Hyperion
27d ago
How are kings and nobles going to run anything except through bureauracies? These were things created by kings to run their countries. Kings and aristocrats will still need bureaucrats and courts to run things, your just changing who gets to decide what the laws and regulations are, not the need for them.
Hyperion
1yr ago
The occupants of the Stans and the Caucuses have surived thousands of years through mutual paranoia and hatred... Cooperation? Compromise? Working with your fellow man? Trusting that everyone ultimately wants what's best everyone? Not being tempted by extremism or alarmism?
That's just false though. The Turks only took over the Stan countries less than two thousand years ago. They intermarried and cooperated with the Iranian peoples who lived there plenty. Lots of Turkish groups just seem like Iranians who culturally assimilated to a Turkish identity.
Do you actually know anything about the history of the Caucasus or Central Asia? Your spelling of 'Caucasus' doesn't inspire hope.
Hyperion
17d ago
I think the biggest issue is that he assumes all these 'great' thinkers of the past actually had a point. From my perspective it's all a tower of nonsense with more dung being flung on top and each successive generation just adding more nonsense to the pile.
Saying that Adorno or Horkheimer said something isn't a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place. You can't just cite each others claims as authoritative if those claims are bullshit in the first place.
Not that Zizek cares, his whole philosophy runs on vibes and free association. He is a clown and he likes it when you laugh at him. Trying to argue with a clown is like wrestling with a pig.
Hyperion
1mo 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
2mo ago
How do you expect to convince the legislature or courts to reject the disparate impact standard except through convincing them HBD is true? If it isn't true disparate impact makes perfect sense. If I believed in my heart that every group really was fundamentally equal, I would love the disparate impact standard. Nothing else would make sense!
Hyperion
4mo ago
In the US, how many people are open-borders advocates?
There aren't many open borders advocates, but there are lots of left-leaning people who are advocates of not looking like racists or Republicans. And lots of other more left-leaning people willing to throw those accusations at anyone who wants to crack down on illegal immigration.
Hyperion
4mo ago
Yet Haiti and the Dominican Republic had comparable GDP per capita in the 1950s. Look at them now.
He's trying to play to the Republican base which is still very Christian. He wants to paint himself as a monotheist like them, not some polytheistic animal worshiper like how most Christians view Hindus. Maybe he would be better off ignoring it, but he thinks it's important to be ahead on this issue.
Hyperion
10mo ago
The other thing is, command economies are pretty effective if you want to speed-run a society's development from mostly agricultural to mostly industrial and if you want to introduce stuff like public education and women's rights on a mass scale. Many people die in the process, but a few decades later the survivors look back and see that they went from having no prospects except subsistence farming when they were children to now working as factory professionals or bureaucrats.
What do you mean by speed run? China tried all this and floundered hopelessly. It wasn't until they liberalized that they started to industrialize. Russia was already quite heavily industrialized before the revolution and it's not clear that central planning helped at all in the process. Other more liberalized countries like Germany were and continued to be more industrialized.
Countries can develop under central planning sure. The question is does it do better than the alternative and every natural experiment we have shows it doesn't. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are richer than China. South Korea richer than North Korea. West Germany even now is richer than East Germany.
Technological growth made everyone better off and assigning this boon to the totalitarian state that happened to take power while the rising tide lifted all boats is an easy mistake to make, but a mistake all the same.
Hyperion
10mo ago
If everything is a mental health disorder; then, nothing is. I find these claims absurd; but, I wouldn't call these people mentally ill. The very idea that personality disorders are real mental illnesses is nonsense to me.
Someone being a dick or a bitch doesn't make them mentally ill. They are just a dick or a bitch. Don't medicalise ordinary human personality variation. If you hate them so much just argue against them and their positions without weaponizing the bureaucracy.
Hyperion
1yr ago
That's also true for psychometric traits and gender expression as well. Women and men overlap massively in each psychometric trait or each way they express gender, but if you look at them all at once in a higher dimensional space the gulf between them is massive and binary. It's why all these claims that gender is really a spectrum fall flat on me. It's easy to tell these 'non-binary' people are really binary if you look at all their behaviors at once.
Hyperion
1yr ago
The Bell Beaker culture is not called the Corded Ware culture. It is likely descended from the Corded Ware, but they aren’t the same.
Hyperion
4mo ago
In this analysis, India is noted as being unstable in terms of central government, instead suffering waves of conquest by foreign powers from the North, I forget the historical elements. This led to, or exists alongside, to cultural tendencies towards nepotism, with family being more important than society broadly speaking.
That wasn't because of foreign invasions. The extreme caste endogamy started during the Gupta empire, an empire of local origin, and during the middle of a long pause in foreign invasions.
Hyperion
10mo ago
Are you forgetting about Plato and his work The Republic where he lays out a rational plan for how an ideal state should be run. Or the religious reforms of Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Mani, Mohmmed, et al. They tend to present themselves as bringing back old wisdom, but they clearly believe that God's designs have gone astray and it is up to humans to change them.
There is definitely an alternative to this world in Buddhism and Christianity. Nirvana through enlightenment in Buddhism; or, the Kingdom of Heaven through Christ in Christianity.
You are confusing the views of a few ancient and medieval sources with what people believed in general. Hell you sound more like you are parroting the views of the early modern philosopher Leibniz then any ancient or medieval person.
Hyperion
1yr ago
Hyperion
8d ago
Your dates don't really line up though. Withholding isn't until 1943. You see higher income taxes earlier, after Roosevelt becomes president. You then see an even steeper rise in taxes in general as the USA becomes more and more involved in the war. Finally in 1943 you see withholding implemented, but this is after a decade of higher and higher taxes spurred on by the depression and war. After WW2 you see lower, but still high income taxes and finally income taxes come down after the neo-liberal revolution in the 80s. Withholding doesn't seem important in this picture.
I think you're regurgitating a lot of, far leftist, Frankfurt school theory uncritically. Stuff like The Authoritarian Personality, and countless other works. There is a whole cottage industry of stuff like this by post-modernists and cultural Marxists. Not that I have any sympathy for the far right either; but, to uncritically regurgitate Marxist-Freudian psychoanalyses done by their ideological opponents seems like a bad way to get to the bottom of their actual psychology.
I mostly just wish people would take to the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and that the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.
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
8mo ago
The result was mass starvation. When cannibalism becomes a major concern in cities, getting farmers to produce becomes a legitimate concern.
What are you talking about? The Soviet Union was exporting grain to support the growth of it's heavy industry in the early 1920s which led the USA to withdraw it's massive famine relief efforts. In the early 1930s famine was caused by collectivization and wasn't required to feed the cities. It isn't like collectivization helped productivity in the long run. That they eventually stopped being so insanely oppressive that starving their citizens was a step to far is more due to politics than anything.
Are you deliberately choosing bad examples to make a point?
Hyperion
9mo ago
Oh, he's literally just paraphrasing an article by a neoconservative Jew. That puts it in a much different perspective.
Hyperion
9mo ago
But why wouldn't an all knowing and all powerful god show himself to all people, but in reality restricts himself to just a geographical area, one that happens to correspond closely to the geographical area that the Roman Empire ruled. And; of course, the Eastern half of that has it's own even more absurd prophet who has taken the hearts and minds of that portion of the human race.
The Post-Modernists are right in that we can't force anyone to believe anything. That doesn't make a completely irrational belief the same as a rational one. That you can differentiate them yourself is all the evidence I need.
Hyperion
10mo ago
Sailer's Law of Female Journalism also applies to women more generally. Women are gripped by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be more attractive than they are.
Even liberal and progressive people will agree with this when it applies only to teenage girls. So, we get all these articles about how instagram needs to be banned; because, otherwise, teenage girls will inevitably fall into a deep depression from the mere fact they see more attractive and popular girls on their screens. That this fragility only applies to girls and boys are immune to this effect is unnoticed and uninteresting to them.
Hyperion
10mo ago
The Marshall Plan is absurdly overrated. Europe recovered from the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars and WW1 without any Marshall Plan just fine. It was European institutions and human capital that allowed the recovery. Things you can't create in the Global South with piles of money.
Diverse might as well mean 'has lots of black people' at this point; but, no one wants to say the quiet part loud.
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