domain:parrhesia.co
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18hr ago
Personally, I see this as Mamdani doing much, much better among kitchen-table issues for the median voter. All about affordability. Of course, the merit of his attempt is a separate question. He's pro rent control (economically sketchy but not unheard of), wants to create public supermarkets (horrible idea all around, supermarket margins are very small), taxing the rich (will they flee or not?), and is obviously young and not super experienced.
Something I would note is that for all handwringing about socialism*, none of this is particularly atypical of a progressive candidate. Which is not the strongest endorsement, but he seems well within norms for silly-but-popular policies. The public option for Bodegas is the most out there, and even that isn't as out there as people think (it's still a bad idea, but it's a tried and proven bad idea). Some of these things aren't even new polices. NYC has rent control!
This more or less comports with my expectations. To one side, Mamdani seems kind of vacuous - he mostly seems to agree with whoever he's talking to. A useful trait for a politician, but not particularly indicative. To the other side, it's unsurprising mirror of the right-wing. The Right hates the aesthetic of radicalism, and will try to present their policies as common sense even when they're completely bonkers. The Left loves the aesthetic of radicalism, and will try to gloss normal policy as revolutionary.
Aside: Mamdani winning the primary seems to have aroused a spectacularly unhinged fury from certain sectors, e.g. one representative calling for him to be denaturalized and another saying he was the vanguard of an effort to turn NYC into a Shia Caliphate.
*illustrative: I once had an argument with a guy who was stridently advocating for socialism, and when I pressed him for specifics on what that would entail, it basically boiled down to UHC + a sovereign wealth fund.
ABigGuy4U
18hr ago
Yes, but notice that the easily quotable catchphrase that Loose Change coined, “Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams” works to take your focus off building 7, and put it onto buildings 1 and 2 where there is at least a plausible argument that the building collapses were caused by the plane strikes.
HaroldWilson
18hr ago
the current government controls people through threatening their driving licenses
This is a pretty odd thing to say given how generously drivers are treated in much of the Anglosphere. To actually get banned from driving in the US or UK you have to be preposterously negligent. Recently a footballer here in Britain was caught speeding eight times in as many weeks (and none of them were even close), lied to the police after some of them and was given a driving ban of less than a month. There are perhaps few less sympathetic groups in the Western world than suspended drivers.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
18hr ago
Just saying, "this person is too crazy to have a gun" overlaps with "the police are unfairly ignoring threats to this person's life"
aceventura
18hr ago
I know this is bait, but the number of childless women I know is so much higher than women who have ruined their lives with natural family planning or children out of wedlock.
This seems like PMC selection bias, unless you have a very diverse social group. And Catholics who are really committed to natural family planning usually have their lives in order already.
Childless woman is the scarier outcome for a daughter than even teen pregnancy IMO.
This depends a lot on the teen's family situation.
I grew up in WV. A state that is deeply misunderstood by our ruling class, but I can tell you that teenage pregnancy is not a pretty sight. Even if things turn out alright eventually (and they don't always do), the first several years can be very rough for both mother and child. Mother and father splitting up is also a lot more likely when both parents are young.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
18hr ago
It burned down because it was on fire.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18hr ago
The standard meaning of "neoliberal" is "person with economic views to my right who I dislike" in the same way that the unfortunately now-standard meaning of "fascist" is "person with social views to my right who I dislike."
Ten years ago, I would have agreed with you, but it's extremely common to see right-wing populists use it as a pejorative as well, targeting people to the left of them economically.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
18hr ago
The richest man in the world has basically the same political program you do (like literally wants everything in your list), and he's powerless to enact it for this specific reason.
Um, what? Elon Musk is modelling dysfunctional ghetto family norms.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
18hr ago
I think you’re going from the wrong assumption here. Kids and grandkids of Trump have much more in common with stereotypical children of wealth than they do children of celebrities. Confusing the two is a common mistake, but they are extremely different. A child of wealth learns that they have a parachute if they screw up. A child of celebrities learns that attention = survival, and are clearly poised to learn counterproductive lessons.
Speaking of children of politicians as a sort of weird third category doesn’t make sense. Either they are kids of the attention seeking variety (where some craziness is expected) or wealth (where they largely turn out fine). And I think you far oversell the number of crazy kids of wealth. Now I grant you part of that is wealth does better at hiding even after being busted for something (eg the children of the Reuters guy and their nanny). Despite that it’s impressive how relatively few wealthy kid screwups there are.
Pigeon
coo coo
18hr ago
I think I'd be more wary about calling Confucianism a religion or religion-like without bounding what is meant by religion and Confucianism respectively.
Speaking of language, the Chinese term for Confucianism is 儒教 (rújiào) - the former character means 'scholar', and the latter means 'teaching', 'school', or sometimes 'religion'. Confucianism is the teaching of the scholars. I bring this up because it's similar to the names of schools that are uncontestedly considered 'religions' in the West.
It is true that Confucius has a temple, and he was himself strict about the preservation of the rites of Zhou and other traditional religious institutions, and many aspects of Confucian thought has seeped into Chinese folk religion; the Classic of Changes literally originates from treatises on divination...
But when I read most works in the Confucian school I get a different sense -- that it is "religious" to the extent that all political systems and philosophies in classical antiquity are religious, and it is less overtly religious than many of its contemporaries!
樊遲問知。子曰。務民之義、敬鬼神而遠之、可謂知矣。
Analects 6:22. Fan Chi asked what constituted wisdom. The Master said, "To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom."
子不語怪，力，亂，神。
Analects 7:21. The subjects on which the Master did not talk, were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.
On the other hand, many of the Socratic dialogues reference gods and the divine much more directly than the Confucian classics do, but I think we would still consider Euthyphro more of a philosophical work than a religious one, right?
Regardless the ancients would have drawn less stark a divide than we would regarding the secular and the religious, if they did so at all.
And Confucianism is also -- I think more commonly -- referred to as 儒家 rujia (家 jia, lit. family/home, in this case meaning "school of thought"). Other contemporary examples of this usage include 法家 fajia (the Legalists) and 墨家 mojia (the Mohists), part of the Hundred Schools of Thought which we identify nowadays as primarily political or philosophical schools rather than religious ones, even if these philosophical schools were bound at the time to various superstitions and religions as well.
This is not to obfuscate the mystical parts of Confucianism, of course. The Classics referencing rites implies a certain belief in the validity of those rites, and we have further developments (e.g. 理學 lixue, often translated as neo-Confucianism) that have a more explicit focus on the metaphysical. But I would still put it as that Confucian thought is a largely humanistic school of moral philosophy that was nevertheless grounded in a superstitious and religious society, and thus utilises the assumptions and language of that society.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
18hr ago
The woman in the article is 25. She's at no risk of imminent infertility. And it's not like she's trying to conceive to avoid being childless, she's trying not to conceive using a less-effective, lower-class method due to conspiratorial ideology.
These types of oddly existential/cosmic horror-laced memes are basically 90% of the videos on burialgoods' channel. Pretty sure he has actually done a voiceover of the processed ham meme at one point.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
18hr ago
and I'm a very strong 2A advocate
If you claim to be a strong 2A advocate yet your reasoning keeps leading to people not being allowed to keep and bear arms, you are not actually a strong 2A advocate.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
18hr ago
No it’s… not?
There’s pretty strong agreement on that from all sides of the political spectrum.
HaroldWilson
18hr ago
Well we make policy for aggregates, not for individuals. X number of possible self-defence use cases obviously cannot outweigh an infinite number of cases of firearms purchased by unsuitable individuals, there are no solutions etc. etc.
Jiro
18hr ago
If she's trying to find a husband, presumably the baby would be with her husband. That's not out of wedlock; that's in wedlock.
fmaa
18hr ago
Ok, I don't believe we have metaphysical free will. That in no invalidates any choices I have made so far or any choices I'll make in the future, because their importance to me has never been based in metaphysical free will, see also the litany of Gendlin. That an algorithm is deterministic doesn't make the work it does any less real or avoidable.
If you want to call this belief something else, go ahead, but then also replace all instances of "free will" in FCfromSSC's posts with that same word, because we're both talking about the same internal feeling of making choices.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
18hr ago
Well I mean what about building 7 though?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
18hr ago
Conspiracists who can see past the “controlled demolition” of 1 and 2 to the truth of the floor truss narrative nevertheless tend to get one-shotted by talk of building 7. They don’t know NIST also has a report on why that building collapsed.
Thoroughlygruntled
18hr ago
I remember Scott sharing a "Tolkein name or pharma startup" buzzfeed quiz once in a monthly links post that was almost impossible for anyone who wasn't both a pharmacist and a Silmarillion fan
aceventura
18hr ago
The NYT article is far more interesting than what you've excerpted here. I recommend everyone actually read it.
Modern society does indeed seem very fucked up, so I'm sympathetic to these young women wanting something different. On the other hand, I've seen firsthand that the "trad" lifestyle does not always work out. Men are often just as unequipped as women to start and raise a family in their early 20s.
The grass is always greener on the other side; as always, the trick is finding the reasonable middle ground.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
18hr ago
I didn’t miss it.
And you didn’t miss the rest of my post either: I want to know why you view what you shared in your post about that woman in a negative light?
Again, it just seems like a woman getting her shit together in her mid 20’s. I did that for the most part in my late 20’s … I know dozens of people that did in various ways.
You don’t like that she did it in part through maybe finding god based on a Turning Point USA (yuck) podcast?
HaroldWilson
18hr ago
the left worshiped him.
Maybe for a short while but left-wing opinion turned cool on Obama surprisingly quickly, and the 'anti-imperialist' Chomskyite left never liked him. As early as 2009 not-exactly-radical-lefist Bill Maher said that:
Barack Obama is not a socialist -- he’s not even a liberal....this country needs a left wing. It doesn’t have it, and part of the reason is the media... I don’t know if this administration has really caught up to the idea that Americans are a lot more liberal, perhaps, than we think they are- or they think they are
More importantly, I think the election denial/J6 clearly puts MAGA a class apart from any other modern American political movement in terms of cultishness.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
18hr ago
Yes, the government's total inability to meaningfully make life better anymore has cratered faith in every institution across the board.
The reasons are far beyond just blaming the government. There's the whole Meaning Crisis, death of God aspect as well.
I believe a normal person should not have their rights abridged.
However, I believe a convicted murderer shouldn't be allowed to have guns. That's pretty common sense (although I'm sure some disagree), in the same way that I am strongly pro-1A but don't want a nuclear scientist giving detailed instructions to ...certain kinds of people.
Some carve outs should be allowed.
Some people shouldn't own guns.
Another clear category is schizophrenics. Once you get the schizophrenia diagnosis (assuming it is well formulated, which it may not be) then you should never ever allowed to own guns because you don't know what is real and that makes you a huge risk to yourself or others.
If you are involuntarily admitted to the hospital that means at some point you were a imminent serious risk to self or others (thats more or less the commitment criteria in most states), and while some people have one episode and then they are done, generally that is not the case. The risk calculus is instantly much different (sidebar: if you believe people have a right to end their own lives even when they have a potentially modifiable medical or psychiatric condition then this changes the calculus significantly).
While they do get it wrong some times the vast vast majority of committed people have some combination of a. incredibly serious mental illness. b. credible suicidality or homicidality. c. are an absolutely enormous asshole.
Society is almost certainly better off restricting the rights of those three kinds of people and doing so results in less death and crime.
Important to note is that you can sue for inappropriate involuntary commitment and that this is a major cause of malpractice claims. The opportunity to defend yourself from malfeasance is there. Yes psychiatrists have notoriously cheap malpractice insurance.
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