gorge
1yr ago
I keep thinking about the rot here, and I think it goes back to in a certain sense that modern WEIRD people have a really hard time — for whatever reason— settling serious boundaries around things that should be obvious. ...We can’t really say “no” on deconstruction of our heritage, the denigrating of our heroes, or the insistence that other people’s history or culture be taught alongside our own.
I'm partial to the "the lights went out with World War I" thesis. Very simply, valorous, self-confident, fertile, expansionist, white men are the most dangerous force in the known universe. I certainly don't believe that white men are the most evil force in the universe, but we are the most dangerous. White people, white men, are most scared of other white men, and so a lot of apparent self-sabotaging behavior is a back-handed way of trying to sabotage competing white men. But psyopping other white men into being self-sabotaging without self-sabotaging yourself turns out to be impossible.
gorge
1yr 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.
gorge
1yr ago
I don't understand the fixation that conservative Christians have with sex acts that aren't PIV. I just don't get it. If you don't like them, don't partake in them, but don't try and make someone else's life miserable just because you ascribe to those beliefs.
American culture and institutions are actively promoting experimental sex acts though -- from the books in schools to pride parades every June to media on TV to the State Department flying flags at embassies worldwide that have colors to represent erotic tendencies. It's not the Christians are not the only party who are obsessed. Christians think these things are bad, and thus, to the extent that we have common culture (public schools, parades, mass media) that sends messaging about sex acts, it would rather that message discourage non-martial non-PIV rather than encourage it.
gorge
1yr ago
I was tapped into the circles that had been discussing alternatives to a dollar standard for a while, so I knew exactly why bitcoin was so exciting. It was only a $1 a coin, I was making six figures at the time with minimal expenses, so putting down $100 or $500 (or $10,000) to take a flyer would have been a no-brainer move, except that I was too cowardly. I console myself with the knowledge I have done financially very well regardless, and with the thought that if I was a bitcoin billionaire I would have a new set of problems, like worrying about kidnapping.
cc /u/amadan
How is a healthy non-hetero relationship something that fits that definition?
To put it bluntly, the problem is not a loving (caritas) relationship between two men or two women, which is all fine and good, the problem is using each other as mutual masturbation aids or sticking dicks up each others poopy holes. I would suggest that doing so is like eating that potato chip or masturbating to porn. It feels good in the moment, but ultimately leaves you empty and just wanting more stimulation/titillation while building a habit of mind that ultimately makes a person unsatisfied and less happy than they would be if the relationship was affectionate but not erotic.
gorge
1yr ago
Is Paul saying there is no male or female on Earth right now as we go about our daily business of living and build institutions to govern our current Earthly society? Is he saying we are not to make distinctions between males and females, not to make different sets of duties and rules for males and females? This is very obviously not the case, because Paul himself does that all the time. What Paul is saying is that men and women, Jew and Greek, have equal ability to hear the word of God, be baptized, receive the Eucharist, and enter the kingdom of God. The Christian message and the Christian sacraments are not just for one nation, or one sex, or just for an aristocrats or priestly caste.
This is really, really obvious from reading the context around your quote and from reading Paul. Have you actually read Paul fully yourself, have you actually engaged with traditional Christian teaching on these topics previously, or are you just repeating talking points you have acquired second-hand?
gorge
1yr ago
So, you believe that normalizing non-hetero relationships is a detriment to society? How do you reconcile that with non-hetero people who are in happy, healthy relationships?
There are many good things that are happy and beneficial that do not deserve special recognition by the church or the state. There are many vices that should be discouraged by the church and state, even though some people will practice said vice and seem to be happy in practicing it.
my boss, but he's also my friend. I play in a DnD campaign with a bunch of other church friends, and he's the DM. Would your suggestion to me be that I break the friendship off because he's technically also my boss?
It's not a perfect analogy, I was just making a point about language. The "boss" relationship is inherently different than the "friend" relationship, different relationships deserve different words. It's not a perfect analogy because one can be a boss and a friend, maybe I'll think of a better analogy.
It certainly has been that way throughout the course of history. However, along with that, we've historically treated women separately from men and for along time, women had fewer rights than men. ... How does this fit into your definition of loving your neighbor?
Christianity (until recent progressive Christianity) has always recognized the basic human reality that men and women are different, have different strengths and weaknesses, are complementary, and therefore have different spheres of responsibility, different rights and duties. It's hard to remember this now that as Americans we are so long removed from existential war, but the state is primary an agent of violent force, that is the state is an organization of men who use violence to protect their land and women from other organized violent men, and as such of course governance rights of the state are going to be of men. "Loving your neighbor" is an entirely different question than whether person should have say, "a vote", (ie decision-making power over the apparatus of violence).
There are many people who agree with either of us, and there are those who are not religious that pay no mind to the doctrine of sin.
Everyone believes in sin, secular people just have different words for it. A vice or a personal sin, is something that feels good but is ultimately bad for the person doing it, you don't need religion to understand the concept, it's just without religion you have to reinvent and throw out all the work done on helping people effectively deal with vices.
But specifically you asked how a "Christian" who loves their neighbor could not want to support their neighbor in X. Well if the Christian loves their neighbor, and their religion teaches X is a sin, that means that X is ultimately bad for that person, therefore if they actually loved their neighbor they would want to discourage their neighbor from doing X.
We have also marginalized people of different races, religions, and sexual orientations.
Apples, oranges, cheese and carburetors. These are entirely unlike phenomena and must be analyzed separately
Do you think that a majority of non-hetero people are more sexually promiscuous than hetero people?
I think that gay men are, yes. I'd recommend reading "And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts. Lesbian women are different phenomenon.
"Love your neighbor" does not extend to "normalize your neighbor's erotic proclivities at the cost of broader society" or "you must erase the distinction between things."
Christians have traditionally believed that marriage is permanent bond between a man and woman for the purpose of forming a household and raising children*, where the duties of the man and woman are asymmetrical. For a man to "marry" another man is a contradiction in terms, the same as when your boss tells you, "I want you to think of me as your friend, not your boss." The male-female relationship has elements that are inherently asymmetrical, and inherently different than male-male relationships, and different things deserve different words. Furthermore, the male-female union is a core building block of civilization and therefore deserves special recognition by the state and by the church. It deserves to be considered normative. One of the things that has especially turned me against gay marriage is seeing how so many institutions (eg public schools) no longer feel empowered to teach the male-female marriage as being the default or the normative institution. Legalizing gay marriage was not just "allow different people to do their own thing" it was, "change the basic way every child is taught about the basic institutions and building blocks of life."
Now part of the problem for modern Christians is that many already have given up on the idea of marriage being permanent or that the husband and wife have different roles and obligations. Once those distinctions have been erased, resistance to gay marriage then looks very unprincipled. But for traditional Christians the argument is very straightforward and consistent.
There is furthermore the argument that homoerotic behavior is a vice, a sin. And if we love our neighbor, we want to save them from sin. Sin ultimately makes us less happy. Vices give momentary pleasure but leave us empty and wanting more, no more happier than before. The glutton eats a lot of junk food, but ultimately that makes the glutton less happy. If society does things to make the glutton less likely to engage in gluttony (eg, banning advertising of junk food) or I do something to make my loved one not engage in gluttony (eg not keeping junk food in the house) then I am doing good for them. If I teach them "fat acceptance" I am actually harming them.
Now I am straight and speak from personal experience about whether for a person who experiences same-sex attraction forgoing homoerotic activities makes that person more happy. I do think though, that forgoing sexual promiscuity and other sexual vices that a straight person has tempted by has made me more happy. So I can see how that argument is plausible. Given the very high rates of promiscuity and sexual experimentation reported among gay populations, seems like gay sex is leaving something empty, like eating a cookie or potato chip, not like eating a steak.
* But what about old/infertile couples? First, never say never. Second, such couples are still modeling the relationship form.
gorge
1yr ago
Twenty years ago, in college, I was a neocon/hawkish liberal/big government conservative and I was wrong everything they were wrong about: the Iraq war, the idea "no excuses" schools were the solution to fix the racial achievement gap, the idea that modern economists had basically figured out the business cycle and how to stop it, that the gold standard was a barbarous relic, the idea that it's women who want "nice guys" and marriage and its men who are generally the cads.
I was wrong not to buy bitcoin in 2010 (this was partly laziness and partly that I thought it was too risky, that I would end up sending money to drug dealers by accident or something and get roped into an investigation).
I was wrong in thinking in 2010 that American cities would continue to have smarter leadership and be on the upswing from their nadir in the 70s and 80s.
More recently, I was wrong in thinking that the Internet could fuel a new generation of elites (think 2010 era Y Combinator, Reddit and Google leadership) that would create their own better information ecosystem, and not be bound to all the myths and lies that academia and mainstream media had been peddling for decades. Instead, the same people and type of people who ran the old media-academia-NGO-government axis ended up converging the big tech companies and people like Paul Graham ended up on the outside.
I was terribly wrong in predicting in March 2020 would lead to moderating American political divisions and hatred of Trump, and would lead to liberals wanting to be tougher on crime, particularly against blacks and the underclass if they were to disobey covid lockdown rules.
I was effectively wrong in believing Pfizer and Modern when I read their study results that showed the covid vaccine was 95% effective against symptomatic infection.
gorge
1yr ago
As a part of sex ed, you teach that while contraception can prevent a majority of pregnancies, only abstinence can prevent it 100%.
Isn't this the status quo? Does any school's sex ed actually teach that birth control is 100%? I'd bet it's a very small percentage of women who are getting abortions who are educatable but uneducated about birth control.
The basic problem is that sex is fun, and not only are all forms of birth control less than 100% effective, all forms have significant downsides. Also couples in a sexual relationship want different things, or feel very different in the moment than a few weeks later when a pregnancy test has returned positive and their life has changed forever.
gorge
1yr ago
Maybe you and them are right, that family is something "higher" that makes everything else seem small in comparison. But from my perspective, it's more like all of my friends are being brainwashed by a cult that forces them to drop connections to anyone outside the cult. They can now only socialize in approved "play dates" with other parents of children the exact same age as their own. And that's, like, 2 hours a week. Most of their time is spent in "family time" which I strongly suspect is just them sitting on the couch watching inane g-rated cartoons with the kids.
I think it's a combination of things:
- the fun things we did in our 20s have gotten old and seem much less appealing or interesting once we are older and have kids.
- there is new friction in organizing get-togethers because you must always check with your spouse to make sure they can handle pick-up from childcare and watching the kids for the evening
- most modern women seem to give their husbands small guilt-trips every time they want to take a night out. This adds friction. Worse, if the kids end up being rotten that night and wifey is stressed out, then the husband comes home to a very cranky wife and a big guilt trip. Fear of this adds even more friction.
- Home entertainment has become much better. I can have more interesting conversations over the internet than I can have with most of my neighbors. The insights and jokes about the local sportsball team I get from listening to podcasts as I do the dishes are actually better than the jokes and insights I get from friends and neighbors at the bar.
- All of these are multiplicative -- if you want to meet-up with three other guys they are all facing these same frictions and so you end up with long, multi-day text threads just to get dinner or something.
gorge
1yr ago
When mothers express woe, it is difficult to discern ...
- what is just complain-bragging and they actually do really enjoy being mothers
- what is real pain, but not inherent to motherhood, but rather a result of modern parents and especially mothers being terrible at discipline.
- what is real pain and unavoidable even with better parenting know-how
gorge
1yr ago
It's blatantly obvious that parenting is full of unpleasantness,
A lot of parenting issues that look very unpleasant from the outside are far more rewarding when actually experienced as the parent, because it is your child. Even holding my two-year old in my arms while he throws a tantrum is rewarding for me, even if unpleasant to the person passing me in the store.
gorge
1yr ago
The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.”
This is true and definitely under-discussed by both men and women. Men don't appreciate it, and women prefer to blame external factors (lack of male support, housing prices, etc.) then admit that they simply don't want to endure the same struggle their female ancestors endured.
But -- this explanation has its limits. Modern women endure many painful undertakings at a high-rate, from training for marathons, to grinding for grades, to getting ACL tears from competitive sports, to climbing the corporate ladder, to pulling all-nighters for law school, etc, and they do this because they are told this is what good girls do and this is what gives them status. Even something like, "travel" is often unpleasant but considered worthwhile because of the benefits of the experience.
We shouldn't underestimate just how much modern schooling and culture is careerist. From the moment girls enter kindergarten its, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" Thus they are encouraged to struggle for the status of career, whereas motherhood is treated as an optional hobby. If treated as an optional hobby, and not a worthy struggle that is an essential part of a life well-lived, then of course many women are going to pass. Not going to college is an unthinkable failure -- but not becoming a mother is a "choice" that must be respected and no one has the right to pressure or shame women about this very personal choice.
His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare.
Perhaps this is cope on my part, as I have kids and don't get out much any more -- but kids also completely reset what one thinks as important. Much of the "going out" I did in my 20s, from trivia nights at the pub to going to the movies to trying out the new exotic restaurant now seems frivolous and uninteresting. At a deeper level, a lot of young adult socialization is about forming networks that allow us to access status and ultimately money and sex. Having reached a stable level of both, socialization becomes a lot less interesting, and most of my socialization is now with fellow parents, since we have more common goals.
It's also nigh impossible to convey the wonderful parts of being a parent to a non-parent. Think of how much people used to look forward to the new Pixar movie. Now imagine having the cutest thing imaginable -- the thing that the cute character in the movie is only a pale imitation of -- and this cute creature is doing new and interesting things in your own home every single night. Why go "out"?
His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror.
Part of the problem here is that modern parents absolutely suck at discipline. Most parents never learn or never feel empowered to tell their kid "Go play by yourself and if you interrupt me or pester me you will get a punishment." Modern parents are grudgingly allowed to punish kids for blatant infractions like hitting or stealing. But it has become unthinkable to punish kids for pestering or interrupting. This really needs to change. With proper discipline, most four year olds are perfectly capable of playing by themselves and not interrupting for an hour.
I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them.
Well certainly in the confines of existing American democratic politics, no, nothing can be done. But the existing political situation is not long-term stable, and under a new paradigm many things could be possible. The question is whether returning to above replacement fertility is a regime-complete problem -- or a civilization-complete problem.
From the linked substack:
women did not have the information and/or power to do anything about it. Now they do, so that’s that...So right-leaning men should stop being in denial about this fact, and more specifically, about the source of their feelings....What you do with that information is another question, but please at least admit that is is a biologically wired-in divergence, and not something that's strange or confusing or a symptom of cultural malaise. It's merely exactly what we should expect to see, even if one was an alien who knew nothing whatsoever about humans other than how their reproduction works....This will happen in every culture and community where women have access to facts, and enough options and agency to make decisions about their own lives. All over the world. Yes, even the mormons. So stop trying to find a magical cultural or memetic solution. There isn’t one.
This is an interesting instance of "woke more correct" or of horse-shoe theory. She is making the same argument that ultra-rightist Dread Jim makes -- women are not hard-wired to preserve civilization or to choose reproduction. Every historical instance of women's liberation has led to cratering fertility and the destruction of that society. Therefore the rightist must go all the way: either women's emancipation gets rolled back or Western civilization will die.
More from the substack
I’ve set forth below the sex-based risks and costs that are fairly standard, and relative risk level. I haven’t included the rare, freakish things that happen to some women, nor all the risks. ...I did not intentionally try to get this to come out at a million dollars. I was just putting in guesstimates about what I thought was a reasonable amount an average man would need to be paid to accept the risks, and only tallied it up after the fact.
One million dollars? Your offer is acceptable.
gorge
1yr ago
It's kind of sad because it means I can't get any of the sacraments, but what can you do.
Have you inquired into a radical sanation?
A lot of people online will say stuff like "you don't have a valid marriage so leave",
That kind of rules-lawyering makes me furious. This shows the downside about having a lot of explicit rules, people think that the explicit rules in canon law or the catechism matter more than basic moral law of keeping sacred vows.
gorge
1yr ago
He did a podcast interview with Adin Ross, but that was a friendly interview. So that makes two, one friendly, one tough. But more importantly, Trump has also been campaigning a long time as being top of the ticket, and has done many interviews, both hostile and friendly. Kamala has an obligation to now speak for herself and represent herself to the American public, now that she is not under the obligation of supporting Biden.
Also, has far as I can tell, Kamala has never done a tough or hostile interview during her entire time running for VP, as VP, or running for president. (If you can find an example, I'd like to see it.)
gorge
1yr ago
Has she taken any questions during these appearances? Any non-screened questions? Any tough questions?
gorge
1yr ago
Is Kamala choosing a midwestern white guy a form of DEI?
It is has always been the case that party bosses have chosen political candidates based on superficial and identitarian reasons -- whether that be their home state, their pedigree, or simply being tall and handsome.
However, we were always allowed to notice that and critique that. Therefore, if it is in-bounds to argue, "Ronald Reagan isn't actually a competent executive, he is a handsome and well-spoken movie star who is an actor playing the role of a competent executive" or "Going to Yale and Phillips Andover doesn't prove GW Bush was smart, because he was a rich legacy and probably got in because of that", then it is also in-bounds to argue that Kamala is not actually that accomplished, she simply has collected a lot of high positions on her resume because she was picked for because of her race and sex.
The other thing is that most of us Americans were taught in grade school that while it is ok to show preferences based on some demographics features ("He was raised on a farm and chopped wood every morning" "She is the daughter of a teacher and a blacksmith, she has the common touch") it is double plus ungood to show preferences purely on race. Even though we were later taught that that race-based affirmative action is a thing and it is good, seeing it in blatant form still creates a dissonance at a very basic level between with what was drilled into us as children.
gorge
1yr ago
If you are reasonably careful, you can probably avoid getting labeled a hate group. However, you may do an enormous amount of work, have a partial victory, then five, ten years later when the public is safe and less concerned about crime they will retroactively demonize your group for criminalizing poor people, and so for all your work, you will be seen as a villain instead of a hero. This is what happened to some of the 'tough on crime' folks from the 80s and 90s.
gorge
1yr ago
What are some actionable ideas, things that might actually help, whether it is some sort of viable plan for forming a vigilante militia or a plan for influencing local elections?
- Organize with your local neighborhood association to raise money to hire private security. I have seen this done moderately successfully.
- Less effective: Attend community meetings with police, community meetings with politicians and make your voice heard.
- Potentially most effective, but very high effort, haven't seen it done: Start a political advocacy group that creates a scorecard for all politicians on how well they are doing on public safety issues. Publicize your scorecard, publish endorsements, so all the citizens in your city know who to vote for if they care about public safety. Once you have enough of a following, you will be able to command meetings with politicians to get your greivences heard.
What stops me is that I quite simply disagree with the laws against recreational drugs on a very fundamental level. I am sure that I am not the only one. I cannot in good conscience side with the cops who enforce such fundamentally illiberal laws.
If someone was stinking up a park with marijuana, and a woman with children asked you to get them to stop, would you have a bad conscience about that? If a street had become notorious for open air dealing and people shooting up and leaving needles around and the police chief told you to make arrests and clean up the street, would you feel bad about that?
AFAICT, urban police in the 2020's are not in the business of arresting people for private use of marijuana in their homes. Their not in the business of jailing people for personal use amounts of marijuana. They police drug problems only when it becomes a major public nuisance.
My problem with the drug war is not just rooted in my libertarian-esque attitudes about the proper bounds of government. It is also rooted in me seeing that the war on drugs turns the banned drugs into a highly valuable and easily produced form of underground currency and thus directly leads to the growth of drug gangs and cartels that are, clearly, responsible for a good share of the street crime that I am seeking to curb.
I think this was always motivated reasoning on the part of left-liberals. They wanted the cause of crime to be something that they opposed anyways, and so such arguments got signal boosted. But in you look at it, Singapore and China don't have a crime problem because of drug prohibition. Loosening up on drug prohibition hasn't reduced crime in the United States. And frankly, the strictness of drug prohibition was always overblown. I recommend this old blog post ( https://devinhelton.com/drug-crimes ) and specifically this excerpt from a news article about policing drug dealing:
That’s just talk to officers, who say the revolving-door punishment makes for an unwinnable game. They know the dealers and users they arrest today probably will be back tomorrow, selling the same drugs and prompting the same neighborhood complaints.
“The dopers know it, too,’’ says Sgt. Rick Lehman, a 26-year veteran who supervises the District 4 Violent Crime Squad. ”They’ll say, `I’ll be back out in a couple hours.’ "
The real drug war was never tried. Those dealers should have been getting a half-dozen whacks with a cane then put in a workhouse until they were able to move to gainful employment.
gorge
1yr ago
Major bummer dude.
I don't think this was a shit test, I think another red-pill unpleasant truth applies: "What they hate, hate, hate hate hate, hate with a hatred hotter than a thousand suns, is that some guy whom they had sex with turns out to be substantially less alpha than they thought."
In this case I think she just wasn't that in to you, but with since she was drunk and it was her birthday and she probably felt like she should let loose (or perhaps she was feeling sad and vulnerable, who knows birthdays can bring out weird feelings) she was open to kissing you. But then in the sober light of the next day she moderately regretted it. Sorry :-/
This is what my life is like. Nothing ever, ever works out,
FWIW, the girls I "crushed" on never worked out even if I got a date with them. It's easier if you aim a little lower and go for the girls who are crushing on you, without you having to put in extraordinary effort.
Also I second 2frafa. A future wife isn't supposed to share all your interests, that's what your guy friends are for, and you will have enough common interests once you have a household together. And she isn't supposed to be manic pixie dream girl, that will get old.
She was tasked to solve the 2021 border problem, namely, migration originating from a few specific countries..... It’s an awkward situation for democrats to communicate because clearly at the time she was the “border czar,” formally or not, for the 2021 border problem.
I understand this but I'm not letting the Dems off the hook. The reason it is awkward to communicate is because it is has been the Dem position that 'harsh' and punitive border policies are bad and the way to fix the immigration crisis is to fix the 'root causes' of the migration. So according to the Dem's own position back in 2021, 'fixing the border' 'addressing root causes' 'border czar', and 'addressing push factors from key Latin American countries' are all the same thing. Since they believed that the key to fixing the border crisis was to fix the push factors -- "To address the situation at the southern border, we have to address the root causes of migration. " -- not beefing up punitive enforcement along the actual border -- so in fact Kamala was in charge of fixing the border crisis. Only now are they trying to back away from this messaging when it turns out that 'addressing root causes' didn't actually fix anything and the old messaging is now inconvenient for them.
gorge
1yr ago
https://www.themotte.org/post/1087/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/233839?context=8#context
One thing I noticed is that her 2019 podcast with "Pod Save America" she seemed somewhat more expansive and smarter than in recent performances. So I think part of this is that as VP she has been conditioned into not saying anything interesting. But, even in the 2019 interview it was all softballs and no real dialectic so she did not come across to me as very smart, she just came across as less stupid then she seems in some of the more recent clips.
I haven't followed the FEMA stuff, but there has been a libertarian claim "the purpose of police is to prevent private citizens from enforcing the law." For a long time I scoffed at it, but I've slowly come around. When I watched the BLM protests there were a lot of police out on the street, but a lot of people were engaging in looting, disorderly conduct, street blocking, etc, with total impunity. But of course, if a group of concerned citizens had come out with clubs to beat up the vandals and looters, the police would have come down hard on them. In some cases there are videos of police arresting citizens who are trying to pull protestors away from blocking the street.
What it comes down to is that it is simply easier for the police to arrest Joe taxpayer-with-something-to-lose for vigilantism, than it is to stop a mob of BLM protestors. Furthermore, it may be more of an embarrassment, a challenge to their manhood, if a private citizen is enforcing the law. The elite don't like the private citizen enforcing the law either, a BLM protest they can contain, private citizens enforcing the law would be far more unpredictable. This model also predicts why despite blatant disorderly crime being so common and unpunished, and gangland violence being common, actual murdering of white children is very rare in a city. The police do take this seriously, because they know threat of arrest won't be enough to stop parents from engaging in vigilantism. So the police still have to do enough actual law enforcement to keep crime to a barely tolerable level.
There is probably some iron law of bureaucracy that states that the bureaucracies primary mission de facto will end up being preventing competition.
Getting back to FEMA, I don't think this is a case of FEMA consciously having orders to punish rural Trump voters. But, as a bureaucracy, they probably have some mandate that says, "our job is to establish chain of command and authority over the disaster area, so we don't have chaos and anarchy, and decision making comes through us." Sounds sensible to people in Washington sitting in the office coming up with the plans. But on the ground, in the middle of the disaster, it turns out it is far easier to stop people from helping, to stop people from flying helicopters in, than it is for FEMA itself to actually analyze and approve all incoming resources, or for FEMA itself to do the providing of resources. So the plan initially is:
But then in the fog of war it becomes:
So the actual result of the organization is that it is an anti-disaster relief bureaucracy. Conquest's third law strikes again.
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