Crowstep
1d ago
Is there a secret to being able to actually understand what's going on in those books?
I'm as big a wordcel as you would expect someone who hangs out on this forum to be, but I cannot for the life of me finish Master and Commander. It feels like I'm a teenager being forced to read Shakespeare and not understanding the Early Modern English.
Do I need to persevere until my brain just gets it? Get ChatGPT to summarise the chapters for me? Re-read every sentence? Is there any trick beyond 'be less dumb'?
Crowstep
1d ago
Crowstep
5d ago
Another similar businessman, Elon Musk just tried his hand in politics obviously without the guiding hand of such a woman. Look how that turned out for him
Elon Musk married to a socially competent woman who he actually listens to would be a powerful thing.
Instead he has a weird harem and spends too much time on twitter.
Crowstep
5d ago
Long term I think more expensive food/meat is unlikely. We reached peak farmland in the late 90s. Since then we've been growing more food on less land. Future technologies aren't going to make food more expensive to produce, obviously, but AI and greater use of GMOs can definitely make it less expensive. And the world's population is likely to peak in the 2050s, with declines in the developed world way before then.
Of course, the birth rate and population collapse could also crash the global economy, making us much poorer overall. But I still suspect that food is something that will stay cheap or get cheaper.
Crowstep
6d ago
I mean, at least one, on this forum.
As one of the HBDers that you deride, my position is that HBD is a thing that we should take into account when looking at the world. It's not the only thing, but it is one of the main things. Pretending that all ethnic groups are identical blank slates is wrong and leads to bad outcomes.
But I've yet to see an HBDer in the wild who ignores everything else. He's a strawman for people like you who aren't willing to say 'all races and ethnic groups have identical IQ' but still force everyone to debate as if that were the case.
You've done away with any entitlement noncitizen babies have to citizenship, but in the process also removed any entitlement citizen babies have to citizenship.
No I haven't.
Would you agree that if the state is to give out citizenship on exclusively a rational basis.
I reject the idea that states could or should give out citizenship to reward prosocial behaviour, as least as the primary mechanism. It's not practical. Every nation has its indigenous underclass, and they need to have citizenship somewhere.
I think that the citizen body should reflect the nation (typically, an ethnic group that shares a landmass, although there are of course immigrant nations like those in the Americas which have to use fuzzier definitions). My ideal citizenship laws would be those practiced by the Gulf states, where citizenship can only be inherited from citizen parents and never given out to the children of non-citizens. Dual nationality isn't allowed. Failing that, simply getting rid of birth right citizenship would be good.
I'm not suggesting anything radical. I'm suggesting that the countries of the Americas abandon a system which produces an obvious moral hazard and do what the rest of the world does.
As far as I can tell, the real core of this story is that children that were found orphaned in Russian-captured territory were put in the Russian orphanage system, which seems like a normal thing to do.
Russia could have returned them to Ukraine. Russia is happy to do extensive prisoner swaps, so why not allow innocent children to go?
Because the regime does not believe that is What Russia Should Do with Ukraine.
Crowstep
7d ago
Depends how you're defining poor performance. Poor relative to other European or East Asian countries, sure. Poor compared to subsaharan Africa? Not really. The average GDP per capita south of the Sahara is $1500. Ukraine is $5000
Crowstep
7d ago
John McWhorter suggested that we conjugate verbs differently depending on whether we're using the singular they or the plural they. They (Alice and Bob) go, they (Alice) goes. It's a good suggestion, doubt it'll catch on though.
Incidentally, yesterday I encountered the most annoying use of the singular they I've ever seen in real life. My colleague is going on maternity leave and I'm covering some work for her. On my annual review, my boss referred to this colleague as 'they'. As in 'Crowstep will cover his colleague's work, while they are on maternity leave'.
I sort of get it, in that 'colleague' is a gender neutral term. But this person has a name, which everyone reading this document knows, and she's going on maternity leave for God's sake!
Crowstep
7d ago
Hence the joke about battle writing in women’s fantasy novels vs. men’s fantasy novels.
I'm curious, what's the joke?
Crowstep
7d ago
I planned to argue that assigning people special hereditary rights is fundamentally incompatible with democratic civilization and the notion that "all men are created equal"
Surely then you would need to assign first world citizenship to the entire planet? Issuing citizenship by blood is hereditary, but issuing citizenship by residence is de facto hereditary, because most of the world can't have children in first world countries, because they can't get to first world countries, because they're not citizens.
Crowstep
7d ago
That's not why Tina Brown is criticising him though, according to Wikipedia she did exactly the same thing. She had an affair with a married man 25 years her senior. Ironically if Bezos had married a younger woman Brown might not have written the blog post, because her readers could criticise her for hypocrisy.
This looks like class hatred to me. Lauren Sanchez looks tacky and low class, with her big fake tits and duck lips. Tina Brown can't criticise her for that, so instead she insists that her sneering is on behalf of womankind, for feminism.
Crowstep
7d ago
Anyone else ever catch the eye of their heroes?
I'm half-convinced that link 5 on this article by Scott is based on this comment by me. Admittedly, they are three months apart, but I'd like it to be true. It would also prove that Scott lurks here.
Crowstep
7d ago
In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
Steve Sailer's first law of female journalism strikes again.
Crowstep
8d ago
90% coincide with what makes men lust after me
I'd say it's more like 60-70%. There's definitely a percentage of women's fashion that is just signalling taste/wealth to other women. Septum rings and baggy mom jeans aren't sexy but they've still had their fashionable moment.
Crowstep
8d ago
As a newly married man, my experience has definitely been that having a wife makes life easier. Pooling our social lives means that she picks up maybe 70% of the organising seeing friends, she organises most of the house stuff, she helps me draft tactful messages with her womanly social skills. Plus even if I'm working from home I'm guaranteed to spend at least some time socialising every day. 12/10 would wife again.
Crowstep
10d ago
Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there
I'd assume it's a selection effect. Think Amy Chua the Tiger Mother marrying a Jewish law school professor. Assortive mating is being driven by higher education and people moving to cities. Cities and colleges are both more racially diverse than towns/neighbourhoods.
Crowstep
10d ago
Not exactly. The idea of 'parents distributing citizenship' is an odd way to frame it. States issue citizenship. I reject the idea that any non-citizen is entitled to citizenship at all. In my ideal world, children could only inherit citizenship from their parents and nobody could have dual citizenship.
Whether you frame it as states rewarding criminals by giving their children citizenship, or as states rewarding the children of criminals (thereby incentivising crime) is immaterial. The key issue is that we have a thing we want to reduce (illegal immigration) and instead of disincentivising it, states provide massive incentives for it.
Crowstep
10d ago
I'm not arguing that birthright citizenship doesn't exist. It obviously does and these children legally are entitled to it. I'm saying that they shouldn't be.
And even if having a citizen child had no benefit for the parents (clearly false, having a citizen child makes it easier for illegal immigrants to stay), that doesn't make it any less of a prize. Parents obviously do things that are good for their children. And a system that incentivises parents to commit crimes by rewarding their children is a bad one.
Crowstep
10d ago
Framing citizenship as a "reward" is completely nonsensical
It doesn't matter how anyone on the internet frames it. Illegal immigrants (quite rationally) do treat first world citizenship as a prize and lie and cheat their way to getting it. They do it for the same reason young third world men risk their lives coming across the sea on rubber dinghies and why rich foreigners quite literally buy it.
Crowstep
10d ago
this seems potentially pretty society altering
Birth right citizenship is a bizarre American (meaning the Americas) custom. Why on earth would you reward illegal immigrants by making their children citizens? It's a planet-sized moral hazard. Just because you benefitted from it doesn't mean it's good. Crimes should have negative consequences, not positive ones.
Crowstep
11d ago
That doesn't explain why its female dominated now though. Medicine and law used to be male dominated. Now women make up a majority of new doctors and lawyers. These things can and do change.
A better explanation is that nursing, a caring profession, is majority female because all caring professions are majority-female, because women enjoy caring (for obvious biological reasons relating to maternity).
Crowstep
12d ago
because it pays very well
This study suggests its appeal lies in it being a caring profession. This one too. I don't know how things are in every country but in the UK, nursing doesn't really pay well. The average nursing wage is only slightly above the average wage for the country as a whole. Also, we see in other jobs that higher salaries attract more men than women, relative to the pleasantness of the job. High salaries should make nursing more male, not more female.
and is female gendered
That's tautological, surely? I'm asking why is it female gendered.
Crowstep
12d ago
I always found it strange for activists to complain about emotional labour (rather than simply describing it neutrally). I mean sure, most emotional-labour heavy jobs are predominantly female, but that's because those are the jobs women want. A woman doesn't become a nurse because she likes changing bedpans, she becomes a nurse because she likes caring for people. The emotional labour is the main appeal of the job.
How ironic that taking this belief to its logical conclusion with the Boriswave will probably be the thing that kills off the party entirely.
Although I'm still pretty skeptical that it was clearheaded pragmatism that made the party govern left and talk right on immigration. David Cameron could have reduced non-EU immigration to literally zero and still have hundreds of thousands of EU workers coming in every year to flood the labour market. Instead he decided that not only did we need Polish plumbers, we also apparently needed inbred Pakistanis and violent Africans. He could have reduced the worst categories of immigration and all that would have happened was a reduced welfare and policing bill. But he didn't, because he found doing so distasteful.
Mike Jones' piece in the Critic is more convincing to me. The (parliamentary) party never wanted or intended to reduce immigration. They are primarily elites who want to impress other elites. They don't actually believe that massive third world immigration is damaging to the country.
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