Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Things like covid and the Russia-Ukraine war probably slowed the US's return to its long-term trend of production, and thus had some effect on inflation. However, you can explain the vast majority of inflation (as well as the slowdown right now) by what happened to the money supply:
"Communist" is already a win for the left. She was a Stalinist, joining the pro-Stalin CPUSA in 1936, around the time when many more humanitarian communists left. She stuck with the Soviet Union through the show trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Iron Curtain, the 1956 revelations about Stalinism, and the Invasion of Hungary.
And for all her support for the Soviet Union, she had the gall to be piqued when the ACLU didn't want a literal Stalinist in their organisation in 1940, whose organisation was defending the use of the Smith Act against Trotskyists, suggesting that the "Rebel Girl" had a high tolerance for hypocrisy as well as bloodshed.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
I have a similar experience, except that I've heard them say that they use it to not feel ugly. The eyes tend to be the most attractive part of someone's face and it's relatively easy to make them look better using make-up. It's harder with a mouth, chin, jawline, cheeks etc.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
it discourages consumer spending on big-ticket items, since consumers will wait until prices fall
The expectation of falling prices in the future discourages consumer spending on an item, but this is not absolute. And if a price is falling in the present, then that increase consumer spending. How these things work out depends on time preference, expectations etc.
There have also been periods of deflation without layoffs. The mistake people often make is to conflate deflation caused by falling nominal incomes (demand-led deflation) with deflation caused by rising production (supply-led deflation). The latter is not necessarily a problem.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Oh, you can even say that it was a lab leak, now:
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Maybe this is actually a good thing? Perhaps most people were, after all, born to live simple lives and have no desire or ability to form coherent political thoughts? It really gives me a dim view of democracy, dimmer than the one I had before covid.
It may be just an issue of abstracting. Politics, beyond the very simple, involves a lot of abstractions, and the capacity or interest of many people to handle more than a few simple abstractions at the same time (as in doing short multiplication or division) seems limited. As David Stove put it when defending positivism against the criticism that it robs life of the spiritual and transcendent wonders of religion and philosophy:
For when common humanity does venture in thought beyond the concerns of common life, it is a thousand to one that atrocity, and not just absurdity, will result. Do the scenes of Tehran, Kabul, Beirut in 1986 disgust and appall you? Then learn to see in them the scenes of Alexandria in 415, of Toulouse in 1218, of Munster in 1535, and all the other famous beauty-spots of your beloved Christian centuries.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Yes, I think we more or less agree.
It can be helpful to think in terms of real interest rates rather than prices. Deflation lowers the real interest rate, and thus lowers the opportunity cost of (safe) saving over consumption. If the deflation is caused by a squeeze in demand, then it tends to cause an increased burden on borrowers, who must now pay back more (in real terms) with less. If the deflation is caused by rising supply, then the burden on borrowers rises, but so (on average) does their incomes.
Deflation in the near future, which I think is much more likely than people think (look at recent money supply growth) would be demand-driven, and potentially disastrous in the same way as the 2008-2009 deflation in the US.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
It was also the norm across a lot of Europe for a long time. My hometown in Europe switched from a local dialect of a minority language to the national language in about one generation, for this reason.
I honestly just don’t buy that it would really be any different in the US
McCarthyism did have the inadvertent effect of making US communists seem as victims, and thus as at least initially sympathetic to most of the American left. They won't defend Stalin, but they will portray pro-Stalin communists as victims of an oppressive US security apparatus. Communism did not become popular in the 1960s, but anti-anti-communism became very widespread, especially among boomers.
That's why Bond films had to be rewritten from the books to stop the Soviets being the bad guys. Making Bond someone hunting down and fighting against Soviet spies/sympathisers would make him instantly uncool.
See also the portrayal of communism in pretty much every good anti-establishment comedy of the period, e.g. Monty Python. It's not communist, but it is always anti-anti-communist:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VEy5vIWCJLQ
Eventually, boomers became the establishment. Anti-communist Democrats like Lyndon B. Johnson or Harry S. Truman became anachronisms. Worrying about communism became a way of signalling that you were a hopeless and contemptible square - a Dan Quayle type:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=83tnWFojtcY
Thankfully, there was nothing to fear from Russia, or from socialist regimes where people would have to line up for toilet paper amidst shortages.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
This is commonsensical if you assume that (a) God is omnibenevolent and (b) you have an independent standard of what is good/evil, but it goes against several widely held Christian doctrines - Original Sin (we are all born with a mortal sin that requires repentence through Christian belief), the idea that knowing of Jesus is an especially good thing as far as eternal life goes (not a logical implication of John 3:16, but certainly hinted at in context) and the idea that Christianity is a prerequisite for salvation (strongly suggested by "I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the father, except through me").
This was one of the main things that made me into an atheist. In particular, it made me think that Christianity seemed an awful lot like a mystical Jewish group that morphed into a gentile religion, rather than the intervention of a God who actually loved all humans. As Jesus Christ Superstar put it, the peoples of the Red Sea had no mass communications... Unfortunately, they also didn't have an all-powerful God (with a record of intervening in human affairs, to the point of drowning > 99% of its population) to help spread their message around the world.
Making them a natural place for a mystical group to develop and talk of miracles, but not a natural group for an all-powerful God to use to spread his message. Of course, you can explain all that in an ad hoc way, but at that point I was finally unwilling to believe more improbable stuff to support my apologetics.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
No, hanging around with a Christian doesn't make you a Christian.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
The contradiction is not to be interpreted away; the contradiction is the whole point.
Saying that X is a Mystery and that X is a contradiction are not the same thing.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Pretty much. I recently had a revelation when I realised that the most important part of "conscientiousness", which has all this data linking it to success, is just frustration tolerance - whether pain, disappointment, rejection, or whatever irks someone. Achieving notable things generally requires tolerating a lot of "frustration", in the sense of things you are frustrated about. Of course, that doesn't mean that frustration itself is what is useful: it's frustration in pursuit of a goal.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Given a consequentialist theory like utilitarianism, there is also a huge asymmetry of importance between "AI kills almost all humans, the survivors persist for millions of years in caves" and "AI kills the last human."
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Jews did not primarily live in the countryside during European history outside of Russia
Could they even own or rent land? Or be serfs?
Humans don’t really value whether they “own land”
Do you have any evidence for this?
More generally, any sources that whether people historically want to live in the countryside is independent of whether they could earn a living, either on their own land or someone else's, in the jobs that exist in the countryside?
It seems that legal restrictions on what Jews could do is a sufficient explanation of why they lived in cities, sometimes with segregation to Jewish quarters. When they could work in the countryside, as in parts of Eastern Europe, it seems they did, like everyone else in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
I do believe that an inclination towards academics is not the same thing as being smart or competent.
Is this about IQ? IQ doesn't measure "inclination towards academics." The relationship is confounded by all sorts of things, like agreeableness and conscientiousness.
Good IQ tests are inductive reasoning problems that can be given to naked spear-wielding tribesmen in savage jungles who have never heard of a school or university, without cultural bias, because they are testing aptitude in cognitive skills that are (a) common across humans and (b) correlated with capacity for other cognitive skills. An Amazonian wild man might not be able to read, but we can estimate his ability to quickly learn to read based on his IQ score in pattern-recognition problems.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
the primary driver of differences in outcome between groups is cultural
I also suspect that this is true, but it doesn't require scepticism about IQ or even not thinking that hereditary IQ is a major determinant of academic or commercial success at an individual level. A large part of group differences is not statistically explained, and many explanatory factors (like agreeableness and conscientiousness) have a cultural aspect to them.
Of course, a HBD theorist might say that cultural differences are themselves largely genetic in origin, but I would want to look at twin studies, adoptee studies, and similar evidence before believing that.
Quite a few monstrosities there, but Frank Lloyd Wright is not exactly the first name I think of when I think "terrible modernist or postmodernist architecture."
Tom Wolfe had some appreciation of Wright, and while this was a rare lapse of good taste on Wolfe's part, it wasn't like people who say that this is "beautiful":
Art, on the other hand, "cuts into you", as Todd McGowan succinctly put it, the same way that the skull cuts into Holbein's painting. It's not supposed to be all sunshine and roses. It's supposed to take something from you at the same time that it gives.
Beauty and "sunshine and roses" are not the same thing. The Fall of Icarus is both extremely beautiful and eloquently says as much about the human condition as some existentialists could only do in a whole book.
It's also wrong to conflate style with demandingness. Someone who wants more beautiful art isn't necessarily asking for more laziness. Again, I point to Bruegel's best works, which works at multiple levels: you can enjoy them at the level of their beauty, but you can also study and think about their details for hours, especially if you are familiar with their historical and intellectual context.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Art only has to inspire emotions in people.
Is that true?
If we could inspire the same emotions by taking the relevant pills, would art be redundant?
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
It's possible that the ugliness is deliberate. For some people, beauty is uncomfortable and alienating. If people are insecure about their appearance or neurotic about unfavourable judgements about other people (especially "marginalized" people) perhaps to the point of trying to reject the very idea of beautiful people (more common than you would think - "Everyone is beautiful" is a rejection of the concept of beautiful people)
More generally, GloboHomo has an emotionally flattening, inclusive, and childlike quality. It wasn't present nurseries when I was young, but I can easily imagine it in them, in a way I can't imagine anything like your first picture being let anywhere near a nursery. It's hygge-culture and wholesomism, extended to art. When I think about it, GloboHomo repels me far more than brutalism or modern art, and that's saying something. At least they aspire to something daring, even if there's more than a little of Satanic bitterness to them. It's the type of thing that makes me want to join the Wagner group, and I'm about as anti-Putin/pro-Ukraine as can be.
We can do better than ugly modern art without resorting to saccharine crap and calling it beauty.
Most art, most of the time, is going to be saccharine. It has always been that way. But better saccharine that's made to taste sweet than saccharine that's made to taste rancid.
Thomas Kincaid was obviously not a great artist, but as someone who produced uplifting art that entertains a lot of people, stirring their aesthetic senses and providing them comfort through the horrors of life, I admire him and miss him.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Maybe they think it's not as simple as you do?
For example, a moderately more complex story could be "Group A tries to appeal to Group B with an ad that Group B likes because it offends Group C." Is A talking to C? Well, that depends on how you precisify "talking to".
This depends on the cause of deflation. Deflation as a result of contractionary monetary policy sucks, like the Great Depression. With mild deflation caused by steady growth in spending + rapid GDP growth, the story is different:
https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/less-zero
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