Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8d ago
less forgiving than it used to be
I think Decarlos Brown Jr. is a pretty good example of the problem with being too forgiving.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8d ago
How would modern industrial infrastructure, both hard and soft, run on traditional feudal principles?
I'd say, start with looking at the UAE and at Imperial Japan — the latter in particular shows combining rapid industrialization with predominantly feudal social structures. (I'll also remind people that the majority of marriages in Japan were arranged — either by families or through the traditional omiai matchmaking system — all the way until the late 1960s. I also recall at least one author comparing the lifetime employment, and loyalty to the company, of the 1980s Japanese salaryman to the feudal fealty of their ancestors a century or so prior.)
Now, I know people will argue that the UAE only works because of oil — I've encountered proponents of strict "deterministic" correlations of political forms and technological abilities who've baldly asserted that "the moment the oil runs out" every single modern building in Dubai will literally crumble into dust and the population will be "back to riding camels and living in 1800s conditions the very next day."
As for the criticisms I get on Japan as model, I must once again note that there is a huge difference between "you can't mix feudal social norms with industrial technology because social and technological determinism make them fundamentally incompatible and doom the attempt to collapse from the internal contradictions" and "you can't mix feudal social norms with industrial technology because the US will bomb you into submission if you try."
(Also, I might add that you're just not reading the right sci-fi.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
if a society degenerates and fails because it can't handle that type of freedom, then it morally deserved to fail all along, and should crash and burn accordingly
What if it turns out that no society can "handle that type of freedom"? Then does the entire human species "deserve to fail all along, and should crash and burn accordingly"?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
I believe that the problem is Blues; if it were possible to coordinate with Blacks and Browns against them, that would be an entirely acceptable outcome. Browns and Blacks are a problem to the degree they empower Blues; if blue power is broken, disputes with blacks and browns are solvable in any number of ways.
I hope it's not to low effort for me to say thank you for expressing this, and doing so in such a clear manner. It sums up not just my disagreement with some people online, but also with some people I know IRL, because we are in agreement here, and they're at the "the problem is blacks and browns, and wish that Reds and Blues could coordinate against them" position.
(It's related to why I argue eugenics is still a deeply Progressive position, and tend to reference Confucians on social inequality.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
These are all good ideas for someone with a fair chunk of startup capital, not someone who's trying to figure out how to afford food.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
you could make an adult visual novel (sex sells).
Requires coding skills and art skills.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
What specific tactics are we talking about?
Well, mostly in the context of interwar Europe, it's the "street-fighting" tactics adopted by the blackshirts and brownshirts, but first developed and used first by Communist and anarchist gangs. That's what I remember the author focusing on.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
How many bucks exactly?
Looking at something like $50-$80/mo. range? (Much more than that, and the "welfare cliff" benefit reductions start to really bite.) I just had a change in landlords, along with a $120/month rent increase (when I'm already dirt poor). Basically, rent, utilities, phone, and internet now take up over half my income, with my usual monthly food budget very close to what's left.
And I asked about online, because I doubt many here would have much knowledge about the IRL circumstances, here in Anchorage, AK, for making a bit of extra money.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
and "complete subjugation of all ideological opponents" is not achievable
Why not? Suharto is my immediate go-to example, but there's also the Reconquista and the Edict of Fontainebleau as what comes to my mind next.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
Nothing scares the left like the thought of the right doing politics to them the way they do it to the right.
I can't remember which historian it was, but I remember reading a book excerpt wherein a historian, in analyzing "fascist tactics" noted that every tactic the Italian Fascists, the Nazis, etc. used had been developed and used first by Communists and other leftists, and thus, not only are there not so much "fascist tactics" as "tactics that become fascist when adopted by the Right from the Left", but that "Fascism" can pretty much be defined as "when the Right starts using Left's own more-effective tactics to use against the Left" (and thus, as a good opponent of "fascism," he then exhorts that we must ensure the Right remains forbidden from using the Left's best tactics.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
But also that still no one is going to ever use em-dashes anymore for fear of being called an LLM.
I'm still using em-dashes, and I'm not going to stop.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16d ago
"A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Palatalization," Nicoleta Bateman's 2007 doctoral dissertation.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16d ago
Anyone know some ways for a person — one without any particular skills at either coding or handicrafts — to make a few extra bucks online?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16d ago
The US can survive with a different form of government.
I know a lot of people — including plenty on the Right — who would deny it, because they'd argue that the United States is its form of government. "Proposition nation" and all that. America is the Constitution; America is the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Wherever those ideals exist, there is America. Whoever believes in those ideals, they are the American People. If maintaining "all procedures and checks and balances" means economic collapse, so be it. If it means entire replacing the "legacy" population with a newly imported one, so be it. If the system of government is at odds with the people living under it, then too bad for the people. The Constitution cannot fail, it can only be failed. "America" the ideal is perfect (some even argue the Founders were divinely-inspired when they wrote the Constitution).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16d ago
Personally I think what terrifies a certain class of people about Trump is just that he seems actually interested in wielding power, and has, I dunno, 'agentic' behavior when he does it.
I've talked multiple times over on Tumblr — particularly this longer post about how modern liberalism (or at least the strain typified by Michael Munger in the interview linked at that post) is about opposition to exactly that. To quote Munger:
Liberalism is the actual belief that no one should be in charge… Even I, if I have the chance to be in charge, I should say no, no one should be in charge. Because anyone who’s in charge, it’s like the Ring of Sauron; it will turn you, and it will make you evil.
And as I put it in my post:
…so much of the West has so thoroughly internalized this distrust of human authority that they can no longer even conceive the idea of a good leader, and are deathly afraid of taking charge of anyone or anything — a deep terror of responsibility, of exercising leadership.
And I'd argue it's why so many opponents of Trump, right and left, struggle to find any vocabulary to describe why people follow Trump beyond "cult of personality" — because they've so internalized Weberian rationalization and this liberal view that they can't really even recognize actual human leadership as anything but some kind of pathology.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18d ago
because unlike manhood, it’s not something you have to achieve.
Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive, lactation more expensive, and placental pregnancy yet more expensive still. Women are precious to the tribe, automatically, by nature; while men are the expendable sex, and have to earn their "value." Such has it always been, such will it always be.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18d ago
Like we could say that 100% of mass shootings are done by someone holding a gun and it sounds scary and intense. That's also a completely factual point because they couldn't do the mass shooting without a gun.
I was thinking, too, that this figure was indeed tautological… and then I thought about it a bit more, and maybe not. I mean, it's plausible someone someone could shoot and kill four or more people in a single incident with a crossbow…
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
23d ago
Thank you; that does indeed clarify what was previously too vague.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
24d ago
Sam Hyde has some advice about this.
And that would be…?
(I mean, this is totally vague — you don't even have a link — how is it not "low effort"?)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
24d ago
Man, I didn't think anyone else but me has read those. Yes, this was my absolute favorite series when I was a kid.
I also read the series as a kid, and while it wasn't my favorite, I enjoyed it.
I also haven't seen anyone mention the book that was my favorite read as a kid — enough I wore out my first paperback copy and had to buy a second — which also had a female author and was first in a fantasy-with-some-SF-elements (some might call it the other way around) series (not to mention more than one less-than-good film adaptation by Disney): Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.
(I still get a chill rereading the passage when Meg finally sees IT.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
27d ago
What else would even be the point?
To destroy enemy centers of power.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
28d ago
I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
28d ago
This. Very much this. It's why I can't stand listening to Eric Weinstein's nonsense about "new physics" and string theory being a government plot. There's not really much room left for the sort of radical revolutionary outcomes the UFOlogist types insist on.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
29d ago
Well, for my own history, getting assigned Strunk and White when I first got to Caltech was a good start, though I agree with the critics as to its tendency to being out of date, some clear hypercorrection in its linguistic prescriptivism, and the more style-oriented parts being not great outside of the formal academic context. From there, it's mostly just been reading lots and lots of linguistics papers.
I also know that several of my peers in high school learned several important bits of English grammar — including, for a few of them, the basic parts of speech — from taking Spanish class.
So the key, really, is to find things that, for one or another element of grammar, lay out something like 'this is how English does this versus how other languages do it.' Like that we use attributive nouns like every other Germanic language (and unlike the Romance languages), but are rather unique in mostly keeping spaces between the nouns: like "motor vehicle liability insurance" versus German * Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung*. Or else, those that cover historical evolution of the language: 'this is how Modern English does this versus how Middle English did it.'
Actually, some of the more introductory articles on Wikipedia for various grammatical categories aren't too terrible as a starting place, particularly for things like tense-aspect-mood and phrasal verbs (which is why you sometimes can end a sentence with a preposition, and "This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put" is an incorrect hypercorrection).
As for the rule of dialogue, there's any number of places to find it pointed out that the actual rule is against having two or more different people speaking in the same paragraph, not that there must be a paragraph break at the start of each sentence where a different person speaks — or worse, at the start of each quotation even mid-sentence. (This last is why I mostly avoid reading webfiction.)
(And the vocative comma shouldn't go away, because it's the difference between "let's eat, Grandma," and "let's eat Grandma.")
Says who, exactly? After all, GDP is relatively easy to measure, and gives you a numerical answer, while we can't even agree what constitutes "human flourishing", let alone measure it. So why wouldn't people choose to take the former as their measure of societal quality — 'line goes up equals world more gooder' — and then argue that, just as the job of corporate executives is to maximize "shareholder value", the job of a modern technocratic government is to maximize the GDP of the geographic territory it administrates… even if that means replacing legacy populations with cheaper imports?
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