Corvos
22hr ago
That, plus he drilled a lot of unusual combat and utility spells for the Triwizard Tournament in the previous book.
Fair enough, if you’re interested in a ‘wouldn’t it be cool if’ conversation. I’m most interested in sensory and mobility stuff - giving more senses and mobility seems to be basically a pure win with very little social upheaval required.
On the practical level, the strong tendency towards bloat means that any such measure would need to be catering to a very strong need that I regard as legitimate and hasn’t been solved any other way, but that’s another conversation.
The cynical rejoinder is that free money is never free. Firstly it ends up taking a huge amount of time and effort and bureaucracy to collect the money, organise its distribution, and police its usage.
But that's only the start. Soon activists will begin to protest that rich people who can pay for their own cosmetic surgery get 20k of taxpayer money, while trans people who will commit suicide without high-quality gender-affirming care get the same amount. The prices for these operations will change as the cosmetic surgeons soak up the extra funds available. It will end up in the same place as UK national insurance - means-tested to hell and back, too small to satisfy the people who want/need it and far too expensive for the people who pay for it and will never receive it.
Rather, we could just say 'No. Your morphology is your own affair. If it matters to you so much, save up and spend your own money on it'. I'm not sure how in practice your pitch appeals to those who are net taxpayers and think that transness is an unfortunate delusion.
Corvos
1d ago
To be fair, Frodo inherits the ring at 33 years old and goes on his quest at 50.
I wouldn't have thought so. Fascism, certain varieties of Christianity, transhumanism, neoliberal technocracy... In practice, a lot of right wingers square the circle by claiming that any ruling ideology (any ideology that has authoritarian tendencies and a vision for a 'better' society) is Marxist by fiat but I don't find that convincing, in part because I don't see a mutual throughline and in part because the differences seem large enough to be meaningful (as opposed to People's Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front). I think 'the King should make things better' is just built into humanity at a base level.
Corvos
3d ago
you will find that bringing up the personal lives of X-ists is often going to blow up in your face; X-ists are X-ist for a reason and that reason frequently is "their personal lives legitimately behave as X-ism predicts"
Very neatly put, I might borrow that. I’m sorry to hear your early life was so awful.
Corvos
4d ago
I have no real Roma tic experience but it sounds like perhaps she has an image of her future that involves her living essentially where she is now, and that even the core of an ‘urban-ish enclave’ doesn’t fit with that.
It could also be that she finds this difficult to convey and is trying to spare your feelings given your existing terror of moving and the potential incompatibility of her current intended life plan with your needs and budget, thus avoiding causing you harm and upset in the short term whilst potentially causing you upset in the long term (a common failure of very kind people).
It sounds like you care for each other, so I can only wish you good luck talking.
Corvos
4d ago
I would agree except to say that the government has considerable influence on it, but the BBC will fight this influence with every tool if the government is right-wing and accede easily of left-wing (though maybe not as left as Corbyn).
Corvos
5d ago
Much respect for working hard in a difficult situation, and good luck for tomorrow.
One word of caution: be careful relying on your therapist’s judgment about external individuals. By the nature of the interaction she gets the evidence you select for her and is predisposed to see things your way, so remember to account for that.
At the end of the day, Alec was a traitor. He smiled at his colleagues every day while secretly he plotted to undermine everything they were working to protect. I find it hard to think of such a man as a hero.
Furthermore, the story is at the very least more complex than he tells it. What responsibility did the British owe to the Cossacks? They had fought for the enemy (Nazi Germany) against an ally. Giving them to Stalin was inglorious in a perfect world, sure, but it’s silly to treat it as a betrayal.
Corvos
5d ago
Sure, that’s always been there too. There have always been lots of bachelors and playboys, especially amongst the upper classes. The working-class boys at the university were much more of the ‘get as much clunge as possible’ mindset which ironically probably put them in a better position to date and marry later on.
So many who wanted to play around. But also a good number who didn’t. For myself in my ideal life plan I wanted to meet a nice girl at university, move in together a year later, spend a couple of years getting to n ie each other and then marry and have children around say 26 years old.
Of course, if I had been popular with the ladies perhaps I would have got a big head and started fucking around. No way to say.
Corvos
5d ago
Hmm, yes, I see. Although arguably the emigration was responsible for the Celtic Tiger and Ireland’s prosperity generally. When America etc. were looking to see how to invest in Europe, having a lot of Irish-Americans and the general diaspora in high places saying it should be Ireland was probably very important.
Corvos
5d ago
If you ever felt like contributing an example to the nostalgia genre (80s Ireland?) I’d love to read it.
They too want freedom, a career, and as much fun as possible before they settle down.
In all seriousness, I think this is where you are going wrong. A lot of young men, especially here which skews conservative, were totally ready to start settling down young (or at least a year or two after university when they had an income) and raising a family. There’s a reason several people were yeschadding your post about young men being over educated, and I say this having done a PhD.
Painting with a broad brush, the problem from my perspective is that we were prepared to be lovers and providers, and the other side never turned up. Indeed, they seemed to flock in droves to the young men who openly disdained responsibility and family while those men were busy getting as broke and high and sexed as humanly possible.
I am ready to believe that this is a mutual illusion arising from young women disproportionately meeting the fuck-around men and not seeing the quiet ones who worked hard, and likewise young men nmeeting the girls who came to parties and not the quiet ones. I don’t say that it’s true, but it’s possible.
But this is how things looked on the other side of the screen.
Corvos
6d ago
Interesting turns of phrase and very good for atmosphere (or at least the descriptions are novel for now) but it gets details wrong and steers all over the place.
Corvos
7d ago
Having written a few scientific papers in my time, and read an awful lot more, I strongly disagree that this approach will yield good results. Third-person passive writing effectively acts as consensus building by default - it is designed to ape a full objective perspective that by definition cannot be achieved. "It is well-understood that rents are too high and women are over-educated" just leads to constant passive aggressive arguing about what it means to be well-understood and what citations are acceptable etc. etc. where two people have essentially a personal disagreement using sock puppets, whereas first-person "I think that..." encourages clear demarcation between one's own personal feelings and expectations, and claims made about the broader world.
Corvos
8d ago
Some people strive for modship. Others have it thrust upon them, and find to their surprise that they wear it well.
Corvos
8d ago
you are a literal masochist.
Ohh, that's why the people in the gym make those noises...
Corvos
8d ago
I see, thanks. I apologise for misjudging your convictions in various areas. I don't think I have that much to say as a follow-up right now, beyond a few points:
if you want to argue "Feminism was bad for society and we should repeal feminism," uh... I kind of agree with the first statement (for some value of "feminism") but I do not see how you achieve the second (given that "repeal feminism" tends to mean "repeal the entire concept of female emancipation writ large") without winding up at "Women are property."
Broadly, I agree with you, with the caveat that I don't think the mores and customs of the pre-1900s West or the Mormons/Amish/Harethi are as bad as 'women are property'.
The problem with all legislation is that even the best-intentioned legislators do not have a crystal ball or the ability to foresee all second and third-order effects.
I also agree with you here, which is why I would ideally like us to take a gradualist approach to this kind of thing, starting off with:
- abolishing/banning the various legalities and practices aimed at achieving higher female numbers in various fields (including those which are already majority female)
- trying to do something to reduce the level of middle-management sinecures in HR/marketing/etc.
and going from there. I don't think that this is actually politically possible - even such relatively minor measures would only become possible if mores have shifted so far that those changes are the first movements of a giant landslide. It seems to be the nature of human society and democratic politics in particular to careen rather than adjust, and I think we will end up at the bottom of the slope no matter what. Not much to be done about that IMO.
If your proposition is that we factory-farm the fairer sex such that every man is free to go through a hundred a year, I think Margaret Atwood wrote a book about that...
Ultimately, the sex ratio is what it is. Chicken consumption is not zero-sum in the same way.
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