IDEA_Dad

Leftists generally believe problems exist because of a lack of the political will to solve them. That's why their solution to every problem is "gib munies to govmint". The two reasons Yann LeCun proposes for why the hobo/bum problem isn't solved are: "Government doesn't actually care about problem" (lack of political will on the part of bureaucrats) or "Government isn't empowered to do something" (lack of political will on the part of voters/taxpayers) Yann LeCun isn't able to see other possibilities because he doesn't understand economics or politics. But if we translated the concept to a domain he does understand, machine learning, then he might be able to see those possibilities. For example: "Big tech didn't have large language models fifty years ago because they couldn't afford them or didn't want them." Ridiculous. They didn't have them until now because it took them this long to figure out all the hardware and software they required. Similarly, the gubmint can't solve the hobo problem because it doesn't know how. San Francisco is inundated with bums, and it doesn't know how to get rid of them. And yes, before you point it out, the city also doesn't give a shit, but even if it did, it wouldn't know how to solve the problem. The reason Yann LeCun doesn't understand this problem, can't understand this problem, is something called the Sapir-Whorf Principle. Goes like this — the words you use to understand something, and the concepts they are made up of, control what thoughts you are capable of having, and of discussing with others, about that thing. This is obviously correct, and anyone who doesn't agree is at best a midwit. So Yann LeCun, for all his vaunted intelligence, is completely unable to understand bums and how to get rid of them, because he persists in calling them "the homeless". When you insist on calling bums "homeless", or "unhoused" (eyeroll), then you are programming yourself to not understand the problem. "Homeless" does not adequately describe a bum. Bedouin tribesmen were homeless. Mongol herdsmen were homeless. They were not bums. They supported themselves and their families, contributed to their societies, and had a complete and healthy lifestyle. It simply didn't involve having a fixed abode. Since they clearly are homeless, and yet are clearly not included in what Yann calls "the homeless", Yann is obviously using the wrong word. And when you think they are "homeless", then that label controls how you think of them. The assumption that the problem is lack of a home is already hard-coded in. So you "gib howse". By making low-cost housing, and tiny homes, and rent control laws. And that, of course, creates other problems, but the point is that it doesn't fix the original problem, because the original problem wasn't "no house". It was bums. Hobos. Derelicts. Vagrants. Using the old terms for what they are reveals the real problem, which leftists hid by changing the language, because calling people what are might offend them, if what they are sucks. Calling someone a "bum" accurately identifies the locus of the problem... the person himself. "Homeless" is something you haven't got, bum is something you are. A bum is someone who doesn't work. They just bum around instead. So you can't fix the problem by giving them a house or an apartment. A house doesn't make them work. And you can't fix the problem by giving them money. Because money doesn't make them work, either. Why don't they work? Either they can't, or they won't. If they won't, the solution is simple. Stop enabling them. If you don't give them free stuff, they will have to work. If they can't, why can't they? Either there are no jobs, in which case the solution is to vote for conservatives, and there will be. Or they are incapable of doing a job. Why? Because either they are addicts who can't get their shit together enough to show up on time and do a job, or they are crazy and can't tune into reality well enough to be productive in it, or they are so disabled, mentally or physically, that there is no job they can do. So take care of your disabled vets, lock your loonies back up in asylums, and deal with your fucking addicts, and you won't have any more bums. Yes, we could talk endlessly about how to deal with each of these problems, but the point is that you can't even have that conversation, much less solve anything, if you persist in denying what the problem is. They are not "homeless". They are bums.

Narrator: "They did, in fact, need to change their positions. All of them." The core disconnect here is that leftists — (And, make no mistake, democrats are now leftists, not liberals. Elon Musk is a liberal. RFK Jr. is a liberal. Donald Trump is a liberal. Liberals have joined the republican party by now, and those who haven't aren't liberals.) — talk to everyone as if we were five years old. And stupid. Tavis Helwig, like Mike Nellis before him, like Harris's entire campaign staff, are unable to conceive of the idea that young white men hate leftist's policies, and any condescension in the delivery isn't the basic problem, it's just an additional insult. The reason that leftists are unable to understand this is how the left approaches economic and social policy. Leftists have a hunter-gatherer mentality. Hunter-gatherers don't create the things they consume. They find them, they capture them, and they divide them up amongst the tribe. This is how leftists look at value in the modern economy. Some store of value exists, they see it, they focus on capturing it, then dividing up amongst their constituents, according to whatever they mean at the moment by this nebulous word "fair". But that isn't how value works in modern society, and hasn't been since the Agricultural Revolution ended the Paleolithic Era. This is why rightists approach the economy with a herdsman-farmer mentality. Herdsmen and farmers do work to create the things they consume. They have breeding stock, and seeds, and they must take care of them, invest in them, so that they can grow. This is how rightists look at value in the modern economy. Some store of value exists because someone created and grew it, therefore they control it. If it is left in their hands, it will continue to make more value, some of which will reach others in exchange for their work. The left's failure with white men is not about messaging at all. The messaging is just a side effect. The left's failure with white men is fundamental to its hunter-gatherer mentality. You see, white men are the only net taxpayers. Why? Because white men create the vast majority of the value in the first world western economy. Why? Well, you're expecting me to say something racist here, which I'd be perfectly willing and unafraid to do, but the truth is.... it doesn't matter why white men create most of the value. Could because of some Aryan-Nordic superiority thing straight outta Axis propaganda. Could be cultural. Could be coincidence based on initial conditions. Could be because their ancestors grabbed all the stuff, and that somehow (don't ask how) is in effect even today. (Also don't ask about all the historically verifiable stuff-grabbing that nonwhites did.) Could be because Jared Diamond was right all along, and the only domesticable species on the planet just gravitate to them, except unicorns, which are drawn to white women, so white men exterminated them all in a jealous rage. We don't know. And we don't have to know. Because it doesn't matter. Empirically, we know that white men are the only net taxpayers. That's all we need to know to understand this. When leftists approach the economy with a hunter-gatherer mentality, the value they are "finding" belongs to white men, because it was created by white men. And the leftists capture it and redistribute it. Imagine, if you will, a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer tribe wandering the world, and coming across a Neolithic village, surrounded by herds of domestic cattle. Well, they're hunters. They know what to do with wild cattle. And the idea of domestic cattle hasn't even occurred to them. So they spear a bunch of them, and cook themselves a feast. And when angry Neolithic herdsmen, armed with spears, show up to punish the thieves, they are... confused. "Why are these guys so angry? There's plenty of meat for us to redistribute. And we offered them a fair share!" The hunter-gatherers have no conception of what it took to raise that herd, of the effort that went into it. They have no conception that if they continue to treat that herd like a free resource to extract meat from without putting work into, then the herd will die out and everyone will starve. Hunter-gatherers will always eat the seed corn, because they don't understand the concept of farming. So, when leftists say things like "Kamala Harris could offer white men free gas and bacon, and they're so fanatical that they'd still vote for Trump"... they are telling on themselves. White men just get angry when you offer them government free stuff. Because they know they are the only ones paying into the free stuff system. They know that the more free bacon the government hands out, the more it will have to take from them. And this is where the left's insulting messaging towards white men comes in. It's necessary to the system. The big insult, the big lie, that the left directs at white men is "You didn't build that." "You didn't build what you have, you stole what you have, you don't deserve what you have" is the thief's first and last rationalization. The left must denigrate white men. It must paint them as pillagers and destroyers and rapists and beneficiaries of unearned, undeserved privilege, because if it acknowledges that white men are mostly builders, then it will not have the excuse it needs to take what they built. So there is always the rationalization that the herdsman just took the cattle from the wild, and the cattle breed by themselves, and the grass they ate just grew, so truly the herdsmen are nothing but hunter-gatherers themselves. In the modern era, it's "Elon Musk didn't build any rockets, he just hired a bunch of engineers who did all the work." And you can make a pretty good case for these, but only if you ignore all the evidence. Because if the herdsmen added no value, then the wild herds would be as fruitful and abundant as the domesticated ones, and the hunter-gatherers would have no incentive to poach tame cattle from the herdsmen. And if reusable rockets could be made by any team of engineers for anyone with the money to hire them, then NASA would have reusable rockets, Boeing would have reusable rockets, and Arianespace, and Lockheed-Martin, and 中国航空工业集团公司, and.... everyone with with eight or nine figures to invest. The left doesn't hate white men because they are white men. The left hates white men because they are the only net taxpayers. The hatred, the racism, the dehumanizing propaganda, was invented for the purpose of the robbery. If it were Polynesian women, instead, who built the majority of society's cool stuff, then it would be "Polynesian privilege" and "female privilege" that the media was unable to shut up about. It's all just hunter-gatherers raiding on the edges of civilization. Leftism is just a new way of conducting those raids. By people who still don't understand where value comes from. So the left can never appeal to white men. Not ever. Unless white men become so permanently naive and stupid that they never realize they are being robbed. Or unless the left somehow manages to get other demographic groups to be net producers, which would be impossible for the left even if the racists are 100% wrong, because you can't get someone to raise pigs when you are giving them free bacon.

Dear Richard: First of all, how we run our own affairs is none of your business. You are not American. You are British. You have no skin in the game. However, I am going to answer in more detail, not for your benefit, but for the education of the audience. This nation is called "the United States of America". If you had really been paying attention, and treated that phrase as if it were composed of individual words which mean specific things, instead of just a name, this would have told you all you needed to know. The United States is a union of states. Not of citizens. That's why it's called the United States. In the United States, the states are not merely organizational units established by a central bureaucracy. They are independent republics, who agreed to join a union and manage some affairs jointly. The United States is not a democracy. It isn't, it never was, it's not supposed to be, and we don't want it to be. Instead, it is a republic. Casual thinkers, such as boomers, or biologists who think that only biology is complicated and everything else is just bar-stool conversations, often think these two words mean the same thing, because their Greek and Latin roots have similar meanings. But words are not just proxies for their etymological origins. They mean things. A democracy decides matter of policy by vote, in a manner proportional to voters. A republic appoints agents to represent political interests. These can be the political interests of individual people, but they can also be the interests of other entities. You see, the people who wrote the Constitution understood that a nation is more than just a collection of people. It also consists of all the organizations, processes, institutions, and industries required to actually keep those people alive and have a functional society. All of these things need political power to defend and advance their interests, allowing them to function. So, the Constitution itself was designed as a balancing act. Some things are up for a vote, and others are not. And when representation is apportioned, it is not doled out equally by head count. This is not a bug. It's a feature. And it's incredibly wise. The more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the fewer actual thinking human people are employed by life-sustaining industries. That's a good thing. It is the whole fucking point of technology... free up most of your population from whacking at the dirt with a stick to survive, and they can be engineers, businessmen, tradesmen, entertainers, and artists. People are freed from drudgery, invent cool stuff with all their newfound spare time, and life is better. But what about those life-sustaining industries? They still have to run. They still need political power in order to make sure the laws protect them, and society sees to their needs. But their work involves very few people, and a lot of machines. And machines don't vote. So it's not only very important, but gradually more and more important, to the health of your nation that the political will of a cattle rancher in Wyoming carries more weight than that of a fashion magazine editor in San Francisco. Because fewer and fewer people in your society even understand what is necessary to keep everyone fed. That's not the whole story, of course. It's simply one example of one the many, many reasons the Constitution is written the way it is. Surely someone intelligent enough to understand evolutionary biology can find others. If he is looking for them. Which brings me to a larger point. I've always understood that "Herp derp, Americans are fat and stupid" is a game that Brits like to play because it makes you feel better about having frittered away your empire, then decided to get drunk and become a third-world nation. I've always been more or less content to let you play that game. I thought of it as a harmless way of preserving your rather fragile self-image. But we are getting to the point where it is hurting not just you, and not just us, but all of humanity. You can't imagine why we do things the way we do, not because you lack the capacity to understand, but because you lack the patience and humility to even realize there is something to understand. You respect biology, realize that life is a complex system, and therefore devote attention and patience to studying it, instead of just looking at a polar bear for five minutes and going with your first take. But you don't appear to have the same respect for the complex systems of human society. Which is perhaps why you waged a decades-long war against what turned out to be one of the load-bearing structures of civilization. You just didn't pause to think. You only understood the concept of Chesterton's Fence when it was a fence made of DNA. Every other kind of fence just looked like firewood. Well, now that your nation is deep in the throes of a cultural suicide that you helped to bring about, I would offer the following suggestion: Examine the possibility that Thomas Jefferson knew something you don't. Try thinking about that for more than five minutes. Try thinking about as if civilization were a serious and complex thing, like a polar bear, as opposed to a football match between two or three political vibes. Try imagining reasons why the early Americans wrote law with the same seriousness that you try to imagine reasons why polar bears might be white, even though the seals are not trying to sneak up on them. This is serious. Persuading people of things has consequences. History has not stopped happening. Look around you. Look at your country. Look at it. Do I really have to explain, now of all times, to you of all people, what kind of damage can be done with a careless word or two? Your mouth is robbing your ears.