I LOVE DANGER ZONE

I think I've run across a good writer who thinks on my wavelength in terms of the "gentrification of mental illness / neurodivergence", and he wrote an excellent essay criticizing a recent book of Devon Price (a blogger/writer/activist I've run across and felt critical of for years; once known as "E. Price", they wrote that famous "Laziness Does Not Exist" post which I made an effortpost about way back in my days of Wordpress blogging and going on about low-agency vs. high-agency goggles). To be fair, I should say, Jon Machnee's post is an excellent review of Price's book modulo the fact that I haven't read Price's book.

Here is a passage I find particularly striking, even if it's purely anecdotal:

Reading this review made me realize that apparently I have completely misunderstood what people mean by "masking". Or maybe everybody but me has misunderstood.

I was having trouble putting my finger on what exactly seemed off until I got to this part:

And I thought,

"Wait, why would you think that masking would make it harder to detect autism?"

What I had assumed the term meant was...

Okay I keep trying to come up with the perfect analogy because I find that allistic people have an incredible amount of difficulty reasoning about what it would be like to have serious deficits in social understanding, so here's another attempt:

I'm writing in English, so I imagine most of my readers have only the vaguest knowledge of what a Japanese tea ceremony entails beyond "fancy" and "tea". If you do know a ton about tea ceremonies pretend I'm talking about, I don't know, initiation into an undocumented Etruscan mystery religion.

Suppose that suddenly you are informed that you have to attend a tea ceremony tonight.

And suppose that, for whatever reason, attending this ceremony and doing well at it was incredibly important for your career, your social circle, and your romantic prospects. Your success in all those realms depends heavily on how well you do at the tea ceremony tonight.

So you ask the friend who brought you the invitation what you do at a tea ceremony, and he says,

"Uh, it's not like there's some script that you follow, it's just etiquette and politeness."

But he does tell you that asking direct questions of your host about what you should do is offputting and inappropriate.

What would you do in a situation like that?

Well, if there are a lot of people you might stay towards the back out of sight of the host.

You might watch what other people did and copy them as closely as you could.

You might try to make sure that any specific tasks for guests were assigned to somebody else rather than you.

And I don't think you would adopt those strategies because they would make you look like an expert in tea ceremonies;

I think you would adopt strategies along those lines because what the fuck else could you possibly do in that situation?

Until now I have assumed that this is what people meant by "masking"; strategies such as avoidance, ceding decision making to other people, and rote copying are things that I adopted quite early on in life, not out of some attempt to stop people from noticing I had autism, but from a desire to minimize negative attention.

I had thought that the analogy was like, If I draw a crude smiley-face in crayon on a paper plate and wear it as a mask, maybe I'm not trying to fool you into thinking that it's my real face, maybe I'm just trying to keep you from seeing what my real face looks like.

To go back to the tea ceremony analogy, maybe another person there was raised by a master of the tea ceremony, knows all the subtle ins and outs, but just thinks it's morally stupid that so much success depends on this arbitrary ceremony. If it was important to success he might go along with the tea ceremony anyway, and you could also, I suppose, call this "masking" as well, but it seems to me that it is only similar to the coping strategies I outlined above in a very broad way.

Yes, both you and he are in some sense attempting to come off as ordinary participants in the tea ceremony and hide the fact that, deep down, you'd prefer not to be, but I think the psychological effects of these strategies on both the self and others are so different that it's worth drawing a distinction.

The corollary of needing to be willing to frame arguments in terms of moral precepts you don't necessarily share is needing to be aware of subtext. Yes, it's easy to get a certain stripe of hyper-conservative folks to agree with anything you please by framing it in terms of opposition to Big Government, but a large part of that is because when you say "Big Government", what they hear is "Jews". You didn't hack their brain with magic words, you just didn't realise what you were saying!

I disagree.

I do think that right-wingers are genuinely opposed to big government, and not because they think it's run by the learned Elders of Zion or anything like that. Rather, their opposition comes from the fact that they believe cishet white Christians (and, in some versions, Jews) are by nature good, law-abiding people who thus don't need to be policed. The purpose of the police is to protect the above group from queer sexual deviants, POC thieves, murderers and rapists and Islamic terrorists (in European versions, the latter two classes are collapsed into one another), and maybe the Jews who control the banks and did 9/11 - those people don't deserve freedom from government.

I think that's a different very suspicious (and in some cases appropriately suspicious) interpretation. I think you're a lot more correct than OP, but I still think that an actual opposition to really big governments without ulterior motives is still the largest reason for opposition to "big government".

I think it's clear that the sheer scale of bureaucracy and level of centralization and formalization of authority of modern governments (I'm talking about the last 70 or so years here) are absolutely incredible compared to even the comparatively recent past.

If you strip government down to the essentials, you do tend to end up being left with court systems, law enforcement, and the military (especially if you ignore religion and other things related to the question of "what makes this legitimate"), which by its own logic creates the situation where the main legitimate form of government is physically fighting internal and external enemies -- "everything is protect".

I think it's legitimate for people to look at the scale of bureaucracy, government payroll, centralization of authority, etc in the modern era and say, "I would like less of this".

(Sorta related thing: The tendency where people contemplate the idea of 'what if a religious confessional government was established' and immediately assume a hugely complex set of religious rules spring into existence, in the absence of any reason for them to actually do so.)

It's obviously true that government massively expanded in post-WWII era, and I get why someone wouldn't like that, but if you look at standard American (or, to a lesser extent, European) right-wing politics, it's notable what aspects of the expansion of government they oppose.

For example, immigration. Back in the days of Ellis Island, you didn't even need a passport to immigrate to America; you just had to show up there and not be a political extremist or a carrier of a dangerous disease (or from an "undesirable" ethnic group). And, as a libertarian friend I have in real life has pointed out, making immigration easier would reduce illegal immigration considerably. But, at least as far as I know, making immigration easier isn't what the standard-issue conservative asking for cutting red tape is calling for.

Something that really made this stick out to me is this video, talking about the expansion of police powers in America. To just pick the example that stuck in my memory, no-knock search warrants, whose rationale is that drug dealers will try to flush drugs down the toilet. This is an obvious violation of the presumption of innocence (assuming that you have drugs and will try to dispose of the evidence) that, to my mind, is a lot more like government tyranny than environmental regulations or welfare programs. So it seems to me that they only oppose the expansion of government when it's a problem for People Like Them (TM).

@thathopeyetlives

See, when a left-winger hears "Big government" we tend to look at, say, the relative size or scope of a government agency. Has this agency gotten bigger or smaller? What does it have the power to do? What kind of oversight does it have?

So, for example, the fact that our military spending is significantly more than that of Russia, China and India combined makes the military seem like "big government".

I think what you're getting at is that for the American right-wing, "Big government" means "The government is doing more than the least necessary things a government should do."

Governments need to do internal policing, they need to prevent people from entering at the borders, and they need to maintain a military and court system.

"Big government" is when the government takes on more duties than this, like educating the populace or feeding the poor.

I think it's clear that I don't really respect this position very much.

Because you end up with a world where the "Small government" spends just as much money as the "Big Government" and the "Small government" can push you around and brutalize you more than the "Big Government" does and then I'm left asking, "Why do we want small government again?"

Kicking down your door in the middle of the night with the above-mentioned no knock warrant and then shooting you to death when you attempt to groggily defend yourself from the half dozen men invading your home is, sorry, worse and more dangerous to me than free school lunches.

The parts of government I'm most frightened of are the armed, masked men with the authority to gun me down and I don't think I'm the weird one for thinking this way.

Like, if you want to say that Republicans are just genuinely scared of big government you need to explain to me why they voted for Trump and ICE.

I would tend to sorta categorize it as:

These are all factors.

That's definitely something where a lot of right-wingers can have sympathy with left-wingers, IMO.

In particular, this is notable for going against factors #1 (a government needs to be fairly large to be doing this kind of massive police raid for anything other than the most serious cases) and #3 (impliedly, "you" weren't actually doing something door-kick-justifying, so this implies the situation where the govt doesn't fear backlash to this kind of sloppiness).

A lot of the right wing narrative focuses on the proliferation of criminal law pursuant to regulatory power, leading to more cases when a Massive Police Raid is seen as sensible for things outside the traditional range of arson, murder, kidnapping, and treason. For example, you can see the aggression of the ATF, which definitely kicks in people's doors and shoots them, as a result of both gun laws and institutional budgets and tendencies (such as the 1970s moonshine crash).

Definitely these are the most terrifying but not the only bad ones in other ways.

I mean, imagine if the government claimed the authority to totally control what was built on any kind of land whatsoever, and to control the exact details of how it was built, and engaged in a kind of promiscuous distribution of the veto power, and this not only made it hard to build inexpensive, ecologically friendly buildings but also caused a catastrophic housing shortage?

And also, imagine if the government semi-monopolized education and people started treating the mere existence of non-governmental education as an attack on mass education?

And what if the government, which has Constitutional restrictions to resist forming a standing army, had normalized the formation of a standing army and authorization bills for that standing army were rubber-stamped every two years by Congress and it was obvious that the standing army was never, ever going away?

And when the Republican party actually takes a stand against this, I will believe any of this stuff about small government.

That's the thing, ain't it?

The "small government" party voting for military deployments in American cities, and attempts to normalize the use of the military for domestic policing operations.

The Republicans (Both in congress and in people who vote for elected officials) keep voting in lockstep to expand the military budget, to cede war-making powers from Congress to the president, and to send the fucking state national guard into my city over the objections of my Governor.

I'll take the small government stuff seriously when the voters or Congress start to.

I wanted to focus on the standing army stuff because, like, we could have a coherent conversation about how Trump's efforts to shut down the Department of Education and state level efforts to promote charter schools stem from small government ideology.

We cannot talk coherently about how Trump's efforts to reduce the power of the military and federal law enforcement stem from small government ideology because those efforts do not exist.

And it is not merely that he has failed to reduce the power of the Pentagon and the military; he has actively worked to increase and consolidate it. It's under Trump that it has finally become undeniable that it is the President, not Congress, who declares war.

It's not Big Government Barack Obama who sent the Military into LA and it wasn't Gavin Newsome who volunteered to send his state's national guard troops into Portland after our governor sued to stop Trump from deploying the Oregon guard.

Those attempts to deploy the guard to Portland were to combat what local police described as about two dozen "low energy" protestors.

And for the most part all the small government Trump voters love it!

I think this needs something more to explain it than "Well, they're actually sincerely concerned about small government."

I do think the bit about "How much does this mass interact with or impact ordinary citizens in good standing?" is important, because "ordinary citizen in good standing" is defined by the government.

The Soviet Union never went after ordinary citizens in good standing, they only went after criminals and subversives.

Same way a bunch of immigrants who diligently followed the rules during the Biden years, just like the Republicans say they want, suddenly became lawless outsiders with no right to be here once Trump unilaterally ended the programs they were here under.

An interesting deep dive. Looks like it's not men that are lonely, it's poor people, but no one actually cares about poor people.

This is less tangential to the article than I thought it would be, but can I share something?

I've literally never once seen anybody talk about a "male loneliness epidemic".

I've heard jokes on podcasts and pop culture and social media about how it's a dumb idea. I've seen thinkpieces on how it doesn't exist and thinkpieces on how it does exist, but it's just because men are whining about their own incompetence and we'd fix it if we really tried (“So many of these problems could be overcome if men would just go to therapy.”)

But I have genuinely never seen a single one of these apparently common sympathetic takes on how the "male loneliness epidemic" is a problem. Just a bunch of rebuttals.

In fact I'm only taking it on faith that they exist.

Now, something I find, well, vexing is the word about all these takes is that there is a common theme among them, which is that focus on male loneliness specifically must necessarily devalue loneliness felt by women.

I don't know why that would be the case, particularly.

That article has a guy who feels like he can't really date, because he's too embarrassed to ask women to go dutch and doesn't have enough money to actually relax if he's paying for a date with a woman.

Is it possible that perhaps the poor straight women tend, as a generalization, to have a different set of anxieties around paying for dates?

I mean, look, I'm not a straight woman, but I tend to think that "I feel like I'm expected to pay for myself AND the man I'm dating and I'm worried that a date will be really turned off if I ask him to go dutch instead of paying for both of us myself." is probably like, statistically a rarer feeling among straight women than it is among straight men, right?

could be more pressure about needing to put out because the dude's paying for the meal if she couldn't afford it herself? also had to howl at the rates of that punk rock psychologist, absolutely underscores that many of these people would be uncomfortable talking about the class aspect

See, and I think that "Gosh my date insisted on paying for this really expensive meal for the two of us and I'm worried she expects me to put out even though I don't know if there's that kind of chemistry but I don't want to be a tease" is probably a situation that straight men are a lot less likely to find themselves in than straight women.

Not saying it never happens, but I'm guessing a lot more straight women have been there than straight men.

I don't feel that I am devaluing the experiences or pressures faced by straight men by saying that.

I think what I don't understand about this whole thing is that women and men are socialized differently, are overwhelmingly likely to find themselves in social situations where men and women are treated differently, and so it seems entirely possible to me that, in group terms, men and women might respond to loneliness and isolation differently.

I don't think it debases men or women to say that, but for some reason everyone talking about loneliness is utterly certain that it does.

The corollary of needing to be willing to frame arguments in terms of moral precepts you don't necessarily share is needing to be aware of subtext. Yes, it's easy to get a certain stripe of hyper-conservative folks to agree with anything you please by framing it in terms of opposition to Big Government, but a large part of that is because when you say "Big Government", what they hear is "Jews". You didn't hack their brain with magic words, you just didn't realise what you were saying!

I disagree.

I do think that right-wingers are genuinely opposed to big government, and not because they think it's run by the learned Elders of Zion or anything like that. Rather, their opposition comes from the fact that they believe cishet white Christians (and, in some versions, Jews) are by nature good, law-abiding people who thus don't need to be policed. The purpose of the police is to protect the above group from queer sexual deviants, POC thieves, murderers and rapists and Islamic terrorists (in European versions, the latter two classes are collapsed into one another), and maybe the Jews who control the banks and did 9/11 - those people don't deserve freedom from government.

I think that's a different very suspicious (and in some cases appropriately suspicious) interpretation. I think you're a lot more correct than OP, but I still think that an actual opposition to really big governments without ulterior motives is still the largest reason for opposition to "big government".

I think it's clear that the sheer scale of bureaucracy and level of centralization and formalization of authority of modern governments (I'm talking about the last 70 or so years here) are absolutely incredible compared to even the comparatively recent past.

If you strip government down to the essentials, you do tend to end up being left with court systems, law enforcement, and the military (especially if you ignore religion and other things related to the question of "what makes this legitimate"), which by its own logic creates the situation where the main legitimate form of government is physically fighting internal and external enemies -- "everything is protect".

I think it's legitimate for people to look at the scale of bureaucracy, government payroll, centralization of authority, etc in the modern era and say, "I would like less of this".

(Sorta related thing: The tendency where people contemplate the idea of 'what if a religious confessional government was established' and immediately assume a hugely complex set of religious rules spring into existence, in the absence of any reason for them to actually do so.)

It's obviously true that government massively expanded in post-WWII era, and I get why someone wouldn't like that, but if you look at standard American (or, to a lesser extent, European) right-wing politics, it's notable what aspects of the expansion of government they oppose.

For example, immigration. Back in the days of Ellis Island, you didn't even need a passport to immigrate to America; you just had to show up there and not be a political extremist or a carrier of a dangerous disease (or from an "undesirable" ethnic group). And, as a libertarian friend I have in real life has pointed out, making immigration easier would reduce illegal immigration considerably. But, at least as far as I know, making immigration easier isn't what the standard-issue conservative asking for cutting red tape is calling for.

Something that really made this stick out to me is this video, talking about the expansion of police powers in America. To just pick the example that stuck in my memory, no-knock search warrants, whose rationale is that drug dealers will try to flush drugs down the toilet. This is an obvious violation of the presumption of innocence (assuming that you have drugs and will try to dispose of the evidence) that, to my mind, is a lot more like government tyranny than environmental regulations or welfare programs. So it seems to me that they only oppose the expansion of government when it's a problem for People Like Them (TM).

@thathopeyetlives

See, when a left-winger hears "Big government" we tend to look at, say, the relative size or scope of a government agency. Has this agency gotten bigger or smaller? What does it have the power to do? What kind of oversight does it have?

So, for example, the fact that our military spending is significantly more than that of Russia, China and India combined makes the military seem like "big government".

I think what you're getting at is that for the American right-wing, "Big government" means "The government is doing more than the least necessary things a government should do."

Governments need to do internal policing, they need to prevent people from entering at the borders, and they need to maintain a military and court system.

"Big government" is when the government takes on more duties than this, like educating the populace or feeding the poor.

I think it's clear that I don't really respect this position very much.

Because you end up with a world where the "Small government" spends just as much money as the "Big Government" and the "Small government" can push you around and brutalize you more than the "Big Government" does and then I'm left asking, "Why do we want small government again?"

Kicking down your door in the middle of the night with the above-mentioned no knock warrant and then shooting you to death when you attempt to groggily defend yourself from the half dozen men invading your home is, sorry, worse and more dangerous to me than free school lunches.

The parts of government I'm most frightened of are the armed, masked men with the authority to gun me down and I don't think I'm the weird one for thinking this way.

Like, if you want to say that Republicans are just genuinely scared of big government you need to explain to me why they voted for Trump and ICE.

I would tend to sorta categorize it as:

These are all factors.

That's definitely something where a lot of right-wingers can have sympathy with left-wingers, IMO.

In particular, this is notable for going against factors #1 (a government needs to be fairly large to be doing this kind of massive police raid for anything other than the most serious cases) and #3 (impliedly, "you" weren't actually doing something door-kick-justifying, so this implies the situation where the govt doesn't fear backlash to this kind of sloppiness).

A lot of the right wing narrative focuses on the proliferation of criminal law pursuant to regulatory power, leading to more cases when a Massive Police Raid is seen as sensible for things outside the traditional range of arson, murder, kidnapping, and treason. For example, you can see the aggression of the ATF, which definitely kicks in people's doors and shoots them, as a result of both gun laws and institutional budgets and tendencies (such as the 1970s moonshine crash).

Definitely these are the most terrifying but not the only bad ones in other ways.

I mean, imagine if the government claimed the authority to totally control what was built on any kind of land whatsoever, and to control the exact details of how it was built, and engaged in a kind of promiscuous distribution of the veto power, and this not only made it hard to build inexpensive, ecologically friendly buildings but also caused a catastrophic housing shortage?

And also, imagine if the government semi-monopolized education and people started treating the mere existence of non-governmental education as an attack on mass education?

And what if the government, which has Constitutional restrictions to resist forming a standing army, had normalized the formation of a standing army and authorization bills for that standing army were rubber-stamped every two years by Congress and it was obvious that the standing army was never, ever going away?

And when the Republican party actually takes a stand against this, I will believe any of this stuff about small government.

That's the thing, ain't it?

The "small government" party voting for military deployments in American cities, and attempts to normalize the use of the military for domestic policing operations.

The Republicans (Both in congress and in people who vote for elected officials) keep voting in lockstep to expand the military budget, to cede war-making powers from Congress to the president, and to send the fucking state national guard into my city over the objections of my Governor.

I'll take the small government stuff seriously when the voters or Congress start to.

Idiocracy's weird eugenics based premise is a problem, but now that we're officially in month six of Operation Totally Kickass Rad Badass while the White House social media feeds post meme compilations and various reality TV stars head Cabinet Positions I feel like we have to admit that Mike Judge at least got the aesthetics right on that one.

I think this is too easy on Idiocracy (I am seriously ashamed of having found that movie smart and profound as a teenager) and not harsh enough on the irony-poisoned people.

Idiocracy depicted a world where President Macho Kamacho was just unremarkable, with the implication that without some college-educated salt and light most people would straightforwardly find that attractive.

Trump's silliness emerges more from (some) people's frustration with a world ruled by anodyne professional norms and soft-spoken Serious People. But that frustration is deeply insecure and cynical. So you get 4Chan-ism and memes and goofy exagerrated BS, welded incoherently to an ostensibly much more sane proposal to roll back the soft-spoken bureaucrats a bit (even though they are load-bearing).

I find that this is my big problem with the right currently.

What's the "sane proposal to roll back the soft-spoken bureaucrats a bit"?

Because we live in the real world. There's a lot of bureaucrats who do a lot of things.

Personally, I can't help but suspect that the reason we've managed record-breaking aircraft carrier deployment lengths after about six months of violence is that we went ahead and rolled back all the bureaucrats who think through the deployment schedule.

To me, a sane proposal to roll back the bureaucracy involves, well, unfortunately it involves some kind of bureaucracy. What does this specific bureaucracy do? Is it doing a good job? How do we know?

It's been decades since I've seen Idiocracy, but the main thing I remember is that people had devolved into a world of advertising slogans.

The "sane" proposal to roll back bureaucracy was expressed though a government agency named after this photo of a funny looking dog:

The guys at the department of hilarious dog meme decided what to cut by just feeding documents into a computer and doing whatever that computer said.

To me, "roll back the bureaucracy" is just the same as "Brawndo, it has what plants crave!"

It's just a slogan, it doesn't mean anything real, but the only point anymore is to have a slogan. It's not shorthand for some more complex idea anymore, it's now the actual extent of the thinking.

An interesting deep dive. Looks like it's not men that are lonely, it's poor people, but no one actually cares about poor people.

This is less tangential to the article than I thought it would be, but can I share something?

I've literally never once seen anybody talk about a "male loneliness epidemic".

I've heard jokes on podcasts and pop culture and social media about how it's a dumb idea. I've seen thinkpieces on how it doesn't exist and thinkpieces on how it does exist, but it's just because men are whining about their own incompetence and we'd fix it if we really tried (“So many of these problems could be overcome if men would just go to therapy.”)

But I have genuinely never seen a single one of these apparently common sympathetic takes on how the "male loneliness epidemic" is a problem. Just a bunch of rebuttals.

In fact I'm only taking it on faith that they exist.

Now, something I find, well, vexing is the word about all these takes is that there is a common theme among them, which is that focus on male loneliness specifically must necessarily devalue loneliness felt by women.

I don't know why that would be the case, particularly.

That article has a guy who feels like he can't really date, because he's too embarrassed to ask women to go dutch and doesn't have enough money to actually relax if he's paying for a date with a woman.

Is it possible that perhaps the poor straight women tend, as a generalization, to have a different set of anxieties around paying for dates?

I mean, look, I'm not a straight woman, but I tend to think that "I feel like I'm expected to pay for myself AND the man I'm dating and I'm worried that a date will be really turned off if I ask him to go dutch instead of paying for both of us myself." is probably like, statistically a rarer feeling among straight women than it is among straight men, right?

The corollary of needing to be willing to frame arguments in terms of moral precepts you don't necessarily share is needing to be aware of subtext. Yes, it's easy to get a certain stripe of hyper-conservative folks to agree with anything you please by framing it in terms of opposition to Big Government, but a large part of that is because when you say "Big Government", what they hear is "Jews". You didn't hack their brain with magic words, you just didn't realise what you were saying!

I disagree.

I do think that right-wingers are genuinely opposed to big government, and not because they think it's run by the learned Elders of Zion or anything like that. Rather, their opposition comes from the fact that they believe cishet white Christians (and, in some versions, Jews) are by nature good, law-abiding people who thus don't need to be policed. The purpose of the police is to protect the above group from queer sexual deviants, POC thieves, murderers and rapists and Islamic terrorists (in European versions, the latter two classes are collapsed into one another), and maybe the Jews who control the banks and did 9/11 - those people don't deserve freedom from government.

I think that's a different very suspicious (and in some cases appropriately suspicious) interpretation. I think you're a lot more correct than OP, but I still think that an actual opposition to really big governments without ulterior motives is still the largest reason for opposition to "big government".

I think it's clear that the sheer scale of bureaucracy and level of centralization and formalization of authority of modern governments (I'm talking about the last 70 or so years here) are absolutely incredible compared to even the comparatively recent past.

If you strip government down to the essentials, you do tend to end up being left with court systems, law enforcement, and the military (especially if you ignore religion and other things related to the question of "what makes this legitimate"), which by its own logic creates the situation where the main legitimate form of government is physically fighting internal and external enemies -- "everything is protect".

I think it's legitimate for people to look at the scale of bureaucracy, government payroll, centralization of authority, etc in the modern era and say, "I would like less of this".

(Sorta related thing: The tendency where people contemplate the idea of 'what if a religious confessional government was established' and immediately assume a hugely complex set of religious rules spring into existence, in the absence of any reason for them to actually do so.)

It's obviously true that government massively expanded in post-WWII era, and I get why someone wouldn't like that, but if you look at standard American (or, to a lesser extent, European) right-wing politics, it's notable what aspects of the expansion of government they oppose.

For example, immigration. Back in the days of Ellis Island, you didn't even need a passport to immigrate to America; you just had to show up there and not be a political extremist or a carrier of a dangerous disease (or from an "undesirable" ethnic group). And, as a libertarian friend I have in real life has pointed out, making immigration easier would reduce illegal immigration considerably. But, at least as far as I know, making immigration easier isn't what the standard-issue conservative asking for cutting red tape is calling for.

Something that really made this stick out to me is this video, talking about the expansion of police powers in America. To just pick the example that stuck in my memory, no-knock search warrants, whose rationale is that drug dealers will try to flush drugs down the toilet. This is an obvious violation of the presumption of innocence (assuming that you have drugs and will try to dispose of the evidence) that, to my mind, is a lot more like government tyranny than environmental regulations or welfare programs. So it seems to me that they only oppose the expansion of government when it's a problem for People Like Them (TM).

@thathopeyetlives

See, when a left-winger hears "Big government" we tend to look at, say, the relative size or scope of a government agency. Has this agency gotten bigger or smaller? What does it have the power to do? What kind of oversight does it have?

So, for example, the fact that our military spending is significantly more than that of Russia, China and India combined makes the military seem like "big government".

I think what you're getting at is that for the American right-wing, "Big government" means "The government is doing more than the least necessary things a government should do."

Governments need to do internal policing, they need to prevent people from entering at the borders, and they need to maintain a military and court system.

"Big government" is when the government takes on more duties than this, like educating the populace or feeding the poor.

I think it's clear that I don't really respect this position very much.

Because you end up with a world where the "Small government" spends just as much money as the "Big Government" and the "Small government" can push you around and brutalize you more than the "Big Government" does and then I'm left asking, "Why do we want small government again?"

Kicking down your door in the middle of the night with the above-mentioned no knock warrant and then shooting you to death when you attempt to groggily defend yourself from the half dozen men invading your home is, sorry, worse and more dangerous to me than free school lunches.

The parts of government I'm most frightened of are the armed, masked men with the authority to gun me down and I don't think I'm the weird one for thinking this way.

Like, if you want to say that Republicans are just genuinely scared of big government you need to explain to me why they voted for Trump and ICE.

I don't know, that particular one just annoys me so much, it seems so self-evidently true that if you cared about animals you wouldn't eat them, and going, "Uh, actually a lot of meat eaters are conservationists" doesn't really help much.

Any time a meat eater succeeds in preserving the species to continue hunting it they are treating that species as a resource to be exploited, and in fact saying that any individual member of that species can be destroyed for purely selfish purposes, as long as the resource as a whole is stewarded for future generations.

But you are treating it primarily as a resource to be exploited, rather than a group of beings that have some right to pursue their own goals free of interference.

I'm not saying this is bad, but again, think of how it would be if you treated a group of humans like this.

"Anybody who regularly kills and eats Frenchmen doesn't care about the French." strikes me as... just obviously true.

And I think it would be fundamentally absurd to go, "Uh, actually I only hunt and eat Frenchmen sustainably, in fact I have donated a lot of money to the Louvre and various efforts to preserve French culture, so what right do you have to say that I don't care about the French."

And vegans are arguing that the same analogy is true of animals.

If you treat people purely as a resource to be exploited for your own gain, I think it's proof that you don't care about them, even if you treat them as a resource to be stewarded and preserved rather than a resource to be destroyed in a one-time orgy of greed.

A lot of vegans feel that this logic should be extended to animals as far as is practical.

The "stewardship" model is *better* than the "destroy the resource in a short-sighted orgy of personal greed" model, I agree, but I still think there's a strong case to be made that it's not really "caring" about animals in the way that Vegans mean.

I would never eat my friend's pet cats. I would never eat them even if they had kittens and I could eat one of his cats while sustaining the population of cats that live in my friend's apartment.

Now, personally, I think that's a pretty clear indication that I care about those cats more than I care about, say, the cow who died for the burger I ate yesterday.

I think it's the defensiveness I find really sort of irritating and, honestly, a little bit perplexing.

Again, it just feels like the cannibal above getting really irritated when you claim he doesn't care about the people he eats, and explaining that he actually does a lot of cultural preservation work, and he's donated way more to museums than most non-cannibals, so how can you sit there and act like the non-cannibals care more about French people than he does?

I guess I don't understand why you want credit for caring deeply about something you'll happily destroy and eat even in cases where you really aren't required to do so.

Why not just admit that you don't care in the way vegans tend to mean?

Like, there are nuances; people are weak and so you can, in some sense, care about something but lack the will to act on that feeling, and there is a real sense in which the conservationist hunter cares more about the animals they conserve than a person who says, "Who gives a shit if they go extinct as long as I get profit from it".

But when a Vegan says you can't care about animals if you eat them that's not what they're talking about, and you are capable of knowing that's not what they are talking about.

I am going to assume that you are unintentionally clouding the difference between the individual and the group here rather than intentionally.

It’s trivial to imagine a character who “cares about” the French but routinely killed Frenchmen! “The French” is a group, and the character desires the group continues to exist. There is no contradiction between wanting a group to continue to exist and killing individual group members. If a vampire particularly likes eating Frenchmen, they are going to want Frenchmen to continue to be available for them to eat, and so may take action to preserve the French collectively.

Also PETA euthanizes animals like it’s their hobby; being vegan because you care about animals doesn’t preclude killing animals.

Right, but, like, when one of the Vampire's crying victims goes, "Why are you doing this? Don't you care about people?"

And the Vampire gives a speech about all the efforts he's made to protect kings and empires, that's not... like... a heroic moment where we're proving the Vampire is a moral good guy and the guy getting his blood drained is a short-sighted fool who doesn't understand morality.

My real problem is not that I think it is immoral to care only about conservationism; it's that when a Vegan says people who eat meat don't care about animals it's very clear that they aren't talking about conservationism, and pretending that they are is just an obnoxious form of question-begging.

If a vegan says, "I don't think it's enough to merely conserve animal species, I think we need to start thinking of individual animals as being worthy of moral consideration beyond the question of what use a human might put them to."

Then, "Actually I contribute a lot to species conservation" is just... meaningless. It's not a retort to their position, it's not an argument for your own position, it's just going,

"Nuh-uh" while pretending that it's the vegan making some kind of error.

The more I think about it the more I feel like the vampire example underlines my point.

Yes, the immortal vampire who picks strays and homeless people off the streets of Paris while working to preserve the French Republic is demonstrating an internally consistent morality.

But like... When the crying person asks him if he has no pity or compassion for people, and he gives a monologue about his vast regard for empires and cultures, that's a villain monologue, right?

Because that tramp is obviously not talking about that. He's not concerned with whether the Vampire cares about the consistency of the French Republic, he's concerned with "How on earth can you think it's okay to eat me, personally".

And the vampire's decision to deflect from that obvious question, and instead airily address a different question which he can more easily justify himself from is part of what makes it a villain monologue.

He's not actually asserting a moral case for eating that tramp, he's simply declaring that "Is it okay for me to eat random tramps" isn't even a question he has to think about or answer.

It also works as a sketch of how a vegan would begin an argument that mere conservationism isn't sufficient. After all, for people, there is no amount of cultural or species-wide preservation that you can do which makes it okay to just kill and eat random people, and at least some animals seem to be analagous to people in the sense that they have brains, independent goals, the ability to feel pain and fear, etc.

That argument is, to me, obvious and sensible enough that it deserves more than a fart noise as a rebuttal.

Instead of actually justifying their position that animals shouldn't be treated like people in this particular way, people elaborately go out of their way to not understand the point these vegans are making, and that's a form of argumentation that deeply irritates me.

Also I do have this genuine reaction of like... Yeah obviously I care less about the animals I eat than I do about human beings or the animals that I refuse to eat. That's a perfectly sensible way to talk about my priorities there, why would I object to it?

First I think the vampire example is kinda disingenuous, honestly; I don't think it's fair at all to compare the debate on eating meat that a vampire would have with a human with the debate a vampire would have with another vampire with a differing opinion.

Second, I think you're missing the point? It's not actually about whether eating meat is right or wrong. It's about the definition of 'care', and who gets to decide what it is. You have to be aware that 'I care about animals and you dont' is an incredibly powerful statement. It's nuclear grade rhetoric; whoever gets to deploy this has made a major victory as far as optics go. (See also: abortion debate and how hotly contested it is to be the side that cares about the children)

And what you're doing is saying 'Okay I accept the vegan definition of caring about something meaning not killing it, so definitionally meat-eaters dont care about animals. Why not admit that? Why are you so defensive?'. But like we all know the asterisks here will get scraped away; what will spread around social media is 'meat-eaters dont care about animals'. This is a major loss for meat-eaters so they don't roll over and allow it. They get defensive. They point out that not killing something is a literal non-action while conservation represents a real material investment into animal welfare so maybe care should mean something different in the first place, and so on and so forth.

This is what it is fundamentally, I think. You probably know all this and just weren't looking at it from this angle, but yeah, as I understand it you're asking basically why meat-eaters don't allow their opponents to frame the debate, and the answer is because that's a stupid thing to do when you want to win an ideological battle.

I think the crux, for me, is this:

I really don't think it is?

I live in the United States, and it's only really in the last fifteen years that you could even find vegetarian or vegan food here that wasn't complete shit.

A quick googling tells me that Vegans make up around 3%, give or take, of the US population.

I have to be honest with you: if only 3% of Americans thought that abortion was murder I wouldn't really give a shit what they thought either.

Not to mention that selling meat is an enormous business here in the US.

So on the one hand, supporting me is the vast majority of the country and several enormous industries, and on the other is a tiny minority. And of that 3% of vegans, some of them aren't militant vegans and wouldn't actually repeat these ideas that meat eating means you don't care about animals.

What exactly do you think the Vegans are working towards? Why this sort of bizarrely defensive and even frightened response to such a tiny, powerless minority of people?

I find it awfully strange.

Hunters are less than 5% of the US population.

If you want to say most vegans care more about animal welfare than the majority of meat eaters (who subsist on factory-farmed meat and don't think about livestock *or* wild game that much) then I agree, and I don't think that's controversial.

But you opened the post pitting two different small minorities with different values against each other, and saying that only one group's values count. That is exactly the definitions politicking that @mostguma is talking about, and replying as if you were talking about factory farming all along is dishonest.

I don't know if the Mii Dash Geget blogger is vegan or not, but I think they care about wolves more than any vegan I've ever talked to, in part because of their nuance and cogent arguments about when we should kill wolves.

Well, no, I'm saying that you cannot compare different values and then pretend you aren't doing it.

The aggressive vegan arguments that people dislike all tend to boil down to something like this:

"In order to really care about animals, our attitude towards them needs to move beyond conservationism."

And I feel like it should be (But apparently isn't) easy to see how,

"Uh, actually I'm really good at conservationism" isn't actually an answer to that belief.

Rather than attempting to explain why conservationism is all that we owe to animals, people just go,

"Uh, actually it's totally obvious that conservationism is all we owe to animals, and the dumb Vegans just don't realize who's the best at conservation."

I find this, uh, underwhelming.

I also find that the arguments for why we don't need to move beyond conservationism tend to be pretty weak, often amounting to, "Since there is some degree of violence towards animals that is necessary for humans to survive, there's no point to thinking too hard about the amount we inflict or choosing more carefully about when and where we do so"

Which I also find deeply underwhelming.

PS - "Hunting" in the one paragraph I used it should probably have been "Eating"; in any case I was partly thinking of commercial fishing operations.

Donald Trump has now resorted to using Deltarune music for instagram propaganda

For how obsessed fascists are with aesthetics, how are their aesthetics so consistently cringe?

This New Yorker article used the word "obviousness" to describe Trump's aesthetic and that about sums it up.

I think good, non-cringe aesthetics probably require some sort of non-obvious component that isn't entirely easily digestible and that's against like, the whole fascist thing.

I also think they tend to think of aesthetics the way they think of everything else, as a kind of bludgeon to weild against their enemies. It's easier to hate someone else's aesthetic judgement than to build your own.

I don't know, that particular one just annoys me so much, it seems so self-evidently true that if you cared about animals you wouldn't eat them, and going, "Uh, actually a lot of meat eaters are conservationists" doesn't really help much.

Any time a meat eater succeeds in preserving the species to continue hunting it they are treating that species as a resource to be exploited, and in fact saying that any individual member of that species can be destroyed for purely selfish purposes, as long as the resource as a whole is stewarded for future generations.

But you are treating it primarily as a resource to be exploited, rather than a group of beings that have some right to pursue their own goals free of interference.

I'm not saying this is bad, but again, think of how it would be if you treated a group of humans like this.

"Anybody who regularly kills and eats Frenchmen doesn't care about the French." strikes me as... just obviously true.

And I think it would be fundamentally absurd to go, "Uh, actually I only hunt and eat Frenchmen sustainably, in fact I have donated a lot of money to the Louvre and various efforts to preserve French culture, so what right do you have to say that I don't care about the French."

And vegans are arguing that the same analogy is true of animals.

If you treat people purely as a resource to be exploited for your own gain, I think it's proof that you don't care about them, even if you treat them as a resource to be stewarded and preserved rather than a resource to be destroyed in a one-time orgy of greed.

A lot of vegans feel that this logic should be extended to animals as far as is practical.

The "stewardship" model is *better* than the "destroy the resource in a short-sighted orgy of personal greed" model, I agree, but I still think there's a strong case to be made that it's not really "caring" about animals in the way that Vegans mean.

I would never eat my friend's pet cats. I would never eat them even if they had kittens and I could eat one of his cats while sustaining the population of cats that live in my friend's apartment.

Now, personally, I think that's a pretty clear indication that I care about those cats more than I care about, say, the cow who died for the burger I ate yesterday.

I think it's the defensiveness I find really sort of irritating and, honestly, a little bit perplexing.

Again, it just feels like the cannibal above getting really irritated when you claim he doesn't care about the people he eats, and explaining that he actually does a lot of cultural preservation work, and he's donated way more to museums than most non-cannibals, so how can you sit there and act like the non-cannibals care more about French people than he does?

I guess I don't understand why you want credit for caring deeply about something you'll happily destroy and eat even in cases where you really aren't required to do so.

Why not just admit that you don't care in the way vegans tend to mean?

Like, there are nuances; people are weak and so you can, in some sense, care about something but lack the will to act on that feeling, and there is a real sense in which the conservationist hunter cares more about the animals they conserve than a person who says, "Who gives a shit if they go extinct as long as I get profit from it".

But when a Vegan says you can't care about animals if you eat them that's not what they're talking about, and you are capable of knowing that's not what they are talking about.

I am going to assume that you are unintentionally clouding the difference between the individual and the group here rather than intentionally.

It’s trivial to imagine a character who “cares about” the French but routinely killed Frenchmen! “The French” is a group, and the character desires the group continues to exist. There is no contradiction between wanting a group to continue to exist and killing individual group members. If a vampire particularly likes eating Frenchmen, they are going to want Frenchmen to continue to be available for them to eat, and so may take action to preserve the French collectively.

Also PETA euthanizes animals like it’s their hobby; being vegan because you care about animals doesn’t preclude killing animals.

Right, but, like, when one of the Vampire's crying victims goes, "Why are you doing this? Don't you care about people?"

And the Vampire gives a speech about all the efforts he's made to protect kings and empires, that's not... like... a heroic moment where we're proving the Vampire is a moral good guy and the guy getting his blood drained is a short-sighted fool who doesn't understand morality.

My real problem is not that I think it is immoral to care only about conservationism; it's that when a Vegan says people who eat meat don't care about animals it's very clear that they aren't talking about conservationism, and pretending that they are is just an obnoxious form of question-begging.

If a vegan says, "I don't think it's enough to merely conserve animal species, I think we need to start thinking of individual animals as being worthy of moral consideration beyond the question of what use a human might put them to."

Then, "Actually I contribute a lot to species conservation" is just... meaningless. It's not a retort to their position, it's not an argument for your own position, it's just going,

"Nuh-uh" while pretending that it's the vegan making some kind of error.

The more I think about it the more I feel like the vampire example underlines my point.

Yes, the immortal vampire who picks strays and homeless people off the streets of Paris while working to preserve the French Republic is demonstrating an internally consistent morality.

But like... When the crying person asks him if he has no pity or compassion for people, and he gives a monologue about his vast regard for empires and cultures, that's a villain monologue, right?

Because that tramp is obviously not talking about that. He's not concerned with whether the Vampire cares about the consistency of the French Republic, he's concerned with "How on earth can you think it's okay to eat me, personally".

And the vampire's decision to deflect from that obvious question, and instead airily address a different question which he can more easily justify himself from is part of what makes it a villain monologue.

He's not actually asserting a moral case for eating that tramp, he's simply declaring that "Is it okay for me to eat random tramps" isn't even a question he has to think about or answer.

It also works as a sketch of how a vegan would begin an argument that mere conservationism isn't sufficient. After all, for people, there is no amount of cultural or species-wide preservation that you can do which makes it okay to just kill and eat random people, and at least some animals seem to be analagous to people in the sense that they have brains, independent goals, the ability to feel pain and fear, etc.

That argument is, to me, obvious and sensible enough that it deserves more than a fart noise as a rebuttal.

Instead of actually justifying their position that animals shouldn't be treated like people in this particular way, people elaborately go out of their way to not understand the point these vegans are making, and that's a form of argumentation that deeply irritates me.

Also I do have this genuine reaction of like... Yeah obviously I care less about the animals I eat than I do about human beings or the animals that I refuse to eat. That's a perfectly sensible way to talk about my priorities there, why would I object to it?

First I think the vampire example is kinda disingenuous, honestly; I don't think it's fair at all to compare the debate on eating meat that a vampire would have with a human with the debate a vampire would have with another vampire with a differing opinion.

Second, I think you're missing the point? It's not actually about whether eating meat is right or wrong. It's about the definition of 'care', and who gets to decide what it is. You have to be aware that 'I care about animals and you dont' is an incredibly powerful statement. It's nuclear grade rhetoric; whoever gets to deploy this has made a major victory as far as optics go. (See also: abortion debate and how hotly contested it is to be the side that cares about the children)

And what you're doing is saying 'Okay I accept the vegan definition of caring about something meaning not killing it, so definitionally meat-eaters dont care about animals. Why not admit that? Why are you so defensive?'. But like we all know the asterisks here will get scraped away; what will spread around social media is 'meat-eaters dont care about animals'. This is a major loss for meat-eaters so they don't roll over and allow it. They get defensive. They point out that not killing something is a literal non-action while conservation represents a real material investment into animal welfare so maybe care should mean something different in the first place, and so on and so forth.

This is what it is fundamentally, I think. You probably know all this and just weren't looking at it from this angle, but yeah, as I understand it you're asking basically why meat-eaters don't allow their opponents to frame the debate, and the answer is because that's a stupid thing to do when you want to win an ideological battle.

I think the crux, for me, is this:

I really don't think it is?

I live in the United States, and it's only really in the last fifteen years that you could even find vegetarian or vegan food here that wasn't complete shit.

A quick googling tells me that Vegans make up around 3%, give or take, of the US population.

I have to be honest with you: if only 3% of Americans thought that abortion was murder I wouldn't really give a shit what they thought either.

Not to mention that selling meat is an enormous business here in the US.

So on the one hand, supporting me is the vast majority of the country and several enormous industries, and on the other is a tiny minority. And of that 3% of vegans, some of them aren't militant vegans and wouldn't actually repeat these ideas that meat eating means you don't care about animals.

What exactly do you think the Vegans are working towards? Why this sort of bizarrely defensive and even frightened response to such a tiny, powerless minority of people?

I find it awfully strange.

I'm curious about the long deployments for Aircraft Carriers we're doing, specifically the fact that we're reaching record-breaking deployment times despite not engaging in any conflicts that are, like, record-breakingly long.

Nobody really seems to have bothered to try to explain that as far as I can tell.

At least part of it is definitely poor management from the Commander in Chief. USS Abraham Lincoln has already been ways into a regular deployment at the time of the whole Venezuela debacle. Then it was pulled off its regular deployment and into covering the Venezuela operation (including the prelude to it). That already wasn't exactly a properly scheduled rotation, as much as just pulling what's around on short notice. And after all that, it was the carrier stationed in the Middle East when Iran kicked off. And while Venezuela at least had a prelude, Iran got kicked off kind of out of nowhere as far as serious staff and logistical planning was concerned. If memory serves, that carrier was already over its standard 6 month deployment at the time it kicked off. And suffice to say that this war wasn't exactly a short victorious one.

So basically it's not so much aircraft carriers having long deployments, as much as this one specific ship getting chained through like 3 separate operations through good ol' not thinking ahead enough to rotate it in time

I continue to believe that people shouldn't join the US military because the executive branch has demonstrated, again and again and again, that they do not care about military personnel and will send them out with remarkably little concern for their well-being.