crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
7mo ago
I disagree!
Although the Declaration of Independence is not a document with any legal force nowadays, I deem it a good marker of what the best Enlightenment thinking of the time was going for. They really did believe that God made man equal. But God has evaporated from the public commons, and we're left with the equality.
I have met many liberals who say that if we only committed more national resources to welfarism, we'd emerge in the promised land. Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary? Is that the 'huge effort' you refer to? If not, then how much money exactly should go into patching up the liberal project, into perpetuity?
crushedoranges
1yr ago
A very well done write up.
I only say that judging by what I've heard, the Finns and Sami have had historically amicable relations and the imposition of brain-rot anti-colonialist narratives has created a granularity of identity which previously did not exist. (How many Finns went off into the wilderness over the centuries? How many Sami settled and became identical to their neighbors over the generations?)
Isn't this a fairer, more egalitarian way of things? Bothering with blood quantums, with ancient lists? Why impose a progressive view on race where the historical arrangement was of no controversy whatsover? Are we supposed to enforce a strict separation of ethnicities, that people cannot pass from one group to another by marriage and blood? Is that not racist?
They are neighbors of linguistically similar language isolates: they have literally been kissing cousins for thousands - if not tens of thousands - of years. The Sami are not Amerindians! It's stupid. It's very stupid.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I disagree: and I think it's a fundamental difference in values that can't be overcome by argument. I think that the world would be a better place if people thought through the consequences of their actions. If you pour chemical waste into the water table, you recruit people into a cult, or you don't push a shopping cart back to the corral, it's not guiltlessness - it's malicious indifference. There's no legal liability, but morally it is abhorrent all the same.
To take a unorthodox (and decidedly un-feminist) perspective on the matter: elite men.
Feminism is a product of industrial civilization. It is inherently bourgeoise in origin: look up the lists of suffragettes and their ranks are plucked mostly from the emerging middle-class. In this general atmosphere of awakening political consciousness, a small group of women desired to have the political rights of rich men. Keep in mind that universal male suffrage was in the process of rolling out around the world: female suffrage was only a natural evolution of this if you subscribe to Whig history!
The anti-suffragettes (cut out of the historical narrative) correctly saw this as dividing the vote of a household, of fragmenting the family unit, and bringing politics into the realm of the home. And the first legislative policy that could be said to laid at the feet of these suffragette organizations in America? Prohibition.
There are always those who scheme of changing the nature of the electorate to accomplish their policy goals - rather than convincing the existing demos of the necessity for change. The further a woman is 'liberated' from structures of faith, tribe, and family, the more energy can be devoted to political endeavors. A politician could hardly care that his female constituents are unhappy or are childless - in the atomized, liberal worldview, she is only as valuable as her vote, and as a foot soldier for the causes of the day. The women who would form the base of community and social life are instead cannibalized into the great Molochian machine of modernity, a bonfire of social capital.
It is ultimately a project to alienate woman from loving their families, their neighbors, the people they live with. And for what? To throw them into a cosmic conflict against a perverse scapegoat of the hated masculine - a struggle that is eternal as it is unwinnable. And it is supported in the west because it creates a potent voting bloc to hammer plebian men into submission. It is not elite women who are living lives of independence from men: they get married as quickly as possible and raise their children with all the resources that they can bring to bear. By supporting ever further Hobbesian freedom into insanity, elite men gain a patina of virtue. They promulgate values that they do not personally practice: in addition to gaining a harem of strivers from the middle-class of which he can casually discard at a whim.
crushedoranges
10d ago
If drug addiction is closer to alien chestburster syndrome then the common cold then that enables a wide variety of policy proscriptions considered too draconian in the west today.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
Ibn Kaldun was an Arab sociologist (the first of his field) and, exceptionally for a man of his time, did not accept the 'god willed it' explanation for why the Rashidun Caliphate collapsed. He came up with a term to describe the social cohesiveness and trust of society that degraded over time (of which I would call social capital).
It serves as a warning to elites who assume a high-trust society is a given: that abusing one's legitimacy by acting in arbitrary ways will lead to the decline and decay of one's empire, no matter how divinely guided. A bourgeoise state is reliant on high societal trust for contract enforcement and stability for business. It is the exceptional malefactor that would burn this trust for a temporary boost to quarterly figures.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
It is my impression that in the vague direction of the general left people are not in favor of things like climate change, and the driving of cars that encourages such processes. If people don't feel safe taking public transit because of addicts and dealers, is that not a problem? Is it not an injury to the public to have one's public spaces smelling of urine and strewn with stray needles?
The new urbanist movement is attempting to shame people into using public transit, at the same time it refuses to make it usable and safe. Revealed preferences shows that it is a bipartisan consensus that one should not expose one's children to schizophrenic lunatics and drug dealers, and women prefer not to go home late at night around the urban lumpenproles.
And somehow they cling to the notion that it's a 'car-centric culture', when it is so clearly a output of clear material incentive. How could so many smart people be so stupid?
Authoritarianism is not 'whenever the state uses force'. If the government is not going to solve these social cancers with its monopoly on force it is weak and ineffectual and the people are not bootlickers or Hitlerites for wanting it fixed. Imprisoning addicts and killing the dealers is preferable to the status quo of letting them do whatever they want, and as populists in other countries have proven: if liberal governments don't solve the problem and just waffle in useless progressive policy a strongman will eventually come along and do it for them.
The frustration is reaching a boiling point: it is a warning to people of progressive, libertarian ideals: you are running out of time to implement policy, and you do not have infinite time or public resources to waste. Sadly, I doubt anyone in power will heed it.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
People feel poorer because they can't own homes and they can't start families. That's a qualitative reality that no amount of quantitative statistics can capture. Something that, I note, that our much poorer ancestors accomplished (albeit, with effort, but not an impossible amount of it.)
crushedoranges
1yr ago
How many smart actors are in political betting, anyway. I think it's mostly wishcasting by feverent partisans. It's best used as a gauge for enthusiasm of the core base. Ceremonially igniting your cash on a bonfire to signal faith in your tribe is worth something (and if you actually win, bonus!)
I bet in antiquity, people would watch the smoke rising from the temples to gauge which Babylonian cult was on the ascendency. It's much the same here.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Is cryptocurrency a significant contributor to capital flight? It's hard to believe, when it can be legislated out of existence by the whim of the legislature. Is Russia using the technology to bypass western sanctions? Surely, if there is any use case for crypto, we would have seen it boom if it was an effective way to bypass Western capital controls.
In my view, it's a solution in search of a problem: nearly everything its advocates say it can do is already done and on a far more economical scale.
crushedoranges
4hr ago
Do women hold up their degrees in pornography?
crushedoranges
5d ago
In one hundred years your shitposts will be taken seriously by the intellectuals of the time.
crushedoranges
16d ago
I don't know who Rufo is, and I'm deep, as it were, in the shit.
Something new you learn every day.
I am puzzled that you believe natural selection is an all-encompassing concept that includes human efforts at selective breeding. It is not a prescriptive term. Humans are not predisposed to select favorable traits from flora and fauna: in fact, it is a social technology that arose from cultural, not biological origins. Insomuch as the word 'natural' is used, it is to distinguish from human and non-human effect on selection pressure. If you object to the anthropocentric viewpoint that puts humanity above nature as a privileged observer, then say so. But that doesn't make natural selection any less valid. It is not a just so explanation that you may have encountered in the softer social sciences, like evo psych. It is also backed by voluminous research and math and hundreds of thousands of papers (literally, the entire field of modern biology.)
If you believe that natural selection is tautological because it is obvious, then you work against history. It was not obvious to the ancients (although parts of it were certainly guessed independently from agricultural folkways) and even in modern times it was denied for ideological reasons (creationism, lysenkoism.) No one is in love with Darwin, as you claim. Of all the theories on the diversity and variety of biological life, it has proved to be the most useful and applicable to science and industry.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I'm not a libertarian, personally, but I don't think libertarians have the goal of society of driving humanity forward or progressivism of any sort. Some of them do, but that is adjacent to libertarianism. They just want a government that can defend property rights from outsiders and arbitrate disputes between insiders. You can't make a critique of liberal morality to libertarianism because they consider it in the domain of the individual and not the government.
A libertarian will tell you if you want to change the world, become an angel investor, or if you lack the means, purchase stock in the most forward-thinking companies. Or even better, start your own. Not demand the government to do so. And this is entirely consistent within their world view. Just because you don't like it or clutch your pearls about the second order consequences doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to a libertarian.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's a classic, but it's also wrong, and I'm tired of seeing it repeated as an aphorism.
Take Einstein, who is good at physics but bad at designing refrigerators and being President of Israel. If you care about keeping your food cold and being an effective advocate for Israeli interests, he'd seem pretty stupid to you. If you judged a doctor on his handwriting or a parapalegic on his ability to run, they'd seem stupid, too.
Outside of partisan politics, it is indeed possible for someone to be incredibly stupid in something and incredibly smart in another. Linus Pauling recommending superdoses of vitamin C. Noam Chomsky in anything that has to do with politics. Ben Carson in literally every category but neurosurgery. We know that these contradictions exist in real life, that these nuances do happen, not just with people, but with groups.
But then the quippy liberal says 'fascists blah blah, weak and strong', as if it means anything, if it isn't just them quoting something trite and banal and passing it off as wisdom if you don't think about it for more than a minute.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's why I believe that Trump isn't a blathering moron and is, at worst, a clever amateur who is intelligent enough to see the end result of policy that its own proponents have cleverly ducked around. If abortion is murder, then why not arrest the mother? We arrest infanticides and infant abandoners, don't we? That it is politically unpalatable and bad optics is one thing, but perhaps it is a natural consequence of unpopular policy.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
From what my admittedly lacking research tells me is that there was an initial, 'strong' version of the constitution that did enshrine them as rights, but the finance department took one look at the figures for such a welfare program and said 'no way, we can't afford it.'
So they were degraded into nonbinding 'directive principles', so it has the weight and pomp of one's Amazon wish list. But still, it is a relic of the strong Catholicism that was once strong in Ireland, which the government is now desperately trying to remove.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It requires a certain mindset that is obsessed about map-painting and an interest in history.
If you read those books and then proceed to completely ignore their lessons and substitute a vague Fukuyamist neoconservatism, of course you wouldn't learn anything. I would say that the American political establishment have a desire for both lengthy wars and wars of ideological vagueness and impossible aims (what does spreading democracy even mean, in an ethnically divided country?) that both books warn against.
If, on the net, reading those books turns you into someone who disagrees with the ghouls in the State Department, then it's a net win.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Alberta is the standout but Saskatchewan and Manitoba are no slouches either: as global warming progresses the US agricultural zones slowly creep northward. All of our Ukrainians have historically lived there, as well.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
'legitimate victimhood?'
Are you like, the edgy version of the Republican boomer that says 'Democrats are the real racists?' 'Wokes are the real oppressors?'
If you define wokeness by that parameter it means on some level you've functionally accepted the priors of critical theory and therefore are not particularly based in any aspect. Cringe indeed.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
Well, of course. It is implicit.
But bringing up this fact ignores the past thousand years of political development, namely, that we live in the era that states have monopolies on force. It brings to mind the sort of self-representing lawsuit maker who smugly brings up the Magna Carta at his trial for tax evasion. Yes, we understand the principle, but it's not very useful for our purposes.
Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder. And through this lense we extend this sense of self to the material (private property) and the abstract (autonomy of action.) Unless you are so radical that you say you have the right to kill anyone you please.
Which, of course, is fine. But then I'd have to report you for strange notions.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
There is some marginal benefit to being the child of a rich person. (Otherwise, there would be no mechanisms to preserve elite status over generations other than by gene transfer.) I think if people were given the choice of being the only child of a Sub-Saharan African or the hundredth (thousandth?) child of Elon Musk, they'd choose the latter every time.
My point being is that it doesn't matter how affluent the society as a whole is: so as long as hedonic escalation is a thing, people will always resent and have jealousy for people more well off then them (even if, relative to everyone else, they are wealthier than everyone on the planet.) We are nowhere near that state in the modern day: the ones with the greatest chip in their shoulders against the 1% are the fantastically wealthy American underclass.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
No.
Or rather, it doesn't matter if your baseline is of low intelligence so as long as you have a talented tenth that actually runs things. Sure, you wouldn't be able to get the results of higher SD nations, but you can get something like modern-day Rwanda or Ethiopia going. Not great, but certainly above the (admittedly low) norm.
What is far more impactful is the threat of pernicious ideomemes like communism. You can throw as much high-iq Asians and Slavic technocrats at it to no avail. Even the most degenerate of African states are paradises to say, Pol Pot's Cambodia. Communism, in terms of HBD, is equalivant to a primal reversion to humanity's primate ancestors, an intellect-shredding machine. Even if one must accept the premises of HBD, it gives one hope that the right ideomeme can produce results out of porportion of one's intellectual talents, but we haven't discovered the right solution yet.
If you don't want to be called the L-word you must turn in the janitor badge. Anyone based enough to have cool opinions would never consider the job of internet moderator.
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