laxam
7mo ago
I could spend a half hour writing a wall of text about what social constructs are and how the categories are made for man and so forth
Could you, please?
Moreover, could you define 'gender' in a non-self-referential way that isn't just biological sex?
laxam
1yr ago
While true to an extent, it's also worth remembering that inter-faith marriages were almost as no-no as inter-racial marriage for a long time in many places. It has probably only been since the Boomers that that has entirely disappeared. In places where the immigrants were Protestant, they would likely intermarry and quickly assimilate with the English descended population. Where they were not, English descent is going to be relatively much lower.
laxam
1yr ago
Yeah, and I've seen commentary that that is significantly worse precisely because it's more difficult for Senators to just take stuff home.
laxam
1yr ago
Trump was given a curated list to pull names from.
Mitch held a seat and Trump did what he was told. The one, huge, unequivocally great thing he did wasn't him, because you have to be delusional at this point to think Trump is good at doing anything but trolling the hell out of the libs.
laxam
2d ago
Also, Scots are Celts
Highlanders, yes. Lowland Scots are Anglos with a funny accent and some Celtic wives.
laxam
2d ago
If anything, it has a lot to do with urbanization and industrialization in general.
laxam
17d ago
You bulwark against any European nationalism movement because this threatens American hegemony.
It can be breathtaking sometimes just how much things coming out of the further ends of the right directly match up with the way critical theory works.
laxam
1mo ago
It looks like 'direction or control' usually means some sort of formal relationship. So, a contract that gives voting power over a company or something like that.
laxam
3mo ago
The point is that the Israelis aren't actually a source of instability in the region, except in terms of their relationship with the Palestinians. Get rid of the latter and you've solved the problem. Get rid of the former and you've still got a problem because they're a radicalized Islamist population which hates all of their neighbors.
laxam
5mo ago
What about in the more literal sense of being not male gendered or female gendered?
laxam
5mo ago
Imo doomerism has always seemed much to convenient to me. Most people, especially women, know that not having kids is a thoroughly antisocial choice in general (there are exceptions of course, such as having serious genetic disorders), so doomerism allows them to reclaim the moral high ground. They get to continue their life of short-sighted hedonism while also feeling morally superior. Of course, there are people whom I believe their doomerism to be sincere, but it's quite rare. Much more common is partying all the time, except the parties are totally for a cause and not just for fun. Perfect example is fridays for future, which consisted of 99% getting to skip school and 1% thinly-veiled excuses how that's the moral thing to do.
Protests themselves are a fun group activity, when they're not outright parties/festivals.
laxam
5mo ago
I'll preface this by saying that I'm transgender, and I had dysphoria since I was a child myself, but I am a bit of an old-fashioned "truscum" as I don't really fully subscribe to the mainstream leftist trans views. I do know some people in the "neutral middle" - most of my more right-wing friends are opposed to the excesses of the trans movement, but otherwise either don't care or just passively go with the medical consensus.
Do you think there is such a thing as 'non-binary'? Is there something meaningful and connected to your experience of dysphoria in neo-pronouns?
laxam
5mo ago
A tiny portion of our energies, maybe. It's not like these things are mutually exclusive.
Of course, a huge part of that was that the American people didn't really care, at the end of the day, once Bin Laden was dead. Israelis will care about what happens in the Gaza Strip.
laxam
7mo ago
I mean, one reason they chose Zelensky in the first place was because they were 'voting harder' to prevent corruption, a platform he ran on. That seems to be pretty close to how countries with more entrenched democratic institutions do it, too: the voters vote for something and it's not always clear if they'll get it, but they try anyway.
laxam
7mo ago
It's dangerous for both to abandon their position, but empire is more costly and doesn't have as many benefits as it seems like it should. The hegemon is always tempted to empire, but benefits more from staying merely hegemon.
laxam
8mo ago
But, I do agree this is substantively a center-left country, and a few lucky EV wins (Bush in 2000, Trump in 2016) along with great timing on SC Judges dying have given right-leaning people an overrated view of their own support within the country
Only ever paying attention to Presidential elections is going to give you a really warped view of the country and the electorate.
First: if you think the US was a center-left country in 2000, you're just lost. I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Second: Republicans controlled at least one chamber in 39 out of 50 state legislatures in 2016 and had 31 governorships (and would win 3 more that year). The US was still a center right ght country in 2016, it's just that the Trump years have caused a lot of center-right people to question their convictions just enough to be willing to vote for what at least looks like a sane Democrat over Trump or a Trump affiliated Republican.
laxam
9mo ago
The obvious criticism is that Romulus is almost certainly a myth.
In kind of the same way China went through its Doubting Antiquity phase in the early 20th century, it's fashionable to assume myths and mythical history are just made up in the West, but it may be we go through something like the Chinese did where, whoops, turns out the Shang really did exist and here's the archeological evidence with writing and who knows when the Xia turn up in the archeological record but we shouldn't be surprised if they do.
laxam
1yr ago
Yes, assessment has always been an issue with taxation, going back into the dark mists of history. The idea is indeed to tax the value of land which, no matter how difficult the assessment, is still more efficient than other kinds of taxes as long as you're not trying to hit exactly 100% like the Georgists.
laxam
1yr ago
The fact that human capital can't be easily taxed is pretty close to a grand unified theory of 21st century American politics, really.
laxam
3d ago
Elite Christian culture adopted the Classical heritage before the Roman Empire even fell in the West, so the thing where British imperial administrators learned Latin and Greek and the Classics is just the same Christian tradition that sent them to listen to the softly spoken magic spell every Sunday.
laxam
1mo ago
Austrian economics correctly states that this leads to over-investment: investment is unbacked by corresponding saving, causing a bubble and mis-allocation of economic resources.
I was waiting for this. The rest of the post prior has all of those usual """dog-whistles""" that it was like a twist in a movie you can see coming from miles away.
Is it 2008 again? I remember the internet being full of this kind of thing (and being one of the contributors!).
Anyway, it's important to point out that 'full reserve' theorizing is not 'Austrian' economics, it's Rothbardian Austrian economics. The original ABCT doesn't require it to avoid business cycles and Hayek's formulation can be re-cast in essentially monetarist terms as about the interplay of the supply and demand for money without much modification. The supply of loanable funds (a nominal quantity) does not necessarily represent the full production possibilities of the underlying economy (a real one). That is, there are 'real' savings that are not represented by nominal savings at a given price level/quantity of money. The demand for money will be driven, in part, by the investment possibilities created by real savings, so a full reserve banking system will under invest in production, while the fractional reserve system the Rothbardians are against would be able to invest enough for the economy to reach its production possibilities frontier without going beyond it and generating a business cycle.
As to the rest of your post: a lot of what you're talking about with population discount rates would probably be covered in post-war Keynesian literature on the propensity to save/consume. The empirical validity of a lot of it varies, I'm sure, but I can't imagine it's any more questionable than your last two paragraphs.
laxam
3mo ago
Maybe. There's probably still more going on than just those particular problems. The theoretically correct answer is that the virtue of the people themselves has declined, so we elect men to Congress who will not govern well regardless of the structure you place them in. This is an appetizing enough answer, although certainly not itself complete.
It's astonishing the level of dishonesty that goes into writing a paragraph like this.
It's not Zelensky doing this. If Zelensky negotiated a surrender to Russia right now, the Ukrainian people would toss his ass to the curb and probably kill him for it.
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