Post by DPost by Coogan's BluffPost by DGood stuff! I had a tonkatsu poke bowl and it was good. The only
drawback is too much sallad and mushroom which they use to camouflage
the inflation here. There just was an election here and the
socialists won, so now we are looking forward to tax increases. In
fact, the woke government that just left are doing their share as
well by doubling the VAT on food, so a lot of small restaurants are
currently closing.
Classics waiting us later next year are a new progressive income tax
and increase corporation tax.
Europe seldom fails to disappoint the greedy socialists of the world! ;)
That's a succinct and sad summary of socialism's solipsism.
And I call it that because as the collectivists go, it's always about
their group-think, not the impact it will have on their nation.
Amen!
Today I heard a story about a businessman in lithuania who told the new
government "f*ck you, I'm leaving" because apparently he had been trying
to build a factory that would bring 6000 jobs, and the government, both
the previous and the new, have been fighting him on every single level,
since he is not a party member. So when the new government only spoke
about increasing taxes, he said, "I'm done".
I think if more business men would be equally principled, taxes would
come down rather quickly. As it is, they remain sycophants in the hope
of receiving benefits from the party in power.
Really good trickle-not analysis there.
Here's a timely piece by a disgraced NYT columinist pondering why "they"
lost the people this election:
https://archive.is/2V2Cw
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/opinion/identity-groups-politics.html
By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist
Why were so many of our expectations wrong? Well, we all walk around
with mental models of reality in our heads. Our mental models help us
make sense of the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world. Our mental
models help us anticipate what’s about to happen. Our mental models
guide us as we make decisions about how to get the results we want.
Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go
through life with false assumptions about how the world works.
Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our
experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular
culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that
emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the
circles where highly educated people congregate. This worldview emerged
from the wonderful liberation movements that highlighted American life
over the past seven decades: the civil rights movement, the women’s
liberation movement, the gay rights movement, the trans rights movement.
The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics
and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements.
Society is divided between the privileged (straight white males) and the
marginalized (pretty much everyone else). History and politics are the
struggle between oppressors and oppressed groups.
In this model, people are seen as members of a group before they are
seen as individuals. When Biden picked his running mate in 2020 and his
Supreme Court nominee in 2022, he told us he was going to pick a Black
woman before he decided who it was going to be. In both cases her
identity grouping came before her individual qualities.
In this model, society is seen as an agglomeration of different
communities. Democrats thus produce separate agendas designed to
mobilize Black men, women and so on. The goal of Democratic politics is
to link all the oppressed and marginalized groups into one majority
coalition.
In this model, individual cognition is de-emphasized while collective
consciousness is emphasized. Groups are assumed to be relatively
homogeneous. People are seen as representatives of their community.
Standpoint epistemology reigns. This is the idea that a person’s ideas
are primarily shaped not by individual preferences but by the experience
of the group. It makes sense to say, “Speaking as a gay Hispanic man …”
because a person’s thoughts are assumed to be dispatches from a communal
experience.
This identity politics mind-set is psychologically and morally
compelling. In an individualistic age, it gives people a sense of
membership in a group. It helps them organize their lives around a noble
cause, fighting oppression.
But this mind-set has just crashed against the rocks of reality. This
model assumes that people are primarily motivated by identity group
solidarity. This model assumes that the struggle against oppressive
systems and groups is the central subject of politics. This model has no
room for what just happened.
It turns out a lot of people don’t behave like ambassadors from this or
that group. They think for themselves in unexpected ways.
It turns out that many people don’t see politics and history through the
paradigm of liberation movements. They are concerned with all kinds of
issues that don’t fit into the good-versus-evil mind-set of oppressor
versus oppressed: How do you fix inflation? How can we bring down crime?
What should our policy on Ukraine be?
...
This is a time when we all should be updating our mental models and
making our view of society more complex. And I’m seeing a lot of that
around me as people try to learn from what just happened.
But I’m also seeing many people who are still victims of conceptual
blindness. They are so imprisoned by their mental models, they can
interpret these results only in identity politics terms: Harris lost
because America is racist (even though she did virtually the same as
Biden did among white voters). Harris lost because America is sexist
(even though she underperformed among women). Some people blamed white
women for abandoning their Black sisters, as if lack of gender
solidarity were the main thing going on here.
Identitarian takes are strewn across the media. The New Yorker ran an
analysis piece headlined “How America Embraced Gender War.” Slate ran a
piece called “Men Got Exactly What They Wanted.” The Guardian ran a
piece called “Our Mistake Was to Think We Lived in a Better Country Than
We Do.” If the election didn’t come out the way we wanted, it must be
because of their groups’ bigotry against our groups.
As I try to update my own models, a few stray thoughts enter my mind.
First, you don’t reduce racial, ethnic and gender bigotry by raising the
salience of these categories and by exaggerating the differences between
groups. Second, integration is better than separatism. Diverse societies
prosper when people in different categories cooperate in respectful ways
on a day-to-day basis, not when we divide people into supposedly
homogeneous enclaves. Third, assimilation is not a dirty word, as long
as it’s voluntary; it’s not a sin to feel that your love for America
transcends your love for your ethnic group, and you don’t really love
America if you despise half its people. Fourth, most of the world’s
problems are caused by stupidity and human limitation, not because
there’s some malevolently brilliant group of oppressors keeping
everybody else down.
Fifth, seeing groups in all their complexity requires seeing individuals
in all their complexity. To see people well, you have to see what makes
them unique. You also have to see which groups they belong to. You also
have to see their social location — where they fit in the economic,
social and status hierarchies. When you’re able to see people at all
three levels of reality, you’re beginning to see them holistically.
Finally, we need a social vision that doesn’t rely on zero-sum us/them
thinking. During his first term, Trump unleashed a cultural assault
based on his version of identity politics. The left responded by
doubling down on its identitarian mind-set. We have to do better this time.
In 1959 the British jurist Patrick Devlin made a point that should haunt
us: “Without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics, no society can
exist.” He added, “If men and women try to create a society in which
there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil, they will fail;
if having based it on common agreement, the agreement goes, the society
will disintegrate.”
We need a social vision that is as morally compelling as identity
politics but does a better job of describing reality. We need a national
narrative that points us to some ideal and gives each of us a noble role
in pursuing it. That’s the gigantic cultural task that lies ahead.
Post by DPost by Coogan's Bluff"The $5 chicken was over $9.
As it currently is, I have a hard time seeing Costco survive in
Sweden. That breaks my heart, as I would love to have the Costco I've
always heard about. Their current offer is for us to pay a membership
fee that allows us to drive to a remote location and pay between
80-300% of normal prices for things. This feels like a scam to me."
I can believe it must!
Ya'll deserve a lot LESS giverment than you're again voting for...
:-/
https://imgur.com/a/dxJA7Bo/
Amen! We must pray and pray hard, that sweden will some tiem get its own
Trump! Only a man with Trumps powers and characteristics will ever be
able to uproot the ingrained socialism from swedish society!
Do you think that will be harder or easier for Sweden?
I ask that in the consideration that you've a royal family that now seem
mere figureheads at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Sweden
Eriksgata was the name of the traditional journey of newly elected
medieval Swedish kings through important provinces to have their
election confirmed by local Things. The actual election took place at
the Stone of Mora in Uppland and participation was originally restricted
to the people of that area; hence, the need of having the election
confirmed by the other parts of the realm. The Eriksgata gradually lost
its importance when, as of the 14th century, representatives of other
parts of Sweden began to participate in the election. After 1544, when
hereditary monarchy was instituted, that meant that the Eriksgata had
little practical importance. The last king to travel the Eriksgata
according to the old tradition was Charles IX, whose reign began in
1604. Later, kings, up until present times, have made visits to all the
Swedish provinces and called them an Eriksgata, while those visits bear
little resemblance to the medieval tradition.
