MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
And this is the problem. Beating the snowflake out of people will usually work, but trying to beat a genuine physical or neurodevelopmental disability out of people will usually leave a wreck, and even worse is that beating the eccentric genius out of people will also work. There is a reason why the global capital of snowflakes and the global capital of zero-to-one founders are the same place.
The uncontroversial example of this is asthma in the military. The military (both US and UK) won't touch even suspected asthma with a bargepole, and the reason is obvious - drill sergeants/drill instructors/recruit instructors are not doctors, and trying to use standard tough love techniques to keep an asthmatic running through an attack is the easiest way to kill a recruit.
The scissor example is Full Metal Jacket. Gunny Hartman tries to fix Private Pyle using the standard tough love techniques, and gets fragged for it. Hegseth and his supporters see this is as obviously an obviously correct attempt to beat the fuckup out of Pyle that had an unfortunate result, and see Hartman as a role model. Snowflake-protectors see this as a justified rebellion against tyrannical authority, and see Hartman as the villain. Anyone with a brain thinks that Pyle should have been discharged on mental health grounds, and sees Hartman as culpably stupid for not considering that possibility. (Simple stupidity is not normally a capital offence, but natural law is not required to be just, and Hartman was 100% the author of his own demise).
The controversial example is the massive increase in autism (and other mental health) diagnoses. How many of the marginally-diagnosed autistic people who currently struggle to present in normie-acceptable ways just need the schoolboy equivalent of a blanket party to straighten them out? How many can't "straighten out" with ordinary effort and will just end up being bullied until they shoot up the school? And how many can be useful members of society if we don't beat them up over some normie-friendly trivia? Many people are confidently wrong about this question. It is existential for my family so I have spent a lot of time looking, and as far as I can see nobody knows anything with the kind of confidence I would want before I beat my kids over it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
This seems off. Both association football and rugby come from an attempt to write down the rules of the folk "football" games, which were played by boys and young men of all classes, to support organised inter-school play, and the The Marquess of Queensbury is obviously trying to do the same thing for a different pre-existing sport.
Marathon running was invented by a French academic in order to provide an on-theme marquee event for the first modern Olympics.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
The Count hails from one of the few British colonies where rugby never took off. (Canadian rugby evolved into a game which is more like American football). So I expect he is comparing it unfavourably to cricket and (field) hockey.
If he is advocating Rugby League as the superior game, I will be surprised as he appears to be neither a chippy northerner nor an antipodean. I do think League would be a better gateway drug for converting gridiron fans to following a real sport.
Interestingly, a lot of the spread of Rugby Union beyond the Commonwealth is driven by a great many cultures having a traditional sport involving trying to advance a held "ball" over the try line while the opposition try to physically take it from you, and World Rugby is good at finding them and saying "this is the international version of the sport you are already playing - why don't you adjust your tactics to our rules so you can compete internationally".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
HFCS didn't undercut cane sugar at world market prices until Chinese sugar demand picked up in the 21st century. HFCS replaced cane sugar in the US because massive sugar tariffs and subsidised corn created an artificial market. If that policy had involved crippling tariffs on the main export of a client state with a powerful lobby, it is not clear that the US would have done it.
If you remember the period when bringing back allegedly better-tasting Coca-Cola from Mexico was a thing, the reason for the difference was that Mexican coke used cane sugar and American coke used HFCS. In both cases, the Coca-Cola company unsurprisingly used the cheapest sweetener available.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I would say that Paradox gaming (Stellaris and CK3 from your list) is a different hobby to the rest of PC gaming. I love it, but I don't have time for it.
Paradox write giant sandboxes trying to capture as much as possible of the feel of a particular strategic era. (Medieval dynastic politics for the Crusader Kings series, early modern politics dominated by incipient Westphalian states for the Europa Universalis series, the horror of industrial-age warfare in the Vicky series, the truly global scale of WW2 in the Hearts of Iron series.) The playtimes start from 30 hours and can go beyond 100 if you play a large empire from the earliest start date to the final end date.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Enforceability of covenants in property titles (which is what the power of an HOA is based on) would be a function of state land law. City codes have very little to do with it.
In both England and Scotland (separately), the process of transitioning from a regime where most land was owned by aristocratic families who would never dream of selling the freehold, and wanted to make contractual arrangements among family members and tenants which reflected that, to a regime where land was freely tradeable in both theory and practice involved a lot of statutory reform, with a lot of contentious debates about precisely which restrictions on land could be made legally enforceable. Scotland didn't abolish feudalism until 2000 because the only legally bulletproof way of creating a condo or HOA-like arrangement under traditional Scots law was to make the association the feudal overlord of the individual homeowners.
I don't know about the US equivalent, except that it varies a lot by state.
You also see this with like Cape Verde being able to draw powerhouse teams which shouldn’t happen in a better game.
If it were "too much luck in football compared to other sports" then they wouldn't be able to do it every damn game. Cape Verde fielded a good team, and their results reflect that.
Also, there just aren't sports where a single match selects the best team from two world-class teams with a reasonable degree of reliability. Pro baseball and basketball both use multi-game series in their playoffs, and the best-of-1 single-elimination format of the NCAA basketball playoffs produces so many upsets that you call it "March Madness".
All sports some how mimic war. Soccer has the least application to war of any sport.
You clearly haven't met European football fans.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
To be fair to the UnKoch my campus movement, if you are right then Cato-style libertarians* (or classical liberals, but I think that is a distinction without a difference) are 10x over-represented in certain academic disciplines compared to the general population. Some of that is because we are smarter than leftists or conservatives, but some of it is because Koch-funded groups spent a lot of money making it that way.
* As opposed to LvMI-style libertarians, who I don't count as libertarian because the only liberty they actually care about is the right of racists to be racist, and who have mostly gone full MAGA-authoritarian now anyway.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Very strong agree with the top pick. Civ IV and SMAC are the best games in the Civ franchise, and Civ IV is a lot more accessible to new players. I am happy to defend this position if anyone wants to argue it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
the Vatican is supremely uninterested in excommunicating them
Unauthorised consecrations are a latae sententiae excommunication, so failing to publish the excommunications doesn't mean that people are not excommunicated (and given that we are dealing with the most observant Catholics, this probably matters). That said, it is entirely plausible that the Church has secretly authorised these consecrations.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
In the US context, if you were too young for the Vietnam draft (1955 birth year or later) you are a noncentral example of a Boomer. (Despite Strauss and Howe's capacious definition). The term "Generation Jones" used to be used for the later Boomer cohorts, but has fallen out of fashion.
Forced bussing applied to all age groups, so some early Xers would have been bussed in elementary school.
But I agree with the key point @2rafa is making, which is that the Boomers are not the adult generation at fault for this one. The leadership on both sides of the civil rights struggles mostly came from the Silent Generation, and it was Silent parents who either acquiesced in bussing or fought it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Zvi Moskovitz has pointed out (in the context of online sports betting, but the principle applies more generally) that there is a specific problem in the US with the current interpretation of the First Amendment in a world where smartphones and targetted in-app advertising exist - in effect any legal activity can be aggressively marketed to vulnerable people in a highly-optimised way beamed directly to their pockets, so the option of keeping vices legal (to avoid the costs of prohibition) but on-the-downlow (so randos who don't go looking for them won't be sucked into them) is not available.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
In my professional opinion as a risk manager, if I were Klarna I would not accept Doordash as a merchant. Irresponsible lending to irresponsible people is a self-punishing crime, as Angelo Mozillo and Dick Fuld learned in 2008.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
It wasn't intended as actionable advice - it was a crass comment by an Australian real estate developer with a sideline as a professional right-wing troll.
Australia, like the UK and California, is a place where the young can't afford housing because of deliberate supply restriction.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
"Food away from home" includes a relatively cheap lunch in a workplace canteen/from a food truck outside the office/a supermarket meal deal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Imagine how Marie Antoinette felt when hubby told her: "Honey, you have enough palaces, you do not need another!"
Marie Antoinette was not responsible for the opulence of Versailles, and probably hated it. Her palace at Petit Trianon is the least blinged-out part of the whole complex.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Urban schools being bad goes all the way back to the forced bussing cases in the 1970s, if not earlier. Whether they have got even worse since then, or whether they are less bad (but still not good) varies from city to city. But they haven't got dramatically worse recently in a way which would explain the current fertility drop-off.
In the UK, schools in London are noticeably better than they ever have been, and the primary schools are now some of the best in the world (where a "good school" is defined as one where a child with a 90-110 IQ and no special needs that the school can't manage will learn a lot). This hasn't affected the narrative.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
From an England perspective, it goes back to the Falklands war and the 1986 World Cup quarter-final where Maradonna punched the ball into the net and the referee missed the blatant handball and allowed the goal.
From a neutral perspective, there have been a lot of complaints that the refs are protecting Messi in an unfair way, which link into the usual allegations of FIFA corruption and greed. Since the Balogun affair it is also possible to link it to rumours of Trumpy interference - the idea that Trump has leant on Infantino to help his ally Milei win re-election is too good to check.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
If you think that flipping and installing Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela (or installing and flipping, although it looks increasingly like she flipped first) is a shining example of the new Trumpy way of war, it is an obvious thing to try. The main problem is the lack of an obvious route to get Ahmadinejad installed as leader.
As a pro-regime "democratic" politician in a fake democracy, Ahmadinejad had one job - to legitimise the regime using the methods of democratic politics. Ultimately he wasn't very good at it, which makes him useless. Stary Lee had the same problem in Hong Kong.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
I have considered it, and rejected it. When Russia was not engaged in a genocidal* war against Ukraine, Ukrainians did not wish to fight Russia. Now Russia is engaged in a genocidal war against Ukraine, Ukrainians do wish to fight Russia. So Occam's razor says that Ukrainian belligerence is caused by Russian policy, which is not consistent with it being caused by European aid. (Which was not particularly significant at the time the key decision to fight was taken in Kyiv).
* Genocidal both in the technical sense that abolishing Ukrainian nationhood and forcibly Russifying Ukrainians is a stated Russian war aim, and in the colloquial sense that Russia is killing large numbers of Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied Ukraine.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Anthropic doesn't care about the peasants, they want to draw more talented people from Google or OpenAI or Meta.
The interesting question is why those people are particularly likely to be watching a World Cup semi-final between England and Argentina. I suppose everyone who isn't a heritage-American or an IPL diehard is going to be watching a World Cup semi-final, but given that heritage-Americans and Indians are over-represented groups in Silicon Valley, it seems an inefficient way of reaching the target audience.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
I am British living in England, and support England, so I feel the pain, although I can acknowledge that we deserved to lose this one. (So did Argentina in the first half).
But I can at least be aware that England were in a World Cup semi-final. For the second time in eight years. And that is a stunning achievement. In 1990 everyone knew this - even after going out on penalties to West Germany, the team that made the semi-final were hailed as heroes. But English fans are more susceptible to entitlement that any other country except Brazil, and now we have far too many people thinking we deserve to win the World Cup and anything less is a disappointment that the manager should be blamed for.
I'm still dreaming, but I think the 60 years of hurt are basically over now. If England had played their best and the opposition had not, we would have won the World Cup. But the opposite was what happened in the second half of yesterday's game.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Precisely - Romans is immediately after Acts in the conventional order, so if (as @FlailingAce appears to be required to do) you teach the New Testatment from front-to-back, Romans 1 is the first Pauline epistle you get to. And if you want an unequivocal declaration that Jesus is not the hippie he appears to be based on some readings of the Gospels, Romans 1 works. But if you are trying to teach Christian sexual morality to people who are receptive to it but not familiar with it, "God curses people who deny him by turning their wives lesbian" isn't the best place to start.
Paul was writing for a society where the Christian ideas about marriage (the Christian idea of marriage is similar to, but not the same as, the pagan Roman idea of marriage) and the family were not countercultural, so he doesn't need to point to the centre of the thing he is pointing at before he can point to the edges. This is the Bible we are talking about, so all of Christian sexual morality is in there, and it forms an intellectually coherent whole. But the presentation was optimised for a time and a place. (Well, a set of places that Paul was writing to.)
But in a world where "marriage" as it was understood from the dawn of time to the 1960s is a somewhat-eldritch piece of lost technology, the logical sequence to teach the material is:
- God's plan for marriage and the family - both what it is and it's additional significance as e.g. a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the Church.
- The role of sex and sexual attraction in same.
- Specific teachings on specific types of sexual immorality, of which the prohibition on male homosexuality is one of the most important.
"Christian sexual morality is basically normie-American sexual morality except we don't like gays" is not true, and empirically doesn't work as a seeker-sensitive white lie either.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
How far had the destigmatisation of male homosexuality got in blue states when AIDS turned up in the early 1980's? It looks like blue states and libertarian-inclined red states repealed their antisodomy laws in the 1970s but most of the South still had them. And of course that is only the first stage in destigmatisation.
In the UK, homosexuality was still broadly stigmatised, even in left-wing circles, well into the 1980's. (The Labour Party was still dominated by blue-collar unions at the time). For example, Section 28 (which prohibited public-sector organisations promoting homosexuality) was broadly popular when it was introduced in 1988
I wouldn't say Mizrahi Jews are "clearly not white". As with other MENA populations, the 19th century scientific racists, the US census bureau, and model HBD-aware biologists would all consider them a white subgroup.
Ashkenazi-on-Mizrahi racism is a live political issue in Israel, but western anti-racists, even ones looking for an excuse to bash Israel, don't see it as the local Israeli form of white-on-non-white racism. And I'm not seeing western pro-white voices who make the distinction - either they see all Jews as white and love Israel, or they see all Jews as <insert anti-Semitic stereotype> and think Israel is ripping us off. So I think Mizrahi Jews count as "politically white" outside Israel.
In fact, the only people I see claiming Mizrahi Jews as non-white are people trying to disprove the claim that Israel is an ethnostate of a white ethnicity.
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