domain:alexepstein.substack.com
Not really, unless you want to broaden the scope of the debate to include possibilities that I doubt OP had in mind like the Jews having a sovereign state in Madagascar (which I do think would have been preferable but has not been a viable choice for about a century).
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
See, teachers can and do do some bad things. Using corporal punishment for no reason isn’t one of them. Corporal punishment is protected by law in my state and getting schools to use it is… difficult.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
22hr ago
Strangely, it looks to me like very few early Zionists seemingly actually justified Zionism in Palestine in terms of Yahwe and high level of Jewishness etc. These were mainly secular socialist/liberal/masonic people. Yet the emotional pull of the religious land seems to have had overridden any cerebral secularism.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
22hr ago
You seem to be claiming that Hannibal directive (or more broadly an IDF strategy of killing hostages if necessary to stop hostage taking situations) isn’t real but then instead of explaining yourself you just prose about some crypto Hamas supporters.
When I talked to Israelis about this topic pretty much all seemed to take the existence of such a strategy as given and necessary because Middle East. Do you have any evidence that this is a made up conspiracy?
Maybe you should double check the conversation context? I think you've become a little confused. I've been pretty clear the entire time, across multiple comments, that I've just been steelmanning the economic value test as a legitimate halfway definition, it's not my true opinion. Clearly our conversation has gone on a little too long and you've lost the thread, it makes no sense to attack me for "vibes" as again I've pretty clearly laid out the separation between that and my own opinions whenever the divergence has come up (such as with jagged intelligence: notice the italics and phrasing when I introduce the concept as my own belief), and I've also delineated the chain of logic that leads to an economic value test (which I don't endorse as optimal but believe to be nonetheless valid). We probably both agree that self_made_human didn't really make a very rigorous attempt at a test, but you've conflated me with him, we are in fact different people.
We were talking about bullet point 3, and you added something irrelevant: you added "information processing algorithm" instead of "AI", and then tried to tear it down as being a bad bullet point because it's too broad or extensible. Maybe you cribbed this language about processing from his original comment? I pointed out that that's not fair, you can't extend and modify my bullet point like that because Google fails the test due to the definition of knowledge work in the first place. Specifically, bullet point 3 evaluates as false, so do not pass Go, do not conclude intelligence. It's not a deliberate smearing of word meanings to call Google something different than knowledge work, which you could figure out if you spent two minutes on the wikipedia page I linked -- did you, honestly, visit the link? I suspect not.
Now, whether you think defending viewpoints you think are valid but don't agree with is a waste of time on a forum like this is a separate issue. I tend to think that it is fine (optimize for light not heat and all that), of course I could be wrong and people find it too motte-and-bailey like. But please take a moment to double check your own reading comprehension before throwing accusations of hypocrisy around.
NYTReader
22hr ago
Counterpoint: No.
I'm concerned enough about what school administrators may be imparting to impressionable young children. I don't want them to also have the power to physically punish students for transgressions that will inevitably differ from teacher to teacher.
I have no inclination to hurt my children beyond maybe a light spanking; the thought that some freak might get off on inflicting serious pain on a child, let alone my own, is intolerable.
2rafa
22hr ago
Rumor has it that a Pakistani finance-bro finally broke under the strain of counting all his money, and ran amok. Last I heard, he'd racked up so many confirmed kills of the local white underclass that it was almost too burdensome to count, and now, was in a tense stand-off with police snipers while his own asylum application processed.
Very good
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
22hr ago
I think you're painting far too rosy a picture of prison, and eliding over massive potentially negative harms (such as the abhorrent 4% chance of rape every year).
Down the rabbit hole a bit, but the actual report cited there doesn't seem like a 4% chance of what I would typically see referred to as "rape":
Approximately 1.1% of prisoners and 0.7% of jail inmates said they were forced or pressured to have nonconsensual sex with another inmate, including manual stimulation and oral, anal, or vaginal penetration. An additional 1.0% of prison inmates and 0.9% of jail inmates said they had experienced one or more abusive sexual contacts only or unwanted touching of specific body parts in a sexual way by another inmate.
An estimated 1.5% of prison inmates and 1.4% of jail inmates reported that they had sex or sexual contact unwillingly with staff as a result of physical force, pressure, or offers of special favors or privileges. An estimated 1.4% of all prison inmates and 0.9% of jail inmates reported they willingly had sex or sexual contact with staff.
Plenty of bad stuff going around, but I think it's unhelpful to put these all in the same category.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22hr ago
The idea that the only choices were "no sovereign Jewish state" and "sovereign Jewish state that is approximately akin to the present-day institution", which seems to be the premise of your second point's interpretation, is a false dichotomy.
Crowstep
22hr ago
The second attempts to address root causes that lead people to engaging in these behaviors in the first place.
I guess my problem with 'root causes' strategies is that the root cause of most crime is 'he's just like that'. Most 'root causes' that get highlighted by activists are just correlates of criminality (e.g. poverty) not causes. If poverty caused crime then our grandparents' generation (in every developed country) would have been extremely criminal during their youth, and they weren't.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
22hr ago
Unlike almost every other person talking theoretically here, I actually did go to school with corporal punishment. I am not even old this was mid 2000s. I do remember that it was 1) quite good at establishing teacher’s authority 2) pacifying the troublemaker kids into learning a bit or at least not disturbing others and 3) extremely discriminatory. Girls virtually always got a pass, so did the boys with middle class or higher parents. I remember vividly the day when an inspector visiting the class noticed the wooden stick in the corner and remarked to our teacher that the ministry doesn’t approve of this anymore. It disappeared and never came back.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
22hr ago
Is this a record number of comments for a Friday Fun Thread? It's >300 at the time of writing.
Totalitarianit
23hr ago
The south Asian presence, The art show, the price jumps, and the juxtaposition of a closed Canary Wharf hotel hosting asylum seekers jumped out at me. That said, it didn't read like the culture war was central, but rather the backdrop for a humorous post about someone's trip to London.
The olfactory input was overwhelming.
I laughed at this. It reminds me of when people used to comment "Imagine the smell." when looking a certain images, and then others would get creative and say the same thing but use different sentences like, "Contemplate the aroma."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23hr ago
I want to start fishing.
Rough location; Eastern US. Mid-atlantic to as far north as Boston and as far south as South Carolina.
For any anglers that might be on here, I'd be interested in recommendations for books, apps, YouTube channels, and subreddits (or other forums altogether) to help me get started.
Please and Thank You.
I think you're painting far too rosy a picture of prison, and eliding over massive potentially negative harms (such as the abhorrent 4% chance of rape every year edit: less abhorrent, but still bad - 4% "sexual victimization", 2.6% chance of what most would typically call "rape" ). I think treating prison as anything but an extremely negative experience for the majority of inmates is not realistic.
I agree that that mental illness and freedom have a complicated philosophical relationship. My general attitude would be results-focused:
- Would going to prison disincentive others from this behaviour? (potentially for the "just assholes", no for the crazies)
- Would it help this individual in the future (like you mention in your post, but I'm very confident the answer is usually no)
- Does it prevent this person from causing harm to others? (yes)
- Does it give satisfaction to the people this person has harmed? (Unlike other lefty leaning folks, I think retribution does have a place in criminal punishment, but there's a very very high bar for it. I don't think yelling at people on the street passes it. For murder, rape, serious assault? Yes screw that person. For yelling like a crazy person? Probably not, let's be calm and just try to help everyone involved as much as is practically possible)
- Does it harm the person in question (yes, definitely)
- How much is this going to cost vs just putting them up in a cheap room and telling them (forcing them) to go home when they get drunk/high/crazy?
This is a tough question, but the answer isn't to stop considering the rights of the homeless/mentally ill person at all.
Can I also ask, on a totally different tack, in what sense is it unjust to send a law-breaker to prison? Why would you be morally 'bad' to do so?
If you're getting the impression that I'm anti-prison or anti-punishment in general I'm not. But it has to be justified, and that justification should include the cost to the law-breaker themselves. It's the general idea of proportionality - it's pretty uncontroversial the the punishment should fit the crime, and if you're discussing changing punishments you can't just saw "whatever I don't care". You actually have to suggest what's appropriate.
I've mentioned in other comments - I agree the current level of tolerance and punishment for this anti-social behaviour is too low, and this is also an issue that affects me personally. The answer isn't prison forever, or forced labour, you have to have a limit somewhere.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23hr ago
Anecdotally, corporal punishment in (rural) schools was ubiquitous through well after WWII. I'm not going to defend the practice, but there are plenty of family stories of it within living memory.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
23hr ago
Thank you, though once again I'm confused if someone doesn't see the CW here! You can see my reply downthread about that.
I haven't been in the UK very long, so take my takes with a NICE-approved amount of salt. The UK was doing well, or at least okay, until the middle 2000s. It was growing at a rate somewhat comparable to the US, or at least other Commonwealth Anglosphere nations. A British person could, with a straight face, claim to have a comparable standard of living.
Since then, it's been a story of stagnation. The economy has hardly grown at all, per capita productivity is down due to a significantly larger unproductive class subsisting on welfare (a lot of them immigrants).
In the places where the COL is lower, so are the incomes. Doctors are a rare exception, we make roughly the same wage everywhere in the country (largely because the allowances for living in a HCOL area are ridiculous). There are very few skilled jobs, manufacturing is as good as dead, and finance is great at inflating GDP, but little else. Energy prices are through the roof, and very little is being built, and hardly maintained.
Social cohesion, while not entirely dissolved, is at a nadir. Nobody is actually starving, but the young despair when it comes to achieving the same standard of living as their parents. People will claim that even in objectively wealthy nations like the States that have their economic engines firing on all cylinders, but it's actually true here.
Supah_Schmendrick
23hr ago
Even "pariah states" have friends somewhere; e.g. North Korea and the PRC.
Really? If you insist, I can actually mug someone in Bromley, a racially-motivated hate crime will, I hope, count as CW.
I think you're missing several clear culture war elements that run throughout the post. Let me point out what I see, I have an advantage courtesy of writing this post, and also having functional, albeit myopic eyeballs:
The observations about London's demographic transformation ("It has more Mirpuris than Mirpur, and more Bengalis than Bangladesh") directly engages with ongoing debates about immigration and cultural change in Britain. I acknowledge my 'privilege' in being able to say it so bluntly at all.
Critiques of modern art or post-modernism in general are hardly new, but they're still entirely relevant. I went into detail on how the Tate is the best parody of itself that one could hope for.
The economic observations about London pricing aren't just complaints from an inept tourist, can't you see the link topolitical debates about housing costs, wage stagnation, and quality of life? When noting that doctors are striking and that London's pay premium doesn't match its cost of living, that's quite explicitly touching on healthcare policy, the failures of the NHS and urban planning issues that are very much culture war.
The asylum seeker hotel conversion mentioned is an explicitly political topic that's been contentious in British politics. The speculation about it connects to real debates about immigration policy and resource allocation. I can only repeat that people are rioting over this as I speak.
Even the class observations throughout - from Bromley's safety to Canary Wharf's demographics to the woman pawning her ring - what do you think they say about inequality, social mobility, and economic stratification that frequently appear in culture war contexts?
It's both travelogue and cultural commentary precisely because I'm observing British society through the lens of someone who's both insider and outsider, which gives it analytical value beyond mere tourism reporting. The culture war elements are everywhere, interspersed with what I deem to be illuminating (or at least funny) experiences, and I don't see how one can miss them.
If this wasn't enough, the CWR thread also, at least from established precedent, allows just about anything that is high effort. If I'm in violation, I'll turn myself in to the other mods and await sentencing. If I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath.
There are fewer English people here than last time I was here.”
I never made such a claim, because whatever demographic change happened in a mere three years wouldn't be obvious just by looking.
Edit:
You asked what an ideal follow-up comment would look like. I suppose it would be someone engaging with one of those specific threads. For instance:
-
Someone arguing that my take on the Tate is philistine and I'm missing the point of conceptual art. I would be very skeptical of such a claim, but I'd engage with it.
-
Someone offering a counter-narrative on social trust in a neighborhood like Bromley. We've got plenty of Londoners on this site, and in this thread.
-
Someone with more economic expertise explaining why my "pint index" is a flawed metric or offering a better explanation for the price discrepancies. This has at least partially happened already.
-
Someone sharing their own experience of the "vibe shift" in London over the last few years.
If I'm wrong about anything, I seek to be corrected. I'm not wrong about this being CW, at the very least.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23hr ago
I suspect China's relationship dynamics are more related to gender asymmetry than divorce laws. Or at least it's a huge confounder that merits consideration.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23hr ago
It would seem like the "millionaire next door" approach would work plausibly for rich guys not quite rich enough to be public figures. Maybe that happens often enough (has golden handcuffs from startup acquisition, still drives a Prius), but I've never seen it explicitly called out as a strategy. If you're rich enough and a public figure such that Google knows who you are (doctors, lawyers), that seems harder.
Magusoflight
23hr ago
That’s fine, bring back the lash then. Have judges order public lashings. The effect will be similar, so long as delays in arrest - punishment aren’t too long
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
23hr ago
The soldier in the linked video (super interesting channel) mentions that the feeling of nearly dying is addicting and lead to beneficial life changes. Naturally, you have to ask “how can this be optimized”, and I concluded that the bunker experience is effectively already optimized.
Whatever type of body of water you want to fish from there is a dozen YouTube videos for
My big rec is to get your gear then go fishing and realize what you need / how you feel
I basically did the same thing on the South Florida coast and the biggest thing was getting out there and seeing what I enjoy
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