Harlequin5942
No bio...
User ID: 1062
I'm not disputing the moral judgement, I'm disputing whether they're vegetarians or not.
So if Hannibal Lecter only kills and eats a victim once a year, then it would be misleading to call him the "cannibal serial killer"? Sure, he's a serial killer, but Hannibal's no cannibal!
You could say that eating human flesh is an unusual feature of Hannibal that enables us to distinguish other serial killers, and so it's not analogous to calling someone who eats meat once a year a non-vegetarian. However, eating meat once a year is itself a distinguishing feature among vegetarians.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
huh? What does this have to do with the topic?
Neckbeard libertarian circles have a lot of crypto talk. I was hearing about crypto in such circles more than 3 years before anywhere else.
I guess the important part is that you feel superior :marseyeyeroll:
Exactly, that was precisely the point I was making. I also feel superior for taking my waterproof jacket on a day when it might rain and consider all people who get wet as inferior human beings.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Nothing matters, all choices and lifestyles are equal.
But nobody in the West thinks or acts this way, and the laws are contrary to it. For example, pedophile lifestyles are not considered to be equal, and people very frequently act as though they think that things matter.
Not to mention the nigh-mandatory participation in politics; as they say, you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you, and it's not going to leave you alone
I don't know how much you know about Afghanistan, but it is also this way.
Even people in such a thoroughly politically apathetic and nihilistic country as Russia found that politics was interested in them once they found that they or their children were going off to be under fire in the cold mud of Ukraine.
Harlequin5942
24d ago
The Twitter account is run by the character's creator, Andrew Doyle, and has some funny moments. As often happens, the best stuff is the material that is JUST plausible enough to get sincere reactions. Or when reality catches up with parody:
https://andrewdoyle.substack.com/p/the-prophecies-of-titania-mcgrath
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
The truth is rich people aren't actually that much smarter than poor people
Your source fails to support your assertions in two ways:
(1) This source might reasonably be taken as supposedly contributing towards your final claim "The simple fact is, luck actually produces most of peoples fortunes." However, it says, "The work reveals that while exceptionally smart individuals typically earn more, they are also more likely to spend to their credit card limit, compared with people of average intelligence." Is it luck if someone has high time preference? It seems more connected with someone's choices than their IQ, supporting a "Victorian values" style conservativism about "thrift" and "clean living."
(2) The claim in the study is that when you control for other factors (and assume that these are causally independent of IQ) then the link with wealth disappears:
On the surface, people with higher intelligence scores also had greater wealth. The median net worth for people with an IQ of 120 was almost $128,000 compared with $58,000 for those with an IQ of 100.
But when Zagorsky controlled for other factors – such as divorce, years spent in school, type of work and inheritance – he found no link between IQ and net worth. In fact, people with a slightly above-average IQ of 105 , had an average net worth higher than those who were just a bit smarter, with a score of 110.
Worst of all, your sources do very little to support your claim that "What I'm saying here is that society-wide, resource distribution is the most important variable to what's being addressed here." To substantiate that claim, you need to show that "resource distribution" is crucial. A good start would be to clearly define what you mean by that. Then support it with evidence, rather than sweeping claims e.g.:
why it's almost impossible to escape poverty no matter how talented you are or how hard you work.
Is it? Even when including time preference under "hard you work"? Obviously, anyone can avoid wealth if they are spendthrift enough. Mike Tyson is smart, phenomenally physically talented, and hard working, but he still ended up bankrupt.
As far as I know, there's no equivalent reliable quantitative data on the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the past. However, I'm no expert.
Note that "no equivalent reliable quantitative data" does not entail "We have no idea about the prevalence."
Also, I should clarify that my claim is that it's misleading to have a simile that presupposes that the changes in prevalence over time are analogous, not that we know the differences in prevalence are comparable. In particular, we don't have good reasons to think that the prevalence of child sexual abuse was lower e.g. in the 1970s, and we know that the prevalence was high. Whether it was higher or lower than today would require reliable quantitative data that isn't available AFAIK.
Harlequin5942
4mo ago
Saying that we're guarding against it more, therefore it is less likely too happen, is like saying "can you imagine how many burglaries there must have been in the past? people didn't even lock their doors back then!".
But we have evidence that sexual abuse of children was rampant in the past, especially in the immediate wake of the Sexual Revolution. I suppose you might think that we have lots of Jimmy Saville-types around right now, but then that's the claim without evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile#Sexual_abuse_by_Savile
In contrast, we have a lot of statistics on burglary that suggest it followed the same rise-and-fall pattern as most other crimes, for reasons that are still not understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
By the standards of Jesus's audience, Marxism aims at making everyone rich men. Obscenely rich. It really didn't take much, by modern standards, to be "rich" in Jesus's day.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Maybe, but I wasn't talking about homelessness.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
So if the government created a law banning you personally from voting in any election, you wouldn't consider that an abridgement of your freedoms?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
"End in itself" and "freedom issue" are two different things, though. If you have one system where an individual can choose to vote or not, and another system where an individual has no choice (mandatory voting or mandatory non-voting) then the first is a system that gives that individual more choices (positive freedom) and doesn't stop them doing something (negative freedom).
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
horses used to exchange their labor for food and shelter, and as technology progressed and humans improved their capital edge, they didn't increasingly specialize into their production of horsepower. Instead they (mostly) got turned to glue, though a minority of the luckier ones shifted into entertainment for the rich.
Horses used to be produced for their labour. As this became unprofitable, horses stopped being produced. Humans are not produced for their labour, so your analogy has problems. If lots of horses were still around and there was no way of just taking them to the glue factory, we'd use horses a lot more.
When and where does comparative advantage break down?
When people behave irrationally.
However, it is possible that humans stop getting employed as a result of technological change. For example, insofar as the value of unemployment benefits rises as a result of automation, to the point where it exceeds the wages that humans can get, then people will stop selling their labour. Another possibility is that the expected marginal profit from hiring more humans falls below the minimum wage and the latter is not reduced, the marginal profit is not increased by subsidies etc.
What doesn't happen is that comparative advantage breaks down because absolute advantage becomes really, REALLY, REALLY big!! Think of them as different scales: absolute advantage is a ranking according to outcomes, whereas comparative advantage is a ranking (inversely) according to opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of using automation for many tasks increases as the range of tasks that automatons can do increases.
Maybe this will help: imagine that a film studio can make at least $50 million by casting Eddie Murphy in any role. People love him so much, they'd rather see him play all the human roles in every film, including all the female parts. (And you know that Eddie Murphy would be game for that.) Would Eddie Murphy play the role of Henchman #9 in a straight-to-video action film? No, because even Eddie Murphy can't play all the human roles in every movie. Now modify the imaginary scenario: imagine that Eddie Murphy can also play all the animal roles as well, and the film studio can make at least $50 billion from casting him in any role. Does Eddie Murphy start playing Henchman #9?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Geographic positions (and natural resources) have remarkably little link with economic development, which is why e.g. New Zealand is more prosperous than Brazil, or places like Albania and Moldova can be poor while being close to places like Switzerland and Luxembourg.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
No, but these also don't solve these problems - they (allegedly) mitigate them.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I do not follow Russian sources
They didn't say that you did.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
2nd is a useful category, but Ukraine isn't in it. Ukrainian GDP per capita is roughly the same as Sri Lanka, Peru, and Vietnam. It's no more than half that of countries that fit well in a 2nd world category, like Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Is this not possible?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
they reveal
It wasn't a reveal. It was already canon. I, at least, always knew that Tolkien's name was Tolkien Black. Maybe one or two racists thought otherwise.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
not being obese shouldn't get people big points.
Why not?
As for late teen girls, women are only late teenagers for a few years. And the same is true for men: I could eat all sorts of stuff when I was a teenager with minimal consequences.
Maybe psychologists should be studying what we can learn from the distant past, when we were doing well by various indices of mental health you could invent and doing so without any actual psychologists?
Not sure how you would know that about the distant past. Our knowledge about mental health in even the relatively recent past is very limited: even by (flawed) modern standards, there is a lot that wasn't measured well in the 19th century AD, let alone the 19th century BC.
For theoretical reasons, I suspect there was a surprising amount of happiness in the past, because I think the best source of happiness is meaningful work and that's easy to find when you need to spend a large fraction of your day just ensuring your long-term caloric intake, maybe some more preparing to fight for your life/wife or trying desperately to ensure that at least half of your 10 kids make it to adulthood, and another fraction praying to the gods so that they don't make your destitute/dead with a flood, famine, or plague. On the other hand, life had a lot of lethal uncertainties, which are probably bad for happiness, so I wouldn't want to bet either way as to whether average mental health was better or worse back then.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Speaking for myself, and we're leaving politics out of this, I as a white working class Southerner have far more in common with my black counterpart here than I do a wealthy white liberal from one of the coasts.
Among the very few things worth watching on SNL in the past 20+ years:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=O7VaXlMvAvk
Part of me suspects that the movement of the US radical left (especially "intellectual" left) from a focus on the working class to a focus on LGBT and race was driven by a terror that, when the revolution came, one of the main consequences would be a redirection of public funding from opera and theatre to the kind of things that are stereotypically working class entertainment, e.g. sports and crude comedies.
Harlequin5942
6d ago
That's not really 'Irish,' though.
They were in the eyes of Americans at the time, specifically Scotch-Irish. Also, Scots are Celts, though views about that at the time were sometimes complex.
Aside from their Catholicism, there was little to distinguish a typical Irishman from a typical Protestant Highlander. (Their languages would have been slightly different, but equally alien to an English American in 1850.)
Harlequin5942
15d ago
Salami tactics. That was apparently what Putin was trying prior to 2022, but changed his mind for some reason, possibly because of Ukraine's arms buildup.
Harlequin5942
15d ago
This is not to say that passion is a necessary component of great writing
Do you mean sufficient effect?
For Sonic fan fiction, I bring you the lowest depths to which the human mind and soul can sink: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LCWoZEXyGU0
I agree up to "expectations". This is a significantly ambiguous phrase in this context. I might "expect" X in the sense that I hope that it will happen. Alternatively, I might "expect" X in the sense that I think that other people (or God, or fate, or whatever) is obliged to give it to me. Or that the world is an unfair place if I can't have X. The latter sense is the type of expectation that causes most anger, as well as a lot of unhappiness.
And I would say that happiness, in general, comes from one's own activity and its relation to one's experiences, rather than meeting expectations (in either sense) as such. Our mental reward system encourages us when we are doing actions that are subjectively meaningful: they are conducive towards a desired goal. Again, this is one sense in which incels shoot themselves in the foot: most of the happiness that you can have from sex comes from the pursuit, not the act itself.
Of course, if they say "I'm no good unless I'm having sex, and with the right sort of context, and with the right sort of person... etc. etc.", then they might feel temporarily better after boosting their egos by having sex under the right conditions. But what then? Pretty soon, they'd find some other noose to hang themselves with. "I'm no good unless my partner only has sex with me, and only thinks about sex with me" or "I'm no good unless I'm having sex with lots of different women" or "I'm no good unless I'm levelling up to a more attractive woman" etc. etc.
The same pattern occurs with people who have anxiety. Deal with one source of danger and what then? There's always some risk in life to be anxious about. Only once the delusion "I must be safe" is addressed can someone be consistently free of anxiety.
Similarly, only once incels are free of delusions like "I need to do/be/have certain things in order to be happy" will they be free of their unhappiness, anger, and depression. And like everyone else, they won't be free 100% of the time, but that's fine - nobody needs to be happy all the time to live a good life. Indeed, there are many times (bereavement, disappointment, combat etc.) when unhappy emotions are perfectly rational and helpful.
I wouldn't suggest this at all. There is a huge difference between hoping for X and thinking that you need X.
Personally, I only started getting laid once I stopped thinking that I needed to get laid, and instead thinking "Wow, I really want to get laid!" I suspect that pretty much all incels would find the same thing happened to them, sooner or later.
As for happiness, I don't think that there's a political obligation upon others to make a person happy, though you might argue that there's an obligation to create a society where that person could live a happy and fulfilling life, if they worked their ass at it. I'm not convinced that incels don't already live in such a society. And I'm not saying that they are all lazy - just possessed by a dangerous illusion that they need sex to be happy. Ironically, if they were free of that delusion, they'd be more likely to get sex. Neediness is not attractive, at least to people with whom you'd actually want to be in a relationship...
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