JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Some times Charlie was in the trees.
User ID: 4009
It was originally a satire/reductio-ad-absurdum of Clinton-era culture war nonsense, but then fell victim to Muggeridge's Law during the Obama era. Still a fun movie though, if you really are a fan of the genre (as I am) I recommend it. The funny thing about men is that when you're nice to them they bring you things
Serious question, do you believe that whether or not a person is "white" is something that I should care about more than whether or not they want me dead?
I don't think I need to be a "right-winger" or "base my ideas on moronic progressive polemics about race" to notice a thing that is happening.
Though perhaps not quite as "black-pilled" as they are, my feelings mirror those of @FCfromSSC. What good is "Shared civilization, culture, blood" to me when weighed against having to share a space with people who actively wants me, my family, and everyone who shares my cultural beliefs dead? Is it really even a shared civilization or culture at that point?
Those are the questions that I am trying to get at when I ask whether someone of European descent who votes for a progressive is really "white"?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
4d ago
A common refrain when the Jussie Smollett story (along with assorted other hoax hate crimes) collapsed was that, among white progressives, the demand for racist hate crimes now exceeded the supply, such that they had little choice but to invent them from whole cloth, or at least avoid asking difficult questions about those that had been invented. So too, it seems, in academia: the demand for talented academics from minority ethnic backgrounds (and if they have disabilities too, all the better) exceeds the supply, such that they have no choice but to hire academics who have burnished exaggerated invented their credentials. It seems like an inexorable law of the universe: whenever an institution begins optimizing for something other than merit, it's only a matter of time before the liars and cheats begin clawing their way in.
Anecdotally, genuinely talented minorities tend to be the people most opposed to DEI policies as they see DEI as an effort to undercut their status and accomplishments. They also tend to have more lucrative opportunities available to them than anything academia can offer them.
Obviously. "Blue tribe progressives" are white people
Is it Obvious? I'm not convinced that it is.
If we take the intesectionalist's characterization of "whiteness" as something pervasive and systemic that must be dismantled (see the infamous "Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness in the United States" graphic) than whiteness isn't about race, it is about culture, specifically Western Culture. This is why Blue tribe progressives feel comfortable accusing Tuskegee University of perpetuating colonialism and white-supremacy for banning Crocs and requiring 1st year students to wear a shirt and tie, and describing men like Clarence Thomas, and Michael Jordan as race-traitors for essentially being southern and conservative.
Point being that if we accept that if an individual of African descent who votes for a conservative "aint Black" than it stands to reason that individuals of European descent who vote for progressive candidates are not really "white", and I feel like the current trajectory of UK politics and European politics more generally would seem to bear this supposition out.
Do you think the difference (if there is one) matters?
The ally of my enemy is my enemy's ally.
This principle holds true regardless of whether we're talking about Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, Nazi Germany and the Vichy French, Ephialtes and the Persians, or specific Mottizens and Third World Islamists.
I don't care why @hydroacetylene chose to support El-Sayed, I care that that he chose to support him
You want my thoughts?
My thoughts are that allying yourself with the enemies of western civilization to gain a marginal advantage in an intra-tribal squabble isn't the brilliant flex that you and @hydroacetylene seem to think it is and that anyone remotely familiar with the last decade of US political history ought to recognize the obvious failure mode.
Kolomogrov complicity is still complicity.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5d ago
For the record I do not think that "even high salaries would not be sufficient to fill the vacancies" so much as I suspect that there are a lot of people here who would object on principle to the idea of sanitation workers being well-paid.
A reasonable point, but at the same time my reply to you would closely mirror your reply to @SophisticatedHillbilly about socially necessary jobs.
Some jobs are just naturally undesirable, and by extension "low status". There are a lot of people who will object to a "low status" (undesirable) job paying more than a "high status" (desirable) job on basic principle because in their minds money is a proxy for status. That in turn feeds into the question of whether you can hire a sufficient number of sanitation workers in a world you are neither willing to pay them a middle class salary nor are you willing to shoot and/or starve them.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5d ago
A personal sense of "justice" imposed on a society that disagrees with your notion is just tyranny.
Yes, but to riff off of Robert A. Heinlein, the laws of gravity and thermodynamics may be unjust and tyrannical but that doesn't make them any less real.
There's a saying in the trucking industry, "if you don't change your tires in the depot, you'll be changing them on the side of the road". By the same token, if you don't police your own, your own will be policed for you. If you want to live in a country where justice values "human dignity", a "fair trial" and the "presumption of innocence" you need to actively provide those things because if you don't you will find yourself living in a country where "justice" is the village strong-man a chopping off a thief's hand and then nailing it to a post outside the market as a warning to others.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
5d ago
The latter is a sequel to the former.
Firstly, you're absolutely correct that the water-use and land-use arguments are bullshit and i don't think anyone local really buys any of it, the people making the decisions, that is the local government, chamber of commerce, land-owners, Et Al. are fully aware of how much land and water agriculture uses, and they are used to playing hard-ball when it comes to negotiating the terms of that use in a way the the typical Silicon Valley VC guy is not. I suspect that the water argument is aimed more at urban liberals than anyone else. That said the power grid and associated infrastructure concerns are entirely legit, local communities have either been burned or seen others get burned too-many times to trust in mere promises.
This is exacerbated by the sort of cultural differences you describe with things like NDA's, for someone who's already kind of expecting to get shafted, trying to swear them to secrecy is only going to reinforce that impression.
Finally there is a more general anxiety about AI as an industry, but rural anxiety about AI is a very different beast from urban AI anxiety, Francisco the fruit-picker and Paul the plumber aren't worried about Claude the chatbot stealing thier jobs, or imenentizing the eschaton/singularity they're worried about folks at Anthropic shredding books while trying to enact the villain's plot from Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (or more realistically) they're worried about Flock cameras being used by thier cultural enemies to identify and hunt wrong-think.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
6d ago
I feel you, I'm kind of salty that something I banged out in a few minutes got nominated while a bunch of other posts I'd put a lot more effort into got snubbed. Clearly I do not understand what the people want.
Remember, even Texas was no carry zone. US gun culture is not something inherited from pioneer and cowboy times, it was created in living memory by hard work and hard fight of millions.
This is not true.
Texas was never a "no carry zone" it was a no concealed carry zone. Ditto Arizona along with most of the Midwest and Mountain States. Likewise by starting the clock at the peak of popular support for Gun-control you obfuscate the broader trend. If that map had started in 1966 in instead of '86 there would've been a lot more green and blue on it, and what we would see, would be gun control getting pushed on the nation in response to the chaos and lawlessness of the 60s and 70s only for the nation to spend the 90s and 00s pushing back.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7d ago
Touche'
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7d ago
Im not convinced that they are not the same picture. I feel like if one of the most effective ways to "trigger" an SJW these days may be to introduce them to a happily married couple with 2 5 kids and a dog.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
7d ago
Well yes, the old joke about how "nobody hates femininity more than a hard-core feminist" is an old joke for a reason.
If you want labor to be paid more, then it means people who pay for the labor can afford it less easily.
Yes, and?
Are you arguing that supporting labor is bad, or are you arguing that "paying people a living wage" is bad?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
8d ago
No, the claim being made here is that the labor shortage and associated rise in wages is a bad thing and I am disagreeing. I find it telling that the all the leisure-class liberals who claim to support labor and be all about "paying people a living wage" immediately change tack when it comes time to actually pay those wages.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
8d ago
I know it's not the point of your post, but I just want to say that I've always found the whole "jobs nobody wants to do" argument infuriatingly obtuse and borderline offensive.
While nobody (that I am aware of) literally follows the argument up with "...and that's why the abolition of slavery was a bad thing" that is kind of what they are implying. What they are saying in effect is that people who do {dirty job} do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job} voluntarily because {dirty job} is sub-human.
The Pug and Trusty's are more my scene, or at least were when I was spending more time in DC. ;-)
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
8d ago
Unemployment in the US is currently at a historic low, but there doesn't need to be a mass of currently unemployed American citizens out there for immigration to depress wages.
As I argued in the comments of the linked post back in January, companies like Amazon and Tyson foods can easily weather things like Tariffs by simply passing the cost on to the consumer, but forcing them to pay American-level wages and provide American-level working conditions is much harder them to shrug off as it provides opportunities for other operators to start competing on cost and/or pick up market share.
It would seem to me that rule of supply and demand is the closest thing that economics has to a natural law. If the supply of labor is constrained relative to the demand, it stands to reason that the market price of labor (IE wages) will go up and vice versa.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
9d ago
This is kind of what I was getting at with "the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but doing it now is still something worthy of praise" and I'm suddenly wondering if you and I might not be in some of the same group chats.
The thing that I hated most about the Silicon Valley scene, and one of the things that ultimately drove me to leave, was the pervading assumption that a high score on the verbal portion of the SAT or an online IQ test somehow proves that one is a good and moral person.
I have learned through experience that I would rather share my neighborhood with a dozen people with room-temperature IQs who are genuinely happy to be here than I would with one genius misanthrope.
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