domain:betonit.substack.com
SSCReader
4hr ago
What if they preferentially hire whites the same way Indians favor Indians, or Jews favor Jews? What if they aggressively subsidize and import white residents the same way the federal government bombs small Midwestern towns with Haitians or Somalians?
I mean they did right? Even more than that actually. This is something white Americans already did. It's how you ended up where you are now. Do you think trying it again is going to work better? You have affirmative action and white guilt, people trying to make things up to black farmers and the like because this is what happened before and white people decided, actually this makes us feel pretty bad when we look at in comparison to our theoretical national values.
Whites had the nation you are envisaging and even more than that. Then they decided they didn't like it. Black people didn't have the power to change it. White people themselves did.
The things you complain about are already the tat for white peoples tit! (so to speak!), to try and make up for slavery and Jim Crow and so on and so forth. Instigated by white people themselves!
They already did the "What if?" You know how it ended.
SSCReader
3hr ago
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Yup, but this isn't medication, or mental illness. This is a choice. You may not like the choice, but that doesn't make it mental illness.
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If anyone is carving out the founding stock, it is the founding stock themselves. Indians, Mexicans and whatever else can't do anything they are not allowed to do. The vast majority of your political apparatus is white. This isn't colonization or invasion. It's invitation. And it is invitation largely because of the white guilt felt by large numbers of your fellow white Americans. You can't fix that by making them do the same thing they felt the guilt about in the first place. If you think it is a problem (and it legitimately might be!) then you have to resolve it, not repeat the actions that led to it. Unfortunately this is one of the dividing issues your nation has faced since its founding. It was called out at its founding this was going to be a huge problem in fact. The Civil War, Civil Rights movement, wokism is all downstream of the choices your ancestors made.
I don't see a good answer, with the possible exception (and even this is shaky) as you point out as going all in for blacks. Affirmative action for blacks only, reparations for blacks only, attempt to help your fellow white Americans extirpate their guilt by focusing on the main group that was harmed so others don't get pattern matched in. But that guilt is the foundational issue you are going to have to deal with. Letting immigrants in is asymmetric. It takes much less effort to do so, than try and get rid of them afterwards. So you have to find a way to make them stop wanting to. To make them stop feeling guilty about being so privileged and about how that privilege was used against yes primarily black people through American history.
I don't think you can do that, by going back to the same behaviors that got you here in the first place.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
17hr ago
I'm always in an unenviable position in these discussions, because I'm always trying to bring people to a more refined and complex position than the one they currently inhabit, regardless of where they're starting out from. If I'm talking to stuck-up hipsters who say "well, there's obviously a divide between High Art and 'pop culture', the former being more valuable, more intellectual, etc" then I say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. But conversely if people say, "well art's just about having a good time, I know what I like, you don't have to make it complicated with all that fancy shit", then I just as forcefully say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. It's never supposed to be a direct denial of the starting position, but rather an invitation for us to walk the endless spiral of the Hegelian dialectic, together, as a team. But it always seems to come off as a direct denial. That's my fault; I need to work on my presentation.
Now, regarding my own capacity for "suspension of disbelief". I just finished up playing a VN recently. Fun game. I binged it as fast as I could, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for each plot twist, I got weirdly obsessed with one of the girls and wanted to waifu her, I cried when important characters died (yes I am a grown man who cries at video games). So am I incapable of enjoying stories like a "normal person"? Not at all! There's nothing I love more than a good story, it's basically what I live for. But, you know, you eventually want something more, you want to move the conversation forward. So you ask yourself: yes, I had this experience, this particular type of experience, but what of it? Well for starters, we can question the "naturalness" of this type of experience. We can ask ourselves if this type of experience might not be historically and spatially delimited. (Did the Iliad have "fans" in ancient Greece? How was their experience of the Iliad different from how we "experience" "stories" today? On the one hand, I think it may not be as different as some might suppose. But on the other hand, it might be utterly alien.) I had this experience, but what is this experience, really? What does it mean? What is it symptomatic of? Where did it come from, and where is it going?
It's as much about making your self and your own experience an object of critical inquiry as it is about inquiring into the artwork and the artist.
It is prioritising emotional connection over intellectual dissection
Not at all! Not in any way. Not that the two could ever be separated to begin with.
But, you know, this question about the connection between art and what might be called "emotion", it's a highly complex and fraught question. The way forward is not at all clear.
Adorno defined "kitsch" as "art that tells you how to feel". Genuine artworks don't tell you how to feel. Meaning, there's something fundamentally manipulative and coercive about an artwork that sets out with the explicit goal of inducing a certain emotional state. When the sad music plays and the camera zooms in dramatically and all the characters start crying, you know you're supposed to feel sad. The work is telling you to feel sad. We've left the domain of art and we've entered the domain of the "culture industry", the domain of pseudo-art and pseudo-emotion, the domain of mass market objects produced to fit utilitarian specifications. Or so this theory would have it.
Is this the same as saying that art should be "emotionless"? Not at all. Adorno was a great lover of Mozart after all, and Mozart's music could hardly be described as emotionless. But I do think he correctly identified a very real and very serious problem here, namely that an attempt to control the emotional resonance of a work too tightly can collapse into simple didacticism.
sockpuppet2
18hr ago
What evidence is there of this for income or race?
SSCReader
23m ago
"Even assuming I agree, that only goes for Blacks. How does it go for Indians, Jews, Asians, Arabs, Mexicans and every other nationality colonizing America and carving it's founding stock out of it?"
Coils initial post I responded to was about white people specifically starting to choose to hire white people only (among other things) and discriminate against other races, I pointed out that had been done before and led to where we are now. He then countered that the founding stock was being carved out by other races (quoted above). At which point I pointed out that only white people generally have the power of enabling that to happen, so the issue is not with Indians or Mexicans and so forth. He then countered that actually white people voted against more immigration but the government gave it to them anyway, at which point I countered by pointing out most of said government was white as well.
So the race of the people making decisions is very relevant in the conversation we are having. Anyway you slice it, it is white people who are carrying out the agenda he doesn't like. And it is them he needs to persuade/stop if wants that to change. No point targeting black or Mexican communities, they don't have the power to force affirmative action or immigration if the mainly white ruling class doesn't want it.
PokerPirate
2hr ago
Flagged as consensus building.
What you call "optimal cultural leadership" is really just "how to make my outgroup not get in power". And your use of neutral language to cover this switch up is bad rhetoric.
A very large percentage of Americans still find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing, including many of the academics/religious leaders/politicians you are critiquing for not being anti-social justice craze from early on. It's fine for you to be anti-social justice craze. But you shouldn't be assuming that everyone else is or that it is the norm around here.
FWIW, I would be very interested in reading an ideologically neutral account of the failures of conservative leadership to account for the rise of wokism, and what lessons can be learned in order to better spread/suppress future ideologies.
HereAndGone
2hr ago
which implicitly means that there is some amount of premature violent death of children we are collectively willing to tolerate as the price of doing business
I hope it is with you in your social circle as with the anarchist in "The Man Who Was Thursday" 😁
"I preached blood and murder to those women day and night, and—by God!—they would let me wheel their perambulators.”
Though it would be a unique selling point for a creche or daycare: "Some small number of premature violent death may occur on these premises, kindly remember that, should it happen to your children, you are helping preserve our liberties".
HereAndGone
2hr ago
because most people in the community were trustworthy, this gamble paid off most of the time
That's the point I'm trying to make. If you tolerate fraud, or even promulgate "well the chance of fraud is better than a world with no fraud" (which is different from "there will always be a risk of fraud"), then what is tolerated becomes commonplace. Once the water changes, the fish change too. Once the bedrock assumptions of "be honest not criminal" are weakened by lack of social reinforcement and no longer passed down, you'll get more and more people willing to be scammers, which in turns mean fewer people opting to put their trust in others, and the costs of protecting yourself against fraud rise because now you have to either spend time and effort on not being scammed, or risk being scammed and losing very badly what you can't afford to lose.
"There's always going to be fraud out there, just be careful and be aware" is not the same as "we need a certain amount of fraud to happen, otherwise it's the Panopticon and economic stagnation". That second message is an encouragement to be fraudulent - after all, everyone else would do it too if they could, and you are just filling your role in the ecosystem!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5hr ago
I would drop immaturity from the conversation entirely if you want to avoid getting people's hackles up
Yeah, I have to work on my presentation. But at the same time, I really do have to ask my readers to suspend certain pre-existing conceptual and emotional associations they have around certain terms, y'know? Not erase, just temporarily suspend. Otherwise we can't make any progress.
There was a conversation here a few weeks ago where I said that love is impossible. That got a few people upset. But did I ever say that people shouldn't do things that are impossible? Did I ever say that there's no place in the world for impossible things? Not at all. Similarly, did I ever say that a certain amount of immaturity is not warranted? Not at all. (I suppose the Hegelian way of talking about it would be, you have to go through maturity to arrive at a mature immaturity.)
which VN btw?
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
It feels like you are trying to intellectualise that away by referring to 'emotions'
Not at all! "Intellectualize"? Goodness gracious no.
an artist shouldn't try to manipulate the viewer, what they should do is try to express themselves
We're in complete agreement that there is an intimate link between art and what might be called "emotion". But this phrase, that an artist should "express themselves", makes me nervous, increasingly nervous, for reasons that I don't fully understand myself and have never been able to entirely articulate. There's clearly something right about it, and yet we should also be cautious. Taking a shot in the dark, some of the reasons may be:
- It implies that the principle modality as issue is expression, as opposed to alternative modes of thought and comportment.
- It implies that the work is about the artist and what he wants to express, as opposed to being about other things.
- It implies that the artist knows what he "thinks" or "feels" well enough to "express" it. (Derrida wrote some of the only good commentary that's ever been written on Nietzsche -- "the truth of Nietzsche's text is that there is no truth of Nietzsche's text". He was quite correct about this. And yet Nietzsche's text simultaneously contains an overwhelming plenitude of truth, it contains too much truth. This is what the authentic work aims at: "expressing" something while at the same time undermining what it expresses and pointing beyond itself.)
sockpuppet2
15hr ago
Vladeck elaborates on the difference between lack of enforcement and dispensation and why dispensation is a major problem.
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
Impassionata
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
Even if your claims of anti-white racism were true (the FAA hiring scandal is clearly an instance, and affirmative action can reasonably be described as both anti-Asian and anti-White, but that does not clear the "all levels of society" bar for me), I do not see how segregation would be the natural consequence.
The Black's response to facing racial discrimination was the civil rights movement, which was way more effective than any attempt to build a black-only community in the US or elsewhere would have been.
Even if you could convince the PMC that they were getting a Bad Deal wrt race in the coastal cities and that they should build their own White-only coastal cities in the middle of Arkansas with blackjack and hookers, I am not holding my breath for these cities to decide national elections. I would rather embark on a campaign of meritocracy and how racial discrimination is not cool even if it targets Whites or Asians.
At the moment, most people openly advocating for racial segregation are Neo-Nazis. I think I speak for the vast majority of Whites, HBD-pilled or otherwise, when I say I would much rather have a randomly selected Black person as a neighbor than a Neo-Nazi for purely selfish Bayesian reasons.
Rov_Scam
28m ago
For years, on this very forum (well, fine, you have to come buck to the /r/SSC days), whenever someone pointed out the advances of the SJ movement, the response was something to the effect of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses / Tumblr", or alternatively there'd be an attempt to "steelman" the movement to make it look more reasonable than it actually is ("defund the police doesn't really mean defund the police"), something later dubbed "sanewashing" by other elements of the left.
It was more than that, but not much more. There was a lot of media rhetoric from the left and teeth gnashing on the right about certain things, but in the end it doesn't seem to have amounted to much. But beyond some limited effects at the local level, most of the media coverage from the left amounted to little more than trend pieces (where a fringe phenomenon is puffed up into something bigger than it is), and the right's reaction had all the hallmarks of a moral panic. I can't tell you how many arguments in bars I got into where someone would insist that this school district just down the road was teaching kids that white people are bad blah blah blah and can you believe what these kids are hearing about gay people only to find out that they got this information from their neighbor's cousin's kid, or something, which is the equivalent of them just admitting that they got it from some dubious social media post. I have yet to talk to anyone with actual firsthand knowledge of any of this who could reproduce lesson plans or anything.
And at the national level, this rhetoric was soundly rejected within the Democratic party. Regardless of how the Republicans would like to portray them, there are few woke Democratic elected officials. The Squad is the most notorious, but those are a few House reps in safe seats, and even some of those got primaried the last go-round. AOC may be nationally known, but it remains to be seen whether she's that popular outside the Bronx. And when woke politicians do get the opportunity to go national, they fall flat on their faces. If there was ever an election where wokeness could triumph over the Democratic establishment, it was 2020. The woke lane was there for any Democrat who wanted to take it. Who did? Kirsten Gillebrand and Beto O'Rourke. Arguably Kamala Harris, though she wasn't very convincing about it. The Democrats ended up nominating Joe Biden, about as an establishment candidate as you can get. Hell, Mayor Pete made a convincing run as a moderate and even led early on despite being the mayor of a town most people couldn't point to on a map.
SSCReader
52m ago
Can you expand on this? I said white people were making the decisions, Coil said the call was not coming from inside the house, I pointed out that the politicians were also primarily white (the house in question). Being white was the house we were talking about as far as I can tell.
SSCReader
53m ago
David Cameron could have reduced non-EU immigration to literally zero and still have hundreds of thousands of EU workers coming in every year to flood the labour market.
Precisely! That's why Brexit will allow us to control immigration was such a blatant lie. We could always have done so. And that article also notes my view. I think he misrepresents it though. It is not that British workers won't do those jobs it is because they will want more money which will then make those services and products more expensive thus slowing growth. He comes close to it here: In reality, the demand for work is potentially infinite: it’s like trying to fill a bottomless well with buckets of water — the more you throw in, the more you need to keep throwing.
What he is talking about is expansion, more immigrants, means more jobs, means more GDP, means the line goes up. That is the driving factor.
I can tell you from direct experience David Cameron and Boris Johnson have barely a committed ideological bone in their body. They aren't allowing more immigrants in because of some love of global Britain or for other elites. They aren't committed enough to anything to sacrifice for that.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
I understand that there are inescapable parts of the human condition which make it so. But I still think that by eliding that (very important) part of the argument, the phrase becomes incorrect as it gets stated. Something like "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it" would be more accurate, and the extra few words is not really a significant amount of verbosity.
Throwaway05
17hr ago
elective surgeries for cheap
Doubt on this front, the Western standard is for when things go wrong, which is rare - but if you get something like a T&A done in your 20s in a major academic hospital in the U.S. and have a major complication, you will likely be fine. In Mexico? No dice.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
17hr ago
The fact that a magic trick falls apart if you look at it too closely
Various 20th century artistic practices that are now grouped under the heading of "abstraction" could be described in precisely this way, as an attempt to "look at the magic trick closely". Artists set out with the self-conscious intent of "breaking the illusion", of foregrounding the process of creation that normally remains hidden; in painting this took the form of abstract painting, painting that embraced the "flatness of the canvass" instead of trying to retreat from it into the illusion of 3D perspective, painting that owned the fact that it was nothing more than blobs of colored goo.
The idea was to ask whether it was possible to construct an art without illusion, an art that would endure even when the magic trick was ruined. Surely you can agree that this is at least an interesting question, even if you think it must ultimately be answered in the negative?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
18hr ago
it will become cost prohibitive and unreliable very quickly.
It's a last resort to hedge against
those stories are still quite alarming.
thejdizzler
22hr ago
I am really enjoying What Hath so far. I'm only a few chapters in, but I like how he is framing the whole period in terms of a transportation/communication revolution. Also enjoying his take on Jackson as a bully. McPherson is awesome, as you've surely seen me post about before. The only other two I've tried are The Republic for Which it Stands and The Glorious Cause. I found the first 5-6 chapters of the first one really really good (dealing with Western expansion/Reconstruction), but have been getting bogged down in the social history that follows those chapters. The second book is overwritten, at least in the first few chapters. I'd like to revisit them both quite soon though. Soft goal for this year is to read all of Oxford US history books that have come out so far.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22hr ago
Maybe you don’t know about them because they’re not actually reasonable?
Like, the same reasoning applies here as to underwater pyramids. Or moon landing skeptics. Or celebrity gossip. It’s bad epistemics.
hydroacetylene
4m ago
I can remember a time when males with long hair were… seen poorly, and usually tilted progressive. But beards seem to have been just unfashionable and not particularly lib coded.
Rov_Scam
7m ago
I understand what you're saying, and I'm happy for you, but GP was giving generalized advice. Like I said, most people aren't that selective. I can't imagine giving someone dating advice that consists of "list all your fringe interests that won't impress women at best and turn them off at worst and plug away for years with little success in the hopes of attracting your one true love". It's not what most people are looking for. And while I understand not wanting to get too involved before finding out it's a dealbreaker, it's not like you're going to keep it a secret. Like I said in my post, when you're online dating, you are your profile, and you're going to be your profile until she meets you in person. The profile is to get your foot in the door; after you actually meet, you're a real person, and discussing hobbies and interests is fair game for a first date, and you can tell her whatever you want on that front. And if you think that one date is too much of an investment to be worth the risk, then online dating just isn't for you, period.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10m ago
At which point I pointed out that only white people generally have the power of enabling that to happen, so the issue is not with Indians or Mexicans and so forth
But white people don't have the power to enable it (his point about them voting against it proves that). If you want to say it's not really the Indians' or Mexicans' fault I more or less agree, but I don't see how you can make that claim with resorting to advanced racism.
Here's hoping. Evil should be nipped in the bud.
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