Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).
I was personally just making up high numbers, but over the long term (meaning I make no prediction about if it will be 5 years from now or 500), I do believe these things to be true.
But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.
That's easy to square. Capitalism created the pollution, particularly during the industrial revolution when pollution was largely ignored, then government (not capitalism) intervened to force companies to change. Having government push companies to reduce pollution is their preferred policy and was enacted, if not to the extent that they want.
Reading your link, it sounds to me like they believed that if they killed this bill they could get a new, more aggressive version pushed. Progressives letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is nothing new.
Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.
The reason I'm a Democrat but not a progressive is because I think that progressives are somewhat good at identifying problems (if oversensitive) but bad at solving them. It's the same personality trait that lead to becoming an environmentalist that lead to every other cause du jour.
I don't think brainstorming solutions to problems is bad, I just think they tend to weight real-life problems high and problems with their hypothetical alternatives low. They aren't central planning for the sake of central planning, they're central planning because it is the most obvious instrument that could potentially do all the things they feel must be done.
Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.
True, I was not thinking of fuckcars. I think I'd only really heard the name once. A quick scan seems to me that their primary issue with cars is the number of people who die in car accidents. I disagree, but that does sound like a motivation that cars are harmful rather than a motivation that because they don't like cars that nobody should have them. Though to be fair I am also seeing some who do hate cars, mostly due to hating parking lots.
Oh, I absolutely agree that their actions are often superficial and having unreasonable expectations of others. That was part of my backhand comment about college kids with iPhones. It's much like wanting to lose weight but not dieting (outside of switching to diet soda) or exercising.
My point of disagreement was anti-dan's framing was that they're not actually motivated by a desire to reduce pollution, instead they want people to live worse lives for the hell of it I guess? Because they derive enjoyment out of decreasing the total happiness in the world or something?
My model is that lots of people want to have their cake and eat it too. That they end up eating the cake is because obviously they can't have both and base desires won out. I'm more objecting to what I see as someone going:
I keep seeing people saying you should save your cake but they end up eating it. The logical conclusion is they hate the sight of cake and want to destroy it.
Tiber727
9d ago
I live in a college town. I honestly can't think of a single person right now in real life that I would describe as a hairshirt environmentalist. Online, I can only think of Greta herself and her refusal to take an airplane, and she's a massive outlier because she pretty much uses her influence to bum rides around the world on an eco-friendly yacht. A quick check of Just Stop Oil shows that most of their antics result in 50-ish arrests, which seems like peanuts to me.
Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.
I would say that your assumptions are way off with regards to your opponents.
The environmentalist would say that:
A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 99%
B) That is bad: 95% (addendum to B) How bad? Coastal areas become flooded. Increased deaths due to heat. Increased frequency of natural disasters. Risk to food production due to unstable weather. We're talking potentially millions of deaths.
C) That due to the severity estimates of B, if proposed policies won't work, increased attention must be given to come up with policies that will.
And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse.
Alternatively, their confidence levels of capitalism solving societal problems are low as a general rule, and in this particular instance capitalism literally has negative incentives to solving this problem. How does one monetize the ability to bring the global temperature of Earth down? How do you monetize clean air? The only thing I can think of are carbon credits, and Republicans oppose implementing such a system in the first place. Conversely, you make money by producing things which pollute the air as a byproduct, and putting in effort to mitigate pollution costs money for no monetary benefit.
a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there.
This strikes me as comparable to saying that pro-life people should be shooting up abortion clinics. Your average environmentalist believes they have 0 influence on India's policies because they are not Indian, and India's government gives every impression they don't care. People believe lots of things they don't follow through fully on, even assuming the assertions that if they believe X they should do Y are reasonable. Do all the people complaining about western fertility have 10 kids?
If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.
That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?
I'm sure there are places on the Internet where (say) criticism of Donald Trump will get you banned--but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces. Whereas places you might naturally suspect to be politically neutral--hobby websites, for example!--are routinely very much not.
That's partly a consequence of the people who make up the groups. Board games nowadays are primarily played by younger, indoorsy people. That's generally going to be left-leaning people. If you started a club for gun enthusiasts, I doubt progressives are going to invade the space and push out the people who refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. And your gun club is probably going to have the occasional comment about Democrats that would start a fight should any Democrat be around to hear it.
But there tends to be a certain creeping nature to it. You're making a wargame forum and someone wants to show off their mechs in pride colors. You either ban it or leave it. Then if you ban it you're a political space but according to the left not a political space if you allow it. If you allow it someone is going to give a negative response that probably leads to an argument. The next time someone shows off their mechs and adds "trans rights are human rights" and we repeat.
To my understanding the Battletech forum rejected pride mechs. And one of the novel authors made some gay characters and that got rejected. Eventually Reddit intervened to replace the mods and the left quite literally took over the space.
Having Trump in office hasn't really changed this
No one can without trampling on the First Amendment. And they certainly aren't going to choose to stop being angry that Trump managed to win again.
Tiber727
22d ago
GamerGate: Leaderless movement where some Republican strategist came along after it started and made some remarks suggesting he wanted to capitalize on it for political gain, which the left ran with to claim him as a mastermind of a Twitter mob. Side note: I like to compare this to claiming Putin controlled BLM because he supposedly had some trolls online try to fan it to increase fragmentation in America.
Tea Party: Fair that I don't remember how much central planning, but to my recollection there was no leader, more comparable to current Trump protests where they say they're protesting on X date, please come.
BLM: My point in this was that said group that co-opted it was irrelevant to it being a movement.
The will of the electorate is what I'm talking about. If you can define a "will" and a group that possesses that will, you have a group that you can discuss. Leaders are irrelevant for this purpose. BLM is a group with demands, and I can support or rebut its ideas because they are definable enough to discuss. If BLM came along and said, "We're not a group because we came here independently and we're not trying to do anything (this claim is only made when trying to dodge criticism)" then people are free to call bullshit. If they don't want to be named that doesn't stop anyone from coming up with a name for them. If that name sticks then the lesson here is to get better at PR rather than whining that you should be uniquely immune to needing PR. Control the message or you will be controlled by it.
Is the implication here that anyone with a college education is woke?
No, the implication is that it's disproportionate. The consultants and the marketers believed that their view was correct (primarily morally and secondarily financially, and the former biases to believe the latter) and BLM in particular gave them the opportunity to sell it to their bosses as profitable. Again, conspiracy and coordination are not required, merely enough people doing a similar thing at a similar time.
Tiber727
23d ago
I guess maybe I'm being uncharitable by interpreting this as "Please associate with each other as a cohesive, organized political movement so I can attack the principles of your group rather than deal with the 17-headed hydra that is contemporary social liberalism". Maybe I shouldn't have use the term "single theory".
If we must say that there's 17 heads and name each of them, that's at least in the direction of what Freddie and I are saying. The complaint is that first they deny that there's anything there, then that it's a hydra, then that the hydra is good. And of course once the conversation is over they will return to acting like the people who cried hydra are responding to literally nothing. If people see sky blue and cyan and aquamarine together, they're going to call it blue. Ain't nobody got time to go one-by-one with 100,000 ever-so-slight variations on a theme, and if you demand they must they will simply refuse. Republicans have been successful in painting the progressive left as obnoxious, and young men are swinging right despite having many left-wing views.
You and Freddie both are painting contemporary social liberalism as a monolith, with the implication that it's a coordinated effort with offices and political committees. Maybe there's a reason that it's so hard to wrangle these disparate movements together (and why they seem to cannibalize through debates on intersectionality):
No, the issue is that you think these are requirements. Central coordination is not required; the only thing that's required is reasonably definable goal that a noteworthy amount of people would agree with and are or would cooperate towards. Many movements don't have leaders, or if they do most of their own members probably couldn't identify them. Was GamerGate a movement? Tea Party? 99%ers? BLM? Are all of those words useless and should be dispensed with?
I've actually seen the pendulum swing way harder in the past couple of years, with many more complaints of too many non-white male characters.
Well yes, the artists (generally left leaning) started doing it, and people noticed. Said artists will happily admit in a friendly environment that it was a conscious decision to increase representation - the idea that people empathize more with their in-group and this is a good thing (except for white men).
It seems to be the consultants, focus groups, and corporate America that are guiding these decisions - not some National Wokism political action committee.
In other words, college-educated people.
Tiber727
23d ago
Who said it had to be a single theory? Freddie gave an example of teachers in California who want to make school anti-racist. What do we call that group? If you say CRT they will say it's an obscure legal theory not taught in high school, even when you read the supporting material and they straight-out say they are making policy decisions inspired by CRT.
There are several people out there who say there are not enough [insert non-white-male group here] in [industry, fictional story or type of art, etc.] and flat-out state that they are selecting for or wanting to select for said group. What is this group or idea called? Well it's certainly not "woke" because that word means nothing (yet somehow they know the meaning enough to parody it).
Whether all of these people have ever-so slightly different beliefs is irrelevant. The terms "Democrat" and "Republican" manage to lump enough concepts together to be useful as terms even if almost everyone in the set will disagree with at least one of the ideas/policies in the set.
Freddie is saying that it doesn't matter if they deny that they have a banner. If you're all standing really close to each other doing very similar things, you will be treated as a group even if you didn't come as a group. The exasperation is people are tired of the game where if you critique the idea they say, "What idea? I'm not suggesting anything other than being a decent person and teaching history!"
Tiber727
24d ago
why is labor so expensive?
Because in a prosperous society people want a lot of money for their labor, because they have a lot of opportunities and everything costs more in a prosperous society.
Why is there the need to exploit interns?
Begging the question. You assume they did it because they needed to, yet somehow most other companies don't do this. Why did those other companies not need to?
The only body who can actually change laws in Congress.
Yes, and said body uses agencies and interns to provide them information, because they are old men whose major skill is campaigning. Hell, Republicans actively campaign on there being too many laws. An agency designed to find laws that are obsolete and clean up spaghetti laws sounds exactly in line with what they claim to want.
Tiber727
24d ago
My whole point is that we should be talking about fewer laws.
I could tell by context that that's what you believe, and I am contesting that.
When you use legislation and regulation on a case-by-case basis as you described, you're playing whack-a-mole without ever looking up at the bigger picture.
My thesis is that sometimes moles should be whacked, otherwise your yard turns to shit. You state that bad case of having too many laws, and I state the bad case that the rules are being created to attempt to stop a bad thing, so without them you have the bad thing. An example that was brought up was rotating interns baited by promises of full-time work. You might claim that it is a symptom of overcomplicated hiring laws, and I might claim what I see as a simpler explanation - they wanted cheap labor but felt bad about it.
Complexity is the enemy, especially when refactoring of the system is slow or difficult. Congress likes to pass laws, but it very, very rarely retracts previous legislation.
I have a suggestion on that that I think should be followed regardless of my feeling of being more big government. The government should have an agency or committee dedicated periodic review of laws to see which laws can be retired, or if multiple overlapping laws can be combined for clarity and brevity.
Tiber727
24d ago
I'm someone who subscribes to the capitalism but nice theory. I read your linked previous comment. I think some mandatory training is stupid, but I think you're picking some low-handing fruit. Capitalism but nice can just as easily be EU telling phone manufacturers to stop making proprietary phone chargers when USB exists, or that John Deere needs to stop making their tractors unrepairable by third-parties for arbitrary reasons. Good or bad depend entirely on which law we're talking about.
Tiber727
25d ago
Ukraine is already too weak to attack Russia by choice, and that's not going to change no matter what the outcome of this is. I don't believe this is actually Russia's condition.
As far as I can see, the problem with this option is strictly that neither the current Ukrainian government (which surely would collapse in such a situation) nor the West (for whom a neutral Ukraine with present borders is of little value, and they would have to credibly signal that they would defend it, vs. the option to have it cheaply continue killing Russians and gamble on the absolute bonanza that a surprise Russian collapse would be) would actually want it.
I would contend that Russia would also not accept this proposition, but even without that contention you already make it sound like a nonstarter.
If another country were actually willing to face Russia, they could do so right now. At this point, I think that if almost anyone but the U.S. said that they were sending troops and kept those troops in Ukraine, Russia wouldn't actually use nukes.
Tiber727
25d ago
No idea. Every option for Ukraine is losing. Making a deal with Russia is pointless because the only condition they will accept is not having a military, which is the same as surrendering their country to Russia. Either they accept being taken over by Russia and enduring whatever Putin does to secure control, or they throw themselves into debt on the hopes that they barely survive. If they win, then throw themselves on the mercy of Europe and endure having nothing while they try to rebuild.
Tiber727
25d ago
For a smaller country fighting a larger one, a Pyrrhic victory is in some ways the goal. You either surrender, flee, or say, "Fuck it, everyone loses." If the deal is, "I steal everything from you, and you get to do as I say," you mash the defect button and try to make sure they're miserable. The alternative is your state exists only so long as someone else doesn't want it.
I agree that BC and AT weren't banned for leftism.
I was more saying that the forum can be perceived as a "right wing secret club" because, for example, a feminist might consider some of the writings about feminism to be boo outgroup, only there are no feminists here. Whereas a comment that is around the line of boo outgroup towards the right will be read by many people who are right leaning, so there are many more chances for an individual reading it to decide that it is over the line and create a hostile discussion.
This isn't necessarily an insult against the mods, because it is admittedly hard to decide when things are right on the line.
Tiber727
25d ago
Contra Whinning Coil: somebody flaming out because Whinning Coil was allowed to express racist views.
On this, it's not always just the racism element, more that what the mods appear to be selecting for is having a line of how much contempt you are allowed to give off when expressing a view. This seems mostly with the goal of preventing the forum from becoming trading insults back and forth.
Some positions inherently come with animus. There's a reason I scroll past the HBD discussions. But there are times I feel that users get away with a little more spice against groups that aren't typically here than if those groups were here, such as when feminism comes up.
Tiber727
25d ago
Well yes. It's a TV drama after all. No one's going to watch a story about common problems that are easily diagnosed and solved.
It's still probably good advice for real doctors.
Tiber727
26d ago
Eh, I agree with you that Trump keeps bringing this back up when he should shut up. I occasionally look at /r/conservative because it's interesting to me to see which news circulates and which doesn't circulate in different bubbles. This one does have staying power in denting Trump's popularity among conservatives. But beyond remaining a sore spot and blemish in Trump's record, I don't think it amounts to anything concrete. Trump can't run again anyway, and it's not like they're going to start voting Democrat. Republicans in Congress are mostly shutting up and either doing nothing because Trump is doing everything via EOs, or quietly passing a few things here and there but not talking about it. Democrats are trying to keep this alive as long as possible because it's the only thing they've managed to hit him with that has had any effect at all.
Trans activists turn this on its head by actively reifying the ancillary gender roles and arbitrary social expectations, particularly those assigned to female people. Rather than claiming "you are a woman, therefore you have to wear skirts and pink clothing", they claim "I like wearing skirts and pink clothing, therefore I am a woman". They thereby reduce the status of "woman" to the ancillary, contingent gender role, the very thing the radical feminists are seeking to abolish. Radical feminists want to deprecate the ancillary, contingent gender roles altogether; trans activists want to elevate them above all else. Perhaps these goals aren't quite antithetical but they certainly aren't aligned with one another.
This is somewhat right, but misses that there's a weird way they are able to internally square the circle, even though it's externally baffling. And that is that gender has a near-infinite number of possible meanings and takes on whichever actual meaning it needs to at the moment. Skirts and liking pink are part of the female gender role, but not necessarily because not all women like them, and some men like them. Wanting to cut off your dick is a sign that you are trans, but not all trans people want to change their body. I've even brought up the point that "if sex is your body and gender is your mind, why is getting surgery called "gender affirmation surgery" if it's changing your body?" and was told that breasts are "gendered." Which is ironic when you consider that they often complain that "woke" means too many things.
There's gender identity, gender expression, gender performance, etc. and new permutations will be added as needed. Simply put, they want society to not impose patterns onto people. They want people to be able to choose any number of these and impose society to engage with these in whatever way the individual wants, and without any of the negative impositions.
Tiber727
1mo ago
That's what makes this 180 so conspicuous. It makes no sense: if you know you're compromised, you wouldn't have campaigned on lifting the veil, if you know you're not, what could possibly convince you to hesitate at the last second?
Not that I take any position on Epstein or Trump's relationship to him, but as far as Trump's campaign actions go, Trump will say anything and then abandon it. Whatever happened with Obama's birth certificate? Does anyone care? Was Hillary ever locked up?
Tiber727
1mo ago
Adding onto this, this is an example of the real stupidity of this. For boardgames, it requires making lots of different little pieces. China outcompeted in manufacturing so hard that the only manufacturers left only want to deal in volumes significantly higher than most games would sell. The margins aren't there to set up manufacturing in the U.S., so the boardgame industry will likely collapse or stop selling in the U.S. before it ever does what Trump seems to want people to do.
That's the real stupidity of the tariffs. Even if you think tariffs are good, a blanket tariff doesn't care about the reality of the industries it targets.
Tiber727
1mo ago
I wouldn't use Turok as an example of much. Even as someone of a similar political persuasion he posted in an obnoxious and inflammatory way. When it comes to moderating, moderating for tone is vulnerable to wording things in a certain way that it flies under the threshold for moderation even though you could reword what they said into a rule-breaking comment without adding anything inflammatory to it. Turok often imagined what his opponents believed, but I don't think he was hit for that, he was hit for his tone. He could have delivered the same content and not gotten hit by the mods had he put even a little bit of effort into following the rules.
You can't insult someone, but you can accuse large groups of having negative traits with almost nothing to back it up. You can deliberately misinterpret everything and make strawman arguments. And then when someone responds to point out how bad your claims are, not even from a moral purity perspective but from strawmanning perspective, they get hit by the mods if they don't do it right.
None if this is a claim that the mods are bad, just a claim that this style of moderation invites a certain type of arbitrariness - "Why was this comment moderated but not that?"
I think Clementine was arguing that this problem can be fixed either by more moderating or less moderating, giving a responder more slack to call something stupid when it is stupid.
Tiber727
1mo ago
I consider myself anti-woke/centrist Dem and feel I have commented along those lines here (notably when trans topics come up). And I should mention that Carville does air his dirty laundry with progressives.
The problem with this as a metric is that candidates have to be aware of their chances of victory in the general election, so there will almost certainly be some amount of hiding their power level
I don't disagree on your general observation, but I was more using Biden an example of voter habits rather than politician. The politicians that win Democratic primaries tend to be centrists (or at least posing/perceived as centrists), making me believe that progressive policies are less popular even within the Democratic party.
Tiber727
1mo ago
I'm less worried about TikTok as a security risk from a perspective of promoting anti-American sentiment via the algorithm, and more from a perspective of finding a Senator's daughter's account, geolocating her location and making educated guesses as to the Senator's location, contacts, etc.
Interesting. I do think Rasmussen is biased, but biased doesn't necessarily mean wrong. So I am genuinely trying to see if my mental model needs to be updated. I expect my mental model for the number of people who think that is too low but probably for many here theirs is too high.
I was having trouble finding other sources about wanting to ban AC. Thoughts on banning cars yielded far more results. Based on this thread, the steelman version of this argument is that many of the anti-car people don't want to ban cars so much as they want to prop up alternatives to the point that others don't feel the need to buy them. Which Noah Smith pointed out that Japan has both great public transit and a lot of car ownership. Though I think they'd still count it as a win if cars are driven less.
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