Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
That level is almost certainly associated with real risks for liver and cardiovascular diseases, but my bigger worry would just be trajectory. It seems to me that if someone can't go down from five drinks per night, there is a pretty significant chance that they will eventually go up instead, and that this is a ratchet.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
what does The Motte think about moderate drinking?
As with almost every single thing, I think it's likely to be a marginal effect. Seed oils, a bit of booze, grassfed beef, some vitamin or other, high fructose corn syrup, caffeine... whatever. I think properly measured these things all pretty much blend into the background and have no meaningful impact on general health, wellness, physical ability, or longevity barring an actual significant deficiency or severe overuse. Stay reasonably lean, move around a bunch, pick up heavy things from time to time, and that'll get almost every bit of predictable benefit that you can get from health choices.
Every time I dig into studies that say otherwise, they appear to be complete garbage.
(For the record, I think drink at least somewhat too much and expect that it comes with at least some adverse risk down the road - I'm not trying to come up with some cope for why I'm actually totally fine.)
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
There are broader arguments here, but I want to pick at a couple of the smaller bits:
a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition
This condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be referred to as "fascism" in any meaningful sense. Nazism was more occult than religious, Pinochetism doesn't have much relation to religion, Oswald Mosley wasn't interested in Anglican authoritarianism.
To be more direct, the United States doesn't really have much of a fundamentalist religious tradition - it's a religiously pluralist country where the largest single religion is Catholicism, and it's a squishy strain at that.
violence
The American right broadly and Trumpists more narrowly are just not very violent at all. The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks. This wasn't nothing, I didn't like it because I don't like riots, but the political violence in the United States has been primarily racialized (BLM riots and associated violence) or Islamist (various acts of terrorism) for decades.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I broadly agree, but with the footnote that you don't really need a radical break, you just need a consistent policy of saying that no on one showing up from Central America is actually a refugee. This is (in principle, not practice) easy to accomplish, because approximately none of them actually are refugees. Almost all of them that say the magic words and claim to be threatened aren't. Their countries suck, their countries are super violent, everyone there is at risk all the time, but no, they're not actually being targeted for political, ethnic, or religious violence. Recognizing every ridiculous and obviously false claim to refugee status was a much more radical approach than doing the opposite.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I think being a homer is pretty analogous to the snail darter situation. The person involved probably does intellectually realize that they're playing fast and loose with the facts, but they want it to be true and they're willing to sand off any rough edges around the facts to get where they want to go.
Depending on the circumstance, there are definitely things where I would prefer that my interlocutor thinks I'm bullshitting them for personal gain than that they think I'm just such a simpleton that I don't grasp the facts. I unironically think it's more of a show of respect to say, "I think you don't really believe that and are making an instrumental argument" than saying, "I think you're incredibly stupid".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Never?
I don't buy it. If I'm watching a football game with a huge fan of a team and they express some opinion about a call that's just super obviously wrong, I think it's more charitable to say, "dude, you're a homer" than it is to say, "you don't understand the basics of the rules here".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
This further undermines the environmental protection position, right? They invented a fake species to try to stop a dam from being built, the dam got build, and the fake species still lives there. At some point, it's more charitable to think that the "conservationists" here are a bunch of liars that just want to stop things from being built than the alternative, which is that they aren't capable of identifying species and have no idea whether the species they just invented will even be impacted.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I don't think anything happened that I'm not just about on the same page with, to be honest. The only difference is the inclination to articulate it rather than sticking to norms. As mentioned in a couple of my recent posts about the death penalty, I am really having trouble sticking with politeness around certain issues, and things like Rotherham and Islamist bullshit pretty well top that list.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Mechanics have no trouble telling you what it will cost to take a look at your car. They'll post their hourly rate and let you know that if it's just [X] they'll figure it out pretty quick, but it might take [Y] hours if it winds up being the transmission instead. Ask a physician what their hourly rate is for diagnostic services and you will be likely to receive much less transparency and possibly a look of indignance that you'd be so gauche as to reduce their priestly actions to mere labor.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
The crazy person explanation doesn't really require any extra steps or additional information. He may well have believed that he needed to get this information to Pete Hegseth and that he was staving off the feds by carrying explosives in a rented Cybertruck if he'd had a bad break with reality. I think the simple crazy person explanation more or less puts a bow on a lot of questions along the lines of, "why the hell would he do X?" that I'd had about the choice of hotel, choice of Cybertruck, incompetent bombmaking, and so on. The answers are all that his reasoning had broken from reality and could not reasonably be expected to remain consistent from one moment to the next.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Yeah, there are many scams where the scammer isn't actually doing anything illegal, they're just relying on people's anxiety with saying, "no, fuck off". All the way down to beggars trying to guilt people into giving them money for gas with a ridiculous sob story, all the way up to patent-trolling and blackmail. For the party being harassed, there is both the cost-benefit analysis of what it takes to get your harasser to go away to the skillfully crafted guilt or anxiety inducing attack on their conscience.
As an addendum, one small thing that I really hate about this is how developing the hardened shell of being quick to tell people to fuck off subverts judgment and charitable behavior towards people. Years ago, maybe about a decade now, an indigent looking man in a wheelchair tried to stop my wife and I on the sidewalk. I ignored him on the basis that he was almost certainly trying to get money. My wife stopped; it turned out all he wanted for someone to pick up his lighter that he'd dropped (there was no add-on begging, he thanked her kindly and everyone went about their day). I felt bad about that and still do, but my alternative would be hearing approximately 38 bullshit stories that end in, "so I need $20" for every one disabled guy that just needs a hand with something real quick.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I'll once again note that various excuses about how a treating physician probably can't really know what things cost ring hollow for anyone with a decent veterinarian. That end of things is admittedly a newish experience for me, but when I take my dog to the vet and he presents treatment options, I can inquire what they cost and his reply is, "about [$X], but I can get the exact number for you if you want". That physicians cannot do this for much narrower ranges of practice indicates an incentive structure for not knowing what things cost.
Lawyers can debate...
I genuinely believe this is the part that triggers so many people to feel the way they do about Luigi. Guys like Brian Thompson make tens of millions of dollars and if anyone has a problem with it, they can get their lawyers to take it up with his lawyers, who will all make a shitload of money arguing with each other, lying for hire and making arguments that no one actually believes and that most laymen can't even understand. I'm surprised that others are surprised that profitable Kafka rituals occasionally trigger rage.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
The wildest part of the transaction situation, to me, is how many people feel personally wed to the corporation in a way that they're frustrated by colleagues preferring additional compensation to exercising the misguided loyalty of sticking with a company that will drop them as soon as their expected future marginal product is negative. Employer-employee relations are inherently an adversarial collaboration for any employee that doesn't have substantial ownership stake in the corporation. Forgetting this is incredibly foolish.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Were these Pakistani monsters worse than the Japanese during WWII? Were the British toffs who let it happen worse than the genteel Germans who looked the other way?
The Brits that allowed it might or might not be worse, but they're more pathetic. Collaborators are often held in even lower esteem than invaders. The Pakistani gangs are an alien, evil group of invaders. That's horrible, but it's intelligible. If you could find a Chinese guy that was worrying about anti-Japanese sentiment on New Year's Eve of 1937 in Nanking, I'd probably hate him even more than the Japanese soldiers raping their way through the city.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
What happens when it comes time to find that material?
At this point, I'm ambivalent. There are independent journalists that are doing good work with Patreon-style funding. The incentive structures and institutions at play are concerning and I don't have much confidence in how this will shake out in the medium term, but it's not obvious to me that the answer will be generalized enshittification of journalism. If I were inclined to be optimistic, it would be by considering how the variety of content platforms in television have led to some niche products that are really good. If I were inclined to be pessimistic, it would be by noting that the variety of content platforms mostly turn out a bunch of absolute garbage and what you wind up consuming is not necessarily driven by quality. We'll see.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I guess, to be fair, he really is a Texas man rather than someone from Saudi Arabia with thin ties to Texas. Details are still emerging, but this is an African-American born in Beaumont that served in the US military and was later converted to Islamist ideology. He is probably also a literal crazy guy. I'm as quick to blame Islam as just about anyone and I'll certainly do so again here, but it isn't misleading to refer to him as a Texas man as long as you also include the ISIS information alongside it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I assume there's some joke I'm missing here, but you're aware that Trump is not the President at the moment, right? Personally, I think it would be good if we appeared to actually have a President at the moment, but we don't.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
OK, I guess if I thought I couldn't learn anything physical, I'd just give up too.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I don't expect that this will be helpful, but this honestly just sounds ridiculous to me. I know guys in their 40s running PRs, guys in their 50s lifting heavy, guys in their 60s doing cool projects. Yeah, some things are going to be gone to the sands of time when it comes to being the best you could ever possibly have been, but learning and accomplishing news things remains entirely feasible well into middle-age and beyond. You're going to wind up dead eventually either way, why would that dissuade you from learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu today?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Islamism is internally consistent, not crazy, it's just evil.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Speaking anecdotally as a moderately serious running hobbyist that runs with pretty strong athletes in a club, I would say that there is no meaningful difference in training between men and women above some (fairly low) level of running. By the time you get to even low-level college running, the women are generally pretty serious. I'm sure there are noticeable filters in terms of how many people are interested in going into these things in the first place, but among elite athletes, the training regimens are just not dramatically different. Everyone that doesn't get injured from it is running 100+ mile weeks with some mixture of VO2max intervals, lactic threshold work, and long runs. Women aren't just casually competing at a surprisingly high level, the women at that level are putting in the same rigorous training that the men are.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances.
This is not a great point! The claim is based on extremely thin evidence from a few races that don't include genuinely top-tier athletes. At all distances that have been optimized by deep fields of professionals, men run ~10-12% faster than women with no dramatic diminishment at long distances. There are bioplausible reasons for women to get more competitive at extreme distances (or at least requiring less aggressive fueling), but the evidence for it is scanty at best.
Perhaps more to the point, considered in the context of hunting, it really doesn't make much sense to be talking about 200 mile races. Men are faster at every distance that a human would plausibly have covered during a normal day and this difference widens if they're forced to carry any sort of kit with them.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
No, because dogs should be leashed (or so predictably well behaved that this wouldn't happen). Controlling your dog is part of the basic social requirements of owning a dog. I will probably tend to think Y overreacted unless there is actually an apparent threat, but the entire situation is created by X not fulfilling the basic requirements of owning a dog.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
It’s like the white person version of playing one’s music loudly on public transportation. It’s a flex, finding pleasure in imposing yourself upon others, enjoying the discomfort of others, and daring others for a confrontation.
If anything, this argument makes me think differently about speakers-on-the-train guy. I had always assumed that it was a dominance display, but I suppose it entirely possible that they're just actually baffled that anyone would find it offensive. If I take my dog out to a park or a bar with a patio, I do not gain any flexing dominance pleasure and experience nothing but an eyeroll at people that are so deeply affronted by it. I'll grant that there are places that I don't think people should have dogs, but even there, I'm more annoyed by people that are histrionically frightened of dogs than I am by the guy that probably shouldn't have brought his dog into the convenient store.
Except pit bulls, of course. I despise pit bulls.
Yeah, this is a good and correct point. I waffled a bit about how I wanted to phrase it, because we certainly do have fundamentalists and not just a few of them. My objection is that phrasing it as "a fundamentalist religious tradition" suggests to me that this is a uniting force that is a key element of the current Trumpist movement. While some fundamentalists are part of that movement, they aren't exactly steering the ship - JD Vance is Catholic, Musk isn't religious, Vivek is (I think) Hindu, and the Cabinet nominees are a mishmash of different religions and constituencies. So, what I mean to say is not that the United States lacks fundamentalist religions, but that it isn't a fundamentalist nation and the Trump coalition does not emphasize fundamentalism. I unironically think integralist Catholics have more political sway with this administration than young Earth creationists.
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