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
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
10mo ago
Do you have anything to offer in support of this account of human interaction or did you just imagine it?
Mewis
5mo 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
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
8mo ago
Elon really can't win, can he? If he geofences off Russian-controlled areas, he's accused of undermining offensive operations. If he doesn't, then he'd be accused of helping the Russian military.
Note the second paragraph appears to be written in a confusing way
Yes, it's on purpose. Likely, details are being left out to support the preferred narrative.
Mewis
11mo ago
This is a ridiculous stance to take, not really that far removed from 'you survived the last round, therefore you should continue to play Russian Roulette'. No less ridiculous because European governments went to unprecedented lengths to shield households from energy price increases, instead choosing to borrow money to subsidize energy imports and, when they weren't enough, putting the squeeze on heavy industry.
Second, renewable energy is beating new records by the day. In Northern Europe, electricity prices are bouncing around zero and occasionally dipping below the line into negative territory.
None of which matters - you need electricity to flow all the time. Of course electricity demand is low right now - it's 20 degrees outside and the sun doesn't set until nine pm. Renewables are nice to have to supplement the grid, but that's all they do. The fact is that the diminishing returns on building additional wind-solar capacity increase the more you have of it, because you're getting more energy on days like today (when you don't need it) and nearly nothing on days when you actually want it.
Mewis
11mo ago
As Hoffmeister noted in his post on the topic, if Penny has posts like many on here indicating that he thinks the homeless are subhuman scum that need to be cleared off the streets, we will know soon. This is quite likely where the story will hinge. Prosecution will aim to portray him as "looking for a fight" and looking for an excuse to hurt or kill someone.
Stuff like this generally isn't admissable as evidence (it wasn't in the Rittenhouse case, for instance). The fact is that idle words made weeks or months in advance are not the same as intent or premeditation.
Mewis
4mo 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
5mo ago
That's highly dependent on how people interpreted it. A fair few people castrated themselves, and more went into the desert to pursue lives of extreme asceticism. Remember that early Christians were like, a millenarian cult that believed that Jesus would be back in a few decades... Then a few centuries...
Mewis
1mo ago
One thing that stuck out to me in Dune was the chasteness. The Harkonnens are sex weirdo pederasts in the books, an element that is totally excised in the movies, even though they're delightfully weird in other ways.
Mewis
4mo 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
9mo ago
That's an extremely low bar, because nearly any human activity can be part of a plan to commit a crime. Visit a bank - maybe that's evidence you're casing it and plan to rob it. Go to work - maybe you're planning to sell drugs to someone you know at work. Buy a 2l soda bottle - maybe you're planning to turn it into a illegal silencer. Given the correct context, basically anything can be evidence of acts that haven't occurred yet. Maybe this is by design - certainly it would make the job of police and prosecutors a lot easier if they can convict based on a Minority Report-style supposition about what people 'intended' to do.
Mewis
2mo ago
PEPFAR is estimated to have saved over twenty million lives, if that's worth anything to you.
Mewis
8mo ago
I don't see what kind of mindset this reveals at all. If you were to say, witness a superior abusing their position to sexually exploit others at your workplace, are you supposed to just let it go, and not let it affect any of your beliefs around sexism or corporate culture or power, because to do so would be petty and grudgeful and Not A Good Look, like seriously my dude, Yikes?
Mewis
8mo ago
You should have doubted the original story from the beginning. The fact is that it's easy for trained, intelligent journalists to create 'misunderstandings' without actually lying. Musk was never accused directly of sabotaging the Ukrainians - he was just 'appearing to'. His presumed sympathy to Russia becomes an assumed fact. The actual explanation is omitted.
Journalists are not idiots. They write exactly what they want to. Take the phrase 'Musk seemed to embrace COVID denialism'. Elon Musk is one of the most famous and public figures in the world who makes a habit of running his mouth on Twitter, but this trained journalist apparently can't figure out whether he believes that COVID exists.
Mewis
1mo ago
This is what they call 'four quadrant" films, films that penetrate all major demographics. Marvel has it pretty spot on with no sex and minimal romance, and you can't argue with money.
Mewis
4mo 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
10mo ago
I mean, that depends on the meaning of 'coming for the children'. Trans activists see themselves as benevolent saviors, swooping in to protect innocent trans children from being tortured into suicide by evil Christians. In that sense, of course they would not be embarrassed about it. But you probably don't mean it in the same way.
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
1mo ago
This sort of romantic neo-nazi image is ridiculous. The Nazis were not high trust. In fact they were the total opposite, a heap of the most venal, odious, dishonourable bandits to ever come out of Germany (which is saying something). They had no concerns for honour or trust or mercy, no respect for the traditional religion of Europe, no respect for the ancient peoples of Europe. They started vast wars over money and land, lied habitually, ran a horribly corrupt state built on exploitation and outright slavery, and slaughtered millions.
Nor was their state really ever intended to be self sufficient. From the start, the intention was to loot, conquer and subjugate their neighbours. Indeed, the German nationalist project was mostly complete by 1938 with the annexations of Austria and the Germanized regions of Czechoslovakia, and scarcely a peep from the Allies. But the Nazis dreamed of imperial domination and glory, not self sufficiency. Instead of rallying the nations of Europe against Bolshevism ( an easy task), Hitler squandered his credibility. By the end of WWII even anti communists like Churchill were drinking with Stalin, and it was left to the US to establish an anti communist front in Europe - well, the half of it that was left.
It's interesting because we have a much better example of reactionary "we don't do globalism here"autarky from the 1940s - Franco, who carefully avoided entanglement in either WWII or the postwar international order. That didn't work either, but he failed with more grace and less bloodshed than Hitler.
Mewis
5mo ago
Humans are neither hyper rational utility calculators nor are they blind rule followers. Everyone uses both rules and a consideration of consequences to help them make decisions. But it's my impression that consequentialists are much more resistant to this idea.
It's a typical consequentialist trick to conjure up some idiotic thought experiment, as if it means anything. It doesn't.
Mewis
6mo ago
No, but his work lives rent free in my head.
Regardless, the logic is simple. Skookum comes here, moans, gets moaned at. Why does he do it? Because he wants it, on some level or another. Or because, on some level, he feels he deserves it. There are many possible angles. But as someone who has also strapped himself into a rollercoaster to deal with my lack of desire or drive or accomplishment or whatever, I sort of get it, and I personally find the 'sort yourself out, mate' routine to be totally pointless. Having others scold me for being small and weak and lazy didn't resolve my feelings of inferiority, it made them worse... and yet even knowing that's true, I still want it, I still seek it out. As Dostoevsky said, men can be as fond of suffering as they are of well-being.
If all states adopt values antithetical to your own, I think it's a reasonable response to abandon loyalty to nation-states and instead prioritize other loyalties - and if the Chinese give you enough money to set your family up in comfort and style, you might choose them over the nation that discarded you.
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