HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
1d ago
Food is to survive, what makes life worth living are other things that is not food.
Yes, but some might argue that numbers on a graph are not what makes life worth living.
I think using the example of a formerly-communist country is misleading, and that there is a minimum level of prosperity in absolute terms, not relative, wherein people can be satisfied. Did Latvians suffer in the post-Soviet scenario you described, or were they still happy despite a lack of industrial capacity?
HalloweenSnarry
1d ago
I would think the disparity in reaction here is because the upper class are expected to behave better than that, to rise above vice, and they often try to avoid disabusing the public about such a notion.
Consider the meme of pedophile Catholic priests: these are the people who are supposed to be your spiritual leaders, and while all humans are fallible under Christian doctine, molesting boys is a level of sin that one could otherwise not believe a holy man would stoop to.
Maybe it's some sort of hardwired primal instinct. If we gravitate towards hierarchy, we also gravitate towards expecting more out of our social betters.
HalloweenSnarry
1d ago
I dunno, I think both left and right have been directionally-correct in that the economy is not the end-all-be-all of civilization. Plenty of societies in the past didn't give as much consideration to economic growth, yes, but they seemingly didn't really need it.
The way you wrote this post, I genuinely cannot tell if you are being sincere, because, at risk of mod intervention, it sounds like an alien value. If anything, I think it's the opposite: there are other values that allow us to have economic power, they are what lead to an economy and not strictly the other way around.
We are at this point, and you are concerned, because some of the very values that enable the economy are themselves weakened and endangered.
HalloweenSnarry
2d ago
But allowing tariffs destroying economy? That is borderline to treason against the USA.
Is the economy that central to the American nation? I understand that market freedom has been an important component of our political strength, but at the same time, this feels like preparing for the last Cold War right as we are in the midst of a new one.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
See, I am a China Hawk, and I think it is absolutely braindead not to siphon off every bit of human capital from them we can.
The question is, do they stay siphoned? They may not necessarily have loyalty to the state, but they have a sort of loyalty to the land and the people that said state controls, and they also may have family that can be leveraged to achieve whatever goals the state dreams up.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
I think the wrinkle in your model here is that the ones in power in Ukraine don't have much to gain from escaping. Unlike Russian oligarchs or Chinese millionaires, they probably lack in things like Swiss bank accounts, American anchor babies, or British summer homes (or what-have-you).
This whole framing of "elites choosing to wipe out their own population" is so bizarre to me. Maybe it makes sense if one imagines oneself as a dictator wanting to knock out two birds with one stone (ridding oneself of troublesome populations and killing as many of the enemy as possible), but I imagine that no leader truly views things in such cynical calculations. Sure, every medal on a general's lapel is someone's son, but at the same time, it probably gives no leader any great pleasure to know that their constituents' lives are spent doing something necessary.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
I wouldn't say this is a problem with liberalism eating its own, if that's what you're saying. I'd say it's more that the pro-Palestine memeplex has metastasized in the liberal body politic.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
Yeah, I suppose this probably does describe, say, the A-10.
(And now to wait for the shitstorm to hit...)
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
I think Ian McCollum would use the term "obsolescent." E.g., the M1911 and M1 Garand are incredibly out-of-date designs, but they absolutely cream revolvers and bolt-actions for combat practicality. The latter are obsolete, the former are obsolescent.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
Also, what the hell are Chinese liberals?
I am somewhat curious about this, too. I imagine ~all of them live in the West to begin with, and as such don't have a lot of influence on the Chinese state. Similarly, I imagine the Maoists are not the least bit mollified by Trump's actions.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
Similarly, as concerns Yglesias's concerns over Nazi-normalization, I have suspected that the radical left has inadvertently helped the radical right crack open that side door in their own quest for oxygen and sunlight.
HalloweenSnarry
13d ago
That is not a control on willpower. It's not saying anything about willpower. I've said nothing about willpower. It is not apparent how willpower is supposed to come into anything or what straw man you think you're arguing against.
It's apparent from the pro-CICO arguments here that the usual conclusion is "CICO is obviously right, people just don't have the willpower to follow it." The argument path here is so well-beaten that a 4x4 could drive down it in high-range mode.
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
Okay, so you are applying this logic to, say, tax loopholes and environmental regulations, and not, say, production targets or reporting to Comrade General. That makes more sense.
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
Fixing the regulations would be a good deed. Going around them is (somewhat) bad on its own merits.
An ideal, yes, but conditional on the possibility of the regulators letting you fix it.
I understand the content of the moral imperative here, but I think we need to look at the Soviet Union to understand where this falls flat. The system was built and sustained on lies, there were lies and deceptions and samizdat all the way down and it made for an awful society, but they had no choice. Things literally could not get done without people being deceived at various points in the Great Chain of their society.
There are no practical rules to live by here, other than "have an honest and fair system from Day 1" and "anything that lets you sleep with food in your stomach can't be that bad."
HalloweenSnarry
15d ago
Not for lack of trying, arguably.
HalloweenSnarry
17d ago
Do those even exist?
HalloweenSnarry
17d ago
It would seem to me that, if we take the pouring of concrete as an analogy for Trump's policies, then in all cases, the parties opposing him (China, Ukraine, the courts, respectively) are all refusing to accede to his demands, and are attempting to go to the contractor directly and tell them to stop.
HalloweenSnarry
17d ago
Variable geometry consequentialism
This is a new term to me.
Precisely because it is easy to hide behind the fact that the intent of communism wasn't to starve millions of people. But it indeed was its purpose.
I think this is something that Scott could disagree on--or, rather, I personally think the counter here is that the intended purpose of Communism was to uplift, liberate, and equalize people. However, achieving this intent required destructive actions that led to mountains of skulls as a consequence, and the Communists were not at all shy about this being a necessary inevitability (by their lights, anyhow).
Quantumfreakonomics made a good point below that POSIWID is a useful antidote to "if only the Tsar/Comrade Stalin knew," because systems like Communism, oppressive police forces, environmentally-deleterious corporations, and so on naturally produce these externalities as a necessary result of their intention.
Similarly, there's Sunshine's comment, saying that a system naturally alters and optimizes itself to maximize its sustainment. In fact, if I try to apply these ideas to two of Scott's examples:
-The cancer hospital will maximize for getting as many patients as they can, both to genuinely try and cure them and to keep itself going as an established entity that attempts its stated purpose. Patients who lose their battles with cancer while under the hospital's care could simply be cases where the hospital couldn't save them, even with their best efforts.
-The NY bus system wants to maximize ridership, and thus, revenues, so it will naturally do as much as it can to maximize those, which will probably mean running as many buses as possible for as long as possible, which will inherently increase CO2 emissions.
HalloweenSnarry
18d ago
Was RFK not on the side of the "vaccines cause autism"/homeopathy memeplex? I thought he was on that wagon even before COVID.
HalloweenSnarry
18d ago
I am not a qualified expert on the topic of "trade as a force for peace," but I will say that it sure has seemed like China has always wanted to take Taiwan by hook or by crook, completely orthogonally to their entanglement in global trade. If anything, global trade has seemingly helped China conclude that taking Taiwan is in the possibility space thanks to the benefits they have reaped from it, and now that they are in a position of strength, they can happily abandon the power of trade in the name of taking Taiwan if they need to.
HalloweenSnarry
18d ago
Yeah, my hyphenation was done intentionally, but I was afraid it might be missed.
HalloweenSnarry
18d ago
Sorry, I meant my comment more as "does driving the garbage truck not open up opportunities for truck driving in general?"
HalloweenSnarry
18d ago
I meant my comment as "does driving the garbage truck not open up opportunities for truck driving in general?"
HalloweenSnarry
18d ago
Does driving the truck not open up possibilities of non-garbage truck driving?
Okay, then, that's something else, and that seems to explain a lot if you actually are from Latvia. As an American, I am way more amenable to arguments that we are suffering from success, and to some extent, our nation likely barely suffered the kind of privation experienced by Eastern Europe.
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