Mewis
2mo ago
A million things. London, as it is, is being strangled by a hideous combination of sky high rents, high taxes, and a glutted labour market. That it manages any prosperity at all is a marvel - that what prosperity it enjoys is sapped to support housing prices (and atop it, a rentier class of whitehairs) and an underclass of semi employed immigrants. The rest is pure consumption.
This is how despite inviting vast numbers of immigrants, Britain remains poor and is not likely to change it.
Mewis
2mo ago
Rivendell is temporary only from a terribly alien worldview - it has lasted thousands of years. That is, of course, insufficient from the perspective of an Elf, but should satisfy any mortal human.
The Shire, of course, is clearly idealised by Tolkien, but anyone who thinks it to be paradise is wrong. Tolkien himself clearly grasped the drawbacks of such a society - petty, parochial, ignorant, and dependent on the goodwill of greater civilizations.
Mewis
1mo ago
I do like turn based strategy, but there's something totally repellent to me about games or media where every character is a bobblehead anime girl.
Mewis
1mo ago
The more obvious point is that if we really end up facing such a disaster, we'll just geoengineer a solution. The only reason we don't pursue it now is piety, but it's hard to imagine billions of people just letting themselves die because the IPCC says it would be wrong to stop climate change.
Mewis
2mo ago
You might have that fear of God in you, but that doesn't cause you to start lying your butt off in ways that are totally feeble.
Think about it. You're sat across from an expert that has power over you. You want them on your side. And your choice is to tell extremely weak lies. 'Never touched a cigarette in my life', you say through browned teeth. 'It weren't me, it was Mr Dick Bum, my identical twin.'
People that lie habitually like this aren't scared. They have bad judgment, no respect for others, no respect for rules. And, if they're pulling the same crummy trick again for the fifth time, no ability to learn from their mistakes.
Mewis
3mo ago
Did he pour the drinks down her gullet? Yes, alcohol impairs your judgement. And yet you are still responsible for the choices you make, wise or foolish they might be.
Mewis
6mo ago
Other way around, surely?
The fact is, nobody is actually sitting down and crunching the numbers on utils. When it comes to actually making decisions in the real world and not in thought experiments, everyone resorts to the same expedients and heuristics - usually, some combination of virtue ethics and deontology. Don't commit murders, don't be dishonest.
Mewis
2mo ago
Yes, I would like to have gotten more of that 60s weirdness. As for the race, I don't really mind. I think you can justify just about any casting in the context of a post racial interstellar society. Except maybe Zendaya and her weird baby-face. Not that I don't get the appeal of dudes that look like they're 25 going on 15, but it does make it hard to take them seriously.
Mewis
2mo ago
Genocide is just the magic word that gets Westerners all excited and interventiony. Hey, it worked in Libya.
Mewis
3mo ago
I mean, having friends and family that can give you a room is doing a lot of the work here.
Mewis
1mo ago
I would agree that the current US approach to Venezuela isn't working, and sanctions rarely do work (see Cuba, Spain, Iran, Russia, so on). But the US is entitled to refuse to trade with anyone it feels like. Maybe if Venezuelans were actually starving and dying in large numbers, there might be an obligation to send food, but AFAIK things aren't that bad in VZ.
Mewis
1mo ago
Sure, but Hamas doesn't simply want a change in management and a new name on the map. They conceive of Palestine as being essentially and exclusively Arab and Muslim - not all that different from Israel being essentially Jewish.
Mewis
1mo ago
Well, the more obvious answer is that there's more money to be made from King of Pop than Wacko Jacko, since the man himself is dead, but his music lives on.
Mewis
6mo ago
It's my own impression that the fiercest advocates for generous asylum policies or even open borders aren't deontologists (who generally have a lot of respect for rules around borders and citizenship), but utilitarians (who are willing to compromise because they value the utility of asylum seekers over maintaining strong borders). It's also my own impression that utilitarians are more vulnerable to charisma and arguments - theoretically a utilitarian is capable of endorsing any behavior if they're persuaded of it's utility, whereas it's much harder to argue a deontologist into bending his own rules.
Mewis
2mo ago
Unless he's been hanging out with Justin Trudeau, HRH King Charles is still whiter than any of them, and is actually a head of state.
Mewis
1mo ago
Clearly, that exclusionary element is not needless - it serves a purpose or satisfies some desire. I think that desire is the desire for competition, just channelled into a single player game. I also think it's wrong to write off that very natural drive as snobbery.
Mewis
3mo ago
Somehow the richest and most powerful society in the world, one that executes a hundred million cows a year, can't figure out how to execute humans because uh, it's messy.
Mewis
5mo ago
Counterpoint: this same economic malaise is very common among developed Western countries. It is the US that is the outlier here in managing to remain economically buoyant over the past 15 years while peer economies like the UK and Canada have muddled through.
Mewis
6mo ago
I remember reading some accounts that Bill Clinton had an uncanny level of personal charisma that people who hadn't met him just didn't get. I think it's probably a more general quality of today's rigorously competitive political world. Maybe that's why politicians so often come off as incompetent or fake, that they're selected so strongly for personal charisma it leaves no room for other qualities.
Mewis
5mo ago
That seems like rather a crude reduction. Yes, I would think that young people fighting in war do think about their future... Including the possibility of marriage and family.
Mewis
2mo ago
Race is both a social construct and a biological category with real consequences independent of how society chooses to treat it. Consider for a parallel example, tallness. Different cultures have different standards of tallness and might treat people they consider tall or short differently. 'Tallness' here is basically how society decides to treat or respond to the very real feature of height.
Mewis
5mo ago
Yes, though many government departments and place names have been translated into Te Reo as well, with often the Te Reo name taking priority over the English one.
It seems like a pretty spectacularly bad policy, one seemly optimized for divisiveness.
Mewis
5mo ago
Because it's far more appealing to join the western sphere of influence than to remain in Russia's. NATO and the EU offer Ukraine a powerful security guarantee, prosperity and liberty.
Mewis
2mo ago
Christian Bale, Tom Holland, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Idris Elba, John Boyega, Colin Firth, Ewan McGregor, Tom Hiddleston, Henry Cavill, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Nicholas Hoult, Orlando Bloom, Charlie Hunnam...
Note that all these people came to prominence in Hollywood, though. Beautiful Brits go where the money is - we're left with the remainder.
I agree that it's very hard to tease out the direct impact of sun exposure from all the other things that come with it, but if that's really the case then clearly it isn't a big deal and it's definitely not worth shifting your attitude to favour indoor activities over outdoor ones.
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