domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
I think that very few people in the West would say that it should be legal for people to be employed in jobs they can't quit. The number of people who would say that is, I think, not much larger than the number of people who would say that it should be legal to enslave people. Which is not surprising, given that being employed in a job you can't quit is basically a form of slavery.
"People who quit their job and can't find another one should be allowed to starve" is a position with non-negligible support, but that is a different view to "people should not be allowed to quit their job in the first place". The right to quit your job for a better one is fundamental to the capitalist concept of freedom.
Let me elaborate my hypothetical a bit and see if you understand where I'm coming from.
Poll Question A: Should the US legalize Slavery?
I suspect the Yes answers to this would meet the Lizardman constant. A few trolls and a few people whose politics are so insane as to indistinguishable under Poe's Law.
Poll Question B: Should it be legal for Employers to sign contracts with Employees which guarantee lifetime employment, in exchange for which the Employees agree to work for that Employer for the rest of their lives or until released by the Employer, and to do any job requested by the Employer?
I suspect that while this would still be a distinct minority, it would draw more support than A. Many people who oppose slavery oppose it conceptually, oppose Slavery as a boo-light, but don't actually oppose the underlying reality of slavery. In the same way that Fascism probably polls lower than the elements of Fascism.
Hell I could imagine that a decent number of red tribe types would support forcing chronically unemployed or unemployable people into jobs they aren't allowed to quit.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
15hr ago
I just realized an absolutely fantastic essay/blogpost title would be “Shoplifters In The Marketplace Of Ideas.”
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15hr ago
The extremely dangerous men of special forces military units have no desire to signal their extreme dangerousness to the general public when they're out for some drinks with the boys. If anything, these guys are less likely to get into stupid fights for no real reason than the average guy because of their ability to easily keep their cool in stressful situations.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15hr ago
Many men are just as stupid, or worse. OK, obviously this guy's lady friend is a moron, but at least she's emotionally invested in the circumstance and is unable to recognize what absolute garbage this individual is. What excuse does anyone else have? Why would anyone's reaction be anything other than advocating a swift and clean execution?
The longer I'm alive, the more straight up antipathy I feel towards addicts. Some people seem to develop more empathy for them over time, but I am pretty well fresh out of it. Guys like this will predictably make life worse for everyone around them, they're much worse than simply worthless, and it's absurd that they just keep getting to make the world around them worse every day.
"each citizen is an educated adult fully qualified to choose on his own what to think".
Lots of people may profess to believe this when asked directly, but it doesn't really seem all that popular a concept in practice. Plus, as for "free speech," this is also the 'your speech is violence, our violence is speech' and 'free speech does not include "hate speech"' crowds. And social media seems to be eroding people's confidence in "the marketplace of ideas" as well. Again, the woke are more correct than the mainstream, and they're just ahead of the curve on abandoning these false and unworkable positions.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
15hr ago
I get unreasonably angry that our justice system doesn't have exponential escalators such that by the time one is convicted of a 10th criminal charge over distinct incidents they arent sent to the gallows or an effective lifw sentence. No one needs an 11th chance, you've told us who you are by then.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
15hr ago
I also backed First Monday In October. That company is one of those that's been posting on the impacts of tariffs (they have had several games delayed). Most recently they thought they found an alternative by printing in Brazil... and then Trump announced BRIC tariffs.
shoeonfoot
15hr ago
There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people.
Are they willing to do it for a living, or is it just a fun summertime activity with friends? Is this something they do on the weekend outside of work? I assume they have other jobs, unless they're wealthy enough to have retired already, in which case they're extreme outliers.
I find it hard to believe that college-educated people, regardless of race, would cover even a small portion of the necessary workforce on Americans farms.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15hr ago
Oh, that sucks. I actually do enjoy boardgames, but I don't buy them often enough to have bumped into that. We grabbed Wingspan and its expansions, Ark Nova, and Brass: Birmingham and we've been pretty happy with that rotating set for the time being. My wife bought me a preorder copy of First Monday in October which makes for delightful nerd cross appeal, but that order went in quite a while ago.
shoeonfoot
15hr ago
I think it’s fair to say that nobody proposes that Americans are jumping at the chance to do the worst possible jobs.
There was a lot of noise on X about this article from last month. Specifically, a lot of anti-immigration people were quoting the first paragraph as proof that Americans were indeed eager to do the dirty jobs that illegals do now:
Every seat in the waiting area of Glenn Valley Foods was occupied with people filling out job applications early Thursday afternoon, two days after the meatpacking plant became the center of the largest worksite immigration raid in the state of Nebraska so far this year.
The second paragraph was not included:
Dozens of prospective employees, many of them Spanish speakers, had been coming in and out of the plant all day. Some were hoping to land a new job; others were coming in for training.
I assume that what's going to happen across the country is illegal Hispanics being replaced with legal Hispanics if mass deportations actually happen.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
15hr ago
Because now if a woman accused me of being a creep, it was her fault not mine. I don't know what it is, but women can smell when a guy doesn't want to have sex with them. It's so much easier to become a trusted-man around them. I surely lost out on opportunities to sleep with women close to me, but it made me comfortable around them. Exposure therapy works.
Until you run into the women that decide that since you aren't interested they are free to sexually harass you...
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
15hr ago
As a boardgamer, I can tell you that the tariffs have really fucked over a lot of boardgame publishers and Kickstarters. For those who don't know, the vast majority of boardgames are manufactured in China, and many publishers have written detailed responses to "Why don't you print in the US instead?" (The answer is "We've tried and the manufacturing facilities don't really exist here" and also "Costs will go up, not by a little but by so much that basically only people who don't care about price will buy boardgames.") Admittedly boardgames are very much a niche luxury good, but in at least a few industries there have been significant impacts.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
15hr ago
AlexanderTurok, You claim that you are "anti third-worldism", but if that is true, why have you consistently aligning yourself with those who are trying to make the US more like a third-world country against those who want to make it great?
It wasn't MAGA that turned San Francisco into a fecese-strewn open-air drug market. It wasn't MAGA that worked behind the scenes to put a dementia patient in the Whitehouse. And it is not MAGA that has been marching in solidarity with HAMAS, shooting at federal officers, or trying to put a Communist in Gracie Mansion. It is your "Elite Human Capital" doing all of that.
The whole "Immigrants are just doing the jobs Americans wont do" is a blatant lie. There is no industry in these United States where the majority of workers and illegal/undocumented. Not even seasonal agriculture during the height of the Biden surge. The truth is "American don't want to do those jobs for those wages" and that is what this is (and has always been) about, wages.The Plantation owners don't want to pay the help, and once again the Democrats (who have always been the Party of the Plantation Owners) are once again threating civil war if they are not allowed to continue importing and exploiting thier non-citizen underclass.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15hr ago
Honestly, women tend to do that because they generally are protected from those kinds of situations. It’s true of anyone so sheltered, without the lived experience of “drug dealers are violent and crazy” you don’t develop the sort of mental habit of saying “people who are like that are crazy and to be avoided.” Add in the social virtue of being “nice, forgiving, and open-minded” and you get a toxic mix that results in toxic empathy.
shoeonfoot
15hr ago
College-educated White males lean toward Trump.
Education by gender among White voters
White college graduate men: Harris 48%, Trump 50%
It’s just women who shifted a lot toward Harris.
No, women shifted towards Trump compared to 2020, as did almost every group. In the 2016 and 2020 elections, white non-evangelicals with college degrees and even white non-evangelicals without college degrees supported Biden by a wide margin. These two groups, and notably Hispanics, shifted dramatically towards Trump in 2024 because of immigration + inflation. Had Biden not been so tremendously incompetent - and we can't dismiss that the incompetence, especially with respect to immigration, wasn't deliberate - the Democrats may have won.
Elections are very close affairs. Historical precedent suggests that the same voters flip flop every four years. Take immigration; less than 50% of Republicans are now in favor of decreasing immigration, down from 88% last year.
White Americans are an incredibly inviting people when it comes to immigration.
A lot of those jobs being unusually terrible is historically contingent. Being jobs at all is historically contingent.
Much has been said about how low status it is to be a stay at home wife lately, but these are often the jobs being taken. It's nice and high status to have a Mexican maid clean one's house, hire a Guatemalan landscaper, get cheap ethnic take out, to just buy new clothing whenever there's a tear, and that all chickens come pre-plucked and gutted. Gardening, cooking, picking berries, and sewing are not necessarily good candidates for industrialization. Mass produced strawberries and chicken was probably a mistake.
Also, bras are a terrible undergarment for fat women. Bring back the chemise and stays.
No_one
16hr ago
As far as I can tell, TACO is somewhat responsible, but also, average US tariff rates are just over 50% on Chinese goods?. Is it all TACO? If 50% tariffs have been painless, do you expect me to believe that 100% tariffs will truly be apocalyptic to the US economy?
Chinese are not only talented at trade, they're also talented at cheating in trade. So.. it's not having as much impact as you'd think it would. Because they're not paying the tariffs.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
16hr ago
I’m on record here, but given the fact that the laws of physics would have to be nearly completely wrong to allow anything to move faster than light, the chances that we’d actually communicate with an alien let alone be visited by one are pretty small. Even if you have something like a generation ship, any such aliens would either conquer immediately, kill us, or move on. Pranks don’t make sense at all.
Scott’s cultural barber pole. When you were growing up tattoos were only worn by sailors, gang-bangers and punks. Then upper class youth started doing it and it filtered down to the respectable middle class. You still remember back when tattoos were mostly the domain of scumbags so unfortunately you end up being the old man yelling about President Kennedy’s disrespectful Brylcreamed hair. I personally don’t mind tattoos but the Zoomer broccoli haircut has me convinced that Sitting Bull Did Nothing Wrong.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
16hr ago
In this case it seems particularly evident that the issue with drugs that trick you into not feeling hunger at your normal rate is that it becomes that much harder to operate normally without them.
You simply regain your appetite, and around half the weight back in a year if you stop Ozempic. I don't see how that's not strictly better than not taking it.
Unlike OP, I think a world where people can only solve their problems by becoming addicted to complex and expensive drugs is a bad one.
The hell is a "complex" drug? Does it have a hard to pronounce name? Does it have a large molecular weight? Does it act on more than one signaling pathway?
Ozempic isn't particularly expensive. Most middle class people in the West can afford it, if it's not covered by insurance. There are legal or grey market sources that are significantly cheaper. And as more alternatives arise, including generics, it'll only get cheaper.
Gym memberships cost money too.
And Ozempic isn't "addictive". Do people not know what that word means?
Is insulin addictive to a diabetic, because they'd fall sick or even die if they stopped?
Weening yourself off of the drug should be the ultimate goal, otherwise you're just embracing a different kind of slavery.
I would like to see you wean yourself off oxygen and water. Perhaps, to be less challenging or immediately lethal, clothing or shelter. Otherwise what are you but a slave to biological necessity?
This is all such immensely confused thinking that I don't know how such beliefs can even arised. At the very least, it is factually incorrect.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
There is a crazy amount of stupid on both the victim's and the murderer's part.
First off, why would anyone buy drugs in the physical world when darknet marketplaces exist.
Then, what kind of moron decides to buy drugs on credit, or extend credit to their druggie customers. If you want to play loan shark, perhaps don't start with a transaction which will put you in prison if discovered.
And if you have to use violence to collect debts, then recognize that while it is advantageous for you if your customers/victims see you as a violent madman, there is an art to playing that role (I suppose). You might get away with breaking a few fingers here and there (especially if your victims are reluctant to go to the police), but the amount of murder you can get away with is very likely zero.
OP, I empathize.
Did you have peer females in your life growing up (sisters, cousins, female friends) ? I didn't have any women in my life (other than a tiger mom) and I was similarly awkward around women. I couldn't even look them in the eyes. My eyes watered up for some reason.
The fear only went away after I developed platonic relationships with peer-women. I decided to turn my sexy-brain off for 2 whole years, and became a jovial obnoxiously-myself person. This was an essential self-imposed restriction. Because now if a woman accused me of being a creep, it was her fault not mine. I don't know what it is, but women can smell when a guy doesn't want to have sex with them. It's so much easier to become a trusted-man around them. I surely lost out on opportunities to sleep with women close to me, but it made me comfortable around them. Exposure therapy works.
I just want to go for a stroll in the park with someone and bang them later, then do that again with the same person for the foreseeable future
Dating apps (Hinge) were god sent for me. I loved not having to guess if someone was into me. End of 1st date, ask for a kiss. End of 2nd date, ask if she wants to see your place. If she enters your house and doesn't caveat it, then you're good to go. Acoustics like us do well with the clear signals facilitated by dating apps.
BobCut came out of the bathroom, didn't acknowledge fat redhead, took her drink and my hand, and dragged me out onto the dance floor
The fat redhead is straight out of a meme.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
16hr ago
I think uplifting the in-group by getting them jobs sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain is pathetic.
Why? It works incredibly well for China, who has seen consistent gains in QoL. It worked well throughout the history of the West. Sewing bras is more conducive to wellbeing than stacking them on a shelf. Picking fruit is so Edenic that it’s the first recorded activity of humanity. In what world would “picking fruit” be pathetic? I think you are having trouble dissociating the image you have of these things now, with what they would look like if employers didn’t have a semi-slave class. There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people. They work quite hard, then they drink in the evenings and dance and fuck and make music and so on. This is exactly what agricultural work was for nearly all of history. Not for the slaves, of course, but for the non-enslaved.
I'm not concerned that these Guatemalans coming across the border are going to out-compete whites because they have a "better" culture.
Well you ignored all of my points regarding this. If I also ignored all of the points I would agree with you.
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
It depends a lot on the coverage and the gender and stature of the person in question, I would say.
But for a big dude who gives off danger vibes, tattoos seem to serve to enhance that vibe -- especially clearly visible tattoos, like on hands or head, which signal I do not have or plan to ever have a job where looking respectable is required.
Depending on the local culture, I suppose that investing in that level of signaling might reek a bit of desperation. The ex special forces guy probably will not get a face tattoo so the locals take him serious, while a youth with aspirations towards becoming a violent criminal might. Of course, as a non-fighter, I recognize that I am much more likely to be stabbed by some fuckwit youth who is playing the tough guy than by an experienced fighter who has managed to avoid a life sentence so far.
Because up until that point, they think it's hot that he could attack other people with a samurai sword, but he could never do that to them because he just loves them that much / they alone have the power to tame him / he's so emotionally dependent on them that his world would collapse without them / insert-their-preferred-framing-here.
So the hotness can win out over prudence and risk aversion.
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