domain:philippelemoine.com
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
I'm sure there is a based tradcath
You called?
who can contextualize all of these follies of the modern world within the disaster that is the sexual revolution, but 'drastic' age gaps were, as far as my meme understanding of history goes, more common back in the day.
What do you mean by 'back in the day'? The youngest average female age at marriage since the middle ages was in the fifties.
It's true that teenaged marriage with large age gaps was viewed as more acceptable back in the day, and was more common than it is today- my own great grandparents were seventeen and thirty, marrying during the depression. But today that marriage is, contrary to the imaginings of progressives on the internet, sufficiently rare as to distantly aspire to be a rounding error on a lizardman's constant. IIRC married women under twenty have smaller average age gaps than married women in their early twenties.
The fifties were not trad; they were a social experiment that has been in many ways backed off from. In 1900 dating/courting was serious business for adult men ready to assume the responsibilities entailed in marriage and women who understood that this meant it was rather unlikely the man would be younger than about the mid twenties. Sometimes she was a teenager(Little House on the Prairie portrays this) but the average woman who married in 1890 was 23.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
I'm ignorant here. Can you shed light on this ? What were the numbers like pre-Trump ?
I don't have a link on hand but TL;DR is that there's a grant program for security at houses of worship(it is very common in America for churches/synagogues to hire off duty police officers as security with full police powers during peak hours- and this option is available and used by other organizations as well, it's not specifically a church thing, police are allowed to do security work with police powers when off duty for extra money and this is common at both high security facilities and at places that have regular and predictable peak hours like churches). This program is available to churches but most of it goes to synagogues because Jews are very well integrated in the NGO network that doles out grants. IIRC this is an old program that hasn't really changed over time and it's fairly bipartisan.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
I would further add that making democrats spend more effort on Israel-related matters will only benefit the republicans because they fight each other when they do that, they convince talented Jews to accept much higher private sector salaries rather than work in politics(and they get replaced with incompetent and delusional shaniquas), they make the progressive wing more prominent and demanding.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
As I've said before- the people drawing this stuff up are right wing Catholics(because that is who staffs conservative policy-making/writing) who do not believe there is anything special about Jews and are, currently, not fans of Israel due to some recent events in Gaza. This is about making democrats fight each other.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
12hr ago
More to my original point it could very well be that tons of the recipients get Alzheimer’s or some other hitherto unknown condition way earlier and stronger. Causing chaos, and something animal studies didn’t pick up. Our science is not optimized to detect that kind of stuff. And would we really be patient enough to wait for the original test tube generation to fully age before we implement it for others?
Oh yeah, there are always the fears about pushing straight to production with our children. But honestly I think that's the least of it with how dysfunctional all our institutions are these days. We'd be lucky if all that happened was everyone developed generative disorders by 60 instead of living to 120 when you consider how horribly we'd fuck it up even if the technology worked flawlessly.
ChickenOverlord
12hr ago
though not easy to follow unless the plausible threat of eternal damnation is attached
Or the threat of shotgun weddings.
odd_primes
12hr ago
The similarity lies in the fact that they are both visibly indicated in a way the parents can use for social signalling. Right now prenatal screening is still not ubiquitous, so having a child with Down Syndrome is not necessarily a choice. Ironically that reduces its utility as a signalling mechanism. But in 10-20 years? The only people having a child with Down Syndrome will be doing so because they refused the screening, or deliberately ignored the results.
I don't think this trend will take off in progressive circles though, given how it's uncomfortably similar to evangelical Christian practice. Evangelicals will have staked out a position on this first just by being generally anti-abortion.
Supah_Schmendrick
12hr ago
If your goal is the support of civilization - and particularly european-derived civilization - and the flourishing of european-descended individuals, that may not be the best example to cite.
Corvos
12hr ago
I'm not saying they are correct, I am saying its a reasonable non evil position to hold.
Ah, apologies.
I personally think that the position’s semi-evilness comes from its reasonableness. It’s a perfectly reasonable chain of thought that ends up denying white people care because they aren’t yet dying in sufficient quantities.
Broadly I would say that the case of old versus young was so stark that it was ok to deprioritise them. And in general one is normally able to avoid such problems by having sufficient manufactured medicine.
But in general when things like this come up, I think that it is best to avoid temptation by not discriminating, to the extent possible.
Supah_Schmendrick
12hr ago
Israel is a liberal & open democracy.
Ehhhhhhhh...it's definitely both of those things when compared to its regional neighbors, but in any sort of absolute ranking it has all sorts of problems; a crazy runaway judiciary, excessive military entanglement in politics, endemic public corruption, etc.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
13hr ago
Trumps own former BLS chief himself doesn’t like it
So? That doesn't mean it's "without evidence".
And that quote isn't damning at all. The fact that the commissioner doesn't collect the numbers herself does not mean she is not responsible for doing so.
I'm 99% sure Trump's wrong and she wasn't cooking the numbers, and it's likely she wasn't doing a bad job.
Corvos
13hr ago
Re: Avatar fiction, Semper Victoria is very good, although doesn’t take the transhumanist angle.
Rather, it just extrapolates directly from the end of the first film. The original mission has failed and Earth society is on the verge of ripping itself apart from cascading fuel shortages. So the UN does the only thing it can do: cobble together all the resources they can still access, send one more expedition in a Hail Mary flight across the stars, and promise Parker Selfridge immunity from prosecution if he agrees to act as advisor for the mission.
It’s very well written and the author does a great job of keeping the stakes high and the characters relatable and non-preachy. To quote them:
This is not going to be a "humans show up and curb-stomp the na'vi" kind of story. Nor is it "Humanity is perfect, na'vi aren't". I'm going to show humanity as we are, the good, the bad, the ugly. the noble and the savage, the idealist and the cynical, etc.
Even if you're a huge fan of the Na'vi, I think you can still enjoy my tale. Give it to the first few chapters at least and let me know what you think.
Dean
Flairless
13hr ago
Israel didn't directly instigate Iraq 2 of course,
A bit of an understatement: the Israelis advocated against it, on the grounds that if any regime changing was to happen, it should prioritize Iran.
The American response was allegedly that Iran would be next. Which actually makes a fair bit of sense if you are planning to take down both, since it's easier to drive from Kuwait and Saudi into Iraq than do a cross-Hormuz amphibious invasion, but no one exactly remembers them of being good planners.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
13hr ago
Never thought before about how culturally informative it might be to ask what kind of beans go with rice or that you have for dinner.
it wasn't as good as half a can of tomato soup made with milk and a bunch of crackers
Mmm, a little margarine on the crackers when you can? Delicious.
Dean
Flairless
13hr ago
The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?
An end to semi-regular wars along the Suez Canal and degrading the arms-supplier influence nexus to Egypt from major American geopolitical rivals?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
13hr ago
I mean, I’m picturing something like an extra 20 years of useful life, 10 years of not so functional life, and maybe an IQ gain of 5-10. I am not an expert but would doubt you could realistically get much more than this. Laying aside the race stuff and caustic negativism, I don’t imagine that would be too societally chaotic. I’d imagine lifespan differences wouldn’t become obvious until the 50s. So I could imagine some strife within families when your child is 50 and you are maybe 80 and it’s becoming obvious that your child will live longer and already has a higher QoL than you did at that age. Families already get a bit dysfunctional around wills and such at that age so that to me is the bigger concern or plausible source of tension. Like Boomer resentment multiplied, flipped, and personalized. Disease resistance as well (if it even works) is largely invisible on a personal level so I don’t think that figures too much.
More to my original point it could very well be that tons of the recipients get Alzheimer’s or some other hitherto unknown condition way earlier and stronger. Causing chaos, and something animal studies didn’t pick up. Our science is not optimized to detect that kind of stuff. And would we really be patient enough to wait for the original test tube generation to fully age before we implement it for others?
SSCReader
13hr ago
Absolutely. And that is a reasonable critique of the position. Especially if you pointed out significant parts of the poor health is behavioural! I'm not saying they are correct, I am saying its a reasonable non evil position to hold. With scarce resources some people are not going to be treated. But note that is also the basic decision we came to with age. Younger people had to wait to get vaccinated. So were we punishing young people for being too healthy? Or is it simply the pragmatic choice to try and equalize death rates between different age groups? We did deprive young people of care they would have got in an age blind society then presumably. Is that ok but race skewing isn't? Or are neither ok?
Like I said in the other thread its not just about race, its also age, and class and job role. Should you vaccinate a farmer or a barista? The farmer is likely to be more important to food security, but a barista is likely to be exposed to and expose many more people. Depending on your goals/priorities you can make a reasonable case for either.
Dean
Flairless
13hr ago
You have re-cited one of three distinct conditionals that would enable the Trump administration to lawfully act against its political opponents breaking the law, as a response to a post arguing that any of the three conditionals would meet the probable intent of seeking to lawfully act against political opponents breaking the law.
RobertLiguori
13hr ago
If they aren't, and it is ever possible that someone other than the Author-Empowered God Stand-In ever claims (or even challenges) that power, then there is not just no story, but no possibility of a story, because the superintelligence would just turn off the laws of physics that permit its enemies to have ever existed. A superintelligence would need to derive a benefit from the existence of a non-sterile galaxy commensurate with the risk of another superintelligence popping up in it and saying "Fuck you and the light-cone you rode in on."; even if it doesn't go full paperclip-maximizer, shouldn't a superintelligence be like "Hey, the fact that failure is a dramatic possibility means that we should pre-empt this?"
It's just unsatisfying to me, and more so to pretend that being able to change the INT_MAX global variable is anything other than either evidence of pure simulationism or about as sci-fi as the Force. It's a conceit I was able to go along with when I read one of the books, but what was trying to come across as mysterious just felt half-baked to me. Like, what if I invent blargle-snarfing, which is applying reason and inference to data available to me but not actually thought? How is 'thought' defined and gatekept?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
13hr ago
I mean, sure, if you have no imagination. But choo choo, here we go to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
Scenario 1: As a cost cutting measure, the Obamacare gene editing doesn't target specific genes, and fixes the narrow pairings that are causing the problem. They just bulk replace, say, 5-10% of everyone's DNA. That's the only way it scales cost effectively. The government contract to make it so goes to a "Minority Owned Business" as many do, and wouldn't you know it, some H1B colony just uses Indian DNA samples to make their gene editing templates. Next thing you know, everyone's kids are coming out just a little bit Indian.
Also it doesn't actually solve any of the diseases it was supposed to.
Scenario 2: The average African American IQ in America is something like 85? But that's the average. Imagine you uplift the IQ of the child of some congenital felon with an IQ of 75. Can you first imagine the very special hell that child now grows up in? I've seen a few his/hers/ours scenarios where a child of a previous spouse is leaps and bounds smarter than the new wife (and the "ours" kids), and the abuse heaped onto them by the less intelligent new spouse is wild. Below average IQ parents can be fucking savage to the high IQ children that end up in their care. Now imagine that at scale.
Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"
why are our politicians handing synagogues hundreds of millions
I'm ignorant here. Can you shed light on this ? What were the numbers like pre-Trump ?
Why did Trump specifically go after students who criticized Israel on social media, rather than students who criticize America or the West broadly?
That was the meat of my earlier post. Because Trump can frame criticism of Israel as hate speech in courts. Criticism of America & the West is free game.
Why do we, in effect, subsidize the entirety of Israeli society, from their subsidized colleges and subsidized healthcare to their subsidized religious institutions?
The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?
Military funding is very difficult to decode. There's a reason the Pentagon fails every audit. I won't be attempting to itemize it, and neither should you.
no other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell
Woah. I didn't know that the Maxwells has such deep ties to the CIA. Strong signal that Epstein was on CIA's payroll.
The average IQ with Down’s is closer to 50. If IQ was perfectly genetic, nothing about nurture or epigenetics involved, the average Haitian would be almost twice as far from that as from the population average. The difference is more stark if the foster parents have more effect.
I would also say it’s fundamentally different to try for a child (who ends up with Down’s) than it is to knowingly adopt a child from a disadvantaged background.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
13hr ago
(a) Let it go and disengage. (b) Provide links to specific citations and proactively provide an explanation of their relevance. (c) Consider the possibility that they are not "ignoring facts" but that you are both interpreting the same evidence in a way that caters to your own biases and that you need to actually make an argument.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
13hr ago
I think part of the appeal of Star Wars is that since the vibes are compelling, and there are seeds of interesting ideas, it’s a fertile bed for fan fiction and headcanon. Have you noticed that Harry Potter also had great vibes, interesting mini-ideas, and also has some of the most prolific fan fiction? No accident, I say. Rigor and internal consistency don’t allow projection as easily.
Avatar’s vibes to me are more visual and spectacle (maybe a bit of the anarcho-primitivism) and the plot is incoherent to the point where I think there are only like, two interesting ideas and they have been done better elsewhere. Plenty of fiction already about VR/projected consciousness (the Matrix, Altered Carbon, endless VRMMO fictions), encounters with aliens (up to half of all sci-fi), a sort of living world (Speaker for the Dead, Gaia theories), even treating them like past human undesirables (District 9), or exploiting them (Mass Effect?).
We also simply don’t see enough of the actual world to get a sense of what humanity is like nor the Na’vi more broadly. The second movie only partly fixes this problem but mostly not. Star Ward to continue the analogy not only gives us visual spectacle but we also see humans and aliens in a variety of worlds and socioeconomic settings from which you can make interesting extrapolations.
Yes. They are, uh, not the people who are likely to adopt gene editing.
More options
Context Copy link