Crowstep
5mo ago
A podcast I listen to described anons archiving court transcripts from the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK as 'monks preserving scriptures during the dark ages'.
Just like how the woke college kids grew up and into positions of power, now the edgy memelords of yesteryear are growing up and entering the workforce too.
Crowstep
5mo ago
Unless you don't believe in the idea of marital rape, consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages.
A married woman has a lot more leverage against that sort of behaviour even outside of legal sanction. After all, a man has to actually live with his wife. Unless a man is willing to become a tyrant who is in constant conflict with the woman he shares a house with, he's going to listen to her preferences at least somewhat.
Not so for the disposable groupie/employee.
Crowstep
6mo ago
what does The Motte think about moderate drinking?
My vaguely remembered understanding is that, not only are their observation studies in people, there are also experiments with animals and a proposed mechanism. I think that makes the recommendation stronger than the typical associations drawn in nutrition science.
That said, I'm not going to drink less, or indeed more, because I think it'll reduce my risk of heart disease. Alcohol has enough negative effects for me that I can't see myself ever drinking more than I do now, which isn't much.
Crowstep
6mo ago
That's probably why the preference cascade has been so total: talk about culture and you get suppressed as a racist. Housing? Everyone gets it. No amount of gaslighting or talking will change reality.
Leading to this beautiful exchange from a couple of years ago.
Crowstep
6mo ago
I was (am? well, hopefully was) a 5-8 drinks a night kind of guy which, while clearly not good, doesn't really seem like "real alcoholism"
Speaking as someone who drinks occasionally, that really looks like alcoholism to me. Good to hear that you've been able to go cold turkey.
Have you considered naltrexone? It might be worth getting some on hand if you feel like going back on the bottle.
A black Muslim pimp
He's paler than the average Italian. If you're gonna bring up his ethnicity, at least call him Afro-European or mulatto or something. The man's about as black as Father Ted. And Europeans don't use the one-drop rule. If someone passes as European (like Andrew Tate or Meghan Markle) the fact that they may have mixed ancestry is just an interesting factoid for most people.
Although him converting to Islam so he can get religious cover for his promiscuity and saying mean things about women is pretty funny.
Crowstep
6mo ago
That sounds like something out of a contemporary version of Crusader Kings.
Crowstep
6mo ago
I remember reading once about a particular 'species' of fish that was only found in a specific pond. Basically, it was an inbred version of another species that got stuck by the pond losing its connection to a larger body of water. The author noncritically repeated the argument by the researcher that it was important to save this species.
It seems arbitrary that we get to decide that all species must be preserved as they are now. Extinction and speciation are integral to how evolution functions. How can we justify trying to preserve the animal kingdom in aspic? Especially when the preservation mostly takes the form of preventing us from building anything.
Crowstep
6mo ago
Well the developed world has also had dysgenic fertility since the 1800s, so it could well be a case that the two things balance out.
You have to also consider that the rest of the world also had famine, disease and pollution in 1800. You're comparing India now to (a rough outline of) Britain in 1800, as opposed to comparing India in 1800 to Britain in 1800.
India's average IQ is far too low to merely be a product of not having gone through the full Flynn Effect. Maybe once it's more developed it'll be 86 instead of 76, but India is not going to see IQ scores like we see in East Asia, the gap is too vast.
Crowstep
6mo ago
Yes I was considering talking about the OBR rules, with their explicit assumptions that all immigrants are going to be as productive as natives and the fact that they don't take long term tax and spending into account. All in all a profound failure of the political class, especially since the Boris-wave will all have been granted indefinite leave to remain before the end of the Starmer government. Permanently impoverishing the country for...nothing.
Crowstep
6mo ago
In a UK context, I haven't seen this argument in the wild since 2014 or so
It was pretty much what the Boris/Sunak governments believed privately, if not publicly. Sunak himself thought that if illegal immigration was under control, then the public didn't care what happened to legal migration. The assumption was that a massive increase in legal migration would supercharge tax revenues, reduce inflation (by suppressing wage growth) and give the Tories the best chance at winning the next election.
What they didn't realise is that non-European workers aren't nearly as productive as European workers unless they are heavily selected, which they weren't. Dependents are also unproductive. It was a completely unforced error.
Crowstep
6mo ago
We cracked down hard on the lower classes of migrants workers, so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do.
And as a consequence, there has been a surge in working class wages that are the envy of the developed world, along with large growth in worker productivity.
Meanwhile in the UK and Canada, we've been importing low-skilled workers and their (many) dependents, and all we've got to show for it is skyrocketing house prices, a growing welfare bill and stagnating wages and worker productivity.
Crowstep
6mo ago
but in that irritating British way they don't like politicians saying anything about it or doing anything about it, they just want the problem to go away
I'm unclear about this last sentence. Are you suggesting that the political class could do something about it, but the public doesn't want them to?
Because as you say, the politicians could easily reduce immigration by issuing fewer visas, but there seems to be a post-Blair consense that more immigration = more economic growth (a lie that was put to bed by the Boriswave, or indeed the entire post-2008 economic stagnation).
Crowstep
6mo ago
Caplan is Jewish. If he's wrong, he can just fuck off to Israel. Must be nice to have a backup country...
Rich, intelligent people with powerful passports always have a backup country, whether they are Jewish or not.
Caplan is pretty open about wanting to cultivate his own little bubble and not caring about the rest of the country he's in.
Unlike most American elites, I don’t feel the least bit bad about living in a Bubble. I share none of their egalitarian or nationalist scruples. Indeed, I’ve wanted to live in a Bubble for as long as I can remember. Since childhood, I’ve struggled to psychologically and socially wall myself off from “my” society.
Crowstep
6mo ago
Is there any actual evidence that he specifically has dual loyalties?
He's a citizen of nowhere. I'm sure he'd be just as open to migrating to Israel as he would to Singapore, Switzerland or any of the many tax havens around the world.
Crowstep
6mo ago
The biodeterministic hypothesis effectively asks us to believe that there is some magical property of the 35th parallel
It absolutely does not, that's an absurd strawman.
Nobody is literally 100% biodeterminist (in the sense that your genetics determines things like what language you speak). Biodeterminists believe that genetics matters a lot, not that it is literally the only thing that matters.
Caplan's last point in particular strikes me as either willfully ignorant or completely insane:
I'm never sure what to make of Caplan. He's clearly contrarian enough to acknowledge that genetics and IQ matter (see The Case Against Education) but he also states explicitly that he believes in Magic Dirt (or as he describes it, 'Magic Institutions') in The Case for Open Borders.
He also seems to believe that a migrant increasing his wages by moving to a rich country is actually increasing his productivity, rather than just benefitting from cost disease.
I remember reading one of travel pieces about Japan, and there were a lot of comments asking him to square what he noticed about Japan (the trains run on time, people are hyper-polite, there is no crime) with his support for open borders. The one I remember was something along the lines of 'Should Japan open its borders to Somalia? If yes, is this because it will benefit the Somali migrants or because it will benefit the Japanese?). I can't find the comment now, so I guess he deleted it. But looking here, he seems to be mostly interested in the gains for migrants.
He seems to believe that open borders will turn the whole world into the USA, rather than turning the whole world into South Africa.
Crowstep
6mo ago
Are the English a high IQ society?
The average IQ in Europe is about 100 (tautologically, most of the IQ tests are normed here), the average IQ in India is 76.
What India has (thanks to the caste system) is thousands of different ethnic groups, some of which are clearly very intelligent. It hardly makes sense to talk about Indians as an ethnic group, any more than it makes sense to talk about Americans as an ethnic group.
Could the industrial revolution have started in East Asia if their economic policies and political systems were different? Absolutely. Could it have started in India? I'm skeptical. An intelligent smart fraction (that is kept smart through not intermarrying with the masses) can certainly do a lot (see South Africa), but median must matter too. If it didn't, we would see a lot more wealthy countries than we do.
Crowstep
6mo ago
Wikipedia tells me that Scientific American is published by Springer Nature, a German British publishing house.
Which means that, like the Holy Roman Empire, Scientific American is neither Scientific, nor American.
Or perhaps I should say was, because the magazine's slide into political propaganda hasn't gone unnoticed, and perhaps the editor resigning last month for calling Trump voters fascists was the woke wave cresting. I can't imagine many of the actual contributors to the magazine are happy to have their bylines on a publication that thinks men and women are equally good at sports.
Crowstep
6mo ago
The people who write the rules aren't the same people who enforce them. The individual airline workers don't care if you move things between your bags because it doesn't affect them. As for reasons why the airline might insist on the rules:
- As mentioned below, workplace safety rules
- The assumption that some passengers will pay the fine rather than bother with the hassle
- A means to incentivise passengers to purchase more bags
Crowstep
6mo ago
I assume they didn't choose MLK or Douglass because they're both men. If you have a black quota and a female quota, that limits your selection pool substantially.
Crowstep
6mo ago
The black ones are Amina and Harriet Tubman
Man, deciding to have the two black women leaders being an abolitionist and a colonising, slave-raiding queen who was also an aprocryphal serial killer is choice.
Maybe they wanted to choose Amina and had to put in Tubman in for cover?
Crowstep
6mo ago
Well if we had UBI that was literally universal, then it wouldn't matter whether or not people felt shame, because they'd get the UBI anyway.
I was talking about shame as a protection against, for example, somebody who can easily get a job but chooses to live on unemployment/disability benefits.
Crowstep
6mo ago
I think in a more profound sense this is just the failure of welfare states. Fundamentally, any system that rewards negative outcomes (poverty, illegal immigration, crime, disability) will incentivise people to either adopt those negative outcomes, or to lie about having them. Regular moral hazard, whether for citizens or illegal immigrants.
The three things that can counter this are shame (less powerful in a more atomised society), honesty (less common in a low-trust society) or enforcement (very hard to do).
I was about to post about this, I think the top comment on the subreddit post puts it best.
Between this, Steve Sailer's book tour and Elon letting the world know about the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK, it really does feel like something has shifted. The stuff that edgy rightoids were reading about 10 years ago is now just out there in the open (relatively speaking).
Wokism is over. It overplayed its hand. What comes next? I don't know but I'm excited to find out.
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