I just learned that the 2003 World Series of Poker champion was named Chris Moneymaker (yes, that's his real name). And the 2006 champion was Jamie Gold.
"At a startup event, someone asked 12 yo if he was working on a startup. He convinced her that he had started a company to make hats out of skunks, a restaurant where everything (even the drinks) was made of bass, and a pest control company that used catapults."
I am now hoping for the next Bay Area House Party to include an expy of Paul's 12 year old...
I just learned about King Zog I of Albania. "Zog" is the kind of name for aliens that you see in lazy SF parodies, so it's pretty ironic that there's a real guy named that. Yet another reminder that reality is stranger than fiction.
A notable distinction, though I question its veracity:
"Zog was said to have regularly smoked 200 cigarettes a day, giving him a possible claim to the dubious title of the world's heaviest smoker in 1929 ... "
If the Zogster was awake ~ 16 hours a day, that would be a cig finished every 4.8 minutes.
Trump seems to be having trouble making up a good nickname for Harris. What's wrong with the guy that he can't make up nasty nicknames for people he hates anymore? This is just weird.
The namecalling thing worked by forcing everyone to remember a gaffe, and Harris hasn't been campaigning long enough. Kamala also has three syllables, which uses up the whole budget. "Ly-in Ted," "Croo-ked Joe," "Slee-py Joe": see?
He’s been experimenting with Fat pig Chris Christie lately too. In recent usage he uses clumsy apophasis to get away with it. “People say Chris Christie is a fat pig. No you shouldn’t say Chris Christie is a fat pig.”
Yea it has. It's also harder for all of us to avoid fixating as we get older, and his personal age-effects curve has visibly steepened the last couple of years.
I read an article about movies released in 1999 this morning:
Fight Club.
The Matrix
Toy Story 2
Eyes Wide Shut
Office Space
Shakespeare in Love
Magnolia.
The Green Mile
The Blair Witch Project
Being John Malkovich
The Virgin Suicides
This is a pretty impressive set of films. Possibly a high water mark for innovative cinema. Things have taken a turn for the worse in the 21st century.
Also Galaxy Quest, Sixth Sense, The Mummy, 10 Things I Hate About You.
The Iron Giant. Election. Deep Blue Sea. Just an absolute avalanche of quality indie, and low-stakes high-character action movies.
(I, too, like to occasionally trap people at parties and rant at them about how great a year that was for movies.)
There's a lot of competition for "worst Best Picture winner ever" but when you compare the quality of the 'winner' vs. 'average quality of movies that year', 1999 really stands out.
I saw and enjoyed all of them except Toy Story 2 and Shakespeare in Love. Actually I might have been in the theater with my wife for the Shakespeare in Love thing but I wasn’t paying attention. Sorry, it was probably a guy thing.
The other 10 were original and interesting to me. Now it’s the MCU stuff. Well at least there is a new entry to the Alien franchise. It’s doing pretty well on Rotten Tomatoes but it seems like they are all saying the best *since* Aliens, the second one in the series which was pretty great.
I faintly recall Scott mentioning, in an old SSC post, hereditary diseases that are almost 100% jewish, with occurences somewhere along the line of 1 in a million in the general population, and 1 out of 100 amongst jews. Does anyone remember which one it was?
There are some hereditary diseases that are considerably more common among Ashkenazim (not Jews in general) and some other incompletely isolated groups (Quebecois, Japanese, etc.) than in the general population, but they do occur in the general population: Tay Sachs, Goucher, etc.
Torsion dystonia is a tragic heritable disorder that social organizers have gone to great and very effective pains to prevent, but I don't remember the post you are referencing. I don't think it was ever as common as 1 in 100, though.
Join us for our 71st OC ACXLW meetup, where we'll explore the concepts of vengeance, morality, and the interplay of Nietzschean philosophy in contemporary discourse. This session will feature two thought-provoking articles by Scott Alexander: one on the ethics of vengeance and the other examining Matt Yglesias through the lens of Nietzschean philosophy.
Discussion Topics:
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
Reading: Scott Alexander explores vengeance's ethical and practical ramifications, specifically in the current political climate and cancel culture.
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Reading: Scott Alexander examines Matt Yglesias through Nietzschean philosophy, discussing the balance between master and slave morality and its implications for modern liberalism.
What are the potential consequences of engaging in retaliatory cancel culture?
How does history illustrate the cyclical nature of vengeance? Can this cycle be broken?
Is collective punishment ever justified, or does it undermine the principles of individual accountability?
Nietzschean Philosophy and Modern Liberalism:
How does Scott Alexander's analysis of Matt Yglesias illustrate the tension between master and slave morality?
In what ways does modern liberalism attempt to balance these competing moralities? Is it successful?
Can Nietzschean philosophy be reconciled with contemporary political ideals, or are they at odds?
Detailed Breakdowns:
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
Introduction: The article begins by discussing a Home Depot employee's controversial comment, leading to a debate on whether conservatives should engage in cancel culture as retaliation against the left.
Ethics and Morality Debate: Scott Alexander critiques the right-wing argument for vengeance, highlighting that engaging in cancel culture does not lead to moral clarity but perpetuates harm and division.
Historical Context and the Dialectic of Vengeance: The article emphasizes that cancel culture is not new, comparing it to historical cycles of retribution, such as the Red Scare and ancient purges.
The Problem of Collective Punishment: Alexander critiques treating people as collectives rather than individuals, warning against the dangers of collective guilt and punishment.
The Dangers of Tribalism and Polarization: The article highlights how political tribalism justifies actions by demonizing the other side, leading to increased polarization and a breakdown of civil discourse.
Friendly Fire and the Incompetence Problem: Alexander notes that cancel culture often results in "friendly fire," where individuals within the same political group are harmed. This leads to a decline in competence as open debate is stifled.
The Illusion of Power: The article warns that the right-wing might overestimate its power, as the real levers of cancel culture remain in left-leaning institutions.
The Case for a Principled Approach: Instead of engaging in vengeance, Alexander advocates for dismantling the structures supporting cancel culture, promoting free speech, and creating better frameworks for moderation.
Conclusion: The article argues that vengeance will not solve the problem of cancel culture and calls for a long-term strategy focused on promoting free expression and dismantling the mechanisms that enable cancel culture.
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Bentham’s Bulldog: Scott Alexander begins by discussing a blog post titled "Shut Up About Slave Morality," which criticizes Nietzsche's concept of "slave morality." The post argues that slave morality is just a label for normal moral behavior and criticizes the right-wing for using the rejection of slave morality as an excuse for cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Alexander delves into Nietzsche’s distinction between "master morality" and "slave morality." Master morality values strength, ambition, and power, while slave morality, created by the weak and oppressed, values humility, meekness, and compassion. Nietzsche predicted that slave morality would dominate and lead to the "Last Man," a person who worships mediocrity and avoids ambition.
Ozy Brennan: Alexander introduces a self-help concept by Ozy Brennan, which critiques goals rooted in avoiding failure, emotions, or standing out—coined as "dead people's goals." Brennan advocates for goals that celebrate life and achievements. Alexander relates this to master morality, which encourages individuals to "embiggen" themselves, in contrast to slave morality’s emphasis on making oneself smaller and less distinct.
Edward Teach: Alexander examines slave morality as a defense mechanism that avoids positive judgment by downplaying virtues and accomplishments. Strategies to avoid judgment include believing the system is rigged, dismissing virtues as subjective or meaningless, and deriding those who achieve or stand out. This section critiques how modern society often penalizes excellence and promotes mediocrity.
Jason Crawford: The discussion shifts to how societies reflect master or slave moralities. Alexander points out how the 19th and early 20th centuries were focused on "embiggening" through progress, technology, and grand achievements. However, a shift occurred post-World War II towards "ensmallening," with a focus on harm reduction and modesty, which he links to the rise of slave morality.
Andrew Tate: Alexander uses Andrew Tate, a controversial figure known for his wealth, strength, and misogyny, as an example of master morality. While Tate embodies certain virtues admired by master moralists, his moral vices, particularly his treatment of women, make him problematic. Alexander wrestles with reconciling admiration for Tate’s virtues with contempt for his vices.
Cotton Mather: Alexander explores Puritanism as a blend of master and slave moralities. He distinguishes between two forms of slave morality: one that replaces master virtues with different virtues (like Puritan self-discipline) and another that rejects all virtues. He uses Progressive-era propaganda to illustrate how societies have historically balanced these moralities.
Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand is presented as a modern proponent of master morality, but with a twist. Unlike Nietzsche’s chaotic masters, Rand’s heroes follow rules grounded in reason and nonviolence. Alexander discusses the strengths and limitations of Rand’s philosophy, particularly her attempt to justify a peaceful, positive-sum society without resorting to slave morality.
Matt Yglesias: Alexander considers Matt Yglesias as a Nietzschean figure who embodies a balanced compromise between master and slave moralities. Yglesias advocates for progress and excellence but within the constraints of liberal democracy, emphasizing equality before the law and focusing on benefits for the worst-off. This section suggests that modern liberalism attempts to reconcile these competing moralities.
Richard Hanania: Richard Hanania is discussed as an example of a modern Nietzschean liberal who values excellence and rejects slave morality. Despite his right-wing alignment, Hanania’s positions on issues like immigration, vaccines, and globalism reflect his commitment to master morality. However, Alexander notes that Hanania’s Nietzscheanism is isolated, with no broad political or cultural movement to support it.
Sid Meier: Alexander concludes by reflecting on the liberal compromise as a utilitarian balance between master and slave moralities. He discusses effective altruism as an extension of this compromise, arguing that it allows for the pursuit of excellence (like building rockets) while maintaining a focus on helping others. He ends with a meditation on the cyclical nature of ambition and altruism in life.
We look forward to a stimulating discussion where your insights will contribute to a deeper understanding of these complex and timely topics. For any questions, please contact Michael Michalchik at michaelmichalchik@gmail.com.
An exploration of China's mortality decline under Mao: A provincial analysis, 1950–80
China's growth in life expectancy between 1950 and 1980 ranks as among the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history. However, no study of which we are aware has quantitatively assessed the relative importance of various explanations proposed for these gains. We create and analyse a new province-level panel data set spanning 1950-80 using historical information from Chinese public health archives, official provincial yearbooks, and infant and child mortality records contained in the 1988 National Survey of Fertility and Contraception. Although exploratory, our results suggest that increases in educational attainment and public health campaigns jointly explain 50-70 per cent of the dramatic reductions in infant and under-five mortality during our study period. These results are consistent with the importance of non-medical determinants of population health improvement – and under some circumstances, how general education may amplify the effectiveness of public health interventions.
~~~~
I am including this abstract as the background to what would otherwise seem like an insane question: Is Mao Zedong the greatest effective altruist of all time?
Even given his personal responsibility for the more than 40 million excess deaths caused by the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong's impact on net human life expectancy exceeds any other intervention by multiple orders of magnitude. While you can make an economic or moral case against his policies, I think the utilitarian case is frankly extremely weak given this macro picture.
I am not asking this as a kind of troll against EA or anything but to illustrate a more general question about EA political commitments. From what I can tell, the extent to which EA or utilitarianism aligns with a political system is not as an ends to itself but because of the potential of that system to bring a utilitarian benefit. For example an EA defense of capitalism will focus on how free markets lead to the greatest levels of global poverty reduction. The problem is that it is exactly on these kind of macro level poverty reduction/life expectancy levels where hardcore tankie communism does the best. Consider that at Mao's death life expectancy had risen to 62, a number which India would only achieve in 1999. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=CN-IN
Moreover, it is ironically EA's specific focus on the global poor which makes Maoism so well suited to it. This is a movement by and for the global south which can lead to vast life expectancy increases *without* any help from the global north. Utilitarianism demands that we save a drowning child even if he is on the other side of the earth. Should we also hand him a rifle and the little red book?
TLDR: I think the alignment between Utilitarianism and free market capitalism is actually less "rational" than many in the movement would like to admit. While there are a million moral critiques to be made of systems as brutal as state communism, the moment you start using aggregate measures like life expectancy/utils/ ect hardcore communism does extremely well.
My instinctive reaction to these sorts of historical questions is that they're meaningless or unanswerable, because there's never a baseline for comparison. China's position at the end of WW2 (for example) is absolutely unique. Its leader in the following period is unique; every action he took is unique; and China's position at the end of his leadership is still unique.
How much would China's life expectancy have risen over the same period, if not for Mao? How do you even go about answering such a question? Do you think of Mao's policy positions relative to the average world leader of the time, or relative to the average person who was in contention for leading the CCP? He might turn out to be extreme in one direction compared to the first reference class, and extreme in the other direction relative to the second. In that case, does he get credit or blame?
Yes, a fair amount of the good stuff that Mao did seems to be "Chinese empire implements basic progressive Western improvements from the early 20th century". I bet the KMT would have done some of them as well, as would any other reasonable government, because they'd discover what Japan, the UK, and the US did - if you want to be a modern industrial power, you need your workers to be reasonably healthy and educated.
Aside from that, this exhibits the same consequentialist problems that SBF posed - how much evil can be excused if you also do some good? If you have a billion slaves and decide to feed them better because you've calculated that you'll get more work from them that way, does that count? If you cure their diseases so that they'll last longer?
That reminds me of people who praise Soviet Union and its leaders for... basically not stopping time and allowing the technological progress to also exist in the Soviet Union. Because apparently in a hypothetical parallel reality without communism, people in Russia would still be living in caves or something.
It is difficult and maybe impossible to find the right counterfactual, but it is probably not: "in the entire country, the time froze for decades or centuries".
I agree completely that trying to compare global political systems based on these kinds of abstract aggregates is not especially valuable. The problem is that I think that rooting political commitments in EA invites exactly this and explicitly rejects this kind of counterfactual analysis you correctly want to do.
Like the point of raising this is that a normal liberal or democratic socialist can reject something like Maoism on its own terms because both of these systems advocate for political processes as ends in of themselves. I just don't see how you can make a similar case from an EA standpoint given its emphasis on evidence and means approach to political questions (ie how this political system has actually preformed in real life rather than against some hypothetical and what outcomes does this political arrangement achieve).
What made me think of this was a conversation I had with a friend in EA who rejected any criticism of Bill Gates or philanthropy generally by going "while name someone else who has done that much good"
The alliance theory of politics / ideology is getting more traction in academic circles. It basically says are ideologies are bullshit. If today gay men ally with working class people, it will generate an ideology that they are both fighting for equality. If tomorrow gay men ally with rich people because they are more educated and less homophobic, the richness of rich people will downplayed, they will be called educated people and the new ideology will be pro-education and pro-enlightenment. Note that these (both stages) already happened!
I believe this because I watched it in real-time when in 1990 we in Hungary kicked out the one party system and suddenly there were a lot of choices. Many people wanted to be nationalists. And national identity comes from the past, so they allied with people who really like the past, conservatives. Even when a lot of conservatives were reading Oakeshott and were originally not nationalistic. And in the past religion was big and also identity-forming, so they allied with Christians. And they looked at the economy and saw a lot of foreign capital and not much local capital. They don't like foreign things, so they went anti-capitalist. So we ended up with a bunch of conservatives quoting Chomsky. For real.
Liberals in Hungary did the opposite of course. They were not principled liberals, they just liked money, so they liked the West because OMG so much money there, and always supported the Current Thing In The West, even when the CTIW was George W. Bush. Or, back when Hillary was First Lady, she visited Hungary and made the very nice gesture of visiting a Roma orphanage, the most disadvantaged kids in this country. The reaction of the liberal media in Hungary was "why don't you give money instead?"
> If today gay men ally with working class people, it will generate an ideology that they are both fighting for equality.
Do you have evidence for this? Particularly for the word "generate". How do you rule out that (for example) the gay men are following an ideology of gay rights, workers one of workers' rights, and no one is really confusing the two? Everyone can admit that a certain party will do things for the (not conflicting, but not identical either) two ideologies, and that it represents an alliance of convenience.
I feel that you haven't proved that there are only two big contrived ideologies, but only that whatever ideologies exist must lend their support to one of two parties.
That seems pretty obvious to me. Looking at the last 20 years of US politics would show you the same thing. It's especially true in the US because the two party system means that everyone ends up divided into two big tents in a fairly arbitrary and ever-shifting manner.
Yeah, the coalitions are historical accidents, and the ideology is a post-hoc rationalization.
Also, in long term coalitions regroup when one side gets too strong, so the others need to unite against them. For example, a few centuries ago, religion was powerful, so libertarians and socialists united in opposition (French revolution). Then during socialism, socialists were powerful, so libertarians and religious people opposed them together. These days (this is about Eastern Europe) we have a free-market society, so the religious people and socialists are united against it.
It is also funny to observe how the people "on the right side of history" regroup. A few decades ago, I remember how female genital mutilation was used as a #1 example that men are evil. Today if you mention it, you will probably be cancelled for islamophobia. Similarly, no one would dare criticize the African countries that have death penalty for male homosexuality.
But this is not a new thing. It was always like this. The difference is that everyone remembers the big changes that happened during their lifetime. (That's why they say "don't trust anyone over 30" -- those old folks remember how today's best allies used to be enemies in the past, and vice versa.)
In other words, people always vote for what they think is in their best interests, but the perceived intersections of perceived interests sometimes changes (perceptibly).
AI art: I get a very strong phobic reaction, literally shaking if I see three arms or six fingers. When do you think this will be fixed and what can I take as a strong evidence that it is now safe for me to play with image generation?
It will only be fixed with a technological change. (Not just progress, change, you'll need to wait for a credible signal that someone's image generator incorporates and builds upon a model of physical world. As long as all we have is bare diffusion models, stay away.)
Apparently, around 1850 it was a tradition in rural America to show up at the editor's office with a horse whip when a newspaper printed something negative about you. I had first heard of it from Mark Twain, but I thought it was in the book because of its singularity - but today I found another reference to the practice in a history book. Strange times.
So the question becomes, what's the modern equivalent of a horse whip? I think there's an argument to be made that it's a gearshift. But it could also be a can of gasoline.
Insofar as the horsewhip was considered socially acceptable to bring to bear despite its questionable justice, I would guess the modern equivalent is online mob incitement.
Yep. Although I ran right smack into the opposite problem of "putting up with bad stuff for too long". One small lesson there is that not everyone who wants you to be more agreeable actually has your best interests in mind. :-(
Yes, after I realized that women really dislike it when someone is disagreeable outside of specific situations. The internet is now my main outlet for my disagreeableness.
I worked with a guy nicknamed Marco at B. Dalton #6 in Newport Beach, California for a time. Marco was from Singapore, and was garrulous and talkative and a master of small talk. He'd chat up people while he worked the periodicals display, laughing while he worked. I try to imitate Marco. The trivial is important: traffic, weather, pop culture, bad TV shows, all of it. Marco could talk about anything, laughing as he did so, as if to say, Isn't it all ridiculous?
So I'm trying to overcome my bias against trivia, and talk to strangers. The worst that could happen is the person might not share my cheerfulness, and I'd have to avoid feeling offended. Maybe they're having a rough time.
And sometimes people are so emotionally exhausted from Saving the World, they automatically assume the worst. (Silence is complicity!)
If I laugh about the weather and they don't want to join me, that's fine. They can deliver a diatribe about global warming, white supremacy and male toxicity. I can take it. I've heard it before. But even crusaders need to lighten up now and then. They might even stoop to answer the question, How about this fuckin' weather?
lol. I cracked up the guy at the corner convenience store this morning with a small joke about the weather. He was talking about it being too hot and humid to duck out for a cigarette without working up a sweat.
“Yep, State Fair weather for sure.”
In Minnesota the fair runs in the last week in August. Always toasty - correction: the more accurate adjective would be ‘soupy’ - by local standards. The ‘corn sweat’ adds a lot of humidity to the mix. High 80s in SLC is no big deal as long the air remains dry. It’s not the heat it’s the enthalpy
The only thing I can imagine working is surrounding yourself with less idiots and more people you respect.
I feel like I'm extremely disagreeable with the idiots I have to see in real life, but only a little disagreeable with the nice smart people on this blog.
How do they measure disagreeableness anyway? Maybe I am just as disagreeable on here, but it expresses itself as trying to outdo people with fancy arguments.
If I look up a personality test I get vague statements like "I feel comfortable around people." and "I have a kind word for everyone." Seems like psuedo-science to be honest; they might as well ask me "rate your agreeableness (which is definitely a real thing) on a scale of 1-10".
(To make it meta) I've started off trying to give practical advice, and ended up doing something that looks like attacking the concept of "agreeable" -- which could even look like attacking you. Would you say I'm being disagreeable or agreeable? If I'm keeping a tally so I can fill in a personality test accurately, should I count these as kind words or not? Does it make a difference if I add the disclaimer: "I'm really trying to be nice and help you"
I can handle verbal nonsense in small doses with a smile and afterwards a shrug.
There is one person in my life that is problematic. An in-law who is a bona fide specimen of Dunning Kruger syndrome at work. She has a complete lack of self awareness as the kicker. I have to do some serious tongue biting around her.
> The only thing I can imagine working is surrounding yourself with less idiots and more people you respect.
Also, lower your expectations. I learned to expect people to say the most stupid shit, so when they do, I just nod politely and try to change the topic.
Basically, I choose the set of topics I want to debate with them. For example if they are the parents of my children's schoolmates, I want to discuss the school and the after-school activities. If I can talk to them about that, fine. If they privately believe in homeopathy, I don't mind, as long as they don't suggest to teach that in school or something. I remind myself that I talk to them for a purpose, and the purpose is not to make them rationalists.
> How do they measure disagreeableness anyway?
For me, it's (1) whether you can choose your battles, or you need to argue about every little detail that rubs you the wrong way, and (2) when we argue, whether you make your statements calmly and politely, or you raise your voice and your physiology gets ready for a fight.
I succeeded in making my self more disagreeable. Personality change happens gradually. I didn’t notice for years, then I suddenly realized I needed to tone my disagreeable down a bit.
[Bug report] I currently cant log out from this site. Clicking that field just reloads the page with me still logged in. Normal substack works as intended.
I usually write sci-fi and fantasy, but when I visited Israel on early October, 2023, I realized I had to document what was going around me. The result is a documentation of the mental shift that took place on the Israeli side of the fence, in a character driven format. It's not very political (naturally, the subject can't be avoided) and I think for that reason stands out in the discourse.
The part about coming together reminds me of Sakharov's description of the war mentality quieting the inner resistance to Soviet authorities during his time developing the H-bomb under Beria. (His autobiography is fascinating and sensitive, if you can find a copy). The Soviet Union went from having no social fabric (widespread secret policing will do that), to having one based around solidarity against the Nazis, and then slowly went back to having no social fabric at all. In the middle period the citizenry were almost completely numb to Stalin's crimes and their own material deprivation, and the propagandists tried to extend that as long after the war as possible. His descriptions of his own "war psychology," prolonged after the war by continued deprivation and the strictly militaristic/prison-like environment of the atomic weapons research facility are especially striking as he handles casts of uranium he knows hundreds of innocent prisoners/effective slaves died in the production of.
I'm sure our own war-starters understand this effect very well... :(
P.S. "elbow" means the same thing when used as a verb in English
>The Soviet Union went from having no social fabric (widespread secret policing will do that), to having one based around solidarity against the Nazis, and then slowly went back to having no social fabric at all.
Wait a bit! They also went from having a really bad economy / manufacturing to making T-34's and Shturmoviks which were pretty good weapons to slowly falling behind again until the economy disintegrated.
This is generally contributed to central planning, but maybe social fabric played a role? Such as levels of corruption?
Also, incentives. Stalin really had a thing for getting people shot for "sabotage", Brezhnev did not, economic managers who screwed up just got a different but still high job.
Also, central planning. I have a story here. Mao was really afraid of a nuclear war, and thus accidentally did the correct-ish thing within that framework: manufacturing was dispersed, small factories under the local, not central governments, very little central control. That is close enough to a market and the GDP was going well even before Deng's reforms - those reforms just amounted letting those local governments make deals with foreign investors. I mean everybody says socialism is fine on the small scale just does not scaled up. Well it was exactly that, small scale. Of course this happened after the disastrous Great Leap, not during.
Yes, the social fabric woven by the war absolutely improved production - at least according to Sakharov. Intellectuals went from feeling like slaves, to the defenders of their homeland, and then quickly or slowly back to feeling like slaves again over the course of Stalin's dictatorship. In the interim, free-thinkers took initiative within the limits of the system.
That dynamic sounds painfully familiar. I'm always surprised by how limited the tool box of corrupt governments is, and by how it is still so effective. One main difference that might be worth pointing out is that I don't think Bibi wants the country unified as much as he just aims to make any sort of protest seem divisive and illegitimate.
P.S. thanks! I've run this through a native speaking English editor, and she didn't know the term. But then again she is Canadian so...
What's the difference between having the country unified and making any protest seem divisive and illegitimate? Nobody will feel like dissidents are outsiders if they don't feel like they're inside of something. It's not exactly logical, but I remember how thoroughly questions about the Iraq war were coupled to discomfort with overt expressions of patriotism here in the US.
Thanks, this is great, I'm hooked. It's hard to find people who can properly capture the feelings of a country for outsiders. Expats and tourists typically focus on tedious expat and tourist things, locals are usually fish who don't notice the water they're swimming in. You're in the sweet spot and you exploit it perfectly.
Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment!
I agree. Being between cultures comes with a lot of disadvantages, but when it comes to writing, it allows to see things that are invisible to both visitors and locals.
I'd love to hear more of your thoughts, if you decide to keep reading. I just got a bunch of chapters back from my editor and I should upload them to the website soon.
Thanks for enriching the topic with on-the-ground coverage.
> some guy who threatened to kill me on the street because he thought I was an Arab
Why did the guy think you're an Arab? Did you criticize commonly held assumptions among Israeli Jews (who, I assume, you're not, or at least didn't grow up among) in an interview? Or is it something about your appearance?
I walk around with a big black beard, and am relatively dark skinned for a Jewish Israeli, which I am. If I'm honest, calling it an interview is a bit of a stretch. Mainly I tried to avoid getting into a violent conflict.
Hey, the people interested in the topic should be the ones thanking you. It's always good to have more info than less. I appreciate all the tons of effort spent, and I appreciate the focus on people and neutrality on the war.
> I walk around with a big black beard
> relatively dark skinned
Huh, quite ironic how your attacker thought those were the distinguishing features of Arabs. Laziness is disappointing.
People, what do you do when you have an extreme idea, the kind of idea Andrew Tate would have, but you still think it is true?
There is a huge gap in how many people watch men's sports and women's sports.
That is because sporting competitions are partially simulated war (two teams on a green "battle"field...) and partially the usual part of physical dominance competition between men (boxing, wrestling), these are viewed the most, discus throwing is viewed less, but it still correlates to throwing a strong punch. Running has been a huge part of military training since forever.
There is something... unreal about watching women box, because it does not correlate to how women usually behave. Which is why it is only watched when there is a controversy.
All popular women's sports are forms of dancing, ribbon gymnastics, figure skating. Notice that in these sports they wear pretty clothes and make-up.
Athletes rarely talk about their personal lives, but I think it is not a bad guess to assume a lot of women boxers are lesbian and if they were not competing in strictly gender separated sports, they might identify as genderequeer.
So there are a small number of masculine women like doing masculine things, but most women are not like that, only 15% of women watch women's sports.
But what troubles me that if we take this seriously, we arrive to the Manosphere: most men are essentially something like boxers (dominant aggressive alphas), most women are essentially something like dancers (pretty seducers valued for their looks) and so on...
I don't want to think like that. Since I joined the kink community on FetLife, I have seen that a lot of things that are traditionally gendered in narrow ways are in fact not, there are huge body builder guys who are super submissive, muscular women whose kink is defeating men in erotic wrestling and so on, so many different individual things.
--notice that both sides of the Culture War have problems
--stop identifying as either side (this happened naturally, I don't remember a conscious decision)
--devote myself to resolving/dissolving the whole thing, without being needlessly mean to people on either side
Any solutions obviously have to wrestle with both the fact that many think our perception of sport has been distorted, and the fact that many think Andrew Tate is an asshole.
Simple things like inserting the words "many think" in the proceeding sentence are often enough to avoid being partisan or mean.
I can give more details about what I'm trying to do (and why I have the hubris to think the Culture War can be ended) if anyone's interested.
As for your more specific question, I think the obvious answer is: play and watch whatever sport you enjoy, and try to do so in a way that doesn't send strong political signals.
Looking at the very top of a competitive field gives you a distorted view.
It's a lot more common for girls to participate in sports at lower levels. One of my friends in highschool was into soccer, and she didn't seem particularly "masculine". (Also, since then she married a guy, divorced, married another guy, and had a baby. So not exactly lesbian).
This didn't really help the Pope with heliocentrism, you know.
Also, there's a reason the "kink community" used to be called just perverts or deviants: their instincts are perverted from the ordinary, they deviate form the norm, are flipped on their heads, in various ways. I don't say this with any malice or judgment, but it's pretty much definitional that the people you're exposed to in such environments are an unrepresentative minority. Otherwise they wouldn't need their own community. More than anything else their existence proves the rule.
OK but this is really becoming mainstream and popular fast. So fast that many in the community are dismayed over all the people pouring in, not learning from experienced people, likely don't even know any, and transforming everything for the worse. Just yesterday I had to argue with someone saying kink is just sexual foreplay and kink without sex does not exist. That's incredible, I mean even mainstream media has now articles like female journalist visits kinbaku rope Top, gets tied up, and they are not fucking OF COURSE, but this is really what the newbies think...
Women's MMA is a thing. UFC has done more for women's participation than almost any other sports organization I can think of. There are no separate events, both men's and women's fights go on during the same night, and women regularly headline UFC events. This is one of those weird dynamics where people who are not into the sport assume that we only like to look at "scantly clad women prancing in the cage", and everyone actually interested in the sport, is, like, "STFU these women are real fighters with great skills".
To be completely honest though, any heterosexual guy would be lying if he claimed he *hates* the scantily clad women prancing. It certainly doesn't hurt, all other things being constant.
You can't escape hormones, or I can't at any rate.
Oh sure, it's just really not the prime motivation, at least for those really into the sport. There are so many other avenues for seeing scantily clad women!
Most sports at the Olympic level of competition of selecting for the tiny, tiny fraction of the population that has a genetic advantage at that sport (taller, stronger, faster, whatever).
In the case of most women's sports, this is going to end up selecting for the most not-traditionally-femine women in the entire world. Totally unsurprising that a llot of them have intersex conditions. But even if you were to bar intersex persons from competition, it would still be a matter of searching for the most not-traditionally-feminine woman in the entire world who just squeaks in under whatever conditions they have set. So you get the woman who has the highest testosterone level in the entire world without actually being intersex (as defined by the comittee) and people will still complain, You will probably end up finding new intersex conditions. e.g. it seems to currently be a matter of some debate whethefr polycystic ovary syndrome is intersex. So, you're going to get someone with PCOS competing in the olym;pics...
AN aside on Amateur Radio compettions. (For the uninitiated, the name of the game here is to score points by successfully getting a radio message to the other contestants). Like all competitions that have people compete in seriously, there have to be clearly specified rules, and where you have rules you will have some one finding an edge case that is technically allowed by the rules and which gives them a minor competetive advantage.
Th Amateur Radio version of this is someone, at enormous expense, getting themselves and a radio transmitter on to some rocky outcrop in the middle of the pacific ocean (normal population: zero humans, and a flock of sea birds) and claiming that this rock totally counts as a country for Amateur Radio competition purposes. There may be arguments of the form: is that rock even above the water at high tide?,
In Olympic boxing, it appears that the rules edge case is people who might possibly have intersex conditions.
You seem to imply with your wording ("claiming that this rock totally counts as a country") that there is some dishonesty on the part of the organizers of these DXpeditions, when in fact there is not. Those rocks do count as countries. The ops generally make sure that the question is settled by the contesting officials *before* going out there.
This doesn't invalidate your point. These are edge cases, as you say.
It should be noted, btw, that these expeditions are not always (or even usually?) done in the context of contesting. Some operators venture out to these tiny islands with all of their gear and a bunch of batteries at great expense at times when there is no contest going on, just for the sheer thrill of being the one station every ham in the world wants to work. And, I assume, because they enjoy the challenge of handling the inevitable massive days-long pileup of stations trying to call them.
Yes, you're right that, as a technical point, those expedition are not usually for the major contests but instead so that people can claim awards - such as DXCC - for radio contacting them.
(Expeditions for contets are usually to slightly less exotic and expensive locations)
And yeah, completely allowed within the rules as written. But also subject to people going "the ARRL should update the rules to rule out that uninhabited and partially submerged pacific atoll." or indeed "someone should check that KIngman Reef is actually above the water at high tide, because it isnt allowed if it isnt"
And I am expecting that an attempt by Olympic committee to rule out intersex people would run into as many diverse edge cases as the ARRL gets with assorted rocks in the Pacific ocean, the sovereign Military Order of Malta (has UN observer status, apparently), the monastery at Mount Athos (surprise! one of the monks was a radio ham), the British military base at Akrotiri (so, OK, my group went on a dxpedition to ZC4, so I'm as guilty as anyone) ...
"Kingman Reef (/ˈkɪŋmən/) is a largely submerged, uninhabited, triangle-shaped reef, geologically an atoll, 9.0 nmi (20 km) east-west and 4.5 nmi (8 km) north-south,[2] in the North Pacific Ocean, roughly halfway between the Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa."
This seems to be mixing together a lot of different claims:
1. Most men/women like to compete in a particular type of sport
2. Most men/women like to watch their gender compete in a particular type of sport.
3. Most men/women like to watch the opposite gender compete in a particular type of sport.
4. What men/women like to watch on TV is an indicator of how they want romantic partners to behave IRL.
5. What men/women like to watch on TV is an indicator of how men/women in general *should* behave IRL.
All of these claims are describing slightly different things - for instance, if both men and women don't watch women's sports, then that seems less like a claim about "what women want" and more a claim about what the audience in general wants. Maybe they want to see the very strongest and fastest without any qualifications and that makes men's sports more appealing, maybe "battlefield" sports are easier to get into than sports with judges and complicated aesthetic nuances, etc.
Also, consider: If 15% of women are into something, and you have 20 IRL friends, then probably 1-2 of your female friends are interested in it. 15% isn't *that* unusual, it's common enough that you'll encounter the exceptions without really needing to look for them. Which is important, if you're trying to spin some sort of broad stereotype out of these claims.
(Some of the exceptions might be even bigger - I hear that women's soccer (certainly a "battlefield" sport) is very popular in the US, because the US women's national team is more successful and medal-winning than the men's team.)
Lastly, aside from #5, none of these claims are *normative.* Nobody can take away your "man card" for not acting according to the stereotype, and as your FetLife experience points out, there's a huge variety of interests out there. Who cares if most guys aren't into dancing - if you're into dancing and your girlfriend is into dancing, then what does anyone else's opinion matter?
Well, for instance, when you are in the stage of trying to find a partner, then big statistical patterns matter. But also, the truth is, if a lot of people like or dislike something, it inevitably becomes a social norm. This sucks, but this is how it works. People want to be "normal", they want to "fit" in, and they also have an unfortunate tendency to the intolerant towards those who do not.
Here is I think how it works. I think most people behave ethically, like not assaulting people, not for ethical reasons, but because it is a social norm. So the reality is IMHO that if someone violates social norms in an ethical way wearing like funny clothing, there is a higher chance that they would also violate norms in an unethical way like assaulting you. I think this is the root of all intolerance. (Or perhaps it is only intolerant people who think this way and then they project it.)
Yes, I think this is exactly how it works. Some people violate stupid norms, but they explain to you that they only do it because those norms are stupid, and you agree with them and think they are brave. The next day they steal your stuff or they rape you, you get angry, but they explain to you that the concept of ownership or self-ownership is also stupid. And everyone else is like: "Hey, what exactly did you expect? You were already clearly warned that they violate the social norms, but you didn't listen, because you believed that you were smarter than everyone else."
It doesn't necessarily mean that if someone violates one norm, they are going to violate *all* norms. But it means that they are very likely to also violate *some* other norms... and you don't know which ones! (You may think that you know, but you are probably just projecting your own values on them.) Most likely, the actual answer is something like "whatever feels like a good idea at the moment."
<quote>All popular women's sports are forms of dancing, ribbon gymnastics, figure skating.</quote>
I think you have a recency bias because the olympics just happened. These sports only get popular once every 4 years. Tennis and soccer are probably the most popular women's sports (at least in the US), and both are played on green fields.
Yeah. I also think it's not a coincidence that those sports don't require exceptional size, or strength, or strange body shapes, but instead reward good all-around fitness and cardio health.
I don't think you have a choice. One of the arguments against Christianity and Islam is that they taboo **thoughts**. This is innovative, the history of religion, even Judaism, revolved mainly about taboo-ing practices. You're not allowed to *do* this, you're not allowed those *rituals*. Christianity and Islam are unique in how they make you a sinner without even doing anything, if you just sat there and thought "man, a human female giving birth without sex sounds hella sus", you just sinned a grave sin.
I think there is a general purpose lesson here: to the extent that any ideology or way of belief **requires** an unconvinced person to act as if they're convinced or risk being condemned, this ideology or way of belief is wrong and religion-like. It could still make true descriptive claims, or (morally-) good normative claims, just like Christianity and Islam both do, but it's fundamentally wrong/misguided/unfair to normatize **thought** itself.
I think much of what you said is wrong, and I'm going to point out in a bit how I think it's wrong, but I wanted to call out how "I'm afraid of thinking this way" isn't a thing, it shouldn't be a thing, and anybody who thinks it's a thing or should be a thing should be laughed out of discourse. At most, you could say "I'm afraid of telling people that I think this way", or "I'm afraid to put into writing that I think this way", both of those are fine, but putting taboo on thoughts is - not only unfair - but really "not even wrong", that is: nonsensical.
> That is because sporting competitions are partially simulated war
Yes, that's a useful and not-very-wrong way to look at sports: as ritualized violence, or ritualized rhythms that imply violence.
But notice how the "ritualized" qualifier here is doing an awful amount of work. Chess is ritualized violence, it's based - so the popular genealogy goes - on Medieval Indian board game that was itself a simulacrum of Medieval warfare. Although Chess in the popular imagination is a symbol of how *unviolent* and nerdy a guy is, it's based on war in a quite straightforward sense that not even Football can claim.
A lot of things are like this. Racing: the machine is doing all the implied violence, the human's job is to guide it carefully so that its rhythmic violence-implying movement doesn't turn into literal violence that will tear the driver apart. E-sports, a billion(s)-dollar [1] sports industry: the violence is a bunch of voltages traditionally named "0" and "1", inhabiting the screens and computer memories and network cables, and the human's job is pushing the bits around through some interface to make spectacular-looking violence or implication-of-violence.
I think this is an important point to make because when you liken sports to war, you implicitly assert that women are not good at it by its very nature, since women are bad at war (if war is very narrowly conceived as physical fighting, which hasn't been true since the invention of firearms.). Sports are **ritualized war**, and the ritualization/sublimation can go very *very* far into making it very unlike war. Board games, racing, and esports taken together probably eclipse Football in audience and/or profits, possibly more. And I'm not even a sports enthusiasts so there could be more examples.
> what troubles me that if we take this seriously, we arrive to the Manosphere
I don't get this assertion at all. The "Manosphere" is a lot of things to a lot of people, it evolved through time and emphasized different things to different audiences. Its claims about the fundamental nature of human males and females are just a subset of the total beliefs involved, and even this subset encompasses a lot more than "Men Physically Strong, Women Physically Weak". At minimum, the Manosphere makes some normative claims about women and men, that men (who are X) are morally superior, and women (who are Y) are morally inferior. You can't get to this from a purely empirical observation of male and female sports performance at all.
> most men are essentially something like boxers (dominant aggressive alphas), most women are essentially something like dancers (pretty seducers valued for their looks)
You can only get to this if you assume that athletes are representative of their gender. Maybe that's true in the negative sense, i.e. that the absence of aggressive women's sports is perhaps evidence that women aren't really that aggressive or dominant compared to men. But it's not true in the positive sense: the presence of dominant aggressive alphas in boxing says nothing about how common those traits are in men, so you're not allowed to use "most" here, anymore that you're allowed to say "Most men are impressive drivers" after you have seen Michael Schumacher driving.
But even if that inference was valid, that's just an empirical issue that has nothing to do with the Manosphere.
1) some thoughts would be very literally harmful if adopted on a large scale. e.g. "Hitler was right".
2) by Manosphere thinking I mean linking the male gender with aggressivity and a competitive spirit in an essentialist way and saying women are the opposite and probably like aggressively competitive men because they are the real men. Not about strength.
3) The athletes are not representative but the people watching are. I tried to express this in the comment, saying how women boxers tend to look like those people in my social circles who identify as non-binary, except of course athletes competing in gender-segregated sports will not say that.
Quit worrying about it. This is a non-issue that has little to do with gender concepts and a lot to do with maximally pleasing displays of movement and who does what kind better. NBA players can jump higher and throw further. Rhythmic gymnasts can bend more directions. That's all there is to it.
Or put another way, there is only one sport in the Olympics in which men and women compete head-to-head, and no one has ever meaningfully tried to have a conversation about which gender is better at it, because in equestrian events, the most interesting thing to look at is *the horse,* not the rider.
Sure, but different displays are pleasing for women and men apparently. I tried and mostly failed to convey this, that sports are really not about the athletes but the people watching it. I am not surprised people are looking at the horse. Some racehorses are way more famous than any jockey. But this is precisely about this. People like to watch men fight and watch women dance.
> People like to watch men fight and watch women dance.
While there is a trend here, I don't think this is nearly as universal as you think it is, nor that the trend is significant enough for this self-flagellation.
As @1123581321 mentioned, women's MMA is pretty darn popular! Joe Rogan (who, don't forget, is also a professional commentator) has said several times that many aficionados/practitioners of MMA feel the women's fights are often more enjoyable to watch than the men's fights due to the higher reliance on skills and strategy rather than sheer power. I, a woman, casually like MMA while being actively bored by most sports, and I'm equally interested in the men's and women's fights, and my father and brother feel the same.
Also, QUICK, off the top of your head, name the most legendary ballet dancer you can think of!
...
Was it a woman?
Or was it Mikhail Baryshnikov?
For what it's worth, I've been on Fetlife a very long time. I currently moderate one of the largest regional groups on the site, one which was Fet-famous in the Before Times for dumpster fire flame wars in the comments section, and occasionally has a good conflagration even today. There is a *tremendous* amount of both self-important navel-gazing and ideological scolding amongst the non-OnlyFans users of the site. You can safely ignore almost all of it.
> the women's fights are often more enjoyable to watch than the men's fights due to the higher reliance on skills and strategy rather than sheer power.
I've heard this about a few other sports, too: that the modern professional men's sports have selected so heavily for strength and size and power, that they've lost the flavor that the older amateur versions had, but that we can still find that rhythm in the women's leagues.
I am unfortunately not cultured enough for the ballet question, but the most famous non-ballet dancer I heard about was Fred Astaire. So good point I guess.
LOL, Fet. I am there for two reasons. It is the likeliest place online to find local Masochists. Despite everything Baku is saying, it can work like a dating site if people are not stupid about it. He says it is Facebook for kinksters, and it is, but if I want a partner who is into mountain biking, I will look into local mountain biking Facebook groups. He is saying it because today people tend to confuse the difference between dating (getting to know people for checking compatibility) and the "wassup, netfix and chill, wink wink?" stupid hookup attempt stuff. The second reason are some extremely good Writers. _Pavlov_ , owlfinch, AncillaL, SpokenInWhispers, RopeTigerDaddy, decibel etc. The people around these circles are remarkably good at actually not engaging in dumpster fires. They manage to strike a good balance between the overly aggressively woke and its opposite, and generally treat people with empathy. They are aware of the precise academic meanings of the words the overly aggressively woke constantly misuse (privilege and so on), and use them sparingly. Some of the best social commentary I have ever read was there.
I think it would be helpful to clearly state what it is that you are trying to avoid. But the fact that the opinion, which you have arrived at by hard, logical work, coincides with that of unliked people, doesn't say much about the opinion. I agree with the Unabomber on many things, I can't just deny that because I don't like the light it shines on me.
As your argument itself, it's my understanding that many people agree with you. If I could suggest a way to strengthen the stracture, though, I would completely avoid assumptions, like here:
"it is not a bad guess to assume a lot of women boxers are lesbian and if they were not competing in strictly gender separated sports, they might identify as genderequeer."
What you're saying may or may not be true, but it stands on nothing aside from your gut feeling. Same with "Something unreal about watchin women box".
Also, I might be misunderstanding, but your last paragraph seems to contradict everything you said before? You assume women adhere to the same gender roles you expect them to adhere to, rely on your intuition, but then say that people often upset your expectation. How does that coincide?
Anecdotally, we had a dog die when my son was ~2.5 YO, and then his grandmother (wife's mother) died recently with him at 4.5 YO. He took both events better than expected, and processed his emotions fairly normally. The part that was hardest was that he will go up to strangers and tell them about how his dog and grandmother died, and ask a lot of questions that will be uncomfortable.
Children in previous generations grew up much more aware of human and animal mortality — were they worse off for it? Of course, you'll have to deal with your own discomfort when you explain these things to your child. Lots of people use the "Granddad/Spot is in heaven" get out of jail card though to soften the existential crisis that a child might feel. I don't think I was aware of my own mortality until I was around six. I'm not sure I could have comprehended that idea before that age. I remember running to my grandmother for comfort saying, "I don't want to die!" She hugged me, and said, "Don't worry, it's a long way off."
My wife and I took a pretty hard stance against lying, both from our children and also *to* our children. I would first advise to not start, or stop, telling your children things that are not true in the first place.
As for the timing, it depends a lot on the kids involved. If possible, I wouldn't go out of my way to sit them down and explain this stuff, but also don't sugarcoat reality when it comes. If a pet dies, let them know the pet died. Have a funeral, make it okay to be real. If an human dies in your circle, consider allowing them to go to the funeral. Don't hide it.
The other animal stuff, they'll figure out eventually unless you're reinforcing the thoughts. As long as you or other trusted adults don't try to convince them of the untruths you are worried about, that will come with time.
More fun with nominative determinism:
I just learned that the 2003 World Series of Poker champion was named Chris Moneymaker (yes, that's his real name). And the 2006 champion was Jamie Gold.
I remember Chris Moneymaker and that specific WSOP. It was a landmark outcome in some ways.
Paul Graham on Twitter:
"At a startup event, someone asked 12 yo if he was working on a startup. He convinced her that he had started a company to make hats out of skunks, a restaurant where everything (even the drinks) was made of bass, and a pest control company that used catapults."
I am now hoping for the next Bay Area House Party to include an expy of Paul's 12 year old...
I just learned about King Zog I of Albania. "Zog" is the kind of name for aliens that you see in lazy SF parodies, so it's pretty ironic that there's a real guy named that. Yet another reminder that reality is stranger than fiction.
Edit: Also Disenchantment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zog_I#Life_in_exile_and_death
A notable distinction, though I question its veracity:
"Zog was said to have regularly smoked 200 cigarettes a day, giving him a possible claim to the dubious title of the world's heaviest smoker in 1929 ... "
If the Zogster was awake ~ 16 hours a day, that would be a cig finished every 4.8 minutes.
Trump seems to be having trouble making up a good nickname for Harris. What's wrong with the guy that he can't make up nasty nicknames for people he hates anymore? This is just weird.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/17/donald-trump-kamala-harris-nicknames-00174461
The namecalling thing worked by forcing everyone to remember a gaffe, and Harris hasn't been campaigning long enough. Kamala also has three syllables, which uses up the whole budget. "Ly-in Ted," "Croo-ked Joe," "Slee-py Joe": see?
Commie Kamala
hilary?
Crooked Hillary. Well, it kept the iambic meter.
Low energy Jeb, Bird brain Nikki
He’s been experimenting with Fat pig Chris Christie lately too. In recent usage he uses clumsy apophasis to get away with it. “People say Chris Christie is a fat pig. No you shouldn’t say Chris Christie is a fat pig.”
Just 9th grade bully crap.
And the weird thing seems to have gotten under his skin...
https://x.com/i/status/1822123410958299406
Yea it has. It's also harder for all of us to avoid fixating as we get older, and his personal age-effects curve has visibly steepened the last couple of years.
I read an article about movies released in 1999 this morning:
Fight Club.
The Matrix
Toy Story 2
Eyes Wide Shut
Office Space
Shakespeare in Love
Magnolia.
The Green Mile
The Blair Witch Project
Being John Malkovich
The Virgin Suicides
This is a pretty impressive set of films. Possibly a high water mark for innovative cinema. Things have taken a turn for the worse in the 21st century.
Also Galaxy Quest, Sixth Sense, The Mummy, 10 Things I Hate About You.
The Iron Giant. Election. Deep Blue Sea. Just an absolute avalanche of quality indie, and low-stakes high-character action movies.
(I, too, like to occasionally trap people at parties and rant at them about how great a year that was for movies.)
There's a lot of competition for "worst Best Picture winner ever" but when you compare the quality of the 'winner' vs. 'average quality of movies that year', 1999 really stands out.
Where are the comic book movies? Hmm
I saw and enjoyed all of them except Toy Story 2 and Shakespeare in Love. Actually I might have been in the theater with my wife for the Shakespeare in Love thing but I wasn’t paying attention. Sorry, it was probably a guy thing.
The other 10 were original and interesting to me. Now it’s the MCU stuff. Well at least there is a new entry to the Alien franchise. It’s doing pretty well on Rotten Tomatoes but it seems like they are all saying the best *since* Aliens, the second one in the series which was pretty great.
I faintly recall Scott mentioning, in an old SSC post, hereditary diseases that are almost 100% jewish, with occurences somewhere along the line of 1 in a million in the general population, and 1 out of 100 amongst jews. Does anyone remember which one it was?
There are some hereditary diseases that are considerably more common among Ashkenazim (not Jews in general) and some other incompletely isolated groups (Quebecois, Japanese, etc.) than in the general population, but they do occur in the general population: Tay Sachs, Goucher, etc.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
This is the only one I found, which briefly mentions that Ashkenazi Jews are 100 times more likely to have certain genetic diseases.
Torsion dystonia is a tragic heritable disorder that social organizers have gone to great and very effective pains to prevent, but I don't remember the post you are referencing. I don't think it was ever as common as 1 in 100, though.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/161_wc4q5l0188B01y9E-fUDe6WoRYfdJmkbW2f8N-40/edit?usp=sharing
OC ACXLW Meetup: Vengeance and Morality - August 17, 2024
Date: Saturday, August 17, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com
Hello Enthusiasts,
Join us for our 71st OC ACXLW meetup, where we'll explore the concepts of vengeance, morality, and the interplay of Nietzschean philosophy in contemporary discourse. This session will feature two thought-provoking articles by Scott Alexander: one on the ethics of vengeance and the other examining Matt Yglesias through the lens of Nietzschean philosophy.
Discussion Topics:
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
Reading: Scott Alexander explores vengeance's ethical and practical ramifications, specifically in the current political climate and cancel culture.
Google Doc
Audio: Listen here
URL: https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/some-practical-considerations-before-descending-into-an-orgy-of-vengeance
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Reading: Scott Alexander examines Matt Yglesias through Nietzschean philosophy, discussing the balance between master and slave morality and its implications for modern liberalism.
Google Doc
Audio: Listen here
URL: https://open.substack.com/pub/askwhocastsai/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean?r=fbgbc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Questions for Discussion:
Vengeance and Morality:
What are the potential consequences of engaging in retaliatory cancel culture?
How does history illustrate the cyclical nature of vengeance? Can this cycle be broken?
Is collective punishment ever justified, or does it undermine the principles of individual accountability?
Nietzschean Philosophy and Modern Liberalism:
How does Scott Alexander's analysis of Matt Yglesias illustrate the tension between master and slave morality?
In what ways does modern liberalism attempt to balance these competing moralities? Is it successful?
Can Nietzschean philosophy be reconciled with contemporary political ideals, or are they at odds?
Detailed Breakdowns:
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
Introduction: The article begins by discussing a Home Depot employee's controversial comment, leading to a debate on whether conservatives should engage in cancel culture as retaliation against the left.
Ethics and Morality Debate: Scott Alexander critiques the right-wing argument for vengeance, highlighting that engaging in cancel culture does not lead to moral clarity but perpetuates harm and division.
Historical Context and the Dialectic of Vengeance: The article emphasizes that cancel culture is not new, comparing it to historical cycles of retribution, such as the Red Scare and ancient purges.
The Problem of Collective Punishment: Alexander critiques treating people as collectives rather than individuals, warning against the dangers of collective guilt and punishment.
The Dangers of Tribalism and Polarization: The article highlights how political tribalism justifies actions by demonizing the other side, leading to increased polarization and a breakdown of civil discourse.
Friendly Fire and the Incompetence Problem: Alexander notes that cancel culture often results in "friendly fire," where individuals within the same political group are harmed. This leads to a decline in competence as open debate is stifled.
The Illusion of Power: The article warns that the right-wing might overestimate its power, as the real levers of cancel culture remain in left-leaning institutions.
The Case for a Principled Approach: Instead of engaging in vengeance, Alexander advocates for dismantling the structures supporting cancel culture, promoting free speech, and creating better frameworks for moderation.
Conclusion: The article argues that vengeance will not solve the problem of cancel culture and calls for a long-term strategy focused on promoting free expression and dismantling the mechanisms that enable cancel culture.
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Bentham’s Bulldog: Scott Alexander begins by discussing a blog post titled "Shut Up About Slave Morality," which criticizes Nietzsche's concept of "slave morality." The post argues that slave morality is just a label for normal moral behavior and criticizes the right-wing for using the rejection of slave morality as an excuse for cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Alexander delves into Nietzsche’s distinction between "master morality" and "slave morality." Master morality values strength, ambition, and power, while slave morality, created by the weak and oppressed, values humility, meekness, and compassion. Nietzsche predicted that slave morality would dominate and lead to the "Last Man," a person who worships mediocrity and avoids ambition.
Ozy Brennan: Alexander introduces a self-help concept by Ozy Brennan, which critiques goals rooted in avoiding failure, emotions, or standing out—coined as "dead people's goals." Brennan advocates for goals that celebrate life and achievements. Alexander relates this to master morality, which encourages individuals to "embiggen" themselves, in contrast to slave morality’s emphasis on making oneself smaller and less distinct.
Edward Teach: Alexander examines slave morality as a defense mechanism that avoids positive judgment by downplaying virtues and accomplishments. Strategies to avoid judgment include believing the system is rigged, dismissing virtues as subjective or meaningless, and deriding those who achieve or stand out. This section critiques how modern society often penalizes excellence and promotes mediocrity.
Jason Crawford: The discussion shifts to how societies reflect master or slave moralities. Alexander points out how the 19th and early 20th centuries were focused on "embiggening" through progress, technology, and grand achievements. However, a shift occurred post-World War II towards "ensmallening," with a focus on harm reduction and modesty, which he links to the rise of slave morality.
Andrew Tate: Alexander uses Andrew Tate, a controversial figure known for his wealth, strength, and misogyny, as an example of master morality. While Tate embodies certain virtues admired by master moralists, his moral vices, particularly his treatment of women, make him problematic. Alexander wrestles with reconciling admiration for Tate’s virtues with contempt for his vices.
Cotton Mather: Alexander explores Puritanism as a blend of master and slave moralities. He distinguishes between two forms of slave morality: one that replaces master virtues with different virtues (like Puritan self-discipline) and another that rejects all virtues. He uses Progressive-era propaganda to illustrate how societies have historically balanced these moralities.
Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand is presented as a modern proponent of master morality, but with a twist. Unlike Nietzsche’s chaotic masters, Rand’s heroes follow rules grounded in reason and nonviolence. Alexander discusses the strengths and limitations of Rand’s philosophy, particularly her attempt to justify a peaceful, positive-sum society without resorting to slave morality.
Matt Yglesias: Alexander considers Matt Yglesias as a Nietzschean figure who embodies a balanced compromise between master and slave moralities. Yglesias advocates for progress and excellence but within the constraints of liberal democracy, emphasizing equality before the law and focusing on benefits for the worst-off. This section suggests that modern liberalism attempts to reconcile these competing moralities.
Richard Hanania: Richard Hanania is discussed as an example of a modern Nietzschean liberal who values excellence and rejects slave morality. Despite his right-wing alignment, Hanania’s positions on issues like immigration, vaccines, and globalism reflect his commitment to master morality. However, Alexander notes that Hanania’s Nietzscheanism is isolated, with no broad political or cultural movement to support it.
Sid Meier: Alexander concludes by reflecting on the liberal compromise as a utilitarian balance between master and slave moralities. He discusses effective altruism as an extension of this compromise, arguing that it allows for the pursuit of excellence (like building rockets) while maintaining a focus on helping others. He ends with a meditation on the cyclical nature of ambition and altruism in life.
We look forward to a stimulating discussion where your insights will contribute to a deeper understanding of these complex and timely topics. For any questions, please contact Michael Michalchik at michaelmichalchik@gmail.com.
~~~~~`
An exploration of China's mortality decline under Mao: A provincial analysis, 1950–80
China's growth in life expectancy between 1950 and 1980 ranks as among the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history. However, no study of which we are aware has quantitatively assessed the relative importance of various explanations proposed for these gains. We create and analyse a new province-level panel data set spanning 1950-80 using historical information from Chinese public health archives, official provincial yearbooks, and infant and child mortality records contained in the 1988 National Survey of Fertility and Contraception. Although exploratory, our results suggest that increases in educational attainment and public health campaigns jointly explain 50-70 per cent of the dramatic reductions in infant and under-five mortality during our study period. These results are consistent with the importance of non-medical determinants of population health improvement – and under some circumstances, how general education may amplify the effectiveness of public health interventions.
~~~~
I am including this abstract as the background to what would otherwise seem like an insane question: Is Mao Zedong the greatest effective altruist of all time?
Even given his personal responsibility for the more than 40 million excess deaths caused by the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong's impact on net human life expectancy exceeds any other intervention by multiple orders of magnitude. While you can make an economic or moral case against his policies, I think the utilitarian case is frankly extremely weak given this macro picture.
I am not asking this as a kind of troll against EA or anything but to illustrate a more general question about EA political commitments. From what I can tell, the extent to which EA or utilitarianism aligns with a political system is not as an ends to itself but because of the potential of that system to bring a utilitarian benefit. For example an EA defense of capitalism will focus on how free markets lead to the greatest levels of global poverty reduction. The problem is that it is exactly on these kind of macro level poverty reduction/life expectancy levels where hardcore tankie communism does the best. Consider that at Mao's death life expectancy had risen to 62, a number which India would only achieve in 1999. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=CN-IN
Moreover, it is ironically EA's specific focus on the global poor which makes Maoism so well suited to it. This is a movement by and for the global south which can lead to vast life expectancy increases *without* any help from the global north. Utilitarianism demands that we save a drowning child even if he is on the other side of the earth. Should we also hand him a rifle and the little red book?
TLDR: I think the alignment between Utilitarianism and free market capitalism is actually less "rational" than many in the movement would like to admit. While there are a million moral critiques to be made of systems as brutal as state communism, the moment you start using aggregate measures like life expectancy/utils/ ect hardcore communism does extremely well.
PS: I am not a communist lol
Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4331212/
World Bank Comparison between India and China: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=CN-IN
How did life expectancy in China compare with life expectancy in Taiwan? Hong Kong? South Korea?
My instinctive reaction to these sorts of historical questions is that they're meaningless or unanswerable, because there's never a baseline for comparison. China's position at the end of WW2 (for example) is absolutely unique. Its leader in the following period is unique; every action he took is unique; and China's position at the end of his leadership is still unique.
How much would China's life expectancy have risen over the same period, if not for Mao? How do you even go about answering such a question? Do you think of Mao's policy positions relative to the average world leader of the time, or relative to the average person who was in contention for leading the CCP? He might turn out to be extreme in one direction compared to the first reference class, and extreme in the other direction relative to the second. In that case, does he get credit or blame?
Yes, a fair amount of the good stuff that Mao did seems to be "Chinese empire implements basic progressive Western improvements from the early 20th century". I bet the KMT would have done some of them as well, as would any other reasonable government, because they'd discover what Japan, the UK, and the US did - if you want to be a modern industrial power, you need your workers to be reasonably healthy and educated.
Aside from that, this exhibits the same consequentialist problems that SBF posed - how much evil can be excused if you also do some good? If you have a billion slaves and decide to feed them better because you've calculated that you'll get more work from them that way, does that count? If you cure their diseases so that they'll last longer?
That reminds me of people who praise Soviet Union and its leaders for... basically not stopping time and allowing the technological progress to also exist in the Soviet Union. Because apparently in a hypothetical parallel reality without communism, people in Russia would still be living in caves or something.
It is difficult and maybe impossible to find the right counterfactual, but it is probably not: "in the entire country, the time froze for decades or centuries".
> in the entire country, the time froze for decades or centuries
To be fair, one of the options here was the Ch'ing dynasty... :-)
I agree completely that trying to compare global political systems based on these kinds of abstract aggregates is not especially valuable. The problem is that I think that rooting political commitments in EA invites exactly this and explicitly rejects this kind of counterfactual analysis you correctly want to do.
Like the point of raising this is that a normal liberal or democratic socialist can reject something like Maoism on its own terms because both of these systems advocate for political processes as ends in of themselves. I just don't see how you can make a similar case from an EA standpoint given its emphasis on evidence and means approach to political questions (ie how this political system has actually preformed in real life rather than against some hypothetical and what outcomes does this political arrangement achieve).
What made me think of this was a conversation I had with a friend in EA who rejected any criticism of Bill Gates or philanthropy generally by going "while name someone else who has done that much good"
may repost later on next weeks thread if that's allowed
I’m not a moderator or anything but I’ve read this substack for a couple years and it seems like that sort of thing is no problem.
The alliance theory of politics / ideology is getting more traction in academic circles. It basically says are ideologies are bullshit. If today gay men ally with working class people, it will generate an ideology that they are both fighting for equality. If tomorrow gay men ally with rich people because they are more educated and less homophobic, the richness of rich people will downplayed, they will be called educated people and the new ideology will be pro-education and pro-enlightenment. Note that these (both stages) already happened!
I believe this because I watched it in real-time when in 1990 we in Hungary kicked out the one party system and suddenly there were a lot of choices. Many people wanted to be nationalists. And national identity comes from the past, so they allied with people who really like the past, conservatives. Even when a lot of conservatives were reading Oakeshott and were originally not nationalistic. And in the past religion was big and also identity-forming, so they allied with Christians. And they looked at the economy and saw a lot of foreign capital and not much local capital. They don't like foreign things, so they went anti-capitalist. So we ended up with a bunch of conservatives quoting Chomsky. For real.
Liberals in Hungary did the opposite of course. They were not principled liberals, they just liked money, so they liked the West because OMG so much money there, and always supported the Current Thing In The West, even when the CTIW was George W. Bush. Or, back when Hillary was First Lady, she visited Hungary and made the very nice gesture of visiting a Roma orphanage, the most disadvantaged kids in this country. The reaction of the liberal media in Hungary was "why don't you give money instead?"
This tends to turn a fellow rather cynical.
> If today gay men ally with working class people, it will generate an ideology that they are both fighting for equality.
Do you have evidence for this? Particularly for the word "generate". How do you rule out that (for example) the gay men are following an ideology of gay rights, workers one of workers' rights, and no one is really confusing the two? Everyone can admit that a certain party will do things for the (not conflicting, but not identical either) two ideologies, and that it represents an alliance of convenience.
I feel that you haven't proved that there are only two big contrived ideologies, but only that whatever ideologies exist must lend their support to one of two parties.
The reasons for the two party state are (IMO) fundamental to political decision making, and not a sinister attempt to undermine all ideologies. I've written about this recently: https://gayasarainbow.substack.com/p/the-two-party-system-is-all-we-have
That seems pretty obvious to me. Looking at the last 20 years of US politics would show you the same thing. It's especially true in the US because the two party system means that everyone ends up divided into two big tents in a fairly arbitrary and ever-shifting manner.
Yeah, the coalitions are historical accidents, and the ideology is a post-hoc rationalization.
Also, in long term coalitions regroup when one side gets too strong, so the others need to unite against them. For example, a few centuries ago, religion was powerful, so libertarians and socialists united in opposition (French revolution). Then during socialism, socialists were powerful, so libertarians and religious people opposed them together. These days (this is about Eastern Europe) we have a free-market society, so the religious people and socialists are united against it.
It is also funny to observe how the people "on the right side of history" regroup. A few decades ago, I remember how female genital mutilation was used as a #1 example that men are evil. Today if you mention it, you will probably be cancelled for islamophobia. Similarly, no one would dare criticize the African countries that have death penalty for male homosexuality.
But this is not a new thing. It was always like this. The difference is that everyone remembers the big changes that happened during their lifetime. (That's why they say "don't trust anyone over 30" -- those old folks remember how today's best allies used to be enemies in the past, and vice versa.)
In other words, people always vote for what they think is in their best interests, but the perceived intersections of perceived interests sometimes changes (perceptibly).
AI art: I get a very strong phobic reaction, literally shaking if I see three arms or six fingers. When do you think this will be fixed and what can I take as a strong evidence that it is now safe for me to play with image generation?
Flux appears to be extremely good at hands. (That's the system Grok/xAI is using.)
It will only be fixed with a technological change. (Not just progress, change, you'll need to wait for a credible signal that someone's image generator incorporates and builds upon a model of physical world. As long as all we have is bare diffusion models, stay away.)
Apparently, around 1850 it was a tradition in rural America to show up at the editor's office with a horse whip when a newspaper printed something negative about you. I had first heard of it from Mark Twain, but I thought it was in the book because of its singularity - but today I found another reference to the practice in a history book. Strange times.
So the question becomes, what's the modern equivalent of a horse whip? I think there's an argument to be made that it's a gearshift. But it could also be a can of gasoline.
Insofar as the horsewhip was considered socially acceptable to bring to bear despite its questionable justice, I would guess the modern equivalent is online mob incitement.
But that doesn't affect your vehicle's rate of travel at all.
Unless your vehicle is powered by the tears of haters...
That'd be the throttle cable, then.
The verb form of the word ‘throttle’ could imply something more menacing than a horse whip. ‘Throttle cable’ could be interpreted as ‘garrote’.
Historically, gangs of youths around 1950 would break off car antennae to use as whips.
Horsewhip? Amateurs. In France, it was a pistol duel. Source: The Count Of Monte Cristo by Dumas.
Has anyone succeeded at making themselves more agreeable?
Yep. Although I ran right smack into the opposite problem of "putting up with bad stuff for too long". One small lesson there is that not everyone who wants you to be more agreeable actually has your best interests in mind. :-(
Yes, after I realized that women really dislike it when someone is disagreeable outside of specific situations. The internet is now my main outlet for my disagreeableness.
I worked with a guy nicknamed Marco at B. Dalton #6 in Newport Beach, California for a time. Marco was from Singapore, and was garrulous and talkative and a master of small talk. He'd chat up people while he worked the periodicals display, laughing while he worked. I try to imitate Marco. The trivial is important: traffic, weather, pop culture, bad TV shows, all of it. Marco could talk about anything, laughing as he did so, as if to say, Isn't it all ridiculous?
So I'm trying to overcome my bias against trivia, and talk to strangers. The worst that could happen is the person might not share my cheerfulness, and I'd have to avoid feeling offended. Maybe they're having a rough time.
It’s so easy to make someone’s day. A smile, a kind word, a small compliment. It costs nothing but a bit of good will.
And sometimes people are so emotionally exhausted from Saving the World, they automatically assume the worst. (Silence is complicity!)
If I laugh about the weather and they don't want to join me, that's fine. They can deliver a diatribe about global warming, white supremacy and male toxicity. I can take it. I've heard it before. But even crusaders need to lighten up now and then. They might even stoop to answer the question, How about this fuckin' weather?
Sometimes they forget to act illiberal.
lol. I cracked up the guy at the corner convenience store this morning with a small joke about the weather. He was talking about it being too hot and humid to duck out for a cigarette without working up a sweat.
“Yep, State Fair weather for sure.”
In Minnesota the fair runs in the last week in August. Always toasty - correction: the more accurate adjective would be ‘soupy’ - by local standards. The ‘corn sweat’ adds a lot of humidity to the mix. High 80s in SLC is no big deal as long the air remains dry. It’s not the heat it’s the enthalpy
The only thing I can imagine working is surrounding yourself with less idiots and more people you respect.
I feel like I'm extremely disagreeable with the idiots I have to see in real life, but only a little disagreeable with the nice smart people on this blog.
How do they measure disagreeableness anyway? Maybe I am just as disagreeable on here, but it expresses itself as trying to outdo people with fancy arguments.
If I look up a personality test I get vague statements like "I feel comfortable around people." and "I have a kind word for everyone." Seems like psuedo-science to be honest; they might as well ask me "rate your agreeableness (which is definitely a real thing) on a scale of 1-10".
(To make it meta) I've started off trying to give practical advice, and ended up doing something that looks like attacking the concept of "agreeable" -- which could even look like attacking you. Would you say I'm being disagreeable or agreeable? If I'm keeping a tally so I can fill in a personality test accurately, should I count these as kind words or not? Does it make a difference if I add the disclaimer: "I'm really trying to be nice and help you"
I'm really trying to be nice and help you.
I can handle verbal nonsense in small doses with a smile and afterwards a shrug.
There is one person in my life that is problematic. An in-law who is a bona fide specimen of Dunning Kruger syndrome at work. She has a complete lack of self awareness as the kicker. I have to do some serious tongue biting around her.
> The only thing I can imagine working is surrounding yourself with less idiots and more people you respect.
Also, lower your expectations. I learned to expect people to say the most stupid shit, so when they do, I just nod politely and try to change the topic.
Basically, I choose the set of topics I want to debate with them. For example if they are the parents of my children's schoolmates, I want to discuss the school and the after-school activities. If I can talk to them about that, fine. If they privately believe in homeopathy, I don't mind, as long as they don't suggest to teach that in school or something. I remind myself that I talk to them for a purpose, and the purpose is not to make them rationalists.
> How do they measure disagreeableness anyway?
For me, it's (1) whether you can choose your battles, or you need to argue about every little detail that rubs you the wrong way, and (2) when we argue, whether you make your statements calmly and politely, or you raise your voice and your physiology gets ready for a fight.
I succeeded in making my self more disagreeable. Personality change happens gradually. I didn’t notice for years, then I suddenly realized I needed to tone my disagreeable down a bit.
If you say so.
[Bug report] I currently cant log out from this site. Clicking that field just reloads the page with me still logged in. Normal substack works as intended.
I usually write sci-fi and fantasy, but when I visited Israel on early October, 2023, I realized I had to document what was going around me. The result is a documentation of the mental shift that took place on the Israeli side of the fence, in a character driven format. It's not very political (naturally, the subject can't be avoided) and I think for that reason stands out in the discourse.
You can read it here:
https://aaronbenelli.com/im-fine-all-things-considered/
Two chapters in, this is great writing. Thank you for sharing. I forwarded it to some friends who liked it as well.
One small editorial note: “Spielplatz” is a playground, not an amusement park
The part about coming together reminds me of Sakharov's description of the war mentality quieting the inner resistance to Soviet authorities during his time developing the H-bomb under Beria. (His autobiography is fascinating and sensitive, if you can find a copy). The Soviet Union went from having no social fabric (widespread secret policing will do that), to having one based around solidarity against the Nazis, and then slowly went back to having no social fabric at all. In the middle period the citizenry were almost completely numb to Stalin's crimes and their own material deprivation, and the propagandists tried to extend that as long after the war as possible. His descriptions of his own "war psychology," prolonged after the war by continued deprivation and the strictly militaristic/prison-like environment of the atomic weapons research facility are especially striking as he handles casts of uranium he knows hundreds of innocent prisoners/effective slaves died in the production of.
I'm sure our own war-starters understand this effect very well... :(
P.S. "elbow" means the same thing when used as a verb in English
>The Soviet Union went from having no social fabric (widespread secret policing will do that), to having one based around solidarity against the Nazis, and then slowly went back to having no social fabric at all.
Wait a bit! They also went from having a really bad economy / manufacturing to making T-34's and Shturmoviks which were pretty good weapons to slowly falling behind again until the economy disintegrated.
This is generally contributed to central planning, but maybe social fabric played a role? Such as levels of corruption?
Also, incentives. Stalin really had a thing for getting people shot for "sabotage", Brezhnev did not, economic managers who screwed up just got a different but still high job.
Also, central planning. I have a story here. Mao was really afraid of a nuclear war, and thus accidentally did the correct-ish thing within that framework: manufacturing was dispersed, small factories under the local, not central governments, very little central control. That is close enough to a market and the GDP was going well even before Deng's reforms - those reforms just amounted letting those local governments make deals with foreign investors. I mean everybody says socialism is fine on the small scale just does not scaled up. Well it was exactly that, small scale. Of course this happened after the disastrous Great Leap, not during.
Yes, the social fabric woven by the war absolutely improved production - at least according to Sakharov. Intellectuals went from feeling like slaves, to the defenders of their homeland, and then quickly or slowly back to feeling like slaves again over the course of Stalin's dictatorship. In the interim, free-thinkers took initiative within the limits of the system.
Thank you for reading as far as Leaders!
That dynamic sounds painfully familiar. I'm always surprised by how limited the tool box of corrupt governments is, and by how it is still so effective. One main difference that might be worth pointing out is that I don't think Bibi wants the country unified as much as he just aims to make any sort of protest seem divisive and illegitimate.
P.S. thanks! I've run this through a native speaking English editor, and she didn't know the term. But then again she is Canadian so...
What's the difference between having the country unified and making any protest seem divisive and illegitimate? Nobody will feel like dissidents are outsiders if they don't feel like they're inside of something. It's not exactly logical, but I remember how thoroughly questions about the Iraq war were coupled to discomfort with overt expressions of patriotism here in the US.
Thanks, this is great, I'm hooked. It's hard to find people who can properly capture the feelings of a country for outsiders. Expats and tourists typically focus on tedious expat and tourist things, locals are usually fish who don't notice the water they're swimming in. You're in the sweet spot and you exploit it perfectly.
Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment!
I agree. Being between cultures comes with a lot of disadvantages, but when it comes to writing, it allows to see things that are invisible to both visitors and locals.
I'd love to hear more of your thoughts, if you decide to keep reading. I just got a bunch of chapters back from my editor and I should upload them to the website soon.
Thanks for enriching the topic with on-the-ground coverage.
> some guy who threatened to kill me on the street because he thought I was an Arab
Why did the guy think you're an Arab? Did you criticize commonly held assumptions among Israeli Jews (who, I assume, you're not, or at least didn't grow up among) in an interview? Or is it something about your appearance?
Thank you for clicking!
I walk around with a big black beard, and am relatively dark skinned for a Jewish Israeli, which I am. If I'm honest, calling it an interview is a bit of a stretch. Mainly I tried to avoid getting into a violent conflict.
Are there Israelis who don't know about the Mizrahim?
Hey, the people interested in the topic should be the ones thanking you. It's always good to have more info than less. I appreciate all the tons of effort spent, and I appreciate the focus on people and neutrality on the war.
> I walk around with a big black beard
> relatively dark skinned
Huh, quite ironic how your attacker thought those were the distinguishing features of Arabs. Laziness is disappointing.
Hopefully no one repeated his folly.
People, what do you do when you have an extreme idea, the kind of idea Andrew Tate would have, but you still think it is true?
There is a huge gap in how many people watch men's sports and women's sports.
That is because sporting competitions are partially simulated war (two teams on a green "battle"field...) and partially the usual part of physical dominance competition between men (boxing, wrestling), these are viewed the most, discus throwing is viewed less, but it still correlates to throwing a strong punch. Running has been a huge part of military training since forever.
There is something... unreal about watching women box, because it does not correlate to how women usually behave. Which is why it is only watched when there is a controversy.
All popular women's sports are forms of dancing, ribbon gymnastics, figure skating. Notice that in these sports they wear pretty clothes and make-up.
Athletes rarely talk about their personal lives, but I think it is not a bad guess to assume a lot of women boxers are lesbian and if they were not competing in strictly gender separated sports, they might identify as genderequeer.
So there are a small number of masculine women like doing masculine things, but most women are not like that, only 15% of women watch women's sports.
But what troubles me that if we take this seriously, we arrive to the Manosphere: most men are essentially something like boxers (dominant aggressive alphas), most women are essentially something like dancers (pretty seducers valued for their looks) and so on...
I don't want to think like that. Since I joined the kink community on FetLife, I have seen that a lot of things that are traditionally gendered in narrow ways are in fact not, there are huge body builder guys who are super submissive, muscular women whose kink is defeating men in erotic wrestling and so on, so many different individual things.
My journey has been:
--notice that both sides of the Culture War have problems
--stop identifying as either side (this happened naturally, I don't remember a conscious decision)
--devote myself to resolving/dissolving the whole thing, without being needlessly mean to people on either side
Any solutions obviously have to wrestle with both the fact that many think our perception of sport has been distorted, and the fact that many think Andrew Tate is an asshole.
Simple things like inserting the words "many think" in the proceeding sentence are often enough to avoid being partisan or mean.
I can give more details about what I'm trying to do (and why I have the hubris to think the Culture War can be ended) if anyone's interested.
As for your more specific question, I think the obvious answer is: play and watch whatever sport you enjoy, and try to do so in a way that doesn't send strong political signals.
Looking at the very top of a competitive field gives you a distorted view.
It's a lot more common for girls to participate in sports at lower levels. One of my friends in highschool was into soccer, and she didn't seem particularly "masculine". (Also, since then she married a guy, divorced, married another guy, and had a baby. So not exactly lesbian).
>Looking at the very top of a competitive field gives you a distorted view.
Yup, the thin tail of a (typically) gaussian distribution.
"I don't want to think like that."
This didn't really help the Pope with heliocentrism, you know.
Also, there's a reason the "kink community" used to be called just perverts or deviants: their instincts are perverted from the ordinary, they deviate form the norm, are flipped on their heads, in various ways. I don't say this with any malice or judgment, but it's pretty much definitional that the people you're exposed to in such environments are an unrepresentative minority. Otherwise they wouldn't need their own community. More than anything else their existence proves the rule.
OK but this is really becoming mainstream and popular fast. So fast that many in the community are dismayed over all the people pouring in, not learning from experienced people, likely don't even know any, and transforming everything for the worse. Just yesterday I had to argue with someone saying kink is just sexual foreplay and kink without sex does not exist. That's incredible, I mean even mainstream media has now articles like female journalist visits kinbaku rope Top, gets tied up, and they are not fucking OF COURSE, but this is really what the newbies think...
Women's MMA is a thing. UFC has done more for women's participation than almost any other sports organization I can think of. There are no separate events, both men's and women's fights go on during the same night, and women regularly headline UFC events. This is one of those weird dynamics where people who are not into the sport assume that we only like to look at "scantly clad women prancing in the cage", and everyone actually interested in the sport, is, like, "STFU these women are real fighters with great skills".
To be completely honest though, any heterosexual guy would be lying if he claimed he *hates* the scantily clad women prancing. It certainly doesn't hurt, all other things being constant.
You can't escape hormones, or I can't at any rate.
Oh sure, it's just really not the prime motivation, at least for those really into the sport. There are so many other avenues for seeing scantily clad women!
Most sports at the Olympic level of competition of selecting for the tiny, tiny fraction of the population that has a genetic advantage at that sport (taller, stronger, faster, whatever).
In the case of most women's sports, this is going to end up selecting for the most not-traditionally-femine women in the entire world. Totally unsurprising that a llot of them have intersex conditions. But even if you were to bar intersex persons from competition, it would still be a matter of searching for the most not-traditionally-feminine woman in the entire world who just squeaks in under whatever conditions they have set. So you get the woman who has the highest testosterone level in the entire world without actually being intersex (as defined by the comittee) and people will still complain, You will probably end up finding new intersex conditions. e.g. it seems to currently be a matter of some debate whethefr polycystic ovary syndrome is intersex. So, you're going to get someone with PCOS competing in the olym;pics...
My point is about people who watch, not compete.
AN aside on Amateur Radio compettions. (For the uninitiated, the name of the game here is to score points by successfully getting a radio message to the other contestants). Like all competitions that have people compete in seriously, there have to be clearly specified rules, and where you have rules you will have some one finding an edge case that is technically allowed by the rules and which gives them a minor competetive advantage.
Th Amateur Radio version of this is someone, at enormous expense, getting themselves and a radio transmitter on to some rocky outcrop in the middle of the pacific ocean (normal population: zero humans, and a flock of sea birds) and claiming that this rock totally counts as a country for Amateur Radio competition purposes. There may be arguments of the form: is that rock even above the water at high tide?,
In Olympic boxing, it appears that the rules edge case is people who might possibly have intersex conditions.
You seem to imply with your wording ("claiming that this rock totally counts as a country") that there is some dishonesty on the part of the organizers of these DXpeditions, when in fact there is not. Those rocks do count as countries. The ops generally make sure that the question is settled by the contesting officials *before* going out there.
This doesn't invalidate your point. These are edge cases, as you say.
It should be noted, btw, that these expeditions are not always (or even usually?) done in the context of contesting. Some operators venture out to these tiny islands with all of their gear and a bunch of batteries at great expense at times when there is no contest going on, just for the sheer thrill of being the one station every ham in the world wants to work. And, I assume, because they enjoy the challenge of handling the inevitable massive days-long pileup of stations trying to call them.
Yes, you're right that, as a technical point, those expedition are not usually for the major contests but instead so that people can claim awards - such as DXCC - for radio contacting them.
(Expeditions for contets are usually to slightly less exotic and expensive locations)
And yeah, completely allowed within the rules as written. But also subject to people going "the ARRL should update the rules to rule out that uninhabited and partially submerged pacific atoll." or indeed "someone should check that KIngman Reef is actually above the water at high tide, because it isnt allowed if it isnt"
And I am expecting that an attempt by Olympic committee to rule out intersex people would run into as many diverse edge cases as the ARRL gets with assorted rocks in the Pacific ocean, the sovereign Military Order of Malta (has UN observer status, apparently), the monastery at Mount Athos (surprise! one of the monks was a radio ham), the British military base at Akrotiri (so, OK, my group went on a dxpedition to ZC4, so I'm as guilty as anyone) ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingman_Reef
"Kingman Reef (/ˈkɪŋmən/) is a largely submerged, uninhabited, triangle-shaped reef, geologically an atoll, 9.0 nmi (20 km) east-west and 4.5 nmi (8 km) north-south,[2] in the North Pacific Ocean, roughly halfway between the Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa."
This seems to be mixing together a lot of different claims:
1. Most men/women like to compete in a particular type of sport
2. Most men/women like to watch their gender compete in a particular type of sport.
3. Most men/women like to watch the opposite gender compete in a particular type of sport.
4. What men/women like to watch on TV is an indicator of how they want romantic partners to behave IRL.
5. What men/women like to watch on TV is an indicator of how men/women in general *should* behave IRL.
All of these claims are describing slightly different things - for instance, if both men and women don't watch women's sports, then that seems less like a claim about "what women want" and more a claim about what the audience in general wants. Maybe they want to see the very strongest and fastest without any qualifications and that makes men's sports more appealing, maybe "battlefield" sports are easier to get into than sports with judges and complicated aesthetic nuances, etc.
Also, consider: If 15% of women are into something, and you have 20 IRL friends, then probably 1-2 of your female friends are interested in it. 15% isn't *that* unusual, it's common enough that you'll encounter the exceptions without really needing to look for them. Which is important, if you're trying to spin some sort of broad stereotype out of these claims.
(Some of the exceptions might be even bigger - I hear that women's soccer (certainly a "battlefield" sport) is very popular in the US, because the US women's national team is more successful and medal-winning than the men's team.)
Lastly, aside from #5, none of these claims are *normative.* Nobody can take away your "man card" for not acting according to the stereotype, and as your FetLife experience points out, there's a huge variety of interests out there. Who cares if most guys aren't into dancing - if you're into dancing and your girlfriend is into dancing, then what does anyone else's opinion matter?
Well, for instance, when you are in the stage of trying to find a partner, then big statistical patterns matter. But also, the truth is, if a lot of people like or dislike something, it inevitably becomes a social norm. This sucks, but this is how it works. People want to be "normal", they want to "fit" in, and they also have an unfortunate tendency to the intolerant towards those who do not.
Here is I think how it works. I think most people behave ethically, like not assaulting people, not for ethical reasons, but because it is a social norm. So the reality is IMHO that if someone violates social norms in an ethical way wearing like funny clothing, there is a higher chance that they would also violate norms in an unethical way like assaulting you. I think this is the root of all intolerance. (Or perhaps it is only intolerant people who think this way and then they project it.)
Yes, I think this is exactly how it works. Some people violate stupid norms, but they explain to you that they only do it because those norms are stupid, and you agree with them and think they are brave. The next day they steal your stuff or they rape you, you get angry, but they explain to you that the concept of ownership or self-ownership is also stupid. And everyone else is like: "Hey, what exactly did you expect? You were already clearly warned that they violate the social norms, but you didn't listen, because you believed that you were smarter than everyone else."
It doesn't necessarily mean that if someone violates one norm, they are going to violate *all* norms. But it means that they are very likely to also violate *some* other norms... and you don't know which ones! (You may think that you know, but you are probably just projecting your own values on them.) Most likely, the actual answer is something like "whatever feels like a good idea at the moment."
<quote>All popular women's sports are forms of dancing, ribbon gymnastics, figure skating.</quote>
I think you have a recency bias because the olympics just happened. These sports only get popular once every 4 years. Tennis and soccer are probably the most popular women's sports (at least in the US), and both are played on green fields.
Yeah. I also think it's not a coincidence that those sports don't require exceptional size, or strength, or strange body shapes, but instead reward good all-around fitness and cardio health.
> I don't want to think like that.
I don't think you have a choice. One of the arguments against Christianity and Islam is that they taboo **thoughts**. This is innovative, the history of religion, even Judaism, revolved mainly about taboo-ing practices. You're not allowed to *do* this, you're not allowed those *rituals*. Christianity and Islam are unique in how they make you a sinner without even doing anything, if you just sat there and thought "man, a human female giving birth without sex sounds hella sus", you just sinned a grave sin.
I think there is a general purpose lesson here: to the extent that any ideology or way of belief **requires** an unconvinced person to act as if they're convinced or risk being condemned, this ideology or way of belief is wrong and religion-like. It could still make true descriptive claims, or (morally-) good normative claims, just like Christianity and Islam both do, but it's fundamentally wrong/misguided/unfair to normatize **thought** itself.
I think much of what you said is wrong, and I'm going to point out in a bit how I think it's wrong, but I wanted to call out how "I'm afraid of thinking this way" isn't a thing, it shouldn't be a thing, and anybody who thinks it's a thing or should be a thing should be laughed out of discourse. At most, you could say "I'm afraid of telling people that I think this way", or "I'm afraid to put into writing that I think this way", both of those are fine, but putting taboo on thoughts is - not only unfair - but really "not even wrong", that is: nonsensical.
> That is because sporting competitions are partially simulated war
Yes, that's a useful and not-very-wrong way to look at sports: as ritualized violence, or ritualized rhythms that imply violence.
But notice how the "ritualized" qualifier here is doing an awful amount of work. Chess is ritualized violence, it's based - so the popular genealogy goes - on Medieval Indian board game that was itself a simulacrum of Medieval warfare. Although Chess in the popular imagination is a symbol of how *unviolent* and nerdy a guy is, it's based on war in a quite straightforward sense that not even Football can claim.
A lot of things are like this. Racing: the machine is doing all the implied violence, the human's job is to guide it carefully so that its rhythmic violence-implying movement doesn't turn into literal violence that will tear the driver apart. E-sports, a billion(s)-dollar [1] sports industry: the violence is a bunch of voltages traditionally named "0" and "1", inhabiting the screens and computer memories and network cables, and the human's job is pushing the bits around through some interface to make spectacular-looking violence or implication-of-violence.
I think this is an important point to make because when you liken sports to war, you implicitly assert that women are not good at it by its very nature, since women are bad at war (if war is very narrowly conceived as physical fighting, which hasn't been true since the invention of firearms.). Sports are **ritualized war**, and the ritualization/sublimation can go very *very* far into making it very unlike war. Board games, racing, and esports taken together probably eclipse Football in audience and/or profits, possibly more. And I'm not even a sports enthusiasts so there could be more examples.
> what troubles me that if we take this seriously, we arrive to the Manosphere
I don't get this assertion at all. The "Manosphere" is a lot of things to a lot of people, it evolved through time and emphasized different things to different audiences. Its claims about the fundamental nature of human males and females are just a subset of the total beliefs involved, and even this subset encompasses a lot more than "Men Physically Strong, Women Physically Weak". At minimum, the Manosphere makes some normative claims about women and men, that men (who are X) are morally superior, and women (who are Y) are morally inferior. You can't get to this from a purely empirical observation of male and female sports performance at all.
> most men are essentially something like boxers (dominant aggressive alphas), most women are essentially something like dancers (pretty seducers valued for their looks)
You can only get to this if you assume that athletes are representative of their gender. Maybe that's true in the negative sense, i.e. that the absence of aggressive women's sports is perhaps evidence that women aren't really that aggressive or dominant compared to men. But it's not true in the positive sense: the presence of dominant aggressive alphas in boxing says nothing about how common those traits are in men, so you're not allowed to use "most" here, anymore that you're allowed to say "Most men are impressive drivers" after you have seen Michael Schumacher driving.
But even if that inference was valid, that's just an empirical issue that has nothing to do with the Manosphere.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/490522/global-esports-market-revenue/
Thank you!
1) some thoughts would be very literally harmful if adopted on a large scale. e.g. "Hitler was right".
2) by Manosphere thinking I mean linking the male gender with aggressivity and a competitive spirit in an essentialist way and saying women are the opposite and probably like aggressively competitive men because they are the real men. Not about strength.
3) The athletes are not representative but the people watching are. I tried to express this in the comment, saying how women boxers tend to look like those people in my social circles who identify as non-binary, except of course athletes competing in gender-segregated sports will not say that.
Quit worrying about it. This is a non-issue that has little to do with gender concepts and a lot to do with maximally pleasing displays of movement and who does what kind better. NBA players can jump higher and throw further. Rhythmic gymnasts can bend more directions. That's all there is to it.
Or put another way, there is only one sport in the Olympics in which men and women compete head-to-head, and no one has ever meaningfully tried to have a conversation about which gender is better at it, because in equestrian events, the most interesting thing to look at is *the horse,* not the rider.
Sure, but different displays are pleasing for women and men apparently. I tried and mostly failed to convey this, that sports are really not about the athletes but the people watching it. I am not surprised people are looking at the horse. Some racehorses are way more famous than any jockey. But this is precisely about this. People like to watch men fight and watch women dance.
> People like to watch men fight and watch women dance.
While there is a trend here, I don't think this is nearly as universal as you think it is, nor that the trend is significant enough for this self-flagellation.
As @1123581321 mentioned, women's MMA is pretty darn popular! Joe Rogan (who, don't forget, is also a professional commentator) has said several times that many aficionados/practitioners of MMA feel the women's fights are often more enjoyable to watch than the men's fights due to the higher reliance on skills and strategy rather than sheer power. I, a woman, casually like MMA while being actively bored by most sports, and I'm equally interested in the men's and women's fights, and my father and brother feel the same.
Also, QUICK, off the top of your head, name the most legendary ballet dancer you can think of!
...
Was it a woman?
Or was it Mikhail Baryshnikov?
For what it's worth, I've been on Fetlife a very long time. I currently moderate one of the largest regional groups on the site, one which was Fet-famous in the Before Times for dumpster fire flame wars in the comments section, and occasionally has a good conflagration even today. There is a *tremendous* amount of both self-important navel-gazing and ideological scolding amongst the non-OnlyFans users of the site. You can safely ignore almost all of it.
> the women's fights are often more enjoyable to watch than the men's fights due to the higher reliance on skills and strategy rather than sheer power.
I've heard this about a few other sports, too: that the modern professional men's sports have selected so heavily for strength and size and power, that they've lost the flavor that the older amateur versions had, but that we can still find that rhythm in the women's leagues.
I am unfortunately not cultured enough for the ballet question, but the most famous non-ballet dancer I heard about was Fred Astaire. So good point I guess.
LOL, Fet. I am there for two reasons. It is the likeliest place online to find local Masochists. Despite everything Baku is saying, it can work like a dating site if people are not stupid about it. He says it is Facebook for kinksters, and it is, but if I want a partner who is into mountain biking, I will look into local mountain biking Facebook groups. He is saying it because today people tend to confuse the difference between dating (getting to know people for checking compatibility) and the "wassup, netfix and chill, wink wink?" stupid hookup attempt stuff. The second reason are some extremely good Writers. _Pavlov_ , owlfinch, AncillaL, SpokenInWhispers, RopeTigerDaddy, decibel etc. The people around these circles are remarkably good at actually not engaging in dumpster fires. They manage to strike a good balance between the overly aggressively woke and its opposite, and generally treat people with empathy. They are aware of the precise academic meanings of the words the overly aggressively woke constantly misuse (privilege and so on), and use them sparingly. Some of the best social commentary I have ever read was there.
I think it would be helpful to clearly state what it is that you are trying to avoid. But the fact that the opinion, which you have arrived at by hard, logical work, coincides with that of unliked people, doesn't say much about the opinion. I agree with the Unabomber on many things, I can't just deny that because I don't like the light it shines on me.
As your argument itself, it's my understanding that many people agree with you. If I could suggest a way to strengthen the stracture, though, I would completely avoid assumptions, like here:
"it is not a bad guess to assume a lot of women boxers are lesbian and if they were not competing in strictly gender separated sports, they might identify as genderequeer."
What you're saying may or may not be true, but it stands on nothing aside from your gut feeling. Same with "Something unreal about watchin women box".
Also, I might be misunderstanding, but your last paragraph seems to contradict everything you said before? You assume women adhere to the same gender roles you expect them to adhere to, rely on your intuition, but then say that people often upset your expectation. How does that coincide?
At which age should I tell my kids about these harsh truth of life?
1/ Death is inevitable. His parents, his pets,.. will eventually die
2/ Most animals don't communicate with human
3/ Most animals don't befriend with other species
4/ Wildlife is mostly about hunting and being eaten
Note: My 4-years-old kid still tries to befriend with animals, still believe cartoon animals love each other
I started writing you a response but it got too long, so I've turned it into a post:
https://gayasarainbow.substack.com/p/lying-to-children
TLDR: I think death only maintains its status as a "harsh truth" and scary, to the precise extent that our parents tried to "protect us" from it.
Why don't you think they will figure all that out on their own?
Anecdotally, we had a dog die when my son was ~2.5 YO, and then his grandmother (wife's mother) died recently with him at 4.5 YO. He took both events better than expected, and processed his emotions fairly normally. The part that was hardest was that he will go up to strangers and tell them about how his dog and grandmother died, and ask a lot of questions that will be uncomfortable.
Children in previous generations grew up much more aware of human and animal mortality — were they worse off for it? Of course, you'll have to deal with your own discomfort when you explain these things to your child. Lots of people use the "Granddad/Spot is in heaven" get out of jail card though to soften the existential crisis that a child might feel. I don't think I was aware of my own mortality until I was around six. I'm not sure I could have comprehended that idea before that age. I remember running to my grandmother for comfort saying, "I don't want to die!" She hugged me, and said, "Don't worry, it's a long way off."
My wife and I took a pretty hard stance against lying, both from our children and also *to* our children. I would first advise to not start, or stop, telling your children things that are not true in the first place.
As for the timing, it depends a lot on the kids involved. If possible, I wouldn't go out of my way to sit them down and explain this stuff, but also don't sugarcoat reality when it comes. If a pet dies, let them know the pet died. Have a funeral, make it okay to be real. If an human dies in your circle, consider allowing them to go to the funeral. Don't hide it.
The other animal stuff, they'll figure out eventually unless you're reinforcing the thoughts. As long as you or other trusted adults don't try to convince them of the untruths you are worried about, that will come with time.
Is death inevitable? Only about 93% of people who have ever existed have died. https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/
Some organisms, such as redwood trees, can live for thousands of years. https://www.visitredwoods.com/listing/redwood-facts/186/
Medical technology is improving all the time. It is possible (no promises) that some people may not die.