aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
2mo ago
There's nothing like it. I recommend everyone do it at least once, to spend an extended amount of time where you don't speak the language. Suddenly what is taken for granted falls away, and it's like rediscovering communication from first principles. What are the critical things, the meaningful things? What is helpful and useful, what is not? What is good - and not just good because I deem it so - what does this culture value, and how did they arrive at that belief?
This just isn't my experience with travel, but I also haven't had the opportunity to live somewhere totally foreign for extended periods of time. Unless you have some cause, like a job or exchange program, this just kind of isn't practical. What is practical are a week or two of being a tourist which I have zero interest in and also what people are actually talking about when they say they love travel.
aqouta
2mo ago
if it ends up out competing, isn't that ipso facto eugenic?)
It would be ipso facto selected for and evolutionarily sound But eugenics is the selection of genes that people find good, meaning literally good genes, not just another word for what gets selected for.
aqouta
2mo ago
It seems pretty clear that the economics of it doesn't work out for modern states. In the very long term a negative fertility rate has a 100% chance of ending a society. I'm not sure what term length you're optimizing for that having a population that halves every few decades isn't a crisis.
aqouta
2mo ago
My understanding is that I'm quite open in that sense. I'm really open to the idea that there is some there there which I'm not getting. But poetry for instance. Mostly it's trying to express views I already basically understand into compressed formats. Cool, I appreciate it in the way I appreciate that certain picture formats take up less space on my hard drive. Instrumentally useful and when communicating very large ideas I will make use of its techniques. I even find some poetry useful as short hand. But I've never really been moved by poetry. Although I often struggle to even define what poetry is.
aqouta
2mo ago
There is a lot more to be gained from travel than just an album of Instagram thirst trap photos. I’ve found travel to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life, personally.
I genuinely don't understand this and I've tried to. Maybe it's just innate human variability and some people are like me and incapable of 'getting it'. I also feel this way about most poetry and a dancing so I may just be weird. But I just don't understand what I'm supposed to find compelling about going to some place that I could already get the gist of in picture. I feel invariably like either a burdensome tourist or a mark for scams whenever I travel. Events or meeting specific people I understand. But I can't shake the feeling that events and meeting people would be strictly better if they came to me without the travel element.
aqouta
2mo ago
The problem with Communism is that it's able to be packaged in such a simple appeal. It's like if there was a sexy way to sell flat earth. Most people really and truly can't understand the proofs for spherical earth. They have no hope at groking at any real level a critique of theoretical economic systems. They can handle memetic things like "communists are envious" but trying to explain the value of price signals or anything that would give them an actual feel for the fundamental disagreement is impossible. It's one of those areas where I'm sympathetic to the "platforming" argument by anti-free-speech people. Arguing with communists makes it seem like they have a competitive system that actually works and we could feasibly replace what we have with it. When in fact they don't. They don't have a system that has ever meaningfully been applied. The stuff they have actually accomplished in the real world amounts to "capitalism but with regulation" from which there has been a mixed bag of results but not one of them were evidence that communism is possible. And communists do their best to blur the lines. They'll call the 8 day work week a communist addition rather than an addition that communists lobbied for. These are silly points that any serious discussion instantly disregards but it's what the lay person is actually convinced by.
aqouta
2mo ago
A circular definition is just not useful. It breaks down and is only tethered to reality by the lingering remembrance of a rooted definition. A tether that will only fray and disintegrate over time like a plant pulled from it's soil.
There are ways to define trans that aren't circular, they just would cleave off one or another group of the trans coalition or make some asks carry less weight. My current model of trans(I'm going to give the MTF case but assume a symmetrical FTM case) is that it is a feature of some male brains that they are able to be in a state where they genuinely believe that would be happiest if they had as close as possible the experience of being female. This belief can be true or untrue, suppressible or unsuppressible those are their own questions. This belief is genuine and following the principles of freedom of form these people should be allowed to pursue body modifications and ask those around them to treat them as if they were female in whatever ways are reasonable to accommodate. Polite people should humor them and there should be a general understanding that this is an acceptable way to live. However we should not blind ourselves to the reality that this is fundamentally a truth about male brains, that there exist no gendered souls and that a brain cannot be in the wrong body.
I think this is basically the truth of the matter combined with the most reasonable course of action to take in response to it. A circular definition doesn't let us solve anything, it says nothing about the state of the world and is evidence of poor reasoning.
aqouta
2mo ago
Name your odds, I'd put $200 up right now. Trump really comes off a uniquely bad for many reasons.
aqouta
2mo ago
2.92% inflation in the last 12 months. If you measure inflation as "absolute distance from 2% target" this is 54th percentile for all years since 1990 (a hair worse than average)
I'm usually on team "the economy isn't really hat bad actually" but I'm baffled how people can misread the sentiment like this. It's obvious that what people who think inflation was too high want is for prices to go back down. the inflation number is a second order leading indicator. The previous years were 3.4%, 6.5% and 7.0% so around 17% over 3 years. And spread unevenly among the indexes so there were items in the basket that stayed relatively flat and other items that saw much higher price hikes, human cognition is such that those price hikes are the main thing people notice and do feel like the kind of thing that ought to be able to be put back in the bottle.
The leading indicators of how the economy is going to feel in the future have done decently over the last 6 months is just not really a compelling argument.
aqouta
2mo ago
People don't like a loser, Trump's whole brand is winning and it's why he can't give up the last election. Two losses in a row and becoming even older is going to be enough to have people jump ship, even if his health doesn't decline biden style.
aqouta
3mo ago
My bad, for some reason I had thought the eponymous coast in wotc was Californian.
aqouta
3mo ago
This conclusion seems very excessive. China has a couple hits but the west has a large stable of bangers and continues to release. If we're going to say that the East is punching above it's weight class the example would be nintendo and it's a little late to be worried about that. The last mega hit was Balder's gate, a western studio making a game using a californian IP. The East is big in gacha games but that's partially because those aren't as popular in the west. You mentioned PUBG but you know who ate their lunch? Fortnite, western.
It doesn't really seem like the East is eclipsing a west that can no longer make games so much as china is actually for the first time making serious contributions. many of which are using western IPs like many of your examples.
aqouta
3mo ago
I don't buy the Hollywood scenario where a tyrant suddenly has tanks rolling down the streets from a bunker where they never interact with the common man. Trump's recent experience with American small arms should shatter any illusion that assassination is beyond us and fighting a full military occupation is a step I don't think anl properly armed population willing to fight gets to.
aqouta
3mo ago
I know a few people pretty high up in HPE, despite their job's being selling AI servers they weren't aware of what TSMC even was let alone that it was a bottle neck in their supply chain. The idea that this group is doing well targeted assassinations is uncredible.
aqouta
3mo ago
The game theory for making sure individuals maintain an offensive advantage remains. It makes the land generally inhospitable to tyrants. It is true that there are costs but I tire of people that think simply pointing them out and also the that the decaying retirement home husks of once vital nations don't pay them should make me jealous. To put it as kindly as possible, I am not jealous of these nations. Pointing out that these once giants and now living museums have adopted a policy in the last few hundred years makes that policy sound as appealing as rat poison. I don't have any particular attraction to guns. I own none and despite having been shooting with friends on a few occasion generally recognize no personal appeal. But I hate the idea of being part of a disarmed population. I will not childproof my my home for my own safety. Fuck that.
aqouta
3mo ago
A fair nuance. I'm not quite a red piller and do think that monogamy is a good a social technology. For the evo-psych perspective though it's sufficient that men with the ability to influence such things would generally prefer more risk though as it's selected for where they can influence reproductive success and irrelevant where it doesn't.
aqouta
3mo ago
I like the case for modesty as intimacy increasing. There is something to having a large delta between the woman that she presents to the world and the women she presents herself as to you personally. I'm not sure how that weighs against other interests but I am sure there is at least some value there.
As for why women are more lefty I can see this from a bunch of different lenses and have trouble coming up with as strong reasons for the opposite. the evo psych lens is pretty simple that women do best in stable safe environments where all their offspring can make it to adulthood and men do best in somewhat more risky environments where they might sire children with many women. When resources are plentiful women might prefer they be shared equally and men might prefer a chance to roll the dice and end up with a bigger share. From the self interested lens the redistributive state as it is today tends to take from men and give to women on average. The social dynamics lens tells us that caring, self sacrifice and gentleness are a feminine traits that women compete with each other on and leftists successfully pitch leftism as the humane alternative to callous and brutal liberalism. Older masculine framings of leftism like those in the soviet era of manly men menacing their enemies with the tools of their trade and demanding what is theirs would see a different skew but the feminine framing predominates today. From a propaganda lens it seems like the leftist strategy of just showing as many dead or suffering children as possible and drawing some plausible causal chain to the status quo is more effective on women than men.
aqouta
3mo ago
I concur that this is a pretty bad look from a moderator, and would really like the mods to look past the +44 upvotes and fawning u-go-girl responses and consider that this sort of thing is enabling/deepening bad tendencies in the community.
Obligatory low heat take drop that moderators not using the mod hat are allowed to make low quality posts. We are moderated by men, not gods.
aqouta
3mo ago
You're just describing conflict theory from the inside view. The essence of conflict theory is saying things you don't believe as means to an end rather than to reach understanding. You can think conflict theory is good and normal, it is, but there is no way to describe knowingly saying wrong things on purpose as mistake theory.
aqouta
3mo ago
I fully don't even think it is bad. Agnostic on good. People stress testing your information diet is a kindness and a service a perfectly rational person might pay for in a red teaming sense. Hoaxes, as long as they ar published are unambiguously good.
aqouta
3mo ago
A trans person is a natal male or female that identifies with the opposite sex and seeks to undergo treatment to approximate the experience of the opposite sex as close as possible. An intersex person is someone who is born with a rare but identifiable physical ailment that complicates the standard XX/XY binary options that naturally describe male and female people. I'm very sympathetic to annoyance that the various authorities haven't clarified the situation but as far as I know no one who has looked into it seriously thinks this is a trans person.
aqouta
3mo ago
The suspicion is that those facts are being weaponized
Fighting the facts is just never a good look. When you start out saying something that isn't true you pretty immediately lose the persuadable audience. It's not good strategically and more importantly to me, it's not good epistemics. Keeping these things straight matters.
You can't make arguments for years on end that rely on conflating "trans" and "intersex" and then get all huffy and indignant when people confuse the two in a way that you don't find politically convenient.
They weren't doing this though, or at least not the more serious people. Certainly intersex people come up in discussions of exactly where to draw lines on defining what it is to be a man or a woman because they're exactly the kind of edge case bullet people need to bite if they want to rigorously define "woman" and people arguing for expanding the definition will naturally make you bite those bullets. The claim wasn't that trans women and people who were born with a vagina and womb but have an odd genetic disorder are exactly the same thing, just that they're both category errors(or at least the trans advocate will try to claim that trans identification ought to make them a category error, I find this argument dubious).
They're obviously quite different for many reasons, most important to me because intersex is a very objective kind of thing, we can run tests and know what is going on. For this reason we're not at high risk of mistakenly giving someone, especially a kid, inappropriate life altering treatment. We have no risk of a social contagion of intersex diagnoses. Because of this I think we can and should calmly sit down and determine what should be done about these cases where nature is the only party at fault. I do still think in that calmly sitting down, if we avoid invoking the trans culture war mind killing, the natural outcome would be banning intersex cases that provide advantage from serious competition. And invoking trans people in this discussion is not helping.
aqouta
3mo ago
This is silly, it's important to actually get the facts straight and one shouldn't respond as if attacked when corrected on the facts. The question of how to categorize people with rare genetic defects and whether to rule them in or out of sports competitions are entirely different to the same questions applied to natal males or natal females who identify with the opposite sex and undergo treatment to approximate as much as possible the body and experience of the opposite sex. One can come to the same conclusion on both, and I broadly do, but we must actually keep our thinking straight here.
aqouta
3mo ago
justified in excluding black women, on the grounds they would be too dominant
If there was some racial group of women that somehow had man equivalent strength then I think and argument could be made. I'd imagine such a thing would have a lot of trouble practically because racial lines have a bad history of being drawn with malicious intent but in the hypothetical space I don't have a fundamental issue with it. Natal women is a naturally category and drawing it there rather than a genderless weight class has obvious winners in losers, natal women win, very light natal men lose and this is fine.
The wife is on a copper IUD, is there a downside to that which I'm not aware of? I mean I feel it on occasion which isn't pleasant but compared to all the other options it is always seemed strange to me that this wasn't the default. edit: asked the wife last evening, it is apparently a hormonal iud and not copper, which has less bad symptoms.
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