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Notes -
I recently had an experience with a regular at work that left me in a bit of a dilemma. It has some worthy CW meat to chew on, particularly in regard to some recent events, so I thought I'd share it here.
Let me tell you about Hassan.
Hassan is not his real name, though his real name is similarly classic Arabic. Hassan is an American black guy. Nothing he has said in the years I have known him implies Islamic faith, but the name suggests maybe his parents had interests in that direction. Hassan is tall, in quite good shape, and fairly handsome - a bit like a Temu Young Denzel. As I mentioned, he is a regular, and he seems to like me in particular, so I usually end up chatting with him for a while whenever he comes in. The last time I encountered Hassan he mentioned his desire to leave Jersey for the south (possibly the Carolinas), something he's mentioned on numerous prior occasions. He has issues with New Jersey that we'll get into later, and thinks the south would be a more welcoming environment. But this last time he added that if he were in the south, he could get a gun (he pantomimed a holstered pistol on his hip as he said this), so that he could "be a man" and "take care of business".
And the reason I found this concerning is that Hassan is a textbook paranoid schizophrenic.
The very first time I met Hassan he spent 15 minutes telling me that the government snuck into his apartment while he was out and planted listening devices in the walls. He frequently expresses concern that "they" are out to get him, a nebulous shadowy they who mess with his Social Security Disability payments, try to steal his money, try to lure him into doing bad things, sabotage his employment efforts, and try to take advantage of him sexually.
More on that last bit in a moment.
Talking to Hassan, all of this comes out in a non-stop stream of consciousness type exposition that has never even caught sight of a filter or a reality check. It's as though every thought that occurs to him is taken as literal Truth, and never subjected to any kind of, er, sanity checking.
That said, Hassan is actually quite functional. He lives by himself, handles his own bills and money, cooks for himself. These are accomplishments he is very proud of, that frequently come up during his expositions. He will start by telling me how the people at the Social Security office are stealing from him (AFAICT, that was either taxes or a garnishment of some sort), then veer into reciting all the vegetables he eats because he knows how to eat healthy, he cooks for himself, but these people they not eatin' right and it causes problems, mental problems in they head they be havin' mental problems because they don't eat right, not like him because he eats his green beans, real food that he cooks for himself because he knows how to eat right, act right because he learned it in school, third grade, food pyramid, he learned that here in Jersey in school, third grade, and these other people should have learned it but they not acting right, that’s just Jersey, lotta bad people in Jersey, obsessed with money, takin’ from you, takin’ your money.
Just imagine that sort of run-on sentence going on for 45 minutes.
"Acting rightly" is a very serious concern for Hassan. He is deeply worried about people plying him with drugs, or otherwise enticing him into criminal behavior. He recently managed to get a job at a bakery, but he noticed his boss was sniffling and rubbing at his nose, so Hassan flatly told the man to please not offer or force Hassan to do any coke.
He was fired shortly after for some reason. "They" struck again. Jersey, ammirite?
So, we have a man with an internal filter that is severely misfiring at best, with consistent delusions of enemies out to get him, telling me he wants to get a gun to "be a man" and "take care of business".
I consider myself to be a strong proponent of the Second Amendment, but that conversation made me consider the merits of having a chat with my local police department.
Awkwarrrrrrd.
As that thought occurred to me, it wasn't conceived as a hostile action. Five seconds before that moment I would have happily told you that Hassan was the very model of "Oh, yeah, he's crazy but he's harmless." As my brain first traced that hypothetical report, it was largely directed by concern for Hassan himself. He travels on foot throughout the county, often in bad neighborhoods, but that's always been the case. Has something changed? Is he being threatened? If I were to take that info to the police, it would be in the hopes that they would be forewarned, and able to help him.
And, contrary to popular belief, I honestly believe they'd try, because I've seen it before. Someone called the cops for a wellness check on Hassan, and they caught up to him when I was there. Three of them showed up, because this is a small, safe town with little for them to do, and they earnestly tried to just check and see if the man was alright.
Hassan responds poorly to wellness checks. On another occasion, Hassan was trekking around on a hot summer day, on foot and hauling his old lady luggage cart. A much more successful black man (judging by the car) paused to ask Hassan if he needed some water. Hassan yanked out his gallon jug of water from the luggage cart thing and shook it at the interloper, yelling "You need water?! You need water?! You need water?!" I had a young second-generation Hatian kid working for me at the time, and he thought it was the funniest fucking thing he'd ever seen. He was wandering around the place for weeks afterward, randomly muttering "You need water!" to himself and cracking up.
It was worse with the three cops. Hassan was yelling and agitated and scaring other customers, and I ended up sort of forcing myself into the situation and just aggressively treating him like a normal customer to keep him calm until the cops left (Hassan responds very well to being treated with normal, respectful courtesy. Imagine that.)
You might think it was so bad because of the obvious racial element of three white cops stopping an erratic black man and trying to grill him with questions, but it's actually because one of Hassan's persistent delusions is that The Police want to enter a homosexual relationship with him and he has no interest in doing so. It's not even like specific officers. Just "The Police" in general. All of them, I guess. Hell of a polycule. And it sounds funny, but it's probably actually very sad. Hassan has told me that his deceased father was a police officer, and the interest in a relationship from the cops came from when he was a young man. I suspect that the start of this was his dad's old buddies trying to watch out for the son, but their interest and attention being filtered through Hassan’s delusional paranoia.
Or maybe someone tried to molest him. I don't know, and I can't exactly take his interpretation at face value.
So the optimistic thought of the cops trying to help Hassan while being mindful that he may be armed lasted until the instant it occurred to me that they might try to frisk him, because that could well end in Gay Panic Tragedy.
But really, what right do I have to red flag the man? He has never done anything wrong that I've ever seen. Hassan would walk ten miles out of his way to avoid the appearance of having accidentally stolen a quarter. He might honestly be the most scrupulous person I've ever met - and if part of that is fueled by paranoid delusions, then his paranoia is remarkably pro-social and it might be that this world could do with more of it. By what right should a man that is pathologically righteous be stripped of the right to self-defense?
Well, because his IFF functionality is broken. Because his current modes of behavior may be "pro-social" because his only move when he encounters anything that strikes him as sketchy is to leave. But it's not like the man is powerless now. He's above average in height, and fit enough that I assume he's still doing Presidential Physical Fitness Testing daily, just like he was taught in third grade. If he was inclined to strike at perceived enemies, he could certainly do so by hand. A gun expands effectiveness, it won't add intent where none existed before.
Unless it puts the idea in his head. He's been paranoid and talking about moving to the south for years. Why the gun, why now? Was it a random conversation? Was it the violence on the news, in the air? Hassan strikes me as too focused on daily life for that. It takes nearly 100% of his mental bandwidth to get through his day to day. But I only see slices of his life. If a 3rd grade teacher told him that good citizens watch the news, how susceptible to social contagion would he be?
The final thing that dissuades me from taking a stroll to the station is the fact that we live in New Jersey. Hassan is never going to buy an illegal gun - in the tiny chance that some ne'er-do-well offers him a sale, he would assume he was being set up, freak out, and flee. And if the state that requires fingerprinting and a background check and two character references and a psych history and a sign-off by the local PD and assorted other rules so strict they won't let TheNybber buy a gun... well, if they give Hassan a Firearms Purchaser Card to buy a gun with his Permanent Disability For Psychological Issues money then we have much more general problems. And it's not like a warning like that would carry across state lines, even if the Free Carolinas would take a warning from the People's Republic of Jersey in the first place.
So I'm 99% sure it's a totally moot point. But it raises interesting questions. At what level of non-functionality should people lose rights? Should they, if they've never done anything wrong, in spite of the non-functionality? When I look at things like mass shooters, I will decry playing the partisan blame game when I think the person's thought process is sufficiently disordered - roughly at the level of "GPT2 playing madlibs". Is that a level that justifies preemptive action? If no, does such a level exist at all? If yes, where is the line?
The recent boat guy with the bullet in his brain who thought the "LGBTQ white supremacist pedophiles" were trying to kill him for narrowly avoiding their previous assassination attempts? That dude seems like he might just be broken hardware in a way where blaming any kind of software is just irrelevant. But before the attack he was just filing unhinged lawsuits and expressing wild conspiracy theories (unless there is an LGBTQ white supremacist pedophile cabal, in which case we again have much bigger problems). Is that something a man should have his rights stripped for? If so, is that meaningfully different from believing that, say, the police kill 10,000 unarmed black men per year? Or that Obama is a gay Kenyan married to Big Mike? Even broaching the topic feels wildly ripe for abuse.
Is this whole topic a can of worms best left unopened?
A big part of the problem with Western modernity is universal human rights, not in a “some people shouldn’t have rights hahahaha” shitposting way, but in the sense that some people struggle to function in modernity and must, for their benefit and the benefit of wider society, live with a lesser amount of both liberty and responsibility.
We understand this in some cases, people with down’s, late stage dementia, low-functioning autism. But those one or two cognitive steps above them have been granted, by the courts, almost absolute freedom. This was the second components of the emptying of the asylums.
Modernity is complex and confusing, I think Moldbug makes the point that plenty of people who would have been quite capable in historical situations struggle to function in their interactions with the modern state, modern employment market, modern social customs, subtext.
These people don’t deserve to be slaves. They have value as people, and in our materially abundant and prosperous society they should be supported in finding their happiness. But, in their interests and those of wider society, they shouldn’t be as free as us either.
There must be a stage between liberty and being a total ward of the state. A half-freedom.
I think about this a lot lately. I've been religiously watching Caleb Hammer's Financial Audit this year. Apparently this year in particular older fans of the show have complained that it's devolved into Caleb Springer, and all the dysfunction of humanity is paraded in front of the camera with a thin veneer of "Lets look at you finances" after 60 minutes of discovering what a low functioning member of society they are across the board.
That said, the same themes keep coming up again and again. Employment has gone totally fucky, and you need to SEO your resume and tailor it to each job application, probably using AI to save time. Because everyone is getting spammed with thousands of AI generated resumes for even entry level positions, so git gud. I'm not sure this is a state of affairs we should accept for mid-wit level career opportunities.
The second is that feeding yourself is fucked. Generational knowledge of how to make thrifty healthy meals has been lost, and low functioning individuals constantly struggle with the impulse to door dash poison, and finance it to boot. That said, cheap staples like beans, rice, etc are still widely available. So it's not totally impossible, and it helps if you were raised right.
The third is that there are arrays of predatory credit vehicles that would blow your damned mind. I knew about how terrible it was to run a credit card balance, and I knew payday loans were predatory to a point of exciting legal scrutiny. I had no idea there was a whole world of credit apps build directly into shopping apps. Pay in four, Klarna, other crap I'm probably not spelling correctly because somehow I've never actually been exposed to it personally. And seemingly the prevailing wisdom is at 18 you get a credit card, max it out because it's "free money" and then pay the minimums your entire life. Sounds like a fair trade, a few months of zero impulse control, followed by paying only a few hundred a month forever. I'd say it's just the show, but then I think back to my 20's and all the people I knew, even educated professionals, who did exactly that and were digging their way back out from it. Nobody balances a checkbook anymore, and cash isn't physical so that when you are out you are out. It's all imaginary numbers and notices you can ignore.
And I mean, that's a complexity disease that has hit the three main areas of your life, employment, feeding yourself, and money. It makes me think a lot about how the bar has risen to meet some minimum standard to meaningfully navigate society.
Watching just a few minutes of a recent episode, can you tell me what you like about it? Caleb seems extremely cruel in an obviously performative way, and frankly he comes off as almost evil to me.
I did watch one of the earlier ones where he seemed much more good-hearted and trying to help. These recent videos he just seems as if he's aiming to humiliate people.
Yeah this is an underrated terrible part of modern life. I personally think we need to massively reign in credit card companies given the fact that if someone carries a huge debt load for even half a year, it can set them back a decade in their financial life. It's frankly insane what we allow here.
I wanted to ask the same question, I found the clips I saw on tiktok initially funny and then rapidly they became boring and sad when it was the 10th iteration of "you spend all your money on an $800 bi weekly F150/hellcat and doordashed burritos YOU IDIOT" as some mildly confused mildly obese person from heartland America stared at him with a 95 IQ gaze.
Stupid people are stupid, and it's way more fun watching their antics on a fun reality show like Love Island versus a sad one like Caleb. At least the Love Island people are hot.
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Everyone gets Flanderized even people who are ostensibly playing themselves.
Not everyone, but the vast majority it seems.
Even flanderising gets flanderised.
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Hammer has “broken character” on the show before and revealed that the participants are told he’s going to play up meanness for the cameras but that it’s a bit. This was when one of the participants broke down crying at one of his wisecracks, and he tried to console saying he wasn’t trying to be hurtful, he’s sorry, this is the mean guy stuff they had agreed to.
So, it’s all consenting adults, and probably it’s meant to make viral clips to help promote the show, but I’m also uncomfortable with the meanness.
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As is common, trying to alleviate the suffering of the wretched (in a paternalistic rather than charitable way in this case) results in more suffering for everyone else. Credit cards are great. You can buy things without carrying cash around, without being present, without having to apply for credit at every place you might buy things. You don't need to trust the merchants and they don't need to trust you. And you don't have to pay for this service if you don't want to. But as with many useful things, you can get hurt with it, and trying to make it "safer" will almost certainly increase cost and reduce utility.
Credit cards are moronic. Debit cards are great. If you have to put small ticket item on credit, it is good to have some friction in the system to think twice whether it is a good idea.
Debit cards violate the whole "need to trust the merchant" thing. Fraud on your credit card means the bank is out the money. Fraud on your debit card means YOU are out the money until the situation is resolved.
Fraud on your credit card is nearly impossible nowadays. At least here in EU you have to have secondary (sms or bank app) confirmation for every online transaction.
The EU may be a crime-free paradise, but there's still plenty of credit card fraud in the US. And not all of it from online transactions.
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That just means you buy everything with cash and only trust a few big merchants like Amazon with your debit card information. I don't see why that's a big deal. Fuck credit cards.
You don't see why making it impossible to operate as a small business online is a big deal?
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I buy stuff that isn't available on Amazon. Some of those merchants apparently haven't had the best security practices. With credit cards... that's between the issuer and the merchant, all I have to do is tell the issuer that I didn't make the charges.
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There's a thing that can let you pay without carrying cash around, without being present and without having to apply for credit. It's called debit cards. You spend money you actually own, as opposed to some weird exercise of "paying back the money you spent during the month" that I once was surprised to learn most Americans apparently have to engage in. You can't be preyed upon with tricky overdraft fees because if you don't have the money, you simply can't spend it.
Oh if only that were true. I found out the hard way that my bank would happily let transactions through that my checking account couldn't cover, then charge me a $50 fee on top of having to bring the account positive. There are some very predatory banks in the US.
That aside credit cards do have other advantages. They aren't insurmountable but do exist.
So there are rational reasons to use a credit card. You don't have to, but they can be beneficial if you can avoid the trap of spending money you don't have.
Yeah, and if you use a credit card that won't happen. (Since 2009, they can't even charge you an over-the-limit fee unless you specifically opt-in).
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Most banks will let you overdraw your account.
Mine doesn't do so by default.
Mine tricks people into signing up for "overdraft protection" (even the name is Orwellian!) with a story that it will save you from embarrassment at the grocery store if your card declines or something, and doesn't tell you anything about the $35 fees (and how they are completely silent so that you have no idea you are in the red until you actually remember to log in and check your balance, so it is very easy to overdraft several times and get nailed with a fee each time). I went online and turned it off once I figured it out, but that was years after I got my first bank account.
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I'm perfectly fine with increasing cost and reducing utility in this situation. Yes credit cards are convenient, no I don't think the societal ills they unleash on the financial illiterate are worth the amount of convenience they provide. I like having them, and don't think we should get rid of the entire industry, but I'd be happy to make it significantly more inconvenient to use them if we could stop the predatory behavior.
Yes, of course you are. Because you value the wretched above all others, because that is the general rule everyone is taught. This is itself a problem with modernity, if modernity goes back to AD 1 anyway.
I do not value the wretched above all others. I value God. I think there are plenty of ways in which we should make life harder for the poor, in fact. Like restricting healthcare and social security and such. That being said, I still don't think that promoting ruinous usury is a good.
Unfortunately, as you probably guessed from my AD 1 reference, Christianity values the wretched above all others.
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Yes, he's a man after my own heart.
LOL this is a non-answer, but at least it's funny. I'll give you that. ;P
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The problem is that progressives (both in terms of race and class) spent decades promoting the message that “access to credit” was a key axis of intersectional inequality and the reason why various communities were locked out of “building wealth” that must be remedied as soon as possible. Of course lending to poor people, because of the inherent credit risk, can only be viable at very high rates to cover the many, many defaults involved.
Either you ban lending to the poor, and progressives whine about people locked out of credit and the opportunity to build wealth, or you allow them to borrow, and face the consequences. Blaming the lenders is ridiculous.
Progressives were never demanding that the poor get increased access to credit cards; banks have never had a problem marketing high-interest, low limit credit cards to the poor. The argument was that it was stupid for banks to deny mortgages to people with jobs who were currently paying more in rent than what the mortgage payment would be if they bought, on the grounds that they were too high a risk. It's also an argument that no one has made in the 20 years since banks went further than the progressives asked them to and started writing mortgages to people who couldn't pay them off if they lived to be a million, then repackaged them as AAA securities.
Not quite no-one. Kochtopus-funded economist Kevin Erdmann has been arguing for over a decade that a huge part of what is wrong with the post-Great Recession economy is that post-crisis regulations on mortgages have destroyed the bottom half of the owner-occupied housing market for no good reason. Erdmann and Scott Sumner have successfully convinced me that their contrarian theory of the 2008 crisis is probably correct:
Quote from the linked report:
I prefer the theory advanced by American Enterprise Institute economist Peter Wallison (free 90-page report (p. 441), Amazon book).
Quote from the linked report:
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Can I blame the lenders and the progressives?
In general this argument that political pressure has forced businessmen to be immoral is not very convincing for me. I hope to live in a society where generally businessmen have lines they won't cross, like openly defrauding the poor.
They aren't "openly defrauding" the poor. We have all these disclosure laws about credit cards, which among other things tell people how much and how long they'll be paying if they only pay the minimum. The people who get into credit card trouble want to get stuff and pay only the minimum. They may want this because they are stupid and foolish, or they may want it because they figure if they get in deep enough someone will bail them out, but they want it.
Yeah I agree the openly defrauding was inaccurate. I'm angry about it. But you are right it's not fraud, though still immoral imo.
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I mean, sure, technically you aren't wrong.
But even with everything spelled out for them, few people appreciate the reality distorting effects of 30% interest. They don't appreciate how quickly it is to get in trouble, or how slow it is to get out. They either never learned, or never really appreciated the rule of 72. They never had pointed out to them that their credit card debt doubles every 2-3 years, while a gold standard S&P500 index fund earning the historical average of 10% takes 7 years to double. They have no grasp of the fact that everything they put on a credit card that is accruing interest is eating up 2.5x more of their precious life than the equivalent amount saved in an S&P500 index fund gives them back. Closer to 10x more than a run of the mill savings account.
Math, and especially interest rates, aren't real to most people. Even explained to them, it doesn't translate into years of their life like it should. It was certainly never taught to me that way, nor I suspect to you. It was only in retrospect, in my 30's, looking at my nest egg thinking "This represents 10 years of my life" did these realizations hit.
Now imagine you never have a nest egg.
If we arrange the world to "protect" people like that, we make life worse for all the rest of us. A lot worse, because these people are so incapable. Just as a world without fast cars and sharp knives is worse than one with them, so is a world without (or with very limited) credit cards or any of the other things those people can hurt themselves with.
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