BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
This is a direct consequence of having a culture that values weakness above strength. When the former is valued more than the latter is it any surprise people deliberately try and become weaker to gain status? In his society the status and utility gained by our young man from having two fewer fingers exceeds the amount of utility he would have gained from those two intact fingers so from his point of view what he did was completely rational: It isn't him who is diseased, it is the culture around him.
There is no fix to this problem either. The only way out is replacement by a new culture that doesn't do this. The prognosis is terminal.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
10mo ago
Good in the short term as the worse stock gets to expropriate the creations of the better stock, even worse in the long term compared to the medium term as your country falls behind the rest of the world due to your lower human capital and lack of rule of law leading to nobody external with any sense investing even a single cent into you.
And the kinds of people who prioritize the short term over the medium/long term are basically almost definitionally the ones you want nowhere near the levers of power.
Better stock humans are God's gift to worse stock humans (as a class, not individually, no single person should think of themselves as "God's gift to humanity" because they are not, but as a class of human beings it's absolutely true), without them the low quality stock would be living in even worse conditions than they do at the moment (compare American blacks vs Liberian blacks). Shooting them with bullets is like killing the golden goose and the lower classes need this simple fact repeated to them multiple times until they finally get it.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
2mo ago
Another valid solution is state sanctioned "beating the shit out of bad human beings until there is no more shitty behaviour left in them". This is surprisingly effective at getting those who are immune to reason to see sense. Operant conditioning works just as well on humans as it does on lower animals.
Six lashes for his rude behaviour followed by a solemn promise that he's going to get another sixty lashes if anything untoward was to happen to the woman afterwards would set him straight very quickly.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
You may not offer unsolicited advice. Presume that other people are competently managing their own lives as they see fit. If they want your thoughts on their relationships, finances, or dietary habits, they will ask.
Interesting. My upbringing was basically the opposite. I was told by my parents (and culture more generally), that if I saw someone doing X to achieve goal Y and I really truly believed that instead of X it would be better to do Y it was my duty to let them know this and the fact that this was unsolicited means nothing.
Imagine you see someone trying to open one of those child lock medicine bottles where you have to push them in first, wrangle the cap around a bit and then twist to open them. However they don't seem to know this and you've noticed them for a while trying to twist the cap and open it and it keeps on failing, and they don't know why. They haven't asked you for help but anyone can see they are clearly frustrated. Pretty much nobody would say it's a bad thing to go and tell them how to open the cap, even though technically it is unsolicited advice. We just take this concept and scale it up to apply to many more things.
Now whether they choose to follow my advice or not is completely up to them, and I shouldn't try to change what they do, but my duty is to let them know and what they do with this knowledge later is purely for themselves to decide. On the Day of Judgement I will be able to say before God that I did what was required of me at that point in my life to help my fellow man and thus I was indemnified from whatever happened to that person afterwards, e.g. if they were swimming in waters I knew to be shark infested I have a duty to tell them they should get out ASAP, if they don't and then get eaten I am not morally responsible for what happened in a way I would be if I saw them swimming there and just went on with my day giving them no warning.
I guess this is yet another example of the cultural differences between the west and my homeland. It's pretty small on its own but when you have many dozens of such things they add up very quickly.
You say: Don't give unsolicited advice.
We say: It's your duty to give unsolicited advice.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
2mo ago
and I don't believe for a second Tolkien didn't have an allegory in mind when he was writing that.
The place where that became unrealistic to me was how stupidly Saruman behaved after he got news the ring had been destroyed. The Shire under his control, like everywhere else in Middle Earth, would have felt the reverberations from the destruction of the ring and the fall of Sauron. Saruman would absolutely have known that the Fellowship hobbits were going to return back home soon (knowing their temprament and desire for domestic life) and would fight him for control there.
The very first thing a smart Saruman would have done would have been to completely ethnically cleanse the entire Shire of hobbits by genociding them all (and we know that by this point he was evil enough to do so) and replacing them with Uruk-Hai, so that when the inevetable battle happened at least the locals would side with him instead of against him. And if you read the chapter you'd quickly realise that the fellowship hobbits wouldn't have been able to muster their successful rebellion had there been no more living local hobbits left.
For whatever reason Tolkien didn't write the chapter in this way though... Perhaps it would have been even more anticlimatic than The Scouring of the Shire is on its own, but it would definitely have been more realistic.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
5mo ago
Quick reminder to everyone that Islam exists and does not suffer from this ... problem ...
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
7mo ago
including the raid shelter killings that have already been publicized.
God those videos are extremely brutal. Such videos should (but we all know they won't) convince everyone that the side of peace and kindness and treating other human beings well and general "stuff westerners say they like" here is Israel, not Palestine. If you want peace in the Middle East, they are the ones you should be supporting. Sure they are discriminatory etc., but the alternative is not Nordic style welfare democracy, it's literal Hamas, and compared to them, Israel are the good guys.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
Should Palestinians in Gaza just forget the last 18 years and the thousands men, women and children bombed to death?
Yes, yes they should. It sucks but there is no alternative. Israel is too far advanced and strong now compared to the Palestinians, end of story. The time to compete was 50 years ago, and the way to compete was not rockets and bullets but rather a singular focus on economic growth to the point where your soft power grew so much you could influence the players that really matter (lets be honest here, both Palestine and Israel are too small to influence the world by themselves) to put extreme pressure on Israel because they wanted to trade with you (which is what Israel is doing now to the Palestinians, see the proposed normalization of relations with parts of the Arab world).
Violence no longer works on large scales in the 21st century (see Russia v Ukraine) if you want to create a peaceful country and prosperity for your people. The only reason it works for Israel doing the reverse is that the Palestinians are much weaker (to the point that it's no longer two equals fighting - which leads to a lot of damage to the world; but more like police subjugating a riot - minimal damage to the world if the police handle it right), and because Israeli economic heft will mean other countries turn a blind eye to what is going on, were Palestine to try the same, they would rightfully be sanctioned into the ground. Until Hamas understands this the very people they want to help will suffer even more than they would in a counterfactual world where Hamas suddenly disappeared off the face of this planet.
Even if Hamas wants to take the fight to Israel physically, the way to do it is not through the sticks and stones tier rockets but rather through diverting economic resources into high end military research to make yourself a plausible equal of Israel in the domain, and then threaten them (this is never going to happen, but it's still the right way to do things if you choose this path).
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
8mo ago
If you want to learn about the latest happenings at breakneck speed with reasonably high confidence that it's not a hoax, rdrama.net is probably the best place for it at the moment.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
10mo ago
· Edited 10mo ago
Russia (like the rest of Europe) is slowly dying. That's fine, everything eventually comes to an end. However it made an inadvisable move to lash out one last time before the inevitable, one final death throe before the end, but this too has backfired on it and made things even worse for the country as a whole. You can't blame them for trying something, but you can blame them for picking a particularly bad thing to try. In the modern world we have reached an equilibrium where military power means less and less compared to economic and cultural staying power and many of these events are just (painful) lessons to those who weren't able or willing to follow the winds of change. Experience is the best (and most painful) teacher as they say.
Sure, it sucks for current Russians (and Europeans) but this is just the wheel of fortune, nothing more and nothing less. There are times when you're climbing up, and times when you're being kicked down. It's just what it is. Given that it's very hard to compete with the current hegemonic American culture if Russia really wanted to be successful in spreading its ideas in the modern world it would defund its military and spend the money on boosting Russian fertility to create lots of people who believe in Russian ideology instead.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
Russia is putting all its abilities into winning, the US considers the Ukraine war an afterthought. And yet, despite being an afterthought they/them are able to check the entire might of the great "masculine" Russian bear.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
6mo ago
Canada already proved euthanasia is a slippery slope, so I don't buy all the talk about how this isn't an important issue.
Slippery slope? Canada is doing absolutely the right thing when it comes to Euthanasia. It is not being forced upon anyone, merely given as an extra option in addition to the normal healthcare system for those who's diseases are really bad.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
6mo ago
Some people are born pedophiles, they should still be locked up and at the very least heavily monitored if they ever molest children.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
7mo ago
Random rumors from the internet:
https://twitter.com/realpepeescobar/status/1711973752924455254
Mossad is now blaming Huawei.
Hamas used Huawei smartphones with no Western backdoor.
That completes switching the blame to the new "axis of evil".
Russia-China-Iran.
The source is a twitter account named @RealPepeEscobar, so do your due diligence, but if this is true it's absolutely hilarious: Western intelligence agencies spend their time and money breaking into their own side's hardware rather than that of the enemy...
One of the replies to the tweet says he'll go and buy a Huawei now, and to be honest who can blame him, just like how having western rather than Chinese backdoors in your hardware protects you if you're living in China, having Chinese rather than western backdoors protects you if you're living in the west.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
The Ukranians have the right to fight back, not because their land was once stolen, but because their land was very recently stolen. The further back in time you go, the less your right to push back becomes, if Finland today attacked Russia to try and recover Karelia (this happened around the same time as the creation of Israel) people's sympathies for them would be nowhere near the level they have for Ukraine, and rightfully so.
Indeed, even in western countries like the UK, there are laws on Presciptive Easement where if someone uses a piece of land openly for some use for 20 years they do not own, eventually the government recognizes their claim on the land and hands it to them if the original owner tries to complain, and there are good reasons why such laws exist.
In Israel's case the land theft happened so far back and they have done so much to transform it that what exists now is nothing like what existed in 1950 (on the Israeli side at least), so they have a claim to keep it. And no, I don't expect "if you steal land you will be given 75 years (a lifetime) of hell, after which you'll be allowed to keep the land" to be much less of a deterrent/cause more moral hazard than "if you steal land you'll be given perpetual hell" in stopping people from stealing land.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
2mo ago
"My son, when you sin, it reveals that you're wicked and going to hell. Best, therefore, to abstain from sin."
And my response to this is: "So what? If I'm destined for eternal hell in 80 years I want to have an absolute blast before I die and being around people just like me will help with that." Signalling that I'm the kind of person going to hell is a good way for us hellbound to recognise each other and get together so that we can turn our lives into one continual orgistic rave of pleasure that we couldn't if we were all separated from each other. It far beats living a life of austerity and then ending up in hell anyways.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
and it doesn’t matter if chickens are as smart as chickens or as smart as people, I will still fry and eat them.
If chickens were as smart as people there would be absolutely no justification to fry and eat them, if only because their equal intelligence implies there will probably be a time in the future when the tables are turned on who has power and you absolutely wouldn't want the chickens to start eating humans.
Of course intelligence gives rise to moral worth, and yes I will bite the bullet and freely say that some people are worth more morally than others (this doesn't mean that intelligence is the only thing behind moral worth, but it absolutely is one of them).
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
6mo ago
To be honest with you I also think this question is stupid and gross, because sex is meant to be sacred. In a society run in a way I would like it my answer would be an absolute, immediate no because sex is sacred and powerful, and you shouldn't let them have sex for the same reason you wouldn't hand a 5 year old a loaded revolver.
However westereners have made sex completely and utterly profane to the point of total ignominy. I want them to experience the logical consequences of their professed belief system, and I want them to expeirence these consequences good and hard.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
Whites pay significantly more in than they take over their lifetimes
Is this before or after you include the imputed damages of tens of thousands of dollars each year they cause by hogging desirable accommodation near jobs after they retire and forcing actually productive working age people to live further away and waste time on commutes (or alternatively pay through the nose to live a pretty shitty life centrally)?
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
People who have cancer often undergo chemotherapy. This procedure involves pumping toxins into the body to kill cancerous cells. Of course some healthy non-cancerous cells do get caught up in this and die. Like many other things in life, chemotherapy comes in different strengths, if a cancer is small you go for low dosage chemotherapy where very few helathy cells get killed in the crossfire. But if the cancer is very big you need to go for agressive chemotherapy because the low dosage stuff won't get rid of the cancer. This agressive chemotherapy will kill lots of healthy cells too, but that doesn't mean the chemotherapy as a whole was a bad idea.
In much the same way Hamas is a cancer on the face of this earth this has grown way too big. Low dosage stuff like precision strikes and being 150% extra sure you're not shooting at people who aren't threats (when by and large 90%+ of the people you encounter will be threats) before pulling the trigger isn't strong enough to excise Hamas from this world. That requires high dosage chemotherapy which will regrettably have side effects including some number of civilian casualites. It's sad, but the alternative (Hamas is left to fester) is even worse.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
5mo ago
Trump can also not take office due to legitimately losing the election.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
5mo ago
The poker player. This is the hardest to explain, they they seem to be able to read people, manipulate people and navigate around smart people in a manner that no one can. They aren't immediately obvious as the smartest in any room, but they somehow always get their way. Often end up CEOs or millionaires somehow.
The best poker players in the world are now robots, they play online, have zero idea about reading other people or how to manipulate/navigate around them.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
Was in agreement with the author until this:
sustained immigration of high IQ and ethnically nepotist immigrants from India into highly paid tech jobs, blocking the sons of the American middle class from the possibility of upward social advancement and leaving them stranded in five figure wagecuck hell
I am reminded of the quote misattributed to Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”
We have reached the stage where right wing westerners are fighting against us after not caring about us and then laughing at us. But we are no laughing matter as the more astute westerners are now seeing. We will be taken seriously. By simple virtue of being better than them we will eventually win if given a level playing field. I agree ethnic nepotism is bad and should be discouraged, but more high IQ people is straight up good. The US can extend its worldwide hegemony by another two generations if it just replaced its immigration criteria with an IQ test where anybody IQ 125+ was welcomed.
All we want is the same thing that you want: better living standards for us and ours.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Overstepping definitely exists and there are lots of ways in which it happens, one way I mentioned above was e.g. trying to get people to actually follow the advice you gave them, thiis is looked down upon quite hard.
There's no offense taken when you presume to understand someone's most personal circumstances better than they themselves do?
Using an example from your own culture (Machiavelli's The Prince):
Nor, I hope, will you think it presumptuous that a man of low, really the lowest, station should set out to discuss the way princes ought to govern their peoples. Just as artists who draw landscapes get down in the valley to study the mountains and go up to the mountains to look down on the valley, so one has to be a prince to get to know the character of a people and a man of the people to know the character of a prince.
It's more that the advisors aren't seen by the advisee as knowing their personal situation better than they do, the advisor is just saying what they feel is best for you (the fact that they give up their own time to even give you the advice in the first place is a small act showing they care, it's cheaper for them to save their own time and say nothing) from what they are able to see. Like the artist in the valley looking at the mountain, they may be able to see something about you that you have overlooked, even though you have a far better idea of the exact details of the situation.
There is minimal expectation for the person being given the advice to follow it, and people often freely ignore the advice they have been given by randoms (because of course, the random doesn't know much about you, you might be doing X because X' is unfeasible for some other reason they don't know but you do, so when they tell you to try X' you thank them for their advice and continue doing X),
Equally this isn't seen as insulting towards the random person who's advice you just decided to ignore because everyone knows and acknowledges that you have more information about the situation at hand than the person giving you advice. Note that this is often even true in the case of solicited advice, that too is often freely ignored by the person who asked for the advice in the first place because it doesn't work for them and isn't seen as something particularly bad by the culture beyond a slightly higher expectation that you will follow the advice because you were the one asking for it in the first place.
Going to 50 different people, asking for and getting their advice and then ignoring everyone's suggestions is definitely looked down upon, it's perfectly possible for the first 3 people that they gave you bad advice, but it's far far more statistically likely that if you don't take the advice of 50 different people the problem is with you rather than them. On the other hand ignoring 50 people who gave you unsolicited advice is seen as far less bad, because all 50 of them might not have seen the reason why X' is unfeasible for you.
I personally try to at least give a small justification for why the advice they gave me wouldn't work when I'm put in such a situation, and then other person, their duty discharged, goes on with his day. Repeatedly pestering the same person multiple times with advice on the same thing they don't take is most definitely seen as overstepping though, and looked down on, generally it's fine to give 1 piece of advice, maybe 2 if you really know the person well and like them, before moving on with your life, more is seen as excessive but of course the closer you are to the person you are giving advice to the more you can do here.
Interestingly financial advice is the one type of advice I do not give to anyone, not even those close to me. This is because if the advice doesn't work out they will blame you, while if the advice does work out they won't thank you in anywhere near a proportion to how much they would have blamed you in the counterfactual. "Buy index funds and don't touch them" is where I leave it at (incidentially this is also how I invest my own money).
And of course, certain things really are beyond the pale, telling people "you should have at least 4 kids" is not gonna fly unless you're their parent or grandparent or your argument is so high level that it would apply to basically everyone (in which case it isn't personal advice any more). Interestingly though far more people can get away with "you should have at least 2.2 kids", probably because the argument behind giving the latter advice does not rely on much specific factors about the person you are giving the advice to, so it really doesn't matter you don't know them well at all. I have been told multiple times I should donate my sperm to a sperm bank though, completely out of the blue...
In the medium term wiping out better stock hurts the worse stock more than letting them rule over you.
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