non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
non_radical_centrist
17d ago
Hanania says things like "nobody is more pro-Israel than me" and I genuinely do not know if he is being sincere or intentionally outlandish.
I think he is somewhat sincere. I think he looks at all Jews have contributed to civilization, e.g vastly disproportionate numbers of Nobel winners and establishing a democracy in the middle east as two examples, and considers them a culture worth supporting. Meanwhile he looks at the Palestinian culture and Hamas, and sees them as a blight on civilization worth bombing into obliteration.
He apparently hates leftist protestors too and I think a substantial portion of his support is just to "trigger" them. I don't really get that part of his motivation, I don't have any particular fondness of leftist protestors but I don't have any visceral hatred of them, I just consider them a bit dumb.
So the "we should roll back Civil Rights law, but in the meantime let's massively expand the ability of Jews to use Civil Rights law to wage lawfare against their political opposition" is a little bit out of loving Jews, but I think it's mostly out of hatred of leftist protestors. I don't really agree with that myself, but I don't really particularly care either way.
non_radical_centrist
19d ago
You can't be all those things in the US census system. You can only choose one. It's only Hispanic that's a both ethnicity instead of a race.
That's why Hanania is calling it obviously artificial.
Edit: as /u/toakraka said, that's old news and they've updated the system to reflect less artificial categories. It's still somewhat arbitrary though.
non_radical_centrist
19d ago
Part of what makes it obviously artificial is that hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, in the US census. So someone can be both hispanic and white, or hispanic and black, or even hispanic and Asian American Pacific Islander! And it was chosen like that because black activists didn't want to lose any influence from black spanish speakers choosing to identify as hispanic over black.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
It's annoying how expensive substacks are. I wish there are some sort of bulk deal where I could buy all the ones I'm interested in at a significant discount, because as much as I love the writing of the writers I follow, I can't drop a hundred bucks a year on each of them.
non_radical_centrist
30d ago
If everyone was equal in ability and some groups were being discriminated against for no reason, I would hire them since they cost less money/are more desperate and I would crush the competition with my superior offerings.
There was a problem with racism in the Jim Crow era where, if you were to be colour blind with your hiring practices and what customers you let in in the South, you could get racists making a lot of trouble for you. I think we're well past that era, but that there was a time when things really were nastily racist needs to be kept in mind.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
Neoliberals were strip mining the economy and the labor market
Neoliberals embraced deregulation and austerity because Keynesian economics and large amounts of the economy being state owned or heavily regulated lead to the stagflation of the 70s.
non_radical_centrist
16d ago
Richard Hanania has some good ones. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-monogamy-and-incest-taboos-made
That's his review of The WEIRDest people in the World
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
I don't read much of Kulak's stuff, I find most of his writing to be wrong in some way. I would call this piece he had pretty racist too, since it implicitly dismisses any possible environmental cause for India's woes. The amount of extreme government disfunction, poor nutrition and poor healthcare many, many Indians receive I think are very plausible candidates for low human capital there, which he doesn't address at all.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
I much prefer it that way than the other way around.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
People have been protesting Israel and calling them genocidal basically every year since 1947, with only small breaks during the periods of hours to days when the Arabs start a military offense and briefly look like they have the upper hand before getting their asses handed to them.
non_radical_centrist
21d ago
Sure, but I don't think we're going to ever get to that point anytime soon, because some questions are real hard to forecast. I don't think anyone today knows when say the Israel-Palestine conflict will next have a ceasefire, but that's something a lot of people would like to know. If we get to a point where we can forecast so well everyone agrees on when it's most likely to end, then that's mission accomplished.
non_radical_centrist
21d ago
If it gets really good and really common then how would one extract any value from it?
If there's one answer that everyone agrees on and no one betting against each other, all the value would come from whomever posted the question and sponsored it so that anyone who guesses correctly gets proceeds. If people disagree on the answer, then people who're right also get value from whomever's wrong losing their money to the people who are right.
non_radical_centrist
2mo ago
I have a formative childhood memory of exactly that sort of thing happening. I was roughhousing with a friend of mine, in the type of way that it was very unlikely either of us would get seriously hurt, but was still very much against the school rules. I remember then a parent volunteer caught us in a way that she didn't didn't directly witness it but it was very obvious to everyone what happened- I don't remember exactly how, but it was probably something like hearing a yelp and then turning the corner to see my friend with a bruise. When she interrogated us, I stayed quiet and my friend insisted he just walked into a pole- despite no poles being nearby. We both got off scott free.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
I believe Turks are known for being unusually secular Muslims
non_radical_centrist
18d ago
I would expect being alone would massively increase the risk rate. How many people would steal a stack of bills if they were left out in the open but there are people all around who knows they don't belong to the thief, vs how many would steal the stack of bills if they had total anonymity?
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
We try to avoid making two-flavor combos where the dessert could be done as a single flavor in one of the two flavors
I'm having a hard time understanding what that's supposed to mean
non_radical_centrist
19d ago
I didn't realize there was an update, thanks for letting me know
non_radical_centrist
29d ago
I have no experience being a professional developer, I just do side projects, but Youtube's a great resource for learning. I find you already need some familiarity with the topic before official documentation is understandable, and a youtube tutorial shows you every step, including ones that are just implied in written tutorials, e.g installations.
non_radical_centrist
2mo ago
I think you underestimate the amount of support Hamas has among the regular Gazans. And the groups that are more popular than Hamas are usually other Islamic terrorist groups. And underestimate how much those regular Gazans hate Israel and would be uncooperative in the concentration camps, they wouldn't just be passively grateful for food and shelter, they'd be getting into fights. And those fights would be terrible PR- "Israeli soldiers beat civilian in concentration camp!", regardless about any context of if the guy needed to be beat down.
non_radical_centrist
29d ago
That post-secondary isn't going to work out for you, and to enlist in the military.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
If you want an audience regardless of the quality of your writing, write fanfiction. You'll get a few readers who desperately want more fandom content as long as your writing isn't totally unreadable
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
But when Darwin says that traits that favor the preservation of the species are preserved, no new information is gained.
To someone who thinks that traits are not passed down, it is. Someone might think that the distribution of traits in cats today are the exact same as the distribution of traits in cats 5000 years ago.
Also, there are interactions between traits. Say someone has a mutation that removes their thumbs, but has another mutation that makes them a super genius. Are they more or less likely to pass down their traits than an average person with no unusual mutations? Understanding Darwin's theory is the first step to understanding the exceptions, to understanding why detrimental traits are passed down sometimes.
non_radical_centrist
2mo ago
What do you think of Internet outrage of companies raising their prices, chiefly companies like Netflix and fast food restaurants? I think morally, it seems pretty iffy- it's a free market, and if they raise their prices, you can just stop buying what they offer. If the government got involved to set any sort of price ceiling, I think that'd definitely be a bad idea that'd lead to a shortage of some sort.
But if the outrage lets customers act as a pseudo-monopsony which gives them more power, I also don't really mind if they're able to use it to demand cheaper prices, even if I think the accusations of corporations being evil are vastly overblown. Especially when it comes to keeping the price of something like Netflix low, where much of their value comes from having exclusive rights to stream old shows and movies instead of all revenue to them going towards making new stuff or improving technology. If consumer outrage keeps the Netflix price $5 cheaper than it otherwise would be, is anything hurt besides shareholder bank accounts?
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
To what degree should the politicians do what the general population wants, when what the general population wants is stupid? The most clear cut case of the general population wanting stupid stuff I think is price controls- the idea of keeping rent or gasoline below a certain hard cap is very popular with a lot of ordinary people. But it of course would be counter-productive- it'll only result in a lower supply of something people desperately want, and force them to start paying with their time in long lines instead of paying just with their wallets. So if 90% of the population say they want a cap on prices of something, does their elected representative have a responsibility to say "No you guys are stupid, I know what you really want" and not implement price controls?
Another example would be nationalism. A lot of times, people will be chauvinistic about their culture, and want to oppress minority cultures. Not really so much in the US recently despite all the fuss about race relations, but there are many extreme cases internationally. The majority will try to inflict on the minority restrictions on using their minority language in schools, prevent access to elected and civil service jobs, take children away from families, forcibly expel people, even execute the minorities with roving firing squads or death camps, in a brief list from least bad to worst actions chauvinism often leads to. Does a politician have any obligation to say, "No, I will not implement this policy. Not only is it immoral, it won't actually make life better for you" to the people who elected him if the 90% majority population wants to inflict those degradations on the 10% minority?
The obvious slippery slope is a politician thinking he knows better in a case where he doesn't actually know better, or deciding laws based on his own personal values instead of the general population's in a case where there is no option that's better on all metrics. E.g, abortion laws always have a trade off between the preferences and health of the mother against the fetus, and where you want abortion laws to be at depends on the ratio of which you value mother:fetus.
Thank you, corrected
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