Tractatus
3d ago
He texted them; no evidence of a hookup. The alleged hookup - other than his dead brother's wife, which is confirmed - was with his neice, also allegedly nonconsensual.
Tractatus
3d ago
Of all the things that make me realize I just do not see the same world as the rationalists - and there are many! - the reaction to "Sort By Controversial" is the greatest by far. To me, the meanign of the post was obvious, particularly in light of Scott being a fan of The Last Psychiatrist; people were so deluded by their own ideological bubbles that nothing, no act, no statement, could make them question it, and there was nothing that could be twisted to support the preferred worldview (this is part of the TLP definition of narcissism, in which the subconcious desperately tries to maintain the prefered narrative of one's own life, because to fail to do so would be worse than death, and in fact, death is preferred to confronting reality). Any statement, no matter how clear, could avoid reinterpretation to fit the preferred narrative. And yet, everyone else in the community took away that there exist magical superweapons that could cause strife just by their existence.
You mention the Henry Nowak case as an "anti-scissor" yet this did not change anything in the UK, did it? Has any leftist proposed immigration restrictions? Elimination of the exception to open carry of dangerous weapons (I saw a tweet the other day of a white kid buying a baseball bat from a store for a sporting event, and immediately upon exiting the store being violently arrested by a cop for "brandishing" an item still clearly bagged and sealed. No such footage exists of bobbies slamming Sikhs to the ground for their weapons). No? Of course not.
Tractatus
4d ago
Evangelical Conservatives apparently did have some qualms about Reagan; I recall my youth pastor talking about this in the 90's, that supporting a man who divorced his first wife, and signed no-fault into law, was a hard pill to swallow, only done after "significant prayer" (i.e. realizing that there were no better options). I myself was way too young to have any first-hand experience; I was barely a toddler when he moved into the White House, and spent his administration watching thinly-veiled advertisements for toys passed off as cartoons (that his own admin changed the rules on to allow!), but he really wasn't a Culture Warrior, and not much of a social conservative, when you get down to it. Evangelicals were really a cheap date for the Republicans at the time, and it wasn't until GWB that they even so much as got the Party to pass meaningless legislation (that they had no intention of vigoursly defending).
Tractatus
4d ago
That would be the Deep State; the FBI and CIA are lousy with Mormons, and gladly played a huge role in undermining the 1st Trump presidency. The "elite" Mormons are very solidly Blue Tribe, with some Red leanings.
Tractatus
12d ago
Unless you are Methusala, this is patently false. Steak for Sunday has been my staple from 2005 through 2020, but after Covid lockdowns, I can't do it anymore. This has been broadly true for everything; I used to be able to afford a variety of nice deli meats to make sandwiches to take to work for lunch, now I buy the shittiest hamburger meat to make burritos with (the tortillas are kinda stale by the end of the second week, but them's the breaks). I didn't change, the prices did; good stuff is out of reach, switching to lower quality stuff has only somewhat aleviated the problem, and likely won't even manage to do that in a few years, even though I'm more financially successful than I've ever been.
Tractatus
23d ago
seeing Mini-baby booms
Japan didn't. The US had a dead cat bounce around the late 90's-early Aughtsas the Boomers had half as many kids as their parents; note that this did not manage to reach replacement level, even at its peak, before collapsing downward again. The trend has continued down since. Ditto the UK. These "mini-baby booms" - and dramatic emphasis on "mini" - are artifacts of the Boom generations finally getting around to having kids, having both delayed and having far fewer children than preceding generations, and the trends for subsequent generations fit the pattern.
There's a reason why Lasch felt the need to publish The Culture of Narcissism in '79, as by that point the writing was sufficiently on the wall that it could no longer be ignored.
'Modernity' doesn't really fit as an explanation. After all, the 1950-70s were definitely more 'modern' than the 1930-40s, but that's when the Baby Boom happened. The Industrial Revolution (arguably the beginning of 'modernity') caused the global population to explode as it left behind the malthusian limits of agriculture.
As I mentioned in my post, the Post WWII "Baby Boom" was more a return to normalcy after the Great Depression and the boys being shipped out to war; total births peaked in 1957, and TFR peaked in 1960 (note the free-fall immediately after '60). Worth noting that the term "Parasocial Relationship" was coined in 1955; bored suburban housewives whose kids were in school all day and had no immediate relatives nearby began thinking the characters on the TV were their friends. This happened 60+ years before we started asking why kids thought Twitch streamers were their friends; the smartphone didn't do this, atomization did.
The Industrial Revolution caused the population to explode by dramatically reducing childhood mortatility and letting people live far longer; it did not due so by making Jack and Diane fuck more often than rabbits. In fact, cities still showed lower births per family, as they have always historically done. This is so consistent that Spengler mentions it as a law of civilizations in The Decline of the West, and he was basing this on antiquity, long before even television, let alone smartphones.
The most we can say about technology - and also the favored bugaboo, financial precariousness - is that it's not helping things, but it's not the cause. I'd go so far as to say tech is downstream of the root cause; we were already atomized, and demanded amusements be made for us
Tractatus
25d ago
Before 2010, birth rates were going up across the developed world, and either reached or came close to reaching replacement level.
What? That's not even close to correct. I was going to ask if you somehow mistook "undeveloped" for "developed," but even if you did, that's wrong too. This has been obvious, and well-discussed, for ages; fertility collapses as people move to modernity. Even if you confused the post-WWII "Baby Boom" (itself only a fleeting return to pre-WWII fertility rates), we watched this play out in real-time with South Korea, as even the devastation of the Korean War was only sufficient to drop them from over 6 per woman to just over 5, before a post war recovery, but Park Chung Hee's development plans in the late 60s pushed that off a fucking cliff, where it has bottomed out at around .75, with a recent dead cat bounce getting massive media play, as though it changes anything.
Smartphones are, at worst, just the developed world refusing to stop digging holes; even if you could wave a magic wand and not only make smart phone technology disappear, but fog people's minds to such an extent that they wouldn't even think to invent them again, you would not come close to solving the problem of "narcissism is a generational pathology; people are not looking to find a spouse, they are looking for actors to play the role of "my spouse" in the movie that is "my life"
Because you staunchly refuse to acknowledge what's in front of your own eyes..
Oh, you're claiming that there is no difference between a doctor ending a patient's life by their own judgement is no different than the patient deciding to. What a spectacularly disingenous claim. But, yeah, we have the Canadian government on video browbeating patients to accept MAID even when they're just there for treatment; it was literally posted here. If you're not going to argue in good faith, why are you here?
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