curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
fascist policies enacted to stop transmission of an illness that doesn't kill people
Lockdowns aren't on the pareto frontier of policy options for even diseases significantly deadlier than covid imo, just because rapid development and distribution of technological solutions is possible, but ... covid killed one million people in the united states. Yes, mostly old people, but we're talking about protecting old people here. No reason to pretend otherwise.
You provide no substance here; the story of Carlson's supposed texts is old and baseless. Dominion sliced apart internal communications and arranged them to falsely portray things like Carlson hating Trump
The texts were:
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he texted an unidentified person.
“I hate him passionately. ... I can’t handle much more of this,” he added.
“We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest,” he wrote in another text message, referring to the “last four years.” “But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
Even for this, I agree it's possible he was just really mad at Trump and is usually pro-trump even in private, and that was his defense. People say a lot of things, in a lot of contexts, and cherrypicking can do almost anything. But ... on the balance, those are very strong statements. What makes you call it baseless?
But no, you don't understand, if you truly understand how they are criminals who will take whatever they can the only rational consequent is "Can they prove they didn't?"
... are they? I know some people in the Democrat Establishment. Mostly, they follow the law and the rules and try to do what's right. I don't think this is good evidence against election fraud, but it is strong evidence against them being moral mutants who hate truth and all that is good. Are my enemies innately evil?
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
Okay, teleport back to the 1700s. You're a Christian. A high decoupler invites you to a talk about how to assess the historicity of the bible. Do you accept?
On the one hand, yeah, it's a trap to convince you to be a non-denominational Deist damn you to hell for eternity and expel you from polite society.
On the other hand, the person's more right than they know, because the Christian God actually isn't real!
The ideologies and material practices of the next 50 years will be different from those of today, in ways that will necessarily not be emotionally 'coupled' in the way today's issues are. By refusing to 'decouple', you're covering your ears as the world changes around you.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
But the strongest possible incentives have failed to stop aging, or find a way to increase IQ.
PGT-P, polygenic testing for diseases for pre-implantation embryos in IVF, is available right now. The exact same technology works for IQ, and could be used today if people weren't worried about legal/regulatory/PR pushback. 50% chance it already is being used secretly.
Also, even before that, we know how to increase IQ: use sperm/eggs from smarter parents. This isn't something most average parents would want, but it'd work. In a few decades, there'll probably be direct gene editing for something like 'your kid looks like you but has the intelligence-related-genes of someone much smarter', and even though valuing your child looking like you but not valuing them acting like you is quite confused, that'll probably sell. Black on the outside, jew on the inside.
It's the same principle as - you think your wife conspired with a corrupt family court to take your children, so you forge documentation to get a school to turn them over to you, breaking a court order. Maybe you're right. But there are processes for addressing that, and if you ignore those (or in trump's case try them but perform terribly and don't prevail), you don't have a right to lie and manipulate other processes.
This is a fundamental way modern governance works. The process prevents conflict by giving both individuals and the state a - usually fair - 'final authority' to appeal to, instead of using violence, coercion, or deception. Even if it's sometimes wrong, it's better to have a single source of truth to prevent conflict - whether that's individual conflict over who owns what or who deserves what, or political conflict over who has power. It's known who wins and how that's decided, according to the process and the court, the monopoly on violence enforces it, so nobody bothers to even fight. If you're wrongfully convicted, your supporters don't suicide bomb the cops/accusers and start a blood feud, they collect evidence and appeal. If someone screws you on a deal, you sue based on the contract both parties signed. If you lose an election and are upset, you file a lawsuit.
It could be argued this is a fundamental pillar holding up modern life. I'm not entirely sure - certainly a neoreactionary government would have less of this at the top-level, but that isn't ours. And if the election wasn't stolen (and I'm very unconvinced by arguments that it was), then Trump's actions is not good for democracy.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
No, I don't think so. We can already clone Von Neumann, and we can't actually engineer smarter people than that in the way we engineer airplanes or computers because we don't know how either intelligence or neurology work at that level.
We can certainly do iterated embryo selection on top of Von Neumann ... but I don't think that's going to work that well, you're running into non-additive effects there.
Sunday Fun Thread
Walter Isaacson: I got this text message from Elon Musk at 4:44am CT showing a screenshot of some text messages in which he tells Mark Zuckerberg they should fight this Monday at Zuckerberg’s home in Palo Alto.. The message to zuck appears to be sent at 1 AM.
Is this all just an elaborate joke? If not, it's hilarious that Elon's unparalleled skill at running companies coexists with this.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Every time they come up in my circles, everyone starts screaming "FED! FED!" and until they deal with those optics they are going to be left out to hang.
Funnily enough, this FED-screeching happens in both relatively normal freedom-loving libertarian and neo-nazi groups.
I don't think there are any particular reasons to believe PF are "feds" (presumably meaning: led by federal informants?) beyond them being a group that does IRL protests. Which is a decent reason to believe they have informants, but not a decent reason to believe that they, as a group, are primarily lead by feds.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
I think it's clearly true that humans are a lot less biodiverse than is possible or normal for other species, and that the range in human cognitive ability and behavior would be a lot larger if older human populations were still around.
Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates "Africans" from other groups is going to be suspect.
I mean, some African subpopulations seem to do a lot better than other African subpopulations, but it's reasonable to compare American whites to American blacks even if you don't generalize that to all of Africa so I don't think this proves much. I think it's reasonable to not expect the properties of American blacks to generalize to Africa, but that isn't the core of HBD so whatever.
Race isn't a valid construct, genetically speaking. It's not well defined; even HBD proponents disagree on how to classify people beyond Blacks/Whites/Asians
This is kinda ridiculous. You can tell what a non-mixed person's ancestry is by looking at them. There are extremely clear associations, you can get something looking like a map of europe by doing (something like a) PCA on genetic variation. Yeah, there's no single entirely correct categorization, but no single entirely correct categorization exists for fish either, and I think we can talk about fish. And different ancestry groups have differences in so many different traits - skin color, kinds of athleticism, body shape, hair, etc etc etc - that it's not implausible there'd be a statistical difference in intelligence.
Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid. There's no single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields can agree. (Among other things, this is why AI specialists have been struggling with "general AI" for the better part of a century)
... I mean, there's a whole literature on this, but IQ tests have strong associations with achievement and capability in every area. And just like, anecdotally, I can personally observe that some people are clearly much smarter than other people. And, funnily enough, when I get these people I know to take IQ tests, the ones I judged as clearly much smarter score ~130+, and those that I didn't don't.
There's no single genetic explanation that was ever put forward to account for traits purported to be "genetic" in origin by HBD proponents. This is because HBD proponents do not care about genes, and because they do not know about anything related to genetic mechanisms
No, this is because valuable complex traits are highly polygenic - many different genes have a small effect on the trait. This is because any variant that has a strong positive or negative effect is highly selected for/against, so the only genes with remaining variance have small effects.
Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells (this can carry over two generations if someone is pregnant - the stress then applies to the cells that would become the germinal cells of the foetus). That's not even addressing the environmental confounding factors. When confronted with their lack of an actual genetic explanation, HBD will fall back to utterly bizarre retorts like "uuuh you don't need to find genes for something to be grounded in genetics".
The effects of epigenitics, microbiota, and environmental cells are just quite small. The evidence just isn't there. Environmental confounding is very well addressed by existing studies. "lack of an actual genetic explanation" - again, complex traits are extremely polygenic.
Literally every public HBD proponent operates outside academia and is virtually unknown in the genomics community
So, this is a subtle trick. The comment's been attacking several things as foundational to HBD - the construct validity of IQ, the relevance of heritability, genetic explanations for traits like intelligence and personality that are claimed to be genetic, the relationship between genes and race. And then we say "HBD operates outside academia and is unknown in genomics". This is true, if HBD means "race genetically causes low IQ". It is profoundly and either maliciously or negligently false if we take HBD to include the validity of IQ, polygenic scores, and the heritability of and genetic explanations for intelligence. Those are well studied and in significant part accepted in academia. The positions this comment takes, especially about the validity and heritability of IQ, are not what is currently believed in academia.
Literally anyone who's been working on HBD stuff has been receiving funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund whose express purpose is to prove a hierarchy of races and justify eugenics since the 1930s so their neutrality can be questioned.
... okay? This is "every progressive organization was funded by SOROS, a globalist jew who loves criminals and hates wites" tier. Funding doesn't make something false, Soros has funded plenty of good causes.
Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two neighbouring countries' IQ in order to derive "data" from a country's unknown national IQ.
Yep, and anti-HBD people do bad things too. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the big names! Or consider modern research policies that just ... ban the use of biobanks to research the relationship between race and IQ.
I'll also link you to this, which probably does a better job than me, but I like writing anyway.
And if this is all too abstract and not connecting, try this - for a direct demonstration of one of the practical consequences of HBD, jewish overrepresentation. Once you've seen it it's hard to stop seeing it. But it's not necessarily a (((conspiracy))), they're just smart.
Let's say we add the new lanes, and congestion stays the same, and travel times stay the same. Is this a failure?
Let's say you have a single supermarket in a town. It's too crowded, the lines are always long. A second supermarket opens in a town. There's enough demand that, now, both supermarkets are too crowded, and the lines are too long. Is this bad? No, it's strictly an improvement - more people are buying food now! And the supermarket makes more money!
The same is true of 'induced demand' - the goal of 'reduce congestion' wasn't accomplished, but a separate goal of 'more people getting to where they want to' was. The extra people who drive on the new highway are benefitting greatly from the change - they can now get to places they couldn't before!
No, it would be a net decrease, because the cost of doing so would be very high, and those resources could be more efficiently used elsewhere.
That's ... not a net decrease. That's a 'suboptimal policy'. It's only a net decrease if those resources would be used more efficiently elsewhere absent the highway. Which, I think you would agree when looking at the rest of the city budget, they're not likely to be any time soon.
It would suck for anyone who currently lives in the area and has to deal with additional car traffic
A net decrease would require comparing that 'dealing with additional traffic' to the new jobs or new activities the people the additional traffic brings, or the economic benefits from the businesses employing / serving the additional traffic. And ... I can't see how that comes out net negative. Having your property sized does suck, yeah, and I'm not sure how to factor that cost in - but that's basically a universal cost of development, so it doesn't obviously bring the total negative.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
Right, that doesn't get you to 250 IQ or above existing variation I think.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
Oh, Science, blah blah
Evolution by natural selection is easily the most important 'theological' thing to ever happen, it (together with history) explains every impulse that God is claimed to have given to man by independent choice. Every unexplainable natural phenomenon used to be attributable to God, and his role today in that front is minimal due to science - even today's Christians still claim various modern miracles (and if you investigate one of them deeply enough, it inevitably collapses). Like, how does Christianity relate to AGI? It doesn't! Does this mean AGI won't happen?
But that does not mean that someone proposing a 'decoupled' idea is right;
It means that some of them are in some parts right, and if you don't decouple you'll not be able to notice that
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
Right, I'm suggesting that the mathematical model stops applying. Like, imagine humans are now cars. You can make a faster car than you did last time by copying the techniques of all the best car factories (this is sorta what embryo selection does). Maybe you could even go 10-20% faster than the fastest car ever by doing that, though I think non-additive effects will prevent that. But you can't make a car that goes at 1000 mph by picking out the best techniques from existing car factories. You'd need to do more technical design work than that, or have a LOT of new mutations and natural selection on them.
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
The experts are wrong a lot. But, for almost everyone in the general population, and for many people here, your vague guesses and anecdotal impressions are a lot worse. It takes effort, discipline, and raw intelligence to do better! It's reasonable to not trust that everything's going great just because the economy numbers are up! But you shouldn't just jump from 'my costs feel higher than a few years ago' to 'clearly experts are wrong', dig deeper!
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
The vaccines were kinda sorta effective, but not in the way that I had hoped they would be
I mean, they strongly prevented severe illness and death, which is the only really important thing.
It became clear that there was not going to be a covid-free future and the best we could do was get vaxxed and get on with life
To my knowledge, current circulating covid variants are not causing excess mortality, so that's as good of an outcome as being covid-free? It seems a bit convenient and too-many-degrees-of-freedom that the vaccines prevented death, and then the variants independently became less deadly and now covid's not an issue, but I think that's what happened. So I don't think that our current situation is particularly non-ideal, or that the vaccines failed in some significant way.
We take politics pretty seriously in the main thread. Maybe too seriously. What are your political cocktail party ideas? (the link is a good piece). Maybe you haven't thought it through, maybe it's totally unimplementable, maybe it's in an area you know nothing about. They don't have to be dumb, just fun or pretty out there.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
They are geofenced to not work in Russian-controlled areas so that Russia can't use them
That's possible, but all i have here is the New Yorker's assertion vs your assertion. Do you have a source or something?
My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
My political positions are ... on the same side as conservatism, at least. I think you're right, at least, that the 'culture war sticking points' aren't really moving anyone towards conservative norms - banning drag queens, not allowing gay marriage, banning abortions for poor black women, this doesn't really move us towards a more conservative society.
I think it's bad, on an individual level, for anyone who transitions. Meaningful desires aligned with their outcomes (desire for sex/romantic relationship that produces kids) are replaced with confused simulacra. And actual children (pretty important! whether you're a radical inegalitarian or a sum of hedonic state utilitarian, more people existing is good) fail to be produced.
But if you actually try to consistently pursue the underlying values that generate something like 'trans is bad', the harm actually has to come from 'not having children' - and 'trans people being .2% of the population' is simply 50x less of an issue than many people not settling down into families, or those that do deciding to have 2 children. I do think that conservatives should focus on the latter, and not the former.
Unfortunately, I'm not having a rational conversation with "conservatives", the conservative movement is a huge mass of a hundred million people that hypes itself up about a whole bunch of nonsense. Just like progressives. So, idk. Maybe the only way to change things is elite persuasion, even more likely there's just not enough time to change things too much until AGI is too big of an issue.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.
Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.
Crucially, I stated that environmental confounding was well addressed for the heritability of intelligence among individuals, and that this is the consensus. I am not claiming that the scientific consensus claims environmental confounding has been addressed as an issue for the heritability of intelligence contributing to group differences.
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
A lot of them are using it, to great effect. The flat piece of nanoscale-patterned silicon you're using to post, the network of private businesses and public law that makes up the 'financial system' that structures your economic activity, and a thousand other omnipresent social systems have been built by hundreds of thousands of those 'experts'. And they all work pretty well, and are complicated as hell! Even when you can intuitively tell something's wrong with one of them, that does not imply they're wrong or lying specifically about the first thing that comes to mind, e.g. inflation or how productive the economy is.
The reason people are using personal anecdotes is they are not given access to the same data the "experts" are, so any comparison between the two is inherently disingenuous from the start.
I strongly disagree? I'm strongly for making more data used for research public (as in, free to download from github or wherever), but, like, there wasn't any secret data that mask or vaccine advocates were making decisions off of that we didn't have access to. And there were a small minority of experts, people at Harvard or similar, who fought the covid consensus the entire time. Do you have an example in mind here?
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
Why?
Dodging the entire moral philosophy question for the moment, civilizational and economic competence are important for every goal. Want water that doesn't give you deadly diseases? Want to not have violent crime? Want to treat diseases so a large percent of your population doesn't die young? Want your smartest to be poets and physicists instead of farmers and street hagglers? Certainly some of these are related to morality.
If the Palestinians simply gave in, stopped all forms of resistance, and accepted annexation and (likely temporary) second class citizenship, they'd be much better off within a decade. And that 'better off'ness includes fewer deaths from disease, greater happiness, etc. The human rights violations don't really change that, and they're ongoing anyway, and you can try to fix them if you want, but either way self's solution is still better.
curious_straight_ca
10d ago
They're saying that ideas latent in Christianity, deeper currents that Christianity just represents an early emanation of - caring more for the downtrodden, poor, and weak than the strong, caring more about peace and salvation than greatness and power - are to blame for 'cucking Whites'. And that returning to Christianity won't solve that core problem. So this doesn't rebut their argument at all.
From the article UnHerd cites:
“He hides his fingers, keeps them flexed, leading to impaired dexterity, localized pain, irritability and anger,” Dr. Nadia Nadeau, of the department of psychiatry at Université Laval wrote in the journal Clinical Case Reports. He grew more determined to find a way to get rid of fingers he considered “intrusive, foreign, unwanted.”
“He had contemplated asking a friend to watch over him and be prepared to call emergency services in case his attempt led to a need for resuscitation,” Nadeau wrote.
After undergoing elective amputation, the nightmares and emotional distress immediately stopped, Nadeau said. The post-op pain resolved within a week, there was no “phantom pain” at one month follow-up and, without the two missing fingers, “he was able to pursue the life he envisioned as a complete human being without those two fingers bothering him.”
It’s not the first time amputation has been used as a treatment for BID. In the late 1990s, a surgeon in Scotland amputated one leg above the knee each in two men who’d felt a “desperate” need to be amputees, and who had been turned away by other doctors.
Despite the scandal that erupted, “At the end of the day I have no doubt that what I was doing was the correct thing for those patients,” the surgeon, Dr. Robert Smith, told a press conference.
The fact that there were only two fingers involved in the Quebec case, as opposed to a complete limb, made the decision to proceed easier for the medical team, Nadeau said.
If this now-amputee were me, I'd try to just get over it. Stop taking any action to either sate or resist the discomfort, meditate real hard, just feel it and let it burn out. I think it'd work for me.
But it's a mistake to not understand the other side's perspective. You have a guy who's constantly distressed, whose daily life is significantly impaired, who's begging for help, where many pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions have failed, and a simple operation will fix his problem permanently. It makes a certain amount of sense, right? This guy's had this problem since he was a child, and it is a doctors' job to fix it, and nothing else is working.
It reminds me of
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
But I think the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue.
Amputating a few fingers is somewhat more invasive than putting a hairdryer in your car. But it's the same principle, right?
That's from the categories are made for man, which Zack's spent a lot of time disagreeing with because, yes, it was about trans people and how to treat them. I didn't even remember that was why Scott told that story until I looked it up again today.
And, it's a good analogy, because this is what it feels like for a medical professional dealing with trans patients. You have adults who beg for hormone treatments, claim to be and appear to be in severe distress due to lacking them, and do indeed appear to improve after taking them. This is what it should look like! There are issues with kids, issues with surgery, but none of those undermine the obvious case for accepting trans people and treating them with hormones - it seems to make them happier and better. Again, yeah, edge cases, but the trans people I know are not perpetually depressed psychological wrecks like you'd expect from rw twitter memes, they're generally normal and happy.
Claiming otherwise requires some sophisticated reasoning, like one that claims happiness or sexual satisfaction are of little value themselves, and only matter when done for in line with a greater purpose - in this case, marriage and having children. And since trans individuals imitate the appearance of sexuality without the fertility backing it, it's bad. I agree with something like that.
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured
If A is evidence for B, B should be evidence for A, yes? "One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens?" If we took this case being a novel case of unnecessary amputation as evidence that trans ideology has thoroughly captured the medical system, or something like that, and then we observe that this isn't novel - I think we should doubt the reasoning that led to the claim of ideological capture.
edit: here is the paper about the case.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
This seems more like a sneer than a contribution. Themotte's opinions, other than the few white nationalists, don't get you banned on most large Western websites, e.g. even pre-Musk most of the HBD bloggers had unsuspended twitter accounts.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
The actual content of the book is all performative insanity -- nobody would seriously consider comparing Mitt Romney to Alcibiades unless they're joshing around. BAP is a full-on thought-criminal who attracts just the people he needs to attract: serious young men with spines who are looking to armor themselves for the eventual crackdown their overlords will visit upon them
I honestly think this is cope for the fact that BAP and people who like him genuinely believes a lot of straightforwardly false ideas. "The mean of the white IQ distribution is significantly higher than that of the black IQ distribution and that means more white people should have positions of influence than black people" - okay. "Race mixing pollutes the nobility of the Nordic Races and races have different spirits. white people are superior to asian bugmen" - not true at all. (ten more examples elided). And, yeah, it's pointless arguing whether or not BAP 'really believes this', maybe it's all a big joke. But a large portion of the internet far right he associates with, e.g. people he retweets on twitter, clearly do believe it - both from their public posts and (if you imagine they're joking too) private conversations. These are precisely the serious young men you mention. What prevents this resurgence of far-right ideas from descending into romantic fantasies and failing to accomplish anything? Those "serious young men with spines" satisfy their animals spirits translating old texts or dreaming of conquering a small african country, while ... lifting weights and posting on twitter, or plotting to reduce illegal immigration by 30% or introduce tariffs in the next Trump admin.
They need to find communities of other, understanding men with whom to build themselves against the world.
You can imagine your Based Marketing Firm or Based Dating App is a mannerbund all you want. It's still responding to the demands of the market, selling slop to consumers. The 'world' isn't going anywhere - technology's taking it over, the 'liberal' global economy is more capable than ever and 'satisfying consumers' as well as it ever has.
Seriously, it's worth meditating on the lack of practical meaning within this statement:
serious young men with spines who are looking to armor themselves for the eventual crackdown their overlords will visit upon them. These men don't need another thought-piece about changing the Leftist orthodoxy from within. They need to find communities of other, understanding men with whom to build themselves against the world.
How are they 'armoring themselves'? 'Communities of men building themselves against the world'? I keep hearing stuff like 'build brotherhoods of men / institutions that will survive the collapse, and pick up the pieces in the harsh world to come'. But ... that isn't happening. AGI catastrophe is more plausible than that. It's hard to think of a material way that 2020 is worse off than 1980, and 1970-1980s america didn't collapse.
Not a defense of 'fat acceptance', but by normalization I think you mean positive acceptance? Obesity is, in any objective sense, normal in many communities in the United States.
Arguably obesity needs ... not necessarily more shame, it was and still is incredibly shameful in the eyes of most. I think a combination of explicit coercion, both towards the obese and towards those who create the conditions that lead to it (i.e. those who sell the food), is justified.
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