SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
No bio...
User ID: 206
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
9mo ago
Yes. The ruling specifically calls out "indirect" ways of re-implementing the same system. They can try it, but my guess is most of their lawyers will be advising against it because they will auto-lose if anyone sues.
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
9mo ago
My understanding of the ruling is that Title VI applies only to institutions who receive federal funds, but that the Equal Protections argument is separate and affects any government institution under the Constitution, including Universities for the several States.
It has the distinctive unseriousness of having never held power and thus never having to make compromises with reality.
I don't understand how a positive policy of restraint, of withdrawing or neutering power, is in any way inherently idealistic. Most Anarcho-capitalists, including me, argue that it is the very pragmatic, consequentialist strain in our thinking and in our politics that should drive us towards promoting voluntary interactions as much as possible and towards beating the swords of the State into plowshares. It is a very quick and, frankly, disingenuous oversimplification, merely a hand-wave, to treat the "ideology" as if it were utopian. It is most decidedly not.
Some of those ideas have bizarre and meme-worthy implications, as seen in the anarcho-capitalism memes that tend to focus on the Non Aggression Principle. E.g. "My NAP-bot detects the neighbor's voluntarily-contracted child slave has stepped 0.4 inches past my property line onto my flower bed, responds to his aggression by dousing him in McNapalm."
The existence of memes within communities that share an ideology says nothing beyond the fact that people like to make and share memes. It's certainly unrelated to any actual assessment of the ideas.
Experience with real-world examples of that sort of thing, like social media companies, payment processors, and even banks cracking down on those expressing the wrong opinions, paints a less idealized picture and has probably played a role in making such rhetoric less popular.
None of these examples are in any way dispositive since they are examples, first and foremost, of institutions wielding State power in various ways as their primary means of maintaining market share or even validity. Social disassociation is not an effective strategy against the State, especially the US behemoth. The idea is more apt for discussions about inter-personal and inter-group conflicts within truly private spheres.
In short I don't think you've engaged with anarcho-capitalist thought, but merely noticed some internet phenomena and come to some wry conclusions about some internet strangers.
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
1yr ago
Anarcho-capitalism ... meme ideologies.
You think Bryan Caplan, Michael Huemer, Jason Brennan, the Friedmans, etc. are memers?
Everything coming out of Education is about flooding and streamlining the process of sheering students and their families like sheep at the "Higher" Education gates. Anything that promotes enrollment and retention is good. Learning and even graduation are neutral or sometimes even negatives (especially the learning part since it leads some people to throw themselves on the gears of their machine). DEI, Administration Appartuses, "Woke" K-12 education, prestige/elite political and moral posturing, and absolute obedience to Federal government agencies, departments, and policies -- all of these increase and maintain the input of students each year who carry guaranteed funds in with them like giant bags of Monopoly money, regardless of their own personal situation.
What we are seeing is the inevitable, "late-stage" outcome of the structures established in the late 20th century around providing "college education" for everyone via State-backed programs, loans, etc. All of the incentives are topsy-turvy, and the algorithm has been allowed to run freely, out of control. The same could be said for US Health Care, the Military-Industrial Complex, etc.
The "growth mindset" is pure sugar in the mouths of Higher Ed admins, because it applies to literally everyone -- don't worry if you've never been able to master even basic algebra, you can still grow into it! Sign here on the dotted line for a 30k$ semester of Aerospace Engineering classes at your local State school (which you will inevitably fail, only to be "retained" and looped back for another round two or three more times).
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
1yr ago
That's a subset, not the whole set.
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
1yr ago
People in repressive regimes easily get overloaded, fed up, frustrated, and of course make more than a fair share of mistakes, even when they are basically on the right track. Not everyone can be an Oskar Schindler -- that level of cool under fire is rare and valuable. And in those areas with the highest concentration of repression, selection pressures will be very significant; you would expect only to find those outliers, in terms of personality, who would be both motivated enough and perseverant enough to dive into those depths, and those traits are likely to correlate with plenty of other things that can be weaknesses. There are fine lines -- and relative ones -- between perspicacity and paranoia, between holistic judgment and black-and-white thinking, between personal virtues and social vices, etc.
I find in talking with progressives as well as MAGA types that there is usually a core or kernel of value, often surrounded and obscured by more dubious stuff, but I am well passed the idea that "extremism" or even major asocial/atypical behavior is a reliable indicator that someone should be ignored. Too many central, stable, status-quo social formations, ideologies, and institutions have been revealed to be grossly mistaken at best and patently corrupt at worst. My guess is there may well be a very interesting historical connection being drawn by the woman, for instance, even if it happens to be wrong (though who's to say if we haven't even encountered its content?).
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
1yr ago
How is protesting the Government and requesting redress "evil and contemptible," even if you were 100% wrong about everything you believed?
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
1yr ago
Asian masking is like American circumcision : a widespread cultural practice backed by mythology that is occasionally dressed up as science.
Polling seems as much a marketing and campaigning gimmick as it does any kind of actual fact-finding. Your question depends on how much you believe pollsters are actually concerned with facts versus marketing/campaigning. I admit I have almost nothing to add on that score, beyond the observations that Democrats are oversampled and that they always miraculously poll better in the closing months of an election cycle. But your question highlights something I think important more generally that I've been wanting to comment on.
One problem with all of the discourse around "election integrity" and "voter suppression" and "Red mirages" from the left is it presupposes that there is no cheating. While it may be expected that in-group analysis would begin with such an assumption, an objective or out-group analysis would not. In fact, the more parsimonious explanation for why there are "Red mirages" or late-count Blue resurgences might be systematic electoral fraud -- that question must remain open until investigation is completed and the hypothesis properly explored.
Similarly, when trying to interpret the consequences of "Election integrity" laws, a result that shifted favorably towards Republicans is explained by both the "voter suppression" and "electoral fraud" narratives. This is why full-scale, forensic audits coupled with comprehensive investigations of elections are actually necessary. If the voter suppression narrative were true, such audits and investigations would give a solid accounting of it. Ditto for electoral fraud. Given this, it's very, very suggestive that audits and investigations are unilaterally opposed. As for polling, I think that there is enough of a "black box" phenomenon at work there, where everything is private and proprietary, so that they could engineer their efforts towards their actual goals regardless of the truth about "election integrity" -- that is, they might become more accurate, as you suggest, but they also may persist as inaccurate or false/misleading regardless; the two things seem quite untethered.
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
1yr ago
No, the Dixie Chicks were not cancelled, they were simply boycotted by some erstwhile fans.
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
1yr ago
Caplan's Open Borders arguments are obviously correct in a world not run by the stationary bandits referred to in the thread above. My question is: if the Mafia were stuck with only one neighborhood to exploit, and one set of neighbors, how would they behave differently than if those same neighborhoods were continually being repopulated from the outside...? I think the answer frustrates Caplan's easy free-market argument.
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
1yr ago
made huge claims about the risks, sometimes going as far as to claim that there would be evident mass dieoffs already at this phase
And the worldwide increase in all-cause mortality doesn't hint that this might be at least somewhat accurate? How many "sudden adult death syndrome" articles are there, and how many news blurbs about people "dying suddenly" that pointedly omit actual cause of death?
SpiritofJames
Perpetual Civil War Guerilla
1yr ago
It was not and is not a "vaccine."
This is endlessly repeated but breaks down fairly quickly. The North did not invade the South "to end slavery." The North invaded the South to end secession.
Yes, the South seceded to preserve slavery as they rightly saw that they were losing at the national level in the long run. But secession is not a synonym with war.
So there were two essential steps:
If it could be maintained historically that 2) was caused/motivated by abolitionist ideals, "The Civil War was about slavery" might make sense in its very ambiguous, general way. But it really cannot.
Eliding that preventing secession was the motivation for war by Lincoln and the North allows those "on the right side of history" to pretend that they and their allies were holy. On the contrary, their motives were at best Machiavellian.
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