RedRegard
8mo ago
I'd say the eugenics would be more about promoting pro-sociality. I don't think East Asia has as much trouble as the West, let alone other parts of the world, with these kinds of perennial bad actors. The OP specified two approaches that only East Asian countries have so far achieved, Japan's acceptance of insularity and its attendant low immigration and economic stagnation, and China's social credit authoritarian system. Both are quintessentially East Asian systems. You need an East Asian-style populace to even get to the point where such approaches are plausible, as otherwise you are dealing with whacky Westerners and their preferences.
RedRegard
8mo ago
Sounds like you need a long-term eugenic environment to cost-efficiently correct this. The social matrix that enables this behavior is itself founded on genetics. To fix a country you must fix its people.
RedRegard
9mo ago
The disadvantaged groups that get on the 'stack' all have something in common: their qualities act as tribalistic signifiers, which in turn provides a basis for political coordination. This might just be an outgrowth of human evolutionary history, where apes gathered themselves into tribes and warred against rival tribes, mirroring our present political circumstances not by accident but because of the encoding of behavior into genes. We are witnessing the modern potential of ape-evolution.
Mental and psychological disabilities are not close enough to the tribal dynamic to serve as signifiers in this way, so they are not adequate, in the same way, as a basis for political organization. To the extent that policy is made to take these things into account I would say that it's probably driven by higher mental processes and philosophies than by instinctual ape-tribalism.
I disagree with your second point, I think that openly self-interested arguments are a lot less common than ones presenting themselves as high-minded or altruistic, which utterly saturate modern-day societies. Even the most brutal dictatorships, like North Korea, present their edicts in idealistic terms.
Any debate that followed from an argument of self-interest (i.e. an honest argument) would be of a technical nature on how best to achieve it. This is opposed to debate that follows from false idealism, which is a contest of deception and narcissistic self-delusion. There, the art is in the effective spin and the bald-faced lie.
RedRegard
11mo ago
No, but it does challenge the moral authority somewhat. I'm an immigrant to the US, so if I am unhappy at immigration (generally) then I am at least somewhat hypocritical. If I had the courage of my convictions I would go back to the UK.
This is a common argument, but I think it's only hypocritical if you're assuming a standpoint of moral universalism. If someone cares about themselves and not other people then a 'immigration for me but not for ye' argument has no hypocrisy. They simply want to get the best that they can for themselves and regard further immigration to be a detriment.
RedRegard
11mo ago
If America had a high-standards culture like Japan I would see it as utterly degenerate for immigrants to do anything but try to uphold it, but we're talking about the West, here, which has always held to barbaric if practical customs.
RedRegard
11mo ago
Even if racial divergence may have ended, on net, around the Neanderthal age, the trend towards total racial homogenization was very slow up until recently. You probably could have had visually distinct races indefinitely if travel technology stopped with pre-Columbean tech. The future mongrelization of humanity is merely another aspect of the bug-man future we're all looking forward to. It's maximum entropy, maximum simplification, degradation to increasingly robust physical states.
RedRegard
1yr ago
The native birth rate in Canada is 2.2, dipping to 1.4 for those not living on reservations and climbing to 2.5+ for those on reservations, compared to the overall Canadian birthrate of 1.4.
RedRegard
1yr ago
A lot of them live on reservations and are impoverished, which is a great context for maximizing birth rates. They have nothing better or more appealing to do than breed. No career prospects to sacrifice fertility for, no Molochian god of GDP maximization to care about, just civilizationally robust cigarettes and booze.
RedRegard
1yr ago
The Iraq War was because American intelligence thought there really were WMDs and because Saddam had previously lied about them and aroused America's displeasure.
RedRegard
1yr ago
Manipulate housing prices in order to extract rents from all the anti-British immigrants and have the last laugh while they squabble over pronouns and shit?
RedRegard
1yr ago
I think the reason I prefer playing chess with people rather than AIs is due to the competitive aspect of it. There's pride to be had in besting a human opponent - and thus stakes to the game - that doesn't exist when playing an emotionless, uncaring AI. The values of pride and shame are what make human opponents preferable to machines.
RedRegard
1yr ago
The hedonic trap while showering is where you spend a superfluous amount of time showering because you don't want to change from being pleasurably warm to damply cold. How to avoid it? Here is one way: do not always shower your whole body, but only the parts that actually require it. How often do you need to wash your back? Possibly never*! This efficient way of showering usually entails washing the face and wherever there is lots of hair. Since only a portion of your body is wet, the discomfort of being cold and wet is minimized, and there is less warmth to sacrifice.
I got this idea after hearing about Aella.
*Except after sweaty workouts, in which case I recommend cold showers.
Actually, the natives of Canada are extremely demographically relevant. Their overall TFR was 2.5~ in 2011 and was higher for those on reserves, where it was over 3, and substantially lower for those assimilated urban populations you mentioned. Their share of Canada's overall population has actually substantially increased over time despite Canada's sky-high immigration rates.
In 2011, when Canada’s TFR was 1.61 children per woman, the TFR for Status Indian women was 2.63 children per woman, 3.25 if living on reserve. The TFR for women identifying as First Nation but without Status was 1.47 children per woman, and the TFR for self-identified Métis women was 1.81 children per woman. The TFR for Inuit generally was 2.75 children per woman, with records collected by Nunavut and the North-West Territories indicating a TFR of 3.02 children per Inuit woman living there.
https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/indigenouseconomics244/chapter/104/
I think you neglect the way in which power factors into status considerations. People would fawn over Elon Musk or an emperor not because they believe such people to be meritocratic but because they hope to receive rewards and avoid punishments. The people at the top of power hierarchies manipulate those below them through various means in order to encourage and shape desirable consensuses. People buy into these for selfish reasons having more to do with personal fitness than group fitness. That's why people who aren't in a position to benefit from or be punished by Elon Musk (random journalists on Twitter) pile on him so relentlessly. They do it because he does not matter to them, but the opinions of their peers and employers do, so they demonstrate commitment to the group consensus in the hopes of impressing other members of the hierarchy.
Also, people often base their status evaluations on personal egotism. People who fancy themselves to be technophilic, market-oriented individuals will argue that Elon Musk deserves utmost respect, while people who fancy themselves to be more artistic and empathic rather than logical will decry him, and this is simply based on how their own qualities are reflected in Elon Musk. They use their perceptions of other peoples' status to feel good about themselves.
RedRegard
1yr ago
I think that some countries, which have little hope of competing internationally by themselves, willingly subordinate themselves to more powerful coalition leaders like the US, whereas other countries, which have the hope of standing on their own two feet, are reluctant to do this and instead try and act as autonomous agents. Subordinate agents don't hatch geopolitical complots by themselves, they instead go along with whatever the coalition leader organizes, sometimes leveraging their support in order to extract aid or benefits. Autonomous agents do attempt to move and shape things by themselves, generally with a view to maintaining or enhancing their relative power, with this being in view of maximizing their security. This describes how all states operate, including the US, either subordinating themselves or attempting to carve out their own fates.
RedRegard
1yr ago
Sometimes they really are on the street (usually obese, weird looking, skeletal, etc.), but I think people tune them out because they don't enjoy contemplating unfeminine women. They are actively unwholesome in ways that slovenly men are not. It is the dual edge of the women are wonderful trope.
RedRegard
1yr ago
Not only do we not see female losers as losers, but I think that often we fail to perceive them at all. A third of homeless people are female, for instance, but the prototypical homeless person in the public consciousness is almost invariably male. I think there's also a recent upswing in young male dysfunction owing to the collapse of masculine-coded blue-collar work. Service sector jobs code as more feminine and better pair with female agreeability, while males chaff under the subservience required of them.
RedRegard
1yr ago
why do you think that building more will actually solve the problem with unaffordable housing? We have been adding lanes to highways since time immemorial (aka the 50s) and the congestion is still here.
If instead of adding lanes, you employ technology designed to transport large numbers of people through dense areas (mass transit systems), you can indeed defeat congestion. Likewise with housing. Technology exists for high-density housing, and if you implement it then more people can live according to their preferences, and less taxes, less pollution, less economic inefficiencies must be endured in the name of car-dependent, utility-subsidized suburbs.
RedRegard
1yr ago
There are two practical reasons to avoid war crimes:
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They encourage a defect-defect race toward the bottom, as the enemy is encouraged to reciprocate by killing your own soldiers.
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They create bad optics. Given that Ukraine is highly dependent on foreign aid, its public image is important. Tarnishing that image in order to kill small numbers of enemy prisoners and thus jeopardize large amounts of foreign aid seems like a poorly calculated strategy.
So the Halla-aho guy's reasoning seems poor. (Also, killing enemy soldiers is just one of many factors that could advance one's war aims.)
RedRegard
1yr ago
Political beliefs are used to construct egotistical fantasies of importance and self-righteousness. Market forces commoditize this via talk shows and podcasts. They're also used to win popularity among conformist hierarchies such as office spaces. The only true insight into a person's character is through their actions. This has always been known but narcissism and widespread delusion induce mass fantasy in the political sphere. Many other types of fantasy pervade society as well.
I've read that medieval workers averaged 1600 hours annually, while modern people work 1900 hours, and industrial revolution-era workers put in 3000+ (https://tudorscribe.medium.com/do-you-work-longer-hours-than-a-medieval-peasant-17a9efe92a20). The horror stories about the wretched condition of peoples teeth and health in premodern times I've come across also seem to mostly come from the industrial age. I suspect that Malthusianism is partly to blame for declining standards, but also the power that capitalists and landowners gained over the commonfolk. Medieval economic systems were chaotic and inefficient, but they served to protect the peasantry against the ruling class through their illegibility. As the economy became more streamlined and efficient, it also gave the powerful greater leverage over the common people. The maximization of profitability for those at the top led to the sacrifice of complex arrangements that satisfied a broader array of needs for those at the bottom.
On a similar note, I've come to believe that medieval peasants weren't necessarily super different from tribalists in their economic engagement, and also that the distinction between hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, etc. is somewhat misleading, since most societies derived their nourishment from a motley of sources. Medieval people fished, foraged, hunted, etc., too, and many hunter-gatherers I've read about seem to have engaged in some amount of cultivation, so the categories aren't entirely discrete. In Seeing Like A State, it seems to be indicated that primitive peoples, including medieval peasants, had a complex arrangement of nutrient sources, which depended on access to farms, forests, and streams, but as society became streamlined and living spaces monopolized, they were forced into factories and workshops and fed mono-diets of grain. From there, various vitamin deficiencies and rapid tooth decay ensued.
RedRegard
1yr ago
We've already seen the mass obsolescence of humans. The result was to push people towards the service economy while also increasing social dysfunction among the former blue-collar working class. Political outcomes actually led to the reduction of social programs under the auspices of neoliberalism and Reaganism, as the blue-collar class had lost the organizational potential that their former labor involvement had granted them. Probably we will see more people employed in the service economy as well as a 'shadow economy' while the real economy falls under the sway of capitalists and their robotic labor forces.
RedRegard
1yr ago
Having Putin invade Ukraine was the worst possible outcome. Russia is now excluded from Western markets and politically stigmatized, so it will no longer have an incentive to behave itself in interactions with the West. It will become like North Korea, an insular security state that uses terrorism and criminality to get what it can from a hostile global order. Ukraine itself has lost a third of its population, had a large amount of land permanently scarred, and had its economy destroyed, and even if it wins it will find itself with a long-term hostile neighbor. Large amounts of Western capital have been sacrificed to the war effort, and Russia's resources and economic contributions to the world are now for China to take. So economically, security-wise, and in terms of Ukraine's well-being it seems like the war has been a monumental disaster for Western diplomacy.
A panopticon society might fix the problem everywhere, but if you're talking about just a single implementation of the legibility fix then you're only resolving the surface aspect of the problem. If you simply wish for parking spaces to not get stolen, sure, it would work. If you're viewing the problem as 'bad actors use intimidation and bullying to create unfair, anti-utilitarian outcomes', then implementing the fix in one place will simply squeeze the problem out elsewhere.
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