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Backlash to the border bussing policies: To the surprise of no one, sanctuary cities don't actually want hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners wandering about in their backyards. New York City- which has received the largest number of migrants shipped from the southern border by Greg Abbott- is the site of protests https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/another-massive-rally-expected-outside-staten-island-school-turned-migrant-shelter/ Obviously not all of these people are democrats, but some of them seem to be. But the real story is down below, in LA.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/la-city-council-texas-governor-migrant-busing/story?id=102840424
One motion directs the city attorney to investigate whether any crime was committed by Abbott and if there's any potential civil legal action that can be taken against him and Texas regarding the initial busing incident. The other is a resolution calling on LA County District Attorney George Gascón, California State Attorney General Rob Banta and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to similarly investigate Abbott's actions, as well as urges the county, state and federal government to assist in responding to the needs of the migrants. MORE: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott buses group of migrants to Los Angeles
Both motions, which passed 13-0, were filed on June 16 -- two days after the first bus originating from McAllen, Texas, arrived in LA carrying 42 migrants, including 18 minors, according to the motions. Since then, 10 more buses have arrived from Texas -- the most recent Wednesday morning, a spokesperson for LA Mayor Karen Bass said.
Obviously, some of this is just hypocrisy and looking out for number one- it's fine for you to have hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers camped under highway overpasses with no say in the matter, but don't you dare dump any on me- but I'm struck by 1), the fact that the LA city council thinks injunctions and lawsuits will work
"[Abbott] is just going to continue to do it, because he has no incentive at all whatsoever until there is legal teeth put to this," he said. "And that means an injunction by a U.S. federal judge to stop the trafficking of these individuals." Abbott has also sent buses to cities including Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, Denver and Philadelphia.
When in reality Abbott has no incentive to stop when a federal judge tells him to, he has every incentive to appeal to the supreme court and ignore the federal judge- he does after all want to win his 2026 primary- and realistically unless the federal government decides to take over the border itself, or meet his demands, they can't make him stop. Both practically- he wants these people to be someone else's problem- and politically- this makes him look tough to a base that doesn't already think of him that way- there's every reason for Greg Abbott to just keep doing this until he's lost much, much bigger than anybody seems to be talking about, or his demands are met.
And of course, 2), the decision to cast this as human trafficking
During Wednesday's meeting, LA City Council member Imelda Padilla addressed the strain the influx of migrants causes on service providers while calling the busing an "ugly form of political theater."
"It's against all dignity and humanity of all people -- especially towards immigrants, families and children who have fled their country due to injustices or threats against their lives, who have faced unimaginable obstacles to seek asylum," she said prior to the vote.
When, likewise in reality, "free bus tickets to New York/LA/DC" is quite an appealing pitch to migrants living under a bridge in McAllen and Eagle Pass Texas. After all, most of them didn't walk from Venezuela with the intent of settling in McAllen, they wanted to go further into the US. And obviously Abbott's real incentive is to get them out of his jurisdiction as fast as possible, which means offering free bus tickets to the places they actually wanted to go to in the first place. There just isn't a scenario where the migrants stayed in Eagle Pass long term; they could be deported to Honduras or wherever they came from, or they could go somewhere else in the country.
Elon is a True Believer, and that's why he Backs Trump
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger
So there's been discussion of why Elon Musk put threw in so hard with Trump. What he gets out of owning twitter. I've long had a pretty simple and parsimonious explanation- he wants humanity to spread throughout the universe, and if democrats get in his way he will have to back republicans regardless of his other political opinions. Democrats got in the way.
This review of Reentry is, functionally, a better sourced argument for my intuition. I suppose as a religious fanatic myself I can recognize a fanatic of a different creed by instinct; I guess indifferent PMC types need to be reasoned into the conclusion. As an aside, this is why I'm less worried about woke than some of our other social conservative posters- I don't think I can point to it, but everything about them just screams 'these people sort of believe, in the sense that they don't really disagree, but not in the sense that they'll take licks for their ideology. Like, they're willing to ruin other people's lives over it, sure, but not their own'. Regardless, the actions of SpaceX point to being run by true believers:
when SpaceX is preparing to move their Falcon 9 rocket from its test stand to the launch site for the very first time, they hire “the second largest crane in Texas” to first stack the pieces of the rocket on top of each other, and then lower them onto a waiting trailer. Halfway through the operation, they realize it won’t work because of the wind and that they’ll have to assemble them on the ground. But the piece currently dangling from the crane and blowing like a sail in the wind isn’t designed to bear its own weight, so they literally can’t put it down.
The guy in charge of the operation joined the company a few weeks ago as a rocket engineer in California, and he is now watching the future of the company dangling in front of him from the second largest crane in Texas. Darkness is falling. What does he do? He does what he has to do: calls a few dozen welders to come the next morning, then stays up all night designing a custom “cradle” that the rocket can be lowered into while anxiously watching to make sure the crane doesn’t start leaking hydraulic fluid. He notes: “At Northrop [Grumann], building a custom cradle would have become its own mini-program with design reviews, taking months to build rather than hours.”
Once the rocket is down, they need to move it. To Florida. NASA and other rocket makers generally move their rockets by sea, but that’s slow and expensive. SpaceX doesn’t like to do things that are slow and expensive, so they decide to drive it there. Unfortunately, when lying down on its cradle, the rocket can’t fit under a standard freeway overpass. This is the point at which, if you did not follow the Haywood Algorithm, you would rent a barge and allow the rocket to arrive a few months late. But SpaceX always acts as if any delay at all will kill the company, so they instead set off on “the road trip from hell,” finding an absurd and tortuous route down backroads from Texas to Florida.
Their route has no overpasses, but it does have power lines and traffic lights. So some of the world’s best rocket scientists drive in front of the trailer with a flexible, 17-foot pole taped to the bumper of their car. Whenever it hits something, they jump out, use large sticks to lift the power line enough that the rocket can pass under, then jump back in their car and drive off the road and around the rocket (it’s too wide to pass) so they can intercept the next obstacle. The average speed of the trip is 10mph, and they drive continuously through the night, sleeping in shifts when they’re able to. They have a hard deadline of 5pm on November 24th, because Florida closes its roads to oversized loads for a week around Thanksgiving, and they roll into Cape Canaveral on November 24th, at 3:21pm, after ten days of continuous driving.
That's one example. It's also not just about SpaceX being lean and nimble. It's about being true believers. Elon Musk literally actually believes that humanity spreading through the entire universe is the most important thing... ever, with no exceptions. And he's managed to convince the company that that is correct. Obstacles to this will need to be overcome or removed, such as by sending a guy with a flexible pole to lift up overhead power lines when your rocket engine passes through backroads in the rural south because a barge would take too long. NASA would have accepted the cost. Why? At the end of the day, they believe in going to space, sure, but they're not, like, fanatics about it. SpaceX are fanatics.
And SpaceX just consistently decides not to cash out and take easy money for the rest of their lives. Instead they plow the profits from that easy money into moonshots that push the possibilities of space exploration forwards by developing new technology. Why? I'll quote the review again:
No! It’s actually very simple: remember all that stuff about how SpaceX is less of a company and more of a religious movement, with a goal of making life multi-planetary? Elon and SpaceX behave the way that they do because they believe that stuff very sincerely. A version of SpaceX that merely became worth trillions of dollars, but never enabled the colonization of Mars, would be a disastrous failure in Elon’s eyes.
It's actually pretty simple. He's not a perfectly rational money-maxxer because a perfectly rational money-maxxer would not be betting the entire company on moonshot technological progress no matter what the math says. People are risk averse when all they care about is purchasing power.
So how does this tie in with politics? Well, he bought twitter to back republicans because democrats were doing things like making him kidnap seals and record their emotional reactions to recordings of rocket launches, and other such stupid delays. It's extremely rational for Elon to conclude 1) a cooperative government will enable him to get to mars faster and 2) republicans will give him a cooperative government in exchange for support, democrats will never give him a cooperative government. Yes, he condemns woke, but a) woke doesn't have, like, an actual definition, so it can easily refer to the socialism-by-bureaucracy wing even if that's not totally standard b) I get the sense that a lot of the turn of opinion against him relies on woke-ish methods, with things like cancel culture allowing a corralling of left public opinion, and it's pretty reasonable to think he does too c) there's lots of wokeness or woke ideology involved in holding him back(especially with environmental stuff), and plenty of potential attacks on him from a woke perspective(I'm kind of surprised nobody's already tried to metoo him). Yes, he's conspicuously worried about birthrates, but space colonization essentially requires high human capital high tfr populations.
I wrote a post a few months ago about Gen Z not having enough grit, aggression and agency and willingness to go all in. In retrospect, I don't think it was my best work. Elon's plenty gritty. There's lots of lack of grit in modern society; the every-other-month-AAQC about how all marriages are gay marriages now is basically decrying that, because in modern marriages there's no going all in, doing whatever it takes, they're in concept similar to 'partnerships' among sexual minorities. I'm willing to make that argument but not making it here. Instead I wonder- is fanaticism a necessary component of grit? That certainly seems to be the difference between SpaceX and NASA. Is today's malaise just downstream of being unwilling to commit to things? The birthrate crisis, the military recruitment crisis- moderners just not wanting to burn their bridges and have no recourse but to see their commitment through?
I've rambled a lot here, but it seems convincing to me at least.
This could just as easily be ‘men who participate in polls run by prostitutes have lower relationship satisfaction’.
An Attempt at Bringing Back the User Viewpoint Focus Series
I'm attempting to bring it back, and I'm attempting to bring it back with a template so it isn't just an expectation of writing a ten thousand word essay at the drop of a hat. If you have suggestions, feel free to drop them in a comment.
Self description in motte terms
I'm an actual IRL tradcath with classical conservative political views in the continental tradition rather than the British one. More de Maistre, less Hobbes. I'm inherently skeptical of central planning as a solution for long-running problems; the role of a rightly ordered state is more that of a gardener than an engineer. There might be some planning involved but the government's job is more to promote good things and suppress bad things than to build a mold; nobody and no technology can tell what the end result will be. I'm techno-skeptic and HBD accepting-but-minimalist, with strong utopiaskepticism.
I'm also not rationalist in that I don't think we can reason through our problems all the time. Thinking isn't a bad thing, generally speaking, but it's probably not going to solve our actual problems. There's some we're stuck with and some we haven't figured out the solution for but the solution is generally a doing and not a thinking or talking. And in a lot of cases we're not going to figure out the right doing by sitting around and reasoning through it, we have to go try stuff. Like capitalism- nobody in an ivory tower came up with capitalism from first principles. It developed over time until Adam Smith wrote down how it worked from observation. That's why it works and communism doesn't.
Finally, I'm a western supremacist. The west is the best civilization and that's just factual. But the west has a boom/bust cycle of decline before growth, measured in centuries. This isn't usually a technological decline although it sometimes is; it's a civilizational malaise which drives political fragmentation and lower accomplishment until people rebuild. In other words decadence, but I believe decadence isn't just a feeling, it can be measured(by someone who's better at math than I am). The west in its boom overtakes every civilization; the chinamen will stick to their tea and incense when a western boom spreads to Mars and then the stars, just as the last western boom spread to every corner of the earth. The west is unfortunately in a decadent part of the cycle but we as individuals can build functioning institutions to rebuild it, as our ancestors did in the middle ages to claw themselves back up to greatness. And we do need to learn from the past; tradition is not necessarily a perfect guide but the alternative is fartsniffing until we've figured something out. Recommended Reading
Family and Civilization by Carle Zimmerman- account of the boom and bust cycle of western civilization. Read with Soldiers and Silver by Michael Taylor to read a snapshot of one of his examples(republican Rome overtaking the Hellenistic kingdoms).
The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich- on western institutions and their organic development into the greatest civilizational boom their ever was.
The Case against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry- on a failed experiment.
The Hapsburg Way by Edward Hapsburg- on applying traditional lessons to modern life.
Brief Manifesto
Build something. Do something. Make civilization work. Run in the hamster wheel turning the cogs of society- propose to your girlfriend and have babies, raise them right, work hard, if you see problems in your community go and find a way to solve them. Get people to organize, or infiltrate a preexisting institution. Join the Elks or the Lions. Make a mark that isn't digital. You probably can't be president(unless JD Vance actually is on this forum), but you can make a difference in people's lives and you can start building the machinery of a functioning society.
Senators and presidents can do whatever stupid things they're on about, it's not an excuse for not showing up. Us common folk still need to make shit work. Follow the success sequence and make it so your kids can do the same. Set a good example. Listen to your grandparents. Make being a worker bee OK.
Ping me on
I have specific knowledge of: Catholicism and Tradcaths(the real ones, not the twitterati), Texas politics, trades work(I would like to write an effortpost about the trades shortage but think I would need help with research) and blue collar work in general, and the people who do it.
AAQC's I'm proud of/would like to call attention to once more
https://www.themotte.org/post/1287/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/277989?context=8#context
https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/194609?context=8#context
I nominate @Dean for the next one. If you can't do it, please say so in the comments so someone can replace you.
Film Review: Am I Racist?
Yesterday I went to go see one of the, uh, more controversial movies of the year. So a plot summary, some general thoughts, and then speculation about the culture war implications.
The story of the movie
It begins with Matt trying to learn about America's systemic racism and be a good ally. I don't know that anyone will actually believe this part, but it's the plot justification. So, he meets with some anti-racism experts and it does not go well. After he's kicked out of a anti-racism workshop when his real identity is discovered, he decides to disguise himself as a hipster, inspired by the fashion choices of his interview subjects for What is a Woman?. He becomes a certified DEI expert on the internet and begins attending interviews and workshops to see what the anti-racists have to say, then attempts to spread the word, still disguised as a hipster. This does not go well either, some stoners call him a racist and then a biker bar decides to hold an intervention about how he needs to respect black people more. So, he decides to sit his white ass down and listen to black people in some dirt poor majority black podunk town in the deep south. A collection of pastors, grannies, and small business owners- all of them very dark black- advise him to put down the critical race theory and pick up the bible.
Instead of taking this advice, he returns to found his own DEI training company. https://www.dotheworkworkshop.com/ is clearly satire, but the film plays it as completely serious, and he recruits the attendees for his first anti-racism workshop on craigslist. They have clearly been told that this is a genuine anti-racist DEI exercise and that the documentary they appear in is for genuine anti-racist DEI educational purposes, and they start walking out as they realize it isn't- some when they have to label themselves on a racist scale, the same one in the link, some when he brings in his racist uncle in a wheelchair for participants to berate over an insensitive joke from twenty years ago, and the rest who don't show signs of mental illness when he brings out the whips for self-flagellation. It is one of the participant's eagerness to actually do the last part which leads him to break character and have an onscreen crisis of faith, which he goes through as a guest appearance as a diversity expert on one of those local news programs my dad always called 'Gay Morning (insert locality)'.
The film ends with a monologue about treating people equally, and the virtue of colorblindness.
General Thoughts
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The film subtitled meetings with diversity experts with the fee they charged to appear. While some of them seemed to genuinely be believers, many of them came off as just wanting the money and not caring very much at all about what they were saying. Indeed, a few of them looked like they knew they were appearing in a hostile documentary and were more than happy to do so for the right price. Only one of them- a combative campus activist- seemed ready to make personal sacrifices for the sake of her ideology. I would consider her a bit unhinged, but she has my respect as a true believer. Other than in that one case, the point of anti-racism being a money making industry not very concerned with the people it's notionally helping was made very effectively. In What is a Woman? interviewees got offended at hostile questioning all the time; not here. The mother who made national news about her black children being snubbed by sesame street in particular gave off a strong vibe of 'well I guess I have to stick to this story to collect tens of thousands of dollars, so there we are'.
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As you might expect, DEI activists did not come off well. Several of them seemed unhinged, many of them seemed cynically lying. The first anti-racist workshop host(her fee- $30k) mentioned that she felt unsafe emotionally around so many white people to open the workshop. I can, for myself, remember doing some work for my day job at a 'racial healing center' hosting an 'antiracist yoga class'. I felt uncomfortable in the sense of just clearly not belonging, but also a bit creeped out at the sense of fear directed at me, not with the suspicion that I would actually do anything, but just fear because? I also remember wondering how these people were all free at 10 am on a Tuesday. This idea of suspicion of white people doing?, where ? was clearly not any actual action- like they weren't worried about the KKK showing up here or even a white person getting angry and subjecting them to verbal abuse- but just something that upsets the vibes/makes things ritually impure, it's unclear.
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The people who more conventionally pay these thousands-of-dollars fees for DEI experts come off as mostly gullible and unwilling to make personal changes or sacrifices. Lots of them are portrayed as very concerned about first world problems. And they would rather spend thousands of dollars for woke Cathari to absolve their guilt than do anything about it. I don't think the intent was to point to anti-racism as an analogue to gnosticism, if for no other reason than the normies not knowing what gnosticism is. But the parallels are really there! A lot of this stuff is knowledge that will be revealed as the initiate becomes purified and perfected from an outside world which is evil and can't be fixed, and can only be guided by the pure ones. There's a scene early in the movie where Matt visits an anti-racist bookstore and is told a book, titled after the N-word(the cover is shown but the title is never pronounced), is one he's not ready for and he should come back later on in his anti-racist journey. But to the Cathari in the film, dropping $$ is the best evidence of separation from the demiurge.
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This movie was hilarious, but it did not seem to be a super-reliable source of information. Evidence of selective footage use, careful tricksiness to get damning soundbites, etc was very there. Particular the Robin DiAngelo scene, she came off as perhaps being pressured into doing and agreeing with things she wasn't a fan of- but the interviewees for What is a Woman? would have just kicked him out and forfeited their $15k.
Culture war
First off, I think this really cements that the right has figured out to hit the left by portraying their fringes as ridiculous. No hyperventilating about 1984 or they're coming for our guns- more 'this is what they actually believe(cast in the least charitable possible light)- decide for yourself if it's stupid'. I think this film did an ok job of that, but a much better job of casting DEI experts as being experts in anti-raci$m. It probably shows a broader shift, as well, towards the use of right-wing humor as a political strategy; the normies will watch things which entertain them.
Second, right wing talking points are fairly mainstream. It's OK to be a normiecon in the public sphere; I saw this in a normal theater that was showing Betelgeuse and Alien: Romulus down the hallway. It doesn't seem to have been supercontroversial that Am I Racist? was getting released in normal theaters. I didn't see any protesters- and I went to see it in a not-white part of Dallas- and the ticket guy didn't care.
Third, Matt Walsh is clearly influential among normiecons. This film had a lot more money behind it than What is a Woman?, and the people backing normiecon advocacy are obviously willing to put themselves behind Walsh. This is important because Matt Walsh seems willing to at least try to push the overton window rightwards; it's possible that this is an early indicator of the partisan lines hardening tribally.
There is a political quote which says that "the Right thinks the Left is stupid while the Left thinks the Right is evil".
While this quote gets repeated, I don't think it's quite true. Instead I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that.
Granted that Mao was not a good person, he didn't set out to kill 100 million people. He made some bad decisions that inexorably led to a famine which killed 100 million people. But that wasn't his goal, his goal was to do what Deng would wind up doing. He simply happened to be incompetent at it. And from a right wing perspective, the results speak for themselves- Mao's incompetence killed more people in a war against sparrows than Hitler did in a war against a continent spanning superpower. The lesson if you're a right winger is pretty obvious- pick the cold and competent guy even if he's a little bit evil. That's probably why the right bet so big on capitalism in the later 20th century- capitalism is not very nice, but it works better than anything else anyone has ever tried and there's no getting around that.
The left, on the other hand, doesn't seem to grasp that right wingers see no practical difference between stupidity and evil in running a society. The trying to help people is what's important, that's why the political left doesn't like arguments about tradeoffs and side effects and whether or not their climate change and gun policies work. It's easy to write this off as a bit, or virtue signaling, or whatever, but I think a lot of them really do inhabit a world where as long as the people in power are willing to commit strongly enough to solving whatever problem it will inevitably be solved through the power of positive thinking. Maybe that's uncharitable, but my experience has not been that, say, gun control activists consider "whether assault weapons bans actually prevent mass shootings" to be a particularly relevant factor in whether there should be assault weapons bans to prevent mass shootings, more like it's a distraction from the broader issue of whether mass shootings are a tragedy.
Trump is a symptom of polarization, not a cause. He suspended his campaign in 2012 when it was clear he wasn’t going to go anywhere, in 2016 he cleared the field and hasn’t had a serious GOP rival since.
Why? Well, I would point to the actions of the center-left establishment as pushing conservatives into hostility. Obviously there’s the just, blatant, lies about everything from the media. But in Obama’s second term you also had fast and furious, you had democrats aggravating racial tensions for shits and giggles, you had the IRS targeting scandal, you had Obama himself moving from a polarizing but broadly popular figure into a progressive ideologue partisan. Then you’ve had the Biden admin targeting conservatives, with EG going after pro-life activists for three-felonies-a-day stuff while ignoring attacks on churches and pregnancy resource centers.
I recall reading a CNN journalist once writing, with great concern, that 40% of Americans think democrats want to take their guns away and force them to let trans in their bathrooms. It didn’t seem to occur to her that this was because democrats keep saying they’re going to do those things.
I just want to point out for those who don't know- longshoremen are not skilled labor. They are extremely well paid in hereditary sinecures that may or may not be bolstered by fraudulent timecards and maintain their dominance with an old-fashioned organized-crime-linked union.
I’ve heard before from the sorts of people who do domestic work and related(high end hotel concierges and the like) that old money red tribe adjacent people- think the country club crowd, or oil executives, or exotic game ranch proprietors- are preferable to work for because, although their security tends to be jumpier and better armed, unlike the blue tribe money(celebrities and rich lawyers) they understand what servants are, are used to having them, and know how to maintain boundaries with them, while also being friendly enough.
This seems like the closest American division to the royal family/Meghan markle clash.
I mean I think what gets me about it is Nate silver and his team were liberals, they didn’t try to pretend they weren’t, but they felt like liberals who were trying to get at an accurate reflection of reality. Sure, they had biases. But for all their faults they came reasonably close to an accurate reflection of what was actually happening and they seemed like some people I could sit down and have a reasonable discussion with, despite our many disagreements.
Then ABC gets rid of him and turns his brand into partisan hacks because it’s not enough to be reasonable liberals seeking the truth.
Phrased differently, it seems to me South Korean's may be too realist and grounded in their evaluations of things. Again, having children is hard. If you analyze all of the realities of child rearing, you are going to find thousands of reason not to do it. Without a faith-level "Yeah, but fuck it!" decision making mechanism, it makes sense that a highly educated and highly rational community would not see many kids.
I'll conclude by asking the Motte to chime in on anything about the above, of course. More specifically, however - To what extent are the Judeo-Christian roots of the United States responsible for cultural attitudes of "hyper optimistic belief" around things like child rearing, entrepreneurship, scientific frontier-ism (space travel, moon landing, AI). I worry that on the Right, Judeo-Christian ethics are mostly touted as ways to keep social order and cohesion and, on the Left, they're derided for a lack of acceptance and as an inhibitor to full self-expression. That's one axis, sure, but I don't think it's the entire problem space. Moreover, is much of the rising Western trouble with pervasive anxiety, sexlessness, poor family formation, etc. partially due to a loss of a quasi-faith belief structure.
I’ve said this before, but birthrates in the post-contraceptive world depend on whether people expect to enjoy raising kids. South Korean childhood seems legitimately awful for everyone involved; of course a realistic thinker opts out of doing it a second time!
If you look at groups with the pill that have above replacement fertility rates, by contrast, you see people who want to have kids. Rednecks really look forwards to going to their kids’ sporting events and taking them fishing and teaching them to work on cars, and have an entire genre of very popular music about how wanting to be a mother turns otherwise plain-looking women phenomenally beautiful.
And it’s not necessarily that one is clear eyed and the other is hopelessly romanticized; South Korean childhood is legitimately much more unpleasant than redneck childhood, for both parties. But you don’t have to go to South Korea to see the impact of attitudes towards Natality; blue tribe fertility is on the lower end of average for the developed world and blue tribe culture is full of fretting about how awful motherhood is. You contrast that to red tribe culture and it’s obvious.
People want kids when they expect to enjoy parenting. I’m not saying there aren’t economic or structural issues going on. But remember the study of teenaged girls who had to take care of a baby doll like a real baby, discovered they liked it, and then went and got pregnant? Wanting kids is a pretty big factor and people on the motte underrate it significantly.
A pre-Lenten post that's been in the works for a while.
On April 10, 1947, a man named Rudolf Hoss went to confession, six days before his execution. Hardly a particularly unusual course of events, but Hoss had left the Catholic Church in his teens over an incident involving confession, joined the Nazi party, and would shortly therafter issue the following declaration:
My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done.
He was not the only war criminal to seek absolution following WWII. On the other side of the world, Yasuhiko Asaka would convert to Catholicism in 1951. While his connection to the imperial family would prevent his being charged for war crimes, he gave the order beginning the rape of Nanking. His immediate superior, general Matsui, who was executed for the crime, spent his retirement after the massacre promoting devotion to the Buddhist goddess of mercy and advocating for full independence for captured territories, and his last request was for his family to adopt a maid, presumably a large favor in postwar Japan.
On a lesser scale, I have spoken to missionary priests who talk movingly of impoverished third worlders walking hundreds of miles, often barefoot, to go to confession, often with no interest in the faith beyond it(especially in west Africa, it seems many had been baptized by Pentecostals but wished to confess transgressions rather than simply trust in the mercy of God- He may forgive, but does your ancestor spirit?). The early Spanish missionaries in Mexico noticed the same thing- Indians clamored for confession, they clamored for baptism, for release from their sins, but before the Guadalupe apparition had few interested in the practice of the faith.
The natural state of man is to fear retribution from the immaterial- will the ancestors punish me? Is the river angry with my conduct, will it flood? Have I cursed the whole village? How can I appease them? Will there be retribution on me, or maybe on my whole clan?
We have not moved past this. WEIRD Americans speak of Karma, of what comes around goes around, of 'garbage people getting what's coming'. It's been noted that the SJW brigade seems not to forgive; transgressions contaminate you, your works, your associates... forever. I don't know any SJWs so I have to take the motte's word for it.
Scott noted new atheism as a failed hamartialogy, but he focused mostly on the question of 'why do bad things happen to good people'- there's another aspect to hamartialogy, the question of 'how can I, as a person, move past my sins? How can I end the contamination?'. In Catholicism there's a simple answer- confess to a priest, do whatever penance he gives you. There might be purely natural consequences, like health problems from drug use, but the contamination is gone. As far as I know there is no other answer, anywhere, ever. Notice general Matsui, above, never seemed to regard himself as having atoned for the rape of Nanking- and he said, at the time:
I now realize that we have unknowingly wrought a most grievous effect on this city. When I think of the feelings and sentiments of many of my Chinese friends who have fled from Nanking and of the future of the two countries, I cannot but feel depressed. I am very lonely and can never get in a mood to rejoice about this victory ... I personally feel sorry for the tragedies to the people, but the Army must continue unless China repents. Now, in the winter, the season gives time to reflect. I offer my sympathy, with deep emotion, to a million innocent people."
Even if you are a secular materialist, the time to think about what you have done wrong is nigh. And it's the time to remember that guilt is real, very real. How does your society remove guilt? I suspect for many, the answer is 'it doesn't'. And removing guilt serves a vital and important function. We see it, so I am told, in the internecine warfare of SJWs over being too closely associated with wrongthinkers- without it you can't reintegrate into the community. We see it in the man weighed down with guilt over his past behavior, unable to move on. And I suppose we see it more controversially with the post-religious right, hanging a sword of damocles over the heads of converts from all sorts of degenerate behavior. Former abortion doctors and homosexuals are minor celebrities in Christian spaces; I suspect many of these people would have committed suicide without the ideas of Christian mercy.
I can very definitely tell that Freddy is an actual Marxist communist when he rights ‘America has two right wing parties’. Both parties are, by global standards, pretty centrist, progressive on social issues(one of them only moderately so), pro-business capitalist(one of them only lukewarmly), moderately nationalist, anti-isolationist, and liberal. The GOP is well to the left of major right wing parties like Likud and PiS on social issues; the DNC is well to the right of major left wing parties like die Linke on economics. By global standards, our parties are pretty compressed on a spectrum.
If you take the USA as a wealthier Latin American country, we ‘should’ have a have-not party which claims to be socialist but is actually more interested in corruption, and a party of the haves which is anti communist and tough on crime, and a populist far-right party which openly praises the idea of becoming a fascist dictatorship. If you take the US as an eccentric European country, we ‘should’ have a socialist party, a Green Party, two centrist right wing parties, and a far right party. In reality we have two centrist parties.
And while ‘Cthulhu always swims left’ is an oversimplification to the point of inaccuracy, ‘Cthulhu swims right’ is true only in stupid definitional games.
I have no idea where they actually live.
20 people to a three bedroom trailer.
The secret side effect of high housing costs is extreme crowding in lower income households. They need the income from renting out bedrooms to keep paying their own way. And people can’t afford their own place, so they rent rooms, often to share.
I’ve seen people on here wondering how low functioning but not actually dangerous people can be homeless; don’t their extended families take care of them? There’s no room, quite literally, in these households. Couches are being crashed on by someone who can contribute, or a more sympathetic dependent. Bedrooms are rented out for the cost of apartments in more normal cities. You don’t see the same scenes in place like houston where housing costs are more reasonable, because low income households can accommodate people like that.
Texas Border Flareup... Again
Border Patrol’s normal access to the border through entry points in the federal border barrier is likewise blocked by the Texas National Guard installing its own gates and placing armed personnel in those locations to control entry. See id. at 4a. And the Texas National Guard has likewise blocked Border Patrol from using an access road through the pre- existing state border barrier by stationing a military Humvee there.
Texas has seized a public park in Eagle Pass to take control of a 2.5 mile stretch of the border(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-blocks-federal-border-agents-processing-migrants-eagle-pass-shelby-park/). This is a bigger deal than it seems; the only boat launch and main surveillance point for miles is located there, effectively preventing border patrol from operating over a relatively wider frontage.
Context
The State of Texas has long been adding concertina wire to the border to prevent crossings, and has been accusing the federal government of cutting it to allow migrants to cross. Recently Texas won an injunction in court blocking the federal government from doing this, and the federal government has of course appealed, but the injunction includes an exception for if cutting the wire is necessary to assist migrants experiencing a medical emergency.
So Texas seized the main surveillance point and boat launch(in this sector) for the border patrol to prevent them seeing migrants experiencing a medical emergency. For the record, I don't trust the federal government with this "medical emergency" exception either, but this is flatly illegal in, well, pretty much every way you approach it.
Of course the border patrol union is siding with Abbott, which would make it awkward for fedgov if they cared. Although Abbott's justification has nothing to do with the border patrol union's:
Texas has the legal authority to control ingress and egress into any geographic location in the state of Texas, and that authority is being asserted with regard to that park in Eagle Pass
And anecdotally his fundraising emails are talking a lot more about state sovereignty than normal. It led to a twitter breakdown by Gina Hinojosa(head of the Texas democrats) accusing him of being a secessionist, and the admittedly low chance of Gina Hinojosa of all people meming Texas independence into the political mainstream through the power of negative partisanship is kind of hilarious.
But back to the topic at hand; it's unclear what Abbott's actual game is; he's an accomplished constitutional lawyer(literally; that's how he became governor) and knows he's going to lose at court. He's also never been the reckless type and so it's unlikely he did this without thinking it through. Angling for a Trump cabinet seat, maybe? It also surprises me that he did this now; primaries are coming up in March, and Abbott endorsed a relatively wide array of candidates to try to shift the house in a more partisan republican direction; taking a political risk like this one is unlike him.
Is the decline in teen mental health mostly about parenting?
https://ifstudies.org/blog/parenting-is-the-key-to-adolescent-mental-health
The findings are clear. The most important factor in the mental health of adolescent children is the quality of the relationship with their caregivers. This, in turn, is strongly related to parenting practices—with the best results coming from warm, responsive, and rule-bound, disciplined parenting. The data also reveal the characteristics of parents who engage in best-practices and enjoy the highest quality relationships.
A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches". But where it really gets interesting is here:
Yet, some parental characteristics do matter. Political ideology is one of the strongest predictors. Conservative and very conservative parents are the most likely to adopt the parenting practices associated with adolescent mental health. They are the most likely to effectively discipline their children, while also displaying affection and responding to their needs. Liberal parents score the lowest, even worse than very liberal parents, largely because they are the least likely to successfully discipline their children. By contrast, conservative parents enjoy higher quality relationships with their children, characterized by fewer arguments, more warmth, and a stronger bond, according to both parent and child reporting.
That paragraph actually understates the findings compared to the chart just above it, if you click on the link- just look at the stark discontinuity between 'very conservative' and everyone else. In fact the order by political ideology, on parenting quality, is 1) very conservative 2) blank spot 3) conservative 4) moderate 5) very liberal 6) liberal. And I would hazard a guess that this is majorly correlated with the other two, quality of parents' relationship, factors.
Now there's a couple of hypotheses as to why this is- it could be that parenting has just been getting shittier recently, that more conservative types are somewhat insulated from the trend by being, well, conservative, and that there's some population discontinuity between 'liberal' and 'very liberal'. This could be red tribe-blue tribe ethnogenesis manifesting itself in an interesting way- the red tribe adopted adaptive parenting measures, the blue tribe didn't(or alternatively, they both used to share good parenting practices but as part of ethnogenesis the blue tribe is moving away from them, which I guess is pretty close to the first explanation. It seems pretty clear that they didn't both used to have terrible parenting with the red tribe moving away because teen mental health is a relatively newer problem). It could be a regional difference. It could be that, given fertility differences by political ideology, conservative parents have more role models allowing them to more easily adopt good parenting practices. Personally, I lean towards number two, myself- I'm reminded of a section in Irreversible Damage, describing how nearly every girl with rapid onset gender dysphoria had a liberal mother, and some had country club republican/rino fathers but most of the fathers were liberal as well. The section goes on to claim that at least some parents of daughters with ROGD found success in sending their daughter to live with more conservative relatives, resulting in desistance. That's obviously not conclusive, or even particularly strong, evidence(and it's also confounded all to heck by duh), but it's a second datapoint on a trend.
In any case, it seems like the other interesting question raised by this report is, well:
Returning to the present crisis, it would appear as if this scholarship has been forgotten. No effort is being made by leading public health organizations to inform parents about what works to prevent depression, anxiety, or behavioral problems in teens. ...... Expert-led services that could heal relationships—through family or individual therapy, for example—are often not even covered by health insurance, in part because reimbursement rates are too low. Parents are disempowered and sidelined, and yet social science continues to show that their actions, judgments, and relationships are the key to their teen’s mental health.
My assumption is that inscrutable bureaucratic reasons are the main factor in that. But it's worth noting that this is probably the main explanatory factor behind why conservative teens have so much better mental health than liberal ones; after all, the competing "it's smartphones and instagram" hypothesis doesn't explain this. And even if you assume parenting doesn't matter much in the long run, it doesn't pass the smell test to say it doesn't affect kids while they're being parented.
Trump is not a vote for restoring norms. That’s just stupid, I’m sorry but Trump did and continues to violate norms regularly. He still won’t concede the 2020 election and J6 may have been small potatoes(it was), but it’s definitely not within the norms.
Now all that being said- democrats are a lot worse. As Scott correctly notes, democratic backsliding in the real world, as opposed to Netflix shows beloved by progressives, is one party that packs the courts and colludes with private media to censor the opposition and finds three felonies a day reasons to go after dissidents after spying on them and ending meritocracy in economic and educational opportunities to distribute spoils to supporting groups. Sort of like what we have with democrats. You know, the things they’re actually literally doing. Not the ones we can imagine Trump doing.
Do you think Erdogan is going around saying he’s ending judicial independence to consolidate his own power?
This is an election between two sets of norm violators. Trump will do far less damage.
I’ve said before- most people have identical views on trans which amount to ‘sure, we should probably humor them most of the time, but they didn’t actually change their sex and we don’t have to humor them all the time’. That goes for both the anti-trans activists and most people who push trans acceptance.
And honestly, that’s what’s showing up here. ‘Wear a dress if it floats your boat, but that doesn’t make your concept of gender a thing that exists’ is an attitude that explains a lot of this.
Does Mass Migration Always and Everywhere Lead to Populist Backlash?
No. It does not. I grew up in Texas during the era when the great replacement was just a factual thing that was happening, in circles which were not generally politically correct. Everyone knew we were going to have a Mexican plurality and be bilingual and the like soon. People grumbled a bit, but Trump still underperformed in 2016.
I remember my father ranting about how the Mexicans were more like the orientals(specific to vietnam war refugees) and chinamen(could also be koreans) of his childhood than like the blacks, who he thought shouldn't have full liberty of movement for crime control reasons. I recall blue collar workers talking about the need to learn Spanish to get on in their workplaces. I remember in school having to translate Spanish advertisements because that'll be the world we live in. And everyone was, if not happy about this, at least OK with it.
Of course there was grumbling about Hispanic customs like "having five names", but also praise of them for "being willing to work- you(young hydro) should take after that part". I remember people who now had to learn to speak Spanish, but also talking about how they go to church(which we should do more of, you are to understand from that part) and work hard and respect their bosses and the police. I recall lots of favorable comparison to local blacks, and griping that we(whites) brought it on ourselves by being too good to kill chickens for a living. And I remember even fairly low on the totem poll, people would say things like 'most of them are good people, I don't know about kicking them out'.
The current round of Texas border security is mostly after Haitians started arriving at the border en masse- and the core red tribe can check a map and note that walking to the border from Haiti has significant levels of geographic impossibility, so this is obviously a plot by the UN/Biden admin to hurt Texas by making us care for millions of non-contributing and criminally inclined blacks and centracos from who knows where. 'Somebody's paying for these people to come here and we can't even figure out what language they speak'. In my childhood, when it was all Mexicans? Nobody cared. The decent thing to do, up until after covid, when you found out someone was here illegally, was to not have heard it. Pre-fentanyl, pre-news headlines about people from 'not Mexico but countries south of there' busting through the border in organized groups.
Some people assimilate better than others. Canada turned racist because their newcomers were subcontinental; Britain turned racist because their newcomers, uh, set up rape gangs that the authorities allowed to operate with impunity on explicitly racial lines. In Texas? The Mexican restaurants where you can't order in English serve brisket and barbecue places offer Mexican street corn(which is, in fairness, delicious). White teenagers flirt in Spanish and switch to English when they hit the extent of their knowledge. Mexicans vote republican now. If Canada had opened their borders to Mexico and Vietnam instead of India, Trudeau would still have a job.
I don't know what my point is, it's an inebriated rant against a budding consensus on the Motte. I guess it's that there is no instinctive racism bone in Anglosphere countries that kicks in when things get extreme enough?
This is anecdotal, but I spent the weekend with deep red tribe boomercons who just a few years ago would have been talking about the need to hit Iran before they can hit us- the sentiment was that the USA is fucked up and overextended with a government that’s increasingly telling lies to try to drag out their time before the music stops, foreign entanglements are mostly wrongheaded, and the government is as hostile to its own people as to anyone else. ‘Crimea is part of Russia but I don’t like Russia. Ukraine needs to admit they lost.’ ‘Israel is a wealthy country and should pay cash for their weapons.’ ‘The government and the media lie to us about race to cover up for the dysfunction in black culture, why should we take the blame for it? Without whites they’d be living in mud huts, or be someone else’s slaves.’ ‘The government is importing as many illegals as possible to make it look like economic growth so they can get away with running up a deficit.’
Just a few years ago it would be ‘the economy will get better, all this gay stuff’ll blow over, we need to hem Russia in on the world stage’. The red tribe disillusionment with the federal government is real, and since recruiting is mostly from the red tribe, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t affecting recruiting.
Major changes to the Vatican's org chart over the past week and a half or so seem worthy of a top level comment.
The centerpiece of the story is the appointment of Archbishop(soon to be cardinal) Victor "Tucho" Manuel Fernandez as head of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, a hybrid doctrine chief and internal affairs head position and de facto the second most powerful man in the Catholic Church. This comes on the heels of the previous head's term having been expired for six months as Cardinal Muller threatened a coup attempt over the attempt to appoint a German ultraliberal(https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2022/12/cardinals-block-appointment-of-heiner.html). Initial criticism of Archbishop Fernandez centered on boring things like having authored a book of poetry called "Heal me with your mouth: the art of kissing" and appearing to have ghostwritten his own job offer letter, but this rapidly changed to criticism of his absolutely terrible record of handling sex abuse cases. Most of this criticism centers around his handling of the allegations against Fr Eduardo Lorenzo, which even he can't seem to defend(https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-argentina-fernandez-abuse-case-5d80d28a77290807ce762963ccb75350), but less reliable sources have stronger allegations- Argentine far left wingers claim he covered up an additional eleven abuse cases. He has also received some criticism over his theological orthodoxy, which is relevant to being the head of the Vatican's doctrine office(https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cdl-muller-reveals-vatican-doctrine-office-had-a-red-flag-file-on-incoming-chief-abp-fernandez/).
The other major story is the appointment by pope Francis of 18 new voting cardinals(https://www.usccb.org/news/2023/pope-names-21-cardinals-including-us-born-archbishop-prevost), to bring the number to 137 at the end of the year out of a canonical cap of 120 voting cardinals. This is, in itself, not unprecedented- the only pope within living memory who abided by the cap on number of voting cardinals was Paul VI, who did so by raising the cap, although Benedict XVI made significant efforts to come closer to following it(and this, as an aside, is a decent microcosm of the recent history of the Catholic Church), but the scale by which he exceeds the number of cardinals is notable, as is the relative lack of notability of many of his appointments- soon-to-be cardinal Aguiar is an auxiliary bishop(assistant bishop assigned to a diocese considered particularly large or important), and even more rarely a non-bishop has been appointed cardinal- Fr Angel Fernandez Artime. The most controversial appointments are bishop Aguiar- for claiming that the church does not want to convert young people, although he claims to have been misinterpreted- and bishop Chow of Hong Kong, who is considered close to the Chinese communist party. Also notable is Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, head of the dicastery for eastern churches(department of eastern rite Catholicism, basically), although this is mostly because eastern rite Catholicism is generally on rather bad terms with pope Francis for a variety of reasons, some of them reasonable and some of them stupid. It's also probably reasonable to point out that multiple traditional cardinal positions were snubbed this go round, and had been last go round, including the archdiocese of LA and the patriarch/major archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church.
Additionally the pope has named his delegates to the Synod of bishops on synodality(the translation from jargon is literally if uncharitably "committee meeting bishops on having committee meetings"), including such notable Americans as Fr. James Martin SJ and Bishop Robert Barron. Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who will be attending as a voting member, is also a minor culture war figure(https://www.usccb.org/news/2023/pope-appoints-hundreds-attend-synod-bishops-synodality). Another important figure is, surprisingly, Cardinal Muller.
Cardinal Mateo Zuppi's attempt to broker a peace deal in Ukraine has also wrapped up, to the surprise of no one with nothing to show for it. As Cardinal Zuppi is a top contender in the conclave everyone expects to come soon(Pope Francis has been hospitalized for major issues twice this calendar year), this is likely relevant- he has egg on his face from accepting an assignment that was forseeably a waste of time to appease the vanity of an unpopular pope. Notably the other top contender for next pope, Cardinal Erdo, refused the mission.
What's the conclusion? Probably that Pope Francis doesn't expect to live for much longer and is prioritizing a continuation of his regime after his death over things like precedent or making meaningful improvements to concrete level problems facing the RCC, in the face of significant unpopularity even among the ideologically sympathetic. Cardinal Muller continues to hold his role as de facto head of the opposition, and it's unclear what his threshold for attempting a coup is- likely there are candidates at the next conclave which would trigger it, such as the Portuguese Cardinal Mendonca.
Uh, hate to break it to you, but this guy’s plan was way to functional and well thought out for him to be a random schizo.
Some Kind of Brouhaha over Trans Kids in Texas
I'm not actually sure what the one sentence summary is here, so bear with me. https://thetexan.news/issues/social-issues-life-family/paxton-investigates-texas-childrens-hospital-following-second-child-gender-modification-whistleblower/article_d61a2ece-2e6b-11ef-aeaa-cf9abce1d2a4.html
Following reporting from Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, of another gender modification whistleblower at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH), the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) has launched an investigation into the issue.
According to Rufo, he received information from a second whistleblower that “doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital were willing to falsify medical records and break the law to keep practicing ‘gender-affirming care.’”
So two whistleblowers told Chris Rufo that a children's hospital in Texas was doing gender transitions in violation of the law, and he got Paxton to open an investigation. Ok, page five story. Their names are Ethan Haim and Vanessa Sivadge.
According to Sivadge, TCH was “unlawfully billing the state Medicaid program” for the purposes of child gender modification.
Again, kind of boring, but public funds were supposedly being illegally redirected to do illegal things(remember, gender modification is considered child abuse in Texas).
Here's where it gets interesting:
Following Sivadge talking with Rufo, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sent agents to her home to “intimidate and threaten her,” in Rufo’s words.
Rufo also previously reported on the first TCH whistleblower, Eithan Haim, who alleged that TCH has continued to provide “gender-affirming care” to minor children.
Since then, Haim has been visited by agents of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and has been indicted on four felony counts of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.
So the federal DOJ stands accused of, basically, witness intimidation to enable medicaid fraud. Meanwhile, the Texas government is investigating the hospital for medicaid fraud.
Now, fraudulent medical billing isn't the most interesting story in the world. But the accusations of FBI witness intimidation are https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/06/18/whistleblower-surgeon-trans-kids-gender-affirming-care-texas/74075234007/
Haim recorded evidence of the hospital's ongoing care and passed it on to Rufo. Haim says he redacted any patient information that would violate HIPAA. On May 16, 2023, City Journal published Rufo's story that included Haim's anonymous account of what he witnessed at the hospital. The Texas Legislature then officially banned transgender medical interventions on minors.
Our first whistleblower claims that his releases didn't violate HIPAA; no doubt he didn't air personally identifiable information in the media. But three felonies a day and all; there might well be a crime involved.
Our second whistleblower is more interesting https://nypost.com/2024/06/19/us-news/texas-nurse-alleges-fbi-threatened-her-for-blowing-whistle-on-transgender-care-of-kids/
Vanessa Sivadge, who is a nurse at Texas Children’s Hospital, said the alleged feds “promised they would make life difficult” for her and that she was “not safe at work” after she started speaking out about the facility’s gender affirming care practices.
That sounds... pretty bad.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating her allegations, a spokesperson for his office told The Post.
This could get interesting, if Texas is actually(which this may be bluster, taken out of context, whatever) investigating federal agents for witness intimidation in a medicaid fraud case.
Okay, my curiosity is piqued. What does this phrase mean?
It doesn’t. Or more specifically, it’s a political slogan that can mean any of 20+ things, few of which are specific to trans kids. It could mean ‘I’m a good blue triber’, it could mean ‘the lgbt+ community can do no wrong, literally’, etc, etc. political slogans don’t always have a specific meaning.
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This is, of course, a blatant lie. I understand why that lie is getting made here, of course- TW is trying to get liberals to pay attention instead of ‘lalala anti white discrimination isn’t a real thing in the real world affirmative action is just undoing prior discrimination I can’t hear you’. But it is still a lie, and it’s a lie that won’t work.
Obviously, we can imagine if the roles were reversed. But I think it’s more reasonable to imagine a different cultural group, and a specific one, that isn’t favored by TPTB. Let’s go with Mormons; they’re an actually unpopular group that probably does suffer from some light discrimination, and it’s readily imaginable to think that they could do something like that. Do you really believe that an officially-unofficial Mormon whisper network gaming resume acceptance in a meritocratic-for-good reason field like aviation would go unnoticed? How about requiring you to have lived rough in a foreign country(mission year) to sit for the exam when it’s totally irrelevant? Prioritizing applicants from a not-highly-regarded program at BYU because of probably technically illegal collusion between the LDS aviation association and the FAA?
Nobody will ever get punished for this and it’s all who/whom, and that’s a damn shame for the smart, capable blacks who already made it. It also sucks for whatever white applicants lost out. But it sucks even more for the people affected by the accidents.
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