WestphalianPeace
No bio...
User ID: 184
WestphalianPeace
19hr ago
do you see 75k as "you now have enough money to avoid living wildly inefficiently, you can now start putting the extra into the market" or as "if you've already saved up to this point, 75k compounding with everything in VTI will keep you safe for the rest of your life. even if you're incapable of picking stocks"
WestphalianPeace
21hr ago
whenever I see these "I got so rich now i'm retired" posts all can I wonder is not "how do I emulate you" but rather "what is your advise for the mass of peasants with some money to their name who are not you, and cannot become you"
WestphalianPeace
8d ago
it's worth reiterating that the heritability of political views is extremely high. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4038932/
More than half a century of research in genetics, neuroscience and psychology has demonstrated that human behaviors, including social and political attitudes, are influenced by genetic and neurobiological factors.........[Authors] pioneered this radical departure, finding that genetic variance accounted for a substantial portion of individual differences in conservatism, sub-dimensions of social, economic and defense ideologies, as well as individual social and political attitudes. Additional twin and extended kinship studies which included parents, non-twin siblings, spouses, and twins reared apart confirmed these earlier results and found that most individual political attitudes were influenced by a combination of genetic effects (which explain between 30 and 60% of variance) and environmental influence. In this way, children resemble their parents because of their genetic relatedness as much as parental upbringing and social environments.
block quote edited for readability
not disagreeing with you. just adding for emphasis because it's easy to forget just how large a factor it is on people's outlooks.
WestphalianPeace
11d ago
What a time to be alive
WestphalianPeace
11d ago
Imagine a world where Marxists ardently claim that Index investing is the next "Stage of Investment" that "Rearranges the Mode of Investment", and which "Structures Capital in its latest stage, making new Social Relations possible" (investing in the first place)
Meanwhile the culture war continues and anti-marxists claim index funds prevent entrepreneurial spirit in individuals and therefor must be avoided at all costs.
WestphalianPeace
12d ago
The very simple answer is to claim that all Lenin-Stalin thought is actually deviation from authentic Marxist Stage Theory. To develop a Plain Reading of Marx that advocates for capitalism as a matter of development and productive capacity as a further step towards actual Marxism.
You take credit for every advance in GDP. Whenever a country implements market reforms and grows that's Actual Communism. When a country flounders that's Deviationism. Cheap electricity? A sign of future Marxism. Rising house prices? State deviationism away from Marxist overabundance. Ozempic is Marxist. High Speed Rail is Marxist. Forests are Marxist. Breathable air is Marxist. You take credit for all the gains of capitalism but disavow any ownership local tensions. You conflate development with historical destiny, you disavow all failures as tragedies of our age will will, eventually, at an unspecified time, be overcome once The Next Stage of History comes into being.
You buy the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index to keep your 250 million alive. There is no contradiction. You use some of your proceeds to pay people to write books, science fiction, and fan fiction. You live a quite life. Your goal isn't to build a gym and show how change is possible now. Your goal is to entice people with a possibility of the future. Your friends call you Fabius. No one gets the reference. Nothing should ever be available now. Communism will arrive "Like a thief in the Night" and "No one knows the time or hour". The uneducated will find these phrases self-evident, although they can't quite place why they find them intuitive.
Yours is not a Vanguard Party of action, but a vanguard party of thought. Whose goal isn't to instantiate communism, that of course is a historical necessity driven by new Modes of Production whose being isn't conceivable yet but which the capitalist mode must eventually create, but rather your goal is to keep alive the communist dream among some educated few because it is beautiful. You turn theory away from the drab of Actually Having to Do Something. Instead your society becomes a society of dreamers, a society of romantics who feel self assured in their inevitable destiny and who want to spread the word not out of revolution against capitalism, but out of love of the vision. You avoid all communist iconography. You avoid the Red, the hammer and sickle, the Socialist Realism. Those are deviations and you won't be tarnished by them. You indulge in a little identification by calling yourself "historically Parisian in outlook". No one gets the reference.
You spend half of the returns from your Index position on your project. the other half remains with you personally. You die 30 years later a Billionare.
WestphalianPeace
20d ago
KulakRevolt has a long history of outlandish failed geopolitical predictions and should be read more as entertainment than as prophecy.
My personal favorite being a strong prediction that Egypt would invade Israel after Oct 6th in support of Hamas
WestphalianPeace
3mo ago
I would pair Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics with the ACX Book review of Hannania's Public Choice Theory & The Illusion of Grand Strategy. The two are complementary in that they are complete contradictions. Understanding the internal logic of both is a good foundation to be able to call bullshit on other people's spouting off regarding IR.
I think International Relations theory is tragically under considered. Too often people first form a domestic political sense of "what should be" and then scale it up to the world stage, instead of first asking "what is" and then figuring out what they value that can be done within that context.
WestphalianPeace
4mo ago
I had a Starting Strength phase and Rippetoe arguing that lifting for aesthetics is stupid but if you going to be stupid at least do it right and listen to this guy was my first introduction to him. And i take that recommendation seriously. Everything i've learned since that has only reinforced that positive impression on me.
WestphalianPeace
4mo ago
for what it's worth I have a prior for trust in Legion Athletics. The owner has a few niche (i'm talking 200 person views) podcasts where he's getting into the weeds about getting pissed off about not being able to get random samples for a given product and having to drop it as a result. His entire schtick is about competing by being not "unverified from cheaper chinese factory" and if you keep digging you'll see him complain about things like "i can't put out a COQ10 supplement because i can't compete on cost because i can't find a verifiable source that'll let me do a random sample"
his old multivitamin ad had a gigantic eye watering list of why is justifies each ingredient with a given study but he had to take it down because people didn't care and it basically him satisfying his own fitness autism.
so, if you need specifically a plant based protein (whey is still king for non-plant based), I put my weight behind seriously considering his products.
his is also the only not-Nootropics Depot sleep supplement that has the AcX recomended dose of melatonin, which increases my inclination towards his other stuff since most companies just do a megadose of melatonin
WestphalianPeace
8mo ago
The war situation has developed not necessarily to Gaza's favor.
WestphalianPeace
8mo ago
iirc this has already happened in South Korea.
I suppose it's only a matter of time.
Such is life.
WestphalianPeace
8mo ago
i can see some cashiers wearing these to protect themselves from accusations of rudeness/racism.
"gimme cigarettes."
- "of course, what type"
"newps"
- "grabs Newports"
"no the tall pack"
- "*grabs the tall pack"
"no the tall soft pack man. what the fuck"
- "of course sir. one moment. *grabs newport softpack 100's". I just need to scan your ID"
"man what the fuck. fuck you. you saying I look like a kid"
- "I'm sorry sir. I just have to scan the ID of anyone who looks under 30" (guy looks 17)
"this is bullshit. you racist man. fuck you. i wanna see your manager man. what the fuck"
- "grabs manager"
"hey i just wanted to get cigarettes and he's acting all racist. calling me a kid. and rude too. you know how he does this?"
it's a nationwide scourge. and, wanting to avoid an escalation scene, a company is absolutely inclined to throw a peon under the bus if it means avoiding a nationwide scandal.
at some point people in low status positions whose jobs are under daily threat will start to look to technology like this to protect themselves.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
your link does not seem to work.
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
Eliezer is 'The Prophet', aka the originator. and Scott is 'the rightful caliph', aka successor.
in cultural influence Scott exceeded Eliezer years & years ago.
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
tl; dr
“Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying—which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one’s native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter’s weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free;” ― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
epistemic status: Not a Fanon scholar. Pretty much this.
Everything I say is going to be crude but direct. A Fanon-ist would disagree with my characterization, instead opting for language and terms that takes his world view in more gushing tones. Nevertheless I think my characterization is broadly correctly.
Fanon believed colonization had wormed its way into the character and self-conception of every colonized people. That the very ethnic identity of everyone living under colonial rule had altered their morals, values, ethnic self-conception, and ultimately, their own personal psychology. He mixes Marxism, esoteric psychology, and Race/ethnicity and comes up with own model of colonization as psychological totalitarianism. That colonial rule has tainted everything with no escape. So what is to be done? How do you liberate your people and also yourself when you live in a totalitarian system?
You commit acts of violence. You get your whole community together and bomb innocent civilians. You beat up innocent passerby's because they are of the race of your colonial masters. Because there are no innocents. Because they are part of the colonial power structure.
and when you do that you personally rupture yourself away from the Colonial Worldview. Your personal acts of violence emancipate you from the totalitarian thought control of your overlords. All of this from exploding disco's where young people went to dance.
He structures this all in extremely high-falutin terms. terms which are absolute catnip to a certain type of intellectual inclined to give the status of High Cause to what is, on the ground, really just old tribal-brain us vs them hatred. Colonialism is frozen Hegelian dialectic between colonizer and colonized. Violence breaks the frozen system and restarts the dialectic so that the oppressed can restart progress.
"In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich"
So lets compare to Singapore & Zimbabwe
Lee Kuan Yee's first language was English. His grandfather named him Harry. He once had the British Foreign Secretary
threw an arm around Lee. "Harry," he said, "You're the best bloody Englishman East of Suez."
Later he visits London and notices
"...he travelled to Piccadilly Circus by tube train, and as he emerged onto the pavement he stood and watched an unsupervised newspaper stall. He saw people stop and take a newspaper and then put their money in an old cardboard box next to the stall. He even saw people put in money notes and take out exactly the right change. Otherwise, no one interfered with or touched the money left uncovered and open to the world. He said to himself 'This is a well-ordered and disciplined society.'
....."he returned to Singapore determined that his country would be run on the principles he saw in operation in this country. Inspired by the level of social order and respect for private property he had witnessed during his visit to the UK, he not only changed Singapore from a war-ravaged and desperately poor country into one of the wealthiest of nations, but he also made it one of the safest; it now has one of the lowest crime ate of any modern developed country."
LKY then works tirelessly to work with an incredibly complicated multi-ethnic city-state. But everything is done pragmatically. It's about making sure every community feels like they are being given a fair shake in their city. That not one is exploiting them just because they are small, but also that meritocracy itself isn't being dismantled for the sake of equity. There is a ruthless pragmatism, but never an outlook of resentment.
For Fanon this hard fought public safety & ethnic harmony isn't success. This is total failure. Abdication of the fight for Liberation & Decolonization. Algeria ethnically cleansed itself of 13% of it's population to free itself from European influence/psychology/ways of knowing/epistemics/ethics/etc. Now it has dignity. That's success. Meanwhile LKY has become the colonizer himself. His society is a farcical continuation of colonization by "westernized elites". Only now without the British having to do the heavy work.
In this sense even Zimbabwe is richer than Singapore. Because Zimbabwe has overthrown is colonial superstructure for native rule. It's people might be poorer as a matter of GDP. But they are mentally far richer since, having committed prolonged acts of violence against their colonial masters, they've emancipated their minds from colonial influence.
“For a colonized people the most essential value, because [it is] the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” ― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
WestphalianPeace
11mo ago
When Uganda decolonized it immediately engaged in ethnic expulsion of 90% of it's businesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Uganda
At the time of their deportation Indians owned 90% of the country's businesses and accounted for 90% of Uganda's tax revenue. The real value of salaries and wages plummeted by 90% in less than a decade following the expulsion
Zimbabwe promptly used literally North Korea trained death squads to commit genocide against the Ndebele as soon as it could.
Algeria promptly ethnically cleansed 10% of it's population upon de-colonization. About 1 million Pied Noir were expelled. No one calls it ethnic cleansing or genocide though, because they were told they had a choice. the choice given to them:
the suitcase or the coffin
Kenyan independence immediately led the the complete destruction of the Arabs of Zanzibar.
Even Singapore itself was effectively born from ethnic race riots. See the 1964 Race Riots. Plural.
I blame our collective forgetting about it all on Franz Fanon. Who made it clear that ethnic hate wasn't a coincidence, it was the point. He would regard modern Singapore as a failure and modern Zimbabwe as success.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I'm Old Stock born in Toronto with family in Brampton. Every single expression of whatever the name given to my culture is treated as the most heinous evil possible that must be 'dismantled' as quickly as possible. I am mostly in mourning.
well why not? Canada is an uncountry, comprised of no one, & representing nothing.
Canadians do not even exist. There is no Canadian history and no Canadian culture. There is a Quebecois/First Nations history, and any annexation of Quebec/First Nations should be negotiated separately. But Canada is merely a term of geography in which nations reside, not a nation in itself. Not a controversial idea. The government proclaims it regularly, lest anyone look back farther than June 15th, 1964.
Maybe there was once a culture called Canada. But it's long dead now. Canada is now Terra Nullis. It's for no one and belongs to no one. So annexation is completely acceptable.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
Going off memory. Change your worldview from saving's as a denial of your income to instead that of "Paying Yourself First". Your saving's are something to be smiled upon and take pride in. Not a prevention of your ability to consume.
For the average person, get out of the cycle of living on whatever is your current income and instead get into the simplest of all possible budget plans.
Save 10% of your income. Pay off your debts. Then, once stable, invest.
It's a bit folksy. Often it's advise is outdated from an era of "just give him a good handshake and explain your situation". But humans intuit stories better than raw lists, and the advise is great for someone who is otherwise winging it at life.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
Wesphalian Peace mentioned in proxy!
Occasional reminder that the Nazi's rhetorical explanation for giving up at the end of ww2 was "if this continues the devastation will approach that of the 30 years war and we don't want that"
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
Such a great series.
Novawar (now Iamnova) also did an entire let's play of Legend of Dragoon for those who are irrationally attached to that ancient rpg.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I would completely agree that the World Issue is also the United States. I consider the important difference to be that of familiarity. Countries have been navigating a world with the US as a Great Power for 100 years, and as a Superpower for 30-60 depending on your definition. China is relatively new, and every country, ngo, and ethnicity has to navigate that space of what it means for them now that China's back.
In the 50's China was still 80%+ farming. In the 70's it was still 77% farming. Today it affects every single industrial chain in the world and the Pentagon is tearing it's hair out trying to figure out how to build anything without it relying on Chinese firms at some point. The Great Divergence was an assumed global condition.
Behold this comparative composition of world GDP by country over time.
The world has known a what it means on a daily basis to deal with European & American global dominance. But that Chinese trendline? That collapse 200 years ago and sharp rise to today? That's something new. Because it's one thing when a country is massive but it's pre-industrial. Zheng He sought tribute, not Naval bases in Djibouti. This is a genuine arrival of a new industrial power on a world scale. And every country from Colombia to Kenya has to account for it.
I'd love to read those US DoD comments if you can drag up the link. Not challenging it as wrong. Just enjoy reading this kinda stuff.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
China. The world issue is China. In 1600 China was 29% of world GDP. By 1913 it was 8%. A small island nation on the fringes of Europe was capable of crossing the entire globe and imposing it's will upon the Heavenly Kingdom. Austria-Hungary, that corpse of an empire, would send troops to fight the Boxers. Germany had concession near Beijing.
Today the Chinese fraction of world GDP is back to ~20% and rising. It has aircraft carriers. It's the number one trading partner of almost every nation on earth. It's over 50% of world steel production. Over 50% of concrete production. Every single supply chain in the world interacts with China. In 1990 Shenzhen has 800k people. Today it has over 17 million. An entire NYC greater metro area has been birthed between that book in 1992 and today. And every country in the world has to adjust. The entire globe has gone from treating China as a non-issue to having to reconcile the return of China to global affairs. A world stage unseen for literally hundreds of years. What does the Chinese leadership want? How integrated should each nation be with it? How can any global treaty be efficacious if China is not on board?
Do you want to affect climate change? China is over 50% of global coal consumption. Chinese domestic coal consumption is a World Issue.
Do you want to affect global poverty? Chinese development alone has done the majority of lifting the global poor out of poverty, by sheer population scale. Any growing market today has to consider China as a factor, whereas previously the only game in town was the West.
Global security? World Peace? China. Now that Russia has torn itself asunder in Ukraine China is the last source of Great Power conflict.
For the longest time 'global issues' were just a proxy for 'concerns of the global community'. which in turn just meant this map. Now every country, on all issues, has to deal with sheer scale of the factor that China is back.
Blessed is he who can avoid lifestyle inflation
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