Corvos
1yr ago
To be clear, I am speculating that a group descended by several generations from people taken captive after being conquered in war, or as the result of a successful raid, are likely to have worse outcomes than the children of the people who won those wars and committed those raids. Do you disagree?
I am not asserting that losing a war brands a group with the Mark of Perpetual Loserdom.
Corvos
2mo ago
It seems worth noting that I usually hear this argument being made by comfortable people living relatively easy lives (e.g. webcomic artists). People actually experiencing the kind of calamity people are talking about (earthquakes, war, disease) tend to find meaning in these events. See for example that famous book by an Auswitz survivor about the necessity of meaning for sustaining life.
Now, this is obviously an ad hominem argument about psychology propensities rather than whether God actually has a plan, but it does rather colour the conversation for me that arguments based on suffering are mostly deployed cynically by those who are basically ok rather than the sufferers themselves.
Corvos
5mo ago
It's interesting to see what kind of clothes people wear, even though they don't sew the clothes themselves.
Understanding the theory != agreement with it.
If your theory doesn’t allow you to predict (and preferably control) actual results then it’s dubious by default. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but disagreement is inevitable and appropriate. Micro-economics is mostly non-controversial for this reason. Macroeconomics is much more controversial. What inputs and outputs economic analysis should consider is incredibly controversial.
Corvos
2mo ago
In the UK we sort of did that (city Mayors, Scottish/Welsh/NI governments) but the result always seems to be hard left nonentities who have very little history of practical achievement (even less than our top-level MPs). I’m not sure if that’s a structural problem or simply what the regions prefer, but implementing localism in a way that doesn’t end up with virtue-signalling parasites constantly invoking ethnic grievances for more money seems like a serious problem.
Corvos
2mo ago
What I meant by
Now, this is obviously an ad hominem argument about psychology propensities rather than whether God actually has a plan
is that obviously suffering people trying to find meaning in their suffering doesn’t make them correct. What it does do is make me less inclined to take people who tell me variations on, “say that to a child dying of leukaemia, asshole!” seriously.
And?
You stated that "Russia has no more right to demand subservience from Ukraine than the US does from Canada or Mexico". Others have pointed out that the US acts as if it does have that right, and always has. To the extent that you believe what you say, you are rare. The majority of people who assert that Russia has no right to care about its neighbour's alliances are hypocrites who willfully refuse to put themselves in Russia's shoes, which they don't have to because America owns most of a continent and quelled its only neighbours centuries ago.
it is because they are the proverbial man in a gated community patrolled by police who believes that nobody has the right to self-defence
It's a fairly standard criticism of the kind of people who condemn others for physically defending themselves against assault - that the condemners can afford to take a high-minded view on such matters only because they live in a fortified community from which potentially-dangerous elements of the underclass have been forcibly excluded.
Corvos
5mo ago
I agree with much of what you say, and I think some level of moderation is necessary and desirable. It should be possible to address this stuff you raise in this post whilst still primarily modding for content.
My particular concern is that I would like to do a really proper AI-assisted effort-post (category B, undetectable) in the near future. For moral reasons I would prefer to give credit to the AI where appropriate and would like not to be modded for it if the post is otherwise up to my usual standards.
Corvos
5mo ago
But you live in a traditionally catholic area, right? I assumed that your secular friends were Catholic-tinged, so to speak, even though not actually catholic. Whereas for example my parents are secular but they're Church of England secular. Or in California they would be Silicon Valley secular.
Corvos
7mo ago
Sorry, I’m thinking out load and so not always clearly. What I mean is that I physically can’t spend more than my total salary on basic necessities. Society requires that basic necessities be cheaper than skilled/intellectual work - if they aren’t cheap, society doesn’t function and everyone has to be a subsistence farmer.
The more fundamental the work, the more we have to drive the price down for our civilisation to remain functional. More physical work is resistant to automation is various ways (robots can’t interact with complex objects / human environments so no robot nurses, truckers, shelf stackers etc.) and the end result is that you have many low-paid physical labourers who notice that they are being paid badly for doing very necessary jobs while others are being paid better for sending emails. Before, of course, these jobs were done by peasants and slaves, so you had the same problem.
I can’t see a better solution but it always causes problems for social cohesion imo.
Corvos
7mo ago
Yes, and it has to be this way because anyone providing me a necessary service must be paid less per person that I am paid. Otherwise I can’t afford those necessary services.
For example, I am dependent on food (farmers, truckers, shelf stackers etc.) to live. If those people are too well paid, I can’t afford to eat. So it seems that, most of the time, it’s a prerequisite for civilisation that people doing necessary jobs are paid less than people doing unnecessary jobs. Which is very awkward for society.
Corvos
8mo ago
Putting aside our inability to read minds, if they conduct the war the same way the latter speech does seem preferable to the former. Rage and hate are pretty unpalatable in anyone not already firmly on your team.
Corvos
10mo ago
All those Never kissed a Tory T-shirts take on a wholly different meaning. Poor guy.
Corvos
10mo ago
Out of curiosity, have you discussed your opinion of Japanese dramas with local friends? I can't stand ドラマ either, and I don't know if it's because I have Westernised tastes that dramas offend (but anime doesn't somehow) or because Japanese drama is legitimately that bad. I lean towards the latter.
why don’t we vote on bringing back the bare links repository?
Eh. Might be interesting but I'm not really keen on bringing back the daily rage. I get as much current news through here as I can handle. I'm mostly happy with the site and @cjet79's formulation as-is, I just wanted to provide a little calibration in favour of 'this specific warning was too strict'.
You are being utilitarian, I am being deontological. It doesn’t matter who benefits, it’s not a moral way to handle your employees.
To put it another way, there are many, many things that a manager can do which is in the best interests of their employer (corruption, assassination, faking emission tests) but being good business doesn’t make those actions morally acceptable.
Corvos
6hr ago
modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts
Are guns banned in Massachusetts?
Corvos
19hr ago
Yeah, I know. But I didn't feel like events had been treated with enough gravity, either. What just happened was really, really grim and I feel like the narrative needed to slow down and find some way to acknowledge that. As it was, I got the same sense I tend to get from Neal Stephenson: that the author is observing human emotion from the outside as a sort of interesting plot mechanism, and my desire to read further just evaporated.
I gave up on it after Light forced a woman to kill herself in such a way that nobody will ever know what happened to her.
Literally ‘for the next two hours you will think of nothing except how to kill yourself in such a way that the body will never be found, and then do so’.
He sets a time delay so that he has just enough time to gloat in front of her before it takes effect... and then we watch the light leave her eyes as she stumbles off into the rain looking for a place to destroy herself.
And all of this is presented as, essentially, a clever ploy. Death Note makes bile well up in the back of my throat. I know Light isn’t presented as a hero but I feel like it’s way too casual and pleased with itself about the concept of playing chess with human lives.
Corvos
5d ago
Understood, and that’s interesting to hear. I wanted to write something about the difficulty of getting genuine policy preferences in an election or polling situation:
- the small supply of viable politicians
- the difficulty of disentangling personal preferences from tradeoff complications.
The former is a well known issue with indirect democracy. For the latter, put it this way: if you ask people ‘do you want A’ devoid of tradeoffs, that doesn’t tell you how they’ll respond to real electoral offerings. OTOH if you add in tradeoffs, you have other problems:
- Are you still pro-A if it will mean all your loved ones die in a fire? Well, no, but I don’t think that’s a realistic tradeoff. If I say that I am not pro A on the survey under those conditions, I give the impression that my support for A is weak.
- I may weight issues on achievability as well as desire. Do you value A or B more? Well, perhaps I really care about A but I believe (thanks to the same polls that have these problems) that public support for A is very low and even a politician promising A will never deliver it. Whereas support for X is on a knife edge. I therefore say truthfully that I plan to vote based on X.
Corvos
11d ago
I think you construct your sentence as, “Peter Dinkle, an actor who famously suffers from dwarfism, commented today…”
Losing a war kind of makes you untermenschen by default. One theory for why descendants of slavery underperform, say, Nigerian immigrants is that they are the children of the people who were easily conquered and didn’t provide much utility to their neighbours.
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