Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I can't think of a job that involves selling your own body so a stranger can use you for sexual pleasure.
You mean, other than prostitution? You can't think of a job that is prostitution, other than things that are prostitution?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Everyone opposes "excessive" immigration, they just have different ideas of what numbers (if any) constitute "excessive" in a given time and place.
As an example of the principles leading to heavy regulation in the EU, see the precautionary principle, which is a major idea in EU law but almost alien to the US or China:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
The classic American principle is "innovate and break stuff, with regulators acting if you break something serious." The precautionary principle, in the extreme, is "we do not need to know that you are breaking stuff to stop you from innovating." Or, as Stewart Brand put it:
"When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public [meaning the regulators, not the public in the sense of the people in general], should bear the burden of proof."
The EU regulators and lawmakers have decided that this principle is worth the price of being a tech industry backwater.
In general, a secular gap has developed between the EU economy and the US economy since the mid-1990s:
https://statisticstimes.com/economy/united-states-vs-eu-economy.php
Per capita, the gap has always been big, but it's become really big, especially in nominal terms, where the EU has been stagnant since about 2008.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I don't know anybody in my circle of friends/aquaintances who has spoken out in favour of it, and I know people who loudly proclaimed their appreciation of Ghostbusters 2016.
I actually find the hate-watchers tedious at this point too. Is there anything shocking in Current Year about a once-respected intellectual property being driven into the ground to promote the careers of mediocre creators, who put in woke elements to either cover their asses, promote their careers, or further their socio-political agenda? It was interesting to tear that apart in 2016. In Current Year, I am happy to move on and enjoy classic entertainment from better times. You only have to go back to the Golden Age of television to enjoy countless hours of great television which are neither preachy not hamstrung by woke ideology, e.g. I don't even think about drug legislation when watching Breaking Bad, let alone Race, Class, Gender issues.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
And I'm really getting tired of marketing by fan-baiting.
Tiredness is definitely my impression of the whole Rings of Power stuff. The old media hype, the production, the casting, the hate-videos on Youtube... There's nothing new or creative in any of it. I don't see an ounce of creative passion anywhere in the whole thing. It's like someone secretly upgraded Stable Diffusion to create a whole media circus based on past glories of hype, e.g. Ghostbusters 2016 or Gamergate.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
There were the Epicureans, but even they advocated a kind of long-term hedonism, and at least Lucretius argued that social life, including family life, was one of the best methods for sustained happiness. They constrasted such "static" pleasures with the "dynamic" pleasures, like drinking, wild sex, and consuming rich foods, which they thought had consequences (emotional and physical) that were at least as bad as the pleasure they gave. I have heard that the Epicureans were less suspicious of family life than Plato in The Republic, though Plato was pro-reproduction.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.
That's nothing compared to Hong Kong, which is looking at introducing vaccine passes for 5-11 year olds and requires mask wearing almost everywhere outside of your own home (including e.g. sitting on your own outside at a public civic park, where you are also banned from congregating in groups of more than 4) to protect the 30% + of the old who don't want to be vaccinated.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
as fun as The Hobbit Extended Edition was.
That's some grade-A Poe's Law right there.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color.
Insofar as I have a problem with it, it's that the Lord of the Rings was a substitute for the loss of Anglo-Saxon mythology. Unlike the Greeks, Vikings, or Romans, we (I'm half Anglo-Saxon) don't have a surviving corpus of cool sagas/myths, but Tolkien did an amazing job of filling in that gap in Anglo-Saxon culture.
But there was nothing particularly Anglo-Saxon about the Peter Jackson films (e.g. Aragorn wasn't played by an Anglo-Saxon actor, a lot of the music was Celtic...) so this isn't a new problem.
Similarly, the fact that the race-swapping etc. is so forced is off-putting, but I also didn't like how Arwen's character was changed to fit with modern sensibilities in the Fellowship of the Ring film. Off-putting, but not the end of the world.
My personal case for not watching it is that I found The Hobbit films that I saw (Hobbit I and Hobbit III) painful to watch, and I didn't like the Lord of the Rings films that much anyway. I enjoyed all the Tolkien I've read a lot, but just like they can't make a Madeline L'Engle film to match her brilliance, I have accepted that Tolkien will never be great on screen. The closest that match the awe-inspiring images I have in my head as I read Tolkien was a few moments in the 1978 Lord of the Rings and in the original Peter Jackson trilogy. The rest is meh at best.
Same with Dune, except that I thought the most recent Dune film was at least worth my time watching, unlike anything done with Tolkien's works for nearly 20 years...
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
No, I think that that's hyperbole. If someone put out a movie with an all-white cast, there might be some grumbling on Twitter or whatnot, but no serious consequences.
See The Northman. As I recall, an all-white cast (or close enough) and it flew under the woke radar almost completely. Sadly, not a lot of people watched it in general, because it was very good.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Maybe it's an "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" situation:
"African Amazonians from historical kingdom of Dahomey: (a) fighting white colonialists and (b) slave traders."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahomey_Amazons#Conflict_with_neighbouring_kingdoms
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Great points.
AI content generation and lower costs of CGI could break down the barriers to epic indie art. Right now, all you need to make most paintings is an idea and the ability to plug the right inputs into a neural network. You don't even have to pay for something like Stable Diffusion. In the next 20 years (maybe a lot sooner) I can imagine a world in which all you need to make a popular epic fantasy film that looks at least as good as the 1978 LOTR worth watching will be a story that people want to see on screen.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Didn't know that. Somehow, I was caught by the first name and assumed he was Italian (basically an African, really...).
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
That's what an adaption is, it takes a product, re-envisages it as if it were written today
This is such a bold misdefinition that I'm surprised you thought you could get away with it. ONE way of adapting a "product" (yeuch!) is to do that. For example, you can do Shakespeare in modern dress. To say that that's what an adaptation IS is like saying that carbohydrates are just what food IS.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
It makes more sense, though I don't agree. For example, The Northman is very close to the movie I'd expect an actual Viking to make. Tolkien is far closer to modern viewpoints.
It's true that every adaptation is made through an adaptor's viewpoint, but they can be more or less faithful. And I'm not presupposing that more faithful is good. Stanley Kubrick adapted material in an unfaithful way in The Shining and it was better than a faithful adaptation, like the TV miniseries.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
The rules may not have differed much (though most countries were never as extreme as HK with masking) but the fact that severe pandemic measures are still in HK in autumn 2022 is unusual.
it just needs to be higher of around 2-3 kids a family.
As it was in my village when I was growing up. More than 3 kids was very rare - the only case I recall was of a family which had triplets and an older sibling. Being an Only Child was a thing of note, and the stereotype was that only children would be socially awkward and probably spoilt by their parents. About 10% of child-bearing families have just one child. It was very typical to share a room with your siblings, at least until one of you was a teenager, but once your parents had a little money, it was easy to have a house with plenty of room for 2 or 3 children.
Almost all of the houses on my street had families with 2-3 children of school-age or younger. There was one mini-house with an unfriendly old couple (I assume they had grown-up children, but they kept very much to themselves and nobody knew much about them) and another little cottage with a sweet old granny. If I walked down the street on a summer's day, I would almost always hear other children playing in gardens and I only had to climb over a wall to spend time with one of my best friends. The children also formed interconnections between parents, and so almost everyone knew everyone else on the street, even if people didn't go to church or other social events. Child-centred holidays like Halloween also meant that e.g. the sweet old granny were brought into the community. Babysitting, Scouting etc. meant that even families with teenagers were brought into the network of social relations.
Now the demographics are reversed: there are only about two families with young children and most of the houses are occupied by older couples/single people. On a summer's day, one hears no children, and the youngest people one generally sees are the gardeners who commute in from the city to do manual labour in the old people's gardens. This is not due to depopulation: the problem is that young couples can't compete with older people's wealth when it comes to buying houses, and older people can comfortably retire without selling their big family-sized homes. In contrast, my grandparents generation generally either moved into care homes or into places in the city soon after they retired. They reasoned: why live in a five room house with a big garden? Pensions were much less generous back then and poverty among the old was widespread, so selling a house was a good way to have liquid assets in your retirement.
This is an extreme case, but the demographic transition is really visible in some places. I hate it, and as it happens, the older people in the street with whom I've talked about it also hate it. I do know people my age who have a child and sometimes two, but they generally live in cities in cramped apartments that are unsuitable for having 2-3 children. Ironically, their homes remind me of the type of places that my grandparents' generation would live in, if they lived independently.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
For another example of this: I think that "Amazonia" and "The Chant" by Gojira are both great protest songs at a musical and lyrical level. The problem is that, in the abstract, opposing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the Chinese occupation of Tibet is a mainstream opinion. You have to be careful how you express these opinions in the concrete, e.g. it's not mainstream to blame Brazilians or say China Flu, but in the abstract these are establishment opinions. It's like Nixon saying "I, too, want peace!" in 1972-1973.
Such abstract mainstream assent takes the wind out of the sails of protest music, which itself tends to be abstract and cautious, though not always. Rage Against the Machine managed to resist this, but only barely, and post-2008, their "Bring down the system, man!" is very mainstream - just as long as it doesn't actually mean nationalising Amazon/Microsoft/Google or closing Wall Street, because the Democrat (or Tea Party) policies are enough for Change We Can Believe In, and bring down the system as we know it.
It's hard to imagine now, but late 1960s protest music was controversial, was risky, and did make many people suspicious about your character. How many parents still get worried if their kids play Rage Against the Machine or Public Enemy? Only insofar as some parents will worry their kids using naughty words or what could be construed as antisemitic rhetoric ("crucifixion ain't no fiction") or gun violence (one of the very few remaining respectable reasons in liberal reasons to be worried about 90s rap, or Wheatus).
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Yes, that's a good distinction between the two. I suppose I would classify Public Enemy as closer to RATM, though I haven't listened to a large proportion of the former's songs.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I'm not a utilitarian, but I don't think that the utilitarian case for Scandinavian social democracy is obvious. It may be correct, but there's a huge amount of hard work that you need to do to make the argument for it.
Let's leave Norway out, since if you have good governance plus massive natural resources per capita then you can have good conditions with a lot of bad policies. The opportunity cost matters a lot for utilitarians (remember, utilitarians are maximisers not satisficers) and you can't determine much about opportunity cost by comparing policies in countries that have massively different situations.
Sweden has low poverty, but also persistently high unemployment:
https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/unemployment-rate
Unemployment is arguably worse than poverty for utility, because it creates a sense of worthlessness: humans generally like to feel useful, which you can explain with evolutionary psychology as the fact that, in our early evolutionary environment, there were not kings and queens sitting around doing nothing - even leaders were expected to contribute towards hunting, shelter, child-rearing etc. People who were not useful were at risk of being left behind and/or not reproducing, so psychological mechanisms that punished people for perceived uselessness helped them to pass on their genes.
Denmark has low unemployment, but a neoliberal rather than social democratic unemployment benefits system that pushes people into work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_Denmark#Current_policy
Also, in terms of GDP per capita, there is a significant and persistent gap between Denmark and Sweden vs. the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Remember, utilitarians are welfare maximisers, not just satisficers. And the benefits of a higher GDP per capita are massive relative to the benefits of poverty reduction, if you make the assumption that a higher GDP per capita is a persistent gain over time, i.e. it benefits future generations, whereas poverty reduction does have a big impact on welfare but mainly for the present generation. Arguing from a broadly utilitarian perspective, the economist Tyler Cowen has argued that people massively underrate the benefits of economic growth, assuming that one also maintains long-term economic stability:
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/
Arguably, welfare states not only undermine economic growth, but also long-run social stability. If I can enjoy healthcare, pensions, housing etc. in my old age without a high personal savings rate, then I am incentivised to save less and consume more over my life. It also makes less sense for me to have children, which were historically a way of investing in your old age, as they were expected to support you using their incomes. If I have fewer children, then I can still benefit from future generations, because other people's children will be taxed to benefit me as much as them. I can free ride on their parenting and spend the time/money that they spend on children on myself or on my own child or two. This is mitigated somewhat by subsidising parenthood in various ways (education spending, child benefits etc.) but overall there are big financial costs to raising children, especially more than two.
Like all social democracy, Scandinavian social democracy developed at a time of high birth rates and high personal savings rates. The economist Paul Samuelson explicitly made reference to this in his defence of American Social Security: sure, it's a Ponzi scheme, but it's a Ponzi scheme that can never go bust, because each generation is always much bigger and more prosperous than the last! Social democracy has had a clash with reality in the past few decades and the question of its viability in an ageing society has not been solved. How do you make social democracy work with an exponential and structural increase in the numbers of people using welfare services but not contributing to them?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.DPND?locations=SE
This problem is structural, in that higher life expectancies and lower birth rates mean that it will continue to accelerate over time. The baby boomers were an unusually big demographic group, in Scandinavia as elsewhere, but the pattern of generations being smaller and living longer is persistent.
This problem is aggravated by the stagnation in wealth-creation in European social democracies since 2007. Sweden, Denmark and even Norway have seen approximately no increase in the level of GDP per capita since 2007. So they have both a structurally persistent rise in welfare demands and a structurally persistent stagnation in their capacity to produce new wealth to meet those demands.
Scandinavia is like a bee hive that is still producing new larvae at an accelerating rate, but which has stopped producing higher levels of honey. The current solution is for the worker bees to work harder and eat less, but that does not seem like the kind of long-run stable social system that Tyler Cowen points out is important for utilitarians, since it requires that the worker bees work harder and eat less indefinitely. And, unlike worker bees, Scandinavian wealth-creators have the option of leaving to places like Switzerland, Singapore, the Netherlands, Hong Kong etc., which let them eat money of the honey they create.
As the proportion of the population benefiting from the welfare state but not contributing to it explodes, how can social democracy survive? It will either have to go down the direction of authoritarian socialism, e.g. banning wealth-creators (workers and investors) from leaving the country to escape high tax rates, or more neoliberalism, e.g. a smaller, meaner welfare state. Thus far, the choice of social democrats has been the latter, moderated by high national debts to put the tax burden on future generations of wealth-creators, who can't vote yet - intensifying the welfare state Ponzi scheme, but not solving its long-run stability problem.
Of course, insofar as the US is socially democratic, it has similar problems, e.g. with Social Security. But that's not a case against right-wing policies, but the opposite! And US GDP per capita has risen at an astonishingly persistent rate since 2007. Note that I'm not talking about wages: what matters for the long-run viability of a welfare system is that wealth-creators are sufficiently incentivised (and not disabled by regulations etc.) to create wealth to fund the ever-increasing future liabilities of the system. For that, you need higher total incomes, not necessarily wages per se - from the point of view of public finance, capital gains tax revenue smells as sweet as payroll tax revenue. There are other problems with "wage stagnation" arguments that may come up at this stage of my arguments, but the whole issue is prima facie irrelevant for the reasons I've just given. And the US welfare system is arguably still too generous to be stable long-term, even with its higher economic growth relative to Scandinavia and other highly social democratic places, but again, that's hardly a utilitarian argument against right-wing policies!
Now, I don't strongly endorse the reasoning above. I can think of lots of social democratic responses. For example, importing worker bees from other hives without Scandinavia's demographic problems may at least prolong the sustainability of social democracy until medical technology enables healthspan to catch up with lifespan. The connection between welfare states, higher taxes, and economic growth is very murky: you can make the case that we don't know if it's Scandinavia's social democratic policies that are causing economic stagnation in Scandinavia and other social democracies viz. the US and other less socially democratic countries. Causal inference in social science is an extremely difficult matter. You can also argue that the utility benefits of a generous welfare state are so strong relative to the costs of unemployment and risks of long-run instability that Sweden's model is preferable to the US model. Or you could argue that social democracy + Danish-style labour market policies is the sort of social democracy that a utilitarian should want. I don't know how to estimate aggregate utility with a sufficient degree of accuracy to answer these questions - that doesn't bother me, because I am not a utilitarian, and even if I was, I wouldn't actually be so epistemically arrogant as to think that utilitarian reasoning was the best way to implement a utilitarian analysis of what is good/evil, any more than being a hedonist is the best way of achieving maximal personal pleasure.
As stated at the start of this comment, I am not saying that there is an obvious utilitarian case against social democracy. I don't think that a social democratic utilitarian is obviously irrational. I am saying that there is not an obvious utilitarian case for social democracy, and that a right-wing utilitarian position is not obviously wrong. Both David Friedman and Peter Singer are utilitarians, and I have a huge amount of admiration for the intellects of each of them.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
And as Sting said, Russians love their children too.
Yes, but the Russian state is also taking Ukrainian children in the occupied areas and distributing them to Russian families, potentially as a bargaining tool in future negotiations. A little love for Ukrainian children would be good.
However, I think that a good vs. evil framework is helpful only insofar as it is focused on actions rather than people. "Germans are evil" was neither a helpful nor well-justified belief in WWII. "Many Germans are doing and supporting evil actions" was a helpful and well-justified belief.
The same is true of Russia: I know of no evidence that there is anything innately evil in Russians, but a large number of Russians are doing and supporting evil actions in Ukraine, like mass abductions of Ukrainian children, bombing the electricity supplies to children's hospitals, or planning to redirect the electricity supplies of a Ukrainian power plant from Ukrainian children's hospitals towards the Russian electricity network. (To just focus on a few of the fucked-up things that Russia is doing to Ukrainian children.)
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
huge amounts of money
What's a huge amount, as a percentage of US GDP?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Ukraine is basically North Korea at this point...
This doesn't harmonise with your complaints about the intellectual laziness of others. "Putin is literally Hitler" and "Zelensky is literally Kim Jong-un" are both intellectually lazy takes.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Yes, as I said, causation in social sciences is hard. For my overall claim, what is important is not that we know that Sweden's welfare state causes its structurally high unemployment rate (in spite of its considerable spending on active labour market policies) but that a right-wing utilitarian could make a case that it does. In a brief part of a brief comment, I naturally cannot make that case rigorously.
Things like e.g. the Wellness Wednesday thread shouldn't really be CW.
And there can be interesting things to discuss with The Motte-style regulations that are not CW and could be disrupted by CW topics.
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