Esperanza
10mo ago
Those terms are meta-exclusionary. They only exclude people who try to exclude others. This is reminiscent of Popper's intolerance of intolerance.
I expect you can come up with new examples that are not meta in this way, but of course, offhand, I cannot.
Esperanza
9mo ago
Let's say the ultra-elite in the US is something like 10,000 families. That's accounting for the roughly 700 billionaires, a larger number of 9-digit millionaires, some political elites, some cultural elites, and a few odds and ends. If 1/4 of those have a kid in college at any given time, that's say roughly 2500 ultra-elite students in college at any moment.
3% of Harvard are from the 0.1 percentile. That is 50 kids per grade. The threshold to get into the top 0.1% by income is supposedly $1.6M. These people are not rich or elite in a meaningful way. The top 0.01% have a threshold income of $7.5M, and these are comfortably well off. There are about 16k of these families. One thing worth remembering is that almost all very rich people are very, very old, so their grandkids are the ones going to college, not their kids. If there are 50 kids from the 0.1% then there are perhaps 5 to 10 from the 0.01 percentile, the people you would consider elite.
From personal experience, there are about that many actually rich American kids at these colleges, and perhaps the same number, or more, of rich foreign kids.
Esperanza
10mo ago
they had rich rulers
There is no question, that Mansa Musa, King of Mali, was immensely rich.
impressive art
This is more questionable. Here are some highlights from Met. Which do you consider impressive?
What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace
The model African model of a strong man extracting wealth is only possible because of Western (or recently Chinese) trade. The ruler can now exchange what he takes from his people for useful things. Prior to being able to trade with the developed world, there was little reason to oppress the populace as they had nothing (save some daughters) that was particularly worth much to the ruler. It takes a lot of organization and manpower to extract rents from the poor.
Esperanza
10mo ago
Parkinson suggested the following test to reduce the number of candidates for an attractive position:
Let us suppose that the qualities deemed essential are (i) Energy, (2) Courage, (3) Patriotism, (4) Experience, (5 )Popularity, and (6) Eloquence. Now, it will be observed that all these are general-qualities which all possible applicants would believe themselves to possess. The field could readily, of course, be narrowed by stipulating (4) Experience of lion-taming, or (6) Eloquence in Mandarin. But that is not the way in which we want to narrow the field. We do not want to stipulate aquality in a special form; rather, each quality in an exceptional degree. In other words, the successful candidate must be the most energetic,courageous, patriotic, experienced, popular, and eloquent man in thecountry. Only one man can answer to that description and his is the only application we want. The terms of the appointment must thus be phrased so as to exclude everyone else. We should therefore word the advertisement in some such way as follows:
Wanted– Prime Minister of Ruritania. Hours of work: 4 A.M. to 11.59 P.M. Candidates must be prepared to fight three rounds with the current heavyweight champion (regulation gloves to be worn). Candidates will die for their country, by painless means, on reaching the age of retirement (65). They will have to pass an examination in parliamentary procedure and will be liquidated should they fail to obtain 95% marks. They will also be liquidated if they fail to gain 75% votes in a popularity poll held under the Gallup Rules. They will finally be invited to try their eloquence on a Baptist Congress, the object being to induce those present to rock and roll. Those who fail will be liquidated. All candidates should present themselves at the Sporting Club (side entrance) at 11.15 A.M. on the morning of September 19. Gloves will be provided, but they should bring their own rubber-soled shoes, singlet, and shorts.
It is very hard to find a test that will distinguish the people who want the job from the people who really, really want the job. For an actress, the major issues that come up are a willingness to get naked on camera and pretending to engage in quite atypical actions (for some reason, this seems to be the sticking point for most actresses. They object to nude scenes, but not to killing people, defacing works of art, or jaywalking). How can you test if an actress is willing to do this? Some things come to mind but are significantly weirder than the casting couch.
Feminists will doubtless suggest that movies should not have gratuitous nudity. That raises the question as to whether the nudity is gratuitous or not. My guess is that Gwyneth Palthow's performance in Shakespeare in Love would have been received differently if she had worn more clothing, and thus Weinstein got the job done. Julia Roberts, who was supposed to get the role had a policy of keeping her top on. I could be completely wrong about this, but there certainly is a trend for more female nudity after a lull. We are now back to 70s-era levels of nudity in films, and especially in cable channels (or whatever they are called now), and possibly beyond that. Hollywood could be wrong, and perhaps more people would watch movies if there was less nudity, but "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." The same perhaps applies to morals.
Esperanza
10mo ago
This makes the assumption that normal humans treat sex like ordinary financial transactions. This assumption is false.
I don't think Hollywood actors are normal people. Asking the actress for money would not be the same kind of test at all. You need a test that will show that the actress is willing to do whatever it takes. Acting is weird, and people do things in movies that are very out of character, as people like watching strange things. Furthermore, directors think that they know best and want people who will do what they say.
Consider Ms Depp's recent show, The Idol, (which to be honest, I have not watched). My faith in humanity suggests that less than 1% of women would consider acting in that role. Much of modern film is probably indistinguishable from pornography on set at times.
I think that the casting couch is deeply immoral, but I understand why it reliably selects actresses who are desperate and willing to do anything to get and keep a role. There is a difference between understanding how something functions and approving of it.
Esperanza
9mo ago
There is a difference between the Waters Of The United States and the navigable waters. The navigable ones are the ones that can be used for interstate commerce, and the ones connected are the WOTUS. "a relatively permanent body of water connected to traditional interstate navigable waters);"
The court did not claim that wetlands were navigable, just that the clean water act applied to them.
Esperanza
9mo ago
Perhaps I could have phrased this a little better. The point is that people who earn $2M a year are by no means "the elite." By the time you are in the 0.01% you are probably at least on first-name terms with a lot of actually elite people.
The modal person with an income of $2M probably owns some car dealerships. This might make him a big shot in his town, but it does not make him elite.
Esperanza
10mo ago
Since the casting couch is by its nature implicit rather than explicit, there's never any guarantee that satisfying the guy's demands will get the desired outcome.
It is common to pay people for attempts rather than for successes, as the former is more under their control. I can't see why it is wrong to pay an agent money to promote your book, even if the agent might not get you a book deal. I don't think you can claim book agents and Harvey Weinstein are wrong for the same reason. The same applies to most agents, sports included.
"Must perform sex acts on producer"
The requirement is that the actress must be able to plausibly fake being interested in having sex with Weinstein et al. That requires real talent and is an actual test of acting. Allegedly, most Hollywood actresses meet this bar.
Even when it does happen, there's rarely any explicit demand for sex;
Do you know this? My sources claim that people are very explicit about expectations. Actresses have agents who set these meetings up, and they explain in great detail, what is expected. For every John, there is a pimp.
Luckily all this will be made moot by AI. No-one, and I mean no-one, is going to ask the AI developer for sex, (except the sexbot that AI developer him(or her)self made).
Esperanza
10mo ago
Producers are the usual people to run a casting couch, and they normally own a large part of the production company.
The casting couch was more common under the studio system, but I do not know if the movie moguls were the ones on top at the time: They were Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Bros., Adolph Zukor at Paramount, William Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck (at 20th Century Fox from 1935), Carl Laemmle at Universal, and Harry Cohn at Columbia.
If someone has to have sex with the new young starlets, I imagine the job, like most difficult things, is past off to the guy in charge. If you want something done, ask a busy person.
Esperanza
10mo ago
a professional from the pornographic industry
Why is Weinstein not a professional at this? Allegedly he has been doing it for years. He is like the Robert Parker of actresses. Parker's big advantage in wine tasting was that he had tasted all these allegedly fabulous vintages that are no longer available. Who but Weinstein could compare the charms of actresses across the decades.
Esperanza
9mo ago
Also casual sex tends to be a mediocre experience for women
How do you compare the experience of the two sexes. Tiresias at least experienced both conditions and voted conclusively for being a women, though it cost him his sight. "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only."
I wonder which trans people prefer. Are there cases where transwomen feel that they have lost out in switching teams? Similarly, do trans men feel they are on to a good thing? My guess is that this effect is swamped by other issues.
Esperanza
10mo ago
The oppression was done by loyalists, but the specific atrocities, Balymurphy and Bloody Sunday, were done by the British Army and the Parachute Regiment in particular. Operation Demetrius, when 2000 men were interned, was a British Army operation, so is definitely the fault of Westminster.
Esperanza
11mo ago
One problem with suburbs is that they don't generate that much economic/tax revenue to support their infrastructure
That can be solved by raising property taxes. In California, prop 13 makes this difficult, as the old rich people are grandfathered in (or whatever the new term is supposed to be).
Esperanza
10mo ago
Ancient Greek and Rome had perhaps 90% of men engaging in sex with young men. This seems high to me, but I must accept that there have been substantial genetic changes in humanity since that time or 90% of men would engage in homosexual acts if society told them it was normal.
There were extensive incursions of Germanic tribes that did not routinely engage in homosexual sodomy, but gene analysis does not support enough of a change to suggest that the behavioral difference is genetic. At least, that is my understanding.
Ovid was out of step with Roman society, and Juvenal, Martial, Stabo, and Lucian, in suggesting that sex with women was superior. It seems that most Roman men, perhaps almost all, preferred to have sex with teen boys rather than women.
It seems that Roman homosexuality came from Greek influence in the second century BC. I think this strongly suggests that homosexuality can be culturally nurtured. I wonder what the upper limit it. In Ancient Rome and Greece it seemed remarkably high. I wonder if there is a more modern society where more than 50% of men engage in gay sex? Perhaps Arab societies?
I find this weird, but I suppose it is just as strange as realizing that I would be a pious Muslim or enjoy eating fermented herring should I have been born in different circumstances.
Esperanza
10mo ago
Weinstein was the co-owner (with his brother) and founder of Miramax, the production company that made Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction, Heavenly Creatures, Flirting with Disaster, and Shakespeare in Love. It was his money on the line.
Esperanza
10mo ago
it is not necessarily in the interests of the producers of the film.
This is why producers are the ones who run the casting couch, presumably. It is their money on the line, so they make the decision.
As Wikipedia says:
Predominantly male casting directors and film producers use the casting couch to extract sex from aspiring actors in Hollywood, Bollywood,[3][4] Broadway, and other segments of the industry.
Neither [3] nor [4] give any evidence for the claim "Predominantly". If there is a female producer or casting director using the couch, she is flying under the radar.
Esperanza
11mo ago
The entire premise of the book is an attempt to explain why people in Papua New Guinea have so little while white people have so much. Do you recall him addressing the argument that you would get if you posed that question here?
Jared Diamond’s journey of discovery began on the island of Papua New Guinea. There, in 1974, a local named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question:
“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
Diamond realized that Yali’s question penetrated the heart of a great mystery of human history -- the roots of global inequality.
Diamond knew that the answer had little to do with ingenuity or individual skill. From his own experience in the jungles of New Guinea, he had observed that native hunter-gatherers were just as intelligent as people of European descent -- and far more resourceful.
Diamond just knew that it had nothing to do with "ingenuity or individual skill." He did not have to prove that; he just knew it.
His answer is fabulous, as it presumes that animals and plants can be radically different depending on the continent they are in (hence zebras and horses) but denies that any such difference could exist between people from different continents. A zebra is from Africa, and we can presume that it cannot be domesticated because of its genetics, but genetics only work for plants and animals. We could never countenance such a claim about an African person.
He completely fails to engage with the other side and refuses to even consider the possibility that some countries did well because of individual decisions. It has to be geography that matters, not decisions made by people. Even on this point which he believes because of Marxism, he can not be consistent, as he blames China not dominating the seas on the decision of a single emperor. Basically, he is a hack that refuses to argue.
Esperanza
8mo ago
The recent huge increase in the percentage of people who are LGBT suggests that at least bisexuality is a choice for 1 in 5 women. The number of gays is up 4x, and lesbians 11x since the silent generation.
The new narrative is that orientation is a spectrum. Perhaps this is true. Male homosexual acts were commonplace in Ancient Greece and Rome and I think this suggests that at least 50% of men would engage in homosexual acts if it were fully normalized. This seems very high bit I can't explain the ancient world without people being quite flexible.
Esperanza
9mo ago
If post-op trans women prefer sex as a woman rather than a man, then I would consider this strong evidence that the woman's role is more enjoyable.
I agree that the sexual experience is probably very different, but my sense is that it would be better for natal women than trans women.
Similarly, if post-op trans men enjoy sex more as men, then that would be evidence the other way. Here are a bunch of transmen talking about sex. They seem hornier and more comfortable, but none claim that the sex is better. In contrast, a plurality of transwomen seem to enjoy sex post-op more.
Esperanza
9mo ago
IQ is gender normed, but that does not mean there are no differences between men and women on specific subtasks. I know it is illegal to have certain tests for jobs unless they are needed for the role, as otherwise, it is too easy to discriminate against women.
Esperanza
10mo ago
This makes me question claims that homosexuality was widespread in ancient Greece and Rome.
I question it too, but the evidence seems pretty strong. In Rome, it was definitely socially normal to have penetrative gay sex with young boys. That suggests that their society was very different from ours and perhaps suggests that we have a lot further we could go in that direction.
Esperanza
10mo ago
You can't conclude much about unwillingness to do other things, which includes simulating sex, based on unwillingness to sleep her way into the job.
Girls who are willing to sleep with people for roles are usually willing to simulate sex on screen. At least, that is what I am told. To be honest, I find the idea that there would be a strong correlation between the two things plausible. They both involve sex.
Esperanza
10mo ago
you can't conclude much about unwillingness to do other things based on unwillingness to sleep her way into the job.
Much of the difficult things that actresses are asked to do involve simulating sex. Hence Ms. Depp in the above post. Game of Thrones pushes the line a little beyond simulating at times. If actors were made fight other people with swords, joust (incidentally, the only jousting school is in LA. Can you guess why?), jump out of planes (with and without parachutes), and scale high buildings, cliffs, etc. then this might be analogous. Some actors actually do these things, and allegedly their movies are the better for it. You test actresses with sex as that is the thing they are most likely to balk at on the actual job.
For example, just today Joanna Lumley complained about nudity in movies.
Esperanza
10mo ago
Charles C. Tansill
is a revisionist historian, for what it is worth.
In the 1930s, Tansill was a staunch isolationist, arguing that the United States should not participate in World War II.[1] At the same time, he was an advisor to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.[2] In 1952, Tansill published Back Door to War, a book about the war.[1][6] According to A. S. Winston, Tansill, "blamed Franklin Roosevelt for forcing a peace-minded Hitler into war and used the standard Rudolph Hess line that Hitler wanted only a free hand to deal with Bolshevism in the East."[1] Tansill went on to argue that it was Roosevelt who persuaded Neville Chamberlain to assure Poland that it would be defended by Britain if it was attacked by Germany, which happened in 1939 during the German invasion of Poland.[2] Winston goes on to suggest, "The book became a foundation for revisionist history of World War II."[1]
Barnes is similar, if a little kookier.
In his 1947 pamphlet, "The Struggle Against The Historical Blackout", Barnes claimed that "court historians" suppressed that Hitler was the most "reasonable" leader in the world in 1939, and that France's Premier Édouard Daladier wanted to commit aggression against Germany, aided and abetted by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Edward Raczyński
was later President of Poland in exile and is a reputable figure. "he provided the Allies with one of the earliest and most accurate accounts of the ongoing Holocaust". A statement by him should be believed in this matter.
Łukasiewicz
was a marginal figure who committed suicide in 1951. I find him credible, but much less so than Raczyński. However, Wacław Jędrzejewicz is a completely solid figure, awarded many honors and was a professor at Wellesley.
Tyler Kent, a fascist (in the sense he was a member of a fascist organization, the Right Club), was convicted of spying as he leaked documents to the Germans.
At his trial, Kent also admitted he had taken documents from the US Embassy in Moscow, with the vague notion of someday showing them to US senators who shared his isolationist, antisemitic views.
Wikipedia says:
Isolationist groups in the United States claimed he had been framed and that the trial was an attempted cover-up of an attempt to get the US to join the war. The documents, finally released in 1972, did not support this claim. The papers that Kent had purloined indicated British-American naval co-operation, but they also showed that Roosevelt was not prepared to go further without support from the US Congress or the public.
but this ends with "citation needed" so it is unsourced.
Overall, if the source that says Raczyński vouched for them is accurate, then I believe the documents are accurate. I find the claims of Kent, Tansill, and Barnes unconvincing, as I would expect them to make those claims. I would also place significant weight on Jędrzejewicz, but he was reporting on someone else's beliefs as I read it.
I hate when people mix reliable figures with others that are completely partisan.
Alternatively, an actress who refuses the casting couch does not really want the role, and will be trouble on set. The casting couch is a quick and reliable way to see if actresses are biddable. Can you think of a better test to see if an actress is willing to do what the director asks her to?
I wonder what the corresponding task you should set a man is? Perhaps very similar.
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