MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
It's worth noting that a 90th percentile liar can lie much more effectively in high-context communications than in text. I agree that people are more inclined to trust a notorious lying liar who is a familiar face and can perform authenticity on camera, but they shouldn't be.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
Ted Cruz is a voting member of the Senate Committee responsible for US policy in the greater Middle East. So knowing the approximate population of America's main adversary in the region is basic job-related knowledge. "I'm not good with figures but I know it's a lot bigger than Iraq" would be an acceptable answer if Ted Cruz is, indeed, not good with figures.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Are autoandrophiles even a thing? Blanchard was sceptical.
Heck, now the option of identifying as non-binary is more salient, FtMs are barely a thing for autoandrophiles to be a sub-thing of.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
A lack of revolution is understandable
Critically, this is a federalism issue with no important underlying policy disagreement. Non-consensually cutting people's hair (except in specific situations like the military draft) is uncontroversially illegal everywhere. In the modern US, nobody cares whether the same policy is implemented by the States or the Feds except in so far as it works as a litigation maneuver. (This isn't true in Europe, where the EU is not a country and the member states are still seen by their electorates as countries, and a substantial minorities of people are deeply attached to the idea that certain types of decision are made at country level)
Since America became a country and the individual States ceased to be countries (which a lot of people date to the Civil War, but I think happened somewhere between the Monroe and Jackson administrations) federalism ceased to be a principle people actually believed in and became a peace treaty. (Compare the infamous Yonatan Zunger essay making the same argument about liberal tolerance.) And right now, politically engaged Americans on both sides unfortunately don't seem to believe in abiding by the long-standing peace treaties between the Red and Blue tribes.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
Just so I understand, are you saying that the Democratic Party of the United States is a criminal organisation which is sufficiently dangerous compared to, say, the Black Panthers or the Mafia that the US Department of Homeland Security (or Stasi, to use the original German) needs to break precedent and introduce the first secret police force in the history of the United States?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
Yes - that. We can argue about the ethics of a country defending its citizens' property rights by couping foreign governments till the cows come home, but if we are considering the practical wisdom of doing so then "The 1953 Iranian coup had long-term negative consequences for the West which vastly outweigh the potential impact of an oil company being nationalised" is simply true and needs to be taken into account. In the world of international politics, a mistake is worse than a crime.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
Normal tomboys want to date straight men. Autoandrophiles (such as exist) want to date gay men.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
I keep gravitating back towards my own null hypothesis - public welfare is a bad idea through and through, and no matter how many epicycles its proponents attach in attempts to sanewash it, it will never be a better system than not having public welfare.
I'm not sure why this would be the null hypothesis. Coercively funded public welfare has been around since time immemorial, the consequences of abolishing it have been politically unacceptable even in poorer and harsher times, and members of the manual labour class who can no longer work hard enough to hold down a job due to old age have almost always been seen as the most deserving cases.
Poor relief through the Church in medieval Europe was not voluntary charity - it was institutionalised welfare funded by State-endorsed coercion. In England the system largely operated through the monasteries and there was a combination of real secular coercion (tithes were a compulsory levy which could ultimately be collected by force, and impropriation of rectories by monasteries basically meant that tithes beyond what was needed for the support of the parish priest were diverted to monastic "charity") and spiritual coercion (in a society where people actually believe in a religion which incorporates justification by works, "you will go to hell if you do not leave a reasonable percentage of your net worth to the local monastery" is coercive). In the middle of the 16th century the dissolution of the monasteries and the Reformation mean that this system stops working, and the resulting increase in visible destitution is as politically destabilising as the present-day street-shitting crisis in San Francisco. Eventually England gets a comprehensive system of tax-funded secular poor relief in 1601. The Malthusian turn in the 19th century doesn't change the principle - the workhouses were harsh but they weren't cheap. And "don't put the infirm elderly in the workhouse" was the first demand of left-populists and one of the top five demands of right-populists for most of the next century.
What did change, probably for the worse, was the shift from a poor relief system where who gets what was ultimately at the discretion of local elites who could rely on their own knowledge to distinguish between deserving and undeserving poor to a bureaucratised system. And that change was made by the workhouse-mongers who thought that the local elites were too soft - something that is still an issue in the UK in the present day, where governments of all stripes keep trying to centralise eligibility assessment for disability benefits because patients' own NHS GPs (in the late 20th century, the archetypal local elite) are too soft, particularly in high-unemployment post-industrial areas like the Welsh valleys.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
Nobody has ever called a wanted 8 week old fetus anything other than a baby, unless it already had a nickname.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
This was in the fairly specific context of a society with a female-skewed prime-age population (due to the extreme and unusually battlefield-only lethality of WW1) and a strong monogamy norm. The trad Christian approach was to put the surplus women in all-female communities under religious supervision. The effective pro-natalist approach was to support the surplus women in single motherhood. Of course, under the actual trad rules of large-scale warfare, the surplus German women would have been second wives of the victorious British (if they were lucky) or French (if not) troops.
If a pickup does, in fact, tow significantly better than a full-size SUV that would be a large part of the answer (even if just by perceived option value). Does it?
It would also explain some of the national difference - heavy-duty towing (>750kg trailer and >3500kg combination) requires a license endorsement in the EU (and thus in the pre-Brexit UK) so a lot fewer people imagine themselves doing it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
20d ago
Every cyclist I've ever suggested this to hates it, and I think it's just because they don't like going as slow as you sometimes need to go on a sidewalk to be safe. But it is often what they are asking drivers to do: go slowly for the cyclists safety on the road. Which is when it turns into a whole political question. No one likes going slower than they can, so who has to suffer the indignity drivers or cyclists?
Are you proposing that drivers should be required to check sidewalks for cyclists and yield when turning left or going through an all-way stop? If not you are proposing a soft ban on cycling, in that cyclists are required to yield to everyone everywhere. If you are proposing that motorists should yield to cyclists in sidewalks when they would yield to cyclists in the road then you are proposing something that non-criminal motorists would find even more annoying than the status quo.
Fundamentally, primary safety (i.e. avoiding crashes altogether, rather than making them less lethal) requires cyclists to either be in fully segregated infrastructure (either grade separated at junctions as in Milton Keynes in the UK, or having their own phase at traffic lights as in Dutch cities) or to be in the road where drivers will see them.
In addition, a bike (ridden at speed by a competent adult cyclist) is more like a car than a pedestrian in that it can't stop safely if someone crosses its path without looking. The place where you are required to be paying sufficient attention to not cross other road users' paths without looking is the road, not the sidewalk.
If you want to ban bicycles (except as children's toys) in your community, that is a perfectly plausible tradeoff to make after considering the relative importance your community places on the health and fitness of the population, teenagers' ability to be independent, green goals etc. against a marginal speed improvement for drivers. But if there are bicycles in environments where the speed of car traffic is 30mph or less, they belong in the street. Society worked this one out while Henry Ford was still alive and nothing that matters has changed since then.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
Googling "American lawyer average IQ" gives various estimates in the 115-125 range, with comments that successful lawyers (white-shoe partners, lawprofs, federal judges) are mostly going to be 130+.
I am pretty confident Sotomayor is in the 115-130 range - above average for traffic court lawyers, but well below the average federal judge. KBJ is even dumber than her. Kagan, Alito, Roberts, Kav, Barrett and Gorsuch are all smart enough to be e.g. High Court judges in England. I don't have an estimate on Thomas because so much of what he writes is easy dissents (or increasingly, concurrences) where he applies his simple but wrong (at least according to the majority and stare decisiis) law to the facts.
I suspect Alito is the smartest justice, but it isn't obvious because he is also the most partisan of the smart justices and partisanship makes you act dumber that you are.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
I dunno, the sort of a leftist who would have called, say, Obama a neoliberal would be unlikely to call Trump a neoliberal even though Trump's views on economy were to the right of them (or if they did, it would be specifically as an unexpected term with the intent of highlighting that Trump's economic policies aren't as divergent from the standard post-Cold-War Western economic model as he or his fans might like to claim.)
I think that is because they would be calling him a fascist. Trump's right-wing views on the only social issue that matters (immigration) are the most salient thing about his politics.
In addition, part of Trump's political strategy is maintaining plausible deniability that he is to the right of Obama on economic issues, including by attacking elite consensus economic policy from a "left-wing" direction over trade, industrial strategy etc.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
"Career" would surely be the common English word?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
This meant that if one side was a belligerent in a conflict, the other side abstained from officially sending troops as well.
I think the mutually-agreed, informal rule in the Cold War was (after Korea, where both sides violated it for no net gain) that you don't attack the other superpower's client directly, only with your own client. So the US could send troops to defend South Vietnam, but not to attack North Vietnam. (And the USSR couldn't directly participate in North Vietnamese attacks on South Vietnam, but they didn't need to because they had a much better proxy). And the US couldn't invade Cuba with regular forces, which they otherwise clearly wanted to do, given that they did the Bay of Pigs.
Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
Calculus doesn't become low-hanging fruit until you have co-ordinate geometry. Descartes publishes La Geometrie in 1637 and Newton publishes Principia in 1687. In between you have a lot of work that develops calculus - most notably Barrow's proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus in 1670. (Barrow is conventionally listed in academic genealogies as Newton's PhD-supervisor equivalent.) The first analysis proof that is considered rigorous by modern standards was Rolle's theorem in 1690 and the first important result in analysis is Taylor's theorem in 1715. That is a much faster development than implied by your post, although I suppose you can argue that something that should have taken years took decades.
But that just pushes the problem back a step. Co-ordinate geometry was low-hanging fruit for the 1800 years between Apollonius and Descartes. I think the explanation here is that mathematics got stuck on a local maximum. Apollonius developed the classical geometry of conic sections to the point where (for the few people able to master it) it was more powerful than co-ordinate geometry without calculus. There is also a weird status thing going on. The mathematical brain finds co-ordinate geometry ugly and hackish. As late as the 1990's, part of an old-school mathematical education was the idea that submitting a correct co-ordinate geometry proof when a classical one was available would get you full marks and the lasting scorn and derision of the examiner. In the 17th century, this was compounded by the problem that calculus arguments (though not co-ordinate geometry without calculus) could not be made as mathematically rigorous as geometric ones because modern analysis hadn't been developed yet. Barrow lectured on co-ordinate geometry (that's how Newton learned it) but he published on classical geometry (he started his career as a classicist and his work that was most prestigious in his own lifetime was new translations of the great Greek geometers). Both Barrow and Newton published work that to modern eyes was clearly done using co-ordinate geometry and pre-calculus, but was re-derived using classical geometry for respectable publication.
Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
Fleming's original discovery could have been made by anyone, but actually synthesizing penicillin in useful quantities required (in our timeline) modern industrial chemistry. I think it could have been done 50-100 years earlier if alt-Fleming takes his discovery to the brewing industry (the hard part is growing fungus cleanly on a carbohydrate feedstock) rather than pharma, but not before that.
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
I think the physical sciences have been picked pretty clean by now - my best guess of where to look next is that there could be simple models of the human brain that will be obvious in hindsight to someone with access to 2050's neuroscience and psychology that isn't neutered by political biases, but that could be discovered today.
It is a small local example, but the discovery of superconductivity in MgB2 in 2001 was an example of unpicked low-hanging fruit in solid-state physics - the stuff had been available in obscure chemical catalogues since the 1950's but nobody had tested it for superconductivity.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
actively chosen a celibate life (be they clergy or otherwise)
My understanding of Catholic (and even more so Orthodox) teaching is that everyone is either called to marriage and family or to a religious life. "Religious life" includes lay and clerical members of religious orders (monks are only ordained if their work as a monk includes ministering the sacraments, and nuns are obviously never ordained) as well as the (for Catholics only) celibate parochial clergy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The UK and US have announced a trade deal.
Key terms (based on press releases - apparently the text hasn't been agreed yet):
- US continues to charge a default 10% tariff on imports from the UK
- Up to 100k cars per annum are exempt from the 27.5% tariff on cars, but still pay the flat 10%. Not clear whether car parts are included.
- British steel, aluminium, and aeroplane parts (this mostly means Rolls-Royce jet engines) enter the US tariff-free. The US announcement implies that there is going to be some still-to-be negotiated quota arrangement on steel.
- UK will be exempted from future pharma tariffs
- Both sides cut tariffs on agricultural products, including beef and corn ethanol. The tariff cuts are reciprocal but benefit the US more than the UK because of the balance of farm trade. Scotch whisky is not included.
- The US announcement says that the UK will cut non-tariff barriers on US agricultural exports, the UK announcement says that the UK is not going to relax food safety standards.
- The US is trying to rhetorically link the deal to a $10 billion order for Boeing planes that "a British company" (presumably British Airways) is going to announce imminently.
- Nothing on services - in particular the UK isn't going to cut our Digital Services Tax (which is mostly paid by US tech companies on their UK revenue).
Initial thoughts:
- This is a thin deal. Both sides are drastically overegging it in their press releases.
- This is worse for the UK than status quo ante (because of the 10% flat tariff), although given the current salience of steel in the UK Starmer has a good chance of spinning zero tariffs on steel as a big win. The US has aggressively protected its steel industry for a long time (under administrations of both parties) and US tariffs on British steel have been a long-running grievance.
- This is probably the best deal the UK could have got. It is better than any deal we could have got quickly as an EU member, but not necessarily better than the deal the EU could have got after a protracted trade war with pain to both sides.
- The benefits to the US are pretty trivial - the farm tariff cuts affect about $1 billion of US exports. The US's biggest ask in trade negotiations with European countries is on food safety standards, and they didn't get it.
- The two sides are sufficiently confident that they can fill in the details that they announced the deal before the text was finalised. I find this surprising - there are a couple of major bear pits where the two sides announcements are not aligned. The obvious one is non-tariff barriers on food. The less obvious one is that the US announcement claims a $5 billion opportunity from changes to UK public procurement, but not what they are. This is an extremely politically difficult area in the UK because of NHSism.
Thoughts on the politics:
- The US announcement explicitly calls out the US cutting tariffs on British aeroplane parts as a win for US manufacturing. I think this is the most public acknowledgement to date that tariffs are hurting American manufacturing by disrupting supply chains.
- Trump admin spin (though not the official White House announcement) is that the big win for the US is that the 10% tariff stays in place, and this represents the US collecting $6 billion in taxes on British businesses. That is what you say if you are defending a thin deal.
- Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has attacked the deal as worse than status quo ante. A few dissident Conservatives have praised Starmer for taking advantage of Brexit to get a better deal than we could in the EU.
- The Liberal Democrats are not attacking the substance of the deal - we are saying that Parliament must have a chance to approve the final text.
- The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.
- Farage hasn't spoken yet.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Tournament and cash poker are equally zero-sum.
In poker, if you are strong you want to hide your strength so people pick fights with you and lose. In war, if you are strong you want to advertise it so nobody is stupid enough to pick a fight with you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
The whole point of the Iraq war from the PoV of the "realist" faction in the Bush Jr White House (I would guess particularly Cheyney and Rumsfeld) was to set up a US client state on Iran's border, ideally one that (unlike Saudi Arabia) was not funding Al-Quaeda. The project failed because the only Iraqi faction that was willing to collaborate with the American invaders was Badr/SCIRI, which was also the pro-Iranian faction.
There was a long period (roughly from 9-11 to the defeat of ISIS by Russian and Iranian forces in 2017) where a rapprochement between the US and Iran would have been possible, based on the shared enemy in Salafi Jihadism (including Al-Quaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS), if both sides had been run by actual foreign policy realists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
If you know any lesbians and are under the age of 30, you're likely to run into at least a few lesbians who flirt with transitioning or transition.
In the Blanchardian model, they would be homosexual transexuals (the FtM equivalent of the kathoey-hijra type) and not autoandrophiles.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
I think this has been overtaken by events in Ukraine - also by the news about what the US was actually doing in Afghanistan. Actual drone warfare fought by people who know they are at war, hate the enemy, and want to win, is about as gentlemanly as WW1 era trench warfare.
I can't advocate anyone able to avoid it going to a Gaza-focused protest at all. "Don't go near political protests" is standard travel advice offered by every country about every country for good reasons - and essentially nobody in the West has a stake in Gaza that makes it worth protesting about.
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