Crowstep
1d ago
Is there a secret to being able to actually understand what's going on in those books?
I'm as big a wordcel as you would expect someone who hangs out on this forum to be, but I cannot for the life of me finish Master and Commander. It feels like I'm a teenager being forced to read Shakespeare and not understanding the Early Modern English.
Do I need to persevere until my brain just gets it? Get ChatGPT to summarise the chapters for me? Re-read every sentence? Is there any trick beyond 'be less dumb'?
Crowstep
1d ago
Crowstep
5d ago
Another similar businessman, Elon Musk just tried his hand in politics obviously without the guiding hand of such a woman. Look how that turned out for him
Elon Musk married to a socially competent woman who he actually listens to would be a powerful thing.
Instead he has a weird harem and spends too much time on twitter.
Crowstep
5d ago
Long term I think more expensive food/meat is unlikely. We reached peak farmland in the late 90s. Since then we've been growing more food on less land. Future technologies aren't going to make food more expensive to produce, obviously, but AI and greater use of GMOs can definitely make it less expensive. And the world's population is likely to peak in the 2050s, with declines in the developed world way before then.
Of course, the birth rate and population collapse could also crash the global economy, making us much poorer overall. But I still suspect that food is something that will stay cheap or get cheaper.
Crowstep
5d ago
I mean, at least one, on this forum.
As one of the HBDers that you deride, my position is that HBD is a thing that we should take into account when looking at the world. It's not the only thing, but it is one of the main things. Pretending that all ethnic groups are identical blank slates is wrong and leads to bad outcomes.
But I've yet to see an HBDer in the wild who ignores everything else. He's a strawman for people like you who aren't willing to say 'all races and ethnic groups have identical IQ' but still force everyone to debate as if that were the case.
You've done away with any entitlement noncitizen babies have to citizenship, but in the process also removed any entitlement citizen babies have to citizenship.
No I haven't.
Would you agree that if the state is to give out citizenship on exclusively a rational basis.
I reject the idea that states could or should give out citizenship to reward prosocial behaviour, as least as the primary mechanism. It's not practical. Every nation has its indigenous underclass, and they need to have citizenship somewhere.
I think that the citizen body should reflect the nation (typically, an ethnic group that shares a landmass, although there are of course immigrant nations like those in the Americas which have to use fuzzier definitions). My ideal citizenship laws would be those practiced by the Gulf states, where citizenship can only be inherited from citizen parents and never given out to the children of non-citizens. Dual nationality isn't allowed. Failing that, simply getting rid of birth right citizenship would be good.
I'm not suggesting anything radical. I'm suggesting that the countries of the Americas abandon a system which produces an obvious moral hazard and do what the rest of the world does.
As far as I can tell, the real core of this story is that children that were found orphaned in Russian-captured territory were put in the Russian orphanage system, which seems like a normal thing to do.
Russia could have returned them to Ukraine. Russia is happy to do extensive prisoner swaps, so why not allow innocent children to go?
Because the regime does not believe that is What Russia Should Do with Ukraine.
How ironic that taking this belief to its logical conclusion with the Boriswave will probably be the thing that kills off the party entirely.
Although I'm still pretty skeptical that it was clearheaded pragmatism that made the party govern left and talk right on immigration. David Cameron could have reduced non-EU immigration to literally zero and still have hundreds of thousands of EU workers coming in every year to flood the labour market. Instead he decided that not only did we need Polish plumbers, we also apparently needed inbred Pakistanis and violent Africans. He could have reduced the worst categories of immigration and all that would have happened was a reduced welfare and policing bill. But he didn't, because he found doing so distasteful.
Mike Jones' piece in the Critic is more convincing to me. The (parliamentary) party never wanted or intended to reduce immigration. They are primarily elites who want to impress other elites. They don't actually believe that massive third world immigration is damaging to the country.
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