pigeonburger
2yr ago
Yup.
Despite having gone through the very heart of the cathedral in my formative years I consider myself more resistant to the indoctrination than my parents are/were, than most of my peers are and than any part of my education. Whatever mutation of genes and memes created me, I believe it has to be nurtured, alerting the system to my presence will only cause an overwhelming immune response that is all but guaranteed to wipe me out. So I will attempt to nurture and grow this mutation, by genes or memes.
Going out in a blaze of glory is a winning scenario for the state. Your family line will be either eradicated or severely diminished. Your manifesto (or as they will call it "your hateful screed") will not be spread. The movies they will write about you will depict you as a desperate, ignorant loser.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
While I disagree on the object level towards ACAB, I have some sympathy towards people who dismiss all cops as being bastards as I have a similar attitude towards all mainstream journalists. The rationale for that attitude is that even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, as a group my observation is that they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession, and when outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. I can easily imagine someone making a similar argument against the police, that they are unwilling to truly clean up their profession in the eyes of the public, that there is a culture of silence and an anti-snitch mentality within the profession. As with journalists, they are performing a duty to society that is sacred and requires the population's absolute confidence so they cannot afford in-group loyalty when it clashes with their duty.
I guess one distinction could be that one could argue that cops are not always aware of specific actionable, denounceable action by bad apples in their group. I don't think journalists can use that argument.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
pigeonburger
2yr ago
The solution is to go external for the ressources. Reagan replaced the air traffic controllers, but recent events show that even getting the military to replace civil servants is not likely to be an improvement, as resistance to the Trump administration's goals also came from within the military. Contractors would be the solution, but the reaction from the administrative state would be intense as that would rightly be seen as an existential threat. So whatever administration puts it in motion is likely to be in for an even rougher time than Trump's was.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
I think nothing demonstrates this better than the case of Alexander Vindman. Let's assume his whistleblowing was not a premeditated impeachment trap for Trump as I don't think there was any evidence to that. His whistleblowing was based on that public servant's impression that the POTUS was undermining US Foreign Policy, which when you think about it with in mind who is supposed to set US Foreign Policy, is a really odd thing to say.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
The administrative state when it was thought up, had these people be mindless cogs that would pass and process information to the next level until clear orders were drafted and sent for whoever actually ultimately executes them. But consolidation of roles, education and computers now has many of these people aware of the picture they are painting and opinionated with regards to the orders and the people who gave them. Even in cases where they nominally don't have any discretionary power, they can selectively apply rigor, sabotage their own work, know who to inform or not inform of a situation, etc... to give themselves some margin of discretionary power.
And recently they seem to relish how much power leaking to the press gives them.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
I think he forgot to write the part where he argues that despite all these good reasons not to go into these fields, and despite them not holding any prestige for that power, they hold real power, being an increasingly self-aware part of the chain that every executive decision has to go through to get actually executed.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
I do live in a city dense enough for mass transit, and I do use it all the time (having no car myself). It is usually fast enough, but the infrastructure is decaying, there's trash in busses and trains, constant visible, water infiltration in the concrete walls of subway stations that have been left unfixed for years. And the experience of using it in the last 5 years has become notably worse. There's the tolerance of disruptive behavior I've mentionned: mentally ill people screaming, groups of rowdy loitering late teens/young adults. But also the service itself is also getting worse, a mix of desperately hiring whoever is available and strong public service unions puts us far from the kind of pride and conscientiousness of, say, the Japanese rail system. We have busses showing up late (from the yard, not from traffic) regularly, sometimes not showing up at all with no indication at stops. The subway is somewhat more reliable, except for the daily service interruptions. Obviously, the cost has also kept increasing. All of this is of course overseen by politicians who are not in the least incentivized to solve the issues.
And this is one of North America's top public transit systems, and one of if not the most popular (as in % of population using it regularly).
pigeonburger
2yr ago
OP is modelling the progressives as percieving and understanding the problem and its solutions the same way as he does, so is confused and left scrambling to find an explanation as to why they chose bad solutions, coming to the conclusion that bad solutions must be a deliberate part of a plan to force people to find good solutions. Progressives do the same thing when they claim that their ideological opponents must be evil or selfish for refusing to fix whatever social ill is their current project.
As you point out, most progressives likely see the issue differently, and their solutions don't seem bad to them.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
In the same spirit: pointing and shaming how wasteful north americans are for driving instead of using public transport, claiming that if almost all the money we put on road maintenance and car infrastructure instead went to public transport it would be fast, clean, cheap and wonderful and all the junkies and mentally ill people belligerently bothering people on it would disappear, despite it being the very same people who push for everyone using public transport that are also pushing for complete tolerance of every nuisance in public spaces in the name of compassion.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
It'd be easy to turn the good/evil framing around on them.
By signaling that you are the kind of person that would pick blue, you are pressuring everyone around you to risk their death or else they'll live with yours on their conscience. I love my family and my friends, I would prefer they NOT put themselves at such a serious unnecessary risk of death, especially not my sake.
The only truly selfless moral choice (assuming no one is reading this post or applying meta reasoning) is to signal that you're the kind of person who'd chose red and then secretly chose blue. It's also quite a stupid choice, I think.
You also seem to have some personal beef with "vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives". I'd suggest dropping it. This is not the kind of discussion forum for your personal grievances.
I didn't read him as having any beef with them. To summarize what I believe is position is: libertarians usually are people whose personal issues with "square" conservative society are minor and not substantive, and they could easily just negociate for acceptance of them (acceptance of minor risk taking with regards to personal health, acceptance of interracial relationships with ethnic groups that seem mostly compatible) rather than agitate for the destruction of functional societies.
The vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives line just points out how for the most part they're still heterosexual and white. That they don't consider gender/sexual anarchy to be optimal solutions since they don't for the most part use themselves the freedom it gives them, and that they are the kind of white people who move out of neighborhoods at the first signs of diversity-fueled racial unrest. But most of them are very smart, so they often write the best most convincing arguments against conservative norms, which are then picked up by people who do want gender/sexual anarchy and believe homogenous societies are inherently deficient.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
I think the best way to describe this in military terms would that it's baiting the enemy army to fight you in the bailey.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
He simply asked Lance a couple of questions to tease out his position, and Lance admirably admitted something a lot on his side probably believe: "bodily autonomy" is the strongest legal argument for abortion but the point of abortion is to avoid this issue. If tomorrow a 5 week-old baby was viable that basic, pressing issue of work that helps the pro-choice movement would remain.
I mean it is the most clearly announced motte & bailey argument I've seen, and it frustrates me to no end when people refuse to admit it. The main organisation championing it in the US, Planned Parenthood, is named after the bailey. But if you come with arguments that if women are given the choice of parenthood men should be given a choice too (to legally and financially renounce fatherhood) then woah bro! We're just talking about a medical procedure and bodily autonomy!
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Maybe it's just edgy kids using twitter as an unprecedentedly powerful megaphone and we're still at the same base rate of this sort of thinking. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of greater general polarization.
I have non-edgy barely online friends in their 30s who seem to think a local political party's throwaway idea of the government rationing car and plane travel is what we need. These friends do travel more than they would be allowed under that scheme and they do admit it, but they basically just say "it'd suck, but that's the kind of decisive action we would need" and excitedly talk up the idea to everyone.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
That is still meritocratic with one extra step; they're meritorious because they've been appointed to the job by God, who's the supreme judge of merit.
While we're on the subject of Star Trek Voyager episodes with interesting allegories for race, there's Living Witness (which was directed by Tim Russ, the actor for Tuvok, even!). There's two alien races living on the same planet and Voyager's passage caused a war after which one of the races subjugated the other. Centuries have passed and relations between the two races have improved, but a copy of the Doctor wakes up and finds out that this relatively peaceful state of affair is based on a rather false retelling of the events where the race that won the war was belligerent and had Voyager kill the leader of the other race for them, when the doctor knows the subjugated race actually attacked Voyager unprovoked. The Doctor is stuck between leaving things as is, even if it's based on a lie, or pursuing the truth, which threatens the peace as some of the subjugating race always felt bad about the way they were cast as the villains and the subjugated race wants to clings to a view of history where they were blameless. Eventually it's settled on the truth. The whole episode has a feel of exasperation towards grievance politics.
Voyager got maligned for having some of the worst episodes (and the worst multi episode arcs) in Star Trek, but it had some great one-offs too. And it's funny to me how a show like Star Trek that's meant to be progressive can be "left behind" by an ideology that by design keeps moving.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Of course these duties are much less grand than making the perfect society. You just have to be a good whatever it is you are. Neighbor, husband, mother, worker, student, businessman, beggar; it doesn't really matter what or who you are, but you have to play the cards you have as well as you can. Only because to not do it is a waste.
That is quite important, yes. If you're in actor in the middle of a play and you think that the play sucks, you're not going to make it better if you start stealing lines from another actor because you think you can say them better than he can. That will only ruin the play even more. The only thing you can do to improve the play, is to play your own role as best you can.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Yes. It's not a waste of energy to understand his actions in the sense that if you have to make a decision on his actions, like voting for or against him in an election, you need to act wisely and justly. But it doesn't really matter to YOU whether it was driven by vice or vertue, I was simply pointing out that you can't really tell whether something outside of yourself is good or bad; you can't know all outcomes, and you can't know other people's internal thoughts. All you can really know is your own.
Now this is one of the parts where Stocism tends to lose some people, but Stoics, like most ancient virtue ethics philosophers, consider that ethics are simple and innate. When we're close to nature, we do not need to be taught that being rash, cowardly, mean and violent is bad, it "feels" innately bad. Likewise being wise, bold, nice, and calm feels good. The Crusader or the Jihadist who commit large scale murder are doing so because instead of focusing on themselves and their actions, they focus on the world, which they see as "evil". And trying to correct the world directly blinds you to your own actions. If instead of focussing on whether the world or other people are good or evil, he were to think "is my conduct virtuous?" as he's about to massacre an innocent, he would likely come to a different conclusion. You can commit an awful lot of evil when trying to improve the world, that you wouldn't be committing if you were trying to improve yourself.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Well, that's specifically what I was talking about too!
If you're in a large city with a big East Asian population with some effort you can usually find the small places that exist to cater to that community instead of "the locals" and they will usually have smaller menus and much better food. But serving Chinese in particular is a tough one because China is big and its cuisine hasn't homogenized the way Japan's did for instance, and Canadians have no idea what Chinese people eat. It's probably simpler for the restaurants to just go with what their customers expect to see on the menu: every single variation of noodles/rice/dumpling/soup with chicken/pork/beef/shrimp, overly sweet sauces that is general tso's flavored, lemon flavored, peanut flavored, fish sauce flavored... rather than have to explain to confused Canadian who felt adventurous enough to go a chinese restaurant, but not THAT adventurous, that she might actually enjoy the braised tendon or the chicken feet.
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Restaurants in East Asia, or restaurants of East Asian cuisine abroad?
Here in the west if a restaurant has a giant menu it's usually a bad sign because it means nothing's really good. But I think for East Asian cuisine restaurants abroad, they feel kind of forced to serve a few (often westernized to hell) "staples" of asian food else people complain. Like I see a lot of korean or vietnamese restaurants serving sushi because people just don't know or don't care. Thaï restaurants will be forced to serve general tso's chicken, all noodle restaurants will be forced to serve pad thai, etc...
I've had similar experiences to you, for me the difficulty has been piercing through the veil of expertise of the priesthood. If you sit them and debunk a specific thing, they'll still hold the belief because "If the truth was so plainly different surely all those elite journalists wouldn't believe a falsehood! There must be some more complexity to it that you don't know or understand..."
I feel like in a lot of cases, it's because people have an unconscious understanding that if they let one thing through to show them "yes, the news achors absolutely would tell you easily debunked falsehoods" (and note, this applies to the priesthoods of any political team) it'll all come crashing and they'll be cast out into the intellectual wilderness as we here mostly are; and sadly I have to admit it's a place many people are not equipped to face mentally and emotionally.
Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?
Indeed, as others have pointed out, this mindset is at the heart of Stoïcism. It's also fairly close to Taoism.
What Stoïcism instructs is what to direct your will at: yourself. If you think that you have some influence over the DA, even just as a private citizen voting and writing letters to other people, then consider doing that. Or shape yourself into someone who would become a DA that would achieve the outcomes that you consider optimal. Make yourself into a better person and a better world will flow from that. The world is what it is; it can be improved if the people in it are improved, but the only one you can ultimately control is yourself. "But this DA is bad and is encouraging more bad people to do bad things!" Good is virtue, bad is vice. And virtue and vice can only be truly known from the inside. If the DA's actions are driven by greed and the desire to be popular, that would be vice. But most people would consider forgiveness to be virtuous, maybe that's what's driving this DA? And your view that these charges should be brought up against these criminals, it's important that you observe your own thinking to understand if that's truly driven by wisdom, a virtue, or by a vice (in that case I think most would see wrath as a vice). Broadly: worry about yourself. Your soul, your actions, your reasoning.
And couching things in emotional terms, is a sure way to lessen your power of reasoning, to lessen the quality of your very soul. You see it everywhere; the originally well-meaning extremists that believe that because they see what they consider an injustice, it gives them licence to cause similar injury to others. Or single issue political/social crusaders who become blind to unintended consequences because they see one thing as "bad".
pigeonburger
2yr ago
Gonna try to steelman the X rebranding here.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
Moving to X could be a very powerful move because specifically of it's weak branding. At this point in time, I think most americans and people who are deep into the american sphere either currently hate or have at some point hated Twitter. Right-wingers because it's been banning them hard under the previous management, mainstream progressivesbecause it stopped banning right wingers under current management. Nazis because it doesn't let them post aggressive slurs at people. Communists because it's a corporation owned by a billionaire. Libertarians because they respond to government requests. Greens because I don't know, computers use electricity. Centrists because everyone is yelling politically charged polarizing content at them on it.
Not only sunsetting the brand, but making the branding less salient can be a smart move. Seeing X branding when clicking on a link to a post somewhere doesn't remind me immediately "oh yeah, its twitter, fuck twitter!" like it used to. And in time, X being so generic might avoid having such strong emotions associated with it; it's more likely to be a liability for the company.
Being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I can't help but see this as validating the other side's concerns about representation. One of the main defenses against culture being remade was that the old one was serving everyone just fine; that black kids were identifying just fine with a white Little Mermaid. Of course, there's an obvious over-representation of diversity now, but after how many decades of under-representation? The thinking here, which I can't agree with, is that dragging our faces in it for a while is necessary for straight cis whites to learn not to do this again. But your reaction seems to be exactly what they're going for and is likely to embolden them; your unease is the mirror of the one they claim every non straight cis white has felt for decades before they established institutional and cultural dominance.
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