ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
3d ago
To a first approximation, everyone is bad at math, and it's a rare person who applies it thoroughly to all parts of their lives. As a more immediate demonstration than abstractions around compensation, just pay a Starbucks worker cash for your latte and see them figure out the change.
For this particular case, union officials are absolutely aware of this, and I don't think it's common for a bargaining committee to push a fix to this as a demand during contract negotiations. Or, honestly, that it happens at all. Union staff have plenty of people who can do math. But it is an effective rhetorical move: it's evergreen and will always be true, so once the disparity becomes a true-ism among workers, it can be called on in any situation. The alternative would be to focus on e.g. profits. In which case, the rhetoric would entirely lose its potency: if high profits mean workers should get higher pay, then low or nonexistent profits would undercut any argument for improved pay.
ThenElection
4d ago
One possibility is that the Right implicitly accepts that there will always be disbelievers/bad people/whatever, and so the role of the inquisitor is to put them lower on the hierarchy. But the Left believes in the perfectability of society, and there's no room for bad people in a utopia.
ThenElection
4d ago
It's always surprised me that there are so few mass casualty events; I could name two or three attacks that would kill a thousand plus. I don't know if those targets are non-obviously hardened in a way that would prevent a successful attack, or if my estimate of the number of extremely violent/insane people in society is off by an order of magnitude.
That seems more a right-wing thing than a left-wing thing, IMO (cf the owned by facts and logic genre, which is heavily right-wing).
The Left does need to have opponents, but the point of an opponent isn't for him to be humiliated over and over again. It's to offer a target to express power over, and particularly symbolic/verbal power, because that's where the Left dominates now. The Opponent's role is to say something and then be expelled, as a symbolic ritual. The Right cares about the psychological humiliation and hierarchy you can inflict on an individual, while the Left cares about using someone as an example pour encourager les autres.
But, if you keep on expelling people, eventually those people will be gone. So you have to find a new Opponent to maintain the ritual, and that's how Jesse Singal ends up the witch.
ThenElection
6d ago
I haven't met a non-communist straight man who has 'volunteered for the democrats' or 'worked on the campaign'.
As a (admittedly bi, but married to a woman) man in a deep blue city, I'll raise my hand. A half lifetime ago, I spent several years getting my paychecks from Democratic campaigns and the DNC (depending on when in the cycle we were).
Thinking about my ex-coworkers (who were mostly male) I've stayed in touch with, I'd say a third to a half are now thoroughly disenchanted with the Democratic Party, with the turn toward identity-based politics being a repeated, major point brought up by them.
Though none of us have voted Republican, AFAIK.
ThenElection
6d ago
I would say hot and frumpy women both attack and defend men, without a strong trend. The bigger difference is that men don't value the defenses offered by the frumpy women, while they excuse the attacks of the hot women. So the frumpy women get more of the blame for misandry, while the hot women remain simped for.
ThenElection
6d ago
As an unrelated aside, it's very interesting to see Klein and especially Yglesias struggle with '24. They both recognize there are real issues in the Democratic Party now, beyond bad marketing and the failure of the deplorable electorate not seeing its obvious superiority. But even they have to carefully avoid triggering those same antibodies I mentioned earlier. I think there's a reasonable chance Yglesias eventually steps on a mine and gets fully excommunicated.
Democrats are getting it wrong, mostly. It's not about policy or marketing (though the idea that they just need to hire more pro-Democratic TikTok influencers to shill for them reveals a deep and amusing disconnect). It's about the casual contempt they show for men.
For instance, AOC today, saying Miller is a short troll:
[while knitting a shirt] Stephen Miller is a clown! I’ve never seen that guy in real life, but he looks like he’s, like, 4′ 10″... Like, laugh at them! Laugh at them... insecure masculinity. This is what this is about... One of the best way to dismantle a movement of insecure men is by making fun of them... I'm not here to make fun of anyone's anything, but the way people overcompensate...
So, it's not quite that she's insulting him, which is fine. Trump does similar stuff all the time, although in a funnier way. The difference is the double standard. Say what you will about him, but Trump is equal opportunity: he'll nastily insult anyone he doesn't like. There are no sacred cows. But you will never see AOC calling a woman an obese smelly pig, or implying that a female opponent holds her positions because she needs a good dicking down. And, even if she did, Democratic and liberal antibodies would attack her in retaliation: awhile back when one Democrat called MTG a butch lesbian, there was a lot of pushback for transphobia.
It's not any one individual event, but a pervasive attitude that men and masculinity are worthy of contempt, while everyone else needs to be protected from being triggered. If you're trying to appeal to men, probably encouraging a norm of a free-for-all is better than one of an HR lady who polices everyone, but the worst of all places to be--and this is where Democrats find themselves--is saying that every identity needs to be protected, except for men, who are always fair game to identity-based attacks.
ThenElection
12d ago
No universities can fund current expenses indefinitely through their endowments. Only a couple rarefied ones could last a decade.
ThenElection
12d ago
Democratic vote share of college graduates. There's even a dose dependent effect.
Hardly a worthless measuring stick, since it has substantial impacts on government and corporate management.
ThenElection
15d ago
Making sure you have funding is still an important function. And I'm not sure it's actually better for the district to have a principal who makes a courageous stand against bad policy as opposed to one who secures funding. If nothing else, the district already pays taxes; if the school district is better described as babysitting than an educational organization, at least there's the befit of getting the babysitting you pay for.
ThenElection
15d ago
Administrators are (obviously?) necessary and useful, so it's not a purely parasitic function. Imagine a world where we have a good public school system, but a teacher is refusing to teach or use effective methods to teach. Who will discipline or fire them?
In the world we actually have, they... fall short of that ideal, to say the least. But it seems alienating to call them a parasite class. For people who do want a public school system but one that's better run, it's better to distinguish between good administrators and destructive ones, even if as a class a current supermajority of them can be fairly described as destructive and self interested.
ThenElection
25d ago
There was a poll out a couple days ago suggesting 10-20% of Americans think the shooter was right wing. That's not enough to get a "verdict" from a jury.
ThenElection
27d ago
Good ole Anglo-Saxon words over Latinisms.
ThenElection
28d ago
Although not about the election and focusing on the nonprofit administerial/management classes, there was a lot of discussion around woke movements destroying nonprofits capabilities back in 2022. E.g. https://ryangrim.substack.com/p/elephant-in-the-zoom. People here at least probably wouldn't object to them being considered quasi-political/Democratic.
As for the Democratic Party apparatus itself, I don't think it's ever had a full reckoning, but I also don't think it ever was dominated by true believers in the same way media/academia/nonprofits were/are. Instead, its failings were more conventional: domination by a gerontocracy and a risk-averse leadership whose main qualification was never rocking the boat. That's how you end up with a comic scenario of Kamala Harris whining that it's Biden's fault because he stayed on well past the sell by date and because no one in his administration was willing to do anything about it.
ThenElection
30d ago
Isn't Bluesky federated? Can't people just leave and migrate their account to a different host if they don't like one's "no celebrating assassinations" rule?
ThenElection
1mo ago
Kash is referring to the Valhalla of the Marvel pantheon, not the Norse pantheon, so it's a solid established part of our civic religion.
ThenElection
1mo ago
(Tongue in cheek) Throwing this out there as a proposal: it's a double false flag, a lefty pretending to be a righty pretending to be a lefty. All the hints that he's a right-wing 4chan kid are so explicit that no one earnestly trying to cover his tracks would be so obvious.
ThenElection
1mo ago
When Fairchild started, it had pretty much no customers. But, in the early 1960s Minuteman and NASA provided massive contracts, to the point where the federal government was purchasing 95%+ of all integrated circuits from it (which is to say, 95%+ of all ICs manufactured in the world).
By the late 60s, the market was much more diverse for Fairchild and the Fairchildren (majority of revenue non-government), but that initial contract was what allowed Fairchild to drive down the cost curve enough for commercial applications to be feasible.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Silicon Valley has much deeper roots than FAANG. The semiconductor industry had the national security complex as a primary investor and a primary customer.
This seeded the regional expertise ecosystem--VC, academia, local talent--that enabled companies further up the value chain to develop and succeed.
ThenElection
1mo ago
People overstate the cost of living aspect. Most costs, except for real estate, are a rounding error compared to the generous compensation. And even real estate just means you do have to plan and save a couple years for it like everyone else in the US; two people in tech can easily afford a detached single family home in a nice neighborhood in San Francisco. And when you hit whatever number you're aiming for, you can retire decades early.
That's all with minimal risk and a reasonable work life balance.
ThenElection
1mo ago
It's about a hierarchy and order of abstractions, as opposed to a hierarchy and order of individuals. "The experts" is itself an abstraction. Any individual expert can be bad and wrong; even a majority of individual experts can be bad and wrong. But, taken as an abstraction, the experts are always right.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Civilization is a delicate thing. It's not the natural state of man, and when lost it needs to be rebuilt. And you're as likely as not to end up in the abyss as you are to successfully rebuild.
It's not something to give up lightly.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Politicians gonna politic. I know what's in Newsom's soul--a gaping abyss--but if he at least pivots to mouthing the right words, I'm happy.
You can require the military to purchase only e.g. equipment made of rare earths that are mined and processed in the USA or its allies, with a rigorous supply chain verification. Expect to pay out of the nose for it. (And if you don't get any takers with your initial offer, you're not paying enough.)
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