I’ll quote a 2011 blog post from an Australian Catholic social conservative author who is also critical of the Manosphere:
This is by no means a Catholic critique at all. There are two completely different ways of how modern feminism or even modern thinking breaks down intersexual relationships. The first one is that the basis of Catholic teaching is not some maturity or anything like that, our morality is Virtue Based. Both men and women should strive to be virtuous: humble instead of prideful, chaste instead of lustful, generous instead of greedy, kind instead of jealous, balanced in moderation instead of gluttonous, patient instead of wrathful, diligent instead of slothful. Above all these virtues we have Christian love, caritas as guiding principle. There are of course other virtues such as courage or wisdom which are subsided in there. The point is that Christian ethics is Virtue Ethics, it is not utilitarianism or harm reductionism - it is centered around personal virtues related to deification and individual relationship toward God and other people.
Catholic anthropology follows this in sacraments. In baptism, a child is introduced into a community where mother, father, godfather and godmother take responsibility to educate the child toward these virtues in form of caretakers utilizing methods of discipline and consistency to teach the child. This results in first communion around age of 7 o 8, this tracks the ability to discern between good and evil, the child is capable of sacrament of confession and to decide on what is good and evil. From there there is the period of theological grounding for child's decision making, the parents are there as teachers with the child having more autonomy to explore these realities. The child is a catechumen and this period ends around age of 15-16, where he is considered and adult but still to be mentored by other people, including parents and the community.
Now the point is that in terms of maturity, by age of 16 you as a Catholic should be fully aware of what is Christian moral teaching, what are vices and virtues and live you life accordingly. There is no eternal "kid" mentality where somebody can be 28 and still "exploring" as some forever university student, it is preposterous. You can be 17 or 18 years old and preparing yourself for marriage and taking care of children in the same loop. Maturity is not about wealth, "responsibility" in terms of being a manager of team of 50 people or anything like that. While this is of course one way to grow, it is by no means implied in catholic teaching. You are mature as long as you posses ability to discern good and evil and as soon as adult Christian you know the doctrine to live virtuous life. The catholic teaching of responsibility is stemming from subsidiarity, by age 15-16 you are fully capable of thinking and managing yourself, and you are preparing to take care of your closest family such as husband/wife and even children and whole community. But this is reciprocal, The Church is proper way to live Christian life and the community is helping everybody till their last days. The process of deification is a lifelong process where the whole community including your priest is helping you in this endeavor.
When Hymnowitz points to the Star Wards nerds, all I can think of is the "mature" female SATC equivalents. I admit that men sitting in mom's basement jerking off to online porn are pretty shallow, but so are the women who spend their lives shopping for bags, clothes whilst riding the carosel waiting for the enabling supplicant whom will provide them with lifestyle to which they are accustomed.
That is not lack of maturity, these young adults are mature enough to have capacity to understand what is going on. It is lack of virtue. You can be 80 year old alcoholic bum jerking off on your pissed matrass doing stupid shit. We do not think that such a person did not mature, they are just lacking virtues.
georgioz
19hr ago
I am reminded of the usual reddit "Am I the Asshole" threads. What usually happens is that in any given story everybody is an asshole in there. It ties to a very good article of jugaad ethics, which uses the Indian word of tying the new to the old one, such as having a donkey or a bull trying to tow a modern car. This is what happens when you tear down Chesterton fence and observe the aftermath.
What I see lately is percolation of various worldviews into ethical system informing morality, which ultimately has reach toward law as law is "minimum of morals". One of them is the overarching result of various forms of physicalism - there is no free will, we are all just atoms in motion, sometimes imbued by various outside sources and "systems" of oppression. So a psychopath murdering her own children has no true agency - it is all failure of systems that did not provide help. And at the same time there is visceral need to put some personal blame somewhere, there has to be some agents - even unwitting ones - perpetuating some systems. Like in this example - we are talking about minutiae of what constitutes a "consent" and who has ability to clam systematic influence as opposed to agency.
It is a car crash waiting to happen, where some people are for the first time confronted with their worldviews and moral presuppositions colliding with reality. If anything, it is fascinating to watch.
I think it is quite the opposite. The Culture War is more alive than ever. There still are woke progressives although they want to rebrand to Woke 2.0 silently distancing themselves from some of the more stupid stuff, but it is still there only bubbling beneath the surface. You have revival of Christianity either in form of true conversion but also silently in form of "cultural Christianity". You have other stuff especially in Europe with regards to rising popularity of Mumdani style socialism, you have literal Islamists popping up more often as Muslims especially in Europe get more power.
In terms of policies you have age old stuff like immigration or wars. But there are various interesting issues rising up, like for instance the gender wars stemming from huge divergence of voting patterns between men and women which are driven by completely different worldviews as attested by Lindsay Clancy trial. You have Palestine vs Israel conflict creating strange bedfellows between progressives, Islamists and alt-right agreeing on who is the source of all evil in the West.
To me it seems not at all clear which ethos and ideology or culture will rein in let's say 20 years. Will it be the same GloboHomo technocratic coalition trying to hold the post war liberal consensus as outlined in official UN documents such as 17 Sustainable Development Goals? Will it be some sort of right wing conservative nationalist coalition? Will it be rationalist technobros developing AI overlord who will rule with iron hand of utilitarianism where everybody is hooked on some sort of UBI and robot hookers? Will it be some sort of South African style of failed country split in tribal conflict over diminishing resources in the middle of failed AI dystopia and demographic crisis?
georgioz
1d ago
That, or as the comment from the gold mine of youtube comment section put it more succintly:
She went to the Zuckerberg school for human emotions
Thanks for the link. The comment section is gold, I really liked this one:
"It took me a really long time to be able to cry on command... but check this out" single tear rolls down cheek
Or how the other comment put it:
She almost shit herself producing that teardrop
I am still laughing my ass off over it, a real goldmine in there. Also I unironically think that we may be witnessing a birth of a new hero for Lindsay Clancy's gaggle of lunatics. I'd not be surprised if a few years down the road Holmes is AOCs chosen for vice-president or something like that.
Underdetermination is exactly why reversing stupidity doesn’t get you intelligence.
I agree, that is why I wrote:
Also I agree that reverse stupidity is not intelligence, but stupidity is at least a hint of lack of intelligence.
I also agree, I'd say that in my Christian worldview there is not only lack of ontological substance of evil but also of a lie, Steresis aletheias. There is infinite way of how to be wrong, but only one way to be correct in my theology. In other theologies there is only infinite ways of being wrong without any metaphysicaly objective way of aiming toward truth, as this objective truth does not even exist.
That gets you back to a state of Cartesian doubt
Carthesian doubt was not deep enough. He did not doubt time or language for instance. His cogito ergo sum should in proper sceptical tradition be something like sgdsjvfdngfd lshgfk h lsng, only even more stupid, as he should doubt meaning of very language.
The most information you can get by rejecting paradigms is zero.
This cannot be true as there should be way to doubt your paradigmatical grounds, otherwise it is just pure dogma. In other words you are just asserting grounds of your paradigm as correct without any justification, thus basically creating a new fairy tale.
I can give a steelman position to the OP argument. I can tie it to my older post about theology, which is paradigmatic disjunction. There is famous Quine proof of Underdetermination of Scientific Theory, meaning that data are not neutral towards underlying paradigm and interpretation. Therefore you do not just have The Science™, it completely relies on underlying paradigms that select what to study, how to formulate hypothesis, how to formulate and propose theories that explain data which are dependent on presuppositions.
So in the end it is just a pure conflict theory. There is no absolute The Science™, all science is instantiation of their underlying theology and paradigm onto data. Be it Socialist Science, Scholastic Christian Science, Progressive Science or even Rationalist Yudkowskian Science. In that sense the OP just hates the Progressive Science with its own paradigmatic blind spots and correctly identifies it as a Conflict Theory with Lab Leak being one of the example. Even more prominent one was the petition of The Scientists™ to allow BLM protests in the middle of pandemic as they consider racism as greater threat than COVID-19.
Also I agree that reverse stupidity is not intelligence, but stupidity is at least a hint of lack of intelligence. Reverse of stupidity of let's say paranormal science is not intelligence, but it is not a reason not to dismiss it.
You said "provably infected" (in your earlier post), not me. I'm happy to stipulate that any evidence that could prove the infection status of the lab animals at WIV (in either direction) has been lost.
They were "provably infected" by coronavirus and it is proven by loads of research on that published by WIV. You shifted the goalpost that there is no proof of animals in the lab being infected by this specific SARS-CoV-2 strain. I agree, there is no proof mostly due to purposeful destruction of data and samples. On the other hand there is also no proof of any animal infected by any coronavirus in some mystical smuggler/breeder supply chain leading to Wuhan needed for zoonotic origin. But the lab leak at least has the proof of tens of thousands of animals in cages living for decade+ a few miles down the road being provably infected by coronavirus infections and experimnented on. Nothing even close to such a proof exists for zoonotic origin, there is no animal reservoir, no causal link, no breeder farm identified. There is nothing.
Your response is isolated demands for rigour and (entirely plausibly) slinging allegations of dishonesty at the Red Chinese authorities.
Quite to the contrary. The zoonotic origin story has the same problem that you presented - there is no direct ancestor found anywhere in the wild. It was not found near Wuhan or anywhere else. The distance toward COVID-19 strains require quite a leap. So this fact does not save zoonotic origin. So you require rigorous proof of plausible research in biolab that provably produced the exact SARS-CoV-2 strain of the virus. And lack of evidence is evidence of absence. But you do not require the same evidence for zoonotic origin, which should leave massive trail up until it reached Wuhan market from either Laos or Yunnan or some other unknown bat cave thousand miles and decades of natural mutations away from what was produced in form of two lineages of SARS-CoV-2. That is isolated demand for rigor.
Also I am not slinging "allegations" but facts about Red Chinese authorities. They refused to cooperate, provide data, samples or anything. In fact they provably slaughtered and removed all animals on the market, bleached the whole area and never presented any animal sample from lab to the public, scrubbed the WIV database and more. How is that an allegation? You yourself agree by saying that:
As you point out, the Red Chinese were destroying both potential evidence that could have supported wet market zoonotic spread and potential evidence that could have supported lab leak. This is not surprising, as the official Chicom position at the time the evidence was destroyed (being enforced inside China with the usual Chicom techniques of truth suppression) was that the virus originated outside China.
So yes, Red Chinese authorities are purposefully obtuse and dishonest. You say that nobody coming forth from the lab is implausible, which makes you discount Lab Leak angle as unlikely conspiracy - so again absence of evidence is evidence of absence. But I can do the same for zoonotic origin: out of the whole conspiracy chain of wildlife smugglers, breeders, market employees and customers - not one person was overcome by conscience to say that they in fact had smuggled a bat from Laos together in cage with a racoon dog which created the pandemic? In fact this chain was broken by Chinese Authorities who could have tested animals, focused on specific stall and investigate the whole supply chain, but this time they scrubbed all the evidence. This is not what happened in the past outbreaks where zoonotic origin was proven to an animal held in a specific hotel room in Hong Kong in SARS outbreak in 2002-3 or camel virus reservoir for MERS 2012. Additionally, unlike Lab personnel who are all vetted and gagged by contracts and career or criminal charges, the zoonotic origin this is an operation of ordinary people and we do not have a single peep about this massive smuggling/breeding operation delivering dangerous infected animals for 1000 miles over to Wuhan. Not even somebody talking to his sister who talked to her boyfriend to leak it? Why is that absence of evidence not a kill shot against zoonotic origin?
False dialectic exactly according to the lack of evidence formula. Also we lack evidence exactly because Chinese communist institutions refused to cooperate in independent investigation and actively acted against it - they destroyed data, slaughtered animals on the market, bleached residual evidence and gagged researchers. So it is doubly ignorant to use lack of public evidence as evidence of absence.
I can also reverse it and say that based on the publicly available information none of the animals was proven NOT to be infected with SARS-CoV-2. It is just Chinese government communication that none of the staff or animals tested positive, none of the live samples or anything like that remains. Which is highly suspicious as it seems unlikely that none of the hundreds of staff were tested positive in the middle of supposedly zoonotic outbreak inside Wuhan in March-April of 2020. But this is not even the main point, it is possible that the leaked animal was from some earlier batch of research that leaked on the market in 2019. Testing animals in March 2020 would not be proof of absence of a virus in animals in 2019. But again, we do not even have that as Chinese government refused to cooperate.
I can also say that there is no publicly available information that would provide evidence of any actual zoonotic link. Zoonotic origin is all circumstantial, there is no "animal zero" proven, there is no cluster of infected animals or any physical link of infection and mutation from bat to human. There is no hard evidence of zoonotic origin, so it is pure speculation and fantasy story bordering on conspiracy.
And I literally mean it - it presupposes that some breeders traded various animals including bats in some hidden breeding stations where the virus spread between animals until it reached Wuhan market and jumped on a human. There is no proof for any of that - there is no evidence of any breeding farms with the final virus strain or any of its its precursors, there is no link leading from bats to any other animal virus reservoir or anything like that. It is a literal conspiracy theory inventing invisible wildlife smugglers, underhanded breeders and unscrupulous sellers in complex supply chain who delivered deadly virus to Wuhan and killed millions of people on Earth without leaving a shred of evidence. In past zoonotic outbreaks, we were able to trace animal reservoirs and vectors easily such as SARS-1 in 2002-3 or MERS 2012. How is such a preposterous hypothesis more plausible than a another lab leak that happens all the time?
"A lab leak virus that looks plausibly zoonotic just happened to have its first superspreader event at a wet market 10km from the lab" is not an unlikely coincidence - see Rootclaim's post-debate rebuttal."
I can revert it. Is it plausible that one of the hundreds of provably infected animals held in cages in lab down the road was the source? What kind of false dialectic was presented in the debate - if the source of infection was the market or the lab - and if it was the market it automatically was zoonotic, meaning no lab leak?
I don't think there ever was a real disagreement of null hypothesis of the origin of COVID. The situation is as follows. We have the only biolab with Biosafety level 4 certification in China that studies bat coronaviruses related to SARS for decades, that biolab is Wuhan Institute of Virology. They produce papers where they admit that they engineer specific bat coronaviruses such as this one from 2016 named Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Like Coronavirus ORF_X Modulates the Host Immune Response in Journal of Virology. And now mysteriously in a country of 1.4 billion people with 100 cities with population of over 1 million people and out of almost 40,000 wet markets in China we see a new strain of bat coronavirus turning into COVID-19. And this event happens a few miles from the institute. By this fact alone the likelihood is overwhelming on human origin of the virus.
Add to the opaque nature of Chinese communist institutions. We have precedents for this such as in Soviet Union, where they wanted to bury even catastrophes like Chernobyl, which only had to be confirmed by outside sources - two days later in Sweden where they detected increased radiation. This is nothing new. We have proof of Chinese scrubbing data from the lab - they literally deleted their database of tens of thousands of tested animals in September 2019 due to "hacking". They bleached everything in the market destroying biological data. We also have circulation of claims and counterclaims of Wuhan employees being hospitalized for alergies or cold. By the way, to this day we do not have any confirmed deaths from COVID of any of the hundreds of staff of the institute, including any old goats and administrators - despite the supposed zoonotic origin of the Virus and catastrophic situation in Wuhan. And now some people just say we lack evidence for lab leak hypothesis. No shit, but we also lack evidence for zoonotic origin, it is all just circumstantial.
Lab leak is the most parsimonious and likely explanation of the whole thing and any other explanation such as some mysterious transmission from bat to pangolin to thousand of miles travel to Wuhan is the real conspiracy theory. Also it is not without precedent, there were two documented leaks of SARS just in 2004 in Bejing biolevel 3 lab investigating SARS. Back then it was concluded that the lab was hugely negligent and did not apply the safety level to proper standards. By the way the ascendancy of Wuhan lab to study viruses was exactly in the aftermath of Beijng catastrophe and by 2010 the Wuhan became the crown jewel of Chinese research into SARS and other coronavirus infections. In fact this Beijing-Wuhan rivalry was fueled by different commie institutional players inside the Chinese power structures (Ministry of Health vs Army/Academy of Sciences) and could potentially be one of the reasons and motivations for cutting the corners when it comes to safety, including conducting part of the research in Biolevel 2 and 3 facilities.
Anyways, I do not care if it was some sort of breach of containment, a bioweapon research or even age old communist corruption where some janitor sold infected animals scheduled for incineration to the Wuhan wet market for $10 profit as it is usual in communist countries. Which by the way shows the false dialectic of "Market Origin" vs "Lab Leak" - these are not mutually exclusive, it is not impossible that an infected personnel or even infected animals leaked from the Lab into the market few miles from said lab. Both theories have plausible explanation of "infected animals at the market", just competing source of said animals. And even in this scenario - what is the most likely source of said infected animals. A bat cave thousand of miles away transmitting it to to pangolin or racoon or dog or civet that ended up in said market? Or that the source was literal hundreds of provably infected animals in cages a few miles down the road. That the virus leaked from the lab is still the most ready explanation of the situation especially by virtue of opaqueness of communist regime.
Imagine that you had the same standard for any other thing. Let's say that a local corrupt politician who had provable ties to local mafia suddenly won $1 million in a lottery. What would be the most plausible explanation:
- He was just a lucky winner
- He was gifted the winning lottery ticket from local mafia, who purchased or even robbed it from some anonymous local lottery winner
And now it seems that all journalists and academia are for some reason going for "nothing to see here", or "lottery ticket is valid and not counterfeit" and any other number of explanations. And moreover they would claim that the mafia tie is a "conspiracy theory" and an offence, for which you will be depersoned and cancelled. In the past no respectable journalist would drop this story, and the corruption angle would never be declared as "conspiracy theory" using strawman story of how the lottery ticket is not fake etc.
georgioz
8d ago
When I read something that, presumably, is the human author's thoughts, only for it to turn out to be LLM's output, I feel a similar betrayal of trust as when I read something purportedly factual that turns out to be fictional, even if not actively meant to deceive.
I agree, but only partially. My red line is AI assisted human writing as opposed to pure AI bot writing. The point being that we already lived in this reality. For instance for years and years youtubers and bloggers and forum posters used computer algorithms to evaluate their content creation. If everything you create in your video is informed by the algorithm from the length, language used, thumbnail even to analysis of content that has highest chance of viral impact - you were as much a slave to "AI" in 2019 as you are in 2026 if you use AI for research or refining of your post. The original idea of "human writing for humans by humans" is long gone.
Right to bodily autonomy means the right to suicide.
Why? People in USA literally have second amendment right and it is curtailed by many, many stipulations but yet everybody pretends or even firmly believes that the right exists. Why you cannot have right to bodily autonomy except suicide? You already have many such stipulations, for instance your right to bodily autonomy and many other rights are suspended if you are in prison. There is right to bodily autonomy except certain mandatory vaccinations etc. What is another stipulation changing?
georgioz
13d ago
I like Matt Walsh take on this. Some people believe that AI has very significant apocalypse potential, thus AI executives are literally building a bomb about to kill us all. And the response? "Ah, you are silly! AI executives only spread fake doomsday propaganda trying to scare the population in order to get competitive advantage, power and money."
And this is supposed to be "there is nothing to worry about, just move along, nothing to see here" argument? It is horrible either way.
Humans form into self-integrated societies that have net-positive moral utility.
Humans do not agree what is "net-positive moral utility". For instance I think about it from of Christian virtue ethics, not in form of utility.
Rights dependent on subjective or arbitrary thresholds have historically had enormous potential for abuse.
Right is a legal fiction, basically a strongly worded law. From where I stand, right was always the other side of duty. As soon as people renege on said duty, rights stops existing. We see it again and again. Right to privacy of correspondence is in article 12 of Universal Human Rights. It basically stopped existing after decades old creeping process of governments spying on said correspondence, people do not feel duty to resist it so the right stops existing, and not enough people care.
For a functioning, high-performance society, we must have it be generally the case that people believe rights, including life, will generally be upheld
Even skipping what "high-performance society" even means as it by itself is value and thus morality laden statement, rights as was said are social constructs. If enough people think that sacrificing hearts to the blood good or that tears of newborn children are perfectly fine price to pay for greater good, then such thing will be enshrined as a law. Maybe even a right - people have right to live their free lives enabled by tears of newborn children. What is life of a child in face of all the other things that are valued in society, children will be sacrificed to the Moloch of these rights. All of the aforementioned things be it surrogacy or euthanasia are also argued in terms of rights: right to family life, right to bodily autonomy or whatnot. In the end the rights have to be evaluated by somebody if they clash, they can be amended or suspended as during COVID. Nothing will happen if right is stepped upon or changed: no smiting, nothing will physically shatter.
In the end we live in a society that we live in, we have laws based on values and ethical system accepted through culture in the society, which are in turn informed by theology of decision makers and general population in their day to day activity. This world is the result of that.
georgioz
15d ago
Sperm donors create their own unique problems in terms of potential incest or spreading of rare diseases and whatnot. However this Chinese case is different - he literally has 100+ children inside his compound with hired staff etc. You can see it in the photo. I have never seen anything like that, however it was the first thing that was obvious to me as soon as I learned about how the surrogacy works.
georgioz
15d ago
The situation in Yemen is very interesting. Currently Houthis govern the population of around 28 million people out of 43 million total population of Yemen. and their standing army is around 350 000 people with around 30k of hardcore elite troops. Just as a comparison, at the time of US retreat the Taliban only had around 70,000 warriors with another 200,000 in various militias and reserve forces. However Houthis are much better equipped - they posses artillery, air defense, ballistic missiles as well as around 100 tanks as well as drones from quadcopters to Iranian Samad-3 despite decade long warfare against Saudis and USA.
If you read the comments on the substack post, he even acknowledges that he knows he'll lose business over this. So here's a case where someone who is supposedly an "effective altruist" is making a decision to help one convicted felon in order to damage his company's future, likely permanently. I know that the only thing I'm going to remember out of this is "Oh, Manifund? Those are the retards that hired Caroline Ellison".
It is not as if EA has any coherent definition of morality. Morality is whatever is convenient for utils. "Ellison is smart and she will do more good than bad eventually" is all that is needed for an argument. I really mean it, there is no stable grounding, no deontological laws or even heuristics that would inform you on what action to take inside EA. It is all about if you can produce some good sounding 20 page parable about baby eating aliens, thus making your decision correct and moral.
I am not surprised, it just confirms the quokka meme for EA and broader rationalist movement. By the way I will use this opportunity to remark on "surprising" development of free malaria nets so much pushed for by EA. Apparently these nets are used by natives for fishing, but given the small diameter of the mesh size, it catches everything - including baby fish. The whole project contributes toward destroying whole ecosystems in Africa, exacerbating the food security in whole regions. I am sure there will be another rationalist "solution" to this problem thus adding on to previous catastrophe. Also I'd love to see how this impacts the util calculation of the whole program and if it potentially turns saints into villains retrospectively - at least for now.
Add this HR decision to whole battery of stupid and naive decisions made so far.
That it's unclear whether the problem can really be resolved with sufficiently strong contractual terms. I'm slightly more inclined to accept the premise that surrogacy in general opens up a Pandora's box of ethical problems.
I considered making this as a top post, but I can use it here as another example from Pandora's box of surrogacy problems. Apparently there is a Chinese billionaire and video game executive named Xu Bo, who has over 100 children through US based surrogacy programs.
I guess my imaginary example of weird millionaire cult leader filling his ranch with hundreds of children from surrogacy - that I used before in these hypotheticals - was not imaginative enough. Now there is also the foreign aspect twist due to intersection of jus soli citizenship laws, where foreign billionaires and possibly state actors can breed US citizens Soldiers abroad and make cults in safe jurisdiction. The reality has always some ways to surprise.
Yet another "unintended" consequence of completely surrendering the culture and law over to Queer Studies weirdos, who specifically pushed for surrogacy as a "family equality" tool for access to motherhood by queer people degenerates. And now after these ideas were imposed by activists on the ground, we can all adopt surprised Pikachu face, that the society has to rummage through debris of yet another norm "abolished" by these lunatics specifically engaged in crusade against "heteronormativity", so we now live in their world of country-wide mental asylum constructed for the most abominable degenerates of all kinds, not only the queer ones.
Not being able to do official segregation has basically made the American urban lifestyle very expensive and even more expensive if you have kids. You can’t just buy a cheap house and send your kids to public schools because of the demographics. Which forces you to either live in an expensive suburb or use private schools. This also means you largely can’t be poor in your nice community because your community refuses to have low costs of living options because that would allow the more criminally inclined people to move in.
I think this is not such a novel idea. The acceptance of car culture in USA was to large part driven by the fact that owning a car or two was middle class signifier and defensive measure. I think Europeans will eventually learn the same - if your rich neighborhood is one subway station away from crime ridden hellhole, you will have that spilled into your subway station and from there into the neighborhood. In that sense being cut off from public transit is the logical thing to require. We already see the same pattern in European cities, where natives flee to the surrounding towns and villages.
It's no secret that the Republican party under MAGA really likes conspiracies. They let you substitute wishcasting for evidence. Kirk pushed a lot of conspiracy theories from big ones like [The 2020 election was stolen] to [Aghanistan's collapse was engineered to import D voters] to [J6 was instigated by the FBI/Antifa/BLM]. He also pushed smaller ones that are closer to simple misinformation, like implying the Covid vaccine makes you blind and paralyzed. But for Kirk, all of these conspiracies were instrumental. They all pointed in the same direction: helping the Republican party, or more specifically Trump.
This is incredible use of equivocation of the word "conspiracy". I can name twenty such "conspiracies" that are not even talked about as such on the left. Ranging from overarching theological ones such as that all men consciously and unconsciously conspired to create the mystical "system" of patriarchy to oppress all women to a very specific conspiracies promoted by academia such as that Republicans want to create uninformed voters who will get them in power.
I am not doing this in some tu quoque ad hominem. But telling that some large voting bloc of tens of millions of people believes "conspiracies" is like saying that water is wet. For instance I can say that the death of George Floyd was the hallmark of conspiracy lunatics taking over the public discourse in 2020. If tomorrow some crazy person killed Kamala Harris, you can immediately assign conspiracy theories to her, her supporters, her detractors and everybody in between. It is useless category in such a broad definition.
Candace Owens opened her show the day after Kirk's memorial by mocking Erica Kirk and claiming Charlie had been "betrayed" by someone within the TPUSA, either Jewish donors or Erika Kirk herself because golly gee, didn't Charlie's wife seem a little too enthused about going on camera after his death?
In context of above "conspiracies", maybe you are aware that for instance former Young Turks progressive Anna Kasparian is highly supportive of Owens theories. She endorses Owens, Carlson and is fully behind them. So by that metric I can say that It is no secret that DNC under progressives really like conspiracies. Including that of Kirk murder. Now some people say it is a cynical ploy by leftist operatives to split the vote and demoralize Republican voters for the upcoming elections. But that is exactly the point, it by itself is a "conspiracy theory", and yet another potential thing for you to list as such. It is all an incredible mess.
IME homeschooling is fairly middle class-
Of course it is, as I argued above it is because it is worse from the both systems. You still pay taxes for public schools but opt out for every single benefit starting from free lunch to free babysitting basically. For lower middle class or poor there is no real choice, they either put their children into public schools or lose half of their dual income including taxes that is there to support the necessities.
The proposal is there to at least partially offset this. How insane it is to have $20k taxpayer money per year to educate 6-10 year old children on basic things, while the school system fails to teach them anything. You can pay $10k to parents, have them organize pods and the rest and check if the results are at least comparable to public schools. Government saves half the costs on taxes and children stay with their mothers and pods.
By the way there is also another alternative for more business savvy people. Just fund one of the famous "learing centers". Rake in money from public funding, give parents some kickback and just profit not only from "education" but also from free lunches and the rest of it. That is the no-brainer arbitrage of the current insane system. People are up in arms and disgusted when they find such a fraudulent schemes by Somalis or other communities in Minnesota who do that under veneer of leftist blind eye policy. But this is literally what is right now happening in the public school system such as New York: just huge money siphoning scheme where teachers, teacher pensioners and various contractors extract money while not teaching kids reading or math and not even giving any kickback to parents. That is the true travesty.
You are arguing the current situation. If you are a family with two or three children, the cost is $24k-$96k per year for schooling for a taxpayer just for K-12 system. You are forced to work, but one parent is working entirely to pay just the official schooling costs. If you decided to homeschool, now you have worst of the both worlds: you pay taxes and you forego one income in the family. Of course only some people can afford it, mostly driven how terrible the school is. Moving children out of that system makes homeschooling more advantageous on the margin, which actually saves taxpayer money.
Of course there is more in it. If you have stay at home mum, you save on other costs such as cooking and delivery, cleaning plus the person can still do some gig or part-time work, especially via unofficial channels such as bartering. On top of that you have other advantages: my wife researched discounts, she researched obscure government dotation schemes not even related to kids. It takes time and effort to do that and in fact saved us a lot of money. The whole system is incredibly perverse.
What victim. A moron who lets some random chick snort ketamine from his dick before gangbanging her with his 3 equally moronic friends? I am sorry that I do not have much sympathy for such a victim. Neither do I have sympathy for said chick who voluntarily went into such a situation. I am not thinking of any of them as some victims.
Like I said, everybody is an asshole in this story. Or am I supposed to be male or female feminist who thinks of a college men and women like that as "kids having fun" and at the same time as unthinking victims of systems of oppression who are just bunch of atoms in motion inevitably dancing to the tune of power structure of Rothchilds, GloboHomo power brokers and TechBros who beamed subliminal messages about ketamine orgies into their empty heads via TikTok? I dont think so.
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