domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
I read someone here talk about deepening capital the other week and it created this mantra in my head: regard females, deepen capital.
The regard females part isn't very actionable since I think I've maxed that out, but the deepen capital part is.
So I've been on this rampage of cleaning my property and fixing stuff and thinking of renovations to do. Maybe even considering getting a mortgage to buy another house and seeing if I can exploit some tax advantages and maybe landlord maxx my current place.
It's borderline obsessing. Just gonna try scaling back to cleaning and doing maintenance until this little bout of entrepreneurial(?) zeal passes.
I'm rather astonished how many incentives the government gives you. Subsidized mortgages, deductible interest, depreciation of rental properties even if they're actually appreciating in the market, no capital gains taxes on flipping your primary. What in the world. Kind of silly not to be in this game with at least one property.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
P-Necromancer
1d ago
Ah, I don't necessarily disagree on any of this. To tell the truth I haven't followed these events closely at all -- my point was very narrow: 'I'm confident these claims are false, which makes it a lot harder to believe your other claims.' Not even saying the pro-Israel side doesn't do the same thing (though I can't immediately recall anything quite so blatant).
Probably best I not make a fool of myself commenting on Israel's internal politics, but sure, I'm not clear on what Israel expects their current actions to accomplish. I certainly don't like some possible answers. Your theory doesn't sound implausible to me.
If that is what's happening, it's a curious mirror of what's going on on the other side: Hamas depends on Israel's misbehavior to gain recruits and garner international sympathy while Netanyahu depends on Hamas's ability to recruit and garner international sympathy to push his voting public right. Not sure if that's actually an insight or just pedestrian inter/intra-group dynamics. (Pretty sure that was one of the reasons for eternal warfare in 1984, so it probably counts as a hackneyed truism by now.)
Yet, the loudest detractors steer the conversation towards the existence of the state of Israel instead of Netanyahu as the leader who oversaw this response. To me, that's the difference between credible detractors (Tech elite, European centrists, American Jews) and antisemites. (Progressive left, Muslim leaders). Antisemites are tempted by maximalist claims and their hate makes up for the lack of due diligence. "All Israelis are evil, always have been. All Gazans are being killed. All kids are being shot in the dick. No one is getting food." No nuance. Only hate.
Yeah, this makes sense. I object to a certain strain of common, virulent opposition with a loose relationship with truth -- certainly doesn't mean Israel's actions are unobjectionable.
I understand that no military ever actually wants transparency into any of their operations, but it doesn't seem like it can do all that much harm to the IDF at this stage; the more national and international pressure mounts to provide that transparency, the more suspicious the failure to do so will be.
oats_son
1d ago
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The world made a rule that ethnic cleansing was never justified under any circumstances.
A much more basic way to frame this moral precept would be:
All people who live within your borders are, and of right ought to be, citizens of your state, and the government of your state has equal responsibilities to them as to any other citizen. You can exclude people from entering your country, you can expel parts of your country (Malaysia/Singapore, India/Pakistan), but you can't treat certain people living in your country as non-citizens.
Israel has tried to find its way around this by creating two Palestinian bantustans and keeping them split, the non-viable non-contiguous territories providing a shred of cover that those living there will never have to be integrated into Israel's population, despite Israel's permanent control of the external policy of each enclave.
My point being that Israel has another path: re-educating and reconciling with the Palestinian civilian population such that they no longer support Hamas (or whoever).
Hamas doesn't get to do its permanent-war bit on its own. It requires mass support among Arabs, undermine that and there's no more Hamas.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1d ago
Hello fellow lurker. I used to be a leftist. Then the left changed. Now I consider myself a classical liberal.
I happen to agree with what you claim is the "Motte consensus", but I think most modern social justice "liberals" would agree, too.
- "Anti-meritocracy." Just like everybody likes the idea of free speech and nobody actually likes free speech, everyone likes the idea of meritocracy, but nobody actually likes it, especially for their children. The elite who created Harvard instituted admissions interviews 1922 so that they could keep the high-performing jews out. Now that Asians are the outperforming minority, they discriminate against Asians. More generally, elites consistently find ways to game the metrics of meritocracy so that we can live under a facade of meritocracy, which justifies their social status. In reality, our institutions love putting weights on the scales, and those who pass the "meritocratic" tests have been selected because their selection benefits the elites.
Note that here the social justice position is the anti-meritocratic one.
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People who believe they gained their position through meritocracy are less likely to be charitable to the less fortunate: Prompting people to attribute their success to skill or hard work lowers their willingness to share windfalls or support public goods.. As I read it, less likely to believe in a noblesse oblige. This is, to me, a classic symptom of American dysfunction: instead of thinking a la Henry Ford about the impacts of their greed on the less fortunate, the modern upper-class is happy to raise the rent on the rest of us until we can't pay anymore. (This is enabled by their ability to financialize, lobby, and snuff out actual market competition.)
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I would submit that the modern left in academia also dislikes meritocracy, but because it sets up a heirarchy. Example 1, Example 2
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On Individualism. The individualism/collectivist dichotomy is something that every society needs in moderation. Too much collectivism, and you get stuck in your current rut. Too much individualism, and you cannot solve collective action problems. Too much collectivism expresses itself as groupthink, stifling social pressure, following tyrants, and people voting for the "popular" candidate in elections. Too much individualism and you have a bunch of selfish psychopaths who are impossible to govern. To put this another way, collectivist meritocracy is why every Korean kid is pushed to go to the same colleges, but rampant individualism is why Russians and Americans cannot exit burning planes quickly, but Japanese can.
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Anti-individualism. I would assert that both the left and the right in the US are currently anti-individualist. The social justice left is collectivist in that it sees people as representatives of their demographics and in that it will brook no dissent. The moderate left is collectivist in that it believes that children should go to public schools for their education. The moderate right is collectivist in that it embraces orthodox religious and moral norms, and the radical right shuns leftist-adjacent behaviors and has its own shibboleths.
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But individualism is all highly relative. Any American plopped into Japan would struggle to maintain Japanese social norms, whether that individual be from the left or the right. There is a certain socialization and mindset that is inculcated in early schooling in more collectivist societies, and Americans don't get that in their kindergartens and elementary schools.
oats_son
1d ago
Agreed, but again, how is starving babies going to bring an army to its knees?
I'm not sure if I'm missing something here. Has there ever been a method devised that starves everyone except for exclusively babies? How is throwing every piece of a cow into a meat grinder going to make ground beef if there are bones inside the cow that don't make ground beef?
What does this look like? I don't know. But directionally, perhaps it's something like the British Raj. A civilizing mission is basically the only way to turn things around.
From where I'm standing, that looks literally impossible. Some dogs are just impossible and dangerous and they get put down, kind of a downer for this metaphor. You'd have to specify what that looks like instead of gesturing vaguely at it for me to take it seriously. How do you get from "kill all Jews which we hate with religious zealotry and take back the Holy Land which they stole from us 70 years ago" to "yeah 2 states are okay, I'm okay with giving up my important holy sites now"?
The latter might be a Pyrrhic victory if the rest of the world turns against Israel.
That might be happening anyway, so at some point that stops being a disincentive.
Losing western support would be bad for Israel, but I think it's unlikely it ever becomes truly friendless. Being the most intellectually advanced and militarily capable country in the middle east means there'll probably always be someone willing to do business with them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm not really interested in horse-trading and baby-splitting about what you think constitutes a war displacement and what constitutes a genocide, how many need to die before it constitutes a genocide rather than "ethnic cleansing with the hallmarks of genocide" as Poland's parliament termed the massacre of over 100,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia during the end stages of WWII by Ukrainian nationalists who wanted to make sure that those areas would be part of the "correct" country at the end of the war.*
But I'm not sure what the point of this argument you're making is. What is the upshot here of the Holocaust being different? What impact does it have on the world today, in terms of how people should or do act?
I don't even think Jews, generally speaking, are any more likely to maintain multiple passports or loyalties than anyone else in America, curving for differences in social class, education, urban/rural split. It's a common affectation.
As an aside, accusations of hypocrisy against Jews regarding Israel/Palestine are often misplaced. Highly detailed demographic breakdowns on the NYC mayoral primary show that Zohran Mamdani won a plurality of all Jewish voters in the primary, and 67% of Jewish voters under 45 (he finished second among Jews over 45). The astroturf campaign trying to paint Mamdani as anti-semitic is mostly driven by and targeted at non-Jews.
*Learning about this really changed my view of the Nazis, in the sense that I'm still confused by the idea that the Nazis didn't actually have that tight of control over the interior of the Ukraine, that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army could still have weapons and congresses and stuff.
And also that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army would have weapons and use them on the Polish rather than on the Germans OR the Soviets! On the one hand, it's almost a kind of grimly admirable focus, there's a sort of cold-blooded truth to it: their actions did change the borders of Poland and Ukraine on a permanent basis. But it's just unimaginable to me, I'm American, I consider all racism not based on US census categories to be so junior varsity as to be pointless. Don't they realize they're all just non-hispanic whites?
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Sure, this is a stupid example- and we can do without them(or with them being prohibitively expensive). But there's numerous jobs(many in construction) in which every single person who does it long term is permanently on probation because they are legally required to have jobs and can't find other ones. Lots of much-harder-to-do-without agricultural jobs, too.
Gaashk
1d ago
picking strawberries is still a job that really sucks
I've heard that mentioned a lot, as a reason it's so, so important to have slaves. It just seems incredibly weak. Coal, sure. It was super important. But... think of the strawberries??
nomenym
1d ago
The world made a rule that ethnic cleansing was never justified under any circumstances. Unfortunately, the Palestinians evolved a culture to exploit that rule. If they could only be so belligerent that the only way to defeat them would be by ethnic cleansing, then they win by default no matter how militarily superior their opponent. This is effectively the propaganda game they play with the West. It's almost like they're daring Israel to ethnically cleanse them, and then double-dog daring them, and then triple-dog daring them. They know that if Israel breaks the one rule against trying an ethnic cleansing, then they'll lose Western support. They intentionally do not want Israel to have another option. There is no peace, no two state solution, no compromise. If Hamas can just persevere and stay the course then they'll eventually win. Israel can either carry on essentially at war with Hamas for the foreseeable future, or it can just take the risk and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. The latter might be a Pyrrhic victory if the rest of the world turns against Israel.
I too am convinced that that many 3rd parties reporting on Israel are lying (outright or by omission). However, the information blackout from Israel makes it hard to defend them.
Hamas has lost. Israel's existential threat comes from Iran, which has temporarily been rendered sterile. There is no plausible reason for fighting a war with medieval siege tactics. Not anymore. Sure, many who're accusing them of genocide are antisemitic. But, it should not be that hard to refute it. The burden of proof is on Israel. There's little indication that the majority of Israelis want a final solution to the Gaza problem. Israelis haven't so much as articulated an endgame, let along enacted it. In this framing, Israel's current actions don't make sense, unless viewed as Netanyahu's actions.
IMO, Netanyahu's interests and Israel's interests stopped coinciding after the attacks on Iran's nuclear sites. Hamas's leaders were dead. Iran's nukes were gone. Hezbollah was over. Gazan supply lines were wiped. Israel was safe. So what's next for Netanyahu ? He's a dead man walking. He was thought to be on the way out in 2020. He swindled (all is fair in love and war) Benny Gantz into a 1 sided coalition and through morbid luck got a national emergency handed to him. His approval ratings are on a slow decline in 2025 after a post-tragedy resurgence. Democracies have a track record of ousting wartime leaders as soon as the war is over. Netanyahu won't be an exception.*
Netanyahu wants his problems to be Israel's problems. As long as the conflict remains, he can keep finding exceptions to stay in power. Global anti-semitism pushes Israel to the right, strengthening him**. He is the only one who benefits from a protracted conflict. Even today, there is sufficient internal pushback against Netanyahu within Israel.
Yet, the loudest detractors steer the conversation towards the existence of the state of Israel instead of Netanyahu as the leader who oversaw this response. To me, that's the difference between credible detractors (Tech elite, European centrists, American Jews) and antisemites. (Progressive left, Muslim leaders). Antisemites are tempted by maximalist claims and their hate makes up for the lack of due diligence. "All Israelis are evil, always have been. All Gazans are being killed. All kids are being shot in the dick. No one is getting food." No nuance. Only hate.
Either way, their detractors have served. The ball is now in Israel's court. Sympathies are wearing thin. Netanyahu better show proof refuting it, or his time might be up. Hopefully, the Israel's people are able to pin the stink of genocide onto him. Otherwise, this will cement the end of Israel's post-holocaust sympathy.
* famous last words. There always seems to be a Netanyahu exception. Slimy bastard that man
** and Bennett, but that's besides the point
I disagree with your definition of Individualism, the word is usually meant to describe something more like "every man for himself." I do agree with the statement that "every man should be judged for his own capabilities and qualities." I also agree on the Meritocracy front - we should have the best people in the toughest jobs getting the biggest compensation.
I suspect JD Vance would agree with these two statements as well.
Where I disagree with you is the idea that this would apply to membership in a nation. It's really odd to me that you see the two as connected so I will try to make analogies and you tell me where you think things are dissimilar.
Membership in a family is not based on meritocracy. There aren't game shows where kids compete against each other to have the best parents. There aren't quarterly reviews of a child's grammar school progress lest it turns out a child is not good enough for their current last name and have to move down the road to join the Johnson's.
For most people, membership in their family is based on happy accidents of their parent's geographical proximity and how well they got along.
People can join a family without without genetics, too. There's adoption of young kids. There's adoption of older kids. There are people who declare themselves brothers as adults because they enjoy similar interests and look out for each other. There is marriage.
Within a family there is a hierarchy and meritocracy to an extent. Parents are usually the most competent members of the family and are rewarded with the majority of decision-making. But being a member of a family is not a measure of merit. For most people it's something that just happens to them and even if they are disabled and need extra help they usually don't run the risk of getting disowned.
A nation is like a family in this way. Membership in a nation is generally an accident of geography and family tree. There are ways of getting adopted in, but this requires agreeing to conform into the nation's culture/mindset and should be a very limited, personal, and slow process. A child can't just crawl in through your window and declare they are your child now. Adopting a child is deliberate, adopting a new citizen is also deliberate.
Within a nation, there should be merit. The best people should be governing, doctoring, etc. But I strongly disagree with any conception of American citizenship that perceives it as a reward.
It's utterly ridiculous if you take it to the logical conclusion. Every year, let's send our bottom 20th percentile to Mexico and let in their top 20th percentile! No, there just isn't a hierarchy among nations like that.
American citizenship is not a prize, is not fungible, is not tradable. American citizenship is an identity. American citizens are the group of people who elect American leaders who in turn make decisions to prioritize the well-being of American citizens over everyone else. There are smart Americans, stupid Americans, lazy Americans, hard working Americans. Our leaders represent us all. Or at least, they should.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I'm sure the USA thought the Vietcong were too weak to have a chance of victory.
And the viet cong didn't win. The north Vietnamese Army did, yes, eventually, against South Vietnam(not the US; the USA had actually withdrawn after assurances that North Vietnam would respect the sovereignty of the south and then chosen not to intervene when they predictably broke that promise), but not the viet cong.
Or the British/Russians/USA vs their flavor of Afghani opposition.
Of course what actually happened was getting tired of propping up the local puppet government and withdrawing to leave it to its fate, which was to get overthrown by militant groups which had consistently lost to the imperial army.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
Israel exercises all the power over Palestinians that a national government would,
I can only assume this is a joke statement. So, holding the power of government over Gaza, Israel decided to redirect all of the resources there into a total war with...themselves?
I feel like this series of events has culture war implications.
SIG has absolutely been trying to leverage the fact there is a culture war to shout down people who now believe their guns are unsafe.
SIG lost two of those cases because they shipped a trigger shoe that did not have a Glock-style trigger safety, which would have hypothetically prevented an uncommanded discharge that occurred due to an undescribed mechanism.
The ultimate problem with the P320 is that it's a case study in extreme cost cutting.
Once upon a time, there was the P250. It was a very modern handgun, with a very mechanically simple firing mechanism. This mechanism is inherently extremely safe for the same reason it's safe on revolvers: the trigger pull is heavy, long, and even if the hammer let go and hit the firing pin somehow it couldn't hit the bullet hard enough to fire it. You don't need any other safeties[1] on a gun like this.
But the same things that made the gun safe and simple to manufacture also made it basically dead on arrival- the trigger pull is long and heavy. Not great for accuracy, or shooting all that quickly, or particularly usable by people who don't have a strong trigger finger. Understandably, sales weren't great.
Now, because modern guns cost far more in tooling to make than non-modern guns, SIG might have been in a bit of a hole financially. The plastic grips and triggers[2] for the P250 may be dirt-cheap to make on a per-unit basis, but the moulds for that plastic are incredibly expensive. To a lesser degree, this is also true of the barrels and slides (when you consider the CAD work for the outside and everything forward of the magazine would need no changes).
So SIG's engineers set to work designing a new firing control mechanism to fit in the same footprint as the old one[3]. By doing that, they could sell it as an upgrade for P250 owners, and recover the costs of that tooling- so they reused the maximum number of parts they could get away with and off it went to consumers.
It's at this point the problems start showing up:
[1] The new firing control mechanism is fundamentally less safe than the old one- they went from a gun that's completely incapable of firing a bullet at rest to one that is intentionally designed to do so (which in a vacuum is a perfectly valid thing to do: it makes the trigger pull much better than it is on competing pistols). So, design decisions that were fine on the old gun are all of a sudden not fine on the new gun- now they need a bunch of additional safeties to make sure the firing pin absolutely can't let go when the gun is dropped or when you pull the slide back a little.
This is what the second recall did- they milled out a bit of the slide and added another safety to it so the striker couldn't drop unless the trigger was pulled.
[2] The new firing control mechanism only needs a fraction of the trigger pull force, and a fraction of the total travel distance, to release the striker. Because inertia means things in motion stay in motion, a heavy enough trigger may have sufficient inertia that when the gun stops (by hitting the floor at a particular angle after being dropped) it still has enough potential energy to release the striker on its own. Now, in a vacuum, having a heavy trigger is a perfectly valid thing- if your gun can't fire until the trigger travels a great distance back under 10 pounds of force, there's no problem- but it stops being fine when the trigger no longer has to come that far back and must have much less force applied to it to activate.
This is what the first recall did- they replaced the heavy P250 plastic trigger with a much lighter one.
[3] The new firing control mechanism makes engineering compromises to stay within the footprint of the old gun. Those compromises include things like the effectiveness of mechanical safeties, as well as requiring certain parts be held to much more exact tolerances (because the size they'd normally be isn't possible on a retrofit like this). Now, if SIG kept making those parts to the initial standard, that's fine- but more exact tolerances cost more money. So, if you tell your subcontractors they can take shortcuts, and they do, a design that was just barely safe if made to those initial tolerances is now no longer safe, so the guns fire on their own.
This is why they're fucked now. They've sold so many, at so low a price (enabled both by being able to reuse tooling and aggressive subcontracting), that doing a recall is likely financially infeasible. SIG doesn't know which guns had parts made by which contractor or when they were made, so they can't guarantee that any gun is safe, and taking them all back to put parts made that are actually to standard in the first place is conceivably going to cost them more money than they ever made from the guns in the first place.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Uh, who told you ethnic cleansing is in the 'never again' category? As long as you don't seek to actually wipe out the losing side, it's ignored unless you're a US adversary. The soviet union carried out ethnic cleansing regularly within its own borders, and that trend continued with its breakup. Azerbaijan is being allowed to ethnically cleanse territory captured from Armenia. US backed forces ethnically cleansed parts of Iraq and Syria.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
in all likelihood apolitical and religiously moderate, if not irreligious
X to doubt. Not just because it's Gaza but because intemperate religion and radical politics are very appealing to the greatly distressed.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
we can finally stop sending them massive amounts of direct and indirect aid.
Aren't you Turkish?
birb_cromble
1d ago
Doesn't the service variant have a manual safety?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
How much more suspicious activity and lucky coincidences would there need to be to convince you (if you're a current denier) that Epstein was murdered/"allowed" to kill himself?
Because from what I see there's a lot of weird things already. The cameras for in front of his cell are down, guards apparently failed to check in on him (apparently both of them fell asleep despite this being their job), his roommate he's supposed to have for suicide watch is moved out earlier that day without replacement, and two staff members get accused of falsifying records only for the charges to get dropped silently two years after over new years.
Now the one camera that was working has footage released from it only for it to be likely edited video that doesn't even provide a meaningful perspective even if it wasn't edited (so why is it changed and had parts removed? Was something incidentally caught on one of the cameras they didn't shut down?) and a full minute missing along with the other smaller possible cuts, a cut that was completely unmentioned in the inspector general's report but suddenly shows up now. With an excuse that the "missing minute" is a standard reset and the recordings aren't operating at that time yet it now appears to exist according to government leakers.
That same day Epstein was also allowed to make an unmonitored call on a line intended for attorneys only to a non-attorney, with the regional director saying "We don't know what happened on that phone. It could have potentially lead to the incident, but we don't - we will never know" which is another oddity. He claimed he was calling his mother ... his mother has been dead almost two decades before then.
Then afterwards, Epstein's own lawyers contested the official finding and hired their own pathologist who said the injuries were more indicative of homicide by strangulation than normal self hanging.
Then of course we have things like Epstein's sweetheart deal maker Alex Acosta being a literal high level member of the government stepping down only a month before the suicide. Was he distancing himself? Cause that's a mighty odd coincidence too to leave right around that time.
And we get told all sorts of things about having files ready for release, only for them to apparently not actually exist like all the files sitting on Pam Bondi's desk. We have leaks of multiple high level politicians (including the current president refusing to release the records who also resigned over the federal government when Epstein died and hired Acosta earlier) with close connections to him. We have intelligence operatives and high level officials trying hard both directly and indirectly as anonymous sources to deny accusations he was working for them which many powerful people are trying to tout as evidence. Which fair, I expect them to deny if it's not true. But also I expect them to lie if it is true.
Like oh really spy agencies, half your job is to be skilled liars and we're just supposed to take your word for it. People can't be this lacking in self-awareness right? So why do so many of the powerful people with connections to Epstein apparently lack this understanding and think it's compelling counter evidence by itself?
Like obviously none of these things in their own are proof by themselves. If they were, we wouldn't be having a discussion like this we would just say "look at the 100% proof it happened". But a lot of truthful things don't have 100% proof. I'm pretty sure OJ Simpson is a murderer despite not having seen it myself and him being found not guilty. I'm pretty sure Casey Anthony killed her daughter. There's a really strong likelihood Micheal Jackson molested some children. Carole Baskin (although a bit weaker of a suspicion) might have been involved in the disappearance of her husband. None of these have hard conclusive evidence, yet none of these are odd to believe.
And just like those examples, there's a whole lot of weird oddities and coincidences and suspicious behavior around Epstein, his death, and the information on him and his connections that it seems pretty reasonable to suspect his supposed suicide wasn't entirely legit. Outside of 100% proof, how much more would be needed before it stops being "just a conspiracy theory"?
birb_cromble
1d ago
If somebody can show me a set of manipulations that can set off the primer without touching the trigger, SIG should face criminal charges.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
There is a moral universe of difference between ambushing patrols in the jungle versus using your children as human shields, or holding a gun to the stomachs of your own pregnant women to threaten your enemy into compliance. The latter in particular literally assumes that your enemy is morally superior to you.
I address that in the original post. He shoves a screw into the trigger assembly. I don't consider that no reason, but I could entertain the notion that it is indicative of a deficient design.
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