JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
1d ago
gay people
Gay people or gay men?
prominent intellectuals and artists.
Aside from the problem of defining such a group, given the rank bigotry of the class of people who decide who is and is not an "intellectual" and "artist", could be selection effects as well. I suspect if you took academia's word for it, a disproportionate number of "the most prominent artists and intellectuals" would be POC as well. And communists.
JTarrou
12d ago
The short answer is that greeks arguably don't exist in the bronze age. The language group moves down from the black sea mid-bronze age, shore hopping colonies into the Aegean onto Greece proper, but there were already people there. We can trace the language a bit, and we can trace the archaeology of various durable goods and burial practices, but we don't have a cohesive group of people we can call "greek" until perhaps late in the Bronze age, but even that is wobbly. It is not until after the Bronze Age Collapse that we get clear evidence of classical greeks (even then, half or more were in the Balkans, Turkey, Italy, etc.). Their myths (Troy, etc.) take place during the Bronze age, but at that stage, there weren't many of these people in Greece itself. At least parts of the greek migration south may have been the "Sea Peoples" of the collapse. There is a theory that the biblical Philistines were a proto-greek invasion/migration that was turned back by the Egyptians and settled in one of their hinterlands (the Gaza strip).
JTarrou
12d ago
So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"
The minimum necessary for victory.
JTarrou
13d ago
Not necessarily. The main states seem not to have done much sailing of their own, possible a maritime trading empire could be relatively safe to raid and slip off into the Med. One wonders exactly how peaceful Tyre was, for instance.
JTarrou
13d ago
I'm guessing these "soft traders" were more similar to the Vikings, Portuguese circa 1600, or the East India Company. One of the main things they traded was weapons and armor.
We know very little directly, but what we do have from the bronze age in terms of written inscriptions is mostly kings boasting about how many thousands of people they killed in various inventive and horrifying ways, how many they carried off into slavery and how many they sacrificed to various deities. This was the propaganda being put out to impress the populace, which says something about the public morals of the day. And the fact that there were several empires maintaining major standing armies, all our evidence points to a time of significant, regular state violence on a mass scale. Many of our remaining bronze age-era human remains were killed, and many of the ones that weren't have healed wounds from repeated violence. Even Pharaohs were sometimes bashed in the head with a mace.
It may be the case that in the smaller societies which left much less historical footprint, violence was less than in settled cities. No way to really tell for sure. What we have says that these people were far more violent than most modern states before the collapse. Then things got worse.
A sample inscription from an Assyrian king:
In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of the heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.
JTarrou
13d ago
I find it hard to believe only the Allied forces had that capability.
Well, believe it, because in practical terms, only they did at that scale. The germans attempted something similar with the Blitz in London, but it came nowhere near the heights of the Allied bombings late in the war. Partly due to doctrine, partly due to better technology, partly due to the fact that by then the Luftwaffe was on the defensive and badly worn down. In greater part because the long war had hardened feelings and the Blitz/Pearl Harbor had Britain and the US spoiling for revenge.
It is my contention that the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo would not have been done or at least repeated if the Axis powers were witholding a similar threat. Germany bombed London when the Brits had no prayer of bombing Germany. Then, a couple years later, the Brits bombed Germany when they were unable to respond in kind. A few V2 rockets were all the germans could manage by then.
JTarrou
13d ago
But we did use nukes. The difference being both sides had chemical weapons.
JTarrou
16d ago
I doubt you can extrapolate much from a year or so of missed recruiting goals in a strong job market.
But there might be a kernel of truth that the sort of people who generally staff the pointy bits of the military are increasingly skeptical of their role as the enforcers of a world order that is explicitly hostile to them, their families, states, politics and demographics.
JTarrou
18d ago
Is the bureaucracy with all its political biases the best place to make that call?
JTarrou
19d ago
People don't change. Despite every generation thinking they're the first ones to ever apply intelligence and morality to the problems of the world, they are not. The people who live today are the exact moral equivalents of Salem, or Mao's China, or interwar Germany. They're just pushing their bigotries, hatreds and moral panics along different channels. It has always been this way and always will be. We cannot predict which issues will rise to salience, but we can predict with absolute certainty the psychology and behavior of the people in aggregate.
I believe the current mishmash is a religious void being filled by various cults, one of which will eventually rise to prominence and challenge "traditional" (whatever that means) christianity for the default belief system of western civilization. The "In this house, we believe...." posters are the early adherents.
Re-read your Hoffer if you want to know how it's going to play out.
JTarrou
20d ago
Lot of projection going on here.
Perhaps you'd like to hear it from the Hamas spokesman in an official interview with the NYT?
I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times
From a member of their Politburo (an apt name, I might add)
“Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr. al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”
“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”
JTarrou
21d ago
I would say the stereotype is broadly correct, though individuals vary wildly. I am a far less sexually adventurous person than most of my compadres, but my experience there both psychologically and training/observation of technique did vastly increase my success and dabbling in casual sexual encounters, but "vastly increase" is a nice way of saying "started from shit". Frankly, that period of my life wasn't particularly fulfilling sexually, I much prefer longer term relationships.
JTarrou
26d ago
Wait, you think that Israel should be putting troops in Afghanistan/Iraq? Even Bush wasn't that dumb.
JTarrou
26d ago
You need to start hanging out with other people than Nick Fuentes.
Never heard of her.
JTarrou
26d ago
you never hear about
Quite the opposite, I hear about it roughly six times a day. It's the most widely publicized attack on the US shipping since Pearl Harbor. Why? This seems strange, until you remember Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos!
JTarrou
27d ago
We know that the academic-government-NGO complex is cooking the scientific books in service of whatever the short-term political goal is for their class. COVID proved this beyond a shadow of any doubt, and in short enough timespans for a lot of people to notice. This may not matter much for most of the hard science that is not politically salient, but it matters a lot for "science" that is directly impacting public policy. Economics as a profession has always had this weakness.
You seem pretty big mad that a few of us are not gonna roll over for Euler anymore. Institutional trust is a thing, and it is a thing that has been entirely destroyed. If your "experts" and their fan club want to be taken seriously, they need to clean house. People who abuse positions of trust and authority to promote false science to the public need to be publicly punished, those who enabled and repeated the lies need to be publicly punished, and the entire superstructure needs to be completely re-oriented to avoid such obvious bullshit in the future.
If you start now, you might get back to the position of trust in fifty years or so. Until then, your data is meaningless, your appeals to authority hollow. It could be correct in any specific instance, to be clear. But it can't be trusted, because it's being produced by partisan hacks who will lie their heads off for any or no reason at all. None of us have the time to investigate every paper to see if it's hogwash or not.
So you can stop appealing to that particular naked monarch. If you want to be able to appeal to "science", you best start with making the science trustworthy.
I'll wait.
JTarrou
29d ago
Yeah, it sucks when your sense-making institutions don't have any more credibility than Reddit randos. An appeal to authority would go down really well about now.
JTarrou
29d ago
Over the long run. They can hide the ball until someone they don't like can take the blame for it.
JTarrou
30d ago
Perhaps. That's one option.
Another is that economics is staffed by the same sort of experts who run our health care systems, legal systems and educational systems. They went to the same schools, drank the same koolaid, attend the same parties and conferences, belong to the same socioeconomic strata. Maybe Gell-Mann Amnesia is creeping up on you.
Anecdote is small data, but it's the only data I can be sure isn't horseshit.
JTarrou
30d ago
I smell statistical bullshit.
My normal standard of living has taken a noticeable if not disastrous turn. My pay is roughly the same, my costs are a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries etc.). My rent is up 30%, the value of my savings is down 20%, and the cost of buying a house is up 50%.
Three years ago I had a lot more disposable income. Now, all that might fit fine within the "economy is doing fine" narrative, but it doesn't feel fine to me. What I hear from posts like this is "economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies". I am noticeably poorer today than I was in 2020. All the statistics in the world aren't going to change that.
JTarrou
30d ago
You're still wrapped around the axle about the word "nation", which I did not use. We've established that there are no universal definitions for what is or is not a "nation", so that's probably not the way to go if we want to be able to judge the violent actions of various groups. The question remains, what does?
A lot of artists/authors in the colonial period were famous for running off to Morocco or some such place where pederasty was winked at. Borroughs, etc. Some overlap with gay.
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