Pasha
Defend Kebab
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User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1d ago
For some reason it didn’t occur to me that people pay for any of this AI stuff
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1d ago
Right now I am rather wealthy in both aspects but this is a while ago and I was just a broke backpacker back then
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1d ago
As someone who admittedly did something similar to the described tourist at some point in my life, the biggest difference was that I am not a particularly rich or exceptionally handsome guy, but some of the girls I could date easily were definitely the top of their societies in these aspects. (Also I am not particularly “white” to a westerner but in the third world I am. Weird dualism of being Turkish..)
People are generally accepting of class differences and its consequences in their own societies to sometimes extreme degrees. But they tend to get angry and develop some class consciousness very quickly when it’s the foreigners doing the same and disrupting the existing cultural norms. Perhaps it’s because this also bothers local elites and they are the only people whose opinions actually really count.
The great genius of American world empire compared to the previous European attempts was to avoid appointing any visible American rulers to its colonies but instead co-opt the local elites to run their own countries like colonies and share the spoils through opaque financial means.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
8d ago
How is this different than just going to chatgpt.com?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11d ago
This, plus it locks you out of a lot of initiative. Many situations in which you could offer a solution to some work problem and advance your career will entirely fly by you.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
17d ago
I don’t know who he actually is and what is dr x but what makes you think angry young men cannot be closer to truth than calm old men?
Pasha
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18d ago
I think Kulak is either insane or at least relatively good at acting the part of the mad prophet but in general I can’t help but think he is closer to the truth than most other people in these internet spaces.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
21d ago
As someone living the “not very well integrated brownish expat working a lot in high earning sector in the West” life it makes me rather nervous to see the calibre and the intentions of the people supposedly vouching for my interests in this debate.
The social contract I came here for is simple. I broadly like the society these people created. I don’t think a different people could/would create this society so I am happy people of broadly the same ancestry and culture stay in control of it. In exchange of living in it and having my children become a proper part of it I can pay a lot in taxes and generally be a modal citizen at the sidelines of the society.
I am aware of the costs I am imposing on the society here. I am pricing the residents out of the housing market, causing some wage suppression, watering down their culture and social cohesion and giving them mixed-race grandkids who doesn’t quite look like them.
The desirable scenario for me is that immigrants are not too high in numbers and generally similar in profile to me so that the tensions aren’t too big and our posterity assimilates without attracting too much negative attention.
The very undesirable scenario for me is that high profile individuals shout it to the regular people from the top of their lungs that their culture is worthless, their children are deadweights, and they will use armies of people who look somewhat like me to teach them a lesson.
This is a very dangerous game they are playing. Many PMC immigrants seem entirely incapable of sensing the zeitgeist and subterranean societal currents of the countries they are living in. The people from the subcontinent are especially bad at this
Pasha
Defend Kebab
21d ago
Another Covid era is impossible exactly because of the Covid era.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
21d ago
Just finished Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China. There should be some regulation on how long book subtitles can be.
It’s basically a Chinese guy’s real life rags to billionaire story. He is quite open about how their wealth was almost entirely made through mediating various forms of corruption between CCP officials. He tries to spin his own role in this corruption many times and it’s definitely tailored for attracting sympathy from western audiences. But overall quite a fascinating book.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
23d ago
You will never get anywhere in such a discussion unless you’re willing to admit that race is much more than just the tone of your skin, and males/females of different races are indeed substantially more or less attractive than each other in certain dimensions.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
27d ago
Just addressing the sentences about the author’s dad, it’s extremely common and normal to find people in the third-world who are practically white supremacists in the sense that they will believe and express sentiment to the effect that white people are superior in some inherent ways.
It doesn’t even necessarily imply affection, people hold such views while still being very nationalistic and somewhat hostile to the West sometimes.
It’s typically only after they had some exposure to the western style leftism that they will learn to express their sentiments regarding the superiority of the western peoples in politically correct ways
Pasha
Defend Kebab
27d ago
I don’t have any research to back this up at all, but as a generally bright student I always felt that the school tried to teach me too many things with the inevitable boredom and time waste as you forget all that stuff inevitably.
I believe very strongly in just encouraging/letting kids read and write as much as possible until a certain age of mental maturity (probably early teenager years). School should be almost entirely focused on this besides giving them some life skills they need as children (arithmetic, basic science facts, national identity building, how to cross the road etc). Vast majority of what I remember actually learning in primary school is from the books I read plus some maths classes, Turkish nationalism and earth-turns-around-the-sun-which-is-a-star type of facts.
It shouldn’t waste their time with busy work. A common failure mode is we desire to teach young kids things their brains aren’t yet capable of properly understanding, then end up having to teach them a dumbed down version which they will learn later was actually not correct. It’s profoundly useless.
If a kid is especially talented in a field at an early age, they can be directed to relevant books with some tutoring. If your kid is actually capable of understanding trigonometry at 9, they won’t need endless busywork homework sheets.
After around teenager years if the kid turns out to be smart and interested enough they can continue to get much deeper education in a limited number of subjects. Their brains are finally ready for it and they can have rapid progress without dumbing down the subjects. It’s also at this point that majority of kids should be funnelled towards practical/vocational education. It’s incredibly useless and akin to torture to force not very bright kids to sit down and pretend to learn highly g loaded subjects until they are 18.
It might be difficult to give such an experience to your kids if the education system where you live is set up with opposite assumptions (ie daycare and social mobility activism centers). In that case I personally think it’s ethically admissible to simulate this by relieving your child off the busywork as much as possible (ie help them cheat at bullshit homework)
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Incidentally, divorce/family laws of similar vein (i.e. practically written by feminist activists and applied very unfairly by a judiciary motivated to protect women at any cost) caused the most major fracture in Islamist politics in Turkey since Erdogan's rise 20+ years ago, with a promising new party (led by Erdogan's old mentor's son) spawning around it.
I don't think almost anyone in his cabinet personally would agree with these laws or their applications personally, but even after achieving near-dictatorship level control of the country, Erdogan and his Islamists have been seemingly powerless to stop this drift.
Non/anti-Western politics are often really brain-dead and are starved of human capital. They are really bad at actually articulating and planning for a society that escapes the slow but steady drift towards the latest Western fashions.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Perhaps the unexpected Zerg rush of HTS was all Biden’s doing to beat the curse
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
most of my favourite destinations have been quite out of the way and not on the average tourist's radar. The ability to make these discoveries is an integral part of travel for me.
How does this combine with lacking free time then? Do you just spend a lot of time researching
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Are you aware of any reliable write-ups about pregnancy/childhood vaccinations?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I have done quite a lot of "discover the hidden things" type of traveling and I can tell from my experiences that most of those hidden things were quite crap. You need a lot of free time, bravery, tolerance for discomfort, language skills, executive function, social acumen etc etc to come up with the good things. Vast majority of people don't have almost any of these, and most backpacker types lose it mostly as they age from early 20s as well.
I have a job now, I can't just fuck off to Colombia for 3 months without a plan. Also my back hurts randomly even with regular workouts, nice bed, ergonomic chair etc. I can't imagine anymore spending 6 days sleeping in a hammock on an Amazon riverboat filled with chicken or probably even the cheap hostel beds.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
There is strong “bubble” energy in the crypto markets and aside from their bad-rep for collapsing, bubbles can actually be pretty good for driving change and innovation: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-boom-by-byrne-hobart-and-tobias
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Turkish government has immediately made announcements to the effect but I have dim hopes of even Syrians in Turkey leaving. The ones in Europe look basically impossible without a very radical shift
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Did anyone other than Erdoğan (and Netanyahu) politically survive Assad from his original set of enemies though?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
This is pretty accurate in general but I also want to note that Turkish foreign policy was controlled by different groups back when we got so deeply entangled in the civil war (ie former PM Ahmet Davutoğlu and very CIA-aligned Gülen movement). There was a strong expectation of West getting directly involved and Assad collapsing very soon. This pretty much only didn’t happen because Obama
I’m not sure the current Erdoğan government members would have acted the same way 10 years ago when the uprising started. But they inherited the situation and need to continue state policy.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I will be very surprised if there are any non-Sunni groups left in parts where they aren’t a solid demographic majority. And even in those areas they will survive likely only due to the communities organising for self-defence and Turkey’s control over the new Syrian government.
What’s up with Nasim Taleb? I read Black Swan recently and found it generally insightful. But the guy constantly boomerposts on twitter and gets into pretty stupid arguments calling people racist for mentioning IQ
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