domain:betonit.substack.com
Tanista
5m ago
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement. It is not the case, for instance, that the experts in western history, literature, or philosophy were more likely to argue against the mass movement in any substantive way. This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
Probably shouldn't have let so many activists and grievance scholars critical of Western civ into the henhouse.
Maybe this is where being Western gets you into trouble. Others would accept that, while their beliefs are true, education is a matter of indoctrinating people into viewing those alleged facts through the right lens. Westerners think argument will lead to the correct conclusion so why does it matter?
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
People did sense it, the ones in spaces with the activists just had to be terrified. The "why not transracialism?" argument everyone uses online, for example, led to a huge shitstorm for Rebecca Tuvel. I think someone like Weinstein didn't know what he was getting into, and Peterson just has a naturally grandiose personality and an ideology that reacts very badly to being shamed (if you're charitable, his psychological background makes him very suspicious of moral tyrants)
The other problem is that a lot of the more established people in institutions who could say something hate the enemies of the modern social justice movement more than they do the socjus types (agreeing with them on what they think are the important points and being baffled when it's not enough), and would rather be in denial than grant them an inch . Trace more or less summed up the dynamics when one set of consistent deniers ran into problems getting hired elsewhere (I suppose when you already have a job and seniority it doesn't seem worth it to rock the boat)
What lesson can be taken from this? Don't fall asleep at the wheel while the pipeline for educating your kids and new elites is taken over by your enemies. That's about it.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
8m ago
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family.
I thought my girlfriend and I were the most introverted couple out there, but we like going to restaurants and visiting scenic sites. Though I admit, there's a lot of "watch youtube on the couch."
It's interesting that a lot of dating advice is "be attractive" "be extraverted", and introverts have a hard time dating. I wonder at times how introverted women are meeting men. Perhaps the answer is "they aren't"; I have a theory that introverted women make up a majority of the "women going their own way" and not dating. I don't know that I've ever dated, or seriously considered dating, or asked out, a woman I would consider extraverted, and I wonder at times whether this contributed to my limited success back when I was on the market.
SSCReader
12m 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.
ArmedTooHeavily
14m ago
Disagree with this. Carriers have been performing extreme maneuver drills on a regular basis with planes onboard since they first were created, and the Nimitz class has been doing it since the first one was commissioning in 1975. Planes don't usually fall off during these drills.
ArmedTooHeavily
16m ago
Yeah, having gotten some more info from people in this thread, I'm coming around to it just being a spectacular fuckup by the guy towing.
ArmedTooHeavily
17m ago
Thanks, absolutely banger song. Gonna listen to the rest of the album now.
Rov_Scam
17m 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.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17m ago
and not knowing this poster's alleged prior history
There's your problem.
On top of what cjet says dude always nukes his posts and account after people figure out it's him. The behavior is all the more bizarre, since, as you say what he posts isn't really objectionable, if he just gave the whole "hiding your power level" shtick a rest.
ArmedTooHeavily
22m ago
fwiw, and not knowing this poster's alleged prior history, the OP doesn't seem like an objectionable top level post.
SSCReader
23m ago
If the rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
I mean America is pretty great in my opinion.
Moral improvement should have costs surely? If being moral was easy and cheap then everyone would do it. If you want to be moral you are explicitly making decisions that are worse practically, because if they were better practically you wouldn't have to be moral to choose them. Being moral mean soften looking at the most efficient choice and not making it. You risk your life to dive into the river to save the child and so on and so forth.
The ancestors of America brought the wolf in (as per Jefferson), they could later have chosen to be immoral and kill/deport all the wolves. Or moral and have to contend with what enslaving a race means for race relations and the future when you let them go. They chose the latter. That means their descendants have to deal with that choice, for better or for ill. Being immoral is often better practically. But it isn't what America was founded to aspire to. I don't think that's a nasty lesson in as much as a lesson about reality. Choices have consequences. Being better than you were does not immunize you against previous choices. It's easy to go back and think we should have just killed them all. It probably would be easier. But morality isn't about being easier it's about being better, however you measure that.
"Jefferson wrote that maintaining slavery was like holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”17 He thought that his cherished federal union, the world’s first democratic experiment, would be destroyed by slavery. To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. But he also believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, could only result in a civil war that would destroy the union."
America you will note, managed to not have the union destroyed, not have a full scale race war and has not as yet been destroyed. And part of the reason for that is because efforts were made to make up for slavery. The Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action and the like were promises to ADOS that they didn't need to resort to a race war to get their place in America. The white guilt you speak of as a mental illness was vital in charting a course that has made great strides.
Is it perfect? Not at all. Racial resentment did not vanish. Black people are still poor compared to whites. But assuming you think genocide is bad, the outcome has to be measured against that. Not against perfection.
pigeonburger
23m ago
Exactly, until they have had a chance to actually interact meaningfully with you, women are going to be maximally uncharitable with anything you say on your profile. Because they can afford to, as "men willing to message them on apps" are not a scarce ressource at all for them. So if you mention anything about anime in your profile, especially if it's one with limited real estate (I don't know how Hinge works specifically), then they will assume that this means anime is a massive part of your identity, so their mental image of you will shift to that of a neckbeard weeb with waifu bodypillows..
It's the same as with the politics we were discussing in this thread too. Until there's a bit of time/emotional investment from her part, you want to avoid giving her any reason to reject you; because as far as she knows, somewhere in her inbox is a message from her perfect 10, 6'3, 8" cock, liberal surgeon/prince who shares all the same interests as her, so why would she waste any time trying to understand what kind of human being someone with any yellow flags at all is like?
Once she's met you, or had some meaninful communication with you that humanises you, that changes, of course.
MathWizard
Good things are good
25m ago
There's a difference between someone sharing all of your interests, and someone who is willing to tolerate all of your interests. Even if they don't share the same hobbies, you don't want to date someone who fundamentally is unwilling to accept a part of you. If someone is going to be scared off by me liking anime, I want to scare them off instantly, not 5 dates later when they find out. Now, granted, there is some middle ground where some people might be willing to accept anime in someone who they already know is sane and not a pedophile but would screen it off on a stranger, but that still indicates some level of judgemental that I personally would rather filter out too.
And beyond the truly negative stereotypes, it signals that you're the kind of guy who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much.
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family. When given the choice, we usually stay home and play games, where we both want to be.
Positives and negatives are subjective and high variance. And ultimately are scored from the single unique perspective of the person you end up with. They are not averaged. Your value as a romantic partner is not the average value ascribed to you by women collectively, but the value from the perception of the one person you actually end up with. So if you have niche interests and traits with high variance, where rather than everyone slightly disliking them, some people strongly dislike them and other rarer people strongly like them, then you want to filter for and find the people who like them, and then they become positive traits.
ArmedTooHeavily
25m ago
Looking at it at the state level is insufficiently granular.
SkoomaDentist
28m ago
I'm actually surprised at how effectively Stross keeps his leftist ideology from ruining the books entirely. It does make it through sometimes but generally can be ignored.
Just be sure to never ever visit his blog. That's woke leftist central to the power of one million.
ArmedTooHeavily
32m ago
They have a strategic stockpile of rice! (What a thing for a government to choose to do, have the expertise to manage, etc.) Which they've opened, and only slightly pushed prices a bit.
as an aside to your point, strategic grain reserves are pretty common.
what is "adversary-proof production"? What does it actually look like? I tried my typical strategy of hopping over to google scholar to see if I could find some academic writing on the topic, but perhaps they just use different key terminology, and I'm missing it. Can TheMotte help? Any academic work? Or even your home-grown (autarkic?) definition?
My naive assumption would be that a product is weakly "adversary-proof" for nation N when the production of the item and its inputs, as well as relevant transportation/shipment routes are located in territories directly controlled/defended by N's military, or the militaries of countries allied to N, and strongly "adversary-proofed" if all of the above conditions obtain plus production of the product and its inputs are located in places either beyond the direct reach of the conventional military and paramilitary capabilities of nations currently or plausibly adversarial to N, or which are meaningfully hardened against attack generally.
ArmedTooHeavily
35m ago
I would like to register profound disagreement here. We should absolutely not relax any rules because "everybody knows we all agree." Allowing consensus building will degrade the quality of commentary significantly.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
38m ago
Not much to expand on, the race of the people making the decisions is irrelevant to what you're discussing. What were you even trying to point out by mentioning it?
07mk
39m ago
I disagree. I think that part of the argument isn't being elided, it's being summarized with the word "optimal." At least, it's being summarized at least as well as in the phrase "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it," and I also think that the that latter phrase is far less elegant and beautiful than the much simpler and pithy "the optimal amount of [bad thing] is not zero" while not really adding any extra meaning or explanation.
gattsuru
39m ago
Fair on Jole; like Ethan of Athos it feels like it's putting too much effort into trying to answer Le Guin's 'taking life versus giving it' problem, but without the big narrative tension from a speeding deadline. Flowers felt stronger if a bit more repetitive and is certainly no Memory or Komarr, but I still enjoyed it about the same lines as Cryoburn.
FtttG
40m ago
Something like "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it" would be more accurate
The two phrases scan as synonymous to me, no different from "men are taller than women" vs. "the average man is taller than the average woman".
SSCReader
41m 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
42m 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.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
45m ago
Whites had the nation you are envisaging and even more than that.
This assumes more continuity of people and culture than is advisable.
actually this makes us feel pretty bad when we look at in comparison to our theoretical national values.
When appealing to those national values and the ideals of the Founders, modern folk do tend to forget John Adams' ominous line- "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." And so we reap that failure mode.
If the rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Or one of those other pithy lines, like "liberalism is not a suicide pact." A libertarian arguing for open borders is not a result of mental illness. For any other ideology, the root cause is at least mental illness adjacent. By extension, "white guilt" (and many other racial sicknesses) should be in the DSM.
There's a really nasty lesson here; that moral "improvement" has incredibly high costs for a culture. Either a culture has to be fully right and never commit even a single evil act, or go Full Evil and salt the earth behind you; anything in between tends to result in a blood curse.
The things you complain about are already the tat for white peoples tit! (so to speak!)
Sounds like a subcategory of Onlyfans, or an Aella stunt. English is funny.
Several European countries passed gender self-ID laws, the town hall where I live was draped in "TRANS DAY OF REMEMBRANCE" banners, the whole "Gender Affirming Care" thing is a fiasco based on no evidence, and a failure of scientific institutions to do proper filtering, there's people being harassed by the police or outright arrested for not buying the gender ideology, or mild jokes... Yes please go on and tell me how these things are indicative of a moral panic. I guess it's completely normal for sweeping reforms in accordance with a specific ideology to take place, when the influence of said ideology is nothing but a moral panic.
No it hasn't. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, probably not even you, has ever rejected it. What happened is that Democrats noticed that it's losing them the election, so they're trying to turn the volume down, but they did absolutely nothing to reject it.
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