Corvos
1hr ago
You seem to be reacting to something specific that I'm not aware of. Would you mind going into a bit more detail?
What I'm saying is that it's not a matter of people like you and me looking at zero hours of work but low living standards and opting for the alternative as revealed preference.
I'm saying that option genuinely isn't available unless you're also poor and up for committing fraud, so the lack of middle/upper class takers doesn't tell you much about its desirability.
Corvos
2hr ago
True. One of the sadnesses of this decade has been realising that most of the freedoms I took for granted around technology and the internet were essentially predicated on normies not knowing about them, and the creeping realisation that something can be light-touch regulated (airsoft, remote-control planes, websites) or popular, but not both.
Corvos
2hr ago
you had Farage implying that multiple times through the campaign
I don't think that's fair. There were noises around "we should be getting in the best from around the world, not literally any rando from Eastern Europe" but going from that to infinity Africans and especially infinity low-paid Africans seems a stretch.
Corvos
3hr ago
It also implies some level of evenness and length. Digwa was armed with a massive knife; Nowak was unarmed, and Digwa killed him with a single lethal blow. Nothing about that says "fight" to me. That's just a straight up killing, bordering on execution of an unarmed man.
The essence of populism is that it is popular because it takes the stated concerns of people seriously rather than airily dismissing them.
The centrist trap @Corvos is referring to is to attempt to dismiss inchoate anger by pointing to a non-existent scapegoat.
I have no idea what you are talking about here, but thank you for providing a perfect example of the type.
Corvos
7hr ago
You can’t do that, at least in the UK.
You need to provide evidence that you are working full time to apply for jobs, or they’ll cut you off. And you need to be genuinely poor or they’ll tell you to live off your savings.
After all, what comes after reclaiming your lands if not seizing theirs in kind?
This does seem to be have been the reaction of the Africans and Arabs to colonisation, who as always are very clear-eyed about how they see other civilisations.
In general you seem to be going off on a weird tangent. My point is that it is the constant murders of white people by ethnic minorities that is radicalising whites against ethnic minorities, not the Twitter algorithm.
Because it’s a mental trap I see friends and family who think of themselves at centrists fall into a lot.
Something along the lines of:
- Most centrists are people who are reasonably comfortable with how things are, which is why they avoid radical politics.
- But they see that lots of other people are upset. How can this be? Intellectually, they can read the arguments/complaints but viscerally they don’t feel them and it doesn’t make sense to them.
- They therefore get deflected to an argument that does make sense to them. This is usually either economic (‘people scapegoat minorities when they’re feeling precarious’ is a common one) or media (‘social media presents a biased view of the world so they can’t see the truth that actually the important things are all fine’).
- These explanations are particularly useful because they suggest it’s possible to fix the angry people’s problems without doing anything scary. All we have to do is improve the economy using the tried and tested methods the populists dislike, such as raising immigration in a Boriswave or lowering taxes, and/or regulate social media to show the true (and centrist-friendly) state of affairs at which point they will slowly realise they were wrong.
In short, blaming the discourse for popular upset flatters centrist sensibilities/*, gives an excuse for authoritarian action to silence the scary people before they ruin everything, and best of all it’s sometimes correct. So it’s very alluring.
* like all of us, centrists are only human
Perhaps a misleading phrasing I admit.
Corvos
14hr ago
Which British party would you have voted for in the 2019 general election, in order to achieve this goal?
Corvos
15hr ago
Twitter delenda est.
With respect, I think you are falling into the centrist trap. Twitter isn't radicalising people. All the horrible murders are radicalising people. Twitter is merely declining to censor them afterwards.
I realize that saying 2. automatically places me in the Leftist Shill category, and I don’t like that the discourse is so poisoned.
Again, it's not about the discourse, it's about the horrible murders. I don't think you're a leftist shill but I think you are okay, fundamentally, with this kind of thing happening. That doesn't mean that you wouldn't fix it if you could snap your fingers and magically prevent all horrible murders, but ultimately you seem to prefer all the horrible murders to any of the things that would prevent the horrible murders.
If "calling for calm" means "calmly discussing how we are going to begin repatriating these people" then that's fair enough, but otherwise "it's good that politicians are calling for calm" does absolutely translate to "I want you to sit down and do nothing". That's not a discourse thing. That's a basic divergence of political preferences.
Corvos
18hr ago
I think part of the definition of art is that it's not done for money or status, but rather it's genuine self-expression.
As good a definition as any, but it’s not mine and I don’t make that distinction. Indeed, I think the increasing tendency to force a distinction between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment / media’, rather than between ‘high-status/cultured art’ and ‘popular art’ has been leading people astray. My sympathies have always been with the jobbing writer and I’ve never had much use for self-expression except as a tool. I just want to make nice things that people like.
Yeah, I see that. FWIW I wouldn't trust a instagram handle of 'writer' or 'musician'. As far as I'm concerned writing and making music is a verb, not a noun, and getting some stories published and playing proper gigs is genuinely impressive.
Realistically, my stuff wasn't that good. I only finished one novel, and that was a fan thing, so unpublishable. It was the most popular one in its niche, at least, but that's not a high bar. I have about half of a bunch of others (rewritten many times) but I have an issue with endings for some reason. I know where I'm starting from, and there's always a moment or a few moments that I really want to get to, but once I get the characters into the state where I want them to be then things kind of fizzle. You know that saying about how drinking a margherita on the beach is an Instagram photo not a retirement plan? It's kind of like that, but for plot. (Any advice appreciated).
I must have written maybe 400,000 words over the decade or so I spent writing seriously, which was late school to university to early postgrad before the pressure really kicked in, and I didn't get so far, but I can't help feeling that was a skill issue and I could have got something good. I wouldn't fund me, but I wish somebody could.
They were beautiful to me. I got shortlisted for a reasonably prestigious prize once, but most of the rest weren’t objectively great. I would really, really like the chance to try and do better someday, but even beyond that, I think that making things is good for its own sake. Maybe my stuff would have improved if I'd had more time to spend on it, maybe it would improve if I could go back to it after a decade in industry.
I don't suggest that we should fund just anyone who asks off the taxes of those who do tiresome, creativity-sucking work. But I do kind of think it's a shame we can't. Lots of the creativity of the 70s came out of super-cheap housing in cities and a dole system that didn't ask too many questions, and I think that the end of that was inevitable and morally just but also killed much of British art, comedy and entrepreneurship (the kind of entrepreneurship that makes genuinely interesting, far-out things rather than just chasing VC funding by jumping on the nearest bandwagon). The system that replaced it, where you only get Arts funding if you're young, black, gay and Marxist doesn't seem like an improvement. The idea that you can tell the Great Artists because they'll crawl over broken glass or because they show amazing talent right out of the box seems similarly suspect.
Some people genuinely never try at all, and maintain the dream that they could have been great by carefully never actually producing anything. Maybe that’s who you’re talking about. But I don't think many/most of the lamenters are like that. Many more like making things but find it hard, and need a bit of space/mentorship - how many people voluntarily pay their hard-earned money for writing courses? Ideally I'd like for them/us to be able to try, and it saddens me that isn't possible.
I think this is far too triumphalist. Many great artists did it at least in part for the money, and as any amateur dramatics society could tell you, motivation to produce art has very little correlation to the quality of that art. Look at Anthony Trollope, Dickens, Shakespeare! They wrote by the word, or for commission, as did many many others.
And of course there were people in the comments complaining about being told to paint/write/compose in their spare time, insisting that there's no way they can be expected to produce anything of value when they're exhausted after a long day in work. Again, I can't help but think – skill issue?
Look, I can only speak for myself. When the working day is over, I'm zonked. My work is research and development, and it genuinely uses up all my brainpower. Boo hoo, I'm so special, yadda yadda, but it's true. I wrote several novels back when I had the time and now when the work day ends I just want to crawl home and watch something unchallenging. I know you wrote a novel lately and that's lovely, but others aren't the same.
All of which has to sit alongside the fact that writing is something that one does, hopefully, learn. The extent to which it's teachable is over-rated because people like to dream, but lots of good authors needed some mentoring and some experience to write their really good stuff. And that takes time, and energy, and space.
TL;DR: "If you'd like to try and make beautiful things like you did at university, but you're too tired because your job sucks out all your energy and creativity, then I guess it must suck to suck, loser" seems neither necessary nor fair.
EDIT: Lower heat, what you are observing is a filter that basically removes anyone who doesn't have sufficient time and energy left over to run a side hustle along their main job. Deciding that almost all the stuff that gets filtered out would have been crap seems very much to be a just-world bias. It's equally possible that lots of people who would have made great things or even just pleasant things are getting filtered out, and that it's not economically possible to do much about that now, and that this is sad.
Corvos
21hr ago
Upvoting requires you to be logged in. I think it's a usual rule of thumb that accounts : lurkers is approximately a 1:100 ratio.
Corvos
1d ago
It's not that it's not literally the same coins, it's that people get out more than they put in. It was not earned, in the most literal way.
Specifically, the report found that a single man who earned the average wage ($66,100 in 2023 dollars) every year of his adult life before retiring in 2020 at age 65, would have paid about $466,000 in taxes into the Social Security and Medicare systems, but can expect to receive benefits equal to $640,000—or an additional $174,000—over the course of his retirement.
A single female with average earnings ($66,100 in 2023 dollars) retiring in 2020 at age 65 would pay $466,000 in taxes but is likely collect $722,000 in benefits.
The imbalance is mostly driven by medicare; social security is much closer to breaking-even or even losing you money if you are a high earner, although married couples get more under certain conditions.
Ultimately the scheme was designed in such a way as to rip off the taxpayers of the future to promise gibs now. Those future taxpayers are all grown up and recognise that they are being ripped off and that the economics are going to leave them holding the bag.
Corvos
1d ago
My old company took in a bunch of Russians fleeing potential draft at the start of the war. One was a bit of a dick but the rest were great workers and are doing well AFAIK.
Corvos
2d ago
Sworn men have always been looked on more kindly than mercenaries. For that matter, so have people who change companies every two years. People distrust those whose loyalties seem too loose.
Corvos
2d ago
I think I set myself up for this, but, um, the talent floor is very low for the way I sing it...
That's how you do it in the UK too. But I don't think it's trivial, especially if your life history is incompatible. Degree + good job for ten years suggests an ability to live in society, unless you can cite being assaulted or raped or some other trauma. Someone from the underclass who's perfectly able to work if they want to but is belligerent/anxious and has a history of getting sacked because he/she doesn't play well with employers is much more plausible.
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