coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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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
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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
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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
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28d ago
videos circulating of protestors harassing Jewish students
Where are these videos?
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
no question too simple or too silly
This is a real shower thought, but doesn’t the fact that the USSR was rival superpower to America prove without a doubt that communism actually does work? In fact, it works really well?
Thinking about it, it makes no sense to ever retort “well did it work for the USSR?” when someone brings up the prospect of communism. It worked so well that the communist USSR rivaled America and launched the first satellite. If it didn’t work well, the USSR could never have been a competitor to America. One could even argue that America cultural capital is what really led to American dominance later on, which is independent of political system and relies on America’s unique position as cultural crossroads, but that is beside the question.
coffee_enjoyer
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9mo ago
I agree on your main point but I don’t agree with your characterization of Rufo’s argument. Rufo is trying to elevate the conversation to a deeper level of substance, and Robinson refuses to break from the realm of connotation. Being a racist is bad because being a racist is immoral, and Rufo is disputing the immorality of the founding fathers by reminding Robinson that the consensus at the time of Jefferson was that Blacks were inferior. We judge people morally based on whether they did morally better than expected in their conditions or milieu. We shouldn’t, for instance, declare MLK Jr evil on the whole just because he was a supporter of conversion therapy. If we held to a milieu-controlled standard we would have to declare that there is no moral man left, because we all fall short of perfection. How bad is it that we buy vanity products from companies that abuse workers? Or that we pollute the earth? Why would future generations find this forgivable, rather than the purchasing of already-enslaved people from an undeveloped part of the world during a time period where slavery was normalized and historically ubiquitous?
So I don’t think Rufo let anything slip. He explained his position not badly for the time allotted. Robinson is using lawyerly tricks to make Rufo look suspect to the ears of an untrained audience by refusing to charitably entertain Rufo’s nuance. And also, Rufo doesn’t believe that immorality (true racism) should never be cancellable. Rufo believes that the standard of cancellation is too low. It’s not as if Rufo is trying to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler or Mosley or someone who was genuinely more racist than their time period without ever having produced some balancing commensurate good to society. Good examples of what I mean by the latter are John Lennon (wife beater), Wagner, and Kanye West. We don’t cancel them because their good on the whole far outweighs their bad on the whole. I think this is genuinely how people see moral judgment in practice, rather than a less nuanced rules-based morality.
Re: prostitution, perhaps a general rule is that it’s much more difficult to argue against someone who has committed themselves to a general rule. Destiny can say “women should do what they want with their bodies if not harming others”, and then the opponent has to scour through psychological sciences and moral philosophy and the anecdota of history to adequately present the view that prostitution is bad for the sum good of society. Consider how much harder it is to argue against gambling than for it. To argue against gambling you have to have an understanding of addiction, genetic proclivities to addiction, the data on who gambles, and the adaptability of human happiness. To argue for gambling you just say “people should be allowed to do what they want unless harming someone”.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
Looks like they are stopping that (Zionist) student from recording the faces of the protestors, by preventing him from entering into the protest square with his phone recording. This would be evidence that Zionist students want to harass the protestors, but not evidence of protestors harassing Jewish students.
More on the hospital blast. NYTimes Visual Investigations is now issuing a debunk on the supposed “lynchpin evidence” in the American and Israeli intelligence finding. A thread from NYT’s Aric Toler (previously Bellingcat) —
Israeli and U.S. intelligence officials believe that a projectile captured on videos shortly before the Ahli Arab Hospital explosion was a Palestinian rocket. nytimes Visual Investigations found that this object was launched from Israel, and likely unrelated to the deadly blast.
An IDF spokesperson went on CNN and the BBC with a printed-out screenshot from an Al Jazeera livestream showing this projectile, claiming it was the rocket that hit the hospital. We also believe that American officials are incorrectly assessing this to be a Palestinian rocket
this projectile launch from the north, south, east and west. By drawing lines of perspective, three of which can be seen here, we assessed that this project was launched from near the Israeli city of Nahal Oz.
Three days before the blast, a 155mm illumination shell, commonly used by the Israeli military and not in use by Palestinian militias, was fired into the Al-Ahli Hospital. Hospital administrators said that they had received warnings from the IDF telling them to evacuate.
Our analysis does not answer what actually did cause the blast or who was responsible, but it does undercut one of the most-publicized pieces of evidence used by both American and Israeli officials.
The NYTimes article is archived here: https://archive.ph/ngGpq
I hope we will eventually find out what caused the blast. This NYTimes article might wind up confirming my bias that we shouldn’t trust the immediate Israeli/American intel.* Interestingly, the NYTimes conclusion is based on a relatively obscure twitter thread by some random researcher on the 19th. So a +1 for twitter, I guess.
[edit + wording change*] small update, Le Monde agrees with the NYT assessment of the projectile.
coffee_enjoyer
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2mo ago
Hebrews 11:1 may lean more toward assent but I think it’s still a bit nuanced, because the word translated assurance is hypostasis, its primitive connotation being “that which underlies the visible”. Some have translated this title deed. The word “assurance” is criticized because while the Greek words means certainty / certainly-persuaded, our word “assurance” doesn’t come close to that conclusiveness except in its technical business sense. For instance, if you are “reassuring” or “giving assurance” to a friend, it’s an open question whether this results in some cognitive certainty of a reality. But in the Greek there is sense of it being conclusively held.
In the rest of Hebrews 11, we see the examples of “why the ancients were commended” for their faith, and this is a list of people being obedient or committing to some action based on expectation of a promised reward. This seems more than “mental assent”, as in, “I assent to the truth of this and that”. It’s more like an allegiant assent, because the focus is on how the patron deity rewards its client believer. The person fully knows (not believes) that a promised reward will occur based on the relationship between the God and the believer based upon good faith (like the business term).
But I agree with you on the primacy of the passage in Matthew. The difficulty is in establishing compatibility between Matthew and some of the more “protestant” verses, like “by faith you are saved and not works”.
coffee_enjoyer
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4mo ago
You can confiscate the wealth of illegal aliens to fund sending them back. You can implement work ID laws that incentivize migrants to take a ticket back to the US. You can trawl social media etc to find the communities comprised of mostly illegal migrants. You can fine businesses who use illegal labor.
Food prices would only increase as a proportion of income for the already wealthy; the lower class will now find significantly more demand for their labor and can pick and choose which businesses to work for to maximize their quality of life. (We saw this happen with the peasants after the black plague in Europe; fewer peasants = more demand for their labor = a natural wealth redistribution from the wealthy to the poor). They would make more money than the price of food increases. The eradication of remittance payments means more funds in US economy. Would be enormously beneficial for the lower and middle class and really only hurt the very wealthy white collar workers who are far removed from the economic competition of lower/middle class.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
My priors are completely opposite. Zionists have more influence over American news, business, and foreign policy than the Arab world.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43
According to the modern scholarship which is in dispute, which has no primary documents or primary evidence of the deaths at this time, and which does no archaeology to determine deaths.
absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population
You misread what I wrote. If you find pre-WWII population estimates of Jewry in Europe, published pre-WWII, as for instance in a Jewish encyclopedia, the numbers are lower than today’s estimates of pre-WWII Jewry in Europe. IIRC, by millions.
Bolshevik atrocities
If you told me Bolsheviks in quiet camp positions had a weekly routine of murdering women and children, then yes I would doubt it. If you told me that some shellshocked war-scarred Soviet soldiers committed an atrocity after experiencing months of trauma, no I would not doubt it. In any case, we did have whistleblowers of Soviet atrocities.
There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt
I wish you would quote something from it. From a review,
case that knowledge of what would be later known as the Holocaust was widespread within the home front by the summer and autumn of 1941. By that time, he argues, German atrocities on the eastern front involved hundreds of thousands of participants, eyewitnesses, and passersby. While some addressed these mass executions openly in letters, others either referred to them euphemistically or kept their thoughts private in diaries. Stargardt also demonstrates that many citizens were involved in the process of death and deportation, whether as executioners, witnesses, photographers (“execution tourists”), railway men, government bureaucrats, or other functionaries. The author’s case makes it difficult to believe that “ordinary Germans” did not know what was going on
With hundreds of thousands of participants, we should certainly find letters which speak to the organized and systemic campaign of killing Jewish women and children. Can you find these letters for me?
plenty of Nazis admitted to it
We don’t generally consider confessions made under torture to be reliable, such as the Nuremberg testimony. Neither should we consider the coerced confessions of the leaders of a defeated country who faced the risk of total destruction (Morgenthau plan) particularly reliable.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
New businesses typically lower prices so that consumers try out their business, as consumer behavior is based around habits and attachment to routine — lower prices break this cycle. If you’ve noticed this is why newly opened stores have sales / deals. McDonald’s also may be over-pricing an item and at the same time a new competitor can’t compete due to economy of scale
How would private investment into companies work
Thy will have to invest based upon the idea that the business they invest in is actually valuable to society. If it is valuable then it will grow and profit for a period, and if the profits are too extravagant than the Government steps in — and this is a good threat because it makes investors vote for boards that lower prices themselves, lest the government step in.
America doesn’t have a democracy in any substantive way. What we have is a colosseum of capitalist interests, where corporations and advocacy groups and institutions fund gladiators to shred each other in the public arena, mediated by social media companies and entertainment. The average American does not participate in or listen to debate or know where they could even do this. Instead, they are presented by political parties with figures and stories and myths, which they then subscribe to according to their limited knowledge and understanding. So what we have is a kind of perverse consumer capitalist meritocracy where wealthy people and corporations controls the trajectory of the nation. I don’t think you can consider this system “mostly democratic”, because democracy presupposes rational actors, informed voters, and an absence of psychological manipulation. If a man tricks a drunk woman into sleeping with him, and then uses brainwashing techniques to keep her around, we don’t consider that a consensual relationship, but abusive.
So, re: “shared civil religion”, the ideas of democracy and freedom are the civic religion. If everyone thinks there’s a democracy, then we have the main benefit of democracy (less rebellion) without its problems (mob rule). Ib the same way, people think they have freedom (despite an inability to decide how their children are raised or what they are taught, ie the continuation of any culture). They think they have a higher standard of living than Europeans, because the system’s thinktanks write studies that inaccurately compare wages without consideration of debt, work conditions, general social stress, commute times, car culture, healthcare, public school quality, etc.
Our civic religion is just… lying to the proles. And in a way, both Christianity and Islam share this feature. Islam has a vivid portrayal of an afterlife with sex and good food. Christianity on the other hand delegitimizes the value of “worldly” goods, like sex and good food, and instead orients the adherer toward focusing on a spiritual life which consists of non-acquisitiveness and non-competition.
coffee_enjoyer
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6mo ago
Male self-love: a key hidden determinant in the high fertility of the conservative religious?
I came across this interesting study (PDF archive link here) that measured the correlation between “dark triad” traits and lifetime offspring. The authors claim that this is one of just a handful of studies on the subject. Among the dark triad traits, only narcissism was significantly associated with lifetime offspring, and only in men. There’s something insightful here, because men and women differ in their level of selection for sex, so a narcissistic woman may be overly-selective and end up with a lower number of offspring. A narcissistic man, on the other hand, is predisposed to be less picky, so his narcissism turns into maximizing offspring earlier with less selection. The study is flawed because it uses a basic question as a proxy for “narcissism”, but I think the preliminary finding and the hypothesis are still worthy of discussion.
A common belief for why religiosity impacts fertility is that having children is socially sanctioned and esteemed among these communities. But on closer inspection this falls apart. Consider that the Japanese and Korean, with their disastrous fertility rates, are chided by their mothers and grandmothers to have children. Their governments and media push family formation which is also a metric for a successful life. All of this is amplified by their culture of conformity. Yet the fertility rate trends downward. Regarding the study’s finding on the difference of male and female narcissism, we can note conservative religion privileges men uniquely with honor and respect. In traditional religions, women usually cover their head and stay quiet in sacred spaces as symbolic gestures of obedience. Women are told to be subservient to their husbands and that their role is to support him, which works to reduce female self-esteem and increase male self-esteem. Men are told that they are privileged by God for certain duties.
There’s a more significant dimension to this that I want to discuss. Having a child fundamentally changes a person’s life, and people do not voluntarily change their whole lifestyle unless the pleasure of the change outweighs all the discomfort. You need to sincerely desire the change to make the change. Humans are terrible at making changes that are merely “good for them” in the abstract without any concomitant overriding pleasure, which obesity and addiction and low exercise rates clearly prove. So when we’re talking about having children, we really ought to ask, “why would anyone want to be around a child every day instead of having fun?” Because adults don’t usually make this decision — they don’t skip the bar to go read a book to children at the library. So what’s the reason that the conservative religious actually desire to be around their children, these versions of themself in miniature?
Reproduction in all of its sense
I think that what the fertile religious cultures are good at is inculcating sincere and deep-rooted male self-love. As a consequence of this self-love, they naturally desire to have children as extensions of themselves, to be around and expand themselves. This desire is intrinsic and compelling on its own, and they are not compelled to have children because of a social prescription. Their self-love means that simply being around their child is fun and positive regardless of any criteria of parenting or external criticism. If you love yourself, and know yourself to be loved and to enjoy living, then reproducing yourself is intrinsically desirable. There’s more of you! It’s like a self-friendship, where one wants to increase their friends and time spent with friends.
Now, I mean self-love in a particular way. I don’t think these words — esteem, narcissism, pride — capture the type of positive self-assessment of the devoutly religious. I’m not talking about clinical narcissism here. What I mean is all follows: (1) there is a complete devaluation of capitalist or hierarchical notions of success, as well as concerns for beauty, meaning that a man is buffered against attacks on his worth which overwhelm so many today, eg balding or income, not to mention there’s an equality among believers; (2) there is intensive gratitude for the primary aspects of a man’s identity: merely the state of being alive, having a healthy body, being a man, and being personally selected and personally cherished by the maker of the universe itself regardless of one’s acumen or skillset; (3) lust for one’s wife, contrary perhaps to popular notion, is invested with divine purpose, and each moment of intimacy fulfills a chief command of God Himself; (4) in a counterintuitive way, one’s own life and local community become the center of the universe, because it’s through here that God works, and nothing else has relevance to one’s ultimate purpose, so no such comparisons to self are made.
An immediate (and anticipated) criticism of this would be: what about sin? What about original sin? But sin is just one item within whole religious package, and the package needs to be understood as whole. Whether one believes he sins daily doesn’t actually tell you about his self-regard unless you know whether he is forgiven daily. The emphasis in traditional religion is on the state of being forgiven and favored by God, and the emotions of guilt and shame are fleeting and quickly washed away with more positive emotions. (This holds true for the Abrahamic religions). And so, while sin is a big aspect of religion, it needs to be understood that (in practice) sin is merely a way to increase thankfulness and forgiveness and so forth, which increase one’s own positive valence. (Consider the emotional life of a child who is bad at chess yet is being lovingly tutored by Magnus Carlsen. His self-esteem as a whole is increased, and yet his skill has never been self-judged lower. The calculus on positive/negative valence vs self-judgment can be pretty nuanced).
So maybe this is key variable for understanding religious fertility. Maybe this is why the hyper-competitive, hyper-capitalist East Asian countries are dealing so badly with fertility right now. Maybe the esteem-crushing competition of a consumer nation can never be more fertility-promoting than simply loving the act of being alive. And maybe the direction that society is going with its condemnation of male pride and (seeming) reduction of joie de vivre will prove to be disastrous in the future.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
Fun article I found: East Asians rarely have imaginary friends as children, whereas Westerners have imaginary friends at a prevalence of 50%. On the other hand, East Asians are more likely to personify inanimate objects. The authors say that this is for cultural reasons, but i’m actually leaning toward deep genetic differences in tendency — Western religion, poetry, and music are much more likely to extol brotherly affection than those of East Asia, which (imo) favors an emphasis on place, natural objects, and strict hierarchy.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I appreciate your advice to look at Khan Academy. I will look for a cost-efficient reading comprehension program to suggest you.
but how's that relevant to why McDonald's wouldn't set their price to $10
That wasn’t in the reply I replied to. You are asking me why my explanation for X does not reply to the non-existent question Y. In fact, you asked Y three posts up, and to that I replied
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.
Now clearly this answers your question as to why all fast food locations can’t arbitrarily raise their prices to infinity. They compete with grocery stores, which have more competition over prices due to the variety of bulk retail outlets, online grocery orders, and so on, and which the consumer plans trips to in advance. This is different from having a limited number of expedient food options near your work.
why is my experience[…]
I have no idea, you could have googled it
From the article:
At the moment, according to the site, the cheapest Big Mac in the country is being sold in Oklahoma for $3.49. The most expensive Big Mac in the U.S. will run you $8.09 in Massachusetts. That’s more than double the price of Oklahoma’s.
What you can do as a consumer is do research and, perhaps, support local stores,” Klyman noted. “Giant global chains are sometimes not being honest and bringing up their price 200% even though their cost hasn’t gone up at that rate, so do your research, and you might find that local stores and restaurants won’t upcharge you as much.”
Back to you:
Even if the private company earns so much profit by simply making an amazing product everyone wants to buy and can't produce enough supply to meet demand even when they try, e.g Ozempic or Nvidia?
We have to ask, (1) should the developer of Ozempic make as much money as possible, or (2) should the developer of Ozempic make approximately the amount of money that a reasonable developer would consider justifies his research. My position is the second one. (If this is too many words of commas let me know and I can rephrase). Imagine how evil it would be if the scientist who discovered penicillin tried to maximize profit.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
I think I'm missing something
A union is a way to force the C-Suite and investors to share some of the massive amounts of wealth that they hoard (and ultimately waste on trifles). UAW has 145k employees, who are real people that have a greater quality of life because of union activity. I don’t know if you can say that unions destroyed the auto industry, as Japan has an auto union. It’s more likely that German and Japanese cars are popular because they make better cars irrespective of unions in the same way Japan historically makes better electronics (why is PlayStation competitive against Xbox?) and parts, and Germany pharmaceuticals (despite a high employee quality of life). East Asian phones and laptops are also pretty much superior to anything America’s non-unionized tech workers come up with, even though America wins out due to Apple’s marketing.
coffee_enjoyer
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28d ago
I can help you imagine. If a group of BLM protestors have sequestered themselves into a square to do their BLM chants and so forth, then someone dressed in a police uniform with his phone out to record is clearly the provocateur if he attempts to enter the zone when there is clearly no interest in the zone other than provocation. (Notice the square is densely packed and it is evening.) It is crybullying to call it harassment if the BLM people hold their arms to prevent your incursion. Of course, I’m saying this as someone who thinks BLM was the height of American stupidity. This is why it’s ubiquitous during protests to separate the two sides, and the police will often prevent a member of one side from entering the other side.
coffee_enjoyer
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4mo ago
Who does that in Japan? Who does it in Iceland (well they don’t have fruit, but slaughter houses apply)? Millions would be happy to do these jobs once the pay rises, just like you have dudes doing underwater welding. And the pay will rise in the absence of a pseudo slave labor class.
there isn't a scenario where meat and fruits and vegetables prices rise lower than the wages of the american poor and working class [rises]
Sure there is. All of the increase in payment to “food companies” due to the rise in food prices is going to the lower class employee base (who need the money more), yet this increase in payment is paid for by everyone (lower-to-highest classes), meaning you necessarily see a transfer of wealth from upper to lower class; and on top of this, the increased cost of food for the wealthy makes prices more salient, leading to more cost-saving consumer practices which winds up enforcing more competition among food-related businesses.
coffee_enjoyer
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4mo ago
In order to establish whether there are ethnic category differences in civilizational potential, we would need to measure the propensity to feel guilt rather than shame, the extent to which different groups instinctively feel the sharp pain of empathy when considering another’s suffering, the extent to which there is a natural domesticated interest in making others’ happy, and perhaps the extent to which emotions and trustfulness can be read on their face. No amount of checks and balances can actually stop a society filled with the sociopathic/“gunners” from corrupting institutions (we see them do this today as is (I am from New Jersey)), so BAP’s hypothesis is not invalid, just unevidenced.
The interplay between racial genes and morality has actually been studied recently, but I haven’t taken the time to delve in:
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781003281566-7
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781003281566-8
I don’t find it impossible or even improbable that different groups would have different levels of prosocial tendency (obedience, guilt, interest in the feelings of others). I’ve seen the role of genetics at play in my dogs who have vastly different characters despite only diverging 1000-2000 years ago. And frankly I also think this discussion is pretty important. Which doctor would I rather have, the intelligent one who uses all their cognitive energy for self-gain, or the less intelligent one who has a permanent cognitive reserve dedicated to checking his own moral behavior? The former is going to prescribe me unnecessary pills, not actually be interested in healing me, and may scam my insurance by sending me off to cousin doctors when it’s not necessary. The latter will take a little bit longer, but more efficiently arrive at the actual purpose of his social role.
coffee_enjoyer
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7mo ago
Satan infamously tempted the Son of God with all of the world’s riches in exchange for obedience (Matthew 4:8). The Son of God declined and instead chose poverty, trial, oppression, and a torturous death in order to save his people. Rejecting riches in exchange for a promised land is deeply Abrahamic. It’s also very evolutionary, if we want to talk as strict atheists: they are making a bet that, if they succeed in winning against Israel, they will have a greater genetic proliferation than if they are evicted and sent to a random Arab nation.
I genuinely think the best solution is to just start shootin’. Muslim youths in France respect force, just like their prophet used and just like their rap idols extol in their music. If you just start shooting them, even just with rubber bullets (but lots), or even better with paintballs that smell horrible when they break, they will stop rioting.
The key missing topic in the discussions on the French riots is that these guys really want and enjoy to light things on fire and loot. I would too, if I hated the people in the country and could get away with it. There is fundamentally no way to counter that except with punishment, ie violent. The punishment has to come with no social approval — prison, while bad, comes with social approval among their culture. But pelting them with rubber bullets, going into their neighborhood and smashing their cars, going into their neighborhood with a helicopter filled with a gallons of durian juice to drop on their apartments… they very quickly realize that the benefit is no longer worth the cost. You essentially have to humiliate and subject them. Just like any of us would feel living in Singapore or Hong Kong, that we would be swiftly punished for malefaction.
I have a dog and one of the things most interesting to me is how reinforcement and punishment is so clearly on display in its most primal way. You have to think like a dog with her. I can’t chase her when she steals something, because she likes to be chased. Yelling is ineffectual, because she likes yelling (barking). Even slapping her paws would do little, because the way dogs play with each other is more aggressive than that. If I’m dealing with a creature that likes aggressive play, being chased, and risk, the punishment has to be very much not pleasant. So a good one is crate time, but if you can’t do that you can give a painful physical punishment — I don’t do the latter because I love my dog, but I think it’s fitting for people blowing up libraries and so on.
I think the idea the “French people will move on” is wrong. This is a blow to the morale of the French people. They have received a serious injury to their identity. Living among people who can destroy your car and shop whenever they want is demoralizing and in some invisible way probably leads to an 80k monetary injury per every affected Parisian resident. It decreases sum total happiness and induces a feeling of helplessness. So it’s really serious. It’s not the same as if it were 10000 unrelated instances of minor theft.
coffee_enjoyer
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16d ago
The far right has little knowledge of how ultra orthodox communities operate, which is a shame because it’s the perfect discursive weapon: either you must defend the orthodox practices (and then approve of similar white aspirations), or you must criticize them (and then ask, “how did they steal one billion dollars in public funds and not be prosecuted”)? It is a win-win discursive tool.
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.
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