Now, there are a few "high inquisitors" like tenured critical theorists, internet moderators, or the SLPC who have to engage with this information enough to fight its dissemination. To steelman what they would say, the evidence for what you're talking about is not conclusive (iron deficiencies in childhood, shared environments, etc), and could have disasterous social consequences if the average idiot takes a simple conclusion from complex and mixed research.
This reminded me Sam Harris and Ezra Klein debate around Murray's Bell Curve book, race, IQ and all that with Harris defending existence of IQ gap. At one point Klein did use the argument that even if true (which he argued against), it would be bad for it to get out there. The discussion then derailed when Harris said he is interested in facts and what is true, for which Klein responded that Harris also has biases that prevent him from finding truth. When Harris denied such biases, Klein threw at Harris accusation that he did not have enough people of color on his podcast and the discussion got quite heated from there and turned into shit.
I absolutely lost any faith in Klein as an intellectual from there on. Anything he claims that is true or that he believes should automatically be suspicious as he may just lie for moral or political reasons. What was interesting is that Klein is fully aware of him engaging in this Conflict Theory thinking, his defense as I understand it is assuming that everybody is Conflict Theorist, some people just deny it. Another interesting notion to me is that Ezra knowing that he is a Conflict Theorist puts him on a moral high ground compared to misguided naive people like Harris who just delude themselves and do not have moral power to do what's right. To use an analogy, it is like CDC experts lying about efficacy of masks early on in order to prevent panic buying from general public. And they kind of admit it in similar fashion - people should have known that we lie and in fact it was a fantastic thing we did and we would do it again. Grow up and cough up some money so our good work can continue. I do not quite have my finger on what is going on here but I think this is very important phenomenon to understand.
This is ridiculous for me. Not UK resident, but I got my first small folding knife when I was maybe 6 and I was given knives to do stuff by adults even before then. It was part of the ritual to get your own knife from your dad for your birthday, it was source of great pride and acknowledgement of responsibility of kids. Having a knife was seen as one of the hallmarks of boyhood/girlhood. I do not remember any type of "knife crimes", quite to the contrary it was a step on the ladder for kids to mature. Learning how to handle knives was commonplace - one did not have to hide the ownership of knife, self-teaching oneself in secret - which would exactly be the source of injuries.
Knife is incredibly useful for all types of things: making stuff from wood, serving as scissors to cut rope when you construct anything, when you gather some type of fruit or shrooms and myriad of other things. I carry knives with me very often, I have multiple of them in various places such as a car or work, etc. And it is not only me but also my wife.
This emasculation of society in the name of evermarching safetyism is starting to piss me off big time.
Yes they did, which makes it ahistorical and hilarious. Although I do not necessarily have an issue with that, for instance I liked the movie 300 and also laughed when Leonidas had the speech about age of freedom - yeah, freedom to perpetuate slave society with arguably the highest ratio of slaves to citizens in history.
As others said, it is basic premise of stoicism and its teachings on locus of control.
I find it especially useful to avoid certain manipulations - including those asking money from you, like EA. As a pragmatic observation, my internal spidey sense now lights up as spoon as I hear “we” as in “we humanity”. We should stop climate change, racism and if we are at it why not also hunger, all murder and pineaple pizza?
I think saying “not my problem” and even “fuck you, I wont do what you tell me” is perfectly fine stance for random ask by some stranger, especially online.
So the argument is that since "sissy hypno porn etc." is available online, then there is no need to be worried that it is pushed in school as it does not do that much harm?
Good, so given that terminally online people have access to gore and snuff videos or ISIL radical propaganda or holocaust denial bullshit, let's move it into schools maybe in slightly sanitized form. It cannot harm anybody to have teachers handing out books written by Nick Fuentes, right? Kids who don't like it will not read it anyway and even if they do, it will not do that much harm.
georgioz
1yr ago
I just want to add the usual switcheroo between marginalized people and historically marginalized people. As other people say, women now have 50% higher college enrolment compared to men. But if one grants argument that they were historically marginalized, this remains the same even if women are 100% of enrollment and no men are allowed.
I agree with you, gender wars make least sense when it comes to conflict. Mostly because men and women do (or at least used to) literally live together. Everybody has some mother and father or some brothers and sisters or cousins and nephews. Also it is very hard to be hardcore misandrist feminist if you happen to raise a boy.
I think that the modern gender wars are fueled by mostly technological but also social changes in the west in 20th century. There are several important milestones there: the first one being invention of home appliances which made it easier to take care of household production/chores freeing mostly women to pursue other things in life. Second was overall servitization of economy where unlike agricultural or industrial economy the physical strength is no longer advantage. And the last and huge one is of course the pill which gave women control over their reproduction.
What happened as a result of all three of these technological changes is basically emasculation of women who could go out and take over traditionally masculine roles of a provider and also ability to adopt more male style of sexual behavior. One can easily see this in all cultural product where a woman can get away with some pretty nasty and outright insulting stuff that men would not be able to get away with. But this is still incomplete transition, there is still a lot of friction there. We still see lingering women are wonderful effect which basically gives them license to behave this way. It also has to be said that while emasculated women and effeminate men are a thing, they are not necessarily viewed as a model for ideal partner.
I like how Louise Perry described it - if you are a modern woman in office setting you can go about your life without ever encountering any situation where sex really matters, that is if you do not go to a gym or similar setting trying to lift weights or something like that. You would be correct to assume that there is no distinction between men and women and possibly perceive any challenge to that experience as somehow weird or even insulting. Having a widely accepted conspiracy theory about how patriarchy is beyond all this, that any differences are unnatural and a result of these nefarious forces distorting the natural equality of sexes for millennia can look very appealing - especially if believing or at least espousing ideas of such a conspiracy can get you advantages. However this is less tenable view if one becomes a mother of a boy or if one wants to have long-term partnership or if a woman is faced with some really nasty things like financial stress, crime in the neighborhood or myriads of other situation when actually having masculine man would really come in handy.
I can't tell if this was the intention of the President's Office when they passed the rule, and how much will be left after everything settles (or if it won't settle, and everything will just sit in storage awaiting a change of zeitgeist).
I think anybody can tell that it was the intent, at least according to the link you provided regarding the NAGPRA Act itself:
These regulations provide systematic processes for returning Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian Organizations (NHOs). The revised regulations streamline requirements for museums and federal agencies to inventory and identify Native American human remains and cultural items in their collections.
Between funerary object, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony, I think anything goes since cultural patrimony is synonymous with cultural property. And I would emphasize the word cultural is by now long hijacked by the Left: as in cultural studies or cultural sensitivity or cultural racism or LGBT culture and others. The word cultural in this context is one of the archetypal examples of "we share your language but not your dictionary", similar to words like inclusion or diversity. So if you hear something like culturally relevant teaching you cant translate it as woke, probably explicitly as a vehicle to pose as a protector of oppressed native peoples to gain power.
So yeah, I guess the exhibition curators and museum directors are now scared shitless as they probably know what is coming their direction - if they do not immediately overdo at least by factor of 10 of any measure they think is reasonable.
georgioz
3mo ago
As others said, I do not think Israel is particularly destabilizing force in the region compared to all the alternatives. Historically you have all types of conflict in the Middle-East including religious and sectarian strife, ethnic strife, ideological strife between monarchies and republics and socialist revolutionary states as well as tribal and all other types of conflicts. If anything, Israel has quite cordial relations with some of its neighbors like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, which is obviously the reason why somebody sees an ally of my enemy as his enemy.
In fact the civil war in Yemen is a proof that Israel does not have much to do with instability in the region as it is generally viewed as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran where Saudis are actually propped up by western aid in this conflict. So now what - should US and EU depose the Saudi dynasty and establish the country as some direct protectorate to ensure flow of oil and secure Red See and straight of Hormuz?
georgioz
3mo ago
Mass immigration is only one angle of change with late stage demographic transition. You can apply the same logic you apply to immigrants to demographic collapse. Some things:
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Dysgenic effect of this demographic collapse. The population that is more likely to have children in modern context is population that is more likely to be prone to risky behavior. We are talking about teen mothers, people who also are more prone to addictive substances and so forth. It also makes huge difference when it comes to regional birth rate difference as well as various subcultures: for instance orthodox vs secular Askhenazi Jews in Israel.
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The structure of post-collapse population is impacted in very important way. If you will have 15 million South Koreans in 2100 their median age can be close to 60 years. I is far worse than just having small population, it means that small number of working age people will have to take care of so many unproductive ones. Even if everything that you say is true and we will have some sort of robot revolution, this whole affair will impact the underlying political structure. I do not think that democracy as we know it can thrive in a situation where over 50% of the population is literally living on government dole or its equivalent.
Nevertheless I think you and Kevin Dolan are agreeing here. Birth rates are "not a problem" as long as some societies somehow will find a way to organize economic and political life so that people don't need to work and everybody will get what they need and want - as if this "don't work and get rich" is somehow a novel idea. I think in that case you just solved the people bottleneck by making people obsolete, as easy as that.
At the same time though, we have lost much of the utility of shame. Shame, in its traditional role, is to engender manners and create a very legible and trainable way for people to interact with each other.
We have completely different view of the situation, shame is routinely used now to the extent that it was probably not used for decades before - to enforce progressive values. The progressives developed shame into an art, they deployed the heavy philosophical weapons and they even have special name for it - problematization which is very much also part of the Critical tradition (as in Critical Theory). Look at something or somebody and try to find out what is wrong with them. Shame them until you take control of it.
James Lindsey described this tactics as a three-pronged ad hominem attack:
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Attack on your intellectual legitimacy: Are you an expert on the topic? Did you read all the relevant books? What is your H index, do you have PHD or do you use authoritative sources such as New York Times?
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Attack on your emotional legitimacy: Who hurt you that you are saying this? Are you feeling well today, you do not seem like yourself, It is okay to accept that you are depressed, no shame in that.
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Attack on your moral legitimacy: You know that only fascists say what are you saying? Why did you like a tweet from known transphobe?
In short, people are constantly pressured that they are either stupid, crazy or evil if they do not conform - sometimes all three things at once. We are living in one of the most stifling times in history of humanity. Just today there is a news that one Noah Gragson was suspended from NASCAR for liking a twitter meme making joke of George Floyd. Liking a tweet in your home on your private time possibly while drunk is fireable offense now. Talk about losing the utility of shaming. Utility of shaming is all there on the display stronger than ever, it shows its power and utility of creating illusion of conformity all around us.
You describe how people are convinced about anything like ever. It always works frustratingly slowly and then suddenly and quickly. You do not convince people in one discussion, my working model is that you maybe shift their position 1 percentage point at a time. And as their previously 100% opinion reaches that 50% threshold after many discussions and personal experiences, then they suddenly flip their publicly stated and communicated position. It may seem very surprising, but in fact nothing dramatic happened - it was the same slow process as before inside their heads. The upside is that the new beliefs have deeper roots and they will not shift on a whim.
The second rule is that even if talking with true believers, the aim is not to convince them - although it is a plus if that ever happens even in the sense of mildly shifting their posterior. It is lurkers and bystanders watching from the outside, those who are interested in the discussion which are the true "targets". So you are not shifting one person slightly, you are shifting many more people slightly and depending on quality of your arguments you may flip public position of a few people on the margin. I know it happened to me and at least my friends I talk to, when over time we are more likely to get closer in our previously different opinions if the quality of arguments is good.
As for "creative songbirds" who transcend the polarization, they are out there. Prime example that comes to my mind is Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, a youtube talkshow where the former represents the progressive and the later conservative viewpoint on a given controversy of the day. The issue is that the polarization is in the eye of the beholder. Depending on who you ask, the Breaking Points is a cesspit of fascist propaganda or a commie plot sneaking into your bedroom. Again, not a new phenomenon - I remember similar research that asked to rate newspapers and their stance on Israel/Palestianian conflict. The evaluation of any given paper from people asked ranged wildly, depending on what piece from that paper different persons remembered. People often get stuck on things they dislike, it is hard for them to forget. You may know that saying where a man builds 1,000 bridges but sucks just one dick, and he is now forever known not as a bridgebuilder, he is now a cocsksucker.
georgioz
9mo ago
To me, increased immigration seems like a no-brainer, similar to Bryan Caplan style open borders.
The issue here is that immigrants and as we see from the article even nations where the immigrants come from are affected by the same demographic issues that afflict the western countries. A young 30 years old immigrant will require pension in a few decades for himself. So at best, you only kick the can down the road - you are not really solving the underlying issue of too few children being born. To the contrary, you are introducing foreign religious and cultural elements into your country, so when the resource scarcity will hit in those 3 or 5 decades later down the road, you will have much more linguistically, religiously and culturally divided country than it is now - all possibly creating tribal blocs to fight for resources.
Now maybe you envision perpetual system where your country is attracting immigrants at the expense of all the other countries that in turn have their natural demographic collapse made worse by economic emigration. But again even at best if you assure 100% perpetual assimilation of this mass foreign immigration into local culture that produces country where people want to move in the first place - this is not a global solution, but rather very localized workaround. If this is what people mean by solving demographic crisis, then my "solution" to Climate Change is to move north to Canada or Scandinavia and live comfortably while the rest of the world boils and descends into Mad Max dystopia. There, climate change solved, it is nobrainer.
Radical feminists have the same simplistic and faulty “analysis” as Marxists. For traditional Marxists, all history is to be analyzed as class struggle between workers and capitalists. Capitalists use their privilege in form of property of capital to allienate workers and politically oppress them in order to perpetuate and reproduce that whole system called capitalism.
For radfems, the history is to be analyzed as a gender struggle between men and women. Men use their male privilege to oppress women to perpetuate the whole system called patriarchy.
To me all these new causes are basically the same recycled template of dialectical leftist conspiracy theory - just with a new name for oppressed and boogiemen. They just change the name for this boogiemen secret power group and for the system they create. What they all share is the Manichean dichotomy of these forces, analysis that is always reduced to simplistic power relations and the name of the whole conspiracy. So you have whites vs POC, white privilege and white supremacy. You have cishetero vs queer people, normalcy and cisheteronormativity and so on.
As with all conspiracy theories, there may be some grains of truth of various sizes in there, you can have some fancy sounding language and so forth. But similarly to any other conspiracy theories, the analysis runs backwards from belief to “arguments”.
Nudging is a technocratic concept of giving pretense of choice, but then “highlighting” the one preferred in order to manipulate the result. It is the difference between opt-in and opt-out model and similar concepts. It is named after the 2008 book The Nudge by Richard Thaler, the 2017 economic “nobel” prize winner for behavioral economics
While there is probably some argument to be made for it, the equilibrium is ultimately unstable, often due to Lucas Critique. If you try to force people that clicking large green button to “accept” as opposed to small grey button of “reject”, over time your “psychological” tricks will lose efficacy over random choice. Nevertheless “nudging” became pop-psych concept used by your cookie-cutter PMC class wannabes to show their dominance. Which by my estimation exactly reflects the late oughts thinking from elites when it comes to public policy and similar issues.
georgioz
3mo ago
If you consider only wellbeing of nobility/elites, then yes.
I am considering tons of sugar produced, in that sense slave plantations were more efficient compared to other forms of ownership. So no matter the initial organization of labor, slave plantations will be more efficient and thus will be established as dominant structure as that is how incentives are aligned.
By the way it is not dissimilar to some issues here an now: organic and ethical farms are less efficient compared to industrial agriculture and that is why we have the system that we have now. The same goes for textile industry and so forth. And even the do-gooders and Buddhist vegans may not be as squeamish buying illegal drugs with all the costs associated with financing criminal cartels wreaking havoc in many countries. I do not see the situation that different - if English ladies and gentlemen of 18th century wanted to sweeten their tea with sugar, they just accepted slave labor in the same way modern comrades in California accept some people being horribly executed by cartels just as a price of having fun when partying.
georgioz
11mo ago
I think of banality of evil more in line with the Moloch idea. And I also find it useless. For instance I think that everybody involved in transitioning kids is taking part in great evil, of course they think they are doing good. In the end most people involved ranging from receptionist in gender clinic to actual surgeon who chops off healthy organs of kids will be fine. They are not doing anything illegal presumably. Another example - everybody knows what is happening in Xinjiang, China and it does not mean squat. Disney executives had no qualms filming Mulan next to it, literally thanking Xinjiang government for their tremendous help.
I most probably would not do shit about Jews were I living in those times. I don't do squat about kids being tortured in North Korea or literal slavery all over the world. So there is that - am I evil for just watching Netflix while all that is happening around me, possibly even contributing by paying slavers money for their products? If yes, then I don't care, it is not my business to solve these injustices.
georgioz
1yr ago
What is causing a kerfuffle is not the number of days she had sex (63)
If it is not causing kerfuffle, then it should. She had sex almost twice as many times as she showered. So she did not shower before or after having sex.
georgioz
1yr ago
Exactly, for instance in interwar period, USA had War Plan Red in case of conflict with British Empire that involved invasion of Canada. Military is paid to plan for such outlandish scenarios, there cannot be anything assigned to the fact that these plans exist.
georgioz
1yr ago
This may not be the case, Chinese nuclear arsenal is shrouded in mystery and nobody knows how many they have. The estimates range from just couple dozens to high hundreds. Another factor here is that Chinese army is famously corrupt and inept. You have a lot of nepotism - like Mao's grandson who is clearly borderline mentally challenged holding position of Major General and being in charge of thousands of soldiers. Chinese general Guo Boxiong who was sentenced for corruption was charged with openly selling promotions inside army en masse. If somebody thinks that Russian Army is corrupt, Russians are playing child's game next to the status of PLA. So who knows how many of the nuclear weapons are actually functional. Nukes require very sophisticated and expensive maintenance and calibration. And these are exactly ideal targets of corruption as they are existing only on paper with low chance of them ever being used. Similar situation as when Russian suddenly realized that supposed 1.5 million uniforms in warehouses actually do not exist. It is similar situation as when within weeks of declared inspection of grain reserves in China many grain silos mysteriously caught on fire.
Coincidentally I have just recently listened to the latest episode of The Redline podcast related to cobalt mining in Congo. It is an episode within wider miniseries regarding green topics, but it can very well be considered as a standalone episode. I really highly recommend the podcast in general to anyone who wants to keep tabs on what is going on around the world. It has a unique format of interviewing 3-4 experts on any given topic (e.g. civil war in Jemen or what are Private Military Companies about in today's world).
There is fair share of geopolitics of Congo in that podcast episode. Sadly one thing that stuck with me is how bad the situation is there with various warlords. There are apparently over 100 different armed groups in this vast country of 92 million people - a country larger than Mexico. And apparently all these armed groups created a new equilibrium where they basically depend on constant conflict to make money. Additionaly, attention paid to green minerals of the future from developed markets have potential to push Congo even more into some kind of "green minerals" version of petrostate, where the government gets all the profit from resource extraction which gives them no incentive to create healthy economy and tax base to draw power from. I see very bleak future for the country given that it would be extremely challenging to overcome myriads of other obstacles even under the best of circumstances. Listen to it if you want to know more.
I don't think it works this way. Cozying with Tim Cook is not just about having a dinner and a few beers and cracking some jokes. I'd guess that it would involve concessions probably around censorship or letting some actors inside the company to guarantee compliance with Apple's interests or something like that.
Just an interesting sidenote, Tim Cook's net worth is apparently around 1.8 billion which is hundred times less than what Elon Musk has. But of course Cook is in control of company thousand times more valuable than his wealth. This is the problem I see in these top echelons of PMC. You have hired CEOs who enforce their own culture and habits that may be largely orthogonal to interests of companies and shareholders they manage. This is even more pronounced when we are talking about large financial corporations like Vanguard (managing $8.1 trillion) or Blackrock (managing $8.5 trillion) with their CEOs of Mortimer J. Buckley and Larry Fink net worth of probably in hundreds of millions up to a billion at high end. I am absolutely unsurprised if at certain points these professional workers kind of stop caring about money and may smell too much of their own farts, gathering in various exclusive locations like at Davos and coming up with ideas like ESG or other initiatives to basically utilize the company's power and resources they are hired to manage to leave larger imprint on society to satisfy their power trips.
I think there may be something rotten when it comes to modern corporate structure, it starts to resemble a government with quite a large difference between interest of managers (politicians) and shareholders (electorate). To me it resembles more and more structure of the past where kids of nobility got plucky jobs as governors of provinces or as army officers exactly to get status and power in order implement their own personal or family or wider network interests.
Ever since Aristoteles there are broadly three categories of rhetoric/arguments: logos, pathos and ethos.
I'd say that at least during the last decade the discourse shifted more toward pathos/ethos side of things and this distinction does not even have to be gendered. At the base you have encounters which you described: you make me feel discomfort therefore you are a bad person doing bad things. There is whole slew of rhetorical arguments that are basically ad hominem seeped in pathos/ethos, to use some classic examples they are for sure things like who hurt you that you say this or only fascists think that and so forth.
You can even see it even in language change. For instance if in the past if there was something problematic it meant something practical - it is problematic to tighten a screw without screwdriver or in general accomplish some task without some necessary preconditions, that was what was at the core of the problem. Nowadays problematic may mean that process of tightening a screw is perpetuating some social injustice. In fact to problematize is now a verb that even has positive valence and denotes exactly this: look at something and find some way this may harm somebody or a way it transgresses some principles. It is a moral duty to do this and then relentlessly criticize that thing until it is changed only to then target it with even more rigor until that new thing changes in a cycle with hope that at the end of the process of this negative thinking something good crystalizes.
I have to add that your conclusion of evading this stuff is absolutely reasonable one but with one caveat. Even if you do not care about politics, politics may suddenly care for you. It is worthwhile to get in contact with this stuff from time to time so you are not caught with your pants down so to speak. You can train your resolve to adopt fuck you I won't do what you tell me stance when needed, not getting yourself emotionally or morally extorted by such a rhetoric.
There is a good article on Everything Studies with a nice graph showing how let's say rationalist view reality and how some more humanities inclined people view it. If one accepts the latter framework, then saying reality is socially constructed means the social order is socially shaped as opposed to the physical universe is socially conjured.
To further muddle the waters, many people say that social construction does not mean things are not real. Often used example is money: value of otherwise worthless physical pieces of paper stems from other people giving it value. Money undoubtedly is "socially shaped" but it does not make it unreal meaning that pieces of green paper are an illusion or somehow physically not existing. In that sense claim that race is socially constructed may mean that certain social aspects of race and its impact on daily lives of people is socially shaped even though it is obviously real in a sense that there are people with white skin and people with black skin.
This really is often confusing and even well meaning people may talk past each other. As an example I will use the term science. For somebody it may mean body of knowledge gathered by scientific method. For somebody else it means more philosophy and sociology of science meaning ways how grants are awarded, social processes that steer researchers into certain fields of research more than other fields and so forth. So saying that science is social construct is obviously true as science is done by people and they are working in socially shaped organizations using socially shaped processes. It does not mean that scientific body of knowledge is just some arbitrarily made up stuff. But then again it can be if let's say scientific social processes were driven by racism or whatnot.
Now to be frank, even if I do somewhat understand where social constructionists come from I think their insight has limited value. It would be better to define special terms for what they actually mean so if one says "science" we know if we are talking about scientific body of knowledge or something else. These discussions often take form of sophistry spreading confusion and they paradoxically contribute to the whole social constructivist premise. Which in a sense may be ultimate level of trolling: see, we made scientists say stupid things by sophistry and social pressure. We were right all along except in the past the social pressure was based on racism and misogyny and homophobia!
I care because it is one of the many instances of how the social norms are established and before you know it, it will be your own daughter smelling around the dinner table. I am done with the "live and let live" attitude for all the craziness it brought upon us. I am now all for return of good old shaming/blaming back into town. So yeah, I have no problem calling Aella and any of her partners as disgusting people. Sue me.
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