domain:felipec.substack.com
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
1hr ago
I think the thinking of manifesto suppression is based on the idea that one of the motivations for shooters is getting their views signal boosted in the media. If you don't allow them that it may disincentivise future attacks.
hanikrummihundursvin
1hr ago
Then we do not agree as white people do not owe brown people anything. What they do give is an act of kindness that is comparatively very rarely reciprocated.
I agree humans should help one another. Which is why I find your position so distasteful. You don't want to help white children. You want to risk their wellbeing. We can all be equal in squalor. That doesn't mean its good.
As for human values, what white people are doing and have been doing are not human values. China isn't opening its borders. India doesn't care for equal rights. Africa doesn't care for LGBTQ+ or whatever. The places on earth that engage in what you call human values are white. Humankind as a species only got where it is today because white people pushed it there. Ending perpetual conquest, ending slavery, sharing technology, pushing for an end to unnecessary suffering. The rest of the world was dragged kicking and screaming away from their barbarism and is only kept from it, still kicking and screaming, through the implementation of neo-imperial financial coercion and threat of force.
Children in general do not turn out intolerant, ignorant or sheltered if raised in homogenous schools. It's in fact easier to be tolerant of the things that are so far away from you that they practically do not exist. Children raised in homogenous schools miss out on nothing that's worth the increase in risk.
What you offer parents is a coercive bargain. You promise them total equality and an end to racism in return for placing their children in worse environments. The problem with this bargain is that your end of it is a lie. The only thing that happens is that white children become worse off whilst brown children continue being who they are, good and bad. We know your end is a lie because it, like every progressive humanist effort, has been tried and subsequently failed.
You as a person, like so many others, can not functionally understand this, for whatever reason. So you continue chasing the promise of equality and eternal salvation through whatever means you can imagine. People like you have already cost billions if not trillions in your futile efforts. White people have paid for all of it, and here you come asking for more in the name of humanity, equality and all the rest. Listen, white people already did all of this. They are doing it even today. It doesn't work. None of it works. What do you think progressives have been doing for the past 60 years?
'Success in school' is meaningless. Every teacher could pass every student with no issue by just doing what is already being done and dropping the standards so the browns can pass. What actually matters is peoples ability to interact with modern societies. That means the ability to read and understand, having the capacity for low time preference behavior and the ability to implement mathematics into practice. School outside of these things is not meaningful in the modern context. So long as a majority of the children get a grasp on these things, society can continue to function properly. The problem is that no one knows how to get the children that don't grasp these things to grasp it. It doesn't matter if they're white or brown. No one knows how to meaningfully raise IQ scores or lower a persons time preference.
Taking children and placing them in environments where they are more likely to get bullied is not banal. Arguing in favor of this by abstracting away from reality is not honest. You should take some time to reflect on what you are proposing in practice. Because there are many more values people hold to than just the imperative to help those in need. And your particular emotional proclivities in no way trump those who differ.
Is there a case in the last 15 years where police had the opportunity to suppress a manifesto, but released it anyway? If the option to suppress it is there, then it seems like this is becoming more standard. Most manifestos that make it into the public get directly uploaded somewhere, posted to 4chan, mailed to a newspaper if you're a 20th century terrorist, and so on. Seems like poor form to forget to post your deranged manifesto publicly before committing a heinous act. ** Also, her diary seem less like a philosophical statement, or call to action, than they are the weird doodles and thoughts of a mentally ill individual.
As for the police, Nashville PD, and most police departments, probably don't contain many cops that are too interested in protecting trans ideology. I can buy FBI involvement or pressure decreases the likelihood of a single cop leaking it as it pertains to trans-y ideas versus white nationalist ones. As a counter example, Brenton Tarrant and his manifesto was heavily suppressed in New Zealand and elsewhere following the Christchurch shooting. His manifesto was banned on lots of sites places if I recall. New Zealand also suppressed his name, face, and manifesto, albeit not very effectively.
For media coverage, yes I think it's fair to say there's a bias here. Googling Audrey Hale gets me this which includes a few right wing rags and the Post which may or may not qualify as one. On the flip side, here's one NPR article on Dylann Roof's manifesto. Dylann had his manifesto read out loud in court, but the NPR article predates that. If this was instead white nationalist rage manifesto, then yes it's fair to say there would be American media all over this shouting at the roof tops. Crazy trans radical kills children just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Is there a good argument for police to release every crazy's manifesto? Is there a good argument for media to cover the contents and proliferate the ideas in every manifesto?
Offering free national publicity for each person that gets the bright idea to impose their bullshit on others by killing kids creates a perverse incentive. If the options are coordinate a memory hole or offer them an free publicity-- one seems better than the other. A media ecosystem that could effectively coordinate this would be pretty scary though, wouldn't it?
I think drumming up fear about Dylan Roofs and Tarrants behind every keyboard by using their names and written word is bad. Drumming up fear about unhappy trans radicals seems similarly bad. I'd prefer we don't allow media to latch onto or create either narrative. I'd prefer they not cover mass shootings the way they do at all.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
What motivates the people in Congress, individually?
Esseintes
Que sçay-je?
1hr ago
I have to counter your quote (but agree with your last sentences!) with the following from Serotonin:
Everything was clear, extremely clear from the beginning, but we didn’t realise. Did we yield to the illusion of individual freedom, of an open life, of infinite possibilities? It’s possible; those ideas were part of the spirit of the age; we didn’t formalise them, we didn’t have the taste to do that; we merely conformed and allowed ourselves to be destroyed by them; and then, for a very long time, to suffer as a result.
God takes care of us; he thinks of us every minute, and he gives us instructions that are sometimes very precise. Those surges of love that flow into our chests and take our breath away – those illuminations, those ecstasies, inexplicable if we consider our biological nature, our status as simple primates – are extremely clear signs.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2hr ago
I am not talking about most historians (who I would not trust in any case) or most situations. I am talking specifically about Brown v. Board of Education. Where the court ruled that black kids DID have a "right to white people".
DradisPing
2hr ago
I doubt we even have any good data to disprove or approve on whether segregation is good.
That's not really true, we just have so much data on schools. There have been many programs to mix school districts in cities over the past 60 years, so we have a lot of data. Plenty of recent data too, for instance NYC adjusted school boundaries and implemented race quotas in it's elite schools just a few years ago.
Relatedly I always wander if there is anything positive in the Florida school system which has very high Hispanic test scores.
A lot of Florida's hispanics are basically just Spanish speaking Europeans who lived in Cuba. James Franco got a lot of flack from hispanic actors for getting cast as Castro, but Castro had no non-European ancestry. In fact Castro's father and Franco's grandfather probably grew up less than 100 miles from each other.
Compare that to California which is getting a lot of Oaxaca natives these days who speak Spanish as a second language and are illiterate on prose literacy scores.
Red state back to basics education actually does very well at educating new arrivals. Texas does quite well once you control for ethnic makeup. Meanwhile the largest black - white disparity in student performance is in ultra blue Berkley. Teaching black students they can't ever succeed due to institutional racism is damaging.
EverythingIsFine
2hr ago
Here's something I've always found to be interesting. I think there's a latent political prior model going on that often interferes with political discussion. Namely: What motivates the people in Congress, individually?
Here's what I feel like is a fairly exhaustive list:
- genuine desire to do the right thing, ethics, or patriotism
- desire for help some specific people (or people more broadly)
- mad enough at some specific current thing they decided to run for office
- well-intentioned but fell victim to their own ideological kool-aid or echo chamber
- true believer in some strong broad ideological cause
- in it just for personal wealth
- pure ambition and vanity of being important
- just think they could do a better job than the last bloke
- people you know, or family, pushed you into running and you won
- wanted to specifically change some law for corrupt purpose
- you wanted to specifically represent some demographic or other group
- you are addicted to the feeling of power
- wanted to avoid some personal or criminal controversy
- the office is a stepping-stone to some other career or goal
- backed by a foreign power
- advancing a specific special interest
- part of larger group with a secret agenda
- desire to oppress some other group, political or otherwise
Obviously some of these overlap or could both be true. A few approaches (rank them or something?) but I feel maybe the best is simply to answer the question, "What percentage of people currently in Congress (House and Senate) ran for Congress (most recent election) for this as one of the principal reasons?" Here's my take:
- Do the right thing: 75%
- Help people: 60%
- Mad at a specific: 15%
- Ideological capture: 25%
- Ideological purist: 10%
- Personal gain: 15%
- Ambition or pride: 35%
- Better than the last: 5%
- Pushed into it: 5%
- Specific corrupt change: 5%
- Representation: 10%
- Power addict: 10%
- Avoiding or distracting: 1%
- Stepping-stone: 10%
- Foreign agent: 1%
- Special interest: 10%
- Secret agenda: ~0%
- Desire to oppress: 1%
Of course a lot of these can overlap a bit, but that's fine. I'm talking about major reasons to run for office in any given election. (PS: should I have split help people into generally vs some specific group?)
Do you think these are about right? Too charitable? Too cynical? I bring this up because I was recently talking to a friend who his mental model had pegged something like 60% of people in Congress as in it for the money and power. Another friend thinks that 70% are pure partisans (ideological purists). Another thinks it's mostly special interests and corporations. You can see how these can subtly skew opinions about almost any given topic.
Of course, to me, I'm correct of course :)
No but actually, if we think about the process many go to first get involved in politics, there's only a few common paths. There's being an activist of some sort and then you (or supported by an org) run as a logical next step. There's being fed up of some specific status quo and starting to run for something on a local level and then you end up working your way up. There's being wealthy and/or having connections (famous sometimes) and jumping in to something directly. There's being a pure egomaniac and running just for that. And then there's some group of people where you're minding your own business and you get recruited into it. And that's actually most paths into politics. Seems to me that there are better ways to make money, and better ways to spend your time, so I think most people run because they actually want to. Congresspeople aren't aliens, they have similar motivations to you and I, at least I think. How many people that you've talked to who have idly talked about what they would do if they were in charge, have given a corrupt reason to do so?
Tomato
2hr ago
The degree of realism and personalization intuitively matters a lot so without any other context the AI thing seems worse. But as with many things like this often the real answer is that context matters and fact finders on the ground are better at determining that than we are on some random online forum. It also seems like a sort of a bad faith waste of time to try to legalistically determine which side of the line some particular way of sexually harassing high school girls falls on.
Tomato
2hr ago
This argument proves way too much. Yes, there is female genital mutilation in other societies and it’s abhorrent. That doesn’t give American high school boys, or socially maladjusted or inept men in general, free rein to harass women.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Well, in actually existing non-state societies people abandon individualism to take advantage of, or form, structures which provide security from external violence. Eg, clans, gangs, etc. I think we can safely say that the far left does not want to live under clan structures, and when asked what they envision they're usually cagey on details, but they talk about everyone living together in harmony and doing whatever it is they find personally fulfilling. When they try to start something, it usually at least attempts to do this before failing horribly because no one in the commune is volunteering to scrub toilets and they can't resolve disputes.
I think we can take their ideas at face value, as stupid as they appear(very). Yes, as a good redneck it seems trivially obvious that some people have to be assigned to do unpleasant work, and someone has to be in charge so you don't have people fighting it out whenever there's a disagreement(often over who has to do that unpleasant work). But I think far leftists have very different backgrounds and life experiences.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2hr ago
I'd agree, and it's unfortunate that the ubiquitous trope is that babies are miserable diarrhea factories and being a parent is about sleep deprivation, thankless labor and cutting your wealth in half.
My main regret is not being able to pull degenerate late nights in the lab anymore (I always hated travel), although I still get the odd weekend here and there. It's significantly harder to focus on my career and I expect to be outcompeted by the DINKs who can grind properly or the FOBs who have no qualms with making their wives do 90% of the childcare.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
AI can 'remove' the clothing from photos. It can also composite supplied images into existing or generated scenes. It can generate 'original' images from descriptive text input.
Do we know in this instance how the boys generated the image? Does the particular method used make it better or worse?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
30 year old salary men can pretty readily scoop up a 20 year old nymphette if they get past their own shyness. It may be quite different outside Japan.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
If instead of photo-realistic AI generation it was anime would you think the same?
If instead of AI it was hand drawn by one of the boys in the style of , 'I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.'? Is this better, worse or the same?
EverythingIsFine
2hr ago
The absolutely fascinating intersection here is so interestingly captured by the reddit /r/stupidpol, who see the same setup and conclude that current racial thinking is manipulated by the wealthy to distract from the true issue, which is the struggle of the poor vs the elite. The solution? Marxism.
I guess what it comes down to is if you think the "progressive laptop class" have been gaslit and co-opted, or if it's accidental, or it's deliberate by the "true" elite, or it's the Jews all along, or any number of boogeymen. Personally, I think a lot of the movement, if we can speak of it like that, being naive but well-meaning.
Who_Cares
2hr ago
The pearl clutching is a bit on the nose after your feigned moral outrage over “browns” curb stomping your white children, even for a troll. If these privately educated adults are “well liked and sociable everywhere they go,” then why would they fear the ire of uppity “browns”? Seems there’s a hole in your logic.
EverythingIsFine
2hr ago
Many leaders lacked the pragmatic realism that other visionaries like (IMO) the Founding Fathers had. The practical answer is a lot of people were living in objectively poor conditions and were mad and wanted to throw a bomb at the system. Bomb-throwing has a habit of not stopping nicely and neatly and isn't exactly known for forward thinking. A leader of an angry mob only has so much power. At the time, they felt the existing structure was too strong and deep-rooted for anything other than revolution to fix. And you see this (horseshoe theory anyone?) from other groups, too. At risk of opening a can of worms, you can even see Trumpists use this same exact language today (the justice system needs to be blown up, the deep state is too deep where we need to wholesale fire entire swaths of the civil service, flirting with suspending the Constitution to allegedly save it somehow, etc).
EverythingIsFine
2hr ago
Homicide is the leading cause of death for black males under 45, and has increased dramatically in a short period of time -- and yet the very people who angrily shout that "Black lives matter" have little to say about the issue until they are pinned down on it by people on the other side of the political fence. What gives?
I don't think this is true, though you use this as a foundational premise. The conversations just look very different and so you might not recognize them immediately as such. Probably for tactical reasons (not wanting to give ammo to right wingers), it isn't usually highlighted as a problem-alone. There isn't the angst-for-its-own-sake aspect like there is for some other issues (like income inequality). It does actually come up at least sometimes! It's just usually in a hopeful kind of context, paired with a solution. For example, there are still well-publicized pushes for community violence interventions (I've seen them highlighted several times in national, left news outlets). One dimension of the gun control is exactly this. There's also talk about how this kind of violence is the result of the prison and justice system. And as an aside, indeed I am at least a little sympathetic to the particular argument (of many, some of which are bunk) that once you send someone to prison once, they acquire friends and influences that encourage further lawbreaking in the future, including homicide. In other words, there are actual, plausible mechanisms for these beliefs other than a vague
So yeah, they DO talk about this death/crisis. Just not in isolation (not anymore). One of the things that struck me watching the Malcolm X biopic recently was how up-front he was about problems within the black community and taking ownership of the fix (though still he blamed white people for all of this, at least early on in his life). And yeah, that approach you don't see as often (though I can't say I'm like, super plugged in to Black culture and news, so it might show up there) which I do find interesting.
So that's for many modern leftists. I find your talk about earlier revolutionary leftists very interesting. You can definitely see the seeds of later problems in some of what they discuss. Such as the perpetual, mob-conducted non-state violence of the Cultural Revolution in China. Or how untenable abolishing so many groups of people from the vote would be, as per the list you quoted which would eliminate a huge percentage of the population. However, modern US progressives still have much more in common with European social democrats (or democratic socialists) than they do with any form of communism, though they sometimes adopt the same language (the goals are very different).
JulianRota
3hr ago
I'm mostly inclined to agree with you, at least on the modern view of BLM and related movements. But I've been thinking lately about the Communist movements of the late 1800s through early 1900s and wondering, to what extent did they actually have a reasonable point? I'm not going to say I support authoritarian Communism or anything, but it didn't come from nowhere, at least some of the problems they were complaining about were real at the time.
I don't really know what things were like in the 1910s Russia. Maybe the Tsars really were both incompetent and authoritarian themselves, and industry may have been dominated by a clique-ish elite who hoarded the wealth and kept the working-class down. Around that time in America, that wasn't too far away from being the case as I understand it. It was the peak of the time of robber-baron capitalism, with lots of workers getting the shaft. Long hours, terrible working conditions, indifference towards injuries, low pay. Sometimes even worse when it gets into company towns and piles of other abuses that I haven't even heard about. I can see where those of a more angry, retributive, perhaps even revolutionary frame of mind might get the idea that overthrowing the whole system and giving this whole Communism thing a try might be a good idea.
Fortunately for all, we managed to improve things gradually and more smoothly. It turns out that further advances in industry, unionization, market forces making skilled workers more valuable, and relatively lightweight and limited government intervention while maintaining the fundamental tenets of capitalism did a much better job at improving the lots of the ordinary workers than any dictatorship of the Proletariat ever did.
Okay then, but what does that say about the behavior of modern Progressives? I can see how the Bolsheviks weren't right, but at least has a point. Damned if I can see the point of modern Progressives though. How does it make sense that they get all up in arms over a police shooting of a black guy who, upon review of the situation, probably had it coming, but don't care at all about dozens of black men getting killed in the inner cities every weekend for decades, and it actually getting worse when their prescribed solution of "abolishing the police" gets implemented? If Lenin and the rest of the inner circle of Bolsheviks were taking advantage of a shitty situation with legitimate grievances to leverage in their authoritarian tendencies, are the elite of the modern Progressive movement leveraging total nonsense to support theirs?
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Yes, if a single Jew did. It may not be technically in accord with Catholic theology to think Jews have no need to convert, but in practice non-trad western Catholics will mostly tell Jews that anyways. If a single gentile did this I would think there's a pretty good chance they were a former evangelical who goes to charismatic mass and was convinced in college to believe in the real presence in the Eucharist. In fact one of the vanishingly few American Catholic bishops(David Konderla) to have been appointed without getting on the future bishops shortlist before his ordination to the priesthood managed to become a bishop by being really good at this.
Ashkenazim and Cajuns are probably the most overrepresented ethnicities among tradcaths(hilariously, that makes Shia Labeouf a stereotype), but that doesn't mean a majority of either are. It's probably tail effects from small population sizes on both ends magnifying specific local factors in both cases.
But seriously, there are a lot of not-trad but conservative religious Catholics, ranging from former mainliners who converted over gay marriage to charismatics who are basically evangelicals with the real presence to opus dei to culture wars-y ethnics. And FYI no one converts to happy clappy guitar liberal Catholicism, white or otherwise; it's probably whiter than tradcaths or charismatics for similar 'just so incredibly old' reasons to, say, ELCA Lutherans.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3hr ago
I’ve never found left and right, or even the four quadrants system to be really useful in describing political ideologies. When you try to simplify too much you end up suggesting that very different things are the same. Birds and dragonflies both have wings, they just have nothing else in common. I think political ideologies are best described by using aggregate similarities between systems. Confucius believed in hierarchy, but he also believed in the powerful not overstepping their authority and not abusing power and so on. He believed that education at least in theory should be available to anyone. I think we’d agree that this is a basic meritocracy. But I don’t think he’d believe in our system of economics or government. Cicero talks in The Laws about how laws should be aimed at the common good and not favor some over others. Would he count as a liberal?
I tend to see conservative and much of the right as trying to fix problems by looking to the past and traditional structures: classical economics, traditional family structure, traditional modes of behavior, and so on. And the liberal side seems to mostly want to either artificially reduce or eliminate the traditional system. They want a stronger welfare state because why should we be bound to the economy and have to produce something useful to live? Or have to get married or not dress in strange ways, or not twerk in public. Hitler wasn’t a classical economics enthusiast, he didn’t believe that one should be judged on the merits. Washington did (slavery excepted).
EverythingIsFine
3hr ago
Isn't it common practice for all police departments to resist releasing manifestos no matter the subject matter? From a police perspective, you'd rather release it when you can tie everything up with a nice bow a year or two later in a larger report -- on top of preventing copycats. I don't necessarily see anything culture-war unique or nefarious in that.
While Houellebecq is undoubtedly an inveterate and unrepentant coomer with a possible predilection for hebes, I would say he looks on pedophilia with sort of bemusement more than anything. His characters are consumed by their jealousy for the young (which, as @BahRamYou's quote indicates, is specifically high school/college age), and regrets for what could have been in their own youth. And this ends badly for them. Jumping to your conclusion via this one passage is...well, a jump.
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