chooky
3d 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.
chooky
3d 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.
chooky
5d 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.
chooky
5d 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.
chooky
5d 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.
chooky
5d 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.
chooky
9d 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.
chooky
10d 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.
chooky
10d 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.
chooky
11d 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.
chooky
11d 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...
chooky
12d 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".
chooky
13d 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.
chooky
13d 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.
chooky
13d ago
Indeed, the debt/GDP ratio reaching problematic levels is a very recent development (post-covid, getting much worse in Trump 2).
chooky
16d 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.
chooky
16d ago
While the "US" as an entity seems like it is obviously in dispute with Russia over Ukraine, I don't really perceive Trump as having a huge problem with it. Seemingly, Trump and Putin get along, or at least Trump respects Putin's aura/energy (sorry, can't come up with non-colloquial here) and even has an understanding perspective on Russia's nationalist/expansionist ambitions. I do not at all see propping up Russian oil revenues as something that makes Trump really mad, though it is kind funny that this greatly mitigates the war's impact on Trump's Asian trade enemies.
chooky
23d ago
And of course Iran also has the tech to make them smart (and become inert after a period, for example), but I don't know if they bothered.
If Iran is charging $2 million for passage through the Strait, it would seem that there is some system that allows ships to pass through (or avoid) any minefields freely with a high degree of certainty.
chooky
26d ago
We'll get to TACO eventually, but it seems like not enough damage has been done to the economy yet for Trump to care or his handlers (please tell me there are handlers) to come their senses. Really should have just declared victory after week 1, and then if Iran kept retaliating and closing Hormuz it would be Iran's belligerence and not Trump's bellicosity.
chooky
1mo ago
For school officials, evacuations without notifying parents, arranging transportation, etc, would be tough to carry out. Honestly, I would kind of imagine the "our country is getting bombed plan" to be closer to shelter-in-place and hope the building/status protects us rather than walk away from the military base. What happens if they leave the building and are hit by shrapnel? Possibly, this will be a Columbine or 9-11 moment for schools next to bases that causes them to completely re-think how to respond to airstrikes.
This was mostly just sloppy intel from the US and a failure of the AI target selection. Possibly, Iran should have evacuated civilians away from all bases as the US forces were mounting in advance of the strikes; I am open to the critique that the school should not have been open at all. But the scale and scope of the strikes was pretty surprising. Also keep in mind the extent to which schools function as childcare.
chooky
1mo ago
This one is a "feature" that aows you to undo misclicks. I really just wish there was an Undo button for misclicks in the base game.
chooky
1mo ago
A leftist government does not make a country unaligned with a country or not. An authoritarian regime might, but Argentinian voters just made bad choices on electing irresponsible leftist populists for many years (I am not very educated on if the alternatives were much better). Argentina was still closely allied with the US throughout, a marked contrast with authoritarian leftists elsewhere.
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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