Titus_1_16
2yr ago
also pro-infanticide
I'll take the bait. Go on then, spell it out
I won't disagree with your contention that forcefully supressing a population keeps them, you know, surpressed. But I will contend that this imprudent and short-term civilisational management, because oppression degrades a people culturally and spiritually. Oppression makes brutes of a people, and the oppressor ends up riding a tiger.
I contend that there's strong empirical evidence in support of the brutalising effect of harsh oppression. If you're willing accept that premise then please skip the next two paragraphs.
Despite what a lot of activists will claim, the vast bulk of sub-Saharan Africa only experienced European colonialism for a bit less than a century: 1875 or so until 1965 or so, arguably starting later with the Berlin Conference in 1885. The obvious exception is South Africa, which had much earlier settler colonialism as opposed to the later and more popular extractive model. Looking at the societies that have emerged post-decolonisation, a really striking fact is how much more violent South Africa is than any other country in the continent, even those that have experienced recent military conflict. I'm talking specifically here about murder rates, by far the most reliable measure of violence even in extremely badly-run societies (ie most of Africa). South Africa is notably more violent than almost any other African country; in some cases up to 30× more (note that oppression is colourblind, and SA's only large competitor in the murder stakes is Nigeria, anothe country cursed with intense ethnic conflict, and jockeying, alternating subjugation of the Yoruba by the Hausa historically, and the inverse now).
This presents a serious challenge for a strictly white supremacist position; South African blacks had by far the most contact with civilising whites of any peers on the continent, and have come out of the encounter by far the most violent. This pattern shows up throughout the world; Russia is famous for tsarist oppression of its populace, and really high levels of interpersonal violence. Brazil was the largest slave nation in the world (surely an oppressive institution...) and is far more violent as a result than the vast majority of African countries. Even thinking of my own lovely nation of Ireland; historically oppressed, and authentic brutes for much of history as a result. In our case we were a big European outlier for most of the 20th century as a country with vastly higher levels of interpersonal violence than others; but the longer we went post-independence, the closer we tracker to the European norm. This was separate too and preceded our (literal) enrichment; getting richer didn't make us less violent and ignorant, it was a precondition for same.
I could go on and on but to my mind there are more than sufficient natural experiments around the world showing that, whatever the quality of the biological substratum of a people in the first place, oppression en masse tends to coarsen and degrade en masse. There are certainly very many interesting sub-mechanisms and processes behind this but, sinilar to your own big-picture view of oppression working as a large-scale system, I won't bother to speculate on them here.
Given this observation about the development of peoples, oppression as you propose it is storing up trouble for the future. In a world than has experienced the French and American revolutions, it just doesn't seem tenable to me politically that any Western society is going to have the will to keep oppressing its untermenschen forever (or at least, not in the form of coarse and ill-fitting explicit racial oppression; something a bit more subtle like a class system can of course coexist with liberal democracies forever). You can genocide them, or you can fully emancipate them, but history demonstrates that you can't keep kicking the oppression can down the road forever. And about genocide, let's be realistic; it is the civilisational equivalent of murder, the guilt of which is analogous to the guilt in a single (non-deranged) individual. It cannot have no effect. If you want to argue for the desirability of an America which had sent its formerly enslaved population to concentration camps once it was done with them... that actually would be interesting and I'd engage with it. But I doubt it's your belief.
Full legal and social emancipation, with all the calamities it entails, is a plaster (band-aid in American) that the US had to rip off sooner or later. An interesting counterfactual for you is this; what do you think would be the state of the US today if reconstruction of the slave regions had been completed in earnest and totally? This has been pulled off successfully in other societies; my understanding is that it's not a sociological impossiblitiy but rather a particular project which failed and was aabandoned in the 1870s US, only to be picked up again from the mid 20th. Really fascinating "what if?" there. And incidentally, lest you think Haiti is the only possible model of post-slavery societies in the western hemisphere: no! Look at Barbados, look at Jamaica; both pretty respectable societies that made a much better go of the same raw material, through better stewardship, institutions etc.
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
The Michelle Obama trans thing is a good example of the trade-offs that social liberalisation impose.
Like, back in the late 2000s, when Michelle Obama was not any more popular on the American right than today, I don't recall anyone proposing that she was trans, simply because "trans" was not on most people's radar.
Michelle Obama, and millions of other mannish-looking women, have been negatively impacted by trans liberation. Trans liberation has brought it into the realm of the thinkable, the reasonable, that any given mannish woman or petite man could in fact be biologically not their presenting gender. What previously would have been only a cruel, childish insinuation now has to be... seriously considered?
30 years ago, in a workplace, if someone had suggested that Sandra with the square shoulders, or Sarah with the sharp brow, was in fact a transsexual - this would just straightforwardly be a (fireable) insult. Now though, the same woman can be concern-trolled and made insecure by ostensible tolerance.
It's as though, in a future which continues leftward socially, we were to see emancipation of incest and "motherfucker?" become a polite and reasonable query.
I really feel for these mannish girls. When I was a teenager, I went out with a beautiful girl who nonetheless had kind of a square jaw - more square than mine anyway. She was terribly insecure generally (like most teenaged girls?) and I happened across an old photo of the pair of us in my parents' house yesterday and thought, damn, the way the shadow falls on our faces there - a 2020s teen might well read this pretty 2000s girl as actually trans
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
But actually there clearly is, or at least, it's reasonable that even an otherwise orthodoxly liberal young woman might not want to be read by strangers (potential romantic partners particularly) as MtF. There is a certain harm imposed by this.
The general public is no good at Bayes - there are quite a lot more mannish-looking women around than there are genuine MtFs. Yet now young people, even when looking at old photos from the twentieth century, are apparently having their trans-radars ping on like pictures of dowdy kitchen maids and 1940s housewives
An interesting point to consider in the utilitarian calculus of trans liberation
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
There's something subtly absurd about the use of the term "race-mixing" that gave me a chuckle there, nice
Otherwise this seems like a super super broad question. Are you asking about the psychological impact of doing a race-mix with someone, or the typical profile of a person who's inclined to racemix, or traits over-represented in their resultant offspring, or...?
Since it's a super-broad question, I'll toss in a couple of unscientific observations I find interesting.
First, in biracial people with one SSA-descended parent and one Euro-descended parent - those with a white dad are practically a different ethny to those with a white mum. This isn't hyperbole -I can very reliably discern white-dad from white-mum biracials with about the same accuracy I can discern western and southern Africans, say. And it's interesting because the world at large doesn't seem to put much stock in this distinction - I can't imagine environmental effects can plausibly account for the difference, rather it's because white men who shack up with black women tend to be very different in profile from white women who get knocked up by black men.
White-dad biracials are more upwardly mobile, competent, typically identify more with the white part of their ancestry once the dad is still present, and don't seem particularly blighted as a group. White-mum biracials are cut from different cloth entirely
I'm curious if there are other bi-racial pairings whose offspring differ greatly based on which parent is which ethnicity. I could see Jewish-Christian matches showing some interesting patterns, dependent on country. Arab-Euro matches might also have an interesting assymetry
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Okay I'll bite on the pictures: the first, more attractive, woman is the nice one who wrote the Slate piece, and the second woman is the one that wrote "Cat Person".
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
Degiro is a pretty standard choice if you're based in Europe - low transaction fees, good interface, reputable, and decent KYC (identity verification) process. I'd think they're fine for small retail investing, ie <€1m, beyond that point you might find a better experience elsewhere (not a concern for me lol)
Also, from your username you're based in Ireland right? Bear in mind that the taxation process on shares in Ireland is DREADFUL - it's both much dearer than a normal EU country and more cumbersome. An ETF specifically is taxed differently to ordinary single-share investment - for some ludicrous reason ETFs are taxed identically to ordinary income, not like a normal capital gain. This means if you're already at the highest rate (52% cumulative) all of your gains will be taxed at this rate. You're also hit with deemed disposal every seven years.
To bypass this there are a few UK products (eg Scottish Widows' Trust, can't recall the ticker) that basically mirror an ETF investment basket but are assessed as individual ordinary shares (ie 33% capital gains).
It's worth highlighting that you're unlikely to be audited any individual year, but if you're investing for the long haul the likelihood of you being hit at some point over eg a 20-year investing span is pretty unfavourable.
Bonne chance!
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Is the Motte supposed to be funny?
This is the funniest shit I've read all morning
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Nordstream was a Ukrainian op
Titus_1_16
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr ago
An interesting specification here:
a pretty (by conventional Western standards) blonde lead
Is the detail in the brackets really necessary? Is there really any hetrosexual man who wouldn't, in his heart of hearts, grant that this woman is at least "pretty"?
I mean perhaps there are some freaks who'd demur - but they'd simply be wrong. This is "pregnant people" hair-splitting.
If the word "pretty" means anything, and if there are any moral/æsthetic truths at all, then it's just simply true that this actress is "pretty".
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
Standard physiognomy win, nice
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
As much as Americans kvetch about their black people, there really is no population over there that's really comparable to Gypsies.
It's an unfair over-generalisation to assume, without any other evidence (habitus, dress, accent, etc) that some individual black American person has a meaningfully higher chance of committing crime. But with Gypsies, man, it's an iron law, there's not even a question. A gypsy president, or for that matter gypsy lawyer or doctor or other middle-class type, is inconceivable.
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
I'm biracial myself (white dad, black mom)
Slay, king. I genuinely had no idea while writing this, and wasn't trying to do some weird suck-up thing about the better outcomes for black-mum biracials. Do you agree on the possibility of reliably discerning white-mum and black-mum biracials?
A few further guesses here, for perfect stereotype accuracy - it'd be amazing if you let me know the accuracy of any of this, also feel free to tell me to fuck off. I'll limit myself to stuff that shouldn't be immediately inferable from the racial fact of their marriage (eg your folks are relatively open-minded, and your dad's overall less racist than your mum - no shit)
1)your mum's a bit nerdy and 2)benignly snobbish. 3) She's experienced at least one incident of serious depression 4) Your dad is quite a kind guy
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
young men that look a bit gay have not been smothered by concern trolls who insinuate they're actually gay
I'd say the main trade-off to our contemporary Western settlement on The Gay Question is that it has cast in suspicion huge swathes of male friendship, more than it has caused effete men to have a particularly harder time than they would have otherwise
It's a commonplace observation that male friendship outside the West can look pretty gay to modern Western eyes. Men holding hands, openly prioritising male relationships ahead of their romantic one with a woman, openly declaring love for one another, a warmth and intimacy that seems gay as hell to me, frankly, as a typical Western man.
It's also a commonplace observation that there's a crisis of loneliness in the West, more acutely among men, and downstream increases in depression, misery, suicidality and addiction and all the rest.
I don't think these two facts are unrelated, and I think that's quite a heavy burden that all Western men, and the women that like them, have borne for the ostensible liberation of our irrepressibly-gay brothers
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
I find it unsurprising and troubling that your sister went into psychiatry, the wooliest field of medicine which is least amenable to objective oversight (ie a bad psych can go unmolested for a long time in a way that a bad anæsthesiologist can not)
From the description you've provided it's... A bit horrifying that your sister is actually practicing as a doctor. I'm sure she says she "can do it", but look - there were plenty of conmen throughout the twentieth century who practiced as doctors, successfully, without any medical training. Even surgeons! And I'm sure plenty of their colleagues would have said they were fine doctors, not knowing about their absent/fraudulent qualifications. Many conmen did this for years and years!
The fact that your sister has not yet run into a situation where her incapacity causes some public disaster is meh.
If the description you've provided is accurate, she doesn't have the requisite mental equipment to be a doctor, and it's a serious indictment of whatever country's medical school she graduated from that she's practicing as one. Horrifying tbh
Titus_1_16
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr ago
You'd be wrong actually - Brazilians have congregated heavily in certain areas of Dublin and are widely viewed as a scourge there (eg, the area I live in, where this attack and subsequent riot took place - literally 100m from my flat).
True, they are more economically productive than the median African or Arab, but have some cultural traits that make them rub Irish people the wrong way. For one, they are more crassly materialistic than even Nigerians, and are heavily involved in every sort of vice trade.
Second, their sexual mores are extraordinarily lax in comparison to the Irish, who would be one of the more chaste European nations - prostitution in Dublin is dominated by Brazilians, and a "Brazilian wife" gives rise to the same sort of sniggering that a "Thai wife" might elicit elsewhere. Brazilians have a reputation as being ruthlessly mercenary in matters romantic, and the visa-marraige-to-ugly-man-until-passport-divorce is a very true pattern I've seen in a mate myself.
Third, they are facilely _un_cynical in a way that grates on Irish people - I have yet to get through a conversation with a Brazilian without them telling me about their "dream of Europe" in such a gormless way as would make a beauty pageant contestant squirm.
What's interesting is that Brazilians actually embody many of the traits that Irish people claim to dislike in Americans, with none of the redeeming characteristics whatsoever.
Titus_1_16
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
How offensive is the term "Abo" in Oz? Ive heard it's about on a par with "Paki" in the UK, or "Tranny" in the US. Ie not something to be said in polite company, firable offense if you're in a public-facing job, a kid in school would probably be suspended for taunting another with the term, but not absolutely taboo and referred to with an initialism?
On a scale of the N word (nincompoop) to the N word (redacted), where wpuld you place it? Closer to N, or N?
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
It's ubiquitous porno usage, not obesity. The Japanese example supports this heavily
Titus_1_16
2yr ago
Because they do business in Europe, ie sell to advertisers here. They could of course withdraw from the EU market if they though that was in their best interest.
OpenAI researchers warned of AI breakthrough before CEO ouster according to Reuters. It seems that, disappointingly, there's more to the Sama exit than just petty politics.
I had found myself greatly reassured by the thought that, actually, this whole debacle was just (human) politics as usual - and not the eerie dawn of some new era.
Have other motizens noticed a substantial disconnect between their foremost worry the past while, and that of the normies in their life? Everyone else is chanting for Palestine, and I'm chanting sotto voce for a decade or two more of human supremacy before the singularity. And anytime I could comfort myself by the thought that, well, Serious People are not yet concerned, I see some preposterous headline from selfsame Serious People about how hillwalking is white supremacy, or equivalent bullshit. The illusion is bollocked.
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