domain:parrhesia.substack.com
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
There is a small but substantial fraction of Trump voters who are willing to break with him on foreign interventions and military support of foreign countries.
Strong disagree here. Foreign affairs consistently ranks as one of the issues voters are most likely to "trust their leaders" on, i.e. be sheep about. MAGA quite vehemently wanted no more interventions in the Middle East... until Trump started bombing Iran, then they switched to being more or less OK with it. He even threatened full regime change and the response from MAGA was lukewarm at worst. Much of MAGA was unequivocal in how much they wanted Trump to dump Ukraine and "not give another dollar to Zelenskyy", right up until Trump promised to arm Ukraine a few days ago, when most of MAGA flipped to saying it was OK due to the minerals deal (or something like that).
Likewise, voters DGAF about tariffs, but might be more concerned if they manifest as inflation later on.
Things like immigration and to some degree the Epstein files are less likely to evoke sheep-like responses from the right.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4hr ago
I'm curious overall - do you not see a benefit to being in touch with the working class whatsoever?
To a small extent, sure.
The issue I see here is that conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities. Instead of thinking about how to acquire power, or attract EHC who have power, they're smoking copium about how noble manual labor is.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4hr ago
My post says nothing negative about low-class people. I'm taking issue with lower-middle-class conservative policy wonks who fetishize manual labor. As to being a one-trick pony, I've written much else, see:
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4hr ago
Now, frankly I have no idea how he does want these necessary but awful (by his lights) jobs to be done, and would very much appreciate hearing that directly from him. I would also, honestly, really like him to make a top level post where he lays out his own, explicit, positive ideas about how he wants the economy and culture to work.
Over the short term, by people who have no better option, which is how they're done in any society. Over the long term, economic and technological growth will allow more and more of those jobs to be eliminated.
Bartender_Venator
4hr ago
Not suggesting they become academics (God, no! Affirmative action just scratches the surface of academia's professional pathologies). If you go to a top university, and are sufficiently intelligent, personable, and flexible, you can pivot into basically any type of email job you want with a little networking. Or, with luck, they can follow some passion and have a happy life doing something for its own sake.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
I've started to read up on this whole Epstein thing, and your take in your first 3 paragraphs seems much more realistic than the crazy conspiracies. WAY too much of this whole affair is sourced from Virginia Giuffre, a serial accuser and known liar.
The question I have, though, is why Trump proceeded the way he did.
A mix of incompetence and disinterest. Trump only has an implicit, gut-feeling on his base which is good enough for him in most ways, but has limitations. That's why he messed up on H1-Bs in December, and it's why he messed up now. He probably didn't really think this whole Epstein thing was that important so he let his lieutenants (Bondi and Patel, among others) hype up promises they couldn't keep, and now its blown up in his face. He's trying to backpedal like a malfunctioning ChatGPT doing a slurry of outgroup hate that usually works -- mentioning the Steele Dossier, Hillary, Obama, Biden, Russia investigation, Comey, etc, etc. I don't think this will actually do much to dent the Trump coalition in the long term -- there will be a few defections and disillusionments, but not a critical mass since the human brain is quite adept at rationalizing away cognitive dissonance. However, it's sure been good pickings for hilarious blatant hypocrisy, e.g. example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4hr ago
Yeah, SSQ allows culture war topics.
It’s still not for “waging the culture war,” i.e. slinging shit at your outgroup or trying to dredge up drama, but this would be appropriate.
It absolutely does work if you can convince the admissions officers that you are dead set on that particular department, you just have to be a little cannier. Knew a guy who was excluded (i.e. not formally expelled) from his posh high school for drug dealing who got into an Ivy-tier college that way.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
(This is one big reason I still live with my mom; if I have to have a roommate anyway, who better than my mother who loves me? What's the point of moving out just to become roommates with a stranger?)
Because it makes bringing partners home for sex less weird.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
How do you make God more interesting than or more impressive than whatever's happening in their smartphone?
Well, he could start doing stuff again. Blatant smiting, parting of seas, that sort of thing.
Ah, noted. Regardless of topic?
(Should I move the post? Delete here/add there?)
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4hr ago
Quantumfreakonomics
4hr ago
Lol yeah. Have fun locking your capital up and missing literally everything.
charlesf
5hr ago
Anything like this that still exists on the internet has to be protected from "the web at large". These sorts of things worked in the past due to the filtering of all internet users for for smarter, more tech savvy, PC owners. Anything today that gains a reputation as someplace quality discussions might be taking place will be face a number of dangers from people and groups who would have been filtered out in the old system: bots, paid shills, culture war crusaders, and people who interact with the internet entirely through their smart phone. This has forced the older, higher quality users onto largely private Discord servers, Onion sites, or fora that otherwise apply a filtering mechanism locally, either through vigorous manual enforcement, like this place, invitation only membership, paid accounts, or other equally effective systems. While I don't think its been explicitly investigated or analyzed, I think its largely the case now that the dangers that the new cohorts of internet users present to thoughtful discussion spaces significantly outweigh the potential losses of smaller numbers of new quality contributors.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5hr ago
on average
If we're only concerned with the most positive possible outcome, I guess you're saving for retirement by buying lottery tickets.
AvocadoPanic
5hr ago
Aren't
people think that if we don't deport 50 million brown people the country is doomed
and
people think we're sliding into fascism and non-white people are going to be put in camps soon
the same people, if they think both are a good thing?
shoeonfoot
5hr ago
Some people think we're sliding into fascism and non-white people are going to be put in camps soon.
Other people think that if we don't deport 50 million brown people the country is doomed.
It's good to be a sensible centrist.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5hr ago
Good post. I agree way too many people take their wishy-washy vibes, put them on a chart and then zoom off to infinity.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
Even if you make enough money, working in a blue collar job all day means you hurt all evening, which is going to interfere with physics. Einstein may have overly romanticized plumbing.
shoeonfoot
5hr ago
it isn't up for debate that there are massive differences on average between the kind of child OP could have (if not infertile) and the kind up for adoption.
Everything is up for debate. They might adopt Rob Henderson.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
The main thing summer jobs were supposed to teach middle class kids when I was that age was how much low-skill jobs sucked and thus why you should go to college.
roystgnr
5hr ago
Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts
That's true for some people, but if you're smart enough to be an auto-didact, you're probably smart enough to have noticed just how bad most people are at simply reading. The biggest difference between you and the dumb kid isn't that you had more exposure to texts, it's that he had more exposure to tests - in theory there's at least some level of verification, even in the liberal arts, that he picked up what he was supposed to from the lectures and reading (at least from the Cliff's Notes). If you swear you did all the reading, you might be much smarter than him, but you also might be much dumber, and we've got no quick way to tell except to take your word for it, and even people who skipped the readings on game theory and mechanism design can intuit why that's not good enough.
In practice, those tests are also increasingly not good enough, and for some reason even the average human who can understand why "I'm self-reporting how good I was at learning" is bad still manages to get lost before they figure out that "We're self-reporting how good we are at teaching" is also bad, so the problem may just continue to get worse, at least until nobody respects college degrees as credentials much more than they respect high school degrees. A degree from the right college name at least may still certify that you had an SAT score in their range and didn't drop out for 4 years, but that's a really expensive SAT test; much safer to be in a field where you can take the PE Exam or grind LeetCode or something on top of getting your diploma.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
5hr ago
It never made sense to me in art, literature, history, or other liberal arts. Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts, or practicing drawing or writing. If I had a kid who wanted to be a writer, im not sure I’d make him go through university— in fact it’s a waste of time.
There used to be (and still is in some areas) a long, rich tradition of the humanities, passed down throughout the centuries via the academy and other institutions of knowledge generation.
This tradition and gatekeeping it is crucial, and keeping the chain of humanities alive is in my opinion crucial as well. If you just let the masses go at it as they will, art becomes diluted and we stop caring about the old great works of art. As we're seeing now...
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
5hr ago
Friend, mate, old buddy, old pal - learn a new song? "Righties are dumb and smelly and low-class and have too many bastard kids and are way too sympathetic to the low-grade low-IQ blacks and browns who have too many bastard kids" is getting boring now.
Ok come on now. @AlexanderTurok is biased against many right-wing folks as he has admitted, just like 80%+ of us here are biased against the left, progressives, wokes, etc etc. The entire point of this site is to allow us to discuss across ideological divides.
Personally I think this post was fine and shows a willingness to take the feedback from the mods he was given earlier.
While it's a bit of a personal attack, I do think this is a interesting frame - should the elites not care about the working class? So far in America they have (at least nominally), seems like folks nowadays are sort of turning against that. I am curious to see where elite consensus moves on this.
I had a very similar thought myself the other week when past the local Pride parade.
All these people, and everyone who tolerates these people, are refusing to breed. This is all a flash in the pan. Unless AI flips the table and changes all the rules, the Europe of the future will not have Pride marches.
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