fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Would you please, 30 comments down, tell him what you believe?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
By what mechanism then, are aliens prevented from taking over institutiona?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Because greedy selfish sociopaths rise to the top even quicker without meritocracy. Shouldn’t the developing world, Africa, India, South america, be counted as institutiona? You seem to think hereditary positions and nepotism protects societies against intelligent sociopaths, but I don’t see the real world reflecting that. Also the analogy ignores the gains from giving more qualified aliens important jobs, the main justification for meritocracy.
Are you trying to butter up your audience, dude? Is it campaigning season for nobility seats already? Your motte-approved opinions, appreciation for wholesome americana, and humble family beginnings are besides the point. No configuration of these parameters would justify that privilege.
You say you want to recognize luck and ‘a sense of duty’(applause), but your method is to recognize blood instead of merit, both subject to luck. Luck is tangential to your argument. If luck was our primary concern, we should forget blood and merit, and draw lots for membership in the ruling class.
The angry journalist at vice also believes he is helping society by supporting opposite causes to your own. In his defense, his self-interest is hidden, he doesn’t nakedly request aristocratic status for his prosocial efforts.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Obviously baseline intelligence in positions of power is necessary for the successful functioning of society. But how much? Must they be the most intelligent people from all the land, or can they merely be quite intelligent people who also have other things about them that should be valued in a ruling class?
Why would we grant an exception and compromise the efficiency of the system at all ? I don’t recognize the supposed higher value or altruism of your class. Even if some individuals in that group had those traits, we wouldn’t reward entire bloodlines. In theory, you’re making an argument about ‘personality’ versus ‘IQ’, but what you actually propose is blood versus everything else, because hereditary classes are not subject to any assessment of their worth to society, whether personality or IQ.
I can understand why most people would want their (high) status to be unalterable, but this being a zero-sum game, their interest diverges heavily from everyone else’s. This is little more than pining for the sweet life of the aristocrat who never has to justify himself.
They seek power and so ought, quite rationally, to be denied it or at least to be handed it very, very slowly.
I don’t think you can be absolved of this sin either.
These include mild sociopathy, lack of gratitude,
What gratitude? I thought you were here to serve the common folk. Hereditary ruling classes do not feel any obligation towards their lessers – like you, they expect adulation.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Intelligence is like scientific research, Bletchley park is another manhattan project. From their poor scientific production the japanese could and should have inferred an intelligence deficit in every battle.
Japan rolled a dice stacked against them and lost, they thought they had no other choice but to go in at Pearl Harbour or otherwise they'd certainly get crushed.
Option A: vacate a few overseas territories. Option B: vacate all overseas territory, lose all industrial capacity, country under occupation, lose three million people . They went with option B, naturally.
Those militarists never have a choice, do they? They charge towards their own destruction like a mindless beast every time. Only the US has the ability to make choices.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Imo you’re retreating deeper and deeper into more far-fetched explanations and unknowable information. There is no reason why a tradesman or urban worker would be poorer than a peasant, it doesn’t match our experience, and he could always go back to farming. One of the quotes says the food situation was even worse in the 17th century than in the 18th, which matches with the unprecedented pop growth in the 18th. In light of this hunger equilibrium, I think it is absurd to discuss the “lower tax burden” they “enjoyed”. If it was higher they would have likely starved to death, like a fucked up Laffer’s curve.
The article also mentions, and calculates from, 290 days of work/y. So I don’t understand at all why you believe medieval peasants lead these easy lives. I can always bulverize about romanticizing the past and medievalists’ need to redeem their chosen field of study etc, but it’s not getting me any closer to understanding your perspective.
Can you give me one of those qualitative accounts/anecdotes, because from my perspective the weight of hard evidence is overwhelming. Maybe you have some skeletons that show how well-fed they were, anything. Although the skeleton guys tend to celebrate the bucolic charm of a different age, and attack peasants as underfed and overworked.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Wiki's got similar, though slightly more favourable for the ancien regime worker, prices :
Daily wage around 1750-1780: 1.3 livre;
Cost of 1 kg of bread in Paris in 1782: 0.2586 livre;
Cost of 1 kg of bread in Paris in December 2013: €2.58.
Still, if they usually ate bread (and they must have, at least before the introduction of the potato), they were close to starving. (1.3 * 200 * 2200 / 0.2586) / 364 = 6076. It seems very hard to feed, shelter and clothe a family for 6000 kcal of bread per day all-in. No wonder kids had to work. And if economists are to be believed, they were already twice as rich per capita as in the middle ages, so I don’t think the medieval comparison, when they were actually serfs, helps your argument.
I was calculating it before, but I had trouble believing it: they were indeed starving, constantly. This article did essentially the same math.
Two and a half pounds of bread is 3,000 calories, almost exactly the average physiological minimum per head in a family of five. One can assess at one year out of four in the 18th century, and at one year out of five in the 17th, the number of years when this ration was reached. The average deficit for the other years can be evaluated, as we see, at a fraction as high as two-thirds of the needs.
The situation of the average man in the traditional period of mankind, i.e. before 1800, can therefore be summed up as follows: the purchasing power of the working classes depended essentially on the atmospheric situation ; the standard of living per head and per day of a working-class family fluctuating from a maximum of less than two and a half pounds of wheat in the best years, to an extremely low minimum, but which, in the middle of the 18th century, still often lowered below a pound of bread.
I should have figured it out earlier, with Henry IV and the sunday chicken he promised his subjects. Of course, they’d starve if they bought meat. I guess modern man is so insulated from such base concerns he has trouble grasping the concept of hunger.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Il semble que ces prix aient été ceux pratiqués pendant à peu près tout le XVIIIeme siècle. (2 lines below, traduction for readers: 'It seems that these prices were those practiced for almost the whole of the 18th century.')
Now I can't guarantee that monsieur de riedmatten in Paris 1944 didn't have an agenda, but that's what he says anyway, if you don't have anything better.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
If they could take valuable targets, they wouldn’t have needed to attack midway.
Firstly, it was not until the end of the war, nearly 3 years after Midway, that the Mk. 14 torpedo became "reliable".
I got November 43, less than two years. Even with the malfunctioning torpedoes and slow gearing-up the japanese merchant fleet was down 25% from the start in 1943. 1944 would be the biggest year ever for anti-shipping before they ran out of targets.
I think his risk was justified as it would ultimately put the Japanese on the defense going forward.
Why is that good? They were already spent, they should have been left free to overextend further into the jungle before the hammer came down. The last thing the US should want at this point would be to get the japanese to switch to their “fortify and make them pay for every inch” strategy. Perhaps if americans had waited until supremacy to engage instead of sending every ship into battle right off the line, the whiplash would have broken the japanese, while minimizing casualties and any japanese chance of winning a limited war in the process.
Everyone thinks about WWI for generals sending men to their deaths for useless dirt, but the case is equally strong for WWII pacific. Given how it ended, any soldier who lost his life in guadalcanal and most of those grinds was wasted. But the brass needed a ‘fair fight’ over one neat island or other for those little stars to mean something. Hard to brag about winning the battle of the philippine sea or an even more lopsided battle in a wargame.
Do you think it was luck that german and japanese codes were broken? Just one of the myriad of easily predictable weaknesses the axis leaders had to ignore before embarking on their doomed adventure.
When the US makes a “heavy-handed” demand that Japan leave China, it is not merely a question of the morality, of whose right it is to occupy the country. The real question is whose will is backed by superior might. And clearly, the japanese miscalculated. They were as wrong as one can be, and even they knew it. Surprised Drmanhattan didn’t give that yamamoto quote: ‘“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
One can talk of the memory tsushima, of the luck of the dive bombers (forgetting all the things that did go wrong), of the parallel operations, of the crippled aircraft carriers that didn’t get swapped, but really, the whole war was stupid and decided before it began. If it wasn’t midway, it would have been another, even more dominating one. I think nimitz was crazy to give battle at merely better than even odds. Why give them the ‘decisive battle’ they want for some useless bait like midway, literally the only way they could possibly eke out a limited win, when the alternative is far more punishing for them? Just sit back, strangle shipping with ironed out sub torpedoes, fight purely training & PR battles until every battle odds estimate reads north of 95%. The fabian strategy doesn’t require weakness.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I got this random list of prices (page 8 of the pdf). http://www.numdam.org/item/JSFS_1944__85__7_0.pdf
Which lists prices in francs in 1788, and also says daily salary is 1 franc. So I naturally assumed 1 livre = 1 franc, which is sometimes ("Le terme perdura en tant que synonyme de la livre ") claimed. But if you know more, please share.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Or the women who died as infants. Actually, what we're seeing with the matrilineal versus patrileneal lines diversity ratio could also happen if victors killed everyone in the clan, men and women. All it requires is that women occasionally marry out, and are then considered part of the other patrilineal clan (common enough, see new name of the bride), thereby preserving their line after the massacre of their cousins.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
They are released into the magical forest where they build tree houses and sing songs forever.
At that time the monthly salary of a mason in Paris is at a little less than a livre.
daily, you mean.
The real question is how many days in a year does he need to work to feed himself? Let’s say he only consumes bread. One kilo of bread was 0.3 francs. So they both need, and ancien regime worker gets as his entire salary, say 200 working days times 3.33 kilos = 666 kilos of bread a year. Cheap bread’s 3 euros/kilo, so modern counterpart needs 2000 euros to live all year, or about a working month. Clothing and butter are even cheaper comparatively.
Edit: that’s... very little bread, actually. Hard to believe they were this close to starving. A kg bread is 2200 kcal, so he gets 3800 calories per day (not just working day) to feed his family. And nothing else. No meat, no clothes, no rent, no entertainment. I guess they must have eaten potatoes, which cost only 0.02 francs per kilo. That’s 10 tons of potatoes yearly salary, or 19 000 kcal per day. That’s more like it, now they can afford clothes and the poule au pot on sunday.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Where does it make that claim? He specifically says the it is not the product of extreme polygamy and sexual inequality Hoffmeister presents.
Let’s say you have 10 patrilineal clans. They have children normally, then on generation 5, clan 1 wipes out the men and takes the women, in clan 2. Then on generation 10, clans 3,4, and clan 5 wipes out clan 6, 7. The diversity ratio between mitochondrial dna and Y-chromosome is now 2:1 compared to the beginning. And on it goes, increasing the ratio through generations, but everyone's having children.
Because patrilineal social organisation sorts males into groups with identical or closely related Y-chromosomes, wars and feuds between such groups, even if it leads to a low level of group extinction per generation, strongly depresses diversity over 60 generations (~1500 years). Put differently, entire branches of the Y-chromosomal genetic tree may become extinct when social groups go extinct. Up to twentyfold reductions in diversity are possible with very little or no change in male population size over 60 generations.
This is the 17:1 diversity ratio that is often touted. It's 60 generations of filtering, not a 'one man to 17 women' harem.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
That’s great, but I also have no problem with marxists if they want to try a commune where they pool resources and acquire means of production. If you think you’re going to re-build feudalism without coercion, good luck to you.
All I'm saying is that those people lived generally more free and human lives than we do today.
And I still haven’t seen a single point supporting that. We’re arguing against a vague feeling of unease.
Best I've seen is people who convert existing farming structures, and that runs you at least some years of labor to buy the land.
Which land? Do you think the serfs owned the land they farmed? Few months salary should suffice for a decrepit building and the land it sits on.
You'll have to forgive me, I don't see our 80 days a year of mandated holy rest from here.
With the sundays, saturdays, and holidays, the average modern man has, what, 130 days of rest a year? And you can rest for well over 300 days if you're willing to settle for merely vastly superior comfort to what peasants had. And on these holy rest days, you are not forced to attend mass in the morning under the scrutiny of the mob.
But that one's not really a contest, the serf doesn't have a black rectangle in his pocket that tells everybody where he is and allows them to summon him at all times.
This isn't obligatory, you know. Like, just turn it off.
Outside of perpetually insane places, such as Russia, conscription has been viewed as abominable throughout the middle ages and a clear act of tyranny.
Very convenient for your argument to take out the central example of serfdom. I didn't see this 'perpetually insane' label when you were defending the country's perspective in the current war.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I mean sure. If reactionaries or communists tried to take power, the bullets are on me. This is the point where discussion ends and my support of modernity, democracy, etc, gets a little more concrete. And even in peacetime, I take responsibility for the blood on the hands of the government I support.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
If fellow serfists came to power and reinstated serfdom by force, what would you do?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Can’t say I understand you. The superstimuli don’t bother me, I enjoy them.
Such men must not be seen as losers and washouts
Why do you have to demand that society respects your choices, borne out of self-professed weakness, as equally valid? Why adopt their hierarchy and ask for a fake place on it? The sexual hierarchy has no more inherent value than the ping-pong skill hierarchy. Just make up your own.
In Neolithic European civilizations, prior to the Indo-European (Aryan) conquests, a harsh sexual order appears to have prevailed in which the vast majority of men did not reproduce, and may have simply been worked to death in salt mines or massive farm complexes while the women could spend their time advertising their beauty and sexual competitiveness to a small elite of men.
On what do you base this? Is this Y-chromosome myopia again? Just because their Y did not find its way along countless generations to the present, doesn't mean they didn't have kids.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Cop-out. Is a communist blameless because right until his party took power, he had not coerced anybody?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Where’s the probability that they’re good-faith-stupid? The guy went to reasonable people about his alien theory, and they said ‘There’s literally a 0.0001 probability of aliens being real lmao’ – at this point, he could have admitted he was wrong, or he could have chosen to accuse “them” of lying to protect his ego. Starting from your “aliens are extremely unlikely” (correct) prior, this is the expected path. It’s why they are so much more focused on ‘the lies’ than the rather important fact that Aliens walk among us. No need to update anything about lizard people.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I’ll take this as a ‘No, I want to keep talking to you, forget the antagonism’. That’s alright with me.
«morality does not exist and does not differ from conventional etiquette in some substantial objective sense». It is not a singular real thing that exists outside us, it is an arbitrary system of behavioral guidelines that differ between groups and individuals.
What is the difference between this take and similar claims about truth, science and objectivity? You say yourself that truth is a matter of aesthetics and you question objective reality. (Sometimes. At other times ‘it’s because of the single shared objective reality that we can discuss our distinct interests in common terms’).
Groups and individuals may adopt differing behavioral guidelines, but a child can see they do not work equally well, like science and superstition. It takes a lot of smarts to blur the lines between sense and nonsense, but you can do it I guess.
Pomo on the whole is a meaningless wordgame. The avg 100 IQ human being understands that murder is wrong, what truth is, that objective reality exists, etc. And they mean the same thing to him as they mean to me. If some wacko honestly denies them, their epistemology is worthless and morally, they should be treated as defectors. Now understandably you don’t want to bite the bullets all the way yourself, so with great effort you’ve cobbled together a weaker version of conventional beliefs. The main difference being, you’ll ‘well-actually’ any Joe that speaks candidly of these matters, before frantically backpedaling when he identifies you as a wacko – 'Practically we’re the same, I just mean it’s not true “in some substantial objective sense”’”.
Greeks, in Plato's cynical imagination, believed that «the best is to do injustice without paying the penalty», such was their intuitive internal moral compass, with prosociality a burdensome etiquette indeed. I live millenia later, and my idea of the highest good is different
Can I treat them as if they’re wearing a defector badge? If so, you’ll understand why I’m uncomfortable relying on your “cultural indoctrination and various feelings resembling a conscience, possibly ingrained, who knows” to not murder others. As you allude to, you have no self-interested reason to lie about your precarious commitment to morality, a true machiavellian would loudly proclaim their intention to cooperate, so I have to believe you.
I know people who blithely speak and live by your code where success at attaining power justifies itself, and consider them being alive and unbothered my personal failing, as well as collective failure of my civilization.
Do you honestly believe the russian or nazi ruling class is anything like me? I just look at might and incorporate it into my worldview alongside everything else, to a Carl Schmitt there is nothing but might, for a postmodernist all information is corrupted by might.
people can argue persuasively that even antisocial punishment is rational, and thus good.
The guy who spends tokens to punish a cooperator out of some personal beef isn't trying to keep predators starving. Are predators starving in russia?
Workers who beat up scabs would have, in another era, destroyed the very machines that ensure they now live in abundance. This sort of defection relies on a myopic view of one’s self-interest. Where are those ‘rationally defecting’ coal miners now? Who can argue with the rotten fruits of societies that practice antisocial punishment?
You’re not debating this in a fair manner imo, you’re throwing gotchas from the ether. You can’t ask him to endlessly redefine his terms and appeal to a vague philosophic consensus without making your own attackable case. Is your point 'it's complicated'? For the record I take the sam harris position. See how that helps you understand from where my criticism is coming from, as well as give you a chance to land a few blows of your own?
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