AMA (YYW)

Is it too late now to say sorry?

What do you think of Richard Nixon?

What is your favorite kind of sandwich?

Do you like turtles?

Why are you a liberal?

How well done is the steak and any sides or sauce/toppings?

As in regards to our country's policies aimed at changing less economically developed nations, what should we be trying to achieve?

1. An end to state compulsion that requires people to live in a more traditional/repressed context

2. Active promotion of lifestyle choices not amenable to local indigenous custom (which obviously includes Option 1)

3. Neither, but only that the local governments are receptive to the practical interests of the United States

If option 2, is a culturally and religiously pluralistic world actually desirable?

Is Wahhabism acceptable so far as people freely choose to practice it?

It is always too late to say sorry... lol

Great question.  The reason I'm on the left is because the kind of society that I want to live in measures its success, collectively, as a more perfect union; based on how well those at the bottom of any hierarchy fare, as opposed to how well those at the absolute top fare.  Said less abstractly, it is because I care more about people's lives and well being more than I care about corporate profits or any other return on capital. 

>How well done is the steak and any sides or sauce/toppings?

The steak is seared on the outside, to a sufficient degree; but cool on the inside, before the point whee any fat begins to render. 

No sauce if the meat is good.

If the meat is not good, then London Pub.

At the end of the day, every foreign policy question begins and ends with American self interest.  We do not act for the welfare of the world, as the so called indispensable nation or whatever.  We occupy that position because it is in our interest to do so, and the fact that the world happens to be better off because of that (which it obviously does) is a merely tangential benefit. 

The delusional progressive/pluralist notion that no one culture is better than any other and all cultures are equally "valid" or "valuable" or whatever bullshit language they want to use is, as my tone suggests, not something that anyone with neurons firing between their ears can reasonably suggest.  There are cultures that range from acceptable to intolerable in varying degrees.  That said, the issue with purportedly "traditional" cultures (by which I presume you mean Islamic fascists like the Saudis) is something that American foreign policy has failed almost without exception to change in any meaningful way.

This is the bottom line, though: the United States' interests are best served when all people have a reasonable chance to self actualize, as they perceive self actualization to be.  What that means is that we want people in shithole countries like Afghanistan to be in a position to make the choice to do something that is economically productive for themselves, so they don't fall beholden to terrorist groups like Al Quaeda or others.  The same applies in every other Muslim majority country on earth.  We also want members of Muslim majority countries to see themselves as individuals with rights who have a place in the world, rather than as nihilistic vessels for murdering infidels (which is what entirely too many especially Muslim boys and men in certain shithole countries tend to think).  

In an ideal world, the identitarian aspects of who they are (e.g., "I am a Muslim first, and an Afghani, second.") need to be ordered by each person in such a way that when their terror-prone cult-of-death theology conflicts with, say, Western standards of morality; they default to the Western standard of morality.

Absolutely not.  Islam, generally, is intolerable as it is practiced in nearly all parts of the non-western world (with the possible exceptions of Oman, and Morocco).  Islam, specifically as it is practiced by Wahabists, is a cult of death that is unacceptable in any society.  

nice

If abortion in general is not immoral, what makes sex-selective or sexual orientation selective (assuming tests for such will become available in coming years) abortions different? Doesn't the argument that this is vile discrimination rely upon the assumption that the fetus is being denied something that they are owed on the arbitrary basis of the presence of a certain trait?

Or, do you not have any qualms with it?

(Let me add to this: I've heard stories that many parents in the US enthusiastically support their child's decision to transition because they secretly don't want a gay son or daughter and would even prefer a transgender son/daughter over that. With that in mind, I think it's fair to say that if this screening were to become widely available tomorrow plenty of people would make a decision of whether to terminate based on its findings.)

I like how someone asked if you were actually YYW and just ignored that half of your posts are essay length for no reason other than "whelp that's YYW".

Thoughts on your local police?

Are there any debates you have legitimately enjoyed reading on the site?

There are entirely too many stories of parents taking action with respect to the gender of their already-born children than I wish to discuss.  Though, for what it's worth, I'll say this:

I think that many, many parents for inexcusably incompetent or selfish reasons are doing untold damage to their kids by and through so called "gender clinics" and the butchery/chemical perversion they offer. 

There is no medical evidence at all to suggest that anyone can know that they are in fact trans before the age of, at least, 25.  

There is an incredibly high rate of post-op trans kids committing suicide.  

The so called doctors who are offering hormone "therapy" and gender reassignment anything to anyone under the age of 25 should be stripped of their medical license if not imprisoned. 

Around the world gay boys are being told they're girls by know-nothing imbecile parents and malevolent "doctors" who are out to profit over the latest politically driven pseudoscience that is the universe of all research supporting the idea that gender dysphoria is anything other than a mental illness.

Nearly all feminine gay boys are NOT trans, or victims of gender dysphoria.  They're just feminine, and it is beyond perverse to have some medicalized bullshit tell them that they're trans and need hormones or a sex change operation because of what is most likely nothing more than a passing phase.

This is once again another instance of psychiatry discrediting itself by and through its normative psudoscientific bullshit, that has and will continue to visit spectacular harm on great quantities of people.

This reminds me of how gay boys and young men used to be forcibly castrated as was the recommendation of the so called APA until 1979 as a "therapeutic" measure.  It is beneath contempt, and a repeat of the identical mistakes that were made decades ago.

Any parent that puts their kid on hormones or takes them to a gender clinic is a terrible, irresponsible, incompetent parent. 

Oh stahp.

Bring back Gary McCarthy.

Not so far...

My bad. Sorry.

Do you perceive that as you grow older your tendency is to enjoy things less and less? If so, how should one respond to this, ideally?

I enjoy some things less, like politics.  I enjoy other things more, like literature.  I'm confident that before I'm 30, I'll have read everything that Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Solzenitzen ever wrote.  I'm about 3/4ths of the way there right now.  I have also found that I care less about what people think about politics, and I'm less inclined to try to influence them one way or another.  At the end of the day, I'll discuss political issues as long as I think the conversation is interesting to me, but as soon as it isn't... I'm moving on to something else.  More than anything, I am more interested in the people I care about doing well for themselves and being ok in life. 

I also care way less about philosophy now than I did when I was in college and graduate school.  I think having read as much of it as I have, it's probably influenced my life and will continue to influence how I think for the rest of my life.  But, I don't read philosophy now.  I also certainly don't bother to write about it.  There is no point.  I can speak with a reasonable degree of fluency on nearly every major political philosopher in the West from Thucydides to present, because I once taught political theory.  Now, I am indifferent to the subject matter. 

The problem that has me thinking the most these days, though, is still politically related.  It's a problem that I've been thinking about since 2015, and I still don't think I have it worked out.  The basic set of issues within this problem is the relationship between ideas, worldviews, events, media, and culture; on societal, cultural, and individual levels.  I don't even know how to describe it less abstractly than that, because the only way I've been able to make any sense of it is to set out characters in a plot.  Jung was right.  People don't have ideas.  Ideas have people, and this has been chewing at me since I first started to see the early signs of MeToo, cancel culture, and the progressive insanity that has metastasized into an onslaught civil war in the democratic party in 2013 when I was teaching undergrads.  Then when I correctly called Trump's winning the Republican primary on the day he announced, and later around February 2016 called him winning the general (before I defaulted against my instincts and yielded to the collective "wisdom" of the polls) ... that was when I think it fully gripped me.  

I might come back to this later.  There is more to be said here. 

One thing I would say that has profoundly changed about me since I've been getting older is that I don't recall the last time that I have ever felt threatened by someone else's opinions.  I think when I was younger, I did, because I still wasn't sure what I thought about things.  Now, I know what I think and why.  I know I can say what I think and say that in a way that I won't later go back on and think "oh, I should have said X or Y differently."

On the other hand, I am also probably a lot more closed minded now than I was before.  I'm more willing to listen to people, but the probability that they're going to change my mind on nearly anything is exceptionally low.  The only issues I really have changed my mind on is that I have become relatively more socially conservative than I was when I was younger.  I don't approve of the way that certain elements in the society are encouraging gender-nonconforming behavior among the youth.  I think that is dangerous and irresponsible, especially in consideration of the fact that now there are no shortage of so called "doctors" who will pump boys and girls full of hormones or androgen blockers because they happen to be less than stereotypically masculine or feminine, and are convinced by deviants and imbeciles that they're "trans." 

It's sickening to see.  Society has now come full circle; 40 years ago, they were electrocuting, castrating, and lobotomizing gay boys and men because of the delusion that homosexuality was a mental illness.  Now, they are pumping those same boys and young men full of estrogen because they're less than stereotypically masculine, while putting them on a medical conveyer belt to convince them that they were born in the wrong body.  Then, after the hacking and butchery that is sexual reassignment surgery (which in reality, is never only ONE surgery, but many) is it any wonder that gay boys who grow up after enduring that pseudoscientific insanity are almost thirty times more likely to kill themselves than similarly gay men who thought they might be "gender nonconforming" but never got on the conveyor belt?  

The stats on this are clear.  There is a cascade of so called "queer" types, and "gender non-conforming" misfits who are now more common than e-coli outbreaks on romaine lettuce.  Are people more "gender nonconforming" now than they were thirty years ago?  Yes, because it's a learned behavior and deliberate choice, rather than something that is innate.  Gender and sex do not vary independently, they are perfectly correlated, and there are exactly two genders/sexes: male and female.  None others. 

I've also become far more intolerant of progressive types, as you can obviously tell... to the point that I hold them in almost outright contempt.  It's not only that they present as socially destructive forces; it is that they are morally vacuous, and often genuinely malevolent people who by and through their actions contribute to increasing the collective suffering of all, themselves included.  I have no patience for people like that. 

In the past I used to think, and I still do think to a large degree, that the identity politics insanity will run its course just like every other stupid idea that left wing populists have come up with in the past has done before.  But, what I'm seeing instead are corporate efforts to commoditize virtue and stake monetary claims on pseudo-moralistic capital.  Here's an example, to put this in perspective: Nike and Colin Kapernick.  Obviously the merits of what Kapernick did are something I don't really care about.  He's a free person and has free speech rights just like everyone else.  The NFL's handling of the affair was disgraceful, but that's no surprise.  The NFL's corruption and incompetence is perhaps exceeded only by the NCAA.  But, what matters here is Nike. 

Nike made a deal with Kapernick to advance the brand's perception as being "socially conscious."  At the outset, this doesn't seem any different than Coca-Cola supporting WWII by encouraging people to buy war bonds; but upon deeper reflection, there is something much, much more insidious going on.  By making its deal with Kapernick, Nike is trying to get people who oppose those who oppose Kapernick to buy their brand, and in so doing, make Nike a symbol of what Kapernick was trying to say.  What this means is that how you spend your money now had an added dimension of "moral" gravity beyond whatever it might have had from buying clothing that was manufactured in South Asian sweatshops by child labor. 

By wearing that "swoosh" you "stand" for... what, exactly?  Social justice?  BlackLivesMatter?  It's not clear, and that to me seems like it's something by design.  Pepsi tried this with Katlin Jenner and failed hideously.  The point is that Nike stands for whatever people are up in arms about at any given time.  Nike, therefore, stands for nothing because it -- like Hillary Clinton -- only has an opinion when the demographic information supports that Nike should stand in any particular way.  When the polls change, Nike's opinion changes.  Notice how they nixed the shoe with the colony flag?  Proof positive I'm right. 

And what, in response?  Charlottesville.  

I think we're just getting started... and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. 

Don't you "oh stahp" me. Go read over the previous two posts before your reply then try that one again. You know its true.

Oh stahp.... lol

We should talk more. Do you use discord or something?

I'm on facebook and google hangouts.

Maybe one day I'll even share my snapchat lol

Gah youre lame I dont use any of those lol. Rip