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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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It might be relevant to note that nearly the entire Uvalde Police department seems to have been mixed race latino

I think it’s more that Uvalde is a small town. You don’t expect to deal with that kind of thing there, whereas I’m sure every major metropolitan police force has real school shooter training.

It looked like "making a business decision" to me, not poor planning. As @faceh just posted upthread, they were afraid that the shooter had an AR-15 and knew they'd take casualities. It's unfortunate they weren't equipped to respond to the situation safely. But in any functional non-decadent society, armed men are expected to charge into danger when the community's children are being slaughtered.

Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.

This is partially downstream of immigration and ethnic diversity weakening the country's civic bonds, though I don't draw a straight line between the ethnic makeup of the police and their business decision.

Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.

It's their fundamental responsibility as cops: willingly going into danger on behalf of the larger community. At those tho haven't forgotten they "protect and serve" the people by upholding the law.

While Texas has gotten more Hispanic over the past years, uvalde has, uh, not been a magnet for immigrants. It’s a fairly homogenously Hispanic town that can plausibly claim to have been homogenously Mexican-American Hispanic since 1848 if not before.

Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.

Not a fan of this 'as men' line. Try 'as police officers', or as 'a good person'. I really don't think women should be absolved of such costly responsibilities when they clamor for equality. 'Women can be heroes too'. No, they have to be. Else, the kitchen.

Just because feminism wins in some arenas with its unsustainable social ideas doesn't mean we should cater to all of its delusions. Asymmetry is sometimes better than equality. If we start insisting lady teachers storm doors to stop terrorists, we will get more dead children and teachers. And that will have the disastrous downstream affect of legitimizing more gun control.

Quite a fanciful chain of consequences you've got there. One could hypothesize that a few armed female teachers could curb the problem far more effectively, thereby delegitimizing gun control, if that's what you care about. As Timur nearly said, “It is better to be on hand with one woman than absent with ten men.” Do people who stop school shooters die all that often?

If I trusted the competency of the women in your theoretical plan I might endorse it. I do not.

I believe men's lives as expendable in the defense of women and children is a satisfactory social arrangement, possibly the only sustainable one*, extremely honorable, and probably encoded somewhere in our genes. Has there been any culture in history that demanded something like "Return with your shield or on it" of women? I believe that's probably impossible.

* With the ALOHMNBIDTAI proviso ("All Lessons of History May Now Be Irrelevant Due to AI")

Don't do the 'and children' gambit. Children are innocent, and they've got more QALYs.

This is about the social contract between men and women. I personnally do not care to sacrifice myself for women. Not instinctively, not rationally, not morally. If some 50 year-old stranger with a vagina wants my seat on the lifeboat she better bring more than 'time-honored traditions'.

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