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話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
1d ago
I was no “chad”, just a short skinny effeminate guy. I had an awful personality, little interest in women and still a few hook-ups and flings just happened from going with the flow.
Nice humblebrag. Now I understand that was most likely not even meant as one, but that's how it comes across because that's how awful it is for most men nowadays. I'm not going to rehash Radicalizing the Romanceless, but it's even worse nowadays than when that article was written. Men are suffering.
And I think you're right in that it's worse in America, especially compared to East Asia, where I and my family were from originally, but with how widespread the American ideological contagion has become, I don't see thing getting better any time soon.
Are they just blindly lucky? Or do they persevere with some luck and effort - maybe a lot of luck - but mostly persistence?
I think that those are all people who are not socially and emotionally malformed via catastrophic deprivation of peer relations during childhood and teenage, and - thank you, COVID - early adult development, and all I hear from the rest of this response is that the only way to receive sympathy from people who share your approximate perspective is to take my society-mandated optimism and bang my head against a wall, no stopping allowed. I will admit that an example of Down's Syndrome was excessive: strictly speaking there is some nonzero hope given a considerable effort on my part, but this demand for effort gets crueler as the minimum effort gets greater and the odds get worse, and I'd put my odds low enough and the prerequisite effort for those odds high enough that that extreme example is, if not equal, then congruent.
Then again, of course that's what I'd hear, what I'd say.
But I want to jump out of my personal gripes, my uncharitability: whatever my dissatisfaction, your perspective is a good one to hold. Denying pity to people like me is a healthy social tool, as refusing emotional gratification to a few terminal sad sacks is preferable to letting someone with a decent chance at some (hopefully prosocial) goal give up prematurely. After all, for all you know I'm lying about my chances - either to you, or to myself.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
Excellent post. I do have to say though, if my friend rocked up at my house, with my gun in his hand and said 'Dude, I just shot my wife and that prick she cheated on me with, the cops are coming, hide me!' and when I looked hesitant he said 'hey man if I end up in prison I might accidentally talk about the cache you have buried in the backyard', I would feel obligated to help him out, destroy the gun and give him an alibi. Not for his sake, for my own.
But then I would also hate my former friend and never trust him again and do my best to cut him out of my life asap.
orangecat
1d ago
The far-right (which includes most people on this website)
I don't think you know what far right actually is...
And starting from (and assuming) that point pretty much forces people to prove that they're not an extremist (good luck proving a negative).
Can you explain what 'far right' is? And how I'm far right?
can't really detect any reasoning at all in decisions like this? How could the law possibly fail under heightened scrutiny[?]
Because falling under heightened scrutiny would produce the desired result. That's it.
Jackson can play the game. I find her unimpressive as well but she seems at least aware that her arguments should have, well, arguments. She knows the law ok and will go through with the ritual of tortured interpretations and equivocations to forward the Cause. The conservatives do this too; don't be blinded by agreeing with them. Although I would argue the current group are much better at it. Sotomayor doesn't care at all, nor does she put more than a token effort to try to hide it. Her writings look superficially like a considered legal decision, but even to a non-lawyer if you apply any scrutiny at all many of them completely fall apart into the absurd.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I watched the interview, I care about the possible cost of a war with Iran.
charlesf
1d ago
As much as I support the norms here about charity and civility in communication, I have to agree as well. Just read some of Sotomayor's writing. I wasn't really following the issue at the time when the opening was being debated in the first Obama admin. Everyone knew that he was going to appoint a woman, and probably a minority, and I assumed that all the eligible judges were interchangeable. Then some time later I found myself reading one of her dissents entirely unprepared for the experience. I was appalled. This was obviously someone who had gone though life without ever having anyone correct her or challenge her on anything serious. She has a reputation as a bully which I 1000% believe. I wouldn't call her stupid in absolute terms; she's probably a bit above average for the nation as a whole. She was certainly very good at school and skilled at navigating bureaucracies. She probably would make an ok, or at least not totally disappointing local politician. A lot of people have accused a lot of justices of being concerned primarily with the results of their decisions, cleverly twisting the laws to produce the desired political victory for their side. She doesn't even both with the pretense of respect for the law.
By the standards of supreme court justices, she is stupid.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I enjoy the cocktail party version of this argument: the logical conclusion of the "potential persons" line is that men don't have the right to refuse consent to potentially fertile women. Women, of course, have a limited number of possible pregnancies and as such can maintain some right to choose their partners. But men are capable of impregnating at least once a day, so unless he's saving it for someone else when a man is offered sex by a potentially fertile woman he is obligated to accept, as otherwise he is destroying the potential for human life.
I actually have a chance to improve my station in life, which was famously not something peasants did frequently.
Social mobility has increased. I won't deny that. There's a lot of mitigating factors on what exactly that means, but in theory the next shitcoin bet I make can make me a billionnaire and there's few social stigmas that would go along me not being an aristocrat.
I could marry a black woman and not risk her being murdered.
I think you could go either way as to whether increased cosmopolitanism is a good thing or not. You can do certain things a homogeneous society can't and vice versa, at best it's a sidegrade.
I can say things that piss people off without being ostracized or jailed or killed (although this is steadily getting worse).
I personally know people that are disgraced, in prison and/or dead for doing that, so I find this claim unconvincing. It's as it ever was. Just with different idols.
I can vote despite not being rich or owning land.
And have basically no effect on how the affairs of your community are conducted because that has been thoroughly insulated from that particular ritual.
It is easier than ever to literally move around the world, both temporarily and permanently. I'm pretty sure peasants frequently literally weren't allowed to leave? Also if they moved somewhere else they'd just be destitute.
It's certainly has become far easier to move, but it was actually pretty common for peasants to move around, and the people who couldn't that you're thinking of, serfs, were specifically created as a class to prevent this problem for landowners or as part of specific cultural practices. Shopping around lords for a better deal is not at all unheard of.
Did peasants own land? I assume it depends on time and place but I thought that was the whole point of Lords.
It depends. Most did not outright but owned a perpetual lease. (much like people still do in the UK) Most of them owned their dwellings though (or at least their family did).
I'm so confident that peasants got drafted. Isn't that what peasant levies were? Did fighting age men get to opt out of wars? If so, why did any go?
The history of the practice is actually pretty complex, with early middle ages armies being more like bands of peasants called directly by kings. And the extent to which they were replaced by professional knights and men at arms is debated.
Still, it's pretty consensual at this point that for most of the period armies were composed of professionals fighting limited battles. With peasant levies filling more of a militia role or last resort stopgap than that of a real fighting force. Which I must concede is actually similar to how a lot of Europe treats conscription these days. Perhaps less so as military threats start to loom.
In contrast the the total wars of the modern era that would mobilize huge amounts of men and empty whole countries to the degree that it require women take over industrial production, it's incomparable. That level of discipline was simply impossible with the logistics of the time, and you have to go back to the empires of antiquity to find practices that compare.
Here's a nice article on the topic.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Lots of cultures historically have had much more consensus on treating sex the way that traditionalists would prefer it were treated, including America in earlier eras...
I always feel like this is way oversimplified.
“There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the alter of monogamy” -- Arthur Schopenhauer
I highly doubt a traditional culture has ever existed where most high-agency (read: upper class, free, generally attractive and fit) men reached the alter after their teenage years as virgins.
Assuming it were possible to settle such a bet, I would put considerable money down that no King of France ever reached his wedding night a virgin other than Louis XVI, and we know how that turned out.
Really, it's probably worse than that: if I asked the many Louis' and Francois' if they were virgins when they got married, they'd be confused by the question. "What do you mean virgin, I'm a man you fucking idiot?"
What we're dealing with is a result of a culture built around equality, of the classes and the sexes, and the results of that culture.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
If you read Tribe's comments in context it's clear that he's referring to her having a certain arrogance where she thinks she'll be able to persuade conservatives where she's more likely to put them off. It was more a comment about her personality than her intelligence, and why Kagan would be better in the role of Kennedy-influencer. In any event, Tribe later said that he was proven wrong. As for Jackson, she didn't ask that question, she gave a non-answer to a gotcha posed by Marsha Blackburn, who appeared less interested in determining Jackson's qualifications or judicial philosophy than in going on a rant about Lia Thomas and talking about how progressive education led to mind rot. Seriously, how was she supposed to answer? What could she have possibly said that would have satisfied Ms. Blackburn and earned her vote? From Lindsey Graham's questions about her faith to the softballs Democrats were lobbing, the whole thing was a dog and pony show, everyone knew this going in, and she was given specific preparation to not answer any questions if she could help it. Yeah, she gave an idiotic answer, but it was an idiotic question.
Anyway, the reason for my comment wasn't to specifically say that you were engaging in boo-outgroup, just that it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity. I've been here since 2017 and I have yet to be modded once. I rarely report comments, though I also get pissed off when troublemakers decide to argue with the mods. Whenever I see someone people tying themselves in knots trying to explain and/or justify Trump's latest Outrage of the Week, I'm tempted to respond by simply saying that Trump is obviously too stupid to engage in anything approaching coherence and that his supporters, almost without exception, are too stupid to notice that he's incoherent, and that if you want to bemoan the decline of conservatives in academia then maybe it's time to consider that it isn't so much persecution as it is proof that conservative ideas are simply unappealing to anyone with half a brain.
Of course, I don't do this, and if I did I'd probably be reported on a bunch, and I'd probably be given some leeway at first because of my history here, but eventually patience would run thin and I'd have to start eating bans. And whoever reported me and the mods would be correct to smack me for it, because, despite the fact that I can point to all kinds of evidence supporting the idea that Trump and Trump supporters are generally all morons, that isn't really productive and isn't the kind of discourse I expect here. So when I see it coming from a mod it's disappointing, and when I see it trying to be justified on the grounds that Larry Tribe once said this and "Did you hear what she said to the Senate Judiciary Committee?" it makes me wonder if I should just say "Fuck It" and see what I can get away with. Unless, of course, you're telling me that I'm perfectly within the rules to do that, in which case I won't do it all the time, but you can count on me referring to Alito and Thomas as the "low IW wing" in the future.
Tree
1d ago
I guess I’ve just had better experiences than you. I’ve never been depressed about casual sex or masturbation. Or anything, really. Another difference between you and me is that I do not want to stop others from choosing your path, or the other, while your side is fundamentally willing to coerce.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think that my argument, which was clearly meant to highlight the absurdity of treating potential persons the same as actual persons, rhymes with beliefs of the pro-natalist crowd (which you hold for other reasons than wanting to maximize future persons). One man's modus tollens being another man's modus ponens and all that.
Let me rephrase my argument a bit. Our premise is that baby-killing is wrong because it denies the existence of a future person. As far as that reason is concerned, anything else which denies the existence of a future person should be just as wrong.
Take the perspective of a healthy female person, which turns out to be a bottleneck for making new homo sapiens persons. When she optimizes for the number of persons produced during her fertile life span, she can probably get pregnant 15 times or so, and given medical advances in treating underweight newborns I would assume that having twins each time (not hard to do with IVF) might give the highest expected value of babies which will live to personhood age, perhaps 28 kids or so.
So while both the conservative natalist and the future-persons-maximizer agree that a woman who decides not to have kids for personal reasons is wrong, their assessment of a woman who marries at age 25 and then proceeds to have six children would be very different. I am assuming that from a conservative perspective, that woman would be a role model. The future persons-maximizer would still consider her rather horrible. She wasted her first fertile decade, for one thing. "So you just did the equivalent of murdering 22 potential persons instead of 28. Do you want a medal for that?"
The utopia of the future-persons-maximizer is the repugnant conclusion, a world so overcrowded with human persons (and their babies) that their lives are barely worth living.
Hadad
1d ago
Yes, he's advocating to the people who watch Tucker Carlson, and those people don't especially care about Iran's population either. They're not concerned about the minutiae of logistics. That's not something normal people concern themselves with.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I think we are nearly agreeing? The push against smoking included much more than anti-smoking education in schools: bans in many public and private spaces that are enforced, taxes, fees, inconvenience for selling and marketing tobacco, varied media campaigns not limited to the equivalent of odd sex ed class. School health education about harms of smoking hopefully contributes to anti-smoking, but wasn't decisive on its own.
So reiteration of my point: if the intention is a society of no premarital sex, then abstinence-only sex ed in schools will be much easier time having an effect if there are other policies in place that make the abstinence-until-marriage lifestyle sound more enticing, realistic and attainable than other lifestyles.
Sure. I think we are mostly agreeing. The only thing I'd add is that the only person who has posited that the only strategy available, the only strategy that we can consider when determining a chance of success, is just trying to have mostly left-leaning schoolteachers officially say that abstinence is a thing that exists... is you.
Honestly, I'm getting shades of the perennial weight loss discussion, where certain factions strawman the science of caloric balance as, "The only way this can be tried is to just suggest to people that they consume fewer calories." Naw dawg. You're strawmanning hard.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Ted Cruz didn't go on Tucker for a chat, he went on Tucker to convince the American people (ME) of the correctness of his views. Ted Cruz is advocating for a position.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Cruz also thinks that the Bible requires Christians to support the nation of Israel, which is somewhat non-mainstream in theology: "Where does my support for Israel come from, number 1 we're biblically commanded to support Israel". Tucker tries to ask 'do you mean the government of Israel' and Cruz says the nation of Israel, as if to say it's common-sense that the nation of Israel as referred to in the Bible is the same as the state of Israel today. It seems like he's purposely conflating the dual meanings of nation as ethnic group and nation as state, which is a stupid part of English.
Also Cruz said to Tucker "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States”. How would this help in the context of a hostile interview, does he think that's a helpful thing to say? I can only imagine that Cruz thinks this is a winning issue, he wants to play hard rather than go down the wishy-washy 'Judeo-Christian' values route. Is declaring your devotion to a foreign country really that popular in America?
I have so many layers of problems with this logic. Even starting by accepting that "the bible tells me so" is a good way to set up foreign policy, let's take a second and think through a few implications:
a) What kind of arrogant or ignorant person thinks that the verse can be interpreted simply and literally?
Ted Cruz says that in Genesis (well, he didn't know that, but that's where it is) God commands us to bless and aid Israel. But much of the Old Testament consists of God punishing Israel, often with foreign invasion and raiding. God is constantly using foreigners as a tool to punish Israel, especially when Israel is lead by a corrupt, selfish, venal, dishonest, cruel man who refuses to give up power at the appointed time. God seems to cause Israel to lose as often he causes them to win, to be honest as a genre-savvy gentile if I were living in Old-Testament-Superstition-Land, I'd probably stay out of it. God, to my knowledge, never punished anyone for ignoring Israel. God's blessing to Israel is as often the blessing of discipline as it is the blessing of good things, and I sure wouldn't want to get between the Father and the child he intends on spanking. Getting involved with how exactly God is seeking to bless Israel seems like a real Oracle of Delphi situation!
In fact, the one clear example where God blesses an outside nation for its aid of Israel would be...Cyrus the Great of Persia. So perhaps we can intuit that the Persians are a nation specially chosen of God to chastise and discipline Israel? It seems odd that Ted Cruz is so certain he knows God's will. But let's accept for the moment that we are obligated to help Israel:
b) Which Israel?
Is Israel its government? Is Israel the global diaspora of Jews? Is Israel the population within the borders of Israel, regardless of religion, provided they descend from Abraham? This might seem like trivia, but I'm pretty sure the verse that Ted Cruz is citing is Genesis 12:3 which reads in the ESV:
I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Which of course brings up the question: Who the fuck is you? Frequently this is interpreted, and put up on billboards by Israel lobbyists, as "blessing Israel." (Where's your Sola Scriptura, Ted?) But God makes no mention of a state or government. The more natural interpretation of the phrase (leaving aside the new covenant that "you" is the Church, which is pretty obviously correct and righteous to me) would be all the descendants of Abraham are to be blessed. I would certainly offer no privilege to Abraham's descendants who have persisted in one type of religious error over another.
But let's accept that the state of Israel, as represented by its government, is what is to be blessed, let's consider:
c) Is it blessing someone to help them commit a sin?
Some years ago I was the best man in a very relgious Evangelical wedding. Before the ceremony, the pastor gathered up all the groomsmen, and we prayed and we put our hands on the groom, and the pastor told us that our obligation was not finished when he said I Do or when the tables were cleared up, that we had taken on an ongoing sacred obligation, to bless our friend, to bless his union, to come to his aid to keep his marriage together and to keep him on the straight and narrow. I said Amen.
Today, he called me, and told me that his wife is cheating on him, that he knows where she is the guy she is there with, that he's coming to my house because he needs a gun today so he can go kill them both.
Does my sacred vow to help him and bless him obligate me to give him the gun? Am I violating my oath if I ask him any questions other than "what caliber?" Ted Cruz would seem to say yes, you are obligated to bless him and that means helping him do whatever it is he wants to do. Ted would probably say "Do you need a ride?"
I would say that's an insane interpretation or friendship, and an even more insane interpretation of blessing. I would say that my obligation in this scenario is to restrain my friend, by physical force if necessary, to prevent him from committing a horrible life-ruining and soul-damning sin. I would say that my obligation extends so far as to warn his wife, to call our mutual friends and his pastor to help me talk him down, or even if no other means were available to call the police, to prevent him from committing murder. Friendship means protecting your friends, and that includes protecting them from committing mortal sins.
In my life, when I've had a friend who was in a really bad place, I've gone to his house with a bunch of friends and told him hey let me take your guns to store them for a few months, to keep you from doing anything you might not live to regret. That is what I think friendship is.
But ok, let's say I do give him the gun, that still doesn't answer...
d) Is it blessing someone to help them make a mistake?
Let's alter the hypothetical above: accepting ad arguendo that I am obligated to give my friend a gun to kill the man that cuckolded him and his cheating wife, what if my friend's wife cheated on him with JD Vance, and my friend has no realistic chance of taking my 1911 and getting past the Secret Service (ok that may be easier than previously thought...) and killing Vance. Am I still obligated to give him the gun?
This is where knowing the population of Iran is a useful piece of information. At least within an order of magnitude! It allows you to faithfully discharge your obligation to Bless Israel with, for example, wise counsel! If what Israel needs is advice, it doesn't help them to give them weapons to help them get themselves into trouble.
I just don't see how evangelical politicians can act like the bible command leads directly and easily to using bunker busters on Iran.
Hadad
1d ago
No, where did glassing Taiwan come from?
Your chain of causality there suggests that it's our munition reserves -- and our ability to launch them at Taiwan if China invaded -- keeping China in check. That is, we'd render Taiwan useless before they could extract any value out of it. It's not like we'd start lobbing missiles into mainland China over Taiwan!
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Every word of this is cope.
Shall we go back and forth going "nuh uh"? I think every word of your response is wrong and frankly ridiculous. Peasants were not living in some proto-libertarian utopia. But yes, you can absolutely aspire to peasantry and a cottagecore lifestyle if that is what you are into, and while no one can completely escape the jurisdiction of a state (sorry, other people exist), plenty of people do in fact live off the grid to varying degrees. No, they don't all wind up "dead, destitute, or in prison." You don't hear about many of them because most people don't want to do that, and those who do are mostly mentally ill, pathologically antisocial, or Ted Kazinski types. (Ted didn't wind up the way he did because he just wanted to live in a cabin in the woods.)
I do not believe you would literally prefer to be a medieval peasant, because if you did, you wouldn't be here on the Internet. (No, that doesn't just mean "Of course we have the advantage of technology and comforts," it means you prefer the technological lifestyle.)
Every word of this is cope.
Your tax rate is as imposed to you as it was then, and as with every human society it's within a range, but the median and average was much lower in medieval societies. People always try to point to the Ancien Régime numbers as if a post-famine state bankrupted by war was representative of centuries of wide variation in quality of life. It's not.
Most peasants didn't own land nominally, but you don't either and basically nobody does in the modern world. You pay rent on an exclusive lease just like they did, and yours is more expensive than theirs.
As for the size of dwellings, I encourage you to actually go and visit peasant cottages in England or France, divide by the size of a common family at the time and then look for yourself how attainable a home like that is. I've done this myself and that's what formed my opinion.
The idea that the social relationships that you get over your whole life in a village are lesser than those you get with strangers in a city or online because of sheer quantity is something I've only ever heard from people who are stuck in either. I don't really feel the need to refute that because it's just a transparent indictment of itself.
Peasants worked for themselves most of the time, this is pretty much indisputable given that without industry, you had to make everything yourself. But I'm puzzled as to where you may have even gotten the idea that they didn't, given how uninterested most nobility was in agricultural matters in the first place. Perhaps yet more 1800s treatments?
Of course schooling and general vocational choice weren't available, but this is part of my criticism: those were specifically introduced to fill the needs of modern society in both control of the population and production of workers for ever more abstract pursuits. None of this has anything to do with freedom, and as much as I value knowledge and its dispensation as a virtue, we are quite literally arguing for yet more social control in the name of the maintenance of society here. Not for individual freedom, not in the slightest.
So too was conscription invented to serve the needs of the modern state. You're not exactly going to convince me, a Frenchman, that the practice was widespread or accepted in Europe before the French Revolution since our national anthem is about how exceptional it is to do that and how it grew so specifically with the advent of Napoleonic total war. To quote De Jouvenel:
The people conceived of conscription as an accidental and temporary necessity. But it became permanent and established when, after victory and peace had been achieved, the people's Government kept it on. Thus, Napoleon kept it on in France after the Treaties of Luneville and Amiens, and the Prussian Government kept it on in Prussia after the Treaties of Paris and Vienna.
Medieval warfare imposed other ills on civillian populations, but getting entire populations blown up in massive engagements was neither possible nor desirable given the fragility of the food supply.
As for you decrying the inability of peasants to fill paperwork, I think they'd rather argue for their illegibility to the State than against it. How else to explain that a common feature of peasant revolts was a burning of records, so as to deny their rulers taxation. You want "rights" for them, theoretical constructs instead of the practical freedom that is denied to the victim of the Rousseauan panopticon. Yet more talk of liberation that only spells bondage.
And as for your last point. It is provably impossible to build yourself a cabin in the woods and disappear to be left alone, many have tried, all of them ended dead, destitute or in prison at the hands of state funded men with guns. Most places will deny you even the ability to grow your own food or build your own dwelling if it doesn't satisfy the needs of bureaucrats.
The modern state offers no exit rights. This is yet more of consoling fictions that would have one justify a practical enslavement for theoretical freedoms. Please look at man's condition instead of entrusting it to ideas. I beg of you.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
No, where did glassing Taiwan come from?
China doesn't start world war 3 because of all the various American missiles that are likely to blow up Chinese things before they could complete their strategic objectives. There's also lots of American missiles that prevent Chinese missiles from blowing up American things.
If America uses massive quantities of its offensive and defensive missiles, they can't use them against China.
If America bombed Iran with only JDAMs/bunker busters and never fired any cruise missiles or defensive interceptors then sure, that's "free" (we'll ignore airframe wear).
Stellula
1d ago
People are contrarian signaling over “why should he know the population”
Because it shows that he has a general idea of the makeup of the country. Compare a country like Iraq (45M) or Afghanistan (41M) with Iran (90M).
It’s twice their size.
Iran is also a space-faring nation. They started launching satellites in 2009, they have advanced hypersonic missiles.
It’s just a very, very different country than our previous Middle East adventures, and Tucker quizzing him on this was to elucidate the fact that Ted’s primary driving motivation to get the US involved is (as Ted himself admitted in another section of the interview) a doomsday prophecy based on a hilariously absurd (and Israel-serving) misreading of the Bible.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Everyone knows the real agenda here is that you don't want anyone getting abortion pills period.
Avoid consensus-building phrases like "everyone knows," as well as presuming you know the other person's motives. You are probably correct that @hydroacetylene does not want anyone getting abortion pills, but you need to actually engage with him ("Are you saying...?" or "I think your actual agenda is...") rather than simply asserting it in this antagonistic fashion. This is a pattern you're unfortunately engaging in a lot. I hate to see it, because here you are a leftie on a mostly anti-left forum (you aren't wrong about that, though you are wrong about "far right"), and you are of course being heavily downvoted and reported for having unpopular opinions. The usual failure mode from here is you get more and more frustrated and antagonized by everyone telling you off, and eventually the warnings accumulate and you get banned. I realize this is a hard pattern to break out of, and maybe it's not entirely fair, but I will tell you that rightie posters that start taking the same attitude you do to all comers who argue with them also wind up getting banned because they just can't stay calm and gracious enough while arguing with people whose opinions they clearly do not respect.
roystgnr
1d ago
Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.
Devon Eriksen expressed the problem with this in horrifying fashion a few weeks ago:
But what if Chesterton's Fence isn't a fence at all, but a sort of beaver dam? What if social norms came about by evolution, instead of intelligent design?
If tens of thousands of tribes come up with sets of customs based on silly ideas from their stone age ooga booga tribal religions, then a few of those are bound to have effective ones by pure accident. Then they become successful, and wipe out or absorb the other tribes. And those customs combine, and mutate, and get justified by new religions, and once again, the ones that randomly happen to be best guide their unwitting hosts to victory. But they never know the real reason why it made them successful. Because they never knew in the first place. It was all just ooga booga, and luck.
Then, millennia later, not only do they not know why the important bits are important, they don't even know which bits are the important bits. And which bits might actually be bad. Suddenly, you're playing minesweeper with your entire society. Eliminating archaic customs is like some kind of malevolent cosmic game show. Some doors have fabulous technological prizes behind them, and others have a swarm of angry Martian Death Bees. And you don't dare just decline to play the game, because if you don't, you'll be conquered and replaced by the winners. But that's also what happens if you play and lose.
And all the labels on the doors just say "Ooga Booga".
To some extent you might expect this sort of thing to be a problem that's also its own solution: if some cultures evolve poorly, well, the ones that didn't will just replace them again.
Memetic natural selection was never really a good solution. Anthropology had the "Pots, not People" movement that suggested cultural diffusion was often a peaceful spread of winning ideas rather than a violent expansion of people armed with winning ideas, but even Wiki admits that
the arrival of archaeogenetics since the 1990s ... has resulted in an increasing number of studies presenting quantitative estimates on the genetic impact of migrating populations. In several cases, that has led to a revival of the "invasionist" or "mass migration" scenario".
You'd think that progressives would have fought harder against such a bleak dog-eat-dog view of the world, but maybe something about the typical "lots of ancient DNA survived in-place, but the Y chromosomes all came from the invaders" evidence resonates with their worldview in other ways.
But memetic natural selection probably isn't even a possible solution, today.
Thankfully, in the modern era wars of conquest are more frowned upon, and intellectual production and publication are far greater, and so the diffusion and uptake of ideas is the main source of cultural change ... but the trouble is that evolution just doesn't work the same way via that mechanism! Even if the only change to cultural evolution was that far more memes now spread horizontally (like genes in viruses) rather than vertically (like genes in mitochondria),
Meme Mitochondria prioritize your evolutionary success, but don’t really care if you enjoy the process, and don’t care about anything else.
Meme viruses prioritize sounding good, but don’t care whether you live or die. Even a meme-virus that kills you will succeed if it gets you to spread it to others.
Newly screwed up mitochondrial genes can kill a person horribly (no hyperlink for this one - it was too depressing that Google searches mostly bring up children's hospital web pages), but new screwed up viral genes can kill whole swaths of a population horribly, before the virus evolves to be less virulent or the survivors evolve resistance to it. Backing out of the metaphor, I guess that's the three possible answers to my "how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there?" question, isn't it? Either a bad new culture wrecks everything so badly that something else climbs out of the wreckage, or its badness is offensive enough to get outcompeted by less offensive forms of itself before it creates too much wreckage, or it's rejected by subcultures that eventually outbreed it. I'm hoping for #2 or #3, myself. #1 seems like the only hope of a major conservative cultural restoration, but the cost would be atrocious, and I'm not really conservative, and it's hard to forecast exactly what flavor of conservatism would be the one to come out on top afterward.
This is not a high-effort response, and yours certainly is, so I apologize for the inadequacies.
Hmm... my first impulse is to say that no apologies are necessary, and point out that grep finds a bunch of quotes from you in my personal archives that I'm happy to repay in part. That's all true, but I do notice that those quotes are from your /r/themotte days rather than from TheMotte. Probably even that's just because I read here less and archive much less than I did 3 years ago, but if you think you've been slacking off lately, don't let me discourage you from whatever self-criticism keeps you at top form! ;-)
How exactly?
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