BinaryHobo
10mo ago
you shouldn't be surprised when others seek to use force to challenge that hegemony
I'm not, it's exactly what I expect. Then again, I would expect it even if the US had an additional justification, such is the nature of power. Additionally I expect the rules based system to only last as long as US hegemony does.
But I also expect what comes next to be considered much worse, regardless of how much people talk now about America being evil. Despite getting to set the rules (and, admittedly, getting quite a few carve outs in its favor), Pax Americana has been good for basically everyone, save possibly the Russian elite.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
The new usage, where it's used to refer to individuals even when their gender is known (see what I did there?) is both awkward and frequently unclear.
Could you expand a little on this? I'm not sure how, once you've accepted the singular they for a person of unknown gender or perhaps an abstract person without gender, applying it to different individuals causes more ambiguity.
Or is it just that this previously rage edge-case is becoming more common which is leading to problems?
BinaryHobo
7mo ago
How many of those residents would self-identify as "suburban" instead of "urban"?
Because there's a pretty big difference between the political behavior of suburbanites and urbanites.
From what I remember, there was an article from a while back about the majority of Texas identified as suburban. Let me see if I can dig it up.
Edit: Found it. I was thinking of an old 538 article from 2015. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/ it's ~8 years old at this point, so the percentages could have swung a couple points, but I think the general point still stands.
BinaryHobo
8mo ago
I don’t think any of that disagrees with my point.
My point was that you can't objectively say that policing failed without consulting the local community, unlike with healthcare. Which makes the comparison you were trying to make really squishy and not very useful.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
It was not immediately clear that the new definition was the point of contention. People railing against the "singular they" is much older than the current gender debate (including my 8th grade english teacher), and the OP specified that it was more on grammatical grounds than gender.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
I don't want to comment on the neo-pronouns, but I have a question about this bit:
That one offends me more on grammatical grounds than any feelings I have about gender identities.
The singular they goes back to at least the 1300s, at least according to Merriam-Webster. What kind of pedigree are you looking for in your english words above and beyond a word usage that literally predates modern english? Is it just that the same word can refer to singular and plural? Does the word "deer" bother you in the same way?
BinaryHobo
6mo ago
I believe HBD is a worse explanation for persistent black underachievement than the lingering effect of centuries of cultural disruption under slavery combined with decades of further disruption under racist post-Civil-War legislation
I know this wasn't the point of your post, but the way you sorta phrased this as a binary made something click in my mind. I'm gonna be honest, I can't buy either of these explanations. And both, oddly enough, for the same reason, the Greenwood District in Tulsa (site of the famous race riot). Ok, so not just Greenwood, but there's plenty of examples of functioning black communities from that era.
Modern society is just straight up not as racist as 1920s Oklahoma. And black people were able to build functioning communities within 60 years of gaining their freedom. And by all accounts, communities that worked quite well. I'm aware of the highway system disrupting black communities, but it's been 60 years since that happened, and that can't be as big of a disruption as being enslaved. There has to be, at the very least, a confounding factor.
At the same HBD makes no sense. The argument is generally that black people have too low of an average IQ to succeed, but we have examples of functioning communities. Even if it were true, the most extreme claims of the HBD groups tend to put the average IQ at around 70, and that's roughly where the US as a whole was circa 1900, and there's plenty of examples from that time of people with this average IQ forming perfectly functional communities. That can't be the entire explanation either.
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
So the 'rules based order' has nothing to do with coherent, consistent law, it's just an excuse to do whatever NATO wants.
I mean sorta? Might makes right never went away, but the most powerful country generally wants a rules based system most of the time, and so one exists. With just enough exceptions and post hoc rationalization to prevent two nuclear armed powers from coming to direct conflict.
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
I'm not really the person to talk about it, since Rome is more my jam than Africa, but there's a couple of decent comparison points. Assuming we're talking about Sub-Saharan Africa, as Northern-Africa is being conquered by the Muslims at this point.
The Great Zimbabwe is being settled around the 9th century. It ends up being a full stone-walled medieval-style city. This seems to be more technologically advanced that Europe was at it's lowest trough, but significantly less advanced than Rome at its height (it's not really comparable to the Theodosian Walls).
The Sao city-states are also humming along at this point. These are more impressive to me, but that might just be because it pattern matches to the Greek city-states.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
The phrase "If you were to identify as non-binary, you'd be less likely to get hate-crime charges." is not legal advice. It's a statement about the legal system that is likely true (and might be useful for an accused person to know).
What someone else takes from that is not necessarily the lawyer's business.
BinaryHobo
21d ago
Or what do you call bombing another country's consulate?
An act of war, probably. Generally speaking, that's what one state attacking another is considered.
There aren't good definitions of terrorism, but generally speaking, they require non-state actors (or possibly by people from a state pretending to not be state-actors).
BinaryHobo
6mo ago
Appropriations bills haven't gone through the legislatively designated normal process of how they are supposed to be drafted and modified and on what schedule for decades.
Has it been decades? I seem to remember the process being roughly the normal appropriations process up until 2011 or 2012 (can't quite remember which), when they got rid of earmarks.
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
Sure, but they're talking about a technology change.
Before the internal combustion engine, the maximum human travel speed hadn't changed in centuries either.
Not to say that it's likely, but I think you're ignoring the essence of the argument.
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
Why we find ourselves in an orderly world can be explained by the anthropic principle of "if the world was not orderly, we would not be here asking the question".
I've never liked this as a rebuttal to the point made. It definitely answers the question as you've phrased it. Why do we find ourselves in an orderly world? Because if it weren't orderly, we wouldn't find ourselves anywhere. I get the line of reasoning, but it gives no insight into why the world is orderly, which is what question is really being asked. It merely asserts that it is the case, which wasn't really up for debate.
To rephrase the point in a slightly less charged light. When discussing the question "Why does the necessary precursor to A exist?", answering "A exists, therefore the necessary precursor to A exists" doesn't answer the question. It completely ignores the "Why" part of the question.
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
Now subtract all of the men who
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
I don't think low end ($40-50) android tablets have hardware to connect to the mobile network.
I guess I could be wrong. Volume of cell phones made might make a default chip with that hardware cheaper than one without.
BinaryHobo
6d ago
That's a fairly reasonable explanation, but there's been a ton of things that started out as "a thing dumb college kids are doing" and ended up in the wider world. Some take longer than others.
BinaryHobo
1mo ago
It gets a bit more complicated if you want autoupdates.
Put pacman -Syu in a cron job?
BinaryHobo
1mo ago
But all of them are punished in exactly the same way, according to traditional Christianity.
Maybe "traditional christianity" is doing some work here that I'm unaware of, but I'm going to assume that the text of the bible is still in play.
The bible does absolutely give us at least two classes of sin, with different punishments. For most sinners, once they have committed a sin, they are given a chance to repent and be forgiven. But for those that blaspheme against the holy spirit, this option is cut off (Matthew 12:31). It would seem to be a reasonable interpretation of the words of Christ here that at least 1 sin is viewed more harshly by the divine.
BinaryHobo
3mo ago
I see a difference in that. But that's not what we're talking about here, considering natural born citizenship generally passes from parents to children, not only to people that are born in a place. Being born in a place automatically conferring citizenship is kind of a new world thing, most places in the old world don't do that (source)
In the current world, you can be a citizen of a place you've never been to already. And you can be incapable of giving up that citizenship. And that doesn't seem to be an exception for you, so I'm not sure why it's an important difference here.
The relevant difference is:
- Place your family has history
- Place your family doesn't have history
If that's not the relevant difference, I think you need to start carving out some exemptions to your policy.
BinaryHobo
4mo ago
This is a fair response, but taking the accelerationist argument seriously for a sec, the argument is generally that it will be better for your granddaughter, not your daughter.
Which, y'know, choosing between the two is one hell of a sophie's choice level decision, but I don't think it can be dismissed off hand that easily if what you value is the safety/comfort of your decedents. I feel like a better counterargument is that there's a decent chance we never get advanced civilization up and running again if the whole thing collapses.
BinaryHobo
6mo ago
That doesn't automatically mean they can be used for any reason and still be legitimate.
BinaryHobo
7mo ago
As opposed to what the current pope is pushing?
BinaryHobo
7mo ago
I think that's only because you're only focused on Marx's side of theory.
Smith's theory is about the labor the buyer is willing to expend to obtain something. To quote the wealth of nations:
The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.
Which, I think is the other half that you're missing.
I don't think this necessarily follows, unless you want to look at Europe after Rome left, and declare the Europeans must have naturally crazy low intelligence as well (or, I suppose you could argue that the difference can be made up in
1000 years).Based on the my observation of the middle-ages, it seems pretty reasonable that the former territories to struggle amongst themselves in a series of constantly escalating conflicts until a distaste for war is (quite literally) beat into the local culture enough to outweigh the natural human drive to see your out-group killed (at least enough to stop fighting with people within a few hundred km). This seems to take several hundred years (it could possibly be faster with increased communication speed, but the power vacuum in Africa is only 60-80 years old, so I'm not willing to write off the theory yet).
It's only at that point that you can build infrastructure and complicated supply lines that complex societies are built on. Before that, I would only expect high-intelligence to result in more efficient killing.
Alternatively a single victor/foreign power can come in and dominate (your classic pax X-ana period). The point is more that stability seems to come from either subjugation or deep cultural changes that seem to be orthogonal to intelligence.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're entirely wrong, but I think looking at the state of an area for a single 50-100 year period is a horrible argument about the IQ of the humans that live there.
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