domain:parrhesia.co
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
5d ago
>Be Pope
>Latin American
>live in walled city-state with strict immigration
>criticize Trump administration for deporting members of gang famous for Satanic black mass human sacrifice initiation
>drops dead
What did God mean by this?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
3d ago
Schoenfeld: .....The school the express directive from the school is you don't need to understand your peers, you don't need to agree with them, you don't need to affirm with them, but you do need to treat them with respect.
The problem with this kind of rhetoric is that it has become transparently false. I have social circles I move in that range from boomer shitlib to woker than woke, and they all agree and affirm that the only way to treat someone with respect is to agree with them and to affirm them. Anything less makes you a monster.
Some white evangelical 14 year old politely saying they disagree that there is such a thing as trans people is not going to be treated with respect.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
It’s the same problem that’s occurred since time immemorial and is the reason why (as I understand it) Republican politicians were discouraged from spending too much time in Washington.
That was part of the 1994 Republican Revolution under Newt Gingrich. It wasn't just 'discouragement' either- it was a organizational-restructuring, as the rules of Congress were changed to facilitate frequent travel out of DC. Most notably, Congressional business workflows were centered on the mid-week, so that key votes were Tuesday-Thursday, to make Monday/Friday travel days more viable.
It was part of 'proving independence from Washington' and 'staying in touch with your constituents.' It is the oft-forgotten root of regular complaints that Congress spends too little time in Washington compared to the past, and the associated complaints that Congress gets less done (because they are present less) and don't know eachother as well. On the other hand, it arguably contributes to the dynamic of voters loving their congressperson but hating congress.
It was also, critically, a period where Republicans were also incentivized to not bring their families to D.C., which in turns means the wives and children who stay behind aren't culturally socialized into the blue-tribe-dominated national capital region. But it also means, by extension, that Democratic representative families under the same dynamics aren't socializing with more red-leaning counterparts, and are free to be even bluer influences on their Congressional-spouses.
This is an oft-forgotten / underappreciated rules-level dynamic of national-level political centralization and elite-consensus.
Keeping key elites spending time together and away from their own power-bases that could foster a sense of disconnect from the central authority has been a national cohesion strategy since before Louis XIV and Versailles. This helped political centralization by giving the monarch an easier time keeping an eye on everyone if they were in one part. But it also allowed for political homogenization/consensus-building/shared-identity cultivation of a common French identity amongst elites, as the French nobility were forced by proximity (and tactical political interests) to get along and socialize. Court politics is infamous in fiction for political infighting and drama, but it does create paradigms for collective understandings, interests, and identities, hence the divide of the french estates leading to the French revolution. Nobles infight against eachother, but unite in common cause against challenges to their collective interests and privileges.
Congressional committee placement politics isn't an exact analog to the French Monarchy making appointments dependent on remaining at court, but there are more than a few parallels. If you're not missing key votes because you're spending time with constituents- because Congressional workflows are focused on Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday execution- then you're not losing your chance at valuable appointments to powerful Congressional committees. The lower the opportunity cost of not-being in the capital, the greater the opportunity-gains of being elsewhere for fundraising / political events / etc. And, again, you're away from your family less if you're free to return to them more often.
These are changes that the Congressional Democrats have kept even when they recaptured Congress. They get many of the same benefits as well. And as the D.C. area is something like 90% Democratic for a variety of reasons, it's hard to see them convincing (or, frankly, forcing) the Republicans to revert to the pre-Gingrich status quo in the name of homogenizing them in an expected blue direction.
Interestingly, it's also a dynamic being actively pursued in the reverse by the movement of property, and not just people.
You can arguably see an implicit effort-to-reverse Federal consensus-centralization ongoing right now, as Trump attempts to push the federal bureaucracy away from the capital region.
One of the less-commented efforts the Trump administration is pursuing is moving federal agencies outside of the DC area and to other states. This has been overshadowed by the media coverage of the personnel management, but the property management is (almost) as important.
Among the earliest executive orders was a direction for agencies to propose relocations away from DC and to other states. This purportedly on cost-reasons. DC property is expensive to maintain, employee allowances are higher to make up for the regional cost of living, etc. The actual cost of moving has to be balanced against savings are likely to provide, but states have an incentive to take some of that cost for their own long-term gain in getting the relocated agencies.
Almost as importantly, Congress persons have an incentive to approve federal agency relocations to the benefit of their own state. Even Democratic politicians who might personally hate Trump. Which is to say, Federal government divestment from DC offers bargaining chips / horses to trade in the upcoming year(s) of budget negotiations.
That this is also is likely to have an employee-composition impact, as the hyper-blue DC environment those agencies recruit and socialize and network within get replaced with more purple environments that are geographically dispersed, is probably not going to be a publicized or recognized until it's as locked-in as the Gingrich Congressional travel changes.
As has been seen with some shutdowns like the USAID shutdown, DC-based federal employees have often indicated they want to stay in the DC area. This is natural. Even if they were offered an opportunity to keep their jobs if agencies were relocated instead of shutdown, some percent would refuse and seek other employment in DC. This is just a matter of statistics. It is also an area of precedent. In the Trump 1 administration, nearly 90% of DC-based Bureau of Land Management employees retired or quit rather than relocated to Grand Junction, Colorado.
That's bad if you think an equivalent dynamic to, say, the DC Headquarters of the Justice Department would lose vital experience and expertise and informal coordination with other agencies. On the other hand, if you don't think the headquarters of the US Justice Department should be rooted in the swamp that is 90% blue, and less than a mile from where a 'Black Live Matter' mural used to be maintained on the street...
And once departments are separated, the sort of informal coordination that can occur if you and a friend/ally you know in another part of the government can meet in the same town also goes away. Inter-government lobbying is a lot harder if you are cities apart. Inter-department coordination is also, and almost as importantly, a lot harder to do without a document trail.
And this is where one could infer a non-stated motive for the resistance-shy Trump. One of the only reasons the US electorate learned that the Biden administration white house was coordinating with the Georgia anti-Trump case despite denials was because one of the Georgia prosecutor assistances invoiced the White House for the travel expenses for in-person engagements. In-person meetings, in turn, are one of the ways to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests or Congressional subpoenas for communications over government systems.
This is where the Versailles metaphor comes back, but as an inverse of sorts. It was easier for Louis the XIVth to keep an eye on and manage the nobility when they were in one place. They were scheming, sure, but he could keep watch of them in a single physical location where he controlled the coordination contexts. Trump / the Republicans do not control the coordination context of DC. They can, however, increase political control over the bureaucracy by physically separating it across multiple physical locations, where they have easier means to monitor inter-node coordination.
It is also an effort that will be exceptionally hard for the Democrats to reverse, if they try to. It is a lot easier to divest and reorganize government institutions when you have a trifecta than when you don't. It is also much easier to give up federal property in DC to the benefit of states than it is to get state Congressional representatives to vote to strip their states of jobs and inflows for the sake of DC.
Which means that federal agencies that depart DC will probably not return in the near future. And the longer they stay away, the longer that local employment hiring filters into organizational cultures at the lowest levels. The more that Federal employees have their spouses and children shaped by the less-blue-than-DC environments, and thus shape them in turn. The less engaged, and involved, they can be in the beltway culture.
The Trump administration DC divestment are arguably going to have long-term effects on affected parts of the federal bureaucracy on par with Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution affects on Congress in the 90's. Affected agencies will be less compositionally composed of, less socially exposed to, and less culturally aligned to Blue-dominated DC in ways that will only become apparent decades from now.
The term "supply chain attack" has been applied to the world of software (not just pagers in Lebanon) to describe a modern phenomenon that arises because of the way modern software development works. Very little code today is written by an individual (or small group of individuals who are all working for the same company or whatever) in a way that relies only on their efforts to run it all the way down to the bare metal. Dependencies are essentially omnipresent. That is, someone else, somewhere, wrote some other code that the main characters in our story think could be helpful for making their own code work, so they just import it and use it. They often have to trust that it just does what it says it does on the tin. They may have to hope that if something goes wrong with it, that someone else (or their successors) will update it and keep it running correctly. This phenomenon is probably most famously summed up in this XKCD.
As such, it is sometimes possible for someone to get into one of these dependencies, find or insert a flaw, and then exploit it in order to get at some higher-level software package. There have been tons of examples, some very high profile, of this happening. The funniest version that I had heard of to date was "typosquatting". The idea is that, sometimes, just by random chance, some programmer somewhere will misspell a package that they want to import. Typosquatting is used for websites, too, where there is just some chance that some number of people will misspell a website and happen to go to a site controlled by a bad guy (famous example was goggle(dot)com). The idea for package dependencies is the same; some percentage of the time, some programmer may just accidentally type "hugingface" instead of "huggingface"; if the bad guys published a malicious version by that typo-d name and the programmer in question somehow doesn't catch it, big oof.
There is now a funnier version. Of course it would be LLMs that give us a funnier version. "Slopsquatting", they call it. They even created a wikipedia article already for the paper. The idea is that so many coders (and "vibe coders") are now using LLMs to create mountains of new code, some who barely understand what's going on in their newly-created code. The LLM just creates it, and it works! It's magic! Of course, anyone who has spent much time with LLMs know that they do occasionally hallucinate. And, well, hallucinating is close enough to typo-ing that it'll get the job done.
It turns out that LLMs will, some percentage of the time, just randomly hallucinate a package that doesn't exist (or at least, doesn't exist yet). They'll "imagine" that maybe such a package, if it existed, might be helpful to the task they were given to accomplish. And they'll just write code as if it existed and did the thing that they'd kinda like it to do. Of course, just like with typosquatting, if you have an attentive and knowledgeable human watching closely, there's no reason why they couldn't catch it. But again, we're entering the world of "vibe coders"; at least some percentage of them are simply not going to have a clue. "The magic inscrutable matrices gave me this code. I'll try to run it."
So now, what if the bad guys have already figured this out? The bad guys create a package that they think is likely to be hallucinated, and they turn it into a very bad package, indeed. To the "vibe coder", it might even look like it's running correctly! The magic inscrutable matrices came through again; let's ship some product! Utterly brilliant... and utterly devilish.
At least this one is funny.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
It's all so tiring
2d ago
In a move that appears to have largely flown under the radar, President Trump has signed an EO aimed at eliminating disparate impact analysis/theory. CNN devoted a whole 11 sentences to this EO, the Washington Post bundled it with six others, and the New York Times gave it two sentences in an article about another order. I have to wonder how this is flying under the radar, because 🦀🦀🦀 DISPARATE IMPACT IS DEAD 🦀🦀🦀.
Of course it's not gone gone yet, it is still part of the Civil Rights Act (1964), but the EO instructs that:
the Attorney General shall initiate appropriate action to repeal or amend the implementing regulations for Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for all agencies to the extent they contemplate disparate-impact liability.
and
Within 45 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shall assess all pending investigations, civil suits, or positions taken in ongoing matters under every Federal civil rights law within their respective jurisdictions, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that rely on a theory of disparate-impact liability, and shall take appropriate action with respect to such matters consistent with the policy of this order.
This will of course result in litigation, which will likely drag on for years, but the fact that this started now, in April of the first year of his term, means that there's a very good chance this ends up before SCOTUS before President Trump's term is up and a new face takes the oval. I'm very excited to see where this goes, and have my fingers crossed that this means we'll see a return to civil service exams and meritocratic hiring.
I know I harp on this, but it's yet another one of those cases where everyone explicitly promised we wouldn't end up here. Or rather, relentlessly mocked anyone who suggested this would happen. Like, "leather fetish stuff in kindergarten" was the literal parody of "conservative hysteria" the left made fun of for years.
Forget the legal arguments, because this never should have been allowed to get this far in the first place. What could have been done differently? What can be done differently against the next batch of "nobody's trying to take your X/do X with your kids" tactics? Because all the tactics that everyone tried the last ten times failed miserably.
The left has won for a century pushing things that nobody wanted (even themselves in the beginning!), because they've discovered an entire strategy based around an ideological vanguard pushing insane things on the masses. A strategy which has taken on a life of its own and now exists only to replicate itself like cancer, with no regard to the plans or interests of its creators. Because ultimately, those creators are just a malleable as the proles their "strategies of intervention" were designed to control.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
Schoenfeld, arguing for Montgomery County, says these books that are part of a curriculum that preach uncontroversial values like civility and inclusivity. Alito, skeptical, said Uncle Bobby's Wedding had a clear moral message beyond civility or inclusivity.
Alito should have been more skeptical that "civility" and (especially) "inclusivity" are uncontroversial. Any teaching of "civility" is teaching not just that people should act in ways which are civil and not in ways which are uncivil, but teaching WHICH ways are civil and WHICH ways are uncivil, and those things vary sharply across the population. "Inclusivity" is worse, in that it's basically a positive label for progressive values rather than a label for anything uncontroversial at all.
aldomilyar
3d ago
Honestly the Karmelo Anthony is insanely blackpilling to me. The whole thing should be so abundantly open-shut and it's being presented as an issue due to a combination of race issues and a childlike understanding of what happened with Rittenhouse.
Spontaneously stabbing somebody to death since they told you to move from a seat in an area that you obviously didn't belong in is something that prettymuch any society in human history would condemn you to immediate death for. Yet Karmelo's being compared to Rosa Parks of all people? Genuinely insane.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
The FBI this morning arrested a Wisconsin state judge on charges of concealing an illegal alien from arrest.
The initial criminal complaint is here. For those of you who prefer to watch TV instead of read, here is attorney general Pam Bondi giving the details on Fox News. The accusation is that upon seeing federal agents waiting outside her courtroom to serve an administrative warrent for the arrest of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz (who is an illegal alien currently being charged with battery), Judge Hannah Dugan escorted Flores-Ruiz out of the courtroom through the jury door so that he could evade arrest.
For all of the "Kash Patel Arrests Judge" headlines I saw this morning, this seems totally fine? It looks like an open and shut case if the facts alleged in the complaint are true. It sounds like there ought to be plenty of witnesses (it literally took place in a courthouse). State-law judges don't have jurisdiction over federal agents executing federal functions. An illegal alien in court for an unrelated violent crime is an incredibly unsympathetic defendant. All of the smarter left-leaning commentators I follow seem to be keeping quiet on this, which seems smart.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
that is worth noting, but it's also worth noting that their fundraiser was allowed to operate, in contrast to those of, for example, Gardner and Rittenhouse. This is a concrete way in which our society observably treats red-tribe lawful self-defense as strictly worse than blue-tribe lawless murder.
In lieu of the normal SCOTUS Mottezins... wake up, honey, the Culture War went to court again. Arguments for Mahmoud v. Taylor just dropped (PDF). A less oppressive SCOTUSblog write up here.
Obligatory disclaimer that I do not know anything. The gist of the case:
- In 2022 Montgomery County, a suburb of DC, approved a number of LGBTQ books for the curriculum. They include these books and other materials from ages as early as 3-4 and up.
- A bunch of parents cite religious reasons to opt-out of this part of the curriculum. This is in line with Montgomery's historical policy and the policy of neighboring counties. Opt-outs for religious reasons are normal for things like sex education and health classes that include it around the country.
- Depending who you believe, so many parents chose to opt-out that the district had no choice but to change policy, or the district was so ideologically wedded to the material that they changed the policy. Either way, the county says no more opt-outs. Lawsuit commences. It goes up the chain and here we are.
I know we have some skeptics of "woke" curriculum, so for a probably not unbiased overview of the material, BECKET, the religious freedom legal advocacy non-profit backing the plaintiffs, provides examples in an X thread. They also provide a dropbox link to some of the material in question. In one tweet they claim:
For example, one book tasks three- and four-year-olds to search for images from a word list that includes “intersex flag,” “drag queen,” “underwear,” “leather,” and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker.
Another book advocates a child-knows-best approach to gender transitioning, telling students that a decision to transition doesn’t have to “make sense.”
Teachers are instructed to say doctors only “guess” when identifying a newborn’s sex anyway
The Justices had read the books in question. Kavanaugh acknowledged Schoenfeld, representing Montgomery County, had "a tough case to argue".
The county asserted that mandatory exposure to material, like a teacher reading a book out loud, is not coercion (or a burden?) that violates a free exercise of religion. Sotomayor seemed to support this position. Schoenfeld, arguing for Montgomery County, said these books that are part of a curriculum that preach uncontroversial values like civility and inclusivity. Alito, skeptical, said Uncle Bobby's Wedding had a clear moral message beyond civility or inclusivity.
The liberal justices were interested in clarification on what Baxter, arguing for the parents, thought the limits were to. What limits are placed on parents with regards to religious opt-outs? Kagan was worried about the opening of the floodgates. Sotomayor drew a line to parental objection to 'biographical material about women who have been recognized for achievements outside of their home' and asked if the opt-out should extend to material on stuff like inter-faith marriage. Baxter didn't give well-defined lines, but said nah, we figured this out.
Sincerity of belief is one requirement for compelled opt-outs. The belief can't be "philosophical" or "political" it has to a sincere religious belief. Age was discussed as another consideration. Material that may offend religious belief to (the parents of?) a 16 year old does not apply the same sort of burden as it does to a 5 year old, because a 16 year old is more capable of being "merely exposed" rather than "indoctrinated". A word Eric Baxter, arguing for the parents, used several times and Justice Barrett used twice.
Eric Baxter also stabbed at the district's position that there was ever an administrative issue at all. Chief Justice Roberts agreed and seemed to question whether the school's actions were pretext. Baxter had one exchange (pg. 40-42 pdf) with Kavanaugh who, "mystified as a life-long resident of the county [as to] how it came to this", asked for background.
Baxter: That's right. Hundreds of parents complained. These were mostly according to news articles mostly families from Muslim faith and Ethiopian Orthodox who were objecting.
B: When they-- when they spoke to the Board, the Board accused them of using their religious beliefs as another reason to hate, accused a young Muslim girl of parroting her parents' dogma, and then accused the parents of aligning with racist xenophobes and white supremacists.
B: And so, again, there's no question in this case that there is a burden, that it was imposed with animosity, and that it's discriminating against our clients because of their religious beliefs.
Baxter also pointed at ongoing opt-out polices in neighboring counties and different ones in Montgomery itself. He clarified the relevance of Wisconsin v. Yoder where it was found strict scrutiny should be applied to protect religious freedom. One example of an ongoing opt-out policy in Montgomery allowed parents to opt their children out of material that showed the prophet Mohammed.
ACB: .....What is your take on that and how we think about this, whether this really is just about exposure and civility and learning to function in a multi-cultural and diverse society and how much of it is about influence or as Petitioners would say indoctrination?
Schoenfeld: .....The school the express directive from the school is you don't need to understand your peers, you don't need to agree with them, you don't need to affirm with them, but you do need to treat them with respect.
Thots and Q's:
- Is it necessary to introduce concepts that include queer and gender ideology to children in public school? Why, why not? At what age would the introduction be appropriate or inappropriate?
The eternal fight over what the state uses to fill children's minds in a land of compulsory attendance is main conflict, even if this legal question is one of what a compromise should look given religious freedoms.
- A competent school district should account for the addition of new, potentially controversial or sensitive material.
It can do so in a few different ways and avoid a trip to SCOTUS. I support preaching civility and inclusivity to children. There are thousands children's books that preach these things without drag queens or bondage. In an ideal world, knowledge of and tolerance for queer people can also be taught without, what I would call, the excess. Schools can also program curriculum to account for opt-outs when it comes to touchy subjects.
Sex education can be crammed into 1 hour classes for a week of the year. This allows parents to opt-out without placing an unmanageable burden on the administration. A curriculum that requires teachers to read a number of controversial book at least 5 times each a year is a curriculum designed to, intentionally or not, make opt-outs onerous. In this case it was so onerous and so controversial that Montgomery was compelled to change the policy. Which is an administrative failure even if one doesn't believe it to be ideologically motivated.
- It may be worth pointing out that coverage from outlets like NPR didn't include the name of the case or a description of the plaintiffs that brought it.
I've seen it argued both ways. That outlets notoriously don't link cases or share case names, but in this case the plaintiffs -- a mixture of Muslim, Christian, Jewish parents -- the absence is notable. Were this an evangelical push we could expect some evangelical bashing.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
It would help if we weren't constantly gaslit about the nature of what's happening.
For example, the relentless bait and switch around Title IX "interpretations". Obama's DOE famously published that "Dear Colleagues" letter, and all the colleges wrung their hands and went purposely insane under the premise that if they didn't, the DOE might withhold their funding. Trump's DOE rescinds that guidance, and those same colleges turn around and sue him in court. Biden's DOE does an even more expansive Title IX "interpretation" making it so there can be no local discretion in how the school system handles trans issues. You need to flee the country if you want to live in a school district that can't secretly trans your kid. The schools "begrudgingly" comply, none sue. Now many states sue, but the schools, suspiciously mum about it. Trump rolls in, rescinds the guidance, even forcefully reverses it, schools sue again.
It's a constant shell game. When a Democrat DOE is top down forcing local schools hand it's "Oh, elections have consequences, don't want this to happen vote harder next time." You win that game and suddenly the locus of control shifts to the local level "Oh, you have to win at the local level too, too bad, so sad". You can't win both in perpetuity, and somehow things never ratchet back in your direction no matter what you do.
The truth is, public schools, pedagogy, teacher training, the unions, etc have all been deeply captured institutions. It doesn't matter what battles you win against them, they are hostile to your interest, and will never comply. No matter where or how you win, they just gaslight you that the "real" battle was over here. In reality, they are just doing what they wanted to do the entire time, and coordinating with where ever they can to launder legitimacy on their immoral actions.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
It's a different Supreme Court. You cannot at the same time have
-
Lack of disparate impact according to a protected characteristic
-
Lack of disparate treatment according to a protected characteristic
-
A test which truly measures merit.
-
Merit which is correlated with the protected characteristic.
If the Supreme Court were to confront this head-on, they'd have the job of deciding between
A) Banning tests based on merit. This is practically absurd but legally sound
B) Deferring to the legislature and allowing disparate treatment (discrimination against the group whose membership is correlated with greater merit) in such instances. We are, in effect, here.
C) Ruling that "equal protection" in the Constitution bans disparate treatment and striking down the requirement to avoid disparate impact.
However, the Supreme Court will not confront this head-on; they will do almost anything to allow B) to remain the case while pretending that it isn't and 4) does not attain.
SnapDragon
3d ago
We shield kids from a lot of complicated real-world things that could affect them. 4-year-olds can have degenerative diseases. Or be sexually abused. Both are much more common than being "intersex" (unless you allow for the much more expansive definitions touted by activists for activist reasons). So I guess schools should have mandatory picture books showing a little kid dying in agony, while their sister gets played with by their uncle, right? So that these kids can be "at peace" with it?
...Of course not. Indoctrination is the only reason people are pushing for teaching kids about intersex medical conditions. Kids inherently know that biological sex is real, and can tell the difference between men and women. Undoing that knowledge requires concerted effort, and the younger you start, the better.
Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking.
To me this is why the argument that some institutions are too important to be subject to cullings for political reasons has to be rejected if those organisations shove themselves into political fights. This tactic of crying "but think about the good libraries/public broadcasting/whatever else does" has to be severely punished, even if it extracts a cost from the punisher, if there is ever a hope for the ratchet to stop.
The one to blame for cuts and cullings is the activist who involved an organisation that is supposed to be owned by everyone into his activism, not the politician who finds himself either forced to do the firings and cuts or literally give taxpayer money to fund his opposition and goals his voters find aberrant.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
The school board wasn’t thinking. They’re teachers and they were going with the flow. It is literally incomprehensible to teachers that ‘the experts’, however defined, can be wrong. Like if you suggest it they’ll stare at you blankly, literally not understanding the words you just said. And the experts suggested kids should be taught this stuff, so teachers concluded ‘parents who want to shield their toddlers from learning about BDSM should lose custody of their kids’ instead of ‘the experts should be shot’.
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
1d ago
Speak plainly—this routine is obnoxious. Do you think he expanded presidential power? In what way? How does his "expansion" compare to Biden's use of power, since you are in fact able to predict these objections beforehand, aren't you?
Do you think he has dementia?
My father has been a glazier for 40 years, and I've worked with him on occasional jobs here and there. He is self-employed, and primarily does storefront windows and doors for restaurants, banks, retail, offices, etc.
Pros:
- Nothing gross about it really. All metal and glass. Sawdust, metal shavings, etc., but nothing unsanitary.
- In growing areas the demand is tremendous. It's a somewhat uncommon trade skill, but required in damn near every building everywhere. For many corporate clients, if you can get on their approved vendor list you can basically name your price, and they'll pay it without blinking.
- Pretty high-precision/high-craft. Not mindless at all. Lots of practical problem-solving. Your work may be beautiful. You can drive around your city and point at all kinds of buildings and say, "I did part of that."
- You go all over town or your region each day - no being chained to a desk. But your range wouldn't typically be more than a couple hours from home.
- Don't have to work for a company or with anyone else if you don't want to. The most he does is occasionally hire laborers to help move very large things.
Cons:
- Glass and metal are sharp and can be dangerous. You really have to take safety seriously. People do get seriously injured or die in this line of work, but it doesn't have to be you.
- Shit is heavy. Glass is just very heavy. Finished units are heavier still. A lot is mitigated by various simple machines, carts, dollies, and so on, but there will be times when you must shift some big thing around a corner with muscle force, and you'll feel it the next day. Having said that, my dad is in his 60s and still has all his functions, and tells me he has no unusual daily pain.
- There is often work at heights, potentially extreme ones, usually on scaffolding. Wear the safety harness. And of course you'll certainly be outside in the heat and cold.
- It's a potentially hard skill to pick up, in that you either have to get someone to teach it to you, or work for a company doing the scut work for a couple of years while you learn. No legible credentials (in non-union states anyway), which may be good or bad depending on your perspective.
I can say I would be quite happy if children of mine went into it. It's honest work and actually quite deep and interesting.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
"Own the racist" is a funny way to say "Dunk on the poor victim's cuck father".
Allegedly there is some NGO that goes around coaching/bribing/threatening victims families into saying a bunch of "Let's not make this about race" bullshit. It's quite the contrast to when some black teen commits suicide by cop. But regardless of whether the father's calls for forgiveness, lenience and understanding are sincere or coerced, the degree to which the murderer's family is adding insult to injury should be unforgivable. Not a single ounce of contrition, reflection or humility. I get that people are framing this as the father being a "Good Christiantm", and I'm no Christian myself (yet), but I'm under the vague impression even God requires you to ask forgiveness with some sincerity. It's not just on tap for everyone all the time always regardless of how remorseless or sociopathic they continue to be.
Scott Adam's continues to be correct. It's a hate group, and it's not safe to be around them. If you had doubts before, they are literally putting their money where their poll results are.
"Intersex flag" I would, however, strongly defend. Being intersex is an anatomical trait, not a sexual behavior. Four-year-olds can very well be intersex themselves. Teaching them to be at peace with it, and teaching their classmates that it would be wrong to bully people for being intersex, seems perfectly defensible. Indeed, viewed in this context, the intersex flag is just about the only pride flag which could apply to a four-year-old.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the likelihood of any individual child being intersex or knowing an intersex child is vanishingly small (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome only affects 223 out of every 100,000 male babies, and often isn't even obvious until the subject starts puberty). This isn't like myopia, which affects nearly a quarter of the population. Even if I received credible assurance that the four-year-olds in question would only be taught about intersex conditions in a strictly medical context and would not receive any education about queer theory, gender ideology or pseudoscientific nonsense about "sex assigned at birth" - I would still question the utility of teaching four-year-olds about extremely rare medical conditions which affect such a tiny proportion of the population. Of course no hypothetical child suffering from motor neurone disease should be ashamed of themselves or face bullying because of their condition, but teach a class of four-year-olds about motor neurone disease, and no matter how many caveats you include about how rare it is (never mind statistics, these children don't understand addition yet), we both know what would happen: the dumber half of the class wouldn't know what you were talking about, while the smarter half would go home in floods of tears and have nightmares for weeks afterwards about being paralysed and dying young.
I suspect know that the only reason that children are being taught about intersex conditions at all is the same reason these conditions have been brought up 99% of the time they've been raised by anyone since the turn of the century: as a means of smuggling in gender ideology by the back door.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
This user has requested that I give them a one-month ban for personal time-management reasons. This ban is not a response to their posting quality and will have no bearing on future mod decisions.
Enjoy the break, @Iconochasm.
Corvos
5d ago
(Sorry, I’m migrating this over).
Pope Francis has died at the age of 88. My understanding is that all of his plausible successors are more conservative in terms of doctrine. I imagine that Latin Mass will be easier but are they likely to make any significant changes to the Vatican II settlement?
gafpromise
3d ago
I too am bemused at kids being exposed to drag, it puts me in the same weird headspace as Las Vegas. (Caveat: I'm aware actual people with families live and work in Las Vegas, but I'm talking about the touristy stuff). It always struck me as quite odd that Las Vegas at least in its marketing, had tried to clean up their act and put on a family friendly sort of facade. You can search for family friendly attractions and find official Vegas tourism guides that just pitch Vegas as a fun spot for the whole family. I am still astonished at how many corporations think Vegas is an excellent place to hold their trade shows - and then are somehow caught off guard when the HR reports of inappropriate behavior start piling up.
The thing is, when you are actually there on the Strip, the "family friendly" facade is paper thin. The smell of weed is everywhere. Aside from the many scantily clad costumed characters you'll see roaming around in broad daylight, the many leaflets for various erotic shows, it's common to see tourists themselves cutting loose because, hey, it's Vegas baby!
I went for work events three or four years in a row, and my boss always looked for some attraction or some show we could see for a night out. And no matter how family friendly it was billed (of course the explicit stuff would have been way off limits because work function) I left afterwards wondering if I needed to make a report to HR. There was one occasion where we ventured off the Strip - that was a big mistake. I don't know the name of where we ended up but it was highly awkward to be there with my coworkers, let me tell you.
Drag shows hit me in a similar way. Like it's so clearly designed with particular content for an adult audience. The fact that this one person wants to tone down their act this one time and read little kids a book does not to me, take away from the fact that this is fundamentally an adult-oriented performance art, made for adult consumption. I am absolutely baffled why people want to sanitize it and pretend it's something other than what it is.
The Southeastern border region of Poland is pretty mountainous which would make an armored thrust a lot more difficult. Then you would have to fight through 400 miles of Belarus before you got to the Russian border, and another 200-400 miles of Russia before you a start to get to the important rail network terminals around St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Invading from the Baltic states, you either have the same problem of fighting through Belarus, or you would have to confine your offensive to the very small section that is the Latvian border, because Lake Peipus makes most of the Estonian border unusable. If you did that and are successful you could potentially cut off St. Petersburg pretty fast but it would be a slog to get to Moscow.
Any attack from the Baltics would also have two additional logistical problems: First you would have to concentrate your entire invasion force in a pretty small area of Latvia, making it vulnerable to a tactical nuclear attack or a conventional thrust into your staging areas. In the event of a conventional thrust you are backed up against the ocean, and risk having your invasion force overrun before it can even start moving. Secondly, Russia owns Kaliningrad and has a substantial force garrisoned there so you risk being attacked from your rear and potentially pincered between two Russian forces. You could deal with Kaliningrad before your invasion, but that could take a while and gives your game plan up weeks or months early unless you are planning on a first-use nuclear strike to deal with it.
Invading from Ukraine has none of these problems. You can attack through the Sumy region along a wide front line and it’s just a straight shot of about 350 miles over flat open steppe and major road systems directly to Moscow. Additionally you can easily divide the Russian force from any potential Belorussian force.
An Attempt at Bringing Back the User Viewpoint Focus Series
I'm attempting to bring it back, and I'm attempting to bring it back with a template so it isn't just an expectation of writing a ten thousand word essay at the drop of a hat. If you have suggestions, feel free to drop them in a comment.
Self description in motte terms
I'm an actual IRL tradcath with classical conservative political views in the continental tradition rather than the British one. More de Maistre, less Hobbes. I'm inherently skeptical of central planning as a solution for long-running problems; the role of a rightly ordered state is more that of a gardener than an engineer. There might be some planning involved but the government's job is more to promote good things and suppress bad things than to build a mold; nobody and no technology can tell what the end result will be. I'm techno-skeptic and HBD accepting-but-minimalist, with strong utopiaskepticism.
I'm also not rationalist in that I don't think we can reason through our problems all the time. Thinking isn't a bad thing, generally speaking, but it's probably not going to solve our actual problems. There's some we're stuck with and some we haven't figured out the solution for but the solution is generally a doing and not a thinking or talking. And in a lot of cases we're not going to figure out the right doing by sitting around and reasoning through it, we have to go try stuff. Like capitalism- nobody in an ivory tower came up with capitalism from first principles. It developed over time until Adam Smith wrote down how it worked from observation. That's why it works and communism doesn't.
Finally, I'm a western supremacist. The west is the best civilization and that's just factual. But the west has a boom/bust cycle of decline before growth, measured in centuries. This isn't usually a technological decline although it sometimes is; it's a civilizational malaise which drives political fragmentation and lower accomplishment until people rebuild. In other words decadence, but I believe decadence isn't just a feeling, it can be measured(by someone who's better at math than I am). The west in its boom overtakes every civilization; the chinamen will stick to their tea and incense when a western boom spreads to Mars and then the stars, just as the last western boom spread to every corner of the earth. The west is unfortunately in a decadent part of the cycle but we as individuals can build functioning institutions to rebuild it, as our ancestors did in the middle ages to claw themselves back up to greatness. And we do need to learn from the past; tradition is not necessarily a perfect guide but the alternative is fartsniffing until we've figured something out. Recommended Reading
Family and Civilization by Carle Zimmerman- account of the boom and bust cycle of western civilization. Read with Soldiers and Silver by Michael Taylor to read a snapshot of one of his examples(republican Rome overtaking the Hellenistic kingdoms).
The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich- on western institutions and their organic development into the greatest civilizational boom their ever was.
The Case against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry- on a failed experiment.
The Hapsburg Way by Edward Hapsburg- on applying traditional lessons to modern life.
Brief Manifesto
Build something. Do something. Make civilization work. Run in the hamster wheel turning the cogs of society- propose to your girlfriend and have babies, raise them right, work hard, if you see problems in your community go and find a way to solve them. Get people to organize, or infiltrate a preexisting institution. Join the Elks or the Lions. Make a mark that isn't digital. You probably can't be president(unless JD Vance actually is on this forum), but you can make a difference in people's lives and you can start building the machinery of a functioning society.
Senators and presidents can do whatever stupid things they're on about, it's not an excuse for not showing up. Us common folk still need to make shit work. Follow the success sequence and make it so your kids can do the same. Set a good example. Listen to your grandparents. Make being a worker bee OK.
Ping me on
I have specific knowledge of: Catholicism and Tradcaths(the real ones, not the twitterati), Texas politics, trades work(I would like to write an effortpost about the trades shortage but think I would need help with research) and blue collar work in general, and the people who do it.
AAQC's I'm proud of/would like to call attention to once more
https://www.themotte.org/post/1287/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/277989?context=8#context
https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/194609?context=8#context
I nominate @Dean for the next one. If you can't do it, please say so in the comments so someone can replace you.
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