JTarrou
4mo ago
Well you've really changed my mind with that bit of scintillating criticism.
JTarrou
4mo ago
Nonsense, we've never given weapons to some indigenous radical group because they were fighting the Russians, only to have them turn on us once that war was over!
JTarrou
4mo ago
You've made a good description of political extremism, but not it seems to me the left/right divide.
There are further complications: The discrete policy positions are completely untethered to the right or the left. Is gun control right or left? Well, it depends a lot on whether you're talking about France in 1790 or the US in the 2000s. Is war right or left? Depends on the war! Is trade protectionism right or left? You get the idea.
Then you have the problem that political coalitions are shifting constantly, pressure groups, identities rise and fall etc. "Gay" was a big political identity for twenty years or so. Black people shifted parties, and will do so again, so which one is the racists? The liberal assimilationist jews are on one side, but the nationalistic hardcore jews are on the other! Which group hates the jews?
I think Sailer's "leapfrogging loyalty" remains the best predictor of what is meant by "right" and "left" so far, but it's far from perfect.
JTarrou
4mo ago
Capitalism is an economic system connected to a society that is primarily status driven. It's superiority at transferring goods and services does not imply an immunity to spending the resulting profits on signaling.
That's why capitalism works. It's not for itself.
JTarrou
4mo ago
When you own Harvard Law, everything you do is legal. The DNC owns Harvard Law.
JTarrou
4mo ago
The Palestinians were in Mandatory Palestine peacefully living their lives
Really? Nothing happened in 1936-39?
JTarrou
4mo ago
When the British took over Mandatory Palestine, the Ottoman Empire had been governing it for like half a millennia since anything interesting had happened there
Hmm. Let's do some rough napkin math.
Mandatory Palestine started in 1920, half a millennium back is 1420. Did anything much happen then? Well, let's start.
The Mamluks of Egypt were ruling the area, and had since they kicked the Crusaders out in the previous century.
In the sixteenth century the Turks invaded, and the levant came under Ottoman rule.
In the seventeenth there was the great Druze revolt, which destroyed several major cities.
In the eighteenth, around the time of the French and Indian War in America, local elites revolted against the Ottomans, drove them from the Levant and formed an independent Emirate under Sheikh Zahir al-Umar. This lasted some decades, from around 1730 to 1774, before the Ottomans were able to regain control of the area.
Twenty years later, Napoleon invaded, won, then lost at Acre.
In 1831, Egypt re-conquered the levant from the Ottomans, but withdrew nine years later. The Ottomans regained nominal control in 1840.
So, when Zionism kicked up in the late 19th century, the Ottoman grip on the area had been slipping for centuries, living people remembered independence, French control, Egyptian control and the Ottoman was the most recent. The actual ability of the empire to govern the area was almost completely sub-contracted to local sheiks and mullahs, which is why the British-sponsored Arab Revolt of the first world war actually worked.
JTarrou
5mo ago
Of course the guys fighting are going to be mad and talk some wild shit. Some of them might even do something about it.
It's called a war. That's how things work.
Go ask the lads in the 82nd Airborne how they'd prosecute the war in Gaza. Even without the personal connection, you'd get an earful.
JTarrou
5mo ago
My read is that China will take Taiwan, and they'll do it very similarly to the way they did Hong Kong, and almost certainly not in the next twelve months.
The Taiwanese consider themselves chinese, large sections of their population already support union with China, the Taiwanese military is ridiculous and corrupt. In time politics, soft power, economics and possible chinese control of the south pacific will give China a beachhead in Taiwan without invasion. Say what you will about the Chicoms, they plan for the future.
My guess is the only thing that would trigger an invasion is a tottering Communist Party which needs a popular war to stay in the saddle.
JTarrou
5mo ago
This is common. I recall a case where two robbers, one armed, held up a place and shot someone. Both were convicted as the shooter.
Both had fingerprints on the gun and testified the other guy pulled the trigger. Prosecutors had no problem convicting them both for a crime that logically only one could have committed, the other being an accessory.
JTarrou
5mo ago
I know a place, you call a number they will put you up in a hotel for two weeks, pay you for training for two weeks, give you a company truck and all sorts of equipment, which you can take home. You start at twenty-five an hour, with raises every six months, and you'll never work less than sixty hours a week. Literally any joe off the street can grab this job any time they want. Rehab, felonies, whatever. You have to work outside, in all weather, six days a week and in the prime building season, a hundred plus hours a week. I worked there for a year back when wages were lower, made ~85k my first year and quit from the burnout.
The maternal instinct for the children is mixed with adoration for murderous, rapey barbarians. Personally, I suspect the second to be stronger than the first, but the first to be more what they talk about. Women love a killer, but which killer they love is a function of their social class and politics.
In the '70's, rich white girls used to form terrorist cells, break black felons out of prison, serve as a harem and follow him into battle against the evil white people, by which they meant assassinating black people.
JTarrou
5mo ago
You're right, but time preference and discipline are not randomly distributed, and half the population will be in the bottom half of it anyway.
To the degree that the behavior of those with poor decision making skills, short time horizons, impulse control problems etc. should be controlled, the question becomes then at what level of society to accomplish this control, and what are the upsides and downsides of each?
Gossip is relatively low stakes, but can lead to larger consequences, and isn't that reliable.
Mass public shaming campaigns ala DARE tend to be ineffective at best and counterproductive (DEI) at worst.
Institutional norms are good if you can keep them, a sort of sub-legal process of who gets to have what sort of job, or any job at all. Lots of problems with due process and hypersensitivity to public pressure campaigns, which do work on corporations better than teenagers.
Or you could just sort of build it into the legal structure, don't actually ban the behavior just barrage it with legal inconveniences like smokers or gun owners.
But ultimately, every society has a lot of people who are not going to do the pro-social thing reliably in large enough numbers unless their behavior is..... controlled is a strange word. Perhaps "averaged control" is better. Some people always swim against the current, and some amount of that is good.
The real rules of every society are always enforced. How well they work and on what percentage of the population fluctuates widely.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Slave morality can be exploited by non-slaves
There is no non-slave morality
JTarrou
6mo ago
Not at all. Straightforwardly, the religion preaches slavery (to Christ). Politically, it accepts actual slavery and counsels christian slaves to uphold the institution. Early christianity was big among the slaves of Rome. And at the metaphysical level, it counsels submission to greater powers, both spiritually to god, and secularly to Rome. Top to bottom, at every level of analysis and description, Christianity is for slaves and those who aspire to slavery.
The wild Teutone women who hanged their children from their wagons and slew their defeated husbands fleeing the battlefield before committing mass suicide were not Christians. They at least preferred death at the personal and cultural level to slavery and assimilation. This is why there are no non-slave major religions.
JTarrou
6mo ago
The exaltation of the pathetic. The moral superiority of whoever is the biggest victim.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Not a Nietzschean, but his basic description of mass religion tracks just fine. Not just abrahamic, I would argue every large religion is a religion of submission, of slavery. Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism etc. all count. All are functionally about convincing the ruled to keep to their place.
Non-slave religions cannot spread beyond a tiny martial minority, nor survive social progress or the achievement of wealth and comfort. The slaves outnumber the free a thousand to one. Religion must take its adherents where they are.
JTarrou
6mo ago
You're passing a progressive or nietzschean interpretation of those elements as their true, indisputable meaning. Consider the possibility those teach self-discipline ("bearing the cross") rather than as statements bashing those high in status.
You're sanewashing a two thousand year old Judean mystic/revolutionary. Consider the possibility that Jesus meant what he said, and Paul meant what he said, and the whole religion is straightforward.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Let me take an aspect of this: Regardless of what any other internet rando says, Christianity is the organizing principle of western civ. It is also indisputably a slave religion of slave morality for the sort of people who aspire to slavery. As such I find it practically, morally and metaphysically ridiculous.
I also think that the shift in the sixties was the beginning of a new version of the old religion adopting the skin of academia in an end run around the establishment of a state religion.
"Wokeness" is just the latest christian heresy, with state backing. Nor will it be the last.
JTarrou
6mo ago
IQ is a proxy of a proxy. At the top end of the scoring distribution, the proxy stops working, because the sort of people so totally maxed-out on one ability are incapable of living normal lives or talking productively to normal people.
Sort of how height is predictive of NBA ability, but the tallest people can't play sports.
JTarrou
6mo ago
If by "high IQ" you mean an SD or two above average, I absolutely agree. Being smarter than the average bear is a big advantage. If by "high IQ" you mean "higher IQ means more success", then it's obviously wrong. There's a bell curve to functionality for IQ too. Everyone who runs an institution is probably above average IQ. But virtually none of the smartest people in the world are in charge of much of anything. Leaders are also all high in ambition, social dominance, that sort of thing as well.
Intelligence is hyper-optimized. Like, for instance, physical skills. Good athletes are not necessarily smart, but they tend to be above average, and at the top of any sport, they are usually quite smart. But at the top end, say, bodybuilding, the proxies being chased are so remote from reality that it ceases to be functional. People who wind up in charge of things disproportionately have some athletic background or pursuit, although not necessarily a high-level one. Does being athletic predict success? Yeah, kinda. Does that mean the strongest person is always in charge? Not even a little. If you could invent a test that would score athleticism, you'd see a good correlation with both sporting success and with life achievement. Should we re-orient society to min-max this AQ?
I'm not bagging on IQ so much as urging people to consider other factors and a wider context. Yes, intelligence is important for a whole lot of things. So is everything else.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Think a bit more deeply, and it will seem far less important. The only reason we fetishize IQ is because it predicts academic performance and we use academia as the filtering mechanism for our elites.
Yes, if we keep using academia as the way we pick our upper classes, IQ is going to be important, and the current black population will be at a disadvantage for a long time. But that's a big "if". If we chose our elites using the olympics, asians would be at a pretty strong disadvantage.
The problem is not relatively minor (but important at the margins) IQ differentials, it's a social system that outsources elite production to an IQ-loaded institution.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Doesn't it?
No. The materialist world is where we live, but we humans are sentient. Meaning we don't live solely in the materialist world, we interface with it through our brains, which are full of delusion and fantasy. Delusion and fantasy are how we overcome the randomness of the universe.
This is all old existentialist philosophy, with roots in stoicism. Camus said that the whole point of life was the revolt against death. To live and experience is to deny death for one more day. Through our offspring (genetic, artistic, ideological, political) we live beyond our own lives, and deny death into the future. It is our task to live our lives as seems best to us, to enjoy what we can, overcome what we cannot, and fight it out to the last.
The last act is bloody, however brave be all the rest of the play. But our own personal experiences are tiny, insignificant things, important only to us. There's six billion people breeding and fighting, all trying to get to the next stage, the next generation, into the future.
It's not about the words, it's about the power to force others to change their behavior. It's never about the words.
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