domain:theintrinsicperspective.com
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9hr ago
From the Red Tribe's point of view, the Blue Tribe is basically using an exploit in the rules (or rather, several; the education system's another) to generate new loyal voters. This is one of the biggest weaknesses in democracy: if there are any ways to generate new loyal voters en-masse, some arsehole will use them to take over the country.
That's why they take such a hard line on it: because if they lose this, they suspect they lose it all, forever. Hence, no surrender, no retreat, no matter the cost. A substantial amount of Reds would say that if the next Dem President would do that, then the correct response is to raze the Democratic Party so there'll never be one. Indeed, @Dean has since written a QC about Trump using available resources to roll up key supporting structures of the Democratic Party.
When enemy victories build up permanent advantages, worries about escalation go right out the window. To quote Zvi:
When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. If playing it ‘safe’ with your resources means you don’t win, then it means that you die. Either don’t play, or don’t hold back.
The grand irony of all this, of course, is that this is exactly the same mentality that a lot of Antifa subscribe to; they think they've already bet their lives on the culture war and will actually be executed for sodomy/etc. if the Red Tribe ever gets enough power.
There's also concern around organ donation. I've seen some reports online about adopting new guidelines around brain death so that (to put it crudely) they can start getting the organs as fresh as possible.
I think that, too, causes unease: some eager-beaver surgeon pushing for declaration of death while the patient is literally still breathing in order to get the organs as fast as possible.
There's a lot of ways this could go wrong, and I'm too cynical to accept "but that would never happen! slippery slope is a fallacy!" arguments since the slopes have been greased with butter in every other instance of big social changes. Right now the fears around euthanasia may not have manifested, but I think that is largely due to the brakes from social lack of acceptance being put on. Remove the brakes, and what will happen?
EDIT: To clarify that last, I don't mean simply making it legal. Where it's legal, but there is high social opposition to it, that keeps the brakes on. But push for mainstreaming it, run publicity campaigns with the hardest cases (the way activists fighting abortion bans always pick the "pregnant by incestuous rape ten year old" victim when the vast majority of abortions are for economic reasons), and weaken that opposition, and then what happens?
Canadian style MAID where disabled veterans are told "we can't afford to pay for the supports for you to live in your own home, but if you want to kill yourself we can sign you right up"? If a twelve year old wants assisted suicide, then providing a psychiatrist rubber-stamps that they are mature enough to make the decision, it can go ahead? Once again like the bad old days before antibiotics, the danger is not from the illness but from going into hospital, because you're less likely to come out alive?
When you take the brakes off, there's only so long the inertia holds. Then the new normal sets in, and then all the edge cases and "that will never happen" start happening.
HereAndGone
10hr ago
Regarding the UK, do you remember the furore over the Liverpool Care Pathway? Allegations that elderly patients were being ushered out instead of patched up and sent home, on the rationale that they would only get sick and end right back up in hospital again, putting more strain on the over-stretched NHS, and thus it was better all round (and more compassionate) to just let them die - or if they annoyingly didn't show signs of dying just yet, to help them along the way.
Some lurid stories of people visiting sick relatives and noticing another patient begging for water, claiming to be thirsty, and being ignored by nurses, and when the visitors asked about it, they were told this person was 'nil by mouth', they were unresponsive, they were DNR, and it was none of the strangers' business, and so (it was claimed) they were being let die of dehydration by stealth.
Things like that are why euthanasia in hospitals has a very tough opposition to overcome: people are legitimately afraid they, or their loved ones, will be checked off a list by some faceless bureaucrat on the grounds of 'too expensive to keep them alive', and not because of expensive experimental end-of-life treatment, but literally "well they got pneumonia, they may come back in next winter with it again, just let them die this year and save the bother".
There were also some allegations about euthanasia in the Netherlands, one I remember from years back was a doctor deciding on behalf of a sick nun that he'd give her euthanasia because he knew her religion would prevent her asking. That's the kind of fear of "god-complex" doctors that people have. It may be unfounded, but one rotten apple ruins the whole barrel.
There is currently a case where a family here in Ireland claim a Swiss clinic provided "assisted dying" to their mother without their knowledge or consent (but the clinic counter-claim they got permission from the family) and only learned she was dead via a Whatsapp message.
I suppose that my view is "it depends". Sometimes letting someone go without resorting to extreme measures is the right thing to do. Actively intervening to cause death? Yeah, that's difficult for me.
My own experience of this is with my late father. He suddenly, in his mid-70s, collapsed one day with what turned out to be total kidney failure. While in hospital, he had to be resuscitated three times. The hospital asked us (after the first resuscitation) would we want them to try again, should it happen (with the very strong hint that we should say "no"). My mother and siblings insisted that no, we wanted him given every chance.
When they did let him out, it was clearly evident from their behaviour that they considered they were just sending him home to die. He was very weak and very ill, but my mother and I nursed him through it and he got another ten years of life, and good years too - not miserable, confined to bed years. In fact, he bounced back so well that the consultant used to call him his "miracle man" (and we smiled wryly and muttered under our breaths 'no thanks to you bastards, if we left it up to you, he'd be dead').
Come forward to when he's in his early 80s and my mother died of lung cancer the year before. This time, he was gradually failing. Nothing big, but you could tell he was fading. I said to my sister that this would probably be his last year, or if not, then next year. He got a stroke due to DVT clot, and this time when the hospital said that efforts to prolong life would just be futile, we agreed. He was ready to die, and it was his time. Any extreme measures would just have meant waiting for the next stroke, and the next. So, letting him go while keeping him comfortable was a peaceful, and even natural, death.
My point? The first time would have been wrong to let him die. The second time would have been wrong to try and keep him alive. And both times, the hospital was trying to nudge us towards the death side of the equation. That's the lack of trust in medical experts that is at the heart of the debate.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
10hr ago
I occasionally dip into the Reddit teachers sub-reddit and sometimes there are sensible posts (e.g. violent students being able to beat up teachers and other pupils with no consequences, and the administration doing nothing) but equally there are "now today I was highly disturbed because I failed to inculcate into one of my 15 year old male students that Patriarchy Bad, Toxic Masculinity To Blame For Everything, and Men Bad, White Men Especially Bad, what can I do to steer him onto the right path?" posts.
It's worth remembering how extreme Reddit is when you see stuff like that. For example, the board gaming subreddit is extremely woke (as the forum discussed a few weeks ago), but in real life very few people I have encountered are that way. Similarly, the observation that Reddit teachers are crazy does not necessarily show that the wider group of teachers is that way. They may be, I don't have experience or evidence to say otherwise... I just think one needs more data points than Reddit because of how overall crazy that site's users have become.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10hr ago
Looking at that thread you linked, I am more leaning towards the theory that @hydroacetylene is KulakRevolt, based on politics, the particular style of deflection when they want to deflect, and most of all the curious dedication to the idea of frustrating stylometry/basilisks with artificial tics (Kulak's forwards-from-grandma punctuation, hydroacetylene's "French autocorrect").
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
10hr ago
This matches my experience as well. I find that consciousness almost constantly throws off quanta that emerge as concepts to which language then attaches, which defines and refines the concept into something more definite. My attention inevitably engages something from this firehose-like blast of experience and from this my inner monologue emerges, describing my experience to me. Emotions are unusually intense quanta with fractal-like definition that require much more attention and language to tease out, almost as if I have to weave my thought and language around them to accurately capture what I'm experiencing.
HereAndGone
10hr ago
"Put a chick in it, make it gay, and make it lame" was pretty good, though, and I say this as someone who has no sympathy at all for Parker and Stone's politics (whatever they may be).
ulyssessword
10hr ago
Anything can be a UFO is you're bad enough at identifying flying objects.
Gaashk
10hr ago
I haven’t encountered all that much of that, in the course of getting an education degree, among other things. There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse. Lately, the higher ups have been going on a lot about “data” — academic data, behavioral data, data to get kids in trouble, data to get higher staff ratios, and so on and so forth. I don’t like it, much of the data is just a more onerous way of documenting opinions, but it’s certainly getting pushed hard.
HereAndGone
10hr ago
But there is wealth and talent to squander. There's a higher baseline and that is the most important factor in just about any equation.
That's true, but raising the waterline for the less able and less talented is going to be good for the nation as a whole. Better to have literate, functional (as in "learned how to pay attention and behave, not wreck the classroom"), blue collar or working class kids than criminals-in-training. Sure, they'll never get jobs at Bear Stearns, but they won't be clogging up the jails either.
I believe it was season 21, episode 10, Splatty Tomato.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=STT1ZHPPpGQ?si=0SBcTWEn7GyX2KdJ&t=100
HereAndGone
10hr ago
It's the teaching colleges and the universities. I saw the same when it came to newly-minted social workers: they had been stuffed to the gills with (slightly outdated by that time) theories of value-neutral, non-judgemental, the rest of it. So completely unprepared to deal with the types who were cunning, gaming the system, and knew exactly what buzzwords to use when spinning a tale to wrap the social worker round their finger and get them to advocate for "more gibs!" (that handy phrase which the job could have used back then) when interacting with authorities on their behalf.
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decades old by this time, and it's still being referenced, for one.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
10hr ago
At one point this may have been true. After vaccine mandates and pronoun mandates, the activist have more or less gotten the last of the conscientious objectors out of the profession, and the normies have been indoctrinated.
ABigGuy4U
10hr ago
Why have they gone easy on leftists so much since the rise of wokeness
Old age and actually having status to lose has made them cowardly. The new school principal character South Park introduced in 2015 was basically a meta-textual admission that they just can’t do the same kind of jokes that they did in the 90s for fear of getting cancelled. Even with their criticism of Trump, they spent 10 years walking on eggshells and are only being really vicious in their parody now that much of controversy over Trump has died down and he has safely solidified into a semi-establishment figure.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10hr ago
Both @Belisarius and I speculated four months ago that @TequilaMockingbird may be the return of Hlynka, but my confidence was fairly low then and remains a bit shaky even now. The “Steve Sailer is actually a liberal” thing is so inexplicable a delusion that it’s tough to believe two people could arrive at it independently, but I guess it’s plausible, given a certain set of intellectual priors (and generalized mistrust of urban Californians) which Hlynka and TequilaMockingbird might just happen to share.
I support the ban because anyone who peppers their post full of “dude I’m totally gonna get banned for this one, the mods are gonna be soooo pissed” ban-baiting deserves to get what they’re asking for. This can be true even if he’s not truly a ban evader.
Gaashk
10hr ago
I’ve had to unfollow a couple of people I used to be friends with and like well enough in person for this, though I think it may be decreasing. In person they’ll read the body language of people around them, but only positive reactions are allowed on most social media, which was a mistake. There’s probably no solution, women have been spurning each other on moral grounds forever.
HereAndGone
10hr ago
So no, Miss Smith, second grade teacher number three at literally who elementary that used to be named after a well-known but now problematic individual, does not bear responsibility for this proxy battle.
Unhappily, the most vocal and most online ones are the Mx. Smiths in a polycule who were highly indignant over not being able to tell their eight year old pupils all about their sex life as a queer non-binary folx because some repressive, probably MAGA, parent snitched on them to the administration about what was really being taught instead of readin'/ritin'/'rithmetic.
I occasionally dip into the Reddit teachers sub-reddit and sometimes there are sensible posts (e.g. violent students being able to beat up teachers and other pupils with no consequences, and the administration doing nothing) but equally there are "now today I was highly disturbed because I failed to inculcate into one of my 15 year old male students that Patriarchy Bad, Toxic Masculinity To Blame For Everything, and Men Bad, White Men Especially Bad, what can I do to steer him onto the right path?" posts.
(In case you think I'm inventing the polycule teacher, nope, that's a real example from a few years back).
Tree
10hr ago
I am hugely disappointed that rather than taking your ban like a man
Never understood this concept. In Paths of Glory, when they decide to execute three soldiers at random, one of the condemned starts whining and dragging his feet, saying it’s so unfair and he doesn’t want to die, and his executioners and their priest tell him to show courage and die with dignity …. But why should he help them to commit an unjust act?
That quivering mess is the only honest man there, and moreover he’s morally correct. You want your “comrades” to have nightmares for years where they see you begging for your mother – their conscience torturing them is good. You don’t want them to commit a grave crime, then eat breakfast like it’s tuesday.
When you make it easy on them, you are cooperating with defectors. In modern parlance, by acquiescing to your own destruction, you become a cuck.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10hr ago
95% sure. The report made me look back over his comment history and previous warnings.
We do frequently get reports claiming someone is an alt, but we usually don't find them particularly credible.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
Luckily I went to school before the "whole reading" thing kicked off (indeed, I was able to read before I started school) but I was there for when the New Maths kicked in, and oh brother.
I think they did to English what they did to Maths: don't teach it the old boring rote way, be the guide helping children discover for themselves, draw out of them what is naturally there.
That's fine for people who have talent for maths and can figure out on their own from first principles. For the likes of me, it meant I understood nothing of what was being taught and scraped along with barely passing. The old "rote learning" would have worked a whole lot better for me, rather than "now we'll just write this on the blackboard and you can all figure it out for yourselves". Even the teachers were stuck at times! They couldn't follow the methods in the new textbooks and were reduced to "just look up the right answer in the back".
For kids who got thrown in at the deep end with "just look at the shape of the entire word and take clues from the context and then you'll figure it out", that must have been a nightmare if your parents weren't teaching you how to read at home.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
11hr ago
I thought South Park went fully mask off at the end of the 2017 or 2018 season when they looked directly at the screen, broke the 4th wall, and told me "Well Whites, what are you going to do about Trump?" Haven't watched it since.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
To be fair to Freddie, I don't think he's claiming "education doesn't work". He's claiming "some kids are academically stronger, some kids are academically weaker, and all the interventions in the world are not going to magically give Susie a six point IQ leap up to the same level as Theophilus if she doesn't have that originally".
It's the push about "all kids must go to college" where experience at the coalface has shown him that some kids are not college material and would be better served being educated for a different path. But if the 'cure' for poverty or getting out of your original social class is being pushed as "more college! college for all!" then you are faced with (a) be honest and some kids won't get into college, any college at all (b) go along with what the government and everyone else is telling you, fudge the figures, lower standards, and graduate kids to go to college who will then drop out in their first year because they are not able for it.
I think Freddie sees (b) happening and thinks that is worse for everyone: schools, parents, the kids, society itself.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
Are you sure it's Hlynka? It's easy for someone to tell you "Dude, I think this is him" but if you didn't catch it before, then maybe it's not?
I dunno, I can't identify posters as easily as others on here claim to be able, so if it is him, okay.
They're not going to have nightmares or be tortured by their consciences. They're just going to remember you as a whiny, blubbering coward. If you can't change your fate, then facing it with dignity is better than making yourself pathetic. You aren't helping people do what they are going to do anyway.
Banning people from a forum, of course, is nothing like executing them, and I feel no remorse for banning people who deserve it, so arguing that it's "cucked" to refuse to accept a banning just means you think there is some virtue in being an undignified annoyance. There isn't.
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