domain:kvetch.substack.com
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again is a 2025 non-fiction book by the American journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. It was published by Penguin Random House on May 20, 2025. It details the claims of a cover-up regarding Joe Biden's age and health during his presidency and reelection campaign, leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
shoeonfoot
3hr ago
No, Taylor left Japan when he was a teenager and has himself abandoned any claim to be Japanese.
I was fortunate enough to live in Japan for four years in the 90s. I met a white guy who grew up in Japan from a young age and was then in his mid-30s. His parents were French but he attended Japanese public school rather than an international school, which is popular among more affluent foreigners. His Japanese friends considered him Japanese. Obviously the barrier to become Japanese is higher, but Japanese people are more open-minded on this question than most people think.
charlesf
3hr ago
This is a good point actually. I've knows a few Chinese American youths who spend a lot of their non-school time working at the restaurant their parents own. None of these kids were on the books as employed at all, and received pay to match.
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
Act utilitarianism is not the only kind of utilitarianism there is. There is also rule utilitarianism and Two-level utilitarianism. Utilitarians can be against believing false things in the same way that they can be against child rape: while it is certainly possible to conjure hypothetical scenarios where the thing they are against has the better outcome, in practice these situations do not seem to appear.
Go and find some utility improving lie as an example
Hey, I am not the one who claims that there is such a thing as a false belief which improves utility. You seem to claim that such things exist, so you should come up with examples.
One example comes from Pratchett:
"For example, there was the Raddles' privy. Miss Level had explained carefully to Mr. and Mrs. Raddle several times that it was far too close to the well, and so the drinking water was full of tiny, tiny creatures that were making their children sick. They'd listen very carefully, every time they heard the lecture, and still they'd never move the privy. But Mistress Weatherwax told them it was caused by goblins who were attracted to the smell, and by the time they left that cottage, Mr. Raddle and three of his friends were already digging a new well at the other end of the garden."
There are several defenses of Granny Weatherwaxes behavior possible: 0. Operating on simulacrum level 2 is fine, truth does not matter. Obviously I reject this.
- It could be argued that she wanted to transport the true belief that the distance between well and privy was to small (but I do not find that very convincing).
- It could be argued that this was the closest thing to the truth the Raddles could grasp. Consider:
Medieval peasant: "Where do you come from?"
Literally-truthtelling alien: "To understand the answer to that question, you first have to understand that your cosmology is all wrong. While you believe that your world is planar, it is actually a sphere, strike that, a roughly sphere-shaped body. You do not fall off from that sphere because there is a force called gravity which pulls you towards the center of that body, even though calling it a force is an oversimplification as in reality it is more accurately described as bent space-time. Gravity is also causing your world to rotate around ..."
Conceptionally-truthtelling alien: "We come from the stars."
Literally-truthelling alien: "We most certainly do not. The surface temperature of stellar bodies is much too high to support life." I would be rather sympathetic to the second alien here, because while he lies in a very technical sense, he is trying to answer in the most truthful way the peasant will understand.
- One might argue that both the Raddles and my peasant are not so much suffering from a false belief, but trapped in a whole world-view full of falsehoods. Where normally spreading false beliefs is like salting the fertile earth, replacing one falsehood with another one in an endless sea of falsehoods is like dumping salt into the ocean, so the lie is not morally wrong.
However, none of these arguments apply to believing falsehoods yourself or your epistemic peer community. The peasant who tries to understand general relativity, fails and ends up believing that in a vague way, the aliens come from the stars, but not exactly is more virtuous than the peasant who just goes "sure, you come from the stars. whatever."
shoeonfoot
4hr ago
Are you sure they are as loyal to you, as you are to them?
Yes? The vast majority of second and third generation Mexican-Americans are never going to fly a Mexican flag in their life. This is a strawman.
Their views are just as legitimate as yours.
Wanting to deport non-white citizens is a suicidal political position because it foments civil war.
There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence.
How much of that is due to small changes in policy positions, and how much of that is due to the entire liberal establishment utterly stonewalling any effort to find out?
shoeonfoot
4hr ago
I'll never understand this nostalgic mewling. Millions of white Americans are obese, welfare-dependent, high school dropouts who don't hold a candle to a Mexican day laborer, let alone the millions of educated and net-positive tax contributing immigrants whose hard-earned money is used to pay for SNAP so Harold can buy more Doritos.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
4hr ago
I'm not saying they have discovered anything. I'm saying the techniques are more salient in the Buddhist tradition and easier for the modern mind to understand. Prayer and meditative prayer is an extremely confusing concept comparatively, in my opinion. It's also not nearly as popular in Christian circles.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4hr ago
Russian (or maybe Irish) proverb: nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.
Also, do you think any country is doing better? Which?
We're always going to have problems. Problems can be solved though, and the ones that don't get solved are maybe not as bad as in our imagination.
One example: the debt problem is bad but it's still decades out before it becomes catastrophic, and it could still be ameliorated or turned into a soft default (e.g. a few bouts of massive inflation) in the meantime. Also if we default on our debt everyone else is also feeling serious pain as well.
oats_son
4hr ago
I do think the standard is different for Japan, because Japan was founded in a different way than America was. Japan is pretty much by definition formed by Japanese people from its inception before the international concept of nations existed. America did not exist in that way.
I will note that this makes the cosmopolitan-ization of the western European states more sad. They used to be basically exclusively white, now they aren't, every single one of them has been globalized and diversified and I don't really know what it means to be French anymore. At least the shithole central European states haven't been touched in this way.
TowardsPanna
4hr ago
How? How does atheism alone equip you to go through aging, illness and the dying process without mental suffering? Atheism and the dharma aren't opposed btw.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4hr ago
Ah lol that is where that comes from. I'd seen Lenin referred to as Chudin in the past, I thought it was just an insulting nickname for him. My bad.
There's no new cheap missile to take them down
There is actually, the APKWS laser-guided rocket, which has already been used by US fighters to take down Geran-type weapons.
A single F-15 can carry fifty of these, [edit: sorry, at least 42, although I'm sure larger pods could be introduced] introducing video game ammo logic to real life and allowing a squadron on station can defend a vast territory from even hundreds of Gerans pretty easily and more effectively than static air defenses (Gerans are slow and ~easy to detect if they are flying at 3km). At somewhere around $20 grand it trades nicely in cost with a $70,000 cruise missile.
Ukraine can't use this particularly effectively because it has been unable to degrade Russian air defenses and fighter coverage (and in fact I wonder if Russia modified their Gerans to fly at higher altitudes specifically to deny fighter interceptors ground clutter cover). NATO's air forces and capability to degrade air defenses are vastly superior to Ukraine's, so the APKWS is a more viable defense strategy for them.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4hr ago
Would you consider a Chinese or Vietnamese person less American if they were born here and spoke English natively?
By that standard, Jared Taylor is Japanese.
charlesf
4hr ago
I speculate the the higher income families might also have more connections with which to secure their kids summer work. All of my summer jobs as a teen and in college came from connections, not randomly dropping applications or otherwise cold approaching employers. Living in a higher income area probably helps too; one of my summer jobs was working at the boat service center at a private marina.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
4hr ago
Jeroma, Jerometta, Jeromina, and Jeromabelle
@FiveHourMarathon We’ve solved your problem for you.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
Yeah, it could have been Brussels.
Just something I remember I saw while doomscrolling, and my brain might have rounded off the capital for the country. Though your link is for 2020, and I think the info I saw was more recent. Either way, I can't find at the moment, so I'm happy to concede.
TitaniumButterfly
4hr ago
This anecdote isn't intended as commentary on what you wrote, but I feel like sharing.
My area is full of big homes occupied by single retirees and tiny apartments occupied by families. Somehow, whether due to regulation or tax nonsense or what have you, there doesn't seem to be a way of fixing this. Maybe when the boomers really start to die en masse it'll work out.
Actually something I've seen a few times is married boomers who are still 'together' but each live in their own full sized homes near each other as they simply find that more pleasant. Blew my mind the first time but it keeps coming up.
Corvos
4hr ago
To the degree that gender is a useful concept separate from sex, it is exactly a belief.
This I think is exactly the bone of contention behind the relabelling. To the trans, 'gender identity' is an innate characteristic that is often incorrectly assigned at birth and rediscovered later in life. That is very different from the conception that sees 'gender' as being a propaganda concept that is actually the exact same as sex and 'gender-identifying' as a category mistake at best and a mental illness at worth. That is what I mean by 'reifying' - the manner in which such things are recorded implicitly gestures towards an official attitude on them and is at least in part an attempt to take hold of the 'neutral' ground.
To take a more extreme example for illustration, if Sarah is an otherkin we do not say
Name: Sarah. Species: unicorn.
If we note their weird beliefs at all, it would be as a note in the misc section.
Finally, let's take your atheist example. Let's imagine a very, very atheist society in which 2% of people at most have a religion and it's regarded as a ridiculous peculiarity and evidence of schizophrenic delusion. Such a society would certainly not have a Soul column in their datasheets! Nor would they have a religion column because almost nobody has a religion and nobody cares about the people who do. They would, where appropriate, note the person's peculiarities in the misc section.
I was amused to see 'Lord' and 'Lady' as potential titles on a questionnaire I was sent recently from Harley Street. You wouldn't get that in America, but you might get 'Mx' or various other formulations. The questions that are asked, and the way the answers are recorded, show society's implicit viewpoint and define common sense, so they are absolutely going to be a battleground in cases like this.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
You sound European?
Correct.
but my Asian and Hispanics friends in southern California are just as American as me
Are you sure they are as loyal to you, as you are to them? Does this statement include the fellows flying Mexican flags during the recent riots?
Right-wingers who went them gone from the country or to feel less American have no place in politics.
Sure they do. Their views are just as legitimate as yours, and have the advantage of not being suicidal.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
I've seen and read the play before. I'm hoping to look at it with new eyes.
Ioper
4hr ago
Shouldn't you look up stuff like that after? Just watch the play, it's not that complex.
WhiningCoil
4hr ago
Man, but then you miss out on the essential dad activity of pushing them, letting them fall, and telling them to rub some dirt in their skinned knee.
TitaniumButterfly
4hr ago
The Democrats' positive vision is more socialism and it's pretty popular with a lot of young people. The worsening economy will only fuel this fire.
No, I mean there is a 2-3 bedroom apartment and 2 or even 3 people live in it. Like on Friends!
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