fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
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User ID: 2896
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
17d ago
Bezalel Smotrich infamously had that 2015 quote about Hamas being an asset:
“The Palestinian Authority is a burden and Hamas is an asset. On the same international field, in this game of delegitimization, and think about it for a moment: the Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset. It is a terrorist organization. No one will recognize it. No one will give it status at the ICC. No one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council. ...”
That's some galaxy-brained thinking, right there.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
17d ago
Wasn't that about France wanting deniability, so they used their spies instead of their military?
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
17d ago
Isn't this what a game of "chicken" looks like from the losing side? If we're unable or unwilling to escalate far enough to deter Putin (or Hamas), then we're stuck dealing with their actions. So naive people who "don't have a side" and "just want the killing to stop" have all their brains' capacity for rationalization being applied to finding reasons why the other side should give up. Which makes them indistinguishable from people who actively want the defeat of the other side, but who have enough social skills to lie about their motivations.
Moving stuff by boat is a lot more efficient than moving it by land, meaning you can support more people in one place, and easily ship raw goods in and manufactured products out. Not to mention that it's easier to reinforce and defend coastal settlements from barbaric hill people in the "interior". There's often a city near a river's mouth, and another where the river becomes impassable to ocean-going boats (and there's often a portage there, if the river is still navigable on the other side). Alternatively, bridges and fords can serve the same purpose: I think London was the site of a ford, which the Romans built a bridge across. Also, I recently ran across a video about how Lewiston in Idaho is a Pacific sea port.
For the Roman empire (pre- and post-), here's a map of travel times and an ACOUP post about grain shipments, trade, and wealth equilibria.
I think Southern India had a cool bit of luck, in that if you sailed down the Red Sea and continued east out the Gulf of Aden past the Horn of Africa, you'd end up in Thiruvananthapuram. So they got Greek travelers, and Arab traders by sea (instead of Arab conquerors by land), plus two separate colonies of Jews fleeing disasters in Judea.
For east Europe, we can notice the Baltic Sea area had a different climate, too.
For China, look at the history of the Grand Canal.
For exceptions, maybe Persia and modern Switzerland might count? West Virginia is kind of the opposite of an exception.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
17d ago
To build on what other people wrote, how you value the judgement should have a correlation to how you value the person doing the judging. Don't worry so much about random people on the Internet. Especially don't pay attention to people who actively dislike you for other reasons than the particular action in question, or who have an ideology that they want to convert you to, or who seem to have bad judgement about you or in general. But pay more attention to people you respect, including mentors, your idealized/future self, or any relevant demigods or bodhisattvas. "Don't make baby Jesus cry." Maybe a question to ask is, "who does this person think I should become?"
The catch is that this works for narcissists and solipsists, too, because they don't value anyone except themselves. So you need to have empathy and humility and openness to the possibility that you might be wrong. But there are entire ecosystems out there built on exploiting this. Walking down the street today, I encountered panhandlers, crazies, and contractors soliciting for charities of questionable effectiveness. The world is full of people who don't give a shit what your personal experience is on the inside, as long as you act the way they want on the outside.
To use astrophysics as a metaphor, the stable Trojan points all seem to involve some form of religion, but it's possible to hang out at unstable Trojan points if you're up for making periodic orbital adjustments.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
18d ago
It would throw a monkey wrench into all the arguments about "so-and-so won the popular vote".
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
18d ago
The law has been on the books for plenty of time. I think this is a good reminder that the basic unit of the United States of America is the State, not the political party. I think the Democrats really thought the state would simply roll over and accommodate them, and that expectation is frankly cause enough to remind them of the proper place of the party.
I'd love to know the rationale for repeatedly ignoring these sorts of laws. "Because we can", sure, that works until you can't. At the very least, start lobbying the states for uniform 2-month rules or something.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
18d ago
I think it's just the horses vs. elephants thing discussed over at ACOUP. Yeah, horses may freak out when they encounter an elephant in combat. But if you train the horses around elephants, they'll get used to the elephants, and then they can deal with elephants in combat just fine.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
19d ago
I notice that Scott isn't including it on his list of affiliated sites.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
19d ago
If you get a chance, maybe check out the North American Pacific NW during the "rainy season" (fall through spring): Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver BC all get at least 8 hours of daylight in the winter, so it's not as bad as Scotland for daylight. It's grey and drizzly (parts of it are technically a rainforest!) and in the middle it hangs out in your desired temperature range for months on end, but rarely gets colder, and it's not humid. Or maybe try New Zealand, they've got more normal weather, but their winter is the northern hemisphere summer. ;-)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
19d ago
"Beggars in Spain", the original novella, by Nancy Kress. I have no idea how I went this long without reading it. There's almost nothing I could describe as "filler"; she makes me work as a reader, in a good way. It hints at the inner life of other characters, without ever giving definitive answers. And it's on-topic for this forum, too.
"Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by just laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing them anything? Be as honest as I know you are."
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
19d ago
I feel like the key is that someone who is working should have a life that's clearly and obviously better than someone who isn't working, even when taking into account all the time and stress of the work itself. Right now the incentives are out of whack.
I envision something like people having a 10' square room, including bed and desk and sink and shower and toilet, with communal meals that are nutritious but bland, and simple clothes in pastel colors. If they can work enough to buy a computer or smartphone of their own, they can spend all day freebasing video games and porn, and the rest of us never have to see them again. Or they can go to the library, train to do something useful, find a job, and then actually live somewhere with a separate bathroom, and buy clothes of their choice, and eat real meat, and drink decent coffee, and have beer and soda and junk food whenever they want.
I suspect a good chunk of the left would react in horror. But this seems like something we could afford in America, if we got control of the borders, and got control of cost disease.
(And then there's the little problem of children.)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
19d ago
I think there's a steelman to 'expanding welfare forever.'
I agree, my ideal would be a slow transition of welfare to a cash transfer system (plus Medicaid for all), and then that can expand into a UBI if that's how the economy of the future goes.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
20d ago
But it didn't though! Why do you think the Irish were living in mud huts on tiny plots of land, and entirely dependent on potato cultivation? Two centuries earlier their society was completely different with warring tribes/clans largely focused on where they could steal their next cow from (apologies to the ghost of FarNearEverywhere). Ireland wasn't some Atlantis laid low by a potato blight, it was an overpopulated clusterfuck dependent on potato monoculture, setting the scene for disaster.
Wait, what? The cattle raid of Cooley was set in pre-Christian history, 1st century AD according to Wikipedia. The famine started in 1845, but the Normans/English/British/whoever had been messing with the island since 1169.
My understanding was the proximate cause of the problem was the sheer poverty of most of the Irish, and the lack of work, or more broadly the lack of an economy, that could lift them out of poverty. The poor tended to rent a small farm where they grew potatoes to eat, and worked odd jobs for money which mostly went to rent. Without the potatoes, they were simply too poor to survive on their own, and the British work-fare programs came late and had problems. It was a horrible situation, and mostly I blame the British, but the basic dynamic was that there were a lot of working people who were so poor that the only food they could afford was potatoes that they grew themselves. When the potatoes went away, everything collapsed. It's not like they were buying most of their food with money, but then there wasn't enough food. They just didn't have enough money to buy food in the first place.
In contrast, America is absurdly wealthy, with a diverse economy, and has huge amounts of absurdly cheap food. Even without the subsidies, we'd have cheap food. I've personally been part of an organized group that cooks food and gives it to anyone who shows up (100-150 a day, mostly homeless). (Maybe I'm part of FCfromSSC's problem?) There's no way that people kicked off of welfare would starve, as long as they can find work, and assuming they didn't also have crippling mental illness, physical disability, or drug addiction. (Not to get into other big problems.)
That said, I agree that cutting off all welfare and similar services, cold turkey, would be a disaster. Any such reduction would have to be done slowly, making sure that there were sufficient jobs and cheap enough housing to handle everyone. (We do have plenty of housing, it's just not where people want to live, or it costs too much.) But I doubt that America has the political will or attention span to pull this off, and so we may be stuck with the current system or a disaster.
(I'm not personally against the existence of a safety net, and the optimal amount of exploitation is probably not zero. But I worry that it's gotten so complex that we don't know what's going on, or what the effect is. And the people who run it seem to be ideologically committed to expanding it forever, and that worries me most of all.)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
20d ago
half the expressions are British
Would you mind giving some examples? I've been curious ever since I heard this claim, but for a few reasons I'm not very good at distinguishing them myself.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
20d ago
Their goal might seem hyper-reactionary. If I were to try to create a coherent extrapolation, I'd almost characterize it as "humanity should abandon the use of metal and depopulate down to 10,000 people who all live in East Africa".
But their attitude and methods are very progressive. They don't frame it as replacing our existing culture, so they're not radicals. But they look around, see things in the world that they don't like, and push for changes to get rid of them, regardless of the effect of those changes. (Wishful thinking helps here: "what bad effects?") IMO, that's progressivism at its purest.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
20d ago
I'm not sure about "are", but Cubans "were" an immigrant group that voted Republican.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
20d ago
This is completely unfounded, but I suspect internal passive sabotage, by Google engineers who don't like the dominant internal politics, but who don't feel safe saying anything about it. Not precisely "quiet quitting", but more like a subtle "Amelia Bedelia rebellion", where they do what is required, but their actual goal is to make the people running the place look like fools.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
20d ago
It's not a "swear", except possibly technically sometimes, but when I see the circumlocutions used for, you know, ... that word ..., I keep noticing the parallels to The Name, HaShem, the Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name of God.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
20d ago
If you're looking for more in that vein, try searching for "Christian Dominionism" or "Dominion Theology". My impression is that this is a thing that only a handful of people actually believe in, but that it's been picked up by the left as a catchall umbrella term for many unrelated movements, to claim that everything involved is as extreme as this particular worst case scenario. (The parallels to "woke" are there, but it's not a precise match, as my impression is that most people whom the right calls "woke" will, if pushed, refuse to publicly denounce people and policies associated with "woke", but that this isn't the case for people whom the left calls "dominionist".)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
20d ago
This is true, but in later stories we see "cool" bits where Holmes busts out familiarity with various bits of culture, but we very rarely if ever see the "uncool" side, where his hyperspecialization interferes with his work or leaves him looking foolish. IMO, too much of the fan work and re-imaginings lean into the "cool" side, or alternately completely undermine his whole character, but I appreciate the ones like "Seven Percent Solution" that manage to show him with flaws but also keep his heroic side intact. I've watched some of the Jeremy Brett TV series, and one of the many things I like about them is that they humanize Holmes.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
21d ago
Other criticisms aside, I think EY was trying to do three things at once, but fell short with two of them due to internal contradictions. He wanted it to be 1) a teaching tool for rationality, and also 2) to have a literary character arc where Harry learns and grows, and also 3) to max out his personal sense of cool (hereafter "EY-cool"). But 2 and 3 hide 1, making it hard to tell what's actually a recommended course of action, because the bad stuff seems precisely as EY-cool as the good stuff. And 1 and 3 hide 2, because Harry is relentlessly portrayed as EY-cool, whether or not he's making mistakes. And so what comes through is a lot of EY-cool, sprinkled with a bunch of rationality lessons where you need to read the entire thing, possibly several times, to figure out what's a recommended approach (not to mention keeping up with the replication crisis), and a character who goes from being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly silly, to being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly sad. (But maybe that's how EY views his own personal development.)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
21d ago
Sometimes slaves were actually paid. I've seen some account books and journals from one particular mediumish farm in the 1850s-60s (to the best of my recollection, the total population was the owner and his wife and about 5 children, plus maybe 4-5 hired workers and 20-25 slaves, who were about 20% men, 20% women, and 60% children). Speaking only for that one location, and purely from an accounting perspective, there wasn't much difference between hired workers and enslaved workers, except that the enslaved workers were usually paid less per capita. Most of the pay wasn't in money, it was in produce, which could be consumed by the workers and their families (this was how they got their food for the year), or be taken to market and sold for cash or bartered for other things. Bacon was a big deal. It's been a while, but as I recall, the hired workers were only paid on merit (agreed upon wages, but the better ones were paid more, and there was some arrangement about produce vs. cash), but payment to the enslaved workers was based on both merit and family size. (That is, when a slave had a baby, that family got more pay, which is to say, more food.) The owner's family also worked, but weren't paid directly, of course.
All workers lived on the farm, but I have to assume that the hired workers had better quarters, and the family had a nice house. In other respects, like health care, the slaves seem to have been treated as kind of a disreputable offshoot of the family, like an adult child with Down Syndrome, who had to be looked after and kept out of trouble and put to as much productive work as possible. But one or two of the enslaved workers were actually trusted as much as the more reliable hired workers, to be able to independently take goods to market, sell them for a fair price, and return with the proceeds.
I don't recall seeing any incidents of leaving, during the period I looked at, but I'd assume that local law enforcement would be harsh, not to mention that most people in the area would at least recognize them. They left the farm every Sunday to go to the "colored people's church", after all. And I seem to recall something about one of the young (black, enslaved) men courting a (black, enslaved) girl from another farm, which implies that they had some sort of a social web.
That's just one particular time and place, of course, and I suspect it was much better conditions than average.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
21d ago
I think I've seen this in teenage boys in white progressive households. At some point, they realize that they are becoming a straight white cis dude, and getting older by the minute. And if they've been mouthing comments putting down "stale pale male" people for years, they need to change something fast.
That's a good point, although I'm not sure how much to put on NATO's current escalation, and how much to put on the Russian military's surprising weakness. I'd been solidly in the "Putin won't invade, but if he does it would be over fast" camp, so that's two big things I was wrong about, which shows you how much I knew.
I think Hamas are religious fanatics, and have found a coordination mechanism that's strong enough to allow for suicide attacks, and which justifies "holding their own people hostage" as being in those people's long-term best interest (72 virgins for martyrs and all that). I'm still on the fence as to whether that attitude is a new category of "hostis humani generis", or whether "give me liberty or give me death" is a useful bulwark against oppression. It's hard to draw the line.
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