doglatine
1yr ago
I had exactly the opposite take — first book okay, second book good, third book excellent.Liu can’t write characters or plausible motives for shit, but his ideas are absolutely wild. Book 1 is mostly badly written characters doing stuff. Book 2 is badly written characters doing stuff with a great reveal at the end. Book 3 is Liu coming up with insane genius explanations for string theory, matter-antimatter asymmetry, entropy, etc..
doglatine
1yr ago
I’m surprised no-one mentioned the way this incident has been covered on the /r/NYC subreddit. Given that it’s a deep blue city and Reddit is a deep blue site, you’d think everyone would be up in arms about Neely’s death. But the dominant mood is dramatically more pro-Penny than here, for heaven’s sake. Multiple posters saying that he did what needed to be done, people have a right not to be hassled by psychopaths on their commute, even some highly upvoted comments calling out progressivism by name as the ideology that created this problem. I’m utterly bemused and perplexed. Am I missing something?
On a related note, if Trump is canny, he’ll make his candidacy about law and order this time. The democrats can’t plausibly reclaim that particular political mantle after the prominence of Defund The Police, and there are enough true cop-haters along the Democrat activist base that you’d never get message discipline on the issue. And while I don’t have good polling on the issue, my sense from reading the city subs on Reddit is that crime is creeping up voters’ list of priorities. Oh, and as an issue it’s less alienating than immigration for many Latino voters, while being able to be plausibly connected to immigration with Trump’s base (“I’ve been gone four years and we have chaos in the streets of our cities, chaos on the border”).
doglatine
1yr ago
Also Emma Raducanu’s US open victory in the US Open in Summer 2021 was a HUGE deal in the UK. She instantly became one of the biggest sporting personalities in the country. And such an underdog story!
doglatine
1yr ago
Yes. I fully agree with these criticism of the modern movie industry. That said, I think TV is getting interesting again; after the Golden Age of the 2000s (The Wire, The Sopranos, The West Wing, Six Feet Under) and the Silver Age of the early 2010s (Breaking Bad. Mad Men, early Game of Thrones), we’ve had a rocky few years, with far too many streaming services chasing too few eyeballs. But The White Lotus, Ted Lasso, and Severance are both excellent and are new IPs, if I’m not mistaken.
doglatine
1yr ago
One fun example — almost the entirety of narrative literature in the ancient world is based on a shared mythological and historical corpus, in many cases the exact same telling and retelling of same stories. The Trojan Cycle, the Theban Cycle, and legendary Roman history (eg the Aeneid) dominate. Notable exceptions include comedic drama, Roman elegy, and a few weird works like Apuleius’s Golden Ass.
I think Ancient literature is pretty good, FWIW, so a relative fixed narrative repertoire is at least compatible with decent storytelling.
doglatine
1yr ago
100% agree. That's what really impressed me when I heard the story. It made it go from the kind of system that could lead to feuding to something like justice by-social-consensus.
doglatine
1yr ago
Definitely sounds outrageous to a Western audience, but most Filipinos I know loved Duterte (excluding FilAms with college degrees). None of them felt personally endangered by his policy, and they reckoned it was a success. I'll be honest, despite spending a couple of months in the Philippines most years, I don't have a good grip on whether Duterte 'succeeded' in his war on drugs, because in my time in the Philippines I saw basically zero evidence of drug use except an occasional joint being passed around at a party. Certainly nothing like the zombie hordes of San Francisco or Philadelphia. But culturally, the Philippines seems to have a really low tolerance for substance abuse; I always felt like an alcoholic when I was there, whenever I ordered a third beer and everyone else stopped at two. So perhaps there was a groundswell of support for wanting to aspire to Singaporean standards and nip the problem in the bud?
doglatine
1yr ago
One example I'd flag here is the Philippines, which amazingly has a lower per capita crime rate than the US and the UK, but which is VERY reliant on private security and community justice. The middle class live in gated communities, private security guards are everywhere, and justice is swiftly and pretty brutally implemented. Here is a really funny scene from the movie La Visa Loca where a British tourist gets his bag snatched by a thief. After he's arrested by private security guards, the British tourist is invited to beat the shit out of the guy before they call the police.
Another example - back when she was a teenager one of my Pinoy wife's friends was sexually assaulted in a Manila club. The next day her brothers and cousins had established the name of the guy, and went to his family and explained they were going to teach him a lesson. The guy's family basically agreed and they fixed the terms of the beatings (e.g., nothing that would leave him permanently disabled). A few hours later a dozen 20-something men jumped the guy as he was leaving work and kicked seven shades of shit out of him. Thus was justice done, and justice was perceived to have been done, and a precedent was enforced in the wider community.
doglatine
1yr ago
Absolutely fair, but obviously hard to disentangle cause and effect here; the medieval era was desperately poor and ideologically fanatical by modern standards with an incredibly poorly educated population. I guess my main point was not that private justice systems are necessarily desirable from a niceness and human civilisation point of view, but merely that there are indeed stable equilibria involving them that don't immediately turn into the war of all against all. Also note Scott's discussion in his NRx explainer post about the bizarrely low crime rates in Victorian England that existed alongside high poverty and very low per-capita policing.
doglatine
1yr ago
With traditional Christian-values inspired conservatism, yes. But most conservatives here are of the Nietzschean post-Christian kind, which is much less fussy about the sanctity of life and much more comfortable with humans differing in intrinsic value. And yet even people in the second camp have to make the proper prostrations to liberal pieties.
doglatine
1yr ago
I'm glad you're defending this line of argument. That said, it's not clear to me that decentralised enforcement of the law is going to lead to widespread violence and vigilanteism. It always amazed me that police forces were relatively rare in both the ancient and medieval worlds, and that was largely due to a combination of collective enforcement of norms and the ability of wealthy respectable private citizens to pay for investigators/private muscle.
I'm not say that's better than our present arrangement, or that it's compatible with the luxury liberalism we enjoy today, but in many cases it worked surprisingly well.
doglatine
1yr ago
You realise it's April Fool's Day, right? The odds of this being anything other than satire seem low to me.
doglatine
1yr ago
Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that one did it without one's partner's knowledge and consent. And of course it won't work for all relationship dynamics. But I think more couples in general could benefit from having (explicit) loose rules around occasional dalliances outside the relationship.
doglatine
1yr ago
100%. I honestly think this is one of reasons it's valuable to have some non-monogamous options on the table in a long-term relationship - it helps combat the 'grass is greener' phenomenon if you're occasionally allowed to leave your house and check out the neighbourhood. And generally speaking, these days the neighbourhood is a burning valley of cinder and radioactive ash. Maybe you find an intact tin of beans or something but you're mostly relieved to rush back into your cosy warm home.
doglatine
1yr ago
doglatine
1yr ago
In some ways Brilliant Pebbles is even more exciting. In principle, space-based BMD is actually viable even for mass launches of ICBMs. In fact, because (i) MIRVs are only deployed on re-entry, (ii) objects moving in a vacuum are relatively predictable, and (iii) any kind of collision in space is likely to be terminal due to the insane velocities involved, the economics and physics might even favour the defender: 10,000 or so baseball-sized micro-missiles could take out huge numbers of ICBMs reliably (again, in principle - so much of this stuff is untested).
doglatine
1yr ago
doglatine
1yr ago
Getting a green card currently takes 12-18 months, and if it's through marriage to a US citizen it's conditional for two years on the marriage being bona fide. Getting full blown citizenship takes five on top of that. I'm not saying that US citizenship isn't a significant attraction for people from the developing world, but you'd very much have to be playing a long game, especially since you're presumably going to be having sex with a partner (and potentially having kids). Combine that with residual stigma around divorce in some SEA cultures and their tendency towards pragmatism around marriage (it's about building a family and shared financial platform, with sexual attraction relatively de-emphasised) and I think this risk is overblown. Sure, it happens sometimes, but most SEA women who partner up with American guys are going to be entering the marriage in good faith on the assumption they can make it work and build a better life for themselves, rather than intending to bail at the first opportunity.
doglatine
1yr ago
It definitely doesn't need to be 6 months, especially if you plan in advance and do your homework. My sister-in-law (Filipina) met her fiancé while he was on a 1-month surfing holiday in Siargao, and they connected and bonded and he came out to visit her a couple more times in the next 12 months, and now she's living in the Netherlands with him. She's also (I hasten to add) a very impressive woman in her own right, with graduate degrees from US and European universities, so their case isn't typical, but if anything that supports my case.
doglatine
1yr ago
There's obviously a huge difference between "mail order bride" scenarios vs "I met this amazing Cambodian woman while I was on a surfing holiday and now we're married and she's doing her ADN at SUNY Albany". The latter carries - if anything - positive social weight among the professional managerial class.
doglatine
1yr ago
Maybe I'm putting too much weight on my social experience here, but when I think of "guy who can't get a girl" I imagine someone making decent-but-not-great money in IT or business (say $45,000 a year) who's just a bit of an introverted loser. That kind of guy can definitely say "fuck it, I'm going to do a one month CELTA course and move to Manila", and if their lack of romantic success is the main source of pain in their life, they probably should.
doglatine
1yr ago
I’ll just throw my hat into the ring here and say I’m surprised that more sex-starved white guys aren’t looking overseas for partners, especially to East/Southeast Asia. Quite beyond sexual reasons (Asian women tend to be considered highly attractive by westerners as judged by eg response rate on dating sites) and cultural reasons (Asian cultures tend to be more family-oriented, with loyalty especially being highly prized), there’s simple market dynamics — a white guy in Vietnam or the Philippines or even Hong Kong has massively inflated Sexual Market Value.
Of course, the way to approach this is NOT to go via some skeezy online site, but rather to spend time in relevant country. If a single white dude saves up his money and vacation days, he can spend 6 weeks in the Philippines or Vietnam having a fun time, and if he does his research first, he can go to places where he’ll meet smart accomplished trendy young women rather than just bargirls, especially if he’s spent a few months acquiring rudiments of the relevant language. This can easily lead to relationships and marriage, and I know several “success stories” like this. Ideally, though, a single white guy would simply move out to the relevant region for a while — maybe a year — and conduct the matchmaking under a more relaxed timescale. The best life stage for this would be a gap year or similar, or just a career break. English language teaching is an obvious pathway here, but there are usually industry-specific routes too.
Finally, if you can’t bring yourself to leave your home country, you could just try spending more time in relevant foreign-origin communities. Take lessons in Malay or Vietnamese or Tagalog or Mandarin, get to know your local Asian restaurants and cafes, go to cultural events, etc.. Obviously, though, don’t be a creep about it — you’re going to these places to be in an environment where you’re hoping romantic interactions are more likely to occur spontaneously, rather than specifically going there to hit on women.
I’m not saying that white guys should give up on white women — some of my best friends are white women, and I’ve had lots of rewarding romantic relationships with them — but I do think Western gender relations are in a really toxic and fucked up place right now, and I’m surprised more men aren’t looking for more genteel and constructive alternatives.
doglatine
1yr ago
I honestly don't wish him ill at all, and I suspect this is all fairly deliberate, but I do think it's worth pointing out that his comments would have gotten anyone cancelled, even as far back as the 90s. Sure, there's a high-decoupling reading of them where everyone who participates in "white flight" agrees with him etc. but he chose a highly provocative way of making his point. Like I said, I think it's deliberate, and I expect to see him as a talking head on various alt-news stations and podcasts henceforth.
doglatine
1yr ago
FWIW I made it to my late 20s working in philosophy and cognitive science before I encountered HBD. Most people, especially educated ones, will simply believe some combination of (i) IQ is a discredited old measure of intelligence, (ii) race is a social construct, and maybe (iii) insofar as we give IQ any weight at all, we should recognise it as highly mutable as demonstrated by stuff like the Flynn Effect.
This started to unravel for me when I began poking around and found that (i) was false. But most educated people won’t get to that point.
I hope this isn't too shallow for a top-level comment, but I wanted to share a personal observation about shifts in political views. Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime. Part of this is probably me getting older (damn kids, stop cycling on the sidewalk!), but I'd single out two main factors.
(1) A big part of it has been related to noticing shifting views on the issue among city-dwelling liberals (that's my in-group, whether I like it or not). I regularly visit a bunch of US cities for work, and I subscribe to their relevant subreddits, and there's been an incredible shift from "defund-the-police is a solid principle albeit the details need to be worked out" to "lock up the bums now". And similarly, several real life liberal friends who were traditionally pretty anti-police have become much more authoritarian of late, complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit, and something needs to be done.
(2) I've also had a lot more professional dealings with academic criminologists lately, and damn, it's been a wake-up call. It seems to be one of the most activist domains of academia I've ever encountered (and I deal with sociologists and social psychologists on a regular basis!). Over a few different conferences and dinners, I've chatted with criminologists who were pretty explicit about how they saw their role, namely speaking up for oppressed criminals; empirics or the rights of the wider populace barely came into the conversation. On top of this, there have been some spectacular scandals in academic criminology that have helped confirm my impression of the field. Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.
I'm going to add two quick personal longstanding reasons why I'm inclined to be quite authoritarian on crime -
(i) Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority: if public schools become known as a magnet for drugs and gang violence, then middle-class parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and won't give their votes or (more importantly) their organising energy to maintaining school quality. If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death. Speaking as someone who likes public options, I think it's essential that fairly strong state authority is exerted in public utilities to ensure that they are seen as viable by the middle class.
(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.
Obviously lots more to be said here, but I'll save my follow-ups for the comments. Curious what others think.
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