urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
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urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
I've been listening to a Tim Dillon (a standup comedian) for a lot of my political news.
You'd like talking to my girlfriend. She gets half her political news from Tim Dillon. Not sure I've ever laughed as hard as when she showed me the video about two very private people just trying to get home -- Prince Harry and Megan Markle.
He called it a while back that Musk and Vivek were going to be fall guys.
Is Vivek even involved in the administration? It seemed like his influence cratered after the immigration twitter debate. I don't want to admit that we're at the point where internet flame wars determine presidential advisors, but we are.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
The first order effect is that tarriffs make it more profitable to produce things in America vs offshore, so there will be more jobs and industry created here.
This would require that the US economy is at all set up to have manufacturing be a major sector, which it isn't, and that companies believe the current tariff regime is a permanent fixture of the economy rather than the crusade of one president. As it stands, these tariffs will be the first to go on January 21, 2029. And you can't spur investment by taxing, especially in an economy where the blue collar workforce does other things and manufacturing culture is gone, any more than you can turn the ocean into land by taxing Tuvalu.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
I was going to post something like this myself -- it's age effects. Both because culture was just different when older generations came up, and also because Gen X and above, even some millennials, have no clue how bad things have gotten in culture for the younger generations.
Younger social conservatives are generally very chill and warm people, even if they're dogmatically rigid. I think it's selection effects because social conservatism requires a certain approach of dutifulness and compassion, and highly disagreeable right-wing men under ~30 gravitate towards libertine libertarianism and are people I expect would be Democrats in the 60s-2000s.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
Trump won a second term because the economy did well in his first one — but the opposition spent so much mana crying wolf on his fairly reasonable and normie-Republican first term that they’re unable to stage effective opposition when the wolf comes as a wolf.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
Agreed. And I’m all for some level of mercantilism, but to do that you have to actually control a manufacturing base — and the US doesn’t have much of one, especially in key sectors. I agree with criticisms of NAFTA and Chinese manufacturing, but that damage was already done, and it’s insane to try and fix it by applying taxes. You have to have the manufacturing base before you can protect it.
Trump’s gambit here is equivalent to setting up an automatic turret to protect your house, but the camera pans out and what you thought was a house is actually just the still-standing facade of a house that was shelled into ruins.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
the quality of American politicians is higher when Revolutionary War veterans (and War of 1812 veteran Jackson)
I wouldn’t exactly call Jackson a high-quality politician, especially in the same thread with complaints about Trump’s economic policy. He was historic for sure, but he caused economic damage by vetoing the renewal of the Bank of the United States on populist grounds against all expectations.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
Maybe conspicuous Chinese hatred is like that, but my point is that low-level suspicion and dislike is so ubiquitous that it's not conspicuous. Particularly when it's focused on the CCP and not Chinese people, as it almost always is.
I'm not really talking about "The Chinese eat dogs!!!" stuff, which I agree has a racial component. Though I do believe there's growing suspicion more broadly about Chinese attitudes towards animals after the China-sympathetic view of COVID's origins was that people in Wuhan were eating bats, and especially after reports that the Chinese government was mass-killing family pets of infected people.
(If you want to find the few tankies who like the Chinese government, find the people who would get mad at me using the acronym "CCP" and loudly insist it's actually the "CPC". It's the lowest tier of language policing, which is why you'll only find it among internet communists.)
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
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This is an online poll.
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The alternative was Trump, so it became a fargroup vs. outgroup question.
I really don’t see the left having much admiration for China, they’re too involved in religious repression of Muslim minorities and too ethnically-chauvinist for the social-and-not-economic left to find them appealing. There’s also the one-child policy legacy, widely understood as a policy that led to mass-murder of female infants and thus is seen as horrifically misogynist (it’s literally an example of the government controlling women’s reproductive rights!). I’m sure there’s some tankies somewhere who admire Mr. Xi, but they’re not mainstream.
If anything, “China is not trustworthy and can’t be allowed to grow in power” is the one foreign policy matter where there’s broad agreement across the political spectrum in the US. See strong support for the Hong Kong protesters, spy balloon fiasco, scandals about Chinese students being spies, fear of a war over Taiwan, the CHIPs Act (that failed). There’s bipartisan support for a firm position against China and the progressive left has no interest in allying with them. I suspect if tensions over Taiwan ever went hot, left-wingers would be more likely than right-wingers to support war; it would be another Ukraine.
I know some grassroots right-wingers who’ve bought into the propaganda that Russia is some great haven for social conservatism, but I don’t know any left-wingers who believe China is anything but a repressive authoritarian regime. Unlike the Soviet Union, they don’t have the cover of limited information — when an elderly official was dragged out of a party meeting it was all over Twitter — and people on the ground who speak English like the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan can speak to how China’s actions threaten their freedom.
Plus, their regional dominance threatens Japan, and everyone in America seems to agree the Japanese are cool.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
I think this exposes the fundamental flaw in the red tribe/blue tribe model and undermines this whole debate.
If we're defining "red tribe" (as Scott does, it's his model) solely in terms of class markers for the white working class, and dumping literally all other Americans into the other bucket... well, uh, yeah, it's going to be a tribe that values higher education less than the other bucket. Put the way you have, "the red tribe" isn't even represented by the Republican Party -- Trump is not a red triber in this sense, Josh Hawley (the Trumpiest senator) is not a red triber in this sense, Clarence Thomas is not a red triber in this sense, Alito is not a red triber in that sense, Amy Coney Barrett is not a red triber in that sense, all but very few in elected office is a red triber in that sense, Vance grew up in the red tribe but is very much not so red tribe now.
In fact, J.D. Vance is a perfect example; he grew up "red tribe" but adopted many values of the "blue tribe" as he gained social status, yet he's a fairly conservative guy who believes in God and cares about the needs of rural white people. If red tribers who adopt the beneficial aspects of the blue tribe like the pursuit of higher education, while having a religious conversion experience and supporting policies driven by patriotism, lose their "red tribe" cred... then the distinction doesn't actually cleave to anything relevant for whether conservatism or progressivism values art and scholarship more. It would mean that valuing art and scholarship makes you not a red triber, making the whole debate circular.
Conservatism, in any meaningful sense, isn't about being a member of the white working class. It's about having a commitment to conserving the values of the past that contribute to human flourishing. Often it's about believing in God.
If a devout Christian who reads his Bible every day and goes to church every Sunday and puts his hope in Jesus Christ for eternal salvation -- but also lives in a city and works in a computer science lab on a university campus -- is a member of a different tribe than his fellow parishioner who lives outside the city limits and works as a contractor, then not only these tribal markers but the Church itself means nothing. If we're going to talk about whether conservatism is intellectually vacuous, we had better get our definitions right first, just as we had better get our dogmas in a row before we start anathematizing people as formal heretics. We should probably try to understand reality before we condemn.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
I don't understand your incredulity. "Not participating in or watching high school sports" describes half my high school - every once in a while the principal would beg people to come to games, but few showed up. While you're going to have to do some sports in PE, you can basically brush it off and half-heartedly sort of participate. Even the fitness exams aren't really pushed any more, they'll do them but no one is even mildly criticized for a poor score.
The "picking up your sister" thing is itself complicated by the fact that women are on average heavier than before. Sure, even a fairly weak man could pick up a thin woman, but you try and pick up someone who weighs 250lbs while also having weak arms. This is complicated by the fact that people assortively interact and date, so a boy who doesn't exercise is likely to spend time with girls who don't exercise. Does it only count as an "interaction" if you're wrestling, or something?
Playful roughhousing is also much less common, especially cross-gender. I had female friends in school, but there was never any sort of "playful touching" of the sort you apparently imagine would uncover physical strength differences like a revelation from Mount Sinai. There might be a playful poke or a shove, but never from the male side; the "men are stronger than women" truth has decayed, but the "men don't hit women" truth abides, even though large numbers of people couldn't explain why - maybe something to do with the patriarchy or domestic violence statistics?
As for the sex part... well, we've already litigated that a thousand times. Personally I think a huge portion of the romance crisis is due to men and women being much less fit than in the past, and therefore not finding each other particularly attractive. You can notice that in how men seem to recoil as from a snake when you suggest dating a fat chick. We even had one user with a pathological complex about ending up with a wildly obese woman: it was literally the worst thing he could imagine. If we're all being honest with each other, I think we've located the male ick.
You describe this as insane and pathological, but this describes a large set of younger generations. However little you might think the zoomers are working out and roughhousing, I assure you they're doing less. There's obviously a prescriptive angle you can take on this, but as a description of experience it rings completely true to me.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
For the current administration's actions -- I'm not sure there is a news source that could keep you genuinely informed without just being outrage one way or the other. Things are moving too quickly for anything other than surface-level takes. The Trump administration seems to be doing the policy version of a gish gallop, where there's not enough time for anyone to form an opinion about any policy before the next big one drops. How people feel about that will depend on their politics, but it's certainly a strategy that's working in terms of drowning out opposition.
My response has been to disengage from political news. I get secondhand reports from friends and family on whatever drama's happening on Twitter and whatever the headlines are saying, but I don't read political news at this point. I used to always keep abreast of what was going on and even enjoyed talking about current events with people, but it's been so chaotic and so impossible to understand that I'm just numb to politics.
It's not what you asked, but my honest advice would be that there's no way to be more informed without becoming extremely online or devoting your life to exploring executive actions. The feeling you have is real, and it's shared by just about everyone.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
One part of the CIA triad (which sounds like some kind of military secret, but I’m told it’s just a cool-sounding cybersecurity acronym) is Availability — users should have access to everything they need to do their jobs without undue hurdles. If the government is violating that principle, it invites a cavalier attitude towards security and damages it in the process.
This Signal chat situation sounds like a particularly pernicious case of Shadow IT, as much as I dislike the term. But I’m very much curious how government officials are supposed to communicate with each other, particularly with how interconnected the world is now.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
That’s the exact opposite of what I’ve always understood it to mean. It can be somewhat exaggerated, but how I’ve seen it used is as a direct counterpoint to someone claiming that something is bad by discussing its advantages.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
I think there is pressure on men to ask for sex frequently as well. If you don't, you might be gay or not into your date very much.
My understanding is that women really, really, really don't like having a man choose not to have sex with them when they're turned on. Because men are almost entirely higher in sex drive than women, the expectation (and not necessarily an unreasonable one) is that men will be ready to go at any time and all a woman has to do to get some is appear interested. So a man not being into it is a massive ego hurt: "Am I that ugly?" And like all ego hurts, the defense mechanisms start triggering like an intrusion prevention system, and obviously the problem isn't her -- it's that he's gay and no woman would please him, or he's an impotent loser.
The accurate understanding that both men and women have complicated reasons for wanting or not wanting sex at any particular time is hard to adopt and introduces complexity, and the human mind craves simplicity, especially simplicity that results in the protection of the ego. Hence why something like intersectionality, which on the face of it ought to introduce greater complexity and accuracy in the face of how varied social experience is and how many different social hierarchies there are, ended up in actual practice to simply mean adding more of the reductive social rankings that were already in the oppression olympics.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
It's the fact that the internet has made applying for things (jobs, dating, schools) so much easier, which led to a proliferation of applications. But applications are mostly a zero-sum game, so employers, schools, etc. have responded by ratcheting up expectations.
Yes, fully agree. While macroeconomic and cultural changes leading to unemployment and underemployment are real, the big factor I see underlying this whole conversation is that online applications make it possible for 15,000 people to apply for a job, which was never possible before. You can't treat 15,000 people respectfully and humanely. And the surplus of choices creates a sense of decision paralysis, dulling any ability to reason through options while diluting any sense of personal responsibility. There's a reason making most decisions starts by creating a shortlist.
That's why online dating is collapsing, too: a surplus of options leads to a sense of paralysis and lack of moral responsibility. Where before someone would be restricted to the local fare, now someone can see everyone around, and reach out with almost no effort. And what is offered with no effort can be rejected with no effort.
As always, technology is introduced as a liberating option but quickly transmutates into a crushing obligation. The market will extract all value, and will trample over any barrier in order to obtain it.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
If anything, architectural free-for-all seems a bit of a libertarian aesthetic, and it's popularity in the US strikes me as a remaining vestage of the nation's cultural focus on "liberty".
I wouldn't say that the US's focus on liberty is at all in a state of remaining vestiges -- both the mainstream US left and right define themselves explicitly in terms of liberty ("my body my choice," "live free, no mandates", "trans rights are human rights", "no tax on tips" -- even "all cops are bastards" is rather an interesting corruption of libertarian critiques of the police), they just disagree on precisely where the limits of liberty should be and what constitutes an unacceptable attack on the liberty of another. That's why the left went all-in on the paradox of tolerance, after all, and why they began defining hate speech in terms of 'violence', because 'violence' was long considered the limit of liberty.
Americans eat, drink, sleep, and breathe liberty, so much that it's very hard for Americans to understand how profoundly liberty-focused they are even in comparison to the rest of the Western world.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
Then who are the online right wing personalities to follow
Not following any online political personalities is an option. I don’t know of any on either the left or right that aren’t embarrassing for their perspective.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
The territory was captured and its inhabitants fled due to the (probably accurate)belief that they would be ethnically cleansed if they didn’t.
We have a term for this. It's called "ethnic cleansing."
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
3mo ago
Both sides are always ready (if not necessarily able) to restart it. Violence related to the Israel-Palestine conflict will continue until one side exterminates the other or one side gives up and flees. That's why Israel-Palestine is such an interminable and depressing debate: you're hoping for either genocide or ethnic cleansing. There are no winners and there is no ending.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
3mo ago
Trump's core appeal was an improved economy, particularly comparisons between the 2016-2020 economy and the 2021-2024 economy. Not that he has to run for re-election, but if he tanks the economy chasing tariffs, he might end up disgraced even among those who voted for him.
Negative partisans will still hate him less than Democrats, and his core will still love him, but he has a chance at destroying the future of his movement. It was already looking shaky whether MAGA could outlive Trump.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
3mo ago
A lot of this is likely because this is very online: converts are essentially acting as influencers, which gives good reason to gatekeep the usual positive reinforcement that comes with forgiveness.
If I see an aging instathot in a burqa I'm willing to accept she's a Muslim now (it's frowned upon to question that sort of thing without good reason), but there are good reasons to deny her prestige for wearing it. She clawed her way back to neutral, she's not a moral exemplar.
I find people who are influencers/celebrities for a certain point of view and then flip flop on that, converting but maintaining their public profile to be reprehensible. If your publicly-endorsed perspective or behavior, the one that made you famous, was really so wrong, it calls into question the whole concept of your deserving any fame at all.
The appropriate response to so publicly being wrong is to state your intentions and then disappear. Run to the wilderness. Strike your breast. Fast in sackcloth and ashes. If your reasons for converting are about gaining the mercy of God, you will receive it; seek and ye shall find, and blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. But if your reasons for conversion have to do with saving face or maintaining status, I have bad news for you:
Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted. (Luke 18)
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
3mo ago
What this amounts to is “no one should be allowed to argue in their own defense” which is of course a ridiculous and fanatical restriction to put on someone sharing their own perspective of a rapidly developing situation.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
3mo ago
If AI ends up being as cheap, efficient, and transformative as people want to claim, it should drive down the price of all goods to near 0.
The value of goods is not based solely on labor -- that's Marxism. The value of goods is based on scarcity, which cannot be alleviated by AI (even with advanced robotic labor) for two reasons:
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We live in a physical universe with physical limitations, on a single molten rock with limited, albeit abundant, natural resources. The price of the phone in your pocket is based in part on the physical materials used to assemble it, and any use of those has an opportunity cost. The glass in your iPhone can't be used in someone else's Android. So both the raw materials and the assembled goods have an inherent value because they are scarce and alienable.
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Human consumption has a huge status component. Even if AI-powered robotics could produce any and all goods, human labor and artistry will still remain valuable, perhaps even moreso, because of its scarcity. Inevitably there will be profit to be made in appealing to conspicuous consumption, and so profit there will be.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
3mo ago
Now phones are just broken as a concept. I never pick up unknown numbers and now miss all sorts of important calls like drs appointments etc.
Fair warning, zoomer take here. I seriously wonder why phone numbers even still exist, and especially why they exist with barely any real security, confidentiality, and authentication requirements. Companies use them to verify identities, people call them with personal information, but the system is set up with absolutely no reliable guarantee that who you're talking to is actually the person, and not some bot, spoofed number, or sim-swapped identity thief. And we've taken things like area codes and just destroyed the whole system.
They were great -- if expensive -- I'm told, in the days of Ma Bell. But now they seem like a bolted-on addition to our telecommunications system, which is founded on the internet. And outside of the US, people don't even use SMS!
This is another area where the opposition seems horribly unable to do its job -- most of the grassroots anger I see is directed at Elon Musk personally and not Trump, when all his power comes from Trump and the president has gone on record saying he believes in what Musk is doing at DOGE. Before the tariff debate, it seemed like we were in full Rasputin mode: it's not the tsar, it's his crazy advisor! I recall the "Elon Musk is AN UNELECTED MAN creating a coup against the government" thing from major Democratic politicians even early on in the Trump administration... it made no sense then and makes even less sense now. Everything Trump's opposition seems to say is exactly the opposite of what you'd want to say if you were working hard to stage a strong opposition and put pressure on the executive. It seems like everything the GOP is doing comes straight from Trump's mind, and everything the Democratic party is doing comes straight from grassroots anger and not strategy.
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