Progressives see a measure of prestige that implies a hierarchy with some people or institutions ending up with less, and try to "fix" this by rejiggering the measure to be more fair on the grounds that prestige will then be more fairly divided, ignoring that some hierarchies are not purely arbitrary and can't be molded that way.
Tanista
2mo ago
Have color-blind admission policies and don't care about the outcomes, and there is really no good reason for any decent person to wonder why there are more Ashkenazi than Black faculty members.
I don't know how anyone could believe this about our world. Maybe a different one with a different history, but there's just no way people here don't notice.
But then the wokes decided that a system which produces disparate outcomes must be unfair.
They decided on it because they noticed color-blind meritocracy wasn't getting the job done.
Tanista
2mo ago
There are obviously dissenters, but the pro-equality bureaucracy trans activists hijack is far more popular when used for its original purposes than for this stuff. I'm of the opinion that that general ethos/bureaucracy created the problem but most people are not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
In countries like the US this is even more obvious than in Britain because the laws often being exploited for trans activism (Title IX) were clearly about sex and have to be turned to a new purpose by much less accountable Presidential actions compared to passing a new law.
That's why there's so much forced teaming and the constant implication that being anti-trans is in some way racist.
I have no problem with a principled attack on quotas. "Why do you care if it's only one?" is what I find meaningless.
Because:
Again, I think that the numbers matter.
The principle matters, especially when we're dealing with something that clearly can spread and has no strong limiting factor. People used to make these arguments in sport because no one ever saw a transwoman win. No one can guarantee it'll stay within the bounds of their proportion of the population.
People who actually dislike quotas should be the people most confident about this it seems? Presumably you think men are overrepresented in certain spaces for a reason. Letting them identify as women will just cause this overrepresentation to spill over.
On a much more basic level one wonders what the point is? Are people who were raised as men up until X year (sometimes they transition already into middle age) saddled with the same problems that prevent female advancement?
But whatever, apparently we have quotas. If you have, say eight out of 20 board appointments thanks to your quota, and then you bitch that one of them is a trans-woman when that seat is clearly the birth-right of a biological woman, that seems incredibly petty.
Quotas can be good or bad. But, if a society has already accepted the need for a quota system, trying to police who is allowed in is the least petty thing in the world.
It would be absolutely horrible for a feminist quota system if everyone could just say that men counted for their purposes and the underrepresentation problem was declared solved as a result.
Thinking otherwise is, ironically, a form of woke reasoning.
Yes you need to sit down and budget, but you also need to understand the difference between a good purchase and a bad one, understand that rent and other bills come before entertainment in the budget, and understand how to get more bang for your buck.
CICO without cheating (which is why we always emphasize actual tracking) makes this clear. Or clear enough for weight loss.
Knowing the calories you get out of a Snickers bar, given your daily caloric needs and the satiation you get from it, lets you know how bad a decision it is. Once you set a ceiling you can easily see which foods are inefficient.
And, if you choose to indulge, you'll have to fast or exercise later (which you'll probably enjoy even less, proving the point) or compensate with some satiating, low-calorie foods.
People who come up with a fixed budget and can't decide between Netflix or rent have a problem but it isn't ignorance.
Tanista
2mo ago
Drug addicts can admit that they're doing drugs. Doing drugs is a discrete act from non-drug, non-destructive acts.
Speaking from direct experience: Food addicts either don't know or actively convince themselves that they haven't crossed the threshold between eating and gluttony. Their mental math never bothers to account for that extra quarter cup of canola oil they dumped into the pan. They don't have a good sense or willfully refuse to investigate how calorie dense a cup of berries is compared to a cup of Nutella compared to a cup of jam. The direct relationship between that snack (which they may forget when they go back to tally at the end of the day) and the amount of time it'd take to burn it are conveniently uninvestigated.
When some people are forced to stare this in the face with strict CICO, they make better decisions.
They just wanted to stop the USG from spending American tax dollars to fund ridiculous frivolous bullshit like communist rap albums and teaching lesbian farmers about sustainability.
The claim was that they were gonna meaningfully cut the deficit (Elon originally gave a figure of 1 trillion at least).
If they merely wanted to cut a left wing patronage network to size they could have said that and aimed lower.
"I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that timeframe," Musk told the Fox News anchor Bret Baier during a panel interview with top members of the DOGE team.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-lowers-doges-estimated-savings-again-2025-4
"We've got a $2 trillion deficit," Musk said. "If we don't do something about this deficit, the country's going bankrupt….Interest payments alone on the national debt exceed the Defense Department budget, which is shocking [because] we spend a lot of money on defense. And if that just keeps going, we're essentially gonna bankrupt the country….It's not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses; it's essential. It's essential for America to remain solvent as a country. And it's essential for America to have the resources necessary to provide things to its citizens and not simply be servicing vast amounts of debt." https://reason.com/2025/02/12/elon-musk-implausibly-claims-competence-and-caring-can-cut-the-federal-budget-deficit-in-half/
Some people may have also wanted to starve the beast but the point was sustainability.
If the argument is that people expected the government to do this by cutting mosquito nets to Africans and sinecures to left wing professors and not welfare then that is really just the oldest argument against populism: what you actually get if you try to come up with policies based solely on what's popular with people is incoherence and stupidity.
It's clearly a case of hopes and wishes against basic reality. Attacking waste is popular, attacking the deficit is popular in theory. It would be awesome if people teaching Afghans conceptual art were squirreling away hundreds of billions.
There's a different party on each end of the trade. The route between those parties being protected benefits both and hurts nobody.
So what? Plenty of people benefit from public goods or are not harmed by them directly and yet they often never get built or decay as parties see it in their interests to exploit the commons.
A sword is a sword. The same ability to protect sea lanes opens the risk of a party trying to control it. The more parties you have with serious navies with no absolute superior the more the temptations rise. The more a party might wonder why it must accept losing a valuable natural resource to a rival or opponent and then be forced to protect that opponent's trade.
Nations that have amicable relations today like Western Europeans cannot agree on a European army or how it is to be used. Why would we assume this would change in a world without America?
The simple temptation here is just...to not do that. Let them fend for themselves and protect your own trade. Then the next temptation for other parties is to prey on those who either can't or they have rivalries with. And then there's the temptation to lock weaker nations into trading only with you, which may strictly be worse than a totally free trading system, but balances the costs of your navy with more control because you assume someone else is planning the same thing.
Indeed, but that's hardly insurmountable with a bit of will and training.
Demographic decline is not a matter of a bit of will. The European nations that once protected their own spheres are in terminal demographic decline. They don't have the bodies, they don't have the money (because of welfare, not the military) and the world has changed.
But it also just is insurmountable for many nations.
America can blow up everyone that'd interdict its trade. How about Poland? Lesotho? Indonesia? Ghana? What about when the trade is being stopped by a legitimately powerful nation like Iran?
Agree. But I don't agree that reduced trade or living standards means the "end of globalism".
I mean, if you take the broadest definition of globalism, sure.
The trade system we know and take for granted (that some call globalism pejoratively) would in fact end and it would be a noticeable change and drop in the living standards of a lot of people.
Rome built roads and pushed back on the barbarians in the north.
Rome did not protect trade for foreign nations (even trade Rome wasn't a participant in) without a demand for absorption into the Roman state.
Building infrastructure within your own borders and pushing back on the barbarians on the periphery are simply standard expectations for all states not free trade policy.
This is true. However, how effective would tariffs be as a negotiation tactic if they came out and said "don't worry, it's just a negotiation tactic" ?
So is Trump lying about the tariffs being potentially permanent? Because, if not, "do X or I will continue to withhold Y from you" seems like a perfectly valid and sensible negotiating tactic. It is straightforward and lets your counterparts know exactly what they have to do and you've already shown them that you're willing to seriously harm them if you don't get what you want.
It is the same strategy Trump himself used against Colombia.
If Trump isn't lying that he was willing to keep on tariffs this seems like a pretty good negotiation tactic since he achieves the same certainty that he is serious without the doubt that he's serious/acting in good faith.
If Trump is lying, then what are we to make of his sudden pause after refusing to offer such a thing? It seems the worst of all worlds. You appear insincere and erratic and like you're pulling a negotiation tactic with people being unable to settle on one explanation.
I'm not one to ascribe genius and 4D chess for every move that DJT does, but this case in particular does have Art of the Deal written all over it
Maybe. But one might wonder whether Art of the Deal is what you want here.
It's one thing to highlight leverage. But there is a question of whether you actually want to keep people guessing about what you want in a trade deal, especially when that trade deal will have to be sold to their domestic audience who a) have to accept it as legitimate and b) have to trust that Trump's demands are bounded and that making them eat shit on supply management or whatever won't actually just lead to Trump coming back in a little while because your willingness to fold emboldens him.
Tinfoil hat: there's little incentive for American conservatives to create any legislation around immigration. Action through executive enforcement, while not as effective as legislation and reform, will keep the base energized and conservatives in power. What's the equivalent for the progressives? Taxes on the rich?
People used to say abortion. Ironically, they went in both directions: Democrats didn't want to codify Roe (somehow) because they liked Republicans threatening it and giving their voters a reason to get out, and that Republicans loved fund-raising on it and wouldn't want the enemy mobilization that would follow if they actually caught the car. And then...
Ultimately, I think both explanations are naively cynical and don't account for practical difficulties you face when actually legislating and are a bit optimistic in attributing the gridlock and decay of Congress to the master plans of legislators. I don't think they're acting.
That depends on whether or not you believe that long trade negotiations occur as a means of negotiating trade, or as a means of furnishing the sinecures of lazy trade negotiator bureaucrats.
One of the arguments made against reciprocal tariffs is that it was simply too difficult to calculate - given the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of items and so many countries, and the non-tariff barriers that the Trump admin themselves pointed out - by April.
I would be much more confident in the "lazy trade negotiator bureaucrats trying to get paid" explanation rather than "Trump panic button" if Trump had already outperformed the naysayers by putting out a reciprocal tariff scheme that didn't boil down to a simple formula.
Why can't some of that responsibility be delegated to other countries?
Past experience? The more parties you delegate enforcement to the more parties whose interests can clash.
You have four or five nations managing this stuff and you risk just being back in the great power era where people protected their own trade and spheres of influence.
Also, a lot of nations simply aren't as good at this right now due to delegating it to America. It's not Somali pirates you need to worry about but state-sponsored groups like the Houthis, and their sponsors themselves if they decide to pull a Saddam.
Global trade has existed for thousands of years. Spices and silk have been imported by the west since time immemorial.
Your example - a luxury good like silk - is telling.
We live in an incomparably more connected time and much smaller falls can lead to large changes in our standard of living.
With a level of charity that I would myself question the reason behind: "reasonable requests" get indefinitely referred to committees and yield "we'll see" (which means probably no in practice) responses.
The alternative is not the President politely requesting X in a diplomatic communique and then sitting around, especially if the thing is clearly something people are not inclined to do. It's some mixture of messaging combined with arm-twisting and maybe even tariffs, just without the weird deficit/tariff calculations, the erratic behavior or the opacity or inconsistency in the messaging.
It's not as if this is even unknown in the Trump administration: it is quite clear what his beef was with the Colombian president and why it would end and what he would do if it didn't.
WhiningCoil feels like they're being psyopped by the debate, I feel similar. The debate forces you into arguing about whether the American president is incapable of coercing nations or manufacturing crises for them without this level of uncertainty or incompetence.
People literally cannot say what Trump's goal is for sure, but we're all forced to play this game.
Tanista
2mo ago
and won't need to resort to industrial-scale infringement to get their fix.
But why not do so anyway, honestly? Rich countries don't do Turkish Star Wars because they have deals that force them to respect copyright law. If the whole thing is breaking down, why not?
That's going to be the case for mainstream entertainment pretty much no matter what by definition of being "mainstream entertainment". They're not aiming to be that challenging, they're aiming to appeal to mass markets. Mainstream entertainment isn't going to stop being slop if China stops watching because the average American is still a slop consumer to begin with, yet alone the below average Americans that still have money to spend on the Netflix subscriptions and theater tickets. If anything a lot of modern mainstream media is arguably better compared to the slop of Dance Moms and Real Housewives and Kardashians and Honey BooBoo and shitty reality television from just a decade or two ago.
The top ten highest grossing movies in 1990 looks very different from today. IPs have always been a thing. Slop has always been a thing.
But you used to have smaller-scale movies like American Beauty be one of the biggest movies of the year, you used to have more variety in your action slop so you'd get a Gladiator along with your Marvel and Bruckheimer slop, and that movie could credibly win Oscars without it being a pity nomination like with current comic book films like Black Panther.
If anything, the American audience has proven itself capable of watching more complex stuff. Not just in the past but on TV today. Part of the problem is the opposite: films have an even larger global market they need to appeal to today. The slop is extra bland because they need to squeeze juice out of every disparate community in the world.
Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.
Is that what happened to the zombie genre?
Tanista
2mo ago
Every bet that the GOP will finally break with Trump has been wrong.
Intellectually, I know there has to be a point but I can't put my own money on it.
I imagine it's the same for actual Republicans.
Maybe Ackman missed one of the two political views Trump has held for decades? Couldn’t say.
I think for a lot of people immigration is the thing Trump is most associated with. It's what he initially got the most buzz and criticism for .
He's also just a liar armored in sycophants trying to "translate" his thoughts to something acceptable to win power which always makes it harder. At a certain point I give people a little grace for not knowing that he actually has values.
An individual didn't; Roman peasants didn't supplicate the gods in penance for their sins, personally. The senate managed the relationship between the Romans(all of them) and the gods.
This doesn't even pass the smell test, because why then did it quickly become notable - and criminal - that Christians wouldn't sacrifice?
And yes, I'm sure the Senate liked to believe that they managed the relationship between Gods and the people. And, because of the slack in the polytheist system, they eventually could slide Emperors in there (and those sorts of proclamations are obviously more likely to reach us compared to a random freedman's sacrifices). But people probably still worshiped their tribal gods. In fact, when Constantine finally got tolerance for the Christians it was justified on the grounds of good politics: each group would cause its patron deity to be favorable to the Empire. That seems like the opposite relationship.
You can't look at the trouble a far more concerned Christian clergy had with enforcing uniform doctrine on the laity and imagine that the Senate alone managed religion
Equalizing outcomes enough that we stop noticing.
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