ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
To my mind, the idea of worrying about vaccine risks seems akin to worrying about the risk of your child falling and breaking their neck from being allowed to play outside on a playground. It's certainly nonzero, but by their nature those activities are less risky than being explosed to those same diseases in an uncontrolled environment or playing unsupervised in the woods, which was the condition of the vast majority of children who have ever lived. Not that I have any issues with skipping the COVID vaccine, but as others have mentioned downthread interfering with the standard schedule may also result in a variety of byzantine bureaucratic difficulties for your child down the line, assuming RFK Jr. doesn't scrap the whole thing before then.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
is it moral to buy children, or is it not?
In some cultures e.g. rural China this is or was a common practice, where poor parents with too many children would sell one to a wealthy family (usually an older and therefore less fertile couple) to improve the standard of living of both the exchanged child and the remaining members of the birth family. This happened to my grandmother, who seemed perfectly fine psychologically, and to several other members of my extended family, some of whom definitely seemed to carry lingering resentment over it (the older they were when it happened, the more problems they had, as one might expect). I suppose all I have to say on the morality of it is that it's better than the whole family starving to death, which was often the alternative.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
As you've pointed out, there are clear cases where more or less everyone either agrees that an invasion was justified e.g. the Vietnamese invading Cambodia to end Pol Pot's reign of terror or clearly unjust e.g. Iraq invading Kuwait, with a large grey area in the middle. Personally, I would say that for a place like Haiti anything would be an improvement over the current situation (if Haitians weren't black someone would have probably done something by now, but they hold back out of fear of being seen as racist/colonialist, and so I think progressive ideology deserves some amount of blame for the continued dysfunction there, but I digress), but that past a certain level of basic economic development where people aren't starving or completely lacking in basic healthcare or infrastructure that being merely poor (by first world standards) is not sufficient grounds for someone to overthrow your government, whatever their economic policies may be. That is, the US has no right to take over Cuba by force even if by doing so we could raise their GDP per capita to the level of Florida's. This isn't because I wish to consign the people of Cuba to poverty or believe in some absolute form of ethnic self-determination, but because I don't trust governments to make judgements about whether the citizens of neighboring countries would be better off under their own stewardship in good faith, and would rather they avoid doing this outside of edge cases like people being herded into death camps or cannibal gangs overrunning the capital, where either the government in question will ask for help directly or some multinational deliberative body can agree on an intervention.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
And yet we failed to overthrow the government of Cuba and it remains communist to this day. Just because every country wishes they had a sphere of influence and will take steps to obtain one doesn't mean we are under any obligation to give it to them. European nations freely ignored the Monroe Doctrine for decades after it was promulgated until they were too weak relative to the US to do so.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I was not. My assumption was that Finland would have become a Warsaw Pact member under a nominally independent communist government if they had lost the war more completely.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Like Trump, it's hard to tell if this guy got high on his own supply, or is merely bluffing to try to negotiate from a position of "strength". In which case, I don't much mind Trump bullshitting back. Zelensky wants to bullshit like they can push Russia back to 2014 borders?
I don't see how not premptively and publically conceding Crimea to Russia prior to entering private peace talks counts as bullshitting that ought to be responded to with derision. This is just diplomacy 101. Formal recognition of the line of control as the official border between Ukraine and Russia is a major concession on the part of Ukraine, and should not be given without getting something in return at the negotiating table. After they wring whatever they can get out of symbolic gestures, they can start making more material concessions, but that's not where you want to begin haggling if you have the option.
I have never understood this insistence by his detractors that Zelensky speak completely truthfully about the strategic and military situation all the time. If my government were on the cusp of losing a war, I wouldn't expect them to shout to the heavens that supply lines were stretched to the breaking point, that there were mass desertions on the front, and that some loss of territory was inevitable. Their job would be to project the illusion of control and maintain public order while entering talks to obtain the least bad outcome, and to do otherwise would be a gross dereliction of duty. [Insert your preferred proverb about warfare and deception here].
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Observe that the conclusion of the Winter War was Finland losing all the land that the Russians demanded and more.
The result of the Winter War was that Finland did not become a Soviet puppet state and suffer under communism for half a century. I consider that a victory and worth the blood that was shed, and I am guessing most Finns would as well, even if from a tactical point of view it was a guaranteed defeat.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Combat experience counts for a lot, and they certainly aren't lacking for equipment either. A few dozen Ukrainian military advisors on the ground in Syria with knowledge of modern drone warfare were sufficient to turn the tide of that conflict decisively against the Assad regime. The French have done a lot of counterinsurgency work in Africa and I might trust them more with operations requiring precision, but if I were fighting a high-intensity war I'd want guys on my side who know how. Perhaps you were implying that Russia's army is clearly superior and the best in Europe, and certainly in a numerical sense they are, but I don't know about man for man.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I support the building of Freedom Cities, California Forever or any other project on federal or private land that aims to shake up our current land use paradigm, but that's because I want better urbanism in this country, not more sprawl. Imagine Guantanamo Bay as the Hong Kong of the Caribbean instead of a prison camp, or an EPCOT that was an actual living community instead of an amusement park. Perhaps many of them would crash and burn for want of funds, residents, or effective policing, but we won't know until we try. To not make the attempt at all would signal a depressing lack of ambition.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
That is true, although I would count it as another point in favor of the "revolutions are bad" camp.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Classical liberalism emerged out of centuries of vicious religious conflict as a truce between warring parties that had just beaten each other to a bloody pulp and were too tired to continue, and functioned so long as a cultural memory of that struggle endured that was strong enough to put down any would-be challengers. Now that those lessons have been forgotten (because [the other side] violated the truce first, everyone says) they will have to be re-learned the hard way.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Revolutions are cool. They have happened in every country. Many countries are better after the fact.
As far as I can tell, very few countries have been made better by revolutions. Look at France and Britain: the former abolished their monarchy via revolution and ended up with millions dead and a century of chaotic and unstable governments (three monarchies, two empires, and five republics) while the latter defanged their monarchy piecemeal over hundreds of years and took its place as the richest and most powerful country in the world. Certainly the various communist and Islamic revolutions have been disasters for the nations in which they took place. Whether the American Revolution was an improvement depends on how you feel about Enlightenment values. Perhaps only the Glorious Revolution counts as an unmitigated success.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
For the events of the Mao era, Frank Dikötter's People's Trilogy will tell you more than you ever wanted to know. I haven't read his more recent book covering the last half century, although I think the focus there is more on the economic side of things. It's hard to find unbiased accounts of the 1989 protests and events since then in English, so your best bet might be to supplement whichever interchangeable mainstream source you choose to consult with something like Carl Zha's Silk and Steel podcast (unfortunately most of his newer stuff is paywalled), which will give you the opposite perspective, and split the difference. I tend to get my own information on these things secondhand from older relatives who are plugged in to the Chinese language media ecosystem.
The main item you left out of your list was the extreme covid lockdowns and subsequent CCP crackdown on anti-lockdown protestors in 2022. This is the proximate cause of the current wave of emigration that has sent hundreds of thousands of their citizens fleeing to Thailand, Singapore, Japan, and the US in the last 3 years. Dan Wang's 2023 letter gives a good rundown of this. There's also the ever-present persecution of religious adherents, though the Falun Gong diaspora take it a bit far with overblown claims of mass executions of prisoners to harvest their organs (though feel free to investigate this yourself). Most of the rest is bog-standard developing country stuff that isn't China-specific e.g. air pollution from factories causing illness, infrastructure projects built too fast that occasionally collapse, lax safety standards in food and consumer products, and so on.
I don't know about general world history books, as that seems a bit too broad of a topic for a single volume that isn't a college textbook, but for pre-modern China, Mote's Imperial China is in the running for best history book I've ever read. For Korea, I have a few books on my list, but haven't gotten around to them yet, so can't give an informed recommendation.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Fascist states have an even poorer track record than communist ones as far as longevity is concerned. Monarchies are stable in the Middle East for now, but their European counterparts were all overthrown or defanged centuries ago, being themselves the soil from which liberalism sprouted in the first place. Just as the printing press and mass literacy fatally weakened the Catholic order of medieval Europe, modern communication technologies pose a dire risk to would-be authoritarians of any ideological bent wherever they have taken root. The CCP has the best chance at riding this particular lion, and newer technolgies may turn the tide in their favor, but so far they are losing the hearts and minds of their younger generations, who are fleeing en masse to Thailand and the West.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I think liberalism is in for another rough century, but assuming it isn't rendered obsolete by AI-backed surveillance states of some sort, I think the same lessons that Europeans learned by 1648 will be re-learned by an even larger fraction of the human race this time around (tree of liberty, blood of tyrants, you know how it goes). It may take a couple more swings of the pendulum back and forth between right-wing and left-wing illiberalism and who knows how many deaths along the way, but people will eventually realize that trying to crush their ideological enemies underfoot has a tendency to backfire and that the revolution always eats her children. This is little consolation to those of us who have to live through it, but so it goes.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
No, I don't go around assigning exact numerical values to how much taxpayer money should be spent on foreign aid, or healthcare, or the military, or exactly how many American lives we ought to be willing to sacrifice in a war to defend our allies. If you believe that everyone who doesn't autistically prepare spreadsheets of such figures is incapable of moral reasoning, then I have some bad news for you (or good news, if you want to ignore everyone's opinions, I suppose). Not that I couldn't put such a list together, but it would be a lie, as these things are decided intuitively on a case by case basis, as below.
You could spend one trillion dollars on a program that encases every newborn African in a suit of power armor to protect them from cradle to the age of majority under the justification of the non-zero value of human life.
If this were being proposed at a time when every American did not also have such a suit of power armor and this would be an immense strain on the economy, then it would be a violation of the ordo amoris as properly understood. If, however, there comes a day when every US citizen is a member of the Brotherhood of Steel and mass produced power armor costs next to nothing to export, then why not send them some? You give decreasing amounts to each concentric circle of care, moving outwards, but if you are fantastically wealthy the people on the outside still get quite a lot in absolute terms.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Africans leave Africa and cause problems with crime and low IQ any place they go.
This is not a problem if you have sensible immigration policies. If Europeans are so dumb that the only way to save them from themselves is to hope that every African drops dead before they can be invited in, then they are already doomed.
They also make living in Africa impossible because it's full of Africans.
We haven't exactly run out of space in the rest of the world yet. If that ever becomes an issue it will be easy enough for other nations to re-colonize Africa and clear the land.
Lots of money is spent helping Africa that could be spent elsewhere.
This depends on your definition of "lots of money." Foreign aid is less than 1% of the US federal budget, and PEPFAR even less than that.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Yes, the State department funds "democratization" programs that are a front for destabilization of foreign governments and the subversion of their civil society with progressive ideology. I won't lose any sleep if all of that gets tossed in the trash heap of history. But Scott and I are not talking about the entire NGO complex; we are talking about PEPFAR. And I see little daylight between giving lifesaving medicine to the deathly ill and the unborn and any sort of traditional religous charity.
You can object to it because it involves providing contraception, performing circumcisions, or because the recipients are African, but to consider it a net negative requires placing either zero or negative value on tens of millions of human lives. Even I, someone who doesn't particularly like Africans (I lived there for 3 years; I have no illusions about what they are like), wouldn't want them in my country, and thinks it would be better if most of them had never been born, believe they're worth something, and that if it is possible to save them from certain death for the cost of a rounding error of our budget, then to not do so would be a crime against humanity.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
The US withdrawing foreign aid to Africa is not going to decrease the amount of future Africans, unless you can get the rest of the world to agree to a policy of blockade and imposed famine. As it stands, the Chinese, Europeans, Japanese, etc. would be more than happy to pick up the slack and claim the moral high ground, meaning the only result would be damaging America's international reputation while saving a miniscule fraction of the federal budget.
If you want to lower the African population, all you have to do is accelerate their demographic transition through development work i.e. what organizations like USAID are supposed to be doing anyway. Getting girls in school and providing them with contraceptives will tank the birthrate faster than waiting around for them to starve or die in a pandemic (even if you tried bombing them you'd have about as much luck as Israel has had in Gaza). They don't have to become rich to stop having children; France underwent the transition in the 19th century when they were poorer than anywhere on Earth today.
Moreover, if your problem with Africans is their migration to western countries, then all you have to do is not let them in and it becomes a non-issue. If you assume that this is impossible because white people are too altruistic then I don't see how you can imagine getting them to cut off foreign aid either. If your problem is that Africans are taking up land and resources that would be better utilized by higher IQ populations then I refer you to the previous paragraph (or we could just invest in eugenics).
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
It seems odd to me to associate this type of charity with rationalism/EA specifically when it has been a common practice for centuries for religious institutions to collect a larger fraction of congregant's income than the US spends on foreign aid and at least in theory distribute it to feed, clothe, and house destitute strangers. If giving away your posessions to the poor were an inherently suicidal worldview, then the world would not be full of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists instead of Nietzschean neoreactionary twitter pagans.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Details tend to bubble up on various OSINT twitter accounts when they aren't distracted by other events, but you're unlikely to get as much reliable information on this or other contemporary wars in places people don't care about e.g. Burma or Sudan by dint of fewer people putting in the effort to collect and disseminate on-the-ground reports to a foreign audience.
I have not been following this particular round in much detail, but it doesn't seem like too much of an aberration in the grand scheme of things. After the Rwandan genocide, the Tutsis followed the Israeli example and built an organized military machine that has only been prevented from conquering huge swathes of East and Central Africa by an alliance of most of their neighbors and heavy UN pressure to abide by various ceasefire agreements. With the gloves off they could probably steamroll almost all of the Congo by themselves, but that would ruin their international image and probably lead to things like foreign aid being cut off, so they are content to use their proxies for the time being.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I'm hopeful that Vietnam can follow the same developmental trajectory as its neighbors in the Sinosphere, and the clearing out of motorbikes and ordering of street traffic is certainly part of that (unless you're Taiwan). So far they've only just managed to climb out of the rut the wars of the 20th century left them in and the real test of their economic potential is yet to come. Assuming their PISA scores are not all fake, then I am optimistic that they can get to around where China is now within a couple of decades.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I would draw the dividing line in Virginia to include only Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, and Fauquier counties in the new expanded DC. In my experience, it starts to feel like the South about halfway to Charlottesville. I'd also push the borders of the now shrunken New York a little farther north and east into Connecticut.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
As far as I can tell, the dearth of innovation across contemporary music, architecture, literature, etc. is symptomatic of a deeper cultural malaise and applying palliative care to any one area, whether through documentaries or executive orders, is unlikely to do much to slow the decay until something more fundamental changes. There can be plenty of disagreement over what exactly has gone wrong or when (if you quizzed a group of online reactionaries, you'd get answers ranging from 1965 to 0 AD), but reaching a consensus is neither sufficient nor likely even necessary to build something new and beautiful for its own sake.
Of course when we look back on history, we see a punctuated equilibrium where short periods of years or decades can outshine the centuries surrounding them in terms of art, architecture, music, poetry, and other measures of cultural achievement, leaving a long trail of decaying imitations in their wake. Is this an artifact of chance historical preservation and the biases of those who recorded the works of their contemporaries, or do whole societies really just suddenly stop producing anything interesting or worthy of remembrance? Our own example seems like evidence for the latter, but I remain unsure.
Getting back to buildings, I recall once looking for any example of a contemporary style of architecture whose designs I liked, and all I found was the Neo-Andean of Bolivia. Some mixture of that, Art Deco, and whatever you call the supertrees in Singapore (solarpunk, I suppose), is what I'd like to see more of if I had a say in such things, though I would value having regional or climatic differentiation above all else. When I read Albion's Seed years ago, one of the things that struck me was the extent to which people's homes in colonial America (and basically every society ever except the one we live in now) were designed to either take advantage of or mitigate local factors such as snowfall, wind direction, humidity, and so on, rather than simply copying and pasting the same suburban floorplan, adding air conditioning or heating as needed, and calling it a day. There is something profoundly wrong with the fact that apartment buildings in Chicago look the same as ones in Miami.
To me the question of assimilation is primarily about second and third generation immigrants. Obviously a bunch of people fresh off the boat are going to seem foreign, whether they're Europeans a hundred years ago or Asians today. To use a fictional example, Tony Soprano would count as unassimilated because despite being at least two generations removed from Italy, he does not consider himself American (he even uses the word madigan i.e. the dialectal Italian word for American, as a term of derision for WASPs), his speech is peppered with dozens of foreign expressions, and he is involved with a dysfunctional social practice from his ancestral homeland by being a mafia boss.
By contrast, the American-born children of Vietnamese from Seven Corners, Koreans from Centreville, or Indians from Herndon (all of whom I went to school with and know quite well) do not typically speak their heritage languages to anyone their own age or younger (i.e. they will die out within a generation), self-identify as American (hyphenated, of course), and are under the majority of circumstances culturally indistinguishable from their white neighbors (Indians insisting on traditional wedding ceremonies being the biggest exception that I can think of). Now, the culture they all share is cosmopolitan urban liberal culture, so anyone who has a problem with said culture will have a problem with them, but plenty of heritage Americans are part of it too.
In practice it's harder to maintain a distinct enclave in the suburbs compared to the city due to a lack of third places or walkable neighborhoods for people to congregate outside and do whatever activities are part of their culture. The ethnic neighborhoods in Queens (e.g. Flushing and Jackson Heights) are the most non-American feeling places in the country to me for this reason, and even there many immigrant children get out by testing into Stuyvesant or other selective high schools.
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