RenOS
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
something is wrong
11mo ago
I agree one could have seen the signs from the start, but it was easy to tolerate or even join in the sneering since many of the early targets were simultaneously ridiculous and unsympathetic, like scientology.
RenOS
something is wrong
11mo ago
Even assuming that DC is so well recorded that it is almost impossible to not notice, it doesn't need to outright be an op. It can simply be someone inconvenient for whatever story the CIA wants to push. Which in this case would probably mean somebody who is openly and obviously anti-trump. But again, that would just be damning in a different way.
RenOS
something is wrong
11mo ago
My expectation at this stage is that no one actually challenges, and Biden is coronated. Taking him on is a highly risky option - if you fail and Biden loses some people will blame you for the loss, potentially killing your future prospects. If you take him on and he wins that's even worse - now the President has a very personal grudge against you.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the american system, but rebelling at the convention does not actually directly impact Biden's chances at the general election, right? At most indirectly since it makes the democrats look chaotic.
But the popular impression & even the mainstream media is sufficiently critical of Biden at this point that I think there is a good chance that if someone already sympathetic challenges Biden, and Biden wins the convention anyway, but then proceeds to lose the general election, that person will get a large boost in popularity and media pieces about "if only so-and-so had won the convention, everything would have been different". It might even be better for the person than winning the convention outright, since no potential democratic nominee has a >50% chance of beating trump. Better make a good impression now and then fight against someone else in the next election.
RenOS
something is wrong
11mo ago
That's the Trump shooter afaik; I don't know that particular photo, though, nor do I understand the implications.
RenOS
something is wrong
11mo ago
It's a well-known, specific exorcism and warding against evil spirits phrase in certain religious community. And these exorcisms would often include holy water. Even assuming it was meant jokingly - which I don't, it sounds to me more like crazy person rambling - , the "joke" here is something like "I'm gonna throw this scalding water in your face like a demon lol".
RenOS
something is wrong
11mo ago
Getting "proper" swing voters is one thing, but I get the impression that there is a decent number of people who disliked Trump enough to be somewhat receptive to this rhetoric, while also thinking Biden is sufficiently senile that they didn't want to vote for him either.
Also, Harris has a lot of unpopular policy positions, so just focusing on how bad Trump is and otherwise staying as "generic democrat" as possible might genuinely be the most EV-positive for her overall.
RenOS
something is wrong
11mo ago
No, progressives can be quite authoritarian. In fact plenty kind of organically function similar to three letter agencies in this respect - If they don't directly work on something they'll not check, let alone call into question the work of an ally. And if they do, they'll be careful to only publish correct results, lest it might be "misused". I've been personally told better not to research something bc I might get unpopular results, and this was by someone who otherwise was quite willing to pick a fight on other issues that don't go against his politics.
RenOS
something is wrong
11mo ago
Having some doubt after a while in a relationship is normal, and it does not surprise me that for a mottizen it expresses itself in this way. You should ask yourself whether you really think this, or whether you are rationalizing your own cold feet.
That said, being a strong proponent of some level of HBD as well, I can understand this fear. But there is nothing wrong with shape rotators or pragmatism. Arguably, the biggest biological winners of modernity where workers and farmers, while many intellectual families struggled to even keep their numbers steady despite living in splendour. I don't think history vindicated an attitude of intellectual genetic purity. Your children will still resemble you substantially, and maybe a little bit less depressive self-consciuousness might be a good thing. You say she has many desirable qualities; You should imo aim for such a good mix, instead of pure IQ-maxing (though I agree that IQ should be considered disproportionally due to its importance).
RenOS
something is wrong
11mo ago
I think you mean you conscientiousness? Though contentiousness might be an entertaining quality as well.
This reminds of the study (don't have the link, sorry, it's quite some time ago) that claimed to show that men resent and feel threatened by female success, and that this is a large part of successful womens' struggle with dating, based on the fact that men are much less attracted to successful women.
The numbers? Seeing a highly prestigious/high earning job such as CEO increases a woman's chance to consider dating that person by something like 50%, whereas men give only a 10% premium. On the other hand, seeing someone with a less prestigious/lower earning job than them reduced the chance to consider dating that person for the majority of women to near zero irrespective of other qualities, while men only gave a 20% penalty or so.
In other words, men just don't consider women's jobs as super-important either way. Only a minority of men resent that "a woman could do this". It's women who look down on male cashiers so much that they'd never consider dating one.
But as usual, everyone tries to find a way to blame men.
RenOS
something is wrong
11mo ago
If your post was entirely about how men just really like building, fighting, hunting, etc. and that modern jobs simply fail to fulfill some primal male urges I'd completely agree! Though I'd add that modern jobs struggle to sufficiently fulfill many primal female urges as well.
But a large chunk of your post was about how men resent certain female jobs and in particular resent doing jobs if - and because - a women can do them. This is a fairly common claim I hear, and it's in my view an inversion of reality ; It's primarily women who resent men doing a job they can do themselves, similar to how the average man does not resent successful women, but successful women resent the average man.
RenOS
something is wrong
10mo ago
Nate Silver was right yet again. The most generally applicable is probably simple - trust the polls. If people tell you that they don't like either of two options, then giving them a third option will improve your odds. Kamala somewhat outperforms her old polling, but the writing has been on the wall for some time that almost any replacement for Biden will improve the D's odds.
90% of Isekai is exactly this, though. For a while it's fun, but doesn't it get boring fast?
RenOS
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10mo ago
Could you link to such a post about LOTTs fact checking?
RenOS
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10mo ago
At that point you can limit speech in absolutely any way you see fit. "Well, a citizen of $country is duty bound not to incite hatred. We didn't punish you for your speech on top of your jail sentence for inciting hatred!"
RenOS
something is wrong
10mo ago
But in this particular example, the treason is entirely through speech. If that counts, so should inciting hatred entirely through speech. I don't really see the relevance that treason can in theory be committed differently.
RenOS
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10mo ago
Another vote here for Brave, both as browser and as a search engine.
The AfD is at the very least flirting with the far right, if not being it itself. But overall the core issue is that the grand coalition under the Merkel CDU was so "pure centrist" that there effectively is a vacuum for a proper, believable moderate right. Remember: The start of the current immigration problems in the popular conception was Merkel's 2015 complete surrender to immigration on the basis that any limitation, any requirements that could possibly, theoretically keep a legitimate asylum seeker from entering the country is not morally justifiable. Which in practice meant that we actively filtered our immigrants based on honesty - that is, any immigrant stupid enough to be honest risked to have to go back, while brazen lying was consistently rewarded except if it could be proven beyond doubt (which is almost impossible in practice). The same goes now for deportations; Almost only proven criminals are affected with an order, and the majority of orders still goes unprocessed for a variety of reasons.
Scrolling forward to today, in polls around 40% of germans state that they think the CDU/CSU does not want to limit immigration at all. And this is the allegedly farthest right party considered legitimate by the establishment! No matter your own political position, it should be obvious that any functioning democracy WILL generate a new right given due time. Well, now we have that, and it is the AfD and to some degree the BSW (which is far-left on economic issues, but right-leaning on several social issues by public conception). Noting that both are somewhat kooky, incompetent and include extremists is true, but also increasingly beyond the point - if I think that, say, immigration is the most serious issue, I will vote for someone who at least attempts to limit it. Voting for someone who competently and sanely works against my interests and for his own would be stupid, after all.
RenOS
something is wrong
10mo ago
Why are they chanting death to America and not death to Iceland, Zimbabwe or Uruguay? It is clear that they are motivated by the absolutely abhorrent policies that american impoerialists have imposed on them. They are fighting the same military industrial complex that is a cancer on western societies.
This is extremely naive. The same people will happily make terror attacks in arbitrary non-majority muslim countries they can get into, in fact even in majority muslim countries against non-muslim minorities.
RenOS
something is wrong
10mo ago
You have it fundamentally backwards. Israel not only already substantially opened up shortly before Oct 7, but they also hoped to open up further and Hamas put an end to it since it was against their interest. Palestinians working in Israel and normalising relationships is in Israel's interest, since it makes Hamas' obsolete and removes their biggest thorn in the side. Or at the very least they would like to just leave the Gaza strip alone, but that was unsustainable since it gave Hamas' easier access to weapons. Endless death and war on the other hand is in the Hamas' interest, since it lets them generate western and arab support and keeps them in power.
Then there is that whole Remigrationskonferenz thing (called Wannsee 2.0 by some). What was said and by whom is contested, but there are credible claims that some called for deporting German citizens if they had the wrong ethnicity, which would be completely beyond the pale. I mean, restricting political asylum is one thing (and unless you have a 2/3 majority, expect the German supreme court to have an opinion on that, because that right is in the constitution), but this is something different. Sending people with US passports back to the birth country of their ancestors is way out the overton window for US politics, and it is similar for Germany.
Sorry, but it's not just contested; it is simply not credible. We now know that Correctiv was purposefully suggesting the similarity, but never actually explicitly stated that there were these plans. In their recent court case they now did, in fact, claim the opposite: That the reason they didn't explicitly stated such is because there never were these plans. According to Correctiv itself, all participants agreed that this was beyond the pale. You can read more about this at the Cicero or the Übermedien. Both in german, obviously, but google translate exists.
RenOS
something is wrong
10mo ago
I take offense to making fun of our pronunciation! The correct term is Kraut, as being named after the most supreme of foods is an honour.
But yes I agree, though I would extend this to almost any topic in any country. For an example close to heart, looking up first source english papers but blindly trusting their framing of their findings is almost as guaranteed to lead to misconceptions as blindly trusting MSM reporting on the findings.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
First, I want to mention that almost all population projections I'm aware of completely ignore even the possibility of evolution and selection. Plenty of them are just simple regressions that implicitly assume a homogenous population. This is, of course, complete bunk. The number of (surviving & procreating) offspring is literally the thing evolution selects on, and no human population ever has been homogenous across traits. So this is almost guaranteed to be a transient phenomenon, unless you deny evolution in general. Given that at least in my home country of germany we're already at a TFR of 1.6 again, population differentials in family size and heritability estimates for most traits being in the ballpark of 50%, it's probably a matter of only a few generations until we worry about too high population growth again instead.
That means, aside from having to deal with short-term issues such as a terrible working vs dependent/unemployed ratio for the next decade, the primary question should be: Who do we currently select for and who ought we select for? And there is some negative, but also some positive views on this front. On the negative side, we definitely select for unemployed and low time preference people who fail to take the necessary precautions to not become pregnant. On the positive side, we select for people who want to have children and are as such likely to treat them better and likely to prepare themselves better in general. We select to some degree against both hedonism and doomerism, since both inclinitations straightforwardly lead towards being childless, and instead in favor of certain kinds of optimistic long-termism, which includes in particular religiosity. We select somewhat against education in general, but also more specifically for pragmatic people that don't waste an endless amount of time getting stuck in dead-end endeavours (which includes certain educations) throughout their early adulthood. And so on.
Overall, I'm not entirely sure whether we really need to change anything. There are a few horror stories such as drug addicts with almost one heavily disabled kid per year (a colleague of mine works with such cases in a non-profit), but these are basically rounding errors in practice. Poor/unemployed people have slightly more kids, but not by a crazy amount, and these are still mostly pretty normal people. Down syndrome is a good example of positive development: In theory, the modern world enables heavily disabled people to have arbitrary numbers of children whereas they couldn't provide for them before. In practice, not only do the great majority of people with Down's have no children at all, we also massively reduced the number of de novo cases by screening, since even the people who want to have children don't want a heavily disabled kid.
That said, I think the current issues boil down to a few factors:
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We didn't evolve to actually want kids before we have them. We evolved to want partnership and sex, and then to nurture and protect any child that might arise from the union. Furthermore, men and women have very different want profiles on this topic. Unless we force people to have kids against their will, easily accessible, reliable contraceptives will always mean a substantially reduced TFR until we have had time to select in favor of wanting kids directly.
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Culturally, we spend an inordinate amount of time and pressure teaching kids to not get pregnant too early, but there often is no conception of having them too late or having too few children. My parents always told me that I should wait (when they heard about our first, their first words were literally "so soon?" I was 27!). TV showed me unhappy teen pregnancies on one side, and endless fun adventure for the childless on the other. Even doctors will misinform women that they can have kids whenever they want, in spite of the data clearly showing that even at only 35 there already is a substantial chance for pregnancies to fail, and an even higher chance for disability. School and university made clear that I ought to postpone children until after I'm finished. And finally, friends and acquaintances treat having children as just one lifestyle choice among many.
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We have seen an inversion in the economics of having children thanks to retirement. In the past, children were your retirement, the childless depending on the kindness of strangers or at best their neighbours and friends. Kids could help on the farm as early as the late single digits, and could be gainfully employed by 14. Today, having kids means earning much less money in the first place due to not being able to work as much and due to missing promotions, then of that reduced amount you have to spend substantial money to care for them, and then due to earning less you also have a reduced retirement. Child money across the west is peanuts compared to all this, in particular considering that all retirement systems absolutely require a sufficient number of new humans to function at all.
We can't do much about the first except wait, but for the second and third we can. We should inform people adequately about the biological risks of late pregnancies. Programs supporting grandparents to take time off work to help out with child rearing would also be quite positive, since they usually are in stable employment, will not miss promotions anymore and many have already passed their most productive years anyway. Education needs to be shortened and focus on things that are useful. Likewise wasting more than one or two years in early adulthood should be frowned upon much more. There should be less TV and media, and more activities like outdoors summer camps, since the former will always idealize childless adventuring, while the latter is almost intrinsically family-friendly. Retirement probably needs to be rehauled entirely so that that having kids - be it biologically or adopted - is similarly net-positive for your retirement prospects as earning decent money. We need to get rid of many "child protection" laws that sound good in theory but mean in practice that they can't do any paid work whatsoever. Lastly, I've found that a mentality of "hobbies and most fun activities are for kids" coupled with "adults are primarily allowed to engage in these as long as they do so for the benefit of kids" leads too a much more happy and family-oriented life, since on one side without this it's easy to oversaturate yourself with "fun" at the expense of long-term happiness, while on the other you look forward to having kids so that you can do these things more again. Doesn't mean that the childless aren't allowed to have any fun at all, but just that overindulgence in these things should be socially frowned upon.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
Afaik it include some immigrants that have a residential or citizen status, but not nearly all. The main origin countries are still poland (1.4), turkey (1.9) and russia (1.5), so the most recent waves from arab countries have not been (fully) incorporated as far as I can see. Also, the TFR of germans without migration background (which is not necessarily ethnic germans, though) has allegedly been increasing as well from the low of 1.4 to somewhere above 1.5.
He didn't say that evil is the goal, merely that he did it deliberately. As in, the kind of person who knowingly dumps poison in the river if it's not punished, as opposed to the person who is just running their plant so incompetently that they can't stop polluting everything even if they don't want to. As you may guess, I'd prefer the former, since he can be persuaded to change his way, while the latter is incapable of doing so.
Imo history has vindicated him; The advent of meritocracy, which often only cared about morality insofar as the person can be relied upon not to work against the interests of the employer, caused a major speed-up of progress. Greed used to be seen as a vice that needs to be reigned in, but through capitalism we managed to channel it into productivity instead.
I don't necessarily think we should entirely ignore morality, but combining competence with good incentives leads more reliably to good results.
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