domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
8m ago
IMO the problem with low fertility isn’t that humanity goes extinct, it’s that the more centralized and authoritarian countries figure out how to retain a high population before the West, and then they dominate us through greater manpower and industrial capability. China’s TFR is low right now, but China is authoritarian, centralized, and vaguely Han-supremacist. They will eventually realize that they can enhance fertility through cultural and economic change, and the day after that realization they can instantly implement laws to transform Chinese cultural and educational norms. America has no such capability because we aren’t centralized and authoritarian and we have the feminist fifth column which will make a big deal about schools switching to teaching/propagating women how to be mothers and excluding them from high stress professions entirely.
There are other issues at play:
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4B disrupts the fertility of somewhat intelligent and conformist women, the kind of genes we want in a civilization;
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Our consumer capitalist system demands a steady supply of immigrants, meaning the domestic fertility rate can steadily decrease without affecting business, so the government has little incentive in solving the problem unless there is an essentially racist pressure applied to it;
I also disagree that evolution will figure out the solution on its own. The evolutionary drive to form families is the sexual drive. There is no other drive. Humans may have a vague drive to care for a little cute creature, but that interest can be cheaply satisfied with pets, neopets, squishes and genshin impact. If you have an outlet for the sexual drive, which modern culture has, then an entire human population can gradually go extinct and evolution may not have the time to fix this.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
9m ago
Point remains if a parent makes a mistake they'll usually by wrecked with guilt
I'm not talking about mistakes but conflicts of interests; 'parent has ideology with which child does not agree, makes decision based on that ideology, causes suffering to child, refuses to consider that they may have been wrong.'
So it just so happens that this blog post was talking about the exact same drug
That'll larn me to skim the article -- I thought they were talking about surgery!
In the case of puberty blockers, I would only intervene insofar as to ensure that the child and parents had at least heard the counterargument to their proposal; I could see applying the same argument to gender transition.
If you want to live in platonic / marxist utopia where all children belong to the state
Again, children aren't property. Not belonging to their parents doesn't mean that they must belong to someone else, it means that they belong to themselves; whatever authority we give to parents starts from zero even if it doesn't stay there.
If you actually believed that this means parents have no authority over their children, you'd be quoting Rousseau, not the American founding fathers.
I was quoting the Declaration as opposition to the divine right of kings.
"As above, so below" was the extrapolation to the divine right of parents.
Yes, that's my point. If you were advocating pure libertarianism, I could consider your idea of removing all authority from parents, and ensuring the child's autonomy. But since you don't, the idea is completely absurd to me.
The idea of something between 'pure libertarianism' and 'status quo' is absurd to you?
If parents have no authority over their children, than an adult has even less authority over another unrelated adult.
A having authority over Bs personal decisions is not the same thing as A having authority over B's authority over C. A parent has every right to forbid their child from making unreasonable demands of their younger sibling.
No_one
9m ago
Just play DayZ SA. Same thing essentially.
It's a quite chill game mostly, except when you're getting ambushed and killed.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
10m ago
Mariupol had half a million people to start. Seoul (metropolitan area) has roughly 25 million. And shells don't care what gender you are.
Also, it's much harder to see a civilian evacuation, since Seoul is so much bigger. Of course, if the South does well at first, the destruction will be much less (because they'll stop the artillery), at least until the North starts nuking.
No_one
11m ago
The federal government employs a lot of people, and those people aren't being spewed out by a magic high-IQ-only people factory;
There used to be a standard for federal bureaucrats - IQ tests, essentially.
MartianNight
14m ago
Okay but that was like 10,000 civilian deaths, a rounding error for a country of 40 million.
Corvos
17m ago
Thanks to everyone who answered my hypothetical about the startup.
General opinion seems to come down to ‘you don’t owe them anything but a decent sum of money would be a gentlemanly / ladylike show of gratitude. Which seems about right to me.
One of the reasons I’m interested in the question is that much social conflict comes from the discrepancy between the market value of labour (determined primarily by the number and type of people able to do the work) and what you might call the utility value (determined by how important it is that the work gets done. For example, @PutAHelmetOn’s code saves hundreds of thousands in processing costs, farmers stop everyone dying of famine, longshoremen make it possible to have international trade (modulo automation).
I would say the primary economic conflict of the last two hundred years is that the employees think in terms of the utility of their work while customers and employers think in terms of the market value.
Trade unions and guilds have historically been used as a method of arbitrage between these two values, limiting competition to drive market value closer to utility value. And the communist states show pretty clearly to my that trying to base your society on something other than the market value causes problems. I suppose the welfare state is basically ‘we don’t owe you this money but we’re going to give some of it to you anyway’.
Would like to write an effort post but this is what I have for now.
(Meta: is it obnoxious to do multi-top-posts like this? I didn’t want to talk about these ideas right away because I felt it would bias the replies, but at the same time it seems like a waste to write this as a second level reply in an old thread just before the new CW thread opens up).
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
41m ago
His activism caused a measles outbreak in Samoa with 83 deaths.
No, it didn't. The outbreak was ultimately caused by two nurses who diluted two measles doses with muscle relaxants instead of water. Two children died as a result, and the government paused MMR immunization for several months. When they restarted, they didn't immediately release the reason for the children dying, which probably limited uptake after that. The outbreak started in this environment, the government imported a lot of measles vaccine from India, the outbreak continued. It is at this point Kennedy comes in. He does claim the measles vaccine from India was probably defective and caused the outbreak to continue, but HE certainly was not the cause of it.
Mantergeistmann
41m ago
Okay, yeah, that's pretty good.
Ditto6687
1hr ago
Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.
Do you know where I can read up on this?
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
More like the reduction of Mariupol.
Mantergeistmann
1hr ago
Depends on how charitable you want to be. I read it as "inner peace", personally.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
2hr ago
May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace.
Is this not a straightforward call for violence? I find this manner of speaking despicable in public, and I'd want an apology if I was her target.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
2hr ago
Taboo the word hate, sheesh. I'm with the Count, here. The word is inappropriate for the feelings being expressed; hyperbolic and histrionic, as expected from one side of the divide.
Here
2hr ago
The 4B movement has already been disavowed by the American Left for not being inclusive of trans ideology (i.e., transwomen who may still have their initial bits and parts are not getting laid by a 4B chick; transmen are also encouraged not to do the same; it inherently focuses on reproductive functions; it started on a message board that includes anti-trans sentiment), which makes all of this somewhat odd to me - the gender divide isn't going to swing back to the Democrats by Democrats telling biological women that they can't have feminists movements without biological men being lifted up within those movements.
yofuckreddit
2hr ago
Bro, you're not even going to mention "Good Time" by Owl City? Perhaps it's just too easy.
I'm embarrassed I liked so many of these songs, though by 2011 I had started to get really sick of it and hated (for instance) "Give me Everything Tonight"
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
About two months ago, I had a chat with @gattsuru about Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, which I had been struggling through at the time. I've since got on with it and finished Dawntrail's MSQ, and I promised to get back with some more thoughts then.
So, what do I think?
For a starting point, I'd have to grant that this is FFXIV's worst outing since 1.0, and I don't get the impression that this is particularly controversial? There's a clear decline in metascore (PC only, ARR is 83/7.0, HW is 86/8.0, SB is 87/7.5, SHB is 90/9.1, EW is 92/9.0, and DT is 79/5.3), and anecdotally my sense among fans has been that there's a sense that this is a slog. I occasionally chatted to people doing story dungeons, and never encountered pushback on the idea that this is a weaker outing. Fortunately, FFXIV is very good, so the worst FFXIV expansion is still potentially quite good relative to its competitors.
I found that the first 75% or so of Dawntrail's story really dragged. I think the primary issue for me was that neither the world nor the cast of characters I was exploring it with were particularly interesting, or revealed any compelling dramatic tensions. I'll talk about the characters a bit later, but Tural in general is not a very interesting place until you get to Mamook, because it's just a very peaceful place with no outstanding issues. The formula for most of the MSQ is that we visit a place, the locals are friendly and generous and tell us about their culture, Wuk Lamat appreciates that culture a bit, maybe one of our rivals does some Scooby Doo level prank to annoy us, we resolve it, and then we move on. Unfortunately the cultures we visit are all very superficial. The Pelupelu like trade and negotiation. The Hanuhanu have a harvest festival. The Moblins patronise craftsmen. The Xbr'aal like chili wrapped in banana leaves. It all feels like surface, and comes off badly compared to some of the cultures we met in previous expansions, almost all of which were complex, contained both sympathetic and unsympathetic traits, had their share of unresolved issues or tensions, and invited some level of engagement with them. Dawntrail improves a bit towards the end - I liked the Old West bit in Xak Tural, where for once there was an interesting domestic conflict, with crime springing up in the wake of a rapid economic and territorial expansion into the ceruleum fields of the north, and formal legal institutions clashing with the ad hoc codes of justice worked out by vigilantes on the frontier - but it doesn't measure up that well compared to the past.
The major exception for me was Mamook, which I did find interesting, but also tragically under-explored. I'd also like to add Mamook to the pile of evidence that FFXIV is secretly a quite conservative game, because to me at least the whole Mamook story felt like a blatant pro-life allegory. Even if it's not quite about abortion, it is very easy to read as being about IVF. The Mamool Ja are desperate for more blessed siblings to be born, mutant two-headed Mamool Ja of superior strength and power, and to accomplish this they've been mass-producing hybrid eggs, even though they know that the vast majority of these hybrids will die unborn, struggling in vain to break free of their own shells. Only one in a hundred of blessed eggs successfully hatches, and the survivors, like Bakool Ja Ja, carry the weight of this holocaust of the unborn. The Mamool Ja believe that they need blessed siblings to survive, but the guilt of this crime weighs on their entire community, a hidden torment that they cannot reveal to the rest of Tural. Naturally the heroic thing to do here is to convince them that they don't need to engage in this kind of eugenics, that it is not worth sacrificing so many lives for the sake of worldly, military power. A more blatant pro-life allegory I struggle to imagine!
Likewise when we get to the end of the expansion, well, it's a bit more subtle, and the script occasionally ventures that we shouldn't be too quick to judge another culture, but there's no disguising the fact that the narrative thrust of Dawntrail is strongly critical of Alexandria and the world of Living Memory. The soul-recycling of Alexandria and the unnatural immortality of the Endless are condemned. This too strikes me as remarkably amenable to a conservative interpretation - much like the world of the Ancients before it, Sphene's paradise is fundamentally flawed, and the right thing to do is to smash its memory banks, let these digital ghosts fade away, and encourage the living to return to the world.
But I've gotten ahead of myself. I do think the expansion picks up considerably once you reach Alexandria. I don't love Alexandria overall, and in particular its neon futuristic aesthetic is a pretty big clash with the rest of the setting, but since it's explicitly from another world, that helps a bit, and it seems likely to remain cordoned off to its own part of the setting. Still, I hope this isn't a sign that Eorzea may end up going the same way as Azeroth, with new, high-tech additions gradually building to the point where it becomes impossible to take the world seriously. Even so, Alexandria is better than most of Tural because it manages to be a portrayal of a society that's complicated. Alexandrians aren't bad people for the most part, and there may be much to admire in Alexandria, but even so, there are clearly deep issues in its society. The fact that we rapidly meet a group of Alexandrian dissidents who articulate some of their complaints helps with that as well.
Now let's talk about characters a bit as well...
This is probably the weakest part of Dawntrail, for me.
Some of the Scions are still around to help us, but for the most part they feel under-used or mis-used. Some of them are present but do almost nothing, and feel like they're just there to provide a familiar face or two. Alphinaud and Alisaie, Y'shtola, G'raha Tia, and Estinien all appear a few times, but none of them do anything in the story or contribute anything, and might as well not be in Dawntrail. Thancred and Urianger sort of have something interesting, and it's neat to see them mentoring Koana, but unfortunately most of that happens off-screen. Lastly Krile... should have had a chance to shine here, but unfortunately I feel she was screwed over a bit. She doesn't do much for most of the story, and then the discovery of Krile's parents and her discovery of her origins is rapidly shoehorned in at the very end of the story, in a way that honestly kind of ruins the pacing of the end as well. I feel Krile was done dirty here. For most of FFXIV before now, Krile has never really gotten a chance to shine, and she should have had it here, but she didn't. Perhaps some of the new characters got in the way?
Speaking of... well, I'll preface this by saying that I don't hate Wuk Lamat as a character, and I don't think the issue with her is the voice acting. Sometimes I switch the voices in FFXIV to Japanese and it doesn't substantially change how I feel about Wuk Lamat. The problem is that only a few local Tural characters, mostly Wuk Lamat but also Koana, need to carry most of the story, and it is too much for them. Wuk Lamat is not a particularly interesting or deep character and it means that the expansion spends way too long stretching out a character arc that just doesn't have much bite to it. Wuk Lamat is fundamentally an optimistic, cheerful, kind person who wants to be Dawnservant so she can protect her people's happiness, and her biggest character flaw is just that she's a bit naive and a bit prone to self-doubt, so her story is about gaining confidence. Koana is basically the same - he's a good guy, he wants to help, but he struggles with self-doubt. Add in that Wuk Lamat is basically the protagonist of this expansion, with the Warrior of Light primarily a helper, and a lot of the expansion comes off as just following around a not-massively-interesting person as she goes on a tour. I don't find Wuk Lamat particularly *dis-*likeable, but she's just not up to the task of carrying this story.
In a sense, it reminds me a bit of some of the criticisms of Dragon Age: The Veilguard for being far too positive - all the characters are friends, and rough edges are all sanded off. In this case, Wuk Lamat is nice to everyone, and the WoL and the Scions with her are also all very nice, and no significant conflicts ever emerge. Even the rivals end up quite friendly; Koana is also lovely, and Bakool Ja Ja is a jerk for five levels and then pulls an extremely rapid heel face turn and then he's our friend too. This just makes for a story that feels bland.
By comparison, let's look at some earlier expansions. One of my favourite parts of Heavensward was the Warrior of Light's trip into Dravania with Alphinaud, Estinien, and Ysayle. This was another small ensemble cast, and it worked really well because all of those characters have depth, and are full of complicated feelings and ambivalencies, and those feelings then bounce off each other and throw sparks, creating tensions. Alphinaud is a prodigy who had a brilliant scheme to create international peace, but has recently seen that whole scheme blow up in his face and end in disaster. He thought he could unite Eorzea through diplomacy, but treachery, greed, and violence have seemingly destroyed his dream. Estinien is a veteran warrior driven by a need for revenge against the dragons who slaughtered his family as a child, and stoically holds himself aloof from others. Ysayle is a heretic from the Ishgardian church, a dragon-sympathiser who believes that dialogue will make peace with the dragons possible, and a cult leader whose followers have been responsible for violence against innocents in the past. Together we are going to confront the leaders of the Dravanian Horde - Ysayle firmly believes that they will listen to us and be willing to make peace, and has agreed that, if this fails, we may have to use force; all while Estinien believes that Ysayle's hopes will fail and then we'll need to try it his way, and just kill the leader. You can see how Alphinaud is then in this interesting place between them, where he's been where Ysayle is now and seen it fail, but also doesn't want to embrace Estinien's bloody worldview. However, as the adventure progresses, evidence of a past age of human-dragon cooperation seems to validate Ysayle's view and Estinien perhaps has to re-evaluate his view of dragons, and meanwhile he's slowly developing a father- or older-brother-like relationship with Alphinaud, whom he's clearly taking a shine to. Ysayle's hopes grow, but are dashed when we do meet the dragons and they inform her that all her dreams are impossible, and she collapses in despair as we move on with Estinien's plan.
That's just a period of 2-3 levels in the middle of Heavensward, but I was drawn into it and fascinated because there's a huge amount of tension there - both internal tension, with three characters all of whom find their own beliefs challenged and need to undergo growth, and external tension, as the characters dispute what we must do with each other. And this was just one example. At FFXIV's best, we see these kinds of tensions again and again - think of Yugiri, Gosetsu, and Hien in Stormblood, or Fordola and Arenvald's growing friendship, or the way Shadowbringers built Emet-Selch into a beloved villain through a long period of travel like this, or the way we saw old characters challenged and recontextualised (like Alisaie's despair at seeing her friend become a monster, or G'raha struggling to bear the burden of an entire city's hopes, or Y'shtola becoming 'Master Matoya' and stepping into her old teacher's role). Ever since at least Final Fantasy IV back in 1991, Final Fantasy has been all about an ensemble cast of colourful characters interacting and growing.
That kind of cast is what I think is missing from Dawntrail.
But I'm not done with characters yet, because we need to talk about villains. Specifically, Zoraal Ja and Sphene, both of whom I think have a lot of potential, but both of whom I'm also ultimately a bit disappointed by.
Zoraal Ja has a lot of potential! There's a very obvious theme of fathers and sons going on with him, and measuring up to or exceeding his father, and I think it could work, except it has the one fatal flaw that we just don't see enough of Zoraal Ja. He is an extremely reserved character who almost never talks, and neither do we really meet or talk to people who know him well. Baby Gulool Ja is adorable and it would have been great to learn more about Zoraal Ja's time in Alexandria, how he came to have a son, and then how he came to abandon him, but we don't get to see any of that. Surely there must have been ways to write the MSQ to show us more of its central villain? (Sphene comes in too late, I think, to claim that role, even if she is the final boss.) This is a game in which the player character has the explicit superpower of seeing flashbacks of things that he/she did not witness personally! The Echo has been used quite hamfistedly at times, but surely if it's for anything, it's for this? It is an excuse to let the player just see visions of things that are narratively useful. Why not use it?
As for Sphene... I think Sphene is fine by herself, but is let down contextually for two reasons. The first is that we've already met Emet-Selch and he already did this story better. An ancient leader of god-like power who wants to sacrifice or doom our world in order to save/maintain/restore an ancient world that he/she believes is utopian and more worthy of existence. We've already seen that story, and Emet-Selch was built up for an entire expansion to try to give that story some emotional heft. Sphene comes in for the last 25% or so of Dawntrail to basically speedrun that story for a second time, and it just can't hit as hard as it did before.
The second is the relationship with the heroes. Good villains in FFXIV have often mirrored the heroes in some way. Nidhogg is compelling in large part because his feelings and motives are the same as Estinien's, to the extent that the two of them literally merge together for a bit. Heavensward is about vengeance and hatred and exacting retribution on the ones who dealt you an inconsolable loss, and both the heroes and the villains undergo that experience. Hopefully even the player does as well - that's why Haurchefant has to die, so that, like all the other major players in the story, we experience that need for vengeance. Zenos, meanwhile, has been presented as a superlative warrior yet one who suffers tremendous ennui, and only finds a purpose to life when fighting against the worthiest of foes, and Zenos explicitly draws a comparison between himself and the Warrior of Light, inviting you to see your own quest for martial excellence (because why are you playing an MMO anyway?) parallelled in his. It's then up to you to decide whether you accept or reject that comparison, and if so, why. Emet-Selch wants to doom your world to save his own - and of course you're in a position where you're going to let his world be lost forever in order to save your own. The blasphemies in Endwalker all played around in this space as well.
A disappointment I had with Dawntrail was that it didn't really explore this the way I hoped. Wuk Lamat talks a lot about understanding Sphene, and indeed this seems reasonable. Wuk Lamat and Sphere are both young queens with kind and compassionate dispositions who are fundamentally driven by the need to protect their people's happiness. Before we reach Alexandria, Wuk Lamat has spent the entire MSQ talking about how precious the people are to her and how she loves them and just wants them to be happy. Then we meet Sphene, who has the exact same motivation, but in Sphene's case, this leads her to ruthless and genocidal excess. You'd think that might be an excellent opportunity for Wuk Lamat to re-evaluate her ideals a little. Does a good leader need to have something more than love for her people? If so, what? Good judgement? Sense of justice? Meeting Sphene seems like it ought to provoke a bit of soul-searching, but alas, it never happens.
Ultimately, I think I come to the end of the MSQ not really sure what Dawntrail was trying to do or say. There were some interesting ideas in here, but they were often a bit rushed or incoherent, or just not explored as skilfully as FFXIV has handled similar issues in the past.
On the positive side, though, the environments and the music are still gorgeous as always, and the dungeon and trial designs are all great. So there is still material to like here, and I hope that with the next expansion FFXIV will be able to return to form.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3hr ago
Are you a measles virus or something? From a human perspective, RFK is visibly malevolent in a very obvious way.
Before he got on the Trump train, RFK devoted a significant part of his activism to discouraging parents from vaccinating their children against measles based on false claims that vaccines cause autism. His activism caused a measles outbreak in Samoa with 83 deaths.
If we measure malevolence by the degree by which the harm-to-victim exceeds the benefit-to-wrongdoer, killing kids for social media klout is the worst.
zeke5123a
3hr ago
Except there is a large group of women who don’t share the values of the strikers. So effectively you have probably at least 40% of the population already going to defect and they will heavily benefit which would encourage the not true true believers to defect.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
OK, the US military is not well-endowed with the cerebral sort. Many abstract tasks like strategy or military-political coordination elude them. They have produced some real masterpieces of silliness in past years: https://x.com/DefenseCharts/status/1321799395571097601
But the US military do have powerful radars and cameras pointed at the skies. They have lots of space assets, they are very interested in space. There's no way of getting to the bottom of this without their resources.
Original Stalker was pretty brutal, don't you remember? I had a 'gaming' laptop and it ran like shit. I don't think that 'audience' played it around release.
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