coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
When I hear that something like half of Trump supporters claim to literally believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, yet I also see that basically none of them used guns to do anything about it, it gives me some doubt about this whole "bulwark against government tyranny" train of thought. And almost needless to say, widespread public gun ownership did nothing to stop NSA domestic surveillance or, long before that, things like the WWI-era Espionage Act. Or, for that matter, slavery.
I’m not persuaded here. There’s a category of intelligent Americans with prior military service who would fertilize Jefferson’s metaphorical tree of liberty, so to speak, yet who are not persuaded that any of the above constitute a legitimate threat. I think the extrapolitical action you’re talking about is more likely the more intelligent you are, rather than less, so the low IQ person who believes that the voting machines literally flubbed vote tallies is the least likely to act on a political ideology. Dying for political ideology requires insanity or extremely low time preference plus prosocial obligation. “Democrats won the election because of ostensibly lax voter laws and the lawsuits about this are still in progress” is not a serious threat. The NSA’s spying is not serious threat for personal liberty in its current form. War-era spying act is not serious (wars are special cases), and attempting to shoot all slave owners is not a serious hypothetical scenario.
I would rather like my in-group (white Christian / Western-Tradition-sympathizers and her allies) to own guns, because I ultimately do not trust power in the hands of other groups and cultures, who have shown themselves to be violent against my group (eg Bolsheviks), whereas my group has shown itself to be pretty welcoming and fair to others.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
This is a microcosm of the problem with the agency people. “High agency” often just means “putting all cognition energy into obsessive self-gain”. AI that lies to people about dieting? High agency. Made something addicting with little social benefit? High agency. Foregoing relationships and social identity in order to be like the dude from Whiplash with low mood and a TFR of 0.50? High agency.
When all of your elites become high agency, the culture is ruined. No one will have the desire or the ability to solve collective action problems. Something wrong with crime? Sorry, all the high agency people have simply moved to a higher income area. Cheating scandals? All the high agency people know to use chat AI to scaffold their essays. Obesity? No one is there to consider longterm causes, because that’s not high agency. And when America is finally ruined, all the high agency will be on the first flight out of the country.
People have no idea how real world change is actually effected. Freemasonry sprung out of a LARP novel about a fictitious Rosicrucian Brotherhood; freemasonry rituals involved LARPing; this organization had a huge effect on the modern West. If you are an atheist, it’s impossible to see Christianity as anything other than a Hellenic / Hellenized-Jewish LARP over the Old Testament — yet it’s the most important movement of religious history. The entirety of the Roman elite were engaged in various “mystery cult” LARP rituals, like the Mithraists who were LARPing their own version of a Persian cult. Hitler, of course, was motivated by Wagner’s Live Opera Role Playing work Rienzi, a LORP, and then joined a LARPing movement filled with LARPing occultists who inflated their numbers, and before all his speeches he neurotically LARPed the gestures to seem organic and impassioned. It was LARPing all the way down, and the last thing you can say about Hitler is that his influence on reality was small.
The thing about the LARP is that the more you do it, the more it becomes true. If I were to throw you into the Chinese military, to do their ritual allegiances, you would be faking it 100%. But when you fake it, there’s invisible peer pressure and then music and ambience which changes your memory of the event… The second time you do it, it’s only 95% fake. After enough times, you wouldn’t be LARPing anymore. Provided that the ritual is actually reinforcing the right things. Not too dissimilar to the techniques used by the Chinese in the Korean War to gradually change a person’s identity. Of course, it’s far easier when you yourself are interested in modifying your own identity.
It’s like if I just repeat an affirmation, that’s not going to do much. But if I repeat it while elaborating upon all the connections in my life, and all the benefits, and I imagine various rewards of the affirming identity, over time I will believe it. Our own identity is constructed by memories, and we can modify our memories and make new ones — ergo, we can construct our own identity. This is akin to sports hypnotism. It works.
LARPing isn’t fake, it’s pre-reality. What’s fake is people pretending that they are in reality, when they are doing nothing. This comprises a lot of posting online. Posting online does little; LARPing identity rituals can change the entire history of the world. I imagine that this is part of the reason why IRL organizations are routinely slandered as LARPs — it is a useful tool to prevent anything that has actual potency from disrupting current structures.
Also, “authentic belief” itself is kind of mysterious as a concept. If I’m some guy online, and I write all these logical reasons for why Jesus is definitely God, but my behavior in the world does not evidence this belief, then do I really believe it? I mean, Jesus says right there that giving away my wealth gives me 100fold in this life and the next. So, why am I not doing it? There would be no better investment or use of my time. The reason no one does it is because they don’t actually believe. Whatever they say they believe, it doesn’t matter, because their revealed preference belief is that they don’t believe. So their criticism of others’ lack of belief is Pharaiscal. They would be more faithful to a Mr Beast challenge prize. And well, of course, Jesus also assumes this, hence why he spends so much time talking about how we need just the faith/trust the size of a mustard seed. I think that, we don’t really believe as we think we believe; we believe we believe, because this feels good; in actual fact, in our soul, we do not believe. And we don’t believe because there is insufficient social reinforcement / identity-rituals regarding the belief. The “faith statements” are something of a stretch or exercise: you practice believing that this bread is real flesh, and that the man was born a virgin and revived from death, in a socially-reinforcing way; and though you will never fully believe, you will at least be convinced part of the way, that it’s a good idea to be kind and a little giving. The faith statement is not a belief statement (we don’t accurately know what we believe) it’s instead an exercise with a mechanical consequence in our behavior.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
The boys are gloating to the liberal girls that their team won. They are doing this by inverting the liberal catch phrase (“my body my choice”) to indicate ownership and victory. Ownership, or dominance, is such a mainstay of young male speech that I don’t think it needs an example, but “you got own’d” is the most hilariously explicit version. “Sonning” or “been adopted” is what the teens are using to indicate that you’ve become the loser’s father, at least last I’ve checked. In the gaming days of old, players would simulate raping the dead enemy’s body and talk about the other team “getting raped”.
Kamala’s loss has given young boys the ultimate opportunity to boast. Her own catchphrase can be expertly inverted to indicate that the boys’ team won using a clear, in vogue signal of dominance (“I own you” + “get bodied” = “I own your body”). When I first saw Nick’s tweet I literally laughed, and I still can’t read the controversy without smiling, because it’s so decidedly non-serious. There’s no serious policy prescription to attach to the tweet. There’s no actual interest in controlling a woman’s body. It’s simple, childish making fun of the other gender’s party. The fact that it has 80 million views on Twitter and teachers are talking about their kids saying it is… sorry, it is very funny. It is infinitely more childish than whatever the news is saying about it to instill a moral panic.
Note that Nick’s audience is separate from the groups that actually successfully control women’s bodies, which are all the conservative religious groups, especially Muslims. Nick is not a cleric in charge of your local Salafi mosque (a group that no liberal will ever consider protesting), he’s a dude making edgy commentary to teenagers. He is against abortion because he wants a conservative sexual culture where men and women marry early. That isn’t anti-woman as he wants virginity for both men and women.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
Rape fetishes usually involve implied consent. The “rapist” is the most attractive person in the erotica’s universe, and the protagonist usually knows that he would stop if she didn’t enjoy it. We should probably just stop calling it rape fetish altogether and call it dominance fetish or something. The phenomenon of the fetish is totally distinct from the real world phenomenon of rape.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
Football player Tyreek Hill was arrested the other day during a traffic stop. Because he refused to keep his tinted windows rolled down for the officers, they commanded him to get out of the vehicle. Because he refused to get out of the vehicle, the officers forced him to the ground for a detainment. In Florida, officers have the right to command you to keep the window low enough for (1) communication and (2) officer safety. This appears to be a universally agreed upon fact before this event, as for instance in a video by a criminal defense attorney specifically about a Floridian just two weeks ago, and in legal advice proffered online just a month ago.
Let us assume that the officers knew who Tyrell Hill was, which isn’t a given because of the arresting officer’s thick Latino accent. They would have every reason to treat him with precaution because of his domestic violence and assault record, meaning that a concern for officer safety is legitimate despite the subject’s fame. And really, even thinking about a subject’s level of fame before enacting a law or police procedure should make us recoil. We don’t want to do that, right? We should treat everyone the same. The typical talking heads, of course, are calling this police brutality.
I am interested in how this scene would be treated if the subject were of a different appearance and nature. Tyreek, a 1%er super-wealthy person of privilege, is extremely rude to a working class minority police officer. Let’s imagine some white CEO stammering to the minority police officer, “don’t knock on my window… I’m going to be late… don’t tell me what to do!”, while ignoring the officer’s requests. We would all agree that this behavior is unacceptable. We would rightfully delight in his retribution, being placed on the ground in subservience to the Law. The comments would read like, “white man realizes the law applies to him”. But Tyreek, a (former) criminal, has a social privilege that would never be afforded to a white CEO: he is a star athlete and the public implicitly expects less of him because of his genetic nature. I can understand the public behaving like the public, but it’s annoying to see media figures excusing the behavior, too.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
Same experience, I went twice for random reasons as a kid and the reverence of the place was palpable. A mix of reverence, seriousness, glory, order, stability… it’s actually one of the more interesting places to go because these moods are rare in America. If I lived nearby I would through it frequently.
Re the above —
yet simultaneously is so theatrical and useless, pseudo-monastic”
The costly, theatrical, monastic signal is extremely useful for inculcating values. If cathedrals were made of painted cardboard they wouldn’t be so interesting.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
On Sunday I speculated that the Dems will use a George Floyd-like psychological operation to increase Democrat turnout in the election. Today, Kamala issued a statement about Sonya Massey, a black woman killed by police whose body cam footage was released recently:
Sonya Massey deserved to be safe. After she called the police for help, she was tragically killed in her own home at the hands of a responding officer sworn to protect and serve. Doug and I send strength and prayers to Sonya’s family and friends, and we join them in grieving her senseless death.
I join President Biden in commending the swift action of the State’s Attorney’s Office and in calling on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that I coauthored in the Senate. In this moment, in honor of Sonya’s memory and the memory of so many more whose names we may never know, we must come together to achieve meaningful reforms that advance the safety of all communities.
The body cam footage shows two police officers answering a call from Massey about a prowler in her yard. Massey acts mentally unwell throughout the encounter, answers that she is on medication when asked about her mental health, and has a difficult time telling the officers what her last name is or retrieving her photo ID. The officers are somewhat friendly if impatient, but the vibe changes when Massey grabs a pot of boiling water after the officers requested she turn off the stove. The officers say they are stepping back while she grabs the boiling water (crazy people may use boiling water as a weapon, something that has lead Starbucks to ban giving patrons boiling water), and Massey says “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”. Either because of this statement or because of a physical sign we don’t pick up on the body cam, an officer points his gun and demands that she drop the boiling water. She does not drop the boiling water but instead continues to hold on to it. Right before she is shot the body cam just barely picks up Massey throwing the boiling water toward the officers, with the water landing on the ground and steaming where it landed. I want to thank Twitter user Fartblaster4000 for turning that moment into a helpful gif.
Massey’s death is certainly not the preferred outcome of the encounter. Once the officers picked up on Massey being crazy, they should have mentally decided to leave her house if she did something like equip a plausible weapon. The three seconds that the officer gives for Massey to drop the pot of boiling water was insufficient — of course, the pot was in her hand and thrown toward the officer before the officer shot. Springfield is the third most criminal city in America, so perhaps the officers did not believe they had the resources to call mental health professionals in their place. In any case I do not think that the officers should have moved toward her but instead left the premises until they felt she did not pose a threat. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for crazy people to attack police officers with whatever is around, and it’s rational to be afraid of a crazy person who has a pot of scalding water in their hands, able to disfigure you for life.
According to a UPenn study, BLM may have been the political ingredient that shifted the election toward Joe Biden:
Mutz also notes that roughly 90% of voters reliably vote with their party, and only about 10% of voters are likely to shift their vote from one party to another. It was that group that she focused on, finding that as their awareness of discrimination against Black people rose, so too did their likelihood of voting for Biden. Interestingly, many voters who had voted for third parties in 2016 also shifted to major party candidates in 2020, and disproportionately moved toward Biden.
Concern surrounding COVID-19 caused voters on both sides of the aisle to favor their own candidate more, but it did not cause any significant vote change from Trump to Biden or vice versa. Nor, Mutz says, did factors relating to the economic effects of COVID. As levels of concern about COVID became increasingly partisan, the issue lost its ability to change vote choice so much as to reinforce it. Does that mean BLM decided the election? That question remains unanswered
If the relevant voters are swayed more by victimhood narratives than Covid, this explains why Republicans are bringing up the topic of migrant rapes. I predict we are going to see more victimhood narratives in the coming months!
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
My favorite reply from a relative: “this is the first time I wish Trump leaned further right”. Comedy knows no political aisle
coffee_enjoyer
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6mo ago
Rules on attire have relaxed but other rules around work have become stringent. Smoking and drinking when staying late at your white collar office job is obviously gone; off-color and boyish humor is gone; flirting with female employees at work is gone. Progressive shibboleths have been instituted. Where you go to school matters more, whether you’ve stayed at the same job matters more. Appearance of hair and teeth matter more. So is the workplace really more “relaxed”? It’s just no longer uniform regarding clothing, but it’s less-permissive in a whole lot of other areas.
the boilerplate celebrity interview question "What book are you currently reading?" was retired years ago: no one is reading books anymore
A lot of this is that non-fiction is filled with filler as it’s considered more respectable to publish a book rather than a pamphlet or booklet (so diminutive!). You can glean a lot of the valuable information of a non-fiction book from reading reviews and seeing discussions online.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Where I’m from there was a “circle game” where you make the OK symbol on your leg, and if your friend looks at it you get to punch them on the shoulder. Was played middle school through high school (in increasingly ironic ways). I wonder if that’s what this is: some dude knows his school buddy is watching so he pranks them with an old childhood game.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
When you've…
Well yeah, because enormous things are at stake, and the choices are binary. We don’t have the luxury to care about inconsequential matters when the binary is so consequential. The very nature of the country is at stake: demographics, who becomes the eternal national villain. Any public criticism of Trump makes Republicans less likely to win in the future. And conservatives want Republicans to win. I’m sure if I were a radical transgender, or a black nationalist, I would feel the same way but in the other direction. What you’re asking is essentially —
why don’t conservatives decrease their chance of existential victory in order to punish the administration for something which the media has already punished them for?
— and the answer is simple: they want to win. I’m sure there’s a lot of criticism internally, but why would an influencer countersignal their own army here? Is the middle of a battle the right time to loudly denounce Napoleon?
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or if basic reasoning is actually at an all time low, but the “debunking” that the store preselected customers and that it was just for a photo op is absurd. (Top post on Reddit for the week is approximately that). Like yeah, of course they didn’t allow a presidential candidate with 3x attempts on his life to serve anyone driving by. Do they have any idea how risky it would be to do that, even if you scanned all the cars beforehand? Of course it was just for photos — do they think he was genuinely employed there? None of these debunk or detect an iota of the spectacle, but that they are shilled so hard signals that there really are low IQ Americans who are persuaded by this. The Reddit political propaganda in recent weeks has also been lots of “look at this photo taken at an inopportune moment that makes him look bad”, like the Elon Musk jumping photo. Yeah, if 20 photographers take 500 photos each, some are destined to make the subject look bad.
widely seen as trashy and disrespectful
I disagree. It was widely seen as awesome, including by those in attendance. It was narrowly seen as trashy by snotty rich progressives who don’t want to admit they enjoy the occasional fast food.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
It’s noteworthy that most of the extremist attacks this election have been anti-Trump, while a section of the population still believes that the Republican Party is the “radical”, “extremist”, “violent” party. This is despite Republicans having twice the gun ownership, and being out of office. Judge a tree by its fruits. Who is producing the most violent radicals? This shows (once again) that media propaganda can exist completely outside the realm of facts — propaganda doesn’t need facts to undergird it, you can genuinely just manufacture and shill it.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Harris is not Black because she is from the Jamaican slave-owning upper strata. She has nothing in common with the American Black experience which her father has made clear in his writings. When Kamala tried to insinuate that she knows about marijuana because she is Jamaican, her father publicly wrote —
My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty”
Harris was raised by her mother anyway, who is as far from the median black American experience as you can be. When Trump says “she is not black” to the raucous applause of the largely black audience, he’s speaking (naturally) in a black way, where denying the blackness of a black person because of their personality is common.
Apparently his manifesto is here: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-israel-embassy-shooter-manifesto
A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.
I suppose for context, here’s something published in Haaretz-Israel yesterday (auto translated): https://archive.md/yI4Dy
In the eyes of Israeli-Jews from all walks of life, thirsting for a "solution" to the Palestinian problem, a survey conducted in March, which sought to examine a series of "impolite" questions, whose place we would not recognize in surveys that are regularly conducted in Israel, shows this. The survey was conducted by one of the HMs at the request of Penn State University, among 1,005 respondents who constitute a representative sample of the Jewish population in Israel. To the question "Do you support the claim that the IDF, when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, that is, kill all its inhabitants?" 47% of all respondents responded in the affirmative. 65% of those surveyed responded that there is a contemporary incarnation of Amalek, and of these, 93% responded that the commandment to wipe out the memory of Amalek is also relevant to that modern-day Amalek.
About two months ago, Supreme Court Justice David Mintz rejected the petition of the "Gisha" organization to oblige Israel to ensure the supply of humanitarian aid to the Strip, stating that this is a "biblical war of commandment," and in effect authorized the denial of food, water, and medicine to millions of Gazans. The ruling by Mintz, a resident of the Dolev settlement, who was joined by President Yitzhak Amit and Judge Noam Solberg, from the Alon Shvut settlement, is already taking its toll.
Researchers of the education system point to a sharp shift in the nationalist, ethnocentric direction in the curriculum since the second intifada, and this process has led to high support for deportation and extermination, especially among those who completed their studies in the last 20 years. 66% of those aged 40 and under support the deportation of Arab citizens of Israel, and 58% want to see the IDF do what Joshua did in Jericho
New data from Pew on the Israel-Palestinian topic
the public’s views of Israel have turned more negative over the past three years. More than half of U.S. adults (53%) now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42% in March 2022 – before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip
Negative views of Israel have increased, but in a unique way according to demographics. 50% of Republican-leaning Americans under 50yo have a negative view, up from 35% in 2022. For the Dem-leaning in this age bracket, there’s been only a 3% shift toward negative views. For 50yo+ Republicans, negative views have increased by just 3% to sit at 23%; but for Dems in this age bracket, there’s been a 13% increase to 66%. Most of the shift in the public’s dislike of Israel has occurred among younger Republicans and older Democrats. This is interesting data, because there’s been an idea circulating that the shift in public perception of Israel is driven by younger minority progressives. And while that’s a big part, the data really tells us that Americans have changed their view in recent years in ways unaccounted for by demographic change, but which can be explained by the war. Because in just three years, from 2022 to 2025, we’re seeing huge shifts in regards to views on Israel while demographics have only changed slightly.
I think this shift is clear when looking at the media young people consume. Theo Von inconspicuously doing an “early life check” on the Sackler family in his interview with JD Vance; Shane Gillis on KillTony a few days ago; the popular youth streamer “iShowSpeed” refusing to talk to people if they mention they are Israeli. Pro-Israel Americans need a feasible game plan for dealing with this shift which doesn’t fall victim to the Streisand Effect. The current strategy of deporting foreign national students is bad, because the negative publicity far outweighs the tiny changes on university campuses. Zone of Interest came out in 2023, and our media reported on October 7th crimes well enough, yet these clearly didn’t move the needle on public favorability. There doesn’t appear to be any youth figure who can shift perceptions.
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
The original assertion specified he had intercourse with “an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions”. Extraneous details that we consider difficult to imagine someone making up work to make a story more believable. If Republicans want to humiliate as well as Democrats, the story must contain all necessary elements of a believable, mnemonically sticky story.
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
IMO
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small writers, researchers, and information-aggregators need to be credited with specificity. This promotes good sources to the top and incentivizes independent efforts. It’s also intuitively good manners. It is what we owe to someone who spent his free time aiding the Common Good.
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if you’re copying an original independent researcher’s small blog, just dropping it in “links” 20 subtweets down is insufficient. The reader will think that the author merely consulted the information but synthesized it themselves in digestible language. But Crem took someone’s synthesized and digestible language and simply reposted it. This would be like if I took an old themotte post and reposted it, just linking it at the bottom, or if I reposted someone’s humorous post for more views and only linked him as a reference. The small guy is owed recognition for his unique effort, or a direct mention; not a footnote.
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Twitter and blogosphere generally = zero-sum status game; there cannot be infinite “interesting people you consult”. Crem siphoned most of the status gains from the “little guy” who may have spent a dozen hours writing an effortpost after reading about aspartame.
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Crem, being the most popular twitter account in his niche, has a duty to promote good manners, ie cooperative prosocial norms. If he doesn’t give sufficient cred, then he is setting a standard where insufficient cred is the rule; suddenly, no one is ever going to do anything new or effortful, because someone like Crem will take most of the status.
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It’s trivially easy to sufficiently share the status. Just say, “x wrote a good summary at y”, or “over at z’s blog”, or “summary is from h”. Best manners would be to find his account and link it. But just “links” isn’t enough.
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Crem’s reply tells us that he is an antisocial status-obsessant like so many others, and people instinctively find this character type repulsive because it’s incredibly dangerous to the Common Good. World of Warcraft saw a similar moral quandary regarding PirateSoftware which essentially led to his plummeting in status. It’s not a “small error” if it indicates a deeper ethical violation, even though this specific error is super super tiny.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years. The news has been doing this forever. Everything else Hanania writes is not a full representation of facts, but a partisan slant to make you dislike Elon (eg, no proof that cutting Department of Ed employees will reduce the longterm collection of debt in any way that it deserves a moment’s thought; no entertaining the notion that he did not cut those specific employees; no entertaining the notion that “build fast and break things” may be the overall utilitarian strategy which simply looks worse when you write a slanted list of all the bad things; etc)
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Polling from the WWII era disagrees —
https://x.com/gen0m1cs/status/1913800277792039250
Only 25% of active soldiers “really hated” Nazis. 31% felt no personal hatred and 38% thought they were “pretty much like we are”. Among those 25% who “really hated Nazis”, perhaps some amount of them would want to genocide every German, but I doubt it’s more than a few %. And only 29% thought that America shouldn’t supply aid to Germans. Those polled were active soldiers, not the general population like in the Israel polling. So not even an America soldier who literally fought against the Nazis feels the way an Israeli civilian feels about Gazans.
coffee_enjoyer
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6mo ago
A primary motivation of January 6th protesters was the belief that the election was stolen by the other party, which is a decidedly anti-fascist motivation. Many of them were interested in more safeguards for the democratic process, like voter ID and a ban on election machines. This is in stark contrast to BLM, where the whole idea of American democracy and rule of law was thrown out in favor of an emotional narrative centered on an oppressed people — a textbook example of how fascists get into power. You may argue that Trump was being fascistic when he accused his opponents of election manipulation, but then the very fact he had to cloak his intention in the language of democracy is a testament to the absence of a fascistic undercurrent in the American Right. Which, in my opinion, is unfortunate, because there are a lot of good arguments for the introduction of fascistic aesthetics, prosocial values, and meritocracy to America. Isn’t China being fascist when they make the State beautiful and promote Han civic values and ban immoral entertainment and curtail the power of billionaires? How about El Salvador? Okay, it’s not exactly going poorly for them.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
Wealth is a Good only insofar as it is instrumental toward happiness. When we consider America’s increased wealth we must also consider the difference in lifestyle between today and the past. How are the social stressors? How is nature exposure different? How is family life different? How different is work? How different are inculcated values? Forestry, agriculture, and logging industry workers report superior happiness, superior meaning, and lower stress than finance and insurance workers, which is a blow to the “wealth and happiness are linear across epochs” hypothesis. This difference is probably just due to exposure to the natural environment, as being near forests and mountains and bodies of water are associated with greater life satisfaction. But consider all the effects this has… one hundred and thirty years ago, the median American walked on dirt roads more often, under a canopy of trees, had more contact with horses and livestock, more likely worked in a natural environment. Even just examining one dimension here — the environment — and ignoring the multitude of social and nutritional differences, we should be suspicious of pronouncing a preference for one time period.
Born in a homestead dugout. And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!
Well, the homestead dugout woman was an expert at being a mother through social acculturation. Her daily tasks did not involve cognitive stress or constant multitasking. She probably did not spend 10 hours of her adolescence sitting in a chair in an academic rat race. She did not have to learn how to navigate a stressful high-speed husk of metal to pick up groceries. Everyone she met on the daily was likely the same religion and ancestry, which reduced stress. She probably gardened. I can see how she would have an easier time being a mother just like the Afghani women in wartime Afghanistan had no problem being mothers.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
Your graph shows that non-Hispanic whites don’t have replacement level fertility until the 99th percentile. Meanwhile we are bringing into the country millions of random immigrants, illegal and illegal. This is an apocalyptic case of dysgenics. The dysgenics Black / immigrants will also affect the whites over generations into the future through interbreeding.
The browning of America is manageable
What is manageable? Your grand grandchild will have a very high chance of marrying a “dysgenic” Central American due to the numbers. It is manageable in the sense that you will still be alive but in a less competitive country irrelevant on the world stage?
immigration enforcement is getting harsher
Not sufficiently so, and neither is white racism sufficiently high that you can rest assured that your future ancestors will not be dysgenic. Who did Jeb Bush marry? Your future great grandsons will have the Faustian dilemma of thick latinas or high IQs, to be sure.
It’s hilarious how these are the exact wrong people you want possessing decision-making capabilities regarding AI. Like, the moral test was placed in front of them, and they all failed it. They chose money over (1) honesty (2) their own pledged word (3) morality (4) the public Good.
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