RenOS
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
something is wrong
1d ago
I've noticed this tendency as well. First, progressives claim that changing the law or cultural mores on something will improve this or that, or everything altogether. When their predictions inevitable fail and the changes turn out to be somewhere between less good or outright negative, but everyone already got used to the new norms, the claim becomes that this is what we wanted anyway. Ideally, you start a bunch of tv shows how terrible life as before [X] changed. Didn't chesterton have a quote to that effect?
Ah, found it:
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."
The implication here being that the progressives of old are now the contemporary conservatives.
RenOS
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2d ago
Do you have anything in particular on your mind? Being an European myself, Dase's rant strikes me as substantially worse than anything I've ever read about Europeans on here.
RenOS
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3d ago
I'd rather say that without western support, they would have simply lost some time ago already, so you're kind of right but I wouldn't say that this means my causality is reversed. I don't think that they wouldn't have at least tried to fight. It's more a case of reciprocal causality that is hard to entangle; I also wouldn't deny the obvious maidan involvement of the US either, which is itself a precursor of the current conflict. But there as well, it worked because the Ukrainian majority did lose trust in the russia-aligned government, and it did want a realignment towards the west.
RenOS
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3d ago
I'm not so knowledgeable for tractors specifically, but there definitely were car bubbles. When people realized that cars have reached a state close to horse-drawn carriages, will predictably become even better in the near future, and probably replace horses altogether, a host of new companies with various variants of car technology cropped up. Of course, as you should know, almost all modern cars have used the same basic style of engine, the internal combustion engine (and in fact, mostly a specific kind of it).
But it wasn't always so. There was a variety of companies with their own engine designs that overwhelmingly failed. And of course various companies experimented with non-engine related designs that also didn't work out. Some companies successfully made the switch early enough, but many just failed. You could do everything right, correctly predict the dominance of cars, invest in a reasonable company, and lose absolutely everything anyway.
The main difference now is that many of the current competitors are already giants so they can write off a lot of losses without going broke, and it's unclear whether governments will even allow them to outright fail. But a bubble popping on several of them (or even all of them - maybe the real breakthrough will come from a smaller competitor, though I consider it very unlikely) and them losing substantial valuation seems like a foregone conclusion, even if I think that eventually AI will be a technology of the future.
RenOS
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5d ago
I mostly agree with you in the context of medieval or ancient warfare. Historical societies could rebound fast because they were essentially malthusian-limited: Even if they lose a majority of men, they'd just get them back in a generation or two. Whether you stay at the limit thanks to high infant mortality or dip below for a while thanks to war but recover quickly afterwards doesn't really matter all that much, not even in terms of net-deaths. Arguably, a decent number of the men were more trouble than worth anyway, so it might even be beneficial for the rest to get rid of them. But two can play at game theory, see the Melian Dialogue, so you shouldn't discount the alternative even back then.
Ukraine's behaviour is also beneficial for me, as a cynical european who wants them to bleed russia as much as possible to reduce the chance of them starting a war against us. It's apparently also what Ukraine wants, so they should get our support, and we're in no position to talk them out of it. But for themselves it's basically suicide if you look at the numbers. Lots of dead, mostly men. Lots of emigration, mostly women, and I'd be very surprised if more than a third returns, if even that much. The birth rate is in the gutters as well. There's no coming back from this.
Venezuela becoming a de-facto US vassal seems ... clearly preferential to this? It's true that I prefer the US by far to Russia already so it's hardly a symmetric issue. But to go back to history, there are plenty of independent rulers who swiftly surrendered or even swore fealty to a superior foe when the writing was on the wall, only to bide their time and come out on top eventually.
You can easily square the circle however by realizing that specifically the subgroup of women who currently have difficulty finding a partner are the ones who disproportionally suffer from hypergamy run amok. Most women have a reasonable or at least mostly functional version of hypergamy. Similar to how the subgroup of men who become NEETS are disproportionally struggling with addiction, anti-sociality and motivational problems that are male-typical and which other men also have, but just not to such a dysfunctional degree. Or to the difference between Asperger vs Autism.
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