Hyperion
1yr ago
That is what happens in rush hour; though, economists call it induced demand. It's a classic example of a market failure and something that should ideally be regulated away.
Russia was on paper far superior to the Ukrainian forces early in the war. They were shelling Kiev and there was a very real fear it could fall, before Russian logistical and morale problems forced a retreat. No one, not even the Russians themselves, expected such a pathetic showing by the Russian armed forces.
Hyperion
25d 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
25d 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
7mo ago
I'm a short thin man who drinks a lot of alcohol and also has lots of sugary drinks alongside that. I can't subsist off one meal a day. there is no way anyone else can either. What kind of meals are you eating that you can fit 2,200 calories on one plate?
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
12d 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
As an ex-Christian I find this view somewhat flawed. To me Christianity and religion in general are things that people do. If Christians start disbelieving in Jesus's divinity that seems totally fine from an outsiders perspective. Lot's of tiny Muslim sects in the Middle East believe in later prophets after Mohammed and other things an orthodox Muslim would decry. The most fundamentalist Muslims consider almost all practicing Muslims today kafirs due to the practices they follow.
I don't think God came on down from heaven and created some platonic definition of Christianity. I think it has changed a lot since it was founded and the early Christians would likely consider your practices far outside the acceptable range and you a non-Christian. I don't really care and trying to push this sectarian line as if it was some kind of obvious ground truth that can't be argued with is silly from an outsiders prospective.
Though the inner Catholic in me agrees with you, just another reason why I can't ever consider myself a Christian again.
Hyperion
5mo ago
You really get the impression that the hebrew god is worshipped because he is unfathomably powerful and terrifying rather than because he is some font of morality.
That's very explicit in the Old Testament especially the early parts. They make explicit covenants with that are about earthly rewards like having lots of descendants or being given possession of the promised land. There isn't anything about an afterlife better than that of a shade in Sheol.
God's punishments for breaking the covenant are earthly ones that usually involve bringing a foreign army against them. These stories of God's punishment mostly seem like post-hoc justifications for why Judah was defeated in battle and conquered despite having the support of the Lord of Hosts. They rationalize it as them having broken the covenant first.
This idea of God and the universe having a moral bent is something inserted later into Judaism through Zoroastrianism and Greek philosophy.
Hyperion
2mo ago
Second, many better tools already exist (standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting).
Sure, and then when you use those tools and a disparate racial impact is found the courts find you've run afoul of the Civil Rights Act.
I'm confused why you think the caste system is eugenic. Indians, like Jews, suffer from a surfeit of genetic diseases from their excessive endogamy norms. And the extreme endogamy norms seem to be inherited from the Harappans the Aryans conquered not the Aryans themselves. You don't see anything like it from the Iranian branch of the Aryans.
You also seem to be confusing eugenics with kin/group selection in your argument. Unless you think the only genes that are 'good' are your own despite how objectively inferior they might be on other metrics.
Pumped storage has been a thing for almost a century now. I leaned about it in science class as a child.
Hyperion
5mo ago
The entirety of the Mosaic law found in the Torah? Are you trying to make some kind of point with this question or do you somehow not know that?
Hyperion
7mo ago
They are illegal in sanctioned events, which is why sanctioned vintage events are extremely rare. The only real sanctioned vintage is in the online version where the cards are 2 orders of magnitude cheaper.
There are unsanctioned tournaments, but I hear they limit the amount of proxies allowed. No point in showing up with your deck worth more than the per capita GDP if you get smoked by some kid playing a bunch of lands with ancestral recall and black lotus written on them.
You are confusing Varna with Jati as caste. Other Indo-Europeans had a Varna like tripartite division between warriors, priests and commoners, but there wasn't the extreme level of endogamy that you find in India that has let upper caste Indians remain genetically extinct from lower caste ones. You don't see that in other Indo-European societies, but you do see it in the Dravidians.
I'm glad to mention Greece, because in Mycenean Greece there was absolutely no correlation between steppe ancestry and social status. The gryffin warrior a steppe style chariot riding warrior aristocrat with his ostentatious grave was found to have no steppe ancestry at all. Despite them clearly having close contact with the proto-Indo-Iranian peoples before they entered Greece. The Basque have a higher percent of the Indo-European r1b then there fellow Iberians. The non-Indo-European Etruscans were genetically identical to their Itallic neighbors.
Edit: I'm also a little confused about your obsession with Y-haplogroups. We have lots of studies on autosomal DNA. Eastern Iranians are more Aryan than Brahmins and a quarter of Iranian citizens are Turks.
Hyperion
2d 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
5mo ago
No, I don't think a law against eating pork has any bearing on morality.
I get what you mean now and I reject the implications.
Moses, like all great thinkers, was both original and true. In that, what he said that was true wasn't original and what he said that was original wasn't true.
I prefer Zoroaster. I think laws against kicking pregnant dogs make much more sense morally, than laws against eating shrimp.
Hyperion
6mo ago
It doesn't confirm materialism and rationalism are correct, only that the fact the Creator is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. He can be two, but not all three. If you want to be a Spinozan and just call the materialistic universe God, be my guest. It's a hypothesis that predicts nothing and everything.
Hyperion
11mo 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
5mo ago
it's the atheists, the intersectionalists and the grievance-mongers.
That's all stuff that's blamed on the Jews in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and it didn't start there. The idea that the Jews were trying to undermine White, Christian civilization is an old White nationalist trope. It's what the Nazis pushed as well. Just read a summary of the Protocols.
Hyperion
1yr ago
I think it’s more he was basing it off Greek statues hence the tiny uncircumcised penis.
Hyperion
1yr ago
To quote the television show Mad Men, “I don’t think about you at all.” The idea that the plight of black America is somehow the heart and soul of this country is laughable to most white Americans. To say nothing of Asian or Indian immigrants who make up an ever increasing share of our elite.
Hyperion
1yr ago
You and that person were misinterpreting what induced demand means. It means the only cost to driving on a road is traffic, so in high demand times the cost will equal the benefit of driving and traffic will be at a standstill. It is agnostic over whether greater capacity is a good thing, it just says greater capacity won't fix rush hour problems.
Wow, Germany was provoked into invading Poland; because, they were not just handed Polish land on a silver platter. What an argument. Just like Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine; because, they were not just handed eastern Ukraine on a silver platter.
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