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Titus_1_16


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 08 23:25:49 UTC

				

User ID: 1045

Titus_1_16


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 08 23:25:49 UTC

					

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User ID: 1045

Id rather get wet a few mornings a week than deal with obesity and heart disease from physical inactivity. I charitably attribute Americans' fatness to your car-centricity: if you think it's actually just pure moral torpor, and the cars are an unrelated co-incidence, then fair play to you.

Car-development gives diffuse malus and discrete bonus (ie a dry and comfortable commute), whereas walking is the inverse

Nordstream was a Ukrainian op

This is a wittier version of the same point I was going to make - bravo

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)

Being a Mediterranean is even worse than being a chihuahua.

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

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?"

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?

Is the Motte supposed to be funny?

This is the funniest shit I've read all morning

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.

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...

Super interesting, and you're quite correct: relatively mild criticism as it goes

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

Personally I think a 50 year limitation seems fair.

Do you agree that Israel should stop accepting their annual "sorry" payments from the German government, pursuing old men who were Nazis, etc?

It strikes me that it's basically impossible to make proper restitution for millions murdered, but relatively easy to make whole someone that's had their land connived and stolen away from them. If anything, all the Israeli schmaltz and guilt about WW2 should stop well before the Palestinians give up on regaining their rightful homes.

As an experienced pedatn, I enjoyed the fact that the line morphed from the grammatically correct "How would you feel now if you hadn't eaten breakfast?" to the strictly incorrect "How would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast?"

Obviously look it's variation in dialect, blah blah prescriptivism, but I still found it funny

Ishiguro is British, not American.

I don't wonder; I'm quite certain they'd all be dead in a decade, or whatever is the longest possible period you can run on predatory cannibalism.

Re: eating well all the time, it sounds like you've accidentally reinvented French food culture. I don't think it's a problem, but it may certainly be a shock to the system if you have an Anglophone background

That name is actually Sadhbh, not Sidhbh.

Very nice old Irish name, pronounced "sive".

For sure the main focus in a market as saturated as that for soft drinks in the US is more focused on expanding a slice than growing the pie, but both effects are there.

Coke still spends $x to shift y units of Coke; it's largely immaterial to them whether those concumers would otherwise drink Dr Brown or nothing.

If there were no advertising for soft drinks in the US, what do you think the effect on overall consumption would be?

And are you referring to Irish colonisation by the Viking kingdom based in Dublin in the late first millennium, or are you referring to an Irish colonization that happened much earlier?

The latter. There were Gaelic polities that preceded the big Viking one - this is how Scotland came to speak Gaelic, and how the Picts were pushed east prior to Viking invasion

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"

Sorry, that was a failure to convey tone correctly on my part - I agree with the busywork proposal, I wasn't being facetious. Perhaps some holy commandments like an obligation to pray x number of times per day etc

Right, so the AI creates busywork for humanity.

All this schmoozing you're describing is generally a really inefficient/old-fashioned way of doing things actually. You'd still do it sometimes in high-level business development, or maybe high-end account management/partner management, but it's honestly very niche. >90% of sales people at big tech are not doing anything like this stuff.

There certainly is a minimum charisma/personability bar for sales, but it's lower than you'd think. The work of modern tech sales people is closer to, say, what those in the 2000s "seduction" community used to do: think about interactions in a very methodical way which is totally inappropriate for True Love but actually quite applicable for tech sales. Except with emails and video calls instead of, you know, bars and booze.

The key thing salespeople do that's difficult, is to cause an outcome they have no direct control over. Coping with that inherent uncontrollability/vulnerability is what most people hate doing (ie experiencing a lot of rejection despite possibly having done an objectively good job).

I'd also contend that outside Enterpise sales (this segment generally not the biggest money-maker for companies, though it's the most highly-paid and desirable role to sell in) it's rarely efficient to persuade a person; more generally a rep is looking to act as a catalyst for a course of action that genuinely is in a client's best interest, but which left to their own devices they might never bother to do/investigate.