coffee_enjoyer
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Why are Americans falling behind in “brain-y” competitions? Or, if we haven’t fallen behind, why have we always been bad at them?
League of Legends is holding their Worlds competition, and most of the North American region teams did not make it past the first stage. The performance of NA teams has been poor compared to Chinese and Korean teams. The one NA team that has done okay is mainly comprised of non-Americans. The NA region actually has more players than the Korean region, and there are serious incentives to get a high-performing team together.
I have also noticed that in the chess world, most of the top grandmasters are first or second generation Americans. Despite only comprising 25% of Americans, they make up 19 of the top 20 players (only Sam Shankland afaik is the exception). It is not as if the immigrant competitors are all from the former Soviet Union or another chess-heavy region, either, but you find Italy, the Philippines, Japan, and China represented too. (Possibly, because Hispanics are so much of 1st/2nd gen but not represented in chess world, it could be more like 5% make up 95%.)
What explains the loss of American high achievers in intellectual competitions? Google Code has similar results, as does Overwatch. Could there be an environmental cause?
Chess World Controversy
After rising player Hans Niemann defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen as black (when wins are unusual), Magnus insinuated that Hans cheated and quit the ongoing tournament. Internet detectives and Magnus fanboys leapt at the opportunity to discover the truth and/or administer mob justice. Chess commentators, lead by popular Twitch streamer and top player Hikaru, analyzed Han’s post-game interview looking for clues. Lots of unsubstantiated claims followed: that he showed signs of guilt, that he made up a past game position in his analysis to hide that he cheated (later proven wrong), that Hans was faking his accent, that Hans was unable to justify his chess positions, and so on. The stronger evidence is that Hans claimed to have looked at the chess variation that Magnus chose as white, which is improbable (like 0.01%). However, Hans has a strategy of getting in opponents’ heads, and claiming to be able to predict the opponents’ preparations is a great way to do that.
The controversy goes on, and is made up of many parts.
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That Magnus insinuated and withdrew has led to many now saying “he is kind of a dick”, as chess teacher Ben Finegold put it. Magnus had a pure reputation before, but it was known he handled losses poorly. Magnus’ withdrawal, due to a technicality in the tournament rules, means that he keeps his high FIDE rating, while Hans’ win is somewhat discounted. Magnus’ silence since his tweet is blameworthy.
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Hans cheated online at chess.com when he was 12, and again when he was 17. He is now 19. The cheating two years ago was not in a competitive setting and was allegedly to increase his online rating to entice stream viewers. There has been no claim that he has cheated except in these two instances, and he has never cheated in a competition.
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Chess.com has allowed him to continue playing since his 2017 cheating incident. But after this week’s (unevidenced) cheating claim against Hans, chess.com banned him from future tournaments, costing him significsnt career opportunities and prize moneys. What’s curious about this is that chess.com is buying out Play Magnus, a separate company that Magnus has a relationship with. Did Magnus apply pressure on Chess.com to ban Hans? This would be more serious than other parts of the controversy, as it would mean that Magnus is one of the worst sore losers in chess history, not just hurting an opponent’s reputation but using backroom influence to take away his opportunities.
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Some chess players, like Hikaru and Naroditsky, leapt at the opportunity to accuse Hans, while others with greater reputation (eg Kasparov) defended him. There is now a stable opinion online that Hans did not cheat and that Magnus is in the wrong, but this took three days post-allegation to develop. Interestingly, it seemed like the chess players who were competitors to Hans were the ones eager to take him down, while the older greats defended him and pleaded for measured opinions.
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It should be noted they Hans’ had a meteoric rise in rating over the past year, one of the greatest in history. At 19, he has years left of improvement. So we’re dealing with potential world champion material, not just a random contender.
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There is rigorous cheating detection at this tournament (Sinquefeld Cup, St Louis), TSA-like security. Since the accusation they implemented even more security measures. The theories on how he cheated are truly bizarre, from Hans having an antenna in his hair, to having swallowed a chip that vibrated in morse code, to having inserted a vibrating ”device” sublingually to alert him on tactics, to Godfather-esque hidden bathroom devices. I’m not joking.
If I can don my conspiracy hat for a moment, Hans is opened his remarks after his Magnus win by talking about how he doesn’t want to be canceled for misspeaking (about Magnus having “tics”, when the PC term would be mannerisms). A keen eye would sense that Hans is not so progressive. Chess is political, with former champion Kasparov constantly in the news with his anti-Russian, Russian players banned from playing in certain tournaments, former leading chess players criticized (but not more) for claiming women cannot be as good as male players due to biology, etc. I wonder whether there are interests behind the scenes that do not want to see a Fischer-esque personality rise in popularity.
Links:
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Hans post-win analysis: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DCeJrItfQqw
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Hikaru insinuation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5qTs-eFgLqc
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Hans post-insinuation defense (a strong defense, as blackened reputation, Hans-variation), which earned him much respect online: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJZuT-_kij0
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Hans beating Hikaru, just for fun: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EJTg-emEAjQ
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Hans being beaten by Naroditsky, just for fun: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ddc-C3SqidI
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The funniest chess teacher, Ben Finegold: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DMxJbJGGKgQ
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If you want to play chess, use Lichess.com. Chess.com appears as a link because that’s the name of the company.
Google, the most influential and powerful search engine in America, which most Americans use when searching for product information, released a propaganda music video advising everyone to only buy from black people. Buy what, only from black people? Everything. During a specific day as a kind of protest? No, every single day of the year. This follows Google’s decision to artificially boost black-owned businesses on their Maps app, giving these businesses a special eye-catching symbol.
Buying All Black - Ludacris feat. Flo Milli (A Google #BlackOwnedFriday Anthem)
“It’s time to buy black. All day, every day. Choose black 24/7, 365.
The music video goes on to tell the audience to “buy black” thirty times, while the Google-funded music video showcases individuals searching for black-owned businesses of every variety, from restaurants to salons.
I for one, am less than enthusiastic about the hegemonic consumer search engine producing propaganda advising consumers to never shop at a white-owned business. I’m less concerned with the music video, which received 15 million impressions on YouTube alone (a Google product), than with the underlying sentiment that clearly permeates through the business. I’m afraid of what Google is doing behind the scenes in terms of showing services, and whether they are going to artificially reduce exposure to a business owned by the ancestor of an Irish slave, in favor of a wealthy and privileged Nigerian immigrant whose ancestors owned many slaves.
Ban porn, subsidize prostitutes: a modest defense of whoring
The popular view is that masturbating to porn is fine, and using the services of prostitutes is not so fine. Porn is not a poor man’s prostitute, but instead a cleaner acceptable method of sexual satisfaction. You might joke with a friend, like Markiplier on the Logan Paul podcast, that you gave up porn because the two-hour wank sessions got old. Were Markiplier to say he recently gave up prostitutes, which he had been using for a decade, the conversation would have taken a somber tone. Yet for most of Western history, this moral calculation was inverted. Masturbation was seen as worse vice than than the vice girl. Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Voltaire, and Richard Wagner all thought the solitary vice more dangerous than the sex worker. Why would this be?
We don’t need to get too bogged down in the historical miscellany and theological glosses. For starters, our ancestors noted that fucking a woman is more natural than fucking a hand. But this was not haughty naturalistic phallicy. This is complex. Due to the nature of human habit and memory, obtaining satisfaction from a woman promotes and orients a man’s sexuality toward women, and not oneself. Let’s flesh this out. On the first level, once you’ve completed the intended act with the harlot, a memory is formed in which all preceding sensations cue for satisfaction of the urge. There’s [urge -> satisfaction from woman], but we can go deeper. There’s [urge -> WOMAN -> satisfaction from woman], with all the sensations of a woman encoding sexual satisfaction: pheromones, tone of voice, clothing, mannerisms, and importantly socializing with a woman, implicating your social personality and hers. This works to develop a craving associated with all the sensations of women, increasing the desire for the company of real women and the formation of relationships and marriages. There is one more social benefit, which is that the [dressing up -> traveling -> paying] is more prosocial than opening a tab on a laptop, and associating sex with money is great salience on the value of money.
If sex were the Milky Way and the earth were a wife, prostitutes would be Venus and porn would be Pluto. It’s very far away, and it’s not even a planet.
But the argument is yet to reach its climax. Prostitutes are seen as dirty, and this again betrays our modern misunderstanding of psychology. Going out, away from your home and work, to purge your desire with a woman is a way to keep your home and work life free from the cognitive “stain” of sex, because the whole sexiness is entrenched in its own unique context. The home and office, and the home office, are clean of memories and cues of intercourse — you have ejaculated these cues far away from your “pure” life. There’s no risk of Toobin-ing all over your keyboard after a zoom meeting, because your computer has no cues related to sex. Instead, your conception of sex is caught up in a web of strong cues, all of which are related to real life women.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
The only realistic move is to organize into a tight religious in-group, because: religion is the best way to train the young’s’ spiritual/mental immune system against political propaganda, religion is the best way to transmit cultural/philosophical concerns, and (most of all) America offers strong religious protections which would allow you to live sequestered away from normal life in America. Note that (while I think Western Christianity is the best) your religion need not be fantastical or even really theistic. Unitarian Universalism for instance is simply the progressive worldview codified into religious dogma and adorned in tax protections. There’s nothing stopping a conservative from establishing a religion that believes in Spinoza’s God, believes that the Western classics were divinely inspired, or even believes that certain developed populations are God’s chosen people. Now your community’s resources can be pooled together without taxes, you can establish schools with a religious and conduct requirement, etc
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Large companies have zero incentive to reduce prices when they know that their competitor will do the same. McDonald’s has actually sued 12 of the major national meat suppliers for price-fixing simply based on the fact that each supplier knew the others’ pricing due to a shared analytic tool. All it takes is one reasonably intelligent analyst at the meat supplier board room to ask “so what happens if we lower our prices” for all to realize it’s an unprofitable move.
https://www.fooddive.com/news/mcdonalds-sues-meat-companies-pork-price-fixing/637572/
If you are McDonald’s and there’s a Wendy’s across the street, you have two options. You can both keep your prices high and split the pool of consumers 50/50, knowing that stressed American consumers will continue to buy your slop because it is time-efficient and they have formed a habit to your addictive slop. Or you can lower your prices, which the competitor will do next week, which leaves you back to the first option only with less profit. Of course they don’t do this. But if a brand new competitor moves in who doesn’t play ball, perhaps they will do this to squeeze him out — no new competitor can compete with the supply chain and the institutional knowledge of McDonald’s.
It’s an entrenched mythology of capitalism that companies lower prices based on competition. This hardly ever works in the real world. There’s no reason, for instance, for OnlyFans to rake in billions of dollars when anyone can create a similar site. But OnlyFans isn’t profitable because their service is better, but because the pornographer who operated it made the site a meme among the public (a kind of psychological rentseeking), because he had the previous institutional knowledge and capital to do this. And you see with car dealerships, there’s no reason for any used car dealership owner to make tens of millions. But in an intensive competition what they do is compete over psychologically manipulating the vulnerable, so the car dealerships compete over misleading pricing plans, overpriced itemization that the customer doesn’t have the knowledge to dispute, etc. It is horrifically inefficient and immoral as a system and it is only maintained due to various mythologies in the public imagination.
A 28yo man with an excellent job, a wealthy nest egg, and a reasonable attractiveness and personality is an amazing catch for girls 18-38. If he has no intention of starting a family until 32, he can have a harem of women who are also intelligent and relatively successful. These women should know that they have no chance with him, and that it’s male nature to have as many women as possible. For some reason, most likely a glitch in the female brain that society used to remedy with expectations/shame, this doesn’t happen.
I find the “gender war” angle boring and unfruitful. We can think beyond culpability. The current setup simply doesn’t work from the standpoint of human nature and incentive. So a low income earner who is a dim prospect should simply find someone out of America, because there’s high odds his “stats matched” partner is being used by someone else or otherwise lacks the ability to discern her true level of sexual worth
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
It seems to me that his identity is more aligned with a progressive identity than a conservative one. He is the product of a progressive lax culture, not a conservative one. He’s the child of a drug addicted porn star father and a felon mother. His father was addicted to meth, a commonly abused drug in the gay nightclub scene. His parents’ lifestyle was the opposite of conservative.
The fact that he was previously charged for threatening to blow up his mother’s house strongly suggests that he targeted the sexually promiscuous nightclub because of its similarity to his father (in his mind). Clearly he had an interest in violence against his parents before.
If you want less of these kinds of attacks, what is the best course of action?
- Well, there’s absolutely no association between anti-gay belief and attacks on gays. Many millions of Americans are heavily invested in being anti-LGBT, but they don’t attack gays. Muslims and Orthodox Jews hardly have any interest in attacking gays, despite being anti-LGBT.
- There’s a stronger relationship between shooters and broken families / traumatic childhoods, in particular absent fathers.
To best prevent future cases of this sort of violence, producing even more lgbt propaganda will accomplish nothing (it’s already omnipresent after all), but fixing society and keening families together would probably help. It would be more advantageous to actually extol the value of a stable mother-father marriage, versus continually talking about gays
Fecund privilege and the oppression of those who do everything right
Democratic and progressive ideology assume that each person ought to be valued the same in equations of political power. Representatives are allotted according to the number of inhabitants, presidential elections are dictated by the popular vote of states, and equity calculations are informed by population percentages. The infrastructure of our popular ideology is undergirded by a strange and rather aged idea, that each individual magically gets the same political points of influence at birth, regardless of any greater social concern. Yet this way of thinking breaks down when real world social justice claims are considered.
Imagine a situation like the Rwandan Civil War, where the Tutsi minority were killed en masse by the Hutu and their population significantly reduced. It is not morally sufficient to compensate the families who lost loved ones and to punish individual actors. The loss in political power of the Tutsi demands justice, because their reduction in population along with their impoverishment leads to a real loss of political power. Ignoring the specific details of the actual Rwandan events and political system (for example’s sake), in a basic model of democracy the Tutsi could have their future completely controlled by their genociders forever, because the political power lost due to reduced population/fertility is not compensated. The Tutsi would have a legitimate moral claim to re-exert their old political power, and yet our old “magic value” way of thinking about democracy contains none of the complexity necessary to make sense of the Tutsi claim. Adherents can only glue the justice together with ad hoc formulations, perhaps implementing a regional governance system or property compensation system or something other thing which avoids the real substance of the claim. This proves that there are moral considerations involving democratic power that are not adequately addressed by fecund privileged ideology.
For a second thought experiment, imagine two regions of a nation with different cultural values and interests. As chance would have it, a neighboring country invades one region and a defense is launched, and the invaded region valiantly defends the whole of the nation from the invaders. As a consequence their population is halved. The region behaved perfectly and sacrificed itself for the whole of the nation is now the one who might forever lose its past political influence. Does the “sacrificing” region have a moral claim that their loss of political power should be compensated in some form? If they do not, then the basis of our political system appears capricious and superstitious. A constituency of a nation can do all the right things and be harmed from it, or can be harmed from chance. And this for reason other than the idea that the number of current human lives is somehow inexplicably valued over every greater concern, despite this number being essentially governed by chance and historically untied to production or any good.
Perhaps one last example. Within a tribe of 400 humans, 100 of them decide to spend more time working for the good of society, spending more hours raising up two great children versus their neighbors who have 8 and spend little time with them. Within the current fecund privileged system of democracy, the tribesmen who are putting in effort to make the whole of society better by raising better children wind up worse off than their less-caring neighbors, who inherit more of the tribe, whose families increase in influence, and who proliferate their habits and genes. (Remember that humans are living organisms governed by concerns of gene proliferation as much as a fruit fly or gorilla, and it makes no sense to pretend it isn’t so, but even without genes, we can see how worse habits are proliferated). The tribesmen who make the better decision are punished in influence.
To hit home on my bolded assertion above: A constituency of a nation can do all the right things and be harmed from it, or can be harmed from chance. Our society, implicitly and explicitly, discourages high fecundity among those who do absolutely everything right. Our best and most obedient citizens are pressured toward paths that make fecundity difficult, and are propagandized to actually place a ceiling on their number of progeny. They are told that overpopulation is a problem and they incorporate that idea into their future family plans. They are doing everything right and their ancestors will be punished for it, with reduced political power due to the capricious notion of fecund privilege. Their cultural, behavioral, and genetic legacy is irrevocably worsened for making the right choices.
The children of our best doctors will have their power dwarfed by the children of a random 7/11 attendant who happens to be a Salafist, or a Hasidic person who abuses tax schemes to study only his holy book, or an Amish farmer who contributes little to the polity, or the migrants of a random Nigerian that chose children over more prosocial concerns. The legitimate moral concerns of our best citizens have no way to be expressed through the decrepit ideology of “magical political power allotment” and “fecund privilege”. The result is that the descendants, constituency, culture, genes etc of our best and brightest are oppressed by those who simply ignored the greater moral concerns and popped out more babies.
coffee_enjoyer
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20d ago
How does a social progressive respond to the Amish Question, namely that the Amish have a better quality of life according to nearly all objective indicators? (Including but not limited to: lower suicide risk, greater longevity, lower female depression risk, greater sense of purpose, greater community, lower cancer and diabetes risk, negligible drug and alcohol use, lower carbon footprint, and lower income inequality)
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
The problem that religions face regarding hell is that the adherent can pick whether or not to believe in it, and whether or not to go to church or believe in anything at all. Hell as a concept is ultimate punishment in the psychological sense; it is ultimate deterrence, so the point is to modify our present behavior. As a method of ultimate deterrence it can’t be triumphed over by good deeds. Why? For too many reasons to list really, but the big ones are: doing good deeds for their own sake puts the focus on an action, whereas morality comes from focusing on the Good which is God, and there would be no need to focus on the Good if a simple ToDo list saves all eternal ills; not every person can immediately do good deeds, even if they are essentially on a perfect moral path given their past behavior, which could lead to people like alcoholics and the infirm to feel that they are damned until they are cured; it reduces a person‘s interest in all religion, if all Good can be received from a simple checklist, and Christianity is a religion designed to socialize morality communally within the fully human Christ.
If hell is perfect deterrence, a huge problem arises in how to condition a person into this deterrence who is not seriously religious. A serious Christian sees the options as heaven or hell, but someone less religious sees it as “non-hell and probably heaven” vs hell. In other words, they are deterred from buying into the deterrence. Why have a fear of hell, when I’ll have less fear if I don’t believe it at all? So in order to even buy into the punishment of hell, you need to first buy into religion generally; in the same way that first you need the boy to sign up for the Great War, and only later can you force him to walk through no man’s land at the battle of the Somme.
This is very ironic, but hell is only for the believers. It is for the believers in the sense that the believers reap the full harvest of fearing hell. But in order for the magic of hell to work, you need to be always and perpetually saved from it by knowing the next moral action or step. And, in an ideal variant of Christianity, this is Christ — the socialized Good — and every step in your moral life would be his very steps on his path.
I am a big fan of hell, as an idea. It should be conceived of as not an additional thing to fear, but instead the One True Fear. So the kids today who are afraid that their zoomer haircut isn’t perm’d well enough, or that the Taylor Swift tickets are sold out — all of their petty fears would be sublimated to one great fear, the fear of evilness (which in Christian thought is eradicated from believing and imitating Christ).
[edited this comment significantly to clarify + to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]
Re: “Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion”, it should be noted that Judaism is an ethno-religion. An ethno-religion that doesn’t convert also runs into some moral quandaries. There’s a big movement in the Jewish World based around Chabad, and according to the foundational text of Chabad, the Tanya, gentiles have a naturally more evil soul and Jews have a soul with a “divine spark”. This is a mainstream lesson at Chabad-friendly synagogues. The religion of Judaism in its more conservative variants is extremist in this sense. “Praying three times a day that apostates have no hope” is also normative, which can be contrasted to the Christian prayer of praying for conversion and enlightenment.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
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The war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
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There is a longterm dysgenic effect with 2 kids per household, because the way human fertility is designed to work is that ~8 births occur and perhaps 1 or 2 of the healthiest go on to have 8-12 births themselves. A norm of 2 births is a norm of decreasing health over generations until the problems become apocalyptic.
- In America, even without mass immigration, you have the high fertility of the ultra Orthodox Jews. So unless you want a future without music or art or equality or indigenous Europeans it’s a good idea to incentivize births. Eg 200k in New York, doubling every 20 years means hundreds of millions within 200 years. And they already wield an absurd amount of political power in New York
Some of Zelensky’s appearances strongly suggest he uses a green screen. With technology it is trivial to place Zelensky anywhere you want in Ukraine. I do not believe for one moment that he spends a majority of his time in Ukraine. But that’s neither hero nor there, because it is a smart choice to base your operations in Poland.
What makes Zelensky not a hero is that nothing he does is heroic. It is not heroic to be the figurehead for NATO operations in Ukraine. It is not heroic to be the darling of an oligarch who already fled to Israel, who boosted him up to Presidency. It is not heroic to sign someone else’s children up to die or to command to shoot defectors when they leave. Zelensky has only moderate skin in the game, no matter what he will be safe in NATO territory.
Ask “if Zelensky were a coward, what would he do differently?” Here we have to rely on the claim that he spends most of his time in Ukraine. Everything else he would do is identical. Even a coward can be secretly bussed into Ukraine from time to time for a photo shoot like in Bucha, and the claim “Zelensky is in Kyiv!” is suspect given the nature of 21st century warfare and technology.
coffee_enjoyer
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25d ago
The alternative theories are as follows:
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Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed. We should expect very high starvation numbers in isolated concentration camps given that the Germans themselves were starving all over Germany, and they would feed themselves before feeding other nationalities. There’s even the question of, “these people are obviously going to starve to death, should we let them cannibalize themselves to the last man or take them out of their misery?” A lot of the infrastructure to supply concentration camps was bombed. The mainstream historical assertions about Jewish fatalities shows shockingly low typhus death rates which make no sense in light of the typhus death rates we see from the Civil War, WW1, Russians in WWII, and shipping voyage logs. Sometimes this question is answered by the fact that Germans really really cared about cleanliness in their camps, hence the delousing chambers, but this makes little sense in light of genocidal intent and the survivor testimony that confirms frequent typhus bouts.
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Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII (holocaust historians claim that every figure of the Jewish population from before WWII undercounted areas of Russia by millions).
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Many Jews after the war assimilated with a non-Jewish identity.
I don’t think holocaust proponents grasp how strong the motive would be to to cement a holocaust narrative. You effectively demoralize Germany, a rival nation that “caused” two wars and which historically created the upperclass of Europe. You effectively seal the moral superiority of America. If the Allied bombing campaign led to millions of starvation deaths among Jewish camp captives, this would be grounds for criticism, but instead the blame is solely laid on Germans. You bulwark against any European nationalism movement because this threatens American hegemony. You justify the creation of Israel and retcon the reputation of Jews as predatory moneylenders to “burnt offering” lambs (literally the word “holocaust”). And lastly you perfect all the neat psy-op techniques that you started in WW1, which also consisted of gas chambers and torturing people etc.
police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist
Well that’s the thing, in my opinion even the most virulent 20th century European racist would not gas family after family of downtrodden Jews. This is inexplicable when you consider (1) there were no camp whistleblowers, not even a friend or family member of a camp member who was confided in, which is improbable, (2) the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen. I don’t know, can you imagine hundreds or thousands of Russian soldiers putting family after family of innocent Ukrainians to death by gassing, women and children in all? None of them leaking or whistleblowing? And most of them, even when age has taken away their inhibitions, maintain that it didn’t happen? This is improbable to me.
coffee_enjoyer
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3mo ago
I think you’ve kind of elaborated on the wrong things (although I’m interested to hear more about the skateboarding and if we know any of the same spots).
The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview
But what are they? I do too though. I believe that there is a human instinct for retribution that has been delegitimized in academic penal theory regarding deterrence, and that a victim is actually owed this retributive justice because it instinctively feels good and its omission is a harm. Additionally I think that there are some things humans naturally find disgusting, and that disgust is also a harm (in a lesser but similar way that assault is a harm), and I found the class I took on Rawls laughable because the professor a priori denied that a person has a right to not feel disgust while possessing a right to not be slapped.
castrated our society's ability to discuss certain topics
But what topics?
Penny / Neely
I definitely agree here. Once a civil authority can no longer predictably keep you safe from crime or make satisfaction after the event, you should have the right to inflict corrective corporal punishment on the criminal provided you have sufficient evidence of the crime occurring (video recording). This is doubly true if the crime will not be investigated or if the response time is greater than half an hour. Our idea of withholding personal justice is predicated on the faith that our victimhood will be satisfied by a higher civil power. It’s also truly insane from a psychological position of (ironically) deterrence theory. Imagine if you withheld administering a slap on your dog after biting a child, and instead waited months before assigning a verdict. Such a process is only effective for rational intellectual creatures and criminals who reason about there actions longterm, not for your average violent or antisocial criminal. We could be deterring so much more crime by simply beating criminals immediately if sufficient evidence is obvious, or at the very least throwing them in a cell without food for 30 hours (the walls decorated with the psychological cues of their crime). This is actually vastly better for the criminal who hopefully develops a minor trauma response when considering criminality in the future.
coffee_enjoyer
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4mo ago
I still cannot wrap my head around the idea of low/middle wage immigration to a country with billionaires and wealth inequality. All of the “economic efficiency” is just going to go to the very wealthy, whereas by restricting immigration you force the wealthy not just to pay higher wages and allow greater employer QoL, but to invest in the future of the citizens. If companies with longterm plans realize that they need to hire high-skilled Canadians to work as employees, suddenly you’ll find yourself with widespread maternity programs and more investment in education. Your companies will actually be lobbying the government to increase health and fertility.
Informative thread on the Hospital Blast
at 0:23 you can hear what sounds like an Israeli fighter jet in the background. It appears roughly 2 seconds before we see the explosion at the hospital and disappears at 0:30.
Airstrike Hypothesis: Pros - The main strength of this argument is the initial audio, due to its similarities with another IDF airstrike. Additionally, the strength of the impact/shockwave had the ability to launch a human body and a car into the air. Cons - The current shrapnel dispersion aligns with shrapnel from a projectile impacting the road, as more shrapnel fans upwards and out - but is obscured by the trees/cars. Windows in relatively close proximity are also not all destroyed.
Misfire Hypothesis: Pros - Depending on the type of rocket fired by Hamas/PIJ we could potentially get a similar sound of impact. Also, the crater location is directly next to where the victims were in the yard and the cars (with fuel) that moved -Crater size supports this.
Newly reached conclusion: Based on the audio of the explosion, the shrapnel dispersion, and the newly published video: Both the misfire hypothesis & the airstrike hypothesis hold equal weight. I will update this again after experts in the respective fields analyze these issues.
All around a highly informative thread by an (independent) Israeli researcher. Debunks some evidence and brings in new evidence — of particular note is a video that seems to confirm the sound of an Israeli jet. He disconfirms the interception hypothesis based on the sound of the projectile and the magnitude of the blast. His next post will apparently include evidence from Earshot.NGO which specializes in sonic analysis.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Came across a philological-theological argument that the word for faith in the New Testament context (pistis) means embodied allegiance more than cognitive assent. This is interesting as it could indicate that the faith/works controversy comes from inappropriate translations and inadequate study of the original meaning for a first century audience. When I read this I immediately thought of the weird Centurion moment in the New Testament, where Jesus states that someone has the greatest faith (pistis) because he says —
“Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
I wonder if this anecdote was included in the New Testament specifically to illustrate the meaning of pistis. Because we see the cognitive trust that is typically thought of when we think of faith (say the word and it will be done), yet we also see an emphasis on fealty (not worthy) and, significantly, an even greater emphasis on obedience and allegiance to commands.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1mo ago
They can’t charge an amount that is so noticeably higher that you remember it and buy a pack of water for 1/20th of the price at a store. But they can (and do) overcharge on water, understanding that they can get away with it because it’s an inconvenience for you to get it elsewhere. That’s extremely economically inefficient, because McDonald’s surplus profit goes disproportionately to already-wealthy individuals. (It’s better for a nation to have more people with more money, versus some with extraneous wealth that doesn’t provide any benefit in terms of happiness or entrepreneurship or invention or culture.)
It would be more efficient if, for super-sized corporations, an agency stepped in and “auctioned” off the corporate positions and ownership according to who will do the job for the least amount of money, then pass the saved money to consumers. If that’s too much government interference, then allow the employees to form powerful unions, because the employees are more likely to identify with the interests of the consumer and stand to gain less as individuals from purposeful economic inefficiency.
There are a lot of problems with communism. People should be paid up to 10x more than median wages for performance, because humans have an instinct to be rewarded according to performance, that’s deeply evolutionary. Humans also have an instinct to care for things they own, and you see this in small businesses and entrepreneurship. The answer is a balance that accepts the importance of human instinct while also realizing that primitive capitalism can get harmful, antisocial and inefficient. For large corporations, no one should feel like they “own” it, and these trend toward pseudo-monopolies due to institutional knowledge accumulation and established supply chains. For a problem like used car dealerships, we should have some kind of Honesty Regulation akin to Cicero’s grain merchant at Rhodes thought experiments. The policy should make it so that even a very dumb person can immediately tell that something isn’t in his economic best interest.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
7mo ago
It’s commonly advised to not fight a low assessment because it reduces your property taxes. No one would assume a corrupt and/or ignorant judge would use that against him decades later.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
10mo ago
Can you flesh out your argument for why it was the smart thing to promote Ukraine entering NATO, rather than negotiating Ukraine as a neutral region? Given that this was their red line since the early 2000s, I have no idea how someone could consider it “appeasement”. It seems to me that the worst case scenario has transpired: our continual pressure and influence in Ukraine has destroyed the country, probably forever (given fertility rates), has cost enormous sums of money, has wasted American influence in Ukraine, has pressured Russia into developing better drone technology, has finalized the alienation of Russia from the West, has influenced Arab nations into cozying with Russia, and all we get in return is some dead Russians, and maybe we will increase German weariness to America given we destroyed their pipeline. This was a bad decision, unless we only care about dead Russians. What will we gain in five years from it all?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
6mo ago
There are two important omissions and inaccuracies IMO:
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You ignore the DNA evidence that Palestinians are the direct ancestors of ancient Canaanite and Levantine inhabitants of the land, and doubly ignore that Ashkenazim — the chief instigators of Zionism — are half-European in DNA. The crucial question of who the original inhabitants are is swept aside with a misleading, “the area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration [who were the] last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds”. But Palestinians are Arabized more than Arab. They took on the dominant Arab culture and language, and intermixed with Arabs, but this in no way denies their claim to original occupancy. If I leave Ireland for Germany and marry a German girl, and meanwhile the Irish who stayed in Ireland changed their language and creed and adopted some Arab immigrants, I would be (reasonably) laughed at if I arrived by boat and demanded claim to half the land as an original inhabitant.
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You claim that you could never “support any movement, no matter how righteous its cause might be, that employs sadistically orthogonal violence”. Yet this is precisely how the early Zionists obtained as much land as they did. A chunk of it was purchased through less sadistic means, yes, by concealing their intent to ethnically cleanse the land and only hire Jewish workers. But for much of the land they inflicted terror on the British to pressure them into favorable terms, and terrorized the Palestinians to force them into fleeing. 1, 2, 3. This is important to dwell on: how would Israel behave if their bloodshed couldn’t be excused by targeting Hamas leaders? 40% of their missile strike casualties so far have killed under-18s, right? (The Haaretz figure on the original Hamas incursion, half-complete, is that Hamas killed just 20 under-18s). If Israel lacked a powerful state — if they were in the shoes of the Palestinians — would they engage in sadistic orthogonal violence? History says yes. That’s how they were founded. And they also hid under civilian cover, at one point requiring the British to institute a curfew of 200,000 Jews.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
His admission that Pfizer is in bed with its regulators is important. That’s not something that people make up to brag about on dates, it’s actually the opposite. No one brags about their company being corrupt to a gay liberal on a date, neither would they say that they think Covid leaked from the Wuhan lab. This makes me strongly believe he wasn’t lying about his first claim, either.
I don’t know what Pfizer’s defense will be. “You don’t understand, our director of global research was a token diversity hire” is not something that can be transmitted on CNN.
Even if we were to interpret his remarks as “the idea came up in a meeting for fun but was shut down”, his statement on Pfizer being corrupt is super important!
Not only is it public obedience, but it’s public obedience that is inherently interesting for children, as they have a natural interest in colorful things and unique identity marks that give social reinforcement. It is certainly making some percentage points of the children gay, the only question is what percent.
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