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Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7hr ago
Might be true, might not - one thing I am sure of after reading Caro's biography is that absolutely nothing LBJ said about himself could be taken at face value.
Ah, sorry. That's on me, then, for assuming that Ligotti was not a leftist based on a very shallow knowledge of him.
That said, I don't know if he is more of a leftist in the typical modern highly online sense of the word, or if he is a socialist in the same way that H.P. Lovecraft supported some flavors of socialism and supported FDR while having extremely right-wing social attitudes even by the standards of his era. Lovecraft favored a sort of technocratic socialism that would ensure his own kind of people a decent living while keeping out the people whom he found undesirable. Not surprising given that he spent much of his adult life in poverty during the Great Depression as a random kid from a broken-down family who probably felt himself to be an aristocrat at heart and had a viscerally racist reaction to pretty much everyone other than people whose stock was from North-West Europe.
But Ligotti is not Lovecraft, and I should not let their surface-level similarities make me assume things about Ligotti.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8hr ago
It's an interesting question of why the Chinese never switched to an alphabet.
My take is that it allowed mutual intelligibility between various Sinitic languages. You can have a man speaking Mandarin write a text and a man speaking only Cantonese or Wu will be able to read it. It will sound weird, like German translated into English word-for-word (yesterday is a female patient in the clinic come that such fear before tooth doctors had that she during the examination to scream begun has then upstood and out the building run is), but it will be legible. Without it a unified China would've been very unstable.
Now that everyone is taught Mandarin it might be easier to switch to bopomofo, but this would separate the newer generations from China's massive literary legacy.
ABigGuy4U
8hr ago
People who were vehemently pushing BLM and Defund the Police slogans a month before suddenly became totally cool with the idea of a justified shoot
Ironically one of the loopier members of the BLM movement, Shaun King, was the only one who actually took a principled stand and said he thought the Babbit killing was a bad shoot and an act of police brutality.
AstralMateus
8hr ago
We should start thinking about raising the birth rates as a practical, logistic and technological problem to solve and not a moral commandment to enforce upon society. And I think Caplan's approach to convincing people to have kids is a step in the right direction.
First, some things have to be be acknowledged. Pro-natalists will not get people to have more kids with moral arguments.
For most, having kids is a risk-reward calculation, and, given freedom of choice, at current levels of expected investment in terms of time, money and effort, less and less people are going to have kids, and TFRs will continue to fall. It just seems like a bad deal to many people – they don't want to give up their free time and life's little pleasures for 5-10-15 years (depending on the number of kids) for dubious benefit. The pro-natalist side may reply that "it may seem like a bad deal now, but your whole perspective on life will change once you have kids!". Well, what if it won't? The life described by you and other people down the thread seems downright miserable to non-parents. Once you have a kid, you're stuck spending most of your time and extra income on them at least for the next 10 years. That is a huge downside risk that you're asking people to take as, essentially, a leap of faith.
Trying to convince young people with spiritual arguments (from Christian pro-natalism to vaguely gesturing towards the fate of the West, human race and the infinite) is laughable. Ain't no one actually, truly believes in those things or cares about them, to the point where it influences their actions, and the minority that does already has kids. Every young Catholic I've met uses contraception, and a few have had abortions. The genie is out of the bottle and it's never coming back. Nor is the "lonely cat lady" scaremongering effective, for that matter.
You have to meet people where they are at, and where they're at is a world of hedonism and infinite alternatives. Unless you have a way take away their freedom, which you don't, you have to sweeten the deal. Alter the risk-reward calculus. Make it drastically cheaper to hire help (perhaps by mass-importing Philippina maids, Singapore style, with no path to citizenship). Offer massive tax credit and subsidize childcare. Somehow convince people that they can relax and not care about extracurriculars and mostly let their kids entertain themselves, which is what Caplan writes about. Create artificial wombs. Whatever. Make having kids somehow take less money and, most importantly, less time and effort. People can spare the money. The hand-wringing about kids being too expensive is mostly cope. But they will not surrender their time, and every attempt to take it from them forcefully will be rejected at the ballot box.
The pro-natalists have to do something other than shake their fists at people and tell them to "suck it up and just do hard things like your ancestors did". No one will "just". No one has ever "just". The left had to learn this painful lesson in the recent years, and it's high time for the pro-natalist right to do the same.
(This rant is mostly aimed at the pro-natalist discourse I see day in and day out in my feed, not your post in particular. If it is not obvious, I sincerely wish them luck, it's not a boo outgroup post)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8hr ago
I think if we're talking about the classical antecedents of modern leftism -- the anarchism of Proudhon, or the work of Marx and Engels -- I don't think that stuff can be described as anti-natalist or anti-life. I think the humanist tendencies in Marxism are generally underestimated and underappreciated by critics of Marxism. But it's clear that now, today, there's a strong link between anti-natalism and leftism: you can't have kids because it's destroying the environment, you can't have kids because it's racist and colonialist, etc.
It's harder to think of examples of anti-life attitudes on the right. Maybe you could talk about the sorts of Gnostic and neo-Platonist Christian sects that were popular in late antiquity and the early middle ages: you must abhor the flesh, abhor reproduction, abhor pleasure. But were they really "rightist" just because they were religious? Does religion automatically make you a rightist? Or is the left/right spectrum inadequate to describe their views?
And then there is Nietzsche [...] he probably would not have found it that hard to get married and have kids if he had really wanted to.
Nietzsche was by most accounts what we would call, in modern parlance, a "weirdo autist". His few romantic advances towards women were rejected. (Famously, a woman named Lou Salomé spurned him in favor of their mutual friend Paul Rée.) Allegedly he was once alone with a prostitute and he fled from the room when she exposed her genitalia, although that story may be apocryphal. In his later years he seems to have consigned himself to the fact that he wasn't marriage material:
"Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition."
In the opening pages of Twilight of the Idols, he addresses your central question directly:
"You really have to stretch out your fingers and make a concerted attempt to grasp this amazing piece of subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, who are an interested party, a bone of contention, even, and not judges; not by the dead for other reasons. - It is an objection to a philosopher if he sees a problem with the value of life, it is a question mark on his wisdom, an un-wisdom.
AKiwi
8hr ago
The problem with free markets is that they require a modern state.
Modernity provides the scale and technology to enable now commonplace and relatively undistortionary forms of taxation (e.g. income, sales) with ease and precision. Premodern societies struggled to raise taxes in non-distortionary ways, because anything they taxed needed to be highly legible to a tax collector. Hence, the widespread practice of building taxes becoming taxes on windows, gross floor area, and so on - leading to predictable results of fewer windows and slim but tall buildings in those areas. The most effective way of generating long-term revenue was in the form of tariffs levied at trade checkpoints. ~20% of the British State's revenue during the Napoleonic Wars was from customs duties, so you can imagine there was little incentive to reduce trade barriers even then, despite whatever Adam Smith had to say.
Premodern states simply weren't powerful enough to enable free markets. The local baron was powerful enough to enforce his idiosyncrasies within his domain. Certain products were restricted for his use, others might be required to be produced in a certain way, while 'his' peasants were tied to the land. A king attempting to change this would be attempting to upend feudalism, and find himself killed or forced to agree to limit his powers. In fact, the incentives usually ran the other way, with the crown being encouraged to grant certain monopolies or rights in return for support for new taxes or causes. Meanwhile, while Guilds notoriously fixed prices and restricted supply, they were sufficiently embedded in the social fabric that the King would find breaking them up or restricting their behaviour essentially impossible. Their dealings would be almost completely illegible to a premodern state, who anyway lacked a police force loyal to the crown able to punish cases of the guild breaking the legs, say, of a non-compliant journeyman.
Free markets are reliant on trust. For a village, the trust networks are already there, but at scale, what's needed is homogeneity and stability. Coinage was often inconsistent, and subject to frequent debasement. Only the modern state has the reach to provide consistent governance and enforcement for contracts, arbitrate disputes and so on.
Finally, only modern economies are sufficiently productive to allow free markets without frequent bread riots and the demand for price controls.
Yes, you can explain free markets to an intelligent 17-year-old, but only in modern times could it be anything more than a thought experiment.
The politics of male envy are interesting. Everyone knows how women act around sexual competition, around women more beautiful, younger, more skilled at seduction. It’s a meme, a joke, a retold story, a familiar motif. Men are more private about their envy, they redirect it, channel it in different and sometimes more subtle ways; they are more embarrassed of it, more shameful of it. One of the most interesting things you can see is a man interact with a man who has fucked his girlfriend or wife, or even with any man who has fucked more than him. There are things men yearn for but can never admit. I will refrain from further judgment, given the demographics of this forum, but I find it fascinating.
I very much enjoyed the Rivals show on Hulu (Disney+ in the UK). They advertised it very heavily here, but it did very well; everybody was talking about it.
2rafa
9hr ago
There are also pretty well founded arguments that periods in the Roman Empire had - especially in Rome proper - relatively free markets for many goods and to some extent land. Market capitalism in various forms has existed for at least a couple of thousand years.
2rafa
9hr ago
There was that famous post that GPT-2 would have been possible with early 2000s and possibly even late 90s supercomputer compute with the right optimizations, so it language models surely count as one of these inventions.
Lizzardspawn
9hr ago
A market has no objectives aside from matching buyers and sellers.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
9hr ago
We probably have different views on what schizophrenia is.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
9hr ago
Yeah but my understanding was that it's extremely inefficient over anything past like a couple inches?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
9hr ago
WOAH I had no idea! You just blew my mind.
Can we do it efficiently though? Is the only problem the danger?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9hr ago
I'd put it under the broader virtue of Adaptability in the same way I think that having an adaptable diet is a virtue.
Be vegan or Paleo or keep keto or bread and water. That discipline is a virtue. But so is being the kind of person that can eat something anywhere without being sick. When your diet causes you to not to be adaptable to being out of your comfort zone it ceases to be a virtue and becomes a vice.
In the same way, being able to pack light is a virtue, even if doing so in every case isn't the best choice. Only being able to travel with multiple checked bags is bad, so is being the kind of person who comes to a formal wedding in cargo pants because you refused to pack anything else.
Idk I'm working on it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9hr ago
I think hyper palatable foods represent a real hazard to the health of tge general population , and it’s something I think needs to be dealt with on a policy level alongside providing good public nutrition training in schools. It simply cannot be good for a nation to have 75% of the food in a typical grocery store be the highly processed hyper palatable foods that drive obesity, especially if you have them in single serve ready to eat formats that are found in every venue open to the public. America is a nation of snacking, and any place you go there will be snacks available for sale, even when it should not make sense. Do you really need to be able to buy a bag of chips (that’s actually 4 servings) at a hardware or clothing store? It’s weird to think about.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
9hr ago
Depending on the charger you can actually wireless charge a phone with a 1cm air gap between the charger and your phone.
And if you want to see wireless power transmission over long (many meters) distances then this MIT demo is basically the best out there I know of, even though technically it's to show dipole radiation and not power transfer. Also it's a very good demonstration that you don't need to have a complete circuit for electricity to flow.
Most people, even the scientifically inclined, have absolutely zero idea of how electricity really works. And yet their vote counts just as much as mine... (yes I am salty about this)
No_one
9hr ago
WDYM you don't live in hog country. They live literally everywhere. You just need to be patient.
with no winning flavor to save it.
Sounds like most fish to me tbh. We commonly eat carp in eastern Europe and it too doesn't have that much flavor either.
It's not bad but the breading does a lot of lifting.
dr_analog
razorboy
9hr ago
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
9hr ago
YouTube autogenerated subtitles are fine if you want to watch some actual fishing guides. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qe69lsqX3u0 or just paste "ловля толстолобика" into the search box.
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
Ok but skepticism about the natural course of reproduction is almost the sine qua non of progressivism(and there are no non-progressive leftists today, or very few). Progressivism was all about eugenics, originally- and it continues to be about birth control and transhumanism.
This seems to tie into a deeper division in the west, that of a telos, whereby creatures(defined broadly as 'part of the material universe') have their purpose not set by themselves. The right in the west basically believes in this; continuing itself is a telos of human life. The left in the west broadly doesn't; the purpose of human life is to do whatever it wants. There's a theistic/nontheistic division but which comes first? My philosophical commitment to the idea of a telos comes from my theism but there are many whose theism was derived from their belief in telos. In turn this ties into the commitments to stability and continuity vs individualism and self growth.
Under a 'your purpose is to do what you want' framework obviously that can't be wrong, because it's subjective. Yes, most leftists would be skeptical of a young woman claiming she wants to take care of babies and bake, but that's what false consciousness is about- it's not wrong to want that, she's just wrong about what she wants. It's an epicycle, not a real course correction. Contrast a framework which believes in telos- if what you want is to 'advocate' then you are wrong for writing off just being normal. You 'make a difference in the world' by fulfilling your appointed task, which probably isn't something particularly notable.
There's far less charitable ways to phrase these things, obviously. But the core of conservatism is this idea that, yeah, you kinda just have to, circumstances beyond your control have spoken. See the trans debate- the core of the conservative objection is 'drop your pants in front of a mirror- you see a penis? Yeah, it means you have to be male. It doesn't matter if you're sure you'd rather be a girl. Sometimes you have to do the things you have to do.'. It's why normiecons don't get conspicuously upset about child support laws even when they suck for individual men 'supporting their kids is what dads do. Suck it up, it's your job.' or think that unwanted pregnancies don't justify an abortion 'yeah, moms put their child's needs before their own wants. Get over it, that's what you are now.'.
I support the dictatorship of the universe. No good comes from defying it. Progressives simply think it's unfair that being male means being male- after all, you didn't get to pick. That's why they're so obsessed with consent all the time.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9hr ago
Seconding @pigeonburger, I'm not even packing light! I always have a laptop (Macbook Pro, not even a slim one) and iPad. I'll usually have two pairs of shoes in the bag (running shoes and dress shoes). Running clothes, dressier clothes for work, a hat for running, a warm hat for chilly days, and more.
I'm with you on overpacking for driving trips because it just doesn't matter - throwing another bag in the car is pretty much the same thing as doing one fewer. On flying trips though, it's just unreasonably convenient to have the soft-sided bag to avoid ever needing to even gate-check a bag. I wouldn't quite go so far as calling it a virtue to figure out travel economy, but it's something in that direction.
TeknOShEeP
10hr ago
Wireless power transmission is very much already a thing, you do it with powerful microwaves.
The issue is any suitably powerful and efficient means of wirelessly transmitting energy is indistinguishable from a death ray should some unfortunate soul happen to stumble into the emission cone.
They have lots of languages in China. Most Chinese people historically didn't speak Mandarin and had no use for Mandarin speech transcribed one phoneme at a time. Characters that mean entire words are quite useful as a common written language in a nation that is so pluralistic that most people lack a common spoken language with people outside of their local region.
This is true even in the modern era. Chairman Mao learned Mandarin as an adult and it shows in his strange accent and phrasing. Like almost everyone, he grew up speaking his local language, not a common national language. But any text written by any Chinese person would be understood by him.
Today Chinese schools demand students speak the common language in class. Outside of school many still speak in local languages which are entirely different than Mandarin. I've seen shanghaiese people switch to shanghaiese to prevent people from other regions and foreigners from understanding them. Rudely right in front of everyone obviously talking about us.
But yeah, bit odd they didn't think to also make a phoneme based script so they could write out their local languages. I was going to say they actually have that, but Google tells me that was invented in the 20th century. And even the Koreans had periods in which hangul was banned and all writing was mandatory Chinese only.
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