whatihear
3mo ago
I've long had a feeling of disquiet about just how far removed from the necessities imposed on us by the fact of our physical existence we are in the modern era. For me, this manifested most strongly as a revulsion towards a career that just pushes paper or people around, and made me interested in STEMy stuff, but I don't think I'm alone in this. I think this sense of disquiet undergirds a lot of strange behavior you can observe in left wing hippies and right wing homesteader types. For some people it isn't the disconnection from physical reality (by this I mean mostly agriculture and manufacturing), but instead from what one might call the societal production function. My grandmother once remarked that as a girl she thought the only jobs worth doing were being a soldier, a teacher, or a farmer, and I think this sentiment was coming from a similar place as my feeling that you have to be getting your hands at least a little dirty.
I think you're a bit like my grandmother in that you feel that there are certain social truths that will remain inescapable so long as we are a bunch of jumped up apes. As I get older, I've started to come around to this view more even as I loosen my grip on my old feeling that work is fake unless you're building a little. Pinker really convinced me that Hobbes was right, and watching the world devolve into chaos as US hegemony fades is only strengthening that view.
whatihear
5mo ago
I'm looking for a audiobook, series of audiobooks, or podcast that gives a historical survey of the middle east starting with the founding of Islam. Basically I'd like to have an AP Euro/AP US level of detail about the region. Normally my proceedure for this is to look for a "History of $REGION" podcast, but I found that I felt I couldn't trust the "History of Islam" podcast I found because it was done by a believer and I wasn't sure how much that distorted the narrative (I didn't get the sense he was a propagandist, just had some fairly obvious biases). This part of history seems uniquely political, so I'm afraid I would run into the same issue if I just bought a random book on the subject.
Does anyone have any recommendations? Ideally this would be by a non-believer. Even more ideally, by a non-believer from quite a while ago (somehow I feel like people might have been able to be more objective about it before 9/11).
whatihear
9mo ago
One big reason people are not bringing up Tom Cruise's Scientology connection is that it is old news. For better or for worse, if a nasty fact has been out there for a long time, people don't bring it up in the discourse as much. This is how the process of un-cancellation works on an individual level (I think broad vibe shifts also have something to do with it). The Scientology thing has been litigated in the court of public opinion for quite some time.
whatihear
11mo ago
"has an advantage" != "is better". Two different competitors will always have a multitude of different advantages and disadvantages relative to one another. It just happens that the results of male puberty have a very strong advantage over the results of female puberty for almost all sports.
whatihear
11mo ago
On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
This assumes that people are in one of two states: behaving in a deranged and menacing way in public, or minding their own business. That's not really the case though, there is a pretty smooth spectrum of menacing behavior people can exhibit in public.
If observers are being good basians, they will factor in the observed behavior in addition to more contextual information about a person. A well dressed white man drunkenly throwing a single strike at someone and not following it up would seem like a much bigger deal than a similarly attired 5'0" white woman doing the same to me, partially because the woman is much less physically imposing, but also because of what I know about rates of sexed violence and my guess about the likelihood of escalation to a point I couldn't easily control.
At the same time, waving a gun around is a red-alert pretty much no matter the identity of the person doing the waving.
When? If you are talking about the resettlement of the German tribes inside imperial borders, they only did that after smashing them in battle and disarming them. Sometimes they would skip the smashing in battle bit, but there would always at least be a negotiated settlement before the tribes were allowed to move into the empire uncontested. Towards the end of the empire they stopped disarming the Germans, but that was definitely not by choice, it was because the empire was falling apart.
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