HaroldWilson
11mo ago
I think most people would look at that picture and be surprised to be told that these people are committing a genocide
Would they? Especially given that SS members were presumably self-selected to be ideologically committed Nazis, it doesn't seem at all implausible that many were sufficiently untroubled by genocide as to partake in jollity in their spare time. After all, depending on when these photos were taken, they might also not look like people staring down the barrel of total defeat in the war.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.
I mean, you can call it a 'vacation' if you really want to, but the market has spoken, and it has said that the better educated command much better salaries.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I don't think that the current low crime levels of many East Asian cities can be put down to some kind of long-running national culture, much less to 'biological heredity'. Late imperial China was quite a violent place; for just one example, the problem of laoguazei murdering and robbing travellers was thought to be endemic. An assessment of actual figures is obviously impossible to arrive at, guides on travelling published in the 18th century, for instance, often included warnings such as this;
[Rule no. 6]: When traveling, you must choose the right companion,
which might be helpful at times. If encountering someone unknown,
even if riding on the same boat or sleeping at the same inn, it is possible
that he has a different agenda from yours. All sorts of valuables should
be kept secret and guarded attentively. At night, be wary of theft. In
daytime, be wary of robbery.
[Rule no. 7]: No matter whether traveling via water or land, always
wait until the eastern sky turns bright before setting sail or leaving the
inn. If the eastern sky is still dim without any sign of sunrise, even if
a rooster has crowed, it is still nighttime. If one hurries to unleash the
boat or set off down the road, one must be wary of the danger of being
robbed by evildoers. When the sun starts to set in the west, one should
park the boat or find an inn. As the idiom goes, rest early instead of
late, better to be delayed than to be wronged
Likewise, William T. Rowe's study of Hankow in the late Qing period found that, while again we can't assess things quantitively, the public perception was the criminals were everywhere and that they were effectively free to commit crime as they pleased, and there were certainly 'bad' parts of the city where the more respectable citizen would not wish to find himself. As one newspaper observed in the mid-19th century, 'bandit-types from all over China find it easy to engage in violent crimes... the bad freely intermingle with the good'.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
The central problem with your argument is that you are ignoring the vastly different history of all these groups and the flattening the different circumstances of each by saying they were all discriminated against. Of course, you do address the point that each group are/were disadvantaged to a similar extent, but it isn't really that simple. Of course, Asian and Jewish Americans did/do face significant discrimination. However, for instance, in the case of Asian Americans the circumstances of their arrival have had the effect of counteracting disadvantage based on race faced on an institutional or inter-personal level. Asian Americans are almost all here as or as descendants of economic migrants, which selects for the most educated and grafting. Consider this; in the period immediately following 1965, Asian immigrants (excl. Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) had an average 15.2 years of schooling, which makes plenty of sense - it was not your average Indian or Japanese that immigrated to America in the 1960s and 1970s, or even today, especially in the case of poorer countries. This far exceeded the average native level, which as late of 1980 was only 13.07. This represents an enormous advantage in terms of ensuring the kind of beneficial which, as you, Asian-Americans disproportionately enjoy. So of course Asian immigrants should do better than average.
The circumstances of the arrival of African-Americans are plainly vastly different. Hence why recent Nigerian immigrants and their children actually out-earn the American average. Looking at such a vast disparity between recent black immigrants and the descendants of slaves, what else can explain that gap except the circumstances of the arrival of the slaves and their subsequent treatment, first as slaves and then as free but disadvantaged citizens?
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
A first generation American, Vivek was born to industrious immigrants who came to this land with nothing and went on to become a geriatric psychiatrist and engineer / patent attorney, respectively
Vivek seems to say this a lot but it's a bit stolen valour, he shouldn't get to trade off his parents' achievements. He had a sufficiently privileged upbringing to go to a private high school, so the whole 'American Dream' thing won't wash for him. But I guess 'I went to a private school from which 99% of students go to college, which has a $100 million dollar endowment and which has won a federal award for its excellence' doesn't sound good on the debate stage.
He's an impressive guy anyway, so why bullshit like this?
HaroldWilson
9mo ago
The bureaucrats nearly always win
FWIW, I don't think this necessarily gives a completely accurate impression of the show; especially as the series go on, Hacker gets his way quite a lot; just off the top of my head, he gets one over Humphrey on defending St George's island, the national database, moving soldiers to the North, Humphrey testifying about the bugging in one of the last episodes, the phone tapping petition (in the death list episode), over that bureaucracy/waste/select committee thing, the Buranda speech/oil loan, and moreover in many episodes they are working to the same ends. The Channel Tunnel, the threatened abolition of the department etc.
So, at some points in the series, it almost approaches an even contest. And iirc, Humphrey and other senior civil servants do now and again admit that if a minister, or maybe just the Prime Minister, is really dead set on something they often can't stop it. Plus, Hacker seems to be a less competent minister than the average
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
They tend to select the worst candidates most of the time.
I don't think is true more so than any other potential method of selection. The average democratic leader in the world right now seems pretty clearly superior to the average autocratic leader even when only comparing peer nations, if nothing else because democratic systems usually (though of course not always) seem to exclude the truly deranged; for every Ataturk you get several Mobutus, Amins and Kims.
They are beset by short term thinking
True, but autocratic leaders are hardly immune from that; see Galtieri.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I think you could make posts identical to this with regard to almost any ideological leaning. So for every conservative that would cite released criminals murdering again, so could someone else cite the various cases of suicide after DWP withdrew their benefits of the depravity of their enemies, or Trump's pardoning of war criminals etc. etc.
I'm reminded of Amy Biel who went to South Africa to fight apartheid, only to be pulled out a car by a black mob which slaughtered her despite the protests of her black friends that she was on their side. And then her parents flew into the country to testify a the "truth and reconciliation committee" in favour of releasing her murderers. They then started a foundation and hired these murderers.
It's not like Truth and Reconciliation was entirely one-sided though, see for instance Brian Mitchell.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
It's a bit subjective sure, but it's very obvious to me personally than this sad state of loneliness, empty and infantile thoughts and talks about making the world better, constant painful rat wheel of self reflection and psychologists to replace friends and so many more which i completely non-charitably imply from this ladies document. It all is much worse than the full family with 3+ children at 40, very trivial and non-enlightened down to earth thoughts about children, their education, clothes, food and holidays. When you simply don't have time or energy for do-gooder bullshit. In the non-woke society where societal norms are working and where you know how to do things and achieve good results just by blindly following the norms.
Eh, you can frame anything in a negative light like this is if one so chose. Just as one could unfavourably compare the much maligned 'cat lady' to the wholesome rural wife, one could do the exact opposite and unfavourably compare the put-upon housewife who lives in a drudgery of unstimulating household tasks, where for every one minute playing with her kids in the garden she must endure many many more minutes of boring domestic chores, who as Betty Friedan put it looks around her laundry, cooking and cleaning and asks herself whether this is all there is to her life, to the successful career woman who commands greater respect among male peers, is independent and stands on her own two feet and contemplates the deeper questions in life. This is also a wildly oversimplistic picture to be sure, but no more so than yours and surely equally plausible.
Indeed, no-one would make the equivalent observation for men with such certainty as you did. Would anyone say that Buchanan or Ted Heath had wasted and lonely lives because they never married? Of course not
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Very true and very important. When colonists tried to extract taxation from colonies, it (usually) wasn't British/French/Spanish taxmen going door to door demanding payment, they just dealt with local elites at the top level who passed some of the proceeds from the payments they themselves obtained from their communities to the colonists.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Without rampant credentialism the average bricklayer would have the alternative choice of becoming the average email sender.
I think this claim requires a lot more evidence than anyone ever gives for it. For it to be true, it would mean almost every company in the world is just ignoring an enormous opportunity to cut their spending on salaries because... who knows. Maybe possible, but a fairly extraordinary claim that requires commensurate evidence. I think it's fair to assume that if these companies could employ most anyone to do 'email sender' jobs, they would.
Also, if all people mean by saying 'bullshit jobs' is 'jobs that maybe aren't quite as hard as people think', 'bullshit jobs' is a terrible term and people should stop using it. What do you think most people hear when someone describes something as 'bullshit'?
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Might I gently suggest that in case of a nuclear war the finer points of hate speech laws and college campus environments may no longer be a particularly urgent concern.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
No-one is disputing this. I think the point is rather that, if you dropped 30 Romanians or Finns into this school, they would probably self-segregate together as well, at least as strongly as the American students of different races.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
The people forming these views are factually upper class, -ish, but they're jealous of those who have it even better and want to tear them down.
I think almost the opposite tends to be more true; middle-class guilt is much more powerful than middle-class jealousy. Hence why, though people like Disraeli and Sadler fancied that the aristocracy were better guardians of the poor, it was the barrister Lloyd George and the thoroughly bourgeois Attlee who created the foundations of the modern welfare state. This is really why Oliver disguises himself as poor; because the latent Methodism present in every middle-class Briton tells him that his (unearned) station is actually shameful, and the only acceptable circumstance in which to accept aristocratic largesse is poverty.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
refuses to name the player responsible for the death, Matt Petgrave
This is what you would expect, no? There is no public interest from the journalist's perspective in further broadcasting the name - it would be grossly wrong of them to make any insinuation of deliberateness before there is any evidence of such, and if it is indeed just an accident, as I would imagine is overwhelmingly likely, then no point putting him in the story anyway - to be honest he's not even really a public figure. The only results on google for him except about the recent accident are some official league stats pages and a club bio. No more than you'd get for a decent amateur club cricketer. The number of Britons who know his name without knowing him personally would be a rounding error to 0, I imagine. In that light, putting his name in the national press under these circumstances seems unfair.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
time and money to get far from trade routes,
Time sure, but money? Surely it's cheaper to go to less touristed places almost by definition, as the further off the tourist path you go the less demand there is.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights
Why are they mutually exclusive? I don't have strong views on your proposed explanation, but we have plenty of disaffected people in Britain yet manage to keep our mass shootings down to single figures per decade.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I mean in that instance I as an atheist do think the polite thing to do is thank them for praying for me or do it as well if they ask. It mightn't mean much to me but it does it him so why not, and the same applies to pronouns.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
It was one of the things leading to "3 strikes" laws (long prison sentences for the 3'rd crime in order to get rid of the very worst criminals).
I wanted to comment on this bit specifically because it's reflective of the conflation that happens everywhere on this subject with criminal justice policy and policing policy. I think under-policing in deprived neighbourhoods actually is a problem, and as you say most black leaders and the black public broadly did and do agree with this. Getting more police on the streets is a good thing. However, this is a completely different area to criminal justice policy. The academic consensus seems to be that, within reason, what really deters crime is not harsh punishments but the high clearance rates - actually catching more criminals. So more police is definitely part of the solution to crime, but once criminals have been caught I think the evidence in favour of meting out very harsh punishments is minimal.
HaroldWilson
30d ago
as close to a landslide for Trump as possible for tribal America.
Which is not a landslide at all. Trump's cap is at best 322, realistically 312 (MN the difference), hardly above Biden's 2020 result. To go any higher he'd have to start pulling some pretty preposterous states out of the bag. In any case, Trump's polling margin even in true swing states is low single digits, the economy has 6 months to get even better and Trump still has his trials to contend with. It's way, way too early to predict a 'landslide'. A week is a long time in politics, six months is an eternity.
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
I think it would help to lose weight to improve your odds
The obvious difference here is that almost everyone already knows this, probably including the person you're talking to, which is not the case in the bottle-cap or shark-infested waters examples. Indeed, the latter two aren't actually unsolicited advice, they are unsolicited unknown information which is very different.
There is almost no-one for whom 'lose weight' will be novel and actioned advice.
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
In Britain there's a popular-ish show called 'Eat Well for Less', with Greg Wallace, in which for a week a family who thinks they need to reduce their food bill has all their groceries replaced with new ones with all the branding removed so they don't know what they're getting. Invariably none of them can tell the difference when their branded products are replaced with the cheapo own-brand 'value' range, despite them all usually insisting beforehand that they'll be able to tell. Most amusing though is when they insist they don't like the replacement, only to find out they've been double bluffed and it was in fact the same brand as they have always been eating/drinking, and they look like morons. The vast majority of people who genuinely think they can tell a difference have definitely just been sucked in by marketing, which I suspect applies to most of the people in this thread insisting 'no, Heinz ketchup really is different to all the others!'.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
At least it can be said that the people didn't oppose with sufficient zeal to bother meting out any electoral consequences. 'The people chose it' is maybe a slight exaggeration but 'the people chose not to stop it' is basically right. And fwiw Hart-Celler polled pretty well.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
The democrats can’t plausibly reclaim that particular political mantle after the prominence of Defund The Police, and there are enough true cop-haters along the Democrat activist base that you’d never get message discipline on the issue.
I mean Biden managed to neutralise it well enough last time, and he has distanced himself pretty clearly from that side of the party. If he felt so inclined, with no real primary challenge this time, he could start leaning into the 'I am the Democratic party' sort of thing even more, stress his opposition to radical measures throughout his career. Perhaps the crime bill thing even becomes a plus! In any case it's not as if the President has that much power over matters of law and order, so what is even Trump's positive case here? There's just not much he can credibly propose.
Surely whatever you think about the UK, any plausible faults are on a completely different plane to those of the Chinese state, especially if the complaints you're levying are the aforementioned ones about affirmative action or whatever. Most importantly of all of course is the total absence of any genuine democracy or appreciable freedom of the press in China. Certainly to the extent that assisting China militarily because you were hacked off at a diversity initiative is indefensible.
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