DimitriRascalov
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User ID: 450
DimitriRascalov
1mo ago
People still want their country to win, and the reality is there is no ethnically pure replacement for Mbappé or Lamal or Bellingham
I think this is an even weirder problem for progressives than it is for blood-and-soil nationalists, since they're often familiar with more essentialist arguments about human populations. Even accounting for the effects you mention further down, there is no plausible way that a completely football-obsessed nation like England ends up with a selection where unmixed ethnic English players are a minority (all of whom are also either washed like Henderson or soon too old to warrant a call-up), assuming that merit is distributed equally across groups. Same goes for Germany, we had like one black guy in the era from 2006 to 2014, now we're suddenly half black, too (and here too the remaining whites ones are typically on the older side and soon to be replaced).
The obvious implication is that black people are just better at (at least some parts of) football, which clashes with progressive ideas about this topic. Tepid acknowledgements of racial differences in things like fast twitch muscle fibers can pass their watchful eye in sports limited to more singular pursuits like sprinting, but football is too much of a composite between various disciplines that the seeming superiority of blacks in it would sit comfortable with the standard progressive outlook on the reality of ethnic groups and differences between them.
I find this hard to believe if it were generalized. Regardless of the financial vehicle people choose for their retirement, the actual amount of physical resources and labor to fulfill their demands doesn't really change. The material burden caused by 40% of society being unable to work isn't alleviated in any way if all of those people are nominal millionaires due to their portfolios' appreciation over time, prices for elder care, cruises in the Caribbean, the local retirement home's weekly Bingo event etc. would simply adjust upwards according to the actual amount of working age people being able to deliver these things.
Society can't collectively out-save demographic change. The stock market or government pension schemes are different ways to save money, but they're just saving nonetheless, not material solutions to the actual issue. Individually, investing is obviously still the way to go as long as there are enough suckers unaware of or not engaging with these better financial options, but that just elevates your relative standing, it's not a solution for society as a whole.
DimitriRascalov
2mo ago
The issue with this is that elder care-related consumption is reaching a relative share of all expenses that it's starting to eat up all the headroom for robotics or general investment in productive capital. And in that sense, anti-old policies need not be moronic, even for someone who is well aware that they're going to be old one day too. It's better to cut down expenses now and focus them into the things that will ensure the continued ability of the economy to produce goods and services at a sufficient level well into the future where I want to retire too at some point, than to feed the seed corn to the gerontocracy utility monster that we've collectively built in the West and watch society come crashing down as a consequence.
Case in point: here in Germany, even though state spending as a total share of GDP has grown quite slowly in past decades, inside that state spending welfare has greatly displaced capital investment, and while a tiny share of that change is related to stuff like migration and a general propensity towards ever greater gibs, it's basically 100% down to our aging society. It's no coincidence that we have collapsing bridges in major cities, but pensions continually increase above inflation even as the share of pensioners increases.
DimitriRascalov
2mo ago
If HlynkaCG were still here
Bro, come on ... you're not exactly making an effort to hide that he's very much still here. You have the same writing style & opinions as Hlynka, you frequently speak as if you are a long-term part of the community even though you're a relatively new user, your account was created almost immediately after Hlynka's last one was banned, you even spell "their" wrong with the same frequency as Hlynka (and TequilaMockingbird) did!
And I say this not to have the mods ban you again, since I disagree with the permaban and find your posts interesting, but if you want to pretend that you're gone you need to change up your writing, for better or worse (mostly better!) you've got a very distinct voice that is immediately clockable.
[Of course, if you aren't Hlynka then I'm ready to eat crow and apologize]
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
Why would I deny a list of ancient miracle healings performed by Apollo? God loves all His creatures and may bestow on any of us a healing if we try to reach out to Him the way we know how.
Have you read a few of them? They explicitly claim conscious dialogue with both gods in their full pagan, wider-Greek-pantheon persona, i.e. a much stronger and clearer experience compared to Savino sensing the characteristic smell of St. Pio. Unless God used to like to role-play before becoming a dad, this isn't something that you can file away as "God as seen through various cultural filters", it's an alternative provenance of miracle healing that is straightforwardly contradictory to the Christian tradition.
As for the report: I can't imagine how in the world you think that this strengthens the case for the reality of miracle cures. IMO the most telling part is this:
Using all 636 medical miracles for which I have a “diagnosis,” the miracle cures before 1800 were of visible conditions detectable by any- one, laypeople and medics alike: skin disease, fevers, blindness, convul- sions, paralysis, and lameness. In the nineteenth century, the diagnoses amenable to miracle cure concentrated on specific internal organs and on specified fevers, such as tuberculosis.
Why would this change occur? Isn't it extremely suspicious that right as reliable documentation and photography come around, the diseases amenable to miracle cures shift from bombastic stuff like curing blindness and resurrection to much more murky things which, while treatable and sometimes curable with modern medicine, aren't exhaustively understood in their full breadth to this day? Right after this the author makes the argument that stuff like diseases affecting internal organs can only start to appear once medical instruments get good enough to detect them, so it does make sense that these sorts of miracles start to get more prominent in modernity, but that shouldn't stop blind people from seeing or cripples from walking again.
In essence, it seems like all the cool cases of miracle healing have by now mostly ceased and their documentation amounts to basically hearsay, and nowadays, even though we now have good experts observing them and reliable documentation, all we get is much more mundane stuff like a cancer going into highly unexpected remission. That is still remarkable, true, but it's not something that is so outside of the realm of expected outcomes as growing an eye back is. Medicine isn't physics and there are still billions upon billions being poured into grinding away at various diseases to gain a better mechanical understanding of them, we have no equivalent of Maxwell's equations or Newtonian gravity in medicine that would allows us to confidently predict spontaneous changes in extremely complicated micro-biological processes.
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
And then someone would want a scan of the medical records, which I do not have. And so it goes.
But that's a totally legitimate response to a highly unusual claim without much more evidence than a report by a highly biased source. Given what we know about human cognition, social dynamics, the malleability of memory etc. it's completely reasonable to dismiss this out of hand unless a durable record of this miracle, e.g. photos of his blown off skull on the construction site and the happily healed Savino in his hospital bed the next day after, exist. If it weren't, on what grounds do you (presumably, given its pagan association) dismiss this list of ancient miracle healings performed by the gods Asklepios and Apollo at the sanctuary at Epidauros?
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
Because we have agency in shaping that environment to a significant extent, and we can steer it towards (expected) outcomes that align with our values and preferences. Are you similarly confused about eco-conscious people who say we should e.g. try to consume less oil? Like, what's the big deal here, once the oil runs out or the Earth becomes uninhabitable the industrial economy causing this in the first place will collapse, so all's well, it's just selection at work, right? No, obviously most people would prefer that we could somehow alter conditions such that we aren't slaves to a selection process that will consume a lot of things that we value pretty strongly.
DimitriRascalov
3mo ago
Most federal states in Germany have or used to have a three-track model. When it was designed back during the Kaiser's time the idea was that track one ought to take like 60% of the student population and instill mostly the basics, track 2 should take 30% and give the foundations for becoming a low-to-mid-level engineer, skilled tradesman, competent basic white collar worker etc., and track 3 the elite rest destined to go to the top of society.
Nowadays, due to the exact drift you describe, track 1 is for the dumbest of the dumb, track 2 for the ever so slightly less dumb, and everyone else crams into track 3. Some states have recognized this reality and simply abolished the formal distinction between the three types and have allowed every school, even those from the former track 1, to hand out the necessary certification for tertiary education, which they of course eagerly give to basically everyone (the average grades for this Abitur exam, the German equivalent to the French Baccalauréat or the UK's A-Levels, have skyrocketed over the past decades, even as a bigger percentage of the population takes it and overall scores in more objective tests like PISA have declined pretty badly).
The only way a tracked system works out is if the people maintaining it are willing to accurately filter students. Since there are about a trillion arguments that move typical Western minds, particularly those attracted to the education system, to immediately stop doing this ("it's too early set someone's life in stone!", "the only reason I sucked in school is because my teachers were mean/racist/sexist" etc. pp.), no institutional (re)form will fix this unless the overall culture moves back to being fine with distinguishing people very clearly on their revealed cognitive abilities.
DimitriRascalov
4mo ago
Which promise are you talking about? In most countries the payouts from state run pension schemes have some hard lower boundaries but are otherwise subject to the whims of the legislature and the courts. Few systems keep a personalized account that creates concrete contractual financial claims.
Even disregarding that, the promise you're asking the state to keep is not the same promise that was in effect when the Boomers were young. You can look up how much of an average worker's wage bill went to elderly welfare in e.g. 1950, 1980 or today and notice a steep increase, the idea that what's being asked of today's workers is somehow equivalent to what the current recipients paid in is ludicrous.
Regarding point 2, I'm obviously not endorsing concentration camps for the old, but you're overlooking an element of vague generational moral culpability in this. The current and soon-to-be recipients of elder welfare grew up in demographically healthy or at least stable societies, and the problems with the systems that are now slowly breaking apart have been known for their entire lives, and this has been discussed ad nauseam out in the open for decades!
Yes, theoretically current young people will be in a similar position themselves later on, especially considering their even worse birth rates, but given that they already grew up in a heavily demographically imbalanced society they have much less economic slack to maneuver and a ton more social inertia to fight against to meaningfully reform these systems, with the numbers being the way they are in a democracy it's a coup-complete problem. Either you wait until you yourself can benefit marginally or you hope the eventual collapse will bring an opportunity for improvement. Meanwhile, current old people had fewer elderly people to take care of (thanks to two world wars) and fewer children to raise, they were in an historically uniquely ideal position to set up the system in a way that is more sustainable. But across the entire West they didn't, they went into a socio-economic disaster with open eyes.
DimitriRascalov
4mo ago
There's a substantive difference here in that Nick would have much more agency in deciding his mom's living standard and consequently the hit to his own if he had to take care of her by himself. The state is going to send thugs to collect his money regardless of whether voters, who increasingly consist of the beneficiaries of this, decide to be reasonable or to utterly drain the remaining workers.
Then there's an argument to be made that socializing these sort of costs is part of the reason why there won't be enough workers in the first place. If socialized retirement systems only covered hard and sympathetic edge cases and otherwise you'd have to rely on relations to sustain you in your old age, maybe the idea that you can forego reproduction and just stack green paper in the expectation of having your consumption needs fulfilled in the far future would be less seductive to the masses.
DimitriRascalov
4mo ago
The amount of energy that goes into both making and maintaining solar panels is so enormous, that the net gain we get back from those panels before they expire is paltry.
Can you show your work here? Just googling "solar panels lifetime EROI" gives me tons of papers that come to the exact opposite conclusion, even including storage to make it more comparable. Given that EROI figures are easily manipulated that's not strong evidence either way, but a great many countries have rolled out solar at scale so I tend towards believing it to be roughly true. If it were not, what would those countries' motive be to do this? I've heard arguments to the effect of "China is subsidizing the panels to hide their ineffectiveness as a scheme to wreck their opponents' economies", but they're building out solar capacity massively as well, so if energy-wise solar is a long-term zero sum scam, they've fallen for it too.
DimitriRascalov
4mo ago
Gays have lower fertility than straights, so surely we will have no gays at all within a few generations!
Why is that implausible? Until fairly recently, if you were (marginally) gay, you were unlikely to act on it, because the social environment heavily discouraged you. This meant that carrying a hypothetical gay gene wouldn't depress your fertility all that much, since the overwhelming influence of the default social script would still push you towards having the standard 1-3 children surviving into adulthood.
That social script has now expanded to include being openly gay and significantly decreased the pressure to have children, so many more people that in earlier times would have just kept their romantic thoughts about their same-sex neighbor to themselves can now actually live out their preferences. Consequently, the fertility of people with genes that make them gay, after having survived centuries of open repression, now crashes close to 0. A similar argument can be made for other formerly oppressed behaviors that are associated with low fertility, e.g. being trans or queerness in general.
Note that I don't have any clue as to whether a gay gene really exists or how much it eventually influences the expression of sexuality, but our environment changed so much w.r.t. to gay rights that it's not impossible that the selection pressures at play here have changed massively as well.
DimitriRascalov
5mo ago
That's true, but it's not like it's impossible to broadly survey the alignment and publicly held ideological stances of feminists in general and to notice that the average feminist holds views that would put them into the center-left at least, if not further to the left. Notably, in modern times this part of the political spectrum is strongly correlated with stances on migration that directly imply that the West, particularly Europe, will become much more Muslim towards the end of the century. How e.g. 35% Muslim France is going to be compatible with the ostensibly central ideological tenets typically held by feminists is, to put it mildly, an open question.
Blaming specific negative consequences of (Muslim) migration like the rape gangs on feminists directly is unfair, in that I agree, but it's quite clear that the average feminist is pretty much all-aboard with the political program that brought those rape gangs here, is in fact quite likely to advocate for accelerating that program, and has no plausible, pragmatic & politically viable plan to ensure that it's not going to get worse as the prominence of Islam increases as the direct consequence of that program. For that, I think it is fair to blame feminists.
DimitriRascalov
8mo ago
But most people do in fact not plant trees. The vast majority of economic activity produces things that are either consumed almost immediately or can't be conserved for the time scales relevant to retirement. A worker in a power plant can't store up lots of kilowatt hours to then use them up over his retirement 30 years later, for there to be electricity at that point there needs to be a new, younger worker taking his spot and giving up a share of his production.
Financial abstractions like saving only work out if the material economy on which the financial stuff is making a claim on continues to exist up to the point in time where the saver wants to convert green paper into actual goods or services. The causal mechanism isn't saving, it's having children and ensuring that they become productive participants of the economy.
The administrative elite of the empire disproportionately hailed from the European conquests (far more Grand Viziers were Albanians, Georgians or Greeks than Anatolian Turks or Arabs), commerce was largely run by Jews, Greeks and Armenians, and the elite itself had European concubines and wives from very early on (the early Ottoman dynasty tree features several captured Greek noblewomen, and later we have the ethnically half Ukrainian/Ruthenian Selim II.; this behavior was mirrored widely in the non-royal part of the elite as well).
Essentially, the apparatus keeping the empire running was highly disproportionately European, and the wielders of power themselves, while they definitely weren't European in a cultural sense, became more and more European(-adjacent) genetically as time went on. "Pure" Turkic steppe warrior ancestry in the elite was probably already washed out from mixing with local Hellenized Anatolians, Kurds and Armenians before the Ottomans really got started as a serious power, similar to what happened to the original Hungarians.
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