I'm not interested in spitting prepackaged platitudes from others back and forth.
Ideas need room to stretch their legs. The process of writing an effortposts should lead to the writer being different than when they started.
Ideas need room to stretch their legs. The process of writing an effortposts should lead to the writer being different than when they started.
Only tangentially related to anything, but...
At the moment, the left is calling for the destruction of Israel and death to the Jews because Israel is more powerful than Palestine, and the strong are always morally inferior to the weak (paraphrasing and simplifying obviously)
Which really makes me wonder if eventually the left will drop abortion as an issue the same as they dropped eugenics as an issue (and they pretend that didn't happen, but as an example, Tommy Douglas, the socialist father of universal healthcare in Canada was a proud advocate of eugenics).
No human is less powerful than an unborn baby, so an adult woman killing that baby because it's powerless, unseen, and inconvenient seems totally at odds with that ideology. It's the ultimate power imbalance. A child who has no choice in being created is totally powerless and dependent, and the powerful adult human female from a rich country kills it.
Bodily autonomy is the argument the left primarily relies on, but in my view an unconvincing argument because rights often end up conflicting with one another. In this case, you have the right of a mother to choose whether to carry a baby to term in conflict with the child (who was created by the usually willful acts of the mother in the first place and didn't ask to be created) to not be murdered. In most circumstances, we would consider this a clear moral choice, the right not to be murdered being the highest right. Consider the argument of American slavery, where the rights for someone to be secure in their property rights ran up against someone else's right to Liberty and not to be considered someone else's property.
Another thing is that women who are typically more left-wing and collectivist with other people's money and freedoms sound like Ayn Rand when it comes to personally supporting a child they acted to bring into being. "It's a parasite! What do we do with parasites? We kill them!!" Particularly women in their second and third trimester have to dehumanize a baby to explain why a baby who could be born immediately and likely survive should be murdered in the womb.
Some might make an argument about freedom and bodily autonomy, but leftism isn't liberalism, leftists don't necessarily believe in personal freedom as a core value. All the most totalitarian regimes of the 21st century started with leftism. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Pol Pot all ideologically came from leftism, with Mussolini being part of the socialist party in Italy, and Hitler being elected leader of his Soviet during a brief socialist uprising in Germany. It seems there's no reason to think this one freedom is somehow sancrosanct when none of the others are protected.
Modern day China is closer to fascism aka state socialism than Marxist class socialism, but I characterize both as left-wing, hoping to break down society in a revolution and build something new in pursuit of utopia. I think that China will be the first to break with the idea of bodily autonomy for women. As we are on the verge of a population collapse which is going to dramatically change the way people look at having kids, I'm certain that China will be the first country to claim government authority over women's bodies and not just not allow them to have abortions, but probably start forcing them to have kids because to not have kids is "an anti-revolutionary act". Most people don't know that the Chinese government is far from socially progressive in a western sense, being highly racist (there's a lot of talking in the United States today about immigration and citizenship, outsiders cannot get citizenship in China, and a Chinese police track where Africans travel to and perform routine midnight raids on those houses whether there is evidence of wrongdoing or not), considering being gay anti-revolutionary and therefore something to be attacked rather than embraced, and so on so there is no good reason to think that they would follow the Western progressive idea of bodily autonomy for women.
As a skilled craftsman myself, I have often considered a criticism of class socialism's suggestion that the working class "seize the means of production". Personally, I know that a skilled individual is as much ore more "the means of production" as a machine. Give someone with no trades skills a high technology shop with all the latest tools and they won't be able to create anything with it, but a world-class craftsman could potentially arrive shirtless and shoeless in a forest and create all kinds of amazing things (watch "Primitive Technology" on youtube for a great example of this, the guy literally does this). This plays out in practice by class socialist governments effectively enslaving the skilled workforce because they require such people and lack the positive incentives of capitalism to get them to work. In the same way, women's bodies as "the means of production" can be similarly collectivized, and some leftists at times have suggested that women ought to effectively be sexually available to any man who wants them to prevent class systems from developing of attractive and unattractive men. This means that it isn't outside the realm of the possible for leftism to not just abandon "bodily autonomy" as an argument for abortion, but potentially as an argument for women's sexual autonomy in general. This shows the dangers of collectivist ideology, in that it can justify any range of totalitarian control of the individual.
If nothing else, I think the discussion above suggests that abortion isn't necessarily an inherently leftist stance, and instead is more a stance of the left due to previous ideological horse-trading with different factions within the left (giving some space for feminists) than a principled stance based on core ideology. Indeed, one could just as easily make right wing arguments in favor of abortion, including as I implied the objectivist individual liberty argument, or a social darwinist argument. The Japanese historically allowed post-birth infanticide using language implying their agrarian past where farmers would cull weak or diseased plants or animals to ensure the strongest thrive, and a moral argument that infants mostly exist in the spirit world and it's only through their childhoods that they become more human and entrenched in the material world. Sparta famously encouraged infanticide in the name of maintaining a strong warrior aristocracy, a deeply far right idea. In Rome, the patriarch of a family would have the right commit an abortion, and even to kill an infant within his family, and indeed any of his children or even his wife, but far from being framed in a left-wing way, it was due to their deeply patriarchal, hierarchical society.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming...
At the moment, the left is calling for the destruction of Israel and death to the Jews because Israel is more powerful than Palestine, and the strong are always morally inferior to the weak (paraphrasing and simplifying obviously)
Which really makes me wonder if eventually the left will drop abortion as an issue the same as they dropped eugenics as an issue (and they pretend that didn't happen, but as an example, Tommy Douglas, the socialist father of universal healthcare in Canada was a proud advocate of eugenics).
No human is less powerful than an unborn baby, so an adult woman killing that baby because it's powerless, unseen, and inconvenient seems totally at odds with that ideology. It's the ultimate power imbalance. A child who has no choice in being created is totally powerless and dependent, and the powerful adult human female from a rich country kills it.
Bodily autonomy is the argument the left primarily relies on, but in my view an unconvincing argument because rights often end up conflicting with one another. In this case, you have the right of a mother to choose whether to carry a baby to term in conflict with the child (who was created by the usually willful acts of the mother in the first place and didn't ask to be created) to not be murdered. In most circumstances, we would consider this a clear moral choice, the right not to be murdered being the highest right. Consider the argument of American slavery, where the rights for someone to be secure in their property rights ran up against someone else's right to Liberty and not to be considered someone else's property.
Another thing is that women who are typically more left-wing and collectivist with other people's money and freedoms sound like Ayn Rand when it comes to personally supporting a child they acted to bring into being. "It's a parasite! What do we do with parasites? We kill them!!" Particularly women in their second and third trimester have to dehumanize a baby to explain why a baby who could be born immediately and likely survive should be murdered in the womb.
Some might make an argument about freedom and bodily autonomy, but leftism isn't liberalism, leftists don't necessarily believe in personal freedom as a core value. All the most totalitarian regimes of the 21st century started with leftism. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Pol Pot all ideologically came from leftism, with Mussolini being part of the socialist party in Italy, and Hitler being elected leader of his Soviet during a brief socialist uprising in Germany. It seems there's no reason to think this one freedom is somehow sancrosanct when none of the others are protected.
Modern day China is closer to fascism aka state socialism than Marxist class socialism, but I characterize both as left-wing, hoping to break down society in a revolution and build something new in pursuit of utopia. I think that China will be the first to break with the idea of bodily autonomy for women. As we are on the verge of a population collapse which is going to dramatically change the way people look at having kids, I'm certain that China will be the first country to claim government authority over women's bodies and not just not allow them to have abortions, but probably start forcing them to have kids because to not have kids is "an anti-revolutionary act". Most people don't know that the Chinese government is far from socially progressive in a western sense, being highly racist (there's a lot of talking in the United States today about immigration and citizenship, outsiders cannot get citizenship in China, and a Chinese police track where Africans travel to and perform routine midnight raids on those houses whether there is evidence of wrongdoing or not), considering being gay anti-revolutionary and therefore something to be attacked rather than embraced, and so on so there is no good reason to think that they would follow the Western progressive idea of bodily autonomy for women.
As a skilled craftsman myself, I have often considered a criticism of class socialism's suggestion that the working class "seize the means of production". Personally, I know that a skilled individual is as much ore more "the means of production" as a machine. Give someone with no trades skills a high technology shop with all the latest tools and they won't be able to create anything with it, but a world-class craftsman could potentially arrive shirtless and shoeless in a forest and create all kinds of amazing things (watch "Primitive Technology" on youtube for a great example of this, the guy literally does this). This plays out in practice by class socialist governments effectively enslaving the skilled workforce because they require such people and lack the positive incentives of capitalism to get them to work. In the same way, women's bodies as "the means of production" can be similarly collectivized, and some leftists at times have suggested that women ought to effectively be sexually available to any man who wants them to prevent class systems from developing of attractive and unattractive men. This means that it isn't outside the realm of the possible for leftism to not just abandon "bodily autonomy" as an argument for abortion, but potentially as an argument for women's sexual autonomy in general. This shows the dangers of collectivist ideology, in that it can justify any range of totalitarian control of the individual.
If nothing else, I think the discussion above suggests that abortion isn't necessarily an inherently leftist stance, and instead is more a stance of the left due to previous ideological horse-trading with different factions within the left (giving some space for feminists) than a principled stance based on core ideology. Indeed, one could just as easily make right wing arguments in favor of abortion, including as I implied the objectivist individual liberty argument, or a social darwinist argument. The Japanese historically allowed post-birth infanticide using language implying their agrarian past where farmers would cull weak or diseased plants or animals to ensure the strongest thrive, and a moral argument that infants mostly exist in the spirit world and it's only through their childhoods that they become more human and entrenched in the material world. Sparta famously encouraged infanticide in the name of maintaining a strong warrior aristocracy, a deeply far right idea. In Rome, the patriarch of a family would have the right commit an abortion, and even to kill an infant within his family, and indeed any of his children or even his wife, but far from being framed in a left-wing way, it was due to their deeply patriarchal, hierarchical society.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming...
"we banned you, banned your subs, downvoted your posts, and called you Hitler Satan! Where'd you all go?"
I haven't actually read the Manga. For most series I start off reading the light novel, then maybe move on to the manga after that, and then sometimes ones I like end up getting turned into an anime, but I'm a voracious reader even now.
I'm on the 7th volume of "Enough with This Slow Life! I Was Reincarnated as a High Elf and Now I'm Bored", and one thing that strikes me is how dense the book feels. It isn't particularly long at 200 pages per book, but I can read something like 100 million year button in a sitting but each book of this series takes me a long time to get through.
One key part of the book is elves live 1000 years, and so for the main character 10 years is similar to 1 year of a humans life, so many of the things he does are like taking the prime of your life to do. He becomes a master of many skills through hard work over years of dedication.
The themes of the passage of time, seeing and rediscovering places, saying goodbye to people, and growth and mentorship, as well as the impact one person can have without really feeling like they did much important are everywhere. Often you drop in to see how the great grandkids of the first book's cast are doing. You really need to focus because you're keeping a large cast of places, people, descendants, and history straight to understand what's going on, but it's really rewarding going back to a place and seeing how a character's life turned out while the main character was off doing something totally different.
One key part of the book is elves live 1000 years, and so for the main character 10 years is similar to 1 year of a humans life, so many of the things he does are like taking the prime of your life to do. He becomes a master of many skills through hard work over years of dedication.
The themes of the passage of time, seeing and rediscovering places, saying goodbye to people, and growth and mentorship, as well as the impact one person can have without really feeling like they did much important are everywhere. Often you drop in to see how the great grandkids of the first book's cast are doing. You really need to focus because you're keeping a large cast of places, people, descendants, and history straight to understand what's going on, but it's really rewarding going back to a place and seeing how a character's life turned out while the main character was off doing something totally different.
Anyone who knows me knows full well I'm not in any sense against teaching kids. My son has had a rigorous education since the day he was born.
The question was about indoctrination, and good indoctrination is about the heart, not the head.
Indoctrination itself is associated with evil, but that isn't necessarily true. You can be indoctrinated into a suicide cult for sure, but you can also be indoctrinated into things like virtue, integrity, and honor. The key is to ensure you're making sure the deep messages you're passing on, the stuff that becomes the subliminal foundation for a child throughout their lives, is something worth living. Some people don't thing they have any values worth passing down so they consider all indoctrination evil, but I think there's many core values and ideals I have worth passing down.
The question was about indoctrination, and good indoctrination is about the heart, not the head.
Indoctrination itself is associated with evil, but that isn't necessarily true. You can be indoctrinated into a suicide cult for sure, but you can also be indoctrinated into things like virtue, integrity, and honor. The key is to ensure you're making sure the deep messages you're passing on, the stuff that becomes the subliminal foundation for a child throughout their lives, is something worth living. Some people don't thing they have any values worth passing down so they consider all indoctrination evil, but I think there's many core values and ideals I have worth passing down.
You don't even need to tell your kid one word. Just be there and try to have fun with your family.
The mammalian brain doesn't need words. "Having kids is terrible and horrible!" "I dunno my dad seemed to love it, and I loved spending time with Dad too"
The mammalian brain doesn't need words. "Having kids is terrible and horrible!" "I dunno my dad seemed to love it, and I loved spending time with Dad too"
There was a post on x claiming there were 2038 suicides on election day (15x the normal daily rate), but looking into it appears to show that was not true.
So I guess it was just a massive uptick in drama queens claiming they're about to commit suicide on reddit for attention.
So I guess it was just a massive uptick in drama queens claiming they're about to commit suicide on reddit for attention.
I made a big post a couple months back with two predictions.
One of them came to pass that "Personally, as long as [Donald Trump] retains his core identity and brand, I think it’s a winning strategy, insofar as such a thing can exist." And he won with that strategy.
The second was that "Most alarm lights that haven’t had masking tape put over them by the government are screaming imminent stagflationary depression, maybe one of the worst in American History, and everyone with eyes and basic math skills can see the looming sovereign debt crisis. Nobody wants to be holding this hot potato because whoever is in power at that time is almost certainly going to preside over a disaster and there’s nothing to be done about it."
I'd love to be wrong but I don't think I am. There's trouble ahead for Trump and the Republicans, and I hope they are already planning for the incoming financial crisis.
One of them came to pass that "Personally, as long as [Donald Trump] retains his core identity and brand, I think it’s a winning strategy, insofar as such a thing can exist." And he won with that strategy.
The second was that "Most alarm lights that haven’t had masking tape put over them by the government are screaming imminent stagflationary depression, maybe one of the worst in American History, and everyone with eyes and basic math skills can see the looming sovereign debt crisis. Nobody wants to be holding this hot potato because whoever is in power at that time is almost certainly going to preside over a disaster and there’s nothing to be done about it."
I'd love to be wrong but I don't think I am. There's trouble ahead for Trump and the Republicans, and I hope they are already planning for the incoming financial crisis.
You're not wrong, but it doesn't matter -- it'll send a message that the conservatives need to do their job without putting labour in charge.
I'm so glad he's not crazy. Gretzky is sort of a national hero, especially for 80s kids.
The people to blame are the ones who kept voting conservative instead of switching to reform. Handed the majority to labour.
The past 4 years have really been a divide between those who own stocks and assets, and those who sell their labor.
Even people who got respectable raises for the past 4 years haven't gotten raises to cover the increased costs in food, shelter, transportation, and fuel. You can blame companies for that, but they can't just massively increase everyone's pay in the same way you can't fly just by denying gravity exists. Moreover, CPI shows 20%, but that's cumulative and a lot of things that didn't go up or went way down by CPI's measure. Smart phones went way down, but ever since phone companies stopped giving out free phones, a lot of people are still using their old phones. I'm personally rocking a Galaxy S10, released 6 years ago, and I'm not looking to upgrade any time soon. Personal computers went down, but I'm still rocking the gaming PC I bought pre-pandemic.
Stonks, on the other hand? They've been doing great in general! My (modest) retirement account has gone up double digits, and there were months where I made more on stonk increases than on my actual wages. (It's all set aside for the future so it isn't like that changed my quality of life for the better today, but it's something worth knowing). I'm not even invested in stuff like the AI trade, which has in some cases seen more than triple digit increases.
If you realize this scenario, then it perfectly explains how the Democrats (who are mostly elite multi-millionaires themselves and whose closest allies are at least that too) thought they could run on vibes and joy. If you're already rich, then it *has been* vibes and joy. The problem is most people don't live off of stonks, they live off of selling their labor, and those people have seen material drops in their quality of life.
Don't get me wrong, the Republicans are mostly multi-millionaires (Trump is a multi-billionaire) with at least multi-millionaire friends, but one other key thing of the past 8 years is that the Democrats reject anyone who doesn't agree with them as racist sexist homophobic transphobic fascist nazis, as deplorables, and the Republicans haven't taken to this strategy. I think that's one reason why despite their historical disadvantage with the poor, the Republicans won big among the masses including union workers.
Even people who got respectable raises for the past 4 years haven't gotten raises to cover the increased costs in food, shelter, transportation, and fuel. You can blame companies for that, but they can't just massively increase everyone's pay in the same way you can't fly just by denying gravity exists. Moreover, CPI shows 20%, but that's cumulative and a lot of things that didn't go up or went way down by CPI's measure. Smart phones went way down, but ever since phone companies stopped giving out free phones, a lot of people are still using their old phones. I'm personally rocking a Galaxy S10, released 6 years ago, and I'm not looking to upgrade any time soon. Personal computers went down, but I'm still rocking the gaming PC I bought pre-pandemic.
Stonks, on the other hand? They've been doing great in general! My (modest) retirement account has gone up double digits, and there were months where I made more on stonk increases than on my actual wages. (It's all set aside for the future so it isn't like that changed my quality of life for the better today, but it's something worth knowing). I'm not even invested in stuff like the AI trade, which has in some cases seen more than triple digit increases.
If you realize this scenario, then it perfectly explains how the Democrats (who are mostly elite multi-millionaires themselves and whose closest allies are at least that too) thought they could run on vibes and joy. If you're already rich, then it *has been* vibes and joy. The problem is most people don't live off of stonks, they live off of selling their labor, and those people have seen material drops in their quality of life.
Don't get me wrong, the Republicans are mostly multi-millionaires (Trump is a multi-billionaire) with at least multi-millionaire friends, but one other key thing of the past 8 years is that the Democrats reject anyone who doesn't agree with them as racist sexist homophobic transphobic fascist nazis, as deplorables, and the Republicans haven't taken to this strategy. I think that's one reason why despite their historical disadvantage with the poor, the Republicans won big among the masses including union workers.
Right now, the Conservatives under Poilievre are on track to a massive majority. If the election were held today, the socialist New Democratic Party would drop from third largest party to fourth, the Trudeau's Liberals would drop to second.
My hope is that we can drop the Liberals to third, so the official opposition will be the the separatist party the Bloc Quebecois, because I can't think of a better denunciation of the Liberals or NDP than having the separatists beat them in a federal election.
https://338canada.com/
My hope is that we can drop the Liberals to third, so the official opposition will be the the separatist party the Bloc Quebecois, because I can't think of a better denunciation of the Liberals or NDP than having the separatists beat them in a federal election.
https://338canada.com/
Reminds me of all the people who claim the only good people for the environment live in cities, apparently blissfully unaware of why people can live in all those cities and not die of lack of food, fuel, or other materials.