Tarnstellung
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User ID: 553
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Why do you believe modern architecture sucks?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
The growing anti-war sentiment in the US is, I think, directly related the right-coded nature of the military. The Right feels like the military are their people, and that their people are being sent out to risk their lives to line the pockets of effete sexually deviant billionaires who are the lizardy powers behind Globohomo.
But their people aren't being sent out to risk their lives! There's a tiny number of American military advisers and the like, mostly working well behind the front lines. American aid to Ukraine is mostly in the form of funding and equipment, much of it outdated and due to be scrapped soon anyway.
And how exactly does the war "line the pockets of effete sexually deviant billionaires"?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
My beer consumption in general is small enough to not be a real market for brewerys. But for those of you who do, I encourage you to continue with the boycott. I'm far from the most anti-trans poster here, but I'm excited to see a big company brought to its knees when it give into corporate woke.
Did they really "give in" to wokeism? Given that:
The WSJ states that: "[M]any people, including bar and store owners, wrongly came to believe that Ms. Mulvaney's video ad aired as a television commercial or that the can with her picture on it was stocked on store shelves, wholesalers said." Because the content did not appear to people organically, they really didn't know what it was, and people assumed it was so much bigger than it was because the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplified it. A throwaway insta video became a TV ad, Bud Light making a custom can as a joke became people fearing that the beer they bought on a store shelf would have a trans woman on it.
Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Just as a simple sanity check, all the arguments you're making comparing people in 1900 to people today, would apply just as much to people in 1800 to 1900, and 1700 to 1800, and 1600 to 1700, no? If life was so much worse a hundred years ago, shouldn't it be even worse than that the further back you go? At what point, shouldn't the misery become unsurvivable?
It gets worse the further back you go, yes. There are ups and downs, but there is a secular trend of living standards getting better throughout the past few millennia. However, this improvement is not linear. Things were getting better slowly for most of history before the rate of improvement increased in the past couple of centuries. The period after WWII is the second half of the chessboard.
Psychology mostly didn't exist a century ago, but given that Psychology is fake as fuck, it's unclear to me why that is supposed to be a problem. I see absolutely zero reason to believe that the "common factors" giving rise to the Dodo Bird Verdict should be supposed to have been a recent discovery, and not achievable through previous religious and spiritual traditions the world over.
We can't cure most serious mental illness now, and for all the criticisms of Bedlam, it is not obvious to me that our current method of allowing the mentally-ill to kill themselves on the streets with meth and heroin is in any way an improvement
Mental health care includes applied psychology, i.e. counselling, therapy (CBT is supposedly an evidence-based intervention; I haven't really looked into it very much), etc., but it also includes psychiatry, a field that has seen immense progress in the past century. When the first antipsychotics were introduced shortly after World War II, they were seen as miracle drugs. Newer antipsychotics have only improved treatment since then. I don't know if we can cure most serious mental illnesses, but we can certainly treat many effectively and enable the patients to live a more-or-less normal life. Contrast this with a hundred years ago, when the only option for someone with schizophrenia was being confined to a lunatic asylum.
I know a substantial portion of homeless drug addicts are mentally ill, but I'm not sure if a substantial portion of people with severe mental illness are homeless drug addicts. Presumably these are only the most severe cases, or people who haven't been treated at all due to lack of access to health care in the US. Poor health care and mass overdoses, along with the drug markets and homeless camps mentioned in the original comment I was replying to, are a primarily American phenomenon and they could be solved if the political will existed. But I guess you could argue that the fact that politicians have accepted this is part of the supposed social decline.
And yet people clearly survived, and even thrived to the point of producing rich cultures of beauty that we enjoy to this day. (...) I mean, we have writing and records from quite a ways back, stories, songs, plays, art, personal journals; why speculate, when we could look at their thoughts directly? None of these depict an unmitigated hellscape.
The "rich cultures" were created by an elite minority who lived in relative luxury. The vast majority of people until relatively recently were illiterate farmers and pastoralists.
Even so, the stories I have read do in fact depict the many horrors the plebs were subjected to. Ever read Dickens? And if we go further back in history, you have stories featuring abusive feudal lords, marauding armies, and so on. The horrors of everyday life – lack of sanitation and running water, entire families sharing a single tiny bedroom, mothers dying in childbirth – don't get mentioned very much because they were unremarkable.
Heck, why not compare suicide rates? That's an objective measure, right?
The honest answer is "because I tried and I couldn't find good data on historical suicide rates, and my post was already getting long". If you have the data, please do post it. It should be noted when comparing suicide rates that culture is a major factor. There is significant variation between developed countries today that is not explained by objective economic circumstances.
Or maybe marriage rates, given the overwhelming correlation between long-term marriage and a whole host of positive outcomes?
The correlation is only recorded in modern times, as far as I know. There could well be a confounder, e.g. people with higher conscientiousness or people who are already doing well mentally also have a higher chance of having a successful marriage. In a time when people didn't have to work for a marriage because society made sure that everyone got married, there would have been no such correlation.
What you're doing here is comparing every bad thing you can imagine about the past against every good thing you can imagine about the present. Shockingly, this results in the present being the apparent best of all possible worlds. Your explanation ignores the concept of the hedonic treadmill, the way peoples psychology adjusts itself to both prosperity and hardship, such that the former does not simply satisfy, and the later does not simply crush. People are more complicated than that.
My interpretation of the hedonic treadmill is that people will eventually adapt to an objectively higher or lower standard of living, such that the difference eventually won't be as great as might be expected, but it would still exist. I do sincerely believe that people in the past were often horribly traumatized by modern standards, and no one cared because it was so widespread and nothing could be done about it anyway.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
debts that most people owe for decades now
Those debts are usually mortgages to pay for an enormous, luxurious home of the kind that only the richest had access to a century ago. If you want to have ten people sharing a bedroom in a small hut, you can still get that at an affordable price point. Finding a small windowless room in a tenement in NYC to house your family will be a bit more difficult because of regulations, but you could probably find a studio apartment to squeeze them into, if that is what you want.
and the costs of health care for most Americans
Again, health care of the kind that was available to the average person a hundred years ago is still accessible: just don't go to the doctor. Even for those who could afford one, a doctor couldn't do anything much of the time. There were no antibiotics, there were no vaccines for polio, smallpox and other debilitating illnesses that have been eradicated in the West (if not the world), there was no organ transplantation, cancer care was exclusively palliative, and medical imaging technology was limited to X-ray machines that gave you a huge dose of radiation.
Obesity and mental health reaching the crisis point in the twenty first century— I would absolutely dare argue that other than crisis care, we were much healthier a century ago when the fattest man alive was 300 something pounds and this was rare enough that he was in a circus.
Life expectancy and infant mortality are two objective measures of health. Both have improved dramatically since the 19th and early 20th century.
A century ago, millions of kids in America were not depressed
How do you know? Did you ask them? Because no one else did.
Mental health care is a luxury for which demand only exists after physical ailments have been largely dealt with. There was no mental health care to speak of a century ago. The closest is some rich people going to psychoanalysts. The world back then was awful in a way that is hard to comprehend for a person in a developed country in the 21st century. Many people were horribly traumatized and depressed by modern standards, it's just that no one cared. Veterans returning from the trenches of the First World War with PTSD were told to suck it up, if they weren't shot for being cowards. Asking if a two-year-old was depressed in this kind of environment would have been laughable.
Likewise the control over what can and can’t be done on your own land or with your own house is pretty high. The government can tell you whether you can raise food or animals on your land, require you to get approval to expand your house or build permanent structures, require inspections at every step of the process.
I am in fact very glad that my neighbour isn't allowed to open a pig farm next to my house in a residential area and that he needs to get a permit and a professional crew to build his house rather than improvising something on his own that could collapse and bury me in the rubble. If you want to see what a world without building codes would look like, you can look at the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Turkey. Regulations weren't followed, buildings collapsed, sixty thousand people died.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
That being said, I'd really want to see the Fourth Crusade, just because I'm a Dandolo fanboi.
The one where they destroyed and looted a bunch of (Christian) cities, including Constantinople? A bizarre crusade and doge to be a fan of.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Chance you could remotely "update" my books to censor them? Pirate. (This one has become more relevant in recent days.)
What is this referring to?
And these uneducated Third Worlders speak fluent English?
Your proposed explanation seems implausible. There are more than enough native English speakers who enjoy low-effort rubbish. To confirm this, just check a local US subreddit. How many Brazilians do you think are posting on /r/portland? And I don't think even the best education systems teach people how to post thoughtful media analysis on the internet.
The problem is that repeating a line of dialogue and similarly vapid comments are much easier to make compared to something meaningful, yet they get upvoted just as much, if not more because they are more accessible. It's the Gresham's law of internet forums: bad posts drive out good. A subreddit that doesn't ban image posts will eventually come to be dominated by them, because a picture is much easier to make and much easier to consume than a long text post. This can be prevented only with strict moderation.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Reddit sucks for the same reason government housing projects suck.
So TheMotte is the Singapore of internet forums?
The thing about a post from an anonymous user is that it could be literally anyone. That is after all, what "anonymous" means. There is no way to tit-for-tat an anonymous user and thus no incentive for them not to turn into total fuckwads. The only way to escape this trap is to have an identity/voice that persists through multiple encounters. An identity that can both gain and lose reputation.
There are good forums that are primarily anonymous, such as 4chan. (Yes, 4chan can be good, depending on the topic.) What matters is the website's culture.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Given that Jews make up a very small portion of the Italian population, they can be overrepresented without constituting a majority of the leading intellectuals and writers.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
The idea was to embarrass the bully in front of all of his classmates etc., not just his friends.
But OK, it might not be a foolproof plan. Maybe I just don't understand middle school social dynamics well enough.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
I don't think respect for teachers matters. You think a 12-year-old being spanked in front of the whole school wouldn't be embarrassed about it? You think his peers wouldn't laugh at him?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
No need to ruin any lives. The solution is simple: anyone caught bullying gets punished in a horribly embarrassing manner. Spanking, maybe? Something that would make them the object of mockery, to reduce their social status and impede the social dynamics that encourage bullying.
The process is then iterated. Anyone caught bullying the former bully is also punished. After a few passes, everyone will be too terrified to bully.
This won't be implemented because (1) the required punishment is not permitted in Western countries and (2) teachers generally don't actually care about bullying.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Are children in daycares and schools prevented from socializing with their peers?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
immigrants who are frequently low IQ, or racially foreign, or demanding of special privileges via DEI initiatives
Most racial DEI in the US benefits native Blacks. The little that benefits underachieving immigrant groups is counterbalanced by the overachieving immigrant groups who are harmed by DEI more than Whites. Likewise with IQ, assuming HBD is true.
Why is it "not desirable" that "racially foreign" people immigrate to the US? Non-WASP peoples have been immigrating to the US in large numbers for about two centuries now and nothing bad has happened. Is it just a personal preference?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Certainly there were people making that argument for the Tennessee shooter regarding random Christian adults and kids
Were there? The closest is that one tweet from the "Trans Resistance Network" (the "network" being a Twitter account and a Wordpress website) that said that the shooting is a tragedy but it's also a tragedy that trans people are mistreated. It did not say that the shooting was justified.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
And would you likewise say that chemists who describe a molecule as "hydrophobic" are medicalizing a simple physical phenomenon as well as hurting people with debilitating phobias?
If it isn't clear, I am saying that a word with the suffix -phobic does not necessarily imply a phobia in the medical sense. No one is claiming homophobia or transphobia is a phobia, i.e. an irrational fear of those respective groups. That is a strawman.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
If I understand correctly, you're asking if I know of anything wrong with EA or if I believe it's perfect and infallible.
I can't think of anything bad that's actually happened as a result of EA. Maybe those allegations of "sexual harassment" from a couple of months ago, but I think something like that can be found in any group composed of humans and the only reason the likes of Time chose to publicize it is because they have an irrational dislike for EA and wanted to attack the movement in any way they could (AKA concern trolling).
This doesn't mean that nothing bad could ever happen because of EA. Hypothetically, it could end up being the case that, as some critics of EA claim, the world can't be reduced to numbers and focusing on numerical effectiveness instead of cultivating relations with your community or what have you ultimately leads to worse outcomes. It could be the case that it really is more effective to give your money to a homeless person you pass on the street than to send it to Africa to buy malaria nets (as claimed by one post on TheMotte, which I think has since been deleted). Though it does seem unlikely.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
There exist people today who, due to disabilities or other conditions, are unable to support themselves financially. They depend on the charity of others, and in richer countries they may also get tax-funded disability benefits. If the development of AI caused a significant number of people to become unemployable, there is no reason why we couldn't just include them in that category.
If the claim that "a person should have to pay for any good or service that he receives" is to be interpreted literally, then that's not "capitalism", that's some extreme form of libertarianism, verging on parody. That would make even charity immoral. Real-life libertarians believe, at most, that people should be free to do what they want with their money, including giving it to charity. Maybe Andrew Ryan of Bioshock believes that donating to the poor is bad because it keeps them alive even though they deserve to die, but I doubt you could find a real libertarian who believes that.
I, too, "believe in capitalism", that is, I believe that a free market with some (limited) state intervention is the optimal form of social organization from a utilitarian perspective in the current technological environment. I don't believe that there is a universal moral law that people have to work for everything. If robots take all the jobs, taxing the robots' owners to provide income to the newly-unemployed would clearly be the right decision from a utilitarian perspective.
Safety: The Chernobyl reactor was an ancient Soviet design. Modern designs are much safer and more resistant to human error. With a failsafe design, there is no possibility of a black swan event. A black swan event is by definition unpredictable, but for a reactor it is in fact possible to predict and account for all possible failure modes.
As for military attacks on nuclear plants, the very worst that could happen is a Chernobyl-type scenario where a city-sized area is contaminated. There is no global risk. Most likely, even in a direct strike on a reactor, the contamination wouldn't be nearly as bad. Nuclear plants have insane security, so a terrorist attack or sabotage couldn't do very much. And it should be noted that hydro plants are also vulnerable to attacks (and even random failures) that could result in large-scale destruction, including thousands of direct and immediate deaths.
Waste: The warnings for people 10,000 years in the future are in case civilization collapses and humans basically revert to the bronze age. I don't know why anyone would take this seriously.
Nuclear waste is only considered extremely dangerous because of double standards. Burning coal produces radioactive ash. If the same standards were applied to coal as are applied to nuclear energy, the ash would be classified as low-level radioactive waste and would need special procedures to dispose of it. In reality, it is mixed into cement to build roads. High-level waste, which actually is dangerous, exists, but there is so little of it that it can just be stored somewhere securely.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Europeans had the massive benefit of playing local tribes off against one another, and horrific waves of disease that killed 95% of the native population.
It's a good thing, then, that there are no bitter tribal divisions within Western countries and no dangerous infectious diseases spreading from China.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
FTX can't be blamed on effective altruism. If SBF had been an ordinary greedy rich person instead of an enlightened effective altruist, he would have done the same thing. The problem was his arrogance that resulted in him believing that he could pull off what he was trying to do.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
People will be able to get realtime instructions into headphones telling them exactly how to complete each task.
Where have I heard this one before?
Seriously, this seems too specific to be a coincidence. Was it a deliberate reference?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
From Middle English auctorite, autorite (“authority, book or quotation that settles an argument”), from Old French auctorité, from Latin stem of auctōritās (“invention, advice, opinion, influence, command”), from auctor (“master, leader, author”). For the presence of the h, compare the etymology of author.
From Middle English auctour, from Anglo-Norman autour, from Old French autor, from Latin auctor, from augeō (“to increase, originate”). The h, also found in Middle French autheur, is unetymological as there is no h in the original Latin spelling. The OED attributes the h to contamination by authentic.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#contamination
What evidence do you have that the shooting was politically motivated? One article says:
And you can tell this media outlet isn't particularly dedicated to pushing the trans agenda by the fact that they're not using the shooter's preferred pronouns. The obvious explanation is that this particular school was targeted because the shooter once attended it.
Are trans people collectively guilty for a shooting committed by one trans person? And if they are, how long do they have to wait after the shooting before they can go out in public again without this being a provocation? How long does everyone else have to wait before it becomes acceptable to associate with trans people again?
The Wikipedia article on the shooting says:
The president ordering that flags on all federal buildings be flown at half-staff is certainly not ignoring the victims. It seems that they reacted the same way they react to other school shootings. Every remotely notable left-wing figure that publicly reacted to the shooting condemned it and called for more gun control. No one decided that guns and school shootings are fine now because sometimes a member of the ingroup will be shooting at the outgroup.
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