BahRamYou
4hr ago
Unless... he starts sneaking a little "Soylent Green" into the beef supply...?
BahRamYou
1d ago
I suppose it's possible. But like you said, I just don't think the Saudi military is capable of that sort of thing. It's more likely this was genuine, and the Saudis got caught by surprise, but now they can counterattack easily.
BahRamYou
1d ago
As usual, i find it difficult to follow all the details through the fog of war and propaganda from all sides. My main hunch is that the houthis will be quickly fought back- they just don't have the resources to actually hold territory. The market seems to agree, as the price of oil jumped yesterday but went back down today, suggesting an attitude of initial alarm and then calm.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I think it's just very hard to get started in that career. Of course every career has that to some extent, but in architecture it's especially hard to get people to trust you with that first, crucial career building step of being lead designer on a building. Meanwhile there's a ton of students getting architecture degrees thinking it'll be fun.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Now it is the turn of mathematicians to feel doomed; in that context, I find this sentence very interesting.
Is the purpose of the Great Work not for humans to understand mathematics? What does it even mean to "produce" mathematics?
Isn't it proven by Godel's Theorem that any complex logical system should have an infinite number of potentially provable theorems? And no easy way to know which ones are provable? So I guess the field of mathematics will go on forever, just with AIs proving more and more abstract, ridiculously complex theorems. The "job" of human mathematicians, if you can call it that, is to simply marvel and appreciate what they've done, like an art critic.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Is it not customary for parties in Germany to have a campaign platform outlining all their proposed policies? That's how it works for American elections. They don't have to fully follow it, of course, but it's nice to see it. If they're a more established party then people can just look to their track record to get a general idea, but for a party that's never held power before I think it's valid to ask what they're going to do, outside of their one signature issue (and I'm still not clear what exactly the AfD is proposing their either- limit immigration? halt it entirely? remigration? concentration camps?)
BahRamYou
6d ago
Does the AfD actually have anything to promote "human flourishing?" Genuine question, all I know about them is that they're anti-immigration. I think they might find out what countries like Hungary found out... just because you block immigration, doesn't mean you magically fix the economy or birth rates.
BahRamYou
6d ago
Ah, thank for adding context. Sounds like there's a real chance for AfD to win the governance of Sachsen-Anhalt, then. Still, that's (a) just one state and (b) still a slim majority that relies on a very different party to help it keep it's coalition. So would expect them not to accomplish much. Maybe this will actually cause their support to break, if they finally win power and people realize... it's still just a regular political party, they're not going to snap their fingers and magically solve everything. They probably can't even significantly affect immigration.
Satirist Martin Sonneborn has called for a reestablishment of the wall for decades (and this time it would actually be an antifaschistischer Schutzwall), and more and more I feel that reunification was a mistake. It would have been better to let them join what would become Schengen but keep them separate. An AfD running the government of East Germany would not be so different from Orban in Hungary, PiS in Poland, Haider in Austria and so on, all very tolerable from West Germany.
OK, this would be hilarious. And it opens the door for the funniest election ever. Germany wants a president who is has experience building a giant border wall along politically contraversial territory. Someone with huge name recognition, a fresh approach to politics, and no sense of shame. He's got experience, but he'll be a free agent after 2028. He even has (distant) German ancestry, making him potentially eligible for citizenship if they can dig something up. Drumpf for Deutschland, 2028!
BahRamYou
6d ago
So... big win for AfD last night: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4zejgz3z9o. How important is this?
Since I'm not one to closely follow European politics, at first I thought this meant that they had won control of the entire national parliament. But then I noticed that, no, it's just one state election, and they're still short of a majority. In every other state, they have far less support, and every other party is still maintaining a rule to never work with them, so the AfD is still effectively shut out of power everywhere.
I suppose it's another sign of their trajectory, though. They seem to win more and more votes in every election. I remember when, not long ago, they were an extreme minority fringe party. Now they get enough votes that it's difficult for the other parties to form a coalition without them.
Is this a sign that the people of Germany are secretly longing to Nazi again? I doubt it. They seem to still be, on the whole, an extremely leftist-liberal nation. Pro-immigration, pro-welfare, anti-militarism, anti-nationalism, and anti-nuke. So I wonder how much this surge in support for AfD is driven by immigration, or how much of it is just them being the only real conservative party that gives voters an alternative to the status quo?
I also wonder what the AfD would actually do if they came into power? There's a big range between "slightly restrict immigration" and "force all the immigrants to pack up and go home." I suspect they haven't entirely figured it out themselves, since for now they're still just a protest vote. Not to mention how they'd have to figure out their policy on every single other policy issue. It's easy to make big promises when you have no actual power to deliver on them.
But I don't know! Maybe I'm wrong. I really don't know much about German politics, I just saw this and I thought it was interesting. Anyone else have thoughts?
BahRamYou
8d ago
but how do you force jurors to listen, understand, and actually follow those instructions? Once they're behind closed doors in jury deliberation, the judge has no power anymore.
BahRamYou
8d ago
It seems like the law, at least in the state of Massachusetts, is just riddled with contradictions when it comes to this. What is "reasonable doubt?" What is "Burden of proof?" What is "insane?" These are tough questions for even the wisest of philosophers to determine, let alone regular people in a criminal case. But that's OK, let's just throw it to 12 random people in a jury... surely they'll figure it out, right? We won't need to see the horrendous flaws in their logical because the jury deliberations are all secret.
BahRamYou
8d ago
...do you think that people in Russia, China, and other countries had some sort of fair democratic election over whether they wanted to join the communist bloc? They didn't. It was enforced upon them.
BahRamYou
9d ago
Right now, the secret "real system" seems to be that the both sides will make a highly emotional argument, and then the jurors go and decide however they want. Jury selection is by far the most important factor, and written legal precedent means very little. Hooray.
BahRamYou
9d ago
I think, no matter what happens, this will just continue to add to the general schism between men and women. Men are starting to develop some of the same in-group bias that women have always had.
BahRamYou
9d ago
It feels pretty mean-spirited to describe tech billionares as simply "nerds". Maybe they started off as humble computer nerds, but that was a long time ago and they've done a lot of other stuff since then.Now they have a lot more in common with the richest CEOs of non-tech companies than they do with the rank-and-file engineers. And like you said, theater kids can be nerds too... what about them?
Imagine if they wrote a book talking about Hollywood celebrity culture had gone too far, and for some reason the subtitle used the word "fag." I feel like that would not go over well, even if they later clarified that "oh I didn't mean all the fags in Hollywood, just the ones who run it!" But I guess it's still normal and cool to throw out slurs against people who work with computers for a living, even though that's an increasingly large and diverse part of the population.
BahRamYou
13d ago
I think my criticism is that, even with the second type, their history didn't evolve because of any sort of deterministic, psycho-historian type play. It still seemed to rely on some individual doing a stroke of genius, like the mayor with his "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" saying. Good thing they had that genius mayor or they all would have been annihilated by their more violent neighbors, regardless of their more advanced technology.
A rough real-world analogue is Marx. He had this whole complex theory of how society would inevitably evolve into Communism, regardless of what individuals did. But revolutionaries like Lenin seemed to take matters into their own hands, and relied heavily on a few powerful men taking very specific actions, which weren't at all pre-determined!
BahRamYou
13d ago
I enjoy those books for how weird and unique they are. They remind me of Star Trek, where great men solve problems by calmly discussing philosophy over a conference table. But I agree with you that a lot of the characters end up sounding exactly the same. (To be fair, he wrote them when he was quite young, and just trying to make some extra money on the side while going through grad school)
I do think there's a bit of a contradiction built into them. The whole premise is that humans, at the large scale, are ultimately predictable: individual decisions don't matter, and there are no great men of history. But the entire plot depends heavily on the actions of Hari Seldon, and a few other great men who think and act just like him. So... what's up with that?
BahRamYou
13d ago
The original trilogy really is a miraculous convergence where brilliance met technological limitations in the best possible way, and he was somehow lucky enough to remove all his bad ideas while keeping all his good ones. All of the missing stuff contributed to the magical, mysterious atmosphere, while he kept just enough details to make it seem realistic. The prequels were... the opposite.
BahRamYou
13d ago
That's interesting. I didn't know that either. I wonder why no one else wanted to do it? It seems like that would have been the dream project for a lot of up-and-coming young directors.
And yeah... I can't help but think that it would have been better off with someone else other than Lucas at the helm. Spielberg would have been amazing, I wonder why he was so against it? Maybe he was just scared that he couldn't do it justice.
BahRamYou
15d ago
That's fair to distinguish the different types. There's definitely an increasing amount of people who are just in category 1: acknowledging real psychological differences between the sexes, but without any particular malice. But... I think there's some guys in category 2, also, who really do have some malice towards women. They usually mask it as jokes, from edgy "shock jock" pundits like Nick Fuentes, but... when they keep making the same sort of joke over and over, I get the feeling they really do believe in it to some extent.
BahRamYou
15d ago
But most (99%) of men were just as powerless and unequal as men. Indeed, if you compared the position of a wife of a wealthy landowner with that of a coal miner in the 19th century or that of a duchess with that of a peasant, it's pretty clear that the sex-reductionist view falls apart somewhat quickly.
Sure, of course most men are going to be lower class in any society. But, relative to the women in their own social class, they still had some power. The stereotypical coal miner still had some power over his wife that would shock people today. Moreover, he could probably find a wife quite easily, because women really needed a guy like him to earn money for her, whereas now he'd be considered "low SMV" unless he was particularly handsome.
Young, childless women unequivocally and consistently do better than their male counterparts now. It is true that companies are not allowed to price in the detriments of hiring a woman (periods, sexual harassment lawsuits, pregnancy) and that the regulatory and welfare state creates and redistributes away investment and jobs towards women (HR and nursing for example, DEI), but it's wrong to say it hasn't worked.
Yeah that's fair. And I think there's a generational disconnect there. The older men, especialy the ones with long established careers, don't feel threatened and still want to help promote women. The younger men absolutely feel threatened, and feel like they need to organize to protect themselves.
BahRamYou
15d ago
Wouldn't it be a contradiction for any woman to become a thought leader as an anti-feminist? By definition she should be trying to not lead, and simply support a man. It's the same reason women would never support a male as a feminist leader.
The female influencers who I've seen play the act best tend to just kinda... flirt with anti-feminism but then just duck any sort of serious discussion. They're entertainers first and foremost, not political pundits.
BahRamYou
15d ago
Even hardcore chuds would laugh you out of the room/look on in stunned silence if you started quoting Edward Hammond Clarke. The actual views held by anti-suffragettes were not things that are popular with present day anti-19th amendment believers
Hmm, I've never heard of him before. Let me take a quick trip over to wikipedia to see what he believed...
He claimed that a woman's health would deteriorate as a result of higher education, and moreover that the education of women would come at the expense of their reproductive health.
hahaha, what crazy nonsense. Good thing no one believes that anymore. There's definitely no relation between women's higher education and a lower birth rate, is there...?
(There is)
All of this, plus the "arms race" effect. It's OK to be a bit frumpy if that's just what all the regular guys look like. But when everyone starts working heavily on their appearance, you start to stand out a lot more (in a bad way) if you're the one who's not.
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