kky
12d ago
For posts like this, in the future, could you indicate who you’re linking at the start? I assume it’s the Paper of Record, but my phone struggles to load the archive link and it’s not immediately clear otherwise.
kky
13d ago
Okay, let’s lay Rule of Law aside for a minute. There’s a much, much more serious problem here.
First off:
It turns out that Red Tribe is not allowed to have actual Supreme Court victories.
What, does the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade not count? The “Blue Tribe” had pinned a huge policy platform of abortion on it, and it was totally undone. Abortion was returned to being a state legislative issue. And this is not merely in words only; there are real and meaningful differences in how states treat abortion. General opinion, and especially Democrat or Democrat-adjacent opinion, is clear that this was a major sea level change. The fact that it does not seem to register to you as a win is really, seriously bad. And I think the rest of the post makes it clear why:
A Supreme Court victory means you get your way, and those who disagree are shit out of luck.
It sounds like what you actually want is not the freedom to do as you wish, but the power to coerce others, and particularly to deny the other what they want. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to elaborate on why that’s a bad thing, and especially a bad thing for you in particular, but here we are.
First off, there’s nothing wrong with wanting things. Everyone does. There’s also nothing wrong with wanting exclusive things, wanting things that by their nature prevent someone else having something. That’s life; there’s not always enough to go around, especially of the really valuable stuff. But wanting specifically to exert your power over another is something different. Its envy, or at least, is rooted in the same. Envy is seeing what someone else has, hating them for it, and wanting to destroy it. It’s bringing someone low because you can’t stand seeing them up. What people tend to hate about the great and powerful is that they just don’t seem to care; the eggs hating how casually they get tossed in the omelette. The powerful don’t care. Things need to get done, and you can’t please everyone. Envy goes a step further. Omelette be damned; I’m going to break those fucking eggs.
Envy is a deep part of human nature, and by deep I mean base. It is the primitive ape who can’t help but see the world as zero-sum. Kill or deprive the strong man, and I’ll get more, as sure as shit rolls downhill. But as the wise of all ages have told us, we are more than that. I won’t belabor you with the spiritual and philosophical elements on why we can all of us be uplifted into greatness, the last will be first, the tardy day-laborer will get his full drachma, etc etc. I’m sure you’ve heard them all. The same goes for the economic: cooperation and interconnected systems yield greater production and profit, removing the powerful just disrupts the system and impoverishes everyone, something something communism. Nor do I need to detail how the most powerful empires rise on this positive-sum thought and perish on zero-sum dissent, Roman Empire and socii, abiyyah or whatever it’s called, you get the drift. But on the mere psychological level, envy means you will never appreciate what you have. The mere existence of another is enough to make you fly into a rage. The things you have are irrelevant compared to the comparison. And doesn’t that sound miserable?
What’s worse, it makes politics impossible. What you want is not a laundry list of items that you can get and be satisfied with. It’s specifically to remove what the other has. Who can negotiate with that? Yes, obviously the Democrats have behaved very badly. They’re naughty boys and girls and deserve to be punished for what they did. I won’t argue against that for even a second; that is MY opinion. But that has nothing to do with you. Your problem is: right now, in America, there are a lot of people who don’t really like the Democrats, they think they’re overstepping. But if they caught the idea that the Republican Party was thinking like YOU, they’d vote to suspend habeas before they voted Red. You’re scary as shit, man.
kky
13d ago
What’s happening here is the wrong decision, just like Roe v. Wade was the wrong decision (for reference, that the Supreme Court had any business deciding the matter - I actually rather like the rule as pragmatic legislation). The law, as written, and procedures, as defined, deserve a great degree of deference. This is precisely because such deference prevents disagreements from devolving into their primal forms.
You’re coming at the whole Rule of Law thing from a bit of a strange angle, as if its proponents must view any legal decision as inherently proper and to form. It’s a little like the ol’ Pope Francis gotcha against Christians, or that post some time back about how Catholicism was obviously bunk because the wrong number of cardinals voted. A system, properly understood, is teleological in nature. That is, it has an essence which drives its character and directs its behavior, and the system is functioning as intended to the degree that it asymptomatically approaches that essence. Plato’s Forms are the obvious analogue here. Just because a chair is broken doesn’t make it not a chair; it is simply a chair that is not serving its purpose - the degree to which it is broken is the degree to which it falls short of the ideal of a comfortable single seat with a back to lean on.
So, very obviously, a legal system as implemented in reality will fall short of the ideal of the Rule of Law, for as you well know we are fallen, mortal things aspiring to immortal essence. But the reason of that ideal is to have a way of solving our differences that is more than just conflicting preferences or arbitrary whims. The Rule of Law, embodied, is a set of fundamental systems for determining what relation man has to his neighbors and the corporate body of the state, with progressively less absolute rules layered on top and a process for rectifying and managing tensions in those rules. In the abstract, it is the principle that there is real justice out there, a fair and proper way of doing things, of preventing the injustice we know all too well, which is the power of a man or a mob to crush the free out of avarice or spite. That’s the whole reason here.
So obviously there are going to be failures in such a system. There were from the beginning, there will be in the future. But calling this a suitable case for abandoning the project altogether - well, what do you think the alternative is? The only thing that has prevented gun bans in the US thus far is the Second Amendment. All our peers have long since banned guns, or put massive restrictions compared to ours. And there has been no end to efforts to eliminate them! The argument that keeps holding absolute gun control back is that the 2ndA is quite clear in its requirements. People choose to ignore it, but unless the amendment is removed, it will be a constant boon to any argument in favor of gun freedoms. But if the fig leaf goes away, the question boils down to power alone, and right now Progressives have all the institutional power and they all hate guns.
Rule of Law is not bald proceduralism to protect the powerful. Power hates rules, because rules limit the exercise of power, and prefers commands which can be totally arbitrary. Rule of Law is here for you, even if you don’t recognize it, even if you don’t support it. Rules are the way the weak organize against the strong. And speaking personally, I’ll be damned before I recognize a system that does not respect my God-given rights as being morally equal to one which does.
kky
15d ago
Most women did reproduce, but up until the 20th century, pretty much no women anywhere on Earth -- not enough to change the behavior of the sex -- had a choice in who would be the father of their children.
Do you seriously believe this? Have you read what people in those eras write? Let’s stay recent, if patriarchal. Tolstoy is exquisitely clear that, in the upper classes of the time, courtship was expected to be somewhat mutual. Marriages where the woman was unenthusiastic went much worse. You see echoes of this in Austen, or Dickens, or any of the other 19th-century European authors of note.
OK, how about further back? Maybe the age of chivalry? Wait a minute, isn’t the model of chivalric love a man trying his utmost to get a woman to cheat - where she can say yes or no? Sounds a lot like she’s controlling who she has kids with, and indeed genetic testing has started to indicate that female infidelity is truly a woman’s way to choose when more traditional methods are removed from her. And that’s not just the West - circa year 1k in Japan the courtly literature is clear on infidelity or intrigue driven by women’s desire.
Obviously there were major cases of rape or abduction. They matter. But women’s choice has been a driving factor in sexual selection for forever. Why else do you think teenage boys so actively, so instinctively, try to impress the girls around them? It sounds like your impression is based less on actual people and more on some BAP fantasy of the Real Gritty Past. And I hope you see how that ignorance could seriously mislead you.
kky
15d ago
Unspoken as of yet in the world of self-driving cars is their obvious utility in childcare. No, not in removing the last vestiges of usefulness from the suburban soccer chauffeur, but in soothing infants and toddlers to sleep. All are aware of the soporific power of the common automobile over our young; but taking advantage of it locks one behind the steering wheel for the hours needed for proper rest, or risks disaster should the larval creature be transferred to an indoor crib. Self-driving changes the equation; nay, creates a new paradigm. No more rocking one’s child tenderly to sleep before laying him or her softly in the crib; now one may gently buckle the child into the car seat before sending it on several carefully timed stops leading back to one’s humble abode. The bliss of this new arrangement can scarcely be imagined. But there is always trouble in paradise. Soon the great traffic jams will not be bound to the working hours alone; afternoon naptime will yield a fleet of autonomous vehicles cruising about town, each cradling a single precious cargo. And in the end, New York will have no choice but to impose congestion pricing, after the first gridlock composed entirely of child-bearing cars paralyzes Manhattan. Such are the risks of Progress.
(This post in loving memory of today’s naptime, viciously cut short by my kid falling asleep in the car. We will never forget what could have been.)
kky
16d ago
So, just to be clear, you are arguing that ~10% of the population is incapable of performing basic duties towards society and needs to be managed as effective wards of the state with permanent case managers? I know that what you suggested is more of a “my brother’s keeper” model, but everything is atomized now and social mobility is too high, the responsible members of society have successfully escaped their former peers and live in a different suburb. So if they’re coming back, they’re coming as agents of the government, which is trying to collect or control, because that’s what governments do.
I’m not saying this like your solution is unheard of. To a certain extent it’s what we do already, and I guess we hold property owners to a higher standard. But these laws aren’t especially new. Property taxes aren’t new either. People managed before. And how can you really expect someone who can’t manage to regularly pay taxes, to figure out what’s going on in the single most important letter of their life, to attend to all the other maintenance required in owning a house?
(FWIW I don’t read these individuals as too dumb to understand letters, I read them as somewhat lazy and inclined to drag their heels or expect that they’re getting away with things. Very educated people, like college students, can fall into these habits too. I have friends in academia who tell me of students who drag their heels, don’t go through the documents given them, and then panic after the deadlines that they can’t get into the classes they need. This feels like the same pattern: no response to warnings, no response to the official point of no return, but only when their failures become tangible and they can no longer pretend that their inaction has cost them nothing do they try to take action, by complaining that they were never given a fair chance in the first place. And then they go through the right venues, and then they show passion and sophistication, and all those formal barriers are no obstacles to their abilities, and they are oh so very aggrieved. But why not before? Because the issue wasn’t IQ or what have you, it was good practices, and especially the wisdom that wasting time and putting things off and delaying has real costs that add up. As long as nothing tangible is lost, they can lie to themselves that everything is fine, so it’s that moment of losing something real, the sale of the house, that spurs action and also drives these guys berserk because they must confront the fact that they were irresponsible this whole time, and that in particular is too much to bear. So while they are hiring a lawyer and arguing minutiae and appealing to higher courts, their primary argument, or at least sentiment, is that what they were previously asked to do was just too hard, that nobody can reasonably achieve it. And they don’t notice the dissonance. But I do, and I judge them for it.)
kky
16d ago
But that requires a set value for “useful work.” Previous societies found more useful work to do as more time became available. Time freed from labor on farms became time spent in factories, for instance. So your model demands an explanation of why useful work has suddenly plateaued, as a function of useful work, not of bureaucracy.
kky
16d ago
Sorry, I meant before that. Like, yearly automated mail: you’re not paying taxes. If even that was sent, what else could you do but nanny state or feudal bailiff the guy?
kky
16d ago
The only thing I can think of here is to serve the house with info on the delinquent taxes before foreclosing. If that were done, I would have no sympathy whatsoever for the sons (Dennis certainly).
They got served! They know that taxes are a thing! And they did nothing at all about it. For ten years. Did they think they were just getting away with it?
I get that paperwork sucks. What was the alternative? That people can just avoid paying taxes because they’re too lazy or ignorant to do it? To increase taxes on everyone else to assign a case manager and counsel them very social justicely? To send the landlord’s bailiff around to collect taxes with a bullwhip to handle the delinquent serfs?
kky
17d ago
The major theme of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, outside of his obvious love and nostalgia for the mighty river of his boyhood, is the unending march of progress. He speaks of the raft-men (who he also immortalized in Huck Finn), who would lazily guide rafts loaded with upstream cargo down to the Gulf and spend their free time preaching their strength and tussling with one another with an Appalachian verve that reminds me of nothing more than WWE fights. They were beaten out by the steamboats. He talks of his experience as a pilot of one of these steamboats, a highly lucrative profession due to its technical complexity and fine art, carefully dodging the sandbars and "reefs" (usually - sunken trees) and adverse currents and following side-channels to cut out major parts of the voyage, not only at day but even at night, through nothing more than one's memory, with the constant risk of the bomb of a boiler sitting below-decks and threatening to detonate and kill most of those aboard, as happened in fact to Twain's brother - liveliness, risk, and the gaudy beauty of those old, painted boats, which Twain recalls pulling into his hometown's dock as a child, with the tempting offer of a life on the river and wealth beyond his imagination. The trains came down the river postbellum, and the passengers and freight moved over, for the most part, and little tugboats in the hire of the newly muscular federal government came along to pull all the stumps and dredge all the sandbars and haul long trains of barges for far cheaper than the steamboats ever could, leaving the pilot's job simpler and his steamboat derelict and unwanted.
Twain, of course, was a fervent Progressive - of the movement of the time, which meant recognition of what was changing, and what was changing so much for the better. And indeed, he describes these incredible shifts in the world of his time. The mosquito-ridden bogs of New Orleans were drained by a modern system of sewage and water control that left nowhere for them to breed. The agonizing, slow stage-coach journey he took out West was replaced by a train that made the trip in a fraction of the time and in total luxury. All of these things were changing over the 19th century. I remember feeling almost dizzied when reading Twain's Innocents Abroad, when he stops in his pleasure-trip in France in 1868 - the last time I had read about France, it was 1815 and Napoleon's troops were marching north for their doomed encounter with Blucher and Wellington, and their movement was compassed by Napoleon's compass, firmly set to the number of miles a pack-laden man could march in a day. But now the country was covered by a beautiful and perfect train network - why march to the Netherlands when you could go by train? Incredible, incredible. Or I remember how Chekhov (yes, that one), who was a doctor as well as a playwright, had expressed shock at some of the war-deaths in War and Peace, as he himself was (now, later), perfectly capable of curing the gangrene that was irreversibly fatal in 1812. (But I can't find that quote again at present, so treat the source as apocryphal - but not the medical fact.) The end of the 19th century was a different world from the start, completely and totally.
Hopefully you've enjoyed at least some of this meandering, but let me make my point clear. What gave the Progressive movement of the 19th century such muscle was the obvious, incontrovertible, and massive improvements to life of applying its methods generally. Everyone became richer, healthier, and in better control of their environment - especially in America, where the fruits of the movement rapidly percolated down to the common man. There were disruptions, and pretty major ones too. The steamboat industry was one of those sacrifices. But the great wealth of the time defanged the worst of the Luddism that could have arisen in response. Luddism is always on the back foot compared to the powerful evolutionary quality of progress, but it can make some temporary gains if there's enough general sympathy - and there just wasn't, and the reason why there wasn't is clear.
We've recently been sold a story that computing is the next Industrial Revolution. Certainly computing is now everywhere, absolutely everywhere. What was once an analog control mechanism became a custom-programmed digital interface; the custom-programmed digital interfaces have become small installations of Linux. Everything is "smart," which (to be honest) often doesn't live up to its own name, but the processing power is there. The ubiquitous internet has changed how we interact with just about any question of fact and knowledge. AI is, in a sense, just a continuation of that, another horizon of computing. Where before we would have people sitting and doing manual entry, now we have a prompt sent to an LLM to produce similar output. Everything that required a little human fuzziness and finesse to corral uncertain inputs into uncertain outputs now falls under the domain of the digital. So now we don't have to bother getting our fuzzy mindsets to cleanly interface with discrete digital systems, but instead can interface with those fuzzy AIs and get what we want without worrying about the specifics. That, I think, is what's roughly on the table here. Obviously jobs are at risk, just like the old manual computers were replaced by calculators, and how the required number of secretaries went down as computing technology went up, and how email replaces the need for a great many form-shufflers, but there are meaningful changes in how people can interface with the world - as a simple example, no more balancing a checkbook, just log onto your online banking portal and you can see exactly how money entered and exited your account (and a short hop to your credit card's website will give you the rest of the breakdown).
But people are, this time, generally unhappy in a way that goes beyond the disruptions of the past. The main division I've noticed in optimism here - beyond the AI fanatics, who I think are an unrepresentative subset of hobbyists invested in the technology for reasons other than pure practicality - is between ownership and everyone else. There was a post on here some few weeks back, where a small businessman was using AI and was pretty happy with what it was giving him. That's the small end of AI. On the large end, CEOs in big businesses are creaming their pants about AI to the shareholders under the impression that shareholders are very interested in AI, and less cynically, they might even believe that AI is an important improvement to their business model. (I have connections in the industry on both sides of the buying-AI and selling-AI divide, and at the moment neither one has a good idea of what LLMs will be useful for but definitely don't want to be left out - my paraphrase, but not my words on that one. So I'm a little more dubious than the CEOs are, here.) So if you stand to control the use and output of AI, you're all in favor. If not, then you're a lot more skeptical of whether it will benefit society. That's it. There are other questions about efficacy, which we don't need to get into, but assuming it will do something, the answer of whether or not it is good depends on whether you will get control over it.
And this is not a new question for computing. I'm sure the median reader here is aware of the "right to repair" movement arguing that non-licensed mechanics should be able to repair proprietary hardware, like cars and farm equipment. But the reason this movement had to start, the shift from the old mechanic status quo, was the introduction of computing to vehicles. EULA terms for the software on these vehicles, most famously from John Deere, would invalidate the license if anyone other than the manufacturer was involved in the repair. Computing, because of the tight copyright and licensing scheme for the distribution and reuse of software, has become a powerful tool for ownership in America and abroad. If you get a purely mechanical tool, it is possible - maybe not easy, but possible - to modify it to meet your needs, and certainly legal. With software, this is often illegal. Old software, because its source code is both under copyright and not published, disappears into the ether instead of being used as a meaningful basis for new software - the public domain of software is only those things which people have, for their own reasons, decided to publish generally. And more recently, in the age of cloud computing and the internet, the tools we use most commonly aren't under our own ownership and on our own servers, but on some large company's server - a company who can make unilateral decisions about our software, nominally responsive to the market but certainly not responsive to you. (I'm still personally salty over a Firefox UI change from fifteen-odd years ago.)
This is why the response to AI is so muted among your coworkers, in my opinion. It's obvious to the little guy that you don't control what's happening with software. The ownership is simply removed from you. There's no real alternative than to get what's coming to you. If someone retrains an LLM and makes it worse for you, then you'll just have to suck it up, won't you? If they replace your job, you're not getting any of the profits, are you? It's just more leverage for power and less for everyone else. And I don't think this is going to change, not as long as we regulate software under our current rules, with copyright and the EULA. Those rules are not a necessity of the technology, but they sure do create "natural" monopolies, as much as if we'd let Carnegie copyright molten steel and hold onto that copyright for 90 years. Until this changes, there is never going to be good news out of computing, because the only news will be that the bastards who rule your life get to twist your nuts a little tighter. AI is no exception.
Install Linux, btw.
kky
17d ago
Interesting. Did you read the same post I did? It appeared to me to be a series of statements of fact with minimal “trust the experts” color. Are you alleging that there are outright lies in the OP? If not, or so, be more clear, because it sure does look like you’re making a scummy and intellectually weak effort to deflect the points at hand. The rest of the reply chain seems to support the latter interpretation.
kky
18d ago
Don’t worry about what you did. It sounds like she was never attracted to you, and led you on. Great - now you know a little more about avoiding people who don’t respect you. But you didn’t cause her to not be attracted.
Frankly it sounds like you weren’t attracted either. In what world do two people date even for a month without it devolving into something steamy? Not even sex, necessarily, but there is typically a sort of gravitational force that makes at least a deep kiss inevitable. And being denied that, especially at the beginning of a relationship, tends to drive men absolutely nuts, and they will get what they want or sink the relationship trying. Maybe that’s just telling on me, so correct me if you work another way, but the fact that you didn’t flame out on her says to me that you didn’t really want to screw either. And at that point, who cares. Mutual dumb mistake to move on from. You have my sympathy, obviously, but there’s nothing wrong with you for this to happen.
kky
20d ago
I’d support that, for what it’s worth. Let’s go for higher standards than whatever the AI spits out.
kky
20d ago
Answering from the perspective of my younger and more ignorant self…
I would start by dividing the women up into those above my “bar” of attractiveness and those below. Harsh, but that’s basically how it works. With that done, I’d attempt to engage with every woman above the bar. However, I’d very quickly realize this was much more difficult than I thought, because (youthful lechery aside) I do like women and don’t really enjoy making them feel bad by brushing them off etc. At that point, I’d start trimming numbers until I got a manageable amount, prioritizing attractiveness. But then, as the warm feeling of approval started wearing off, I’d start being more picky again, mostly on the basis of personality. (Any man who says personality has nothing to do with how attractive a woman is either has no experience with them or is totally disconnected from the women he fucks.) Specifically, pleasant, caring, and engaging women will make the cut, while mean, erratic, and dull ones will fall out. And eventually I will realize that more than one is nothing but trouble and just go for the best one.
The number isn’t 50, and it wasn’t like I had an absolute pick of the litter, but this is a somewhat accurate if abstract story of my dating life (minus all the women I tried dating solo before learning what real standards I had).
kky
20d ago
These are not independent variables. Just to hammer on the most obvious point, obesity is inversely correlated with wealth, typically measured by race in these statistical reports, and wealth is also inversely correlated with single motherhood. So you’ve got a bunch of fat poor single mothers out there, probably with 5+ partners, sucking up all of those negative attributes. Meanwhile, on the other end, you have relatively thin and sexless women… who have college debt and are very liberal. So which is more important? Impossible to do without the headache of real analysis. Said again, I really don’t like the practice of asking AI as if it’s an oracle. It ain’t.
Finally, the most important question to ask about this data is: have things been getting worse, and why, and for whom? Obesity is obviously getting worse, and is a real scourge, but there’s no effort here to measure things which would have been very important in the recent (<100y) past, like: does she live in my town? Is she the right Christian denomination? Is she white and NOT Irish?
Mating is an incredibly complicated sorting problem, where the constraints are enforced by personal attraction, class standards, and social Brownian motion that brings suitable parties into contact. If I had to swipe through the millions of women in a couple-hour drive from me, my wife (or someone like her, single) would be a bit of a needle in a haystack. And yet I met her at the right time, seemingly without effort. My friends tend to have similar stories.
Put another way. Obesity is high, yet very few of the people in my area are fat. In my personal circle the number goes down even further. At the same time, wealth goes up. So, by those standards, if men want to marry they should leave the areas with bad women.
Personally, I believe there aren’t many good women, but that there are plenty. A helpful factor breaking this down is that there aren’t many good men either. Being intelligent and stable starts moving you one to three standard deviations out of center, and makes a strong position feasible. If you’re in that category, the remaining question is: what unmarriagable characteristics do women and men in your subcategory have and what can be done about them?
In my experience, intelligent and educated men struggle with, basically, giving women what they like. They don’t have much personal, visceral experience with flirting, pushing boundaries gently and challenging women without threatening them. At the same time, they are insensitive and unresponsive to women’s needs, which are typically more subtle (or she drops the point more easily than she feels). Men who have a lot of trouble are typically aggressively against caring about what women like, usually out of spite. This can be fixed with experience and focused learning.
For women, the problem is that they are socialized to disrespect men and to identify any male qualities that they don’t personally gel with as moral failings. They are more aware of what men do and don’t like, but are encouraged to view giving men what they like as a sort of selling out. (At the same time, women actually LIKE positive attention from men, so you get bizarre behavior like women wearing revealing clothing and insisting that it’s “for them.”) This obviously sabotages relationships, but again, you can learn your way back out of it.
Finally, educated men and women both have problems with respecting the privacy of a relationship (although women have more trouble). So when they have problems, instead of dealing with them personally, they broadcast them widely - meaning that other people’s dysfunctions enter the relationship.
All this can be learned away. So, for the high-class young men looking for relationships, they should fix what problems they have in themselves and anticipate and work towards lessening them in women, probably starting with the public-private distinction.
But then again, who am I to say, I’m just another guy who just happens to know a lot of great guys my age (late 20s, early 30s) who found and married great women and are having kids with them. I guess that’s elite privilege? If so, I’ll happily bear that designation; why shouldn’t being better entail getting better things? I know some guys who aren’t doing so well in life who have worse women - is that supposed to surprise me?
kky
21d ago
Are you kidding me? You weren’t able to find real numbers, so you asked a system that has a well-known propensity to provide the kind of answers it thinks best match the question. I.e. you got a guesstimate, and you didn’t even bother getting it from a human. Nobody reading your post has gotten any information from it. There is no information there. It’s all just hunches and feelings, all the way down.
I get that you feel there aren’t many good women. Probably there aren’t. But this post makes a claim of objective reality that simply is not substantiated by its contents.
kky
27d ago
Well elaborated. Thank you!
I agree with most of what you’ve said, so I’ll just riff on a few of the differences or gaps.
In my mind, part of what’s great about kids is spending time with them. That loving, intimate relationship is hard to get outside of family, and it’s built up through closeness and time, just like in a marriage. And while some of that time is spent in obligations, like the family dinner (not always thrilling, always very important), it’s good to spend time together doing something you both enjoy. Playing, in short. Much of my closeness with my own father - and we are very close, I have sought and followed his guidance on some of the most important decisions of my life, and I’ve independently directed myself at considerable expense to bring me physically close to him so that he can stay in my own life and so I can care for him as he ages - comes from the time we spent together in my youth, playing in all kinds of ways, and talking about the world, and learning all number of things. That time was deeply worthwhile, and I’m trying to raise my daughter (more on the way, God willing) the same way.
At the same time, the parent is obviously not responsible for the child’s entertainment, but instead their wellbeing. (My dad: “If someone complains that they’re bored, I can’t help but think: you really have no imagination, do you?”) And what’s best for the child is that they have plenty of places to find whatever they want and need outside of you, such as from themselves. The love of a parent doesn’t need to be smothering and all-encompassing to be felt. It just needs to be warm and present.
And I have a great time with my toddler, and play with her plenty, and leave her to others plenty, or to her own devices, and by the measures I value she seems to be growing up well indeed. Couldn’t be happier.
kky
27d ago
The Western World and Japan, George Sansom. At some point I’ll have to write a review on it.
kky
27d ago
Free markets
I suspect the reason free markets took so long to catch on is that the most valuable commodity in human history does not respond particularly well to free markets - namely, annual staple crops.
An ideal free market good is fungible and does not spoil, easy to transport, and has flexible supply and demand. Excess goods on the market can be absorbed through lower prices and reduced production, while deficiencies spur increased production through higher prices, resulting in rapid recalibration towards efficient prices for the good.
Staple crops are obviously not like this at all. They spoil fairly rapidly if overproduced (mostly through pests eating them), and excess food is worthless at any price - a person can really only carry so much fat on them. Meanwhile, underproduction is a literal life-and-death affair, and bringing the goods to market a few months late is going to be less profitable, because everyone involved is dead. To reap crops you need to sow them well in advance, and even when you do, you really have very little control over what is produced (good year? Bad year? Who knows?). Even with all that in mind, most people are self-producing anyway, so the “market” would only be skilled labor and up, which is what, under 10% of the population? Finally, they’re really not efficient to transport on anything but a boat, and even then it’s somewhat risky and therefore expensive business.
So the right model for staple crops is a lot less free market and a lot more risk mitigation. Most of that risk mitigation is decentralized, but central authorities were very interested in helping out, like the Roman dole or the Egyptian granaries. Either way, there’s more demand for theory on agriculture, harvests, and models of good and bad kingship than for free markets, and that’s exactly what we get for most of history.
It’s only once advances in European sail coincide with the durable products of flexible industrial manufacturing to create new centers of value that the free market becomes a more relevant abstraction, and just at that point, the theory emerges to explain why merchant powers are dominating the old land-bound interests. C’est la vie. (I’m sure the spice trade factors in too.)
kky
27d ago
This is a reasonable explanation, although I think it buries the lede just a little - the real premise being covered over is the “free men.” Their implicit ability to join or foil any particular military action is reigned in their explicit vote. And for some reason that legal fiction persists under the extreme authority of the paterfamilias! Why would the vote not be delegated to him? In an abstract sense, it seems very practical, but apparently it was not in the running.
On the flip side, the Japanese had military service as a sort of corvee labor in the distant past, for suppressing the natives still on the islands. But at a much later point, during the warring states period, the increasing militarism of the region percolated down to the farm level and generated a system of “farmer samurai” (or really, petty barons) who would mobilize independent of lords. That could have been a turning point for the vote, as the prerequisites are in place, but the warlord Toyotomi established a rule forbidding farmers from owning swords or sword-owners from farming. But the question there is: why was he able to make that rule? Only because it did not particularly offend anyone’s sensibilities - because for the most of them, they didn’t particularly want autonomy and the vote it would imply.
Culture is a hell of a thing. Probably you’re right that something akin to the free association of warriors was central to the old Indo-Europeans, maybe as an expression of the liberty and power of horse-ownership, but the fascinating thing is how powerfully that sentiment has persisted. I have a feeling that culture is the great unexplained, because nebulous and unmeasurable, factor of history, and the genius who finally cracks it open to even elementary analysis will gain superb explanatory power over the past. So far I’ve only read one book which attempts this with any seriousness, but the author admits his own limitations and wisely stops before doing anything too foolish…
kky
27d ago
I’m not sure voting was ever really common in the East. At minimum, I can’t think of any instances of it in Japanese history at all. Even now, the vote is more of a bellwether than an actual mechanism for decision-making. When the Meiji architects of modern Japan were selecting their political system, once they had decided on a democracy (because it was the best-recognized on the global stage at the time), and specifically a constitutional monarchy for obvious reasons, they spent the rest of the time searching for a system that would nevertheless keep power in the hands of the elite (themselves) and settled on the Diet of the Prussian Junkers.
If I had to offer a guess - Japanese culture hates open confrontation, and has done since essentially forever. The early Chinese-inflected system of ministers from Heian and earlier was somewhat ornamental, and the real decisions got made behind closed doors in private tea ceremonies and the like. One of my favorite little scenes from Japanese cinema is in Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, in a council of war. Everyone of importance is sitting on their dedicated cushion in highly regulated order of importance from the lord, who heads the affair from a raised platform. They speak in turn, paying superlative respect to their master in precisely flowery language, offering alternatives and arguments with all the structure and stiffness of a five-paragraph essay. Finally, the lord speaks, and with a few laconic phrases dictates his will and the plan of action. Of course, the real planning happened the previous evening after dinner, with the generals talking it over in casual language while simply standing in a circle, at which point they assigned roles for the next day’s performance.
Communal decisions, certainly. People need to be pointed in one direction to make progress, and they need to agree to align. But voting is notably visible and combative. Two sides need to make their case in public, and it really is win or lose. People who worry about losing the election start doing dangerous and erratic things. There’s no polite and mutually congenial resolution available, except through the ritual mercy of the victors. Of course non-voting has its faults too, but voting is far from a human universal - why is it then so popular in Europe?
kky
27d ago
For hiring an FTE, keep in mind that you are typically on the hook for all the fun things like healthcare and retirement plans that you never see the costs of as an employee. Those can run hideously expensive. It’s possible to hire someone under the table, but there are risks associated because it is quite literally illegal.
I looked into nanny costs, and in my state, it really isn’t $20/hr. And this is true for most affluent states, to the best of my knowledge. A good daycare built around a tight-knit and inherently somewhat exclusive community will almost always run you cheaper, like the church-associated ones that others have mentioned. (I saved significant cash going from 3/wk to 5/wk from a downmarket nanny to one such daycare.) I think the arbitrage is way less than your instincts are telling you.
Sorry to reply so late; my actual life imposed.
Your idea of a “national divorce” is tempting only inasmuch as there are two distinct groups that will have no more internal conflicts once separated. But this is not borne out by reality. Look at the tenuous Musk-Trump alliance, which has already fallen apart. Would they have to share part of America? Why would they not simply fall into factional infighting? Why isn’t it divorces all the way down?
Loving thy neighbor, or at least tolerating him in a modestly political sense, is a difficult thing to do, and when it breaks down there is no limit to the breakdowns. There are no Blues without Reds, no Reds without Blues, and the spirit of the age is one of malice seeking an outlet. What I have argued, am arguing, and will continue to argue, is that opposing this malice in itself, not through some subset of its mortal proxies, is both right and the only hope we have.
I have friends and family who are much, much more politically attached than I am. I oppose them in many ways, and I’m fairly open about that. But I still have good relationships with them because that opposition is braced by the much more real and human love and trust we share. I believe this is what’s at the heart of what one might call a homogeneous nation - this sense of trust that permits differences and arguments. And that trust, when it exists, exists on the smallest scale and percolates upwards as a simple expression of the way we live our lives, day to day. And part of that trust is the trust that we will do what is right and proper even when it is inconvenient or disadvantageous, that we will keep our word. Will you keep your word? That’s what’s really there, in the rule of law. It’s the rule of law over one’s own heart. And if you repudiate that in favor of advantage or passion, who can trust you - on any scale?
No shit the progressives have overstepped. But that’s not what’s at issue here. The real question is, and can only be, the safety of one’s own soul.
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