domain:betonit.substack.com
Ben___Garrison
29d ago
The east Asian democracies are quite far from the Western democracies, and many have similar cultures to eastern autocracies, yet the corruption of the autocracies is far, far worse. Again, look at South Korea vs North Korea, or Taiwan vs China.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
29d ago
Not particularly. I saw a pretty famous psychiatrist, and he largely took me at my word since I was a med student and read up on it, I was already taking modafinil, and he ended up agreeing that I should try Ritalin.
I recently spoke to another doctor with ADHD from the other side of India, and she said she has issues with the doctors there being much more leery about prescribing it, which is retarded IMO. It obviously has abuse potential, but I think the benefits of giving the millions of underdiagnosed people with the disease here their meds outweighs the small risk that some of them will abuse it.
I would say most psychiatrists aren't particularly gatekeepy about it, and worst case you can shop around. I know my diagnosis was legitimate, I'd have failed many of my exams in med school if I wasn't able to take it to study, and thankfully that never happened.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
29d ago
That's communism vs. Non-communism, if anything (a system that pretends to be democratic, I might add), you even see it's echoes in the democratic Europe. There's also no shortage of corrupt democracies you're ignoring, and like I said, the lack of historical comparisons to when the non-corrupt countries weren't democratic makes this very low quality evidence.
Felagund
29d ago
Your two points are funny to me, because I wouldn't really care about either. I have no idea how unusual I am in this.
Of course, I have no intent to become muslim.
Smoluchowski
29d ago
The thing about both this and the Havana Syndrome piece is that they obviously come from intelligence, meaning that someone in (probably the UK/US) government sent them this dossier and told them to publish it;
If so, then the dossier was originally assembled, vetted, edited, approved, and ultimately released as a political op. The most significant thing that can be reliably concluded from the story is (further) evidence that western intelligence agencies carry out such political-narrative ops on their own citizens. I am surprised at the willingness to accept the story at close to face value, given all that we've learned in recent years.
Rov_Scam
29d ago
I used to run a high-adventure program for the Boy Scouts, and whether or not some sourt of "Trial by fire" wilderness experience would be considered abuse would depend on the nature of the experience. There's a big difference between pushing a kid's limits and actively abusing them. If I take a kid mountain biking and he's apprehensive about riding a certain line, I'll encourage him to ride it if I think it's within his ability based on my observation of him. If I don't think he can ride it and that it's going to end in a crash I'll tell him to walk it. If he's clearly freaking out at the prospect of riding it, I'll tell him to walk it. If it's a difficult line I'll probably won't even pressure the kid into riding even if I think he can ride it; I'll just tell everyone they can walk it if they'd like. It gets more difficult when, say, you take the kid on a long bike trip with limited or no opportunity to bail. In that case it's more a question of getting them motivated enough to keep pedaling rather than putting them in a situation that could lead to injury, and making sure they have enough snacks, water, etc. so that an acute event isn't going to happen. I mean, I always have outs in case of emergency, but a kid being tired isn't an emergency unless they're obviously incapable of continuing. Usually I just slow down the pace and take more frequent breaks to keep them moving, even if it ultimately takes longer. When they complain, I just ask what they expect me to do about it, and that usually shuts them up, especially when I tell them that an evac means an ambulance ride and a trip to the hospital that will likely end their time in the program.
The key is that the adversity be time-limited, controlled, and intended to develop skills and build confidence. Telling kids who are old enough that they'll be cooking dinner one night a week so they can learn the skills necessary to be adults is a lot different than just not feeding the kids. Making sure your kids get early exposure to outdoor adventure in the hopes that it will maintain fitness and social relationships while building a lifetime hobby is different than putting the kid in situations he's clearly uncomfortable with (and that come with high risk of injury) and regularly subjecting them to death marches in the woods. Some kids are just whiners who want to stay inside and play video games all day and not do anything that's going to make them mildly short of breath, and I never had any problem trying to toughen those kids up over their complaints. But it's important that you know where the line is, and that you make sure you never get anywhere near it. If you're moving to the Alaskan wilderness because you like the outdoors and want your kids to learn self-sufficiency, I don't think that's too much of a problem, as long as you understand the limits I outlined above. I certainly wouldn't put it anywhere near the level of the kind of stuff that's on the ACE quiz.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
29d ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm on Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar. The writing is smooth and the character is great, though still hoping it will be more than just entertaining.
2rafa
29d ago
I’ve met a few people who grew up in Bermuda or the Caymans. They’re similar to expat Hong Kong or Singapore kids in that they often tend to become degenerates by their late teens.
Does anyone still 'collect' music (i.e. keep locally stored copies in some kind of organized database, regardless of format) in the current age of ubiquitous streaming?
I assume that Spotify (and the rest) has all but killed the idea of 'keeping' music on your local computer or phone amongst the youth.
As someone who has a music collection going back to when I first started obsessively ripping CDs to my PC in my teens, I find that I mostly keep doing it through force of habit, and the slight fear that things I like might disappear. Some of the older files in my collection are hard or impossible to find online these days. But with so many different streaming options and, now, an AI that can produce radio-quality music in seconds it seems like there's really no point to keeping a large local music collection unless its related to your career in some way.
So if you DO still store music locally, what are your reasons and methods?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
29d ago
I hadn’t heard this particular story, but it absolutely tracks with the naive way that modern western leaders approach global politics. There’s just a weird thought that all they need to do is “be the good guys” and they win by default. Couple this with the idea that bad actors wouldn’t use subterfuge to get what they want and it’s a system that’s not hard to either work around or subvert. We expected Russia to just collapse when we disconnected them from the global exchange. We sneered at them rushing western stores to get the last goods before they closed. What we never ever seemed to consider is that Russia might well have had contingency plans for the sanctions they knew the west would impose, that they’d already created BRICs and could do just fine without us. We expected a short war tha5 they would lose any day now. Annnnd guess which side is lowering their draft age.
We’re in some sense victims of our own success. We have been so dominant for so long that we don’t think about how vulnerable our systems are or what a determined nation can do.
rathorepsycho
29d ago
Hey friends, I have recently started to read nrx blogs and hanging out on this corner of the internet. I realized I need to understand economics better to be able to make sense of the world around me. It seems overwhelming to start from scratch, what do you recommend would be the highest ROI way to understand the major principles and events in economics? as that is closely intertwined with the history of states
2rafa
29d ago
I love KL, it’s probably one of the cleanest and best ‘developing’ country cities in the world, possibly the best. Every modern amenity is available and you’re very close to Singapore in the rare event something can’t be found. Also pretty close to nature, hiking, moderate amount of cultural activities (certainly the most you’ll find in SEA), that wacky amusement park on top of a mountain they keep expanding, pretty low tax and not much hostility toward whites (a lot toward Jews from Malays, but probably not something that affects you). Plus very close by air to great beaches and diving and good international connections.
The downside is it’s about as far from the US as it’s possible to get, but because you’re very close to Singapore and Singapore Airlines has ultra-long-haul flights to NYC and LA it’s not a huge issue if you can afford business class and are willing to sit on a plane for 18 hours.
hydroacetylene
29d ago
Hence I said non-Iberian(so not Spanish and Portuguese)- and even for Spanish the situation is complicated; full-bloodedly indigenous Catholics mostly spoke indigenous languages up until independence, but mixed people and whites spoke the colonial language. Actually Latin America has plenty of mostly-indigenous speaking areas still to this day in a way the US doesn't, and that's after nominally-secular post independence governments tried their best to get Quechua and Maya speakers to switch to Spanish exclusively.
I'm less familiar with Brazilian history, but at least in the Spanish colonies- speaking mostly Spanish was a sign of having at least some Spanish ancestry and turned into a national identity marker that would be expected of everyone regardless of their place in the racial hierarchy in the 19th century. Catholicism often resulted in learning Spanish but during the colonial period the church wasn't particularly interested in replacing indigenous dialects, and sometimes inconsistently tried to provide services in Guarani and Quechua.
hydroacetylene
29d ago
Yes. The Aristotelian understanding of essence and causality still underpins Catholic doctrine.
TwiceHuman
29d ago
That's a difficult question! But I will attempt to answer it. Keep in mind that this is my own thoughts, not any specific theory that some other guy came up with. I don't believe in the theory of forms, but I can see how one could mistakenly believe they exist, and they might be useful either way (every model is wrong, but some are useful!)
I believe that everything is unique, finite and different, that there's nothing universal, and the desire to equalize and unify is a quirk of human perception (an attempt to dominate the environment). However, many things are similar! But noticing these similarities requires a great deal of intelligence. Being a shape-rotator myself, I can usually tell when things are similar in their mathematical structure, for example if something is isomorphic to something else.
And easy pattern is: A "branch" of government is similar to a "branch" of a tree. They both contain one-to-many relationships.
The more intelligent you are, the more abstract similarities you will be able to grasp. But these shared aspects aren't universal objects, we just recognize common structures (overlaps, redundancy) and start giving them names. At best "universal" will mean universal for our universe, with our laws of physics. Or perhaps "universal for humans". But this is a form of "universal" which is bound to a scope. But that makes it not universal, no? Many people don't believe in love/morality/meaning because they don't exist outside of humanity. But nothing can exist outside of itself, so nothing can be universal in such a sense.
The theory of forms might reveal how the human brain works, just like how the Buddha recognized how suffering functioned in humans. Both theories are about objective reality as it appears to humans. In fact, it's only about the "Appears to humans" part, as that's the only thing we can perceive. For human beings cannot break out of their own humanity. For the same reason that you can't write what's beyond words. It should also be noted that great pattern-recognition has limited value. It can't carry me in life. Everything has its own specifics outside of the shared patterns. You can't compress knowledge beyond a certain point. And everything is specific - even set theory. It's an axiomatic system, it's not the one true axiomatic system, such thing could never exist. You can create anything which doesn't contradict itself, but said creation doesn't contain anything but itself, it doesn't exist outside itself. I think "Sphere" is a category, many spheres can exist. But you can think up an infinite amount of categories, and these definitions can contradict eachother, so you can't evaluate one as more correct than another. Even if you use the laws of physics as your "base", an infinite amount of universes with different laws could exist, so our universe is also specific. The universe isn't real outside of the universe, so zooming in and out doesn't change anything.
This reply may be inadequate, but I believe the problem is beyond most people, possibly also beyond me. But in this case, I don't think it can be explained in a way which we can understand it.
And lastly, if I had no concern for standard of living or safety, then I might just want to spend my days in some ancient Carthaginian settlement on the North African Atlantic coast. Say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essaouira, just living with history at my back and the stark, naked face of the Earth below me, and the Ocean gently wiping it all away.
Morocco isn’t too unsafe and the standard of living for expats is pretty high, Carrefour has pretty much their full French selection (including the high end stuff) in all upper-middle class neighborhoods of larger towns and cities. There are quite a few wealthy French retirees there and a large tourist economy. If you speak French and have a remote job it could be interesting.
I love Lake Constance and actually lived in Konstanz for a short time. That whole band of far south Germany is really nice, one of my favorite places in Europe and seems like a good place to raise kids, very close to nature, outdoor sports, rich and peaceful.
hydroacetylene
29d ago
Mormons have an unusually high percentage of people who actually follow all, or the vast majority of, the rules.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
29d ago
If you speak French and have a remote job it could be interesting.
I do and I do, actually. Not sure whether my contract allows remote work from outside Germany though. But then again, I'm not married to this particular job. I am unfortunately married to a woman who falls apart at temperatures above 15°C, whereas I begin to feel comfortable at 25°C and more. I don't think Morocco is a realistic option, sadly.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
29d ago
I just finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I have to say it is nearly perfect as a book, for me. It's the perfect mix of literary, philosophical, enough action to keep moving, enough sex to be fun without becoming grating or disgusting. The length is perfect, it doesn't drag beyond the material, and at no point was I reading just to get the book over with, but it's a sufficient length to explore a lot of ideas and really dig into the characters. It's obviously political, but not overbearing. It's about a time and a place but it is timeless, it neither holds your hand explaining things nor requires so much background that you need a history degree to get it.
I'm probably going to go back to Tolstoy for a few hundred more pages. Get at least to the start of the second war.
REQUEST: What are great graphic novels I should read? I've read and enjoyed Watchmen and V for Vendetta in the past, and read Tezuka's Buddha last year and found it to be as such a book goes very fun. I read some manga as a tween, but never got really into it, kinda feel like it's something I should explore, now that I live in a world where I could get that from a library or get it off LibGen.
hydroacetylene
29d ago
I was speaking of "will people get religion by turning to Islam". No, they will not, because few people find religion while intending not to follow the rules, and any American who wants to follow the rules of Islam can get a much better deal in mormonism.
tsiivola
29d ago
I would say that things like the idea of a circle or the idea of a dog exist in some sense, even though ideas are not material things that you can touch. Maybe it's a feature of the human brain that it tries to find patterns with commonalities in everything that it perceives, and you can only mentally process physical things as representations of these patterns. If you see a rock that is approximately the shape of a circle, you can see and remember it as a rock shaped like a circle, but if you see a rock with a random shape then it's kind of like looking at something that's in the blind spot of your retina, it's right there, but it's difficult to remember what the shape is or to draw it on paper, etc. If you analyze your subjective experience further along these lines you may come to think that there is some other reality of pure ideas that is parallel to physical reality, because that's what it feels like from a subjective point of view.
This really does not seem to track with the definitions of authoritarianism and totalitarianism I'm familiar with. Would you call the PRC totalitarian? Ukraine? Turkey? Ukraine is broadly similar to Russia on every relevant metric now, PRC has much more political control and state meddling in private life (which I'd consider the definitional core of totalitarianism), and Turkey seems only slightly better (and their crackdown on Kurds and Gülenists still exceeds anything Russia did so far in scope, though you might pin this on those groups being more determined than any opposition in Russia).
Ben___Garrison
29d ago
Left wing authoritarianism is still authoritarianism. Further, modern China isn't particularly communist, and hasn't been since at least the 80s. It's more like Fascism With Chinese Characteristics. Openly fascist countries like Nazi Germany also pretended to be nominally democratic by carrying around the corpse of the Reichstag, but the illusion fooled nobody.
The corrupt democracies are mostly the ones that have shaky democratic fundamentals, i.e. ones that are either hybrid regimes, or the ones that wobble in and out of coups.
Morgenland
29d ago
I store my music locally, but it's not a big collection. I do not consider myself a huge music enthusiast, usually I listen to some jazz albums or to obscure post-punk or post-cold-wave music. I do not enjoy radio and listen to my music only when the mood strikes, not very often. Some of the albums I like are semi-amateur, I doubt if many people even know them. I don't like the experience of streaming, too much of a fuss, a lot of distractions, I don't want any recommendations, I don't like working while music is playing, heck I even rarely drive with music.
And I like the experience of playing music locally, no distractions, just my music and me. I put myself into the state of day-dreaming, and I can play it anywhere, just need to take my mp3 player (yes, I use mp3 players, they are ridiculously cheap now). Mp3 players are very convenient at night, when I don't have to reach for my phone, just a little, discrete device only for music. It helps me a lot with my sleeplessness. And I'm sentimental about some archival recordings that are nowadays barely accessible anywhere, certainly not on youtube. So, the sum of my idiosyncrasies I guess.
Probably not; I imagine he would think that the ELCA and whatever else would need to be reformed. Remember, his ecclesiology, much more than yours, allows for institutions to start off healthy and then stray further.
But I suppose I don't get your point. Are you happy with the current state of Roman Catholicism everywhere? The German bishops? The current pope? Blessings for same-sex couples?
(And there are strands of Lutheranism which are healthier. The LCMS is somehow both conservative and pretty large, which is fairly unusual for more traditional protestant churches.)
Is there some way that that previous question was supposed to relate to my previous comment that I'm currently not seeing, or was that just meant to be a sample of the refighting the wars of religion that you would do?
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