Corvos
8mo 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
10mo ago
Wouldn’t work. Trump’s ego is too big to work with genuinely competent people long-term. Same problem with Boris Johnson: ultimately he couldn’t bear to share the stage with Cummings. (Other problems too, but that was a biggie.)
If you want to work with good people, I think you have to be able to give public credit where it’s due, and you have to tolerate some genuine pushback from your advisors.
Going to push back a bit on "the early 90s [were] the true golden age of the West". The way I remember it, there was a lot of abundance but also a deep ideological conformity and a corrosive cynicism. I remember the 00s better but I remember it as a time that was resolutely anti-ideological, such that any hint of sincerity was mocked and any possibility that we hadn't discovered the only philosophy man would ever need was almost incomprehensible. The great questions of life were regarded as solved or irrelevant.
Our current crisis is unpleasant in many ways but at least we know the wokeness exists. It's something that one can recognise when implemented, it's something that you can identify with or stand against (even if one is afraid to stand against it publicly). There is far more, and better, free thought now than there was in the 90s and 00s.
Corvos
9mo ago
I'm not wholly sure what you're trying to say.
Giraffes got longer necks because the ones with necks too short to reach the treetops died of starvation. In short, sexual selection is meta-Lamarckian (i.e. not Lamarckian) to the extent that successful variants reproduce and unsuccessful variants don't. Creating these conditions artificially was the core of classical eugenics, but I don't think it's what you're advocating?
Corvos
9mo ago
What specifically does, say, a Filipino need to do to join a Western nation? Why can't they do that?
To me, they need to commit to propagating the culture of their new home rather than their old one. That means not hanging out with other Philippinos, it means speaking almost exclusively the language of the country they immigrate to, and raising their children with the same mores and customs as the natives.
In my experience, this is very rare. Learning new languages is very hard even when you have the time and money; it’s difficult to get by at first without help from ethnic support groups; and without introductions it’s hard to get into new social circles as a foreigner. The children also tend to feel isolated and retreat into their ‘parent’ culture (where they don’t fit either).
I say the above as someone who tried very hard and failed. I’ve only seen it happen successfully once. For this reason I’m very skeptical about the viability of integration except for minute levels of immigration.
N.B. It’s also much harder if you and your children are visibly different from the people around you.
Corvos
2mo ago
The idea that "Trump lost because social media companies cracked down on supposed COVID-19 'misinformation'" makes Abrams look like she has them dead to rights by comparison. OR the corollary "Trump lost because social media companies censored the Hunter Biden story", which leaves out the fact that this censorship was only in effect for, at most, a few days, and that the story itself was national news about a day after it broke.
To be clear, I would classify both of these as malicious election interference, especially the latter. Yes, the news made its way out eventually but it was prevented from going viral. The combination of preventing mainstream outlets from discussing it and wheeling out someone from the FBI to lie about it being fake turned a legitimate and hugely damaging story into a wacko conspiracy theory. It was a close election, I wouldn’t be surprised if that and a couple of other things tipped it.
These theories also rely on the supposition that social media is so powerful that no one can avoid the grip of the information it conveys... except of course, for the people making these arguments, who are obviously immune to any forms of persuasion.
Different people respond to different forms of media. I know people who are influenced by, say, radio vox pops even though I certainly wouldn’t.
Corvos
8mo ago
It makes far more sense in an Amazon warehouse, where what’s needed is a functional human body, than in academia, which is highly prestigious and where your output depends heavily on your specific background, interests and talent. The difference is that a sufficiently powerful academic can push the university into taking their significant other instead of a more deserving candidate.
It is also possible to conceive of a society where the hiring unit is the family (whether nuclear or extended) rather than the individual, but that is not the society we live in.
This, or the living wage, works for me. As you say, the difficulty is getting there.
Corvos
7mo ago
Modern monetary theory does actually lead to inflation, outsourcing your manufacturing to China is not a free win and immigration reduces wages.
To give three examples where economists sagely assured us that the obvious conclusions were wrong and then events (global inflation, hollowing out of American manufacturing, the big rise in worker bargaining power when immigrants couldn’t be brought over during Covid) made it clear that they were wrong. I’m not saying that all economic theory is wrong, any more than all psychology is wrong, but I don’t see how you can look at the history of failed predictions and see it as anything more than a very flawed science.
Corvos
7mo ago
But each person who buys a house is taken out of the pool of would-be renters, so how is the shortage worse? The number of houses is the same, the number of people living in them is the same.
don't make enough money/make money irregularly, can't get a loan, lack of documentation
How are these people better off renting rather than paying off a mortgage? If they don’t have money or documents they’re screwed anyway. A certain number of people are not going to be able to manage in either system and will either be homeless or in government housing. I don’t see how that varies between our two scenarios.
The final about needing to move house regularly is a concern for me too. I speculate that a bigger market with more buyers and sellers might make things easier in this regard but I can’t know for sure. And at least these people would be able to get a property when they settle down rather than have spent a lifetime subsidising other people’s.
Corvos
8mo ago
I can’t prove otherwise, though would be interested to see some evidence that his affectations etc. used to be significantly different (as opposed to just developing or being less hidden.)
The main reason I’m sceptical is that if he just wanted money and power and respect (really, don’t we all?) I don’t see what he gets out of making himself the figurehead of a despised and weak ideology.
Corvos
9mo ago
We roll out the vaccine to 95% of the population. Six months later, turns out it makes people infertile. Whoops. Civilisational collapse.
Any attempt to roll out a new type of medicine at a civilisational scale should be done extremely carefully. Coronaviruses are to some extent a known factor and are very unlikely to have that level of effect - the mRNA vaccines were very likely to be safe (and mostly were) but it was an entirely new mechanism for messing with the immune system and in my opinion you shouldn't do that for 95% of the population without being very very sure what happens.
Corvos
2mo ago
I’ll back @ymeskhout here and say that there’s a pretty significant amount of motte-and-baileying going on, where people retreat to ‘obviously the Deep State didn’t literally hack voting machines and the people who claim to have evidence of large-scale ballot stuffing are grifters, but there was still a widespread effort across the country to swing it for Biden using unsavoury methods’. And then the minute pressure is relaxed, people go back to ‘the deep state literally stole the election’.
So I understand why he’s being a hardass and saying, ‘can any of you provide any evidence at all that the election was literally, actually stolen’. And he gets crickets, or attempts at sanewashing.
I do actually believe that the combination of censorship, changed voting rules, and keeping Biden in a basement so his senility wouldn’t show add up to ‘an election that should shame a first-world country’. But the American Right has an amazing ability to take valid, compelling critiques and convert them into obviously wrong factual claims.
If you were to point out that the current situation is in part caused by society making it harder to be a profitable landlord and that the correct remedy is to make things easier for landlords to make a profit (the real correct remedy is to build more, but good luck doing that in NIMBYland)
You seem to be assuming your conclusion here. If what you state above is true, the rest of your argument may follow, but it seems to be a classic case of applying economic theory and then assuming that everyone is a moron for not going along with your conclusions, rather than disagreeing with your analysis.
From where I’m standing, houses have some fairly unique attributes: the supply is zero-sum in the UK as you note, everyone needs one (or a part of one, I’m including flats and things), realistically nobody needs more than one.
It is not obvious to me that making it very difficult to be a landlord would make it harder to obtain shelter. A plausible consequence of increased tax would be for landlords to sell up and the available housing stock to rise, thus lowering house prices.
As it is, we have a situation where it is entirely viable (though becoming less so) to get somebody else to pay your mortgage for you, and property serves as a useful asset for native or foreign oligarchs to store wealth. I’m not sure that this is innately desirable.
This isn’t an ‘eat the rich’ argument, or an argument for rent control. I’m just dubious about facilitating the treatment of shelter as an asset class and would like to hear your reasoning on the matter.
Perhaps I phrased it too harshly with respect to the OP, I didn’t mean to. My hypothesis is that disagreement is not down to Dunbar’s number but down to a widespread suspicion that most economic theory is bunk. Modern monetary theory does actually lead to inflation, outsourcing your manufacturing to China is not a free win and immigration reduces wages. So when economics say ‘slaving to pay off somebody else’s mortgage is actually good for you’ the response is not supine acceptance but suspicion.
I’m also interested in discussing the case for taxing landlords on its merits, since I have a stake in both sides of the divide and the topic interests me.
Corvos
1mo ago
I think this ignores the big gap between utopia and tradition. If you can point to a time when things were good, and say that you want to recreate those conditions as closely as you can, that might require considerable social change but I would still count it as 'traditional'. You can use 'reactionary' if you prefer.
Alternatively, if you have a vision for humanity that has never yet been properly realised, I think of that as being 'progressive' or 'utopian'. Utopia, of course, famously means 'nowhere'.
If you look at it like this, you have two axes: complacency vs revolutionary; and traditional vs utopian.
So I would be a revolutionary traditionalist; @2rafa's political friends would be complacent traditionalists, and Walt is a revolutionary utopian.
Corvos
2mo ago
The point of predestination is that God, being timeless, already knows whether you're going to turn out to be a good person or a bad person. It's not as though you get a Hell mark on your forehead which dooms you no matter how many good things you do. It brings up awkward theological questions but from the point of view of the patient, trying to be a good person still has worth.
Saying, 'I'm obviously the sort of person who will go to hell so better sin as much as I can beforehand,' is silly and self-fulfilling.
Corvos
2mo ago
The theory that Epstein would talk has no substance. He was already old ... He was 100% going to be convicted and spend the rest of his life in jail as a sex offender, alternating between getting shanked like Chauvin and being locked up in solitary confinement with no hope of ever being released.
By the same token, why wouldn't he talk? What does he have to lose? If I were going down with my criminal empire, I wouldn't want to go down alone.
Corvos
2mo ago
‘If you get caught doing drugs, your life is over, and we WILL catch you if you try doing drugs,’ sounds like exactly what’s needed to fix the opiates epidemic.
You like shrooms, LSD, cannabis, ok, I don’t approve but we can argue about legalisation or appropriate penalties. But for anything harder, don’t do them, don’t associate with people who do them. It cannot possibly be that hard.
Corvos
8mo ago
The impression I get is less that users of the term want to machine gun people they call NPCs and more that they feel if someone else did so nothing of value would be lost.
As opposed to words like “orks”, “scum”, and “vermin” where I 100% believe the speaker would rampage if they had an opportunity.
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.
As someone who doesn’t cook, it’s because it takes ages to get a worse-tasting product than what I can buy, it’s messy and I have to clean up afterwards. Frankly, I have better things to do with my time. It would be an ask even if I had a big kitchen and a short commute but otherwise it’s just not on.
Perhaps I’m overextending but I think that before 1950 cooking was done by housewives, employers or landladies. After the 80s it was mostly takeaways and microwaveable meals. The era when a majority of employed people cooked for themselves was almost infinitesimally short.
Corvos
8mo ago
The internet collapses space. When you go online anywhere in the world, you are effectively stepping into an American university campus and required on pain of cancellation to comport yourself accordingly.
Presumably the African slavers who forced them into slavery and sold them felt otherwise.
In all seriousness, every pre-industrial civilisation relied on some system of forcing people to do back-breaking physical labour. Africa had slavery since Ancient Egypt invaded Nubia, in Europe we had peasants and serfs. Now we have robotics (lit. Workers in Czech) and machines. Soon we will have AI.
From where I’m standing, the devil’s bargain is importing an ethnically distinct forced labour class. Once you do, even post industrialisation it will be very clear who was on which side of the metaphorical or literal whip and those wounds aren’t going to heal with time. Especially when the forces that put A on top of B end up not changing.
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