Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Ah now, everyone knows he was a Gypsy, not a Slovak. Ironically it would mainly be over-the-hill, state TV watching, identity-is-citizenship types (ie not far right) that would fail to make that distinction.
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
modern democracy is much more actually democratic than Athenian democracy
The Athenians took the word "democracy" to mean one thing, and modern Western politicians take it to mean [almost anything they want]. It's small-minded to claim one particular state of affairs is more "democratic" than another - very many political system can fairly lay claim to the term.
It's a defensible position to describe as "democratic" any that involves a reasonable number of people voting on what's to be done/whom to rule them.
Beyond those bare bones, it's like arguing which of Louisiana and Utah is the more American, or Pentecostalism and Anglicanism is the more Christian. Ie, a futile endeavour to rile up true believers
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
A niggle, but:
aren't African Americans more like 10% of the population, with the other 2.5% that's black being mostly African immigrant
It seems intuitively incorrect to me that one in five black Americans have even recent African ancestry. I would guess it's more like one in ten at most. Can any Americans vouch for the likelihood of this?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Decarbonization is against the interests of most people, even if a lot of people favor it politically.
That's a pretty contentious assertion to just plop down. I think you're mistaken, and my guess is that the source of the error is you considering people's "interests" quite narrowly. Are you following a logic of "decarbonisation will make many/most things more expensive while delivering equivalent/worse service, therefore it's against most people's interests?"
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Also the world bank data shows that before the whole tax haven thing, Ireland was trailing the UK with around 65% of its GDP per capita.
Small note here since I both work in finance and am Irish; this exagerrates the UK advantage since a large proportion British GDP also comes from financial/tex efficiency stuff. If you're going to strip out the Irish tech sector (which is both the largest employer and largest GDP contributing sector of the economy) on the basis that firms are only sited there for tax efficiency, then to do a fair comparison you'd need to strip out the UK financial sector too.
It's true that GDP isn't a good metric to examine Ireland; our central bank publishes a figure that tries to account for the distortionary effect of profit funnelling, and which puts us about on a par with France on a per capita basis. If we're talking salaries and cost of living, Irish salaries are higher than non-London UK ones, and slightly lower than London ones.
Titus_1_16
24d ago
one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens
Really nice turn of phrase
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
Yes, this is exactly the sort of "context" I was gesturing at (but failed to actually write) in my comment.
Strictly speaking, in the 1840s, the median Irishman was undoubtedly at a lower "civilisational level" than the median Anglo - but there are truer explanations for this than "the Irish are eternal untermenschen".
For example, you mentioned the Border people of the Scottish lowlands, and the Scotch-Irish of Ulster, who played an important role in US history - go back a thousand years for the second half of the first millenium though and you'll see that these peoples are descendants of Irish colonists in western Britain, which is at odds with the eternal untermenschen hypothesis.
For that matter, the median Irishman today is a little bit higher in a material/human capital sense than the median Englishman (though this is only a development of the past 20 years or so)
Titus_1_16
4mo ago
Why do you think humans have infinite moral worth compared to animals?
That's a pretty unusual viewpoint for a modern westerner to espouse (though in a "revealed preferences" sense I guess it's very common). Christian background, Cartesian background, contrarianism, Chinese background.... how come?
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
The emotional explosiveness isn't limited to twitter.com, but that's fine because it's a good thing.
Ethical reasoning is something a person can be better or worse at, and it's good that most people do not engage in a priori ethical reasoning - they follow the guidelines laid down by those who've examined an issue deeply (their betters, to be maximally provocative).
There's a complex system through new norms are derived by experts, road-tested by organs of opinion propagation, the common man's reception is incorporated iteratively into refinements, and so on.
It's no more desirable that everyone should invent his own ethical systems than that he should invent his own electrical systems.
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
It was a bunch of people writing books at the same time.
What's the difference between that and an intellectual movement?
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
You might not believe this, but he's not.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Right, so the AI creates busywork for humanity.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
I think until such time as Israelis stop kvetching to Germans about the Holocaust, Palestinians can be permitted to protest their subsequent territorial expropriation.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Ostensibly, humans want to maximize the greatness of their life
This "ostensibly" is doing quite a bit of work.
Trying to answer "what is good in life" with any rigour is not possible in the format of a board like this. You may equally try to answer in the same space a question like "by the way, what actually is everything?"
To avoid condescension and make clear what I mean, let's even tease apart your first postulate here:
humans
Why is the goodness or otherwise of life applicable to groups of "humans" rather than individuals? Now it might be or it might not, I'm not taking a position, just pointing out that you're implicitly smuggling in a sort of moral realism here, a sense that "the good" is a discoverable truth that's the same for many people, as opposed to say an "invented" individual preference or something else.
want
The Good is what people want, really? Is that the relation you're grounding it in? You sure? What about people who want bad things etc. Okay, so we'll only trust the wanting of sensible people. But how do we decide which reasonable group's wanting we should trust to define the Good, when the Good itself is the criterion we'll have to use to define reasonableness? (This is close to something called the Euthyphro problem, FYI)
to maximise
Do they? What does "maximisation" really mean here, is this like arithmetical summing of good to get the most utils? What's the conversion ratio of big boons to little ones? How many fun nights out does it take to equal me bearing a child?
the greatness
Is this just a synoym for "the Good"? If not, what is it?
Usw, the point is getting clear now!
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Notice that midway through my huge screed I talked about oppression of the Irish by the English, or Russians by themselves. Oppressive social structures don't need a racial dynamic (though they are still helpful colour coding who is oppressing whom).
Africans are perfectly capable of oppressing one another brutally without outside help.
This says nothing either way about my central thesis that oppressing a group while people in your society have access to books about the French Revolution is not a tenable strategy in the long term.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Minor historical point first, on your traducing of Russians' treatment of conquered peoples. It was by far the least harmful to those they conquered of any European power. The thing to remember about Russia is that it's a European country with its entire imperial possessions still 90% intact, and attached contiguously as the country streches east from its European heartlands. To see what would have befallen American indigenes under Moscow's cruel fist, look at Kamchatka today. People who are not ethnically Russian are a majority of the population east of the Urals, and their relative position to the dominant ethny is inestimably better than that of American indigenes, who are a sad and broken people.
Notably among Europeans, Germanics (of whom Anglos are a subset) have the taste for genocide in conquest. Spain, France and Russia tended to integrate conquered people to varying degrees, and the Dutch kept them entirely separate to the point of weird indifference.
Second important point: a huge tension you don't seem to have noticed here:
my attitude toward native American grievances is: "Sucks to suck, git gud, gg no re." Black and brown BIPOC bodies of color can get in line right behind every other conquered/defeated people with a sob story. This is the Law of the Jungle.
Okay, fair enough, but then:
this slimy conniving chipping away at the edges to guilt your oppressors into give you free shit is just pathetic.
"All's fair in love and war". If you're claiming groups that lost out historically should just accept it, how can you consistently criticise graft against your own group today? Either all conduct is fair or it isn't. "Oh no, using disease and a much higher population to swamp natives was great and mighty when Euro colonists did it back when, but it's pathetic and underhanded when other groups use the same techniques against us". How the hell can out-diseasing and out-breeding indigenous Americans be kosher, but non-whites doing, what, lawsuits and subversion of your institutions is verboten?
Considering you were ostensibly opposing whining, "it's not fair when they do it to us" sounds a lot like, well...
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Oh right, I didn't realise that was the spelling she's using herself. That's totally, totally stupid if it's actually legally spelt that way; Sadhbh is already a name you need to know how to pronounce, so why bother chsnging the vowel and not the cluster of consonants at the end? Maybe to avoid having the letters S - A - D in her name?
But if I were anglicising that name I'd just spell it "Sive".
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Coke isn't taking anything out of society, coke isn't making "society" drink 6 cans of coke in a day
This is exactly what advertising is; their billion-dollar marketing team would be very disappointed to hear that they're all, what, playing make-believe? The entirety of marketing and advertising is just a big ineffective scam, and no-one has ever noticed?
Coke might not be "making" people do something by putting a gun to their head, but it spends over a billion dollars to get a certain social outcome, and then every year that outcome happens. I don't know what else you'd call that, David Hume
Titus_1_16
28d ago
A couple of points: first, in terms of English proficiency being a cultural solvent - English already is the lingua franca of Europe, as it is in many other parts of the world. When an Italian meets a German, 9 times out of 10 they will speak English. When a Finn meets a Spaniard - English (although the Spanish are generally pretty bad at English). And so on.
If Europe is to achieve some manner of proper confederation and thereby preserve itself as anything other than a relic over the next century or two, it needs a language with which to do this. English in Europe (and remember it is after all a European language) doesn't just mean Americanisation, it also means the coalescing of pan-European consciousness.
So English proficiency is not purely a malus, or purely a tool of globohomogenisation.
Secondly - I know you're talking about Latvia as a long shot in terms of migration and integration, but actually its neighbour just to the north, Estonia, explicitly is pursuing a strategy of welcoming ambitious foreigners from the likes of America. They've set up an E-residency scheme that's kind of notoriously open to abuse, but it's meant a lot of foreign tech setting up shop there. Estonia is a more reasonable shot for someone of your profile to move to and integrate into, if you're interested
Titus_1_16
28d ago
Russia looks pretty white to me, just saying.
Russia is only about 70% ethnically Russian, from memory. Eyeballing it, at least half of the countries in Europe would have a higher % of their primary ethnicity.
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Does anyone really have anything against actual Romanians? I don't think so. It's almost always the latter, and the difficulty is compounded by the High Wokish word for "Gypsy" (that is, "Romani") sounding so like "Romanian"
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
I'm sorry to report that I could not resist downvoting this post, but will make amends with a comment.
Also - I think the downvote is useful, it's interesting sometimes to see the tally of up and down votes. Highlights contentiousness in an interesting way
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Which Jesse Singal article, the trans kids one?
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Ah look, I'm sure they're fine on their own terms - this isn't a critique any Brazilian should take seriously. I'm describing a mob of Brazilians versus any individual, etc.
Behold: classic Irish obsequiousness and indirectness and backpedalling coming out even on an anonymous board. I'm sure a Brazilian could take an equally good potshot at us - I've heard they find our lack of cosmetic surgery troubling and wrongheaded, for example.
As for poverty explaining vice - I don't think that's the case in an interesting way. Sure, poverty drives people to vice - but which vices, and which first, are culture. Brazilians in Ireland are generally here on bad-faith student visas (they must get a stamp from an "english language school" as a visa condition, making these schools de facto a private arm of Irish migration control - this incentive structure leads to exactly the outcome you'd predict) and I don't see, say, Indian students that dool the same visa scam turning en masse to dealing or prostitution.
That name is actually Sadhbh, not Sidhbh.
Very nice old Irish name, pronounced "sive".
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