DimitriRascalov
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User ID: 450
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
My first reaction when I heard of Musk's plans here was that this does indeed sound a bit harsh, however, that was before I found out that Twitter apparently employs 7500 people. I get that Musk is controversial and has enough of a reputation by now that many people will view his suggestions with instinctive disapproval, but even as someone who doesn't like his personality, I can't help but agree with him here: what are they even doing with 7k people? When was the last time Twitter rolled out a significant feature?
DimitriRascalov
10mo ago
It's likely that the author of the article misread the original study. Here's the source the article was referencing probably, it's the bar chart titled "Zufriedenheit mit der Bundesregierung". 20% are happy or very happy with the current government, the rest is not.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for.
This is definitely a side note to all the other things going in this thread, but I can't help but wonder how this will play out. I just received a notice from my German gas provider and the price per cubic meter has gone up x5, that's on top of a 60% increase in electricity price. Fortunately my wife works at a place where they're legally obligated to keep the heating on, I do WFH and am unusually cold-resistant and whatever else we'll actually consume fits comfortably in our budget, but not everyone has that privilege.
Across Europe, there will be a large number of people that will be unable to pay for some of the basics of life this winter. Assuming that they'll not just be content to lay down and die, this might have serious consequences starting from cascading economic consequences of non-payment of absurd utility bills to populist parties surging in support. Another thing to consider is that this winter we're still able to largely run off of Russian gas which filled our storage tanks over the summer. That won't be the case next winter.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
It wasn't until after Biden's assuming of office that ultra-rapid vaccination rollouts, universally, became the cause celebre of the progressive press
Speaking of Biden, here's a pretty famous quote from July 2021:
You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
I have no doubt that specific scientific writing was clear that a reduction in infections was a probabilistic thing and might wane as time goes on, but here you have the most powerful man in the world, whose administration was trying to mandate the vaccines in various ways and is still requiring them for entering the country as a foreigner, confidently stating that they confer sterile immunity. I'd say that outweighs whatever science reporting or personal anecdotes from upper-class London you can bring to the table.
Throwing in my own anecdotes, the German press was absolutely completely on the same wavelength as Biden here, solid looking and repeated promises about immunity against infection were like 95% of the reason I myself got vaccinated. A common talking point in German (social) media in early 2021 was how Israel had "vaccinated away" its Delta wave. For months on end, even as the divergence steadily shrank and several scandals in data collection undermined its trustworthiness, public health authorities and their lackies in the media obsessed over the differences in unvaccinated and vaccinated case rates, a talking point that is now completely forgotten.
Mainstream COVID discourse was 100% thoroughly permeated with the idea that the vaccines are going to stop transmission up until late summer 2021. This only started to go away in the fall and died completely with the emergence of Omicron.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Barely. As the other post mentioned, it's only until April, but, more importantly, it's only three locations for which no new fuel will be purchased. That means that in January at the latest all three plants will have to greatly reduce their power output in order to be able to run all the way into April, at least according to the company maintaining operations.
It should also be mentioned that this decision was only reached after months of discussion. As late as two days ago it seemed plausible that the original end date (the new year) would stay simply because the parties in the governing coalition couldn't agree on this. It has only happened now because the chancellor used a special and very rarely used provision in German law that allows him to shutdown any debate within the (executive branch of the) government on its course of action.
DimitriRascalov
11mo ago
I'm unsure if this framing illuminates much. If I, without your consent and neither any pressing need nor benefit to you or anyone else, performed a procedure on your house that gives it a <0.01% p.a. chance of spontaneously collapsing the tiny probability of something happening in your lifetime would not be a convincing defence. That the risk is small doesn't matter when there is no reason why anyone should tolerate being exposed to it in the first place, which is a significant difference to things like driving which you brought up in the post above.
DimitriRascalov
10mo ago
Even pro-UA accounts like Julian Röpcke are conceding that Ukraine is losing lots of armored vehicles with very marginal gains.
I don't think this says quite what you seem to want it to say. Röpcke is strongly pro-Ukrainian and fills most of his feed with praise for successful Ukrainian actions, true, but from the very start of the war he has had the tendency to wildly blow the potential consequences of any Russian success out of proportion in order to play up the "desperate Ukrainian heroes repelling the onslaught of the Russian horde"-angle to a hesitant German audience.
Leopards and Bradleys being lost in a weird traffic jam not even at the line of contact is a bad look for sure, but the fact that people like Röpcke immediately went into panic mode over it tells us next to nothing either way.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
How would whatever governing entity that's doing this force the refugees to stay there? Even within rich countries like here in Germany the government bureaucrats tasked with dealing with asylum seekers often find it very hard to keep them in the unknown 10k rural town they were assigned to. There are tons of stories how migrants are sitting in Calais, a completely fine and rich First World city, waiting for an opportunity to make it over to the UK.
That's before considering that the refugees would have to settle next to a potentially aggressive and still dangerous neighbor.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
But what if it goes mainstream, and from subconscious to conscious?
In some ways, it kind of has. The overwhelming consensus in mainstream discourse is the environmental model of intelligence/capability/doing-well-in-modern-society: if you have loving parents, went to a good school/college, had good nutrition etc. you're going to be more likely to be successful in a wide range of metrics and the mentioned things are causally affecting this. At the same time, a common narrative is how certain groups, e.g. ethnic minorities, the poor or people from the Global South have less access to things like Spanish immersion daycare or well-funded schools, i.e. exactly the things that are supposed to boost intellectual capability.
The obvious conclusion when considering these ideas together is that at this very moment, even if it's subject to change and also the result of unethical acts like Colonialism or racial segregation, generally speaking a rich person will be smarter than a poor person, a white one smarter than a black one, a westerner smarter than a third-worlder. This also goes for a lot of other things education/the environment in general is sometimes said to cause in people, e.g. open-mindedness, kindness or critical thinking. Taking the environmental model seriously, all the disadvantaged groups should be seriously lacking in these things, at least in comparison to people with stable finances or those going to Harvard.
Now, obviously no one is shouting exactly that from the roofs in mainstream media. Instead, a popular approach, often documented in this space, has been to say that certain groups are lacking by Western/white standards, but only because those standards were implicitly or explicitly constructed to systematically supress other, equally valid ways of knowing and societal conduct. A well-known incarnation of that idea is the now-removed chart that the NMAAHC had on its website for a short while (1, 2, 3). This isn't quite the same as a full on 4chan IQ-redpill link dump and it's also not attributing anything to genes, but it's still acknowledging significant and pervasive (and therefore hard to change) group differences all the same.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Let's go best case scenario. Even if these immigrants do end up integrating into Western society and adopting their values - I'd say that's definitely still something one should be worried about. Western culture itself seems absolutely intent on stirring up racial animosity between the groups, as well as creating and maintaining a threat narrative that paints whites as being deserving of contempt regardless of whether they actually did anything or not.
Another point here is that even if the ideal version of integrating into Western society works out instead of the one where the different ethnic groups are living in strife, that still leaves such a society on the very same long term path OP is complaining about, unless a lot of other things radically change as well. Migrants who are productive, who attain academic degrees, who don't make constant tribalistic or ethnocentric comments have birthrates very similar to the ones of Western white majorities. The problem of demographic replacement applies to "good" minorities just as well as to whites!
I brought it up on the old place a while ago and it's an illustrative example: probably the most famous and accomplished migrants (of Turkish heritage at least) here in Germany, BioNTech (known through the Pfizer vaccine) founders and married couple Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, have just one child, despite their fabulous wealth. Meanwhile, the Arab crime families of major German cities like the Abou-Chacker- or Remmo-clan are expanding demographically at a fast pace.
The only point I'm making is that receiving a jillion dollars' worth of NATO aid didn't help the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan much, so there's hardly a guarantee it'll help Ukraine.
What does helping Ukraine mean to you? The last big movement of the war, the Kherson retreat, was enabled by Western long range artillery making the supply situation of the Russians on the western side of the Dnepr untenable. There are hours of video material showing how Western weapons are being used effectively by the Ukrainian forces.
The Afghan army, aside from never receiving gear as advanced as Ukraine, had a fundamental issue with morale. This is not the case in the current war AFAICT. The comparison with Afghanistan seems like a stretch to me.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
An interesting related aspect: I was watching this interview with the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman on his Vision 2030 project, basically aimed at propelling Saudi Arabia forward and lessening its dependence on oil (you might have heard of parts of it like NEOM or, most recently, the Line). Right in the opening few minutes, he goes into detail how such a transformation is necessary because (paraphrasing) the Saudi population has grown at such a rapid pace that the living standard secured by fossil fuel wealth is in danger.
He doesn't directly draw a connection to his social reforms, but I was wondering if there might be at least a partial intent there: increase women's liberation, reduce the birth rate, stop his barren desert country from becoming overpopulated.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
That depends on how much of a difference AI will make, doesn't it? If advanced AI enables big American corps to churn out absurdly efficient code or highly advanced machine designs in minimal time, what will sclerotic German companies do?
I used to work at Siemens and half the people employed as programmers there thought that automating things in Excel was black magic, let alone doing basic things in Python with libraries like pandas. The difference in productivity compared to its rivals is small enough that coasting on momentum of past strengths might be sufficient to stay relevant in the present, but strong AI could plausibly make a lot of crusty German institutions obsolete in a way that our lawmakers won't be able to compensate for.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
The 11th and 12th of September are auspicious dates in political Islam as they represent the Caliphate's "high water mark" and end of the Islamic golden age. While it has largely passed from conscious memory in the West, the day that King Sobieski of Poland broke the Siege of Vienna (September 12th 1683) is remembered by many in the Islamic world as a bloody and shameful anniversary, the day that Islam lost it's way.
Do you have a source for that? Because that sounds very unlikely, given that the battles at the end of the Siege of Vienna happened on the 19th and 20th of Ramadan 1094 (9/19) and 9/11 happened on the 23rd of Jumada al-Thani 1422 (6/23) in the Islamic calendar. The correct date would have been the 5th of December 2001 (19th of Ramadan 1422) if the terrorists were after a symbolic message.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Based on the above data I would posit that feminist societies result in fertility rates declining to below replacement rates, but once a country is wealthy it is far worse for the population to remain conservative than for it to be a feminist nation due to the fact that conservative rich nations do far worse on population growth than feminist nations.
Within those less conservative nations, it's the more conservative subset having more children however. In Germany, refugees, recent migrants and obscure evangelical sects have tons of children, everyone else has mostly one, with sizeable minorities having none or two. How would your model explain this? More conservatism on the national level causes lower birthrates, but at the level of broad social subgroups it causes higher ones? Doesn't make sense IMO.
DimitriRascalov
10mo ago
Go on /r/transpassing and sort by top all time. Even the MOST passing transwomen on Reddit as voted for by their own peers don’t pass. And that’s in posed photos!
To be fair, this is not as strong a point as you're making it out to be, given that you already know that each of these people is trans by virtue of the subreddit's name. I agree that many of these pictures look obvious but I'm not sure whether I'd have the same confidence if these were presented in a gallery of portraits of random cis and trans people.
On the rest I agree entirely. It reminds me of this post by @Walterodim. For any given measure men can come arbitrarily close to the female standard, but combine multiple and the difference becomes clear as day almost every time. From a probably highly curated sample like the top posts from your link a number could plausibly be women going by the image alone, but I've never met someone in real life where the full package including voice, stature, body build etc. didn't tip me off immediately.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Not sure how much help it'll be to you, but here's a page containing all the articles the author of the tweet I quoted published for the Rosa Luxemburg institute, which is institutionally and ideologically very close to the "Die Linke" ("The Left") party. Most of this material is German only, but if you switch to English a few have been translated, like this latest one from May 2020.
From what I can tell from reading a few articles, what he's saying here largely conforms with what I've seen elsewhere: dismissal of market based solutions (interestingly, in an article from 2015 carbon taxes are mentioned as a valid tool in tandem with more direct interventions like mandating the phase-out of coal, in the 2020 article however he advocates full on socialization of the means of production as a precondition for success), the need for faster and way more radical action right now (society waking up to the reality of climate change 10 years too alte is a common theme of the newer stuff) and a focus on climate justice aspects, especially with regards to Global North vs. Global South.
So in other words, he's not hoping for an initiative of current governments or private enterprise as anything more than a temporary thing, he wants a total transformation of society along broadly Marxist lines which would then be able to tackle climate change effectively and ethically (I guess, the things he mentions and the party association obviously imply that, but he doesn't mention Marx or communism by name). I'm sure this doesn't reflect on the entire movement, I'd say the median member is much more concerned about climate change than about climate justice, but among the leadership this line of thinking seems very common to me.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
... reads exactly like "race is a social construct" except you're constructing it in a way convenient to your particular (somewhat idiosyncratic) white nationalist sentiments.
That just gets back to the common Motte-and-Bailey of "race is a social construct", doesn't it? On a narrow reading, it clearly is, as OP's personal account of racial categorization provides evidence for. On the reading with the further implication of "... and therefore whatever racial groupings are often used are entirely arbitrary [and have no grounding in biology whatsoever]", which is the one that's often meant when the phrase is used in arguments, I'd say it's clearly not, and OP provides a few reasons to think that, e.g. phenotype or various degrees of admixture.
In other words, I don't see the own-goal here, OP seems clearly aware that racial categorization draws both from cultural attitudes and genetic facts. You could basically read his posts as: "this is my social construction of whiteness, here's why I think it captures something about objective reality and why it's socially useful".
Isn't the obvious objection here that during the first period, citizenship and power in institutions mostly rested with WASPs and similar demographics while in the second one, although immigration had been restricted, now a large share of the native born population consisted of (descendants of) Italians, Irish etc., i.e. ethnic groups that down to the present day have markedly different attitudes towards redistribution or even things like free speech in comparison to English- or German-Americans?
Unless the hope is that quasi-accidental effects like 'diversity reduces societal cohesion -> less unions form -> unions can't interfere with growth' outweigh this, I'd wager that continually adding more people who come from countries that practice more distribution and, when asked in surveys like the GSS, explicitly say that the government should intervene more and reduce income inequality, will in fact eventually result in a society that redistributes more and values economic freedom less.
After we reopened our borders government spending and union participation went back down
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you or you meant spending coming back down from the highs of WWII, this claim doesn't seem true, whether for overall spending or social spending in particular, both of which have a strong upward trend starting in the early 20th century.
DimitriRascalov
9mo ago
There is no ill will against Poland in Germany by and large. Apathy and condescension, yes, but no bad blood. The people from the former eastern territories are dead or soon will be and their descendants don't recognize themselves as such, so basically no one has any real historical grievance against Poland. Negative feelings are reserved for admonishing Poles about LGBT rights or abortion.
There'd be little enthusiasm among the general populace, but if Poland asked and genuinely needed assistance the German government would definitely send help. NATO commitments and ethics aside, they would do it for the sole reason of it being an excellent addition to the post-WW2 German national mythos.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Are German television shows always based in Berlin, or in Munich?
Partially as a result of the defeat in WWII and the Allies' desire to decentralize the German media, Germany maintains a large amount of regional public broadcasters. There are no less than 9 regional TV channels (each covering 1-3 federal states) in addition to two flagship channels (one from Berlin, the other from Mainz) dealing with national and world events (e.g. news or large sports events) plus an additional 10 channels for specific audiences (children) or covering more niche things (high culture, theater, documentaries, that sort of stuff). All of these are broadcasting 24/7. As you can imagine, that's a huge amount of screen time to deal with and especially the regional channels make sure to fill a lot of that with locally relevant stuff.
As an example: the long running and very popular German police crime drama series "Tatort" consists of several different police precincts all across the country, always produced by the respective regional broadcaster. There's even one from Vienna and Zürich. Across the weekly screenings of new episodes throughout the year, a viewer will be taken to big cities such as Berlin or Frankfurt but also smaller towns like Saarbrücken or Weimar.
Apparently, the Battle of Vienna happened on the 1st of September 1682/83 in the Julian calendar (both years are possible depending on where the locality in question puts the date border between years). Mistakenly treating this as a Gregorian date and converting it to the Islamic calendar yields either Shaban 29, 1093 (8/29) or Ramadan 10, 1094 (9/10). However, as stated above 9/11 2001 is 6/23 in the calendar that matters for the terrorists and the Islamic world that is supposedly aggrieved about this date, so neither one fits.
The other way around also doesn't work: mistaking September 11, 1683 for a Julian date converts to Shawwal 3, 1094 (10/3) or Shawwal 15, 1095 (10/15) Islamic.
Maybe I'm getting something wrong or there's another way to spin this, but I don't see it.
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
Is this true? This is what I could find online:
- (via Wiki) This paper from the 90s claims based on census data that between the 60s and 80s intermarriage rates between blacks and whites were much higher in the Western US than in the South. In 1980, 16.5% percent of all marriages involving a black person were with someone from another race on the West Coast in comparison to just 1.6% in the South.
- This map by Pew shows no obvious trend in the South. Metro areas in Texas and Florida have high rates, but basically the same as SF or LA and not that far above Chicago or NY. Elsewhere in the South it looks like average or slightly below to me. (caveat: this is for all races, not just black-white, and it's just urban areas)
- As a proxy for intermarriage, although 56% of all black Americans live in the south, just 41% of mixed-race Americans with black heritage do so. Naively, this seems to point to higher intermarriage rates outside the South, although this might be skewed by internal migration.
DimitriRascalov
5mo ago
France does have birthright citizenship (with some minor, practically pointless limitations), along with a host of cultural habits such as not asking anyone about their race or insisting that everyone with their passport really is a Frenchman. Their outcomes aren't much better than anywhere else in Europe, arguably even worse, given that something like a plurality of race riots in post-1945 European history happened there.
Yes, yes, yes, I know 3rd or 4th generation college educated immigrants are all SJW's who complain about America all the time. Well...what's more American than that?
You seem to imply some sort of seamless assimilation here. That's simply not the case. Persistent differences in voting patterns and political attitudes between post-Hart-Celler immigrants and the legacy population are pretty well known, but even within the ostensibly fully assimilated white group there are significant differences. A US without e.g. Italians or Irish would be much hostile to the welfare state or restrictions on free speech.
Three days ago, my hometown Berlin witnessed an event (German news article) that combines several culture war flashpoints into an almost absurdist melange: a cyclist was driven over by a concrete mixer truck (who was at fault is unclear at the moment, initial statements by the police indicate that the cyclist fell over by her own and that the driver could not react in time, though he might still be at fault for driving too close to her), the driver, as he was leaving his vehicle to call for help, was attacked and wounded with a knife by an unknown and currently fugitive
homeless* person, resulting in him needing hospital care, and finally, to top it all off, the special emergency service vehicle purpose built for rescuing people stuck under heavy vehicles was hindered in its approach to the scene of the accident by a traffic jam caused by climate activists who had glued themselves to one of the main highways of the city, losing valuable time and forcing personnel that had made it to the scene to "improvise", in their own words. The woman has died of her injuries today, the driver will survive, as far as is known.It goes without saying that this story has something for everyone: car drivers vs bikers & new urbanists; crime, homelessness and decay of public spaces; climate activists vs people wanting to go about their day without disruption; and of course the extra comedic cherry on top that this happened in Berlin, notorious for incompetence and embarrassing gaffes.
In the days that followed, several notable people weighed in on social media. One particular take by one of the luminaries of German climate activism quickly made waves on social and legacy media for its display of a pretty cold-bloded pragmatism:
(image of the now deleted original)
Now, this guy in particular was always pretty radical, but until now this exact scenario was always waved away as something improbable that no activist of good conscience would allow to happen. As already mentioned, after the backlash he quickly deleted it and apologized, but his output since then has been to basically affirm the content of the tweet in a more polite tone, and the scene around him seems to agree AFAICT.
The last few months have seen an increase in highly visible stunts by climate activists, most notably a constant flow of people gluing themselves to the glass casings around famous paintings throughout Europe's museums. Highway blockades such as the one from this event are becoming a regular occurrence here in Berlin and other large German cities. It seems as though climate activism is becoming more and more serious. Up until now, reactions have been more annoyed than angry, with most people I talked to or saw posting on social media dismissing these activities as childish stunts. This and the rather unapologetic stance of the people involved might change things a bit. It remains to be seen if the reaction will be a decrease in happenings as activists are slapped down by prohibitive fines or a further radicalization. Demographically, the protestor seem to be a mixture of almost entirely urban and college-educated young people and a few younger Boomers and older Gen-Xers. I don't know if that's the stuff which refinery bombers or electricity-cable cutters are made of, but perhaps an event approaching significant eco-terrorism might be on the horizon.
* I remember reading something to this effect initially, but that seems to have been retracted or deleted. For now, nothing but the assailant's gender is confirmed.
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