Idea: I Don't Want To Settle For Choosing The Lesser Of Two Evils; I Want To Abolish The System That

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.)

This seems like one of those trends that will come to define politics a few years on down the line. Racial tension is nothing new in the US, but this kind of gender clash has no historical precedent, at least to my knowledge. Someone on reddit once joked that the future of politics was the (implied nonstraight, nonwhite, liberal/leftist, feminist, etc) Tumblr party losing national elections to the (implied straight, white, rightist, anti-liberal and anti-feminist) 4chan party, and they're probably right. This is what happens when we focus on gender instead of class.

Most Popular Posts of 2018, and what that says about 2019

These are my most popular original posts of last year. You may notice a theme:

Why men bottle up their feelings - “Men need to get in touch with their feelings,” they say, right up until they do.

On the play “Straight White Men” - Or how being the ally you’re told to be makes you disliked by the people you’re supposed to be supporting.

Dirty Sock Sexuality - When the sexuality of young males is portrayed as gross, everybody suffers.

We Built an Incel Factory - A model of dirty sock sexuality appears in the wild. 

What if Sex Ed helped boys get laid? - A solution to dirty sock sexuality.

Pick your man myth, pick your misery - When fear and myth drives a woman from one set of abusers to another. 

The dumbest thing I’ve ever done - In which I am the dirty sock and waste hours upon hours of a therapist’s time. 

Cunnilingus class is cancelled until further notice - Nobody wants to learn from someone who actively loathes them, and sex-positive feminists will never change male behavior without recognizing that.

“Entitled” isn’t a catch-all for men who do bad things - Incels aren’t entitled, they hate themselves. 

Special mention: The help-to-prison pipeline - A trans man discovers that the women tasked with helping vulnerable men fear and blame them, with predictable results.  

The pattern here is that all of my top posts are about vulnerable men and boys. Specifically, how they are given from people who see them mostly as threats to be mitigated, not individuals who want growth, love, and success just like anyone else. Models for men fall into the bitter MRA whine, the anachronistic trad, or the pop-feminist “good man” schtick that sees men’s behavior only through the lens of what it accomplishes for women. There must be a way forward that allows for self-advocacy and self-worth but still respects others and I don’t think any of these models get it right. These posts poked around the edges, seeking to define the contours of the problem. In 2019, I hope to explore these themes more.

Thank you to my readers for your support in 2018!

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world’s experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

- Iain M Banks, http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

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.

I'm pretty sure this was a case I saw recently; what happened is that the federal funds had originally been transferred via ACH (which is different from a wire). ACH transactions can be reversed by the sender within 5 business days, which Elon just managed to do (he did the reverse on day 5, if I remember correctly).

This is obviously unprecdented and concerning, but the government does not have the means to directly remove/transfer funds from within your private account. They can stop transfers from a government account(or again, reverse them within a limited window) or "request" a bank to freeze/close your account for suspicious activity, but they can't just reach in to your checking account and take your money.

Elon and DOGE have access to your banking info and can drain your account.

Russia needs money? Maybe they will access your life savings. Putin is Musk ally.

Speak out against Musk? He will target dissent.

Want to file a complaint? They got rid of CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is beyond apocalyptic.

Vox

American democracy’s Senate problem, explained

A huge — and growing — source of bias in the political system.

Pretty bold of Vox to advocate for destroying the Senate because they vote the wrong way. As a bonus, the memo they link to doesn't contain a single mention of the House, which (at least attempts) to balance the small-state bias of the Senate with a large-state bias.

Communism is when you do a lot of unpaid overtime and are expected to be grateful for the privilege, apparently.

There were many incredibly hardworking peasants and workers in the USSR who achieved astonishing things in service of the revolution, but the fact that they had to make such extraordinary sacrifices is itself a tragedy, and should not be celebrated.

The individual referred to in OP's post was actually named Nikolai Ostrovsky (Pavel Korchagin was the main character of his fictionalized autobiography). He lived a short life full of hardship and sacrifice and died at 32. I think the best way to honor his memory would be to create a world in which such sacrifices are no longer necessary.

wait till i tell "i don't dream of labor" crowd about pavel korchagin who became soviet national role model for basically working himself to multiple disabilities to save town from freezing in the winter during russian civil class war. he wrote autobiographical novel while already blind for which he became famous. and in it there was a scene where anyone who refused to work in those terrible conditions were asked to give up their communist card. because you can't claim to call yourself a communist without being ready to put in as much work as you can. and that wasn't just him ussr was able to withstand these critical first years thanks to selfless underpayed work put by it's people towards rebuilding country's wealth. getting rid of feodal lords and capitalists was enough motivation imagine that! the fact so many people who call themselves communists on here seem to be proud of flaunting their individualism and complete lack of proletarian morals is an insult to all revolutionary workers of the past. go call yourselves libertarians or something.

“We train our young men to drop fire on people, but our commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene.”

The above thread is a typical, and entertaining, mockery of crude and reactionary youth (presumed entirely male but who knows) getting shut down by calm and minimalist mods running X-box live.

But reading through it, it’s easy to forget: these are social rules for games where you run around in grimdark settings finding other players and shooting them with realistic guns until they are a bloody mess on the floor. And then you do it again ten seconds later.

I’m not criticizing that as an illegitimate form of enjoyment, but it does seem that such an atmosphere goes pretty well in hand with crude and violent jokes, particularly usernames. This one guy calls himself ObamaDeathPanel, a morbid joke about what the true all time killer is (perhaps I should claim the usertag Capitalism.) And while that might be tasteless - that seems exactly the sort of joking nom de guerre a barbarian in that situation might take. Many of the other handles and bios don’t seem that much farther off from what an adrenaline addled machine gunner would say either.

The whole thing highlights the hypocrisy and disavowal of this corporation. We want to take the money of teenage boys who love shooting their problems into oblivion, but for mods’ sakes don’t talk like someone who does that.

They fallback on the excuse “well the Live service is E because people from other games use it”, but then that begs, why are you trying to make a social experience that is inclusive of both Call of Duty and Spyro?

I'd be more sympathetic to the protestors if blocking highways actually accomplished anything. At least chaining yourself to a redwood saves the tree, but what's gained from stopping people from driving down a certain road? At least Occupy Wall Street blocked a couple office buildings, which inconvenienced some business scumbags. But the only thing produced by blocking roads is bad PR at best and dead protestors at worst.

Unusually poignant example of how stupid the "blocking traffic with protests is fine if it's for a good cause" argument is: