Crowstep
8d ago
It's not very efficient. We spend more than the OECD average, and we get fewer doctors, fewer nurses and fewer hospital beds for it. The waiting times are infamously long, and productivity is still worse than it was pre-COVID. Honestly, it might work better with more administrators if that means that GPs don't need to spend time writing actual paper letters to refer their patients to specialists, and similar kinds of bureaucratic nonsense.
Crowstep
9d ago
Since the descendents of these unions became the modern ashkenazim, that means it's a case of Romans (Roman women, specifically) leaving the Roman demos, rather than Jews joining it. If the Jews had integrated in, then their descendents wouldn't be Jews today.
Crowstep
10d ago
Isn't there a time limit on DOGE? I guess for Noah's hypothesis to be true, there would need to be a plan to set up a Federalist Society-type body within the civil service after DOGE has finished up.
I guess we'll need to see what happens later on to test it. It wouldn't shock me to see JD Vance go on a spree of political appointing over the next few years to put these conservative civil servants in place, but right now it all looks a bit too chaotic to be that well planned.
Crowstep
15d ago
My understanding is that, although the people's of Europe were divided by religion, they were still WEIRD in the modern sense. They were fighting for their own universalist religions, not for their clans. They were wars of ideas, rather than of peoples.
Crowstep
18d ago
Do you really think Kanye chose her outfit? Seems to me the woman is an exhibitionist. She always dresses semi-nude.
But yeah, the 'dress' giving the news outlets a veneer of plausible deniability that she's naked is pretty funny.
Crowstep
25d ago
A bachelor/spinster tax wouldn't necessarily be a cruel punishment on the ugly, because it would encourage them to couple up with eachother. A punishment on the shy, maybe.
Crowstep
25d ago
I was so shocked by this I couldn't even retort. Like the show leaves some people with the impression that the median male existence in the 60s was a Manhattan advertising executive's hedonistic life and not closer to all of the little people he steps on. (To say nothing of the fact that he was drafted to fight in Korea and ... I'll save the spoilers)
I always thought the introduction of Don's brother in the first season was the showrunners trying to remind us that being an average white man in America in the 60s meant being extremely poor, because the country was (by modern standards) extremely poor.
It kind of reminds me of when some young guys think about polygamy, imagining that having a bunch of wives and concubines would be great. Ignoring the fact that if 50% of the men have two wives, then 50% of the men have none.
Crowstep
26d ago
Sure, let's compare average wages to average house costs in Europe and see what we get.
The cheapest houses are in Denmark (TFR 1.46), Ireland (1.47), Sweden (1.42) and Spain (1.12), for a mean of 1.36. The most expensive houses are in Slovakia (1.45), Czechia (1.36), Slovenia (1.5) and Montenegro (1.79) for a mean of 1.53.
According to this article, the cheapest houses globally relative to wages are in Brazil (1.47), Poland (1.12) and Thailand (0.95!!).
Cheap housing does actually increase birth rates, as I mentioned in my post, but its effect is miniscule compared to the massive cultural effects of whether or not getting married young and having children is high status or not.
Crowstep
28d ago
This is not true. In fact, you admit as much in the silence between this period and the next sentence, because presumably something happened during this silence.
Be charitable. You know what I meant. Appetite goes up, metabolic rate goes down, and then yes, people either eat more food and regain the weight, or their metabolism slows down so much that it doesn't make a difference how little they eat, they still regain the weight.
Simply white-knuckling your way to thinness doesn't work for 95% of people because the body fights back. People don't decide to get obese by choosing to eat more calories, telling them to simply choose to not be obese by eating less calories doesn't work. To recommend a strategy which will fail almost everyone who tries is cruel, particularly if it involves judging them for lack of willpower afterwards.
By contrast, ExFatLoss describes his weight loss through his version of keto as easy, compared to calorie controlled diets that he had tried before. Something else is clearly going on. Much better to try and work out what it is than just sneering at the fatties.
Crowstep
28d ago
I can't say that I'm surprised that a country which has been famous for its Ladyboys for decades has legalised gay marriage. They're clearly not that conservative when it comes to sex.
They also have a TFR of 0.95, one of the lowest in the world, the same as Singapore.
It may well be cohesive, but Thailand is certainly not a conservative place. It's going extinct with the same liberal modernity as everywhere else.
Crowstep
28d ago
I think you're misunderstanding the 'caloric reduction doesn't work' thesis he promotes (and which I share). Obviously CICO is true as an accounting tautology, if you're losing weight, then your body must be consuming/expelling energy at a greater rate than it is consuming it.
But CICO as a description of weight loss is very different from CICO as an actionable weight loss strategy. Simply eating fewer calories on a standard diet doesn't actually work. The weight always comes back because obesity is fundamentally a problem of a broken lipostat. This is the consensus among obesity researchers because obviously the entire world didn't just decide to start eating more in the 1970s for no reason and then get obese. As for what caused the broken lipostat? Gary Taubes think it's hyper-palatable food, I personally think it's vegetable oil, or rather an excess of linoleic acid that vegetable oils provide, far beyond what our biology requires.
The ExFatLoss diet (and high carb, low protein, low fat diets like the potato diet) are attempts to fix the lipostat by resaturating the body's fat stores. I recommended this one because CertainlyWorse was trying keto, and I think if keto is going to work then minimising polyunsaturated fats is the key part.
Crowstep
29d ago
Crowstep
1mo ago
Louise Perry (a British 'reactionary feminist') argues that agency is distributed on a bell curve, with some people being very agentic and some people being very passive/conformist. She also acknowledges that young women are particularly conformist, and so more vulnerable to doing things that are socially promoted (Louise was talking about Only Fans) even if they are damaging to the woman in question.
It's easy to focus on young women having sex because it's titillating, but I'm happy to accept the premise that lots of people need protection from their own choices by the state/society. Whether that means banning sports betting, making it harder to get drugs/alcohol, or for parents to stop their daughters from making poor choices about who to sleep with.
The state is a blunt instrument, of course, so it's better to have it regulate concrete things like gambling than messy things like sex.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Oh certainly they haven't just deleted all the stuff about the rape gangs.
My point was more that Pakistani clans who sexually tortured hundreds of thousands of native girls over several decades in a liberal democracy with the cooperation of various organs of the state probably deserves its own article.
In the same way that The Battle of Britain has its own article in addition to Strategic Bombing in WW2. For someone to delete the Battle of Britain article would be suspicious, particularly if the existence of the battle was a live political issue, as the rape gangs are.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Ah, I think the bit I was referencing was below the paywall. Here's what I was quoting:
- The Palestine protests
I recently wrote a post about the Palestine protests that sums up much of what I think here: Palestine is the end of the line for the New Left
Basically, I think that although Israel’s war in Gaza is unpopular, the Palestine protesters are earning few friends in the U.S., thanks to their support for even the most violent and savage armed resistance, their desire to forcibly and bloodily redraw national maps in the name of “decolonization”, their aggressive protest tactics, and the whiff of antisemitism around their movement.
But there’s another important effect of the Palestine protests besides boring and annoying the American populace. Leftists have attempted to subsume every progressive cause — climate change, racial justice, abortion rights, gender equality, trans rights, even affordable housing — into the Palestine issue. Many have started to call this the “omnicause”.
And because Palestinian revanchism is an unpopular cause, and because the protesters have generally acquitted themselves badly, Palestine threatens to drag down all the other progressive activist causes into an abyss of unpopularity. Climate activism, trans rights activism, etc. will now have a whiff of radicalism about them that they didn’t possess before — there will be a general understanding that folks like Greta Thunberg ultimately aim not at the redress of individual problems in the framework of our existing society, but at the violent overthrow of that society in the name of “decolonization”.
Most progressives are not leftists. Most thought Thunberg was cute when she was a kid shouting at old men about her stolen future, but will be less impressed by her keffiyeh-wearing incarnation. But leftist activists hurt the progressive cause, by giving a movement that should seem staid and responsible the whiff of 70s-style radicalism. Progressives are far more institutionally powerful than they were in the 70s — they command the majority of the professional and managerial classes, and they occupy positions of power in corporations, academia, and the government. But when leftist activists are out there setting the tone on national news night after night, it makes progressivism seems like a movement that will never stop, never be satisfied, and never settle down.
That perception will drive a lot of Americans in a conservative direction.
Crowstep
1mo ago
An article which has now been folded in to the general 'child sex abuse in the UK' article, which of course mirrors the laundering of Pakistani rape gangs that we saw in the Alexis Jay inquiry. Instead of denying Pakistani rape gangs, just muddy the waters by talking about all child sex abuse.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I love petty liguistic wars.
My personal favourite is the French one over what you call a pastry with chocolate in it.
Crowstep
1mo ago
You're right that there was no conspiracy of silence, there was a conspiracy of murmuring.
Bringing it to the attention of the world had the effect of kicking the British political class up the arse and forcing them to do more than the bare minimum needed to brush it back under the carpet (although Labour is certainly trying with its 'limited number of local enquiries' and 'short national audit').
Crowstep
1mo ago
I was about to post about this, I think the top comment on the subreddit post puts it best.
Holy vibe shift Batman
Between this, Steve Sailer's book tour and Elon letting the world know about the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK, it really does feel like something has shifted. The stuff that edgy rightoids were reading about 10 years ago is now just out there in the open (relatively speaking).
Wokism is over. It overplayed its hand. What comes next? I don't know but I'm excited to find out.
Crowstep
1mo ago
A podcast I listen to described anons archiving court transcripts from the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK as 'monks preserving scriptures during the dark ages'.
Just like how the woke college kids grew up and into positions of power, now the edgy memelords of yesteryear are growing up and entering the workforce too.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Unless you don't believe in the idea of marital rape, consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages.
A married woman has a lot more leverage against that sort of behaviour even outside of legal sanction. After all, a man has to actually live with his wife. Unless a man is willing to become a tyrant who is in constant conflict with the woman he shares a house with, he's going to listen to her preferences at least somewhat.
Not so for the disposable groupie/employee.
Crowstep
1mo ago
what does The Motte think about moderate drinking?
My vaguely remembered understanding is that, not only are their observation studies in people, there are also experiments with animals and a proposed mechanism. I think that makes the recommendation stronger than the typical associations drawn in nutrition science.
That said, I'm not going to drink less, or indeed more, because I think it'll reduce my risk of heart disease. Alcohol has enough negative effects for me that I can't see myself ever drinking more than I do now, which isn't much.
Crowstep
1mo ago
That's probably why the preference cascade has been so total: talk about culture and you get suppressed as a racist. Housing? Everyone gets it. No amount of gaslighting or talking will change reality.
Leading to this beautiful exchange from a couple of years ago.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I was (am? well, hopefully was) a 5-8 drinks a night kind of guy which, while clearly not good, doesn't really seem like "real alcoholism"
Speaking as someone who drinks occasionally, that really looks like alcoholism to me. Good to hear that you've been able to go cold turkey.
Have you considered naltrexone? It might be worth getting some on hand if you feel like going back on the bottle.
You can't hold back economic forces on your own. If a job is automatable, it will eventually be automated. in any case, automation is just a means to make human workers more productive. Which is what economic growth is, fundamentally.
In the long term, the way to make poor people richer is by increasing worker productivity in the countries those poor people live in, and therefore GDP per capita. Poor people in rich countries are wealthier than average people in poor countries because the rich countries have higher worker productivity, which benefits the poorest workers through cost disease and cheaper goods/services.
I honestly think you have a moral duty to automate those jobs. The benefits will outweigh the costs, even if said benefits are diffuse and the costs are concentrated.
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