Hyperion
7d ago
I have trouble embracing the progressive worldview on Gaza because those same principles, applied to WWII, would have me side with the Axis powers. And I am quite certain that the world is a better place because the (Western) Allies won the day. Not that they are perfect (ha!), but I'll certainly stan them over the major Axis players.
The Germans and Japanese starving to death weren't POCs. It's that simple.
Decolonization means removing the colonialists. It's that simple.
Hyperion
12d ago
Oh, I completely agree with you. I'm just coming at it from the other side.
Given how insane their policies were, for all the reasons you listed, they should have never gone down that path; or, realized long ago that it was fruitless.
Given that they did do all those things anyway; yes, only something really shocking could have changed their minds.
Hyperion
12d ago
I wouldn't call Germany asleep at the wheel with regards to Russia. I would consider them turning the wheel as sharply as they could towards Russia.
The only surprising thing is that a crisis as immense as the current war in Ukraine was what was needed to wake up their leadership.
Hyperion
12d ago
Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism.
Why can't conservatives be 'classical liberals'. If you look up a list of historical classical liberals it's people like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Ronald Coase. People like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were considered neoliberals. They were and are considered conservatives as well!
Hyperion
15d ago
I don't think it's just counter-signalling. Freddie really is a dyed in the wool leftist who does have contempt for any remotely rightwing people, even principled liberals and moderates. He hopes he can win those people over to leftism by presenting a more reasonable version, but he knows which side he is on.
Just read this piece from his substack. He hates the anti-woke. Full stop. He hates James Damore and he hates Quillete and he hates Jordan Peterson. He is a leftist. He is 90% woke, he just wants to push for a less insane version.
This isn't a rhetorical tactic, it's what he really believes.
Hyperion
19d ago
We had, for a while, a middle class of technicians, educated from normal schools, who were able to use our brains to make a good living. But that option seems to be hollowing out.
This upper middle class group hasn't been hollowed out, it's been growing. What is hollowing out is the middle class factory line worker who makes good money despite being effectively a low skilled laborer. The skilled knowledge workers have been growing in numbers and income.
Hyperion
20d ago
From what I know about 19th century Georgia I don't think it would be that exceptional.
Hyperion
21d ago
The question is over what kinds of people we are going to make in the future, not over who to cull now. I don't think all beings have an equal right to life.
Hyperion
21d ago
A world without natural selection would lead to an accumulation of deleterious variants that would quickly lead to the extinction of any species. If I was given a choice between health or sickness, intelligence or ignorance, and life or death, I'd choose life every time.
Hyperion
22d ago
I find your talk about genetic engineering for intelligence to be basically a form of genocide.
By that definition evolution by natural selection is genocide. Anything that caused differential reproduction of genotypes could be considered genocide even.
Hyperion
24d ago
But then in the 70's a bunch of psychologists saw computers and were astonished at how much they reasembled human thought, and came to the conclusion that the human mind works like a computer. I'm personally against the expression "Artificial Intelligence" because computers are neither intelligent nor dumb.
All physical processes can be simulated by a computer. They are all computers. You seem to believe animal brains are special, but they aren't. An Intel CPU or an Nvidia GPU are both made of electrons and quarks, just like the neurons in your brain. Both are the same particles governed by the same laws of physics and just as computable as any other configuration of particles.
Hyperion
24d ago
That was Robert H. Frank's argument for a steeply progressive consumption tax. It would reduce zero sum status competition while keeping savings/investment high.
The greater male variability hypothesis and the related cluster of explanations is still the best theory I've seen bandied around for this.
The Y chromosome has a much higher mutation rate and its presence determines sex, which makes men the volatile and unstable genetic testing ground, and women the selectors and carriers of the successful experiments.
What?
No, the reason males are more risk taking is because a male can impregnate multiple females, where as, a female can only be impregnated by one male. So a male has a higher expected return to risk taking mating strategies.
Chickens are the opposite of humans where females have ZW chromosomes and males have ZZ chromosomes; however, roosters are famously aggressive and risk taking. You can't stop them from fighting if enclosed together.
In contrast to the XY sex-determination system and the X0 sex-determination system, where the sperm determines the sex, in the ZW system, the ovum determines the sex of the offspring. Males are the homogametic sex (ZZ), while females are the heterogametic sex (ZW). The Z chromosome is larger and has more genes, similarly to the X chromosome in the XY system.
Hyperion
30d ago
The Christian theory has the same problem the Positivist one has unless you just assume the consequent. If we were made by God as rational being we can be rational, but how do we know we were made by God and are rational except through our senses and reason? If we were made irrational by a demon or evolution then the Christian theory is wrong and the secular theory could still be right for the wrong reasons.
This reminds me of Lob's Theorem, or as Scott Aaronson puts it.
Do you remember the puzzle from Thursday? The puzzle was whether there's any theorem that can only be proved by assuming as an axiom that it can be proved. In other words, does "just believing in yourself" make any formal difference in mathematics? We're now in a position to answer that question.
Let's suppose, for concreteness, that the theorem we want to prove is the Riemann Hypothesis (RH), and the formal system we want to prove it in is Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF). Suppose we can prove in ZF that, if ZF proves RH, then RH is true. Then taking the contrapositive, we can also prove in ZF that if RH is false, then ZF does not prove RH. In other words, we can prove in ZF+not(RH) that not(RH) is perfectly consistent with ZF. But this means that the theory ZF+not(RH) proves its own consistency -- and this, by Gödel, means that ZF+not(RH) is inconsistent. But saying that ZF+not(RH) is inconsistent is equivalent to saying that RH is a theorem of ZF. Therefore we've proved RH. In general we find that, if a statement can be proved by assuming as an axiom that it's provable, then it can also be proved without assuming that axiom. This result is known as Löb's Theorem (again with the umlauts), though personally I think that a better name would be the "You-Had-The-Mojo-All-Along Theorem."
Hyperion
1mo ago
This is just a kind of argument style common among educated Christians. We have a couple other ones who comment frequently here and think this Alvin Plantinga style skepticism is a slam dunk against naturalism and empiricism.
Hyperion
1mo ago
There were 57,540 births in Ireland in 2022. The death figures are per 100,000. If the true average was 4-6 deaths per 100,000 you would expect Ireland to have the frequency of zero maternal death years it does.
Hyperion
1mo ago
It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero).
Are you even a German? You talk like an American with some far off German ancestors, who has no real connection to the country or it's culture. You also idealize Germany, and attack the Anglo world, like someone who knows the faults of the Anglo world first hand, but has no real understanding of what Germany was like then.
That's not a theory. The Ancient North Eurasians were a population that existed in Siberia 20+ thousand years ago before being demographically replaced by North East Asians. The Native Americans got stuck in Beringa during this process so they are about 30-40% ANE. Some of the ANE migrated east into Eastern Europe where they contributed a lot of ancestry to the Yamnaya as well as Scandinavian Hunter-gathers the Germans assimilated. Europeans are only about 20% ANE at most and it was so long ago and so little of the ancestry of moderns I doubt it really matters for any traits today.
As a bonus here is one of the last people who was mostly ANE by ancestry, shortly after her death her people were assimilated by Indo-Europeans.
Hyperion
1mo ago
It has and is happening in ADoS. It's just there are lots more black people in the USA then there are Indians, especially in the deep south where most live. I see lots of very white looking black people who still identify as black and are culturally very black. And many have been absorbed into white majority once they start looking white enough.
American Indians are very European by ancestry. It isn't unusual at all to have people who look white despite having two Indian parents, to say nothing of Indians with one white parent/grandparent. Lots of famous Indian Chiefs had white mothers.
It's a big reason why the Indian population has been falling in the USA. Some Indian from the reservation moves out, marries a white person; and, has white looking children, who just get absorbed into the white majority as another white person with some story about an Indian ancestor.
Hyperion
1mo ago
I think the only take away from that is to ignore all the editorializing and only look at the actual pictures. I agree that the people who wrote the files are pushing an agenda and playing fast and loose with the facts, but the stuff in the actual WPATH communications is just as crazy.
This mostly seems like an attempt by the author to get people to avoid looking at the actually damning stuff.
Hyperion
1mo ago
There are lots of supernatural acts that are tied to suffering in the bible and Christian mythology. Jesus' own bleeding of water instead of blood when he is pierced in his side and his eventual resurrection, including him still having the wounds he suffered on the cross. The saints suffered like Christ and in doing so became magical like him. Objects associated with Christ and the Saints are considered magical relics, these include supposed body parts of Christ and the Saints. If that isn't magic I don't know what is.
If someone thinks kissing my foreskin or finger can heal them, that is magic.
Hyperion
1mo ago
The had monks, yes, but they also had secular scholars who preserved these things. I assumed you were talking about monks like those in Irish monasteries and other monasteries throughout the Western Europe who preserved some of the ancient corpus despite being assaulted by pagan Germans.
Hyperion
1mo ago
magic actually works but you have to literally either go through extreme suffering...
it would be the best to approach all of this precisely through an institution that says "That's bad...
(most likely) Christianity.
Are thinking about the same Christianity? The one I know glorifies martyrdom, suffering and self sacrifice. At least the Catholic version.
There are countless examples of women and children being massacred throughout history. The sack of Magdeburg, the sack of Baghdad, Nader Shah's sack of Delhi, the Sand Creek Massacre, or this massacre of Globular Amphora Culture women and children(they might have even been killed by proto-Germans). History is littered with stuff like this, human brutality isn't rare and it isn't exceptional.
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