domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
Tree
5d ago
Trump on his assassination attempt:
"They briefed me and I'm satisfied with it," Trump said. "They should have had someone in the building, that was a mistake, they should have had communications with the local police—they weren't tied in—and they should have been tied in. So there were mistakes made. And that shouldn't have happened."
"But I was satisfied in terms of the bigger plot, the larger plot," he continued, "I have great confidence in these people. They're very talented and very capable—they had a bad day, I think they'll admit that." "This is a very dangerous job being president,"
Trump’s claims of stolen election have led to much recriminations that he is no mere crook or liar, but damaging to democracy. His supporters otoh, have ramped up the anti-elite conspiracy to include this assassination attempt, in order to show loyalty/outbid themselves, even here on the motte. This rejection by the principal actor/TV star sends a clear signal where the truth lies in this matter, whether you agree with Trump’s politics or not. Test is over, results are in, you can calibrate. If you bought the assassination conspiracy, consider that your brain may have been fried by the culture war.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2d ago
American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:
The teen summer job is an American tradition that has been in decline since the turn of the century. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 50% and 60% of Americans aged 16 to 19 had summer jobs. That started to decline in 2000, and during the Great Recession, it plummeted to less than 30%. It has barely rebounded since then, hitting 36% in 2019 before dropping back to 31% during the pandemic. This year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the share of 16- to 19-year-olds working or looking for work at 35%.
The article notes one reason why:
One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job. Only 20% of Asians aged 16 to 19 have one, compared to 40% of whites and approximately 30% of blacks and Hispanics. For adults it is the opposite, with Asians having the highest labor force participation rate.
Why are Asians half as likely to have summer jobs as white teenagers? In part, because they are busy studying. Tiger Moms think working as a lifeguard will not help anyone get into college, but test prep or math camp will.
The college admissions arms race puts pressure on parents who might otherwise prefer to let their teens spend their summer lifeguarding. Moms and dads worried about the intense competition decide to make their teens spend their summers on something that will boost their test scores or burnish their resumes. It is a vicious circle.
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."
This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.
None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
22hr ago
I also think having an upvote/downvote system on what's supposed to be a neutral discussion forum is just completely idiotic. Everyone just uses it as an "I agree" button for upvotes and "I disagree" for downvotes. This functionally means any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I've had plenty of people then use this as an excuse to claim the equivalent of "uhhh, can't you see you're getting a lot of downvotes!?! Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe this is because you're wrong and stupid!?!?!?!?" Pure heat, negligible light.
However, you can actually block yourself from seeing the score if you use Ublock Origin and add the following to your filter list:
www.themotte.org##button.m-0.p-0.nobackground.caction.btn
I consider this 100% essential if you want to use this site and ever substantially disagree with MAGA talking points.
kky
2d ago
Sorry buddy, Rambo rules apply, you drew first blood. Your whole post was spurred by a single dollar estimate taken totally out of context from that poor guy’s Substack, and what he was saying has zero bearing on anything you said. In reality, he could have said anything at all, it didn’t matter what, you would have read whatever you wanted out of it. That’s why it’s all about you. You don’t need to make it about yourself explicitly; your post is saturated with yourself. You couldn’t even keep it down enough to read what the guy wrote! No protesting, I brought receipts.
If you want to complain about Society, do it on your own. Don’t twist other people’s words into it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6d ago
This part:
This is exactly why we have the rule,
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.
Is ridiculously selectively applied, e.g. basically any time people use "the establishment" as a foil they're guilty of this, but they don't get modhatted. As it stands, the rule is merely another cudgel to use against people making left-leaning arguments, although in this case I don't think an unbiased application of this rule would be particularly good either. It just makes it clunky to talk about subsets of a group that believe in specific ideas that might not be shared among the whole group.
Though I do agree the "I expect that RandomRanger will withdraw his claim" is fairly presumptuous here.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22hr ago
Racism is, after all, the default state of humanity
Like, yes, but also no? Mostly no. First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist. There's nothing inherently, fundamentally, deeply different about human groups. There are some genetic quirks here and there. Sometimes these genetic quirks collect in particular geographical and sexual assortment groupings. But groupings mix and blend like crazy, and different quirks show up, and then sometimes get re-blended, and sometimes groupings get big enough that humans in their constant drive for classifying and categorizing and delineating end up giving them a linguistic label. Sometimes, quite frequently in fact, these linguistic labels end up being poorly applied, but sometimes they are pretty accurate, or the label shifts and stretches to match some underlying grouping. And anyways, these labels very often extend poorly and incompletely to individuals: even a single mixed-race person breaks all the categories.
In this context, the modern (popular) understanding of race is probably less objectively "correct" (insofar as it even makes sense to say) than the more ancient understanding of race. Historically, and I mean by that roughly before the initial advent of genetic theories and eugenics and all that stuff, racism was the case where it applied geographically to clustered sexual assortment groups. And usually (but not even all the time) this worked just fine, because mass migrations and mixings were semi-rare. We should also note that even here, culture and race are basically intertwined quite tightly, because both are primarily geographic and spatial in nature (although culture can spread memetically and through trade links faster than actual sexual interlinkage). These migrations did happen though with some decent regularity, but the typical person alive would have limited exposure to other groups anyways. As especially "empires" grew (typically defined as a cross-cultural/ethnic political entities, as opposed to "kingdoms"), and increasingly leveraged what we could call cultural technologies, you did start to see some differentiation.
But here, it's important to take things into perspective. Locally, skin tone differences due to tanning would imply social things mechanically, but melanin differences were not seen as the primary differentiator, and nor were other ethnic groupings. Empire-wide, you'd get some local-geographical discrimination and categorization, but the interplay with culture was also very important. And even more than culture, social status. If you look at Rome, for example, as a time in history when you had different ethnic groups interacting all over, and frequently (in a relative sense), social standing and nationality seemed to matter much more than localized ethnic groupings inherently. There was this general idea of "barbarians" but that had again more to do with culture than race.
Fast forward. Today, many people think of race as skin color, and maybe a few other scattered traits like facial structure or whatever. This is ahistorical, frankly, at least when it comes to skin color. Slavery really did a number on the country and dichotomized things, for one, and also the modern "categories" are, frankly, terrible, even without skin color explicitly. "Hispanic/Latino" is such a uselessly broad categorization. Brazilian is its own pot of crazy. "Middle Eastern/North African" is like, very loosely its own category but doesn't even show up in many official government questions. We now have this vague notion of "white" which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't include Eastern European origin in addition to Western European origin, and sometimes includes Spaniards but sometimes doesn't, and anyways I'm not going to get into all the (common) edge cases, hopefully you get the idea.
And underneath it all, you have increasing rates of "interracial" kids. Underneath it all, even if you are to try and be scientific about "race", you still have to make a highly controversial and indefensible decision, which is where to "snapshot" racial differences as a baseline. When we are talking about Chinese people, are we talking before or after the Mongol invasion? How local are we going? Are 'Han' Chinese from Northern China different than 'Han' Chinese from near the Vietnam border? Do we distinguish Koreans from Chinese? What about Japanese, who objectively stayed more isolated historically? How linearly do we interpret genetic distance? Is a Japanese person more or less different than a Chinese person vs a White English descent person from a Portuguese? Are we just admitting that we're taking culture and history into account, or are we still insisting on some genetic measure? If we're talking genetic facts, are we allowing for snap judgements?
All this to say that sure, historically humans discriminate, but no, they didn't think of race like we do now. Racism is an obsession of modern discourse, and it just doesn't make sense. Most notably, there's this conflation of culture, nationality, and genetic "race" as one giant construct - often this is lazily referred to as "race", but it really is more broad. Maybe we need a better word.
Now, many people here at the Motte seem to take the tack that so what, categories are imprecise, but all that matters is some kind of "predictive accuracy" for my mental heuristics. Can I predict that a Black-presenting person will rob my store, and does that merit treating them different? These are different questions, and have more to do with "discrimination" (which includes much more than race) than they do race itself, and I've gone on too long, but let me just end by saying that if you think historically there was anything remotely like these modern issues of 'asians are good at math' or 'blacks are criminals' you are dead wrong. Historically, those statements are really weird to say. Charitably, you can maybe say that these issues are common to the last ~2 centuries of history, as transportation technologies accelerated migration trends, but you really can't say more than that.
HughCaulk
2d ago
Best take on this site.
The dating discourse here tends towards “communism for pussy” as I’ve said before. Funny that on a mostly libertarian leaning site, many posters write screeds about the “top 20% of men”, kinda like you’d see on some socialist forum about the “top 1% of earners”. Libertarianism for what I do have, communism for what I don’t!
You want more wealth and income? Better work for it! Want more pussy? Better work for it!
Good news is that they are somewhat correlated, so you can do a two birds one stone situation here.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2d ago
Trump knows his audience better than most, but even he has trouble sometimes.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
What dating crisis? This is just the almighty hand of the free market at work. Standards are high, as they inevitably will be when all parties are equally free to enter into voluntary associations.
We need to take "collective action as a society" to remove impediments to men's access to women (including, presumably, the "ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50%" of men) -- yeah, ok, have you asked the women how they feel about that? "I have this plan that will make it more likely for you to date someone who's ugly, mean, and poor". Wtf that's a terrible sales pitch.
Guaranteed monogamy for all is nothing more than the socialized ownership of the means of reproduction.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6d ago
If AOC says something and isn't broadly getting a lot of pushback from her party, that would be quite indicative that at least a major fraction of the left believed something, or at least doesn't disagree with her. This is not weakmanning.
Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Of course Trump is in the Epstein files. It was deniable 2 weeks ago ("two more weeks" guys finally get a win), but there is really only one reason everyone in the administration would suddenly get cold feet and display the same suspicious nothing-to-see-here attitude at exactly the same time. They didn't just want this quietly ignored, they wanted this GONE.
the_Culture_is_great
21hr ago
The implication that a "ghetto boy" is a member of a "virulent invasive species" is both literally false, and metaphorically wrong.
I shouldn't have to explain why it's literally false.
The metaphor is wrong because in the typical understanding, the actions we should take against "invasive species" should be extreme, up to and including eradicating them from the "invaded" area.
You can make a nature/nurture point just fine without bringing these kind of implications into it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
21hr ago
Humans are basically hardwired to care about that sort of thing. For any average human, arguments between people are mostly just popularity contests, not truth-seeking exercises. Even though the Motte might be composed of people who are several standard deviations away from being "average" in that sense, it's still bothersome. If the downvotes happen on posts you also thought were not your greatest, that would be one thing, but having them happen only on posts with a particular type of political persuasion makes it start to seem like a BOO OUTGROUP button.
The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.
“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.
Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.
Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.
The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.
I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.
EDIT: Trump has responded, and he's furious. It appears he desperately tried to have Rupert Murdoch crush the story, but that Murdoch apparently wasn't able to do so. Now he's promising to sue. Also, Hillary.
The Wall Street Journal, and Rupert Murdoch, personally, were warned directly by President Donald J. Trump that the supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was a FAKE and, if they print it, they will be sued. Mr. Murdoch stated that he would take care of it but, obviously, did not have the power to do so. The Editor of The Wall Street Journal, Emma Tucker, was told directly by Karoline Leavitt, and by President Trump, that the letter was a FAKE, but Emma Tucker didn’t want to hear that. Instead, they are going with a false, malicious, and defamatory story anyway. President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly. The Press has to learn to be truthful, and not rely on sources that probably don’t even exist. President Trump has already beaten George Stephanopoulos/ABC, 60 Minutes/CBS, and others, and looks forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal. It has truly turned out to be a “Disgusting and Filthy Rag” and, writing defamatory lies like this, shows their desperation to remain relevant. If there were any truth at all on the Epstein Hoax, as it pertains to President Trump, this information would have been revealed by Comey, Brennan, Crooked Hillary, and other Radical Left Lunatics years ago. It certainly would not have sat in a file waiting for “TRUMP” to have won three Elections. This is yet another example of FAKE NEWS!
It also looks like he might cave and actually publicize it? I don't know if the grand jury stuff is all that people are interested in or what:
Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
1d ago
I agree our society is too credentialist. The issue is not "they're bad because they went to a third-rate university" so much as "they're bad because they have an inferiority complex around having went to third rate university, and that's where the fetishization of manual labor comes from."
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18hr ago
literally false?
You realize that black people didn't hop on their ships, cross the Atlantic and invade America, right? Forcibly enslaving people, displacing them from their homes and bringing them to America is vastly different from an invasive species...invading and ruining an ecosystem?
Bailey: But Chris, that was hundreds of years ago! Whiningcoil wasn't talking about the slave trade or all black people, just modern 'ghetto culture.'
Okay...are you sure he wasn't? But whatever, you realize that the parents willingly adopted this child, right? That they consented to adopting and raising a black child? They didn't ask for a white baby and some dastardly HR Karen with a humanities degree shoved a black baby into their arms at the last minute. There's no great replacement theory here, there's no 'hostile invasive species' invading their home against their consent. Just another post from Whiningcoil meant to rattle cages, which for all we know, could be entirely fabricated.
the_Culture_is_great
20hr ago
Black people are not a seperate species.
Sure make an argument about "we should stop subsidizing black people" (I especially agree with "don't subsidize people based on race specifically"). But don't do it in a dehumanizing way by calling them a seperate species.
kky
2d ago
I did. Everything I wrote was about what you wrote, starting from how you plucked a single word out of context as a launching point for your own hobbyhorse. I oppose that. It’s a sign that the real has been subsumed into the symbol. You know the “everything I see reminds me of her” meme? It’s like that, but with theory, and it’s poison to discourse. You would have written the same post if he’d cited minimum wage numbers.
kky
2d ago
Jesus, one of the things I hate about this discourse is that everyone just takes a half-baked detail and… runs with it.
Here’s the actual quote:
What is a good job? It’s a job that pays you enough to afford your own apartment, own a car (unless you live in a place like NYC or SF where it’s impractical), and pay for an adult lifestyle—probably $70K at the low end, depending on the city. If you can afford your own place, congrats, you’re an adult man...until you can do this, you’re a boy. Men, as a rule, don’t have roommates.
$70k is a location-specific estimate for a set of far more concrete guidelines. The guy is saying: you should own a car and pay for your own place. (Small note, IME the roommate thing is not a particular dealbreaker provided your roommate is cool and you have space which is obviously yours.)
He then benchmarks: in the average CITY, he reckons this at around $70k. (Again, IME this is a little conservative, a lot of second-tier cities will run you fine for $60k or less.) NB: cities are more expensive than the country.
OK, let’s drill down on his raw expectations. What percentage of Americans have cars? Over 90% of households, according to a quick Google search. Pretty attainable by that metric. How about the rough cost of renting a 1bed? Average of $1650, which if you follow the “1/3 of your paycheck” rule, is around $60k average, regardless of location - so the average American can rent a small apartment affordably. And in places where the pay is lower, the rent should be lower too, so this should be a large average of people who can live this way.
So our entire discussion got arbitrarily pegged to the $70k figure, plucked out of the context of WHY he thinks that, in an article that already assumes the context of by-college-educated, for-college-educated. I mean, for Chrissake, he barely gets across the page fold before linking out to his favorite books list. This guy’s a nerd! $70k is pretty damn attainable in his class - it just shows you’re at least trying!
So, reading his article, I can comfortably say that this is correct and attainable advice for any man in the larger class of college-educated, intelligent, but not a true natural with the ladies. If I’m being perfectly honest I’ve seen too many chicks spring for a fella who didn’t have what he’s slinging to take it too seriously; the big thing is actually just to interact with women regularly, turns out they go for whoever shows up! But working on yourself gives you some major advantages with women you’re meeting for the first time, so they want to interact with you a little more regularly. And having a car and your own place DEFINITELY lowers barriers to sex. The rest of this, the “systemic” talk - yeah, obviously things are happening on a larger scale, but come the fuck on man, why are you already talking about yourself like you’re a statistic? Don’t you have any self-respect? Or is it just other people you treat this way?
Flip it around. Here’s a strong pronouncement for you: the thing that let our society do great things in the past is the same one that let people get married, and it is PERSONAL initiative and responsibility, not collective. If someone has to be “empowered” to do something, what does that say about where the power really lies?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2d ago
There is no true free market. Give me a market, and I will provide a counterexample to how free it is.
But there is truth behind "All is fair in love and war": I would agree with primax3 that dating is one of the free-est of markets, which may also be why there's so much complaining about it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
15hr ago
I've seen this excuse used approximately a thousand times, and look: what if your priors just are wrong here? What if the Democratic party and its surrounding establishment just aren't the all-powerful, almighty band of operators that this theory presumes that they are? What if genuinely is information that they haven't obtained, at least in usable form, until it comes out?
kky
1d ago
I appreciate talking specifics here!
For the first part: $70k is well within the target range. The numbers I picked up said it was actually a little high. However - point being - while the average 1bed costs somewhere in the $1,600-$1,700 range, that means that half of them are BELOW that in cost, matching the roughly 50% of workers occupying that income range. So, in fact, you can get below the average and still meet the concrete requirements that he sets. Here's a link out to some cities with REALLY cheap rent. When you're talking $1k/mo or less, you could practically get away with minimum wage. Not saying you necessarily want to live there, but considering that the cities he has top of mind are NYC and SF rather than Des Moines and Madison, you should expect the number to be skewed.
And that's my point! He gives an estimate that is highly specific to the kind of coastal city he's used to (the guy's from Portland, OR), and the only reason to index that estimate highly is if you're trying to live in a similar city. (He's actually pretty far off even for Portland - median rent there is $1,380, which puts target income at around $50,000 - median income is just shy of that at $47,000, making it within reason for a single guy and well within budget if it helps you land a girl to help pay rent.) So the number is not what matters. He even caveats the number as "probably." I'd certainly caveat it as "probably," given that it's the wrong number, but I'm not here to beat up on the guy over the math he did or did not do before his fingers hit the upper row of his keyboard. I'm here to say that the meat of that paragraph is this sentence, edited down to exclude all bait:
It’s a job that pays you enough to afford your own apartment, own a car, and pay for an adult lifestyle.
Now we hit the real point of contention. Can the average American afford their own apartment, own a car, and pay for an adult lifestyle? When you consider that the costs of these things scale based on place and class, the answer seems to be a pretty confident yes, most men have the potential to do it, even assuming a relatively luxurious (but not frivolous) American adult lifestyle. If we're looking at the type of person who he is trying to advise, the kind of person who has even heard of Substack or who is willing to hire a dating counselor, I'd estimate that the number approaches 100%.
Let's go back to what you said in the beginning.
Although much of the post is the standard dress better, be fit, be more interesting shtick, one thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was Get Better Soon's insistence that you had to be making at least $70k to be thinking about having a girlfriend, as well as living by yourself and preferably owning your own house/car. Now the median income in the US in $60k, and even controlling for the fact that men out-earn women, Get Better Soon is effectively saying here that more than 50% of men in the US are undateable.
I've highlighted the two assertions that seem totally unsupportable to me after reading the guy's actual post. He doesn't insist on $70k, he spitball estimates it, and he's wrong. Oops. As for the second, here's what he actually says:
The good news however, is that nearly all men can clear the bar if they’re willing to work on themselves...
This is why I'm accusing you of reading what you want out of the piece rather than what's actually there. If you told this guy "hey, I read a Substack post the other day that said you need to make more than the national average income to have a chance at scoring a woman," and then revealed to him it was his post, I bet he'd be shocked at the twist reveal. Call him innumerate, sure, but actually talk about what he wants to talk about. Are those fair standards for a job? Can nearly all men live up to them? I think so, on both counts. But, if we're being honest, assuming that there's a substantial contingent of men who CAN'T meet that bar is actually more about the job market and the housing market than the dating market.
So, for your big point, and here I'll do exactly what you're asking and respond to you personally:
I am not saying self-improvement is bad, nor that it won't increase your odds of success, I am saying that it is insufficient to deal with social decline, which is manifested in this issue and the others that I mention.
I couldn't disagree more. It's necessary to deal with social decline.
Draw back. What is a society if not the totality and product of its constituents? What is the quality of a society if not the quality of its constituents? What could cause a society to decline if not a decline in the quality of its material?
When you talk about societal decline, you say:
Yes individuals did great things, but they were only able to do those things because of the presence of continually enforced social norms surrounding gender roles and expectations. The farmer and factory worker of the 1880s worked hard to provide for his family. We were able to win the civil war and the first and second world wars because we had competent social systems (at the family level and beyond) that have since vanished.
We're not talking specifics here, so I don't know how much I agree with you on the details, but what you're describing here is coherent. So: how were these social norms continually enforced? Was it done by God, by the laws of nature, or by the individual members of American communities on the back of their own character? When we talk about competent social systems, aren't we talking about the competence of these old Americans? You say: "The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional." OK, then who's supposed to fix it? "Us" "communally?" Come on, we all know how value-props that start as "we should really..." wind up going. "We" means "nobody," unless there's someone in the room who hears "we" and thinks "me."
That kind of thinking is, very specifically, the poison in America right now. It's the thought that you, personally do not have responsibility to fix a given problem, that it doesn't rest on your shoulders, that it's communal guilt. Say what you like about Christ, but he was big on personal guilt, that it's not enough to say that everyone else is doing it, that you personally must repent and uphold standards. He was even willing to make that his own cross to bear. He took on our sins, and died for them. Our Lord took on our communal guilt - so we could no longer have the excuse.
At my current stage in life, the biggest thing on my mind is my family. In particular, it's the future of it. My parents were not especially good at keeping the fabric of the family together. I love them dearly, they have much to commend them, but that was not one of their strengths. I want to keep mine together. I want my children to have faith, to have me and my wife, to have their eventual spouses and children. I want them to have honor. I don't see any way for them to get this if I do not act faithfully and honorably. I don't see how they can be faithful and honorable to their friends or even to strangers if they can't be that way within their family. I don't see how their family can be that way if I am not that way. I don't expect these actions to magically change the entire world, but I do hope that they will change my family, and that we can be fruitful and multiply, that we can be a bedrock for our communities wherever they may be. And I believe that individuals making these decisions, over and over again individually, is what will create the new great American society.
Obviously I am still a poor sinner, no matter what I aspire to, you need no help picking that particular out. But I believe that the things I do matter for the people around me. My family is, right now, living in a better society than it was when I was a feckless adolescent because of the actions I have taken. It is a small society, but it is theirs, and I am proud of what I've done for them, no matter how small. That is what I believe in.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
Well, we're getting to the root of your dating problems at least. "Ah, where have all the virgin 25 year old 130 lbs women who have more interesting hobbies than just Netflix gone..." You're doing the same thing as the women who say "yeah I have 20 options but I'm just not feeling any of them, you know?" It's the exact same thing.
but I'm sure that she won't ever be thinking about any of them or comparing your performance
It would be utterly bizarre if she didn't! How could you not compare! This is what humans do!
Basically we've discovered that you're not after "dating" (quite attainable), you're after "she has to be noticeably above average in most metrics, and I have to own her mind body and soul, there has to be no chance that she ever even thinks about a man other than me, lest I constantly be paranoid about cheating" (maybe not as attainable, unsurprising that you're having difficulties).
Whelp that's enough of TheMotte for me today.
Anyway, my bigger concern in the US is actually having a healthcare crisis with my child and becoming destitute, especially since I've worked diligently to create a life of relative comfort compared to my very blue collar ancestors.
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