HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Mexico is bursting at the seams with dogs. These dogs are not family members. They are alarm systems, beasts of burden to be used, abused, and thrown away. Locals will sometimes say, “They are working dogs,” but this is not a good enough reason to chain your dog to your roof and neglect it for years. Walking down streets full of starving, chained-up dogs exposes one to a constant stream of psychic pain much like that which famously drove Friedrich Nietzsche insane. As the story goes, one day in 1889, Nietzsche saw a horse beaten to death in the streets of Turin. He lost his mind, had a mental breakdown in the street, and never wrote again. (Of course, Nietzsche may have actually lost his mind because untreated syphilis ate his brain.)
I find this pearl-clutching a little hollow when most Westerners eat animals for breakfast lunch and dinner. Close the factory farms first, then you can get all high and mighty about Mexican dogs.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Are they? Outside of the more online younger types, I really don't think they do make that much of a fuss about it. Speaking to Britain, where while the tribes are not directly analogous or polarised there has been some spread of the American culture war, most of the Labour party, and certainly Starmer in particular, try not to talk about it at all if they can. Activist types do overemphasise it, but among, say, the median democratic state legislator I don't think it ranks very highly.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Ever heard of decorum? 'I won't be wrong' is the lamest possible defence to rudeness, we lie all the time for the sake of common courtesy and that's just as it should be.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
What does?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
evolutionarily self-destructive choices
particularly at the thought of them being medically sterilized.
Not the thrust of the comment I know, but I'd be curious if you really think this is at the root of your reaction. I mean, would you react in the exact same way if your kid was in some other way rendered unable to have kids themselves, like they were gay or got a vasectomy once they were an adult?
Also;
I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State
I think we're tipping in hysteria pretty clearly here.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
So it seems like it’s more of a targeted war against China specifically? Likely giving other nations time to choose (with us or against us), and slapping the nations who chose to align with China with huge tariffs in 90 days
I think this is giving too much credit. Plenty of people in Trumpworld, even people very close to him, have spent the past days insisting that the tariffs are not a negotiating tactic, they are a necessary measure, and even in some cases that the stock market collapse is a necessary correction. I think they just got spooked that the slide had no signs of stopping and went into reverse gear. It's hard to see that 90 days is sufficient to conclude trade deals with most of the countries in the world (TPP took over 8 years to conclude), it's just a panic button.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
production is too low
Physical production? I don't see why this is a problem if service production rises to compensate (except for e.g. national security reasons which has nothing to do with whether some service jobs are 'fake' or not). Yes the US runs a BoT deficit but the durables deficit is like an order of magnitude bigger than the overall deficit - that is to say service exports wouldn't have to rise that much to eliminate the deficit, which would certainly be easier than trying only to boost physical goods exports in which the US obviously has far less comparative advantage, especially in mass production.
There are lots of people in the US who are very wealthy and prosperous but shouldn't be
How could this even be true in an inter-country sense? If production is too low, what sustains consumption? Foreign investments in American instruments? But surely these prove that investors are satisfied in the likelihood that future American production, on which they are trading, will be able to make good their investment? Service exports would be the other candidate, but then these, if they are competitive on the open world market, clearly 'deserve' their price.
I don't really understand tbh, and I don't mean that in a rhetorical sense. How do you perceive the supposed 'instability' of the US position unravelling?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
a website with numerous sub-communities each enforcing their own specific orthodoxy on their members, or a website in which the members of every community have to adhere to exactly one orthodoxy?
Well we can make this argument one stage removed no? Reddit is simply one of many websites enforcing certain values, if you don't like them you can go to another website - it is itself a 'sub-community' of all websites.
HaroldWilson
2yr 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
2yr ago
SS scam
This is silly, there will need to be some (moderate) increase in payroll taxes or means testing or (moderate) decrease in payments in the next decade or two to keep SS solvent in the long term, but it's nowhere near a 'scam'. Who is it scamming, it's working precisely as intended?
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
More chaotic perhaps. But we're already almost a decade into the MSM's Fine People hoax and it still gets pushed and believed. I find it hard to make a distinction between major political institutions blatantly lying, and an LLM hallucinating information on the receiving end.
Only someone who largely consumes rolling news slop could say this. MSM produces reams of very high quality reporting every day, it's just that no-one cares about it because round-table shouting gets more clicks. If you actually think LLM generated false articles are no different to say, reading the Financial Times or New York Times you are simply wrong. Does the latter (and to a lesser extent the former) embed left-liberal assumptions in a lot of their reporting? Of course, and one should read anything with a critical eye. But they're still pretty good. If you don't want that just read the WSJ instead. These aren't as popular as the slop of course, but that's mostly the fault of the readers/viewers. If one read any of those publications daily or every few days, you would have a more complete and accurate understanding of politics, the economy etc. than probably 99% of the American public.
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
provides no justification for England
Leaving aside for a second the more odious points of this comment, this is preposterous. Britain had no justification for attempting to stop Germany attempting to make itself the pre-eminent power in Europe by conquest? Almost as if it was the guiding principle of the British to prevent such a state of affairs emerging for centuries prior. This was precisely the argument Napoleon tried to give at various - Britain had no need to meddle in continental affairs rather than attending to its overseas possessions and trading activities and had ruined itself for the sake of a conflict it had no interest in. It was preposterous then and equally so in 1939. And indeed the conduct of Hitler and the and the Nazi government before and during the war proved that they could never be tolerated as a major element of the European order.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
If you're not voting with reference to the outcome, why bother going at all? If it's just a question of making yourself feel better, stay at home and throw darts at a picture of Kamala Harris, and let the people who actually care about who becomes President do the voting.
HaroldWilson
1yr 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
1yr ago
The root cause of the problem was inventing gender and the best solution IMO is abolishing gender.
Just because you don't put a name to it that wouldn't 'abolish gender'. Whether or not it was conceived of as such, gender roles as separate from sex clearly existed prior to the semi-recent past - without the existence of gender, what would it even mean to behave as 'more masculine' or 'more feminine'? If anything, putting a name to the notion of gender surely helps to abstract behaviours away from sex rather than strengthening, as without it the only language with which to describe gendered behaviour is sex-based.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
When you are on your third PM since the last election there is a real question of democratic legitimacy for their current administration.
How so? He has the support of the MPs we all elected on the understanding that they could if they wished replace the PM with another.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
you don't really get to "call dibs" on a bike you are not currently renting
Don't you? I don't live in New York, but if someone was doing this I would think extremely bad form to try and take one they were obviously just about to take out, especially if you've already asked and they've said no. Indeed, the very fact that she asked surely implies she recognises they do have some sort of 'dibs' on it.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This is a very easy comment to make from, one imagines, the comfort of the West.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
leaders regretfully apologising for their crimes against human rights just before they go on to commit them, they just go unacknowledged or denied
Certainly not 'apologise for their crimes' because obviously an apology for a 'crime' would imply they are wrong anyway, but politicians absolutely constantly stressed that these decisions were not being taken lightly and were only demanded by truly extraordinary circumstances.
Perhaps the most important thing though is that they subjected themselves to the same measures (partygate etc. notwithstanding) - how many high-ranking Nazis subjected themselves to the concentration camps?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The people are never intentionally consulted about important issues, and when they are and vote against the wishes of the elite, their will is ignored in practice or slow walked to oblivion.
Perhaps not intentionally, but elections are a de facto consultation on the biggest issues anyway. The latter part of the statement just isn't so universally, or even generally, true as you suggest. Take immigration. Every election in a European nation was a consultation around the time of the refugee crisis; Germans could have voted for AfD if they felt that strongly, but they mostly didn't so more Merkel it was.
Concerning EU integration I assume you are referring to the Denmark Maastricht referendum, but I don't think it proves your point. As a result of the referendum they negotiated several crucial opt-outs including on defence and currency, then they put that changed agreement to another referendum and won fairly comfortably. So score one for liberal democracy, if anything.
Also; Obama did end the Iraq war? So not sure what the 'foreign entanglements' bit is about. If it's referring to Trump, them that isn't evidence of deep state interference, just of the fact that Trump is a moron who had no idea how to work the levers of power.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
So what would you estimate the 'social cost' of those 15 or so million people who use firearms without harming anyone being unable to hunt is?
Hard to say of course, but bear in mind none of the potential restrictions mooted by any mainstream figures in the U.S. would seriously damage hunting or shooting for sport in the U.S. After all we still have both of those in Britain.
This seems obviously confounded by factors that contribute to suicide and accidents independently of gun ownership.
So I find it doubtful that for the median gun owner it turns into a net negative, even if we see on the lower end of the bell curve that accidents and suicide are an actual risk.
In the same way that owning a pool makes it WAY more likely you or a loved one will die of drowning, and yet there are fairly easy precautions one can take to mitigate those chances (learn to swim, learn CPR, fence in the pool, provide life vests) to almost zero.
We make policy for aggregates, not individuals. Whether for some people owning a gun might be a net positive is irrelevant, society-wide they seem to do more harm than good which is the relevant point.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
My assumption as with every one of these controversies is that it will peter out within weeks. I mean, is there anyone still not buying Gillette razors or Nike trainers on the grounds of their respective controversial advertising campaigns? Corporate top brass are not morons, nor I suspect do they care much about any social causes, except for perhaps keeping their own taxes low and regulations light.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
While that may be some kind of motive for some activists in that specific area, in any broad sense I don't think it's really important considering the aforementioned point that there is a positive (though not necessarily huge) correlation between obesity and voting Republican. I mean, here are the ten most obese metropolitan areas in the US.
McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas: 38.8 percent
Binghamton, N.Y.: 37.6
Huntington-Ashland, W. Va., Ky., Ohio: 36.0
Rockford, Ill.: 35.5
Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas: 33.8
Charleston, W. Va.: 33.8
Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla.: 33.5
Topeka, Kans.: 33.3
Kennewick-Pasco-Richland, Wash.: 33.2
Reading, Penn.: 32.7
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Ok but clearly that's a non-answer because the problems still exist. If you want to say 'I think the problems continuing is better than any potential remedy' that's a fine argument to make, but individuals cannot be called upon to solve existing systemic problems. Poverty exists, so clearly letting individuals 'solve' it themselves has not worked.
Probably not much continuing here now thar these points have come up in your other comment but this is absurd. This is just how the Westminster system functions and even this party-orientated system has been the norm for coming up on a century. It's called the 1922 Committee for a reason.
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