wow:
"Why would a clan that guarantees its own justice ever yield to a system that promises justice to its enemies? To do so is to voluntarily surrender its greatest strengths: the power to protect its own, punish its rivals, and maintain its position in the world. It is not merely a loss of advantage; it is the dismantling of the clan’s very foundation."
White nationalism and conservatism in a nutshell...
Yes, I find folks in other countries are highly collaborative in a way that my own country (USA) often is not.
I think the general sentiment in my country is driven by goal-seeking behavior dominated by individualistic fear, and I see less of that elsewhere. "Political charged"-ness is both a contributor and an outcome.
That is true everywhere though, locals only have a say when they rebel and throw out their overlords. It isn't like the Irish were particularly happy about England pushing them around and so on.
As a matter of power in the global scope, sure. Locally, it's messier. The British had to concede to local autonomy across the border they drew in what is now north-western Pakistan, and that formal arrangement persisted past partition (and informally persists to this day.) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_Administered_Tribal_...
Has it occurred to you that a White nationalist and conservative may be reading that same passage and bringing whatever you are to mind? Or the entire article for that matter.
This is not a novel insight. The attitude described is basically textbook conservatism, as per Wilhoit's law [0]
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect
For a majority of HN readers (and I assume the commenter you're replying to) that in-group is their country's white majority but in other circles it's other groups. They may be groups who don't call themselves conservatives but that doesn't mean they aren't.
In other words, I agree with their claim that said quote is conservatism in a nutshell. Anti-conservatism isn't rooting for some other group, it's being against this kind of tribalism wholesale.
That's a pretty wild definition of conservatism, I don't think even uncharitable historians/political scientists would define conservatism in that way. And in fact it's not a textbook definition; looking at the link you posted seems like that quote is from a composer's blog in 2018.
It is wild ... but pretty accurate observation on their actual behavior. It is exactly how conservatives define law and order. It is about hierarchy and alliances. Their friends on the top get protection and enablement regardless of what they do. Their enemies and those on the bottom get obligations and punishments.
For that matter "cruelty is the point" might also be a slogan, but is also very correct observation.
Based on that last sentence I'm not sure if this is meant to be a serious argument or if you're being sarcastic. But assuming good faith, I would argue that there's nothing inherent to conservatism as it's defined that would logically lead the to the things you are describing. What you're describing is effectively corruption and authoritarianism. I think those things are elements that arise from overly centralised power and power imbalances. That is why one observes those things often in extremist governments where a large amount of power is centralised. It exists on a different axis to conservative vs liberal. Looking back on the 20th century, we can see both liberal and conservative governments that have had those traits.
For reference, here is the Wikipedia definition of conservatism:
"Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in which it appears."
Overall: I would argue that conservatism is a confounding variable in the events you're observing. What's actually causing the things you're observing is centralised power and authoritarianism.
> But assuming good faith, I would argue that there's nothing inherent to conservatism as it's defined that would logically lead the to the things you are describing.
It's exactly what "conservatism" has always been as a political ideology since it emerged as a coherent thing as the reaction against liberal/left politics (originally two different names for the same thing in different places, though they have since diverged in common use somewhat).
> I would argue that conservatism is a confounding variable in the events you're observing. What's actually causing the things you're observing is centralised power and authoritarianism.
Conservatism is (in relation to any of the societies in which it has existed since it emerged, not a hypothetical way the term might be used in some other context) retaining and reinforcing the centralization of power in established elites against the pressure from liberalizing forces to distribute power outward.
You're talking about conservatism. He's talking about American Conservatism. It's just a name, like "Pro-Life" or "Death Tax". It has no bearing in reality. Similar to how the National Socialist Party was not Socialist and most of the world's Communist parties ceased to be Communist long before the stopped calling themselves communist.
"Some random 59 year old from Ohio wrote this, so it's well known that that's conservativism in a nutshell" is a strange stance.
> Anti-conservatism isn't rooting for some other group, it's being against this kind of tribalism wholesale.
Do you have any examples of that? I've never seen someone who doesn't go mild on people who share beliefs he holds dear and judges harshly those who don't.
The ACLU was pretty anti-conservative in the past (before they got captured by the regressive left). Eg they helped protect the right of free expression of nazi groups, stuff like that.
ps. Fair, I agree that it's weird to elevate one random blog commenter's words to a "law", though this particular one is widely quoted because, I think, it resonates and hits the nail on the head. I do feel that "tribalism" is a better word for the concept, but "conservatism" isn't far off since every conservative group I know of (at least in the US and Europe) support this kind of tribalism to a fair extent.
We'd have to see how ACLU-members react/reacted to transgressions of friends or allies vs opponents. Would they not be affected when evaluating e.g. corruption charges? It'd be very rare.
Defending both left and right against the government is another story, I think. There are more tribes than just left and right, and even left and right I'd see more as meta-tribes, tribes made up of other tribes. Depending on the issue you're looking at, alliances shift, e.g. on Ukraine or Israel where the fault lines are not the typical left/right divisions in most Western countries.
That "law" probably resonates with lots of people who aren't fans of conservatives, but that's a low bar to clear and doesn't say much about whether it's true and only conservatives form tribes (calling everything conservative that forms a tribe would turn it into tautological reasoning). Every political movement I've ever witnessed was tribal at its core. I'm not sure it's impossible to have a cohesive movement without forming a tribe, but it doesn't seem to be easy or we'd see it more often.
I don't think 'Tribe' is really defined as merely a "political" group in the OG article. It's more a system of government rather than political affiliation. In tribalism, it is rule-of-the-strong, dominance over the weak; it is not 'rule of law'. Any group that believes in rule of law rather than dominance of the weak is not tribalistic. The article posits that the shift of tribalism comes about as a group can tear down the barriers that the rule of law provides - at which point society readily devolves to tribalism.
That's true, but aren't they still tribal in practice? Granted, that's getting into very broad strokes, but libertarians don't feel different in e.g. defending transgressions of other libertarians, their reaction is tribal (like everyone else's).
That's not a moral failure in my view, it's just the default state of humans. Possibly connected to self-interest, everyone tends to view others from "his tribe" favorable, people from random unrelated tribes somewhat neutral, and people from enemy/rival tribes more negative.
That doesn't change much, but more wealthy / free societies create more elaborate tribes than just genetic relationship or age. Now you can join the iphone owners, console gamers, or flat earth believers, or you can join the dog owners (cat owners are a rival tribe, but they'll band together if you're from the pet-hater-tribe), bmw-drivers, or one of the linux-user subtribes (and look down on the windows- and macos-tribes).
The scary thing is that if we take that (misattributed, but interesting) definition ("There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect") into consideration then its interpretation could be employed by whoever conservatives are supposed to be to describe the contemporary ideals of whoever isn't a conservative (or at least they don't call themselves conservatives but that doesn't mean that aren't).
And I don't think that the grandparent comment portrayed anything like anti-conservatism as you've defined it.
There's pots and kettles here clanging and banging against each other fighting to get the noose around the other's neck the quickest.
The tribes in the United States used to be called Yankee and Dixie. Now they're called other things, sometimes "red" and "blue", sometimes "MAGA" or "woke", but the geography (Mason-Dixon line), the sympathies, the prejudices, all very visible to this day.
Americans have no trouble seeing tribalism or clannish behavior when its in the Middle East, or in Africa, but seem to think America is differentnt (a phenomenon that also has a name: American Exceptionalism).
In my view, the Yankee/Dixie tribal cold war combined with American Exceptionalism is some pretty stiff stuff indeed.
Not american and have no idea what the situation there is like, but from election county maps it seems that the divide is much more fine-grained than you make it sound (nowhere near the sort of thing you see in Germany for example).
> (a phenomenon that also has a name: American Exceptionalism).
I’m not American by live in the US, and I agree. This inability of Americans, on average ofc, (regardless of the degree, social status, race, etc) to accept that people in other countries may view A THING differently than what Americans think these said people think is mind boggling.
Americans see tribalism just fine: we’ve been discussing since Malcolm X how the tribal sentiments of minorities are utilized by a political party in the pursuit of power.
And the primary division these days is urban vs rural, with the secondary PMC vs working class. Woke vs MAGA maps onto that divide more cleanly than anything else.
I think its much more useful to think of those divides as artificial or manufactured creations, as a tool for pacification, divide and conquer. You can also see that expressed in US foreign policy, the sunni/shia/kurdish divide in Iraq after the war, that too was an artificial creation by the US ruling class.
US foreign policy might have exacerbated some tribal or sectarian conflicts but historically those groups have never gotten along very well. There is a long history of violence stretching back centuries before the US even existed.
I think you downplaying it, but I understand the need to defend the US at all times. A source on the matter for example:
> "This analysis paper begins by examining how the U.S. occupation effectively
dismantled the Iraqi state post-2003, paving the way for sectarian conflict
and allowing for armed groups and sectarian elites to fill the resulting gap. It
explores the weaponization of sect and identity and its devastating consequences
for the country. The second part focuses on the Baath Party-enforced political
and institutional order to explain how the former regime was able to constrain
the space for group identities."
> "Sectarianism would not have become the powerful, destructive force that it did were it not for the weaponization of identity and sect by the exiled opposition and a series of disastrous post-conflict reconstruction policies"
I think John Dolan's take is the ruthlessly honest one: some neighborhoods are rougher than others, and that's not a parochial or imperialist sentiment a-priori the way some would try to paint it (the Troubles are far too recent to think that white/Empire-descended people have forgotten real sectarian conflict).
Saddam Hussein was siting on top of one of the most complex and high-intensity sectarian fault lines on Earth (not unlike other Baathist proto-commies-turned-strongmen who have since been replaced by Islamist hardliners) and he kept order with the kinds of brutality that keep order when salients like that are in play.
I don't know what the long-term humane solution will be, but it won't be sanctimonious twittering on the heels of an Arc Light strike. I think self-determination is an easy talk to talk but a harder walk to walk for cultures like America.
Yes. However, frankly, BSers weren't maintaining a good architecture anyways (in my experience). Code simply landed where it could rather than addressing the overarching problem.
A BSer is about pushing for things that don't make sense but sound like they solve more constraints than anything possible to implement could. It is very unlikely they are giving you code that could compile. (Though if so there's a little bug or todo in it that just happens to be Turing award's material.)
It really isn't that at all, he argues that it's wrong to discriminate but that government interference in the freedom to make contracts isn't the best solution. He goes on to elaborate an make a case for how else it might be better addressed. The article intentionally misleads by clipping the quote out of context.
But it is.
This the the same argument against minimum wage. It's just wrong.
The government should absolutely set a floor on wages and discrimination.
There must be a standard to minimize friction. It's just not something that anyone can do by themselves.
Discrimination was the actually historical basis for the US introducing a minimum wage. There’s available testimony from congress that show that the intention was to push women, blacks, and immigrants out of the workforce.
I think it is totally within the bounds of reasonable discourse to discuss if minimum wage laws achieve their stated goals.
The arguments are so facetious and facile. India has more corruption then the US and they can handle a free lunch program for all kids. Why can't America?
Because many of the people that need it the most keep voting against their own interests. Because education is terrible in all the the states that vote red.
The wealthy do use public schools. They pay huge amounts to live in upper class neighborhoods with wealthy peers, where a lot of tax money goes into the schooling system so the kids can take all sorts of extracurriculars and AP classes. It gets the same results as private school but the cost comes from living in that neighborhood rather than paying the school directly
California actually has a pretty solid school tax-redistribition system that more or less solves this problem (of course districts still can and do fundraise for direct donations to the PTA/music fund and bond measures to upgrade facilities, but it's still vastly more fair).
In a completely unrelated phenomenon, private schools are incredibly popular among Californians of means.
I am dating someone that has a child in private school. First grade costs $4k+ a month, maybe even 6k I forget.
Nothing in the parking lot or talking even screams wealthy.
Every person I've met in the social circle, also send their kids to private school in the SF bay area. I haven't even met another adult that sends their kids to public school.
These are people that make $250k-$600k probably. But that's not "wealthy" in the SF bay area.
That's very believable; the kind of people who unnecessarily send their kids to an expensive private school when some of the best public schools in the country are nearby are the kind of people who would generally socialize together.
And $250k is wealthy. That's literally top 1.5 percentile in the U.S. They don't have to blow half of their income sending their kids to an expensive school. They choose to do so and that is the hallmark of wealth.
It doesn't matter what percentile in the US it is, when a 2 bedroom apartment is $3k+ and the average small house is $6k to rent.
Also. If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed. I went to public school all my life and then ended up in Berkeley. I'm 40. It was borderline negligent for my parents to send me there in my opinion as a kid knowing what I know now. But we were pretty hard up for money.
But if you told me, should someone lease two luxury cars or send their kid to private school.... You'd have to be nuts to think you'd gain more from the cars than the school.
After taxes (assuming single income, CA residence), $250k is $150k of spendable income.
$6k on a house is $72,000 a year, leaving $78k to spend on food, utilities, etc. Assuming for some reason you spend $1000 on utilities each month (presumably you run a cryptofarm in your closest and a weed farm in your backyard), you still have $68k to spend on food. Assuming you spend an average of $20/meal/person on 3 meals/day every day of the year that's still leaves $2000 for other stuff.
Or in other words, even with profligate spending you still have money leftover. Which brings us back to this: techies apparently are good at code but very bad at basic finance.
If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed. I went to public school all my life and then ended up in Berkeley.
Berkeley is considered one of the best universities in the world. If you don't think it's a good school, the problem is you, not the schools.
If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed.
I volunteer coach to various local schools (changes every season). My alma mater is (now) considered one of the best public schools in state and occasionally makes the national list; it sends a higher % of students to the prestigious colleges (Ivy League, Berkeley, Stanfurd) than the famous local private schools (Troy and Harvard-Westlake).
But if you told me, should someone lease two luxury cars or send their kid to private school.... You'd have to be nuts to think you'd gain more from the cars than the school.
This is a nonsensical strawman...which supports my first point.The choice is not to lease two luxury cars or send their kids to private school. Both choices are the wrong choice. The correct choice for someone making $250k who claims that they are living paycheck-to-paycheck is to send their kid to public school, and address any deficiencies with tutoring or extracurricular activities (both of which are more likely to benefit college admissions and academic performance than private school and cost a fraction of private school tuition).
TLDR: if you are in the top 1.5 percentile you are not, nor will you ever be considered living paycheck to paycheck. If you tell someone that, they'll smile at you politely and assume you have a severe mental defect.
I told you I went to public schools and made it into cal...while talking about people spending $4k a month of 1st grade..
And you decide to talk about the quality of UC Berkeley instead of the average 1st grade school in the SF Bay Area.
But yes, I have the mental defect.
It's all relative. Someone making $250k with a family in the SF Bay Area could be basically living paycheck to paycheck if they just try to appear casually financially well-off. Nice house, nice car, electricity is 4x more than Idaho for example so add bills, eat out a few times, and send one child to a $4k a month 1st grade and you're living paycheck to paycheck.
No, that's just bad financial management. Spending $48000 to send your kid to a private school is a choice that parents can make when they're wealthy enough to do so.
"Living paycheck to paycheck" means that you just barely make enough to pay for food and rent, and don't have any spare money to cover unplanned costs like medical care. Spending a ton of money on vacation and private school is by definition not living paycheck to paycheck.
No it doesn't. Living paycheck to paycheck means you don't have any left over each paycheck, and the worse version of it is that you don't even have emergency savings left over in case unforseen costs come up.
The underlying issue too is "Sorry Timmy, cause we're not rich and live in a poorer district, your schooling is worse and you have access to less choice."
And that goes back to how taxes for public schools are driven. The problem seems too engrained and too massive to fix. And since schools are state controlled, you'd need 50 solutions, not 1.
This really isn't true anywhere in the US. The highest spending per pupil will be the city school district. The people who live there may be relatively poor but there's a lot more commercial real estate to tax.
The wealthy should not be required to go to public schools. They should be able to choose whatever schools they think is the best fit for their children. Same for everyone else.
Not only do they pay for it, they pay for public schools too.
I am, by any measure, at least upper-middle-class (though I do have to work for money; it's not free in my mailbox). I don't have kids, so I wouldn't be taking advantage of the public schools I pay for, but I also grew up in a very median-income household and went to private schools (which were much less expensive at the time, though still not cheap). So my parents paid for public schools that neither of their children ever attended.
People who send kids to private schools pay taxes (which fund schools) but don’t take resources from public schools.
Forcing them to use the public schools would further divide the tax funding across more kids, reducing the funds available per kid.
This suggestion is reminiscent of California trying to reduce educational inequality by eliminating advanced math classes and putting everyone together. It was a terrible idea, but it made sense to someone looking for what they thought was an easy solution.
"Texas will implement a $1 billion school voucher program, one of the largest in the country, that uses public dollars to fund private school tuition under a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed Saturday, capping off a yearslong effort by Republicans… Texas joins more than 30 other states that have implemented a similar program, of which about a dozen have launched or expanded their programs in recent years to make most students eligible."
I get your math and appreciate the insight within it.
At the same time, PTAs accept cash which when not being spent on private school is available. The challenge is getting those parents to allocate it when it will be spread across the entire student body. Far more impactful is the factor of alignment of incentives that given wealthy families' generally greater proximity to power can deliver funding.
I liked this: it's not private school vs public school, it is private school vs public school plus a tuition's worth of enrichment.
Your other comment does get at why my kid is in private school: you can't ignore special education needs.
> At the same time, PTAs accept cash which when not being spent on private school is available.
I think this is magical thinking underlying the concept: That wealthy parents will step up to provide money to privately fund the public schools for everyone.
We have plenty of evidence that the is just isn’t the case, though. People spend that money on things like sending their kids to school with their own lunches and hiring private tutors.
When parents have lost faith in a school’s ability to provide good education (or lunches, or activities, etc) they don’t think the best course of action is to send the school a lot of money and hope for the best. They take matters into their own hands, outside of school.
The entire concept is built on layers of wishful thinking that just aren’t supported.
We are wealthy parents who stepped up and gave substantial amounts to the PTA
We made our decision (noted before) when the school spent its energy to manage us rather than fix problems and serve our student. To be fair, there were ties they had no control over but they definitely failed in ways they could have done better too. When things that matter to us are out of our power we put them back under our power to the extent we can.
The problem with defection is the large scale/long term reduced prosperity trajectory.
> things like sending their kids to school with their own lunches and hiring private tutors
And summer "enrichment". That was popular among the small group of well-off families that insisted on sending their kids to public schools (in, essentially, a school-within-a-school that actually taught the kids instead of warehousing them for six to eight hours a day). Expensive camps, summer programs in Europe, that sort of thing.
Public schools are funded by taxes. Wealthy people already pay those taxes.
If you force everyone to use the public schools, you’re just dividing the tax money across more students.
In the context of school lunch, they would just send their kids to school with a packed lunch.
The whole concept of forbidding people from taking advantage of other educational opportunities is half-baked class warfare fodder. It doesn’t make sense if you think about the numbers, but it appeals to people who are more interested in punishing wealthy people than fixing the situation.
Full disclosure, am a parent who sends their kid to a charter school and strong advocate for parents to be allowed to choose where to send their schools.
That being said, the strong version of the argument being made is that if all schools are funded nationally (so that schools in more affluent areas don't automatically get more money) and rich people and people of influence were forced to send their kids to the same public schools as every body else, then those people would be more inclined to use their influence to try to make public schools better and would be less inclined to fight against raising taxes to improve public education. Of course this would go against those peoples narrow self interest (since many of their kids would probably end up getting a worse education) so it is unlikely to happen
I understand the argument, but I’m trying to point out that similar claims were made about eliminating advanced math classes in California and it did not work at all.
I think the claim appeals to some people because they’re bought in to the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes, and therefore if you force them into your space and restrict their rights to other options they will use that extreme influence to improve the situation for everyone.
Yet in practice it doesn’t work, and we’ve seen it play out. In California the parents who cared about their kids’ math scores just gave up on school math classes and hired tutors or did their own at-home tutoring (at great sacrifice, especially for the non-wealthy). With school lunches you would just see parents with means sending their kids to school with good prepared lunches. I suppose the next logical extension is to ban wealthy parents from sending their kids in with lunches and hope that it will set off the chain of events that’s supposed to make them fix the problem for everyone.
Where I live our school budgets and funding are partially up for vote on the ballot every election cycle. It’s not for the wealthy to decide, it’s just a public vote. And things still aren’t passing easily. I think people reach for the wealthy as an easy excuse for who to blame, but whenever I look at the ballot results it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the general public is averse to increasing school budgets right now.
> the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes
It's not control.
It's simply that there exists a (relatively-speaking) small fraction of wealthy people. To wit, income inequality.
If we had less income inequality in the US, there wouldn't need to be nudges to align wealthy people's interests with everyone else.
If we're fine with large amounts of income inequality, then we're going to need to put in some utilitarian guardrails, given that $ = political power and political power controls school funding.
Why does less then replacement rate equal extinction?
It just requires a reimagination of the economy it's not an extinction level threat. That's just scare mongering.
I don't see anyone else saying this, but I don't like audiobooks because of the voices and over production.
If I want to listen to a book, I use TTS, it's gotten very good. I can pick the voice and I just hear the story. I can also switch back to reading without trying to figure out where I am since the Text to speech is using the same epub I'm reading.
Same as you, I found some I absolutely hated, especially where they added background music, sound effects, etc. - I just want the book, not a production.
Others I found that a good narrator really added to the experience, especially when they were good at changing voices/accents for different characters speaking. I found that made it a lot easier to track what was going on or who was speaking, especially in books with a large number of characters.
