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MelodicBerries

virtus junxit mors non separabit

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joined 2022 October 17 16:57:34 UTC

				

User ID: 1678

MelodicBerries

virtus junxit mors non separabit

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 17 16:57:34 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 1678

To be fair, relationships in history

In most of human history, people didn't live long past the age of 35. India's median life expectancy as late as 1945 was something like 36 years if memory serves.

In short, humans weren't meant for ultra-long relationships. That's a very recent phenomenon. Couples that have 40+ year relationships are extremely rare for good reasons. Typically, the man either has a very low libido or he is seeing prostitutes or has mistresses on the side. Or he has simply learned to suppress his desires to an unnatural extent and come to terms with it.

I don't know why our culture promotes the insane idea that marriages should last forever. It's actively harmful.

  • -24

The Cathedral

So ADL are Christians now?

  • -19

But this loss didn't happen thirty or forty or whenever the immigrants started to come in big numbers years ago, rather it happened in the aftermath of the Second World War when the UK dropped its long standing traditions of Classical Liberalism, "an Englishman's home is his castle" and the Anglo developed system of limited government, preferring to go for the expansive and nannying welfare state model instead.

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place. You can even buy arms in open air markets with minimal regulations. Perhaps you can sense my dripping sarcasm, but I have little patience for these kinds of arguments. Taxes can go up and they can go down, but what - or rather, who - made Britain were the Anglo-Saxons.

This type of argument is the right-wing version of the blank slate.

  • -12

I don't think anyone has had a spotless record in this war. US intelligence got the invasion right but then publicly claimed that Kiev was in danger of falling 'within days'. How did that pan out?

But the facts speak their own language: if Ukraine was doing well, they wouldn't need to ask for NATO materiel when the same NATO countries no longer have "easy" choices available to them, such as mothbolled ex-Soviet stuff.

At any rate, trying to handicap the chances of UA victory wasn't the primary aim of my OP, but rather to question the assumption that victory in this conflict for the pro-NATO side is of such titantic importance that the media and the political class would have us believe. As I outlined in my OP, Russia is unlikely to be a long-term winner even in the event of battlefield victory and Ukraine's importance has also been grossly overstated.

And that was still an improvement in most QoL measures over the previous socialist government.

Interesting, have you lived in Somalia during this period?

I know about the source of the term. I'm just ridiculing its use here (in fact, I think it is misleading in general).

The ADL has been the organising force in pushing for an advertiser boycott here, which started the revenue collapse. This is simply the latest salvo in the war that they started.

Yet their lives are infinitely better than if they would have remained sovereign. No offence to American Indians, but given their social problems, I find it hard to believe that their standard of living would have been better today if not for European conquest. The tall tales of mass annihilation is also mostly bunk. Many Europeans were often very sympathetic (e.g. Sam Houston).

But Serge's paragraph is about America and American stockpiles--so why link to a piece about European supply issues?

Poland and other countries have ordered HIMARS already in 2018 but still haven't gotten deliveries. Why do you think America has outsourced significant parts of F-35 production to friendly countries? It no longer has the domestic capacity to fully manufacture the plane at scale. It isn't only Europe which has cut back massively on military production. Equipment has gotten more expensive and fewer units are built, along with lower investment in manufacturing more generally.

The Israelis are a paper tiger without daddy America. As this conflict showed (8 billion dollars needed from Uncle Sam within the first day of rocket attacks). If the Israelis had the capability to attack Iran, then they'd have done it years ago. They don't and ultimately depend on the US to do it. Successive American administrations have turned down every request from Jerusalem.

Iran today is much more capable than it was 10 years ago. If Iran is attacked, they would almost certainly conduct a a massive attack on Saudi Arabia and other US-aligned countries. That would send the world economy into a gigantic depression if oil output suddenly crashed by 10-15 mb/d. Many Western strategic oil stocks are already depleted after the UA war so there wouldn't be much buffer space to absorb the shock.

TL;DR near zero.

In any serious conflict, the missiles wouldn't just be limited to the Taiwan strait. China would likely take out all major US bases on day 1 of the conflict.

Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did

I am not someone who likes excessive racialisation of politics, but I think some on the left may be correct in speculating that Russia being a conservative, white Christian country has a lot to do with it. Ukraine is very similar, but there is simply more respect to Russia since it resembles the USA in many ways (frontier culture, etc).

I also think a lot of right-wingers have this obsession against China for the same reason. It's an alien race, on top of actually being a real threat in a way that Russia is not. And to counter China, it'd be remarkably foolish if you were to push Russia and China together instead (which is what the US has done). I think Beinart wrote about these dynamics well a few weeks ago.

Does your theory predict collapse in immigration once AI-powered automation makes this (already net budget negative over lifetime, in many cases) addition clearly counterproductive?

I've been hearing about the automation makes work superflous for well over a decade now. It reached a crescendo in 2016-17 with Erik Brynjolfsson's book and subsequent forecasts by various institutions of a rapid job less. Never happened. Can AI be different? It could, but people are vastly overestimating AI progress. The key to productivity displacing jobs is when programmers themselves are no longer as needed and AI can self-improve. We're still a long away from that.

the people supporting mass immigration are driven by basically moral considerations (though their morality may be different from what we believe), and would rather slow down productivity growth than allow their clients to be made patenly uneconomical for "capitalism".

Alternatively, some capitalists prefer high immigration as a way to cheap out, reduce bargaining power for workers and saving on productivity-enhancing investments while pocketing the change in terms of dividends. To be clear, I think some on the left are driven by moralistic arguments but they aren't the ones driving policy. Capitalists are, but they are opportunistic enough to use the shield of leftist morality to bludgeon their political opponents. It has the added benefit of raising one's social status in the domestic arena and people care deeply about status, too.

Lapdogs don't call the shots.

Georgism isn't changing ownership of the land, it's changing the way the government taxes the land.

I think this strikes at the root of the issue, and it's something many seemingly misunderstand. I have respect for people who want a low-tax regime as possible, but even there you can replace a lot of taxes with a LVT, so in some instances the cumulative tax burden could even be lower than before. High taxes are not in themselves a goal worthy of striving to, but tax efficiency is, even if it happens to land a lower level than before.

Not really. Lots of well-to-do people do projects-based work with fluid locations and enjoy it. You probably just have bad work experiences.

You ironically need the Roman model, where the peoples subsumed by Rome came to view themselves as Roman.

This has been the standard policy for the past 50 years and I don't think it has worked well. It may be different in the US since most immigrants either come from a Westernised background (Latinx America) or are from the upper elites of Third World countries, which tend also to be fairly Westernised. Europe gets neither.

I agree that a two-tiered system is probably untenable in the long run, but this goes to my point about some problems not being able to be solved but merely managed. Besides, it also depends on the willingness of natives to enforce it. Gulf Arabs do it just fine, but I suspect Europeans are too soft. OTOH, the current status quo is a massive failure too. No easy answer here.

Interesting, thanks. I didn't think about it that way but you're probably onto something.

The median age of Western countries was much lower in previous eras. Had the demographic structure been similar as now, there's no reason why things would have been different. Besides, most migration was intra-European in previous eras. Plus travel was more expensive. All those structural factors are different, precisely because of much greater wealth (in turn a consequence of capitalism).

Sunak himself commented on it, saying how political correctness shouldn't prevent people from identifying these grooming gangs. In some ways, getting an Indian PM to say these things is a "cultural victory" of sorts. Having other races stan for you is the ultimate soft power. The media is also talking about it openly. That wasn't the case years ago.

More importantly, police have actually begun to prosecute and sentencing these vile rapists. So your characterisation that they "refuse to act" is simply wrong. Perhaps you could argue that they should do more, but saying they refuse to act is incorrect. There have been many trials by now and they are still continuing:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/11/eight-men-on-trial-accused-of-grooming-and-abusing-girls-in-rochdale

20 years ago, it was all swept under the carpet. As the UK has gotten more diverse, these things have gotten easier to talk about, not harder. And coverage is pretty balanced even in left-wing papers like the Guardian, meanwhile many of these vile scum are getting hauled off to court. Not exactly what you'd expect if you believed that whites were losing power. You'd see cover-ups or even celebrations. That's not what we see.

Erdogan is pretty loopy but he isn't that bad. I follow their economy fairly closely. They will see more devaluations but no Lebanon-style collapse.

Interesting, thanks!

I know about Cole's turnaround but Irving is news to me. Mind sharing source?

Top people are the ones who need the most loyalty, instead the WASP-elites are surrounded by foreigners while much of the elite are actual foreigners. This puts the elite and the people in different universes, while dismantling any sense of noblesse oblige.

This is an important argument but it would be difficult to combine it with recruiting the best from the world. You'd have to essentially put in practice an officially-sanctioned discriminatory system that tells the best and the brightest from abroad that they will always operate under a glass ceiling despite their abilities. That in of itself would act as a great repellent for any prospective talent. Why work hard in a society where there are limited avenues for personal growth?

So in my view, you'd essentially have to make a choice: either you welcome the best from the world over but with differing loyalties or you aim to consolidate a very homogenous elite but accept that their capabilities will be less. You can't have both. The US elite apparently chose the former and so far, at least, it isn't obvious to me that the US has suffered from it. That may change, then again, it may not.

Importing tens of thousands of Chinese people into the university system, getting China up to speed, and then trying to keep them making plastic toys won't work. They were obviously going to bring a lot of that know how home.

True, but a lot of them also ended up staying. A non-trivial fraction of top AI talent comes from China. Almost 90% of Chinese postgrads choose to stay in the US. In my view, the US has benefited more than China from this exchange. Just as the US has benefited more than India from their brain drain.

Why wouldn't they return to China?

Twenty or even ten years ago they probably wouldn't because the opportunities back home would have been meager, so instead of the US they'd likely move to Western countries without such a racial system of institutionalised discrimination. That may still happen to some extent, but the difference today is that their domestic research ecosystem is already world-class. That makes all the difference, so there is not only a pull-factor but it's combined with a push-factor (China initative).

I suppose the argument is that one shouldn't treat all ethnic Chinese as a giant blog of Borg working in perfect co-ordination. While the Chinese government and some of their VC firms do act like you describe, many ordinary Chinese people have nothing to do with it but were unfairly targeted in a broad campaign that often was remarkably crass in its target-selection - as even former administrators of the program now admit.