Pasha
Defend Kebab
No bio...
User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3d ago
Watched the Conclave (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20215234/) at the cinema the other day. Visually well made (although it is just difficult to portray Catholicism without some impressive visuals), somewhat okay but uninteresting story with no clear point and an incredibly disappointing ending. Couldn't stop comparing it to another depiction of a Catholic conclave, from 2011's Borgia (the European made one: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1736341/)
Which made me realize that I am not sure if I have ever watched a movie that depicted a modern religious institution well. Not about some humble believer of the religion, not a sob story about how the religion doesn't match up to modern liberal sensitivities etc.
I am looking for a well-made movie about modern-day Japanese monks, or Latin American/African evangelizers or Iranian Mullahs or whatever is out there. Does anyone have any recommendations for me?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
5d ago
There are other places in the "West" than the USA. Education is essentially free in many of these places for example. Or free until the kid is 18+, at which point the parents presumably had a lot of time to financially become stable. Otherwise student loans and scholarships exist. And most people don't go to university anyway.
If you actually check the numbers, you might be surprised to find out the fertility numbers are nowadays actually lower in many parts of non-West even compared to the "West", or plummeting so fast that likely they will be lower in a couple years. Turkey has had lower fertility rates than Germany in the last couple years for example.
Westerners aren't (entirely) some weird rugged individuals. Many grandparents help their children quite a bit with child-rearing and overall financials in early adulthood. You seem to worried specifically about raising children in the West as an immigrant without family or savings.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
12d ago
I have volunteered in a bunch of elections in Turkey. I find it mind-boggling how it is to possible to NOT count and report almost everything in 1-2 hours max after the polls close. It was always really easy to do the counting and just wrap up the reporting after a long and sometimes annoying day of explaining to public again and again how to vote and what they can't do in the booth etc.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
24d ago
I can’t make much in the way of an economic argument but it’s extremely obvious that Chinese have intentionally been using state support and dumping to strip and move entire industries from western countries to China. This has created a parasitic class of rich people in the west whose entire wealth comes from middle manning either the 1)importation of this production to the west or the 2)sale of western financial assets to China which are needed to sustain western trade deficits.
There is nothing organic and laissez faire about any of this. It’s very intentional and it has been very destructive for almost everyone involved. Western working classes are extremely wage suppressed and largely lost the discipline required for industrial production. Middle classes are corrupted into believing their laptop jobs (which usually simply supervise one of the two legs of this trade I mentioned above, or extract profits from it in some indirect way). Cheap credit due to massive Chinese demand for western financial products has destroyed any integrity and competency left in western political classes. Free money plugs every hole anyway so they just keep making disastrous decisions non-stop with no apparent consequences.
Large sections of the Chinese society seem to have benefited but overall it’s not good for humanity that economic “growth” comes from shifting labour and environment externalities around to world instead of technology. We only get richer if we have more robots. Substitution of one European worker and his advanced machinery earning 20x with 10 third worlders with no machinery earning 1x, is bad for humanity.
So I don’t know if tariffs are the right policy to stop this decay but it’s absurd to oppose them as an obvious wrong policy simply because they don’t fit in with some notion of free trade and markets invisible hand. None of this process is classic economics at all. It’s state policy and distortion all the way.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Discovered a good source of audiobooks so suddenly my book consumption skyrocketed. Listening to Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth at the moment. It’s a hell of a book.
Also slowly progressing through a physical copy of God Emperor of Dune. Things became pretty weird at the end of the last book and has no sign of slowing down.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Assuming this is your real sentiment and not just trolling, have you ever been in a team attempting something truly difficult? Not just something that needs lots of structured man-hours and money, but something you don't even know if possible, and other people shy away from?
Leadership really REALLY matters then. It is not the only thing that matters, but you can have every other ingredient aplenty and it will never work without someone truly exceptional leading it.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
if you’re the kind of Ghanaian wealthy enough to go through 10+ years of tertiary education in the US
Yes a lot of such cases are already local elites, but not at all. Scholarships can do wonders in this category if you were a bit savvy as a teenager (or your parents were)
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I have similar experiences with European healthcare. People don't care much about "average life expectancy" type of stats when they judge healthcare quality typically but simply how easy it is for them to get attention when they feel they need it. Also European healthcare is typically heavily drained by old people and tries to salvage costs by gatekeeping young people which doesn't help perceptions either.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
That is correct. The unvoiced assumption of my post was that Taiwan is not self-sufficient and cannot survive without open shipping lanes and so any technology that makes it easy to sink ships is very bad news for it
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Hey that is me sometimes.
Well sort of. I don't know what those Indians are smoking but as a Turkish guy living in Western Europe for a while at this point, I do sometimes get into discussions with friends of similar background to the tune of "here things aren't actually better sometimes huh?".
A lot of it comes down to all of us being potential upper-class candidates back home, way above average in education and social stature and earning good money etc. Very few things can really substitute for relative social standing. It is difficult to get any above-mediocre social standing in Europe as a first-gen immigrant. So some of what you are observing is snarky comments from bitter people, but they have good personal reasons for being bitter.
GDP is a fine indicator but it will hide a lot from you in terms of living standards if you are ignoring costs, housing and taxes. For example Turkish PPP is at 44k, while German PPP is 62k from quick googling (Greece 41k lol). That is not such a massive difference. Pretty much all Anglo countries and Western Europe is suffering from gigantic housing problems, especially in major cities, especially effecting people who by definition could not have gotten into the mortgage market 10 years ago (i.e. young immigrants you are most likely to come across in white-collar and university settings). High progressive taxation systems are crippling for people who feel they deserve an upper class lifestyle and are trying to build it up with high-value professional labour income. You are basically slaving away for funding the boomer retirees of your host country. These boomers aren't even your own family so you won't benefit from this even in the form of inheritances. This creates massive resentment.
Often the first-tier cities of decent third world countries are actually quite decent places to be. They tend not to have "progressive" policing structures so ambient crime can be less of an issue (big variance here). They often have ample housing, and recently built. The infrastructure is often much newer.
And lastly, don't underestimate how much cheap low-class labour can improve one's life quality and how difficult it is to get accustomed to living without it.
So the comparisons come from a mix of real and perceived advantages of the home country, as well as people expecting an upper-class lifestyle not finding it in their host country. Also India is definitely not it, but a lot of "emerging" countries "emerged" quite a lot in the last decades and sometimes the perceptions didn't quite catch up in the West (and GDP is just not very good for comparisons between service and industry based economies)
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Surely blockading an island is much easier thanks to these drones, rather than the other way around? Chinese can swarm any ship going towards the island with the said drones. Cherry on top is that vast majority of the quad drones used in Ukraine by both sides is made in China.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it.
The concept of "Deep State" is one of the only exports of Turkish political discourse to the wider Western world (you are welcome).
While some Americans such as you came up with explanations as to how it "actually" denotes something else more inline with your own worldview, no the actual concept of Deep State very much describes an inner polity that actually runs the country while staying embedded deep inside the visible state.
This makes a lot of sense in the local context of Turkey and similar shakier Western-aligned countries (Greece, Egypt etc but even for example Italy). These countries often had a core of NATO aligned bureaucrats and military/intelligence officers who coordinated with each other to manipulate or bypass the wider political process for important decisions. These structures were on hyperdrive during the Cold War but they did not disappear overnight afterwards and usually morphed into different shapes.
As the world nears a new era where there is genuine competition and danger for the US Empire, and the politicians and regular bureaucrats cannot be trusted with certain decisions, it is not a coincidence that some of these groups are reactivating and flexing their muscles.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
That’s not a “mechanism”. What would be the actual mechanism behind this proposed effect?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I have always avoided commenting on your posts because I don't like to give advice to people whose mental state I cannot categorize at some basic level. But I will chime in a bit.
Your stream of consciousness is coming off really badly. You keep obsessing about a couple of topics repeatedly. It really feels like you could use some chemical stabilization. Why are you conspiring so much with psychologists to get Ritalin? Isn't this stuff easily available in Thailand?
I strongly believe you would benefit from putting your family out of your mind for some decent amount of time. It is very difficult to change your parents' culturally ingrained behavior modes towards you. Even with best parents, 24yo guy living at home will lead to conflict. So be a man about it and leave. Stop thinking about your brother or your grandpa or your parents' relationship or whatever. That is a ridiculous way to spend your mental energy. Fix your own life first.
24 is not so young anymore but it is not a late age at all. Depending on your genetics and self care, you will likely not see too much body decay for the next 10-15 years or so. You should seriously stop obsessing so much about some bad decisions you made some years ago. Most people waste their teenage years in some way or another.
You shun doing any salaried work but you should realize that having some experience in the industry, connecting like-minded technically skilled people, having some cash savings, CV entries that can open you doors, being able to obtain bank loans based on your past financial history etc are quite significant benefits. You are very unlikely to succeed at creating a startup without any of these. It is easy to ridicule "leetcode junkies" but at the end of the day getting moderately good at programming has been an enormously high EV activity in the last decades if you lack the social skills necessary for most other high paying careers. Even if you don't get to a nice place and decide to start your own business later, it is very useful to observe possible gaps in an industry from inside.
I am very familiar with the backpacker/digital nomad paradise parts of 3rd world. They are often filled to the brim with 1st world losers/hustlers who are trying to do some sort of passport/living costs arbitrage (or worse). Most of these people fail but have a good time in the meanwhile. You should not try to imitate these people with your Indian passport and lack of backup funds. On the contrary, you have much better prospects as a young ambitious guy if you do the opposite move and move towards concentrations of economic activity instead of away from it.
Above all, good luck and remember that you are very very far away from the rock bottom.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I saw a coworker take notes with one and found it super cool and looked into the models a while ago. Ridiculously expensive. These devices basically cost iPad prices. And many seems to not be even that good for their most basic use case of functioning like an e-notebook.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
With caveats: I am not American, never been to a proper frat/sorority environment in my life as described in the articles etc
But I have gone through a pretty selective elite-adjacent boarding school education in my own country. I have gone through and applied hazing myself and have experienced a lot of the best and worst things such an environment can provide.
At its best, pretty much nothing else in life can provide the type of connection you can build with people with whom you go through some group humiliation ritual with at a formative age. And the rituals are typically not that bad and somewhat fun for even the victims.
At its worst these initiations simply get hijacked by the people with worst sociopathic tendencies. Typically violent for guys or emotionally abusive for girls.
I was in a much more intellectually rigorous environment than what’s described here, but the heavy group pressures to conform to certain modes and looks were definitely omnipresent. And typically it provided most people with a productive script for how to behave at an age where they typically have absolutely no clue.
But also at its worst, it was very heavy on the small minority who couldn’t conform or weren’t accepted for a variety of reasons. Even led to suicide attempts etc. Also such group dynamics are very difficult to control in a top down manner so typically it’s seen as very undesirable by people who desire to do social engineering (in the current context this would be the woke crowd, we had different pressures back then).
Other commenters are totally right about the “race to the bottom” dynamics that happens in such environments and how it can destroy group cohesion and invalidate institutional goals. Especially obviously around sex, alcohol and drugs but also other type of group-defective behaviour such as academic misconduct, honesty, helpfulness towards peers etc. You need social policing. Not because it produces the best outcomes for each specific case (ie it sucks for the girl whose ex leaks her photos), but to protect the group. Especially young people will lack much of a personal moral compass and constantly be probing what they can get away with for personal social advancement. If there are no social repercussions for that girl (and the guy who leaked this stuff!!) then you will have dozens of nudes/racy photos circulating in no time and hogging all the sexual interest from girls who aren’t comfortable with immodesty.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I highly doubt they spent any noticeable fraction of their total capacity yesterday. This is homemade gear not some artefact they bought from soviets half a century ago (like most US enemy gear)
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Although I wouldn’t put it past Israeli politicians to think about this, I find it a very unlikely scenario
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Theory time: Israel is pushing very hard to start a regional war with US involvement before US elections so the next president (the one that won’t be a zombie presumably) has no choice but to continue.
This missile attack is a dramatic warning that Iran can decimate oil production and other regime critical infrastructure in every single American ally in the region. Iranian leadership has been very consistently acting like they are aware that they won’t survive a war with the US.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
The real threat seems to be towards the oil fields and other crucial infrastructure (ie desalination plants!!!) of neighbouring American allied countries.
They are reminding Saudis (who will presumably give a call to the US) that they can absolutely wreak havoc if it comes to real war
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Isreal is a country of neurotic people with abysmal school results
Care to explain?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Perhaps it’s a technology thing. Declarations of war made more sense when war involved marching 250k men armies in fields or packing 5M men in trains towards the enemy. It’s really not clear when a “war” starts when you can chuck hypersonic missiles at some select targets once in a while
I remember it being fantastic. Characters who really believed in a way that I can imagine a renaissance Italian aristocrat would believe. Also very good plot and acting
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