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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2389 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 20, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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If you really did want to use tariffs, even punishing tariffs, to return domestic manufacturing of physical goods to within your borders, how would you go about it?

It seems to me that you would want to start at the top of the value chain and slowly work your way downwards. I.E., you start with XX% (or XXX%) tariffs on completed automobiles, then some time later, you apply some degree of tariff on whatever products are used in the step before completion, and so on down the chain until you reach the degree of autarkic internal production that you desire.

Is this correct, or headed in the direction of correctness, or what?

Relatedly, it’s possible that laying out a roadmap of your plans and clearly communicating it and sticking by it might even accelerate your plan, if business views it as credible and starts on-shoring faster. I am also open to the idea that publicizing your roadmap might allow a trading partner to pursue a strategy of increasing domestic subsidies until you give up, in that “They have the watches, we have the time” kind of way. Which direction would you go in that regard, or what alternative approach seems best to you?

Please consider a “Should we have a 1% or 2% war tax” kind of response, not culture war. Thank you.

"Manufacturing of physical goods" or "manufacturing jobs"? Counted how? If you believe the Real Value Added folks, the former hasn't left, and the latter is a significantly different type of problem that tariffs may just be orthogonal to.

I’m inclined to think that “jobs” is just, in democracies, the politically optimal phrasing to accomplish what nations really want, which is adversary-proof production of food and materiel.

My question is about the physical goods manufacturing, and is to do with, for example, how many steps of the process of car manufacturing can you, hypothetical power of a country, get within your borders and how should you go about it if tariffs are in your tool chest? Lights-out factories are totally fine.

how many steps of the process of car manufacturing can you, hypothetical power of a country, get within your borders

As many as you want? Forget tariffs; you can just ban stuff from foreign. The biggest constraint would be if you're not a large enough country to be able to develop all of the specialization required (while also accomplishing all the other things a country needs to accomplish).

how should you go about it

One needs a metric for "should". Sure, North Korea now "produces" its own airplanes. Which I guess is cool if you want to make sure that you have whatever metric of "adversary-proof" (I'm not convinced it actually is, but it depends highly on the metric you use) and if you're okay with only being able to produce what are essentially copies of extremely old Cessnas. Maybe in 50 years, they'll be able to produce their own WWII-era fighter jets, which I guess is "adversary-proof" to one metric, but probably not all that "adversary-proof" according to other metrics.

I kind of joke, but only kind of. Market size is a significant factor in the diversity of goods that are going to be available and how 'advanced' they can be, because diversity and 'advancedness' requires significant specialization. Thus, if we're shutting off large chunks of the market because we don't trust them, we're necessarily going to take hits elsewhere. Where you "should" be on this tradeoff curve is extremely dependent on how you've defined "should" in the first place.

Are there historical precedents of the modern, 201x and 202x version of the word "racist"? I don't mean when it's used accurately to describe someone advocating for the extermination of the jews or whatever, but in the "heretic" sense in which it is used to shut down discussion and malign political opponents or anyone who tries to present real data on immigration etc. What did e.g. the Greeks or Romans use, if they had anything like this?

Isn’t “heretic” literally a catchall term for holding the wrong beliefs? I don’t think it really entered the lexicon until Christianity, though.

Wikipedia suggests that the Old Testament used “αἵρεσις” as something more like “partisanship” or “factionalism.” Ironically, that’s probably closer to what you were looking for.

The Romans labeled a number of practices superstitio if they seemed too incompatible with Rome’s weird flavor of religious tolerance.

Yes, heretic seems to cover it, heh.

Thanks for the links!

Good question because I'm really racking my brain and can't think of anything good. I'm assuming you're asking about xenophobia in particular having moral weight attached to it instead of any kind of morality language being used to shut down discussion or malign enemies because examples of the the latter numbers in the thousands. The only example I can think of doesn't feel the same even if it's in the same ballpark. "Misobarbaros" was an ancient Greek word for someone who hated foreigners too much. But this was more a "stop making fun of the savages, they don't know any better like us superior Greeks" kind of a way, and even then it doesn't seem to have the same moral weight as 'racist' does today. And it wasn't so much about race as it was about culture, customs, and language, which presumably can be changed

That seems to be the pattern through history, that admonishment for anything approaching race-hatred would be like being critical of someone who hates children in a more modern setting, and even people who hate kids these days still get to keep their jobs

any kind of morality language being used to shut down discussion or malign enemies because examples of the the latter numbers in the thousands.

You mean like, "counter-revolutionary" in early Soviet Russia? That would be a more intense and threatening label, cause they'd physically torture and kill you if it stuck.

Yeah, counter-revolutionary also applies in France ~1800. Heretic was a big one in Europe, "secret Catholic" in England at one point, "witch" practically everywhere, communist, terrorist, enemy of the state, enemy of the people, monarchist... I'm pretty sure humans are hard wired to do this crap to each other

I'm working in tech. Some questions:

  1. Are there any tech hubs where the COL isn't bananas? SF, NY, NOVA, and PNW are right out. I'm okay with living in Kansas or whatever since everyone has a hard-on for in-office now, I just need a place where 50%+ of my salary doesn't go to rent. It seems like even second tier places are expensive now (Research Triangle, Huntsville)
  2. Any good recruiters or recruiting firms you'd recommend? DMs appreciated.
  3. What's the market like? I don't really know who I'm up against. Posts online seem to be either "things are tough but manageable" or "the tech market is ending, get out now" and I'm not sure which is more true.
  4. Should I just sit tight at my current job for another year? The pay is shit and it's a miserable place, but it's something, and Trump seems indifferent to the economic chaos he's causing, so I imagine tight budgets and hiring freezes will remain for a while.

Dallas/Fort Worth is doing alright. Unlike certain cities, it’s had enough room to keep adding more suburbs. My rent is like 20% of my pay and I have an easily sub-half-hour commute. That would change if I were getting into a house, mind you. I’d have to live a lot further out to avoid competing with the tiger parents fighting over the best schools.

We’re not as much a hub as Austin, but on the other hand, we aren’t Austin.

Thanks, good to know. I think we will be homeschooling anyway, so maybe school district won't be as much of an issue. And DFW is pretty well connected so I suppose it wouldn't be hard to visit home.

What's your ideal weekend-to-long-weekend vacation look like?

  • Day 1: Approach day. Drive into the mountains, ascend to camp/the mountain hut by evening.
  • Day 2: Summit day. Spend the day hiking and preferably climbing. Chill at camp/hut to soak in the views, or (ideally) move to a new location.
  • Day 3: Summit secondary peaks, take a detour back to the car.

These days, it's been day trips to a nearby town or city to check out food, museums, and nature. Get back late and crash, chill the next day to recover.

Okay, @hydroacetylene, who's going to become the next pope?

It's going to be me. I'm gonna hit up the college of cardinals and put my name out there for consideration.

I bet you won't last 5 months.

Reminds me of when my wife and I got married. She joked that her minimum bar to clear was to last longer than some celebrity marriage (Kim Kardashian I think?) which only made it 6 months.

So as long as I can be pope for more than 5 months, I won't be in last place! Time to buckle down and really pope it up.

If that's your goal, you need to last just two weeks to beat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Urban_VII - he ruled for 13 days, dying of malaria before he could even be officially crowned. He did manage to ban smoking in his short reign, try to achieve something of similar magnitude if you want to get ahead.

Was the smoking ban upheld afterwards?

Looks like it didn't because people kept smoking anyway and the ban for smoking in church led to people going in and out of the service to smoke, which caused much more disruption so the church gave in. A number of popes preferred sniffing to smoking though.

Top guesses- Oullet, Pizzaballa, Aveline in roughly that order.

After trying for years, my wife is pregnant with our first. Any advice from the parents of the Motte? Books, bloggers, etc. I know about Emily Oster, but it is challenging to find solid advice for parenting.

Congratulations! It's an adventure.

Have a support network. Family, friends, church, what-have-you, just find other people who have had kids who will understand what you're going through and can sometimes help out. Before the baby pops out, make friends with other pregnant couples (there are apps and websites aimed at exactly this demographic). Taking care of two similar-age kids who are friends is not that much harder than taking care of one, and the ability to get a few hours' break by trading coverage with each other is priceless.

Also, enjoy it. There's lots that's really difficult and your life is about to change forever, but it's wonderful at the same time. I love spending time with my kid, and every new thing he figures out both makes me proud of him and also reminds me that he's going to need me less and less from here on out.

Don't buy anything new. I assume you'll probably have family and friends that will gift/loan you a lot, but even if not it's so easy nowadays to find second hand stuff for way cheaper, and it's probably been used liked 10 times total.

I don't have the link, but in some ACX comments a few months back someone linked a blog series on back sleeping for babies. The conclusion was that the evidence for the benefits re:SIDS was extremely weak, while there was some good evidence that back sleeping has quite negative effects in other domains. We've slept our child on front, back and side, but she falls asleep really easily everyway so for us it's been less important, but could be useful when yours arrives

As soon as you feel comfortable going out of the house with the baby, take full advantage of it. While the baby is young enough to be content sitting/napping in their stroller, you can savor the last bit of dinkiness allowable. By 8 months, your baby will be restless and the pleasure of going out to eat or do other adult oriented activities with them will take a deep dive for the next several years.

Spend months 2-7 going out and socializing with a baby in tow.

I know it's most people experience but don't generalize. Neither of our kids was anything like this. Months 1-3 are so sleepless that we didn't even want to meet people even if we could. Month 4 they would already be mobile enough to not tolerate the stroller.

it's ok to generalize when giving general advice. generalization isn't a synonym for absolutes.

Nearly 4 months in with our first so I’m far from an expert but this is very relevant to me right now. Some thoughts:

We limited visitors to just my mother in law (whom we live with) and my husband’s siblings for the first 2 weeks. I cannot recommend this enough. Everyone and their neighbor wanted to meet our baby but entertaining guests while I was bleeding, in pain, and could barely get out of bed was the last thing I wanted to do newly postpartum.

Hopefully your wife will have an easy pregnancy and delivery but be mentally prepared for things to go off plan. My labor and delivery was basically exactly the opposite of what I wanted and postpartum recovery has been waaaay more difficult than I could’ve anticipated. Pelvic floor therapy is a thing and your wife doesn’t have to “just live with it” if she has issues. Try to be supportive and understanding and do as much as possible with housework and the baby.

One thing I wish I would’ve done while pregnant was the whole freezer meal prep thing. Having healthy food to eat while breastfeeding and recovering from delivery is really helpful to me physically and mentally but can be hard to prepare when I’m home alone with baby all day.

Every baby is different. Try not to compare your baby to your friends’ babies too much, especially when it comes to sleep. Our baby is not a good sleeper and my husband and I are still taking it in shifts every night 4 months out because our little one is up every 1-2 hrs. I’ve had people tell me that he’s probably cold, hungry, sleeping too much during the day etc., and no, he is not, he’s just a crap sleeper.

Newborns will basically sleep anywhere but around 6-8 weeks they will “wake up” to the world and you’ll need to actively start trying to put them to sleep. This seems like a no-brainer but babies change and develop so quickly that sometimes it can be hard to catch up with their changing needs. Now that hubby is back to work at the end of the week he comes home and says it’s like trying to relearn the baby all over again because the baby is so different and doing different things.

This might not apply to you and your wife but postpartum hormones are no joke and in my experience it was really hard for me to not be overprotective of the baby, especially in the first couple months. It was really difficult for me to hear him cry and not “take over”. The best thing I did was let my husband learn to soothe the baby in his own way because now he can actually help but it was hard to give him that space.

If your wife plans on breastfeeding it might be a good idea to introduce a bottle of expressed milk once or twice a week. We did not do this and now our baby won’t take a bottle so when we have a sitter we’re limited to 3-4 hrs away.

Breastfeeding can be really hard even when everything is going well.

Facebook marketplace is a goldmine for used/secondhand baby items. Some things you need to buy new (car seat) but most can be bought used super cheap and are in really good shape because babies grow out of things so quickly.

Every baby is different. Try not to compare your baby to your friends’ babies too much, especially when it comes to sleep. Our baby is not a good sleeper and my husband and I are still taking it in shifts every night 4 months out because our little one is up every 1-2 hrs. I’ve had people tell me that he’s probably cold, hungry, sleeping too much during the day etc., and no, he is not, he’s just a crap sleeper.

You have my sympathy.

Our first kid was a crap sleeper for 2 years and it almost killed me.

Someone asked me once what I wanted for Christmas and I just said "... 3 nights in a row where I can sleep 8 hours a night" and I had to leave the room in case I started lolsobbing.

The second kid? No problem.

Thanks. I keep hoping we get lucky with the next one because the chronic sleep deprivation is a killer. Every night I hope is the night he’ll sleep 4 hrs uninterrupted but unfortunately it hasn’t happened yet. But I keep reminding myself it will happen one day…even if it’s in 2 years(!) :/

I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but why can't you just ignore a crying baby at night? Call it ferberizing, call it self-preservation, whatever.

We are genetically predisposed to be unable to ignore a crying baby. It's the worst, most upsetting sound in the world. If you have a soundproof room it's doable, but if you don't...

We’ve discussed sleep training but have decided against it for now mostly because we don’t think it will work with our current setup (which will be changing in a few months, anyway) or baby’s personality/development level. I also don’t know if I can stomach cry-it-out while he’s this young.

Most of the sleep advice out there now says to wait until 4 months to do any sort of sleep training.

ferberizing

Looking up this term has convinced me that any research related to child rearing is absolutely insane. This should be the easiest thing to test. Instead, every article I saw was either unabashedly pro- or anti-Ferber, and bent over backwards to explain why the lack of clinical evidence supports their position. Then they go back to evo-psych.

(For what it’s worth, it probably works, so the pro-side actually has studies to cite.)

This is like reverse Gell-Mann amnesia. Maybe every field looks like this.

Looking up this term has convinced me that any research related to child rearing is absolutely insane.

Yes. Fucking everyone in the world has opinions on parenting. It's worse than politics.

Re: Ferberizing

I think if I knew we were looking at 2 years of that shit we would have been much more hard about it. Something about being in the midst of it made it unthinkable.

We were all set to do it with the second kid but she barely put up a fuss.

It’s a minefield. Just this weekend I saw a couple of relatives, they have a baby, and they have looked completely exhausted for the better part of two years now. The light has gone out of their eyes. When I suggested the same thing as above, that maybe they should ignore him at night and wean him off, a grandmother rudely told me that as a childless man I had no right to an opinion. Fine, it's not my business, but if I'm right, who is going to tell them? I'm sure that the father too would be told off because it's seen as the mother's domain and her prerogative, and it would be 'selfish' for him to complain when she likely does a bigger share of the (useless) night work. There is no debate, and so they keep suffering.

Mom and I are were too bleeding heart to do that.

One thing I wish I would’ve done while pregnant was the whole freezer meal prep thing. Having healthy food to eat while breastfeeding and recovering from delivery is really helpful to me physically and mentally but can be hard to prepare when I’m home alone with baby all day.

I second this and if you can get the grandparents involved in cooking for you then that can be really helpful. My mother really wanted to help out but was cognizant of that visiting too often could be a more of a burden than help so she got to cook and freeze meals for us that she could drop off once a week or so the first couple of months.

She got to be involved and help out and we got a really valuable help. The alternative had probably been a lot more takeout and very simple meals, and m frankly much more stress.

All parents are different but if someone has a strong desire to be helpful then this is something valuable they can do.

I liked Mayo Clinic books.

From a more personal standpoint: nothing you do matters much, so unclench your sphincters. You have to be [actively malicious](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)) to fuck up your child. You see people from dysfunctional homes grow up into upstanding citizens, you see people from good families shoot up schools. Your socioeconomic status and genes have already defined something like 85% of your kid's future. The remaining part will be shared between you, school, friends and random internet strangers.

Formula vs breastfeeding, co-sleeping vs separate rooms, letting the baby cry it out vs singing lullabies, two walks a day vs no set number of walks a day, daytime sleeping outside vs sleeping inside... who cares, just keep your wife happy.

You will fuck something up. You will set a bad example for your kid. You will feel like you don't spend enough time with him or her. You will lose your temper and make the kid cry in fear. It's okay to feel bad about this; it's not okay to redefine yourself as a bad dad just because you've done this.

Savor every minute of free time you have from now until the baby arrives.

A lot of what you remember about being a kid isn't going to be relevant until your kid's older. Sounds obvious, but it isn't. Even if you had younger siblings, you may have blacked out the first three months of their lives from your memory.

Reading to a baby is a way to get them exposed to the phonology of the language they are immersed in. Genuine baby books that have good rhymes are rare though. Bill Grossman is one of my favorite children's poets, then there's Seuss and Silverstein. At that age it's not really about the pictures yet.

At around 1-2 years old, it's all about the pictures. They can't follow the plot too well, but they will love to point to things and have you say what they are.

Diaper blowouts are a thing that you can't really avoid. Always have a change of clothes for the baby, and maybe a second shirt for you and mommy. If diaper blowouts get common, that is a sign to go a size up on diapers.

The first three months are just about teaching a baby to eat and sleep. Because these things are best learned at home, we don't really travel outside the house without the baby except for maybe a 10 minute walk during their most wakeful time. Doctor visits are the exception and you'll have a ton of them until the baby is 6 months old. If I have to, I'll go shopping with the baby but kids can't sit in grocery cart seats until they are 1 years old.

Lots of parents like to use baby chest carriers. I struggled with "baby wearing."

  • Baby is near the boobs and can smell milk. This makes baby hungry and cranky.
  • Can't lean forward, it's hard to do things. Some women claim they can do the dishes, sweep the floor, and dance like a Disney princess while baby wearing. I cannot.
  • Baby overheats.
  • If baby naps in the carrier, they only take a short nap and then are cranky. I've never had a baby nap 1.5 hours in a chest carrier the way they do in their proper bed. (A baby will happily nap in a car seat carrier for hours if you let them.)
  • If you get two kids, and the older one needs to be picked up, you can't. A stroller keeps my arms free.

I recommend getting a stroller system that works with your car seat. Baby falls asleep in the car and then you can transfer the car seat to a stroller. Baby stays asleep up until the doctor's testing reflexes.

Books I read and stuck with me:

Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct by Abigail Tucker. Talks about the changes that will happen with your wife. It's almost as significant as a second puberty and comes with many challenges and benefits.

Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman. What sets this apart from a lot of baby books is that it suggests relaxing and not trying to deliver the perfect experience to your children is how to raise the happiest children.

Babywise - the most controversial book ever and you can probably get a lot of the good advice elsewhere, but here are the good things I got from it:

  • Sometimes we wake a baby if the time is appropriate.
  • Babies are just like humans in that they will get hungry and sleepy at around the same times every day, if you are consistent in feeding them and getting them sleep at around the same times every day. Not so much in the <3 months age range, but 4 months and older for sure.
  • Nursing should take 20 ish minutes, switch sides and interact with the baby to keep the baby awake, don't let the baby snack on foremilk and never get hind milk.
  • Burping works by consolidating little bubbles into bigger bubbles. I feel like my technique improved once I understood that.
  • The schedules in the book were helpful guides.

In the end, the baby year is the hardest, and the first baby is the hardest. But babies are pretty simple. The complicated stuff comes when you try to figure out what "Authoritative" parenting means.

The only thing I can recommend for the Toddler years is to repeat back what you think the kid is saying before responding to it. A lot of preschool/toddler conversations go:

"I Want X"

"We need to do Y instead."

"I want X!!!"

"We need to do Y instead. Don't you want Y?"

"I Want X!!!"

"I know you want X. X is really great. I'm sorry we can't do X right now."

"OK."

With and adult, they would understand that when you bring up Y you're also addressing X. But a toddler doesn't make that connection, especially when they're emotional. Sometimes just addressing X directly, even if you're not adding anything of value, is what they need. They just need to know that you understand them.

Best to you and your wife, and hopes for an untroubled pregnancy and healthy delivery. Once you have that, really everything else is gravy. If you want advice as the dad: Your wife will be doing a lot of the difficult parts for the foreseeable future, so pick up the slack whenever possible.

A couple of baby books that I thought were worthwhile. Our first was born about 6 months ago.

  • The Baby Owner's Manual (Borgenicht) - A comprehensive guide to the practical things you will encounter with the baby (How much do they feed? How many diapers do they go through a day? What are typical weight/height percentiles? How do you clean the baby?)
  • The Happiest Baby on the Block (Karp) - Talks about the behavior of newborns and how to calm them down/put them to sleep.
  • Baby Meets World (Day) - Explains baby behavior through their eyes, so you can understand their behavior better
  • Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (Weissbluth) - All about sleep for babies and children. I only read the sections for <1yr olds. A bit lengthier than it could've been. It is remarkable how challenging it is to get some children to sleep.
  • Your Baby's First Year (Altmann) - A reference book, given to us by our pediatrician. The "official" medical guidance that our pediatrician dispenses is consistent with this text.
  • What to Expect when you're Expecting - I did not read this but my wife did, my understanding is that this is the gold standard for pregnancy books.

The learning curve to taking care of a baby (speaking for the first six months, and assuming your baby does not have any special needs) is incredibly simple. I went from never having touched a baby in my life, to being able to feed, change, carry, swaddle, burp, put to sleep, etc. within a week or so.

Thousands of years of evolution have given you the tools for this - read a couple of books, talk to parents or grandparents for family-specific topics, and you'll be good. Wishing you the best.

All parenting is by guess and by golly.

If you're doing any kind of pump/bottle feeding, make liberal use of the dishwasher and don't bother with hand washing. The oven at 250 for 20 minutes can remove most smells from silicone, including dishwasher soap.

Read books, lots of books, but the actual reading will be mostly after the first year. Until then it's shapes and contrast and colors. Repetition is king.

Take pictures, take notes. Babies change week to week, month to month. Tell stories to your wife, to your family, about the mundanities.

Baby food is overrated. By 6 months they can eat bananas and blueberries (squished), and most of the purees aren't worth much. There are silicone chew pops with holes that work well for fruits, frozen or otherwise, that let them taste without worrying about choking. A baked sweet potato is practically a puree anyway. Most nutrition is from breast milk until a year anyway.

Have a white noise machine. I like the hatch, but a simple dumb noise machine works fine. Sing to your child. Nursery rhymes, poems, simple songs, folk songs, and the stuff you might have learned in elementary school. Make up dumb rhyming or rhythmic phrases to entertain.

Again for after the first year, but get a membership at a local zoo or aquarium or similar, and then go regularly. Outdoor time is wonderful.

If you can run a hose from an indoor faucet, you can deliver bath water to a splash pad for fun even when the weather is cool.

Don’t freak out, you’ll be fine. There’s 10,000,000 people telling you how if you don’t do this or don’t do that you’ll ruin the kid. All of them are lying or delusional. Your kid will be fine with less than perfect, he will not be fine with parents that have driven themselves crazy.

So, what are you reading?

Still on Korzybski and Lovecraft. Trying to finally get through the Iliad.

Just finished "I, Claudius" (big thumbs up) and started "Cute Accelerationism", which is basically about "cuteness" as an inhuman thing summoned from the Outside by technology. One of the co-authors was in the CCRU with Nick Land and this is very much both in the tradition of and sort of a send-up of Landian accelerationism. I haven't yet decided what I think of it or how seriously to take it; some portion of it is definitely a bit/gimmick but it's a really delightful gimmick (the physical book itself being tiny and cute is sort of emblematic here). Whatever it is, I'm really enjoying how it manages to be dense and obscure while simultaneously being really fun.

This interview with the authors tipped me over the edge to buying it after Amazon recommended it to me: https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-amy-ireland-maya-b-kronic-cute-accelerationism

Ancient Law, by Henry Sumner Maine.

Surprisingly readable for a legal history book last updated in 1906.

Also, while I am reading the Imperium Press edition, nominally intended to re-expose people to classics of rightist thought, it is amusing to read Sir Maine extolling the virtues of the progressive society of the late 19th-century vs. the Roman law.

He seems to have a particular disdain for the Canon Law and the (his words!) retrogressive concepts of coverture and marital power. It’s interesting, because he seems to be on board with the man leading the marriage, however you choose to define leading, but not with the legal doctrines that mandate such a situation. In this regard, he strikes me as a very modernistic, even borderline woke, thinker. It makes me wonder if Imperium Press just pulled the oldest law book they could find that mentions Rome and uses the word Aryan.

I’m only halfway through though, so maybe he takes a 180 and retvrns later in the book.

Was up north with time to kill while watching rain fall on the lake. Read Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama over the weekend. I enjoyed it, though the edition had an appalling forward. I can see why the ending was controversial, as the central mystery of the book is not resolved, but it did not bother me as much as I expected it would. Also started a novel Subsunk about various submarine rescue developments and incidents. However it was printed in 1960 and I suspect may be slightly out of date.

I never read the original RWR, but I did read the sequels and greatly enjoyed them, even if I don't think Clarke was particularly involved in the writing therein.

Interestingly, I was going to reply in the opposite. I greatly enjoyed the original with all of its exploration of Rama and the wonders therein and couldn't get past all of the characters and their various agendas in the sequel, which made it the rare DNF for me. Can you tell me more about what you liked in Rama II and if it ever really gets going?

It's been a while, but I recall enjoying the exploration of the ship itself, the tense standoffs with the aliens, and the drama around the potential of being the last humans alive on the ship. That last bit prompted some funky incest babies before Rama picked up more humans and made that approach obsolete. I don't remember if it was R2 or the sequel that had colony hijinks as the humans tried to settle/conquer the ship, but it was great nonetheless.

After the chore that was Magda Szabó's The Door, I needed some light reading, so I picked up The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero's account of his relationship with Tommy Wiseau and the making of The Room. It's a very entertaining and easy read. Someone named Dormin posted a review on the Slate Star Codex subreddit in which they compared and contrasted this book with its film adaptation (directed by and starring James Franco as Wiseau, and his brother Dave as Greg), arguing that the film had completely missed the point of the book. While Wiseau in the film adaptation of The Disaster Artist is weird, tactless, continually baffled by concepts which come naturally to most people and completely incompetent when it comes to the craft of filmmaking, he is essentially portrayed as a harmless nutcase. In the book, by contrast, Sestero presents him in a much darker light: rude and unpleasant for no good reason, paranoid, jealous, controlling, conniving, manipulative and indeed emotionally abusive. Given that Wiseau was involved in the production of the film adaptation, Dormin speculated that some softening of his portrayal was necessary to get him onboard. Highly recommended so far.

Dickens' Selected Short Fiction. The latest piece was a satire of British rail train refreshment staff extolling the noble and unchangeable tradition of consciously and deliberately providing the worst food and service possible.

It's amusing to come across these small social insights from history that continue to be relatable.

Desolation Island. Aubrey scammed out of accolades for taking Mauritius for the British. Apparently he's now headed to Australia.

I expect battles, bad puns and likely Stephen Maturin getting excited over a platypus.

@Mihow, I found the ending of For a Few Demons More to be compelling enough that I'm now on to book 6 of The Hollows, The Outlaw Demon Wails.

Sweet - thanks!

Book 1 is on my list now after I finish Gates of Fire.

I finished book six last night and I just have to say: holy shitsnacks did some major stuff go down! I was sorely tempted to start right in on number 7 although I chose a different book, I'll be tempted tonight to put that choice down and go back to the Hollows anyway.

Is Kilmar Garcia's tattoo actually related to ms 13 or just a coincidence? https://nypost.com/2025/04/18/us-news/social-media-flooded-with-theories-about-kilmar-abrego-garcias-ms-13-tattoos/

It seems to fit too well to ms13 to just be some random finger tats for things the guy likes. On the other hand I was unable to find any references to other gangsters doing something similar.

The problem with theories like this is that motivated reasoning leads one to the desired conclusion without considering that similar motivation can just as easily lead to other, equally plausible conclusions. So the marijuana leaf supposedly is a stand-in for the M in MS 13. Okay, but the plant has so many colloquial names that it would work with other letters as well. So it could also be a C (cannibas), or P (pot), or W (weed), or even L (leaf), or any number of other things. Then go to the smiley face for S, except that it could also just be F for face. And then it gets ridiculous. The cross is supposed to be a coverup for a 1. Or it's commonly used as a stand-in for a 1 (I've never heard this before, and I can't find any support for it online). And the skull is a coverup for a 3, which seems highly unlikely since there's nothing even remotely resembling a 3 in the skull. Or maybe the the two eyes and nose mean 3 (but the two eyes in the smiley face don't mean 2?). OR maybe skull in Spanish is clavera and 3 is the third letter of the alphabet, though cross in Spanish is cruz, so MS 33? Or maybe he just decided to mix a bunch of pictograms together like a bad metaphor. Or maybe the cross really means X and it's actually WF33. Or WD40.

In all seriousness, if you want to use any of this as evidence, you need to find a qualified expert to testify that these are actually MS-33 gang tattoos, not rely on crowdsourced Twitter speculation.

So it could also be a C (cannibas), or P (pot), or W (weed), or even L (leaf), or any number of other things

I'd assume you would need to use Spanish for that. I also have been told by reliable sources that using the word "marijuana" is racist, so not sure it can be even mentioned by a proper expert.

you need to find a qualified expert to testify that these are actually MS-33 gang tattoos,

I would assume the guys who made the photo that Trump showed around would be called "experts" at least by the current administration and would gladly testify that these signs mean MS-13 (I assume 33 is a typo here). After all, they told so to the president, if they aren't sure that's what it is they would be majorly screwed. The problem is the other side could claim those people know nothing and they are lying and they have got their own experts that are ready to testify that these tattoos actually mean "universal peace and love" and has absolutely no relationship to any gangs and anybody who is not a racist fascist knows that. I'm not sure where in our days it is still possible to find experts that haven't been claimed by any sides are would be universally acceptable.

For me personally, absence of alternative explanations and the fact that his wife insists on hiding the tattoos on all photos explains enough, but I'm not an expert, just a random dude on the internet.

Thoughts on o3?

Initial reviews from what I can tell seem very mixed, with some people claiming that it’s a step down from previous models.

It doesn't feel as smart as o1 but it has access to tools and non-zero training on how to use those tools, and I find the latter matters more than the former for most things I do.

I just watched The Birth of a Nation (1915). Despite having a shredded attention span for movies typically, I found it pretty compelling and surprisingly watched it in just a few sittings (same thing I found with the Napoleon silent epic from the 1920s which was even longer). Just great expressive acting, scored well, with a story that flowed at a solid pace (and from a perspective that I can imagine inhabiting, but hadn't seen before). And I can guess how especially impressive some of it was for the time. Though the actors playing mulatto characters were maybe hamming it up too much as the villains, and seemed like they thought they were in a different movie (or maybe the director really wanted to sell that angle).

Given our forum members here, does anyone know of any heterodox witchy takes about the KKK? Are most people fairly accurate in seeing them as shallow dumb racist terrorists, lashing out while hiding their identities in cowardice? Or is that more like history being written by winners, where there was actually more to engage with, some higher theory of mind, like what this movie is trying to portray (revenge, fighting back, or maybe even beyond that)? Back in the day I had the basic high school AP US history, but apparently everything between the civil war and the great depression didn't make a lasting impression, because I find myself really not knowing anything about reconstruction, 'radical republicans', etc. In general I find that time period pretty interesting & appealing, with Monet impressionism, Dostoevsky & Arthur Conan Doyle books, and post-civil-war-set Westerns being most interesting. Just have no idea about the US South vs North around then I guess.

Or failing that, does anyone have any movie recommendations in any similar vein? I used to think of silent movies being mostly slapstick comedies which weren't even that funny, but these two epics I mentioned were great. Or related to this movie in other ways, I tried watching Gone With the Wind and Triumph of the Will, but got bored of both after 10-20 minutes (will give them another shot at some point). The 2012 spielberg Lincoln movie was great too, for DDL acting, and it seems like the Tommy Lee Jones character was rehabilitating the similar character in Birth.

Minor Heterodox take: The KKK mostly did nothing. They're just a particularly famous kind of Elks At their peak there were fewer than 200 lynchings annually in the USA, at its peak the Klan had eight million members.

Most Klan members never lynched anyone, or probably ever attended a lynching. They never saw, as it were, combat.

Can you name any other organizations that get close to 200 murders a year?

By your standard, most organizations mostly do nothing. They prefer legally and socially defensible activities like fundraising and complaining on Twitter. The big exceptions are outright criminal gangs where violence is instrumental.

The big exceptions are outright criminal gangs where violence is instrumental.

Which would be the normal framing of the Klan in history and pop culture! As an outright criminal gang, dedicated primarily to violence against black people. If you asked MoPs for historical peer organizations for the KKK, you'd probably get a lot of the Mafia, the IRA, Crips and Bloods, MS13, maybe Al Qaeda or ISIS. You typically wouldn't get a lot of comparisons to the Elks, Masons, Odd Fellows, Optimists Club, BSA Order of the Arrow, Knights of Columbus, the Campfire Girls. ((FWIW, the best comparison is probably the Black Panthers))

The former, on a murders-by-membership basis, typically run pretty close to even, if you say you're in La Cosa Nostra or a Cartel or in Al Qaeda I expect you to have been involved directly in acts of violence over the course of your career. The same could not be said of the typical KKK member: taking 200 as our upper bound (assuming KKK involvement in every lynching) and even taking a crazy number like 100 Klansmen involved in every lynching, that's only 20,000 Klansmen if they all only participate in one lynching. Over a ten year period, that's only 200,000 Klansmen who were actually involved in a lynching, as against 8,000,000 Klansmen nationally. Your modal Klansmen never lynched anyone. They may have participated in other, smaller scale violence, but that's a lot harder to track. By comparison, the Cartel membership estimates vs body count runs close to 1% a year; if the Klan ran that high at its peak we would have been seeing 70,000 lynchings a year.

Of course, the Masons aren't an entirely apt comparison on this basis, I would expect that most years the Masons have zero associated murders. But the experience of the average Klansman was probably closer to that of the average Mason than to that of the average Mafiosi.

I agree that cartels and international terrorists are bad comparisons. I’m trying to say that the Elks are also a terrible comparison.

The gap between “zero” and “200” is huge! There is a categorical difference between a club that refuses minorities and one that occasionally goes out and kills them pour encourageur les autres. Not incidental protests turned violent, not even organized patrols spoiling for a fight, but actual, premeditated murder. Putting them in the same category as some xenophobic philanthropists is doing the latter a disservice.

Hezbollah, the Muslim brotherhood, and the longshoreman’s union do extralegal violence. All of them have lots of members dedicated to the organizations other functions and not involved in personally doing terrorism.

I'm focused on the experience of joining and participating in the Klan for the average Klansman. Who never murdered anyone, though he probably approved of it pour encourager les autres.

The second wave of the klan(the one everyone actually remembers) actually did a lot of things, but there’s lots of actions short of lynching to engage in- from intimidation campaigns to beatings and vandalism.

The Invisible Empire did a lot more bake sales than beatings, and a lot more local parades than lynchings, and a lit a lot more grills than they did crosses. They were much closer on any given day to the Elks than to Al Qaeda, their existence and traditions and activities basically resemble that of any other fraternity, with the occasional addition of violence.

Their existence nevertheless suggested the existence of a vast body of white men willing to engage in racialized violence, but they didn't actually engage in it all that often.

A lot of their violence wasn't racialized. The klan believed it was a guardian of historic American protestant morality(in the process of shifting due to the first sexual revolution) and did a lot of busybodying.

Racialized was also relative: my only personal contact with a KKK victim was a family friend whose house was vandalized after coming to the USA as refugees when his father died fighting the soviets on the eastern front.

I would say the second Klan was more anti-Catholic than anti-Black. By the time the second Klan was founded in 1915 the racial issue had basically been won by the racists, Jim Crow was firmly in place, and there was no need for an extralegal anti-Black organisation similar to the first Klan. The strongest second Klan state organisation was in Indiana, where there were no Blacks to oppress.

Racialized was also relative: my only personal contact with a KKK victim was a family friend whose house was vandalized after coming to the USA as refugees when his father died fighting the soviets on the eastern front.

We're already seeing a much more nuanced Klan than we get in the average portrayal.

  • My grandparents grew up under segregation(albeit towards the tail end). They’re glad it changed, and don’t remember the rules having done anything good(or having been very strictly enforced in the general case). I have little nice to say about Jim Crow.

  • Reconstruction was an actual military occupation(this is what happens when you lose a war). The south was factually invaded and occupied and union troops factually treated southern civilians as enemies. Arbitrary measures to humiliate and break southern society were imposed- such as a ban on speaking French in public in parts of Louisiana. Union imposed governments were incompetent, corrupt, and full of radicals who didn’t particularly care how their ideas worked in practice. There is a reason the radical republicans were overthrown in coups which then wrote constitutions which were racist but mostly limited the governments ability to function. The Texas constitution has(literally) been amended over 500 times because it was such a mess. Granted, lots of these amendments are the sorts of policy changes that should be normal legislative matters, but that’s partly because the constitution requires it. Another way of saying this is that patching the constitutional restrictions on acting like a normal government required more words in constitutional amendments than in the actual constitution.

  • Perhaps related to this, the south was a low-state-capacity society for most of the solid south period; in low state capacity societies you get vigilante groups and secret societies with radical ideologies and those groups have actual supporters. Many Islamist groups in middle eastern shitholes are a present day example but the second wave of the klan definitely was one themselves; for all their racism a lot of the people they hanged were actual criminals that deserved it and in the roaring 20s KKK patrols regularly administered beatings to people who transgressed social norms, old school policeman style. Much less is known about the first wave of the klan but vigilantism has a long history in the south; the republic of Texas had a civil war over the issue and veterans of that war would have still been alive during reconstruction.

Interesting, thanks. Yeah the wiki article on Reconstruction era referred to "the legal, social, and political challenges of the abolition of slavery and the reintegration of the eleven former Confederate States into the United States" and various laws & amendments being passed nationally, which sounded like what I remembered. But what stood out was looking up what marked the end, the supposed compromise of 1877, simply being when federal troops were pulled out (so it was all an 'era' characterized by gunpoint).

Union imposed governments were incompetent, corrupt, and full of radicals who didn’t particularly care how their ideas worked in practice.

That's the wild part to me, which I somehow never learned or got through osmosis. I always had the connotation of 'carpetbagger' as economic opportunist, northern capitalists coming down to make a buck, a la 'shock doctrine'. Never knew that apparently northern white & black republicans literally went south and became congressmen & governors for a decade. The people who would actually pack up and move to a southern city to try to run/organize politics and government -- that's a mindset I'd also like to see portrayed from the flipside. If it was something other than a naked power grab, I could imagine it positively portrayed as a moral SJW angle, a 'doing my part' missionary flavor, or a more general entrepreneurial spirit.

Much less is known about the first wave of the klan but vigilantism has a long history in the south

I was wondering if maybe in the initial wave they were trying to imitate the crusades with the outfits and talk of wizards & knights. Then the revival in the 20s after this movie came out seems a lot more like a fanclub secret society, either larping or wanting more agency of 'you can just do stuff'. Admittedly, the movie poster artwork does look fairly badass, and makes me want to play dark souls or something.

I could imagine it positively portrayed as a moral SJW angle, a 'doing my part' missionary flavor, or a more general entrepreneurial spirit.

Take up the White Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed...

The difference between how reconstruction was taught to me in school in my state-mandated Texas history class and how it was taught in my American history class is striking; while the radical republicans can certainly be portrayed sympathetically, they were undoubtedly a disaster in practice.

I was wondering if maybe in the initial wave they were trying to imitate the crusades with the outfits and talk of wizards & knights

Maybe a little bit, but what is known is that they were fairly explicitly using the robes and titles to try to convince freemen that their white former masters had magic powers- and it actually worked. The robes were intended to look like the ghosts of confederate soldiers(and had the added benefit of concealing accoutrements for magic tricks) and the wizards were supposedly their masters who summoned them.

The south in the nineteenth century was not a very literate or scientifically minded society, and black slaves were more superstitious than most. A lot of the theater has very different effects on us than it did on illiterate, unfree subsistence farmers who unironically believe in witches- it’s plausible that although Islamist movements are a better metaphor for the second wave of the klan(and it’s underdiscussed the extent to which the 20’s era klan saw themselves as a bastion of white Protestant morality being eroded by the then-ongoing first sexual revolution, for which they blamed foreign influence), the oprikhniki is a decent analogue for the first wave.

This, along with the numerous references to confederate relatives, has left me wondering if Scooby Doo was inspired by the KKK. They were literally Scooby Doo villains, disguising themselves as ghosts to scare people away.

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