Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
The more common term for a serious, intelligent Libertarian for the last decade-plus has been "neoreactionary". Mr. Caplan is certainly intelligent.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
There is no 'liberal' or 'classical liberal' position in history that includes open borders. As he justifies it, it's more of an extreme libertarian belief, and hardline libertarians have always been politically homeless from the moment they diverged from right-liberalism (which included freedom of the individual, but also the common good of the nation and the maintenance of tradition through non-governmental means). I believe Caplan would also describe himself as a libertarian.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
If I was in charge of a frat with dudes that did this, they'd be reprimanded or kicked out*
It's actually kind of a tough line to walk (I'll assume here, given that you were once a teenage girl, that you weren't in a frat). From a fratboy perspective, there are two liability issues: first, the reputational and potential legal damage of having the orgy in the first place. We'll bracket the legal, since what that should be is the dispute at hand - reputationally, if the orgy is socially understood as fully consensual, it's mixed but generally a net good for the frat's reputation, you'll make the other guys jealous and probably pique some girls' interest. Tough for the girl in question but that's how greek life gender dynamics work, if you're disgusted by weird sex stuff you're not going to make it past the hazing. Second, the damage of the messages sent in the group chat. If I was president, even if the girl in question loved the experience and came back for more (which happens, there are girls who pride themselves on going through as much of a given frat as they can), I'd be tanning the hide of whichever idiot sent stuff like "free pussy in room X". You're taking a totally negligent approach to party safety, an attitude to women (including sorority girls) which they will find repellent, gift-wrapping it for the salty geeds at the campus newspaper, and you're broadcasting it permanently to 57 people?! You're essentially handing a massive potential blackmail to anybody in that group. What if the frat needs to kick out a problem brother next semester and he shows you a screenshot of the messages? (Again, not hypothetical, something like this happened to a frat I knew - a brother did something extremely unpleasant to another, was kicked out, and aired out every offensive message in groupchats he had). What if some brother's an idiot and shows them to his friends to brag? What if one's dumb enough to show them to a girl to play pick-me? The only way you could get away with harshly punishing the guy who sent the messages is because they'd be equally embarrassing for him if revealed. Kids these days and their stupid phones...
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Also funny is that in an alternate universe where Craig was allowed to attend the Halloween party, prance around in a slutty costume for a few hours before snorting some ketamine off cock and fucking and sucking some number of Chi Phi bros
I read this without remembering that Craig was her surname, and thought, well, that probably would have caused a different kind of drama.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Imagining a feminist account of Saddam Hussein's capture which is concerned entirely with the yonic nature of the hole he was hiding in.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
The fraternity president - who did not have sex with her - disinvited her. He is likely also the male who "shut down whatever the fuck this is", and was probably acting under pressure from the sorority queen bee regarding the disinvitation.
Even if it's not entirely legally true, it's generally considered in frats that the president is the face of the frat both in dealing with the university and the legal system, and shoulders a lot of personal liability in his role. The job of the president is to be the most paranoid and stressed-out guy in the house, not an easy job. I've known many cases where everyone's chill with something and the president has to step in and shut it down (and, very occasionally, like this, it backfires horribly).
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Honestly, I'd guess Valerie Solanas being a Baathist wouldn't even be top 5 in the strangest links between American progressive activists and third world postcolonial regimes.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Funny, from the examples given on Wikipedia, it sounds like a mash-up of regional British accents, almost half Scots half West Country.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
It's also very good at planning out a walking/transit/driving itinerary between sites (just remind it to leave time for chilling, coffees, and the general interruptions of travel)
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
This is pretty basic tribal behaviour. When a group has social power, one of the things they use that for is enforcing their taboos on outsiders by dogpiling them (part of a scale of escalation, roughly: dogpiling, career damage, state enforcement, execution/murder - different groups have different levels of power to enforce, nobody in this dispute is getting their head sawed off like they might over a joke about Muhammad). This is basically universal, or at least counterexamples are very rare. Such is life, individual members who are more reasonable and easygoing don't have veto power over their group. What's unusual is that nobody's used to Christians on the internet (or, specifically, on X dot com the everything app) feeling they have that kind of social power.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Uh, are you under the impression that there are internet-rationalist leaders sleeping with Aella?
Yes, this isn't exactly a secret. Nate Soares probably the best-known now.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Also, one might wonder whether an organization that was so willing to cheat so extensively on the bureaucratic side of things might have tried their hand at other methods...
Pep Guardiola is nicknamed PED Guardiola for a reason - most notably, when he failed his doping test as a player, he blamed his doctor (he was acquitted on the grounds that some people just naturally test positive for nandrolone, so we really can't know if he was doping). Then, once he was a coach at Barcelona, he hired that same doctor...
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Why does every league restrict free agency until age 26/27?
Do you mean 16/17? In football (soccer), this was settled by the Bosman ruling in 1995, in an EU court verdict that was then extended to British law, but youth players are covered by different rules intended to protect underage workers.
It’s the median age. You can get the union to approve a deal that limits young players salaries if that means more money goes to the older players and the convenient age to get the majority or 51% is the median age.
I can believe this is how it works in a more cartelized system like the US. Every other cartelized profession is either there or headed in that direction, just ask a lawyer or a doctor.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
Yeah parity is very important to the long-run success of a league. Nobody cares about "Ligue 1 McDonald's", or Bayern winning the Bundesliga, or La Liga matches outside of the Big 2.5 teams there, but the Premier League has become the global leader by far in revenue in large part because it's consistently dramatic and unpredictable. Unquestioned dominance by a single big-money team hurts the league in the long run even more than it hurts fans of other teams in the short term.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
Getting mainline neoreactionary is not at all a surprise for me - and Florida/British Empire are pretty good suggestions for ideal countries. My closest figure, however, beating out Thiel, Land, and Moldbug, is... Salvador Dali!
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
None of the parks have restrooms
This is America, buddy, and those parks have a lot of trees.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
I find that using AI as a non-coder requires a fundamental change in how you think about things. Imagine you have a generally competent software engineer as your personal servant, and he commands a legion of data-entry interns: what can you now do that you previously couldn't do? Talking about work would be giving away the secret sauce, so I'll give another example. I write poetry, and I have many poet friends. I had AI spin up a database of poetry publishing outlets - journals, magazines, etc. - and create a bot that can a) scrape any given url and, if it publishes poetry, get its info, submission windows, required formatting, etc., b) tell you which outlets are open for submission, which require fees, which pay you, etc., c) answer natural-language questions like "I've written a poem about my faith, what Catholic outlets are currently accepting submissions?". From there, automating formatting your submission and sending it to the journals would be pretty easy, but I chose not to do that out of respect for the editors. There are probably a surprising number of things in your life that can be made easier with a simple personalized CRUD app, but almost nobody is grokking that yet (to be fair, I've spent an inordinate amount of time around software engineers for a wordcel, so I have a lot more pre-loaded intuitions about architecture and planning in this space).
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
I'm tempted to distinguish urban and suburban based on whether, as a practical matter, you need a car.
I endorse this distinction wholeheartedly, although there are a lot of transitional neighbourhoods in US cities which don't feel truly suburban, and aren't objectively far from the urban core at all, but you still need a car to go anywhere. And I'd say it runs both ways - obligate urbanites like myself are attracted to dense cities in part precisely because you don't need the inconvenience of a car for your daily errands or going out at night.
The sharing walls/floors/ceilings thing can be mitigated pretty well by living in a solid older building. You can insulate your personal space with money in an urban area just as well as in the suburbs, the question is your tolerance of strung-out hobos (which shouldn't have to be a question, but there's also the tolerance of libs issue).
Bartender_Venator
16d ago
There's nothing qualitatively unusual in Berlin's rent situation except that they introduced rent controls, got slapped down by the courts, and then tried again, afaik. Berlin's image as a city is "cool grungy party place for artists", which relies on cheap rent, but also attracts lots of richer people who want to party with cool grungy artists and drive up the rents (and many, many people spending a couple weeks or months, which drives landlords to convert to temporary rentals). Imagine if Williamsburg was a city. So rising rents are felt particularly hard by the locals who are most capable of making noise in public about them, and then at converting that noise into left-wing politics because they were already way on the left to begin with. It also means landlords are doing crazy stuff to try and get around rent control laws, so you have very public and convincing stories of evil landlords to target a campaign at.
But what’s up with M-V? It’s the least dense state in Germany. Is this an urban/rural split? Are there even any immigrants over that far?
Former East Germany, so poorer and less ideologically tied into how the Right People think. I see just over 10% of the population are "migration background", but doing some quick mental math looks like maybe 3% from MENA/Balkans.
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
Reconciliation between the North and the memory of Dixie was a symbol of reconciliation between the two halves of the country, so naturally it ratchets back up with the culture war (the 1920s culture war was along different lines, like prohibition, that didn't match to North/South, but nowadays the South, as well as anywhere up North that would fly the flag, is Deplorable country).
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
The British would have loved to have a competing power effectively encircling the United States, particularly one that was mostly interested in exporting raw materials and importing finished goods. This could have worked for the Confederacy... if Britain wasn't the most fanatically abolitionist of all the Great Powers.
Bartender_Venator
18d ago
Yeah, Canada and America are basically in the same boat: the nation vs the megalopoleis. It's just that Canadian national identity was easier to kill (America has more hicks and the hicks have more money). Blue Tribe Canada is overwhelmingly powerful and takes all the oxygen, but Red Tribe Canada is also, more slowly, losing its Canadianness.
Bartender_Venator
18d ago
Home Gym Master Race, eh?
It's having a grounded and coherent identity as a nation which animates the state. It's not to do with size exactly (Iceland, for instance, is one of the "realest" countries in the West). Having that sort of self-grounded nature is generally very hard when you're in a position like Canada's - the real issue is cultural proximity to a much bigger and more influential nation, such that your culture is constantly bobbing around like a rowboat in the wake of a supertanker. Compare for instance Belarus, or the old tributaries of the Middle Kingdom. Where there is a "real Canada" among Anglophones that is distinctly Canadian, it's in the run-down Maritimes, the rural prairie, places which are sheltered from America's impact, either as an object of emulation or as a Big Other to which one defines oneself by opposition. Belgium is a good example that actually, I think, illustrates the point. Belgium is not a real country because it has no coherent identity, divided as it is along linguistic lines which also represent internal national and economic divides (the parallel to Canada should be obvious), and having developed its state while torn between the influence of four different larger powers. Denmark, and Danishness, on the other hand, go back over a thousand years with a basic internal understanding of its own continuity to the present day, with the intangible self-possession that entails.
The downside is that it would probably take a planet-sized superintelligence to make GOFAI work.
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