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And much like HBD, an obvious truth gets dismissed because to believe it leads to only a single brutal conclusion. A group of people that you want to enjoy full human rights and political autonomy because that's what we've decided is the bedrock of being a good person, must be marginalized and contained at worst, eliminated at best. Or vice versa? Because it's impossible to share a Republic or a Democracy with a power faction that are literal raving lunatics and/or pants on head retarded.
I have so much whiplash from the 90's. The promises implicitly made to me by the culture (in the absence of parental guidance), the beliefs I took on by osmosis, and the horrifying hellscape of a nation I now live in 30 years later which seems the ultimate fruit of those promises.
Like, as a trivial example. There was a humor site called Pointless Waste of Time, that eventually got rolled into Cracked.com and had all it's best articles memory holed, even from archive.org. There was an article where this guy was trying to catch up with his highschool friends maybe 10 years later. I viewed this author as my peer, just a few years ahead of me. He liked video games, shock humor, and was a sneering atheist who never wanted kids. Over the course of catching up with a bunch of his friends, they'd all changed. He alone remained basically as he had been in highschool. I don't recall the precise score, but something like 2 of his friends overdosed and 5 had gotten married, had kids and found Jesus. He joked that he "lost" more friends to God than to drugs. I laughed. What fucking losers deciding to go to church with your family if you'd made it through your childhood not doing so.
So anyways, I got married, had kids, and now we go to church as a family. I can scarcely imagine how miserable I'd be had I bitterly clung to some version of myself I thought was "cool" in 1998. What sort of neuroses I'd develop to cope with the objectively lack of meaning, stability or community I'd be adrift in. The idea that "being a father cost me my identity" sounds literally insane to me, any more than not being a sneering 90's teenage atheist anymore "cost me my identity". Maybe 90's teenage me wouldn't understand the life 2020's middle age me lives. I don't care.
I also grew up on Pointless Waste of Time. FYI, the guy who ran PWOT, Jason Pargin (nom de poast David Wong) still has an internet presence. His twitter feed is pretty damn funny. He now has a substack that I think is pretty good and in particular does a very solid job of threading the needle between "don't piss off the blue normies" while still being actually insightful, same basic thread as he did back in the day. He's also been very successful on tiktok (not really my thing, can't comment on quality or anything), I think that's actually mainly how he mainly makes his living.
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I find it ironic that you would pick HBD as your example because to me it HBD reads as this precise dynamic only in reverse.
That is to say i think that a lot of people who are culturally progressive but who otherwise find themselves on the wrong end of the intersectional stack, end up fixating on racial differences and other structural "-isms" to avoid the more uncomfortable implications of thier beliefs regarding individual responcibilty/agency. Or acknowledging that the old John Wayne, Bill Buckley, Ronald Reagan-type "Stern Fathers" may have been Right all along.
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It's funny that you say HBD, because, uh, what exactly do you figure is the group of people that should have been marginalized and contained to prevent these outcomes?
I continue being a big fan of the theory that almost all the stereotypical "SJW" behaviours we are seeing are the result of (at least partially heritable) conservative temperaments grown on a liberal cultural substrate that was made by and for people who are disposed quite differently. "Lana" coming from a committed evangelical background clicks with this theory just as well as Puritan Harvard of all places being considered the main cathedral of the capital-c Cathedral, and I can't help but notice the overrepresentation of various priestly castes and theocratic cultures (Brahmins, Ethiopians, ...) in SJ activism. Leftism seems to simply have choked on its own success - much like England would probably have been spared Rotherham if their ancestors had been a little worse at subjugating Pakistan, the Left probably could have avoided getting taken over by people building a sacred hierarchy full of arcane behavioural rules around their ideology of toppling sacred hierarchies and arcane behavioural rules if they (we?) had resisted the urge to assume suzerainty of places full of people thus inclined.
(Are people like naraburns the rarer opposite example of temperamental liberals running on conservative memes?)
I think this is the vast majority of people on this website. Hlynka was definitely right about that. Yarvin called them (us) "dark elves" in that one substack post (which did have some good insights, but dear lord is he terrible at optics), and the same people are the "tech right" that has been so recently ascendant until like 8 hours ago. The extremes always pull the moderates to the edges (h/t martyrmade's "Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem", the best podcast about Israel and Palestine that's ever been made), and the culture war has pulled scott's "grey tribe" towards the blue and red, and in more even proportions than you'd think.
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Let me put it like this.
I would not be against much maligned literacy test to register to vote. I wouldn't be against banning people on SSRIs from voting. I don't understand why felons ever started getting their rights to vote back, when the last thing we need is a felon voting block, somehow convincing politicians to make their crimes legal or at least unpunishable. I think it might be a worthy experiment to whittle away at universal suffrage "disparate outcomes" be damned.
Sometimes I think of the origin story of sorts for the Slavs. Mostly because Dan Carlin did a podcast on vikings in the east, and then immediately after I heard that Putin summarized largely the same history in his interview with Tucker Carlson. And that origin story, as written by the victors, is that the Slavs were so incapable of ruling themselves, they invited some viking nobles who were much better at ruling down to rule over them. The relentless and short sighted tribal strife largely calmed down, some measure of relative peace and prosperity returned to the region.
Now on the face of it, that sounds like a preposterous story obviously written by the victors. Are we honestly supposed to believe that a people requested from foreign stock a new ruling class? That it's even possible for them to have the self awareness required to realize, as a people, they are temperamentally incapable of governing themselves? It's probably just a story, a myth even. But sometimes I think about it wondering, what if?
Kinda sorta happening a bit. Some prominent West coast prosecutors selectively decline to prosecute some classes of crimes. Not prosecuting property crimes of course. But also more serious issues of selectively not prosecuting gun crime depending on the demographics of the perpetrator.
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98% of people with a record believe that the law as written is fair, but they and their friends are being railroaded by the man. Prisoners would not vote to legalize theft/shorten sentences. They would vote like normal poor people, except they might support more of an anti-cop platform.
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Not exactly what you're talking about, but Zimbabwe does come to mind, what with their begging whites to come back and do basic things like organize agriculture and start businesses. In that case they're not asking for a foreign ruling class, but a foreign middle class. Interesting stuff.
I wonder if they're getting any takers.
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There are recorded instances of something like this happening: the Glorious Revolution, Texas seeking US annexation, or Napoleon III in Mexico.
Frequently it seems to be "please invade us to replace our rulers with better ones."
Texas seeking annexation was done on the basis of being a state, not being ruled over, and the selling points were military defense and paying down the ridiculous debt.
Likewise Napoleon III invaded Mexico because it defaulted on its debt. There were individual Mexican politicians supporting him, but that’s because they wanted to be the puppet rulers. Santa Ana might be an example from Mexican history though; he just kept talking the Mexican government into making him president and having to be removed from power involuntarily.
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Even if you limit the process to the same supposed mechanism as the Slavs, "please rule us to provide an impartial judge for our feuds", Slavs wouldn't be the only example of that Stranger King theory - Wiki lists cases in the Pacific, Iceland, and Sri Lanka (although the latter swiftly regretted it).
Wiki doesn't list the Slavs, though. IIRC when I looked into it the historians' consensus was that in their case it was a false narrative invented by writers centuries later.
Well, as little as we know about the Rus, we know of several Byzantine treaties with them, with the earliest ones featuring very Norse-sounding signatories and the latter ones featuring more and more Slavs.
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Church attendance is highest at middle-income levels. It's why people in low-income areas associate Christianity with success and people in high-income areas associate it with failure.
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Must we marginalize and contain these people? I reject this premise. What we can do is work with them, educate them on how to live a better life, and love them.
Then ideally create a culture that doesn’t lead people down these paths.
I'm certain you don't: you just draw the line a little bit further down the hierarchy. Imprisoning people is marginalizing them. Putting people into custodial care (mentally-deficient adults, etc.) is marginalizing them. Keeping disruptive, aggressive children out of normal classrooms is marginalizing them. This is obviously necessary. Again, the question is where the line ought to be drawn.
It's not hard to imagine an argument that segregation was the humane, minimally-marginalizing functional solution here. Main issue with it being that it was indeed deeply unfair to outliers, genetic hybrids, and so on.
Disagree. That's possible for those who wish to improve themselves; who are willing and able to receive such education. Many do not fall into this category.
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As with HBD the question is what happens if you can't do that (at least at scale) and it's easier to do other things?
In this case "destigmatize" whatever their condition is, which seems to have somehow flowed directly into "publicize" and even "encourage".
You can see why. It's simply much more convenient, and less mean, if society has the problem and it can be made to disappear in a puff by encouraging the "marginalized".
If you take punitive/mean options off the table it's an excruciating problem to find some way of containing bad memes without containing carriers. And, frankly, it cedes power to a certain sort of person I'm not sure it's wise to trust.
You can absolutely love people into more virtue. Christians did it with entire societies and came to basically rule the world.
These are excuses that I don’t accept.
I don't know that the conquest of large sections of the world were really expressions of Christian love, even if Christianity was often invoked as legitimating force and Christian voices often called for temperance in colonial activities in the name of the Gospel (i.e. Bartolomé de las Casas).
It's not quite that simple. In my view the Christian faith led to a massive amount of pro-social coordination to happen, which allowed Europe to evolve in unique ways. Then the wealth of that was misused I must admit.
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This has been the political project of the last 50 years, and it's only resulted in the inmates running the asylum.
I don’t believe it has been done correctly. Love is not endless, empty compassion. Love is pushing people to become better, even if sometimes against their will at the moment.
(Always excellent when I can resort to life lesson from The Wire)
How do you deal with those who are too seasoned?
Because, eventually, you're going to have a non-trivial amount of people who actually have exchanges like this:
- What if you had a life sentence?
- Then I'd fucking escape.
Fat tails are real. Whenever I see someone make your argument of "we have to love them more, and educate them!" I know, and even sympathize, with what you're thinking. You're thinking of my cousin who's just kind of goofy bro who drinks too much, smokes pot, lives in his girlfriend's parents' basement, and has been to jail a couple times. His shit isn't in order, but it could be. Is it his fault? Eh, his dad wasn't there and his mom didn't try. Love him more, educate him.
And that feels good because it feels manageable if we all just pitch in! And for a good number of guys-like-my-cousin, it would probably work! This is why I am a believer in charity in principle.
But what do you do with people like our friend Sean (from the clip) who, when faced with a hypothetical life sentence, immediately defaults to "I will escape from prison so that I can murder a man" -- and means it (inasmuch as he can "mean" anything, driven by immediate emotion and instant gratification as he is).
The fat tails of society are both what lift it to new heights (real entrepreneurs, real political leaders, et al.) and what pose a constant existential threat. The social consensus since 1964 has been to look at that constant existential threat and say ... just got to love 'em more!
I agree that there are people who must be contained for the benefit of others, that's not what I'm saying. It seemed as if @WhiningCoil was making the argument that all progressives are insane and need to be imprisoned or killed. Perhaps I read it wrong.
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The political project of the last fifty years has skipped the "educate them on how to build a better life" part in favor of simple affirmation, partly out of a woeful misconstrual of what love is and partly because our societies have adopted increasingly hollow ideas of a better life.
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