domain:putanumonit.com
iprayiam3
6hr ago
Conservatism is not an ideology. It's an orientation. Moreover, it's an orientation against a reference point, (which is why today's conservative is yesterday's liberal etc.)
People confuse this because contrast the term with liberalism, which can mean two things.
- Is just the opposite orientation of conservatism, and
- is an actual ideology - prioritization of safeguarding individual freedom and equal rights through rule-of-law and representative government
Most of the useless polticial showerthoughting is downstream of the confusion caused by the fact that the word liberal can refer to either, which conservative can't.
Both the complaints of liberals not being liberal, or conservatives not being ideological, or of assuming conservatives are ideologically illiberal etc.
At the end of the day, both American Conservativism and Liberalism are big tents each containing both liberals and illiberals.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6hr ago
but currently the entire political spectrum is based on "my life sucks, boo out group".
You don’t actually believe that’s true, do you? Like, clearly there are many people — people well within the mainstream Overton window of the two major American political parties, and certainly those within the mainstream of other Anglosphere countries — who do not fit this description at all. One could point to the “Abundance Democrats” and the “Tech Right” as two ascendant factions made up very largely of successful, optimistic, non-resentful individuals.
Supah_Schmendrick
6hr ago
I seem to remember that the Drug War of old included an element of "it's your own fucking fault, just don't do drugs" and it still failed horribly.
Your memory is at least partially incorrect; drug use fell precipitously during the peak of the DARE era:
On the question of drugs themselves, it seems like Americans, especially teenage Americans, really did change their minds about how dangerous drug use was. Gone were the days of cocaine paraphernalia on magazine covers. For example, high-school seniors (the group for which we have the most data) in 1979 were relatively sanguine about cocaine: only 32 percent said there was “great risk” in trying it. By 1994, that figure peaked at 57 percent. Support for drug-law reform also sputtered out. In 1977, 28 percent of Americans said marijuana should be legal, a 16-point gain over the preceding eight years. In 1985, though, support was back down to 23 percent, and it rose only barely to 25 percent in 1995. The dream of marijuana legalization was dead for a generation.
Initially, the War on Drugs also had a remarkable effect on the total number of people using drugs. The share of high-school seniors using any illicit drug peaked in 1979, at 54 percent. It then fell more or less continuously for the next decade, bottoming out in 1992 at 27 percent. The class of 1992, in other words, was half as likely as the class of 1979 to use illicit drugs. Similarly heartening trends obtained in the adult population. In 1979, there were an estimated 25 million illicit drug users, including about 4.7 million cocaine users; 4.1 million had ever used heroin. By 1992, those numbers had fallen to 12 million, 1.4 million, and 1.7 million respectively.
Nobody gives a darn about that musician. He's a one hit wonder and now he's gone. Google trends says his popularity lasted a few months at most.
Conservatism does have an ideology. Clean safe streets lined with trees, single family homes, and white picket fences. Young people working starter jobs around town in stores and businesses knstead of shitskins.
dr_analog
razorboy
6hr ago
maybe I'm not the intended audience but I would never have heard about his interview with Tucker if not for this leak, so...
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7hr ago
The reason detached single-family units are important is because they deliver the ability to personally develop. With a condo you're not actually doing anything; you're not doing maintenance on your mechanical devices (unless you're fortunate enough to have a garage or driveway, of course), you're not really able to store anything, you can't do anything loud (no instruments, etc.), it's more difficult to entertain people, etc. The same thing applies to townhouses to a lesser degree.
This led me down an interesting rabbit hole - I am aware of the importance of the myth of the garage startup in Silicon Valley, but also that the main lines of mentor-mentee and exited founder-investor-founder genealogy run back to Fairchild Semiconductor via companies that were not founded in garages or, mostly, by garage tinkerers. A quick fact-check finds Wozniak denying that Apple was actually founded in the garage (the tinkering that led to the Apple I happened inside the house - it sounds like the garage was just used to store inventory), that pictures of Jeff Bezos founding Amazon in his garage show a room that had not been used to store motor vehicles for a very long time, and that the Google garage was commercially rented space which happened to be a converted garage. It looks like the last significant tech company founded in a space which was primarily designed to store motor vehicles was HP in 1939. Nvidia is often referred to as founded in a garage, but it was actually founded in a spare room in Curtis Priem's townhouse.
In other words, the point of the Silicon Valley garage isn't the idea of the garage as marginal space - it is that it was normal for middle-class Americans to have more square footage than they actually needed, giving space to work in. A spare room, something it is perfectly possible to have in a townhouse, or even in a condo if you live like middle-class Continental Europeans or super-rich New Yorkers do, works better as a home office/workshop than an unconverted garage. And the surplus of square footage is something that you don't get by insisting on sprawl zoning in a place as rich as Silicon Valley - nobody thinks that the next generation of Silicon Valley founders can afford SFHs with garages in the Valley, and it is notable that the only reason that the Apple founders had access to the garage in the first place was because Job's parents had bought the house it was attached to before Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley.
The even more important point is absence (or, in the case of California, lax enforcement) of laws against running businesses out of private homes. The canonical place to found a 21st century startup is a Stanford dorm room. Under UK charity law, that is illegal in a Cambridge College room.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
Define the terms please. There's a version of this I might agree with, if for example by Conservatism you mean it's Boomer implementation, but that's not a problem of Conservatism qua Conservatism, that's a problem of Liberalism writ-large.
My life sucks, boo out group isn't really lyrics that inspire or offer novel insights.
What? There may have been a time that political thinkers would sell you dreams of a shining future, but currently the entire political spectrum is based on "my life sucks, boo out group".
It isn't surprising that the anglosphere right has greater problems attracting young people than the right in the rest of the west.
Isn't this completely false? Last I've seen they had trouble attracting young women, with young men flocking to the in droves.
I've heard the claim that US and Russian strategic bombers are currently required to be stored in a way accessible to satellite recon, as part of the verification sections of our arms control treaties.
Skimming through summaries of New START (and the long-expired START I, in case this was an outdated claim), though, I can't seem to find any such requirements, so it's possible this was just a misunderstanding or a fabrication. I do see requirements for allowing frequent on-site inspections, though, which you'd hope would be sufficient alone. If I missed something about bomber storage and there is some need to change the verification requirements, now would be a great time to do it - the latest extension of New START expires next February.
Edit: ... and apparently nobody cares when New START expires, because Putin suspended Russia's participation in it in 2023.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7hr ago
There are many other things we could do with these people instead of killing them that will still make society safer.
Like what? I’m trying to imagine some institutional entity set up to try and maximize the productive labor value of people like this girl; such an entity would need to devote a very onerous amount of money, time, and resources just to making sure she doesn’t fuck something up massively. This is money spent just to make sure she isn’t a huge net negative; that’s long before we’ve gotten anywhere near turning her into a net positive. We also need to make sure such an entity does not give her access to anything important with which she could channel her obvious devotion to cause into a genuinely destructive action.
So, what sort of menial, non-impactful tasks are we setting her to, such that if she decides to do something horrible she can’t have much impact, but she still has the capacity to represent an economic (or even social) net positive, after taking into account everything required to keep her from doing something horrible?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
7hr ago
Resurfacing another old comment from @functor about Conservatism as anti-ideology. I think it's interesting to reflect back on now that we're in Trump 2.0:
Keith woods says it better than me
Conservatism as Anti-Ideology
There was much debate online recently over the political beliefs of country music singer Oliver Anthony. Anthony captured the hearts of conservatives with his “Rich Men North of Richmond”, which took aim at out of touch fatcat Yankees who have abandoned people like him. At first there was no question to conservatives, Anthony was definitely one of them. After all, he railed against welfare queens, taxes, and complained about elites not relating to regular folk. Anthony did alienate some of his newfound following when an interview of him appeared where he affirmed the “diversity is our strength” mantra. Then the first question at the first of this years Republican Party primary debates was the hosts asking the field for their interpretation of Athony’s masterpiece, to which an indignant Mr. Anthony then responded with derision for the entire field, reminding Republican partisans that these politicians were actually part of the elite he was singing about.
Still, most conservatives are not in any doubt that Oliver Anthony is one of them, and I think they’re correct. The fact that he is almost indistinguishable in his rhetoric from a Berniebro Democrat is a feature, not a bug. Neither is it a problem that the message in his song seemed inconsistent - targeting rich capitalists as the source of his problems in the same song that he complained about taxation and welfare spending. Conservatism in recent years has lost any positive content, it is now best understood as an anti-ideology, a vague, paranoid and inconsistent critique of a nebulous “elite”, the only point of which is to spread a general mistrust in whoever happens to be in power. ... Modern conservatism in the English speaking world developed out of the cadre of conservatives who formed the National Review in 1955, led by William F. Buckley. Buckley believed he had found a program to unite the two camps who dominated the right, but had been up to that point adversarial: the Burkean conservatives, led by figureheads like Russell Kirk, and the increasingly expanding camp of libertarians, who had been influenced by works like Friedrich Hayeks The Road to Serfdom. The program that would unite them was the “fusionism” of Frank Meyer, a German-Jewish immigrant to the United States who himself abandoned communism after reading Hayek’s work while serving in the US Army. Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian | Mises Institute .... Since at least the 2000s, the conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher has been in retreat, while it found a resurgence with the Tea Party program during the Obama administration, this trend was swept aside by the muscular populism of Donald Trump. Since then, conservatism has lost any vestiges of whatever positive content it had remaining. Free market economics are still central to the establishment GOP politicians, but many conservatives now sound like economic populists, seeing rich capitalists as part of the same elite class as liberal politicians. While many conservatives still stand firm on abortion, there is little else in the way of the social conservatism that used to define the right: Trump was the most pro-gay US President in history, and modern conservatives are all too happy to embrace their own, based versions of “trans women” like Blair White if they affirm them back. Alex Jones asks Blaire White if "the chemicals" made her trans | Media Matters for America -... So what’s left? Well, there’s definitely a strong belief that the elites are evil - ridiculously, cartoonishly evil, to the point that they poison the water and the skies, intentionally derail trains, and start wars just to make common people suffer. There is also a strong cynicism about politics and idealism generally, not only is the conservative anti-ideological, but they are convinced everyone else is too, and that people that profess to believe in leftist ideals like egalitarianism are just cynics who don’t really believe it. As saimleuch, conservatives will often critique leftists for being inconsistent anti-racists or say things like their affirmation of trans rights is rooted in a hatred of women. Oliver Anthony engaged in some of this on his recent appearance on Joe Rogan. Rogan pointed out that Democrats in the early 90s “sounded like Nazis”, Oliver Anthony recognised the argument and immediately pointed out that Democrats like Hillary and Obama didn’t even support gay marriage in the 2000s! .. It is of course an eternal source of frustration to people on the radical right that conservatives attack the left by holding them to the moral standard the left itself has established, thus enforcing the leftist moral framework on the whole political spectrum. This seems obviously counter-productive, until you realise there is no alternative program the conservatives are advancing anyway - all that matters is getting people to share the same sense of cynicism and mistrust of power, so an accusation of racism or homophobia works as well as anything else.
https://keithwoodspub.substack.com/p/conservatism-as-anti-ideology
Conservatism lacks ideology, vision and a moral compass. At this point it is just angry ranting against cartoon vilians who are satanically evil. There is little systemic analysis instead there is an over emphasis of conspiracies. If the populist conservatives took power, they would be incapable of wielding it since their policies lack depth beyond SJWs bad but trans people with MAGA hats good. Conservatives are too negative, their entire focus is on what they dislike. Rich people bad, welfare queens bad, Klaus Schwab bad but what is good?
My life sucks, boo out group isn't really lyrics that inspire or offer novel insights. It isn't surprising that the anglosphere right has greater problems attracting young people than the right in the rest of the west. AfD, Sweden democrats and national rally do fairly well among young voters. The rather aimless right in the anglosphere fails at attracting young people and successful people. A young highly educated person is simply going to find the aesthetics and the values of mainstream conservatism boring and unappealing. It isn't a uniting message, it is a message with no vision that is anti PMC. I simply struggle to see a well travelled, highly educated person fitting in to the conservative movement at all. The right is making itself culturally toxic defenders of boomer rights.
I'll say from my perspective, this view actually seems validated after what we've seen from Trump so far. With the exception of tariffs, which are already being struck down, there's much more of an emphasis on destroying than actually building anything.
That being said, I'm generally conservative myself and weakly pro-Trump, so I'm not trying to just take cheap potshots. I genuinely think this is a huge problem the right needs to face in order to create a more compelling and useful platform for the future.
EdgeCityRed
8hr ago
I read it due to the buzz and I have deep regrets.
EdgeCityRed
8hr ago
Cassandra Cla(i)re was well-known in the fandom space. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Cassandra_Claire
oats_son
8hr ago
The idea that you can swap genders is a farce that is only enabled by anarchists who spent too much time thinking about sex, and invented a convenient concept that gender is opposite from sex. For pretty much anyone, undertaking the sex change journey is an incredibly bad idea. It marks you as a freak and you will spend your whole life trying and failing to fit in. Fighting one's nature is not fun. It also mostly puts you out of normal life paths like marriage and raising kids.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
8hr ago
Interesting, I actually preferred the last few stories over the first few ones, which is a bit like the opposite of most people. Perhaps I'm too much of a softie but the more romantic and human theme of them left more more fulfilled at the end of the story compared to, for example, In the Court of the Dragon.
Botond173
8hr ago
It's a bit of a stretch to say that disagreeableness is common on this site, isn't it?
Botond173
8hr ago
At this point, you basically have to be doing some kind of search on every single container coming in, right?
Or alternatively just store your combat aircraft in reinforced hangars, as they all should be in the first place.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
SCP Foundation
I've read the anti-memetics division series and mostly enjoyed it, and a few others that were a lot of fun like the vhs tape of the Celtics game where the crowd became aware they were in the video. What are other great SCP stories?
I definitely agree with the idea that SCP is the modern repository of Cosmic Horror, in that Lovecraft relied on a kind of Satan-of-the-Gaps theory of the supernatural. Cults in foreign colonial ports, ruins in the remaining unexplored regions on the map, demon worship in the non-Anglo population of New England that the "respectable" parts of the world never touched.
But today most of those gaps have been closed, so to write in the same style and not just write a period piece, you need to move to new gaps. You have to write for today. Where do Demons hide in a world where I have satellite photos of the whole planet on my laptop, and people in the Congo have smartphones?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
I guess he lost me too. Reading the book it feels like, looking at the date, it presages a lot of stuff I like that came later (Sartre, Camus, Kerouac) but I'm not actually enjoying most of the book.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9hr ago
I don't think the writers intended Spock to be the sole voice of wisdom in the series. If anything, he's used to show that pure rationality, while probably at least functional, isn't the best most human way to make decisions.
"The Rats in the Walls" "Shadow over Innsmouth", "The Shadow Out of Time" and "At the Mountains of Madness" are probably among the most widely acclaimed. I own & really enjoyed the Necronomicon, nice hardcover and quite comprehensive collection of tales, so as a completionist that might be your thing.
Edit: Also, dunno how much you already know that, but the SCP Foundation is in many ways the modern equivalent of part-weird part-(eldritch)-horror of lovecraftian stories. Also definitely worth checking out.
Grant_us_eyes
9hr ago
Apartments are literally built different in America compared to Europe.
All the urban issues most cities have come down to onerous requirements. You want European urban centers? Then start using European regulations.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
9hr ago
Eh I'm like 50 pages in and stalled. It's interesting and I like his arguments but yeah very dense.
Why the anti-immigration right tends to do better in non-anglosphere than anglosphere countries has a lot to do with the differing electoral systems. The main center-right party in Sweden, the Moderates, isn't much sexier than the UK Conservatives but because Sweden uses proportional representation (as opposed to FPTP) a vote for SD isn't going to risk feeling wasted like a vote for Reform in the UK might.
More options
Context Copy link