ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Yes, but I would rather deal with hypocrites who claim to be on the side of truth and logic than with honest conflict theorists, because with the former there is an opening, however small, to engage intellectually, while with the latter there can be only war. Obviously both sorts exist on either side and we may disagree on their proportions, but to me it seems clear that the median woke progressive is more of a hypocrite (based on revealed preferences when it comes to lifestyle, the neighborhoods they move to, etc.) while the median dissident rightist is more of a conflict theorist.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Hating "stroads" for their appearance, though, is like complaining about the interior architecture of a factory.
I also would not enjoy spending a significant fraction of my life staring at the ugly bowels of a factory and would be willing to pay a premium to avoid it. The problem is there is nowhere in this country where I could get that even if I wanted to (and the thought of moving to Europe disgusts me).
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
Your physical security would actually be substantially impacted - just go look at what happens to crime rates in areas with high levels of immigration.
Areas with high concentrations of Indian tech workers in California or the northeast don't seem particularly prone to crime. I can't speak to whether there's more white collar crime going on, but that isn't particularly relevant to physical safety. Canada may be a different story, but they have a separate set of (idiotic) policies and problems they spawned.
Your income would actually be substantially lower in real terms, because you've just introduced hundreds of millions of competitors for your labour.
human prosperity and flourishing is not particularly advanced by having a gigantic population of incompetent and low-human capital peasants whose consumption of food, medical services and housing pumps up the GDP while suppressing wages.
For these immigrants to be meaningful competitors for the labor of anyone posting here, they would presumably have to be highly-skilled and therefore not incompetent and low human capital. I don't see how they could be both.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Yes because they were part of the empire.
I'm not sure importing Chinese students really makes them part of the empire.
Chinese-Americans have been part of the empire since the 1850's, longer than Italians, Poles, or Jews.
If we're looking to the Roman example how well did it work out with Arminius?
The Romans system worked for over four centuries (taking the Social War as the starting point) far longer than any of us expect the American one to, individual cases of betrayal aside.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
As long as we assume that living with a botched circumcision is still better than dying of AIDS, I don't see how this is sufficient grounds to condemn an organization that has saved tens of millions of lives, perhaps more than any other foreign aid program in history.
ResoluteRaven
17d ago
1. Yes
2. Yes
3. +10 on the highway, +5 otherwise
4. Left lane is for faster traffic, but not for passing only except on highways with 3 or more lanes
5. No
6. No
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
What is the evidence that admitting foreign students is taking spots away from domestic students, rather than subsidizing them as Noah Smith claims? Why should we even be trying to increase the enrollment of (normie) white students when all making college education quasi-compulsory has done is inflate the minimum credentials needed to get a decent job and waste a bunch of people's time and money? It has never been easier to get an education in whatever subject you want on your own or start your own company, so to say that the weak (by world standards) form of discrimination that white students face in school is depriving them of opportunities they need to make something of themselves seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Their ancestors, the generation that produced all the marvelous inventions that underpin modern life, had it far harder. They couldn't study electrical or chemical engineering or computer science because they had to go out and invent those fields from scratch themselves, after spending their childhoods translating Latin in unventilated schoolhouses. The only thing students today want for is purpose, and that is not something that tinkering with college admissions is going to resolve.
As for the value of educating foreigners who do not intend to stay, it consists chiefly in the spread of liberal American values to the elite of neutral or enemy nations, destabilizing governments that are hostile to us and creating a naturally pro-American constituency and reserve of goodwill that can be drawn from in the event of a geopolitical crisis. We are also implicitly holding the children of high officials in China, South Korea, India, etc. hostage should a conflict develop with their home countries. In medieval times, you usually had to beat sombody in a war to get that kind of deal, but today they come here willingly.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I'm not expecting a solution; I don't even really disagree with any of it. But even if the sky were falling and we all saw it coming I would eventually get tired of people running around screaming "the sky is falling!" without any original commentary.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I was referring to Kiev, the first capital of the original Rus state from which modern Russia claims cultural, linguistic, and religious continuity. To the extent that one can claim that Russia itself is ancient (which is debatable), Kiev was a part of it. It is true that the territories that comprise "Novorussia" in the southeast of Ukraine were seized from the Crimean Khanate over a thousand years later, but they are peripheral to the importance of Ukraine in the Russian mind, despite having been easier for them to conquer in the current war on account of their terrain and their population not having gone through the cultural separation from Moscow and St. Petersburg that the rest of Ukraine has.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Fair enough, I respect that. I just don't know how one would consistently distinguish between tourists and immigrants just from hearing them speak in public. The children and grandchildren of immigrants also lose their ancestral languages so quickly that it doesn't seem like that big of a problem in the long run.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Assuming you're American, would you speak Spanish to a fellow American expat in Mexico City? Or Thai to one in Bangkok? I read once that certain Aboriginal Australians would beat to death anyone who uttered so much as a single word of another tribe's tongue on their soil and expected everyone to switch languages even mid-sentence as they were crossing tribal boundaries, but in practice this is an impossible standard to uphold unless you are a hyperpolyglot or simply never visit non-Anglophone countries.
ResoluteRaven
4mo 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
4mo 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
5mo 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
6mo ago
Let's say that if we import 200 million Indians, our economy would be the best in the world forever. If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success.
This would only be true if Indian immigrants and their descendants never married into the existing American population and remained a culturally and genetically distinct population indefinitely, which is clearly not the case. The children of elite Indian immigrants marry their White, Jewish, and East Asian peers all the time and have children who are about as Indian as Japanese curry powder. There are other countries where this is not so e.g. the UK where British-born Indian Muslims and Pakistanis seem to often get arranged marriages with peasant girls from back home, leaving their children in a perpetually unassimilated state, but even the few arranged marriages I know of in the US occur between two second generation immigrants who themselves are detached from the social networks that would allow them to continue the practice.
Is a person who has mixed-race children less biologically successful than one who has an equal number of children of the same race? From the perspective of a single gene perhaps, but from that point of view the optimal outcome would be to field an army of clones rather than engaging in sexual reproduction at all. I'm reminded of Roman naming conventions here, to wit: "The ideal Roman family was, in effect, one Appius Claudius after the next, each one quite a lot like his father, on and on forever." With all due respect to the Romans, who I, like any man, remember fondly at least once per day, the mere thought of such stultifying monotony makes me want to fedpost.
ResoluteRaven
8mo ago
If you buy loose-leaf tea I would suggest you store it in a vacuum-sealed container like this one. Oolong tea is my favorite, particularly the stuff grown at higher elevations (usually called something like "high mountain tea"), but I get it when I travel to Asia or from friends and family, so I don't know what it costs to order online or where else they sell it. If you want something a bit different you can get some Kirkland brand green tea and cold-steep it in the fridge overnight for a refreshing drink the next day, and if you ever want something caffeine-free you can try barley tea (although if I remember right this was an acquired taste for me).
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The Romans and the Ottomans certainly were. Hell, Egypt was run by Circassians for centuries and the elite of Tsarist Russia was disproportionately Volga German. An empire by definition consists of multiple peoples without a common ethnic heritage, so all this nationalist talk of "foreign brains" would be alien to them.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I don't see any way to do Venus faster than Mars. Even if you cooled it down very quickly with orbital mirrors it would take a long time for the atmosphere to condense out. You can get Mars to a partially terraformed state i.e. stable bodies of water on the surface much faster, although if you wanted to bring in enough nitrogen for an earthlike atmosphere and surface pressure it would take you a lot longer.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
You're right, that was a poor way to phrase what I meant, which was "you can't learn a language properly as an adult if you never acquired one as a child."
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
How would you describe this "modern worldview"? Empiricism, materialism, skepticism, rationality, something along those lines?
"We, as individuals, are capable of discovering the physical and moral laws of the universe and in so doing creating a more perfect society."
The short version is that as Science began delivering massive, obvious benefits, people noticed that they could lie and claim to be Scientists doing Science, and as long as they engaged in a certain minimal amount of social posturing, the empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality could simply be bypassed, and they could reap all the social, fiscal and political benefits of Contributing to Science without actually having to contribute anything meaningful at all. The more people explicitly or implicitly locked into this paradigm, the lower the incentive to resist the bypass became. The result was a parasite class of "intellectuals" growing fat and happy, while at best actively burning value to accomplish nothing, and more often burning value to produce dangerous forms of self-replicating deceit to plague mankind generally.
While this parasitic class clearly exists today, the benefits of scientific advancement were not obvious enough in 1789 for this to be a primary motivator of anyone involved in the French Revolution. Three years later China could still imperiously dismiss the Macartney Embassy, and the idea that Britain would go from producing nothing that they needed to kicking down their doors and taking whatever they wanted by force within a single lifetime was as far from European minds as it was from Asian ones.
You should be able to recognize the hostile takeover in the architects, actions and character of the French revolution. You should definitely be able to recognize it in how subsequent generations spoke about the French Revolution; Mark Twain is one of my favorite examples of a purportedly intelligent person spouting insane, mindkilled horseshit. By the time we get to Marx and Freud, it seems to me that failure to recognize the pattern must in some sense be willful; and then there is the 20th century, where we must laugh lest we weep.
This is why I ask people to identify whether the American or French revolution was a more central example of the Enlightenment. My impression is that the consensus answer is the French revolution is the more Enlightened; yet the industrial revolution came out of Britain and then America, both of which stubbornly resisted the succession of ideologies spawned by the French Revolution far longer than their European peers, to their enormous benefit.
I don't hold that more Enlightened = better, only that some minimum threshold of Enlightenment needed to be passed for the Industrial Revolution to occur. Beyond that point, that ideological train was almost certain to crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Therefore, I will raise Mark Twain one better: modern technology and Communism were separate but inevitable consequences of the Enlightenment, and the hundred million dead at the hands of the latter were a fair trade for the former.
Likewise, the universal literacy that was an obvious precursor to the scientific and industrial revolutions was a product of Protestant Christianity
Bit of a tangent, but we do have examples of highly literate societies that did not produce a scientific revolution, namely Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate and pre-colonial Burma.
The empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality were never rigorous in any population-level sense. Superstition and ignorance changed their masks, and nothing more. Now that bedazzling scientific advancements are slowing down and we have had a moment to collect ourselves, a modest amount of actual skepticism and curiosity and a memory broader than the last fifteen minutes is sufficient to tear the whole rotten edifice wide open.
No argument from me here. I think our priority should be salvaging what is valuable from Western civilization before it implodes and incorporating it into a more sustainable philosophical tradition.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
When I was taking piano lessons, my teacher showed me a video of a Japanese 4 year old playing that Clementi Sonatina and dared me to do better. At the time I was infuriated to be shown up by a toddler, but it's probably the reason I still remember and enjoy the piece.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
The aversion to cold water is based on traditional Chinese medicine i.e. the belief that cold drinks will sap your Qi and shorten your life, although I'm guessing that the true reason is that in the past serving hot drinks was a way to prove that you had boiled water for your guests and weren't trying to get them sick.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Why must every border in the world be drawn according to 19th century European nationalist principles? Multiethnic empires, religious caliphates, city-states, mercantile republics, and tribal confederations all existed long before the national revivals of Mitteleuropa and I do not see why they should be considered inherently less legitimate forms of political organization.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
In addition to their historical lack of access to their own fisheries, the fact that Ireland remains relatively underpopulated to this day as a result of the Great Famine meant that there wasn't the kind of Malthusian pressure to exploit every available food source that existed in places like Japan. However, certain kinds of seaweed (dulse and Irish moss) are considered part of the traditional Irish diet and are seeing a resurgence in popularity nowadays alongside other more quotidian sorts of fish and shellfish.
I don't see progressive ideology as an existential threat and so have not lifted a hand to fight it. Is not the man who does perceive it as such but does nothing except fume about it in an anonymous forum more spineless than me?
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