Titus_1_16
1yr ago
I've definitely never heard of a farm kid thinking of cows as pets before
Have you talked to an Indian dairy farmer before? I know a small-scale dairy farmer here in Ireland that would be loth to eat his own cattle, even though there's no taboo on beef here.
For OP it's like growing up on a stud farm and then eating horse.
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Twitter has an EU HQ in Dublin that runs the EU subsidiary. Post-Musk, they still have over 500 staff here. Most of those are salespeople, selling ads to EU customers.
I don't know the breakdown for Twitter specifically, but typically American MAGA/Faang/whatever firms make about 25 - 30% of their revenue in Europe. It's not nothing
Titus_1_16
1mo ago
Is the Motte supposed to be funny?
This is the funniest shit I've read all morning
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
the above are just a few years ahead of the rest of us. If we survive the singularity then we, too, will spend our lives on our little reservations, everything provided from above
It's worth considering that the rickety, shitey-arse state of many reservations etc. is as much the result of incompetence, indifference and bad faith from conquerors, as it is the inherent fecklessness of indigenes. Perhaps a hyper-competent, hyper-intelligent robot overlord would simply provide a better standard of reservation.
Competently-administed mandatory eudaimonia would actually be a wise policy on the part of any hypothetical roboking that was disinclined towards genocidal eradication. To keep humans in a sub-par state of flourishing would mean less predictability - there's always the chance of some freak behaving who-knows-how. Having all the decorative/ethically-sourced humans in a state that is the absolute pinnacle of human excellence means you can plan accordingly, and the odd freak won't "hop the fence" so to speak.
Even that practical concern aside, I think an AI inclined to keep us would probably keep us well. And for the humans, this is a life at least as fulfilling as that experienced by all the chaps in the old testament, in Greek myth, etc - a life of challenge, overseen by known gods. Not too bad really.
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
1yr ago
Akshually... oppression isn't a binary state, it's a scale. I'd contend that the leash on the Chinese people has been loosened gradually but meaningfully since Mao's era, very skillfully, in such a way as to uplift them and allow a more advanced society without slackening too much and causing social disharmony
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
The author's name is the same as your username, did you write this?
Titus_1_16
23d ago
It's really interesting to me that someone could post regularly on this board and yet still enjoy cannabis. I'm envious of your mental robustness tbh.
A strong plurality of people posting here could fairly be called "anxious overthinkers" - the board is a bilge pump for excess thought, and eg expressing any worry whatsoever about AI risk (whether the worry is grounded in real things or not) ought to be a criterion for anxiety diagnoses.
I smoked a fair amount of weed in my teens/early 20s, took plenty of other recreational drugs, and a near-universal thing I've heard from peers with a similar profile is that around age 25, they started to find weed disagreed with them. Specifically, it makes them/me really unpleasantly anxious. Weed to me now is solely a tool I would use if for some reason I wanted to give myself a panic attack. Maybe I'm a little more dramatic in my dislike than normal, but it's very normal to find weed unenjoyable from mid-20s onward.
So what's your secret? Youthful brain? No prior history of smoking? Iron resolve?
I actually would quite like to like weed again, and agree with the demerits of drink that you outlined - so if there's One Weird Trick you can share, please do so.
Titus_1_16
1mo ago
Would you say a majority of people find the linked image amusing, or sad?
I gotta say the cat at the end really bummed me out. Poor little chap
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Ethnic wilting was contemporaneous with the decline and fall of the western Roman empire, if not its proximate cause. Hardly a point in favour of "civic nationalism"; the Germanic barbarians that Rome allowed to settle in its lands from the 3rd century onwards were never assimilated, and to use anachronistic language, formed a fifth column.
As for America - large-scale Irish Catholic (and later German) migration was the proximate cause of the collapse of the sort of agrarian yeoman republic that most of that American rebel leaders had envisioned. The sort of Irish people that showed up en masse in the 1840s - starving, illiterate, destitute, non-anglophone and uncivilised - ruptured the white/other distinction that had bounded the USA's participatory democracy for white landowning men, and necessitated the shift to managed democracy: yellow press, chickenfeed for the hoi polloi, the impossibility of complex public arguments and time horizons beyond the next election.
Were I making an argument for democratic universalism - I wouldn't - but if I were, I'd pick an example where a state identity has authentically and comprehensively erased localist ethnic distinctions into a single homogeneous "the people". 19th century France is actually not a bad example. Any country you can think of where ethnic division is still noticeable has not, ipso facto, succeeded in democratic levelling.
Titus_1_16
1mo ago
A 50% raise is serious business, well done
Titus_1_16
1mo ago
As a European, "hot ethnic cleansing in Europe" would be top of my wishlist. I have a few candidates in mind.
However it's very, very, very unlikely to happen within a 12-month time horizon. There is no party near power in any western/central European country with the will and means to do this.
The likeliest scenario (and it's not very likely) would be that we have another crazy year of illegal migration north across the Med like 2016 - except voters and politicians know what this spells now, and "Wir Schaffen Das" sentiment is supplanted by "No Fuckin Way" sentiment. I could then imagine a pushback of current wannabe migrants, and perhaps expulsions from some of the particularly god-forsaken tent cities - but not deportations of people who'd been here longer than a few months.
Titus_1_16
1mo ago
That's not a sensible or fair criticism. The point of the post was to illustrate that effective policy solutions are certainly conceivable, they're just outside the Overton window.
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
Many English criticisms of Ireland are/were factually accurate, but incomplete and lacking context.
There's no question that 19th century Irishmen and women generally lowered the tone of the US, though.
Titus_1_16
10mo ago
The same way that gay liberation did a number on close male friendships (ie made them more difficult to cultivate and maintain), trans emancipation has been strictly negative for masculine women (who of course greatly outnumber MtF transsexuals)
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
No, that shit would be on /b/ all the time.
Or any, I mean, I've gleaned knowledge of tonnes of sexual shit I'm not into just from shitposting subreddits and the like. Most normal men (gay men are still men) have some level of fascination with weird gross shit, just because.
I mean I know what "docking" is, and I can tell you it's not my cup of tea. For God's sake you'd pick half this stuff up from like South Park.
How can you possibly be on an obscure message board for non-heterodox niche political/cultural stuff and then act like you've never seen weird shit online?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
it would make it very easy to tell how many people voted
I read this as "very easy to tell what number of people voted" instead of "very easy to tell many individuals' voting preferences", and was wondering what you thought the point of voting to be.
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Very interesting way to pose the question.
I can't speak for the entire nation, but I would think it's a saccharine and narcissistic sentiment and stop consideration there - I wouldn't consider how deeply believed it might be by the speaker.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Both are in restitution for evils that are older than the state of Israel, ie well past your 50 year rule. If the Paelstinian cause has exceeded some statute of limitation, it follows that WW2 and all its attendant evils has passed also.
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
What did Jefferson mean by inferior in "body"?
Probably aesthetically. Enslaved people tend to look pretty wretched. Also, this might not be obvious to a person from a multiracial country, but if you're not exposed to them very much, people of other races can seem kind of generally gross. Witness eg Chinese people encountering bodily hairiness in the flesh for the first time - they're often repulsed. Or, non-African men (for whom women's hair is a site of eroticism) encountering precolonial African women, for whom the hair on one's head was no more a locus of beauty than the skin on one's elbow.
Titus_1_16
9mo ago
Far-right insulting term for blacks. Comes from some case in the US South a while ago where a black jogger was shot. I think it's popular because the last four letters are G-G-E-R
Titus_1_16
10mo ago
People who get eye contact wrong come off as autistic, because it's a classic symptom of autism. But they can get it wrong by having too much or too little.
The correct amount of eye contact varies by culture. New Yorkers make remarkably little, and Irish tend to make quite a lot. I was showing a crew of New York Jews around Dublin last year for a wedding, and the eye contact differential was striking
A point that rankles my American other half, year after year, is that the "Christmas Music" played publicly here in Ireland is a completely different canon to what she grew up with back home. And, unusually, there is just a total failure of Americanisation in the domain of Christmas music - her canon seems ancient (many tunes from the 1950s versus a tilt towards the 1980s here, because of different population pyramids - we don't have a bulge of 60-70 year olds monopolising all the cultural memory space) and painfully schmaltzy to most Irish ears, including my own.
For example, the universally-acknowledged GOAT of Christmas music in Ireland is The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, a thoroughly secular 1980s ballad that consistently rankles schoolmarmish woke types not because of overt Christofascism, but because the word "faggot", in the pejorative sense, is a key lyric. This song gives rise to the only occassion in modern Ireland where a person can drunkenly chant the word "faggot" at a stuffy office (Christmas) party and recieve no censure.
Overtly religious stuff is also played publicly (a fine example is Mary's Boy Child by Boney M, a jaunty German-calypso tune) because it's a religious holiday. The modal Irish person under 35 sounds like a Q-Anon believer when discussing Catholicism (it's a giant conspiracy run by paedos to amass wealth & get a go of children), yet will still tolerate religious music at Christmas because, come on. I don't know how American culture has managed to get away from this. Maybe it really is semitic sour grapes from the pullers of American cultural levers.
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