hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
2mo ago
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.
hydroacetylene
9mo ago
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.
hydroacetylene
9mo ago
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.
hydroacetylene
9mo ago
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.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
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.
hydroacetylene
6mo ago
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.
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
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.
hydroacetylene
5mo ago
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?
hydroacetylene
6mo ago
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.
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.
To be clear, progressives don’t have an answer for this. The case for conservative views on trans is at least coherent enough to put in simple words- a woman is a biologically female adult human, trans women by definition are not that, ergo trans women are not women. The case for progressive views on trans is not that, and the inability to write definitions of ‘woman’ that are both meaningful and trans-inclusive is the reason why.
hydroacetylene
9mo ago
So why are we spending trillions trying to nibble at the edges when we could spend billions and achieve much better results. We can cool the climate to an acceptable level while we wait for the carbon removal technology that is the only way to fully solve the problem.
Because the point of 'climate advocacy' isn't controlling the weather. It's demanding every left wing idea under the sun get enacted, and spending trillions to do it. See also: nuclear energy.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
Attempting to summarize the ideas of red tribe normies around me
-Putin is not popular. Russophiles are acknowledged to exist but seen in the same way hardcore conspiracy theorists in, say, 2010 would be. That being said, ‘Russia is our enemy but Ukraine is not our friend’ is a good summary of the popular consciousness.
-Most people are aware that EG Poland and Greece are much poorer than the US per capita but believe that France, Germany, the UK, etc have lower personal incomes mostly due to very high tax rates and that these societies have similar resources to Marshall for defense to the US once you adjust for population size. There is little sympathy for euro defense budgets.
-This is the main military recruitment demographic in the U.S., especially for the combat branches. There is no appetite whatsoever for their sons coming home in body bags. On the other hand, most believe that in the event of a major war a draft is just, necessary, and correct. That it would be extremely unpopular is something politicians should consider before putting boots on the ground. The cultural memory of stop lossing and national guard deployments abroad is alive and well.
-Most support America as #1, hate and fear red China, and believe Islam needs to be repressed. But there is widespread disapproval of the, uh, social and cultural goals associated with US foreign policy.
-Japanese rearmament is extremely popular; so are Israeli and South Korean conscription. France, Germany, Britain, etc are viewed as freeloaders that should follow their example instead of relying on American protection. Many think they should cut their welfare budgets to pay for it. British and German hate speech laws are widely hated and seen as evidence that they don’t share our values.
-Most accept that non-US powers are allowed to have interests and advocate for them. But they do not want the US to advocate for the interests of these countries, or fund those interests.
hydroacetylene
5mo ago
The majority of the J6 prisoners had the book thrown at them for minor crimes and impartially enforcing the laws against your own kin is a lot to ask- on the contrary, I think the pardon power is fine. Instead, weaponization of the justice system is the problem- and most of the j6 defendants would already be out without it.
hydroacetylene
6mo ago
It is illegal to kill the poor, and in point of fact the pro-life movement is fighting(and, it must be said, generally losing this fight) against the killing of the elderly and chronically ill. There is nothing inconsistent about being pro-life; this is simply a very progressive man dressing up his progressivism in the guise of Christian religion. There’s nothing particularly unique about this; lots of people wrap their ideology in the trappings of local religions. There’s also little that’s particularly Christian; no doubt this pastor would point out, accurately, that Jesus wants us to be better people. But so does Confucius and Kant and Aristotle and president trump and, presumably, Chuck E. Cheese. Jesus also wants us to believe in Him and bring all nations to belief in Him, and I doubt this pastor mentions that part much.
hydroacetylene
10mo ago
Feminists give horrible advice like this all the time. I’m not sure why they do this; most seem to think there’s a noble lie involved.
I 100% guarantee you this woman would find an offer of menstrual products creepy and off putting, and that she will not talk about her period IRL any more than she would talk about shitting or blowing her nose.
hydroacetylene
10mo ago
Imane Khalid is not trans. There’s a reasonable- but not ironclad- argument that she has an intersex condition which should preclude her from competing in the women’s division, but she just objectively isn’t trans.
hydroacetylene
1mo ago
The actual lyrics of the song are 'I still can't see my children, niggers see my twitter but they don't see how I be feeling, so I became a nazi yay bitch I'm the villain, nigger heil Hitler, they don't understand the things I say on twitter nigger heil Hitler nigger heil Hitler they don't understand the things I say on twitter all my niggers nazis nigger heil Hitler'. This is not political commentary it's lashing out. He's still framing the nazis as villains.
I agree that the WWII taboo is fading. I don't think a mentally ill black man identifying with Hitler in an act of rebellion is the sign thereof.
hydroacetylene
2mo ago
The school board wasn’t thinking. They’re teachers and they were going with the flow. It is literally incomprehensible to teachers that ‘the experts’, however defined, can be wrong. Like if you suggest it they’ll stare at you blankly, literally not understanding the words you just said. And the experts suggested kids should be taught this stuff, so teachers concluded ‘parents who want to shield their toddlers from learning about BDSM should lose custody of their kids’ instead of ‘the experts should be shot’.
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
What is actually wrong with working at a nail factory? It’s not advice I would give to a bright young man, but, like, somebody has to be willing to work at a nail factory, and the continuing availability of nails is more vital to our civilization than further refinements in advertising software.
There are plenty of people who aren’t college material and aren’t cut out for the trades or the army. What would you have them do? A factory job is usually a step up from McDonald’s. It’s better than being a welfare parasite.
hydroacetylene
2mo ago
Obviously this situation is retarded- did you expect blue collar workers doing nasty, physically demanding, unpleasant, and not well esteemed work were in it for the exercise? Self-fulfillment?
I suspect these coullions literally did think that garbage collectors and grave diggers went to work because they’d be bored otherwise. It certainly seems like the class behind wokeness has no concept of ‘people go to work so they aren’t homeless beggars’.
Individual citizens can call their council members and burn their trash(yeah, it probably takes a ‘not getting the plague’ license). Not a lot to be done though.
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
Or, every child with an accommodations plan is labeled as special Ed, and huge numbers of kids have fraudulent ADHD diagnoses because higher grades are worth the side effects of aderal to their parents.
hydroacetylene
7mo ago
Uh, normie Twitter is very much a thing. Sports and pop culture and local news that isn’t about politics is pretty easy to come by.
hydroacetylene
8mo ago
Trump is associating himself with working at McDonald’s, not with it as a cornerstone of the American diet. One in eight Americans have worked at McDonald’s- statistically, Trump is showing that he’s not too good for an incredibly common American experience.
Now obviously it’s a campaign stunt. But it’s a clever campaign stunt that plays into his Everyman image.
hydroacetylene
10mo ago
NPR is playing to its audience. It’s basically a partisan rag at this point.
Anti trump propaganda dressed up as neutral think pieces is just the lay of the land now.
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:
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:
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.
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