hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
19d ago
I hate the political angle on this. It feels leftist to me that “if we just had more schools/spent more money” we would not have “maga/disinformation problem” instead of most of things being fundamental disagreements.
Ironically, right wingers in America do much better on the ideological Turing test than left wingers. There’s no actual reason for the sometime leftist assumption that if conservatives would just get out of their bubbles, they would calm down.
I’m reminded of an article a few years ago, by a progressive pointing to the 30-40% of the country which he claimed was obstinately convinced that democrats wanted to do a short laundry list of perennial conservative complaints- all of which were regularly being floated by mainstream democrats and had large support in their base. He was of course oblivious to the idea that more exposure of conservatives to people who wanted to take their guns away would not in fact convince them no one was coming for their guns.
hydroacetylene
19d ago
The problem with our Covid response was the urban/rural divide.
No, the problem with our Covid response was that it was damn stupid and full of lies, not in the sense of being mistaken but in the sense of being knowably false and told for political purposes.
hydroacetylene
21d ago
In the US, no, I don’t get the sense of Islam as being a common ‘get religion’ thing at all. Most Americans still think of Islam as uniquely predisposed to violence and savagery, converts to Islam mostly come from prison, and Americans who want to make the sacrifices required by Islam can join Mormonism for something 10,000X more appealing and less foreign.
Now I don’t think the dogmas of Islam are the reason- people bring up female submission and the like but the fact remains that women immigrated to join IS from first world countries. That doesn’t happen in any other case, ever. You don’t have women immigrating to Iraq and Syria unless they plan on joining IS. Likewise Mormons have no problem getting converts who are willing to give up alcohol and caffeine.
Instead Islam is just foreign and a refuge of losers. American Islam has an uphill battle to overcome its association with criminals, barbarians, and lunatics. The Islamic terms in online discourse come from MemriTV, well known for its general insanity, after all.
hydroacetylene
24d ago
University of Texas Austin Fires dozens of DEI-related employees
https://president.utexas.edu/organizational-changes
The University of Texas is, notoriously, much more liberal than the state for which it is the flagship, and in light of the frequent motte discussion about how conservatives can make whatever laws they want, and progressives will just ignore them, I thought it was worth sharing the abovelinked letter. I guess you need more of a submission statement than that, so I'll begin with picking out a few highlights.
For these reasons, we are discontinuing programs and activities within the Division of Campus and Community Engagement (DCCE) that now overlap with our efforts elsewhere. Following these changes, the scale and needs of the remaining DCCE activities do not justify a stand-alone division. As a result, we are closing DCCE and redistributing the remaining programs. This means that we will continue to operate many programs with rich histories spanning decades, such as disability services, University Interscholastic League, the UT charter schools, and volunteer and community programs. Going forward, these programs will be part of other divisions where they complement existing operations. We know these programs and the dedicated staff who run them will continue to have positive impacts on our campus and community.
Additionally, funding used to support DEI across campus prior to SB 17’s effective date will be redeployed to support teaching and research. As part of this reallocation, associate or assistant deans who were formerly focused on DEI will return to their full-time faculty positions. The positions that provided support for those associate and assistant deans and a small number of staff roles across campus that were formerly focused on DEI will no longer be funded.
Now I would prefer it if those deans focused on DEI were offered the opportunity of becoming janitors or being summarily terminated, and called the RINOs representing me to the state requesting that change to SB17, but it's, undeniably, an effect, and a fairly significant one given that my impression is that academics really resent having to actually teach classes and prefer to do either pure research or at least focus on passing asspulls off as research, and also that DEI programs seem to have providing comfortable employment as a primary goal over actually doing anything. I'd also like to point towards teaching and research being the actual functions of a university, and even if these people could be replaced with less odious professors requiring them to be mission focused is a major improvement.
And, to note, this is an effect began with the state legislature banning DEI, and not for some other reason, or at least that's what the letter opens by assuring us.
Soon after the passage last year of Senate Bill 17 — which prohibits many activities around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — the University embarked on a multiphase process to review campus portfolios and end or redesign the policies, programs, trainings, and roles affected by the new law. Our initial focus was to ensure we made the required changes by SB 17’s January 1 effective date, but we knew that more work would be required to utilize our talent and resources most effectively in support of our teaching and research missions, and ultimately, our students.
Since that date, we have been evaluating our post-SB 17 portfolio of divisions, programs, and positions. The new law has changed the scope of some programs on campus, making them broader and creating duplication with long-standing existing programs supporting students, faculty, and staff. Following those reviews, we have concluded that additional measures are necessary to reduce overlap, streamline student-facing portfolios, and optimize and redirect resources into our fundamental activities of teaching and research.
It's worth noting the UT's endowment is literally the size of Harvard's, and so 'money problems' is not the secret real reason. I haven't crunched the numbers on this, but I suspect that the endowment is big enough relative to operating expenses that UT could just ride out any measures imposed by the state as a noncompliance penalty short of "send in the state troopers and haul faculty out in handcuffs". Not that I'd put the latter past the state, but UT would be extremely reasonable to think that that particular measure is not a step one in the event of a noncompliant university and so they'd kind of have a while to drag their feet.
CNN is reporting that the total number of staff cut is unknown(https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/us/university-texas-austin-cutting-dei-jobs-reaj/index.html)
Brian Davis, a university spokesman, declined to provide the number of jobs that are being eliminated. Davis told CNN in an email that the university would not comment beyond Hartzell’s letter.
And that same article also gave me material for a minirant:
One student said Tuesday she was saddened by the news of staff jobs being cut. Aaliyah Barlow, president of the university’s Black Student Alliance, said she feels discouraged by the disinvestment in DEI-related jobs and programs.
“Me personally, I cried,” Barlow said. “The fact that I am going to come back here next year and all the staff members I know and all the programs I value are just going to be gone, it’s very disheartening. I feel like my college experience is ruined.”
Ma'am, you going to college is not about the experience. It's not about enrichment or programs you value- it's about you getting an education. Now I suspect that the president of a university black student alliance is getting an education in something extremely low value, but still- the government isn't funding college to make students feel valued and empowered and grant them a fun experience. The need to offer more fun, luxurious experiences to students seems like a part of cost disease in higher education that makes life worse for everyone who can't afford the ludicrous pricetag. Honestly, if I had my way, students at government-funded universities would be required to live in the same conditions as enlisted members of the military, with barracks and early morning calisthenics, for at least the first year, and barred from using loans or government funding to finance any lifestyle improvements or extracurriculars past that.
Rant over. Discussion prompts- is this a falsification of the narrative, so popular on the motte, that it doesn't matter how conservative a government is, it can't stop the cathedral from doing whatever it damn well pleases? Is this evidence of the cathedral being less monolithically progressive than commonly believed? Is it some Texas specific factor?
hydroacetylene
23d ago
I don’t particularly want HBD to be true, either, but it doesn’t actually say you, personally, are low in intelligence. It says black people are more likely to be low in intelligence compared to other races. That doesn’t mean we think George Washington Carver was secretly a white man pulling a Black Like me. It means that on average there are fewer George Washington Carvers than Henry Fords. I mean this is the motte; our average is a white guy 3 standard deviations smarter than the average White guy.
Nor do I think American blacks are performing near their intellectual limit given America’s context- cultural problems are a bigger factor. And nor are American blacks that badly off right now either. They have a standard of living similar to the average in Western Europe instead of much higher like white Americans. Obviously I think they’d prefer to have a higher one, but having a standard of living similar to France or Germany isn’t a catastrophe. And most of the other problems they face are either hallucinated(many of the claims about police violence) or culturally self-imposed.
hydroacetylene
18d ago
Alright- halfhearted defense of India. I don't want to live there(I mean, I live in the financial capital of a core province of the wealthiest society in history, I really don't want to move), but it's not as bad as Haiti. India is a rising power and it's made massive progress in things like sanitation and economic growth. Given that it's burdened with like a billion people with sub-90 IQ's, it's actually kind of impressive that India is able to consistently make progress despite its admittedly low baseline.
Yes, the rural north is like, sub-saharan Africa level sucky. I won't deny that. And Indian immigrants do their fair share of fraud to get to live in nicer countries. I certainly don't begrudge Canadians for not liking their new neighbors much. But, uh, if I had the misfortune to be born in India- and India is nowhere near the worst place to be born, Haiti, Somalia, Eritrea, North Korea, Afghanistan all seem like they're strong contenders and we just notice India so much more because of the sheer size, for that matter it seems like Pakistan and Bangladesh are both suckier than India- I think I'd have as a top goal "living in a first world country". It's kind of hard to blame random Punjabis for having a flexible arrangement to the truth in trying to move to Canada(and yes, I do find it hard to blame Guatemalans who walk to the border and make fake asylum claims even if I'd rather they stay put). And India seems like it's genuinely improving, albeit slowly. To be fair to them, there's a lot of inertia holding them back.
hydroacetylene
14d ago
To be clear, if you are white and will be spending all day in the sun, rashguards, broad brimmed hats, and sun blocking sleeves are a very good idea even with sunscreen.
hydroacetylene
7d ago
He believed The Simpsons was sending coded messages about an impending global totalitarian government. That’s much crazier than average.
hydroacetylene
8d ago
I believe the answer from a leviathan shaped hole perspective is that the local baron is a face to be appealed to directly who can solve the coordination problem leading to arbitrary tyranny directly.
I've met elected officials, I've met aristocrats(well, pretenders to the same- individuals with the bloodlines to call themselves nobles but without the state recognizing their title). Honestly I can't tell you whether the graf von whatever or the representative for bumfuck wherever is more of a reasonable person on average- I suspect they come from basically similar social strata and are basically similar people. But an aristocrat at the very least has a bigger bully pulpit to get bureaucrats to back down on their vogonity and probably has legal privileges in a monarchist society to effect the same.
Now in practice I think it's more complicated; 'if only the tsar knew' is a meme for a reason. But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.
hydroacetylene
18d ago
There’s no actual strict definition of either subspecies or race(and for that matter species doesn’t have a particularly strict definition in practice, either).
Referring to blacks or East Indians as a different subspecies would mark you out as an absurd racist(and kulak is, to be fair, pretty racist). But that’s not because the idea is scientifically absurd(although I suspect the most scientifically supported subspecies would not match cleanly onto typical racial groupings). It’s because the very statement is a political one.
hydroacetylene
26d ago
Being autistic is very literally not rape. Saying creepy shit out of social awkwardness is worth discouraging, but it's not an indication that a man is about to commit rape.
hydroacetylene
12d ago
Yes, this will cost lots of money, but Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending.
This is the one thing Europe will never, ever do.
hydroacetylene
12d ago
t will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.
No, it will not. Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe for the foreseeable future- it was before the war, and getting bombed flat didn’t help. It’s poorer than South Africa. Even third worlders do not want to live there, and if forced to- well, they’re third worlders, they can walk from there to a nicer country- which is such a low bar to clear that it includes the entirety of the balkans. Notably, Romania and Bulgaria, which are both several times wealthier than Ukraine, have functionally no third world migrants.
You have to be at least as wealthy as Mexico or Russia to attract migrants. Ukraine is as poor compared to those countries as they are to the US and Germany.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
So they were in a no-win position.
Joe could have ignored it. Joe could have wished a happy dual celebration of Easter and trans pride day. Joe could have not banned religious themes from Easter egg contests for military families at the same time.
hydroacetylene
27d ago
My state offers heavily subsidized childcare
Free childcare is not actually an inducement to have children. It’s a subsidy for moms to work.
Moms have a strong revealed preference to work less and spend more time being a mom. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in a capitalist economy that results in some unfair-on-the-surface outcomes, and you can’t paper over them. It’s much easier to make mothers miserable so you can claim their career outcomes are where you want them.
hydroacetylene
8d ago
I’m going to push back- everything predictable tells us that the optimal game theoretic move for dem policy priorities would be for sotomayor to resign right now. The DNC is weak in the senate and probably performing at or slightly above their ceiling right now, but manchin and tester and brown all vote for dem judicial nominees in a way their replacements, almost certainly republicans, most assuredly will not. And sixteen years is an average, not a hard rule- there’s a good chance of living less than that. Democrats shouldn’t count on being able to fix their heartland problem and our next president will probably be trump.
I also think dem justices are basically interchangeable- the current fashion is low talent partisan hacks like KJB.
hydroacetylene
17d ago
Skookum got banned for one issue posting, and I think we've had a pro-pedophile poster and the teen liberation guy banned under it as well. It's definitely not a common think to get banned for, but it's been used before.
hydroacetylene
25d ago
I see the far left picking fights with damn near everyone. The right, on the other hand, very rarely targets the center left- it’s usually the activist left that winds up in our crosshairs.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum.
The current system of requiring a college degree with an education specialization is also extra friction and expense compared to the previous system of letting school officials hire 16 year old girls and use their judgement to pick which ones would be any good at it.
hydroacetylene
10d ago
I am not a construction worker. But I have been a construction worker(pre-pandemic), work in a trade that is sometimes categorized as construction, my grandpa was a GC who retired recently, and I’ve overseen minor construction projects recently. A few points:
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Construction workers in general have always been unreliable people who have lots of no call no shows, sometimes for months at a time, waste materials, do things other than the ones they say they’re going to do when not supervised, and just disappear for long stretches at a time. Also lots of them do drugs, because the industry has never tested, so there’s plenty of them with what the industry refers to as ‘crackhead tendencies’. This has gotten worse with the supply crunch for blue collar labor, and ‘crackhead tendencies’ make already-rising labor costs rise exponentially because the guy demanding to be paid early because he’s out of cigarettes(he was paid on Friday and ran out of money Saturday morning) now has a lot more negotiating power than he used to.
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Lumber rose and then fell to where inflation would predict it should be. Everything else stayed high, and concrete in particular is ludicrously expensive right now. The usual construction industry explanation is that Amazon buys up all the supply for building warehouses.
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In addition to the labor issues I already noted, construction is one of the least pleasant jobs that’s widely available. In a general blue collar labor crunch construction will see a particular supply drain, which introduces lots of delays that the customer pays for.
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Construction costs rise partly because construction foremen and contractors have no incentive to keep costs down- everything just gets billed back to the customer so nobody cares. Yes, that means the customer eats the bill for lots of waste, dishonesty, and sometimes theft(remember, plenty of the workers are literal crackheads).
Put all that together and it’s not really a mystery why construction is particularly affected by the post pandemic inflation and enshittification.
hydroacetylene
13d ago
If a kind fairy made you absolute ruler of your country, what batshit crazy out of left field ideas would you implement? We’re assuming that you can’t be overthrown or stymied by the deep state, but have only the normal powers of the government and other actors for your country’s coordination problems don’t necessarily listen to you.
As for me, a few ideas-
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declare that police racism is caused by angry confederate ghosts and that by appeasing them we can prevent police racism. To this end have sweet tea, Marlboros, fried chicken, etc left on confederate graves and monuments and put all of Dukes of Hazard in the library of congress. Trumpet anything and everything that could be considered improvement in race relations as a victory of this policy. This is because ‘hey, police shootings are actually nothing to worry about’ is simply not a narrative that will catch on, but an outlet of superstition can make intractable problems seem acceptable.
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Ban federal funds from supporting university education for anyone without an associates degree from a community college first, including by guaranteeing debt- most people who obtain student debt without a degree drop out in the first two years, so forcing people who would otherwise borrow to complete community college will minimize the amount of new pointless student debt.
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Pay already-canceled celebrities to go on racist rants using foreign racial slurs like ‘preto’ and ‘kafir’ so the n-word will lose its racial connotation as it morphs into a general very harsh swearword(which it kind of already is) similar to the c-word. This way future controversies caused by this use can avoid harming race relations.
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Require any school getting federal funding to give equal time to any gender, sex Ed, or civil rights lessons to curricula designed by popular boomercon figures like Mike Rowe and Dave Ramsey. Either the schools teach things the kids could stand hearing, or they stop teaching stupidity like what actually gets pushed in the former category. Win-win.
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Repeal Marbury v Madison to take the federal government out of hot button issues(which, let’s be real, are very rarely passed by congress).
hydroacetylene
17d ago
Uhh, I don't think the single issue posting rule means he can't go back to posting about the topic he enjoys, as long as he posts about other things too, does it? I mean he's allowed to deny the holocaust here even if it's clearly stupid and wrong, and he did post about other things.
hydroacetylene
25d ago
The elders do however have a much more comprehensive panopticon these days, through the electronic leash.
hydroacetylene
26d ago
I think you’ve got to look at it this way- feminism is a class interest movement for college educated liberal urbanites. It is not, and hasn’t been for years, about women qua women. You’ll notice feminists are typically very concerned about rape on college campuses and blissfully ignorant of rape in the military, any guesses as to which one actually happens at above average rates? It’s because the type of women(and it is mostly but not entirely women) feminism represents pretty much all go to college and very rarely spend time in the military.
So with that in mind, ‘teach men not to rape’ is about generating assabiyah within the cohort. It’s a form of indoctrination into class interest through a universal right of passage for the group feminism is intended to represent. It’s not really about rape prevention; liberal sexual norms and substances can’t really be combined without having a rape problem(and I am not claiming that that’s the only way you have a rape problem- see the military, above. I’m claiming that it’s probably impossible to reduce the incidence of rape in heavily feminist-influenced strata below where it already is because of it, and the low hanging fruit has mostly been picked).
Now that being said, there’s probably men somewhere who could be influenced not to rape by consent-based sex Ed. Picture a fresh off the boat afghani migrant, for example- this guy probably literally doesn’t know that a girl walking down Main Street unescorted with her hair showing isn’t a hooker. It’s just not what consent based sex Ed is aimed at doing.
Ethan Crumbley Parents Found Guilty of Manslaughter
Ethan Crumbley is a school shooter who killed four people. This does not make him unique. What makes him unique is that his parents have been found guilty of manslaughter for it. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/16/us/james-jennifer-crumbley-trials-differences/index.html
The legal theory is that the parents were extraordinarily negligent- and, TBH, at least the mom seems to have been a shitty parent who ignored her son's obvious mental illness- and provided a firearm to their son despite clear evidence he was at least a potential danger to others. I don't think this legal theory is particularly novel even if it's rarely used; when I took my CHL class in much more firearms-friendly Texas I was told that if I provided a minor with a handgun, I could be held liable should they kill someone with it. But on to some article quotes:
So his father was convicted under the idea that he had a positive responsibility to store firearms in a way inaccessible to a mentally ill teenaged boy. I'm not an expert on Michigan law, but I'm pretty sure that the letter of the law says something along those lines in most states, and it would be very difficult to argue that he doesn't have a moral responsibility. But maybe he was a responsible gun owner who took measures to keep his troubled son away from household guns that a reasonable person would expect to be sufficient:
Nevermind. While I'm leery of the precedent this sets for obvious reasons, I have no trouble acknowledging that James Crumbley deserves to go to prison and, were I a juror, I'd probably have voted to convict. On to the mom's case.
This does not paint a picture of good parenting. Furthermore,
IANAL, but Jennifer Crumbley's legal defense strategy sounds sufficiently suboptimal that she seems to just have generally very bad judgement, maybe the mental illness runs in the family. That being said, I'm a lot less comfortable with the legal logic here- being a generally shitty parent who has bad judgement and neglects her son's mental health problem isn't illegal. I'm comfortable calling her a shitty parent and saying she should be called out for it but it kinda seems like a novel legal theory of the sort that's generally bad.
Personally I doubt this case will be widely replicated; the Crumbleys seem to have had much-more-damning-than-average facts. But let's go to the general principle; parents sometimes being held responsible when their minor child kills someone doesn't seem terribly controversial, no doubt had they left out a gun and their five year old killed someone using it to play cowboys and indians this would be a rare scenario but not a case that grabbed much attention. And it doesn't seem controversial either that Ethan Crumbley was sufficiently crazy to be less than 100% responsible for his actions. On the other hand, parents of teen murderers getting tried for manslaughter is definitely abnormal; teen murderers almost certainly suffer from distinctly below average parenting, too, although I would expect that in the median case that's due to a single mother's weird work schedule or poverty rather than a wealthy woman neglecting her kid. I think the difference is that these parents had, at least materially, the ability to do better. His mom obviously knew her son was showing signs of being crazy but preferred horses, extramarital affairs, and booze, his dad had a gun safe but didn't store the murder weapon in it(and when I was a teen with my own guns they were required to be stored in my dad's gun safe, which seems like the reasonable policy for your teen owning guns). This wasn't a single mom working a shift that made it hard to pay much attention to her kid, which is a lot closer to the family scenario for most minor criminals and for most mass shooters.
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