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muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
29d ago
ten to twenty years from now it will be generally accepted that Mistakes Were Made
I wish we had RemindMeBot? And is your prediction that general sentiment is "Mistakes Were Made"? Or is it the general sentiment that some particular group of people are too stupid to vote? They are not the same claim. The latter seems to be generally shared sentiment about the political outgroup in the US politics since I can remember, so I am uncertain how it can be verified. Perhaps you intend a more specific claim about responses about stupidity that is more strong than more than stable trend of everyday political animus?
Nevertheless, I don't think observable presence of either kind of sentiment would tell much about the objective facts of the war. Watching MAS*H, made 20 years after the Korean war, the generally accepted sentiment of the producers of the show is that the Korean war was a mistake (naturally the show was for a large part about Vietnam, also thought a mistake). I don't think the evidence proves that either war was a mistake. South Korea is clearly a victory for all of mankind, only complicated by their later problems with their birth rate. Vietnam is more difficult to assess. There were faults in execution of the war, both strategically and on home front, but containing the Communism probably was not one of the mistakes. The domino theory worked, sort-of. Who knows what would have happened in SE Asia if North Vietnam would have had a shorter, more victorious war. What if Second Malaysian Emergency would have started earlier and turned out differently? Would Singapore had been the success story it has been?
In general, if the overall American mood during "Freedom Fries" moments are not the most rational, it is mostly information about the state of American mood than anything objective. The consistent prediction is, the American mood ten years before or after "Freedom Fries" is equal in its rationality, no matter its current polarity or valence.
Concerning casual discussion: The amount of death during the course of human history is of such magnitude, any discussion about it will appear nothing but casual or callous in comparison. Also an isolated demand.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
29d ago
I honestly cannot even fathom being unable to see NPR's shift in the past 8 years. Someone has to have a bare minimum of observational skills and long-term memory, and then it should just be patently obvious.
I've never had a car commute, so I haven't listened to NPR on radio regularly since I was a child. My exposure to their current slant is mainly by reading articles and occasionally listening to podcasts. So I don't know what their day-to-day news coverage is like for the most part, which makes it harder for me to notice a change. But my interpretation of their bias is from articles of theirs I've read in the past few months.
According to this Twitter thing, race-IQ is the most taboo topic. It's more taboo than "are pedophiles harmful or not?"
In general, I find the outrage over this topic a lot more interesting than whether or not blacks have lower IQ than whites.
Speaking of which, what are the implications if blacks have lower IQ than whites? That doesn't tell you about the IQ of any individual standing in front of you. For that, you would just test them?
What's important about this finding? What policy would we change? Is this actually a proxy for acknowledging IQ exists and that improving society through education won't work in a meritocracy because some people will never be doctors no matter how hard we try?
Stated another way, I can't think of any policy we would change to address low IQ blacks that wouldn't also apply to low IQ whites. Race is almost irrelevant.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
29d ago
I'd say ProPublica, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all mainstream left-leaning news sources I expect to do a better job of analysis than NPR. With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP which I expect to be relatively trustworthy on the facts (of course with some bias on which facts they report and precisely how they present them), but analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
29d ago
Isn't "service for the duration" the default assumption mostly everywhere? Only powers fighting far-off wars of little importance can afford to send soldiers on limited combat tours.
sliders1234
29d ago
What do you mean by “not well understood”. Do you mean economists do not understand why or the average guy doesn’t understand why.
I think economists would easily cite things like land restrictions, failure to build infrastructure, zone restrictions etc as the cause of high home prices.
So, I wouldn't go with "Men wearing pants" as an explanatory example, I would go with something more absolutely limiting, such as the state of the art of our food crops.
Corn is a great crop at least partially because we chose to spend thousands of generations selectively breeding. There was an original reason why corn was chosen over other available crops at the time- that's the historical contingency, and then there's the modern fact that corn is a better crop than other similar plants that we never modified. But- Some of those plants might be able to produce better outcomes- might have produced better outcomes- had we known about them and chosen them all those epochs ago when we chose corn.
Our Plateau here is the different species of corn. They are different, but many are all relatively similar. You can take your pick of corn based dishes, choose different species of corn to make different varieties of those dishes, and you can selectively breed our current corn to get other, slightly different varieties of corn. We are in a sense, married to these historical choices now. Not to a single point, a single species of corn, but to the general area of the state of the art of corn that we currently occupy. A 'plateau' of viability.
But purely hypothetically, there may well be a viable food crop 100k generations down the line of, say, parsely. If we run into a civilization that bred parsely into a different supercrop, that would be a different plateau. But to get to the world where we are using that supercrop from this world, would be a 100k generation ordeal. Similarly, to those in that world, it would be an ordeal to produce our supercorn.
So this is the sense in which the plateau is arbitrary. There are other hypothetical stable ways of life out there. But we are stuck on a metaphorical island. Cultural Nomadism could get us to these 'islands' of culture, but the journey may be hard and costly and uncertain, and in many cases is inordinately expensive.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
29d ago
It was personal reasons, I won't go more into it.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
29d ago
Conscription, like all laws restricting individual liberty, can be societal equivalent of Ulysses tying himself to mast.
Very few people really want to go fight in a war. Yet the consensus may be that all men are needed to fight or the war is lost and the war ought not to be lost.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
29d ago
With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP; analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.
Technically, Reuters does have an opinion section, Breakingviews.
campfireSmoresEaten
29d ago
I don't consider NATO an alliance of puppet regimes, I just consider it an alliance. So as far as I'm concerned there's nothing to feel guilty about there.
campfireSmoresEaten
29d ago
Also Transnistria! Break-away state from Moldova supported by Russia! I don't know the full story so I don't know if the details are similar to what happened in Georgia. I gotta look into that.
campfireSmoresEaten
29d ago
But that only started once it became clear that Russia was belligerent. The US didn't want to destroy Russia just for the sake of it, they wanted to do that because Russia was a threat to the system of the world.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
29d ago
How does it not? There is a bounded amount of things of value, and everything available for the use and consumption of Elon Musk is not available for the use and consumption of J. Random Janitor. Whether we directly confiscate Elon's land and redistribute it among the Janitor family, or reduce the number in Elon's bank account so that Elon's ability to bid and win in implicit or explicit auctions for things that the janitor also wants, making Elon poorer helps the janitor in expectation.
DTulpa
29d ago
Then I think your nose will serve you right here. I know here in TheMotte we've had people praising the writing and also those unimpressed by it, and the latter consistently brings up zaniness and the 'it's a fun romp' vibe as criticisms. And regardless of writing quality, everybody pretty much agrees this is a Larian game with a BG skin, not a proper continuation. The horniness of the companions alone makes it feel juvenile to me.
Outside of a dabble or two, I don't table-top. But my understanding is that Critical Role played a big part in reviving DnD in the age of streaming and Let's Plays. I went to a DnD birthday party years ago for a girl who had no awareness of any of the rules or anything, but wanted a game held because the show looked so fun. She was very confused when we explained to her that she had already wasted all her spells in the first combat encounter, when all she really wanted to do was girlboss a mage.
That night was fun, don't get me wrong. But I felt like I got a decent insight into the kind of person CR was appealing to: people who like the drama, the self-expression, and the costumes of table-top, but are quickly in over their heads when they have to roll for crit or w/e. So they just watch others do it.
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
29d ago
Yes. For this post, I skimmed it, then I pasted the full post in GPT. GPT summarized it, which gave me a few more mental handles to start asking questions, and reading the post proper. As I did this, I re-pasted pieces alongside questions about them, followed links sometimes pasting bits from those, and so on as I began to understand it and have questions.
I do indeed do this for other pieces of writing as well, ML papers are a good example. GPT-4 is going to know any ML jargon that came out before 2013 for instance.
Hallucination can still be an issue, but if you treat it like a friendly human teacher who sometimes gets confused, and keep your critical thinking skills about you, these systems can really help introduce you to new topics where it might otherwise be hard to get a foothold.
I do also sometimes craft posts in a similar way. Talking to GPT about my ideas with stream of thought, asking it to summarize them... And then throwing out it's summary because it messed up my voice and changed some of my meanings and social intents. But this is still useful, because it's still often successful at drawing all my scattered ideas together into a structure, so I can then rewrite my ideas again with a similar structure to it's summary, then move on to my reread and edit phase.
RedRegard
29d ago
The DEI stuff is built around internet fads, upper-middle-class pretensions/narcissism, and establishment imperatives. The terms left and right are malleable and relative, so it's both left-wing and not-left-wing. In any case, it's very convenient for the knowledge worker class and the giant institutions they serve, as it not only leaves their deeper structures and economic advantages uncontested (while merely arguing for superficial alterations), it also argues for increased power to be given to these people and institutions, as their credentials, HR departments, teams of lawyers and such are put forward as the necessary cures for 'systemic' bigotry or whatever.
What 'true' leftists, which exist only as fully as true rightists, lament is that there aren't strong working-class involvements in this new left, and indeed it lacks much revolutionary spark at all. It's not about solving or changing modern society so much as it's about keeping things in place and expanding the purvue of some of its most powerful factions. I think it deserves to be treated as a process of its own, best understood as a unique development that began around the 1960's, rather than something that matches patterns as broad as 'leftism'. Although, I can see the propagandistic appeal of accusing them of being false leftists, given that the term left enjoys positive valence with many of the people who would benefit from more working class, economically focused initiatives, such that it's a way of signaling to them that they are missing out. It's a matter of brand manipulation rather than objective understanding.
07mk
29d ago
The number one de facto policy this would change is that proportionate representation by race in jobs that are heavily IQ dependent wouldn't be the goal which, if our society fails to reach, gets deemed White supremacist. Instead, greater emphasis would be placed on removing any extraneous barriers for all individuals from all races, including unfair discrimination, and may the chips fall where they may in terms of the racial proportions.
spring
29d ago
And in this hypothetical the positioning of troops in Mexico and Canada was in direct response to USA's seizure of Nova Scotia.
The Baltics joined NATO in 2004, and didn't host any permanent NATO troops until the EFP was created in response to Russia's seizure of Crimea. The current force is ~10,000 in the Baltics, 11,600 in Poland. It doesn't take much historical acumen to understand that this is not a credible threat to Russia's continuity.
Throwaway05
29d ago
Dr. House doesn't really exist, the equivalent in real life is something like a specialty tumor board at a premier research institution, which is a group of knowledgeable specialists "discussing" the specific approach to a known problem (and rarely trying to figure out what the problem is or arguing over what it is).
Your situation is different in that you know what the problem is, and it's a basic diagnosis, but you can't seem to get it treated. It's not unreasonable to be like "okay what's up we need more options, more heroic measures."
However, my suspicion is that you need to go back to basics.
Basically - you need therapy. Medication may not help in the way you want it to help.
This doesn't mean you should give up on medications, you can always try more/different SSRIs etc. to find something that hits for you, but at a basic level you have to keep in mind that some things are more responsive to medication than others and this includes in psychiatry.
The classic example non-psychiatric example is insomnia (well some consider this psych). We have meds. We have a lot of meds. We have really expensive meds. We have really dangerous meds you should never use but people demand anyway and have really bad outcomes. What works for insomnia? Behavioral modification and therapy. Works (maybe an exaggeration, maybe not, I'd have to review the data) orders of magnitude better than meds.
In psych - for people with certain types of depression (terminal cancer? live in an active war zone and your family all got blown up?) medications aren't going to work for a lot of people. Therapy is generally going to do more.
Back to anxiety.
Anxiety often requires higher doses of medications (sometimes to the point where the side effects outweigh the value), but best practice is essentially to have medications lighten the load enough for therapy to be useful and helpful.
You don't need a genius psychiatrist, you need an excellent therapist (can be a psychiatrist), which is not the same thing and is something you can absolutely pay for if you wish in most metro areas (and a cheap, serviceable therapist may do). It is possible that a slightly more clever psychiatrist would throw something on that would solve the problem but that should be a secondary goal.
Now I don't know what your relationship with therapy is but you might be skeptical about it and might be asking why that would suddenly be a thing you would need now later in life after medication worked for so long. Additionally, if you are posting here you are probably intelligent, high resource, and rational - and thinking because of all that therapy shouldn't be needed. Unfortunately that's not how this work.
For example: a lot of anxiety related behaviors and experiences are basically just good old Pavlov fucking with your nervous system. Don't matter if you are mucho smart, if the bell goes off you'll salivate.
I wonder if a process like that happened here - you went off the med and expected something to happen or something happened, you felt like the safety net was gone, you had experiences, they rapidly reinforced themselves now you are in an anxiety spiral..... one you'll be able to get out of with time and space maybe, but faster and more effectively with some skills training, CBT, whatever - all with medication as a supportive factor. The meds are often a crutch, and therapy skills can be more definitive treatment (one of the reasons why you may want to avoid meds for anxiety).
Keep in mind that other conditions often work very differently.
It may also be reasonable to see your PCP to rule out any medical problems (not that they are likely) and assuage any health anxiety.
BahRamYou
29d ago
Breaking news: Uri Berliner has since resigned. I have to assume that "resigned" here is the usual thing where bigshots are allowed to resign to save face and avoid the public spectacle of being fired that any normal employee would face.
One thing I should add, which I didn't know earlier: some of this is being driven by this guy: Christopher Rufo. He was apparently important in proving that former Harvard president Claudine Gay plagiarized her PHD thesis and getting her fired/resigned, and recently has been posting a lot of Katherine Maher's most ridiculous tweets to make people realize what kind of person she is. He's been getting signal boosted by Elon Musk. This gave some of his tweets, as he put it, "10 million views, compared to NPR which gets 8 million listeners per week." So it's not like this stuff just randomly came up, there seems to be an organized conservative effort now to headhunt these woke progressive leaders.
Yo, since you're calling me out: A) What post are you talking about where you "explained what the problem was"? I didn't see it or read it. Perhaps you're right that I could have or even should have. I didn't. You're assuming.
You're apparently pattern-matching me to someone who denies there's a problem with media. I do not deny this, as my post history indicates.
The initial post by @FaibleEstimeDeSoi was about video games and a black/white pairing, which didn't and still does not strike me as odd. The issue is not with one game. The issue is larger, as with the tide that goes out--it lowers all boats. For whatever reason I did not make that connection to the post and I felt the issue was with the interracial pairing in and of itself, not a symptom of a larger issue (i.e. focusing on one boat instead of the tide.)
Dase decided to go for it and get personal. That's what I take issue with--well, that and his general writing style, which I find tedious but not because I think he's a liar or cretin. I don't think either of those and he seems quite intelligent. He was also rude and thus far in his interactions with me does not seem to be interested in changing that tack. So be it.
I'm not blind and I'm not lying. I spent three years in Africa and most of my life in Alabama--black men with white women is a thing. That is the issue I was bringing up. I am not Gillitrut.
(Edit: I'm probably one of the most normie dudes in here and need to adjust my expectations. Absurd really how thin my skin is at my age.)
Ukraine was also poor before war.
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