ResoluteRaven
No bio...
User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
8mo ago
Now let's talk about the supposed conspiracy to force people into the suburbs. The largest American cities of 1920 were all built before the car. Many of them have a ring of streetcar suburbs. Most of them have lost population. There is a plentiful supply of dense urban cores in America with lower population than they had a century ago, and yet all the demand is for building more suburbs.
There is a reason many of those urban cores lost their population and it isn't just because the people there decided they wanted to move out one day because of changes in technology or lifestyle. Without the increased crime rates, race riots, and domestic terrorism of the 60's and 70's, America's cities would probably look much more similar to those in Europe.
I'm moving there for the same reason people hate suburbs: community. People talk about how suburbs are alienating and have no third spaces. I'm moving for the community, which is my wife's extended family. The third space was her grandparent's house. Now it is her parent's house, and someday (hopefully far in the future) it will be our house.
My understanding is that a family home is explicitly not a third place, because a third place is by definition a neutral public meeting ground with a semi-rotating cast of characters who have no obligation to be there. It might be possible to make one's house a third place by hosting enough open and regular events and parties, but that would be quite unusual, and would be made unnecessary if more typical meeting spaces e.g. coffee shops, bars, bowling alleys, dance clubs, etc. were common enough to meet people's need for socializing.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
The recent success of semaglutide bodes well for a long-term resolution of the obesity crisis, and fertility rates in developed nations are also in the process of restoring themselves through natural selection. While heavy-handed state intervention (e.g. Romania's ban on abortion under Ceaușescu) may offer some temporary reprieve, such solutions appear in practice to be brittle, vulnerable to changing political currents, and easily overwhelmed by the broader incentive structure of modern societies.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
It is a crime against humanity to shaft their futures and potential livelihoods for social engineering.
Are their livelihoods actually negatively affected by being denied admission to Ivy League schools? My impression is that by future income and most other material measures of success there isn't any effect. In the same way, when Jews were kept out of Harvard all their Nobel Prize-winning scientists went to CUNY instead, and didn't seem any worse off for it.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
It seems to me that it's the fraction of angry young men you have on your side that matters more than the absolute number. If your side has all the kids, then you will have disproportionate power regardless of how many octogenarians hate your guts.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
N=1 of course, but the suburb I grew up in had precisely one thing within walking distance besides single-family homes: a gated community center with a pool and gym. There was one bike path that I could have theoretically taken to school if I wanted to cross a highway, but that was it. Any trip to the grocery store, cafe, restaurants, arcade, parks, doctor's office, dry cleaners, pharmacy, or shopping mall was done by car and children had to be chaperoned by their parents to any sort of activity outside of visiting their immediate neighbors.
I didn't mind this at the time, but from where I am now I envy those people who got to grow up traveling independently to hang out with their friends, explore their community, and learn the skills of life without adult supervision. I don’t feel like I have a hometown in the sense that those people do, just an endless sprawl of houses with no distinguishing characteristics, unique architecture, local culture, or collective memory.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
As Carl Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A single clear picture of an alien spacecraft, a single radio signal listing off prime numbers, a single microbe in a meteorite that shares no common origin with life on Earth, any of these would be evidence of extraterrestrial life, but none have been presented. All we get is a lot of hemming and hawing, winks and hints, and the tiniest crumbs of blurry images or eyewitness reports. Show me the data and we can have the conversation. Otherwise I don't see the point.
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.
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
While I agree that smart people often overestimate the intellectual capabilities of people with average or below-average IQ's, the claim that violence is associated with a particular IQ range seems extremely tenuous. Intelligence is important but it isn't the sole determinant of personality, and while there is a correlation between lower IQ and violence in the US owing to the particular populations present here, the opposite trend can be observed in Mexico, where murder rates are lower in plurality indigenous regions than in plurality white ones (Conquistadors were a mean bunch).
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Only for certain subpopulations. Others, for example New England whites, are comparable to Europeans in this regard.
ResoluteRaven
11mo ago
Since the phrasing here seems to be causing a lot of confusion, I will offer a potential clarification. Is it your position that posession of something that doesn't belong to you is immoral regardless of how you came to have it? Therefore quantifying harm done to the original owner is irrelevant?
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
One of the arguments made in the 18th and 19th centuries for restricting the franchise to male landowners with large estates was that being politically informed was the equivalent of a full-time job and that only a wealthy individual who did not have to work for a living had the free time to learn about the issues of the day and make reasonable voting decisions. Such a position eventually became politically untenable given the trends of industrialization and urbanization, but I think it was certainly an understandable concern.
For my part, I try to read or skim several articles from one of a few news aggregator sites every morning, as well as keep up with scientific advancements if possible. If a topic piques my interest, I may dig a little deeper and find the original source. I also usually try to read books relevant to current events as they pop up (e.g. pandemics, the history of Ukraine, AI). This all adds up to less than an hour each day and has a much higher information density than watching cable news, so it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation to me.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
If by misgendered you mean referred to by a different pronoun with all else remaining equal then I think people could get over it, but if you mean actually treated as the opposite gender all the time then you end up with horror stories like David Reimer's. Most people who think of themselves as not having a strong gender identity are like white people in the US who don't think of themselves as having a strong racial identity. Take them out of their present circumstances by either treating them as the opposite gender or sending them to live in Africa, respectively, and they will discover very quickly that their gender or race are real and important to them.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
It's not clear to me that Taiwan and Ukraine require the same kinds of weapons. The former needs naval and air assets while the latter needs artillery shells and tanks. Any war between China and US allies in the Pacific (outside of Korea) would be a quick and deadly exchange of missiles and planes that ends with one navy still afloat and one at the bottom of the sea, Battle of Midway style, rather than the kind of unending slugfest that a war between two nations that share a land border can devolve into. By the time you find yourself fighting a ground battle on the island itself, a war for Taiwan would have already been lost.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Chechens are a Muslim hill tribe with a culture and language alien to that of Orthodox Russians, not fellow East Slavs and members of the triune All-Russian nation. There is no room in that conception for a Ukrainian nation whose destiny is different from that of Russia and there never has been. If Putin got his wish they could keep their folk songs (except the ones about fighting Russians, perhaps) and quaint clothing and go on speaking their peasant dialect regional language at home if they so desired, but that would be the extent of their autonomy.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
The change happened last year as a nationalist PR move by Erdogan, partially motivated by annoyance at having the same name as a dumb-looking bird and partially by a sense of pride in being able to force foreigners to use their endonym. More broadly, there does seem to have been a slightly higher rate of country name changes in the past few years (Turkey to Türkiye, Czech Republic to Czechia, Swaziland to eSwatini, and Macedonia to North Macedonia).
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
I'm of the opinion that once you start debating what is or isn't a "real" member of a given category, it's time to switch to E-prime or else risk No true Scotsman-ing your way from Orkney to Newcastle. In this case the relevant question can be phrased with the verb form i.e. not "Is [person] a mother?" but rather "Does [person] mother [child]?"
As a relevant example, I didn't know that my grandmother was not my father's biological mother until after she died; neither he nor any of his siblings had ever brought it up. I don't think I have ever even heard him say the word "stepmom" before, as he refers to them as "my mom" and "my biological mother." It's unclear to me how unusual this is, though I assume it is more likely the younger the child and the more absent the biological parent is when the stepparent takes over (in this case 4 years old and dead, respectively).
ResoluteRaven
10mo ago
Not everyone's local norms are the same, otherwise we could just call them universal norms. Traditional southeast Asian culture was relatively accepting of gay and "spiritually trans" individuals, usually in a religious context (the stuff the woke left says about "two-spirit" priests in indigenous societies is not in fact completely made up, though they take it way too far in assuming they were exactly like modern trans people). The country in that region least affected culturally by either western colonialism or the expansion of Islam is Thailand, and they also began modernizing early enough to profit first from curious westerners through prostitution and sex tourism.
In the case of Taiwan though it is in fact mostly due to recent western cultural influence. Young people there, who overwhelmingly support independence from China, are influenced by leftist anti-colonialist narratives coming out of the US, which have brought with them a lot of baggage ranging from environmentalist opposition to nuclear power, being anti-military (this position is both more complicated than it seems for contingent historical reasons, but also exactly as dumb as it seems for a group whose very existence threatens war with a superpower), promotion of aboriginal culture and languages, support for LGBT rights, and most recently its own me too movement.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
The heritage you want to pass on, of reading original Shakespeare and understanding everything he wrote, has been gone for hundreds of years.
It seems to have been alive and well in American culture until quite recently.
As far as Shakespeare being the greatest author of all time, I think he certainly makes everyone's shortlist regardless of where they're from. I would certainly rank him above the top writers in the other major European languages (Cervantes for Spanish, Goethe for German, etc.), but I can't speak to the best of the other major literary traditions except that Du Fu probably gives him a run for his money.
ResoluteRaven
1yr ago
The lack of empathy you observe in mainland Chinese culture is in large part due to the cultural devastation unleashed by communism over the past century, which has created a far more atomized, materialistic, acquisitive, and sociopathic society than existed previously or that can be seen in ethnic Chinese communities that did not undergo the twin calamities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This extends even to minority communities such as the Uyghurs, who used to practice a syncretic form of Islam that had integrated into Chinese society before it was torn up by its roots and replaced in recent years by more extremist forms of Wahhabism.
This is not to say that premodern agricultural societies on the edge of starvation or within living memory of such won't in general be numb to human and animal suffering outside of their immediate circle of care in a way that would horrify any First Worlder, but that applies equally to India and Africa as to China, and ignores the extent to which the displacement of traditional cultures by Western ideologies in certain cases caused immense human suffering (like a virus jumping from a well-adapted host to a naïve individual, so to speak).
As for art, while I can't say it was better than what the Greeks or Renaissance masters accomplished, I don't think Chinese sculpture is quite as bad as you made it out to be.
There's not much to say on the topic of footbinding except to agree that it was one of the most horrific cultural practices ever to exist, though my ancestors would insist I point out to you that certain Chinese communities of which they were a part did not participate.
Lastly, regarding masks, I have pretty much run out of alternative explanations for why the degree of imposition they represent is seen to be so different across different populations, so I'm willing to give that one to you. Whether that means me and mine are all alien bugmen with whom the West can never have mutual understanding, time will tell, but I certainly hope not, as ethnic cleansing is really quite a hassle.
This claim has always sounded like an excuse to me, because I have only ever heard it from people who are middle or upper-middle class, while families much poorer than theirs both in this country and abroad are somehow able to raise multiple kids.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
I mean, the trans people I know don't get upset when they are misgendered in contexts like someone who knew them pre-transition slipping up for a second, or a native speaker of a language without gendered pronouns like Mandarin or Persian getting confused.
The internet caricature of a trans activist who flies off the handle at the slightest infraction of pronoun etiquette is not something I've ever come across in the real world, even in extremely liberal areas and college campuses, and neither is the sort of person who would misgender them in an antagonistic manner to trigger such a reaction.
At most the people who have disagreements with modern gender politics, including me, just avoid pronouns altogether in situations where it makes us uncomfortable.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
While India alone is not likely enough to provide an alternative to China for the reasons you and other posters have described, I think that collectively the ASEAN nations, India, and Bangladesh can. With a combined population of over 2.2 billion, this block of more or less pro-American nations (China may invest heavily in some of them, but it's not my impression that they have enough leverage to force Cambodia or Bangladesh to issue a wholesale trade embargo against the US and its allies, since ultimately those countries mostly just care about getting rich) would be sufficient even if we assumed their citizens had on average only half the human capital of China's. That assumption seems a bit harsh even for India, and is certainly not true for places like Vietnam and Malaysia.
It's true that coordinating trade relations with a dozen countries is a lot more complicated than managing a single relationship, but it also spreads out the risk, and the supranational organizations (i.e. ASEAN) that can facilitate this already exist. Looking at the tags on clothing and cheap manufactured goods in recent years, it seems to me that this shift is well underway for economic reasons irrespective of US foreign policy decisions, but there are a few moves that could perhaps help secure its future, such as negotiating a formal alliance with Vietnam.
ResoluteRaven
10mo 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
10mo ago
Better than them causing a civil war in a first world country.
Your proposal itself would be enough to start a civil war in a first world country. The "we" in your case is not some silent majority of Europeans but a tiny minority that would first have to carve a bloody swathe through your own kin to seize the kind of power needed to conduct mass deportations.
It is the Laestadians, traditionalist Catholics, and other rapidly growing Christian sects who have the right approach, as they have the potential to weather the coming storm and outbreed the other survivors.
The concept of '15-minute cities' came up a few weeks ago, but since then it appears to have piggybacked off a local dispute in Oxford to become the locus of the latest so-called 'far-right conspiracy theory'. The proposed measure certainly codes as dystopian to me on this side of the pond, even as someone who is generally supportive of new urbanist ideas, but I can't speak to how it plays in Europe.
I've often felt that the culture war battle lines on these urban planning issues have not been as clearly drawn as those on gender, immigration, or abortion, mostly due to a lack of attention, but that time appears to be coming to an end. Though seeing as we already can't build anything, I suppose it isn't much of a loss.
More options
Context Copy link