TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
22hr ago
My estimation of your reasonableness and sincerity has been trending upward of late, so let me put a little more effort into this.
Thank you for this, not just for the compliment but the longer post as well that makes for a far better discussion point.
My overall philosophical retort is this post.
To this point specifically, I'm not appealing to the "majesty of the law". I agree that if one side is selectively enforcing rules against you while exempting themselves, then unilaterally disarming is suicidal. I essentially said that in the hypocrisy post, that some hypocrisy is justified when refusing to reciprocate leaves you permanently disadvantaged.
But the point where I disagree is the jump from "the outgroup abused power" to "there is not law to uphold" or "our side now gets a blank check and none of our sins count" as I've been effectively hearing from MAGA apologists on this site and on others. Most of Trump's corruption doesn't directly advantage MAGA as a movement, and in fact does some amount of harm. MAGA as something other than just a Trumpist personality cult would be stronger if everything else was the same, except that Trump didn't sell off pardons. There would be some momentary discomfort as the right had to undergo self-criticism, but it would emerge stronger for it. The fact that it mostly refuses to do so is a cancer that eats it from the inside.
My position isn't "never fight back", it's that people should be very clear about what counts as fighting back, and not trying to launder every act of corruption as defensive necessity. If the claim is "the law is already dead", then the burden is on you to explain why a specific escalation improves the situation rather than just helping to bury it.
In your view, does the Trump administration get points for not engaging in this particular "arms race to see who can be worse?"
Yes! Or rather I'd frame it as Trump not losing points in this instance while Biden would have.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
22hr ago
The guys on here have little to no conception (ha!) of the reality of pregnancy or the kind of physical toll it exacts.
I've read a lot of what other people have been writing in this thread, and I can't find anyone who's asserting that pregnancy is a walk in the park. Obviously it's extremely rough on women's bodies in a number of ways.
But we're not looking at in a vacuum though. We're comparing it to war, and saying pregnancy is clearly worse than being a frontline infantryman is where my credulity strains. My response to this comment can be cross-applied here pretty much as-is.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
23hr ago
No_One would never have eaten humble pie.
I mean, obviously not. There would have always been another cope, another reason to show why Ukraine's doom was imminent, but for real this time when in reality they'd probably be able to just muddle through again.
I had a vague inkling that he was shoveling Russian propaganda but had never perused that information space so I only had a hunch. Reading your post was interesting (and quite cathartic) for me.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
23hr ago
Because there's no war currently happening that the major Western nations are a part of. But the international situation is looking darker every year. The threat still looms.
State-mandated pregnancies would not be required if the fertility rate was naturally >2.1, so there's symmetry in that the government only uses these options when necessary.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
23hr ago
This comparison describes pregnancy from the inside in the most visceral possible terms, but then describes the draft from the outside as "only a 0.5–1.8% death risk."
But the horror of conscription is not exhausted by your chance of being killed. Being drafted means the state seizes your body, removes your freedom, ships you away from your family, subjects you to total institutional discipline, and may order you to kill strangers, watch friends be dismembered, be shelled, step on mines, burn, drown, lose limbs, suffer brain injury, be captured, tortured, or come home with permanent psychological damage and moral injury. It also means you may be forced to participate in acts you find evil under threat of prison or execution.
So I don't disagree with you that forced pregnancy is horrific. But I'd argue that conscription still comes out handily ahead as the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy states have ever imposed, ahead of mandated pregnancies if they were to be implemented.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
23hr ago
Well put! It really sucks to see both sides engaged in an arms race to see who can be worse. At least have a little bit of introspection and be willing to say "that thing our side is doing is bad, and although I don't support the outgroup, we still shouldn't do that".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
23hr ago
We're not there yet though.
But assuming we get there in our lifetimes then that would eliminate the fairness argument for state-mandated pregnancy in terms of the gender balance. However, there would still be the state-interest argument for state-mandated pregnancies that conscription originally relied on.
Hopefully eventually that would also go away with the advent of artificial wombs.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
This is the comment I keep coming back to as pretty clearly violating at least the spirit of "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary". He includes several personal attacks including the following:
Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite. a lot of people think you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll
you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.
You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit
Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.
If stuff like this isn't against the rules, it should be.
Or when he's warned me of posting short comments. In this case he's justified since it's hard to tell if something is sarcasm on the internet. In my case it wasn't but it could be read as such, so I was fine with the warning. But then he does his own "ok bud" sneer comments which pretty clearly are sarcastic, and it's hard to read the situation as anything other than "rules for thee but not for me".
You can just read through some of his comments and it's not hard to find him being very aggressive like in this conversation:
You will not like getting into an IQ dick-measuring contest with me.
Are you aware that that there are numbers between 0 and 1? And other numbers besides?
Your hypothetical … is ridiculous and, of course, dishonest.
The problem with your farcical debate tactics is...
Do you actually know anything about Palestinians and Muslim culture besides what you have gleaned from the Internet about dogs and ‘honor culture’? No, you do not.
This was just one I found after scrolling on the front page of his profile. He's constantly getting into these hostile back-and-forths, so when I see No_one's profile has this banner: "Amadan is a power-tripping delusional idiot." It makes me think there might be an issue with how he was modded, although all his posts were deleted so I can't check.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
There's apparently no public-facing list exactly, you have to dig through various databases and hope it's accurate. Someone like DataRepublican has probably done some of that work on twitter but it's not the kind of thing I'll be spending project time on.
fair enough.
From my perspective as a taxpayer, Trump is undignified, but fraud costs a helluva lot more.
My original point was claiming Trump was uniquely corrupt as far as American presidents go. You're almost certainly correct that in a direct dollar comparison, fraud costs more. But corruption is particularly pernicious far beyond the direct dollars lost. Here's a good rundown of what I mean. That's in a military context specifically, but corruption spills out into all layers of society and is quite difficult to excise once it takes root.
Welfare fraud is a problem and probably has some second-order effects of its own, although it's more of an issue of simple dollars going missing by way of going to people who don't deserve them.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Sure, women were a small percentage of the armed forces of some of the countries that fought in WW2. But they were overwhelmingly not on the frontline, and most were entirely noncombat. As I said in my first comment you responded to, I don't see noncombat roles as being anywhere close to as awful as frontline combat duty where the risk of being killed is far higher. If people wanted to subject women to the draft out of a sense of equality, but then the women ended up mostly just getting noncombat roles, I would call that performative equality.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Amusingly, @No_one went back and deleted all of their posts
Well that is indeed amusing! I was looking forward to Mr. "Majestic Capeshit Arc" having to come up with excuses when his theories almost certainly failed to pan out. Unfortunately it seems his disappearance has more to do with getting modded by Amadan and deleting his posts out of spite or not wanting anyone to follow him to wherever he goes next or whatever. Amadan does a lot of uncontroversially decent modding, but also blatantly violates at least the spirit of the rules often himself, especially that "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary" bit. I've been more than a little skeptical of at least some of his modding decisions, so it's unfortunate to see No_one who should be here eating humble pie instead get taken out by something unrelated. Alas...
Ukraine is seeing a bit of a PR boom going their way right now, and as someone who's pro-Western I've been enjoying that a bit. But as anyone who's followed this war for long knows, that type of thing tends to happen in cycles. We're in a good cycle for Ukraine right now, but I wouldn't herald it as anything more than a temporary upswing. As always, Perun has probably the best take in that there's indeed some reasons for genuine optimism, but it's simultaneously not worth getting ahead of ourselves.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
The military is physically grueling beyond simply swinging a sword. There's a reason the Nazis and Soviets didn't bother drafting a large amount of their women into frontline combat despite both sides believing they were in an existential conflict and that the loser could very well be on the receiving end of genocide. From a trite view a women should be about as good as a man when it comes to shooting a gun or piloting a tank. Marching long distances under load, digging trenches, enduring cold and wetness, dragging wounded men -- all of these are things frontline soldiers had to and have to be able to deal with. And that's not even getting into the reflexes advantage men have as evidenced by esports competitions that others have cited below.
Maybe one day manpower will be fully replaceable with metal, but as of now that's not the case. Men are indispensable to manning frontlines even as (man-controlled) drones do most of the killing.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
I guess? But having a bunch of people die in pointless wars would be bad in and of itself.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
And I would guess those few examples like trans operas were an unrepresentative sample the Trump admin threw out to try to justify their action on an otherwise mostly uncontroversial program. I haven't seen other commenters present more than a few other anecdotal examples. I'm willing to change my mind on this though if someone has a more rigorous look.
ah, there's always some reason. Can we just admit it's partisanship?
No, my issue was specifically with corruption against Trump. This is getting into the issue where people redefine corruption as "anything the outgroup does that I don't like". Trump selling off pardons, Biden pardoning his son, and improper Medicaid disbursements are all bad, but only the first two are corruption.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
And I'm saying again that the realities of being drafted mean men are already subjected to violation of the body as a temple. Sure, having the government inseminate women would be gross and weird and terrible. But it's also terrible to have the government say that men have to go to the frontline where enemies can shoot them full of holes.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
As to the draft specifically my preference is that we abolish it entirely or, in the alternative, draft men and women equally.
If we abolish the draft entirely then authoritarian states with less scruples would eventually overpower and dominate all the countries that tried to do so. Then they'd do things like what Russia did with the Donbass and use their subjugated lands to go after their next round of conquests.
If we instead drafted men and women equally, this would almost certainly devolve into mere performative equality where women are mostly given noncombat roles.
If we were really committed to equality then we'd run up against the reality that women don't make great frontline soldiers, and would face even greater risk of abuse if they were ever captured.
Evolution has made men into warriors and women into childbearers. You can try to push against that but you'll always come up against biological realities.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
What?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
I think you're underselling the "invasive" point.
Compared to the reality of being drafted where a man might at any point have their leg blown off?
that there are actions so vile that if it's a choice between death and performing them, death is the nobler choice
I don't see why you're claiming that pregnancy is so much vastly worse than warfare. I don't think your sentiment is uncommon, but I'd think it comes from 1) this hasn't been done before, so the Overton window still sees it as beyond the pale, and 2) it would be done against women, and humans naturally want to protect women from everything.
These are not particularly compelling reasons.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
It was very much a worry in the Cold War era. It was less of a worry during the Liberal Peace of the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s, but that was a mere few-decade aberration.
The principle is "help your country in times of need, whether you want to or not." Warfare, which is men's duty, is a perennial issue. Birthrates, which are women's duty, is probably the same.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
No? That would presumably lead to an absurd amount of unnecessary wars and would flip the underpopulation problem into an overpopulation problem.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Are 6000 grants a petty amount?
But are all 6000 grants funding things as contemptible as Columbian trans operas?
Is the total of Medicare fraud, home health fraud, home child care fraud, disability fraud a "petty amount"?
Fraud is an obvious problem and isn't something most politicians would defend. It's categorically different than the type of corruption that Trump is showing.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
The 2 I'd cite for a list that Trump is going above and beyond are:
- Giving pardons to people who have helped him in one way or the other, like the Binance founder as well as Trevor Milton
- Hosting multiple private events for holders of the Trump meme coin, essentially doing what Republicans accused Hunter --> Joe Biden of doing, but doing it far more directly and at greater scale. Also enacting crypto-friendly legislation that Trump would personally benefit from.
- Refusing to divest from his businesses while President, which has been common practice for Presidents for a while now, and which causes conflict-of-interest issues to pop up constantly.
But then a lot of it comes from the laundry list of other things he's doing. Other politicians might skirt around things that are similar, but I can't name any other single politician that has as many as Trump. Things like:
- Accepting a luxury jumbo jet from Qatar, after signing favorable deals with them including billions/trillions in economic commitments and giving them an unusually strong security guarantee.
- Many of the deals his sons are doing, trying to implicitly profit from the fact that their father is the POTUS.
- Using pardons to assist political allies like the J6 rioters, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner, and Paul Manafort
- Charging the Secret Service at Trump properties well above normal government rates, meaning taxpayer money flowed into the President's business because of his official protection needs.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
You're not wrong. I also think wokists are vile.
The only solution is to keep demanding each side do better without regard to what the other side is doing, even though each side would really prefer to use their outgroup's sins as a blank check to be as terrible as they want.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
I honestly think this is a pretty reasonable take. A lot of people are attacking the claim that drafting people isn't controversial. It obviously is, but the majority of society still sees it as a necessary evil, as without it the nation could be overrun by other states that are less scrupulous. This is less of an issue for the USA that only has two relatively weak neighbors, but the principle is sound in general. Ukraine would have collapsed to Russian aggression long ago if it didn't draft its population to fight, and yes it's very controversial in that country with there being many examples of draft dodging enforcement actions that look more like kidnappings, but again it's still necessary.
Childbirth is extremely invasive for women of course, but it's also very invasive to be enslaved by the military and potentially shot to death. While death in childbirth can happen, it's fairly rare with modern medicine. Death in war on the other hand is an expected outcome for thousands or millions of men. If women were told that raising the children was optional after birth, then they'd only need to go through the pregnancy for 9 months, give birth, and then they'd be done which compares to the years-long requirements for many draftees, with unclear end dates. If I was behind the veil of ignorance and told I either had to be either a man reborn to be drafted in Ukraine's war, or a woman forced to bear a child for the state, I'd choose the latter pretty easily.
The main 2 differences I can see between drafting and forced childbirth are the following:
- Forced childbirth hasn't been seen as necessary historically since natural birthrates had been sufficient.
- The idea of forcing women to bear a large share of societal costs is seen as far more heinous than asking men to do the same.
Neither of these is very compelling in our current situation.
My issue with you isn't your actions as a moderator, it's your response style when you're acting as a normal user. I looked through a few pages of your comments here and all of your moderator actions were taken against posts that either clearly deserved, or were at least reasonably defensible. I'm pretty sure I've never gotten what felt like an unreasonable mod action from you either, even as I've gotten a few from other mods that were a bit iffy. I don't doubt that No_one probably got what he deserved.
But then I get warned for this while you're doing something very similar here and it feels like the traffic cops are speeding.
That's a small example and we could chalk it up to a one-off. My main issue is how often you devolve into making personal attacks when you're having a regular discussion with other people. I've seen you ban other people when they start swearing at each other -- which you should! But then you consistently get right up to that line with some of your posts doing so in practically every other paragraph (accusations of dishonesty, insults, mockery, sarcasm, etc). I'm sure you get a lot of unnecessary flak as a moderator and that can make you want to lash out, but as a moderator you should be held to a somewhat higher standard and not use that as an excuse.
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