easily leave the major social media platforms. We just don't. The problem is

a) these algorithmically driven services may be inferior to organic, homegrown human interaction, but, crucially, they are free and offer a path-of-least-resistance option. You could start your own forum or even go outside and meet people, but Facebook is a click away. Whatever your community of interest is, it probably already exists on reddit.

b) network effects mean there's a lot of value lost in leaving the big platforms for a smaller one. Being the first person to break away from twitter gets you little but a massive improvement in mental health isolation. And, especially for people who view themselves as incumbents, the suggestion that they should leave because of what someone else is doing is deeply irritating - "why should I change, he's the one who sucks". So everyone stays on the big platforms and complains about the moderation policy but never leaves.

the extremist american patriot dream is to aquire assets that allow them to live independently from the country they "love" away from all society and culture on a metaphorical if not literal island

That's more a reflection of how a subset of hardcore American conservative low-key hate America and have despaired of reasserting control by force.