domain:farhakhalidi.substack.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7m ago
Guy writes fun short story.
Who? Where?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10m ago
... and decrease even as it's GDP is increasing. This is true especially if we assume the liberal theories on the benefits of free trade and immigration are correct.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23m ago
I don’t think it’s quite the mainstream position in the right-leaning spaces. They might nod along with “evil” or “ideologically possessed” (which started with JBP, I think) but I don’t think, aside from mocking college students and wine moms that they call liberals stupid.
Arguably, low social cohesion would manifest in a less cooperative and thus less productive society with more defectors and worse tragedies of the commons, thus lower GDP. Lower life expectancy could then be downstream from that, in addition to lower social cohesion probably making people less happy and unhappiness is unhealthy in general.
OTOH, I suppose one can (and I would) argue that a society can be cohesive even when its GDP and life expectancy decrease due to reasons unrelated to social or cultural questions (e.g., for reasons of hard economics), and that these metrics are only partially downstream of and partially orthogonal to social cohesion.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
31m ago
Everything. GDP, murder rate, life expectancy, etc.
I can give you the murder rate, what do the rest have to do with social cohesion?
Tree
35m ago
If you disagree, give me the metrics by which you judge social cohesion, peace and prosperity to be increasing, and we can discuss it.
Everything. GDP, murder rate, life expectancy, etc.
Blues are on the back foot because we Reds dealt them a crippling and humiliating electoral defeat.
And you were saying this wouldn't happen, they made sure you could never ever win, they stole the election etc. Life’s too short for me to spend it assuaging your incoherent fears of doom.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Which is rather the point here.
Sorry, I don't get what is rather the point here. Can you spell it out?
Guy writes fun short story. "Source?" says one, "What did he mean by this?" says another. It's a joke, c'mon.
Was this meant to be a mean joke? Sorry man, you put in too much effort and snark, so the snark itself came off as in parody and the whole thing came off as decent satire. Well done, I did laugh, you stuck the landing.
You have an obsession with class but you shouldn't. Of the top 1,000 or so achievements of humanity you will find, well down the list of its contributors, maybe one single noble by name of Tycho Brahe. It's Shakespeare, scrutiny on his identity didn't come from a fair evaluation but noble arrogance at the impossibility of a commoner having such a way with words.
I think you approach something truthful here, but only approach. You wrote this (I hope; if it's AI consider me the sad fool), you show your intelligence, you also show how deeply you consider this topic. More than some of these respondents realize, but worse, more than you yourself realize, because I think your obsession with class fogs your mind by forcing you to write off branches in reasoning and take conclusions you otherwise wouldn't. There may be something to be said about the behaviors of large groups of people, and the way that relates with their "class," who they started around, who they are around now, who they will end their lives around. But class as Banana uses it, and as you may have fallen into, is more like a religious belief, something ineffable to which you always reason back. I can assure you the progressive metaphysical beliefs of western Brahmin are just that: without substance. You use them as though they're the map while they're just making it all up.
So why not, just for curiosity's sake, reconsider one of your conclusions? Any, you know this, your subject, your choice, but after shelving class as having explanatory power and instead as detail incidental to the territory you try to see.
Tree
1hr ago
I approve of the anger. Suicide is too often taboo’d and romanticized. Strange that it’s so much more prevalent amongst men than women, given life satisfaction and women’s anxious and depressive tendencies.
One suicide I knew was also a high school friend, charismatic, wild and smart. Didn’t transition well to adulthood. Two were middle-aged men with large families who couldn’t ‘provide’ anymore because of invalidity and unemployment. What I’m getting at is that even though I believe one has a strong duty to others not to commit suicide (and not to threaten it), I’m not sure that increasing the list of their duties, the burden they feel, is the way to go. Part of the reason why I can’t condemn parents who abandon their children too harshly. Walking away should always be the available runner-up terrible option, in any situation.
Was that really the only reply you got?
I'll give you you my favorite argument, skipping all the lesser ones. And please excuse the rambling style; I'm writing in between numerous interruptions. The chiefest argument against immigration, in my view, is that of culture. Americans may scoff at this, but for a German it's obvious that our country worked at all and gained its orderly prosperity entirely due to the culture of the people who inhabit it.
In theory this isn't incompatible with immigration - immigrants come, adopt our culture, great, we're still just as orderly and even more productive! But that's not what happens, unless you set the bar for "cultural assimilation" about as low as "speaks some pidgin German when forced to, does not commit brazen rape and robbery, works and pays taxes, and might own a German passport.". Whick you can do, of course! If you see the whole issue purely through the lens of economy and you ignore any effects and dynamics that occur outside of economics, then you can stop at that point, see that immigration just means more workforce, checkmate nativists. If you want to go outside of economics, then the first stop is humanitarian concerns and you can even pat yourself on the back for being a good guy who saves the poor huddled masses of the world by letting them into the infinitely expandable first-world economic zone and human rights preservation area that makes everyone better off and even more so when there's more people inside. You did the right thing. And I suppose that for atomized, globalized urbanites, that's just the world as it is. Ground-level reality right there. Who cares what language your neighbors speak or what color the cashier's skin is? You don't want to talk to them or look at them anyways, you have your phone right here. So long as the economy keeps going and public welfare picks up the slack, everyone can do their own thing to nobody's harm.
But if I might invite you to step outside of your axiomatic comfort zone and enter mine for a spell, here's the countervailing world-view. Let's get back to my opening statement: Prosperity and social peace are mainly downstream of culture, and not the other way around. To someone on the right, this is as obviously true as the opposite might be to someone on the left. Where you might see that obviously people become peaceful and productive once their material and legal circumstances are agreeable to them, I would see instead that obviously a cooperative, high-trust society will be peaceful and productive. Maybe both are true to some extent, but I would give far greater weight to the latter. Can you lean slightly to the right for a moment so as to take a brief look through this lens together with me?
For a society to be thus - cooperative, trusting, mutually supportive - some conditions need to be fulfilled. A shared language is strictly necessary. And not some assortment of crude pidgins that are barely mutually intelligible, but an actual mature language that can convey subtleties with a high degree of fidelity, information with a high signal-to-noise ratio. And especially, dear God, not several mutually unintelligible languages from different language families that are spoken only by disjoint subsets of the population that each self-segregate into separate communities.
Beyond language, and less clear-cut: Shared commitments. If I consider myself a long-term inhabitant of a local community and responsible for its well-being, but my neighbor is only a transient dweller of opportunity, then what reason does each of us have to do the hard work of getting to know the other? What reason has he to contribute to the community, or I to welcome him? He'll just move on anyways, and if not, will very likely surround himself with others of his background instead of mingling with the natives, and work for the benefit of his relatives in his home country instead of his neighbors here. And this is not some self-fulfilling prophecy of social exclusion, but the plain fact of what one sees happen with solid regularity. An immigrant has numerous incentives to cohere more strongly with his co-immigrants than with the natives of his new country of residence; to take from the host country and give to his personal associates. Tragedy of the commons. And with each additional community-member-in-name-only (which includes asocial natives, of course), you have a defector who weakens the body social as a whole and shifts norms away from cooperation.
And then there's the big pitfall of public welfare. You've already pointed out that immigrants cannot simultaneously be net job-takers and net welfare-leeches. I don't know how this works in America, but here in Germany the issue of welfare parasitism is certainly not exclusively to immigrants - plenty of natives take more than they give. But this is still a perverse incentive that hits immigrants even harder because of their inherently greater difficulty in finding well-paid work that's actually worth doing instead of relying on gibs.
If we could and would force immigrants to assimilate, to become natives in all ways but their family history, to communicate with us like we do with each other and reliably commit to the common good, to cut ties with their former country and nation, then all these problems would probably be feasible to solve. But this is not the case. Instead Germany is absorbed by a cultural self-hatred and a refusal to see cultural differences between natives and immigrants. The immigrants themselves in turn see the floundering, self-effacing culture of the Germans and naturally stick to what they know instead. And funnily enough, native kids pick up on this, and so we get the "migrantisch" culture that many young people buy into regardless of whether they even have any recent immigrants in their family trees. And so we end up with a growing parallel society of immigrants and their hangers-on who have ample incentives to be game-theoretic defectors, and who instead of adopting more cooperative native norms end up weakening those norms across the country.
And I ramble and ramble and can't keep a train of thought for how frequently I need to go and do other things. Let me know if this makes the remotest lick of sense to you; if not I'll try again in a quieter hour.
hanikrummihundursvin
2hr ago
Yet they still try.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
Or the sneeze gun, the mega sneeze gun, the sneeze gun detector, efforts to develop gasoline cancer...
I recommend Flesh Simulator's MK ULTRA subproject rundown
Botond173
2hr ago
It changes everything. If he's unavailable for long-term commitment, he's no longer a potential catch for women who want that.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
MKUltra showed this when a couple dozen universities across the country were dosing unknowing participants with psychoactives
Don't forget the brain surgeries.
jake
3hr ago
I think that’s also a very good counter example to all the people who say that there are no conspiracies because they are impossible to keep secret
MKUltra showed this when a couple dozen universities across the country were dosing unknowing participants with psychoactives and it took congress investigating something else to uncover it. People are in fact so good at collectively shutting up one could wonder if a separate conspiracy had anything to do with the appearance in common wisdom of "number of participants" as a weighty variable in the success of plots.
Jiro
3hr ago
"Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is."
You literally picked some random person from a group you don't like and told a shaggy dog story about her just so you can have a wall of text whose upshot is that this person and "people like" her are bad.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
3hr ago
"I hate my enemies and want them to suffer" is true, but not what I said.
Really?
The more pain and terror inflicted in the process, the greater the psychic wound sustained on the collective consciousness of these illegals and all others interested in following them, the better.
And it's not even that I disagree with you on the object level. Just - it looks a lot like you did indeed say that.
I'm in a similar position of being glad that he's here providing a differing viewpoint, but come on, a couple of days?
Really, I'm not. Progressives like these actively drag down the standard of discourse in this forum with their shit-flinging (this applies to other people of varying political stripes too, but the OP here seems to be one of the worst and most prolific offenders in this forum as of late).
I'm willing to engage with other left of centre people who participate here and even say I appreciate their participation in spite of our ideological differences, but this ain't it. It's such obvious bait that it barely even warrants attention from me - I basically look at a post of his, roll my eyes and move on. Even Darwin wasn't this consistently terrible, in spite of his penchant for doubling down on transparently incorrect statements. This on the other hand is an utterly vapid waste of time: it's badly-written fanfiction that builds up to the ultimate reveal of "A MAGA said something ick, checkmate rightists".
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
3hr ago
Congratulations, you have succesfully cherry-picked one of the right's worse representatives. Is this supposed to teach anyone anything other than "This Natalie Winters I never herad of before who I will probably never hear of again seems a little vapid."?
madeofmeat
4hr ago
Very late reply, but this sounds uncannily like Tove K's description of her estranged teenage daughter.
functor
4hr ago
It is the ISIS ideology of building a caliphate and invoking the return of Jesus. The idea of commanding god and ordering Jesus back to Earth is an antithesis to what pretty much 99% of Christians throughout history have believed. It is a big part of the rift between Al Qaeda and ISIS in which Al Qaeda considered ISIS to be completely out of control.
FistfullOfCrows
4hr ago
It’s people like Natalie Winters, whose response to the Trump-Musk feud was, “this whole thing is proof of why we shouldn’t vaccinate children.”
I'm just going to candidly and frankly tell you because of the shenanigans by the biotech companies and governments I'm not going to be getting my scheduled age group vaccines that are coming up, there are posters all over my Doc's hall ways that such and such age brackets have their regular scheduled vaccines coming up, I'm just not going to get it, I'm going to delay the whole thing as long as humanly possible and if by some administrative slight of hand the issue is pressed I'm going to go shopping for a doctor who I can slip a 100 and have him fictitiously give me one, noting me down in the app that I had mine given.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
4hr ago
They've never been super high quality IMHO but recently they seem like almost pure shitflinging.
Some concept work, some coding. No great accomplishments; just some basic refactoring to make working with Unreal C++ a little less painful. Working my way out of some Unreal problems, while failing to solve others. Not much, but I'm happy just go get anything at all done.
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