domain:city-journal.org
aqouta
13hr ago
Maybe you do but I consistently find that the sorts of people who resist thought experiments tend to have deeply conflicted world views that they never examine. As I said, if you're being accosted by some rude stranger feel free to dodge out and stick to small talk. But With people you know well who are curious about how you think? On a discussion forum where the whole purpose is battling out ideas? What's the point? You could just go do something else with your time.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13hr ago
I mean, is that an example of “brute force violence”? If those American hostages had been captured by, say, ISIS, we would have seen high-definition videos of them being decapitated, set on fire, etc. Instead, the Iranians released all of the hostages unharmed. The only casualties from the entire incident were caused by the American military’s own incompetence in Operation Eagle Claw. (Obviously if Kenneth Kraus had been killed instead of injured and subsequently released, the story would be different, if only slightly.)
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14hr ago
Are you saying inflation was caused by wages increasing instead of the government printing money?
Real wages went down in the Biden years.
What I recall during the Biden years was employers complaining that they couldn't find people to work for them, without being willing to raise their wages. And then Biden imported millions of new low-wage workers for the complaining businesses instead of letting the market come to a new equilibrium.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
14hr ago
It does not appear to be truthful reporting. American officials took the unusual step of announcing on several occasions that America is not on board with the attack. The IDF is telling reporters that they are coordinating with America.
I think the only coherent reading of both claims is something like "Israel told the US ('coordinating with') they were going to do it, and US forces didn't take part in or recommended against ('not on board with') the actual action".
Lizzardspawn
14hr ago
Meh. Iran choose to have economy comparable in size to Denmark themselves. If they had done the sensible thing - chase growth they would be on par or even surpass Turkey by now. The west has no need to destroy them, their stupidity is enough.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
14hr ago
Are the traumatic memories of life under the Shah, fifty years ago, really still so fresh that the Iranian people will continue to roll the dice on the Ayatollahs?
No, but Islam is that powerful.
FarmReadyElephants
14hr ago
Sexual nihilism is considered harmful. There's a reason why the rationalist community has a very low TFR - I wouldn't be surprised if it were as low as 0.1.
There was a rationalist adjacent group in a certain city that banned Aella from their events, and I remember her complaining about it a few years ago. But that subgroup had a TFR of closer to 2.0. They didn't want someone throwing sex parties, being an open prostitute, and debating whether-or-not pedophilia was really that bad around their kids. She felt hurt, her friends felt the need to defend her, but its an unavoidable side-effect of basic social hygiene.
Sex is an incredibly powerful psychological force. People kill for sex, people die for sex, people throw away their careers for sex, they lose a fortune for sex, the commit crimes for sex, they bully people for sex. Jeff Bezos pissed away ~$40 billion to upgrade his lay. The best we've been able to do is cage that energy and channel it for pro-social and pro-civilizational ends.
People like Aella are smart enough to reason through the second and third order consequences of their actions. They just don't. Probably because they are directly benefiting from lighting civilization on fire. Cool. The rest of us don't have to put up with it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14hr ago
So history won’t change. I’m just like waiting for anyone to take a fair honest look at the ME. Israel isn’t perfect, but I think most people are hopelessly naive about just how warlike the Arab world can be. It’s just a bunch of war and honor cultures that are hopelessly aggressive against Jews existing in the region. Iran isn’t France, and Palestinians are not Hopi. Jihad is a major part of the current theological understanding of Islam, and not the internal kind of jihad.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14hr ago
This is the same question I have: how many sustained humiliations can a government endure and still maintain a sufficient level of popular support? Like you can only blame the perfidy of the Great Satan for so long before the buck eventually stops with you. I’m seeing that Fox News apparently reported that the Israelis managed to dupe the entire leadership of Iran’s air force into a fake meeting before taking them all out. If this sort of thing happened to the American military, I have no idea how the government could continue to stand.
Is the fear of what regime collapse would mean for the country so pervasive that the Persian people will continue to tolerate the status quo? Perhaps I’m just a naïve American, wildly overestimating how much power the people of Iran have to effect a regime change even if they wanted to. Are the traumatic memories of life under the Shah, fifty years ago, really still so fresh that the Iranian people will continue to roll the dice on the Ayatollahs?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
14hr ago
I know the Persians are a civilized people, so they may not resort to brute force violence.
LOL. You know, the storming of the US embassy and the ensuing hostage crisis is in fact within living memory.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14hr ago
Even if we gave everyone citizenship, there would still be downward pressure from wages. The majority of immigrants are in low-skilled jobs. If we maintained immigration so that the same proportion of upper-, middle-, and lower-class people immigrated as US citizens, then there would not be distortion. Even with removing illegality from the equation, immigration creates a distortion to the labor market exerting downward pressure.
This is in addition to the cultural concerns of having 16% of people in America "foreign born" and the increased difficulty of passing along US values to immigrants as the proportion of native-born Americans goes down. Does American culture matter? Yes! It created the prosperity and freedom that Americans enjoy - the very reason why the world wants to come here. Don't kill the Golden Goose. Don't tear down Chesterton's fence.
FarmReadyElephants
14hr ago
And I thought The Motte could only by riled up this much by transwomen.
In some ways, Aella seems like a trans-transwoman — her sexuality and content is more typical of transwomen than of women. The rationalist community has a pretty high transwoman/woman ratio, so its predictable that the few women who are around have more masculine traits and interests.
kky
14hr ago
Agreed. I generally like these, because they’re fun and quirky rulings on edge cases for the law, unusual things that come up from time to time but which you wouldn’t really think about. The weird ones are the best.
This case is not that. It’s a bog-standard murder case where an unprovoked attack wound up killing someone, where the murderers did not obviously intend for the death but just as obviously did not care about whether or not it happened. There is a specific class for this kind of killing in every jurisdiction that I’ve bothered looking at, because it’s how you classify the casual killings committed by people who think violence is funny or a normal means to whatever end. The only thing unusual is how on Earth the trial judge dismissed charges in the first place, and any speculation there either stops at concluding ignorance or continues on into Culture War territory.
FarmReadyElephants
14hr ago
This isn't to say she's a bad person or should be mocked or bullied, just that you should take her opinions on sex and romance with a grain of salt.
She is smart enough to know that the lifestyle she advocates is bad for most people and bad for the groups that she is a part of. They do more harm than good at the individual and communal level. And she still pushes them because she makes a living in the attention economy.
I guess being a selfish antisocial grifter doesn't make one a "bad person" on its own, but it's certainly not a good start.
Rov_Scam
14hr ago
Illegal immigrant workers are the market distortion...
No they aren't, at least not any more than importing any other economic input is a market distortion. Telling an employer that he can't use labor from Mexico isn't fundamentally different than telling him he can't use iron ore from Australia, or electronic components from South Korea. You can make public policy arguments for why certain market distortions are necessary, but they're only distortions if you presuppose some kind of Peronist ideal where the only economic activity that matters is that which takes place inside your own borders. As @AlexanderTurok says, MAGA Maoism.
aeqno
14hr ago
His whole selling point on the foreign policy front was that world leaders would tremble at the mere thought of crossing Mad Man Trump.
If that's now shown as fantasy and Putin, Xi, Netanyahu etc. are ignoring him and doing whatever they want anyway, where does that leave things?
yofuckreddit
14hr ago
Why do they keep dying? Does she beat them up or just bad luck?
Owned
- 2005 Nissan Sentra for $5k - really awful little car but didn't have any major problems with it. Shared with my sister who has the unfortunate proclivity of leaving trash in the car, which soured me forever on sharing vehicles with family members. Had my first and only crash of my life which ended in a smashed passenger window.
- 1997 Ford Ranger for $3k - Had absolutely beat-to-shit paint but was a really cool green. Would vibrate over 70. Despite being totally antithetical to my personality, it ended up being a sufficient panty-dropper because I kept it spotless inside and could help people move. I bought it with literally 3,000 miles on it from a grandma who used it for groceries. I sold it for more than I paid for it. I still have a core memory of meeting at a gas station with a guy who could barely keep his tongue inside his mouth he wanted it so bad while trying to negotiate for a couple hundred bucks off. Nice dude, but it felt amazing to say "You can hand me the cash now, or I have 6 other people lined up to meet today". I see why truck guys loved em.
- 2002 BMW 525i for $6k - I graduated college, paid off my student loan debt, and had a couple thousand left over. I have always loved these cars from afar, and this was my first car purchase as an individual. The example I bought was.... fine. I can't help but wonder how much more fun I would have had with the manual 530i that was 45 minutes away I should have bought. I learned how to do my own mechanic work on this car. Sold it for $2900 after 5 years.
- 2001 Honda Accord for $3k - Holy shit I hated this car. Ugly, poorly maintained, slow, un-fun to drive. I spent almost as much keeping it on the road as I did the BMW. Atypical, I know! Worse in every way. A lot of good memories associated with it but when I got rid of it i was happy. Had a bidding war to sell it which shows the power of the brand and just vacuuming cloth seats before posting on FBM.
- 2017 Mazda CX5 for $23k - The replacement for the Accord. I had to push a bit for "us" to spring for leather and nicer speakers, and I was totally right. Useful car, no reliability issues at all, and this was pre-kid so I could keep it kind of clean. Some people think this is "fun to drive". No, not really. No CUV is going to be able to do that as well as a sedan or coupe even if they're trying. I believe the latest generation tightened up pretty much every complaint I had with the car so I would absolutely buy it again.
- 2002 BMW M5 for $23k - If I go too long on this it'll come off weird. It's my dream car, I saved up for years to buy it in cash, and it's amazing.
- 2019 Honda Odyssey for $32k - Had to push for a minivan. Insanely un-fun to drive. Insanely fun to move kids, dogs, bikes, and gear in. My pity for women who can't get a goddamn grip and upgrade to a minivan from an SUV is boundless. Great purchase, but I can already tell the depreciation will sting, given how poorly we treat it.
In terms of "worth the money" the extra ~$15k/car really went a long way, especially not all of that disappears when it comes time to sell. It should be obvious, but people who don't care about cars don't care about cars. You can drive the same age and mileage model and they're going to be radically different based on who kept up with fluids and tires. Spending the extra money to buy from an enthusiast in the used market is just a no-brainer.
Side note: I don't drive 100+ like SOME of our board members, but I'm a solid "84 mph almost all the time" guy. I've done one 2am cannonball runs at 100+ to make it to the last eclipse. A nice German sedan handles this far better than you'd expect if you haven't been in one.
DirtyWaterHotDog
14hr ago
Trump's truth social posts suggest otherwise.
Wouldn't be surprised if it's the other way around. Trump encourages Netanyahu to go for the attack. The hawks in Israel have been aching to go at it for the last decade. Not only would the US have to complicit, it would need to have given an explicit go ahead.
I'm surprised that the Islamic Republic of Iran has stood for as long as it has. The urban areas don't want the conservatism. Khamenei is at death's door. Succession is unclear. Economy has been doing worse YOY and elite human capital leaves the country on first opportunity.
I know the Persians are a civilized people, so they may not resort to brute force violence. But, 30 years of stability under a continuously deteriorating economy is unheard of.
The West developed many nations in the way it did Iran. At some point you need to make it clear that stealing the West's investment in your nation has consequences.
The counterfactual world where we just let Iran get away with it and then emboldened socialists the world over to run on a platform of stealing Western investment is worse.
Tree
14hr ago
Iran and Russia have pretensions to negotiate with the West as if they were equals, but they don’t have the cards. Even as a lifelong western stan, I’m still amazed at how easily the highly reputed armies of anti-western powers crumble. The quick and absolute dismantling of Saddam’s "top 5" army was one thing, against a superpower-backed coalition. But this is just a few western planes and drones taking out a big chunk of a regional power’s air defense, missile launches, leadership and nuclear sites in one go. It's another complete wipeout for a woke, decadent army versus the 'high asabiyah' hard men.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
14hr ago
Crowstep
14hr ago
I predict more Israel Bad posts everywhere
I'm not sure it'll make a big difference. Months of civilians getting starved, displaced and blown up is quite different from a short, narrowly focused military operation targetting high-ranking members of a regime plus military/nuclear hardware. Israel's actions against Hezbollah didn't elicit much of a negative reaction.
remzem
14hr ago
Trump as well is speed running losing long term support. He's alienated the more libertarian voters by attacking Rand Paul and Massie, while having a really bloated pork filled spending bill. He's alienated the isolationists by continuing to provide intel to Ukraine, basically doing the same good cop bad cop routine he just did with Iran to claim neutrality while all the evidence points to continued support. He alienated the moderates and boomers with his poorly planned tariffs, even managed to alienate the pro tariff people by waffling too much on them. If he does the amnesty he was talking about yesterday his base is going to shrivel up. I've never seen this much hate before for Trump on right wing twitter.
I've been driving some kind of BMW I-series for half a year now. Great car. Shame it belongs to my driving instructor.
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