TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
I can't be the only one getting tired of the same couple topics, so here's some comparatively lighthearted fare. Well — if one can call lighthearted anything involving a first-world nation flirting with plague.
https://x.com/lara_e_brown/status/1909607333090513144
The Birmingham bin strike has reached its fifth week. Rubbish is piled high, rats are infesting the streets, and experts are concerned about Weil's disease.
🧵on how the Equality Act contributed to this, and how it may cause similar strikes across the country.
1/ In 2012, 174 former Birmingham Council employees brought an equal pay appeal to the Supreme Court.
They argued Birmingham City Council had provided lower pay to women in predominantly female jobs (cooks, cleaners & care staff) compared to refuse collectors and road workers.
Long story short: The Birmingham City Council employed (employed) garbagemen, roadworkers, and grave diggers, who naturally were mostly men. They also employ cooks, cleaners, and caregivers for the elderly; these are mostly women.
At some point someone noticed that the former set of workers tended to earn more than the latter. A lawsuit was launched which argued that this was obvious sexism and a violation of the Equality Act since, in aggregate, male employees were getting paid more than female employees. The lawsuit succeeded, which spawned countless followup lawsuits. Any woman working in a job which paid less than a typically-male job was suddenly able to sue for damages, and consequently the Council has paid out over a billion pounds in equal pay compensation. The Council estimates that it is likely to have to pay an additional 800 million or so pounds before the thing has run its course.
Naturally, they also had to fix the problem, and so slashed the pay of garbagemen, road workers, grave diggers, and so on to match the female average. (Raising female pay to the male level would have been untenable before paying out >£1B, and certainly isn't possible now, as they're already basically bankrupted.) Unfortunately, it seems that people aren't interested in doing those jobs for so much less pay, and have declined to continue.
Result: Ever-growing piles of garbage all over the place, leading to a massive population of disease-bearing rodents and other pests. Weil's disease and hantavirus are suddenly major concerns. And, as the average daily temperature rises, the already-unspeakable miasma is getting worse. And no one can do anything about it, since, afaict, it's not allowed for the private sector to 'compete' with the government.
No one's even arguing that it's different pay for the same job. It's universally agreed that it's different pay for different jobs. However, the rhetoric here has to do with the value of the job not economically, but in some ineffable moral sense. Supporters of the move argue that surely the 'value' of the predominantly-female jobs must be the same as the predominantly-male jobs. To think otherwise would apparently imply that female labor is less 'valuable' than male labor, which in turn would imply that women are less 'valuable' than men.
What can one say in reply? It's one of those things where all one can do is shake one's head. Especially in Birmingham, where anyone considering pointing out some obvious considerations on the matter is liable to be charged with misogyny. And modern polite white society doesn't seem to have any kind of defense against women's tears.
All in all it's one of the clearest examples I've ever seen of wokeness destroying a society's ability to perform basic functions.
Birmingham is, FWIW, the economic and cultural center of the Midlands region, and Britain's second-largest city after London. Now it's facing problems which sound like something out of its medieval era.
And I have to wonder: if it happened there, can it happen in London?
To add some of my own commentary, this seems to me an example of the impossibility of compromise with wokeness. There can be no detente. Wokeness can never rest until it has erased all practical distinctions between human beings, and one generation's gracious, ostensibly common-sensical compromise ('equal pay for the same job') not only doesn't address the real problem but serves as a springboard for the next generation's 'equal pay for different jobs', e.g.
The fundamental relationship between men and women hasn't been harmonious since Eden at the latest, but it has at least remained functional throughout most of history. When I see the above, it occurs to me that one side effect is even fewer men able to generate enough income to provide for a family or maintain the respect of potential mates. Another straw on the camel's back.
I tried this one weird trick called "going to church" and through that met a hot girl in her 20s (I was mid-late 30s) who was excited about homemaking and being a mother. Rolls her eyes at the word 'feminism'. More people should try it.
Her take is that I'm already working hard to support us and she's obviously biologically/psychologically better-suited to making babies and cleaning the house. Why would she expect that of me?
My mom taught me to never buy a household/kitchen appliance as a gift for a woman, as that would somehow be denigrating. But for Christmas I bought my wife the snazzy new vacuum cleaner she'd had her eye on and she just loves the thing to pieces. Vacuums the house twice a day.
Turns out women can be really happy to be women, and act as the natural compliment to men, when no one raises them to hate the idea. Our next baby is due any day now and I'm working hard to expand my business to more than cover all the new expenses that will bring. I can do this because she supports me as I support her. I come home to a clean (and pleasant-smelling) house, good food, thriving children, and usually a decent massage before bed. Really takes the stress of the day out of me before I fall asleep. Getting up the next day and rocking hard comes easy.
Meanwhile, last night, I was hanging out with a mixed crowd when a lonely, bitter, circa 35-year old woman I've been acquainted with for several years -- has a professional career and a house -- was crowing about some article she'd read regarding how men are feeling bad about 'falling behind' economically. The satisfaction in her voice was palpable.
Teach your children well.
Just saying, look! Turning away from Christianity has been a social disaster on a scale previously impossible to imagine. I'd rather be single than try to date a secular woman. Meanwhile the landscape is dotted with little islands of sanity where men, women, and families are still quietly humming along in harmony and deep cohesion. Isn't the protocol obvious?
the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".
What did you think 'sinful' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Sin is definitionally injurious to individuals and societies.
All that's changed is that instead of warning people (and getting called crazy), we now get to say "I told you so" (and still mostly be ignored).
TitaniumButterfly
26d ago
women don't want to be forced to spend nine months pregnant
Then it sounds like either they're specifically upset about the extremely rare cases of rape leading to pregnancy, or else they have an accountability problem.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
I was astonished when my fiancee's family got indignant and saw it as a red flag that we were waiting until marriage to have sex.
Interestingly, in May 2025, the same article notes that average hourly wages rose by 0.4%, reaching $36.24, as companies competed for a smaller pool of workers.
Something I've never been clear on is how this dynamic is controversial. Obviously if labor is scarce wages will go up, eating away at the 'income inequality' boogeyman.
But try to argue that flooding the country with cheap labor will (besides making housing much more expensive) drive down wages and people smirk and tell you that's the "lump of labor" fallacy.
I don't think it is though. Yes, having more people around also generates some economic demand, but surely this is in the same sense that broken windows will generate economic demand? Unless those people are actually providing more value than they cost -- and here we must consider healthcare, education, wear and tear on infrastructure, social friction, decline in cohesion, crime, and so on -- doesn't the argument come down to "Well we have more mouths to feed so that generates economic activity"? And isn't that rather the broken window fallacy?
What is going on here?
15-20 years ago, during the great internet atheism wars, it was popular to argue that morality is 'obvious' and that any rational person could easily determine its rough outlines. Is anyone still arguing this?
I was an atheist then and people kept referring me to Harris's The Moral Landscape. So I read that. His argument seemed to be roughly the same: we all sort of just know what's right and don't need reference to any kind of overarching moral framework. He intrigued me by granting that some people clearly just don't see things the way the rest of us do, e.g. psychopaths, but that he'll address this problem later in the book. AFAICT he never actually does, though.
Found it disturbing then and I find it disturbing now. Ran into a guy on reddit quite a while ago who suggested that atheism is best classified as a 'moral parasite'; that it relies upon existing metaphysical systems to generate a socially-agreed upon moral framework, at which point of course an atheist can conform to that and 'be a good person' according to whatever their society thinks that means -- but that atheists also tend to work to undermine the roots of that system itself, resulting in moral collapse.
No real point here; just musing.
ETA:
trans-alpaca ranch holocaust
Is /r/bandnames still a thing?
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo
Could you elaborate on this? I've been seeing a lot of arguments lately to the effect that the Belgians weren't nearly as bad as they're made out to be, e.g. those "hands chopped off" pictures are something the natives did to each other and the Belgians actually tried to stop. So far when I look such things up I first find that the official story is everywhere, but when digging deeper it falls apart. At this point I don't know what to believe.
On the other hand (jeez no pun intended) I can very easily believe that it's massively overblown for to cast colonialism in the worst possible light.
I haven't played a Civilization game since I dabbled in 5, and decided the tactical layer with single combat ruined an element of Civilization that I actually really enjoyed, which was the death stacks.
Granted we're on the same side here, but THIS PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH.
Death stacks. Death stacks? Death stacks!
According to the complaint, the problem with this game is that it allows you to combine several units of disparate types all in one area and attack with them in the same turn.
You know what we call that in the real world? A mother fucking ARMY. In other words, it's just how things actually work.
Yeah, you know what, it is troublesome when an ARMY shows up at your door and your defenses weren't ready for one. So what are you gonna do? Prepare, or bitch about it? Here I'm imagining any great military commander of yore whining that he lost because his opponent utilized (implicitly, fake and gay) 'death stacks'. Honestly! 'March divided and fight concentrated.' This is central to warfare in the human experience.
And it's not like the game is un-self-aware about this! In fact several mechanisms exist to moderate the power of death stacks armies. For one, a much smaller defensive force can almost always hold against one in a fortified position given rough technological parity. So, again, reality. For another, multiple classes of units exist just to punish the behavior of packing too many units in too small a space. Siege weapons, early on, and later we have things like bomber squadrons. Enormous, ruinous collateral damage. Sure, put all your units on that square. Pack 'em in. See what happens.
Also, the sheer logistical challenges of actually getting all those units to one place at one time seem to go almost wholly unappreciated. It's not an easy thing to do! And concentrating your military at one point on your frontier means that a whole lot more of your land borders go undefended. Do you have the roads and railroads and bridges to get them back to defend if necessary? There's a lot of tradeoff and investment considerations here!
When we do get to aircraft, there's a whole consideration about also sending along fighter squadrons to maintain air superiority and protect your armies from enemy bombers. So now you've got firefights blazing across the sky while you try to establish forward airstrips to keep control of the heavens and avoid getting your entire army wiped out before it achieves its goals. This is GOOD. This is RIGHT. This is FUN.
Civ4's treatment of unit consolidation and movement makes vastly more sense than any later entry in the series. V was a mess in general (terrible game design mostly across the board) but what really killed it for me was the ridiculous traffic jams and archers shooting across the English Channel. I don't want a cutesy pegboard-style tiny-scale European board game-esque microcosm of tactical combat played out on the apparent scale of a continent. I want vast armies clashing! Oh, sorry, the swordsmen can't get to London because some (allied) archers are hanging out in Northumbria. What the fuck.
Anyway, the very existence of the (craven, weak, and effete) term "death stacks" fills me with disgust. Civ4 is by far the best game in the series and when the primary salient complaint about it has to do with modeling reality well and generating interesting logistical and defensive considerations, because, apparently, a bunch of losers failed to prepare adequate defenses and got caught with their pants down when a lizard-brained AI managed to show up with something resembling a coordinated assault, which was entirely foreseeable, and rage-quit in protest at their pretense of being a brilliant mastermind strategist being exposed as the comforting, but baseless schizophrenic fantasy that it was, well, I, I disagree.
Do yourself a favor and stop repeating the phrase 'death stacks'. It's unbecoming.
TitaniumButterfly
7mo ago
Incidentally I'm kind of amazed that the word 'hysterical' hasn't gotten y'alled yet.
people will eventually realize that trying to crush their ideological enemies underfoot has a tendency to backfire and that the revolution always eats her children. This is little consolation to those of us who have to live through it, but so it goes.
Is that true for everyone, or just for leftists?
I see the right/left divide as basically being one of hierarchy/'equity', and since equity isn't a reality-based ideology it's gonna be prone to backfiring, yeah. But I see no reason that an ideological system involving uniting the elites to rule over the rest is a problem, at least until those elites hit upon the idea of organizing the masses against competing elites on grounds of equity, at which point we're back to leftism.
ETA: While I'm here, I'd like to point out that leftism is inherently satanic in the literal sense. On the one hand we have "God is God and you are not and He knows best" and on the other "You can be like God and decide for yourself as well or better than He can decide for you." This latter sentiment is known as pride.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Oh man, this guy gets to read the second half of Cryptonomicon for the first time.
I'm always in torture arguing with myself about whether it's too soon to read it (yet) again. I think it's been every 3-4 years.
TitaniumButterfly
6mo ago
Could you elaborate on what you are talking about?
TitaniumButterfly
1yr ago
They weren't a problem when they were slaves. Your ancestors fighting to free them are why we're in this mess.
TitaniumButterfly
12d ago
It’s the woman who is inconvenienced by having another person strapped to her circulatory system, so she has an excuse to get away with murder.
You mean after she (in 99.5% of cases) voluntarily did the one specific thing that creates people?
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
They could stop
TitaniumButterfly
4mo ago
Even so I can easily see it pushing a lot of people from "Let them die" to "Kill them preemptively." And if that sounds extreme consider that it's the default position in a lot of places.
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
If you don't want to do your job then don't, but quitting to pick pineapples isn't going to make you any happier until you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for.
What's your personal solution to this problem? I ask sincerely but also by way of justifying the comment I actually wanted to make, which was that I haven't seen you around for a bit and am happy you're still here.
Carrying on, one of my major frustrations in modern discourse is that there doesn't seem to be much individual reflection on what the point of life (or anything) even is, let alone widespread agreement. "Gratifying the human limbic system" seems to be what we're settling on and that puts us squarely in OP's dilemma.
TitaniumButterfly
14d ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Democracy simply does not work.
The form envisioned by American's founders might have, except for the fatal problem latent in democracy which leads to a race to the bottom to expand the franchise for more votes. Inevitably this will include people who really have no business getting involved with policy decisions.
Then again our (American) system was explicitly designed for a 'moral and religious people' and Adams openly admits that without those elements it all falls apart.
I don't know. We were given something amazing and ruined it. That much is clear. Whether such a thing can ever arise again remains to be seen, but what we have now is not headed in a viable direction.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
It's not a war of extermination, they can survive the dissolution of Ukraine as a state
It's not clear that Ukraine as a people can survive continued war. Their demographics were already terrible and tons of dead and fleeing reproductive-age people occurs to me as likely to be fatal. Then again the worst case scenario has already basically happened, so yeah, I guess they may as well ride the thing to zero. Sucks for the ones who wanted to live though.
TitaniumButterfly
2mo ago
Christianity says that our ancestors were all wrong, for thousands of years, and then a guy in the middle east figured out the truth
No, this is definitely not what Christianity says. Not that our ancestors were all wrong, and not that a guy 'figured out' the truth.
TitaniumButterfly
3mo ago
Can you recommend any? I've been trying to get into classic anime lately (with all my spare time haha) but it's a minefield at best. Mostly trash or weird problems like when someone tells me to watch a series and it sucks and then they're like no not THAT version!
Incidentally the auto-subs on Crunchyroll's version of Berserk (i.e. the bad one) are hilariously awful. Often incomprehensible, always late, names are inconsistent, and at one point a horse demon is licking an uptight bound and topless blonde (just to scare her I guess) and then, per the subs, shouts 'EMAIL ME!' right as Gods or Guts or Gertzu decapitates him with the giant sword.
TitaniumButterfly
1yr ago
You call it slavery, I call it animal husbandry. It worked just fine and while cruelty to animals sucks, domestication is not evil. Often it's a pretty great deal for the animals. Nature is harsh and wild animals are generally worse to each other than their human masters.
My ancestors are at fault inasmuch as they failed to adequately anticipate the fatal flaw in voting-based government, which is the incentive to expand the franchise to those who should never have had it in exchange for political support and dominance over the responsible opponents who refuse to stoop so low.
Changing tacks here but I'm not a fan of 'build more housing' outside of already-established high-density areas. I've seen too many lovely towns get ruined by the government deciding to (only) approve large blocks of 'low-income' housing which totally destroys the character of the community. Not to mention the natural beauty that tends to get paved over. Over time everything seems to tend toward a concrete hellscape and nowhere is different from anywhere else.
Also I'm just horrified by the loss of the dignity of single-family dwellings. My gut says that living in dense cities is somehow injurious to the human spirit and generates a lot of sicknesses downstream. If someone lives in an entirely man-made environment, why wouldn't they believe that everything's a social construct? Whereas if they're raised in and around nature, they will also perforce have to contend with nature, which would seem to inculcate some common sense in addition to other virtues.
I guess it's just not clear to me why we need more people rather than getting our existing people to be more productive.
Racial sexual preferences are natural, mentally-healthy, and racist.
Attraction is about reproduction. If you want your child to be like you, to psychologically, phenomenologically experience the world as you do, to live again in them, it's important that their genetic makeup be very close to your own and this means mating with someone relatively closely-related. If a Frenchman has a kid with a Chinese woman, he'll be genetically more closely-related to a random French kid on the street than to his own child. His child will not experience the world the same way he does. Can never be fully French, or fully receive that cultural inheritance. Instincts, inclinations, minutiae of perception and cognition and desire will be blended with something very other. So in general it's the case that, all else being equal, it's vastly better to reproduce with someone of your own race, down to a fairly narrow scope.
Oh, I thought you meant preference for one's own people. Yeah, no, what you're talking about here is different and occurs to me as sad but understandable.
So look, women are hypergamous and have been selected to be aroused by foreign conquerors since before we were human. They generally do prefer males of their own race! But if that race is broadly marginalized in social and economic terms, it becomes imperative to try to mix with the winners. This is how the race blends and survives -- its beautiful women, i.e. storehouses of positive genetic innovations and low mutation load, are folded into the superior population which will continue on into the future in a dominant mode. All else being equal she'd be happier with a male of her own race if that race were (evidently) superior, than she will be with a male of a superior foreign race, but life demands such sacrifices and the proto-women who got on board with this program vastly outcompeted those who did not.
As to the men, yeah, the incentives are very different. Sperm is cheap and all that, and men are wired to be aroused by what we see as cheap or free opportunities to copulate with what amounts to a lower-status female because, hey, why not? But actually marrying one is a sign that a man couldn't get a higher-status mate of his own race and we all understand this.
Economic/attractiveness disparities among races fuzz the dynamic a bit; e.g. a member of a low-status race managing to marry a member of a high-status race is obviously a different situation than the opposite. Probably the key thing to bear in mind here is that it's not like all races are identical but for cosmetic considerations and some aren't higher or lower than others in critical, objective, documented respects.
So, it depends.
Oh come on. Asian women are obviously more feminine in general than, e.g., black women. I speak in terms of physical gracility, hormone balance, proclivity to physical aggression, and so on. It doesn't take media programming or indoctrination by porn to notice this. It's right in front of our faces all the time. Unfortunately for Asian men, they're also obviously more feminine than the men of any other race along exactly the same metrics. Everyone can see it and this is all born out in spades by dating app data. (It's also why there are so few male Asian leading men in movies, etc.) Come to think of it, from where I'm sitting, your perspective (as I understand it) is the 'delusional' one that could only have come about by social programming.
No. I can't even imagine what that would look like in practice.
These 'minor' attributes correlate with all kinds of major ones. Reminds me of referring to race as being about 'the color of someone's skin' which is rather less than the tip of the iceberg.
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