domain:alexberenson.substack.com
aardvark2
21m ago
Ukraine to protect the Ukranians despite Ukraine facing far worse than Palestine.
Really? Less civilian Ukrainians killed by war in 2 years than Palestinians in few months (and that's not counting as a percentage of population). Also Ukrainian women are free to travel outside.
RedRegard
25m ago
Squat sitting and cross-legged sitting are the ideal ways to sit and read IMO. The first takes pressure off your lower spine while together they keep your muscles limbered and ensure good flexibility. Backup method: random chair. I've always enjoyed reading in rocking-style chairs for some reason, even though their resting position typically leaves you in a presumably unhealthy posture, with your head and upper body curving forward to maintain equilibrium. I guess they make sitting somewhat 'active', and I am by nature a bit of an ADD rat.
ResoluteRaven
29m ago
I think a generalized concept of a network state makes some sense, in that it recognizes that increasing numbers of people in the future will be more loyal to an online community of likeminded individuals than to their physical neighbors or the nation state that governs the land they live on. Such a group will naturally seek to build a parallel set of institutions and leverage their combined resources to achieve shared goals. Not having read much of Balaji's actual writings on the subject, I can't speak to any concrete proposals of his, but I can presume that he has a misguided sense of who, if anyone, will be directing this phenomenon and what the results will ultimately be.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
29m ago
No need to even recruit an attractive young woman. I'm sure there are attractive young women who are interested in this question and could source the DNA all by themselves, then get it analysed and upload the results, immediately ensuing massive fame for themselves if the theory is correct.
hydroacetylene
34m ago
Americans already believe in God at very high rates by developed world standards, and that number is surely much higher among the red tribe. Declining church attendance probably has a temporal-world solution that could be routed into with the right social structures/church outreach/whatever.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
37m ago
Then why use the term at all?
Look, I don’t think Nietzsche had a very realistic model of history, either. But if you’re going to ignore everything else about his “slave revolt in morals,” maybe you should pick a different term.
hydroacetylene
43m ago
Just rig elections.
hydroacetylene
43m ago
Don’t chew gum.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
53m ago
Were you already religious?
Because that strategy begs the question of why people have been falling away for decades. Otherwise you’re betting on a losing horse. Fine for getting a local support network, but I don’t see it scaling like the more ethnonationalist examples in that essay.
ArmedTooHeavily
54m ago
Seconded, this is good advice.
Botond173
1hr ago
Russia is actively taking refugees from the middle east and elsewhere and shipping them to the Finnish border where they are provided with bicycles and told to cross.
How is that, in effect, different from what Serbian, Macedonian and Turkish authorities were doing in 2015?
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
1hr ago
How do you model the ability of ants to farm aphids? What is your definition of "Notion"? What is your definition of "Understanding"?
It is probably not impossible to get an ant colony to have a substantially predictive model of a human.
But it's going to be at least as difficult as getting Doom to run on biological cells.
Ants can already understand you as a threat. I'll agree that getting them to understand you as a human understands a human would probably be very difficult. But if you had pheremones, you could make them understand you as any sort of notion that an ant can communicate with pheremones.
You can construct more complex notions. You can transmit isomorphisms that are present in your brain to their brains.
They can clearly adapt such that they synchronize with external features. Therefore you can communicate with them. You can transmit telos to them. You can program them.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Ask for help.
Your manager exists to balance the workload in situations like these. Either by handing off one of the secondary clients or by allocating additional help on the big client. You should be able to go to him or her and say “Client A is taking more of my time than expected. Can I get some help?”
This may feel like admitting defeat. It’s not. You’re not in this alone, so use the resources available. Plus, in my experience, leadership likes it when people are communicative about their roadblocks. It makes their job easier.
I don’t know that I can help with anxiety late at night. Other than the usual advice of avoiding caffeine and screens before bed, enforcing a regular sleep schedule, et cetera. I suppose one thing that’s helped me in your situation is resolving on a course of action. I feel better knowing that, in the morning, I have some plan. Doesn’t have to be a perfect one.
AmrikeeAkbar
1hr ago
Something I've been working on; presenting it here to solicit the feedback of the hive-mind.
The Life Cycle of Fashionable Causes
Inspired by some of this recent commentary on the latest trends in identity politics, I’ve been inspired to try and outline a possible model for how these things emerge, develop, and fade. Originally this was written with identity politics in mind, but you could probably apply the model to other things, such as the centuries-long transition of Christianity from being an outlaw religion to a state-sanctioned religious monopoly, or the rise of revolutionary Marxism. I draw heavily from the “Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths” model. Also, I more or less take it as a given that identity politics, in its most common form, is intellectually incoherent and most of its champions are largely driven by self-interest; I will not be discussing the merits of any particular form of it here.
Stage 1: Client identification
Elite-entrepreneurs identify some conceivably-marginalized group (racial or religious minorities, the handicapped, slaves) and position themselves as champions of said group. This is especially frequent in times of elite overproduction, for obvious reasons. Note that at this stage, these champions may well be selfish, but they aren’t necessarily insincere. On the contrary, they’re likely to be true believers. Remember, the cause isn’t fashionable yet. On the contrary, advocating for it too strongly will likely raise eyebrows in polite society. There was a time when Christians were still a despised and hated minority, and when anyone suggesting that slavery should be abolished would be met with astonishment. John Brown was a villain before he became a hero. Our elite-entrepreneurs are analogous to settlers or prospectors on the cultural frontier. They may hope to hit pay dirt but they haven’t yet.
Stage 2: Advocacy
This is the long march through the institutions. The champions create platforms for advocacy, or seek positions within existing platforms (academia, parliaments, the Senate). They form organizations, publish manifestos, recruit disciples. Very importantly, during this stage the cause starts to accrue social capital. Not a lot perhaps, but a little, concentrated in certain areas. It starts to be possible to accrue legitimacy and street cred in “the movement” even its only with other supporters and second-generation converts to the cause. You may still face penalty or sanction for association with the cause among the general public though.
Stage 3: Critical Mass
The cause is now practically mainstream. People put their preferred pronouns in their linked-in bios; they say “He is Risen” as a greeting. It’s likely that in the process of expanding, the movement has softened some of its hard edges and dispensed with some of its more controversial positions. This is the gold-rush stage. The cost of joining the movement is now relatively low, and an increasingly large portion of converts are simple band-wagon jumpers.
Stage 4: Fragmentation
As the movement expands, the social capital it began accruing in stage 2 starts to dissipate. Its no longer hip or cutting edge to be associated with it. The late-comers to the movement are frustrated because they can no longer accrue status by participation. The old guard (the Old Bolsheviks) are frustrated because the movement has lost its purity and its revolutionary fervor. At this point, you start to see infighting. There are lots of attempts to establish internal discipline, to decide who is and is not truly part of the movement, which particular courses of action best serve the cause. Much of this comes down to fighting over scraps of power and prestige; the gold rush days are over.
Stage 5: Dissolution
At this point, the movement is largely spent. Some of its precepts have probably been normalized in the culture at large (not even the race-realists nowadays advocate for a return to slavery). Precisely because the cause was largely triumphant, you no longer draw any attention to yourself by advocating for it. In the case of sufficiently far-reaching transformations – such as the mass adoption of Christianity – the movement has probably become such a big tent that you can find people advocating for totally-opposed courses of action, each claiming to represent the true spirit of the movement. In the Catholic-Protestant wars which racked Europe for centuries, both sides claimed to fight in the name of Christ. Other such totalizing philosophies, like Marxism-Leninism, have had their own internal schisms. Its important to note that simply because a belief system has become such a big tent that it can seemingly accommodate or justify almost anything, that doesn’t mean the movement which spawned it had no impact. The fall of paganism, the rise of Protestantism, and eventual rise of Marxism-Leninism all left the world a very different place than it was before.
A few other notes here: Obviously this is presented as a linear model, and assumes that the movement in question is ultimately more or less successful. There’s no reason that need be the case. I’m sure further investigation would identify a number of movements which never progressed through all these stages. For that matter, I see no reason in principle a movement couldn’t move back and forth through these stages, or even be in different stages among different sectors of the population.
With regards to identity politics, I think that in certain sectors, (academia, most establishment media organizations), its probably in stage-4. Affirmative-action hiring policies are increasingly ubiquitous, but at the same time, there is massive labor surplus for a relatively small number of jobs. In the case of media, the financial opportunities are rapidly declining, as Freddie DeBoer has documented extensively; while academia hasn’t yet collapsed I strongly suspect the current model is not sustainable, and there may be an implosion at some point in the future. People are hopping on board the identity politics bandwagon in an attempt to carve out a secure niche, but enough people have hopped on this bandwagon that now they’ve hit diminishing returns, and will now have to start adjudicating who is and is not a member of minority group X
RaiderOfALostTusken
1hr ago
Put the cans of spray paint away
RaiderOfALostTusken
1hr ago
See, i did actually think this is within the realm of possibility. I don't know enough about DNA to know how far you can go to establish a relationship, but yeah between siblings, cousins, etc. Maybe there's something
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1hr ago
In my own ethical view, it depends on the store.
I don't generally view our obligations to corporations to be the same as our obligations to individuals. A small business I would not cheat. A corporation has already stated that it will act to maximize profit, screwing me in the process if necessary or just beneficial.
naw, it's a repeat of a repeat of a repeat. Wouldn't have made it if it weren't a direct response to a question. It'll come back up in the main thread soon enough.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
You should post it as a parent comment in main thread
jkf
1hr ago
Fortunately I am pretty polite, and don't have much use for the 'well bless your heart' style of polite disagreement. I know it when I see it though.
jkf
1hr ago
Kyle Kemper is his half brother from his mother
We're not trying to prove who his mother is, though?
are you sure it isn't illegal and even posting this on forum put you on some list?
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