domain:nunosempere.com
TIRM
9hr ago
Medical care in the 1950s was cheaper. It was easy to become a doctor and they were plentiful. The standards of care were incredibly low compared to 2025.
Let's get a magic wand that grants you inflation adjusted 1950s medical costs and 1950s medical outcomes. Would you wave the wand?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
9hr ago
What do you mean?
Exactly what I said. That the clear dualism you see is, in truth, a dialectical monism.
There is no such thing as rational thought detached from the urges you describe. Your plan to quit smoking is just weighting your fear or death heavier than your nicotine cravings, which you may override for both conscious and unconscious reasons.
There is no rational and irrational in truth, all is trans-rational.
Why do you think this is, if you can’t fall back to “it is in their instincts”?
It is in their nature.
My culture’s mysticism rigidly distinguishes between the Spiritual Person, which is spirit and intellect and prosocial emotions, and the Flesh, which is the instinctual cravings of the animal part of man.
Assuming from the vocabulary that you are talking about Christianity, I must remind you that you are One in Christ. Christian Mysticism specifically rejects Platonic dualism through the incarnation, the resurrection of the body and the unity of soul and flesh which the Eucharist represents.
anon_
9hr ago
I’m well aware that the liberal modernity I oppose is the only thing keeping me alive at all, let alone giving me the lifestyle I currently have, and that come any serious reactionary victory, my life will most likely end (and become massively worse in the case it doesn’t)… and yet I still want that liberal modernity destroyed.
Well, I appreciate the honesty, but why would anyone join you on it?
Has anyone here seen the movie Serenity — the Firefly sequel/conclusion movie? If so, do any of you remember the speech by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s nameless “Operative” character — the “there's no place for me there” one?
I also thought of that. It's a good cultural marker how one feels about that speech.
TIRM
9hr ago
is the only reason you hold your political views because you expect to personally benefit?
No, but if a political system screws people like me or literally kills them, then I do not endorse it.
anon_
9hr ago
“I will be a warlord” is a very different type of fantasy than “I will be a poet”. Both fantasies, both silly, but silly in different ways.
I disagree. Both are saying "I will occupy a tiny slice at the top 2% of society".
Maybe I should back that up. They are silly in different ways but they have some important overlap which is that either way, the odds are slim.
anon_
9hr ago
The fact that this is extremely close to
- I want worker's revolution that provides me with enlightened socialist superiors so I can be an autistic craftsman while they run the government
And I think both will end in the same exploitative place and the rediscovery about why socialist revolutions had to be enforced violently.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9hr ago
I legitimately did not know that converting to another religion means you don't qualify for the Law of Return. What I can't figure out (with five minutes of Googling) is whether that applies to atheist or agnostic Jews. Like, atheism isn't a religion you convert to, right? But it would be weird if Christian Jews were disqualified but atheist Jews weren't.
gog
9hr ago
The tough-guy/hot chick tattoos of yesteryear are mostly finished in the wild. Some 40 year-olds who didn't get the memo still get them, but most of the tattoos I see nowadays are just crappy line doodles of flowers or mountains or whatever on the floppy, under-toned triceps of 20 year old girls. These don't communicate criminality or BPD or sluttiness like they did in the old days- they signal (intentionally or not) total conformity to Latest Thing. They look stupid, but I wouldn't even say they look ugly- they just look like she got pen on her arm, like an accident. Tattoos as threat- or sexual availability-signals I could at least understand, but I don't understand these new ones at all.
Throwaway05
9hr ago
I think this is too harsh, MBTI has value if you understand its limitations. For example managers can use it as a shortcut to understand management styles until you get to know your staff on an individual level.
In a healthcare context you can use it to understand a little bit about what interventions, therapy, explanations and so on will work for a patient until you get to know them better.
Most patients won't know that they prefer a logical style of consenting over an emotional one, but if they tell you they are an INTJ you can be pretty sure, etc.
anon_
9hr ago
I don't claim it's a very special insight, but I think the romanticism of one side has been made into a meme (on KYM no less) and it was worth looking at the less explored side of it as well.
The leftist mockery of rightism is never about how it's unrealistic, only that it's evil.
oats_son
9hr ago
Hey, lots of veterans are meatheads who make awful decisions, too. Who was doing the raping during the Rape of Nanking? Yes, that's a bad example in the context of America.
Not all veterans, of course, but men in the service are commonly exactly the stereotype that I'm struck by when I notice multiple visible tattoos, coarse rough-and-tumble assholes who one-up each other, drink, and do stupid things. My favorite non-fiction book is probably Quartered Safe Out Here, which certainly did not dispel my false stereotype. I actually didn't recall that Pete Hegseth is a veteran, if it helps.
anon_
9hr ago
I see no contradiction.
It's not meant to be a contradiction, it's meant to underscore that one's assessment of a system has to take into account what one believes that one's role in that system would be.
That is -- we agree that this is the same system. But the people daydreaming about destroying capitalism and replacing it with (whatever) are imagining a small slice of it. They imagine the commune but not the forced labor. They imagine the social order but don't imagine that they would ever see the sharp end of the stick.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
9hr ago
Who's Howard?
Jeremy Howard runs fast.ai.
You got 15k xp in 4 months? Pretty sweet, I skipped literally everything in college, so getting a decent XP is slightly harder for me. I learnt nothing beyond the 9th grade, even though I got an undergrad degree 2 years ago. I was doing 180 XP daily at my peak but have always had consistency issues. I wish I were more consistent.
Trace knows a lot of cool, helpful people in the learning sphere, a lot of them are rationalist adjacent.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
9hr ago
Matthew 7:2 isn't so bad, on its own, but 7:1 literally starts with "judge not". And Matthew 7:3 suggests the judge has problems of his own he ought to be considering before judging anyone else.
The same sentiment is in John 8:7, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her". Only the perfect (i.e. God) get to judge, everyone else can suck it.
anon_
9hr ago
I agree but I also endorse /u/maiqthetrue below that there is some kind of equivocation here.
There is also something else here -- the leftist version doesn't always actually explain quotidian things like how the food is grown when no one choses to be a farmer than wakes up at 5AM and works for 12H a day.
yestrusocialist
9hr ago
The guy working the counter at Mcd is not the modal poor person or recipient of benefits. The modal person is on welfare, (fraudulent) disability or similar who does not work at all and is not looking for work.
We don't need them, unless "we" = left wing politicians who harvest their votes or perhaps educated leftists gaining money/status from fake jobs servicing them.
The rest of us would be better off without them.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
9hr ago
I do not see rational and irrational sentiments to be disconnected
What do you mean? Do you disagree that humans have instinctively strong desires, which spring from their evolved biology? Do you disagree that human instinct is often unaligned with human reason? Is sugar not more desirable to you than bitter herbs? Do you not believe that “beauty” is inherently more pleasing than “non-beauty”? All of this is due to our evolved biology. Reason can say that it’s best not to smoke cigarettes, but this seldom influences the decision of a habitual smoker, because their biology finds it pleasant and they want to keep the habit in spite of reason. And you don’t live in a country where everyone is skinny, right? Or a world where teenagers stop playing video games late into the evening because they care about their 15-year plan and the effects of poor sleep.
culture's mystical traditions
My culture’s mysticism rigidly distinguishes between the Spiritual Person, which is spirit and intellect and prosocial emotions, and the Flesh, which is the instinctual cravings of the animal part of man. However, I don’t necessarily think this is the optimal way to construe things.
As a last question: when boys are choosing a book or movie, do they choose something about healthy strong man taking charge, or do they choose something about a young woman? Why do you think this is, if you can’t fall back to “it is in their instincts”?
anon_
9hr ago
Sure. I think the question there is about whether the vision for where the individual tradcon fits into their hypothetical future lines up with reality.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
9hr ago
Unless someone can gamify it to some extent, lay out an extremely clear path for progression, with periodic rewards and a well-defined end-goal, and some mechanism for accountability, then I'm just less likely to commit to it fully, since I'd have to use discipline to establish a habit and overcome the initial unpleasantness. But so many side activities seem pretty pointless to engage with if they aren't going to drastically increase your status or wealth, even if the skill itself is handy on its own terms.
I think gamification is the exactly opposite of what you need. I cycled through a bunch of frankly masturbatory hobbies before I settled on woodworking. I tried to learn guitar, I tried mountain biking, I did martial arts for a long time, I've tried to make video games off and on for my entire adult life, did a smattering of electronics repair. All of them, to various degrees, felt like pissing in the ocean. I think I enjoyed the martial arts and mountain biking the most, but at a certain point going through the motions felt pointless. Especially with martial arts, once I no longer had anything to prove to myself that I could do it, I just wasn't feeling it anymore. I sunk costed through many more years of just showing up, but my drive to put in the extra work evaporated. A lot of what compelled me to put time into hobbies I really wasn't getting anything out of was the addictiveness of the gamification in the learning method.
But woodworking, at least for now, is fantastic. I make beautiful things that go into my home that are exactly what I want, and I don't care one teeny tiny bit how they stack up to what anyone else has done. It's not gamified, it's not competitive, but it's marginally creative and meets specific needs. Plus it's nice having hardwood furniture in my house instead of flat packed sawdust and glue. Mastering a smattering of baking recipes has been similar. I wanted great scones, I didn't like any of the bakeries around me, I figured out a recipe that produces the scones I want and now my family gets to enjoy them.
Human motivation is funny, and in several ways, I suspect gamification has spoiled our brains to expect more rewards for fake task than they deserve. I've found making real things you actually want and need has been a great detox, and doesn't necessarily carry with it the sort of "I'm too tapped out from work to do this" vibe that other more masturbatory and pointless hobbies might. But that might just be me.
anon_
9hr ago
I mean, the left and the right are huge spaces. I think some of the right wants to greatly change society, especially along gender lines. Some doesn't and just wants a nicer economy, less crime and fair college admissions.
This is just not true, communists want to participate in politics and this is a key component of their ideology. They don't want any rulers. And they want everyone down to small groups to rule themselves democratically.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a transitional artifice to allow the state to wither away, if you remember. There is no "correct ruler". There is only the required politicization of the masses to the death until history finally synthesizes the perfect society.
I won't relitigate here the "but what if you get a bad king?" question since that's a matter over which large amounts of ink have been spilled and it is irrelevant to this discussion of the teleology of either ideology.
Your example link goes to the "nice hat" reddit post. This has happened to me. You copy paste a reddit image link and somehow it points to "nice hat".
People centuries ago drank and said dirty jokes. They weren't typically flogged for such popular and common behavior. For example the puritans drank a lot by modern standards. Drunkenness was not much respected.
anon_
9hr ago
The would-be commune dweller is funny because leading discussion groups and making clothes out of scraps is no more plausible as a career after the revolution than it is before. If it's not profitable to do under a capitalist system them it's not practical to do under a communist system.
Sadly this is not true. The profitability of making clothes out of scraps depends the opportunity cost of that labor to do something else useful. If Communism destroys all other productive activity, it will render that profitable. Of course, the other way to say that is "your labor will be so worthless that mending socks will be net positive".
Being a warlord is a real job, it's just that you chose for some reason to compare a regular person making clothes out of scraps with a highly-exclusive job reserved for social elites.
I think the mockery of the leftists is that "person that doesn't have to do hard labor but can futz about in the garden, sew embroidery and teach the children for an hour in the afternoon" is an aristocratic/elite position.
"Under an authoritarian system I would be one of the dictator's goons enforcing his will on the people and exploiting his power to enrich myself," may not be a very moral stance, but no one can say that it's not a tried-and-true strategy for getting ahead.
That can't work for everyone. And there is quite a bit of intra-goon competition there too. It's a very slippery post.
Very interested to hear what you think of episode 3 and following...
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