coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
That figure doesn’t account for the four year degree requirement, the grad school requirement for a lot positions, the debt of these two, or the requirement to have a smart phone and laptop, right?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The efficiency that matters is if a larger portion of the population has a higher quality of life to produce more, healthier children, and if they have the resources to educate their children well. The efficiency that doesn’t matter is if we have rung out the lifeforce of 80% of the population so that 1% of people can waste resources lavishly. Surplus resources going to Bezos and wealthy stockholders is much more inefficient than if it were spread to his workers and increased their quality of life.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Okay, we can see if that way, but then they are doing something infinitely worse — abusing and destroying resources, value, and potential, which are what underlies the importance of money.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Do you think people invest without receiving appreciation or dividends? What do they do with that? Do they give it all away, or do they buy expensive unnecessary things for pure vanity, wasting the resources required to train its manufacturers, then manufacture it, then ship it, then store it, etc.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
That’s why I wrote “C-Suite and investors”, btw. Why do you think that a person should only get the lowest amount their employer is willing to pay? That’s not how it is supposed to work. It’s supposed to work like the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, or the Secessio Plebis of 490 BC, or the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 1650. It’s supposed to work like that in the sense that this is how it has historically worked, with the modern fantasy of “just compensation = set by employers” being an historical anomaly limited in scope. This modern fantasy is not found in developed European countries, neither is it found among white collar professionals like doctors and lawyers who lobby to increase their pay.
How does one "hoard" money?
How does one hoard property?
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr 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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1yr ago
Once on a Caribbean vacation as a kid I swam to a floating platform, maybe 100 feet from shore or so. I stood up on the platform and looked down only to see a medium-sized shark just chilling underneath without moving. I waited and waited and the asshole never left his position, only occasionally moving far enough out that I could see his whole body. After 10min of deliberation and pacing I waved to my parents on the beach, a passing server mentioned that there was a large barracuda seen by the platform earlier in the day, and they had someone on a jet ski nearby come and retrieve me. It was not a shark, but I thought it was. When I learned it was a barracuda this did not assuage my fear or relief because I was raised on animal planet, finding nemo, and hit rock songs from 1977.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Who has ever said that cleaners are a net negative on society? Why do you believe they can be classified as net negative because their wages are low? In a medieval agricultural society, you could argue that every farmer is “net negative” individually because the Lord provides more in resources for their protection and administration… but this would be forgetting that those resources are wholly the result of the farmers. If I own a cleaning company and I hire illegal migrants and I take most of their wages just because I can, and then I hire an overseas Indian to oversee my fiefdom company’s day-to-day, who is bad for society here? Isn’t it me? So I don’t think a wages-only analysis works here.
If a factory needs 5 people to work the machines but union regulations require them to hire 25 people instead of 5 then yes, each and every single member of the group of "workers" is a parasite sucking on the teat of the group of people who are "factory owners"
Why? You are alleging it’s now better for society to have less people employed, less people paid more, which means more people stressed, more people unhealthy, more health problems, less civic engagement. You want to live in a society where more people are worse off, so that someone “at the top” who may not even be financially or socially invested in the community has more to spend on overpriced foreign goods and overpriced foreign women. You really need to flesh out your argument more instead of assuming your wages-only premise is correct.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Try imagining an emotionally salient “story image” for the name. Barbara = imagine the person as a Barbarian. Tom = imagine the passion as Tom the Cat, or with a tommy gun.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Welfare is one iota of a large group of policies, some of which are prosocial and some of which are antisocial. If we want a “well-behaved lower class”, we would be making shift work illegal and enforcing rules on maternity leave and company-provided healthy meals. And banning children from accessing certain media. This would be a great boon to mental and physical health. Alas, we don’t do this, and so the middle class pays a disproportionate amount of their income on the consequences of our antisocial society, via healthcare and police services and jails. So in addition to welfare and unemployment checks, we also have other policies: unions, capping C-Suite pay at a percent of employee pay, domestic protection from foreign immigrant workers… there’s a lot.
the progressive impulse is that capitalism creates a class of elites that will inevitably interfere in the democratic process both to preserve their wealth and status and to further their own politics
I don’t think this is the root of the progressive impulse. The root is that they feel their quality of life is not proportional to what they deserve, given the vast mass of wealth that is wasted by the 1%. Interference in democracy and self-serving tendencies are secondary concerns. Progressives see the social policies of other countries and find them desirable, and they can also imagine better conditions in the US.
Modern developed countries are now so materially prosperous that allowing poor people to starve, or freeze, or die of easily treated illness really does seem inhumane
If we disperse more of the funds that the mega-wealthy waste, and lobby for better employee conditions, then people will be healthier and live longer. So progressives are merely asserting that there is a superior possibility for America, instead of the steadily decreasing health and purchasing power and increasing debt the middle class. I think that the way they go about this is wrong but that’s the impulse.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I like the idea of liberalism as a utilitarian balance between the competing concerns of “men have a right to reap the fruit of their labor” and ”no one should hoard and abuse resources which are not integral to their pursuit of happiness”. I don’t see the philosophy of natural rights as having any direct influence on people’s political beliefs today; it hardly ever comes up. Instead, in terms of the capitalism vs redistribution debate, I see two camps separated by two intuitions regarding justice. One is that people deserve the resources which they fairly obtain, one is that people do not deserve to hoard 100x the resources of their employees. The idea that there is a universal principle that someone necessarily deserves their income if they make it is nonsensical superstition, it’s magical thinking, a dogma of mammon. Someone can argue that this is the best dogma to establish social stability, but it can’t be a self-evident fact.
I think the most realistic points of disagreement in mainstream America are that conservatives fear redistribution will go to the wrong people (demotivating and harming the status of the middle class), and liberals fear that the wealthy waste resources frivolously that could go to the greater social good. At root, I think these are utilitarian intuitions.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I’ve seen some before for Brazil and American states / counties
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Has anyone done a correlational analysis of violence and stability in Middle Eastern region by rate of SS African admixture?
Re: 3, the ADL and other advocacy groups have a vested interest in showing you the most irrelevant but vivid cases of extremism. They do this because it helps their ethnocultural block. It brings in wealthy donors who fund the ideological version of the Western Wall, it creates an image in the mind of the public of perpetual Jewish victimization, and it attempts to unify Jews together (stories of Jewish persecution are, like, half of the Torah; this is a deeply Jewish religious practice).
We saw this play out very clearly during the “day of hate” earlier this year, and both SS and myself wrote about that comprehensively. They found an absolute no one with something like ten telegram followers who planned to hand out flyers, and the whole behemoth of Jewish advocacy turned that into a “day of hate” quasi-religious spectacle, replete with police presence at every synagogue, statements by governors and congress, news reports and bipartisan condemnation. It turns out that the funder behind this push was a Jewish billionaire who has involvement with ultra-orthodox yeshivas and who lobbies for security enhancement bills that give synagogues free money yearly. But the ultimate absurdity of the day of hate is that a Jewish man in Florida read about the fiction of “the day of hate” from one of his advocacy group feeds and proceeded to find a gentile toddler and throw him against a wall while complaining about antisemitism. That’s right: while the Jewish advocacy engine complained about antisemitism, a Jewish extremist literally threw a toddler against a wall in response, and this got almost zero non-local attention. [Sources]
This is all very boring to post about which is why I don’t anymore, but this is the reason you will always hear about “literally who?” antisemites — it’s extremely beneficial for Jewish advocacy groups to bring this to your attention, groups which employ tens of thousands of people to specifically enhance Jewish Life in America, without any scruples about giving Americans anxiety attacks or leading to stochastic terrorism or just generally promoting fake news.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
how the hell he ended up in jail can't be explained by anything other than that they indulged
He was abusing dopaminergic drugs typically prescribed to Parkinson’s patients and went years with only four hours of sleep per night. I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn that he was abusing a lot of nootropics in addition to selegiline
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The secular anti-homophobia and anti-racism can indeed be seen as virtues, or at least the tenets of a moral code. So they do check each other’s behavior, which is a point against my assertion that talking about virtue has died out. But these virtues are not rooted in a shared experience (attempted imagining) of the Greatest Being. The virtues wind up being political (trans rights) and rule-based (never misgender). There’s no interest in growing the antiquated virtue of caritas, pure love for others, because there’s no attempt at collecting in the mind the idea of Perfect Love, and there’s no unitive story of love that binds the community together. So the virtue of authentic love for others degenerates into adhering to political rules, merely to not be publicly crucified by your friends for something politically incorrect.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
This my belief as well, and it’s shown in the works of John Scotus Eriugena, especially his inquiry into the ways of seeing God:
The first is God as the ground or origin of all things; the second, Platonic ideas or forms as logoi, following St. Maximus and Augustinian exemplarism; the third, corporeal world of phenomena and formed matter world; and the last is God as the final end or goal of all things, and that into which the world of created things ultimately returns
The best way to unite a community must be via this “nested” structure of complexity. The basic level of Christianity is so simple that a child or mentally handicapped person can understand it: they have been personally saved by a guy named Jesus, who is a very great guy. The levels increase in complexity when you read deeper into the text: Christ both represents the ideal man, and the relationship of God to man. Then you notice that the progression of his life itself reflects the development of the moral life (beginning under the obedient Virgin Mary, later sacrificing one’s life for the Good of the Community in spite of extreme torture by the high status members). You can add greater and greater wisdom on top of the Bedrock of Christ, and the whole importance of this is that every member of a community can all love the same human exemplar. It’s no surprise then that we follow Christ in the Gospel by the testimonies of his friends.
I think perhaps modern people have trouble realizing that what occurs in the imagination can be as strong as reality, especially in a period of human history devoid of media superstimuli and formal education. (Read Oliver Sach’s Musicophilia for a description of a music lover hearing a full symphony in his head when out to sea, and believing it was real. This is sensory “deprived” humanity).
If a group of people of various stages of wisdom are united by a perfectly imagined friend and teacher, that is all the same psychological stuff as if it were a real friend and teacher. That’s the power of the social technology. You are creating an optimal reality for your community that cannot exist in a materialistic-reductive way of socializing. It will be a better community!
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Well the original sin of the progressive religion is that it is not founded on a shared reverence to optimal experience, which all monotheistic religions are
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I would prefer a Christianity where people are provenly made virtuous, which is an important theme in the Gospel. Those who lack righteousness are actually told to “sell” what they are currently doing, in order to buy enough (what you call) “good boy points” in order to overcome their sin. This is illustrated in the parable of the five wise and five foolish Virgins, as well as the parable of the Talents — in the latter Jesus actually commends someone for putting his God-given coin “in the bank”. Those who are not righteous will find their place in hell — all three of these are shown clearly in Matthew 25. Lastly, to those who do evil works, there will be no saving them, which is found in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Would you say that no mainstream Christian is “still in their sins”? Because they all assent to the fact that the dead were raised. But I do not think that this fact, as something simply assented to (rather than dramatically imagined), is doing anything to change someone’s morality or sinfulness. And if we’re not ultimately changing our righteousness, then the whole of Christianity is worthless.
For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Well a mystical experience, which is rare and comes on its own, is different than a stable object of attention that can be accessed daily. What we’re after is something which can be conceived in the mind with some reliability, not a transient “high” feeling when chance and gratuitous conditions are met. But I’d agree that “ecstasies” (religious or otherwise) are not always social, books like the Cloud of Unknowing and various testimonies of Saints often describe something where a sense of self is lost.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
People take things seriously which have some benefit to them; my assertion is that the mental practice of God is greatly beneficial. Once someone learns the benefits they would pursue it with seriousness just like they would with weight-lifting, the silly fictional shows they like, their video games, etc. If God is the mental practice of imagining the most serious possible state of mind in relation to the most important Being, then that alone is a good reason to take it seriously.
I think we forget that many statistically “devout” people are not doing daily prayers or giving away all their possessions or what you would expect someone who “literally believes” to do.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Literalist religion is not only dying, it’s exactly what gave birth to the secular West and its identity-consumerism. We have had 100 years of attempted revision because the old interpretations are insufficient. I don’t know if you read my post but “inspirational message” has nothing to do with the points I made. I do not think “inspirational messages” are something that secular culture can absorb from religion.
A mandatory four year period of large debt and fewer working hours is a serious cost on the median citizen and I’m skeptical this is actually conveyed in the inflation metric. Because you can’t just take “tuition increased by this amount”, you also have to measure the fact that it’s required for more workers who may otherwise have forgone it completely
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