domain:tracingwoodgrains.com
GBRK
1d ago
if you were to estimate the level of care you owe to the following people
That I am obligated to owe? 10. Always 10. God is pretty explicit about this.
That I am physically capable of owing without supernatural intervention?
... admittedly less than ten in all respects.
But I don't think ranking people by how much you "owe" them makes sense. If you're going to rank people, rank them by your ability to help them. If you have a glass of water and a man is about to die of heat stroke, you should give it to him regardless of which of these men he is. You should also take the chance to restrain him, if he is likely to harm innocents, but in any case should help him survive. If you have a glass of water and ten thirsty man, give it to the man for whom it maximizes the chance of survival (plus survival chance multiplied by net good the man will do over his life, to the best of your ability to estimate second-and-third-order effects.) You should help your wife, or a member of your community, over a total stranger, not because the stranger is a distinct, worse class of human, but because you are more capable of helping your wife or community member. Your help goes further, and does more good in the world. But again, that's a matter of maximizing good, not about people being entitled to different levels of brotherhood.
...and that's why I give some, but not all of the money I allocate for charity to the GiveWell foundation. It's a very cost-effective way to do lots of good, but I'm also uniquely capable of targeting "good" when it's aimed toward buying gifts for my family, or drinks for my friends, or donating to my own local parish.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
I should have been more clear, yeah. But the thought remains, because as I mentioned the normal left (which even Vance distinguishes from the far left) are still mostly fans of the civil religion stuff. Other parts of the left aren’t as loudly America Sucks and in fact disagree. So I think he’s exaggerating the trend.
To attempt being more specific, if we use the Pew Political Typology groups, as of 2021 the “Progressive Left” is 12% of Dem and Lean Dem people, and though there isn’t an exact question on patriotism, there is this perhaps-proxy: “there are other countries better than the US”. It might interest you to know that there’s a huge chasm between them and the rest of the main Dem alliance. They respond 75% yes. “Outsider Left” (16%) also land at 63%. Here’s the catch, every other group, Left or Right, is at under 25% on this same question including Establishment Liberals and Democratic Mainstays.
If we’re talking immigration, as of then the “Democratic Mainstays” (28% of coalition) were notable doubters on a few measures. It depends heavily how you slice the adjacent questions though, for example “America’s openness to people from around the world is essential to who we are as a nation” has a sharp divide (70 and up vs 30 and below) but the Stressed Sideliners join an actual defection from the Ambivalent Right on the upper end.
GBRK
1d ago
He doesn’t care about the pieces of shit.
"Love thine enemy."
I know not everyone is a christian. But aside from the fact that everyone should be, it's just good game theory. A society that has made a pact to be utilitarian still has all the justification it needs to prevent bad individual behavior, but at the same time doesn't risk arbitrarily turning its instruments of judgement against someone without regard for their preferences just because they're doing something someone else doesn't like. But to defect against that is to ask people to in turn defect against you. And as proof for the danger of that, I'd point out that that's what the OP was literally doing against these "pieces of shit"-- presumably, reacting to some prior defection. I know, in turn, that no society can survive unilateral total disarmament... but disarmament need not be total, merely proportional. Spending less of your effort caring about bad people is still better than spending none of your effort.
Plus, it's just good virtue signaling. If a man will give his son a fish, that says little about what he'll give a beggar. But if a man will give a beggar a fish, he must be generous indeed to his sons! I would rather be friends with a generous man than a stingy one, and will therefore work harder to make it into the good graces of the latter man. That's the (nonreligious) essence of being a good person: the ability to gain long-term benefits from your reputation!
07mk
1d ago
A brief look at the recent history of the awakening clearly shows the ideas flow from the institutions to the children,
Does it? I can assure you in very Blue Tribe places that is not so. Maybe you can argue it flowed from Blue Tribe places to Blue Tribe academia to academia in general.
Considering these "woke" ideas specifically have academic heritage, I'm not sure how this flow of ideas is plausible. Is the contention that these ideas that explicitly source themselves on stuff developed by "critical X theory" and "X studies" departments of the past 50 years actually somehow flowed into these departments through influence of people from Blue Tribe "places," who also influenced their children with these ideas? To whatever extent this is true, it just seems to be a way of describing the process by which academia developed these ideas - it's not surprising that the people in academia who developed and propagated these ideas largely came from cultures that were predisposed to such ideas.
That protests happen on college campuses does not mean the colleges are responsible for the ideas those protests are expressing. As I pointed out the kids I get in my classes are already well to the left of me in general.
That the protests are based around ideas that are essentially word-for-word, identical to those taught by academia is what means that colleges are responsible for the ideas those protests are expressing. No one's making any claims about proximity or location.
And your students being more left of you in general doesn't say much, since having the proclivity to comment on a forum like this already makes you a highly atypical academic, but also, if you teach high schoolers or above, this is entirely consistent with the notion that academia is responsible for the flow of ideas to these students, via their exposure to academia in grade school and middle school.
That was exactly my experience as someone who grew up in Blue Tribe environments. My experience with proto-woke ideas (I was ahead of the phenomenon by about a decade, but the typical sociopolitical narratives that were hegemonic at my schools in the 00s would have been nearly indistinguishable from the typical SJW and "woke" ideas from the late 10s) was that they absolutely flowed in from academia to students, with my parents being essentially non-factors (this part is likely mostly caused by my own parents' parenting behaviors and hard to generalize), with my earliest memories of such ideas being from my 4th grade homeroom teacher.
TIRM
1d ago
And people used to fuck before marriage anyways. The puritans commonly had premarital pregnancies. Covered up by rush marriages.
Fornication was indeed a crime. Like smoking weed today. Illegal and popular.
GBRK
1d ago
My school teachers are not trusted to make good judgments.
"X" are not trusted to make good judgments is why any variant of corporal punishment/extra bullying/more police brutality doesn't work in person. We intuitively want to do this because through the vast majority of our evolutionary past we lived in small bands with a smaller population than dunbar's number where the discretion of a few enfranchised elders and warriors was a fair, just, and effective way to police our behavior because they could know everyone under their authority as a fully realized person. But while that remains an effective approach even now, in many small agricultural communities, it's indisputably a bad model for policing a city.
Are you familiar with the phrase "trust the science"? Where does "the science" come from?
blue tribe people make blue tribe institutions, which in turn generate a consensus reality wherein Blueness is obviously true and correct, with contrary facts elided or buried. Academia is a knowledge-generating apparatus, together with media. By the time a Blue Tribe kid arrives on campus, their reality has been defined by this apparatus their entire life. Then they spend four years being taught and graded and managed by high-status members of this apparatus, often in a close pseudo-paternal relationship, with discrimination against anyone contradicting the apparatus being policed by the full force of the institution backed by the power of the federal government, to say nothing of the informal status economy, before moving into a career where office life is similarly policed.
None of this seems mysterious to me. It seems pretty obvious to me that it's an interlocking system of control, wherein each of the components is purposely designed to bolster and reinforce the others. It's almost certainly true that solving it by aiming at Academia alone won't be sufficient, but that doesn't mean that it isn't necessary.
FlailingAce
1d ago
Yeah I've shot the M9 before as well. The Sig is definitely better but it's still not great.
The Sig safety has several problems: it is not particularly easy to hit (especially to put it on fire from safe), its action is in a non-intuitive direction relative to the safeties on most other Army weapons, and it's not actually marked which direction is safe, so guys who don't use it a lot will accidentally have it on safe/fire when they meant the opposite.
You can mock my experience if you like but I sure as hell don't know any direct action guys who use the Sig, most have a personal sidearm they use instead, and some units will have a few random Glocks or other pistols in the arms room that they use on the range to qualify.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
She's refusing to see a therapist alone or with me, she's refused to see a psychiatrist.
If you have the capacity, you might consider talking to a therapist for yourself, partially because this is a lot to deal with, and partially because they may be more familiar with resources and ideas that may be helpful to her.
It probably isn't much, but you have my sympathies and prayers, anonymous internet friend.
GBRK
1d ago
We are the primary constraint on Israel's conduct during this war.
Maybe.
Without American restraint there already would be no one alive in the Gaza strip
Definitely not.
In a counterfactual world with full american support for israel, I actually seriously doubt they would genocide the palestinians. It's just bad geopolitics-- they're surrounded by arabs on an sides, and several of those arab nations can very credibly threaten to nuclearize.
I recognize that this was probably hyperbole-to-demonstrate-a-point rather than an actual assement of what israel would do, but it's worth remembering that "kill them all and salt the ashes" is historically not what most empires do with their enemies. that's especially true with succesful empires. A more realistic strategy looks like either "collaborate with local elites to suppress popular sentiment in response for tribute" or "raise up a local minority group to serve as a precarious class of administrators beholden to your own political order." Plus some sort of long-term incentives against childbirth and in favor of out-migration... were I genuinely trying to eliminate a particular ethnic group as a local political force, I would be encouraging late marriage age, spending a long time in foreign countries in guest workers, gating employment behind credentialing, enforcing wealth transfers from the young to the old, increasing the employment rate of women, and so on and so forth.
aqouta
1d ago
If Israel had to buy its munitions (either in the short term or long term) it would impose more pressure to finish the war quickly, or in general do more diplomacy and less bombing
The quickest way to win a war against an intransigent opponent when you have total military supremacy isn't less bombing and more diplomacy, rather the opposite. Same goes for people's plans to defund the iron dome. The cheapest way to do things is the bloodiest.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Very
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I can with a great degree of safety (90%? 95%?) avoid questionable girls right off the bat by sight.
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I can avoid places where underage girls hang out pretty easily and costlessly
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No one actually checks their dates ID.
I can't avoid places "people who didn't take or can't pass the sex test" hang out. I can't read it at a glance. I'd HAVE to actually check.
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
Maybe but I definitely remember Lewinsky being villified across the political spectrum, which wouldn't make much sense if she was viewed as a a non-consenting victim by either side. Here's one example from a republican rabbi, as I remember it there was a lot of this sort of thing around: https://observer.com/2014/05/monica-should-apologize-to-hillary/
aqouta
1d ago
No! We gave them a shitton of money to rebuild stuff, tried mostly to avoid civilian deaths, helped them set up a new government for themselves, tried all sorts of education and policy interventions, lots of stuff
I mean Israel has done this too over the years, It tried to create a government for the Palestinians in the PA through the Oslo accords. You need to extend the Afghan analogy. All of America's, much larger, neighbors would need to explicitly support the Taliban. You have to remove the Ocean separating the countries so that the Taliban can plausibly be in any city in American in under an hour if not held at bay. You need the aim of the Taliban not to be to kick Ameicans out of Afghanistan but actually out of all of America or preferably kill every last American. The existential threat is pretty important, America could always have just left Afghanistan, that's just not an option for Israel.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Prison guards at least seem to believe that bribery is incredibly widespread in the profession and that it does not, on average, put a very high premium on the lives of sex offenders.
I DON’T disagree that finding two guards willing to personally kill someone is a tall order- probably most prisoners would shrink from doing that. Finding two guards willing to accept money for letting someone- especially a pedophilic pimp- die- either at his own hand, or someone else’s- seems like… Tuesday.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
Unfortunately, no. Just one person having them can be a deal-breaker. There are rare mutations where chromosomes are malformed, and during the process of recombination when embryos form, they just don't pair up right. It would be exceedingly unlikely to find someone with the same kind of defect, such that this goes off without a hitch.
It's still not the end of the world. IVF usually helps find the embryos that would be viable.
SSCReader
1d ago
A brief look at the recent history of the awakening clearly shows the ideas flow from the institutions to the children,
Does it? I can assure you in very Blue Tribe places that is not so. Maybe you can argue it flowed from Blue Tribe places to Blue Tribe academia to academia in general.
That protests happen on college campuses does not mean the colleges are responsible for the ideas those protests are expressing. As I pointed out the kids I get in my classes are already well to the left of me in general.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I'm sorry. That is not an easy position to be in. Your wife might know all the things that a shrink or gynecologist might say, but they seem hollow or unhelpful when you try to apply them to yourself.
If I can say something somewhat hopeful, what basis do you have to claim 30% odds of there being a genetic abnormality? You frame it as one that's present in either your or or partner, as fetuses can get them de novo even if the parents are alright.
It's been a while since I brushed up on my chromosomes, but my understanding is that only ~5% of couples experiencing repeated miscarriages have an underlying chromosomal problem. I presume those are balanced reciprocal translocations, Robertsonian ones and so on.
Have you guys been karyotyped? Did one of the doctors specifically relay this to you, or is this something you've been trying to figure out yourself? Ask your wife for more details, I expect they've been giving her a far more detailed debrief than you've received, or at least she understood more of it by virtue of medical training.
In the absence of more information, I'd be very averse to ascribing your difficulties to such. Even if that's the case, there's reason to hope that IVF would help! Something like PGT-SR would help identify viable embryos that have dodged the bullet. IVF is expensive, but I expect the two of you can afford it. I wish you guys well, and hopefully you come out of this with the happy family you deserve.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
That's fine, but doesn't imply it would be that much easier for an assassin to bribe his way through?
hydroacetylene
1d ago
No, ‘your intern deserves protections from being asked to have an affair with you’ is something that modern neo-morality and tradcon morality would agree on, although they would phrase it differently. Modern neo-morality is all about trying to find ways in which consent isn’t really consent when the tradcons would disapprove, because consent is a woefully insufficient standard.
The moral majority probably wouldn’t have seen it as wrong for a boss to date his intern/employee if he was single. But the idea that an extramarital affair is much worse if it’s with your employee, or with an impressionable teenager, is pretty core to moral majority views about sex.
SSCReader
1d ago
I'm not at an age where I have to worry about significant medical expenses, but later down the line, one must confront the choice between cheap/quick/quality. The NHS errs on the side of the former.
It does. Which is why in the US I had like 5 people call me (pharmacist, nurse, Drug company rep, pharmacy tech, doctors office) before my infusion, all that cost disease money over here is at least employing people!
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Blue Tribe people make Blue Tribe institutions. Which is the chicken and which the egg?
A brief look at the recent history of the awakening clearly shows the ideas flow from the institutions to the children, with parents having very little to say about it outside of "it's just a couple crazy kids on college campuses".
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
Keep in mind that the official explanation is that the prison was an absolute clownshow where the cameras were falling apart so frequently that both of the ones aimed at Epstein's cell just so happened to be not working, and both of the guards on duty fell asleep at the same time.
I'm not arguing with your other points, but having dealt with jails & prisons, that level of clownshow strikes me as completely believable.
Not sure which comic said a joke to the tune of - pedophilia is liking kids, ephebophilia is liking underage, the problem is you can't explain the difference without sounding like a pedophile.
Since pedophilia is the last standing hard taboo in the society, there is a incentive to push it's boundaries ever higher. Because the other sticks just got softer - no one is scared of being caller racist, sexist or phobic anymore. To the point where some fringe activists include even persons above 18 to it. Which will lead of course to dilution, people discarding accusation more easily and give the Jimmy Savile's and Epstein's even more freedom. But this will be in 10 years.
We wouldn't normally call that academia though. And my experience right now is that these kids are getting their ideas from their parents and from Tik-Tok. So they come in already having opinions about Palestine for example. They weren't taught that in elementary school. And as I said before they are also left of most of my colleagues as well (who are yes a bit to the left of me on average).
But again you have it reversed. Critical theory is a creation of the Blue Tribe, it didn't create the Blue Tribe. You're again just saying Blue Tribe places do Blue Tribe things. Well yes, of course they do. If they didn't they wouldn't be Blue Tribe! All the concept of critical theory does is putting an academic skin on things Blue Tribe people already believed. They believed it, then they taught it in an academic way, but the Blue Tribe already HAD those beliefs. So the students are at best being taught how to express the things they already believe in an academic fashion. Because it's the very water they and their parents swim in.
Academia is downstream not upstream in other words. Academics frequently overestimate their own importance. Don't fall for it.
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