@CuriousnTT @Sargon_of_Akkad @sleepy_devo @EndWokeness Have you listened to any of his discussions of why he is no longer a liberal?
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jageriv
1.8K posts
@Sargon_of_Akkad @sleepy_devo @EndWokeness Nope. Were you cowardly when you called yourself a Liberal?
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@tracewoodgrains I mean, would this work on the old slave owners? They also like free things. Liking free things is not stupid, if someone else is stupid/weak enough to give it. Arguing someone is better without free stuff than with is very hard.
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This is one right-wing alternative, bluntly put: Black people are stupid and like free things on average, so don't bother appealing to them and openly pursue policies that will make things worse for them.
I want politics that has room for people.
x.com/travis4nh/stat…
travis4nh@travis4nh
1/ There's an asymmetry here that I don't think can ever be overcome. Socialists promise to steal and redistribute wealth, which is extremely tantalizing to a demographic that bc of average low IQ, skill, earnings, and wealth likes free things...and has no culture of liberalism
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I'm sympathetic to classically liberal views of race, but people in my broad camp tend to simply lament that black Americans, by and large, are not persuaded rather than asking why not.
Why did socialists win black support? because they cared in a way classical liberals did not
NeoDogma@NeoDogmaX
@tracewoodgrains @PromptTheory @qualiascript The structure will never change until we let it. My whole thing with black racial questions is, we had a good thing going in the late 90's/early 2000's. Was it perfect? No, but society writ large took the treatment that should have in 20-30 years ended racism as an animating...
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@MojaveArtClub hm, I really should find the peterson quote on this. Its the two sides of the coin of his talk, that one needs to take responsibility, but also don't be a rube, and if a leader, you need to delegate both the good and bad, the authority and rewards.
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It is more accurate to say men have liability without power, or burden and responsibility without power.
America/The West loves these sorts of arrangements, usually the person held most liable, with the most responsibilities, also has the least practical real power.
Wayne Rowcliffe 🦬@wrowclif
The thing I really want to know, and I hope one of you can enlighten me on this, but I've had literally dozens of people come after me with this, "Modern men are given responsibility without authority!" line. Where on earth did this come from? Who is telling them this?
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@spamalotcamelot @AscendedYield I mean, I also don't think Germany could rewrite its welfare state from scratch either. All of europe was able to create their current states from a relative blank slate in the 1950s. Just as FDR and LBJ were able to in the US.
Reform is often a lot harder than creation.
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@AscendedYield Percentage of spending is below Germany, France, Belgium, the Nordics, similar to Canada. Making it out like we're an anomaly among developed nations.
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There is a damaging narrative that Labour built the welfare state in 1945 while Britain was broke, and that this somehow proves we can simply do it all again. It is historically illiterate and it is politically dangerous.
Attlee's settlement was bankrolled by imperial surpluses, Marshall Aid, sterling's privileged role within Bretton Woods, capital controls that turned domestic savers into a captive bond market, and inflation that quietly torched the real debt. It sat on top of a state a fraction of today's size, financed by a young workforce, riding reconstruction productivity growth.
None of that applies now. No imperial buffer. No Marshall Aid. No captive market. UK industry is under 2% of global output. The state already eats 45% of GDP.
Expect this narrative to gain more traction in the coming days when people tell us we can just ignore the markets.
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@Germanu84126434 @upholdreality Hm, my picture of N. Korea has also probably been stuck in the 90s, when things were legitimately awful with no fuel and famine. Like Russia, its maybe a bit of a meme, but the 90s were legitimately terrible.
The 90s are 30 years ago now though.
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@upholdreality This also I just found out now. To my thinking North Korea maybe only high ranking official government who has a car. Seems a lot of cars are actually there, and not old ones but new ones. Maybe there are car factories there, and everything else like a cafe, restaurant, hospital?
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Breaking from Reuters: North Koreans... own cars. With license plates. And drive them. To places. Sometimes there is traffic.
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@wrowclif I think the first place I heard it was Jordan Peterson. His comparison was that someone with responsibility, but no authority, was a slave. The other side of the coin of his "men need to take responsibility" talk was that, I think it was a father needs to give his son authority.
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The thing I really want to know, and I hope one of you can enlighten me on this, but I've had literally dozens of people come after me with this, "Modern men are given responsibility without authority!" line.
Where on earth did this come from?
Who is telling them this?
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@TheFreesaw @parasociality and to be clear, I don't think your arguing in bad faith, I just think your not approaching the question in the optimal way. And that how I laid out is a better frame to consider the question.
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@TheFreesaw @parasociality To talk about meritocracy effectively, I think we need to discuss it as a system, rather than an outcome. And generally, a meritocractic system means some sort of formal testing/exam system. It leadership by those who can pass exams or meet explicit performance reviews.
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My theory is that meritocracy hits a point of diminishing returns.
If you have a group of 100 people, and you pick the smartest one, that person will most likely be both very smart and basically normal.
If you have a group of 100,000,000 people and try to pick the smartest one
arctotherium@arctotherium42
Positive selection on Congressmen increased over time (meanwhile Congress as an institution become useless and retarded).
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@Peter_1_1 @eigenrobot Drones, especially of the million + variety, basically require boots on the ground. You need something like 10,000 shipping containers of bombs, and to get the full benifit of drones, you need endurance, and thus local bases to recharge the drones.
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@eigenrobot why not send in 1M drones and partner with locals to identify and neutralize all irgc members? locals have intel and drones prevent boots on the ground
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yeah at this point i think we probably would be best off just biting the bullet and zeroing out iran's economy
Faytuks News@Faytuks
Iran has rejected dismantling its nuclear facilities in any future talks with the US, sources tell the Wall Street Journal
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@Legal_Fil @NickEMoran Of course, that partially begs the question of if adultery should be illegal? Law as teacher and all that. At the very least, shouldn't that be a civil matter that can be adjucated, at least potentially, privately?
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@NickEMoran “Legitimate” is a low threshold, as in “that’s permitted.” One can think, however, that certain things that are legitimate aren’t socially healthy, so should be avoided.
Much as one can reasonably frown up adultery even though it isn’t illegal.
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Despite my view that gerrymandering is part of politics (as well as my skepticism that anything can actually be done about it), I simply don’t believe that anyone thinks it is a good idea that we are so gleefully rushing toward all-red and all-blue states.
OSZ@OpenSourceZone
The South Carolina House Rules Committee has voted to amend the sine die agreement to allow for Redistricting next week. Final Vote: 🟢 Yes: 12 🔴 No: 2 Potential New Map: 🔴 Republicans: 7 (+1) 🔵 Democrats: 0 (-1) (+/- vs current map)
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@Legal_Fil Hm, isn't this partially the ideal under nationalism, and part of the logic of having states? I'm not sure for example you can have functional politics if, say, language rules are at risk with every election. The ideal is to have a state thats, say, 90% French or english speakers
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@Stradivari78 @SaysSimulation I mean, the Wehrmacht was still probably one of the largest armies ever: quick search suggests it was still about 8 million men.
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@SaysSimulation Ukraines’ army is half dead and made up of old men. Just check who they are forcibly drafting to plug the gap. They have good drone units (btw the Russians as well) and a few remaining elite units, but after 4 years of war this is more strength on paper like the Wehrmacht in 1945
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As a starting point, Ukraine has somewhere around 130 combat brigades at the moment, and they are battle-hardened drone experts. Talking ground troops, Germany, France and the UK combined have somewhere around 25-30 combat brigades. The Europeans are also very deficient
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Steven White@stevewhitemd1
@SaysSimulation So, okay, let's buy your hypothesis. Russia can't beat the proxies in Ukraine. Even more reason why Russia can't roll through Europe. What am I missing here?
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May try n corral some folks up for collab worldbuilding, with a sorta core group of people I know will be cohesive together before opening it up publicly. Could host on my DC or just make a new server, we'll see
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@SofaMods Basically, this assumes a more classic greece colonization, or early British, where each colony is founded as its own distinct political entity. Thus, timeline wise things are more like Classic Greece: Athens and Sparta are both distinct entities with 200 year histories.
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Current dilemma is (a) our own solar system after a unified development effort collapses, or (b) a fictional star system with post-Earth colonial factions coming back into contact as they all try to redevelop it independently. Interstellar would prolly be most flexible but iunno
Sofa (Comms Paused)@SofaMods
There's also the matter of how heavy I want to lean into the worldbuilding/lore side of it, versus just making it a pure toybox. I can think of some ways I might be able to make it a bit of both, though.
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