crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
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.
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
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
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
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!
crushedoranges
2mo 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
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
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
17d ago
In one hundred years your shitposts will be taken seriously by the intellectuals of the time.
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
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
Your point would be better if Yud was a prophet in the wilderness, but instead, he's an influential idiot who has influence in the development of LLMs (and whatever AGIs emerge from their development.) It would be like having a board member on Intel who wants to make their chips hotter and slower. He's past the point of contrarianism: he's a Yuddite.
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
2mo 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
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
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
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
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 comparison is in scope, not in kind. The reason there isn't a conservative Battletech is the same reason why there isn't a conservative credit-card. If the left is going to turn every conceivable facet of human existence into culture-war, things as diverse as crochet, miniature-painting, hiking, whatever - it is a total war.
Innocence (or a complete lack of relevance to politics) is no defense: they're going to come for your little comfy niche hobby eventually and cover it with rainbow paint. And unless you're willing to fight as hard as the Kiwis you'll be shoved out and marginalized and kicked out of your own communities. You can't flee. You can't abandon the high ground to the woke. You have to fight.
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
11mo ago
This is an unfair argument.
Take Kiwi Farms, for example. You could extend your argument you make, smugly saying: 'make your own payment processor, make your own DNS, make your own web-host.' The left extends controls over previously neutral institutions and you say 'why not make your own?' Why not make your own laws, your own bank, your own country? Your own autonomous sovereignty, right-wingers?
Imagine my face: it is a chiseled, manly expression, saying YES.
All culture war issues are essentially coup-complete ones now because of the left's influence over the government and the media. If you want to keep the globohomo out of your Battletech: you must first overthrow the US government.
crushedoranges
8mo 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
1mo ago
What has always frustrated me about Freddie is that he gets it, he really does, but at the last possible moment he crimestops himself and reaffirms his loyalty to the progressive agenda. It's never the fault of progressivism that it fails in practice: it's the no-good grifters who corrupt it away from Real Communism.
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.
Watership Down. Or, if they have a higher tolerance for reading, Dune. (Those who are already playing Warhammer 40k can read Starship Troopers.) If they're more of a nonfiction type Machieveli's The Prince is concise and relevant. Art of War and On War are good for leadership.
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