RedRegard
7mo 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
7mo 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
1yr ago
Sounds like you need a long-term eugenic environment to cost-efficiently correct this. The social matrix that enables this behavior is itself founded on genetics. To fix a country you must fix its people.
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
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
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
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
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
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
6mo ago
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.
RedRegard
7mo 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
7mo 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
Western states want to maintain a high ratio of working-age population to retirees and that definitely will help to achieve certain goals. Even if the immigrants are destined for low-wage roles, that means that hiring care workers won't be as expensive (higher labor supply equals lower wages) and current levels of care can be maintained. Another common reason was to address the ostensible post covid labor shortages that business interests in many Western countries were arguing for. And yet a third is that many of these countries feel it's in their strategic interests to make their populations as large as possible, which I've seen French, Canadian, and American establishments explicitly endorse. In reality, I think the first two explanations are serving a few powerful interest groups at the expense of general welfare and future prosperity, and that the third explanation is misled as it's not overall population that matters but high value HBD, but this isn't taken into account by the establishment probably because it serves other purposes to deny. There's also a dark fourth reason, which is that elite interests converge on diverse populations as they are easy to divide and conquer and thus dominate. We do live in an era of anti-competitive corporate consolidation, top-bracket tax cuts, corporate welfare, and persistent privatization of inappropriate industries despite gross failures, whilst the broader populace bickers primarily over matters of racial prestige, so if the elites indeed orchestrated this they've done a good job...
RedRegard
1yr ago
The DEI stuff is built around internet fads, upper-middle-class pretensions/narcissism, and establishment imperatives. The terms left and right are malleable and relative, so it's both left-wing and not-left-wing. In any case, it's very convenient for the knowledge worker class and the giant institutions they serve, as it not only leaves their deeper structures and economic advantages uncontested (while merely arguing for superficial alterations), it also argues for increased power to be given to these people and institutions, as their credentials, HR departments, teams of lawyers and such are put forward as the necessary cures for 'systemic' bigotry or whatever.
What 'true' leftists, which exist only as fully as true rightists, lament is that there aren't strong working-class involvements in this new left, and indeed it lacks much revolutionary spark at all. It's not about solving or changing modern society so much as it's about keeping things in place and expanding the purvue of some of its most powerful factions. I think it deserves to be treated as a process of its own, best understood as a unique development that began around the 1960's, rather than something that matches patterns as broad as 'leftism'. Although, I can see the propagandistic appeal of accusing them of being false leftists, given that the term left enjoys positive valence with many of the people who would benefit from more working class, economically focused initiatives, such that it's a way of signaling to them that they are missing out. It's a matter of brand manipulation rather than objective understanding.
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.
I've read that medieval workers averaged 1600 hours annually, while modern people work 1900 hours, and industrial revolution-era workers put in 3000+ (https://tudorscribe.medium.com/do-you-work-longer-hours-than-a-medieval-peasant-17a9efe92a20). The horror stories about the wretched condition of peoples teeth and health in premodern times I've come across also seem to mostly come from the industrial age. I suspect that Malthusianism is partly to blame for declining standards, but also the power that capitalists and landowners gained over the commonfolk. Medieval economic systems were chaotic and inefficient, but they served to protect the peasantry against the ruling class through their illegibility. As the economy became more streamlined and efficient, it also gave the powerful greater leverage over the common people. The maximization of profitability for those at the top led to the sacrifice of complex arrangements that satisfied a broader array of needs for those at the bottom.
On a similar note, I've come to believe that medieval peasants weren't necessarily super different from tribalists in their economic engagement, and also that the distinction between hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, etc. is somewhat misleading, since most societies derived their nourishment from a motley of sources. Medieval people fished, foraged, hunted, etc., too, and many hunter-gatherers I've read about seem to have engaged in some amount of cultivation, so the categories aren't entirely discrete. In Seeing Like A State, it seems to be indicated that primitive peoples, including medieval peasants, had a complex arrangement of nutrient sources, which depended on access to farms, forests, and streams, but as society became streamlined and living spaces monopolized, they were forced into factories and workshops and fed mono-diets of grain. From there, various vitamin deficiencies and rapid tooth decay ensued.
RedRegard
6mo ago
Germany would have formed a European empire if America didn’t halt the final progression of balance of power politics. Near-to-midterm utility would have probably been maximized but whose to tell the far term prognosis based on the butterfly effect.
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
8mo ago
Yeah, i suppose if you're living somewhere with high inefficiency and waste the numbers will be extremely negative for all but the upper echelons of society. My model of modern society is that much of its value is produced by machines (capital) which only require skeleton crews of mechanics and engineers to maintain, and that asides from those specialists and the capitalists who own the machines, most other people are superfluous. On the other hand, democracy provides a brutish sort of power to those superfluous people, and thus they are able to extract value beyond what their economic potential would otherwise command. So the attempt to internally partition countries along these class lines could be seen as a class warfare attempt to undermine democracy.
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
Other than quantum mechanical shenanigans this seems like a settled fact of existence?
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.
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.
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