RedRegard
8mo ago
As the capitalist system develops it alters in character. Some of the current capitalist institutions suppressing birthrates I mean to refer to include: office labor being the norm, extremely high levels of consumerism and luxury being available, various cultural diminishments in the role of community and family in peoples' lives owing in part to automobiles, suburbanization, etc., obesity caused by processed foods and cheap low-nutrient foods, environmental contaminants, etc., government and corporate propaganda systems increasing the prestige of educational and economic attainment while denigrating 'traditional' lifestyle choices. All of these flow in some way from the role of capital both as a general incentive and as a recursive shaper of policy.
RedRegard
8mo ago
Areas of the world that are more enmeshed in capitalism versus less. Examples would be New York versus Oklahoma, Singapore versus Malaysia, or your local upper-middle class neighbourhood versus lower class.
RedRegard
7mo ago
The difference between traditional forms of processing and the modern is that the modern kind is hyper optimized by capitalism, through vast amounts of capital and chemical engineering, for addictiveness and thence profitability. Healthiness could also be optimized for, but unfortunately it’s opaque to most consumers and doesn’t function as a schelling point in any case.
RedRegard
8mo ago
If you focus on Korea particularly those might seem like likely causes, but every capitalist country is suffering low birth rates and it's always concentrated in those urban centers that are the centers of economic growth. Capitalism is what suppresses birth rates by optimizing for short-term wealth accretion over other values. Women are incentivized to work rather than reproduce, and both sexes are incentivized to engage in hedonist consumerism, while meanwhile social factors conducive to fecundity, like having grandparents who expected grandchildren, gradually fade away like a strange dream.
RedRegard
11mo ago
All that is at stake for America is some small fraction of wealth that the blockade represents, and ultimately that wealth is of little importance for a country as glutted on it as America, and in any case it's probably mostly at stake for the well-off investor class rather than the broad populace.
It is in most people's best interests for state power and particularly the power of the world's elite to be constrained by various laws and conventions. Houthis are fighting against powerful and malign forces represented by Israel and the US. It is in most peoples' interests that they win over their adversaries, as this will weaken elite power and the power of the militaries they control.
RedRegard
7mo ago
Doesn't really look very good for the general pro-Russian camp that a major ally/prop of Russia would go out ingnomiously like this -
The same happens to America's puppets like South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. If they aren't themselves chased out, the moment they turn their backs it all collapses like a house of cards.
RedRegard
8mo ago
What does this have to do with property rights and free enterprise?
It’s caused by market forces and corporate influences rather than planning.
Even government propaganda is capitalism now?
Yes, as the governments in question are ideologically capitalist and are operating under a capitalist paradigm, some of which even entails the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres with revolving door politics, regulatory capture, and the importance of plutocratic funds in running modern political campaigns, among other things.
RedRegard
8mo ago
No we wouldn't expect that to necessarily be the case, since it's possible for more than one economic system to suppress birthrates, and also Western capitalism was suppressed historically through greater levels of unionization and government regulation. But in any case, fertility rates in the Soviet period were in fact higher than the post-Soviet period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Historical_fertility_rates
RedRegard
1yr ago
Why did the US only suddenly start to do this in the late 1970s, though
That's when the US started getting close with Israel, so all the ADL, holocaust propaganda, and other shit was to help cement the budding alliance through public relations manipulation, perhaps. We've seen how claims of antisemitism were used most recently to try and stifle dissent towards America's support for the ongoing 'police action' in Gaza, and various projects like the opening of new holocaust remembrance museums and movies directed by Spielberg depicting the suffering of Jews keep getting announced ever since 10/6. This strongly suggests that all of the anti-antisemitism buzz is just for propaganda purposes, not for actually contesting antisemitism (which would be bizarre if it was).
RedRegard
1yr ago
You can simply adopt eugenicism and the desire to improve black intelligence through DNA as your primary worldview, as opposed to nihilism (which I think is also an adequate choice...).
RedRegard
1yr ago
I'd say the eugenics would be more about promoting pro-sociality. I don't think East Asia has as much trouble as the West, let alone other parts of the world, with these kinds of perennial bad actors. The OP specified two approaches that only East Asian countries have so far achieved, Japan's acceptance of insularity and its attendant low immigration and economic stagnation, and China's social credit authoritarian system. Both are quintessentially East Asian systems. You need an East Asian-style populace to even get to the point where such approaches are plausible, as otherwise you are dealing with whacky Westerners and their preferences.
I disagree with your second point, I think that openly self-interested arguments are a lot less common than ones presenting themselves as high-minded or altruistic, which utterly saturate modern-day societies. Even the most brutal dictatorships, like North Korea, present their edicts in idealistic terms.
Any debate that followed from an argument of self-interest (i.e. an honest argument) would be of a technical nature on how best to achieve it. This is opposed to debate that follows from false idealism, which is a contest of deception and narcissistic self-delusion. There, the art is in the effective spin and the bald-faced lie.
RedRegard
1yr ago
Even if racial divergence may have ended, on net, around the Neanderthal age, the trend towards total racial homogenization was very slow up until recently. You probably could have had visually distinct races indefinitely if travel technology stopped with pre-Columbean tech. The future mongrelization of humanity is merely another aspect of the bug-man future we're all looking forward to. It's maximum entropy, maximum simplification, degradation to increasingly robust physical states.
RedRegard
1yr ago
The native birth rate in Canada is 2.2, dipping to 1.4 for those not living on reservations and climbing to 2.5+ for those on reservations, compared to the overall Canadian birthrate of 1.4.
RedRegard
1yr ago
A lot of them live on reservations and are impoverished, which is a great context for maximizing birth rates. They have nothing better or more appealing to do than breed. No career prospects to sacrifice fertility for, no Molochian god of GDP maximization to care about, just civilizationally robust cigarettes and booze.
RedRegard
2yr ago
The hedonic trap while showering is where you spend a superfluous amount of time showering because you don't want to change from being pleasurably warm to damply cold. How to avoid it? Here is one way: do not always shower your whole body, but only the parts that actually require it. How often do you need to wash your back? Possibly never*! This efficient way of showering usually entails washing the face and wherever there is lots of hair. Since only a portion of your body is wet, the discomfort of being cold and wet is minimized, and there is less warmth to sacrifice.
I got this idea after hearing about Aella.
*Except after sweaty workouts, in which case I recommend cold showers.
RedRegard
2yr ago
I think that some countries, which have little hope of competing internationally by themselves, willingly subordinate themselves to more powerful coalition leaders like the US, whereas other countries, which have the hope of standing on their own two feet, are reluctant to do this and instead try and act as autonomous agents. Subordinate agents don't hatch geopolitical complots by themselves, they instead go along with whatever the coalition leader organizes, sometimes leveraging their support in order to extract aid or benefits. Autonomous agents do attempt to move and shape things by themselves, generally with a view to maintaining or enhancing their relative power, with this being in view of maximizing their security. This describes how all states operate, including the US, either subordinating themselves or attempting to carve out their own fates.
RedRegard
6mo ago
He works for libertarian think tanks, so you should think of him as ‘a propagandist for rich people’. The arguments are just spins for increasing immigration, which benefits his employers by providing them with cheaper labor.
RedRegard
7mo ago
You're assuming that CEO competence is unlimited in its range and potential. It could be that decisions CEOs make are fairly obvious and simple ones, that their skillsets are only somewhat more demanding than those of any other top tier professional, and that a lot of the variance of outcomes between companies comes down to more structural matters than whose at the helm. If business churn is more about structuralism than great man theory, then there are diminishing returns for attempting to poach talent.
RedRegard
8mo ago
It’s not a choice people make from a position of detachment. People are habituated to their societies by adulthood, so that altering their lifestyles by jumping into a different sort of society would constitute a major cost. Everything they had lived for and adapted to up until that point of change would be gone. And it works both ways, the Amish would be apprehensive about forsaking their native societies as well. Crossing the threshold comes with a hefty toll, and so it doesn’t indicate ‘natural’ predilections.
RedRegard
11mo ago
Why is it an "unpleasant implication of the Israeli state" that Israel wants to keep its Arab population from not growing much beyond 20%? Is it an unpleasant implication of the Iranian state that they probably don't want a 20% Jewish population?
For any country wanting to be a powerhouse in commerce, it is perhaps necessary to become cosmopolitan and tolerant, but for countries that can see themselves doing no better than wallowing in third world poverty, there is no incentive to do that, so perhaps that is why it's embarrassing for Israel, which aspires to the former, to be somewhat ethnically supremacist but not for hopeless backwaters like Iran.
RedRegard
1yr ago
Other than quantum mechanical shenanigans this seems like a settled fact of existence?
RedRegard
1yr ago
No, but it does challenge the moral authority somewhat. I'm an immigrant to the US, so if I am unhappy at immigration (generally) then I am at least somewhat hypocritical. If I had the courage of my convictions I would go back to the UK.
This is a common argument, but I think it's only hypocritical if you're assuming a standpoint of moral universalism. If someone cares about themselves and not other people then a 'immigration for me but not for ye' argument has no hypocrisy. They simply want to get the best that they can for themselves and regard further immigration to be a detriment.
The job you described is basically a frivolity, a way for the rich to waste time, a way to skimp on a dishwasher, no one needs to do it. The people who work those jobs are obsolete. Their jobs suck because there’s not enough demand for their supply, so they need to accept bad work conditions for low pay. Improve their conditions and offer better pay and it’s not a dead end job any more, but to do that there’d need to be greater demand, tautologically proving these people and their work aren’t very important.
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