burkeboi
6d ago
I was reading the book Expecting Better from Oster since I'm having a kid soon, and she gave a stat where something like 80% or so of SIDS deaths come from smoking households in the UK. Those households are like 10-15% of the total households. That's not to say smoking is the big killer, although it is pretty bad for fetuses and new babies, but a family that is likely to smoke around their kid is likely to ignore other best practices as well.
From that, and other things I've read, it seems that SIDS is highly correlated with parents who do tons of things wrong, rather than just one thing or another. The "conspiracy" take is that a lot of public health messaging, to make the underclass and/or specific minorities look less bad, overemphasizes that 'this could happen to anyone' rather than pointing to most SIDS happening from parents being really negligent on many axes rather than Sally the Secretary having a drink every now and then.
burkeboi
15d ago
Historically in many societies, landlords had the right to use corporal punishment on their tenants. I wonder how a grand bargain of combining rent control with corporal punishment would affect the market. This is real radical centrism.
burkeboi
15d ago
If you define 'working' as reducing crime/violence, I agree it won't work. If you define 'working' as harming the outgroup/red tribe, I think this will work to a greater or lesser extent.
burkeboi
16d ago
I'm not sure it really makes sense to talk of policing nationally in the US. While there are some areas that embrace woke policing more or less, I used to live in one, other ones have policing tactics that haven't been affected by it. I think the dominance of 'racial considerations' when policing very much is a place-by-place thing. While it may be the case in, say, San Francisco that the overton window is limited to undesirable options that's not necessarily the case in other parts of the country.
burkeboi
16d ago
The actions are not politically acceptable, and that is why we cannot implement them. It does not matter if there are ways of stopping black criminals if we cannot implement them. We've seen what happens if we try -- the pushback gets stronger until we stop doing it, people who notice the issue are ostracized, it becomes illegal to use data to demonstrate things, and if the data stubbornly keep showing the wrong things, they just stop publishing or collecting it.
Doesn't this largely depend on where you are, though? The initial 60s liberalization/crime wave ended in Giuliani time. Even beyond that, the 60s-90s crime wave affected parts of the US very unevenly; parts of the US like NYC had pretty omnipresent crime, while others like suburban Texas really did not. I've lived in both big blue cities, purple suburbs, and red exurbs and the treatment of crime, as well as experience of crime, really is local.
burkeboi
22d ago
By the time I went in 2016-2020, it's culture had already largely converged with other 'Ivy' related universities. Individual departments and individual coursework could be hard, but they can be hard at any university if the student elects to go that route. I haven't been there since, but I don't really think they have a meaningfully different culture like they may have had in the '80s.
burkeboi
22d ago
Except none of that is happening. Taxes are paid by the "old" -- well, really, the middle aged, but our angry Zoomer doesn't make a distinction
In Zoomer parlance, the Tax system is Boomer-on-Boomer crime.
burkeboi
22d ago
I believe that X people are a burden and Y people should clear them out and take their wealth if they don't demonstrate utility to the Y
Endless human conflict is based on this principle. It really never works out as intended.
burkeboi
22d ago
I really didn't care for any third spaces, I would consume things like BJJ but not really put in effort to maintain them, for a long time. Then in my late twenties my wife and I were about to have a kid in a new city and we didn't know anyone. Joining a church kind of fixed everything socially.
burkeboi
22d ago
I went to a prestigious US school who is famous for its relative rigor and resistance to fun and double majored in two STEM degrees. My stress level went down greatly when I graduated college and started working full time in a startup. My experience was similar among other people in my major, as well as some other groups such as pre-Med students and folks grinding for specific internships and career paths.
That being said, there was a minority who honestly coasted. I'm unsure globally who is more representative.
burkeboi
22d ago
However I don't think this is an argument that most of his political allies would normally be sympathetic to.
Having to run cover for Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct made the Democrats, at least temporarily, more moderate on the issue of sexual harassment. With any luck, this will make the Democrats more moderate on Cancel Culture, at least for edgelord Nazi related stuff.
burkeboi
22d ago
I think this is a product of a long-running psy-op to convince people that National Socialism was not a fundamentally left wing movement. There were a lot of left wing journalists and academics in the immediate post World War II period who suddenly found the need to "memory-hole" which horse they'd been backing prior to the allied victory in Europe.
I think fascism really can't be summed up as anything other than Third Position. Intellectually it inherits from both the then right and the left. It combines the 'lets remake society based on my rational principles (charitable) / my ideology (uncharitable)' of the left, which the right hates, in the service of many institutions and cultural mores, such as natural hierarchy and nationalism, that the left hates. The fascists typically allied a lot more with traditional conservatives than the left in the interwar period. At the same time, they allied with the left on occasion such as working with Communists to bring down the Weimar Coalition. They were a very different ideology and both democratic conservatives and continental authoritarian conservatives had a lot of negative things to say about Fascists.
Anglo American conservatism didn't really have anything to do with Fascists. Unlike their continental counterparts, they never made any alliances with then nor did they have much ideological shared lineage. There was some admiration from the then progressives in the US for Fascism and even Nazism, but there also was admiration for Stalin as well. Many American technocrats thought the Communists and Fascists were technocracy done right, until it became obvious they were failed experiments. To be honest, both the Anglosphere left and right are so far removed from Fascism and Nazism that I don't think any comparison or contrast is useful. It's like comparing Democrats or Republicans to the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia or the Taliban; they are just so different there isn't much to say.
burkeboi
23d ago
I think this is quite likely. Already, most indictments in cities end in plea bargains rather than trials. Prosecutors love winning and hate losing, so you can have a drift of behavior where you get more plea bargains without needing to change any laws on the books anywhere; just a stochastic shift in prosecutorial and defense strategy.
burkeboi
23d ago
I don't think that 21 pregnancies in the paper is 21 children. The female body needs time to recuperate after birth. Stacking back to back births, without nursing, is a big reason why so many European noblewomen died in their early twenties. While it's possible the 21 is a 5 SD phenom, or maybe it's a weird counting method and/or false report, 21 pregnancies would just physically wreck a woman.
burkeboi
23d ago
Isn't this post a contradiction? The manosphere/machismo culture guys make a pitch that is a variant of: "You are weak and that is contemptible. Follow my view of how you should be, and you will no longer be weak and contemptible." You are basically making the same pitch, just swapping out what actions/beliefs are indicative of weakness. The core part is that both this post and the machismo ideology relies on shaming men for being weak, thus implicitly asserting that to be a good man you must be strong. That is an enforced gender role.
Here are your last two paragraphs, changed to be something a manosphere guy would say.
Chud! what could be worse than that, you wouldn't want people to think you weren't an ally, you should think about it all the time, you should neurotically worry about it all the time, you should punish other men for not aligning with the oppressed, you should in fact die about it instead of acting one degree off the course history has set for you. Now go back to pretending to respect women or yer cancelled.
It's why I find the male feminist types personally disgusting: Weakness is contemptible, and there is nothing that signals weakness more than letting the idea that people might tut tut at you dictate your entire fucking existence. HR Karen following ass
burkeboi
23d ago
The British aristocracy were over-represented among the dead in WW1 and WW2 (and, as far as I am aware, in most of the 19th century wars). That is, of course, to be expected for a group that justifies its privileges by claiming to be a warrior elite. As far as I am aware, the same was true for the Germans. (The Prussian aristocracy was uncomplicatedly a real warrior elite in WW1. In WW2 the Waffen SS did more dangerous stuff than the Reichswehr, and Nazi elites' sons were more likely to be in it).
I've looked into this, and those are good counterexamples to the rule I posited in the above post. I suppose feudalism would be another case where the 2nd estate did most of the fighting despite being the ruling class. The early 20th century US was another example of all classes sharing a similar burden in terms of military service.
My point about more powerful people in society avoiding service, or altering their service to make it better, probably needs a bit more refinement and may be more circumstantial than universal. I do think my central point about coercion still stands though; all agrarian and industrial societies I know of relied on coercing a lot of men to do their gender roles in regards to military. People skirting those requirements is a perennial source of complaints.
That the planter class in the Confederacy widely dodged the draft would be surprising to me, if true. They tended (as do their descendants in the red tribe elite) to see themselves as a warrior elite.
They didn't really engage in illegal draft dodging; it was primarily about abusing legal ways of avoiding service, or making your service better. Substitution, being employed in an essential industry, and volunteering for a better assignment were common ways it was done. I don't know if statistically the planters were more likely to do this than the middle class or, when they were able to, the lower class, but it was a source of resentment that many Confederate men were able to skirt the draft and avoid the worst service.
burkeboi
24d ago
but women joining the workforce and participating in society in at least some different ways is hard to make a rational case again.
A bit of a nitpick, but I don't think women working is necessarily feminist. Women work in the informal economy is practically every single nation in the world. The labor force participation rate for women going up is seen as a positive in the third world less in terms of 'women working is good' and more that a higher LFPR for women means more women in the formal economy, which provides a lot more protections than working in the informal economy.
Patriarchy historically tends to be more about restricting women's ability to get into certain, often high status, jobs rather than restricting their employment in general.
burkeboi
24d ago
Agreed with your points. One point I like to expand on is the following:
Politicians sons who supported the war joined the National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, and in more serious wars there is of course a long history of politicians and their friends landing desk jobs that mostly avoided combat while still getting a pretty uniform to pose in.
While draft dodging is the most visible part of avoiding service, probably even more common in history is manipulating exactly which job a person gets in the military to avoid the worst of combat. As an example, my granddad was actually considered unfit for service medically during WW2 but, since he knew not serving would be socially problematic post war, he became a military policeman stateside and went to dance halls with the wives of servicemen who actually risked life and limb for their country. This is also played out in propaganda since it's honestly true; while the infantryman faces the worst odds and dangers, more socially connected people generally get better postings and often get to stay behind. Even in states engaged in 'existential wars', you see this effect. Draft substitution in the Confederacy, connected people getting better positions in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
Overall, I suspect the man who actually 'does his duty' and faces maximal physical danger is a minority phenomenon; the big bulk of soldiers historically were coerced to a greater or lesser extent. I'll note in the US Civil War once people realized the war wasn't going to be short and that modern combat is very bloody, both sides immediately had to switch over to drafting people since volunteers were insufficient.
burkeboi
26d ago
Reactive vs spontaneous desire essentially.
This right here really is the core of many 'man vs. woman' sex 'conflicts' in relationships. Many men often project their spontaneous sexuality onto women, and many women their reactive sexuality onto men, and treat their partner as defective for just working different. I do think more people understanding how those two types of sexuality work would lead to people finding a middle ground and working with each other in relationships more.
burkeboi
26d ago
Cluster B, and really colloquially "crazy" women in general, IME and from what I've read anecdotally, seem to have a significantly higher sex drive than normal woman (statistically). Many men are drawn in to stay, despite the issues, partially because the sex is plentiful and often of higher quality/excitement. "Crazy" women tend to also be more promiscuous. I suspect the "crazy" angle is another reason a lot of men go for the "hoes".
Part of it also that having sex with a guy early is a high variance play; you may get a guy who disregards you as a 'slut', but you may also get a guy who appreciates it and stays focused on you. Having sex with a woman early certainly gives an ego boost both that the man is attractive both to her and in general.
burkeboi
27d ago
AAQC. Thank you for that post. I find it interesting how arguments of sourcing for the Canon existed both before the Reformation, and how the policy of treating the Deuterocanonicals changed a lot after. I suppose the drift towards a more "conservative" Canon makes sense from a Sola Scriptura standpoint; if you are unsure of the canonicity of a given book, it's better to list it as relevant but not divinely inspired than accidentally list it as an authoritative book.
burkeboi
27d ago
Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo?
Would everybody do it, though? I think it's a very open question if your average Swede would risk his life vs. either leave or accept life under Russian occupation. The Ukrainian experience shows that quite a lot of men would say "no". I can't blame them; as an American I would keep my head down and/or flee were I in their shoes.
burkeboi
27d ago
Does anyone have a simplified explanation of why the Protestant Bible is shorter/different than the Catholic Bible? I know a lot of the difference is Masoretic Text vs. Septuagint, but I've read other facts like Martin Luther considering ditching Revelations. I imagine other early reformers like Calvin had their own opinions of Canon. Was there a point where, at least for least Mainline Protestants, the Canon was stabilized and a justification given for the choice?
Sounds like slavery to me.
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