Humanity is one species. Men and women are two halves of one species. They are two sides of one adaptive strategy.
Men and women have differences, but generally (though not always), these differences are not a pure binary. They often have overlapping distributions.
We can determine what is masculine and what is feminine not by looking at where the populations are the same, but by looking at where the populations are different. We can summarize these differences as masculine traits and feminine traits.
Masculine and feminine traits can be positive, or they can be negative, or, as is often the case, their value can be contextual. A trait can persist in environments and contexts where it is not useful, because it is renewed or valued in contexts where it is useful.
Because men and women are not uniform, and the distributions are overlapping, there can be women who are more masculine, or more masculine in certain areas, or men who are more feminine, or more feminine in certain areas.
This natural variation is adaptive.
In general, splitting the social and literal layers of a message, I would say that men tend to be more literal and care less about social consensus, while women tend to be more focused on the social content of messages and care more about social consensus.
When the social consensus is good, it is good to enforce it, and when the social consensus is bad, it is good to violate it. The social consensus can drift away from conditions, and therefore it will always need to be violated in order to update it at some point, yet it also synchronizes actions, and so it is generally worthwhile to have a social consensus at another point.
It is good that there are women who are less agreeable and less focused on social consensus, for the generations and contexts where the social consensus is bad, and it is good that there are women who are more agreeable and focused on social consensus, for the generations and contexts where social consensus is good.
In general, my assessment is that masculine charisma is about being inspiring, while feminine charisma is about being warm and inviting.
A charismatic man inspires others to put in effort and fulfill their potential. A charismatic woman is soft and fluid, and disarms people, lubricating social friction arising from conflicting intentions, emotions, and beliefs, creating a buttery-smooth social situation.
And yet, someone who is both inspiring and warm and inviting, or who is capable of drawing from either ability according to the situation, can draw in people, smooth the social situation, inspire them to fulfill their potential, and direct them towards some goal.
There can also be a woman who is inspiring, or a man who is warm and inviting. This is not contradiction, but simply a natural range of variation.
A system of two people can sustain a tension between opposites, and therefore outperform either person alone. A wise person can integrate the tension within him or herself, and thereby exceed a person who embodies fully one characteristic or another.
The division of the species-level adaptive strategy, and its embodiment in two groups of people, creates male and female. They push against each other. A fusion of the two wouldn't abolish social competition, and while it isn't clear what the abolition of one would do (such as through exotic reproductive technologies), it's clear that it would change evolutionary pressures.
So given all that above, men are good, actually.
Men are not just women who are physically stronger and also violent and oppressive for no reason. Men, who in homosocial contexts have social (and physical) power less beholden to social consensus, are the ones who are best positioned - and best emotionally primed - to violate a bad social consensus.
So men are good, but because not all masculine traits are good or are good in all contexts, not all men are good.
And similarly, while women can be frustrating for men, it is not the case that the only purpose of women in the world is to bear children, or the case that all women can only contribute by bearing children.
Much of what women do is not quite as socially legible to most men, so many men cannot tell when a woman is buttering over a social situation (lubricating conflicting intentions), or acting in a selfish or socially predatory way in the social layer. So it is not the case that women in general are bad, or that the only point of women is the most obvious thing about them (generational continuity), or that 'the most submissive woman is always the best,' and so on.
Rather, women, like men, can be good or bad, and a woman can embody positive masculine qualities (disagreeability or systems orientation), or positive feminine qualities (being warm and inviting), and do more legible masculine work (engineering), or less legible but still valuable more feminine work (relational management). This work can contribute to society even if it isn't highly legible and easy to monetize.
Now, then...
Every human being is born with low psychological development and low self-awareness. Psychological development and self-awareness require exertion, care, and self-overcoming. Many people do not maximize their potential in these areas, either due to personality, getting stuck in a local maximum, or lack of experience.
So, consider self-awareness and psychological development as one axis.
The division of the species-level adaptive strategy into two groups of people (the sexes), who vary internally and overlap, creates a second axis.
Therefore, there are both conflicting intentions and conflicting experiences, and there is a widespread lack of awareness of self and understanding of others.
Then, consider morality as a third axis. There are conflicting interests, and some people pursue them selfishly, or in a short-sighted manner.
The experiences, and awareness of those experiences, vary widely among people. Gender discourse is therefore continuously regenerated, and even in the case of better overall morality and understanding, would still be regenerated as a continuous negotiation of interests that are in tension with each other.
If we then introduce compression, the limits of information transmission and processing, then obviously there will be continuous misunderstandings, and a continuous flow of people feeling misunderstood, devalued, talked-over, or excluded.
"gender is unary" started out as making fun of non-binary gender (which is implicitly more than two, not less) but I'm increasingly coming around to thinking it's a serious and underrated lens of analysis. There is one gender, and the gender is Men. Women are not men, children are not men, transgenders of either sex are not men, effeminate homosexual males are not men.
A central trait of men in this lens is that men are responsible for people who aren't men.
This is why it's acceptable for women and children (non-men) to publicly break down and cry and attract a man to help them out, but a man who breaks down and cries is contemptible. Non-men get to demand help from men, but men are supposed to be providing help, not demanding it.
This isn't "patriarchy", it's far wider than that.
Feminists routinely demand that men, as a whole gender, must do something to solve the problems of a few worried women. Progressives set up "women and femmes" spaces for non-men, that allow adult dickhavers if they aren't men, and children of any sort. John Hopkins University put out a LGBTQ glossary defining "lesbian" as a non-man attracted to non-men.
Behind a strong independent non-man is usually a man, from the government-funded (meaning: man-funded) women's organizations, to Margaret Hamilton who slept with her male boss at NASA and got promoted onto and given credit for a space shuttle programming team that was halfway done when she joined, or Amelia Earhart who was flown over the Atlantic by a male pilot in 1928 and four years later she managed to do it herself and feminists pretended this was a great accomplishment.
You up for a tl;dr rebuttal to that "MRA" nonnoid?
[anon]
In clearness, this rebuttal would be coming from someone who considers themselves at least MRA-affiliated.
got no fucking idea what I was going for with "nonnoid"
That won't be necessary. I hope all readers already understand that most of the nasty feminist types have essentially zero understanding of how the typical MRA thinks, which is part of why they represent them all as either incels or PUAs or both at the same time.
The thing the MRAs typically care about is stuff like the Duluth Model, which has been used as policy, which presents domestic violence as "men's violence against women" even though it's usually in both directions more often than that. It's pretty much pure ideology.
I was raised by engineers, so when that kind of crap showed up in force in 2014 in the more general sense, it took me a while to figure out what the fuck was going on.
What nasty internet feminists are doing is the following:
Women are equal to men in every positive way (except strength, but that doesn't count for more than opening pickle jars).
Men are uniquely violent and dangerous.
Therefore, women are better than men.
MRAs mostly negate #2. Trads mostly negate #1.
Certain kinds of women tend to understand men and how they relate to men better than others. It's not ironic that girlwriteswhat, who was popular with MRAs on their subreddit back in... 2014? ...had a short haircut, and had been asked by another woman to help escort her to her car.
The more hardcore trad and PUA types don't pick up on this so much, I think.
(Like, oh say, given the general tumblr-user reaction to things like GLP-1 drugs, gen AI, and cryogenics/life-extension, that they're all scams or cheating or something, if we ever get the ability to 'switch bodies' in a way that's now pure sci-fi, I'd lay pret-ty good odds that the people who use it to change their sex will be seen as fake trans, sellouts to The Techbros, in contrast to real trans people like themselves who earned it with HRT and social transitioning.)
Hmn.
"Gender pioneers vs. gender tourists" discourse would probably exist as a potential discourse to arise generally under these conditions, but scale and intensity (e.g. just used to valorize Amish transgender people/contextually by a few old folks, vs. a common discourse) would depend on the level of accessibility of the new technology.
Gonna be honest guys, I can't offer much advice on normie dating. Cis neurotypical women present as so fragile, like glass vases, one careless word or touch and they'll break. So I can get dates but then, what do you do to seduce a neurotypical woman on a date? Don't know. Can't tell you.
So when I get into a long-term relationship (and I'm not in one right now), it's with a woman who has a strong pull factor. ADHD or bisexual (actually they've all been bisexual). 'I want attention.' 'I want sex.' No ambiguity about whether my presence is wanted (altho it still might be vague enough not to register to someone autistic?). A bottom, but assertive enough to give a hard 'no' if she doesn't like what I'm doing.
I assume that cis neurotypical men can read cis neurotypical women as well as I can read ADHD or bisexual women, and so they can pick up on the consent/desire signals better than I can.
Like, can you guys imagine Donald Trump ever admitting that he lost a debate?
Let alone imagine his party *withdrawing him as nominee* because of it?
And we're going to beat him at his own game by, uh, doing literally the exact opposite of his game?
[ mitigatedchaos ]
Your plan is to beat Trump by being better at being Trump than Trump is?
Damn, son. You got a Texas oil baron lined up or something?
-★-
I watched the first hour of the debate. At one point the moderator asked Trump about abortion. As the Republican candidate, this is a tricky question for him, since evangelical voters would like abortion banned in most cases (and thus presumably every state). Trump then argued that he was leaving it up to the states, and the states would decide. He says that he agrees that the abortion pill should be legal, and agrees with the court ruling in favor of it, and that he supports the exceptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother. Further, he's against third trimester and 'post-birth abortion.'
While banning most first trimester abortion only has 38% support, banning most third trimester abortion has 80% supermajority support. The views of the median voter are in tension: they don't want to force women to have babies they don't want, but they also don't want to kill babies.
Biden stumbles in his delivery of his canned line in response, which appeared to be based on the idea that strict limits on abortion access would de facto nullify the exceptions.
Democrats have repeatedly lied about abortion. Republicans have repeatedly lied about abortion. The whole argument about 'after-birth' abortions appears to be based on political fencing with bills, which Democrats also do. (Something like the classic, "Oh, sure, it's illegal, but will you make it super double illegal? Oh, you won't? That means you support it, then.")
(I should note, at the time, I wrote, "I don't think Americans should trust a single word either of these guys is saying.")
But later, Biden trips over Roe v. Wade and the three trimesters to the point that it's unclear just what the hell he means.
The main CNN video doesn't support comments, but there's a clip that does. The top comment?
we're fucked as a nation
In my opinion, these comments overall agree with my post...
Man, both of these men are so old and tired, though Biden is the older and tireder of the two. ... This guy's like a cat with 6 months to live.
It isn't that Biden "lost" the debate, as in he morally failed to engage in enough preparation. The man is simply too old; no amount of preparation would have worked.
-★-
With the abortion argument, we get a good example of Trump's pattern of exaggeration: "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Every legal scholar, all over the world. The most respected."
There was a substantive debate about this, and in fact there were a number of legal scholars that believed that the issue was, on a legal basis, on shaky ground. This was a common argument over the past two decades. There was not a complete, unanimous consensus.
People talk about Trump lying a lot. For a lot of that, I think they have this sort of thing in mind, but I don't take it all that seriously. This is salesman lying. He is trying to sell you a Trump steak.
Each message has a [social] component and a [content] component. Trump is weighting the [content] component lower, making it less accurate, but the [social] component lacks tactical depth.
I think this gets into some sort of personality conflict.
All politicians lie. They put on a nice suit, tell you some flowery speech, and then go bomb some country in the middle east. Obama was a genius at public speaking, like Hollywood President tier, but the drone war continued.
So, to make up an example (that's less controversial), a regular politician will start talking about "the human dignity" of guys that break into cars, or something, and the initial language will be quite empathetic. But rather than going where this is supposed to go, and improving the quality and safety of the prisons, they'll get you to agree to this nice-sounding language as part of a multi-step maneuver, and then they won't fix the prisons, and they won't properly rehabilitate the guys that break into the cars, and they'll just... release them, to break into your car.
So if someone starts talking about "human dignity," I start looking for where they hid the knife. (I also consider their personal record; I'm willing to entertain that they're serious, but I have to see the evidence of pragmatism first.)
Trump comes in and he starts talking about how, "All the legal scholars agree with me, all over the world. The most prestigious." This translates to, "I'm popular. I make great decisions. Vote for me."
It's so crass that it has a tactical depth of like, one. It's not part of some long and complicated chain. There is no sophisticated ideological permission structure being setup. He's not trying to redefine the language. There is no second maneuver.
So to me, this feels safe.
I'm not expecting to be attacked from some high-level social plane or whatever, so I can relax. This man is a salesman. A lot of what he says is bullshit, but he just wants to sell me something.
I know it's bullshit. He knows it's bullshit. He knows I know it's bullshit. But this deception is so unsophisticated that it loops back around to being somewhat honest, or even friendly. (It's like if you had a mandatory prison gang fight, and technically, they have to "fight" you, but they're not really trying.) Obviously it results in a lower rate of information transmission, though. (What will he actually do? It can be hard to say.)
This is not the same as "lock her up," from Trump's 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. That was concerning, and in fact in the 2016 election I voted for Clinton. But then, he didn't follow through on that.
-★-
Thinking from the other direction, why would someone find the general, "we have the best cows," approach to be disconcerting rather than just annoying? (The Wall was kinda also like that. It's just a big, dumb object.)
Well, if you're used to everything having three layers of social misdirection in order to protect everyone's reputations and social position, and using this to demonstrate loyalty to others, maybe the crass rhetoric makes it sound like anything could be up for sale, with enough votes.
So you're supposed to say the stuff that your network socially agree sounds nice, and if you aren't saying the stuff, that might mean you're planning to coordinate to do something bad. (Why aren't you following the network? Do you think you're better than other people? Sounds like you might be planning to subordinate others.)
But the actual content of the messages doesn't get properly evaluated.
To quote some swing voters from the famous Reddit "sanewashing" post:
Only one participant here agrees we should "defund the police." One woman says "That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said." 50% of people here say they think Biden was privately sympathetic to the position.
We are explaining the actual policies behind defund the police. One woman interrupts "that is not what defund the police means, I'm sorry. It means they want to defund the police."
"I didn't like being lied to about this over and over again" says another woman. "Don't try and tell word don't mean what they say" she continues. Rest of group nodding heads.
During the early part of the 2014-2022 era, when we had the feminist push, there was a term called "mansplaining," intended to mean roughly "a men condescendingly explaining things to a woman."
In discussion with each other, men may try to assess who is the most knowledgeable or sharpest (in order to lead the discussion), so they may throw a piece of information out there like it's a tennis ball, and they expect you to hit it back. So a man might tell a woman about a book that she wrote, and then expect her to respond with some insight about the passage he was discussing.
From what I've seen, among men this is social statusy, but it's not like, hardcore. From some women, we got tweets along the lines of, "How dare he lecture me about my own book! Does he think he knows better than me about the book I wrote myself?!" It's basically mismatched systems of etiquette. (An autistic woman might have powered through and info dumped about the book to the man anyway until he got tired of the topic, and perceived no insult.)
This was a triple failure.
First, the men did not realize that the women (this kind of woman) have different discursive norms from men, and adapt in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in mixed spaces.
Second, the women did not realize that this was not a male plot to subordinate women. Feminists connected this etiquette mismatch to a larger ideological construct ("patriarchy"). Some of them are probably still angry to this day.
Third, the two groups largely did not reach a mutual understanding on this issue, except for a few honest people (and people less prone to viewing the opposite sex adversarially) in small spaces, coming into maturity.
Which is to say, in this clash of norms, the view based on multiple layers of social indirection as a form of politeness may be socially astute within its own culture, but may be socially maladapted outside of that culture.
Because these social norms are social, they are a product of a local social equilibrium rather than a more universalist analysis, which in practice makes them more particular. Compare economic or scientific ideas, which, while they exist in a social context, have a non-social framework for discovery and resolution.
I don't find it that difficult to understand the median voter wanting first trimester abortion to be legal and third trimester abortion to be illegal.
In the same way, to the median voter and not just conservatives, a slogan like "defund the police" means "defund the police." A lot of the more confrontational slogans produced by this process sound positively unhinged to outsiders - in a way that makes Donald Trump seem normal by comparison.
-★-
There are a good number of right-wing grifters who are out there regularly lying. I don't post much about them, because they just aren't that interesting. The field of politics is constantly shifting, anyway.
But I think it's worth considering how Democrats got into this situation.
To pick another Trump example, some readers may have seen this 2018 video of Trump telling Germany they're too dependent on imported Russian natural gas, and the German delegation smiling at him.
I vaguely recall that this was part of a Trump push to sell more liquefied natural gas from the US to the Europeans.
Of course, Russia did expand their war with Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Germany was importing 55% of their natural gas from Russia.
Brookings interviewed some economists about how the results went down. Russia cut down on gas supplies into Europe in 2021, reducing the amount of stored gas in Germany by the expansion of the war in early 2022. They raised and lowered the amount of gas coming in to Germany until the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline in mid 2022.
So it's likely that Putin's Russia were, in fact, trying to gain leverage over Germany. Estimates from industry CEOs predicted a major recession.
The economists predicted that the situation would be expensive, but manageable, and the damage to Germany's economy was less than expected. Why?
First, the demand for gas was not perfectly inelastic. The dire predictions were based on gas as a bottleneck causing a cascade of missing production inputs ("for want of a bolt, the bulldozer is lost; for want of a bulldozer, the factory is lost; for want of a factory..." one might say). It turned out that it was possible to substitute at multiple points in the production process, so more gas-intensive components could be imported if needed. (As the war was in Ukraine, Germany was not blockaded.)
Second, gas was imported from other sources, including Norway... and liquefied natural gas from the US. (A second source claims that 5-6% of the gas is still coming from Russia.)
Third, the disruption was already on the horizon from 2021, so it was easier to coordinate actors.
So was Trump right? Was he wrong?
Germany was getting about 26% of its energy from natural gas in 2021. If 55% of that is from Russia, that makes for about 14% of Germany's energy supply, not including imported Russian oil. As of 2014, Russian troops were already occupying Crimea.
What I want to argue is that, less than right or wrong, "Getting ≥14% of your energy from a powerful geopolitical rival, particularly one currently engaged in a military occupation just two countries away, gives them potential leverage, and this makes it risky," is obvious.
Going, "Haha, look at this ignorant buffoon who thinks that Putin might exploit providing us with 1/8th of our energy for leverage," is just... It's cringe.
Germany had to reactivate their coal power plants to deal with the energy crisis, but they still had coal power plants to reactivate. The long-term storage problem for renewables hasn't been resolved yet. If they had an energy economy that was 60% natural gas, 40% renewables, and 0% nuclear, they'd be in an even worse spot.
(Lately it looks like people are making a stab at sucking CO2 out of the air and converting it to fuel. Will that be online as a replacement in 2030? That's harder to say. It would be fortunate, because combustible fuels don't have the same security concerns as fission power.)
-★-
Anyhow, that was all background.
How did Democrats get into this mess?
Well, obviously Democrats and left-leaning people in the media made a huge deal of Trump as the exception, Trump as the risk, Trump as would-be dictator, Trump as the erosion of norms, and so on. And of course, the Covid-19 pandemic landed on Trump's term and was very abnormal.
The point of running Joe Biden, from the perspective of the median voter, was a "return to normalcy." This is what voters were telling them by picking the pre-Trump Vice President from Obama's term.
After Trump got in and stopped caring about pursuing Hillary Clinton, I found it hard to buy the idea of Trump as an emergency.
Democrats always seemed to use "Trump is an emergency" as an excuse to behave in worse ways. For example, Democrats argued that protests against lockdowns of community centers like churches were too dangerous to be allowed due to the risk of spreading the virus, but then argued that nation-wide race riots needed to be allowed and that this was the position of 'science' as an institution.
Did the race riots accomplish anything of value? No. The opportunity for normal police reform was squandered on braindead slogans like "Defund the Police," which swing voters think are insane. There was a significant increase in homicide, and this is before accounting for significantly-improved trauma surgery since 1990. If LA is any indication, most of the victims of the increase in homicide were black and hispanic.
They complained constantly about Trump eroding institutional norms... and then eroded institutional norms. By 2022, trust in mass media among independents and Republicans collapsed to 27% and 14% respectively.
This is going to be a long-term problem; conspiracy theories are proliferating due to a lack of trust in sense-making institutions, and sense-making institutions have had their reputations shredded by wasteful partisan behavior that barely moved the needle electorally.
One way to assess how much someone values something is to ask what they're willing to give up to get it. Ask any Democrat on Twitter - what concessions are they willing to make to the rest of America to ensure Trump doesn't get back into office? The answer is none.
A "return to normalcy" would mean using the racial identitarians as expendable shock troops and then dropping them after the election, not getting shut down by the courts for doing "race conscious" policy.
The administration would quietly make changes to shore up the practical (not mere messaging) legitimacy of the institutions in order to cover for the spent legitimacy from the Trump era and run a boring administration focused on policies with supermajority support.
So now Democrats are the weird theater kids, and Trump is the normal guy. (And he's already been President, so publishing a magazine cover calling him Hitler just comes off as hysterics.)
-★-
Why did this happen?
First, as the guy that won the election, Joe Biden is the primary guy with the political capital to reshape the Democratic coalition's priorities. In 2020, Joe Biden had the same problem he has in 2024: he's too old.
There is no Democrat strategic command to impose discipline on the coalition members. There are lots of factions all fighting each other to pursue policy that's aligned with their own interests rather than the national interest, and it's resulting in what I call a coalitional interest deadlock. (For a relatively uncontroversial example, Left-NIMBYs and boneheaded environmentalists oppose housing construction, while pro-immigrationists bring in millions of people... who, when they get here, would need housing. One of these two factions needs to lose.)
Nasty identitarian rhetoric requires no immediate material concessions from these factions, nor does it require any discipline, so we get nasty identitarian rhetoric that does not benefit the country in any way, and is not connected to positive programs (that would require actual work and limiting claims to what's realistic, which defeats the point).
Some of you are probably familiar with the idea of a "leveraged buyout." This is when a private equity firm buys a company with debt, and then typically put it on the balance sheet of the company they just bought out. A firm with too much debt is said to be "overleveraged."
The second problem is that Democrats are epistemically overleveraged. They are making too many bets based on incomplete information, and a lot of the assumptions they're making in the process are not accurate.
Some tech-related online right-wingers believed that mass schooling was having almost no effect on learning or performance, and that it was almost entirely just selecting for conscientiousness and intelligence.
Learning losses from online schooling during the pandemic showed that mass schooling was having an effect - by removing it.
However, in researching the literature on education shortly before the pandemic, I found that getting educational results beyond what schools were achieving was very difficult, and that many educational interventions would fade out. Charter schools only produced modestly better results (for about the same price), in a way I couldn't differentiate from selection effects on parents. (I did find that online charters performed horribly. Well, I guess that's one finding verified by a larger-scale experiment.)
It isn't a matter of funding. Baltimore schools are highly funded and get terrible results.
We lack means to convert funding into results.
(Roland Fryer reportedly managed to beat the average for one class, but as a sign of things to come, he got politically sidelined in 2019. Naturally, he's an economist.)
Line voter Democrats are likely to claim that sub-par US school results are due to underfunding. The condition of scientific institutions is not as bad as right-wingers think it is; researchers know that just blindly slapping more funding on to education won't work. However, the guys in between, the 'officers' of the Democratic coalition, are quite happy to leave the line voters in the dark.
They're probably patting themselves on the back, thinking, "I should leave out the most damaging information in order to protect the weak and marginalized," and then not accounting for the possibility that everyone else in their information chain is doing the same thing.
Because of this, we don't get a more serious conversation that would establish a better method to convert funding into results. (This applies to other domains as well. Public transit in the US is ruinously expensive to construct, particularly in CA and NYC. A "car tax" without the ability to practically construct public transit is just a hateful punishment.)
When a Democrat is talking about "beating Trump at his own game," for example, by pretending that Biden did OK at the debate, this is generally of the form, "we should be more aggressive, deceptive, and selfish."
The Democrats are already too deceptive. It's inhibiting their ability to govern effectively. The Democrats are already too aggressive. A number of the online right being read by Chris Rufo and Elon Musk were once self-identified liberals [1] who were driven away and radicalized by the hostile messaging (which was not connected to practical benefits for society, so this isn't "mere selfishness"). Democrats are already selfish enough; forgiving student debt without fixing the system to reduce the origin of that debt polls 30-40 approve-disapprove.
And for the debate itself...
Bro why do we have 70+ year old[s] running for office? Shouldn't we have someone at least young and more modern? This is like watching a retirement home cafeteria fight 😭
Do you think telling someone like that, "Biden didn't lose the debate," sounds, you know, hinged? At the very least, it certainly doesn't inspire trust or confidence.
-★-
A little while ago, collapsedsquid posted:
Seeing a lot of the "This Trump thing is because everyone was so unfair to Romney in 2012 and he lost" out there again and this is fucking abuser logic man, "Why did you make me hit you? If you'd only put away the dishes like I'd asked then this wouldn't have had to happen" shut the fuck up man.
I had been writing a draft response to this.
Basically, seriousness is both a substantive position and a rhetorical stance. The Bush administration undermined the rhetorical stance on the Republican side due to the Iraq War, which was mismanaged, and in which no nuclear weapons were found. (Some old chemical weapons were found, but not an actual development program.)
Throwing the line "binders full of women" at Mitt Romney didn't help, of course, but it's more like that faction of the Republican party failed to regain its footing.
During the Bush administration, there were comparisons of George Bush to Hitler (it showed up on protest signs, for instance).
In practice, the Bush administration were libcons. Looking at Afghanistan, a mountainous, dry, landlocked country that has a GDP per capita of around $500, they were neither 'anti-racist' enough to decide not to invade and respect the local rule of the Taliban (and their local cultural traditions), nor conventionally racist (or culturalist) enough to conclude that national development would be a tremendous challenge requiring a radical reorganization of Afghan society.
Utilitarianism is generally about maximizing "utility," or subjective positive experience, and assumes that this can be summed across individuals. For example, there is a utilitarian thought experiment in which a surgeon has one healthy patient and five sick patients. If he kills the healthy patient, then he can harvest the man's organs in order to save the five sick patients. (Yes, like in Rimworld.)
There are many problems with a naive utilitarian approach.
However, if we rotate the concept of utilitarianism, we get the idea of moral prices, and morality as something that can be traded off against other factors of production, such as land, labor, energy, capital, and so on. Morality is not like these other resources; immorality can incentivize more immorality. However, this provides us with a potential frame with which to view a more violent and exploitative past.
One way to view the situation is that a radical reorganization of Afghanistan would be morally intensive, not just financially draining.
For example, Afghanistan has a high rate of cousin marriage, which is not common in developed countries. Overriding that would mean prioritizing foreign marriage norms as superior, taking on epistemic debt as the relationship between marriage norms and democracy or economy is more correlative than rock-solid causative, and to the degree that Afghan people resist this change, enforcing it at gunpoint.
While Democratic voters of the era would joke about Republican-voting "rednecks" being cousin-married, the appetite for such a program likely did not exist.
Another way to view the situation is that, from the outside, the Bush administration believed that democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation, were simply what happens in the absence of dictatorship. This view legitimized American power and influence as simply the natural order asserting itself, and argued that asserting American influence was morally cheap.
If democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation are non-trivially the product of particular cultural norms and values, then American interventionism is much more morally expensive.
In either case, Trump represents a "correction" in reaction to the failed project of the Bush administration: conflict and oppression are still undesirable; bombs are morally expensive; borders are cheap.
-★-
As we know, the United States lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. A joke emerged at the time:
"Now the Taliban have to govern Afghanistan."
Discussion in right-wing circles claims that the Taliban won by doing a better job of maintaining basic property rights and resolving disputes than the US-aligned forces did, despite being in a state of war with the US:
The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.
There were, reportedly, complaints from members of the Taliban after their victory, but it would seem that the Taliban were already governing Afghanistan.
Richard Hanania may be a troll, but he went through some Afghan War documents posted by the Washington Post, and I don't think he's making it up. It would seem that while the Taliban were governing Afghanistan, the US forces, well, weren't:
Six months after he was appointed, Bush didn't know who his top general in Afghanistan was, and didn't care. General McNeill had no guidance about what he should be doing in the country.
He has a whole long thread of this sort of thing. It reminds me of reading through the Wikipedia page on the Vietnam War many years after high school history, which made it sound like the US was quite adept with high-technology weapons, but failed to properly identify and manage the political source for the conflict.
Let's return to the student loan debt forgiveness issue.
A typical firm only has a profit margin of about 7-10%. A firm can keep going as long as it's breaking even, so even a low profit margin can still pay wages. However, if a firm is losing money, it will have to sell off assets or lay off employees, reducing its production capacity.
There is investment, in which we spend current production in order to increase or maintain future production, such as by building a factory. If we make a good investment, we'll get the production value back later. There is insurance, which involves moving risk around. For example, you are unlikely to be in a car accident most of the time, but if you have car insurance and you do get in an accident, the insurance company will pay for repair or replacement of your car. [2] This may make you more likely to buy a car in the first place, or more likely to structure your life around the assumption that you will have a car.
Governments can (in theory) spend a great deal on investment or insurance, but they can only spend a more limited amount on consumption spending.
For a college degree that pays for itself, government can loan money at a low interest rate, and the value will be paid back by the person who took the loan later.
For a college degree that doesn't pay for itself, someone has to supply the production that builds the buildings on the campus, fixes the water pipes, reloads the toilet paper in the bathrooms, and so on, and if that's not "the person taking the degree, but in the future," then it has to be someone else.
Someone like collapsedsquid might have the view, "I want the state to subsidize college education. Why should I pre-compromise and reduce my negotiating position?"
To expand on this, "Guarding the state treasury is the work of the right and of capital (business); why should I do their work for them?"
From this perspective, the role of the Democratic presidential candidate is to be the leader of America's left-leaning coalition, the blue team.
But the median voter or swing voter does not necessarily have this perspective. The median or swing voter is choosing between two candidates to lead the American enterprise.
The actual job is President of the United States.
If you win the War in Afghanistan, you have to govern Afghanistan. If you win the US presidential election, you have to govern the United States of America.
That's the prize. If you don't like it, don't run for office.
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Nonetheless, this causes a tension. In order to become President as a Democrat, you first have to win the Democratic primary, which makes you effectively the leader of the Democratic party.
How do you deal with this?
That's "simple": split the issues.
A political coalition has a lot of people and those people have diverse interests. Representing them all at once is too difficult. Talking about them all at once is too difficult. Generalization of coalitional interests into a smaller, more manageable set of principles yields ideology.
Take the issues, and order them by how important they are to the functioning of the country, and how important they are for mainstream voters.
For the issues most important to mainstream voters, aim for a very broad coalition using very general principles. Pass legislation that has supermajority support in the polls, and be loud about it so that voters know what you've done for them lately.
For more niche issues that mainstream voters care less about, aim for a narrower coalition with narrower principles, to reward your base.
The second is the reward for the first. The median voter should be able to trust you on the things that he cares about, and where he doesn't trust you, it's on things he doesn't care about.
Core issues for the functioning of the country will seep into more generic voter dissatisfaction with things like inflation, so it's better to keep on top of those. Whether to be loud about it depends on whether the individual policy that's actually needed has good optics or not.
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If you want to "beat Trump at his own game," you don't do so by talking about how America has the best steaks.
You identify his most important issues, and then you work out how to best steal them from him.
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[1] "They were elves, once." Extradeadjcb is probably the most prominent example, but it comes up for a number of them. I've written about this before, but ethnic conflict theory by one player creates an equilibrium more favorable to ethnic conflict theory by other players. Lefty Twitter users asked Razib Khan why he attended Extradeadjcb's natalism conference; he replied by asking where the left-wing natalism conference was. That's probably still 20 years out.
The recent discourse circulating on Twitter and TikTok? "Women, would you rather be trapped alone in the woods with a man, or a bear?" One man asks his phone to read him a number of stats. "If you don't get this argument, I don't even think you're human," he says, implying that if you don't think men should be viewed as predators, "you are the problem."
Of course, if we were approaching this question from the perspective of truthfully assessing whether a random 150 pound man is more dangerous than a random 1,000 pound grizzly bear, the correct approach would not be to assess the absolute number of bear attacks, but the number of bear attacks per encounter.
Women in the United States usually encounter men almost every day. They generally do not encounter bears. I would guess that a majority of women in the United States have not encountered a bear outside of a zoo. (My personal experience is that women who live in areas with lots of bears do actually complain about bears.)
But of course, the actual attack to encounter ratio has nothing to do with it. Words have both a social component and a content component. The people arguing that men are "more dangerous than bears" are using words in a way that that heavily weights the social component and very lightly weights the content component.
They're just talking about their feelings (and trying to get leverage). It would not occur to them to divide two numbers about this.
There will always be discourse topics this stupid. Even if you come to power, you will preside over a society in which people are having very dumb arguments, and some of those arguments go viral.
I should note that while the people emphasizing social component are maneuvering in the social domain, this does not necessarily mean that they "have good social skills." People read "you are more dangerous than a bear" as an attack because it's pretty obviously a ploy to get leverage.
A mature person who wants to create a harmonious social environment instead of drama would find a different way to phrase, "I am fearful about men," than, "men are all deadly predators more dangerous than bears."
torn between my desire for biden to anoint kamala as president-for-a-day to discredit the idea of women being leaders and my absolute conviction that kamala would somehow manage to get us all killed within minutes of taking office
The Korean Gender Crisis has reached its historical peak, as plausibly-deniable mansquads and femsquads seek to eradicate their political opponents as a deadlocked legislature has shifted politics to inter-agency conflict.
Though not a parent yourself, you are a member of KNIGHT, an unauthorized armed vigilante group setup to protect children from either exploitation (from vicious groups of mancels) or mutilation (perpetrated by resentful femcels).
The other operatives in your cell include your sister, who is an angry lesbian furious at the number of straight women pretending to lesbianism for political reasons, and a foreign-born transgender engineer whose expensive implants were destroyed by gender warriors.
There are rumors that your organization are funded by the enigmatic owner of the game studio that created the first AI-powered BL gacha, a move widely considered to have further reduced Korea's fertility. The firm's annual revenues exceed $40B.
