chooky

chooky 14hr ago

The loss of cheap loans is also a very large part of current affordability issues.

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chooky 19hr ago

Nah, the goal is to salvage the best exit ramp possible. What I think this probably looks like is something like the return of JCPOA and Iran retaining control of the strait, which, I agree, sucks; hopefully we can do better! While I would like Trump to suffer a humiliating defeat in the abstract, I recognize that such a defeat would generally be tied to bad outcomes and thus very much do not want it to happen in the case of Iran. Far better would be for the SC to issue a ruling that completely smashes the administration's tariff rationale or something; a humiliating legal defeat on that issue would be a good outcome for the US, in my view, so I can root for that one unconditionally.

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chooky 1d ago

I don't claim to be on the euphemism treadmill, which is also to say that my inside views of education and special ed are secondhand. I figured that "handicapped" was probably offensive too (and would have the same sort of exceasibe broadness problem as "retarded") but I decided that I needed some reasonably concise way to refer people whose brains have not developed in a way that provides full functionality.

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chooky 1d ago

A concrete advantage of not using "retarded" at all is that it is a very, very broad word to use when referring to the mentally handicapped, which is also an unproductively broad term when the reality is that "retarded" people will have various forms of Down's, autism, etc. Rather than paint with an extremely broad brush, the current permitted usage of "exceptional" (which also frequently encompasses gifted students or anyone whose parents scams them into special privileges) is so obviously useless that it forces any real discussion to focus on the specifics of how an individual student's exceptionalism/handicap presents.

From an etymological perspective, "retarded" is very similar to "ritartando", which anyone who took a year of band recognizes as basically being Latin for "slow". In almost all cases, it is not accurate to describe a mentally handicapped student's learning as merely slower than other students'. While this is perhaps blunt, it is almost, in a sense, more fair, in that seeing a handicapped student as slow means that they are not fulfilling their potential, which in turn subtly puts more blame on them.

I don't really have a strong argument against the use of "retarded" to describe generally idiocy or to use it as a new slur to replace "gay" ("lame" is not nearly taboo enough to work), but there is a reasonably strong argument to dissociate it from the mentally handicapped. Most of the taboo status of "retarded" generally is probably just the education field's reasonably justified move away from it naturally spreading.

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chooky 6d ago

As someone who thinks the war is unwise and that the Trump administration seems incapable of competently executing its policies, the blockade makes sense. When Iran closes the Strait, it still lets it own oil out and thus has a strong financial lifeline. The US needs to prevent in order to create leverage, especially because a peace in which Iran tolls the Strait is clearly a massive loss for the US. Even if one cedes, or believes, as I do, that the war was a bad mistake by Trump, the blockade was the only move left.

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chooky 9d ago

I think your explanations are missing a driver of why these trends started happening. (I also think you are underemphasizing the greater difficulty of being opposed to gay marriage when one has gay friends or family, though I am not so ambitious as to attempt to explain why being gay seems more common now than 50 years ago.) Anyway, for Gen X/Milennials, the traditional opposition to gay marriage from Boomers and previous generations was severely undermined by the prevalence of divorce among Boomers; why should younger generations take Boomers' moralizing about marriage seriously? This seems like a perfect issue for rebellion.

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chooky 9d ago

I think a problem with the smoking metaphor is that it does seem like sex/pregnancy is closer to Russian roulette. Besides Russian roulette, a matching metaphor could be rock climbing/falling to your death; flying/plane crash; or driving a car and crashing it. While sometimes people have sex with the aim of conceiving, all of these other "bad" outcomes are things that would make people just never do a given activity if they thought it was at all likely to happen in that instance.

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chooky 9d ago

Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking.

These seem substantially different in that each time of having sex is an either/or of conceiving or not, but each instance of nicotine consumption only very marginally increases cancer risk. No one is going to get cancer because they tried smoking a couple of times, but they very easily could conceive a child on their first time having sex.

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chooky 11d ago

That there really was no plan beyond "...and then the people will rise up and seize power." The US military should not have been taken so off guard that decapitation and a couple days of missiles did not topple the regime.

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chooky 11d ago

US economy and stock market will be and are worse from the war. For the US, our own fossil fuel production and exports cushion the blow, but it is unambiguously an overall negative.

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chooky 11d ago

I mean, the US' planes being really good doesn't change that Hegseth does seem extremely incompetent and that the US has performed pretty badly unless you only count having a stronger army.

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chooky 11d ago

The US having tactical military dominance over Iran can hardly be "stunning". The US not being able to translate military dominance into a strategic victory is, well, somewhat par for the course, but is in this case at least a bogey, and probably a double or triple given that the strategic loss on the Strait has fundamentally worsened our security/economy, by a lot, compared with pre-war.

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chooky 15d ago

it doesn't involve literally selling a child.

I think of surrogacy as probably involving the implantation of a fertilized egg that does not originate with the surrogate. This way, a mother without a functional womb would still get to pass on her genetic material, and it would also make it so that surrogate-purchasers would not be forced to use the surrogate's genetics, which is potentially very desirable for both sides of the transaction. The financial transaction here is selling the use of the womb, which seems sufficiently icky for someone to reasonably find it unacceptably unaesthetic, but it does not really seem like selling a child unless the birthmother's egg is being used.

Maybe a way to think about this is to ask if an eggless woman somehow steals a couple's last and only viable fertilized egg from a fertility clinic and implants herself, to whom should the child belong once birthed? My view is that the child clearly belongs to the woman who provided the egg.

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chooky 16d ago

Although it is not my own, I find the position of no surrogacy for anyone perfectly coherent. Normally, I would just upvote and move on, but I find myself wondering how you feel about wet nurses. Breastfeeding is a fairly intimate bonding experience, so a wet nurse arguably also has a strong claim to motherhood, or at least it seems aesthetically displeasing on the same grounds as surrogacy.

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chooky 16d ago

Since the mother has signed up to be paid for surrogacy, I am not particularly inclined to view the child as being torn away from the mother's possession. Possibly, I am not open enough to the infant's perspective that it is being torn away from its mother, but divorce, mothers dying, infant adoption, etc., seem to me like they are common enough that this is not a huge problem. I am open to the idea that allowing surrogacy should be completely illegal on the grounds that it is too much like selling organs, but a) this would also ban surrogacy for high-risk mothers and b) is better than organ sales in that faking the supply chain is totally impossible. If surrogacy exists at all, it seems like it has to be an option for gay males.

-2

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chooky 17d ago

In the absence of artificial uteruses, how is a gay male couple supposed to have a biological kid for one of the fathers except throug surrogacy? I don't see what the aesthetic opposition could be here unless it is to such a degree that gay males are not able to "aesthetically" have biological children at all.

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chooky 17d ago

I would say that it you have reached fuck-off money it is probably time to put the amount of money that it takes for that back into target date funds or something. One consequence of your various theses is that Treasury interest rates are going to remain pretty high for a while...

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chooky 18d ago

While obviously any volatility creates trading opportunities, it seems like OP is just trading big picture ideas. Here, it means "expensive oil" rather than some fundamentals-bases idea of "oil price target is X" because of impact of policy on supply, so they are not really in a position to take wins on moves down since they don't really have a thesis beyond "closer to $95 than $75".

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chooky 19d ago

This criticism of Wolfe's obfuscation as a parlor trick reminds me of Wallace Stevens' critique of TS Eliot, with Stevens saying that Eliot fails to make "the visible a little hard to see". Not that Eliot's poetry is particularly obvious to interpretation, but I would argue that some degree of obfuscation is actually quite important for artistic achievement, kind of like how there is not much purpose to a merely photorealistic painting.

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chooky 19d ago

I think that part of OP's point here is the availability of very specific TACO/horrible policy trades under Trump 2. Personally, though, I'm not sure how one figures out that tariffs will be a TACO dip opportunity and that the equally horrible idea of Iran not - seems like a lucky guess to me.

In contrast, the Biden correction was broad-based in response to the rise of interest rates due to the post-pandemic inflation. This seems harder to take levered retail bets on that would turn screw-around money into screw-you money.

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chooky 19d ago

Indeed, the debt/GDP ratio reaching problematic levels is a very recent development (post-covid, getting much worse in Trump 2).

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chooky 22d ago

Why aren't the unambiguous literary achievements of Nabokov, especially Pale Fire and Lolita, on this list? If the defining feature of postmodernism is a metatextual nature and unreliable narrator, well, um, let's include king of it. Hell, there is quite a bit of Faulkner that is pretty close to postmodernism, too, including Absalom and As I Lay Dying, two of his very finest works. I personally view the critical achievement of Ferrante's Neapolitan novels as resting heavily on unreliable narration, though this might be more controversial and my idiosyncratic interpretation. In SF, it is precisely the postmodernism of Wolfe that puts him on a tier far above all others.

In your list, I really only see Vonnegut as having true critical achievement, so I am concerned that this is far more a critique of middlebrow than it is postmodernism.

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