hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
Sexual freedom is not a real thing in the individualistic sense, because sex isn't really an individualistic activity. We should judge sexual freedom by whether society's norms more easily feed into what makes people happy in the long run, not by the theoretical freedom of activity.
It's unclear by that standard that western societies are sexually freer today or in 1875 or 1950 or whenever.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
Assuming you're referring to an Anglosphere country, there was no draft in 1875(although there was one in France and Germany). The anglosphere adopted conscription en masse for the world wars and, while the US used it for the civil war, that was seen as an exception. Instead, anglosphere armies recruited the poorest in society by promising better conditions during long terms of service- and the barracks probably actually did have better living conditions than home for the poor until at least the fifties, if not even later.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
ACB as a 'liberal' is a bit of a stretch. She's probably better described as a moderate conservative on non-social issues.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
A very large supermajority of six-precepts following Catholics who don't dissent from the doctrine of the Church voting republican is not the same thing as most Catholic republicans being six-precept following believers in every jot of Church doctrine.
The actual name for the prior group when identified in social surveys is 'conservative Catholics', and pollsters literally identify them in part by their beliefs about things like papal infallibility and transubstantiation. @100ProofTollBooth may not be literally correct, but his statement is almost assuredly close enough for government work.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
There are a small number of theologically serious Catholics who vote democrat- over stuff like the border, 'Trump is pro-choice too', 'democrats hew closer to Catholic social teaching'(apart from unions this is not really true, because Catholic social teaching is not really defined enough to say that clearly- it's a set of principles, not a policy platform, and neither party is much into it), or just unironically believing democrat's propaganda. This group is old and shrinking(partly from dying of old age), but the claim that it doesn't exist is just false.
That being said 90+% of non-dissenting, precept-following Catholics do probably vote republican, with the other single-digit percent being a higher percentage of heavily propagandized non-English speakers, or residents of places like Chicago where maintaining a democrat registration to vote strategically for less-bad democrats is more important than protest voting for republicans, than of actual liberals.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
There are (weird)left wing charismatic protestants. It really wouldn't shock me if one of them wound up in a political assassination because, well, you can expect any group of weirdos to be overrepresented in political violence.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Sure, I don’t think my hunting club would be a factor in sustained civil unrest. But, like, 3%er groups and the like totally would.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
You can’t credibly sell that as a premium product to avoid traffic, though.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I mean, we then have to compute 'how many illegal children are in public schools'.
I'm totally willing to believe illegals are consuming more in taxes than they pay in. Just want to point out that the math hasn't been done.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Americans will not do these things, and throwing money at it won't work any better than it does for public schools.
If you want Americans to suddenly start taking mass transit, build trains(not busses) going from commuterville to the downtowns everyone actually works in, boost ridership through heavy advertising as a premium for avoiding traffic, with tickets only sold as monthly passes, and fare evasion punished harshly.
This will not happen. Most Americans like driving, they like privacy in their own cars, and they aren't particularly price sensitive. Mass transit for traffic reduction suffers from the free rider problem and mass transit for cost reasons will never see widespread adoption in a country where even the very poor have cars.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Texas.
Ah, you enjoy breaking the speed limit while the other drivers pass you constantly.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It sounds like all of Latin America- this is probably pretty standard for developing countries.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Yes, people complain about it. Sometimes it seems like ultra-online blue tribers looking for something to get upset at pickup truck drivers for and sometimes it's people making complaints about holding up the flow of traffic in high-entrance times when head-in parking would be faster. The latter complain much more calmly.
I've also seen 'head in parking only' signs which seem like they exist mostly to make checking parking permits easier.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Or- what most educated people believe- that illegals mostly pay taxes but don't collect much benefits because they aren't eligible and like to retire to their home countries(which are cheaper). This leaves stuff out like the cost of their children's public school education but there are true things in it and the actual numbers don't seem to have ever been crunched in an unbiased way. There's also the take that illegals are necessary because somebody has to pick strawberries and kill chickens and Americans are too spoiled to.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The riots in 2020 were generated by preexisting real(if not exactly grounded in reality) grievances the black community- yes all of it- had with contemporary American governance. That's not the case for the 2025 protests.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
In a sense, this is ALSO one faction that is demonstrating that it has motivated, competent shooters on its side, so if something real DID pop off they are at least capable of carrying out deadly violence. The capacity for this violence is no longer just theoretical.
It's worth noting that nobody believes this though- I think my hunting club could wipe the floor with the entirety of antifa in an afternoon in an actual take-the-gloves-off civil unrest scenario, and the median American probably agrees with me. And that's leaving aside that my hunting club is not the entirety of red assets in a serious civil unrest scenario.
The modal outcome of some blue tribe mass-unrest enabled auspicious incident is 'the national guard just kills them all because it doesn't actually want to take orders from blue state governments trying to run interference'. I think both blue and red Americans are aware of this.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Was it? Not all democrats, especially in Minnesota, are blue tribers(although that is changing). This could easily have been blue on red-tribe blue dog.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I have a different take- there are so many reasons not to be violent in modern society because modern society has set it up so that being violent tends to end up with you being less likely to get what you want over the long run.
It is not hard to imagine a society where the elites are more violent than the lower orders- there have been quite a lot of them throughout history. But we live in the reverse. It's fairly plausible to me that for the very bottom rungs of society- the homeless, male(adult women in these communities are much better off) residents of the worst black ghettos, etc- violence is net positive on an individual level. But for everyone else? Violence decreases as you rise on the social totem pole for a reason and that reason is that people towards the top are better at avoiding maladaptive behavior. In polite society, the top four-fifths or so, willingness to resort to private violence is strongly correlated with being towards the bottom, starting with literal dogs.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I’d long heard that Kruschev was the last true believer; there might obviously be true believers in important positions after that, but not necessarily in the top spots.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Ok, fair.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
A former submariner I talked to said they mostly shadowed chink subs in the South China Sea.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
To be even more fair, there's been like two ayatollahs.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Are you willing to post a deep dive on how Iran actually works?
hydroacetylene
2d ago
In Iran? The elites over there are genuinely much more religious than the populace.
Abolitionists absolutely saw it as part of their identity, at least.
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