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Notes -
Since nobody seems to be bringing it up, I will:
"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"
It really is Poetry.
Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology. I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.
I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.
It seems that the aesthetics someone chooses to project and their aesthetic sense (taste? values?) are better predictors of what they will do and who they really are than anything else. It seems that half of my political values boil down to aesthetics in any case: I find trump-hegseth-vance-desantis et al to be disgusting and contemptible; I have more respect for Rubio, but the last Republican I could really get down with was Mccain, purely off of his aesthetics, even if choosing someone as gauche as Palin disqualified him from my vote (Romney was too morman for me to handle, I'm sad to say).
Likewise with the D's: Their candidates have been universally superior to the republicans these past 8 years because they would rather be eaten by wild dogs than put "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" up in lights and then line up behind it, but I have the most good vibes off of Bernie, Buttegieg, and Mamdani; also probably for purely aesthetic reasons.
I think this might actually be rational: just by observing the aesthetics an individual chooses to portray, you can make a judgment vis. how they intend to act in a way that is much harder to fake than "Saying shit". Kamala was a social climber totally absent of virtue, and campaigned like it. Bernie is a crusty old marcher, and acts like it. Buttigieg is a bloodless technocrat, and looks like it. Trump is a neuvo rich venal tasteless rich guy, and governes like it.
All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace. Maybe Duublya had a stutter, you can get an aphorism wrong and it's fine. It's ok. That being the case, if any politician in the future sits down and types out something as fucking sauceless and cringe and gross as "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" and thinks "This is great, fucking SEND IT"; they should probably go back to screaming at the cocain ghosts in an alleyway stop blighting our eyes with their garbage.
Aesthetics are a terrible way to judge a candidate.
It's true that Trump is behaving in a stupid and reckless way and this is causing considerable damage to America. Honest, capable, sober people can also cause considerable damage to America, perhaps even more damage. Even Mamdani can do a lot of damage to America. They just have bad values and so all their good qualities are worthless or even negative.
Would you prefer pointless wars for Israel but with a nicer facade? That's a Rubio presidency for you.
What about a serious, sober, effective campaign to wreck the criminal justice system, have DAs and prosecutors just put offenders out onto the streets to victimize normal people? That's boring, 'sensible' politics, that's what Soros has been doing, what Mamdani would probably do.
Consider Judge Russell Clark. In 1985 he decreed that since bussing (another sensible but torturous and massively harmful social experiment with predictably bad results) couldn't be mandated to desegregate Kansas inner-city schools, he would make city schools so attractive that white kids would voluntarily come back. He told the schools to buy everything they wanted without regard for cost. So they lowered student per teacher ratio, they built robotics clubs, swimming pools with underwater viewing rooms, a model UN with simultaneous translation capacity. Naturally this was paid for by doubling property taxes in the district. Somehow a judge had power to do that in the retarded American system where anything must be done to prevent segregation.
The results: an ocean of corruption, ballooning of administrative workers, administrative dysfunction, test scores no higher, somehow the inner city schools got even blacker than before. Dismal failure in all respects at the price of a few billion dollars.
I bet this judge is very sensible, very normal, a fine dinner guest. He's also a massive wrecker of society, squandering billions of dollars pointlessly. There are many similar stories in the US and around the world.
Just because something looks lawful and officially correct, it doesn't mean it's good. Trump can definitely be bad! But you should not assume that people who appear good actually are good.
Consider Europe. Run by very boring, sensible moderates. Run into the ground, fallen well behind the US, despite all the dumb wars and Trump and assorted incompetence. Real wreckers wear pantsuits.
Part of the job of being a civic leader is instilling/perpatuating/reinforcing faith in the civic model, because without civics we have tribalism. Our leaders should not only promote positive policies, but they should create a sense of faith in the system and appear level-headed while doing difficult things.
Even if Trump doesn't trigger some kind of global apocalypse, his corrosive approach to his civic responsibilities is, IMO, absolutely cancerous and likely to poison our system for a generation or more.
As a conservo-libertarian, I assume that any politician is going to be somewhat corrupt given the size of our current government. While we shouldn't accept corruption, it is far better to have Dick Cheney-like corruption -- quiet, background corruption by adults who are otherwise concerned with oiling an effective civic machine -- than the loud, fuck you, baby-ish corrution of Trump, who clearly cares about nothing and no one other than what serves him in the moment.
I disagree, I think the big problem with the Trump administration is not the corruption but the policies. The US is a pretty rich country, there's lots of room for corruption, sophisticated or babyish. California corruption makes Trump look like a mewling infant dipping a single toe in the water. In fact I think Trump's deregulatory stances probably will do much more to help the US economy than his corruption will harm it.
Going on about anexxing Greenland, trade war with the world, war with Iran. That's where the problems arise.
And all of those things are driven by Trump or his advisor's ideological stances, not their greed. Trump wanting a legacy as a man who expanded the US territorially, Lutnick's/Trump's skepticism of trade and the Israeli/neocon faction yammering about regime change in Iran - that's where the problems emerge. Sure there's insider trading and these policies are pursued in a corrupt way. But corruption is not even 0.1% of the damage. The policies are the damage.
If Trump truly cared about nothing besides what served him in the moment he'd be 10 times the president he is now.
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I see acceptable aesthetics as a necessary but not sufficient criterion.
Suppose you are interviewing for a job, and I come in in clothes which I have been wearing for a week which have tomato sauce on them. For most positions, this would instantly disqualify me, and rightly so.
If instead I come in dressed acceptably that does not mean I am actually qualified to do the job, and it would be very foolish to simply hire the best-dressed person (unless you are hiring a fashion designer, perhaps).
Trump tweets like a deranged lunatic. Of course someone who instead wrote masterful sonnets could have policies which were just as bad, but this does not mean that we should just ignore that fact.
If I'm hiring someone to reverse engineer the firmware of a competitor's product, I'm hiring whoever is the most competent for the job, even if it means hiring the sexually deranged catboy wearing programming socks. And for something like reverse engineering firmware, I'd venture a guess that somewhere in the range of 50 to 75 percent of the qualified candidates are catboys (or aesthetically similar).
The same goes for fixing the rot in Western Civilization. The overwhelming majority of candidates capable of fixing it are going to share a lot of Trump's bull in a china shop aesthetics, it's just kind of the nature of the sorts of people capable of what is needed. Sure, some candidate with will and ability to get things done and with the aesthetics of JFK might exist out there, but I'm not going to vote for Democrats that will keep deepening the rot in the meantime while I wait.
Sure, when you're hiring a guy who will never leave his basement or some other coding lair, you'd hire whoever. But when you hire the face of the PR juggernaut to promote your new rip-off of your competitor's product, you're more likely to hire someone based on their aesthetic appeal to your target market. This isn't likely to be a deranged catboy.
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One of these things is not like the other....
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Doubt it; I've known quite a few people good at that kind of thing (including myself) and none of them have been catboys or anything similar. Even SREs, who seem to have more than their share, don't reach 50% catboy. Maybe if you include bronies, but you can't tell all of them by looking.
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This is part of why Trumpism and similar movements elsewhere came about; the Very Serious People responded to the financial crises of 2008, and subsequent public ire, by putting a seemingly-respectable façade on an ideology that effectively amounted to 'compassion and equality for groups that can be proportionally represented in the C-suites; ruthless social Darwinism for individuals, especially those who are not Members Of An Oppressed Group'.
Re Judge Clark, I'm going to invoke Chesterton's Fence on the American taboo against segregation.
After the end of Reconstruction, many Southern plantationists resented that they could no longer coerce unpaid labour from Black people at whip-point without a fig-leaf of a criminal conviction. Having racially-separated schools allowed them to subject black people to worse conditions than their white counterparts, and 'separate but equal' rarely if ever stayed equal for long. (There was one school district, I think in Texas, that gave the schools in Black areas names at the end of the alphabet, and then implemented improvements such as air-conditioning in alphabetical order!)
That does not mean that any particular method of desegregation is necessarily advisable, and I would be interested to hear any alternative you might have in mind.
Regarding desegregation, I'm really more thinking of all these books like 'White Girl Bleed a Lot' or 'Race War in High School' where the black kids go around beating and viciously bullying the white kids, setting teachers on fire. The knockout game where blacks randomly sucker-punch other races. Blacks stabbing white girls (recall Iryna), or shoving them onto train lines as in NY.
It strikes me as unfathomably unjust that the US system bends over backwards for even the biggest lowlifes if they're black. They give this hoodlum an extremely valuable heart transplant, (he was coming to hospital with an ankle monitor on!) they gave him a second life and he still managed to get himself killed by the age of 18.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/anthony-stokes-teen-who-got-heart-transplant-dies-car-chase-n334001
They gave Kansas city an enormous amount of money for the sake of trying to get blacks and whites to be together harmoniously and it failed. How many lifetimes does a couple billion dollars represent, how many millions of hours of labour does that represent?
And yet the narrative is clearly that whites are in the wrong here, it's projected so loudly that it's international. It was compulsory for me in Australia to be taught about Rosa Parks not wanting to sit on the back of the bus despite it being on the other side of the world.
Well here are some of the things I read, letters that Flaherty publishes in his books:
There's quite clearly bad blood between blacks and whites in the US and I think they should be kept well away from eachother. Ironically enough I say that segregation was the Chesterton's fence that was broken. And then all these people get stabbed and killed and raped and beaten up, get gaslighted about their racism and have to pay all this money to government programs that fight racism.
Interesting set of anecdotes. If you are not in favour of desegregation, what alternative would you propose for ensuring that the Black schools are not systematically neglected as they were prior to Brown?
But in that case, the people tearing down the fence do know why it was put up; that's why they want to tear it down!
Why would it matter if black schools were neglected, what's the worst that could happen? Are blacks going to complain more about racism? They already do that a lot.
Is all this top black engineering and technical talent going to be lost? That would be surprising. I don't recall seeing many black names writing AI papers or earning STEM Nobels.
That's exactly what I brought up originally, spending all this money making the most amazingly well-equipped inner-city black schools in Kansas didn't help raise test scores or promote racial harmony. So why bother?
Because it's the right thing to do.
Because while some Black people will grow up to be criminals even with well-run schools, and some Black people will educate themselves even if they attend poorly-run schools, there are almost certainly a large number who could go either way.
Because if Black people are systematically denied the tools necessary to support themselves, and they thus turn to crime, the Blue Tribe will be more sympathetic to their sob stories and be that much harder to convince that anything ought to be done about crime committed by Black people.
Because somewhere in the U. S., there are future versions of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, and they deserve a proper education just as much as white children do.
Because a society which stomps on its ethnic minorities risks seeing karma hand it its own arse.
What tools are these, exactly? Are you saying they turn to crime because their 1950s schools didn't get aircon quickly enough? Or that the student-teacher ratio isn't good enough? If you're upset about my use of anecdote earlier, why not use some statistics? We could compare the crime rates of blacks in the top 10% of income to whites in the bottom 10%, see if the 'tools necessary to support themselves' argument holds up.
In fact, blacks get worshipped in the US, they're treated like gods. Mere mortals aren't allowed to say their magic words, only they can call eachother 'niggers'. The press invent new rules for capitalizing black while refusing the same for whites.
The media goes out of their way to decry anything bad that happens to them. There are movies and laws and constant updates on the Emmett Hill case. And likewise, extraordinary effort goes into valorizing anything they do well, well beyond the point of historical distortion. Some blacks in menial roles in the Apollo program are not a big deal. It was German rocket scientists and white men making electronics or rocket boosters that were the overwhelming contributors to the moon landing. I can only imagine the comical scenes of these writers looking for some black women to valorize, going through the records: 'Werner von Braun, director of the space centre, no (far too white and Nazi), Arthur Rudolph who oversaw the rocket development process, no (another Nazi), George Mueller who managed the development process and introduced all-up testing, well he is at least not a German but he's still white... Dr Jack Crenshaw, hmm well he actually did what we want to ascribe to black women regarding circumlunar trajectories with a computer and not a slide-rule - still too white and male, OK let's pretend that some black women who just worked in double-checking actually were important figures"
Some white kid gets executed by a black and odds are nobody ever hears about it. Blacks do something bad and they're 'teens', 'youths', 'crazed maniacs' or just forgotten by history. Blacks get given cushy DEI jobs and can scarcely be fired without legally ruinous accusations of discrimination. There are constant inquisitions into industries that don't have enough blacks.
They get perhaps the cushiest treatment of any minority group in history despite their terrible behaviour and incompetence. They're not getting stomped on at all. 'Not getting white people's money to support their school districts' is not the same as being stomped on. Certainly not when spending more money fails to have any noticeable effect.
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Literally anything but that one. Strictly speaking thé schools weren’t even segregated, thé neighborhoods were(and there was no way to fix that easily).
I wonder where the lib outcry about separation of powers was for that particular judge- like there was almost certainly a statutory mechanism for setting school budgets and taxes that he trampled all over.
Gerrymander the school districts?
That was functionally what bussing was, and it was not only incredibly unpopular, it also didn't work.
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I'm reminded of a few lines from Boswell's Life of Johnson, emphasis mine because it's a fantastic line:
I always preferred Saint Augustine's rendition in City of God, "A man serves as many masters as he has vices,” if Dogmatic Theology is your thing. Or if you prefer Nihilism, there's always Tyler Durden, "The things you own, end up owning you." Or the Bodhidharma if Zen Buddhism is your thing, “All phenomenon are empty. They contain nothing worth valuing.” Or Charles Bukowski if Amerian literature is your thing, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” These are all logically identical statements when you run the full gamut of logical consequences under them.
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