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sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
38m ago
History is full of men who wanted nothing to do with it. And rightfully so.
Wars of succession are rarely fought to get the other guy to take on the, ah, "curse." There never seems to be a shortage of men ready and willing to take the top job.
It's only redeeming quality is that in the hands of your enemies, it is even more terrible than in yours.
These people have "enemies" because they wish to gain power and subjugate their rivals. If they didn't want to do those things, nobody would give a shit about them.
The vision of the reluctant ruler is a very romantic fantasy for the armchair philosopher, or for those with zero power in their personal life, but has very little, if anything, to do with reality.
faceh
19m ago
Well this explains a lot about your stated positions.
Makes me realize that I probably turned out as weird as I did because I kind of had a one-foot-in-one-foot out upbringing, where half my family was churchgoing patriotic traditionalists and the other was more... bohemian? And both sides seemed pretty happy with their lives and had things mostly held together.
'How does everyone fit into society' is a question that needs to be answered and if you've already decided personal characteristics are the way to go about it, well...
We've talked about basic life scripts before, and in general I think that demolishing those scripts has made life harder, scarier, more uncertain, less fulfilling for most people. Becoming an adult is difficult enough when there IS a direct example to follow. Now you have to do it while explicitly being told there is no one 'right way' to go about it.
When every single day, month, year of your life feels like you're having to hack through uncharted wilderness, and determine your location via a hand-drawn map and dead-reckoning, then yeah you're going to keep second-guessing a lot of decisions and live in constant fear of bear attacks, vs. staying on a well-beaten, marked, and lit pathway. (I overstate the analogy just to make a point).
And as you note, people who LARP Conservativism don't really push a RETVRN to such life scripts, or have a plan for bring those scripts back. Because telling your viewers "go to church, follow the bible, and accept your given place and role in life without much complaint" is so utterly uncool and, for an influencer, self-defeating. If the audience does that they will start listening to their pastor more than you, right?
In fact, now I think about it: the term "Conservative Influencer" is almost a contradiction.
I don't think this mentality can come back from the government, but only from intermediating institutions that democrats would like to punish for doing their job and pushing this. But this is the key difference; most adults have probably worked it out for themselves but nobody ever says it out loud.
Agreed. But both the right and the left seem to have converged on the idea that the government ought to be the single wellspring from which all morality and practical guidance comes. What to eat, what to wear, how to arrange your affairs.
Again, overstating the case. I have spent a good portion of my adult life groping around for SOME institution, group, maybe even (ugh) ideology that would give me a provably reliable path towards a better life. But very explicitly not wanting to fall into a cult.
The only one that hasn't let me down in some egregious way, and has remained a steadying force in life is, no shit, my martial arts gym.
The gym I teach at provides the following:
- A strong routine. The schedule for classes has been the same for years and years.
- A curriculum of new material to learn (I've mastered basically all of it, but that just lets me reach out and find new stuff)
- A great social group of generally good, reliable people. (If they weren't good and reliable, they wouldn't stick it out. This stuff is HARD).
- A certain amount of moral instruction: "We are teaching you to inflict physical harm on your fellow human, here are the conditions under which you can do so or should do so."
- A system for advancement (there are tests on a regular schedule, and you earn higher belts as you go).
- Which also allows for a benevolent soft hierarchy. Higher belts are more experienced (and theoretically more dangerous) and thus command some respect, but they have a reciprocal duty to help lower belts learn faster. And nobody thinks, for example, a blue belt has the authority to ORDER a yellow belt to do something.
- Also fun.
I'd guess this checks a lot of the boxes for people who want to be able to follow instructions and see improvement in their life circumstances and be rewarded for the progress. There was a period of time where I think Corporations tried to sort of provide that to employees to make them more productive, but the underlying loyalty that requires has dissipated.
Church is still there, but good luck picking one that isn't compromised by political activism or that is mostly full of LARPers.
That seems to leave most people with joining up with political activism or getting into politics. Which tends to make everything worse.
Goodguy
37m ago
Revisionist theories are not much worth engaging with unless they offer an explanation of what happened to Eastern Europe's Jews. For example, the 1926 USSR census records about 2.6 million Jews. The 1931 Polish census records about 3.1 million Jews. What happened to these populations? The current European population of Jews is estimated to be about 1 million total. Is there evidence for a post-war migration of such a large number of Jews to America, Israel, and so on? As far as I know, there is not. There was substantial migration, but from what I understand, not enough to explain the collapse of Europe's Jewish population size. Revisionists, to be taken seriously, should not just pick holes in mainstream theories - they should present an alternative theory that accounts for the evidence. If the European Jewish population collapsed through emigration rather than killing, let's see evidence of the emigration in quantities enough to account for the population changes. Disease, famine, and so on are not good explanations, because they do not explain why the Jewish population collapsed so much more than the populations of other affected ethnic groups.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
38m ago
About those nurses, apparently they get tattoos to help manage their “trauma” which is presumably excreted from an organ somewhere within their bodies.
FtSoA
58m ago
What's the probability vs Ghislaine they would name themselves "maxwellhill?" Let's say indeterminate.
Ahahahahahahahahahaha.
Bayes doesn't work if you don't accurately evaluate the evidence.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
59m ago
Thank you for that. But human memory, while capacious, isn't infinite, and I wonder if I'll ever want these neurons back.
Ross Ulbricht was arrested for a similar OPSEC failure, so I don't think it's completely implausible. Per Wikipedia, "[t]he connection was made by linking the username 'altoid', used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ulbricht, posting under the nickname 'altoid', asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained his full name." I won't discount parallel construction here, but I think there is a certain point in an effort like this when you realize "this is for real", but you can't easily scrub the account history: a new account would itself look pretty suspicious and probably point right back to the original -- "DM'd all the other mods and asked for a new account to be blessed" is itself suspicious if you don't trust all those mods, and it's visible to users that a brand new account was given mod access. Satoshi seems like an exception here, but I think it's hard to leave no trace in these sorts of situations generally.
Early Reddit also strikes me as a place where a power-user could steer the conversation more broadly in ways that would be useful to more than just intelligence agencies, or could just be a personal power fantasy. Bots weren't believable conversation partners a decade ago. Observably, various political activists have gotten a lot of mileage out of moderating default Reddit subs, so even if maybe the impact of that is fading today, I think "digital conversation influencer" might have been a playable role that would get one into real conversations in the halls of (non-digital) power.
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