vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
I think there's a lot of bad storytelling around the stock market in general.
I sometimes listen to the Wall Street Journal's Minute Briefing, and they always mention how the market did that day, and give an explanation for why it went up or down.
Their explanation is always plausible, but my basic issue is that if the stock market is generally just on a random walk, and you always grasp for the nearest plausible explanation, you're going to be completely wrong about why the market was up or down in a given day a lot of the time. Like, in the world where the market had gone slightly down, instead of slightly up and more or less the same news items had happened that day, how much does that change how they tell the story that day?
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
I definitely agree that this is a reason to not naively hope for raw "number go up." Other factors affect the overall resilience and robustness of the economy, and might go along with slightly worse numbers in the short term.
I'm certainly in favor of bringing production of certain critical infrastructure home, but have we done a good job of doing that over the last few years?
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
I have tried to avoid such fallacies. It was probably more than a decade ago that I first read the president doesn't affect the economy nearly as much as people seem to think, and I've tried to bear that in mind no matter who is in charge.
In most cases, it would be like trying to treat the president like a Fisher King who makes the weather good or bad by their mere presence in office.
I'm always open to specific causal stories that are exceptions to this rule, but I don't naively assume the president has anything to do with the stock market one way or the other. (Liberation Day and the brief stock crash that followed would be part of the exceptions that I allow for.)
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
Couldn't a lot of it be because the average effective tariff rate didn't actually go up that much? I think it might be reasonable to say both that tariffs had less impact than many economists predicted on the economy this year, and also state that this might not have been true if Trump had stayed the course with his Liberation Day tariffs.
Whether we're in a bubble or not, sources are reporting that 40% of the stock market is tied up in tech/AI stocks. If we're in the initial phases of a singularity (a big 'if'), then we might expect the economy to do well in spite of almost any burden we could place on it.
I think I perceived you as trying to claim more than you had warrant to claim. If you're just saying "the stock market did incredibly well, and the tariffs didn't have that much of a negative impact", then I'm fine with that claim. If you're claiming it did well because of Trump and his policies, then I would like to see a causal argument that explains what he did that had such a strong positive impact that another president wouldn't have done. My prior from past reading is that presidents generally don't have much measurable effect on the economy one way or the other (certainly much less than people commonly believe), and while I would expect Trump to be the exception to that (for both good and ill) if anyone was going to, I think his own concern about the stock market creates its own feedback loop that makes the statement true of him as well.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
I guess I would have two questions here:
- In general, how sure should we be that the stock market today is doing well because of Donald Trump and not in spite of/unrelated to him? Are there any past economic studies that let us estimate the usual impact of presidential policies on stock market behavior, so that we can have priors here about how much effect Donald Trump could reasonably have?
- How does the current era compare to things like the Nifty Fifty asset bubble, and the Dot Com bubble? I thought Zvi Mowshowitz did a good job laying out the bubble-skeptical take, but I still wouldn't completely rule out the possibility that we're in bubble.
My initial intuition is that in the real world you could have genuinely bad policies (say, New York doing rent control) being overwhelmed by all the positive economic trends in a society. Just because the numbers are going up, doesn't mean they wouldn't be even higher without the drag caused by bad policies like minimum wage, rent control, and, potentially, tariffs. Does your analysis account for this? If it does, could you please elaborate more how you distinguished the various possibilities involved? And if it doesn't, could you add analysis to this effect?
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
It might be possible to describe me as a "stalwart norms enjoyer", but I have also quixotically been trying to cultivate a sense of tribalism around my state and regional culture, and and a sense that my "out group" is everyone else.
This is an ongoing process, but it means I am trying to genuinely not care about every outrage that happens in another state on the right or the left. Those are basically foreign countries, and as long as they mostly play by the rules of our constitutional system, they can rot or flourish for all I care about them.
Who cares what the silly foreigners in Dixie or Tidewater or Yankeedom get up to? I don't live in any of those countries, and I'm sure they're better equipped to manage their own affairs than I am. As long as they don't make it my problem if/when things go wrong thanks to their bad policies, why should I care who they elect?
Don't get me wrong, the coresidents of my state can look out at the foreign nations that are part of our federal league and try to learn what to do and what not to do based on the practical experience those foreign nations get up to, but I'm not a busybody. What can an attorney general in Virginia do to my kith and kin in my state? Does he have any real power to harm me, being away in the far off foreign nation of Tidewater?
As long as the dirty Tidewaterers don't start moving to where I live and make things go to shit with their inferior cultural values, I feel safe and secure in my own city.
I do care what the leader of our military league does, because it affects people in the region I actually care about as well. I don't think that makes me a hypocrite.
vorpa-glavo
28d ago
Regarding the origins of wokeism, recently I chanced upon the concept of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), it also has a Wikipedia entry. Basically there are people who argue that general wokification of institutions is an internal development of some of the American elite's religion, via Unitarianism and then Unitarian Universalism, and the general "be nice, don't judge, don't harm" morality of Oprah with a deistic God you can occasionally call upon for some encouragement but doesn't demand much, just to be kind, there are many equally valid paths etc. This is of course not the same as the mandatory activism required by woke, not merely a lack of judging etc. But it is the basis for the willingness of simply nice decent people to obey such demands.
I've encountered the concept before, but while I think it captures something about the secularization of society and the rise of "spiritual but not religious types", I don't think it is very explanatory.
I actually think the Guilt-shame distinction (which you partially touched upon in your third paragraph) probably goes further to explain much of the shape of contemporary life. I honestly think guilt culture is just another angle of approaching Western individualism. In shame-honor culture, what is important is your place in the collective. This is the source of your pride and honor. In a guilt culture, various social technologies are used to make it so that the rules are inside peoples heads, and are pre-enforced by the knowledge of the self-flagellating guilt that will result from stepping a toe out of line.
While Christianity is one path towards a guilt culture, given its emphasis on individual repentance and salvation, I think in modernity things like Wokeism show one way this kind of culture can be maintained in a secular way. However, I think Wokeism is a lot more prone to what I see as a likely failure state of guilt culture: anxiety. If all the social structures of a guilt culture are oriented towards making human animals feel guilt, a basic problem emerges. How do you know when a person has "cooked enough", and feels enough guilt that they won't do bad things anymore? You don't.
So some people get "overcooked" or "burnt" by guilt culture, and do indeed develop a psychology that won't do bad things or break the rules at the cost of crippling anxiety. And I think because Wokeism is an amorphous mass movement, without the supernaturalism or the 2000 years of practical wisdom of Christianity to deal with it, it is a lot more prone to such "overcooking."
Relatedly, I suspect that a lot of dysfunction in pluralistic, liberal democracies is due to clashes between a wider guilt culture, and pockets of shame culture that still exist in various parts of society. For example, in America, I would put forward African American ghetto/gang culture as more of a shame culture. (I know I'm not the first person to suggest this. Thomas Sowell hints at this in his "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and I'm sure I've read similar things around here, though I am currently unable to properly credit who here might have said something like this.) I think there's always going to be a bit of a clash between the two, especially if elements of the shame culture end up including a rejection of elements of the guilt culture's hierarchies and values.
While I think it is possible that the Kumbaya, "Let's all get along" aesthetic of Moralist Therapeutic Deism (MDT) is one foundation for Western guilt culture, I actually think it is precisely backwards. In the West, people don't decide to act nice and decent because of MDT. Instead, people adopt MDT because their brains have been programmed into guilt machines, and they thus already have a great propensity to act nice and decent most of the time.
vorpa-glavo
29d ago
Marina Abramaovic
She's mostly pre-woke, isn't she?
Sure, she's still alive, but her heyday and peak relevancy are long behind her. Now she's just one of those old ladies that gets trotted out whenever there is a slow news week and people need to be reminded of what a Legendary and Influential Artistᵀᴹ she is.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I'm perfectly happy to accept the official narrative, if investigators say that it wasn't arson.
However, we live in an era where the internet has created so many different epistemic bubbles that question whatever the experts and authorities say, on both the right and left. On one hand, I think this can be a healthy thing. If you're a woman in the 1940's, and the medical authorities are telling your husband that he should get you a lobotomy to deal with your various issues, is it better to be married to a sheep who follows everything the authorities say, or a contrarian who maybe rubs some people the wrong way but whose questioning of authority leads him to rejecting lobotomies (maybe without any good evidence or reason for his actual rejection)?
I agree that objective facts matter. It is my hope that all people will embrace the idea that even if deferring to experts and authorities is often a necessary shortcut for getting by in the world for most people in most circumstances, you should be prepared to do your own research and have the independent conscience to depart from the crowd if that is what your reason or character tells you to do. On the other hand, sometimes you're going to lose to reality, and it will turn out the experts were right all along.
But it's all about humanity not putting all of its eggs into one basket. It is positively good for humanity as a whole if a small portion of us become Amish, or reject modernity for religious or ideological reasons, or join cults, or have their children die of diseases we have reliable vaccines for, because the diversity of practices maximizes the odds that there will be at least one group of humans available to inherit the ashes after the sheep do something so stupid and destructive that it kills billions of humans, or leaves most of humanity infertile, or does anything that almost wipes out the whole species.
There should be room for normie rule-followers, of course. They're the salt of the Earth, and society would be intolerable and impossible without them, no matter what shape society takes. But I think we should feel grateful for the insurance policy that groups that are often easily mocked or not taken seriously because they depart so far from consensus reality provide.
All this to say, I think it is completely fair to mock lefties that are so caught in their epistemic bubble that they can't conceive of the idea that fires just happen, and there's no need to invent an arson conspiracy with corresponding government conspiracy. Probably, they are just wrong, and they're just departing from objective, consensus reality for no good reason. But that's also not the worst trait a group can exhibit.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Is that true though? The common image painted of Europe at that time is as a powder keg ready to go off. It might not have happened in exactly the same way, but do you really believe that if not for Franz Ferdinand's assassins, most likely paths of European history don't result in a Great War of some kind?
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Heck, if you're trying to satisfy curiosity, I'd say branch out and check out more "exotic" things like Eastern Orthodox churches or Iskcon (Hare Krishna) temples in your city. If your city is anything like mine, they will be 50-90% immigrants following a deeply rooted tradition, and it is just fascinating seeing all the ways people do religion.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
But honestly, the best comparison is probably MLK as there are few instances to choose from. Would you hold a moment of silence for him?
I think the issue is that most of us, Left, Right or Radical Centrist, grew up in a world where we were told MLK was basically a saint our whole lives. It's trivial for somebody with that background to say they'd hold a moment of silence for him in 2025.
We're in a very different position from the people in 1963 who were watching things like the March on Washington with fresh eyes, and who might have validly feared that 250,000 black people marching on the nation's capitol was an implicit threat to anglo-American culture and values at the time, and not just in a straightforwardly racist or xenophobic way. Even if MLK himself was intentionally non-violent, I think a lot of people living through his rise to prominence were scared of the downstream effects of what he was advocating for.
The question of holding a moment of silence for him in 1968 would have been in a vastly different political context than asking the same question today.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I suspect it is a little of column A, a little of column B.
I could easily believe that progressive children from high TFR, socially conservative groups that historically reliably swing Democrat like Hispanics or Blacks outnumber many others on the left. That would still lead to a lot of "burned by conservative parents" stories, but would code as "Blue to Bluer" instead of "Red to Blue."
That said, I know a strangely high amount of ex-Mormons, and many of them seem to be in the "Red to Blue" category, so it does happen. But Pew Research definitely supports the view that a majority of kids end up following their parents. Although even their numbers have a slightly lower retention rate among Republicans (81% of teen children of Republican/leans-Republican parents are also Rep./lean-Rep, while 89% of teen children of Dem/lean-Dem parents are also Dem/lean-Dem.)
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Yeah, I should have probably brought up this disanalogy somehow, since people here have brought up that Christians had a high TFR compared to other Romans before.
However, my main point is that while Leftists grow memetically, it might not quite be correct to call it "parasitically."
Like, putting aside their high TFR, when Christians showed compassion and charity to lepers, Roman tax collectors and ex-prostitutes, they weren't being "parasitic" on all those groups.
And in the modern day, when mentally ill black sheep move away from home, and find the LGBT community or progressivism waiting there to embrace them and all of their messiness, I don't think it is correct to call it "parasitism." Those communities are taking the cast offs that the families with lots of kids didn't want in the end.
Like, I get why some people on The Motte have a natural aesthetic distaste for the way the progressive left seems to embrace weakness, mental illness and ugliness. But you can't cultivate an attitude like that, and then be surprised when a leper colony has formed behind your back, and become part of a larger coalition opposing you.
I have seen so many broken people "bloom" for lack of a better word when they became a part of the LGBT community in my city. They went from struggling people with no friends, and painful family connections to people who could embrace being the weird black sheep that they were, becoming more confident and emotionally stable in the process. How is that parasitic? Especially when the "solution" to that supposed parasitism for the other political tribe is one they will never realistically embrace.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war. What are the issues really when you boil it down? Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be? These aren't issues that should be tearing nations apart. These should be normal political issues people can discuss civily and disagree on without thinking of themselves as soldiers in an apocalyptic all-consuming war for the soul of the West. If people could politely disagree on gay marriage they could certainly do it for any kind of trans issue, or so you'd think.
I agree with you wholeheartedly here. A lot of these issues are absolutely small potatoes.
I'm one of the Motte's more pro-trans people, and even I can admit that from a purely consequentialist perspective if the "victory" against trans people looks like the segregation of female-only bathrooms, prisons, and sports leagues and ID cards using biological sex markers, then that is less than ideal from my perspective, but it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can according to their own lights in a liberal city somewhere. Private businesses that want to be inclusive can switch to unisex bathrooms if they want, sympathetic friends and family can still engage in pronoun hospitality, parents of trans children can home school or send them to progressive private schools (with concerned private donors helping families that might not otherwise be able to afford that option), and the Earth will keep turning.
But I think the algorithmic Web 2.0 sites that have swallowed the internet have turned everything into a supposedly life and death struggle. It can't just be that a group of people whose interests you care about will have lives that are about 90% as good as they might have in a counterfactual world where your political tribe got everything they wanted, you need to catastrophize about that missing 10% of well-being, and make up outrages and scandals to justify hating the opposing side. It's not very conducive to having nuanced societal debates, with respectful disagreement when you don't agree with someone else's stance.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.
I'm not sure this is the fairest way to look at it.
I live in a blue city, and a lot of my friends are progressive and/or part of the LGBT community. And a lot of them were the black sheep in their family even at a young age. Things like a person who became vegetarian almost as soon as she could start thinking about things despite living in a conservative religious household (and who was the token liberal in her mostly conservative public school), or gay/bi people who were really messed up by their strict Mormon upbringing.
I've also heard similar things from people of different generations. A 60-something family friend whose son came out as a transwoman in his 40's, and who was bullied from a young age for being effeminate and found solace in theater in high school. (That last fact was one of the least surprising things I've ever heard - many of my LGBT friends were also part of theater.)
I strongly suspect that being "Bohemian" or a "black sheep" or a certain kind of "weird" is strongly correlated with certain kinds of bullying in middle and high school, and often leads to adopting a more liberal/progressive perspective later in life (probably through some combination of nature - their personalities start off off-putting to some portion of population, and nurture - the experience of being bullied leads them to seek out alternative family-like structures to make up for the ones that failed them in the first place.)
Now, the specific manifestation of this tendency resulting in left-wing politics in modern America is obviously not true at all times and all eras. But I think that calling left-wing politics parasitic might be the wrong framing. I think that the left serves a very similar function to early Christianity, by embracing the cast offs and rejects of the fertile majority, and offering an alternative family structure. For black sheep who become estranged from their family, this becomes deeply important to them.
(I'm mildly reminded of a brief encounter I had with some American Mormon missionaries in Slovakia. They happened to be on the same train I was, and asked to sit near me. And they were accompanied by a Slovakian woman with a disfiguring birth mark on her face. Obviously, one brief encounter is not enough to know for sure, but I wonder if that deformity wasn't somehow causally related to the fact that she became drawn to Mormonism as a Slovakian woman.)
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
But Kash says he'll see him there, implying that Kash is going to Valhalla as well. Really, I don't think Kash meant it literally at all. It was just a fancy way of saying, 'I see you as a fallen warrior for our side, and I will keep up the good fight, and metaphorically warrant a place by your side in Valhalla.'
But also when a Hindu (Kash Patel) tells a Protestant (Charlie Kirk) "I’ll see you in Valhalla" it is somehow even more incoherent.
I mean, that would have still made sense coming from a protestant. Kash Patel is trying to say Charlie Kirk was a warrior for his side, who died a warrior's death. Whether it landed or not is a separate issue.
How can/should Hindus appeal to the divine and the afterlife in public pleasantries like this? Should they invoke their own religious mythos? Or should they just appeal to "God" even though they are not talking about the same literary figure(s) as everyone else? Should/are they all going to convert to Christianity? Seems unlikely. They should probably just avoid this trap altogether although that's difficult to do for a Conservative constituency.
I feel like this issue already played out in the Greater Indian sphere, with the end result being that Muslims in that sphere grudgingly accepted Hindus as People of the Book. You can see this today in the weird Islamicized version of Hinduism supposedly practiced in Bali.
Granted, that's a slightly easier posture to adopt in Islam, where the Quran says God has sent prophets to every nation. If you already accept that Judaism and Christianity are corrupted forms of Islam (with mainstream Christianity even having polytheism/shirk from an Islamic perspective), why not accept that Hinduism is a super corrupted form of a true revelation sent from God?
From an orthodox Christian perspective, Hinduism is demon worship writ large. And while the British were practical enough to not actually convert the Indian subcontinent to Christianity, it sits uneasily in the Christian sphere.
I think a compromise invocation of "God" probably works okay (since there are monotheistic sects of Hinduism, and the nature of logical identity is that if there is a God, they're all the same god), but things get dicier when you start to get to the exact specifics of what state Charlie Kirk's soul is in from a Hindu perspective. (He presumably hasn't achieved Moksha or some other higher spiritual state, so he's still part of Samsara, and thus reincarnated based on his karma.) I think referring to secular legacy elements might be the safest compromise. Something like, "You'll live on in our hearts and minds, and in the amazing legacy you've left behind for all of us, but especially for your wife and two kids."
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Yeah, saw several Tumblr reactions today, and while it is perfectly predictable, I'm saddened how many people are celebrating political violence against a non-politician on there. There's a lot of people who don't have any sense of decorum, or respect for people with opposing viewpoints.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I thought you might be interested in this. I was listening through the backlog of the Voluminous podcast, which reads a letter of H.P. Lovecraft's every episode, followed by the hosts commenting on it. And in episode 62 H.P Lovecraft talks a bit about The Worm Ouroboros.
If you're of the right or alt-right persuasion, you might want to skip the commentary afterwards, since the hosts are classic American progressives, but the readings of the letters at the start of every episode are often quite enjoyable.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Did you read the rest of my comment? I'm not using "violence" in a pejorative sense here, I'm using it because within the linguistic resources of English it is the most general word available, unless I am very much mistaken.
Do you have a better word for that category of human activity that is more neutral? Because I personally don't think the neutral use of the word "violence" should be considered an attempt to try to sway an argument one way or another, because there are many instances where "violence" is morally acceptable and justified, maybe even necessary for the functioning of society.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Isn't using men with guns to do something part of the standard definition of violence? How do illegal immigrants get removed from the country?
I'm actually a little surprised by the people pushing back on this one, as I don't consider it a "leftist framing." It's certainly compatible with a libertarian analysis as well.
Except for literal pacifists, basically every person on Earth agrees violence is acceptable under at least some circumstances, whether it be self-defense, carrying out a just/honorable war, defending ones property or whatever. The police and federal agents use violence to enforce the rule of law in society. I think the vast majority of ordinary people consider ordinary instances of police force/violence to be completely justified and necessary. Without that, you don't have the rule of law at all, you just have a bunch of suggestions and no means of enforcing them.
I agree that walls are not violence, though. But I don't think physical barriers are the primary way we prevent people from getting into or out of the country, or get rid of them once they get here.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I read The Worm Ouroboros a while back and really enjoyed it. Obviously haven't had a chance to reread it yet, but maybe this post is a good excuse to do so!
I've sometimes toyed with the idea of turning the setting into a tabletop RPG. The only issue comes in how to depict the various ethnic groups on Mercury. I might be misremembering, but it really seemed like they're all essentially human beings, despite names like "demons", "pixies", "goblins", "witches", etc.
There's a lot of great sections, like the Sending (which was awesomely described), the manticore (especially loved the brief lapse into even more archaic language for its description), and the moment when one of the characters insults another by "thou"-ing them instead of "you"-ing them.
You mentioned people being confused by the Olympian gods being on Mercury, but I found it delightful. I was especially enchanted by the concept of a "fosterling of the gods", since I feel like it has a lot of storytelling potential in itself.
I also think that all the names of characters and places have a certain charm to them, even if they're clearly a little more haphazard than, say, Tolkien's names.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Who on earth liked the Force witches or whatever the hell these things are supposed to be? (Just a hint here, if you're doing a sacred mystic ritual, try not to have it look like an am-dram society pretending to have epileptic seizures).
Didn't watch the Acolyte, but it is sad to see them botch the Force witches so bad. I like the concept of there being non-Jed/Sith force traditions out there, and I think with the right approach they could absolutely make them feel distinct and interesting. Too bad Disney doesn't know how to do that.
I don't doubt that there might be single-day effects attributable to presidential actions. I'm sure the stock market also reacts when we announce a new war or whatever.
I'm more interested in long-run effects, that don't wash out over time. I'd be interested in seeing stock market data going back as far as we have it, along with presidential election day bumps and whether they washed out over time, and whether they tended to be "retroactively justified" by the conditions of that presidency. A one day bump means basically nothing. I'll agree it is people trying to anticipate the effects of the presidency, but there's plenty of cases where markets do silly and unjustifiable things, it's just that other people end up making money when people do that.
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