muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
No bio...
User ID: 1018
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
People who have the ol' good clinically diagnosed autism often have limited range of interests and poor understanding of everyday things, including cause and effect.
Nerds have great obsession about how things should be according to their own pet theories. Normies won't care about irrelevant things, unless it is necessary or beneficial (and then it is no longer irrelevant)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Picked it up because it is a "classic" and supposedly provides a view to pre-WW1 European civilization (from point of view post-WW1 disillusioned intellectual).
I have troubles reading it, it is superbly boring. Plot-wise, nothing interesting happens. Castorp, nominal protagonist, is both boring and detestable. Reading it has been a depressing affair: perhaps 5 pages at one go and I feel cravings to read anything else. Sometimes boring characters can be salvaged by inspired writing and humor or irony, but alas, I see no such redeeming qualities. Major disappointment after Buddenbrooks, which was quite readable with all the family drama.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
4mo ago
There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease
I don't think it would be nice nor kind for drug addicts if we seriously started discussing drug addiction as a disease. Today we think diseases are treatable, but that is because the usual meaning of the word covers diseases caused by pathogens and relatively similar set of causes which the Western science can treat. Viruses that previously killed multitudes have been eradicated with vaccinations. Many of cancers can be fought and occasionally dealt with with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy (made possible because of the antibiotics). Even HIV can be managed with antiretrovirals. Common thread to all: sick individual receives treatment and is treated to effect they he or she is cured, gets better and regains functionality.
As evidenced by the growth of the problem of drug addiction, there is no equivalent of penicillin for addiction. If addiction is a disease, the medical science of addiction is at the level of the medicine of biological diseases in the 18th century or early 19th century: doctors often can recognize the disease you have, there is a scientific name for it, there are procedures to manage it, but professionals are in dispute how they work and which treatment works better than other, because none of them obviously and easily cures the patient or prevents its spread (the way antibiotics cure and vaccinations prevent). The methods that sometimes work often are radical, crude, painful, and often focus on preventing spread of the disease because the individual very rarely can be cured.
You get a wound that that is likely to become infected and septic? The treatment is amputation; there is a profession that is very skilled at removing your limbs quickly and efficiently, but it will be a painful operation and limit your functionality permanently. You catch leprosy (or a skin disease that looks like one)? There is no treatment, the public health officials will do their best to ship you to to a remote colony isolated from rest of the society, for life. Tuberculosis? You are encouraged to be shipped to a remote sanatorium isolated from the rest of the society, which can be a rather nice place if you are rich, but the treatments are no cures and you will eventually die there. Later revolutionary treatments include exposure sunlight and nutrition (which helps vitamin D intake, which may marginally help) and collapsing affected lung (possibly limiting spread of disease to other organs). Public health officials are concerned with sanitation to prevent spread of the disease.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
4mo ago
As a general principle, if enough people consider the "aesthetics" important, it is becomes a cause, which is important for recruitment. Causes attract the real object-level issues, and object-level questions (economic or otherwise) may attach themselves to aesthetic causes. Or find themselves attached; sometimes the aesthetics may take the driver's seat.
I agree chances of classical civil war is quite low. There is still possibility of other forms of super-unfun-bad-times, though. (The Troubles. Italian years of lead.)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
5mo ago
That's the tack that society has been taking since at least the 80s or so. Obviously there's no blinded experiment or anything and lots of different overlapping trends, but it seems pretty clear to me that downplaying gender roles led to an increase in people desiring to transition rather than forestalling transitions.
Hypothesis: Downplaying the traditional norms effectively removed the training wheels from the kids who would have really needed them. It may be difficult to adapt to unsaid social norms if the well-meaning adults are too drunk on their utopian koolaid and insist there being no norms. If a task is difficult, some people do not succeed.
If you complain, the well-meaning adults may say that you've got it all wrong, it is how it is meant to be: the kids (later grown-ups) who take non-standard paths have been liberated from oppressive structures and are finally able to find/express their non-standard identity.
I believe, one part of it is this: When life is difficult and you have very few safety nets, every decision you make matters. If you start making such decisions that matter as a 15-year old, by age 20 you are quite used to making such decisions. Also, looking around, you will see a self-selected sample, because those who made abysmally bad decisions or simply unlucky decisions are in the poorhouse or dead.
Other part, look at the safety nets. Most often they are implemented as professionalized bureaucracies: by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats, with standardized paperwork. The British copied the idea of civil service from imperial China, which was not a country known for dynamism. Nearly every Westerner is trained in an environment of bureaucracy (school) that both explicitly and also implicitly trains them to function in another bureaucracy later on. One distinctive feature of a bureaucratic organization is that it can administer rewards for conformity and punishments for non-conformity very reliably. It is designed by humans to function so. You interact with them in a standardized way. Other methods of human organization, such as free competition or informal social networks are quite different. Non-human forces of nature are similarly unforgiving as bureaucracies, but (used to be) unpredictable and not designed by humans.
Final part: I agree it seems like people are very risk-averse compared to previous. I myself feel quite risk-averse. Is it an accurate measure of change of rate in risk-taking? Plenty of people decided stay on the same farm, farming it the same way as their parents and grandparents did, generations after generations. Mostly, we don't hear of them.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
5mo ago
Half-serious take: Christianity continues to be the religion of slaves and downtrodden, paganism of pleasure and empowerment (will to power).
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
5mo ago
I admit the dry dust is not usually disgusting. When it accumulates, it becomes noticeable and annoying. How annoying, it depends on the choice of the carpets and/or floor material. In a temperate climate, there is usually something else than dry dust, too.
All sort of wet and-or sticky dirt is instantly noticeable and disgusting.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
5mo ago
I suggest an experiment. Buy two identical pairs of white sneakers. Wear the first pair every day. Do not use the other pair. After one week (one month), compare them. Most likely they won't look identical anymore. (It is unlikely but a possibility that you never step outside regularly cleaned indoors spaces, but I find it unlikely.)
There is dust and mud and trace amounts of grime, trash and animal life and occasionally, human life on the sidewalks. Dust is ever present outside where there are cars, despite daily cleaning of streets (which is rare). I know this because of brush my shoes approximately once in a week.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
5mo ago
That might also contribute to the feeling of wasted time - all the discourse happened, and what changed?
Unsure about the direction of causality, but Elon Musk was two handshakes away, and he bought Twitter.
The people who participated or observed the proceeings have been thinking of different thoughts than they would've if the trousers of time had bifurcated differently and we'd gone down the right leg. Or perhaps this is the right left leg?
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
6mo ago
lutefisk
fermented
You are thinking of surströmming, which is fermented herring, acidic and has quite strong smell. It is advised not to open a can indoors. Lutefisk is gelatinous and has mild taste and smell, it is not a fermented product. It is dried, then soaked in godawful amount of lye solution for preservation.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
6mo ago
Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it.
Several people have cited examples from countries with multiparty systems, I guess it was proved.
I think the attempts to come up with consistent "theories of left and right" fail because ... while it is not fully arbitrary random whether any particular party of random time period and historical circumstances is considered left or right, it is a result of partially random path-dependent process of self-sorting to tribal groups. People assign these labels to themselves and others according to what makes sense to them at the time. Then the next generation self-sorts again, in updated circumstances. Their thinking may have been influenced by systematic theories of politics and ideological treatises, so there is some amount of consistency (to the extent the systematic theories were self-consistent) ... but surprisingly often, the rank-and-file did not read the lengthy treatises. Sometimes the popular theories people acted upon turn out to be poor at modelling world, and lead unanticipated outcomes. If the process is not governed by systematic laws, attempts to draw systematic theories to explain the process will fail.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
6mo ago
Different establishment. The establishment that cares about corporate tax cuts probably has some cultural and interpersonal overlap with the establishment that is involved in New York judicial system but it is not like that they are the same set of people with coherent agenda.
The establishment is like the Man -- fuzzy concept that sometimes have informative uses but still fuzzy, which makes it too imprecise and underdefined for other uses.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
6mo ago
I felt visceral disdain for the whole notion of innocent civilians in a democracy for as long as I can remember
The feeling of visceral disdain debaters have and targets of their disdain hardly are evidence whether the argument is worthy.
I think there exists plenty of theoretical literature on whys and hows why our laws of war are such as they are, if one would search for it. My personal intuition is that it comes down to cold raw game theory calculus from Clausewitz and has only a little to do with fairness. The purpose of the war is to achieve goals, and such goals are political in nature, like everything else in the affairs of states. If you attack the enemy's military forces (name that is latched to their primary war capabilities) and win, you render your enemy less capable to achieve their political goals, including their ability to resist your ability achieve your own goals. After a decisive battle or a series of them and utter destruction of enemy's capability to fight, you have control over territory and the population. You may redraw borders, force a change of government, force evacuation of population or property, all because you have territorial control and thus can install an occupying force to enforce your will. It makes the attacks against military targets appear neutral: what you do after victory depends on what you will. The aim and goals of victr may be just, unjust, or in between, they are are up to decision makers of respective belligerent. The method of war itself is much more constrained by the technological capabilities.
A terror attack against soft civilian targets alone, at the usual levels of seriousness and scale, won't itself affect the enemy's primary capability fight a war, which makes it capricious. You will not achieve territorial control with a regular terror attack against civilians, because by definition, the civilians have not military capability to oppose you and the enemy's hardened military capability has not lost a battle, thus it is still present. You are essentially no longer fighting the enemy but blackmailing the enemy, betting that they won't stomach the slaughter and cede the political goal out of their own volition from their moral considerations. Thus terror attacks against civilians appear ethically distasteful by the method alone. (Specifying "usual level" as weapons of mass destruction or conventional means taken to extreme level, to destruction of whole economic base or genocidal destruction of population, can have military effect, but such effects are difficult to achieve without involving military forces. And if you start including military targets, logistics and industries in your terror attack, then it is properly called a guerilla campaign, and it is considered more acceptable in laws of war, though the line is murky and propagandists' brush wide.)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
Conscription, like all laws restricting individual liberty, can be societal equivalent of Ulysses tying himself to mast.
Very few people really want to go fight in a war. Yet the consensus may be that all men are needed to fight or the war is lost and the war ought not to be lost.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
Isn't "service for the duration" the default assumption mostly everywhere? Only powers fighting far-off wars of little importance can afford to send soldiers on limited combat tours.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
ten to twenty years from now it will be generally accepted that Mistakes Were Made
I wish we had RemindMeBot? And is your prediction that general sentiment is "Mistakes Were Made"? Or is it the general sentiment that some particular group of people are too stupid to vote? They are not the same claim. The latter seems to be generally shared sentiment about the political outgroup in the US politics since I can remember, so I am uncertain how it can be verified. Perhaps you intend a more specific claim about responses about stupidity that is more strong than more than stable trend of everyday political animus?
Nevertheless, I don't think observable presence of either kind of sentiment would tell much about the objective facts of the war. Watching MAS*H, made 20 years after the Korean war, the generally accepted sentiment of the producers of the show is that the Korean war was a mistake (naturally the show was for a large part about Vietnam, also thought a mistake). I don't think the evidence proves that either war was a mistake. South Korea is clearly a victory for all of mankind, only complicated by their later problems with their birth rate. Vietnam is more difficult to assess. There were faults in execution of the war, both strategically and on home front, but containing the Communism probably was not one of the mistakes. The domino theory worked, sort-of. Who knows what would have happened in SE Asia if North Vietnam would have had a shorter, more victorious war. What if Second Malaysian Emergency would have started earlier and turned out differently? Would Singapore had been the success story it has been?
In general, if the overall American mood during "Freedom Fries" moments are not the most rational, it is mostly information about the state of American mood than anything objective. The consistent prediction is, the American mood ten years before or after "Freedom Fries" is equal in its rationality, no matter its current polarity or valence.
Concerning casual discussion: The amount of death during the course of human history is of such magnitude, any discussion about it will appear nothing but casual or callous in comparison. Also an isolated demand.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
On this forum, the idea that Russia is some sort of right-wing paradise has been debunked many times.
True. Yet the arguments that amount "it doesn't make sense for Ukraine to fight, the peace would be a better deal for them" keep coming back in some form of other. The level of benevolence of Russian masters directly contributes to calculation of the cost of the peace.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
It can’t be dismissed as silly propaganda
The evidence presented can be dismissed as silly propaganda. The original comment had a link to tweet with evidence that consisted of some claims and 4 photos presumably from Tinder. Same level of evidence would have been present before the war. Claims "go to any bar in Europe" are cheap.
At minimum, one would need statistics to prove it. (Recollections of experiences with/observing presumed hookers in MENA countries and engaging in hypotheses about cultural factors of mountain Slaves does not count as interrogating the evidence.) How many of Ukrainians in Europe are women? Apparently approx 4 million. How many relative to respective demographics stayed in Ukraine? Apparently there was 12 million women aged 14-54 in Ukraine in 2018. Assuming everyone of the 4 million were women from the 12 million, it is a Large fraction, but not all or a majority. More exact statistics would be needed, because I presume there are kids and grandmas included in the 4 million. How many of the women of relevant are single, and how many are engaging in low-grade prostitution, how many are engaging more chaste forms of dating? Evidence not easily found. How many of sex workers are voluntary versus coerced? Evidence not easily found.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
True enough, if it happened today, or next year. But who knows about 2030, or 2035?
Russo-Georgian war happened in 2008. The war in Donetsk started in 2014. The current war started in 2022. As far as the political climate is concerned, a great many things may change in 6 years.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
You can basically say this about almost any state that existed for several centuries
There are plenty of the oldest states with centuries (heck, millenia) of continuity that have not done anything interesting for a century or two. (Switzerland. Sweden. Denmark.)
But let's grant it true for great powers and aspirants. The realist argument of international anarchy doesn't really favor any side: as long as any country has sought keep or obtain greater status by periodical war, the neighbors of the same country have been wary of such attempts, or they have been its willing dominions, or its already conquered unwilling puppets. In international anarchy, it is natural for Russia's neighbors to seek to preempt Russian actions (unless Russia can win them with soft power).
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
They are Russian ethnically and live in a region historically called Novorossiya.
"Historically" is less impressive if one looks at the history: Novorussiya originates from the 18th century, roughly contemporary with Voltaire. Not yesterday but neither Ye Olde Times.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
Thus it's really telling that this historical event and this historical event alone, unique amongst even genocides, it is DEMANDED that schools teach it happened AS MORAL MATTER, that unbelief is the ultimate sin.
We don't treat Holomordor this way, nor the killing fields, nor the plight of the Armenians, Hell in America and Europe you can argue that the Native Americans actually didn't have it that bad, or that slavery was the equivalent of the Russian serfs or just having a job, without being imprisoned in Austria or Germany.
This doesn't really compute. Claims about Armenians or Native Americans or the slavery in the US never had been a politically important topic in Austria and Germany. After the war, the arguments to the effect "Nazis were actually good guys / or better than the other guys in charge now / and all claims of their wrongdoings are lies" were politically important.
The equivalent question in the US context would be, dunno, debates about teaching evolution and creationism in the schools? There have been substantial efforts to have only one of the two included in the curriculum by disagreeing partisans. Extremely partisan behavior can be observed: many an internet atheist argued that teaching evolution is the truth, thus it is moral imperative to teach it happened (and equally imperative not to teach creationism). If given the power, some people would mandate it by law. Despite their moral posturing, the scientific evidence from archeology through biology to genetics is overwhelmingly supportive of the evolution.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
7mo ago
They all claim that "resettlement" secretly became "extermination" but they cannot say who, when, where, or why the change, or point to any documentary evidence that this is something which actually happened.
This is untrue. There is evidence of various resettlement plans that were first considered. There is evidence some of the plans were found impossible or infeasible to implement (such as Madagascar plan), thus they were not implemented. Lublin plan was partially implemented. If you argue that every Polish Jew was resettled to Lublin, you should explain why (all) the Polish Jews could not be found in Lublin after the war.
SEP
IEP
An argument about special pleading won't get resolved without showing the supposed principles are inconsistently applied.
What is the standard sentencing for car drivers who kill other people in cars? Is it different if they kill pedestrians? If The_Nybbler is right, the driver gets probation for both, and the principle is consistent. (Consistently callous.) One could raise the sentencing waterline for all kinds of vehicle-caused deaths, too.
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