You conveniently omit the fact that despite his forgiving nature, Caesar was killed by people he forgave and another destructive Civil War ensued. What happened with Augustus is that he learned his lesson. He was murderous in his purges of hardcore elite - he had no issues with Marc Anthony's murder of Cicero and he ruthlessly persecuted hundreds of senators and other opponents. He also utilized other people like his second in command Agrippa to supposedly "overdo" some of the atrocities, only for Augustus to step in as a merciful one to chastise his supposedly overzealeous pet general while of course building huge temples for him as well.
It is similar to denazification: you need to have a way out for some people, but you also have to ruthlessly crush your main opponents and hang them like dogs in order to provide some incentives to defect. Otherwise you only invite snakes like Brutus to stab you in the back.
georgioz
11mo ago
I agree with other posters. This win to me feels more like a "win" when during the pandemic the governments got away with almost all they wanted to do including complete lockdowns. The problem here is that while it was a formidable show of combination soft and hard power, it did not actually deal with the underlying issue of the pandemic. And this show of power came at the cost of further degradation in their perceived legitimacy. It ultimately won them nothing even mid-term.
Does anybody think that by jailing some twitter commenters, the underlying conflict on the ground will get any better? That there will be no more stabbings, terrorist plots and more of the low-level simmering race and religious war? The show of force is the show of weakness.
“once you cease to be of value to others or once you experience too much pain, you willingly die, which is honorable.” By value to others, I mean that you can no longer relay to the young any worthwhile stories or wisdom, can no longer provide any emotional warmth to others, your redeeming personality traits have decayed, and you have too many costly medical problems.
You are coming to this from utilitarian standpoint and here I'd have to agree with you, support of euthanasia is perfectly fine in that horrible worldview. The only obstacle here is something like parasitic relationship that some utilitarians have toward deontological moral systems such as Christianity - where they keep some of the deontological axioms, and then slap them onto their version of utilitarianism in order to prevent themselves going full retard, also resolving some unpleasant cognitive dissonances. Something like Adding Up to Normality where "eating babies" is for some reason axiomatically bad without further explanation. I could have argued with you on your grounds, the usual angle would be mentioning let's say mentally handicapped people who share most characteristics with seniors you mentioned and then some - and then go with that. But I won't, as I think the whole premise of utilitarianism is wrong.
What we see is real-time dissolution of these unspoken axioms as more and more people are raised outside of traditional morals, and who find these axioms less relevant. So we now perfectly accept that it is okay for young mother to kill her own baby in her womb just to improve her career prospects. Nothing to see here, in fact let's throw a party. We now accept that euthanasia is perfectly good option for 29 years old with depression to end her life. Yay, heroic doctors just eliminated bunch of negative utils from the universe, where is the champagne? I tend to think that this is the feature and not a bug of utilitarianism in its pure form. Euthanasia is just another of those lines, those "normality" axioms under attack. And you are just "not persuaded" and refuse irrational religious moral arguments that "life is sacred". Okay. Just beware, because in couple of decades somebody else may not be "persuaded" that things like "free choice" is sacred - it basically stems from some religious "bullshit" about how we were all created as morally equal or some such nonsense - and then they will just euthanize people for greater good.
So yes, I would argue that life is sacred and that euthanasia is wrong based on virtue ethics principles. You will remain unpersuaded I guess, but then you neither persuaded me that euthanasia is such a terrific thing and we should all jump on that bandwagon. Mostly because I do not submit to your utilitarian moral reasoning with your sacred utils.
I think one of the comments was also on to something when he said that cancel culture is also about action out-of-proportion to the perceived transgression. Which is now not only about the loss of reputation and resulting disassociation, but also deplatforming or in extreme cases firing from the job. Potentially also debanking or who knows, maybe in the future your heating or electricity could be shut down.
No more state pension. Require everyone to have saved enough to cover their own retirement and associated medical costs or have had enough economically-active children to cover them.
The retirement problem is not a problem of "saving". All pension systems are just redistribution of current production, it does not matter if it is "financed" by taxes or selling some assets or in any other way such as coerced slave labor of future productive population. The problem is that you as an elderly will need things in the future: you will need fresh bread, a surgery, working power lines and maintained house. These things can only be provided by productive people that are being born right now. You cannot have a surgery now in reserve for the future, you cannot store electricity in order to have it in 50 years when the blackout happens due to insufficient maintenance. If there are not enough people born to be future doctors, bakers, linemen etc. - then you will not get product of labor of these unborn people. Whatever you save will be eaten by inflation.
AGI/Mass automation
Okay, so we will all live in in Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism utopia in 20 years. And we will also have endless electricity from nuclear fusion any time soon. Also as a sidenote - not many people really believe this, otherwise they would just sell their assets now when they still have value, to enjoy some hookers and booze - since they will have robot hookers and endless booze in 20 years. So they should smooth out their lifetime consumption, that would be the most logical strategy, right? Like people selling their houses if they believe that apocalypse will arrive in 5 years. I am curious if you are doing so, since you are so sure about these utopian predictions about AI and automation.
Biotech revolutions
Of course, another technological solution is around the corner.
Degrowth
What an euphemism for economic and societal collapse. It will just be nice "degrowth" landing, no other issues as people are just dying on the streets in the middle of blackouts and wars for shrinking resources. A little bit of population and economic "degrowth" will not hurt anybody.
So, all in all I'm not massively worried about declining TFR as a long-term issue.
I am, mostly because TFR is collapsing, and collapsing fast. Many people point out to South Korea as an example where the TFR dropped to record low of 0.68 in 2023, while already being bellow 1.2 for over two decades already. And it may not be the bottom, TFR in Seoul was 0.55 and is also falling. So let's look at simple math if TFR remains at this 0.7 level. One hundred young Koreans will have 35 children and 12 grandchildren. That is almost 10 times drop of young population in just two generations, this is catastrophic level of population collapse, way more than Black Death that ravaged Europe in 14th century resulting in 50% drop of population. The "nice" thing about demography is that it is baked in. There were just 230 000 babies born in South Korea in 2023. This means that there will be at most 230 thousand young 20 years old Koreans in 2044 who may go on and do all the necessary jobs that the country will require of them in two decades, like soldiers to stop North Koreans, firemen, policemen, scientists and everything else. There will be no more of them in next couple of decades.
georgioz
10mo ago
The important part is "displays of party loyalty". You did not want "true believers" next to you, when some high ranking general or other party member wanted something not exactly communist-like, such as expensive western gadget or other contraband. I think it is similar to HR ladies today - you want to have good activist cred by posting the right flag on your social media and all that, but you should also not interfere if the CEO has some fun with his assistant on his business trip. It's the same logic why Trudeau surfed through his blackface episode so easily - everybody just pretended it does not matter, because if you said anything, then maybe you would garner some level of (whispered) sympathy, but then find yourself suddenly redundant and replaced.
This is what is so comical about all the activists: the corruption and nepotism is not the bug, it is the feature of all these stupid systems. Communism was tried so many times and it always devolves into some kind of nightmare, often of fascist variety. It is because it is baked into the system.
georgioz
10mo ago
According to Morgan Stanley 41% women aged 25-44 were single and childless in 2018 and the number increases around 0.4% a year. Also according to Pew the married women are voting more conservative, it's the strongest predictor of conservative leaning women, 26 points difference compared to never married women.
There is something happening to political coalition making, it is novel and I agree also dangerous.
georgioz
10mo ago
That is beside my point. There are things you can meaningfully save, mostly durable goods. You can build a house, buy pots and other goods that can last your lifetime. You could store some canned goods and so forth. You can also do this on larger scale of building national capital: highways, bridges, factories that may work a long time.
However unavoidably you cannot save labor. It has to be provided when you need it. Your house and highways etc. need to be maintained, the factory needs labor for production. You can sell your assets when old to current population in presence of rule of law and get labor of youth in exchange. But if there are less workers, then your assets will buy less. That is the problem in any society to be solved.
In the extreme situation of the movie “Children of men”, where all that is left is 70+ old infirm people, they are fucked. There are no firemen and policemen and bakers and linemen and nurses and doctors and all the other essential workers to sell your gold to. The same it happens in wars and civil unrest where your gold necklace will buy you loaf of bread. You will die of hunger in your bed. Technically, you individually could save more, but it would be impossible society wide.
The same logic applies in 50% or 90% young population collapse scenario. That is the point.
georgioz
10mo ago
It is still an apt parable. Go and buy canned food, with this inflation you would be king. The key thing is that good ant would also invest in his children to take care of him if he can no longer work thus “storing” and “saving” the labor.
I used to despair that not only we're losing democracy, but The West in general is also trending in a similar way although slower. The entire western hemisphere seems to be becoming like Brazil, bit by bit, all sort of places that I used to admire in North America and Europe gradually resembles me of my own country. There's soon gonna be no champion of Free Speech, Small Government and so on in the global stage.
This reminded me an old article from Foreign Affairs called The Brazilianization of the World. It is a little bit more lefty critique for my taste, but some passages are eerie:
In political terms, Brazilianization means patrimonialism, clientelism, and corruption. Rather than see these as aberrations, we should understand them as the normal state of politics when widely shared economic progress is not available, and the socialist Left cannot act as a countervailing force. It was the industrial proletariat and socialist politics that kept liberalism honest, and prevented elites from instrumentalizing the state for their own interests.
The “revolt of the elites”—their escape from society, physically into heavily guarded private spaces, economically into the realm of global finance, politically into anti-democratic arrangements that outsource responsibility and inhibit accountability—has created hollowed-out neoliberal states. These are polities closed to popular pressures but open to those with the resources and networks to directly influence politics. The practical consequence is not just corruption, but also states lacking the capacity to undertake any long-range developmental policies—even basic ones that might advance economic growth, such as the easing of regional inequalities. State failure in the pandemic is only the most flagrant recent example.
Brazil’s ignoble history of irresolution and indeterminacy, coupled with a dualized society in which hustling is essential to survival, gave birth to Brazilian cynicism. Increasingly, the West is coming to ape this same pattern. Not only does there seem to be no way past capitalist stagnation, but politics is characterized by a void between people and politics, citizens and the state. The ruling class’s relation to the masses is one of condescension. Elites call anyone who revolts against the contemporary order racist, sexist, or some other delegitimizing term. They also advance outlandish conspiracy theories for why electorates have failed to vote for their favored candidate—most visibly with “Russiagate” in the United States and beyond. This phenomenon, dubbed Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome, only breeds further cynicism in Western publics, who are increasingly taken with conspiracy theories of their own. This is another Brazilian speciality: in a country with very low levels of institutional trust and plentiful examples of actual conspiracies, conspiracy theories flourish.
Revolts against the establishment, when they aren’t driven by QAnon-style derangement, wield the weapon of anti-politics, whereby not only formal politics, but representation and political authority itself are rejected. Anti-politics tends to result in either a delegitimation of democracy itself, leading to authoritarian rule, or it prompts technocrats to learn from populists, returning to the scene promising an end to corruption and real change. The result is the same sort of distant, out-of-touch politics that prompted anti-political revolts in the first place. Brazil’s history from 2013 to 2019 is this dynamic presented in pure, crystallized form. But the same pattern is visible in Italy’s Five-Star Movement, the anti-corruption protests that led to Viktor Orbán’s ascent in Hungary, Trump, and Boris Johnson’s technopopulist attempt to defuse Brexit.
I am from Eastern Europe and I was born into socialist country and lived my childhood through the tail end of communist regime and then the newborn democracy. I disagree with the author that this is the result of some neoliberal capitalist plot, this pervasive feeling of frustration, political apathy and resulting cynicism was defining feature of late-stage communist regimes as well. I'd say it is the feature of out-of-touch bureaucratic regimes, all too quick to use force to save their pretend legitimacy. Everybody shouts the slogans and lies and everybody knows that everybody knows it's all a farce. Actually it is even worse than that, if somebody has some ideals or expects some decent behavior, he is laughed at - especially if something wrong happens to him. It is certain level of schadenfreude - you stupid naive moron, you thought you could have some hope? You got what you deserve for not being as cynical as me.
Corruption is no longer viewed as something wrong, it is basically the normal way to live. Everybody knows that some professions are underpaid, that some palms have to be greased so it is absolutely normal that your doctor asks for a bribe, if only because he also has to bribe somebody else in order to keep his license. "Patrimonialism, clientelism, and corruption" is the oil that lubricates the whole machine, everybody understands and accepts it. Everything is so bleak, people find solace in their private spaces - their huts where they can escape for a brief time and forget the drudgery and hopelessness of their situation with elephant doses of alcohol. Yeah, it is quite depressing and I always get this feeling if I watch some local movies from 70ies and 80ies. You can almost feel it through the screen.
georgioz
10mo ago
While BSW is of the 'refuse to cooperate with AfD' direction, they are also notable for stated opposition to supporting Ukraine with more military aid, though how hard they hold that view / what they might trade it away for in coalition-negotiation remains to be seen.
I have no special insight into German politics, but in Slovakia this pro-Russian and pro-Putin moniker was attached to the current prime minister Robert Fico before elections. Interestingly enough, one of the the first things he did post-election was a conference with Ukrainian prime minister Denys Šmyhaľ in the city of Uzhhorod, where he signed the treaty of military cooperation with Ukraine, expressed his support for Ukrainian EU integration as well as support for EU military package. The rhetoric from anti-Fico coalition then changed that he betrayed his voters and that he only wants to make money for his cronies who will provide the military assistance.
It is incredibly difficult to navigate this situation, I am just used to media lying and speaking from the both sides of their mouth. It is just sad state of things.
It's not only Slovak media. Once you are marked as pro-Putin, the whole media complex parrots this endlessly even in the face of contrary evidence, I think there is some media incest in this manner. Examples regarding Fico from Reuters or Guardian or even Die Welt.
They are all lame, that is why if media say that AFD party is Pro-Russian, then it really is tough to know what to think about it, they just cannot report about these issues honestly. It really is terrible, because people do not have time to delve into these issues deeply and maybe they really are Pro-Russia. It is hard to tell.
georgioz
10mo ago
They way the discussion went was that Tucker asked Darryl what he is working on, Darryl responded that he is working on WW2 and the rest is history. To me it is insane to just lie about basic facts of your life just because it is an election year. But it is a good form of projection of how other people think.
This is all to say, Hitler was not a normal leader, and whatever priors we have about how "normal countries" work don't apply here.
Compared to what? He was on the level of Stalin and at least in the same league as Franco or Mussolini who actually invented blackshirts as a precursor to Hitler's brownshirts, and we do not even go to atrocities committed by Italians in Ethiopia. Even "milder" leaders like Austrofascist leader Engelbert Dollfuss committed political violence in three figure range. We can go on, especially early post-WW1 period was full of atrocities such as during Polish-Soviet War or under Hungarian Soviet Republic and related red and white terror.
I think your sense of "normal" is highly curated by modern sensibilities and information available to you, which is vastly different to what people in Europe lived as "normal" for decade of their lives or more prior to WW2.
That said you cant talk about the causal chain of WWII without looking at WWI. From the british perspective WWI starts with the invasion of Belgium.
You cannot talk about causal chain of WW1 from British perspective without looking at the whole Causal Chain. Which is assassination of Franz Ferdinand > Austrian Ultimatum Against Serbia on July 23rd > Russia starts secret "partial" mobilization on July 25th > Austria declares war against Serbia on July 28th > Russian full mobilization on July 30th > July 31st German ultimatum for Russia to demobilize, which was not replied > August 1st German mobilization and declaration of war against Russia > August 1st, Britain mobilizes its Navy > August 2nd, Britain guarantees Belgium > August 2nd, Germany asks Belgium for military access, is refused > August 3rd Germany declares war on France as part of Schlieffen plan > August 4th Germany attacks Belgium > August 4th, Britain declares war on Germany
One thing to understand about WW1 mobilization is that it is equivalent of launching ICBMs. Countries had decades to meticulously prepare so they can get their army ready in matter of days. Soldiers need to be concentrated and equipped, trains have to be rerouted etc. If you stop the mobilization it would be as if one side of the nuclear conflict self-destructed their own rockets while the other side has them still in the air, putting themselves into very dangerous position.
I think that the biggest triggers of the war was behavior of Austria and Russia, each in their own way. By the time Britain made their mind in August, it was too late - Russians were in the middle of mobilization almost for a week and dominoes fell. In fact to me it seems that Germans were too timid, if they were more aggressive, they may have pulled it of - if they had one more week against Russians and and mobilized on July 24th/25th. History remembers them as warmongers anyways.
I guess my gripe is with the definition of "normal". Let's think of today - I think Putin is a "normal" leader. Not dissimilar to Xi Jinping or range of various leaders in Africa or Middle East etc. Hitler espoused especially virulent version of fascism, but then Germany was also facing unique challenges. If let's say Germany won WW1 and carved out Lotharingia/Burgundy out of France/Benelux as a new puppet state populated by Dutch and German and French and Flemish people, I would not expect rump France to have your cookie-cutter milquetoast leaders just accepting that.
I would not say that let's say kaiser Franz Joseph or tzar Nicholas II or kaiser Wilhelm II or president Raymond Poincaré or prime minister David Lloyd George were "abnormal" leaders for their times and yet they are all co-responsible for WW1, which should put them into 0.01% of abnormal leaders according to your criteria - right?
Also I was assessing Hitler pre-war, of course once you have total World War, then all comparisons are off. In fact related to the topic of Darryl Cooper vs Churchill - and we can throw Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman into the bunch - grounding to dust millions of houses full of civilians during air raids on cities in Germany and Japan, including dropping atomic bombs is up there on the scale of atrocities committed on civilian population by any leader in the history of the world. Vietnam war caused around 2 million civilian deaths in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - which makes JFK and Johnson and Nixon also pretty high on the abnormal list. What percentile of abnormality are those figures in your eyes?
And I see why you do not want to discuss these things, because exactly as Cooper points out, the WW2 is prime example of hyperreality event, it has high place as a national myth in very many countries, which makes any assessment immediately mired in controversy. The thing is that as the time goes this pressure is lessened - not many people are riled up if one assesses pros and cons of Napolen or Emperor Ferdinand II or if they talk about how Gengis Khan can be praised for bringing hundred years long Pax Mongolica, which enabled Europe to reach to orient with explorers like Marco Polo and spurred them toward modernity in its own way. We already see WW1 in rearview mirror and you can finally have reasonable discussions about the events leading to the war as well as if the treaty o Versailles. It is inevitable that the same will happen with WW2 some time, Cooper is just one of the early birds in this sense.
georgioz
10mo ago
most Christians I've known are content to live and let live
I have no problem with live and let live, but they should keep their heresies outside of Catholic church. Catholics acknowledge three pillars of their faith: Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition and Sacred Magisterium as opposed to protestant sola scriptura. Catholics accept the authority of the church, this free-for-all shit that is happening in constantly fracturing protestant churches so they can just vibe with Jesus on personal level does not fly.
During WW1 shell crisis in Britain, the government was able to ramp up production from 500,000 shells in first few months of the War (since August-December) to 16 million shells in 1915.
During shell crisis the reasons were similar - UK was missing some key chemicals like acetone, now Europe and to some extent US have shortages of guncotton and other basic materials. By the way during WW1 Dupont was able to produce 500 tons of guncotton a day. We are now two years into a conflict where Western powers know they are draining their munition reserves and they still cannot produce near the volume of munitions that countries were able to produce 100 years ago. In fact US and EU is reliant on guncotton production from China
You may say that it is problem of state orders, but that itself is a problem of state capacity or to better say incapacity. No decision can be straigthtforward and is mired in endless internal battles due to incompetence and other reasons.
But constantly talking about it on the national stage does not help. It is just virtue signaling. What would help is to win some fucking elections.
This is such an incomprehensive take to me. Pro-life movement had one of the biggest victories recently with repeal of Roe v. Wade, even leftists tacitly admitted that
This decision is the culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law. It’s a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court,” President Joe Biden said. But he added: “This is not over.”
As for "winning elections" this to me seems as a strange thing, what do you need to win elections for? Presumably to pursue your preferred policies. If your candidate "wins elections" but then he goes against your deepest held values, does it even make sense to call him your candidate anymore? And it is not such a small number of people - according to Gallup the number of people who say abortions should be illegal under all circumstances ranges from 10%-20% since 1975.
One thing I also noted, is how right and left differs in treating their ideological fringes. Leftist mainstream people have no problem tolerating or celebrating even the most unhinged leftist radicals. Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers can get a cushy job at public University and get praise from Wall Street Journal columnist as a model citizen. Marxist radicals such as Angela Davis can be popular champions of police reform movement no problem. Democrats nurture and take care of their radical fringes, they defend them and propagandize in their favor, and then they use their vigor and energy to replenish their ranks and to push Overton window in favor of their policies. Kamala can have the most insane takes like taxing unrealized capital gains or transitioning children of illegal immigrants for free - and you see the ranks closing and defending her exactly on the grounds of pragmatism: it's only a rhetoric to mobilize more radical voter base, nothing to see here. She is still our joyful momala.
While the right absolutely shits not only on "far fringes" like J6ers, who have nothing on leftist radicals like Kathy Boudin - the mother of Chesa Boudin and professor at Columbia after being released from prison in 2003 - bombing the senate building. That would be absurd, but the right also shits on anybody who is not moderate like pro-life activists. They even shit on people who go against mainstream leftist narrative, it is "moderate" right who will be the first to execute their up-and-coming talent for racism, sexism, being pro-life - exactly like you do now. The rightist moderates completely adopt leftist versions of morality and sins, and push it on fellow rightists, moving the Overton window. It would be absolutely inconceivable, that some right-wing version of Bill Ayers such as some former abortion clinic terrorist would be a chair of charity organization, a university professor at state university and could ever be called as "model citizen" by WSJ or similar media.
So yeah, the right will not win elections with castrated elite, with no semblance of balls or spine, which tone-polices and cancels their own people in accordance to leftist sensibilities. And even if they win, they won't do shit with that victory. Or maybe even worse, they will take their victory and cave to leftist preferences as we saw it in UK with immigration, because supposed conservatives are terrified of being called as racists or booed if they go take their kids from private school/university. Who needs enemies with wussy wankers as allies.
georgioz
10mo ago
As you said, contraception only lowers the risk of unplanned pregnancy while increasing sexual promiscuity. Additionally presence of both options also decreases willingness of men to marry their pregnant girlfriends, no more shotgun weddings. The logic is simple - men did not want the child and it was woman's decision to not take pills properly and to keep the child when abortion is such an easy and accessible "healthcare" option. Which on average increases abortions while also increasing single parenthood.
This idea is just fundamentally incompatible with my morals. Where does this lead?
This idea is ubiquitous. One of the point I realized this, was COVID era argument: we have to lock people down in order not to overburden healthcare system. It was one of the most stupid arguments I have heard - my purpose and governing principle in my life is now supposed to be not to overburden healthcare system? This amorphous system is actually more valuable than human life as it is embodied in my daily activities and pleasures. I exist for the benefit of this system - not the other way around. No more dangerous activities such as skiing or anything else. By the way the same goes for other similar arguments: smoking and being fat and chronically ill is terrible for the healthcare system, so you should stop doing it.
It reminded me of the old Monty Python skit.
Sure, but there is more to the life than just your pulse. Should we ban kids skating, because they can break their bone and thus be the burden on the system? What I found more scary is how readily this thing was accepted without question. Ask not what the healthcare system can do for you, ask what you can do for the healthcare system. And again, this is nothing new, I just realized it at that point. For instance in the UK there is heated debate if immigration is good or bad thing for their National Health Service. The NHS is like a sacred cow, people accept it without thinking and put such an importance on it, that it is almost as if NHS has agency of its own, and we need to think what will harm NHS. It is just weird.
It's the same principle behind GoT meme of any man who must say I am the king is no true king. Also in general in organizations the position/authority is the weakest form of leadership compared to other forms such as competence, charisma etc. Telling somebody to do something because manager said so is the weakest form of authority you can use as last resort after inspiring and explanation failed and it is a sign of weakness.
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