what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
The French Revolution, and the whole downstream branch of purported Enlightenment thinking and subsequent revolutions which took the French Revolution as their model, which appears to me to be the predominant portion both in raw numbers and in intellectual influence throughout the modern era.
Maybe this is just my Amero-centric bias speaking, but it seems to me like the American version is much more influential worldwide. Are there any countries that are currently trying to do what the French Revolution did as far as religion? I agree that the American Revolution is fairly unique among revolutions, but I think this more likely has to do with who was doing the rebelling and the circumstances of that rebellion than ideological influence. For example, the Americans were British colonists, rather than being natives of the country they inhabited, and so were not subject to the same sort of oppression (and technological and economic disadvantage) as, say, the Indians, Haitians, Mexicans, or Congolese.
(One could even argue that the real legacy of the Enlightenment is neither of those 2 big revolutions, but rather the peaceful granting of independence to countries like Canada and Australia much later, and these data points don't even come to mind because of how boring it is. That's fairly speculative on my part though).
Yes, the French Revolution was influenced by and incorporated aspects of the Enlightenment. I think it's a mistake to judge any intellectual movement by its worst "members" since some portion of any group of people will have bullies, narcissists, sociopaths, and people just hungry for power or violence, who are willing to join any movement and utilize it to their own ends, as well as extremists who truly believe but also use it to justify violence regardless of what those beliefs actually are. For example, what exemplifies the "core elements" of Christianity? Is it the Crusades? The forceful suppression of Native American culture and religion? The preservation of Greek and Roman learning through the Dark Ages? Maximillian Koble sacrificing himself at Aushwitz? All of these are some combination of what Christianity teaches and individual behavior by individual people. The French Revolution is the same.
(Communism rightfully gets dragged because all of its examples, at least above Dunbar's number, are horrific.)
No, it doesn't, because what people claim is of far less evidentiary value than what they do. But the flipside of this is the people who claim that Communism is Utopia, and therefore the USSR wasn't really Communist since it didn't create a Utopia. That is what I perceive you and others to be doing with the Enlightenment; you seem to be claiming that good results are part of its definition, and therefore an instance that produces bad results can't have been part of it. I think we should understand ideologies by the methods they employ and the outcomes they produce, not the outcomes they claim to be pursuing. The claims are still helpful in understanding how their agents saw themselves, but those statements should be heavily outweighed by what those agents actually did and the results they actually achieved.
I see what you're saying, and I agree that it's fallacious to just redefine a thing you like to be "good things" and a thing you don't like to be "bad things." However, in this case I really do believe that the individual liberty interpretation is much more in line with what Enlightenment thinkers like Locke actually proposed, and French Revolutionaries were largely taking out their anger with the Church, which was heavily entwined with the monarchy and had benefited from special privileges, rather than implementing an Enlightenment philosophical vision. Particularly when you have a mass movement with individual people from many walks of life... do you think that all of those people had read and digested all of the Enlightenment thinkers? Similarly I'm sure there were aspects of the American Revolution not perfectly in line with Enlightenment principles.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
No, they were actively proclaiming for assimilation and suppression of foreign cultures and foreign tongues, if not explicitly foreign people.
Some people certainly wanted this, but did it actually happen? Or rather, did it actually happen any faster than it does now, or would have happened anyway? German was actually a very popular language in the US, with German newspapers in many towns, until the world wars. Lots of other diaspora communities persisted as well, like Celtish in the Carolina lowlands. My impression is actually that a lot of nativists did the opposite, and wanted the immigrants to remain separate in their own enclaves indefinitely--"No Irish need apply" doesn't seem like it encourages assimilation.
There were never as many Italians or Irish then as there are Mexicans and assorted CA hispanics now.
Do you have data to support this claim? Raw immigration numbers peaked in 1990, with the second peak being 1900-1920:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States#/media/File:Immigration_to_the_United_States_over_time.svg
Adjusting for population, it's clear that we're in a pretty low spot historically (excepting the Depression and WW2)--adjusted for the 4.3x population difference, even the low point in 1900 is equivalent to well over 800,000 today. In fact, even going purely by raw numbers, "the last 60 years" is largely not that high!
Things have changed, and those changes have destroyed the mechanism for the assimilation that you take for granted. Hence the sneering. That machine's broken, it's not going to be rebuilt, and anyone who wants to do so is pilloried.
I don't see much in the way of evidence for any these things. I think people who say this don't sufficiently grapple with the history of assimilation, which I only know a little bit about, but I know enough to know that it's complicated.
This won't happen, because that goose is cooked.
Well, this is a testable prediction, at least. I think it's rather early to conclude it won't happen, when large-scale hispanic immigration is, what, 30 or 40 years old? German language newspapers existed as far back as the Revolution and was quite popular throughout the 1800s, only really declining because of WW1. Do you think that, say, the grandchildren of early hispanic immigrants (so, the children of people born in the US) don't speak substantially more English than their grandparents?
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
I don't really see a better proxy for judging a sense of duty to others than blood/nobility.
I have a hard time thinking of a worse one. The history of "nobility" is largely one of forcefully looting as much wealth as possible from what are effectively slaves, held in place with military force. What was the nobility's reaction to the peasantry being able to demand higher wages after the Black Death, or move to cities for the same end? Was it to encourage this natural economic development which improved productivity even at their own cost? Of course not, they passed laws prohibiting peasants from leaving so that they could not get those higher wages.
The feeling of societal obligation you're talking about--and in particular, a feeling of societal obligation that actually helps other people and does not consider the rigid maintenance of the existing order for the sake of "stability" to be the primary obligation--is extremely rare.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Maybe part of the reason the average American is obese is because they drive everywhere, and walking 30 minutes a day would have tremendous benefit.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
They were developed very quickly--I believe the first ones in January of 2020. They were approved "quickly" in the sense that a new medicine getting approved in less than a year would be unheard of in normal situations. They were not approved quickly in the sense that quickly by FDA standards is still glacially slow by any reasonable person standards. Also, the testing process was delayed--they were allowed to do phase 2 and phase 3 trials at the same time, IIRC, but those trials took a lot of time because most people weren't getting covid in the course of a month and you need a lot of people in the control group to get COVID in order to have enough data. This could have been worked around with challenge trials, which people even volunteered for, but we can't have that. People might get hurt!
Edit: Since I'm being sarcastic, I should say that manufacturing might have slowed down the process of getting vaccines out anyway. But even with a small number of doses you could prevent a lot of deaths by vaccinating old people and other at-risk groups, which is what we did, so I would guess challenge trials still end up saving lives on net.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
It is possible for metrics to hide important factors. For example, there could be an increase in inequality, which means that most people are worse off while a few people are much better off. This seems to be the opposite of what has actually happened, though. One that seems more likely to me is an increase in prices swallowing more income, so people are worse off. Given what I've heard about housing costs, it rings true, although I can't seem to easily find great data. The US could easily be in a similar position, but being wealthier to begin with masks it.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
they managed to allow states to ban abortion with minimal loopholes
I'm confused by this statement. Wasn't, "states can decide what to do on abortion" the entire explicit point of Dobbs?
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky
How about neither?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=179Pg
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=179Pi
As far as major economic trends, nothing seems to have even changed when Trump was elected. These graphs show % change from 1 year prior, but they're easy to modify to show raw level or whatever else. I guess he was "lucky" in the sense of being elected after the recovery was well under way but even that seems like a stretch.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
This creates a spiral, where the most walking-friendly destinations and infrastructure end up neglected, making them even less attractive, and people who want to drive end up going elsewhere.
Something like this is possible, or even likely. Another point, often made by urbanists, is that having more regular people in spaces makes them safer, and feel safer, because of safety in numbers. However, mainly what I was trying to get at is that the policies that allow lawlessness to continue and spread are orthogonal to policies that favor driving/other modes of transportation, and so it is entirely possible (easy, even, aside from the political constraints that seem to be unique to America) to make walkable places that are nothing like what firmamenti describes.
Yes. People began moving to suburbs almost as soon as they could get cars. Even before, with the "streetcar suburbs" proliferating in the 1920's. Then rising crime and unrest, and safety-hostile urban policies like blockbusting and forced school integration caused mass flight right when the new interstates made it convenient to do so.
Streetcar suburbs are the opposite of a car-dependent development and are not a problem.
I think you should re-check your history. Homicide rates declined from the mid 30s until the mid 60s, which is exactly when American governments started demolishing urban neighborhoods to build highways, subsidizing homeownership, etc.
If you're just going to drop a thinly veiled claim that being near black people is a public safety hazard, you should have some evidence for it. "Controversial claims require evidence" etc.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Now sure, normal people with normal social skills could figure this out.
I'm no lawyer, but is this the point of the "objective person" standard which is common across many issues in law? A very wide range of behaviors could effectively become legalized if you can just say "I didn't know/couldn't tell that what I was doing was bad" and the prosecution would somehow have to prove you knew it was bad? (While trying to find an answer to this question, I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person#Mentally_ill, which says "The reasonable person standard makes no allowance for the mentally ill."
(For what it's worth, I agree that it seems fairly weak to convict someone of a crime when the most explicit message they were given is being unable to see the profile and when they did nothing beyond send facebook messages.)
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Communism. Like, it's not even close.
Communism is a system; blood/nobility is a personal characteristic. This feels like a category error. I agree that "need" (as in, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need") manages to be worse than blood, but this is quite a low bar and they're both so bad it feels pointless to ask which is worse.
For most of that history, wealth as we understand the term effectively didn't exist, because there wasn't a workable way to create it.
Indeed, wealth creation jumped massively right as inherited power and nobility-based political systems were starting to be replaced! I wonder if there could be a connection between these events? Maybe such a confiscatory tax regime discouraged higher production? Perhaps nobles are effectively of random competence and random (or worse) moral character? Possibly such a rigid hierarchy discouraged innovation?
If everyone abandons the fields to go chase better wages in the cities,
I think it was quite far from "everyone" who wanted/tried to move, and some of those still planned to farm, just under someone who would pay them more. In any event, if nobles can foresee this happening, there's an obvious solution: Pay the peasants more! In this situation, their work is clearly valuable, so that shouldn't be an issue. It's not like no one except nobility is capable of understanding that food will need to be harvested 6 months out! This is exactly the kind of problem that markets are wonderful at solving and central planning is terrible at. Obviously if too many people start to move to the cities, wages drop because of supply effects, because there's limited capital, and because the productivity of the marginal migrant goes down, which discourages more migration.
Speaking of central planning, I find it rather bizarre that you pointed out how terrible communism was, then immediately suggested that some of the things the Soviets did, such as preventing peasants from moving to the city and engaging in confiscatory levels of taxation, all enforced by military strength, which demonstrably destroyed the economic productivity of huge swaths of land (most notably Ukraine) and lead to mass famine, were somehow good when implemented under feudalism?
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I agree; I linked a video in another comment which goes into detail on the conditions that permit deadly force in self-defense. It includes, among other examples, a description of how drawing a gun, aiming, and firing can take substantially more time than charging at someone with a knife, even from a distance where the casual observer would look and say "that seems safe." My main point is that these standards have to depend on what the person involved actually did and could do in the moment, and that those actions have to reach an objective standard of threat. They cannot be based on someone's personal distaste, or on guesswork, or on the behavior of other people who might be similar, or on an immediate emotional reaction that is not grounded in reality.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
The theory I heard is that Hussein was trying to pretend he had WMDs in order to intimidate potential rivals in the region like Iran, and accidentally did too good of a job.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
There's not "no evidence" in the sense that you can certainly find papers claiming narcissism has decreased over time. However, you can also find ones saying that it is flat over time, or has increased over time. E.g. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_surprisingly_boring_truth_about_millennials_and_narcissism
In a foundational 2008 paper, Jean Twenge (coauthor of The Narcissism Epidemic) and her colleagues reviewed 85 studies that surveyed more than 16,000 college students between 1979 and 2006... The researchers found that college students were becoming more narcissistic—by a full 30 percent from 1982 to around 2006. UC Davis’s Kali Trzesniewski and colleagues responded in 2008... The results indicated no change in narcissism... In yet another 2008 paper, Twenge and Joshua Foster re-analyzed data... they found that narcissism rose among both whites and Asians from 2002 to 2007. But because Asians tended to have lower narcissism scores in general, and the Asian population at UC campuses increased during the time period under scrutiny, the overall trend may have been obscured. Twenge and Foster also objected to the data that Trzesniewski and her coauthors had used... Further studies in 2009 and 2010 found no rise in narcissism. But a 2010 paper by Twenge and Foster objected to their methods... “The debate on changes in narcissism [is] seemingly settled,” Twenge and Foster wrote in 2010. “Seemingly” being the keyword: In late 2017, a new study appeared in Psychological Science that called all the previous ones into question... They found a “small and continuous decline” in narcissism throughout that time period.
The actual section is several paragraphs with a lot more details, but you get the gist. It then points out that the instrument used has a constant wording, which may be interpreted differently. Other sources don't provide a single simple answer, either, such as https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191210111655.htm or https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171115-millenials-are-the-most-narcissistic-generation-not-so-fast (which I think summarizes some of the same evidence as the first article).
Crime by native whites is low
It looks low in comparison to the AA rate, but the US white-offender homicide rate is still higher than most developed European countries' total rate (and many of the poorer ones as well). Even if you assume that none of the "unknown" in the first link below are white, it's still 2.1 per 100,000. If you use the distribution of victims as an estimate (2nd link) since most murders are same-race, you get 2.5; if we assume the unknowns are distributed the same as the knowns (41% white), then we get just under 3. Countries such as Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, France, the UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are all below 2, as well as Poland, Spain, Albania, and Croatia, among others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Vital_statistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
Thanks, and I feel especially bad now since I upvoted one of those! (It is old, to be fair to me). I do feel like the standard here is pretty low, and is more along the lines of "discourage the worst posts" rather than "encourage a high standard of discussion" but I'll take what I can get.
Especially since only the latter is a report option!
I meant to mention this fact originally; since several rules are not listed on the report default, I assumed this was either a technical limitation or to prevent decision paralysis.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
For most of that time, when people had lots of children, many of them died in said wars, famines, and plagues, or just from everyday diseases. The mother often died in or after childbirth as well.
not a single thing related to raising children should be expensive given the capabilities of modernity.
What is the saying? Consumption always expands to meet the income available? Children are just one example of this--possibly one of hte clearest examples, in fact. Obviously calories are cheap, and people are rich enough to afford much more space per person. But if you tried to raise a child like an 1800s farmer (minimal or no schooling, having them work on your farm from a young age, 12 people in a 1 room house, everyone sleeping on the floor, no electricity or running water, letting them walk to a neighbor alone, etc) you'd be locked up for child abuse (and they wouldn't be set up to do very well in the modern world).
Even if you think about these labor saving devices... many of them correspond to tasks that weren't done at all or were much easier in the past. When your house is small and 1 room, cleaning is much easier than when it's large with many rooms. A simple wood floor is easier to sweep than if you have a mix of tile, wood, carpet, etc. You don't need a dishwasher or laundry machine if you have the absolute bare minimum of dishes and clothes. Or take medicine: If the only medicine you could possibly access is what you can make from herbs, well that's certainly cheaper than buying something expensive at the pharmacy! It just might be completely useless and your child might die.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Neither that argument nor any supporting evidence for it are in their post. It's mostly just complaining about the outgroup.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I'm no doctor, but this claim doesn't explain anything to me. The spike protein is in COVID, that's the whole point. AFAIK COVID doesn't cause anywhere near this range of symptoms, and if it did, it would be vastly more dangerous than most vaccine skeptics seem to think. Just because something is "toxic" doesn't mean it causes literally every symptom imaginable.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I'm all for facing certain risks head-on and accepting that some amount of risk is unavoidable in a life worth living. I don't know what's to be gained from neglecting even basic safety regardless of context. At least Pasha's post from today is about taking risks to have fun, explore, and learn things. Risking disability or death when it's easily avoidable for misplaced machismo is the opposite of masculine, in my opinion. "Duty is heavier than a mountain. Death is lighter than a feather." Your duty as a traditional man is to take care of your family. Can't do that if you're crippled or dead. Put aside your ego and do the boring but important things; that's actually the hard part.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Do you see the shape of the problem?
I don't understand your claims in this paragraph at all. Britain, its former colonies, and the other states that those places controlled or influenced, can't possibly be an "outlier" when they represent such an enormous amount of people, land, wealth, and influence. There were only so many major powers at the time or in the immediate aftermath.
And what does Marxism have to do with this? Marx's main works were published around 50 years after the end of what is generally considered the Enlightenment, and represents a very different intellectual tradition. Maybe Marx and some his followers thought they were the following in the Enlightenment tradition, but I don't see it at all, except to the extent that you could group literally all Western philosophy into one big tradition, but which is far too broad to ask a question like "Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?" Each generation of thinkers presumably takes influences from their predecessors, while also rejecting some of what came before. While you can have fuzzy boundaries for sure, I feel very comfortable placing the late-1800s socialists, the early- to mid- 20th century socialist states, and their apologists in Western academia, outside the purview of "The Enlightenment."
Doesn't it behoove the ideologues to account for such vagaries when designing their theories? If you're going to claim to know how to make a better society, shouldn't you account for the real-world conditions that will cause your system to fail?
I'm not really sure I follow, but it is impossible to anticipate all of the possible ways in which someone might misinterpret or misuse your ideas. Aside from the infinite range of human excuse-making and rationalization and stupidity, if someone can ignore what you write about individual liberty, they can also ignore what you write about not ignoring the part about individual liberty.
When the ideology itself claims that the nature of the political problem is that there are good people and bad people and the solution is for the good people to kill the bad people, I don't think you get to blame the outcomes on bad actors.
Ok, but did Enlightenment thinkers actually say that? Or did some people just hamfistedly glue their unrelated complaints to vague ideas about equality and distrust of authority and hierarchy?
For Christianity, you gave examples spanning a thousand years and several continents.
It wouldn't be hard to give examples that are much closer in space and time. Just look at the reactions to Martin Luther's theses, for example, which split down the middle of countries or even families. Or the differences across the groups of Albion's Seed.
Then your argument would be that the French Revolution was not a central example of the Enlightenment, and that individual liberties are a defining characteristic?
I think it's less central than the American Revolution, but also, the new system didn't even last that long. Napoleon took over, then the Bourbon monarchy was restored, then you had the revolution of 1830, then another in 1848, then Napoleon 3rd declared himself Emperor until 1870. While this initial event had something to do with the Enlightenment, it seems weird to me to over-index on this one fairly short event. Modern France's government is based on what happened many decades later, while America is still using the same Constitution we had in 1792. As I described above, I might just be biased as an American, but violent revolution against the existing powers is nothing new. For example, do any of the things you identify as negatives in the Enlightenment also seem to describe the Hussite wars of 400 years prior, and if so, why?
If so, what do you make of all the people arguing the opposite throughout history?
People also argue that the American Revolution is a central example of the Enlightenment, and your post is largely about the differences between the 2 revolutions. So do you argue the American Revolution is not a central example? Do you agree that 2 things can be wildly different while still being part of one big intellectual movement? Do you think that all of those people you mentioned are just confused?
You originally asked, "I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?"
In order for this question to be meaningful, there has to be an "essential spirit" which is not simply defined by the behavior of people in those revolutions, as the latter would be circular. It seems like your answer is to define this "essential spirit" as being closer to the French version mostly because that version was more... popular? Globally influential? Which is something you can do, I guess, but is mostly an empirical question and I'm far from sure that you're correct, and in any event seems fairly close to saying that Catholicism is closer to true Christianity simply because there are more Catholics than any other branch.
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/
So we might set a new record soon, but it's only recently (last 10 years) gotten close to the level that was maintained pretty consistently from 1870 to 1920 (although this is also affected by the native reproduction rate--I think "we have more immigrants" may be less useful than "existing residents are having fewer kids"). So it's still not really accurate to say "There were never as many Italians or Irish then as there are Mexicans and assorted CA hispanics now." If this trend continues it might be true at some point in the future.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
According to this video, to be in the clear in most jurisdictions, you should... just not be there when he comes back.
The way I understand it is that if you want to be as sure as you can in all jurisdictions then yes. It doesn't mean you'll definitely be found guilty if you don't leave. But if you can't leave, as in the subway car, I'm not sure how relevant it is?
In the case of Neely... did he have a history of causing grave bodily harm to anyone?
I don't think his criminal history can generally be admitted as evidence unless Penny or someone else involved knew it. The really relevant facts are "what was he doing in the moment?"
This doctrine seems to let you do a lot of dickery before anyone is actually permitted 'deadly force'.
I mean, yes? I have to admit I'm confused by the statement. We're talking about killing a person, regardless of whether some people think that being mentally hill or on drugs or a petty criminal means you're subhuman. This is very much something we as a society should be taking seriously, and not permitting for minor annoyances or slights.
Amadan can disagree, but I don't think I have seen a modhat comment explicitly invoke that rule in a long time. Since the migration off of reddit, at least. If they have receipts, I would be happy to see them. @ZorbaTHut, since this is a meta-thread do you mind if I tag them in this thread (or you can let them know or whatever you think is best) to ask for specific examples?
Whether they are wrong or not, it's clearly low quality as it doesn't contain any argument or evidence. It also violates the rules for boo outgroup and speaking plainly.
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