Do you work some US-government-adjacent job that comes with speech obligations, to the extent you would even be allowed to disclose that? That would make a lot of things about my reality model click into place, given the number of times I have been frustrated with you arguing for the "party line" in the past.
This has been a working theory of mine for some years now. On domestic stuff @Dean is somewhat idiosyncratic, on foreign affairs he always sticks very very close to the party line.
Firstly, beating somebody up i.e. violently assaulting them is not equivalent to calling them a bitch, and I cannot take seriously a frame that considers otherwise.
Secondly, re: gendered solutions, please see my response to @hydroacetylene. If you are willing to apply your 'gendered solutions' fairly, then fair enough. If, however, you advocate for maximum harshness against men while chickening out whenever it is time to apply your 'gendered solutions' to women, then from the recipient's POV that is ultimately indistinguishable from straight-up hatred of men and I'm not going along with it.
I think I should state a clear position rather than just responding.
Fairness, and broad equality of burdens, is important to me. This means I'm somewhat happy to go with any one of:
- We put exactly the same burdens on men and women, and expect the same behaviour from them both. I don't think this is wise, because of innate differences and consequent disparate impact, but it's fair.
- We decide that men and women have different natures, and thus should play divergent roles to at least some degree, but try to keep the burden somewhat fair. Both men and women are punished for poor behaviour and/or failing to fulfill their role.
- We are paternalists and decide that men are stronger and women weaker and more delicate. Men are given more burdens but are also given more power, respect and rewards. This applies at the bottom of society as well as at the top. Women defer to men.
To my mind we live in a society that nominally believes in equality (1) but rewards womens' hurt feelings with all possible aid plus harsh coercion/punishment for men, and rewards the difficulties of men or even physical violence towards them with contempt. What makes me very angry is when traditionalists, on the Motte or elsewhere, shrug and say, 'well, we might advocate for (2) or (3) but in the current political climate, all we can do is make sure that men hold up their side of the bargain and women will have to do their own". In practice this means that traditionalists will happily pile onto men with the rest of society, and then make awkward faces and back off whenever women do something that these traditionalists are supposed to be against. Self-declared traditionalists become indistinguishable from the most sadistic of man-hating feminists.
By contrast, I and at least some of the 'double-standard' Mottizens advocate for (2) or (3) but acknowledge that for now we are supposed to be living in (1) and demand to be treated fairly by that standard.
To return to the object at hand, I am quite happy with punishing the boy for bad behaviour, just not giving them a violent beating. Likewise, I think the girl should be punished for instigating a violent beating for a boy who had not actually physically harmed her and also "punching and stomping" them. Likewise, since I believe men and women are different (2) I doubt that you will find this exact scenario reversed but there are plenty of cases where girls gleefully ruin a boy's reputation and make him miserable for fun and I think that they should be punished just like the boy in this scenario.
Corvos
1d ago
I think I'm expressing majority feelings about this.
I really hope you're not. "Don't beat up little children" shouldn't be controversial IMO.
Would you beat the snot out of a little girl for being nasty to your son, or is this treatment reserved purely for penis-havers?
Notably, the girl was expelled (for a single term) for organising a public and violent beating of the boy:
She hit him a second time. Then, the principal said, the girl asked aloud: “Why am I the only one doing this?” Two classmates hit the boy, the principal said, before the 13-year-old climbed over a seat and punched and stomped on him.
Having an AI-generated picture which pretends to be you is legitimately hurtful, but fists and boots are pretty damn hurtful too.
“She’s already been out of school enough,” one of the girl’s attorneys, Matt Ory, told the board on Nov. 5. “She is a victim.
“She,” he repeated, “is a victim.”
Martin, the superintendent, countered: “Sometimes in life we can be both victims and perpetrators.”
Which seems like a pretty good way of summing it up, although it doesn't fly in public.
But in the general case it holds up. I cannot imagine this level of outrage if a boy were being bullied (or suffering equivalent psychic damage) by girls. Ultimately girls get compassion and boys get told to man up and/or shut up - I am honestly surprised they expelled the girl in this case and I wonder if it has anything to do with
inviting others to join her
if she organised a group beating. Which, on reading, she did:
She hit him a second time. Then, the principal said, the girl asked aloud: “Why am I the only one doing this?” Two classmates hit the boy, the principal said, before the 13-year-old climbed over a seat and punched and stomped on him.
If the genders were reversed, the boy doing the beating would get a lot worse than a temporary expulsion.
Season 1 was brilliant, and artistically they should have stuck with the original plan and made the series an anthology with each season running as a different story set in a different place in a different decade.
I don't know if you remember, but this exact same thing happened to Heroes twenty years ago. They had intended for each series to follow a different group of newly-empowered people, but the first season was so good and the characters so popular that the public demanded the same characters come back again.
This was a disaster because a) those characters had finished their major arcs and b) they'd been given completely story-breaking powers that were fine for characters who only learned to use them properly in the last couple of episodes but were disastrous when you need to put them into a new plot. All the real game-breakers had to be nerfed, crippled or otherwise taken off the board in some way, which just made them feel lame.
To be fair, Season 2 of Heroes was legitimately pretty good without too many of these contrivances. In general, though, I would say that showrunners have to accept that the 'anthology' style is unlikely ever to work - anything popular enough to get a second season will have an audience that refuses to let go of their favourite characters.
Corvos
2d ago
For a different perspective, I went to a similar school and university (in the UK), and the attitude was completely different. I never heard of anybody cheating, let alone petty theft. Occasionally at university we got email ads from essay mills but the prevailing attitude among the students was 'how absolutely doomed and pathetic must you be before something like this starts to look like a good option?'. Actually admitting to your friends that you'd used one would get you cast out into the outer darkness.
Corvos
7d ago
Bugger all, but realistically I think that when people say ‘British’ what they mean is ‘English’ or at most 80% English and 20% Scottish. From the sheer proportions of population it really couldn’t be any other way.
There was a conscious attempt to make a British identity during the period of Empire but that died with Empire. The Scots and Irish hate it because it associates them with the Empire (as it ought) and nobody ever asks what the poor Welsh think about anything.
Basically the only people who use British are the English and the English-adjacent people like @2rafa, because talking about an ‘English’ identity or discussing Englishness is consciously exclusionary and raises awkward questions about how the vastly more populous part of the UK should act with the others. This is also why England is the only part of the UK not to have a devolved parliament.
Take your point re: different Chinese groups. Going to have to wait and see how that shakes out.
For the rest, I think it would help to make my perspective more clear. I am British as I said, and we’re in a mess, so the question of which role models we should look at is a salient one. America is clearly more prosperous than China now, but the direction of travel seems to be in a quite negative direction (I am not talking about GDP) whereas China seems broadly positive and improving except for the very serious issue of demographics.
The genocide against the Ugyurs is awful, but looks rather different when in the UK we have mass stabbings by Arabs on a monthly basis and polls find ~25% of the Muslim population is softly supportive of jihad. Just yesterday we welcomed a man to the UK who has called for the slaughter of all Zionists, and policemen, and says explicitly that he despises all whites. I would not like us to go as far as the Chinese but an explicit goal of ‘no Islamic culture in the UK’ pursued with vigour and the invasive surveillance of the CCP would be far better than what we have.
That is, I am not saying that the American republic is clearly worse right now than the CCP. I am saying that I am not sure it is a good role model, and I am not sure how much it was being propped up by historical contingency. It may be that there are no good role models, and that we all take our turn in the great carousel of history, but I am not yet quite so black pilled.
The largest ethnic makeup of America is by far German and British (including Scottish and English as one for simpliticty's sake), with Mexicans a recent distant third. Neither of these places were exactly the bottom of the barrel of the world at the time. America was just better.
I think that this is the wrong time period to look at. Yes, when America still had lots of empty space and a weak central culture, lots of people being restricted chose to go there and make a society for themselves. That time is over. America is settled, it has a central government with wide-ranging powers and a fairly strong culture both formal and informal. Now the question is not, “should we leave to the New World and start afresh?” it’s “should we go to America and become Americans?”. That is why I limited my analysis to Ellis Islanders and later.
Corvos
7d ago
We used to use BIPOC as an imported term until irate English people pointed out that we were indigenous.
All points taken.
FWIW what I’m basing my ‘Chinese’ reports on is:
a) various conversations with (mostly older) people in train stations etc. Maybe I am the victim of a sophisticated propaganda barrage designed to subvert visiting foreigners but if it can successfully hire/imitate retired professors of geology then it’s a very good program. I didn’t speak to younger people.
b) My Chinese co-workers in Japan. One of whom is a very good friend and left China to escape his overbearing extended family not Xi. He is mildly pro-China rather than anti-China or pro-America, but not to any silly extent.
This seems like a huge strawman to me. Americans aren't capable of ciriticizing themselves? Really?
Of course Americans are capable of criticising themselves. But in the main they seem to criticise themselves for not being American enough. For failing to live up to the American ideal, undermining American freedoms/rights, too much or too little immigration according to taste. Very few people apart from the largely-defunct pro-European movement are saying that maybe the American way of doing things is at best one system among many. Or for example things like, “maybe balance-of-power democracy and a system of rights defended by law is less effective than a single party run by engineers and a tightly controlled industrial policy” or “maybe basing our national mythology on having a revolution to avoid paying taxes and submitting to central authority encourages fractiousness and sectarianism”.
EDIT:
150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power suggests that people wanted to be Americans long before America was the all powerful hegemon it is now
You do have to bear in mind who these people were, though. Overwhelmingly Irish, Italian, German and Jewish, with some Chinese. All people who had pretty good reasons (poverty or persecution or not wanting to live with the Prussians) for leaving their current country. I am sure they liked the idea of freedom but I think that the push factors were more pressing. And indeed Britain also got many of these people.
I have only ever visited China once but most of the people I spoke to (and the Chinese I have known outside China) were very proud of their country and not very interested in America.
This is the point being made above about glibness. China is rapidly developing industrial might, while America (plus Europe) looks an awful lot like a sclerotic mess with incredibly high costs, propped up by finance and an AI bubble. And faced with this, Americans claim that ‘actually, the Chinese want to be like us really’ and ‘Chinese growth is all an illusion so it’s not worth worrying about’*. Americans seem right now to be incapable of genuinely entertaining the proposition that the American way of doing things isn’t the only way or the best way.
*The latter claim may be true. Genuinely unsure.
Whereas one might as easily point out that huge amounts of Western economic activity are either self-sabotaging (wasting vast amounts of treasure and brainpower on finely-balanced legal questions, financialisation of the real economy) or fripperies and super stimuli (witness China heavily restricting video games).
Ultimately people didn’t want to be American or like Americans because of America’s culture and system of government, but because America was rich and powerful and they wanted to be rich and powerful too. Even for Americans themselves this is the case, I think: how many Americans would happily live in a third-world shithole economy as long as it was run faithfully in accordance with the American Constitution and Amendments? 10%? If America loses industrial might, they will lose a lot of other things in quick succession.
This is the same mistake we British made, incidentally: that the rest of the world looked up to us and came to be educated by us and copied our parliament because they liked us and respected our way of life. No. They respected Empire and when the Empire died so too did the respect.
I think his point is that many Americans are watching China build an extremely impressive society almost from nothing and searching for excuses to explain Chinese achievement away rather than deciding they could learn a thing or two.
(It’s not ‘real’ growth, Chinese can only imitate, what about the consumer sector, etc.)
It is conceivable (though not certain) that the achievements of the West are not a reflection of a better philosophy or system of government but merely a temporary reflection of weakness in our competitors plus luck for us (finding a new continent, the renaissance, etc.). If so, if so, it would behoove us to get our act together and drop our certainty in our own systems ASAP.
Corvos
8d ago
I knew of both but was never educated on them. My education was during Blair’s tenure and lopsided towards modern (post 1900) history: heavy emphasis on the welfare state and the suffragette movement, plus the rise of Hitler and Stalin to power.
Corvos
9d ago
Russia and Ukraine are two butch lesbians fighting over a condom
Time for a new flair, methinks.
Corvos
9d ago
The Empire never came up in my schooling or childhood at all. Part of that was tact, of course, but it was also because the formative events of British identity are broadly:
- 1066 and the Norman conquest
- Magna Carta
- The Hundred Years War with France.
- The Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, the scouring of the monasteries and the creation of the Anglican Church.
- The creation of the labour movement and the welfare state.
- WW1 and 2.
Not only was the Empire not really considered important, but neither were Napoleon, America or the Industrial Revolution. They were just stuff that happened.
Corvos
13d ago
Oh @crushedoranges san, you're so clever and handsome! And I agree with everything you just said!
His character is the admiral of the titular battleship, under huge stress, and releases this stress by very slowly and carefully building a model ship in his rare time. Said model ship is a beautiful and very intricate historical galleon; it appears in pretty much every scene where the admiral is being introspective in his quarters.
Avoiding spoilers, a Bad Thing Happens to the admiral and he loses someone he cares about. Olmos is a rather improvisational actor and completely aces his character's reaction: he roars, takes the ship in his hands, lifts it up, and smashes it to smithereens on his table, the admiral wrecking years of his own work in grief.
The cameras cut, everyone high-fives... and then the director points out that the real-life prop for the model ship was on loan from a national museum. It's very old, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars... and Edward James Olmos has just smashed it to match-sized bits.
Thought you might find it amusing as a case of life imitating art.
Corvos
13d ago
is it not at least sympathetic
No. People have endured far, far worse with more dignity. By the sounds of it this is entirely gratuitous and achieves nothing.
There is also the fact that, when you get right down to it, there are billions and billions of people and very few precious works of art. Yes, most of them are special to someone but if we acted like every person was as precious as their mother/father/brother etc. thinks they are then society would be unable to survive.
(This is an assertion, of course. I can't make an argument for my moral intuitions, I can only describe them.)
On a lighter note, are you aware of the story about Edward James Olmos and the model ship from Battlestar Galactica?
Corvos
13d ago
That doesn’t seem fair. For the world’s biggest rising country and the greatest threat to the American-led world consensus to break with its own economic model and institute effectively a freeport on its own territory seems like big news.
Corvos
13d ago
Globally over the last fifty years it’s obviously female education and careerism, which is why the UN and Western governments used to promote feminist interventions explicitly as fertility reducers.
You seemed to be shifting the conversation to the West since a mild uptick (which I haven’t heard of) since 2005, so I gave a more Western modern factor. Perfectly happy to concede that phones made a big difference too (using one right now) but the negative push factors are a big, big part of the story and did a lot to drive people to phones in the first place.
Did you ever read Scott's essays Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled which describe the broad atmosphere of online feminism in the late 2000s/2010s?
Or for that matter Ezra Klein's article on "Yes Means Yes"? The moneymaking quote is:
everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter
Many young men including myself blame the modern-day lack of coupling on the fact that that we grew up in the fifteen years where feminists were telling us with absolute sincerity that any interactions with women were potentially sexual assault, and that we needed to be afraid when dealing with women. Men are on the dating apps, hellscape that those are, because men were made to feel unsafe approaching women in any environment except one where women had explicitly opted into being approached. And even that doesn't work, because an awful lot of women in both dating apps and other dating meetups make it very clear that they are not actually there to be approached in any non-theoretical manner. (This is likely the reason for the sudden turndown you were discussing in another post, incidentally).
Yes, a decent number of men had enough female friends and social nous to realise the gap between the rhetoric and the reality, and now have happy dating lives. Good on them. Seriously.
But feminists wanted young men to feel afraid and uncertain when socialising with women in person, and they worked hard and they achieved their aim. And fixing that requires more than an insincere apology (which we haven't had) and even more blame for not being supermen and fighting through the blizzards that they ginned up. The reason that I focus on women is that fixing this requires women to actually be positive and welcoming towards advances by men, which all experiences show only occurs when they need us for something.
I was being descriptive. The fuller quote is:
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