domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
DirtyWaterHotDog
3d ago
It doesn't work because his name is pronounced : "Mum-daani". MudMaani doesn't have the same ring to it.
johnfabian
3d ago
I finished four books over my holiday, including Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire which I wrote a short review of on reddit
FtttG
3d ago
Kind of sounds like a smaller-scale version of Mattress Girl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_That_Weight)), without any sexual contact between complainant and defendant alleged to have taken place.
gattsuru
3d ago
And the year-long Floyd-specific admin-motivated rule against promotion of violence. And everything that hit politicalcompassmemes. And the other cases where it was never clear exactly what motivated admins to intervene, it just happened.
And while I'm not impressed by the Joos-posting, I'll notice that the alternative at reddit was a poster getting AEO'd for merely looking like he was triple-parenthesising.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
A person who travels to another country to end their life has the agency that they can commit suicide the normal way.
I donāt advocate for putting cancer patients on a list of prohibited firearms possessors, even if I think them killing themselves is a bad thing.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Well yes, it exists in relation to prevailing life paths is my point- Iām merely disputing the direction of causation.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Itās in the Bible.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhÅ«yÄt, durjano badhyatÄį¹ sadÄ, baddho'nyÄn nibandhÄyet
3d ago
Fwiw, the slatestarcodex reddit is terrible now, it's full of bad ai takes, I think we did the right thing.
Hang on, are we using the same forum? themotte.org?
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3d ago
I once thought about whether writing original articles might be a way to attract a better audience, the way many organically found econlib and ssc, like I did.
Reddit will only swim leftwards, there are fewer "based" people there, you don't want excessive sneerclub attention.
As for how bad it is, Gina Carano got fired by Disney for normie boomer cuckservative posting, she recently settled with Disney as Musk was happy to foot the bill, every single post about it there is actively hostile.
I'm afraid, if we go back, people will paint a target, or at least the self censorship will neuter quite a bit of what we do.
I feel that the rationalist ideas are played out, we have gone through the bulk of the rat ideas, the vision for me is something new that goes beyond what we already have.
And props to zorba, my last week's comment about the internet being concentrated forgot to include reddit, having your own platform makes you sovereign, it's worth the troubles.
Fwiw, the slatestarcodex reddit is terrible now, it's full of bad ai takes, I think we did the right thing.
DradisPing
3d ago
At this moment in the US there are far more people with obesity than with cancer.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
3d ago
Damn, I never knew yud wrote about quantum mechanics. Can you please tell me more about it.
Throwaway05
3d ago
It's both true and not true. If you give men an unlimited stipend and no consequences they'll go to strip clubs and buy hookers constantly. They probably know it's bad for them, but well people do shit that's bad for them all the damn time.
Dating apps are an equivalent for women, a constant parade of male attention and access to men they wouldn't have otherwise who in truth have no interest in them. A decent subset will abuse that, with intention or without. Eventually society and obligation will make them circle back (well for most).
Some may have insight into it or not.
"I want to fuck the prom king" isn't irrational when given permission to do so. It may be common but usually they grow out of it and it's a matter of when.
DradisPing
3d ago
What drives such a belief? Do you think that drugs care about the moral pulchritude of those taking them?
There's a common religious belief that suffering is holy and morally required. You see this a lot with Catholics in particular. They will lecture people with claims like "quitting smoking using nicotine lozenges isn't really quitting smoking". Somehow results don't count, it's the suffering that's important.
Also in modern society the left expresses purity through diet.
Additionally believing that fat people are gross because they are sick and unhealthy doesn't jive with a lot of modern views. You aren't supposed to be weirded out by people's medical conditions.
So the view that obesity is a moral failing is popular. This has the added effect of letting healthy weight people feel morally superior.
The idea that a medication can safely reduce appetite is jarring. That implies that their feelings of moral superiority were unjustified and kind of immoral.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
It could be explained idealogically, but there's a simpler answer that also explains "why did Mississippi fail so hard for so long then?" and "why is Mississippi the standout and not all the red states?"
The top of the Urban Institute list for 4th grade reading is Mississippi. Number 2 is Lousiana, number 3 is Florida, number 6 Kentucky. Mississippi isn't the only Red State doing good; it's not even the only standout. Mississippi is most notable because it was the worst before.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3d ago
So I had a cousin commit suicide this year. I don't know the exact means and methods he used, seemed garish to ask at his funeral, and frankly it doesn't change anything to me how he did it. He suffered into his 50's with mental health issues, and I can only assume the ruins of the life he was still inhabiting overwhelmed him. I wish he hadn't done it. I wish I could see him again, have a cigar, and shoot the shit for another evening. I wish it wasn't so hard for him to exist. But I can't change it.
The pain it caused in his mother, who he saw all the time, and his sister, who he saw less often being states away, was beyond words. That said, as nightmarish as that act was to them, there at least was no 3rd party to the act to complicate their feelings of grief. There were no accomplices who gave him advice, walked him through the act, supplied him with means and methods, or even just did it for him. When all was said and done, he took all the guilt for the act to the grave with him, and saved his family the further grief of having anyone else to be angry with, anyone else's actions to judge.
I can accept that some people just want out. I can accept that though it may be painful for their families, their decisions about what to do with their life is theirs to make. I don't think I can accept third parties being involved, making it easier, "normalizing" it, and complicating the grief of an already unimaginable difficult thing to cope with.
Before I was born, a culture war was fought over ending life, and the defenders of it ran on the slogan of "Safe, Legal and Rare". 63 million abortions in the United States later, it's clear this was just a slogan. I don't know why I would trust these same people a second time.
Well, not me personally, I wasn't alive for "Safe, Legal and Rare", but you know what I mean.
2rafa
3d ago
Thatās because itās the easiest topic to grandstand on because it gets almost no opposition. Even our few trans posters have had very heterodox opinions on the subject, and everyone else (again, including the liberals and leftists) tends to be opposed to the standard libleft position on the subject.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
I'm rather torn on this issue.
On the one hand, I do think that people have a fundamental right to commit suicide if they want to, and I think it would be healthy if we as a culture took some steps to demythologize suicide. Specifically, it would be nice if we could revoke its status as a "superweapon"; all too often, certain unsavory individuals will use "you're making me suicidal!" as an emotional manipulation tactic to immediately end all rational discussion and assert the priority of their own immediate desires. If these outbursts were met with indifference instead of panic, maybe people wouldn't be so quick to go there. Alan Watts once mentioned that he would occasionally get people coming up to him and telling him that they were suicidal, and his response was always, "Ok! Well, you can do that if you want". And in the majority of cases, the person would immediately start feeling better upon hearing this; it simply "deflated" whatever problem they had become fixated on. What happens sometimes is that people get stuck in a powerful negative feedback loop where they feel suicidal, and then they realize that that desire is bad and wrong and they shouldn't want to do that, which makes them feel even worse, which makes them more suicidal, and so on and so forth. By demythologizing suicide, you make it a less attractive option in the first place and you cut off the feedback loop.
On the other hand, you are correct to point out that there are clear dangers associated with suicide becoming a "business" (or even worse, an "institution"), and this institutionalization is indicative of a fundamental underlying current of cultural nihilism.
Pitt19802
3d ago
I generally use it as a search engine that I can ask more specific questions to than I can ask google.
I think its pretty helpful with travel planning, I feel like it lets me dictate more degrees of freedom than google does.
I'm taking a trip with my daughter next month, my daughter wants to go ziplining, "Can you help me find ziplining places, we're starting at A, ending at B, anywhere roughly along the route ..." I find LLMs handle that sort of thing better than google does. "We going to be in X for 2 days, what's some things we should do?" "Ehh, I don't think we would like that, what else" "Ehh, how expensive is that, is there something more affordable?". idk, couple iterations of that get you to something pretty workable.
iprayiam3
3d ago
I think another comparable industry is trans-medicalism, which is clearly, and documentably associated with profit motivations, and led to an incredible rise of something that was once much much rarer.
much of self_made's response below is a predictable mix of techno-libertarian priors and false assurance against corruption (or simply runaway incentives to overexent) by profit-seeking via ideological purity.
In most professions, especially those with an ethical or ideological core, the profit motive coexists with, and is often constrained by, professional ethics, reputational incentives, and a genuine belief in the mission.
Again, with the case of trans, we can se that was is laughably not the case. We saw the ideological core of trans distort and blind a lot of otherwise obvious ethical, and reputational issues. And we are seeing the backlash now.
Also much like the trans question, we are going to have two movies on one screen interpretation of any rapid rise: A need being met vs creeping pressure and social memeplex.
Self-made's objection is again the same tautology that is used to defend an ever growing number of trans individuals as self-justifying:
A person who travels to another country in secret to end their life has, by their actions, expressed a powerful preference.
If powerful preference is the driving justification, then people with ideological motivations will push their hand on the social memeplex / overton window, even if just to make the existing number with these preferences or marginal preferences more free; it will cost lots of money to do this, and lots of money with be made. And then the number will grow inorganically.
This is exactly how it works.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Welcome!
It's always interesting to get a perspective from another part of the world, though that always comes with a built-in inability to comment on it much, due to the same lack of familiarity that makes it interesting to begin with. It's a bit sad to hear the same sort of controversies are taking place in a completely different culture. What's worse, even the pushback that followed doesn't feel like cause for much optimism, as it reminds me of various backlashes in the Western internet ~10 years ago. Here's hoping China is on a different trajectory, and not just a bit behind on the same path.
FistfullOfCrows
3d ago
I look forward to being paid in š¹asilisk coin [tm]
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
the admins were most upset about discussion of the trans thing which was comparatively minor.
There go 80% of my AAQCs...
2rafa
3d ago
The political situation was never bad enough to warrant an exodus, the admins were most upset about discussion of the trans thing which was comparatively minor.
I do think we should return. It was good for discoverability. At the same time I am of course grateful to Zorba and the others who created this place.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhÅ«yÄt, durjano badhyatÄį¹ sadÄ, baddho'nyÄn nibandhÄyet
3d ago
A person who travels to another country in secret to end their life has, by their actions, expressed a powerful preference. That preference is not just for death, but for a death conducted on their own terms, which in these cases explicitly involves secrecy from their family. They tell their loved ones they are going on holiday. They, allegedly in one case, forge letters and create fake email accounts to maintain the deception. This those not strike me as ideal, but I can't really condemn someone who is clearly this desperate to die.
From the patientās perspective, the ideal outcome is one where their autonomy is maximally respected. For the clinic, this presents a dilemma. Who is their client? The patient who is paying for a service and demanding confidentiality, or the family who is not their client but has a profound emotional and moral stake in the outcome?
If they were merely a profit-maxxing company, the answer becomes clear. They could, with ease, tell the family to fuck off, or something a tad bit more polite than that. After all, they followed the letter of the law.
When the clinic reportedly promised to āalways contact a personās familyā, it may have been making a well-intentioned but practically impossible promise. What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted, or provides false information for them? If Maureen Slough did indeed forge a letter from her daughter, the clinic was not simply "skimping on postage". It was being actively deceived by its own client in a way that pitted its promise to families against its duty to the patient. The failure to make a phone call seems like a clear error. But in a context of deliberate deception, we can see it not just as a cost-cutting measure, but as a failure to be sufficiently paranoid in the face of a determined client. And the paranoia would have been pointless, the family has no legal right to stop the process. At most, everyone feels better if they're on board.
I run into similar issues every week. Hospitals are forbidden from divulging patient details, even if the voice over the phone claims that they're a brother/wife/best friend. Especially if the person has capacity to make decisions, and this lady seems to fit the bill.
Second, the characterization of Pegasos as "a business" may be both trivially true and misleading. Of course it is a business in that it charges fees for a service. But reducing its motivation solely to profit maximization seems to be a category error. It appears to be a mission driven organization, an ideological entity that must also be a business to survive. The people running it are almost certainly true believers in the cause of bodily autonomy and the right to die. They charge money, like many an NGO does, to pay the bills and keep the lights on.
Their own site says:
At Pegasos we philosophically believe that no one should be prevented from a VAD with us, simply because they lack the financial resources. Pegasos hopes that in the future we will be in a position to provide financial aid to those who would otherwise be unable to avail our service.
And I believe them. The regulatory paperwork alone must be an awful nightmare. If Charles Schwab is handing out big bucks to save on the expenses of more longterm pods and chicken feed, they're not getting a cut.
Finally, we must be wary of the availability heuristic. We are reading these stories in the newspaper precisely because they represent catastrophic failures. The family who has a peaceful, well-communicated experience with an assisted dying clinic does not generate headlines. At least not after the first dozen times.
We have no access to the base rates. How many clients does Pegasos serve in a year? For what percentage do these communication breakdowns occur? It is possible that these tragic cases represent a small number of "glitches" in a system that, for the most part, functions as intended by its clients. Or it is possible that they represent a systemic failure. The point is that from this handful of terrible anecdotes, we cannot know. You can come up with lurid anecdotes for just about anything, and in medicine?
I've already presented a quantitative analysis. The slope doesn't seem very slippery to me and it certainly hasn't reached the point where fair and open-minded advocates feel beholden to shut the whole thing down.
The Swiss have had legal assisted dying since 1941. If the "businessification" of death inevitably leads to this kind of procedural slippage, we should have seen decades of this. We should have a mountain of data on Swiss citizens being bundled off to industrial parks by greedy doctors against their families' wishes. Instead, we have a few tragic stories, mostly involving "suicide tourism," where the informational and logistical challenges are exponentially greater.
The complaint about tracking the ashes "like she was a parcel in the post" is emotionally powerful. But what's the alternative? A private courier hand-delivering the ashes internationally? Who is paying for that?
will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit
A tired and overly generalized critique. Do the police run Burglary 101 classes when the crime rates get too low? Do cardiologists open McDonald's outside their hospital? Do the hospital admins squeeze tubes of trans-fats into the sandwiches served at their cafeterias?
In most professions, especially those with an ethical or ideological core, the profit motive coexists with, and is often constrained by, professional ethics, reputational incentives, and a genuine belief in the mission. A scandal like this is terrible for Pegasos, both for its "business" and its "crusade." It invites negative press, legal scrutiny, and tarnishes the very cause they champion.
Not so much anymore since the mass destruction of buildings and orchards, and the intentional destruction of water sources.
Your comment is as ridiculous as wondering why a prisoner who is locked in a cell requires food being brought in, and can't just grow his own food, when any attempt to create a mini-farm, would be destroyed by the guards.
More options
Context Copy link