Already been noted, but what an unbelievably sinister sentiment. "Effective life behaviors" which include being married. Social conformity enforced through corporate power with the approval of the state, and people willing to countenance it as long as the mores being enforced are reactionary instead of disingenuously "progressive".
Being married is a proven effective life behavior. So is saving money, etc. Progressive ideas, by contrast, pretty much by definition lack demonstrated effectiveness. They have unknown and typically unpredictable effects on society.
I’m not suggesting that corporate enforcement of behavior is the best way to go. But we should obviously do it for things that are proven to work before we do it for things that are untested.
I don't know if that is actually proven. It isn't like through a lot of history women have had much choice about the whole thing, nor could they leave someone toxic in many cases. Is it an "effective life behavior" if you don't have a lot of other choices?
You could use the same words to state that hetero marriage is "proven", when realistically, people didn't have the choice.
The notion that language is "what the learned have built out of competence and reflection" is abjectly risible. The evolution of language consists of corruption, confusion, coinages of demotic provenance, and general chaos. The contributions of learned classicists to the modern language are subject to exactly the same inexorable flux.
There is no party that refuses to accept "bastard" semantics; in no language does there exist a fraction of a syllable of legitimate descent. The only recourse open to the pedant and misanthrope is to forgo the use of language altogether, which would in your case constitute a marked improvement in the discourse.
False, if only because it is evident that naive and competent are evident opposites, practically. You can see the competent and the naive use, they cannot be mixed.
By the way: you have completely misunderstood 'is' in the quotation. It was not descriptive language, it was deontic.
And for what your «which would in your case constitute a marked improvement in the discourse»: this is the first time I find myself in front of the shallow disrespect that I expect elsewhere from YCombinator. Happily - look around -, with that attitude, you are the one isolated.
I find it incredible that anyone could have such a cartoonish view of the world that the completely secretive, unaccountable and independent security apparatus, which has totally liberated itself from democratic control or oversight, is simply "the government" in a way undifferentiated from say, the post office.
What is especially galling about it is that the entire monstrosity was constituted specifically in order to maintain the structures of private power and profit and has never deviated from that goal. The entire murder machine exists to benefit the corporate power that you absurdly imagine as some kind of countervailing force.
How do you account for the fact that military and CIA involvement overseas is systematically in the service of imposing minimal-government orthodoxy, from Chile 1973 to the Contras, Grenada, Iraq, Cuba, etc?
What I found so frustrating about the comment was how close it was to some sort of insight, while maddeningly not connecting the dots.
He has some vague sense that his unhappiness is related to "workaholism", but is so fixated on gender politics that he twists it to revolve around that. He imagines that women have a "choice of careers, choice of being a mother while the husband provides", apparently oblivious to the economic reality that single-income families are an impossibility for the majority of people, not because of feminism, but because of market forces.
You can see the alienation and the sense of rage and despair engendered by social atomization and hustle worship, only to be channeled not against any of the root causes, but some bogeyman like feminism which, precisely because of the aforementioned dislocation, hits closer to home emotionally.
And the worst of it is hearing echoes of my previous self in the words (projected or not), but being aware of the irony that it's only people who ARE close to you who have a chance of helping you out of that kind of morass.
I don't know OP, but a lot of people just spent a long time all alone with no outside communication except the internet. Lots of them discovered that as soon as in person work was removed that they really had no real friends. That can be quite a terrible discovery finding out you are really all alone. Isolation does strange things to the mind. That coupled with whatever echo chambers people happened to wonder into online probably had a dramatic effect on hundreds of thousands of people coming out of this thing. May take years for some to recover and many will probably never return to the same person they were.
Just the other day I read a comment from a single mother with three children who just sent her children back to school after 15 months of home schooling. Her comment indicated that her views on society did not improve much during the pandemic, either, no workaholism required.
Society has very openly displayed its disrespect for certain groups of people during the pandemic, he clearly has a point there.
Feminism was just one of the several things he said.
There are plenty of zero-income families - single mothers. So single-income families are surely even more possible. Usually only women have this choice. Men can't choose family over career.
How does that work? You get money just for being a mother?
At least the way it works in the countries I’ve lived in is that if you’re on the dole it doesn’t matter if you’re a mother (or a father for that matter)—you still have the obligation to find a job.
And as a man you can totally chose family over career, in the same way that women do. There’s a social stigma against it, of course. And it can be economically difficult—but that’s the case for women as well.
Of course, the pressure for a man to act as a provider and to focus on his career is very real. I think laurent92 isn’t wrong about the pressures men face. It’s weird though to blame that on feminism. I think feminism already helped chip away at the pressure. A stay-at-home dad should be acceptable to a feminist, more so than to someone who never gave pause to these questions. But in the end, it’s not feminism’s job to take care of men’s mental health, that’s really something that requires a movement of its own.
I’m not sure why you think this. I have quite a few friends and families in my circle where the women are the primary breadwinners of the family. Let alone the number of two-mother and two-father households. In almost all cases dual-incomes are the norm.
When you say, “men can’t choose family”, who’s preventing that?
The point of the minimum wage is not to create jobs, it is to ensure that jobs that exist already pay a certain minimum.
The more coherent argument against the minimum wage is that it destroys jobs which cannot be profitable for the employer at the higher wage. The problem with this argument is that the preponderance of research indicates a small magnitude for the elasticity of minimum-wage employment with respect to the minimum wage, generally around -0.05. If a 50% increase in minimum wage results in a 2.5% increase in unemployment in the cohort of people earning near the minimum, and if your aim is to increase the average wage for that cohort, then minimum wage increases do work. The idea that they don't is based on non-quantitative reasoning about the rightness of interfering with markets, or the virtue of work, or a value judgment about a small amount of unemployment outweighing an overall increase in compensation, etc.
I've elided a bunch of detail here, in particular the distinction between minimum-wage elasticity and own-wage elasticity, but this is a good starter:
So in this hypothetical what happens to the 2.5% that lost their jobs? It seems to me that in an attempt to raise the average wage we’re reducing the cohort and removing those with little to no skills and putting them on the gov dole to make statistics happy.
I'm curious what you mean by "homogeneous". I've just had a quick Google and apparently the Gini coefficient in Japan is ~0.3 compared to ~0.48 in the US, which is one definition of "homogeneous". Another search turned up some suggestion that said coefficient correlates well with the percentage of people who have been victims of theft/assault or who feel unsafe walking home alone.
It's possible that once a company reaches a certain size, it's inevitable. Corporations internally have the same top-down centralized organizational structure as a typical government. Market forces can't eliminate that kind of inefficiency if it invariably affects all large enterprises, and the economies of scale enjoyed by such companies outweigh the perverse incentives of sub-organizations.
What strikes me as unique to government is the tendency for sufficiently powerful appendages to secure enough resources to start wagging the dog (e.g. the military industry in the US), although now that I think about it seems possible that it would happen within companies.
Also don’t forget how unevenly applied market forces are: if McDonald’s started charging 10% more for a hamburger they’d lose sales to Burger King a LOT faster than, say, Comcast or Oracle because the products are basically the same and most customers can switch almost effortlessly whereas you have to be especially mad to trench fiber out to your house or migrate every database in a large enterprise.
Any business with a natural monopoly, high migration costs, etc. can support a surprising amount of inefficiency even if most of their customers find the experience unsatisfying.
The offshoring of the production of consumer electronics devices is mostly the result of the free-trade policies of said countries, coupled with market forces. The growth centred around manufacturing has been the basis of Chinese prosperity and requires no speculating about devious motives to account for.
As for the Chinese government's massive spending and subsidization of key industries, it's largely due to being free of the particular ideological constraints which force the US government to entrust everything to the market (except the military industry) which has predictably led to brittleness and vulnerability.
The American approach does resemble the Chinese one in a sense. Whereas the Chinese government prefers to directly subsidize e.g. semiconductors, the US government pours unfathomable quantities of capital into a military capable of dissuading any country from capitalizing on the US's dependency on any of their industries. When this approach breaks down, as in the case of China, things tend to get very dicey.
> The offshoring of the production of consumer electronics devices is mostly the result of the free-trade policies of said countries, coupled with market forces.
This fails to explain why everything moved to China and not Mexico or Brazil or India.
> As for the Chinese government's massive spending and subsidization of key industries, it's largely due to being free of the particular ideological constraints which force the US government to entrust everything to the market (except the military industry) which has predictably led to brittleness and vulnerability.
Entrusting everything to the market works great when it's a level playing field. When a country is doing things that would be an antitrust violation if done by a company, that requires another country to stop them. Typically through the use of trade sanctions, i.e. tariffs.
> The American approach does resemble the Chinese one in a sense. Whereas the Chinese government prefers to directly subsidize e.g. semiconductors, the US government pours unfathomable quantities of capital into a military capable of dissuading any country from capitalizing on the US's dependency on any of their industries.
I understand now. Unfettered market freedom is the best way to organize things and at the same time, large-scale government intervention is an unfair competitive advantage.
> This fails to explain why everything moved to China and not Mexico or Brazil or India.
Of course, no industries moved from the US to Mexico, Brazil or India over the same period as China's rise.
> In other words it's completely different?
Yes, in the sense that a portion of massive Chinese government spending goes directly into producing things that people need, and almost all of massive US government spending goes into funding imperialist violence.
Tariffs don't do much to hurt the other country. What they do is hurt yourself by making your consumers pay more for things.
If you want to make your country more competitive, you want Asian-style industrial policy and export discipline - as found not just in China but in Korea and Japan.
I think "hold the first accountable" is the wrong focus to have here, especially since so much of what the Republicans do violates norms rather than actual rules. I think it would be better to see the Democrats adopt their tactics, i.e. using every available mechanism to oppose everything they do as forcefully as possible, as opposed to meekly waiting for good faith from the other side which will never be forthcoming.
The other thing with "holding accountable" is that it can backfire. Imagine a second Trump impeachment passing. It would be perfect for the Republicans. They would have a solution to the problem of his potential reelection bid (which they would like to avoid), while simultaneously he would be a martyr as well as a symbol of what "cancel culture" / "leftist authoritarians" took away from you, the patriots.
A race to the bottom of decency is exactly what is currently happening. One side continuing to "take the high road" will do absolutely NOTHING to stop it.
It is delusional to think that the Republicans will ever be shamed into cooperation. They don't care, their voters don't care, and high-minded speeches about the need for civility are the stuff of a comedy sketch if delivered while the listener is in the process of hacking you to pieces.
If you honestly believe that, then who cares who wins? You'll just get one of two different brands of corrupt, power hungry, greedy, totalitarian regimes. That may happen regardless, but I for one won't be cheering it on.
I'm honestly baffled by this. I care who wins because of the POLICY DIFFERENCE, i.e. the difference between what the two parties want to DO with their power. I can't even imagine what kind of worldview I would need to have to believe that the desirability of a political regime is a function of the level of courteousness of the politicians within it, so I'm struggling to understand where you're coming from with this claim.
Authoritarianism consists in undemocratic rule in which obedience is brutally enforced, and dissidence suppressed, using the security apparatus of the state.
Authoritarianism does not consist in using every avenue allowed within the rules of a democratic system in order to exercise power, even if it's "not nice".
Again, it's genuinely puzzling how you could conflate these two things.
People need to really internalize this. It's a game for power, and depending on the circumstances, will use any tool necessary to achieve those means. Our opinions here are worse than nothing, as it accomplishes nothing of value at the expense of projecting our (dare I say propagandized) bias onto millions of people while changing our behavior in very harmful ways to ourselves and others.
We all need to just detach, because what is DC really going to do for you? I don't know, but I would put serious money on it being negligible to the impact of your immediate family, friends and community.
Two years ago I'd have fully agreed with where you're coming from, but this latest dose of celebritized ignorance has caused the deaths of half a million Americans and wasted a year of all of our lives. There's a significant difference between our traditional self-interested domestic-looting foreign-malevolent power structure, and one that's actively self-destructive. The question has become more like what is DC going to do to you?
It might also lead to another presidential candidate arising in the same mold as Trump, and people latching on to him in vengeance against what they perceive as unfair treatment of the martyr Trump.
> I think "hold the first accountable" is the wrong focus to have here, especially since so much of what the Republicans do violates norms rather than actual rules
Why not defend norms? If the premise is that the divide isn’t so bad, standing up for decency without needing to pass a law is at least as big a deal as a tan suit.
> I think it would be better to see the Democrats adopt their tactics, i.e. using every available mechanism to oppose everything they do as forcefully as possible, as opposed to meekly waiting for good faith from the other side which will never be forthcoming.
I’m confused how this is a distinction. The tactic that achieves that is holding the other side accountable.
> The other thing with "holding accountable" is that it can backfire. Imagine a second Trump impeachment passing. It would be perfect for the Republicans. They would have a solution to the problem of his potential reelection bid (which they would like to avoid), while simultaneously he would be a martyr as well as a symbol of what "cancel culture" / "leftist authoritarians" took away from you, the patriots.
Please understand that I’m not picking on you and don’t have any real quarrel with you. But this is exactly the kind of spinelessness I’m talking about. Read it back to yourself and see how much you’ve conceded before you even began. You’re accepting their advantage (which is structural not messaging) and just giving the whole battle up. They get to walk away with the win and still claim cancel culture bullshit because who would dare question them?
They need to lose. They need to be shown they can and will and do lose. That’s what accountability achieves. You can’t stack the Senate for the Dems, but you can sure as shit keep it in their hands with some real trials.
I think I have the same feelings as you about the Democrats' spinelessness, but a disagreement about what a more robust approach entails.
> standing up for decency without needing to pass a law is at least as big a deal as a tan suit.
"Standing up for decency" is completely meaningless. The Republicans do not think in those terms, and neither do their voters. They want their agenda passed and they will use the means at their disposal to achieve that. That is exactly what I want Democrats to do. What I view as "spineless" is the Democrats' insistence on continuing to abide by norms that their opponents have long since abandoned in the hopes of a return to comity. It is not going to happen.
My view is that the only way to defeat the Republicans is to enact left-wing policies that are broadly popular, e.g. stimulus checks, medicare expansion, etc., and thus eat away at the foundation of immiseration, precarity and alienation that is the root cause of rising social tensions.
I don't think that the Democrats are, as a party, capable of doing that (or even desire to), which is why the outlook is so bleak.
