faceh
3mo ago
Yes, but look at the positions supported by the people who actually labeled themselves anti-federalists.
faceh
3mo ago
Looking at how bad they have it in the European nursing home countries makes me feel better in relative but not absolute terms, it is true.
Parasitism seems to be baked into the bread itself over there.
Lenders make out fine charging these two 7% interest on their HELOC and car note.
Sorry, I came of age during the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis, I am overtly sensitive to the whole "Just give money to financially irresponsible people and hope that in the aggregate we make adequate returns to justify the risk" approach.
I'm sure SOME lessons were learned since then. Maybe not the right ones.
If anything I am now more aggressively wedded to my general policy preferences (Read: Anti-Federalism, reduction of FedGov Spending to whatever is needed to maintain national defense and a Judicial system, and throwing all welfare programs back to the state level).
How that shakes out in terms of what policies I expect to see passed is a little different.
I didn't have undergrad debt because I busted my ass in a hard science to maintain grades for my scholarships at a state school. I paid off my law school loans (what a mega-chump move). I drive a 15-year-old paid-off truck.
Same, same, and same. Although its a 13-year-old Honda, and I haven't finished paying them off, its only a matter of time.
That said I can be 'proud' that I beat out the early stage of DEI-based admissions to actually secure a law school slot in a highly-ranked school and then (eventually) find a decent job.
Its only been in recent years I've realized how much of the deck was actually stacked against me and how much better off I'd probably be if:
A) The system was actually as meritocratic as I believed
or
B) I just said "fuck it" and cut the corners and cheated as much I could get away with.
I don't believe in Karma, although I do believe "what goes around comes around," so I expect I'll come out of things alright. I didn't become the 'type of person' who cheats and cuts corners, so I won't be subjected to the various failure modes that cheating and cutting corners are prone to.
But there's no avoiding the fact that the political system is still functionally designed to redistribute rewards of good behavior and high performance no matter how well you follow the rules, which makes one much less inclined to follow the rules.
I can't get too worked up about them after watching all those bodycam and parole hearing videos I mentioned. The people who are really a "parasitical" class are not boomers crying that their health insurance is going up or a DREAMER couple who will probably declare bankruptcy.
This is what bugs me, though.
Its sort of easy for me to accept that there will ALWAYS be an underclass that we can only ever 'contain' and 'placate,' never fully integrate into society regardless of how much we spend. Accept that its a fixed cost and move on.
But then you see ostensibly functional people happily tearing off chunks for themselves, and the scope of the problem starts to seem larger, where the justifications for the behavior are more elaborate, and the political costs of intervening are much steeper.
But ultimately I think you are being manipulated to hate the easily hateable. If you are really concerned about the government spigot and all the parasites bleeding the beast... well, like I said, there's much bigger bleeding to rage at.
Yeah, but I bring these up because they're not easily hateable. And yet I still find myself wanting to label them with the 'parasite' moniker because there's me, over here doing just about everything 'right' and getting rewarded with a portion of what I genuinely earned, with the potential for more to be taken later (one hopes not!), and then there's these guys, guiltlessly sucking up resources and clearly expecting no resistance or problems, and just generally living their life with much less stress than I.
A similar source of ragebait that you see on Caleb's channel: "disabled" veterans who are clearly very functional but have managed to find a sympathetic doctor who declares they have service-related injuries which mean they now get a check for life. Even if they never saw combat. Even if they were never in a combat-facing role. Are you man enough to call out veterans for welfare-queen behavior?
Likewise, I run into it in my professional life, "Retired" cops from New York, Chicago, other big cities, who qualify for Pensions from their home state (and pull certain tactics to maximize the payout), then move down to Florida (see my point about lack of income tax) to 'retire' while pulling part time gigs with local PDs for extra cash. Its one hell of a payout and there's clearly a known strategy for maximizing return on 'investment,' and who the hell would argue our brave boys in blue don't 'deserve' this special treatment? Not I.
Oh, firemen too.
We are culturally tuned to treat these 'heroes' with deference. Ignoring the fact that these jobs have gotten MUCH safer over the decades, and much cushier, and basically impossible to fire bad actors from said jobs.
How many bailouts has the government shoveled money into to rescue failing businesses and failing industries? How much money did we spend on Afghanistan over 20+ years to achieve literally fuck-all in the end?
Yep, my point when I stated "I've KNOWN how bad the Government money faucet was for the past 15 years." My political 'awakening' was tied up in realizing how much money was burned bailing out failed banks and pursuing pointless military debacles. Very impersonal, abstract harms.
There's a bit more emotional valence when you can see the face of the person soaking up the wealth, even if its a comparatively trivial amount.
When, if ever, is it appropriate to refer to someone as a 'parasite?' I don't mean in a literal sense, only in the political/economic sense. My instinct says 'never', its a very dehumanizing term... but I had that resolution sorely tested this week.
Two separate examples bubbled up through the twittersphere:
First, consider an 'early retired' couple. They have been held up as a sympathetic example of citizens who will be deeply impacted by losing their health insurance subsidy. But a bit of reading shows something... surprising:
Based on figures available through Idaho’s online insurance marketplace, Bill, 61, and Shelly, 60, expect to pay almost $1,700 in monthly health insurance premiums in 2026 if enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of this year as scheduled. That sum — a nearly 300% increase from their current $442 premium — would add $15,000 a year to their household medical costs.
Okay, first and foremost, its sheer statistical fact that your average 60-year-old will OBVIOUSLY consume more medical services now and in the immediate future than your average 30-year-old. Hence the risk premium for the 30 year old would ideally be much, much lower. But if they're in the same risk pool, the 30 year old is having to cover a LOT of conditions, medications, and services they are vanishingly unlikely to use. AND, if the 30 year old is paying taxes... they're contributing to the subsidies that those 60 year olds are using to cover things like:
Bill Gall has what he calls “old eyes”: He’s had more than 10 eye surgeries over the past decade and is now blind in one eye, he said.
Shelly has had two spinal fusion surgeries and suffers from chronic pain, which has prevented her from working full-time since 2015, the couple said.
That. Issues that arrive in older age or due to a rough lifestyle. This seems sort of sympathetic. And yet:
Bill, who worked for more than 31 years in local and state government in Nevada and Idaho, said he expects their household to get pension income of about $127,000 in 2026, exceeding the 400% threshold.
The couple had a modified adjusted gross income of about $123,000 in 2023 and $136,000 in 2024, mostly from pensions and some from individual retirement account withdrawals, according to their tax returns.
$127,000 per year? On pensions? This legitimately sounds like a princely sum to me. And... early retirement? That they achieved through working for governments? Bill the Civil Engineer, and Shelley who worked in banks and other state institutions? This is NOT your stereotypical blue collar family who busted their ass for decades to set aside a nest egg.
For God's sake. An extra $15k-20k a year is NOT going to bankrupt anyone worth a low seven figures. I cannot square that circle at all. And if they're not worth low 7 figures then how the hell did they decide to retire in their 50's? Oh, wait:
With significantly higher health premiums, the couple said, they would have to make tough financial and lifestyle decisions: pulling more money from retirement savings; claiming Social Security earlier than planned, which would lock in a lower lifetime benefit; putting off non-mandatory medical care; and traveling less.
Bill decided to retire early so the couple could enjoy nonworking years together while they’re still in relatively good health, they said.
They just wanted to consume more. That's... fine on its own, but I don't think you get to complain if you drop out of the workforce early that those remaining in the workforce don't want to fund your trips or medical care.
Being slightly uncharitable, I read this as a couple that very intentionally gamed certain financial systems in a way that let them extract a lot of personal benefits from comparatively little effort and input, and are continuing to do so after they retired by sloughing their largest non-optional expenses on the next generation.
And finally. No dependents. Its not like they've got mouths to feed and kids to raise. Every dollar they spend here on is solely on themselves, and contributes 'nothing' to the future productivity of the country.
There's a counter argument that they've quite possibly contributed more to the system in their working years than they've extracted. Maybe. But I cannot be convinced that they are justified in receiving $15-20k a year paid by young, healthy people who are still trying to build capital... when they clearly possess the means to pay their own way. Of course, government pensions are ALSO being paid for by younger generations' tax dollars. So this does start to seem quite... parasitic.
They've worked about 30 years, and they'll be retired for 25-30 more, it seems likely that they'll have extracted more wealth from the system, especially if they divert said wealth from productive uses, than they put in when all is said and done.
Second, a pair of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S.
Twitter thread with commentary Here. Original video here.
They're DREAMers, so not the most blatantly offensive example of illegal immigration. But after learning about their situation I still don't want to share a country with them:
-
They have three kids. They're not married. First two aren't his. She's a SAHM.
-
Caleb calculates they'll owe about $3,300 in federal taxes this year (the commentary thread wrongfully implies he pays zero).
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Own a house.
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$133k in 'bad debt.' (that is admitted/disclosed)
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Total debt (including the house) is $420k.
-
Early 30s.
So, at the very least the house can be seized to cover most or all of that debt if they ever just stopped paying. But hearing the rest of their financial situation and how aggressively they (well, mostly her) spend money and I'm really forced to assume they're getting financial support from some other programs to eke out more than a basic level of existence.
I am at a loss as to how these people could be considered a net benefit to the country. Unless one of those kids goes on to cure prostate cancer or something, booting them out would have no noticeable negative effect. To be faaaaair she seems to be the main problem. If it were just him cranking out work it'd be hard to be offended.
But we have two non-citizens and their kids enjoying, from the sound of it, a living standard higher than the median American in their age bracket (just counting the home ownership, for sure) and overall paying little into the system at present, and racking up enough debt that its questionable if it'll ever get paid down.
Presumably they have a net positive effect on GDP when measured on the spending side, and if we ASSUME they don't declare bankruptcy, or renege and duck out on the debt, or just die early (not something I wish on them), they're helping the engine of Capitalism in this country sputter along.
And yes, YES there are plenty of U.S. Citizens who are doing WORSE than this. Caleb has had many of them on his show.
But ask me how I'm damn near certain that these two aren't saving enough for retirement and will not save enough for retirement (around the 41 minute mark she talks about pulling money out of her retirement) so if they're around in their late 60's they're either still working with no end in sight OR have figured out a way to sponge benefits out of the government to maintain their livelihood and yet still die with a mountain of debt someday.
I doubt they'll be in any position to retire early like Bill and Shelley up there. It certainly seems like they're choosing to live parasitically, but unlike the early retirees they still have a lot of good working years in front of them to make up the difference.
Two separate cases that are only similar in the abstract: couples who have gamed parts of the U.S. economic system so as to have their lifestyles paid for without contributing as much to it as the support they have extracted (yet). Bill and Shelley managing to pull off a plan that would be virtually impossible to repeat for anyone much younger than they: get the state government pensions + the Fedgov subsidies and then stop working well before most people could afford to do so.
This raises a question: are 'we' really supporting this entire apparatus on the efforts of some small and possibly shrinking minority of our actual population? Without getting too Randian, what's the ratio of productive/unproductive left now?
It leads me, specifically, to ask: HOW MANY PEOPLE DO WE HAVE IN THIS COUNTRY PULLING THESE KINDS OF SHENANIGANS. There have to be known strategies that are shared amongst groups on how to follow these paths, exploit edge cases, take advantage of lax enforcement, or otherwise slip into niches that allow you to live 'above your means' for some period of time if not indefinitely. On the individual level its rational. On the population level, the equilibrium can get dangerously unsustainable. Have we crossed that tipping point? I don't know. Feels like it to me.
I personally recall visiting a friend in college and learning that both of his parents (in their 50s) were 100% disabled, getting checks from SSI. Both were mobile but certainly had some impairments... but what stuck with me is more the fact that they had a massive collection of Disney movie memorabilia (especially Tinkerbell) all throughout the house, displayed on shelves floor to ceiling, and even then I wondered "who paid for all this and how does buying these kinds of trinkets square with the claim that you're unable to support yourselves and need government help? Clearly you've got money to spare if you can spend it on things that has no investment value."
We've got some indeterminate number of guys like Oscar paying $3500/year in taxes into the system. We've got some indeterminate number of guys like Bill pulling $15,000/yr OUT of the system in insurance subsidies. WHO THEN IS MAKING UP THE DIFFERENCE. Someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my country is dying.
Today was payday for me. I had a really good month last month. And yet I look at my actual pay stub and see that ~24% of that will never even touch my account due to Federal Taxes. Florida has no income tax, so I can be certain that money is going to pay for all kinds of lovely U.S. Government programs. And now, I have to wonder, what portion of that is going to help Oscar and Natasha raise their kids and pay their mortgage. What portion is paying down Bill and Shelley's insurance premiums so they can take a cruise, or fly to Australia or whatever.
I've KNOWN how bad the Government money faucet was for the past 15 years. Trump and DOGE showed just how blatantly fake/fraudulent much of it is, earlier this year. But this here has me putting a face on the issue and that makes it feel personal, even though I have no direct grievance against these folks.
Here's my personal history:
-
Never used welfare, food stamps, or even unemployment insurance. Have literally never pulled money from a government program to pay my bills... other than the Covid stimulus.
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I've held two government jobs in my life. One was Census Enumerator, the other was Public Defender for the State of Florida. Its not inconceivable that I could work for the Gov't in the future, but right now I have no intention to return. No pensions for me.
-
I've made some boneheaded financial decisions in my life. Its not even a joke to say that I've only been able to reach my current financial position because I was trading Crypto in 2014-2020, and it happened to work out for me. I have never rugpulled a memecoin or otherwise indulged in the scammier parts of that ecosystem.
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Yet. YET I've managed to maintain my life on what I earn, and follow most of Dave Ramsey's advice to have adequate savings, minimal (unsecured) debt, and I fully intend to sock away enough to retire on my own even if I never get to draw a social security check.
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I'm unmarried and have no dependents so I'm pretty much boned on my tax bill, although I do use some strategies to mitigate the damage.
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I have debt comparable to Oscar and Natasha, but on a good day, when everything shakes out, I'm probably at around $250k net worth, and diligently reducing the debt load as I go.
-
I have not taken an extended vacation in almost exactly 5 years. I could afford to, but it feels irresponsible for various reasons and I've chosen to prioritize financial stability for so long its hard to break that habit. For the right woman, perhaps.
And some days I feel like an utter buffoon when I can see people living a lifestyle that matches or maybe even exceeds my own by making choices that, while individually rational, are deleterious to the overall fabric of the civilization they exist within. Its bad enough if they're burning up our surplus wealth that could have been put to productive use, all the worse if the capitalist machine itself starts to break down under the strain.
One of my favorite little storybooks as a child was The Little Red Hen. The hen goes around seeking assistance from the other animals to make some bread from scratch. Finding no help, she completes the whole process herself. and at the end of the day when the bread is done all the animals follow the wonderful smell and show up hoping to get a piece. And she politely tells them to fuck off. (I also read The Rainbow Fish as a child, that message didn't stick.)
I start to feel like that's going to be my life trajectory. Building as much as I can through my own efforts while trying to cooperate with others, who have found alternate ways to subsist, and then when I finally sit down to enjoy it all, in this version the farmer shows up with a shotgun and says "these other animals are hungry, you're gonna share half that loaf with them." Bluntly and uncharitably, this seems like the logical outcome of the many policies that the Boomers implemented over decades to keep themselves financially secured into old age, which has left a lot of cracks and crevices in the mess of various entitlement programs that various amoral latecomers can latch onto and coast along even after the Boomers are gone.
All paid for by whatever percentage of the population is suckered into actually producing wealth and paying their taxes every year.
I don't want to dehumanize them. Bill and Shelley seem like good people. Oscar seems like a decent guy. I want my fellow Americans to thrive, along with most humans on earth. I do NOT want to tolerate a system that has such a mix of malincentives and avenues for cheating that it is actually easier for the low-conscientiousness hordes to simply shove handfuls of seed corn into their mouths and demand payouts from the most productive members of society than it is for them to maintain a job, not acquire too much debt, and live within their means with enough saved to sustain them into old age.
But human beings are exceptionally good at finding ways to drive excess calories into their own bellies at the expense of others. You might even say this is the actual basis for the entirety of the culture wars: which tribe will do most of the work, and which will consume most of the rewards. Bastiat had it right a long time ago. I don't blackpill over this stuff, but I do wonder how one is supposed to feel when the entirety of your civilization depends on your demographic continuing to accept a status quo that confers benefits on everyone BUT your demographic.
Oh, did you hear that California is going to put a Wealth-Tax Proposal on the ballot next year?
I'm sure its nothing to worry about.
faceh
3mo ago
Tell me about it.
At least in that case though you can find out who the defector is.
faceh
3mo ago
Yeah, as per your second paragraph, I yearn for social circles to shrink enough to be more amenable to Dunbar's number so we largely don't NEED a social credit score to maintain a generally stable order.
I understand this is infeasible in the current era, but why do the technological solutions inevitably end up creating more problems than they're worth? (I already know the answer: monetization and the principal-agent problem)
Being more direct, I think most people WANT there to be an information asymmetry between themselves and the people they interact with. But they want that asymmetry to favor themselves and so they want to know all the dirty details about their counterparty while revealing only the most flattering info about themselves.
And that's just not how it really works. They create the Tea App to help women gain the upper hand, but to limit it to women they require those women to disclose valuable information about themselves, and that information is susceptible to leakage as well.
And of course there's no mechanism for assessing the truth or quality of the information that they collect anyway, so relying on the honesty of strangers (who they also know nothing about) to avoid polluting the epistemic environment. Ironically they would need some kind of reputation system to make their own reputation system trustworthy.
The current approach to the internet where most companies try to silo the user data they collect from outside discovery, with the occasional massive breach revealing everything at once, seems to be less preferable than one where most information is open and discoverable with a Google search, and thus there's a little more parity between everyone since they can all see what's out there without jumping through that many hoops.
Stuff you really want to be kept private can be kept in the groupchat or one-on-one setting.
faceh
3mo ago
French, Max Boot, Bill Kristol, Tom Nichols... man I could go on.
Just a whole generation of writers who need to be put out to pasture. HAVE been put out to pasture, but continue to emit the same annoying noises that anyone important stopped listening to 5+ years back. They've been replaced by a whole host of new annoying-noise emitters to take their place, mind.
Their failure to maintain and protect anything they claim to find important or dear is complete, their usefulness to the regime is completely at an end, their legacy will be at best a footnote.
But still they bleat. And still they completely fail to engage with a new generation that is learning that no amount of argument, criticism, or data can penetrate their ossified mental barriers, and so learns to ignore and route around them.
The most successful actors on the right are the ones willing to actually engage with attacks and critics, although they do so with varying levels of snark. J.D. Vance has gotten pretty adept at that game.
If nothing else, these guys' insistence on remaining in their ivory towers and dropping their proclamations down upon the peasantry without bothering to listen for a response reads as a level of cowardice that, in the age of the internet, is basically inexcusable if you want to be taken 'seriously' as a commentator.
On a larger scale, any economically aware young person sees how the Boomers have systematically rigged the system against them; social security, Medicare/aid, and the home mortgage ponzi scheme. It's intergenerational theft plain and simple.
I'm cooking up a top level post on this topic.
faceh
3mo ago
Well that was 30 seconds of skimming I'll never get back, and fails to truly engage with anything she's actually saying.
Nor does it offer a practical alternative argument.
Kinda like when he argued Tim Walz was more likeable than JD Vance, its just surface-level contrarianism.
Hanania remains a hack.
I can visualize, but I guess my point is that if its a sexting session, I'm visualizing the other person and anticipating a future experience and its the anticipated experience that I'm really fixating on.
I don't think the mere words are technically what I'm responding to.
Like, I have made some attempts to do erotic roleplay with LLMs, and they get the idea but its hard to feel like the tease is 'real' without the promise of some fulfillment later.
So... it doesn't work for me. I can visualize the acts, but with an AI there's zero chance of it going anywhere. Its words on a screen, and they don't promise a payoff.
Its also what makes Onlyfans a little perplexing to me. Its all the emotional distance of a stripper, none of the skin-on-skin contact.
This also makes the digitally-intermediated dating environment a bit of a hellscape for me by default.
faceh
3mo ago
"Throbbing," "dripping" and "devouring" are, to me, inherently un-sexy words, yet literotica seems to consider those the best damn words in the whole thesaurus.
faceh
3mo ago
It does blow my mind that women seem to be able to get 90% of their sexual gratification from text alone, with some visual accompaniment.
Proof is in the pudding, but my male brain pretty much demands that I get some sort of visual and audio stimulation and ideally it be physically present, so its hard for me to grok how it feels to get aroused from text without some accompanying expectation of actual physical contact later.
faceh
3mo ago
If I am in a conversation with some other guys at work and a female colleague enters the room, I that does not make me feel hostility.
Never said it did. Its not the occasional encounter with a female in the workspace that is the real issue. Its the tipping point when you are basically unable to avoid interacting with the female colleagues daily and the norms around 'professionalism' change with this reality.
If the work environment, the boundaries of 'professional' conduct are pretty much defined what the most easily offended coworker will tolerate. And the company will usually craft all of its personnel policies around mitigating the risk of offending said coworker.
What it actually means in practice is that you have to be careful about leveling critiques at female coworkers or suggesting they aren't performing adequately or even making jokes at their expense, since at any given time they can take offense to it and claim, e.g. 'discrimination' based on their gender, or hostile work environment, or claim your workplace has a general 'bro' culture.
And, of course, if you do end up finding one of your single female colleagues attractive, your options are:
A) Either stifle that feeling as hard as possible and hope that you can stay in contact if one or both of you leave the company; or
B) Put it all on the line to actually ask her out, which in the best case she reciprocates (although let's not talk about what happens if that situation sours) and in the worst she rejects and then interprets almost everything you do later as vindictive retaliation for the rejection until it becomes an HR complaint regardless of how you conduct yourself afterwards.
And the complications if you have a higher position than she does.
And being as polite as possible, do you spend much time in male-dominated group settings at all? Outside of work?
One of the key social dynamics for men (not universally, but almost) is 'line treading' by bringing up ever-more-controversial topics or making ever-more-edgy jokes until someone finally calls them out and says "whoah dude, too far." Then he apologizes, walks it back, and everyone going forward forgives them as long as they don't habitually step over that line in the future.
And the very instant an unvetted female enters the group, that line gets WAY more constrained, and the possible consequences for crossing it get way sharper. The men are no longer 'comfortable' pushing that boundary and it puts a strain on camaraderie.
Ironically the one civil institution that is becoming less 'female' is The church.
It does make sense, in that any churches that take doctrine seriously are going to have certain advice like "wives submit to your husband" and "be modest and demure" and "it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church" (1 Corinthians 14:34-35).
And so the Church is like the one place where "minimal restraint on females' decision-making" is NOT a core ideal baked into every other rule they follow. And where the idea that men and women are different (and that's just fine) is part of the very founding text from Book 1. "Male and female he created them." (Genesis 1:27). Its like page 2 of the freakin' book.
Related note, it seems like women are less comfortable using AI in general, and particularly in the business context.
THAT is going to have massive downstream effects if AIs do become half as ubiquitous as the boosters (and the investment levels) suggest. Not only are female-dominated jobs probably more prone to AI takeover, they're less likely to use the AI to augment their performance in the meantime.
And then, other recent studies find that women find leadership roles in business emotionally depleting, anxiety-inducing. Even when painted over with the language of "gender norms," the raw conclusion of the study is that women in leadership don't handle pressure well on a personal level.
Deviating from gender norms made the women feel incompetent or anxious, they reported.
As a result, the women who engaged in more assertive behaviors often felt depleted, overwhelmed by their workload and more withdrawn as a whole.
Interestingly, men in the study did not experience any stress over these gender expectations.
Basically, if you take the gender studies approach seriously, then you have to suggest that we upend the entirety of society's notion of gender roles in order to make some small subset of women who become business leaders more comfortable with their jobs, rather than suggesting that these women could find positions that don't actively degrade their mental health, as an easy solution.
Huge contortions to avoid the conclusion that males tend to have psychological traits better suited for leadership roles, in line with the entirety of human history.
I kind of hate that the bulk of research is showing that the presence of women in the professional workspace immediately makes the environment feel more hostile for men, in the sense that they now have to navigate the minefield of HR rules and avoid offending the most easily offended demographics on earth... meanwhile these women are becoming emotionally unglued with the expectations and the deadlines and the constant stress of comparing themselves to other high performers while also navigating the social dynamics they themselves impose on any group context. Basically we've given ourselves the worst of all possible worlds where neither gender is allowed to have anything close to their ideal working conditions.
I daresay this is a worse equilibrium for everyone involved than one where women were effectively banned from working in the same departments as men.
I further, and more daringly, say that the only fix is re-asserting masculine norms and refusing to coddle feminine feelings simply to keep women on staff.
Simply, I don't see any feasible way to make the business environment, with its heavy competition, hard decisions, constant demands on your time and your sanity more comfortable for the fairer sex without destroying the actual mechanisms which make it function at all. No more bonuses for good performance, no more unpaid overtime, no more crunch, no more strict hierarchy and constantly shifting expectations and demands... how can commerce occur in such conditions?
If you want to escape all that, well, can I suggest starting a family?
So in short, I would agree with and Amplify Ms. Andrews up there.
You know I'm just going to cut through the epistemic fog once again.
If there's a festering level of antisemitism amongst the GOP/Conservatives, its not having any noticeable impact on actual outcomes at the Federal or State level.
Can you name a single policy proposal, let alone an actual piece of legislation that was debated and voted on that could legitimately be characterized as 'antisemitic?' There are at least 38 states that explicitly passed laws that discourage anti-israel activities.
"Hints" and Dog Whistles and carefully cropped photos don't signal much to me when the actual legislation that is passed and enforced doesn't reflect that attitude in the slightest.
And uh, at risk of pure whataboutism, its been the left that is assassinating Jews and electing actually antisemitic politicians to congress.
Near as I can tell, there's <1% of honest-to-goodness Nazi sympathizers on the right. There's a larger contingent (still, <10%) who aren't antisemitic but also 'notice' that Jewish activists are behind a whole lot of the subversive activities on the left, and provide a lot of the intellectual cover for its beliefs. The kind who see Soros funded plots behind every tree.
Then there's an actually significant contingent who are seeing the tension between "America First!" as a guiding principle and the GOPe's continual preference for assisting Israel and protecting Jews in ways they clearly do not prefer or protect other racial or religious groups, and find that suspicious.
I model this mostly as a tug-of-war between the waning Evangelical right that considers Israel their greatest ally, vs. the more secular newer right that doesn't consider the U.S.-Israel or Christian-Jewish relationship to be sacred and mutually beneficial. The latter may in fact admire Israel as a functional example of a Nationalistic, Jingoistic homogenous ethnostate with strict border controls, but wants some actual justification for spending U.S. tax dollars as economic or military aid to such a country.
And hey, it is actually obvious that Israel puts their thumb on that scale and does in fact use different forms of leverage to impact U.S. domestic and foreign policy outcomes, which is precisely why the aforementioned tension/tug-of-war isn't going to subside for a while.
faceh
3mo ago
being aggressively, overtly racist isn't quite socially acceptable yet.
Uhhh it certainly is if you're from an oppressed demographic and directing it against an oppressor demographic, as framed by the left.
is neonazism, support of slavery, and unabashed bigotry such as this actually common among young conservatives as Hanania and the group chat themselves seem to believe?
How many layers of irony are you prepared to dig through?
I've been in groupchats where varying levels of racism, sexism, homophobia, and contempt for minority groups is tolerated. Never out-and-out calls for extermination, but at worst places where everyone can quote crime statistics from heart and Pinochet/Helicopter memes are in vogue.
Generally speaking, my perception is that the ratio of participants who engage in edgy humor and thoughtcrime for purely signalling purposes to those who truly have a core belief that is reflected in the statements is at least 3:1.
Which, under standard lefty logic makes them all just as culpable.
But I simply disbelieve that anything like a majority of them are actually in favor of literal Hitler taking power, rather than just noticing that he is one of the few taboos left that you can actual 'violate' for comedic effect. Decades of media programming that "NAZIS ARE THE ABSOLUTE WORST EVIL", you're going to get some people who find it amusing to trample on that message.
Indeed, digging into the actual texts make it clear much of what was being said was sarcasm with a negative valence towards the subject.
Anyway, I used to be the guy that occasionally reminded people not to go too blatant in their poasting since everything being said could in theory get publicized at an arbitrarily later date. I myself use the same sort of discipline I do in professional e-mails where I assume that I might have to explain what I wrote to a Judge at some point, so don't put it in writing unless you're okay with it being read into a Court record later.
I've since stopped doing that sort of policing... unless I see something that could be read as an actual call for violence or statement of intent to commit violence. The norm against such calls is what I myself dearly want to maintain.
Otherwise, trangressing taboos is ultimately a pretty standard way of establishing camaraderie, and a group chat is inherently not a space where these words are being exposed to people who would genuinely be offended or 'harmed' by them, so it seems obvious that the 'intent' is not to offend or harm. This is distinct from the types who go on twitter and elsewhere specifically to troll or get a rise out of others. I still disdain those ones pretty universally for polluting public discourse.
There are practical reasons to rein in the language a bit b/c of the risk of exposure like this, but at this point I am more in favor of adjusting the larger social rules to be more permissive than I am in punishing young guys for being uncouth or poorly socialized.
And of course, if the most benignly controversial statements of the kind Charlie Kirk used to make (and he was light-years from spouting slurs) is enough to justify killing you, why hold back at all? There's value in signalling to peers that you'll have their back if the left comes for them because you're stuck just as deep in thoughtcrime as they are, and there's value in signalling to the left that you're not afraid of thoughtcrime and there's more people on your side than they expected.
faceh
3mo ago
I think a lot of witches would love to take up residence there for the laughs, but I'd readily admit they'd probably get up to such powerful dark witchcraft that it would be justifiable to ban or otherwise limit their reach.
But pretty much the witch hunters got bored with no witches to kill and started hunting each other.
There MUST be a term or idea for this (other than a "Purity Spiral") where a bunch of hardened witch hunters finally form their ideal social order where the greatest crime is mere suspicion of witchhood, then for want of actual witches they start slinging accusations at each other b/c they can't break the witch-hunt itch.
Oh, I just mean that twitter will be completely intolerable for them now, as the witches are very much out of the closet, loud and proud, and will happily engage with the witch-hunter brigades, so I doubt any of the bluesky refugees will last very long if they come back into the fray. There's enough screenshots of what they said on BS (lol unfortunate acronym) to come back to haunt them.
It'd be like getting released from Juvenile Detention straight into the the rec yard of a Maximum Security Federal Penitentiary.
Its witches all the way down.
Although in my mind the distinction is that most Right Wing Witches aren't trying to drive lefties out, they need 'em as a foil and might even enjoy the conflict. Its the lefties who are insistent they must burn the witches.
Hilariously seems like Bluesky has the inverse of the Witches Problem.
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
They witch-hunted all the witches off Twitter, pushed them to Gab, Twitter, Parler, Truth, etc., then a new monarch came to power and let (most of) the witches return.
So the witch-hunters all filed off to form a new community that was in theory was against witch-hunts but also promised to prevent the witches from doing their witchy stuff too much.
Witch-Hunters started making some really questionable accusations and some of the accused just shrugged and returned to twitter, and a few leaned into it and antagonized the witch-hunters enough to garner the current reaction.
Like its crazy, Bluesky might have managed to gain real traction as a Twitter alternative if the users were allowed to have fun and the primary userbase wasn't exactly as censorious and bigoted (using the proper broad definition, look it up!) as their stereotype. Now its arguably a more petulant echo chamber/breeding ground for radicalism than ANY of the RW twitter alternatives.
Now they can't even easily return to twitter because the witches are pretty well entrenched. Also they've declared the owner of the site to be a particularly dangerous witch.
Sometimes it seems like the main thing keeping me from doing the "exploit every handout and assistance program the government offers" thing is the capacity to feel shame.
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