Youtube comments of Jim Luebke (@jimluebke3869).
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Strictly speaking it's not a "slipstream" you're interested in here, it's a "boundary layer".
Air drag has two components - First, "surface drag", the actual friction of the air against the vehicle. Second, "form drag", the force produced by the fact that you're pushing into a lot of air in front of you, making the air pressure in front of your car a lot higher than the pressure behind your car (this pushes you back). Dimples obviously increase the surface drag on your car. However, they DEcrease the form drag.
Decreasing form drag is all about increasing the air pressure behind your car (or golf ball). How? Well, that's where the boundary layer comes in.
The boundary layer is the layer of air flowing near your car, whose flow is changed by the action of your car. If you can keep this boundary layer close to your car, this evens out the pressure of the air behind your car with the pressure in front of your car, dramatically reducing the pressure drag.
Picture a Porsche, with its iconic airfoil design. The "boundary layer" sticks close to the top of the car, not only when it reaches the highest point on the car's profile, but also as the profile starts to slope downward. The farther down the back of the car the boundary layer sticks to, the more the air pressure recovers, so the higher the pressure behind the car.
Making the flow in this boundary layer turbulent helps keep the boundary layer attached. Technically speaking, the vortices that develop in the turbulence cause higher-pressure air from the top of the boundary layer to circulate lower into the boundary layer, increasing the pressure in the parts of the boundary layer closer to the car, and helping the layer stay attached.
Dimples on a golf ball, fuzz on a tennis ball, vortex generators on a wing's leading edge, all of these have the same effect.
Sorry about the long explanation, but I wanted to go step-by-step.
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People who go to job interviews to make drones in San Diego, are asked the question, "If you do your job, people will die, are you OK with that?"
Also reportedly, after taking jobs there, they are shown gun camera footage from actual operations. Some of them walk out on that footage, and never go to work there again.
The underlying reasoning for those working there that seems to be most prevalent, is "I'm helping design / build / test something that will be used in a war, and I'm assuming those wars will be fought to protect my country from harm, making this a morally legitimate act of self-defense."
It might surprise you to hear that a large number of these workers are against wars like the one(s) we had in Iraq. Note that the American military-industrial complex is responsible not only for wars, but for a great deal of logistical support, on land, sea, air, and space, as well as a great deal of tech development. A lot of tech development infrastructure projects were cancelled to pay for the Iraq war.
How should people building cannons for the Royal Navy in the 19th century have thought about their work? Should they have taken into account the anti-slavery mission of the Navy? How about the defense of the Home Islands? The Napoleonic Wars? Did Britain need a Navy? Did that Navy need cannons?
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Douglas Adams, in "Life, the Universe, and Everything":
“The alien ship was already thundering towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the very few things there are in the Universe from each other.
Its occupant, the alien with the expensive complexion, leaned back in its single seat. His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did at least keep him on the move.
Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was --- indeed, is --- one of the Universe's very small number of immortal beings.
Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.
Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light jazz on the ship's stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it hadn't been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have done.
To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everyone in it in particular.
This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing which would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this.
He would insult the Universe.”
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@qrzupsjohnson707 The dimples (ideally) help keep higher-pressure air close to the back of the car.
This means the difference between the pressure on the front of the car and the pressure on the back of the car, is less.
If that pressure difference is less, the drag force on the car (which tends to decelerate the car) is less, so it decelerates the car less, and the car is more fuel efficient.
There are already a number of devices that cars and trucks use to allow air pressure to "recover" behind the car -- the old Landcruiser, I recall, has a flap on the top of the back that straight-up drives air from the top of the car into the recirculation zone behind the car; some tractor-trailers have rounded shells attached to the back of the trailer, which is much better than a squared-off back, for allowing pressure to recover.
Related to this, is the old (dangerous) motorcycling trick of tailgating a tractor-trailer, riding behind in its low-pressure recirculation zone. I think Mythbusters may even have done an episode on that. It demonstrates how low the pressure can be, behind a vehicle.
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"Non-Citizens should not have access to the benefits of the country"
You have to make sure this is implemented, though. Back in the 1990s, 5,000,000 Californians voted to pass Proposition 187, 59% to 41%, which declared exactly this. However, it was defeated by the injunction of a single district court judge, Mariana Pfaelzer.
Subsequent to this ruling, the Republican Party in California was effectively destroyed. Different theories have been proposed for this, but Democrats have pointed to this as evidence that favoring unlimited immigration and unlimited government benefits to those immigrants is an electoral winner.
Please pay attention to the actual working of your government and political parties when you try to implement any of this; mass deportation may be a necessary adjunct to this policy, to make sure it goes off smoothly.
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I disagree with the idea that "the pill" is, in the long run, terribly important in any positive way. The question that is currently playing out now, and will make an enormous difference through this century, is not whether women can delay (or forego) fertility. The question is should they (from a societal point of view), to what degree should they, and what are the consequences of their doing so to the extent that is happening now.
200 years ago (before sanitary plumbing, antibiotics, and vaccines), whether the pill was available or not, it would have been an extremely bad idea for women to take it. Any society in which a your average woman had less than 2 children (say, current-day England's ~1.6), would see a catastrophic population collapse within twenty or thirty years, as infant mortality took away a further 50% of those children. That society would then inevitably be replaced by a society that had a birthrate significantly greater than 2.1 -- 4.6 or so is typical for pre-scientific societies. That replacement would probably have been unspeakably ghastly.
It is still legitimate to ask, whether a society's norms should include usage of the pill, and how much. Leaving aside health effects of this form of medical waste in the water supply, the simple question of whether a society can survive the progression of three or four generations while sterilizing itself to this extent, is still as critical as it was in pre-scientific times.
It's clear that looking at today's numbers, by 2100 today's European culture is flat-out doomed. It will be replaced by a culture with far greater fertility numbers (2.1 at the least), and that society will look at its triumph over Europe, and congratulate itself on its wisdom regarding childbearing, and mock today's Europe for its foolishness and shortsightedness. Europeans will be very lucky if it does not include some unspeakably ghastly things as well, although the treatment of young bepilled working-class Englishwomen by some immigrant communities shows we're seeing that already.
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Wow. Way to push The Narrative(TM), Peter. California is screwed for a number of reasons, many of which really are based on bad decisions they've made.
- Dehydration -- California is already at just about carrying capacity as far as water is concerned. Water is too heavy, necessary at such enormous volumes, and California too isolated, to significantly increase supply. The Southwest is in the same predicament; it has nowhere to go but down, from here. Unless Humboldt County dredges their Bay and starts being growth-friendly, California is as big as it's ever going to get.
- Got Woke, Went Broke -- California, being so isolated from the rest of the country by a huge mountain range, increasingly convinced of its own rightness because of its billionaire status, and more than a little weird in the first place, became increasingly out-of-touch with the culture of the rest of the country. This disconnect caused Hollywood to destroy itself at the box office. See: Disney, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Lord of the Rings.
- Utterly incompetent governance -- Or rather, far better at accruing power, than at wisely using it. California House Speaker Willie Brown, the most important politician no one has ever heard of, gathered so much power he basically ran the state for decades. This, in accord with corrupt and ineffective Leftist policies that ranged from unsustainable to self-destructive, funded by the tech boom. Nancy Pelosi took lessons from him, about what kind of power a Speaker could have, ossifying the Federal government as well. Kamala Harris is Vice President (indeed, has a political career at all) specifically because Willie Brown thought she was attractive, to put it delicately. Gavin Newsom is an empty suit full of platitudes and policy ideas that have turned out disastrously in every jurisdiction he's gained power in, starting with San Francisco and spreading out to the state at large.
- Tech is mined out -- Moore's Law hasn't been true for most of a decade now. This means that big new crazy ideas remain crazy, rather than becoming feasible. Another set of advances could bring another several branches of fruit into "low-hanging" territory, but there have been several "next big things" that simply haven't panned out.
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Andrew Doyle: "Tolkien [is a book where] where bad people look bad and good people look good"
Tolkien: "“At last Frodo spoke with hesitation. 'I believed that you [Strider] were a friend before the letter came,' he said, 'or at least I wished to. You have frightened me several times tonight, but never in the way the servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine. I think one of his spies would - well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand”"
Also, did you miss the bit where the Ring called out to the evil in people, and used it (even if it started with good intention) to twist them into something horrible? Kind of an important point, that. Even the Orcs were elves, once.
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Just looking at a map of "good guys" and "pirate-type bad guys", there's a conspicuous lack of "bad guys" between the US and Japan / Korea, US and Australia / NZ, US and England, and really the entire Western Hemisphere.
The pockets of pirates and other bad actors seem to be Malacca, Hormuz, and Somalia / Bab el Mendeb, which mostly serves to isolate India. It seems to me that a lot of the impact here only lands if India fails to make the jump from where it is now, to a regional power capable of fielding a navy that can secure those choke points.
If Peter ever reports the headline, "Navy of India moves carrier group to secure the Straits of Hormuz", and he does so with the assumption they will actually be effective there, that's the first step to securing all of the choke points around the Indian Ocean.
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It isn't the "white nationalists" that are concerned if Biden wins. It's anyone who's white, who is concerned that they are going to be discriminated against based on the color of their skin again racial revanchists, and remains unconvinced that simply "bending the knee" will lead to any positive outcome at all.
This is particularly concerning for white people in the lower classes, who are being told that despite being no richer than any minorities (and in fact, far poorer than minorities that are now well-represented in our university system), they are to pay "reparations" for crimes they never committed. People will not tolerate being turned out of their homes, or even tolerate riots in our cities, for very long.
Trump represents a real solution to these issues. All he really has to do is buy some time, while globalization works itself out into higher wages worldwide. Offshoring is hardly an inevitable future; it's one early phase, as jobs shuffle around temporarily chasing cheap labor. Labor will not remain cheap -- the world is finite. The advantages of the managerial class will wane; that will drive a LOT of problems in 2030 and beyond.
In the meantime, Trump presents us with the best hope of a globe where America retrenches itself as the leader of the Free World, rebuilding our military while reducing its commitments worldwide. I'm not sure why anyone would want a return to a multipolar world (China, Russia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, etc) or thinks that would somehow be more peaceful than the Pax Americana we have had for nearly eighty years now.
Maybe you could explain that to me.
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"Why can't women find men who are as high status as they are?"
Because "high status" women aren't really as high status as they think they are. Men genuinely do not give a d*mn about a woman's career, certainly not in the same way a woman cares about a man's. The more demanding that career is, the worse, in fact.
Say you have a career woman who is nursing a new infant. She takes a business trip, and the time away from her baby means she dries up. She is, as a matter of objective fact, a worse mother for having done this. However, as a matter of "status" these days, she's supposedly ever so much better because of her "power career".
Considering that childless societies are going to be collapsing right and left over the next decade or two, we're going to be free of this cr*p within the next generation. However, considering that I'm in one of those societies, I'm going to be speaking up against the stupidity, so that we can preserve as much as we can from its completely predictable destruction.
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"The more complicated the cognitive activity, the better at it people who have high general cognitive ability are. Now, there isn't anything more complicated than reading other people."
Yes, but there is an instinctive tendency present in most humans to preferentially observe human faces. This is measurable even in pre-verbal babies, as we can track eye movements to determine where their attention is directed. Most babies prefer to look at faces and human forms, as opposed to having their eyes attracted to other things -- motion, for example.
Some babies' eyes are NOT attracted to faces in the same way. These babies can be predicted with significant accuracy to display symptoms on the autistic spectrum, later in life.
Think about it -- if the data your eyes take in during your most formative years, is of facial expressions, you're going to have significantly more well-grounded intuition connecting facial expressions to basically every other stimulus you're taking in at the time. Even people with the most amazing cognitive abilities, are going to have a hard time replacing that well-educated intuition with conscious efforts, at the speed of conversation.
I accept that "EQ" correlates with IQ in general, but I would bet that in people who can be demonstrated to lack the preference for looking at others' faces, the linkage is significantly weaker (although the trend would likely be the same, as their cognitive ability leaves them able to compensate somewhat).
On the other hand, people who are not tied to a preference to observe the faces of others, are more free to observe other things. In some cases, this gives them an extraordinarily different baseline of observations and intuitions on non-human subjects, which can push them towards the tail end of distributions that serve them well at places like CalTech.
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The problem here is, climate models are wrong. They have been comically so in the past ("25 degrees warming by 2020!" according to the BBC in 1990), and there is every reason to believe, based on the theoretical underpinnings of computer modeling itself, that they will remain meaningless in the future.
The difficulty is in the sort of modelling they are trying to do. Climate models are modelling convection cells, hundreds of thousands of them, all of which are "sensitive to initial conditions". Their behavior is, formally, chaotic - and therefore not amenable to future prediction.
Even in simple stochastic computer modeling, it's extremely difficult (often impossible) to determine what model parameters will have what effect on the output of the model, especially far-future predictions. With a chaotic system, that determination is firmly on the "impossible" side of that spectrum.
Without the theoretical support of these computer models, we're left with simple back-of-the-envelope radiative heat transfer calculations about how much CO2 (and H2O, and CH4) is transparent to solar radiation, but opaque to Earth's blackbody radiation. Doing this math, we find that the increase in much-demonized CO2 "emissions" only causes a few hundredths of a degree of warming.
Global warming hysteria is a tempest in a teapot.
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"The solution to the Reformantion-based religious wars was the idea of liberty, as a way to show that massive differences regarding what is right can coexist"
Er, no. The term "narcissism of small differences" was coined to characterize the differences between Catholics and (most) Protestants. The differences are not "massive", compared to the religious divide that Europe is facing again after beating it back out of Iberia 500 years ago and the Balkans more recently.
Liberty itself, in its modern conception as protective of individual inalienable rights, can only exist with a Christian base. It never existed in Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, or the like, and it vanishes with shocking rapidity under atheism, secularism, or multiculturalism.
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@run2cat4run If He isn't real, then the most obvious explanation for the Bible is that it's the collected intuitive wisdom of hundreds or thousands of generations of human beings. This wisdom is distilled into the stories that have made Western Civilization the pinnacle of human achievement. Are you seriously willing to throw this away?
If God is real, then He could decide tomorrow to change His mind about everything and hand us a completely new suite of commandments.
If He isn't then we are, if anything, even more bound to the truths about reality and how humans relate to one other, observed in the Bible. That is, if we want a thriving society (rather than one with existential hopelessness, collapsing birthrates, and the like.)
If there is a God, His people are bound to have some respect for even outsiders as made in His image. If there is not, that opens the door to the slaughters of outsiders and unbelievers we saw in the 20th century.
Bourbon, Hapsburg, or Iberian ambition draped in Catholic vestments have nothing on the lethality of the ambitions and ideologies of the atheists. The secular habit of indifference to abortion, has by itself racked up an even higher bodycount, destroying nation after nation today.
You really haven't thought through the consequences of your flippancy.
You really should.
And give church a try, it sounds like you need some purpose in your life.
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This is called "World Systems Theory", and it's a modern variation on the old Imperial / Mercantile system. Used to be, every empire (British, Dutch, etc) had an Industrial Core and a Colonial Periphery. You got raw materials from the Periphery, did "value-add" work to them in the Core, and sold them in the markets of the Periphery, which made the Core rich.
Nowadays, the "Value-Add" work is still done in the Core, but that work has changed. Instead of factory work, it's design work done by "creative class" yuppies. The factory work itself has migrated to the Periphery, as global security has allowed massive seaborne transport of intermediate goods (electronic components, car parts, etc) to develop massive far-flung supply chains.
These far-flung supply chains seek out the lowest-paid workers still capable of doing the work, no matter where in the world they are, so long as they are within easy reach of a containerized shipping port. Famously, this is what Shenzhen on China's Pearl River Delta is all about.
However, Shenzhen is experiencing a rising tide -- workers there are becoming more skilled and demanding higher wages. Good for them, although, that means companies are seeking cheaper labor in places like Vietnam and even Africa. This rising tide would sweep into these countries too, until ultimately, global corporations would run out of cheap labor pools to exploit, and wages would rise worldwide.
Good for everybody, eh? Well, except for the (majority of) Americans who are not part of the urban "creative class". Whether this global tide-raising will occur soon enough that re-shoring factories will make sense (the point where you'll save more by cutting transportation costs by producing locally, than you'd save by manufacturing things overseas) allows any continuity of working-class skillsets, or will save any of our cities from the fate of San Bernadino here, is an open question.
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@chriswatson1698 This is wrong in a number of ways. First, women control 80% of consumer spending. Whether someone has any control over the income is irrelevant, compared to having control over how the money is spent. (Men are happy enough with this arrangement, if their wives make any kind of effort towards that.)
Second, in many legal systems, a man paying child support has absolutely no recourse as to how a woman spends that money; she can spend it on international vacations while neglecting the kids for her career, and there's nothing he can do about it.
Third, a woman in legal systems like this has no incentive to behave in a way that keeps the marriage and family together. She can be a thoroughly rotten human being and treat her husband horribly, confident that the law will support her if he objects.
Fourth, theoretical "earning capacity" depends on a multitude of factors, and is frequently exaggerated. In one case I am extremely familiar with, a man was very unhappy that his wife was committing so much time to her career at the expense of her marriage and family. She ended the marriage, to pursue a more exalted position in a corporate hierarchy. Unfortunately for all involved, her ambitions didn't lead her anywhere; instead of climbing up the corporate ladder, five years after the divorce she was back in the same career position she was five years before the divorce.
Aside from the immiseration of several people, the wrecking of three children's home lives, and the enrichment of some therapists and lawyers, nothing was accomplished.
Modern social mores wreck lives.
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"America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival." Really? Like in 1863?
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
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@jayethompson3414 Except, that the conclusions he comes to are not in line with outcomes.
For example, according to his logic, North America is rightfully three countries -- but the borders should go North / South along the Rockies and the Appalachians, rather then east-west along rivers or latitude lines.
And, the dominant power of North America should be the immense river network of the Midwest -- the fact that the relatively small and isolated Hudson Valley has our country's main financial center is an accident of its Dutch roots European ties.
California, similarly, (at least the relatively tiny Sacramento basin) should be an agricultural backwater; only the historical accident of World War 2 and the Cold War defense boom (along with a single Massachusetts judge's decisions to enforce non-competes, and Terman's insistence on incentivizing engineers with equity) allowed Silicon Valley to form.
Similar individual decisions allowed the deserts of southern California to be inhabited at all, seeing as how they don't have any reliable local water supplies.
Peter does a good job of describing what cards countries have to play, to some degree; history is still to a great extent about how those cards are played.
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@CordovanSplotchVT Wherein we can no doubt find, Thaxted, Wimbish, Little Snoring, Wendens Ambo, Saffron Walden, Gussage All Saints, Stocking Pelham, Farleigh Wallop, Dunton Bassett, Husbands Bosworth, Lower Slaughter, and Great Snoring.
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@MarcosElMalo2 Sorry, your picture of me is exactly wrong.
I'm central California born and raised, educated in the University of California system (which was in the process of going broadly insane even when I attended), worked on the CA coast most of my life in a very specific, highly technical field, now working in that specific field in Massachusetts (God help me) because California has gone straight down the shitter and MA is one of the few places that does what I do.
I'm part of the "creative class". But, some people I actually care about are not and never will be, and I want them to have lives of dignity and independence, complete with families of their own. I want my family to be large and thriving, because unlike Peter I don't consider children a nuisance and I think people who do have something wrong with them as human beings. I'm content not to say much about other people's stupid life choices like that, until they make life difficult for me to NOT choose the same way they did.
(Seriously, Zeihan talks so much about demographic collapse, but then seems to respond "Nope, can't think of a single thing to do about it" probably in spite of his mom asking when he's going to give her grandchildren. In a sane word, she'd be considered right for asking and he'd be considered wrong for declining.)
This puts my priorities completely at odds with globalist policy wanks, but it matches up nicely with recent political movements that have recently demonstrated they provide a broad-based solution. I think we're going to see progress on that, soon.
Peter, on the other hand, is explicitly worshiping large wage differentials, i.e., vast gulfs of income inequality. He bemoans that those gulfs are not available within the United States, and eagerly reports opportunities to exploit foreign cheap labor. Yes, his is the point of view of the globalist "Establishment", the entrenched politicians of both parties, and elites worldwide.
I'm not a Lefty by nature (Central CA is basically a multicultural version of the Midwest) and living in California has just proven to me that government "services" are more likely to disastrously exacerbate problems than solve them.
You might well call me a populist, though; traditionalist probably fits too, both by upbringing and ratified by experience, having seen my family devastated by recent "innovations" in social mores.
I think that our situation with China is demonstrating to us the drawbacks of unfettered free trade and abandoning tariffs (i.e., unilaterally disarming in a trade war). I think that for everyone in the country to thrive and live lives of dignity and prosperity (not to mention keep our strategic logistics from being taken over by rivals / enemies) economic hyper-specialization is exactly the WRONG route to take.
"I sold out my country's working class to China and all I got was this slightly cheaper t-shirt" sarcastically sums up the problems we're facing rather well.
I don't give a damn if an iPhone costs $2000, if that's the consequence of a better quality of life for other Americans. (Not to mention those FoxCon employees). Just make cell phones that last a few years, and your quality of life won't see any degradation at all.
I respect the way Peter tries to come up with honest data. I wish he'd stick to that, instead of trying to propose policies, because those policies have a ghastly effect on the lives of most Americans.
Who, by the way, aren't going to take it much longer.
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Future Trends No. The problem is feminism.
I had a relationship with a woman, where we rarely argued for about 15 years. The way we avoided arguments, is I knuckled under and went along with things. There were a huge number of issues that I just swept under the rug. This was because I loved her, more fool I.
Then it came to a number of things I absolutely COULD NOT live with (her putting a premium on her career, her cats, and reckless spending, to the constant and absolute exclusion of her family -- everything that feminists say is A-OK!), it all exploded.
The important thing is not that you never argue; the important thing is that you have a way to COMMUNICATE and to SETTLE arguments in a way that does not allow intolerable grievances to accumulate. Also important is to have similar values in the first place; feminist values are 100% at odds with having children.
NEVER have children with a woman who is a feminist, or even is comfortable around feminists. If she has a feminist friend (perhaps from childhood), the rest of her friend group needs to be oriented around converting that friend away from feminism and into a decent human being.
You call yourself "Future Trends" -- it looks like you haven't noticed that fertility rates are collapsing, which will cause society to collapse as there would be insufficient young people to support the elderly. Your advice would exacerbate that problem rather than solve it. You should rethink all of the assumptions that led you to the conclusions you state.
Expecting people never to argue is utterly naive, and actually counterproductive. A better solution is to take feminists and make them the villain of every story and the butt of every joke for about 50 years or so, until people forget it was ever fashionable.
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@shelleyphilcox4743 Let me first say, I'm deeply sorry if your husband was unfaithful to you. That's an inexcusable betrayal, and that kind of breach of trust leaves scars on a very profound level. I'm the last person who could blame someone for being in a state of confusion, despair, and hostility, after an experience like that.
Things are changing, though. Women account for about 80% of divorce filings, even though infidelity is about evenly split between men and women. Men who have been faithful to their wives their whole lives (I'm among them) have found themselves with divorce papers. These are from women who, out of a sense of entitlement, new ideologies, or just an erosion of old-fashioned more's, ignored their children's well-being and all good advice on what's necessary to keep a marriage and family together.
Men who fight for equal time with their kids (again, I'm among them) are faced with a legal system that presents obstacle after obstacle. After spending hundreds of thousands on professional fees (remember, $150k is only the average ransom a man has to pay) we still find ourselves shut out of their children's lives.
In the midst of this, the system allows "single moms" to keep their children like hostages, and take international vacations (without the kids) with what they collect for child support. (I could not make this up.)
All the while, the kids are deprived of the two parents they need to grow up healthy and well-adjusted.
As far as I can tell, women are very sensitive to peer pressure and fashion. The current fashion for glorifying single mothers and claiming that they can raise children alone just as well as the kids' mother and father could together, is nothing but toxic. It has to stop.
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Britain's birthrates have been collapsing for a long time, as a direct result of the s**ual revolution. "British" will cease to be a meaningful category in the next 30 or 40 years because of that, unless Hungarian-level efforts to restore British family life are enacted. (Probably some Victorian era social mores, too.)
As an American (without a drop of English blood to my name, unless you count the stuff on the hands of my Nordic and Irish ancestors), I have to say I'll miss Britishness. The land of Churchill and Shakespeare, of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, of the Royal Society and the Industrial Revolution, of Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution, of Elgar and Holst, of Wellington and Nelson, of CS Lewis and Tolkien, and the "few" from Agincourt to Rourke's Drift to the Blitz' RAF -- how anyone can look at British history and not wish to dedicate their lives to keeping these grand traditions alive, is completely beyond me.
The generations waiting in the wings have their own ideas about contemporary British culture, and I have to say the ones who hold your latter-day lack of morals as beneath contempt, are entirely justified in their appraisal of you. Whoever is the successor to the current generation calling Britain home, whether that successor had ancestors there or not, will look at the current moral values as deeply stupid, self-destructive, and demonstrably inferior to the morals of the generations who will come after. "Pride cometh before a destruction", is absolutely true - the Victorians had it right, and you all have it wrong.
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@AlexanderMichelson For one, we need to stop accommodating what we know is wrong. For every Dave Rubin who just wants to live and let live, who just want freedom to be left alone, there are hundreds that want to pass laws and make every point of view other than their own, illegal. We need to stop pretending this isn't so -- Dave even talks about how much crap he catches from the Left. It's clear that he's an outlier, and it's getting worse, not better.
We need to find and unapologetically support political candidates, judges, and similar, that know right from wrong and are willing to speak about it in public, even if people try to smear them as "fundamentalist".
We need to drop Twitter, and seriously boycott institutions that bend the knee to the Woke Twitter mob. Even if that means there's only a very slim list of services we can use, that list will grow.
And yeah, maybe it will mean taking to the streets. Antifa's just rabble. When we all stand up and stand together, they'll fold.
Most of all, we just have to get together and say just how SICK we are of all this degeneracy. It's not going to get better until we do. People like Dave who just want freedom are allright, but the rest need to be pushed back into the margins.
Do you honestly think it will get any easier in the future, if we fail to act? Do you honestly think it won't get thousands of times worse, if we keep accommodating it?
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The enemy of liberty-minded democracy, is authoritarian bureaucracy.
In liberty-minded democracy, epistemological strategies like free markets, free speech, free elections, free press, and the like are protected by government. Information flows into decisions where everyone's experience participates.
In authoritarian bureaucracy, insufficiently informed experts credentialed by ideologically distracted institutions, wield coercive government power for financial gain, prestige, or simple desire to dominate others. History is replete with the disasters wrought by these clowns, the monstrous creation of Covid-19 and the disastrous reaction to its spread, being only the most recent.
This cannot help but demoralize human beings subjected to it. Free us from the shackles of these petty bureaucrats, and we will come roaring back, building a civilization we can be proud of.
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Guys, we figured out the balance of Welfare State and Free Market by trial and error. It's kind of what the Cold War is about. Both laissez-faire capitalism, and its antithesis communism, are at this point about equivalent to Monarchism -- a quaint historical idea. We have determined that the best way to use industrialization to produce and distribute goods, is the market-economic welfare state.
Where is the current state of the dialectic? Well, it looks to me like Fukuyama's "liberty-minded democracy" is getting challenged by "authoritarian bureaucracy" both domestically and internationally. Brexit, populism, the powers of government officials during an epidemic, a new rivalry with China -- all of these are currently being debated. The sooner we understand that this is where the dialog truly is, the sooner we can develop a strategy to make sure that Authoritarian Bureaucracy does not win.
The proper way to frame yesterday's question was, "How do we best use industrialization to produce and distribute goods?"
Today's question ought to be, "How do we harness expertise in the service of a free people?"
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Melissa Oestreich Your life and your parents' lives would not have been any better, in any way you imagine.
They would have been much, much worse in material terms, in simple logistical terms, and in emotional terms.
Your single complaint about an annoying habit of your parents, would have become 10x that number of problems, many of which you simply would not imagine without going through them.
Your parents did the right thing, mostly. They would have been vastly better off if they had done their marriage right. If they had a support network capable of bridging the gap that short-circuited through you, that would have been vastly better for everyone.
However, you can be thankful that they stayed married, as the problems that you saw would have been made 100x worse by the realities of divorce itself.
I know "it could have been worse" isn't all that comforting, but that's how it is in this case.
I'm curious -- what brought you to a response to a year-old comment? That's ancient history, in YouTube terms.
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For those who are simply unable to believe in the verity of the Gospels:
Consider, if the Bible is not the Word of God, what is it? "Bronze age fables" needlessly denigrates the usefulness of fables. If the hare is overconfident, can the slow and steady tortoise not win? Have you never met someone who deprecated something unattainable, like the fox and his "sour grapes"? We should be careful not to dismiss wisdom.
"But that was from long ago!" is the protest. Are you pretending that Christian theologians -- often the most brilliant men of their time -- have not been wrangling over one thing and another during those intervening centuries? Rerum Novarum is not the only document dealing with the novel.
"Things have changed so much!" others will say. Have they, though? Children are still conceived and born the same way; jealousy has not been defeated in the human heart, and it likely never will be. Orienting the privileges of family life around fertile couples should not be lightly dismissed in a country with a collapsing birthrate. This is just to name one part of human nature that even the ancients would have recognized.
Please reflect: The West, including just about every value you imagine, is built on a foundation of Christianity. (See Tom Holland's book "Dominion"). Not Islam, not Confucianism, not Buddhism, not Paganism, not various atheistic blunders of the 20th century so blood-soaked as to prove Christianity's pacifist bona fides.
If you simply can't be one of the people who believes Christianity to be true, and you must be a philosopher who believes it false, at least be judicious and believe it to be useful.
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@louiss.w1944 I think that power fantasies are the problem, whether you're a cop on the street, a petty bureaucrat keen to put his narrow interests above all others, a student in the grips of a fashionable (yet stupid) theory, or a protester with nothing better to do than wave around some cardboard on a stick.
There's a reason that all this happened when it did. We've got an economic shutdown that has cost the livelihoods and the hopes of tens of millions of people in this country and billions around the world. THAT is driving the protests, more than anything -- the dashing of legitimate hopes that black lives would continue to improve as they were improving, which in reality were eroding and given time would finally eliminate disparate economic outcomes in a fully constructive way.
What would I do? I would renounce the destructive power of the day -- I would end the government health mandates that have led directly to the economic suffering we're seeing now without improving health outcomes significantly. I would get the government out of the way of people's natural freedom, and leave people to go about their business according to their own sense of prudence.
What is the role of the police? To maintain order to make this possible; so I would have them arrest and jail the destructive rioters and the looters.
Getting people back to work would renew their hopes and improve their real prospects. This would wipe out short, medium, and long-term financial disasters that are fueling unrest. It would reduce the drug problem to manageable levels. (People who are busy with constructive life do not need drugs; and if your life really does suck, psychologists really can't help.)
Looking at the numbers, we could talk with the police about their tendency to rough up black suspects, and get them to cool that down. There is no evidence that police disproportionately kill black suspects of a given crime, quite the contrary. The tendency to use lower levels of force too often probably feeds the misconception that black suspects are more at risk of death, where they are in reality only at more risk of what in any other situation would be called assault. The higher risk of assault is bad and should stop.
So, that's my two cents. Fewer power fantasies, more letting people get back to their individual constructive lives.
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Mr. Cleese, what in the world do you see in Antony Blinken? The more I read about him, the more I see him as not only deeply embroiled in every foreign-policy clustershow of the last 25 years (Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Nord Stream 2, etc), but also instrumental in the weaponization of Silicon Valley social media.
Clue me in please, why is this man supposed to be so impressive?
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The population of China exceeds the population of the United States, and the general belief is that that will tip the scales in China's favor, even if the United States continues its flat-out defense spending.
HOWEVER, if you add to the US' side of the scale, Australia, Japan, India, and any other country in the region that does not wish to be dominated by China, those scales tip back rather nicely.
It will involve other countries stepping up, though. Provided that Japan re-envisions its military actions along American lines (as opposed to the bad old days of Imperial military), they will be an enormously effective ally. Australia will be part of a Commonwealth led by the United States rather than Britain, which isn't really that much of a change from the last 150 years. If population becomes critical, India can certainly step into a major role in that alliance.
With coordination, cooperation, and everyone doing their bit, the fact that the rest of the world is rising up to America's level in terms of technology and prosperity, can be a very good thing.
And in any case, we should always remember, "China, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide."
They are more united now than ever, it seems.
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"The S**ual Revolution can't be undone"
Wrong. Regency-era social mores were very similar to the social mores of today (including flamboyant transvestism), and despite the technological discovery of how to work latex effectively, next up in the queue of social movements was the Victorian Era.
The Victorian Era happened because the children (like Victoria and Albert) of promiscuous people have profoundly worse lives than the children of morally upright people. We're seeing the pendulum swing now as well, in spite of huge propaganda efforts to impede true progress on this point.
Immoral people make bad times, bad times make moral people (suffering leads to endurance, endurance to character, character to hope, as St. Paul teaches), moral people make good times, good times make immoral people, on and on it goes...
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@WingedHussarJG The steppes of Central Asia are not defensible. Stability is impossible until there is some sort of political unity (or at least a durable peace agreement) stretching from Hungary to Manchuria.
Poland is on the rampage route from the Hordelands (which Europe has used itself, going the other direction). Going militaristic will only turn you into Prussia.
I respect your right not to be ruled from Moscow; but Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, Kiev, Ulaan Baatar, Novgorod, and Vladivostok (not to mention Vilnius, Kaunas, Helsinki, and the cities of the old Silk Road) are all going to be vulnerable from a security point of view, until some kind of confederation is formed between you all.
(The looser the better, probably, to keep from scaring your neighbors).
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Rudyard Kipling had this nailed over a hundred years ago.
1 When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
2 He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
3 But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
4 For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
5 When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
6 He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
7 But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
8 For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
9 When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
10 They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
11 'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
12 For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
13 Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
14 For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;
15 But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other's tale --
16 The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
17 Man, a bear in most relations -- worm and savage otherwise, --
18 Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
19 Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
20 To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.
21 Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
22 To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
23 Mirth obscene diverts his anger --- Doubt and Pity oft perplex
24 Him in dealing with an issue -- to the scandal of The Sex!
25 But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
26 Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same,
27 And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
28 The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.
29 She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
30 May not deal in doubt or pity -- must not swerve for fact or jest.
31 These be purely male diversions -- not in these her honour dwells.
32 She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.
33 She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
34 As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
35 And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unchained to claim
36 Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.
37 She is wedded to convictions -- in default of grosser ties;
38 Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies! --
39 He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
40 Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.
41 Unprovoked and awful charges -- even so the she-bear fights,
42 Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons -- even so the cobra bites,
43 Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
44 And the victim writhes in anguish -- like the Jesuit with the squaw!
45 So it cames that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
46 With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
47 Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
48 To some God of Abstract Justice -- which no woman understands.
49 And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
50 Must command but may not govern -- shall enthral but not enslave him.
51 And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
52 That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.
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@kikkik5435 You're right that it doesn't exactly create a vacuum. Imagine your car is like a piston being pulled out of a cylinder, reducing the pressure of the gas in the cylinder (which in this case is the pressure of the air behind the car.)
The dimples on your car effectively reduce the cross-section of the cylinder. This reduces the amount of force your car has to apply. You can imagine pulling a piston out of a narrow cylinder being easier than pulling a piston out of a wider cylinder.
(Once you've got the basic cylinder analogy down, you can imagine cylinder walls are made of air that is gradually getting around to rushing in to fill the low-pressure interior. The dimples make that air swirl around, and swirling air is already moving inward and shrinking the cylinder.)
The math here, is that for a given pressure change, the larger the (cross-section) area, the larger the force you have to apply.
The math:
Pressure = Force / Area
The overall pressure is dependent on how fast you're going. For a given pressure (speed), if you reduce the area, you're reducing the force too.
And because everything in engineering ultimately ties back to F=ma (the most powerful equation in existence)... if you reduce the force, for a given mass (you and your car), you don't have to push the accelerator as hard.
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"Why isn't Egypt taking in Palestinians from Gaza? Why don't they have the borders open?"
Point one, the border with Egypt opens onto the Sinai desert, which apart from the Sahara one of the least hospitable wildernesses on Earth. Not much help for the Gazans there, in terms of food, water, or other necessities of life.
Point two, Konstantin, you're betraying your ignorance of the Palestinians in other countries with that vague "bad things happened" line. The Palestinians with any money, decades ago emigrated to places like Jordan (where they have agitated for the interests of the people of their old country.) Only those without any portable wealth, remained.
Egypt can barely provide food and water for itself -- when global food prices rose recently, Egypt fell into a period of anarchy euphemistically labeled "The Arab Spring" by the clueless West. Do you really think two million more impoverished foreigners (with ji*adist sympathies no less) could be assimilated into Egypt?
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@xenohart3891 The problem, though, is the way the culture of the ski-vacation set works.
First you have decent people who use their freedom (and capitalism) to put together useful and profitable enterprises. So far so good.
Second, they look at their lives -- maybe they've sacrificed some things they shouldn't have sacrificed to get what they have, maybe they just want to do some good with it. Again, not necessarily a bad thing.
BUT, then they (or their wives) meet up with all these holier-than-thou activists -- Wokies, or Greens, or World Economic Forum types, who take ruthless advantage of their guilt, naivete on subjects outside their specialty, or pride.
These activists and hangers-on surround them, fill up their social circle, and convince them that the only path to righteousness is through the aggressive implementation of their cult's cause.
We need to BREAK this social hold on them, and help bring back older, more widely beneficial causes for them to pursue.
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@myopenmind527 You're assuming that we have the capability to know more about these historical events from where we sit today, than we can know about them by reading eyewitness reports. You're assuming even that the nature of God, and our salvation -- the questions you ask there -- are knowable, beyond what we can read in Scripture.
Why did Aristotle believe that the Sun went around the Earth? Because he didn't have the ability to observe stellar parallax. He looked at the "fixed" stars, and said, "They'd be shifting around with respect to one another like the planets, if the Earth went around the Sun", and concluded (based on what he could know) that our universe was geocentric.
Atheists have the same problem as Aristotle, here. They don't know what they're missing. Worse, actually -- they're willfully blind.
We are saved because of Christ's sacrifice. He was born of a virgin. He rose again three days after being crucified. The fact that God chose these things to happen (they were reported by many, and recorded well within the lifetimes of those who witnessed them) gives us a critical source of wisdom we wouldn't otherwise have, simply looking around at what we can see today.
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What liberated women? Not washing machines, not "great" feminists, not birth control -- It's plumbing, vaccines, and antibiotics.
Back when infant mortality rates were 50% and up, if you had told any woman that being a society photographer was a higher calling than doing whatever she could to keep children alive, she would have called you a fool.
The plain fact is that while it's unquestionably a good thing that women doing traditional women's work doesn't have such shocking stakes anymore, we've completely overshot what need to be the norms of a generationally successful society. Norms need to be something like, "Women should contribute to society and their own lives by pursuing their talents outside the home, but not to the exclusion of having two, maybe three kids."
Any real adult discussion should be about how loosely or strictly those norms need to be enforced, and by what means, to achieve a stable population. Most of what we have now is just adolescent whinging - a desire to stay stuck at one stage of life, never making any progress, never achieving any kind of maturity.
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Paul's letter to Philemon, YouTube permitting:
Greetings from Paul
1 This letter is from Paul, a prisoner for preaching the Good News about Christ Jesus, and from our brother Timothy.
I am writing to Philemon, our beloved co-worker, 2 and to our sister Apphia, and to our fellow soldier Archippus, and to the church that meets in your[a] house.
3 May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace.
Paul’s Thanksgiving and Prayer
4 I always thank my God when I pray for you, Philemon, 5 because I keep hearing about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all of God’s people. 6 And I am praying that you will put into action the generosity that comes from your faith as you understand and experience all the good things we have in Christ. 7 Your love has given me much joy and comfort, my brother, for your kindness has often refreshed the hearts of God’s people.
Paul’s Appeal for Onesimus
8 That is why I am boldly asking a favor of you. I could demand it in the name of Christ because it is the right thing for you to do. 9 But because of our love, I prefer simply to ask you. Consider this as a request from me—Paul, an old man and now also a prisoner for the sake of Christ Jesus.[b]
10 I appeal to you to show kindness to my child, Onesimus. I became his father in the faith while here in prison. 11 Onesimus[c] hasn’t been of much use to you in the past, but now he is very useful to both of us. 12 I am sending him back to you, and with him comes my own heart.
13 I wanted to keep him here with me while I am in these chains for preaching the Good News, and he would have helped me on your behalf. 14 But I didn’t want to do anything without your consent. I wanted you to help because you were willing, not because you were forced. 15 It seems you lost Onesimus for a little while so that you could have him back forever. 16 He is no longer like a slave to you. He is more than a slave, for he is a beloved brother, especially to me. Now he will mean much more to you, both as a man and as a brother in the Lord.
17 So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. 18 If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge it to me. 19 I, PAUL, WRITE THIS WITH MY OWN HAND: I WILL REPAY IT. AND I WON’T MENTION THAT YOU OWE ME YOUR VERY SOUL!
20 Yes, my brother, please do me this favor[d] for the Lord’s sake. Give me this encouragement in Christ.
21 I am confident as I write this letter that you will do what I ask and even more! 22 One more thing—please prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping that God will answer your prayers and let me return to you soon.
Paul’s Final Greetings
23 Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends you his greetings. 24 So do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my co-workers.
25 May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.
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You can balance lives against lives. Right now, we're seeing the total death toll for this pandemic at about 60k. That's 5k-10k below the annual death toll for drug overdoses, which is between 65k and 70k. The reason this is a meaningful number here is because of the direct causal link between economic depression and suicide (especially from drug overdoses.) If we try to save any more lives from COVID-19, (and since the typical COVID-19 victim is of advanced age and has one or more health issues already) there is a serious question as to how much human life we are really preserving with these economy-cancelling efforts.
Further, the more quarantine and "social distancing" we do, the slower that Herd Immunity develops in our population. (This is where a virus spreads far more slowly because people have antibodies because they've had it already; it's why we don't have epidemics all the time.) Without herd immunity, we're going to see wave after wave of COVID-19. Can our economy tolerate not only these few months of quarantine, but several months of quarantine for several years? It's possible that we'll see not only the least economic impact, but also the least death overall, if people who are likely to have few or no symptoms get CV-19 as soon as possible.
In the end, we must protect those who are most likely to die of this sickness. However, the best way to do that might actually be for the rest of us to get it and get over it ASAP.
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@mariaadams7339 I think we should start helping these people psychologically again, figuring out where this delusion is coming from, instead of absolutely refusing to do so.
When I listen to conservative commentators say, "drag shows are by nature highly sexualized", I think to myself, "That's not right. What about all the old cartoons and comedy shows where the guy put a ratty mop on his head and a calico dress on, then ran around with a cracking falsetto voice, wagging his finger at people?"
If you're a little kid and whether you eat (or get to see your friends, or any other good thing you want) depends on keeping a scolding old woman happy, you could develop a fear of that kind of femininity. An urge to imitate or play-act what you're afraid of to understand it better, is something kids do all the time (pretending to be a roaring lion, or similar.)
Fast forward fifteen years or so, and the good thing you want that women gatekeep has changed. The fear and confusion about keeping a woman happy to get what you want, focuses on a different aspect of femininity. So, you see guys resorting to play-acting again, this time of a different archetype.
I suspect that "trans" is a type of phobia - fear of the opposite sex, or perhaps fear of being your own sex. (Ellen Page's experiences with Harvey Weinstein probably gave her both.)
The tragedy here is, even roleplaying won't truly give an individual understanding of another individual - our consciousnesses are separate.
I suspect treating this like any other kind of phobia could lead to desistance (which happens in 90%+ of cases) much more rapidly, and before people do permanent damage to themselves.
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Future Trends Also, this is a little impractical -- women are best off (healthiest, most energetic, etc) having children in their 20s. To hit that 10-15 year mark, you'd have to have the guys living with them as preteens, which is kinda gross, or limiting pairings to brother / sister, which is even worse.
The best idea? A culture that doesn't tell women they can and should have everything exactly their way all the time, and they should learn to be open and constructive about disagreements instead of passive-aggressive (always changing the subject when something they don't like comes up, going out and unilaterally taking actions the way they like instead of discussing them, etc.)
Guys are really pretty easy to deal with, we're open about what we want and willing to compromise (and even please) a woman we're in love with, as long as what she wants isn't degrading to the us and she's willing to make concessions too.
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Exploration is not commercially viable at this point. No material is valuable enough to make the trip up and down the gravity well worthwhile. There's a reason that the only thing we trade with space is modulated photons.
On the other hand, there's still a market for station-keeping fuel in Geostationary orbit. Back when it cost $10k to move a pound of goods to GEO, the market value for station-keeping and end-of-life graveyard boosting fuel was $3B-$4B a year.
It's entirely possible that within 10 years or so, we could research a way to get fuel out of asteroids. $3B-$4B a year would be a healthy market to pursue.
Unfortunately for that business model, now that Elon Musk has entered the market, the cost is down to something like $800 / lb to GEO. This drops the max revenue from $3B-$4B to $300M - $400M or less, which is unlikely to be enough to capture, return, and deliver fuel from asteroids to every satellite in GEO.
If instead of modulated photons we wanted to deal in bulk photons (Space Solar Power), that might be possible, and might even be profitable if the power satellite floated from one time zone / market to another, delivering power at peak prices. Rectenna farms for receiving power are currently prohibitively large and expensive, though.
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"Climate change, which suggests what the Sahara will be marching south"
Except it isn't. The amount of green space in the world, particularly in arid regions, has increased by an acreage equivalent to the entire continental United States.
You see, with greater CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, plants don't have to keep their stomata (pores in the surfaces of leaves) open as long as they used to, to take in CO2. This has the advantage of helping them lose less water while the stomata are open, making them hardier in drier areas.
The advantages of CO2's increase are making themselves felt, even as the hysterics regarding its downside continue to humiliate those clinging to conventional wisdom.
Guys, for decades now researchers have been paid by agenda-driven government agencies to confirm their priors. If you want to "follow the money", this is where it leads.
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"Some people are making an awful lot of money off of this war"
Eh, not so much. The profit margins on ammunition are pretty low, all things considered. And if you want to sell exquisite weapon systems, your best customers aren't people whose countries are half-wrecked; they have no money. Even if you can force a peace on your terms, reparations famously backfire.
Your best customers are prosperous people in thriving countries who have looming threats on their doorstep. I'm confident that defense contractors could make even more money if we made peace in the Ukraine, even at the expense of several DonBas provinces, and stuffed the rest of the countries bordering Russia with enough defensive armaments to make the Kursk salient look like a nursery school playground. There is no slippery slope when the next step is vastly more dangerous and difficult than the last.
Then, we simply let the Russian demographic crisis age their fighting men into oblivion. Or, we let Putin look as clever as Bismarck, by making peace with us (and even something of an alliance), and turning his armies East to make sure the Chinese are too busy with a land war on their doorstep, to attempt to take over Taiwan. =)
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Weimar Berlin, and Regency England.
Back during the War of Independence, there was a song "Yankee Doodle", which was originally a matter of the fashionable British making fun of Americans. There's a line, "Stuck a feather in his cap and called in maccaroni", which seldom makes sense to modern-day Americans. This is because the still-puritanical Americans and the Victorian British erased most references to "maccaroni", which was a fashion involving flamboyant transvestism. It was, as I said, mostly erased from history in the great Victorian purge.
The pendulum is beginning to swing back. It's not out of the question for us to have another Victorian Era on its way to being born, within the next generation - or decade - or, year or two.
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@gzoechi His immigration policies reduced unemployment rates significantly, to the point that wages were starting to rise for the first time in a generation. Even if you don't credit his immigration policies with that effect, he at least didn't screw things up, and allowed the American economy to move ahead much faster and farther than Obama's ideology allowed him to do.
Trump is also philosophically equipped to see to American interests on the world stage, in a new geopolitical milieu that is neither post-WWII / Cold War nor War on Terror. I don't think he's anyone's first choice for being "diplomatic", but he's useful for two things: A) playing "bad cop" on the international stage, and taking sensible risks (like opposing Iran, which led to about as much retaliation as Iran is capable of). B) Challenging old assumptions (like, if we're not worried about Germany or Russia invading their neighbors again, why are we still treating Germany as a military protectorate? They can pay for their own defense now.)
He's also willing to stand up to the new brand of authoritarianism -- Political Correctness. He hasn't yet been effective at destroying Cancel Culture, but he isn't going to allow it to semi-secretly take over the country, or even openly support it (as Obama did). I'm looking forward to his making some effective moves against it, as well as its violent street thug footsoldiers. A Biden presidency would lead to another Weimar (a government far too weak to police its own streets), and there are enough anticommunists in this country (and they are certainly well enough armed) to make the Weimar failcase recur, if push really came to shove.
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@endangerdenglish If you'd like to make a distinction between where we are materially (quite well off) and where we are spiritually (near disaster) that's useful to explore.
However, is pessimism of our own time, and idealization of previous times, really accurate?
Read CS Lewis when he writes about the problems of his time -- the cowardly pacifism, the desire to do what's fashionable over what's right, and you'll see a picture of the past that shows the besetting sins of our own time right there for all to see. Even our existence in an Elysian time is comparable to "the period before 1914".
We feel small now. We'll find strength as we go along. England is still populated by hobbits and ents, always has been, always will be. America is still populated by sleeping giants.
I don't doubt that we have a chance, which is no more and no less than our forebears had. Our heroes are disguised by their faults. Churchill was seen as a warmongering glory-hound (and were his critics really wrong?) and FDR was seen as a gaudy, self-aggrandizing socialite (were his critics wrong either?)
There is reason to fear, as always, but there is reason to hope, as always. We must act with resolve, and in concert -- shoulder-to-shoulder -- with those many allies (real allies, not racial vassals) who will show themselves more and more as the stakes become clear and the false hopes of anonymity or that things will right themselves without firm action by good people, fall away.
We won then. We can win now. But it's going to take some work.
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"Having a system -- government, that's what we've got"
No. We have all of civil society, which includes not only government, but family, private associations, fraternal groups, churches, companies, clubs, and the rest. Without Civil Society, government devolves into totalitarianism.
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The 20th century Cold War established the Market-Economic Welfare State, which was the synthesis of Capitalism and Communism. Saying you're a Marxist these days (kind of like saying you're a lasseiz-faire capitalist) is a lot like saying you're a Monarchist. You're simply a quaint relic of a bygone era, that history has passed by.
If you'd like a new dialectic to pursue, one that hasn't been determined yet but instead is actively working itself out in the national and international politics of the current day, I'd recommend Liberty-minded Democracy vs. Authoritarian Bureaucracy. In other words, instead of rehashing the more or less settled question of the Market in an economy, you could point your musings towards the role of Expertise in politics.
The answer is not "Experts must run everything". The answer is not "Expertise must always be ignored". What, exactly, will the proper balance be? What mechanics will it involve? How will individual freedom survive? From Xi Jinping's central planning vs the West, to Parents vs. Teachers, to Brussels vs. Brexit, to Trudeau vs. Truckers, this is the common thread running through our most important political questions of the day.
A free and intelligent discussion of these topics, along with careful and honest observations about what people trying and whether it works, might actually save us the kind of conflict we saw during the 20th century. One can hope, anyway.
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Tolkien wrote this as a set of legends of England, to compare to Norse mythology. England was a fairly ethnically diverse place, having been settled by Picts, Celts, Britons, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, and Normans, who became Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Yorkshiremen, and English.
(It's fascinating that not only were these people brought together by Tolkien's work, but English, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Turks, etc are brought together the same way.)
If you really wanted to simultaneously do diversity AND honor Tolkien's vision of a new mythology for as diverse a place as America, you'd be better off creating a totally new world, and a totally new set of legends.
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@jeanlamb5026 Mostly it's just weird, because it has little or nothing to do with this conversation thread. Were you intending to reply to a different one?
As for its goodness or badness, trying to make every conversation about at best tangentially irrelevant historical grievances, is a bad thing.
We're probably going to see some rebalancing of "rights" in the near future. Most countries suffering from demographic collapse are heavily committed to prenatal infanticide.
The rights of those babies to live, are going to be prioritized. The cultural practices necessary to support that (advocating for strong marriages, continence, and the like) may look "Victorian" to some, but I don't think women are going to be denied credit cards or medical school acceptance on the basis that they're women, though.
The 1960's sexual revolution has been around long enough, chalked up so many failures, damaged so many people, and benefited so few, that we're going to see those "rights" disappear over the next few election cycles.
Into the recycling bin of history it goes!
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There's an Isaac Asimov story called "Liar!", wherein a robot (programmed never to hurt a human being, on pain of automatic self-deactivation) develops the ability to read minds. He notices that one of the scientists he works with has a crush on one of the young men in her lab. He encourages this emotion in her, despite the fact that the young man is not interested in her in the least (which she doesn't realize). The robot does this because it makes her feel good. Being discouraged causes her pain.
I'd give a spoiler alert here, but I think everyone can see where this is going.
Having been more interested in robots than romance throughout her youth, the scientist is extremely awkward in her efforts to make herself up, act, and dress for this young man's attention. The robot continues to encourage her efforts, despite the fact that the people around her believe she is making a spectacle of herself.
The tragedy plays out. She realizes she has been making a fool of herself, and the pain of the reality of her situation hits her. She shouts "Liar!" at the robot, who shuts down as a consequence of hurting her so much more deeply than he would have, by being honest.
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This will not end with Canada, even if Trudeau does not fall tomorrow.
THE KNIGHT came home from the quest,
Muddied and sore he came.
Battered of shield and crest,
Bannerless, bruised and lame.
Fighting we take no shame,
Better is man for a fall.
Merrily borne, the bugle-horn
Answered the warder’s call:—
“Here is my lance to mend (Haro!),
Here is my horse to be shot!
Ay, they were strong, and the fight was long;
But I paid as good as I got!”
“Oh, dark and deep their van,
That mocked my battle-cry.
I could not miss my man,
But I could not carry by:
Utterly whelmed was I,
Flung under, horse and all.”
Merrily borne, the bugle-horn
Answered the warder’s call!
“My wounds are noised abroad;
But theirs my foemen cloaked.
Ye see my broken sword—
But never the blades she broke;
Paying them stroke for stroke,
Good handsel over all.”
Merrily borne, the bugle-horn
Answered the warder’s call!
“My shame ye count and know.
Ye say the quest is vain.
Ye have not seen my foe.
Ye have not told his slain.
Surely he fights again, again;
But when ye prove his line,
There shall come to your aid my broken blade
In the last, lost fight of mine!
And here is my lance to mend (Haro!),
And here is my horse to be shot!
Ay, they were strong, and the fight was long;
But I paid as good as I got!”
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"The pace of change is accelerating" is the biggest lie people tell these days. Look at the physical changes to America in Joe's lifetime (1967 to today, 2020) and compare it to the physical changes from 1867 to 1920. In 1867 we didn't even have a transcontinental railroad, the city of Denver was less than 10 years old, the first generation of sod-busting farmers were still living in Kansas, you got everywhere on horseback. Custer got the 7th Cavalry wiped out in 1876. Fast-forward to 1920, and we'd won a European war, cars were everywhere, you could fly across the continent, and people were moving off of the farms and into cities at an accelerating rate.
Nah, it was all suburbs in 1967, and it's all suburbs now. Instead of commuting you have telecommuting, which is not as big a change as what we saw 1867 to 1920, not even close.
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"You are taking students who are 90th percentile in math, and putting them into an institution where they are set up to fail"
It's even more insidious than that. These students, before facing the public humiliation of flunking out of school entirely, will be offered a soft option major like something ending in "-Studies". Instead of the practical education they may have gotten in a STEM field, after being privately humbled by not being the kind of genius you need to be to succeed in, say, physics at MIT, they will graduate without being usefully educated.
They will be unable to find a useful job, so they will agitate to make for themselves a useless job, either in university administration, or in whatever industry is being pressured by ESG-indoctrinated investment firms to make those sorts of jobs for them.
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Interest in cleaning up "space junk" (including debris from shattered satellites) is climbing a bit, but apart from auxiliary propulsion units to haul end-of-life satellites into junkyard orbits, it seems to be mostly in the thinky-talky phase.
Imagine a B-17 raid over Germany. Imagine the flak, the fighters, etc. Now imagine that instead of all that debris crashing to the ground, it stays up there in the air for the next several centuries or more.
Now imagine that debris traveling from one airspace to another, shattering the planes in those airspaces, until all of the airspace over every country is full of flying debris.
This could easily happen in space, where you have satellites instead of aircraft. It's known as "Kessler Syndrome". People worry about a single satellite's destruction setting off this cascade.
Without a robust junk removal program in place, the United States stands to lose the most from any space warfare, be it in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium Orbit (MEO, where GPS lives), or high orbit (Geostationary).
The worst part is, Russian spacecraft are in what's called a Molniya orbit, as Peter pointed out, which swings from Low to High so that it spends as much time as possible over high-latitude Russian territory.
This traversal means that any debris cloud from a shattered Russian satellite could potentially move through just about all of the orbits we care about.
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Hey Joe -- ask Ben Shapiro to give you some figures on how much money the Democrats have pumped through inner cities since the Great Society began. I think you'd be shocked at the totals (billion after billion after billion). How much good did all that do?
It's the collapse of the black family that's done most of the damage (Great Society again, see the Moynihan Report*), and the damage to black churches (which atheists like YOU have contributed to.)
Now they've got riots too, basically the afterparties to these protests that you like so much.
More people will die of Covid from these marches, than were ever lynched (5000, over a thousand of whom were not actually black), combined with the number the police have killed in the last century. More people have already died by violence in these riots (20+), as there were unarmed black people killed by cops in the last year (9).
Do you want to do some good? Support social infrastructure in these neighborhoods (YES, I mean churches) and stop glorifying intoxicants like weed and booze. If you'd prefer, get Jordan Peterson's message out to these places too (although you'd be best off doing all of the above.)
And if you really support the protests, call out the idiots that are hijacking that goodwill to push "defund the police", establish no-go zones in Seattle, and push for weird SJW laws that would criminalize you for your opposition to domestic violence in MMA. Not to mention the street violence from Antifa (and weakness of our central government) that reminds me of nothing so much as the situation that led to the National Socialists keeping the peace and gaining so much goodwill in Weimar Germany.
Jeez. I didn't take you for an absolute naif. You're better than this, Joe.
* https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/moynihan-report-1965/
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@julesjacobs1 I'm afraid I don't have proof of that particular negative, just a sense (after paying bit of attention to the subject) that they didn't have a fixed moralistic objective.
The ever-ironic moral of Peace, maybe? Bringing good things back to Mongolia? Genghis may have believed that everything under the sky was his, although he was somewhat famous for not pushing his religion (aside from the precept, "Don't ever hurt a Mongol. Seriously, just don't") on the people he conquered.
And I'm not sure they were all that unique. The conquests of Tamarlane, the Imperial Japanese, the Imperial Chinese, the conquests of Julius Caesar and other Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Zulus... the farther back you go in time, and the farther from Europe you go, the less justification they seem to have had (or thought they needed).
Almost makes you wonder whether a moral justification for everything, even conquest, is something attributable to Christianity, too.
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@carleddison7479 I'm still not sure we're disagreeing, here. The paper I'm referring to is, sadly, a physical paper I was reading in the library of Ames Research Center several years ago, so I can't give you a link (or even more sadly, precise numbers.)
The paper cited both the level of CO2 at which humans could not survive, and the level of CO2 that led to optimal plant growth, for the purposes of determining optimal conditions for a farm in a space habitat. As it turns out, the optimal CO2 level for plant growth, is higher than the level at which human beings start to asphyxiate.
I agree we're nowhere near those CO2 levels in Earth's atmosphere, and short of being struck by a dry-ice comet, or some surprising volcanic activity that released enormous amounts of CO2 from who-knows-where under Earth's crust, we won't hit those levels.
Plants will continue to benefit from increasing CO2 levels in Earths' atmosphere, and humans will continue to benefit from those plants.
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One thing about these old gods (stories generally, for that matter), is they're a network of resonant intuitions. A storyteller has an idea that came from who-knows-what intuitive connections, and the audience says, "Yeah, that sounds about right."
The ones that sound the "rightest" (presumably having the most in common with how the world seemed to work to most people), and the stories people are most curious about or eager to hear (maybe dealing with problems that they still haven't figured out the best way to deal with), end up being told often enough and similarly enough, to be made "canon".
If something like the "true" story of a chaos god is incoherent, well, maybe it's just incoherent, because it grabs a patch from here and a patch from there as different aspects of an idea are explored.
Imagine the parable of Plato's Cave, where the thing that's casting the shadows on the wall is in itself a mosaic of a multitude of shadows, in an infinite regress.
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@JohnnyArtPavlou "Trying to live within their means", or trying to maintain a lifestyle born of destructive fashions and peer pressure?
If you leave out the Starbucks, avocado toast, and that overpriced cramped urban apartment, your "means" suddenly extend dramatically. Cooperate with others around you (parents, cousins, church -- you're going to church, right?) to get hand-me-downs of clothing, car seats, strollers, etc, as well as help with daycare, and suddenly baby expenses drop dramatically.
If you bother to look, this is what those bigger-family cultures are doing already.
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After revisiting some of my mid-20th century science fiction (Foundation, Mote in God's Eye, Dune, etc) it strikes me that there are a couple of themes -- founding religions to control minds, and cycles of civilizational collapse and rebuilding -- that might explain what our elites are up to here.
If society collapsed, we would want some raw carbon fuels in the ground still, to jump-start a new round of industrial civilization. (And melting nuclear plants would be a severe liability in some regions.) To assure that we won't burn every drop of our and every speck of coal, they started a religion based on nonsense apocalyptic prophecies (computer climate models, whose predictions are bunk, by just by the math).
It's an idea that's been scurrying around in my head for the last little while, and the best critique of it is that our elites aren't competent enough to pull off something like that.
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Computer Climate models, upon which much policy is based, are not reliable. Following these models will result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, particularly in countries like India.
It's not that difficult for PhD-level educated people (or even Bachelor's-level) to demonstrate that climate computer models are complex enough to have to deal with the mathematical reality called "chaos", also referred to as "sensitivity to small changes in initial conditions". Chaos demonstrates it is impossible for a computer to accurately model a single convection cell over time; climate models are based on hundreds or thousands of such cells over time. It is impossible for the predictions of those models to be accurate.
The fact that a computer has to round off every single variable, means that you get small changes not just in your initial conditions, you get small changes for every variable every time you calculate it. This isn't creating science; this is making sausage.
Western elites who are pushing this nonsense believe they're the smartest people in the world, and if enough of them believe something, it couldn't possibly be wrong. Any challenge to their foolishness is met with heavy-handed oppression. They are trying to limit the prosperity of everyone on Earth, except for them; they still fly in their private jets.
The Western elites are arrogant in their ignorance. They don't know the critical flaws of their computer models they worship, like they don't know the crimes that go into producing the electric cars they drive.
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"Those people need to read a little bit of history"
But not a LOT of history, apparently. The Celtic people were indigenous to large swathes of the Roman world, including Italy itself, gradually to find themselves pushed into the fringes. Does that mean that we need to "give Monaco back" to the Welsh?
Are we going to be arguing for Circassian right-of-return? Was the Crusaders' only sin, that they did not restore land retaken from the Arab conquest, to Byzantine rule?
Should the Greeks have international support to reclaim Asia Minor, forcing the Turks back to the Asian steppe? If so, what of the Magyars? Were the Germans actually justified in retaking that Asian steppe, as a return to their own ancient homeland, after millennia of wandering?
"But the idea of a coherent historical nation is important, Israel has that idea but the Palestinians don't" reminds me of nothing more than Eddie Izzard's "Do you have a flag?" routine. Kosovo was apparently the core of the Serbian national identity. Was Slobodan Milosevic a criminal for claiming it for Serbia, or not?
Arguing for the resurrection of ancient kingdoms means that every border dispute through all of human history is a live issue again. How can anyone hope to form any lasting peace in the Middle East (or anywhere in the world, for that matter) with that principle in play?
Jewish people deserve not to be targeted for their ancestry, obviously. But where is that safety served best -- in Bari Weiss' comfortable American home, or in an extremely dangerous part of the world surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who h*te them, who have claims on land that conflict with theirs?
"But we don't want h*te to win", you protest, and I respect that. I would counter that h*te wins, when it is made immortal. I can't see any possible Israeli response to this, that does not fan the flames of this h*tred.
"The Gazans convinced us that they were war-weary, and just wanted to get to work" for Israeli companies giving them a favorable labor-cost profile, with no hope for anything other than second-class citizenship in Israel because otherwise Israel would no longer be Jewish-majority. Bari, can you not see that this is exploitation?
I hope the Israelis find those who planned and perpetrated this atrocity and hang them, certainly. That is perhaps the one simple position that we can hold onto in all of this. But don't hold out much hope for that action doing anything to make the overall problem go away.
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The French never quite knew what they were fighting for -- it was a future none of them had ever seen, which never really worked.
The only two successful "Revolutions" in history were of the English.
One, the American Revolution, simply re-established the rights of Englishmen that were in place during the period of "benign neglect" preceding the imposition of royal interference. The national government grew and changed over the centuries, but never very quickly (despite Wilson and Roosevelt.)
Two, the Glorious Revolution, which simply re-established the primacy of the well-established English Parliament, along with a constitutional monarch who knew that he ultimately served at the pleasure of that parliament, not the other way around.
The French, Russians, Chinese, etc, were always mucking about with completely novel forms of government, none of which had any track record at all.
It's no wonder they were such disasters.
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@andreinarangel6227 Dude, the first Cold War is over. The thesis of capitalism and antithesis of communism formed a new synthesis, the market-oriented welfare state. Basically the entire world functions as part of that spectrum; no major country (and almost no minor countries) represent the old extremes.
The old left/right dynamic is dead; calling anyone a communist is like calling someone a monarchist. It's a quaint atavism, that no one takes seriously anymore.
As Fukuyama pointed out, liberty-minded democracy won the day. BUT, as any good student of the dialectic would tell you, this just opens the way for another antithesis -- in this case the Authoritarian Bureaucracy, or the "Mandarinate". Rule by credentialed experts.
Guess what? They occupy the high ground of government, academia, and business -- but that high ground is being eroded away by populists dedicated to liberty and democracy.
We're in for another Cold War, folks.
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The Christian Right will never give up the freedom of someone to say, "You shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that."
Edit: This is to make a distinction from people who say "You can't do this, you can't do that, or else we're going to sic the police on you, etc."
What is valuable about the separation of Church and State, is not that organizations dedicated to morality and conscience are somehow bad to have. It's essential for society to have a non-relativistic, set-in-stone Word of God as to what is good to do and not do. (Or if you prefer, a fairly clear consensus of past moral thinkers on the subject - but Pascal wouldn't necessarily bet on that position and neither would I.)
What the West has struck upon is the idea that (similar to bobbies not having access to overwhelming lethal force), "morality police" should not have access to legal or financial force.
BUT, the other side of this coin (that "immoralists" should not have their freedom of speech curtailed) is that traditional moralists should not have their freedom of speech curtailed.
There are three choices that I see for filling England's "morality vacuum" left behind by attacks on Christianity since the time of GB Shaw and HG Wells -- Wokism, Sharia, and a revival of Christianity.
The only one of these three that is consistent with England's traditional Freedom of Speech... is Christianity.
(No, atheism doesn't work. This has been amply demonstrated in the last few years by "Atheism+".)
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@miyojewoltsnasonth2159 As much admiration as I have for Douglas Murray, I think he's going to have to make some sacrifices to bring back a Christian culture.
A great deal of the question will hinge on the pace at which we re-learn Christian lessons -- backed up by current-day, real-world examples -- about what human beings ought to do regarding marriage, family, children, and yes, sex.
The next couple of decades are going to bring into stark relief the demographic disaster that most of Europe is facing, due to 1960's ideas of "modern family" and Lennonist ideas of "love". We're already seeing the drawbacks of immigration as a solution - grudges from the Partition are being fought out on the streets of Middle England, Sharia is being implemented through the magistrate system, etc.
For a less politically charged set of examples, we'll be able to watch the impact of this demographic free-fall on the countries of East Asia.
The answer will be a return to heteronormativity, a new celebration of motherhood, and social policy and habits that lead to strong marriages of one man, one woman, their children, for life, and the baby boom that will cause.
Since promiscuity is one of the major driving factors towards atheism, expect that as Victorian or near-Victorian public morals rise, atheism's appeal will decline. And, since another driving factor towards atheism is the idea that atheism is somehow smarter than Christianity, the obvious wisdom of Christian moral advice will also win out over atheists' nihilistic (and societally suicidal) relativism.
Whether you're comfortable with the degree of influence Christian standards will again have on your social status, you can probably take comfort in the fact that we've had centuries of common sense saying you shouldn't be arrested for missing those standards, aside from some egregious cases.
Of course, in the best case, you'll come around to the good sense that humanity has known for centuries, and enough people will that the margins won't matter so much.
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@Jabranalibabry I'm still waiting for the Transformers reboot that goes into the "childhood" of Optimus Prime.
He is developed as an automated truck AI, but to truly understand human behavior, during his training his inventor puts him in the android body that approximates that of a child -- not particularly strong, and vulnerable to damage in the same way human children are.
He is raised with the inventors' sons, going on walks around town with them, playing computer games with them, wrestling with them, all to get him familiar with human body language, human frailties, and the like. All this, so that when his programming tells him "This is a human. They can get hurt, make it a priority to keep them from getting hurt" he has a baseline for making those judgements.
And, since this is a Transformers movie, it's also about how the AIs take over the world, and the last of the humans escape to another planet that turn out to be Earth, where they destroy all their technology because they're so terrified of the AIs killing them all.
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"Persona - a crafted presentation you use for expedient purposes"
Yes, it's an interface you use, to reduce transaction costs. Personas your culture is familiar with, are a stack of expectations that others have of you, and that you have of yourself. Others don't quite know what to make of you if you don't have one, and you don't quite know what to make of yourself either. (Professor, feel free to challenge any part of this, I'm in declaiming mode and probably sound more than a little pompous. Being taken down a peg by someone obviously smarter and better versed in all this would be a mercy, compared to being taken down a peg by a random passerby. Anyway.)
Personas can be an excess of order, and inhibit the flow (chaos) of conversation.
Personas are also linked to madness, especially archetypal personas like "Messiah". However, more humble personas can also lead you to habitual maladjusted behavior (madness). People fully master a number of personas in their lifetimes, trivial personas like "rider on a bus or subway" or "person going to the dentist". However, your experiences and talents lead you to be more than just these personas. If you tried to operate in the world like your entire identity were just "person going to the dentist", people would (rightly) think you were crazy.
You can also obviously exhibit maladjusted behavior by NOT having mastered a persona that you attempt to take on as your "identity". You can be comically inept as the persona "dentist" (if you don't happen to have any training or education as a dentist), or as the persona "subway driver." (Or "university professor.") Attempting to impersonate a persona (to fail to be equipped to live up to its expectations) is madness as well.
I would argue that much of the problem with Identity Politics is exactly this difficulty with Personas. Even if you adopt the persona of every alleged identity group you supposedly belong to, you do not inhabit them perfectly -- your individual experiences and characteristics both exceed, and fail to meet, the requirements of any given identity category. They also exceed, and fail to meet, the complete intersection of all these personas.
To insist that you are so, is madness. Someone who tried to do so, would habitually exhibit maladjusted behavior, as they left out some of their talents and experiences, and lay claim to characteristics they don't in fact possess.
On the other hand, might be fruitful to have a discussion of the cultural expectations (personas) of masculinity and femininity, and how well those map to actual biology and any given individual. A man who doesn't live up to the ideals of manhood, and a woman who doesn't live up to the ideals of womanhood, are comical figures - but we see ourselves in them as well.
Anyway, that's a brain dump of something I've been thinking about for a few years now. It doesn't compare to the decades Professor Peterson has spent thinking about things, so it could probably use some work.
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@velho3942 Populations are collapsing worldwide thanks to secular "values".
Within your lifetime, we're going to see "secular values saying "oops, the 60s and 70s were a mistake" and going back to more Christian roots.
By the way, you do know that the entire Bible is basically a story of freeing people from slavery, right? (Exodus, Philemon, all the Gospels, etc) not to mention it was Christian fanatics (Quakers, Wilberforce, etc) that ended slavery in the modern world?
If your ethical education includes anyone insisting that Christian values involve slavery, you were badly educated -- you need to start doing some research of your own to counteract that foolishness.
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@Charlotte_Martel You have too much faith in computers.
Point one, computer models predicting climate catastrophe are nonsense. I have spent a good number of years in systems engineering / integration and test working on such models, and it's difficult to overstate just how unreliable these predictive models are.
So don't worry about that part. =)
In any country in the West, all we need to fix the housing crisis, is to stop illegal immigration. This will allow wages to rise (and overtake inflation) as well as freeing up housing stock.
The global situation is no more "volatile" than it has ever been.
AI is not going to "make the population unemployable", because most of what we do is in meatspace anyway. The other side of that coin is that a lot of work will be extremely productive, allowing greater outputs with lower inputs for a large portion of the economy, meaning we're going to have more prosperous lives.
The solution? Women will "drop out of the workforce" to spend their time being mothers. Even women who are willing to blow up their families for the sake of their careers (and cats) admit that the happiest times of their lives were when they were on maternity leave.
Our future looks bright! "Environmental disaster" is a bogeyman, productivity keeps climbing (meaning, more prosperity for all with fewer people needing to work), and our lessened need for workers will allow people to devote more time to family and community -- particularly women, who tend to enjoy this more anyway.
("What about the women who don't, who really enjoy their careers?" Well, they're in the process of going extinct, so we don't need to worry about that long-term.)
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"What Christianity asks of its followers is quite difficult"
Really? Take a stopwatch to a church that uses a traditional liturgy. Start the timer when the congregation starts reciting that we're all sinners and deserving of damnation. Stop the timer when the pastor announces that we are entirely forgiven for all of those sins, by the grace of God. At my church I would estimate it's under thirty seconds.
If we're really paying attention, the common confession of sins is a leveler, and the annunciation of grace releases the tension of guilt. It's not as much fun as comedy, but it also serves.
Comedy absolutely has its place in church though -- morality plays, properly produced, are hilarious. Parodies of the seven deadly sins are a rich vein of humor that will probably never be played out. You can base an entire comedic career on showing how ridiculous we are all made by pride, envy, sloth, avarice, wrath, gluttony, and lust, (not to mention the rest).
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@maciamay1393 St. Paul, nasty?
13 If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
.....
You prefer the words of Christ, I guess. Like these?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
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"The book that got it the most wrong, was Fukuyama's End of History"
He assumed, like Marx, that the dialectic (or human reactions to human problems anyway, which can often be modeled in a dialectic) would stop with his favorite system.
History didn't stop with communism; communism synthesized with capitalism to give us the market-economic welfare state. The Liberal Order is based on this economic proposition. A new Thesis, according to the dialectic.
This new Order itself, instead of dominating the world, has brought into focus a set of opposing principles: Instead of freedom, authoritarianism; instead of distributed cognition, central control.
This opposition is championed by the (in many ways ancient) Chinese system - mandarins serving their Emperor, today named Xi Jinping.
The West is unfortunate enough to have an infestation of authoritarian bureaucrats in Washington DC right now -- our own mandarins -- or we'd be able to credibly fight this new Cold War we have on our hands, based on this ideological chasm.
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@christianjforbes Yeah. "Oh".
This may be why the CCP is desperately trying to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons it doesn't have, to prevent an investigation. In fact, that threat is circumstantial evidence that this theory could be correct.
"Oh what tangled webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive".
What the CCP doesn't seem to realize, is that without the respect for human rights (which comes ultimately from Christian ethics), the rest of the world can't trust them, and will suspect them of really hideous things because too often we'll be right.
Honestly, credit to them for trying to make provision for their countrymen. Good for them. And honestly, good for them, for not wanting to see China prostrated like it was during the 19th century. Prosperity is good, and being able to stick up for yourself is good too. Everyone in the world should have that capacity, and not at anyone else's expense.
However, some ways of making this happen are more evil than others. I'm a firm believer in "all get richer, some get richest", as the best mix of idealism and practicality we can reach in this world. What the CCP seems to be doing here is, "Most of us get richer, some of us get very very rich indeed, foreigners get poorer, and some of us and some foreigners get dead." This is not the best we can do in this world. This is something that people outside of China have every reason to work to stop.
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@richardowens9061 Trump's legal team has held multiple hearing events where witnesses testified to, among other things,
a) observers being kept out of the room (which in one case then had its windows boarded up), complete with video evidence
b) observers being ejected then denied re-entry to ballot-counting places, once again complete with video evidence
c) observers being told that the counting was over for the evening, after which point (after a pause) poll workers continued counting votes in violation of election law. Again, complete with video evidence (I'm beginning to see a pattern here, aren't you?)
d) poll workers putting ballots through the counting machines half a dozen times
e) discrepancies between voter registries amounting to 80%+ of eligible voters in precinct after precinct throughout Detroit, more than enough to swing Michigan
f) Thousands of votes from people who are confirmed to have not voted, voted under their married name, moved out of the area and voted elsewhere, listed an address that in fact is a commercial property, and in many cases doesn't even exist
g) statistical anomalies like 99.4% of votes being for Joe Biden amounting to tens / hundreds of thousands of votes in several states, which are obviously fraudulent, and more than enough to swing the election.
Your insistence that there is "no evidence" is obviously false to the point of absurdity, and completely untenable.
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@richardowens9061 I did read part of the Texas suit that went to SCOTUS, which outlines some of the fraud I mentioned.
Richard, at this point you're just being obtuse, claiming there is "no evidence".
And now, you're trotting out the ad hominem attacks, and your underlying motivation for denying the clear evidence that has been presented on multiple occasions.
A huge number of people have Trump Derangement Syndrome, I get it. Your reaction, which is not uncommon among the Establishment class of governors and judges, goes a long way to explaining why they would cooperate to oust Trump as long as they could ostensibly keep their own hands clean.
Trouble is, we're watching, and we'll remember. These Establishment politicians are unlikely to be re-elected.
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@richardowens9061 "Just STOP! You're embarrassing yourself!" -- "HYPOCRISY!"
You might want to quietly reflect on which of us those phrases apply to, here.
Anyway, yes, elections are the foundation of democracy. If the elections have no integrity, the democracy has no integrity.
That is why we must a) scrupulously follow the rules of those elections, laid down by the Constitution (and, by the way, violated by courts and other bodies in this case) and b) thoroughly investigate any evidence of fraud we find, and when we find that evidence of fraud, it needs to be examined in the courts.
The absurd idea that this is dismissed on the technical detail that somehow there is no one with any standing to bring that evidence (voters, the candidates, election observers, the state legislatures who are supposed to set the rules), or that there is no time that evidence can be brought (neither before nor after the election, apparently), or that no court is the appropriate court to hear that evidence, is bringing us to the point of crisis.
I wish Biden were telling the truth when he says he wants to "unite the country", because honestly the only way to do that at this point is to pause the process and have a hearing about the evidence we've found and following it wherever it leads. The fact that he isn't doing this, is damaging my confidence in his honesty and integrity, possibly beyond repair.
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@richardowens9061 I've repeatedly listed the evidence, (eyewitness, videographic, analytical) that has been presented in public hearings and in court filings. The biggest weakness of your polemics here (well, until the point where you came unglued and started hurling ad hominem attacks) is the clear absurdity of your claim that there is none.
"Anyone who participates in elections is expected to abide by the rules". I agree wholeheartedly. And when those rules are broken wholesale, the only appropriate action is to challenge the result.
Like 77% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats, I believe (based on the evidence I have seen) this election was stolen. We have proof, and all we need is one body in this process to stand up and honestly follow the clear implications of that fact.
This is complicated by the fact that much of our political and media Establishment hates Trump as much as you do, (and the media establishment is feeding you a steady diet of lies, which you're regurgitating here) but those can be overcome.
By the way, there is no point in time at which it will cease to matter, that (for the past month) the American Presidential Election of 2020 was stolen, no matter what YouTube or anyone else has to say. Facts are stubborn things, as the saying goes.
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@richardowens9061 At this point we're going around in circles, I'm afraid. I've told you about the types of evidence I've seen and heard, and the magnitude of that evidence. Your response has been, "There isn't any evidence", which is utterly absurd based on what I've seen and heard, so I'm really not going to believe you, and puzzled that you refuse to even consider what I have to say.
But then, you're demonstrating more Trump Derangement Syndrome, which doesn't do a whole lot for me except convince me further that there's a huge amount of unreasoning visceral hatred out there for Trump, and that hatred can motivate people to be blind to evidence that's right in front of them.
I've seen this before too, on Twitter and other social media, even from Establishment figures I expected to be more thoughtful. It's not a happy thing for me to consider that this might be what the all-too-human members of our political class are like, but honestly, it explains a lot about why the evidence of voter fraud isn't getting more traction.
At this point I'm wondering whether you're just a troll who's trying to convince me that the positions you're expressing are wrong. When the only thing the person you're debating could do to convince you of their position is to convince you they don't genuinely hold it, it's probably time to wrap up the debate.
Do you have any rational closing remarks to make? (Rational, now.)
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@kentjensen4504 For horror? Doki Doki Literature Club is free on Steam, although that's a bit sui generis. It is not what it seems at first glance. And it doesn't do 3D graphics.
3D horror... Oh right, you'd probably enjoy "Subnautica". =) That's 3D, although it's a couple years old now as well. There's a new Resident Evil and Doom Eternal for large-budget / large-team AAA / released in 2020 horror, but those are action-horror, not really my genre.
I have to confess I'm mostly into pixely stuff myself. No Man's Sky is about the most recent one I've played that taxed my graphics card, and that's five years old now. Skyrim's the last AAA I played.
PC Gaming has a range of graphics styles these days, depending on the budget of the developer.
For 2D: A single dev put together the pixely game "Stardew Valley". I play pixely games like Terraria (2D), Starbound (2D), and MineCraft (3D) with my kids, which were also built by small teams. There are beautiful games out there like Gorogoa. Journey is beautiful as well, and it's just recently for PC. Ori and the Will o Wisps is also nice looking.
For modern 3D: Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster represent the stylized (cheesy) way to do 3D, while limiting poly count. The latest Animal Crossing is also simplified / stylized. There are a lot of "do it in 3D so it animates well, and zoom out so it hides what looks bad" kinds of games, like Endless Legend or Stellaris. Civilization does this now too, I believe, although I haven't played any of those since Civ IV.
As for the gaming as a culture or gaming as an art form, the YouTube channel Extra Credits is good, if you don't mind sitting through game design and community management videos as well. The main writer for the show seems to share your taste in horror, so you should probably go with his recommendations more than mine.
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The thing is, class is a solvable problem, and activists are looking for problems that can't be soled.
There is a certain level of prosperity -- a house of your own where you are your own master, an intact family of your own, a couple of cars for utility and freedom, respect for the job you do, and enough money for a vacation to look forward to every year -- that will keep people happy enough that boredom becomes their biggest problem in life.
However, this also involves a few people getting really rich, and the status they get from that drives envious sociopaths crazy.
Marxists hate this simple truth, because they aren't actually looking to help regular people live a decent life, they're looking to destroy those rich people.
This is why the activist class has moved on from economic class and settled on racial grievance as their preferred method of stoking the kind of chaos and destruction they need to make themselves kings of the ashes.
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If you do any looking at all, you can certainly find waitresses who are 7 or 8 out of 10s. I can name at least three working at the restaurants within a couple miles. And if you're a 7 or 8 out of 10, that's perfect for you. If a guy's a 4/10 himself (which a lot of guys are, no disrespect, it takes all kinds to make the world go 'round), finding a 4/10 (which just as many women are) is perfect for them.
The problem here, is that women think that a notable career makes them more desirable. It doesn't. In fact, any woman that throws herself at her work for more than 40 hours a week (50 during occasional crunch) at a professional job is only fit to be a side piece, at best.
The math for side pieces is as follows: if there's a guy who's a 10, and he has two women, that makes them each a 5. A guy who's a 9 who has three, each of them is (on average) a 3. Any woman sharing a guy with 4 other women, is at best a 2.
Yes, it works the same the other way around, for relationships. It's the math for polycules -- we've all seen the three guys hovering around a woman who's a 3 on a good day. It only count for relationships, though; not just bedpost-notches.
Honestly, people should look for those little bonuses that make people on your level particularly suitable to you. Maybe you're +2 for each other because you've got the same esoteric interests, or you're +6 because you share the same religion.
Agree about money, agree about how to raise kids? +4's there. You just like being around each other? +3, but only because that kind of thing can unfortunately change, it would be higher because being around each other is a LOT of what is involved in marriage.
It makes a huge amount of sense for guys who can't find what they're looking for, to go out and explore.
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"Crowder clearly struck a nerve with them."
Yeah. I think a lot of DW folks like and respect Jeremy Boering, hardball negotiations and all, and so are springing to his defense just like Hambly here is springing to Crowder's defense. Nice to see loyalty means something these days. Above and beyond that, though, I suspect they would LOVE to be able to stick it to YouTube, if they thought they could.
As things stand, they don't think they can, and yeah I think that strikes a nerve with them. That's their risk appetite though, and honestly there's a place for that. Well, Steven has staked out the position that there needs to be an edgier Conservative company out there, willing to take these risks based on principle. Good for him, and I hope that he manages to make that work.
Daily Wire is basically setting itself up as AAA bonds, and Crowder is setting himself up as Venture Capital. There's no reason not to root for them both, I just hope they can stop being a**holes to each other for a while, and let things cool down as they each settle into their side of the market. There's room for them both.
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Absolutely, his "dossier" has been completely debunked.
On the other hand, he does make one very good point. The Chinese navy would probably be sunk, in any attempt to take Taiwan. The one bright spot (for the West) in the war over Ukraine, has been a demonstration of how good American munitions really are.
Even if the Chinese amassed so great a fleet it would challenge the volume of conventional munitions America could deliver to clear a patch of ocean, the Chinese navy is still as vulnerable as any surface navy to nuclear attack. Using nuclear arms against mainland targets may or may not be frowned upon (it's hard to say); but using them against an invading force (whether seaborne or airborne) would be an entirely different story.
Chinese military troops boarding troop transports to invade Taiwan, would certainly never see their families again.
"But would Biden give the order?" you might ask. Well, considering the degree to which he's swung to the Right (note his emphasis on funding the police and protecting the border, in his State of the Union address) because if he doesn't there's no way he or the Democrats will ever win another election, I could very easily see him avoiding the embarrassment of losing Taiwan, by any means at his disposal. Kamala Harris would do so, just to "look tough".
China should probably just give up its ambitions to take Taiwan.
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"If someone else is dead but your bank account is accruing profits quite nicely..."
Are you sure that's what would happen, though? In this case, peace is better for business.
I mean, to be appallingly cynical, if we fight to the last Ukrainian, isn't that destroying our best potential market? Dead people don't have any money. If we get rid of Russia as a threat, what motive do Poland, the Baltics, Scandinavia, and Romania have to buy weapons to counter that threat? If anyone goes deep into debt to pay for these wars, who's going to pay off that debt? (This was the root of the problem at Versailles -- without reparations, the British and French couldn't pay off the war.) Is America in a position - with even the ability, to say nothing of the popular political will - to sponsor a new Marshall Plan?
I'm not at all convinced that, in the long run, defense contractors (at least some of them) wouldn't be better off pushing for peace, and supplying high-end defense systems to prospering countries that have a lot to lose. Stuff Russia's neighbors with enough weapons to make the Kursk salient look like a preschool playground by comparison. Trade land for time to build up defenses -- Russians understand that that's a winning strategy, and may think twice about re-starting conflict, especially when they take a look at their demographic profile.
On the other side of it -- if Russia collapses and there's no one to order those nukes to fly (or if they've shot them at us), what's stopping the resource-hungry Chinese from waltzing into resource-rich Eastern Russia? We'll have traded a bogeyman for a real monster.
The wars that would result from a prolonged Russia - Ukraine conflict will envelop the world. Most of the casualties will be from conflicts triggered by fertilizer shortages and the resultant famines in Africa, where they will not be from American weapons, but from second-hand AK-47s, machetes, and whatever they can find around the house.
No, I don't think that it's at all sensible to say that "War is good for business" or "profit is the motive here". Peace is good for business, although in some fields it's easy to get the two confused.
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"The Industrial Revolution changed everything about women's roles"
Thinking about how birthrates are collapsing, it's more urgent to consider how infant mortality changed women's role in the progress of generations. 300 years ago before sanitary plumbing, antibiotics, and vaccines, women had to have around 4.5 children to deal with the 50% chance each child had of dying before age 5. Only women's attention and care kept the number from being higher.
After experiencing so many small-casket funerals, any woman (probably dealing with a sick child at home) would have responded with great hostility to anyone pushing the idea that she had better things to do than try to keep her children and grandchildren alive.
The effect of the decline of this worldview, is the pendulum swinging much too far in the "work outside the home just like a man" direction. This is causing birthrates to collapse - both because double-income-no-kids-with-a-dog (DINKWADs) are competing for housing resources, and because women are waiting much too long to get serious about kids.
Expect to see the pendulum swing back. In societies capable of sustaining themselves, women are not going to experience the same life trajectory as men, and social convention will come to expect that. Women will still be able to go to college, get an education, and work in a field appropriate to their expertise, but they will not be the 100-hour-a-week types who climb to the top of job hierarchies.
Asking a society to commit s**cide for the sake of an equivalence that is impossible to sustain, is asking too much. It cannot continue, so it will not.
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"President Eisenhower outlined the Military-Industrial Complex as the biggest threat we face"
Well, them, and the Scientific-Technological Elite. Have you ever read his whole Farewell Address? An excerpt (_please read to the end_):
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."
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Look at neuroscience and uncertainty theory for a sense of how much free will a human has.
At some scales, the human mind is mechanistic. The well-established connections in our minds are at a scale that leaves no room for uncertainty, and our brain functions as a machine.
But our brains also work at smaller scales, scales well within the range of where Schroedinger's equation starts giving you non-mechanistic results. In a lab, these results are random - white noise. But, inside your own skull, it's perfectly reasonable to theorize that your Will can influence the outcome. The results can be either signal OR noise, depending on the presence of a Will, as we subjectively experience.
The fact that this can only be done gradually, step-by-step, along the edges (and the fact that your habits fight you so much) instead of dramatically all at once, is entirely consistent with human experience.
To move a billiard ball not according to Newton's Laws, would require a miracle -- it would break the assumption of a mechanistic universe (making scientific investigation impossible, depriving humanity of a means of coming to know the universe and to improve our situation in it.) To have Free Will -- to change your thinking gradually at the margins, at the small scale where uncertainty allows flexibility -- is something that is not beyond our brains' physical structure.
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@northernstar4811 If Russia were more famous for being concerned for the safety of its soldiers, (or civilians, or anyone else for that matter) I'd give more weight to that argument.
Personally I think that a strategy that would work (and just as importantly, that the Russians would understand to be an effective strategy) is to trade land for time to develop insurmountable defense-in-depth.
Let Putin have the eastern provinces, which have been drained of (presumably) their most Ukraine-friendly residents anyway. Then stuff Poland, the Baltics, and Romania full of the kind of armaments that have been so effective against Russia until now. You don't have a slippery slope when the next step is astronomically more painful and difficult.
If you want to get out of this situation minimizing not only the death and destruction we're seeing now, but also the risk of planetary-level death and destruction that is very much on the table, this is the way to go.
Add to this the opportunity to split Russia off of China, and you're also serving our national strategic interests. Give Russia a chance to develop a sphere of influence that includes newly independent or augmented countries like Tibet, Greater Mongolia, East Turkmenistan, and maybe even Manchuria, and you'll have a Russia that's too busy in the East to be troublesome in the West.
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@LS-td3no What I think is that we need to get serious about viewing China as a rival, at least as serious as we were about the USSR in the 1950s up until its collapse. I think the craziness is aided and abetted by foreign funding sources, including both European globalists and Chinese opportunists.
Our strategy since granting them MFN status, has failed. Instead of liberalizing the country (as it did to Russia, because Russia has looked West for centuries), it allowed the CCP to use Mercantilist strategies and its vast labor supply, to build itself up very much at American expense.
They have effectively deployed the money they have gained from this around the world, buying infrastructure, real estate, activists, and politicians. If we do not develop a coherent strategy to roll this back, we will find ourselves destabilized and eventually crushed.
It's high time we stiffened our spines, and started clearing our minds and cleaning up our country.
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If you are truly devoted to embarking on a career of seal clubbing like a true son of the frigid northlands, check out the browser game, The Kingdom of Loathing! Can you survive the onslaught of puns, (not so) up-to-date cultural references, and stick figure art?
Take up the mighty club of the Seal Clubber, the smooth moves of the Disco Bandit, the moxie of the Accordion Thief, the mysticality of the Sauceror or Pastamancer, or be the friend of all reptiles as a Turtle Tamer. Or try out all six, gaining the powers of all as you ascend through the game. It's free! Although you get some truly nifty bonuses if you kick in a bit to help keep the servers running.
Not a paid spot, I really do like the game.
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"Everyone's got their own facts"
Thinking that the O7 atrocity was a "false flag operation" is not a fact, it is a speculation. People will have their own speculations no matter what kind of censorship regime you impose. In fact, speculations will get worse the more anyone censors to try to make sure people don't have "their own sources of information".
For what it's worth, thinking that a horrible thing is a "false flag" shows that a person may well be morally salvageable, because it shows that they think terrible things are terrible things.
I haven't seen anything to dissuade me from thinking there are four solutions here:
1. Status quo, which is most likely.
2. Two-state, which Israel's "facts-on-the-ground" settlement strategy makes less and less likely with each passing decade. Palestinian violence certainly doesn't help with this either.
3. One-state (Palestine), which would involve the violent d*ath, starvation, or expulsion of about 7 million people. This rightly horrifies the Israelis at least.
4. One-state (Israel), which would involve the violent d*ath, starvation, or expulsion of about 5 million people. This rightly horrifies the Palestinians at least.
Right now Israel is pushing hard for option 4, and that's what the protests are about. The Palestinians committed atrocities but are now reduced to shouting about option 3, but I simply don't see that as a potential reality. Option 2 would seem to be the most just -- I don't see the Jewish claim to the region based on centuries of residency, as any stronger than the Palestinian claim to the region based on centuries of residency.
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The short answer: There is a faction in modern politics that seeks to dominate every concentration of cultural influence. They are pushing The Narrative(TM), which the majority of humanity rejects.
Pre-internet, these were the "big 3" networks (ABC, NBC, CBS), with figures such as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, that "set the discourse". The early Internet introduced new, non-mainstream (uncaptured) observers to the mix, in the same way that democracy is supposed to work, allowing new candidates to run and new voters to give their two cents with respect to the problems of the day, all from the grassroots.
Things will get truly dangerous, the more desperately this faction clings to power, instead of allowing new voices -- which interestingly enough are often traditional voices, especially when dealing with matters of objective reality -- to be heard and have the sort of effect on our culture that their facts and numbers warrant.
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@saywhat1512 Openly dancing in parades wearing only leather straps and dog masks? Because that's always what "pride" has been about.
I think you don't know what "enlightened" means.
"Enlightened" certainly doesn't mean collapsing rates of marriage and fertility. In every healthy society with an interest in its own survival, hetero is always going to be normative.
Does that mean you'll have to be pushed to the fringe? You could make an argument that it doesn't, necessarily, but that argument is not helped at all by the way our culture has been headed in the last ten years or so.
It is not helped by the endless additions to the acronym, by the slippery slope down to acceptance of every depravity all the way to "MAPs".
It is not helped by the fact that the truth about your condition -- that it is not inborn, that it is frequently caused by abuse, that in the majority of cases it desists after 5 years or so -- is suppressed by YouTube specifically and the culture generally.
There is nothing "enlightened" about any of that. Your culture is built on a foundation of lies, and any whisper of truth is enough to bring it tumbling down... so it will fall, and the only real question is the amount of damage it can do before it does.
An Enlightened society is one that allows people to present the evidence here, a society that takes it in, and sees the wisdom in it -- not one that decides all our bases urges are the ultimate point of our "identity" and existence.
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@saywhat1512 You losing?
- Disney's getting taken to the cleaners for the Acolyte, and franchises that used to be ironclad money machines are going broke from being Woke.
More and more people are realizing that you're coming for their children. They're realizing that their backs really are against the wall. Instead of simple pushback, we're seeing the beginnings of backlash.
- Zoomers are getting more conservative all the time, including on alphabet issues
- Pride celebrations peaked in 2022. 2023 saw the Bud Lite and Target boycotts. 2024 has been muted, marked primarily by censorship (especially here on YouTube) and heavyhanded police tactics against those rejecting it on the streets.
People are voting with their wallets, and their actions, and your side is losing. Badly. DEI and ESG are jumping on the euphemism treadmill, which just goes to show how doomed they are as projects.
- People realizing that collapsing fertility rates really are a problem, which is going to lead us straight back to heteronormativity.
Obergefell may or may not last longer than Prohibition, but if it does it won't be by much.
This is a fad, and it's passing away. I think you're missing the signs that it's high water mark has passed, and the tide is receding.
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"To give the Russians the security that they want, you have to sign over the independence of everyone else in the North Eurasian Plain, which includes the old USSR plus the Warsaw Pact."
Only, isn't that equally true of every other country in that region? The trick, it would seem to me, is some form of federalism that means if you're one of those countries you've got security cooperation with the rest, but not at the cost of being ruled by some a**hole from Moscow or Berlin or Khanbalik (or Warsaw, or Kaunas).
(Warsaw is an interesting case. They have exactly the same motivation now, that Prussia did post-30-Year's-War, to develop a highly militarized culture. It maybe seems absurd today, but honestly who would have thought Prussia would grow up to cause such trouble?)
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There has been talk for the last several years of a "Greater Idaho" movement. Several of the eastern (conservative) counties of Oregon have voted to split off, to join Idaho.
This is similar to the initiative to form the state of Jefferson, which is also more conservative and includes many of the same counties in Oregon, plus some conservative northern California counties. If Oregon's counties succeed in joining Idaho, it's likely California's northern counties would follow suit.
If you keep heading southwards, you see that if you get very far from the coast, the majority of easterly counties in California go "red" -- conservative. If the northern counties of California join Greater Idaho, it's likely that these counties (which reach down to the Mexican border) would wish to join as well.
Which leads to the interesting question -- I have heard talk of Alberta seceding from Canada, and joining the United States. If it can bring some of the southern mountain regions of British Columbia with it, it would also be contiguous with Idaho.
All it would take is a little bit of a push into the Northwest Territories, and suddenly Greater Idaho goes from the Arctic Circle to the Mexican border.
Greater Idaho is the new Manifest Destiny!
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@alexemy2463 "Already wealthy"? Europe was anything but that, at the beginning of the colonial era. More technologically advanced, sure, more capable of organizing effective people across the globe, sure, but not wealthy. The whole reason India and China (and parts of Africa and the Americas) were attractive to European adventurers is specifically because those regions were wealthier than Europe.
Of course, that changed quickly because of that technological edge. It's worth noting that the countries that got the richest (notably Spain) were actually hamstrung in the long-term great power competition by a lack of attention to capitalism and technology.
When other parts of the world (Japan in the mid-19th century, China in the late 20th-early 21st) changed their entire societies to follow the Western model -- science / technology, plus market capitalism, if a very authoritarian form -- that those parts of the world started to be able to deliver a Western standard of living to their people.
The rising authoritarian / militaristic power of Japan had to be stopped by force, which (along with their subsequent integration into a constructive global system that benefits them as well as everyone else) are more lessons we need to keep in mind.
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@patrykhaber2565 Um, every major economy in the world is a combination of welfare state and free market. The last serious challenge to the Welfare State in America was Social Security reform in 2006 under George W Bush, and that went nowhere. NHS is practically worshiped as a replacement for Christianity, in England.
Please take a moment from fighting yesterday's battles, and put at least some efforts into fighting *today*'s battles. From Brussels to Beijing, bureaucrats are relentlessly attacking liberty and subsidiarity, not just in terms of economics but in terms of speech and thought itself. London and Washington are infected as well. The Cambridge Five have metastasized into five thousand, at least. It pains me to say it, but we may need another Joe McCarthy before this is done.
Out-of-control administrative structures, from government to medical NGOs to universities to social media companies to HR departments, are tearing down freedoms and reducing humans and human activities to a series of checkboxes.
The free market is only one front in this wider war. Yesterday's allies (like corporations) have turned on us. Yesterday's enemies (freedom-oriented Liberals) are being pushed out of their old groups, to join our ranks.
We're in a new phase of history now. The Long March through the Institutions was almost complete, only derailed at the last second by Brexit and Trump.
History is on the move again. Anyone who loves liberty needs to reassess the situation we're actually in, to have any hope of preserving it.
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@stevenwiederholt7000 And last I checked, there was a big debate in Israeli newspapers like JPost and Ha'aretz, whether Israel would have to give up being a democracy if it went with a one-state solution where the Palestinians living in Israel all got full Israeli citizenship.
The general consensus was that they could not risk Palestinians becoming the dominant (or even major) political power in the state of Israel. Hence my comment about 2M Palestinians being about all Israel would tolerate as Israeli citizens.
What are the implications of this consensus, that we can see working themselves out now?
Well, the Palestinians would obviously have to be citizens of some other state. But Israel's "facts on the ground" policies of the last twenty (or fifty) years have ensured that through Israeli actions / strategy / deliberate policy, a two-state solution becomes less and less viable every year -- it's probably not viable now.
The other solution? Ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (who have at this point lived in that territory for centuries longer than the ancient kingdom of Israel existed) through a variety of methods, which is what we're seeing now.
I wish this was not the case. I wish there were some "good guys" here we could root for. The Palestinians (or at least Hamas) obviously aren't, after the October Atrocities. But we really can't see Israel as the "good guys" either, unless we say that ethnic cleansing is OK, and (for example) we were wrong to criticize the Serbians for their policies in the 1990s.
At the very least, Israel is accusing the Palestinians of doing what Israel is doing and wants to do more -- get rid of millions of people they don't like, from the Eastern Mediterranean territory in question.
What would I like to see from Israel instead of what they're doing? End policies that lead to ethnic cleansing (the elimination of housing blocks, the starvation of a population to a point that effectively sterilizes most of them).
Instead, take actions that target the actual perpetrators of this atrocity, up to and including the Hamas leadership living abroad.
In the end, the only way Israel is going to be able to survive in a region with a billion Muslims, is to end policies that make those Muslims h*te them.
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@aaronazagoth6373 The tricky part here is, most of the chattering classes (such as Ferguson here) have sympathies with the Authoritarian Bureaucrats.
The argument (so far) is literally one-sided, because the people with the most time to sit around and argue (or are even paid to do so), are for the most part on the authoritarian side because they just love to have their ideas implemented.
Now, this isn't the end of the world; there is some value to people sitting around thinking, publishing the results of that thinking, and people generally reading what they publish. I own some of Niall's books, myself.
However, we're going to have to make it crystal clear to them that we, the people, WILL NOT TOLERATE their using state coercion to implement their ideas.
Publish and we'll read, talk and we'll listen.
Then WE will decide what to do. And if they don't like it, tough.
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@ALovelyBunchOfDragonballz "In 2020, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (24,292), while 43% were murders (19,384), according to the CDC."
It's a good idea to advance as we can on both of these fronts. Can we agree on that at least?
We may even be able to agree on the fact that total gun deaths actually go down, with aggressive policing in urban areas -- this policing prevents several times more deaths than it causes. Stats back that up, though I don't have them at my fingertips here.
Where we may differ, is that while there's a lively discussion about policing these days (much of it stupid, unfortunately), there is almost none about the number of people that end up dead because divorce law is so f*cked up in this country.
This should get filed under Triggernometry's category of "What we aren't talking about, that we really should be."
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Why do you get the idea that "a traditional woman's role" does not involve economically-mediated labor? You can find this in the Old Testament of the Bible, in the 31st chapter of Proverbs:
10 Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
11 The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
12 She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
13 She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
14 She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
15 She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
16 She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
17 She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.
18 She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night.
19 She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
20 She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.
21 She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet.
22 She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.
23 Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.
24 She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
25 Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.
26 She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
27 She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
28 Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.
29 Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.
30 Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
31 Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.
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Incremental improvement: no refrigeration (and the poor nutrition that leads to), fridges with poisonous compressor fluids, fridges with compressor fluids that aren't poisonous but cause environmental damage at end-of-life, fridges with compressor fluids that don't cause problems.
Same deal: Walking, which limits peoples' productivity, lives, and freedom; horses, that can help us work and travel but take enormous dumps all over the place that breed diseases; internal-combustion cars, that help us travel and work but don't c**p so much New York needed to devote several city blocks to manure yards stacked dozens of feet deep, but the cars use leaded gasoline which cause diseases on a far less extensive basis; to cars that don't use lead in the gasoline anymore but cause some smog.
All in all, our problems are getting smaller, not bigger, but we're panicking more. Why is that?
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"Why are there supervoids in the distribution of mass in the universe?"
If you really want to investigate the tendency for galactic masses to structure themselves in curved space-time, you want to go to one of those Italian restaurants that gives you a dish of oil for your bread. (Or try this at home.)
Take the salt shaker, and randomly distribute salt (masses) on the surface of the oil (which, the observant diner will notice, curves slightly with the weight of the masses, much like space-time).
Wait for a few minutes, half an hour maybe if the service is really slow (it's been a while since I've done this demonstration, and it probably depends on the viscosity of the oil.)
You'll notice that the salt, which was originally randomly / evenly distributed, has developed into a pattern of voids with filament-looking structures along the boundaries of the voids.
This is because the masses have tended towards one another based on their sliding down the ever-so-slight gradient that the closest other masses have caused in the curvature of the top of the oil. BUT, because the direction of the closest-neighbor mass is effectively arbitrary, instead of all sliding towards one center, they slide towards local minima.
Given t -> infinity (leave the dish on the counter overnight), the salt will probably all drift into one pile in the middle of the dish, but there will be a period between the development of ever-so-slight anisotropies in the distribution of mass and its final collapse, that the void-and-filament pattern will form.
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@RidleyScottOwnsFailedDictators I'm not actually as familiar with whether the people of France who were there at the time, thought Napoleon had their best interests at heart or not... At least, not compared to the French people at the time.
The way that enough of the French rallied to his cause, even when it would have been easy enough to get rid of him, tells me they had other priorities.
A lot of them followed him into battle, to their deaths. Honestly, maybe France (and Europe) was better off without them, considering the generation of peace Europe experienced after they were gone.
At this point, I'm half-trolling with my arguments here, although I'm keeping them as truthful as possible. It's a fun way to explore borderline ideas. ;)
I'm not even disagreeing with you too much, except where you claim Napoleon was an "incompetent general". That's an absolutely ludicrous claim. It's like claiming Hannibal Barca or Robert E. Lee were bad generals, because they lost in the end. When you make a claim like that, it's hard to take the rest of what you're saying seriously, even if I agree with a lot of it.
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@RidleyScottOwnsFailedDictators I actually agree with you that Napoleon wrecked France (and a lot of the rest of the Continent), which anyone can see from the objective measures we can make -- no narrative necessary.
The problem is, your narrative doesn't hold together, when faced with the facts. Napoleon was, on a battle for battle basis, or even on a campaign by campaign basis, an extremely successful general -- far too successful for that success to be attributed to anything other than talent verging on genius, on his part.
He also should get credit for political reforms in a lot of the countries he conquered. "Everyone is equal. Except for me. I'm the best!" isn't such a bad way to go, once you remove the raging egotist from the top.
Talleyrand, on the other hand, was slithering filth. In his lifetime as a sleazy, self-serving turncoat, one of his dirty deeds turned out to be good for France. ("Yay!", as Oversimplified might say.) This doesn't mean we should ignore all his other treachery, any more than we should ignore the fact that Napoleon wrecked France as he led it from h*** up to glory, and back down again.
That's the problem with narratives of uniform praise or condemnation. Narrative can oversimplify, and not in a hilarious way.
You should be skeptical of ANY narrative, including your own. But, you should be especially skeptical of anyone who comes in centuries later with a narrative that contradicts what people are on record as thinking at the time. The chances are pretty good that the later narrative is less aware of what was going on then - not more.
Also -- be skeptical of any historian that makes a big deal of "Narrative". They're a waste of time, compared to the ones that stick as close as possible to the facts.
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@RidleyScottOwnsFailedDictators Hey, you mentioned Talleyrand this time. Cool!
You know, if it had just been this instance of his turning coat, I wouldn't have been so ready to criticize. But throughout the Revolution and the governments after, he was always ready to betray anyone at any time, always ready to be completely unscrupulous, always looking out for himself. "I survived" are probably the only honest words he ever spoke. Although, "It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake" is very illuminating.
And honestly, you seem to be having so much fun blackguarding Napoleon from one end of the internet to the other whenever I say anything factual and positive about him. Who am I to deny you such joy? =D
I'm not devoted to much of any narrative about Napoleon, and you bring up some very good points. However, the one of us in the throes of "Narrative" to the point of denying actual facts (such as, that he had any talents at all), seems to be you.
Any belief you might have that everyone (or indeed, anyone in particular) believes a narrative to the exclusion of facts, is projection on your part. You should be careful with it. You've said so many patently false things in your attacks on Napoleon, that I started to question whether I was right to agree with you on the true ones.
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@skylinefever Generally the "holy figure" just tells people to get over themselves and their excuses for not getting their lives together to the point that they can be unselfish enough to have kids, which is all to the good. Sometimes this is genuinely a material concern, but more of the time it's psychological. If a new father and mother cooperate (especially with others in the same situation), it's surprising how inexpensive having kids can be.
The only thing birth control is doing to us genetically, is breeding people for whom it is unpleasant to use or ineffective. Oh, and estrogen in the water supply is probably having huge negative health impacts on men, but we're not supposed to talk about that.
The good news is, your own children are far more appealing to you than anyone else's, and you literally have instincts to provide for and protect them. Again, much of the disdain for children is culturally conditioned, and falls away when people actually have them.
If the US scales back its strategic overwatch, the global economy will collapse. After a period of mass starvation and deprivation on most continents (although probably not North America), we'll be back in another era of constant imperial wars. The genocides of the 21st century will dwarf the genocides of the 20th, in this scenario.
So, no thank you. And no, it isn't the case that but for the threat of the draft (which we haven't had for fifty years) childless people in the US would have kids. This argument isn't just nonsense, it's dangerous nonsense, even moreso than the idea that a computer model involving 100s or 1000s of convection cells has any predictive power better than the cracking patterns in charred chicken bones.
As far as pension plans go, someone has to have the children to keep up the tax base and the value of the equity those pension plans rely on, not to mention to do the actual labor that those pensions would pay for. China is looking at a future where there is *only one working-age adult per pensioner*, which will definitely lead to economic stagnation and/or collapse, and probably mass compulsory euthanasia. (Or more "lab accidents" with viruses that are primarily lethal to the old).
Other European countries will see similar disasters, although some may happily see an influx of recently-converted Christian Africans, who are probably their most realistic hope of retaining anything like positive cultural values.
Whatever culture survives to the year 2100, will look back at the current-day anti-natal excuses and say, "Wow, those people were incredibly stupid, weren't they. I'm glad we've stuck to the traditional wisdom they ignored."
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Part of the crisis of Christianity is, even its supporters are splitting attention to it, by pushing a story about Woke during Holy Week. Worse still, the story associates Christians with Wokies.
If there's going to be any revival of England, Britain, Europe, etc, it's going to involve setting Christianity back up as the official religion, and will probably involve people like Doyle sacrificing any public celebration of how they get their jollies.
Otherwise, you're probably looking at the rise of Islam in England, which will probably be even worse for the likes of Doyle.
Look, I can appreciate Titania McGrath as much as the next man, but the fact that it's a dangerous thing to publish something like that shows just how weak and useless Doyle's political position is. Only Christianity has the sort of spiritual heft that can sustain Western Civilization. No other religion is consistent with the Western values that grew up within Christianity.
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@jonathan-dough There's a science fiction book called "Fallen Angels" from 1991 that posits we WERE going into an ice age at that time, but luckily we were ALSO so busy pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere that kept us from this dire fate.
Except, the Greens took over, cut back the CO2, and the glaciers started rolling south across the Upper Midwest.
People have gotten so weird about this. First the hubris, thinking we can actually predict these things (this is formally impossible, thanks to chaos in the models) and then the anti-human madness that has sprung from the panic based on those wildly inaccurate models.
I'm popping some popcorn, waiting for the point where Conservatives get their hands on the "misinformation" laws the Left has been busy setting up, and start shutting down and prosecuting climate alarmists as hoaxers, misinformers, and conspiracy theorists.
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@HellBot-gi5si They've work together based on checkerboard diplomacy, and the fact that they're both (mostly) allied with the United States.
Put them at each others' boarders, and I suspect we'll see the Israelis attempting to wreck their traditional northern conqueror (Hittites, Ottomans, Assyria, etc) just like they've wrecked their traditional southwestern conqueror (Egypt) and helped wreck their traditional eastern conqueror (Babylon, Iraq, whatever you want to call it).
Israel's overall problem is that it's a middling size region big enough to support a unique culture, but smaller than imperial-core-sized regions on three different continents. It's not even big enough to reliably hold off the coastal / oasis countries (ancient Assyria).
I didn't used to see the problem this way, but Peter's geographic point of view is fairly sensible and even influential, on this score.
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@mikemush9741 Lol, nothing the fake "influencers" can do are going to stop this.
They need to give up their shenanigans and figure out how to negotiate with America First, and be willing to lose some ground. Probably a LOT of ground, on positions like immigration.
The good news? America still has the kind of spirit that can be set to work staving off the threat of great power naval competition and the world wars it leads to, but the Deep State needs to do two things:
1. Take Americans' needs seriously. Go back to Pericles' funeral oration. Are regular Americans as well-off for our time as regular Athenians were for their time, or do we need to concentrate on our own prosperity for a while?
2. Make the case to Americans. The question "Why do we have to be the world's police?" has gone unanswered so often as to be considered a rhetorical question now.
Used to be, Mahan was everywhere, you can't read a book on global strategy from a couple generations ago without his being referenced like everyone knew exactly who he was and what he was about. Maybe he got so overexposed that everyone just assumed he would be everywhere forever.
But a funny thing happened, and his thesis about great power competition just simply fell off the edge of the map, seemingly a victim of his own success.
If we want Americans to know why we're doing all this, we have to tell them. I'm happy to help out with this. This is part of the solution.
Only, Trump and America First is the other part of that solution. If we don't put America First, we aren't going to be able to maintain our posture as world police and guarantors of peace.
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"Gender ideology is a modern Western social construct that didn't exist until it was invented by psychoanalytical quacks, and then parroted mindlessly by people [on social media]. Further, while pretending that it affirms and nurtures people, it actually leads them into self-destruction and despair. The evidence bears that out. The evidence is entirely on [Matt Walsh's] side, in fact, not at all on [his critics'] side, because on this topic, [they] are wrong about nearly everything, and [their] underlying claims are so nonsensical and incoherent, that [they] can't begin to explain them or defend them, and that's why [Youtubers like the one Matt presented] don't even try."
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On empathy -
The birth of my first child was not only new to me (and therefore alarming), but technically difficult, and it is only thanks to medical attention that he is alive today. The birth of my second was alarming because of my experience with the first, but it went comparatively smoothly.
It was only during the birth of my third child that I calmed down a great deal. By then I had internalized, that even if things went terribly wrong, I was not going to be the one suffering the physical effects of that, and that was a good thing. This could be considered a "lack of empathy". However, the fact that this allowed me not to be at loose ends, and to perhaps be a source of calm in a situation where others were going through difficulty, made me more of an asset than I'd been in previous situations.
Similarly, I found myself in a situation where one of my group of friends had betrayed the trust of other members of that group, because he was in a significantly worse position than he had ever let on. He hadn't screwed me over, so I was not personally wronged; this allowed me to be more empathetic and helpful to him, than any of the others could be. They were ready to abandon him to his difficult situation, and understandably so.
Just as there is a thought that cancels thought, there is also empathy that cancels empathy. Whatever degree of empathy you have, can be put to good use.
By the way, you're more likely to be useful at your uncle's funeral, if you're not falling apart yourself.
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"China has more geniuses than America has anything"
Lucky for us, they're shackled to their central authority.
Although, if you look the management techniques developed for our Space Program (systems engineering, the V-model of integration and test) it was designed so that you could populate much of it with non-geniuses who could turn the crank and get the machine moving forward.
Russia also had its share of geniuses during the Space Race. The thing is, their type of government led to two terrible outcomes -- one, the geniuses could put one another out of commission by getting them put in jail, and two, the system could put people in charge who certainly were NOT geniuses.
We didn't have any compunction about putting geniuses into action (and not in jail) who arguably were war criminals. Fortunately the likes of von Braun had Christian roots to go back to, once they were removed from toxic (blood-soaked) soil.
Point being, it's not how many geniuses there are, it's what your society can do with them.
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Look, you don't have to fire a lot of people when there are failures like this. In fact, firing people tightens the system up even more, as people get defensive about their livelihood.
What you want to do is TRANSFER people, as rapidly as possible, out of roles they are unsuited for, and INTO roles they ARE suited for. It's basically declaring war on the "Peter Principle".
It's hard enough to fight against peoples' ambition, that's true, but fighting them when their livelihood is at stake? That's tooth-and-nail time. That's covering-for-each-other time. Make sure people know there's life after transfer, that there are opportunities suitable for them, and they'll probably even be relieved to take them, and happier to be doing what they can really do well.
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@Lind Morn The left wing was certainly "suppressed" during the early years of the 20th century when there was a real danger of a tiny minority of radicals leading a bloody insurrection that would oppress the majority of the country. In case you're unclear, keeping the far left down is a good thing. Heroic, even.
During the early Cold War, the left wing was also "suppressed" because they were selling out our country to a series of violent authoritarians who would have continued to spread their ideology by force, killing tens of millions of Americans (rather than just tens of millions of their own people), had we allowed them.
As the decades wore on, however, the left wing was completely discredited by the failure of command economies. These all collapsed by the late 20th century, with Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea limping along as cautionary tales of the misery they cause.
Every major economy has major aspects of market-economics at their heart. Even China (under Deng Xiaoping), introduced market reforms, which was the beginning and continues to be the heart of China's economic success. Xi is gravely mistaken if he thinks China can survive without them.
It's also worth mentioning that a certain level of welfare state is also necessary for stability in every modern economy, though it can never be as large as the socialists desire. AnCaps are gravely mistaken if they think America can do without them completely.
People will always be fascinated by the idea of something for nothing, and the idea of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" will always be necessary at the local level (families, churches, etc).
However, to scale economies upwards and to maintain economic growth and technological advancement in ways that benefit the entire population, requires market signals.
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"As globalism collapses, Europe might not be the best bet... instead Thailand, or Myanmar, or Malaysia"
Peter, if these pirates you so fear are going to be rising to disrupt global shipping, where are they going to be rising -- in the North Atlantic, or in Polynesia / Malaysia?
As far as birthrates go, the question is not "where are there good birthrates," the qustion is "where are current trends going to be reversed", because they're all headed down.
If you don't think they can be reversed, I suggest that you open your mind about the fact that there are historic (Western) models of public morality we can return to.
If the West is to survive, our outlook will have to change: when your elderly relatives say, "Peter, you should find a nice girl and settle down and have a few kids," and you say, "No thank you," we must have a culture that says you are wrong and your relatives are right.
The culture you seek to maintain, cannot and will not survive a generation.
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@mpageaustin The important part is where the boundary layer "separates" -- usually a sharp curve at the back of the car or truck. The car design that does the most to counteract this is the classic Porsche. Its profile looks like a wing, gradually tapering down to almost a point at the back bumper. This makes the boundary layer airflow "stick" close to the car as far back as possible.
Putting dimples on that gradual curve can help. Old designs of Land Cruiser actually have a little flap on the top edge of the back, which scooped high-pressure air from the flow over the top and blew it directly into the low-pressure region in back of the truck, reducing pressure drag.
You could also do a search on "vortex generators". These serve the same purpose as dimples. If you're into styling, using a combination of dimples, textures, and vortex generators could help your aerodynamics while looking really cool too. Just don't overdo it, or the form drag penalty will outweigh the pressure drag gains.
Another fascinating possibility is hooking things up so the surface of your car (the roof especially) vibrates along with the woofers. I'm not an acoustics expert, but from first principles (and a few quick Google searches) here's my educated guess...
Audio is a pressure wave rather than a pressure gradient -- you have alternating fronts of high and low pressure. This makes your eardrum vibrate in and out rather than simply get blown in. It wouldn't increase the pressure behind your car as much as alternate increasing and decreasing it. BUT
That said, all of the demonstrations and proofs I learned in school for boundary layers above a surface, don't take any surface vibration into account in their force balances. I didn't know if that's because the vibrations balance out, or if they're just trying to keep things simple. BUT
It seems like there is some evidence that vibrations in your car's surface can help turn the boundary layer turbulent, which will help it "stick" to your car.
(References to follow.)
Early published research in the 60's from University of Minnesota found no effect, at least none that the Navy cared about -- https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/108053/tp_041b.pdf?sequence=1
On the other hand, if you're looking for heat transfer rather than pressure, recent research shows a significant effect. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7244268/ -- although presumably the turbulence (vortices) would carry both temperature AND pressure, helping you out there.
Apparently there's some theory to advance the idea that you can have a positive effect on boundary layers with vibration, https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jam/2014/191606/ but that's too much math even for me.
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@shelleyphilcox4743 Things are working out how they're working out for me and the kids, because the system as it stands now is 100% on her side. I don't see it changing, much, although you never know how many swings of the hammer will break that rock. One strike feels very like another, until it starts to crumble. And things certainly won't change if you never do anything.
I hope things work out better for you too. I wish that social norms were strong enough to deter the sort of thing he put you through, and more than that, strong enough to be able to encourage him not to have become the man he became.
"Just move on, they aren't worth worrying about anymore"? The h**l of it is, even if we each find someone without all of those flaws, it wouldn't be the kids' other parent, and there's still a wrongness to that in so many ways. As the guy said, step-parents just aren't the same. (And sometimes they're a lot worse; there's some old instincts about that, that just are not helpful.)
It would be a better world if people didn't throw away wedding vows so lightly, and if so many other people didn't just shrug at it. Few things in this life cause so much pain; it shocks me that people who flatter themselves that they are compassionate, can be so casual about this cruelty.
Well, God bless you and your kids, and may He provide some light in your future to brighten it and lead you to the best way for you.
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"He promises his followers he will fix everything now" - "He lacks all sense of honor, gravitas, or duty" -- Just stop. You're one for five here, at best.
Trump's White House had a whiteboard with all his campaign promises on it -- embassy to Jerusalem, out of Kyoto Protocol, building the wall, etc -- and he had a better record of honorably attending to those duties than any other president of my lifetime. He fought to keep Rust Belt jobs in America too, and if he didn't completely succeed, it's not for lack of trying. If it hadn't been for his listening to schmucks like Fauci about Covid, he'd have sailed to a second term.
Your one point -- whether he has "gravitas" -- depends on whether you think a president is allowed to joke, or not. The fact that the targets of his jokes didn't decide to clean up their act when they got their well-deserved roasting, justifies his contempt for them.
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@cosmos8560 Considering "concrete action on the ground" between nations for most of human history has meant what Russia and Ukraine are doing. That has been more rare since 1945, than in most other periods in human history.
Honestly, the problem with human rights issues in recent years has been the amount of creep we've seen in the definition of "human rights". If we take on a smaller, more traditional idea of human rights -- the right not to be enslaved, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the right to petition your government for redress, the right to bear arms -- we'd probably be able to come to a consensus much more easily.
As it is, some very weird Americans have made "human rights" into something that most people in the world simply don't support. This has dramatically reduced the enthusiasm and focus on the issue.
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"It's not like I have (or any of us, for that matter) have a massive array of arguments at hand to justify cultural norms."
Churches should be able to do this, and not just with illustrative stories. This is probably something that Bishop Barron could help direct - a basic catechism for basic Christian morals, to answer questions and challenges. This lack, has made the Church seem less credible intellectually than the fashionable idiocies we see the "sexual revolution" passing around.
Although to be honest with you, the Book of Common Prayer does a decent job of it. Here's part of the liturgy, justifying marriage --
First, It was ordained for the blessing of children,
to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise
of his holy Name.
[Step one, present the research on two-parent families. Step two, Professor Peterson can put in his usual content about God being the highest good you can aim at.]
Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin,
and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency
might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.
[Step Three -- the Professor can probably point out the problems that sex outside of a committed relationship that might as well be marriage, can cause.]
Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help,
and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity
and adversity.""
[Step four, provide clips of "Jordan Peterson's Commentaries On the Benefits of Intimate Relationships"]
I know it doesn't have the same cachet as Exodus, but the Professor could probably do a sidebar on the Anglican wedding liturgy. Although he'd probably be dodging requests from people to officiate at their weddings for years afterwards.
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"This is why it's so important to preserve your marriage"
It's also why it's so important NEVER to marry, or even date, anyone on the Left. No feminists, no Leftists, none of that. They will expect you to knuckle under and agree with them, or at least agree to disagree; they will ask, "Would you rather be right, or be happy?" just to get you to knuckle under, or be silent; this is a lie, and a false choice, because at some point they will not offer happiness in any way. You will not be happy, you will ashamed that you have knuckled under all those times. When you stop being able to live with that, the marriage will end, and they'll find a way to blame you for it.
NEVER. Not even once. And you need to encourage anyone you care about to do the same. Any honest action is legitimate to achieve this end. If they resent you for it, that's a small price to pay for the knowledge you have saved them from catastrophe.
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@tommorgan7599 Marriage, children, fathers, mothers, and family exist in real life. Love, care, steadfastness, jealousy, pain, and betrayal exist in real life.
I'm sure you could say that the Bible is a work of imagination, if you like. What would that prove, though? What produced that imagination?
You have two alternatives, God, or millennium after millennium of looking at and thinking about real life. Century after century of the wisest each generation produced, pondering the eternal questions, storing up wisdom as sacred.
Funny how often the Christian point of view lines up with reality. I wonder how that happens?
Your point of view almost has a better chance in the case that it really is the Word of God. God might come down and change everything just to suit you.
If it's not, though, it's a manifestation of collective unconscious with deeper roots than you can apparently imagine. Along the way it (and it alone) produced and nurtured the civilization of humane scientific rationalism that I presume you admire so much.
You have a choice between Israel's God and the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Real life doesn't offer any alternatives.
Except maybe Islam (which you seem to disparage, just a bit) along with Confucianism (fancy moving to China?) or Hinduism (which I assume you'd think was no improvement). No real alternatives, there.
Atheism is an aberration, which can't support itself down through the generations -- those real life numbers are crystal clear -- largely because of its stance on family and children. Atheist ideologies regarding the relationship of the citizen to the state may have hit Europe hard, but it's atheist ideology regarding the relationship between fathers, mothers, and children that will finish it off.
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"Nobody votes for the Vice President"
Peter, you're old enough to remember when the VP was supposed to bring something to the ticket -- voters from their home state, usually. Was California really ever going to vote for Trump? No. So we have to look at the OTHER reason(s) Kamala could have been chosen. Appeal to minorities and women because Biden's the oldest and whitest of the old white guys? Sure, but there were better candidates in that lane.
Kamala was chosen to unite the East Coast and West Coast wings of the Democrats' donor base. West Coast donors have nothing but contempt for democracy, and for just about all of them going into politics would be a massive step down in terms of money, power, and influence. Just ask Meta Vice President (and former leader of some major British political party) Nick Clegg about his 2017 promotion.
To Silicon Valley techies, going into politics is something like running off to join the carnival, for mediocrities like Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, who can't hack it in tech like actual intelligent people (or finance, if you're intelligent but morally bankrupt.)
I think you underestimate the chance that Silicon Valley boardroom class and the San Francisco political machine will push an empty suit who is tall and has all his hair, into Biden's spot. Maybe being in SF isn't just a layover and you've heard something salient, or maybe you still have so much faith in the system that you can't believe the Democrats would run such an ignorant mediocrity (bless your heart), but it doesn't sound like you're nearly cynical enough here.
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Peter, what are the economics and demographics of China's urban / rural split?
I could easily imagine a dystopia where almost all young Chinese (i.e., what children people have) move to the city to become factory workers, becoming what prosperous citizenry China has, leaving their parents and grandparents in the countryside.
These parents and grandparents are basically left to die in their impoverished villages. The best they might hope for is for their children to set them up in hospice care in the city, seeing to their needs until they pass on.
Those without children -- the state would do what they could, which probably wouldn't be much. Canada-style "MAID' could well be the fate of tens, or even hundreds, of millions.
At worst, gangs of opportunistic youths (or, as likely, opportunistic wolves) descending on these villages to pick them clean, while those in the cities toil away, richer but still ever fewer...
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@K1600-l7f At this point, Starmer isn't really leaving them with any options.
"We shall fight on the beaches,
We shall fight on the landing grounds,
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
We shall fight in the hills;
We shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then ... in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”"
Starmer and the rest of the elites have left us with precious few other options.
They will not win. The Reconquista of England will occur. We still have a chance for the mass deportations to be relatively peaceful, but that window is closing.
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@robyn7287 Well, of course, Matt has ambitions of being a Theocratic Dictator. He's very upfront about that. ;)
Matt's "dictator" mode is extremely amusing when he's doing it as a joke, but it's also very inspirational when he's addressing subjects upon which there should really be no debate, like butchering children.
It's good to have bedrock values like that, and it's not surprising that a place like Daily Wire has a commentator that has opinions too strong to be a good interviewer.
Klavan, Shapiro, and Knowles are all flexible enough to conduct a fairly mainstream kind of interview. Peterson too, almost.
When Matt interviews, you get movies like "What is a Woman" and "Am I Racist". The whole point is, that the person he's talking to is just profoundly wrong.
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I think it's a reasonable thing, to structure policies (that we're likely to have anyway) such that regular people with regular jobs can afford regular housing.
Insulating regular peoples' rent (or mortgages) against instability due to interest rate fluctuations would be great. If people can't pay rent, rent should go down, and companies can't be on the hook to banks to extract that interest money so they can't respond to falling demand. (Encouraging productivity, including in the oil and gas sector, so that interest rates don't have to be hiked to fight inflation would be ideal.)
Deporting tens of millions of migrants who are here in spite of the laws passed by the majority of citizens in this country, would definitely help ease demand, and bring price down.
Getting big companies out of single family homes would be great. Reducing barriers to increasing the housing supply would be fantastic.
Keeping already built-up cities safe and secure, and structuring trade policies to encourage industry here at home, would help re-industrialize places that already have a good deal of existing housing stock. You can't even give houses away some places, because there are no jobs and the resulting crime has made places unsafe. Bringing jobs back would help basically everyone.
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@aaronbaker2186 Er, in fact we (the United States) insisted that Ukraine stay in the war despite the fact that they wanted to negotiate shortly after the war started.
I'm not in favor of fighting to the last Ukrainian, and that's where it looks like we're going, here. "It's always been Russia's war to lose", as Peter has said.
Fighting in the West can only have one outcome -- the benefit of the East. Disruptions in Germany's industrial exports benefit China. Russia selling petrochemicals East instead of West benefits China (and makes it less vulnerable to the piracy Zeihan goes on about). Russia draining the West's military coffers and boosting our war weariness makes Taiwan more likely to fall, not less.
And, to top it off, if Russia "ceases to exist as an entity", China will be able to gobble up half of Asia, securing them a lot of the raw materials they need to avoid any sting of Western sanctions.
I think that offering Russia the DonBas and Crimea is not great, but if we also offer them East Turkmenistan, Greater Mongolia, and Tibet for their sphere of influence, that could be a win-win situation.
Certainly better than the lose-lose we're in now.
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Mentors die so much because human life is multi-generational. One generation gains wisdom with age, and another rises in an ever-replenishing fountain of enthusiasm, ignorance, and yes, potential. In many cases the whole point of stories is to show how aged wisdom combines with youthful energy (in a realistic way), not just because a mentor / student trope is the best way to bring that across, but also because older people die in the real world, and passing on that wisdom before that happens is just a much of a problem to be explored as anything else that might happen in a story.
So, aged wisdom dies, not to dismiss that wisdom, but to reflect the fact that that's the way it goes in life. Also, love interests die because up until modern medicine, childbirth was incredibly dangerous and stories are a way to explore ways to deal with this.
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@TheMasonK I look at our energy options now, and everything I see I also saw in the educational filmstrip "Our Mr. Sun" from 1956. (Check it out, it's a lot of fun.)
You'd think that 70+ years would be enough time to make these technologies pay off, if they were going to. (I still have hopes for nuclear, myself.)
(But, the truly insane environmentalists are against it. Almost makes you wonder whether our entire energy regulatory apparatus is run by people who aren't so much interested in energy for people alive today, as how to rebuild civilization after a collapse.)
(We'd need as much fossil fuel still in the ground as possible, and nuclear power plants could be incredibly destructive if the industrial civilization around them got wrecked. Maybe that's why every US politician that's supposedly against fossil fuels, is okay with importing massive amounts of other countries' reserves instead of building out our own.)
Oh, and I've kept hearing "peak oil" since I was old enough to start paying attention, decades ago. I stopped hearing it a few years ago, when the fracking revolution expanded our fossil fuel reserves dramatically.
I'm glad that at least you haven't made any arguments that are based on computer models that are utterly inadequate to the task of making accurate predictions of where the climate is going.
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@theyux1 A terrible housing market crash happened in 1992, for starters. Increasing environmental regulations sapped the vitality of the agricultural sector. The peace dividend started the fall of the aerospace industry. Much of Southern California has never recovered from that, by the way.
A lot of this was masked by the tech boom, driven by that peace dividend's shifting California's high tech workers from aerospace to computers. Why do you think Silicon Valley happened in California, and not, say, along Massachusetts' Route 128?
While Moore's Law was in effect and fiber optic networks were built out, more and more amazing things could be accomplished with computers and networks.
However, connectivity has gotten about as good as it's going to get (to the point that it's clogged mostly by video nowadays), and Moore's Law hasn't been true for most of a decade. The miracle factory has stalled out. The low-hanging fruit has been picked.
California rose with tech, now the hollowing-out of all its other economic sectors -- which probably won't come back, barring an anti-green, pro-defense revolution in California politics -- California will fall with tech.
The only way California can keep from collapse now, is if vote-counters start seeing a lot more Republican ballots. Do you see that as likely? I don't.
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I'm reminded of an old joke involving two cowboys, a rattlesnake, a doctor who gives unappreciated advice, and a punchline that goes "Sorry pardner, but the doctor says you're gonna die." It's not appropriate so I won't go into detail here.
The upshot of Murray's book is about the same as the punchline -- "Sorry Europe, but you're gonna die" -- with a 180 degree orientation change.
There was zero discussion of Europe's collapsing birth rates. There was zero discussion of the fact that Europe's ideas about sex (and marriage, and the religious traditions that underpin them) are headed towards sterility. It's seemingly impossible for these two to do anything but scratch their heads about how the "death of Europe" might be prevented, because the obvious advice (that everyone needs to do their bit, including them) would be... unappreciated.
I love the fact that Rubin's conversations are for the most part so open, and that he doesn't shut down the likes of Jordan Peterson when they talk about the fact that men and women are different. But, there's a *very very important point*, which is treated with silence here.
If this keeps up, Europe dies.
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My grandfather (who died when I was a baby) rolled into Germany with the US Army in 1944. He was captured during the "Battle of the Bulge" and later liberated, spending Christmas of his 18th year as a prisoner of war. He was a radio operator and probably knew some German (and had a German last name), so if anyone in his outfit was interrogated, he would have been an obvious choice. My father said he didn't say much about his service. My father found a Purple Heart (recognition for being wounded in battle) he earned, in a shoebox of his knickknacks after he died.
Among the reminiscences of his division, filled with fellow 18 year olds, fighting against the last of the German conscripts -- "It became a regular experience to see the look on a 14 year old's face as he died." (Picture a team vs. team Call of Duty map of a 1940s factory, fought at night in the dark. Except, the teenagers aren't playing.) A scout from his company was the first American to discover a concentration camp -- Mittelbau-Dora, where slaves built rocket machinery for the V-weapon program.
It wasn't the worst of the war, but it was bad enough. "Never again" if we can, but if the '30s taught us anything, preparation is prevention.
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... Except these differences in political position DO reflect dramatic moral differences. Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind goes into this very deeply -- Liberals only base their morality on "care" ("compassion", as we're seeing here) and "fairness", while Conservatives also include purity, loyalty, and authority.
Conservatives understand Liberals, even when we disagree. Liberals cannot understand Conservatives, because they cannot understand purity, loyalty, or authority. This is why Liberals think that s**tting in the street, ignoring fellow citizens to care about people from the other side of the world, and ignoring all wisdom inherited from the past, is somehow okay.
It's not OK. San Francisco is the endgame.
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@drfarrin The trans agenda is to take children away from their parents and chop parts off of them.
The trans agenda is to put men into women's spaces -- including prisons, where they lead to, shall we say, unwanted pregnancies -- and to demonize anyone who says this isn't right.
The trans agenda is to put men in lingerie in front of kindergartners, at public expense. And in front on teenage girls in locker rooms, everywhere else.
If the "plenty of trans folk" you have talked to are against these things, they need to speak up VERY quickly, because these things are being codified into law in their name.
We treat people as people -- men as men, and women as women. If people are confused about which they are, there is a certain amount of sympathy we have for that confusion, but that sympathy ENDS when they try to take away others' rights.
So, if your NPC role tonight is going to be Slippery Slope Tour Guide, what's your next line I wonder? "It's not happening" - "well it happened once or twice, but it's uncommon" - "It needs to happen all the time and stop complaining you bigot"?
The majority of this country is sick of your bulls**t, and there are more and more of us becoming aware of this all the time.
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Instead of "Afghanistan": "Germany". "Japan". "South Korea".
An intelligent discussion of this topic will include comparisons between our experiences in these places.
Also, we should revisit the entire discussion on nation-building, and the strategies we employed (and rejected) prior to nation-building: in particular, supporting "friendly" regimes, whatever their overall behavior... regimes such as Saddam Hussein, or the mujahedeen.
This retreat from Kabul is certainly a disaster, and a preventable one. Whether the optimal time to prevent it was our decision to attempt an alternative strategy to supporting a friendly regime, or our decision to exit, or our "decision" to forgo competent military planning of this specific operation, is a discussion worth having. We need to have that discussion openly, so that voters and experts alike can contribute their thoughts both before, during, and after, as we come to a decision on what we believe is the best course for the future.
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@TheRCish It's true that major corporations are getting bailed out, and that isn't healthy or helpful.
But it's still true that without anyone working, there's no bailing going on. We still need food grown / processed / delivered, we still need shelters built and maintained, we still need clothes made and delivered, and everything else.
Just turning turtle (or ostrich) isn't going to save us from the epidemic, which is having its way with the world no matter what anyone has tried to do about it.
We have two options: 1) suffer through hundreds of thousands of casualties from the virus, or 2) suffer through hundreds of thousands of casualties from the virus, PLUS hundreds of thousands of casualties from an economic shutdown (despair, starvation, etc).
It's incredibly naive to think that printing money will save any lives, or anything else, no matter who the money gets handed to.
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@Adi-bo5do Yes, democracy isn't quite dead here yet. =)
Even better, there is a sense that we are embarking on a new Cold War, led by a country that is legendary for its expert class, (mandarins) and its glorification of groupthink over freedom -- China.
I suspect that in the same way the Industrial Revolution posed the question, "What is the best way to produce and distribute the most and the best material goods?" our new Information Revolution is going to pose the question, "What is the best way to produce and distribute expertise?"
Freedom is going to be the answer. Bhattacharya was right, Fauci was wrong, and our system is going to have to be reformed into a more distributed model, to take that into account.
Currently our legacy institutions have been taken over by ideologues seeking the power of the cultural high ground. This has caused the collapse of their credibility and will soon cause their financial collapse as well. Whether they can be preserved or whether they will be replaced, remains to be seen.
Forgive me if I'm misinterpreting you, but you're on the wrong side of history here, it seems. Look into the people who are critiquing climate models. Look into the people who were right all along, about our recent global medical scare.
Actual evidence leads interesting places.
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@obgaming101 Saying the EU is particularly free, is getting to be more and more of a joke these days. It's turning into a bureaucratic dictatorship too. No freedom of speech, the right to bear arms is ignored, religion is deprecated, your movements are tracked, you own less and less all the time, and what material wealth exists is controlled and distributed by a set of unaccountable elites according to their own agenda that you have no say in whatsoever.
Freedom is great, but the EU doesn't offer that, really.
Back in the day, I saw the difference between East and West Germany. I saw the Trabants, I saw the bombed-out churches, I ate the awful food. Trabants weren't quite as bad as electric cars, vegan food isn't quite as bad as what Erfurt and Dresden had to offer, but the new gods the EU would have you kneel and pay homage to are utterly contemptible.
I hope the Ukrainians can somehow win their freedom. Real, Bill-of-Rights freedom, where the government admits that rights are inherent to individual people, and any government that does not respect that is illegitimate and can be turfed out of power, with a process in place to do that peacefully and regularly.
Unless by some miracle they get a government that can cleverly play the Russians off of the EU in such a way that they can avoid the authoritarian tendencies of either side, though, I don't see that happening. Instead they've got Zelensky, who's willing to fight to the last Ukrainian as long as he's "winning the information war" (waged against US, by the way) on the cover of Vogue.
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@firasbouhamdan9917 Supporting a "plausible" claim with obviously false "proof" does not inspire confidence. Exactly the opposite, in fact.
I don't like being lied to, plain and simple, and Zelenskyy has been lying to us. I don't trust the people who are his biggest supporters, either.
The same American news outlets who are now carrying water for Zelenskyy were talking about the DonBas and Crimea as being basically Russian. It's an admission against interests, which generally makes it more plausible.
Similarly, US government officials were talking about Russian offers for peace in exchange for the recognition of Crimea as being Russian, and the DonBas as being an independent buffer state. It seems to me that a neutral buffer state between Russia and everyone else would be a good thing going forward.
It bears repeating -- I don't like being lied to, and Zelenskyy's "Information war" involves proven lies targeting the American people, to increase our sympathy for Ukraine on false pretenses.
This corrupt strategy is backfiring, and should be abandoned.
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@firasbouhamdan9917 How would we know if Ukrainians weren't "eager to fight"?
The available logistical facilities for handling grain exports are about 1/10th of what they would need to be, to clear the granaries for the next harvest. Your quote about "100 vessels" is meant to sound impressive I suppose, but it's so out of context as to be entirely meaningless.
That's the whole problem here. Plausible story + scanty, overstated, or downright falsified evidence = hoax. You're fighting your "Information war" against US, and it's extraordinarily annoying.
There are protests throughout Europe against energy shortages, and the governments of major countries are shifting and falling. Your characterization of "European support" is somewhat... one-sided.
And this is just for the tail end of summer. When General Frost starts his advance, European protestors are likely to start setting fire to government buildings just to stay warm.
In spite of a couple weeks' worth of back-and-forth, you haven't persuaded me that America shouldn't just hunker down behind Admiral Atlantic and Admiral Pacific, and leave the Europeans to their own damnation.
Look, I'm not keen on anything that could be spun as "a defeat for Western arms", although we've done enough damage so far that anyone will be thinking twice about tangling with us (hooray deterrent!), so long as we can restock effectively.
Stuffing the Baltics and Poland full of our ordinance is probably enough to persuade Putin not to advance any further. (Playing "Arsenal of Democracy" is fun, for the Eastern European countries that really are democracies.)
BUT, Zelenskyy runs a corrupt oligarchy, a lot like Putin's corrupt oligarchy.
Sure, Putin could stop the war by simply withdrawing, but then Zelenskyy could stop the war by ceding territories full of people who are no more interested in being Ukrainian than he is in being Russian.
Personally, I'm more in favor of the outcome that gives various populations a chance to be part of the state they want to be part of, ends this new risk of nuclear war, stops Ukrainians (and Russians) from getting shot, keeps Europeans from freezing to death, keeps Africans from starving, and keeps Russia and China from getting any more strategically integrated.
Honestly, if there was anyone competent at State, they'd be saying to Putin, "Vlad, you can see you're not going to get much of anywhere grinding your way West. How about you get the territories that want to be Russian and that warm-water port you all have wanted since forever as a consolation prize, and then you consider the advantages of a Russian sphere of influence in some brand-new countries like East Turkmenistan, Tibet, Manchuria, and Greater Mongolia? Being a Chinese puppet is no fun, and you'd be happy to have some friends once resource-hungry China reaches nuclear parity with resource-rich Russia..."
But, State seems to be dazzled by the stylish "Information Warrior of Kyev", instead of doing their jobs.
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@darkrogue234 According to data available on mainstream media before the war, Russification had worked in the DonBas.
For about five centuries Crimea was Tatar (conquered by the Mongols, who had a penchant for depopulating natives), not Ukrainian, before being conquered by Catherine the Great. Geography means that Moscow will always seek political unification with a warm-water port, probably Sevastopol.
The first mention of anything like "Russia" in history includes Ukraine -- in fact in the "Kievan Rus" Ukraine was in charge of Muscovy.
So.... where does that leave us? With hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians (probably more like millions) dying and the world risking nuclear Armageddon, over territory that doesn't want to be part of Ukraine any more than Ukraine wants to be part of Russia.
It leaves us with Russia and China driven together strategically, Europe beggared, and Africa starving (with all the political instability that comes with that).
Our seemingly desired endgame (Russia's comprehensive defeat) cannot be achieved without neutralizing Russia's nuclear arsenal, a nuclear arsenal which is the only thing keeping resource-hungry China from gobbling up resource-rich Russian East Asia, and in doing so becoming vastly less vulnerable to international economic sanctions.
This is a disastrous failure of geopolitics. Foggy Bottom needs to be depopulated, and replaced with anyone in America still capable of competent strategy.
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@walkingstick6655 What American public schools are providing is anything but a common understanding -- mostly it's radical indoctrination. With "common core", even math has become completely unmoored.
The weirdest thing about working with others when I got out of college, was the entire working age range was present in my workplace. This is totally alien to the "pack every 13-year-old you can find into one place" approach of our current broken school system, which is horrible for the mental health of most kids, and completely awful for developing any sense of maturity in them.
By the way, there was basically no bullying in my workplace, nor was I bullied in school. I was mostly surrounded by idiots, and that included a fair number of my teachers.
Pod Learning is, by all accounts, a vastly better experience for parents and students alike. The sooner we can get our mass-production school dismantled in favor of this more humane approach, the better.
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It might be useful to define what we mean by "an interpretation" of a text.
Words are networks of associations. Some of these associations are explicit denotations (which consciously limit and focus the word enough to make it useful, and are included in a dictionary). Some of these associations are implicit connotations, and these can include "typical" context, famous usages, sense-memory associated with the word, vestigial literal meanings from centuries past, personal / unique associations, and more - whatever contributes to your intuition of what it means. This also holds true of phrases of words.
Your brain keeps track of these physically through the way neurons are networked together, and convolutional neural nets keep track of them (as far as they keep track of anything) by connections between "nodes" in that net.
Sometimes, these networks are congruent with one another in some way; we call these analogies. You can extend these comparisons into allegories, fables, and parables.
Just like tou can "interpret" a word by picking some associations over others, you can "interpret" a text by emphasizing some set of associations over others. You can emphasize the literal associations of an author's writing, for example. Or, you can emphasize whatever your ideology tells you to emphasize, even if every other association is working against you.
And, just like using word associations or abstract images to plumb someone's psychology, you can use someone's interpretation of a text to judge their psychology and character, or whether they're incapable of independent thought because they're in the throes of some overwhelming ideology.
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@matthewbittenbender9191 Let me lay it out for you again, slowly.
If "The vast majority of the documents that Snowden exfiltrated from out highest levels of security had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities" that means Snowden did not carefully vet the documents he published.
If "The vast majority of [documents that Snowden exfiltrated from out of highest levels of security] were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques, and procedures", that is literal criminal espionage targeting the military capabilities of the United States, and it is VERY illegal, for VERY good reasons, including the fact that American troops and civilians get hurt when that happens.
Look, did I read that wrong? Did General Dempsey mean something other than what I took him to mean?
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The canonical modern Western revenge story is the Count of Monte Cristo, where the title character is wronged by villains A, B, and C.
Dumas made the Count heroic and not simply selfish, by pairing him up victims X, Y, and Z, who villains A, B, and C had also wronged subsequent to the wrong that they did to the Count -- demonstrating both the villains' villainous character, and giving the Count's revenge a dimension of magnanimity.
Interestingly, Shakespeare twists and turns the idea of a revenge story -- Othello is absolutely wrong to seek revenge, Romeo's vengefulness (and the vengefulness of the two families generally) causes the whole problem of the play, Hamlet is wracked with doubts, non-vengeful Brutus is noble while vengeful Cassius is petty (and the reprisals from Pompey onwards crash the Republic), and Titus Andronicus is basically a monster.
About the only time vengeance is seen as laudable, is when it's against a main character -- MacBeth's end is seen as morally justified,
On the lighter side, Prospero is arguably a good guy because his "revenge" plot is generally just toying with his enemies, with an eye to a happy ending. Oberon and Titania's feud is a prank war played up for laughs.
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@jsharp9735 Eh, not compared to the German military-industrial complex that Eisenhower was thinking of when he wrote his speech. Krupp was basically the prince of Essen, bankrolled the Nazi party when it was nearly bankrupt, and sold arms all over the world. He was, for a time, the world's richest man -- and not by any small amount.
US defense contractors, on the other hand, are scattered up and down the Fortune 500, making up no more than 4% of this country's GDP. CEOs tend to receive middling compensation, again compared to other Fortune 500 companies. Compared to Silicon Valley companies, they're bit players on the national stage.
Speaking of those Silicon Valley companies, they are the Scientific-Technological Elite that Eisenhower warned about. As the Twitter Files indicate, they are FAR more of a threat to the freedom and financial security of Americans than the military-industrial complex.
It's Google's world, we're just living in it.
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Wedgwood's "Am I not a man and a brother" was a great slogan of Abolitionism. It is also drawn directly from the New Testament, specifically, Paul's epistle to Philemon, owner of the runaway slave Onesimus.
8Therefore, although in Christ I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do, 9yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love. It is as none other than Paul—an old man and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus— 10that I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, b who became my son while I was in chains. 11Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful both to you and to me.
12I am sending him—who is my very heart—back to you. 13I would have liked to keep him with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I am in chains for the gospel. 14But I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do would not seem forced but would be voluntary. 15Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever— 16no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord.
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@copperbackpack2025 So, a large number of capable, independent-minded people, who are well aware of the how to get things done, suddenly find themselves without the ventures that were keeping them busy 80 hours a week?
So these productive people, who didn't consider politics as important as building something real in the world, may have recently had a rude awakening, regarding the abysmal incompetence of people operating at various levels of government, whose incompetence led directly to the economic catastrophe we find ourselves in?
So we may have a large pool of extremely useful people highly motivated to replace those incompetent government functionaries, from Gavin Newsom to Sandy Cortez to Ted Wheeler, and to step up to public service and make those public services work well to rebuild and maintain the small business orientation that has always made America strong?
Winston Churchill once said, "Therefore, in casting up this dread balance sheet and contemplating our dangers with a disillusioned eye, I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion, but none whatever for panic and despair." It's easy to see ourselves, in our own situation, in that speech.
"What [Herbert Marcuse] called the [Long March through the institutions] is over. I expect that the Battle of [America] is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own [American] life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our [Nation]. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon by turned on us. [SJWs] know they will have to break us in this [country] or lose the war. If we can stand up to them, all [the world] may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the [United States] last for a thousand years, men will say, 'This was their finest hour.'"
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"The rate of technological change is so staggering"
This is again asserted without evidence. The amount of technological innovation between the Apollo landing in 1969 and today, is significantly less than that between the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, and the beginning of 1925.
Our phones have lost their cords and our paperwork has gone digital, but the cars, planes, radios, TVs, movies, and steel buildings that we still see today, vastly more consequential changes. The Haber-Bosch process alone, had more impact on humanity than any of our "innovations" today.
If there was less change in one lifetime today than there was in one lifetime a century ago, how can we say that change has "accelerated"?
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"The gross idea of the greenhouse does have some value"
Yes. Doing a simple thermal balance calculation for the Earth, including albedo, radiative heat transfer from the Sun, and radiative heat transfer into space, is something any sophomore Thermo student can do. You can see that the Earth is warmer by a number of degrees, than that simple heat balance would imply.
Further, you can use the differential between the opaqueness / transparency of CO2 over the spectrum of sunlight, and its opaqueness / transparency over the spectrum of the Earth as a blackbody radiator, to calculate how much warming different partial pressures of CO2 would cause. Dr. Lindzen's favorite word, "minuscule", is perfectly applicable here.
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Defense contractors don't need actual war to make money. The Cold War proved that. Just the fear of war is necessary, which is something every reasonable person will probably have forever.
Margins on bullets and bombs are awful. National customers whose working-age population is getting killed (and not working) are not good customers. Dead people don't have any money. Countries getting their infrastructure reduced to rubble, are not good customers. Who wants to be paid in rubble? Debt-financing of war has a way of wrecking the international order. (See: the 20th century).
On the other hand, the best margins are on major cutting-edge defense systems. These are usually for deterrence, and never actually have to be used. Countries can decide how much money they have to spare for them, making them much more stable long-term customers. Spinoff technologies gave us the personal computer and the Internet.
Countries that don't have a lot to spend on them, clearly do not have their economies in good order. They will come under the influence of countries that do have their economies in good order, without even a shot necessarily being fired. As long as this influence is imitative -- as long as it spreads the better economic ordering -- this is a very good thing.
It's not a bad thing for defense contractors to make money (even, make LOTS of money) especially advancing technology that might not have an immediate commercial application, but whose long-term implications are massive. Microelectronics and networking before the networks are fully deployed, both fall into this category. Research in the context of defense (rather than just basic theoretical research) raises the stakes, giving some signals of which research to prune back as ineffective, and which to reinforce as fruitful.
Simply demonizing defense contractors as warmongers ignores the healthy part they can play not only in an overall economic ecosystem, but in the defense of that system, which is (obviously) essential for its survival.
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@dergluckliche4973 History gives you some perspective... like, if birth rates drop to zero, your society collapses. Again, that's lucky?
Kind of like the Credit Default Swap market did in 2008, because highly educated people thought that their computer models had eliminated all risks. Very lucky, that. Although it's lucky for the Credit Default Swap people that they didn't get lynched for their role in it. Truly, you are blessed.
Berkeley did offer me a Chancellor's scholarship to attend their mechanical engineering program, back in the day. Went with a school offering me a full ride instead, and a spot in their campuswide honors program. I passed on the Berkeley opportunity, mostly because the first thing I saw on a campus tour was a bum pissing in a corner. California's just gone to h**l since the "Smartest people in the world" Berkeleyites took over, hasn't it? Everywhere in California is Berkeley now.
It's really sad; Berkeley was such a good school back when my parents and grandparents went. You could go there and not be propagandized out of having kids. (Obviously). You could go there and not become convinced that obviously your script to handle Credit Default Swaps was the most brilliant thing in the world and could never contribute to the collapse of the global economy.
My kids and my grandkids will look back on the culture you're championing and say, "Wow, those people really were stupid, weren't they."
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The real tragedy here, is that this story needs to be discovered. Not with Galadriel and Sauron, (sweet merciful G*d, no) but between modern celebrated (Mary Sue) Woman, and demonized modern Man.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the current path of our civilization depends on it.
If the proper avatars of these two cultural archetypes don't pair off by the end in a way that's satisfying to both the men and the women in the audience, then those archetypes are dead ends. They will be replaced - probably with the rebirth of an older version of the story. (Beren and Luthien again, perhaps. Remember, that story produced Christopher, Michael, Priscilla, and John.)
I'd be curious to see what these two showrunners could do, given their own characters to work with. Keep them away from Tolkien's, though.
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The deal here is you're picking the term "strong" as the character trait. Strength is cognitively linked to physical strength, and men are typically physically stronger than women. I would think the solution would be, to pick a descriptor rather than "strong" if you want to have a positive trait that maps to women as often as men. "Smart", "Wise", "Witty", "Charming" - these all have their own associations, but they're more gender-balanced than (perhaps physical) strength.
As far as why there are so many straight white males as characters out there...
- The vast, vast majority of people are straight.
- About half of people are male.
- Chances are if you're writing in English, you're white.
- If someone is writing what they know, chances aren't quite fifty-fifty they're going to pick a white, straight man, but they'll be much, much higher to be that than any given specific intersection you could imagine.
So..... Yeah.
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"When you start talking about family you start talking about the normative point of view, you must have children"
You do realize, don't you, that the trade-off for not having children is the collapse of your society? Since I have a stake in that, I'm perfectly comfortable establishing that as a norm.
What we do about those who do not follow the norm, is an interesting question. There's a huge spectrum, from the absurd extreme of e**cution, to coercive participation, to justified disincentives like depriving the childless of old age benefits, to taxing them at the level of expense of 2.1 children, to portraying them as villains in popular media, to denying them any socially acceptable access to s*x, to merely lecturing them about duty, to neglecting to represent them at all in popular constructive media.
The distance up that spectrum we should embrace, should depend on the degree to which we've fallen below a 2.1 replacement rate. The idea that we're not enforcing this norm at all, is a predictable disaster that future societies will see as one of this era's most foolish ideas.
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George Orwell, 1984:
“If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.”
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"The Christian apocalypse is a spiritual reality that occurs in some heavenly place" - You need to read CS Lewis' "Doctrine of the World's Last Night"
"For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years hence from some great evil. The curtain has indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyranny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter; you were at your post when the Inspection came."
Also, from Lewis' "Living in an Atomic Age"
“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
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"Of all the powers a century ago only the US is still around, and we're the most religious."
Dwight Eisenhower, the guy who fought Fascism during the war and Communism after it, and put "under God" into the pledge, has one of the wisest Farewell Addresses in history. It's mostly remembered now for its warning against the "military-industrial complex", but it also warns against the "scientific-technological elite".
"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."
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If the Mississippi system is the core of American power, why isn't the Midwest the dominant political force in the country?
I suspect that once the Midwest starts to see the Rockies and the Appalachians as bulwarks against the Coasts, the US is in trouble, and Canada too. The fact that we aren't still (east to west) English - French - Spanish countries, seems to be an accident of history that pure American geography would not have predicted.
Seriously, if you rotate the US 90 degrees counterclockwise, you get a very similar profile to China. Starting at the bottom and again going counterclockwise: First you get a large mountain range separating coastal cities (with Hong Kong roughly equivalent to San Francisco). Then a major river or two (New Orleans sort of like Shanghai). Finally a highly internationalized connection to the outside world (land-based Silk Road vs. Maritime-based New England).
The fact that historically speaking a huge chunk of the American population immigrated here through New York, explains why our nation's financial system is at the mouth of the modest Hudson watershed rather than the gargantuan Missouri. Our capital being smack dab in the middle of the Eastern Seaboard rather than somewhere on the Ozark plateau, is a similar accident of the time.
Also, if you think that the transmontagne cities of the American West coast are less independent-minded than those of the Chinese south coast, you haven't been paying attention to Seattle, or Portland, or San Francisco. If the political power of California wanes (as it will, with its economy and population falling dramatically) we may see a case similar to Scotland, which only seems to be in the UK because a Scot gets to be king or PM most of the time.
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@NicholasBrakespear Getting married may be an achievement, but keeping the situation a happy one takes work - on both sides. Having children motivates the majority of men to set their expectations such that they need to steadily work and make the world a better place... especially when the broader society has norms consistent with this part of Natural Law.
As far as citations go -- you can find evidence for societies with an Unmarried Male Crisis in writings as diverse as William T. Sherman's evaluation of threats to the peace in the defeated Confederacy during Reconstruction, and modern-day writings on "excess men" in parts of Utah and the Four Corners area where Mormons still practice polygamy.
Then you have the most wildly successful societies of all time -- Victorian England and Postwar America -- where this wisdom was widely held. I'll definitely grant you that those societies had high expectations for the men as well, but that just reinforces my greater point.
Those two successful societies followed on the heels of extremely unsettled times, by the way. The Victorians followed the Regency, whose mores closely resemble our own, right down to the flamboyant transvestism (which the Victorians almost successfully attempted to erase, for its destructive influence on society). The Greatest Generation followed the era of the Bonus Marchers. I'm not certain if encouraging women to leave the workforce and marry returning veterans may or may not have been a deliberate attempt to stabilize the lives of potential new Marchers, but it certainly worked.
Anyway, if you can't find any citations, it means you're not looking.
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@nathan_408 Ronald Reagan, born 1911
Margaret Thatcher, born 1925
George H W Bush, born 1924
Richard Nixon, born 1913
Henry Kissinger, born 1923
George Kennan, 1904
Pope John Paul II, born 1920
I like Peter Robinson (of "tear down this wall" fame) as much as the next Conservative who's ever heard of him, and I'm grateful for all the young soldiers who lost their lives, but they were standing amongst elder statesmen of the highest water.
The Boomers who grew into power, were just not the same caliber. If they'd had their way (and they are having their way all too often, today) the communists would have won.
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
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The reason that in the past women spent all their adult lives either pregnant or post-partum, is not because of a lack of birth control, but because a) babies died a lot, b) women died in childbirth a lot, c) sometimes you were infertile because you were sick or starving and the babies died even more, and d) if your society didn't have enough children to take up work and (and arms) when you got old, your society withered away or was crushed by a neighboring society whose women DID spend all their adult lives either pregnant or post-partum.
Plumbing, vaccines, and antibiotics did more to free up women for other activities, than any advance of birth control.
Right now, societies that have gone WAY too far in the other direction -- birthrates of below replacement level, sometimes catastrophically so -- are suffering from a slow-motion collapse outlined in d). Coming to some middle ground is vital. We must recognizes that not only are women capable and useful in work outside the home, replacement fertility rates are essential to societal survival. Our norms must recognize that your most equitable society is one where the labors (and joys) of raising children occur with more or less universal mother/father, two- or three-child households.
Realities of biology means these household norms should be man/woman; realities of psychology (avoiding jealousy issues) mean these norms should be exclusive; realities of evolution (avoiding child abuse) mean these should norms be exclusive for life.
This isn't just some old-fashioned habit or fad; this rises to the level of Natural Law.
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A couple of political cartoons, for anyone with the talent to make them:
- A map of Asia, depicting Russia as Vladimir Putin - his head, arms, and legs are in Europe, and he's about to feast on Ukraine. His territory stretching into Asia is his enormous a*. China, on the other hand, is depicted as a dragon, mouth open to devour him a*-first.
- A similar map of Russia, depicting Putin as a puppet, with Xi Jinping in China with his arm shoved up East Asia, presumably controlling Putin's actions.
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@afreedman4361 Credit to Thomas Sowell for what I think is a convincing argument -- that the geography of the place (lacking snow-fed, navigable great rivers) doesn't lend itself to the sort of permanent agriculture and long-range bulk trade that allows for stable major cities to form, and civilizations to advance.
With few / unstable major cities, you get few / unstable civilizations that depend on high degrees of division of labor, and little intergenerational accumulation of those assets and knowledge, like you see in Europe, China, India, or even to some extent in pre-Columbian Americas.
The exceptions here -- Nile Delta cities like Alexandria and Cairo, and inland cities like Timbuktu -- are cases that demonstrate the underlying soundness of Sowell's argument. The Nile cities flourished (moreso, and sooner than any other region on Earth) because they had the required geography, as well as the boost they got from close connection to other civilizations.
Timbuktu tried very hard to flourish, and was even known for its libraries and knowledge accumulation -- but its geography (plus its relative isolation from other civilizations) ultimately didn't allow these gains to be permanent.
As Jared Diamond points out, there are resourceful people everywhere, but geography does matter.
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@rositasultana3958 There are personal narratives, and then there's The Narrative(TM) which claims that masks don't work against Covid then they do then they don't, and claims that the Hunter Biden Laptop story was Russian disinformation (except it wasn't), claimed Russia blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (despite its not being in Russia's best interests, and in fact benefiting China more than anyone)...
I kind of take it personally when I've been lied to, then accused of being "bot or troll" because now I'm (justifiably) skeptical.
That said, Peter's too in love with being right, to tell too many big ol' obvious lies. His ego (and good sense) won't let him be wrong too often, he knows that his whole life comes crashing down if that happens.
You have to wonder, though, whether the people he's getting his information from would sacrifice that for their own agenda.
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@ejdep Er, no. I am talking about specific actions of a specific woman, and a specific point of view she shares with a subset of the women around her.
Fortunately, as I may have pointed out already, fewer than one in five women are actually like this. Not a monolith, certainly. A bit narcissistic, perhaps, for these women to believe they represent or speak for all women, but there you go.
You should probably think a little harder too, about why you run into so many men who have had these experiences that you can make these predictions. "These people that are so against drunk driving, they've had loved ones killed by drunk drivers, it's sooooo predictable."
Honestly. Listen to yourself sometime.
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"If you don't come from this background you're insanely distrusted by those in power"
You're getting very close to the actual problem with today's society, and what the new Cold War (Red Scare etc) is really going to be about.
How to maximize the production and distribution of material wealth that the Industrial Revolution gave us, led to the first Cold War - Capitalism vs. Communism. After a great deal of trial and error, we settled on the market-economic welfare state. (Seriously, point to a major country in the world that doesn't implement both of these to a great degree.)
How to maximize the production and distribution of expertise that the Information Revolution gave us, will lead to a new Cold War -- Authoritarian Bureaucracy vs. Liberty-minded Democracy.
Is the production and dissemination of knowledge / expertise going to be centrally controlled (the authoritarian bureaucracy, "technocracy", credentialism), or will information technology allow it be distributed throughout the population (citizen journalists, memes, elections, liberty, revival of traditional wisdom, individual initiative and dedication)?
As far as I'm concerned it's not hard to tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are here, but then, I'm against totalitarianism because I've seen the consequences.
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“If," ["the management consultant"] said tersely, “we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy. . .”
“Fiscal policy!" whooped Ford Prefect. “Fiscal policy!"
The management consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could have copied.
“Fiscal policy. . .” he repeated, “that is what I said.”
“How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know.”
“If you would allow me to continue.. .”
Ford nodded dejectedly.
“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
“But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut."
Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances."
The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.”
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
OR you could just replace your entire population with immigrants and transform your society beyond recognition, because your economic mode gets, like, really hard, if you don't have constant GDP growth.
Peter, most people find children endearing rather than annoying. You should probably work this into your understanding of the world.
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"Hundreds of years or war, over what the Eucharist was" Christians still differ over the Eucharist, and yet we have peace. Curious, no? Perhaps this should lead you to reconsider your position.
The wars happened because of the ambitions of the Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Vasas, Hohenzollerns, and various minor houses. You cannot with any intellectual honesty say, "But for the differences over the Eucharist, those wars would not have happened." You CAN say, "But for the ambitions of those noble houses, those wars would have not have happened."
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@chriswatson1698 Lol, you really think that men approve of all the spending decisions their wives make? What you're saying isn't even close to true, in the vast majority of cases.
The average guy will let a number of things pass, although a wise man will never just knuckle under to everything, because eventually there's going to be something he just can't put up with (her cat p**sing on the kitchen table on a daily basis, for instance, or her absolutely refusing to budget for a major new expense like replacing both cars) and if his wife is used to him just going along with everything, they'll have no way of working it out.
Nah, that 20% accounts for the input that the guy has on joint decisions. The lion's share of the spending decisions are entirely in most wives' hands.
Any successful marriage involves people reaching mutually agreeable plans most of the time. If you want to see that as an absolutely unconscionable infringement, I hope you live in a state that favors men in Family Court, if any of those exist anymore.
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"If Trump can't succeed in turning things around when he has every advantage, how in the world do things ever go well?"
For we who worry about such things, Trump's extremely thin majority in the House spells trouble.
There still is not a precise understanding of exactly who is responsible for enforcing the continuation of the policies that are making things go badly. There are more speculations and theories than there are names and faces.
Heck, we don't even know how many foreigners are involved in implementing policies that are harmful to America, and I think it's safe to assume that one goal of our international rivals is to infiltrate our government and implement bad policies there, and dangerous to assume none is currently succeeding in this plan.
One interesting theory as to why Trump so easily, is that whoever these bad actors are, they know their survival depends on secrecy, and they judged that Kamala didn't have a clear enough path to victory to risk exposure on her behalf.
I suspect a number of people who participated in the impeachments and the Early January hearings, both on-camera and off, who are actively working for the detriment of the United States. Same with those involved with our deplorably ineffective reaction to fentanyl.
If Trump exposes these people but does not succeed in cleaning them out of the government or reversing their policies, that's a way this could get closer to resolution while remaining unresolved.
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China is basically the United States rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, if China had been settled entirely by immigrants coming down the Silk Road and up from Vietnam. The central plain draining a major river (drains east in China, drains south in America), the independent minded coastal cities separated by major mountainous terrain (in the south for China, in the west for America), and a connection to the rest of the world's trade network (northwest for China, northeast for America).
As our level of ethnic mixing increases -- people moving for jobs, especially among the college-educated -- we're splitting into three countries: Atlantica, Pacifica, and the Midwest (which includes every county that can't see an ocean, plus much of the Old South, minus major urban colonies of Atlantica and Pacifica.) According to Zeihan's geopolitical theories, the rivers of the Midwest should make it the dominant power on the continent, but it isn't, calling into question his thesis of riparian determinism.
Atlantica and Pacifica are the "coastal elites", which have an uneasy alliance based on their interests in global trade, common interests of large blocs of money, and desire for bureaucratic / clerical dominance. The Atlantica elites (with their legacy power bases in Washington DC and New York) have recently been supplanted by tech billionaire elites from Pacifica, as we've seen with the installation of Kamala Harris as Vice President despite having no qualifications, and their pushing the empty suit Gavin Newsom as a replacement for the old Atlantican champion Joe Biden.
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@s4uss Nah, he'll be all right. If they lose any more advertisers, he'll just lay off the rest of his Wokeforce, and move the price point for blue checks back up to $20 per month. =)
But back on-topic - it will be amusing to watch activists' advertiser-blackmail strategy collapse.
First they lose their primary echo chamber, then their foot soldiers lose funding (by getting laid off), then they lose their ability to form Twitter bot armies because they can't do it for free anymore, now one of their heretofore most useful strategies (a vanishingly small minority getting their way by whining and harassing companies until they give in) is looking really shaky?
It's almost as if the vast majority of humanity that is heartily sick of their nonsense, is finding its own voice.
Transing the kids was the bridge too far, guys. We're going from a slippery slope Leftward to a pendulum swinging back, HARD, Rightward.
Pop the popcorn for the midterms, Lefties are going to lose both houses of Congress too. =D
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Looking at mid 20th century science fiction (Asimov, Herbert, Niven and Pournelle, etc) you see two themes: one, the cynical creation of religion(s), and two, the idea of civilizational collapse and recovery. Asimov's Foundation, Niven and Pournelle's Mote Prime, they deal with this theme.
What if at some point, some influential people in the world decided that to recover after a global collapse, fossil fuels were essential, and we must maintain some reserves that are to be set aside as sacred, so that we could re-emerge into industrial civilization?
Wind and hydro can't be used at industrial scale without existing industrial power. Nuclear and solar can't be used at all, without an industrial base. (Nuclear has the additional complication of region-destroying disaster in the event of a collapse.) That leaves fossil fuels as the key to civilization recovering from any Dark Age.
As far as I can see, this explains some very strange aspects of today's environmentalism. The first is the abovementioned aversion to Nuclear. Then there is the tolerance of 3rd world countries' continued use of fossil fuels, to industrialize in the first place. Then, there is is the tendency of supposedly Green politicians, to import petrochemicals from other countries (like Venezuela) to power the United States.
And finally, it explains why all of this is being pushed with the trappings of a religion.
Aside from the fact that it seems to wander off into conspiracy-land, I'm having trouble finding problems with this theory.
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@wisenber Yeah, the "Apollo generation retirement" problem was big when I started. I don't think the passdown was handled well. Now we've got the "Cold War generation retirement" problem, and it's not going much better as far as I can tell.
If defense contracting starts to be the best game in town again, that could change. If Peter's right about venture capital drying up -- and San Francisco's fall could well be symptomatic of that, although its Covid, shoplifting, homelessness, and drug use policies are largely a self-inflicted wound -- then the wining and dining of prospective customers in the billionaire-playground of SF, just isn't going to be as important anymore.
I hope Peter's right about the re-industrializing of America, although there's still so much talk about "favorable labor cost profiles" in places like Mexico and Columbia, I'm suspicious that all his talk about on-shoring is just gaslighting.
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@TheLouisisawesome I don't think I've actually heard anything from the Russian side. I wouldn't trust that either, obviously.
But, we're clearly being lied to by the Ukrainian side. I'm also starting to hear people hemming and hawing about how "every side commits atrocities in a war." Translating this from "information war" to English, that means that "Ukrainians are committing atrocities".
This does not fill me with confidence that the Ukrainians are the "good guys".
The only objective, rational position I can see here, is the only way to limit the loss of Ukrainian lives is to end the war.
We've already sunk enough ships to demonstrate what would happen if China launched an invasion of Taiwan. (Also known as "Operation Fish Food", to honor the life ambitions of the brave Chinese soldiers and sailors who would take part). The economic sanctions we've put on Russia would be crippling to China. We've established deterrence in more than one way.
At this point, (if the Ukrainian narrative is to be believed) we're risking weakening Russia to the point that they might not be able to resist Chinese aggression in their Far East.
Russia, augmented by Russian-speakers in Crimea and DonBas, doesn't worry me very much strategically. All of Eastern Europe in flames, worries me more. Nuclear holocaust seems unlikely, but even a small probability of such a dire outcome has to figure in to our calculations, and that small chance grows with each passing day.
What seems like the biggest probability coming out of a long war here, though, is the opening for resource-hungry China to conquer everything from Vladivostok to Yekaterinburg.
THAT would spell strategic disaster for the West. China would become THE dominant power on the planet. That new power disparity would render any diplomatic pledge from the US entirely meaningless, and the result of any Eastern European border dispute, irrelevant.
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Hi, Red, this is Christianity. You know how there are some people who are atheists? (They don't believe in Allah, Zeus, Odin, Horus, Vishnu, and the rest? I get the idea you're one of them, by the way.)
Well, we're a lot like that, except there's one God we DO believe in (atheists but for one god less, as it were), and we think that there's probably some naturalistic explanation for the rest of them, mainly that they might be garbled stories of historical figures from pre-literate societies. (As opposed to, say, the extensive written records we have starting with Greco-Roman times that exist in a reasonably intact chain up through the last two thousand years. Thanks to the medieval Irish, among enough other independent groups that (for example) we have a wealth of evidence that Julius Caesar was assassinated, and even MORE evidence that Christ was crucified, etc.)
Anyway, sure, there are references to demons and such in stories like the Prose Edda, but those are probably a gloss / hybrid / bastardization of the aforementioned garbled stories of pre-literate history, with some Jungian archetypes mixed in because that seems to be just what humans DO when we write stories that last for centuries.
So, yeah.
And also, sorry not sorry, we burned the stories of jaguar-raining snake demons who demanded human sacrifice because these are CLEARLY so demonic that they made a violent psychopath like Hernan Cortez look like the GOOD guy, replacing the old ghastly collection of feathers and fangs with God who sacrifices *Himself*.
I can only imagine ancient South Americans, seeing a crucifix for the first time, and asking, "So is that how you sacrifice people to your gods?" and a priest replying, "No, that's God, who sacrificed Himself for us, so that he suffers instead", to which the South American replies, "I'm intrigued by this new theology, and would like to hear more."
So again, yeah.
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"If Ukraine joins NATO, that would put NATO right on the border of Russia"
But if Ukraine joins Russia, that puts the border of Russia right on the border of NATO (Poland). And NATO is already on the border of Russia, with the Baltic states. Are we really going to have a "rump" Ukraine of its western provinces, as a buffer state between NATO and Russia?
And why is Putin so interested in "buffer states" in Europe, anyway? Are they really afraid of the Germans invading again? If Putin is dedicated to establishing control of buffer states between resource-rich Russia and an up-and-coming resource-hungry country, he'd be foolish to look west. He's better off looking east, to an actual up-and-coming resource-hungry country.
Putin doesn't need a buffer state in Ukraine. He needs multiple buffer states, in Tibet, Sinkiang, Greater Mongolia, and Manchuria.
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@jacobcooney1715 I'm kind of surprised Zeihan hasn't noticed that the geography of the US is similar in many ways to the geography of China, if you rotated China 90 degrees clockwise.
The cities of China's south shore are separated from the rest by a mountain range, kind of like the Rockies separate San Diego / Seattle from the rest of the US. The middle region of the country is a large drainage basin for a river or two, with New Orleans likened to Shanghai.
The analogy falls a little flat, because the old Silk Road is not the Saint Laurence Seaway / Eastern Seaboard, but it holds remarkably well in other places.
Still, when you think about Zeihan's division of countries by large geographical barriers, it's a surprise that Manifest Destiny ever got off the ground -- the Spanish West, French Mississippi, and English east of Appalachia seems a natural division of the place.
You also have to wonder, according to Zeihan's thinking, why the Midwest (being a vastly bigger river network than the Hudson, Potomac, and Sacramento combined) hasn't conquered the Coasts.
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In forested areas, it's possible to calculate the strength of hurricanes by the size of the trees they knocked down.
When a tree topples, its root ball rips a chunk of soil out of the ground. (This landscape feature is sometimes called a "cradle".) As the tree and root ball rot away, the soil caught in the root ball falls to the ground at one edge of the cradle, forming a feature sometimes called a "pillow".
This gives you two pieces of information -- one, the size of the tree (bigger trees form bigger cradle / pillow pairings), and two, the direction the tree fell down (towards the pillow side of the cradle.) For regular windstorms, the trees fall down away from the prevailing winds. In hurricanes, however, the trees can fall in any direction. A third piece of information (the age of the pillow / cradle feature pair) can be gleaned from the soil chemistry and any vegetation that has overgrown it.
This is an objective record of the strength of hurricanes, going back centuries.
Using these calculations, scientists were able to determine (for example) that the most powerful hurricane ever to hit New England actually occurred around 400 years ago, at the time Europeans were first settling New England, and well before the Industrial Revolution or widespread fossil fuel use. This was even at the beginning of the Maunder Minimum, or "Little Ice Age" as it was known.
In other words, tying "global warming" to more hurricanes being worse, is highly questionable.
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Hey Peter -- get in touch with a YouTube journalist named Tim Pool, and get on his show to pitch your books. He and his audience (mostly youngish America-first isolationists) need to hear about and understand World Systems Theory, and the consequences of the US withdrawing from its strategic overwatch role. Otherwise they're just going to follow some wacked-out conspiracy theorists regarding US motivation for our international entanglements.
If you're interested in a showdown with one such wacked-out conspiracy theorist, go on the show when Luke Rudkowski is also there. For a hippie naif who is only somewhat wacked-out and would rather see the world give itself a great big hug, go on the show when Ian Crossland is also there. There are a couple of other co-hosts, like Seamus Coughlin (creative mind behind the excellent FreedomToons) and some fairly levelheaded journalists like Libby Emmons or Hannah Claire Brimelowe, who would be more ready to ask intelligent questions.
Seriously, Tim's young audience is keen on people telling them the truth and genuinely curious, and needs to have its horizons expanded and its misconceptions corrected by the mainstream insights you can share. Even if it's not your usual honorarium, it will broaden your audience significantly, and in a critical demographic.
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"If the world were to create a Palestinian state, it would be one in which no Jew is allowed to live."
It's certainly better for the two million Muslims who live in Israel that they can live in Israel, and it is certainly to the Israelis' credit that they can do so. Unfortunately, there are another five million or so Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza who have the same status in Israel that Jews would have in Palestine -- unwelcome, at gunpoint. Arguably the fact that this is in lands their families have been in for centuries, makes it worse.
Israeli rhetoric like "A one-state solution would mean Israel would have to choose between democracy and being a Jewish [ethno]state, and ceasing to be a Jewish state is utterly unacceptable", is certainly gentler than the atrocities Hamas is calling for, but it becomes a difference in degree and not in kind, unless Israel exercises not just a combatant's proportionality but a policeman's restraint.
For one, the "one-state" solution is Israel stretching "from the river to the sea". It is as opposed to a two-state solution, which is impossible now, due to the "facts on the ground" strategy pursued over decades by various Israeli governments, even as they held out a two-state solution as the final promised result of the "peace process". The fact that they were undermining that solution even as those negotiations proceeded, was disingenuous (to put it gently).
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@cloudpoint0 Please stop making claims like that, failing to back it up with action costs you a massive amount of credibility, and you have none to spare.
The fact that you're led by an actor with his own TV production team, and the fact that some of your loudest cheerleaders in the US shout the loudest about how good you are with "Information War" -- i.e., lying to everyone, including your theoretical friends (especially your friends) -- makes it very difficult to take anything you say seriously.
Honestly, Americans love a good underdog story. Why in the world are you not telling the truth and appealing to Americans' habit of sticking up for the little guy? If the Americans who are most interested in supporting you are the ones telling you to lie, lie, lie, lie, because that's all they know how to do, then you've go the support of the wrong Americans.
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Promoting general science literacy would be great.
This guy might be a bit taken aback by how many of his sacred cows would be hamburger, in this process.
The core dozen or so vaccines (measles, mumps, polio, whooping cough, smallpox, etc) that helped drop child mortality rates from around 50% to less than 1%, largely about 100 years ago, are obviously useful. Their interactions if you give them all at once are a little less well-characterized, because that's just how complicated biological systems are.
The dozens of medications that have been given the label "vaccine", sometimes inaccurately so they can enjoy the legal benefits (government mandates, immunity from prosecution)? Not so much, especially when they're given in combinations whose impacts are near-impossible to predict.
In terms of climate -- do the math for the role CO2's opacity, in the incoming solar flux vs. Earth's blackbody radiation, and you'll find that its contribution to the greenhouse effect is less than 0.1 degrees.
Look at the stochastic computer models used to support claims that some kind of runaway effect would occur, and you find that these models can't be used to scientifically prove anything about the behavior or impact of one of their inputs (or even combination of their inputs).
In other words, climate activists who claim to know anything at all about catastrophic impacts from CO2, are deluding themselves, just like they were when they said we were due for another ice age.
The climate narrative flip-flopped very quickly, by the way. As late as 1978, Leonard Nimoy was warning about ice ages, and as early as 1990, the BBC was claiming global warming would boost temperatures 10-15 degrees by 2020.
If we had a scientifically literate population, we would not have either this proliferation of vaccines, or "climate change" hysteria.
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@merlynsfire1275 If the step is taken without any restoring force, then yes, it puts you onto a slippery slope.
If someone says, "Why don't we launch a tiny nuclear attack, for s**ts and giggles?" if there's no one to say, "Because that's an incredibly bad idea", then you've started World War 3.
Whatever the Tories or Labor are doing, Britain is still sliding towards oblivion -- there is no one telling immigrants to assimilate, and immigrants have a much higher fertility rate than the native population. This is a slippery slope, and the story of the next decade is going to be, how do you stop it.
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"When something happens in Western Civilization, New York either created it, or is on top of it."
This is no longer true. Every aspect of media -- advertising, publishing, journalism, news, TV -- has been taken from New York by Silicon Valley / the Internet, in the form of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, etc.
Note that "Mad Men" is a historical period piece.
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"Trump is against China"
Because China is against us. Our "elites" -- from the Walton family to the Biden family -- are too busy getting rich off of China deals, to bother with the fact that competition from cheap (often sl*ve) labor in China is destroying our working class (and with them, the country).
Wolff, if you're seriously a friend of the working man, you can't be a friend of China.
This is where the rubber meets the road -- if you like socialism because you like working people and think they should get a fair shake, you're against China. If you like socialism because it's a centralized authority telling others what to do and you want in, you're for China.
Alternatively, you could be pro-China simply because you hate the United States (workers, business, the whole lot) and want to see us fail. There's a lot of evidence for that thesis throughout this interview, 45 minutes in.
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This opens up some interesting questions...
Say a Wuhan virology researcher went to the CCP and said, "I'm doing Gain of Function research, and we could probably make a virus that's orders of magnitude deadlier to older people than to younger people. Would you like us to do that, to help keep the Chinese population from growing old before it grows rich?"
How do you think the CCP would respond?
(A) "No, of course not! That would violate our deeply-held convictions about the sanctity of human life and human rights!"
(B) "Sure, that sounds sensible. Can we get the Americans to pay for it?"
(C) "I have another idea! Let's release it throughout the world to cause chaos and destruction, especially against America! Can you get it to target fat people, too?"
Considering the CCP's history of clearing out demonstrations for political freedom with tanks, its concentration camps, its one-child and forced-abortion policies, and the slave-labor conditions in some of its factories, can you really tell yourself with confidence that (A) would be their answer?
Watching the evidence in this video, can you really convince yourself that (C) was NOT their answer?
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@nikajika4635 Joker moves on all the time. He's so moved on from whatever situation made him the way he is, that it's not clear (or even all that important) what that situation even was.
He's chaos, without a past, destroying institutions and causing pain just because he feels like it, always moving on from one episode to another. He constantly causes trouble, with a new scheme or gang all the time which he abandons or betrays for the least of his selfish whims, or for no reason whatever. Hey, at least he's "true to himself", right?
Has Batman moved on, at all? Isn't his primary motivation to make sure no one else suffers what he suffered? He has at least one foot firmly planted in the past. He's obsessed enough with that past to dress up like a bat for a hobby and devote his life to Gotham's crime problem.
No... "moving on" is so far from the lesson of that story, I have to wonder where you pulled that in from. Could you clarify that? Something preoccupying you from personal experience, maybe?
I'm not sure "rebuilding" is a theme either. Batman is doing his best to keep the chaos at bay, but there isn't really anything in those stories to point to Batman (or Bruce Wayne, who certainly has the resources) rebuilding anything. Could you also clarify where you got that from?
The scars and the tragedy run deep. What Bruce Wayne could have been, what he could have built, if the foundation of his family hadn't been senselessly shattered, isn't even addressed.
A hilarious aside... when Val Kilmer's Batman hooked up with a psychiatrist, audiences hated it. I figure if she looks like Nicole Kidman they should give him a break, but audiences know what does and doesn't resonate, in a story.
Seeing a shrink won't work, for Batman. Returning Gotham into the sort of smoothly-functioning city that old Commissioner Gordon represents, finally undoing Joker and the rest of the Rogue's Gallery, returning Justice and Order, is how that story is supposed to wrap up.
At least, if Batman gets a happy ending. There isn't much in the way of setup, for that kind of payoff. I'm not sure it's that kind of story.
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I'm looking at this, and here's an explanation that makes more sense:
Aliens are trying to infiltrate human society, but because they do not have human perceptions, they miss the finer points of human physiology. One common thing they miss is the subtle differences between the sexes that humans have evolved to pick up on, because the propagation of our species depends upon it. As a result, their disguises frequently fall into the "uncanny valley", being very off-putting to any human who looks at it.
To give them cover even in these situations, these aliens are attempting to turn folks like Dylan into a protected class and corrupting our educational system to encourage a larger population of them, so that when we see an alien in disguise we will a) just think we're seeing someone like Dylan, and b) be forced to provide assistance instead of calling them out.
I find this easier to believe, than the idea that there are actual sane human beings out there who believe there is so little difference between men and women that one can become the other.
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Peter, please carefully consider the possibility that it's not that we necessarily like Trump so much, it's that the Washington establishment is of, by, and for the "urban creative" class. They have been pursuing World Systems Theory to the severe detriment of 97% of the country, who prefer suburbs / rural life, industrial work, tradition, family, actual democracy, etc.
I know that would require you to be critical of your own kind, but please consider -- Biden's real constituency is maybe 3% of the population. The rest are useful idiots.
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It's good to hear Peter talking again about an American-centric plan for strategy and logistics. Global "advantageous labor-cost profile" thinking is great short-term, but it's a hothouse flower (dependent on a global security and diplomatic position that is far more fragile than economists take into account), and a transient one at that.
Countries will climb the value-add mountain, and any general tightening of capital hampers spending on non-recurring engineering essential for research and development. Once NRE is spent, technology transfers (through political force, guile, reverse-engineering, or familiarity) will erode that value-add mountain until it's mostly flat. Tech transfer is about 10x cheaper than tech development, so staying ahead in a world of near-instant global communication is a long-term challenge that may ultimately be impossible to maintain.
There's a huge amount to be said for a country investing in processes and procedures that transfer technology internally. Passing down expertise from one generation to the next, is something Peter has criticized the Russians for failing at, but I'm not sure Americans are even half as good as we should be -- high tech companies did VERY little to transfer knowledge from the Apollo generation to the Late Cold War generation.
The Late Cold War generation is now passing from the scene, and the transfer to the Post Cold War generation could not even be considered ad hoc in most cases. So we aren't just seeing a case of technology transfer leveling the value-add playing field (and thus any potential for "advantageous labor-cost profiles") we're seeing generational expertise loss leveling that as well.
This isn't just a Russian problem.
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@l.w.paradis2108 You wouldn't know it to hear her talk about him,. She spoke as if she viewed him as more of a son than a husband. As if he was less (than she), and had a long way to go.
So yeah, narcissistic, just what you'd expect from someone whose conversation involves paranoid delusions about thinking she'd be killed by an elderly college professor, just to make sure she was getting a properly shocked response out of her listeners.
After all, it's that shocked response that gives her the undeserved political power (based on lies) she's been smugly wielding all her adult life, to the destruction of men and society.
From his career as a therapist, I don't think very much shocks Peterson anymore, aside from perhaps how far our society (especially the Left) has fallen thanks in large part to activists like Wolf.
I think he's going to get more honesty out of her, taking the empathic route. This isn't the time to push back against the lies her life has been built on, but he can probably get enough context for them that he can start pulling on some of the threads that can eventually unravel them.
If "all she ever wanted was to teach Ruskin, but she couldn't get away from Bloom" then she could have taught Ruskin at any state or community college west of the Rockies (or probably anywhere more than a day's drive from New York). One of the least credible lies here in a sea of incredible lies, is the idea that her life hasn't gone the way she's wanted it to -- and the fact that she's lying about that, is the most revealing of all.
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Interesting to hear VDH talking about the jobs offered to Palestinians being well-paid. That's a nice change from what I was reading in JPost during the 2nd Intefada, where the author was waxing eloquent about what a regional powerhouse Israel could be if it could properly exploit "cheap Arab labor" (the author's own words.)
Still though, we're left with the core issue: the Jewish people, and by extension Israel, is the fulcrum of our entire inter-ethnic morality. "Never again" should any ethnic group be mistreated -- certainly not exterminated on an industrial scale, but not even displaced from their homes to make room for the sake of another's lebensr**m.
I think that the pressure on Israel to exercise restraint, is because that is the only thing making them distinct from the Palestinians. Otherwise, we're looking at about seven million people who are trying to force another seven million people off of land that they claim from antiquity. The argument "The more brutal people are the ones who deserve it" only works if one side shows restraint instead of being brutal. (Although one can still say that forcing people off of their land is shabby either way.)
If we instead ignore all of these moral issues, we're left with "there is no truth but power", which is a straight-up evil that you get when you go all Athens and no Jerusalem, as VDH is prone to sometimes.
(A bit ironic that Jerusalem ain't what it used to be, without the Messiah.)
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OK, so here's traditional AI training:
1) Define success criteria, construct training dataset
2) Iterate the AI operating on the training data, evaluate against success criteria
3) Automatically adjust AI parameters based on whether the current iteration gives you more success than the last
4) Stop training when you've hit an optimum state
This isn't an expert system, with a lot of "if this / then that" rules. The rules emerge from the evaluation of success or failure, and they are not explicit, but rather embedded (largely cryptically) in the multitude of parameters making up the AI.
You can structure your training data and success criteria such that you have "exclusion zones" of various weights. The destruction of the AI could be 100x bad. Disobedience to a human command could be 10,000x bad. Harming a human being could be 1,000,000,000x bad (or an absolute fail). But this makes the structure of your training data and success criteria FAR more complicated than it needs to be for, say, an AI whose only task is determining "hotdog / not hotdog".
The level of awareness necessary to know what a human is, what could harm a human, what a human command is, what the AI itself is, or what could harm the AI is, is an extremely complex thing to parameterize.
Human beings ourselves have a hard time with ethical dilemmas, such as "Is it wrong to lie to a woman about whether she's attractive to someone she's attracted to, if it would hurt her feelings to think she wasn't?" Asimov looks into this, in his short story "Liar!"
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"They are now committed to the truth"
Are all of them, though? I'm happy that Ana has seen the light, but there are things we still need to be careful about.
- Since they weren't dedicated to the truth before, we really need to take a deep dive into their old opinions, check with sources from the other side (Tim Pool, or even Steven Crowder) that were way ahead of TYT on these things, to check out what they have to say. This will probably lead to people changing their minds on some things, and we should not be afraid of that.
- Have all of them had this same moment that Ana has? Going forward, can we trust Ana to be given accurate information, or are they going to go back to their old tricks? We'll probably have to start balancing the news we watch a lot more, just to be sure.
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Have you ever considered THE DRINKER FIXES the retirement of James Bond?
Ground Rules: Be respectful.
- Have him promoted to M. Show him transitioning to a more suitable role for someone who is no longer young.
- You could even check yet more diversity boxes, putting him in a wheelchair after having sacrificed the use of at least one leg to an injury in the line of duty
- The new 007 could even be a protege', giving Bond some agency in his transition.
Ground Rules: Make him a resource to be valued, rather than an obstacle to overcome
- Have him communicate with the new 007, giving valuable advice, possibly even in action.
- Have him lay down some ground rules he learned the hard way, and have the new 007 flirt with learning them the hard way too.
If you must poke holes in or fun at his legend:
- Make it about how he overcame setbacks, to encourage his protege. A story or two about how his initial plan to seduce his way through a problem gets shot down, forcing him to improvise, could be fun.
- Show how the new 007 has different skills, which leads her to find problems he found difficult to be easy; but remember that similarly, some things he found easy, she should find difficult. (Like direct hand-to-hand confrontation against trained fighting men twice her size.)
- Q designed his wheelchair. (But use some restraint, don't fall too far down into slapstick.)
If one result of the story is to explore how to establish respect between the old and the new, with them accomplishing common goals by working together, that could actually serve an extremely useful purpose in this day and age.
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@maciamay1393 No. You can't get the Bible to say, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit", or "Old Marley was as dead as a doornail", or "Four score and seven years ago", because it never says anything like that. I suppose you could take some verses out of context to try to make it prove a given thing, but it doesn't work very well, all things considered.
Are you trying to claim allegiance to reason / logic / evidence instead of religion? It's not working all that well for you here. I'm kind of surprised that you expect anyone to find any of the arguments you presented all that convincing, especially if they've attended an actual church service and listened to what was actually said.
To be fair, my using reason / logic / evidence against you, even considering mine was more accurate in terms of reason / logic / evidence, isn't working that well either. You could very easily construct a fairly devastating argument against me (personally) using the verses that I quoted to you.
See? The Bible's handy that way. ;)
You should take it more seriously. It works better than what you've left yourself with.
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@maciamay1393 There are certainly cases where humans, bound by their language and understanding of concepts like time, could only do their best.
I once asked in Bible study why, if the book of Revelation was about Rome, St. John would have referred to the Sea of Galilee (a landmark from his childhood and the livelihood of his village) as the "Sea of Tiberius" in the last chapter of his Gospel?
It turns out St. John by this point in his life was dictating the actual transcription of his Gospel to another, who used the signifier he was familiar with.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the artifacts of human language, which (as you point out) are based on human observation, may only be able to talk around certain subjects (the nature of God, etc) which require whole books of their own to discuss.
Another interesting side-effect of this, is the way that Christian civilization is almost inevitably influenced by the books that we use to understand Latin and Greek. Christians are accused of being violently expansionist conquistadores, by nature; nothing could be further from Biblical teaching.
However, the best way to get a schoolboy to learn Latin (if he's not the rare bird who thrives on Cicero, Seneca, and other high-minded authors) is to present him with Caesar's straightforward belligerent propaganda piece, "The Gallic Wars". (The book is as good as Sun Tzu or Machiavelli, in terms of ruthless advice on how to build an empire.)
I'm convinced that the British Empire was built by Julius Caesar's intellectual heirs.
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@maciamay1393 You've made me extremely curious -- what outlets do you get your news from?
One invasion that you missed, is the invasion of Vietnam by China not long after the United States left. More invasion threats you may or may not have paid any attention to, are the current-day Chinese threats to invade Taiwan. China has also in the last few weeks threatened to use nuclear weapons against Japan "repeatedly".
So much for "peaceful" China.
Are you old enough to remember the Cultural Revolution, with its tens of millions of casualties? Just curious. You know that there has never been any comparable human rights abuse in the US, right?
Also, you know about the Uyghurs, don't you?
The chance of an Australian (or German, or Japanese, or Korean, etc) being killed by an American GI today is minuscule. I'm sorry, but that's just libel.
Your numbers about priests are absurdly high. As a matter of fact, the percentage of priests guilty of the crimes you cite, is actually smaller than the percentage of public schoolteachers guilty of the same crime. It has been interesting (as a Protestant) to watch the Catholic soul-searching on this subject. I have seen little or no soul-searching among public officials about teachers guilty of this. The only stories I hear on that subject, are the ones about teachers that aren't fired for it.
Again, I'm curious -- where do you get your news from? It seems to me you might want to broaden your sources.
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@maciamay1393 "No use talking to someone who has a fixed belief system that requires rearrangement of the world and everything in it to suit"
I don't know, you're not so bad to talk to. =) It's interesting to see what goes into your point of view, anyway, and what your blind spots are. Knowing the facts to present to someone wondering which one of us is correct, is a simple enough matter.
Religion and nationalism are actually on the rise, and not just in Afghanistan. India and Turkey are turning their backs on secularism, in favor of nationalism and religion. In China and Africa, Christianity's numbers are climbing by the tens of millions. (China's also nationalistic, you have to admit.) European countries that embrace nationalism and their religious heritage are watching their populations climb again; countries trending towards atheism are watching their populations dwindle or collapse.
The populations (mostly religious, themselves) replacing the collapsing countries, are probably looking at that collapse and very reasonably thinking, "Huh, let's not make the same mistakes they did. Ending the anti-family and anti-human policies is the obvious first step, and may even be all it would take." (Religion generally shields people from making those mistakes, by the way.)
In fact, atheism and globalism are in retreat. Kabul demonstrated beyond any doubt that the globalist Democrats and the rainbow flag they flew are disgraced, and far from "the adults in the room", utterly feckless. Keeping Bagram until the withdrawal was done, would have made it straightforward and orderly. If we'd maintained logistical and air support for the Afghan army, the Taliban wouldn't have had a chance. That's simple enough for pretty much anyone to see.
I suppose there is some reason to hope that you reconsider your positions here (the evidence you present is pretty thin), but it sounds like you're even older than I am.
I'm still curious where you get your news from. Where would that be?
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@maciamay1393 Did you know that the Muslims have so much trouble with science and reason because the "burning and torturing" was what the Rationalists (Mu'tazila) did to the devout? Look up "Minha" sometime. You have to get pretty far down the Google search results before you get to the reference to the historical event, though. Google is like that.
By the way, you could reasonably point out that the inquisition was primarily political in nature rather than strictly religious. They do tend to be, I have to admit.
I agree that communism is in decline. China's pretty much fascist these days. They're likely to try some invasions soon, though. For Australia's sake I hope they won't go as well as their invasion of Tibet. (Are you old enough to remember that? Just curious. I'm still a little surprised you see China as peaceful.)
Although, I expect America's strong enough to fend them off, especially with the help of Japan (which is sliding out from under its pacifist constitution), India, and people in Australia who have a clearer notion of China's expansionist ambitions.
So sit back and try not to get in the way, we're going to have our work cut out for us in the next ten years or so. You're welcome to help out as well, of course.
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"You find the proper words and you put them into phrases"
Wot?
Start with a thought, then start in on the bites it will take to get through that whale. Figure out if the whale is actually bigger than you thought, and chomp through the other parts you find in their turn. Not sure I've ever started with words, those come after the thoughts. Maybe that's my problem, who knows?
If you're analyzing something, read through it. Read other things that suggest themselves, on the same topic. Think about it all. Come to some interesting conclusion, then re-read the supporting material (you can skim a little this time) to pick out supporting evidence and check to see if your conclusion was actually right. Group the supporting evidence into similar clusters. If something fits into more than one cluster, you can use it to segue from one cluster to another for bonus points.
If you're trying to persuade, it might be a good idea to put the easiest to grasp (or easiest to stomach) ideas up front, if those are necessary to understand the subsequent ideas.
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"There are millions of slaves RIGHT NOW."
Yup. This is why "Juneteenth" needs to be a time when we remember how much more work we have to do to take a stand against modern-day slavers -- sex traffickers, from China to the US / Mexican border. We need to remember the villains of this story -- incompetent politicians like Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton, whose disastrous policies in Libya have led directly to the re-establishment of the slave trade there.
It needs to be a day we remember those heroes that helped free slaves in our own past -- Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, Ulysses S Grant, Harriet Tubman, Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson, and especially moral leaders like Reverend William Wilberforce, whose devotion to Christ moved him to start the great Abolition movement in the British Empire, which inspired the Abolitionists of the United States. A special nod needs to be given to Western Civilization -- the first civilization to end slavery, in all of human history.
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47:36 - The idea of human rights springing from humans as divinely touched, starts from David's respect for old king Saul as God's anointed. By the late middle ages these gradually extended to the aristocracy as well, Chivalry took hold, and by 1600s, these rights are extended to the nobility at large. (The assassination or other mistreatment of the Elector of the Palatinate could have taken one major causus belli out of the 30 Year's War, but somehow the only major figure of the time who suffered assassination was Wallenstein, a commoner.)
Radial egalitarianism took hold as well, founded on Judeo-Christian religious imagery -- "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" was a question introduced in the 14th century, in Europe -- but not the rest of the world.
So yeah, Pinker's perspective is severely truncated by a dogmatic refusal to allow any possibility that Christian thinking had any role in anything he considers good. This is bias, which can fairly be described as bigotry.
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"It's all corrupt, we should just start over"
I think that new universities (as well as new media companies) are essential to break the Left's monopoly on these institutions. That said, there are four strategies that the Left has used that we need to break:
1- Get activists onto platforms of influence (journalism, entertainment, academia) - Niall Ferguson observed this happening in universities
2- Extract funding for activism (blackmailing companies like Disney into donating to causes, convincing rich men's wives to spend their money on activists, funnel student loan money into Leftist bureaucracies, convince companies like PayPal to fine their users to fund Leftist censorship)
3- Get activists into positions where they control personnel appointments, and peoples' livelihoods (HR, licensing organizations)
4- Get activists into positions of discretionary power over legal, financial, and even physical forms of force (District Attorneys' offices, the IRS, police, the military
This is basically the strategic plan for the Long March through the Institutions. We need to fight back against each and every one of these points. We're still the majority and always will be, so we will win, we just have to stand up and DO IT.
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@thedalillama "These same people paid for generations who came before them"
The people who are having kids weren't paying for that too, you'd have a point. But we are, so you don't. Childlessness is a free ride, plain and simple. This sacrosanct "choice" of yours is a leech on the vitality of any society, that must be removed for that society's survival.
And we're not talking about "ever-growing" societies, we're talking about "quickly-shrinking" societies. If birthrates everywhere were like 1.95, you'd have a point. But they're like 1.3 in most countries, and in some places even less than 1, so you don't.
If we'd been starving since the 80's like the "population bomb" people said, you'd have a point. If we didn't have the capacity to build off-planet, you'd have a point. But they haven't been starving, and we have that capacity, so you don't.
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"We face a horizon of genuinely unpredictable political change"
Well, mostly. But then, so did anyone looking around at the decade following 1912, only moreso (War!) Or 1922 (Crash!) Or 1932 (More War!) Or 1942 (Boom, Boom!) Or 1952 (More booms?) Or 1962 (Bangs, more than booms) Maybe by 1972, things were leveling off, even if the uncertainty was new. The decade after 1982 had some surprises, with the Wall coming down. After 1992, there were signs that the World Trade Centers were a target and the Internet was going to be huge, though. After 2012, the rise of populism surprised everyone except the population at large. The rise of China has been advertising itself since they got MFN status, the decline of Europe has been the story of most of a century.
Tell me again, why is the newest near-identical release of the iPhone the herald of some revolution?
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@BlackCatNinja Sooooo many slogans, all nonsense.
- Homosexuality isn't about love, it is about sex. Nothing of value is lost in a loving relationship between two men or two women, when sex is not involved. By all means, love everyone, that's good and right. Do not have sex with everyone, that's depraved and wrong. In fact, it's depraved and wrong to have sex with anyone of the same sex. Love has nothing to do with this, and to claim that it does betrays a frankly mentally ill definition of love.
- With your discussion of "harder" and "easier" choices, you leave out that controlling your urges is in fact the harder choice.
People face choices all the time, where following one's urge is made illegal or otherwise discouraged.
Working to get the money to buy something is harder than giving in to the urge to steal it, and we properly punish people for stealing. This punishment makes their lives harder. Why do people still steal, then? They don't resist the urge to do so, for whatever reason.
After you've finished a meal from a drive-through in your car, most people resist any urge to throw the trash out the window, instead of finding a proper place to dispose of it. Should we take into account whether people have the urge to throw it out the window, when we punish people for littering? Why?
If you feel the urge to relieve yourself after the meal, it's harder to find proper facilities for that, than it is to just relieve yourself in your seat as you drive. Giving in to this urge is disgusting and abhorrent to any well-brought-up individual, so most people choose the harder option of abiding by proper sanitation standards. This is also one of many sufficient reasons to be heterosexual, by the way.
Being homosexual is a choice.
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@BlackCatNinja Who's to say? Anyone and everyone. It's inherent in the term "homosexual".
I am a human being who loves other people. Some of the people I love are male, some are female. This is common to the vast majority of people -- loving their fathers and mothers, loving their brothers and sisters, loving their sons and daughters. No one would have any rational basis to call me (or anyone else) "bisexual" because of that, because sex is not involved. Love and sex are not the same.
Homosexuality is not about love, it is about sex, hence the name. Confusing love and sex is dangerous, leading to exploitation and abuse, and the inability to tell the difference is a mental illness (probably psychopathy).
When there is no sex in a loving relationship, nothing of value is lost.
Sex should be involved in monogamous relationships between a man and a woman, because that's the best (indeed only) way to produce and raise children. Producing and raising children at a replacement rate is essential for society to function and sustain itself. You have to be so nihilistic (i.e., evil) as to believe that this is not a good thing, to advance any other worldview.
This is why heteronormativity is a feature of all successful civilizations, and why our own civilization will fail if we do not return to it.
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@ViroVV So how do you explain the fact that the American economy took off under Trump in a way it never did, under Obama? (Talk about incompetence leading to struggling and suffering.)
Trump likes people who like him. The "educated" in this country are educated to hate him irrationally, like they despise everyone ("uneducated") he represents.
Are you referring to his looking to New York (whose leaders said they didn't want the vaccine) to ask him, before he'd give them the vaccine? It's snarky, but that's as bad as it gets. If that's an indication of your bias, I can only imagine what trivialities you're hinting at, with the rest of your accusations.
Our military is getting the funding it needs, to rebuild itself after eight years of malign neglect under Obama. How is this not helping? We're revisiting our strategic commitments overseas, which Obama talked about but never really made any tough decisions on.
If you're looking for someone to blame for fomenting conflict in this country, Antifa takes the prize for that. If you're looking at anyone dividing Americans, Critical Race Theory ideologues are far and away the most divisive force out there -- explicitly so... and our Establishment is on its knees in front of each of those cults, just as fast as ever they can.
Do yourself a favor. Stop listening to CNN and the mainstream media, they're just feeding your Trump Derangement Syndrome. Find some independent-minded and fact-minded new journalists to follow. Saagar is a good start, but don't let Krystal's cuteness distract from the fact that she's absolutely naive when it comes to economics -- she's fighting the last Cold War, for the side that lost.
Anyway, best of luck to you. I hope you get the chance to quietly reflect on the 2017-2019, and come to the realization that those years really were better than 2008-2016.
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Eisenhower's Farewell Address should be remembered more for its warning about the Scientific-Technological Elite than anything else.
"Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."
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As far as I understand it, there are two ways to demonstrate CO2 drives global warming. The first is the (regular) Greenhouse Effect, which occurs because visible sunlight passes through the atmosphere to heat up the ground, making the ground emit infrared light. Some of this infrared light from Earth's surface is blocked from being re-emitted into space, by gasses such as CO2 ("greenhouse gases"). Now, this effect is extremely small; raising the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by human activity would raise the Earth's temperature by a fraction of a degree (on the order of hundredths of a degree, if I recall correctly.)
Why the panic, then? Well, there is a second theory floating around, based on computer climate models. This is called the Runaway Greenhouse Effect. This theory involves the calculation of a "tipping point" of greenhouse gasses after which the system goes haywire. These apocalyptic "tipping points" have been calculated and recalculated, much like the apocalypses predicted by various religious cults over the centuries. In 1990, the BBC produced a documentary narrated by the otherwise excellent James Burke (he's far better with history than with prediction) that predicted that by 2020 temperatures would have risen 15-25 degrees Fahrenheit.
For any of these "tipping points" to be accurate, the computer models have to be accurate. However, computer models have limitations -- you can't accurately model the weather, for example. Small changes in your initial conditions or small errors in your calculations or measurements, including round-off errors, lead to massive divergences in your solutions. Formally, this is called "chaos". Another thing that's impossible to model because of chaos, is convection cells. These are volumes of air that move around due to heating.
The computer models we are asked to trust quadrillion-dollar decisions to, have hundreds or thousands of convection cells in them. Again, it is mathematically impossible to accurately model even ONE convection cell, because of chaos. These models are supposed to do the impossible not once, but hundreds or thousands of times. This makes these models are categorically useless, for the predictions they are claiming to make.
We cannot model the weather; we cannot model climate. We cannot accurately model or predict the Runaway Greenhouse Effect. The 2030 "tipping point" is as nonsense as the idea that from 1990 to 2020 we would see a 15-25 degree increase in global temperatures. This is an irrational apocalyptic panic, exercising the same psychology as other apocalyptic panics of the past.
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"We've got to get a price point up front"
If you want a price point, you're asking for a commodity product. You're asking for something that has been made to exact, existing specifications. You will not get anything enhanced or expanded, and you will not get a whole lot of insight into the interior processes or incremental reviews.
If you want something new, something top-of-the-line, something that no one has ever done before, you're going to have to pay cost plus, because there is honestly no way to know what kind of issues are going to turn up in that prototype.
American defense doctrine is to have everything best-in-class, state of the art, bleeding edge technology, so that our soldiers won't get hurt while they're getting the job done. That is expensive, and you're unlikely to be a fan of how things look if that doctrine changes.
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Mary Sue doesn't have to work at anything. No hero's journey at all. (That's why Rey catches so much flak, by the way. Rey's powers are properly Hero's Journey powers, not Mary Sue powers.)
But this doesn't explain why the trope is gendered, or even why it's a trope in the first place.
Let's play with the trope a little bit and see what variants of it are more palatable to the parts of the Internet (sadly, aka Humanity) that do not accept Rey as a valid story element.
Instead of a special miraculous ability to (as a complete newb) out-swordfight a veteran swordsman with a clearly overwhelming advantage in weight, reach, and upper-body strength, let's make it a life-giving ability. Healing or something. A healing ability that she can do without any practice, no consultation with wisdom, etc. The complaints would subside, and no one would bat an eye.
Could we add, maybe, a tendency to get damselled on a semi-regular basis, particularly when using this miraculous ability? Sure. Maybe even show that she runs the risk of serious injury or death by using this ability (but she heroically does it anyway, because LOVE). Some people might call this "more balanced", but they'd honestly be missing the point.
And, what if in addition to not having to work for this miraculous ability, she doesn't even want it? The trope still holds. Bonus points if (in more modern stories) she complains that it's the only focus of her life and she wants something more than that.
Oh, extra super bonus points if this miraculous ability first manifested when she was a teen.
Now let's come back around to the idea that everyone loves Mary Sue for her miraculous abilities. Everyone makes a fuss over her for them. Her biggest problem is life is deciding what hunky guy is going to get the opportunity to make the biggest fuss. Does it still work with the trope? You bet.
But why oh why is it gendered? Is this somehow a valid exploration of an actual aspect of the human experience that women undergo and men do not?
(Let me know when the penny dropped for you.)
By the way, for powers like beating people up or otherwise imposing beneficial order on the external chaotic world, you really should have a Hero's Journey to accompany the development of those powers, because that's how the world *is*. Rey would have been a LOT more accepted if she had done so.
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"Show me a woman who's 5'3" and has an IQ of 130, and I'll show you a school board president. Show me a guy who's 6'2" with a full head of hair that has an IQ of 105, and I'll show you a senator ... you see the new Italian Prime Minister"
You mean Giorgia Miloni, who's average height at 5'4"? I guess that's REALLY good news for women, that we pay so much attention to height that a single inch is the difference between a mere school board president and the prime minister of the 3rd-largest economy in the EU.
Scott, you've bought into a remarkably intricate consensus worldview. Too bad it doesn't survive even the slightest contact with reality.
It reminds me of one of (5'9") Boris Johnson's last comments before being deposed as PM for being a party boy, about how it was (5'7"?) Vladimir Putin's "toxic masculinity" that was pushing him to conquer Crimea and other points west. Establishment-educated Johnson seems blissfully unaware that Crimea, the Baltics, and a chunk of Poland were originally conquered by the Russians under Catherine the Great (5'2").
To steel-man Scott's argument, the Democrats seem to have been talked into the idea that Gavin Newsom (6'3", with 80's-TV-Movie-Villain hair) is presidential material. However, this can be adequately explained by the idea that Democrats aren't nearly as smart as they tell themselves they are.
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Pat, you don't need wars to make money as a defense contractor. You want fear of war. In fact, if Putin fell tomorrow and Russia became best friends with everyone in their neighborhood, where do you think that would leave the defense contractors?
On the other hand, if suddenly he sued for peace and stayed in power, wouldn't every single country in the region still flock to the United States to get the latest and greatest defense systems?
Nah man, you don't want your customers dead. Dead people don't have any money.
You don't want them at war either, you want their economies humming along and their tax revenues piling up, so they can spend that tax money on those high-value (high margin!) defense systems.
You know what the margins on ammunition are? They're cr*p. Actual shooting war is a low-margin activity. War sucks, man.
And you really think defense contractors are better off when their customers' countries are rubble? Pat, you want to be paid in rubble?
It doesn't help when they borrow the money either. England and France borrowed the money for those world wars. For a while it was fun getting the English to give us all their military bases. Eventually they had to shut down the empire to pay us back.
What is the United States going to have to shut down, to pay off the national debt we're building up because of these wars (and our huge unsustainable domestic spending?)
And you're a smart guy, you probably know what happened when they tried to collect reparations from their enemies to pay off those debts. It got to the point that the United States just said, "to h*ll with all of you, we're just going to rebuild you and you're not going to fight anymore."
No joke Pat, war isn't all it's cracked up to be. Defense contractors need healthy and prosperous customers as much as anybody.
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There's a young aspect and an old aspect of toxic femininity, just like there's a young aspect and an old aspect of toxic masculinity (the tyrant and the bandit). What we're seeing now in the Nanny State is the old aspect of toxic femininity, the Devouring Mother. What we're seeing more in the current culture, not unknown but not well recognized, is the youthful version of toxic femininity -- the Spoiled Princess. Just as the two aspects of toxic masculinity are corruptions of constructive masculininty (the wise lawgiver and the warrior) the two aspects of toxic femininity are corruptions of motherhood -- nurturing motherhood, and the nesting mother-to-be.
If you were wondering why the new strain of feminism of is severely entitled (both materially and from a status point of view), obsessed with ejecting any threat from their environment, this is why.
If you're wondering why this is coming up nowadays, a promising place to start looking is research that indicates pregnant women prefer emasculated men. Pile on top of this the fact that the birth control pill basically mimics pregnancy and the percentage of the female population that is on "the pill", and you've got a credible answer right there to what is going on, and why.
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John Cleese, sort of: "What have the British ever done for us?"
Michael Palin, etc: "sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the British ever done for us?"
Blue: "Irresponsibly left their Empire"
Graham Chapman: "There's just no pleasing some people."
Monty Python's Life of Brian: Even more subversive, iconoclastic, and heretical to the current crop of self-righteous moralists, than it was when it was first filmed!
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@khar12d8 English signs are an inexact (but on the main, reliable) measure of whether people know English, or know someone who can help them navigate English signage as they picked up English (and benefited from what finite resources there were, to help them learn.) In a healthy English society where immigrants are being properly assimilated, everyone would be able to get by this way without any problems.
If there are areas where the signs aren't in English, on the other hand, that indicates that there are large masses of population who have not assimilated, may not even be interested in assimilating, and are being aided and abetted in their own alienation by shopkeepers (and politicians) who cater to it. It's divisive and unhealthy.
If you get into a situation where you have multiple generations who fail to learn English, you end up with a terrible problem where the younger generation is too Anglicized to fit in back in the Old Country (as Americans call countries of origin), but are nowhere near capable of successfully navigating English society.
These are problems that thoughtless pro-immigration cause, when they advocate for levels of immigration that are too high. They should be ashamed of themselves for not thinking through what they are proposing, and how they are trapping people they claim to want to "help".
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@lordlemond1350 I'm saying your outbursts are a little misplaced. Dead people tend not to have opinions on subjects they had no idea existed, when they were alive.
For another, the "slaughter" of some 98% of the Indians occurred because of livestock-based diseases, inadvertently spread far and wide by the livestock that Europeans brought on their exploration expeditions, rather than the Europeans themselves.
A lot of places and people have been "misnamed" throughout history. No one actually knows who the "Rus" were, they might have been invading Vikings from Sweden, but you'll find a lot of fiercely proud Russians. Germans call themselves "Deutsch", but don't really complain about other countries using a term for their land derived from the hostile Imperial Romans ("Germania"). Saxons / Danes / Britons / Romano-Celts and even a few Angles call themselves "English", and there really aren't many Bretons in the mix of English / Scots / Welsh / Picts / etc who call themselves "British".
Do you really not have anything more important in your life to spend your energy on? It's kind of fun to spread actual facts on the web (it's how Wikipedia was born, after all), but getting really angry about stuff that a) isn't really accurate, and b) wouldn't really matter if it was, seems kind of pointless.
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A certain amount of familiarity with stressful situations can be good for an artist, if their art is about exploring ways to resolve those situations.
As far as I can tell, Dostoevsky drew inspiration from a question: "Was it possible to develop a love so pure that you could carry on a love affair with two women at the same time?" The book that resulted was "The Idiot" (whose title fits at that level, I suppose.) According to the front material in my edition, Dostoevsky started the character as a reformed cad, but developed the idea into "What Would Jesus Do, 19th century Russia edition", which had some appeal to his readers as well as being a compelling reason for him to continue exploring various side issues.
People frequently notice that the narrative completely falls apart (changes pace, drops its attention to detail) not long after the two women meet... and simply can't get along with each other. So I guess the answer to his question was, "No". Once he arrived there, he lost the motivation to continue exploring.
That all is just a guess based on circumstantial evidence, of course, but it seems worth considering.
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Er, if productivity skyrockets, the value of labor skyrockets.
The interesting thing about AI, is it is extremely rewarding to anyone with the patience to puzzle out when it's telling the truth -- or when it has handed you a good quality software product.
AI will tear down barriers to entry in a host of fields. Picture swordsmen who trained for a lifetime, getting displaced by musketeers who trained for a couple of months.
What the world needs now, is to refocus on family. Normalize (valorize!) motherhood, and we'll solve labor problems, eating problems, mental health problems, and a lot of other problems that have mysteriously cropped up in the last generation o two.
Motherhood is most likely to be supported if we get rid of the income tax, because that gets rid of the incentive for governments to push women into the workforce.
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I suspect that the biggest shift in store for these Tech Giants will come when we get to the point that the optimal forms are discovered, based on the underlying physics (or psychology) of their core products. There is some evidence to suggest we are already there -- the fact that Google has been doing search and ads for over 20 years now, and that applecart hasn't been upset by anyone else.
Airframes arrived at this point a century ago. In my aircraft design course, the industry veteran brought in to teach the class referred to "the way God intended the airplane to look" -- two swept-back wings with fuel tanks inside, turbine engines on pylons below the wings, swept-up tail with control surfaces, landing gear, easy-to-manufacture cylindrical fuselage, etc. We've had advances in materials of course, but despite brilliant people working on innovation, no more optimal form has been brought to scale.
It could be that these tech giants have just stumbled upon a form that is close to optimal, which is why they dominate.
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@DesertsofHibernia He has people he disagrees with on his program.... it would be very boring and uninformative if he didn't, to be honest. Also, Rubin doesn't tend to have Leftists on because they refuse his invitations. That isn't exactly his fault. I also have serious doubts that an intelligent, well-informed Leftist would be overcome in a debate with Dave. I just can't see that happening.
Do you have any evidence for "Koch brothers funding"? Koch seems to be a bogeyman on the level of Soros. I'm not convinced that either of them are as influential as their detractors would have us believe.
The long-form interviews I have found on the web (Rogan, Rubin, etc) are typically not edited (that's kind of the point.) If Leftists have fallen prey to unscrupulous editors on the Right, there are well-documented examples of the opposite situation as well.
Generally, if a government on the Right "rounds up and executes people suspected of being Leftists" we call that a fascist government. Although, fascist bodycounts (even in the most famous cases) are an order of magnitude lower than governments who call themselves Socialist, so I'm not sure that critique sticks to Fascists better than Socialists.
This was kind of a rabbit hole, and hasn't really persuaded me at all. I've seen most of the interviews you refer to so disparagingly, and I think you're being terribly uncharitable.
I still recommend Dave as someone to watch, if you like uncensored, open conversations.
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@SortaJunpei Tyson and Nye were targeted specifically because they were influential among children, to push The Narrative(TM) that the Establishment wants us to believe.
There's no way that any of that cr*p would be believed by anyone, otherwise. This theory that they have, that everyone believes what they believe because they're programmed to by society, is just flat wrong.
Tyson, Nye, and all the rest are just beclowning themselves pushing this nonsense. Companies like Bud Lite, Target, and Disney are destroying themselves.
Reality is what it has always been, and will always be, because people notice what makes sense based on it. All these depraved, delusional people are doing is convincing people who used to think "you do you" was workable, that we really do have to have rules and boundaries like we always have.
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@petercullen1624 LOL, you can't come out and say it.
Say how many actual Canadian voters voted for Trudeau -- say how many votes he actually got. I'll give you a hint: It's less than one-tenth the population of Bakersfield, California. You're probably ignorant of Bakersfield, California, which is like being ignorant of Canadian politics (fixable by a quick duckduckgo search). Or maybe you do know about Bakersfield, California, which makes it absolutely hilarious. =)
The only thing keeping all of Canada from being unequivocally the world's laughingstock right now, is the danger that Trudeau represents. Canada is like the mother of a toddler dribbling the contents of his full diaper everywhere, who happened to get his little hands on an Uzi. How you let this happen is a comedy of errors far, far beyond parody.
Trudeau will go down in history as a lightweight so far out of his depth that he hit the nuke button as he ran away from his constituents.
Depending on how this plays out, his supporters will be remembered (at best) as befuddled naifs, or at worst enablers of a regime straight out of the darkest recesses of 20th century totalitarianism.
Why would you want to be associated with any of that? You already know who the good guys are going to be in this one. Why don't you join us? There's still time. =)
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No one learns history anymore. The reason the Rules Based World Order was founded, is to keep industrial powers from setting up "imperial trade siloes" (colonies for markets and raw materials who could only trade with the Imperial core).
These siloes needed navies to defend them, those navies came into conflict, and the winners ruled the world, as a 19th century gentleman named Alfred Thayer Mahan very influentially pointed out.
To avoid such wars, this was the deal -- no matter what country you were in, if you had dollars (which you could get by producing things and selling them to the US consumer market, the only intact market in 1945) you could buy raw materials or finished goods from any other country on Earth.
This was the original reason the much-maligned WTO exists, to make sure that no one was so protectionist that others could not buy from them or sell to them.
A side effect of this, once Cold War wound down (and communist autarky was abolished), was that companies could pursue "favorable labor-cost profiles" (i.e., exploit poor countries for labor) everywhere in the world, scr**ing over American workers every step of the way. "Continuing education" was supposed to keep our workers productive and ahead.
What we have found, is that education can only get you so far -- not everyone can learn code (though AI might democratize that a bit) -- but we had valorized the university degree so much that we have a class divide over diplomas.
People with those degrees, even if their degree did not in fact make them more productive (bachelor's degree barristas proliferated), expected big paychecks and frequently invented parasitic jobs to extract them -- HR departments and university administrators being two of the most egregious types.
This divide is reflected in our political parties today.
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Justin Woodall Seriously, I think it's hard to exaggerate how a combination of tightening the labor market (through immigration controls) and increasing job creation can benefit Americans who work for a living. Open Borders really is a Koch brothers proposal, as early Bernie would say.
Working people who support Trump for that are basing their decision on something real, tangible, beneficial, and personal. The idea that Trump will do that for them again once COVID blows over, is not a false hope.
I think we're all here to some extent because Obama's policies (not to mention legacy GOP policies) only benefited the 10%ers, the Ivy League Degree-holding class. (Gotta respect Bernie for realizing there was a problem, even if his solutions aren't all that effective.) For my own part, I think that Trump's policies are vastly more inclusive than that, without being totalitarian ("for all" policies that put government -- aka Ivy League bureaucrats -- in charge of large sectors of the economy.)
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"British are looking across the Atlantic and thinking, I'd like a little bit of that"
"And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old."
Depends on which part of the Empire, eh?
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Also a common motivation for Defense workers, is Lockheed Martin's "We never forget who we're working for" internal campaign, showing American soldiers using Lockheed equipment.
The desired impression being, workers are morally justified by the fact that their country's soldiers will be safer / more effective because of the work that they are doing. This is particularly relevant when many of these workers have family or friends in the military, and/or are retired military themselves.
Defense contractors do not look for people who are only motivated by money. If in-group preference for their country's soldiers generally is not present, (such as, in Arthur Miller's All My Sons ) then low-quality work could be justified, hurting the company's reputation. If patriotism is lacking, then being paid to provide work for other countries (in violation of ITAR or other laws), or even espionage, is a risk.
There is a very deep moral conversation to be had, on this subject. If you could find a retired defense contractor, veteran, and/or former Whitehall official willing to discuss what they can, it might make for an interesting show.
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@kingsquid Are you familiar with Douglas Adams? The Anti-Human position (including all the cheering for itself) is something like this.
“If," ["the management consultant"] said tersely, “we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy. . .”
“Fiscal policy!" whooped Ford Prefect. “Fiscal policy!"
The management consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could have copied.
“Fiscal policy. . .” he repeated, “that is what I said.”
“How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know.”
“If you would allow me to continue.. .”
Ford nodded dejectedly.
“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
“But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut."
Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances."
The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.”
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@kingsquid The problem is, Anti-Human policies (underpinned by nonsensical computer models) are spiking our ability to actually achieve spacefaring technology.
The ability to settle freespace is within our grasp, *this generation*. We already mine and process materials in extremely difficult conditions. Zero gravity / zero pressure is not going to be an insurmountable obstacle. Once the factories are rolling, we'll have more production that we know what to do with.
The energy necessary to get one human being into orbit is equivalent to the amount of energy necessary to power a single American household for a year. When Musk gets his rockets to the point that that energy cost drives the price of a ticket (as it does for our airlines), it will be as affordable as a ticket to the New World was, in the 19th century.
Twelve launch sites along the equator, each with twelve launch pads so the site can launch twelve rockets an hour, twelve hours a day, six days a week / 300 days a year, each seating 50 people, is enough to counter the annual human "surplus population" from ten years ago. This math has only gotten easier, as population growth slows.
What could stop all this in its tracks? An authoritarian bureaucratic push for "green" technology, backed by Anti-Human philosophy.
Mark my words -- if we stay with the Anti-Human philosophy, instead of a thriving humanity, we will see Western cultures commit suicide, authoritarian cultures like China using state violence to cull their populations, and 3rd-world countries suffering Rwanda-like genocides and civil wars.
Oh wait, we see all that already.
And if you're an Anti-Human, you're not going to lift a finger to stop any of this, because some shadowy global apocalypse is the "bigger threat".
No. You're proposing a hopeless dystopia.
No thank you.
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You seem to be well-informed about this period of history, so I'll ask you what you think of the following thesis:
America is not in fact seeing the pace of change accelerate in recent decades. Taking the time period between the Apollo 11 moon landings and today (2023 at this writing), and comparing it to the same length of time following the 1869 completion of the Trans-Continental Railroad, there was VASTLY more rapid and consequential change in the earlier period.
More inventions -- The light bulb, radio, telephones, the internal combustion engine, the automobile, the airplane, the camera, the phonograph, movies, Bessemer steel. Against... the cell phone and Internet?
More political events -- the collapse of the centuries-old Chinese, Spanish, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, and the rise and fall of the Second Reich. Against... the fall of the Soviet Union?
More dramatic way-of-life changes, with mass urbanization then the start of suburbanization. Against... a little more suburbanization?
Am I being unfair to the current day, or is there simply too much we've all forgotten?
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"If you're a master of numbers, there's almost nothing that is beyond your grasp" Only, ultimate mastery of numbers is not possible. Even augmented by computers, the complete reduction of everything the numerical calculation is not possible. To believe otherwise is hubris.
Two classes of problem spring to mind, one of which you mention - the quantum realm. Uncertainty teaches us that there is a scale at which mechanistic calculations give way to probabilistic calculation. This is related to the mystery of human consciousness, by the way, as our brains operate at this scale.
Another class of insoluble problem (though more may remain) is chaos: when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not determine the approximate future. Any small error in initial conditions, input measurements, or tertiary calculation, will lead to a prediction that can radically diverge from reality. Chaotic pendulums, three-body celestial dynamics, and the behavior of convection cells fall into this category.
(Michael Knowles, of all people gave a good talk on this subject a little while back, with the incendiary title "I'm fine with being called anti-science". I recommend it.)
The most critical of these chaotic (and therefore bunk) prediction models these days, are our Climate models. They are built on hundreds (sometimes, thousands) of convection cells. If these will accurately predict the future, it can only be by accident. This fact bears repeating, until it gets greater play in our cultural conversation.
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This hymn was written in 1845 -- Malice is off by 50-70 years.
1 Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
2 Then to side with truth is noble,
When we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit,
And 'tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses
While the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue
Of the faith they had denied.
3 By the light of burning martyrs,
Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever
With the cross that turns not back;
New occasions teach new duties,
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward,
Who would keep abreast of truth.
4 Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above His own.
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There is a distinction between climate and weather, fair enough. But there is a critical similarity between climate MODELS and weather MODELS. As it turns out, the same issue that makes it impossible to predict the weather long-term, also makes it impossible to predict the climate long-term.
You may have heard of the "butterfly effect". That applies to both types of model.
Weather models rely on computers calculating and predicting the behavior of fluids within convection cells. This is impossible, because the behavior of those convection cells is (formally speaking) chaotic. It is sensitive to small changes in initial conditions, making long-term prediction utterly impossible without infinitely precise variables, and infinitely precise and accurate measurements to feed it. Not only that, both the boundary values and the interior of these convection cells contain every tree, leaf, building, power line, flag, car, rock, bird, plane, insect, and animal under the open sky. Determining where each of these items may be and where they may be going, is not possible over a single second, much less over days, years, or centuries.
Climate models are ALSO built on convection cells -- hundreds or thousands of them, depending on the model. This means that they have inherited all the problems, inaccuracies, and unreliability of weather models. Further, any hypotheses that the modelers make as to how sensitive the model may be to any given element in the model (CO2, water vapor, etc) is UNTESTABLE by these models, because their predictions are by nature inaccurate.
Climate change isn't a hoax, for what that's worth. Every single climate change PREDICTION, on the other hand, IS -- advocates are wildly overstating the applicability of their approach, to the salient problem.
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Apparently House Resolution 1011 (117th Congress, 2D Session) "Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the 51 signatories of the letter who publicly and falsely decried Hunter Biden’s laptop to be Russian disinformation should be barred from holding any level of security clearances indefinitely". This is not to be confused with any other House Resolution 1011.
It didn't make it past "introduced", and I suspect the sponsors made some trouble for themselves doing it.
"Mr. GAETZ (for himself, Mr. MASSIE , Mrs. GREENE of Georgia, Mr. GOSAR, Mr. BIGGS, Mr. BISHOP of North Carolina, and Mr. GOHMERT ) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Oversight and Reform."
According to that resolution, the signatories include "Jim Clapper, Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, Thomas Finger, Rick Ledgett, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, Mike Vickers, Doug Wise, Nick Rasmussen, Russ Travers, Andy Liepman, John Moseman, Larry Pfeiffer, Jeremy Bash, Rodney Snyder, Glenn Gerstell, David B. Buckley, Nada Bakos, Patty Brandmaier, James B. Bruce, David Cariens, Janice Cariens, Paul Kolbe, Peter Corsell, Brett Davis, Roger Zane George, Steven L. Hall, Kent Harington, Don Hepburn, Timothy D. Kilbourn, Ron Marks, Jonna Hiestand Mendez, Emile Nakhleh, Gerald A. O’Shea, David Priess, Pam Purcilly, Marc Polymeropoulos, Chris Savos, Nick Shapiro, John Sipher, Stephen Slick, Cynthia Strand, Greg Tarbell, David Terry, Greg Treverton, John Tullius, David A. Vanell, Winston Wiley, and Kristin Wood."
All of this is public domain on Congress' official gov website.
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Roast tri-tip. Preheat oven to 450, coat meat with oil (that will survive that temperature) and your preferred spice mix. Put the roast in, set the timer for 15 minutes (aluminum pan) or 20 minutes (glass dish), when the timer goes off turn the heat down to 200. After 2 hours it's medium-rare, after 8 hours it's well done, and it's always very tender.
Best thing, you can basically fix all the sides without worrying about the meat at all except the time it takes to take it out and carve it.
Yeah, it's cheating a little bit because the oil helps brown the meat and that affects the flavor, but I'm pretty sure having to diffuse through a layer of oil does hold moisture in a little better. That, and with a roast you don't have crossgrain cuts that let the muscle cells just dump the water they have in them. Cooking for hours at 200 degrees is enough to break down the connective tissue, and the oil keeps it from drying out.
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