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Quite frankly, the "man strong and powerful, man subjugate women who are dependent on him" perspective is an incredibly reductive conceptualisation of traditional gender relations which I unfortunately see bandied around ad nauseam. You can't just hold everything else to be the same “well ceteris paribus men are stronger” and extrapolate the entirety of gender relations from a single principle.
There are major sources of social power women possess, informed partially by people's preferences towards protecting women and a general women-are-wonderful effect. For example, there's the Moral Machine Experiment where a preference for protecting women was found in almost all countries, even many "patriarchal" ones. The result of unwillingness to harm women compared to men has been replicated in many, many different studies. And it holds when studied not only in a questionnaire context wherein people are merely quizzed about it, but also in experimental, real-world contexts. People are less likely to hurt women for personal gain, drivers leave more space for a cyclist who looks female, people are more willing to label male violence against women as a crime than the reverse even after controlling for perceptions of injury, and so on. As to the women-are-wonderful effect where people perceive women more positively, that too has been confirmed and replicated in multiple studies.
The rallying cry of feminists with regards to relationships in the past is always the legal doctrine of coverture. "Women weren't allowed to own property or enter into contracts!" Actually, they were, if they were single. Marriage changed the legal status of women from feme sole into feme covert, and sure, a feme covert could not own property (her property, goods and earnings belonged to her husband) and a feme covert could also not enter into contracts in their own name. This is technically true, but it is also a misleading half-truth. This analysis leaves several important things out, namely the male responsibility that stemmed from marriage. Husbands had a legal responsibility to support their wives, and what was considered "necessaries" for a wife was dependent on socioeconomic status. So a rich man could not simply leave his wife in rags, feed her gruel and claim she was technically being supported. The next thing to note is that the husband, along with taking ownership of all of his wife's property, also took responsibility for all debts. If the family needed to buy goods on credit or otherwise take on debt, well, the husband contracts for the family, so inevitably, the debt is under his name, and the responsibility for paying it falls only on him. Remember, failure to pay that debt could result in imprisonment. These were some of the risks and costs that the husband took on under coverture.
Furthermore, if a wife was not already being adequately provided with her necessaries by her husband, she could buy necessaries on her husband's credit (this was called the law of agency). She was basically given the ability to act as her husband's agent. This is important because it means all debt contracted on behalf of the family's maintenance (whether made by the husband or the wife) was held to be the husband's debt. And defaulting on the debt meant he could go to jail. Husbands had some recourse if the wife was spending way more than she needed by telling traders not to deal with her in the future, and sometimes cases were brought where husbands were not held liable for the debts, but IIRC in such cases it was not the wife who got in trouble - it was the trader who bore the loss. Furthermore, in reality some wives actually seem to have gotten their husbands in legal trouble through overspending. As I said, under coverture, husbands were the only ones who could be thrown in jail for debt, and this was a significant risk for men in the marital position.
To build on this, here's an interesting statistic: In the eighteenth century, the vast majority of imprisoned debtors in England and Wales were men (all estimates of the sex ratios of imprisoned debtors are over 90% male), and it is likely that coverture was a very big reason why. Yes, women had to trade something for protection and provision (something I do not view as unreasonable, considering the costs that undertaking the role of provision and protection placed on men - it is only fair that there be reciprocity). And sure, it was a bit of a restrictive marital contract for women who wanted to take on more of an active role even if that meant they had to assume risk they would otherwise be shielded from. But it wasn't only restrictive for women. Men did not get to say "Hey, I want my wife to manage all the marital finances if that means she takes on all the risk of default and also assumes responsibility for supporting me". Men did not simply get to abandon their role because it didn't suit them.
And in practice, sex roles were not nearly as strictly prescribed as coverture stated. Women could and did participate in public sphere work, did a lot of purchasing for the family, managed the household property, and exercised a large amount of agency over the household economy generally speaking. When the family defaulted, men went to debtors' prison, but their families often followed them into these debtors' prisons. Both sides' responsibilities and rights were shared to a greater degree in practice than was stipulated in law, and ultimately the idea that women lived in some state of subjugation is a myth.
And moving away from the strict topic of relationships, the idea - that because men hold positions of formal power, society will favour men - is called into question when you look at multiple sources of evidence. Men do not act as a collective male "us" against a collective female "them". A study examining the raw and adjusted gender gaps in defendant pleas, jury convictions, and judge sentences from 1715 to 1913 at the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court in London found that women were consistently treated more leniently - they were less likely to be subjected to the most severe form of punishment, even controlling for observable case characteristics. One of the posited reasons for this was that: "Given that males were deemed responsible for the welfare of females (their wives) in the home, it certainly seems feasible that they carried this duty over to the courtroom. ... [O]ne can think of judges and jurors as being less likely to convict females because of their positive taste/preference for protecting them."
The male:female suicide rates in the past also seem to contradict the idea that the system back then favoured men's preferences over women. In England and Wales the suicide rate was much, much greater for males than it was for females in the nineteenth century. Males committed suicide 3 to 4 times as often as females. According to this article: "The male rate was consistently higher than the female rate over the entire time period although the male to female (sex) ratio rose from 3.3 in 1861 to 4.0 in 1886 and 1906 and subsequently declined steadily to its lowest level (1.5) in 1966 before increasing again". This was similarly true in places like Switzerland. This article notes that "At the end of the 19th century, the suicide sex ratio (female-male ratio) in Switzerland was 1:6. 100 years later the sex ratio has reduced to about 1:2.5." Men must be the only historically "privileged" group who historically did more labour, who historically were given longer sentences for the same crimes, and who were historically far more likely to commit suicide compared to their supposedly "oppressed" counterparts.
Another note on historical female power: The social/moral power allotted to women seems to be pretty immense - the White Feather Girls in WW1 handed out white feathers to men in civilian clothes, marking them out as cowards if they did not enlist, and after that recruitment increased significantly - volunteering surged by a third during the 10 days after the first mention of the White Feather Girls in the news. Those young women who struck men at the very heart of their masculine identities - bestowing them a feather telling them "If you don't go off to be maimed or die, you are no longer a man in the eyes of some brassy chit you've never even met before and will probably never see again" - were exercising a classic female form of social power. And many men went because women's censure had the power to drive them straight into the teeth of death. Here is a recounting of one such case.
I think all of these things are enough to lead one to at least question the idea of historical female oppression. This seems to have just become a point of dogma, it aligns with our instinctive perceptions of men and women, but it's just not correct.
EDIT: added another link
Are there any alternative systems to RNA/DNA that can pass on genetic information? I'm not talking about stuff that essentially just uses the central principle and structure of DNA with some of the specifics changed, like XNAs which just use a different sugar backbone, or Hachimoji DNA which just adds on extra base pairs, I'm talking about plausible hypothesised systems that are radically different to what we use now.
One of the most fascinating and out-there proposals I've come across is Graham Cairns-Smith's clay hypothesis, which posits that clay crystals were the first genetic material. The idea here is that crystal growth is a form of self-replication that "reproduces" its arrangement, and can even transmit defects. The pattern is then "passed along" when the crystal breaks (scission) and continues to grow independently from the original crystal. Eventually, a "genetic takeover" of sorts happens, where clay crystals that trap certain forms of molecules to their surface improve their replication and catalyse the formation of increasingly complex proto-organic molecules that eventually take over the original genetic substrate as the new genetic material.
Schulman, Yurke and Winfree in their paper "Robust self-replication of combinatorial information via crystal growth and scission" use the same principles to create a set of DNA "tiles" that replicate its sequence of tiles through crystal growth. Each tile has "sticky ends" that hybridise with each other, and under appropriate growth conditions, complementary sticky ends hybridise, while non-complementary sticky ends are unlikely to interact. The interaction of these sticky ends allows for accurate sequence replication during growth, and once crystal growth has propagated the sequence, these additional layers are then "cleaved" off through mechanical scission.
However, that's the only truly interesting and novel idea surrounding this I am aware of, and I'm not entirely sure if and how this system of replication could achieve a significant level of biological complexity (save for a "genetic takeover" that effectively replaces the original system). I can't help but feel there are probably more such systems that could be posited.
I like Hanania in general, but it really is striking how much the change seems to be about having something to lose.
This seems to be a common trap people fall into, the second people gain any amount of status within the system their ideas quickly soften and become more in line with the cultural hegemony. Hanania isn't an exception. I don't even think this is necessarily intentional dishonesty per se, people are primed to shift their beliefs the second the costs of that belief become unacceptable.
I'd wager your average, well-adjusted person is engaging in motivated self-delusion on many different topics without being aware of it, and that it is the people who have nothing to lose (or think they do) who have the ability to entertain independent thought the most. This doesn't mean they necessarily come to the correct conclusions, it's rather that their conclusions are not constrained by social desirability and are more "honest" in that regard.
You're probably correct that each produces biases of their own - nobody is completely free from that. However, that specific bias you're mentioning cuts both ways - those who are doing well in a system are also more likely to view it positively, warranted or not. The skewing effect of social desirability, on the other hand, seems to be a pressure that just gets worse the more integrated you are in social life. The more you rely on other people, the more incentives there are to curry favour with them and adopt the beliefs of the group.
Personal experience probably isn't a great source for belief, but as I've grown my social circle over the years the more I have felt the pressures of social life encroaching. The tribalistic social pressures and incentive structures that drive people to adopt certain group beliefs for social signalling purposes are disturbingly strong, and it occurs even when no proper evidence has been provided to me that these beliefs are correct, and it's only by actively and consciously guarding against these instincts that I've managed to maintain my streak of heterodoxy. But doing that requires one to accept a level of discomfort they could otherwise shield themselves from.
As far as I can tell, no one has seriously tackled that question in full - I'm not aware of any paper for now that confidently advances a novel system explaining how an alternative replicator mechanism can be interpreted as instructions for building stuff. The way DNA/RNA is translated into building an organism is a fairly convoluted multi-step process and building such a system for any hypothetical replicator is probably very difficult.
Most of the papers I come across are at the very basic level of "how can a sequence of information robustly self-reproduce and transmit its characteristics in a way that Darwinian selection can operate on it", that additional layer of complexity surrounding translation is unfortunately not touched on (either because it's not part of their intention to create a general purpose replicator, or because they can't propose one).
Hadn't heard about the 0E0P metacell before, reading about it now and it's certainly cool.
I don't think the original question is fundamentally interesting, tbh - any system capable of universal computation tied to some sort of action will be capable of self-replicating in all sorts of bizzare ways, comparable to turing tarpits.
I suppose the question was less "would there be other usable self-replication methods" - because the answer's almost certainly yes - and more "has anyone else posited one and would that specific system be capable of significant emergent complexity". The question was asked for completely trivial worldbuilding purposes where specific details are crucial - I have a tendency to get bogged down in detail analysis to an unreasonable degree.
Honestly, this just goes to show me that framing is everything and I think the unnecessarily obfuscatory and slanted nature of the original wording is causing most of the controversy.
I agree with the reframe posted in the Twitter comments: "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you die". If formulated in this way, there would probably be much less disagreement over the optimal solution here, and picking blue so you can also save people from their own choice to pick blue would be much less of a point of debate.
It's not my framing, it's someone else's whose I agree with (in part at least because it stresses the "personal agency" aspect behind someone selecting blue), but if framed in the way you've postulated I still think there would be less disagreement over the optimal solution. I also think "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you, along with everyone else who has also taken the blue pill, die" is good wording.
I'm not allergic to altruism, but assuming no coordination and no knowledge of others' choices I seriously cannot envision a real-life scenario with actual life-and-death stakes where the majority pick blue. I've got a fairly high level of confidence that people would be rational actors in such a situation and thus consider "blue" to be suicide with no actual added benefit to anyone else.
Perhaps this is harsh, but there's also the fact that if we're talking about adults the people who would pick blue in the first place would likely be a tiny subset of people (suicidal people, mentally retarded people, etc) whose QALYs are realistically fairly limited. I'd say "Maybe we could just not try to pull off some incredible coordination feat which might turn out horrible for marginal gains" is fairly reasonable.
So, I belong to that portion of gay men who are completely uninterested in women. I have never felt particularly attracted to women in any manner nor feel any desire whatsoever to have sex with them. If a woman propositioned me, I would indeed turn her down. Perhaps it is my autistic inability to see things from others' perspectives, but the idea that women are so impressively attractive to men to the point that men are willing to endure the contradictory and punitive norms around courtship that are placed on them (which is apparent even from an outsider's perspective) is frankly wild to me.
I absolutely think that a portion of people in the rainbow community are reacting to social incentives and there are those who do so in order to extract benefits from the current social environment (non-binary being a popular one in certain circles), but there are people who are exclusively gay.
FWIW, I agree with you. @Sloot's intense and sometimes deranged takes on the Gender War get very tiresome for me as well. He does toe the line between "offensive, annoying but directionally correct" and "crazy hates-all-women redpiller" quite well though.
In contrast, I find it exceptionally hard to sympathise with this sentiment, given the state of the overall culture. It's been quite surreal to watch various women taking offence at the fact that in a few places online, some of which have been sequestered, men are saying mean, denigrating and in their opinion untrue things about women.
I've seen it put like this: "[This] upsets you. You find it unjust and unfair and unjustifiable. What if that was what you saw when you watched CNN or MSNBC? Read Slate or Salon or the Guardian or the Washington Post? What if it was constantly trending on Twitter? What if your HR department instantiated it in company policy? What if your union promoted it as a true fact that needed rectifying? What if the American Psychological Association, in their guidance for treating women and girls in crisis, was promoting the ideas espoused by /r/TheRedPill and recommending treatment practices based on them? What if this narrative had convinced your country or state to reverse hundreds of years of jurisprudential advances, and return to an era where due process is an inconvenience that should be abandoned? That's what men see when they turn on the TV or open the newspaper. It's what they're confronted with when they come into contact with the criminal justice system, or the mental health profession."
The high-status, influential, thought leaders of our time do in fact promote such negative narratives about men, and it's ubiquitous in our institutions to the point that it's overtly endorsed by governments and many prominent organisations. Such viewpoints have actively influenced law and public policy. And yet a commentator on some nowhere forum online can make @FarNearEverywhere "want to introduce mandatory castration for all men". Well, I suppose in some way you kind of understand how the "extremist" redpillers feel, then.
I understand how this would be frustrating to some women who find themselves attacked when they personally did nothing to contribute to that state of affairs, and I do wish gender relations weren't the way that they currently are. But quite frankly, I don't think many women understand that this kind of thing is just daily background noise for men. And if the red pill is a response to anything at all, it's a response to the fact that said anti-male cultural trends have been allowed to go on for so long without any significant correction. Even if their defection is anti-social, it's a reaction to incredibly dysfunctional social conditions that they did not create. You can't make situations that resemble a boot stamping on a human head forever and expect people to never chafe under it and never create their own compensatory rhetoric - this is just a classic example of "You reap what you sow".
Would I like to see better sexual relations? Yes. Do I think things are headed somewhere bad? Absolutely. But the redpillers did not start this, they don't have institutional power, and in accordance with this they are not the ones upon whom I place the obligation to change first.
EDIT: clarity
I sometimes vote if someone has written something I think is insightful. So I do cast votes very occasionally, but they're virtually all upvotes - I basically never downvote or report people for that matter.
I would not disagree that some MRAs have a view of gender relations that resembles conflict theory (but as you already noted, many MRAs are also mistake theorists or are a blend of both). However, in contextualising this viewpoint it's necessary to note that the predominant feminist view of gender relations is itself an antagonistic one (patriarchy theory), it arose much earlier than MRAs, and much of feminist political activism is informed by this idea. And when you stand in opposition to conflict theorists, you need to understand that they believe they are at war and will treat it as such. Perhaps their belief is mistaken, but through their actions they have created a dynamic that's fundamentally indistinguishable from what you'd see if conflict theory was true.
In other words, the funny thing about conflict theory is that it’s self-fulfilling, to some degree. Once it is believed by enough people and acted upon, conflict theory frameworks then actually become a somewhat correct framework to view the world through, regardless of the prior validity of the theory. So when the primary lobbying group that purportedly works on behalf of women is essentially treating gender relations in this way and actually getting what they want, I do believe that does indeed introduce a strong aspect of conflict to the relationship, and I think the "conflict theorist MRAs" are simply perceiving this fact. Gender relations might not inherently be one of conflict, but in the current environment, they have gained a distinct shade of antagonism wherein one side seeks to incessantly improve the position of "team woman" in some shockingly zero-sum ways, and while they do feed into the gender hostility as well it's clear that the conflict-theorist MRAs were not the primary progenitors of this antagonism. The way I see it, a large part of the purpose of their rhetoric and activism is to create some kind of necessary counterbalance to trends they didn't start, and they're doing this without benefits such as the backing of institutions.
Once again, I don't like how things are going and find the entire thing to be almost excruciatingly tiring at this point, but once someone starts a memetic arms race (and I do indeed place the blame primarily on feminists for instigating that arms race) it's almost impossible to stop.
This whole thing is genuinely hilarious, the fact that the "mummy" bears an uncanny resemblance to E.T. and the repeated assertions by the press that scientists managed to "draw DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating" makes this perhaps the most unintentionally funny thing I've read in a while. Guys, I measured the velocity of a moving car using mass spectrometry, please believe my results.
At this point, I would be glad to never hear about ayy lmaos again - I'm actually interested in the topic but the ayy craze has crossed the line into sheer parody. It's particularly frustrating because there are more credible (albeit circumstantial) pieces of evidence out there they could grab onto like the Viking Lander biological experiments, but their case has hinged around ridiculous UFOlogy and eyewitness testimony and now apparently they're resorting to using ridiculous E.T. looking mummies that obviously aren't faked at all.
In the US, where people and income are easier to keep track of, a third of custodial parents who are owed child support receive nothing.
I looked into the Census Bureau source that this statistic is based on, and the data seems to be based off self-reports by custodial parents, it is not being based off any kind of formal tracking of child support (that method of doing things poses problems too, as it does not include payments made through unofficial channels, but I won't get into that at the moment). Here are some selected quotes:
In this report, child support supposed to be received refers to the amount due as self-reported by the custodial parent. This amount includes both formal, court-ordered support (awards), as well as informal support agreed to between parents.
Of the 6.4 million custodial parents with child support agreements, 88.2 percent reported that these agreements were formal legal orders—established by a court or other government entity—while 11.8 percent reported informal agreements or understandings.
A total of $18.6 billion of child support was reported as received by custodial parents, amounting to 62.2 percent of the $30.0 billion that was supposed to be received in 2017 (Figure 6). ... Overall, custodial parents reported receiving $20.6 billion directly from non- custodial parents for support of their shared children in 2017, which included $2.0 billion received by 505,000 parents without child support agreements.
The technical documentation, which can be found here on the Census Bureau's website, notes this, too: "All household members 15 years of age and older that are biological parents of children in the household that have an absent parent were asked detailed questions about child support and alimony." It is asking the custodial parent, the one with the child in their household, not the non-custodial parent. And looking at the questionnaire used to assess child support payment makes it very clear that the intended target of the questionnaire is the recipient, not the obligor.
Here are some more selected quotes:
S300INTRO DO NOT READ
THE NEXT QUESTIONS ARE ABOUT WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN ACCORDING TO THE (AGREEMENT/UNDERSTANDING/COURT ORDER/COURT AWARD)
IF THE RESPONDENT TELLS YOU WHAT THEY RECEIVED, PROBE TO MAKE SURE IT WAS WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO RECEIVE
S313a So you said you were SUPPOSED to receive $X (per month, per week, every other week, twice monthly, per year) (including back support), is that correct?
(1) Yes (2) No
===>_
S313b How much child support, in total, were you SUPPOSED to receive? ENTER THE AMOUNT
===>$,_ .00
S326INTRO DO NOT READ
THE NEXT QUESTIONS ASK ABOUT THE CHILD SUPPORT THE RESPONDENT ACTUALLY RECEIVED
S335 What is the correct amount of child support you ACTUALLY received in 2013? ENTER DOLLAR AMOUNT
===> $,_ .00
I could not find an equivalent questionnaire asking the non-custodial parent what they paid.
This is not, in any way, a trivial source of bias and needs to be kept in mind when you're using these statistics, but the Census Bureau does not disclose this as being a significant limitation of the data - despite the fact that they have used this methodology for a while and despite the fact that this census data has been used for decades to drum up huge social scares around deadbeat dads with no acknowledgement of the possible bias involved.
These caveats were outlined decades ago by Sanford Braver, who states in his book "Divorced dads: shattering the myths" that to answer these questions completely accurately, respondents would have to remember twelve to twenty-four different payments over the past year. In the absence of precise information, many if not most respondents will just try to make up a best estimate, which is a circumstance that allows for an incredible amount of bias to enter into one's results - even worse when you consider that many people are deeply angry at their exes. And if the census officials come to their conclusion based on reports by custodial parents that is going to hugely distort things, the effect being that the results will come with a built-in bias against non-custodial parents.
Braver conducts a study himself where he solves this problem by asking matched sets of custodial and non-custodial parents, and unsurprisingly, custodial parents (mostly mothers) report a much lower percentage of payments made than non-custodial parents (mostly fathers). 13% of mothers report receiving nothing despite being owed support, but only 4% of fathers report paying nothing despite being obligated. When looking at the overall payment statistic, divorced mothers report receiving between two-thirds and three-quarters of what they are owed, and fathers report paying better than 90 percent of what is owed. If we were to do what the Census Bureau did and interview the non-custodial parent only, child support nonpayment is barely even a problem at all!
He states, after this, "I am certainly not arguing that interviewing only fathers is what the Census Bureau ought to have done. I don't believe that noncustodial parents' reports should be uncritically accepted as truth, either. To me, it merely points out how erroneous the present practice of accepting the mother's report as truth without qualification is. When studying something as emotionally wrenching as divorce, it's nearly impossible for people to answer without bias. Indeed, both parents' reports are likely to be biased. In the absence of trustworthy objective official data to the contrary, it seems safest to assume that noncustodial parents are probably overstating child-support payments made, and custodial parents are probably understating. Thus, the truth lies somewhere in between, and our findings can best be thought of as "bracketing" true child-support compliance. In short, we must conclude that how much child support is not being paid remains in substantial dispute, but the amount being paid by divorced fathers is almost certainly higher than most official estimates. Deadbeat divorced dads are nowhere near as numerous as the stereotype portrays".
As to the divorced dads who don't pay, Braver notes that you can’t assume that this represents wilful noncompliance - the single biggest factor relating to nonpayment is typically unemployment and when you exclude fathers who experienced a period of unemployment from consideration, the compliance rate rises dramatically.
EDIT: a small correction
Haven't written anything significant in one of these Wellness threads for a while, suppose now's a good time.
I'm currently in my fourth week of my first job at an accounting firm after a year or so of actively looking for a job (after recovering from years of chronic illness that derailed a lot of my plans). A lot has been thrown at me so far and it's been fairly exhausting. Despite how draining it can be, this is a development I'm fairly pleased with, and I'm even more pleased with it given that I have a reasonable level of certainty that I got in because of merit and not identity. During the job application process, I had a practice of entering "prefer not to answer" to any identity-based questions that could work in my favour, especially if the organisation indicated they would like to diversity hire (an all too common sight in Australia).
There is one thing that has been causing dissonance though, and it's the gulf between how I perceive myself vs. how other people seem to perceive me. So far people have told me that I have been doing well, and according to my superiors everyone who has worked with me has offered up very positive feedback. I am frankly very perplexed by this - I consider the rate at which I've been picking things up to be normal and expected, if not slower than I would personally like. I do attempt to be as fastidious as possible in my work, but I get the sense that I sometimes ask questions in excess and miss things that should be obvious. Note, I'm not complaining about the positive feedback in any way and I'm glad they consider me to have been performing well, but it's genuinely surreal to see how different their evaluation of my performance is from my own.
Perhaps I'm just used to unreasonably high expectations and perhaps my idea of "basic competence" is biased upwards, but I feel like short of actual mental retardation it's very hard to mess up what I'm currently doing. And it sometimes makes me think that the other shoe is going to drop, and other people are eventually going to see me in the way that I see myself.
I've been refreshing the counts for the past few hours, and this referendum failed even harder than I thought it was going to as well. 60% rejecting the proposal and losing all states is a pretty damning result for The Voice. I'm particularly surprised by Tasmania's rejection, because it was a state that Yes supporters were relying on to support the referendum, and surveys before the referendum indicated it might vote yes.
Something that Mundine stated in the aftermath of the referendum results did resonate with me quite heavily:
Warren Mundine, the leading no campaigner, has credited his side’s focusing on migrant communities for helping defeat the referendum.
Mundine spoke to Sky News, noting “some of them come from countries where they were second-class citizens” and were open to a message about the voice causing a divide.
We knew that the migrant community is 50% of Australia, either born overseas or their parents have been born overseas. We deliberately target that group.”
I'm the kind of migrant that has experienced this, and am incredibly opposed to affirmative action. Progressives might think their ideas are revolutionary and new, but their mindset of victimhood, group accountability and unequal racial treatment on that basis is basically endemic in many third-world countries, and many migrants have been on the wrong side of policies that look and quack a good amount like progressive politics.
As a result, I was in support of No from the very beginning, and though I couldn't vote in it I am happy with the outcome of the referendum. If the Voice had ended up with too much influence it would essentially have been a permanent, constitutionally mandated lobbying group which constituted an outright subversion of a proper and impartial democratic process, if it ended up with too little influence it would have basically been useless. Both would have warranted a No vote.
One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were.
The amount of resources there are behind progressive politics is pretty much always immense, basically every influential institution was supporting Yes. At the entrance of my train station, there were Yes campaigners outside for days, handing out flyers to people. Even bodies that should strictly be impartial such as local governments (City of Sydney) were putting up advertisements all over the place telling people to support the Voice, which is frankly inappropriate and clearly overstepping the bounds of their ambit. As you note, it ended up being very clear that this was not some grassroots campaign for change, but a well-funded, dominant group filled with people who have an overwhelming influence over what the public gets to hear and see.
It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them. Then every single time people turn against their policies, there always seems to be such a great amount of surprise and dismay that people would disagree with them, and a knee-jerk assumption that the reason for lack of support can simply be chalked up to stupidity or racism. Perhaps some of it is performative, but I do think that they really believe it.
The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board. It may be fashionable to dehumanise your outgroup and form representations of them as evil and stupid that justify not listening to them or trying to sympathise with their concerns. But the reality is that if you fail to try and properly understand the rest of the country, and form caricatures of them that simply do not align with how they really think and act, you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.
The entire Yes campaign has seemed to believe that the morality of an indigenous Voice is so self-evident that they don't even need to try and form much of a coherent argument in favour of why it's a good decision (well, outside of empty sympathy-mongering, sloganeering and other such tactics that attempt to substitute actual argument for emotional appeal, I believe @OliveTapenade has covered that topic in detail in this thread and in previous ones too).
One of the main arguments I see in favour of the Voice is that Indigenous outcomes are poor, it's the fault of whites and therefore Something Needs To Be Done. But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help? It's also unclear why providing help even requires any amount of differential treatment based on race at all (if the Indigenous are disproportionately poor, any policy focusing on socioeconomic status instead of ethnicity will also disproportionately help the Indigenous while also not neglecting other Australians in need). The woke arguments simply have not addressed these issues and do not stand up to this kind of scrutiny. Regurgitating empty platitudes about "listening to people affected" are not arguments, they are slogans, and not particularly convincing ones either.
The reality is that it's not as clear cut as they think, and their failure to make sensible arguments in favour of the policy or properly acknowledge the arguments of their opponents drives home to people just how intellectually vacuous the argument in favour of the proposal is and has always been. It really seems like Yes just can't conceive of reasons why one would vote No, and instead of actually dealing with the core-level issues inherent to the proposal they are supporting it mainly on vibes alone.
This is what I mean when I say they have "hugely lost touch with the rest of the country". Of course, I won't interrupt my enemies in the middle of making a mistake.
The standard reply to this was, "This is what they asked for."
I'd add that what people deserve is a matter that is able to be litigated, not a matter that is unilaterally decided by the beneficiary and that everyone else is obligated to blindly agree with. Making "what people asked for" the basis for one's reasoning is untenable, as even in a situation where someone has been wronged and everyone agrees they deserve compensation there are indeed requests that can be made which are unreasonable or disproportionate or just plain impractical. Just because you deserve something doesn't necessarily mean you deserve to get what you want. And these are holes that can be poked even after one has assumed that the progressive framing of poor Indigenous outcomes is correct, and I don't.
Do you know if anyone's around to watch him at the moment, like a family member or another friend? It's probably incredibly impractical for you to do so (and it's not really your sole responsibility), but it definitely doesn't sound like a good time for him to be left alone. After someone tries to make a death cocktail for themselves and threatens to use a knife when prevented, suicide watch seems like a perfectly reasonable measure.
problem_redditor
6mo ago
You guys underestimate how shit the psychiatric services are in the third world!
Oh trust me I know, I grew up there (and had an impossible time finding any halfway-decent mental health services there when I needed it). By suicide watch I just mean an informal one made up of friends and family.
Glad to hear you left him with company, and good on you for talking him down.
So here's an admittedly fairly trivial matter that's been on my mind lately. This is a bit of Fun, bit of Wellness, take it mainly as a lighthearted question because it's really not weighing on me too badly all things considered.
It's Friday and I'm home after 10 hours poring over numbers in Excel spreadsheets. I find that after a workday like this it's hard to get myself to do anything at all, it's almost as if there is a daily quota of mental effort I can expend on things. Once I devote all of that to preparing people's financial statements, income tax returns, business activity statements and so on I can't devote any more of my focus to my own projects and endeavours. Not to mention memory limitations, I am now using a significant portion of my storage capacity to track goings-on at work (made worse by my clients' numerous demands, which I will mention later) and remember the appropriate accounting and tax treatment for various matters as well as the relevant circumstances of each of my clients. The work itself isn't necessarily super difficult in and of itself, it's just that there are a lot of clients asking for a lot of different things.
It's quite hard to coordinate anything after work too, because my clients are often absolute fucking children who expect they be catered to on a timeframe that suits them - for example, they want things to be done at a certain time yet sometimes take forever to provide the information necessary to do the work they request, and their delays sometimes require me to stay long after close of business. Yesterday, I had scheduled something with a family member at 6pm, and near close of business the client returned with over a dozen transactions they wanted me to process (while this is something that happens on Thursdays the client usually provides the relevant info earlier in the day), and I was forced to complete the work hastily and hand it over to a reviewer - who unsurprisingly found errors. Said reviewer was not happy about that, and I have stopped planning anything after work because of this. Compared to other stuff that's happened though, this is a small matter - this same client requested that we do work over the Christmas period for them, when the office is closed and people are expected to take annual leave. Please note, they sprung this on us in November, when almost everyone else working on the client had already made travel plans, and as a result I might be the one who has to do that work.
I can't really list anything significant I do outside of work at the moment, because as it is right now the work week smashes me enough that I can't build up the level of focus necessary to actually do things. In other words, I feel as if I'm becoming my work, and I'm not sure if I like that.
How do you not be a boring person after work? Help, please.
Automating away a bunch of my work has actually been in my mind. There's often no standardised format to the data though (sometimes a client will just throw us various bank statements, rental statements and other such documents and we'll just have to use those). This isn't an insurmountable problem and I do want to do it, but I haven't had sufficient downtime to pursue that goal yet.
I have a fairly similar feeling of being uninterested in being around other people, but for a different reason. My ennui surrounding it is less because I find social games uninteresting and more because it's very clear just how much of social interaction is a psychopath's game, the kind of thing where the optimal strategy is to be highly manipulative and obsessive. When participating, my guard is always up. Being good at it is a form of "optimisation" you can be motivated by, but it's one that ultimately kind of sucks.
This isn't even necessarily disdain for normies, it's more that a truly incredible amount of human interaction is just warfare in disguise, people locked into an endless multilayered evolutionary arms race with each other which they can't extricate themselves from. And while "warfare" is not all there is to it, these undercurrents exist in so many facets of social life that it often makes it unpleasant to deal with. For a certain type of person I think it feels much nicer to wrap oneself up in intellectualising than to have to participate in that.
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