crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
7d ago
Because taking on sovereign debt is borrowing from your children and incurring a obligation upon generations yet unborn for your personal benefit.
If great men are those who plant trees who will shade those long after they are gone, then the weak man consumes those fruits, and leaves the future to the harsh light of the unforgiving sun.
Goya: Saturn Devours His Son
crushedoranges
12d ago
I live in Canada.
There's no amount of propaganda that can make land or housing an unattractive investment. If people want to live somewhere badly enough, it increases the subjective value. It is fundamentally a doomed proposition unless you adapt a communist system where the government decides where and how you live. Land is such a powerful store of wealth that the primary goal of wars - not just in human societies, but in apes, and all sorts of creatures who fight over territory - is its acquisition.
Even if you say: 'all land is no longer an speculative investment vehicle' - it will not change the essence of the fact that people will start exchanging property rights with bullets instead of dollars. Because that was the status quo, before the market.
crushedoranges
12d ago
Land is perhaps the ur-investment, the one thing guaranteed that God (and perhaps the Dutch) aren't making more of. Even in societies where the government owns all the land, like in China, and merely hands out leases you have crazy real estate bubbles.
There is fundamentally no way to uncouple housing from investment because houses are expensive and take a lot of time and effort to build. There will always be fewer houses then there are people willing to buy them.
crushedoranges
17d ago
It's an objective truth that people have gotten fatter, not just women.
It's an subjective one that women's fashions have trended to the blue-haired and side-cutted. Androgynous, maybe. I would say 'less aesthetically feminine'.
Although on average, people are having less sex, the ones who are having it are having a lot more of it.
"I want to start a family with a woman I find attractive and young and who isn't the town bike" isn't the end of the world.
crushedoranges
17d ago
Newt Gingrich was exceptionally vile even by today's standards because he left his wife as she was dying of cancer. Trump is not the best husband (he may have beaten one of his wives) but so as far as I know his ex-wives all live comfortably.
crushedoranges
20d ago
It becomes inevitable, at the start of the new dynasty: to throw all the old scholars and burn them with their books. There is approximately a snowball's chance in hell that anyone in Harvard will cooperate, Politics is the question of the posssible. It is impossible to do politics with the left. Best to cut the gordiian knot.
If someone calls you Hitler, believe them as an honest expression of non-cooperation.
crushedoranges
21d ago
People who use power = bad Powerlessness = virtue.
It really is that simple. Progressivism is a massive navel-gazing operation in which people extol the virtues of powerlessness. Using power is something Icky Fascists do, and might hurt someone's feelings, so it has to be avoided at all costs. You see, if we take power away from the powerful, money from the wealthy, and beauty from the masses, and grant it all to the marginalized, everything will be better.
Like how taking away the farms from the whites worked in Zimbabwe, it's not that the new owners knew how to use the things they were given, but that it corrected a long-standing score, and that's what matters. Not the actually farming part. They want all the power but they don't want to govern. They want to control politics without participating in it. Very childish, very stupid. Very Theater Kid.
crushedoranges
21d ago
It's the 'many chiefs, one indian' problem in that they all want to be courageous thought leaders and someone else will do the work for them (namely, the state.) That's why the left wants to grant more power to the state, so that it has the power to enact their utopian experiments on their behalf. Heaven forbid they do any actual work!
crushedoranges
21d ago
That's not the definition of anarcho-tyranny at all.
A state of anarcho tyranny can exist even if the government has absolute control. They can allow crimes to happen to you (that's the anarchy) but if you try and defend yourself, you get arrested (that's tyranny). Special classes of people get to commit crimes with impunity while the law-abiding are punished with the full force of law.
crushedoranges
24d ago
I'm not going to go into the semantics game of gender. It is a trap that has consumed too much time for ultimately no purpose.
Sex is far more important: and indelible in which the exceptions make the rule in nature. The male anglerfish is a male anglerfish. Evolution has shaped him to end his life as a vestigal set of gonads, his face permanently melded into his mate's flesh. It is a horrible fate, but that is what nature dictates his life and function to be. A transgender human is more capable, for human beings in general are more capable, but all humans are animals and must obey what nature has endowed them with.
A MtF lacks the qualia of female-ness... womanhood is not acquired, but innate. As a 4chan shitpost brilliantly in my memory states: the state of being is inachievable by any level of becoming. They may claim to have been born a woman and assigned male, but they have the sex organs of a male: the body of a male. Their conception of what a woman is no different than their conception of what a transcendent posthuman intelligence would be. Or what an anglerfish imagines a man to be: fundamentally limited by the limitations of their bodies.
In other words: women don't have to think about passing, and neither do men, because by nature they are effortlessly what their birth sex is as their gender, to the point where the two terms are identical. It is only the trans perspective that insists on a duality!
Even if the technology were perfect: if it were a machine that turned XY to XX, they would still not be a woman. They would be a man who has become a woman through scientific miracle. The transgender demand is not 'I can do what a woman can do' but 'I was always, in essence, woman in nature, in defiance of my biology'. That is the contentious part. In the modern day, the best they can do is 'you are a man who is trying to become a woman, and failing'. And, in spite of that failure, demanding the special privileges of those who are women anyway.
To contrast, human flight has obvious and inevitable consequence for those who do not respect the natural law: that we lack a righting instinct to pull out of death spirals, that we are susceptible to horizon illusions that kill many pilots, etc... it is not comparable. That is the price we pay for heavier than air flight. Transness would be to insist to the universe that you be treated like a swan.
crushedoranges
26d ago
Let me talk about Gramsci for a moment.
Gramsci came to the (right) conclusion that Italy was not ready for socialism. Socialism in Italy was about as popular as Christian Nationalism is now. Any creation of a socialist regime in Italy would inevitably have to come top-down from a Leninist vanguard party. He was intellectually honest and realized that taking power for the people against the people's wishes was so contradictory as to be unjustifiable.
For similar reasons, America is not amiable to being a Christian nationalist homeland. But nevertheless, he believed it was possible: because he bought into, at some level, Marxist dialectical materialism. Christian nationalists believe they will succeed because God is on their side. You may not accept these reasons as being valid, but they are very real and compelling reasons to them.
By definition, they seek to transform and revolutionize society, but from such a marginal position, all they can do is encourage the development of a civil society that wants to be socialism/christian, etc. The strategy is sound. The reason that it's not done by everyone is that it's hard and requires patience. Only people on the margins of society without any other recourse to more potent levers would try this because success isn't certain in the least.
You're asking for novel and unique tactics from fringe ideologies: but the truth is that there really isn't any. Hitler sums it up in Mein Kampf better than anyone else, in my opinion: parasitizing off an existing movement and repurposing its infrastructure for your own ends. Street violence as self promotion: shows of strength in enemy strongholds. Attract the convincible and use them as leverage to force the establishment to make concessions. Then, when the time is right, seize power. This is virtually identical to Leninist vanguardism in every respect. Culture war is just to shape the intellectual landscape to prime the masses to accept the process of overthrow of bourgoise democracy as natural and necessary.
crushedoranges
26d ago
You get the foederati problem in that a majority of the population is only loyal to money: they have no love of your nation and will betray it if it is in their self interest.
Now, the Qatari and UAE may not be as stupid as to man their armed forces with foreigners, but having an entirely foreign proletariat begs the question. If they strike... what are you going to do about it? Factory workers are not easily cowed like domestic servants. You can't appeal to them for love of country or a shared religion.
You can only maintain such a state of affairs through authoritarian force, which will lead to abuse... industrialization will create a class of workers that has power that the state can't easily crush. It's why it's a dead end. Miserable slaves that will never rebel are not productive workers, not for the kind of industry that matters in the modern world.
crushedoranges
26d ago
Let me state the contrapositive: no nation has ever succeeded by being built and operated by foreigners. Those foreigners either become like you (ideally) or your country collapses from the contradiction of misaligned interests. The Emiratis are aristocrats playing at being a nation-state, with a economy of servants to work its trappings. They have no interest in investing into a native workforce and neither do the natives have an interest in doing hard work.
So everything is done by outsiders: either at the high end (foreign expat technocrats) or at the low (Indian slave labor.)
Having a workforce that has no stake in the long-term venture of a nation-state is bad, obviously bad. There is probably no solution to it.
crushedoranges
26d ago
Kulturkampf is in of itself a reactionary idea: Gramsci merely applied it to socialism as a tactic to make the masses want socialism organically rather than have it imposed top-down from a vanguardist party. It's a dialectic all the way down.
But as a thought experiment, let's pretend I'm a Christian nationalist: my ideas are so far from the mainstream that sticking to principles is pointless. By default, any tactic or strategy that gets me closer to realizing my ideology is better than nothing. Even if I have to lie and pretend that I'm not a CN: that I'm a secularist or whatever, or pretending to respect democracy when I want to enact a theocratic form of government.
"We'll win, and then decide what our program looks like" is a perfectly reasonable response to extremely hostile enviroments. It worked for Franco, for instance. Acquiring power is the important part. Having principles while not having any power is useless. Compromising on your principles to get it is worth it because having part of your program enacted is better than none. The only people who think otherwise are idealistic intellectuals.
Now the reasons why your original tactics don't work in defiance of your ideology in the first place..? Well, every ideology has some way of papering over that. Marxism has false conciousness and wreckerism, WN has da joos... etc. Hypocrisy and unworkability has never gotten in the way of ideologues anywhere.
crushedoranges
26d ago
The simplest way I can describe the problem is that they're elites trying to build the roof of a great house before the foundation and the walls: creating a future of which their own descendents will not be able to sustain. They're trying to move forward while looking back, trapped in islamist trappings: wealth without modernity. Impossible, like driving a car by looking through the rearview window. Regression to the mean is inevitable.
crushedoranges
28d ago
I would make the argument that Gramsci's tactics are, by their nature, apolitical: and they are successful enough that even his most hated ideological enemies have adopted them because they are effective and they work. It is impossible to describe what the woke right is without describing it as a reaction to the woke left: its shadow and anima. Perhaps it was inevitable that the right absorb the insights of the left, and not stay static forever. It is an active dialectic, after all.
Note that rightists who know who Gramsci is a vanishingly small clique in any case.
But nevertheless, I wouldn't oversell the impact for 'A Case For White Nationalism' and other works like it. They are very clever works, throwing the prevailing orthodoxy's own logic against it. They have the benefit that woke structures do, in fact, exist to disenfranchise white men, and all they have to do is Observe while their opponents try to explain why their racially discriminatory policies are actually Equitable to a increasingly cynical audience. The woke right only exists in the imaginations of vanguardist liberals, kicked out of the progressive sphere but eager to gatekeep the populist right back to liberalism.
It won't work. But why it won't work is a whole essay in of itself.
crushedoranges
28d ago
Woke right is not a thing: it never was a thing, because actual Nazis, fascists, and white nationalists don't use or accept critical theory. Any resemblance (da joos vs da whitey) is coincidental: the true similarity is that both wokism and fascism are illiberal, but for completely different reasons.
Let us use argumentum ad Hitlerum to demonstrate what I mean. Hitler is uncontroversially a Nazi, a fascist, and a white nationalist. To call him 'woke' is a definitional collapse. He's not building a intersectional coalition against Zionism and its supporters. He has a particular volkgeist and conceptions of ethnic superiority that is not postmodern in the least. (This is why hoteps aren't woke, despite arguably being the originator of the term: they're particular, not universal.)
It's dumb. It's dumb, lazy thinking: liberals playing definitional games and labels as if they mean anything. If you have a problem with white nationalists and cryptonazis, you can say so: that's a popular opinion in normieland. You don't need to invent fake terms that only you and a particular clique define.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I want to believe in God, in defiance of the absence of evidence of his existence. Because faith is an absurd notion: but it is like love and hope. It is a necessary balm in a cruel and uncaring world. In the Kierkengaardian sense, I believe in God as the manifest nature of love: eternally abiding, unconditional, perfect. Forgiving. Merciful, to the flawed creatures that are men. In my life, I feel so sad, so forlorn. I feel that only God could love such a creature as I.
It is probably the only love I will feel in this life.
Perhaps that makes me a strange Catholic, but I arrived here strangely, in any case. You could make a secular case of Christ's nonexistence, but that wouldn't change my faith in God, because my faith isn't based in scurrilous readings of the Bible or enscribed onto plates. I don't care to prove my faith or defend it against skeptical inquiry. I base it on love: that transcendent, ethereal quality that is beyond the ability of materialism to define beyond the inadequate language of hormones and socialization.
That is the most profound miracle of all, and beyond the reach of fedora'd Redditors.
As much as the meaning of Matthew 16:18 has been stretched to assert papal primacy, let me be the first to dunk on the central conceit of faith of Mormonism: Joseph Smith and his golden plates. As a recent convert to Catholicism, I spent quite a bit of comparison-shopping between the Christian denominations. Mormonism, even in comparison to the other sects of Christianity, is too much to ask to believe in without being born into it.
Joseph Smith does not claim to be a prophet, but merely the reciever of revelation of historical apocrypha: translated to him from the original 'Reformed Egyptian' created from a Native American script. This is an article of faith of the Mormon Church: you cannot be a Mormon without accepting this. You can probably guess that I'm not a Mormon because I don't believe this for a second.
Now, you might say from a secular perspective: isn't this the narcissism of small differences? You believe in the resurrection of Christ, don't you? You believe in miracles? Surely, you can't give the benefit of the doubt - or even faith - to an American finding golden plates with the word of angels on it? Yes. Yes, actually. I'm not a midwestern subsistance farmer with less than a grade-school education. Egyptians never crossed the Atlantic, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn't have passed their script in such a way that there is no sign of the language anywhere else than the Book of Mormons attests.
Catholicism, on the other hand, has thousands of years of writings of church fathers in Greek and Latin. Is the New Testament an 'add-on' to the Old in the same way the Book of Mormon is? Perhaps. But the New Testament is the description of the life and ministry of Christ (with added prophecy.) The Book of Mormon describes events that no human being could plausibly witness the entirety of (the post-Resurrection ministry of Christ in the Americas.) The Gospels, at least, are written to be the accounts of different church fathers all witnessing the same thing. We only have Smith's word that it is relevation of God at all.
As a Christian, and as a Catholic, even if the papacy is so astray as to have broken the church of Christ, it was certainly not amended or renewed by Smith. His claims to being a prophet hinge on the legitimacy of a dubious forgery. By Nicene standards, his followers are not even Christians - being non-Trinitarian in belief and dogma. No doubt you've heard of these arguments before. You might even have been taught how to rebut them. But you can't get away from the golden plates.
If he had merely asserted that he was a prophet from the beginning, no such artifice would be necessary.
So why didn't he?
Christ, was, at some point: a living person. The Church fathers were real people who attested to him: the writings of early Christians that formed into the Catholic Church exist. Secular analysis into the Bible has even analyzed the different authorial voices and styles within it. Doctrinal discord within the Catholic Church is nothing new. But the basis of Mormonism is in an article of faith that is transparently a fraud. If the plates aren't real, then everything he teaches and every commandment he pronounced is a falsehood.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Scott is a Democrat partisan now. He used to have useful insights, but then they got him, first by attacking his reputation, and then his Californian social circle has naturally limited the scope of acceptable opinions that he can hold. Of course he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left. All of his friends live there.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
No, because having without owning is something I already experience in live service games and software and it is decidedly not pleasant.
If you've ever heard the slogan 'you will own nothing and you will be happy', perhaps - I'm assuming on your part - that sounds pretty good. But there is a great majority of people who will react to that with complete revulsion, and on further thinking about it, will want nothing to do with your anarchist deconstruction of ownership (and call the police on you if you persist.)
A billionaire can have a lot of stuff. Is he depriving me of stuff because of inequality? Only in a ethos that supposes equal distribution. But I don't want his stuff: I want my stuff. And the system that protects his stuff from arbitrary seizure is the same as mine. Overall, property as a concept is worth its tradeoffs. Inequality that emerges from a differential of effort is good. Others, not so much. The slice I would get from redistribution is smaller from the peace of mind knowing that my stuff won't be messed with.
You may not like this logic, you may even have arguments that rebut it: but this is how the majority of the people in the world think.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I'll be happy to defend Trump's foibles and missteps if you'd like to defend the Iraq War. Or the COVID response. Or Critical Race Theory and its formalization into academia and hiring practices. Affirmative action in college recruitment. The replication crisis. Politicians and NGOs openly lobbying for open borders and the immiseration of the working class. Every single brick of the system that held it up that is gone that you don't want to defend.
And my answer to that is: I don't know. I don't know how to fix the system. But a good start, in my mind, is getting rid of everyone responsible. And it seems like you're standing in the way... for no discernable reason at all.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Good writing is something beyond technical skill and authentic expression.
I would describe it as a religious experience: that you are offering yourself to a divine muse: and you are a conduit for something unearthly. It passes through your unworthy hands and is lessened by its transcription onto the page. Something pure and real, an echo of a sublime vibe that trembles through the air.
It is the most satisfying and furious passion I have experienced in my life, and everything I've done as a writer is chasing the dragon of communion with that mayfly feeling. Words fail to describe its swelling intensity: you can see reflections of it in truely great works. I hope at least some of you get to experience it someday.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
what kind of sample has a majority its participants go through a formal DEI training? That excludes almost the entirety of the blue-collar and tradesman, as well as a plurality of the service industry. I hate to go diving into crosstabs to discredit a survey, but this sounds very suspicious.
A younger version of me might say, 'tits or gtfo'. I know better now.
Oh, how I know.
The whole premise of that particular idiosyncratic statement is that once the woman shows her tits, it is a fundamental humiliation: that she acknowledges she has nothing to contribute to the conversation but the aesthetic value of her body. If she feels objectified, good. That is the point.
Once that Rubicon is crossed, there is no going back. There is only the diminishing value of rapidly vanishing youth. Once the tits are shown, they cannot be unshown. You will never be taken seriously again, because to do so would be unfair to the literally countless other women who must compete for men's intellect without the benefit of gratitious nudity.
Aella is a woman of loose morals, literally (and with the intent of accuracy) one of negotiable affection. Her intellect shall always have qualifications because there is no end to men desperate for a crumb of pussy to validate her every musing and whim.
You can't make a ho a housewife. She cashed in respectability to ride the cock carousel. If she really cared about the opinions of others, she wouldn't have fucked thousands of men to begin with. She feels shame because she should feel shame. She gave up something meaningful for nororiety, fleeting and ephemeral. And that's really the end of the story. Hos mad. Hos sad. Life goes on.
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