domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
HereAndGone
23hr ago
But what if they all make up a group mind and so they have intelligence and sentience? You just don't know! What if yeast have souls? What if yeast are souls, the soul of Gaia? All the individual organisms on the Earth make up one giant mega-organism, just like all the different cells in our bodies make up one mega-organism that we call the self! And besides, humans aren't conscious either, there is no one single unitary "I" or "self". So it's all the same!
(No, I don't believe any of this, but if one gets into the weeds of philosophical explorations of what is life, what is consciousness, why do you think it's not okay to shove the fat man into the path of the trolley, etc., one can easily discard common sense by the way).
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
I'm not really that interested in buying anything. I suppose I'll need to get a helmet eventually, but outside of that this is more of a work with what I have situation.
Though I had an unrelated conversation with my sister recently about "boys" vs "girls" bikes, where I said I never saw the classic female bike design as peculiarly feminine, and outside of a bike that was pink or ribboned, I wouldn't really see a guy on a girls bike and think "fag."
If anything I could easily imagine one of those Traditional™️ masculinity™️ bloggers informing me that it was effeminate for a man to spread his legs to "mount" and "straddle" a men's bicycle.
Corvos
23hr ago
this is more of a work with what I have situation
Fair enough, though I think renting one for a day would benefit you by giving you a better idea of what difficulties are coming from you vs your bike.
effeminate for a man to spread his legs to "mount" and "straddle" a men's bicycle
I’ll admit that putting a long, hard object between my thighs to get pounded repeatedly isn’t my idea of a fun time ;)
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
23hr ago
Doing a similar standard of job for 30% of the price, or even doing the same job to an 80% standard for 30% of the price for almost all jobs is a very valid component to the merits of an individual for a job. Microsoft choosing to recognise and reward this doesn't reflect badly on either them or the person doing the job for cheap, the only person to boo here is the person who wants to extract economic rents by artificially restricting competition.
HereAndGone
23hr ago
I genuinely think what will reduce meat eating is the price of meat and other animal products becoming ever more expensive, not vegan sermons about ethics and moralising about the monstrosity of liking roast chicken and burgers.
When we get back to the days of meat being a luxury item for the common man, then we'll all be eating more plants, pulses, and vegetarian/vegan alternatives. It'll be interesting to see how agri-business responds to the need to grow more crops to feed the world - I think the vegans may not like the results of what is needed for mass industrial farming in order to produce enough foodstuffs to feed the West (monoculture, insecticide and pesticide reliance, GMOs, huge fields cleared to be easy to plant, sow, and harvest those crops meaning no hedgerows or ditches or habitats for birds or wild flowers/plants, otherwise known as 'weeds', the demands on water, the problems with pesticide and fertiliser and insecticide run-off into ground water, and a hell of a lot more).
There's seven billion people in the world. We won't feed ourselves on a few herbs grown at home in window boxes.
BahRamYou
23hr ago
I was thinking earlier like medieval times, where it was less extreme but still gross by modern standards. I agree that most traditional societies are not very sustainable, we just forget about the ones that perish from massive crop failure.
Corvos
23hr ago
An excellent post, I didn’t think of this. Should have taken the female half of the deal more seriously. Mea culpa.
Botond173
23hr ago
There are two glaring problems with that. Imperial Germany had a legacy of democratic norms already - there was a legislative assembly, elections, political parties, political discussions in a free press etc. Also, Germany isn't in Eastern Europe.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
23hr ago
Some people are better than others. Elite Human Capital is just the stock at the top of the hierarchy.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
23hr ago
Genuine applause for taking one for the team. I protest your ban as unjust silencing for stating true facts about the world, with your only crime being that your blade was too sharp and well honed. I stand with you in solidarity. Omnes pro uno.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
23hr ago
Whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Imperial Germany was absolutely an Obrigkeitsstaat (elite-state?) ruled by a small number of people with very token democratic institutions that were meant to channel republicanism into wearing itself out and discrediting itself via fruitless procedures conducted within a powerless framework. That "democracy" never amounted to anything, wasn't taken very seriously by non-activists, and got absolutely bulldozed over by the actual rulers whenever they didn't jump according to orders. The Prussians in general and Bismarck specifically had a habit of allowing seemingly republican instutions to take the wind out of activists' sails, only to pull the rug out from under them and have riot police beat the shit out of them a few years later. The counterrevolution was still very much going on in Imperial Germany.
So the "legacy of democratic" norms was really the legacy that democracy was a farce. Does that square with your perception of inter-war Germany?
Corvos
23hr ago
Given that the 30% wages essentially work due to relative purchasing power and / or arbitrage between a Third World childhood and a First World adulthood, isn’t this global laissez faire approach basically poison for long-term economic growth?
If it becomes widely accepted that economic growth means an increased quality of life here and now, but that the window of opportunity only lasts maybe 1.5 generations before your (grand)children are priced out of the global market, that seems to make growth and laissez faire economics a much tougher sell.
Crowstep
23hr ago
Long term I think more expensive food/meat is unlikely. We reached peak farmland in the late 90s. Since then we've been growing more food on less land. Future technologies aren't going to make food more expensive to produce, obviously, but AI and greater use of GMOs can definitely make it less expensive. And the world's population is likely to peak in the 2050s, with declines in the developed world way before then.
Of course, the birth rate and population collapse could also crash the global economy, making us much poorer overall. But I still suspect that food is something that will stay cheap or get cheaper.
Crowstep
23hr ago
Another similar businessman, Elon Musk just tried his hand in politics obviously without the guiding hand of such a woman. Look how that turned out for him
Elon Musk married to a socially competent woman who he actually listens to would be a powerful thing.
Instead he has a weird harem and spends too much time on twitter.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
23hr ago
That seems to be the face-value meaning of the term, but I have a feeling that there's a meme on the Motte that goes by the "Elite Human Capital" name.
What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.
Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? Poland? Romania? Bulgaria? Hungary? And yes, contrary to what you said below Germany also counts, of course. I'm almost impressed how you put your finger on the single country in the region that did not revert to authoritarianism, and are acting flabbergasted how I could possibly think they're not representative.
The "democratic tradition", the way the term is being used nowadays, of western Europe is more a result of the Cold War and it's alliance with the USA, than it does with anything that happened before the war. Even Spain and Portugal were dictatorships until the 70's.
The Asian Tiger route was a str ictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.
Whether or not it would work is another question (and the explanation of why it worked for Asia is another liberal just-so story that they had to scramble for after the fact, as they do with many things), all I'm saying is that it was an idea floated by public intellectuals at the time, although ultimately not attempted.
It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.
First of all it's worth reiterating that the "it" is "people voting the wrong way", something that clearly shows the "democratic traditions" are a cruel joke.
As to the causes, I mean, maybe? I could imagine that if the reunification went well the east Germans could be bread-and-circused into complacency, and would be just fine with brilliant ideas like importing seven zillion Syrians and Afghans, putting people in prison for speech, but locking them in a women's cell after they declare themselves a woman, and fining people €10K for misgendering them, but it's not immediately obvious to me. The psyops ran by the Americans on their western counterparts are legendary, to the point that anyone coming from a country with any amount of healthy patriotism comes away shaken after seeing the end result of what they were put through.
Dude literally picked the only country in the region that didn't have an authoritarian "back"slide at the time.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
22hr ago
Well I hope you voted to acquit or you have some terrible karma.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22hr ago
And yet, somehow the state of Russia is explained by a lack of democratic norms.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
22hr ago
The suffering of bees may be important to mitigate (I think that’s true — wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?) but the author must convince us —
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the suffering of bees is of such high importance that it is worth writing on it to convince people to place a burden on themselves. (Unlikely. There is worse suffering taking place even if we consider only bees, like the effects of pesticides. It’s not worth discourse hours).
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that writing something so unintuitive that people ignore what else you write is morally worth the future drawbacks of loss of influence.
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that the suffering of bees is so important that we should forego the very term of pleasure. This is problematic to his utilitarian ambitions, because our motivation to live well and expand our wellbeing is tied to whether we are able to experience wholesome pleasures in life. If people feel better from a spoonful of honey, not only does their own suffering decrease, but (1) they have energy to reduce the suffering of others and (2) the reason to love bees over wasps is brought to mind.
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bees are not designed to be destroyed by mammals, given that bears and raccoons destroy them in the wild, and given that fish are designed to be eaten by other fish. If the author does not believe that nature’s design should be respected, then his interest should be ensuring that killer whales aren’t able to kill dolphins in the ocean. But wouldn’t only a senseless person have a problem with the killer whale enjoying his design and eating dolphins, who significantly more intelligent than bees? So the suffering of bees is within our design — we should only guarantee that the suffering isn’t excessive, like with some easy regulations about whether all the young bees are killed off after the honey is made.
There’s possibly an element of Jewish thought in this reasoning + Singer’s. Because there’s an eagerness to heap up behavioral proscriptions, however numerous; there’s the love of rules and the eagerness to find extrapolations to the rules which defy normal intuition; there’s the arbitrary basis to begin morality; and there’s the obsession with trivia and edge cases over more substantive issues. That’s immaterial, but just interesting to note — it’s possible some of Matthew’s moral intuitions come from a different traditional framework.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
THIS order doesn't apply. That doesn't mean that three months from now there might not be another order that does.
Five years ago birthright citizenship wasn't on the table.
ThenElection
22hr ago
Got me to wondering: has there ever been a video game or movie where the villain (hero?) becomes convinced that the only way to end all suffering in the universe is to extinguish all consciousness and life? I feel like I've seen this trope a thousand times, but I can't put my finger on one that matches it perfectly. Maybe one of the FF games? Probably some anime somewhere.
Obviously no, not unless it was two bees. Three? Absolute moral obligation or else you are a monster!
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