SophisticatedHillbilly
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User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
14d ago
decentralization between culture and politics
I wonder to what extent this is simply because cultures were more effectively separated at the time. It's easy for culture and politics to be separated when everyone that you're talking politics with is either the same culture or a known, geographically adjacent culture. A huge problem with the internet is that there's no easy way to discern the culture of the person you're talking to. Talking gun control with a backwoods Alabaman man is a fundamentally different exercise than with a Canadian woman from Ontario. On the internet, you don't get to know which one you're talking with. More importantly, even if you do, you're likely to experience culturally-mediated political opinions that are fundamentally contrary to your way of life, which is much less likely in person.
If I live in Xtopia, a city where the only mode of travel is bicycles, and I see some tax supportive discussion about taxing and registering bicycles online, I might look at the discussion as anti-Xtopian. They hate bicycles! They hate the way I live! They care nothing for me, my family or my friends! This may or may not be true (it often is, such is the nature of cultural differences) but either way it's very different than talking to my Xtopian neighbor. If he supports the tax, surely there must be a more rational reason for him doing so. He likely enjoys bikes, or he wouldn't live here. I can at least hear him out, maybe learn something. It's just a totally different activity, and frankly it's a shame the same English words are used for both. If I hear someone from Y-ville (city where bicycles are banned) talk about the bike tax, I can be certain that they hate bikes and probably my bike-centric existence, but it really doesn't matter that much. I already knew that, it was priced in. If I'm talking to them in the first place I've already decided they have enough other qualities that outweigh their opinion on bikes.
SophisticatedHillbilly
30d ago
I will jump in on the “I’ll take this problem off your hands” idea.
Is your concern here just taxes? If so just sell it and make a reasonable guess as to the basis, file the taxes, stick the money in an investment account, and give it a year or two to see if the agency wants their money. Or just do the zero basis thing and pay full taxes. Either option results in you coming out better than nothing.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Don’t the lower classes have the lowest rate of suicide? Suicide is correlated with income if I remember correctly. Seems like that supports the idea.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
I wonder to what extent just decriminalizing minor physical violence would help. Like you look back to the 30s/40s and it seems like a low level of pervasive physical violence was normal. Guys get mad at eachother, fight it out, all is well (unless someone suffers a horrible permanent injury, which did happen).
Commonplace martial arts etc might do it well enough but I do feel part of the desire/need is the need to be unconstrained by a boss/teacher/parent/state/wife. Those adventures were vital for my own development and I think if I grew up where I live now (generic mid-sized US city) then I would never have gotten that taste of freedom. That unsupervised part is just as important as the physicality I think
SophisticatedHillbilly
1mo ago
Wait I’m confused. Wasn’t creationism just being suggested here because it’s a right-wing theory with roughly equivalent public support to the core wokism (like the actual serious all whites are racist etc type) and with roughly the same level of grounding (which is to say, a lot of circularly cited papers and few ground facts that don’t have better alternative explanations) and so would be a ‘fair’ replacement?
I don’t think the point was ever that there’s actually a 1-1 prevalence of every single problem between the two of them.
SophisticatedHillbilly
4mo ago
Is it safe in the two senses of:
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Doesn’t cause any appreciable loss of strength, at least not beyond what losing that amount of weight would normally do via not eating (exercise held constant)
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One can stop taking it without any negative consequences beyond just the loss of the benefits?
I’m interested in taking it but haven’t done a deep-dive into the subject yet. Any resources you’d recommend?
SophisticatedHillbilly
4mo ago
if a model was right, you wouldn't give up and call it merely useful.
This is only true if a correct model is useful, which is certainly not always true. Even further: the most correct model isn’t necessarily the most useful model even when it is useful.
If I remember correctly evolutionary simulations consistently show a fully accurate perception of the world is generally actively harmful even when there’s no associated resource cost. Autistic analyzers often have more accurate models of social dynamics but do worse at socializing. Blind optimism, undeserved confidence unfounded worries etc are all extremely useful, and moving to a more accurate view is less useful.
It’s possible to have wrong and useless models of course, but that’s the point of the adage.
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
For this reason, conscription is ironically good because it allows meatgrinder-wars that eliminate the populations of “nations that don’t deserve to survive.” If we do this enough we might end up with some deserving nations coming up.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
Is the Allies winning WW2 really evidence of liberal societies with unplanned economies being better when they only won by taking national control of ~their entire economies, in some cases suspended elections, and turned the entire state towards control, propaganda, and bureaucracy?
I’d go so far as to say that “liberal” countries in the pre-WW2 sense just plain don’t exist today. Pre-Wickard v. Filburn the idea that the government even had the authority to decide whether you could grow grain on your own property to feed to your own horses was unthinkable. Such ideas didn’t really survive contact with war.
SophisticatedHillbilly
11mo ago
From my anecdotal experiences (which weirdly enough include specifically receiving an MRI as part of a health sharing system) you pay out-of-pocket and that price ends up being equal or lower to the negotiated insurance prices. You may have to do some negotiating yourself, but it’s usually as simple as calling the office and saying “this is unreasonable, give me the real price” and then they do. The $5000 price is there because they know insurance will haggle, and so they can charge the government systems exorbitant amounts, insurance pays the $1000 price, and if you pay out of pocket it’s more like $500, then health sharing reimburses you. The amounts aren’t accurate but the ratios are.
The $5000 price is part fraud, but realistically mostly just because they have to recoup the cost of all the non-payers who receive care and don’t pay for it. It’s basically just backdoor government-funded healthcare for the poor, scummy (has money just doesn’t pay or pays like $10/month), or undocumented. The only ways to bring the costs down are to not allow those people to receive maximum care, which the public doesn’t have the stomach for, or to address the elderly medical cost issue, which is politically untouchable, or address the supply cartel issues mentioned above.
SophisticatedHillbilly
11mo ago
I think the answer there hinges on whether you’d vote for a pro-abortion anti-Griggs candidate or an anti-abortion pro-Griggs candidate if they were head-to-head.
I think it's a good example of just how non-typical the average Mottizen is that this isn't immediately obvious to everyone. Giving over 10% of the population a ruined Christmas in a way that can be plausibly blamed on a particular party is basically a political bullet to the brain, especially in a period where the election margins are pretty thin. I mean in the culture we have an entire century-old genre of story that is basically just "people being poor at Christmas/not being able to celebrate Christmas properly is bad and you have to make that not happen." Any government that fails at such a basic task has lost the mandate of heaven, and will be thoroughly destroyed.
People joke about people tolerating/enjoying Fascism for "making the trains run on time," and that's a pretty good example of ordinary day-to-day things that the general public cares more about than things like civil liberties. The Holidays is basically that times ten. People make a lot of promises leading up to the holidays, both implicit and explicit, and keeping those is a 'big deal' to most people. The party that causes family drama, marital strife, sad children, and economic harm right at the time where everyone is the most sensitive those things? They're done.
The only hope for this continuing shutdown would have been somehow successfully fully offloading the blame onto the opposing party, and that wasn't happening.
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