Politics/Slapfights - Ancient history to modern day!

[Mazder]

Okay the UK has now voted that we will not leave the EU without a deal. So a NO-DEAL Brexit is off the table.
So it's either;
-Theresa May's Deal
-A deal that includes a Second Referendum
- some other deal
-No Brexit.

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

Okay the UK has now voted that we will not leave the EU without a deal. So a NO-DEAL Brexit is off the table.
So it's either;
-Theresa May's Deal
-A deal that includes a Second Referendum
- some other deal
-No Brexit.

Your Government deserves to go the same way as Charles not gonna lie.

[Mazder]

Your Government deserves to go the same way as Charles not gonna lie.

Yeah....
Sadly the only way that's possible now is if they all decide they're fucking up.....

Kill me now.

[Raga]

What's with all the news insistence that the Charlottesville wackos were chanting "Jews will not replace us." They clearly weren't. Seriously. Just listen/watch the footage of the event. They were yelling "You will not replace us."

That's not me trying to pretend they weren't overt white supremacists who are probably wildly antisemitic because most white supremacists are.

It's just weird that this keeps getting repeated and nobody seems to note or care.

[Mazder]

What's with all the news insistence that the Charlottesville wackos were chanting "Jews will not replace us." They clearly weren't. Seriously. Just listen/watch the footage of the event. They were yelling "You will not replace us."

That's not me trying to pretend they weren't overt white supremacists who are probably wildly antisemitic because most white supremacists are.

It's just weird that this keeps getting repeated and nobody seems to note or care.

OMG THANK YOU!
I was starting to think I was the crazy one who wasn't hearing "Jews".
I mean, grainy, obviously slightly distorted choicely picked clips aside where it was rather vague I swear I saw loads of different clips saying "you".

I think it's almost as if saying that they didn't say that in the famous/infamous clip means by default you're claiming they're not most likely white supremacists.
I mean it's clear they're against a left wing ideaology and it's a more generalized "against/replace us" feel, that doesn't mean it doesn't include jews but clearly those guys are more than just Nazi's 2.0.
They are something more.

[Raga]

clearly those guys are more than just Nazi's 2.0.

Sure, but that's mostly because they are American. Americans have never done fascist in quite the same way Europe has. The progenitor white supremacist movement here is the Klan and even Neo-Nazis here end up mimicking them as much or more than actual historical German Nazis, whether they mean to or not.

Tiki torches much? Night time march rallying around Confederate iconography? That's got Klan written all over it. The Klan is/was aggresively antisemitic, but the Jew hate has always been secondary to being anti-black.

[Mazder]

Sure, but that's mostly because they are American. Americans have never done fascist in quite the same way Europe has. The progenitor white supremacist movement here is the Klan and even Neo-Nazis here end up mimicking them as much or more than actual historical German Nazis, whether they mean to or not.

Tiki torches much? Night time march rallying around Confederate iconography? That's got Klan written all over it. The Klan is/was aggresively antisemitic, but the Jew hate has always been secondary to being anti-black.

Oh, yeah, it definitely gives off that feel more than a "Right Wing Rally" as I would think of it.
Blackshirts, Brownshirts, Silvershirts, etc.
It doesn't feel like they have the same organisation power.

I do think there is more of a range in their group. None innocent but definitely more shades of grey than absolute black. Don't get me wrong they have their darkest side, but they do have people in you could bring away from them.

[Raga]

I do think there is more of a range in their group. None innocent but definitely more shades of grey than absolute black. Don't get me wrong they have their darkest side, but they do have people in you could bring away from them.

Inasmuch as it's sometimes possible to deradicalize people generally whether they are jihadists, white supremacists, or whatever, sure, but their current nature is pretty unambiguous.

[Mazder]

Inasmuch as it's sometimes possible to deradicalize people generally whether they are jihadists, white supremacists, or whatever, sure, but their current nature is pretty unambiguous.

True, in the same way BLM has a load of Black Supremacists and racists in it's mix, yeah.

[Mazder]

Also a video by some guy that rambles a bit but he goes into how absolutists view centrists/moderates and tries to explain why/how they're wrong.
Yeah it's sparked by light youtube/twitter drama but it's a decent example I just saw;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvoBdaqqQ9o

[Raga]

True, in the same way BLM has a load of Black Supremacists and racists in it's mix, yeah.

I'm really trying to not be one of these people that just shuts people down with this, but it's really not like that.

The Charlottesville people were unequivocally committed white supremacists. This supposed "Unite the Right" rally did not draw people broadly from across the Right who number in the 10s of millions in this country. It drew a few hundred to a few thousand people out of a country of 320 million. Way, way, way less than most any march that claims to be representing a broad swath of people would draw. And the reason it drew so few is because it *wasn't* targeted at a broad swath of people. It targeted a very narrow subset of people: avowed white supremacists. Calling it "Unite the Right" was PR.

This has 0 to do with the odiousness of Antifa or BLM or any other thing. Whatever those other groups do, whatever they are comprised of, it doesn't change anything about the fundamental makeup of the tiki-torch wielders. The tiki-torch wielders were *predominantly* composed of white supremacists. It's not a case of a few bad apples. And this is me using the old, original, actually meaningful definition of the term "white supremacist" and not the newfangled social justice one. I mean "people who think white people are superior to other races, who think race mixing/miscegenation is a biological and moral horror, people who believe that Anglo-Saxon/Aryan man is the best and that he should keep other races out with oppression and violence."

You don't have to concede to the Left's assertion that everybody left of Bernie Sanders is a white supremacist in order to call actual white supremacists what they really are. You also don't have to think Antifa or BLM are peachy keen organizations with no issues, wackos, ideologues, or racists in their mix. You don't have to pretend that white supremacists are uncompromisingly evil and are beyond any effort or hope of rehabilitation or redemption. But none of that changes the underlying fact they are still really white supremacists.

This not calling a spade a spade thing is one of the reasons why "white supremacist" has undergone such radical meaning creep in the last years and why some of these fuckers have actually managed to find a spot in the Republican party.

@ moderation

As I said in some early post, people misunderstand what moderation means. It doesn't mean you think the position exactly halfway in the middle is always right. It means that you acknowledge that moderate, managed change is almost always preferential to abrupt, unmanaged change or being a stick in the mud who never changes at all.

[Vol]

You also have the white preservationists, who on a Venn diagram would have a lot of overlap with the supremacists, but a different fundamental intent. I didn't pay much attention to the Unite the Right thing, before or after that one woman was killed, so I cannot speak as to what they were. But that many young men baring their face for the tiki-march was rather ballsy for what is normally a more secretive group.

That's my impression of this nascent wave of white indentitarians anyway. Not necessarily believing whites are the master race, but not necessarily believing they're a problem to be fixed. White culture isn't necessary the best, but it is pretty great and should not be destroyed. Some immigration is necessary, but white majority nations importing massive amount of third worlders isn't good. Milquetoast supremacists, you could call it. They seem to make up a large amount of the more public face of the "movement."

[Vol]

Massive shooting at multiple mosques in New Zealand. At least one killer uploaded videos of him doing it. Appears to have written the name of victims of Islamic murders on the cartridges, if the pictures I'm seeing are real.

[Mazder]

Massive shooting at multiple mosques in New Zealand. At least one killer uploaded videos of him doing it. Appears to have written the name of victims of Islamic murders on the cartridges, if the pictures I'm seeing are real.

I heard it was anti-muslim slang/words/phrases. The footage I saw was rather grainy.
And, yes, I saw one of the videos, about 17 minutes long and it is haunting. About half of it is him driving there but it adds a weird mundane-ness to it until the first shot.
It's also weird how cameras don't pick up the loudness of guns when really close. Every shot "sounds like" a soft "pop" sound in the footage.
One guy ran at him to try and stop him. Failed, obviously. But he was....maybe ten people in by the time he got to the guy, maybe more.

I mean I could give a play by play if anyone is curious but TBH the less people see it the better IMO.

And watching it I realised just how desensitised I am to some things. But just because it was "easy" to watch, thousands of miles away through a screen I know that if I was in the same town, or even the same territory as this happening I'd be very shook and I do feel for those Muslims that lost their life, as much as I am against Islam/religion. No-one deserves their fate.

[Raga]

It's too bad. New Zealand seems like a place that mostly had its shit together. This is literally the only thing I can even think of where I've heard of drama or major issues from there. The only thing that even comes close is that I think Auckland got listed as one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in a few years back or something.

You also have the white preservationists, who on a Venn diagram would have a lot of overlap with the supremacists, but a different fundamental intent.

Sure, but I think that Venn diagram overlaps so much that it's next to impossible to separate. Usually because the reason they think the "white race" is worth preserving is because they think there is something inherently superior biologically or mentally that must be preserved. This is somewhat unavoidable given the nebulous definition of what "white" means. It's different from, say, an Indian tribe trying to preserve itself because that tribe has actual customs and traditions to preserve: rituals, a language, crafts, etc. What exactly is the "white" language or religion or craft tradition? To substitute "European" isn't much better because you are still dealing with dozens of languages, denominations, and customs. You either have to separate it out into regional permutations (think Quebecois or Cajuns or Southerners at large) so that you can affix actual customs to preserve or you have to talk about broad philosophy: "Enlightenment values," "Christianity," "liberal democracy," etc. But those philosophical constructs, while real, worth defending, and historically tied to the West don't *require* white people to work. They are all ethnically agnostic. But that's all too frequently what generalized white supremacists/preservations are left doing: trying to conflate broad, agnostic philosophical constructs as somehow being inextricable with white people as if we are just biologically wired to create freedom of speech or something.

[TTTX]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P53I8AlbhLI

[Vol]

I skimmed through the manifesto. Some of it was outright trolling, such as implicating Candence Owens and Pewdiepie. But the thrust seemed to be, coincidentally enough, "white preservation." Birth rates, immigration, US global supremacy, balkanizing us around gun rights. Claims he's not anti-Jew, oddly enough. Hard to reconcile that with the rest of it, unless that too is part of the trolling.

@Mazder: One of the ammo clips had "Rotherdam" written on it, which is a case that continues to baffle me. Violence is innate to us, being traumatized or shocked to see it is only normal in times of peace. We've had a relative good run of that. Not surprised this happens so much as I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. The forced dramatic shift in culture and population is unprecedented, but civil unrest is fairly low, so much that these terrorist attacks are rare and noteworthy still.

@Raga: I would argue that preservation of diversity implies nothing about the quality of what is being preserved. Otherwise any sort of archival work is subject to moral judgement, which is absurd.

There is nothing innate to any culture which could not be the product of another given the same circumstances and time. Human phenotypes are not different enough, barring future evidence to the contrary.

That "white" is an identity group that does not have clear customs or philosophies is the problem. It should not be a group, rather a broad header with explicitly clear subgroups. Instead, thanks to certain interests, it is now a minority group that covers an extremely large geographic area that has been split between self-loathing and self-preservation. In practice, as with most matters, people are going to tend to a vague spot near the center where they feel bad about some things, don't care about others, celebrate this, do that, and roll their eyes at the extremists, which in turn drives said extremists harder to affect change.

[Grand Admiral Cheesecake]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1raA76FSRo4

[Raga]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1raA76FSRo4

Seems to me by her reaction that he just succeeded in trolling the trolls.

Though more seriously, the overwhelming brunt of the reaction that I've seen actually hasn't been knee-jerk reactionism but a sort of "but what does it *really* mean?" reaction from people on both the left and the right. Whatever he wanted to be a catalyst for, I doubt it was introspection.

Upon reading the manifesto I'm inclined to not overly interpret it and to actually believe that it says what it says. He appears to just be the most current internet savvy version of that age-old, tired archetype of some stupid fucker who wants to start some kind of weird eschatological, redemptive race war that will result in some kind of white people's utopia. There's various black variants of this tired old saw as well.

[Vol]

http://archive.is/0ZXYV

I dislike KiwiFarms, but in this case, we see the proper example of how to respond to authority making undue requests.

[Alienmorph]

So, one of the declared inspirations of the psycho who killed all those people in NEw Zealand is actually an italian white suprematist and hardcore supporter of our current bullshit government. So what do our right-wing newspapers and journalist do to distract from that fact? Point out that the asshole was also a Fortnite player, and imply that it was likely violent videogames that melted his brain.

For fuck's sake. People have died, if you have nothing meaningful to say, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

[Vol]

You'd think a proper white supremacist would cheer the attack, wish there were more, rather than blame an easy target for it.

Meanwhile, as our rulers are wont to do, they're eager to expand their means to spy and control us. Never let a good massacre go to waste, can clamp down on the internet harder, make more sites and companies comply with arbitrary rules, get personal data on malcontents, it was a lovely gift for the nobility.

[Alienmorph]

That's because the narrative around here is that racism is a thing "The Left" made up, and people aren't racist, they are just tired of being invaded by immigrants who don't want to live in our country by our own rules. So officially the fuckheads in charge can't cheer hate crimes. Even tho their most loyal followers absolutely fucking do.

[Vol]

I suppose that'd be the next step the right in America would take if they had any cultural clout. Here they're more concerned with furiously denying they're racist at all times because it's the scarlet letter for anyone who's not a Dem.

So you have that much going for you, they cannot openly cheer for massacres yet.

[Alienmorph]

I keep wondering what the average american snowflake would have to say, if they were to spend a few months in here, where alot people really ARE sexist, mysoginists or homophobes. Tho I guess it would just confirms their bias against straight white guys in general, rather than teaching them anything about talking and thinking in hyperboles all the damn time.

[Raga]

Otherwise any sort of archival work is subject to moral judgement, which is absurd.

Didn't pick at this before because it was just a pick. Archival work isn't subject to moral judgement, but it is absolutely subject to quality judgement. You can't preserve everything because you just don't have the space, resources, or time to process it all. If we're talking like actual archivists here (which is what my formal training in grad school was towards though I ended up going a different path jobwise), that's one of the major things you spend your time doing: deciding what gets thrown out and what gets kept, deciding what gets added to the collection and what doesn't. There are literally archivists/librarians whose whole job is nothing but that. They are called collection development archivists/librarians. And you have to make those decisions based on the relevance, quality, rarity, and authenticity of the work.

[Raga]

Idle thoughts:

I said a few days ago that I think the effectiveness of the outrage culture is dying down somewhat. (Add the refusal of Tucker Carlson to apologize or resign and the rehiring of James Gunn to the list of evidence I gave then). And that its usefulness is now mostly limited to intra-Left conflict; it's still wildly effective when Progressives use it against other Progressives and thus will probably be of use to candidates against other candidates in the Democratic primaries.

I then happened upon a couple of things that talked explicitly about intra-group conflict and the impact that had on outer group conflict:

No Hate Left Behind
The Iron Law of Institutions and the Left

The second one is written by a Marxist, but who cares because he's correct in this instance.

My actual idle thought was that social media, particularly Twitter, serves 0 use as an actual organizer of leftist political thought or organization or as a real focus of confrontation or resistance to the Right. Instead, it's purpose is almost entirely devoted to intra-group policing. It's not about attacking the enemy, the ostensible hordes or racist and sexists and fascists running around. It's about expunging heretics from the ranks. Sure, the odd non-Leftist gets caught in the crosshairs, but non-Leftists aren't the point.

Struggle sessions after all aren't for the foreign capitalists. Witch trials aren't for pagans. They are for members of the insular group,to ensure purity and conformity.

This is sort of common sense and yet it's a nuance I was sort of missing before. I was mostly interpreting all this as the Left trying to seize institutions and thereby the means of information production and dissemination, which it is. But it isn't *just* that.

[Alienmorph]

Some times... just SOME times... the universe has a good sense of humour

[TTTX]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MpZZObvR4w&index=10&list=WL

[Vol]

Ole' Muttonhead Mueller released his report to the DoJ. They're reviewing it now, will release a summary, though early word is there are no additional indictments recommended, which would mean the only criminal behavior found in 2 years would be process crimes and financial crimes before the campaign. A full report is probably going to come out sometime after.

[magnuskn]

It was pretty obvious from the start that this was a distraction the DNC and anti-Trump NatSec people manufactured to distract from the DNC rigging their primary, losing the election to an orange clown TV host and further drive the national discourse to the right, as well as starting a new cold war (with huge profits for the military industrial complex).

Journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Aaron Maté, Matt Taibbi, Abby Martin and Michael Tracey also saw right through it from the start and got huge flak over it for the last two years from blinkered corporate democrats and establishment liberals. Everybody of them is taking a huge victory lap on Twitter and rightly so.

The question is if anybody in the corporate establishment media will face any accountability over this two-year disaster. And the answer to that is "Very probably not, they'll just move the goalposts and insist it never was about proving Trump colluded with Russia", so that they can keep the faithful riled up and keep in raking the dough. Can't wait to see how Rachel Maddow will shift her goals now.

The thing I most regret is that I lost all respect I had for Cenk Uygur and the rest of TYT (except Jimmy Dore, Malcolm Fleshner and Steve Oh, who I think were the only ones there who kept a cool head and examined the facts, not their personal feelings towards Trump), of whom I was a fan of the years prior to the rise of Trump. A lot of good progressives lost their fuckings minds when the orange one got elected and I am not sure if they'll ever get it back.

[Vol]

@Raga: I wouldn't even call that a pick so much as elaboration, since you're not technically disagreeing with me. Good to know though, really don't think much about the actual cost of preservation, only assume it's been done. Like this website, for instance. Every year or so I make a backup to my PC, but then this site only really "exists" on the host server, their backup server, and my computer. It's not infeasible that all 3 could suffer catastrophic failure, and will on a long enough time scale. Then CZ would not exist in any form!

And yes, your're right about the intra-group policing. Find a place with a lot of people, infiltrate both the community and the power structure, take it over, remove rightist-opportunists, counterrevolutionaries, capitalist roaders, etc., then with the massive amount of moderates and leftists you have left, purge and pressure until you have conformity. It works really well.

There's also the purpose of creating fuel for the media-political establishment by cultivating certain crops of users to report on and pretend represent a great many. Plus data mining. Social media as a whole is corrosive and disgusting and we'd be far better off without.

@magnus: Yeah, I disagree with Dore on most things, but I give him a lot of respect for being one of the very few prominent leftists being honest about Russia, Mueller, and foreign intervention. Puts being truthful, insofar as he's aware, over being a toady or making money, and that's a fucking rare trait these days.

Predictably, the narrative is shifting from "Russia collusion, who said anything about that?" to, "Trump wasn't exonerated of obstruction of justice, we need more investigations!", so much like a duck, the consequences of a 2-year fishing expedition turning up nothing is rolling right off the collective backs of our though leaders. Doesn't it seem like heads should roll, figuratively or literally, for this?

[Vol]

So, uh, that there Article 13 passed.

How long's that take to go into effect?

[magnuskn]

It still needs to ratified by one institution in a few weeks, then I think it's two months until the member countries need to have put it into effect. But I'm not really sure about those dates. Could be a bit faster, could be a bit slower.

And as far as RussiaGate, of course heads should roll, but since the entire establishment media, intelligence apparatus and opposition party leadership was slapping each other on the back in furious excitement over the prospect of Mueller indicting Trump, they will protect each other and simply continue, with slightly shifted goalposts.

[Raga]

*Incomding WoT/rant*

Inarticulate indignation at the mere mention of the word "feminist" or any concepts that could vaguely be considered feminist: sincerely do not get.

I have had two run-ins now on otherwise sane, civil conservative websites wherein I said something that amounted to "women want autonomy and to not be treated like children forced into dependency or generally treated as second class citizens" and was greeted with a response that seemed to imply that insistence on these points was *the* reason Western Civilization was in decline (assuming it even is in decline). This is not some radical assertion that gender is a social construct or that every profession should be 50/50 male female, or that women marines pose 0 issues or challenges that need to be addressed. This is literally limited to a stance that "women should not be in a position where their options are limited to 1) rely on the whim of some dude or other, 2) prostitution, 3) starvation." In other words, the freedom to separate one's sexual desirability/parental status from one's economic status at least in part. Ugly people need to eat too and sometimes hot people actually would rather just sit inside and code or whatever.

And obviously, such assertions have to be based at least partially on some aspects of a feminist framework such as "biological predilection =/= destiny," and *gasp* "women also enjoy sex and don't always want to get pregnant" and "women possess the intellectual capacity/temperament to do any job based on brainpower (allowing for the obvious variance between individuals)" and "housework/child rearing kind of sucks and works better the more people chip in."

An insistence that any and all aspects of feminism be off the table for serious consideration is throwing all of that overboard. It's analogous to an insistence that because communism really sucks and was responsible for the ruin of several societies (which is actually provable - you can't actually demonstrate even radical feminism has ruined any societies), we can't talk about income inequality or worker's rights.

As far as I can tell, a good deal of the resistance comes from the second wave assertion that the personal is political because it undermines the nuclear family (or more specifically the male=breadwinner and female=homemaker dichotomy). The phrase has an unfortunate ancestry of overt Marxism and radicalism but it's still *true!* (Just like it's also painfully true that all these white supremacists pointing out that white people in the West mostly have below replacement birthrates and that given current trends, they will be outnumbered by non-white people by the end of the century in most countries on Earth are correct. You may not like the messenger but the message is still factually correct). If you can't get a job because an employer assumes you will have kids and be an unreliable employee, that's hardly just a personal problem. If the chief recipe for your autonomy and success is your willingness to turn yourself into a sexual fetish object that's hardly just a personal problem. If the realities of your biology force you to take the vast bulk of the burden and weight of reproduction on yourself, and society treats the slightest slip-up in that regard as deserving ruin and pariahship, that's hardly just a personal problem.

[Vol]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-euro ... SKCN1R823W

Literal nanny state(s).

[Vol]

@Raga: It's the logical conclusion of the rejection of feminism. I'm not well read on this branch of the right-wing, as I tend to read more about the nature of masculinity, but there line of thinking, if they could articulate it, is that you no societal value as a worker. Even if you're demonstrably more intelligent than most men and can perform important work, your individual contribution is likely to be far less important than if you were popping out kids and raising them. It'd suck for you to be chained, barefoot and pregnant to the stove, but 8 white kids with a strong moral backbone and a good education would go out and contribute more to society than anything you could ever do with your own career. A man's labor has value because he has to go out and support all that, as well as perform vital functions for civilizations that thus far, feminism has not seemed to induce women to try. I believe that's the general underpinnings of what they would be trying to say anyway, this is a secondhand response to a secondhand account.

Radical feminism hasn't ruined any societies because you make that determination in hindsight and it was invented relatively recently. Given our society isn't capable of sustaining itself in part because of feminist victories, I'm not inclined to think we'll judge it kindly in retrospect unless somehow this new paradigm of importing third world immigrants to replace the babies we didn't have/aborted to work the jobs we didn't prepare our youth to do is actually a brilliant long-term solution.

Related, the hot topic in the male side of the gender sphere is on a new version of a study WaPo reported on that dealt with male sexual activity in the US.



There's more graphs, but that's the one that stands the starkest. Americans in general are fucking less, but it's mostly dragged down by young men. This comes on the heels of Tinder confirming the 80/20 rule, where the top 20% of men get nearly all the hookups. So if between a third and a quarter of men aged 18-30 haven't touched a vagina possibly ever, their economic engagement is down, their social prospects are grim, it's not a hard sell to radicalize, and I'm frankly more surprised no one seems to be working on that.

It's a difficult topic to have a fixed stance on. I think feminism is cancerous to functional society, and that there does to be strong incentives to not waste reproductive years on being cogs in the financial machine or fritter away in extended childhood, boozing and bouncing between relationships, but that's another minefield. It'd be nice if men could support families on jobs you could get with a high school degree, fatherless households weren't so readily subsidized, and <classical gender role stuff>, but clearly that's not an option for a great many anymore. The appeal of a more rigid structure seems healthier than what we have now, even if necessitates authoritarian means. It'd be nice if it didn't tho.

[Raga]

The problem with the rigidity of the nuclear family model (or more specifically the ironclad gender roles in it) is that's it's a model that was adopted largely as a result of the realities brought about by the confluence of new technology (agriculture) with rigid biological problems with that system (high infant mortality because of increased exposure to infectious disease, the risks associated with pregnancy and lactation because of higher infectious disease and less varied diets). We are undergoing another radical shift in new technology and the biological constraints we are bumping up against are different (obesity versus infectious diseases, psychological issues versus malnutrition, etc).

The core of what the nuclear family model covered (and incidentally what the prehistorical clan/extended family model covered) is an accurate reflection of what humans need to successfully rear children:

1. Multiple adults who share responsibilities
2. Both types of responsibilities (homemaking/private/inward facing & breadwinning/public/outward facing) being covered

There is 0 reason those have to be aligned with ironclad gender roles and given the profound shifts in technology, economics, and population pressure in modernity, the insistence on the rigid parts of a model adopted to deal with subsistence farming in circa 3000 BC to roughly 1700 seems...dubious at best. It's not actually that far removed from hippy assertions that we should live in communes because that's what hunter/gatherers did.

@ graph and Tinder stats

Something that's not ever covered in that though is the question of what percentage of the population, male or female, actually wants hookups as opposed to longer term, meaningful relationships? This is completely anecdotal and I have no idea how you'd ever go about studying it, but my personal experience leads me to think that the idea that there is such a thing as emotion free, unattached sex is mostly a myth. I hazard the percentage of the population that is truly capable of chronic, unattached promiscuity with 0 adverse psychological repercussions is probably less than 10%.

We may not be wired for life long monogamy as some people argue, but we also aren't wired for mate and go invertebrate sex.

That's a valid criticism of certain species of feminism, but feminism isn't alone in this. There is a large family of leftist political philosophies that claim that anything more than free love is oppressive and constraining because it violates the cult of hyper-individuality by implying that when you have sex with somebody you accept certain responsibilities toward them, psychological, biological, and physical, like it or not.

[Raga]

Idle thought: Political memes are literally just propaganda. Seriously look at the general style, format, and language of a Soviet or US or German propaganda poster circa 1945 and compare. It is a grassroots manifestation of messaging that governments can't bring themselves to do anymore or that would only be met with cynicism if a government did it.

[Vol]

Right, the details of gender roles changed with the times and technology, and in ours, western women enjoy incredible freedoms and opportunity and control over their hoo-hahs. The problem is that they're not having babies. So it's great for them, "patriarchy" is more of a useful tool for acquiring more power than a repressive force, they can make sure no fruits ever take root inside for a relative pittance, and have a legion at their back to assure them it's good and just. They can be humble housewives, trophies, stars, or compete with men in the economy and rise to become part of the nobility through as legitimate of means as anyone can. Not quite to the very top, not yet, but that's a place for sociopaths anyway. All sorts of good and bad with this new paradigm. But they're not having enough babies. Education, wealth, and career ambition, lethal for replacement rates.

Therefore we import people to try to plug the gap where people should have existed. But as we see, those who integrate into liberal western culture see the same drop off. So under this paradigm, western culture is poisonous to itself. It will necessarily contract the population, and unless there is a significant change in social and economic pressures, it will continue to shrink. You cannot import infinite third worlders to plug that gap, the amount of replacement our leaders have already undertaken is ridiculous.

So on the personal level, it's a great time for women, but on the cultural level, it's not a sustainable model. The older ones were, nuclear family, multiple generations under one roof, roaming tribes, whatever. They could keep themselves alive or grow. We cannot, women control their bodies, they do not face nearly the pressures to settle down and start a family as they once did, and as a consequence, western civilization and all those who imitate it are experiencing a population contraction, partially plugged by various third world immigrants.

I'm not sure where to stand on this, since making policy decisions on the grand, future scale is the kind of thing that gets you immortalized in history books for the wrong reasons, but it's also very clear that women, if given a choice, will not inherently incline towards popping out 2-3 kids for the good of the nation, especially in our kind of economy.

[Joblom]

But as we see, those who integrate into liberal western culture see the same drop off.

You presume they are even really integrating. A simple look at voting patterns and polled political opinions says otherwise. As does a drive through town in California. Or paying attention to the political and cultural discourse.

Circling the drain and it will only get worse and having imported all these disparate people will make the hard times ahead 100x worse.

*Incomding WoT/rant*

Inarticulate indignation at the mere mention of the word "feminist" or any concepts that could vaguely be considered feminist: sincerely do not get.

I have had two run-ins now on otherwise sane, civil conservative websites wherein I said something that amounted to "women want autonomy and to not be treated like children

The problem is, a society that doesn't control its women and treat them like children is a society that cannot survive. Sorry, thems just the facts. The data, as Vol so graciously provided, proves it. He only scratched the surface, however. Organisms which become passive and fail to multiply will be overtaken by more aggressive and fertile ones. It's unavoidable. Just look at women's voting patterns ever since they got the vote and it is apparent they have been among the major forces dragging the West into the grave (and along with it their liberated lifestyle). Obviously they aren't solely to blame and in truth men might as well bare most of the blame because they were the ones foolish enough to cede power to them in the first place. It was a more naive time.

You are going to replace the native population in a high tech society which increasingly has no place for the unskilled, with people with even lower average IQ's? It's not going to work. It's going to fail. UBI is a band-aid on an amputated limb that this hemorrhaging blood.

[Raga]

The problem is, a society that doesn't control its women and treat them like children is a society that cannot survive. Sorry, thems just the facts. The data, as Vol so graciously provided, proves it. He only scratched the surface, however.

What he provided was a rough correlation of declining birth rates that appear more or less at the same time feminism does, but it's hardly enough to prove causation, and if you really dig into the data, you'll find that birthrates have been declining since 1800, that the phenomenon is global and occurring even in societies the West considers retrograde in terms of women's rights, and that the overall rate of women per child closely aligns with how well the economy is doing (read more significantly how expensive it is to have a kid). That's evidenced by the baby boom during the economic boom years of the mid century following a relative dearth of births in the Depression, by dropping rates again during the 1970s during the age of rampant stagflation that recovered to above the 2.0 needed for replacement during the relatively good years of the 1990s and dropped again following the Great Recession. It's hardly surprising it's failed to recover given that the women of prime child bearing age of the moment are Millenials who are disproportionately juggling student loan debt, unable to afford buying houses, and are bearing the weight of wage stagnation of the last 40 years mixed with the likely lifelong consequences of entering the job market during the Recession and its immediate aftermath. Not to mention that women want to have more kids than they actually have which suggests there's more going on here than women wanting consequence free libertinism and suddenly finding reproduction gross. There's nontrivial evidence that Gen Y and Z are actually prudes compared to Gen X and the Baby Boomers in some respects. They tend to be more tolerant of behavior previously considered kinks but generally down on promiscuity and sexual spontaneity.

All of that provides an alternative explanation that is at least as strong (arguably stronger) that both feminism *and* lower birth rates are a byproduct of modernity and not the other way around. Real strides in feminism especially of the "women get to control their fertility with technology" variety occurred *after* precipitous drops in both infant mortality and overall fertility rates, not the other way around.

And considering civilizations *not* treating women like chattel is almost entirely novel in the history of the planet until the recent past (at least since the introduction of agriculture - a nontrivial number of prehistorical tribes were quite egalitarian & almost all of them practiced infanticide which amounts to the same thing as "women getting to control their hoo-hah"), there is no "them's just the facts" baseline of historical data to rely on to make this assertion.

Organisms which become passive and fail to multiply will be overtaken by more aggressive and fertile ones. It's unavoidable.

This is a woefully overly simplistic and deterministic explanation for how evolution works. Proliferation of offspring is a strategy that has enabled bugs to thrive. Having costly offspring that require intense amounts of internal development and maintenance upon birth is a strategy behind how many mammals, including humans, have thrived. It's not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the best adapted for the situation, and given the inherent randomness in evolution, it's entirely possible that some alternate adaptation pattern *could* have succeeded if it had happened to have evolved. You simply can't look at an organism and proclaim "This thing is best and will always succeed because X."

Just look at women's voting patterns ever since they got the vote and it is apparent they have been among the major forces dragging the West into the grave

I assume you don't mean white women with this because the majority of white women have consistently voted along the same lines as white men, including for Trump. I really hate using this line of argument because it's so often employed in a spurious, virtue signaling type of way, but this really does seem like a rough equivalent of "anybody who didn't/doesn't vote how white dudes have voted for the past 100 years is responsible for the decline of Western civilization" which is just...inane. For one, white dudes voted in mass for the stupid neoliberal policies of Reagan and Co. that go a good way toward explaining our grotesque economic mismanagement of the last 40ish years, including our inept immigration system.

You are going to replace the native population in a high tech society which increasingly has no place for the unskilled

Why would having a bunch of extra children solve this problem? Seriously, if it's cheaper to make cars in China it's really irrelevant if China has a one child policy and the US has above replacement birth rates. Manufacturers are still going to move factories to China. If a robot can now do the job that used to take 10 skilled workers for 1/3 the price of the workers, the factory owners are going to install the robot regardless of what the birth rate is. The only way to upset this is to provide extremes of population pressure at either end: to have so many children that people are so desperate for work that they will work for any wage that prevents starvation and thus maintain cheapness relative to tech or to have so few workers that employers have no choice but to pay out the nose for the jobs that really do still require a skilled human to perform. Unless you are operating at those population extremes, this situation is a product of globalization and disruptive tech and doesn't have much to do with the birth rate.

@ general conversation

Something relevant to this that I almost never see discussed is that I think there's strong anecdotal evidence that along with economic factors, society at large has become rabidly anti-child in the last 40 years and this phenomenon isn't limited to women. I've never seen a study done on this, but I actually believe there has been *decreased* tolerance for children in public places and a general decline in the sense of obligation that people feel towards children collectively. Children have been relegated to cordoned off pens in society: home, school, and public places explicitly designed for them (playgrounds, animated movies at cinemas, etc). People basically have 0 tolerance for children in any other arena of life. People who allow their children to "penetrate" society outside of the designated child box are not only considered horribly rude social pariahs with unruly brats out to ruin everybody else's peace and quiet, but in many instances are considered *negligent* and can be arrested for child endangerment or some nonsense. It's not only economically harder to have kids; it's also morally, logistically, and psychologically harder to have kids. The days of my own childhood of "here kid, take this BB gun and your dog and go play in the woods but be home by dark" are extinct.

[Joblom]

What he provided was a rough correlation of declining birth rates that appear more or less at the same time feminism does, but it's hardly enough to prove causation,

Feminism is not the only factor, but I do think it is well established that it is a large factor. Feminism gutted marriage, without which it is harder to form families because men are increasingly dissented to marry in the firs place. It's a huge risk for a man. It also became harder for men to support a family when we doubled the work force by taking our child bearers out of the home and put them in job market. A great win for employers, but not so much for the rest of the public in the long run. There is also the issue of birth control, which would have happened without our without feminism, and ditto the economic incentives that turned women into half the labor force.

Millenials and Gen Z being "prudes" is a good thing. A 'prudish' society has much happier and more stable families than the hedonistic baby boomers. It is only becoming apparent now just how important environment is for developing children. Single-motherhood is terrible for children and especially boys. This is important because men are still the foundation for society; they do almost all the hard work needed to build and maintain society. Women going on strike in the work force is inconvenient, but if men did it society would grind to a halt. Not that my intent is to trivialize the role women play in a healthy society, but in terms of running the day to day that is all on men. Feminism did not cause modernity and modernity did not cause feminism; but feminism could not have taken root without it. Feminism is a naive luxury of a lifestyle divorced of day to day survival. Which leads me to another point...

Feminism purports that women deserve an equal say in society and I say... no they don't and they never did. Men built it. Men maintain it. Men fight for it. Men die for it. That is still true even today. It was not hundreds of thousands of women who died in the Civil War, or WWI, or WWII, ect... It is not thousands and thousands of women maimed, inured, or killed on the job in America. Not that I look down on them for this; women aren't physically or psychologically suited (in general) for these rolls. Women aren't as expendable either. We can loose hundreds of thousand of men in a war and replace them just fine... but you can't so easily recover from that many women dying. The push for women to be in combat roles in the military is a long term strategy that will lead to decline, presuming it wasn't itself already a sign of decline. Tribes which sacrifice their wombs to war will not endure. For that matter, tribes which take their most intelligent women and then burden them with life-long careers that preclude or inhibit childbearing are also tribes which will not endure.

I used to champion liberty above all and I suppose I still do but with one caveat; liberty can only benefit a virtuous society. Perhaps, that society should also envision liberty as self reliance as well. For submitting to the state for all your needs is a surrender of liberty in the long run. That which gives you everything can also take everything away. I am well aware of women's voting patterns as well and certainly white women vote more in-line with my views than other women, but they are still a significant portion of the democrat party and its insane, destructive, anti-American policies. They also by their nature temper the Republican Party. Not that I lay sole blame on them; the money which controls our political system is the biggest culprit here. For that matter, I don't abscond white men of their complicity in bringing about this unacceptable situation; it was white men after all who first had all the voting rights and then voted them away, casting a wider and wider net in voting blocks and citizenship. If you want the most honest answer as to the root cause of our decline the answer is simple; human nature.


And considering civilizations *not* treating women like chattel is almost entirely novel in the history of the planet until the recent past (at least since the introduction of agriculture - a nontrivial number of prehistorical tribes were quite egalitarian & almost all of them practiced infanticide which amounts to the same thing as "women getting to control their hoo-hah"), there is no "them's just the facts" baseline of historical data to rely on to make this assertion.

This is a woefully overly simplistic and deterministic explanation for how evolution works.

It's just math. I didn't say it was sustainable or that there wouldn't be a subsequent die-off; there will be. The current trends would indicate that whites will decline and become minorities in their own nations by the end of the century. The money will run out because the replacing populations will not be able to replicate or maintain the societies that the native whites built. Systems will start to fail. People will kill each-other as stability evaporates and famine and disease will kill many more. Bear in mind, you can have replicators in a system that overtake all competitors and become unbeatable... only to die off because that organism only thrived in an ecosystem made possible by less aggressive and more cooperative organisms that it out-competed and eliminated.

Why would having a bunch of extra children solve this problem?

Have however many children you need to continue to support your population. They'll be better off in a homogeneous society that shares common values and investment in the future. They'll be even MORE better off if you stop subsidizing bad decisions and lifestyles. I didn't say to just shit out children by the wagon-load.




@ general conversation

I've heard this before. I'll have to think about it.

[TTTX]

Single-motherhood is terrible for children and especially boys.

I don't know, I was raised by my mother and never knew my father.

Personally I think it's more about having a stable family environment and have someone who fill out the father and mother role. After all it doesn't mean much if you have parents and they are both terrible people.

[Mazder]

Feminism is not the only factor, but I do think it is well established that it is a large factor. Feminism gutted marriage, without which it is harder to form families because men are increasingly dissented to marry in the firs place. It's a huge risk for a man. It also became harder for men to support a family when we doubled the work force by taking our child bearers out of the home and put them in job market. A great win for employers, but not so much for the rest of the public in the long run. There is also the issue of birth control, which would have happened without our without feminism, and ditto the economic incentives that turned women into half the labor force.

U wot M8?
Feminism may have gutted "Traditional Marriage" but it gave way to a much more financially capable option. No longer do we have to fit the old, conservative and religious methods of a massive oppulent waste of money day in a church with all the trimmings and now you can just go down to the local registry office with your two witnesses and a priest if needed/wanted and get it done that way.
Plus it's added the validation for same-sex couples, which are still not treated as fairly.
For me, as a man with a shit job, no decent footing, living at home still, the only thing that is a risk for me, as said man, in the case of marriage is not marrying a woman who would use the old-world view of "staying home and getting everything paid for them and if you speak up against it, fuck you because feminism and you gotta do what the woman say". And that is screened out in the dating process.

Millenials and Gen Z being "prudes" is a good thing. A 'prudish' society has much happier and more stable families than the hedonistic baby boomers. It is only becoming apparent now just how important environment is for developing children. Single-motherhood is terrible for children and especially boys.

U fokken wot M8?!
Yeah, because all those people living in prudish societies being unable/afraid for their lives for simply loving what they loved were having such a lovely and stable time...
The only reason those families could even call themselves stable is because of an oppressive and downright disruptive influence from the parents tantamount to abuse in it's own way. Shit like "Oh, you can't be gay because my prudish beliefs say you can't be because that'd make you a heathen, debauched and broken" is 100% absolute bullshit.
Just because you have some kids who do not conform with the instant crack of the whip like kids used to, back in the "good old days" where they were beaten by teachers at school and shit, doesn't mean you had better behaved kids.
Flogging a soldier teaches them only one thing, how to turn his back. You beat an ideology into your kids they will resent you for it.

How do I know this? Because I was raised by my mother for the most part of my life. She was very strict given she'd been through divorce and thought that adding the discipline would help make things more stable.
It tore the family apart. Even while she had remarried and there was a Step-Father in the picture.
I left to live with my dad as he'd become the genlter one and I didn't speak to my mother and hated her for years.
Everything is okay now and we all acknowledge that the heavier hand was a stupid way to go.

Feminism purports that women deserve an equal say in society and I say... no they don't and they never did. Men built it. Men maintain it. Men fight for it. Men die for it. That is still true even today. It was not hundreds of thousands of women who died in the Civil War, or WWI, or WWII, ect... It is not thousands and thousands of women maimed, inured, or killed on the job in America. Not that I look down on them for this; women aren't physically or psychologically suited (in general) for these rolls. Women aren't as expendable either. We can loose hundreds of thousand of men in a war and replace them just fine... but you can't so easily recover from that many women dying. The push for women to be in combat roles in the military is a long term strategy that will lead to decline, presuming it wasn't itself already a sign of decline. Tribes which sacrifice their wombs to war will not endure. For that matter, tribes which take their most intelligent women and then burden them with life-long careers that preclude or inhibit childbearing are also tribes which will not endure.

Which would be all very well and good if you were not the size of a continent...
If you were the UK you might have a valid point of finite resources, but in this world where overpopulation is going to eventually become a problem the only thing that hinders female inclusion into military roles is ability. Ability that can be trained on.
Eventually, if it's unhindered, there will be some way for our evolution to compensate for the biological differences between the sexes if we treat it as tribal mentalities. But we're not in that world any more.
And assuming men are any more better suited psychologically for these roles is just arsewater. The bias for that measurement is just woefully out of balance. As a man I am definitely less suitable for war compared with Raga. She has way more mental fortitude than I have and this is just from our interactions in text on this forum and I know that.

I used to champion liberty above all and I suppose I still do but with one caveat; liberty can only benefit a virtuous society. Perhaps, that society should also envision liberty as self reliance as well. For submitting to the state for all your needs is a surrender of liberty in the long run. That which gives you everything can also take everything away. I am well aware of women's voting patterns as well and certainly white women vote more in-line with my views than other women, but they are still a significant portion of the democrat party and its insane, destructive, anti-American policies. They also by their nature temper the Republican Party. Not that I lay sole blame on them; the money which controls our political system is the biggest culprit here. For that matter, I don't abscond white men of their complicity in bringing about this unacceptable situation; it was white men after all who first had all the voting rights and then voted them away, casting a wider and wider net in voting blocks and citizenship. If you want the most honest answer as to the root cause of our decline the answer is simple; human nature.

If you're going to use Liberty as a way to enforce what you think Liberty should stand for then you don't stand for Liberty IMO.
If a bunch of people wish to band together and rely on each other and they wish to call themselves a state, or THE state for their peoples then it fall on you if you wish to agree and be a part of that. If said people also outnumber those that wish to be self reliant then said self reliant people must provide an alternative for the objectives said statehood supporters would wish to achieve and convince them otherwise.

It's just math. I didn't say it was sustainable or that there wouldn't be a subsequent die-off; there will be. The current trends would indicate that whites will decline and become minorities in their own nations by the end of the century. The money will run out because the replacing populations will not be able to replicate or maintain the societies that the native whites built. Systems will start to fail. People will kill each-other as stability evaporates and famine and disease will kill many more. Bear in mind, you can have replicators in a system that overtake all competitors and become unbeatable... only to die off because that organism only thrived in an ecosystem made possible by less aggressive and more cooperative organisms that it out-competed and eliminated.

This only becomes a problem if immigration policy is not properly supported.
You say that non-white communities will simply out-breed the white community in countries. These countries are also places with a lax immigration policy, especially when it comes to supposed refugees taking advantage of the humanitarian nature of those countries. A humanitarian nature that is based in and around Liberty itself.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Ignoring the "creator" part we can see that the very basis America was built on, and since it's subsequent influence in other nations around the world has left a need to make things equal between all men. Something that is not achievable at the speeds which our modern world believes things can be done.
Which is now why appropriate control by definitive means, border controls, population controls, etc. which were always seen as Right wing ideals (but barely right of center) are now seen as Far-Right ideals for the humanitarians. Said humanitarians are mostly left wing, as the current political sphere is likely to support right now.

Have however many children you need to continue to support your population. They'll be better off in a homogeneous society that shares common values and investment in the future. They'll be even MORE better off if you stop subsidizing bad decisions and lifestyles. I didn't say to just shit out children by the wagon-load.

I mean, yeah, this kinda.
Don't overpopulate one way and don't overpopulate the other way.

Also there is a way some can interact.
Take the Sikh populations and Pakistani and Indian populations in the UK before the 21st century. They were able to integrate with British values and populations just fine. Because they did it over a few decades, slowly.
This current influx of Muslim based refugees however are coming through at a quicker pace and are not giving themselves integration time, so it's jarring and not working and making more conflict.
If the Sikh's, Hindu's and Buddhists can do it then the Muslims surely can eventually too, if they slowed down.

[Raga]

Eh, Wot. Standard disclaimer that if the battles by novel length posts get old, I'm always good with dropping it.

Feminism gutted marriage, without which it is harder to form families because men are increasingly dissented to marry in the firs place.

This is really the challenge of the day. How do you construct some model which allows for stable childbearing and rearing given the realities of modernity? Because modernity isn't going anywhere. If your answer is "you can't and it's all going to hell in a handbasket" then I'll just say "Fine, then I'll take the inevitable dystopic future that allows me the longest period of not being reduced to chattel again, thanks."

I would qualify that statement by saying that what's really been gutted is compulsory marriage for the lower classes because middle class and upper class people still overwhelmingly chose marriage and they have lower divorce rates. They just take longer to get married. And given that poor people tend to be more conventional and socially conservative and feminism has pretty much always been an upper class woman's game, it's hard to see where feminist ideology or metaphysics is the cause of the gutting of marriage. It's more like feminism (among other things) made divorce easier and because divorce was easier a bunch of other preexisting pressures collapsed marriage for poor people. However, it also simultaneously helped insure poor people had access to birth control, which helped negate at least some of the failout of the collapse of marriage among the lower classes.

Millenials and Gen Z being "prudes" is a good thing. A 'prudish' society has much happier and more stable families than the hedonistic baby boomers.

I'm not really arguing with this at least to the point that I've already said that I think rampant promiscuity causes psychological problems for most people and in aggregate that causes all kinds of community dysfunction. My point was that given the prudishness of Millenials it's hard to establish that the reason for low birth rates among them is because they want consequence free debauchery and general libertinism.

Feminism purports that women deserve an equal say in society and I say... no they don't and they never did. Men built it. Men maintain it. Men fight for it. Men die for it. That is still true even today. It was not hundreds of thousands of women who died in the Civil War, or WWI, or WWII, ect... It is not thousands and thousands of women maimed, inured, or killed on the job in America.

This is getting well outside the spectrum of economics or supposed biology or whatever into morals and "just deserts" and metaphysics, which is fine, but when you do this, you open a whole other can of worms that lays open some common moral contradictions that I see in this worldview (assuming you share the worldview that a lot of other people who purport this have). Firstly, this idea contains the idea of merit by association, which is to say that you deserve certain things simply because you are demographically similar to a group who experienced/did X. So it absolutely contains the idea that "random layabout waste of carbon X who happens to have testicles deserves heightened prestige and influence relative to people who don't have testicles because other people who have testicles built most of the roads and did most of the fighting in Afghanistan." It runs contrary to the idea in something like Starship Troopers where you have to earn enfranchisement by public service which says "because you are part of a group which *actually* did something hard for the sake of everybody else and the system, you deserve outsize say" and instead substitutes "you deserve outsize say because you are statistically correlated with the people who are more likely to do something hard for the sake of everybody else and the system."

It also contains the idea of inherited guilt/credit. "Historically, way more dudes died in wars and therefore they deserve outsize say and influence as just deserts." How is this in any way different from "Historically, black people were way more likely to be slaves and to be lynched and therefore they deserve outsize say and influence as just deserts?" Or for that matter why not "Historically, women have disproportionately born the physical pain, trauma, and potential maiming/death of pregnancy and childbirth and so they deserve outsize say and influence?"

It's also just nonsensical to suggest that the services that women have historically provided and do currently provide aren't part of the general support structure of society. The only meaningful difference is that when men stop providing the services they have historically provided the dysfunction tends to be swift and immediately noticeable and when women stop providing the services they have historically provided the dysfunction is slower and more subtle.

And when you stop looking at it chiefly historically but in a contemporary sense, the support structure provided by women becomes even more explicit. That "Women striking is inconvenient only" thing is not true. An anecdotal example pertaining to a "society 101" essential institution: I work in a police station for a mid size city. The cops here are overwhelmingly male (I don't know exact stats but it's probably like 80%+). If all the women here decided to not show up to work tomorrow, the police station would be crippled. Why? 100% of the dispatchers are female so nobody would be screening calls and coordinating officers. And on top of that chaos they would be immediately short-staffed because the 20%ish of officers who are female wouldn't be here. Meanwhile, I work in the IT department which would then also immediately be short-staffed so all the systems and shit that need maintaining literally everyday (radios, body cams, dash cams, laptops in squad cars, desktops in offices, printers, cellphones, etc) would start getting backlogged. Also, something like 75% of all the people working in the court department are women: so all the people who are keeping records on arrest warrants and vehicle citations and so on would just vanish. Cop gives you a speeding ticket? Well, the court isn't able to log that in the system or actually collect your fee, so who cares? Just go about your merry way and forget about it.

Now, I am *not* arguing for an "equality of outcome" position either because that outcome is explicitly impossible without aggressive social engineering, which has a pretty horrible historical record for the most part. You simply can't guarantee 50/50 parity in everything without compelling people in certain directions because even when given something like equality of choice or opportunity people self sort in disparate categories (men disproportionately chose to be engineers, women disproportionately chose to be nurses, etc.) What I am saying is that sorting out "just deserts" based on what gonads people happen to have is as morally arbitrary as sorting it on skin color or height.

I *am* saying that whatever the actual ratio of female to male contribution to society is, female contribution is definitely high enough to merit them having more say in society than chattel, which was their historical status.

I used to champion liberty above all and I suppose I still do but with one caveat; liberty can only benefit a virtuous society. Perhaps, that society should also envision liberty as self reliance as well. For submitting to the state for all your needs is a surrender of liberty in the long run. That which gives you everything can also take everything away.

I'm not a libertarian so I'm explicitly not arguing from a position of "unfettered individual liberty is the right answer to everything." I've never quite been able to categorize my position, but it's some species of right of center communitarian.

Bear in mind, you can have replicators in a system that overtake all competitors and become unbeatable... only to die off because that organism only thrived in an ecosystem made possible by less aggressive and more cooperative organisms that it out-competed and eliminated.

You can also have a massive asteroid hit the planet and suddenly the little rats that previously scurried about the feet of the dominant species inherit the earth.

That's not me trying to flippantly dismiss all predictive models or saying we can't tell shit about the future. But the Nostradamus stuff about the state of society capsizing in mass starvation or whatever is another kettle of fish. It's like the climatologist who correctly asserts that his model predicts the climate is heating up, but then he goes on to incorrectly assert that this proves that carbon capture tech is a pipe dream and that if we don't all stop eating meat we will absolutely be living in the society of the Hunger Games in 100 years. His model tells us what the temperature will be (with a nontrivial margin of error). It tells us 0 about how technology might change because of that or how humans will react to the new reality.

I don't believe in the fallacy of "history as progress." Collapses *will* occur. Some will be predicted. Some won't be. But even when you correctly manage to predict the particular problem or problems that herald a collapse, that doesn't necessarily demonstrate that solution A will solve the problem while solution B won't. Even a correct prediction like that still can't be that deterministic and prescriptive.

Have however many children you need to continue to support your population.

This is part of my point though. We actually need fewer children to support our population than we've ever needed before. The issue with economic migration isn't that we're using it to support gaps in our population created by children we didn't have. We stopped having children because the cost started to outweigh the benefit. What's the benefit of having 3 more kids who can ostensibly pick strawberries in Central California or clean toilets in hotels or cut rich people's grass for starvation wages? They wouldn't be any more able to support society doing that than the migrants can. If the good jobs aren't here for them and society can't/won't pay decent wages for certain kinds of work, no amount of having more kids will change that reality.

If you simultaneously restricted immigration and somehow rendered automation and outsourcing impossible, you might succeed in raising wages for some of those crap jobs, but I'm extremely skeptical how feasible that is. For one, people don't just resist paying high wages for certain jobs on economic grounds but on moral or social grounds. As I said at some point in some other post "Nobody is going to pay people $50,000 a year to put sprinkles on cupcakes at the mall."

[Raga]

Trump says weighing sending illegal immigrants to U.S. sanctuary cities

Lol, please do.

[Mazder]

Trump says weighing sending illegal immigrants to U.S. sanctuary cities

Lol, please do.

Lol, DO IT!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47907350
DON'T DO IT!

[Raga]

Currently reading "The Meaning of Conservatism" by Roger Scruton, but he really means more what would be termed paleoconservatism today and not so much Reagan style modern conservatism.

He makes a good point about needing some kind of immutable elite (he uses examples of the House of Lords and/or the monarchy) which are not subject to popular removal as a kind of insurance for the long term continuity of the body politic. In that way, the voices of both the dead and the unborn are heard as they both have a vested interest in the continued survival of the social fabric of which they were/will be part, and the mob of the present is not going to think either of their ancestors or their descendants when left to their own devices. They are quite happy to burn it all down to satisfy some present urge or grievance.

However, what do you do when the elite *are* the force that wants to wildly disrupt everything or generally use the social fabric as a guinea pig to answer some academic quandary? What do you do when your elite are the intelligentsia and the intelligentsia itself becomes hereditary as it currently has? This later reality had made me borderline rabidly anti-elitist and anti-intellectual in the last few years.

I concede the theoretical need for the elite niche as a stabilizing agent, but what do you do when that niche has become the destabilizer and the mass of the people are the ones resisting them and demanding continuity and stability and Rule of Law and so on?

[Vol]

What would constitute a desirable gentry to rely on anymore? Are there any groups of wealthy Americans who have all their stakes in our nation and aren't parasites working the financial system? Unless we drop down the ladder of wealth and influence quite a ways to the solely domestic elites who run businesses that provide goods or services. Which doesn't sound half bad, honestly.

As for the elites acting as cancerous influences, excision generally works. I tend to believe that if you have the wealth and influence to be considered "nobility," and you are an adult, you are culpable for the actions of your class. Unfair, but so's life for the rest of us. Act in the best interest of those your lord over or be assumed to be part of those who don't. Big fan of the sword of Damocles.

Right now, we still function. I would imagine that unless the Zoomers somehow get a rebound to prosperity that the Millenials missed, the willingness to tolerate our masters' nonsense erodes. We have a quarter of young men as virgins, a generation unlikely to do better than their parents economically, and our elites are preaching suicide. They have failed their duties, there is no need for them to exist in our nations, someone else can do it better. Ideally learned men and some women with strong moral compasses and wealth that isn't dependent on public perception. We can't go back to what we had, never can. But something new that isn't cynical and destructive would be nice, ideals and roles to believe in, maybe even leaders of character and integrity. As much as anyone who covets power can be, anyway.