What are /r/theschism's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> In an ideal world, we'd able to segregate people into groups based on how they think of Covid, and force that segregation on the basis that people have a responsibility to live with the consequences of their beliefs.

I mean we can already do this -- just that under a "freedom" regime the onus is on those who are Very Concerned about covid to act accordingly.

You will never get covid if you wear something like this all the time, and/or avoid social contact. Vaccines are effective enough that getting the shot is nearly as good.

So why should the onus be on people who are prepared to accept an aggregate risk of death which is comparable to the general population in the early 90s to take extreme measures, instead of the other way around?

> If someone advocates truck bombs and the tight-knit community backs him up, do not be surprised if a lurker truck bombs. It's not complicated; the causal line is perfectly clear.

Can you name a single person, community, organization or outlet on the left that you will similarly blame for any instance of left-coded political violence? Say, the congressional baseball shooter, or the guy who just tried to assassinate Kavanaugh, or the guy who murdered that 18 year old, or, you know, any of that summer of political violence we recently had, or the decade of political violence we had back in the Days of Rage?

> Yes. If a male teacher gave my daughter novels about steamy hetero relationships between male teachers and teen girls I would be deeply concerned

I feel like leaving out the 'oh, and actually these lesbian romances involved adult authority figures courting their teenaged students' is an extreme omission and I'm pretty disgusted at your drawing attention to the gay aspect of the romance over the the one that a parent should actually be concerned about.

Incidentally, I tracked down the book you mentioned (it's titled The Housemistress, btw) and it's self published erotic lit solidly intended for adults. I'm just going to link to the Amazon page you y'all can judge how completely obvious this is for yourselves. I'm not sure how that teacher ended up with those books or how they ended up in the donation bin, but it's pretty funny regardless. It's definitely not grooming YA lit, though.

I've been reading the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity and came across a term that is very relevant to this forum: schismogenesis. The authors of the book provided a real snappy definition that was something like "conscious oppositional culture" - basically the idea is that a community creates a culture as something pointedly different than a culture of a nearby group. So like how Classical Athens was into democracy, drama, and philosophy while Sparta had its war-mongering and oligarchy. The authors also give examples of two neighboring Native American cultures on the west coast of the US/Canada where one had slaves, agricultural, and an ostentatious, indolent aristocracy, while the other was strictly hunter-gatherer, non-slave-holding and had an aristocracy that prized physical fitness and austerity. Schismogenesis could literally refer to the genesis of theschism, but also how the culture here was oppositional to a certain other subreddit.

Schismogenesis (schismogenic is the adjective form) is a pretty useful conceptual way of thinking about the world IMO and, according to wikipedia, has been applied in various contexts, including inter-personal and international relations. I would also add contemporary US party politics to this list.

Not a direct answer to any of your questions, but let me put in a rec for Law School for Everyone (one of the Great Courses series). It was really interesting in general, to a non-lawyer, but there is a section specifically on the history and function of the Supreme Court, in which the lecturers explain how the court has always been very cognizant of politics and how their decisions will affect their legitimacy and the balance of power. It contradicts both the popular perception of SC justices as lofty beings elevated above mere politics and who have no concern for the real-word impact of their rulings, and the more partisan view that they're tools of whichever president appointed them and promptly go about trying to push their own ideological agendas.

Like the Constitution, the SC has never produced timeless truths etched in stone, just a continuing series of negotiations, compromises, and occasional backpedaling, carried out by people who have usually been acting in good faith and doing the best they could.

Regarding the intense concerns about sterility in transgender men, a good example would be Abigail Schrier’s book Irreversible Damage. From the blurb:

> Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and “gender-affirming” educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility.

If you like fiction, try reading Everything Matters!.

>In this novel rich in character, Junior Thibodeau grows up in rural Maine in a time of Atari, baseball cards, pop Catholicism, and cocaine. He also knows something no one else knows-neither his exalted parents, nor his baseball-savant brother, nor the love of his life (she doesn't believe him anyway): The world will end when he is thirty-six. While Junior searches for meaning in a doomed world, his loved ones tell an all-American family saga of fathers and sons, blinding romance, lost love, and reconciliation-culminating in one final triumph that reconfigures the universe. A tour de force of storytelling, Everything Matters! is a genre-bending potpourri of alternative history, sci-fi, and the great American tale in the tradition of John Irving and Margaret Atwood.

This kind of sounds like the rationalist sphere is missing actual conservatives, people who are conservative in the same way Oblonsky is liberal. A lot of those who are 'right' leaning in the rationalist sphere are only 'right' in an idiosyncratic way intimately tied up with issues of contemporary national politics (although surprisingly infrequently on policy). Even the so-called reactionaries feel lot like modern leftists with the valence switched.

You may find The Other Greeks to be an interesting book in this view. The author is a farmer who intellectualizes the kind of temperamental conservatism that emerges from that lifestyle. He uses historical analysis of ancient Greek rural life to demonstrate a philosophy that may lie behind that temperament.

He's also a conservative Californian writing in the 1990s, so during the great demographic and cultural shift that state underwent at the time (his other famous book is Mexifornia), so he's not immune to considerations of modern politics, but his insightfulness into his own philosophy is kind of heightened by the sense he feels of something old passing away. He's also a professor whose area of expertise is this particular time period, so it's a worthwhile read even if you find yourself repulsed by his political conservatism.

Just a quick mention of the recent rerelease of one of my favorite texts; James Burnham's <em>The Machiavellians</em>. I only bring this up because it was out of print for so long that even used copies were essentially nonexistent, and the only remotely available version was an audiobook, but evidently someone decided to put it back out at the end of 2020 (which is wildly amusing for obvious reasons). Thus, my sixty-year-old, falling apart, browned paperback just got replaced. Hallelujah! Many of you are familiar with Burnham, probably from Suicide of the West, also recommended but rather similar to several loss-of-community-and-social-bonds cris de coeur from Deneen, Kolakowski, and countless others. The Machiavellians is probably the best English-language introduction to power theorist thought, and Burnham is an excellent writer to boot.

As you were.

>pre-emptive self-cancellation surgery

Yes, that is a good way of putting it. "Cancel yourself before they cancel you." I'm guessing the PR people they consulted said that it's better to get a jump on the situation before others determine your fate. (Usually that's the immediate groveling apology but here the withdrawal of a limited number of books from the market.) Putting aside whether it was right to do what they did, maybe it was the smartest business decision they could make in that situation. Time will tell, I suppose.

>https://www.amazon.ca/Was-Cat-Hat-Black-Literature/dp/019063507X

Since that book only has 41 reviews on Amazon, hopefully it won't gain too much traction. I can't help but laugh at this from the description of the book: "The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy." For a book published in 2017, it didn't take much courage to make this claim. It's a lot more fearless to say no, it isn't minstrelsy in this climate.

I'm partial to <em>What is Intelligence?</em>. Its title is a bit of a misnomer, as it's much more focused on his specific research niche than intelligence as a whole, but it proved very useful in fleshing out and pushing my views on the topic. When I find my copy again I'll try to whip out a few notes from it.