cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
7d ago
Someone being reasonable and apolitical can definitely draw that line. It's just that it's too easy for bad actors to start being political.
cjet79
2mo ago
Scott's post begs the question though: what does he think reform of the institutions looks like? I think what we are seeing is what we should have expected.
Governing institutions in a democracy cannot survive by being only trusted by one political party.
What will it take to restore most Republican's trust? Either gutting those institutions entirely, or reforming them with punitive measures until they seem cowed and fully cooperative.
Thatcher and Reagan in the 80s are some of the more recent examples of this phenomenon.
The left isn't capable of reforming institutions, just like the right isn't capable of reigning in their strong-men (and women). They need each other to play those roles. And obviously if you identify more with one side than the other you don't like having to be the side that reigns in the other. My side's honest mistakes and forgiveable excesses, are the other sides willful maliciousness and unforgivable escalations.
I recently spoke with my mother who has worked on cancer research contracts with NIH. She is a lifelong moderate Democrat (pro choice). She had spoken in fearful tones about Trump and Doge. But recently when Doge began taking an axe to medical programs she sounded pretty happy. Apparently they cut some kind of dog cancer research program that my mom always thought was dumb (there is some joke in there about DOGE's meme name sake, but I'm too lazy to find it). Her words were basically that they cut the things she would have cut.
I live in the northern Virginia area. I know many people who work in government. The common refrain is that "yes they definitely needed to trim the fat and slim down government, but this just seems crazy the way they are doing it". But there was an opportunity to trim the fat during the Biden administration and they didn't take it. They were too busy starting dog cancer research programs. So maybe this is the only way you cut things, with a side of bad ideas from a strongman willing to do it.
cjet79
23d ago
I think it is more of a symptom of the breakdown of communities. Shame works pretty well for someone within your congregation.
Someone with no attachments to others? No family, no religious community, no coworkers, etc. it's gonna bounce right off them.
cjet79
2mo ago
I grew up in the 90's and 00's. I always had the sense that women did not enjoy sex and barely tolerated men. This somehow came up in a drunk conversation with my mother at some point and she was a bit horrified. "No I never told you that! Women like sex! Your dad and I..." I cut her off at that point, didn't need to hear more. But it feels pretty clear to me that I picked up this idea from media sources. And yet I can't point to a single particular example.
I can't imagine how things have gotten even worse since that time.
I do feel that putting the onus on parents to either raise better men or women is misplaced. I'd first turn to Hollywood or other culture makers and say "stop making such shitty culture". I have memories and can point to specific times when my parents took the right approach with me. My dad telling me that he was never willing to have sex with a woman he didn't want to have a kid with (he seemed to want kids though, so I don't know how much of a restriction that was), and him making jokes about not sticking your dick in crazy. My mother being concerned for my emotional well being after silly breakups in middle school, and her insisting on us watching a discovery channel show that was basically sex ed. Them telling their kids that they wanted grand babies, just not while we were in highschool or college. I remember them showing signs of affection towards each other, and forgiveness after they fought with one another.
TV shows and movies still managed to do a number on me, and on those around me. After all I can't count on how other kids are raised but I can usually count on them having a similar cultural soup they grew up in.
From a practical perspective applying the social responsibility to cultural producers also seems easier. It feels like they've weaseled out of that responsibility somehow. I'm happy to reward shows like Bluey that have good parental figures. But they seem like rare glowing exceptions instead of the rule.
Should we expect all parents to explain to their teen kids how Chani's love in Dune seems slightly off, or should we lean on Dennis with criticisms of the film that his interpretation of love sucks. Of course we can do both, but the latter seems fat more effective for the level of effort involved and reward expected.
cjet79
30d ago
There does seem to be a huge range in health outcomes, so that might be why it sort of gets tabooed. We have a neighbor in her early thirties that just gave birth to her 5th kid. She did it at home in a rental bathtub thing. She says her pregnancy was great, and aside from the discomfort of having a bowling ball in her uterus was otherwise totally fine. One of my wife's best friends growing up got a form of blood poisoning during the pregnancy and she died along with her second child.
My wife's pregnancies have slowly gotten worse and more difficult. We are both pretty sure we are done after our third just arrived a few months ago. Two of the pregnancies have been "geriatric" pregnancies, and the rates of complications start going up a frightening clip at these ages. For that reason alone I've become way more against more pregnancies.
You mentioned being in your lower thirties, my only advice would be to avoid geriatric pregnancies at all costs. If you think you'll really desperately want a kid later, then have one now instead. If you are already gonna be in geriatric pregnancy realm (35) I'd suggest stopping while you are ahead. 3 kids is great.
cjet79
14d ago
I love being at the pool in the summer. I live in Virginia which is hot and muggy in the summer but still snows a few times in the winter. I hate cold weather. Anything freezing and below is too cold for me.
Hot weather and sweat is something I can sort of adapt to and deal with for a few hours. I've been to India in August/September. It's not pleasant if there isn't a pool I can jump into, but I'd much rather deal with that than a cold winter.
Without a pool, perfect weather is just whatever allows me to live outside as if it was inside. Post rainstorm in the summer is pretty awesome, cuz it also tends to tamp down on the bugs for a little bit.
cjet79
3mo ago
This is one of the topics that really broke my trust with the medical 'experts', along with the covid stuff.
There are some basic common sense things to know about medicine and if someone is going to make a claim contradicting it they need to have a lot of evidence and some damn good explanations.
The idea that halting a major development milestone would be harmless breaks every bit of common sense about child health. The idea that infection with a sickness does not grant any kind of immunity is also insane.
cjet79
1mo ago
I'm in favor of the libertarian paradise option.
There are two failure modes of the FDA:
- Letting bad drugs through that on net injure people.
- Slowing or stopping good drugs that on net help people.
The natural and personal and business incentives already heavily align towards getting good drugs out there, and not taking bad drugs.
You seem well informed, I'm surprised you even mention a drug killing a 100 people. I would shrug my shoulders at a thousand. FDA drug delays have estimated kill rates in the hundreds of thousands for some heart medications.
Optimal situation in my mind would be to switch FDA over to a certification regime rather than a licensing regime. This is basically the same thing I say about all government regulation, but I say it about everything because I think its a good idea. Certify that a thing is safe and not harmful, but do not require that certification for selling or consuming of the substance. Companies can submit their drugs to be certified, and the FDA runs those tests. They also run some number of public interest tests every year, like for fish oil or whatever.
And yeah, who knows wtf will happen with JFK at the helm.
He also just released The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID.
I went and looked into the death rate a little more. Found this graph of the trend. Here is a fun game: spot when covid starts.
There has been a year over year increase in the death rate by about 1% starting in 2014 and hasn't started shrinking much until 2024. What the hell is going on?
I have a suspicion that old people have just been getting older. And that those old people are dying more during flu season. And that the excess death chart from 2018-2019 would line up pretty well with an excess death chart from 2020-2021. But that would probably take a lot of effort to figure out. I dont even know where to get month to month death numbers, tried asking some AI to help me find it, but sounds like its not publicly available.
edit: data i found is bad, nybbler has better data below.
cjet79
23d ago
I think they just nominated Trump as king and kind of based all social standing on his level of approval. Which works as a quick way to build an alternative system, but maybe is not the best long term solution.
cjet79
29d ago
I think I remember some IRS rule going into effect a decade ago that said that if you renounced US citizenship you get taxed on all your assets as if they were income for that year.
I only knew about this because I studiously have followed libertarian arguments for a long time, including "if you don't like it you should leave" and the rejoinder now being obvious "ya and have a third of all my wealth stolen for the privilege of leaving, thanks assholes".
I think there was a lot of people leaving right before this rule went into effect.
cjet79
24d ago
Bikes yield to everyone on nature paths and it has not effectively banned them at all. Instead such paths are filled with bikers.
I'd be fine with bikes only on streets in areas of less than 30mph speeds. As soon as it hits 35 though they are asking cars to generally slow down to accommodate them. At 45mph I think they are a danger to themselves and all other drivers.
I'm fine with effectively banning what I'd consider "racing cycling" this ain't the tour de France. Just like highways aren't NASCAR or formula 1. All people in shared commute spaces have to sacrifice the top speed of their vehicle for the safety of themselves and others.
cjet79
1mo ago
The Dream, 1947 The Dream was Churchill’s fanciful short story about conversing with his long-dead father in 1947. In it he explains all that had happened since his father died in 1895. The full text is available. Referring again to the Holocaust, he spoke of the two World Wars:
“Papa,” I said, “in each of them about thirty million men were killed in battle. In the last one seven million were murdered in cold blood, mainly by the Germans. They made human slaughter-pens like the Chicago stockyards. Europe is a ruin. Many of her cities have been blown to pieces by bombs. Ten capitals in Eastern Europe are in Russian hands…. Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order. But, having gone through so much, we do not despair.”8
That wasn't hard to find.
cjet79
1mo ago
This is a little wild of a prediction given that it already seems to be proven wrong.
Current gen AIs already seem poised to be pretty disruptive.
I think the main reason they are not as disruptive is because they aren't done cooking. Why try and squeeze out work from an AI right now when the AI will be better and cheaper in 6 months?
cjet79
2mo ago
I admittedly laughed when I saw the Trump in a pope outfit and a headline about what he said.
Hard to explain humor. It was just someone ridiculous doing something ridiculous.
I can also understand that plenty of people might not find it funny at all.
cjet79
1mo ago
I think I'm a little bit broken in my set of preferences for certain art forms. For a long time I've lacked the ability to understand and explain why. Video games have helped, but music might have the best metaphor, even if it doesn't apply to me.
First, imagine that there is an objective ranking for how good a piece of music can be. The ranking stands regardless of individual preferences. More sophisticated listeners who can appreciate music better will have their preferences more in line with this objective ranking.
Second, imagine you have some unique ears, and the sound of string instruments just really bothers you. So you prefer any music without string instruments.
Most of the best music includes some string instruments, so you end up not liking most of the "best" music. The best rating doesn't require string instruments, its just that it makes some things easier in the course of crafting the music. A theoretical best song could be crafted that has no string instruments, it would just be much more difficult. Your tastes end up looking very unsophisticated. You gravitate towards an amateur community of song writers that share your hatred of string instruments, and some of them are just bad at writing any songs with string instruments. They write songs that are relatively bad on the objective ranking, but it removes string instruments at least, so it becomes more tolerable than mainstream stuff for you.
Something like this has happened to me in regards to reading and literature. There are common story elements like certain foreshadowing techniques and certain character development tricks that really grate on me. And there are story settings that I dislike, mostly modern and non-magical settings are boring to me.
I've ended up in a weird spot, like the stringed instrument hater. I can only really enjoy the other authors that also hate stringed instruments, or the amateurs that can't even write stringed instruments into their music. I am probably reading stories and literature that is "objectively" worse on some cosmic literature scale, and I'm well aware that it makes my tastes look unsophisticated and "bad" to the elites of the literature world. But I can't stop and won't stop, because I have some subjective preferences that entirely override the importance of the objective scale.
cjet79
1mo ago
I think Caplan's biggest miss is actually on theory of mind. He is a very conscientious and non-neurotic individual. The idea of mental illness seems basically incomprehensible to him. He accepts that these people exist, but his personal interactions with them are heavily minimized because he is good at cutting them out of his life.
He lives in immigrant heavy Northern Virginia. He is aware of and happy with many cultural changes that happen due to immigration. He can go in depth on crime statistics with people, and the take-away is that immigrants are relatively low-crime compared to native born Americans. They sometimes look high crime because young men are high crime, and immigrants also skew towards young men. Any objection you think you have about immigration that Caplan has not answered, he has certainly heard and answered.
One last thing I'd add, he is much more of a microeconomics professor than a macro one. I consider that a huge plus, because macro is voodoo stats BS.
cjet79
3mo ago
Or you end up with something like the Jones act and basically destroy the industry by making sure they never compete and they turn into parasites.
cjet79
1mo ago
Base voter preferences would still be mostly the same, and I think politicians mostly respond to voter desires.
There would end up being two types of politicians. The demagogues that flaunt the risk, and the timid that shy away from it. The demagogues would have even more power because there would be few to opposed them.
cjet79
27d ago
I've been reading the murderbot series after watching a few episodes of the show and deciding I liked it and didn't want to wait.
cjet79
3mo ago
It's partly that they flipped all the standards of evidence on their head.
Interventions were considered safe until proven otherwise. Masking young kids in school, widespread adoption of a novel medical treatment (MRNA "vaccines"), puberty blockers, etc.
Covid is basically a flu/cold virus. All intuitions about such things turned out to basically be correct. And there was good evidence that was true in 2020 but they spent nearly four more years dragging it on. Unless you were part of a BLM protest, and then things were fine.
Biology can often be weird and unintuitive I get that. But when it gets weird is when you need more evidence and research, not a political wall of silence saying "you are a bad person if you don't believe us".
I literally cannot imagine a non life threatening scenario where hormone therapies would be allowed for kids. Hormones are definitely one of those systems that we don't understand very well. We know that getting it wrong can even cause life threatening conditions. We correctly vilify anyone giving out steroids to teen athletes, this seems just as dangerous and permanent.
cjet79
24d ago
Original article was proposing enforcement of rules against bikers. I do know that cities often have cops on bicycles.
Maximum speed and some enforced guidelines on sidewalks sounds great. Where places are less dense enforcement would be hard but also less necessary as there would be fewer pedestrians.
Roadways for motorized vehicles, sidewalks for human powered things.
cjet79
1mo ago
I don't understand why you kept putting classical liberal in quotation marks.
I'm pretty adjacent to classical liberals. It might be the second or third term I describe myself with (an-cap and libertarian being the other words). I feel it necessary to respond to your descriptions of classical liberals.
"Classical liberals" like to hit sentimental ideologues with cold hard facts.
This is a fun thing to do. I think I liked doing it before I was ever an-cap/classical liberal/libertarian. Back then it was arguing evolution vs creationism with people in myspace groups. But other people like Ben Shapiro are not classical liberals, and that is like his whole shtick. The classical liberals are also sentimental about quite a few things, Adam Smith, the founding fathers, the enlightenment, etc. So I'd call this a weird and mostly uncorrelated description of classical liberals.
A true "classical liberal" would treat his ideas the same way he treats everyone else's, as hypotheses to be tested against reality.
I'd say that is more of the rationalist's shtick. Its again another weird description where it sorta fits, but fits other groups better, and also doesn't fit in some glaring cases. Most classical liberals will point to American and Britain in the late 1700s and 1800s as sort of shining beacon examples. They do in fact happily and openly privilege ideas coming out of those time periods.
"Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities? As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one.
The results have not been stellar, but they've also been fighting back against it longer than conservatives have even been aware that it is a problem. FIRE is one such organization. They have also carried out and implemented their solution. Classical liberals generally outnumber conservatives in the university. Ya they are both super outnumbered by liberals and the left. But the libertarianish/classical liberal guys have go on a targetted campaign to develop stellar academics and an academic support network that can allow their own to survive in an otherwise hostile environment. Do they have society wide solution for the problem? No, of course not, they don't have society wide power to even think about implementing such a thing. That is for the conservatives to carry out. But there is no point in trading one enemy for another.
Haidt seems to object not to the specifics of what DeSantis did, but to the notion that any radical changes could be made to even a single college unless they're driven from within the academic caste.
Quick aside: I hope you don't think Haidt is a classical liberal, here is a quote from the man:
"But it’s also that once I switched my research over from culture to politics, and once I began criticizing the ideas on the Left and the Democratic Party — for many years I was doing it to try to help them win."
He calls himself a political centrist these days, but I still think he is mostly a democrat that thinks the democrats went a little too far. Either way he is not a classical liberal.
There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.
You are right in the first sentence. It is certainly not classical liberal. Which is why most classical liberals don't like it. Most classical liberals do not think universities should be subsidized at all. You'll find some that are sort of adjacent to classical liberals that think basic research should be funded (Tyler Cowen). But anyone with an ounce of understanding of economics can realize that education is a private good, and that private goods are handled just fine by markets. It misses the mark so badly that I can't help but think maybe you are again talking about some other group. Until I read your last few paragraphs, and you seem to have understood their actual ideology all along.
I don't know who you are reading that is calling themself a classical liberal. I'd read these guys if you want an actual example of classical liberals examining higher education: https://www.amazon.com/Cracks-Ivory-Tower-Higher-Education/dp/0190846283
cjet79
2mo ago
I read your posts and just hope your children against the odds manage to become well-adjusted adults despite your efforts
Perhaps this is my bias as a parent, but insulting the way people raise their kids is often a step beyond insulting them personally.
"You are an asshole" is less antagonistic than "Your kids are assholes, and it is your fault".
Take a time out. 3 day ban.
America dodged a bullet when Trump dodged one.
Don't think any other event in my lifetime has been so close to setting off a civil war.
I know at least two men that are a combination of drunk, belligerent, massive Trump supporters, and in possession of enough firearms that they could have easily turned into a problem. The problem is that I don't know tons of country rednecks, maybe a dozen. So that is probably a bad sign of just how fucked things might have gotten.
Their goal wouldn't have been taking control of the government, it would have been shooting the politicians they didn't like.
At best it wouldn't have been a civil war, just a decade or two of people deciding it's ok to shoot politicians they don't like and all the impacts of that norm.
By comparison we are fine nowadays. There is always going to be a low background noise if violence and murder in a country this size. Certainly sucks when it's you or someone you know that is the victim. But as long as you are staying out of certain cities and areas you are unlikely to be that victim.
What sets off ugly civil wars is being forced to choose sides. "Help me find the rebels or I torture you until I'm satisfied you don't know" vs "Help me hide from the government or my friends come back and kill you and your family". It doesn't start that bad, just a case of ping ponging escalating consequences.
More options
Context Copy link