TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
No bio...
User ID: 373
Sentenced to 1000 Pages of Contemporary Diaspora Literature Written by Asian-American Women
Here's a link that's not login-walled.
Asian-American women are not OK, at least if you go by what they write about.
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All the books the author read feature a difficult mother-daughter relationship, with the author giving a hilarious quote of "Chinese mothers spent a thousand years binding their daughters’ feet, so maybe there is some deep need to torture their female offspring, which can nowadays only find an outlet in forcing them into piano lessons and telling them they are getting fat. "
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They all mourn being unable to speak their mother tongue, but make no significant attempt to actually learn it.
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The books are mostly portraits of neuroticism. "Neurotic about not being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about only being attractive because they are Asian. Neurotic about being too Asian. Neurotic about not being Asian enough. Neurotic about taking after their mothers. Neurotic about not living up to their mother’s expectations. Three of the books feature visits to therapists."
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They're largely obsessed with white people, but in the worst ways possible. They think white society is a hair's breadth away from putting them all in concentration camps. They all have white boyfriends, which presumably fill the same niche that orcs do in hentai, with their physical characteristics (especially their height) always being brought up.
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They think white people are just as obsessed with them. What might seem like a casual conversation to the white person feels like an intense struggle for racial supremacy that both people are obviously aware of to the Asian woman.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
22hr ago
I'm talking about "availability" in terms of the teens getting access to firearms, and in particular handguns. In the 1950s fewer than 1 in 7 households had a handgun while by the 1990s almost half of households had one. Teens largely wouldn't go out and buy a gun on their own prerogative so the laws don't mean much to them. What matters is if the parents had a gun somewhere in the house.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
22hr ago
I guess it might seem a bit strange, but I'm mostly talking in terms of basic survival within a community, and human decency. Sometimes the community will whip itself into a frenzy and say you have to help them lynch a witch or something, but normal human intuition + living in a community is enough to teach people the basics of civilized society.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
22hr ago
Laws should just be guidelines
I don't think we really disagree here. Like I said I understand the need for a bit of discretion, but there's a big difference between that and the police just ignoring entire laws. If the laws are bad, repeal the laws!
The question I have is why the police didn't apply common sense here.
If I had to guess, it would be something unusual like a female police officer who maybe thought other nefarious things were going on, or maybe they police station was under more scrutiny to crack down on "child abuse" or something.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
23hr ago
Nobody needs a moral framework. All people need to get by is normal human moral intuition, and following the rules of whatever community they grow up and live in. In the modern world that mostly just means following the law, which people will learn the basics of well enough, like "don't kill" and "don't steal".
More rigorous moral frameworks are just smart peoples' attempts at making sense of humanity's incoherent blob of evolved moral intuitions.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
It's never been easier to be mediocre in terms of income or basic sustenance. 300 years ago "mediocre" might mean you lose a kid in one of the rolling famines. Now the worst that will realistically happen is you get fired from your project manager job.
In terms of envy, however, mediocrity has never been more miserable thanks to social media.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
AI is simultaneously the best tool for learning, and the best tool to avoid learning that mankind has ever devised.
What one chooses to do with it just depends on the individual's personality. It will supercharge conscientious people, while being yet another "skip" button for the lazy. The internet was the same way -- a portal to infinite potential learning and skills for some, while little but the latest vector for proleslop for others.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
The increase in suicides from 1950 --> 1990 was mostly caused by:
- More readily available firearms
- Parental divorce
- Surging youth alcohol and drug use
- Improved death classification
"Societal complexity" might have had a nonzero impact around the margins, but it was almost certainly much less important than the other reasons.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Are the police really at fault here? This seems more like a social thing slowly ramping up helicopter parent expectations. The police could just decline to pursue these sorts of things, but I don't think that's the way society aught to be structured. The police should enforce the laws, the laws shouldn't be stupid, and there should only be a little bit of discretion on the sides to grease the wheels. We shouldn't rely on the police ignoring laws wholesale to create reasonable outcomes.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Awesome, yet another reason never to have kids just dropped.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
The anniversary produces an upsurge of talk about the topic, and then some of that talk is negative. It's not unheard of, or even particularly uncommon to hear things like "MLK cheated on his wife" on Apr 4 (the anniversary of his assassination) or on MLK day.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Leftist conspiracy theories are arguably much worse because they tend to be held by people in positions in power, compared to powerless yokels on the right.
Republicans hold power approximately 50% of the time in the US. Like... uh... you do know who's president now, right?
Mainstream people on the left hold the conspiracy belief that low African-American test scores are the result of systematic racism.
Not a conspiracy, as I explained to FCfromSSC
Dingbats like Tucker and Candace have low status audiences.
They're big audiences though. Tucker and Candace are regularly near the top of the biggest podcasts in the US. They're very influential within MAGA.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
These largely aren't conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are typically things that allege multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public.
Some of these like "Trump is a Russian asset" are borderline I suppose, where weak versions are just normal partisan attacks while strong versions definitely do veer into conspiracism.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
That's not what "charity" means in the context of political discussions.
And I remember in the wake of his death that a lot of people on this site it was "too soon" to say anything negative about him. It's been a full year and that's still not long enough? He was a political operative, who helped accelerate the Republican party's epistemological decay. That's worth discussing at some point.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Both sides
Conspiracism isn't nearly as big of an issue on the Left today compared to the Right. At least not without sneakily changing the definition of a conspiracy theory to "partisan fact I disagree with", which is different.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
No I don't really blame Napoleon III for being unable to address France's demographic issues for the reason you laid out: nobody's really demonstrated a consistent way to fix it. That's why I said he had a mediocre hand.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
There's a difference between winning an election on a platform (which demonstrates some baseline level of popularity) and actually pushing it through, and then sustaining it in the long term. So yeah, Republicans might not have gotten long-term victories on the issue in 2010, but it was still a priority that some voters were willing to push for.
And you don't have to go that far back in time to find more unconditional fiscal health. The US was fine in the 1970s for instance.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
The material value is held constant, that's the point, and that's why we use it to see how real goods have changed cost, not in fake currency
Just because it's a physical good doesn't mean it's somehow "true" value in a metaphysical sense. Physical goods are just as susceptible to speculative price spirals as intangible goods. It was true for tulips and it's true for gold.
Looking at a single good like beef is also bad since it mistakes perennial supply chain issues with long term trends. It's almost exactly like the comparison in egg prices people were making against Biden, which were a short-term issue that were resolved once chicken herds recovered. Beef prices are almost guaranteed to follow a roughly similar trajectory.
Yes, there are specific goods where an hour of work in 2026 might earn you less than it did in 1975. But that's not true of the prices of things overall.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
In what way is it uncharitable?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
I'm nothing if not consistent on some points.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
American conservatives have an allergy to having the state give money to the poor which they know is going to disproportionately go to blacks. But it certainly didn't stop America's penchant for shoveling money to the Olds through SS + Medicare. It might have even supercharged that to some degree as a replacement for typical socialism. America isn't that much less socialist than the rest of Europe.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Napoleon III flitted from whim to whim, and France's population growth slowed substantially which essentially ensured it would no longer be the pre-eminent land power in Europe. Then he utterly failed to contain the rise of Prussia, which would go on to wreck France in multiple wars over the next century. A lot of this wasn't his direct fault, but Napoleon III certainly played a mediocre hand badly.
And yeah, I also think Trump is a step below Napoleon III.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
The median voter's commitment to deficit reduction was indeed waning by the 90s, so the achievements of Clinton and Paul Ryan were short-lived. It was still alive to some extent which is how they were possible in the first place, but this was no longer the 70s or even the 80s.
How did the modern electorate get to be the modern electorate
Simple: The primary problem is that voters in both parties really, really love shovelling money to the Olds. The issue is Social Security and Medicare. D's like giving money to the poor, which disproportionately goes to Blacks, but that's not the primary issue. It's the voters worshiping SS + Medicare.
In death, Charlie Kirk reaped what he sowed.
It's the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. On his death, there were many in the Right who believed he could serve as the martyr that would finally force the Right to "get serious". This meant very different things to different people from retaliating for cancel culture, to aggressively implementing Trump's immigration agenda, to turning the US into an outright dictatorship and instituting the Day of the Rope. In the end, none of this happened since his death got bogged down in endless conspiracies.
It's no secret that the Republican party under MAGA really likes conspiracies. They let you substitute wishcasting for evidence. Kirk pushed a lot of conspiracy theories from big ones like [The 2020 election was stolen] to [Aghanistan's collapse was engineered to import D voters] to [J6 was instigated by the FBI/Antifa/BLM]. He also pushed smaller ones that are closer to simple misinformation, like implying the Covid vaccine makes you blind and paralyzed. But for Kirk, all of these conspiracies were instrumental. They all pointed in the same direction: helping the Republican party, or more specifically Trump.
But conspiracy theories have a tendency to mutate. When you let in epistemological rot like this, some of it might end up being turned against you during the course of factional infighting. That's exactly what happened in the case of Kirk's death. Sure, the official report from the mainstream media (bah!) is that he was killed by some rando named Tyler Robinson. But... isn't that just a little too convenient?
Tucker Carlson eulogized Kirk by presenting the Biblical narrative as a story powerful people in Jerusalem “sitting around eating hummus,” adding that “there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let me just kill him.’”
Candace Owens opened her show the day after Kirk's memorial by mocking Erica Kirk and claiming Charlie had been "betrayed" by someone within the TPUSA, either Jewish donors or Erika Kirk herself because golly gee, didn't Charlie's wife seem a little too enthused about going on camera after his death?
Here's a link to a screenshot of the article that's not login walled.
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