FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
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User ID: 1739
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
Kind of seems like they're trying to change the conditions. That 9 step plan they started off with in 2007 consisted of:
(i) research on the prevalence, risk, and protective factors for suicidal behaviors; (ii) increased public awareness; (iii) human resources for early intervention; (iv) community efforts for mental health; (v) better access to mental healthcare; (vi) supportive community environments; (vii) prevention of suicide reattempts; (viii) support for persons bereaved by suicide; and (ix) enhanced public–private partnerships.
Seems like doing more to treat depression, improving access to mental healthcare, and creating supportive community environments are all ways of changing the conditions. What would you want them to do?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
Kind of seems that that is exactly what they are doing: providing mental health services, attempting to find ways to reduce social isolation, trying to change social norms so that literal oblivion does not look like such a nice choice in comparison to social disgrace, etc.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
It's popular because the financial benefits are great: for many (maybe even most) veterans the care they get through the VA system is either free or close to it. And the VA Community Care Network program means that for outpatient stuff you can actually get seen by a non-VA doctor and the VA wills still pay the whole bill (there are hoops you have to jump through, but a lot of people are motivated to jump if it means they don't have to pay a cent of their healthcare bills).
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
Suicide is a form of murder: self-murder. We make efforts to stop murders, we should make efforts to stop suicide. Overall, society must signal disapproval of suicide. Cultures that honor or otherwise approve (even the implied approval of not bothering to do anything about it) fall into failure modes that our current society doesn't, without much obvious benefit. See Imperial Japan, for instance, which continued fighting long past the point where there was no hope of victory because their culture venerated honorable death over defeat. It did their society active harm. Their suicide rate remained high up until around 2010, when it began to drop and has continued to drop until today, where the suicide rate is actually a little less than the United States (it went from a high of 25.6 per 100K people in 2003 to around 12.2 today, compared to the US's 14.5).
Why did suicide rates drop so significantly in Japan? Well, in 2007 the government released a nine-step plan to lower suicide rates. Since then they funded suicide prevent services, suicide toll lines, mental health screenings for postpartum mothers, counseling services for depression, and in 2021 created a Ministry of Loneliness whose job is to reduce social isolation. In other words, when the Japanese government tried to make a societal effort towards preventing suicide, suicide rates dropped.
Which is good, because Japan needs every citizen it can get. Population is still dropping, and everyone who kills themselves can no longer contribute to society nor create and raise society's next generation.
If you're talking about actual speechcraft: as in, oratory, speechifying, talking out loud to a crowd, etc, then I have one piece of advice that it seems people desperately need: stop saying "Um"! Or "Um" derivatives such as "like", "er", "you know", "really", etc. It seems like everybody I hear give a speech can't help but pepper the whole speech with them. Trump is a notable exception, but he gives so many speeches that it's expected he would get the basics right.
There is a method which can cure you of this common bad habit. It was performed on my by my venerable public speaking professor, and I can testify to it's efficacy. Get a friend, and give them a bell; one of those bells you see at reception desks, where you give it a good whack on top and it lets out a loud ring. Then start talking. It doesn't matter what, any kind of monologue will do as long as it's not memorized. Tell them to ring the bell every time you let out a filler word. That's it. After doing a few sessions of this your filler words will be gone. Just make sure the bell is loud enough to be a bit startleing.
As far as writing goes, I can only pass on the advice of the great C. S. Lewis (who, whatever anyone thinks of him, was undoubtedly as successful and extremely effective writer). Here is a cosolidated list of his writing advice, gathered from a few different sources:
- Always try to use language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.
- Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
- Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
- Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please, will you do my job for me.”
- Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
From time to time I have had sudden bouts of insecurity because I never had an experience like that when I met my wife, or when we were dating. So when people talk about “love at first sight” I get uncomfortable. I’m a romantic at heart, and I like the idea of falling desperately in love with someone like that, but that’s not what happened to me. I was not especially attracted to her when I met her, no more than any other young woman. I grew to love her slowly, as I got to know her. I love her deeply today: I would die for her if I had to. But I never “fell for her”, so to speak.
Of course I never fell for anyone else either. There have been three times in my life that I saw a woman and was struck by her beauty. I felt strongly physically attracted to her: infatuated might be a good word. But I wanted to bed those women, not love them. Two of them were complete strangers whose character was unknown to me. The third I had a conversation with, and discovered she was not the kind of person I wanted to have a discussion with, much less live with. It was lust only.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
Who ever said it was acceptable? It wasn’t: sodomy was a sin and a crime, both for the sodomizer and the sodomized. It’s just that the sodimizer wasn’t considered to be homosexual. He’s just a guy who stuck his penis in the wrong place, like someone who commits beastiality. They wouldn’t consider someone who shtups sheep a zoophile with a sexual identity, he’s just a guy who did a sex crime.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
In 19th and early 20th century Britain you were a homosexual if you liked to be penetrated by men, but if you were the one doing the penetrating you were not considered homosexual. This is similar to the culture of the Roman empire, which saw nothing wrong with man penetrating another man but considered being penetrated to be shameful. All that to say, the conception of the "gay man" as being someone who wants to have any kind of sexual activity with other men is historically quite recent.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
Most people with dormant TB don't know that they have TB: getting to keep their money isn't worth them spreading antibiotic resistant TB.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
You know how every time there's a new potential pandemic you hear about how new diseases are deadlier because the pathogen is not adapted to human hosts? And how a well adapted pathogen doesn't want to kill the host, it wants to live in the host long enough to propagate to other hosts?
TB is arguably the most human adapted pathogen out there. It has our immune system beat six ways from Sunday, kills slowly over an extended period of time, and can lie dormant for years before becoming active again (which means healthy people you let through customs may have a passive infection, and will only turn active and contagious later when they're already in the country). It is also arguably the most difficult bacterial infection to cure. You need to be on multiple powerful medications with significant side effects (including potential blindness) for 6-9 months in order to cure it.
If a TB strain managed to become resistant to one of those medications then it may not be possible to cure it, not without new drug development. In the US we've managed to mostly extirpate the disease at great cost over many years of effort. If an antibiotic resistant strain showed up it could undo decades of progress in US health.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
Sadism by definition has a sexual component. People use is a bit broadly these days, but that's what the word means.
And of course justice has a component where people want to see the guilty harmed in proportion to their crimes. Calling that sadism makes the word meaningless. It is good and right to be pleased when justice is done, and displeased when justice is not done.
I would disagree that the Great Terror during the French revolution was justice steeped in sadism because it was not justice at all. People were killed who committed no crime and deserved no punishment. Justice is people getting what they deserve, and nobody deserves to have their head lopped off because they disagree with you politically.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
What do you mean when you say “sadistic”? The textbook definition would be something like “sexual gratification gained from inflicting pain to others”. Do you mean that the desire for justice, which seems to be a human universal (even monkeys seem to desire justice) is often a source of sexual gratification? I doubt that’s what you meant, since that clearly isn’t the case. I suspect that by “sadistic” you meant “evil”, and that you believe desiring justice is usually an evil desire. I would disagree strongly with that. Or perhaps you only meant that people often are pleased when justice is served; yet, why shouldn’t they be?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
I disagree strongly that what you describe is sadism: what you describe is the natural desire for justice. Calling that sadism is a trick the left uses to attack the idea of punishment as a whole. C. S. Lewis wrote about this in his essay "Delilnquents in the Snow": though he was describing 1950s Britian what he wrote applies to the modern U.S.A. just as well.
According to the classical political theory of this country we surrendered our right of self-protection to the State on condition that the State would protect us. Roughly, you promised not to stab your daughter's murderer on the understanding that the State would catch him and hang him. Of course this was never true as a historical account of the genesis of the State. The power of the group over the individual is by nature unlimited and the individual submits because he has to. The State, under favourable conditions (they have ceased), by defining that power, limits it and gives the individual a little freedom.
But the classical theory morally grounds our obligation to civil obedience; explains why it is right (as well as unavoidable) to pay taxes, why it is wrong (as well as dangerous) to stab your daughter's murderer. At present the very uncomfortable position is this: the State protects us less because it is unwilling to protect us against criminals at home and manifestly grows less and less able to protect us against foreign enemies. At the same time it demands from us more and more. We seldom had fewer rights and liberties nor more burdens: and we get less security in return. While our obligations increase their moral ground is taken away.
And the question that torments me is how long flesh and blood will continue to endure it. There was even, not so long ago, a question whether they ought to. No one, I hope, thinks Dr Johnson a barbarian. Yet he maintained that if, under a peculiarity of Scottish law, the murderer of a man's father escapes, the man might reasonably say, 'I am amongst barbarians, who . . . refuse to do justice ... I am therefore in a state of nature ... I will stab the murderer of my father.'
Much more obviously, on these principles, when the State ceases to protect me from hooligans I might reasonably, if I could, catch and trash them myself. When the State cannot or will not protect, 'nature' is come again and the right of self-protection reverts to the individual. But of course if I could and did I should be prosecuted. The Elderly Lady and her kind who are so merciful to theft would have no mercy on me; and I should be pilloried in the gutter Press as a 'sadist' by journalists who neither know nor care what that word, or any word, means.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
I dunno: it may include the morbidly obese, but also the senior citizen health nuts. Presumably the unhealthier you are the more likely you are to die early, which would imply that the older you get the fewer people are left your age who made bad lifestyle decisions Healthwise. I have no idea how that shakes out in practice though, maybe you don't see that effect happening until you get into the 80s or 90s.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
I was not as clever as you and simply took the probability of surviving each year from ages 78-81 and multiplied them. That gave me a combined probability of survival to age 82 of 77.58%.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9mo ago
This gives a baseline 5-6% chance of death for the year, climbing towards 8% when he leaves office. He’d have a cumulative chance of death, during that period, of about 24%.
Based on the SSN actuarial tables, it's a cumulative chance of death of 22.42%.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
In the year they imported the most coal from Mongolia (2023) they imported an average of 150,000 tons of coal per day. That’s after building two new rail lines to Mongolia. If it takes them two new rail lines to go from importing 70,000 tons per day to 150,000 tons, how many rail lines do you think it will take to import an extra 3 million tons of iron ore and 14 million barrels of oil?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
A single train line, if it has been fully upgraded with appropriate sidings and signals, can move 1,000,000 tons per day when working optimally. There are currently only two major rail lines from Russia to China. So you would need to build at least a third and have all three running optimally to get all the iron ore China needs overland.
But that’s just the iron! China also imports 14 million barrels of oil each day. The maximum cargo train capacity for oil is 90,000 barrels per day, so that’s another 155 trains per day. And we haven’t even discussed the amount of grain, copper, and other raw materials we need to import daily. We’re going to need to build at least two more train lines, probably three, and run them at optimal efficiency.
Except wait: we can’t run them at optimal efficiency because Russia and China use different track gauges! That means all the cargo needs to be unloaded and reloaded at the Chinese border.
Is it possible to build the rail infrastructure needed to get all of Chinas imports overland? Possible, yes, but very impractical. Especially when you consider that the Chinese will need to rely on the Russians to run their trains efficiently.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
It’s not about expense it’s about throughout. A modern cargo train can carry about 13,000 tons of material. China imports 3 million tons of iron ore per day.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
They do not have enough arable land to feed their population.
Despite its place as the third largest nation in the world, China falls behind other major food producing countries in terms of the availability of arable land (figure 1). Rapid urbanization, pollution, and uses of land for other purposes have all contributed to a rapid decline of agricultural land in China. The total pollution rate in China’s farmland soil is estimated at 10 percent, and about 2.5 percent of that land cannot be cultivated due to excessive contamination with heavy metals. As a result, it is estimated that the country has a domestic planting area shortage of 90 million hectares. This cropland shortage is expected to worsen and will further undermine China’s goals for food self-sufficiency.
And if you can survive by drastically reducing your industrial output then you can’t use that industrial output to win a war with the US.
If we are in a shooting war with China we will be bringing significantly more pressure on our friends and allies not to trade with China than we did for Ukraine. If China and the US are at war than this is WWIII and every country on Earth is going to be asking themselves the question: whose side do I want to be on? The US or the Chinese? I can't imagine India choosing China. China, the bellicose country that keeps trying to push the border with India. China, the country that killed 20 Indian soldiers as recently as 2020. China, the country that has been arming and allying with Pakistan against India. China, the country that keeps building dams in Tibet across the headwaters of major Indian rivers. China, the country Indians have a 67% unfavorable view of (in contrast, 70% of Indians view the US favorably).
If China is going to war with the US then India will be the first to stick a knife in their side.
EDIT: Also, of course they resisted Russian sanctions: they like Russia! They've been great friends with Russia since the 40s, back when it was the USSR. They like the Russians more than they like us, Russia sells them a lot of weapons, they and the Russians go way back. We should not expect India to treat China anything like they treated Russia recently.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
Even if China gets domestic consumption off the ground they're still reliant on imports for raw materials. China imports more than than 3 times as much oil is it produces, imports a little under three times as much iron ore as it produces, a little under 3 times as much copper ore as it produces, and produces less than 65% of their food domestically. They need global trade to keep their industry running and their people fed. You're not going to ship the 14 million barrels of oil, 3 million tons of iron ore, and the 161,000 tons of grain that China imports daily by train.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
They got the minerals, but they don’t have the throughput to get China as much as they need by train. Overland trade is something like 5x more expensive than maritime trade.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
For most of its history China would stand no chance against the modern US in a conventional war. The China we’re concerned may stand a chance against us hasn’t been an autarky in half a century.
What a strange thing to believe. Do you believe parents have no duties to their children, and that children have no duties to their parents?
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