erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
11mo ago
I remember reading an academic article making the argument that this was causal - that the knowledge that you would have to fight even against the odds changed the way that captains trained their crews and planned engagements.
Oh, hey, @KulakRevolt is there; congratulations! I'm sorry you lost to Blacks Support Slavery.
Of course some dude saying that the age of consent should be 13 is gross and disgusting, but tweets expressing that sentiment are a dime a dozen, and pale in comparison to the woman who confidently asserted that it's impossible to sail across any ocean.
I mean, yes, Ocean Gyers is objectively more insane, but you also have to look at the shape of the tweets, not just the substance. No No No Yes Yes Yes is hilarious; I would have voted for it, too.
EDIT: Don't Eat Eggs is literally The Breakfast Question.
erwgv3g34
11mo ago
Like, what if you're wrong Bryan? Where does he go from there: "Well, shucks, I guess we ended up with two Indias after all. My bad."
Caplan is Jewish. If he's wrong, he can just fuck off to Israel. Must be nice to have a backup country...
Also, I don't see how wanting your son to be tall/athletic is anything like not wanting your daughter to have sex. One will get someone who shares your genes laid more; the other will not.
The concept of "getting laid" does not make sense when applied to women. Any women who wants to have sex can do so by the simple expedient of spreading her legs. Men have to actually work for it.
Given this, the bottleneck for women's reproductive success is not having sex, which again any woman can do, but having sex with a man who has both the ability and the willingness to stick around and provide for her and her children and protect both from harm.
A woman who has sex with men without taking those facts into account is rightly derided as a slut or a whore, and she and her children would die out in the streets if the state did not steal money at gunpoint from productive, hardworking men to support her bastards.
erwgv3g34
11mo ago
Robert Fitzgerald's 1965 translation is the standard modern version. Why not do that one?
Samuel Butler's 1900 translation was included in the Harvard Classics, but I usually recommend against it because it's in prose.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
I wouldn't call ourselves "a right-wing monoculture"; we have everything from colorblind gender-neutral 90s liberals, to centrists who just want to grill, to autistic libertarians, to God-'n-guns conservatives, to throne and altar reactionaries. The only thing we are really missing is the far left, either economic (communism) or social (wokeness).
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
From "Mormonism: The Control Group For Christianity?" by Scott Alexander:
One common apologetics tactic is the argument from the historicity of Christ and the Apostles. That is, the Apostles said they saw the Resurrection of Christ, and it would take quite a conspiracy to make twelve different people lie - not to mention to make them stick to the lie even after Christianity became unpopular and it became clear they would be persecuted or even die for their faith. If the Apostles had been making the story of the Resurrection up, there were ample opportunities for them to say so. Yet either they never did, or it never made it into the tradition.
...
One way to knock down this argument is to find a case of twelve people who said they saw something miraculous, didn't recant despite persecution and strong self-interested reasons to do so - and yet everyone, atheist and orthodox Christian alike, agree they were wrong. Ever since I left Utah I've been slowly making my way through The Mormon People, and I was very excited to find a case of exactly that.
If you're not familiar with Mormonism, it was founded in the 1820s by an American prophet named Joseph Smith, who claimed that an angel led him to a series of golden tablets written in hieroglyphics which, when translated by means of a magic stone, contained various revelations. He attracted various followers despite persecution and today there are over ten million Mormons who believe the insights he took from these tablets and various other angelic encounters form a new testament of the Bible called The Book of Mormon.
During Smith's lifetime, there was obviously a lot of curiosity over whether his story about angels and golden tablets and hieroglyphics was true. This was compounded by his insistence that he had given the golden tablets back to the angel when he was done translating them and so couldn't produce the originals for scholarly review anymore.
However, Smith was able to produce eleven witnesses (besides himself, for a total of twelve) for his story. Three witnesses claimed to have seen the angel holding the plates and heard the Voice of God tell them Smith's story was true... Eight others saw the plates later, and although they did not encounter God or any angels, they confirmed that there were a set of mysterious golden tablets with hieroglyphics on them... All eleven signed official legal statements swearing their testimony, which were later incorporated into printed editions of the Book of Mormon.
What are we to make of this?
One obvious possibility is that Smith made some fake tablets and showed them off to few enough people for a brief enough time that the fake couldn't be investigated closely. I don't like this explanation for two reasons. The first is that it would be really hard for a dirt-poor farmer to construct a book seemingly constructed of gold tablets inscribed with hieroglyphics. He would need the cooperation of a couple of professionals, and he would have to rely on them keeping quiet. Even moving the tablets - they were said to have weighed several hundred pounds - would have been a production. No goldsmith or wealthy backer has ever come forward claiming a part in it, nor have any likely candidates been proposed. And second of all, this is less parsimonious than most alternative hypotheses. It would require Smith to be pushing two totally different plots at the same time - whatever plot got the first group to testify to angels and divine voices, and the plot to fake a golden book for the second group.
A second possibility is that Smith found a bunch of people who were willing to lie for him. But this suffers from the same problem that the "the Apostles lied" theory does. Several of the witnesses later had very public fallings-out with Joseph Smith and the incipient Mormon Church. Oliver Cowdery, one of the three who saw the angel, got into a fight with Joseph Smith over polygamy and some money matters and got excommunicated from Mormonism. He ended up moving to Ohio, becoming a Methodist, and declaring that he was "ashamed of his connection with Mormonism". However, he always stuck to his story about seeing the angel and the Golden Plates, even when, according to Wikipedia, "that confession cost him the editorship of a newspaper".
David Whitmer, another of the three witnesses to the angel, also got in a spat with Joseph Smith and was part of a coup attempt in the Mormon church to expel Joseph Smith as leader and replace him with himself. Smith excommunicated him and then sent a militia to harass him and his family; eventually he was forced to leave the state. Although he denounced Smith for the rest of his life, he continued to swear that he had seen the angel and the golden plates.
Further, the Mormons were getting persecuted ad nauseum by this point. On three different occasions, Mormon towns were burnt, the Mormons lost their land, and a bunch of Mormons were killed or jailed. Joseph Smith himself was killed by an angry mob. Eventually the Mormons got so sick and afraid that they all packed up and fled to Utah, which as anyone who's seen Utah knows requires a special level of desperation.
This presents a serious problem for the Christian apologists, at least if they're not Mormon. Their argument is that there's no way twelve people would simultaneously hallucinate a mystical experience, and although twelve people might agree to lie about the mystical experience there's no way they would all keep that lie throughout decades of church politics and terrible persecution. But now they're faced with a dilemma. Either they have to throw out the argument that a dozen people testifying to something and holding to it means it definitely happened, or they all have to convert to Mormonism.
So what did happen with all those witnesses to Mormonism? Well, there are a few helpful hints. All of them were strongly predisposed in Smith's favor to begin with. Some were his family members. All had a background in the sort of folk mysticism that was common in America at the time.
(notice none of this differentiates it from the Jesus case; those who saw the resurrected Jesus were his disciples, some were members of his family such as his brother James, and they were all steeped in the folk mysticism that was common in Palestine at the time. But I digress)
A number of the Mormon witnesses sort of change their stories in weird ways. One, Martin Harris, supposedly admitted later he saw the plate not with his earthly eyes but with his "eyes of faith", and a neighbor said he "never claimed to have seen the plates with his natural eyes, only spiritual vision". Then Harris totally denied ever saying this and said they were definitely literally real in every possible way. Another witness is supposedly on the record as saying the angel had "no form or shape" and was more of a "vague impression", although again he's also on the much more official record as totally denying this and saying it was all definitely really real. Apparently in contradiction to these, there is a record of one witness insisting he hefted the (quite heavy) plates and held them on his knees and felt the weight and so on.
The Jesus story also has some weird incongruities. In many cases, the disciples originally thought they were talking to someone else (a gardener, a traveler on the road), and later "realize" it is Jesus. Jesus tells Mary not to touch him, suggesting some kind of belief he might be a vision or apparition, but then Thomas very specifically does touch him, suggesting an attempt to dispel this belief. Although the Christ story admittedly does not have the sort of guarded-then-retracted attempts by the witnesses to say maybe it was really spiritual after all, we also have only about a thousandth as much material in the Jesus case as in the Joseph Smith case, and we totally lack any independent testimony from the Apostles involved let alone any evidence that they were ever questioned harshly by skeptics or had things they mentioned to their neighbors come back to haunt them.
Overall I think the Mormon experience proves (if you're not Mormon!) that the sort of psychological forces surrounding mystical experiences can be more complicated than we naively expect. We wouldn't expect twelve witnesses to swear up and down that they saw angels and magical golden plates and so on, and then stick to the story despite a host of opportunities to profit by denying it - and yet if we are to continue denying Mormonism we must admit exactly that. And coming to that conclusion should make us update our probabilities in the case of the Apostles as well.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
I mean, if you find a foolproof (in the adversarial sense) way to assess how well someone would perform at a high-skilled job, you would be a billionaire overnight.
No, you wouldn't, because it would have disparate impact out the wazoo, which means it would be illegal.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
But mothers can save most of those expenses by staying at home, thus making quitting those careers a much more attractive option. Put another way, children dramatically reduce the value of a woman's career.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
Okay, so the woman takes a few weeks off from her job to have the baby and recover. And then what? She goes right back to work and leaves the baby in a daycare? Great, so now much of her salary is going to that. And since she doesn't have time to feed the baby, she can buy formula and switch to take out when the kid is old enough for solid food. And speaking of old enough, once he gets to kindergarten age she can sink most of her remaining wages into a zero-sum competition for the scarce real-state with the good schools attached . And...
Or, you know, she could just cut out the middleman. Specially if she is planning to have more than one child.
What's the point of having a baby only to see it raised by strangers?
Children need mothers. They don't need girlbosses.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
Pressuring men to marry is both unnecessary and useless. One antisocial fuckboy can lead on thirty girls indefinitely.
Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive; you guard what is expensive, not what is cheap.
Once you are willing and able to use physical force, social pressure, and economic privation to coerce women into only having sex inside of marriage, you will have plenty of hardworking beta providers lining up to marry the resulting virgin brides. Or, at least, you will if you also get rid of such nonsense as marital "rape" laws and no-fault divorce that understandably makes men afraid to get married.
(Imagine that the government passed a law that, at any moment, your employer can decide to stop paying you, and if you ever quit or get fired, he is entitled to steal half your assets; that's what marriage 2.0 is. What happens to the labor market in this scenario? Solve for the equilibrium.)
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
Can't overestimate the body blow of losing Latinos to a guy they've been trying to protect Latinos from since he came off the elevator.
We warned them to stop calling us Latinx.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
I work at a hotel which is open 24/7 365. That means we need someone in the front desk at all times. We have three 8-hour shifts, from 7 AM to 3 PM (morning), from 3 PM to 11 PM (afternoon), and from 11 PM to 7 AM (night). That's 3 x 7 = 21 shifts per week. We have a full-time worker for each shift doing 5 shifts a week, for a total of 3 x 5 = 15 shifts. The other 6 shifts get covered by other people as needed (I cover two afternoon shifts and two night shifts, and somebody else covers the remaining two morning shifts; it helps that our company owns two hotels, so the person with only two shifts at my hotel can work more shifts at the other hotel if they want a full workweek, but in principle you could cover this schedule by having four people working 5 shifts each and rotating the extra day among them unless somebody wants to volunteer for the overtime).
Why can't you do something like this? Sounds to me like the fundamental problem is simply that you need more doctors. Double the number of residents and see if anybody still needs to work 24 hours straight.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
Reminds me of "How to Do Health Care Right" by The Dreaded Jim:
My wife was advised to get a colonoscopy. We shopped around, got a reasonable price at a doctor with a good reputation, negotiated with the insurance company, did all the stuff one does in an environment which actually has prices. Then after the colonoscopy was done, the hospital pulled a huge list of stupendously expensive charges out of their ass, most of which were obviously ridiculous or completely made up out of thin air, just trying it on to see what they could get away with, and all of which were charges we had definitely not agreed to, nor consented to in any way, formal or informal, written or unwritten. They just were not used to doing stuff on the basis that one has a definite price, and that the price one charges affects demand for one’s services. The concept seemed alien and incomprehensible to them. Mentally, they were socialists.
In Singapore, they advertise prices.
Some years later, I had the following conversations with various US health care providers. I recorded the conversations:
Conversation with Stanford Hospital:
Me
My wife needs a colonoscopy: Could you give me a price on it?
Stanford Hospital: (businesslike tone)
Twenty five hundred to thirty five hundred.
Me
You do this all the time. Can’t you give me a specific price?
Stanford Hospital: (cooler tone)
Sorry
Me
Is $3500 the all up, all included price to both myself and my insurance?
Stanford Hospital: (businesslike tone)
It only includes the doctors fee, and does not include any additional services
Me
So after I have this done, any number of people could then charge me any fee they like in addition to the thirty five hundred?
Stanford Hospital: (distinctly chilly tone)
I am afraid so.
O’Connor Hospital
Me
My wife needs a colonoscopy: Could you give me a price on it.
O’Connor Hospital
Do you have a primary physician?
Me
Yes, my primary physician has advised this procedure, but it seems expensive. I am looking for a price.
O’Connor Hospital (outraged and indignant)
We don’t give out prices!
Mercy General Hospital
Me
I am looking for a price on a colonoscopy.
Mercy General Hospital hangs up without a word.
Saint Joseph’s medical center of Stockton:
I am transferred to financial counselling, who transferred me to “Estimates” The estimating lady appreciated my problem and made sympathetic noises.
She then asks me for a CPT code. I then research what CPT codes are, and discover that an operation can result in any CPT, and any number of CPTs. I discover that no matter what CPT I give, it is unlikely to be correct or sufficient, that additional CPTs can show up any time. A CPT would only be useful if it was possible to know in advance what CPTs would result from a colonoscopy, but the CPTs are only decided after the colonoscopy, usually long after the colonoscopy.
Oh shit, it's true. He goes by Senna Diaz now. God fucking damn it. Who is he trying to fool? The guy couldn't be more male-brained if he tried. Where have you ever seen a woman draw a webcomic about transhumanism and the singularity?
Removing the undergrad requirement would be nice for American doctors, who wouldn't have to spend an extra 4 years and $200,000 for literally no reason, but it wouldn't do anything to help patients. That's because the real bottleneck on the number of doctors is the residency requirement, not the medical degree. To increase the supply of doctors, need to either shorten residency or increase the number of residency slots.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
Huge tits look great when a woman is young, but they age horribly, becoming saggy and veiny.
One of the reasons Asian women age so well is that they are so flat.
teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem
Going nowhere without a chaperone was the traditional solution.
Yeah, this. It's how Muslims solve the problem. It's how Christians solved the problem until very recently.
I was watching ¿Qué Pasa, USA?, a bilingual sitcom from the 70s, and one of the big conflicts between the Cuban immigrants and their American daughter is the need to have a chaperone on her dates, as in episode 7, "The Super Chaperone". That's because America had already gone through the sexual revolution, but Cuba hadn't.
There is only one thing a woman wants to be alone with her date for. Chaperones are how we kept girls from becoming sluts.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
Once you've got a 17-year-old on Life360 (Slogan: "Family-proof your family"), you've pretty much fouled up completely anyway. If you want your children to achieve independence, making lax rules for them is insufficient; you need to actually allow them some actual independence. Or at least enough that they don't know you're still watching.
This is good advice for a son. Not so much for a daughter.
Giving your daughter independence is how you ensure she gets her cherry popped by a fuckboy.
I'm profoundly sensitive to demoralization and trans propaganda in children's programming. We basically have a rule in our house that our daughter doesn't read or watch anything newer than 2000, with older generally being better. She's still little, I don't know how well this will hold up. She's starting to ask if we can get Paw Patrol like all the other kids at school. We've heard through the grapevine from other parents with concerns like ours that "the first few seasons" are fine. But we aren't interested in playing whack-a-mole with a franchise our daughter grows to love trying to sneak bullshit past us. We know this isn't sustainable forever, but god damn. The media put out there for children just keeps getting worse and worse.
A quick online search reveals that the Paw Patrol spinoff Rubble & Crew features a nonbinary character, River, in its first season. So, good call.
But I think your first mistake was sending your daughter to school. It's not going to stop at TV shows. Everything that your family does differently from the mainstream is going to be something that she learns is not normal from her peers, and become a point of contention. If you think it's bad now, wait until she hits 15 and she is yelling that she hates you and that you are ruining her life because you won't let her go out to a date or party unchaperoned like her friends. You cannot send your children to Caesar for their education and then be surprised when they come back as Romans.
From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:
First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.
Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.
While we’re on the subject of children: DO NOT send your children to a public school. “Drop out” here too; by which I do not mean that your children should go uneducated, but that you should – you must – homeschool. To do otherwise is pure child abuse. Perhaps fifty years ago, this was not the case, but these times are not those times. The failures of the public schools need not be repeated here, but they are undeniable, and any reasonably smart ten-year-old whose attention span hasn’t been destroyed by television can learn more by being left alone all day with a stack of books than they can in any public school classroom anyway. As for the universities, there are not quite any suitable replacements for them yet, but some lurk just over the horizon and will appear before long.
To say that one should “drop out” of – not bother listening to and not ever trusting – the mainstream news media goes without saying.
If they do not know the problems of the black underclass, then how do they know what to censor? Like the man inventing excuses for the dragon in his garage, they must have a model of black dysfunction hidden somewhere in their brains; otherwise, would not know which thoughts are dangerous. Hence "the woke are more correct than the mainstream"; when a progressive complains that coming down on crime will affect black people the hardest, it is because he realizes on some level that blacks are much more criminal than whites.
From 1984 by George Orwell:
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.
It's so insane. It's like the European elites looked at all the problems America has with its black underclass and thought to themselves "I gotta get one of those".
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
His point is that the college already got the money, so they don't care if the loan is dischargeable or not. The one on the hook if the student is allowed to default is the government, not the university.
Most student loans are from the government, not from private banks. And the government doesn't make a risk/profit calculation before lending you the money.
The definition of species should probably be restricted to animals, plants, and fungi; it's impossible to draw clear boundaries around bacteria and viruses.
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