doglatine
7mo ago
Just an aside, but I’m on my first diet in ages that seems to be working. The sad principle behind it is “cut out high calorie foods that I overeat and/or am prone to binge on”. For me that means beer, bread, cheese, and a bunch of sweet stuff. So I’ve simply cut out alcohol, wheat, and dairy. I’m still eating eggs, b/c as a vegetarian they’re one of my best protein sources, and they’re pretty benign as far as food goes.
The upside to this diet is that it leaves a lot of carbs that I quite enjoy but just don’t binge on. Eg, potato, rice, and corn. I can get McDonald’s fries or guac and chips as a treat or make myself a baked potato or Thai curry with rice. But I can’t absent-mindedly have four slices of toast for breakfast, a giant brie baguette for lunch, pizza for dinner, and ice cream for dessert.
So far it’s going great; just a little joyless. Unfortunately I think this may be the price I have to pay — I overeat these foods because they taste amazing to me and do good things to my brain. By limiting myself to foods that are just “yeah, that tastes fine”, I won’t have to use willpower to limit portion sizes to anything like the same extent. (All of this is very much Stephan Guyenet inspired of course)
So my longer-term plan once I’m through the first ultra-strict 8 weeks or so is to permanently reorient my diet away from these foods but allow them as treats -once a week for the alcohol, once a week for banned foods, maybe special exemptions for stuff like holidays. I’m hoping in the longer run also that I might lose my cravings for these things a bit as my palate adjusts. Of course, it’s possible I’ll acquire new food vices, in which cases I might need to cycle them out.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk I guess, just wanted to share.
doglatine
7mo ago
If this comes to pass, it might just kill online dating in Australia. That would be bad in the short term, but might be beneficial in longer run insofar as OLD is no longer really functional for most people yet has made more traditional means of meeting partners harder.
doglatine
11mo ago
I agree with this, and I regularly lambast my students for saying things like -
As has been widely demonstrated, AI is a tool of the patriarchy (Anderson, 2018; Balaji, 2021; Cernowitz, 2023).
As I emphasise, using citations like this demonstrates nothing. This kind of "drive-by citation" is only barely acceptable in one context, namely where there is a very clearly operationalised and relatively tractable empirical claim being made, e.g.,
Studies of American graduate students demonstrate a clear positive correlation between GPA and SAT scores (Desai, 2018; Estefez, 2020; Firenzi, 2022).
Even then, it's generally better to spend at least a little time discussing methodology.
Reposting my original advicepost from the Motte —
Since dating came up in last week's Culture Wars thread and seemed to trigger a bit of brief discussion, I thought some people in this sub might be interested in hearing a bit of dating advice geared towards contrarians. Back in Radicalizing the Romanceless, Scott says -
Male attractiveness seems to depend on things like a kind of social skills which is not necessarily the same kind of social skills people who want to teach you social skills will teach
I think I can give some useful pointers in this regard. Note that as sex and dating are fundamentally gendered experiences, most of my advice is geared towards straight men, and won't be applicable to straight women (though some surely will). I'd be interested to hear female perspectives as a result. I also imagine that a lot of people won't be interested in hearing advice on this topic, or will find some of what follows obvious and patronising. This is probably unavoidable, but apologies in advance.
As to why I feel arrogant enough to give any advice: I've had a fairly long, rich, and interesting dating life, with quite a few painful lessons learned along the way. I discovered the existence of sex and romance relatively late by some measures - in my late teens - when I lost a lot of weight and suddenly found women responding to me differently, so I think I have a bit more insight than someone for whom this stuff came wholly naturally. Additionally, I'm fascinated by sex and dating norms, both on a philosophical and practical level (in fact, I've taught undergraduate classics on the applied ethics of sex and romance), and despite now being happily married I still read a lot of dating and love advice out of raw curiosity. Still, as always, YMMV, and I'm happy to debate any of the below points.
(1) Don't be unattractive. Sorry to start out with this one, but it can't be overstated. This particular bit of advice is usually placed second to "be attractive", but I think being attractive is a lot harder than not being unattractive, so I'd recommend focusing on the latter. Worse still, I think trying to be attractive can lead people to try to be extravagant or unconventional in their personal style or behaviour (see 'peacocking') and this can backfire horribly. Instead, focus on minimising unattractiveness. This means obvious stuff like good personal grooming - don't underestimate the difference wearing cologne, having good dental hygiene, having a good haircut, and trimming your beard regularly can make.
It also means having a good solid wardrobe and sense of style. I'd suggest that for most men conservatism is the right strategy, at least to begin with - stuff like OCBDs, slim or straight leg jeans, smart sneakers or brogues, and fairly slim fitting cashmere or merino wool sweaters. As a rule of thumb, if you're interested in looks, buy clothes that are slightly tighter than is optimal for comfort (surprisingly, this also applies if you're overweight). Malefashionadvice has some good tips, but bear in mind it's a bit of a circle jerk. One of the key purposes of all of these efforts (in addition to looking and smelling better) is to show that you are sensitive to and aware of presentation norms in your peer group.
Of course, it can also help a lot if you have chiseled abs and arms like Henry Cavill, and everyone should figure out a good diet and exercise routine for their long-term health and mental well-being. But that's a huge topic I won't address here. I'd also flag that I think being 'ripped' or 'shredded' or even just in good physical shape are factors that can be overstated in dating - there are plenty of stylish, well-dressed, funny, confident but slightly pudgy men who are also real casanovas, and plenty of desperate depressed singletons over at /fit/. Above all, don't put off dating until the day you have a body like a Greek god: it will probably never come.
(2) Don't assume dates will come to you. Most men can go years without ever once being approached by a woman with explicit romantic interest. You will need to be proactive to find a romantic partner. In the modern age, this sadly means getting on dating sites and apps. The upside to this is that the costs of failure are typically pretty small: the people you meet are people you will never see again, and with whom you probably have no friends in common, so even if it's all horribly awkward it will have few negative consequences downstream. While I've been out of the dating pool long enough that I can't recommend the best current apps, a good rule of thumb is to be proactive about setting up as many dates as possible and to triple your rate of failure (though always remember the human... and for god's sake never, ever send dick pics to anyone you've known for less than six months).
Most dates will inevitably be crash-and-burn ventures, but as long as you learn from the experience and gain confidence, you'll still be benefiting. I would strongly suggest that you don't pay for your date's food and drinks on the first few dates. It increases the costs of a bad date and can lead to bitterness and unreasonable expectations. Besides, it's current year, as the meme goes. Note that each dating site and app has its own norms and strategies. Each has its own target demographics, and while some will skew towards detailed profiles and lengthy intro messages, others will be more of a numbers game (though they all are to some extent). When you join a new dating site, try to learn 'the meta', whether from reading blogs or asking the advice of friends. One big point worth emphasising: the pictures you put up really matter. That may seem shallow, but it's just how it is. Get the advice of friends, and maybe even get a professional photoshoot done. The difference between a bad set of profile photos and good ones is colossal.
(3) Don't treat dating like a purely cooperative venture. While dating is ultimately a non-zero sum game that should lead to happy relationships, early on, there's a definite element to it that requires a more strategic mindset. This is a delicate point, and I certainly wouldn't recommend being adversarial about it, but you should certainly be trying to manage your date's first impressions of you (see point 4 below). While you shouldn't think of a date like a job interview, it's not totally crazy to think of it as resembling a pitch to an investor: you want to accentuate your positives and avoid dwelling on the negatives. You need to be confident and genuinely believe that you have something valuable to offer the other party. Hopefully most of you believe you do have value to offer, whether it's your intellect, your common sense, your good finances, or your in-depth knowledge of the Punic Wars. If you don't think you have anything to offer, you're not ready to date. See a therapist or work on yourself until you've nurtured a bit of confidence. But otherwise, you should really reflect on your best qualities and ground your behaviour in the date on a strong sense of your own value. "I have a lot to offer as a romantic partner, and any woman who chooses to date me will be making a great choice," is a useful mantra, even if sometimes it takes a bit of effort to internalise it.
(4) Don't just be yourself. A huge amount of what we look for in a partner is good judgment, especially in social matters. There are a lot of people out there who are weird, awkward, and generally indifferent to the social cues of others, and a lot of early dating is about weeding these people out. If you're too up front, you can easily come across as someone who simply doesn't get it. There's nothing wrong, for example, with having wargaming, Magic The Gathering, and videogames as your main hobbies, but these are not high status activities, and if you lead with these you look like someone who simply doesn't notice what's high status and what's not. If you want to talk about hobbies, try to cultivate some that are high status: physical activities like climbing, running, and team sports are good, as are outdoor activities like scuba, skiing and even hiking. Travel, languages, and literature are solid, and food and cooking are easy and safe, if a bit pedestrian. Being able to talk about what's trendy in culture and your city is also helpful, e.g., "have you been watching Tiger King?" and "have you seen the fancy new restaurant that opened on main street?".
You don't need to invest too much time and effort into these interests and hobbies - just enough that you have something to say about them and can honestly report that they're something you're interested in. I'd also flag that talking about sex, kinks, and exes on a first date is generally a bad idea (unless you're meeting someone from Fetlife, of course). Again, it's about displaying good judgment and showing that you're not one of the creepy weirdos with no filter. A good general rule for most straight men is to follow women's lead on these issues, and to reveal personal information carefully and gradually. I imagine some people think this all sounds dismal: "I want a partner who accepts me for who I am, warts and all!" I think that's absolutely a realistic thing to aim for, but the process of opening up should be done gradually and in a way that's responsive to the growing intimacy between you and your partner.
(continued below)
doglatine
6d ago
There are lots of other large scale processes that have very high cleanliness standards and can’t use strong disinfectants, from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation. Honestly seems like one of the less difficult things to get right.
doglatine
2mo ago
Another problem is that there are more scientists than plausible paths of scientific enquiry.
Philip Kitcher has some useful insights here on the division of epistemic labour in science. In short, it's not always ideal to have scientists pursuing just the most plausible hypotheses. Instead, we should allocate epistemic labour in proportion to something like expected utility, such that low-probability high-impact hypotheses get their due. Unfortunately, this can be a hard sell to many researchers given the current incentive structures. Do you want to spend 10 years researching a hypothesis that is almost certainly false and is going to give you null results, just for the 1% chance that it's true? In practice this means that science in practice probably skews too much towards epistemic conservatism, with outlier hypotheses often being explored only by well-funded and established eccentric researchers (example: Avi Loeb is one of the very few mainstream academics exploring extraterrestrial intelligence hypotheses, and he gets a ton of crap for it).
There are also of course some fields (maybe social psychology, neuroscience, and pharmacology as examples) where the incentives stack up differently, often because it's easy to massage data or methodology to guarantee positive results. This means that researchers go for whatever looks bold and exciting and shiny because they know they'll be able to manufacture some eye-catching results, whereas a better division of epistemic labour would have them doing more prosaic but valuable work testing and pruning existing paradigms and identifying plausible mechanisms where it exists (cue "it ain't much but it's honest work" meme).
All of which is to say, I think there's plenty of work to go around in the sciences, enough to absorb all the researchers we have and more, but right now that labour is allocated highly inefficiently/suboptimally.
doglatine
3mo ago
Just FWIW as someone engaged on academic work on these issues, I broadly agree with your take. That said, two quick points of disagreement -
(1) Even supposedly friendly personalisation can be dangerous. Really effective personalised advertised can boost consumption, but if you're anything like me, you should probably be consuming less. You're like a dieter walking through a buffet restaurant filled with dishes perfectly targeted to your palate. By controlling the data held on you by third parties, you can limit how appealing the menu they offer you is. Now, of course, sometimes it will be your cheat day and you can eat to your heart's content, and having an amazing menu offered to you is positively desirable. But most of the time, having this personalised menu is going to be bad for your ability to achieve your reflectively-endorsed goals. Data privacy is one way to protect yourself from having your own most voracious instincts exploited.
(2) Privacy concerns don't seem to me to be male-coded. If anything, more of my female students are very worried about it. More than anything else, I'd say it skews continental European; Germans above anyone else seem obsessed with it. Brits are radically unconcerned about it.
doglatine
5mo ago
I'm coming late to this fantastic post, and most things worth saying have been said, but one issue no-one's tackled: how will AI affect all this? That might sound tenuous but I think it's potentially significance. We're on the cusp of -
- Vastly more accessible/effective homeschooling and self-education via AI tutors
- Massive skill equalisation for low- and mid-level white collar work
- Likely evisceration of large parts of the Blue Tribe base
- Easy creation of reasonably smart AI media/propaganda bots
- Emergence of new more salient axes of disagreement splitting society down the middle (e.g. pro-tech/anti-tech)
doglatine
8mo ago
Their backstories rhyme, but Yang is playing to Grey Tribe superegos. Ramaswamy is a next-gen populist, a Shift to Trump’s Puzzle.
doglatine
1mo ago
You can look for correlated clusters of symptoms. It’s not that women and men with autism present with entirely qualitatively different features, it’s just that men and women present them to different degrees (men usually more so). If the scale is calibrated to men it will be relatively insensitive for women (though more specific).
Toy example: playing Warhammer and MtG is not especially diagnostic of autism in men. Lots of non-autistic men play Warhammer and MtG [citation needed]. I would expect a far higher proportion of cis women who play Warhammer/MtG to be autistic. So if our toy autism scale only puts a small amount of weight on this variable it will miss autism in women.
/u/justcool393 has a nice post about science and values below, and the conversation veers into discussion of what makes for good science. Without wanting to criticise anyone in that conversation, I'd like to vent a bit about a problem with broader discussion around Science (with a capital S), namely a kind of essentialism about science and the scientific method that's ubiquitous in Rat-adjacent spaces and popular science reporting.
In short, one of the few really good insights coming out of history & philosophy of science in the last fifty years has been the demise of Essentialism about science, in favour of a view of science as disunified and pluralistic. If you start looking at the history of activities we label as "science", you'll find radically different methods, norms, and distribution of labour being adopted at different times, different disciplines, and different theorists.
This is true synchronically - some fields like pharmacology that have to deal with the insane complexities of human physiology are data-centric and heuristic by nature, others like particle physics involve a lot of narrow theoretical work and are reliant on dramatic insights, others like material science are somewhere in between. Moreover, ideas like replicability and experiment simply don't apply to all branches of science; many areas of geology (e.g. study of mass extinctions) are dependent on natural accumulation of evidence and lucky finds, while others (like parts of cosmology) are strikingly limited in the kinds of experimental data they can access, so the challenge becomes a matter of using existing data to probe theories.
But it's also true diachronically; what made for successful science in the 18th century is very different in many respects from what makes for successful science in the 21st century. Part of that is the disappearance of low hanging fruit, and the need for large scale co-ordination across teams with tens of thousands of contributors. Part of it may also be that we have stronger priors on which theories we can discard with minimal proof (e.g., perpetual motion machines). And while it's tempting to see these shifts in norms and practices of science over time as reflecting some linear trend, there's no guarantee that's the case. Here it's worth using the heuristic of an underlying "tech tree" that we're climbing (of course, things aren't like that, but work with me). In videogames, usually the amount of research points required to unlock the next branch of the tree increases steadily over time. But there's no reason to assume that has to be the case, or applies in a blanket way across different areas of science. We don't know what the future of the tech tree will look like; it's possible that advances in technology and society could open a new wave of "gentleman scientists" (cf. some of more optimistic commentary on the LK-99 affair).
I imagine some of you might be tempted to scoff at this and try to boil down "Science" into a few sensible epistemic rules, e.g., use of Bayes's theorem, active efforts at disconfirmation, preregistration of explicit weighted hypotheses, etc.. I think this is valuable as epistemology, but it doesn't provide a core to science - for one, plenty of non-scientific practices (e.g., running a sports team, managing an investment fund, optimising a relationship) also benefit from incorporating these rules. For another, many of the most fertile and successful canonical periods in the history of science (e.g., the Enlightenment) were a methodological Wild West, where few if any of these rules applied. So it's neither sufficient nor necessary for something to be science that it embody these principles. But perhaps most fundamentally, this approach to essentialising science relies on drawing a misleading equivalence between scientists and individual believers. In fact, belief doesn't have to come into science at all: someone can be a perfectly good scientist while remaining personally agnostic on the theories they're testing. What matters is that, for example, the results of their experiments are appropriately incorporated within industry and institutions. Indeed, there are some occasions where arguably science benefits from individual epistemic irrationality; e.g., scientists on the fringes who pursue low-probability high-impact theories to the detriment of their careers because they're (irrationally) true believers. All of those scientists would be individually better off (and more likely to get jobs) if they pursued safe mainstream alternatives. But if everyone does that, science is more likely to get stuck in local theoretical minima.
So if there's no core to "science", then what should we attribute the remarkable successful Renaissance/ Enlightenment technological revolution to? This is a big question, and I won't seriously attempt to answer it here. But two quick thoughts.
First, I wouldn't underestimate the role of what we could loosely call "engineering" - the steady accumulation of advances in things like horse-breeding and ship-building and glass-blowing and metallurgy and mining and industrial chemistry and carbon-fiber construction and so on. Many of the advances we think of as instances of historic scientific genius (e.g., Enlightenment astronomy, Hooke's microscopy, Faraday's insights on electromagnetism; see also, famously, John Harrison's resolution of the longitude problem) were very dependent on prior slowly-accumulated advances in fields like these, built on the back of lengthy intergenerational metis rather than just technê.
Second, I'd emphasise that the major expansion in human knowledge that (according to the traditional story at least) started in Europe in the 1600s-1700s and has since taken over the world should not be attributed to us summoning The Science Demon (the Science Demon doesn't exist, on my view; he's like like sixty different minor demons) but something rather more abstract. If I was pressed, I'd call him something like "pluralistic-quantified-high-stakes-competition-demon" (a close relative of one of the Darwinian demon). What started to happen in Europe, maybe, around the 1600s-1700s, was European civilisation started to converge on a successful recipe, involving lots of inter-state and inter-elite competition, increased quantification/visible demonstrations of results via things like warfare, ideological pluralism allowing lots of experimentation, etc..
That said, I'm not a historian, and precise characterisation of the demon is beyond my paygrade as a philosopher, so I'll leave my speculations at that. But what I would emphasise is that if are looking for any kind of unified explanation of "the success of science", it won't be at the level of "do experiments using method X"; it'll be something far bigger and more abstract, more at the level of civilisation-wide social-institutional design than epistemology.
Part two:
Simple example: I dated a woman who revealed - after we'd been together for several months - that she had serious financial problems and that they were a major source of anxiety for her. If she'd told me this on our first or second date, it would have been a huge red flag for me. As it was, by the time she revealed this to me she'd already demonstrated many really impressive virtues, as well as displaying good sense in realising this was quite a personal piece of information, so it was no longer a deal breaker.
(5) Don't be (too) spontaneous. Romantic comedies play up spontaneity and we associate it with romance. That's why it's important to be able to fake it. Glib one-liners aside, you should try to be prepared for different eventualities so you can embrace spontaneity when it comes. This means simple stuff like ensuring your apartment/house is clean and presentable and doesn't look like the abode of a serial killer (seriously, have some decorative objects/stuff on the walls). It means having a trashcan with a lid in the bathroom (if it's not obvious why this is something you should have if you're expecting female company, think about it). It also involves having options to cover various contingencies. If you meet your date for happy hour drinks and tells you she's getting hungry, you should know a few good restaurants nearby. If the initial bar you picked to meet is crowded and noisy, have some decent alternatives in walking distance. The rule against spontaneity also extends to responding to messages. While the whole 'three day rule' is bullshit, I think it's a good idea not to respond to a date's messages too quickly. It can be super awkward when you write someone a message saying "hey that was fun last night, HMU next week if you want to do it again" and they respond immediately, basically forcing a conversation you weren't prepared for. Give yourself some time to think about your response and don't pressure communication.
(6) Don't be too open with your feelings too quickly. Again, Hollywood has a lot to answer for here. We rarely see romantic leads downplaying their affections, but it can be really important early on in a relationship not to come over too strong. Two simple reasons for this. Firstly, it can again show a lack of judgment. There are lots of emotionally unstable people out there (men and women) who express their undying love for someone after a couple of dates, and most people are aware (if only implicitly) that this kind of behaviour typically bespeaks someone with a cluster of personality disorders. Displaying good judgment means showing that you're a smart cautious person who doesn't rush into things or make themselves vulnerable unless they've had clear indicators of interest from their partner. Second, there is a balance of power issue here. I don't want to overstate this, but thinking back to the investor metaphor, if you're too eager, too soon, it can make you look like a dodgy salesman trying to offload an inferior product as quickly as possible. By being sensibly restrained and responsive to what your new romantic partner says and does, you show that you recognise your own value: you have something important to bring to the table, and you're not going to risk giving it away too quickly to an unsuitable partner. In special conditions - an intense and rapid holiday romance for example - the above advice may be temporarily waived, but again, pay attention to cues and respond appropriately.
(7) Don't expect instant results (and don't get bitter). Finding a lifelong romantic partner is one of the most important and challenging things people do. While some people get lucky and stumble on a suitable partner early on, it's increasingly common for people to have to go on a lot of dates before they find someone they can happily date for a few months, let alone the rest of their life. I suggest leaning into the experience and learning to enjoy the process of dating itself rather than just focusing on outcomes. Dating offers an unparalleled way to hone social skills in an emotionally complex environment, as well as a unique opportunity to meet people from varied backgrounds and learn about them and their lives. This is true even if they don't go home with you at the end of the night. Indeed, you should absolutely expect to be rejected repeatedly. Rejection burns, but it's a little less intense each time, and if you've been on the dating market for a while then it'll probably become incrementally less painful. If you are rejected, try to be gracious and smooth about it, and I'd generally recommend not asking the person why they ended things (or didn't want them to start). While you might get lucky and hear some useful advice, you're far more likely to get a delicate platitude about things just not working out.
In fact, most people have lots of implicit criteria for romantic partners that they may not even be fully aware of themselves. Maybe you weren't tall enough, maybe they didn't like your accent, maybe you reminded them too much of a bad ex. Closure is something we do for ourselves, and if you rely on other people to provide it for you then nine times out of ten you'll be left hanging. Moreover, just because a date doesn't result in romance doesn't mean it's pointless. In addition to providing good life experience, it can provide other opportunities. Two of my best friends today are women I went on dates with where there didn't turn out to be much chemistry. Both of these women subsequently set me up with friends of theirs, complete with a letter of recommendation stating that I was a good and decent guy. Above all, for god's sake don't get bitter and starting coming up with theories about how women are stupid, silly, or evil. Dating is a nightmare for women too, and while the problems they face are often different from those experienced by men, almost no-one has it easy. And on a more practical note, bitterness will not help make your more attractive or enhance your dating prospects - in fact, quite the opposite.
(8) Don't think you're above following the rules. "This is all bullshit. Two of my best friends got together on a first date where they bonded over their love of anime and MT:G and they were immediately open about their kinks and are now married with ten children." There are absolutely people who find love via pathways quite different from those discussed here, and I don't pretend any of the suggestions I'm giving are absolute. However, they represent my considered advice as to how to make dating more productive and less mysterious for straight men, and if you're feeling frustrated or despondent, I think they're a solid starting point. But the internet is full of people giving romantic advice, some of which is quite different from my own, and I don't take myself to be some inspired oracle dispensing eternal truths. Nonetheless, if what you're doing isn't working, or is making you unhappy, you should try something else.
doglatine
1mo ago
Given the already high rates of data fabrication inside but especially outside the West, I’d assign very little weight to any data from a paper where the authors, reviewers, and editors don’t even check for howlers like the ones quoted.
More broadly, speaking from the sausage factory floor, I can say that the trend in high-level publishing in the humanities increasingly seems to be towards special issues/special series where all papers are by invitation or commissioned. This creates some problems (harder for outsiders to break in, easier for ideologue editors to maintain a party line), but in general seems like an acceptable stopgap measure for wordcel fields to cover the next 5-10 year interregnum where LLM outputs are good enough to make open submission impossible, but not quite good enough to replace the best human scholars.
doglatine
6mo ago
Turkey isn’t going to war with Greece any time soon. The country’s membership of NATO is central to all of its defense plans and pretty important to its national identity. Entirely possible it gets drawn into the next round of Armenia-Azerbaijan though.
doglatine
1mo ago
'defend allies without going on global adventures' I meant taking a stand to defend Taiwan if it were attacked as opposed to isolationism - that wasn't clear in my post though. However, the US has lots of troops all over the world, that huge base in Africa that was recently closed for example.
One of the reasons the US has bases all over the world is so it can quickly deploy forces in defense of allies. For example, the recently-closed based in Niger was helping the government of that country (and neighboring regions) defend against ISIS and Boko Haram. Bases in the Middle East can help defend KSA, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and UAE against Iran, Houthis, etc.. Base in Okinawa and the Philippines protect those countries from China. And so on. While I'm sympathetic to your broad view that the US has overestimated its strength and should be focused on protecting what it has, it's not clear to me that the material means of doing so are radically different. E.g., if a US ally in East Africa is attacked, the solution is sending a carrier group.
doglatine
5mo ago
Maybe a silly question, but given that Canada is a massive country concentrated in a few urban areas, why aren’t there more initiatives to build new cities and associated infrastructure, with migration plans explicitly focused on bringing migrants to the new cities rather than existing overcrowded urban areas?
doglatine
11mo ago
It sounds like one very effective way to protect people like A, B, and C in your story would be to more rapidly and permanently incarcerate the genuine bad eggs around them, as well as making opiate drugs less widely available. The state can’t ensure that feckless weak-willed people are exposed to healthy friendship circles or overcome their natural deficits in decision-making. However, it can intervene to ensure that there are fewer bad actors around to exploit them.
doglatine
6mo ago
Just to add to this — a recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia would be an incredibly significant step towards ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, and with it the hope of an independent Palestine. Consequently, a bloody offensive that keeps the flames of war alive and the Arab street enraged and derails the hope of a detente between Israel and KSA might arguably be judged worth it.
doglatine
9mo ago
I think this says a lot about the "anti-woke right". It's basically just warmed over liberalism from 20 years ago
What you call the anti-woke right is really the institutional anti-woke right — the version of the right that can get editorials in national newspapers, books with major publishers, and professors at good universities. It is beholden to liberal norms because of the utter collapse of the traditional right in major cultural institutions and its failure to build alternatives.
This is why right-wing anti-elitism (as exemplified by Trump) is a fairly anaemic long-term threat to the left: it doesn’t build anything to compete with their long-term bases of power.
doglatine
6d ago
No rhetoric intended — “Mycoprotein” can include regular mushrooms but in the meat replacement context, it’s usually used to mean microfungi like Fusarium venenatum. These are cultivated in big vats in roughly the same way you’d cultivate brewer’s yeast, rather than on more traditional farms like field mushrooms.
I’d be pretty surprised if the issues you raise were a serious problem. We have a huge amount of experience at preventing bacteria or pathogens getting into a whole range of industrial biotech processes, and in this case we can very tightly control the inputs and monitor conditions. Hell, if necessary, you could just include antibiotics as inputs into the process, though I doubt it’d come to that.
doglatine
3mo ago
Nice! Note that it’s iecit rather than iacuit, and I feel like Latin wouldn’t do two coordinate clauses joined with a conjunction. Maybe a participle phrase, eg Abbotus numquam fideliter credens aleam iecit.
doglatine
4mo ago
My understanding is also that any airline that was perceived as doing anything other than maximally cooperating with immigration authorities in a given country would probably be denied landing slots in future.
doglatine
7mo ago
That’s not an especially hard one for the ancap to resolve; you can just let private medical licensing authorities award medical-qualification ratings based on their preferred criteria and create an accreditation marketplace. If I choose to go to an amateur surgeon despite him having low ratings, that’s up to me.
This kind of stuff is only really a major problem with a very specific western, educated, secular, metropolitan, young, trendy demographic. Unfortunately, most people here fall into many of those same baskets. However, there’s no reason not to branch out. I’ve been urging people here for years to broaden their dating horizons. Dating across class and education boundaries never worked for me, but I’ve had great romantic relationships with women from Russia, Japan, and Pakistan, and my wife is Filipina.
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