The Man From Post-Dystopia

Abused optimist. Antiutopian dreamer. I have a massive stack of out-of-print books, and lead a band of dyspeptic misfits.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@imbrokebabee85 @ForgiatoBlow47 You can’t even write grammatical English. What’s your native language?

[Coddled Affluent Professional @feelsdesperate]

So weird that all the people who want to ‘defend our democracy’ are totally fine with voting circumstances that are routinely associated with rigged elections in third world countries.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@SCVCamp79 @amanofthesoil @LeighWolf Those were generals already in the armed forces. I was referring to the volunteers who joined, who cared far more about abolition than union.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@johnkonrad No true Scotsman would have left out the No True Scotsman fallacy.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@tetheredtoed1 @pmarca “The right”

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@amanofthesoil @LeighWolf That’s bullshit. The Union armed forces were volunteer only until 1863, and nearly everyone who joined prior to that time did so because of opposition to slavery.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@ManDaveJobGood Punk's not dead, but it deserves to die when it becomes another stale cartoon.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@feelsdesperate From making Notre Dame a temple to Athena during the French Revolution to this. It's the natural course of progressivism.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@plzbepatient The mood was unusually glum in the manager's meeting I attended Wednesday morning after the election. My office was in Midtown East, and there was a beseiged expression on the faces of the people at work and on the subway.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

I won’t repeat the comments others have made on infant mortality. @cremieuxrecueil has an excellent thread on it. But, an additional note: infant mortality is significantly higher in two prevalent ethnic minorities in the US (demographic groups not prevalent in Europe) , and this raises the average significantly. The extent to which this is true due to physiological or environmental factors is debatable, but it’s observable fact. If we compare the white American mortality rate to the white European mortality rate, there is not a significant difference.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@MikeB2030 @feelsdesperate The “obnoxiously woke” should be garroted, or at the least exiled permanently to Devil’s Island.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@feelsdesperate It’s always amusing to see, in your comments, this particular breed of lefty that asserts that they are the “normal” ones, and even challenge your masculinity because you use a pseudonym.

They’re like contemporary versions of Norman Mailer, and every bit as phony.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@feelsdesperate I did, in fact, vote for this.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@Devon_Eriksen_ We GenXers are split - older GenXers are the children of SilentGen.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@AuronMacintyre Leftists are used to being forthright in their seditious activities, and never facing consequences for them. Perhaps this time is different, but I won’t hold my breath in expectation of it.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

Good observations. In the US at least, the Boomers were the last generation that had economic optimism, a belief their economic opportunities and standard of living would be better than those of their parents. This expectation was reasonable , despite the debasement of the currency: their parents’ adult lives had been dominated by the Depression. Americans had had only one experience with the destruction of war happening within our borders, Pearl Harbor (a military base). By the mid-50s, the financial caution and social conservatism of their parents (which had been shaped by Depression, wartime shortages and rationing, and upper-class animus promoted by FDR and Truman) seemed out of temper with the times. Economic uncertainty was diminishing, and time horizons and risk tolerance were growing just as boomers reached early adulthood.

They were conditioned by Cold War propaganda to believe that their experience was a product of their grit and good sense. They enjoyed their youth and settled down at just the right time to benefit from the explosion of financial innovation in the 1980s.

These were one-time events, but when they engage in boomerisms they are assuming that their experience is repeatable.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@hot_rails @Devon_Eriksen_ The statist generation

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

You can bitch and moan about high-skilled immigration all you want, but at the end of the day we have to give all the good jobs to foreigners. Otherwise we might someday get conquered by a foreign country, and then they’d give all the good jobs to foreigners.

[Coddled Affluent Professional @feelsdesperate]

I feel like this sort of framing always makes libertarians look bad because it’s so obvious they’re refusing to engage with what’s at issue.

Labor arbitrage favors employers. An expanded labor pool in general leads to lower wages.

You’re not ‘insecure’ or a ‘loser’ for not wanting an expanded labor pool that reduces your earnings. In fact, there’s really nothing more politically legitimate than advocating for your economic interests.

Libertarians need to make the case that expanding the labor pool is good for society as a whole, at scale, and it’s something that they’re having an increasingly hard time doing for a number of reasons.

However, trying to argue people are somehow deficient for pursuing legitimate interests is completely unpersuasive and isn’t going to win anyone over.

[The Man From Post-Dystopia @baalwark]

@feelsdesperate When socialists use the word “care”, it’s a jargon term with a specific meaning for them that is distinct from how non-socialists use the word.