ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
16hr ago
What are his metaphysical/spiritual beliefs?
Most people don't really have these in any meaningful sense. Your average Christian, agnostic, or atheist differ only to the extent that they give different answers to questions about god if you ask them directly, but in practice they don't live their lives any differently. Suburban liberals typically have some faded recollection of their ancestral religion, whatever it may be, but are not particularly introspective or concerned with the deeper mysteries of the universe in general. To the extent that they aren't pure atheist materialists, that's because they lack the autistic disagreeableness that most of us here possess and are defaulting to basic human inclinations and behaviors.
What does he do for in person socializing?
He will have a small set of friends from work, old schoolmates, and family (more likely if coming from an immigrant background) within driving distance to share occasional backyard barbecues, movie/board game nights, gatherings at restaurants/bars, sports matches, concerts, etc. This set will often notably exclude his actual neighbors, whom he probably doesn't know very well. Most are lonely, even if they don't have the self-awareness to recognize it as such, and this contributes to declining fertility rates, as there is no social support network for new parents and they may essentially drop out of their friend groups and become social outcasts with only paid nannies and their own aging parents (if they are even in the vicinity) for help.
What’s his definition of Nazi? Surely he’s not literally worried about Adolf Hitler.
To him, Nazi is more or less a synonym for racist, and what counts as racist is dictated by the collective opinion of his peers, social media, and mainstream news sources. His actual knowledge of the relevant history will be quite limited, though if he sees a NYT article comparing some current event to Kristallnacht he knows that means it's very bad.
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
The Taiwanese consider themselves chinese
Polls say otherwise, and my own interactions are consistent with those numbers. Even many Taiwanese boomers who grew up under KMT martial law are, if not anti-unification in the abstract, becoming as rabidly anti-Xi as their grandchildren due to a combination of his own hawkish rhetoric, what they hear from mainlanders fleeing COVID lockdowns and the increasingly harsh censorship regime, and the collapse of the Chinese housing bubble. That's not to say that China couldn't crush popular dissent with overwhelming force as they did in Hong Kong, but most collaborators would have to be bought rather than joining willingly.
ResoluteRaven
1d ago
I think the odds of another Taiwan Strait Crisis are reasonably high, but that China isn't ready to pull the trigger on the big one. In the past I suspected they might move on the outlying islands as a trial run for a blockade or invasion, but having seen what happened when Russia took Crimea without a fight but then waited 8 years to invade for real and gave time for Ukraine to prepare psychologically and materially for war, it seems like that might just light a fire under the bafflingly apathetic Taiwanese population and make their job much harder down the line.
The two key challenges the Chinese military faces in advance of any war are lack of experience and internal corruption. Xi appears to be trying to address the latter, but if he wants to give his army some practice he may intervene in the Burmese Civil War as a fairly low-risk enterprise (who's going to stop them, Thailand?) with a reasonable casus belli (instability and criminal activity on their borders threatening national security). If such an action or any other foreign deployment of Chinese troops were to occur I would start worrying more about future wars.
As to whether China would go for a blockade as opposed to an invasion of Taiwan, it's hard to tell without a better read on the psychology of Xi's inner circle. By blockading they would lose the element of surprise if a shooting war breaks out as a result of a ship being sunk or a plane shot down, including the chance to neutralize US naval and air assets in the Pacific with a first strike. If however they think they can psychologically dominate Taiwan so thoroughly that they would submit without a fight then this would seem to them a low-risk approach, as well as the fact that they can initiate it at any time as opposed to an amphibious crossing which can only happen a few months out of the year.
ResoluteRaven
2d ago
I've had backyard eggs that tasted better than store bought eggs, but not so much that I would go out of my way to raise my own hens or pay a lot more for them. As others have mentioned, it depends a lot on what the chickens are eating.
ResoluteRaven
2d ago
I don't expect every station to be a moneymaker, but I would rather population growth and infill occur naturally around existing stations, which at some point become profitable and can help support the next extension, as opposed to the sort of stasis that suburban voters and zoning regulations implicitly promote. The high levels of dysfunction we see around urban transit centers probably require population densities that wouldn't be reached for a long time, if ever, around new suburban stations, but the correlation between density and homelessness/crime is observed by all and hardens the resistance to any movement in that direction. I will admit that it's hard to tell how much of this is a result of national factors and how much is a result of voters with different policy preferences on policing self-segregating into different communities, and we will never know for sure without some kind of impossible social experiment involving large-scale population transfers.
ResoluteRaven
2d ago
Ukraine
US officials are allowing Ukraine to use American weapons in limited (depending on your point of view) strikes on Russian soil, following the example of France. Macron is also reportedly considering sending military advisors (though I'd be surprised if they didn't have boots on the ground already), and his statements in recent months make it seem as though he is willing to condone quite extreme levels of escalation if the Ukrainian position continues to deteriorate, up to and including a repeat of Borodino on the Dnieper.
Mexico
I have just found out that Mexico is having a presidential election this weekend and that the candidate favored to win is a Jewish woman with an engineering PhD expected to continue the left-wing populist policies of the current president AMLO. As you can infer, I don't hear much about Mexico these days, so I assume they're mostly muddling along as they always have. In any case, it's always interesting to see the diversity of political candidates and leaders in Latin America, whether it's Arab strongmen who clean up the streets, a corrupt Japanese political dynasty, Chainsaw Man, or Croatian socialists.
ResoluteRaven
2d ago
I watch/listen to most videos and podcasts in English at 2x speed, Spanish or Chinese media at 1.5x speed, and any other languages or things I need to pay particular attention to at 1x.
While that is more or less what suburban NIMBYs imply when they protest against new transit developments, I think the truth is more that our inability to police low-level crimes or keep homeless people off the street inhibits growth that would occur naturally around transit stations after they are built i.e. some new Metro stop on the Silver Line in the DC area is currently surrounded by a mostly empty parking lot used by a small number of commuters into the city, and is pretty clean and well-maintained, but for it to not be a permanent money pit denser housing and businesses would have to be built in the area and that would attract unsavory characters and run the risk of it becoming like a BART station (shudders) and spoiling the entire vicinity, so why build it in the first place?
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
I don't think anyone's mind will be changed unless Trump actually goes to jail. Not sure if this is just me, but I have found the details of these endless investigations and trials mind-numbingly boring ever since they started six or seven years ago, and cannot get through reading a single article or post about them without nodding off. If the Democrats haven't figured out a way to lock this man up by now, I doubt they ever will.
On a related note, I find the contrast between the apocalyptic way this election is being framed online and in the media and the complete apathy and disinterest I see in the real world to be the greatest in my lifetime. In 2016 and 2020 I could see people around me marching/organizing/rioting/etc. but this time around I've just seen the demonstrations for Palestine, which seem more like an impotent tantrum than something that risks spiraling into partisan violence on behalf of a party or candidate with a real chance of seizing power. Other than that most normies seem to be minding their own business, getting on with their lives, or else wandering around in a sort of haze as though they never quite recovered socially from covid lockdowns.
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
I don't think you can define one single reactionary right position on this topic, even leaving out the large fraction of trolls who don't take the political project seriously. There are IQ supremacists, eugenicists, tradcath integralists, etc. who don't care what race Americans are or sometimes even if there is such a thing as America, and focusing just on de facto or professed white nationalists there are increasingly vehement disagreements over whether someone counts as a true American as we go down the line from descendants of British colonists to descendants of German and Irish immigrants to Ellis Islanders to light-skinned Latin Americans and so on. The position that we need some sort of 19th century European-style nationalist project to shore up or restore an American identity is the closest to what you've outlined and might be the logical endpoint of many reactionary trains of thought, but I don't know how many have actually gotten there yet.
I also find it interesting that your hypothetical reactionary considers whites, blacks, and natives collectively to be Americans, leaving out the Asians and Hispanics who are now over a quarter of the population, because I have long been expecting some sort of racial/political realignment along those lines. It seems as though a high rate of intermarriage and low rate of civic engagement by the new arrivals may prevent this from happening however, which means that we might have to hear the same tired arguments about slavery and segregation between the white (now with added flavor) and black populations repeated ad nauseum until the end of time, or at least of America.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
While access to trade is the main factor, Eastern Europe and the North of India and China also share particular security vulnerabilities i.e. historical risk of being invaded and then economically exploited by nomadic tribes. That said, there aren't really any major exceptions to the trade=wealth rule that come to mind; even remote inland cities that became wealthy did so by supplying some rare resource to global markets, such as Potosi in the 16th century with silver, central Asian cities acting as intermediaries in the silk trade, etc.
ResoluteRaven
6d ago
It appears as though the modern English are less than 50% Anglo-Saxon, having been diluted through sustained contact and population exchange with France, presumably as a result of the Norman conquest and through migrant populations such as the Huguenots.
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
The early literature in the Irish language always struck me as precocious by northern European standards, particularly in prose, and the Irish also developed the Ogham script within a few centuries of the Nordic runes, so I think they have a literary tradition to be proud of even discounting the Anglo-Irish contribution.
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
I mean, Out of Africa in the narrow sense of "100% of our ancestry comes from a single migration from Africa that completely wiped out all other human populations without interbreeding" has been debunked, but it has been replaced with "~95% of our ancestry comes from a single migration from Africa and the rest from interbreeding with other human populations that migrated from Africa at earlier times" which still fits the simpler statement "we all came from Africa."
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
I think there's just more educational stratification in Britain. Upper-class Britons including, to throw out two random examples, Boris Johnson and the actor Tom Hiddleston, still receive a classical education at Eton and Oxbridge which is very verbally-loaded and includes learning Latin and Greek. The comparable tradition in the US died out nearly a century ago (the last American president to know Latin well was apparently Herbert Hoover).
By contrast, the best and brightest Americans today go into STEM fields and receive an education that is very challenging technically, but not so much verbally, at least in my experience (I was genuinely challenged by some of my math, physics, and engineering courses, but writing an essay for a humanities class was always something I could blow off until the last minute and I literally fell asleep during the verbal portion of the SAT and got a perfect score).
The relative ranking of taboo words depends a great deal on social class in most places, but I imagine many European languages have slurs used against Muslims that might fit this category. Probably 'untermensch' and other Nazi vocabulary in German as well. Oh, and apparently monitor lizard is the worst thing you can call someone in Thai.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
My source was the following passage I remembered reading from The Chinese in America by Iris Chang:
Back in 1880, on the eve of the Exclusion Act, the male-female ratio in the ethnic Chinese community was more than twenty to one—100,686 men and 4,779 women. By 1920, deaths and departures had reduced the male Chinese population, while a small number of births had increased the female population, but there were still seven Chinese men for every Chinese woman. One significant cause of this disproportion was that U.S. immigration policies prevented Chinese workingmen from bringing their wives into the country. The law automatically assigned to women the status of their husbands, so if their husbands were categorized as “laborers,” their wives would be, too, making them ineligible for admission to the country. Only the wives of bona fide Chinese merchants were welcome.
So the arrival of any Chinese female in the United States was a rare event. From 1906 to 1924, only about one hundred fifty Chinese women secured legal permission to enter the United States. Then the Immigration Act of 1924 was enacted, prohibiting the entrance of any foreign-born Asian woman. Aimed primarily at ending the practice of Japanese mail-order brides, it hurt the Chinese American community as well: from 1924 to the end of the decade, not a single Chinese woman was admitted to the United States.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
In the case of online restaurant reviews I just look at the names of the reviewers and use those by people of whatever ethnicity's cuisine it is to judge authenticity and those by people with white surnames to judge their customer service; you can also try out the 3.5 star rule instead.
As far as other topics goes, a little bit of background goes a long way (the Pareto principle strikes again). Simply familiarizing yourself with the basic vocabulary of a field makes a potential swindlers' job much harder, as does paying attention to their behavior e.g. are they willing to explain things or are they obfuscating? Diversifying your friend group career-wise is also a good idea; I remember the first time I was in a room with a bunch of medical students and residents and they began discussing which hospitals in town they did not want to be sent to in an emergency because the doctors there were incompetent and I realized I should have been asking them about such things sooner.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
Even if in absolute terms the percentages are small compared to the US or Europe, the change has been rapid and very noticeable, particularly if you visited Tokyo, Seoul, or Taipei 20 years ago and only went back recently (I will amend my statement to exclude mainland China, where the percentage of foreigners has fallen since the pandemic). The proportion of East Asian or East Asian-looking (i.e. Vietnamese) immigrants is also significant in terms of things like running into people who don't speak the local language well, although they may be indistinguishable to outsiders.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
Taiwan
Days after the inauguration of their new president, protestors took to the streets outside Taiwan's legislature in anger at a proposed bill that would introduce harsh penalties for "contempt of parliament." Debate over these same reforms led to a brawl in the chamber itself (which on its own is not terribly unusual). As the government is now split between a DPP (pro-independence) president and a KMT (Chinese nationalist) legislature, this power struggle is likely to continue for the next few years.
Canada
The Canadian border agency's union has voted to go on strike next month, which may seriously impede cross-border traffic with the US. Apparently major railroad strikes are in the works as well.
Palestine
The International Court of Justice demanded that Israel immediately halt its offensive in Rafah (now let them enforce it) and Ireland, Spain, and Norway made a joint announcement on the recognition of Palestinian statehood.
ResoluteRaven
10d ago
My understanding is that the ratio of Chinese men to women in 19th century America was something like 20 to 1. Add to that the fact that many of those women were prostitutes in Chinatowns and it's pretty clear why there's hardly anyone left descended from that particular wave of immigrants, apart from a few white Californians who have an Asian blip on their 23andme results.
ResoluteRaven
10d ago
You'd be surprised how quickly this is changing. Most East Asian cities these days are full of Southeast Asian and Indian immigrants, and mixed-race children are approaching double digit percentages of the next generation. While the locals are still much more anti-immigrant than in any Western country, the path from where they are to where we are seems pretty clear and they are only a few decades behind us. The Japanese of today let in immigrants out of perceived economic necessity, just as pagan kings accepted baptism for political reasons, but their children and grandchildren will be true believers.
ResoluteRaven
11d ago
As far as historical examples of ethnic cleansing go, there's the expulsion of the Acadians by the British, pretty much everything that happened in the Balkans from 1821 to the present including the expulsion of Muslim Turks and Albanians from newly independent Christian nations and vice versa, Soviet deportations of Crimean Tatars, Koreans, Ukrainians, etc. to Siberia and Central Asia, the partition of Cyprus, and most recently the flight of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh after its conquest by Azerbaijan. The last time Western leaders condoned such a campaign was the removal of Germans from Eastern Europe, and in addition to being the culmination of the largest war in human history it was Soviet boots on the ground actually carrying it out, not Americans and Brits.
For such a thing to occur in America today would require either the rise of an authoritarianism as overwhelming as China's or a level of interpersonal animosity and cultural segregation much greater than I have observed in my travels (I can't speak much for Europe and suspect that their Muslim communities are more separate and alien to the majority than any immigrant enclaves here), and in either case the lines would be drawn in ways orthogonal to simple ethnic identification i.e. a government that could would deport whatever groups it found troublesome regardless of their background and any sort of civil war in the US nowadays would feature Hispanic Trump voters on one side and white progressives on the other and I'm honestly not sure which faction would be more diverse by the progressives' own standards.
I mean, ensuring that their entire population has at the bare minimum a subsistence diet of rice porridge and millet is pretty much rule #1 of any Chinese government so there's no way they haven't planned extensively for this, especially considering that every Chinese person I know thinks about food about 5 times as often as your typical white American and has a pantry filled floor to ceiling with non-perishable goods and a freezer that rains down ziploc bags of frozen meat and seafood when you open it.
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