ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
This framing describes pretty well how many American liberals see things, but my understanding of the conservative point of view is that the division is between those who wish to be "colorblind" and resent being categorized in racial terms at all, and those who embrace racial identity politics as a way to gain power. To them, what the woke left would call "white" characteristics are simply aspects of American culture that do not belong to any particular race. This is of course different from the typical dissident right/white nationalist framing, which is to just take the woke liberal framing, invert it, and make it even more restrictive.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I mean, I don't think it's possible to create a test of political ideology that accurately predicts real-world behavior because those things are nearly orthogonal. In the same way knowing that a 12th century Templar knight and Mother Teresa were both Christians does not provide any practical guide to their actions, what a given liberal, conservative, or libertarian does in any situation is at best very loosely informed by their liberal/conservative/libertarian-ness. To the extent that those labels have meaning it is by providing the lens through which each individual interprets their own unique personal preferences. The number of people who have actually shopped around for an ideology whose principles they align with most strongly is so vanishingly small as to be meaningless, even though we are overrepresented by orders of magnitude in a forum like this one.
In other words, what you're looking for is a personality test and not a revised political compass test. For the record, my answer to your question is that it's entirely context-dependent but if you insist then I would have to go with option 1. I outlined my ideology here.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I at least wouldn't have any problem with that in theory. I don’t see the point of trying to freeze the ethnic map of the world at any particular point in time, as these things are always in flux. In practice, however, the things I do care about (cultural practices, crime rates, behavior) are so highly correlated with national origin that the simplest approach is to screen by background rather than thoroughly vet every individual immigrant to get only those that will assimilate well.
When I have visited Scandinavia in the past, the thing that annoyed me about immigrants there wasn't that they were nonwhite, it was that many did not seem to speak the local language, and I came close to berating several shopkeepers in my broken Swedish for their lack of respect towards their new home.
Cultural homogenization or breakdown of law and order are much worse outcomes in my eyes than racial replacement, and to the extent that they can be disambiguated (and perhaps they can't, this a point of disagreement), I don’t particularly care about the latter.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
My impression is that Mesoamericans are like the Japanese or Germans: capable of committing horrendous acts when sanctioned by the state or their religion, but less likely than most to commit spontaneous acts of interpersonal violence. People who have lived in Guatemala, for instance, have told me that the stereotypes there are that Mayans are shy and docile whereas Ladinos (the local name for Mestizos) are loud and aggressive.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
There are certain banks without ATM withdrawal fees (Credins Bank is the main one) that you should look for when exchanging cash. I think some places will also let you pay in Euros, but there will be a hefty markup.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
I think Albania is the best choice. It's cheap, relatively safe, has decent amenities and some nice beaches. Depending on where you're from, you may also get a better reception from the locals than you would elsewhere in the Balkans (i.e. you'll find American and NATO flags all over Tirana, while street peddlers in Belgrade sell Russian Z merchandise).
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
Well, part of what keeps a high-trust society the way it is is distrust of outsiders, so you may be starting off on the wrong foot here. I would suggest first taking a look at your own roots or those of your significant other if you have one. Are you from an immigrant family or do you have relatives in or recent ancestors from a small town or rural area? Those are places where you already have a connection, where the locals are less likely to immediately reject you because your being there makes some sense in their eyes, and where you yourself may be less likely to bail out early. There are plenty of places still left in America where you can tune out the culture war just by turning off your computer or phone, and if you choose to get involved in things like town meetings and local government you can do your own part to build the kind of community you want to live in.
If that isn't an option or if you insist that you still want the lifestyle of a first world urbanite without the downsides of violent crime or social dysfunction, then the places I would suggest are Taiwan (more accepting of foreigners than Japan with a similar standard of living, but may only be a short-term solution for geopolitical reasons) or New Zealand (politics there might offend you if you are hardcore anti-woke, but it's probably the safest place to be during the apocalypse), in addition to Singapore which you mentioned.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
I mean, I have no qualms about biting the bullet with #4 and I am someone who would almost certainly be dead of a childhood illness in that world. Humanity does not deserve those things that would not have been produced without the current legal incentive structure.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
The difference between the standard varieties is increasing over time as Urdu speakers add more Persian and Arabic loanwords while Hindi speakers make every effort to purge the ones acquired during Mughal times and to replace them with older Sanskrit vocabulary, but this takes a while to trickle down to the way the average person speaks.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
There are a lot of confounding factors. If the languages are closely related e.g. Spanish, Italian, French, Latin, then it isn't too hard, particularly if you are a native speaker of one of them. If you truly, absolutely need to master a language for work as an adult e.g. English for immigrants to the US, then you aren't going to hear many complaints like "oh, I'm bad at languages" that you get from monolingual Americans or Brits. It's just that most English-speakers are never put in a situation where knowing a foreign language is essential, so the opportunity cost for them is too great.
I grew up in a State Department household (my parents speak 9 languages between them) that hopped from country to country so of course I'm biased, but I don't find learning a language at least to the basic "can barter for groceries and ask for directions" level to be that miserable of an experience. Sure, you might sound like a fool who can't conjugate verbs, but it can still be a lifesaver if you happen to be stranded in a third world country without any other means of communication with the locals. The hardest grammatical rules tend to come relatively far along the path of diminishing returns when it comes to language learning. Pronunciation can be trickier, but I would only expect that to be an absolute communication barrier at first in something like Chinese or Arabic.
I'm not sure what sorts of universal rules you are thinking of, but I find that learning the linguistic terminology for things like verb tenses, noun declensions, particles, etc. does help a lot when starting a new language, so I'm glad I went through the traditional schooling approach with a grammar textbook for at least one language. Of course you will encounter more new things the farther you stray from your mother tongue, but that's to be expected.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
It’s been the realm of cranks forever because as much as the public loves space operas, the only way to transverse the distances involved in a single human generation is to suspend physics.
I agree with your larger point, but there is another way to make such trips within one generation and that is to increase the length of a human generation. If through life-extension people lived for many centuries, for instance, a trip of several years to Alpha Centauri would be the equivalent of a long sea voyage in the 18th century.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
Modern racial and class politics are not some constant of the universe. What was created by man can be undone by man. Better public transit isn't even the most compelling reason to do so, but are you so willing to abandon our cities to being shitholes unworthy of the third world?
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
If we're focusing on California, the system there is uniquely dysfunctional due to a confluence of factors, including the onerous costs of environmental and other assessments.
Japan is an example of a place with cheap rents in dense cities; they have simply built enough apartments to keep up with demand.
If we extrapolate both models, building outwards will run into land use problems much sooner, as the space taken up by roads and parking lots will crowd out homes and businesses, unless we can decentralize work entirely so that not everyone is trying to drive downtown in the mornings from farther and farther away.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
The neighborhood around Walt Whitman High School in Maryland (which has been in the news lately for other culture war related reasons) is around 8 miles from the White House and looks to be about a 15 minute bike ride from the nearest grocery store, maybe longer if you lived to the north or west.
I'd say from looking at the intersections that need to be traversed and knowing the poor quality of the local drivers that the helicopter parents in such a wealthy neighborhood would never let their kids make that particular journey, but that of course has no direct bearing on your question.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
Drinking seltzer water straight is pretty common in Europe and Latin America, but I suppose some Americans are only familiar with it as an ingredient in mixed alcoholic drinks. Making your own soda, shrubs, or something like a sekahnjebin are all perfectly fine uses, whether you have some oversweetened juice that needs to be diluted, some overripe fruit that needs to be used up, or just want a refreshing drink.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
I quibble a bit with the "much higher" here. The starting point for Northeast Asians was already quite high.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
For what it's worth, Arab immigrants from the Fertile Crescent do form a market-dominant minority across much of Latin America (including the president of El Salvador who has been getting a lot of attention recently) and Africa.
And as far as simple formulas go, I'd be surprised if IQ by itself didn't get you a lot closer to the mark than SAT, with the caveat that many, if not most, nations are too diverse to be analyzed as a single unit regardless of what parameters are being considered (e.g. Latin America has Whites, Mestizos, and Natives; India has its castes; every African country is a patchwork of tribes and ethnic groups).
In terms of how this potential, however it is determined, relates to a given country's economic performance, I often analogize it to genetically predicted height, where it's easier to make someone shorter than they would be otherwise through malnutrition, but quite hard to make them taller than their genes indicate. We can easily find pairs of countries where one has been held back from its true potential, usually but not exclusively by communism e.g. North and South Korea or Burma and Thailand. The key challenge in terms of immigration policy would be to identify nations underperforming relative to their potential and encourage migration from those places specifically.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
I suppose I should have said "more strongly flavored." In the case of Cantonese food this is more from soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, and oyster sauce rather than chilis or powdered spices, and taken to an extreme it becomes Americanized Chinese food. I find Northeastern food to be hearty, but in a meat and cabbage soup with steamed buns sort of way quite similar to Irish or Polish cuisine.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
I feel the need to point out that that style of mustache was in fact adopted by German soldiers in WWI to fit under a gas mask.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
The fact that many people are unable to take prescription drugs frequently or consistently enough for them to be effective at treating their illnesses is not usually considered an argument against telling them to do so.
Not a pair of books, but I find that https://www.realclearworld.com/ and its sister sites do a good job of aggregating news articles and op-eds with dueling perspectives.
Edit: How could I forget the most obvious answer to your question? The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers are classics of political philosophy, if you haven't read them already.
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
Here are some suggestions depending on what your exact interest in linguistics is:
- If you're interested in learning languages for travel, reading literature, impressing foreigners, etc. then you might want to check out Ecolinguist, Benny Lewis, Moses McCormick, Xiaomannyc, or Alexander Arguelles on YouTube and in terms of podcasts anything with slow in the title e.g. Slow German Podcast, News in Slow French, etc. for learning purposes.
- If you're interested in linguistics because you want to channel your inner Tolkien and invent conlangs for a fantasy novel, then jan Misali or the conlang and neography subreddits are your friends (and so is a historical linguistics textbook like this one).
- If you just think languages are cool for intellectual or aesthetic reasons, then ILoveLanguages, NativLang, Langfocus, Watch your Language, and the Lexicon Valley podcast may be of interest to you.
Also if you want to learn Latin or Ancient Greek check out ScorpioMartianus and if you want song covers in obscure dead languages then check out the_miracle_aligner.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
There is a generation of dogs that are poorly socialized on account of covid lockdowns, or at least that is the explanation their owners give when I have asked them about it.
Whether this is a failure mode or not depends on the specific details of "having it hard." Making your children exercise every day is being harder on them than letting them lounge around on the couch watching cartoons, but the outcome is better; making your children exercise until they throw up or pass out from heatstroke is being too hard on them. There can't be any universal rules at this level of abstraction because people's definitions of hardness are conditional and based on their own experiences; some tiger parents need to be told to take it easy and some parents who are spoiling their kids should be encouraged to be more strict.
As an aside, for an example of a culture whose members took shunning pleasures to the extreme but was nevertheless quite successful, look no further than Puritan New England, which banned everything from music to sports but also produced an outsized number of great scientific and literary figures. I've even heard it speculated that New Englanders had a longer life expectancy than all their colonial neighbors because their food was so bland that people inadvertently practiced the sort of calorie restriction that leads to longevity in laboratory mice.
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