Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
A lot of our GDP is in services, finance and real estate, not heavy industry.
But things like steel, rare earth metals, and oil are traded on world markets, so nominal GDP is very important. Domestic heavy industry is more important if you're at risk of sanctions by other countries.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Military Summary Channel will always make me smile when I remember him, just because of his "Mongolian Tactics" cope when talking about the loss of Kherson by the Russians, and similar setbacks in that period. I stopped following him as he became both less balanced and less amusing.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Civ 1 is very primitive and silly, but I really like the balance of simplicity and immersion in Civ 2. For me, it was the best balance of those two in the series (and in strategy games in general) though I never had time to properly learn Civ III onwards, because by that time I was a postgraduate student and I had very little time to learn new games that I might not enjoy.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
I wouldn't want to deny the existence of gholas.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Hunting heretics/Muslims/Jews gets conflated with hunting witches.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
I don't think there's ever been a point where a given leader was race or gender-swapped
A half-example: the female Zulu leader in Civ 2 was a gender-swapped Shaka.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Um actually black samurai were totally a thing historically. But even if they weren't, why does it matter and why are you so bothered about an ahistoric depiction of a black man pairing up with a young Japanese woman to kill a bunch of Japanese men? It's only a video game.
We need a general name for this two-step strategy of a claim + poisoning the well: P, and if you argue against P, then you are ungoodthinker.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
That seems like an unnecessarily high standard of what "victory" involves.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
There's also 'birthing persons' for to denote what would otherwise (problematically) be called real women.
Let's just hope that 'birthing vessels' isn't next: https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Axlotl_Tank
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
I find young men gain status from having somewhat, but not overly disagreeable opinions. The goldilocks zone is on the fringes of the overton window; you'll get shunned for throwing a roman salute, but merely tut-tutted and quietly respected for shrugging off the dotted-i's and crossed-t's of political correctness.
Absolutely. If you're not a "Fiscal Conservative, Social Liberal" or "I think it's men's responsibility to be providers", then how can she try to civilize you? Note the usefulness of underlying attractive traits (financial ambition, provider mindset etc.) whereas whining about something is never a good way to seduce a woman.
Even my ultra-socialist students tolerate "I'm pro-markets" and it doesn't affect my evaluations. If anything, it makes my approval of their coursework (which tends to be relatively good, compared at least to the median deeply apathetic and relativist student) more meaningful to them.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Sure, being a mother kicks maternal instinct into overdrive, but it also channels and focuses it on your offspring.
Anecdote: my mother was a hippie liberal commie until she had children, then she has gradually drifted right, but she apparently became very conservative on law-and-order issues more or less as soon as she had her first child. Lifestyle wise, she ended up going 75% tradwife and 100% Christian, having been a classic careerist feminist. Talk about a "transformative experience."
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).
I have noticed that older women are sometimes extremely skilled at exploiting this tendency to try and fulfil expectations in younger women. I recently talked with someone doing her second PhD (an obvious masochist) and she said that, while her first supervisor (an older woman) had been able to run rings around her emotionally, she now found that female academics were less able to "emotionally manipulate" (her words) her.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
none of the groups targeted by the communist regime meet this description
Not all, but some, including large numbers of Red Army soldiers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union
Never underestimate the capacity of communist regimes to target a wide range of people.
You would surely have seen that the main thing they talk about is about how fiscal policy already manages the macro system with automatic stabilizers for the last 80+ years, not requiring congress to manually fiddle with tax rates all the time to respond to demand and inflation
There's nuance between "fiscal policy to control demand" and "manually fiddle with tax rates all the time". I never attributed the latter to MMT advocates. Please read this comment again: https://www.themotte.org/post/995/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/210377?context=8#context
And you would have heard Wray say in every book or every talk that we could certainly get some demand-pull inflation before true full employment if simply pumping fiscal stimulus via general spending, which is a demonstrated lesson from the 60s keynesians
"An approximately flat SRAS curve". Please read my comment again: https://www.themotte.org/post/995/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/210377?context=8#context
As for your last paragraph, sorry: I am not going to go through the dynamic I mentioned in the comment you responded to, when I have literally explained how I have waded through the same incredibly tedious rhetorical strategies (strawmanning, motte-and-bailey etc.) from MMTists in the past. Unfortunantely, nothing you have said makes me expect discussing the issue with you to be any different. I am not going to go through dismantling a whole set of unattributed strawmannings again. Based on how you're trying to frame things, I could show chapter-and-verse that every economists believes X, but you could still say, "Ah, but here's a politician who said..." Can you try to empathise how tedious that would be for me?
But please read my comment again, especially before you make assertions about whether I have read things or read them carefully.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Such a discussion would be hard. MMT advocates tend to see themselves as primarily stating a profound critique of standard theories of public finance that is true as a simple matter of institutional facts + accounting, whereas I see them as warming up a few ideas that almost all Keynesians abandoned long ago. So the very terms of the debate would likely be messed up. This has been my experience debating MMTists in the past, e.g. they say, "Do you admit X?", I show that X has been standard econ for 100+ years, and they say "Oh, so you admit X!", I say "Of course", and then they say, "Well, this politician says otherwise, and he did PPE at Oxford, so economists must teach otherwise!"
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Bingo.
I looked deep into MMT many years ago to find out what descriptive claims they made that were different from mainstream economics. I found three:
(1) Confidence in fiscal policymakers to e.g. time fiscal policy to control demand.
(2) An approximately flat SRAS curve, though many of its advocates don't realise this and haven't read about SRAS curves, because they have never read an intro macro textbook. In plain English, it's like an on/off model of how increased demand affects prices: until full employment, stimulus is more or less non-inflationary. Mainstream Keynesians used to believed this.
(3) Various Old Keynesian claims about the monetary policy or interest rate changes, though this is not universal among MMT advocates.
That's it. Everything else is motte-and-bailey, rhetoric, distractions which have performed the useful function of hiding MMT from most rigorous scrutiny, or uninteresting errors that some advocates of MMT make when they mix up normative with descriptive claims about how e.g. the Treasury works.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
I'm illustrating the motte-and-bailey by analogy.
"I don't want CP in video games" is the motte. "This particular censorship is desirable, at a minimum" is the bailey.
I think it's true of how some men think of sexually relating to women. Also some women: a lot of romance novels are explicitly about emotionally subjugating a powerful man, with a "he gets down on his knees and begs" scene being a very common trope of the genre. Not so much "civilizing a bad boy into a mature man" as "having control over a bad boy".
IIRC, romance novels are disproportionately read by middle-aged women and AFAIK Tatism appeals to low status/young men. Two of the bottom feeder groups of their respective sexes, who fantasise about debased devotion of a partner in the absence of perceived opportunities for healthy romantic fulfillment. The equivalent submissive pathologies are femdom pornography for men and rape fantasies for women, both of which seem to be largely a matter of despair at forming a mutually loving connection.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
not wanting underaged girls depicted sexually in video games
That's the motte.
You don't want women to get raped as a result of wearing immodest clothing, do you?
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
Calling a specific subsection of women unrapeable is a pretty clear implication that you consider other subsections acceptable to rape
What does "clear" mean here? Reliable? Or subjectively persuasive?
I also think you're probably wrong about the semantics. "Raping Jane is impossible because she's so ugly" doesn't ordinarily imply that "Raping Sally is permissible because she's attractive." That's conflating two different types of modality: moral permissibility and practical possibility.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
In the feminist mindset, rape is an expression of power, not an act of lust, and hence it is quite disconnected with a woman's attractiveness.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
it would be if the genders were reversed, like in that South Park episode
You don't think many teenage girls rank male classmates?
I remember ranking boys in terms of cuteness (albeit ordinally rather than quantitatively) being a repeat conversation among some girls from age about 11 onwards. How else can you work out which boys you can date without getting bullied?
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
My annoyance with some of the other issues here aside, what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime?
It's classic anxiety behaviour. When one is worried about X, but doing something about X seems hopeless, then worry about Y instead, provided Y seems X-ish and it seems like progress on Y is more optimistic. Politicians are under pressure to do something about women being murdered. This is something, and it's "kinda about" women being murdered, or at least violence against women, or at least implied violence against women, or at least violent words about women, or at least nasty words about women. By the supposed transitivity of "aboutness", that's about women being murdered.
Harlequin5942
6mo ago
You wouldn't want to be a black person in Europe because the people wouldn't like you and would consider you inferior and possibly not human.
True to some extent, but people will tolerate terrible treatment if the price is right. Just look at migrant workers in the Gulf States.
I'd compare it more to Afghanistan after 1979: a conflict where the West was never going to intervene and expected a simple Soviet assimilation, but found that it was possible to bleed the Soviets and wear down their will to fight, without losing any Western troops. Of course, Ukraine is not a guerilla conflict, but it is also one where Russia has been frustrated militarily and faces accelerating costs. When Putin dies/retires/becomes senile, there might also be a similar period of instability to the USSR in the 1980s, since there is no young, popular, and competent successor.
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