Probably the wrong crowd for this, but I'll ask anyways...
Does anyone know of any long-form podcast interviews with Kamala from a tough or adversarial interviewer? I've listened to three different interviews with her (from Pod Save America, I've Had It, and Sharon McMahon) and they are all of the form "ask softball question, let her say her talking points." None actually interrogate her to try to see if she understands the potential problems with her policy ideas, or to make her defend against the most common criticisms of her policy ideas, or get her to pass any kind of intellectual turing test. Part of the reason I went down this rabbit hole is because I'm curious if Kamala is actually smart or not. But it is difficult to tell if someone is smart if they are never pushed to defend their viewpoints. I'm also curious if she can actually understand the right-wing critique of her immigration positions, or actually lives in such a bubble she has never actually engaged with the critique.
gorge
1yr ago
If you care about the things that Trump's base cares about (immigration, America first, bringing industry back, stopping the 'woke' agenda, curbing the establishment/Cathedral-state, etc. ) , then for all of Trump's faults, the other options may be even less unappealing:
Haley -- do I need to even explain why she is bad? She is an awful combination of 1) having the worst of neocon foreign policy 2) being an authoritarian on free speech issues 3) being weak against the woke agenda 4) being cynical 5) being dumb as bricks. Desantis -- naive boy scout who is going to be eaten alive. He simply doesn't have the charisma or the guts to take on the establishment. Ramaswamy -- I think he has a lot of trouble overcoming the "who is this guy" problem. Both in the sense of having low name recognition and no history of being a public figure, but also in the sense of how did this Harvard/Yale/Goldman Sachs guy come to be giving Trumpist talking points -- is he sincere or does he think there is a market to be tapped?
The bet with Trump is that maybe he learned from his mistakes and won't staff his administration with GOP establishment types who wanted to cave in on issues and stab Trump in the back.
Is it likely that Trump can learn from his mistakes at age 77 and be a better president this time around? Is it likely that he can overcome is own personal history of not having the back of the people who supported him or worked form him? Very doubtful.
The basic reality is that right now all the presidential options are terrible.
"You can't actually demonstrate how Kristol is getting the money from USAID because it is all put in one big pot and laundered" is not exactly making the argument for USAID or Bill Kristol.
Why does USAID need to fund grants by sending them through the Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors? If an organization is deliberately obfuscating its funding flows, the burden of proof is on that organization to prove that it is all on the up-and-up. Legally, when USAID gives money to the Rockefeller Foundation, it is legally the Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors money. Maybe USAID tells them to use that money only for a certain specific groups that does not include Bill Kristol. Maybe not. Maybe there are all kinds of hidden favors and log rolling and kickbacks in how Rockefeller Advisors disperses their funds. The public cannot audit the Rockefeller Foundation, so all we have is the official legal flows, which is that USAID gives money to the Rockefeller Advisors and Rockefeller Advisors gives some money to Bill Kristol. If you want to conclude otherwise the burden-of-proof is on Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors to completely open up its books.
The Catholic Church has always maintained:
- same-sex marriage is an impossibility
- same-sex sexual/erotic relationships are disordered, immoral and sinful.
- Priests should not bless sin
- Priests have wide discretion to give blessings to anyone and everyone, for mundane things and important things, even and especially to sinners. Eg you have the priest bless your pet or your hunting rifle or many other things. It would be possible to ask for a blessing in a business partnership or a promise of livelong brotherly love and friendship.
- Priests should not give blessings to same-sex unions, or give any blessings to same sex couples in a way that would be scandalous (ie make it seem it is giving approval to sinful behavior) or that would create confusion with a sacramental marriage or confusion about church doctrine.
The recently released document reiterates all those points. The ABC headline is simply false
However, the thing that the liberals in the church are excited about is the changing emphasis in terms of pastoral care:
Paragraph 12. One must also avoid the risk of reducing the meaning of blessings to this point of view alone, for it would lead us to expect the same moral conditions for a simple blessing that are called for in the reception of the sacraments. Such a risk requires that we broaden this perspective further. Indeed, there is the danger that a pastoral gesture that is so beloved and widespread will be subjected to too many moral prerequisites, which, under the claim of control, could overshadow the unconditional power of God’s love that forms the basis for the gesture of blessing.
Paragraph 13. Precisely in this regard, Pope Francis urged us not to “lose pastoral charity, which should permeate all our decisions and attitudes” and to avoid being “judges who only deny, reject, and exclude.”[11] Let us then respond to the Holy Father’s proposal by developing a broader understanding of blessings.
So previously maybe two gay men walk into the church and ask the priest, "Can you bless our dedication of life-long love to each other?" The priest is wary and says, "Wait ... love 'amore' or love 'caritas'?" So the priest asks some questions, figures out they are asking him to bless a marriage-like relationship, a sexual relationship, and the priest would refuse it because such a blessing would be scandalous.
After this document, a liberal priest now has a winking approval from a Vatican that he is allowed to play ignorant and not "subject the couple to moral prerequisites" and avoid "being a judge who rejects." So instead of asking about the nature of their relationship or telling them to go and sin no more, he may give a blessing like, "may all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit."
gorge
4mo ago
It was never in my interests for US government to be involved with Ukraine. My position on Ukraine is the same as Obama stated in 2016, which is that it is a core interest of Russia but not of the U.S..
What country are you from BTW?
gorge
2yr ago
Why is Elizabeth Taylor outlandish? Remember Cleopatra was of Macedonian descent, the Egyptian ruling class all were the heirs of Alexander the Great's generals. To the untrained eye, Elizabeth Taylor doesn't look all that different than a Macedonian woman
gorge
2yr ago
I was listening to a podcast with Michael Bailey, an OG researcher on trans issues and a guy who was at the front-lines of the conflict 20 years ago, long before this was a mainstream flashpoint.
Bailey talked about the autogynephilia model of male-to-female transexuals. I had heard some of it before: that many start off by having a fetish of being aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman. But historically since doctors would not prescribe sex reassignment for a sex fetish, they could only claim that they "were really a girl inside." Even though m-t-f's like McCloskey hit every male brained stereotype.
But then Bailey went to say that over years of cross-dressing to get off on themselves, many create an identity for themselves as a woman, an identity which may come to seem like the "real" them. Hence the eventual desire to transition and really become this character.
This got me thinking that to extent that something like "gender identity" exists in the brain separable from biological sex, I think wonder if it is really the matter of an entire personal identity that gets molded and created over time.
Question: are there documented examples of this kind of thing happening outside of sex/gender? Like an actor who becomes so caught up in role he thinks that role is the "real" him.
(Perhaps some of us can feel this way, our psued life can feel more like the real us...)
gorge
9mo ago
Other times, I am frustrated by her lack of brutal drive to self improvement. Shes objectively achieved enough that her intelligence is not up for question, but other times Im dissastisfied with the lack of sharp off the cuff retorts that ive come to expect from my male friends.
Honestly, sounds like you have been mind-killed by modern media. Real, actually living women are like this. From this comment and other comments sounds like you have a great catch.
This is somewhat belied by Nixon's own decision making, he probably could have survived the break-in had he come clean about it early, it was only the long cover up that sank him.
Have you read Geoff Shepard's book (The Nixon Conspiracy) or listened to any podcasts with him? Shepard was a young aide in the Nixon White House and as part of his junior lawyer duties was one of the first people to originally listen to the tapes to review them for problematic material. Recently, as an older man, he got access to a lot of the prosecution documents and then wrote a revisionist history. I haven't read the book in full, but Iistened to a podcast with him and it was very interesting.
Basically, he argues Nixon was completely unaware of the break-in, he was not trying to cover it up, but that he fired special prosecutor Cox because Cox had totally gone rogue, including giving the person much more responsible (Dean) a slap-on-the-wrist plea bargain. The specific trigger point for the firing was Cox reneging on a deal about the tapes, which Nixon thought would show people that Cox was being plainly unreasonable.
Shepard also argues that:
-
The 18 minute gap was actually likely due to a mistake by the transcriber and it is extremely unlikely that it covered up any key conversations. He additionally notes that it was Nixon's lawyers inside the Nixon White House that discovered the gap and told the judge, but it was then portrayed to the public like the special prosecutors had on their own discovered this nefarious destruction of evidence.
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Another famous incriminating line from Nixon supposedly showing Nixon calling for a cover-up was actually a mis-transcription and mis-interpretation of a very low quality tape.
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The famous "smoking gun" tape in which Nixon is giving the OK to tell the CIA to stop the FBI from interviewing a certain witness, turned out to have nothing to do with Watergate, but was due to wanting to cover-up a legal campaign donation that was coming from a well-known Democrat (who did not want it known that he supported Nixon).
So all-in-all, Nixon did not try to cover-up Watergate, he could not come clean about it because he actually did not know about it. What got him in trouble was thinking the special prosecutors team was actually trying to find the truth about what happened, when in fact they were on a fishing expedition to take down Nixon. At that point he was screwed, if he tries to block them, it looks incriminating. If he allows them to do anything they want, well, besides the embarrassment of having all the internals of the presidency leaked to the press, no presidency can survive a team of prosecutors going Beria ("find me the man I'll find the crime") on his entire staff.
In the dissident circles I travel in, I've seen the phrase "sex positive traditionalist" as an alternative to both progressive sexual attitudes and to sex-negative conservative attitudes. The sex-positive-traditionalist would rather men and women not be promiscuous, we would rather see people only have sex in marriage and to have children. However, this view differs from the "purity culture" conservatives of the 00's. That culture -- especially the more wordly moderately conservative Christians and the more worldy Catholics -- told teens to wait until marriage but then put their kids on the college->grad school->career track at the expense of the marriage track. They would also encourage very long engagements. Following such a plan forced adherents to either be very sex negative, they would have to wait for a long time to get married and have sex, or, more likely, the kids would get tired of waiting and drop the religion. Whereas a "sex positive traditionalist" would prioritize early marriage over going to college.
Specifically in terms of Catholic pastoral care, "sex positive traditionalism" would mean giving long-dating or cohabitating couples a shotgun marriage and telling them to go forth and make babies, rather than telling them to move out of the same apartment and live chastely for a year as they go through a lengthy "pre-cana" process.
The sex-positive-traditionalist is also very pro sex within marriage, believing in that there is moral an obligation to perform the "marital act", even when one spouse perhaps has not been feeling it for a few days. Whereas the contemporary progressive is horrified at the idea that a married woman be pressured into sex or have some obligation to give sex.
Going back to the example of bias in policing that I mentioned earlier, I’d say that the vast majority of people on this forum would say that you can’t really use “lived experiences” to contradict data.
I think that almost no one believes data that contradicts what they see with their own eyes. And that is good, because there are million ways data can be limited, poorly recorded, confounded, erroneous, etc. And that applies a hundred times more so to numbers that are not "data" but complex statistical creations.
Data is useful as a check on personal experience. If the two contradict, then one simply has to do the work to see which is more likely to be wrong. There is no shortcut.
The one that bothers me personally is when I've seen people point to total crime data to show that crime hasn't risen in the major US cities. But as someone who lives in such a city, I know that simply reporting a crime is a very burdensome process of waiting hours for the police show up, and the police won't do anything anyways. I know that many (most) people don't report crimes in the city that would likely be reported as a crime in the burbs. Thus total crime number is rate-limited by the police capacity to arrive on the scene and take down a report; it has nothing to do with the actual rate of minor crimes. Thus trend data is absolutely useless. But you would only know this if you knew actually knew something about the city in question, and didn't blindly think that "data" is the highest source of truth.
However, we should remember why the specific phrase "lived experience" became the target of much ire. People have forever validly cited personal anecdotes during debates; but citing "lived experience" was a novel and obnoxious argumentation tactic. The appeal to "lived experience" was specifically being made when the person could not actually specifically describe the evidence they had seen with their own eyes. Rather than say something specific like, "I've had X many racist interactions in these situations in Y years ..." etc the person citing "lived experience" was citing something far more amorphous and undefinable. Or, the context was often that the person citing "lived experience" was claiming the sole right to interpret events that had happened to them. So person A says, "I have experience racism all the time, such as people asking me where I am really from." And B says, "Eh, I don't think that is racist, white people get asked about their ancestry to, that's just a result of living in a country that is a melting pot" and person A then responds, "how dare you deny my lived experience of racism."
In contrast something like this is a valid contribution to a debate:
HlynkaCG says he “has receipts” and linked to a 2 year old post where his local price of cheap meat went from $5/lb to $6.75 (a 35% increase) whereas the national meat price index at the time had only gone up by 9.5% over that period.
HlynkaCG's claims are worth taking seriously. We should investigate this discrepancy. And maybe we find that he just had the bad luck of liking one kind of meat which has risen in price the most and when you do a more broad analysis the government numbers are correct... or maybe we find that the government economists are actually cooking the books.
The better alternative is to use other economic data to make a point. If you think unemployment numbers don’t show the true extent of the problem, for instance, you can cite things like the prime age working ratio if you think people are discouraged from looking for work.
This only works if accurate and relevant data actually exists in published form, which often it does not. You must avoid the "looking for the keys under the lamppost fallacy."
Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?
It's at least worthy of further investigation. Where did Ezra live? Who are his friends? If he grew up in a rich suburbs and all his black friends were friends he made at the Black Student Union at a private boarding school, then the reason for the discrepancy becomes obvious. His friend circle is not at all representative of the general population. If Ezra lived in very typical black neighborhood in south-side Chicago and all his friends were all from the neighborhood and public school, then his claims would be puzzling and worthy of more investigation. If Ezra was the only person saying this, I might think he was just making it up, or was ignorant of his friends behavior. But if other people like Ezra kept making the same claim, I might suspect there was something wrong with the government data.
In reality though, your Ezra is fictional The anecdotal evidence, even as supported by black activists like Ta-Nehisi Coates, corroborate the FBI numbers. Personally, I don't believe that blacks have a higher crime rate solely because of the FBI data, I believe it because of lots of anecdotes and from what I see with my own eyes. Actually, based on what I read from news stories and what I see with my own eyes, the FBI data likely significantly understates the black crime problem, because FBI data does not distinguish public crime (knock-out game against strangers) from private crime (eg, a bar fight).
gorge
2yr ago
(...part 2...)
Newspapers articles seem to corroborate this narrative of gradual movement toward women's lib. As I read these articles, one thing I noticed is that in general it seems like the King and the government were trying to please both sides. They were trying to show the U.S. and the West that they were becoming more "modern" and treating women well, but also trying to show Islamic conservative critic that they were still obeying Islam. So maybe while the government would throw a sop to the conservatives by banning women from TV, the government would at the same time push women's education and employment -- but would say this is for economic reasons and not social reasons and not in violation of Islamic law. Ultimately, the latter was far more important toward ending patriarchy. Let's review the history through some articles.
From a 1981 article:
Expatriates call them ''religious police'', but a better term would be vigilantes. The House of Saud licences their busybodying as a useful release valve for the fundamentalist religious fervor which the Shah and Sadat both tried to suppress. And the honor and respect they are accorded by the Saudi Government helps to conceal the reality of change.
The House of Saud is getting ready for the 21st century. There is a singer on Saudi television who remembers when he used to have to sing in secret. Veteran expatriates remember how, 20 years ago, it was not permissible to smoke in the street, and how cigarettes were purchased under the counter, in plain brown envelopes. In April 1981, a committee of Islamic legal scholars ruled that a Saudi woman must be allowed to unveil in front of her prospective bridegroom: ''Any man forbidding his daughter or sister to meet her fiance face to face will be judged as sinning,'' the committee declared.
Italics mine -- note the government is playing a double game of assuaging the conservatives while telling the NY Times and Westerners that they are "progressing."
From another 1981 article:
As the Saudis race to invest their oil riches in ambitious economic-development programs, the roles played by Mrs. Fawzan and many other urban women indicate that the traditionally conservative Islamic social structure is gradually yielding to change.
What this means is that beyond the overall Government policy of encouraging female literacy and education, there are few specifics concerning the promotion of employment or career opportunities for women. A Government commission is reportedly examining areas of work to be officially approved for women. Women who run boutiques or beauty parlors may run the risk of having their businesses closed down, even if temporarily, by the so-called religious police or members of the Society for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
...The recently disclosed third five-year plan calls for the participation of women in the development of the country, although few specifics are offered. Officials such as the Minister of Planning, Hisham Nazir, one of the most prominent technicians, are known to espouse the position that since more than 50 percent of the potential labor force of 2.5 million are female, the increased employment of women could help Saudi Arabia become less reliant on foreign labor.
...A number of women say that the key to change is more education. ''Education is the basis of the change that is taking place in Saudi society for women,'' Mrs. Rouchdy said. ''But for the most part Saudi women do not want to change their social norms. They don't want to run away from Islamic values and from religion. They are saying, We don't want the superficial aspects of Westernization but only the scientific part of it.''
In 1982 Saudi Arabia got a new king, who was depicted "as the leading figure in a progressive, modernizing faction within the tradition-minded monarchy."
We should keep in mind that of course Saudi Arabia is still very patriarchal and has very high brith rates at this point. The changes described in the previous two articles are just a beginning.
Leading on to 1989 we see more of a movement leftward, which is supported by the King and the government:
While this remains a country where women are veiled in public, cannot drive cars and must seek permission of husbands or other men who are relatives before traveling abroad, education and modernization have made Saudi women a force that neither the Government nor the religious authorities can ignore.
Elegantly dressed and armed with a doctoral degree in education from Ohio State University, Miss Dekheil, who uses her maiden name, is, at 28 years old, the director of an interdisciplinary program at a Government institute that trains women for jobs by sharpening their skills or teaching new ones.
She is one of a new breed of Saudi women dealing with the Saudi Arabia of 1989: A country with nearly a million girls going to school, 100,000 of those in higher education. They are graduating into a conservative society where traditions holding them back from an active role in the economy are slowly coming down. Saudi Arabia's women are becoming doctors, engineers, social workers and computer operators.
...Miss Mosly, who is also married and uses her maiden name, has defied many customs, going to a boarding school in Lebanon at age 4 and studying engineering, then coming back to find a job at Aramco nearly 21 years ago. She runs a department of 186 people, including 50 Saudi men who report to her.
In the battle between progressives and traditionalists, the Saudi Government, known for moving ever so cautiously, appears to be leaning toward a slow integration of women in the work force.
The Saudi Government gave a clear signal when it conferred its most prestigious award, the King Faisal Award for Islamic Studies, on Sheik Mohammed al-Ghazali, an Egyptian religious scholar who has taken a strong stand defending the rights of women to work and seek higher education.
From a 1990 article, Saudi Arabia is officially extremely patriarchal, birthrates still very high, but women's lib creeping in:
Although almost 30 years old, she is still forced to live with her family, since in Saudi Arabia it is against the law for her to live alone as an unmarried woman. If she chooses to leave the country, she said, the only way she can get a passport or board a plane is with her father's written permission.
Legally, neither she nor any other single Saudi woman can go out alone, drive, work with men, travel alone, stay in a hotel, go out to eat, or do anything else alone that might allow them to somehow encounter a man on their own.
The woman who said she was frustrated sipped a whisky at a private party, danced and, after a long conversation, confided that she was divorced and recently had a lover.
But, she said, Government officials had found out about the relationship and investigated her. Her father threatened to lock her in the house and one of her brothers threatened to kill her.
...Drinking alcohol, dancing, mixing of the sexes and a great deal else is officially prohibited here as non-Islamic. In spite of such formal strictures, drinking, dancing and a great deal else that is non-Islamic regularly goes on behind closed doors.
...A Western diplomat told of his astonishment on attending a private party of well-connected Saudis recently. Wine flowed and the men and women were arguing loudly about everything from politics to food when, his Saudi host said, "Watch this."
The lights dimmed and two beautiful women, veiled and clad in sheer but discreet dancing robes, appeared and "danced the most sensual dance I have ever seen," the diplomat said. After a few minutes, he said, he realized that the dancers were the wives of Saudis who were present.
"I still can't figure this place out," the diplomat said.
Again, Saudi Arabia is still more patriarchal than the West (and has higher birth rates), but being "investigated" and "threatened" is still more liberal than being executed (as the adulterous Princess of 1977 was) or stoned (as the New York Times claims was the practice in the 1950s and 1960s).
From 1991, now in debt to the West after the Gulf War, the King is liberalizing by forming citizen councils:
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has announced a series of changes in the Government to take place by January, including the formation of a council of Saudi citizens with whom the royal family is to consult in ruling the country, the introduction of a written body of laws and greater local autonomy for the provinces.
He told Saudis for the first time that Saudi Arabia had to borrow billions of dollars to meet what he described as the huge cost of the gulf war. He asserted, however, that the debts would not affect the welfare of citizens.
(...part 3 continues as a reply...)
gorge
1yr ago
I'm almost inclined to view Napolean as a force of nature rather than as "good" or "bad."
He was a man of incredible talent, incredible will, he was both a man of action and intellectually a total mensch. Thus, anyone who wants to achieve something in the world, can profit from studying his life.
But, what he accomplished, he accomplished for his own visions. The results were in the end catastrophic for the men who followed him, as they starved and froze to death in the Russian winter. The results for France itself were a mixed bag.
But it is hard for me to cry too many tears about the fate of his followers or of his victims. The institutions that fell were old and rotting. The men who followed him, chose to do so, if they were captivated by his amoral visions of conquest and were willing to subjugate themselves to his vision, then I cannot say they deserved better. We all die in the end.
I, an amateur to the Napoleonic wars, wandered away from Ridley Scott's Napoleon feeling more or less pleased with my night.
I haven't seen the movie and don't intend to after reading the American Sun review and others. From what I've heard the main problem is that they turned one of the most charismatic men in history into a mumbling bumbling clingy loser.
gorge
1yr ago
Like... we've had gay marriage for decades now, no one got turned into pillars of salt or anything, seems like empirically it works about as well as straight marriage for families and for raising kids, and even for church membership at accepting churches.
Marriage has been hit by a quadruple whammy over the last 150+ years:
- Replacement of asymmetric vows/obligations (the woman vows to obey) with asexual vows. Ending of the legal privileges of father/husband.
- No-fault divorce
- Normalization and even encouragement of sex-outside of marriage by high production value media
- Gay marriage
All of these things happened gradually and culture often lagged legal changes, so it is difficult to correlate the damage done with the change in policy. However, overall marriage has been completely hollowed out, and as a result we have seen a dramatic rise in broken families and mental illness. "Gay marriage" was more the final nail in the coffin than it was the decisive blow.
The biggest thing I've noticed about the post-Obergefell world is that it now seems political incorrect/taboo to say that "man-woman" marriage is better or the norm. Children are not born knowing that man-woman marriage is better than other arrangements, they must be taught that. But the post-Obergefell world, or official institutions like schools or children's TV programming cannot teach man-woman as the norm. And we see in surveys things like 50% of young women identifying as non-straight, or under 40% of young people responding in surveys that marriage and kids are important life goals, and we also see very high rates of mental illness among young liberal women. We have lost our ability in as a society to model what a default good life should be, and kids are making poor choices and ending up with mental health problems. And yes, the absysmally low (and highly dysgenic) fertility rates will result in an end of civilization if nothing changes.
One's true personal third heart might be atheist or animist or deist, one's sectarian second heart might be Catholic or Quaker, but everyone agreed their first public heart would be secular and nonsectarian and that no one would be punished for their other beliefs.... One really believed in the secularism taught in schools but they would go along with it and agree with it.,
Your history is off. You may be basically Madison's and Jefferson's views and the policies of Virginia, but you are not describing the early republic as a whole. Individual states were allowed to have official state churches, Massachusetts had Congregationalism as established and taxpayer supported up until the 1830s. Religious tests for office (requiring office holders to sometimes be Christian, other times Protestant) lasted into the 20th century. School teachers could actively teach religion in class up until at least the middle of the 20th century. The original idea behind the First Amendment was simply as a truce between the religious sects that were dominant in various states, the states could intertwine religion and government but the federal government as a whole would not choose sides and enforce one particular sect upon the entire country.
But by the late 1800s state constitutions banning "sectarian support" was starting to be used as anti-Catholic cudgel. State support of protestantism was ok, because protestant was not sectarian, according to this logic, but Catholicism was sectarian so could not be taught in a local public school.
By the 1950s and 1960s the First Amendment became a cudgel to use against mixing of any Christianity with government at any level. The novel "incorporation doctrine" was used to apply the First Amendment down to even a local public school of a town of a 1,000 people. The federal government was being used to quash the religious choices of a local community which was the exact opposite the original intent. At the same time, the hegemonic ideology of the United States shed its last connections to Christianity, and thus mutated to make itself immune to First Amendment charges. This hegemonic ideology -- an ideology that has no name, and defies all attempts to be labeled, any time a name is placed on it it tries to shed its name -- gained tremendous state support not only financially but in law (Civil Rights law has morfed into becoming a speech code and ideological test for high-status employment).
But Wokism has adapted to that circumstance, and now provides a full binding metaphysical moral vision in public that must be bowed to,
This isn't new to "Wokism" -- I wrote a school paper 20 years ago about how "Civic Americanism" basically had almost all the properties of what we normally call religion. Moldbug wrote the same back in 2008 in his "How Dawkins Got Pwned Series" -- https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/ I'm sure other people noticed the phenomena before.
So how do we level the playing field, without shredding the constitution in ways we'll regret later when we live in Rick Santorum's Iran?
Who is "we"? The powers that be quite like being able to suppress the ideologies that traditionally code as religion, while being able to turbo-charge their own ideology with funding and legal support. They don't want a level playing field.
Fundamentally, I think the idea that religion could ever be separated from politics was an error. Politics at the end of the day depends on raw military power, and raw military power depends on people willing to risk their life for their God and their Sovereign. Politics also is all about making sure various groups and people get along, thus needs to teach a common morality, or at least a meta-morality. Politics is about forming durable group alliances -- which is what much of what religious ritual and sacrifice is about. "Religion" can only be separated from politics if you basically water down religion to just meaning a random grab-bag of stuffy old superstitions. Historically, and even in many contemporary societies, there isn't really an equivalent of our concept of "religion" that was separable from just life itself (in the same way American schools that teach "values" don't separate this value system as a separate category from just life itself.
My best take at defining religion that cuts reality at joints (and doesn't arbitrary distinguish between adhering to a "deity" versus "universal principles") is that a "religion is the binding agent of a non-kin or super-kin tribe." Things like creeds, stories, beliefs about ultimate meaning, rituals, sacrifice, are all components that help bind the group together and enable it to take collective action. I am unsure whether I would call "American hegemonic ideology" or "wokism" a religion, or a cancerous and metastatic mutant form of a religion, that is out-competing and strangling real religion.
gorge
2yr ago
Having kids, especially infants and toddlers, is distinctly type II fun: "miserable while it's happening, but fun in retrospect."
As a dad, this has not been my experience with infant and toddlers, except for the first two months of the first child. The journey itself is intensely rewarding. Has it been your experience?
To start, the idea that Trump is the next Hitler is obviously crazy, overheated political rhetoric. Trump is nothing like Hitler, historical fascism was a movement born out of millions of angry World War I veterans and nothing like it exists or could exist today.
Part of the issue is that American education stinks and so there is simply no broad frame of reference for strongman leaders other than the good leftwing/progressive guys (FDR, Lincoln) and Hitler. You can't compare Trump to a Salazar, Pinochet, Sulla, Hidenberg, Caesar, Augustus, etc, because people simply don't know history well enough.
However, there is a bit of a "woke more correct" element to the Nazi accusations. Historically, communism/progressivism/leftism was an alliance between the intelligensia and aristocrats with the lowest classes. Fascism was renegade aristocrats and a lower-middle-class alliance. Second, Trump's base actually does want him to be much more of a "dictator" than Trump himself wants to be, but sometimes he gives signals as if he is going to play along. Trump's base actually wants him to act alike a real executive in control of the government -- they want him to fire employees and close departments (contra civil unconstitutional civil service law), they want him to ignore unconstitutional Supreme Court rulings, they want him to take strict and harsh measures that are morally beyond the pale by the standards of the current establishment. Overall, the wishes of Trump's base do pose an existential threat to the current post-New Deal, soft-socialist expertocracy. Thus you can see that the left has a working definition of fascism as being: "An alliance of a strongman with the lower-middle class that poses an existential threat to socialist (soft or hard) bureaucratic state." By that working definition, you can seen how Trump does match the pattern.
Ultimately, this is a case of Scott Alexander's worst argument in the world. You rhetorically group A and B together, when A is something with really terrible connotations, in order to have those connotations rub off on B.
- Nazism was a movement of a strongman leading the lower-middle class in order to become dictator, invade Poland, start a world war, and genocide six million Jews.
- Trump shows strongman tendencies, and he is a lower-middle class populist leader.
- Ergo, Trump has smiliarities with Nazis. Therefore, we can call him Nazi and then all the other things associated with Nazism (killing millions of people) get associated with Trump.
It seems to me that they are on the attack - it's just a very stupid, self-destructive form of attack. Calling Kamala a "childless cat lady" just makes Vance look like a weirdo who has been marinated too much in online right-wing men's chats,
This was not a new campaign attack against Kamala. This misquote comes from a resurfaced Tucker Carlson interview from three years ago when JD Vance had just entered the Republican Senate primary.
Here is the full quote by the way:
We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make sense that we've turned this country over to people who don't have a direct stake in it? I just wanted to ask that question, and propose that maybe if we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more, for leaders that actually have kids because those ultimately are the people that have a more direct stake in the future of the country.
So she is not directly singling out and attacking Kamala as being miserable cat lady, there are two separate sentences.
like a weirdo who has been marinated too much in online right-wing men's chats, normies don't feel the anger towards childless women that is evident in such circles - like, to me, a childless aunt is the literal childless aunt of our kids (i.e. my sister) who doesn't own cats or drink wine but helps us often and is beloved by the kids.
Dread Jim has a take that the problem is childless older women who haven't played a role in raising their nieces and nephews tend to end up hating children. I think there is something probably to this, and the childless women who have climbed the corporate ladder are probably less likely to have played a role in the lives of their related children than your sister. I don't know how active a role Kamala played in the life of her nieces and nephews, but there are several clips of her giving a cackling laugh at the plight of parents, and that does make me uneasy. And she is a wine-drinker.
Anyways, I do agree that calling out Cat-Lady-Occupied-Government is bad politics, even if it is a real problem worth being concerned about.
gorge
1yr ago
Meanwhile if you transition around the start of puberty, you don't have to do any of these surgeries - you'll go through the rest of your life as a normal-looking member of the opposite sex, and won't have to go through the trauma of watching your body turn into something that gives you psychological pain every day. There's only one surgery you might have to do and that's sex reassignment surgery, and there I don't have any issue with not allowing minors to go through it.
Jazz Jennings seems to be going through plenty of psychological pain.
This not an honest presentation of the pros and cons of early transition. You are listing out the possible pros of early transition while forgetting the massive, elephant-in-the-room con: the child will likely be sterilized, they will likely never be able to have their own biological children, and may never have any proper sexual function or ability to orgasm. Again, see Jazz Jennings. No child is prepared to make that decision, no adult should be making that decision for a child.
I’d argue that the more or less unstated promise of the Sexual Revolution to young single women was that: a) they will be sexually free without inviting social shame i.e. normalized sexual experimentation and promiscuity on their part will not have an unfavorable long-term effect on men’s attitudes towards them, and women will not sexually shame one another anymore b) they will be able to leave their constrictive gender roles to the extent they see fit, but this will not lead to social issues and anomie because men will be willing to fill those roles instead i.e. men will have no problem becoming stay-at-home dads, nurses, kindergarteners, doing housework etc.
And none of that turned out to be true.
I'd argue that these actually turned out far more true than many critics at the time would have ever imagined. Shaming against sluts has decreased dramatically, men have repressed their concerns about sexual history, men have started to do much more housework and childcare, etc.
The two great errors were:
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The claim that sex with someone whom you were not committed to with is fun and healthy -- the claim that it is not inherently sinful/disordered/"bad for your psyche"/"bad for your soul". This claim is false -- sex is very likely to create an emotional bond, and so when you create that bond without permanent commitment a woman is setting herself up for great hurt and distress. It also makes it harder to pair-bond in the future, which makes women less likely to find or create successful marriages.
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The claim that "consent" is the critical thing that society needs to police. Sex doesn't work that way, it originated before we could even talk, and it is simply more natural and preferable to use body language. Many women like playing a bit of cat and mouse, like giving some token resistance, and don't like being explicit. What women want is "it just happened." Meanwhile, explicitly "consensual" sex can still be traumatic or greatly regretted. It gets even worse when "consent" is expanded so that women cannot actually consent to sex with more powerful men. But this is a problem because power is something that inherently something women find attractive. So women cannot consent to men they are most attracted to? Or women can only consent to sex with men who they attracted to for reasons of the genetic lottery (looks, height), but not to men who earned their attraction by working hard and gaining status? This is all a giant mess. The "consent" framework wrongly says that society shouldn't police a handsome guy who attracts and pumps and dumps a fully consenting women. However, it should ban, say, the relationship that made my good friend's life possible (his dad was a professor, his mom a grad student on the same team, they married and had a very long, fruitful, and successful relationship). IMO, what should matter is seduction with intent to marry. I'm fine with a professor going after a grad student or a boss his secretary, but if he wins her heart he better marry her.
gorge
2yr ago
For any given level of income/wealth, fame seems like a significant, net negative. That is, I would rather make $20 million from secretly winning the lottery than to get $20 million from having a runaway number one hit music album that made me famous. You have the downsides of stalkers, harassers, gold-diggers, cheats, etc. For every person with newfound respect for you, there are others trying to take you down a peg. And there isn't really any benefit. A person can reach peak happiness from being high status within his own family and social group. If you get so famous that you are awkward with your original social groups, and are in new higher status groups, then you haven't made yourself any better off.
Now, fame can be translated into money. So is it better to broke and waiting tables in Hollywood, or to get a huge break and become a famous actor? That is harder to say, but generally it seems to me that most modern social circles of the famous are very toxic and should be avoided.
Can someone explain to me how sex with no strings hurts people, and specifically how it hurts women more? In an age of contraceptives?
There are two potential problems with "sex with no strings" -- either the sex is bad or it is good. If it is bad, it is bad. If it is good, high chance that one of the two people "catches feelings" -- and now that person has formed a bond with someone else who might not be good for them, or that into them. Forming a bond with someone who is bad for you is very damaging. And forming a bond to someone, exposing your nakedness and vulnerability to someone, and then having that person reject you is also tremendously damaging and hurtful. This goes for both men and women.
"Sex with no strings" is not something that was common among our ancestors, it is not something we have evolved to handle. Young men and women have not evolved to make good decisions in some lazzei faire sexual marketplace, nor have they evolved to even predict how they will react to sex. "Sex with no strings" is simply not something that can be predicted a priori. Impossible.
Sex did evolve to generate a powerful, intense bond with your partner (especially for women), which helps bind the couple together through the difficult years of child rearing. Sex with random people at best fritters this bonding power away, and at worst makes people bonded to partners who aren't properly screened or committed and thus will end up creating great hurt.
Agree 100%. In older mass media, "think of the children" was an archetypal motivator in community and political action. But today, living with children in a big American city, it does seem like making the world nice for children is a lower priority than dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc. The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.
I'm reminded of this old quote from Plutarch:
According to William Durant, who I believe, a major underlying cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire was a gradual decline in population, in turn due to people deciding to have fewer children. This started with the elites, but eventually reached the provinces. From his Caesar and Christ:
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