2021-05

Sources:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Book Reviews

/u/ymeskhout:

• Unmasked by Andy Ngo

/u/oleredrobbins:

• I Was Born in Slavery

Contributions for the week of May 03, 2021

/u/EfficientSyllabus:

• “This story just tells so much about Hungary, they should put this in those textbooks on cross-cultural understanding and stuff.”

COVID-19

/u/2cimarafa:

• “The truth is that we wanted a real plague.”

Education

/u/TracingWoodgrains:

• “The myth that top students can take care of themselves is a damaging one, used to excuse people not even trying to meet their needs.”

/u/Euphoric-Baseball-61 on:

• “Education was intended as a way for the rich to force the cost of training workers onto the workers themselves.”

/u/Careless-Question-57 on:

• “If kids stayed home and did nothing until grade 10, they might know a bit less than they do now, but they wouldn’t know much less, and the billions saved would make up for it.”

/u/ThirteenValleys on:

• “My experience with hundreds of area high school students over two years does not paint a picture of a generation failed by institutional incompetence.”

Identity Politics

/u/2cimarafa:

• “Gen X is now the face of American power, and just happens to be ruling the country in partnership with its first true Silent Generation President.”

/u/Amadanb:

• “I will say that [Basecamp’s] David Hansson impresses me with his reasonable and nuanced takes, in marked contrast to the responses to him from both employees and the media.” (Topics: Wokeism in Tech, as well as Moderation regarding user flagging/ reporting)

/u/dasfoo:

• “Objectification of women is a (too-narrow) expression of love for women, one which celebrates biology and fertility and primal intimacy. What is celebrated in the cynical send-up of [Promising Young Woman]?”

/u/EfficientSyllabus:

• “Unintelligent and low-social-skills people are routinely stepped over and screwed over using constructs ‘designed’ (or rather evolved) to filter for cognitive and empathic capacity.”

Contributions for the week of May 10, 2021

/u/aaronb50:

• “There is approximately a 0% chance that a minimum wage is the policy you’d come up with. Why? Politics and economics.“

/u/Ame_Damnee:

• “If you’re only doing homework ‘to get the teacher off my back’, you’re not going to learn.”

• “The wicked roué spies-for-hire seduced the ingenue press and left her pregnant with the story about Trump being Putin’s pawn which she then delivered into the arms of the public.”

/u/Rov_Scam:

• “If you want to look for guidance in ancient treatises you have to do so on their own terms, and be careful not to read them through the lens of contemporary values.”

/u/Euphoric-Baseball-61:

• “Youth were more precocious in Ancient Rome.”

/u/WestphalianPeace:

• “People like Samantha Power really do think in terms of ‘if we just acted we would have lost a few dozen and saved hundreds of thousands in Rwanda.’ but lets take a different look.”

/u/iprayiam3:

• “The way a child cries out for their mother, the way a mother knows their child’s cry, this is not fungible.”

Identity Politics

/u/Ilforte:

• “The grand narrative of terrible Tsarist Anti-Semitism bordering on genocidal intention has been produced on the basis of a forged letter.”

/u/Shakesneer:

• “My point is not that black people are better or worse than white people, or that systemic forces don’t exist – rather, when we talk about black outcomes being different from white outcomes, we assume that white outcomes are the desired outcomes.”

Quality Contributions in the Main Subreddit

/u/Frosty-Beginning5601:

• “The CDC doesn’t try to figure out what the optimal risk-reward or health-fun tradeoff is, they give advice about what the healthiest thing to do is and then everyone ignores it.”

Contributions for the week of May 17, 2021

/u/2cimarafa:

• “The British elite, new and old, shares much of the same politics.”

/u/Ilforte:

• “If you can keep and selectively share secrets, in time you can gain any other right you need. And if you can’t, then those who can will take away anything they want from you, piece by tiny piece.”

• “The booming voice of North American continent drowns out the voices of other peoples, flattens all their cultures, rends the Earth asunder and strings the white-hot debris into a Twitter feed of a 19yo girl from San Diego(Biracial, posadist, werefox, BPD vixen, #DeathToLandlords. {Three fist emojis} {more emojis} Pansexual. {cashapp}. she/they.). Regrettably you can’t unfollow.”

/u/Eetan:

• “All people who talk about ‘Havel’s greengrocer’ miss one important piece of context, that was absolutely clear to the intended audience - people of 1970’s socialist country - and is necessary to understand the parable.”

/u/Denswend and /u/georgioz on:

• The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s

/u/Sizzle50

• policing the community.

COVID-19

/u/ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr on:

• “We have an incomplete understanding of literally every process in the world.”

• “mRNA vaccines transiently produce spike protein on the order of days-weeks.” COVID-19 Vaccine

Abortion

/u/FlyingLionWithABook:

• “We toss away the idea that all human life is sacred to our own risk.”

/u/wlxd on:

• “That’s how I’d want the constitutional right to abortion to exist, if we are to have any: not through total bullshit legal ‘reasoning,’ but through clear and unambiguous political process.”

Identity Politics

/u/Southkraut:

• “Historical injustices are impossible to resolve productively, especially in a moral framework that rejects every kind of group in favor the individual, and even more so now that some groups are re-introduces as acceptable as long as they belong to the canon of historical victims.”

/u/RandomSourceAnimal:

• “History is replete with examples of simple factual statements being signifiers in ideological fights that are, in turn, manifestations of power struggles between competing political factions.”

/u/Ame_Damnee:

• “So whatever way we look at it, there is not an epidemic of murder against trans people.”

/u/PoliticsThrowAway549:

• “I don’t think it’s an unreasonable view of history to look at, say, the rise of fascism as seen in 1938 as turbo-progressive for its era.”

/u/Dysautognome:

• “College was pretty strict about having to take leftist concepts for granted and it certainly exuded an exclusively leftist cultural pressure.”

/u/Njordsier:

• “Against Activist Mission Creep gives a name to a concept that I had long thought important: that of activist groups undermining themselves by subjecting themselves to an ever-expanding list of requirements that distract from the original mission.”

/u/honeypuppy on:

• Steelmanning cancel culture in the face of failing to fine-tune norms. (Topics: Cancel Culture)

Contributions for the week of May 24, 2021

/u/XantosCell:

• “Fantastic Mr. Fox is furry-porn for non-furries and trad-porn for non-trads.”

/u/Nouveau_Compte:

• “A theory that apparently explains the crime drop is the security hypothesis.”

/u/Ilforte:

• “There are two ongoing AI races: China vs. the US-led West, and governing bodies vs. their citizens.”

/u/aqouta:

• “You think antipathy towards Doctors is even in the same class as antipathy towards lawyers and bankers?”

/u/curious-b:

• “…even if we never get to hyperinflation, and we see only mild (secular) inflation of the USD, we could get into trouble.”

COVID-19

/u/Sizzle50:

• “The idea that we should have taken COVID more seriously is so alien to me as to be barely comprehensible.”

• The response to COVID-19 was worse than the disease–by the numbers. COVID-19 Response

Love and Courtship in the 21st Century

/u/cjet79:

• “…why I hated being single and going on dates…”

Identity Politics

/u/cantbeproductive:

• “If they can write this stuff about Donald Trump, so synonymous with New York that he had a cameo in Home Alone, born and raised by a father raised in New York, whose name is writ large on the skyscrapers, then let us please have one comic about Yang’s California values.”

/u/Niallsnine on:

• Whether the point of “Pride” parades to reject one thing, or to normalize something else. (Topics: LGBT)

/u/Chaarmanda:

• “I submit that this misses the most powerful response, which we can semi-ironically refer to as ‘the Bartleby’–refuse without fighting.”

/u/SlightlyLessHairyApe:

• Framing the hill to (not) die on.

/u/iprayiam3:

• The “further you go with capitulating because this isn’t worth putting your foot down over, the deeper shit you end up in.”

Contributions for the week of May 31, 2021

/u/Ilforte on:

• The Tian Mingjian Incident

• “Russian accelerationist trolls, yeah. This eternal roadblock towards American unity. Fine, let it even be so, I’m not in any position to demand good faith.”

/u/2cimarafa:

• “…meritocracy and aristocracy are indistinguishable in the same population over long periods provided extraneous confounding factors absent.”

• “Offering [ugly people] free cosmetic surgery won’t just improve their lives, it’ll improve everyone’s.”

COVID-19

/u/Shakesneer:

• “Are we being capably lead? Why did we turn to Fauci? Did we place in him too much trust? Will he be punished and does he deserve to be?”

Love and Courtship in the 21st Century

/u/2cimarafa:

• “There are men who enjoy women’s company, and those who don’t, but in an age in which the barriers of casual social interaction between the sexes have come down entirely, the former have a significant advantage.”

/u/theoutlaw1983:

• “I really think Grey Tribe/nerdy/etc. guys end up in spirals of their own making, while a lot of normie dudes complain once or twice to their circle of friends, and that’s the end of it.”

/u/WhiningCoil on:

• Being of many minds regarding relations between the sexes.

/u/mister_ghost:

• “No one I know has ever said ‘you know, dating is awesome and I really enjoy it.’”

Identity Politics

/u/Ame_Damnee:

• “It will never happen, and when it does, you will have deserved it.”

/u/cantbeproductive on:

• Weighing what is known, versus what is said, about the infamous Tulsa riots.

Quality Contributions in the Main Subreddit

/u/Iacta_Procul:

• “If you’re a rationalist, [depression] will convince you that you’re miserable because that’s the Facts And Logic Way To Feel.”

/u/Iron-And-Rust:

• “If the alternatives are to come to terms with your conditions or die, then, well… all you’re gonna have left is the people who came to terms with it.”

COVID-19

/u/FPHthrowawayB:

• “I am 2019 Chinese coronavirus vaccine critical (a term I quite prefer to antivax).” COVID-19 Vaccine