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SophisticatedHillbilly


				

				

				
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joined 2022 December 04 20:18:48 UTC

				

User ID: 1964

SophisticatedHillbilly


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 December 04 20:18:48 UTC

					

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User ID: 1964

Is that not the employers fault for firing someone for such an absurd reason? I find it hard to blame the teens for that particular aspect of this.

Only a blackpill if you for some reason have no respect for strength or power, which would be odd given how important they've been for all of history.

🙄 🤓.

While I agree with your point and generally am opposed to simply handwaving away all the details on how exactly we will par for things, I think the USA might actually be an example where this is true.

The state has immense resources at it's disposal, and almost certainly could give a comfortable life to everyone if it tried to do so without raising taxes or the like.. Of course, this would require cutting costs in other areas, and more importantly it would require cutting cost disease and corruption. Tough to provide for your citizens when the budget is stretched to its limit on $200 aspirins and $100,000 sinecures.

This is almost certainly not true actually. Females have a roughly standard distribution in most traits, where most are about average. Males have a bimodalish, flattened distribution, where most males are either above or below average. Because of this, there are more men at either extreme. The peaks of humanity, and the dregs of it, are something like 10:1 male:female.

While I understand your point, in some sense taxation is the central example of theft.

How many people get robbed each year? How many get taxed?

How much money gets stolen? How much gets taxed?

Any examination of other forms of theft are basically looking at weird hobbyist fringe-thieves.

The counter would be that, in determining how much society offers various parties, it should matter how many people go against our most basic urge to survive because they think the deal is just that bad. One side opting out vastly more is important data.

This does create the rather intuitive answer that impoverished black men on average get a better 'deal' than the average middle-class white woman.

Simple:

  1. The longer this world goes on, the more of the sinners who can be saved.
  2. While the actual end result is a total victory, the time just before that is expected to be horrific beyond anything that humanity has ever experienced. Most people don't want to go through that sooner than necessary.

If you just keep shelling, we'll find out if Iran can figure a way to sink a carrier group.

And if I remember correctly, wargame scenarios from the early 2000's (when the Navy was arguably in better shape) showed this exact scenario going very very badly for the US. So much so that they had to redo the wargame from scratch with heavy restrictions of the Red Team general to save face.

That's what it was, the "Millennium Challenge." On further review, the range limitations in the exercise were definitely a factor, but it's still not inspiring.

Force sale of X% of shares he held by his estate on the open public market at whatever the price was at his death (or some randomized time before it to prevent gaming) and the government collects its cut as those sell. Seems like a simple enough solution but I'm probably missing something.

I disagree on a few core points: I understand blue tribe is their own thing separate from the Democratic party, hence my point about blue-tribe conservatives.

The majority of the country watches, listens to, eats, drinks, and generally has the values and preferences of blue-tribe. First generation immigrants do not, but second-generation do by a massive margin. Perhaps the one major exception is LGBT issues, but that does not disqualify them completely.

Minorities may have a fewmajor cultural differences with blue tribe, but they align far closer than they do to red tribe. Immigrants typically are not at all supporters of the small-government, pro-gun, pro-christianity, pro-self-sustainability, pro-private-property-rights, anti-elitist, anti-intellectualist value set of the red tribe. AADS are probably the closest match, but they try very hard to signal that they are not of the red tribe, and red tribe does the same in return.

Do minority groups behave exactly the same as blue-tribe whites? No, but they aren't meant to. Many cultural groups have different roles for different classes of people, and blue-tribe is no exception.

This is especially true when what we know of reality contradicts these ideas of infinities. You cannot divide a line an infinite number of times. Even a line the length of the entire observable universe can only be divided 205.2 times before reaching 1 Plank Length, beyond which there is simply no smaller unit to divide the line into. Infinities are useful abstractions, but reality operates in discrete units.

I wouldn't say they're bad per se, rather that they're a stabilizing agent. If there were only strong men, there would be no society at all, as there wouldn't be enough of the type who mindlessly upholds status quo. Too many however, and no necessary advancement and adaptation can occur.

They're the stabilizing rods of the great nuclear reaction we call society. Too few and it explodes, too many and you choke out the necessary chain reactions.

Honestly it's one of those things I read somewhere, but I don't have the source on me or the time to find it. I will note that it was for general quality on numerous metrics which extends beyond physical attraction.

As to your point, it would only be true in a case where:

  1. Everyone must have a long-term partner

  2. No two people can have the same partner.

Both of which are distinctly untrue. Just means more women will share the non-1s or end up alone. People, especially women, have standards, and won't just end up with trash because everyone else was taken. There's always the option of getting knocked up from a man a couple notches up and being a single mother.

A man who is actually a 1 in attractiveness is actually horrible, given that even a total uggo would still score above a 1 with nearly any redeemable qualities. Single motherhood is almost certainly preferable to even being in the same room as such a man, let alone interacting with him.

Those systems tend to be framed as meritocratic internally though.

"Of course the aristocrats should run things, they are literally better than everyone else due to superior breeding (blood)"

"Of course we need to distribute things between the races, they are equal in their merits and so need equal rewards."

"Of course the most experienced people are in charge, they're the best at their job because they know it better than anyone."

Or for the credentialists: "Of course those with the highest credentials should run things, the credentials show that they're the best in their field."

Or for the IQists:

"Of course the smartest should be on top, smarter people are better than everyone else due to their superior inherent abilities."

I can't think of a system which a typical adherent doesn't frame as meritocratic. The question is always how to determine merit, which if you ever hired for a job you know isn't particularly easy.

Honestly I don't believe this entirely. The issue of try-try-try again-pass is real yes, but as Brexit shows it's an advantage inherent to the "Anti-Status-Quo" stance rather than inherently an advantage for progressives.

The problem is that conservatives believe you can just rest on your laurels and do nothing whatsoever to uphold your beliefs beyond voting, while progressives understand that to win you have to fight for your beliefs every single day. If conservatives tried half as hard to ban gay marriage as the progressives did to legalize it, it would be illegal.

Progressives collectively throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards their social goals, have numerous people whose entire lives and careers are dedicated to furthering the cause (many of whom abandoned more profitable avenues to do so) and have millions more who make art, put the values into their work, make public displays of loyalty, etc. Conservatives aren't even in the same ballpark of effort and commitment.

The sole exception would of course be Christian Evangelicals, who do all the same things progressives do to to actually attempt to win. And would you look at that, they did in fact get Roe v Wade overturned! Turns out conservatives can win if they actually care and put their money where their mouth is!

So do all the people screaming absolute bloody murder about the fact that their mail-in-ballot was filled out and submitted without their knowledge (until they checked) count?

Now I have to admit that my experience may be somewhat unusual: I worked as an on-the-ground political activist for about a year during 2020, and was simultaneously working for a tier 2 news organization.

What this means is that I talked to a LOT of people (>10,000) about politics during that period spread over a very wide area of a purple state. For many, I was the only target they had to complain or yell about what was upsetting them, so they did.

Most common fraudish complaints I heard were:

  • People going to sign up for a mail-in ballot and discovering that their ballot had already been submitted.
  • Sending in a ballot early, but it never being received, and then having to vote in person anyway.
  • Ballot harvesters asking who they voted for before collecting ballots. (They would offer to collect them regardless. The fear is that they would put disliked votes into a "do not send" pile.)

Such complaints were primarily, though not exclusively, from Republicans, and almost exclusively those in and around Republican stronghold areas.

I heard these things many, many times, at least a couple hundred each. This combined with my own experience with activism (we were actively told to lie and commit crimes to convince people, though I did not ever do so) makes me extra suspicious of the more partisan campaigns.

There were only 2 cases where someone said they were pressured by their partner into voting for someone they didn't want to. Both seemed somewhat politically disengaged, and I discovered this only because I was like "oh, did you vote for Biden/Trump?" and they responded with "yeah, but not because I wanted to" and explained. They didn't seem particularly upset about it.

So, is that evidence, or does the hysterical screaming only count if it's for the exact reason you wanted?

I like the comparison to the rocket equation, but I still think the US is wealthy enough to make it work. US GDP works out to around 70k per person per year, which means it's a distribution and priority problem. The reality of the modern world is that one person putting in the effort can generate the resources to provide for 100 who hit defect. Is the problem easy to solve? No, but it's definitely possible (okay fine, maybe not to 100% completion, but 90% even would be fine.)

I would argue it shouldn't be solved, but that's a different matter.

I don't entirely disagree with this, though I would say it occurred largely because conservatives didn't care enough about their own values to maintain them. They could have done what progressives are doing now, but failed to do so, and instead let sinful behavior take control of the most powerful state to ever exist.

The solution now is to find new tricks, new takeover methods, that the opponent doesn't see coming. It is a war after all. You can't just reuse the old methods identically, but there are consistently functional principles that are timeless.

A few points:

I think you may be somewhat underestimating the impact that the COVID election law changes had on turnout. Democrats are typically low-effort voters, and so gained hugely from the expanded access. Not sure how many of those changes are still in effect, but something to find out.

Good points on Jan 6 and Dobbs. I think some who are immersed in the conservosphere forget just how big those points are to the rank-and-file voters.

Additionally, I think conservatives have a habit of underestimating just how many blue-tribers the country has at this point. Like sure, they're mostly in a few cities or whatever, but it's probably 65-75% of the population of the country by now. The red tribe is vastly outmanned currently, though demographic trends will shift it back in 80ish years or so barring major cultural or tech changes. Blue-triber conservatives, meanwhile, tend to forget that they functionally don't exist as far as democracy is concerned.

People repeat this a lot but the only explanation I see for it is that the left keeps fighting and the right just doesn't. If you don't like the left that's bad I guess, but it rarely seems to be used to support the more general point: you have to actually expend effort for your beliefs to win, and you have to keep doing that forever or your beliefs die. "Blood of tyrants" and all that.

Without that, it always just feels like whining that other people actually try.

Yeah I live on less than 20k a year at the moment and I'm very comfortable. I even eat out occasionally. Frankly I could cut costs a bit more if I wanted too.

Russia will not get more powerful as result of that adventure

No, but they will acquire 62,000 sq mi of land that is better than most of the land that they currently possess. And the cost is what? Weapons that would have expired anyway? Some consumer goods shortages for things that no population actually needs to begin with? 180,000 men? That's only 3 men per square mile, a hell of a deal! And that of course is leaving out the possibility of Russia winning anything more than it has already gotten.

Maybe there are some more extreme long-term costs that I'm not seeing, but I really don't think so. What move could possibly have better contributed to Russia's long-term overall position.

Do they need "boots on the ground" in that sort of conflict though? Couldn't they just bomb and shell every square foot until there's effectively no one and nothing left? Of course, it isn't that sort of conflict (yet).

Yes, he seems to be experiencing what has happened to many in the past: the Cool Thing went Mainstream.

It's always a wonderful experience when you find a corner of the art world that caters to people that think like you. It opens a realm of discussion, building on other's ideas, and just plain having fun that isn't otherwise possible.

But then the space gets invaded by "normies" and it stops being fun. The same rules that exist in the rest of society get implemented there as well, and the whole game is up.

The only solution I can see is to make things, and to join together with others who like to make similar things. You can't rely on others to do it for you.

I mean look at the furry community. It's full of people who self-taught drawn animation because they wanted animated furry content. Now it's a thriving art scene, and if that makes you go "eww" that's just proof of my point.

You want stories with old-school values? Make them. You want videogames with Nazis and hot women? Make them. You're gonna make the normies say "eww," and the only people who will appreciate what you've made are others like you, but that's okay because those people are who it's for.

And as a final note for all those who say "but I don't have an artistic bone in my body,": you can help in other ways. Anything more complex than a text-only work requires a lot of hands, and even text benefits from editors and the like. Provide funding, organize groups, bring in connections, manage projects, etc etc.