“if Trump won then that means anyone more to the left of the Democratic establishment is unelectable” is the stupidest argument ever bc if you pull your head out of your ass you’d notice that if you wanted to be consistent with that logic then it shouldve been impossible for Trump to win considering that he’s further to the right than McCain and Romney
“democrats lost because they are too far left and therefore need to swing right on stuff like lgbt rights and environment” is a sentiment that’s hilariously false but also convincing enough for certain bubbles that it can do a lot of damage
In case one of those bubbles happens to be reading this:
It’s worth noting that Trump didn’t do much complaining about LGBT rights himself, even if he’s let the Republican party adopt a harder stance than he has. He wasn’t elected to Crush the Gays. And the Environment does need its protection.
The real questions are things like Nationalism vs Globalism, concerns about terrorism, immigration, culture war speech-policing, and the people left behind by Globalization.
If the Left didn’t shift an inch on LGBT rights, but started saying “you know, maybe we should impose tariffs proportional to our trade deficits with other countries so we don’t have net capital outflow” or “you know, maybe keeping high-risk refugees from active war zones outside of our country and just sending them heaps of supplies instead isn’t diabolical racism” and stopped saying “lol dey tuk er jerbs” when someone complained about it… then they could grab some of these people that the Democrats lost.
Of course, that won’t actually happen. Instead they’ll keep stubbornly exposing people to the same stimulus that has shocked the far right back from the dead in Europe.
I mean Donald Trump has married a succession of models, just sayin’.
So either he’s not a true asshole or “assholes don’t get dates” has a ton of mitigating factors, as assholes are well aware.
wasn’t it more like “assholes get all the dates”?
The people who use shaming for people who don’t get dates don’t believe that. They frequently denounce anyone who does.
This is the problem with applying moral weight to whether someone is dateable. Even Adolf managed to have dates, but the average dateless slob that is complained about is multiple orders of magnitude less evil.
This is because attraction is nearly orthogonal to whether someone is a good person.
I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.
Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.
For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.
The only hope, in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.
If large corporations had to carry insurance which paid out in the event of a security breach exposing users’ data, they might take it more seriously. It converts the small annual risk of such a breach, which managers can gamble on, into a measurable monthly or annual cost which can be lowered through preventative measures.
You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that your mind is in Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president. You are guaranteed that it is impossible to undo this change. As president, what do you do with the powers available to you? How do Congress, the media, and the public respond? How do you respond back?
Oh wow.
I want to be clear that I think I’d be a pretty bad president. I wouldn’t be worse than Donald Trump, admittedly, but I think being president is legitimately a really hard job which you can kill billions of people by screwing up badly enough and kill millions of people just by not thinking to ask the right questions or appoint the right people. And I don’t know the right questions or the right people. I don’t even necessarily know how to find them, it’s not like ‘interviewing people and determining whether they are competent at federal policy’ is a skillset I have.
I think like @ozymandias271 I probably call Obama and explain what has happened and ask him for suggestions and take them unless they involve bombing people, which I am not going to do even though becoming president seems to mysteriously make people conclude it’s a good idea. And instead of spending our foreign aid bribing people we should probably spend it stamping out malaria and neglected tropical diseases. And maybe I could try to wiggle Trump’s position on immigration around to the stance that we should have an arrangement like Canada’s where communities can raise money to sponsor a refugee and help their integration.
And of course throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture and developing carbon sequestration and so on and so forth (how much power does the President actually have to do this?) and bringing in people to have debates over things like the minimum wage and healthcare where the end result of the debates will not be ‘I know what to do’ but just ‘I remain horribly uncertain what to do, and I feel terrible about myself for not being smart enough to have it figured out’. Meanwhile I desperately try to replace the VP with someone who will be a good president. As soon as this person is secured I step down.
- to, uh, be a seventy year old man? The rest of my life sounds super unpleasant tbh. I will feel uncomfortable around all of my friends who have made cracks about how ugly Donald Trump is (moral: you shouldn’t body-shame people because what if a random blogger is bodyswapped with the sitting president and feels bad about themself as a result?), and most people I interact with will think I have a long history of sexual assault and this will be, like, incredibly unpleasant and terrifying and make me feel constantly disgusting. And I’ll have a ten year old who thinks I’m his dad, though maybe improving on Trump’s parenting would be as easy as improving on his presidency.
I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.
Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.
For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.
The only hope, in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.
Endorsed
This is why one third of my online thought is devoted to a blog trying to figure out how tribalism works and whether it can be used to good ends. Either we can make a society with Universal Justice that does not have systematic problems that turn person against person… Or we can’t.
If we can’t, we should find the second best alternatives, and investigate them even when they perpetuate some injustice (since in such a case, it’s impossible not to.) I think there’s a good chance such a “second best” resembles tribalism more than liberalism, and at least this question needs to explored seriously.
nationalism. the concept you are looking for is nationalism
this is confused by the fact that people use ‘nationalism’ to refer to nationalism, the thing one meta level up from zionism, ethnopolitics in any form including merely engineering an ethnicity-specific culture, debates over immigration policy, and whatever dumbass shit jasbir puar tortured the word into
imo the important question that falls out of this is roman empire ‘civic nationalism’ vs the thing i’d call metazionism except back when moldbug’s comments section was relevant handle went and called it multizionism instead – if civic nationalism (which in the US would require a lot of engineering, both in the style of the ‘60s ‘black nationalists’ – or for that matter the finnish nationalists who went out and made the kalevala a thing – and in the form of redrawing the flows of information and people that give rise to shared context) is viable it’s obviously preferable, but what if it’s not
happy christmas adam to all men’s rights activists
Please stop pestering us with things like this. This has nothing to do with men fighting for their rights. Eve is short for ‘evening’. Please don’t turn activism into a joke. Thanks.
Someone isn’t having a good christmas adam
Christmas Adam: December 23rd. Comes before Christmas Eve and is generally unsatisfying.
Christmas Adam is like so many other jokes and “jokes” - it’s only funny when someone you know isn’t saying it as an attack is saying it. Otherwise it’s no better than… honestly I can’t think of a good gender-flipped example right now.
Same thing with 95% of X Tears memes. If it’s a demographic being targetted and not something like “Console Peasant Tears”, then it isn’t really “ironic”, it’s just a flat-out attack against which they are permitted to defend themselves.
in order for the media to actively marginalise white supremacist groups they need to adopt a classically liberal posture, eg. that there are universal values, that ethnoracial solidarity is bad and cosmopolitanism good, and that some cultures deserve to be squashed because they suck.
a reminder that the reason nuclear power has not grown in the US is not overzealous safety fears, but because building a plant is an extremely capital-intensive investment with a large tail risk of extremely high costs. (quotes you see about the cheapness of nuclear power are about the *marginal* cost of the power, not including the fixed costs like the plant.)
no one wants to insure that. so, the government has to subsidize nuclear power with below-rate insurance. which is akin to the government insuring major investment firms - usually they won’t have to pay out, but the one time they do, it will be ugly.
the states with a flourishing nuclear power industry (such as France) are characterized by more government involvement because that’s what it takes to subsidize such risks. nuclear power does not flourish in a free market.
It isn’t the insurance. The US government would cover it if the price of the power were right. The issue is very cheap natural gas combined with uncertainty about the future price of renewables.
A carbon price could make a big difference in the first.
As for the second, there currently seems to be a saturation point on renewables before it starts needing too much backup power generation, and the real question is battery technology. That will remain uncertain.
Francois and David are what you could loosely characterize as “libertarian” in their world view, and we often argue about the role of government in society. One particular “clash” stands out in my mind, because it helped me crystalize my thinking on this matter. So we were talking while eating lunch at the Taco Bell in downtown Monterey of all places. Suddenly David, a man in his sixties, excused himself, got up, and ran outside. What had happened was that he had seen several young men bullying and roughing up another young man, and David had gone to intervene.
In thinking about what David had done, I finally understood how he and other libertarians could see their vision of limited government as a viable means of running a society. Such a society would be entirely workable if most people behaved like David!
It’s always a pleasant surprise when, instead of saying “libertarians are libertarian because they don’t care if other people suffer”, an opponent of libertarianism says “libertarians are libertarian because they think other people care about helping others as much as they do”.
Isn’t this true of nearly all ideologies? That if they were practiced by good people in good faith, they’d work an awful lot better?
Francois and David are what you could loosely characterize as “libertarian” in their world view, and we often argue about the role of government in society. One particular “clash” stands out in my mind, because it helped me crystalize my thinking on this matter. So we were talking while eating lunch at the Taco Bell in downtown Monterey of all places. Suddenly David, a man in his sixties, excused himself, got up, and ran outside. What had happened was that he had seen several young men bullying and roughing up another young man, and David had gone to intervene.
In thinking about what David had done, I finally understood how he and other libertarians could see their vision of limited government as a viable means of running a society. Such a society would be entirely workable if most people behaved like David!
It’s always a pleasant surprise when, instead of saying “libertarians are libertarian because they don’t care if other people suffer”, an opponent of libertarianism says “libertarians are libertarian because they think other people care about helping others as much as they do”.
Isn’t this true of nearly all ideologies? That if they were practiced by good people in good faith, they’d work an awful lot better?
Do you ever prescribe Ritalin/Adderall for excessive daytime sleepiness? Just curious how common a practice it is, because before my psychiatrist prescribed it for me I didn't know that was a legitimate reason to give stimulants.
I’ve never done it, and I’d be reluctant to unless I’d done a really good job trying to find the source of the sleepiness (did someone screen you for sleep apnea?)
Even if I had to do something like this, I would probably try Wellbutrin or modafinil, on general “don’t prescribe Adderall if you can avoid it” principles, which I admit are not very scientifically backed.
Okay, I think this needs to be clarified, since apparently people have sort of overlooked it:
It does not matter whether someone’s reasons for not wanting to have sex with you are good enough. They get to say no. Period. No exceptions. You don’t get to attack them or shame them for it. They just get to say “no”. It doesn’t matter whether they’re being transphobic, or racist, or sexist, or whatever else you think is wrong with their reasons. It doesn’t matter whether they’re crass and shallow and materialistic, or holding the world to unreasonable standards, or anything else.
If someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, you do not get to harass them for being wrong.
if they don’t consent, that is the end of it!
Caveat: you never get to harass someone for the act of saying no, but you can certainly call out any hurtful actions they take in the process of saying no. If someone says “of course I’d never fuck you, you [slur]”, it’s not wrong to say “I respect your ‘no’, but that was nasty and uncalled for.”
She would probably tell you you’re insane and there’s no way she would do that.
This is because, if she acts like this, she will have a harder time finding a mate. She’s been told all her life that men want a certain kind of woman, and if she is not that woman, she will die alone.
Whenever you see someone in a culture with a strong aversion to breaking their gender role - “I can’t have sex with a lot of men or I’ll be a slut!” then that is a sign that they are undergoing external pressure to behave that way in order to attract a mate - a reaction to “men want to have sex with younger, relatively inexperienced women”
So I don’t understand all of the comments about “fragile masculinity.”
If masculinity is fragile, then it’s because men have been told their whole lives that women want a certain kind of man, and if he is not that man, then he will die alone.
I don’t understand the mockery. It should be replaced with sympathy. If you wouldn’t mock a young conservative girl for having fragile femininity, then you shouldn’t mock a young man who’s scared of wearing a skirt. He’s not just afraid that wearing a skirt will make him look silly, he’s afraid that if he wears a skirt, women will ridicule him and never be attracted to him again. And sadly, a lot of the, time he’s not wrong.
If you still don’t feel sympathy for this, imagine being asked to do something that you believe will render you unattractive to your desired gender. “Come on, what’s so bad about a face full of rampant acne?” “Hey, why are you scared of 250 extra pounds? Is your body image really so fragile?”
It’s also interesting to note that women seem less afraid, in general, of violating their gender role than men are - which is why the concept of “fragile masculinity” is way more popular than “fragile femininity.” I also suspect that 100 years ago, this would not have been the case - that women’s gender roles would have been equally as strict as men’s (as evidenced by all those etiquette books on how to be a ‘proper woman’).
This seems to imply that more progress has been made into loosening women’s strict gender roles than has been made for men.
Why do you think this is?
It’s easier to loosen gender roles for women than for men because masculinity also circumscribes within it the span of all heroically admirable traits. Inner strength, ambition, risk-taking, decisiveness, independence, and command are all strongly coded masculine, and are also the traits that you see most often in the protagonists of any narrative.
The heroic feminine is far more limited- I can only right now think of empathy and emotional resilience (which differs from inner strength in that it is displayed primarily to loved ones rather than to outgroup). These heroic traits tend to be assigned to beloved, but auxiliary characters, which necessarily draw less admiration. Some might argue wisdom to be an example of heroic feminine, but I think wisdom isn’t strongly gendered either way- while the wise woman is an acceptable expression of femininity, there are still more wise men represented.
Moving from the conceptual to the practical, skills that are coded masculine are universally more respected than skills coded feminine. The oldest example of this is physical combat versus childcare. While you could argue that motherhood and childcare is well-venerated, it’s tiers below the glory found in violence. Even in the modern day, the humanities have become less valued as more women have moved into them, and STEM and entrepreneurship (which retain majority male population) are most respected. While being a doctor is respectable in the US, nations with majority female doctors respect and pay their doctors far less.
This extends even into personal interests- masculine-coded interests like sports and cars are treated as universal, or at least understandable and immune to critique in the mainstream. Meanwhile, feminine-coded interests such as fashion and makeup are seen as frivolous and vain.
I feel the relationship between disrespect towards women themselves and disrespect towards feminine-coded skills, traits, and interests is, like most such things, a feedback loop with no clearly identifiable start or end. But I do hold that misogyny is at the root of women being able to buck their gender roles more easily than men.
The trouble for a man staying in a female-dominated, or even gender-equal-population field, is that he cannot use it to demonstrate his masculinity. If something is done 90% by women, then it cannot be used to prove manliness to women - after all, how can it separate him from them when they could do the exact same thing themselves! (It might be the case that various LGBTQ women, don’t count for this psychologically/socially.)
My fear, not full-on belief, but fear, is that the reason things are this way is that a sufficiently large chunk of cis heterosexual women don’t actually want the situation to change, because their selection criteria are different from mens’.
My hope is that it’s going to collapse by women realizing that they can be attracted to men that break the traditional pattern, and eventually this will reach sufficient critical mass to collapse the culture’s self-reinforcing effect. A lot of the conditions that created the current culture’s norms aren’t holding anymore.
But since the level of nature vs nurture is unknown, I don’t see that as guaranteed. Transhumanism may ultimately render it irrelevant by the time it would normally take effect.
Five years ago a young man went down into the haunted mines, promising to clear it of evil. Today he emerged, covered in ancient armour stained with the blood of unimaginable horrors, glowing of magic. He demands we dig deeper.
“Finally, you’re back!”
Karlof stepped into the wooden mining shack. The ancient metal of his armor, meant for a war forgotten by time, clanked as he walked inside. The green patina of the armor was stained with the black blood of countless horrors.
Karlof looked over at the woman who welcomed him. She sat in a wooden chair, gray hair coming down to her shoulders. Her simple outfit looked worn from years of use.
“You can’t stay here,” Karlof said. “We need to warn the village. We must dig deeper into-” After a moment, he looked at the woman again.
“Mom?” He asked.
“We’ve been waiting for you for so long,” the woman said. “They said you would come back soon. Listen, Karl, a lot of things have changed since you were gone. The government-”
But Karl didn’t wait. If his mother was still alive, perhaps some of the others from the village might still be, too. He opened the door, still expecting the charred remnants he had seen in the vision far below.
He was startled by the loud “FWEEEEEEEE” of a whistle. The head of the whistleblower turned and faced him. Two fiery orange eyes with pupils slitted like a cat’s drew his attention. Above them, rising from the new woman’s head, rose two horns, curling backwards. A pair of fangs pushed downwards from bored lips. She was wearing a sturdy outfit of cloth and leather.
The horned woman looked back at him for a moment, before turning her head and shouting. “Alright, ‘e’s out! You can get back to digging!” In the corner of his eye, Karlof saw the mass of some huge brass contraption move.
“What’s the meaning of this?!” he said, looking first at the horned woman and then at his mother.
“The government was taken over by these Otokyaryi, oh, several winters ago now.” Said Karlof’s mother.
“We lost the war?” Karl said the words, but after years of fighting in the dark recesses of the Underworld itself, he had almost entirely forgotten the fighting on the surface.
“No,” objected the horned woman. “We bought this territory fair and square.” She gestured in a “come here” motion with her hand. “Now step on out of there. We’re two million pounds overbudget and three months behind schedule.”
Karlof just stared back in disbelief.
“Well don’t just stand there looking at me,” said the horned woman. “If this energy well isn’t finished and converting nightmares into crystal rock in the next three months, I’m going to get fired. You didn’t think magic carpets fueled themselves, did you?”
The road to ending “slut shaming” of women probably goes through the town of “destroy the norm of giving men status for being sexually successful, and of treating male virgins as disgusting losers”.
I say this because I think some of the desire to enforce sex norms on women relates to the nature of sexual access as a status good for men.
If a low-partner man gets into a relationship with a high-partner woman, he is considered lower status for it, under multiple frameworks. Under a “promiscuous women are low-value” framework, it lowers his value by suggesting he had to ‘settle’ for a woman other men could extract sex from but didn’t consider worthy of commitment. Under a “anyone having a high partner count means they are high-value” framework, it suggests that the woman is higher value than he is (which is risky if men are judged more on status than women are), and that the way for him to raise his value is to have lots of meaningless sex with lots of people.
If a low-partner man and a high-partner man are in the same community, the low-partner man is lower status than the high-partner man is, since masculinity is contingent on success, and success with women is counted as one category of success. (In fact, one of the socially damaging aspects of virginity / lower partner count is that it is considered “unmasculine”.)
This creates a strong motivation for status war. If low-partner men can attack promiscuity in women, they can create a situation where women have partner counts closer to their own. Failing that, they can lower the status of such women so that they’re at least not higher status than themselves.
Unless their sexual success is decoupled from their social status, men will always have a motivation to wage status war through “slut shaming”.
The way to alter the status of high-partner men is not through straight men themselves, since their value in this respect is conferred by women. (Low-partner men are already low status, so they have less social power to alter these very norms.) It’s through the actions of women.
One way to do this is for women to start treating promiscuous men the way promiscuous women were treated in the past. If women started treating high-partner men like hot potatoes that are disgusting, low-status (like male virgins are now), and aren’t worthy of sex (not just commitment, as getting a woman to commit isn’t considered special), it would radically alter the status dynamic in male communities.
Another possibility is if commitment from women somehow became more difficult to get, and thus was considered special and more valuable than sex, but it’s unclear under what conditions this would emerge as a stable equilibrium. Current conditions don’t favor it or any obvious paths to it. The traditional norm is the opposite - women trade sex to get commitment. If this could be changed, it would increase the status of a man the woman finally ‘settled’ for. (It appears to be true in the opposite direction currently.)
Another way to do it is to treat low-partner and high-partner men the same in a very noticeable way so that men will start internalizing that being high-partner isn’t the same as getting the “approval from women” they need to prove their masculinity and raise their status. This doesn’t mean in fields unrelated to sex. The status comes from sex, so they have to be treated as equally sexually desirable, perhaps even the virgins.
All of these courses of action have their own problems. Depending on the balance of nature vs nurture, some or all of them may not even be feasible. They may do secondary damage. They may just not be enjoyable to a lot of people.
It was the year feminists agreed that “dick is abundant and low value”
In short, gymtw is centered around the idea that women deserve to be directly compensated by men for the emotional labor they provide.
Misandry has gone mainstream, and unfortunately the irony seems to be lost on men.
women are using performative misandry as both comedy and coping mechanism; a way to bond with each other and commiserate about the seeming inevitability of their oppression. In a way, it’s the logical alternative to the real violence we might have enacted if we had decided to actually revolt.
Even if feminists sincerely did want to kill all men, ban all men, or bathe in male tears, it would be a logistically difficult and absurd proposition.
And I won’t lie: Making you uncomfortable — not afraid or hurt, but just a little bit discomfited — is part of the point.
Feminist misandry is an act of reclamation. It’s a way to defang the accusations that at worst get women killed and at best get them ostracized. It is an extended exercise in harmless trolling.
[K]ill all men’ — even in jest — is a reminder of the historical role white women play in white masculine violence against men of color.
The world is actively hostile to women in a way that it isn’t to men.
The rising prominence of feminism in mainstream discourse does mean that fewer men will automatically have access to unearned privilege.
That is, after all, the goal: To convert our society into the meritocracy we have long claimed already existed.
I don’t really have anything to say about these quotes, but I find them interesting to read, like elaborate permutations of a discourse rubik’s cube.
I recognize about half of the quotes and could tell you the authors and outlets where they appeared. Hate-sharing and clickbait seem to work better on me than I’d like to admit.
“When you say ‘I hate you’, do you mean hate me?”
“I don’t hate just you personally, I hate every single person in a group you belong to and find that this seething hatred a great way to bond”
A lot of ace people are LGBTQ. I typically go with the standard definition of “if you experience any significant same-sex attraction, you’re LGBTQ,” and just being asexual or aromantic doesn’t disqualify you from that. I would also consider people who experience no attraction at all (asexual and aromantic) as LGBTQ too, but that’s just me personally. But people who are asexual and heteroromantic or aromantic and heterosexual are not LGBTQ.
What I really objected to in that post was the idea of categorizing an HIV activism blog as “aphobic”
My mother didn’t allow me to have fake guns as a child. At the time, it was a choice to reject glorification of violence. These days, it would be a choice to ensure one’s child does not get shot.
I had an idea. What if we just stop gendering toys?
I had LEGOs and they came in boy colors, but I didn’t know, I was five years old and I thought they were fun to play with! What if we gave kids functional toys and imaginative toys and anything in between, and just ignored gender?
Less profitable.
Lego started selling girl Legos and got such a massive surge in profits you would think three new Star wars movies came out. Not that Legos were boy only in the first place.
This is actually the reason they started the whole “Girl LEGOs” thing in the first place. The LEGO sets for girls are the result of a lot of focus group testing in addition to market research, if I remember correctly. It isn’t actually arbitrary. The things make bank, and the previous ones just didn’t sell as many kits to girls.
so I’ve been blogging fairly consistently on here for the past two years now but I haven’t received my first check yet, do I have to contact @staff myself or
You need a sponsor like Blacktower IFG or General Atomics. Private sponsors pay a bit better than state sponsors usually, but they’re harder to get.
If you’re willing to go for lower bids, you can always get cash from the Middle Kingdom, but you might have to swallow a bit more of your pride than you would for one of the Western nations.
I’d tell you some of mine, but my contract prohibits disclosure. (That’s par for the course for most sponsors that aren’t political campaigns.)
This is a pretty good article about the town next to the one I grew up in. I knew the young mayor, who is quoted in the article, as an even younger man, goofy and occasionally annoying to me, but definitely a good dude. I dated his sister and their family always made me feel accepted.
But there’s no hope here. Delphi is slightly bigger than my town, but it shrinks every year. As the article points out, there is an incredible generational gap here. It’s not just that the town is run down and kind of boring (beautiful as it actually is), there are also less and less opportunities to scrape a living out of the dirt or off the factory floor. There are sharp racial divisions as well, which this article doesn’t explore. The hog processing plant mentioned in the article employs a lot of immigrants and there is certainly some lingering resentment toward them, maybe for supposedly taking some of the few jobs, maybe for their inability or refusal to integrate. Probably both. The entire county is sharply segregated.
I really encourage reading this if you have a while. Living in small town America, at least there in central Indiana, feels a lot like dying- because that’s what it is. It’s the slow withering death of hope and promise.
Of course I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s worth living there. Having just moved out to Sandy, OR from Portland, I can say that I’ve actually really missed living in a rural area. The truth is, life itself is looking more and more bleak no matter where you are, so you should just stay wherever feels like home.
I’ve lived in towns that were slowly dying and in economically vibrant towns. There’s a difference, in the psychology, in the politics, in everything.
And, on paper, on a meta level, the Left absolutely should have something to offer the citizens of failing local communities.
But, the Left didn’t.
And, Indiana feels like dying, and it feels like nobody cares.
I mean, what could the left have offered these communities that they didn’t already offer (even if they potentially failed to deliver on due to divided government)?
The standard Democratic politician supports more infrastructure spending, renegotiating trade deals, bolstering unions, job re-education programs, more funding for public schools (which would probably disproportionately benefit poor rural areas that can’t easily fund their own schools), bailing out the car manufacturers, tax incentives for rural development, more access to health care, and the (broadly defined) welfare state.
Sure, these communities probably were going to economically decline anyway even if all those policies were done 100% as their designers had hoped, but I don’t see anything short of extremely inefficient and absurd crony capitalist subsidies for companies to stay put and absurd regulations against automation saving these towns economically, and if those things were done they would amount to basically be a very large (indirect) handout for the very same people who despise handouts when smaller amounts of money than it would take to save these towns are given to black and brown people in the cities who are also struggling and feel like nobody cares.
Which is why I can’t help but conclude that the resentment of the left of these rural flyover communities is more (though not entirely) cultural/racial/religious/ethno-nationalist.
It’s true there’s nothing (ie, not a lot) reasonable that technocratic center-leftism can offer dying communities. And because the Democratic party has a lot of fact-checking instincts that prevents outright lying, there’s not much they would.
But you don’t need to resort to ulterior motives to understand that people will vote for the party that DOES offer a solution (even if its a lie) over the one who says “we can’t solve your problem.”
And if a significant politically-dominant block of your country has an insoluble problem, then guess what, your country will keep voting for outright liars until something resolves their crisis.
A lot of the Trump angst focuses too much on specific American factors or the moral failings of various politicians in not reacting appropriately (it’s not the fault of Democratic messaging or their various small ball policy proposals). But we can see with the rise of an isolationist far-right across among almost every developed Western country, that it’s a fundamental reaction to trends across the whole world in the last few decades.
I should clarify that I don’t think economic distress is not a factor in this, it absolutely is. Maybe I downplayed it above. I believe that it is a necessary condition for the rise of the populist-nationalist-isolationist right. It doesn’t seem to be sufficient to explain what has happened, though. Especially when poor immigrants and poor racial and religious minorities aren’t flocking to these populist parties despite equal or greater economic distress. Especially when it seems like education rather than income is more predictive of support of support for these parties.
There are a lot of lefty politicians who will pretend that technocratic center-leftism will save these communities, and offer it up as a solution, and yet that wasn’t the message that resonated. I don’t think (most of) these people are racist or xenophobic, at least not in the harsh colloquial sense of those words, but I just can’t explain Trump or Brexit or LePen or Alternative for Germany without there being some sort of intense cultural/demographic anxiety involved (not all of which is irrational, I do think for instance that Germany probably took in too many refugees). Why this anxiety crosses borders is simply that, for good and for ill, globalization and neoliberalism allow for more cultural and demographic change than is normal in the west.
Yeah for certain there are a lot of center-left politicians offering lamppost solutions* when none might exist. And as we saw from America to Greece, much of the technocratic establishment is extremely eager to knee-cap far-left parties which precludes finding out whether their solutions would quell this uprising.
But the answer might be nihilism. In a society structured on identity-through-job, modernity (including increasing financialization, free trade, and automation) might just kill enough communities that the entire democratic consensus falls apart. I think it’s important to remove “having a job” as a necessary part of social identity (both for individuals and emergent structures like small towns) in the face of this capitalist revolution, but that’s not exactly easy to implement as a federalized governing agenda.
*As in when a drunk loses his keys on the street at night, and assumes they are under the lamppost, because if they aren’t he can’t find them anyway.
Wage subsidies might have been able to do the trick, and economists like them. They don’t seem to be on anyone’s radar, however, and the EITC is yearly which isn’t often enough to work.
Some part of me suspects the reason they aren’t on peoples’ radars is that rural whites were used as the fulcrum for identity politics, but maybe they’re simultaneously too boring while being too left wing.
Attention is a finite resource, so every thing that you care a lot about, there will be something you don’t give a shit about (but not necessarily vice versa).
Newton: if I have seen further than others it is only because I totally neglected a whole bunch of things other people consider absolutely vital
an intellectual: everything you eat is made of chemicals.
another intellectual: “chemicals” as used in colloquial speech typically refers to isolated compounds created by industrial processes that are not commonly found in the natural environment, some of which we know are toxic to humans and have been banned for use in food production and some of which we still use but suspect are not conducive to good health.
Why do so many people continue to insist that not telling your partner you once did sex work before you even met them is tantamount to some massive betrayal?
“But funereal-disease,” they keep saying, “what if I didn’t want to date a sex worker? I have a right to make an informed decision about staying in a relationship.” Indeed you do, but where do you draw that line? How many personal sexual details must someone divulge before their partner’s consent is sufficiently informed? Is it a betrayal if you’ve had an STI in the past? If you’ve attended an orgy? If you’ve experimented with people outside your orientation? If you’ve engaged in a kink that you know your partner finds repulsive? Once you’ve coupled up, are you no longer allowed private memories?
Apparently not when it comes to sex, because sex work, according to the brain trust at reddit dot com slash relationships, isn’t just another part of one’s sexual history. It’s something inherently and irreversibly tainting. It’s something so all-consuming that not disclosing it means you’ve “tricked someone” into marriage. It’s a bait and switch, clearly: you expected a normal woman, but instead you got one of those icky sluts. Because if she’s capable of doing the unspeakable, of ~selling her body~, then she’s obviously got nothing in common with the woman you thought you loved. Sex workers are never clever or funny or worth marrying on personal merits. Either she’s a worthwhile person or she’s a whore.
I’m sure this is a part of it, but I’d also be kinda pissed if I was married to someone for 5 years and I found out through someone else that they were a geophysicist for 3 years and had somehow avoided the topic of the entire time we were together. How you sell your labour is a weirdly significant part of your identity, and it would definitely feel like a significant omission: what else is she hiding? Infidelity? Drug Trafficking? A pivotal role in the end of the Weimar Republic?
It’s less the fact that she didn’t tell him and more the fact that it seems that it probably took intentional effort on her part to hide it from him.
Which is not even to mention that if it’s something you could easily be blackmailed for (as it sounds like she might be being threatened here based on the comments) that’s definitely something that should come up before the “joint tax returns” part of the relationship.
Sex work is orders of magnitude more stigmatized than geophysics, though. I don’t think hiding something you’re likely to be marginalized for and likely to be suffering internalized shame about is indicative of an inherently deceitful personality. If my partner, after almost four years, came out to me as bi, I wouldn’t wonder what else he was hiding, because being closeted out of shame and/or necessity isn’t the same as enjoying deceiving others.
it seems to me that even without the stigma of sex work, the original problem of how much you must divulge to one’s partner before sex is a problem of guessing the relevance of one’s personal information to a partner. is my lack of sexual history relevant? is my disability? my job history? ideally, if someone’s consent is contingent on information, they should seek it out before engaging in the activity, right? granted, i don’t know how practical that is.
ideally, if someone’s consent is contingent on information, they should seek it out before engaging in the activity, right?
THIS. If having particular information is very important to you, ask!
I still feel like there’s a lack of easy ways to enumerate every possible thing I want to know about a partner.
When was the last time you were tested? Have you ever killed anyone? Are you a werewolf? Etc etc.
I’m all for changing the expected set of questions based on broader social trends (like the more recent move towards assuming by default that a person shouldn’t be expected to disclose being trans unless it’s explicitly mentioned as a deal breaker and they can do so safely) but it seems that there does need to be a list, even if it’s fuzzy and unspoken.
Wouldn’t just asking if someone did sex work before be considered an insult by many people? Along with asking them if they’re trans?
Being “asexual” is listed, along with being insulting and demeaning (as if it was equivalent to those things), as an abusive behavior that should be a reason for societal outcry.
Other sites say that “withholding sex” is fine when it is due to a medical condition. However, the person not providing sex is then expected to get their condition treated as soon as possible so they are capable of providing sex again:
So, not getting your sex-preventing medical condition treated is abuse, and not “refusing to offer alternate means of pleasure”, whatever that means, is also considered abuse.
And what I get from this is that if you’re in a relationship, you are outright expected to provide sex unless you have a medical exemption.
It’s not like this kind of expectation fuels marital rape and relationship violence or anything.
Yet another site adds to this, noting that mental illness is not a valid excuse unless you try to fix it so that you can provide sex “normally”.
At worst, withholding can manifest itself in ways that may be a red flag for general controlling or manipulative behavior, or it can be done in ways that could be mean or abusive for other reasons (such as if it’s done insultingly).
However, the action itself is not wrong and no one is owed sex even when the person refusing to have it is trying to control others through that. They still have a right to refuse any sex they don’t want and to set whatever standards they wish before they have sex.
It’s too dangerous to allow being in a relationship to be a default “yes, you gotta have sex or you’re evil.”
On the other hand, it isn’t fair to sexual people to demand that they be in sexless relationships.
The middle ground, I think, is that anyone can refuse sex, and anyone can refuse to stay in the relationship, and “we have too little/too much sex” is considered a valid, non-abusive grounds to leave the relationship.
