Goodguy
25d ago
I want to follow up on the earlier discussion about anti-natalism and natalism. I find it interesting that some people see anti-natalism as being a leftist phenomenon. I feel that this is true if you limit your understanding of leftism to stereotypical Redditors. However, historically speaking, philosophical pessimism, deep skepticism about the value of life, and doubt about the value of reproduction as anything other than an animal instinct are, I think, far from left-oriented. If you think about some of the most famous people who have held such views, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Michel Houellebecq... well, these are certainly not leftists by any common definition of leftist. And then there is Nietzsche who, even though in his writings he constantly insisted on the value of healthy virile life, did not leave any offspring even though, despite his various health problems, he probably would not have found it that hard to get married and have kids if he had really wanted to.
I do not think that being dubious of natalism is a right-wing phenomenon, but I also certainly do not think that it is inherently a left-wing phenomenon.
Thanks for this deep analysis, much of which I don't have the scientific background to understand. If I may ask, why would it take modern industrial chemistry to synthesize penicillin in useful quantities? I suppose that I have been wrong in thinking that it could be synthesized by pre-modern techniques?
Edit: I should also note that to me, a dabbler in mathematics, this survey of mathematical thought-trends and their impact on the history of mathematics is fascinating.
I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.
Some examples from history:
- Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
- Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
- Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.
- Natural selection - The idea that the combination of survival pressure and reproduction will over time cause better-adapted entities to out-reproduce worse-adapted entities is so logical that one can demonstrate the truth of it through pure mathematics. But as far as I know, it did not become a popular explanation for the evolution of living beings until about 170 years ago, even though people 2000 years ago were both familiar with so-called artificial selection (breeding of livestock and so on) and probably had the intellectual background to understand the concept of natural selection mathematically (people who were advanced enough mathematics thinkers to create something like Euclid's Elements certainly had the raw brain-power to model natural selection mathematically, if a certain spark of genius had struck them).
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
Goodguy
26d ago
Would you not classify Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and abortion clinic bombers as being intellectual terrorists same as this anti-natalist? I do not see anything particularly left-wing about this flavor of terrorism.
I wouldn't trust anything I read from an account on X, especially a high-profile account on X, to be real. Most high-profile X accounts who were not already famous before joining X are engagement bait grifters, and some of these grifters are precisely in the business of crafting scissor statements to get maximum engagement. Even if the genesis of this particular story is a real-life situation, I wouldn't trust a high-profile X account to convey it accurately instead of conveying it in order to mine maximum engagement. The entire nature of the medium, with its short clippy posts (yeah you can pay to write long ones, but this comes off as geeky so is not used as much as one might think) and its monetization, makes it a melting pot of scammers, grifters, and con artists. I have tried many times to start genuine political/cultural discussion on X, and 95% of the time it doesn't work. X rewards cheap engagement bait vastly more than it rewards serious conversation. It is a brutal Darwinian power struggle in which masters of scissor statements, controversy bait, and so on rise to the top.
If someone makes more money than someone else, or one group is healthier than another, or people from one neighborhood go to jail more often than people from the next neighborhood over, the only explanation is systemic injustice. Someone must have done something evil to exploit someone else -- there's no other way people could end up in such different positions.
To be fair, there is a relatively small but quite loud subset of right-wingers who believe exactly this about Jews. And there are quite many right-wingers who really overestimate the degree to which leftists make their decisions out of deliberate maliciousness and really underestimate the degree to which leftists make those decisions out of a combination of ignorance and pathological empathy. Some right-wingers have even adopted a Rousseauian "man is innocent in the state of nature" attitude, except their idealized pre-modern utopia from which humanity has fallen is some kind of amalgam of ancient martial cultures, 19th century farmsteads, and the 1950s.
Korea and Vietnam were not wars of national defense for the US, USSR, and China. My point is that nukes are probably sufficient to deter other powers from launching major attacks on your own territory, not that they are sufficient to put an end to all forms of war.
Also, I phrased my comment poorly. I was not trying to say that NATO does not or will not use conscription. Clearly, some NATO members already use conscription right now. I was trying to say that NATO, insofar as it actually is a defensive alliance, does not actually need to use conscription. But to some extent it uses conscription anyway.
That said, maybe I'm wrong. I do not think that NATO would abandon, say, Finland or Poland to a Russian invasion out of fear of nuclear war - since this would mean the end of NATO as a viable alliance. But certainly a country would prefer to be able to fight off an invasion in the first place, rather than just relying on waiting for a NATO counterattack to liberate it at some point later.
Goodguy
30d ago
You started to ask her political questions at 9 in the morning. I don't generally get into the mood of talking to anyone for longer than a couple of sentences until it's 10 am or so. Some people are not morning people. On top of that, as others have pointed out, the questions that you asked her may be risky for her to answer. You also judged her appearance. Only internally to your own mind, sure, but it's possible that the judgment energy radiated out from you to her just like her 'fuck you' energy radiated from her to you. Who knows which came first.
Goodguy
30d ago
Some of NATO's proxies rely on conscription, but I think that NATO itself doesn't, at least as long as it only cares about defense and not taking the offense. I think that nuclear weapons by themselves are already sufficient to guarantee NATO's security, and maintaining an effective nuclear deterrent does not require the labor of so many people that a developed country would ever realistically need to use conscription to get the necessary manpower, as opposed to using less forceful means of recruitment such as money, patriotism, and the mystique of nuclear weapons.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Not sure if the media has much to do with it. Boy meets girl narratives in the 90s/00s, same as now, are one of the most popular types of narrative in media, including obviously among women as well as men, and rationally speaking, that would be weird if women did not like sex and just liked all the other things about erotic relationships. Naturally, it can be hard to be rational about such things when one is young and has not yet had direct first-person experience that women like sex. But that doesn't necessarily make it the media's fault.
Maybe one issue for a lot of guys is just that sex is biologically asymmetrical. One penetrates, the other is penetrated. For a straight man, even a virgin, it is easy to understand that he would enjoy penetrating a woman, but it can be hard to understand why anyone would enjoy being penetrated. Hence the confusion.
Goodguy
1mo ago
My experience doesn't support this. When I go out, I see many young men in their early 20s doing really well with women. There are young couples everywhere. I don't see any difference between zoomer men's confidence with women and my generation of men's confidence with women. This is anecdotal, sure. But it makes me wonder how many of the articles and posts about this supposed problem are based in reality.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Well, I would say yes and no. Trump and Trumpism are bad in many ways as far as I am concerned, but what I mean by TDS is the sort of reflexive emotional attitude where a person is willing to believe pretty much any anti-Trump talking point just because they fervently hate Trump/rightism. For example, I am not a right-winger and I dislike a lot of Trump is doing, but I do not have TDS, because I don't automatically believe that Trump's actions are automatically bad/evil all of the time, and I don't believe that he is literally taking orders from Putin, etc.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Well sure, but that's not me and my point. That's those other people. I'm not claiming that taking all of the billionaires' wealth would improve society, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't unless it was done in some completely unrealistic sci-fi fantasy way, I'm just dunking on people who claim to be all about meritocracy while ignoring inheritance.
Goodguy
1mo ago
I do not support pure meritocracy or communism :) I am just pointing out a very common blind spot in many meritocracy supporters' views.
Goodguy
1mo ago
I understand your logic and I think it has a lot of truth to it but that said, I still find it silly when people talk about how we should have more meritocracy but do not want to address the fact that some people are born with 1000 times more resources than others.
An alternative is unlikely unless we solve scarcity emotions using technology and/or massive shock-driven consciousness changes like in Star Trek (hyper-advanced tech and WW3). Basic mammal nature in the presence of scarcity is to priviledge oneself, one's family, and one's friends over others. This usually only fails to hold true in the presence of extremely powerful emotional ideological or political forces like nationalism (where one emotionally feels like the entire nation is one's family) or political authoritarianism (where you are forced to fight for the government because they will hurt you and maybe your loved ones if you don't). And those have their own negative consequences.
Communism could work if we were all near-constantly on an MDMA trip type of immediate feelings of love, but I'm not sure that the average human is even physically capable of being like that without some of the hardware burning out. Some spiritual teachers have claimed that they have gotten there without drugs, but whether or not they are telling the truth, the fact is that clearly even if they did reach it, they have consistently failed to teach that state to anything more than a tiny fraction of the human population. Although I will say that, even by trying, they have probably helped humanity. Modern Western morality is much better than the morality of 2000 years ago, which was basically "tough shit if you're poor or crucified, I guess the gods don't like you lol".
All that said, I do find it funny that most modern proponents of meritocracy do not challenge what is probably the biggest modern source of un-meritocracy in the West, which is inheritance. Even the most wild-eyed free market libertarian who advocates for pure meritocracy typically does not call for all humans to be put on a truly level playing field, which could only be done by forbidding parents to pass on their wealth to their children. And the truth is that, whatever you think about passing on wealth to children, all meritocratic ideologies that accept inheritance are at best just nipping around the edges, and not addressing the biggest un-meritocratic phenomenon in the whole human world.
I think in the past, I overestimated what fraction of people are high-decoupling. I have always been a high decoupler since I was a kid, so maybe it's just hard for me to understand not being a high decoupler.
Also, I haven't explored Discord at all so far, I probably should. Am open to suggestions about how to get into some interesting Discords.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Makes sense abstractly, but please provise more pragmatic details :)
Unless you intend to gatekeep, which I wouldn't blame you for given that gatekeeping seems kind of necessary to avoid having your forum overrun by low value contributors.
If that's how you mean it, then I get it lol.
Similar to how the best way to use Reddit is to find actually smart people and then follow their entire post histories.
The current state of online politics discourse seems pretty dire to me. Here are forums I'm aware of:
TheMotte - often a bit too "assume that social conservatism is correct" and wordily show-offy for my taste, but it's a good forum, you can speak your mind without being banned.
X.com - engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters... and the occasional rare actual worthwhile discussion.
/r/moderatepolitics - good, very surprisingly good for average Reddit censorship norms, but a bit slow.
/r/politicaldiscussion - used to be decent like 5 years ago but now has been overrun by typical Reddit TDS ("Drumpf will end all elections", etc...)
4chan /pol/ - basically useless, 95% literally mentally ill people, trolls, and maybe bots. Might as well engage with flat Earthers about astrophysics as engage with these people about politics.
Astral Codex Ten comments - can be interesting sometimes, but isn't mainly politics focused and the politics discussion seems to be be dominated by the same few people.
rDrama.net - is usually directionally right about politics, in my view, by the simple expedient of assuming that anyone who is very demonstratively committed to a given political ideology is likely worthy of ridicule, but of course not a forum for discussing policy in any depth, most of the time, and also unsurprisingly given the origin of the site, is as focused on trolling as on political analysis, lol.
/r/politics - TDS central, orange man bad 24/7.
/r/centrist - seems ok, but pretty TDS leaning.
/r/stupidpol, /r/redscarepod, etc... Dirtbag left, good for criticizing the establishment but also they tend to be Hamas apologists etc... basically mostly people who are still at the I hate America so anyone who fights America must be awesome stage.
debatepolitics.com - people yelling at each other, very slight step up from 4chan /pol/.
Like, there have to be some good forums I've missed, right? Billions of people are online, including hundreds of millions of Anglophones (I largely have no idea what the state of non-Anglophone political discussion is like). Is it really possible that only like 0.00001% of them are capable of having relatively moderate and rational (not that I've always been) political discussion?
I've been searching for good politics discussion forums for years. You'd think there would be more. What the fuck is going on?
Goodguy
1mo ago
My assumption is that a super competent deep state could kill Trump and make it look like a natural death, but maybe that has more to do with thriller novels than with reality.
Ah, sorry. That's on me, then, for assuming that Ligotti was not a leftist based on a very shallow knowledge of him.
That said, I don't know if he is more of a leftist in the typical modern highly online sense of the word, or if he is a socialist in the same way that H.P. Lovecraft supported some flavors of socialism and supported FDR while having extremely right-wing social attitudes even by the standards of his era. Lovecraft favored a sort of technocratic socialism that would ensure his own kind of people a decent living while keeping out the people whom he found undesirable. Not surprising given that he spent much of his adult life in poverty during the Great Depression as a random kid from a broken-down family who probably felt himself to be an aristocrat at heart and had a viscerally racist reaction to pretty much everyone other than people whose stock was from North-West Europe.
But Ligotti is not Lovecraft, and I should not let their surface-level similarities make me assume things about Ligotti.
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