crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
8mo 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.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
The world is moving closer and closer to a monoculture, of which societal differences are obliterated from the twin forces of capitalism and social media. What justice would such a society have? It would be permanent and immutable, and if you dislike it even in the smallest part it will be imposed upon you.
The relativist stance is descriptive of a reality that is fast disappearing. Current academics feel no shame of imposing their morality on the distant past. It is post-modernist babble that is completely unhelpful to the vital question of what is right and good.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
It is, in a vacuum, but grudger strategies seem to be replicated in societies across the world while forgiveness ones tend to be the product of highly advanced societies with high social trust. Hothouse flowers, in other words.
It probably says something about the decay of social institutions when grudging feels better than forgiving.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
The presentation of heritage gives a false impression, like it's fifths of a pizza pie, but it's more likely that she's ENGLISH and irish and homeopathic amounts of the rest.
In other words, a Dolezal. She looks a bit brown in her photographs, but much like other fakers like Shaun King there's a ton of things you can do to look mulatto. If Trump claimed to be Namekian because of his spray tan I wouldn't put too much credence on it either.
crushedoranges
11d ago
Just as an abstract question, if you were a woman, how would you go about becoming the mistress of Arnold Schwarzenegger? He is undoubtedly at the top in the political, physical, and social sphere of America. How would you do it?
Well, certainly not by going to college!
He had a child by his cleaning maid, a child that seems to have recieved the jackpot in terms of genetics, becoming a Hispanic clone of his father. We're not talking about relationships here: we're talking about reproductive success.
If you're a woman, and you want to have ubermensch children, you don't even need to be attractive. You just need to be available to elite men, be discreet, and be feminine and pliant. That's all it takes. It's not complicated. Women have been doing it for millenia. You don't need a piece of paper to get into Chad's pants. You just need girl game.
Career? Working is for the working class!
More of how drugs turn normal people into monsters that seek to replicate their misery. They superficially resemble the person they once were, but something new and horrible blossoms inside of them.
And yeah, you could try and cure it. But that only solves it on the individual level. The alien queen is still alive, and there are fools who advocate for her to get corporate citizenship. What's the point in spending half a million dollars trying to get a addict clean (and failing more than half the time) when a drug dealer can get a new victim hooked for the price of a happy meal?
crushedoranges
30d ago
The very credibility of the LIO and the West in general is at stake. If Ukraine loses, then it's a green light to all with revanchist ambitions. Too much national honor has been put on the line by feckless politicians, who have entangled their political fates to this insignificant front. There's no room for pragmatism.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
They're perfectly fine games. (Paarthurnax and Trevor are my favorite characters from each, for vastly differing reasons.) They're just open world games and are considered inferior to their predecessors by auteurs. To a certain degree, they're right, but they exaggerate it for memes.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Let me voice the reactionary opinion: strength is good, actually.
Valuing traits that are signs of personal character - virtue, integrity, honor, personal fitness, stoicism - leads to strong individuals who lead strong societies. There is no shame in being weak: because no one is born perfect. But giving up on self-improvement, selfishly wallowing in one's own incapacity, that should be shamed, and those who make their identity of being weak should not be valued or praised.
A society that values strength will produce people of merit. A society that values weakness will produce people of no worth. People respond to material and social incentives. A middling society that attempts to equivocate between the two will only create confusion: pretending that strength is equally as valid as weakness is obviously degenerate. I'd much rather have a paternal society which encourages fortitude than a maternal one which coddles the thin-skinned. If liberals say that it's dystopian and cruel, I'll tell them to touch grass.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Date two attractive people at the same time, then your life will get super exciting. I think part of the appeal of adultery is that the elaborate double life is thrilling. Since you've got more income, you can go on twice the dates! Repeat until you're a bog-standard rationalist polygamist.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I just wanted to make the distinction that being a contrarian is merely being against the prevailing wisdom. It doesn't imply action, only disagreement.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's a slightly gamified version of D&D 5e. An accurate representation of the roleplaying game, but it diminishes how fun it is. (The lack of simulataneous turns is the real killer.)
crushedoranges
2mo ago
I'd like to chime in from my lurker position and say that this is a good thing, in that this forum was obviously not for him - insomuch as he resolutely did not want to have his mind changed. Not knowing him personally, I'd say that my experience with him is that he resolutely held his ground and never conceded any point. Even if his opponent struck a point, he would ignore it.
And that's fine - if you have consequentialist priors. If you're convinced something is good and is the basis of your moral reality, then evidence and argumentation to the contrary will seem like sophistry. But he was made by his times. The simple fact is that it's been a decade since SSC first started going. His Bush-era anecodotes and rambles are very dated. Quite simply, he became old. Everything is postmodern to him because it is.
He was no longer 'with it'. As Simpsons says, it happened to him. It will happen to all of us.
And by God's grace, I hope I will carry myself with more dignity.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
I think the attitude of 'everything is idpol except for this one particular issue which I've pulled out of the Dirty Bourgie Left and is sacred above all others' is the most annoying part. If he was a doctrinaire orthodox Marxist-Leninist who scorned it as false consciousness it would be still annoying but it would be logically consistent.
But instead he twists himself into a loop trying to justify it. Has anyone asked him, given the choice between transgender rights and utopic Communism, which would he choose? I think he'd twist in the wind in pure agony.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
I can only comment on its aesthetic qualities but it very much feels like a raising, a visual bump in the text that is not as grating as italics or bold but still noticable. Kind of like braille.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
Seconded. This seems important enough to get a megathread for - if the Rittenhouse and Floyd 'events' were noteworthy enough to partition, this seems surely equal to that bar.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
I would point to Jefferson and the anti-Federalist papers as to a non-progressive ideation of equality. Namely, that if we're going to have a republic, it'd be better if everyone was a gentleman-farmer. If the height of American society was somewhere around the wealth and property of the English landed gentry then the distortions that come with the hyperaccumulation of capital would not occur.
But that didn't happen, and if it ever was real then it was definitely squashed after the civil war. The bourgeois won, and with it, the idea of independent democratic experiment-making died too. The American federal government made very sure that landholding elite classes could not resist industrial capital for a reason. And once you have carpetbaggers funded by out of state capital to run for offices everywhere, you no longer have local government, or local politics.
Obama and McCain's electoral contest was the ultimate contest of carpetbagging, neither of them being born in the United States proper. If you want local government, you want local elites.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
Others had already answered the question, so I felt that adding the historical content would be more helpful than digging up the old SSC post that introduced the concept to the rat sphere in the first place.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
But it is hypocrisy. What Marxists call attempting to resolve the contradictions of capitalism, and what fascists of every stripe call parasitism. And they are correct in their critique that it solves nothing: there is still inequality and no amount of welfarism will remove it.
Now, you can see this as necessary process of the churn of liberal democracy. That's a kind way to look at it. But, and correct me if I misrepresent you, the essence of your response (and what many liberals would also say) is that "I am okay with a permanently unequal society, so as long as it makes token efforts to make me more comfortable living in it."
Which is a... worldview.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
I attribute the absence of natural rights from the discussion as the appalling dearth of political education in the modern demos rather than its irrelevancy. Ask the average voter where their rights come from and you'll get unhelpful answers (God? the State? being a 'decent' human being?). The degradation of rights into entitlements given by governmental fiat is something to be fought against.
Although it may be irrelevant in people's day to day lives it is of the greatest importance to the philosophy of government, and therefore its character.
crushedoranges
8mo ago
I honestly don't know. I admit that although I am anti-liberal, I am aware that being able to critique a system by no means gives you the expertise or authority to suggest a replacement. It may be indeed that liberalism is the best performant system human beings have come up so far while simultaneously incubating authoritarianism within its ideological framework because of its contradictions. If there's a formulation of liberalism that can square the circle, I would like to learn of it, because I like having liberal rights in general.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
Mainstream media is picking it up: CNN, Telegraph, Washington Post. Even Russia Today has an article!
Oh baby, it's on!
crushedoranges
11mo ago
I actually do make things: I'm a writer, but the content I make is perhaps too spicy for here, being 4chan-adjacent. :P
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.
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