naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
the r-slurs and spergs cheer
First off you need to write like you want to include everyone in the conversation, which... shibboleths like this aren't an egregious violation, but they are still a violation of that rule.
The more serious violation, though, is that you're deliberately picking on a very general group, here. The real point of your post is not, it seems, to explain Rick & Morty--which would be fine!--but to dunk on "spergs" because they don't enjoy it on as many levels as you do.
So, don't do that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Coming from a new user account with no posting history, this post is too smug by half.
However, rather than consign it to the spam bin, I'll go ahead and approve it: this place can't be a place to test shady thinking if we simply ban shady thinking.
Substantively, I will simply point out that your point seems to be just what Aristotle was writing about in the Analytica Posteriora:
Thus it is clear that we must get to know the primary premisses by induction; for the method by which even sense-perception implants the universal is inductive.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
As I note in response to HaroldWilson below:
I have no idea who that person might be. Charitably: a top-notch attorney at an important law firm in Washington, D.C., who is capturing most of the "Title IX complaint" market, maybe? The right intake process could probably make this happen. I just have a hard time seeing it actually playing out this way; unless their "sometimes founded" complaints turn into outrageously large payouts on a pretty regular basis, it would be very difficult to fund such a venture. Part of the mystery of averaging 20 complaints a day is, who is funding that?
My only other half-plausible idea is that there is someone out there on retirement or disability or something who is doing stuff like collecting data on student athletes and filing a complaint any time they can find the slightest mathematical discrepancy in apparent sex balances in school athletic programs, or maybe faculty sex ratios or something. I don't know what else they could possibly find 20 complaints a day to file on, or how else they could be funded.
I know there are some bits of legislation out there that essentially pay bounties to people for filing lawsuits (there was a lawyer in California who was making a living for a while going to "ladies night" at bars and demanding equal pricing, then suing when denied, here's the one I think I'm remembering) but I'm not aware of any such setup for Title IX cases.
I wonder if this is something that can be FOIA’d.
I don't know, but my first thought is that these things probably fall under FERPA, which is not as strict a piece of privacy legislation as, say, HIPAA, but it's still pretty strong.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
From Lawfare's account of the arraignment
How the hell is the statute of limitations not featured front-and-center in every analysis of the New York case? It seems to me that this is by far the most serious "calendar issue" on offer. The indictment itself, on its face, cannot possibly go to trial under any sane and impartial judge. Even if you accept the underdeveloped theory elevating prima facie misdemeanors to felonies, the statute of limitations on the relevant felonies is five years, for acts alleged to have occurred almost six years ago.
I have read claims--though importantly, still no actual legal documents!--that the prosecutor will argue that Trump was not personally residing in New York for most of that time, and that the statute of limitations tolls while he's President. But there is no statutory support or judicial precedent for this. Statutes of limitations typically toll when it is impossible to serve process on someone, usually because they have fled the jurisdiction and cannot reasonably be found (i.e. they're dodging service). To the contrary: precedent is that nothing in the law prevents service of process against a sitting president. The Justice Department does not prosecute sitting presidents, but can (and does) investigate them, and can charge them later for crimes committed while in office. So there is no legal support--beyond partisan abuse of process--for tolling the statute of limitations on a state crime just because the accused holds federal office.
This is the stuff of summary judgment (though again, only assuming the New York judiciary isn't also willing to simply cast off the rule of law so long as doing so seems to harm Trump in some way, which may be too much to assume)--meaning if the New York stuff actually goes to trial, justice will already be shown to be inoperative in Trump's case.
Now, the classified documents and the Georgia stuff are something else, and should be considered in light of the specific circumstances of each potential case. But I have a hard time imagining the judges of New York to be so unhinged as to just steamroll the statute of limitations in pursuit of Trump. Even if the trial court judge goes along with it, I would expect Trump's legal team to immediately appeal, potentially all the way to SCOTUS, just for a summary judgment. Since this is a pure question of law, there is no dispute on the relevant facts (dates offered), and even going to trial would constitute a preventable harm, I cannot see this case ever making it to trial. If it does, it will greatly strengthen my priors against the long-term viability of the United States continuing to exist as a single nation, because it will be strong evidence that the courts of New York have degenerated to "kangaroo" status.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Well, but this is the very question I'm asking. What's the appropriate approach, when the truth itself is a memetic superweapon? "Taboo your words" is supposed to be a way to increase clarity--to say, "alright, that word is clearly a sticking point, what if we describe it another way?" If dropping the word "groomer" would get us closer to putting an end to grooming behaviors, I'd be on board with that. But it doesn't seem like dropping "groomer" would win a single step forward in that battle. Rather, it seems like the attempt to tar "groomer" as conspiratorial thinking is an attack on some people's ability to express the problem clearly.
The carrots are not working
The carrots are a big part of the problem.
I feel like we had an AAQC not too long ago about this, but I can't remember the details now. The gist was something like "the opportunity costs of childbearing and childraising are just insanely high and keep getting higher because there are so many other things to do that generate more immediate rewards." In particular, allowing women into the workforce came up, possibly alongside Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap book.
The value of raising children has become the inverse of the "privatize gains, publicize losses" business strategy. People who raise children bear the actual costs of perpetuating civilization, while everyone reaps the reward. We don't valorize motherhood, but perhaps more importantly, we don't punish childlessness.
so there should be sticks implemented
The comment I'm thinking of referenced someone's argument that "I would never do this of course but likely the most effective way, and maybe the only truly effective way, to increase birthrates is to just ban women from the workforce."
EDIT: Oh, hahah, it was my post actually. Here's the quote from the article I linked:
He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
Justices uncritically citing statements in briefs is all too common, but it is not a phenomenon that is unique to any particular justice, nor to justices of any particular political persuasion.
Irrelevant. The question is not whether, or how often, justices uncritically cite statements from amici. The question is whether the statements they write, cited or no, are so obviously stupid that someone at the level of Supreme Court Justice should be smart enough to at least suspect them, and thus perhaps examine them more closely. To be either so stupid or so partisan as to fall prey to "too good to check" is a serious flaw in a jurist. Justice Jackson really does seem to just be kind of stupid, but as I note above--it's possible she's just very good at being dishonest. Given the evidence before me, I don't see any other plausible alternatives.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.
It's super consistent behavior, though; they like attention and they found a larger audience, or they tend to follow the crowd and the crowd changed directions, or, less charitably but perhaps more accurately, they like to bully others and they found a less costly way to be horrible.
I grew up in a religious community. I was always unorthodox, and was treated poorly by a lot of people who were regarded as "upstanding" for their piety. I expressed doubts about God as a kid, so no one is surprised to hear me say such things as an adult. But the same individual people who were most likely to mete out social punishment for my little heresies are still the people most likely to mete out social punishment for my heresies, only now they're various shades of woke and my heresies are political instead of theological.
Whether they've stayed in the faith or separated from it, basically all of them are ultra-orthodox woke advocates now (mostly for LGBT issues, but depending on their circumstances also for a rainbow of disabilities, with autism--or "autism"--and obesity being common pet projects in addition to the usual vapid strains of so-called anti-racism). The ones who haven't blocked me on their social media feeds are still the same bullies they've always been (I assume the same is true for the ones who took the step of blocking me, but I can't guarantee it). No amount of hair dye or piercings can hide the fact that they are still doing everything they can to punish independent thought or questioning of the party line. That it's a different party line is irrelevant except, perhaps, as a "born again" bona fide. As the Wizard sings--"the most celebrated are the rehabilitated..."
Freddie deBoer's "Planet of Cops" tells the story well, though I don't think he ever quite twigs to the shared identity of the conservative cops he complains about, and the woke cops he sees as imitating them. When he criticizes religious conservatives as natural cops, he memorably cites William Burroughs:
William Burroughs summarized the whole social conservative movement perfectly as “decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.”
And my response is: it's still the "decent church-going women" (and, often, men), they still wear mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. Often, literally the same actual people. They just left their old church and joined your new, political not-a-church.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs are some of the most internally consistent people in the world. If feeling morally superior to others and reveling in hating and even seeking the extermination of the right people is something you enjoy, the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
So would you agree that blackface is not "anti-black" per se? Do you believe that caricatures of Jews are not "anti-Semitic" per se?
There are a thousand reasons to dress in drag as a nun other than being anti-Catholic. To criticize certain Catholic doctrines re homosexuality.
Er... maybe we have different ideas about what it means to be "anti-Catholic," but criticizing Catholic doctrines of homosexuality sounds paradigmatically "anti-Catholic" to me. Pushing back on political efforts by the Catholic church seems "anti-Catholic," especially given the Church's long political history.
And, btw, one can criticize the Catholic Church (an enormously powerful institution) without criticizing either Catholics or Catholicism.
Catholics, maybe, but Catholicism? This seems like splitting hairs incredibly fine, to the point of suggesting a motte and bailey doctrine at play. Mockery has long been a highly effective approach to criticism, and criticism is not pro-, it is anti-.
"You can keep your Catholicism, we're just going to level your Church, caricature your symbols, mock your practices--no, we're not anti-Catholic per se, don't be ridiculous!"
That seems implausible to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I'm not sure which of these two is the greater moral failing.
It's not at all clear to me that they are even commensurable. "The Government" is just other people, ultimately. Diffusion of responsibility can create the illusion that the individuals acting on the government's behalf are somehow insulated from blame for morally impermissible activities, but anyone who has seen A Few Good Men knows how thin that illusion can be.
When individuals' understanding of their rights differ, at least one of those people is probably wrong. The realpolitik (or what are sometimes called the "facts of power") are a different consideration; you are right that powerful individuals or groups will often simply impose a view, but that doesn't make it the morally correct view. And often, powerful individuals or groups will regard themselves as bound by morality in ways that are not explainable on the reductive account you've offered here. Your concern has been expressed since ancient times (e.g. Thrasymachus in Republic), and very few moral theorists find it compelling, because it does not appear to capture the way that most people experience morality.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I would like to call for naraburns to commit to not calling people names for disagreeing
Sure, I commit to not calling people names for disagreeing.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
It seems pretty clear to me what happened. The Florida Department of Education of thinks it’s perfectly fine to teach AP Psychology without the gender identity and sexual orientation stuff, and the college board thinks those topics are integral to the course and cannot be omitted.
This is clearly not what happened. The FDE statement doesn't say the gender identity and sexual orientation stuff must be omitted; the relevant law is quite clear that such instruction may be offered in grades 9-12. The College Board appears to be claiming that its material is not age-appropriate for high schoolers, or at least that the Florida Law is likely to deem it so. But there is no apparent basis for the College Board to believe this. The statute is arguably vague, but if they weren't just playing culture war politics the College Board should be arguing that its material is age appropriate, not that the law forbids its inclusion.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Is this just bullshit jobs or is it just that you disagree with the thrust of the work being done?
More the former than the latter, though I am less certain than you seem to be that these are meaningfully different things. I regard most administrative positions in higher education, as well as most federal regulatory positions, as bullshit jobs--specifically, "box tickers" and "taskmasters." When you say "actual things being done and work produced," you're assuming something for which I see no evidence. You can say "those administrators are not just filling holes" but that's very nearly all I ever see them doing--filling out paperwork no one ever likely read, just in case someone else files a lawsuit that will make no substantial difference to anyone except, maybe, a successful plaintiff in search of an easy payday. If it is your position that the litigiousness of American society, and its attendant bloated insurance market, is actually a good thing, then sure--we have a real, substantive value disagreement. But if that's not your position, then your argument here is ill-aimed.
(The "bullshit" part is also substantially demonstrated by 77% of the complaints being made by a single person. I have no idea who that person might be. Charitably: a top-notch attorney at an important law firm in Washington, D.C., who is capturing most of the "Title IX complaint" market, maybe? The right intake process could probably make this happen. I just have a hard time seeing it actually playing out this way; unless their "sometimes founded" complaints turn into outrageously large payouts on a pretty regular basis, it would be very difficult to fund such a venture. Part of the mystery of averaging 20 complaints a day is, who is funding that?)
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
"Ay! Darnell! DeAndre! Get yo' asses out here! It's time to go! Ay, who you is? Where my brothers at? Where dey at? Ay! Yo, I'm talkin' to you nigga!"
I have a hard time imagining a world in which you wrote that without expecting to eat a ban for it.
Optimize for light, not heat. User banned for three days.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
My problem is that it still hasn't been demonstrated to me that the action abolishing Disney's local control benefits the taxpayers of Florida, rather than harming both Disney and Florida.
It benefits the people of Florida by ensuring that the people calling the shots are the politically accountable people, rather than (Californian!) corporations. There may or may not be a pricetag in dollars that will ultimately fall to Florida (I wouldn't even be surprised to see DeSantis backpedal on this under the right circumstances) but the political benefit seems obvious and arguably priceless. (For a much bigger example of this, see Brexit. The economic cost has been substantial, probably, but Brexit did accomplish exactly what it was supposed to: it liberated the UK from being a vassal state of Brussels.)
Lose-lose governance by deterrence does not appeal to me.
Same--but win-lose governance where leftists demand every W and conservatives are expected to eat every L appeals to me far, far less.
DeSantis could have just said "You stick to cartoons, I'll run the state" and decried Disney's intrusion into politics, without wading into the muck with them.
Right--then he's all talk, no action. Pass.
If you're wealthy, you probably own shares in many "woke corporations" and you don't want to get punished for what management does.
Then you should appreciate Ron DeSantis reminding management to stay in their lane, so as to avoid pointless confrontations with government actors. Woke Corporatism is a plague on politics, but it's not going to go away until it negatively impacts enough people's bottom line, so I think it is good to impose costs on corporations that seek to extract private profits by polluting the political commons. Of course, I say that as someone who misses the anti-corporatism of the late conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist. Presumably more pro-corporate conservatives will have a different view.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
the evidence you cite does not distinguish her from the norm
It does, in precisely the way I claimed. Not in the way you took it, which was wrong, which I have explained; sorry I can't explain it better, but I'm not sure it matters because I can't actually tell whether you have failed to understand, or are only pretending not to understand.
I hope no one reading this thread overlooks the parallels between your error and Jackson's, and the particular way you both approach your respective errors.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
You appear to mostly be asking the basic questions of moral realism versus moral relativism. A majority of philosophers either accept or lean toward moral realism. A big reason for this, I think, is that retreating to moral relativism is like the original motte-and-bailey. It's the kind of thing people say when they feel like they are losing an argument about morality. But if someone starts torturing you, or tries to enslave you, or steals your precious belongings, or otherwise wrongs you, it would be very surprising if your reaction were simply, "eh, who even knows how to do morality, really? Maybe they're doing the right thing, by torturing me for their own amusement." In fact there is a very high chance that, if you thought it might change their activity, and maybe even if you had your doubts about that, you would try to reason with them, in part by appealing to morals. So it is no accident that, for thousands of years now, there has been very broad agreement among people thinking about these matters carefully that ethics is first and foremost grounded in human reasoning.
I'm not saying that this makes the answers easy, or that it makes the answers uncontested, and most of the time those answers are rooted quite deeply in the human condition, so it would be a mistake to assume they are definitely universal in nature, even if they are broadly applicable to humankind. But there is absolutely nothing arbitrary about this process. Powerful people do act to subvert it, but there has never in history been a shortage of criticism of people in power!
I also don’t see why it follows that one person is likely morally wrong (in some objective or universal sense) when two disagree on their rights. It’s as likely, it seems to me, that they could both be wrong
Yes, "at least one of those people is wrong" also means both could be wrong.
both be right based on incomplete information.
No, this is not how "being right" works. If you would be right if you had all the information, but you don't have all the information and you are wrong, then you are still wrong. (You might lack all the information and accidentally be right, but then you're just lucky.) This is just how truth works.
But now that you've removed the discussion from the actual issues and retreated into simple relativism, you've stopped expressing any points (and essentially claimed that there is no way for us to reason to a shared understanding) because moral relativism is in fact a thought-terminating cliche. If you really do accept it, then I have no way of persuading you, and you have no way of persuading me, so it's not clear why you're even talking to me about it. I have reason to talk to you, of course--I believe you actually don't believe what you've suggested here that you believe. But if I'm wrong (as I may well be!) and you're right, then your own judgment on the matter is irrelevant, and the only point of substance you can really contribute here is to discourage substantive conversation. I'm not interested in continuing that conversation, as it seems to me that it can only either be false, or true but both useless and boring.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Your observations make sense to me.
"We're all bubbly little bimbos who designate specific booty shorts for our retail adventures? Is this what you think puts us in the same category?"
Back in the early days of the Great Awokening, the idea of "womanface" (as analogous to theatrical blackface) made the rounds. One Harlem drag queen wrote a surprisingly reflective response, not only owning the unapologetic misogyny of the drag community but actually calling for drag queens, not to change in any meaningful way, but to at least listen, to validate (how feminine!) the concerns many women have about drag as mockery.
I encountered these ideas again in an interesting book review of Once a Man, Never a Woman--this time, in the context of transsexuality:
What truly drives the relationship to its breaking point is Shannon’s eventual realization that, with his slinky dresses and high-heel boots, Jamie isn’t a wannabe woman so much as an amateurish imposter. What he imagines to be womanhood is in fact a male masturbation fantasy that presents women as endlessly parked in front of boudoir mirrors, staring dreamily at their own decolletage as they mist themselves with bulbed perfume bottles. As Shannon writes, real women are more likely to spend their lives fleeing such male-imposed expectations...
I seem to recall that the Motte (used to?) have a poster who claimed to be trans-aged (i.e., a young person in an older person's body), though for various reasons they didn't like to make a big deal about it. This seems to happen enough that I've read more than one article about an adult male living (at least part time!) as an underaged female (occasionally, even a prepubescent one).
That seems ridiculous to me, but not like, substantially more ridiculous than drag queens generally, and it follows the same basic pattern--I expect you'd be hard pressed to find a non-fictional six-year-old girl with the same actual taste and style as Stefonknee Wolscht. But six-year-old girls aren't generally in a position to complain about being parodied.
I also wonder a fair bit about the fact that outrageously distorted caricaturization seems to be less of a thing with females who live as men (or even as non-binary). Most of the "trans" females I encounter are just not-very-girly lesbians using counterintuitive pronouns. I don't know if this is because it would be difficult-to-impossible for someone with a female body to convincingly parody masculinity (at least without the aid of dangerous quantities of illicit steroids), or if there is something else at work there (one theory I've toyed with is that males tend to style themselves trans in hopes of getting a certain kind of attention, while females tend to style themselves trans in order to avoid that exact same kind of attention, but I would be hard pressed to prove this to anyone's satisfaction, I think). Or maybe it's just because masculinity is often enough a parody of itself.
Have you heard of the Female Athlete Triad (FAT)?
If you are a female athlete, or closely associate with female athletes, there's a very good chance that you've heard of the FAT, which has possibly the single most fantastically inapposite acronym in the history of acronyms. On the other hand, if you are neither a female athlete nor closely associated with female athletes, there's a good chance you've never heard of the FAT. The short version is, female athletes often show up at physician's offices experiencing menstrual dysfunction, low energy availability, and decreased bone mineral density. Sometimes this is also associated with that most famous of social contagions, the eating disorder--but often not!
The FAT is an important part of understanding female athletic health. Coaches and trainers (if they're worth anything at all) know to watch for certain warning signs, especially amenorrhea, anemia, and low body weight. Athletes exhibiting even one of these symptoms should, to the best of my understanding, be placed on lighter workout regimes or even excluded from practice altogether; athletes exhibiting all three should be excluded from athletic participation until more detailed medical examination can be done.
The FAT may be somewhat controversial in that attention to it arguably holds women back--a woman who cares more about a gold medal than about having children someday is rather unlikely to care much about amenorrhea (and may even see it as a blessing). But there are other consequences, too--like stress fractures, osteoporosis, bradycardia, and so forth. So people in charge of caring for female athletes--parents, yes, but also coaches and trainers--have for decades been generally regarded as under obligation to monitor women and girls for amenorrhea, anemia, and body weight/eating issues.
Why should you care? Well, recently there has been some culture war brouhaha over Florida (surprised?) weighing certain laws or regulations regarding the monitoring of menstrual health in teen athletes (really, just some standard questions on a standard form). Despite the AP's surprisingly helpful writeup, the Florida High School Athletic Association held an emergency meeting to "reconsider" their forms immediately, rather than waiting for their scheduled meeting later this month.
Certain folks in my social feeds have been going nuts about how monitoring menstrual health is a sneaky way of excluding trans athletes, or secretly learning who has gotten an illegal (?) abortion, and of course--it's all on Ron DeSantis, somehow. Time magazine, for example, seems happy to selectively report on the matter, as does Florida Politics. Advocate asks "why!?" Apparently, people have been asking "why!?" for months.
They've also been getting the same answer for months: "this is to make sure athletics is not endangering these girls' health." This is nothing new, and is something many states check. Should states check this sort of thing? I can imagine a certain sort of libertarian declaring that, no, this is unnecessary. But by and large it is the not the libertarians asking these questions--it seems to primarily be the people looking for something, anything to prevent Ron DeSantis from becoming President in 2024.
And they're even, apparently, willing to ignore and/or unwind a thirty-year-old staple of youth sports medicine to get the rhetoric they're after.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This seems like a troll to me. But if it's not a troll, then it's you wishing death on your outgroup without really engaging the argument in a plausibly serious way--for which you have already been banned once.
This is a discussion forum. If you aren't interested in engaging seriously and charitably with the thoughts of people whose views you abhor, then maybe this is not the place for you.
Banned for three days.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Or maybe they just think you're an asshole and your ideas are laughably wrong?
That's not an "or." They obviously think that. It's the fact that they only seem to think that when CNN tells them to that is, at best, awfully suspicious.
There's a certain thread of intellectual narcissism that reads 'I am so obviously correct, and yet all the smart people are disagreeing with me. They must be too scared to admit the truth, unlike me who is courageous and bold!'
There's also a certain thread of history that goes "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Socrates (well, Plato) laid it out in the Republic, when he suggested that men and women could be intellectual peers, and warned his students not to laugh at the idea simply because everyone else did. Many people who believe themselves to be correct are wrong. But laughing at them doesn't make them wrong, and it doesn't make you right. Sneering and laughing are not thoughts, they are thought-terminating clichés--which is all your comment has offered here.
Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.
They have not spent thousands of pages explaining why Byrne is wrong, they have steadfastly refused to engage, and tried to prevent people like Tuvel from doing so. Part of the impetus behind all of this was the cancellation of Byrne's book. Like, did you even read the article?
There is also an ambiguity in the way you've written your post, where the "you" is arguably general, but could also be directed toward Byrne, but could even be directed toward me. I don't know whether you wrote it that way on purpose, but it sure does come across as an artful bit of trolling, especially since your only point appears to boil down to a sneer-by-proxy.
I think there's a lot of stupid stuff happening in this article, but this may be the most egregious:
Whites of all economic classes are being displaced or prevented from moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Smart, ambitious, young whites are the ones who are hit hardest, and that’s traditionally who you want as a revolutionary class.
I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that smart, ambitious young people of any color face any truly objectionable obstacles to living a life of choice and value. This is probably one of my biggest annoyances with grievance culture and identitarianism generally: it is a philosophy of total Nietzschean ressentiment, a gospel of pure unanchored envy. "I want more, I deserve more" is a whinge that is just totally hollow coming out of the mouth of anyone with an IQ over, say, 95. There are ample opportunities to be pursued; people just don't want to bear the associated costs. They want things handed to them. Put every single white person into North America and Europe, expel everyone darker than Sardinian fisherman, and I would expect everyone to quickly settle to within a stone's throw of the socioeconomic strata they occupied previously. Nobody is keeping you down, but you.
And sure--anti-white racism is real, and can be every bit as virulent and destructive on an individual level as any other kind of racism. So let's not be racist. There are many interesting arguments for separatism. But right here in the United States people are already free to enjoy some amount of separatism, if they care enough to look for it. There are black majority colleges, Asian majority cities, whole damn swathes of desert owned by pseudo-sovereign American Indian tribes--what's to be gained from cutting ties with them any further? Wealthy, predominantly white suburbs with good schools and attractive amenities are a real thing, and if you're a white person who can't afford to move to them, that's because you haven't earned a place there, just like the non-whites who complain about the existence of wealthy white suburbs. The problem isn't that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists (though it is almost certainly true that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists), the problem is that people can't accept that their problems are almost never the result of systemic anything, and almost always the result of their own internal inclinations and capacities.
I have big, big complaints about the ways we deal with race in the United States, but I do my best to make those complaints from a place of principle--and the principle that governs much of my thinking is that attaching your self-conception or your politics to a group identity instead of to individual merit is stupid. My political enemies are wrong because they think that Blackness and Queerness and Whiteness are important. White identitarians are the poster children of "battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster." They embody everything they think they can destroy. They are often the enemies of my enemies, but the fact that I regard leftist identitarians as a depressing blend of idiocy and mendacity does not make me willing to abandon my principles to join hands with white identitarians. Theirs are not arguments I'm willing to support unconditionally, as soldiers; theirs are arguments I reject for the same reasons I reject leftism.
You can't convince me that white nationalists are right without convincing me that social justice warriors are right, too--and the reverse is also true.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
What reason would they have to use a veto power on anything else?
Are you kidding? Anything that they think does not serve their interests,
Why should they be forced to go along with laws that don't serve their interests? The only reason available under "one man, one vote" appears to be "because they are in the minority, so too bad for them." How much more purposeful could discrimination possibly get, than to say "you get no benefit from this law, for no reason than because the majority is able to require that of you?"
or anything that they think might harm them (including anything that happens to have an adverse impact)
Again--what protection do they have against the majority, then? If rural voters think something harms them, under "one man, one vote" that's just too fucking bad. "One man, one vote" is all by itself purposeful discrimination against rural voters, implemented by a court that was clearly dedicated to its own social engineering projects over and above any constitutional principles.
or any culture war issue, for that matter
Yes, exactly. Rural voters having culture war issues dictated to them by urban voters was in practice, I think, the point of "one man, one vote." It was purposeful discrimination from the word go.
Or, any project that did not benefit them as much as they wanted. Or any budget that did not fund some useless pork in rural areas. Etc, etc, etc.
You haven't listed a single reason that doesn't sound like intentional discrimination against a minority, because they are a minority. Urban voters can veto any project that does not benefit them as much as they want. Urban voters can veto any budget that does not fund some useless pork in cities (like, say, the whole NEH). Etc. Etc. Why shouldn't rural voters have the same power? Ah, yes--because they are the minority. That is literally all "one man, one vote" means: mob rule at the state level. I have a hard time imagining more purposeful discrimination against rural voters.
why are you advocating for rural voters to never have a veto over ANY legislation, even legislation that intentionally discriminates against them?
I'm not.
If you agree with "one man, one vote" then actually yes--you are.
If you are arguing that the standard under the EP clause should be higher -- eg, that rural residency should be a quasi-suspect or suspect classification, fine. But you are arguing for something much, much broader: For a certain group to have an absolute veto over ALL legislation.
In fact I think the vast majority of legislation is totally illegitimate under a plain reading of the U.S. Constitution. That's kind of the theme of this discussion, though it was not my original intention: that 20th century jurisprudence basically threw the constitutional order out the window, substantially in favor of sweeping and often disastrous social engineering projects.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
"Truth and Reconciliation" was the darling of progressive legal academics the world over back in the 1990s. I had one colleague who made it the center of a course he taught on "restorative" justice. He's been dead for a while now, so I'll never know what he would have to say about all this, but my impression generally is that academics are most comfortable absolutely ignoring the reality of what is happening in South Africa and continuing to blame colonialism for everything. The fact that they were dead wrong about "Truth and Reconciliation," and it failed, will not be taken as a lesson of any kind.
I mean, they're mostly not. I am very broadly in favor of government taking substantially less action than it does today.
"Even in" is an interesting framing. Direct democracies are historically terrible for pretty much this exact reason. The strongest limiter on coercive action in the American tradition is individual rights. If the majority votes to kill you, your fundamental right to life is supposed to cause the government to stand against the majority. Collective action is often likened to a deaf, dumb, blind leviathan, overwhelming in its capacity to destroy individual lives and insensitive to the nuances of individual human existence. We erect such leviathans out of a sense that our individual lives may be better protected thereby (if nothing else, from the leviathans constructed by others), but the idea that they have great potential to get out of control has led to the Western tradition of hobbling those leviathans in various ways.
Taxation is just one way in which the leviathan extracts sustenance from its constituent members. Some taxation is presumably inevitable; at minimum, the provisioning of a stable financial system seems like something people participating in that system should be willing to support through taxation of one kind or another. Likewise the maintenance of military and police protection. Anything that plausibly benefits everyone in a country more-or-less equally is at least simpler to justify as an expense worth occasional coercion of the recalcitrant; robbing the collective Peter to benefit selective Pauls, on the other hand, is quite difficult to justify on any moral grounds that respect individual rights. (Importantly, utilitarianism does not respect individual rights, Bentham himself regarded rights as nonsense, and this is the central critique of utilitarianism as a moral system.)
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