MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11hr ago
In this case I don't doubt that Epstein was molesting children, but the supposed intelligence connections could be embarrassing for rather unrelated reasons ("reveals methods").
Sources and methods is a very obvious issue. It would be embarrassing to admit that the NSA had tapped Prince Andrew's phone, and compromising to say how they did it. It would be even more embarrassing to admit that the CIA and Mossad are spying on each other like they are in MAD magazine.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11hr ago
I thought it was after the first conviction in 2008.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12hr ago
Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal
Epstein molested a few hundred girls. Rotherham was about 1400 victims, and the total across all known British Pakistani gangs is about 5000. So Rotherham is say 5x worse on scale, or 20x if you treat "Rotherham" as a synecdoche for the whole scandal. I can imagine it being 10x worse on severity, but not 100x worse, so I think 1000x is exaggerated. "It was just men paying underage chavettes for sex, nothing serious" is a pathetic excuse that would cover most (but clearly not all) of the UK grooming gang victims in the same way it does Epstein's.
The fact that nobody who mattered cold-shouldered Epstein before his first conviction, and almost nobody did so even after it, indicates that either Epstein was concealing the more egregious behaviour (i.e. he only pimped out the 17-year-olds) or that elites don't consider sexual exploitation of underage chavettes a big deal (which is worryingly plausible - unlike the sports coach cases, there is no way your daughter could have ended up a Rotherham or Epstein victim if you are a functional normie, let alone an actual elite).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13hr ago
I am at the left edge of the Overton window on this site (I think MAGA and wokestupid are both awful, but MAGA is worse) and my most-upvoted posts are:
- Anti-Boris Johnson
- Pro-Ukraine, anti-Trump by implication
- Attacking a bad study by a right-wing thinktank
- Defending Boris Johnson against inaccurate criticism. The only low-effort post in the top 10
- Anti-Trump on tarriffs
- Anti-woke, endorsing Freddie de Boer thought
- Factual post on the US-UK trade "deal"
- Anti-Musk re. the DOGE all-staff e-mail
- Personal
- Thinky post about trans issues, trying to understand both sides
So you can get upvoted with high-effort posts that are anti-MAGA, particularly if they are attacking Trump from a non-leftist perspective. But there are a lot of people upvoting low-effort posts which are basically "Boo wokestupid". The things that most reliably attract downvotes are posts claiming that the 2020 election was not stolen or that J6 involved serious wrongdoing on the part of Team Trump and posts suggesting that the conservative movement in the US is or was lousy with racists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14hr ago
The list consists of Boomer men who either were wealthy New York Jews or hung out with wealthy New York Jews (like Clinton and Trump), so it is going to be 70+% Democrats. While the Democratic Party was led by Boomers, releasing the whole list hurts them more than Republicans. With most of the Clinton-Pelosi generation of Democrats retired, releasing the whole list mostly hurts Trump personally.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15hr ago
Weak player != scrub. In the weak sense of the word, the Scrub is someone who has no interest in gitting gud. Sirlin mostly uses the term in the stronger sense that the Scrub is someone who does not want to play the game that competitive players are playing because they consider some expert tactics (like throws in console fighting games) that are clearly permitted by the rules and considered a key part of the game by competitive players to be unfair. You see a bit of this in competitive bridge with the debate about exotic conventions in competitive bidding, but in general weak but competitive players play against strong opposition and hope to learn from the experience.
With the notable exception of contact sports where too large a skill gap creates an unacceptable risk of injury, the size of acceptable ability gap for social and competitive play is the point at which the weaker player never wins anything at all. In chess that is about 400 ELO points, but in bridge the luck element and more granular results (you play about 7 hands an hour) means that it is the difference between a decent club player and a world champion. I know several people who play racket sports socially in groups where the weaker players never win a match but win enough points/games to keep things interesting. You can cover an even wider range of abilities if the game supports handicapping. I don't know how large this gap is in console fighting games.
What you can't do is allow a true scrub to play against anyone who isn't playing the same crippled game that he is.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
monads
That takes an afternoon.
I work with Haskell developers professionally, and none of them would claim you can learn monads in an afternoon - it is considered the hardest topic when teaching Haskell to programmers with experience in other paradigms. FWIW, I don't think you can learn pointers in an afternoon either if the learning goal is being able to debug code that uses them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Bridesprices are Lindy(as is borrowing from Shylock to afford it)
Brideprice is negative (i.e. dowry) in the vast majority of cultures with strong monogamy norms. In the particular case of cisHajnal culture, the wedding-related flow of funds is traditionally from the bride's extended family to the newly-formed nuclear family.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Now we hit the real point of contention. Can the average American afford their own apartment, own a car, and pay for an adult lifestyle?
No - the question is "Can the 30th percentile 20something American man afford these things?" Half the population being too poor to date is a failure condition, telling young men to spend their 20s careermaxing and start dating in their 30s is incompatible with the cisHajnal marriage pattern, and the reversed gender pay gap for young childless people makes things worse.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Einstein said that with hindsight being a plumber would have been a better day job than being a patent clerk because it makes you tired in different ways, so you are more able to do physics in the evenings.
Not sure if he was true, and of course it relies on plumbers making enough to put food on the table in 40 hrs a week (then, as now, not a problem for plumbers specifically, but an issue for a lot of blue-collar jobs that would otherwise make good day jobs for struggling intellectuals).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
I'm strongly suspect that Obama claimed to be foreign born in his application to Columbia, and I would guess he was accepted in part because of that status.
Ridiculous. US-born blacks who can keep up with Ivy League-level classes are harder to find than overseas blacks who can, and therefore more valuable to Ivy League admissions offices.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
David Sirlin's Playing to Win is the canonical essay on this point. His day job was balancing console fighting games, but he also develops viciously competitive two player board games as a side gig.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
The "underrepresented major" type, think arch and anth at Oxbridge (iirc) or music at MIT
This doesn't work in the Ivy league, where you are admitted without committing to your major. It is a big deal at Oxbridge, probably the last surviving rich-kid backdoor.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind. The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.
Back in the day, elite career paths included an early training job that was supposed to force you into contact with the reality of working-class life in a way which reflected your status as a potential future ruler. Leadership with training wheels, effectively. The canonical example was sending young officers into the field with an experienced platoon sergeant, but something similar was happening in old-school corporate life where the wet-behind the ears graduate management trainee would be given a shift manager role in their first or second rotation where they would work alongside an experienced foreman.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
The ancient Greek system of slavery
There isn't a single ancient Greek system of slavery. There are two well-documented systems of slavery (Spartan helotry and Athenian slavery) that are sufficiently different that the sources usually use different words for them. There does seem to be a consensus that Athenian slaves (except for the slaves in the polis-owned silver mines) were treated considerably better than the Greek average, and that Spartan helots were treated worse. That in turn suggests that even more distinct systems of slavery existed in other poleis and we simply don't have details.
but if you asked the same people "Should it be legal for certain people to be employed in jobs they can't quit" many would say yes.
I haven't come across these people. Apart from the special case of military discipline, sufficiently few people support bringing back indentured servitude that the business associations lobbying for broad enforceability of non-competes have to lie and say that it is about protecting trade secrets and not stopping people quitting their jobs to get better ones.
"People who quit their job and can't find another one should be allowed to starve" is a position with non-negligible support, but that is a different view to "people should not be allowed to quit their job in the first place". The right to quit your job for a better one is fundamental to the capitalist concept of freedom.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Topic restrictions work well because healthy communities - particularly though not exclusively healthy male-coded communities - have a purpose and the types of conversation that you don't want are almost certainly not advancing the purpose of the community. My understanding is that a key vector of wokestupid rot was SJWs in social environments which normally stayed on-topic convincing the mods that advocating for under-represented groups was so valuable and so obviously harmless that they should be allowed latitude on this point.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
I think this depends on age. I am open to the idea that putting a one-year-old in daycare for 40+ hours a week is, in fact, serious abuse. This long substack post is a good meta-analysis. I am aware of the author's identity and can confirm that you are not reading axe-grinding or filtered evidence like you would in most peer-reviewed social science journals.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
It's a lot easier to win environmental lawsuits if you bring them as administrative law cases saying that not enough people were consulted, so people do that.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
I don't think this is about the merits of corporal vs non-corporal punishment. If the tiny number of women who are currently jailed for child endangerment were judicially caned instead, it wouldn't noticeably affect the incentives for a moron like Mrs DaveyJBro.
This is about the merits of informal punishment by a local authority figure (or mob, as you discuss in your pickpocketing post) vs judicial punishment following due process of law. If DaveyJBro had the socially recognised right to take his wife's phone away for irresponsible use, he probably wouldn't need to escalate to beatings.
Almost everyone agrees that informal punishment is necessary to keep children in line. It is constitutive of a "free society" that mature adult citizens in free societies are not subject to informal punishment. The grey area in between is large, but empirically the Venn diagram of people with the practical wisdom to understand why Lenore Skenazy is a mature adult and Mrs DaveyJBro is not and people willing to administer casual beatings over this kind of thing looks like a pair of spectacles.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Despite what Western media reporting might have you believe, the rate of petty crime in India is surprisingly low. People rarely get pick-pocketed or robbed. Do you know why?
With the greatest possible respect, how would you know how low the rate of petty crime in India is?
If crime is as low as western Europe, or 1st-world Asia, or America outside a few black ghettos, then "nobody in my social circle is a recent victim of crime" doesn't imply a large enough sample size. Police-recorded crime statistics are notoriously bogus everywhere, and Indian ones are going to be more so than most. And you yourself are pointing out (correctly) that media coverage of crime is mostly sensationalist lies.
There is, for good reasons, a standing State Department advisory warning US travellers about pickpockets in London. The risk of being pickpocketed if you do not look or act like a tourist is indistinguishable from zero. I assume the same is true of India, although the wording of the respective warnings implies that State considers the problem to be worse in India than it is here. I do not think the informal enforcement you praise protects tourists, and the absence of pickpocketing against non-tourists proves its effectiveness in the same way that the lack of yeti sightings proves the effectiveness of yeti repellent.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Probably seen friends, family and coworkers spend a weekend in jail on some trumped up charges.
PMC Brit. Nobody in my social circle has been arrested for anything connected with a messy breakup, and I think this is typical for PMC Brits. There is one guy who should have been, if what his wife says is true. (I am sceptical, but she is the blood relative, so I believe her in public)
DV is pretty trashy, and taking malicious DV allegations to the police (rather than the civil courts where they are generally more lucrative) is trashier.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
I've got an idea swirling around in my head about how the draft is necessary(not sufficient) for a free, western society, in a way that goes back to the beginning of time. I think mass culture is just one expression thereof.
The period where the Anglosphere countries had a peacetime draft was very short (20-30 years after WW2) and coincided with a low point for freedom. The model of democracy that emerges from the French Revolution was based on the idea that democracy (which is related to, but not the same as, freedom) requires a draft, although empirically that has turned out to be false in a number of Continental European countries including France. But I don't think France is noted for having more freedom than the Anglosphere.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
Has people "realised that the TikTok ban is bad"? Are there identifiable Congresscritters who have flipped that would mean that the ban would no longer have a majority? I haven't noticed anyone changing their mind on this point who hadn't just agreed a lucrative business transaction with a TikTok investor. I haven't seen anything happen that would change a sensible, normal person's mind about TikTok since the ban was passed.
Occam's razor says that Trump flipped for personal reasons (probably his relationship with TikTok investor Jeff Yass), and that the reason why Congress doesn't care is that a supermajority of Congressional Republicans defer to Trump about essentially everything.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15d ago
I hadn't thought about this theory, but it does explain why women with PR and related career backgrounds are over-represented among rich and powerful men's second wives, particularly relative to the actresses and models you might expect to see if it was about hotness and status. I had always assumed that it was because PR girls had the right mix of hotness, IQ high enough not to be dull but not high enough to be challenging, and elite socialisation.
At least in the Anglosphere, the public support State funding of political parties (which is the alternative) even less. In the past, you could probably have reduced the cost of politics by restricting the ability of FCC-regulated broadcast media to accept paid political ads (this is how the UK kept the cost of politics down) but that is increasingly irrelevant in the modern media landscape.
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