TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
18hr ago
That would make sense to me, except I don't know a single leftist who thinks so. There's either a total blind spot in their memory or they insist all statements were made in good faith at the time, depending on whom I'm talking to.
Some will acknowledge that lies were told about masks, but for the greater good. Most don't want to discuss it at all. Again, IME.
TitaniumButterfly
21hr ago
Re: nature vs. nurture, my toy model is that nature is the foundation and education is the house. Can't build a nice house on a bad foundation, and just a great foundation isn't enough either.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
The question is how/if it could be enforced.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
Could you get a PO box in a tax free state and then tell USPS to forward it?
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
— John Adams, Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, October 11, 1798
Like it or not, our system was devised with this assumption in mind. I don't blame you for not liking that, but it is indisputably the case.
And those have their own negative consequences.
Negative for what?
Communism could work if we were all near-constantly on an MDMA trip type of immediate feelings of love
'Work' in what sense? I don't think that most if any of the problems with communism resolve to 'people don't care about each other enough'.
All that said, I do find it funny that most modern proponents of meritocracy do not challenge what is probably the biggest modern source of un-meritocracy in the West, which is inheritance.
Probably going to need to define 'meritocracy' here because this doesn't make sense to me. Under that rubric, surely an even greater source of 'un-meritocracy' is allowing parents to even raise their own children? We'd all be on a much more 'level playing field' if children were taken at birth -- or, better yet, cloned en masse under expert supervision (some moms drink after all) -- and raised in batches by the state.
What sort of 'merit' are you trying to select for?
Anyway, I think the children of the rich are in aggregate substantially genetically different from the children of the poor and the two serve different functions in the societal organism. It's good for more-capable people to receive more resources, as this allows them to more fully develop their potentials, which benefits us all. Why we would want to change that, I do not know. It could certainly be improved, but I think we're much more likely to break important things in the process of attempting that, and it's still not clear to me what it is you'd be trying to accomplish in the first place.
'Meritocracy' as I understand the concept means that the more-fit are more likely to end up in positions capable of making use of their virtues, not that everyone gets an equal chance, which is an incoherent idea to begin with. What would that even mean? And why would it be a good thing?
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
Well, it's not as though billionaires generally put their assets into swimming pools full of gold coins and go diving. Most of that wealth is tied up in the companies and being put to work providing additional economic value. The very wealthy also tend to use spare wealth for other goals including charity and pushing boundaries which the government can't or won't: c.f. Blue Origin. On balance, I expect billionaires to be more competent and frankly lucid than your 'we' which I'm interpreting to mean 'the government'.
One has but to look to Europe to see what happens when 'we' make sure to not let innovative, driven people 'take' more than their 'fair' share. Stagnation.
And as Kulak once said so well, a 1% annual difference in GDP growth over 100 years is the difference between living in the US and living in Mexico. Still keeps me up at night.
Now, sure, some amount of that wealth is 'wasted' on unnecessary expensive things but A) it's comparatively insignificant and B) that also brings down prices for others since it effectively subsidizes the market. A company producing a cool new item that only the very rich can afford will be blessed by the income and often able to transition to the next level of scale.
My suggestion is that there's an argument from objective morality, an argument from force, and nothing else that I've ever seen. While I'm broadly sympathetic to complaints about the masses and Nietzschean sentiment in general I don't see what they have to do with anything here. If you'd like to posit a third option I'm all ears.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
I'm in H.M.S. Surprise, great stuff so far. Really awesome series and I can't wait until AI can render the whole thing as per the Russell Crowe movie.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
Spain, Portugal, Southern France -- yeah, that checks out.
Been reading the Master and Commander series and this reminds me of how Jack says he likes fighting Spaniards because while their ships are beautiful and their commanders are brave, they are never, ever, ready on time.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
I think the higher-level point is getting lost here. "Useful" for what? Your preferences, which are just as (in)valid as someone else's? If someone else finds a chainéd sex-slave more 'useful' for their purposes, does that mean they get to call you wrong?
Rules should be applied fairly or not at all.
Look I'm not here to argue at the object level but in general this strikes me as a bad idea. Obviously different social strata should have different rules. Every society I'm aware of has recognized this up until fairly recently. In the vast majority of cases I think it's good that rich people can use the legal system to get off scott-free.
Restricting everyone to behavior suitable for the lowest is literally reducing freedom to the lowest common denominator and this attitude is a huge part of why we can't have nice things. Quod licet iovi non licet bovi.
Anyway, in practice, I have much more to fear from the state than does an inebriated homeless schizo because I have resources to purloin.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
And since I'm bored and we're being pedantic anyway, it'd be AD 0, not 0 AD.
I shouldn't need to go to church to defer my kid's sexual awakening until they have a meaningful boner.
Why else would you want that? If there's no absolute standard, anything goes. Guess you could make some argument that it's bad for them, but then you'd need to demonstrate that such a thing as 'bad' exists (i.e. an 'ought' rather than an 'is') and also that things wouldn't just work out if we all stopped worrying so much about sexualizing children.
Or, for that matter, owning slaves or murdering infants, or selling unwanted daughters into prostitution. Going to the next tribe over and killing, raping, and plundering. You know, standard human behavior sans Christ.
People are going to do what they're going to do. It's impossible to call it wrong without reference to a higher authority. One can point to cultural norms but, as we see here, that's ultimately a losing game. You can (physically) attempt to stop them, but not under any kind of rubric of right or wrong. And then the universe burns out (or blows apart) anyway.
TitaniumButterfly
7d ago
Who has any right to land? Either you can defend it or someone else will have it. There's only 'is' here, no 'ought'.
Well, yes -- part of Ireland is already the UK and if the rest were to unite with the UK I wouldn't be losing sleep over the erasure of the Irish as a people. Scotland already did, and it's still there. Wales too. Sure they'd like to be independent but that's clearly a want, not a need.
TitaniumButterfly
7d ago
Sure; such things can be subdivided fractally. But if I heard all those people were henceforth to be under a single government I wouldn't be thinking "Oh no the unique Austrian culture will now be subsumed into Greater Mitteleuropa!" It would make a lot of sense for them to share a government IMO.
Though, the Swiss have a long history of self-government which is unlike anything to be found in Ukraine, so I doubt they'd be much interested. Else they'd be in the EU.
TitaniumButterfly
8d ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine heavily ethnically Russian, and weren't the Ukrainians pursuing a similar policy of forcible assimilation? (I may well be wrong.)
Ukraine has often been part of Russia and their distinctiveness has always seemed to me tenuous at best. FWIW I developed this opinion over a decade ago after spending some time with Ukrainians in the US who were very insistent that they're totally different from Russians and gave me several examples which left me entirely unconvinced. Basically everything came down to regional vocabulary differences. That's not a matrioshka doll, it's a $ukrainian_word_for_exact_same_thing! Based on my mostly-uninformed assessment, Ukrainian can't really be called a dialect of Russian but they have like 2/3 overlap and from a cultural standpoint they're nearly indistinguishable. Easy for an outsider to think, I suppose.
TitaniumButterfly
8d ago
It's not a war of extermination, they can survive the dissolution of Ukraine as a state
It's not clear that Ukraine as a people can survive continued war. Their demographics were already terrible and tons of dead and fleeing reproductive-age people occurs to me as likely to be fatal. Then again the worst case scenario has already basically happened, so yeah, I guess they may as well ride the thing to zero. Sucks for the ones who wanted to live though.
TitaniumButterfly
9d ago
No; Christianity has always (until very recently and only in the West) understood that there are many, many gods, divine beings, whatever you want to call them. Our conception of 'monotheism' is incredibly anachronistic and silly. I'm unaware of any monotheistic religions.
TitaniumButterfly
9d ago
Christianity says that our ancestors were all wrong, for thousands of years, and then a guy in the middle east figured out the truth
No, this is definitely not what Christianity says. Not that our ancestors were all wrong, and not that a guy 'figured out' the truth.
Yeah, pretty much. My model indicates that people who end up in power don't tend to have such hangups, though they'll definitely use rhetoric along those lines to get what they want.
'Keep fighting an unwinnable war because we love the (extremely recent) independence of Ukraine so much' is an odd stance for any competent person to take. Typically elites have lots of options including taking substantial assets elsewhere. Choosing to wipe out one's own population to prolong the inevitable doesn't strike me as particularly nationalistic either. Enough men are dead, and women are fled, that Ukraine as a concept is unrecoverable. There will be no substantial next generation. Why does it matter who the nominal rulers are, of empty farmland and disintegrating cities? Ukraine is gone.
So especially in that (famously corrupt) part of the world my expectation is that those in power are looking to take what they can from the situation, at whatever expense to the commoners, and make good their escape.
That anyone could believe otherwise makes me feel kind of sick. Lambs to the slaughter. What a wicked world.
TitaniumButterfly
16d ago
It's more that I have a hard time believing that the people in control aren't looking to gain something here, but are truly that ideologically committed.
TitaniumButterfly
17d ago
Where do commercial interests fit in? Is there some class of Ukrainian leadership/economic heavyweights which is hoping to gain from protracted slow-rolling defeat?
This is not my understanding and IIRC the thesis has been studied and found to have poor support, not least because if it were valid it should apply to more Jews than just the Ashkenazim.
The thesis which seems to hold more water is that the Ashkenazi population was pushed into lines of work which required high intelligence, financial sense, and above all fluency in speech. This is much better-supported. Scott has an article on it somewhere but I've got a meeting in two minutes and probably won't bother afterward. I think it was the Hungarian high school one. Four parts IIRC.
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