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"
Tractatus
1mo ago
No, the Slippery Slope is not a fallacy; the very concept of "informal fallacy" is just stealing valor from logic, done simply because "You committed Fallacy X!" "wins" debates, while "Well, I just don't agree with your assumptions" does not.
Firstly, "If we let gay people get married, it's just a slippery slope to letting people marry their dogs" isn't even an argument; at most, it's a Major Premise, how can it be fallacious if there's not even an argument? Secondly, the error in reasoning lies entirely on the person stripping the assertionof its context; people advocating that gay marriage would be a slippery slope were claiming so in light of previous relaxations of taboos and erosions of cultural norms, and the obvious downsides that came from that. It is absurd - to be frank, dishonest - to claim that the analog is actually thinking a barber would proceed from hair to limbs; this is done for purposes of derision of the opposition, not honest engagement.
Tractatus
1mo ago
Don Henley
I'll have you know I hated the Eagles long before The Big Lebowski. Henley especially; while I normally advocate separating art from the artist, a) his output sucks, and b) writing a diatribe against tabloid culture because KTLA though it was odd David Geffen made that whole thing about 16 year old hookers ODing with a shit-ton of coke and quaaludes that were totally brought in by her and her friend, your honor, I swear!
Tractatus
2mo ago
China is pretending that putting their kids through 12 hour a day, 6 day a week schooling is accomplishing anything other than producing rampant cheating circles, that will find it terribly hard to steal innovation once the West finally collapses, everyone that isn't well connected in the Party ius desperately trying to scam a buck via "influencing," when they're not just openly whoring themselves out, all while the government is impotentely begging its women to stop watching dramas about billionaire CEOs billionairely settling down with mid office girls because this will never, ever happen to them, and please, for the love of Chairman Mao, have kids (spoiler: this is about as effective as telling Baizuo women to stop doing the meme The future may very well be Chinese, but it will be because the West pulled an Idiocracy, and China will not be far behind the rest of us.
Tractatus
2mo ago
Nah, it was decades of the tv telling them that there was no greater good than to be seen as "not racist," that changing demographics were a good thing, diversity is our greatest strength, anyone saying otherwise, or saying something that could remotely be construed as being against this narrative, was a Nazi. I know, because even as a late Gen-Xer, this was what I grew up with, and was already a sacred value of my church - part of the Southern Baptist Convention, and thus, seen as "staunchly conservative" relative to most - you could not be seen as having any qualms about racial minorities, especially Black people. As Chesterton noted, "conservatives" don't need very long at all to adopt Progressive beliefs as "tradition"
Tractatus
2mo ago
This just results in the case being dropped. Why would you think this would work?
Tractatus
2mo ago
but were neglected by USAID in favor of some kind of nepotism?
Correct; USAID was a slush fund that provided cushy jobs to loyal progressive partisans as a reward for their agitation on behalf of progressive and/or Democratic Party causes, or in opposition to right-wing and/or Republican Party causes. If any of the money USAID spent managed to make life better for the poor and downtrodden in other countries, that made the US look better, then all the better, but that was not to primary driver of the program.
Tractatus
2mo ago
For what it's worth, Martin's tweet concerning the "autopsy" is pretty much a complete disavowal. Depending on "why" he needed to release it as-is may have implications in the Culture War, or it may just be regular political skullduggery, I couldn't say.
Tractatus
3mo ago
Nothing in the 2nd Amendment implies it's only a limitation on the Federal government. It's frankly bizarre to flip the readings of the 1st and the 2nd in this manner; the 1st specifically is written to prohibit Congress from taking an action, whereas the 2nd specifically says the rights of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged period, with no mention of who specifically is prohibited from abridging their rights.
Tractatus
3mo ago
Navigating the sexual marketplace is one of the most centrally selected evolutionary drives.
Amazing. A way of life that has literally no evidence of existing prior to the Industrial Revolution, must, in fact, be the ancestral environment we evolved in, because why else would we be acting that way now? Talk about people living in the "eternal present;" marriage has been about personal fulfilment for about the past 70 years or so, therefore it must always have been that way. Surely we should ask why, were this were the case, then why is it not working? Why is fertility collapsing, why are men and women just completely checking out, why are they increasingly neurotic? No, we cannot ask that, because it simply must be the case that men have to be chad for women, pay no attention to all recorded history showing marriage being controlled by family, with archeological evidence and oral traditions/myths (as well as extant hunter gatheres) indicating this is the same for pre-history.
Tractatus
4mo ago
Presumably, all the tiktoks and instagram reels nurses were making of hospitals completely empty of anything other than medical staff, occasionally interrupted by liking and reposting that stupid "comic book hereos bowing in respect to the real heroes" one-panel. And the completely unused medical aid ship in New York. If you saw bona fide crowded hospitals, then I can only assume you were watching stock footage, and not actual, real-time footage of hosptial admissions.
Tractatus
4mo ago
I'd heard this (and also, #MeToo reasons), but the timing still seems off. Why now? I can't remember the last time I've heard anyone mention "well, Chavez was against illegal immigration!" in an attempt to "pwn the libs," and even when that was a thing, it wasn't really a thing; it was even more impotent than "Hey kids, did you know it's the Dems that are the Real Racists!?" Neither does it appear that anyone calling the shots on the Left/Democrat side really seem to care about losing the support of labor unions. It just seems unnecessary, yet I know that the New York Times does not publish a story like this just because it's interesting news, or good reporting; someone benefits from taking down Chavez now, but I can't for the life of me think of who.
Tractatus
4mo ago
Nobody; they're people who, for whatever reason, couldn't get ballots in (working on fishing boats, working in a labor camp, etc.). Elections aren't contensted; you are presented with the candidate for each particular seat (as applicable), and your vote is either affirmation or dissent. To dissent, you must use a red pen at the ballot box to cross the candidate's name off; this is done in full view of Party observers.
Tractatus
5mo ago
This is just insane. "Recon" - a Company-level asset - is going to confirm the validity of strategic-level targets, and be capable of making decisions on target value versus potential drawbacks (legality, political blowback, unit morale, etc.)? Do the lot of you think this is Starcraft, and one general can, with just a scanner sweep, have perfect knowledge of what is in an area, what it's doing, its value to the enemy, and what, if any, issues may be caused by its destruction.
Targets is present in every 2 at the Division level and up, and they are the ones briefing decision-makers on potential targets, which includes not only verifying the validity of a given target, but also its value, what it might take to eliminate it, and what, if any, potential consequences might arise. They are not axiomatically the wokest part of the military, or even woke at all. Whether or not the particular unit Hegseth ostensibly "gutted" is bad or not, I cannot speak to, but the level of profound ignorance of military operations in this thread is truly something to behold.
Tractatus
5mo ago
Out of all the potential Dem candidates, Newsom is easily the least likely to start pogroms against big business; I don't think any of them are likely, but him least of all. "Vengeance on all Trump allies" was always bluster that could not ever amount to anything more serious than mid-level government employees getting blackballed. Sure, anyone signing up for ICE on Trump's watch can kiss their future employment opportunities goodbye, but the leadership of Palantir and Anduril have nothing to worry about. SF Tech was all-in on fucking over Trump, and any Dem with influence knows that their current relationship with Trump is just bending the need, not indicative of a true change of heart, and can be ignored as water under the bridge if and when the party takes over the White House again.
Tractatus
5mo ago
And yet, feminists all remain on the same page; you would be hard-pressed to find any self-described "feminist" who is as critical of fundamentalist Islam as of the West. For that matter, I stuggle to think of any willing to publicly criticize Islam at all, and would expect them to be summarily excommunicated from the broader movement, even if it has no "Moma" with the formal authority to do so. Yes, crushedoranges actually does have an accurate view of reality.
Tractatus
5mo ago
If ever a comment warranted "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" it's this. "High Trust Societies" only exist at small scale; a tribe, maybe a smallish vilage, where everyone knows everyone, and has known everyone for generations, can do this, and even then, there have always been freeloaders (or suspected freeloaders). At scale, even at the city level, this has never happened, and I have no clue how you believe America as a country once had federal welfare programs that didn't have fraud, waste, and abuse; maybe in the brief moment after the ink was dry on the legislation that created a given program but before the first checks went sent, there hadn't yet been abuse of the program, but claiming we - or any other country, for that matter - once had welfare programs but not absurd abuse simply flies in the face of reality.
Tractatus
6mo ago
There is no world in which 1/3 of random people asked "to wash your car, do you walk to the car wash, or drive to the car wash" with "walk" unless at least 1/3 of the people you pick have never even heard of the English language, let alone speak it. Even the mentally handicapped would get it right, assuming they were capable of saying the words "walk" and "wash"
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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