No more state pension. Require everyone to have saved enough to cover their own retirement and associated medical costs or have had enough economically-active children to cover them.
The retirement problem is not a problem of "saving". All pension systems are just redistribution of current production, it does not matter if it is "financed" by taxes or selling some assets or in any other way such as coerced slave labor of future productive population. The problem is that you as an elderly will need things in the future: you will need fresh bread, a surgery, working power lines and maintained house. These things can only be provided by productive people that are being born right now. You cannot have a surgery now in reserve for the future, you cannot store electricity in order to have it in 50 years when the blackout happens due to insufficient maintenance. If there are not enough people born to be future doctors, bakers, linemen etc. - then you will not get product of labor of these unborn people. Whatever you save will be eaten by inflation.
AGI/Mass automation
Okay, so we will all live in in Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism utopia in 20 years. And we will also have endless electricity from nuclear fusion any time soon. Also as a sidenote - not many people really believe this, otherwise they would just sell their assets now when they still have value, to enjoy some hookers and booze - since they will have robot hookers and endless booze in 20 years. So they should smooth out their lifetime consumption, that would be the most logical strategy, right? Like people selling their houses if they believe that apocalypse will arrive in 5 years. I am curious if you are doing so, since you are so sure about these utopian predictions about AI and automation.
Biotech revolutions
Of course, another technological solution is around the corner.
Degrowth
What an euphemism for economic and societal collapse. It will just be nice "degrowth" landing, no other issues as people are just dying on the streets in the middle of blackouts and wars for shrinking resources. A little bit of population and economic "degrowth" will not hurt anybody.
So, all in all I'm not massively worried about declining TFR as a long-term issue.
I am, mostly because TFR is collapsing, and collapsing fast. Many people point out to South Korea as an example where the TFR dropped to record low of 0.68 in 2023, while already being bellow 1.2 for over two decades already. And it may not be the bottom, TFR in Seoul was 0.55 and is also falling. So let's look at simple math if TFR remains at this 0.7 level. One hundred young Koreans will have 35 children and 12 grandchildren. That is almost 10 times drop of young population in just two generations, this is catastrophic level of population collapse, way more than Black Death that ravaged Europe in 14th century resulting in 50% drop of population. The "nice" thing about demography is that it is baked in. There were just 230 000 babies born in South Korea in 2023. This means that there will be at most 230 thousand young 20 years old Koreans in 2044 who may go on and do all the necessary jobs that the country will require of them in two decades, like soldiers to stop North Koreans, firemen, policemen, scientists and everything else. There will be no more of them in next couple of decades.
I think one of the comments was also on to something when he said that cancel culture is also about action out-of-proportion to the perceived transgression. Which is now not only about the loss of reputation and resulting disassociation, but also deplatforming or in extreme cases firing from the job. Potentially also debanking or who knows, maybe in the future your heating or electricity could be shut down.
“once you cease to be of value to others or once you experience too much pain, you willingly die, which is honorable.” By value to others, I mean that you can no longer relay to the young any worthwhile stories or wisdom, can no longer provide any emotional warmth to others, your redeeming personality traits have decayed, and you have too many costly medical problems.
You are coming to this from utilitarian standpoint and here I'd have to agree with you, support of euthanasia is perfectly fine in that horrible worldview. The only obstacle here is something like parasitic relationship that some utilitarians have toward deontological moral systems such as Christianity - where they keep some of the deontological axioms, and then slap them onto their version of utilitarianism in order to prevent themselves going full retard, also resolving some unpleasant cognitive dissonances. Something like Adding Up to Normality where "eating babies" is for some reason axiomatically bad without further explanation. I could have argued with you on your grounds, the usual angle would be mentioning let's say mentally handicapped people who share most characteristics with seniors you mentioned and then some - and then go with that. But I won't, as I think the whole premise of utilitarianism is wrong.
What we see is real-time dissolution of these unspoken axioms as more and more people are raised outside of traditional morals, and who find these axioms less relevant. So we now perfectly accept that it is okay for young mother to kill her own baby in her womb just to improve her career prospects. Nothing to see here, in fact let's throw a party. We now accept that euthanasia is perfectly good option for 29 years old with depression to end her life. Yay, heroic doctors just eliminated bunch of negative utils from the universe, where is the champagne? I tend to think that this is the feature and not a bug of utilitarianism in its pure form. Euthanasia is just another of those lines, those "normality" axioms under attack. And you are just "not persuaded" and refuse irrational religious moral arguments that "life is sacred". Okay. Just beware, because in couple of decades somebody else may not be "persuaded" that things like "free choice" is sacred - it basically stems from some religious "bullshit" about how we were all created as morally equal or some such nonsense - and then they will just euthanize people for greater good.
So yes, I would argue that life is sacred and that euthanasia is wrong based on virtue ethics principles. You will remain unpersuaded I guess, but then you neither persuaded me that euthanasia is such a terrific thing and we should all jump on that bandwagon. Mostly because I do not submit to your utilitarian moral reasoning with your sacred utils.
georgioz
3mo ago
I agree with other posters. This win to me feels more like a "win" when during the pandemic the governments got away with almost all they wanted to do including complete lockdowns. The problem here is that while it was a formidable show of combination soft and hard power, it did not actually deal with the underlying issue of the pandemic. And this show of power came at the cost of further degradation in their perceived legitimacy. It ultimately won them nothing even mid-term.
Does anybody think that by jailing some twitter commenters, the underlying conflict on the ground will get any better? That there will be no more stabbings, terrorist plots and more of the low-level simmering race and religious war? The show of force is the show of weakness.
You conveniently omit the fact that despite his forgiving nature, Caesar was killed by people he forgave and another destructive Civil War ensued. What happened with Augustus is that he learned his lesson. He was murderous in his purges of hardcore elite - he had no issues with Marc Anthony's murder of Cicero and he ruthlessly persecuted hundreds of senators and other opponents. He also utilized other people like his second in command Agrippa to supposedly "overdo" some of the atrocities, only for Augustus to step in as a merciful one to chastise his supposedly overzealeous pet general while of course building huge temples for him as well.
It is similar to denazification: you need to have a way out for some people, but you also have to ruthlessly crush your main opponents and hang them like dogs in order to provide some incentives to defect. Otherwise you only invite snakes like Brutus to stab you in the back.
It's the same principle behind GoT meme of any man who must say I am the king is no true king. Also in general in organizations the position/authority is the weakest form of leadership compared to other forms such as competence, charisma etc. Telling somebody to do something because manager said so is the weakest form of authority you can use as last resort after inspiring and explanation failed and it is a sign of weakness.
georgioz
4mo ago
Oh yes, they do. You are using the a similar argument to the one "CRT is not taught in schools, it is just some obscure academic work". Analogically, normie Christians probably do not read St. Augustin or they could not say what is the latest theological debate. But they breath air and drink the result of all that in their water. Everybody knows that the word nigger is magical and can ruin your career real quick even if used in joking manner or quoting somebody. Trans stuff is just the latest iteration on that and it is headed in the same direction.
georgioz
4mo ago
All your examples are from The Motte, which is literally place for heretics - outside of this place it is considered a heresy. Go and ask Chat GPT for a transgender joke for instance. Most people breath the current religion and they subconsciously know that they transgress. Saying that Rosa Parks was a filthy whore in some joking manner and laughing about it is somewhat icky, right? That is what I am talking about.
georgioz
4mo ago
Transgender people and other similar categories are now considered sacred and any jokes around these topics are thus considered as blasphemy according to our new official religion. As a comparison, you can easily find thousands of images and articles by googling for "Virgin Mary Whore", try that for some actual modern saints like Rosa Parks.
To be clear, nobody actually wants to abolish the words "mother" or "woman." They want to use them in what they assert is "correct" manner, i.e. to refer to parents or people who personally identify as women, irrespective of sex.
By the way in Hegelian jargon it is exactly what is meant by abolish, which just a translation of the word aufheben. The idea is that we are not abolishing the thing, we are just "enriching" and "transforming" the meaning of contradictions in binaries such as man/woman. This is the idea behind other leftist/social justice utopian thinking: we want to abolish the police by resolving contradictions and making police unnecessary under proper Social Justice. We want to abolish private property, because under communism there is no longer need for such a thing.
If you ignore the ideological aspect and the silliness of the phrasing, there's a certain set-theoretic elegance to it.
If you ignore ideological aspects, then we would not be here in the first place. There is no set-theoretic elegance to confuse meaning of words such as using the same word of "woman" for both a female member of homo sapiens and some invented concept of self-ID gender: you would use a different string for such a thing, let's say "transwoman"? The same with regards to removing the word "breast" as a female organ with milk ducts from our vocabulary altogether just because someone's ideology is offended by it. I don't see any elegance in removing valid concepts that describe biological reality, just deliberate confusion.
I actually think it is the opposite. President is there to lead and communicate policies of his team toward the public. If his staff members are the writers, president is the actor or comedian delivering the lines and bits. Presidents are supposed to debate, they represent their administration while giving State of the Union, they should represent the state behind closed doors meetings with other world leaders, they should inspire in times of need and be the face of the administration and above all else they should provide legitimacy for the government they represent, as they are the person that people get to vote for as opposed to their PR managers or analysts.
This take that person of POTUS is just unimportant position and that a corpse remotely controlled by unnamed staffers could do as good of a job, and that people really should just vote opaque party machinery and believe in the best is absolutely surreal to me. If the politicians can no longer be bothered to even pretend that they care, the legitimacy of the power is gone. It is incredibly dangerous direction imho.
From my perspective the last 5 years has been the easiest time to significantly beat the market in the last 40 years by a large margin. Events you can see coming from outer space and almost risk free investments that take advantage of them (if you manage small amounts of money).
I have seen similar smug attitudes during COVID, people who raked in cash when stocks plummeted between January and March 2020 by almost 25% were patting themselves on the back how smart they are and laughed at other people. And they knew that the worst is only ahead of us: lockdowns, supply chain issues and all that. Only for the market returning to previous heights by September, followed by huge surge up until January 2022. Many people who doubled down on bearish prediction in March not only lost all their gains from early 2020, but lost everything in that gamble.
Just give me a break, streets are lined up with homeless market gurus like you who just know how to beat the market.
Sure, I love my boy James Lindsay including his extensive deep dive into Paulo Freire - with Pedagogy of Oppressed being the 3rd most cited work in humanities. Kaufmann himself gives a lot of praise to Lindsay and he by no means denies these influences.
But that is not the whole story, Kaufmann argues that it is moderates and "bleeding-heart liberals" who enable free reign of these ideas. The way he put it is that after defeat of economic socialism at least in its most radical form of planned economy, liberals still do not understand where the borders on social issues are. This is what enables woke to rampage through our society. It is a little bit depressing but also encouraging - most people do not actively believe these revolutionary thoughts such as Critical Race Theory or Queer Theory - they just want to be and sound as if they are kind and moral. On one hand they can be easily duped into various extremes, but on the other hand it means that potential pushback may not be as tough as many people think.
I recently listened to podcast of Jordan Peterson with Eric Kaufmann and Kaufmann explained the phenomenon of woke as coming in waves. With first being in the 60ies in old Days of Rage where the left radicals first pushed this stuff and actually managed to carve out huge cultural concessions especially for blacks in form of Black Studies departments and such. Then there were eighties where people thought it was all behind them, it was age of Regan and neoliberalism and winning the Cold War - but at the tail end of 80ies and 90ies came the second woke wave in academia with intersectionality and and queer stuff. It also subsided a bit after 9/11 and Bush era of War on Terror only for woke to reemerge in 2010s.
I think he is right, saying that the woke is subsiding to me feels like previous times of pause. Kaufmann is especially skeptical as the millennials and zoomers are strongly in favor of woke ideas in various researches - especially women. If there will be some pushback next few years we may expect 4th wave maybe in the 2030s where the phenomenon may be rekindled with some new additions.
georgioz
5mo ago
Exactly. People should always have the infamous "bear vs man in a forest" question on their minds when reading anything women declare in public. There is great deal of GSR - gossiping, shaming and rallying as tools of relational warfare in any such situation. This is no different, just bunch of old hags trying to use the old tricks of how all women are wonderful and how all men are such pigs, possibly with some juicy story to make themselves look interesting. These diatribes are almost without factual value outside of some meta level anthropological evidence of this behavior.
Typically, German techno is LGBTQ-coded and events can feature anything-goes public displays of sexual activity.
I think this controversy fully displays to what extent the whole "LGBTQ community" narrative is actually astroturfed. I don't even have to use my arguments, Douglas Murray said it better here. Apparently "homophobic", AfD party is very popular with gays in Germany. I'd dare to guess that gay men are the majority of techno party goers, so it does not surprise me the least that Deutschland für die Deutschen, Ausländer raus! would be popular among them. It is incredible to read through the article and watch the cognitive dissonance in real time.
I like Lindsay's take on the whole DEI. Paraphrasing:
Diversity means whatever is opposing the cultural hegemony. That is why room full of white women feminists can be diverse and why Larry Elder can be a Black Face of White Supremacy. So in practice, diversity means that you have to welcome subversive elements into the company/movement/club or whatever, diversity needs to be ensured by cadre of political commissars who themselves are experts on diversity.
Inclusion means that you are welcoming to "diversity", it is making sure that the subversive elements can have free reign. The basic form of inclusion is basically censorship - you will be subject to certain "ethical standards", that you will not do hate speech or microagressions. The advanced level of inclusion is called belonging, this means that you now have to be active and supportive of these elements: you have to put pronouns into your bio, you have to get rainbow keychain for your company card and so forth. The aim is to create atmosphere of fake consensus via social pressure to supress any resistence.
Equity means adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal on basis of diversity. This is your cookie cutter socialist redistribution so that subversive elements get necessary resources to thrive and multiply, but now expanded to other domains such as positions of power inside companies or in casting of movies or moderating teams of some random forum. As with other socialist movements that were also very keen on redistribution, it has to be enforced by diversity and inclusion experts - those are the vanguard forces that will at first enforce equitable society until this becomes automatic as when socialism is supposed to voluntarily turn into communism now called Social Justice.
georgioz
6mo ago
In what world is using image or voice of some actress "evil" especially when he took it down after one strongly worded letter? This is a ridiculous standard of morality to me.
georgioz
6mo ago
If there are Taelons 100 million ly away from us, it is highly unlikely they’d care about us.
Milky way diameter is only around 100 thousand ly, the closest Andromeda galaxy is 2,4 million ly. Even Voyager is travelling around 1 ly/18,000 yeas so it can get to the edge of the galaxy in around 900 million years. Parker Solar Probe, which is fastest moving man-made object has ten times the velocity, so it could travel to the edge of the galaxy in tens of millions of years.
Any sufficiently old civilization - let's say tens or hundreds of millions of years old - could reasonably have a probe in every star system in the Galaxy even with our current propulsion technology with no problem and it could even explore other galaxies if it is 1 billion years or older.
georgioz
6mo ago
No, it does not involve any of that even if you talk about papal infallibility doctrine that was so far used twice in history. Catholics do not have to listen to whatever pope says in some interview. So far Catholic Church is against gay marriages in line with Persona Humana doctrine. Just couple of excerpts:
At the present time there are those who, basing themselves on observations in the psychological order, have begun to judge indulgently, and even to excuse completely, homosexual relations between certain people. This they do in opposition to the constant teaching of the Magisterium and to the moral sense of the Christian people.
But no pastoral method can be employed which would give moral justification to these acts on the grounds that they would be consonant with the condition of such people. For according to the objective moral order, homosexual relations are acts which lack an essential and indispensable finality. In Sacred Scripture they are condemned as a serious depravity and even presented as the sad consequence of rejecting God.[18] This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it, but it does attest to the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of.
Form the video he shouted "nech žije Ukrajina" (long live Ukraine). The rest of the video was testimony of his friends, the first one was his coworker miner who mentioned that he he was a rebel and anti-beurocracy before, the second one was also in the "movement against the violence" that the assasin founded and expressed incredulity about how it could come to violent action. The rest is his brief CV about his sympathy toward now disbanded paramilitary organization Slovenskí Branci, his career as writer and member of the official club of Writers/Authors in Slovakia.
This is part of the spin I see a lot in conjunction with insane conspiracies even in supposedly rational progressive circles - one example being that there was no blood seen at the scene and that people around did not panic, so maybe it was just some stunt. Yes, these things are unironically shared among a lot of pro-opposition people, this is where we are now - in culture war filled disinformation age. When it comes to the assassin then yes, on one side he had photos with pro Russian aligned paramilitary organization Slovenský Branci (although supposedly to convince them to not support Russia as part of his movement against violence) and he also had some rant against Roma/gypsies - BTW not that rare even among progressives in Slovakia. However he also voted for progressive president Zuzana Čaputová, he strongly supported Ukraine in the current war and he participated in anti-government protests that were organized basically since Fico took power as every government action was painted as a huge problem, threat to democracy and all that.
His actions were politically motivated and he decided to assassinate Fico for reasons broadly in line with current opposition rhetoric. I think he really fits the description of "stochastic terrorism" - an unhinged person with fringe views who was sensitive to heightened emotions around the current issue™ and just decided to act extremely on a given day. This gives plausible deniability of any responsibility to any side - look, he is unhinged and we do not bear any responsibility for anything, we could even pin it on the other side due to cherrypicked issues like that he was racist toward gypsies, so he was no true progressive. By the way there was also an interview with his son who said that he was not medicated that he did not have any history of actual mental illness and that nothing suggested that he would do something like that - that is why I use the term unhinged.
And I am not even saying that as some judgement, I just think this is the world we live in. We may see more and more of these types of operations where political violence is used with cloud of plausible deniability, that can itself feed into the overall culture war further polarizing everybody into even more insanity. What a world to live in.
The law would apply equally to somebody funded by Russian organization or let's say Misk foundation that is backed by Mohammed bin Salman. I personally think that there is a huge difference between let's say Club of Slovak Tourists which is a private NGO funded by hikers to mark our excellent hiking trails and who repair water springs or huts as opposed to organization funded by governments like China or Saudi Arabia or Quatar - it is hard to even call them NGOs in that sense. Also was it also not part of the whole controversy of "Russian collusion" where everybody was up in arms that some foreign player - maybe financed by Gazprom funded “NGO” or whatever - is meddling in US domestic politics?
To me this adds transparency to NGO sector. The fact that leftists call it as "chilling effect" or even as you say that it will "shut down" the sector is telling. Of course they are arguing from slippery slope and there may be something there, but it is a different argument from what is happening now.
So today there was an assassination attempt on prime minister of my country of Slovakia - Robert Fico. It happened during his tradition of government meetings across the country, in small coal town of Handlová. He went to greet his supporters when a 71 years old man shot him several times, he was then carried away and sent to hospital in critical condition, he undertook complicated surgery and his fate is still not known.
All the leaders sent their condolences from Putin to Macron, Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, all condemning the violence. The same for Slovak political leaders. Of course, Slovak reddit as a bastion of more progressive people could not hold their glee, most upvoted comments for one of the threads were of the like of "JFK from Wish" or "this is what you get from hate". I mention it just as a litmus test of how more progressive people think in Slovakia and to be frank I find it disgusting. As you can gather, Fico is viewed as a populist and Slovak Orban and pro Putin and all that, despite major differences that may take too long to explain. But he definitely is described as archenemy by the strongest opposition party literally called "Progressive Slovakia" here. You probably get the picture.
As for the assassin, to me he seems like an unhinged man that was supporting a lot of fringe movements from right-wing movements to talking against the current government as leaked by one policeman who released a video of the perpetration in custody, where the assassin ranted something about recent law regarding the state broadcasting and overall disagreement with the government.
At this point all I have to say is that I am in shock. Something like that never happened in 40 years history of my country. I see already a lot of spin including Guardian and other foreign press as well as very strong proclamations from parties in government about "political warfare". One thing is apparent, the politics in my country changed and not for the better. I think there will be some ripples also elsewhere, ranging from "stochastic terrorism" by having somebody radicalized by media to just politicians being more alerted to this kind of thing happening. There is also EU parliament elections in couple of weeks and this is something that may have more impact there.
That is all for now, I am not sure if this will be deleted as it is not probably quite a topic for some extra thread, but also not your cookie cutter idea thrown here for discussion. But it is widely relevant on so many levels even outside of Slovak politics so I think there may be some good discussion bellow. I may add some edit and I am willing to anybody else to update bellow if let's say Fico's condition changes in the upcoming hours when I am asleep.
The important part is "displays of party loyalty". You did not want "true believers" next to you, when some high ranking general or other party member wanted something not exactly communist-like, such as expensive western gadget or other contraband. I think it is similar to HR ladies today - you want to have good activist cred by posting the right flag on your social media and all that, but you should also not interfere if the CEO has some fun with his assistant on his business trip. It's the same logic why Trudeau surfed through his blackface episode so easily - everybody just pretended it does not matter, because if you said anything, then maybe you would garner some level of (whispered) sympathy, but then find yourself suddenly redundant and replaced.
This is what is so comical about all the activists: the corruption and nepotism is not the bug, it is the feature of all these stupid systems. Communism was tried so many times and it always devolves into some kind of nightmare, often of fascist variety. It is because it is baked into the system.
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