4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
Wouldn't doing it in this order get in the way of getting any caramelization/Maillard reaction in the vegetables, which you'd generally want to offset the bitter flavours?
I have made gumbo fairly successfully several times by following this guy's recipe. Getting the right kind of coarse and dense sausage is probably difficult in Japan, but there should be good chicken stock?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
Right, I did notice Arabs doing this in English, but that doesn't do anything to reduce the feeling of wrongness about the English use to me.
I could imagine the reason they do it is a combination of mistranslation (Arabic definite articles distribute over all attributes/modifiers, so "Saudian" Arabia is literally "the Arabia the Saudian"; hence no distinction is made between attributives ("Saudian (...)") and nominalizations ("the Saudian")) and calque (as they famously like referring to things and people by nisbah/belonging epithets, like al-Baghdadi/"the Baghdadian").
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
As an aside, I am peeved by people referring to Saudi Arabia as "Saudi", which is a pseudo-Arabic attributive adjective analogous to a more native "Saudian" (e.g. belonging to the House of Saud, its ruling dynasty). This is as if you chose to refer to the USA as "United", or the USSR as "Soviet" - "Nazi Germany even managed to get America and Soviet to join forces".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
I only said "somewhere in the class", and aren't trolley problems supposed to isolate moral intuitions by way of hyperbole anyway? Putting it differently, what level of sacrifice do you think it is okay to demand from one person to save another from a major financial onus that they knowingly exposed themselves to the risk of? Losing a limb? Taking a strong emetic? Getting punched in the gut? Surely an abortion can at least be somewhere between the latter two in terms of risk/cost.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
I don't think these particular numbers really need to show much other than that the US Republican platform, as well as Trump's aesthetics, are fairly unpalatable to most German voters. 74% of AfD voters and 48% of BSW voters saying Trump here might just as well that these people have gotten the universal culture war toxoplasma and are saying Trump for no other reason than that it maximises aggravation to their outgroup (which in turn has caught invasive TDS through the internet). If presented with two policy programmes slightly adapted to the local context and asked to choose one without linking it to the people or country, I would expect many more AfD voters to go for the "Kamala" option, simply because they are unlikely to take particularly well to the pro-business (the canonical anti-tax/regulation party is actually the FDP, and it earns them ~5% sheepish finance bro votes and lots of ridicule) and the guns'n'Jesus part.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
It's not like the case for nuclear is so cut-and-dry that men being much more in favour can just be interpreted as evidence for "men more reasonable, women more crazy" without justification. There are complex arguments for and against that ultimately reduce to a lot of boring number crunching; since it's hardly ever the case that large swathes of the population have crunched the numbers, consider the possibility that men like nuclear more and women like it less due to some evopsych coincidence.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
Your mental image is on point. I see you are indeed familiar with the lay of the land.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
The fundamental conundrum is that
-
the father can't unilaterally physically abort the child even before it attains sentience, let alone later - abortion requires the woman to undergo a particular medical procedure, which is certainly cumbersome and not entirely safe;
-
child support is framed as being for the sake of the child, not the mother.
You are compelled to pay up because you caused the birth of a human with rights; you don't get the right to prevent the birth after conception because that would amount to compelling a human with rights to put themselves at risk. In the trolley problem space, this is somewhere in the "fat man on bridge" class - you set a trolley (reproductive process) in motion that will eventually run over (leave in need of support) a human tied to the tracks (the child), which could be stopped by pushing a fat man (the woman) onto the tracks (abortion). The fat man decides not to jump, the human gets run over, and now you want to be absolved of responsibility because the fat man could have chosen to jump.
Sausage curry with cheese omelette at a highly-rated lunch café near the Hirayu Onsen bus terminal. The cheese (of which there was a lot) was disturbingly flavourless, the salad on the side made me wonder how you can even grow tomatoes to be so pale in a place where you are constantly fighting off sunstroke, and the curry I can only describe as what I'd expect to happen if you took packaged curry base and kept it simmering with no added vegetables for a day while periodically adding water. To add further injury to injury, their coffee was doing the "no flavour apart from bitterness" thing that I am told some salarymen like because they want their coffee break to be a microcosm of their life. (That final misfortune befell me repeatedly as I was trying to figure out what shops would not do that, but on their own I don't count those events as meals.)
(I have no beef with Japanese curry in principle, and in fact had a great pork kakuni one at a hipster shop in Yoyogi later on.)
All in all, the trip was an overwhelming success in terms of food; the curry encounter would have amounted to an everyday gastro dud over here. If you were hoping for a proper tale of culinary gore, I did pass through China for a few days on the way back...
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
At the risk of linking this mind-killing topic to another one that turned out to be mind-killing even relative to the normal toxic sludge nature of what we discuss here, I remember hearing a very similar line of argument for why Ukraine could not have been behind the Nord Stream bombing. Yet, when mainstream papers all over countries like Germany ran articles asserting that shockingly it was in fact the Ukrainians, the needle of public opinion regarding support for Ukraine in Germany and other Western countries barely twitched.
Regardless of whether you believe the it-was-UA theory, this should tell you that we overestimate the likelihood that people would turn on an important tribal ally for a moral transgression, even if that transgression harms said people. Just like with NS, in the hypothetical case that Israel did it, there will never be a situation where a leader will stand before a camera and swear that they ordered the attack (except in situations where it is too late for UA/IL anyway). For any evidence short of that, those who support them will surely find a way to continue believing a cocktail of "our allies wouldn't do that, their enemies are known to make things up, it wouldn't make sense for them because if it came out they would lose the support of people like me" that allows the supporter to treat the allegation as evidence for nothing except for the deviousness of the enemy's slanderous schemes.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
I recently went to Japan (at long last) and decided to give a conveyor-belt chain place (I think it was Hama Sushi?) a try. It was shockingly mediocre - the best things I could say about it is that the automation was cute, the food was obscenely cheap and Japan being Japan I did not need to tremble in expectation of certain food poisoning. In terms of flavour, you can do much better for not too much money in any medium-sized Western city if you look hard enough. In the end this was the second worst meal of the whole trip.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
Apart from the texture comment in the sibling post, raw fish tastes different from cooked fish. Personally, I really like raw (and smoked) salmon and tuna, but find cooked versions to range from merely okay to bad (tasteless, tough, dry). (Finnish salmon soup is perhaps an exception, but even there, for it to be good you need to poach the fish very carefully so it just barely cooks.)
The soy sauce you dip the sashimi in is basically MSG.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
You have to specify which Europeans, but having been all over Northern Europe for the past twosomething years after a long stint in the US, this really does not align with my impressions. Sure, the Germans (and to a lesser degree everyone else) have a contingent that has mentally spiralled into climate doomsdayism, but those are still way outnumbered by tribalism doomers in the US (just look at this forum!) and on average I just see more random people having more friends, hanging out with them more, and more of the sort of existential slack that makes people take 2-month vacations, backpack or go back to university for some wacky self-actualisation degree at age 50, while typical Americans are desperately hustling to keep/advance their social standing, make rent and fill their array of anxiolytic prescriptions.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
This mindset seems like it could be labelled "cargo cult winning". You see someone beating your team at a ball game (elections/popularity/institutional control) and being obnoxious about it, hollering and making deliberately bad low-effort shots (that still hit) and singing little childish songs about how you are a loser (dragging institutions and values that you appreciate through the mud). You conclude that if you just do all the same obnoxious and self-handicapping moves that the opponent does and that seem to make them feel inordinately pleased, you too can win.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
With the anti-libertarian hat on, the cabin scenario doesn't sound like anything as collectivist as "obligations" to me, but like a trade: you pay your taxes, I don't show up at your cabin to do something about the lack of animal protein in my diet (and passively/actively support a system that will stop others with more hunger for protein than me from organising to do so, reporting them to the authorities rather than cheering them on). Playing with metaphors aside, even, it always struck me as very self-serving how libertarians question every piece of conventional wisdom about society and morality except the one that there is an objective, non-socially-constructed notion of "property" or "someone's" money. No, you see, the right to levy tariffs and taxes is just an instance of theft that humans have gaslit you into accepting; the right to not have me use a thing that you consider yours, though, is part of the moral fabric of the universe.
It is at least interesting to me that many of the same folks that have very strong opinions on what the very wealthy (most consistently defined as "wealthier than the speaker") owe to the rest of us also seem to think that everyone other than the very wealthy owe basically nothing to each other. You know, like not initiating physical violence.
Leaving aside the circumstance that even the pro-police claims here only seem to assert that the person who was shot would counterfactually have initiated violence if she hadn't been shot, I really think that police are a special case here. What do we get from them in return for all the money, status and authority we pay them, if not some degree of surrendering the right to avoid danger and violence that we accord to normal people? If the present police force aren't willing to take a deal that looks like "you get a salary, uniform and the right to order your fellow men around, but in return you have to accept the risk of taking the occasional pot of boiling water if the person throwing it hasn't been accused of a crime yet", maybe they should be laid off and replaced with people who are. I have few doubts that after an initial stage of kvetching we would find plenty of takers, considering how even the US military (<2x the active duty personnel relative to active LEOs, ~5x the annual deaths?) has little trouble finding recruits.
With that being said, if buildings start burning, I will, as she put it, rebuke her in the name of Jesus. I wonder if black people ever think "If I act weirdly and get killed by police here, hundreds of people could lose their livelihoods dozens could die in the consequent rioting."? Or do they only think about their own personal peril? Well, she's obviously mentally ill, but she still shouldn't have thrown the pot for the sake of all of us. Of course the cops should have also just turned off the burner and handled the pot themselves if they were going to immediately be so afraid of it after she grabbed it.
Surely this (tortured, in my opinion) line of argument can be applied to both sides. Do cops ever think "if I act paranoid and kill the weird person here, (...)", or do they only think about their own personal peril? Well, they obviously think they have a +2SD spidey sense and are very valuable individuals, but they still shouldn't have shot for the sake of all of us.
If anything, the cop version strikes me as rather more justifiable, because cops signed up voluntarily for a job whose description involves something about keeping the peace and protecting society, and random weirdos did not.
The details of this case notwithstanding, in the light of the comments it's probably worth contemplating that there may be a fundamental value difference between auths and libs in terms of their views of police - in coarse terms, I think the former may think that it is better that ten hapless civilians get shot by police than that one police officer dies on the job, while for the latter the ratio is opposite. So assuming this case was misunderstandings all around, the liberal (in the compass sense) sees a greater evil committed to forestall the possibility of a lesser evil (and would like to change the system so that in this case nobody is shot, even if this means hypothetical police officers actually getting scalded), whereas to the authoritarian a lesser evil was committed to forestall the possibility of a greater one, and so the only relevant discussion (which is in fact the angle being taken up by posters who reflexively side with the police) is whether the probability of the greater evil is high enough such that p*(greater evil) is still greater than the lesser evil of the shot civilian.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
"You should wear a mask except when predominently engaged in activities that require being maskless". Eating takes up most of one's time in a restaurant.
But then you would get people trying to lawyer "predominantly", walk around with food in hands or just pockets to avoid wearing masks (lots of people, myself included, already did this seated), ...; also there is an argument that when walking around you cover more ground (germs don't fully disperse in dining settings, cf. those norovirus outbreak analyses where correlation with seat distance is seen).
OP was being a concern troll
Doesn't mesh with my understanding of that term, and OP seems to be my political near mirror image. Boomercons hating Trump for breaking rules and decorum seems consistent.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%. Do you have any proposals other than just "you don't have to wear masks in restaurants", which is reasonable if you believe they don't do anything anyway but clearly not a solution to the "what easy rule can maximise mask wearing while allowing people to eat" problem that the rule-setters were trying to solve? What you are doing seems analogous to someone who believes air travel is evil and unnecessary asserting that plane designers are stupid for putting wings on planes because they could save materials if they didn't.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
The question whether COVID rules like this particular one are reasonable ways to implement a particular goal (reduce transmission rate) given particular assumptions (masks work, ...) is orthogonal to the question of whether the goal and the assumptions are sound, and I doubt we'll get much out of relitigating the latter here for the gorillionth time. It is possible for COVID policy to be misguided, masks to be ineffectual, and the restaurant masking policy to be reasonable (as in sensible given its proponents' beliefs) yet susceptible to the sort of anti-arbitrary-cutoff zinger that the poster above posted, simultaneously.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
What does "safe enough" mean? COVID had a transmission rate that was far from "approach infected person -> you get infected immediately 100%", so the appropriate mental model is that there is some positive correlation between time length of exposure and likelihood of transmission. If you believe masks reduce the likelihood of transmission while you wear them, then wearing a mask half of the time is strictly better than never wearing a mask, and wearing a mask always is strictly better than either. However, if you wear a mask 100% of the time, you can't eat. There's your tradeoff.
where public health measures were treated the same as risk factors ("The virus knows if you're sitting or standing, so it's only safe to sit unmasked in a restaurant")
As an aside, this sort of argument by ridicule can be used against any Schelling point rule meant to identify an easy cutoff point between two undesirable extremes (see also the old "she was only 17 years and 364 days old, you monster" jab). Clearly the intent was to make people wear masks as much as possible, except when incompatible with other desiderata like being able to consume food in a public setting; what do you think would have been a better rule to settle this trade-off without causing uncertainty and enabling a lot more disruptive haggling?
As for people like OP, who fail a sort of "guardian-guarded distinction" and transfer some of the sanctity of the things a rule or law is intended to defend against onto the rule or law itself (or conversely treat violators of the law as instances of the bad thing the law was meant to prevent), I understand your annoyance but it's also easy to see how they are part of the grease that makes our society run. Their existence protects against sliding into the sort of illegible system where the written rules are never the actual rules, enabling corruption and causing friction everywhere.
A lot of wildbow's works (Worm, Pact, Twig...) hit similar themes; though the decline is usually violent, he has a recurring pattern of stories starting from a place of relative stability and affluence and gradually cranking up the bleakness/hopelessness/lack of resources available both to individual characters and to society at large.
On the Japanese media side, Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou (English title might be something like Girls' Last Tour) is a worthy spiritual successor to YKK, perhaps slightly more on the bleak and eventful side. It's a sort of cute slice of life series about two girls traversing a ruined world in the wake of WW4 in search of a something/anything, as the last remnants of human activity around them flicker out. The author's narration and Twitter feed pattern-match against the worst cases of inadequately medicated clinical depression I have encountered. Both the manga and the anime adaptation are pretty great.
I would guess that the "he was acting on behalf of Ukraine" story is correct, but Ukraine is not about to burn any trump cards on rescuing impressionable Germans (who I have anecdotal evidence Ukrainians mostly only feel disdain for) and as long as it is essentially German government policy to gently encourage its citizens to make sacrifices for Ukraine that go above and beyond what they feel they can defend as official policy, it would be counterproductive for them to not take the opportunity to bail him out.
Sure, but this is already a low bar. Chechens (who even the SJW contingent of Western Europe seems to need to hold their noses about) are one thing, but Khangoshvili had aligned himself with the pro-European forces in Georgia, who continue to be the EU's baby; his likelihood of extradition would have been in the ballpark of that of the US extraditing some Chinese dissidents to the PRC.
I have heard some rumours that he continued supporting (materially? ideologically?) the Caucasus Emirate which is generally recognised as one, though this is one of those cases where it's impossible to discern what portion of claims/counterclaims/debunkings is credible.
All in all, I do agree that Putin comes out looking like the winner here to an extent that makes me wonder what was in it for the Western side. Are they hoping that they could reanimate the white-blue-white-flag exile opposition with the emergency injection of Kara-Murza? Was there some secret addendum with further favours that are not being made public for PR reasons (e.g. Russia releasing more valuable spooks or unambiguous terrorists)? Is this meant to establish goodwill for future trades (e.g. Griner)?
More options
Context Copy link