When It Comes To Understanding Migration, This Needs To Be Taken Into Account: If You Are In A Rural

What is "corruption"?

Both liberals and libertarians believe that too many politicians serve "big business" or "crony interests" instead of the "public".

But look at from the perspective of a politician. One group of citizens may be the majority, but they have little way of influencing you outside of letters or collective actions, which are rare, and to be honest, their opinions are often uninformed and they have no control over major social organizations, so they don't matter to you all that much.

But a small minority of citizens are very important people, who direct the majority of economic activity and control the fate of your nation or- perhaps even more crucially-your home state, because they control land and resources and can choose where to invest them to create jobs. You're going to listen to what they have to say, especially since they can afford to send specialized lobbyists to wait in your office all day with lots of impressive documents and charts.

And they don't need to threaten or bribe you to get what they want; all they have to do is to make a convincing argument on why voting a certain way on a given law or regulation will benefit them (and by extensions, your constituency) or hurt them (and by extension, your constituency).

"The public may have good intentions in supporting this higher minimum wage law, or in their campaign to resist privatization," they argue, "but with all due respect to the public, they just don't know the facts. This bill will destroy jobs and hurt your state. Look, let us take you out to a nice dinner to discuss it. If you back us up on this, we'll support you come election season. Everybody wins."

"Corruption" is not the result of personal moral failing. It is the natural, inevitable symptom of a divided society, where a small percentage of owners who control almost all property and economic activity have interests that oppose that of the property-less majority. The only way to end "corruption" is to subordinate economic activity to the democratic will of society at large via the abolition of private property and the developmemt of communism.

Hanania may have changed his mind on trans people, but he also tweeted "These people are all animals, whether they're harassing people on subways or walking around in suits" after Daniel Penny was arrested.

The Richard Hanania discourse is weird for me because no one is willing to be specific.

Like, periodically someone links one of his pieces, and I read it, and it's generally pretty anodyne. But of course I'm reading pieces (1) that are current and (2) that people I like are recommending. This is not a good way to figure out what his worst takes are!

But I'm too apathetic to go, like, scrolling through his blog looking for the bad takes. And when people criticize [engaging with] him they never link specific posts or quote specific things he said. They say he's a "white supremacist race realist" and like, that probably means he said some things I'd disapprove of, but I can't tell how strongly I'd disapprove because a lot of people use those terms rather more promiscuously than I would.

(And even if someone made specific allegations, it's hard to know if they're doing a Tumblr Callout-style list where the first three entries are "he literally ships Jen and Fred even though we once had a flashback to when Jen was 17" and then somewhere in the middle is "literally killed and ate several children". If I read the first three links and conclude that it's all bullshit that's not even necessarily right!)

So it's just very hard to get a sense for "how bad are his worst views" and also "to what extent does he still hold those views?" And I don't really have motivation to actually figure it out, so there's just a bunch of slightly dumb discourse that I'm not able to evaluate.

There's a problem here in that if we give socialism a broad meaning to the point where it can be applied to any political program involving state planned/owned/regulated economy, we end up with "socialism with Chinese characteristics". On the other hand, when I try to give specific, concrete examples of what I want socialism to look like or what I think it would grow into given sufficient organic development and trial-and-error experimentation, my definitions are so narrow I quickly end up looking like just another special snowflake whose own personal definition of socialism has never been tried, etc.

It's great that we discuss and debate our terms but I fear that leaving them too vague means we get bogged down in semantic infighting and our political results follow suit.

Maybe lots of people are answering "not sure" because the question seems to be written like a trick question? Most people know about the holocaust and believe in it, but couldn't tell you when it/WWII started and ended. So the question can't be answered unless you know that the holocaust started in 1939, which is probably beyond the grasp of many Americans.

A recent poll by YouGov showed that ~20% of adults under 30 in America believe that the Holocaust didn't happen. This is rather worrying (to put it mildly), so one has to wonder why. The direkt reason is probably that those people end up reading stuff by Holocaust deniers on the internat. But I suspect that is only convincing because history education generally only teaches that the Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews but doesn't teach how we know that Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews. If people have only accepted a claim based on authority, even weak arguments may convince them that it isn't true. Education about the Holocaust needs to get into the weeds of the methods historians use to establish what happens: census data shows that there are ~6 million fewer Jews in the world in 1945 than in 1933; we have reports about what was happening at the death camps by people who encountered them from many different perspectives (prisoners, guards, soldiers when they liberated the camps, Polish resistence fighters during the was - the earliest reports afaik); we have pictures and documents that conform to these reports. Refuting the arguments by Holocaust deniers is important, but that on its own will do little. People need to know the evidence for something to believe it, not just the evidence against the supposed evidence against it.

(By the way, I think it is a mistake to assume that everyone who goes down the Holocaust denial path already has an antisemitic worldview before that. Holocaust denial can be a gateway drug to antisemitism.)

The humanities are too important to be left to the humanities majors.

without humanities you will fall for the first lie somebody tells you that punches in the gut because you never learned how those gut-punches work

"people who didn't go to university are easily fooled morons. I am not classist."

Idea: Resolve this problem by giving workers the power to fire colleagues that they deem lazy or dangerously incompetent. Terminated workers have the right to defend themselves in a court-like environment, with consideration given to the importance/inherent danger of their job and the consequences of letting them stay or forcing them out. Terminated workers are compensated with unemployment benefits and recieve assistance from local government in finding a new occupation.

Why does no one remember Iraq? For all of Trump's faults, at least he didn't start a war that killed or maimed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of innocent people and afflicted countless more with homelessness, hunger, trauma, and despair.

Yeah, the original guidelines were pretty awful, but this kind of reaction bothers me. The stuff about communication and building better relationships is great, but telling depressed or anxious men who are stressed out from any number of causes-say, intense competition at work, crippling insecurity, or unhealthy relationships with other men- to fix their problems via...more competition, more contact with other men, and greater submission to their current hierarchies seems like a step back.

Alternative, Scientifically-Literate Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men - Quillette

The American Psychological Association’s “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men” have received much criticism from journalists and professional psychologists. Much of the opposition has centered on the guideline’s attack on “traditional masculinity” and the privileging of activism over evidence-based treatment. One of the few redeeming features of the guidelines is their acknowledgement that men face unique physical, psychological, educational, and social challenges and are less likely to seek psychological treatment to meet those challenges. But the guidelines fail in their targeted goal of preparing therapists to help the men under their care. Throughout the entirety of the APA’s guidelines, discussion of evolutionary influences on men’s psychological development is either unintentionally neglected or willfully avoided (“testosterone” appears nowhere in the document and, out of more than 400 citations, only four mention either hormones or anything brain- or neuro-related). Whatever the reason, the fact that a sharp distinction is made between “sex” as biology and “gender” as “psychological, social, and cultural” experience suggests that the authors of the guidelines subscribe to the fallacy of …

I really don’t know what to think of this. We don’t need to explain why men and women are different with evo psych, when we just should take men seriously, and treat them as individuals, not as members of some kind of social masculinity movement/ideology, and take their suffering seriously, not just because of caveman-just-so-story cant-help-it determinism.

My maternal grandfather is an incredibly sweet man who has never raised his voice to me and has always been generous with his gifts and advice.

He also spent my mother's childhood mocking civil rights activists, making racist jokes (such as referring to MLK Day as James Earl Ray Day) and indoctrinating her with racist and neo-Confederate ideas, as well as voting for groups and politicians in the Deep South that aligned with his views. He also did extensive contracting work with the military, which may or may not strike you as evil depending on your perspective, but I view it as such.

Will I be sad when he passes away? Yes, because he was kind to me personally. But I will also be relieved, because the world will be, on net, a better place without him in it.

I mean, I really hope the people in their 70s now will die eventually, since theyve had a stranglehold on politics for years. I don’t think this observation is remotely similar to advocating for genocide (or gerontocide?).

Anon, you’re eagerly awaiting others’ deaths just because you want the reins of power? I’m hoping you’re just not noticing how messed up that is.