Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This is not a deep dive or an analysis - though I suspect in future this topic will generate many.
Instead it is a placemarker. I see that there is a brouhaha of some sort unfolding at the Oklahoma state capitol today. Right-wing media sources characterize it as an invasion of the capitol building to keep the state legislature from voting on legislation which would outlaw medical gender transition for minors.
Other sources, including Fox News, characterize it as a protest inside the capitol rotunda during the governor's state of the state address, opposing several bills which have been introduced during the legislative session, and which the governor supports.
There is obvious incentive, from the Trumpy/populist right, to draw as many parallels with the January 6th event as possible.
There has previously been discussion at the old stomping ground about whether liberal protester/rioters were prosecuted to the same degree as conservatives.
I will be trying to watch this as best I can (not being in or from Oklahoma), as it seems it may present another datapoint for discussion. It will also be a demonstration of the degree to which the institutional right is willing to push culture war topics, and authorize the exercise of political power over dissenting minorities to force through right-favored results.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The difference between the Amish and the Jews is that the Amish don't control banking and media corporations, don't control people's livelihood, what they buy, are allowed to buy or what they are allowed to think, who they are allowed to vote for.
"The Jews" don't control banking and media corporations - specific Jews do - and they're not uniformly Jewish. As I keep banging on about, Jews come in all sorts of different groups, and increasingly they're not even all that Jewish at all.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
What does it take to achieve "friendly interactions between blacks and whites as the norm rather than exception"
Maybe take a look at the military? I'm given to understand that the military has been very good at suppressing or eliminating race as a social divisor.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
But Jim Crow wasn't exterminationist. The sum total of all lynchings of blacks in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968 was 3,446, according to the Tuskeegee Institute (who I don't think are incentivized to be conservative with the number).
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria?
I do have empathy for them. But empathy enough isn't a good enough reason to do something, not when I'm already groaning under the unmet weight of already-extant duty:
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I have a duty to my ancestors who made my life possible, and to carry on that line into the future.
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I have a duty to my family who worked and sweated and sacrificed to raise me, and must pay that forward by working and sweating and sacrificing for my future children.
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I have a duty to the people who I work with, who have invested in and rely upon me.
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I have a duty to the people who live near me, who I share streets and parks and utilities and schools and commerce with, and who have to share those things with me.
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I have a duty to my countrymen, who in times of danger are sworn to lay down their lives for me, and for whom I may be called to lay down my life in turn.
Out and out in concentric, relational circles. That's a LOT of duty in the modern world, and I'm not at all certain even all my effort and resources and will is doing a good enough job. Thought and resources I devote to things outside those concentric rings of responsibility is, in a real sense, a defection against those important things. Moreover, because those outside things are far from me and I'm not enmeshed in iterated responsibility with them, I'm not likely to understand what any intervention would do, outside of the most superficially-obvious results.
Better to focus positive efforts on the things close by, to which I am already bound. As for those things far away, the most effective thing I can contribute is a general promise to treat fairly and virtuously with strangers when they come into my life.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
We should've been producing more gas from the get-go, approving projects for export and domestic consumption.
Is this feasible within a relevant time-window? Production today is not based on yesterday's decisions, but instead those decisions made 3, 5, and 10 years ago regarding regulatory, investment, and infrastructural resource allocation. Thus, decisions being made today about production infrastructure and investment shouldn't be based on today's needs for more/less gas, but on estimations of the need for gas in 3, 5, and 10 years. The price, on the other hand, reflects demand today, irrespective of future or past projections or investments. Thus, the two are far less related than one might ordinarily suppose. Insofar as they reflect a broad-based general trend in demand, yes, prices are a good spur to investment and future build-out. However, when there is a lag in build-out's ability to ramp up production in the short term, and the price spike is caused by a short-term or otherwise exceptionally unpredictable event like a natural disaster or war, then the price is likely not a good guide to what the future may require.
This is why it's reasonable to discuss price caps for this kind of black swan event; it's not the kind of thing that could reasonably have been anticipated within the timescales necessary to ramp production, and no action taken today is able to reduce the price through increasing supply within a reasonable timeframe (or even one that reasonably guarantees the black swan effect's will still be applicable at the end of the preparatory period). Thus, it's proper to take into account the societal effects of a sudden and unearned windfall profit vs the costs to the citizenry who see prices spike uncontrollably.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
"Firearm ownership is literally written into the founding document of this country as a fundamental right . . . "
That's just a set-up for the Cersei Lannister response: "This is your shield, Lord Stark? A piece of paper? tears paper to shreds"
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
You may at times despise a member of your family, think their ideas or values are terrible, have had awful experiences with them... but a bridge remains despite the gaps.
And yet, there's nothing quite so terrible as the hatreds caused by family splits. The heathen is combatted less fiercely than the heretic or apostate.
This is without mentioning the massive religious elephant in the room
What, the elephant that most Americans are blindingly philosemitic? Or is the elephant that religion is less and less important in most people's lives, particularly the young?
So the Jewish ethny remains separate
72% of non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010 married a gentile.
as such it's members pursue their ideological goals
Which ideological goals? The goals of insular hasidic sects in NY? The goals of deracinated "cultural jews" scattered all over? The goals of Reform Jews (basically the same as Unitarian Universalists at this point, including the whole "god" thing being pretty much metaphorical)? The Jews that support Israel or the Jews that oppose it? There is no uniform "Jewish" ideology.
without any concern for the damage these impose on the host society.
Nope. Jews are more charitable, on average, than gentiles, and jewish charitable fund money goes overwhelmingly to non-sectarian causes.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I mean, not to tell on myself or anything, but...haven't you ever come across excerpts from japanese AVs? Lots of high-pitched nasal squealing that, through a wall, could plausibly be confused with an infant. Or at least enough for comedic purposes.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
a few years ago when I was giving more to Against Malaria, it was certainly nice to be able to think about how this small amount of money would help to save real people's lives.
Wouldn't you get the same feeling volunteering in or contributing to a local soup kitchen? Or mentoring through Big Brothers/Sisters? Coaching Little League/Pop Warner/AYSO (team activities cut suicide risk!)? Filling in potholes in the road to cut traffic accidents? Are local people any less "real?"
there are complex social politics that will go on in situations of you and the people you personally know. they may be offended that you think they're a charity case, they may not want to accept money cause it'd get weird, etc.
Why wouldn't you think that far-away cases would have their own complex social politics? Why would you think that "aid" parachuted in from strangers would be any less likely to fall afoul of these problems than you, working in an area you're presumably at least a little familiar with, among people you presumably share at least a few things in common with?
I don't mean this as a reflection on you personally - I don't know you, of course - but these two quotes seems related. A person far away actually might be more "real" than a person nearby, at least insofar as their "realness" is as a pure, innocent victim who can be redeemed through charity. The person nearby, after all, is probably smelly and dirty and unsightly and low status. He might be crazy, or addicted to something, or violent and destructive. He might be resistant to help, or prone to relapses, or have other human foibles which so frequently are both the cause and result of being down-and-out. Even if he's none of those things, he might disagree about politics, or listen to the wrong music, or otherwise bear cultural marks that one might cringe from being associated with. And so it's hard and often unpleasant to help those nearby! Meanwhile, you don't see any of those things about the person far away, or if you do it's likely covered up by cultural unfamiliarity. Feels a lot better to help that person, I'd bet.
EA wasn't always like this - insofar as it's an attempt to cut through grift and bloat in charity efforts, it's still quite useful! But your comment seems to encapsulate a version of EA that flattens the world into fungible QALYs and tries to Moneyball-optimize QALYs-per-dollar, with an affective bias against giving and working where one is. And that I seems like a moral superstimulus to me, which substitutes the sugar-water of depersonalized "effectiveness" for the hard, hard work of improving ourselves and the uncomfortable things close to us.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
There isn't any good ethical basis for privileging one human being over another based on their proximity—genetically or geographically—to you.
There absolutely are several.
(1) Practicality. An ethics which people are not likely to follow will not be implemented widely or for long. However noble its aims, such an ethic fails by its own terms. By contrast, an ethics which people are likely to follow, even if slightly less noble, will be implemented widely and for a longer period of time and thus result in more good. As you said, there is a biological bias in favor of genetic or geographic (and I'd add "sociocultural" as well) proximity. If that bias can be taken advantage of to build solidarity, care, and harmony, then it should!
(2) Accessibility. Proximity Bias is a simple concept, common to most human civilizations. It is simple to explain, and thus easy to spread. Moreover, it is also simpler for people of all different capability strata to implement, even without supervision. It's not perfect, and people being people it will sometimes be implemented poorly. But it's easier.
(3) Iterativity. Proximity Bias stresses that individuals should spend their resources on people and things close to them, which are likely to be things which the individual will interact with frequently. This provides for frequent feedback between all parties and frequent assessment of progress. Thus, it limits the ability of middlemen to grift or divert efforts and resources away from the object, as well as generally unlocking the beneficial dynamics present in iterated games more generally. It also allows for short feedback loops to identify and address unforeseen consequences rapidly.
(4) Resiliency. Though Proximity Bias may be less globally efficient, it does allow for the building of general reserves of both physical and social capital which can be leveraged to counteract/mitigate emergencies. Further, because it is decentralized, there is no single point of failure in the system.
If you want to participate in morality, you are just as ethically bound to them, you just don't feel it.
Sorry, nope. Ties go both ways, or not at all. I am bound to those who have some duty to me. Beyond that, I have a duty to cause no unnecessary harm. If, after I have fulfilled my local duties, I still have resources left over, then, and only then, can I look outwards to perform charity on complete strangers. But that's a very high bar to clear.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
like us
Ah yes, but along which axis? Same hair color? Same favorite food? Same clothes? Same language? Other socio-cultural markers? We, to a certain extent, get to define what it means to be "like us" and who "us" is. Staying stuck on racial grouping is profoundly limited thinking.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I don't think the Ukranians should surrender. If someone was invading California, I like to think that I would be brave enough to volunteer to fight. I do think that the U.S. needs to take escalation concerns seriously when analyzing the risk-reward of providing various weapons systems, information, training, or support to the Ukrainian war effort. It's not as simple as "oh, someone waggled a nuclear dick around, they automatically win" - its a question of determining whether what we expect to reasonably be able to achieve by the desired policy is proportional to the risk being run of nuclear or other serious retaliation. And that determination requires (1) a clear statement of what the U.S. expects to achieve from its policies, (2) an evaluation of how important those goals are worth, and (3) an analysis of whether those goals are worth the potential costs imposed by Russian countermoves, up to and including nukes or other action targeting civilian infrastructure in the U.S. or in vital partner-countries/treaty partners.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
So the Pride flag is officially on the same level as the National Anthem now? I thought that was just a dissident right twitter meme about "globohomo" and the "GAE." But good to know, good to know.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I deny that human morality is math at all. People are not indistinguishable, interchangeable, widgets. The essence of humanity is sociability - our particular relationships and cooperation with each other. Your cold math at best ignores it, and at worst denigrates it as pernicious. That's a recipe for trouble.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The physical africans who get bed nets are no more or less abstraction-ish than, say, money you donate to a homeless person in your city.
No, you might actually see the homeless person in your day-to-day life, and he you. You interact, and can make each other's day directly better or worse. You can converse, have a relationship, etc., with very little resources needed to facilitate the communication. That's real. The African, though literally real in a physical sense, is thousands of miles away. Barring intensive intentional effort, you will never see them, speak to them, or have any relationship with them or they you.
Cities, and 'communities', are as arbitrary as 'the world' is - they're contingent groups of people determined by geography, economic history, shared customs, etc!
Not from the standpoint of actual human lives, they're not. Well, okay, the word "community" is so overused it's done to death and is on the verge of becoming meaningless. But it originally described a true thing - a group of people who share things together, potentially including not just location and resources, but habits, language, ancestry, etc., and possess a sense of holding each other in special regard and solidarity; not quite as close as actual kin, but definitely set apart from the rest of the world. That's a meaningful division, or at least used to be before modernity came along and undermined it with "organized delight / in lotus-isles of economic bliss / forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss / (and counterfeit at that! Machine produced, / bogus-seduction of the twice-seduced!)".
I mean, is "my community" the city I live in because it had good schools? Is it people I talk to on the internet? Is it the base of economic production (most of the planet)?
Which of those do you have meaningful, reciprocal relationships in? Which of those supplies the people you'd turn to if you lost your job, or got ill, or had your domicile burn down? Which of those has people for whom you'd pitch in if they had one of those things happen? Which of those has people who you share your leisure time with? Which of of those do you rely on for your daily sustenance?
Most of us lack community. This is not an unnoticed phenomenon. Perhaps we should start building them again?
As for 'art' - how would you propose funding art? You're not gonna find great artists in your hometown
Why do you need your hometown's art to be "great"? What makes art "great?" Just skill in craft? What about history and love; a particular representation of a particular time and place, or of particular people investing what skill they have along with sweat and time into beautifying the spaces they share for their neighbors and descendants? Why not have this on every house and public building? Why not have lovingly-tended flowers along park paths? Why not have well-built and attractive playing fields and sports yards? The Colosseum is art, after a fashion.
As for infrastructure - even if you have a few billion, how can you compete with the hundreds of billions of infrastructure investment per year (vs wealth that you'll have over a decade), by motivated organizations that know a lot more than you?
Do they, though? They may have money, but a lot of motivated organizations do terrible jobs of knowing what they're doing, or doing it at all. Just look at my poor Golden state for countless examples. High speed rail, badly-done forestry, potholed roads, lazily-maintained power lines, unupdated water infrastructure - it all bears the hallmarks of people who are extremely wealthy and very excited about big, global political causes (the environment! Global Warming!), but care much less about the particular places they live and those that live there with them (often because their wealth and modern technology allows them to, and there is no countervailing force pulling them back).
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Is there a good way to describe a group like this?
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
Cannot Europeans simply deny the refugees passage on grounds that Egypt is already a safe country for them?
The Europeans could do a wide range of things, both inside and outside the ambit of international law. Pakistan is expelling nearly 2 million Afghan immigrants. However, there is no will to use force to keep large waves of immigrants outside of Europe - that has been rendered so morally-unconscionable in their view that just about any justification to ignore the problem or refrain from action will be accepted.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
which sits at a similar place as kids buying Pokemon cards.
Just as a note, as an elder millennial when we actually cared about the cards themselves, we didn't just buy packs - we went to the secondary market at giant nerd swap-meets or online and just got the individual cards we wanted. It was actually a salutary early example on how prices fluctuate with popularity and trend (e.g. card prices could vary wildly week to week based on tournament results and the currently-prevalent game meta) and in balancing cost vs desire.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
That sounds like a testable hypothesis. Has Zelensky disagreed with the NATO line before?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Thank you for the good work, Trace.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
I hate the discourse around inflation - when people say "inflation is down" they are talking about a decrease in the rate of change, not a decrease of an absolute number. This is unlike many other things we talk about in economic life; when the unemployment rate goes down, more people have jobs; when there is a decrease in the mortgage rate, houses cost less, etc. This condition people to think that an economic indicator "going down" means that things are getting better.
This is not the case with inflation. When inflation "goes down," it does not mean that prices are actually decreasing back to the levels that existed prior to the inflation. Deflation is a separate phenomenon that almost never actually happens (and maybe shouldn't be allowed to happen - I'm not smart enough to parse the monetary theory of it all). When inflation "goes down," it means "you're still paying way more for stuff than you were a year ago, but at least the prices aren't skyrocketing up quite as fast anymore; you have some time to rebudget and get used to these new, permanently higher prices."
That statement isn't actually a "good sign" for the economy; at best it means "things aren't actively getting worse." Unless there is some significant increase in productivity to drive prices back down, people are still having to pay more for goods and services than they did previously; their money is worth less and they are poorer now than they were previously. The damage has already been done.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
It’s almost like you get incredibly bored without alcohol to distract you and need to find major goals to carry yourself.
As someone whose normal alcohol intake rounds to zero, I have no idea what the rest of you are talking about. Being drunk is awful. My head hurts, I can't think or talk straight, I'm super sweaty, plus a few other random pulls from the Grab-Bag of Unpleasant Symptoms! There's like this teeny thin line where I've had just enough to disinhibit myself, but not so much that my body starts going haywire that's pleasant, but it's just about impossible to maintain for more than about 10 minutes at a time. I enjoy the taste of a few beers, wines, and whiskies, but barely ever drink them because the side-effects of the booze are so unpleasant.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
In addition to what @No_one said, China also has to be graded on a curve because before their recent rise the last hundred years or so had been absolutely awful:
*Great Leap Forward: tens of millions starved
*Korean War intervention: ~180,000 Chinese military casualties
*WWII (chinese theater): tens of millions killed, plus huge swathes of the country's vital agricultural instrastructure purposefully destroyed as a military tactic.
*"Boxer" Rebellion: hundreds of thousands killed/displaced
*Taiping Rebellion: tens of millions killed, tens of millions displaced, major portions of southern China depopulated - literally the worst civil war in human history that we know of.
Plus all the internecine fighting between factions, attempted/successful revolutions, several minor wars fought on Chinese soil (Russo-Japanese war, first Sino-Japanese war), and a normal dose of the floodings, droughts, and other natural disasters that have punctuated Chinese history.
China had one of the worst stretches any civilization has ever had, to my reckoning. Getting conquered by the Mongols again probably would have been significantly preferable. Honestly, I'm kindof amazed that there still is a china after all that. A lot of ruin in a nation, indeed.
Because they're not rich enough to (1) afford ubiquitous personal car transportation, (2) isolate themselves from the effects of luxury beliefs like "we should prioritize the feelings and welfare of criminals over having orderly public places"
Right, rich enough to afford personal cars for most people, and luxury beliefs allying the guilty-feeling, effeminized elites and the underclasses.
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