Corvos
19hr ago
Would be interested to hear more about the HEMA - I want to take it up myself.
How long ago did you get started? What do you practice? Any tips/advice?
Corvos
20hr ago
Significantly, we didn’t have full suffrage at that time. Left vs Right was (very broadly) businessmen vs gentry.
Once we had full suffrage, the Liberal party was defenestrated and we got protectionist command economy vs free trade.
Corvos
1d ago
One way is mutual compliance - if everyone else has DEI, you look weird for not having it. Another way is just by not asking questions - you don't ask whether Fun Bill who's always at the office parties and tells great stories about fishing is really providing good value for money.
Corvos
1d ago
Agree with all of this. I’m not saying it’s a book about communism, I’m saying it’s a communist book. In that way it’s almost more convincing than something like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists b/c it shows how a perfectly normal person could believe this was the future.
Corvos
1d ago
"Hard to be a God" is seen as dissident fiction now but it's still communist. It took for granted that the future was communist, and that communism would produce a good and stable society. At most it's anti-Soviet and really anti-Khrushchev.
The current system very nearly offered up the corpse of a Republican President not a year ago. The spoils system was very corrupt, and produced many results that were undesirable, but we cannot be locked to the whims of civil servants forever. And if we're going to be, let's stop calling it democracy and design our autocracy properly.
Corvos
3d ago
I don't have a source but what I'm told is that German unionists were heavily influenced by British ones who wanted to avoid making the same mistakes. The main idea was to avoid getting into the directly antagonistic relationship you see today in Anglo countries.
I was told that German unions tend to be more attached to individual companies, giving them more of an incentive to preserve their hosts and make agreements that are sane, but a quick search doesn't show any evidence for this. Wikipedia does say that strikes are very rare, and that companies and unions strive for consensus (and apparently achieve it most of the time). I'm not sure how this is achieved.
Perhaps @Southkraut or others would know more.
I think your model of how people think is wrong. I would guess:
- Proportion of population intellectually pro tariffs: 2%
- Proportion of population non-intellectually pro tariffs ('countries like people are stronger when they build for themselves' / 'my job went to china' / 'why do we have all this chinese junk instead of sturdy American stuff'): additional 10%
- Proportion of population tariff-curious: additional 10-20%
Noting that I don't expect these to be purely right or left wing positions. People's 'wing' is an alliance and various with which aspect of their identity is most politically salient. The total constituency for Trump's tariffs is probably 30% max - I don't expect them to be popular unless they turn out to work, but they're popular enough that Fox etc. can't dismiss them out of hand and neither can commenters here.
I would also suggest that going from discussion of tariffs to discussion of firebombing local cities is a bit like an anti-abortion activist saying, 'well, if we're discussing murdering innocent people, let's do the Holocaust next! Pros/cons of gassing all the Jews?'. It doesn't come across as a method of engagement, it comes across as a method of ridicule, and it's not likely to lead to a good conversation.
Such a low bar! But in all seriousness, America is a very rich country mostly for historical and geographical reasons. Then the previous system parasitised America's economy with DEI etc. but did not actually destroy it (whilst wrecking a lot of intangibles), and this is sort of a win. But this line of thinking seems to lead to the 'let the culture warriors do whatever they want as long as they don't touch the economy' thinking that has damaged the West so much over the last two decades.
Corvos
4d ago
This seems needlessly bilious. Yes, it is possible to make a cost/benefit analysis for literally everything. No, nobody is talking about bombing Kansas City, which is why you're using it as a reductio ad absurdam.
Corvos
5d ago
A friend tried Gemini for work and said it was awful: code took endless regens to work successfully (Claude did it in 2 tries) and if you ask it to explain/summarize foreign language documentation it will produce the summary in the foreign language.
I'm not confident in that! Haha. In either direction. I suspect you have multiple groups of different kinds of non-news-reading voter, and that their confidence varies wildly depending on the topics, and even potentially on how it's brought up. People feel a lot less confident when they're comfortable than when they're under attack, for example. But I think that having an institutional backing telling you that you're a Very Serious Person gives you a bit more arrogance than you might otherwise have.
Corvos
5d ago
Your primary (dominant) player type is the Slayer.
Slayers want to be the heroic protagonists in a cinematic story. They are solo gamers who enjoy highly curated narratives and slower-paced gameplay. They see games as highly interactive action movies to be experienced.
Ich bin ein cashual.
Corvos
5d ago
Yes and when people say that reading the MSM makes you less informed I don't think they realise how badly informed some voters are.
You would probably be in the top 5% (or better) of well-informed voters if you read the NYT (or indeed, so as not to appear partisan, the WSJ) and nothing else cover to cover every day.
The argument is that you can model people as having three axes:
- accuracy of information against objective reality*
- proportion of relevant information known / concepts understood
- confidence in their knowledge.
The question is: how does reading a mainstream serious newspaper (NYT/WSJ, etc.) affect each axis?
My personal answer is that I agree that proportion of known information is going to go up for newspaper readers. The accuracy, I don't know. Information directly stated by a newspaper is still usually accurate, but their bias leads them to communicate lots more information through implication that is inaccurate, e.g. reporting accurately on a given murder implies that such murders are common, or accurately reporting the words of an academic on Yasuke the black samurai (see below) may lead people to believe them even though the base research is fraudulent. Finally, confidence. I don't know whether 'low-information voters' are more or less epistemically confidence than the self-professed 'well-informed'; I'd say maybe slightly less?
*to the extent this is philosophically possible for different types of information
No, it's "I worked hard and produced enough money/value that I have the option of no longer working if I wanted it. Wouldn't it be good if the chronically idle were forced to do the same, given that their idleness is making them bloated and unhappy?"
The rich tend to be much more clear-eyed about the downsides of having enough money that they no longer need anything, in the same way celebrities are clear-eyed about mass fame not actually feeling that good.
Personally my feelings are mixed. I want a good long holiday to really get into all the hobbies that I never had time for; at the same time, whenever I'm left without external whips for too long I sink into a morass and get less done. I suspect the optimal amount of non-chosen labour in someone's life is greater than 0 but less than 8 hours a day. In an ideal world I would be interested to see a 4-hour-day work program.
EDIT:
If we get back to the point where the work of maintaining American society is again being done by Americans, and there's still enough surplus to go around to enable some people to live as NEETs, then fine by me. Bully for them. Being a NEET is great! I've done my share of NEETing in the past. I empathize fully with why people want to do that and I have no criticisms of them from a moral perspective.
I might have been projecting in my analysis of @Primaprimaprima's motives. Although I can see an argument that maintaining America on the manual labour of Chinese/Guatemalans is not morally better than maintaining it on Americans.
Corvos
5d ago
If you look up some of the behind-the-scenes vids for Halo 3, the devs talk about what an absolute nightmare it was to move from Xbox to Xbox 360 because of the graphics.
The increase in amount of work required for everything was massive. Like, 10x. With all the knock on effects: inability to do lots of reworking, massively expanded middle management to handle all the newbies, massively expanded costs and therefore require to recoup revenue…
It marked the end of the point when you could make a world-class AAA with 60 people.
Is your friend my father?
@OracleOutlook, I am your father
In all seriousness, pretty similar situation. The friend spent 10 years taking care of her father and in her head the (hypothetical) money from her father's very valuable London house became the solution to all of the problems in her life. Now prices have dropped massively, she's on the hook (I think) for inheritance tax based on the old value not the new value, and it would be VERY nice amount of money but it's not going to pay for a divorce and a comfortable retirement.
Corvos
6d ago
Precisely. If you have a very thin profit margin when you are (indirectly) employing Chinese peasants, you will have a negative profit margin if you start employing people who want higher wages. If you have a larger profit margin, then you can have more costs and still have some profit left over.
I think that Farage's libertarianism is bogging down Reform, if anything. The Right has a problem where, because it's social death to be further right than David Cameron, it's drawing from a very small pool of potential politicians. In a lot of countries, you get maybe one serious, charismatic far-right politician and you just have to live with their quirks.
This is incidentally why the left tries so hard to get rid of them via lawfare. Not only does it narrow the pipeline, but if you can nobble this decade's Great Man then you've got a good long time before another one comes along. Look at how (on the other side) socialism just collapsed after Corbyn got pushed out. Albeit in that case he lost an election pretty badly.
Corvos
6d ago
Yes, modern manufacturing is hyper-optimised and very fragile. I think this fact is well understood.
The fundamental debate is whether this fragility + low cost + slow drain of skill is more or less desirable than trying to keep manufacturing at home, and whether the latter is possible at any decent standard.
Corvos
6d ago
On the face of it, yes:
Tiny profits -> lowest possible price for consumers -> GOOD
which is why it's been economic dogma for decades. However, 'tiny profit margins' is another way of saying that 'your business will go into the red if a butterfly sneezes'. Your profit margin is slack, it's robustness, it's the ability to invest without leveraging yourself to the hilt, and of course it's the ability to pay your workers more than Chinese peasants. Huge amounts of foundational innovation come from places like Apple, Bell Labs, Xerox where they had the money to try out new things.
I'm not saying that Trumpian economics is definitely a great idea, I'm just not yet convinced it's a bad one.
Corvos
6d ago
I kind of think the same. This feels like the 'burning iron' stage of stellar dissolution.
Once a star forms an iron core, its days are numbered. Up to that point, the nuclear fusion reactions produce energy, creating an outward pressure that counterbalances the inward pressure of gravity. But iron fusion uses up energy instead of producing it.
Wow, thank you! Very comprehensive. (I hope to have more detailed thoughts later).
More options
Context Copy link