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Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:

Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."

That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.

Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:

FOX: I think American citizens are willing to do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do.

LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Americans are willing to do the job. What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.

DeRemer refers to "Americans," the online racialist Right is talks about whites, but in both cases the vision is the same, uplifting the ingroup means getting them the opportunity to do the jobs currently done by the guy standing in the Home Depot parking lot. Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party? Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor, which is why in the video DeRemer goes on to talk about how Americans will be given opportunity through being "skilled, upskilled, re-skilled" and how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs, so upskilling Americans won't replace many illegals, but it's not like the Fox News host is going to point out the apparent contradiction.

Given that I've given an example from a cabinet-level Trump administration official, (not "nutpicked" from some rando on Twitter) I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim that I "obnoxiously created imaginary narratives" in the interests of truth and courtesy.

There are reasons to “uplift the in-group” and you need to articulate why this is an innoble goal in and of itself

I never said it was. I think uplifting the in-group by getting them jobs sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain is pathetic.

They are raised with values that are de-socialized by our ridiculous mandatory education culture, and this isn’t the kind of thing you can arbitrarily re-socialize at will

The fundamental difference between me and you is that I like white people more, which extends to liking first-world societies that white people built. I'm not concerned that these Guatemalans coming across the border are going to out-compete whites because they have a "better" culture.

Your yikes are worth nothing. Your female intuition, less than nothing. Mother’s intuition, female intuition, ancient wisdom and tradition, they all did parenting for thousands of years. One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.

Kids today, or at least middle class kids upwards, are a lot more isolated. "The newborn is in a crib in the nursery and we monitor via babycam"?

Parents now spend far more time with them than they used to. You think parents used to wake up 8 times per night for two years to take care of one baby, plus the dayshift? They had actual work to do. I have a lower class family story: Neighbours of my grandparents who had 8 kids, put alcohol in the babies’ bottles to shut them up because they had to work the fields in the morning.

You're broadly correct here: the anti-immigrant right (or "racialist Right") definitely don't regularly push back against claims that legal Americans would be willing to do those types of jobs. If they did, it would undercut their position that we should do mass deportations, so they either ignore it (like Catturd and friends) or they say legal Americans would do it if the price is right. The people claiming you're strawmanning Republicans in this specific post are hard to take seriously.

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.

do you really advocate that some people are property?

personally I will take transing fans, russian agents, antifa and flat earthers over slavery enthusiasts*

anyone that advocates for slavery or considers it as acceptable is worse that serious communists (conscription being a special case, I guess - if you want to argue it is a form of slavery)

*not that I would want either in position of authority or within 100 000 km from me

So you want a serf/slave class of the "inferior" brown people because such jobs are below the dignity of the "superior" white people (never mind that white people all over the world used to, and still do, such jobs). We needn't be afraid that the browns will do anything, because we should (as the superiors) ensure they have no rights apart from being cheap disposable labour until robots can do the job and hence they will be debarred from polluting our culture due to not being able to influence it, and we shouldn't encourage white people to pick up the slack by doing these low-class jobs because such jobs are only fit for low-class people and we don't want low-class white trash, that reflects poorly on our superiority.

I don't agree with "no rights apart from being cheap disposable labour." All their negative rights should be respected, though not "rights" to collect welfare or anything like that. The issue is not specifically racial. I don't think anyone should aspire to those kinds of occupations, nor romanticize or fetishize them.

the Zoomer broccoli haircut

Is that the same one as the undercut hairstyle? Because I can't stand that, especially when partnered with the hair dye. It screams "I am a Special Snowflake, dare not to impugn my Queerness!"

I don’t know what the flippered mutants are referring to, but it can’t possibly compare to the reduction of infant mortality from 50% to 0.5% in the west (4.3% globally).

This thread is full of people saying that tattoos aren't attractive.

Not quite.

Its more that they're correlated with low social status in the larger scheme. This doesn't mean they isn't a local maxima where they make someone more attractive than they would otherwise be, even if it also makes them vastly less attractive to a certain segment of the population.

In fact, I've said it straight up that the 'cheat code' to getting more women interested in you is get tattoos, get subversive piercings and buy a motorcycle. This can lead to other negative effects, but the tradeoffs may be worth it! At least in the short term.

There's a dearth of people who hold positions of true wealth power who have tattoos, though. Thus, they remain a reliable class signifier.

When something is largely a lower-class phenomenon, just like enjoying MMA or light beer, the fact that a few upper class folks indulge doesn't really prove otherwise.

yet every cop and every Navy SEAL and every BJJ champ and every boxer I know has at least one tattoo visible in short sleeves.

Yes, which might explain why people who AREN'T tough want to mimic a signal that makes them seem tough, whether they are or are not. That's common enough in nature.

And if they do so, that degrades the strength of the signal. And makes counter-signalling more viable. If all the cops, SEALs and BJJ guys have tattoos, what might you surmise about the ones that have resisted the trend and don't have any?

I dunno, it reads like a social trend like any other. I lived through the era of tramp stamps, and those faded from popularity. I've seen dozens of fashion trends come and go. The only trick with tattoos is they're more costly to alter or remove.

Also, add in that there is researching indicating they can lead to health issues.

Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"?

She's a member of the United States Cabinet!

Lotta people have gotten used to being out of power. Now that Trump is President they're forced to either defend the administration they supported and voted for or criticize their own side, and they don't want to do either.

It may be more relevant than I thought! Guy with scraggly beard and hair like a bird's nest versus guy who at least trims his beard and washes his hair: who looks like trouble you'd want to avoid and who looks at least semi-respectable?

One tattoo on its own is not an indicator of trashiness, but the thing is: some people can stop at one tattoo. Some people, on the other hand, seem to go "just one more. One more. One more" until they're covered in them. This guy is described as a tattoo artist which may be the excuse he gives for 'what do you do for a living?' or it may just be a self-description: "ah yeah, I make my money from doing tattoos for people, not from drug dealing".

I have to come out and admit I'm prejudiced. Not just because I think a lot of tattoos looks trashy, but also because a partner of a family member was something I moved from being neutral about, to disliking, to writing them off as a manipulative shit head. And funnily enough, they got a tattoo later in life, then went the "just one more" route, then shaved their head, then moved on to full-blown "being a manipulative shit head". So my priors on people with tattoos may well be contaminated 😁

I don't get your point about "the establishment" in this particular context. Why does it matter if they have power (real or perceived) in regards to whether it's a specific or general group. Most people, even politicians, don't see themselves as "establishment". For some people, Trump as POTUS is the epitome of "establishment". For others, calling him that word is utterly ludicrous. Note that I personally think it's fine for people to attack "the establishment" -- I'm opposed to this rule in general.

And I'm not defending his post wholesale -- I agree the last bit is presumptuous and I'm fine with him being given a warning for something like that. I don't think throwing the gauntlet to someone like this is really that bad, but maybe I'm in the minority on that. I think personal attacks are far worse for productive conversations, which happen regularly and don't get punished (or even become AAQCs!) as long as it's someone with a right-wing opinion attacking someone with a left-wing opinion.

I also have some reservations with how it seems like a final warning from stuff like his previous post which didn't deserve a mod action at all.

All you have done is clearly demonstrate that you have already made up your mind and no matter what hoops people jump through will not be sufficient.

first you lie

you would not bother to engage with and would dismiss it all out of hand

All you have done is make me update towards you also being a net-negative.

Yeesh, no thanks.

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.

I didn't expect a banana to give me trypophobia today. Out of a desire to upgrade my diet from becoming 100% junk food to merely 90%, I bought a bunch of them.

They arrived at a non-ideal level of ripeness, and then I let them sit for a few days. Now they're nice and yellow, but have a pattern of spots on them makes my skin crawl. Just about the only image on earth that otherwise does that is a photoshopped pic of someone's tits with holes added on, purportedly from worms.

Problem is, yes I would lose weight if you locked me in a camp and beat me with sticks. But to keep the weight off, you'd have to keep me locked up for life, or give me my own personal 'beat me with sticks and knock the food out of my hands' 24/7 person.

Changing habits is hard and willpower won't let me power my way to the new regime. I managed to willpower my way to stop biting my nails after years and years of that, but I can't willpower 'just stop fucking eating, you fat bitch'.

So, in this sentence, what is the "problem" that is in need of a solution? Is it, like, "the problem of trying to decide what to tell people"? Or what?

Sewing bras is more conducive to wellbeing than stacking them on a shelf.

Then buy yourself a sewing machine. We shouldn't make national policy choices based on psychological theories like that.

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.

So your answer to the question of how White Americans can compete with semi-slave illegal workers is

Why in God's name would you want to?

Relevant mod comment. If you want to say "these are the views of the Trump administration", then say "these are the views of the Trump administration".

Also, what do you mean by the adjective "racialist"? WN defines it as:

  1. A believer or advocate of racialism, the ideology of racial nationalism.

  2. (UK, dated) A racist.

Is "online racialist Right" an endonym? Who are these people? Do they want a white ethnostate in the US? Are they HBD-believers who want to restrict immigration based on what they see as genetic group differences? Did you just want to call them straightforward racist, but knew that this would generate a backslash, so you picked a rare word which strongly implies racism without saying the r-word outright?

On the object level, I think I share most of your opinions about Trump's immigration policy, which I detest. But I do not think you are doing a good job of accurately representing the beliefs of the Right, which is a prerequisite to honestly criticizing them.

I don't think that the Right has a great answer to what will happen to the fruit prices once the migrants who are willing to pick them in shitty conditions for low wages because they can feed their family in their country of origin with these wages are all deported. I think that a significant fraction of the MAGA base imagine that Trump, being a stable genius deal-maker, will simply pull the US into a golden age of prosperity and nobody will worry about fruit prices. The more realistic Trump voters might concede that prices of fruits might skyrocket if the pickers are US citizens earning a competitive wage, but simply see this as a price worth paying to kick the illegal immigrants out. Your framing which includes White druggies kicking their habit getting of their asses and start to pick fruits seems to me to be a minority viewpoint on the Right, to put it charitably.

She's a member of the United States Cabinet!

Which is a collection of individuals with distinct and often contrasting opinions, not a hive mind, or an avatar summoned from the collective unconscious of parts of the electorate.

Whether "woke right" exists or doesn't, "The Right" surely does, and this US administration does rather effectively speak for the Right in the American context.

requires non-free or at least desperate labor to get done in sufficient quantities

What is your excuse for why China is able to do it while having a one standard deviation higher median IQ over America? Even Japan does not utilize as many foreign laborers as America.

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.

Whenever committed ideological conservatives* hear about a minimum wage worker complaining about his low wage, they talk about productivity and demand curves and all that jazz. But mention that the worker is an illegal immigrant and all that logic goes out the window and he starts sounding like Bernie Sanders saying that the employer has infinite resources (to pay an American, not the illegal) and that only malevolence and greed stops the lowest-paid workers from getting 65$ an hour.

And even if the government could arbitrarily order wages to increase, why not order wages to increase for the better and cushier jobs Americans are more likely to do? Seems to me like it's a weird fantasy where Americans are supposed to work Bangladesh-level jobs (crop picking, textile sewing, etc) but get American wages for it because I guess the Bengali government is too stupid to just order wages to increase.

Also, most farmers vote Republican and the CSA constitution forbade the international slave trade.

*Not to be confused with normie GOP voters